The visitors were pompous, well-fed men of middle age; and while they said they had come to perform a duty, one skilled in man-reading might have told at a glance that their great purpose was rather to tickle vanity, and demonstrate how unsparing would be their spirit when the question became one of moral duty.
When the duo first appeared their faces wore a ruddy, arrogant hue. As they went about upon that tour of inspection they began to pale. There was something in the lowering eye of what fragment of the public looked to the leadership of Bear Creek Johnson, to whiten them.
Pale as linen three times bleached, following fifteen minutes spent about the streets, the visitors—their strutting pomposity visibly reduced—made a shortest wake to Gallon’s, being the hostelry they designed to honour with their custom. Gallon’s was a boarding-house distinguished as “Prohibition,” and the visitors proposed to illustrate it and give it fashion in the estimation of sober men, by bestowing upon it their patronage. Two hours later, the proprietor would have paid money to dispense with the advertisement.
Once the invaders were housed, by twos and fives and tens, the disengaged inhabitants of Dodge began to assemble in front of Gallon’s. Some came in a temper of curiosity. The band with Bear Creek Johnson, however, entertained a different feeling. Their taste was for the strenuous. They set forth this fact with imitations of the yelp of the coyote. Withal, they were constantly closing up about the refuge of the visitors, until they stood, a packed and howling mob, with which it was no more than a question of minutes before ugly action would begin.
Bear Creek Johnson was in the van, fostering and fomenting a sentiment for violence. The unworthy Bear Creek was not lacking in qualities of leadership; he realised, as by an instinct, that a mob must have time to pen before it is put to work. Wherefore, Bear Creek, while cursing and threatening with the rest, delayed. He paused, as it were, with his thumb on the angry pulse of the multitude, waiting to seize the moment psychological.
Hemmed in by four hundred pushing, threatening, cursing, human wolves, those agents of prohibition whitely sat and shivered. They knew their peril; also they felt that sense of utter helplessness which will only come to men when forced to face the brainless fury of a mob. What should be done? What could be done? In that moment of extremity the proprietor of the boarding-house, with the fear of death upon him, could think of nothing beyond sending for Mr. Wright.
To be courier in this hour of strain a girl of twelve was sent out by a rear door. There was craft in this selection of a messenger. No Western mob, however bloody of intention, would dream of interfering with a girl. Besides, Mr. Wright would never refuse a girl’s request.
Mr. Wright might have been as pleased had he not been called upon. To oppose the insurrectionists was neither a work of pleasure nor of safety, and the opportunity to thus put himself in feud with a half regiment of men whose blood was up, and with whom when the smoke of battle blew aside he must still do business, could not be called a boon. But the little girl’s lips were blue with terror, and her frightened eyes showed round and big, as she besought Mr. Wright to save the life of her father—it was he to be proprietor of Gallon’s—and the lives of those visiting gentlemen, representative of prohibition. Getting wearily up from the poker game in which he was employed, Mr. Wright made ready to go with the little girl.
“You had better come too, Bat,” said Mr. Wright, addressing Mr. Masterson. “I think you can do more with a Dodge mob than I can. They’ve seen more of your shooting.”
“Of course I’ll go, Bob,” returned Mr. Masterson, laying down a reluctant hand in which dwelt a pair of aces—a highly hopeful pair before the draw!—“of course I’ll go. But it seems hard that I must leave just when the hands are beginning to run my way. I wish Bear Creek had put off this uprising another hour. I’d have been a mile on velvet.”