Damascus jumped to its guns with the fervor of a righteous cause. Major Cottrell spread the news of Simrall's impending raid, throwing off his weakness as a bedridden person is said to overcome his sickness in the menace of death by fire.
There were some who questioned the report at first, inquiring its source, the habit of humor being so well established in the town as to cause its citizens to poke every tied bag and turn every buffalo chip to look for the joke before accepting anything for what it appeared on the outside to be. Several young men leaped the saddled horses which always could be found hitched around the square, and rode off in the direction of Simrall to investigate, and the county clerk, who owned a spyglass, mounted the court house tower to take a peek at the road, which undulated over the hummocks like the picture of a tapeworm in the almanac.
It was a true report, the county clerk said, coming down from the tower white around the gills, sweating, with cobwebs across his extensive forehead, which occupied all the ground where his forelock used to be. He calculated them to be about three miles out of Simrall, with five to come. There were four wagonloads of them, escorted by a troop of horsemen, which appeared to number twenty or thirty. There were enough of them, he said, to wipe Damascus off the map and never leave a mark.
This report from aloft flashed around the square, quickening the preparations for defense. Men were locking up their stores, piling goods boxes, barrels of salt and sugar, sacks of flour and even hams, in the windows to prevent the bullets doing damage among their shelves. Women and children were hurried into the cellars, with instructions to stay there until the fight was over unless driven out by fire. Many of these were struggling to their places of concealment carrying feather beds and pillows, the frontier faith in feather beds to stop bullets being firmer grounded than anybody's experience justified.
Major Cottrell was standing at the head of the court house steps, where he had fought his unequal battle against the Simrall raiders of another day, his pistol ready to his hand, a rifle on his shoulder. On account of his military experience and his official position in the county, the major was looked on as leader.
Other armed men were coming, not at all warlike in appearance, peaceable family men in shirt sleeves, the butcher with his apron tucked up at the corner like an ancient apprentice, the druggist with his eyeglasses and upstanding hair. The Baptist preacher was seen coming with a double-barreled shotgun. He stopped to question Kraus, who appeared to have a sudden pressure of business in the opposite direction.
Meantime, Elizabeth Cottrell and Dr. Hall were collecting the county's funds, small books and documents, which they carried to the bank and locked in the vault. The bank's safe was not large enough to admit the county recorder's books, the things most desired by the Simrall people. The title to every piece of real estate in the county depended on those records, of which no complete abstract had been made. Let Simrall get its hands on the books, and the county officials would have to surrender.
Hall returned to Cottrell's office from a hurried dash across to the bank with some last sheaves of papers, to find Elizabeth standing before the pile of broad, flat books in which land titles were recorded. This array of records had grown fast in the past six months of the county's history; heaped as they two had stacked them in the hope of being able to get them into the bank vault, the pile was almost half as high as Elizabeth, three tiers wide.
"This is likely to be a very serious affair," Hall said.
"I'm afraid there's going to be a terrible fight!" she replied. She was standing with her hand on the books, in a pose of affectionate protection. Her face was very pale.
"Your father's in no condition to take a hand in this, but he'll not listen to anything. He's running on the pressure of excitement, likely to snap like an icicle any minute."
"They won't let me have a gun!" she complained indignantly. "Dad says I must go home, it's no place for a woman, but I'd be more good to them than the best man in the bunch, except him. They're not fighting men, Dr. Hall."
"No, that's the pity of it. They'll throw their lives away in this foolish quarrel, fighting for so little. This old dump! The whole thing involved isn't worth the life of one man, much less five or six—maybe more—that are likely to be killed here to-day. I think your father's right. Home is the place for you, Elizabeth."
"What are you going to do?" she inquired, lifting her anxious eyes. "You haven't got any gun."
"It isn't my fight, Elizabeth," he replied gently, meeting her questioning glance steadily. He touched her hand where it pressed the books. She drew it away, subconsciously, it seemed, shaking her head.
"It's everybody's fight to-day," she said.
"I'm an outsider," he reminded her, "but Damascus doesn't appear to be a respecter of persons in its brawls. It has reached out and involved the innocent bystander before; it may do it again. If anything like that happens I'll have to act on the impulse. That's all I can say, Elizabeth."
"But you haven't got a gun," she insisted, in a half complaining, half blaming way.
