The speaker was just about to begin. He raised one hand, but ere his lips moved, a hoarse, guttural shout echoed through the woods, "Hurrah'h'h for Jeff Davis!!!"
"Kill that man!" rang a sharp, clear voice in instant answer.
A rumble like an awful groan came from the vast crowd. My father was standing on a seat, and I had climbed to his shoulder. The crowd surged like a monster animal toward a tall man standing alone in a wagon. He swung a blacksnake whip around him, and the lash fell savagely on two gray horses. At a lunge, the horses, the wagon and the tall man had cleared the crowd, knocking down several people in their flight. One man clung to the tailboard. The whip wound with a hiss and a crack across his face, and he fell stunned in the roadway.
A clear space of full three hundred feet now separated the man in the wagon from the great throng, which with ten thousand hands seemed ready to tear him limb from limb. Revolver shots rang out, women screamed, and trampled children cried for help. Above it all was the roar of the mob. The orator, in vain pantomime, implored order.
I saw Little Ramsey drop off the limb of a tree astride of a horse that was tied beneath, then lean over, and with one stroke of a knife sever the halter.
At the same time fifty other men seemed to have done the same thing, for flying horses shot out from different parts of the woods, all on the instant. The man in the wagon was half a mile away now, still standing erect. The gray horses were running low, with noses and tails outstretched.
The spread-out riders closed in a mass and followed at terrific speed. The crowd behind seemed to grow silent. We heard the patter-patter of barefoot horses ascending the long, low hill. One rider on a sorrel horse fell behind. He drew his horse to one side, and sitting over with one foot in the long stirrup, plied the sorrel across the flank with a big, white-felt hat. The horse responded, and crept around to the front of the flying mass.
The wagon had disappeared over a gentle rise of ground, and then we lost the horsemen, too. Still we watched, and two miles across the prairie we got a glimpse of running horses in a cloud of dust, and into another valley they settled, and then we lost them for good.
The speaking began again and went on amid applause and tears, with laughter set between.
I do not remember what was said, but after the speaking, as we made our way homeward, we met Little Ramsey and the young man who rode the sorrel horse.