Chapter VII: “gon’er Git Them Niggers!”

Just at noon the three negroes stumbled through the door of the jail, and like men walking in their sleep, obeyed the command of the sheriff and climbed the steps to the second story. There they fell to the floor and sank into unconsciousness.

The sheriff closed the jail door and sat down on the steps in front, where he gave himself up to most serious thought. Almost an hour later he arose, reëntered the jail, and returning to his three prisoners picked out Mobile Boone and kicked him into wakefulness.

“Get up, Mobile,” he commanded. “Follow me downstairs.”

Dumbly, the negro obeyed. On the ground floor the sheriff stopped and spoke:

“Mobile, what are you in here for?”

“I got drunk in de Chicken-Wing an’ tried to claw a nigger’s nose off.”

“Were you arrested with those other two negroes?”

“Naw, suh. Dey fetch me to de calaboose on Sunday mawnin’ an’ dem two coons come in late Sunday night. I never seed ary one of ’em befo’.”

“If I let you out will you leave town right away?”

“Bless gracious, boss,” Mobile exclaimed with most obvious sincerity, “ef you lets me outen dis jail, I’ll put dis town so fur behine me back dat it’ll cost you ninety-seben dollars to send me a postich card.”

The sheriff laughed.

“I means it, boss,” Mobile assured him. “Jes gimme a shirt an’ a pair of britches so I won’t look like I was jes’ bawned, an’ I’ll shore ax you good-by!”

The sheriff led the negro across to the office in the court-house, opened a closet, pawed over some old hunting clothes, and found some suitable garments for Mobile. When the negro had put them on, the sheriff handed him a silver dollar and said:

“Now, Mobile, I’ve let you out because the chances are those other two negroes are going to be mobbed. You are innocent and I don’t want to see you strung up. You’d better hit the grit!”

Mobile did. He went down the levee at a gait which bid fair to carry him very far in a brief time--if he could keep it up.

Then the sheriff returned to the jail and sat down in the same place.

The town of Kerlerac was deserted except for the women and children. Practically every male inhabitant had joined the most exciting of all chases--the man-hunt.

The sheriff placed a cigar in his mouth, chewed it almost to the other end without lighting it, then spat it out.

“When that searching party finds their dead dogs and drinks up all their red liquor,” he reasoned to himself, “and come back to town and find those coons in jail, they’ll form a mob. My deputies will desert the crowd when the mob forms, but they won’t join me. It’s up to me to protect the coons.”

The town-clock struck two.

Far down the road, Sheriff Ulloa heard the piercing yell of the fox-hunter.

“They’re coming back,” he muttered.

Taking a large pistol from the holster under his arm, he examined it carefully, revolving the cylinder between his thumb and finger.

A tiny chameleon was playing up and down the bark of a tree twenty feet distant.

With a motion which appeared almost careless, Ulloa made a turn of his wrist, there was a loud explosion from the gun, and the little creature spattered into fragments, leaving a dark, wet spot against the tree which looked as if a man had spat at a hole in the bark and made a center shot.

The shot aroused the two negroes on the floor above, and the man-hunters heard it and hastened back to town.

When the party arrived in Kerlerac they quickly heard of the sheriff’s capture of the fugitives, but not a man came to the sheriff to ask him about the capture. They gathered in a body in the Red Elephant saloon.

Soon one of the deputies, white-faced and panting, ran into the sheriff’s presence with the news that a mob was forming on the outskirts of the town.

“I expected that,” Ulloa answered quietly. “You and the other two deputies arm yourselves with rifles and hide in the tower of the court-house overlooking the front of the jail.”

“What must we do?” the deputy asked tremulously. “Shoot?”

“Do your duty!” Ulloa replied shortly, “whatever you conceive it to be.”

He turned and entered the jail, locking the door behind him.

“Boss,” Mustard Prophet called down to him, “me an’ Pap lef’ our toot-hawns down-stairs. Please, suh, fotch us up de cawnet an’ de trombone!”

With a grim smile the sheriff complied with the request.

“You niggers better play the _Dead March in Saul_,” he muttered grimly. “It’ll be appropriate all right.”

