Page:Ritchie - Trails to Two Moons.djvu/217

. The corollary instantly becoming patent was that the law really did not have a grudge against Zang Whistler; wherefore, should he be found anywhere around the jail he would be turned loose.

One man at a bar turned questioningly and looked into his neighbor's eyes. Heads nodded gravely. A few words were spoken. One by one men began to sift out on to the street. From saloon and shop they came, gathering in little knots in the deeper shadows between the bars of yellow light laid down on the wooden sidewalks in grotesque mosaics. The giant who had quailed before Original's threatening gun came from his blacksmith shop carrying a heavy sledge and with a cold chisel tucked under the binding thong of his leather apron. Him the men greeted as a leader. He passed from group to group, merging them into a solid core behind his back.

Within half an hour there was a blot of men on Main Street stretching from curb to curb,—townspeople, small farmers in from their homesteads on the prairies, sheepmen whose flocks, like Wooly Annie's, had been despoiled in times past or whose herders had been found in some lonely coulee with a stone between