"I'll make out without one," he replied, somewhat stiffly, his dignity touched by her manner of indictment for what she too plainly believed his remission in a manly duty.
"It's suicide to meet that Simrall crowd without a gun," she continued her censorious arraignment. "I've always told you a man couldn't face the music in this country without a gun, and now you'll see I'm right. Rustle around and get one, can't you, before they come?"
"That would spot me at once as an enemy to Simrall, which I'm not," he replied, disloyally, she believed, as the the sudden flush of her cheeks gave token.
"I shouldn't think you'd want somebody else to do your shooting for you all the time," she rebuked him, a little note of meanness in her voice, a little squint of meanness in her eyes.
If she expected to hurt him that way, or urge him by such nagging to abandon the calm attitude of indifference toward the quarrel which he held to be contemptuous and of small account, it was proof that she had not plumbed him any deeper than the rind. He grinned, untouched by her innuendo, bending the toes of his polished shoes as if he tried the flexibility of their soles for a race he was about to enter, lifting his heels slightly from the floor, legs spread a little, his whole attitude benignant, patronizing, tolerant.
"As long as I'm not in debt to you for it, I don't give a damn," he replied, so unexpectedly, so surprisingly out of his character, as to make her start, much as if somebody had sneaked up behind her and shot off a gun.
Whatever Elizabeth had in mind to say, and it was certain from her bridling look that she had plenty, was cut off by the arrival in the square of the young men who had ridden out on the Simrall road a little while before. They had gone a little sheepishly, like men who expected to be sold, making a joke of it, with light words and humorous quips; they had come back with the humor wrung out of them, feeling more like going on than stopping, if there had been any place to go.
Simrall was coming, every able-bodied man in the place, it seemed, approaching deliberately, the riders holding back to keep with the wagons. They were not more than three miles away.
Major Cottrell had been laying his plan of defense before the men gathered around him at the court house steps. The fervor that had seemed to animate this crowd of citizens was cooling off like a blaze in a pile of shavings. It had come up with a roar, mounted to its height in a moment, and fallen to nothing more than a little wavering smoke before the excited scouts galloped up with their appalling confirmation of the county clerk's long-distance espionage. Some of them began to hedge; to debate the advisability of offering armed defense of a position which a court decision might pronounce illegal in the end.
Among the advocates of this policy stood the lumber dealer and a lawyer named Pettyjohn, the latter a lank usurer of hard repute, but a man of persuasive tongue. Burnett, Dine Fergus, and the other notable humorists of the town were not present, although Hall had seen Larrimore skulking on the edge of the crowd as if he dodged around in the hope of picking somebody's pocket or finding something that had been lost.
The weight of these men's opinion had effect; others spoke up in support of that policy of nonresistance. Some of the crowd began to drift around the corner of the building and disappear; others turned calculative eyes up the road toward Simrall, as if figuring on whether they had time to make it to cover and hide their guns before the raiders appeared. Their guns appeared to have grown heavy in their hands.
Major Cottrell heard these vacillating citizens with scorn. They were strangers in his country, men of another age. He denounced them as pusillanimous cowards, unworthy usurpers of brave men's places in a country that was too big for them in all its dimensions. He called for volunteers to stand by him and fight for the honor of the town and county.
To this call there was a very feeble response. Peters, leader of the cowboy band, sleeves rolled up from his stringy forearms, just as he had turned from making stovepipe to pick up his rifle and run to the square; the butcher, wearing his apron with the corner turned up, to get it out of the way of his legs, perhaps, or maybe to remove any doubt or question of the sex it shrouded; the blacksmith, who was a grave, slow-spoken negro, with a grayness creeping into his kinky beard; the druggist, looking frightened and anything but a dependable recruit.
These four, and these four only, out of the business men and others whose interests were centered in Damascus, stood forward to signify their willingness to fight for what they believed to be their rights.
Major Cottrell regarded this little bunch of volunteers, all that was left out of the first eager grabbing of guns and running, with a softening of his stern aspect. The others were leaving, singly, in pairs and groups, heads laid together, no doubt arguing the justification of their act.
"I don't give a damn how it looks," the lumberman said defiantly, turning for a shot in answer to Major Cottrell's unspoken contempt for them in comparison with the little group before him, "I've got thirty thousand dollars' worth of lumber in my yard, and I can't afford to have it burnt."
