CHAPTER XXI
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 circ.u.mstantial 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, a.s.suming 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.
s.n.a.t.c.hing 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?"
[Ill.u.s.tration: "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 a.s.sa.s.sin. 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 ma.s.s 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 n.o.body"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 l.u.s.tily. 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.
d.i.c.k"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 ma.s.s 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 acc.u.mulated 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 att.i.tude. 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, hoa.r.s.ely 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.