The doctor acted as his own lawyer, and the pock-marked man, whose name was Grimes, as the lawyer agin us. You could see that crowd had made up its mind before-hand, and was only giving us what they called a trial to satisfy their own conscience. But the fight was be-twixt Grimes and Doctor Kirby the hull way through.
One witness was a feller that had been in the hotel at Cottonville the night we struck that place. We had drunk some of his licker.
"This man admitted himself that he was here to turn the niggers white," said the witness.
Doctor Kirby had told 'em what kind of medicine he was selling. We both remembered it. We both had to admit it.
The next witness was the feller that run the tavern at Bairdstown. He had with him, fur proof, a bottle of the stuff we had brought with us. He told how we had went away and left it there that very morning.
Another witness told of seeing the doctor talking in the road to that there nigger bishop. Which any one could of seen it easy enough, fur they wasn't nothing secret about it. We had met him by ac-cident. But you could see it made agin us.
Another witness says he lives not fur from that Big Bethel church. He says he has noticed the niggers was worked up about something fur several days. They are keeping the cause of it secret. He went over to Big Bethel church the night before, he said, and he listened outside one of the windows to find out what kind of doctrine that crazy bishop was preaching to them. They was all so worked up, and the power was with 'em so strong, and they was so excited they wouldn't of hearn an army march-ing by. He had hearn the bishop deliver a message to his flock from the Messiah. He had seen him go wild, afterward, and preach an equality sermon.
That was the lying message the old bishop had took to 'em, and that Sam had told us about. But how was this feller to know it was a lie? He believed in it, and he told it in a straight-ahead way that would make any one see he was telling the truth as he thought it to be.
Then they was six other witnesses. All had been in the gang that lynched the nigger that day. That nigger had confessed his crime before he was lynched.
He had told how the niggers had been expecting of a Messiah fur several days, and how the doctor was him. He had died a-preaching and a-prophesying and thinking to the last minute maybe he was going to get took up in a chariot of fire.
Things kept looking worse and worse fur us.
They had the story as the niggers thought it to be.
They thought the doctor had deliberately repre-sented himself as such, instead of which the doc-tor had refused to be represented as that there Messiah. More than that, he had never sold a bottle of that medicine. He had flung the idea of selling it way behind him jest as soon as he seen what the situation really was in the black coun-ties. He had even despised himself fur going into it. But the looks of things was all the other way.
Then the doctor give his own testimony.
"Gentlemen," he says, "it is true that I came down here to try out that stuff in the bottle there, and see if a market could be worked up for it. It is also true that, after I came here and discovered what conditions were, I decided not to sell the stuff.
I didn't sell any. About this Messiah business Iknow very little more than you do. The situation was created, and I blundered into it. I sent the negroes word that I was not the person they ex-pected. The bishop lied to them. That is my whole story."But they didn't believe him. Fur it was jest what he would of said if he had been guilty, as they thought him. And then Grimes gets up and says:
"Gentlemen, I demand for this prisoner the penalty of death.
"He has lent himself to a situation calculated to disturb in this county the peaceful domination of the black race by the white.
"He is a Northern man. But that is not against him. If this were a case where leniency were possi-ble, it should count for him, as indicating an ig-norance of the gravity of conditions which confront us here, every day and all the time. If he were my own brother, I would still demand his death.
"Lest he should think my attitude dictated by any lingering sectional prejudice, I may tell him what you all know--you people among whom I have lived for thirty years--that I am a Northern man myself.
"The negro who was lynched to-day might never have committed the crime he did had not the wild, disturbing dream of equality been stirring in his brain. Every speech, every look, every action which encourages that idea is a crime. In this county, where the blacks outnumber us, we must either rule as masters or be submerged.
"This man is still believed by the negroes to possess some miraculous power. He is therefore doubly dangerous. As a sharp warning to them he must die. His death will do more toward ending the trouble he has prepared than the death of a dozen negroes.
