Selections from
Katy of Catoctin

CHAPTER I.

MOUNTAINEERS.

“MARYLAND is only a rim of shore, a shell of mountain, but all gold!”

So said Lloyd Quantrell, the gunner, looking down from the South Mountain upon Middletown or Catoctin Valley, an October Saturday in the year 1859.

The mellow light of afternoon touched or bathed the hundred farms, the bridges, barns, hamlets, stacks, corn-rows, brown woods, streams and stone walls, and with a fruity smell, as of cider-presses, seemed to come up the tone of bells ringing the Marylanders home from the labors of the week.

He saw the red and white spires of Middletown in the lap of the valley like its babe, and thought he saw, beyond its Catoctin Mountain knees, the father Frederick, the good old burgher, holding his devout fingers up, like index boards at the junction of his many pike roads.

Then fancy spread other terraces of Maryland, farther and farther on, like descending steps of gold and marble, beyond the hills of Sugarloaf and Linganore, to where Potomac and Patapsco blended their cascades and ocean-tides at the shrines of Washington and Baltimore.

Lloyd Quantrell’s dog put his nose in the air silently, looking also downward, as if he scented, with the pheasants of the mountain, the sea-fowl of the Chesapeake.

A train of cars was crossing the mouth of Catoctin Valley from the dark chasm of Harper’s Ferry, as the dog started back along the mountain-top, “pointing” for a bird; and when Lloyd had followed and fired at and missed the bird, he saw another view in the west, all flooded with the sunset — the plateau between the Antietam and Potomac, stretching in woodland or crystal to the North Mountain and the Conococheague.

Here, amid equal abundance, a wilder paradise extended, as if nature’s ruggedness had somewhat delayed the gardener hands of man.

Beneath Quantrell’s eye, to the left, a short, bold mountain intruded, which had begun a race with the South Mountain for the Pennsylvania line, but stopped in sight of the white clusters of settlement toward Hagerstown, discouraged at their beauty and multitude, like Balaam’s stride arrested by the Hebrew camps.

Between this, Elk Ridge (or Maryland Heights) Mountain, and his own, and in the narrow peninsula beyond, where the Potomac begged a passage to the Shenandoah, a few wild farms found lodgment, as if poor, fugitive, and hermit men had clung there to a funnel, and now their white log and plaster houses and decayed black barns, in the midst of small mountain orchards, sent up to Quantrell light spirals of smoke, or flame of burning brushwood, or bells of milch-cows tinkling in alder-copses.

Where these wild homes and startled spurs of mountain halted, the basin of the great Cumberland Valley fell away indistinctly, and Keedysville lay in the foreground, like a bunch of the American flag.

The colors in the landscape were gold, purple, chrome, and all varieties of autumnal blue and gray, and, as if they were mixed in a cup, the young Baltimore sportsman drank them in and pined to understand the delight: for the love of scenery yearns to become an art.

In all this patriotic prospect there was no responsive heart, and Lloyd Quantrell was still unbeloved.

New pulses had beat of late in him, and, like the hair upon his lip, sentiment had begun to grow: the idea of woman followed him about — of no one woman but of womankind, and in this glowing Eden of his native State the scenery seemed to lack a sympathetic spirit to reach up her white arms from the vale and cry: “Come down, my love, appointed for me; and I will make thy soul at rest, to enjoy every prospect, which, lonely, thou never canst!”

Beautiful, detached time of life! when, like a mote of the Italian poplar’s pollen blowing in the air to find the female cup, the souls of two young, destined people, yet unknown, solicit each other in the world.

The crude, destructive instincts of the young man were expressed aloud in his emotion between savagery and art:

“What would I do if all this was mine, on both sides of the mountain?” Lloyd Quantrell said. “Let me see! Why, I would clean out the whole region, like a Norman king, and make it a hunting park. All the wild beasts once here should return again — none but native American beasts, you bet! I would let them make their dens and shelters in these towns. The people would have to go — go West, I suppose — and then these stone, brick, and timber villages would decay, and we should have real American ruins in a few years. Too many Dutch are in this up-country for me! Instead of a lot of Dutchmen going to Baltimore market, we should have hunters sending down deer and bear. I would bring the buffaloes back from the West — for they used to herd here too, in the early day — and let them make dust, like an army, as they galloped before my hunters. The wolf should howl again, to make the mountains romantic. I would have grizzlies hug each other, panthers sneak away and prowl nearer again, and foxes should be protected, so that every day would be a morning chase. My castle I would put on the South Mountain, right here where I stand.”

He stopped, thinking what would a castle be without a lady. But in a minute his mind ran along with the vision:

“I think,” he resumed, “that I would not disturb the Dutch beauties, for I would need a few vassals, and, to reconcile these and give me society, I might marry one of them. Yes, she should be the rosiest of all. I would educate her and make her my baroness; Baroness of the Blue Ridge.”

As his thoughts, like the predatory hawk, flew back to a domestic nest and mate, Lloyd basked a moment in the soft, languorous vision of a settlement in life, till the dog whined and pointed, and, looking where it indicated, the gunner saw, in the edge of the woods, a few steps distant, a strange, primitive old man, accompanied by two young companions, watching him.

The apparition was more lean than tall, and dressed in dark woolens, cut almost Quaker fashion, and his waistcoat was buttoned nearly up to a leather stock around the tough whip-cords in his throat, which were revealed when he took his bushy gray beard in one hand and drew it aside, looking meantime at young Quantrell with a pair of severe, gray-blue eyes.

The intruder’s hair was brushed straight up from a rather low, receding forehead. He had a hawkish nose, and the beard which encircled his face, and would have fallen low upon his breast, stood outward at his chin like autumn brush against a rock.

“If this is your land, you don’t mind my gunning on it?” spoke Quantrell.

“It is not my land, sir,” answered the man, not finishing his searching look.

“Then I don’t see why you look at me so hard, friend, unless I have stolen something.”

“Are you from Virginia?” asked the man.

“No, I am from Maryland — from Baltimore.”

“You have been walking around this country three days!”

“There’s no law against that, old man. I have been shooting, what little there is, and picking a few fish out of the brooks. Have you been following me all the time?”

“I have seen you around my dwelling, sir, on two occasions, yesterday and the day before,” continued the mountaineer, “and you are here still.”

“Upon my word, friend, I don’t see why I shouldn’t pass your dwelling every day of my holiday here, particularly as I don’t know where it is!”

An idea crossed Lloyd Quantrell’s mind that there might be robbers in these mountains, and he gave a glance at the two other men.

They were young fellows, and, in appearance, were so nearly the same, that observing one, answered for both; of good height, spare-faced and sunburned, sallow, worn thin, and with long, dark hair and beards; mere rustics to look at, with some passing alertness of curiosity now, but too docile and gentle to retain a predatory purpose.

This time Lloyd Quantrell guessed that they might be an old preacher and his two sons, of Mennonite, or Dunker, or some mountain Dutch sect. But the nasal tone of the old man, and his bold, grave address, made Lloyd think again that he had seen such men bringing horses to Baltimore market from Ohio and the West.

The only sign of offensive warfare they possessed was a kind of spear of steel, like a broad, double-edged knife-blade, with a cross-piece or guard below, and carried upon a wooden pole by one of the younger persons.

“What have you there, my friend?” asked Quantrell, walking over freshly. “It looks like what we called at school ‘a gig,’ to spear suckers and pike.”

“I calkelate you hit it right the first time,” said the possessor, smiling agreeably.

“We live over beyond the Short Mountain there,” explained the other young man; “down on the river road to the ferry. Since we’ve been here, so few well-dressed strangers have gone past, that father was a little surprised at you — that’s all.”

“Then we are all Marylanders,” exclaimed Quantrell, “and I’m glad of that, because I have been lonesome for somebody to drink with me. Here’s a flask of old Needwood whisky, I know I can recommend! Age before beauty, pop!”

He extended the flask to the old man and winked at the boys.

“It’s something I never drank, sir, in my life,” spoke the firm old man, shaking his head.

Lloyd then turned to the boys.

“We’re not accustomed to it, friend,” said the elder of these, “but don’t let us interfere with you.”

Quantrell drank, and liked it so well that he drank twice, and then, laying down his gun and calling in his dog, he felt familiar and companionable with all men. He produced cigars and a fuse, and offered his cigar-case to the party.

“We’re unfortunate,” said the younger of the sons; “neither father nor we boys smoke, or use tobacco.”

