ained love and respect,
and this person was his half-sister. With the good name of his prison at
heart, the warden put up the money that paid her fare from her home down
in the Indian Territory. Two days before the execution she arrived, a
slab-sided, shabby drudge of a woman. Having first been primed and
prompted for her part, she was sent to him, and in his cell she wept
over the fettered prisoner, and with him she pleaded until he promised
her, reluctantly, he would make no physical struggle on being led out to
die.

He kept his word, too; but it was to develop that the pledge of
non-resistance, making his body passive to the will of his jailers, did
not, according to the Lone-Hand Kid's sense of honour, include the
muscles of his tongue. His hour came at sunup of a clear, crisp, October
morning, when a rime of frost made a silver carpet upon the boarded
floor of the scaffold, and in the east the heavens glowed an irate red,
like the reflections of a distant bale-fire. From his cell door before
the head warder summoned him forth, he drove away with terrible oaths
the clergyman who had come to offer him religious consolation. At
daylight, when the first beams of young sunlight were stealing in at the
slitted windows to streak the whitewashed wall behind him with a barred
pattern of red, like brush strokes of fresh paint, he ate his last
breakfast with foul words between bites, and outside, a little later, in
the shadow of the crosstree from which shortly he would dangle in the
article of death, a stark offence before the sight of mortal eyes, he
halted and stood reviling all who had a hand in furthering and
compassing his condemnation. Profaning the name of his Maker with every
breath, he cursed the President of the United States who had declined to
reprieve him, the justices of the high court who had denied his appeal
from the verdict of the lower, the judge who had tried him, the district
attorney who had prosecuted him, the grand jurors who had indicted him,
the petit jurors who had voted to convict him, the witnesses who had
testified against him, the posse men who had trapped him, consigning
them all and singly to everlasting damnation. Before this pouring flood
of blasphemy the minister, who had followed him up the gallows steps in
the vain hope that when the end came some faint sign of contrition might
be vouchsafed by this poor lost soul, hid his face in his hands as
though fearing an offended Deity would send