Part 4 (1/2)
”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 admonis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sion. ”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 c.o.c.k 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 hoa.r.s.e 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.”