The girl had failed to realize how her statement would sound—­in such a place as Goldite.  Van had turned sick when it reached him.  He was emphatically denying the story.  The gist of it went through the mass of maddened beings, only to be so soon impugned by the man who had started it from Beth.  The fury, at what was deemed an attempted deception, burst out with accumulated force.

The sheriff had drawn a revolver and was shouting to the mob to keep away.

“This man has got to go to jail!” he yelled.  “You’ve got to act accordin’ to the law!”

He ordered his deputies to clear the crowd and make ready for retreat.  Three of them endeavored to obey.  Their efforts served to aggravate the mob.

Confusion and chaos of judgment seemed rising like a tide.  In the very air was a feeling that suddenly something would go, something too far strained to hold, and some terrible deed occur before these people could ask themselves how it had been accomplished.

The fellow with the rope was being boosted forward by half a dozen intoxicated fools.  Had the rope been a burning fuse it could scarcely have ignited more dangerous material than did its strands of manilla, in those who could lay their hands upon it.

The drummer was shouting himself raw in the throat—­in vain.

Van was courting disaster by the very defiance of his attitude.  It seemed as if nothing could save him, when two separate things occurred.

The doctor who had been with Van at Queenie’s death arrived in the press, got wind of the crisis, and vehemently protested the truth.  Simultaneously, the lumberman, Trimmer, drunk, and enjoying what he deemed a joke, hoarsely confided to some sober men the fact that Cayuse had done the murder.

Even then, when two centers of opposition to the madness of the mob had been created, the menace could not at once be halted.

The man with the rope had approached so near the lumber-pile that the sheriff could all but reach him.  A furious battle ensued, and waged around the planks, between the deputies and lynchers.  It lasted till fifty active men of the camp, aroused to a sense of reaction by the facts that were now becoming known, hurled the struggling fighters apart and dragged them off, all the while spreading the news they had heard concerning the half-breed Indian.

No less excited when at last they knew that Van was innocent, the great crowd still occupied the street, hailing Trimmer to the lumber-pile and demanding to know how he came by the facts, and where Cayuse had gone.

Trimmer was frightened into soberness—­at least into soberness sufficient to protect himself and McCoppet.  He said he had seen the Indian coming from Culver’s office, with blood upon his hands.  The Indian had gone straight westward from the town, to elude pursuit in the mountains.

The fact that Van had been at Queenie’s side at her death became town property at once.  It came in all promptness to Beth.