"I won't need ter say a word. His daddy'll counsel him ter leave fer a spell an' hide out—so thet he kain't be tuck down ter Looeyville fer a gover'ment witness."
"When am I supposed to perform this highly spectacular stunt?" inquired Mark Tapper.
"I aims ter hev ye do hit this afternoon."
"This afternoon—with every foot of street and sidewalk full of wild men, ready to pull me to pieces!" The revenuer's face was hot with amazement. "Besides I have no evidence."
"Ye kin git thet later," Towers assured him calmly. "Besides we don't keer a heap if ye fails ter convict. We only wants 'em outen ther way fer a while. Es fer ther crowds, I'm fixed ter safeguard ye. I've got all my people hyar—ready—an' armed. I aims ter run things an' keep peace in Marlin Town terday!"
CHAPTER X
On the river bank at the outskirts of Marlin Town that afternoon so primitive was the aspect of life that it seemed appropriate to say in Scriptural form: "A great multitude was gathered together." The haze of Indian summer lay veil-like and sweetly brooding along the ridged and purple horizon. The mountainsides flared with torch-like fires of autumnal splendor—and the quaint old town with its shingled roofs and its ox-teams in the streets, lay sleepily quiet in the mid-distance.
Toward the crudely constructed rostrum of the two preachers in long-tailed coats, strained the eyes of the throng, pathetically solemn in their tense earnestness. Men bent with labor and women broken by toil and perennial child-bearing; children whose faces bore the stupid vacuity of in-bred degeneracy; other children alert and keen, needing only the chance they would never have. It was a sea of unlettered humanity in jeans and calico, in hodden-gray and homespun—seeking a sign from Heaven, less to save their immortal souls than to break the tedium of their mortal weariness.
Henderson stood with folded arms beside the preacher whose pattern of faith differed from that of the two exhorters he had come to hear. Blossom's cheeks were abloom and her eyes, back of their grave courtesy, rippled with a suppressed amusement. To her mind, her father exemplified true ministry and these others were interesting quacks, but to Bear Cat, standing at her elbow, they were performers whose clownish antics savored of charlatanism—and who capitalized the illiteracy of their hearers. Lone Stacy was there, too, but with a mask-like impassiveness of feature that betrayed neither the trend nor color of his thought.
Not far distant, though above and beyond the press of the crowd, stood the Towers chief, and his four guardians, and shifting here and there, sauntered others of his henchmen, swinging rifles at their sides and watchful, through their seeming carelessness, for any signal from him. Once for a moment Henderson caught a glimpse of Ratler Webb's skulking figure with a vindictive glance bent upon Bear Cat—but in another instant he had disappeared.