for a moment or so.

"I am from Kenner, gentlemen, and I have come down to New Orleans
tonight to assist you in teaching the blacks a lesson. I have killed a
Negro before, and in revenge of the wrong wrought upon you and yours, I
am willing to kill again. The only way that you can teach these Niggers
a lesson and put them in their place is to go out and lynch a few of
them as an object lesson. String up a few of them, and the others will
trouble you no more. That is the only thing to do--kill them, string
them up, lynch them! I will lead you, if you will but follow. On to the
Parish Prison and lynch Pierce!"

They bore down on the Parish Prison like an avalanche, but the avalanche
split harmlessly on the blank walls of the jail, and Remy Klock sent out
a brief message: "You can't have Pierce, and you can't get in." Up to
that time the mob had had no opposition, but Klock's answer chilled them
considerably. There was no deep-seated desperation in the crowd after
all, only, that wild lawlessness which leads to deeds of cruelty, but
not to stubborn battle. Around the corner from the prison is a row of
pawn and second-hand shops, and to these the mob took like the ducks to
the proverbial mill-pond, and the devastation they wrought upon Mr.
Fink's establishment was beautiful in its line.

Everything from breast pins to horse pistols went into the pockets of
the crowd, and in the melee a man was shot down, while just around the
corner somebody planted a long knife in the body of a little newsboy for
no reason as yet shown. Every now and then a Negro would be flushed
somewhere in the outskirts of the crowd and left beaten to a pulp. Just
how many were roughly handled will never be known, but the unlucky
thirteen had been severely beaten and maltreated up to a late hour, a