“Sh-sh-sh!” she said.  “Is that the range-cattle stampedin’ after water, or is it—­” They listened.  The furniture in the room crackled; there was not a fibre of it to which the resistless heat had not penetrated.  On the range the cattle bellowed in their thirst-torture; in the intervals of their cries sounded something far off, but regular as the thumping of a ship’s screw.  The woman did not need an answer to her question.  The steady trampling of hoofs came muffled through the dead air, but the sound was unmistakable.  She put her arms about the man’s neck and crushed him to her with all her woman strength.  “Oh, Jim, you’ve been a good man to me!”

“Steady—­steady.”  He strained her close to him.  “They’d be, by the sound of them, on the straight bit of road now, before the turn.  Soon we’ll hear their hoofs ring hollow as they cross the plank bridge.”

His plainsman’s faculty was as keen as ever; his calculation of the horsemen’s distance was made as though he were the least concerned.  All Alida’s courage had gone, with the dread thing at hand.  She clung to him, dazed.

“They’re sober, all right enough.”

“How do you know?”

“They’d be cursing and bellowing if they were drunk.”

The hoofs rang hollow on the little plank bridge that crossed the ditch about a stone’s-throw from the door.  Not a word was said either within or without.  The lynchers seemed to have drilled for their part; there was no whispering, no deferring to a leader.  On they came, so close that Jim and Alida could hear the creaking of their saddles.  There was the clank of spurs and the straining of leather as they dismounted, then some one knocked at the door till the warped boards rattled.

Jim could feel the thudding of Alida’s heart as she clung to him, but when the knock was repeated a new courage came to her, and she left Jim and went on her knees close to the outer wall.

“Jim, is that you?” she called, and now every sense was trained to battle; her voice had even a sleepy cadence, as if she had been suddenly roused.

“That won’t do at all, Miz Rodney.  We know you got Jim in there, just as certain as we’re out here, and we want him to come out and we’ll do the thing square, otherwise he can take the consequences.”

Jim opened his mouth to speak, but she, still on her knees beside the wall, gained his silence by one supplicating gesture.  There was a sleepy, fretful cry from the room beyond—­the noise had roused one of the children.

“Sh-sh, dear,” she called.  “It’s only a bad dream.  Go to sleep again; mother is here.”

Through the warped door came sounds of the whispering voices without, drowned by the shrieking bellow of the cattle.  There was not a breath of air in the suffocating room.  Jim bent towards Alida: 

“I’m goin out to ’em.  They’ll do it square, over on the cotton-woods; this rumpus’ll only wake the kids.”