The man looked her over, and raising himself on his tip toes, shook his hat wildly at the mob. "Say," he shouted at the top of his might, "here's a girl he was with at six o'clock." It seemed as if only the men near at hand either heard or paid attention. On the farther side, away from Beth, the shouts for mob law were increasing. She turned to Bostwick hotly. "Can't you do anything? Tell them he was there with us--down at Mrs. Dick's at six o'clock!" "He wasn't!" said Searle. "He left there at five forty-five." The man who had shouted listened to them both. "Five forty-five?" he repeated. "That makes a difference!" The drummer had caught the shout from out at the edge. "Who's that?" he called. "Who's got that alibi?" "All wrong!--No good!" yelled the man who stood by Beth. The girl had failed to realize how her statement would sound--in such a place as Goldite. Van had turned sick when it reached him. He was emphatically denying the story. The gist of it went through the mass of maddened beings, only to be so soon impugned by the man who had started it from Beth. The fury, at what was deemed an attempted deception, burst out with accumulated force. The sheriff had drawn a revolver and was shouting to the mob to keep away. "This man has got to go to jail!" he yelled. "You've got to act accordin' to the law!" He ordered his deputies to clear the crowd and make ready for retreat. Three of them endeavored to obey. Their efforts served to aggravate the mob. Confusion and chaos of judgment seemed rising like a tide. In the very air was a feeling that suddenly something would go, something too far strained to hold, and some terrible deed occur before these people could ask themselves how it had been accomplished. The fellow with the rope was being boosted forward by half a dozen intoxicated fools. Had the rope been a burning fuse it could scarcely have ignited more dangerous material than did its strands of manilla, in those who could lay their hands upon it. The drummer was shouting himself raw in the throat--in vain. Van was courting disaster by the very defiance of his attitude. It seemed as if nothing could save him, when two separate things occurred. The doctor who had been with Van at Queenie's death arrived in the press, got wind of the crisis, and vehemently protested the truth. Simultaneously, the lumberman, Trimmer, drunk, and enjoying what he deemed a joke, hoarsely confided to some sober men the fact that Cayuse had done the murder. Even then, when two centers of opposition to the madness of the mob had been created, the menace could not at once be halted.