Close to Stacey a heavy red-faced man was shaking his clenched fists high in the air. “Oh, lynch him! The God-damn son of a bitch! Oh, nigger lover! Oh, kill him! Lynch him!” he shrieked, his voice hoarse, his face purple, convulsed, incredibly bestial.
And suddenly a white ungovernable rage flared up in Stacey. There was nothing left of his personality but rage. He seized the man about the waist, and, helped by a new surge of the crowd, half flung him, half was swept with him, back into the narrow dark entrance of the alley and down it.
The momentum gathered from the crowd hurled both forward, staggering, and separated them. But Stacey was upon his man again instantly. They were perhaps thirty yards down the alley in a semi-obscurity.
“Here! You! What d’you—?”
Stacey merely dived, in hot silence, for the man’s throat, and fastened his hands upon it tensely.
The victim struck out wildly, gasped, kicked, but Stacey bent him back and leaned over, sinking his thumbs deeper and deeper with every ounce of his great strength into the fleshy throat. And, as he pressed, he had the delirious exultant delusion that he was strangling all humanity. His teeth were set. His eyes were terrible with hatred.
The man’s face grew violet, his eyes protruded loathsomely, his gurgling mouth opened to press out a swollen tongue. Then all at once he relaxed weakly, his whole body limp. Stacey flung him off, and he fell in a sprawled motionless heap to the ground.
Stacey looked down for a moment and pushed the body with the toe of his shoe, then turned away, wiping his hands on his handkerchief. He was quite calm again, fierce, but with no further impulse to kill.
He did not go back and fight his way into the crowd once more. Where was the use? He could not break through. Instead, he followed the alley in, leaving the roar of the crowd behind him, and came out eventually into another street, parallel with the one he had left. It, too, was crowded, but not densely like the first. Stacey made his way off from it swiftly, and before long reached still another street, empty, silent.
But from back over there behind the intervening house-walls came yet wilder noise and crackling volleys of shots. They had got the negro, Stacey supposed.