to death. It would be cruel,
unjust, and hard to bear, but that was the only way. He wondered if
Ollie understood.

But there were certain humiliations and indignities which a gentleman
could not bend his neck to; and being led away by an inferior man like
Sol Greening to be delivered up, just as if he thought that he might
have run away if given an opening, was one of them. Sol had passed on
through the open gate, which he had not stopped to close when he ran in,
before he noticed that Joe was not following. He looked back. Joe was
standing inside the fence, his arms folded across his chest.

"Come on here!" ordered Sol.

"No, I'm not going any farther with you, Sol," said Joe quietly. "If
there's any arresting to be done, I guess I can do it myself."

Greening was a self-important man in his small-bore way, who saw in this
night's tragedy fine material for increasing his consequence, at least
temporarily, in that community. The first man on the bloody scene, the
man to shut up the room for the coroner, the man to make the arrest and
deliver the murderer to the constable--all within half an hour. It was a
distinction which Greening did not feel like yielding.

"Come on here, I tell you!" he commanded again.

"If you want to get on your horse and go after Bill, I'll wait right
here till he comes," said Joe; "but I'll not go any farther with you. I
didn't shoot Isom, Sol, and you know it. If you don't want to go after
Bill, then I'll go on over there alone and tell him what's happened. If
he wants to arrest me then, he can do it."

Seeing that by this arrangement much of his glory would get away from
him, Greening stepped forward and reached out his hand, as if to compel
submission. Joe lifted his own hand to intercept it with warning
gesture.

"No, don't you touch me, Sol!" he cautioned.

Greening let his hand fall. He stepped back a pace, Joe's subdued, calm
warning penetrating his senses like the sound of a blow on an anvil.
Last week this gangling strip of a youngster was nothing but a boy,
fetching and carrying in Isom Chase's barn-yard. Tonight, big and bony
and broad-shouldered, he was a man, with the same outward gentleness
over the iron inside of him as old Peter Newbolt before him; the same
soft word in his mouth as his Kentucky father, who had, without oath or
malediction, shot dead a Kansas Redleg, in the old days of border
strife, for spitting on his boot.

"Will you go, or shall I?" asked Joe.