A number of women are sitting working together in a big room not unlike an old English tithe barn in its timbered construction, but with windows high up next the roof.  It is furnished as a courthouse, with the floor raised next the walls, and on this raised flooring a seat for the Sheriff, a rough jury box on his right, and a bar to put prisoners to on his left.  In the well in the middle is a table with benches round it.  A few other benches are in disorder round the room.  The autumn sun is shining warmly through the windows and the open door.  The women, whose dress and speech are those of pioneers of civilisation in a territory of the United States of America, are seated round the table and on the benches, shucking nuts.  The conversation is at its height.

Babsy [a bumptious young slattern, with some good looks] I say that a man that would steal a horse would do anything.

Lottie [a sentimental girl, neat and clean] Well, I never should look at it in that way.  I do think killing a man is worse any day than stealing a horse.

Hannah [elderly and wise] I dont say it’s right to kill a man.  In a place like this, where every man has to have a revolver, and where theres so much to try people’s tempers, the men get to be a deal too free with one another in the way of shooting.  God knows it’s hard enough to have to bring a boy into the world and nurse him up to be a man only to have him brought home to you on a shutter, perhaps for nothing, or only just to shew that the man that killed him wasn’t afraid of him.  But men are like children when they get a gun in their hands:  theyre not content til theyve used it on somebody.

Jessie [a good-natured but sharp-tongued, hoity-toity young woman; Babsy’s rival in good looks and her superior in tidiness] They shoot for the love of it.  Look at them at a lynching.  Theyre not content to hang the man; but directly the poor creature is swung up they all shoot him full of holes, wasting their cartridges that cost solid money, and pretending they do it in horror of his wickedness, though half of them would have a rope round their own necks if all they did was known—­let alone the mess it makes.

Lottie.  I wish we could get more civilized.  I don’t like all this lynching and shooting.  I don’t believe any of us like it, if the truth were known.

Babsy.  Our Sheriff is a real strong man.  You want a strong man for a rough lot like our people here.  He aint afraid to shoot and he aint afraid to hang.  Lucky for us quiet ones, too.

Jessie.  Oh, don’t talk to me.  I know what men are.  Of course he aint afraid to shoot and he aint afraid to hang.  Wheres the risk in that with the law on his side and the whole crowd at his back longing for the lynching as if it was a spree?  Would one of them own to it or let him own to it if they lynched the wrong man?  Not them.  What they call justice in this place is nothing but a breaking out of the devil thats in all of us.  What I want to see is a Sheriff that aint afraid not to shoot and not to hang.