In the midst of which the colonel takes a chair and sets down and crosses one leg over the other, swinging the loose foot and smiling very patient.

Which Will remembers he is chairman of that meeting and pounds fur order.
"Thank you, Will," says the colonel, like getting order was a personal favour to him.

Then Billy Harden gets the floor, and squares away fur a longwinded speech telling why.

But Buck Hightower jumps up impatient and says: "We've been through all that, Billy.

That man there has been tried and found guilty, colonel, and there's only one thing to do--string him up." "Buck, _I_ wouldn't," says the colonel, very mild.
But that there man Grimes gets up very sober and steady and says: "Colonel, you don't understand." And he tells him the hull thing as he believed it to be--why they has voted the doctor must die, the room warming up agin as he talks, and the colonel listening very interested.
But you could see by the looks of him that colonel wouldn't never be interested so much in anything but himself, and his own way of doing things.