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temperament and philosophy (which was that them as grabs gits) takes very unkindly to competition in any field. Therefore, he courted the best-looking girl, drove the best gig , wore the most expensive boots and drank the most whiskey of anyone in town. His dislike of competition went so far as to hire only those marshals who could not shoot as good as George. Not, of course, that George did much shooting; there were several indefinite-eyed gents around the New York House who generally attended to the more sordid business details of the Bart empire.
    The railroad had been here for a long time, it had not gone any further because of certain Bartlike proceedings back in Wall Street. So Bart was a railhead and Thorpeville, unless drivers wanted to trail another two hundred and fifty miles, was the logical and inevitable destination of the Texas herds.
    George ran his kingdom and was entirely satisfied with it. Texans had to come into it and were just as intensely dissatisfied. But there was nothing they could do, they had to sell their cattle, and two hundred and fifty miles in the drag is a long, long ways to ride.
    T his morning the prairie looked drier, a number of crocuses were out, as well as shooting stars, and a meadowlark was trying to bust his throat over behind the graveyard. The citizenry did not expect a herd today or for many days, a river still being in flood to the south, and they did not at first recognize the appearance of a lone Texan as the symbol that their season of rapine and robbery had begun.
    Johnny Austin Darryl, somewhat better known as Sudden Johnny, owner of the Double G down Matagordas way, was thin and muddy in his saddle. But his gun was not muddy; he had stopped outside town and cleaned that weapon with great care and love, crooning the while in an off-key tenor that there would be blood on the barroom floor that night.
    His herd was ten days’ drive behind him because of a swollen river and because they’d need rail cars on arrival in Thorpeville. But the ordering of said cars was not the reason Sudden Johnny had come north, nor why he had ridden in advance. There were plenty of things on the Double G to demand the owner’s attention and he had five men, any one of whom would have made an entirely competent trail boss. Well, not entirely competent; Greg Matson had brought the herd last year, which was why Sudden Johnny was here.
    He rode to the middle of the main and only street and looked at the imposing falsity of the New York House, the New York Bar and the New York Restaurant, all of which bore the legend that Geo. Bart was sole owner and proprietor.
    “Son,” said Johnny to a man about eighty years old sitting on a porch, “could you kindly direct me to the person of this here George Bart?”
    “Son!” cried the oldster. “Look here—”
    “Can it, pop,” said George Bart. He had a nose for business and anybody with a squint could read Texas on Sudden Johnny. “Howdy, cowboy. Git down and come in.”
    Sudden Johnny looked over his prey. George Bart was about six-six. He carried a sawed-off Lefevre shotgun in a holster, wore a big diamond in his Windsor tie, and he had a look on his face which might have fooled a foolish fly but not another tarantula. “You Bart?”
    “I’m Bart.”
    Sudden Johnny threw his reins to the oldster and roweled up to the porch of the New York House.
    Bart read what he could of the mount’s brand through the mud, then looked at Johnny. Some indefinable warning went through the monopolist, a faculty he had which accounted for his living so long. “Come in and have a drink,” said Bart.
    Johnny was looking up and down the street and sizing the town; this man probably had hired guns and friends behind every counter. He looked back at Bart. Northerners had funny ideas about shooting, even skunks, for Johnny, although definitely a gentleman living by a strict code, was not fool enough to exercise much etiquette on Bart.
    This, then, was what Greg