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We looked all about us for some path leading down to the river, but could find none; so perforce we had to continue on along the trail. Thus we entered the camp of Hangman's Gulch; for if it had been otherwise I am sure we would have located promptly where we had seen those red-shirted men.
Sir Christopher Seaton had been conveyed to the Tower, with his wife, under pretence of there waiting till his wounds were cured, to abide his trial, and in that awful hour Sir Nigel stood alone. Yet he was undaunted, for he feared not death even at the hangman's hand; his spirit was at peace, for he was innocent of sin; unbowed, for he was no traitor he was a patriot warrior still.
Temple allowed him to be carried off by his faithful ruffians, only stipulating that the captain was never after able to release his neck from the hangman's slip knot. The consequence was that he wore a shirt-collar up to his eyebrows for concealment by day, and a pillow-case over his head at night, and his wife said she was a deceived unhappy woman, and died of curiosity.
However, we did not wait to investigate the wonders of Hangman's Gulch, but drove our animals along the one street, looking for the trail that should lead us back to the diggings. We missed it, somehow, but struck into a beaten path that took us upstream. This we followed a few hundred yards.
At sight of Speed he uttered a cry, then plunged through the crowd like a bull, but the lariat loop slipped to his neck and tightened like a hangman's noose. "Larry," cried his employer, sharply, "have you lost your head?" "Ain't they g-g-got you yet?" queried the trainer in a strangling voice. "You idiot, I won!" "What!" "I won easy." "You won!" Larry's eyes were starting from his head.
"If ye'll not pay interest on your debts, I'll pay interest on mine ay, and with a hangman's cord belike." "But I signed a submission and oath, and here 's my pardon," protested Bagby, producing the paper, an example that Hennion imitated. "Damn Campbell's carelessness!" swore Howe. "He deals pardons as he would cards at piquet, by twos, without so much as a look at their faces.
Although the massacre of Saint Bartholomew met with Alva's entire approbation, yet it was his cue to affect a holy horror at the event, and he avowed that he would "rather cut off both his hands than be guilty of such a deed" as if those hangman's hands had the right to protest against any murder, however wholesale.
"Get up.... They air a-comin' to take ye to prison for the killin' of the gamekeeper. I comed to help ye, Ben Letts." The words soaked slowly into the sluggish brain. Tired from the beating Frederick had given him, and lazy by temperament, Ben did not at first realize that Myra's message meant the hangman's rope for him. He turned again in bed, and sat up.
The hangman's speech was broken and obstructed, his face worked strongly, and there was an actual glint of moisture in his eyes. He and my collector had been cronies until his dreadful secret was surprised, and had shared many a friendly half-pint together. His ostracism seemed to have hit him hard. Even a hangman, one supposes, has some sort of human feeling.
The coaches had fallen into lumber, the spanking teams had each and all made their squalid last journey to the knacker's; and the once famous Gentlemen of the Road had long lain at rest in mother earth's lap sleeping there none the less peacefully because the necks of many of them had suffered a nasty rick from the hangman's rope, and because the hard-trodden pavement of the prison-yard covered them.
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