"Ah, Mr. Dalhart, I believe," began the sheriff in that suave and genial manner which most elected officials have at their command. "Glad to meet you, Mr. Dalhart. There's a little matter of business I'd like to discuss, if you'll jest step outside a moment. Yes, thank you. Nice weather we're having now—how's the feed up on your range? That's good—that's fine. Now, Mr. Dalhart, I don't suppose you get your mail very regular, and mebby you ain't much of a correspondent anyway, but my name's Morgan—I'm a deputy tax-collector right now—and I'd like to have you fill out this blank, giving the number of assessable cattle you have. Sent you one or two by mail, but this is jest as good. Sorry, you understand, but the county needs the money."
"Yes, I'm sorry, too," observed Pecos, sardonically, "because it'll never git none from me."
"Oh, I dunno," replied the sheriff, sizing his man up carefully, "Geronimo County has been able to take care of itself, so far; and when I put the matter in its proper light to men who have been a little lax in the past—men like Upton and Mr. Crittenden, for instance—they seem perfectly willing to pay. These taxes are to support the county government, you understand—to build roads and keep up the schools and all that sort of thing—and every property-owner ought to be glad to do his share. Now about how many head of cows have you got up at Lost Dog Cañon?"
"I've got jest about enough to keep me in meat," answered Pecos, evasively.
"Um, that'd be about two hundred head, wouldn't it?"
Two hundred was a close guess, and this unexpected familiarity with his affairs startled the cowboy, but his face, nevertheless, did not lose its defiant stare. Two hundred was really the difference between what U cows Upton had lost last spring and the total of Crittenden's Wine-glass bunch, and Boone Morgan was deeply interested in the whereabouts of that particular two hundred head. To Old Crit, this tax-collecting was only a mean raid on his pocket-book—to Morgan it was the first step in his campaign against cattle rustling. When he had determined the number of head in every brand he might be able to prove a theft—but not till then.
"Call it two hundred," he suggested, holding out the paper encouragingly, but Pecos drew back his hand scornfully.
"Not if it was a cow and calf," he said, "I wouldn't pay a cent. D'ye think I want to pay a government of robbers? What does yore dam' government do for me, or any other pore man, but make us trouble?"
"Well, sometimes that's all a government can do for a certain class of people," observed the sheriff, eying him coldly, "and I'd like to say right now, Mr. Dalhart, that in such a case it can make a hell of a lot of trouble."
Pecos grunted.
"Now, jest for instance," continued Morgan, warming up a little, "in case you don't pay your taxes on them two hundred head of cattle I can get judgment against you, seize any or all of 'em, and sell the whole shooting-match for taxes. I'll do it, too," he added.
"Well, turn yoreself loose, then," flared back Pecos, "the bars are down. But I'll tell you right now, the first deputy tax-collector that puts a rope on one of my cows, I'll bounce a rock off'n him—or something worse!"
"I ain't accustomed to take no threats, Mr. Dalhart," bellowed Boone Morgan, his temper getting away with him, "and especially from a man in your line of business! Now you go your way, and go as far as you please, but if I don't put the fear of God into your black, cattle-rustling heart my name is 'Sic 'em' and I'm a dog. I'll collect them taxes, sir, next week!"
"Like hell you will," snarled Pecos, throwing out his chin. He scowled back at the irate officer, cast a baleful glance at the IC punchers, and mounted from the far side of his horse, but when he rode away Ike Crittenden went out behind the corral and laughed until he choked. After all the trouble this man Dalhart had made him, just to think of him locking horns with Boone Morgan! And all from his crazy reading of the Voice of Reason! The memory of his own enforced tax-paying fell away from him like a dream at the thought of Pecos Dalhart putting up a fight against the sheriff of Geronimo County, and on the strength of it he took a couple of drinks and was good-natured for a week.
If Pecos had had some self-appointed critic to point out just how foolish he was he might have seen a new light, gathered up about twenty head of Monkey-wrench steers and sold them to pay his taxes; but his only recourse in this extremity was to the Voice of Reason, and whatever its other good qualities are, that journal has never been accused of preaching moderation and reason. It was war to the knife with Pecos, from the jump, and the day after his return he took his carbine, his cigarette makings, and the last Voice of Reason and went up the trail to lie in wait for Boone Morgan. The country around Lost Dog Cañon is mostly set on edge and the entrance to the valley is through a narrow and crooked ravine, filled with bowlders and faced with sun-blackened sandstone rocks, many of which, from some fracture of their weathered surface, are pock-marked with giant "wind-holes." Into one of these natural pockets, from the shelter of which a single man could stand off a regiment, Pecos hoisted himself with the dawn, and he did not leave it again till dark. As the wind came up and, sucking in through the opening, hollowed out each day its little more, the loose sand from the soft walls blew into Pecos's eyes and he gave up his fervid reading; but except for that and for the times when from the blackness of his cavern he searched the narrow trail for his enemies, he pored over the Voice of Reason as a Christian martyr might brood over his Bible. It was his religion, linked with that far more ancient religion of revenge, and if Boone Morgan or any other deputy tax collector had broken in upon his reveries they certainly would have stopped something worse than a bouncing stone.
But no one played into his hand to that extent. They say the Apaches educated the whole United States army in the art of modern warfare and Boone Morgan as a frontier Indian fighter had been there to learn his part. In the days when Cochise and Geronimo were loose he had travelled behind Indian scouts over all kinds of country, and one of the first things he had mastered was the value of high ground. He had learned also that one man in the rocks is worth a troop on the trail and while he was gathering up a posse to discipline Pecos Dalhart he sent Bill Todhunter ahead to prospect. For two long days that wary deputy haunted the rim-rock that shut in Lost Dog Cañon, crawling on his belly like a snake, and at last, just at sundown, his patience was rewarded by the sight of the lost Pecos, carbine in hand, rising up from nowhere and returning to his camp. As the smoke rose from his newly lighted fire Todhunter slipped quietly down the ravine and, stepping from rock to rock, followed the well-trampled trail till he came to the mouth of the wind-cave. Peering cautiously in he caught the odor of stale tobacco smoke and saw the litter of old papers on the sandy floor, signs enough that Pecos lived there—then, as the strategy and purpose of the cattle-rustler became plain, he picked his way back to his lonely camp and waited for another day. With the dawn he was up again and watching, and when he saw Pecos come back and hide himself in his wind-cave he straightened up and set about his second quest—the search for the Monkey-wrench cattle. At the time of his first visit to Lost Dog he had seen a few along the creek but there must be more of them down the cañon, and the farther away they could be found the better it would suit his chief. It was not Boone Morgan's purpose to start a war—all he wanted was enough Monkey-wrench cattle to pay the taxes, and a way to get them out. The indications so far were that Pecos had them in a bottle and was waiting at the neck, but if the water ran down the cañon there must be a hole somewhere, reasoned the deputy, or better than that, a trail. Working his way along the rim Bill Todhunter finally spied the drift-fence across the box of the cañon, and soon from his high perch he was gazing down into that stupendous hole in the ground that Pecos had turned into a pasture. From the height of the towering cliffs the cattle seemed like rabbits feeding in tiny spots of green, but there they were, more than a hundred of them, and when the deputy beheld the sparkling waters of the Salagua below them and the familiar pinnacles of the Superstitions beyond he laughed and fell to whistling "Paloma" through his teeth. Boone Morgan had hunted Apaches in the Superstitions, and he knew them like a book. With one man on the rim-rocks to keep tab on Pecos, Boone and his posse could take their time to