A schoolmarm shoots a man while playing poker in the town saloon, wins the game, and has the body removed. She then gives temperance lectures to a group of men on Sunday, as they drink from hip flasks. She's a strict disciplinarian and they form a jury and decide she should be "hung for her cruel city ways."

She makes this a topic of discussion for their weekly "Deep Thinkers Club," during which she asks them "to think about justice and time, how little there is of either, and also about irony, which somehow relates to the same circumstances." The men believe "the schoolmarm’s just showing off again, making their brains ache, unrepentant criminal that she is." The sheriff jokes about the schoolmarm's lack of time, as she is to be hung. The sheriff jokes about justice—a topic which he considers himself an expert on—and the men "applaud his stupidity."

The men fall asleep while the schoolmarm lectures them on eternity and she wakes them up by twisting their ears. The sheriff takes her out to hang her, not wanting his ear twisted. She feels no trepidation on her way to the gallows. The schoolmarm muses about rocks. She says: “They express something profound about this place, this life, as I cannot. Language, even when grammatically correct, is simply inadequate. The situation is, in that sense, unspeakable. A landscape of rocks evokes a time before time, and the end-times as well, forcing us, while contemplating it, to live in all time at once, where words have nothing to attach themselves to. Only humans can experience time, so time itself will not exist when life ends, as life inevitably must. Between the beginning of time and the end of it, there’s relatively only an eyeblink, and without life there’s no one to see that eyeblink or remember it. That is what rocks express. Though they are otherwise meaningless, they are, in this respect, the most meaningful thing we have, putting us in touch with oblivion. Which is the ineffablest thing of all."

The sheriff says she's putting off what's going to happen. She asks for a rock to hold as she is hung.