[Illustration:  SOMETHIN’ LUDIKEROUS.]

“Let’s go fer the Dutchman,” said Norman Anderson, just drunk enough to be good-naturedly murderous and to speak in dialect.  “Gus is turned out to committin’ larson by breakin’ into people’s houses an’ has run off.  Now let’s tar and feather the ole one.  Of course, he’s a thief.  Dutchmen always is, I ’low.  Clark township don’t want none of ’em, I’ll be dog-oned if it do,” and Norman got up and struck his fist on the counter.

“An’ they won’t nobody hurt you; you see, he’s on’y a Dutchman,” said Bob Short “Larson on a Dutchman don’t hold.”

“I say, let’s hang him,” said Bill Day.  “Ha—­oop!  Let’s hang him, or do somethin’ else ludikerous!”

“I wouldn’t mind,” grinned Norman Anderson, delighted at the turn things had taken.  “I’d just like to see him hung.”

“So would I,” said Bill Day, leaning over to Norman.  “Ef a Dutchman wash to court my sishter, I’d—­”

“He’d be a fool ef he did,” piped Jim West.  For Bill Day’s sister was a “maid not vendible,” as Shakespeare has it.

“See yer,” said Bill, trying in vain to draw his coat.  “Looky yer, Jeems; ef you say anythin’ agin Ann Marier, I’ll commit the wust larson on you you ever seed.”

“I didn’t say nothin’ agin Ann Marier,” squeaked Jim.  “I was talkin’ agin the Dutch.”

“Well, that’sh all right Ha—­oop!  Boys, let’s do somethin’, larson or arsony or—­somethin’.”

A bucket of tar and some feathers were bought, for which young Anderson was made to pay, and Bill Day insisted on buying fifteen feet of rope.  “Bekase,” as he said, “arter you git the feathers on the bird, you may—­you may want to help him to go to roosht you know, on a hickory limb.  Ha—­oop!  Come along, boys; I say let’s do somethin’ ludikerous, ef it’s nothin’ but a little larson.”

And so they went galloping down the road, nine drunken fools.  For it is one of the beauties of lynch law, that, however justifiable it may seem in some instances, it always opens the way to villainous outrages.  Some of my readers will protest that a man was never lynched for the crime of being a Dutchman.  Which only shows how little they know of the intense prejudice and lawless violence of the early West.  Some day people will not believe that men have been killed in California for being Chinamen.

Of the nine who started, one, the drunkest, fell off and broke his arm; the rest rode up in front of the cabin of Gottlieb Wehle.  I do not want to tell how they alarmed the mother at her late sewing and dragged Gottlieb out of his bed.  I shudder now when I recall one such outrage to which I was an unwilling witness.  Norman threw the rope round Gottlieb’s neck and declared for hanging.  Bill Day agreed.  It would be so ludikerous, you know!

“Vot hash I tun?  Hey?  Vot vor you dries doo hanks me already, hey?” cried the honest German, who was willing enough to have the end of the world come, but who did not like the idea of ascending alone, and in this fashion.