g like a horse thief or
loaded upon a train and shipped away like sheep.

Morgan's bruised senses assembled and righted at the first conscious
grasp of this argument, as a laboring, buffeted ship rights when its
shifted cargo is flung back to place by the shock of a mighty surge.
Nature was on guard again in a moment, straining and tense in its sentry
over the habitation of a soul so nearly deserted but a minute before.
Morgan listened, sweating in the desperation of his plight.

They had taken him away from the main part of town, as he was aware by
the sound of its revelry in the near distance. Close at hand a railroad
engine was frying and gasping; farther off another was snorting
impatiently as it jerked the iron vertebrae of a long freight train. And
these men whom he could not see around him in the darkness were
discussing the expediency of hanging him while unconscious, against the
morality of waiting for him to come to himself so he might have the
felon's last appeal of prayer.

One maintained that it was against all precedent to hang an unconscious
man and send him off to perdition without a chance to enter a plea for
his soul, and he argued soberly, in the manner of a man who had a spirit
of fairness in him, and a little gleam of reason and morality left. To
Morgan's relief and hope this man went further as he put his view of the
case, even so far as to question their right to hang the granger at all.
They clamored against him and tried to scoff him down, moving with
drunken, scuffing feet near the spot where Morgan lay, as if to put the
sentence into immediate execution.

"Wait a minute now, boys," this unknown, unseen champion pleaded, "let's
me and you talk this thing over some more. That kid put up a man's
fight, even if he is a granger--you'll have to give him credit for that.
I didn't find no knucks on him, and you didn't. He couldn't 'a' dropped
'em on the floor, and he couldn't 'a' swallered 'em. He didn't have no
knucks, boys--that hard-hoofed granger just naturally tore into the
Dutchman with his bare hands. I know he did, his hands is all cut and
swelled up--here, wait till I strike a match and show you."

Morgan thought it wise to feign insensibility while this apparently
sober man among the crew struck a match and rolled his body over to show
the granger's battered hands. The others were not convinced by this
evidence, nor softened in the least. He was a granger, anyhow, a fencer
of the range,