It was well attended.  Enormous crowds gathered, not only in and around the Square itself, but in balconies and windows and on housetops.  It was a very disrespectful crowd, evidently out for a good time.  On the platform within the Square stood or sat the owners of many of the city’s proud names.  Among them were well-known speakers, men who had never failed to hold and influence a crowd.  But only a short distance away little could be heard.  It early became evident that, though there would be no interference, the sentiment of the crowd was adverse.  And what must have been particularly maddening was that the sentiment was good-humored.  Colonel Edward Baker came forward to speak.  The Colonel was a man of great eloquence, so that in spite of his considerable lack of scruples he had won his way to a picturesque popularity and fame.  But the crowd would have little of him this day, and an almost continuous uproar drowned out his efforts.  The usual catch phrases, such as “liberty.”  “Constitution,” “habeas corpus,” “trial by jury,” and “freedom,” occasionally became audible, but the people were not interested.  “See Cora’s defender!” cried someone, voicing the general suspicion that Baker had been one of the little gambler’s hidden counsel.  “Cora!” “Ed. Baker!” “$10,000!” “Out of that, you old reprobate!” He spoke ten minutes against the storm and then yielded, red-faced and angry.  Others tried but in vain.  A Southerner, Benham, inveighing passionately against the conditions of the city, in throwing back his coat happened inadvertently to reveal the butt of a Colt revolver.  The bystanders immediately caught the point.  “There’s a pretty Law and Order man!” they shouted.  “Say, Benham, don’t you know it’s against the law to go armed?”

“I carry this weapon,” he cried, shaking his fist, “not as an instrument to overthrow the law, but to uphold it.”

Someone from a balcony nearby interrupted:  “In other words, sir, you break the law in order to uphold the law.  What more are the Vigilantes doing?”

The crowd went wild over this response.  The confusion became worse.  Upholders of Law and Order thrust forward Judge Campbell in the hope that his age and authority on the bench would command respect.  He was unable, however, to utter even two consecutive sentences.

“I once thought,” he interrupted himself piteously, “that I was the free citizen of a free country.  But recent occurrences have convinced me that I am a slave, more a slave than any on a Southern plantation, for they know their masters, but I know not mine!”

But his auditors refused to be affected by pathos.

“Oh, yes you do,” they informed him.  “You know your masters as well as anybody.  Two of them were hanged the other day!”