Meantime, on their way, the officers had heard a bugle blown; conjectures differed whether it was a signal from the Parker house or a summons for the laborers on the railroad to go to work. The evidence on this point was not positive, but the besieged soon sounded their horn from the upper story. Parker is quoted as saying that Kline threatened to burn the house, and he defied him to do it; that Mrs. Parker sounded a horn which brought their allies; and the deputies fired at her as she sounded it, without causing her to desist; that Pinckney counselled surrender, but Parker was for fight. Parker’s own accounts show no lack of self-assertion nor absence of self-confidence. That may or may not enhance their credibility. Some early summons called a mixed mob together, for while the brief events already described were occurring, Castner Hanway, who lived a full mile away, rode up on a bald-faced sorrel horse; Elijah Lewis came on foot in his shirt sleeves and a straw hat; Zeke Thompson, the Indian negro, arrived with a scythe in one hand and a revolver in the other; Noah Buley rode in on a handsome gray horse and carrying a gun; Harvey Scott was there, weaponless; and a half score of others armed with guns, scythes and clubs, were assembled--far more than the upstairs of that little cabin could have held, even without the women. Other white men came trooping along, who in Parker’s imagination were Gap gangsters enrolled by Kline as “special constables”; but there is no satisfactory proof that these were anybody but residents of the vicinage attracted to the place by the commotion. The excitement and confusion that subsequently ensued, the quick succession of tragic events, the prompt retreat of the officers and the almost immediate flight from the vicinity of their guiltiest assailants, and the fact that none of them remained or ever returned to tell the whole story, combine to make it difficult even now to aver with certainty what next actually happened. It is, however, reasonably sure that Hanway and Lewis were called upon to interfere and aid in executing the warrants and they declined to do so; but they neither advised nor inspired any violence; nor does it appear that they arrived on the scene by any pre-arrangement or otherwise than from hearing that an attempt was being made by some one to take negroes from the Parker house.