toward it.  The crowd got restless and uneasy, and, by and by, experimental and defiant.  For in that crowd was the spirit of Bunker Hill and King’s Mountain.  It couldn’t fiddle and sing; it couldn’t settle its little troubles after the good old fashion of fist and skull; it couldn’t charge up and down the streets on horseback if it pleased; it couldn’t ride over those puncheon sidewalks; it couldn’t drink openly and without shame; and, Shades of the American Eagle and the Stars and Stripes, it couldn’t even yell.  No wonder, like the heathen, it raged.  What did these blanked “furriners” have against them anyhow?  They couldn’t run their country—­not much.

Pretty soon there came a shrill whistle far down-town—­then another and another.  It sounded ominous, indeed, and it was, being a signal of distress from the Infant of the Guard, who stood before the door of Jack Woods’s saloon with his pistol levelled on Richards, the tough from the Pocket, the Infant, standing there with blazing eyes, alone and in the heart of a gathering storm.

Now the chain of lawlessness that had tightened was curious and significant.  There was the tough and his kind—­lawless, irresponsible and possible in any community.  There was the farm-hand who had come to town with the wild son of his employer—­an honest, law-abiding farmer.  Came, too, a friend of the farmer who had not yet reaped the crop of wild oats sown in his youth.  Whiskey ran all into one mould.  The farm-hand drank with the tough, the wild son with the farm-hand, and the three drank together, and got the farmer’s unregenerate friend to drink with them; and he and the law-abiding farmer himself, by and by, took a drink for old time’s sake.  Now the cardinal command of rural and municipal districts all through the South is, “Forsake not your friend”:  and it does not take whiskey long to make friends.  Jack Woods had given the tough from the Pocket a whistle.

“You dassen’t blow it,” said he.

Richards asked why, and Jack told him.  Straightway the tough blew the whistle, and when the little colonel ran down to arrest him he laughed and resisted, and the wild son and the farm-hand and Jack Woods showed an inclination to take his part.  So, holding his “drop” on the tough with one hand, the Infant blew vigorously for help with the other.

Logan, the captain, arrived first—­he usually arrived first—­and Gordon, the sergeant, was by his side—­Gordon was always by his side.  He would have stormed a battery if the captain had led him, and the captain would have led him—­alone—­if he thought it was his duty.  Logan was as calm as a stage hero at the crisis of a play.  The crowd had pressed close.

“Take that man,” he said sharply, pointing to the tough whom the colonel held covered, and two men seized him from behind.

The farm-hand drew his gun.

“No, you don’t!” he shouted.

“Take him,” said the captain quietly; and he was seized by two more and disarmed.