“Sit down, anyway,” said the young man from the city; “there’s the habit of talk, that is common to all. What is your name? — Smith will do; anything to begin on.”

“You’re a good guesser. Smith is what it is,” spoke the old man, taking off his wool hat and stretching himself on the rocks and grass. “Isaac Smith — and yours?”

“Quantrell, of Baltimore.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Mr. Smith, “that is the name of one of the slave-dealers there!”

“Yes,” said Lloyd, reddening a little, “that’s unfortunately an uncle of mine. He’s managed, by the notoriety of the business, to have me identified pretty generally. It’s a business I shouldn’t go into — because it’s not a gentleman’s.”

The young men, as if interested, now stretched themselves on the mountain-slope, and the older man, changing his look to one more neighborly, said, in an impressive yet kind voice:

“Hardly a good Christian business, Mr. Quantrell! A business has got to be good, I think, sir, to insure any prosperity. If nobody could be found to trade in slaves, the evils of slavery would be small, because they would not be sent to great distances and worked up on the plantations. It would then not be profitable. Slavery in Maryland, except in two or three counties, is a trifling matter.”

“Yes,” said Lloyd, “it’s small, except in the tobacco counties, and they, as you have said, don’t seem to prosper. But I hope you ain’t an abolitionist, Mr. Smith?”

“Unfortunately, I am a slaveholder,” said Smith, straightforwardly.

“How many negroes have you got?”

“Six.”

“Why, pop,” answered Lloyd, familiarly, “you’re a man of property! What are negroes worth, up this way?”

“They’re higher than they will be, I think,” said Mr. Smith, reflectively.

Quantrell looked at the old man’s Judaic nose and wrinkled bridge thereof, and wad of grizzly hair above his grizzled, updrawn eyebrows, with the gray-blue eyes wide apart, cool and deep as frozen springs, and that mouth, which was like a fissure in granite, and again it seemed to the young man that there was something wild in Mr. Smith.

“Yet,” he reflected, “Smith is a man more substantial every way than he looks. Six negroes and a farm, and reasoning so rationally against his interests — and with religious views, too!”

“What are your politics, Smith?” asked Lloyd. “I’ll be frank with you, and tell you, I’m an American.”

“Why, so am I, Mr. Quantrell!”

“Shake hands on it, old fellow,” cried Lloyd, while the sons laughed aloud to see the city stranger’s open temperament pushing the acquaintance.

“I’m just keyed up on that,” repeated Lloyd, clasping Mr. Smith’s hands heartily, “for there are too many Dutch and Irish in this, our country. Down in Baltimore we have got them on the run. I’m a cock-robin!”

“I don’t quite understand you, Mr. Quantrell. Is that a kind of fire company or political club?”

“You’ve got it, Smith! On every suitable occasion we turn out and have a parade, and go right through the foreign quarter, driving everything we see under cover. Our idea is that Americans are good enough to rule America!”

Mr. Smith reflected a minute, and said that good Americans ought to make the best rulers. “However,” he added, “Senator Broderick, of California, was an Irishman, I believe, and he has just been murdered, in a duel.”

“Well, he’s an Irishman’s son,” replied Lloyd; “he was born on the Potomac here, in the District of Columbia, and that’s almost as good as Maryland.”

“They killed him,” figured up Mr. Smith, in his deliberate, nasal way,” on the 18th of last month. It will be four weeks to-morrow night, Mr. Quantrell.”

At this, the plain, independent old man, as Lloyd began to think him, looked at his two sons, and they raised their eyes to him.

“Next Sunday night will be four weeks,” repeated Mr. Smith, still looking at his boys, “since David Broderick was killed by a judge, in a duel. The newspapers say his last dying words were, ‘They killed me because I was opposed to the extension of slavery and a corrupt Administration.’”

There was a look of queer import, Lloyd Quantrell thought, between those plain people; for, as if forgetful of himself, they continued observing each other with a sense of some strong coincidence.

At this moment Quantrell’s dog started and ran a little way down the mountain and “pointed” at some low saplings with his fine white and brown nose.

Lloyd took his gun and followed out of sight of his new companions, and finally saw a mourning-dove sitting in a leafless tree. He raised his piece and aimed, feeling it unworthy work to shoot a turtledove, but as he withdrew the gun his dog still “pointed,” as if ravenous after the day’s barren sport.

Quantrell waved his hand, intimating to the trained animal to seek to the right and farther on.

The dog, for a minute, obeyed the order, and then returned, and, with tail straight out and one leg lifted, “nosed” the solitary dove again and made a slight, whimpering entreaty.

“Well, Albion,” thought his master, “I must either disappoint you or the dove,” and he aimed again and shot the bird.

It was so soft-eyed and so harmless, and seemed to look with such love and suffering at him as it trembled in his hand in the convulsion of death, the red rill of blood making purpler its brown plumage — like the blood of Abel sinking in the ground — that Lloyd felt some self-accusation.

With the dead bird in his hand he walked back toward the place of conversation, where he was arrested at a cedar-tree by the singular posture of Smith and his sons.

The old man was standing with his hands stretched straight out and their palms together, his body drawn up and his beard pointing upward, as his head was thrown back; while his sons, still seated, had crawled nearer their father, and had dropped their beards, as if assisting in prayer.

In the greatest wonder, Lloyd Quantrell looked at this scene, and for a minute doubted, as is natural with all men in a very practical land, seeing silent human marvels in lonely places, whether he saw anything at all; if the mountain at this point were not enchanted, and these three serious mountaineers only appearances or illusions.

But he heard articulated sounds proceeding from that old man’s beard, and the word “Amen!” pronounced with respectful inclinations of their heads, by both his tough, grown sons.

A new feeling then suddenly rose upon young Quantrell’s imagination; for the first time he had a sense of parental influence, something he had never known — confidence, consultation, and parental respect and discipline between a father and sons.

Before him was such a scene: absolute community of thought, directed by a strong-willed, plain-hearted father, who held his matured sons in the leash of his integrity and morality, till they loved his magistracy, and were like women to his counsel and authority.

“Such sons exist no more where I have been,” thought Lloyd, “at least not in the life I have seen. There the restraint of sons is broken by their waywardness and rebellion in early boyhood, even if their fathers desire to control them, or are worthy to do so.”

He thought of his own self-loving father, without moral restraints himself, or ever a rebuke for his son’s indulgences.

At the crackle of his approaching feet, the old man, Smith, and his boys ceased their apparent devotion and turned their heads.

“Mr. Quantrell,” spoke the old man, again examining Lloyd piercingly, “we do a little surveying on the mountains, and that is why we found you in this unexpected spot. They tell me, sir, who have lived here longer than I have, that General Washington was the first surveyor of these parts, and surveyed Harper’s Ferry tract itself. But what have you been killing?”

He took in his hand the little bird, and looked at Lloyd as he had at first, with a severe, almost domineering examination, and tight jaws.

“I have no respect for any man who will shoot a little dove,” he remarked, in a cold, reproving tone.

His sons also looked rebuke, and one of them said:

“Mr. Quantrell, that wasn’t fair game!”

“No, I am ashamed of it,” spoke Lloyd Quantrell, frankly. “My dog pointed so obstinately that I killed the poor thing against my better will.”

“I will forgive you, young man,” exclaimed Smith, the elder, “on condition that, if you ever see a man going to kill another dove, you will reprove him, sir.”

“I will,” said Lloyd, blushing, “unless he already feels as mean as I do.”

“Father,” interposed the younger Smith, “it was an accident, I calkelate. He’s owned it like a man. Let us show him our favorite view of the valleys.”

They looked again over the Catoctin Valley, and also at the Hagerstown Valley, both softer, paler in the descending sunlight.

It seemed to Lloyd, when he recalled these scenes in later years, as if that sunset was the last vouchsafed the world of heavenly peace and blessing.

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CHAPTER II.

THE LOOKER.

“FRIEND Smith,” exclaimed Lloyd Quantrell, “I was thinking to myself, just before we met, that if this high country of the Cumberland Valley, and the apron of it off here to the east, were all my property, I would make it a great baronial park, and stock it with nothing but American game collected from every State and Territory — a sort of Forest of Ardennes.”

Quantrell, who was a good singer, and of an unrestrained, hearty temperament, here recollected a bit of song, and without any ceremony raised his voice and sang, to the delight of Smith’s boys:

    “‘Under the greenwood tree,
       Who loves to lie with me,
       And tune his merry note
       Unto the sweet bird’s throat,
 Come hither, come hither, come hither:
       Here shall he see
       No enemy,
 But winter and rough weather.’

