head.

"Never saw him before," he said faintly.

"Then what are you doing here?" demanded the judge sternly.

Ira collected himself with evident effort, and rose to his halting feet.
First he moistened his dry lips, then he said, slowly and distinctly,
"Because I killed the deputy of Bolinas."

With the thrill which ran through the crowded room, and the relief that
seemed to come upon him with that utterance, he gained strength and even
a certain dignity.

"I killed him," he went on, turning his head slowly around the circle of
eager auditors with the rigidity of a wax figure, "because he made
love to my wife. I killed him because he wanted to run away with her. I
killed him because I found him waiting for her at the door of the barn
at the dead o' night, when she'd got outer bed to jine him. He hadn't no
gun. He hadn't no fight. I killed him in his tracks. That man," pointing
to the prisoner, "wasn't in it at all." He stopped, loosened his collar,
and, baring his rugged throat below his disfigured ear, said: "Now take
me out and hang me!"

"What proof have we of this? Where's your wife? Does she corroborate
it?"

A slight tremor ran over him.

"She ran away that night, and never came back again. Perhaps," he added
slowly, "because she loved him and couldn't bear me; perhaps, as I've
sometimes allowed to myself, gentlemen, it was because she didn't want
to bear evidence agin me."

In the silence that followed the prisoner was heard speaking to one that
was near him. Then he rose. All the audacity and confidence that the
husband had lacked were in HIS voice. Nay, there was even a certain
chivalry in his manner which, for the moment, the rascal really
believed.

"It's true!" he said. "After I stole the horse to get away, I found that
woman running wild down the road, cryin' and sobbin'. At first I thought
she'd done the shooting. It was a risky thing for me to do, gentlemen;
but I took her up on the horse and got her away to Lowville. It was that
much dead weight agin my chances, but I took it. She was a woman and--I
ain't a dog!"

He was so exalted and sublimated by his fiction that for the first time
the jury was impressed in his favor. And when Ira Beasley limped across
the room, and, extending his maimed hand to the prisoner, said, "Shake!"
there was another dead silence.

It was broken by the voice of the judge addressing the constable.

"What do you know of the deputy's attentions to Mrs. Beasley? W