"Cowards!" the wife said as the ruffians approached the bed. They swept her aside, but paused an instant be-fore the glance of the sick man's eye. He lay there, desperately, deathly sick. The blood throbbed in his whirling brain, his eyes were bloodshot and blinded, his strength was gone. He could hardly speak. He partly rose and stretched out his hand, and then fell back.
"Kill me-if you want to-but let her-alone. She's-"
The children were crying. The wind whistled drearily across the room, carrying the evanescent flakes of soft snow over the heads of the pausing, listening crowd in the doorway. Quick steps were heard.
"Hold on there!" cried McPhail as he burst into the room. He seemed an angel of God to the wife and mother.
He spread his great arms in a gesture which suggested irresistible strength and resolution. "Clear out! Out with ye!"
No man had ever seen him look like that before. He awed them with the look in his eyes. His long service as sheriff gave him authority. He hustled them, cuffed them out of the door like schoolboys. Barney backed out, cursing. He knew McPhall too well to refuse to obey.
McPhail pushed Barney out, shut the door behind him, and stood on the steps, looking at the crowd.
"Well, you're a great lot! You fellers, would ye jump on a sick man? What ye think ye're all doin', anyhow?"
The crowd laughed. "Hey, Mac; give us a speech!"
"You ought to be booted, the whole lot o' yeh!" he replied.
"That houn' in there's run the bank into the ground, with every cent o' money we'd put in," said Barney. "I s'pose ye know that."
"Well, s'pose he has-what's the use o' jumpin' on "Git it out of his hide."
"I've heerd that talk before. How much you got in?"
"Two hundred dollars."
"Well, I've got two thousand." The crowd saw the point.
"I guess if anybody was goin' t' take it out of his hide, I'd be the man; but I want the feller to live and have a chance to pay it back.
Killin' 'im is a dead loss."
"That's so!" shouted somebody. "Mac ain't no fool, if he does chaw hay," said another, and the crowd laughed. They were losing that frenzy, largely imitative and involuntary, which actuates a mob.
There was something counteracting in the ex-sheriff's cool, humorous tone.
"Give us the rest of it, Mac!"
"The rest of it is clear out o' here, 'r I'll boot every mother's son of yeh!"
"Can't do it!"
"Come down an' try it!"
McIlvaine opened the door and looked out. "Mac, Mrs. Sanford wants to say something-if it's safe."
"Safe as eatin' dinner."
Mrs. Sanford came out, looking pale and almost like a child as she stood beside her defender's towering bulk. But her face was resolute.
"That money will be paid back," she said, "dollar for dollar, if you'll just give us a chance. As soon as Jim gets well enough every cent will be paid, If I live."
The crowd received this little speech in silence. One or two said, in low voices: "That's business. She'll do it, too, if anyone can."
Barney pushed his way through the crowd with contemptuous. curses. "The -- she will!" he said.
"We'll see 't you have a chance," McPhall and McIlvaine assured Mrs. Sanford.
She went in and closed the door.
"Now git!" said Andrew, coming down the steps. The crowd scattered with laughing taunts. He turned and entered the house.
The rest drifted off down the street through the soft flurries of snow, and in a few moments the street assumed its usual appearance.
The failure of the bank and the raid on the banker had passed into history.
V
In the light of the days of calm afterthought which followed, this attempt upon the peace of the Sanford home grew more monstrous and helped largely to mitigate the feeling against the banker.
Besides, he had not run away; that was a strong point in his favor.
"Don't that show," argued Vance to the post office- "don't that show he didn't intend to steal? An' don't it show he's goin' to try to make things square?"
"I guess we might as well think that as anything."
"I claim the boys has a right t' take sumpthin' out o' his hide," Bent Wilson stubbornly insisted.
"Ain't enough t' go 'round," laughed McPhail. "Besides, I can't have it. Link an' I own the biggest share in 'im, an' we can't have him hurt."
McIlvaine and Vance grinned. "That's a fact, Mac. We four fellers are the main losers. He's ours, an' we can't have him foundered 'r crippled 'r cut up in any way. Ain't that woman of his gritty?"
"Gritty ain't no name for her. She's goin' into business."
"So I hear. They say Jim was crawling around a little yesterday. I didn't see.
"I did. He looks pretty streak-id-now you bet."
"Wha'd he say for himself?"
"Oh, said give 'im time-he'd fix it all up."
"How much time?"
"Time enough. Hain't been able to look at a book since. Say, ain't it a little curious he was so sick just then-sick as a p'isened dog?"
The two men looked at each other in a manner most comically significant. The thought of poison was in the mind of each.
It was under these trying circumstances that Sanford began to crawl about, a week or ten days after his sickness. It was really the most terrible punishment for him. Before, everybody used to sing out, "Hello, Jim!"- or "Mornin', banker," or some other jovial, heartwarming salutation. Now, as he went down the street, the groups of men smoking on the sunny side of the stores ignored him, or looked at him with scornfull eyes.
Nobody said, "Hello, Jim!"-not even McPhail or Vance. They nodded merely, and went on with their smoking. The children followed him and stared at him without compassion. They had heard him called a scoundrel and a thief too often at home to feel any pity for his pale face.
After his first trip down the street, bright with the December sunshine, he came home in a bitter, weak mood, smarting, aching with a poignant self-pity over the treatment he had received from his old cronies.
"It's all your fault," he burst out to his wife. "If you'd only let me go away and look up another place, I wouldn't have to put up with all these sneers and insults."
"What sneers and insults?" she asked, coming over to him.
"Why, nobody 'll speak to me."
