"Dinnis Rumpety? Sure he'll niver be dead!" "I tell you Dennis Rumpety is dead. I have killed him!" "You!" she shrieked. "The saints preserve ye!" It was a ghastly work to get that dishonored body across the corral while the spectral horse came sniffing after. Rankin wondered whether the dishonored soul could be far away. He wondered that the woman and children did not seem to dread being left alone with--_it_. He did not know how futile ghostly horrors seemed, as compared with those horrors they had thrust out. As Pincher bore him back over the fourteen miles thither where justice awaited him, Rankin was a prey to two alternating regrets. At one moment he wished he had not said, "I'll murder you!" In the next turn of thought he wished it had been murder in the first degree, that the penalty might have been death rather than imprisonment. He did not allow himself to think of Myra Beckwith; his mind felt blood-stained, no fit place for the thought of her. There, where the thought of her had shone for months, a steady, heart-warming flame, was only a dull desolation which he dared not face. As he rode up the deserted street of Sandoria a strong desire possessed him to keep on to the north and have one more night of freedom on his own ranch; but that would have been a cruelty to Pincher. He put her up in the shed and gave her the next day's dinner which he had brought with him that morning in case there should be a dance to keep him over-night. Then he took a long, deep breath of the icy air and passed into the court-house. Inside, the atmosphere seemed suffocating. The room was so crowded that he did not find Myra's face anywhere. The sheriff was among the dancers, but the fiddles were winding up the set with a last prolonged squeak. As the scraping ceased, Rankin stood before the sheriff. In the sudden pause of sound and motion his voice sounded distinctly throughout the room. "I have just killed Dennis Rumpety," he said. For ten seconds there was absolute silence; then a rough voice growled, "Thunder! But you done a good job!" Upon that everybody began talking at once, and in the midst of the clamor Ed Rankin, the man who loved freedom better than life, was formally placed under arrest. His trial came off the next day but one. The coroner's inquest had shown death by apoplexy, caused probably by a paroxysm of rage. The jury rendered a verdict of "involuntary manslaughter." The sentence was the lowest the law allows: namely, one day's imprisonment with hard labor. This unlooked-for clemency staggered the prisoner. Oblivious of every fact but the terrible one that Dennis Rumpety had died by his hand, he had nerved himself for what he believed would be his death-blow. The tension had been too great; he could not bear its sudden removal. "Say, your honor," he cried, regardless of court etiquette,--"say, your honor, couldn't you lay it on a little heavier?"