he trouble in our minds and in our hearts remained."Like Rainsford, Spangler did not realize the danger or the evil intentions of Dick in time to tell anyone. When Randy and Spangler found a new rifle in Dick's room. He sweet-talked them into keeping their mouths shut. Only after the damage had been done did they realize their mistake. ". . . we both stared there for a minute, aware now of the murderous significance of the secret we had kept, with a sudden sense of guilt and fear, as if somehow the crime lay on our shoulders." Dick was caught in the end, and he paid for what he had done. But this act of brutal violence brought out the absolute animal in the people of the town. To catch the beast, they became beasts themselves. They rioted, and refusing to listen to the mayor, they shattered the window of the gun shop, proceeded to steal all of the guns, and took off with a bloody roar, after the dogs in search of Dick. "The men on horseback reached him first. They rode up around him and discharged their guns into him. He fell forward in the snow, riddled with bullets. The men dismounted, turned him over on his back, and all the other men came in and riddled him. They took his lifeless body, put a rope around his neck and hung him to a tree. Then the mob exhausted all their ammunition on the riddled carcass." In the process of eliminating Dick, the men of the town became just as barbaric and grotesque as he had been, perhaps even more so. On recounting the event, one man proudly boasted, "He was dead before he hit the ground. We all shot him full of holes then . . . Why hell, yes . . . We must of put three hundred holes in him." Spangler must have awakened to the fact that pure evil does exist, and in many, many forms.Similar to Spangler, the members of the Wormsley Common car-park gang were innocent at first. Then T. became the leader of the gang. The boys respected his authority and went along with T.'s plan to dest...
