Without
seeing, he knew that at last his persecutors had found a commander, a
directing spirit--and as well as he knew his own name he knew who that
leader was. Unsophisticated absolutely in the ways of the world was this
man; but in the reading of his fellows he was a master.
Apparently oblivious when a part of this same crowd had congregated at
the train, he had nevertheless observed them individual by individual;
and in his own consciousness had known that the moment, his moment, had
not come: for a leader, the leader, was not there. Again when the train
had pulled in he had watched--and still the leader did not appear. But
he was not deceived. As he had trusted in the girl's coming he had
trusted in another's following surreptitiously; and as now he heard that
one voice sounding above the other voices he knew he had been right. For
the man at the head of that pursuing mob which gained on them so
rapidly block by block, the man whose influence in those brief hours the
Indian and the girl had been alone in the tiny room at the hotel had
vitalised the lukewarm racial hostility into a thing of menace, was the
same man whose life he had once saved, the same man about whose throat
ere the identical night had passed his fingers had closed: Clayton Craig
by name, one time of Boston, Mass., but now, by his uncle's will, master
of the Buffalo Butte ranch house!
Meanwhile in the study of the parsonage Clifford Mitchell was again
looking out the single window.
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