CHAPTER XV
The mob came on, tossing its helpless victim on the surf of its passions. Still Original stood, a stocky figure of cold defiance in the path of frenzy. He had shifted his weight a little to his right foot so that he seemed to slouch; his shoulders sloped slackly forward; his hat, pushed a little back from his brow, permitted the sun to strike down and illumine his smiling face. One with an eye not keen enough to note the underlying readiness for instant action in this careless pose would have said the bow-legged little inspector was about to strike hands with an old acquaintance met after many years' separation.
The front of the crowd wavered and came to a halt at about five paces from the solitary figure in the road. The single will was playing upon the conglomerate and incohesive will of the mob. That moment was come when the spirit of stampede in human kind is confronted by a baffling personification of sanity and finds itself all at once thrown back upon itself. Original was quick to take advantage of it. He held up his left hand above his head.
"Boys, you 're goin' to let this man go. You 're goin' turn him over to me, and I promise he goes out of town on to-night's stage."
Quick reflexes played across the faces in the forefront of the wave of men: First dazed beginnings of comprehension, then sneering defiance. From the back of the mob came impatient surges forward, calls to know what was up, why somebody up yonder was stopping. Original continued to speak without passion, almost without emphasis.
"Let me tell you why you 're goin' turn this man over to me on the promise he goes out to-night. It s because he's a pore fool an' ought n't to be runnin' loose in this man's town. It 's because he has n't got the savvy the Lord gives to a yearlin' steer; because he 's no more accountable than a jack what's eaten loco weed. You boys would n't go for to cat-drag a half-wit out of an asylum."
"He 's a lawyer representin' your dam'd cattle interests come here to hocus-pocus the Killer out of a noose, an' you know it, Blunt!" The challenge came from a huge tower of a man who carried one end of the corral pole supporting the wretched Van Tromp.
"That 's what he told me this mornin'," Original answered without heat. "He told me that, an' he said something else to me which no man in his right mind could say and stay in one piece all together. That 's why I know he 's not strong in his mind."
This surprising confession on Original's part—admission of the true identity of the man on the corral rail—was not what the mob expected. For the space of a breath its leader was caught floundering.
"Ya-ah! All you lyin' cowmen stand together—range inspectors and lawyers." The challenge came from somewhere back in the core of crowded bodies.
"Go ahead! Give the runt a ride 'longside the lawyer! Come on, boys, dump 'em both in the creek!" The jangle of cries deepened into a roar. A thrusting wave from behind suddenly pushed out two wings of the mob to right and left of the center. They curved in to surround the solitary figure stemming the flood. Then lightning action.
Original leaped backward and the hand which had carelessly hung from his coat lapel was a blur. Those who had surged out to surround him shrank back when they saw a cold, impersonal eye of blue-black steel swinging in a slow arc at the propulsion of Original's hand, saw the crooked thumb which held back the hammer so tenuously. The man who faced them was in a crouch, head down-drawn between muscular shoulders, eyes narrowed to the hair trigger of alertness. His teeth showed in a curious grin. Slowly, slowly that hand directing the cold eye of steel swung from the hip; that hypnotic black hole at the gun's end seemed alive,—seemed coldly and casually to be selecting a man who should be first to die.
"Boys," spoke Original, "there 'll be quite a crowd go with me—all pals in hell together. Who 's first?"
In a flash he had mastered the mob. Original sensed this; also he realized how brief would be his victory.
"Jim Hanscomb"—he addressed the giant who carried on his shoulder the near end of the corral pole, and his revolver's snout emphasized the selection beyond chance of equivocation—"Jim Hanscomb, you drop that pole—now!"
As if rattler's fangs had burned his flesh the giant leaped from under the burden-bearing rail. Von Tromp was pitched almost to Original's feet. Original, still covering the front rank, groped for the lawyer's collar and jerked him to his feet. Von Tromp swayed unsteadily until the inspector's left arm circled his waist. Half supporting, half dragging the wreck, Original slowly backed to the sidewalk and to the Capitol's door. The door was opened from within, and hands caught Von Tromp to snatch him in. Original leaped in behind him.
The door slammed. The bar Dad Strayhorn dropped across it was just in time to catch the strain of bodies hurled against the heavy panels from without. A club crashed through one of the windows.
The dozen or so beleaguered cowmen in the saloon closed round Original and Von Tromp and rushed them toward the back door, which gave on to a corral and feed lot. Several saddled ponies were tethered to the bars there. Two cow-punchers mounted and Von Tromp was half lifted to the back of a third horse.
"Ride him to J. C. Ranch and hold him there for the stage," was Original's command to the convoy; then to Von Tromp, in biting accents, "An' you tell the people down Cheyenne way we folks on the range here don't sit into no game with hired killers and tin-horn lawyers."
So Warren C. Von Tromp, playing nip and tuck with the first of the mob to stream round a far corner of the alley, went away from the scene of a vivid and novel experience. A sadder, perhaps, but not a whit a wiser man.
