"Law?" cried Blount, fiercely, "_we_ were the law! We sent for that nigger sheriff--the one they elected for a joke--hell of a joke, wasn't it?--and he wouldn't come. We had with us the old sheriff, Jim Peters, a good officer in this county, as you know, before now. We had with us every white voter in this precinct, every tax-payer. We found them, these levee-cutting, house-burning fools, right at their work. We left some of them dead there, and run some into the cane, and we took the balance over to that church of theirs which you saw. The water wasn't so high then as you say it is now. There was a regular fight, and the niggers were plumb desperate. They had guns. Jim Bowles, down below here, was shot pretty bad, though I reckon he'll get well. I was shot, too--not bad, but enough to make me some dizzy. Jim Peters--and I reckon he was the real officer of the law-- was shot, too, so bad that he died pretty soon. Now I reckon you can tell what we found to be at the bottom of this, and who it was that's been making all this deviltry here for years." "Delphine!" "It was nobody else," said Blount. "You talk about human tigers, and fiends, and all that kind of thing; that woman beat anything I ever did see or hear of. She was brave as a lion. Peters and Bowles and I closed in on her, wanting to take her, but she fought like a man, and a brave one. She had two six-shooters, and she dropped us, all three of us; and then before the others could close in on her, she turned loose on herself, and killed herself dead as hell. She didn't see the finish of the others." Eddring buried his face in his hands and inwardly thanked Providence that he himself had not been present at such a scene.