Except that he was terribly excited, and made a very dramatic picture as he stood in the fire-light and moon-light and acted the murder, it did not interest me, as I considered it to be an unfortunate event of very common occurrence in that part of the world. But the next morning every ranchman and cowboy and Texas Ranger and soldier we chanced to meet on the trail to Captain Hunter’s camp took up the story of the murder of Rufus Glover, and told and retold what some one else had told him, with desperate earnestness and the most wearying reiteration. And on the day following, when the papers reached us, we found that reporters had been sent to the scene of the murder from almost every part of south-west Texas, many of whom had had to travel a hundred miles, and then ride thirty more through the brush before they reached it. How many city editors in New York City would send as far as that for anything less important than a railroad disaster or a Johnstown flood? [Illustration: RANGERS IN CAMP] On the fourth day after the murder of this in no way celebrated or unusually popular individual, the people of Duval County, in which he had been killed, called an indignation meeting, and passed resolutions condemning the county officials for not suppressing crime, and petitioning the Governor of the State to send the Rangers to put an end to such lawlessness--that is, the killing of one man in an almost uninhabited country. The committee who were to present this petition passed through Laredo on the way to see the Governor. Laredo is one hundred miles from the scene of the murder, and in an entirely different county; but there the popular indignation and excitement were so great that another mass-meeting was called, and another petition was made to the Governor, in which the resolutions of Duval County were endorsed. I do not know what his Excellency did about it. There were in the Tombs in New York when I left that city twenty-five men awaiting trial for murder, and that crime was so old a story in the Bend and along the East Side that the most morbid newspaper reader skipped the scant notice the papers gave of them. It would seem from this that the East should reconstruct a new Wild West for itself, in which a single murder sends two committees of indignant citizens to the State capital to ask the Governor what he intends to do about it. But the West is not wholly reconstructed. There are still the Texas Rangers, and in them the man from the cities of the East will find the picturesqueness of the Wild West show and its happiest expression. If they and the sight of cowboys roping cattle do not satisfy him, nothing else will. The Rangers are a semi-militia, semi-military organization of long descent, and with the most brilliant record of border warfare. At the present time their work is less adventurous than it was in the day of Captain McNelly, but the spirit of the first days has only increased with time.