“No doubt he will be punished as he deserves, Jerry,” returned the general, “and we will see that you are suitably rewarded. Go across the street and get me three Calhoun cocktails. I seem to have nothing less than a two-dollar bill, but you may keep the change, Jerry—all the change.”
Jerry was very happy. He had distinguished himself in the public view, for to Jerry, as to the white people themselves, the white people were the public. He had won the goodwill of the best people, and had already begun to reap a tangible reward. It is true that several strange white men looked at him with lowering brows as he crossed the street, which was curiously empty of colored people; but he nevertheless went firmly forward, panoplied in the consciousness of his own rectitude, and serenely confident of the protection of the major and the major’s friends.
“Jerry is about the only negro I have seen since nine o’clock,” observed the general when the porter had gone. “If this were election day, where would the negro vote be?”
“In hiding, where most of the negro population is today,” answered McBane. “It’s a pity, if old Mrs. Ochiltree had to go this way, that it couldn’t have been deferred a month or six weeks.” Carteret frowned at this remark, which, coming from McBane, seemed lacking in human feeling, as well as in respect to his wife’s dead relative.
“But,” resumed the general, “if this negro is lynched, as he well deserves to be, it will not be without its effect. We still have in reserve for the election a weapon which this affair will only render more effective. What became of the piece in the negro paper?”
“I have it here,” answered Carteret. “I was just about to use it as the text for an editorial.”
“Save it awhile longer,” responded the general. “This crime itself will give you text enough for a four-volume work.”
When this conference ended, Carteret immediately put into press an extra edition of the Morning Chronicle, which was soon upon the streets, giving details of the crime, which was characterized as an atrocious assault upon a defenseless old lady, whose age and sex would have protected her from harm at the hands of anyone but a brute in the lowest human form. This event, the Chronicle suggested, had only confirmed the opinion, which had been of late growing upon the white people, that drastic efforts were necessary to protect the white women of the South against brutal, lascivious, and murderous assaults at the hands of negro men. It was only another significant example of the results which might have been foreseen from the application of a false and pernicious political theory, by which ignorance, clothed in a little brief authority, was sought to be exalted over knowledge, vice over virtue, an inferior and degraded race above the heaven-crowned Anglo-Saxon. If an outraged people, justly infuriated, and impatient of the slow processes of the courts, should assert their inherent sovereignty, which the law after all was merely intended to embody, and should choose, in obedience to the higher law, to set aside, temporarily, the ordinary judicial procedure, it would serve as a warning and an example to the vicious elements of the community, of the swift and terrible punishment which would fall, like the judgment of God, upon anyone who laid sacrilegious hands upon white womanhood.
XXII
How Not to Prevent a Lynching
Dr. Miller, who had sat up late the night before with a difficult case at the hospital, was roused, about eleven o’clock, from a deep and dreamless sleep. Struggling back into consciousness, he was informed by his wife, who stood by his bedside, that Mr. Watson, the colored lawyer, wished to see him upon a matter of great importance.
“Nothing but a matter of life and death would make me get up just now,” he said with a portentous yawn.
“This is a matter of life and death,” replied Janet. “Old Mrs. Polly Ochiltree was robbed and murdered last night, and Sandy Campbell has been arrested for the crime—and they are going to lynch him!”
“Tell Watson to come right up,” exclaimed Miller, springing out of bed. “We can talk while I’m dressing.”
While Miller made a hasty toilet Watson explained the situation. Campbell had been arrested on the charge of murder. He had been seen, during the night, in the neighborhood of the scene of the crime, by two different persons, a negro and a white man, and had been identified later while entering Mr. Delamere’s house, where he lived, and where damning proofs of his guilt had been discovered; the most important item of which was an old-fashioned knit silk purse, recognized as Mrs. Ochiltree’s, and several gold pieces of early coinage, of which the murdered woman was known to have a number. Watson brought with him one of the first copies procurable of the extra edition of the Chronicle, which contained these facts and further information.
They were still talking when Mrs. Miller, knocking at the door, announced that big Josh Green wished to see the doctor about Sandy Campbell. Miller took his collar and necktie in his hand and went downstairs, where Josh sat waiting.
“Doctuh,” said Green, “de w’ite folks is talkin’ ’bout lynchin’ Sandy Campbell fer killin’ ole Mis’ Ochiltree. He never done it, an’ dey oughtn’ ter be ’lowed ter lynch ’im.”
“They ought not to lynch him, even if he committed the crime,” returned Miller, “but still less if he didn’t. What do you know about it?”
“I know he was wid me, suh, las’ night, at de time when dey say ole Mis’ Ochiltree wuz killed. We wuz down ter Sam Taylor’s place, havin’ a little game of kyards an’ a little liquor. Den we lef dere an’ went up ez fur ez de corner er Main an’ Vine Streets, where
