his hands.

The spectators cheered this adroit movement, laughing at the spectacle
of the Dutchman hanging face downward on his ropes, and Morgan, sweating
in the heat of the fire and sun, exertion and passion, careless of
everything, thoughtless of all but his unsatisfied vengeance, straddled
the Dutchman's neck as if he were a calf. He brought the iron down
within an inch or two of the Dutchman's face, calculating how much of
the crude device of three flying crows he could get between mouth and
ear, and as Morgan stood so with the hot iron poised, the Dutchman
choking between his clamping knees, a hand clutched his arm, jerking the
hovering brand away.

Morgan had not heard a step near him through the turmoil of his hate,
nor seen any person approaching to interfere. Now he whirled, pistol
slung out, facing about to account with the one who dared break in to
stay his hand in the administration of a punishment that he considered
all too inadequate and humane.

There was a girl standing by him, her restraining hand still on his arm,
the sun glinting in the gloss of her dark hair, her dark eyes fixed on
him in denial, in a softness of pity that Morgan knew was not for his
victims alone. And so in that revel of base surrender to his primal
passions she had come to him, she whom his heart sought among the faces
of women; in that manner she had found him, and found him, as Morgan
knew in his abased heart, at his worst.

There was not a word, not the whisper of a word, in the crowd around
them. There was scarcely the moving of a breath.

"Give me that iron, Mr. Morgan!" she demanded in voice that trembled
from the surge of her perturbed breast.

Morgan stood confronting her in the fierce pose of a man prepared to
contend to the last extreme with any who had come to stay his hand in
his hour of requital. The glowing iron, from which little wavers of heat
rose in the sun, he grasped in one hand; in the other his pistol, elbow
close to his side, threatening the quarter from which interference had
come. Still he demurred at her demand, refusing the outstretched hand.

"Give it to me!" she said again, drawing nearer, but a little space
between them now, so near he fancied her breath, panting from her open
lips, on his cheek.

Silent, grim, still clouded by the vapors of his passion, Morgan stood
denying her, not able to adjust himself in wrench so sudden to the calm
plane of his normal life.

"Not for their sake--for y