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after his meeting with Abraham Cripplehorn, the situation became untenable. He collected his gear and lit out for wolf country. He wondered if Frank had come to grief; wondered it with a touch of concern, as if he’d lost someone close.
    *   *   *
    Frank, however, had lost nothing but his touch with current affairs.
    He was back in Colorado, working for the territorial stock-growers’ association, armed with a Remington rolling-block rifle his employers had charged against his first month’s wages, riding fence for all the big ranches and discouraging rustlers; which was a term loose enough to cover a variety of pests, most often small-time ranchers who represented an obstacle to progress.
    The small-fry countered the pressure by forming an association of their own and sending delegates to Denver, but the courts there and eventually the governor ruled against them on the grounds that nearly all of the complainants had paid a fine or served time for cattle theft.
    Neither the members of the bench nor the governor had worked in the trade. They could not be made to see that every spread, the large ones included, had begun with someone swinging a wide loop. The big fish had just gotten there first, before there was a badge to intervene or a capital to try the case.
    Although Frank was not offered a badge, he and his fellow designates upheld the law as set forth in the Denver decisions, and assumed the added responsibilities of judge and jury, pronouncing and carrying out sentences of death on the spot. It was a question of arithmetic, and of simple economics: a citizen’s arrest, followed by a trek of a week or more to the nearest district court, with at least three men to guard the prisoners and two to give testimony. With cases already backed up into next year, months went by with the ranches short-handed. A rifle in the right hands served the same purpose in less than a second.
    â€œWhat we fixing to call these fellows?” asked one beef baron, smoking a cigar in a silver holder to keep from staining his white beard with tobacco.
    A short silence followed among those gathered in the association’s club room. A baron with an ear trumpet broke it.
    â€œRegulators. Seeing as how we’re paying top-hand wages to return things to regular.”
    The pay was good, no question, but it might have been Confederate scrip for all it was useful four months out of the year, apart from stuffing his shirt and waistcoat to keep out the infernal cold. Frank spent his first winter in a dugout line shack built into a foothill in the San Miguels, bark logs in front and the rest dirt. When he wasn’t snowed in, he patrolled a region the size of a European duchy, going weeks without seeing a white man. The only newspapers he saw were months old, left behind by the shack’s previous occupant to start fires, and the circumstances of his employment prevented him from pumping drifters for information about the world outside. Those he came across were where they shouldn’t be; he shot them out from under their hats when he could, or else kicked up a clump of snow at their feet that sent them over the nearest ridge lickety-split.
    The Indians he saw—stragglers off the reservation—were too wily to come within rifle range, much less offer conversation; in any case, they were unlikely to be abreast of what was going on in California, or for that matter the moon.
    It was a bad winter, and spring was worse. He could hear the ice breaking up above the treeline, the noise like dynamiters blasting tunnels for the railroad, and the rumble of avalanches. When after one ten-day circuit he couldn’t find the shack, he knew it was gone, pounded flat as a griddle under tons of snow and rock. He reckoned then it was time to return to civilization.
    Two days’ ride from ranch headquarters he spotted Juan Valiente, a fellow Regulator, cutting west from the Animas. He recognized his deep-chested