The messenger came with the oil and the crowd moved forward. Hose shouted, “Down by Tom Camp’s by his spring, down the spring branch to the Flat Rock where he killed her!”
On the crowd moved, swaying back and forth with Gaston in their midst by Dick’s side begging for a fair trial for him. A crowd that hurries and does not shout is a fearful thing. There is something inhuman in its uncanny silence.
Gaston’s voice sounded strained and discordant. They paid no more attention to his protest than to the chirp of a cricket.
They reached the spot where the child’s body had been found. They tied the screaming, praying negro to a live pine and piled around his body a great heap of dead wood and saturated it with oil. And then they poured oil on his clothes.
Gaston looked around him begging first one man then another to help him fight the crowd and rescue him. Not a hand was lifted, or a voice raised in protest. There was not a negro among them. Not only was no negro in that crowd, but there was not a cabin in all that county that would not have given shelter to the brute, though they knew him guilty of the crime charged against him. This was the one terrible fact that paralysed Gaston’s efforts.
Hose Norman stepped forward to apply a match and Gaston grasped his arm.
“For God’s sake, Hose, wait a minute!” he begged. “Don’t disgrace our town, our county, our state, and our claims to humanity by this insane brutality. A beast wouldn’t do this. You wouldn’t kill a mad dog or a rattlesnake in such a way. If you will kill him, shoot him or knock him in the head with a rock,—don’t burn him alive!”
Hose glared at him and quietly remarked, “Are you done now? If you are, stand out of the way!”
He struck the match and Dick uttered a scream. As Hose leaned forward with his match Gaston knocked him down, and a dozen stalwart men were upon him in a moment.
“Knock the fool in the head!” one shouted.