When public
feeling took definite shape in the intention to lynch the prisoner,
Ellis felt a sudden sense of responsibility growing upon himself. When
he learned, an hour later, that it was proposed to burn the negro, his
part in the affair assumed a still graver aspect; for his had been the
final word to fix the prisoner's guilt.
Ellis did not believe in lynch law. He had argued against it, more than
once, in private conversation, and had written several editorials
against the practice, while in charge of the Morning Chronicle during
Major Carteret's absence. A young man, however, and merely representing
another, he had not set up as a reformer, taking rather the view that
this summary method of punishing crime, with all its possibilities of
error, to say nothing of the resulting disrespect of the law and
contempt for the time-honored methods of establishing guilt, was a mere
temporary symptom of the unrest caused by the unsettled relations of the
two races at the South. There had never before been any special need for
any vigorous opposition to lynch law, so far as the community was
concerned, for there had not been a lynching in Wellington since Ellis
had come there, eight years before, from a smaller town, to seek a place
for himself in the world of action. Twenty years before, indeed, there
had been wild doings, during the brief Ku-Klux outbreak, but that was
before Ellis's time,--or at least when he was but a child. He had come
of a Quaker family,--the modified Quakers of the South,--and while
sharing in a general way the Southern prejudice against the negro, his
prejudices had been tempered by the peaceful tenets of his father's
sect.
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