, by God!" he shouted, flushing up into a passion--and it
brought blood into their faces, too--"I know you right down to your
roots, better than you know yourselves."

He was losing hold of himself, and roaring like a bull and flinging out
taunts that made 'em squirm. If he wanted the thing over quick, he
was taking jest the way to warm 'em up to it. But I don't think he was
figgering on anything then, or had any plan up his sleeve. He had made
up his mind he was going to die, and he was so mad because he couldn't
get in one good lick first that he was nigh crazy. I looked to see him
lose all sense in a minute, and rush amongst them guns and end it in a
whirl.

But jest as I figgered he was on his tiptoes fur that, and was getting
up my own sand, he throwed a look my way. And something sobered him. He
stood there digging his finger nails into the palms of his hands fur a
minute, to get himself back. And when he spoke he was sort of husky.

"That boy there," he says. And then he stops and kind of chokes up. And
in a minute he was begging fur me. He tells 'em I wasn't mixed up in
nothing. He wouldn't of done it fur himself, but he begged fur me.
Nobody had paid much attention to me from the first, except Buck
Hightower had put in a good word fur me. But somehow the doctor had got
the crowd listening to him agin, and they all looked at me. It got next
to me. I seen by the way they was looking, and I felt it in the air,
that they was going to let me off.

But Doctor Kirby, he had always been my friend. It made me sore fur to
see him thinking I wasn't with him. So I says:

"You better can that line of talk. They don't get you without they get
me, too. You orter know I ain't a quitter. You give me a pain."

And the doctor and me stood and looked at each other fur a minute. He
grinned at me, and all of a sudden we was neither one of us much giving
a whoop, fur it had come to us both at oncet what awful good friends we
was with each other.

But jest then they come a slow, easy-going sort of a voice from the
back part of the room. That feller that had come in along with Old Daddy
Withers come sauntering down the middle aisle, fumbling in his coat
pocket, and speaking as he come.

"I've been hearing a great deal of talk about killing people in the last
few minutes," he says.

Everybody rubbered at him.

CHAPTER XXI

There was something sort of careless in his voice, like he had jest
dropped in to see a sho