“‘Heave away now, Bill,’ cried the man as tied the noose.
“But somethin’ was wrong with the hitch o’ the rope round the branch o’ the tree, an’ it wouldn’t draw, and some time wos spent in puttin’ it right. I felt sorter sorry for the old man, for his grave face was bold enough, and age more than fear had to do with the tremblin’ o’ his legs. Before they got it right again, my eye fell on a small band o’ red-skins, who were lookin’ quietly on; and foremost among them the very blackguard as shot the man in the galley. I knew him at once by his ugly face. Without sayin’ a word, I steps for’ard to the old Injun, and takes the noose off his neck.
“‘Halloo!’ cried a dozen men, jumpin’ at me. ‘Wot’s that for?’ ‘Scrag the hunter,’ cries one. ‘Howld yer long tongues, an’ hear what he’s got to say,’ shouts an Irishman.
“‘Keep your minds easy,’ says I, mountin’ a stump, ‘an’ seize that Injun, or I’ll have to put a ball into him before he gits off’—for, ye see, I obsarved the black villain took fright, and was sneakin’ away through the crowd. They had no doubt who I meant, for I pinted straight at him; and, before ye could wink, he was gripped, and led under the tree, with a face paler than ever I saw the face o’ a red-skin before.
“‘Now,’ says I, ‘wot for are ye scraggin’ this old man?’ So they told me how the party that went off to git the murderer met a band o’ injuns comin’ to deliver him up to be killed, they said, for murderin’ the white man. An’ they gave up this old Injun, sayin’ he wos the murderer. The diggers believed it, and returned with the old boy and two or three others that came to see him fixed off.
“‘Very good,’ says I, ‘ye don’t seem to remimber that I’m the man what saw the murder, and told ye of it. By good luck, I’ve come in time to point him out—an’ this is him.’ An’ with that I put the noose round the villain’s neck and drawed it tight. At that he made a great start to shake it off, and clear away; but before you could wink, he was swingin’ at the branch o’ the tree, twinty feet in the air.
“Sarved him right,” cried several of the men, emphatically, as the hunter concluded his anecdote.
“Ay,” he continued, “an’ they strung up his six friends beside him.”
“Sarved ’em right too,” remarked the tall man, whose partiality for the tin wash-hand basin and the tooth-brush we have already noticed. “If I had my way, I’d shoot ’em all off the face o’ the ’arth, I would, right away.”
“I’m sorry to hear they did that,” remarked Larry O’Neil looking pointedly at the last speaker, “for it only shewed they was greater mortherers nor the Injuns—the red-skins morthered wan man, but the diggers morthered six.