de, or pacing the long, freshly
calcimined corridors, where there was shade and less dust. It was an
eventful day in the history of Zepata City. The court-house had been
long in coming, the appropriation had been denied again and again; but
at last it stood a proud and hideous fact, like a gray prison,
towering above the bare, undecorated brick stores and the frame houses
on the prairie around it, new, raw, and cheap, from the tin statue on
the dome to the stucco round its base already cracking with the sun.
Piles of lumber and scaffolding and the lime beds the builders had
left still lay on the unsodded square, and the bursts of wind drove
the shavings across it, as they had done since the first day of
building, when the Hon. Horatio Macon, who had worked for the
appropriation, had laid the corner-stone and received the homage of
his constituents.

It seemed a particularly happy and appropriate circumstance that the
first business in the new court-room should be of itself of an
important and momentous nature, something that dealt not only with the
present but with the past of Zepata, and that the trial of so
celebrated an individual as Abe Barrow should open the court-house
with _eclat_, as Emma Abbott, who had come all the way from San
Antonio to do it, had opened the new opera-house the year before. The
District Attorney had said it would not take very long to dispose of
Barrow's case, but he had promised it would be an interesting if brief
trial, and the court-room was filled even to the open windows, where
men sat crowded together, with the perspiration running down their
faces, and the red dust settling and turning white upon their
shoulders.

Abe Barrow, the prisoner, had been as closely associated with the
early history of Zepata as Colonel Macon himself, and was as widely
known; he had killed in his day several of the Zepata citizens, and
two visiting brother-desperadoes, and the corner where his
gambling-house had stood was still known as Barrow's Corner, to the
regret of the druggist who had opened a shop there. Ten years before,
the murder of Deputy Sheriff Welsh had led him to the penitentiary,
and a month previous to the opening of the new court-house he had been
freed, and arrested at the prison gate to stand trial for the murder
of Hubert Thompson. The fight with Thompson had been a fair fight--so
those said who remembered it--and Thompson was a man they could well
spare; but the case against Barrow h