Goldie Louie lay caged in the Chihuahua calaboose, and Sanky Dunn joined out with McTaffe and the others in his place. With forces thus reorganized, McTaffe took up the burdens of life again, and--here one day and gone the next--existence for himself and Leoni returned to old-time lines. Leoni met Casey. With smooth, dark, handsome face, Casey was the superior in looks of either McTaffe or Goldie Louie. Also, he had fame as a gun-fighter, and for a rock-like steadiness under fire. He was credited, too, by popular voice, with having been busy in the stirring, near vicinity of events, when divers gentlemen got bumped off. This had in it a fascination for Leoni, who--as have the ladies of every age and clime--dearly loved a warrior. Moreover, Casey had money, and, unlike those others, he was always on the job. This last was important to Leoni, who at any moment might find herself at issue with the powers, and Casey, because of his political position, could speak to the judge. Leoni loved Casey, even as she had aforetime loved McTaffe, Goldie Louie and Crazy Barry. True, Casey owned a wife. But there arose nothing in his conduct to indicate it; and since he was too much of a gentleman to let it get in any one's way, Leoni herself was so generous as to treat it as a technicality. McTaffe and his mob returned from a losing expedition through the West. Leoni asked as to results. “Why,” explained McTaffe, sulkily, “th' trip was not only a waterhaul, but it leaves me on the nut for twelve hundred bones.” McTaffe turned his pockets inside out, by way of corroboration. While thus irritated because of that financial setback, McTaffe heard of Leoni's blushing nearness to Casey. It was the moment of all moments when he was least able to bear the blow with philosophy. And McTaffe stormed. Going farther, and by way of corrective climax, he knocked Leoni down with a club. After which--according to eye-witnesses, who spoke without prejudice--he proceeded to beat her up for fair. Leoni told her adventures to Casey, and showed him what a harvest of bruises her love for him had garnered. Casey, who hadn't been born and brought up in Mulberry Bend to become a leading light of Gangland for nothing, took his gun and issued forth on the trail of McTaffe. McTaffe left town. Also, that he didn't take his mob with him proved that not graft, but fear of Casey, was the bug beneath the chip of his disappearance. “He's sherried,” Casey told Leoni, when that ill-used beauty asked if he had avenged her bruises. “But he'll blow in ag'in; an' when he does I'll cook him.”