"Suh," he cries out, all of a sudden, "ef yo' kin make me white, fo' Gawd sakes, do hit! Do hit! Ef yo' does, I gwine ter bless yo' all yo' days!

"Yo' don' know—no one kin guess or comperhen'—what des bein' white would mean ter me! Lawd! Lawd!" he says, his voice soft-spoken, but more eager than ever as he went on, and pleading something pitiful to hear, "des think of all de Caucasian blood in me! Gawd knows de nights er my youth I'se laid awake twell de dawn come red in de Eas' a-cryin' out ter Him only fo' ter be white! DES TER BE WHITE! Don' min' dem black, black niggers dar—don' think er DEM—dey ain't wuth nothin' nor fitten fo' no fate but what dey got— But me! What's done kep' me from gwine ter de top but dat one thing: I WASN'T WHITE! Hit air too late now—too late fo' dem ambitions I done trifle with an' shove behin' me—hit's too late fo' dat! But ef I was des ter git one li'l year o' hit—ONE LI'L YEAR O' BEIN' WHITE!—befo' I died—"

And he went on like that, shaking and stuttering there in the road, like a fit had struck him, crazy as a loon. But he got hold of himself enough to quit talking, in a minute, and his cunning come back to him before he was through trembling. Then the doctor says slow and even, but not severe:

"You go back to your people now, bishop, and tell them they've made a mistake about me. And if you can, undo the harm you've done with this Messiah business. As far as this stuff of mine is concerned, there's none of it for you nor for any other negro. You tell them that. There's none of it been sold yet—and there never will be."

Then we turned away and left him standing there in the road, still with his hat off and his face working.

Walking back toward the little tavern the doctor says:

"Danny, this is the end of this game. These people down here and that half-cracked, half-crooked old bishop have made me see a few things about the Afro-American brother. It wasn't a good scheme in the first place. And this wasn't the place to start it going, anyhow—I should have tried the niggers in the big towns. But I'm out of it now, and I'm glad of it. What we want to do is to get away from here to-morrow—go back to Atlanta and fix up a scheme to rob some widows and orphans, or something half-way respectable like that."

Well, I drew a long breath. I was with Doctor Kirby in everything he done, fur he was my friend, and I didn't intend to quit him. But I was glad we was out of this, and hadn't sold none of that dope. We both felt better because we hadn't. All them millions we was going to make—shucks! We didn't neither one of us give a dern about them getting away from us. All we wanted was jest to get away from there and not get mixed up with no nigger problems any more. We eat supper, and we set around a while, and we went to bed purty middling early, so as to get a good start in the morning.

We got up early, but early as it was the devil had been up earlier in that neighbourhood. About four o'clock that morning a white woman about a half a mile from the village had been attacked by a nigger. They was doubt as to whether she would live, but if she lived they wasn't no doubts she would always be more or less crazy. Fur besides everything else, he had beat her insensible. And he had choked her nearly to death. The country-side was up, with guns and pistols looking fur that nigger. It wasn't no trouble guessing what would happen to him when they ketched him, neither.

"And," says Doctor Kirby, when we hearn of it, "I hope to high heaven they DO catch him!"

They wasn't much doubt they would, either. They was already beating up the woods and bushes and gangs was riding up and down the roads, and every nigger's house fur miles around was being searched and watched.

We soon seen we would have trouble getting hosses and a rig in the village to take us to the railroad. Many of the hosses was being ridden in the man-hunt. And most of the men who might have done the driving was busy at that too. The hotel-keeper himself had left his place standing wide open and went out. We didn't get any breakfast neither.

"Danny," says the doctor, "we'll just put enough money to pay the bill in an envelope on the register here, and strike out on shank's ponies. It's only nine or ten miles to the railroad—we'll walk."

"But how about our stuff?" I asts him. We had two big cases full of sample bottles of that dope, besides our suit cases.

"Hang the dope!" says the doctor, "I don't ever want to see it or hear of it again! We'll leave it here. Put the things out of your suit case into mine, and leave that here too. Sam can carry mine. I want to be on the move."

So we left, with Sam carrying the one suit case. It wasn't nine in the morning yet, and we was starting out purty empty fur a long walk.

"Sam," says the doctor, as we was passing that there Big Bethel church—and it showed up there silent and shabby in the morning, like a old coloured man that knows a heap more'n he's going to tell—"Sam, were you at the meeting here last night?"

"Yass, suh!"

"I suppose it was a pretty tame affair after they found out their Elisha wasn't coming after all?"

Sam, he walled his eyes, and then he kind of chuckled.

"Well, suh," he says, "I 'spicions de mos' on 'em don' know dat YIT!"

The doctor asts him what he means.

It seems the bishop must of done some thinking after we left him in the road or on his way back to that church. They had all begun to believe that there Elishyah was on the way to 'em, and the bishop's credit was more or less wrapped up with our being it. It was true he hadn't started that belief; but it was believed, and he didn't dare to stop it now. Fur, if he stopped it, they would all think he had fell down on his prophetics, even although he hadn't prophesied jest exactly us. He was in a tight place, that bishop, but I bet you could always depend on him to get out of it with his flock. So what he told them niggers at the meeting last night was that he brung 'em a message from Elishyah, Sam says, the Elishyah that was to come. And the message was that the time was not ripe fur him to reveal himself as Elishyah unto the eyes of all men, fur they had been too much sinfulness and wickedness and walking into the ways of evil, right amongst that very congregation, and disobedience of the bishop, which was their guide. And he had sent 'em word, Elishyah had, that the bishop was his trusted servant, and into the keeping of the bishop was give the power to deal with his people and prepare them fur the great day to come. And the bishop would give the word of his coming. He was a box, that bishop was, in spite of his crazy streaks; and he had found a way to make himself stronger than ever with his bunch out of the very kind of thing that would have spoiled most people's graft. They had had a big meeting till nearly morning, and the power had hit 'em strong. Sam told us all about it.

But the thing that seemed to interest the doctor, and made him frown, was the idea that all them niggers round about there still had the idea he was the feller that had been prophesied to come. All except Sam, mebby. Sam had spells when he was real sensible, and other spells when he was as bad as the believingest of them all.

It was a fine day, and really joyous to be a-walking. It would of been a good deal joyouser if we had had some breakfast, but we figgered we would stop somewheres at noon and lay in a good, square, country meal.

That wasn't such a very thick settled country. But everybody seemed to know about the manhunt that was going on, here, there, and everywhere. People would come down to the road side as we passed, and gaze after us. Or mebby ast us if we knowed whether he had been ketched yet. Women and kids mostly, or old men, but now and then a younger man too. We noticed they wasn't no niggers to speak of that wasn't busier'n all get out, working at something or other, that day.

They is considerable woods in that country yet, though lots has been cut off. But they was sometimes right long stretches where they would be woods on both sides of the road, more or less thick, with underbrush between the trees. We tramped along, each busy thinking his own thoughts, and having a purty good time jest doing that without there being no use of talking. I was thinking that I liked the doctor better fur turning his back on all this game, jest when he might of made some sort of a deal with the bishop and really made some money out of it in the end. He never was so good a business man as he thought he was, Doctor Kirby wasn't. He always could make himself think he was. But when it come right down to brass tacks he wasn't. You give him a scheme that would TALK well, the kind of a josh talk he liked to get off fur his own enjoyment, and he would take up with it every time instead of one that had more promise of money to it if it was worked harder. He was thinking of the TALK more'n he was of the money, mostly; and he was always saying something about art fur art's sake, which was plumb foolishness, fur he never painted no pictures. Well, he never got over being more or less of a puzzle to me. But fur some reason or other this morning he seemed to be in a better humour with himself, after we had walked a while, than I had seen him in fur a long time.

We come to the top of one long hill, which it had made us sweat to climb, and without saying nothing to each other we both stopped and took off our hats and wiped our foreheads, and drawed long breaths, content to stand there fur jest a minute or two and look around us. The road run straight ahead, and dipped down, and then clumb up another hill about an eighth of a mile in front of us. It made a little valley. Jest about the middle, between the two hills, a crick meandered through the bottom land. Woods growed along the crick, and along both sides of the road we was travelling. Right nigh the crick they was another road come out of the woods to the left-hand side, and switched into the road we was travelling, and used the same bridge to cross the crick by. They was three or four houses here and there, with chimbleys built up on the outside of them, and blue smoke coming out. We stood and looked at the sight before us and forgot all the troubles we had left behind, fur a couple of minutes—it all looked so peaceful and quiet and homeyfied and nice.

"Well," says the doctor, after we had stood there a piece, "I guess we better be moving on again, Danny."

But jest as Sam, who was follering along behind with that suit case, picks it up and puts it on his head agin, they come a sound, from away off in the distance somewheres, that made him set it down quick. And we all stops in our tracks and looks at each other.

