aving flung off half a dozen citizens, who in the excitement had
felt some fanatical necessity for clutching him, faced the human wolves
about him in a spirit of angry resentment. The big man from Chicago
mowed his way to the pile of lumber and clambered up by the sheriff.
The pile raised its occupants only well above the surging pack of faces.

"Stop your howling! Stop your noise!" roared the drummer from his
elevation. "Don't you want to give this man a chance?"

[Illustration: "Don't you want to give this man a chance?"]

He was heard throughout the street.

"He's got to prove his innocence or hang!" cried someone shrilly. "A
murder foul as that!"

Another one bawled: "Where was he then? Make him tell where he was at
six o'clock!"

Culver's watch had been shattered and stopped at precisely six o'clock,
presumably by his fall against a table in his office, when he suddenly
went down, at the hands of his assassin. This fact was in possession
of the crowd.

A general shout for Van to explain where he was at the vital moment
arose from all the crowd. The drummer turned to Van.

"There you are," he said. "There's your chance. If you wasn't around
the surveyor's shack, you ought to be able to prove it."

Van could have proved his alibi at once, by sending around to Queenie's
residence. He was nettled into a stubbornness of mind and righteous
anger by all this senseless accusation. He did not realize his
danger--the blackness of the case against him. That a lynching was
possible he could scarcely have been made to believe. Nevertheless, as
the Queenie matter was one of no secrecy and the facts must soon be
known, he was turning to the drummer to make his reply when his eye was
caught by a face, far out in the mass of human forms.

It was Beth that he saw, her cheek intensely white in the light
streaming forth from a store. Bostwick was there at her side. Beth
had been caught in the press of the throng as they came from the
telegraph office.

He realized that at best his story concerning Queenie would be
sufficiently black. With Beth in this theater of accusation the story
of Queenie must wait.

"It's nobody's business where I was," he said. "This whole affair is
absurd!"

Half a dozen of the men who were nearest heard his reply. One of them
roared it out lustily. The mob was enraged. The cries for a violent
termination to the scene increased in volume. Men were shouting,
swearing, and s