“You've gone far enough, Carson,” he said. “There are limits even to the deepest friendship. You can't ask your best friends to make their wives widows and their children orphans in a blind effort to save the neck of one miserable negro, even if he's as innocent as the angels in heaven. As for yourself, your heroism has almost led you into a cesspool of reckless absurdity. You have let that old man and woman up there, and Miss--that old man and woman, _anyway_--work on your sympathies till you have lost your usual judgment. I'm your friend and--” “Stop! Wait!” Carson stood up, his hands on the edge of the table, the lamp beneath him throwing his mobile face into the shadow of his firm, massive jaw. “Stop!” he repeated. “You say you have given up. Boys, I can't. I tell you I _can't_. I simply can't let them kill that boy. Every nerve in my body, every pulsation of my soul screams out against it. I have set my heart on averting this horror. Ten years ago I could have gone to my bed and slept peacefully, as many good citizens of this town will to-night, under the knowledge that the verdict of mob law was to be executed, but in the handling of this case I've had a new birth. There is no God in heaven if--I say if--He has not made it _possible_ for the mind and will of man to prevent this horror. There must be a way; there _is_ a way, and if I could put my ideas into your brains to-night--my faith and confidence into your souls--we'd prevent this calamity and set an example for our fellows to follow in future.” “Your ideas into our brains!” Garner said, in a tone of amused resentment. “Well, I like that, Carson; but if you can see a ghost of a chance to save that boy's neck with safety to our own, I'd like to have you plug it through my skull, if you have to do it with a steel drill. At present I'm the senior member of the firm of Garner & Dwight, but I'll take second place hereafter, if you can do what you are aiming at.” “I don't mean to reflect on your intelligences,” Dwight went on, passionately, his voice rising higher, “but I _do_ see a way, and I am praying God at this moment to make you see it as I do and be willing to help me carry it out.” “Blaze away, old hoss,” Pole Baker piped up from his seat on the nail keg. “I'm not a nigger-lover by a long shot, but somehow, seeing how you feel about this particular one an' his connections, I'm as anxious to save 'im as if I owned 'im in the good old day an' his sort was fetchin' two thousand apiece. You go ahead. I feel kind o' sneakin', anyway, for votin' agin you while you was up thar nursin' yore sick mammy. By gum! you give me the end of a log I kin tote, an' I'll do it or break my back.” “I want it understood, Carson,” said Wade Tingle at this juncture, “that I was only voting against our trying to stop that mob by force, and, to do myself justice, I was voting in the interests of the family men here to-night. God knows, if you can see any _other_ possible way--”