It was the voice of a hound dog—not so awful loud, but clear and mellow and tuneful, and carried to us on the wind. And then in a minute it come agin, sharper and quicker. They yells like that when they have struck a scent.

As we stood and looked at each other they come a crackle in the underbrush, jest to the left of us. We turned our heads that-a-way, jest as a nigger man give a leap to the top of a rail fence that separated the road from the woods. He was going so fast that instead of climbing that fence and balancing on the top and jumping off he jest simply seemed to hit the top rail and bounce on over, like he had been throwed out of the heart of the woods, and he fell sprawling over and over in the road, right before our feet.

He was onto his feet in a second, and fur a minute he stood up straight and looked at us—an ashes-coloured nigger, ragged and bleeding from the underbrush, red-eyed, and with slavers trickling from his red lips, and sobbing and gasping and panting fur breath. Under his brown skin, where his shirt was torn open acrost his chest, you could see that nigger's heart a-beating.

But as he looked at us they come a sudden change acrost his face—he must of seen the doctor before, and with a sob he throwed himself on his knees in the road and clasped his hands and held 'em out toward Doctor Kirby.

"ELISHyah! ELISHyah!" he sings out, rocking of his body in a kind of tune, "reveal yo'se'f, reveal yo'se'f an' he'p me NOW! Lawd Gawd ELISHyah, beckon fo' a CHA'iot, yo' cha'iot of FIAH! Lif' me, lif' me—lif' me away f'um hyah in er cha'iot o' FIAH!"

The doctor, he turned his head away, and I knowed the thought working in him was the thought of that white woman that would always be an idiot for life, if she lived. But his lips was dumb, and his one hand stretched itself out toward that nigger in the road and made a wiping motion, like he was trying fur to wipe the picture of him, and the thought of him, off'n a slate forevermore.

Jest then, nearer and louder and sharper, and with an eager sound, like they knowed they almost had him now, them hounds' voices come ringing through the woods, and with them come the mixedup shouts of men.

"RUN!" yells Sam, waving of that suit case round his head, fur one nigger will always try to help another no matter what he's done. "Run fo' de branch—git yo' foots in de worter an' fling 'em off de scent!"

He bounded down the hill, that red-eyed nigger, and left us standing there. But before he reached the crick the whole man-hunt come busting through the woods, the dogs a-straining at their straps. The men was all on foot, with guns and pistols in their hands. They seen the nigger, and they all let out a yell, and was after him. They ketched him at the crick, and took him off along that road that turned off to the left. I hearn later he was a member of Bishop Warren's congregation, so they hung him right in front of Big Bethel church.

We stood there on top of the hill and saw the chase and capture. Doctor Kirby's face was sweating worse than when we first clumb the hill. He was thinking about that nigger that had pleaded with him. He was thinking also of the woman. He was glad it hadn't been up to him personal right then and there to butt in and stop a lynching. He was glad, fur with them two pictures in front of him he didn't know what he would of done.

"Thank heaven!" I hearn him say to himself. "Thank heaven that it wasn't REALLY in my power to choose!"



CHAPTER XVIII

Well, we had pork and greens fur dinner that day, with the best corn-bread I ever eat anywheres, and buttermilk, and sweet potato pie. We got 'em at the house of a feller named Withers—Old Daddy Withers. Which if they was ever a nicer old man than him, or a nicer old woman than his wife, I never run acrost 'em yet.

They lived all alone, them Witherses, with only a couple of niggers to help them run their farm. After we eats our dinner and Sam gets his'n out to the kitchen, we sets out in front of the house and gets to talking with them, and gets real well acquainted. Which we soon found out the secret of old Daddy Withers's life—that there innocent-looking old jigger was a poet. He was kind of proud of it and kind of shamed of it both to oncet. The way it come out was when the doctor says one of them quotations he is always getting off, and the old man he looks pleased and says the rest of the piece it dropped out of straight through.

Then they had a great time quoting it at each other, them two, and I seen the doctor is good to loaf around there the rest of the day, like as not. Purty soon the old lady begins to get mighty proud-looking over something or other, and she leans over and whispers to the old man:

"Shall I bring it out, Lemuel?"

The old man, he shakes his head, no. But she slips into the house anyhow, and fetches out a little book with a pale green cover to it, and hands it to the doctor.

"Bless my soul," says Doctor Kirby, looking at the old man, "you don't mean to say you write verse yourself?"

The old man, he gets red all over his face, and up into the roots of his white hair, and down into his white beard, and makes believe he is a little mad at the old lady fur showing him off that-a-way.

"Mother," he says, "yo' shouldn't have done that!" They had had a boy years before, and he had died, but he always called her mother the same as if the boy was living. He goes into the house and gets his pipe, and brings it out and lights it, acting like that book of poetry was a mighty small matter to him. But he looks at Doctor Kirby out of the corner of his eyes, and can't keep from getting sort of eager and trembly with his pipe; and I could see he was really anxious over what the doctor was thinking of them poems he wrote. The doctor reads some of 'em out loud.

Well, it was kind of home-made poetry, Old Daddy Withers's was. It wasn't like no other poetry I ever struck. And I could tell the doctor was thinking the same about it. It sounded somehow like it hadn't been jointed together right. You would keep listening fur it to rhyme, and get all worked up watching and waiting fur it to, and make bets with yourself whether it would rhyme or it wouldn't. And then it ginerally wouldn't. I never hearn such poetry to get a person's expectances all worked up, and then go back on 'em. But if you could of told what it was all about, you wouldn't of minded that so much. Not that you can tell what most poetry is about, but you don't care so long as it keeps hopping along lively. What you want in poetry to make her sound good, according to my way of thinking, is to make her jump lively, and then stop with a bang on the rhymes. But Daddy Withers was so independent-like he would jest natcherally try to force two words to rhyme whether the Lord made 'em fur mates or not—like as if you would try to make a couple of kids kiss and make up by bumping their heads together. They jest simply won't do it. But Doctor Kirby, he let on like he thought it was fine poetry, and he read them pieces over and over agin, out loud, and the old man and the old woman was both mighty tickled with the way he done it. He wouldn't of had 'em know fur anything he didn't believe it was the finest poetry ever wrote, Doctor Kirby wouldn't.

They was four little books of it altogether. Slim books that looked as if they hadn't had enough to eat, like a stray cat whose ribs is rubbing together. It had cost Daddy Withers five hundred dollars apiece to get 'em published. A feller in Boston charged him that much, he said. It seems he would go along fur years, raking and scraping of his money together, so as to get enough ahead to get out another book. Each time he had his hopes the big newspapers would mebby pay some attention to it, and he would get recognized.

"But they never did," said the old man, kind of sad, "it always fell flat."

"Why, FATHER!"—the old lady begins, and finishes by running back into the house agin. She is out in a minute with a clipping from a newspaper and hands it over to Doctor Kirby, as proud as a kid with copper-toed boots. The doctor reads it all the way through, and then he hands it back without saying a word. The old lady goes away to fiddle around about the housework purty soon and the old man looks at the doctor and says:

"Well, you see, don't you?"

"Yes," says the doctor, very gentle.

"I wouldn't have HER know for the world," says Daddy Withers. "I know and YOU know that newspaper piece is just simply poking fun at my poetry, and making a fool of me, the whole way through. As soon as I read it over careful I saw it wasn't really praise, though there was a minute or two I thought my recognition had come. But SHE don't know it ain't serious from start to finish. SHE was all-mighty pleased when that piece come out in print. And I don't intend she ever shall know it ain't real praise."

His wife was so proud when that piece come out in that New York paper, he said, she cried over it. She said now she was glad they had been doing without things fur years and years so they could get them little books printed, one after the other, fur now fame was coming. But sometimes, Daddy Withers says, he suspicions she really knows he has been made a fool of, and is pertending not to see it, fur his sake, the same as he is pertending fur HER sake. Well, they was a mighty nice old couple, and the doctor done a heap of pertending fur both their sakes—they wasn't nothing else to do.

"How'd you come to get started at it?" he asts.

Daddy Withers says he don't rightly know. Mebby, he says, it was living there all his life and watching things growing—watching the cotton grow, and the corn and getting acquainted with birds and animals and trees and things. Helping of things to grow, he says, is a good way to understand how God must feel about humans. For what you plant and help to grow, he says, you are sure to get to caring a heap about. You can't help it. And that is the reason, he says, God can be depended on to pull the human race through in the end, even if appearances do look to be agin His doing it sometimes, fur He started it to growing in the first place and that-a-way He got interested personal in it. And that is the main idea, he says, he has all the time been trying to get into that there poetry of his'n. But he reckons he ain't got her in. Leastways, he says, no one has never seen her there but the doctor and the old lady and himself. Well, for my part, I never would of seen it there myself, but when he said it out plain like that any one could of told what he meant.

