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of rifles, and, without answering the question, called to him.

“Hello!” exclaimed Scott halting. He started as he saw Bucks. “Were you with him? And I’ve been scouring the town for you! Stanley will have a word to say to you, youngster. They 285 thought the gamblers had you, Bill,” he added, turning to the lineman.

Dancing, a sight from the pounding he had taken, his clothing in tatters, and with the blood-stains now streaked by the water dripping from his hair, drew himself up. “I hope you didn’t think so, Bob? Did they reckon a handful of blacklegs would get me?”

Scott grinned inscrutably. “They’ve got the best part of your shirt, Bill. How did you get off?”

“Swam for it,” muttered Dancing, shaking himself. “Where’s Stanley?”

“Out behind the flat cars. He is arming the vigilantes. We’ve fenced off the yards with loaded freight-cars. They’ve fired the roundhouse on us, but the rifles and ammunition that came to-night are upstairs here. Take some of these guns, Bill, and hand them around in front. Bucks can follow you with a box of ammunition.”

Scott spoke hurriedly and ran out of the door facing Front Street Square. A string of flat cars had been run along the house-track in front of 286 the station, and behind these the hard-pressed vigilantes, reinforced now by the railroad men, were taking up a new line of defence. Driven through the town in a running battle, they were in straits when they reached Stanley’s barricade.

Following a resolve already well defined, the railroad chief conferred with the vigilante leaders for a brief moment. He called them to his office and denounced the folly of half-way measures.

“You see,” said Stanley, pointing to two dead men whom the discomfited business men had brought off with them, “what temporizing has done. There is only one way to treat with these people.” He was interrupted by firing from across the square. “In an hour they will have every store in Front Street looted.”

The deliberation for a few moments was a stormy one, but Stanley held his ground. “Desperate diseases, gentlemen,” he said, addressing Atkinson and his companions, “require desperate remedies, and you must sometime come to what I propose.”

287

“What you propose,” returned Atkinson gloomily, “will ruin us.”

Stanley answered with composure: “You are ruined now. What you should consider is whether, if you don’t cut this cancer of gambling, outlawry, and murder out while you have a chance, it won’t remain to plague you as long as you do business in Medicine Bend, and remain to ruin you periodically. This is always going to be a town and a big one. As long as this railroad is operated, this ground where we stand is and must be the chief operating point for the whole mountain division. You and I may be wiped out of existence and the railroad will go on as before. But it is for you to accept or reject what I propose as the riddance of this curse to your community.

“The railroad has been drawn into this fight by assault upon its men. It can meet violence with violence and protect itself, or it can temporarily abandon a town where protection is not afforded its lives and property. In an emergency, trains could be run through Medicine Bend 288 without stopping. The right of way could be manned with soldiers. But the railroad can’t supply men enough to preserve in your town the law and order which you yourselves ought to preserve. And if we were compelled to build division facilities, temporarily, elsewhere, while they would ultimately come back here, it might be years before they did so. What else but your ruin would this mean?”

He had hardly ceased speaking when the conference was broken in upon. Bob Scott ushered in two men sent under a flag of truce from the rioters. The offer they brought was that Rebstock and Seagrue should be surrendered, provided Stanley would give his personal pledge that the two should not be shot but sent out of town until peace was restored, and that they should be accorded a fair trial when brought back.

Stanley listened carefully to all that was said:

“Who sent you?” he demanded.

“The committee up street,” returned the envoys evasively.

“You mean Levake sent you,” retorted Stanley. 289 He sat at his desk and eyed the two ruffians, as they faced him somewhat nervously. They at length admitted that they had come from Levake, and gave Stanley his chance for an answer.

“Tell Levake for me there will be no peace for him or his until he comes down here with his hands behind his back. When I want Rebstock and Seagrue I will let him know. I want him first,” said Stanley, dismissing the messengers without more ado.

290 CHAPTER XXIII

He had resolved that Levake was to be punished, but it was not a unanimous voice that backed the railroad leader in his determination. Weak-kneed men in the conference wanted to compromise and end the fight where it stood. Even Atkinson was disposed to make terms, as the party returned to the barricade.

“No,” repeated Stanley. “Levake is the head and front of this whole disorder. As long as he can shoot down unarmed men in the streets of Medicine Bend there will be no law and order here. While men see him walking these streets unpunished they will take their cue from him and rob and shoot whom they please––Levake and his ilk must go. A railroad, on the start, brings a lawless element with it––this is true. But it also brings law and order and that element has come to Medicine Bend to stay. If the machinery of the law is too weak to support it, so much worse 291 for the machinery. I don’t want to see blood shed or property destroyed, but the responsibility for this rests with the outlaws that are terrorizing this town. And I will spend every ounce of ammunition I have and fight them to the last man, rather than compromise with a bunch of cutthroats.

