About 300 people crowded into the banquet hall at the county fairgrounds in this Panhandle town, anxious to talk about the small group of strangers who had moved into their midst.

Men in boots, baseball caps and cowboy hats milled about, while women fanned themselves against the early July heat.

A sign outside the entrance warned: “This is a civil meeting. Anyone disrupting the peace will be escorted out.”

“The whole town’s here,” Jennifer Adee, 33, said to a friend sitting in the folding metal chair next to her.