times 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 a