Outlaw’s Code E-Book

Max Brand

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

No matter what name Frederick Schiller Faust was writing under, it’s sure to be a tightly written action packed book and „Outlaw’s Code” is no exception. Lawrence Grey is called El Diablo – the devil – though he’s fair-haired and has a boyish grin. But no jail can hold him, and some swear that he is the fastest gun alive. Yet everyone has Grey pegged as a goner when he agrees to ride to Mexico to track down Johnny Ray, a man who has been missing for fifteen years. There’s a reward of $50,000 for Grey, dead or alive, offered by those who want to keep Ray from surfacing. Three men have already disappeared while looking for Johnny Ray. But the grinning blond El Diablo knows no fear and fears no enemy. He rides on...

Leseprobe

Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXXIII

CHAPTER XXXIV

CHAPTER XXXV

CHAPTER XXXVI

CHAPTER XXXVII

CHAPTER XXXVIII

CHAPTER XXXIX

CHAPTER XL

CHAPTER XLI

CHAPTER XLII

CHAPTER XLIII

CHAPTER I

MARSHAL NEILAN had slept eight hours a night for two weeks. He had eaten three square meals, and had a full hour’s siesta after each lunch, and yet the marshal was tired. He looked tired, and he was tired. He had a battered face and he had a battered soul. He was mortally weary, and his weariness came from walking constantly in danger of his life.

They were all out for the marshal. The drug runners, and the smugglers of Chinese across the border; the yeggs and thugs of the river towns; the horse thieves and the cattle rustlers; and all those clever internationalists who occasionally drifted in the direction of El Paso and points east and west of that cheerful city; all of these and many odd types had it in for the marshal.

He was tireless, he was unforgetting, he was unforgiving, and he was incorruptible.

Men said that Steve Malley, the great smuggler, once laid a stack of a thousand hundred-dollar bills on the marshal’s desk and got it back the next day. After that, they gave up trying to bribe him. But everyone wondered why he kept on at the job. Certainly it was not the money involved. His salary was beggarly small; if he wanted to turn back to his law office, he could make ten times as much with the greatest ease. Neither did he enjoy great fame; he was rarely in the papers.

In fact, what kept the marshal at his post was an odd thing–a sense of duty so pure and noble that his labors rewarded themselves. But still he could be tired, and he was especially weary this morning, as he wrote on a slip of paper:

“Dear Bill, Will you send Lawrence Grey over to my office?”

He dispatched this note by his office boy.

Then he turned and looked out across the roofs, and listened to the murmur and the rumblings of the city, until the sound took on another character and seemed to him like the drumming sound of bees in the sunshine, and the still, ominous purring of the mosquitoes in the river flats. He looked at the yellow sands of the desert beyond the town, and the rock faces of the hills that made his horizon. That was where he wanted to be–anywhere out there, in the open. But his work was too great and spread over too wide a field. Electricity had to carry his thoughts, and this was the center of power. He had to sit here in the center and send out emissaries to spin the farther margins of his web.

He was in the midst of these melancholy thoughts when his office boy returned and opened the door for an excited man who came with him, Deputy Sheriff Sam Tucker, late of Tucson, and other points west where trouble was in the air.

Sam Tucker said, “‘Lo, Marshal Neilan. Look a’ here, Marshal, is it a joke?”

The marshal, by painful degrees, dragged his thoughts back from the great open places and turned his tired, battered face toward the other.

“Is what a joke, Sam?” said he.

“You wrote a note over. You sent it over, and you says that you wanta see Rinky Dink. Is that right, or is it a joke?”

“It’s not a joke,” said the marshal. “How many people know that you’ve got young Lawrence Grey?”

Sam Tucker looked uneasily over his shoulder toward the door. He looked toward the ceiling, and he looked also toward the floor. It seemed that he suspected everything around. Then he stepped closer and laid a brown hand on the edge of the marshal’s desk.

“Not a damn soul,” he whispered. “And thank God for it! Nobody knows, and nobody’s gonna know till we have to let it out. That’ll be time. The fool newspapers, they’ll blow the word around. They’ll be shoutin’ out loud, and his friends will hear. It’ll be harder and worse to hold him then, than it is to hold freezin’ nitroglycerine. And–”

“How did you get Grey?” asked the marshal, curiously.

