Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (good book club books .TXT) 📖

CHAPTER XXII.

THEY swarmed up towards Sherburn’s house, a-whooping and raging like Injuns, and everything had to clear the way or get run over and tromped to mush, and it was awful to see.  Children was heeling it ahead of the mob, screaming and trying to get out of the way; and every window along the road was full of women’s heads, and there was nigger boys in every tree, and bucks and wenches looking over every fence; and as soon as the mob would get nearly to them they would break and skaddle back out of reach.  Lots of the women and girls was crying and taking on, scared most to death.

They swarmed up in front of Sherburn’s palings as thick as they could jam together, and you couldn’t hear yourself think for the noise.  It was a little twenty-foot yard.  Some sung out “Tear down the fence! tear down the fence!”  Then there was a racket of ripping and tearing and smashing, and down she goes, and the front wall of the crowd begins to roll in like a wave.

Just then Sherburn steps out on to the roof of his little front porch, with a double-barrel gun in his hand, and takes his stand, perfectly ca’m and deliberate, not saying a word.  The racket stopped, and the wave sucked back.

Sherburn never said a word—just stood there, looking down.  The stillness was awful creepy and uncomfortable.  Sherburn run his eye slow along the crowd; and wherever it struck the people tried a little to out-gaze him, but they couldn’t; they dropped their eyes and looked sneaky. Then pretty soon Sherburn sort of laughed; not the pleasant kind, but the kind that makes you feel like when you are eating bread that’s got sand in it.

Then he says, slow and scornful:

“The idea of you lynching anybody!  It’s amusing.  The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man!  Because you’re brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a man?  Why, a man’s safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind—as long as it’s daytime and you’re not behind him.

“Do I know you?  I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the South, and I’ve lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man’s a coward.  In the North he lets anybody walk over him that wants to, and goes home and prays for a humble spirit to bear it. In the South one man all by himself, has stopped a stage full of men in the daytime, and robbed the lot.  Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people—whereas you’re just as brave, and no braver.  Why don’t your juries hang murderers?  Because they’re afraid the man’s friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark—and it’s just what they would do.

“So they always acquit; and then a man goes in the night, with a hundred masked cowards at his back and lynches the rascal.  Your mistake is, that you didn’t bring a man with you; that’s one mistake, and the other is that you didn’t come in the dark and fetch your masks.  You brought part of a man—Buck Harkness, there—and if you hadn’t had him to start you, you’d a taken it out in blowing.

“You didn’t want to come.  The average man don’t like trouble and danger. You don’t like trouble and danger.  But if only half a man—like Buck Harkness, there—shouts ’Lynch him! lynch him!’ you’re afraid to back down—afraid you’ll be found out to be what you are—cowards—and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves on to that half-a-man’s coat-tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big things you’re going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.  But a mob without any man at the head of it is beneath pitifulness.  Now the thing for you to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole.  If any real lynching’s going to be done it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they’ll bring their masks, and fetch a man along.  Now leave—and take your half-a-man with you”—tossing his gun up across his left arm and cocking it when he says this.

The crowd washed back sudden, and then broke all apart, and went tearing off every which way, and Buck Harkness he heeled it after them, looking tolerable cheap.  I could a stayed if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to.

I went to the circus and loafed around the back side till the watchman went by, and then dived in under the tent.  I had my twenty-dollar gold piece and some other money, but I reckoned I better save it, because there ain’t no telling how soon you are going to need it, away from home and amongst strangers that way.  You can’t be too careful.  I ain’t opposed to spending money on circuses when there ain’t no other way, but there ain’t no use in wasting it on them.