. Indeed, he was soon fully substantiated by others who
heard her when she had run home heaping her maledictions on the mill.

Soon among them began the whisper of lynching. As it grew they became
bolder and began to shout it: _Lynch her!_

Jud Carpenter, half drunk and wholly reckless, stood on a stump, and
after telling his day's experience with Mammy Maria, her defiance of
the mill's laws, her arrogance, her burning of the mill, he shouted
that he himself would lead them.

"Lynch her!" they shouted. "Lead us, Jud Carpenter! We will lynch
her."

Some wanted to wait until daylight, but "Lynch her--lynch her now,"
was the shout.

The crowd grew denser every moment.

The people of Cottontown, hot and revengeful, now that their living
was burned; hill dwellers who sympathized with them, and coming in,
were eager for any excitement; the unlawful element which infests
every town--all were there, the idle, the ignorant, the vicious.

And a little viciousness goes a long way.

There had been so many lynchings in the South that it had ceased to
be a crime--for crime, the weed, cultivated--grows into a flower to
those who do the tending.

Many of the lynchings, it is true, were honest--the frenzy of
outraged humanity to avenge a terrible crime which the law, in its
delay, often had let go unpunished. The laxity of the law, the
unscrupulousness of its lawyers, their shrewdness in clearing
criminals if the fee was forthcoming, the hundreds of technicalities
thrown around criminals, the narrowness of supreme courts in
reversing on these technicalities. All these had thrown the law back
to its source--the people. And they had taken it in their own hands.
In violent hands, but deadly sure and retributory.

If there was ever an excuse for lynching, the South was entitled to
it. For the crime was the result of the sudden emancipation of
ignorant slaves, who, backed by the bayonets of their liberators, and
attributing a far greater importance to their elevation than was
warranted, perpetuated an unnameable crime as part of their system of
revenge for years of slavery. And the South arose to the terribleness
of the crime and met it with the rifle, the torch and the rope.

Why should it be wondered at? Why should the South be singled out
for blame? Is it not a fact that for years in every newly settled
western state lynch-law has been the unchallenged, unanimous verdict
for a horse thief? And is not the honor of a white wom