"The Service might well dispense with both of them, I believe," said the domino.
The flower girl sniffed again. "You politicians—" she began, when she was interrupted by a call at the door.
The music stopped. A white-faced boy had mounted a chair and was shouting hysterically: "Where's the Boss? The hombres have shot my father!"
"It's Dad Robins' boy! Why, the old man was here a bit ago!" cried someone.
The monk pulled off his mask and flung his robe in the corner. "Oscar," he said to the hobo, who had unmasked, "see to Mrs. Penelope."
Then he grasped young Robins by the arm and rushed with him from the hall.
Oscar hurried Pen and Jane up to the tent house with scant ceremony, then ran for the lower town. Mrs. Flynn and Sara were greatly surprised by the early return of the merrymakers. The four waited eagerly for news. Sara would not let any of the women stir from the tent, saying that it was unsafe until they knew what had happened. At midnight Oscar returned.
"They got poor old Dad. After he left the hall, he was going past a lighted tent in the lower town when he heard sounds of a fight. He went in and found two drunken Mexicans fighting over a flask of whiskey. He took the whiskey and told them to go to bed. He started out into the street and the two jumped him and started to stab him to death. He yelled and the sheriff and his boy was the only folks in all that town dared to go help him. The two hombres shot the sheriff in the arm before he located them and got away. They had finished poor old Dad, though. Mr. Manning's got posses out and will start more at daylight. If you'll put Jane up for the night, Mrs. Flynn, I'll go back to the lower town. You'd ought to see those committeemen. Three of them would have gone out with a posse, I'll bet, if they hadn't remembered their dignity in time!"
Jim had his hands full. By daylight the next morning there was every prospect of a wholesale battle between the Americans and the Mexicans. The camp was at fever pitch with excitement. The two shifts not at work swarmed the streets of the lower camp, the Mexicans at the far end, the Americans at the upper end near Dad Robins' house, whence came the sound of an old woman's hard sobs. After a hurried breakfast at the lower mess, Jim joined this crowd. The men circled round him, all talking at once. Jim listened for a time, then he raised his arm for silence. "It was booze did it! Booze and nothing else! Am I right?"
Reluctant nods went around the crowd. "And yet," Jim went on, "there's hardly a white man in the camp who hasn't fought me on my ruling that liquor must not come within the government lines. You all know what booze means in a place like this. Those of you who were with me at Makon know what we suffered from it up there. I know you fellows, decent, kindly men now, in spite of your threats to lynch the hombres. But if you could get booze, you'd make this camp a hell on earth right now. No better than a drunken Mexican is a drunken white. Am I right?"