Mob madness is beyond explanation.  Cattle stampeding are no more senseless than men in such a state.  Goldite, however, was not only habitually keyed to the highest of tension, but it had recently been excited to the breaking point by several contributing factors.  Lawless thefts of one another’s claims, ore stealing, high pressure over the coming rush to the Indian reservation, and a certain apprehension engendered by the deeds of those liberated convicts—­all these elements had aroused an over-revulsion of feeling towards criminality and a desire to apply some manner of law.  And the primal laws are the laws that spring into being at such a time as this—­the laws that cry out for an eye for an eye and a swiftness of legal execution.

Into the vortex of Goldite’s sudden revulsion Van was swept like a straw.  There was no real chance for a hearing.  His friends of the morning had lost all sense of loyalty.  They were almost as crazed as those whom his recent success had irritated.  The story of his row with Culver had spread throughout the confines of the camp.  No link in the chain of circumstantial evidence seemed wanting to convict him.  A bawling sea of human beings surrounded him with violence and menace.

To escape the over-wrought citizens, the sheriff, assuming charge of Van, dragged him on top of a stack of lumber, piled three feet high before a building.  The cry for a rope and a lynching began with a promptness that few would have expected.  In normal times it could scarcely have been broached.

Snatching new-made deputies, hit-or-miss from the mob, and summarily demanding their services, the sheriff exerted his utmost powers to stem the tide that was rising.  Something akin to a trial began then and there.  A big red-faced drummer from Chicago, a man that Van had never seen, became his voluntary advocate, standing between him and the mob.

He had power, that man, both of limb and presence.  His voice, also, was mighty.  He shoved men about like rubber puppets and shouted his demands for law and order.

Van, having flung off half a dozen citizens, who in the excitement had felt some fanatical necessity for clutching him, faced the human wolves about him in a spirit of angry resentment.  The big man from Chicago mowed his way to the pile of lumber and clambered up by the sheriff.  The pile raised its occupants only well above the surging pack of faces.

“Stop your howling!  Stop your noise!” roared the drummer from his elevation.  “Don’t you want to give this man a chance?”

[Illustration:  “Don’t you want to give this man a chance?”]

He was heard throughout the street.

“He’s got to prove his innocence or hang!” cried someone shrilly.  “A murder foul as that!”

Another one bawled:  “Where was he then?  Make him tell where he was at six o’clock!”

Culver’s watch had been shattered and stopped at precisely six o’clock, presumably by his fall against a table in his office, when he suddenly went down, at the hands of his assassin.  This fact was in possession of the crowd.