“Ha, ha, ha!” cried Lloyd, when he had ended, his melodious voice humanizing the place, and seeming to touch the younger son, whom the old man had addressed as Oliver, almost to tears, “that’s a song a friend of mine, a great young actor, sings like a real hunter. Now, if you and I and the boys here had control of this, we’d live like banished dukes. Is that your sentiment, Oliver?”

The young man with the sallow face and modest, sunken eyes, and careless hair and beard, put his brown hand to his throat, where there was a rising swelling, and said: “I think it is beautiful as it is. One log-house and — and my wife, would be enough for me.”

The old man, with a firm voice, interposed, glancing seriously at the son’s evident susceptibility to the song and the question.

“This is pretty scenery, gentlemen, and rich country,” he said, in a high, shrill tone, “and it delights the eye; but it fails to appeal to the mind, for the reason that history has not yet embellished it. Its great uses have not yet been perceived, I think. To grow grain and make butter and cheese, are agreeable to man; but even so fine a region as this can not compete with the great West in those respects — with Illinois, Iowa, and the Territory of Kansas. The political importance of the Alleghany Mountains far exceeds their agricultural importance. If I had been General Washington, and had his influence to locate the capital of the United States, I would have placed it behind the South Mountain, instead of in the clay gullies of the tide-water country.”

“O friend Smith,” cried Lloyd Quantrell, “there are too many Dutch up this way. They don’t know anything in the Dutch country but saving and slaving, and that would never do.”

“But hear father out, sir,” exclaimed the elder son. “He’s been a great reader and traveler. Father’s been to Europe!”

It was not common in 1859 to have “been to Europe,” and even the young Baltimorean looked at Smith with new interest.

The old man pointed over the valley with long fingers, his shoulders stooping a little, and his retreating forehead, hollow in the center, assisting the hawkness of his nose.

Lines of thought and an abstracted countenance marked his face while moving up and down and consulting the ground, but when he faced Lloyd Quantrell and his own sons, and gave them the full benefit of his steady and penetrating eyes, they felt that the narrow-shouldered, wiry old fellow must be a tall man.

He now took his beard in one hand, and with the other pointing over the autumnal-tinted plain and detached mountains, gazed out like some Hebrew seer.

“You want your political capital, gentlemen, where it has natural defenses against a military enemy, such as mountains interpose, and has population and agriculture enough to feed and defend it, and is also in a position to exert all its political influence with what I will call geographical directness on the country. The city of Washington can do nothing of that kind. It was easily taken and destroyed by a small army in the year 1814. Before it was established the people in its vicinity were getting their food from these German upland valleys. It has now no political influence at all, except a pernicious one, on the American people, having been governed for sixty years by the local ideas of two places — Richmond in Virginia and Baltimore in Maryland. Those cities were bound to influence it in the line of their very backward, or, as some say, conservative tendencies, because they received no other elements of population that lived around them in the old tide-water parts — people who continued to raise tobacco, catch herring, sell negroes, and marry their cousins. On the other hand, the country above the South Mountain ridge could subsist a very large population, and feed a large army, during repeated years of war. This mountain, with its natural ramparts, could be easily held by a few troops at the passes. The great valley behind it is the line of emigration and of easy communication from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi, and, gentlemen, the inevitable line of war!”

Without paying attention to anybody, Smith reached out his hand and took the spear instrument from his son, and, gesturing with it against the blue air, looked to Quantrell to be a colossal and seedy school-master, illustrating a lecture on an enormous blackboard.

“It will cost more fighting men than can be levied from all that tide-water country,” he continued, “merely to protect the government and the public property located at the city of Washington. If the capital had been placed here, in the Cumberland Valley, it would have been able to launch armies against the enemy and protect itself from a perpetually flanking second army, moving up the valley and getting to the north of Washington. Here will the enemy invade once and again, and have the start in the race, and be deep in the resources and positions of your country before you can come up with him and make him turn and fight. I would remove the public effects from Washington. I would hold Baltimore to her allegiance by Fortress Monroe. I would take the valley of the Cumberland Mountains from them at the beginning, leaving them to scratch clay and eat fodder on the emaciated plains, and I would fight them from the west!”

“Crazy as a bedbug,” thought Lloyd Quantrell, a little awed, “and on the subject of the Revolutionary War.”

Sticking the fish-spear in the sward and apostrophizing it, Mr. Smith, now apparently aroused and in the depth of his subject, continued in the same plain, brief style of address:

“This is why God has established the Alleghany Mountains — for the refuge of his people! The geologist tells us that the first mountains in the world to be made were the Adirondacks. My schooling was all before these days of science, and I don’t just quite get the idea. But if it be so, that the first land to rise above the sea and give the raven foothold after the deluge was there, where our household affections look to-day” (he glanced at his sons), “even upon that Ararat, I was always thinking of my boyhood, when I was a tanner on these Alleghanies.

“Yes,” resumed Isaac Smith, after a pause, “in the year 1826 I was tanning leather near the spot where General Washington — at your ages now, and my age when I lived there — went on his long winter journey to stop the French at old Fort Le Bœuf. I used to look at the creek that supplied my vats, and wish I could follow it down to the Venango and the Alleghany, and ascend Washington’s path by the Monongahela to the mountains and cross them to the Potomac. I married there, and the desire of money arrested my dreams; but every energy I put out in that direction failed. At times great fortunes seemed within my grasp, but slipped from me. In Europe, where I went for business, I found my mind led to battle-fields and the study of war. I tried to drive the idea away, and regain my credit in the business of all my maturer life — grading and selling wool; for I could tell the difference in similar wools raised in different of our States if they were put in my hand in the dark! But the confused verses of Scripture would rise in my mind whenever I heard the military trumpets sound abroad: ‘He seeketh wool and worketh willingly, but all his household are clothed in scarlet!’”

“And now, old man,” exclaimed the irreverent Quantrell, “you think you are at last back in a good country!”

“Yes, Mr. Quantrell,” said Isaac Smith, soberly, “I am in the country of my destiny. I love this country, and hope it may be loved for me and my children.”

“You have made one mourner in advance, pop,” answered Lloyd. “I think you only need to have been born in a military age to have reached the consideration of Sam Houston or General Jackson. But, unfortunately, you could no more get these Dutch, up this way, to fight than teach them style.”

“We never can tell, gentlemen,” said Smith, “when war is, as you may say, at our elbow. I have been a great reader of the history of wars, particularly in the Old Testament. Most of the wars there recorded, were made by Moses, acting out the will of God. He led the Hebrews out of their bondage in Egypt and toward a land of promise. The people in that land, we may understand, had done no harm to Moses or his people. They existed as peaceably as the people of Virginia and Maryland, that we see from this elevation — working for the dollar and expecting no enemy whatever. But Moses, who was keeping his flocks on the back side of the desert, as we read, ‘went out on the mountain of God, even to Horeb,’ say the Scriptures. Something took him there not in the way of interest, perhaps not his desire. But there he heard his name called aloud from a burning bush, or heap of brush — ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here am I!’”

Lloyd Quantrell was again convinced that the Smith family were crazy.

As he recited this old bit of Scripture, with a slow, shrill, nasal cry, Isaac Smith folded his arms, closed his eyes, and dropped his head upon his beard and breast, standing there a moment speechless, and his sons, also taking his attitude, looked to the ground as if all three were again to pray together.

“‘Here am I, Lord, on thy mountain!’” repeated Isaac Smith with rising inflection, unfolding his arms and stretching them wide. His strong jaws closed a moment, as he slowly turned his head, and with a steady eye, looking into Lloyd’s, finished the sentence: “These were the words of Moses.”

Some picture of Moses that Lloyd had seen, probably in the old Bible of his mother’s family, was revived by the appearance of Isaac Smith at this moment. His nose would have been quite the Jew’s, but that it came to an end too bluntly. His eyes, at spells, turned inward, like a lost thinker’s, and his manner varied from the hard, practical American to the introspective, tranceful Oriental.

“The poor man is crazy on religious subjects,” thought Lloyd Quantrell, “but how in the deuce did he get the military lunacy there too? Why, out of Moses, of course!

“So, General Smith,” interrupted the young hunter, pleasantly, “that was the way Moses got his military commission? He was made a general in the bush?”

