en in no manner molested.

"They'll be all right as long as they stick together and keep in the
open," Yank assured me. "That gang will sooner assassinate than fight."

Although for the moment held in check by the resolute front presented by
these three boys, the rough element showed that it considered it had won
a great victory, and was now entitled to run the town. Members of the
gang selected what goods they needed at any of the stores, making no
pretence of payment. They swaggered boldly about the streets at all
times, infested the better places such as the Bella Union, elbowed aside
insolently any inoffensive citizen who might be in their way, and
generally conducted themselves as though they owned the place. Robberies
grew more frequent. The freighters were held up in broad daylight;
rumours of returning miners being relieved of their dust drifted up from
the lower country; mysterious disappearances increased in number. Hardly
an attempt was made to conceal the fact that the organized gang that
conducted these operations had its headquarters at Italian Bar. Strange
men rode up in broad daylight, covered with red dust, to confer with
Morton or one of the other resident blackguards. Mysteriously every
desperado in the place began to lay fifty-dollar octagonal slugs on the
gaming tables, product of some lower country atrocity.

The camp soon had a concrete illustration of the opinion the roughs held
of themselves. It was reported quietly among a few of us that several of
our number had been "marked" by the desperadoes. Two of these were Joe
Thompson, who had acted as counsel for the prosecution in the late
trial, and Tom Cleveland, who had presided, and presided well, over the
court. Thompson kept one of the stores, while Cleveland was proprietor
of the butcher shop. No overt threats were made, but we understood that
somehow these men were to be put out of the way. Of course they were at
once warned.

The human mind is certainly a queer piece of mechanism. It would seem
that the most natural thing to have done, in the circumstances, would
have been to dog these men's footsteps until an opportunity offered to
assassinate them quietly. That is just what would have been done had the
intended victims been less prominently in the public eye. The murder of
court officials, however, was a very different matter from the finding
of an unknown miner dead in his camp or along the trail. In the former
case there could be no m