Costigan, who had led the merriment against Simpson at Mrs. Clark’s eating-house, was playing “mumbly-peg” with Texas Tyler.  They had been working like Trojans all day at the round-up, but they pitched their pocket-knives with as keen a zest as school-boys, bickering over points in the game, accusing each other of cheating, calling on the rest of the company to umpire some disputed point.

But presently, from the opposite side of the fire, some one began to sing, in a rich barytone, a dirgelike thing that caught the attention of first one then another of the men, making them stop their yarning and knife-throwing to listen.  The tune, in its homely power to evoke the image of the ceremonial of death, was more or less familiar to most of them.  There was a conscious funeral pageantry in the ring of its measured phrases that recalled to many burials of the dead that had taken place in their widely scattered homes.  Mrs. Barbauld’s hymn, “Flee as a Bird to the Mountain,” are the words usually sung to the air.

Costigan presently cut across the dirgelike refrain with:  “Phwat th’ divil is ut about that chune that Oi’m thinkin’ of?”

“This,” said the man with the barytone voice, “is the tune that Nick Steele saved his neck to.”

“Begorra, that’s ut.  I wasn’t there mesilf, but Oi’ve heard th’ story told more times than Oi’ve years to me credit.”

“My father was in that necktie party,” spoke up a young cow-puncher, “and I’ve heard him tell the story scores of times, and he always wondered why the devil they let Steele off.  Never could understand it after the thing was done.  He was talking of it once to a man who was a sharp on things like mesmerism, and the man called it hypnotic suggestion.  Said that Steele got control of the whole outfit and mesmerized ’em so they couldn’t do a thing to him.”

Several of the men asked for the story, echoes of which had come down through all the forty years since its happening.  And the cow-puncher, lighting a cigarette, began: 

“It was in the good old forty-nine days in California, when gold was sometimes more plentiful than bread, and women were so scarce that one day when they found a girl’s shoe on the trail they fitted a gold heel to it and put it up in camp to worship.  But sentiment wasn’t exactly their long suit, and any little difficulties that cropped up were straightened out by the vigilance committee—­and a rope.  One day a saddle, or maybe it was a gun, that didn’t belong to him, was found among this man Steele’s traps, and though he swore that some one had put it there for a grudge, the committee thought that a hemp necktie was the easiest way out of the argument.  And this here Steele party finds himself, at the age of twenty-four, with something like thirty minutes of life to his credit.  He don’t take on none, nor make a play for mercy, nor try any fancy speech-making.  He just waits round, kinder pale, but seemin’ indifferent, considerin’ it