Jim Gorman's Brand. J. Allan Dunn

JIM GORMAN closed the thick volume and exhaled a long breath of relief after the concentration with which he had been studying it. At the same time he scratched the back of his head, sure sign that he was still busy on a problem, and placed the book on a pile of others similarly bound in sheepskin, law books all, part of the equipment of the sheriff’s office.

For a few minutes he looked out of the window to the busy street of Vacada, seeing through its present bustle the cow town he had first known.

Then the thoroughfare had been only a dusty trail between a scattering collection of shacks—mostly saloons, with a general store and two blacksmithies.

Now there were stores of pressed-brick and plate-glass frontage, the trail was a macadam highway, the sidewalks cement. There were schoolhouses and churches, a fire department and various lodge rooms. Banks and restaurants and hotels, garages, a steam laundry. Most marked change of all, as many women as men on the streets.

The old Vacada had nearly passed. Downtown, where the land sloped to the creek, where the cement sidewalks changed to wooden sections, stilted to the level, with steps leading up and down, there was the huddling remnant of the cow days which some thought had been the heydays of the place.

Here were the false fronts of the saloons, now titled cafés, displaying soda water and dispensing stronger liquors in back rooms where gambling tables still attracted and dance halls extended their mock gayety. Such things—since the State had elected to leave the enforcement of the Volstead Act to the federal authorities—Gorman, as sheriff, merely regulated.

Sooner or later they would die with the growth of the town. But there were still cattle ranches beyond the suburban irrigation farms that had so swiftly increased Vacada’s population and prosperity, and none knew better than Gorman how a rider, confined on ranch or range for weeks with scant outlet for his red-blooded, healthy vitality, is bound to cut loose when he comes to town with his pay check and finds nothing more exciting than an ice cream soda or a censored moving picture.

Gorman had lived too long on the range himself not to be tolerant of such reckless spirits. He wanted to let the inevitable changes and constrictions come about gradually with the shifting generations, not to be abruptly strangled.

He knew the sterling qualities that had lived beneath the rough displays, the chivalry toward women, the sense of squareness and fair play, the admiration, of true womanhood and manhood and the hatred of anything yellow and underhanded. Sometimes—as this morning—he doubted whether such virtues existed as strongly now. Assuredly vices still flourished that were not all born of the saloon and the card-table.

He rose slowly to his lean height and called to his deputy, busy in the rear, cleaning up the vacant tier of cells. Under the new sheriff, the jail was far from being overcrowded.

“Put them law books on the shelf, Pete,” he said as the deputy appeared, an ancient whose bowed legs proclaimed the rider as well as his leather skin and the sun-puckers about his faded but still keen eyes. “I’ll be away till middle of the afternoon, likely.”

“Might as well take a real vacation an’ go fishin’. Feller cu’d be deef, dumb, blind, lame an’ ha’f witted an’ hold down this job, way you’ve got the town. Dull an’ dead as ditchwater.”

“Find frawgs in ditchwater, Pete, an’ you never kin tell which way a frawg’ll jump or how fur.”

Hope gleamed in the faded eyes of Pete as he watched his chief buckling on his cartridge belt and adjusting the long, blue sixes that had earned him long ago the title of Two-Gun Gorman.

“You goin’ frawg huntin?”

“Frawg or toad. Pete, what d’you know about this new foreman out to the B-in-a-box?”

“Not much. Name’s Moore. So he ses. Some ses he’s a dago. Dark complected as a greaser. Come from where he don’t tell, three months back. Bulls around down in the dumps by the bridge when he comes to town. They say he’s mighty pally with King Bradey out to the ranch. Cook shack ain’t good enough for him. Eats his meals in the ranch house, ’long with King an’ his niece. I’m bettin’ he ain’t popular with her. She’s runnin’ with Bud Jarrett over to Two-Bar. He’s some different from Moore. Same feller brought in the note for you this mornin’ when you was out to breakfast. Me, I’d figger Moore a toad. You after him?”

“He ain’t the biggest toad in thet ditch, Pete.”

“Meanin’ King Bradey?” Pete whistled. “He’s some toad.”

Gorman nodded. The deputy regarded him wistfully as he buckled on his spurs and donned his Stetson. He wished that the sheriff would tell him what was in the letter brought by Bud Jarrett and if it had anything to do with the present excursion. But he knew his own one fault—garrulity—and he said nothing. More than once this habit of gossip, creeping upon him with age, had almost upset the sheriff’s plans.

Gorman knew exactly what Pete was thinking. He had given him something big to chew on and to keep him quiet. The deputy was not going to risk idle talk about King Bradey.

Bradey was a very big toad in not so small a puddle. More cattle buyer than raiser, he controlled large tracts of land and big herds, constantly changing. More than that, he practically controlled county politics so far as they had any thing to do with his own advancement or that of his friends—also the discomfiture of those who were brave enough, or foolish enough, to oppose him. Rich and powerful, big of body and suave of manner was Bradey, whose first name was often used as his only one and in the manner of a title. He had come into the county twenty years before to take up an ordinary holding. Somewhat suddenly he showed evidences of a healthy bank account and began to buy three things, land, cattle and men. He was still acquiring the last two.

If Gorman was out after the King, the deputy told himself, and a gleam came into his eyes, there would be something doing. King Bradey lived a good deal like a feudal baron. He had ten big ranches rolled into one and a hundred riders in the slackest of seasons, besides ordinary ranch hands to carry out his royal bidding.

“You find anything in them books?”

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