At last the throng of people grew so thick around one of these green enclosures, common to the City of Elms, that Rice made his way onward with some difficulty. He paused to take an observation, saw the great square crowded full of people that murmured and swayed to and fro, when new crowds poured in from the streets, as he had seen the ocean in many a dangerous storm.
The general excitement fully aroused him now, and he looked keenly around while elbowing his way through the human masses, asking the crowd in general, and no one in particular, what the noise was about.
No one answered him. All were eagerly searching for commodious standing room, and his questions remained unheeded. At last he saw, looming up in the centre of the public green, a mass of timber, great, heavy oaken posts, and a cross-beam rising above a scaffold, upon which a mass of white, that possibly shrouded a human figure, was lifted above the crowd.
Rice paused, with a sudden exclamation.
"What is that?" he said, turning to a female, who elbowed him fiercely with one arm, lifting up her child with the other.
"What is it? Can't you see? Look for yourself. What should it be but a gallows, and a woman on it?" cried the mother, lifting the little, golden-haired girl on her shoulder, that she might command a view of the show.
"A gallows, and a woman on it!" exclaimed Rice, losing half of his ruddy color. "Oh, my good woman, what has the poor thing done?"
"Done! why, where did you come from? Done enough to hang her as high as Haman, where she ought to be swinging this minute. Done, indeed!"
With these words the woman thrust herself forward, marking her rude progress by the frightened face of the child, which rose and fell in that ocean of human heads like some flower tossed upward by a storm.
A strange feeling seized upon Rice—a desperate wish to struggle through the crowd, and flee from the spot. He turned and pressed blindly against the human masses that heaved around him. But, in spite of his great strength, they bore him onward like the waters of a vortex, till he was flung, against his own will, almost at the foot of the gallows.