"Out behind the flat cars. He is arming the vigilantes. We've fenced off the yards with loaded freight-cars. They've fired the roundhouse on us, but the rifles and ammunition that came to-night are upstairs here. Take some of these guns, Bill, and hand them around in front. Bucks can follow you with a box of ammunition." Scott spoke hurriedly and ran out of the door facing Front Street Square. A string of flat cars had been run along the house-track in front of the station, and behind these the hard-pressed vigilantes, reinforced now by the railroad men, were taking up a new line of defence. Driven through the town in a running battle, they were in straits when they reached Stanley's barricade. Following a resolve already well defined, the railroad chief conferred with the vigilante leaders for a brief moment. He called them to his office and denounced the folly of half-way measures. "You see," said Stanley, pointing to two dead men whom the discomfited business men had brought off with them, "what temporizing has done. There is only one way to treat with these people." He was interrupted by firing from across the square. "In an hour they will have every store in Front Street looted." The deliberation for a few moments was a stormy one, but Stanley held his ground. "Desperate diseases, gentlemen," he said, addressing Atkinson and his companions, "require desperate remedies, and you must sometime come to what I propose." "What you propose," returned Atkinson gloomily, "will ruin us." Stanley answered with composure: "You are ruined now. What you should consider is whether, if you don't cut this cancer of gambling, outlawry, and murder out while you have a chance, it won't remain to plague you as long as you do business in Medicine Bend, and remain to ruin you periodically. This is always going to be a town and a big one. As long as this railroad is operated, this ground where we stand is and must be the chief operating point for the whole mountain division. You and I may be wiped out of existence and the railroad will go on as before. But it is for you to accept or reject what I propose as the riddance of this curse to your community. "The railroad has been drawn into this fight by assault upon its men. It can meet violence with violence and protect itself, or it can temporarily abandon a town where protection is not afforded its lives and property. In an emergency, trains could be run through Medicine Bend without stopping. The right of way could be manned with soldiers. But the railroad can't supply men enough to preserve in your town the law and order which you yourselves ought to preserve. And if we were compelled to build division facilities, temporarily, elsewhere, while they would ultimately come back here, it might be years before they did so. What else but your ruin would this mean?"