“To prove it?” he cried, “Ai, then Lopez shall walk with you in our outer trenches. For in them you shall see the doomed townsmen themselves, a thousand townsmen, sleeping there until the dawn. Afterward, when Maximilian is safe, they who are still alive will be free to surrender.”
“And then––” But Driscoll knew the temper of the siege. What with the chief prize lost, there would be scant mercy for surrendered townsmen.
“God in heaven,” he muttered fervently, “if there’s any to 433suffer, it might as well be the guilty one, and a thousand times better one than one thousand! A man’s a man, or alleged to be!–Murgie, you wait here, I’m going to call the others.”
The others came, and heard. It was the court en banc, five Missourians and a Kansan. And the culprit was a Cæsar. But they hewed forth their Justice as rugged and huge, and as true, as would the outlaw, Michel Angelo. Like him, they were their own law. Nor were they nice gentlemen, these Homeric men who spat tobacco. Finding their goddess pandered to by those who were nice gentlemen, and finding the gift of these a pretty scarf over her eye, they roughly tore it away. For them she was not that kind of a woman.
“W’y, this prince is no Christian,” Crittenden announced in querulous discovery.
“One thousand loyally dying for their sovereign,” Daniel mused, his romantic soul wavering. “Sho!” he cried the instant after, “that thing’s out-dated!”
“And the prince there––” began the Kansan angrily.
“May just go–to–the–devil!”
All swung round on one of their number. It was the parson himself who had pronounced sentence.
Then they set out under the stars to attend to it.