ly holding was still in
his hand; but he did not delay to put it down. There was something
compelling in that knock; something that demanded instant obedience, and
he obeyed. The living-room through which he passed on his way had two
windows and, identical with that of his study, each was black with
humanity; but he did not even glance at them. His legs trembled
involuntarily and his throat was dry as though he had been speaking for
hours; yet, nevertheless, he obeyed. With a hand that shook perceptibly
he turned the button of the spring lock, and, opening the door onto the
street, looked out.

While Clifford Mitchell lived, while lived every man of the uncounted
throng gathered there beneath the noon-time sun that October day, they
remembered that moment, the moments that followed. As real life is ever
stranger than fiction, so off the stage occur incidents more stirring
than at the play. Standing there in the narrow doorway, white-faced,
hesitant, awaiting a command, the minister himself exemplified the fact
beyond question; yet of his own grotesque part he was oblivious. He had
thought for but one thing that moment, had room in his consciousness for
but one impression; and that was for the drama ready there before him.
And small wonder, for, looking out, this was what he saw:

An uneven straggling village street, mottled with patches of dead grass
and weeds. Along it, here and there, like kernels of seed scattered on
fallow ground, a sprinkling of one-story houses. This the background. In
the midst of it all, covering his lawn, overflowing into the yards of
his neighbours, dense, crowding the better to see, all-surrounding, was
a solid zone of motley humanity. Old men with weather-beaten faces and
untrimmed beards were there, young men with the marks that dissipation
and passion indelibly stamp, awkward, gawky youths unconsciously aping
their elders, smooth-faced youngsters in outgrown garments; all ages and
conditions of the human frontier male were there--but in that zone not a
single woman. Ranchers there were in corduroys and denims, cowboys in
buckskin and flannel, gamblers in the glaring colours distinctive of
their kind, business men with closely cropped moustaches, idlers in
anything and everything; but amid them all not a friendly face. This the
surrounding zone, the mongrel pack that had brought the quarry to bay.

In the centre of the half circle they formed, within a couple of paces
of the now open door