In less than a minute they had laid open a gap: and with that the mystery was clear. Leaping through, they found themselves in the midst of a cheerful and entirely passive crowd, lining the road in front of Steens' wall, the gate of which had been closed with large baulks of timber from the mines. The crowd numbered perhaps three hundred, and included men, women and children. Groups of them squatted by the roadside or sat in the hedges, quietly sharing out their breakfasts; and one and all, as the Sheriff rode in through the gap on his grey horse, greeted him with laughter, as a set of children might laugh over an innocent practical joke. Sir James lost his temper, and roughly ordered his soldiers to clear the road. There was no difficulty about this. The men withdrew most obligingly, collecting their breakfast cans, helping their wives and children over the hedge, laughing all the while. They scattered over the fields in front of Steens and sat down again in groups to watch. To disperse them farther with his handful of soldiers would be waste of time, and the Sheriff turned his attention to the house, which faced him grim and silent. He rode up to the gate, and rattling upon it with his riding-whip, demanded admittance. There was no answer. He looked along the wall to right and left, and for the first time began to understand that the place was strong and his force perhaps inadequate. He could not retreat in the face of ridicule, and so--to gain time--ordered the barricade to be burnt. The soldiers set to work, and soon had two fine bonfires blazing, and the Sheriff withdrew up the road with his sergeant to consult Sir John, the pair of them a trifle shamefacedly. Sir James tried to ease his own smart by an innuendo or two on the lawlessness of the West and the responsibility of its Justices of the Peace. Sir John took his sneers very quietly. "My dear Tillie," said he, "I am with you to support the law, and you will remember that I advised your bringing thrice your strength. But I tell you that the law is doing this man a wrong, that all these people are convinced of it, and are innocently scandalised to see me here; and that I at this moment am undoing myself in their esteem, destroying a good feeling of over thirty years' growth, and all for a cause I detest. Get that into your head; and then, if you will, we'll ride round and examine the defences."