“Let go this rope,” he cried.

“Let go yoreself, I cut it first, an’ I’m a goin’ to have it.”

They tugged and wrestled and panted, but they were evenly matched and neither gained the advantage.

“Let go, I say,” screamed Heaters, wild with rage.

“I’ll die first, you dirty dog!”

The words were hardly out of his mouth before a knife flashed in the light of the lanterns, and with a sharp cry, Bud Mason fell to the ground.  Heaters turned to fly, but strong hands seized and disarmed him.

“He’s killed him!  Murder, murder!” arose the cry, as the crowd with terror-stricken faces gathered about the murderer and his victim.

“Lynch him!” suggested some one whose thirst for blood was not yet appeased.

“No,” cried an imperious voice, “who knows what may have put him up to it?  Give a white man a chance for his life.”

The crowd parted to let in the town marshal and the sheriff who took charge of the prisoner, and led him to the little rickety jail, whence he escaped later that night; while others improvised a litter, and bore the dead man to his home.

The news had preceded them up the street, and reached Jane’s ears.  As they passed her home, she gazed at them with a stony, vacant stare, muttering all the while as she rocked herself to and fro, “I knowed it, I knowed it!”

The press was full of the double lynching and the murder.  Conservative editors wrote leaders about it in which they deplored the rashness of the hanging but warned the negroes that the only way to stop lynching was to quit the crimes of which they so often stood accused.  But only in one little obscure sheet did an editor think to say, “There was Salem and its witchcraft; there is the south and its lynching.  When the blind frenzy of a people condemn a man as soon as he is accused, his enemies need not look far for a pretext!”

THE FINDING OF ZACH

The rooms of the “Banner” Club—­an organization of social intent, but with political streaks—­were a blaze of light that Christmas Eve night.  On the lower floor some one was strumming on the piano, and upstairs, where the “ladies” sat, and where the Sunday smokers were held, a man was singing one of the latest coon songs.  The “Banner” always got them first, mainly because the composers went there, and often the air of the piece itself had been picked out or patched together, with the help of the “Banner’s” piano, before the song was taken out for somebody to set the “’companiment” to it.