time night was coming on. Neither up nor down the
single business thoroughfare did a street lamp show its face. One and
all had succumbed long before to the god of gunpowder. Not a stray dog,
and Coyote Centre was plethoric of canines, raised its voice nor showed
even a retreating tail near the area of disturbance. Wisdom and a desire
for deepest obscurity had come to the many, swift and sudden
annihilation to the few. Temporarily, yet effectively as though a
cyclone were imminent, business and social life were paralysed. They
were a tolerant breed, these citizens of Coyote Centre; repeated similar
experience had not been without its effect; moreover, the object lesson
of the day before was still vivid in their minds; but at last patience
was reaching its limit. In the closed doorway of the town hall a tiny
group of men were gathered, a group who spoke scarcely above a whisper,
who kept a sharp lookout all surrounding, who stood ready at the twitch
of an eyelash to disperse to the four winds. This was revolt incipient.
In the single room of Bob Manning's general store was open revolt and
plotting. Manning himself, grizzled, grey of hair, shaggy bearded, had
the floor.

"You're a bunch of measly cowards," he included indiscriminately. "You
come here with your stories and croak and croak, and still not one of
you would dare say a word to Pete's face, not one of you but would stand
and let him twist your nose if he saw fit." He glowered from one horn of
the silent, listening semicircle to the other, with all-including
disdain. "If you don't like it, why don't you put a stop to it? If Jim
Burton has sneaked, why don't you elect a new marshal? You're damned
cowards, I say."

In his place on the cover of a barrel of dried apples, Bud Smith, the
weazened little land man, shifted as though the seat hurt him.

"P'raps you're right, dad," he commented imperturbably, "and agin p'raps
you're not. It's all well enough to say appoint a new marshal, but as
fer's I've been able to discover there's no one hereabouts hankerin' fer
the job." He spat at a crack in the cottonwood floor meditatively,
struck true, and seemed mildly pleased. "Our buryin' patch is growin'
comfortably rapidly as it is, without adding any marshals to the
collection. I've known Pete Sweeney fer quite a spell, and my private
advice is to let him alone. There ain't coffins enough this side the
river to supply the demand, if you was to try to arrest him when he's