In Picayune

One hundred gentlemen of Mississippi, standing, with handkerchiefs over their faces, on a bridge near Picayune, one night last week, derived considerable amusement from the spectacle of a man who stood trembling before them in a cotton nightshirt with a rope around his neck. The other end of the rope was attached to the railing of the bridge.

The moment had been planned with elaborate care. Early in the evening the hundred gentlemen motored to the Picayune jail where the man, one Harold ("Doc") Jackson, was held as an accessory in the murder of two government entomologists found dead near Picayune. The grand jury, which convicted one Jesse Favre for the same murder, had refused to return a bill against Jackson (a white man). A jury's stupidity meant little to the hundred gentlemen. They waited outside the jail while two of their number opened the outer gate with acetylene torches--then the inner gate, then the door of Jackson's cell. The torch glare leaped into his eyes as he started up in bed.

There was just one thing he wanted to ask the gentlemen: Would they let him put his clothes on? He didn't want to die naked.

"Where you're going," a mouth behind a handkerchief reminded him, "you won't need no clothes."

The long line of cars put back to Picayune. When they came to the bridge, the gentlemen adjusted the rope and paused for a moment to enjoy the joke. Then they told Jackson to jump. When the body, its last hideous paroxysm over, hung limp and awry on the rope's end, the cars moved on, their headlights following each other out of sight, into the darkness.