A great many good Americans of Carlow who knew him
well always Mistered him as they would have Mistered only an untitled
Morton or Hendricks who might have lived amongst them. He was the only man
the old darky, Uncle Xenophon, had ever addressed as "Marse" since he came
to Plattville, thirty years ago.
Briscoe considered it probable that a few people were wearing bandages, in
the closed shanties over to the west to-day. A thought of the number they
had brought against one man; a picture of the unequal struggle, of the
young fellow he had liked so well, unarmed and fighting hopelessly in a
trap, and a sense of the cruelty of it, made the hot anger surge up in his
breast, and he started on again. Then he stopped once more. Though long
retired from faithful service on the bench, he had been all his life a
serious exponent of the law, and what he went to tell meant lawlessness
that no one could hope to check. He knew the temper of the people; their
long suffering was at an end, and they would go over at last and wipe out
the Cross-Roads. It depended on him. If the mob could be held off over
to-day, if men's minds could cool over night, the law could strike and the
innocent and the hotheaded be spared from suffering. He would wait; he
would lay his information before the sheriff; and Horner would go quietly
with a strong posse, for he would need a strong one.
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