Pierre Delarue, "Frenchy" Delarue, as all Las Plumas called him, had
been born and brought up in the south of France, whence he had
wandered to many parts of the earth. He had married and lived for
years in England, and, finally, he had come to Las Plumas with his
invalid wife in the hope that its healing airs might restore her to
health. But she had died in a few months, and he, perhaps because the
flooding sunshine and the brilliant skies of the southwestern plains
reminded him of the home of his youth, stayed on and on, went into
business, and became one of the prominent citizens of the town. The
leisurely, let-things-drift spirit of the region, which could be so
easily stirred to violent storms and ardent enthusiasms, was near akin
to his own volatile nature. Nobody in the town could be more quickly
and more thoroughly convinced by first appearances than he, and nobody
held opinions more volubly and more aggressively, so that from the
start he had assumed a leading place in the discussion of all public
matters. Although he had not taken even the first step toward
naturalization, he was active in the constantly sizzling political
life of the town, and along all that side of Main street there was
none more staunchly and violently Republican than he.
He believed, and voiced his belief loudly and aggressively, that Will
Whittaker had been slain and that swift punishment should be visited
upon his murderer. The Gascogne nimbleness of tongue which enabled him
to express his conviction with volubility made him, all through that
excited day, the constant center of an assenting crowd. As night came
on, the groups of men all gathered about his store. By that time every
one among them was convinced that Emerson Mead had killed young
Whittaker. At first this theory had been a mere guess, a hazard of
probability. But it had been asserted and repeated and insisted upon
so many times during the day that every man on the west side of the
street had finally adopted it as his own original opinion, and by
nightfall refused to entertain any other explanation. Inside the
store, Delarue was expounding the necessity of swift retribution. Men
crowded in and packed the room to its last capacity. They made Delarue
get up on the counter, so that all could hear what he said. Those
outside struggled and pushed about the door. A man on the sidewalk
cried out:
"We can't hear! Let's go to the hall and give everybody a chance!"
The crowd gave instant response: "To the hall, so everybody can hear!
Let's go to the hall!"
Those within took up the cry and drowned the speaker's voice with
cries of, "Let's go to the hall! Let's go to the hall!"
Delarue stopped in his harangue and shouted: "Yes, my friends, let us
go to the hall and make this a public meeting of indignation against
the cowardly murder that has been done!"
Out they rushed, and with Delarue in front, gesticulating and calling
to them to come on, they hurried to the public hall. A man quickly
mounted the platform and nominated Pierre Delarue for presiding
officer of the meeting. The crowd responded with yells of, "Yes, yes!"
"Of course!" "Go on, Frenchy!" "Hurrah for Frenchy!" There were many
Mexicans among them, and as Delarue stepped to his place, there was a
call for an interpreter and a young half-Mexican walked to the
platform. Some one was sent to hold guard at the door, with orders to
admit "no turbulent persons." Then Delarue began an impassioned
speech, pausing after each sentence for it to be translated into
Spanish. With each flaming outburst the "hurrahs" of the Americans
were mingled with the "vivas" of the Mexicans.
The interpreter leaned far over the edge of the platform, swaying and
gesticulating as though the speech were his own, his face glowing with
excitement. The crowd yelled madly, while with flushed face, streaming
forehead, and heaving chest the speaker went on, each fiery sentiment
increasing his conviction in the righteousness of his cause, and the
cries of approval urging him to still more inflamed denunciation and
outright accusal.
Those who had gathered in Judge Harlin's office and in and about the
Palmleaf saloon were closely watching developments. Two or three men
who mingled with the Republicans, and were apparently in sympathy with
them, came in occasionally by way of back doors, and reported all that
was being said and done. Emerson Mead talked in a brief aside with one
of these men, and presently he stepped out alone into the deserted
street. The other man hastened to the hall, took the place of the one
on guard, giving him the much-wished-for opportunity to go inside, and
when, hands in pockets, Mead strolled up, his confederate quickly
admitted him, and he stood unobserved in the semi-darkness at the back
of the room. A single small lamp on the speaker's table and one
bracketed against the wall on each side made a half circle of dusky
light about the platform, showing a mass of eager, excited faces with
gleaming eyes, while it left the rear part of the bare room in shadow.
