HAT morning at the usual hour the store-keepers opened their dingy houses in the main street and placed along the narrow brick sidewalks the dusty, stock-worn samples of their wares. The clerks and porters as they swept the floors would pause to discuss the happening of the night just gone. Old Uncle Lewis and Mammy Linda Warren's boy had been summarily dealt with, that was all. The longer word just used had of late years become a part of the narrowest vocabulary, suggesting to crude minds many meanings not thought of by lexicographers, not the least of which was something pertaining to justice far-reaching, grim, and unfailing in these days of bribery and graft. Only a few of the more analytical and philosophical ventured to ask themselves if, after all, the boy might have been innocent. If they put the question to the average citizen it was tossed off with a shrug and a “Well, what's the difference? It's such talk as he was guilty of that is at the bottom of all the black crimes throughout the South.” Such venom as Pete's was the very muscle of the black claws that were everywhere reaching out for helpless white throats. Dead? Yes, he was dead. What of it? How else was the black, constantly increasing torrent to be dammed? And yet by ten o'clock that morning even these tongues were silenced, for news strange and startling began to steal in from the mountains. The party who had been in pursuit of the desperado Sam Dudlow had overtaken him--found him hiding in a bam, covered with hay. He was unarmed and made no resistance, laughing as if the whole thing were a joke. He frankly told them that he would have given himself up earlier, but he had hoped to live long enough to get even with the other leader of the mob that had whipped him at Darley, a certain Dan Willis. He confessed in detail exactly how he had murdered the Johnsons and that he had done it alone. Pete Warren was in no way implicated in it. The lynchers, to get the whole truth, threatened him; they tortured him; they tied him to a tree and piled pine fagots about him, but he still stuck to his statement, and when they had mercifully riddled him with bullets, just as his clothing was igniting, they left him hanging by the road-side, a grewsome scarecrow as a warning to his kind, and, led by Jabe Parsons, they made all haste to reach the faction on Pete Warren's track to tell them that the boy was innocent. Jabe Parsons, carrying a load on his mind, remembering his wife's valiant stand in behalf of the younger accused, rode faster than his tired fellows, and near his own farm met the lynchers returning from Darley. “Too late,” they told him, in response to his news, the Hillbend boys had done away with the Darley jailbird and mysteriously hidden the body to inspire fear among the negroes. At Darley consternation swept the place as story after story of Aunt Linda's prostration passed from house to house. “Poor, faithful old woman! Poor old Uncle Lewis!” was heard on every side.