“I expected that,” Ulloa answered quietly. “You and the other two deputies arm yourselves with rifles and hide in the tower of the court-house overlooking the front of the jail.” “What must we do?” the deputy asked tremulously. “Shoot?” “Do your duty!” Ulloa replied shortly, “whatever you conceive it to be.” He turned and entered the jail, locking the door behind him. “Boss,” Mustard Prophet called down to him, “me an’ Pap lef’ our toot-hawns down-stairs. Please, suh, fotch us up de cawnet an’ de trombone!” With a grim smile the sheriff complied with the request. “You niggers better play the _Dead March in Saul_,” he muttered grimly. “It’ll be appropriate all right.” “Us ain’t ’quainted wid dat toon,” Pap grinned, reaching for his trombone. “But me an’ Mustard kin shore fetch ragtime and religion songs.” In the meantime, in the far end of the town, sixty excited men had supplied themselves with enough rope to hang a man from a not too distant star; had armed themselves with knives and hatchets and axes, with guns and pistols; had appointed their leader, Barto Skaggs, a man of swarthy complexion, a grim mouth, surmounted by a black mustache, and intense, glowing black eyes, which pressed hard against the lids and showed a great deal of white beneath the pupil--the eyes of the wanton destroyer. “Keep together, men!” Barto Skaggs advised. “When one man acts everybody act with him. Come on!” With the first forward step of the mob a tall, gangling, half-wit boy, with a long neck, a step-ladder head, a long sharp nose, and a receding chin, and a loose-lipped mouth which dribbled tobacco-juice as he spoke, began to repeat like a chant: “Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers!” His harsh, crackly, gosling voice, uttering every word with a jerk, soon took the monotonous roll of a snaredrum. Unconsciously the men kept step to the words and the purpose expressed in the sentence was burned into the very fiber of their souls: “Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers!” Turning into the street which led to the jail two blocks away, the mob rounded the Confederate Circle, in the center of which was a ridiculous, stump-legged, pewter image of a man, too short in its stride for glory, but, nevertheless, erected by a grateful populace as a monument of glory to commemorate the heroes of the South. Then Sheriff Ulloa stepped out of the jail, locked the door behind him, tossed the key as far as he could throw it into some high weeds growing at the side of the prison, and waited. It was not necessary for the leader and spokesman to explain to the officer of the law the purpose of their visit. Fully a block away the half-wit’s strident voice, having gained in volume by the constant repetition of the phrase, conveyed the message in tones which crackled like thorns under a pot: “Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git----” The mob halted.