“Didn’t the chief tell you?”

“No. I haven’t heard. You fellows have been very close-mouthed.”

“Smythe and Ridgeby and Allen and Fulton and Meggs, they went out. They all went out to make the plant,” said the deputy sheriff.

“About the five best men you have,” suggested the marshal.

“Not about; they are the best,” said Sam Tucker. “They’re clean and away the best. Who else would we be sending for Don Diablo?”

“I suppose so,” said the marshal. “And what happened?”

“Well, they got a good start. The Mexicans had framed him,” said Sam Tucker. “They took most of the punching, too.”

“How bad was it?” said the marshal.

“A couple of Mexicans will never eat frijoles any more,” said Sam Tucker, carelessly. “Meggs is in a pretty bad way, but they say he’ll pull through. Smythe and Allen, they’re laid up, but they’ll be reporting back for duty in about a month, I guess. The whole bunch was lucky, any way you take it.”

The marshal half closed his eyes and seemed to be dreaming.

“Yes,” he said, “they were a lucky lot.”

“About that note, now,” said Sam Tucker, with a forced laugh. “The chief, he just wanted me to drop over and find out what the joke was.”

“There’s no joke,” said the marshal. “I want to see him. I want to see him here.”

The jaw of the deputy sheriff dropped.

“You don’t mind if I ask again, sir,” said he. “It’s Rinky Dink that you mean, all right? It’s Don Diablo, is it?”

“Yes,” said the marshal. “It’s Lawrence Grey. Tell your chief that I have to have him here. And your chief along with him, if that’s possible.”

Sam Tucker left. He slid through the door with an alarmed glance behind him, as though he were departing by the skin of his teeth from the presence of a madman.

And the marshal turned back in his chair and continued to stare out the window, blankly, sadly, for nearly an hour.

In the meantime, there were many calls on his telephone, and many taps at his door. But he refused everyone. He was saving himself. He was too tired a man for more than one interview such as he intended to have that morning.

Eventually they came.

First, two guards came through the doorway. Each wore revolvers; each carried a sawed-off shotgun. They entered, stepped half a pace to either side of the door, and faced inwards, holding their shotguns at the ready.

Behind them appeared the sheriff, who came in, nodded briefly at the marshal, and, taking up his position in the center of the room, faced the door in his turn. He allowed no weapons to be visible, but the bulges under his coat were not made by packages of candy.

When these preparations had been made, two more men appeared, assisting between them, as it seemed, a third, whose wrists were held together by heavy irons, connecting through a powerful double chain with other manacles that fitted over the ankles.

He was bundled through the doorway.

The door was then closed, and the key turned in the lock.

“Well, Neilan,” said the sheriff. “Here he is. I’ve known you close onto twenty years, Neilan–and so I’ve brought him when you called.”

He was panting. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead. But the movement was furtive, and his eyes never left the face of the prisoner.

The guards looked only at the man in chains, and so did the marshal. Yet Lawrence Grey was no abysmal brute in face or body. He was a slenderly made youth who might have been twenty-one when he smiled, and twenty-five when he was serious. But generally he was smiling. He had one of those pink and white complexions which refuses to be tanned by the fiercest sun; it merely becomes pinker–and whiter. His blond hair, to be sure, seemed rather sun-faded at the outer margin.

Lawrence Grey was dressed in neat flannels, and he wore a white shirt with a soft collar, and black tie of silk tied in a big flowing knot, such as Bohemians and artists are so fond of affecting. He wore a jaunty slouch hat, with the brim turned up on one side. And in general his appearance was that of a pleasant, casual young man. In New York he would never have drawn a second glance. For El Paso, he was just a trifle precious in his make-up.

“Thank you for bringing him,” said the marshal. “You might introduce me to him, though.”

“As if this hombre didn’t know you,” growled the sheriff. “But you tell him, Rinky Dink. You tell him if you know him.”

“Of course I know Marshal Neilan,” said Lawrence Grey.

And he smiled at the marshal, as if to say that he was honored to meet him, and that he was also, perhaps, honoring the marshal just a little.

In fact, he seemed a modest young man, and yet he gave a second impression of being rather sure of himself, in a quiet way. Young Englishmen often give the same effect.

“And I know you, Grey,” said the marshal, “although this is the first time I’ve seen you. One hears about one another.”