“I was about to say, Mr. Quantrell, the general peace prevailing among many nations was broken — among the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Jebusites, the Philistines, and many others — who looked upon Moses, probably, as a sore disturber. They had not heard the voice he heard, nor seen the cause of war that lay among them. But in the deep prosperity of society often lies the live coal of war, as I have seen, at corn-harvest time, the fires break out in the woods and standing crops. One man might fail in this age — even one as obedient as Moses — to set in conflict the powers that now lie so tightly bound in cunning compromises that they can not draw back to strike each other. But the Power which sent the mysterious voice can bring the armies up, though the chosen captain look in vain to know how or where! He may excite only derision instead of war. He may be punished in a lunatic asylum. He may have the misery of utterly failing and involving others in destruction, but Moses thought all these things over, and they did not move him.”

Lloyd Quantrell arose and whistled to his dog.

“General Smith,” he said, “myself and your two sons have been greatly edified. To meet a man of your travel and intelligence on the top of the mountain is a refreshing surprise, sir. But the sun is getting low, and I have no shelter for the night. I would accept the hospitality of your house, if I knew just where it was.”

“We are not going home, Mr. Quantrell,” spoke one of the young men, “and there is nobody at our little cabin to entertain you. We are sorry, sir. You will do best to go down into the Catoctin Valley, here, where the settlements are close together. It is not very far to Middletown, where there is a tavern.”

“Yes,” said Isaac Smith, “we are out, Mr. Quantrell, on a night excursion to hunt minerals in the mountain. I use the divining-rod, sir, with much success. We expect to find lead in these hills, or iron, at least.”

“Ah, General Smith, you have got a universal head there! So all-night luck to you, and good-by. — Come, Albion.”

The dog started ahead at the cry.

“God bless you, sir!” said Isaac Smith, taking Lloyd’s hand in a large, fatherly palm. “Remember the queer old man’s sermon on the mountain, and — never kill a dove again.”

As the young man waved his hand and went on, he looked back once, and saw all three of the mountaineers watching him till he disappeared in the woods.

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CHAPTER IV.

KATY “P’INTED.”

Leaving the Smiths, Lloyd descends into Catoctin Valley, and at a “Dutch” farm encounters a farm maid and her friend. Albion encounters the farm’s mastiff, and in a fight emerges the worse for wear, upending Lloyd into a water trough in the bargain.

“I’m Katy,” declares the girl, after Lloyd emerges from his soaking, “Jake Bosler’s Katy. I’m goin’ on seventeen.”

Having asked farmer Bosler for dry clothes and a night’s lodging, Lloyd muses to himself: “A Dutchman’s guest! . . . Well, well! The last Dutchman I met I stuck in the thigh with a shoemaker’s awl for getting too near the polls. Can I ever respect a Dutchman? — even the father of little Katy of Catoctin?”

WHEN he came down to supper, several plain, uncultivated-looking men were already at the table, where Lloyd was accommodated with a place between Katy and her friend, who was introduced by Katy, saying:

“Tis is Nelly Harbaugh; she’s a Swisser.”

“You’re a Deitsher,” replied Nelly Harbaugh to Katy.

“What’s the difference, girls, between a Swisser and a Deitsher?” asked Lloyd of the two ladies alternately, looking his fondest. — “Jake, you tell me.”

“Nay,” said Jake, replying in kind. “Ich wais’s net, Lloyd. Ask Andrew Atzerodt; he’s quick.”

“Te Swisser,” spoke up one of the apparent serving-men — that only one whose face, as Lloyd now remarked it, seemed to have a little worldly restlessness — “te Swisser offers hisself for to pe bought. Te Deitsher gits sold and says nix. Dat’s so, py Jing!”

He raised his voice at the end in a way to exasperate Lloyd, looking at Lloyd, too, as if to say, “I am always positive.”

“Nelly,” insinuated Lloyd, “when you’re in the market, let me know, sweetness! — Katy, don’t you get sold without giving me the first chance!”

“Ha, ha! Lloyd,” Jake Bosler broke out, “you is a great feller for te girls.”

“Do you mean it?” Nelly Harbaugh asked Lloyd, giving him the whole sunflower of her attention.

“I reckon so,” Lloyd answered, but looking at little Katy.

“Py Jing!” exclaimed Atzerodt, across the table, fiercely at Lloyd, “Nelly, tare, is my gal, I haf you know!”

He looked to Lloyd now to have been drinking, or to be naturally a little drunk.

“There’s nothing like being impressive, Andrew,” replied Lloyd, looking straight at him, and mentally wishing he had him down the road. “Are you a Swisser or a Deitsher?”

“Me? Py Jing, I’m a Swisser. I lif in te Valley of Fergeenia, where tey fights at te drop of te hat!”

“You better go down there and fight, then,” Nelly Harbaugh said to Andrew. — “Luther Bosler, tell Lloyd about the mountain Dutch!”

“Te German-blood people,” spoke up Luther Bosler, after hesitation, and in a still and somewhat dignified way, “come to Pennsylvany first. Amongst te first was us Tunkers. We been here hundred and forty year.”

“You too, Katy?” interjected Lloyd. “A hundred and forty years here, and never sent for me?”

Everybody laughed loud. Andrew Atzerodt more boisterously than all, and Katy answered meekly at last:

“I’m going on seventeen.”

Stopping till he was requested to continue, Luther Bosler, whose dark eyes were like Katy’s, but his hair was coarser and of a deeper brown, said on:

“Yes, Lloyd, us Dutch is a hundred and fifty year in te United States. First off, te Germans come to New York, and didn’t like that much, so most of tem moved to Pennsylvany. Te Tunker Dutch was Baptists, and they spread all over Pennsylvany and Maryland and down Virginia way. After they got to valleys, te Swiss come and took te hills dat wasn’t good for much. So now we’re all mixed up. Katy’s got worldly; Nelly, she’s no Tunker. Andrew, he’s nothin’ but a Dutch coach-maker.”

“I’m te pest coach-maker in Fergeenia, don’t you forgit it!” Andrew said, with rising inflection and want of equipoise.

“No, Andrew,” put in Lloyd, “when Katy and I want our royal coach, we’ll have you make it. — But, Luther, what do these Dunkers vote?”

“They don’t vote in general,” said Luther. “It’s not religious. I voted three year ago.”

“I hope you voted for Mr. Fillmore, Luther?”

“No, I didn’t,” said Luther.

“Oh! of couxse, you Dutch folks had to vote for old Buchanan. You couldn’t go one of us Americans.”

“Because I was an American, I thought,” quietly remarked Luther, “I voted for Colonel Fremont. He got just two hundred and eighty-one out of ’most eighty-seven thousand votes in Maryland. So you can see my vote sticking up at te end, all by itself.”

“Luter ’most got turned out of meetin’ for votin’,” exclaimed his father. “But dey took him back.”

“Dat Fremont was a tam French abolitionist!” exclaimed the excitable Atzerodt. “I kill him, py Jing!”

“Go for him, Andrew,” said Lloyd, grimly. “He’s afraid of you, I know. But, pop” — to Jake Bosler — “can’t you take me to meeting with you to-morrow?”

“O father, do!” spoke up Katy, impulsively, “it’s love-feast!”

“We’ll all go!” Nelly Harbaugh cried; “Luther must take me.”

“Oh, you’ll laugh at us poor Tunkers, Lloyd,” Jake Bosler said.

“Nelly, you goes with me!” Andrew Atzerodt spluttered, hotly. “Didn’t I come all to way from Port Tobacco to see you?”

“I have got better company,” said the girl, negligently.

 Py Jing!” raged Atzerodt, “I kill somebody!”

“Don’t kill me,” exclaimed Lloyd, with humor. “I’ll run under the table if you look at me so.”

Superior in worldly confidence and speech, and with unchecked humor and feelings, the city guest surpassed himself that evening as the candles were lighted and the wood-fire flamed, and the presuming Atzerodt also felt his influence as Lloyd jested light and complimentary.

Luther Bosler was a good listener, and whenever Lloyd looked his way, Luther, with a certain sluggish softness in his dark-lighted eyes, seemed watching him, but not with any dislike; for, once when Lloyd cried —

“Luther, I see you’re a long-headed old sly-boots” —

“Oh!” said Luther, “my head, Lloyd, can’t keep in my poots when you’re a-talkin’!”

When they had partaken of the stewed chicken and smear case and cream, and what Jake called the “wedgable things” for vegetables, little Katy brought in pies for supper. Lloyd smiled to himself, thinking: “What heathens! pie for supper!”

