may have been nine o'clock before the sporadic talk of a jail
crystallized into a definite project which, it was unanimously agreed,
could not too soon be made a reality.

They built the jail that night, by the light of bonfires which the
slightly wounded kept blazing in the intervals of standing guard over
the workers; ready to give warning in case Ford appeared as a war-cloud
on their horizon. There were fifteen able-bodied men, and they worked
fast, with Ford's war-chant in the saloon down the street as an
incentive to speed. They erected it close to Tom Aldershot's house,
because the town borrowed lumber from him and they wanted to save
carrying, and because it was Tom's duty to look after the prisoner, and
he wanted the jail handy, so that he need not lose any time from his
house-building.

They built it strong, and they built it tight, without any window save a
narrow slit near the ceiling; they heated it by setting a stove outside
under a shelter, where Tom could keep up the fire without the risk of
going inside, and ran pipe and a borrowed "drum" through the jail high
enough so that Ford could not kick it. And to discourage any thought of
suicide by hanging, they ceiled the place tightly with Tom's matched
flooring of Oregon pine. Tom did not like that, and said so; but the
citizens of Sunset nailed it on and turned a deaf ear to his complaints.

Chill dawn spread over the town, dulling the light of the fires and
bringing into relief the sodden tramplings in the snow around the jail,
with the sharply defined paths leading to Tom Aldershot's lumber-pile.
The watchers had long before sneaked off to their beds, for not a sign
of Ford had they seen since midnight. The storm had ceased early in the
evening and all the sky was glowing crimson with the coming glory of the
sun. The jail was almost finished. Up on the roof three crouching
figures were nailing down strips of brick-red building paper as a fair
substitute for shingles, and on the side nearest town the marshal and
another were holding a yard-wide piece flat against the wall with
fingers that tingled in the cold, while Bill Wright fastened it into
place with shingle nails driven through tin disks the size of a
half-dollar.

Ford, partly sober after a sleep on the billiard table in the hotel
barroom, heard the hammering, wondered what industrious soul was up and
doing carpenter work at that unseemly hour, and after helping himself to
a generous "eye-opene