"Let the law take its course, as it inevitably will," said Pettyjohn, striding off beside the lumber dealer.
"Thank you, gentlemen," said Major Cottrell, speaking to the four men who remained with him defenders of the town.
He went down the steps, shook hands with them, with a hearty word of commendation for each.
"If they open my heart when I'm dead, as the old queen said, they'll find your names engraved there," he said. "But I can't accept your sacrifice, gentlemen. For it would be a sacrifice with only a handful of us against them. You are honorably discharged. Go home; leave it to me alone."
Dr. Hall and Elizabeth had gone to the window when the scouts arrived, where they had stood listening to the report from the road, and the subsequent proposals and arguments. As Major Cottrell turned from his few valiant townsmen, after dismissing them honorably, Hall saw him stumble at the threshold of the court house, and heard his rifle fall.
Hall ran to the corridor, where he found the butcher supporting Major Cottrell, who was standing with a hand braced against the wall, his head drooping, making a determined struggle to keep on his feet. The old man grappled weakly to support himself against Hall's shoulder, lifting his head for a moment, mortal agony in his appealing eyes.
They carried Major Cottrell into his disordered office, where the pile of records which he would have given his life to defend stood in the middle of the floor. He was unconscious when they laid him on the floor, Hall's coat under his head. His gaunt white face was drawn more in an expression of sadness than suffering, as if the thought of yielding the county he had built out of the wilderness, and the town he had fathered in his pride, over to men too base to stand in their defense, had overwhelmed him and broken his heart.
Dr. Hall sent the druggist to his office for his medical case, and the blacksmith to the hotel for blankets and a pillow. He was kneeling beside Major Cottrell, hand over the old man's fluttering heart, Elizabeth opposite, stroking her father's face, calling to him in little coaxing endearments. She implored Dr. Hall with her eyes. He tried to avoid them, for they carried an appeal which he knew no resources of his could meet.
Jim Justice would not trust any hands but his own with his bedclothes, which he came carrying clasped against his round front, encircled by both arms. Jim knew the armful of bedding would be his passport into the room where Major Cottrell lay. His curiosity to know the nature and extent of the old man's visitation was greater than his fear of the Simrall men. Jim was in a state of dishabille common to him at that hour of the day, without coat, collar or vest, his broad red suspenders conspicuous across his white shirt. He almost wedged in the door with his load. Dr. Hall motioned the major's four supporters to come in after Justice, and closed the door.
Elizabeth hurried away at Dr. Hall's suggestion to bring her mother, while the men in the room worked rapidly under the doctor's direction, building a low couch for Major Cottrell out of the county records. They spread these under the window at the farthest point from the door, covering them with blankets. Dr. Hall was engaged with hypodermic needle, attempting to stimulate the old man's weary heart, hoping to tide him over until his wife might see him once more with the spark of life in his body.
They composed Major Cottrell in dignity on his hard couch of books, where he lay apparently lifeless, his face white as the pillow, his breath so weak there was no perceptible movement.
"They're comin'!" Justice announced, turning from the window, his drowned mustache almost bristling as he suddenly realized his predicament. "They're comin'!" he repeated, standing faced half around from the window, his mouth open, apparently struck immovable in his boots. "God A'mighty, men! let me out o' here!"
"You've done all you can do for him, gentlemen," Dr. Hall told the others as the door banged after Justice. "There's no use in compromising yourselves by being caught here with guns. Leave them here, and go home."
"We promised we'd stand by him, Dr. Hall," Peters said with quiet dignity. "The records they're coming after are here. They'll not respect his condition—"
"I'll answer to the people of this town and county for their records," Hall replied. "Major Cottrell swore me in deputy recorder and treasurer before he'd allow me to touch a paper, or a dollar of the funds. He tried to tell me something out there in the hall when I went to him; he couldn't speak, but I read it in his eyes. He passed it on to me, gentleman. It was his lone fight up to that minute. Now it's mine."
Hall pushed them gently from the room, denying their protests with stern countenance, stern shaking of the head, as he urged them on their way, but said not another word. Peters was the last to go; he held to his gun until Hall wrenched it out of his hand at the threshold, and closed the door on his reluctant heels.