Dwight wrenched his arm from the tense clutch of Garner and dashed through the gate, and was out in the street just as the negro reached him and stretched out his arms in breathless appeal and fell sprawling at his feet. The fugitive remained there on his knees, his hands clutching the young man's legs, while the mob gathered round.
“He's the one!” a hoarse voice exclaimed. “Kill 'im! Burn the black fiend!”
Standing pinioned to the ground by Pete's terrified clutch, Carson raised his hands above his head. “Stop! Stop! Stop!” he kept crying, as the crowd swayed him back and forth in their effort to lay hold of the fugitive who was clinging to his master with the desperate clutch of a drowning man.
“Stop! Listen!” Carson kept shouting, till those nearest him became calmer, and forming a determined ring, pressed the outer ones back.
“Well, listen!” these nearest cried. “See what he's got to say. It's Carson Dwight. Listen! He won't take up for him; he's a white man. He won't defend a black devil that—”
“I believe this boy is innocent!” Carson's voice rang out, “and I plead with you as men and fellow-citizens to give me a chance to prove it to your fullest satisfaction. I'll stake my life on what I say. Some of you know me, and will believe me when I say I'll put up every cent I have, everything I hold dear on earth, if you will only give me the chance.”
A fierce cry of opposition rose in the outskirts of the throng, and it passed from lip to lip till the storm was at its height again. Then Garner did what surprised Carson as much as anything he had ever seen from that man of mystery.
“Stop! Listen!” Garner thundered, in tones of such command that they seemed to sweep all other sounds out of the tumult. “Let's hear what he's got to say. It can do no harm! Listen, boys!”
The trick worked. Not three men in the excited mob associated the voice or personality with the friend and partner of the man demanding their attention. The tumult subsided; it fell away till only the low, whimpering groans of the frightened fugitive were heard. There was a granite mounting-block on the edge of the sidewalk, and feeling it behind him: Carson stood upon it, his hands on the woolly pate of the negro still crouching at his feet. As he did so, his swift glance took in many things about him: he saw Linda at the fence, her head bowed upon her arms as if to shut out from her sight the awful scene; near her stood Lewis, Helen, and Sanders, their expectant gaze upon him; at the window of his mother's room he saw the invalid clearly outlined against the lamplight behind her. Never had Carson Dwight put so much of his young, sympathetic soul into words. His eloquence streamed from him like a swollen torrent of logic. On the still night air his voice rose clear, firm, confident. It was no call to them to be merciful to the boy's mother bowed there like a thing cut from stone, for passion like theirs would have been inflamed by such advice, considering that the fugitive was charged with having slain a woman. But it was a calm call to patriotism. Carson Dwight plead with them to let their temperate action that night say to all the world that the day of unbridled lawlessness in the fair Southland was at an end. Law and order on the part of itself was the South's only solution of the problem laid like another unjust burden on a sorely tried and suffering people.
“Good, good! That's the stuff!” It was the raised voice of the adroit Garner, under his broad-brimmed hat in the edge of the crowd. “Listen, neighbors; let him go on!”