lliard ball, or glass at some unfortunate individual in his audience.
"Hit the nigger and get a cigar! You're just hanging around out there
till I drink myself to sleep--but I'm fooling you a few! I'm watching
the clock with one eye, and I take my dose regular and not too frequent.
I'm going to kill off a few of these smart boys that have been talking
about me and my wife. She's a lady, my wife is, and I'll kill the first
man that says she isn't." (One cannot, you will understand, be too
explicit in a case like this; not one thousandth part as explicit as
Ford was.)

"I'm going to begin on Sam, pretty quick," he called through the open
door. "I've got him right where I want him." And he stated, with
terrible exactness, his immediate intentions towards the bartender.

Behind his barricade of barrels, Sam heard and shivered like a gun-shy
collie at a turkey shoot; shivered until human nerves could bear no
more, and like the collie he left the storeroom and fled with a yelp of
sheer terror. Ford turned just as Sam shot through the doorway into the
dining-room, and splintered a beer bottle against the casing; glanced
solemnly up at the barroom clock and, retreating to the nearly denuded
bar, gravely poured himself another drink; held up the glass to the
dusk-filmed window, squinted through it, decided that he needed a little
more than that, and added another teaspoonful. Then he poured the
contents of the glass down his throat as if it were so much water, wiped
his lips upon a bar towel, picked a handful of coal from the depleted
coal-hod, went to the door, and shouted to those outside to produce
Sam, that he might be killed in an extremely unpleasant manner.

The group outside withdrew across the street to grapple with the problem
before them. It was obviously impossible for civilized men to sacrifice
Sam, even if they could catch him--which they could not. Sam had bolted
through the dining-room, upset the Chinaman in the kitchen, and fallen
over a bucket of ashes in the coal-shed in his flight for freedom. He
had not stopped at that, but had scurried off up the railroad track. The
general opinion among the spectators was that he had, by this time,
reached the next station and was hiding in a cellar there.

Bill Wright hysterically insisted that it was up to Tom Aldershot, who
was a deputy town marshal. Tom, however, was working on the house he
hoped to have ready for his prospective bride by Thanksgiving, and hated
to