And the way he stopped and stood made everybody look at him. Then he went on:
"Once more," he says, "I call the attention of every man present to the fact that what the last speaker proposes is--"And then he let 'em have that word agin, full in their faces, to think about--"MURDER! Merely murder."
He was bound they shouldn't get away from that word and what it stood fur. And every man there DID think, too, fur they was another little pause.
And not one of 'em looked at another one fur a minute. Doctor Kirby leaned forward from the platform, running his eyes over the crowd, and jest natcherally shoved that word into the room so hard with his mind that every mind there had to take it in.
But as he held 'em to it they come a bang from one of the windows. It broke the charm. Fur everybody jumped. I jumped myself. When the end of the world comes and the earth busts in the middle, it won't sound no louder than that bang did. It was a wooden shutter. The wind was ris-ing outside, and it flew open and whacked agin' the building.
Then a big, heavy-set man that hadn't spoke before riz up from one of the hind seats, like he had heard a dare to fight, and walked slowly down toward the front. He had a red face, which was considerable pock-marked, and very deep-set eyes, and a deep voice.
"Since when," he says, taking up his stand a dozen feet or so in front of the doctor, "since when has any civilization refused to commit murder when murder was necessary for its protection?"One of the top glasses of that window was out, and with the shutter open they come a breeze through that fluttered some strips of dirty-coloured papers, fly-specked and dusty and spider-webbed, that hung on strings acrost the room, jest below the ceiling. I guess they had been left over from some Christmas doings.
"My friend," said the pock-marked man to the doctor--and the funny thing about it was he didn't talk unfriendly when he said it--"the word you insist on is just a WORD, like any other word."They was a spider rousted out of his web by that disturbance among the strings and papers. He started down from above on jest one string of web, seemingly spinning part of it out of himself as he come, the way they do. I couldn't keep my eyes off'n him.
"Murder," says the doctor, "is a thing."
"It is a WORD," says the other man, "FOR a thing.
For a thing which sometimes seems necessary.
Lynching, war, execution, murder--they are all words for different ways of wiping out human life.
Killing sometimes seems wrong, and sometimes right. But right or wrong, and with one word or another tacked to it, it is DONE when a community wants to get rid of something dangerous to it."That there spider was a squat, ugly-looking devil, hunched up on his string amongst all his crooked legs. The wind would come in little puffs, and swing him a little way toward the doctor's head, and then toward the pock-marked man's head, back and forth and back and forth, between them two as they spoke. It looked to me like he was listening to what they said and waiting fur something.
"Murder," says the doctor, "is murder--illegal killing--and you can't make anything else out of it, or talk anything else into it."It come to me all to oncet that that ugly spider was swinging back and forth like the pendulum on a clock, and marking time. I wondered how much time they was left in the world.
"It would be none the less a murder," said the pock-marked man, "if you were to be hanged after a trial in some county court. Society had been obliged to deny the privilege of committing murder to the individual and reserve it for the community.
If our communal sense says you should die, the thing is neither better nor worse than if a sheriff hanged you.""I am not to be hanged by a sheriff," says the doctor, very cool and steady, "because I have com-mitted no crime. I am not to be killed by you because you dare not, in spite of all you say, outrage the law to that extent."And they looked each other in the eyes so long and hard that every one else in the schoolhouse held their breath.
"DARE not?" says the pock-marked man. And he reached forward slow and took that spider in his hand, and crushed it there, and wiped his hand along his pants leg. "Dare not? YES, BUT WE DARE.
The only question for us men here is whether we dare to let you go free.""Your defence of lynching," says Doctor Kirby, "shows that you, at least, are a man who can think.
Tell me what I am accused of?"
And then the trial begun in earnest.