“Well, you got here,” he grunted, with the brevity of utter misery.

“You bet I did!  I was away from the hacienda when the peon came, or I’d have got here sooner,” Dade explained cheerfully, swinging to the ground with a jingle of his big, Mexican spurs that had little silver 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 who knew him looked at one another askance.

“Say, Hunter, ain’t yuh got any feelin’s?  That there’s your pardner on the hoss,” one loose-jointed miner expostulated.