Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/372

 military company drawn up in arms; a band of black musicians playing Yankee Doodle; a crowd of bystanders, of all ages and colors, apparently in the greatest state of excitement; and a frantic woman, with a young child in either hand, addressing herself, with vehement gesticulations, to a man who seemed to have the direction of the proceedings, and whom I took — though I did not perceive that he wore any official dress or badge — to be the high sheriff of the county.

On reaching the hotel, I learnt, however, to my great astonishment, that this was no regular execution by process of law, but entirely an amateur performance, got up by a committee of citizens, headed by the cashier of the Planters' Bank, — one of those institutions whose bonds are not unknown in England, though I believe they bear no particular price at the present moment, — the very person, in fact, whom, from the office he had assumed, I had supposed to be the high sheriff I learnt all this with astonishment, because the victims had appeared to be white men. Had they been black or colored, their being hung in some paroxysm of popular passion or fear would not in the least have surprised me.

Inquiring a little further into the history of this singular proceeding, I was told that the men who had been hung were gamblers, part of a gang of cheats and desperadoes by whom that town had long been infested; that the citizens, determined to tolerate such a nuisance no longer, had ordered them to depart, and, when they refused to do so, had proceeded to force their houses and destroy their gambling tools — an operation which the gamblers resisted by force, firing upon their assailants, and having actually shot dead a leading and very estimable citizen, in the act of forcing his way into one of the houses.

The gamblers, however, had all been taken, except two or three, who had managed to escape. The blood of the company was up. The sight of their slaughtered leader, copious draughts of brandy, the