Chapter 3

THE THING THEY CALLED JUSTICE

Jack stared meditatively across at the young fellow sitting hunched upon another of the boxes that were the seats in this tent-jail, which was also the courtroom of the Vigilance Committee, and mechanically counted the slow tears that trickled down between the third and fourth fingers of each hand. A half-hour spent so would have rasped the nerves of the most phlegmatic man in the town, and Jack was not phlegmatic; fifteen minutes of watching that silent weeping sufficed to bring a muffled explosion.

"Ah, for God's sake, brace up!" he gritted. "There's some hope for you--if you don't spoil what chance you have got, by crying around like a baby. Brace up and be a man, anyway. It won't hurt any worse if you grin about it."

The young fellow felt gropingly for a red-figured bandanna, found it and wiped his face and his eyes dejectedly. "I beg your pardon for seeming a coward," he apologized huskily. "I got to thinking about my--m-mother and sisters, and--"

Jack winced. Mother and sisters he had longed for all his life. "Well, you better be thinking how you'll get out of the scrape you're in," he advised, with a little of Bill Wilson's grimness. "I'm afraid I'm to blame, in a way; and yet, if I hadn't mixed into the fight, you'd be dead by now. Maybe that would have been just as well, seeing how things have turned out," he grinned. "Still--have a smoke?"

"I never used tobacco in my life," declined the youth somewhat primly.

"No, I don't reckon you ever did!" Jack eyed him with a certain amount of pitying amusement. "A fellow that will come gold-hunting without a gun to his name, would not use tobacco, or swear, or do anything that a perfect lady couldn't do! However, you put up a good fight with your fists, old man, and that's something."

"I'd have been killed, though, if you hadn't shot when you did. They were too much for me. I haven't tried to thank you--"

"No, I shouldn't think you would," grinned Jack. "I don't see yet where I've done you any particular favor: from robbers to Vigilance Committee might be called an up-to-date version of 'Out of the frying-pan into the fire.'"

The boy glanced fearfully toward the closed tent-flaps. "Ssh!" he whispered. "The guard can hear--"

"Oh, that's all right," returned Jack, urged perhaps to a conscious bravado by the very weakness of the other. "It's all day with me, anyway. I may as well say what I think.

"And so--" He paused to blow one of his favorite little smoke rings and watch it float to the dingy ridge-pole, where it flickered and faded into a blue haze "--and so, I'm going to say right out in meeting what I think of this town and the Committee they let measure out justice.