itch-pine torches danced with infernal effect. Peter Champneys
watched it, his soul revolting. He had no sympathy for Jake; he felt
for him nothing but hatred. He couldn't think of that gay and
innocent girl coming down the corn-field path, unafraid--to meet
what she had met--without a suffocating sense of rage. She had been,
Peter remembered, a very pretty girl, a girl who, as Neptune had
said, used to sing, and laugh, and say her prayers, and trust
Almighty God.

But Peter was seeing now the other side of that awful cloud which
darkens the horizon of the South--the brute beast mob-vengeance that
follows swiftly upon the heels of the unpardonable sin. There must
be justice. But what was happening now wasn't justice. It was stark
barbarism let loose.

Neptune, who had "helped raise" Jake, had meted out to him justice
full and sure. He had avenged both the wronged white and the wronged
black people. Peter looked at the men in the cabin clearing, and saw
the thing nakedly, and from both angles. For instance, consider
Mosely, who had done things--with a clasp-knife. And that other man,
the farm-hand, shifty-eyed and mean, always half drunk, a bad
citizen: _they_ would be sure to be foremost in affairs like this.
They had precious little respect for the law as law. And here they
were, making the holy night indecent with bestial behavior. Again a
sick qualm shook Peter: Mosely was calmly putting four severed black
fingers into his coat pocket. Oh, where was the sheriff? Why didn't
the sheriff come?

Peter caught a glimpse of a shapeless, battered, gory mass under
trampling feet. Maddened by the little they were able to accomplish,
and with the torture-lust that is as old as humanity itself roused
to fury by frustration, the posse turned from that which had been
Jake, to old Neptune, standing motionless by his doorway. Neptune
had not moved or spoken since Peter had answered the posse's
questions. He had not even appeared to hear the vile abuse heaped
upon him. He was not in the least afraid for his life: He was beyond
that. That which had happened, which was happening, had dealt the
stern, simple-hearted old man so mighty a blow that his faculties
were stunned. He couldn't think. He could only suffer a bewildered,
baffled torment. He stood there, dumb as a sheep before the
slaughterers, and the sight of his black face maddened the men who
were out to avenge a black man's monstrous crime.

"Hang the damn nigger!" scream