bells to swell the tinkly chimes when he moved. "Where's Jack?"

Big Bill Wilson's jaw trembled with an impulse towards tears which
the long, harsh years behind him would not let him shed. "They've got
him," he said in a choked tone, and waved a hand toward the west.

"Who's got him?" Dade clanked a step closer and peered sharply into
Bill's face, with all the easy good humor wiped out of his own.

"The Committee. You're too late; they're taking him out to the oak.
Been gone about ten minutes. They had it in for him, and--I couldn't
do a thing! The men in this town--" Epithets rushed incoherently from
Bill's lips, just as violent weeping marks the reaction from a woman's
first silence in the face of tragedy.

Dade did not hear a word he was saying, after those first jerky
sentences. He stood looking past Bill at a drunken Irishman who was
making erratic progress up the street; and he was no more conscious of
the Irishman than he was of Bill's scorching condemnation of the town
which could permit such outrages.

"Watch Surry a minute!" he said abruptly, and hurried into the
gambling hall. In a minute he was back again and lifting foot to the
stirrup.

"How long did you say they've been gone?" he asked, without looking at
Bill.

"Ten or fifteen minutes. Say, you can't do anything!"

Dade was already half-way up the block, a swirl of sand-dust marking
his flight. Bill stared after him distressfully.

"He'll go and get his light put out--and he won't help Jack a damn
bit," he told himself miserably, and went in. Life that day looked
very hard to big-hearted Bill Wilson, and scarcely worth the trouble
of living it.

It broke the heart of Dade Hunter to see how near the sinister
procession was to the live oak that had come to be looked upon as the
gallows of the Vigilance Committee; a gallows whose broad branches
sheltered from rain and sun alike the unmarked graves of the men
who had come there shuddering and looked upon it, and shuddering had
looked no more upon anything in this world.

Until he was near enough to risk betraying his haste by the hoof-beats
of his horse, Dade kept Surry at a run. Upon the crest of the slope
which the procession was leisurely descending, he slowed to a lope;
and so overtook the crowd that straggled always out to the hangings,
came they ever so frequent. Reeling in the saddle, he came up with
the stragglers, singing and marking time with a half-empty bottle of
whisky.

The few