Suddenly the crowd began to mill wildly as if its center were a seat of disturbance and just as suddenly Jim yelled:
“Hey, pardner! I see a flaming redhead in the middle of that muss and—yes⸺ It’s that fellow Ring from Murdock and oh, boy! But isn’t he putting up some fight!”
“Ring? Ring? Come on, Jim! We got to help him out. It’s too one-sided. Come on! Into this bunch we go!” The miner vaulted the rail as he spoke, and charged.
Close at his heels, with all the wild abandonment of fealty, youth, and the love of a good mix-up came his six-foot partner. They were side by side when they hit the outskirts of the crowd like a twin battering-ram, and men taken unawares from behind were hurled right and left as if they were but twigs in the path of a cyclone.
The younger man yelled as he charged, the elder went voicelessly and with shut teeth and jaw, a hard, veteran fighting man who wasted neither breath nor motion. The younger man struck with the quick, timed precision of a trained boxer, the elder with forethought to inflict the most damage.
They gained the center before they met any resistance, and there in the vortex they fought above the prone body of The Reformer, who was down and out. One man reached around and kicked at the fallen man with a heavy boot, despite Smith’s endeavor to bring a truce, and not until then did the miner become angry. With cold malice, he knocked the man down, picked him up, battered his face again and then, exercising his enormous strength, seized him and threw him at the heads and faces of his friends.
Two or three of the man’s supporters started an angry charge when abruptly a loud voice shouted:
“Don’t! Don’t! Stop! Look out, or he’ll shoot! Don’t you see who it is, you fools! It’s Smith, the killer!”
And such was the dread reputation of the miner and ex-gunman that the charge melted into a withdrawal. Smith and his partner, back to back, stood in a clear space above the fallen editor. They breathed heavily from their efforts, and the younger man, grinning as if not half satisfied, exposing his fine white teeth, wiped a cut on his temple, and called:
“Next!”