CHAPTER XVII
The sun had gone down that night upon a town thirsting for action. Two Moons was like a fever patient in whose veins has accumulated all the virus of fantasy and disordered imaginings and who approaches that zero hour of the ultimate combustion of every atom of the contagion. Its imagination had been fired by the early-morning appearance of the Killer between a girl of startling beauty and an outlaw head of a modern Robin Hood band. This imagination easily was transformed to the kinetic call for action when Woolly Annie came to town with her plaint of a new outrage done, when Uncle Alf conjured the voices of ancient prophets to urge a liberation from the bondsmen. The trick of psychology which Original Bill had turned to his advantage wherewith to rescue a hated representative of the cattle barony from summary vengeance was the final provocation of explosion.
The twenty deputies with white handkerchiefs marking their arms and rifles in their hands whom Sheriff Agnew had placed before the courthouse and jail served to point an arrow to the logical course of action. If deputies guarded the jail it was because the law—whom Agnew served theoretically at least—considered something in that jail precious enough to protect against possible mob madness and preserve for its own due and mysterious courses. Who, if not the Killer?
The first answer to the unspoken query came from the mouth of the nondescript waif of the sheep range who had been first to recognize the Killer and announce his identity on Main Street that morning. Foot on rail and glass of whiskey in hand, the little prairie weasel had with much gravity propounded this truth: "Yes, sir, gents, I says the sooner the Killer's lookin' up a rope the better it 'll be all round, law or no law."
From so humble a source speculation waxed and grew into conviction, practically unanimous, that the shadowy thing called law—none too solidly established in the Big Country—would appreciate the favor of having a murderer taken off its hands and executed forthwith. The corollary instantly becoming patent was that the law really did not have a grudge against Zang Whistler; wherefore, should he be found anywhere around the jail he would be turned loose.
One man at a bar turned questioningly and looked into his neighbor's eyes. Heads nodded gravely. A few words were spoken. One by one men began to sift out on to the street. From saloon and shop they came, gathering in little knots in the deeper shadows between the bars of yellow light laid down on the wooden sidewalks in grotesque mosaics. The giant who had quailed before Original's threatening gun came from his blacksmith shop carrying a heavy sledge and with a cold chisel tucked under the binding thong of his leather apron. Him the men greeted as a leader. He passed from group to group, merging them into a solid core behind his back.
Within half an hour there was a blot of men on Main Street stretching from curb to curb,—townspeople, small farmers in from their homesteads on the prairies, sheepmen whose flocks, like Wooly Annie's, had been despoiled in times past or whose herders had been found in some lonely coulee with a stone between their eyes. Woolly Annie herself, minus her skirt of courtesy and with a borrowed shotgun in her hands, was in the fore; her boy Dolphus she had put to bed in the Occidental, and his trousers she had carried off and cached to insure his keeping out of trouble.
Slowly the blot in Main Street moved toward the black loom of the courthouse at the street's far end. No light there; just the indistinct picket line of the deputies drawn across the approach to the building.
A flying horseman, like some restless night bird of the wilderness, swerved round a corner ahead of the mob, dragged his mount to his haunches, spun him round as on a dollar and was thundering down a side street almost before those in the front rank of the marchers could be aware of his presence. This scout shot down a dark alley and came to the feed lot behind the Capitol Saloon. The dim, barred yard was populous with other mounted men. Here had gathered the riders in from the cattle ranges,—hardy men, desperate men of the clan who had caught under the banners of the sunset away out yonder word of big doings in town and had come winging in to see what they could see. Men of the rear guard of cattle land they, set to hold against the enemy in the Great Retreat, to contest every inch of ground, to harry and bulldoze and scourge the enemy of their kind at every opportunity.
Big men, strong men of the Big Country; once riders of an unfenced prairie from Brazos to the Line; fighters of Indians and of blizzards; hard in life and hard to kill; builders of empire. Their clan has long passed. Their code of a fair shot and survival of the quickest trigger is known no more. Only the Big Country they made out of the prairie remains,—and memories which flash sometimes grotesquely, sometimes in exaggerated caricature on the cinema screen or from the typewriters of steam-heated novelists.
The scout from Main Street reported what he had seen. There was brief council, men crowding close to catch the signal for action.
"We can give 'em a run. If a bunch of us holds 'em off in front maybe somebody can bust into the jail from behind an' cut that Zang Whistler bird outa the herd. Leave the Killer be; nobody wants to dirty his hands with no carrion hound like him."
