By a miracle, as it seemed, he had kept them about three yards from the entrance in a semicircle, and here they thronged now. From the first they had surrounded the house, and the possibility of an entrance being forced in the rear flashed upon Caleb. But he counted a little on the curiosity that kept them hanging on his movements, watching the leaders. He saw at a glance that there was no real organization, that a motley crowd had fallen in with the one popular idea of lynching the negro offender, and that a breath of real fear would dissolve them like the mists which were rolling along the river bottoms. “Where’s that nigger?” came the cry again, and then: “It’s time you remembered Jean Bartlett!” One of the leaders, a big man whom Caleb failed to recognize, was still mounted. He rose in his stirrups. “Hell!” he said, “he’s got the child; if he hadn’t, I’d burn him out.” “Gentlemen,” said Caleb coolly, raising his hand to command attention, “I will give the child to your leader’s care if you wish to fire my house. I do not want to be protected by the boy, nor by any false impression that I am expiating an offense against Jean Bartlett.” There was a moment of silence again, then a solitary cheer amid a storm of hisses. A tumult of shoutings and blasphemies drowned all coherent speech. Men struggled forward and stopped speechless, staring at the unmoved figure in the door, and the grim muzzle of his six-shooter. It was full day now, and murder and riot by daylight are tremendous things; they make the soul of the coward quake. There were men here and there in the crowd who shivered, and some never forgot it until their dying day. “Give us the nigger!” Caleb made no reply; his finger was on the trigger. There was a wild shout and, as they broke and rushed, Caleb fired. One man went down, another fell back, the mob closed in, pandemonium reigned. Then there was a warning cry from the rear, the clear note of a bugle, the thunder of more horses’ hoofs, the flash of bayonets, and a file of troopers charged down the long lane; there was a volley, a flash of fire and smoke. Men mounted and rode for life, and others fell beneath the clubbed bayonets into the trampled dust. In the doorway Caleb Trench stood, white and disheveled, with blood on his forehead, but still unharmed. XXI COLONEL ROYALL was reading an extra edition of the morning paper; it contained a full account of the attempted lynching, and the timely arrival of the militia. The colonel was smoking a big cigar and the lines of his face were more placid than they had been for a week, but his brow clouded a little as he looked down the broad driveway and saw Jacob Eaton approaching. Jacob, of late, had been somewhat in the nature of a stormy petrel. Nor did the colonel feel unlimited confidence in the younger man’s judgment; he was beginning to feel uneasy about certain large transactions which he had trusted to Jacob’s management.