The despatchers yelled at him from above. The cry echoed back short from a hundred Polack throats, and they sent a splitter; it was plain they were mad for blood. Even that cry didn't greatly faze the fellow, but in the clatter of it all he caught another cry--a cry sent straight to McTerza's ear, and he turned at the voice and the word like a man stung. Rucker, leaping ahead and brandishing the truck-stake at the hated stutterer, yelled, "The scab!" The Reading engineer halted like a baited bear. Rucker's cry was enough--in that time and at that place it was enough. McTerza froze to the platform. There was more--and we knew it, all of us--more between those two men than scab and brotherhood, strike and riot, flood or fire: there was a woman. We knew it so well there was hardly a flutter anywhere, I take it, when men saw McTerza stooping, grasp Sinkers, shove him towards the depot, slip like a snake out of his pea-jacket, and turn to front the whole blooming mob. There wasn't any fluttering, I take it--and not very much breathing; only the scab, never a tremendous big man, swelled bigger in the eyes then straining his way than any man in McCloud has ever swelled before or since. Mobs are queer. A minute before it was the depot, now it was the scab--kill him. The scab stood. Rucker stumbled across a rail in his fury, and went sprawling, but the scab stood. The line wavered like tumbleweeds. They didn't understand a man fronting forty. Then Ben Nicholson--I recognized his whiskers--began blazing at him with a pistol. Yet the scab stood and halted the Polack line. They hesitated, they stopped to yell; but the scab stood. "Stone him!" shouted Ben Nicholson. McTerza backed warily across the platform. The Polacks wavered; the instinct of danger unsettled them. Mobs are queer. A single man will head them quicker than a hundred guns. There is nothing so dangerous as one man. [Illustration: Old Man Nicholson.] McTerza saw the inevitable, the steady circling that must get him at last, and as the missiles flew at him from a score of miners he crouched with the rage of a cornered rat, one eye always on Rucker. "Come in, you coyote!" yelled McTerza tauntingly. "Come in!" he cried, catching up a coupling pin that struck him and hurling it wickedly at his nearest assailant. Rucker, swinging his club, ran straight at his enemy. "Kill the scab!" he cried and a dozen bristling savages, taking his lead, closed on the Reading man like a fan. From the windows above, the railroad men popped with their pistols; they might as well have thrown fire-crackers. McTerza, with a cattish spring, leaped through a rain of brickbats for Rucker.