With Hoops of Steel. Florence Finch Kelly
He mounted the platform and faced Delarue, while Tuttle and Ellhorn, with revolvers drawn, stood beside Mead.
“Better put your guns away, boys,” whispered Mead.
“Not much!” Ellhorn replied. “We can’t draw as quick as you can!”
“Let’s go for ’em!” pleaded Tuttle in a whisper. “You and Nick and me can down half of ’em before they know what’s happened, and the other half before they could shoot.”
“No, Tommy; it wouldn’t do.”
“It would be the best thing that could happen to the town,” he grumbled back. “Say, Emerson, we’d better go for ’em before they make a rush.”
“No, no, Tom; better not shoot. I tell you it wouldn’t do!”
“Well, if you say so, as long as they don’t begin it. But they shan’t touch you while there’s a cartridge left in my belt.”
The crowd, arrested and controlled, first by the spectacle of Mead’s audacity and then by the compelling roar of Judge Harlin’s denunciation, listened quietly, still subdued by its amazement, while Harlin went on, standing beside Delarue and shaking at him an admonishing finger.
“Pierre Delarue, I am astonished that a good citizen like you should be here inciting to murder! You have not one jot of evidence that Emerson Mead killed Will Whittaker! You do not even know that Whittaker is dead!”
The crowd shuffled and muttered angrily at this defiance of its conviction. It was returning to its former frame of mind, and was beginning to feel incensed at the irruption into the meeting.
“We do know it!” a man in the front row flamed out, his face working with the violent back-rush of recent passion. “And we know Mead did it!” another one yelled. Murmurs of “Lynch him! Lynch him!” quickly followed. Tuttle and Ellhorn were white with suppressed rage, and their eyes were wide and blazing. Tuttle was nervously fingering his trigger guard. “Then bring your evidence into a court of law and let unprejudiced men judge its value,” Judge Harlin roared back. “Accusers who have the right on their side are not afraid to face the law!”
Mead caught the angry eye of a brutal-faced man directly in front of him, and saw that the man’s revolver was at full cock and his hand on the trigger. In the flash that went from eye to eye he saw with surety what would happen in another moment. And he knew what the sequence of one shot would be.
“Neighbors!” he shouted. “Jim Halliday has a warrant for my arrest. I protest that it has been illegally issued, because there is no evidence upon which it can be based. But to avoid any further trouble, here and now, I will submit to having it served. I will not be disarmed, and I warn you that any attempt of that sort will make trouble. But I give you my word, for both myself and my friends, that otherwise there shall be no disturbance.”
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