ons in front passed the word along, and knowing that some better
plan of action had been agreed upon, the crowd dispersed into
neighboring streets.

The deputy sheriff, armed with the proper papers, appeared at the
station house and demanded and secured the prisoner, as the city had no
jurisdiction over murder cases. When he had proceeded about a block with
his prisoner, a group of men who understood the matter raised a mighty
yell. The mob which had dispersed now reformed.

The prisoner was taken from the deputy sheriff, and was hurried to the
bridge connecting the two parts of the city. A rope was secured and the
Negro was dropped over the side of the bridge. As his form dangled
therefrom, every man in the crowd who could, and who had a pistol,
leaned over the railing and fired at the Negro. The rain of bullets made
the Negro's form swing to and fro. The crowd finally dispersed, leaving
the body suspended from the bridge.

Gus Martin had kept up with the mob from the beginning, walking about
with folded arms, betraying no trace of excitement save, perhaps, the
rapid chewing of the tobacco which was in his mouth. His blood was
stirred, but its Indian infusion contributed stoicism to him on this
occasion.

When the whites were through with the body, Gus went to the side of the
bridge and drew it up. Calling to his aid another Negro, he procured a
stretcher and bore the body to Bud Harper's home.

CHAPTER XVI.

_An Eager Searcher._

Up and down the street on which he lived, Ramon Mansford, the affianced
of Alene Daleman, walked as one in a trance. Night was coming and as the
shadows deepened the bitterness deepened in his soul.

"Think of it! my father sleeps in an unmarked grave somewhere in the
South, and I know that the hope of freeing the slave actuated him to
enlist in the army. For the Negro, my father buried his sword to the
hilt in the blood of his Southern brother and in turn received a thrust,
all for a race from which this vile miscreant has crept to murder Alene,
my Alene."

In the darkness of his own calamity distinctions between right and wrong
began to fade away, and he found his hatred of the Negro race assuming a
more violent form than that manifested by the native Southerner. In his
heart there was the harking back to times more than a thousand years
ago--to times when his race was a race of exterminators. At this
particular time it seemed to him that nothing would have suited him
be