"What! do they resent it?" he exclaimed, lifting himself on tiptoe to watch the young man, who seemed suddenly pressed upon and swallowed up by rapidly assembling numbers. Distant shouts arose, the Sheep Gate choked suddenly with a mass, Kedron's banks, the tombs of Tophet and the rubbish heaps there yielded up clambering, running people. The hurry was directed along the brook outside the wall; stragglers closed up and the whole, numbering hundreds, flung itself toward the north. The man in scarlet, moved by amazement and a half-confessed interest in the man he had seen disappear, ran down the Mount and after the crowd. But a glance ahead now showed him that the Essene had not called forth this demonstration. The gate next beyond the heavy shape of Hanaleel was discharging a struggling mass that instantly expanded in the open into a great party-colored ring, dozens deep. The flying body the man in scarlet believed to encompass the young Essene swept up to the circle and melted into it. Meanwhile, around him came running eagerly the travelers, the marketers, shepherds, soldiers and slaves, and behind, the loiterers, who had watched him defeat the Greek. Focalizing at the Bridge of the Red Heifer which spanned Kedron at a leap, the mob caught and precipitated him into its heart. Rushed toward the road on the opposite side, he seized a corner of the parapet, and, holding fast, let the mass stream by him. When the rush trailed out, thinned and ceased altogether, he leisurely drew near the huge compact circle and stood on its outskirts. But he could hear and see nothing but the crowd about him. "What is it?" he asked, touching a man in front of him. The man shook his head and stood fruitlessly on tiptoe. Presently unseen authority in the hollow ring pressed the crowd back. In the ferment and resistance, he caught, through a zigzag path of daylight between many kerchiefed heads, a glimpse of a segment of the center. A young man stood there. About his forehead was bound the phylactery of a Pharisee. At his feet was a tumbled heap of white outer garments. Then the breach closed up. "A sacrifice?" the man in scarlet asked himself. But such a deduction would not answer for the behavior of the crowd. Its temper was ferocious. They howled, they spat, they shook arms and clenched hands above their heads and forward over their neighbors' shoulders; they cursed in Greek and Aramic; they twisted their faces into furious grimaces; they pressed forward and were driven back and the foremost rank which knew wherefore it raged was not more violent than the rearmost which was perfectly in the dark. It was typically the voice of the Beast in man. Some circumstance, unknown to the greater body, had waived restraint. Therefore the wolves of Perea could have come down from the bone-whited wadies of the wilderness and said to them with truth: "We be of one blood, ye and we!"