ike rats in a hole. Surrounded on
every side, every avenue of escape now guarded, they and the luckless
manager of the mine were cooped in their log fortification, with two
lives and several serious wounds to answer for, and as the sun went
westering this long summer's day they had two hours left in which to
decide--come out and surrender or be burned out where they lay.

Half the village had gone to swell the ranks of the rioters; another
half--slatternly women and unkempt children--swarmed in the single
street and gazed upward at the heights. Every ledge about the
threatened buildings was black with men, men furious with hate and mad
with liquor, men needing only determined and resolute leaders to go in
and finish their fearful work.

But here was their lack. The men they had counted on, one man in
particular on whose account many of their number had braved the guard
and threatened the owners--one man, Long Nolan himself, refused point
blank to have aught to do with them or their plans. Another man, he
whose son lay dying in the village, shot down by the guards, was there,
sad-eyed yet stern-faced, to stay and dissuade them. The one train up
from the East that day--the only one that could come, for now the road
was blown out in a dozen places down the gorge--had brought with it
Nolan and Shiner, with two or three friends at their back, and Nolan
and Shiner, in spite of their wrongs, were pleading hard for peace,
pleading so hard, so earnestly, that by 5 P.M. many a man, American
born, had seen the force of their reasoning and had stepped back from
the front.

But among the killed was a poor lad from the mountains of Bohemia.
Among the vengeful throng were swarms of foreigners who could
understand little or nothing of what Nolan and his friends were saying,
and who speedily would have scorned it could they have understood, for
at five o'clock another speaker took the stand, a man of the people he
called himself, a foreigner long on our shores, yet fluent in the
language of the Slavs, and in ten minutes the torrent was turned. With
terror in his eyes, a man who had long worked with Nolan, a foreigner,
too, came running to the silent, anxious little group of Anglo-Saxons.
"Nolan--Nolan," he cried. "He says you was traitor! He says you was
gone to Argenta and told all their secrets, and you was bought
off--bribed--and you bring strangers to help you! He says you and they
are just spies, an' now they come for _you_!"