n trouble to do it; gone
out of their way, made game of him to the quick; and when he remembered,
for the twentieth time this morning, that day he had carried the package
of gold-dust--some of it very likely his own--to the smooth-faced
messenger at Folsom, Drylyn's stolid body trembled from head to foot,
and he spoke blind, inarticulate words.

But down below there the screams were sounding. A brother miner came
running by. Drylyn realized that he ought to be running too, of course,
and so he ran. All the men were running from their various scattered
claims, and Salvation Gap grew noisy and full of people at once. There
was the sheriff also, come up last evening on the track of some
stage-robbers, and quite opportune for this, he thought. He liked things
to be done legally. The turmoil of execration and fierce curiosity
thrashed about for the right man to pitch on for this crime. The
murdered woman had been so good company, so hearty a wit, such a robust
songstress, so tireless a dancer, so thoroughly everybody's friend, that
it was inconceivable to the mind of Salvation Gap that anybody there had
done it. The women were crying and wringing their hands--the Gazelle had
been good to them too; the men were talking and cursing, all but Drylyn
there among them, serious and strange-looking; so silent that the
sheriff eyed him once or twice, though he knew nothing of the miner's
infatuation. And then some woman shrieked out the name of Drylyn, and
the crowd had him gripped in a second, to let him go the next, laughing
at the preposterous idea. Saying nothing? Of course he didn't feel like
talking. To be sure he looked dazed. It was hard luck on him. They told
the sheriff about him and the Gazelle. They explained that Drylyn was
"sort of loony, anyway," and the sheriff said, "Oh!" and began to wonder
and surmise in this half-minute they had been now gathered, when
suddenly the inevitable boot-prints behind the tent down the hill were
found. The shout of discovery startled Drylyn as genuinely as if he had
never known, and he joined the wild rush of people to the hill. Nor was
this acting. The violence he had set going, and in which he swam like a
straw, made him forget, or for the moment drift away from, his arranged
thoughts, and the tracks on the hill had gone clean out of his head. He
was become a mere blank spectator in the storm, incapable of
calculation. His own handiwork had stunned him, for he had not foreseen
that con