You hadn't orter lay things up agin folks if the folks can't help 'em. And I will say Daddy Withers was a fine old boy in spite of his poetry. Which it never really done any harm, except being expensive to him, and lots will drink that much up and never figger it an expense, but one of the necessities of life. We went all over his place with him, and we noticed around his house a lot of tin cans tacked up to posts and trees. They was fur the birds to drink out of, and all the birds around there had found out about it, and about Daddy Withers, and wasn't scared of him at all. He could get acquainted with animals, too, so that after a long spell sometimes they would even let him handle them. But not if any one was around. They was a crow he had made a pet of, used to hop around in front of him, and try fur to talk to him. If he went to sleep in the front yard whilst he was reading, that crow had a favourite trick of stealing his spectacles off'n his nose and flying up to the ridgepole of the house, and cawing at him. Once he had been setting out a row of tomato plants very careful, and he got to the end of the row and turned around, and that there crow had been hopping along behind very sollum, pulling up each plant as he set it out. It acted like it had done something mighty smart, and knowed it, that crow. So after that the old man named him Satan, fur he said it was Satan's trick to keep things from growing. They was some blue and white pigeons wasn't scared to come and set on his shoulders; but you could see the old man really liked that crow Satan better'n any of them.

Well, we hung around all afternoon listening to the old man talk, and liking him better and better. First thing we knowed it was getting along toward supper time. And nothing would do but we must stay to supper, too. We was pinted toward a place on the railroad called Smithtown, but when we found we couldn't get a train from there till ten o'clock that night anyhow, and it was only three miles away, we said we'd stay.

After supper we calculated we'd better move. But the old man wouldn't hear of us walking that three miles. So about eight o'clock he hitched up a mule to a one-hoss wagon, and we jogged along.

They was a yaller moon sneaking up over the edge of the world when we started. It was so low down in the sky yet that it threw long shadders on the road, and they was thick and black ones, too. Because they was a lot of trees alongside the road, and the road was narrow, we went ahead mostly through the darkness, with here and there patches of moonlight splashed onto the ground. Doctor Kirby and Old Man Withers was setting on the seat, still gassing away about books and things, and I was setting on the suit case in the wagon box right behind 'em. Sam, he was sometimes in the back of the wagon. He had been more'n half asleep all afternoon, but now it was night he was waked up, the way niggers and cats will do, and every once in a while he would get out behind and cut a few capers in a moonlight patch, jest fur the enjoyment of it, and then run and ketch up with the wagon and crawl in agin, fur it was going purty slow.

The ground was sandy in spots, and I guess we made a purty good load fur Beck, the old mule. She stopped, going up a little slope, after we had went about a mile from the Witherses'. Sam says he'll get out and walk, fur the wheels was in purty deep, and it was hard going.

"Giddap, Beck!" says the old man.

But Beck, she won't. She don't stand like she is stuck, neither, but like she senses danger somewheres about. A hoss might go ahead into danger, but a mule is more careful of itself and never goes butting in unless it feels sure they is a way out.

"Giddap," says the old man agin.

But jest then the shadders on both sides of the road comes to life. They wakes up, and moves all about us. It was done so sudden and quiet it was half a minute before I seen it wasn't shadders but about thirty men had gathered all about us on every side. They had guns.

"Who are you? What d'ye want?" asts the old man, startled, as three or four took care of the mule's head very quick and quiet.

"Don't be skeered, Daddy Withers," says a drawly voice out of the dark; "we ain't goin' to hurt YOU. We got a little matter o' business to tend to with them two fellers yo' totin' to town."



CHAPTER XIX

Thirty men with guns would be considerable of a proposition to buck against, so we didn't try it. They took us out of the wagon, and they pinted us down the road, steering us fur a country schoolhouse which was, I judged from their talk, about a quarter of a mile away. They took us silent, fur after we found they didn't answer no questions we quit asking any. We jest walked along, and guessed what we was up against, and why. Daddy Withers, he trailed along behind. They had tried to send him along home, but he wouldn't go. So they let him foller and paid no more heed to him.

Sam, he kept a-talking and a-begging, and several men a-telling of him to shut up. And him not a-doing it. Till finally one feller says very disgusted-like:

"Boys, I'm going to turn this nigger loose."

"We'll want his evidence," says another one.

"Evidence!" says the first one. "What's the evidence of a scared nigger worth?"

"I reckon that one this afternoon was considerable scared, when he give us that evidence against himself—that is, if you call it evidence."

"A nigger can give evidence against a nigger, and it's all right," says another voice—which it come from a feller that had a-holt of my wrist on the left-hand side of me—"but these are white men we are going to try to-night. The case is too serious to take nigger evidence. Besides, I reckon we got all the evidence any one could need. This nigger ain't charged with any crime himself, and my idea is that he ain't to be allowed to figure one way or the other in this thing."

So they turned Sam loose. I never seen nor hearn tell of Sam since then. They fired a couple of guns into the air as he started down the road, jest fur fun, and mebby he is running yet.

The feller had been talking like he was a lawyer, so I asts him what crime we was charged with. But he didn't answer me. And jest then we gets in sight of that schoolhouse.

It set on top of a little hill, partially in the moonlight, with a few sad-looking pine trees scattered around it, and the fence in front broke down. Even after night you could see it was a shabby-looking little place.

Old Daddy Withers tied his mule to the broken down fence. Somebody busted the front door down. Somebody else lighted matches. The first thing I knowed, we was all inside, and four or five dirty little coal oil lamps, with tin reflectors to 'em, which I s'pose was used ordinary fur school exhibitions, was being lighted.

We was waltzed up onto the teacher's platform, Doctor Kirby and me, and set down in chairs there, with two men to each of us, and then a tall, rawboned feller stalks up to the teacher's desk, and raps on it with the butt end of a pistol, and says:

"Gentlemen, this meeting will come to order."

Which they was orderly enough before that, but they all took off their hats when he rapped, like in a court room or a church, and most of 'em set down.

They set down in the school kids' seats, or on top of the desks, and their legs stuck out into the aisles, and they looked uncomfortable and awkward. But they looked earnest and they looked sollum, too, and they wasn't no joking nor skylarking going on, nor no kind of rowdyness, neither. These here men wasn't toughs, by any manner of means, but the most part of 'em respectable farmers. They had a look of meaning business.

"Gentlemen," says the feller who had rapped, "who will you have for your chairman?"

"I reckon you'll do, Will," says another feller to the raw-boned man, which seemed to satisfy him. But he made 'em vote on it before he took office.

"Now then," says Will, "the accused must have counsel."

"Will," says another feller, very hasty, "what's the use of all this fuss an' feathers? You know as well as I do there's nothing legal about this. It's only necessary. For my part—"

"Buck Hightower," says Will, pounding on the desk, "you will please come to order." Which Buck done it.

"Now," says the chairman, turning toward Doctor Kirby, who had been setting there looking thoughtful from one man to another, like he was sizing each one up, "now I must explain to the chief defendant that we don't intend to lynch him."

He stopped a second on that word LYNCH as if to let it soak in. The doctor, he bowed toward him very cool and ceremonious, and says, mocking of him:

"You reassure me, Mister—Mister—What is your name?" He said it in a way that would of made a saint mad.

"My name ain't any difference," says Will, trying not to show he was nettled.

"You are quite right," says the doctor, looking Will up and down from head to foot, very slow and insulting, "it's of no consequence in the world."

Will, he flushed up, but he makes himself steady and cool, and he goes on with his little speech: "There is to be no lynching here to-night. There is to be a trial, and, if necessary, an execution."

"Would it be asking too much," says the doctor very polite, "if I were to inquire who is to be tried, and before what court, and upon what charge?"

There was a clearing of throats and a shuffling of feet fur a minute. One old deaf feller, with a red nose, who had his hand behind his ear and was leaning forward so as not to miss a breath of what any one said, ast his neighbour in a loud whisper, "How?" Then an undersized little feller, who wasn't a farmer by his clothes, got up and moved toward the platform. He had a bulging-out forehead, and thin lips, and a quick, nervous way about him:

"You are to be tried," he says to the doctor, speaking in a kind of shrill sing-song that cut your nerves in that room full of bottled-up excitement like a locust on a hot day. "You are to be tried before this self-constituted court of Caucasian citizens—Anglo-Saxons, sir, every man of them, whose forbears were at Runnymede! The charge against you is stirring up the negroes of this community to the point of revolt. You are accused, sir, of representing yourself to them as some kind of a Moses. You are arraigned here for endangering the peace of the county and the supremacy of the Caucasian race by inspiring in the negroes the hope of equality."

