"But we can't butcher the fellow like a hog!" Judge Thayer protested.
"Live hogs are shipped in boxes, right along," Morgan explained.
Judge Thayer saw the light; his pepper-and-salt whiskers twinkled and spread around his mouth, and rose so high in their bristling over his silent laughter that they threatened his eyes. He turned to Craddock, forcing a sober front.
"All right, Seth, we'll take you up on it. You're going out of town in a box," he said.
Judge Thayer ordered the undertaker to bring over a coffin box, the longest one he had. The word ran like a prairie fire from those who heard the order given, that they were going to shoot Craddock for his crimes and bury him on the spot.
There was not a little disappointment, but more relief, in the public mind when it became understood that Craddock was not to be shot. As a mockery of his past oppression and terrible name, he was to be nailed up in a box and shipped out like a snake. And so it turned out again in Ascalon that comedy came in to end the play where tragedy had begun it.
Morgan bore no part in this unexpected climax to his hard-straining and doubt-clouded day. He stood by watchful and alert, a great peace in his mind, a great lightness. He had come through it according to Rhetta Thayer's wish, according to his own desire, with no man's blood upon his hands.
There were many willing ones who came forward to make light the labor of Seth Craddock's packing. They unbound his hands with derision and bundled him into the capacious long box against his strivings and curses with scorn. Morgan suggested the enclosure of a jug of water. Let him frizzle and fry, they said. They'd bore an auger hole or two in the box to give him air, and that was greater humanity than he deserved. Morgan insisted on at least a bottle of water, and had his way, against grumbling.
The undertaker officiated, as if it were a regular funeral, putting the long screws in the stout lid while citizens sat on it to hold the explosive old villain down. They fastened him in as securely as if he were a dead man, in all sobriety, boxed up againt the worms of the grave.
Then the question rose of where to send him, and how. On the first part of it the public was of undivided mind. No matter where he went, or in what direction, let it be far. On the second division there was some argument. Some held for shipping him by freight, as livestock, and some were for express as the quickest way to the end of a long journey. For the farther out of sight he could be carried in the shortest possible time, they said, the better for all concerned.