“What kind of sweet things, Kate,” he cried, “are you trying to sour us on with yourself?”

“Oh,” said Katy, beaming joy, “here’s peach snitz and elder, and some kickelins. I cooked tem.”

Lloyd found the “kickelins” were sweet cakes fried in fat, and the “snitz” were dried peaches, and the queer pie was made of elder-berries. Said Katy, in their Dutch tongue, to Nelly:

“How I like to see him eat! He does it so easy.”

“I should like to see him in love, Katy.”

“Hush!” said Katy, trembling.

“Bedtime,” Jake Bosler nodded, setting back his chair and glancing at the clock. “Bi’m-by!”

“Jake, your clock is fast,” Lloyd observed, consulting his own gold watch, at which all the company looked, marveling.

“We keep it fast, Lloyd,” Luther Bosler said; “it’s te fashion up here, so we can go to work earlier.”

“My goodness!” Katy cried, “te apples is cut and you men must snitz.”

Two wash-tubs were brought into the whitewashed room, and sitting around them on wooden chairs all the men commenced to peel apples for drying, while Katy and Nelly produced two spinning-wheels and made them fly and hum on woolen yarn.

“We make all our own yarn,” said Katy to Lloyd, “and send it to to weaver. He makes it into Dunker cloth.”

Lloyd peeled apples awhile, till Nelly Harbaugh called him to unravel something at the wheel, and then he watched the two fine girls working on Saturday night, with a sense of reproof in his mind for so much avarice of time.

Nothing was here, he thought, but the physical beauty of these women to ornament life; no pictures on the wall but lithographs from Scripture, no books but the “Hagerstown Almanac” and Bausmann’s travels in the Holy Land, and a Dutch Bible; no ornaments but some horns of deer and a robe of yellow panther-skins sewn together, with the eye-holes embroidered around the red lining. The very peace seemed, to the strong-willed American, heavy with unspiritual content; but it had brought to these young girls the perfection of everything but mind.

The face he understood the best, and which seemed also to understand him, was Nelly Harbaugh’s; too open to his gaze, unretreating before him, ready to be admired whenever he turned toward it, and seeming to say, “You can make no mistake — I am ready to hear you.”

Had Katy not been there to drop her eyes before his warm admiration, he might have paid closer regard to Nelly Harbaugh’s sunny charms.

She was larger, fuller, taller than Katy, with a carriage erect yet indolent, as if Nature had given her such animal health that she could not droop, but like some strong-stemmed golden flower blinked not at the hottest sun, but took its color in every petal. Over Katy her influence might be strong, Lloyd thought, and he said:

“Nelly, I know I have seen your fine blue eyes in Baltimore.”

“No, I have never been there,” Nelly said, “except to market, and Luther made us come back as soon as we sold out.”

She looked coquettish reproach, with the same searching directness, at Luther as he came over and, putting his hand upon her shoulder, looked at her with mild interest.

“Nelly,” said Luther, “will you pe my girl if I drive you to Beaver Creek meeting?”

“I am always yours, Luther,” answered Nelly, examining him with even more wistfulness than Lloyd. “But you don’t want me.”

“I do,” said Luther, “but I want you all. I think you can not gif me all your heart. It is difided.”

“It is not,” said Nelly, “but you will not ask for it.”

Lloyd Quantrell was arrested at both the deepened interest in Nelly’s eyes and the finely contrasted animal perfection of her and of her admirer. Luther was dark and deep-voiced, and with a manly something in him, however rude. In her tall, well-rounded figure and long waist, which a bodice might adorn, and finely grained flesh and long braids of corn-colored hair, there seemed to be strength, fruitfulness, and power over man; yet in her undisguised ardor and will it seemed that she needed Luther’s reality and slower though not stronger impulses of character. He looked at her with mild, almost devout, eyes, as if he kept love back by reason.

“Kiss her,” said Katy. “I know you want to, Luther.”

Luther passed his arm around Nelly, but did not kiss her.

With disappointment, yet pride, the girl turned on Lloyd Quantrell again the same penetrating and steady look.

Thought Lloyd, returning the gaze in kind, “That girl a man might dress to look like a queen, but even then she could take a lesson in nature from little Katy.”

Katy had such large eyes, the pupils big and the eyeballs big too, that they turned in her head like poems, Lloyd thought, harmoniously rhyming in expression and so full of tender feeling that he said once, “Katy, I can almost see the water drip from those two buckets of your eyes as they rise on me a from the well of your fresh heart.”

“Why,” said Katy, “you’re a poet, Lloyd. I can make rhymes too.”

“Singsht?” Lloyd asked, having picked up a word.

“Yaw, Lloyd, and I play te accordion.”

Modestly Katy went for the instrument, and bringing it back began to draw forth its sounds, opening her lips to breathe inward the harmony, and Lloyd saw that her teeth were full and white.

Sitting there a mere child, her long braid of chestnut hair hanging to her chair, her long, expressive fingers at the keys, and shyness and fervor playing in her countenance like trout in springs, she suddenly raised a little German idyll, and her brother joined in it with his untrained bass, and all the farm-hands turned their faces up to hear:

“Oh was is shenner uf der welt
      Os blimlin roat un weis?
  Un blo, un gail, im arble feld —
      Wass sin de doch so neis!
  Ich wais noch goot in seller tzeit
      Hob ich nix leevers du,
  Os in de wissa, long un breit
      So blimlin g’soocht we du.”*

[* By Tobias Witmer: “My Old Woman’s Birthday.”]

Lloyd knew that it was a song about hunting bright flowers in the fields, and almost understood the timid peep of Katy’s eyes upon him, when she sang:

“I know yet well that in that time
      Naught would I rather do,
  Than in the meadow long and wide
      Such flow’rets seek as you.”

Jake Bosler, who had been nodding, awoke to hear the tune, and when it was done he wiped his eyes of some tears.

“Ich con’s net helfa — I can’t help it,” he said: “I tink of my olty—”

“My mother who is dead,” Katy explained, as Jake faltered; “she’s been dead two years.”

“Bettime—bi’m-by!” Jake Bosler managed to say at last, and Katy moved to the table and opened the old Dutch Bible. When she had read, in the sweetest tones, words intelligible to Lloyd only by their holiness, all present knelt and Jake Bosler prayed for his brood, for pure hearts and thoughts, and for the stranger within his gates. His daughter and son went up to kiss him.

“Goot-night, Lloyd,” he said. “Soon-up, bi’m-by.”

“Thinking of work even as he falls to sleep!” Lloyd exclaimed. “Now give old daddy a parting tune!”

He started up the little song by Samuel Woodworth:

“The pride of the valley is lovely young Ellen,
     Who dwells in a cottage enshrined by a thicket,
  Sweet peace and content are the wealth of her dwelling,
     And Truth is the porter that waits at the wicket.”

Katy caught the air and kept the accompaniment with her accordion, and Lloyd changed “Ellen” into “Katy,” and sang it to her with all his spirit, being in fine voice, and all the Dutch people listened with delight.

“Ah, Katy!” said Jake, going up-stairs, “I guess you got a beau, Katy.”

The serving-men took their departure too, and only Andrew Atzerodt remained.

“Luter,” he said, “git me some of Jake’s whisky. I hat a head on me yisterday.”

“Here’s some whisky we make ourselves, Lloyd,” Luther said, producing it. “Te Tunkers keeps little still-houses and makes a few bar’ls a year.”

The pure liquor soon brought a pleasurable glow to the men, Luther drinking sparingly, and for a while the influence was peculiar on Atzerodt, bringing out a vein of natural humor in him. Lloyd read him soon to be a man of such volatile nature that his forwardness was always getting him into predicaments. He challenged everybody, and probably had a brutal Hessian instinct, as Lloyd expressed it, but possessed no fortitude to carry it out. Seeing that Luther was now increasing his interest in Nelly Harbaugh, Andrew cried out:

“Now, py Jing! you haf been holting my gal’s hand tare long enough!”

“Sit down!” commanded Nelly Harbaugh, “or I’ll send you home to walk to Middletown in the dark.”

“I’ll go, den,” Atzerodt cried, making a movement toward his hat.

“Behave, you fool!” cried Nelly, making Luther release her hand, however.

“She’s got two fellows on the string,” thought Lloyd Quantrell, “and is fishing for me too. — Ah! Andrew,” Lloyd spoke out, “you are a courageous man. A desperate man, I call you. I have no doubt that you could take your hat and walk alone among these mountains all night, and not run from the ghost I saw to-day.”

