red and hung by the Sawyer's Crossing Vigilantes last week;
his confederate, unfortunately, escaped on a valuable horse belonging
to Judge Boompointer. The judge had refused one thousand dollars for
the horse only a week before. As the thief, who is still at large, would
find it difficult to dispose of so valuable an animal without detection,
the chances are against either of them turning up again."

*****

Salomy Jane watched the cavalcade until it had disappeared. Then she
became aware that her brief popularity had passed. Mrs. Red Pete, in
stormy hysterics, had included her in a sweeping denunciation of the
whole universe, possibly for simulating an emotion in which she herself
was deficient. The other women hated her for her momentary exaltation
above them; only the children still admired her as one who had
undoubtedly "canoodled" with a man "a-going to be hung"--a daring flight
beyond their wildest ambition. Salomy Jane accepted the change with
charming unconcern. She put on her yellow nankeen sunbonnet,--a hideous
affair that would have ruined any other woman, but which only enhanced
the piquancy of her fresh brunette skin,--tied the strings, letting the
blue-black braids escape below its frilled curtain behind, jumped on
her mustang with a casual display of agile ankles in shapely white
stockings, whistled to the hound, and waving her hand with a "So long,
sonny!" to the lately bereft but admiring nephew, flapped and fluttered
away in her short brown holland gown.

Her father's house was four miles distant. Contrasted with the cabin she
had just quitted, it was a superior dwelling, with a long "lean-to" at
the rear, which brought the eaves almost to the ground and made it look
like a low triangle. It had a long barn and cattle sheds, for Madison
Clay was a "great" stock-raiser and the owner of a "quarter section." It
had a sitting-room and a parlor organ, whose transportation thither had
been a marvel of "packing." These things were supposed to give Salomy
Jane an undue importance, but the girl's reserve and inaccessibility to
local advances were rather the result of a cool, lazy temperament and
the preoccupation of a large, protecting admiration for her father, for
some years a widower. For Mr. Madison Clay's life had been threatened in
one or two feuds,--it was said, not without cause,--and it is possible
that the pathetic spectacle of her father doing his visiting with a
shotgun may have touched her closely