They had not moved, had taken no single step forward.  He remembered having seen a man near Mundy standing with open mouth and bulging eyes; the fellow’s jaw still sagged, his eyes were fixed in the same strange stare, his eyelids had not so much as winked.

“That’s one!” yelled Conniston.  He laughed out loud, the laugh of a man whose nerves are strained almost to the point of snapping.

“Come on, come on!  Who’ll be next?”

They muttered among themselves; here and there a man called out sharply.  But still they did not move.  A thing like that which they had just witnessed drives the fumes of alcohol from a man’s brain like a dip in ice-water.  They could beat him down, they could take him, they could kill him as he had killed the Chinaman.  But he could kill more than one of them before they could drop him.  These things were clear.  And the men hesitated.

“Afraid?” he laughed, taunting, jeering them, all discretion swept away from him.  “Why don’t you send some more men?  There might be a little whisky left—­if you hurry!”

He saw Ben and Mundy stir uneasily, saw them glance at each other, at the barrel with its shattered staves and gushing liquor, at the men whom they were self-elected to lead, and back to him.  He saw the Lark and the man Peters standing close together, talking earnestly, seeming to argue with growing heat.  And as the wave of hot blood left him and he grew cool and his saner judgment came back to him he called out to them sternly, but not threateningly, not mockingly: 

“Ben!  Mundy! you, Peters! and you, Lark! what’s the use?  Hasn’t this thing gone far enough?  You can kill me, but what good will it do?  Your whisky is spilled, and you can’t get it back.  You know the wages I offered you fellows yesterday.  You can go back to them, and nothing said.  I have five hundred more men coming from Denver.  They can take your jobs if you like.  You can go to Swinnerton, but when he knows that I have fired you he won’t take you on.  You know that he is just taking men to keep us from getting them.  You’d be fools to give up your jobs now.  What’s the word, boys?  Will you go back to work, Ben?  And you, Peters?  And you, Mundy and the Lark?  Shall I tell the cook to get coffee ready?  Talk up lively.  What is it?”

A rumbling chorus of murmurs rose up to greet him.  The men were sullen, and they snarled openly at him.  But he could see that already the thing had gone further than the more law-abiding spirits had thought to see it go.  A sudden soberness had fallen upon many of them, and with it a cooler sanity.  They broke into quick talk everywhere up and down the line.  He could see that no longer at least were they united against him.  He could see that the argument between Peters and the Lark was strong, heated.  And he hoped and prayed that good might come of it and of the brief hesitation.

Suddenly the Lark broke away from his comrades and ran forward.  Conniston, ever watchful, ever suspicious, covered him with his rifle.  But the Lark was grinning, and as he came closer he lifted his two hands.