IN THE SHADOW OF THE ROPE
Mob madness is beyond explanation. Cattle stampeding are no more
senseless than men in such a state. Goldite, however, was not only
habitually keyed to the highest of tension, but it had recently been
excited to the breaking point by several contributing factors. Lawless
thefts of one another's claims, ore stealing, high pressure over the
coming rush to the Indian reservation, and a certain apprehension
engendered by the deeds of those liberated convicts--all these elements
had aroused an over-revulsion of feeling towards criminality and a
desire to apply some manner of law. And the primal laws are the laws
that spring into being at such a time as this--the laws that cry out
for an eye for an eye and a swiftness of legal execution.
Into the vortex of Goldite's sudden revulsion Van was swept like a
straw. There was no real chance for a hearing. His friends of the
morning had lost all sense of loyalty. They were almost as crazed as
those whom his recent success had irritated. The story of his row with
Culver had spread throughout the confines of the camp. No link in the
chain of circumstantial evidence seemed wanting to convict him. A
bawling sea of human beings surrounded him with violence and menace.
To escape the over-wrought citizens, the sheriff, assuming charge of
Van, dragged him on top of a stack of lumber, piled three feet high
before a building. The cry for a rope and a lynching began with a
promptness that few would have expected. In normal times it could
scarcely have been broached.
Snatching new-made deputies, hit-or-miss from the mob, and summarily
demanding their services, the sheriff exerted his utmost powers to stem
the tide that was rising. Something akin to a trial began then and
there. A big red-faced drummer from Chicago, a man that Van had never
seen, became his voluntary advocate, standing between him and the mob.
He had power, that man, both of limb and presence. His voice, also,
was mighty. He shoved men about like rubber puppets and shouted his
demands for law and order.
Van, having flung off half a dozen citizens, who in the excitement had
felt some fanatical necessity for clutching him, faced the human wolves
about him in a spirit of angry resentment. The big man from Chicago
mowed his way to the pile of lumber and clambered up by the sheriff.
The pile raised its occupants only well above the surging pack of faces.
"Stop your howling! Stop your noise!" roared the drummer from his
elevation. "Don't you want to give this man a chance?"
[Illustration: "Don't you want to give this man a chance?"]
He was heard throughout the street.
"He's got to prove his innocence or hang!" cried someone shrilly. "A
murder foul as that!"
Another one bawled: "Where was he then? Make him tell where he was at
six o'clock!"
Culver's watch had been shattered and stopped at precisely six o'clock,
presumably by his fall against a table in his office, when he suddenly
went down, at the hands of his assassin. This fact was in possession
of the crowd.
A general shout for Van to explain where he was at the vital moment
arose from all the crowd. The drummer turned to Van.
"There you are," he said. "There's your chance. If you wasn't around
the surveyor's shack, you ought to be able to prove it."
Van could have proved his alibi at once, by sending around to Queenie's
residence. He was nettled into a stubbornness of mind and righteous
anger by all this senseless accusation. He did not realize his
danger--the blackness of the case against him. That a lynching was
possible he could scarcely have been made to believe. Nevertheless, as
the Queenie matter was one of no secrecy and the facts must soon be
known, he was turning to the drummer to make his reply when his eye was
caught by a face, far out in the mass of human forms.
It was Beth that he saw, her cheek intensely white in the light
streaming forth from a store. Bostwick was there at her side. Beth
had been caught in the press of the throng as they came from the
telegraph office.
He realized that at best his story concerning Queenie would be
sufficiently black. With Beth in this theater of accusation the story
of Queenie must wait.
"It's nobody's business where I was," he said. "This whole affair is
absurd!"
Half a dozen of the men who were nearest heard his reply. One of them
roared it out lustily. The mob was enraged. The cries for a violent
termination to the scene increased in volume. Men were shouting,
swearing, and surging back and forth tumultuously, wrought to a frenzy
of primal virtue.
One near Beth called repeatedly for a lynching. He had cut a long new
piece of rope from a coil at a store of supplies and was trying to drag
it through the crowd.
The girl had heard and seen it all. She realized its full
significance. She had never in her life felt so horribly oppressed
with a sense of terrible things impending. Impetuously she accosted a
man who stood at her side.
"Oh, tell them he was with me!" she said.