“Yes,” said Grey, with another of his charming smiles. “One does.”

“Listen at him talk,” said the sheriff, half grinning and half snarling. “Sweet, ain’t he? Look at him, Neilan. Butter’d melt in his mouth, all right.”

“You don’t need to point him out,” said the marshal. “Now that you’ve brought him here, I want to ask another favor of you, old fellow.”

“Go on,” said the sheriff. “You know the sky is the limit, between you and me–only, don’t spring another like this one!”

“I want you to send your strong boys back home, and I want you to go and sit in the outer office, yonder, and leave Grey in here alone with me.”

The sheriff started to speak, and then stared. But he stared at the prisoner, not at the sheriff. He still looked at Grey he answered:

“Leave you alone with Rinky Dink? You’re crazy, Neilan. You know you’re crazy to ask that!”

“I’m asking just that,” said the marshal. “He’s loaded down with iron and I’m well-armed, you know.”

The sheriff shook his head, as a man does when he cannot offer a logical objection, though he feels resistant still.

“I don’t like it. Fact is,” he said, “I hate the idea of it!”

“I want to be alone with him,” said the marshal, quietly.

At last the sheriff looked at him.

“You’re never wrong, old son,” he said at last. “And I hope to God that you’re right now. I’ll be sitting out there on springs. Make it as short as you can!”

CHAPTER II

THE sheriff and the rest of his men had withdrawn from the office, with the exception of the second of the two bearers of the riot guns, and this worthy fellow, with a look at young Lawrence Grey and a wondering one at the marshal, now blurted out: “I don’t wanta be botherin’ you, sir, but suppose that I was just to stand here in a handy corner with this here gun, it might be tolerable useful.”

The marshal nodded seriously at him.

“Thank you, Jerry,” said he. “It’s fellows like you that make life easier for us. But I’ll have to trust myself alone with our young friend.”

So the guard went out, shaking his head and closing the door slowly behind him, with a long, long look of doubt cast toward Lawrence Grey.

When he was gone, and the door at last closed, Neilan pointed to a chair.

“Sit down, Grey,” said he. “Make yourself at home while I open the window.”

He spent only a moment, loosening the catch which held the window down, and then lifted it with some effort, for it was a trifle wedged at either side.

When he turned around from his work, he found that Rinky Dink was sitting with the shackles and the double chain piled neatly beside his chair, his knees crossed, and his hands locked lightly across one of them.

The sheriff, looking at him without surprise, merely said, “Don’t you want a smoke, Rinky?”

“I’d like one,” said the boy, gratefully. “They’re rather careless about the details over there in the jail.”

“Here’s Bull Durham and wheat straw papers,” said the sheriff, taking them from a pocket. “But hold on. You have a fancy for Turkish blends, I think.”

He opened a drawer of his desk and took out a package.

“Here’s a sample parcel of Turkish stuff sent over the border for a small, select American manufacturer. But it got to the wrong address, Rinky, the way things will. Want to try it?”

“Of course,” said Grey.

He made his cigarette with the leisurely speed of one whose fingers need no watching; they guided themselves and solved their own problems.

The marshal made his own cigarette of Bull Durham. He lighted both smokes from one match, and afterwards tossed it onto the pile of steel shackles and toolproof chain.

“That was rather a fast bit of work, wasn’t it, Rinky?” he asked.

Lawrence Grey tilted a little in his chair and regarded the gleaming heap.

“The locks are rather old-fashioned,” he said. “No, that wasn’t a very fast job.”

“A very neat one, though,” said the marshal. “And I heard nothing. You must have wrapped the links with flannel.”

“More or less,” nodded Rinky. “I just held the chain between my legs.”

“So there’s no mystery at all,” remarked Neilan, going back to the chair behind his desk.

“Oh, none at all,” said the boy. “This is grand tobacco,” he added. “Some day I want to get over to the section of the world where they grow this stuff.”

“Well, you’ll get there one day,” answered Neilan.

“Not if the sheriff has his way,” said Grey.

The marshal smiled, very faintly, and his battered face seemed suddenly younger.

“Why did you let them keep you a whole day?” he asked.

“Why? Oh, the jail has very strong bars. Toolproof and all that,” answered the youngster.

