Low muttering was heard throughout the crowd as men turned to one another to make comment on the statement. In its incipiency it meant no more, perhaps, than that reason, hard driven by rising emotion, was honestly striving to keep the equitable poise which had recently governed it, but it sounded to the thoughtless, inflammable element like sullen, swelling acquiescence to the bitter charges, and they took it up. Wiggin paused, drank from the tumbler, and watched his flashing fuse in its sinuous course through the assemblage. Mrs. Parsons was near the edge of the platform, and Pole Baker, rising from the grass near by, where he had been coolly whittling a stick, stealthily approached her. “Great goodness, Mrs. Parsons,” he whispered in her ear, “that skunk is cutting a wide swath to-day, sure! He could git up a lynching-bee right here in five minutes if he had any sort of material. The only thing of the right color is that old woman selling ginger-cakes and cider at the spring. Don't you think I'd better slip down and tell her to go home?” “It might save the old thing's neck,” Mrs. Parsons answered, in the same half-amused spirit. “If he keeps on I don't think I'll be able to hold my seat. Why don't you say something?” “Me? Oh, I ain't no public speaker, Mrs. Parsons. That oily gab of Wiggin's would twist me into a hundred knots, and Carson Dwight would cuss me out for making matters worse. I never feel like talking unless I'm drunk, and then I'm tongue-tied.” “Well, I don't git drunk and I don't git tongue-tied!” grunted Mrs. Parsons; “and I tell you, Pole, if that fool keeps on I'll either talk or bust.” “Well, don't bust--we need women like you right now,” Baker smiled. “But the truth is, if some'n' ain't done for our side this thing will sweep Carson Dwight clean out of the field.” “Yes, because men are born fools,” retorted the woman. “Look at their faces, the last one of them right now is mad enough to lynch a nigger baby, and a _gal_ baby at that.” With a laugh, Pole went back to his seat on the grass for Wiggin was thundering again. “What happened _next!_” he demanded, bending over his table, a hand on each end of it, his keen, alert eyes sweeping like twin search-lights into the deeps of the countenances turned to him. “Why, just this and nothing more. Knowing that the jack-leg lawyers of that measly town would clog the wheels of justice for their puny fees, and hold those fiends over for other hellishness, some of you rose and took the law into your own hands. You jerked one to glory as quick as you laid hands on him, and part of you were hard on the track of his mate, when my honorable opponent, not wanting to lose the fee he was to get for pulling the case through, met the mob and managed, by a lot of grand-stand playing and solemn promises to see that the negro was legally tried, to put him in jail.