y's got three bullet holes in him, but he ain't goin' to die, and
he's got Chester's number. They'll hang'm on Jelly Belly's evidence. It
was all in the papers. Jelly Belly shot him, too, a-hangin' by the neck
on our pickets."

Saxon shuddered. Jelly Belly must be the man with the bald spot and the
tobacco-stained whiskers.

"Yes," she said. "I saw it all. It seemed he must have hung there for
hours."

"It was all over, from first to last, in five minutes."

"It seemed ages and ages."

"I guess that's the way it seemed to Jelly Belly, stuck on the pickets,"
Billy smiled grimly. "But he's a hard one to kill. He's been shot an'
cut up a dozen different times. But they say now he'll be crippled for
life--have to go around on crutches, or in a wheel-chair. That'll stop
him from doin' any more dirty work for the railroad. He was one of their
top gun-fighters--always up to his ears in the thick of any fightin'
that was goin' on. He never was leery of anything on two feet, I'll say
that much for'm."

"Where does he live?" Saxon inquired.

"Up on Adeline, near Tenth--fine neighborhood an' fine two-storied
house. He must pay thirty dollars a month rent. I guess the railroad
paid him pretty well."

"Then he must be married?"

"Yep. I never seen his wife, but he's got one son, Jack, a passenger
engineer. I used to know him. He was a nifty boxer, though he never
went into the ring. An' he's got another son that's teacher in the
high school. His name's Paul. We're about the same age. He was great
at baseball. I knew him when we was kids. He pitched me out three times
hand-runnin' once, when the Durant played the Cole School."

Saxon sat back in the Morris chair, resting and thinking. The problem
was growing more complicated than ever. This elderly, round-bellied, and
bald-headed gunfighter, too, had a wife and family. And there was Frank
Davis, married barely a year and with a baby boy. Perhaps the scab
he shot in the stomach had a wife and children. All seemed to be
acquainted, members of a very large family, and yet, because of their
particular families, they battered and killed each other. She had seen
Chester Johnson kill a scab, and now they were going to hang Chester
Johnson, who had married Kittie Brady out of the cannery, and she and
Kittie Brady had worked together years before in the paper box factory.

Vainly Saxon waked for Billy to say something that would show he did not
countenance the killing of the sca