“Ben!” Miss Jessie said suddenly. “I want your head bandaged over like Stacey’s, and you are to lie down in Stacey’s bed. Stacey will have to go down to one of the houses in Medusa Street; he can walk well enough.” She spoke to Stacey. “You help him. Quickly, now!”

Tittle said, “Miss Jessie, I’ll not have you and Mr. Blaisedell getting in any mess trying to—”

“Hurry!” she snapped. He turned and hobbled painfully back down the hall, Stacey, with his bandaged head, following him. Blaisedell was watching Miss Jessie. The other miners stirred uneasily.

“That was an Orangeman, that sergeant,” O’Brien said from the stairs. “I can smell an Orangeman.”

“Are you going to try to stop them from coming in here, Miss Jessie?” Bardaman asked. But he was looking at Blaisedell.

Jones laughed shrilly. “You surely scared that bunch off, Marshal!”

Blaisedell shook his head a little, and frowned more deeply. Miss Jessie was looking from face to face with her eyes blazing and the little muscles tugging at the corners of her mouth.

A bearded miner ran heavy-footed in through the dining room from the rear of the General Peach. “Miss Jessie! They have caught Doc and old Heck and Frenchy and Tim Daley and some others down at Tim’s house. The deputy’s got them there in the jail now. Boys, they are scouring the whole town! They have got wagons coming in and all the strikers are going to be transported out!”

There was an immediate uproar. It was a time before the bearded miner could make himself heard again “and the general himself’s here, Miss Jessie! They are going to shoot us down if we don’t—”

He stopped abruptly and all the others were silent as Miss Jessie raised a hand. “They will not bother you here,” she said calmly. She looked up at O’Brien, on the stairs. “Will you go up to a front window where you can see them coming? Let us know when you do. The rest of you are to go back to the hospital room.” She stood looking from face to face again until they all started down the hall, shuffling their feet but otherwise silent. Then with a glance at Blaisedell she went into her room, and he followed her.

III

There was a disturbance outside the General Peach, a mutter of voices, a crack of boots on the wooden steps and on the porch. A file of townsmen entered, carrying rifles and shotguns, with six-shooters holstered at their sides or thrust into their belts; their faces were set, their eyes excited — Pike and Paul Skinner, Peter Bacon, Sam Brown, Tim French, Owen Parsons, Hasty, Mosbie, Wheeler, Kennon, Egan, Rolfe, Buchanan, Slator. “Marshal!” Pike Skinner called, and immediately the miners reappeared, crowding silently back down the hallway. The door of Miss Jessie’s room opened and Blaisedell came out. Miss Jessie stood in the doorway behind him.

“Marshal,” the townsmen said, in a scattered greeting, and one or two removed their hats and said, “Miss Jessie.”

“Marshal,” Pike Skinner said. “It has come time for vigilantes, looks like.” His gargoyle’s face was earnest. “Marshal, we don’t know what to do but we heard you did and there is a bunch of us here that will back any play you want to make. And more coming. We’ll not see this thing happen in Warlock.”

“Fight if it comes to that,” Mosbie said.

“Ought to be a few of you jacks to make a fight of it, too,” Hasty said, nodding toward the miners crowded together in the hallway.

“As well as you people!” one of them cried.

“Well, we didn’t all come to make a fight,” Peter Bacon said. A chew of tobacco worked in his brown, wrinkled cheek. “But we will make a decent enough stand, and I guess fight if we have to do it.”

Blaisedell leaned on the door jamb. His intense blue eyes traversed the faces before him. He smiled a little.

Paul Skinner said, “Marshal, it is time folks in this town stood up to things some. You tell us how we’re to do, and we’ll do it.”

“They won’t fire when there’s a town full of us against them,” Kennon said. “It is a pitiful sight; they are stacking miners in my stable there like cordwood.”

Blaisedell still said nothing; Pike Skinner looked at Miss Jessie anxiously.

“We are with you, Marshal,” Sam Brown said, cracking the butt of his rifle down on the floor. “You lead us on and we’ll chase blue breeches right on back to Bright’s. We are with you sink or swim.”

“Or stuck in the mud,” Bacon said, sadly. “Marshal, the sheriff is down here and got Johnny Gannon hobbled. That couldn’t do anything anyway. But we are with you, U.S. Cavalry or not.”

“It is his place,” Miss Jessie said. Their faces all turned toward her. Blaisedell straightened.

Then they were all silent, watching Blaisedell.

All at once he grinned broadly. “Well, boys,” he said. “Maybe we can pull some weight here between us.”

There was a concerted sigh. “Why, now then!” Mosbie said.

“You want us in here or outside, Marshal?” Oscar Thompson asked.

“I’ll make my place on the porch there, if that’s all right with you boys. I don’t mean to take it on for myself, but it looks like if I can’t handle it without going to shooting maybe we all couldn’t.” His face turned grave again. “For if it came to shooting there’d be dead men and too many cavalry for us, and nothing gained in the end.”

“Except by God we fit the sons of bitches!” one of the miners cried in a high, cracked voice.

“You mean to bluff it, Marshal?” Wheeler said worriedly.

Pike Skinner said, “Don’t leave us out of it, Marshal!”

“Marshal,” Sam Brown said. He sounded embarrassed. “Well, Marshal, no offense, but — well, that time those jacks tramped you at the jail. I mean, a bluff’s a bluff, but—”

Blaisedell looked at him coldly. “You asked me how I wanted to do it,” he said. “I am telling you how. I am not going to fire on the U.S. Cavalry, or you either. Do you hear?” He gazed from face to face. “I said I will stand by on the porch here. I’ll ask the rest of you to do some climbing and get up on the roof of the barn, and the other places on down the street.” He grinned again, in a swift flash of teeth. “We will have the U.S. Cavalry surrounded and we’ll see if they don’t bluff.”

Tim French laughed out loud. “Why, if we could call old Espirato up from his grave we could hightail Peach out of here at a run!” The others laughed.

“No shooting!” Blaisedell said sharply. “Now maybe you had better move, boys.”

“Squads left!” Paul Skinner said, and limped toward the door. The others started after him.

“General!” someone called back. “Send up chuck now and then, and we will hold out for a month.” They tramped out, laughing and talking excitedly.

“Let them have their fun,” a miner said bitterly. “They don’t want any help from us.”

“Looks like we are having it from them, though,” Bardaman said. “Marshal, you sure you know what you are doing?”

“No,” Blaisedell said, in a strange voice. “No man ever is.”

“You had better get your six-shooters, Clay,” Miss Jessie said. She said it as though she were the general, after all, and turned back inside her room as Blaisedell started for the stairs. Three miners who stood there glanced at him covertly, each in turn, as he mounted the steps past them.

“I hope MacDonald’s black soul rots in hell,” a miner in the hallway said. “And General Peach with him.”

“Amen.”

“This might be a fine show here today,” the bitter one said. “But we will get shipped further and harder for it.”

“Shut up,” Bardaman said. “It’s a show worth it, isn’t it?”

They were silent again as Blaisedell came back down the stairs. He had taken off his coat, and was bareheaded. The sleeves of his fine linen shirt were gartered on his upper arms, pulling the cuffs free of his wrists. He wore two shell belts, two holstered Colts hung low on his thighs. Their gold handles gleamed in the light as he threw the front door open.