“Murder,” says the doctor, “is murder--illegal killing--and you can't make anything else out of it, or talk anything else into it.” It come to me all to oncet that that ugly spider was swinging back and forth like the pendulum on a clock, and marking time. I wondered how much time they was left in the world. “It would be none the less a murder,” said the pock-marked man, “if you were to be hanged after a trial in some county court. Society had been obliged to deny the privilege of committing murder to the individual and reserve it for the community. If our communal sense says you should die, the thing is neither better nor worse than if a sheriff hanged you.” “I am not to be hanged by a sheriff,” says the doctor, very cool and steady, “because I have committed no crime. I am not to be killed by you because you dare not, in spite of all you say, outrage the law to that extent.” And they looked each other in the eyes so long and hard that every one else in the schoolhouse held their breath. “_Dare_ not?” says the pock-marked man. And he reached forward slow and took that spider in his hand, and crushed it there, and wiped his hand along his pants leg. “Dare not? _Yes, but we dare_. The only question for us men here is whether we dare to let you go free.” “Your defence of lynching,” says Doctor Kirby, “shows that you, at least, are a man who can think. Tell me what I am accused of?” And then the trial begun in earnest. CHAPTER XX The doctor acted as his own lawyer, and the pock-marked man, whose name was Grimes, as the lawyer agin us. You could see that crowd had made up its mind before-hand, and was only giving us what they called a trial to satisfy their own conscience. But the fight was betwixt Grimes and Doctor Kirby the hull way through. One witness was a feller that had been in the hotel at Cottonville the night we struck that place. We had drunk some of his licker. “This man admitted himself that he was here to turn the niggers white,” said the witness. Doctor Kirby had told 'em what kind of medicine he was selling. We both remembered it. We both had to admit it. The next witness was the feller that run the tavern at Bairdstown. He had with him, fur proof, a bottle of the stuff we had brought with us. He told how we had went away and left it there that very morning. Another witness told of seeing the doctor talking in the road to that there nigger bishop. Which any one could of seen it easy enough, fur they wasn't nothing secret about it. We had met him by accident. But you could see it made agin us.