ed for the courts. There's your
machinery. These are the hands into which ordinary citizens have put the
law. So you see, at best, when they lynch they only take back what they
once gave. Now we'll take your two cases that you say are the same in
principle. I think that they are not. For in the South they take a negro
from jail where he was waiting to be duly hung. The South has never
claimed that the law would let him go. But in Wyoming the law has been
letting our cattle-thieves go for two years. We are in a very bad way,
and we are trying to make that way a little better until civilization
can reach us. At present we lie beyond its pale. The courts, or rather
the juries, into whose hands we have put the law, are not dealing the
law. They are withered hands, or rather they are imitation hands
made for show, with no life in them, no grip. They cannot hold a
cattle-thief. And so when your ordinary citizen sees this, and sees that
he has placed justice in a dead hand, he must take justice back into his
own hands where it was once at the beginning of all things. Call this
primitive, if you will. But so far from being a DEFIANCE of the law, it
is an ASSERTION of it--the fundamental assertion of self governing men,
upon whom our whole social fabric is based. There is your principle,
Miss Wood, as I see it. Now can you help me to see anything different?"

She could not.

"But perhaps you are of the same opinion still?" the Judge inquired.

"It is all terrible to me," she said.

"Yes; and so is capital punishment terrible. And so is war. And perhaps
some day we shall do without them. But they are none of them so terrible
as unchecked theft and murder would be."

After the Judge had departed on his way to Sunk Creek, no one spoke to
Molly upon this subject. But her face did not grow cheerful at once. It
was plain from her fits of silence that her thoughts were not at rest.
And sometimes at night she would stand in front of her lover's likeness,
gazing upon it with both love and shrinking.

XXXIV. TO FIT HER FINGER

It was two rings that the Virginian wrote for when next I heard from
him.

After my dark sight of what the Cattle Land could be, I soon had
journeyed home by way of Washakie and Rawlins. Steve and Shorty did not
leave my memory, nor will they ever, I suppose.

The Virginian had touched the whole thing the day I left him. He had
noticed me looking a sort of farewell at the plains and mountains.

"