“Geisht!” exclaimed Andrew, looking behind him and turning pale, “I walk past a shpook and shust laugh at him — ha! ha!”

“Give me your hand, my brave fellow,” cried Lloyd, standing up. “And you have got a strong grip too, Andrew.”

“If I shqueeze you hard, py Jing,” said the heedless mechanic, “you goes crazy.”

“Don’t squeeze me, Andrew,” exclaimed Lloyd, with a wink to the rest. “Now you are doing of it. Ouch! Let me go!”

As he spoke, Lloyd, who was a powerful man, trained in athletic games, closed his great palm around the coachmaker’s, and slowly tightened it. The poor fellow writhed and groveled in pain, but feared to cry out, since his oppressor kept saying:

“What nerve! what endurance! Don’t squeeze me so! Oh, take him off! Have mercy, Andrew!”

Thus shouting, the tears came to Lloyd’s eyes to see the poor braggart suffer, and all laughed but Katy, who cried:

“You’re hurting one another, I know.”

“Ah!” said Lloyd, looking at his own hand as if in misery, “never will I go into the lion’s den again.”

“Py Jing!” exclaimed the other, as soon as he could get breath and suppress his sobs, “you got a purty goot grip, too. But I’m a workin’-man. Better not tackle me, Lloyd!”

“Poor thing,” said Katy, taking Lloyd’s hand timidly, and looking at it. He raised her little fingers up as if to show her his wound, and kissed them.

“Don’t,” said Katy; “I been huskin’ corn all day in te field.”

“Do they work the women out in the fields?” asked Lloyd.

“Oh, yes,” Katy answered simply, while Nelly Harbaugh made an effort to restrain her, which Katy did not understand; “father gives Nelly half a dollar a day for huskin’ and plantin’ corn. She must be rich.”

“What ghost did you see on the mountain, Lloyd?” Nelly Harbaugh asked, evasively.

All seemed interested to hear this, and Lloyd, standing up to emphasize the story and test Andrew Atzerodt’s nerve-powers, looked quite the necromancer in his farmer’s suit and in a wide Dunker hat he now drew on.

“Andrew,” spoke Lloyd, “only your splendid courage could have resisted the feeling that the old man I saw to-day was not mortal. He had a nose that seemed to curl like an elephant’s trunk; his eyebrows stood up like a horse’s mane; his beard fell below his breast-bone and had silver fire in it like old punk. He closed his big jaw, saying: ‘Is this a dove you have been shooting? Agh-h-h!’”

“Stop! You lie! He wasn’t tare!” cried Andrew, sinking at the knees, at the stranger’s well-acted part.

“He was there, Andrew. I swear it! ‘Is this a dove you have been killing?’ the wild man said, his voice as cold as the October wind which blows that door open now — hoo-oo-oo!”

“Scat! Te wind is high,” chattered Atzerodt, as the door to the kitchen opened a little way.

“‘I have no respect,’ the phantom said to me, ‘for any man who will kill a little dove. No-o-o-o!’”

“You scare us, Lloyd!” murmured little Katy, leaving her chair and coming forward, as if to shut the creaking door. He held his hand out to detain her, and continued:

“‘I did not mean to do it,’ I said to that strange man; ‘my pointer dog was obstinate, and nosed the harmless bird. Forgive me, mountain-wizard!’ ‘No!’ pealed he, ‘a dove! A little, little d-o-o-ve!’”

“Pooh!” said Atzerodt, “if dot was all, a little pit of a dove, you wasn’t afeard.”

Atzerodt took a stout drink of the whisky. The loose door obeyed the wind again and opened inward. Katy stepped forward, but Lloyd held her at an arm’s length.

“‘My dog would nose the dove.’ I pleaded. ‘’Twas not my fault, indeed!’ ‘You killed a dove,’ said he, ‘a little, little d-o-o-ve.’ ‘Hist, Albion,’ said I, ‘seek farther on—’”

“Ha! what’s dat? I hears a kreisha!” Andrew muttered, as a sort of wail came from the kitchen.

“Albion!” repeated Lloyd, himself disturbed by the noise and his own zeal, for he had involuntarily exceeded his joke.

As he mentioned the name of his dog, Albion himself, mechanically walking as if in sleep, came through the kitchen door that was ajar, and advancing near the middle of the large room, threw back his body and threw up his white and brown nose, and whimpered as on the mountain-top. His torn ear was turned toward them and showed bloody yet.

“The hoond p’ints something,” muttered Luther Bosler. “What is it?”

“Ha! ha! ha!” Atzerodt replied, repeating his drink. “I tink it’s Katy.”

“Maybe it’s the Black Dog!” shouted Nelly Harbaugh. “Say ‘The Words,’ Katy!”

As both girls started to mutter something like an incantation, Luther Bosler advanced to take his sister, but Lloyd Quantrell had assuaged her terror in his own arms, and as he drew her tenderly to him he threw Jake Bosler’s big wool hat at the dog, which snapped at it and shrank back into the dark kitchen.

“Dear little dove,” Lloyd Quantrell said, attempting to kiss Katy, but she pressed his head away, “that wasn’t a black dog at all, only my English pointer.”

“The Black Dog,” said Nelly Harbaugh, “needn’t be black. It’s a spirit.”

“Spirit of what?”

“Trouble,” answered Nelly Harbaugh.

“Lloyd,” murmured little Katy, “it p’inted at me and you. We must say ‘Te Words’ together.”

“‘The Words?’” Lloyd answered. “I don’t know ‘The Words,’ Katy.”

“O Lloyd! ‘Te Words’ keep off te Poltergeist. I say them when I see a bad sign and when I am too happy, for when we’re happiest te bad man likes to come.”

“Say them now, Katy,” Lloyd whispered, pressing her close in his strong arms; “I’m very happy, for I love you!”

“Do you? Oh! you must tell to truth now; for I’m going to say ‘Te Words,’ and it’s wicked to say them with a lie.”

“I love you,” Lloyd Quantrell replied, his arms trembling. “I’ll say ‘The Words’ after you with joy, Katy.”

“Call on te three Highest Names, my love,” said Katy, in rapt awe.

As they said together in a country rhyme, he repeating after her, the dread names in the Trinity, they heard the dog howl in the kitchen.

“There,” said Katy, “te Black Dog heard us and is gone. Lloyd, you may kiss me now.”

“O blessed words,” Lloyd Quantrell murmured, “which brought this kiss to me. Teach me from your pure heart all that it knows, dear child, and keep me happy as I am.”

“You must peliev,” said Katy, “pelieve in te Three Highest Names and say ‘Te Words,’ and then love will be beautiful.”

“Who told you, Katy?”

“My dear mother, Lloyd, and my heart tells me, too.”

“Did you ever love before?”

“No, but I often tried to. When you came to te spring house, Lloyd, I was saying to myself: ‘I guess somebody is going to love me. But I wonder when he will come?’ I knew he was somewheres.”

“God bless you, darling! That very same was I thinking: that the country was beautiful, but I was lonely in it, for want of some gentle heart and glowing face. I have found you, Katy, and both of us are happy.”

Again the stranger in the mountains pressed to his lips the simple and unresisting face which had floated to him like a sunny cloud in this high vale, and for a little while he forgot that she was “Dutch,” hard as his native prejudices were against that humble race, longer in the land than his own name of Quantrell.

---

 

CHAPTER V.

LOVE AMONG THE SPOOKS.

WHEN they returned in consciousness to the whitewashed great room of Jacob Bosler, Nelly was sitting near the fire, which had burned low, with Luther on her right and Atzerodt on her left. Atzerodt was telling tales of spirits and frightening himself, and hence drew frequently upon the jug of whisky to give him what Lloyd called “Dutch courage.”

He told of the snarley-yow and the were-wolf; the phantom soldier and the white woman which announced a death; of the big Indian’s shade with a light in him; and of the fox-fire in the fields which lay on the meadow-grass at night and turned to silver, but like the fire-coals when stirred by avarice were silver only at night, but in the morning ashes.

Atzerodt’s sallow, furtive, somewhat anxious face, like that of one intense yet animal, brightened up between the drink, the superstition, and his enjoyment of the others’ fears; his voice was shrill and responsive to his emotions, his frame thick set and his movements were agile, his eyes a keen blue, and no repose was in his soul.

