“Your ideas into our brains!” Garner said, in a tone of amused resentment. “Well, I like that, Carson; but if you can see a ghost of a chance to save that boy's neck with safety to our own, I'd like to have you plug it through my skull, if you have to do it with a steel drill. At present I'm the senior member of the firm of Garner & Dwight, but I'll take second place hereafter, if you can do what you are aiming at.”
“I don't mean to reflect on your intelligences,” Dwight went on, passionately, his voice rising higher, “but I do see a way, and I am praying God at this moment to make you see it as I do and be willing to help me carry it out.”
“Blaze away, old hoss,” Pole Baker piped up from his seat on the nail keg. “I'm not a nigger-lover by a long shot, but somehow, seeing how you feel about this particular one an' his connections, I'm as anxious to save 'im as if I owned 'im in the good old day an' his sort was fetchin' two thousand apiece. You go ahead. I feel kind o' sneakin', anyway, for votin' agin you while you was up thar nursin' yore sick mammy. By gum! you give me the end of a log I kin tote, an' I'll do it or break my back.”
“I want it understood, Carson,” said Wade Tingle at this juncture, “that I was only voting against our trying to stop that mob by force, and, to do myself justice, I was voting in the interests of the family men here to-night. God knows, if you can see any other possible way—”
“We have no time to lose,” Carson said. “If we are to accomplish anything we must be about it. Gentlemen, what I may propose may, in a way, be asking you to make a sacrifice almost as great as that of open resistance. I am going to ask you, law-abiding citizens that you are, to break the law, as you understand it, but not law as the best wisdom of man intended it to be. This section is in a state of open lawlessness. The law I'm going to ask you to break is already broken. The highest court might hold that we would be no better, in fact, than the army of law-breakers headed this way with the foam of race hatred on their lips, its insane blaze in their eyes that till recently beamed only in gentleness and human love. But I'm going to ask you to chose between two evils—to let an everlasting injustice be done at the hand of a hate that will drown in tears of regret in time to come, or the lesser evil of breaking an already broken law. You are all good citizens, and I tremble and blush over my audacity in asking you to do what you have never in any form done before.”
Carson paused. Wondering silence fell on the group. Upon each face struggled evidences of an almost painful desire to grasp his meaning. That it was momentous no man there doubted. Even the ever equable Garner was shaken from, his habitual stoic attitude, and with his delicate fingers rigidly supporting his great head he stared open-mouthed at the speaker.
“Well, well, what is it?” he presently asked.
“There is only one chance I see,” and Dwight stood erect, his arms folded, and stepped back so that the light of the lamp fell full upon his tense features. The patch of sticking plaster stood out from his pale skin, giving his perspiring brow an uncanny look. “There is only one thing to do, my friends, and without your help I stand powerless. I suggest that we form ourselves into a supposed mob of disguised men, that we go ahead of the others to the jail, and actually force Burt Barrett to turn the prisoner over to us.”
“Great God!” Garner, stood up, and leaned on the table. “Then what—what would you do? Good Lord!”
Carson pointed steadily to the cellar-door and swallowed the lump of excitement in his throat. “I would, unseen by any one, if possible, bring him here and imprison him, in that cellar, guarded by us only till—till such a time as we could safely deliver him to a court of justice.”