time Main Street had his whole story of the calling which led him to the Killer and how Hilma and Whistler had come out of the dark to help him bring the murderer to justice. The girl, he told them, was sleeping in the sheriff's house; the Killer was behind bars; as for Whistler, he was not sure what had become of him; he had been swallowed up. Urgings produced nothing more specific than this in regard to Whistler, plainly the hero and darling of the town.
Uncle Alf irked when he was drawn from his mood of rapt exhortation, and he returned to it as speedily as he could. Here was none of that indifference to his call for crusade he had encountered among the Basin's silent folk; here, his preacher's quick sense of gauging an audience told him, was, in truth, a stringed instrument for him to play upon. The wilderness seer launched upon his most terrific jeremiad against the cattle barons. Somebody had whispered to him the fresh tale of the sheep moving on Poison Spider; that Hilma Ring had lost six hundred sheep in a night. The shrewd exhorter snatched at this for a text: How the oppressors of the small people had robbed this lily among thorns—so he de-
