ed a voice.

Again there was a moment's silence, and then Billy Kyle, the veteran
stage-driver, said: "He's in the jug, but a gaol has doors, and doors'll
open with or without keys. I'm for opening the door, boys."

"What for?" asked a man who knew the answer, but who wanted the thing
said.

"I spent four years in Arizona, same as Jowett," Billy Kyle answered,
"and I got in the way of thinking as they do there, and acting just as
quick as you think. I drove stage down in the Verde Valley. Sometimes
there wasn't time to bring a prisoner all the way to a judge and jury,
and people was busy, and hadn't time to wait for the wagon; so they done
what was right, and there was always a tree that would carry that kind
o' fruit for the sake of humanity. It's the best way, boys."

"This isn't Arizona or any other lyncher's country," said Halliday,
the lawyer, making his way to the front. "It isn't the law, and in this
country it's the law that counts. It's the Gover'ment's right to attend
to that drunken dago that threw the horseshoe, and we've got to let the
Gover'ment do it. No lynching on my plate, thank you. If Ingolby could
speak to us, you can bet your boots it's what he'd say."

"What's your opinion, boss?" asked Billy Kyle of Gabriel Druse, who had
stood listening, his chin on his breast, his sombre eyes fixed on them
abstractedly.

At Kyle's question his eyes lighted up with a fire that was struck from
a flint in other spheres, and he answered: "It is for the ruler to take
life, not the subject. If it is a man that rules, it is for him; if it
is the law that rules, it is for the law. Here, it is the law. Then it
is not for the subject, and it is not for you."

"If he was your son?" asked Billy Kyle.

"If he was my son, I should be the ruler, not the law," was the grim,
enigmatic reply, and the old man stalked away from them towards the
bridge.

"I'd bet he'd settle the dago's hash that done to his son what the
Manitou dagos done to Ingolby--and settle it quick," remarked Lick
Farrelly, the tinsmith.

"I bet he's been a ruler or something somewhere," remarked Billy Kyle.

"I bet I'm going home to breakfast," interposed Halliday, the lawyer.
"There's a straight day's work before us, gentlemen," he added, "and we
can't do anything here. Orangemen, let's hoof it."

Twenty Orangemen stepped out from the crowd. Halliday was a past master
of their lodge, and they all meant what he meant. They marched away in
proce