The crowd, too, surrounding the hospital, had changed somewhat in character.  The men who had acted as leaders in the early afternoon, having accomplished their purpose of overturning the local administration and establishing a provisional government of their own, had withdrawn from active participation in the rioting, deeming the negroes already sufficiently overawed to render unlikely any further trouble from that source.  Several of the ringleaders had indeed begun to exert themselves to prevent further disorder, or any loss of property, the possibility of which had become apparent; but those who set in motion the forces of evil cannot always control them afterwards.  The baser element of the white population, recruited from the wharves and the saloons, was now predominant.

Captain McBane was the only one of the revolutionary committee who had remained with the mob, not with any purpose to restore or preserve order, but because he found the company and the occasion entirely congenial.  He had had no opportunity, at least no tenable excuse, to kill or maim a negro since the termination of his contract with the state for convicts, and this occasion had awakened a dormant appetite for these diversions.  We are all puppets in the hands of Fate, and seldom see the strings that move us.  McBane had lived a life of violence and cruelty.  As a man sows, so shall he reap.  In works of fiction, such men are sometimes converted.  More often, in real life, they do not change their natures until they are converted into dust.  One does well to distrust a tamed tiger.

On the outskirts of the crowd a few of the better class, or at least of the better clad, were looking on.  The double volley described had already been fired, when the number of these was augmented by the arrival of Major Carteret and Mr. Ellis, who had just come from the Chronicle office, where the next day’s paper had been in hasty preparation.  They pushed their way towards the front of the crowd.

“This must be stopped, Ellis,” said Carteret.  “They are burning houses and killing women and children.  Old Jane, good old Mammy Jane, who nursed my wife at her bosom, and has waited on her and my child within a few weeks, was killed only a few rods from my house, to which she was evidently fleeing for protection.  It must have been by accident,—­I cannot believe that any white man in town would be dastard enough to commit such a deed intentionally!  I would have defended her with my own life!  We must try to stop this thing!”

“Easier said than done,” returned Ellis.  “It is in the fever stage, and must burn itself out.  We shall be lucky if it does not burn the town out.  Suppose the negroes should also take a hand at the burning?  We have advised the people to put the negroes down, and they are doing the job thoroughly.”

“My God!” replied the other, with a gesture of impatience, as he continued to elbow his way through the crowd; “I meant to keep them in their places,—­I did not intend wholesale murder and arson.”