With the first frightened cry Sheriff Ulloa knew that it would be impossible to disperse the crowd before him. The scream of the quarry only stimulates the pursuit of the wolf-pack. For two dreadful minutes the negroes sobbed and prayed; then Mustard Prophet turned shudderingly away from the window and, going to a window on the side of the jail, knelt at the casement and wept like a child, looking up now and then with fear-crazed eyes at the silent statue of the pewter hero of the Lost Cause. Then while the grim sheriff stood poised and ready, fronting alone the crouching crowd of eager men, the shrill note of an automobile horn was heard and an immense machine whirled around the Confederate Circle and came sailing down the street toward the jail. One block distant it stopped--abruptly. The white-haired, white-bearded man at the steering-wheel gazed down the street in surprise. The scene was too familiar to require explanation. Leaping from the car, he walked slowly and cautiously down the street. Then, up in the second story of the jail, Mustard Prophet leaped to his feet sobbing, praying, shrieking in a perfect frenzy of hope and fear. “Oh, my Lawd!” he exclaimed. “_Dar’s Marse Tom!_” Grabbing his cornet like a drowning man clutches at a straw, he placed it to his quivering lips. Loud and clear, throbbing with the eagerness of hope, the courage of despair, the strains of music became almost articulate speaking the words of a song: All de world am sad and dreary, Eberywhere I roam; Oh, darkies, how my heart grows weary, Far from de old folks at home! The god Mars, who had witnessed many warlike scenes in Louisiana, never beheld an incident so grotesquely dramatic as this. In front of the jail, grim, white-faced, desperate, determined to end his life right there, and perfectly sure that the end was near, stood Sheriff Ulloa. In the middle of the street, a mob, bloodthirsty and cruel, listening raveningly to the frightened screams of their quarry, and eager for the kill. Up the street, a man serenely observant, apparently indifferent to what was transpiring before his very eyes; while within the jail two strangling, fear-choked negroes whose breath was like the exhaust of an engine and whose hearts beat in their breasts like war-drums, sobbed and screamed and prayed and one of them played on a cornet _Old Folks at Home_! Not since the poor, pitiful, dissipated author of that sweet folk-song stumbled over the ragged carpet in his miserable room in the Bowery, struck his head against his broken water-pitcher, bled to death upon the floor, and was carried to his grave while his friends sang his favorite song, had these words and their music been associated with so dramatic an event. “Fer Gawd’s sake, Pap!” Mustard sobbed. “Come here an’ he’p me play dis toon! Don’t you see Marse Tom standin’ on dat cornder? Play, nigger, play! Say yo’ prayers in dat hawn when you toot it!”