Old Daddy Withers had been setting back by the door. I seen him get up and slip out. It didn't look to me to be any place fur a gentle old poet. While that little feller was making that charge you could feel the air getting tingly, like it does before a rain storm.

Some fellers started to clap their hands like at a political rally and to say, "Go it, Billy!" "That's right, Harden!" Which I found out later Billy Harden was in the state legislature, and quite a speaker, and knowed it. Will, the chairman, he pounded down the applause, and then he says to the doctor, pointing to Billy Harden:

"No man shall say of us that we did not give you a fair trial and a square deal. I'm goin' to appoint this gentleman as your counsel, and I'm goin' to give you a reasonable time to talk with him in private and prepare your case. He is the ablest lawyer in southwest Georgia and the brightest son of Watson County."

The doctor looks kind of lazy and Bill Harden, and back agin at Will, the chairman, and smiles out of the corner of his mouth. Then he says, sort of taking in the rest of the crowd with his remark, like them two standing there paying each other compliments wasn't nothing but a joke:

"I hope neither of you will take it too much to heart if I'm not impressed by your sense of justice—or your friend's ability."

"Then," said Will, "I take it that you intend to act as your own counsel?"

"You may take it," says the doctor, rousing of himself up, "you may take it—from me—that I refuse to recognize you and your crowd as a court of any kind; that I know nothing of the silly accusations against me; that I find no reason at all why I should take the trouble of making a defence before an armed mob that can only mean one of two things."

"One of two things?" says Will.

"Yes," says the doctor, very quiet, but raising his voice a little and looking him hard in the eyes. "You and your gang can mean only one of two things. Either a bad joke, or else—"

And he stopped a second, leaning forward in his chair, with the look of half raising out of it, so as to bring out the word very decided—

"MURDER!"

The way he done it left that there word hanging in the room, so you could almost see it and almost feel it there, like it was a thing that had to be faced and looked at and took into account. They all felt it that-a-way, too; fur they wasn't a sound fur a minute. Then Will says:

"We don't plan murder, and you'll find this ain't a joke. And since you refuse to accept counsel—"

Jest then Buck Hightower interrupts him by yelling out, "I make a motion Billy Harden be prosecuting attorney, then. Let's hurry this thing along!" And several started to applaud, and call fur Billy Harden to prosecute. But Will, he pounded down the applause agin, and says:

"I was about to suggest that Mr. Harden might be prevailed upon to accept that task."

"Yes," says the doctor, very gentle and easy. "Quite so! I fancied myself that Mr. Harden came along with the idea of making a speech either for or against." And he grinned at Billy Harden in a way that seemed to make him wild, though he tried not to show it. Somehow the doctor seemed to be all keyed up, instead of scared, like a feller that's had jest enough to drink to give him a fighting edge.

"Mr. Chairman," says Billy Harden, flushing up and stuttering jest a little, "I b-beg leave to d-d-decline."

"What," says the doctor, sort of playing with Billy with his eyes and grin, and turning like to let the whole crowd in on the joke, "DECLINE? The eminent gentleman declines! And he is going to sit down, too, with all that speech bottled up in him! O Demosthenes!" he says, "you have lost your pebble in front of all Greece."

Several grinned at Billy Harden as he set down, and three or four laughed outright. I guess about half of them there knowed him fur a wind bag, and some wasn't sorry to see him joshed. But I seen what the doctor was trying to do. He knowed he was in an awful tight place, and he was feeling that crowd's pulse, so to speak. He had been talking to crowds fur twenty years, and he knowed the kind of sudden turns they will take, and how to take advantage of 'em. He was planning and figgering in his mind all the time jest what side to ketch 'em on, and how to split up the one, solid crowd-mind into different minds. But the little bit of a laugh he turned against Billy Harden was only on the surface, like a straw floating on a whirlpool. These men was here fur business.

Buck Hightower jumps up and says:

"Will, I'm getting tired of this court foolishness. The question is, Does this man come into this county and do what he has done and get out again? We know all about him. He sneaked in here and gave out he was here to turn the niggers white—that he was some kind of a new-fangled Jesus sent especially to niggers, which is blasphemy in itself—and he's got 'em stirred up. They're boilin' and festerin' with notions of equality till we're lucky if we don't have to lynch a dozen of 'em, like they did in Atlanta last summer, to get 'em back into their places again. Do we save ourselves more trouble by stringing him up as a warning to the negroes? Or do we invite trouble by turning him loose? Which? All it needs is a vote."

And he set down agin. You could see he had made a hit with the boys. They was a kind of a growl rolled around the room. The feelings in that place was getting stronger and stronger. I was scared, but trying not to show it. My fingers kept feeling around in my pocket fur something that wasn't there. But my brain couldn't remember what my fingers was feeling fur. Then it come on me sudden it was a buckeye I picked up in the woods in Indiany one day, and I had lost it. I ain't superstitious about buckeyes or horse-shoes, but remembering I had lost it somehow made me feel worse. But Doctor Kirby had a good holt on himself; his face was a bit redder'n usual, and his eyes was sparkling, and he was both eager and watchful. When Buck Hightower sets down the chairman clears his throat like he is going to speak. But—

"Just a moment," says Doctor Kirby, getting on his feet, and taking a step toward the chairman. And the way he stopped and stood made everybody look at him. Then he went on:

"Once more," he says, "I call the attention of every man present to the fact that what the last speaker proposes is—"

And then he let 'em have that word agin, full in their faces, to think about—

"MURDER! Merely murder."

He was bound they shouldn't get away from that word and what it stood fur. And every man there DID think, too, fur they was another little pause. And not one of 'em looked at another one fur a minute. Doctor Kirby leaned forward from the platform, running his eyes over the crowd, and jest natcherally shoved that word into the room so hard with his mind that every mind there had to take it in.

But as he held 'em to it they come a bang from one of the windows. It broke the charm. Fur everybody jumped. I jumped myself. When the end of the world comes and the earth busts in the middle, it won't sound no louder than that bang did. It was a wooden shutter. The wind was rising outside, and it flew open and whacked agin' the building.

Then a big, heavy-set man that hadn't spoke before riz up from one of the hind seats, like he had heard a dare to fight, and walked slowly down toward the front. He had a red face, which was considerable pock-marked, and very deep-set eyes, and a deep voice.

"Since when," he says, taking up his stand a dozen feet or so in front of the doctor, "since when has any civilization refused to commit murder when murder was necessary for its protection?"

One of the top glasses of that window was out, and with the shutter open they come a breeze through that fluttered some strips of dirty-coloured papers, fly-specked and dusty and spider-webbed, that hung on strings acrost the room, jest below the ceiling. I guess they had been left over from some Christmas doings.

"My friend," said the pock-marked man to the doctor—and the funny thing about it was he didn't talk unfriendly when he said it—"the word you insist on is just a WORD, like any other word."

They was a spider rousted out of his web by that disturbance among the strings and papers. He started down from above on jest one string of web, seemingly spinning part of it out of himself as he come, the way they do. I couldn't keep my eyes off'n him.

"Murder," says the doctor, "is a thing."

"It is a WORD," says the other man, "FOR a thing. For a thing which sometimes seems necessary. Lynching, war, execution, murder—they are all words for different ways of wiping out human life. Killing sometimes seems wrong, and sometimes right. But right or wrong, and with one word or another tacked to it, it is DONE when a community wants to get rid of something dangerous to it."

That there spider was a squat, ugly-looking devil, hunched up on his string amongst all his crooked legs. The wind would come in little puffs, and swing him a little way toward the doctor's head, and then toward the pock-marked man's head, back and forth and back and forth, between them two as they spoke. It looked to me like he was listening to what they said and waiting fur something.

"Murder," says the doctor, "is murder—illegal killing—and you can't make anything else out of it, or talk anything else into it."

It come to me all to oncet that that ugly spider was swinging back and forth like the pendulum on a clock, and marking time. I wondered how much time they was left in the world.

"It would be none the less a murder," said the pock-marked man, "if you were to be hanged after a trial in some county court. Society had been obliged to deny the privilege of committing murder to the individual and reserve it for the community. If our communal sense says you should die, the thing is neither better nor worse than if a sheriff hanged you."

"I am not to be hanged by a sheriff," says the doctor, very cool and steady, "because I have committed no crime. I am not to be killed by you because you dare not, in spite of all you say, outrage the law to that extent."

And they looked each other in the eyes so long and hard that every one else in the schoolhouse held their breath.

"DARE not?" says the pock-marked man. And he reached forward slow and took that spider in his hand, and crushed it there, and wiped his hand along his pants leg. "Dare not? YES, BUT WE DARE. The only question for us men here is whether we dare to let you go free."

