Also unfolded something of which Bently Brown had never dreamed; something which the audience, though greeting it with laughter, failed at first to recognize for what it was worth, because every one knew all about the Bently-Brown Western dramas, and every one believed that they were to be made after the usual recipe more elaborately stirred.

So every one had been chortling through several scenes before the significance of their laughter occurred to them.
Comedy--that was it.

Comedy, that had slipped in with cap and bells just when the door was flung open for black-robed Tragedy.

But it was too late to stop laughing when they discovered the trick.

They saw it now, in the very sub-titles which Luck had twisted impishly into sly humor that pointed to the laugh, in the deeds of blood that followed.
They saw it in the goggling ferocity of Big Medicine; in the innocent-eyed, dimpled fiendishness of Pink; in the lank awkwardness of Happy Jack.