“Us ain’t ’quainted wid dat toon,” Pap grinned, reaching for his trombone. “But me an’ Mustard kin shore fetch ragtime and religion songs.”

In the meantime, in the far end of the town, sixty excited men had supplied themselves with enough rope to hang a man from a not too distant star; had armed themselves with knives and hatchets and axes, with guns and pistols; had appointed their leader, Barto Skaggs, a man of swarthy complexion, a grim mouth, surmounted by a black mustache, and intense, glowing black eyes, which pressed hard against the lids and showed a great deal of white beneath the pupil--the eyes of the wanton destroyer.

“Keep together, men!” Barto Skaggs advised. “When one man acts everybody act with him. Come on!”

With the first forward step of the mob a tall, gangling, half-wit boy, with a long neck, a step-ladder head, a long sharp nose, and a receding chin, and a loose-lipped mouth which dribbled tobacco-juice as he spoke, began to repeat like a chant:

“Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers!”

His harsh, crackly, gosling voice, uttering every word with a jerk, soon took the monotonous roll of a snaredrum. Unconsciously the men kept step to the words and the purpose expressed in the sentence was burned into the very fiber of their souls:

“Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers!”

Turning into the street which led to the jail two blocks away, the mob rounded the Confederate Circle, in the center of which was a ridiculous, stump-legged, pewter image of a man, too short in its stride for glory, but, nevertheless, erected by a grateful populace as a monument of glory to commemorate the heroes of the South.

Then Sheriff Ulloa stepped out of the jail, locked the door behind him, tossed the key as far as he could throw it into some high weeds growing at the side of the prison, and waited.

It was not necessary for the leader and spokesman to explain to the officer of the law the purpose of their visit.

Fully a block away the half-wit’s strident voice, having gained in volume by the constant repetition of the phrase, conveyed the message in tones which crackled like thorns under a pot:

“Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git----”

The mob halted.

“Turn around and go back, gentlemen,” the sheriff said courteously. “Start your one-man band to playing another tune, and go back!”

In the center of the street there was a rut which had been made by wagon wheels.

The mob moved slowly forward, and stopped at this rut like children toeing a mark in a spelling-match. They seemed to feel that a contest was on, and that this rut was the dead-line.

“We want them niggers, sheriff,” Barto Skaggs said.

“You shall not have them,” Ulloa replied quietly and forcibly. “When you kill those blacks every man of you is a murderer. I shall not be sheriff of a parish which contains sixty murderers--men of prominence--running at large!”

“Aw, come off, George!” an impatient voice exclaimed. “You’ve kilt a plenty of coons in your day!”

“Yes, gentlemen, I have,” Ulloa answered quickly. “_I have never been slow to kill!_ And I was elected sheriff of this parish _by you_ for the one purpose of totally abolishing this wholesale slaughter of innocent and unoffending blacks, and for the protection of offenders from mob violence in order that the law might take its course. I shall do it.”

Looking into the quiet, determined face of the officer, the mob wavered. Then the half-wit’s snare-drum voice rallied them:

“Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git----”

The mob took one cautious step forward. Ulloa drew his pistol from his pocket.

“That’s far enough, fellow citizens,” he said, and now his voice drawled like the purr of a cat and was deadly in its menace. “When you get those niggers I won’t be the sheriff of this parish. I’ll be dead. I don’t know who’ll get me, but I’ll kill the first man who takes the next step forward!”

The mob packed denser, became tense, throbbed like an automobile when the power is turned on. Ulloa’s eyes gazed straight into the destructive orbs of Barto Skaggs and held him like a hypnotist. Then the half-wit began:

“Gon’er git--them niggers! Gon’er git----”

A back-handed blow from Barto Skaggs’s fist struck the half-wit fairly in the mouth and sent him reeling backward, disarranging for a moment the tense compact mass of men.

Then from the second-story front window of the jail, just above the sheriff’s head and behind him, there came a sound which caused the sheriff’s swarthy face to whiten to the eyebrows--the most unfortunate thing which could have happened to his cause:

“Oo-oh! My Gawd, my Gawd! De mobbers is comin’! De mobbers!”

Instantly the mob crouched like panthers ready to spring.