“It's that construction camp down below town burning up,” he answered between pants. “How did it get started?”
“It didn't get started—somebody started it. Gentlemen, there's trouble beginning down yonder. Where's Judge Priest?... Oh, yes, there he is!”
He made for Judge Priest where the judge still stood on the little platform, and all the rest trailed behind him, scrouging up to form a close circle about those two, with hands stirruped behind faulty ears and necks craned forward to hear what Mr. Milam had to say. His story wasn't long, the blurting way he told it, but it carried an abundant thrill. Acting apparently in concert with others, divers unknown persons, creeping up behind the barracks of the construction crew, had fired the building and fled safely away without being detected by its dwellers or by the half-frozen watchers of the police force on the hillock above. At least that was the presumption in Mr. Milam's mind, based on what he had just heard.
The fire, spreading fast, had driven the Sicilians forth, and they were now massed under the bluff with their weapons. The police force—eight men, all told, constituted the night shift—hesitated to act, inasmuch as the site of the burning camp lay fifty yards over the town line, outside of town limits. The fire department was helpless. Notice had been served at both the engine houses, in the first moment of the alarm, that if the firemen unreeled so much as a single foot of hose it would be cut with knives—a vain threat, since all the water plugs were frozen up hard and fast anyhow. The sheriff and his only able-bodied deputy were in Hopkinsburg, eighty miles away; and an armed mob of hundreds was reported as being on the way from its rendezvous in the abandoned plough factory to attack the foreigners.
Mr. Milam, essentially a man of peace, had learned these things at first hand, or at second, and had hastened hotfoot to Kamleiter's Hall for the one man to whom, in times of emergency, he always looked—his circuit-court judge. He didn't know what Judge Priest could do or would do in the face of a situation so grave; but at least he had done his duty—he had borne the word. In a dozen hasty gulping sentences he told his tale and finished it; and then, by way of final punctuation, a chorus of exclamatory sounds—whistled, grunted and wheezed—rose from his auditors.
As for Judge Priest, he, for a space of seconds after Mr. Milam had concluded, said nothing at all. The rapping of his knuckled fist on the tabletop alongside him broke in sharply on the clamour. They faced him then and he faced them; and it is possible that, even in the excitement of the time, some among them marked how his plump jaws had socketed themselves into a hard, square-mortise shape, and how his tuft of white chin beard bristled out at them, and how his old blue eyes blazed into their eyes. And then Judge Priest made a speech to them—a short, quick speech, but the best speech, so his audience afterward agreed, that ever they heard him make.
“Boys,” he cried, lifting his high, shrill voice yet higher and yet shriller, “I'm about to put a motion to you and I want a vote on it purty dam' quick! They've been sayin' in this town that us old soldiers was gittin' too old to take an active hand in the affairs of this community any longer; and at the last election, ez you all know, they tried fur to prove it by retirin' most of the veterans that offered themselves ez candidates fur re-election back to private life.
“I ain't sayin' they wasn't partly right neither; fur here we've been sittin' this night, like a passel of old moo-cows, chewin' the cud of things that happened forty-odd year' ago, and never suspicionin' nothin' of what was goin' on, whilst all round us men, carried away by passion and race prejudice, have been plottin' to break the laws and shed blood and bring an everlastin' disgrace on the reppitation fur peace and good order of this fair little city of ourn. But maybe it ain't too late yit fur us to do our duty ez citizens and ez veterans. Oncet on a time—a mighty long while ago—we turned out to pertect our people ag'inst an armed invader. Let's show 'em we ain't too old or too feeble to turn out oncet more to pertect them ag'inst themselves.”
He reared back, and visibly, before their eyes, his short fat figure seemed to lengthen by cubits.
“I move that Gideon K. Irons Camp of United Confederate Veterans, here assembled, march in a body right now to save—ef we can—these poor Eyetalians who are strangers in a strange and a hosstil land from bein' mistreated, and to save—ef we can—our misguided fellow townsmen from sufferin' the consequences of their own folly and their own foolishness. Do I hear a second to that motion?”