The cow-punchers of the Las Animas ranch came spurring into the street at that moment, and at Warburton’s orders began dispersing the crowd. A little later, while Constable Mitchell was indignantly condemning the sheriff’s action to a group of Quintell’s supporters in the hotel office, Warburton entered and placed him under arrest and marched him off to the camp’s jail. Relieving him of his keys, the sheriff locked the fellow in a cell and placed two riders on guard.
“This ain’t very formal, Mitchell,” he said grimly, “’cos I ain’t got time to monkey with warrants and citations. You kin take yore pick whether you turn in yore star or git yanked up before the grand jury.”
CHAPTER XXII—A SHOWDOWN
The day passed slowly. It was a day throbbing with threat and tragedy on the eve of happening. Night fell, but there was no noticeable change in the situation. Legitimate places of business closed early; and singularly enough the usual crowds that streamed up and down the main street were absent, the dance halls and gambling hells deserted, the camp strangely, ominously peaceful.
For one thing, public sentiment against Lemuel Huntington had crystallized rather than abated. Sheriff Warburton’s drastic action together with his threat to call for the militia in the event he could not handle the disorder, stirred the Quintell forces to violent hatred. What inflamed them most was the fact that he had dispatched a number of his deputized cow-punchers to guard the Huntington ranch. That the official was protecting a criminal and not taking steps to capture that criminal, became the burden of the Quintell element’s cry in order to win over to their side the minority law-abiding population of the town.
During the afternoon a number of incidents had occurred which did anything but relieve the tension. The first of these was the arrival of a desperately wounded horseman. He came riding up the street, half hanging out of his saddle, semiconscious, a gaping wound in his side. He proved to be one of the six expert gunmen sent by Quintell to dispossess and murder the discoverers of the Billy Geerusalem bonanza strike. He died, and the name of his slayer died with him. Quintell, raging in his office, waited for the return of the other five. When they did not report, he had Big George Rankin take two automobile loads of men to the scene, with instructions to seize the claims at all cost. Rankin came back an hour later, stating that they had been stopped by a body of armed cowboys patrolling the plains in the neighborhood of the Huntington ranch.
Another significant move, traceable to the emergency methods and industry of Sheriff Warburton, was the sudden appearance in Geerusalem of a growing army of these self-same cowboys. They began arriving at intervals, throughout the afternoon, riding up the street singly and in pairs, in dozens and by the score. They came heavily armed, delegation after delegation of them, grim-faced, wiry, silent men who feared neither man nor devil. Every ranch in that far-flung, fertile hill territory—known as the Green Range—to the north of Soapweed Plains, became represented as the day wore on. For Warburton had dispatched Las Animas riders speeding through the desert, appealing to the ranch owners for help to nip in the bud the reign of rioting and bloodshed which threatened to sweep the camp.
In the midst of this menacing state of affairs, Lex Sangerly had returned from an inspection of the Lucky Boy placer group, at the mouth of Geerusalem Gulch, the conviction now firm in his mind that the Quintell outfit had salted the ground over which the proposed branch line of the Mohave & Southwestern must of necessity pass to reach its terminal in the settlement. He had watched Harrison taking samples of the gravel, here and there, and had seen those samples turned over to the assayer—himself retaining duplicates of each, for purposes of a check-up.
It had all seemed part of a clean transaction, except when he had manifested the desire of himself choosing a second test of the ground. To this Quintell politely demurred, going so far as to declare that he and his associates were in no wise eager for a track to cross the claims, since it would interfere greatly with the extensive work they planned. He pointed out, too, that the matter of purchase had come from the railroad company, that he and his partners had made no overtures with a view to disposing of a right of way.
While Lex was waiting at the Miners’ Hotel for the assayer’s report on the samples, his father—Western manager of the road—arrived from Los Angeles unexpectedly. Sangerly, senior, a clean, sharp-eyed man of fifty, with a close-cropped mustache and thick, stiff, iron-gray hair, was accompanied by the State traffic manager, a Mr. Hudson, a quiet, mild type of person whose one distinctive trait was his ability to listen and say nothing. Lex’s father, it seems, had determined, following receipt of his son’s telegram the day before, on taking a personal hand in the negotiations for the purchase of the Lucky Boy right of way.