ing at him until he had to get up and pace
the woods, and how, throughout the next day, when he sat in the sun
planning his escape, those birds would sweep chattering over his head
and sweep chattering back again, and in that mood of despair he had said
once, and only once: "Somehow I knowed this time my name was Dennis"--a
phrase of evil prophecy he had picked up outside the hills. And now
those same birds of evil omen had come again, he believed, right on the
heels of the last sworn oath old Judd had sent him that he would never
hang.

With the day, through mountain and valley, came in converging lines
mountain humanity--men and women, boys and girls, children and babes
in arms; all in their Sunday best--the men in jeans, slouched hats, and
high boots, the women in gay ribbons and brilliant home-spun; in wagons,
on foot and on horses and mules, carrying man and man, man and boy,
lover and sweetheart, or husband and wife and child--all moving through
the crisp autumn air, past woods of russet and crimson and along brown
dirt roads, to the straggling little mountain town. A stranger would
have thought that a county fair, a camp-meeting, or a circus was their
goal, but they were on their way to look upon the Court House with
its black port-holes, the graystone jail, the tall wooden box, the
projecting beam, and that dangling rope which, when the wind moved,
swayed gently to and fro. And Hale had forged his plan. He knew that
there would be no attempt at rescue until Rufe was led to the scaffold,
and he knew that neither Falins nor Tollivers would come in a band, so
the incoming tide found on the outskirts of the town and along every
road boyish policemen who halted and disarmed every man who carried a
weapon in sight, for thus John Hale would have against the pistols
of the factions his own Winchesters and repeating shot-guns. And the
wondering people saw at the back windows of the Court House and at the
threatening port-holes more youngsters manning Winchesters, more at the
windows of the jailer's frame house, which joined and fronted the jail,
and more still--a line of them--running all around the jail; and the
old men wagged their heads in amazement and wondered if, after all, a
Tolliver was not really going to be hanged.

So they waited--the neighbouring hills were black with people waiting;
the housetops were black with men and boys waiting; the trees in the
streets were bending under the weight of human bodies; an