Robert Franklin McBride had been a deputy sheriff of Graham County, Arizona, for ten months when he could stand it no more. Again, he had arrested two men riding the road from Solomonville to Safford with a load of whiskey. Again, they had been released on the grounds of “insufficient evidence,” though there were six cases of homemade whiskey taken from their auto and stored in the basement of the Graham County Courthouse in Safford.

The illegal liquor was poured out on the dirt roads of Safford to settle the dust. It seemed to McBride that a lot less whiskey and gin was being dumped than had been taken in. Whether Sheriff Tom Alger was in on the missing whiskey didn't really matter. It was his jail, and if he wasn't directly involved, he was complicit. It gnawed on McBride. He had risked a good deal going after whiskey runners headed for Safford and on to Fort Thomas on the Apache reservation. Once he had been shot at, and a couple of times he had to physically force runners to the ground in order to shackle them. It was usually for nothing. Runners rarely went to trial, and many, like the latest arrests, spent just a day or two in jail before they were set loose. The prohibition of alcohol in Arizona wasn't a bad law. But enforcement was lacking.

McBride thought sometimes it might be better if there were no law. But there was one, enforced or not. He didn't like alcohol and had never consumed it himself, though most of his friends had at least tried it once or twice when they were boys. The use of alcohol was forbidden by scripture, as was tobacco and other stimulants. But the teaching of the Latter-Day Saints aside, he saw from his own experience that alcohol quickly turned good men into fools and otherwise good women into tramps and slatterns. One of his own friends, a Latter-Day Saint in good standing, had a fondness for the stuff, and McBride had been called on more than once to come to his friend's aid when he was under the influence. Like a true friend, McBride helped to conceal his friend's secret to the detriment of both their souls.