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shooting in the main doorway, turned around and saw the big man and said “Lord god amighty, Coon Ingledew, you done went and knocked hell out of both of ’em!” He raised his rifle to shoot, but the big old man knocked it out of his hands, then whopped him on top of his head the same way he’d done the other two, broke his arms, hit him terribly in the stomach, then picked him up and tossed him right out through the doorway into the road, where he lay crumpled up and unmoving beside the other two men. All the gunfire had ceased. Then the big old man came to Latha, lifted her up, and led her out through the rear of the store toward the gristmill. “You’d best take off for home,” he said to her. “You don’t want to hang around and watch them fellers get lynched.”
    “Lynch” was one of those words that she hadn’t heard before and she couldn’t ask anyone what it meant. The main road of Stay More was filling up with people as she walked through them to get home. She was almost all the way home before she realized that she had left the paper poke full of candy at the store. Not only that, but she’d left her penny, or lost it. Her sisters wouldn’t believe her if she told them that she had had a whole poke full of candy, so she didn’t tell them. She was happy to see that Rouser the dog was okay. He must have lit out for home as soon as the gunfire started. At supper that evening she heard the word “lynch” again, several times. She learned that there was a big oak tree near the Ingledew store and hanging from one stout limb of it were the bodies of three men, one of them Ike Whitter. As she listened she was able to figure out the details so she could understand that “lynch” meant to tie a rope around somebody’s neck and hang them from a tree limb until they were dead. Latha’s daddy was angry because the Whitters were friends of his, even if Ike Whitter was “a no-good rowdy, a bully and a drunk.” Latha learned that Ike Whitter had gouged out the eyeballs of several men he had fought with, including the sheriff who had tried to arrest him. Lynching, Latha learned, was against the law, which meant that although the three guys hanging from the oak limb were bad guys, and Ike Whitter had done many bad things, including taking out the sheriff’s eyeball and taking possession of the Ingledew store, it was not the job of citizens to punish him, and those citizens who had done so would be tried in a court of law for taking the law in their own hands. This was complicated, but Latha managed to figure it out and her only question, which she did not utter, was, “How often does this kind of thing happen in the world?” She could not know, then, that Ike Whitter was the only outlaw in the whole long peaceful history of Stay More. She eventually learned that the big old man who had started the lynching was the town’s miller, Isaac Ingledew, who was also the father of the Ingledews who owned the store and hotel, and the grandfather of Raymond Ingledew, who would become Latha’s boyfriend by and by…although of course she didn’t know this at the time, or even know what a “boyfriend” was.
    The next day her daddy went off to the village to see for himself the lynched men hanging from the oak tree, and he brought home some folded sheets of paper which he said was a “newspaper,” called the Jasper Disaster . The newspaper was made in the town which was the seat of the county they lived in, Newton, where the sheriff lived. Barb said that someday they would find a way to go there and see all the buildings around “the square.” Saultus Bourne was not able to read, so he asked his wife to read the newspaper for him, at least the parts about the lynching. The story was called, “Stay More Vigilantes Put Noose on Villains.” Latha listened and was able to make out that Ike Whitter had not only taken out the eyeball of the sheriff but also had killed the man who had married his sister. So the Stay