They had watched for his coming during the slackening of
the storm and he had not come, and there was nowhere he could have gone.
He was missing; only one thing could have happened.
They had roused up Warren Smith, the prosecutor, the missing editor's most
intimate friend in Carlow, and Homer, the sheriff, and Jared Wiley, the
deputy. William Todd had rung the alarm. The first thing to do was to find
him. After that there would be trouble--if not before. It looked as if
there would be trouble before. The men tramping up to the muddy Square in
their shirt-sleeves were bulgy about the right hips; and when Homer Tibbs
joined Lum Landis at the hotel corner, and Landis saw that Homer was
carrying a shot-gun, Landis went back for his. A hastily sworn posse
galloped out Main Street. Women and children ran into neighbors' yards and
began to cry. Day was coming; and, as the light grew, men swore and
savagely kicked at the palings of fences that they passed.
In the foreglow of dawn they gathered in the Square and listened to Warren
Smith, who made a speech from the court-house fence and warned them to go
slow. They answered him with angry shouts and hootings, but he made his
big voice heard, and bade them do nothing rash; no facts were known, he
said; it was far from certain that harm had been done, and no one knew
that the Six-Cross-Roads people had done it--even if something had
happened to Mr.
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