irls was
crying and taking on, scared most to death.

They swarmed up in front of Sherburn's palings as thick as they could
jam together, and you couldn't hear yourself think for the noise. It
was a little twenty-foot yard. Some sung out "Tear down the fence!
tear down the fence!" Then there was a racket of ripping and tearing
and smashing, and down she goes, and the front wall of the crowd
begins to roll in like a wave.

Just then Sherburn steps out onto the roof of his little front porch,
with a double-barrel gun in his hand, and takes his stand, perfectly
ca'm and deliberate, not saying a word. The racket stopped, and the
wave sucked back.

Sherburn never said a word--just stood there, looking down. The
stillness was awful creepy and uncomfortable. Sherburn run his eye
slow along the crowd; and wherever it struck the people tried a little
to outgaze him, but they couldn't; they dropped their eyes and looked
sneaky. Then pretty soon Sherburn sort of laughed; not the pleasant
kind, but the kind that makes you feel like when you are eating bread
that's got sand in it.

Then he says, slow and scornful:

"The idea of _you_ lynching anybody! It's amusing. The idea of you
thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a _man!_ Because you're brave
enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come
along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your
hands on a _man?_ Why, a _man's_ safe in the hands of ten thousand of
your kind--as long as it's daytime and you're not behind him.

"Do I know you? I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the
South, and I've lived in the North; so I know the average all around.
The average man's a coward. In the North he lets anybody walk over him
that wants to, and goes home and prays for a humble spirit to bear it.
In the South one man, all by himself, has stopped a stage full of men
in the daytime, and robbed the lot. Your newspapers call you a brave
people so much that you think you are braver than any other
people--whereas you're just _as_ brave, and no braver. Why don't your
juries hang murderers? Because they're afraid the man's friends will
shoot them in the back, in the dark--and it's just what they _would_
do.

"So they always acquit; and then a _man_ goes in the night, with a
hundred masked cowards at his back, and lynches the rascal. Your
mistake is, that you didn't bring a man with you; that's one mistake,
and the other is that you didn't