CHAPTER III.
Old Tom Parker was a "type." He was one of a small class of men at one time common to the West, but now rapidly disappearing.

A turbulent lifetime spent in administering the law in a lawless region had stamped him with the characteristics of a frontier officer--_viz_., vigilance, caution, self-restraint, sang-froid.

For more than thirty years he had worn a badge of some sort and, in the serving of warrants and other processes of law, he had covered, first in the saddle or on buckboard, later in Pullman car or automobile, most of that vast region lying between the Arkansas and the Pecos, the Cimarron, and the Sabine--virtually all of what is now Texas and Oklahoma.

He still spoke of the latter state, by the way, as "the Territory," and there were few corners of it that he had not explored long before it ceased to be a haven of hunted men.
That is what Tom Parker had been--a hunter of men--and time was when his name had been famous.

But he had played his part.