Norman Lindsay felt a fist in his back and was dead before he hit the dirt. Beside him, a brick mason named John Townsend screamed, twisted, and fell dead. William Mouson, an unarmed clerk, crumpled without a sound, astonished, shot clean through his open mouth.

Negro men fell wounded on either side of Tom Miller. He pumped six shots toward the whites and hit Bert Chadwick in the muscle of his left arm. Chadwick’s Remington jumped out of his hands, and he fell on top of it.

A couple of men behind Miller got off shots, deafening him. He ducked into Walker’s Grocery to reload and sent Mr. Walker sprawling into a pyramid of canned peaches. The crowd of Negroes scattered, dropping fence slats, trying to outrun the bullets. The whites kept shooting. George Henry Davis, himself shot in the thigh, shepherded a wounded friend around the corner and into a house, where the friend bled to death in his arms. Some of the wounded lay in the street, afraid to get up. Miller fled out the back of the store into the alley.

Ivanhoe Grant evaporated.

A white dentist named George Piner took a slug in the left side. Bill Mayo, who had proudly signed the White Man’s Declaration of Independence, climbed onto his own porch on Fourth Street to be able to see above the crowd. From behind a board fence across Fourth Street came a single report. Mayo collapsed, shot through the chest.

Lockamy now had his hands full. He tried to stop any further shooting, but bands of white men rushed after the retreating Negroes in all directions. Still, no police arrived to help him. He feared it was deliberate.

A streetcar sparked to a wrenching stop. Father Dennen jumped off. A gang of white men lifted bloody Bill Mayo into the car, and Dennen was torn: should he stay here and try to do some good, or remain with a dying man who needed last rites?

He stayed on the streetcar with Mayo. A safe distance from the shooting, he helped carry the wounded man into Bernice Moore’s drugstore. Dr. T. J. Schonwald happened to be there ordering medicine, and he tended Mayo while someone telephoned for an ambulance.

“Get out of the way, if you please, Father,” Schonwald ordered curtly. “I’ll tell you when you can have his soul.”

Caught once again in the duty of his office, Father Dennen rode in the ambulance with Mayo to City-County Hospital at Tenth and Red Cross. Mayo’s chest was a pulp of blood and bandages, and he was unconscious. In the ambulance, his ears rushing with the momentum of what was happening all around him, Dennen reached into the pocket of his cassock for a vial of holy ointment no larger than a fountain pen, dabbed his thumb, and murmured the Latin blessing of extreme unction.

He might have saved himself the trouble: Bill Mayo lived.