No one touched Braman. On the contrary, there were many in the front fringe that braced their bodies against the crush, shoving backward, crying that a man was hurt and needed breathing space. They were unheeded, and when the banker presently recovered consciousness he was lifted to his feet and stood, pressed close to the building, swaying dizzily, pale, weak and shaken.
Word had gone through the crowd that it was not a robbery, for there were many there who knew Trevison; they shouted greetings to him, and he answered them, standing back of Corrigan, grim and somber.
Foremost in the crowd was Mullarky, who on another day had seen a fight at this same spot. He had taken a stand directly in front of the door of the bank, and had been using his eyes and his wits rapidly since his coming. And when two or three men from the crowd edged forward and tried to push their way to Corrigan, Mullarky drew a pistol, leaped to the door landing beside Trevison and trained his weapon, on them.
“Stand back, or I’ll plug you, sure as I’m a foot high! There’s hell to pay here, an’ me friend gets a square deal—whatever he’s done!”
“Right!” came other voices from various points in the crowd; “a square deal—no interference!”
Judge Lindman came out into the street, urged by curiosity. He had stepped down from the doorway of the courthouse and had instantly been carried with the crowd to a point directly in front of Corrigan and Trevison, where he stood, bare-headed, pale, watching silently. Corrigan saw him, and smiled faintly at him. The easterner’s eye sought out several faces in the crowd near him, and when he finally caught the gaze of a certain individual who had been eyeing him inquiringly for some moments, he slowly closed an eye and moved his head slightly toward the rear of the building. Instantly the man whistled shrilly with his fingers, as though to summon someone far down the street, and slipping around the edge of the crowd made his way around to the rear of the bank building, where he was joined presently by other men, roughly garbed, who carried pistols. One of them climbed in through a window, opened the door, and the others—numbering now twenty-five or thirty, dove into the room.
Out in front a silence had fallen. Trevison had lifted a hand and the crowd strained its ears to hear.
“I’ve caught a crook!” declared Trevison, the frenzy of fight still surging through his veins. “He’s not a cheap crook—I give him credit for that. All he wants to do is to steal the whole county. He’ll do it, too, if we don’t head him off. I’ll tell you more about him in a minute. There’s another of his stripe.” He pointed to Braman, who cringed. “I threw him out through the window, where the sunlight could shine on him. He tried to shoot me in the back—the big crook here, framed up on me. I want you all to know what you’re up against. They’re after all the land in this section; they’ve clouded every title. It’s a raw, dirty deal. I see now, why they haven’t sold a foot of the land they own here; why they’ve shoved the cost of leases up until it’s ruination to pay them. They’re land thieves, commercial pirates. They’re going to euchre everybody out of—”
Trevison caught a gasp from the crowd—concerted, sudden. He saw the mass sway in unison, stiffen, stand rigid; and he turned his head quickly, to see the door behind him, and the broken window through which he had thrown Braman—the break running the entire width of the building—filled with men armed with rifles.
He divined the situation, sensed his danger—the danger that faced the crowd should one of its members make a hostile movement.