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There was a turbulent motion in the crowd, and a cry arose, "Run 'em out! Ride 'em on a rail! Tar and feathers! Run 'em out o' town!" "I wouldn't dilly-dally long if I were you," said Harkless, and his advice seemed good to the shell-men. A roll of bills, which he counted and turned over to the elder Bowlder, was sullenly placed in his hand.
Then he plunged, red-faced and excited, into the circle about the shell manipulators, and offered, to lay a wager. "Hol' on there, Hen Fentriss," thickly objected a flushed young man beside him, "iss my turn." "I'm first. Hartley," returned the other. "You can hold yer bosses a minute, I reckon." "Plenty fer each and all, chents," interrupted one of the shell-men.
They wanted illegal and desperate advice, and quieted down to hear it. He spoke in his professionally calm voice. "Gentlemen, it seems to me that Mr. Smith and Mr. What good are we doing here? What we want to know is what's happened to Mr. Harkless. It looks just now like the shell-men might have done it. Let's find out what they done. Scatter and hunt for him.
No matter what the prosecutor had to say, at least the Skillett saloon and homestead were gone, and Bob Skillett and one other would be sick enough to be good for a while. "Listen," cried Warren Smith, and, rising in his stirrups again, read the missive in his hand, a Western Union telegraph form. "Warren Smith, Plattville," was the direction. "Found both shell-men.
"They were the two shell-men who cheated Hartley Bowlder, and they weren't vindictive; they even seemed to be trying to help me a little, though perhaps they were only stealing my clothes, and maybe they thought for them to do anything unpleasant would be superfluous; I could see that they thought I was done for, and that they had been hiding in the car when I was put there.
Second, that the orthodox churches may not advance into workshops and schoolhouses, but may remain forever the home of a superstition. One would think that the promise of making a person exempt from the results of his own misdeeds, would turn the man of brains from these religious shell-men in disgust.
"Excuse me," he said sadly to those behind him, but his dry voice penetrated everywhere, "I got up to hear Jim say 'We' again." Mr. Bardlock joined in the laugh against himself, and proceeded with his wife to some seats, forty or fifty feet distant. When he had settled himself comfortably, he shouted over cheerfully to the unhappy editor: "Them shell-men got it in fer you, Mr. Harkless."
There came from the crowd the sound of a sad, high-keyed voice, drawling: "That's a nice vest Jim's got on, but it ain't hardly the feathers fitten for an ostrich, is it?" The editor's gravity gave way; he broke into a ringing laugh and turned again to the shell-men. "Give up the boy's money. Hurry." "Step down here and git it," said the one who had spoken.
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