“No, we ain’t!” gruffly responded that functionary. “There’s eleven of us for hangin’, but Conway, there, won’t hear to it. He wants to clear the feller out an’ out, an’ says he’ll stay with us till kingdom come before he’ll budge an inch.” Giles Conway, the man whose obstinacy was causing such unnecessary delay, was seated rather apart from the rest, and wore the brown jeans and soft hat which marked him a farmer. Even had not the absence of any attempt at foppishness proclaimed his caste, there was something about him which insensibly connected itself in the observer’s mind with the free winds and untrammeled sunshine of the country. He was much the same color from his head to his feet, for eyes, skin, hair, and beard were alike brown, and only the deep lines on his firm, squarely cut face showed that he was no longer young. Just at present he seemed in no wise disconcerted by the wrathful impatience of his associates, but pushing his felt hat farther back on his head, and settling himself more comfortably in his wooden chair, said slowly: “No, friends, you won’t ever get me to hand over a man to the gallows on such evidence as that, an’ there ain’t no special use of cussin’ about it, for it won’t do a bit of good.” “Oh, but that is such foolishness!” broke in one of the group. “Here’s all this evidence, that no man in his senses could doubt, a-goin’ to prove that Bob Sullivan killed Jack Wilder, and here you sit like a bump on a log, and won’t listen to none of it.” “That’s just it,” replied Conway. “You all think that evidence like that orter hang a man, but if you’d seen as much of that sort of thing as I have, you’d think different. I ain’t much of a talker, but maybe you wouldn’t mind listenin’ to a case of this kind I happen to know about, an’ maybe the time I’m done—an’ it won’t take me long to tell it—you’ll see why I don’t want to hang a young fellow I’ve known nearly all my life for somethin’ that very likely he didn’t do. “You all know how when I wasn’t much over twenty I went West an’ put all the money I could rake an’ scrape into a ranch an’ cattle. Well, the place next to mine was owned by a young fellow—we’ll call him Jim Saunders, although that isn’t his name—who’d come out, like me, to make his fortune. We took to each other from the first, an’ pretty soon we were more like brothers than a good many of the real article I’ve seen since. After a while Jim told me he was goin’ to get married, an’ a few weeks later he brought home the prettiest little thing you’d see in a day’s ride. She had lots of yellow hair that was always tumblin’ down over her shoulders, an’ big blue eyes, an’ a voice like a wild bird, an’ Jim—well, he thought there wasn’t nobody like Milly in all the country.