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Show All the Variables & Other Love Stories 37 "'Y\^u..-p.5." Hour followed hour and the brave sons of Taos rejoiced every one. "Once more into the fray dear friends," they cried and regaled one another with stories of Number Twenty-Three and his overtime heroics. "That Hightower," one of them could be heard to say in the small hours of morning, "Maybe we ought to give him a second chance. Sure he's probably a decent guy." "One of the best," they all agreed. "A scholar and a gentleman. For sure, a decent guy." * And so it was that in the eighth month of that year an armistice was struck between the Town of Taos and the Hightower Ranch. A season of general goodwill followed. By the light of a harvest moon the curious knaves of Taos could spy high up on the mesa the silhouettes of some two dozen skirts hewing ditches in the soft clay of Hightower's farthest pasture. By the time Indian summer painted the whole valley in ripe sepia the trace was much esteemed on both sides of a segregated Taos. Hightower himself came into town most weekends after nails or planks or a grinding stone. He needn't purchase them, for no one at present tended the shops. No one washed the dishes or laundered the breeches or repaired the automobiles or cooked the meals. Even cantina wanted for patrons, for the men, with no women at home, found no cause to drink elsewhere. The streets lay abandoned by humans. Jackrabbits and prairie dogs and roosting birds crept into town from the outlying sagebrush. Mongrel dogs ranged the throughways hunting in packs. Cars sat on half-deflated tires in the middle of intersections or parking lots or wherever |