Bleaters, as these musicians were called in Lebanon, inspired the steps
of the Manitou fanatics and toughs. As they came upon the bridge they
were playing a gross paraphrase of The Marseillaise.

At the head of the Orange procession was a silver-cornet band which the
enterprise of Lebanon had made possible. Its leader was a ne'er-do-well
young Welshman, who had been dismissed from leadership after leadership
of bands in the East till at last he had drifted into Lebanon. Here,
strange to say, he had never been drunk but once; and that was the night
before he married the widow of a local publican, who had a nice little
block of stock in one of Ingolby's railways, which yielded her seven
per cent., and who knew how to handle the citizens of the City of Booze.
When she married Tom Straker, her first husband, he drank on an average
twenty whiskies a day. She got him down to one; and then he died and had
as fine a funeral as a judge. There were those who said that if Tom's
whiskies hadn't been cut down so--but there it was: Tom was in the bosom
of Abraham, and William Jones, who was never called anything else than
Willy Welsh, had been cut down from his unrecorded bibulations to none
at all; but he smoked twenty-cent cigars at the ex-widow's expense.

To-day Willy Welsh played with heart and courage, "I'm Going Home to
Glory," at the head of the Orange procession; for who that has faced
such a widow as was his for one whole year could fear the onset of
faction fighters! Besides, as the natives of the South Seas will never
eat a Chinaman, so a Western man will never kill a musician. Senators,
magistrates, sheriffs, police, gamblers, horse-stealers, bankers, and
broncho-riders all die unnatural deaths at times, but a musician in the
West is immune from all except the hand of Fate. Not one can be spared.
Even a tough convicted of cheating at cards, or breaking a boom on a
river, has escaped punishment because he played the concertina.

The discord and jangle between the two bands was the first collision
of this fateful day. While yet there was a space between the two
processions, the bands broke into furious contest. It was then that,
through the long funeral line, men with hard-set faces came closer up
together, and forty, detaching themselves from the well-kept run of
marching lodgemen, closed up around the horses and the hearse, making a
solid flanking force. At stated intervals also, outside the lodgemen
in the lines, were