CHAPTER XII

WITHIN THE CONQUEROR’S OWN COUNTRY

It was the day set for the wedding, the eighteenth since the girl had left, the sixteenth since a new mound had arisen on the bare lot adjoining that beneath which rested Landman Bud Smith, the twelfth since How Landor had arrived to haunt the tiny railway terminus.  The one train from the East was due at 8:10 of the morning.  It was now eight o’clock.  Within the shambling, ill-kept hotel, with its weather-stained exterior and its wind-twisted sign, the best room, paid for in advance and freshly dusted for the occasion, awaited an occupant.  In a stall of the single livery, a pair of half-wild bronchos, fed and harnessed according to directions, were passively waiting.  An old surrey, recently oiled and tightened in all its senile joints, was drawn up conveniently to the door.  In a tiny room, designated the study, of the Methodist parsonage, on the straggling outskirts of the town, the only minister the settlement boasted sat staring at the unpapered wall opposite.  He was a mild-featured young man of the name of Mitchell, recently graduated from a school of theology, and for that reason selected as a sacrifice to the frontier.  In front of him on the desk lay a duly prepared marriage licence, and upon it a bright gold half eagle.  From time to time he glanced thereat peculiarly, and in sympathy from it to the tiny fast-ticking clock at its side.  He did so now, and frowned unconsciously.

At the station the crowd of loafers that always preceded the arrival or departure of a train were congregated.  In some way suggestions of the unusual had passed about, and this day their number was greatly augmented.  Just what they anticipated they did not know; they did not care.  Restless, athirst for excitement, they had dumbly responded to the influence in the air and come.  In the foreground, where a solitary Indian stood motionless, waiting, there was being repeated the same puerile pantomime and horse-play of a former occasion.  At intervals, from the rear, sounded the war whoop travesty.  It was all the same as that afternoon eighteen days before, when the girl had left, similar even to the cloud of black smoke in the distance lifting lazily into the sky; only now the trail, instead of growing thinner and lighter, became denser and blacker minute by minute.  In sympathy, the humorists on the platform redoubled their efforts.  The instinct of anticipation, of Anglo-Saxon love of excitement that had brought them there, urged them on.  Not one throat but many underwent simultaneous pantomimic bisection.  A half dozen voices caught up the war whoop, passed it on from throat to throat.  Almost before they realised what they were doing, the thing became a contagion, an orgy.  Many who had not taken part before, who had come from mere curiosity, took part now.  The crowd pressed closer and closer about the alien, the centre of attraction.  When he moved