One of the largest and finest of these trees shaded the court-house corner where the Sheriff and his deputy were sprawling their legs and waiting for something to happen. The Sheriff was burly and broad-shouldered, although his legs had not quite been able to keep pace with the growing massiveness of his torso. The occasions were rare when his blue eyes were not twinkling with good humor, while his mouth beneath its absurd little moustache curved in a smile as habitual as his cheerful kindliness and universal optimism. Little Jack Wilder, who owed his descriptive title to his six feet three of height, was slender and lithe. He wasted neither words in talk nor bullets in pistol fights, and he had the reputation of being one of the best shots in the Southwest, as good even as Emerson Mead, over at Las Plumas in the adjoining county. Curtis Conrad walked across the bridge that spanned the stream, Brown Betty at his heels, and met their "Hello, Curt!" with "Hello! Anything new?" "Yes," said Wilder, "anyway, there's likely to be." "What sort?" "That's what we'd like to know," said Tillinghurst. "Jack's been sashaying around Doby Town for the last two days with his eye on a Mexican horse thief, waitin' for him to do something he can be arrested for; and the darn' fool won't do a thing! He just sits around respectable and behaves himself. Jack's gettin' all out of patience with him." Little Jack growled a corroborative oath, and took a chew of tobacco. "Well, if you know he's a horse thief, why don't you arrest him?" asked Conrad. "We know it all right," said Jack; "but he ain't lifted no critters yet in this county. He's been doin' some chicken-thieving and that sort o' thing around town the last week, but we ain't goin' to arrest him for that." Wilder shut his jaws with a determined snap, while Tillinghurst went on to explain in answer to Conrad's look of surprise: "If we arrest him for that he'd be taken before a justice of the peace; and you-all know what kind of a mess Diego Vigil would make of it. He'd likely fine the man whose chicken-coop had been raided because he didn't have more stuff in his back-yard to be stolen, and he'd discharge José Maria Melgares with a warning not to wake people up o' nights by letting the chickens squawk!" The Sheriff's smile broadened and ran down his throat in a chuckle. Little Jack Wilder burst explosively into brief and profane speech that showed his opinion of Mexicans, and especially of Mexican justices of the peace, to be most contemptuous. "Then why do you give them the office?" Curtis demanded. "Both parties do it, all over the Territory, though you all know that every time they get a chance they make justice look like a bobtailed horse. Up north last week one of 'em fined a man five dollars for committing murder and warned him not to do it again or he'd have to make it ten next time. You folks all knew what you might expect from Vigil when you gave him the place."