“He’s one of the best coachmakers to be found,” said Nelly to Lloyd. “If he’d be steady, he could marry any girl, and be a rich man.”

“Can’t you make him steady?”

“I don’t want to be a mechanic’s wife,” said Nelly, “unless I must.”

Looking at him again, as if trying to read him, Nelly Harbaugh said:

“Is your watch gold? Won’t you give it to me? What do you do in Baltimore?”

“Spend money,” said Lloyd, “run to the fires, turn out with the Grays, and guard the polls.”

“The Grays? That’s soldiers!”

“Yes, we’re all Union men. Not a foreigner in the company. Our motto is, ‘Put none but Americans on guard.’”

“I hope everybody is for te Union,” Luther Bosler remarked; “we’re all for it up this a-way.”

“Katy,” Lloyd said, “do you believe in ghosts?”

“Oh, yes, Lloyd.”

“Tell me about one.”

Katy shrank a little at being called upon to take so much attention, but her ready impulses carried her along.

“There was a girl over in Smoketown,” Katy spoke, “who wanted to sell herself to te divel” — Katy here seemed to be saying “The Words” again an instant — “she wanted to pe rich and not to work; she thought she was a lady, and not a poor Dutch girl. So she asked her mother to let her sell herself to te little lame man. Her mother told her to go sit by te spring and say:

‘I want clothes, and I want gold;
 I want nefer to pe old;
 I want peauty as long as I can —
 Gif it to me, little lame man!’”

“What a nice wish!” exclaimed Nelly Harbaugh.

“So te little lame man came right to te spring, and he said, ‘Put your right hand on te top of your head.’ She put it there. ‘Put your left hand on the soles of your feet,’ said he. She was sitting down, and she did that, too. ‘Now,’ said te lame man, ‘you must say, “All that is between my two hands belongs to te divel.”’ She started to say it, and had got to te last word, when her mother ran there and shouted ‘God!’ so she lost the words and said, ‘All that is between my two hands belongs to — God!’ Te little lame man run back to Smoketown as fast as his legs could carry him.”

“But didn’t the girl get any nice clothes, or anything, for being so good?” asked Nelly.

“She got,” said Katy, blushing, “a good husband, my mother told me, if he was a poor young man.”

“Dot Shmoketown,” cried Atzerodt, “is an ole Shpooktown, py Jing! I come along tare one night purty trunk, riding a horse, and joost as I crossed te leetle stream dis side of Shmoketown an begun to climb te mountain road dat comes dis way, and had got into de glen petween te Short Mountain and te Plue Ridge, I see pefore me a black man with a white face like a chiny plate. I said to myself, ‘Py Jing, any company is petter dan none!’ So I jined te black feller, and he was de nicest feller I ever did know; he was rale shentlemans.

“Says he: ‘It’s cold; we’ll drink together!’ He handed me a flask. When I got done trinkin’, tere was another man riding with us.

“As we come up te mountain through te chestnut forest, te moon shined on te road, an efery time we took another trink, tere was another man on horsepack, till, py Jing! I counted apout nine men, and de last man was a woman.

“Tey all seemed to know te black man with te white face; he was a rale shentlemans.

“He made speeches out of pooks and drilled us like a solcher company, and we charged at a gallop, an rode company-face, an right-countermarch, an had a good time, py Jing! I guess I was purty trunk.”

“You’re not far from it now,” said Nelly Harbaugh.

Atzerodt looked into the darker parts of the room apprehensively yet saucily, and continued:

“We got most to te top of te Plue Ridge, when te black man said, ‘Who’s dat long feller amongst te horses?’

“There was a man walkin’ in te road. He was a long man in black clothes. He looked up and powed and said, ‘Good-evening, friends; we’re ’most home!’ ‘Te devil you are!’ said te black man with te white face.

“We rode along awhile till te captain, as I’ll call him, begun whisperin’ to us an saying: ‘Look at dat feller! He’s eferywhere at once; he’s on dat side, and on dis side, and petween our horses, and I pelieve he’s joost a devil. Let’s ride over him!’

“So we looked, an tere he was, right amongst te horses, dis side, dat side, not a pit afraid—”

“Oh, don’t,” spoke Katy, “don’t tell us the rest unless it’s good.”

“Go to bed, Andrew, you desperate, brave man,” Lloyd Quantrell said, drawing his arm tighter around Katy.

“Yes,” Luther Bosler added, “it’s late, and this story is too long.”

“Go on,” said Nelly Harbaugh; “I want to know what became of the black man with the white face.”

“‘Let’s ride over him!’ said te captain. ‘All right, py Jing!’ says I.

“‘No,’ says some, ‘he’s a nice ole man, and he says he’s ’most home.’

“‘Put it to vote!’ says te black man with te white face.

“Py Jing! it was a tie; one half was one way and one half was te oder way.

“‘Leave it to te woman!’ says te captain.”

“That was the right way,” Lloyd Quantiell said. “The women are always for pity, Katy.”

“Te woman,” concluded Atzerodt, “looked a leetle queer an said nothing till te black an white man rode to her side and looked at her like a rale shentlemans. Den she leaned over an’ kissed him, and she joost yelled, ‘Charge!’”

Excited with the recital and the drink, Atzerodt had arisen unsteadily as he shouted this last word.

“‘Charge!’ yelled to woman, and on we put, py Jing! to trample dat long man in te road.

“The first ting I knowed, we was at te steep edge of te mountain, and te captain rode right over. Down, down he went, and efery feller after him, and I last of all, for my horse had stumpled—”

“Ah! ah! Andrew,” spoke Lloyd, “surely, with your splendid courage, you were not in the rear?”

“I was pitched off te horse joost pefore he jumped over, and I was fallin’, too, but I see te long man lyin’ in te road, an’ I took hold of his hand to save myself.

“Te moon showed him lyin’ there dead, all cut with te horseshoes. Te hand I took was slippery with something, and I couldn’t git a tight hold of it.”

“Not with your stalwart fist, Andrew?” exclaimed Lloyd.

“I couldn’t git hold of it,” said Atzerodt, with a changed and lowered tone, “because his hand was bloody. So down I went, hundreds of feet, and next mornin’ tere I was found underneath te mountain, and Nelly Harbaugh was py me. Py Jing! ain’t it so, Nelly?”

“Yes,” said Nelly, after a pause, “it was last April; he was coming to see me to make me marry him. I went out to hunt him, and there I found him asleep in the road, and his horse going loose. So I woke him up and sent him to the right-about.”

“Py Jing!” exclaimed the tipsy man, tears of various origin coming to his eyes, “I’m come agin to-day, Nelly, to ask you to pe my wife. Don’t say ‘No.’ You’ll preak me all up. I have got a shop at Port Tobacco, and all te work I want, but I can’t keep sober unless you marry me. Come, make me a home! You needn’t work in te fields no more. I’ll save you from want, and you’ll save me from wickedness. Oh, I’ll promise eferything!”

“It’s worth considering, Nelly,” Luther Bosler remarked, with grave emotion. “He’s a good mechanic.”

“Take the candle and go to bed,” commanded Nelly Harbaugh, looking at Atzerodt; “if you intend to obey me, begin now. I will not give you an answer till you are sober.”

She stood, beautiful and tall, with her blue eyes full of care yet spirit, like one with resources but in doubt.

“Oh, to-night,” pleaded Atzerodt, “or I may dream agin!”

“To-morrow,” said Nelly Harbaugh, pointing to the door.

The common fellow, in whom seemed some real sensibility now, took the candle and staggered meekly toward the entrance.

“Kiss good-night!” he muttered unsteadily.

“You are not obeying me,” answered Nelly Harbaugh.

He threw open the door leading into the night and stopped, with a trembling of the candle he held up, and the words, “It’s dark, Nelly!”

“Now, now, Andrew!” Lloyd Quantrell cried, “I know you’re not afraid to go to bed alone.”

“You’re a loafer,” shouted Atzerodt in sudden rage, uttering an oath. “You’ll pe no good to Katy!”

Lloyd made a push for the door, and Atzerodt fled, slamming it behind him.

“The cur!” exclaimed Lloyd Quantrell, throwing his arm around Katy, who had followed him. “You know he slanders me, Katy.”

“Oh, he must,” Katy said, “you are such a gentleman!”

Her brother’s eyes followed Katy tenderly to the fire, as if to reassure her of their guest’s good character; and then seeing her, without affront, caressed by the so recent acquaintance, Luther turned to Nelly Harbaugh, who had sunk into one of the wooden chairs.

