lives and several serious wounds to answer for, and as the sun went westering this long summer's day they had two hours left in which to decide--come out and surrender or be burned out where they lay. Half the village had gone to swell the ranks of the rioters; another half--slatternly women and unkempt children--swarmed in the single street and gazed upward at the heights. Every ledge about the threatened buildings was black with men, men furious with hate and mad with liquor, men needing only determined and resolute leaders to go in and finish their fearful work. But here was their lack. The men they had counted on, one man in particular on whose account many of their number had braved the guard and threatened the owners--one man, Long Nolan himself, refused point blank to have aught to do with them or their plans. Another man, he whose son lay dying in the village, shot down by the guards, was there, sad-eyed yet stern-faced, to stay and dissuade them. The one train up from the East that day--the only one that could come, for now the road was blown out in a dozen places down the gorge--had brought with it Nolan and Shiner, with two or three friends at their back, and Nolan and Shiner, in spite of their wrongs, were pleading hard for peace, pleading so hard, so earnestly, that by 5 P.M. many a man, American born, had seen the force of their reasoning and had stepped back from the front. But among the killed was a poor lad from the mountains of Bohemia. Among the vengeful throng were swarms of foreigners who could understand little or nothing of what Nolan and his friends were saying, and who speedily would have scorned it could they have understood, for at five o'clock another speaker took the stand, a man of the people he called himself, a foreigner long on our shores, yet fluent in the language of the Slavs, and in ten minutes the torrent was turned. With terror in his eyes, a man who had long worked with Nolan, a foreigner, too, came running to the silent, anxious little group of Anglo-Saxons. "Nolan--Nolan," he cried. "He says you was traitor! He says you was gone to Argenta and told all their secrets, and you was bought off--bribed--and you bring strangers to help you! He says you and they are just spies, an' now they come for _you_!" One glance from where the little group were crouching, sheltered from possible shots from the buildings, yet between them and the throng, told Nolan and Shiner the alarm was real, the words were true. Like so many maddened beasts, a gang of uncouth, unkempt, blood-thirsty beings were now crowding up the narrow roadway from the bench below. "My God, Mr. Geordie!" cried Nolan, in sudden agony of spirit, "I never once dreamed of this!"