CHAPTER V
The next morning there were only faint traces of the excitement of the day before. Men began to cross Main street from one side to the other, at first with cautious, apprehensive glances that swept the hostile territory and penetrated open doors and windows, but, as the day wore quietly on, with increasing confidence and unconcern. At noon Colonel Whittaker and Pierre Delarue walked over to the Palmleaf saloon, and while they clinked the ice in their mint juleps, good-natured and smiling, they leaned on the bar and chatted with the two or three Democrats who were in the room. An hour or so later, Judge Harlin strolled across to the White Horse saloon and called for a whisky straight. Then all Las Plumas knew that the war was over and went about its usual affairs as amiably as if the day before had never been.
At the breakfast table Pierre Delarue told his daughter about the mass-meeting, its balked determination to lynch Emerson Mead, and Mead’s subsequent arrest.
“But, Father, how could they be so sure that Mr. Mead killed him? Did they have any evidence?”
“Ah,” he replied, shrugging his shoulders protestingly, “you women never understand such things! Because Mead is a handsome young man and looks good-natured, you think he can’t possibly be a murderer. But it is well known that he had killed more than one man before he murdered poor Whittaker, and he is notorious as one of the worst cattle thieves in the southwest.”
“Father! These are dreadful things! Do you know them to be true?”
She looked across the table at him with horror in her face and eyes. Delarue considered her indulgently.
“Everybody knows them to be true. There is plenty of proof.”