on't
keer a heap if ye fails ter convict. We only wants 'em outen ther way
fer a while. Es fer ther crowds, I'm fixed ter safeguard ye. I've got
all my people hyar--ready--an' armed. I aims ter run things an' keep
peace in Marlin Town terday!"

CHAPTER X

On the river bank at the outskirts of Marlin Town that afternoon so
primitive was the aspect of life that it seemed appropriate to say in
Scriptural form: "A great multitude was gathered together." The haze of
Indian summer lay veil-like and sweetly brooding along the ridged and
purple horizon. The mountainsides flared with torch-like fires of
autumnal splendor--and the quaint old town with its shingled roofs and
its ox-teams in the streets, lay sleepily quiet in the mid-distance.

Toward the crudely constructed rostrum of the two preachers in
long-tailed coats, strained the eyes of the throng, pathetically solemn
in their tense earnestness. Men bent with labor and women broken by
toil and perennial child-bearing; children whose faces bore the stupid
vacuity of in-bred degeneracy; other children alert and keen, needing
only the chance they would never have. It was a sea of unlettered
humanity in jeans and calico, in hodden-gray and homespun--seeking a
sign from Heaven, less to save their immortal souls than to break the
tedium of their mortal weariness.

Henderson stood with folded arms beside the preacher whose pattern of
faith differed from that of the two exhorters he had come to hear.
Blossom's cheeks were abloom and her eyes, back of their grave
courtesy, rippled with a suppressed amusement. To her mind, her father
exemplified true ministry and these others were interesting quacks, but
to Bear Cat, standing at her elbow, they were performers whose clownish
antics savored of charlatanism--and who capitalized the illiteracy of
their hearers. Lone Stacy was there, too, but with a mask-like
impassiveness of feature that betrayed neither the trend nor color of
his thought.

Not far distant, though above and beyond the press of the crowd, stood
the Towers chief, and his four guardians, and shifting here and there,
sauntered others of his henchmen, swinging rifles at their sides and
watchful, through their seeming carelessness, for any signal from him.
Once for a moment Henderson caught a glimpse of Ratler Webb's skulking
figure with a vindictive glance bent upon Bear Cat--but in another
instant he had disappeared.

The first of the exhorters had swung in