"Coon Dogs coming! Coon Dogs coming!"
"No, no," said Ajax.
I slipped out of the house. From the marsh beyond the creek came the
familiar croaking of the frogs; from the foothills in the cow-pasture
came the shrilling of the crickets. A coyote was yapping far down the
valley.
"It's all right, Mary," said I.
"Boss, Coon Dogs come, velly quick. I know."
Did he really know? What subtle instinct warned him of the approach of
danger? Who can answer such questions? It is a fact that the Coon Dogs
were on the road to our ranch, and that they arrived just one hour
later. We heard them yelling and shouting at the big gate. Then the
popping of pistols told us that the sign, clearly to be seen in the
moonlight, was being riddled with bullets.
"We must face the music," said Ajax grimly. "Come on!"
Mary lay back on the pillow, senseless. Passing through the sitting-
room, I reminded Ajax that my duck-gun, an eight-bore, could carry two
ounces of buck-shot about one hundred yards.
"We mustn't fight 'em with their own weapons," he answered curtly.
The popping ceased suddenly; silence succeeded.
"They're having their bad time, too," said Ajax. "They are hitching
their plugs to the fence. Hullo!"
Uncle Jake slipped on to the verandah, six-shooter in hand. Before he
spoke, he spat contemptuously; then he drawled out: "Our boys say it's
none o' their doggoned business; they won't interfere."
"Good," said Ajax cheerfully. "Nip back, Uncle; we can play this hand
alone."
"Sure?" The old man's voice expressed doubt.
"Quite sure. Shush-h-h!"
Uncle Jake slid off the verandah, but he retired--so we discovered
later--no farther than the water-butt behind it. Ajax and I went into
the sitting-room. From the bed-room beyond came no sound whatever.
Through the windows the pack was seen--slowly advancing.
"Come in, gentlemen," said Ajax loudly.
He stood in the doorway, an unarmed man confronting a dozen
desperadoes.
"Wheer's the Chinaman--Quong?"
I recognised the voice of a cowboy whom we had employed: a man known
in the foothills as Cock-a-whoop Charlie.
"He's here," Ajax answered quietly.
A tall, gaunt Missourian, also well known to us as a daring bull-
puncher, laughed derisively.
"Here--is he? Wal, we want him, but we don't want no fuss with you,
boys. Yer--white, but he's yaller, and he must go."
"He is going," said Ajax. "He's going fast."
"How's that?"
"Come in," retorted my brother impatiently. "It's cold out there and
dark. You're not scared of two unarmed men--are you?"
They filed into the house, looking very sheepish.
"I'm glad you've come, even at this late hour," said Ajax, "for I want
to have a quiet word with you."
The psychological characteristics of a crowd are receiving attention
at the hands of a French philosopher. M. Gustave Le Bon tells us that
the crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual
of average brains.
"You have a nerve," remarked Cock-a-whoop Charlie.
"You Coon Dogs," continued my brother, "are making this county too hot
for the Chinese--eh?"
"You bet yer life!"
"But won't you make it too hot for yourselves?"
The pack growled, inarticulate with astonishment and curiosity.
"Some of you," said Ajax, "have wives and children. What will they do
when the Sheriff is hunting--you? You call this the Land of the Free,
the Home of the Brave. So it is. And do you think that the Free and
the Brave will suffer you to destroy property and life without calling
you to account?"
"We ain't destroying life."
"And a heathen Chinee ain't a man."
"Quong," said Ajax, in his deep voice, "is hardly a man yet. We call
him Mary, because he looks like a girl. You want him--eh? You are not
satisfied with what you did yesterday? You want him? But--do you want
him _dying_?"
The pack cowered.
"He is dying," said Ajax. "No matter how they live, and a wiser Judge
than any of us will pronounce on that, no matter how they live--are
your own lives clean?--the meanest of these Chinese knows how to die.
One moment, please."
He entered the room where Mary lay blind and deaf to the terror which
had come at last. When Ajax returned, he said quietly: "Come and see
the end of what you began. What? You hang back? By God!--you shall
come."
Dominated by his eye and voice, the pack slunk into the bed-room. Upon
Mary's once comely face the purple weals were criss-crossed; and sores
had broken out wherever the cactus spines had pierced the flesh. A
groan escaped the men who had wrought this evil, and glancing at each
in turn, I caught a glimpse of a quickening remorse, of a horror about
to assume colossal dimensions. The Cock-a-whoop cowboy was seized with
a palsy; great tears rolled down the cheeks of the gaunt Missourian;
one man began to swear incoherently, cursing himself and his fellows;
another prayed aloud.
"He's dead!" shrieked Charlie.
At the grim word, moved by a common impulse, whipped to unreasonable
panic as they had been whipped to unreasoning cruelty, the pack broke
headlong from the room--and fled!
Long after they had gone, Mary opened his eyes.
"Coon Dogs coming?" he muttered. "Heap bad men!"
"They have come and gone," said Ajax. "They'll never come again, Mary.
It's all right. Go to sleep."
Mary obediently closed his eyes.
"He'll recover," Ajax said. And he did.