The Byway Patrol : Law enforcement: Henhouse break-ins are part of a typical day for two deputies covering a 350-square-mile rural beat in the Gorman area.

Sheriff’s Deputy Mark Jones thought he had a hot one when a series of henhouses were plundered in the northwest corner of Los Angeles County. But instead of squatters, the culprits turned out to be a pack of brazen coyotes.

The mystery of the four missing real estate signs was another baffler--until the owner discovered that her neighbor had stolen them to build a pigpen.

And by the time Deputy Mark Suhr arrived at the scene of an attempted car theft, a rancher was already aiming her 12-gauge shotgun at the suspect.

It’s all in a day’s work for Jones and Suhr, who patrol an area that is three times the size of Seattle but is populated by barely enough people to fill three jumbo jets. Earnest and hard-working as they are, “the two Marks,” as they are known in the tiny communities of Gorman, Neenach and Three Points, deal with only about 250 crimes annually, some of which are solved for them.

Nevertheless, the deputies are highly regarded by the area’s 1,200 residents.

“Can you imagine what this place would be like without them?” said Susanne, the 53-year-old rancher who held the car thief at gunpoint last spring but was afraid to give her last name lest she be accosted again. “We’d be fair game to everybody down in the valley while we waited for the sheriffs to arrive from Valencia.”

Rural as it is, the 350-square-mile beat can be dangerous and not just for hapless car thieves who erroneously perceive the locals as easy prey. The Golden State Freeway in the western end of the region is a major corridor for drug smugglers, gun runners and murderers, who occasionally stop in Gorman for food and gas. The beat used to be patrolled by one deputy until he was killed 13 years ago with his own gun by a man he had detained for disturbing the peace.

That’s when law enforcement became a full-time family affair in the area 35 miles north of Santa Clarita.

In an unusual arrangement found only in Gorman and on Santa Catalina Island, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department assigned two of its deputies to live and work in the area, providing them and their families with free housing in a fenced compound behind the one-room Gorman station.

It is the only place in the county where the deputies’ wives act as unpaid dispatchers while their husbands patrol vast stretches of ranchland in four-wheel drive vehicles with police dogs and assault rifles for protection.

“They even asked me if I would be willing to frisk female prisoners,” said Mark Jones’ wife, Lisa, a homemaker.

Her frisking skills have never been put to the test. But in the year since the couple and their two children moved into the double-wide trailer provided by the county, she has scarcely strayed from home in order to answer the phone and relay radio dispatches to her husband. The trailer is wired so that even when Lisa Jones steps outside, she can hear the telephone ring. Her nearest neighbor is Karen Suhr, Mark Suhr’s wife.

When environmental artist Christo unfurled 1,760 golden-yellow umbrellas in the area this fall, helicopters offering an aerial view of the spectacle landed constantly on the pad 25 feet outside the Joneses’ dining room.

“We didn’t open the windows for a month,” Lisa Jones said.

But she said she never wants to leave Gorman, with its three-room schoolhouse, 13 houses and 17 registered voters.

“You’re sort of Andy in Mayberry for a few years,” Mark Suhr said, summing up the beat’s appeal. “Everybody knows you, and you know everybody.”

Even so, it isn’t easy for the Sheriff’s Department to find deputies suited for the Gorman positions, said Lt. Marv Dixon, operations supervisor for the Santa Clarita station. The department interviews both the deputies and their families to find officers interested in being rural policemen and capable of working with very little supervision, Dixon said. Although the deputies are asked to make a two-year commitment, one officer left after three months because his wife “went stir-crazy,” he said.

“It takes someone special to be that accessible,” said Deputy Mark Shoemaker, who is assigned to patrol nearby Pyramid Lake. “I wouldn’t want to be up on the hill.”

Deputies Jones and Suhr work 10 hours a day, four days a week, but are on call 24 hours a day. They are frequently called out in the middle of the night to rescue errant dirt-bikers, help the California Highway Patrol with a major accident or conduct a search elsewhere in the county, using the police dogs.

People also telephone at 4 a.m. just to ask if “Mammoth is closed or if the I-5 is open to Barstow, but you can’t be rude about it,” said Jones, a soft-spoken man with a blond crew cut and mustache. The deputies also help motorists who have locked their keys in their cars. “It’s all part of providing public service,” Jones said.

“They’re like the old-time local constables,” said Lloyd Ralphs, whose family owns all the buildings in Gorman, including the sheriff’s compound, which it rents to the county for $450 a month. “We’re glad to have them up here.”

On a bright, sunny morning recently, Jones cruises south past the gas stations and restaurants in Gorman. Lisa radios to let him know that Realtors Debra and Richard Smith discovered that someone has stolen signs worth $800 and used them to build a pigpen. Later in the week, he will accompany them to recover the signs.

He heads toward an 80-acre ranch whose caretaker called Lisa Jones to report that someone had stolen jumper cables and some speakers from a van. Typically, it will be the only crime reported that day, but Mark Jones still patrols 600 to 1,000 miles a week.

“You could just sit around and watch TV and eat bonbons all day on this job,” Jones said. “But I like to keep busy.”

On this particular trip he leaves behind his German shepherd, Bobby, but the police dog is ordinarily by his side.

Suhr’s dog, Mr. Dax, helped protect Suhr last year when the deputy was called down to a gas station in Gorman because a man was brandishing a knife, Jones said. When the man lunged at Suhr, the dog bit him, forcing him to drop the weapon, he said.

Nothing that dramatic has occurred recently, a fact Jones quietly relishes. “My feeling is if there’s no crime, I’m doing my job,” he said, gazing calmly at the sunlit hills.