"Dear me! dear me! I don't know what to say to you, Jack. If our men come back and find him here, he surely will never get off the place; they'll hang him on the gate-post; and I don't want that to happen. We've had trouble enough with this dead man here, and I don't want Charley or his father to get mixed up in any lynching." "Well, Mrs. Powell," Jack replied, "this young fellow ought to be killed and killed quick. He surely has no business in this country. But I can understand how you feel. It wouldn't be very pleasant for you to have him hung right in your dooryard, as you might say. Let me go out and talk to Bessie, and see what she thinks. I have an idea from the way she looks and from what you tell me that she has pretty good sense; but first, it seems to me, we ought to get rid of this carcass here. I'll open the front door and drag him out." Jack opened the door, and then going back to where the man lay, and moving the furniture out of the way, took him by the two wrists and dragged him out of the door and left the body lying on the ground. Going back to the kitchen door, he saw Bessie leaning against the fence watching the young man who was seated on the ground, and who apparently had not changed his position since he was tied up. "Come over here, Bessie," Jack requested, and she walked with him to a place fifteen or twenty yards from the young man, and there in a low voice they talked over the situation. Jack told her that her mother had explained what had happened, and of Mrs. Powell's fear lest some of the people now off on the round-up should come back and find the prisoner at the house, and should hang him without ceremony. "That is what I am afraid of, Jack. I want to have this thing ended now, as quickly as possible. It seems terrible that I should have had to kill that man; but I didn't know what else I could do to protect mother, and nobody knows where he would have stopped if something had not been done." "Well," suggested Jack, "what's the matter with giving this young man his horse, or horses, and turning him loose now without any weapons?" "I wish with all my heart you would do that. It seems to me that is the easiest way, and the best way, and it will certainly keep out of trouble any of the boys that may turn up here in the next few days." "All right," said Jack, "we'll do that. But first I've got to use him for a little while, and you must come along too, I am afraid, to stand guard over him." "I'll do anything I can that you say is right," agreed Bessie. Jack went over to the prisoner, and untying the ropes turned him loose. "Now, young fellow," Jack said, "rub your arms and wrists and get the stiffness out of them, and then come down to the barn and help me hitch up a wagon."