Boo!

[Ryan Carboni]

“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 that
half-a-man’s coat-tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big
things you’re going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s
what an army is—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in
them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their
officers.  But a mob without any man at the head of it is beneath
pitifulness.  Now the thing for you to do is to droop your tails and
go home and crawl in a hole.  If any real lynching’s going to be done
it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come
they’ll bring their masks, and fetch a man along.  Now leave—and take
your half-a-man with you”—tossing his gun up across his left arm and
cocking it when he says this.