The other man pressed his hand: "Ned, I believe it--I believe it. Go back to your little home to-night. Your daughter is safe. To-morrow you may begin all over again. To-morrow--" "And you, Dick--I have heard--I can guess, but why may not you, to-morrow--" "There will be no to-morrow for me," he said sadly. "Things stop suddenly before me to-night as before an abyss--" He turned quickly and looked toward the low lying range of mountains. A great red flush as of a rising sun glowed even beyond the rim of them, and then out of it shot tinges of flame. Conway saw it at the same instant: "It's the mill--the mill's afire," he said. CHAPTER XXII A CONWAY AGAIN It was a great fire the mill made, lighting the valley for miles. All Cottontown was there to see it burn, hushed, with set faces, some of anger, some of fear--but all in stricken numbness, knowing that their living was gone. It was not long before Jud Carpenter was among them, stirring them with the story of how the old negro woman had burned it--for he knew it was she. Indeed, he was soon fully substantiated by others who heard her when she had run home heaping her maledictions on the mill. Soon among them began the whisper of lynching. As it grew they became bolder and began to shout it: _Lynch her!_ Jud Carpenter, half drunk and wholly reckless, stood on a stump, and after telling his day's experience with Mammy Maria, her defiance of the mill's laws, her arrogance, her burning of the mill, he shouted that he himself would lead them. "Lynch her!" they shouted. "Lead us, Jud Carpenter! We will lynch her." Some wanted to wait until daylight, but "Lynch her--lynch her now," was the shout. The crowd grew denser every moment. The people of Cottontown, hot and revengeful, now that their living was burned; hill dwellers who sympathized with them, and coming in, were eager for any excitement; the unlawful element which infests every town--all were there, the idle, the ignorant, the vicious. And a little viciousness goes a long way. There had been so many lynchings in the South that it had ceased to be a crime--for crime, the weed, cultivated--grows into a flower to those who do the tending. Many of the lynchings, it is true, were honest--the frenzy of outraged humanity to avenge a terrible crime which the law, in its delay, often had let go unpunished. The laxity of the law, the unscrupulousness of its lawyers, their shrewdness in clearing criminals if the fee was forthcoming, the hundreds of technicalities thrown around criminals, the narrowness of supreme courts in reversing on these technicalities. All these had thrown the law back to its source--the people. And they had taken it in their own hands. In violent hands, but deadly sure and retributory.