"I demand justice," cried the speaker, "upon the murderer, the
assassin of poor Will Whittaker! And I say to you, friends and
neighbors, that unless you now, at once, mete out justice upon that
murderer's head, there is no surety that justice will be done. To-day
you have seen him walking defiantly about the streets, armed to the
teeth, ready to plunge his hands still deeper into the blood of
innocent men. Your own lives may yet pay the penalty if you do not
stop his lawless career! Such a measure as he measures to others it is
right that you should measure to him!"
There was an instant of solemn, breathless hush as the speaker leaned
forward, shaking an uplifted finger at the audience. Then some one on
a front seat cried out, "Emerson Mead! He ought to be lynched!" The
cry was a firebrand thrown into a powder box. The whole mass of men
broke into a yell: "Emerson Mead! Lynch him! Lynch the murderer!" The
speaker stood with uplifted hands, demanding further attention, but
the crowd was beyond his control. Moved by one impulse, it had sprung
to its feet, clamoring and yelling, "A rope! A rope! for Emerson
Mead!"
Then, like men pierced through with sudden death, they halted in
mid-gesture, with shout half uttered, and stood staring, struck dumb
with amazement. For Emerson Mead, a half smile on his face, his hat
pushed back from his forehead, was walking quietly across the
platform. The speaker, turning to follow the staring eyes of his
audience, saw him just as he put out his hand and said, "How do you
do, Mr. Delarue!" The orator's jaw fell, his hands dropped nervelessly
beside him, and involuntarily he jumped backward, as if to shelter
himself behind the table. The interpreter leaped to the floor and
crouched against the platform. All over the hall hands went to
revolver butts in waistband, hip-pocket and holster. The dim light
shone back from the barrels of a score of weapons already drawn. Mead
faced the audience, the half smile still lingering about his mouth.
"I understand," he said quietly, "that you want to lynch me. Well, I'm
here!"
A sudden, bellowing voice roared through the room: "Stop in your
tracks, you cowards!"
Judge Harlin, having guessed where Mead had gone, had just plunged
through the door and was shouldering his way up the aisle, his robust,
broad-backed frame, big head and bull neck dominating the crowd.
Behind him came Tom Tuttle and Nick Ellhorn, their guns in their
hands. A young Mexican, who was with them, leaped to the back of a
seat, and on light toes raced by Harlin's side from seat to seat,
interpreting into Spanish as he ran.
"A nice lot you are!" shouted Judge Harlin. "A nice lot to prate about
law and order, and ready to do murder yourselves! That is what you are
preparing to do! Murder! As cold-blooded a murder as ever man did!"
He mounted the platform and faced Delarue, while Tuttle and Ellhorn,
with revolvers drawn, stood beside Mead.
"Better put your guns away, boys," whispered Mead.
"Not much!" Ellhorn replied. "We can't draw as quick as you can!"
"Let's go for 'em!" pleaded Tuttle in a whisper. "You and Nick and me
can down half of 'em before they know what's happened, and the other
half before they could shoot."
"No, Tommy; it wouldn't do."
"It would be the best thing that could happen to the town," he
grumbled back. "Say, Emerson, we'd better go for 'em before they make
a rush."
"No, no, Tom; better not shoot. I tell you it wouldn't do!"
"Well, if you say so, as long as they don't begin it. But they shan't
touch you while there's a cartridge left in my belt."
The crowd, arrested and controlled, first by the spectacle of Mead's
audacity and then by the compelling roar of Judge Harlin's
denunciation, listened quietly, still subdued by its amazement, while
Harlin went on, standing beside Delarue and shaking at him an
admonishing finger.