“If any man here feels differently about this, he may step out of the barricade now,” continued Stanley, addressing those of the townsmen that listened. “There will be no hard feeling. But this is the time to do it. Worse is ahead of us before we can clean the town up as it will have to be cleaned sometime. The longer you leave the job undone, the harder it will be when you tackle it.”

A movement across the square interrupted his words, and a messenger waving a white handkerchief came over to the barricade to ask for a surgeon for a wounded man. There were some who opposed sending any relief to men that had forfeited all claim to humane consideration. Doctor Arnold, however, was summoned, and Stanley 292 finally determined that the matter should be left to the surgeon himself––he could go if he wished. Arnold did not hesitate in his decision. “It is my duty to go,” he decided briefly.

“I don’t quite see that,” muttered Atkinson.

The white-haired surgeon turned to the leader of the vigilantes. “It is not a matter of personal inclination, Atkinson. When I took my degree for the practice of medicine, I took an oath to respond to every call of suffering and I have no right to refuse this one.”

Leaving his own injured with his assistant, the surgeon told the messenger to proceed and the two walked across the square and up Front Street to the Three Horses. Arriving there, Arnold was asked to dress the wound of a man that had been shot through the breast in the fight along Fort Street. While he was working over his patient, who lay on a table surrounded by a motley crowd of onlookers, Levake walked in. He nodded to the surgeon and drawing a pocket knife, while Arnold was cleansing the wound, sat down beside him to whittle a stick.

293

“I hear your man, Stanley, wants me,” began Levake after an interval.

“I guess you hear right,” returned Arnold dryly.

“Tell him for me to come get me, will you?” suggested Levake.

“If he ever comes after you, Levake, he will get you,” returned Arnold, looking the outlaw straight in the eye. “There isn’t any doubt about that,” he added, resuming his task.

Levake whittled but made no reply. He watched the surgeon’s work closely, and when Arnold had finished and given directions for the wounded man’s care he walked out of the place with him.

“Tell Stanley what I said, will you?” repeated Levake, as the railroad surgeon left the door and started down street.

Arnold made no answer and Levake, taunting him to send all the men the railroad had after him, followed Arnold toward the square.

The surgeon understood that it was Levake’s purpose to engage him in a dispute and kill him if he could. Arnold, moreover, was hot-tempered and made no concealment of his feelings toward 294 any man. For this reason, despite his realization of danger, he was an easy prey.

To the final taunt of the outlaw the surgeon made rather a sharp answer and quickened his pace, to walk away from his unpleasant companion. But Levake would not be shaken off, and as the two were passing a deserted restaurant he ordered the surgeon to halt. Arnold turned without shrinking. Levake had already drawn his pistol and his victim concluded he was to be killed then and there, but he resolved to tell the outlaw what he thought of him.

“I understand your game perfectly, Levake,” he said after he had raked him terrifically. “Now, if you are going to shoot, do it. You haven’t long to live yourself––make sure of that.”

“No man can threaten me and live,” retorted Levake harshly.

“I came up here, an unarmed man, on an errand of mercy.”

“I didn’t send for you.”

“You would kill me just as quick if you had, Levake. What are you hesitating about? If you are going to shoot, shoot.”

295

Throwing back his right arm, and fingering the trigger of his revolver as a panther lashes his tail before springing, Levake stepped back and to one side. As he did so, with the fearless surgeon still facing him, a man stepped from behind the screen door of the deserted restaurant. It was Bob Scott.

The old and deadly feud between the Indian and the outlaw brought them now, for the first time in months, face to face. In spite of his iron nerve Levake started. Scott, slightly stooped and wearing the familiar slouch hat and shabby coat in which he was always seen, regarded his enemy with a smile.

So sudden was his appearance that Levake could not for an instant control himself. If there was a man in the whole mountain country that Levake could be said to be afraid of, it was the mild-mannered, mild-spoken Indian scout. Where Scott had come from, how he had got through the pickets posted by Levake himself––these questions, for which he could find no answer, disquieted the murderer.

296

Arnold, reprieved from death as by a miracle, stood like a statue. Levake, with his hand on his pistol, had halted, petrified, at the sight of Scott.

The latter, eying the murderer with an expression that might have been mistaken for friendly, had not Levake known there could be no friendship among decent men for him, broke the silence: “Levake, I have a warrant for you.”

The words seemed to shake the spell from the outlaw’s nerves. He answered with his usual coolness: “You’ve waited a good while to serve it.”

“I’ve been a little busy for a few days, Levake,” returned Scott, with the same even tone. “I kind of lost track of you.” But his words again disconcerted Levake. The few men who now watched the scene and knew what was coming stood breathless.

Levake,

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