d and
made her way through the group about the bed, waving the others aside
imperiously.

"It is my Christian duty," she said solemnly, "to lay Sis' Pease out,
an' I's gwine do it." She bent over the bed. Now there are a dozen
truthful women who will vouch for the truth of what happened. When Nancy
leaned over the bed, as if in obedience to the power of an electric
shock, the corpse's eyes flew open, Ann Pease rose up in bed and
pointing a trembling finger at her frightened namesake exclaimed: "Go
'way f'om me, Nancy Rogers, don't you daih to tech me. You ain't got de
come-uppance of me yit. Don't you daih to lay me out."

Most of this remark, it seems, fell on empty air, for the room was
cleared in a twinkling. Women holding high numerous skirts over their
heavy shoes fled in a panic, and close in their wake panted Nancy Pease.

There have been conflicting stories about the matter, but there are
those who maintain that after having delivered her ultimatum, old Mis'
Pease immediately resumed the natural condition of a dead person. In
fact there was no one there to see, and the old lady did not really die
until night, and when they found her, there was a smile of triumph on
her face.

Nancy did not help to lay her out.

_Twelve_

THE LYNCHING OF JUBE BENSON

Gordon Fairfax's library held but three men, but the air was dense with
clouds of smoke. The talk had drifted from one topic to another much as
the smoke wreaths had puffed, floated, and thinned away. Then Handon
Gay, who was an ambitious young reporter, spoke of a lynching story in a
recent magazine, and the matter of punishment without trial put new life
into the conversation.

"I should like to see a real lynching," said Gay rather callously.

"Well, I should hardly express it that way," said Fairfax, "but if a
real, live lynching were to come my way, I should not avoid it."

"I should," spoke the other from the depths of his chair, where he had
been puffing in moody silence. Judged by his hair, which was freely
sprinkled with gray, the speaker might have been a man of forty-five or
fifty, but his face, though lined and serious, was youthful, the face of
a man hardly past thirty.

"What, you, Dr. Melville? Why, I thought that you physicians wouldn't
weaken at anything."

"I have seen one such affair," said the doctor gravely, "in fact, I took
a prominent part in it."

"Tell us about it," said the reporter, feeling for his pencil and
noteb