"Your defence of lynching," says Doctor Kirby, "shows that you, at least, are a man who can think. Tell me what I am accused of?"

And then the trial begun in earnest.



CHAPTER XX

The doctor acted as his own lawyer, and the pock-marked man, whose name was Grimes, as the lawyer agin us. You could see that crowd had made up its mind before-hand, and was only giving us what they called a trial to satisfy their own conscience. But the fight was betwixt Grimes and Doctor Kirby the hull way through.

One witness was a feller that had been in the hotel at Cottonville the night we struck that place. We had drunk some of his licker.

"This man admitted himself that he was here to turn the niggers white," said the witness.

Doctor Kirby had told 'em what kind of medicine he was selling. We both remembered it. We both had to admit it.

The next witness was the feller that run the tavern at Bairdstown. He had with him, fur proof, a bottle of the stuff we had brought with us. He told how we had went away and left it there that very morning.

Another witness told of seeing the doctor talking in the road to that there nigger bishop. Which any one could of seen it easy enough, fur they wasn't nothing secret about it. We had met him by accident. But you could see it made agin us.

Another witness says he lives not fur from that Big Bethel church. He says he has noticed the niggers was worked up about something fur several days. They are keeping the cause of it secret. He went over to Big Bethel church the night before, he said, and he listened outside one of the windows to find out what kind of doctrine that crazy bishop was preaching to them. They was all so worked up, and the power was with 'em so strong, and they was so excited they wouldn't of hearn an army marching by. He had hearn the bishop deliver a message to his flock from the Messiah. He had seen him go wild, afterward, and preach an equality sermon. That was the lying message the old bishop had took to 'em, and that Sam had told us about. But how was this feller to know it was a lie? He believed in it, and he told it in a straight-ahead way that would make any one see he was telling the truth as he thought it to be.

Then they was six other witnesses. All had been in the gang that lynched the nigger that day. That nigger had confessed his crime before he was lynched. He had told how the niggers had been expecting of a Messiah fur several days, and how the doctor was him. He had died a-preaching and a-prophesying and thinking to the last minute maybe he was going to get took up in a chariot of fire.

Things kept looking worse and worse fur us. They had the story as the niggers thought it to be. They thought the doctor had deliberately represented himself as such, instead of which the doctor had refused to be represented as that there Messiah. More than that, he had never sold a bottle of that medicine. He had flung the idea of selling it way behind him jest as soon as he seen what the situation really was in the black counties. He had even despised himself fur going into it. But the looks of things was all the other way.

Then the doctor give his own testimony.

"Gentlemen," he says, "it is true that I came down here to try out that stuff in the bottle there, and see if a market could be worked up for it. It is also true that, after I came here and discovered what conditions were, I decided not to sell the stuff. I didn't sell any. About this Messiah business I know very little more than you do. The situation was created, and I blundered into it. I sent the negroes word that I was not the person they expected. The bishop lied to them. That is my whole story."

But they didn't believe him. Fur it was jest what he would of said if he had been guilty, as they thought him. And then Grimes gets up and says:

"Gentlemen, I demand for this prisoner the penalty of death.

"He has lent himself to a situation calculated to disturb in this county the peaceful domination of the black race by the white.

"He is a Northern man. But that is not against him. If this were a case where leniency were possible, it should count for him, as indicating an ignorance of the gravity of conditions which confront us here, every day and all the time. If he were my own brother, I would still demand his death.

"Lest he should think my attitude dictated by any lingering sectional prejudice, I may tell him what you all know—you people among whom I have lived for thirty years—that I am a Northern man myself.

"The negro who was lynched to-day might never have committed the crime he did had not the wild, disturbing dream of equality been stirring in his brain. Every speech, every look, every action which encourages that idea is a crime. In this county, where the blacks outnumber us, we must either rule as masters or be submerged.

"This man is still believed by the negroes to possess some miraculous power. He is therefore doubly dangerous. As a sharp warning to them he must die. His death will do more toward ending the trouble he has prepared than the death of a dozen negroes.

"And as God is my witness, I speak and act not through passion, but from the dictates of conscience."

He meant it, Grimes did. And when he set down they was a hush. And then Will, the chairman, begun to call the roll.

I never been much of a person to have bad dreams or nightmares or things like that. But ever since that night in that schoolhouse, if I do have a nightmare, it takes the shape of that roll being called. Every word was like a spade grating and gritting in damp gravel when a grave is dug. It sounded so to me.

"Samuel Palmour, how do you vote?" that chairman would say.

Samuel Palmour, or whoever it was, would hist himself to his feet, and he would say something like this:

"Death."

He wouldn't say it joyous. He wouldn't say it mad. He would be pale when he said it, mebby—and mebby trembling. But he would say it like it was a duty he had to do, that couldn't be got out of. That there trial had lasted so long they wasn't hot blood left in nobody jest then—only cold blood, and determination and duty and principle.

"Buck Hightower," says the chairman, "how do you vote?"

"Death," says Buck; "death for the man. But say, can't we jest LICK the kid and turn him loose?"

And so it went, up one side the room and down the other. Grimes had showed 'em all their duty. Not but what they had intended to do it before Grimes spoke. But he had put it in such a way they seen it was something with even MORE principle to it than they had thought it was before.

"Billy Harden," says the chairman, "how do you vote?" Billy was the last of the bunch. And most had voted fur death. Billy, he opened his mouth and he squared himself away to orate some. But jest as he done so, the door opened and Old Daddy Withers stepped in. He had been gone so long I had plumb forgot him. Right behind him was a tall, spare feller, with black eyes and straight iron-gray hair.

"I vote," says Billy Harden, beginning of his speech, "I vote for death. The reason upon which I base—"

But Doctor Kirby riz up and interrupted him.

"You are going to kill me," he said. He was pale but he was quiet, and he spoke as calm and steady as he ever done in his life. "You are going to kill me like the crowd of sneaking cowards that you are. And you ARE such cowards that you've talked two hours about it, instead of doing it. And I'll tell you why you've talked so much: because no ONE of you alone would dare to do it, and every man of you in the end wants to go away thinking that the other fellow had the biggest share in it. And no ONE of you will fire the gun or pull the rope—you'll do it ALL TOGETHER, in a crowd, because each one will want to tell himself he only touched the rope, or that HIS GUN missed.

"I know you, by God!" he shouted, flushing up into a passion—and it brought blood into their faces, too—"I know you right down to your roots, better than you know yourselves."

He was losing hold of himself, and roaring like a bull and flinging out taunts that made 'em squirm. If he wanted the thing over quick, he was taking jest the way to warm 'em up to it. But I don't think he was figgering on anything then, or had any plan up his sleeve. He had made up his mind he was going to die, and he was so mad because he couldn't get in one good lick first that he was nigh crazy. I looked to see him lose all sense in a minute, and rush amongst them guns and end it in a whirl.

But jest as I figgered he was on his tiptoes fur that, and was getting up my own sand, he throwed a look my way. And something sobered him. He stood there digging his finger nails into the palms of his hands fur a minute, to get himself back. And when he spoke he was sort of husky.

"That boy there," he says. And then he stops and kind of chokes up. And in a minute he was begging fur me. He tells 'em I wasn't mixed up in nothing. He wouldn't of done it fur himself, but he begged fur me. Nobody had paid much attention to me from the first, except Buck Hightower had put in a good word fur me. But somehow the doctor had got the crowd listening to him agin, and they all looked at me. It got next to me. I seen by the way they was looking, and I felt it in the air, that they was going to let me off.

But Doctor Kirby, he had always been my friend. It made me sore fur to see him thinking I wasn't with him. So I says:

"You better can that line of talk. They don't get you without they get me, too. You orter know I ain't a quitter. You give me a pain."

And the doctor and me stood and looked at each other fur a minute. He grinned at me, and all of a sudden we was neither one of us much giving a whoop, fur it had come to us both at oncet what awful good friends we was with each other.

But jest then they come a slow, easy-going sort of a voice from the back part of the room. That feller that had come in along with Old Daddy Withers come sauntering down the middle aisle, fumbling in his coat pocket, and speaking as he come.

"I've been hearing a great deal of talk about killing people in the last few minutes," he says.

Everybody rubbered at him.



CHAPTER XXI

There was something sort of careless in his voice, like he had jest dropped in to see a show, and it had come to him sudden that he would enjoy himself fur a minute or two taking part in it. But he wasn't going to get TOO worked up about it, either, fur the show might end by making him tired, after all.

As he come down the aisle fumbling in his coat, he stopped and begun to slap all his pockets. Then his face cleared, and he dived into a vest pocket. Everybody looked like they thought he was going to pull something important out of it. But he didn't. All he pulled out was jest one of these here little ordinary red books of cigarette papers. Then he dived fur some loose tobacco, and begun to roll one. I noticed his fingers was long and white and slim and quick. But not excited fingers; only the kind that seems to say as much as talking says.

