Jerry was very happy.  He had distinguished himself in the public view, for to Jerry, as to the white people themselves, the white people were the public.  He had won the goodwill of the best people, and had already begun to reap a tangible reward.  It is true that several strange white men looked at him with lowering brows as he crossed the street, which was curiously empty of colored people; but he nevertheless went firmly forward, panoplied in the consciousness of his own rectitude, and serenely confident of the protection of the major and the major’s friends.

“Jerry is about the only negro I have seen since nine o’clock,” observed the general when the porter had gone.  “If this were election day, where would the negro vote be?”

“In hiding, where most of the negro population is to-day,” answered McBane.  “It’s a pity, if old Mrs. Ochiltree had to go this way, that it couldn’t have been deferred a month or six weeks.”  Carteret frowned at this remark, which, coming from McBane, seemed lacking in human feeling, as well as in respect to his wife’s dead relative.

“But,” resumed the general, “if this negro is lynched, as he well deserves to be, it will not be without its effect.  We still have in reserve for the election a weapon which this affair will only render more effective.  What became of the piece in the negro paper?”

“I have it here,” answered Carteret.  “I was just about to use it as the text for an editorial.”

“Save it awhile longer,” responded the general.  “This crime itself will give you text enough for a four-volume work.”

When this conference ended, Carteret immediately put into press an extra edition of the Morning Chronicle, which was soon upon the streets, giving details of the crime, which was characterized as an atrocious assault upon a defenseless old lady, whose age and sex would have protected her from harm at the hands of any one but a brute in the lowest human form.  This event, the Chronicle suggested, had only confirmed the opinion, which had been of late growing upon the white people, that drastic efforts were necessary to protect the white women of the South against brutal, lascivious, and murderous assaults at the hands of negro men.  It was only another significant example of the results which might have been foreseen from the application of a false and pernicious political theory, by which ignorance, clothed in a little brief authority, was sought to be exalted over knowledge, vice over virtue, an inferior and degraded race above the heaven-crowned Anglo-Saxon.  If an outraged people, justly infuriated, and impatient of the slow processes of the courts, should assert their inherent sovereignty, which the law after all was merely intended to embody, and should choose, in obedience to the higher law, to set aside, temporarily, the ordinary judicial procedure, it would serve as a warning and an example to the vicious elements of the community, of the swift and terrible punishment which would fall, like the judgment of God, upon any one who laid sacrilegious hands upon white womanhood.