In Brooklyn, Negro families were furtively retrieving the bodies of loved ones and burying them in cellars, woodsheds, and stables, so the surviving family members wouldn’t be implicated and hunted down by vigilantes. Some, according to custom, buried their dead with heads pointed east, toward Africa. The Negro mortuary on North Second was stacked with bodies.

It was difficult to keep track of how many were killed, who they were, who precisely was responsible. Nobody was trying very hard.

The only sure thing was that all the dead were black.

George Rountree took the streetcar up to Brooklyn to see for himself. He’d heard reports of six Negroes shot down at the Cape Fear Lumber Company, their bodies buried in a shallow ditch. Somebody else told him that, for sassing a white man, a Negro stevedore had been knocked into the river and drowned within sight of the Market Street ferry landing.

On Fourth Street, a boy no older than thirteen was bragging to all who would listen that he had ambushed a black man from behind a board fence. “Nailed that nigger rabble-rouser right between the eyes,” he claimed.

One of Dowling’s boys was boasting that he’d picked off nine blackbirds, one by one, as they fled from a shanty by the railroad.

When Rountree arrived at the Hilton Bridge on Fourth, several bodies lay sprawled against the iron railings. Barbaric, he thought—why wasn’t somebody removing these dead out of common decency? He would speak to MacRae. Soldiers were in position here. Rumor had it that a Negro mob was heading into the city from Rocky Point. This seemed unlikely to Rountree, but if it kept the soldiers out of mischief, so be it. Somehow, he had to slow this thing down.

He was hoping the worst was over. He’d had word from Chadbourn that the aldermen were meeting right now to talk about resigning. In a little while, he’d go back downtown and hurry the process along. Bring some sanity back to this thing.

On the far side of the bridge, he caught up with MacRae, who was arguing with Walker Taylor about where to deploy the Gatling gun. A courier brought word of a mob of five hundred Negroes massing at Ninth and Nixon streets, preparing to march on the downtown area.

Rountree was skeptical. All day long, every report had been muddied by exaggeration. Discount all the numbers by half, he thought, and you might get a true picture.

“If there’s really five hundred of them, or even two hundred, they won’t scare so easy,” Rountree said, recalling the mob of workers at Sprunts’ Champion Compress, who, even unarmed, had not backed down from a Gatling gun.

“We’d better get somebody over there, stall for time,” MacRae said.

“You’re not going?”

“You handle it, George. We’ll back you up.”

“Hugh, this really isn’t my—”