"Pierre Delarue, I am astonished that a good citizen like you should
be here inciting to murder! You have not one jot of evidence that
Emerson Mead killed Will Whittaker! You do not even know that
Whittaker is dead!"
The crowd shuffled and muttered angrily at this defiance of its
conviction. It was returning to its former frame of mind, and was
beginning to feel incensed at the irruption into the meeting.
"We do know it!" a man in the front row flamed out, his face working
with the violent back-rush of recent passion. "And we know Mead did
it!" another one yelled. Murmurs of "Lynch him! Lynch him!" quickly
followed. Tuttle and Ellhorn were white with suppressed rage, and
their eyes were wide and blazing. Tuttle was nervously fingering his
trigger guard. "Then bring your evidence into a court of law and let
unprejudiced men judge its value," Judge Harlin roared back. "Accusers
who have the right on their side are not afraid to face the law!"
Mead caught the angry eye of a brutal-faced man directly in front of
him, and saw that the man's revolver was at full cock and his hand on
the trigger. In the flash that went from eye to eye he saw with surety
what would happen in another moment. And he knew what the sequence of
one shot would be.
"Neighbors!" he shouted. "Jim Halliday has a warrant for my arrest.
I protest that it has been illegally issued, because there is no
evidence upon which it can be based. But to avoid any further trouble,
here and now, I will submit to having it served. I will not be
disarmed, and I warn you that any attempt of that sort will make
trouble. But I give you my word, for both myself and my friends,
that otherwise there shall be no disturbance."
Judge Harlin shot at Mead a surprised look, hesitated an instant,
and then nodded approval. Tuttle and Ellhorn looked at him in
open-mouthed, open-eyed amazement for a moment, then dropped their
pistols to their holsters and stepped back. A sudden hush fell over
the crowd, which waited expectantly, no one moving.
"I think Jim Halliday is here," Mead said quietly. "He has my word. He
can come and take me and there shall be no trouble, if he don't try to
take my gun."
A stout, red-haired young man worked his way forward through the
crowded aisle to the platform and took a paper from his pocket. Mead
glanced at it, said "All right," and the two walked away together. The
crowd in the hall quickly poured out after them. Tuttle, his lips
white and trembling, looked after Mead's retreating figure and his
huge chest began to heave and his big blue eyes to fill with tears. He
turned to Ellhorn, his voice choking with sobs:
"Emerson Mead goin' off to jail with Jim Halliday! Nick, why didn't he
let us shoot? He needn't have been arrested! Here was a good chance to
clean up more'n half his enemies, and he wouldn't let us do it!" He
looked at Ellhorn in angry, regretful grief, and the tears dropped
over his tanned cheeks. "Say, Nick," he went on, lowering his voice to
a hoarse whisper, "you-all don't think he was afraid, do you?"
"Sure, and I don't," Ellhorn replied promptly. "I reckon Emerson Mead
never was afraid of anybody or anything."
"Well, I'm glad you don't," Tom replied, his voice still shaking with
sobs. "I couldn't help thinkin' when he kept tellin' us not to shoot,
that maybe he was afraid, with all those guns in front and only us
four against 'em, and I said to myself, 'Good Lord, have I been
runnin' alongside a coward all these years!' And I was sure sick for a
minute. But I guess it was just his judgment that there'd better not
be any shootin' just now."
Ellhorn looked over the empty hall with one eye shut. "Well, I reckon
there would have been a heap o' dead folks in this room by now if
we-all had turned loose."
"About as many as we-all had cartridges," and Tuttle glanced at their
well-filled belts. He was silent a moment, while he wiped his eyes and
blew his nose, and his sobs gradually ceased. "No, Emerson couldn't
have been afraid. Though I sure thought for a minute I'd have to quit
him. But you're right, Nick. Emerson ain't afraid of anything, livin'
or dead. It was just his judgment. And Emerson's got powerful good
judgment, too. I ought to have known better than to think anything
else. But, Lord! I did hate to see that measly crowd sneakin' out of
here alive!"