me that the matter was serious,
and was being taken seriously.

The silence was broken from time to time by some casual remark of no
interest, drawled out in a monotone; every now and then a man invited
the "crowd" to drink with him, and that was all. Yet the moral
atmosphere was oppressive, and a vague feeling of discomfort grew upon
me. These men "meant business."

Presently the door on my left opened--Sheriff Johnson came into the
room.

"Good evenin'," he said; and a dozen voices, one after another, answered
with "Good evenin'! good evenin', Sheriff!" A big frontiersman, however,
a horse-dealer called Martin, who, I knew, had been on the old vigilance
committee, walked from the centre of the group in front of the bar to
the Sheriff, and held out his hand with:

"Shake, old man, and name the drink." The Sheriff took the proffered
hand as if mechanically, and turned to the bar with "Whisky--straight."

Sheriff Johnson was a man of medium height, sturdily built. A broad
forehead, and clear, grey-blue eyes that met everything fairly,
testified in his favour. The nose, however, was fleshy and snub. The
mouth was not to be seen, nor its shape guessed at, so thickly did the
brown moustache and beard grow; but the short beard seemed rather to
exaggerate than conceal an extravagant out jutting of the lower jaw,
that gave a peculiar expression of energy and determination to the face.
His manner was unobtrusively quiet and deliberate.

It was an unusual occurrence for Johnson to come at night to the
bar-lounge, which was beginning to fall into disrepute among the
puritanical or middle-class section of the community. No one, however,
seemed to pay any further attention to him, or to remark the unusual
cordiality of Martin's greeting. A quarter of an hour elapsed before
anything of note occurred. Then, an elderly man whom I did not know,
a farmer, by his dress, drew a copy of the "Kiota Tribune" from his
pocket, and, stretching it towards Johnson, asked with a very marked
Yankee twang:

"Sheriff, hev yeou read this 'Tribune'?"

Wheeling half round towards his questioner, the Sheriff replied:

"Yes, sir, I hev." A pause ensued, which was made significant to me by
the fact that the bar-keeper suspended his hand and did not pour out the
whisky he had just been asked to supply--a pause during which the two
faced each other; it was broken by the farmer saying:

"Ez yeou wer out of town to-day, I allowed yeou might hev mis