“But it has to depend on locks,” remarked Neilan.

“Very complicated new ones,” said Grey.

The marshal shrugged his shoulders, apparently not convinced.

“I suppose that you wanted a rest,” he suggested.

“Don’t underrate the sheriff,” warned Grey. “He’s a formidable fellow. Every honest man is dangerous to people like me, you know!”

And he opened his eyes and nodded. He looked like a child, for the moment.

“I don’t underrate the sheriff,” said Neilan. “But something tells me that you’re not likely to end your career in this town. It will have to be in a much bigger place than this, Rinky. By the way, who gave you that new name the sheriff is so fond of using? Who called you Don Diablo?”

The boy sighed.

“You know how it is,” he said confidingly. “If someone has a bit of bad luck, let’s say, and takes quite a fall, he’s apt to call the other fellow the devil. It was only that.”

“Well, Grey,” said the marshal, “or Rinky Dink, or Don Diablo–I’m glad to have you here under any or all of those names. I’ve been waiting for years to see you face to face.”

“Thank you,” said the boy. “You’ll understand if I cannot say that I’ve been hoping for the same thing?”

The marshal chuckled.

“Now I’ll tell you why I’ve sent for you, Rinky,” said he. “I have on hand just the job for you–the very thing that’s made to order for you.”

A shadow came over Grey’s eyes, a mere suggestion of disappointment and disgust.

“Well?” he said slowly.

But the marshal had read the meaning of that passing shadow and he said: “It’s not a graft, Rinky. It’s not likely that you could make much money out of it. It’s merely a good chance for you to go and break your young neck.”

Lawrence Grey regarded him earnestly. He drew in a breath of smoke; he touched his throat with femininely sensitive fingers.

“Yes?” said he.

“Here’s the rest of that tobacco,” replied Neilan. “You smoke away at that while I talk. I’ll begin by reading you a letter that I got four years ago: it runs like this.”

He spread a paper on the desk and read:

Dear Marshal Neilan,

You may remember me from the old Brownsville days. The boys called me “Brick” then. It may help you to identify me if you recall the fellow who was accused of stealing Jay Saunders’ bay gelding. I was the Brick Forbes of that episode.

Yes, I stepped a little too high and touched the ground not often enough, in those days. Since then I’ve turned respectable. And I want to tell you the cause of it.

I was down in old Mexico at San Vicente. It was running high, wide and handsome in those days. I understand that it still is. I had washed out some gold in the hills behind the town, and I came down to Vicente to have a bust.

I had it, all right. Before I finished, I’d spent my money and got into a fight. Two Mexicans had me cornered and they were about to let the light into me when a fellow came by and slammed one of them over the head with the barrel of his six-shooter, and kicked the second one into the street.

This stranger who rescued me was around middle age, about five feet nine or ten in height, and the peculiar point in his appearance was a divided beard. It split in the center and parted outwards, and ended in two points. He had dark eyes. His beard was gray. That’s all the description I can give him, except that he was well dressed.

He took me by the shoulders and brought me out into the light.

He said: “I’ve been watching you. You’ve played the fool, but you’re not as much of a fool as you pretend to be. This nonsense doesn’t amuse you. Go home and be a good boy. This will take you back to the states.”

He dropped a whole wallet into my pocket, and afterwards I counted a shade over a thousand dollars in it. I sat down with that money and had a think. I saw that the stranger was right. I had been chasing a good time all over the West, but I never had found it. I had blown my pay every month, but I always damned myself on Monday morning. I was sick of the life, and I hadn’t known it. I had been at the door of the jail twenty times, and all for nothing. So I decided to pull out.

First, I asked for the name of my benefactor, and I was told that he was called John Ray. He was a high stepper, and a great spender, and everybody’s friend in San Vicente. I tried to see him and thank him and tell him that I was going to follow his good advice, but he was out of town.

So I packed up and left San Vicente and went back to Pennsylvania. I had been raised in the country there, and I went right back to the old ground and sank the rest of my thousand after railroad fare was subtracted in buying some of the worst land in the world, at less than twenty dollars an acre. I got about fifty acres for what I thought a bargain, but I found out that it was the worst ground in the world. It was covered with outcropping soft black stone, and about one sheep to three acres was enough to keep the grass cropped short.

