This time the minister responded.  He did not pause to blot out the faces of the curious.  The licence he had been absently holding was still in his hand; but he did not delay to put it down.  There was something compelling in that knock; something that demanded instant obedience, and he obeyed.  The living-room through which he passed on his way had two windows and, identical with that of his study, each was black with humanity; but he did not even glance at them.  His legs trembled involuntarily and his throat was dry as though he had been speaking for hours; yet, nevertheless, he obeyed.  With a hand that shook perceptibly he turned the button of the spring lock, and, opening the door onto the street, looked out.

While Clifford Mitchell lived, while lived every man of the uncounted throng gathered there beneath the noon-time sun that October day, they remembered that moment, the moments that followed.  As real life is ever stranger than fiction, so off the stage occur incidents more stirring than at the play.  Standing there in the narrow doorway, white-faced, hesitant, awaiting a command, the minister himself exemplified the fact beyond question; yet of his own grotesque part he was oblivious.  He had thought for but one thing that moment, had room in his consciousness for but one impression; and that was for the drama ready there before him.  And small wonder, for, looking out, this was what he saw: 

An uneven straggling village street, mottled with patches of dead grass and weeds.  Along it, here and there, like kernels of seed scattered on fallow ground, a sprinkling of one-story houses.  This the background.  In the midst of it all, covering his lawn, overflowing into the yards of his neighbours, dense, crowding the better to see, all-surrounding, was a solid zone of motley humanity.  Old men with weather-beaten faces and untrimmed beards were there, young men with the marks that dissipation and passion indelibly stamp, awkward, gawky youths unconsciously aping their elders, smooth-faced youngsters in outgrown garments; all ages and conditions of the human frontier male were there—­but in that zone not a single woman.  Ranchers there were in corduroys and denims, cowboys in buckskin and flannel, gamblers in the glaring colours distinctive of their kind, business men with closely cropped moustaches, idlers in anything and everything; but amid them all not a friendly face.  This the surrounding zone, the mongrel pack that had brought the quarry to bay.

In the centre of the half circle they formed, within a couple of paces of the now open doorway, were three people.  Two of them, a rather small brown girl and a tall wiry Indian in a new suit of ready-made clothes and a derby hat of the model of the year before, were nearest; so near that the door, which swung outward, all but touched them.  The other, a well-built, smooth-faced Easterner with a white skin and delicate hands, was opposite.  His dress was the dress