They would have hanged me with as little compunction as they would have drowned an excess kitten, but they felt no hatred for me as a murderer. Life was reckoned cheap in the cow country.

One morning Pete stuck his head between the bars of the calaboose. His long yellow teeth gleamed. "Your padre, he come," he said.

It was as if lightning went through me. I thought that Pete was poking more fun at me. He repeated, "Your padre, big fellow, he come."

I would rather have been taken out to the tree and hanged. I did not want to see my father. I had that picture of him lying at Shrieber's store burned into my mind. But I had also the memory of a hundred gentle things he had done, balancing the roughness of that last impression. I did not want him to see me in the pen with a Mexican standing guard over me. For the first time I felt sorry for the whole affair.

It was Chicken who had sent for him. Once in a fit of depression I had confided in him. We were out on night herd together. The thick breath of the hot evening weighed about us. The cattle had been restless, cracking their horns together, crowding and scuffling. We had bedded them down at last on the level prairie and there was that tremendous silence of the night which rests like the hush of death over the plains.

A storm was coming. We feared a stampede. Chicken and I sat on our horses, riding slowly around the cattle, singing to quiet them. We began to hear the rolling boom of thunder. Lightning struck through the darkness, darting its uncanny flash about the horns of the steers.

I felt lonesome and homesick and full of premonitions. Often since the death of Jim Stanton I had thought of going back. I was tired of the isolation, of the ranges. I wondered about my father and my brothers. I wanted them to know if I died. This night I told Chicken to write to my father's people in Charleston, Va., if I should be killed.