But he liked the law, too. Most of the time. He liked to be out and around, and he was rarely happier than when he was on horseback, which the job required often enough. He had never shot at a single person in his nearly a year of being the deputy sheriff. He often went home at night late but satisfied that he had accomplished things during the day. He aided his fellow man, as directed by the Teachings, and he saw results, where when he built a house, he often could not see what he had done that day for seeing what needed doing tomorrow.

Mostly, the job was settling disputes. Graham County was an open, rural county in the southeastern part of the state. The towns, and there were only a few—Safford, Thatcher, Pima, Solomonville—were small and largely populated with Mormons. The communities were tight and homogeneous. Often enough, it was the stake president of the church who took care of difficulties. The ranchers whose spreads surrounded the towns and made up most of the Gila River Valley were nearly autonomous and tended to keep peace on their own land. For the most part, residents of Graham County got along with each other just fine.

There were isolated trouble spots where the ranchers and the church held little sway. The town of Fort Thomas to the west was part of the Apache reservation, and there the effects of alcohol and poverty led, often enough, to flashes of violence. While no one had been killed during McBride's tenure as deputy sheriff, a couple of residents of Fort Thomas had come close enough to make the possibility of deadly violence nearly an inevitability.

To the south was the town of Klondyke. It was small and remote, and though it fell under their jurisdiction, the Graham County Sheriff's Office tended to leave it be, visiting only when there was real trouble. There was minor trouble in Klondyke often enough. There was a café that had once been a saloon and wanted to be a saloon again and so carried out all the functions of a saloon, including the provision of alcohol. Fights were frequent, sometimes several a week, and a couple of cowboys had been badly beaten for their attentions to one or another of the local women.

McBride had been directly involved in one incident, though it was clear his assistance was neither required nor desired. Klondyke was largely Gentile, and the sheriff's office was considered a Mormon office and ignored, if not despised. He came back from his investigation with a dozen different stories of what had happened and no charges filed by the victims, one of whom had moved on and the other who claimed that he fell from his horse while riding fences at night.