Savagely they fell upon him.  He went down, stunned by a blow on the head, a sense of crushing weight that overwhelmed his strength.  He was vaguely conscious of a tirade of strange words, of an arm at the end of which was a meat cleaver, lashing about.  The vindictive bark of a pistol.  Shouts, feet running.  A blue-coated form.  A vehicle with champing horses that stood by.

“Are you hurt very bad, young feller?”

Robert moved his arms and legs.  They appeared intact.  He rose, stiffly.  “Where’s Po Lun?”

“In the wagon.”

Robert, turning, observed an ambulance.  “Not—­dead?”

“Well, pretty near it,” said the policeman.  “He saved your life though, the yellow devil.  Laid out half a dozen of them hoodlums with a hatchet.  He’s shot through the lungs.  But Doc. says he’s got a chance.”

* * * * *

Late that afternoon William T. Coleman sat closeted with Chief Ellis of the San Francisco police.  Coleman bore but scant resemblance to the youth of 1856.  He was heavier, almost bald, moustached, more settled, less alert in manner.  Yet his eyes had in them still the old invincible gleam of leadership.

“But,” he was saying to the man in uniform, “that was twenty years ago.  Can’t you find a younger chap to head your Citizens’ Committee?”

“No,” said Ellis shortly.  “You’re the one we need.  You know the way to deal with outlaws ... how to make the citizens respond.  Do you know that the gang wrecked several Chinese laundries after the attack on Windham?  That they threaten to burn the Pacific Mail docks?”

Chief Ellis drew a little nearer.  “General McComb of the State forces has called a mass meeting.  He wishes you to take charge....”

CHAPTER LXVI

THE PICK-HANDLE BRIGADE

Benito found his son awaiting when he returned from the Citizens’ Mass Meeting at midnight.  Robert, insisting that he was “fit as a fiddle,” had nevertheless been put to bed through the connivance of an anxious mother and the family physician, who found him to have suffered some severe contusions and lacerations in the morning’s fray.  But he was wide awake and curious when his father’s latch key grated in the door.

“It must have seemed like old times, didn’t it, dad?” he asked with enthusiasm.  The Vigilance Committee of the Fifties in his young mind was a knightly company.  As a boy he used to listen, eager and excited, to his father’s tales of Coleman.  Now his hero was again to take the stage.

“Yes, it took me back,” said Windham.  “I was about your age then and Coleman was just in his thirties.”  He sat down a trifle wearily.  “The years aren’t kind.  Some of the fellows who were young in ’56 seemed old tonight....  But they have the same spirit.”

“Tell me what happened,” said Robert, after a pause.

Benito’s eyes flashed.  “You should have heard them cheer when Coleman rose.  He called for his old comrades and we stood up.  Then there was more cheering.  Coleman is all business.  He commenced at once enrolling men for his pick-handle brigade; he’s refused fire-arms.  He has fifteen hundred already, divided into companies of a hundred each—­with their own officers.”