In this periodical the fool railed and jeered and stated facts about smirking complacency, facts so terrible that folks said they were indecent. He flung his jibes at stupidity, and stupidity sought to answer criticism by assassination.
Texas has a libel law patterned after the libel law of the State of New York. If a man takes from you your good name you can put him behind prison bars and place shutters over the windows of his place of business.
The people who thought Brann had injured them did not invoke the law. They invoked Judge Lynch——
A mob seized the fool, and, placing a rope about his neck, led him naked through the October night, out to the theological seminary, which they declared he had traduced.
There they smote him with the flat of their hands, and spat upon him. It was their intention to hang the fool, but better counsel prevailed, and on his signing, in terrorem, a document they placed before him, they gave him warning to depart to another state. And on his promising to do so, they let him go.
But the next day he refused to leave; and his flashing wit still filled the air, now embittered through the outrage visited upon him.
His enemies held prayer-meetings, invoking divine aid for the fool's conversion—or extinction. One man quoted David's prayer concerning Shimmei: "bring thou down his hoar head to the grave in blood!" And others still, prayed, "let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow."
But still the fool flourished his bauble.
Then they shot him.
That hand which wrote the most Carlylean phrase of any in America is cold and stiff. That teeming brain which held a larger vocabulary than that of any man in America is only clay that might stop a hole to keep the wind away. That soul through which surged thoughts too great for speech has gone a-journeying.