railroad tire in the
country. Hawks had merely reserved the news for Eudora's private ear
because he hoped thus to gain an advantage over his three rivals.

"Ai-yi!" said old Sally, sharply, and the chair came to an abrupt
stand-still. "In the name o' Heaven, how kem they to let him out?" Mrs.
Rodney's knowledge of the law was of the vaguest; and if incarceration
would keep a prisoner out of more grievous trouble, she could not
understand giving him his freedom. To her the case was analogous to
releasing a child from the duress of a corner and turning him loose to
play with matches. "How kem they to let him out?" she repeated, the still
rocking-chair conveying the impersonal dignity of the pulpit or the
justice-seat. "I 'ain't hearn tell of so pearty a couple as the jail an'
Jim in years."

The meaning that she put into her words belied their harsh face-value.
With Jim in jail, her mind was comparatively at rest about him. She knew
he had been branding other men's cattle since the destruction of his
sheep, and she knew the fate of cattle-thieves, and that Jim would be no
exception to the rule. With her purely instinctive maternity, she had been
fond of Jim. He had been one more boy to mother. She harbored no
ill-feeling towards him that he was not her own. Moreover, she wanted no
gallows-tree intermingled with the annals of her family. It suited her
convenience at this particular time that Jim should stay in jail. That he
had been given his freedom loosed the phials of her condemnation on the
incompetents that released him.

"I 'low they wuz grudgin' him the mouthful they fed to him, that they ack
so outdaciously plumb locoed as to tu'n a man out to get hisself hanged.
An' Jim never wuz a hearty eater. He never seemed to relish his food, even
when he wuz a growin' kid."

A pale, twinkling point of light, faintly glimmering in the vast solitudes
above the billowing peaks, suddenly burst into a dazzling constellation
before the girl and her mother. "It's a warning!" shivered the old woman.
"Some'um's bound to happen." She began to rock herself slowly. The thing
she dreaded had already come to pass in her imagination. Jim a free man
was Jim a dead man. He was so dead that already his step-mother was going
on with a full acceptance of the idea. She reviewed her relationship to
him. No, she had nothing to blame herself for. He had been more
troublesome than any of her own children and for that reason she had been
more l