was his funeral that was impendin’.  I’ve heard my father say that he was a tall, slim boy, with a kind of girlish prettiness, and the committee looked some for hysterics and they didn’t get none.  The noose was made ready and they told Steele he could have five minutes to pray, if he wanted to, or he could take it out in cursing, just as he chose.  The boy said he felt that he hadn’t quite all that was coming to him in the way of enjoyment, and that while he was far from criticising the vigilance committee, he was not altogether partial to the nature of his demise, and if it was just the same to them, instead of praying or cursing, he’d take that five minutes for a song.

“They was agreeable, and he up and steps on the scaffold, what they was mighty proud of, it bein’ about the only substantial structure the town could boast.  He began to sing that thing you’ve all been listening to, and he had a voice like water falling light and fine in a pool below.  They crowded up close about the scaffold and listened.  The words he put to it were his own story, just like those old minstrels that you read about, and at the end of each verse came the chorus, slow and solemn as the moment after something great has happened.  There wasn’t a hangin’-face in the crowd after he was started.  At some time or other every man had heard somebody he thought a heap of, buried to that tune, and his voice got to workin’ on their imaginations and turned their hearts to water.  I don’t remember anything but the chorus—­that went like this: 

    “’Who’ll weep for me, on the gallows tree,
        As I sway in the wind and swing? 
    Is there never a tear to be shed for me,
        As I swing by a hempen string? 
    Who’ll weep, who’ll keep
    Watch, as I’m rocked to sleep,
        Rocked by a hempen string?’”

There was a long silence, broken only by the crackle of the logs in the camp-fire and the night sounds of the lonely plain.  The leaping flames showed a group of thoughtful faces.  Finally, Costigan broke the silence with: 

“Begorra, ’tis some av thim ‘ud be doin’ well to be lukin’ to their music-lessons about here, Oi’m thinkin’, afther th’ day’s wurruk.”

The Irishman, with his instinctive loquacity, had expressed what none of the rest would have considered politic to hint.  It was like the giving way of the pebble that starts the avalanche.  Soon they were deep in tales of lynchings.  Peter knew only too well the trend of their talk, the “XXX” men were feeling the public pulse, as it were.  Now, according to the unwritten code of the plains, lynching was “meet, right, just, and available” for the cattle-thief.  And Peter felt himself false to his creed, false to his employer, false to himself, in seeking to evade the question.  And yet that pitiful cabin, the white-faced woman running to the door so often that she knew not what she did, and the little rosy boy, who had put out his arms so trustfully!  Peter broke into their grewsome yarning.  “Lord, but you’re like a lot of old women just come from a funeral!”