Under ordinary circumstances her first impulse would have been to go straight to her husband with the story she had heard, but in this instance she felt that such a course would be impossible. She knew that Ezra was jealous of Mr. Cotterell, he had betrayed his feelings more than once, and in her heart she knew that few men can be just towards the man who arouses their jealousy. Her husband was a very just man, and could, more than any one she knew, put himself in the place of others and see what was right and what was wrong. But in this instance it was not justice Olive wanted, it was justice that she feared. Although she spoke bravely enough to Owen, a terrible fear lurked in her breast that the evidence, though ludicrously deficient by the rules of procedure that obtain in old established communities, was quite sufficient to convince a prairie jury. Ezra would not sit on a hanging jury, nor would he be a party to catching Mr. Cotterell, but his sense of justice and what was due to the principles professed at Perfection City might carry him no further than this passively inactive point? Would he assist Cotterell to escape? Guilty or not, that was what Olive wanted, and to help in such an undertaking, she felt sure, was what her husband might very well refuse to do. Was Cotterell guilty? Olive debated this point anxiously in her mind. She knew he went armed, but so did many other men. In fact, to be armed was the rule on the prairie. The doctrine of non-resistance was one of the least understood tenets of the Pioneers at Perfection City, and was observed by nobody else on the prairie. Even Brother Wright, as we have seen—though Olive was quite unaware of this—had granted to himself a special indulgence in this matter. So the mere fact of Mr. Cotterell’s always having his revolver in his belt did not really count for anything, one way or the other. He had always been so gentle and so chivalrous in his manner to her, she found it difficult to force her mind to keep hold of the fact that he was a very passionate man. Everyone said so, and she knew, too, that the Mills’ were a bad lot, drunken quarrelsome men, who, as Ezra said, combined in their character all the vices of the prairie and preserved none of its virtues. How easy it would be for a proud, passionate man like Mr. Cotterell to bring his revolver into a heated argument with Jake Mills, who might be mad with drink. But surely such a shooting was not murder according to prairie law. In her distress Olive found herself falling back upon the probable laxity of that very prairie justice which a short time before she had so scornfully characterised to Owen.