The man looked her over, and raising himself on his tip toes, shook his
hat wildly at the mob.
"Say," he shouted at the top of his might, "here's a girl he was with
at six o'clock."
It seemed as if only the men near at hand either heard or paid
attention. On the farther side, away from Beth, the shouts for mob law
were increasing. She turned to Bostwick hotly.
"Can't you do anything? Tell them he was there with us--down at Mrs.
Dick's at six o'clock!"
"He wasn't!" said Searle. "He left there at five forty-five."
The man who had shouted listened to them both.
"Five forty-five?" he repeated. "That makes a difference!"
The drummer had caught the shout from out at the edge.
"Who's that?" he called. "Who's got that alibi?"
"All wrong!--No good!" yelled the man who stood by Beth.
The girl had failed to realize how her statement would sound--in such a
place as Goldite. Van had turned sick when it reached him. He was
emphatically denying the story. The gist of it went through the mass
of maddened beings, only to be so soon impugned by the man who had
started it from Beth. The fury, at what was deemed an attempted
deception, burst out with accumulated force.
The sheriff had drawn a revolver and was shouting to the mob to keep
away.
"This man has got to go to jail!" he yelled. "You've got to act
accordin' to the law!"
He ordered his deputies to clear the crowd and make ready for retreat.
Three of them endeavored to obey. Their efforts served to aggravate
the mob.
Confusion and chaos of judgment seemed rising like a tide. In the very
air was a feeling that suddenly something would go, something too far
strained to hold, and some terrible deed occur before these people
could ask themselves how it had been accomplished.
The fellow with the rope was being boosted forward by half a dozen
intoxicated fools. Had the rope been a burning fuse it could scarcely
have ignited more dangerous material than did its strands of manilla,
in those who could lay their hands upon it.
The drummer was shouting himself raw in the throat--in vain.
Van was courting disaster by the very defiance of his attitude. It
seemed as if nothing could save him, when two separate things occurred.
The doctor who had been with Van at Queenie's death arrived in the
press, got wind of the crisis, and vehemently protested the truth.
Simultaneously, the lumberman, Trimmer, drunk, and enjoying what he
deemed a joke, hoarsely confided to some sober men the fact that Cayuse
had done the murder.
Even then, when two centers of opposition to the madness of the mob had
been created, the menace could not at once be halted.
The man with the rope had approached so near the lumber-pile that the
sheriff could all but reach him. A furious battle ensued, and waged
around the planks, between the deputies and lynchers. It lasted till
fifty active men of the camp, aroused to a sense of reaction by the
facts that were now becoming known, hurled the struggling fighters
apart and dragged them off, all the while spreading the news they had
heard concerning the half-breed Indian.
No less excited when at last they knew that Van was innocent, the great
crowd still occupied the street, hailing Trimmer to the lumber-pile and
demanding to know how he came by the facts, and where Cayuse had gone.
Trimmer was frightened into soberness--at least into soberness
sufficient to protect himself and McCoppet. He said he had seen the
Indian coming from Culver's office, with blood upon his hands. The
Indian had gone straight westward from the town, to elude pursuit in
the mountains.
The fact that Van had been at Queenie's side at her death became town
property at once. It came in all promptness to Beth.
With a feeling of sickness pervading all her being, she was glad to
have Bostwick take her home.
It was late when at last the street was clear, and Van could finally
make his escape from danger and returning friends. Dave by then had
found himself; that is, he made his way, thus tardily, to the
horseman's side--and the two went at length to their dinner.
At half-past eight, with the moon well up, Dave and Van were ready for
departure. Their horses were saddled. One extra animal was packed
with needed provisions for the crew on the "Laughing Water" claim. Van
had ordered all he could for Queenie's final journey--the camp's best
possible funeral, which he could not remain to attend. There was
nothing to do but to mount and ride away, but--Beth was down at Mrs.
Dick's.
Resistance was useless. Bidding Dave wait with the horses at the yard.
Van made his way around through the shadows of the houses, and coming
out upon a rocky hill, a little removed from the boarding place, was
startled to see Beth abruptly rise before him.
The house had oppressed her--and the moon had called. Bostwick, in
alarm concerning possible disaster to the plans he had made with
McCoppet, now that Culver was dead, had gone to seek the gambler out
and ascertain the status of affairs.