“They was agreeable, and he up and steps on the scaffold, what they was mighty proud of, it bein’ about the only substantial structure the town could boast. He began to sing that thing you’ve all been listening to, and he had a voice like water falling light and fine in a pool below. They crowded up close about the scaffold and listened. The words he put to it were his own story, just like those old minstrels that you read about, and at the end of each verse came the chorus, slow and solemn as the moment after something great has happened. There wasn’t a hangin’-face in the crowd after he was started. At some time or other every man had heard somebody he thought a heap of, buried to that tune, and his voice got to workin’ on their imaginations and turned their hearts to water. I don’t remember anything but the chorus—that went like this: “‘Who’ll weep for me, on the gallows tree, As I sway in the wind and swing? Is there never a tear to be shed for me, As I swing by a hempen string? Who’ll weep, who’ll keep Watch, as I’m rocked to sleep, Rocked by a hempen string?’” There was a long silence, broken only by the crackle of the logs in the camp-fire and the night sounds of the lonely plain. The leaping flames showed a group of thoughtful faces. Finally, Costigan broke the silence with: “Begorra, ’tis some av thim ’ud be doin’ well to be lukin’ to their music-lessons about here, Oi’m thinkin’, afther th’ day’s wurruk.” The Irishman, with his instinctive loquacity, had expressed what none of the rest would have considered politic to hint. It was like the giving way of the pebble that starts the avalanche. Soon they were deep in tales of lynchings. Peter knew only too well the trend of their talk, the “XXX” men were feeling the public pulse, as it were. Now, according to the unwritten code of the plains, lynching was “meet, right, just, and available” for the cattle-thief. And Peter felt himself false to his creed, false to his employer, false to himself, in seeking to evade the question. And yet that pitiful cabin, the white-faced woman running to the door so often that she knew not what she did, and the little rosy boy, who had put out his arms so trustfully! Peter broke into their grewsome yarning. “Lord, but you’re like a lot of old women just come from a funeral!” “Whin the carpse died hard, and th’ wake was a success.” Costigan turned over. “Werra, werra, but we’ll be seein’ fairies the night!” A “XXX” man turned his head with a deliberate slowness and regarded Peter with narrowing eyes: “If the subject of cattle-thieves and their punishment is unpleasant to the gentleman from New York, perhaps he will favor us with something more cheerful.” It was the same man who had given the two definitions of the “H L” brand that morning at the round-up. “Delighted,” said Peter, affecting not to notice the significance of the man’s remark. “Did you ever hear of the time that Tony Neville was burned with snow?”