He licked his cigarette, and then he sauntered ahead, looking up. As he looked up the light fell full on his face fur the first time. He had high cheek bones and iron-gray hair which he wore rather long, and very black eyes. As he lifted his head and looked close at Doctor Kirby, a change went over both their faces. Doctor Kirby's mouth opened like he was going to speak. So did the other feller's. One side of his mouth twitched into something that was too surprised to be a grin, and one of his black eyebrows lifted itself up at the same time. But neither him nor Doctor Kirby spoke.

He stuck his cigarette into his mouth and turned sideways from Doctor Kirby, like he hadn't noticed him pertic'ler. And he turns to the chairman.

"Will," he says. And everybody listens. You could see they all knowed him, and that they all respected him too, by the way they was waiting to hear what he would say to Will. But they was all impatient and eager, too, and they wouldn't wait very long, although now they was hushing each other and leaning forward.

"Will," he says, very polite and quiet, "can I trouble you for a match?"

And everybody let go their breath. Some with a snort, like they knowed they was being trifled with, and it made 'em sore. His eyebrows goes up agin, like it was awful impolite in folks to snort that-away, and he is surprised to hear it. And Will, he digs fur a match and finds her and passes her over. He lights his cigarette, and he draws a good inhale, and he blows the smoke out like it done him a heap of good. He sees something so interesting in that little cloud of smoke that everybody else looks at it, too.

"Do I understand," he says, "that some one is going to lynch some one, or something of that sort?"

"That's about the size of it, colonel," says Will.

"Um!" he says, "What for?"

Then everybody starts to talk all at once, half of them jumping to their feet, and making a perfect hullabaloo of explanations you couldn't get no sense out of. In the midst of which the colonel takes a chair and sets down and crosses one leg over the other, swinging the loose foot and smiling very patient. Which Will remembers he is chairman of that meeting and pounds fur order.

"Thank you, Will," says the colonel, like getting order was a personal favour to him. Then Billy Harden gets the floor, and squares away fur a longwinded speech telling why. But Buck Hightower jumps up impatient and says:

"We've been through all that, Billy. That man there has been tried and found guilty, colonel, and there's only one thing to do—string him up."

"Buck, I wouldn't," says the colonel, very mild.

But that there man Grimes gets up very sober and steady and says:

"Colonel, you don't understand." And he tells him the hull thing as he believed it to be—why they has voted the doctor must die, the room warming up agin as he talks, and the colonel listening very interested. But you could see by the looks of him that colonel wouldn't never be interested so much in anything but himself, and his own way of doing things. In a way he was like a feller that enjoys having one part of himself stand aside and watch the play-actor game another part of himself is acting out.

"Grimes," he says, when the pock-marked man finishes, "I wouldn't. I really wouldn't."

"Colonel," says Grimes, showing his knowledge that they are all standing solid behind him, "WE WILL!"

"Ah," says the colonel, his eyebrows going up, and his face lighting up like he is really beginning to enjoy himself and is glad he come, "indeed!"

"Yes," says Grimes, "WE WILL!"

"But not," says the colonel, "before we have talked the thing over a bit, I hope?"

"There's been too much talk here now," yells Buck Hightower, "talk, talk, till, by God, I'm sick of it! Where's that ROPE?"

"But, listen to him—listen to the colonel!" some one else sings out. And then they was another hullabaloo, some yelling "no!" And the colonel, very patient, rolls himself another smoke and lights it from the butt of the first one. But finally they quiets down enough so Will can put it to a vote. Which vote goes fur the colonel to speak.

"Boys," he begins very quiet, "I wouldn't lynch this man. In the first place it will look bad in the newspapers, and—"

"The newspapers be d—-d!" says some one.

"And in the second place," goes on the colonel, "it would be against the law, and—"

"The law be d——d!" says Buck Hightower.

"There's a higher law!" says Grimes.

"Against the law," says the colonel, rising up and throwing away his cigarette, and getting interested.

"I know how you feel about all this negro business. And I feel the same way. We all know that we must be the negros' masters. Grimes there found that out when he came South, and the idea pleased him so he hasn't been able to talk about anything else since. Grimes has turned into what the Northern newspapers think a typical Southerner is.

"Boys, this thing of lynching gets to be a habit. There's been a negro lynched to-day. He's the third in this county in five years. They all needed killing. If the thing stopped there I wouldn't care so much. But the habit of illegal killing grows when it gets started.

"It's grown on you. You're fixing to lynch your first white man now. If you do, you'll lynch another easier. You'll lynch one for murder and the next for stealing hogs and the next because he's unpopular and the next because he happens to dun you for a debt. And in five years life will be as cheap in Watson County as it is in a New York slum where they feed immigrants to the factories. You'll all be toting guns and grudges and trying to lynch each other.

"The place to stop the thing is where it starts. You can't have it both ways—you've got to stand pat on the law, or else see the law spit on right and left, in the end, and NOBODY safe. It's either law or—"

"But," says Grimes, "there's a higher law than that on the statute books. There's—"

"There's a lot of flub-dub," says the colonel, "about higher laws and unwritten laws. But we've got high enough law written if we live up to it. There's—"

"Colonel Tom Buckner," says Buck Hightower, "what kind of law was it when you shot Ed Howard fifteen years ago? What—"

"You're out of order," says the chairman, "Colonel Buckner has the floor. And I'll remind you, Buck Hightower, that, on the occasion you drag in, Colonel Buckner didn't do any talking about higher laws or unwritten laws. He sent word to the sheriff to come and get him if he dared."

"Boys," says the colonel, "I'm preaching you higher doctrine than I've lived by, and I've made no claim to be better or more moral than any of you. I'm not. I'm in the same boat with all of you, and I tell you it's up to ALL of us to stop lynchings in this county—to set our faces against it. I tell you—"

"Is that all you've got to say to us, colonel?"

The question come out of a group that had drawed nearer together whilst the colonel was talking. They was tired of listening to talk and arguments, and showed it.

The colonel stopped speaking short when they flung that question at him. His face changed. He turned serious all over. And he let loose jest one word:

"NO!"

Not very loud, but with a ring in it that sounded like danger. And he got 'em waiting agin, and hanging on his words.

"No!" he repeats, louder, "not all. I have this to say to you—"

And he paused agin, pointing one long white finger at the crowd—

"IF YOU LYNCH THIS MAN YOU MUST KILL ME FIRST!"

I couldn't get away from thinking, as he stood there making them take that in, that they was something like a play-actor about him. But he was in earnest, and he would play it to the end, fur he liked the feelings it made circulate through his frame. And they saw he was in earnest.

"You'll lynch him, will you?" he says, a kind of passion getting into his voice fur the first time, and his eyes glittering. "You think you will? Well, you WON'T!

"You won't because I say NOT. Do you hear? I came here to-night to save him.

"You might string HIM up and not be called to account for it. But how about ME?"

He took a step forward, and, looking from face to face with a dare in his eyes, he went on:

"Is there a man among you fool enough to think you could kill Tom Buckner and not pay for it?"

He let 'em all think of that for jest another minute before he spoke agin. His face was as white as a piece of paper, and his nostrils was working, but everything else about him was quiet. He looked the master of them all as he stood there, Colonel Tom Buckner did—straight and splendid and keen. And they felt the danger in him, and they felt jest how fur he would go, now he was started.

"You didn't want to listen to me a bit ago," he said. "Now you must. Listen and choose. You can't kill that man unless you kill me too.

"TRY IT, IF YOU THINK YOU CAN!"

He reached over and took from the teacher's desk the sheet of paper Will had used to check off the name of each man and how he voted. He held it up in front of him and every man looked at it.

"You know me," he says. "You know I do not break my word. And I promise you that unless you do kill me here tonight—yes, as God is my witness, I THREATEN you—I will spend every dollar I own and every atom of influence I possess to bring each one of you to justice for that man's murder."

They knowed, that crowd did, that killing a man like Colonel Buckner—a leader and a big man in that part of the state—was a different proposition from killing a stranger like Doctor Kirby. The sense of what it would mean to kill Colonel Buckner was sinking into 'em, and showing on their faces. And no one could look at him standing there, with his determination blazing out of him, and not understand that unless they did kill him as well as Doctor Kirby he'd do jest what he said.

"I told you," he said, not raising his voice, but dropping it, and making it somehow come creeping nearer to every one by doing that, "I told you the first white man you lynched would lead to other lynchings. Let me show you what you're up against to-night.

"Kill the man and the boy here, and you must kill me. Kill me, and you must kill Old Man Withers, too."

