Tex rubbed his chin thoughtfully as he considered them. Carney’s was the cowman’s favorite drinking place, yet these four cheerful riders had not given it a second glance, judging from the way they had gone past it. This was no matter for congratulation, but bespoke, rather, a determination to show off where their efforts would create more interest. Who they were, or what they came in for, he neither knew nor cared. They were celebrating punchers from somewhere out on the range and they were going to hold their jamboree in the miners’ chosen place of entertainment. A less experienced marshal, filled with zeal and conceit, might forthwith have buckled on his guns, and started for the scene of the festivities, to be on hand as a preventive, rather than a corrective, or punitive, force; and very probably would have hastened the very thing he sought to avoid. Tex hoped to take the edge from the class feeling, and determined to be openly linked with neither one side nor the other. His place was to be that of a neutral buffer and his justice must be impartial and above criticism. So, after turning back to buckle on the left-hand gun, he did not sally forth to blaze the glory of the law and precipitate a riot; he sat down patiently to await the course of events. Williams poked his head out of the door of his store and looked anxiously down the street at the dismounting four. As they went into the hotel he hurried across to the marshal’s office and stopped, panting, in the doorway. "See ’em?" he asked excitedly. "Hear ’em?" "What or who?" asked Tex, throwing one leg over the other. "Them rowdy punchers!" exclaimed the storekeeper. "Nobody’s safe! Go up an’ take ’em in, quick!" "What they do?" interestedly asked the marshal. "Didn’t you _see_ an’ _hear_?" demanded Williams incredulously. "I saw ’em ride past, an’ I heard ’em shootin’ in th’ air; but what did they do so I can arrest ’em?" "Ain’t that enough? That, an’ th’ yellin’, an’ everythin’?" "Sinful and his friends made more noise th’ other night when they left town," replied the marshal. "I didn’t arrest them. Hank was of a mind to see if it was true that a bullet only punches a little, thin-edged hole in a pane of glass an’ don’t smash it all to pieces. Bein’ wobbly, he picked out yore winder, seein’ they was th’ biggest in town; but Sinful held him back, an’ they had a scufflin’ match an’ made more noise than sixteen mournful coyotes. There bein’ no pane smashed I didn’t cut in. A man is only a growed-up boy, anyhow." Williams looked at him in frank amazement. "But these here fellers are punchers!" he exploded. "I shore could see that, even with th’ dust," confessed the marshal. "That ain’t no crime as I knows of." "It ain’t th’ four to one that’s holdin’ you back, is it?" demanded Williams insinuatingly. "They’re punchers, too: bad as h--l."