big house, and in the distance ancient, tumble-down quarters. But no one lives in the quarters, and in the big house few and poor beside what used to be. Harrison Laurie still owned five hundred acres, if you can call it owning when there are mortgages up to the hat-brim.

The Cottonville people come from all over. The greater number are Southern, but there 's north of Mason and Dixon's, Middle West, and so forth.

Some foreigners; not many. Negroes, naturally, but not in the mill. We don't mix labor there; can't. But they drive the company's teams, and they 're in Pleasantly and on the railroad and the boats of the Choccawalla. They have a settlement called Washington down on End-of-Creek, a mile away. Out in the country they 're everywhere in the corn and cotton. There are cabins enough. The South, you know--make the image yourself.

Owen Adams was a Northern fellow, nephew of the manager of the Cottonville mill. When he was n't fishing or dawdling with some woman in Pleasantly or out at Harrison Laurie's, he sat in his uncle's office at the mill. If he had n't been a nephew, it is doubtful if the company would have found his services forever and eternally valuable. There had been some row at college, but college was well behind him. He might have been thirty when the lynching happened.

He ran with Harrison Laurie, far North and far South, New England and Dixie. Laurie was the older man. Jim Nicholls hailed from the Middle West. Jim was long and red, and as dry as tinder in August. Occasionally he gambled, and liquor could turn him into a fighting devil; but three hundred and forty days out of the year he was

a still man and a good druggist. Tom Wherry had come east from Nevada when he was sixteen. Various places east and south, and at last Cottonville, where he was ticket man at the X. & Y. station.

Those were the four, Harrison Laurie, Owen Adams, Jim Nicholls, and Tom Wherry. If they were n't all the leaders, they were certainly among the leaders. It 's known, for all that the court could n't discover it!

The old Laurie place hid itself away until you were almost upon it. The trees around had been growing for Lord knows how long, and they were all hung with Spanish moss. One heard the dogs before one saw the house. When seen, it proved to be dilapidated enough. It belonged to Harrison Laurie, and he belonged to it. It had gone down, and he had gone down. There was an air as though they had been going down for ages and were carrying it off together. He was a long, thin man, Harrison Laurie, with a long, thin face, wearing tolerably white clothes in summer, and a wide white hat and carrying a cane. Or one saw him on horseback, and there he looked best. He had his good points; a reading man, and powerfully fond of that great dog of his, Canute.

Laurie's Bayou is as crooked as a zed. The road to Lane skirts it, then passes Dargan's house. It's a big double cabin and sets right in the cotton, with some heaven-trees around it, and sunflowers and the like. Dargan's wife planted them.

Dargan's wife was still young, a quiet woman who did her work well. She had been pretty; there was a kind of gentleness about her. She liked out of doors, they said, and, when she could, would wander through the

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BURGMFIED BINDE

cotton or sit for an hour under the pine-trees or down by the bayou, where it 's all great cypresses. Often she was alone in the house. John Dargan had his thirty acres to look after, or he went to Lane or to Cottonville in his mortal old car. His sister lived with them, but she had a way of visiting for two or three days at a time Matthew Dargan's people over in Jessamine. So there might be hours when no one was around. John Dargan had two dogs, but they always followed that car.

$2

It happened in July. Dargan, returning from Jessamine with his sister, hunted for his wife for two hours, then roused the neighborhood. At last they found her in the thick wood by the bayou, where she had been left for dead. They carried her to the house. A little life came crawling back, just enough to tell and to say good-by and after a day and a night sigh itself away. They got the doctor from Pleasantly. He held her here for so long, and that was all.

They were hunting for the negro. Two hundred persons had suddenly started up and were hunting him-the sheriff and his posse and all these others.

A big negro who worked on the railroad-Jim Lizard they called him. He was found in the cane beside Big Bayou. It was the sheriff who put down his arms and yanked him out. Sheriff wanted to get him to Pleasantly and into jail right away, before the crowd knew that he had been found. So they hurried him to Dargan's to see if she was still alive and could identify. Of course he swore that 't was n't him. He had been up river,

and was coming home when he heard all the fuss, and got frightened because he had picked up and spent a tendollar bill that fell out of a car window and said nothing about it. He thought it might be that, and got rattled, and just turned off the road and laid low beside Big Bayou. "Fo' Gawd, that's so, Mr. Smith."

She was about gone when they brought him. They had to hold John Dargan. Her eyes were glazing. It's likely enough that she hardly knew what was wanted. But the sheriff got her to answer something. "It was a black man?" "Yes." "A big man?" "Yes. Yes, he had on a blue shirt. No, I can't see. It's all a dark cloud. Voice? Yes, I reckon that 's his voice. I reckon it is. It 's terribleO God!" And she died, sinking down between our hands.

It's hard to tell; perhaps it was identification.

The sheriff considered that it would hang Jim Lizard; he wanted to get him away before the crowd could collect. So they put him on a horse and galloped him into Pleasantly and to the jail.

It's a strong enough jail to look at, and Smith's a strong sheriff.

That was Wednesday. Farrar, the physician who had tended her, went back to Pleasantly. Something was in the air; he thought he knew the taste of it. About sunset he walked down High Street, wanting something from Nicholls's drug-store. Owen Adams caught up with him. "Hot weather, doctor!" "Yes."

