But as Boone talked, she knew that his voice and words and the heart which was meeting, full-front, an issue he had been in danger of deserting, were making magic, and along her own scalp went the creep that is the ultimate test of drama. Inconsequentially she fretted because she could not see his eyes. His auditors, though, could see the eyes and respond to their hypnotic fires--respond though the text he taught was hard to stomach. He was winning them against their prejudices, and so skilfully had he carried them step by step that they were saved from anything like full realization of self-reversal, which means loss of self-esteem. If for the hireling shot from the laurel they had no other response than retaliation in kind, they were only rising to the bait of a lawless and unimaginative enemy. It was better, he asserted, that the efforts to murder him succeed than that they should draw the life essence out of every principle in which his adherents had supported him. Anne said to herself that Boone had carried the night, but Boone knew otherwise. A handful of men keyed for violence now accorded him calm attentiveness. They could even laugh, on occasion, but he was thinking of the closed door of McCalloway's room. He had need to grapple them to his leadership more strongly yet, for when he opened that door they would no longer laugh. Now he drew a deep breath. "These things that I am saying to you, I say not only with a full knowledge of all that you men have told me but with a knowledge of a harder thing to bear." He paused, and then he told them bluntly: "'Little' Jim Bartleton lies dead behind that door. He was killed tonight when he rode my horse on an errand for me, and was taken for me." After an interval of hushed amazement, the commotion broke afresh, and Boone again raised his hands and awaited its subsiding. "When a man asks his friends to hold their hands, though their hearts are justly hot, he has need to prove his own steadfastness. Here is my promise. Tomorrow Joe Gregory as deputy sheriff, and myself are going to Tom Carr's house. We are going alone in the full light of day and without any force of armed men to bolster up our demands. If any enemy seeks our injury he must do that too in the full light of day. In the name of the law and not of the mob, we will demand that Saul be turned over to us. We will accept no lies and no evasions. We will take Saul to Frankfort and present him to the court that refused to send for him. If they fail, then, it will be time for _you_ to act. Meanwhile you must wait. I have never before asked any test of your trust in me. Now those that believe in me must stand with me, and--" his last words were like the crack of a cattle whip--"and those that don't must fight me."