I couldn’t live on that fool place. I went to work in the town as a carpenter and kept at that for nearly five years. Then, all at once, along came a fellow with a pink face and a foxy eye and wanted to buy my land. He offered me my original price. But I held on for more. He came up with a thousand, and finally I upped him to three thousand cash. When I had that offer from him, I simply told him to go to the devil. The land wasn’t worth that much on the face of it and it never would be. I decided that I would find out what was under the face of it.

Well, when I learned that that fellow was a coal miner, it gave me my lead. You won’t believe it; the outcropping on that wretched land was coal. I’d bought fifty acres of as good anthracite as a body could find in the world! And that was in Pennsylvania, where even the worst old fools and the smallest kids know all about coal! And I had spent five years cursing my black rocks!

That made me rich. I didn’t have to use any intelligence. I simply sat by and let a company work the mine and took a big fat percentage for myself. I got so much money that I could afford to sit back and just pick up the good things that offered themselves, here and there. So I’ve stacked money on top of money for ten years and lived the softest sort of a life. I have somewhere between five and six millions today.

Now comes the rub. I get a dizzy spell one day. “Indigestion!” say I. “Hardening of the arteries,” says the doctor.

“What does that mean?” I ask.

“Make your will. I’ll explain later,” says he.

I go to make my will, and there’s another rub. I’ve been raising money, not a family. I have no wife or children. The nearest relations are a batch of second cousins, as hard as steel and as small as conies. The tightest, meanest lot of people I ever knew. If I pass out tomorrow, they get my whole fortune, and split it into fifty parcels–just enough to make them all mean and self-satisfied, the rest of their days.

Then I look at the charities. But what the devil do I care about charities? What did charities ever do for me? No, I want to give my cash to a human being. But, mind you, all I’ve made in the past fifteen years have been business acquaintances. You can’t call them friends.

Now I come to the point where I appeal to you. I think back to the old Western days. Those were the times when I found people that I loved around me. But they were a harum-scarum lot. Pretty worthless a lot of them were–as worthless as I was myself. Only one man ever really did me any good. He gave me hard cash; he gave me good advice; and with his money I’d bought my fortune so to speak.

I remembered John Ray of San Vicente.

Considering the pace he was going when I last saw him or heard of him in San Vicente, he was probably dead long years since. A man can’t be the friend of everyone in town very long. It spoils the digestion first and empties the pocketbook second. But if John Ray is dead, at least he may have left some descendants, sons or daughters.

The moment I think of that, I get a flash of inspiration. I feel pretty good inside and out. And straight away, I send a registered letter to San Vicente, addressed to John Ray.

I’m not surprised when it comes back, the addressee not having been found. And next I send down a special messenger all the way to San Vicente. A good, solid fellow I can trust. A fellow with a pair of hands and a head, too. He goes down to San Vicente. I get a wire from him saying that he thinks he’s on the trail. And the next thing I know, there’s a small item in a Pittsburgh paper referring to the death of my man down there in San Vicente. His body has been found in the lake among the lily pads. He must have drunk too much tequila and fallen into the water; there’s no signs of foul play.

That’s very good. But Sam Bowman never tasted a drop in his life and never made a misstep. He was straighter and more careful than a certified accountant. So I send down a private detective named Richard Burton. I wait three months and never hear a word from him.

After that, I say to myself: Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark. Those two men have been bumped off because I sent them looking for John Ray.

And here’s the point where you enter, Neilan. If I can’t get men from back here to locate John Ray in San Vicente, you can. I’ll pay five times any reasonable fee. John Ray or one of his blood is what I want to find. I pass along the job to you. Whatever money you have to spend on the job is all right with me. I’ll send you the checks for it.

Only, for God’s sake, work fast. According to the infernal doctors, I’m walking a tightrope that’s likely to break under me any minute. And if I fall too soon, six millions will tumble into the hands of about fifty hard-fisted, miserly, mean-souled scoundrels, all because there happens to be a slight taint of their blood in me.

CHAPTER III

AT this point the marshal paused in his reading.

“That was four years ago,” said he. “There’s two things worth noting down. One is that John Ray hasn’t been located. The other is that Brick Forbes is still hanging onto his life out yonder in Pittsburgh. At the last report, he had been living on graham crackers and water, or some such diet, for three years. And now they’ve put him to bed and only give him the air for an hour a day in a wheel chair that they take over the bumps with special care.

