Before he had got half-way to it, however, shouts fell upon his ears, and glancing hastily backward, he saw over a hundred laborers running toward him.  For a brief space he stopped, measured with his eyes the distance he was from the arm of the derrick and his pursuers, then stooped, threw Shuter across his shoulder, and started off on a brisk run.  Nellie made another desperate effort to stop him, but this time he pushed her to the earth and sped on.

Despite his great weight, and the burden which encumbered him, he was the first to reach the derrick—­although the crowd had been close behind him when he began to run.  He had deftly thrown the end of the rope over the arm of the derrick, and was about to hoist Shuter into mid-air, when the crowd was upon him.  The rope was wrenched from his hands, and the noose unloosened from the man’s throat.  “For heaven’s sake, what does all this mean?” asked a foreman, turning toward Joe.

Before he could reply Shuter gasped, “He’s mad, he’s mad; he ran into my tent, and without a word wound that rope about my neck and then tried to hang me.”  As he looked at his implacable enemy he edged towards the foreman.

“He pretends,” began Joe, in a compressed voice, “that he don’t know why I was going to hang him; he’s a liar; yes, a million times worse than a liar—­he’s a murderer!  I thought I’d save you the trouble of helping me to string him up, for when you hear what he’s done you’ll riddle him full of holes and string him up as well!”

The crowd had now gathered about the speaker, and were gazing at him with growing excitement.  “There’s a lot of you,” Joe went on, “who saw him last night, in that gambling whiskey dive of his, try to draw his knife on Harry Langdon, and heard him shout after me that he’d have a reckoning some other time with that cub of mine; and, boys, he’s kept his word, for Harry lies in his tent there, dead, stabbed to the heart, in the dead of night, through the folds of the tent, by that cuss there that you were so afraid I’d string up.”

Angry exclamations followed this fierce tirade, and a rush was made for Shuter.

“It’s a lie!  I swear it’s a lie!  I never stabbed the lad!”

But his words were cut short by the rope, which was again being wound around his throat.  As they dragged him towards the derrick Nellie once more threw herself across her father’s body and begged piteously for mercy.  The sight of the girl’s intense grief somewhat cooled the unreasoning rage which had been kindled in their hearts by Joe’s rude eloquence, and they hesitated as though they hardly knew what to do.

“Let’s see the body before we string him up, anyway,” cried a voice.

The fairness of the proposition appealed to the men—­more especially as they had begun to realize that they had acted impulsively.  There was a general move toward the tent where the body lay.

In the rush none of them noticed the rapid approach of the Indian girl, who so prodigally, and unasked, had given her heart to the murdered boy.  As they entered the tent she was close behind Joe, whose huge body hid Shuter and his daughter, who were in front of him, from her view.