The gathering in the square, which numbered about 700, eventually became in a measure quiet, and a large, lean individual, in poor attire and with unshaven face, leaped upon a box that had been brought for the purpose, and in a voice that under no circumstances could be heard at a very great distance, shouted:  “Gentlemen, I am the Mayor of Kenner.”  He did not get a chance for some minutes to further declare himself, for the voice of the rabble swung over his like a huge wave over a sinking craft.  He stood there, however, wildly waving his arms and demanded a hearing, which was given him when the uneasiness of the mob was quieted for a moment or so.

“I am from Kenner, gentlemen, and I have come down to New Orleans tonight to assist you in teaching the blacks a lesson.  I have killed a Negro before, and in revenge of the wrong wrought upon you and yours, I am willing to kill again.  The only way that you can teach these Niggers a lesson and put them in their place is to go out and lynch a few of them as an object lesson.  String up a few of them, and the others will trouble you no more.  That is the only thing to do—­kill them, string them up, lynch them!  I will lead you, if you will but follow.  On to the Parish Prison and lynch Pierce!”

They bore down on the Parish Prison like an avalanche, but the avalanche split harmlessly on the blank walls of the jail, and Remy Klock sent out a brief message:  “You can’t have Pierce, and you can’t get in.”  Up to that time the mob had had no opposition, but Klock’s answer chilled them considerably.  There was no deep-seated desperation in the crowd after all, only, that wild lawlessness which leads to deeds of cruelty, but not to stubborn battle.  Around the corner from the prison is a row of pawn and second-hand shops, and to these the mob took like the ducks to the proverbial mill-pond, and the devastation they wrought upon Mr. Fink’s establishment was beautiful in its line.

Everything from breast pins to horse pistols went into the pockets of the crowd, and in the melee a man was shot down, while just around the corner somebody planted a long knife in the body of a little newsboy for no reason as yet shown.  Every now and then a Negro would be flushed somewhere in the outskirts of the crowd and left beaten to a pulp.  Just how many were roughly handled will never be known, but the unlucky thirteen had been severely beaten and maltreated up to a late hour, a number of those being in the Charity Hospital under the bandages and courtplaster of the doctors.

The first colored man to meet death at the hands of the mob was a passenger on a street car.  The mob had broken itself into fragments after its disappointment at the jail, each fragment looking for a Negro to kill.  The bloodthirsty cruelty of one crowd is thus described by the Times-Democrat: