He had been played with, ridiculed, and shamed, until he fled
from the town as a place accursed, hating everything and everybody. It
galled him to think that he had allowed Buck Peters' momentary sympathy
to turn him from his purpose, even though he was convinced that the
foreman's action had saved his life. And now Tex was returning, not to
Muddy Wells, but to the range where the Bar-20 outfit held sway.
Several years of clean living had improved Tex, morally and physically.
The liquor he had once been in the habit of consuming had been reduced
to a negligible quantity; he spent the money on cartridges instead,
and his pistol work showed the results of careful and dogged practice,
particularly in the quickness of the draw. Punching cows on a remote
northern range had repaid him in health far more than his old game of
living on his wits and other people's lack of them, as proved by his
clear eye and the pink showing through the tan above his beard; while
his somber, steady gaze, due to long-held fixity of purpose, indicated
the resourcefulness of a perfectly reliable set of nerves. His low-hung
holster tied securely to his trousers leg to assure smoothness in
drawing, the restrained swing of his right hand, never far from the
well-worn scabbard which sheathed a triggerless Colt's "Frontier"--these
showed the confident and ready gun-man, the man who seldom missed.
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