"This place blazes! Harrison Laurie's the only cool spot, behind his great trees. I'm going out there in the morning." They walked a little way, then Owen said in a kind of re

mote and dreamy voice, "The law 's too slow!"

"I don't know about that."
"I do. We 've got to-"

"No, we have n't got to," said the doctor. "Don't let the climate get into your brain! Here's Nicholls. Come in and have something cool to drink." But, no; there was something he must get from the office. He went on, and Farrar turned into the drug-store. There were men inside, and they and Jim Nicholls had been talking. They stopped when he entered, and one said, "Hot weather, doctor!"

Jim Nicholls had been drinking. Farrar thought, "I'll watch you fill that prescription," and did so.

Forth from the place,-it was past sunset now, he made out a crowd before Thompson's livery. As he neared it he heard Tom Wherry haranguing. Owen Adams had not gone to the office; he was here, leaning in his big-shouldered, handsome way against the oak before Thompson's. Farrar thought he would go hear the harangue; then a distaste seized him, and he turned in the other direction.

Night came down hot and close, with a sense of storm. As the physician turned in at his own door a voice floated to him from the street:

"Three to one they 'll lynch that negro!"

Town and country-the thing brewed that night and the next day. A number, known and unknown, were concerned in that lynching, but Harrison Laurie, Owen Adams, who ran with him, Jim Nicholls, and Tom Wherry were certainly concerned. Of course the day afterward nobody remembered or recognized anybody. That's in the convention; but all the

same

Hot and still. Owen Adams had ridden his black horse Firefly out to Harrison Laurie's. Farrar, the doctor, going by the office, was told so. Old Miller crossed the street with him.

"There's been a lot of talking and gesturing to-day! Jim Nicholls at the drug-store-he 's drinking-is doing his share, and Tom Wherry is doing his. Cottonville and Pleasantly have got their roughness and thick, hot blood just the same as elsewhere." Sunset came with a great dark, long finger of cloud pointing out over the red sun. Dusk fell, and the fireflies were thick that evening.

§ 3

It might have been eleven o'clock when Harrison Laurie rode into town, with him maybe thirty mounted men. A number were masked. As the county said afterward, it would be guesswork! The sheriff on the witnessstand named half a dozen, but the court could n't find corroborative evidence. It's known, all the same.

Owen Adams rode beside Laurie. Jim Nicholls and Tom Wherry brought the town crowd to join the horsemen. It was all arranged.

Farrar heard the noise about midnight. He got up and dressed and went out. A neighbor out under the stars accosted him.

"Lynching, that 's what it is! No, I don't approve; but what can you do?" The street had a sound of running feet. Youths, boys, went by. "Come on! It 's at the jail!"

Farrar thought to himself, "Well, I'll go see; but one man can't tame the lions!"

The vindicators and regulators were massed before the jail and the sheriff's house, built alongside. The crowd

Jesus, right here listenin' to me, I was! Don't you drop that fire in those leaves! O Gawd!"

One of the four men lighted the pile. They say it was Harrison Laurie. The cane blazed up, and the night turned red and horribly loudlike hell.

When it was over, here was the dawn stealing in. There were ashes and the gray, dead trees, and the cold light creeping toward them, and they all looked shrunken and frayed and ashen themselves-the fields and Dargan's house and the girdled trees and the bayou and the stake and the crowd.

The crowd was to dissolve into twos or threes or ones and go off in this and that and the other direction, stealing through country or in a roundabout way back to town. And everybody forgot that he saw anybody else, and everybody produced an alibi-made an "elsewhere" all by himself and stood to it. Those who were n't concerned produced an outcry, but it died down. The thing was all through the community. Nobody liked to say, "No, I have n't got the sickness, but there's my nephew or my second cousin or my neighbor or the man I owe money to who ought to be quarantined!" So it went. By sun-up there were just the cotton-fields and John Dargan's house and, near the bayou, a heap of ashes. There was n't anywhere a mob. It had vanished off the face of the earth.

It came on to be a hot, still day, and Tom Wherry was quietly selling tickets for the noon train, and Jim Nicholls was sobering up in the drug-store and talking to a drummer who had a line of fancy goods, and Owen Adams was reading a New York paper in

Robert Adams's office. Probably Harrison Laurie was sleeping, he being about the only one who did n't have to account for himself, there in his old castle behind the trees and the Spanish moss. That was all, in the sense that no one went to Magnolia County jail.

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Owen Adams sat in Robert Adams's office, reading the Northern paper. It was the second morning after the field out by Dargan's. He read with some particularity of a flower show, a wedding, and a boat-race, and then he dropped the paper into the wastebasket, stretched himself, and rose. His uncle was not in the office. Over by the north window young Wilson typed letters.

"Tell my uncle, will you," said Owen, "that I promised to help Mrs. Linley fix things for her children's party?"

Young Wilson nodded. Owen, turning to go, felt suddenly a diffused malaise. He might have said, had he ever used such words, that subconsciously it had been present for some time. Just how long it was impossible to say; perhaps for a night and a day. But now it stepped into consciousness. There was no localizing it; it simply was there, all through.

"Go play and forget it." He had listened to that advice through much of his life, so now he left the office, caught the street car that went up and down between Cottonville and Pleasantly, and presently was advising Mrs. Linley how the tables should be placed, so that they would get the magnolia shade and view the crapemyrtles.

For the rest of the day he thought he had forgotten it or crowded it out,