A plan was formulated. Out over the lowered bars of the Capitol's feed lot rode twenty horsemen, divided at the bars and were swallowed in the maw of the alley. One party rode in a wide swing by the creek to get behind the jail; the other went at a walk through a scattered street of houses to come in and catch the Main Street mob on the flank.
The head of the mob on Main Street came to the picket line of deputies stretched before the big building which housed the jail; came to the line, wavered and halted. Suddenly the big figure of Red Agnew appeared on the courthouse steps behind his deputies. He held up a hand
"Boys, I know what you 're here for. You 've come for the Killer. Boys, you can't have him. He don't belong to you; he don't belong to me. The law owns him, and I promise you the law 'll give him what he deserves. Don't go for to spoil the fair name of Broken Horn County with mob law, because"
A shot from the cross street that cut Main Street along the courthouse front. A shot and the rush of horsemen bearing down breakneck upon the mob and the picket line of deputies.
A solid galloping core, launched straight at the mass before the courthouse, came on irresistibly. Like standing grain under the lash of a great wind the mob bent and parted. Clangor of cries. Shots. Rataplan of hoofs. Then the whirlwind had passed.
Surprise had been absolute and stunning. Had the courthouse walls suddenly pitched upon the heads of the mob the effect could have been no less bewildering. Out of the dark a thunderbolt had come whizzing and passed into the dark again.
But in a moment Two Moons' folk gathered their senses. Boiling rage seethed through the crowd that reassembled. The sheriff's deputies forgot their sworn duty and broke their line of defense across the path to the jail; they mingled with the rest, rushed blindly down in the direction the attackers had disappeared, firing into the dark. Other men with rifles faced themselves in a line across the street whence the attack had come, prepared for a second avalanche.
"They 're after the Killer! The cattlemen have come to run off the Killer!" was the alarm that swept across the bobbing heads.
The boldness of the enemy fired still further the mob's rage. That the cattle clan should dare attempt to cheat them of the murderer the people of Two Moons had come to get was provocation to madness. A segment of the crowd swept against the big gate giving on to the jail yard; it went down with a crash. Men streamed into the jail yard and up to the locked door beyond.
That instant the horsemen who had driven through the press like a spearhead attempted to repeat the maneuver. They were met with a scattering volley which halted them in the dark. Stabs of red through the night were answered by vicious stabs. Uproar settled about the courthouse.
At the first charge of the horsemen Sheriff Agnew had stumbled back through the courthouse door. He ran gropingly to the corridor leading to the jail, mounted an iron flight of steps. A twist of a key let him into the outer cage of the cell house, separated from the inner blocks of cells by a wall of steel bars; a corridor ran the length of the cell house beyond this barrier. Agnew unlocked the door giving on to this corridor.
"Zang!" he cried. "Zang!"
"Here yu' are!" came a voice from the dark. Agnew guided himself with a lighted match to the cell the outlaw occupied and with a special key turned the lock. Whistler stepped out into the corridor at the sheriff's beckoning and followed him down to the door through the outer barrier. Agnew pushed him through and then locked the gate behind him.
"Hey!" was the hail out of the dark wilderness of steel; it was the Killer's voice. "Hey, sheriff, don't I come in on this? You 're not goin' to leave me here, sheriff, with that mob bustin' in to get me?"
"Maybe you 're safer than you think right here," was the cryptic comfort Agnew called back to the only remaining occupant of the cage, and he drew Whistler with him out to the head of the stairs, whence his voice could not carry to the wretch left behind.
"Zang, there 's hell to pay, as I reckon you 've been hearing. The town boys 're aiming to break in and get the Killer. A bunch of cow-punchers is tied into 'em with the idea, of course, of freeing the Killer and nabbin' you. If the cattle outfit should win out you 'd be a goner, Zang." The outlaw chuckled. "I 'm sorta violatin' my oath to do this, Zang, but I 'm going to take you down to my own quarters and ask your word you won't make a break 'less you know the cowmen win out and hear 'em making a search for you. Then—well, the windows are n't barred, Zang; you can take a chance."
Agnew felt the other's hand groping for his.
"Thanks, Agnew, you 're white. Where 's the girl? I don't want her mixed into all this."
"Why, she was asleep in the missis' room," Agnew replied. "You just step in here." He opened a door and pushed Whistler into Stygian darkness. "Don't make a light. I 'll go find the girl and bring her in here until we see which way the cat 's goin' to jump outside."
