Somebody, discovering Daddy Neptune’s woodpile, had kindled a fatwood torch.  Others followed his example, and the red, smoky light flared over enraged faces and glaring eyes of maddened men; over the sweating horses, the baying dogs, and the black corpse with its bruised face.  The guinea-hens, after their insane fashion, kept up a deafening potracking, flapping from limb to limb of the tree in which they roosted.  The indifferent swamp chorus joined in, katydids and crickets shrilling all the while.  And over it all the moon went about its business; the awful depths of the sky were silent.  The wind from the swamp, the night, the earth, didn’t care.

Somebody whipped out a knife and bent over Jake’s body.  A yell greeted this.  Dogs and men moved confusedly around the thing on the ground, in a sort of demoniac circle upon which the hissing, flaring pitch-pine torches danced with infernal effect.  Peter Champneys watched it, his soul revolting.  He had no sympathy for Jake; he felt for him nothing but hatred.  He couldn’t think of that gay and innocent girl coming down the corn-field path, unafraid—­to meet what she had met—­without a suffocating sense of rage.  She had been, Peter remembered, a very pretty girl, a girl who, as Neptune had said, used to sing, and laugh, and say her prayers, and trust Almighty God.

But Peter was seeing now the other side of that awful cloud which darkens the horizon of the South—­the brute beast mob-vengeance that follows swiftly upon the heels of the unpardonable sin.  There must be justice.  But what was happening now wasn’t justice.  It was stark barbarism let loose.

Neptune, who had “helped raise” Jake, had meted out to him justice full and sure.  He had avenged both the wronged white and the wronged black people.  Peter looked at the men in the cabin clearing, and saw the thing nakedly, and from both angles.  For instance, consider Mosely, who had done things—­with a clasp-knife.  And that other man, the farm-hand, shifty-eyed and mean, always half drunk, a bad citizen:  they would be sure to be foremost in affairs like this.  They had precious little respect for the law as law.  And here they were, making the holy night indecent with bestial behavior.  Again a sick qualm shook Peter:  Mosely was calmly putting four severed black fingers into his coat pocket.  Oh, where was the sheriff?  Why didn’t the sheriff come?

Peter caught a glimpse of a shapeless, battered, gory mass under trampling feet.  Maddened by the little they were able to accomplish, and with the torture-lust that is as old as humanity itself roused to fury by frustration, the posse turned from that which had been Jake, to old Neptune, standing motionless by his doorway.  Neptune had not moved or spoken since Peter had answered the posse’s questions.  He had not even appeared to hear the vile abuse heaped upon him.  He was not in the least afraid for his life:  He was beyond that.  That which had happened, which was happening, had dealt the stern, simple-hearted old man so mighty a blow that his faculties were stunned.  He couldn’t think.  He could only suffer a bewildered, baffled torment.  He stood there, dumb as a sheep before the slaughterers, and the sight of his black face maddened the men who were out to avenge a black man’s monstrous crime.