"Bring him out! Bring him out! Hang the hoss thief! Shoot him! We'll rid the country of him! Rope him! Rope him!" they cried.
There were many men in the crowd, who in calm reflective moments would have shrunk from a deed of violence. But they were wild. Wild with excitement. Wild with the darkness of night. Wild with a self-heated anger. Wild with the horribly fantastic knowledge that a human life was in their hands to do just as they pleased with. To crush, to destroy, to hang—and none to say them nay.
"For God's sake, gentlemen, what will you do with me?" cried the Evangelist.
"We'll show you! We'll teach you to steal hosses!" they yelled for an answer.
"I did not steal! As God is my witness I am no thief. Time will prove it. Will you not give me a chance for my life?" he pleaded wildly.
"Dry up! No use lying now! We know what kind of watches you fellers trade for hosses!" and a loud laugh greeted this last witticism.
Four men seized the protesting man and running as many ropes about his neck, they started off dragging him along the road in the clear starlight, the crowd following hooting and yelling. The ropes tightened around his throat, and it was with the utmost difficulty he kept himself from being strangled. Speak he could not, though every atom of his body was in a dreadful quiver with that appalling sensation which those who have approached close to a horrible and unexpected death alone can realize or understand.
Yelling, hooting and jeering, the crowd dragged him out of the village to the patch of woods near the country church. Every thing was done hurriedly. A man climbed an oak tree and flung a rope over a sturdy limb into the hands of those below. At this moment the Evangelist found tongue.
"Men!" he exclaimed. "Men or brutes! This is murder! Murder! I am as guiltless of stealing that horse as the child unborn. I have told you truthfully how I came by it. Will you kill me thus without allowing me to prove my innocence? Are you men, are you human, are you Christians? Will you deliberately take my blood upon your hands?"
But a voice replied, and it sounded like that of Brother Rockafellow, though the man had a handkerchief tied over his face, partly concealing it: