our own!" she pleaded, her hand gentle on his
arm.

The set muscles of his pistol arm relaxed, the muzzle of the weapon
dropped slowly with the surge of dark passion in his breast.

"They deserve it, and worse, but not from you, Mr. Morgan. Leave them to
the law--give me that iron."

Morgan yielded it into her hand, slowly slipped his pistol back into the
holster, slowly raised his hand to his forehead, pushed back his hat,
swept his hand across his eyes like one waking from an oppressive dream.
He looked around at the silent people, hundreds of them, it seemed to
him, for the first time fully conscious of the spectacular drama he had
been playing before their astonished eyes.

The Dutchman had struggled to his knees, where he leaned with neck
outstretched as if he waited the stroke of the headsman's sword, unable
to regain his feet. The girl looked with serious eyes into Morgan's
face, the hot branding iron in her hand.

"I think you'd better lock them up in jail, Mr. Morgan," she said.

Morgan did not reply. He stood with bent head, his emotions roiled like
a turgid brook, a feeling over him of awakening daze, such as one
experiences in a sweat of agony after dreaming of falling from some
terrifying height. Morgan had just struck the bottom of the precipice in
his wild, self-effacing dream. The shock of waking was numbing; there
was no room for anything in his righted consciousness but a vast,
down-bearing sense of shame. She had seen a side of his nature long
submerged, long fought, long ago conquered as he believed; the
vindictive, the savage part of him, the cruel and unforgiving.

Public interest in the line of captives along the hitching rack was
waking in a new direction all around the sun-burned square. It was
beginning to come home to every staid and sober man in the assembly that
he had a close interest in the disposition of these men.

"I don't know about that jail business and the law, Miss Retty," said a
severe dark man who pushed into the space where Morgan and the girl
stood. "We've been dressin' and feedin' and standin' the loss through
breakin' and stealin' these fellers have imposed on this town for a week
and more now, and I'm one that don't think much of lockin' them up in
jail to lay there and eat off of the county and maybe be turned loose
after a while. You'd just as well try to carry water up here from the
river in a gunny sack as convict a crook in this county any more."

This man fou