ere they
enough to justify the husband's jealousy? Did he make love to her?"

The constable hesitated. He was a narrow man, with a crude sense of
the principles rather than the methods of justice. He remembered the
deputy's admiration; he now remembered, even more strongly, the object
of that admiration, simulating with her pretty arms the gestures of
the barkeeper, and the delight it gave them. He was loyal to his
dead leader, but he looked up and down, and then said, slowly and
half-defiantly: "Well, judge, he was a MAN."

Everybody laughed. That the strongest and most magic of all human
passions should always awake levity in any public presentment of or
allusion to it was one of the inconsistencies of human nature which even
a lynch judge had to admit. He made no attempt to control the tittering
of the court, for he felt that the element of tragedy was no longer
there. The foreman of the jury arose and whispered to the judge amid
another silence. Then the judge spoke:--

"The prisoner and his witness are both discharged. The prisoner to leave
the town within twenty-four hours; the witness to be conducted to his
own house at the expense of, and with the thanks of, the Committee."

They say that one afternoon, when a low mist of rain had settled over
the sodden Bolinas Plain, a haggard, bedraggled, and worn-out woman
stepped down from a common "freighting wagon" before the doorway where
Beasley still sat; that, coming forward, he caught her in his arms and
called her "Sue;" and they say that they lived happily together ever
afterwards. But they say--and this requires some corroboration--that
much of that happiness was due to Mrs. Beasley's keeping forever in her
husband's mind her own heroic sacrifice in disappearing as a witness
against him, her own forgiveness of his fruitless crime, and the
gratitude he owed to the fugitive.

THE STRANGE EXPERIENCE OF ALKALI DICK

He was a "cowboy." A reckless and dashing rider, yet mindful of his
horse's needs; good-humored by nature, but quick in quarrel; independent
of circumstance, yet shy and sensitive of opinion; abstemious by
education and general habit, yet intemperate in amusement; self-centred,
yet possessed of a childish vanity,--taken altogether, a characteristic
product of the Western plains, which he never should have left.

But reckless adventure after adventure had brought him into
difficulties, from which there was only one equally adventurous escape: