“You comes hyar from a great corp’ration thet in times gone by we thinks is public spirited an’ enterprisin’, which is a mistake.  You pays th’ debt of said corp’ration, so they sez, an’ tharfore we welcomes you to our bosom cordial.  What happens?  You insults us by paying such low-down ornary cusses as Snowie.  Th’ camp is just.  She arises an’ avenges said insult by stringin’ of you up all right an’ proper.  We gives you five minutes to get ready.”

“What do you mean?”

“We hangs you in five minutes.”

The slow, even voice ceased, and again the silence was broken only by the occasional bursting crackle of a blister in the pine torches.  Bennington tried to realize the situation.  It had all come about so suddenly.

“I guess you’ve got the joke on me, boys,” he ventured with a nervous little laugh.  And then his voice died away against the stony immobility of the man opposite as laughter sinks to nothing against the horror of a great darkness.  Bennington began to feel impressed in earnest.  Across his mind crept doubts as to the outcome.  He almost screamed aloud as some one stole up behind and dropped over his throat the soft cold coil of a lariat.  Then, at a signal from the chief, the two men haled him away.

They stopped beneath a gnarled oak halfway down the slope to the gulch bottom, from which protruded, like a long witch arm, a single withered branch.  Over this the unseen threw the end of the lariat.  Bennington faced the expressionless gaze of twenty masks, on which the torchlight threw Strong black shadows.  Directly in front of him the leader posted himself, watch in hand.

“Any last requests?” he inquired in his measured tones.

Bennington felt the need of thinking quickly, but, being unused to emergencies, he could not.

“Anywhar y’ want yore stuff sent?” the other pursued relentlessly.

Bennington swallowed, and found his voice at last.

“Now be reasonable,” he pleaded.  “It isn’t going to do you any good to hang me.  I didn’t mean to make any distinctions.  I just paid the oldest debts, that’s all.  You’ll all get paid.  There’ll be some more money after a while, and then I can pay some more of you.  If you kill me, you won’t get any at all.”

“Won’t get any any way,” some one muttered audibly from the crowd.

The man with the watch never stirred.

“Two minutes more,” he said simply.

One of the men, who had been holding the young man’s arms, had fallen back into the crowd when the lariat was thrown over the oak limb.  During the short colloquy just detailed, the attention of the other had become somewhat distracted.  Bennington wrenched himself free, and struck this man full in the face.

He had never in his well-ordered life hit in anger, but behind this blow was desperation, and the weight of a young and active body.  The man went down.  Bennington seized the lariat with both hands and tried to wrench it over his head.