"Go ahead, gentlemen," he said.
Some of the men rolled chunks of railroad ballast in the oily packing, to which they attached lengths of baling wire. Then they fired the waste, and Waco Johnson, saying he was assuming entire responsibility, took the torches one by one, swung them as a boy whirls a sling, and threw them to the hotel roof.
That was not a demonstrative crowd. Almost to a man they had been through the fire of battle, the perils of Indian warfare, the adventures of the Santa Fé Trail. Talk was such a cheap commodity they disdained it when there was serious work to be done. One had ridden the border with Quantrill—of which he said nothing to certain of his neighbors, to be sure—one had been with Custer in the Pawnee campaign; the veteran of Appomattox was there, and the man of Jo Shelby's brigade. He had seen the walls of Chapultepec and the golden beard of Maximilian, whose fate might have been less unhappy if he had accepted the unconquered Shelby's proffered help.
One and all thought of the impositions, humiliations, insults, they and theirs had suffered in that sneering, obscene, evil town, which they had shunned even to the point of hardship rather than face its ribaldry. This was the day of righteous vengeance. Within the law or beyond it, they were going to apply the remedy of purgation.
They stood by, as a man stands by a tree where a squirrel is hiding, guns ready for somebody to make a break. Within five minutes the roof of Eddie Kane's place was blazing high, and there was a sound of running in
