He stopped.

He held the fate of Six-Cross-Roads in his hand and he knew it.
He knew that if he spoke, his evidence would damn the Cross-Roads, and that it meant that more than the White-Caps would be hurt, for the Cross-Roads would fight.

If he had believed that the dissemination of his knowledge could have helped Harkless, he would have called to the men near him at once; but he had no hope that the young man was alive.
They would not have dragged him out to their shanties wounded, or as a prisoner; such a proceeding would have courted detection, and, also, they were not that kind; they had been "looking for him" a long time, and their one idea was to kill him.
And Harkless, for all his gentleness, was the sort of man, Briscoe believed, who would have to be killed before he could be touched.

Of one thing the old gentleman was sure; the editor had not been tied up and whipped while yet alive.

In spite of his easy manners and geniality, there was a dignity in him that would have made him kill and be killed before the dirty fingers of a Cross-Roads "White-Cap" could have been laid upon him in chastisement.