“Me? Oh, I ain't no public speaker, Mrs. Parsons. That oily gab of Wiggin's would twist me into a hundred knots, and Carson Dwight would cuss me out for making matters worse. I never feel like talking unless I'm drunk, and then I'm tongue-tied.”
“Well, I don't git drunk and I don't git tongue-tied!” grunted Mrs. Parsons; “and I tell you, Pole, if that fool keeps on I'll either talk or bust.”
“Well, don't bust—we need women like you right now,” Baker smiled. “But the truth is, if some'n' ain't done for our side this thing will sweep Carson Dwight clean out of the field.”
“Yes, because men are born fools,” retorted the woman. “Look at their faces, the last one of them right now is mad enough to lynch a nigger baby, and a gal baby at that.”
With a laugh, Pole went back to his seat on the grass for Wiggin was thundering again.
“What happened next!” he demanded, bending over his table, a hand on each end of it, his keen, alert eyes sweeping like twin search-lights into the deeps of the countenances turned to him. “Why, just this and nothing more. Knowing that the jack-leg lawyers of that measly town would clog the wheels of justice for their puny fees, and hold those fiends over for other hellishness, some of you rose and took the law into your own hands. You jerked one to glory as quick as you laid hands on him, and part of you were hard on the track of his mate, when my honorable opponent, not wanting to lose the fee he was to get for pulling the case through, met the mob and managed, by a lot of grand-stand playing and solemn promises to see that the negro was legally tried, to put him in jail.
“Those promises he kept like the honorable gentleman he is,” Wiggin snorted, tossing back his hair in white rage and rolling up his sleeves again. “You know how he kept his word to the public. He organized a secret band of his dirty associates in town, dressed 'em up like White Caps, and they went to the jail and took the nigger out. Then they hid him in a cellar of a store where you all buy supplies, out of the goodness of your patriotic souls, and later sent him in a new suit of clothes to Chattanooga, where he is now engaged in the same sort of life that he was here, an idle, good-for-nothing, lazy tramp, who says he's as good as any white man that ever wore shoe-leather and no doubt thinks he will some day marry a white woman.”
The rising storm burst, and Wiggin stood above it calmly viewing it in all its subdued and open fury. Shouts of rage rent the air. Men with blanched faces, men with gleaming eyes, rose from their seats, as if a call to their manhood for instantaneous action had been sounded, and walked about muttering threats, grinding their teeth, and clinching their brawny hands.
“Ah, ha!” Wiggin bellowed; “I see you catch my idea. But I'm not through. Just wait!”
He paused to drink again, and Pole Baker, with a grave look in his honest eye approached the sculpturesque shape of Mrs. Parsons and nudged her.