“But they are niggers!”

With a sudden impulse she arose and hurriedly lighted the lamp that stood just within the door, and held it above her head.  She saw his dark face and curly hair.  She shrieked in angry terror and rushed down the path, and just as she rushed down, the black convict came running up with hands outstretched.  They met in mid-path, and before he could stop he had run against her and she fell heavily to earth and lay white and still.  Her husband came rushing around the house with a cry and an oath.

“I knew it,” he said.  “It’s that runaway nigger.”  He held the black man struggling to the earth and raised his voice to a yell.  Down the highway came the convict guard, with hound and mob and gun.  They paused across the fields.  The farmer motioned to them.

“He—­attacked—­my wife,” he gasped.

The mob snarled and worked silently.  Right to the limb of the red oak they hoisted the struggling, writhing black man, while others lifted the dazed woman.  Right and left, as she tottered to the house, she searched for the stranger with a yearning, but the stranger was gone.  And she told none of her guests.

“No—­no, I want nothing,” she insisted, until they left her, as they thought, asleep.  For a time she lay still, listening to the departure of the mob.  Then she rose.  She shuddered as she heard the creaking of the limb where the body hung.  But resolutely she crawled to the window and peered out into the moonlight; she saw the dead man writhe.  He stretched his arms out like a cross, looking upward.  She gasped and clung to the window sill.  Behind the swaying body, and down where the little, half-ruined cabin lay, a single flame flashed up amid the far-off shout and cry of the mob.  A fierce joy sobbed up through the terror in her soul and then sank abashed as she watched the flame rise.  Suddenly whirling into one great crimson column it shot to the top of the sky and threw great arms athwart the gloom until above the world and behind the roped and swaying form below hung quivering and burning a great crimson cross.

She hid her dizzy, aching head in an agony of tears, and dared not look, for she knew.  Her dry lips moved: 

“Despised and rejected of men.”

She knew, and the very horror of it lifted her dull and shrinking eyelids.  There, heaven-tall, earth-wide, hung the stranger on the crimson cross, riven and blood-stained, with thorn-crowned head and pierced hands.  She stretched her arms and shrieked.

He did not hear.  He did not see.  His calm dark eyes, all sorrowful, were fastened on the writhing, twisting body of the thief, and a voice came out of the winds of the night, saying: 

“This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise!”

VI

OF THE RULING OF MEN