of citizens was cooling off like a blaze in a pile of shavings. It had come up with a roar, mounted to its height in a moment, and fallen to nothing more than a little wavering smoke before the excited scouts galloped up with their appalling confirmation of the county clerk's long-distance espionage. Some of them began to hedge; to debate the advisability of offering armed defense of a position which a court decision might pronounce illegal in the end.
Among the advocates of this policy stood the lumber dealer and a lawyer named Pettyjohn, the latter a lank usurer of hard repute, but a man of persuasive tongue. Burnett, Dine Fergus, and the other notable humorists of the town were not present, although Hall had seen Larrimore skulking on the edge of the crowd as if he dodged around in the hope of picking somebody's pocket or finding something that had been lost.
The weight of these men's opinion had effect; others spoke up in support of that policy of nonresistance. Some of the crowd began to drift around the corner of the building and disappear; others turned calculative eyes up the road toward Simrall, as if figuring on whether they had time to make it to cover and hide their guns before the raiders appeared. Their guns appeared to have grown heavy in their hands.
Major Cottrell heard these vacillating citizens with scorn. They were strangers in his country, men of another age. He denounced them as pusillanimous cowards, unworthy usurpers of brave men's places in a country that was too big for them in all its dimensions. He called for volunteers to stand by him and fight for the honor of the town and county.