Every one turned toward the door as he mentioned Old Man Withers. He had never been very far into the room.

"Oh, he's gone," said Colonel Tom, as they turned toward the door, and then looked at each other. "Gone home. Gone home with the name of every man present. Don't you see you'd have to kill Old Man Withers too, if you killed me? And then, HIS WIFE! And then—how many more?

"Do you see it widen—that pool of blood? Do you see it spread and spread?"

He looked down at the floor, like he really seen it there. He had 'em going now. They showed it.

"If you shed one drop," he went on, "you must shed more. Can't you see it—widening and deepening, widening and deepening, till you're wading knee deep in it—till it climbs to your waists—till it climbs to your throats and chokes you?"

It was a horrible idea, the way he played that there pool of blood and he shuddered like he felt it climbing up himself. And they felt it. A few men can't kill a hull, dern county and get away with it. The way he put it that's what they was up against.

"Now," says Colonel Tom, "what man among you wants to start it?"

Nobody moved. He waited a minute. Still nobody moved. They all looked at him. It was awful plain jest where they would have to begin. It was awful plain jest what it would all end up in. And I guess when they looked at him standing there, so fine and straight and splendid, it jest seemed plumb unpossible to make a move. There was a spirit in him that couldn't be killed. Doctor Kirby said afterward that was what come of being real "quality," which was what Colonel Tom was—it was that in him that licked 'em. It was the best part of their own selves, and the best part of their own country, speaking out of him to them, that done it. Mebby so. Anyhow, after a minute more of that strain, a feller by the door picks up his gun out of the corner with a scrape, and hists it to his shoulder and walks out. And then Colonel Tom says to Will, with his eyebrow going up, and that one-sided grin coming onto his face agin:

"Will, perhaps a motion to adjourn would be in order?"



CHAPTER XXII

So many different kinds of feeling had been chasing around inside of me that I had numb spots in my emotional ornaments and intellectual organs. The room cleared out of everybody but Doctor Kirby and Colonel Tom and me. But the sound of the crowd going into the road, and their footsteps dying away, and then after that their voices quitting, all made but very little sense to me. I could scarcely realize that the danger was over.

I hadn't been paying much attention to Doctor Kirby while the colonel was making that grandstand play of his'n, and getting away with it. Doctor Kirby was setting in his chair with his head sort of sunk on his chest. I guess he was having a hard time himself to realize that all the danger was past. But mebby it wasn't that—he looked like he might really of forgot where he was fur a minute, and might be thinking of something that had happened a long time ago.

The colonel was leaning up agin the teacher's desk, smoking and looking at Doctor Kirby. Doctor Kirby turns around toward the colonel.

"You have saved my life," he says, getting up out of his chair, like he had a notion to step over and thank him fur it, but was somehow not quite sure how that would be took.

The colonel looks at him silent fur a second, and then he says, without smiling:

"Do you flatter yourself it was because I think it worth anything?"

The doctor don't answer, and then the colonel says:

"Has it occurred to you that I may have saved it because I want it?"

"WANT it?"

"Do you know of any one who has a better right to TAKE it than I have? Perhaps I saved it because it BELONGS to me—do you suppose I want any one else to kill what I have the best right to kill?"

"Tom," says Doctor Kirby, really puzzled, to judge from his actions, "I don't understand what makes you say you have the right to take my life."

"Dave, where is my sister buried?" asts Colonel Tom.

"Buried?" says Doctor Kirby. "My God, Tom, is she DEAD?"

"I ask you," says Colonel Tom.

"And I ask you," says Doctor Kirby.

And they looked at each other, both wonderized, and trying to understand. And it busted on me all at oncet who them two men really was.

I orter knowed it sooner. When the colonel was first called Colonel Tom Buckner it struck me I knowed the name, and knowed something about it. But things which was my own consarns was attracting my attention so hard I couldn't remember what it was I orter know about that name. Then I seen him and Doctor Kirby knowed each other when they got that first square look. That orter of put me on the track, that and a lot of other things that had happened before. But I didn't piece things together like I orter done.

It wasn't until Colonel Tom Buckner called him "Dave" and ast him about his sister that I seen who Doctor Kirby must really be.

HE WAS THAT THERE DAVID ARMSTRONG!

And the brother of the girl he had run off with had jest saved his life. By the way he was talking, he had saved it simply because he thought he had the first call on what to do with it.

"Where is she?" asts Colonel Tom.

"I ask you," says Doctor Kirby—or David Armstrong—agin.

Well, I thinks to myself, here is where Daniel puts one acrost the plate. And I breaks in:

"You both got another guess coming," I says. "She ain't buried anywheres. She ain't even dead. She's living in a little town in Indiany called Athens—or she was about eighteen months ago."

They both looks at me like they thinks I am crazy.

"What do you know about it?" says Doctor Kirby.

"Are you David Armstrong?" says I.

"Yes," says he.

"Well," I says, "you spent four or five days within a stone's throw of her a year ago last summer, and she knowed it was you and hid herself away from you."

Then I tells them about how I first happened to hear of David Armstrong, and all I had hearn from Martha. And how I had stayed at the Davises in Tennessee and got some more of the same story from George, the old nigger there.

"But, Danny," says the doctor, "why didn't you tell me all this?"

I was jest going to say that not knowing he was that there David Armstrong I didn't think it any of his business, when Colonel Tom, he says to Doctor Kirby—I mean to David Armstrong:

"Why should you be concerned as to her whereabouts? You ruined her life and then deserted her."

Doctor Kirby—I mean David Armstrong—stands there with the blood going up his face into his forehead slow and red.

"Tom," he says, "you and I seem to be working at cross purposes. Maybe it would help some if you would tell me just how badly you think I treated Lucy."

"You ruined her life, and then deserted her," says Colonel Tom agin, looking at him hard.

"I DIDN'T desert her," said Doctor Kirby. "She got disgusted and left ME. Left me without a chance to explain myself. As far as ruining her life is concerned, I suppose that when I married her—"

"Married her!" cries out the colonel. And David Armstrong stares at him with his mouth open.

"My God! Tom," he says, "did you think—?"

And they both come to another standstill. And then they talked some more and only got more mixed up than ever. Fur the doctor thinks she has left him, and Colonel Tom thinks he has left her.

"Tom," says the doctor, "suppose you let me tell my story, and you'll see why Lucy left me."

Him and Colonel Tom had been chums together when they went through Princeton, it seems—I picked that up from the talk and some of his story I learned afterward. He had come from Ohio in the beginning, and his dad had had considerable money. Which he had enjoyed spending of it, and when he was a young feller never liked to work at nothing else. It suited him. Colonel Tom, he was considerable like him in that way. So they was good pals when they was to that school together. They both quit about the same time. A couple of years after that, when they was both about twenty-five or six years old, they run acrost each other accidental in New York one autumn.

The doctor, he was there figgering on going to work at something or other, but they was so many things to do he was finding it hard to make a choice. His father was dead by that time, and looking fur a job in New York, the way he had been doing it, was awful expensive, and he was running short of money. His father had let him spend so much whilst he was alive he was very disappointed to find out he couldn't keep on forever looking fur work that-a-way.

So Colonel Tom says why not come down home into Tennessee with him fur a while, and they will both try and figger out what he orter go to work at. It was the fall of the year, and they was purty good hunting around there where Colonel Tom lived, and Dave hadn't never been South any, and so he goes. He figgers he better take a good, long vacation, anyhow. Fur if he goes to work that winter or the next spring, and ties up with some job that keeps him in an office, there may be months and months pass by before he has another chance at a vacation. That is the worst part of a job—I found that out myself—you never can tell when you are going to get shut of it, once you are fool enough to start in.

In Tennessee he had met Miss Lucy. Which her wedding to Prent McMakin was billed fur to come off about the first of November, jest a month away.

"I don't know whether I ever told you or not," says the doctor, "but I was engaged to be married myself, Tom, when I went down to your place. That was what started all the trouble.

"You know engagements are like vaccination—sometimes they take, and sometimes they don't. Of course, I had thought at one time I was in love with this girl I was engaged to. When I found out I wasn't, I should have told her so right away. But I didn't. I thought that she would get tired of me after a while and turn me loose. I gave her plenty of chances to turn me loose. I wanted her to break the engagement instead of me. But she wouldn't take the hints. She hung on like an Ohio Grand Army veteran to a country post-office. About half the time I didn't read her letters, and about nineteen twentieths of the time I didn't answer them. They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. But it isn't so—it makes them all the fonder of you. I got into the habit of thinking that while Emma might be engaged to me, I wasn't engaged to Emma. Not but what Emma was a nice girl, you know, but—

"Well, I met Lucy. We fell in love with each other. It just happened. I kept intending to write to the other girl and tell her plainly that everything was off. But I kept postponing it. It seemed like a deuce of a hard job to tackle.

