The meeting was well attended. Enormous crowds gathered, not only in and around the square itself, but in balconies and windows and on housetops. It was a ribald, disrespectful crowd, evidently out for a good time, calling back and forth, shouting question or comment at the men gathered about the speaker's platform.
"What kind of a circus do you call this show, anyway?" roared a huge, bare-armed miner in red shirt.
"This is the Law and Murder meeting," instantly answered some one from a balcony.
This phrase tickled the crowd hugely. The words were passed from man to man. Eventually they became the stereotyped retort. "Stranglers!" sneered one faction. "Law and Murder!" flung back the other.
On the platform stood or sat the owners of many of the city's proud names—judges, jurists, merchants, holders of high political office, men whose influence a month ago had been paramount and irresistible. Among them were famed orators, men who had never failed to hold and influence a crowd. But two hundred feet away little could be heard. It early became evident that, though there would be no interference, the sentiment of the crowd was against them. And, what was particularly maddening, the sentiment was good-humoured. Even the compliment of being taken seriously was denied them!
Colonel Ed Baker came forward to speak. The colonel's gift of eloquence was such that, in spite of his known principles, his lack of scruple, his insincerity, he won his way to a picturesque popularity and fame. Later he delivered a funeral oration over the remains of David Broderick that has gone far to invest the memory of that hard-headed, venal, unscrupulous politician with an aura of romance. But the crowd would have little of him this day. An almost continuous uproar drowned his efforts. Catch words such as liberty, constitution, habeas corpus, trial by jury, freedom, etc., occasionally became audible. The people were not interested.
"See Cora's defender!" cried someone, voicing the general suspicion that Baker had been one of the little gambler's hidden counsel. "Cora!" "Ed Baker!" "Ten thousand dollars!" "Out of that, you old reprobate!" jeered the audience. He spoke ten minutes against the storm, then yielded, red faced and angry. Others tried in vain. A Southerner named Benham, while deploring passionately the condition of the city which had been seized by a mob, robbed of its sacred rights, etc., happened inadvertently to throw back his coat, thus revealing the butt of a Colt's revolver. The bystanders caught the point at once.
"There's a pretty Law and Order man!" they shrieked. "Hey, Benham!
Don't you know it's against the law to go armed?"
"I carry this weapon," shrieked Benham, passionately shaking his fist, "not as an instrument to overthrow the law, but to uphold it!"
A clear, steady voice from a nearby balcony made itself distinctly heard: