“Lost your courage, hey?”
“It takes more courage to stand up here and say what I’m saying than to lead this mob.”
“So you say, but that doesn’t convince us. Go home, then, and get out from underfoot.”
It came to me all of a sudden and with sickening force that it required more courage to go home and face my uncle than to undertake any other project which my mind could grasp just then.
I stood stock-still and they began to suspect my motives in sticking around.
“You won’t head the party, you won’t go along as a member, you won’t get out of the way,” growled a voice, and I recognized Ben Pratt. “What do you intend to do—make a holler?”
I could be just as stiff in temper as any of that Levant bunch.
“A good deal depends on what you devils intend to do,” I said.
“You may as well know at the start-off! We intend to have that detective out of Judge Kingsley’s house! If he doesn’t come out when we call him we shall go in and get him.”
“That’s a prison crime—entering a house like that,” I warned them. “Also, think what a report that is to go out from Levant! A guest of our leading citizen dragged from a private residence by a mob! There’s a sacredness about a home—”