ry, 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 nothi