Houston and Love would come back. They expected me to get them.

The remorse of the night before had reared like a coiled snake into a poisonous vengeance. There would be no quitting now.

The mean, sordid gray of early morning had just streaked the night sky. My father came out to the barn. He looked tall and grim, but blanched as a leper.

"Come in with me." His voice seemed pressed and flattened with misery. "Come in here." He led the way to the room where John lay in a moaning delirium.

"There's one," he pointed.

And then he moved silently into the other room where Ed had been placed on the board table.

My father's cavernous eyes glowed into mine in a blazing scrutiny.

"There's two," he said.

"Now what are you going to do? Are you going to finish us?"

It was like a whiplash cutting a welt across my face. I felt like a beaten, cowering dog.

Neither of us spoke. It was hard even to breathe. I could see that my father's hand trembled. I did not want to look into his accusing face.

What did he mean? Did he expect me to do nothing, while all of Woodward waited for the blow?

He knew the spirit of these prairie towns. Men settled their own accounts in swift and deadly fashion. Ex-fugitives and old range men made up the population. They paid little tribute to the law.

The marshals who administered it were the meanest men in the country. They were mostly former horse-thieves, rustlers or renegade gamblers.

The outlaws did their financeering with a six-shooter; the marshals used a whiskey bottle.

I have known deputy U. S. marshals, dozens of times, deliberately sneak the bottle into the schooner wagons going across the plains; double back on the occupants, search the wagons, find the bottle, tie their victims to the trees, hold them until the scoundrelly trick gave them about 10 prisoners. Then they would drive them all into Fort Smith, produce their fraudulent evidence, collect mileage and cold-bloodedly have those innocent men sent up for four or five years on the charge of introducing liquor into the Indian Territory. Ohio penitentiary, when I landed there, was choked with men serving time on such trumped-up cases.