mong the mob.

Hutton did not look at Morgan as he passed with low word from man to
man, sowing the poison of his vindictive hate against this man who had
compelled him to be honest once against his bent. A moment Hutton paused
in conference with the blacksmith, and that man came forward now,
silenced Gray with a word and pushed him aside.

The blacksmith was a knotty short man of Slavic features, a cropped
mustache under his stubby nose. His shop was burning in the ruin of that
tragic morning; the blame of it was Morgan's. Others whose business
places had been erased in the fire were recognized by Morgan in the
crowd. The proprietor of the Santa Fe cafe, the cobbler, the Mexican who
sold tamales and chili--none of them of any consequence ordinarily, but
potent of the extreme of evil now, merged as they were into that
unreasoning thing, the mob.

There were murmured suggestions, rejections; talk of the cross-arms on
the telegraph poles, which at once became determined, decisive. Men
pushed through the press with ropes. Seth Craddock looked across at
Morgan, and cursed him. One of the prisoners, the unwounded man, a youth
no older than Fred Stilwell, began to beg and cry.

Morgan had not been alarmed up to the moment of his seeing Hutton
inflaming the crowd against him, for the mob was composed of men whose
faces were for the greater part familiar, mild men in their way, whom
the violence in which they had lived had passed and left untouched. But
they held him with strong hands; they were making ready a noose to throw
over his head and strangle his life out in the shame that belongs to
murderers and thieves.

This had become a matter beyond his calculation; this should not be.
There were guns in men's hands all about him where guns did not belong.
Morgan threw his determination and strength into a fling that cleared
his right arm, and began a battle that marked for life some of them who
clung to him and tried to drag him down.

They were crushing him, they were overwhelming him. Only a sudden jerk
of the head, a dozen determined, silent men hanging to him, saved
Morgan's neck from the flung rope. The man who cast it cursed; was
drawing it back with eager haste to throw again, when Rhetta Thayer
came.

She came pushing through the mad throng about Morgan, he heard her
command to clear the way; she was beside him, the mystery of her swift
passage through the mob made plain. Seth Craddock's guns, given her as a
tro