Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/174

 again. Sandiver—Hall was convinced he was nobody else—lifted his other foot with as much caution as if the slightest noise would be fatal to his hopes, and stood.

Hall threw back the spring-bolt and opened the door, which had been reënforced since Old Doc Ross' assault on it and made thick to withstand violence. But he opened it only a little way, not far enough to give them a look into the car, blocking that small opening with his body to guard against a rush.

"We want Sandiver," said a man in front of the crowd.

He was a stranger to Hall, a mild-looking, fatherly sort of man with a beard. He was holding a railroad spike in his hand, with which he evidently had made the alarming thump on the door.

"Are you the sheriff?" Hall inquired.

"No, I ain't," the man answered, as mildly as he appeared, yet with something portentous in the very control of his voice. He gave the instant impression of having been abroad in the night on such business as that before.

"I'll have to ask you to wait a few minutes yet, gentlemen. I'm not quite through with him."

Hall was peering into the crowd, trying to see whether Larrimore and the others were there. The one lantern still hung on the stake beside the platform, fifty or sixty feet away, making a confusion of shadows among them. There appeared to be thirty or forty in the crowd, but Hall was not able to identify many. There was a hat like Larrimore's off a little way, and a dicer that surely belonged to Fergus. Kraus' bear-like figure Hall could not pick out among them.

"He'll do the way he is, Doctor," the spokesman said.