I saw you stand there when a ball had already grazed your brow and defy them to shoot again. I saw that poor black boy clinging to your knees, and knew that the light of Heaven had shone on you, while I lay in the hot darkness of the bottomless pit.” “God, you do put it strong!” Garner exclaimed. “I'm not putting it half strong enough,” the sheriff went on. “I don't deserve to hold office even in a community half run by mob law. But I ain't through. I ain't through yet. I got up early that awful morning, and went out to feed my hogs at a pen that stands on a back street, and there a woman milking a cow told me that it was over Pete Warren was done for--guilty or not, he was done for. I went in the house and tried to gulp down my breakfast, faced by my wife, who wouldn't speak to me, and showed in other ways what she thought about the whole thing. She was eternally sighing and going on about old Mammy Lindy and her feelings. I first went to the jail, and there I was told that two mobs had come, the first the Hillbend crowd, who did the work, and the bigger mob that got there too late.” Braider's voice had grown husky and he coughed. Garner stole a searching glance of inquiry at Carson, but Dwight, his face suffused with a warm look of pity for the speaker, was steadily staring through the open door. “I ain't done yet, God knows I ain't,” the sheriff gulped. “That morning I felt meaner than any convict that ever wore ball and chain. If I'd been tried and found guilty of stabbing a woman in the back I don't believe I could have felt less like a man. I tried to throw it all off by thinking that I couldn't have done any good anyway, but it wouldn't work. Carson, you and your plucky stand for the maintenance of law was before me, and you wasn't paid for the work while I was. Huh! do you remember seeing me as you came out of Blackburn's store that morning, with your hair all tousled up and your eyes looking red and bloodshot?” “Yes, I remember seeing you,” said Dwight. “I would have stopped to speak to you but--but I was in a hurry to get home.” “Well, you may have heard that I used to be a sort of a one-horse detective,” Braider went on, “and I had acquired a habit of looking for the explanation of nearly every unusual thing I saw, and--well, you coming out of that store before it was opened for trade, while the shutters in the front was still closed, struck me as odd. Then again, remembering your big interest in Pete's case, somehow, it didn't seem to me--meeting you sudden that way--that you looked quite as downhearted as I expected. In fact, I thought you appeared sort o' satisfied over something.” “Oh!” Garner exclaimed, all at once suspecting Braider of a gigantic ruse to entrap them. “You thought he looked chipper, did you? Well, I must say he looked exactly the other way to me when I first saw him that day.”