uncomprehending. Eyes
turned up to the speaker out of lean and serious visages, waiting for
his next sentence, and he himself stood there for a moment or two in a
silence which was as much an emphasis as a blank margin which stresses
the conspicuousness of print.

His own face, still drawn with the travail of last night's gamut of
emotion, and his figure motionless with the pent-up dynamics of a
tight-wound coil, carried the impression of action presently to burst
with a force beyond governing. They had always thought of him as a man
bred for action but short of speech; a man bound like themselves by the
constrictions which generations of taciturn ancestors had laid upon
fluency, damming it into difficulty. But now self-consciousness was as
absent from his attitude as though the torrential quality of his
thoughts and words came from an external force sweeping through him and
speaking through him.

Abruptly he thrust a hand into the breast pocket of his coat--a coat
torn recently by bullets meant for his heart--and drew out a thing
familiar to every man in that assemblage: a flat flask of colorless
glass, filled with a fluid as white as itself. He held the thing high
above his head, and ripped out his words with a crackling force.

"Thar's ther enemy thet's laid hits curse on the men an' women of
these-hyar mountings! Thar's ther thing thet's hatched from ther worm
of their still--ther pizen thet breeds in ther la'rel! _That's_ what
turns kindly men inter brutes an' wives inter widders an' children
inter orphans! Thar's ther thing thet hes made ther purest blood in all
America bear ther repute afore ther rest of ther world of a people of
bloody outlaws!

"Hit's bottles like thet thet hes shut ther doors of our country
against progress an' prosperity--an' barred out ther future from ther
hills. Hit's bottles like thet thet hes chained us ter ther dead past
when our kinsmen down below war a-marchin' on ter advancement. Hit's
ther false idee thet a man hes a license ter break ther law in
blockadin', even ter ther hurt of them thet don't blockade, thet's
carried along with hit a contempt fer all other law--an' raised up a
spirit of murder an' lay-wayin'."

As he paused again for a breathing space, still holding high the flask
above his head, he might have read a warning in the clouding of pupils
and the tightening of lips; in the out-thrusting of jaws and the
stiffening of shoulders. But these indications of hostile se