Here, against the nearermost bank, the foreigners were clumped in a tight, compact black huddle, all scared, but not so badly scared that they would not fight. Yonder, across the snow, through the gap where a side street debouched at a gentle slope into the hollow, the mob advanced--men and half-grown boys--to the number of perhaps four hundred, coming to get the man who had stabbed Beaver Yancy and string him up on the spot--and maybe to get a few of his friends and string them up as an added warning to all Dagos. They came on and came on until a space of not more than seventy-five yards separated the mob and the mob's prospective victims. From the advancing mass a growling of many voices rose. Rampant, unloosed mischief was in the sound. Somebody who was drunk yelled out shrill profanity and then laughed a maudlin laugh. The group against the bank kept silent. Theirs was the silence of a grim and desperate resolution. Their only shelter had been fired over their heads; they were beleaguered and ringed about with enemies; they had nowhere to run for safety, even had they been minded to run. So they would fight. They made ready with their weapons of defence--such weapons as they had. A man who appeared to hold some manner of leadership over the rest advanced a step from the front row of them. In his hand he held an old-fashioned cap-and-ball pistol at full cock. He raised his right arm and sighted along the levelled barrel at a spot midway between him and the oncoming crowd. Plainly he meant to fire when the first of his foes crossed an imaginary line. He squinted up his-eye, taking a careful aim; and he let his trigger finger slip gently inside the trigger guard--but he never fired. On top of the hill, almost above his head, a bugle blared out. A fife and a drum cut in, playing something jiggy and brisk; and over the crest and down into the flat, two by two, marched a little column of old men, following after a small silken flag which flicked and whispered in the wind, and led by a short, round-bodied commander, who held by the hand a little briskly trotting figure of a child. Tony Wolfe Tone had grown too heavy for the judge to carry him all the way. Out across the narrow space between the closing-in mob and the closed-in foreigners the marchers passed, their feet sinking ankle-deep into the crusted snow. Their leader gave a command; the music broke off and they spread out in single file, taking station, five feet apart from one another, so that between the two hostile groups a living hedge was interposed. And so they stood, with their hands down at their sides, some facing to the west, where the Italians were herded together, some facing toward the east, where the would-be lynchers, stricken with a great amazement, had come to a dead stand.