rrors seemed, as compared with those horrors
they had thrust out.

As Pincher bore him back over the fourteen miles thither where justice
awaited him, Rankin was a prey to two alternating regrets. At one moment
he wished he had not said, "I'll murder you!" In the next turn of
thought he wished it had been murder in the first degree, that the
penalty might have been death rather than imprisonment.

He did not allow himself to think of Myra Beckwith; his mind felt
blood-stained, no fit place for the thought of her. There, where the
thought of her had shone for months, a steady, heart-warming flame, was
only a dull desolation which he dared not face.

As he rode up the deserted street of Sandoria a strong desire possessed
him to keep on to the north and have one more night of freedom on his
own ranch; but that would have been a cruelty to Pincher. He put her up
in the shed and gave her the next day's dinner which he had brought
with him that morning in case there should be a dance to keep him
over-night. Then he took a long, deep breath of the icy air and passed
into the court-house.

Inside, the atmosphere seemed suffocating. The room was so crowded that
he did not find Myra's face anywhere. The sheriff was among the dancers,
but the fiddles were winding up the set with a last prolonged squeak.

As the scraping ceased, Rankin stood before the sheriff. In the sudden
pause of sound and motion his voice sounded distinctly throughout the
room.

"I have just killed Dennis Rumpety," he said.

For ten seconds there was absolute silence; then a rough voice growled,
"Thunder! But you done a good job!"

Upon that everybody began talking at once, and in the midst of the
clamor Ed Rankin, the man who loved freedom better than life, was
formally placed under arrest.

His trial came off the next day but one. The coroner's inquest had shown
death by apoplexy, caused probably by a paroxysm of rage. The jury
rendered a verdict of "involuntary manslaughter." The sentence was the
lowest the law allows: namely, one day's imprisonment with hard labor.

This unlooked-for clemency staggered the prisoner. Oblivious of every
fact but the terrible one that Dennis Rumpety had died by his hand, he
had nerved himself for what he believed would be his death-blow. The
tension had been too great; he could not bear its sudden removal.

"Say, your honor," he cried, regardless of court etiquette,--"say, your
honor, couldn't you lay it on a lit