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THE high pillars of the Irontown lock-up made it inconvenient for the boys and men of the village to climb up and peer through the barred windows into the cage where Peck Bradley was confined, but, nevertheless, this scrambling and peering went on all day long. There was something obscene and defiling in the spectacle of a mud-encrusted man locked up like an animal in a cage which stung the spiritual palate of Irontown with a kind of salty pleasure.

Peck, in all the mud and filth of his three-days-and-three-nights' chase, had been caged without even the comfort of a brush or a pan of water. Nevertheless, he sat on the noisome bunk in his cell with a certain air of assurance and habit. He had hung his woollen socks on one of the cross bars to dry. He pulled off his shirt and beat it against his cage to flail off the dried mud. He flipped his fingers through his bristly hair to get the dust out of it, and he begged cigarettes from his visitors. He made the most of the slender resources of the Irontown lock-up just as an experienced traveller arranges his things in a Pullman compartment and puts himself at ease for a journey.

To those who climbed to the window Peck talked freely and apparently quite casually, but, nevertheless, everything that he said held a certain expert-witness adroitness, so that if it ever should be repeated in a courtroom it would assist him to freedom and not to the electric chair.

"Why, yes," he told Tim Fraley, "I shot Tug—had to do it. I admit I was tryin' to skeer him. He pulled his automatic an' come at me spittin' far ever' step. I yelled at him to stop it, I was a frien', but he kep' comin' an' I had to