Not one can be spared.
Even a tough convicted of cheating at cards, or breaking a boom on a
river, has escaped punishment because he played the concertina.
The discord and jangle between the two bands was the first collision of
this fateful day. While yet there was a space between the two
processions, the bands broke into furious contest. It was then that,
through the long funeral line, men with hard-set faces came closer up
together, and forty, detaching themselves from the well-kept run of
marching lodgemen, closed up around the horses and the hearse, making a
solid flanking force. At stated intervals also, outside the lodgemen in
the lines, were special constables, many of whom had been the
stage-drivers, hunters, cattlemen, prospectors, and pioneers of the early
days. Most of them had come of good religious stock-Presbyterians,
Baptists, Methodists, Unitarians; and though they had little piety, and
had never been able to regain the religious customs and habits of their
childhood, they "Stood for the Thing the Old Folks stand for." They were
in a mood which would tear cotton, as the saying was. There was not one
of them but expected that broken heads and bloodshed would be the order
of the day, and they were stonily, fearlessly prepared for the worst.
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