CHAPTER VII

JERRY STRANN


The wrath of the Lord seems less terrible when it is localised, and the
world at large gave thanks daily that the range of Jerry Strann was
limited to the Three B's. As everyone in the mountain-desert knows, the
Three B's are Bender, Buckskin, and Brownsville; they make the points of
a loose triangle that is cut with canyons and tumbled with mountains,
and that triangle was the chosen stamping ground of Jerry Strann. Jerry
was not born in the region of the Three B's and why it should have been
chosen specially by him was matter which the inhabitants could not
puzzle out; but they felt that for their sins the Lord had probably put
his wrath among them in the form of Jerry Strann.

He was only twenty-four, this Jerry, but he was already grown into a
proverb. Men of the Three B's reckoned their conversational dates by the
visits of the youth; if a storm hung over the mountains someone might
remark: "It looks like Jerry Strann is coming," and such a remark was
always received in gloomy silence; mothers had been known to hush their
children by chanting: "Jerry Strann will get you if you don't watch
out." Yet he was not an ogre with a red knife between his teeth. He
stood at exactly the perfect romantic height; he was just six feet tall;
he was as graceful as a young cotton-wood in a windstorm and he was as
strong and tough as the roots of the mesquite. He was one of those rare
men who are beautiful without being unmanly. His face was modelled with