“If you’re so damned bright as a sheriff why don’t you busy yourself with trying to find out who stole that last bunch of steers from Conlan a month ago? The old man’s half crazy with the loss. Yes—and that ninety head from Bossick—and the ones run off Jermyn’s range last year? It looks like there’s plenty he-man stuff around Nameless to interest your keen powers of perception without picking on a woman.” The sheriff was tying his sack of purchases on behind his saddle and didn’t look round. “I’ll never find those cattle, McKane—nor will anyone else—this side of cow-heaven,” he said as he mounted, “but they, and their manner of disappearance, along with a few other things are all under that magnifying glass of mine. I think their ghosts will be in at that blow-up.” “That’s rustler talk, Price,” said the trader shortly. “Sure,” returned Selwood as he rode away. That talk set going in the sheriff’s mind a train of thought which was recurrent with him, which was forever travelling with him somewhere in his consciousness. Sometimes one thing set it going, sometimes another. In the two years already passed of his term of office it had been a matter of deep annoyance to him that he had not been able to put his hands on the mysterious rustlers who from time to time got away with stock up and down Nameless River. This unseen, baleful agency was baffling as smoke. It struck here—and there—with a decisive clean stroke like the head of a killing hawk, and there was nothing to show the how and wherefore. Cattle disappeared from the range with a smooth magic which was maddening. They left no trace, nothing. It seemed ridiculous that ninety head of steers could be driven out of the country leaving no trail, but such had been the case. Selwood himself, with a picked posse, had trailed them into the river, and there they must have taken to themselves wings, for they had apparently never come out. To be sure Kate Cathrew was driving out her fall beef at the time, and the trampling band had crossed the river a bit below where the ninety head had entered the stream. That trampled crossing was the only spot for miles each way where a cattle-brute could have left the water, for Selwood searched every foot with eagle eyes. The coincidence of time stayed with the sheriff doggedly, even though the Cathrew cattle, honestly branded, went boldly through Cordova and down the Strip, as the narrow valley beside Nameless was called, and thence out to the railroad, three long days’ drive away. And the smaller thefts—old man Conlan’s bunch, and those of Jermyn—all lifted light as a feather. These had left not even a hoof-mark. It was smooth stuff—and it galled the sheriff, was a secret source of humiliation. He had heard a good many remarks about his own inaction, though nearly all of the ranchers in the country were his friends. But deep inside himself he laid a spiritual finger on the handsome, frowning-eyed woman at Sky Line and held it there.