Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/373

 of their own losses at the gaming table, and the dread of being challenged and shot, or shot without being challenged by the gamblers, two or three of whom were known as very desperate fellows, — all these motives coöperating, and it being very doubtful whether, if the matter was referred to the legal tribunals, those who had riotously broken into the houses of other people, even with the professed object of destroying roulette tables, might not run quite as much risk of condemnation as those who had fired, even with fatal effect, upon their burglarious assailants, — all these things considered, it had: finally been determined, as the shortest and most expedient method of settling the business, to take the gamblers to the skirts of the town, and to hang them there on the instant.

To those, indeed, accustomed to the curt proceedings of the slave code, under which suspicion serves for evidence, and power usurps the place of judicial discrimination, all the delays and formalities of the ordinary administration of penal jurisprudence must seem tedious and absurd; and hence the constantly increasing tendency in the south to substitute, in the place of that administration, in the case of white men as well as of slaves, the summary process of Lynch law. It is vain, indeed, to expect that men constantly hardened and brutalized in the struggle to extort from their slaves the utmost driblet of unwilling labor, and accustomed freely to indulge, as against these unresisting victims, every caprice of brutal fury, should retain any very delicate sense of the proprieties of justice as among themselves.

Before I had yet learnt more than a general outline of the story, the principal actors in this affair, finding it necessary to sustain their dignity and to recruit their self-reliance by fresh draughts of brandy, reached the hotel at which I was stopping. They were followed by the woman, with the two little children, whom I had noticed as I passed the place of execution, and whom I now found to be the wife