The young woman burst out weeping afresh, and the wailing of the others answered her.  Hare left the cottage.  He picked up his rifle and went down through the orchard to the hiding-place of the horses.  Silvermane pranced and snorted his gladness at sight of his master.  The desert king was fit for a grueling race.  Black Bolly quietly cropped the long grass.  Hare saddled the stallion to have him in instant readiness, and then returned to the front of the yard.

He heard the sound of a gun down the road, then another, and several shots following in quick succession.  A distant angry murmuring and trampling of many feet drew Hare to the gate.  Riderless mustangs were galloping down the road; several frightened boys were fleeing across the square; not a man was in sight.  Three more shots cracked, and the low murmur and trampling swelled into a hoarse uproar.  Hare had heard that sound before; it was the tumult of mob-violence.  A black dense throng of men appeared crowding into the main street, and crossing toward the square.  The procession had some order; it was led and flanked by mounted men.  But the upflinging of many arms, the craning of necks, and the leaping of men on the outskirts of the mass, the pressure inward and the hideous roar, proclaimed its real character.

“By Heaven!” exclaimed Hare.  “The Mormons have risen against the rustlers.  I understand now.  John Caldwell spent last night in secretly rousing his neighbors.  They have surprised the rustlers.  Now what?”

Hare vaulted the fence and ran down the road.  A compact mob of men, a hundred or more, had halted in the village under the wide-spreading cottonwoods.  Hare suddenly grasped the terrible significance of those outstretched branches, and out of the thought grew another which made him run at bursting break-neck speed.

“Open up!  Let me in!” he yelled to the thickly thronged circle.  Right and left he flung men.  “Make way!” His piercing voice stilled the angry murmur.  Fierce men with weapons held aloft fell back from his face.

“Dene’s spy!” they cried.

The circle opened and closed upon him.  He saw bound rustlers under armed guard.  Four still forms were on the ground.  Holderness lay outstretched, a dark-red blot staining his gray shirt.  Flinty-faced Mormons, ruthless now as they had once been mild, surrounded the rustlers.  John Caldwell stood foremost, with ashen lips breaking bitterly into speech: 

“Mormons, this is Dene’s spy, the man who killed Holderness!”

The listeners burst into the short stern shout of men proclaiming a leader in war.

“What’s the game?” demanded Hare.

“A fair trial for the rustlers, then a rope,” replied John Caldwell.  The low ominous murmur swelled through the crowd again.

“There are two men here who have befriended me.  I won’t see them hanged.”

“Pick them out!” A strange ripple of emotion made a fleeting break in John Caldwell’s hard face.