the criminals to depart from the county within thirty hours, on pain of suffering a like fate. Though Broad Run got most of the credit for this prompt vindication of justice, the leaving of this legible notice upon the door was taken as evidence of the complicity of some whose education was better than that of the settlers at the Run. This execution had taken place but three months before the shooting of George Lockwood, and the mob was like a were-wolf. Perhaps I ought rather to liken it to those professional reformers who, having abolished slavery, or waved their hats while others abolished it, proceed to inquire for the next case on the docket, and undertake forthwith to do away with capital punishment or the marriage relation. Having found its local self-complacency much increased by success in discovering a method cheaper and more expeditious than those of the courts, Broad Run was readily inclined to apply its system of criminal jurisprudence to a new case. But this local reformatory tendency, like many large movements of the sort, was very capable of lending itself to the promotion of personal aims and the satisfaction of private grudges. One of Tom Grayson's rash boyish exploits, soon after he took up his abode with his uncle in town, had been to avenge himself for an affront put upon him the year before by Jake Hogan of Broad Run. Jake, while working as a hired man for Butts, the next neighbor to the Graysons, had taken the side of his employer in the long-standing quarrel between the Buttses and the Graysons about pigs in the corn-field and geese in the meadow, "breachy" horses and line fences. Jake had gone so far one day as to throw Tom, then a half-grown boy, into the "branch." A boy's memory of such events is good, and when Jake rode into Moscow, a year later, in company with his sweetheart to see the circus, Tom repaid the old grudge by taking the stirrups from Jake's saddle and dropping them into the public well; so that the consequential Jake had the mortification of escorting a giggling Broad Run girl to her home with his lank legs and his big boots dangling, unsupported, against the flanks of his horse. Hogan would have beaten Tom, if he had not received an intimation that this would perhaps involve the necessity of his settling the matter a second time with big Bob McCord. But he laid up his grudge, and from that time he had taken pleasure in testifying to his settled conviction that Tom "wouldn' never come t' no good eend." He always lent emphasis to this sinister prediction by jerking his head back, with the self-confident air of a man who knows what he knows. From the moment of the shooting of Lockwood, when Jake found that Tom was on the direct road to the gallows, he began to twit all his cronies. "Hain't I all-ays said so? Go to thunder! D'yeh think Jake Hogan don't know a feller as the rope's already got a slip-knot onto?" And he would jerk his chin back, and stiffen his neck, as he defiantly waited for a reply.