Whistler, groping for a chair, heard the sheriff's retreating footfalls. Then came to his ears a crashing of wood somewhere outside and the thunder of blows upon a door. Zang felt along the wall until his hand encountered a window sash. He pulled aside a shade and looked out. A part of the street before the courthouse was revealed to him. He saw a turbulent boiling of dim shapes there, the occasional spit of a rifle.
Zang waited.
Agnew, with a hastily snatched lamp in his hand, first directed his wife through the corridors of the courthouse and out of a side door, bidding her turn to a near-by house for shelter. Then he hurried back to the living quarters and to the room where Hilma had been put to bed. Just as he opened the door and his quick eye told him the bed was empty, a leg was thrown over the sill of the opened window and the figure of a man pitched into the room. Instantly another man's hands appeared on the window ledge.
"Timberline Todd! What" Before the sheriff could set the lamp down and reach to his holster, the gaunt cow-puncher had lurched into his midriff. Down they went. The light crashed out.
"This way, boys!" Agnew heard the sibilant whisper from the direction of the window. "We got Red an' his keys."
Agnew fought desperately. He felt bodies hurled upon him. Fingers groped for his throat. Something struck him on the head, and he knew no more.
Through the window Hilma had left open in her flight ten of the cattle clan came tumbling. They searched the unconscious Agnew, found his keys and started on an uncharted way through the dark for the jail.
It was then the mob from the street broke through the jail door and swarmed into a broad passageway leading to the flight of iron stairs to the cell house above. Somebody carried a lantern high above his head. That was the only light. It went pitching and tossing over the surf of heads thrusting up the broad staircase.
A door on the second landing was opened just as the vanguard of the mob was turning a newel post for the final rank of steps to the door of the cell house. Timberline Todd, with the keys to the cell house in his pocket, took one startled look at the bobbing lantern and the close-packed scores of men it shone upon, then banged shut the door and turned a key in the lock.
"All off, boys," he shrilled in a half whisper to those behind. "They 've beat us to it. We better vamose while we 're all in one piece."
So back through the sheriff's quarters and to the opened window the retreat of the cowmen carried them. Their way led past a closed door, beyond which the one they had come to find waited in the dark. Just an unlocked door between Zang Whistler and the men who had braved all Two Moons to capture him.
In the dark cell house, meanwhile, the final dénouement of the town's day of climaxes was come to its moment.
The head of the mob streamed through the door leading from the stair landing into the great room filled with a shadow web of ranked steel. The narrow space between outer wall and the close-set fence of the cell block was theirs to possess, but a locked gate and beyond that a locked door to a cell separated them from their victim. For the first time this modern cell arrangement, which had been one of the cardinal points of pride in Two Moons' vaunting of a new courthouse, appeared a disadvantage.
"Where 's Agnew?" some one yelled. "Make Red give up his keys." A dozen hands fruitlessly strained at the bars of the gate; it did not yield so much as a rattle.
"Nobody can find Agnew," was the report called from the stairs where the remnant of the mob denied entrance into the narrow space before the cell house had to cool its impatience. The man with the lantern held it high against the bars; scores of eyes tried to peer through the concentric ranks of bars and find the man doomed to die. Impenetrable blackness there.
"To hell with the keys! Here, boys, let me through." It was Jim Hanscomb, the blacksmith, shouldering his way through the crowd. His black-headed sledge was carried over his shoulder. They made a ring for him around the gate to the cell block. The man with the lantern held it high to give light. Another man was directed by the big blacksmith where to hold his cold chisel against the lock.
The room roared with the impact of steel against steel. The mob bayed. Still from the pitchy blackness beyond the inner fence of steel not a sound.
For ten minutes the steel forest of the cell block was clangorous with the crash of sledge. Then the lock gave and the gate bounded open. A snarling cheer and the foremost of the mob pushed into the narrow corridor which ran four sides round the central block of cells.
"Hey, you Killer! We got you now!"
Slowly, inexorably, the lantern marched at the head of a shadowy rank of men, pausing at each door to be upheld, that its light might fall through bars.
Then a surprising thing—a thing of which Two Moons talks to this day:
Somewhere back in the barred jungle of gloom a match scratched. Men looking through bars saw a bit of lit candle wick catch the flame, saw the outlines of a hand as the candle fire waxed stronger. Slowly the moth-like flame was lifted until it revealed the body of a man. It stopped over his heart. Came a strong voice out of the darkness:
"Don't bust up any more of the county's property, boys. Here! Look!"
A rifle spoke. The candle flame was flicked out.