Given all these fiery ingredients, I didn’t feel a trace of alarmist guilt when I finally got a Bass Lake-Washington connection and began outlining what was about to happen. I was standing in a glass phone booth in downtown Bass Lake — which consists of a small post office, a big grocery, a bar and cocktail lounge, and several other picturesque redwood establishments that look very combustible. While I was talking, Don Mohr pulled up on his bike — having breached the roadblock with his press credentials — and indicated that he was in a hurry to call the Tribune. My editor in Washington was telling me how and when to file, but I was not to do so until the riot was running under its own power, with significant hurt to both flesh and property. . . and then I was to send no more than an arty variation of the standard wire-service news blurb: Who, What, When, Where and Why.
I was still on the phone when I saw a big burr-haired lad with a pistol on his belt walk over to Mohr and tell him to get out of town. I couldn’t hear much of what was going on, but I saw Mohr produce a packet of credentials, stringing them out like a card shark with a funny deck. I could see that he needed the phone, so I agreed with my man in Washington that first things would always come first, and hung up. Mohr immediately occupied the booth, leaving me to deal with the crowd that had gathered.
Luckily, my garb was too bastard for definition. I was wearing Levi’s, Wellington boots from L. L. Bean in Maine, and a Montana sheepherder’s jacket over a white tennis shirt. The burr-haired honcho asked me who I was. I gave him my card and asked why he had that big pistol on his belt. You know why, he said. The first one of these sonsofbitches that gives me any lip I’m gonna shoot right in the belly. That’s the only language they understand. He nodded toward Mohr in the phone booth, and there was nothing in his tone to make me think I was exempted. I could see that his pistol was a short-barreled Smith Wesson .357 Magnum — powerful enough to blow holes in Mohr’s BSA cylinder head, if necessary — but at arm’s length it hardly mattered. The gun was a killer at any range up to a hundred yards, and far beyond that in the hands of a man who worked at it. He was wearing it in a police-type holster on the belt that held up his khaki pants, high on his right hip and in an awkward position for getting at it quickly. But he was very conscious of having the gun and I knew he was capable of raising bloody hell if he started waving it around.
I asked him if he was a deputy sheriff.
No I’m workin for Mr. Williams, he said, still studying my card. Then he looked up. What are you doin with this motorcycle crowd?
I explained that I was only a journalist trying to do an honest day’s work. He nodded, still fondling my card. I said he could keep it, which seemed to please him. He dropped it in the pocket of his khaki shirt, then tucked his thumbs in his belt and asked me what I wanted to know. The tone of the question implied that I had about sixty seconds to get the story.
I shrugged. Oh, I don’t know. I just thought I’d look around a bit, maybe write a few things.
He chuckled knowingly. Yeah? Well, you can write that we’re ready for em. We’ll give em all they want.
The dusty street was so crowded with tourists that I hadn’t noticed the singular nature of the group that surrounded us. They weren’t tourists at all; I was standing in the midst of about a hundred vigilantes. There were five or six others wearing khaki shirts and pistols. At a glance they looked like any bunch of country boys at any rustic hamlet in the Sierras. But as I looked around I saw that many carried wooden clubs and others had hunting knives on their belts. They didn’t seem mean, but they were obviously keyed up and ready to bust some heads.