had its pair or multiple pairs peering out
through the slats of a blind, or, as in a theatre preceding a
performance, at the side of a drawn curtain. Like wildfire the news had
spread; like turtles timid women folk had drawn close within their
shells; yet everywhere curiosity they could not repress prompted them to
take a last look before the storm. Once, and once only, the pedestrians
were interrupted. Then a house dog came bounding across the lawn to
pause at a safe distance and growl a menace; and again the all-noting
Indian had observed the cause of the unwonted bravery, had heard the low
voice from the kitchen that had urged the beast on.

Thus nearer and nearer that sunny fall morning the storm approached.
Long before this, unobservant though she was, had the girl not been
living in the future instead of the present, she would have recognised
its coming. For the pursuers were gaining rapidly now. They had crossed
onto the same street, the principal residence thoroughfare, and were
coming as a crowd ever moves: swiftly, those in the rear exerting
themselves to get to the fore, and so again. Far from silent by this
time, the man ahead, the man who never deigned a backward glance, could
hear their voices in a perpetual rumble; could distinguish at intervals,
interrupting it, above it, a voice commanding, inflaming. Without
seeing, he knew that at last his persecutors had found a commander, a
directing spirit--and as well as he knew his own name he knew who that
leader was. Unsophisticated absolutely in the ways of the world was this
man; but in the reading of his fellows he was a master.

Apparently oblivious when a part of this same crowd had congregated at
the train, he had nevertheless observed them individual by individual;
and in his own consciousness had known that the moment, his moment, had
not come: for a leader, the leader, was not there. Again when the train
had pulled in he had watched--and still the leader did not appear. But
he was not deceived. As he had trusted in the girl's coming he had
trusted in another's following surreptitiously; and as now he heard that
one voice sounding above the other voices he knew he had been right. For
the man at the head of that pursuing mob which gained on them so
rapidly block by block, the man whose influence in those brief hours the
Indian and the girl had been alone in the tiny room at the hotel had
vitalised the lukewarm racial hostility into a thing of menace, was