He rose and stood before her. She kept her face averted, but did not withdraw her hand when he took it. At last he said: "You'd have me quit? You'd have me back down when they--all these here people--done put me in just because they thought I was the best man to clean up this here place? I don't believe it. Not for a minute, Hetty. It ain't like you." "Gunmen aren't the only toughs in this town," she said darkly. "I don't take you, ma'am. Oh, you mean--them?" He pointed to the outskirts of Badger, to the red, tinned roof of Dutch Annie's abode. "Yes, I do," said Hetty, flushing. The subject was dropped for the time and they fell to discussing furniture for the house in Hope Canon. Then, as he bade her good-night, Lafe remarked in a casual voice, as though the step were routine: "I'll do that, too." "Do what?" "Clear out that crowd. There'll be an awful howl all around town, but I'll do it." He had gone a hundred yards when she called him back. "Oh, Lafe." "What is it?" he asked, returning. "That poor creature--Sarah--you remember Jackson?" "I thought we agreed not to say nothing about that feller." "Yes, but--well, I might--you'll look after her, won't you, Lafe?" "Sure. They'll be all right. Don't you worry. Good-night." He was very serious as he took his way homeward. What he planned to do amounted to a moral revolution in Badger, and there would assuredly be an outcry and a tremendous to-do. True, the town had been purged before. Once, in the hottest of the hot weather, driven to frenzy by Brother Ducey's exhortations--he was a genius in choosing the purgatorial months for his vivid pictures of a living hell--a crowd of citizens had rushed from the meeting, and, surging across the sand-flats to the establishment of Dutch Annie's predecessor, had ousted the merry sisters in the dark of the night. But, as is usual in such cases, reaction from their zeal was swift and far-reaching. Dutch Annie came and flourished; and when the citizens of Badger elected Johnson sheriff, no mention of this cancer in the body social was made in the program of reform. Lafe now reflected on these things from a new view-point. His conclusion was: "It ain't decent. Hetty's got the rights of this, I reckon." To many aspects of their Border life, he had given scant thought. Where much that ought to be viewed with horror is tolerated as an established factor in communal life by law-abiding people, a man tends to become complaisant of laxity. Many evils existing in Badger had never struck the sheriff as such, simply because they had always been; but he was learning. Little glimpses of Hetty's healthy outlook on things shook his own code of conduct to its spine and filled him with a species of awe. "Let 'em roar," he said firmly. "It'll be a mighty fine wedding present for her. Besides, it'll make Steve wild."