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 th