Some of them took hold of his legs as if to drag him out of his saddle.
“You won’t believe that you are making a mistake?”
“Hang him!” roared the mob.
Some one flourished a rope suggestively, while the crowd surged round, roaring and shouting.
Buffalo Bill now drew a revolver. He did not intend to be hanged by this mob. If his life was to be lost he would lose it fighting, not at the end of a rope.
Suddenly he drove his spurs desperately into the flanks of his horse, having before that, by a slash of his knife, released it from the hitching rack. It made one jump, then a revolver cracked, and the horse fell sprawling, a bullet in its brain.
The scout would have been hurled violently to the ground if he had not disengaged his feet from the stirrups and landed in an upright position.
As he struck the ground he held a revolver in each hand, and he was ready to use them.
He felt that his last hour had probably come, but he meant to meet it like a hero; these men would not have it to say afterward that he had gone to the rope like a cringing coward. And if he had to die, he would take dear toll to pay to the grim ferryman.
But before he could use his revolvers there was a shout in the street, a loud clatter of galloping hoofs, and a man came dashing up into the very fringe of the howling mob.