"But, finally, I did write her. That was the very day Lucy promised to throw Prent McMakin over and marry me. You know how determined all your people were that Lucy should marry McMakin, Tom. They had brought her up with the idea that she was going to, and, of course, she was bored with him for that reason.

"We decided the best plan would be to slip away quietly and get married. We knew it would raise a row. But there was bound to be a row anyhow when they found she intended to marry me instead of McMakin. So we figured we might just as well be away from there.

"We left your place early on the morning of October 31, 1888—do you remember the date, Tom? We took the train for Clarksville, Tennessee, and got there about two o'clock that afternoon. I suppose you have been in that interesting centre of the tobacco industry. If you have you may remember that the courthouse of Montgomery County is right across the street from the best hotel. I got a license and a preacher without any trouble, and we were married in the hotel parlour that afternoon. One of the hotel clerks and the county clerk himself were the witnesses.

"We went to Cincinnati and from there to Chicago. There we got rooms out on the South Side—Hyde Park, they called it. And I got me a job. I had some money left, but not enough to buy kohinoors and race-horses with. Beside, I really wanted to get to work—wanted it for the first time in my life. You remember young Clayton in our class? He and some other enterprising citizens had a building and loan association. Such things are no doubt immoral, but I went to work for him.

"We had been in Chicago a week when Lucy wrote home what she had done, and begged forgiveness for being so abrupt about it. At least, I suppose that is what she wrote. It was—"

"I remember exactly what she wrote," says Colonel Tom.

"I never knew exactly," says the doctor. "The same mail that brought word from you that your grandfather had had some sort of a stroke, as a consequence of our elopement, brought also two letters from Emma. They had been forwarded from New York to Tennessee, and you had forwarded them to Chicago.

"Those letters began the trouble. You see, I hadn't told Emma when I wrote breaking off the engagement that I was going to get married the next day. And Emma hadn't received my letter, or else had made up her mind to ignore it. Anyhow, those letters were regular love-letters.

"I hadn't really read one of Emma's letters for months. But somehow I couldn't help reading these. I had forgotten what a gift for the expression of sentiment Emma had. She fairly revelled in it, Tom. Those letters were simply writhing with clinging female adjectives. They SQUIRMED with affection.

"You may remember that Lucy was a rather jealous sort of a person. Right in the midst of her alarm and grief and self-reproach over her grandfather, and in the midst of my efforts to comfort her, she spied the feminine handwriting on those two letters. I had glanced through them hurriedly, and laid them on the table.

"Tom, I was in bad. The dates on them, you know, were so RECENT. I didn't want Lucy to read them. But I didn't dare to ACT as if I didn't want her to. So I handed them over.

"I suppose—to a bride who had only been married a little more than a week—and who had hurt her grandfather nearly to death in the marrying, those letters must have sounded rather odd. I tried to explain. But all my explanations only seemed to make the case worse for me. Lucy was furiously jealous. We really had a devil of a row before we were through with it. I tried to tell her that I loved no one but her. She pointed out that I must have said much the same sort of thing to Emma. She said she was almost as sorry for Emma as she was for herself. When Lucy got through with me, Tom, I looked like thirty cents and felt like twenty-five of that was plugged.

"I didn't have sense enough to know that it was most of it grief over her grandfather, and nerves and hysteria, and the fact that she was only eighteen years old and lonely, and that being a bride had a certain amount to do with it. She had told me that I was a beast, and made me feel like one; and I took the whole thing hard and believed her. I made a fine, five-act tragedy out of a jealous fit I might have softened into comedy if I had had the wit.

"I wasn't so very old myself, and I hadn't ever been married before. I should have kept my mouth shut until it was all over, and then when she began to cry I should have coaxed her up and made her feel like I was the only solid thing to hang on to in the whole world.

"But the bottom had dropped out of the universe for me. She had said she hated me. I was fool enough to believe her. I went downtown and began to drink. I come home late that night. The poor girl had been waiting up for me—waiting for hours, and becoming more and more frightened when I didn't show up. She was over her jealous fit, I suppose. If I had come home in good shape, or in anything like it, we would have made up then and there. But my condition stopped all that. I wasn't so drunk but that I saw her face change when she let me in. She was disgusted.

"In the morning I was sick and feverish. I was more than disgusted with myself. I was in despair. If she had hated me before—and she had said she did—what must she do now? It seemed to me that I had sunk so far beneath her that it would take years to get back. It didn't seem worth while making any plea for myself. You see, I was young and had serious streaks all through me. So when she told me that she had written home again, and was going back—was going to leave me, I didn't see that it was only a bluff. I didn't see that she was really only waiting to forgive me, if I gave her a chance. I started downtown to the building and loan office, wondering when she would leave, and if there was anything I could do to make her change her mind. I must repeat again that I was a fool—that I needed only to speak one word, had I but known it.

"If I had gone straight to work, everything might have come around all right even then. But I didn't. I had that what's-the-use feeling. And I stopped in at the Palmer House bar to get something to sort of pull me together.

"While I was there, who should come up to the bar and order a drink but Prent McMakin."

"Yes!" says Colonel Tom, as near excited as he ever got.

"Yes," says Armstrong, "nobody else. We saw each other in the mirror behind the bar. I don't know whether you ever noticed it or not, Tom, but McMakin's eyes had a way of looking almost like cross-eyes when he was startled or excited. They were a good deal too near together at any time. He gave me such a look when our eyes met in the mirror that, for an instant, I thought that he intended to do me some mischief—shoot me, you know, for taking his bride-to-be away from him, or some fool thing like that. But as we turned toward each other I saw he had no intention of that sort."

"Hadn't he?" says Colonel Tom, mighty interested.

"No," says the doctor, looking at Colonel Tom very puzzled, "did you think he had?"

"Yes, I did," says the colonel, right thoughtful.

"On the contrary," says Armstrong, "we had a drink together. And he congratulated me. Made me quite a little speech, in fact; one of the flowery kind, you know, Tom, and said that he bore me no rancour, and all that."

"The deuce he did!" says Colonel Tom, very low, like he was talking to himself. "And then what?"

"Then," says the doctor, "then—let me see—it's all a long time ago, you know, and McMakin's part in the whole thing isn't really important."

"I'm not so sure it isn't important," says the colonel, "but go on."

"Then," says Armstrong, "we had another drink together. In fact, a lot of them. We got awfully friendly. And like a fool I told him of my quarrel with Lucy."

"LIKE a fool," says Colonel Tom, nodding his head. "Go on."

"There isn't much more to tell," says the doctor, "except that I made a worse idiot of myself yet, and left McMakin about two o'clock in the afternoon, as near as I can recollect. Somewhere about ten o'clock that night I went home. Lucy was gone. I haven't seen her since."

"Dave," says Colonel Tom, "did McMakin happen to mention to you, that day, just why he was in Chicago?"

"I suppose so," says the doctor. "I don't know. Maybe not. That was twenty years ago. Why?"

"Because," says Colonel Tom, very grim and quiet, "because your first thought as to his intention when he met you in the bar was MY idea also. I thought he went to Chicago to settle with you. You see, I got to Chicago that same afternoon."

"The same day?"

"Yes. We were to have come together. But I missed the train, and he got there a day ahead of me. He was waiting at the hotel for me to join him, and then we were going to look you up together. He found you first and I never did find you."

"But I don't exactly understand," says the doctor. "You say he had the idea of shooting me."

"I don't understand everything myself," says Colonel Tom. "But I do understand that Prent McMakin must have played some sort of a two-faced game. He never said a word to me about having seen you.

"Listen," he goes on. "When you and Lucy ran away it nearly killed our grandfather. In fact, it finally did kill him. When we got Lucy's letter that told you were in Chicago I went up to bring her back home. We didn't know what we were going to do, McMakin and I, but we were both agreed that you needed killing. And he swore that he would marry Lucy anyhow, even—"

"MARRY HER!" sings out the doctor, "but we WERE married."

"Dave," Colonel Tom says very slow and steady, "you keep SAYING you were married. But it's strange—it's right STRANGE about that marriage."

And he looked at the doctor hard and close, like he would drag the truth out of him, and the doctor met his look free and open. You would of thought Colonel Tom was saying with his look: "You MUST tell me the truth." And the doctor with his was answering: "I HAVE told you the truth."

"But, Tom," says the doctor, "that letter she wrote you from Chicago must—"

"Do you know what Lucy wrote?" interrupts Colonel Tom. "I remember exactly. It was simply: 'FORGIVE ME. I LOVED HIM SO. I AM HAPPY. I KNOW IT IS WRONG, BUT I LOVE HIM SO YOU MUST FORGIVE ME.'"