Ellen awakened to hear a great burst of voices beating upon the cabin and cutting the air of the room where she lay. The cold of the night streamed in at the opened door, and many great hooded shapes, men, had dragged Jasper from the bed. The creatures wore black cloths over their faces. They had carried Jasper out at the door, and “The Barn-Burner!” was in the chaos of their yells and cries, rose out of their tramping clamour. ‘Bring out that Barn-Burner! Hang to this-here limb! No, whips this time. Get back offen the road! Let the whips!’ Their feet sopped incessantly in the mud and churned the soft dooryard to a wallow. Then the lashes fell like a swift hail, a lash and then another hard upon it. She was standing in the shadow of the door, her body shivering with the cold and her breath stilled except where it leaped and jerked with the spasmodic leap of her heart where life would not quit her. Jasper was down where he had been flung, a white shape in the dark of the mud, and the black creatures with the whips were standing and turning about, a circle of cleared ground left about the white of the mud in which the whips could play. The clamour and the scene moved swiftly; ‘The Barn-Burner! Give fifty more!’

She walked out of the house, her bare feet sinking into the cold mud, her night garment limp against her body as she went swiftly through the damp air. She walked into the circle of the men and stood in the bare space left for the whips, and her coming was so headlong that blows fell upon her shoulders and on her breast before she was seen. She came with hard words and a deep malediction, laying curse on curse, speaking into the black rag faces without fear, careless of what came to her for it. ‘You get off en him,’ she said. ‘You white-trash! Rags on your faces! Take off your whips. You dirty low skunks! You hit him again now if you dare. Get back. I know you. I know the last one. I could call out your names. Lay your whips on me; you already hit me. Hit more. You skulken low-down trash!’