Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/390

 manifestations of joy and good will. Within a minute his bearers had started down the steps with him.

Other joy-mad celebrants swung up the other chiefs to their shoulders. They even laid violent but approving hands upon the Reverend Jedediah Collins, and him also, laughing, they bore aloft. They caught up squaws and papooses, and headed a promenade that streamed like a human waterfall down the broad steps and along the concrete walk with the crowd milling in behind and forming a serpentine in the street, with shouts and cheers and songs and a more organized manifestation of the popular rejoicing.

For once in Edgewater the Siwash had his due.

Presently the tumult of good feeling subsided. The old chiefs, permitted to resume their feet and their gravity, gathered once more around their spiritual Moses and looked up into his face as meekly content with what his leadership had brought them to. Yet this resumption of satisfied impassive calm was almost immediately broken in upon. This was because, before anyone else in Edgewater knew that Henry Harrington was to be exonerated of the murder charge, John Boland knew—for he had heard what the detectives said to Scanlon in his library, and when he read confession in the consummate scoundrel's face, he backed away from him with horror burning in his eyes, his stunned mind trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Then he too accused Scanlon—but weakly, for he was weak. "And you—you let me do what I have done!" He gasped this charge and sat trembling. He had ceased to be any longer a self-confident man. His head sank weakly prone upon his library table and it lay there some time.