A general shout for Van to explain where he was at the vital moment arose from all the crowd.  The drummer turned to Van.

“There you are,” he said.  “There’s your chance.  If you wasn’t around the surveyor’s shack, you ought to be able to prove it.”

Van could have proved his alibi at once, by sending around to Queenie’s residence.  He was nettled into a stubbornness of mind and righteous anger by all this senseless accusation.  He did not realize his danger—­the blackness of the case against him.  That a lynching was possible he could scarcely have been made to believe.  Nevertheless, as the Queenie matter was one of no secrecy and the facts must soon be known, he was turning to the drummer to make his reply when his eye was caught by a face, far out in the mass of human forms.

It was Beth that he saw, her cheek intensely white in the light streaming forth from a store.  Bostwick was there at her side.  Beth had been caught in the press of the throng as they came from the telegraph office.

He realized that at best his story concerning Queenie would be sufficiently black.  With Beth in this theater of accusation the story of Queenie must wait.

“It’s nobody’s business where I was,” he said.  “This whole affair is absurd!”

Half a dozen of the men who were nearest heard his reply.  One of them roared it out lustily.  The mob was enraged.  The cries for a violent termination to the scene increased in volume.  Men were shouting, swearing, and surging back and forth tumultuously, wrought to a frenzy of primal virtue.

One near Beth called repeatedly for a lynching.  He had cut a long new piece of rope from a coil at a store of supplies and was trying to drag it through the crowd.

The girl had heard and seen it all.  She realized its full significance.  She had never in her life felt so horribly oppressed with a sense of terrible things impending.  Impetuously she accosted a man who stood at her side.

“Oh, tell them he was with me!” she said.

The man looked her over, and raising himself on his tip toes, shook his hat wildly at the mob.

“Say,” he shouted at the top of his might, “here’s a girl he was with at six o’clock.”

It seemed as if only the men near at hand either heard or paid attention.  On the farther side, away from Beth, the shouts for mob law were increasing.  She turned to Bostwick hotly.

“Can’t you do anything?  Tell them he was there with us—­down at Mrs. Dick’s at six o’clock!”

“He wasn’t!” said Searle.  “He left there at five forty-five.”

The man who had shouted listened to them both.

“Five forty-five?” he repeated.  “That makes a difference!”

The drummer had caught the shout from out at the edge.

“Who’s that?” he called.  “Who’s got that alibi?”

“All wrong!—­No good!” yelled the man who stood by Beth.