urging back and forth tumultuously, wrought to a frenzy
of primal virtue.

One near Beth called repeatedly for a lynching. He had cut a long new
piece of rope from a coil at a store of supplies and was trying to drag
it through the crowd.

The girl had heard and seen it all. She realized its full
significance. She had never in her life felt so horribly oppressed
with a sense of terrible things impending. Impetuously she accosted a
man who stood at her side.

"Oh, tell them he was with me!" she said.

The man looked her over, and raising himself on his tip toes, shook his
hat wildly at the mob.

"Say," he shouted at the top of his might, "here's a girl he was with
at six o'clock."

It seemed as if only the men near at hand either heard or paid
attention. On the farther side, away from Beth, the shouts for mob law
were increasing. She turned to Bostwick hotly.

"Can't you do anything? Tell them he was there with us--down at Mrs.
Dick's at six o'clock!"

"He wasn't!" said Searle. "He left there at five forty-five."

The man who had shouted listened to them both.

"Five forty-five?" he repeated. "That makes a difference!"

The drummer had caught the shout from out at the edge.

"Who's that?" he called. "Who's got that alibi?"

"All wrong!--No good!" yelled the man who stood by Beth.

The girl had failed to realize how her statement would sound--in such a
place as Goldite. Van had turned sick when it reached him. He was
emphatically denying the story. The gist of it went through the mass
of maddened beings, only to be so soon impugned by the man who had
started it from Beth. The fury, at what was deemed an attempted
deception, burst out with accumulated force.

The sheriff had drawn a revolver and was shouting to the mob to keep
away.

"This man has got to go to jail!" he yelled. "You've got to act
accordin' to the law!"

He ordered his deputies to clear the crowd and make ready for retreat.
Three of them endeavored to obey. Their efforts served to aggravate
the mob.

Confusion and chaos of judgment seemed rising like a tide. In the very
air was a feeling that suddenly something would go, something too far
strained to hold, and some terrible deed occur before these people
could ask themselves how it had been accomplished.

The fellow with the rope was being boosted forward by half a dozen
intoxicated fools. Had the rope been a burning fuse it could scarcely
have ignited more danger