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Long before that hour the general headquarters of the Vigilantes swarmed with members. As a neighboring clock struck noon, the Vigilantes debouched into the street, an advance guard of riders clearing that thoroughfare of crowding spectators. First came Captain James N. Olney commanding the Citizens' Guard of sixty picked men, so soldierly in appearance that their coming evoked a cheer.
She felt her father's arms around her, and she was led into the car, her knees shaking, her soul sick with the horror of it all. Half an hour later, as she sat at one of the windows, staring stonily out in the shimmering sunlight of the street, she saw some of the Vigilantes returning. She shrank back from the window, shuddering. The day seemed to endure for an age.
Vigilante!" and knew that the vigilantes were gathering, but before they could get together the murderous work had been finished. All the time there had been perfect silence throughout the hotel. The proprietor told us that he got up, but that it would have been certain death if he or anyone else had opened a door.
Practically all these were executed by the Vigilantes, with many others, and eventually the band of outlaws was entirely broken up. Much has been written and much romanced about the conduct of these desperadoes when they met their fate. Some of them were brave and some proved cowards at the last. For a time, Plummer begged abjectly, his eyes streaming with tears.
The case was postponed again and again, and did not come to trial until several months, by which time the Vigilantes had practically finished their work. The law finally saved its face by charging the jury that "if they believed the prisoners took the arms with the intention of appropriating them to their own use and permanently depriving the owner of them, then they were guilty.
"Was any one shot?" queried Andy. "Not in the daytime. Nobody killed by this Citizens' Protective League, as they call themselves. They just rounded up all the suspicious men an' herded them on to thet cattle-train an' carried them off. It was at night when the vigilantes worked masked an' secret an' sure bloody. Jest like the old vigilante days! ... An' you can gamble they ain't through yet."
How, for example, his vigilantes and endeavors on this score brought him into rubbings, not collisions, but jealousies and gratings, with the English and Dutch, the reader will see anon. Law-reform is gloriously prosperous; Husbandry the like, and Shipping Interest itself as yet.
A committee of vigilantes armed with "revolvers, knives, night-sticks, black jacks, and black snakes," supported by the local press and commercial bodies, undertook to run the unwelcome guests out of town. That this was not done gently is clearly disclosed by subsequent official evidence.
But in another minute the two were in the midst of a yelling, swaying mix-up between the aggressive mob and a thin fringe of vigilantes, who, hard-pressed, had abandoned the jail to its fate and were trying to fight their way down town. Dancing, like a war-horse made suddenly mad by smoke of battle, throwing caution and strategy to the winds, suddenly released a yell and began to lay about him.
The masked vigilantes disappeared, and presently only a quiet and curious crowd was left round the grim scaffold and its dark swinging forms. Joan's one glance showed that the vigilantes had swung Frenchy's dead body in the noose he would have escaped by treachery. They had hanged him dead. What a horrible proof of the temper of these newborn vigilantes! They had left the bandits swinging.
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