an was always a mistake, certainly one this
time. As they walked him among them they gave small notice to his
growing fright and bewilderment, but when he appealed to the sheriff on
the score of old acquaintanceship, and pitifully begged to know what
they supposed he had done, the miners laughed curiously. That brought
his entreating back to them, and he assured them, looking in their
faces, that he truly did need to be told why they wanted him. So they
held up the gold and asked him whose that had been, and he made a
wretched hesitation in answering. If anything was needed to clinch their
certainty, that did. They could not know that the young successful lover
had recognized Drylyn's strange face, and did not want to tell the truth
before him, and hence was telling an unskilful lie instead. A rattle of
wheels sounded among the pines ahead, and the stage came up and stopped.
Only the driver and a friend were on it, and both of them knew the
shot-gun messenger and the sheriff, and they asked in some astonishment
what the trouble was. It had been stage-robbers the sheriff had started
after, the driver thought. And--as he commented in friendly tones--to
turn up with Wells and Fargo's messenger was the neatest practical joke
that had occurred in the county for some time. The always serious and
anxious sheriff told the driver the accusation, and it was a genuine cry
of horror that the young lover gave at hearing the truth at last, and at
feeling the ghastly chain of probability that had wound itself about
him.

The sheriff wondered if there were a true ring in the man's voice. It
certainly sounded so. He was talking with rapid agony, and it was the
whole true story that was coming out now. But the chatty neighbor nudged
another neighbor at the new explanation about the gold-dust. That there
was no great quantity of it, after all, weighed little against this
double accounting for one simple fact; moreover, the new version did not
do the messenger credit in the estimation of the miners, but gave them a
still worse opinion of him. It is scarcely fair to disbelieve what a man
says he did, and at the same time despise him for having done it.
Miners, however, are rational rather than logical; while the listening
sheriff grew more determined there should be a proper trial, the
deputation from the Gap made up its mind more inexorably the other way.
It had even been in the miners' heads to finish the business here on the
Folsom road,