"Drop your hand, you parlor desperado. Kick the fire away. Now unchain
the stranger."

The parlor desperado obeyed. Then the sheriff made a speech; sitting his
horse at martial ease, and not warming his words with any touch of fire,
but delivering them in a measured and deliberate way, and in a tone which
harmonized with their character and made them impressively disrespectful.

"You're a nice lot--now ain't you? Just about eligible to travel with
this bilk here--Shadbelly Higgins--this loud-mouthed sneak that shoots
people in the back and calls himself a desperado. If there's anything I
do particularly despise, it's a lynching mob; I've never seen one that
had a man in it. It has to tally up a hundred against one before it can
pump up pluck enough to tackle a sick tailor. It's made up of cowards,
and so is the community that breeds it; and ninety-nine times out of a
hundred the sheriff's another one." He paused--apparently to turn that
last idea over in his mind and taste the juice of it--then he went on:
"The sheriff that lets a mob take a prisoner away from him is the
lowest-down coward there is. By the statistics there was a hundred and
eighty-two of them drawing sneak pay in America last year. By the way
it's going, pretty soon there 'll be a new disease in the doctor-books
--sheriff complaint." That idea pleased him--any one could see it.
"People will say, 'Sheriff sick again?' 'Yes; got the same old thing.'
And next there 'll be a new title. People won't say, 'He's running for
sheriff of Rapaho County,' for instance; they'll say, 'He's running for
Coward of Rapaho.' Lord, the idea of a grown-up person being afraid of
a lynch mob!"

He turned an eye on the captive, and said, "Stranger, who are you, and