“No one has the right to take the law into their own hands,” Sam said.
“Maybe not under normal circumstances…but I reckon most folks feel like these ain’t normal circumstances. A lot of people are grievin’ tonight.”
“Like Stan Hightower?” Matt suggested.
Archie cast a nervous glance from side to side. He leaned forward over the bar and lowered his voice as he said, “You didn’t hear it from me, but I’ve got a pretty good idea that Stan’s not gonna wait for that judge to get here. I don’t want to see old Cyrus get hurt. What he ought to do—what you boys ought to do, too, if you’re still helpin’ him out—is to take a ride out of town for an hour or so this evenin’. It’d all be over by the time you got back.”
“We can’t do that, Archie,” Sam said. “Neither can the sheriff.”
Archie sighed. “Yeah, I figured as much. But I didn’t think it’d hurt anything to mention it.”
Matt and Sam finished their beers, then left the saloon. They walked down the street to the hash house where Sheriff Flagg had been getting their meals. The food had been good so far, so they didn’t see any reason to change horses in midstream.
They were polishing off platters of thick steaks and mounds of German potatoes when they heard a racket from the street. A large number of riders were passing by outside.
Matt and Sam looked across the table at each other. Matt said, “I don’t reckon we ought to wait for the sound of a shotgun blast, do you?”
“Not hardly,” Sam agreed. “Let’s go.”
Matt dropped a greenback on the table to pay for their meals, and they headed for the door…but not before casting regretful glances at what was left of their food. As they emerged from the cafe, they looked toward the sheriff’s office and saw that the riders had reined to a halt in front of the blocky stone building.
One man edged his horse to the forefront of the group and yelled, “Open up in there, Sheriff! Nobody has to get hurt here!”
Quite a few townspeople had heard the commotion and were now heading toward the jail. Most of them were grim-faced men who carried rifles or shotguns, Matt and Sam noted.
They exchanged worried glances. The situation was developing just as Sheriff Flagg and Archie Cochran had predicted it would. The members of the lynch mob that had been turned back the night before were ready to join Stan Hightower and his men for another stab at hanging Joshua Shade.
“We should’ve brought those Greeners with us,” Matt muttered as they started walking toward the jail.
“We’ll have to make do with what we have,” Sam said.
As they got closer, they saw that the men who had ridden into town with Stan Hightower were all tough, competent-looking hombres. They bristled with hardware, too. Each man was armed with a rifle and at least one handgun.
If it came to shooting, both Matt and Sam knew that they couldn’t stand up to those odds for very long. And some innocent folks would be killed, too. Although you could argue that if they were all that innocent, they wouldn’t be joining lynch mobs, Matt thought.
Still, with all the hell Shade had raised, all the innocent folks
“Damn it, Cyrus, open up!” yelled the man who had to be Stan Hightower. “Don’t make us bust in there!”
The inside shutters had been closed over the windows, Matt noted as he and Sam drew closer. Now one of the shutters was pulled back a little and the barrel of a rifle thrust through the opening. Guns came up in the hands of Hightower’s punchers in response to the threat.
“Go home, Stan!” Sheriff Flagg shouted from inside the jail. “You know good an’ well I can’t let you have Shade!”
“He doesn’t deserve to have a good man like you protecting him!” Hightower replied.
“Maybe not, but he’s my prisoner and I ain’t lettin’ anything happen to him! You and your boys just turn around and go home! Margery’s already grievin’. You don’t want to make it worse on her.”
“I don’t see how hanging that murdering bastard Shade could make it any worse on her!” Hightower replied.
“Because she’ll be a widow, too!”
Hightower stiffened and sat up straighter in the saddle as the implications of Flagg’s words obviously hit him. “Hold on there, Cyrus,” he said. “You and I have always been friends.”
“That was before you came stompin’ up to my door and told me to turn a prisoner over to you! I got this rifle pointed right at you, and the first man takes a step toward this door, I’m pullin’ the trigger!”
A man in the crowd shouted, “Don’t let him talk to you like that, Stan! He wouldn’t dare shoot you, and you know it!”
Hightower might have his doubts that Flagg would shoot, but he couldn’t be sure of that. And having a gun pointed directly at him had a wonderful way of clearing the fog of emotion from a fellow’s mind.
“Hold on now,” Hightower said as he gestured toward the men in the crowd. “Don’t go doing anything foolish.”
“Shade killed your own wife’s pa,” a man argued. “You can’t let him get away with that.”
From inside the jail, Flagg called, “He won’t get away with it! He’ll hang! But it’ll happen legal-like!”
“You can’t stop us by yourself, Cyrus!” another man shouted.
