"I didn't!" cried Aurora Lane, ghastly pale. "He never did. I've tried to live here clean for twenty years. Not one of you can raise a voice against me—you cowards, you liars! My boy—if he were here, not any ten of you'd dare say that! You'd not dare to touch him. Oh, you brutes—you low-down cowards!"
"We'll show you if we don't dare!" rejoined the steady voice of the leader. "Fetch him out now and we'll show you about that. We're goin' to git him, first 'r last, and it's no use trying to stop it. We'll reg'late this town now, in our own way. If that boy's out of jail, he's either skipped or else he's here. Either way, the safest thing to do is to come on through with him. If you don't, we'll see about you—and we'll do it mighty soon. Bring him out."
"Oh, hell!" shrilled a falsetto voice, "you're wastin' time with her. Go on in after him—she's got him hid—she's kep' him hid for twenty years and she's keepin' him hid now—and you can gamble on it! Go on in and git him!"
There came a shuffling of feet on the walk, on the gallery floor. Aurora was conscious that the blur of faces was closer to her.... She saw masks, hats, kerchiefs, stubbled chins crowding in, close up to her. A reek of the man pack came to her, close, stifling, mingled of tobacco, alcohol, and the worse effluvia of many men excited.... The terror, the horror, the disgust, the repugnance of it all fell on her like a blanket, stifling, suffocating, terrifying. She no longer reasoned—it was only desperation, terror, which made her spread out her arms from lintel to lintel of her little deserted door, where the last sacred shred of her personal privacy now was periled. The last instinctive, virginal—yes, virginal—terror at the intrusion of man, of men, of many men, was hers now. Home—sanctuary—refuge—all, all was gone. She stood, disheveled, her gown now half loosed at the neck as she spread her weak arms open across her door. Her eyes were large, round, open, staring, her face a tragic mask as she stood trying—a woman, weak and quite alone—to beat back the passion of these who now had come to rob her of the last—the very last—of the things dear to her; the last of the things sacred to her, the things any woman ought to claim inviolate and under sanctuary, no matter who or what she is or ever may have been.
But the fever, the hysteria of these no longer left either reason or decency to them, neither any manner of respect for the sacredness of womanhood; a thing for the most part inherent even under the severest strains ever brought to bear on man to make him lower than the brute—the brute which at its basest never lacks acknowledgment of the claims of sex.
These men had reverted, dropped, declined as only man himself, noblest and lowest of all animals, may do. There was no mercy in them, indeed no comprehension, else the appeal of the outraged horror on the face of Aurora Lane must have driven them back, or have struck them down where they stood.
"You git on out of the way now!" she heard the coarse voice of someone say in her face....
She held her arms out across her door only for an instant longer—she never knew by whom it was, or when, that they were swept down, and she herself swept aside, crumpled in a corner of her room.
The mob was in her home; she had no sanctuary! She caught glimpses of dark shoulders, compacted by the narrowness of the little rooms, surging on in and over everything, into every room, testing every crack and crevice. She heard laughs, oaths, obscenity such as she had never dreamed men used—for she knew little of the man animal—heard the rising unison of voices recording a renewed disappointment and chagrin.
"Damn her! She's got away with him!" called out someone.