Again there had been a general excitement over a crime committed, much
talk, various suspicions, and, in the end, no arrest made. Men who had
stood by the sheriff until now began to lose faith in him. They
recalled how, after the fight in the Casa Blanca, he had let Galloway
go and with him Antone and the Kid; their memories trailed back to the
killing of Bisbee of Las Palmas and the evidence of the boots. They
began to admit, at first reluctantly, then with angry eagerness, that
Norton was not the man his father had been before him, not the man they
had taken him to be. And all of this hurt Norton's stanch friend, John
Engle. All the more that he, too, saw signs of hesitancy which he
found it hard to condone.
"Let him alone," he said many a time. "Give him his chance and a free
hand. He knows what he is doing."
From that point he began to make excuses, first to himself and then to
others. People were forgetting that only a short time ago the sheriff
had lain many days at the point of death; that his system had been
overtaxed; that not yet had his superb strength come back to him. Wait
until once more he was physically fit.
It was merely an excuse, and at the outset no man knew it better than
the banker himself. But as time went by without bringing results and
tongues grew sharper and more insistent everywhere, Engle grew
convinced that there was a grain of truth in his trumped-up argument.
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