Page:Caroline Lockhart--The full of the Moon.djvu/236

 to Las Rubertas and tell 'em—tell her—I didn't do it. Good-by—good-by, Edie." He turned on his heel.

"I'm ready," he said curtly to the waiting officers, and sprang into the saddle.

So Ben was placed in the stone edifice in Hopedale known locally as the "cooler," and Fritz Poth contributed two soogans toward softening the slats in the bunk, while the citizens of Hopedale came singly and collectively to lighten the hours of his duress by conversation through the grating at the small window of the jail.

The formality of a preliminary hearing was dispensed with by Judge "Bill" Thompson, who owed his seat upon the bench largely to the fact that otherwise he would have become a town charge.

When the judge arrived at a certain stage of inebriety, midway between the mellowness of a few drinks and the total loss of his faculties, he acquired a preternatural loftiness of bearing which combined in his own bulky person all the dignity of the supreme court.

Fritz Poth had learned to a nicety the exact