“Mr. Gordon has one stanch supporter, anyway,” said Mary, smiling. “Maybe I had better tell him. Precious little encouragement or sympathy he gets, poor fellow.”
“Please do not,” replied Louise, quickly. “I wonder if my friend, Mr. Jim Munson, has managed to escape ‘battle, murder, and sudden death,’ including death by poison, and is on hand with his testimony.”
As they approached the office, the crowd of men around the doorway drew aside to let them pass.
“Our chances of worming ourselves through that jam seem pretty slim to me,” whispered Mary, glancing into the already overcrowded room.
“Let me make a way for you,” said Paul Langford, as he separated himself from the group of men standing in front, and came up to them.
“I have watered my horse,” he said, flashing a merry smile at Mary as he began shoving his big shoulders through the press, closely followed by the two young women.
It was a strange assembly through which they pressed; ranchmen and cowboys, most of them, just in from ranch and range, hot and dusty from long riding, perspiring freely, redolent of strong tobacco and the peculiar smell that betokens recent and intimate companionship with that part and parcel of the plains, the horse. The room was indeed hot and close and reeking with bad odors. There were also present a large delegation of cattle dealers and saloon men from Velpen, and some few Indians from Rosebud Agency, whose curiosity was insatiable where the courts were concerned, far from picturesque in their ill-fitting, nondescript cowboy garments.
Yet they were kindly, most of the men gathered there. Though at first they refused, with stolid resentment, to be thus thrust aside by the breezy and aggressive owner of the Three Bars, planting their feet the more firmly on the rough, uneven floor, and serenely oblivious to any right of way so arrogantly demanded by the big shoulders, yet, when they perceived for whom the way was being made, most of them stepped hastily aside with muttered and abashed apologies. Here and there, however, though all made way, there would be no red-faced or stammering apology. Sometimes the little party was followed by insolent eyes, sometimes by malignant ones. Had Mary Williston spoken truly when she said the will for bloodshed was not lacking in the county?
But if there was aught of hatred or enmity in the heavy air of the improvised court-room for others besides the high-minded young counsel for law and order, Mary Williston seemed serenely unconscious of it. She held her head proudly. Most of these men she knew. She had done a man’s work among them for two years and more. In her man’s work of riding the ranges she had had good fellowship with many of them. After to-day much of this must end. Much blame would accrue to her father for this day’s work, among friends as well as enemies, for the fear of the law-defiers was an omnipresent fear with the small owner, stalking abroad by day and by night. But Mary was glad and there was a new dignity about her that became her well, and that grew out of this great call to rally to the things that count.
At the far end of the room they found the justice of the peace enthroned behind a long table. His Honor, Mr. James R. McAllister, more commonly known as Jimmie Mac, was a ranchman on a small scale. He was ignorant, but of an overweening conceit. He had been a justice of the peace for several years, and labored under the mistaken impression that he knew some law; but Gordon, on short acquaintance, had dubbed him “Old Necessity” in despairing irony, after a certain high light of early territorial days who “knew no law.” Instead of deciding the facts in the cases brought before him from the point of view of an ordinary man of common sense, McAllister went on the theory that each case was fraught with legal questions upon which the result of the case hung; and he had a way of placing himself in the most ridiculous lights by arguing long and arduously with skilled attorneys upon questions of law. He made the mistake of always trying to give a reason for his rulings. His rulings, sometimes, were correct, but one would find it hard to say the same of his reasons for them.