Page:Ritchie - Trails to Two Moons.djvu/222

 the mob's rage. That the cattle clan should dare attempt to cheat them of the murderer the people of Two Moons had come to get was provocation to madness. A segment of the crowd swept against the big gate giving on to the jail yard; it went down with a crash. Men streamed into the jail yard and up to the locked door beyond.

That instant the horsemen who had driven through the press like a spearhead attempted to repeat the maneuver. They were met with a scattering volley which halted them in the dark. Stabs of red through the night were answered by vicious stabs. Uproar settled about the courthouse.

At the first charge of the horsemen Sheriff Agnew had stumbled back through the courthouse door. He ran gropingly to the corridor leading to the jail, mounted an iron flight of steps. A twist of a key let him into the outer cage of the cell house, separated from the inner blocks of cells by a wall of steel bars; a corridor ran the length of the cell house beyond this barrier. Agnew unlocked the door giving on to this corridor.

"Zang!" he cried. "Zang!"

"Here yu' are!" came a voice from the