a word. When Polk asked him if he had anything to say, he stood up and turned his back on Polk, and faced the court-room, which was jam full, for everybody knowed him and everybody liked him—you couldn't help it.

"'You people have knowed me here,' Dick says, 'since I was a boy, and you've knowed my mother. I ain't never in times back done nothin' I was ashamed of, and I ain't now, and you know it. I tell you, men, I didn't take that money.' Then he faced the jury. 'I don't know,' he said, 'as I blame you. Most of you don't know no better and those o' you who do are afraid to say it; but you, Judge Polk,' and he squared himself and pointed his finger straight at him, 'you claim to be a man of eddication, and so there ain't no excuse for you. You've seen me grow up here, and if you had any common sense you'd know that a man like me couldn't steal that man's money, and you'd know, too, that he was too drunk to know what had become of it.' Then he stopped and said in a low voice, and with his teeth set, looking right into Polk's eyes: 'Now I'm ready to take whatever you choose to give me, but remember one thing, I'll settle with you if I ever come back for puttin' this misery on to my mother, and don't you forget it.'

"Polk got a little white about the gills, but he give Dick a year, and they took him away to Stoneburg.

"After that the mother ran down and got poorer and poorer, and folks avoided her, and she got behind and had to sell her stuff, and a month before his time was out she got sick and pretty near died. Dick went straight home and never left her day nor night, and just stuck to her and nursed her like any girl would a-done, and got her well again. Of course folks was divided, and it got red-hot 'round here. Some believed him innercent, and some believed him guilty. Lawyer White and fellers like him stuck to him, but Rankin's gang was down on him; and when he come into Chris's place for his paper same as before, all the bums that hang 'round there got up and left, and Chris told Dick he didn't want him there no more. That kinder broke the boy's heart, though he didn't say nothing, and after that he would go off up in the woods by himself, or he'd go huntin' ches'nuts or picking flowers, all the children after him. Every child in the settlement loved him, and couldn't stay away from him. Queer, ain't it, how folks would trust their chil'ren. All the folks in Hell's Diggin's did, anyhow."

"Yes," I interrupted, "there was one with him to-night in the stage."

"That's right. He always has one or two boys and girls 'long with him; says nothin' ain't honest, no more, 'cept chil'ren and dogs.

"Well, when his mother got 'round ag'in all right, Dick started in to get something to do. He couldn't get nothin' here, so he went acrost the mountains to Castleton and got work in a wagon fact'ry. When it come pay day and they asked him his name he said out loud, Dick Sands, of Hell's Diggin's. This give him away, and the men wouldn't work with him, and he had to go. I see him the mornin' he got back. He come in and asked for me, and I went out, and he said, 'Uncle Jimmy, they mean I sha'n't work 'round here. They won't give me no work, and when I git it they won't let me stay. Now, by God!'—and he slammed his fist down on the desk—'they'll support me and my mother without workin',' and he went out.

"Next thing I heard Dick had come into Rankin's and picked up a ham and walked off with it. Chris, he allus 'lowed, hurt him worse than any one else around here, and so maybe he determined to begin on him. Chris was standin' at the bar when he picked up the ham, and he grabbed a gun and started for him. Dick waited a-standin' in the road, and just as Chris was a-pullin' the trigger, he jumped at him, plantin' his fist in 'tween Chris's eyes. Then he took his gun and went off with the ham. Chris didn't come to for an hour. Then Dick barricaded himself in his house, put his mother in the cellar, strung a row of cartridges 'round his waist, and told 'em to come on. Well, his mother plead with him not to do murder, and after a day he give himself up and come out.

"At the trial the worst scared man was Polk. Dick had dropped in on him once or twice after he got out, tellin' him how he couldn't git no work and askin' him to speak up and set him straight with the folks. They do say that Polk never went out o' night when Dick was home, 'fraid he'd waylay him—though I knew Polk was givin' himself a good deal of worry for nothin', for Dick warn't the kind to hit a man on the sly. When Polk see who it was a-comin' into court he called the constable and asked if Dick had been searched, and when he found he had he told Ike Martin, the constable, to stand near the bench in case the prisoner got ugly.

"But Dick never said a word, 'cept to say he took the ham and he never intended to pay for it, and he'd take it again whenever his mother was hungry.

"So Polk give him five years, sayin' it was his second offense, and that he was a 'habitual criminal.' It was all over in half an hour, and Ike Martin and the sheriff had Dick in a buggy and on the way to Stoneburg. They reached the jail about nine o'clock at night, and drove up to the gate. Well, sir, Ike got out on one side and the sheriff he got out on t'other, so they could get close to him when he got down, and, by gosh! 'fore they knowed where they was at, Dick give a spring clear over the dashboard and that's the last they see of him for two months. One day, after they'd hunted him high and low and lay 'round his mother's cabin, and jumped in on her half a dozen times in the middle of the night, hopin' to get him,—for Polk had offered a reward of five hundred dollars, dead or alive,—Ike come in to my place all het up and his eyes a-hangin' out, and he say, 'Gimme your long gun, quick, we got Dick Sands.' I says, 'How do you know?' and he says, 'Some boys seen smoke comin' out of a mineral hole half a mile up the mountain above Hell's Diggin's, and Dick's in there with a bed and blanket, and we're goin' to lay for him to-night and plug him when he comes out if he don't surrender.' And I says, 'You can't have no gun o' mine to shoot Dick, and if I knowed where he was I'd go tell him.' The room was full when he asked for my gun, and some o' the boys from Hell's Diggin's heard him and slid off through the woods, and when the sheriff and his men got there they see the smoke still comin' up, and lay in the bushes all night watchin'. 'Bout an hour after daylight they crep' up. The fire was out and so was Dick, and all they found was a chicken half cooked and a quilt off his mother's bed.

"'Bout a week after that, one Saturday night, a feller come runnin' up the street from the market, sayin' Dick had walked into his place just as he was closin' up,—he had a stall in the public market under the city hall, where the court is,—and asked him polite as you please for a cup of coffee and a piece of bread, and before he could holler Dick was off again with the bread under his arm. Well, of course, nobody didn't believe him, for they knowed Dick warn't darn fool enough to be loafin' 'round a place within twenty foot of the room where Polk sentenced him. Some said the feller was crazy, and some said it was a put-up job to throw Ike and the others off the scent. But the next night Dick, with his gun handy in the hollow of his arm, and his hat cocked over his eye, stepped up to the cook shop in the corner of the market and helped himself to a pie and a chunk o' cheese right under their very eyes, and 'fore they could say 'scat,' he was off ag'in and didn't leave no more tracks than a cat.

"By this time the place was wild. Fellers was gettin' their guns, and Ike Martin was runnin' here and there organizing posses, and most every other man you'd meet had a gun and was swore in as a deputy to git Dick and some of the five hundred dollars' reward. They hung 'round the market, and they patrolled the streets, and they had signs and countersigns, and more tomfoolery than would run a circus. Dick lay low and never let on, and nobody didn't see