In Arkansas

On a moonless night last week a sheriff and two deputies were sitting in an empty warehouse in Wilson, Ark., smoking meditatively and staring at the lantern that yellowed the ceiling above them and the floor at their feet. At one side, in a huddle of shadow, lay a young man. His name was Albert Blazes. He had attacked a white girl; anyway, the girl said it was a Negro who attacked her, and Albert Blazes was a Negro. The bloodhounds had brought him in. Now the sheriff was holding him until he got what was coming to him; he must know what that was. One of the deputies bent to trim the lantern when a grunt from the sheriff stopped his hand; the three men and the huddled shadow listened intently. It was beginning. Darkly, softly borne on the dark soft air, a noise of voices reached the warehouse--tumbled cries, deep and shrill blended together, struck through with the note of an automobile horn continuously blowing. They were in the lane, they were coming up the hill, they were at the door. Lights glared in the warehouse; hands reached for the huddled shadow; they hanged Albert Blazes to a beam. To the sheriff and his deputies all this was a familiar sight. Yet when at length the body stopped twitching and the last masked executioner went home to bed, the sheriff and his men lingered in the warehouse, talking about a variation which distinguished this lynching from all other lynchings of their experience. It was hard to believe, but a fact--among the hangers had been several women.