it the final judgment.

In an hour it was delivered to him, and in all the history of the range
wars between the sheep and cattle men there is recorded no stranger
sentence. In a land where men were either guilty or innocent, and,
therefore, dead or alive, it stands alone.

It was decided by the cowmen that, as a warning and example to other sheep
owners, Bud Larkin should be tied to a tree and quirted, the maximum of
the punishment being set at thirty blows and the sentence to be carried
out at dawn.

CHAPTER XV

COWLAND TOPSY-TURVY

To Bud Larkin enough had already happened to make him as philosophical as
Socrates. Epictetus remarks that our chief happiness should consist in
knowing that we are entirely indifferent to calamity; that disgrace is
nothing if our consciences are right and that death, far from being a
calamity is, in fact, a release.

But the world only boasts of a few great minds capable of believing these
theories, and Larkin's was not one of them. He was distinctly and
completely depressed at the prospect ahead of him.

It was about ten o'clock at night and he sat in the chair beside his
table, upon which a candle was burning, running over the pages of an
ancient magazine.

The knowledge of what the cowmen had decided to do with him had been
brought by a committee of three of the men just before the supper hour and
since that time Larkin had been fuming and growling with rage.

There seems to be something particularly shameful in a whipping that makes
it the most dreaded of punishments. It was particularly so at the time in
which this story is laid, for echoes of '65 were still to be heard
reverberating from one end of the land to the other. In the West whippings
were of rare occurrence, if not unknown, except in penitentiaries, where
they had entirely too great a vogue.

Larkin's place of captivity was now changed. Some enterprising cowboy, at
Bissell's orders, had fashioned iron bars and these were fixed vertically
across the one window. The long-unused lock of the door had been fitted
with a key and other bars fastened across the doorway horizontally so that
should Larkin force the lock he would still meet opposition.

Since Juliet's unpleasant episode with her father Bud had seen her just
once--immediately afterward. Then, frankly and sincerely, she had told him
what had happened and why, and Larkin, touched to the heart, had pleaded
with her for the greatest happiness of his li