He stepped through the inner door and the negro Jim followed him, steering the manacled little negro. Quarles, the constable, and the deputy sheriff tagged behind to see their catch properly caged. They went along a short corridor, filled with a stifling, baked heat and heavy with the smell of penned-up creatures. There were faces at the barred doors of the cells that lined one side of this corridor--all black or yellow faces except one white one; and from these cells came no sound at all as the three white men and the two negroes passed. Only the lone white prisoner spoke out. “Who is he, Dink?” he called eagerly. “What's he done?” “Shut up!” ordered his keeper briefly, and that was the only answer he made. At the far end of the passage Bynum turned a key in a creaky lock and threw back the barred door of an inner cell, sheathed with iron and lacking a window. The trusty shoved in the little handcuffed negro and the negro groveled on the wooden floor upon all fours. Bynum locked the door and the three white men tramped back through the silent corridor, followed by the sets of white eyes that stared out unwinkingly at them through the iron-latticed grills. It was significant that from the time of the arrival at the jail not one of the whites had laid his hands actually upon the prisoner. “Well, boys,” said Bynum to the others by way of a farewell, “there he is and there he'll stay--unless than Massac Creek folks come and git him. You've done your sworn duty and I've done mine. I locked him up and I won't be responsible for what happens now. I know this much--I ain't goin' to git myself crippled up savin' that nigger. If a mob wants to come let 'em come on!” No mob came from Massac that night or the next night either; and on the second day there was a big basket picnic and rally under a brush arbor at the Shady Grove schoolhouse--the biggest meeting of the whole campaign it was to be, with speaking, and the silver cornet band out from town to make music, and the oldest living Democrat in the county sitting on the platform, and all that. Braving the piled-on layers of heat that rode the parched country like witch-hags half the town went to Shady Grove. Nearly everybody went that could travel. All the morning wagons and buggies were clattering out of town, headed toward the west. And in the cooking dead calm of the midaftemoon the mob from Massac came.