In Victoria’s experience, for young men, in particular, pain was far more easily tolerated than embarrassment.

George Simmons had thrown a heavy chain over an exposed beam in the roof over the gas pumps. He’d clamped the ends together with a large clevis hook. Much to Victoria’s surprise, Brandon-Lee did not fight as his captors raised his hands over his head and slipped the knot that divided his hands into the hook and snapped it shut.

And there he was, fully exposed. The jeering crescendoed and Victoria sensed that they needed to get this done quickly.

Ty Rowley sidled up to Victoria and handed her a five-foot length of inch-thick hemp rope, into which he’d tied a knot every six inches or so. “This is the whip,” he said. “I figure you double it over on itself and you’ll be able to swing it pretty easily. Should leave a hell of a mark, too. Tear that shithead’s skin right off the bone.”

This wasn’t what she’d wanted, what she’d anticipated. She was expecting a single length of rope, perhaps made of cotton or nylon. This thing in her hands was a genuine torture device. And it was too late to turn back.

“You gonna do the floggin’, Mrs. Emerson?” Mr. Jake asked.

Victoria looked to McCrea for relief. “Absolutely not,” he said, answering a question she didn’t ask. “I agreed to deliver him and guard him after it’s done.”

People were waiting. How could she not have thought this through to this point? Who would the . . . executioner be? This seemed like a worse idea with every passing second.

With the scourge dangling from her fist, she approached Brandon-Lee, whose face was now a mask of terror. “Please don’t do this,” he begged.

Victoria turned her back on him and addressed the crowd. “We are about to cross a line that can’t be uncrossed,” she said. “Is there room for mercy, or are we really going to go through with this?”

“Oh, hell yes, we’re going through with it,” Joey Abbott said. “I’d be happy to lay that son of a bitch wide open.”

The crowd agreed with enough fervor that if any dissent existed, it would have been shouted down.

“No, please,” Brandon-Lee pleaded. He was crying now.

“Then here’s how it will work,” Victoria said. “Since we do this as a community, then the community will carry out the sentence. Thirty strokes to the prisoner’s back. Dr. Stevenson, I’ll ask you to monitor the prisoner’s health as we go along. Whoever wants to swing the whip may do so, but only to a limit of one stroke per person, up to thirty people. If thirty of you do not step forward, then the punishment will end at the delivery of the last volunteered stroke.”

“Jesus, Vicky,” Ben Barnett said. “Are you just making this up as you go along?”