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 nightm