The prisoner was brought in. His was a familiar personality. He was known to most men west of the river—if not by personal acquaintance, certainly by hearsay. Many believed him to be the animating mind of a notorious gang of horse thieves and cattle rustlers that had been operating west of the river for several years. Lax laws were their nourishment. They polluted the whole. It was a deadly taint to fasten itself on men’s relations. Out of it grew fear, bribery, official rottenness, perjury. There was an impudent half smile on his lips. He was a tall, lean, slouching-shouldered fellow. To-day, his jaws were dark with beard bristles of several days’ standing. He bore himself with an easy, indifferent manner, and chewed tobacco enjoyingly. Louise, glancing casually around at the mass of interested, sunbrowned faces, suddenly gave a little start of surprise. Not far in front of Jimmie Mac’s table stood the man of the sandy coloring who had so insolently disputed their right of way the day before. His hard, light eyes, malignant, sinister, significant, were fixed upon the prisoner as he slouched forward to hear his arraignment. The man in custody yawned occasionally. He was bored. His whole body had a lazy droop. So far as Louise could make out he gave no sign of recognition of the man of sandy coloring. Then came the first great surprise of this affair of many surprises. Jesse Black waived examination. It came like a thunderbolt to the prosecution. It was not Black’s way of doing business, and it was generally believed that, as Munson had so forcibly though inelegantly expressed it to Billy Brown, “He would fight like hell” to keep out of the circuit courts. He would kill this incipient Nemesis in the bud. What, then, had changed him? The county attorney had rather looked for a hard-fought defence—a shifting of the burden of responsibility for the misbranding to another, who would, of course, be off somewhere on a business trip, to be absent an indefinite length of time; or it might be he would try to make good a trumped-up story that he had but lately purchased the animal from some Indian cattle-owner from up country who claimed to have a bill-of-sale from Langford. He would not have been taken aback had Black calmly produced a bill-of-sale.