So Nick reluctantly took the braid and gave up his case against Gillam. "It was just like the blamed whelp," he complained to Judge Harlin, "to back down and spoil all the fun, but it's no more than you might expect from a man that wears a stove-pipe." Harry Gillam was the only man in Las Plumas who wished, or dared to wear a silk hat, and his taste in the matter of headgear gave constant edge to Ellhorn's feeling of contempt and aversion. "I'm blamed sorry for it," Nick went on, "for I sure reckon half the kids in town would have been shyin' rocks at that plug before the trial was over." "I guess he was buffaloed," he said later, as he finished giving an account of the affair to Emerson Mead. "It was the meanest sort of a backdown you ever saw, but it just showed the fellow's gait. A man with no more grit than that had better go back east, where he can wear a stove-pipe hat without lookin' like a fool, which he sure is." "What made you so determined to have the thing, Nick?" Mead asked, examining the braid. Nick gave a twist to the ends of his mustache and looked contemplatively at the ceiling. "Well," he said slowly, and there were signs of the Irish roll in his voice, "it was my scalp. I took it, first, and then I was after payin' for it. Sure and I wanted it, Emerson, to remind me not to mix my drinks again. It's my pledge to take whisky straight and beer the next day. And I sure reckon whenever I look at it I'll say to myself, 'Nick, you've been a blooming, blasted, balky, blithering, bildaverous idiot once too often. Don't you do it again.'" Notwithstanding his feeling about it, Ellhorn went away and forgot the earnest of his future good behavior. Emerson smiled that evening as he saw it trailing its snaky length over the back of a chair and stuffed it in the side pocket of his coat, thinking he would give it to Ellhorn the next time his friend should come to the jail. Judge Harlin thought Emerson Mead unaccountably despondent about the probable outcome of his trial, and at times even indifferent to his fate. He wondered much why this man, formerly of such buoyant and determined nature, should suddenly collapse, in this weak-kneed fashion, lose all confidence in himself, and seem to care so little what happened to him. The lawyer finally decided that it was all on account of his client's honesty and uprightness of character, which would not allow him, being guilty, to make an effort to prove that he was not, and he lived in daily expectation of an order from Mead to change his plea to guilty. The time was drawing near for the opening of the case when Judge Harlin one day hurried excitedly to the jail for a conference with Mead. "Emerson," he said, "some member of the last grand jury has been leaking, and it has come to my ears that testimony was given there by some one who declared he saw you kill Whittaker. And I've just found out that the other side has got a witness, presumably the same one, who will swear to the same thing."