Off to one side, a dozen yards away, a man tentatively lifted a pistol. McCullough caught the movement from the corner of his eye and turned and began walking toward the man, head a little forward, bright, slightly unfocussed eyes intent in his expressionless face. The men between the two moved back, leaving a clear path.
The man with the pistol glanced to either side and saw he now stood alone, all alone. There is a nightmare some men know—the implacable deadly-eyed enemy coming with the red, wetly gleaming steel while you stand all alone with the pistol that poufs weakly with the bullets dribbling from the muzzle. The man jerked the trigger and spun about and ran without waiting to see where his shot had gone, and the charge snapped two feet over McCullough's head.
McCullough turned again toward the main body of the mob and walked slowly forward, his eyes searching the faces around him hungrily. "Get out of my yard!" he said woodenly.
The men he faced were not cowards, few men on that world were, and they had been killing natives all afternoon, their blood was up; but this was different, this was one of their own kind they faced now. If they had been able to see him as another outcast, as a traitor aiding the enemy against them, it would have made things easier. In spite of what Watts had said, however, they knew this was not true. McCullough was not a 'native-lover', he was not upholding the Centaurans, what he was upholding was the right of a citizen to hold his own opinion and keep his home as his castle—two rights which are extremely important in any frontier culture.
It put them in a very difficult moral position, and the physical pressure of McCullough's steady advance did not give them much time to settle the dilemma. Half a dozen men were elbowing their way back through the press now, the marshal had disappeared, there was no one to start things, and they kept fading back. McCullough never varied his pace, but the distance between him and the nearest man increased steadily. He stopped in the street before his house, but the mob kept moving under its own momentum for another fifty yards, and some still kept moving. A knot of perhaps a dozen stopped at the corner and muttered among themselves for a few minutes. One man started to raise a gun, and another knocked it down. They stood there a little longer, and McCullough leaned on his axe watching them, and then they moved off after the others, men dropping off here and there as they passed their own homes.
The riot was over.