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Mr. Fraley. He simply stood and looked at him and hated him and was balked by him—justice, righteousness, and the Scriptures. . . .

At that moment there entered the door of the garage a short stocky man whose felt hat and blue denim shirt were faintly powdered with meal. This was Tom Northcutt, the Irontown miller. Northcutt stopped in the sunlight, which fell into the square entrance of the garage, and made a peremptory gesture for the gang to come to him. They did not do this, but everyone stopped talking to look at him.

"Git ready, this evenin', three o'clock," he directed in the voice of a man used to shouting above machinery, "meet behind that lumber pile clost to the lock-up. Don't come a minute early, you might git identified; nor a minute late, for that'll be too late. Now you boys scatter out o' here an' git to yore homes. Don't be seen on the streets in crowds. I'm not sayin' nothin' a-tall about what's goin' to happen—I don't know. Now clear out, all of ye!"

He waved them away. A thrill went through the garage gang and they began to disperse. A certain note in this brief address was characteristic of the Northcutt oligarchy over the village, and this phrase inspired confidence in the hangers-on. This was Mr. Northcutt's assertion that he did not know what was going to happen. Every man recognized in this sentence Mr. Northcutt's legal alibi; the parry which would deflect from his bosom the keen rapier of evidence in the event that the doings of this day ever came before a grand jury. What had he done? Told the boys to go home and keep off the streets. It was the same sort of shrewdness that Peck Bradley had used, that Railroad Jones used, but on a slightly different plane from the shrewdness of either of those two.

The crowd dissolved at his advice; some wandered out the back door, some the front. Abner took himself out of the side door, the one by which he had entered, to see Zed Parrum walk past the garage with his bride-to-be.

This memory now flitted into his head and flitted out