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Page 13
"He's square as Slim" was the best recommendation ever given of a
man in that region.
Pinal County settlers had made Slim sheriff term after term
because he was the one citizen supremely fitted for the place. He
had ridden the range and "busted" broncos before election. After
it he hunted wrong-doers. Right was right and wrong was wrong to
him. There was no shading in the meaning. All he asked of men
was to ride fast, shoot straight, and deal squarely in any game.
He admitted that murder, horse-stealing, and branding another
man's calves were subjects for the unwritten law. But in his
code this law meant death only after a fair trial, with neighbors
for a jury. He was not scrupulous that a judge should be
present. His duties were ended when he brought in his prisoner.
Hoover's rule had been marked by the taming of bad men in
Florence, and a truce declared in the guerrilla warfare between
the cattlemen and the sheepmen on the range.
Slim's seemingly superfluous flesh was really of great advantage
to him: it served as a mask for his remarkable athletic
abilities, and so lulled the outlaws with whom he had to deal
into a false sense of superiority and security.
Slow and lethargic in his ordinary movements, in an emergency he
was quick as a panther, never failing to get the drop on his man.
Furthermore, his fat exerted a beneficial influence on his
character in keeping him humble-minded. Being the most popular
man in the county, he would probably have been swollen with
vanity had there been any space left vacant for it in his huge
frame. He was especially admired by the women, but was at ease
only in the company of those who were married. It was his fate
to see the few girls of the region, with every one of whom, by
turns, he was in love, grow up to marry each some less diffident
wooer.
"Dangnation take it!" he used to say, "I don't git up enough
spunk to cut a heifer out o' the herd until somebody else has
roped her and slapped his brand onto her. Talk about too many
irons in the fire, why, I've only got one, and it's het up red
all the time waitin' fer the right chanct to use it; but some how
I never git it out o' the coals. Hell! what's the use, anyhow?
Nobody loves a fat man."
Slim was inordinately puffed up by Polly's preference of him,
which she showed by all sorts of feminine tyrannies, and he was
forced continually to slap his huge paunch to remind himself of
what he considered his disabling deformity. "Miss Polly," he
would apostrophize the absent lady, "you don't know what a
volcano of seethin' fiery love this here mountain of flesh is
that your walkin' over. Some day I'll erupt, and jest eternally
calcify you, if you don't look out!"
The sheriff took no stock in Buck McKee's professed reformation,
and was greatly worried over the influence he had acquired over
Bud Lane, who had before this been Slim's protege. Accordingly,
he readily conspired with her to break off the relations between
the former outlaw and the young horse-wrangler, but thus far had
met with no success.
Payson, feeling himself absolved by the death of Dick Lane from
all obligations to his friend, began openly to woo Echo Allen,
but without presuming upon the revelation of her love for him
which she had made at his proposition to go into the desert to
Lane's rescue. She responded to his courteous advances as
frankly and naturally as a bud opens to the gentle wooing of the
April sun. Softened by her grief for Dick as for a departed
brother, as the flower is by the morning dew, the petals of her
affection opened and laid bare her heart of purest gold. The
gentle, diffident girl expanded into a glorious woman, conscious
of her powers, and proud and happy that she was fulfilling the
highest function of womanhood, that of loving and aiding with her
love a noble man.
Jack Payson, however, failed to get the proper credit for this
sudden flowering of Echo's beauty and charm. These were ascribed
to her year's schooling in the East, and her proud mother was
offended by the way in which she accepted the young ranchman's
advances. "You hold yourself too cheap," she said. "It is at
least due to the memory of poor Dick Lane" (whom, now that he was
safely dead, she idealized as a type of perfect manhood) "that
you make Jack wait as long as you did him." When Payson
reasonably objected to this delay by pointing out he was fully
able to support a wife, as Lane had not been, and proposed, with
Echo's assent, six months as the limit of waiting, Mrs. Allen
resorted to her expedient--tears.
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