It put them in a very difficult moral position, and the physical pressure of McCullough's steady advance did not give them much time to settle the dilemma. Half a dozen men were elbowing their way back through the press now, the marshal had disappeared, there was no one to start things, and they kept fading back. McCullough never varied his pace, but the distance between him and the nearest man increased steadily. He stopped in the street before his house, but the mob kept moving under its own momentum for another fifty yards, and some still kept moving. A knot of perhaps a dozen stopped at the corner and muttered among themselves for a few minutes. One man started to raise a gun, and another knocked it down. They stood there a little longer, and McCullough leaned on his axe watching them, and then they moved off after the others, men dropping off here and there as they passed their own homes. The riot was over.