The mob spirit, which had coalesced about the person of the lawyer on mere rumor and found itself cowed for the minute and cheated of a victim, soon was blown upon by a great wind of provocation. Uncle Alf, who had snatched a few hours of sleep in Sheriff Agnew's quarters, awoke in mid-afternoon refreshed and filled with a great zeal. Unconsciously he dodged restraint by Agnew, who feared to have the evangelist abroad to carry with his fiery tongue tinder to the temper of the town Agnew was busy with the district attorney, arranging for the summoning of an extraordinary grand jury to indict the Killer when Uncle Alf shook sleep from his eyes and prepared to preach crusade to Two Moons. Mrs. Agnew, instructed to "herd the old hell-roarer away from the street," Uncle Alf waved aside with a tolerant hand.
"The grapes of wrath are heavy in the vineyard, sister," he droned in his high nasal whine. "Alpheus, servant of the Lord, goeth forth to the harvest."
Forth he went; straight out of the jail door and down the middle of Main Street. He was hatless. His heavy mane of snowy hair lifted high from his forehead and fell over his ears to mingle with a cascading beard. From the tangle of beard his eyes, deep-set in hollows under a hawk's beak of a nose, glowed hot as slag in a retort. He strode raptly, as one following some sign in the heavens; his head was tilted back, and his gnarled old hands were stretched before him as the hands of a groping child in the dark. A fearsome man out of the wilderness, he; another John Baptist, come to cry: "Make straight the way." In Main Street's inflamed imagination the appearance of this apocalyptic figure carried the awesome savor of divine intervention; here was the raw spirit of the wilderness made manifest.
Uncle Alf strode down the middle of the street a full block, seeing no one, seemingly unconscious of the presence of any man. At the first corner he paused and shot both arms high above his head.
"Woe!" he screamed in a terrifying falsetto. "Woe to the taskmasters!"
He could make no forward step, for now the crowd was about him, pressing close, volleying questions: Where was Zang Whistler; what had become of the girl with the yellow hair; and what of the Killer? Uncle Alf professed to be aware of the crowd's presence for the first time. He looked dazedly about the ring of intent faces. He swept his hand through his beard.
"Are ye avengers of the blood of the innercent?" he demanded thunderously. Eagerness prompted assent even from those who did not grasp his meaning. "Then," commanded the evangelist, "prepare ye for the day of reckoning, for I, even I, Alpheus, servant of the Lord, am sent to lead against the might of the usurpers. Their murderers lurk in the hedges, an' their horned cattle tromp down my people's corn. My sheep they slay in the night."
Impatience had to abide Uncle Alf's circumlocutions and restrain itself to interpret his phraseology in terms of the present, but in time Main Street had his whole story of the calling which led him to the Killer and how Hilma and Whistler had come out of the dark to help him bring the murderer to justice. The girl, he told them, was sleeping in the sheriff's house; the Killer was behind bars; as for Whistler, he was not sure what had become of him; he had been swallowed up. Urgings produced nothing more specific than this in regard to Whistler, plainly the hero and darling of the town.
Uncle Alf irked when he was drawn from his mood of rapt exhortation, and he returned to it as speedily as he could. Here was none of that indifference to his call for crusade he had encountered among the Basin's silent folk; here, his preacher's quick sense of gauging an audience told him, was, in truth, a stringed instrument for him to play upon. The wilderness seer launched upon his most terrific jeremiad against the cattle barons. Somebody had whispered to him the fresh tale of the sheep moving on Poison Spider; that Hilma Ring had lost six hundred sheep in a night. The shrewd exhorter snatched at this for a text: How the oppressors of the small people had robbed this lily among thorns—so he denominated her—first of her father, then of her substance.
"With these hands"—he shook them high above his head—"with these hands I made the coffin for to bury Ole Man Ring in, whiles his orphan darter digs the grave among God's wild bloomin' flowers that 's to contain his poor clay. An' there—there, my brothers, out yander on Teapot Creek, where the ravenin' wolf whelps his kind an' the buzzard of the air calls to his mate from on high, I left her alone under the protection of a pitying God."
In the lump of the mob conscience Uncle Alf's bitter leaven worked swiftly and with a sure ferment. Shadows lengthened across Main Street, and still he talked. Orange and purple twilight came flooding down from the dike of the Broken Horns, yet that organ voice pealed on. Main Street seethed.
Near dark certain men whom the sheriff had tapped on the arm and summoned to his office—twenty in all—appeared suddenly on Main Street in front of the courthouse. Each had a white handkerchief tied about his right arm. Each carried a rifle.
Near dark, too, groups of riders began to converge on the roads leading from the Big Country into Two Moons. Strong men, desperate men, to whom had come word of events in the town. Men of the cattle clan from all the ranges were riding to town to see what they could see.