“I expected that,” Ulloa answered quietly. “You and the other two deputies arm yourselves with rifles and hide in the tower of the court-house overlooking the front of the jail.”
“What must we do?” the deputy asked tremulously. “Shoot?”
“Do your duty!” Ulloa replied shortly, “whatever you conceive it to be.”
He turned and entered the jail, locking the door behind him.
“Boss,” Mustard Prophet called down to him, “me an’ Pap lef’ our toot-hawns down-stairs. Please, suh, fotch us up de cawnet an’ de trombone!”
With a grim smile the sheriff complied with the request.
“You niggers better play the Dead March in Saul,” he muttered grimly. “It’ll be appropriate all right.”
“Us ain’t ’quainted wid dat toon,” Pap grinned, reaching for his trombone. “But me an’ Mustard kin shore fetch ragtime and religion songs.”
In the meantime, in the far end of the town, sixty excited men had supplied themselves with enough rope to hang a man from a not too distant star; had armed themselves with knives and hatchets and axes, with guns and pistols; had appointed their leader, Barto Skaggs, a man of swarthy complexion, a grim mouth, surmounted by a black mustache, and intense, glowing black eyes, which pressed hard against the lids and showed a great deal of white beneath the pupil—the eyes of the wanton destroyer.
“Keep together, men!” Barto Skaggs advised. “When one man acts everybody act with him. Come on!”