third.

"The mills of the gods grind swift enough in Barlow County," said the
schoolmaster.

The scene, the crowd, the flaring lights and harsh voices intoxicated
Mason, and he was soon the most enthusiastic man in the mob. At the
word, his was one of the willing hands that seized the rope, and
jerked the negroes off their feet into eternity. He joined the others
with savage glee as they emptied their revolvers into the bodies. Then
came the struggle for pieces of the rope as "keepsakes." The scramble
was awful. Bud Mason had just laid hold of a piece and cut it off,
when some one laid hold of the other end. It was not at the rope's
end, and the other man also used his knife in getting a hold. Mason
looked up to see who his antagonist was, and his face grew white with
anger. It was Dock Heaters.

"Let go this rope," he cried.

"Let go yoreself, I cut it first, an' I'm a goin' to have it."

They tugged and wrestled and panted, but they were evenly matched and
neither gained the advantage.

"Let go, I say," screamed Heaters, wild with rage.

"I'll die first, you dirty dog!"

The words were hardly out of his mouth before a knife flashed in the
light of the lanterns, and with a sharp cry, Bud Mason fell to the
ground. Heaters turned to fly, but strong hands seized and disarmed
him.

"He's killed him! Murder, murder!" arose the cry, as the crowd with
terror-stricken faces gathered about the murderer and his victim.

"Lynch him!" suggested some one whose thirst for blood was not yet
appeased.

"No," cried an imperious voice, "who knows what may have put him up to
it? Give a white man a chance for his life."

The crowd parted to let in the town marshal and the sheriff who took
charge of the prisoner, and led him to the little rickety jail, whence
he escaped later that night; while others improvised a litter, and
bore the dead man to his home.

The news had preceded them up the street, and reached Jane's ears. As
they passed her home, she gazed at them with a stony, vacant stare,
muttering all the while as she rocked herself to and fro, "I knowed
it, I knowed it!"

The press was full of the double lynching and the murder. Conservative
editors wrote leaders about it in which they deplored the rashness of
the hanging but warned the negroes that the only way to stop lynching
was to quit the crimes of which they so often stood accused. But only
in one little obscure sheet did an editor think to say, "There was