“But still Brick Forbes is fighting like a Trojan, and he won’t leave off fighting until the last breath is out of his body. He doesn’t want his money to go into the hands of his relatives. They’re a little too distant to suit him, and they’re too unlike the type of man he respects. They’ve never been west to thaw out; they’ve never learned to spread their elbows at the board.”

“How many men have you sent to San Vicente?” asked the boy.

“I’ve sent three, in the four years. The first fellow got tired of the job and came back, having accomplished nothing. The second was a sound man, and he stayed down there for months, using up my money and faking reports to me. Then I learned that he was too canny to be honest. He’d been prospecting on the side, he struck it rich, and finally he threw up the job and stuck to his mining claim.

“These fellows, between them, had used up two years. And poor Forbes was sending me pathetic letters from Pittsburgh. He was getting worse and worse.

“So I picked out one of the best men I had. Perhaps, you know him. H. J. Broom.”

“I know Dolly Broom,” said the boy. “We met one evening in the Big Bend.”

“The Big Bend is quite a place to meet in,” observed the marshal, with a wrinkling about his eyes.

“Well,” said the boy, with a similar smile, “that evening we both needed plenty of room. But Dolly was all right. I liked him–outside of his profession. What happened to him when he went to San Vicente?”

The marshal paused and shook his head.

“Broom worked for well over a year and got nothing. But at the end of that time, I had a short note from him saying that he was on the right trail, and that it would prove to be a surprising one. Then all communications from him stopped. I thought nothing for a month or more. He might be working out the last details in silence. But then his continued silence began to worry me. So I sent down to investigate Broom’s silence. To put the report briefly, he had been seen and known in and about San Vicente, but some time before he had disappeared.

“From that day to this, I’ve been looking for the right man to send to San Vicente. And at last I’ve found him.”

Lawrence Grey looked at the marshal in candid astonishment.

“You’re not serious, marshal, are you?” he asked.

“Of course I am,” said Neilan.

The other shook his head.

“Tell me why I should do it?” asked Grey.

“For the simplest reason in the world. Three people have already died or disappeared on the trail. So the job is made to order for you.”

Lawrence Grey said nothing for a moment, and finally he leaned a little forward and eyed the marshal with eyes as straight as ruled lines.

“I don’t make it out,” said he.

“You do, though,” said Neilan. “Already every muscle of you is twitching to be off to San Vicente. Confess that I’m right.”

Then he added: “Don’t pretend that you’re a dyed-in-the-wool criminal, Rinky Dink. I’ve watched your career. It’s been a bright one. But you’ve been in the game for the fun you get out of it! Come, come! Tell the truth, confess. I won’t repeat it.”

The boy sat back in his chair.

He said: “Well, what am I to do? Break jail and ride south?”

The marshal smiled.

“You won’t have to break jail,” said he. “Wait a moment.”

He called in the sheriff, and the sheriff came with a hand beneath his coat. When he saw Don Diablo unshackled, his hand flashed out with a gun in it.

“Now, steady up,” said the marshal. “I’ve brought you in to ask for a two months’ parole for this boy.”

“Parole?” said the sheriff. “Neilan, say that again! Parole for a murderer?”

“Stuff,” said the marshal. “You mean the two Mexicans? You know about them, I suppose?”

“I know they’re dead,” said the sheriff.

“Dead on the other side of the border, for one thing. For another, one of them was Francisco Vittorio; the other was Juan Cappano. And Old Mexico offers a price for either of ‘em, dead or alive. As for your own agents, tell me what the devil they meant by making an arrest on the other side of the river?”

The sheriff blinked at this startling array of facts.

“Neilan,” he mourned, “it was right on the edge of the river. The lights from the house made a path right across to our side. There’ll never be a state complaint about that arrest. Mexico doesn’t care who catches Don Diablo, so long as he’s caught!”

“I care, though,” replied the marshal. “You go ahead and arrange the parole, like a good fellow. Or else, just turn your head at the jail. That’s the better way. Let the boy take care of himself. Is that agreeable to you, Rinky?”

“That’s all right,” said Grey.

“Who unlocked the irons?” asked the sheriff, angrily. “Did you take it on yourself to do that, Neilan?”