Quote Detail

George concludes the Weed story by explaining how the girl's accusation triggered a lynch mob, forcing him and Lennie to hide in an irrigation ditch and flee under cover of darkness.

The verb 'rabbits' (used here as 'runs away'), juxtaposed against the 'party out to lynch' Lennie, creates a disturbing taxonomy where the girl is figured as prey and Lennie as the hunted animal—two forms of fleeing collapsed into a single sentence. The casual noun 'party' for a lynch mob, drawn from Western vernacular, registers the historical normalcy of extralegal violence in 1930s rural California; Steinbeck doesn't editorialize because he doesn't need to, the word does the indictment.

Support a thesis that Steinbeck embeds the threat of mob violence as the always-available background of ranch life, making the novel's final act of killing not an aberration but a pre-emption of this collective violence—the Weed lynch mob foreshadows the posse Curley raises in Chapter 5.