This condition of calm persisted undisturbed until one afternoon when the telegraph operator came over to the Alhambra, pale and shaken, bearing a yellow message. The message told how the Attorney General, and the President of the Prohibition League were to be in Dodge next day, with a fell purpose of making desolate that jocund hamlet by an enforcement of the laws. The visitors would dismantle Dodge of its impudent defiance; they would destroy it with affidavits, plow and sow its site with salt in the guise of warrants of arrest. When they were finished, the Alhambra, the Long Branch, the Alamo, the Dance Hall and kindred kindly emporiums would be as springs that had run dry, while, captives in the town’s calaboose, their proprietors wore irons and languished. To add insult to injury, those exalted ones promised that when they had cleansed Dodge and placed it upon a rumless footing, they would address what citizens were not in jail and strive to show them the error of their sodden ways and teach them to lead a happier and a soberer life. [Illustration: In Disapproval of Its Drinks.] When Mr. Masterson withdrew to Arizona, he did not expect to soon return to Dodge. He found, however, that despite Tombstone and its pleasures he dragged a sense of loneliness about, and oft caught himself wondering what Mr. Wright and Mr. Kelly and Mr. Short and the rest of the boys were doing. At last, giving as excuse, that he ought to put a wire fence about a sand-blown stretch of desert that was his and which lay blistering on the south side of the Arkansas in the near vicinity of Dodge, he resolved upon a visit. He would remain a fortnight. It would be a vacation—he hadn’t had one since the Black Kettle campaign—and doubtless serve to wear away the edge of those regrets which preyed upon him when now he no longer conserved the peace of Dodge with a Colt’s-45. There comes a joy with office holding, even when the office is one attractive of invidious lead, and in the newness of laying down that post of Sheriff, Mr. Masterson should not be criticised because the ghost of an ache shot now and then across his soul. The first day of Mr. Masterson’s return was devoted to a renewal of old ties—a bit parched, with ten months of Arizona. The second day, Mr. Masterson invested in wandering up and down and indulging himself in a tender survey of old landmarks. Here was the sign-post against which he steadied himself when he winged that obstreperous youth from the C-bar-K, who had fired his six-shooter into the Alhambra in disapproval of Mr. Kelly’s wares. It was a good shot; for the one resentful of Alhambra whiskey was fully one hundred yards away and on the run. Later, the C-bar-K boy admitted that the Alhambra whiskey was not so bad, and his slam-bang denunciation of it uncalled for. At that, Mr. Masterson, first paying a doctor to dig his lead from the boy’s shoulder, gave him his freedom again.