It was decided by the cowmen that, as a warning and example to other sheep owners, Bud Larkin should be tied to a tree and quirted, the maximum of the punishment being set at thirty blows and the sentence to be carried out at dawn.
CHAPTER XV
COWLAND TOPSY-TURVY
To Bud Larkin enough had already happened to make him as philosophical as Socrates. Epictetus remarks that our chief happiness should consist in knowing that we are entirely indifferent to calamity; that disgrace is nothing if our consciences are right and that death, far from being a calamity is, in fact, a release.
But the world only boasts of a few great minds capable of believing these theories, and Larkin’s was not one of them. He was distinctly and completely depressed at the prospect ahead of him.
It was about ten o’clock at night and he sat in the chair beside his table, upon which a candle was burning, running over the pages of an ancient magazine.
The knowledge of what the cowmen had decided to do with him had been brought by a committee of three of the men just before the supper hour and since that time Larkin had been fuming and growling with rage. 177
There seems to be something particularly shameful in a whipping that makes it the most dreaded of punishments. It was particularly so at the time in which this story is laid, for echoes of ’65 were still to be heard reverberating from one end of the land to the other. In the West whippings were of rare occurrence, if not unknown, except in penitentiaries, where they had entirely too great a vogue.