She lifted her arms, opened her hands, and made one wide, sweeping, inclusive gesture, and turned and walked out into the night.
“Dead! Dead! Bells is dead!”
Dick heard an unutterably sorrowful voice exclaim; and Bill, half-denuded, his blue shirt in shreds, his face puffed from blows, and his cut knuckles dripping a slow, trickling red, plunged toward him, followed by the smith. No one 194 blocked their way as they went, the three together, as they had come. Behind them, the room broke into hushed, awed exclamations, and began to writhe and twist, as men lifted and revived the fallen, and took stock of their injuries.
Two men came running down the street with weapons in hand; and the moonlight, which had lifted until it shone white and clear into the squalors of the camp, picked out dim blazes from the stars on their breasts. They were the town marshal and a deputy sheriff, summoned from some distant saloon by the turmoil, and hastening forward to arrest the rioters, not suspecting that men were wanted for a graver offense. Standing alone in the moonlight, in the middle of the road, with her hands clenched before her, the three men discerned another figure, and, when they gained it, saw that in the eyes of The Lily swam unshed tears.
Dick and the smith hastened onward toward her rooms; but Bill abruptly turned, after they had passed her, and spoke. They did not hear what he said. They scarcely noted his pause, for in but two or three steps he was with them again, grimly hurrying to where lay the man they had come to love.
CHAPTER XII
A DISASTROUS BLOW
In after years it all came back to Dick as a horrible nightmare of unreality, that tragic night’s events and those which followed. The grim setting of the coroner’s jury, where men with bestial, bruised, and discolored faces sat awkwardly or anxiously, with their hats on their knees, in a hard stillness; the grave questions of the coroner, coupled with the harsh, decisive interrogations of the prosecuting attorney, who had been hastily summoned from the county seat across the hills; and there in the other room, quiet, and at rest, the faithful old man who had given his life in defense of his friends.