The Mob at the Jail — To Kill a Mockingbird

One night respectable Maycomb men, Sheriff Heck Tate among them, come to the Finch yard and talk in careful voices. They worry about a change of venue and about trouble when Tom Robinson is held. Feeling in the county is ugly. Atticus says he will sit at the jail himself if keeping the peace requires it. He will not hide Tom. Jem is frightened by the tone, not by shouts. These are men his father knows, arrived as friends and still sounding like a warning.

Later a different group gathers: a mob from Old Sarum, Cunninghams among them, come to lynch Tom before a jury can sit. Atticus has gone downtown with a light and a newspaper and set a chair in front of the jail. The children follow through the dark, find the cars, and see their father looking small against the brick. Scout does not grasp the killing at first. She runs into the circle and starts talking to faces. She greets Mr Walter Cunningham, asks after his son, and mentions entailments and the hickory nuts the family once brought as payment. The words pin him back into being a particular man with a particular child and a particular debt of manners. The mob's spell depends on no one being particular. He looks at her a long time, then calls the men off.

Atticus is shaken. He told them to stay home. Their disobedience may have saved Tom's life and his own. Above the street, Mr Underwood has been covering the scene from the newspaper office with a shotgun and would have fired if the night had gone the other way. The children understand, late, that they walked into a killing, and that a few sentences about school, nuts, and a boy's father were enough to break a pack. They head home through a town that will pretend, in the morning, that this was only a restless night.