There was nothing startling in the aspect of Senator Galloway's patrolman. Rawlins had consorted with dozens of his type in cow camps on the Kansas plains, lined up with scores of them at the long bars of the stockyards' saloons. He came riding out of the bushes with stealthy precision, his horse restrained by careful hand, reins held high above the saddle-horn, free and untrammeled in his dark-blue woolen shirt, coat and slicker behind the saddle, rifle in scabbard under the bend of his knee.
Rawlins watched the fence-rider from his covert as he drew his horse up across the cut panel of wire, near enough to him to see that he had left his youth behind him by at least twenty years. His face was thin, his features were prominent, with a look of inflexibility and determination about him that did not promise well for the trespasser. Rawlins concluded from his neat appearance that his camp was not far away.
The fence-rider waited, horse blocking the gap in the fence, something of injured innocence in his bearing, conveying the impression that it was his fence which had been abused, and he had suffered a deep insult along with it. He glanced at the wire-ends which lay in the dust beside him, the lean muscles of his jaws bunching as he chewed hard on something that prob-