“What will you answer Andrew to-morrow, Nelly?”

“Whatever you say.”

“Do you love him?”

“Luther,” exclaimed the girl, as a great sob escaped from her throat, “there is but one I love: you know it.”

“If I could make you happy,” Luther replied, “I would marry you. Your great beauty makes up for your poverty, Nelly. I haf a good farm next to father’s. Could I tepend upon your opedience?”

“For life, Luther! You are the only man I would obey with joy.”

“Girls nowadays, Nelly, looks at a man as a slave to gratify all their follies. My wife must do her part in toil and saving as our mothers did. Can you do that?”

“Luther, I can for you, I believe.”

“I haf loved you a year,” said Luther, deliberately. “Kiss me!”

Little Katy rose from her lover’s side and came forward.

“Oh, what a night of happiness!” she cried. “Hiresht se, Luther? Marry and call Nelly ‘wife.’ I hoped you would, for Nelly is willful. But she is beautiful, too.”

After Katy kissed them both, her friend, with a moment’s care, exclaimed:

“Luther, will you hitch up your horse and buggy and drive me home?”

“Now?”

“Yes, I do not want to face that man to-morrow. He may be dangerous.”

“Andrew? Why, stay and tell him. Be up and down about it.”

“No,” said Nelly, firmly, “I do not want to see him. He has once before threatened me, and, though he is a coward, he is unsafe. Tell him, Katy, from me, ‘good-by forever.’”

Her face expressed decision yet apprehension. Luther stepped out, and soon came to the door with the buggy.

“Nelly,” he said, putting on his hat and big over-jacket, “it looks as if I had pegun to obey you.”

“To-morrow, Katy,” exclaimed Nelly, nervously, “we will meet you and Lloyd at the forks of the road this side of the mountain, going to meeting.”

Lloyd Quantrell, as the door closed upon them, drew Katy to his heart again.

“Beloved,” he murmured to her, “who would have thought it this morning? That my empty, hungry heart would now be full? That you, dear child, were waiting for me?”

“I love you, Lloyd,” said Katy. “I hope te Lord sent you to me. Come, put your right hand on your head and this left hand under the sole of your foot, and say after me, ‘All petween my two hands pelongs to God!’”

“All between my two hands belongs to God,” Lloyd Quantrell repeated.

“Good-night, Lloyd.”

She slipped from his ardent grasp.

As they gave the long, wistful kiss of faith and future, pain and gladness, life and love, a door opened and Jake Bosler poked his head down the stairs, and saw them clasped together, without reproof.

“Soon-up,” Jake uttered, sleepily. “Bi’m-by.”

---

 

CHAPTER VI.

DOGS AND HOUNDS.

LOOKING through the small stone windows of his sleeping-room, as soon as he was awakened by the big bell, Lloyd Quantrell saw the red and white spires of Middletown peeping low to the south, and the bounding profile of the Blue Ridge overlap itself like elephants marching, and the Catoctin Mountain to the east leap out of the plain like a boy’s ball bouncing forward and falling again.

The Sunday morning dawn touched the high summits and crests of this double panorama with gilt as if it was the picture-frame, while between, just warming with the light, white farm-houses and gray barns, straight yellow-corn rows, sheep with brown backs, and next year’s wheat just spearing above the pebbly swells, made the valley of the Catoctin seem itself another mountain, only kept down by its abundance.

Jake Bosler opened the latchless door without knocking, and entered with Lloyd’s clothes dried and pressed.

“Soon-down. Bi’m-by!” Jake said, looking at Atzerodt asleep upon the floor.

“Who pressed these clothes so well, Jake? Katy, I think?”

“Yaw; she shtayed oop last naucht, Lloyd, to git tem purty.”

“God bless her!” cried Lloyd. “And you, too, Jake, for being her father.”

“Oh, yaw, Lloyd,” Jake Bosler said, taking the proffered hand humbly. “Katy’s my letsht — te last, I mean, Lloyd. Luter, he’s engaged now to Nelly Harbaugh.”

The man lying on the floor, in the second feather-bed, muttered here:

“I can’t keep soper unless you marry me. Come, Nelly! make me a home.”

“T’zu shpoat,” Jake murmured, “Nelly wanted Luter; Antrew wanted Nelly. When Antrew went to ped, Nelly took Luter. I don’t knows not’ing about it.”

“Nelly took Luter!” Atzerodt spoke, rising upon his elbow and looking through hot, dry eyes.

Jake Bosler looked still humbler, and, as he turned down the stairs, said compassionately:

“Soon-up! Bi’m-by!”

“Yes, poor fellow,” Lloyd Quantrell answered for Jake, “wait for sun-up. Bi’m-by it will shine bright, Andrew, from another pair of eyes.”

“Where is she?” whispered Atzerodt.

“Luther took her away last night. She thought it would distress both of you to see each other.”

“O my Gott!” — the unhappy man threw his face into the gay feather quilt — she wrote to me to come and marry her. Dis is her letter.”

He began to weep like a broken-hearted child. Lloyd reflected that even this unspiritual being had a heart.

“Don’t be too hard on her, my lad,” he spoke; “she’s poor and ambitious. She thought well of you, but your coming has brought the man she loved most, to the popping-point at last.”

Atzerodt finished his fit of weeping and rose up.

“Gif me a drink!” he pleaded, “I can’t eat none. I’ll git on te road an tramp agin.”

“Pull at it light, Andrew,” Lloyd interrupted, as he saw the deep draught the other took.

“She said she’d gif me her answer when I got soper,” Atzerodt exclaimed, pulling his slouched hat over his brows; “she’s run away from her promise. I’ll never pe soper agin, so help me Gott!”

Again bursting into a wail and tears, he went down the steps and reappeared from the barn, riding a horse. Pausing a moment at the foot of the hill and looking fiercely back, he shook his fist and shouted:

“Gott tam dat house an eferypody in it!”

Then, with a cruel blow at his horse, and another sob and gush of tears, he galloped away.

“Dutch, Dutch!” Lloyd Quantrell said; “not fit to have a wife. Yet the fine Swisser did deceive him. She is a Dutch Venus; I might have won her instead of Katy. Dare I marry either? Well, I can be in love.”

He took his gun and game-bag to carry them away. The dove was still in the game-bag, and he brought it out and looked at it again.

“By George!” he exclaimed, “Albion did point at little Katy, truly, just as he nosed this poor little bird. If I lived long among the Dutch I would get to believe in ghosts.”

Katy was finishing the setting of the table, and she went up and kissed Lloyd before her father.

“I reckon you think I’m familiar for a stranger, Jake,” Lloyd said.

“How else would you git acquainted?” queried Katy’s father.

“I told fadder you was my peau,” Katy said, blushing.

“Yaw,” Jake said, “if Katy didn’t tell her olt dawdy when she was happy, how could he pe glad?”

Katy spread her hands over the table and said the blessing in English, and Jake Bosler ended it with Amen.

“Lloyd,” asked Jake, after Katy had helped them to coffee and ham and eggs, “what religion is you? Is you Baptist or not?”

“I’m a poor sinner, Jake. I was brought up a Catholic. That’s how I was educated. My father is a convert; my mother was a Methodist.”

“Any religion is petter dan none, Lloyd. Us Paptists was pefore Martin Luter. We asks all to come to te Lord’s supper and to pe our friends.”

A big wagon, with clean straw in the bottom, drawn by two great gray horses, Jake Bosler drove to the door and cried, “Git in, Lloyd.” Little Katy had a bundle with her and a large basket, and Lloyd threw in his gun and kit.

“Stop,” said Lloyd, as they started off; “won’t you lock the house up?”

“Oh, no, Lloyd,” replied Jake, “nobody steals up this a-way, pecause nobody is lazy, and the poor is a-welcome.”

Jake Bosler’s cattle in the bottoms looked up to see them go — those roan, red, white, and speckled cattle, calling “moo” so tenderly, and each with the great mild Bosler eyes; and the turkeys, now fattening, sat under the cherry-trees in their white bodies with wings of gold and red and breasts of black, all agitated that Katy was going; the peacock spread his tail of eyes and fashions, and broke his heart in one long sob of protest; and pea fowls and Guinea-hens, cocks and pullets, came trooping from the barn to see the face which fed them smiles, as her hands had given them food, go away but for a day.

Along the row of cherry-trees, by a little mill-race flowing in the clover, near hedges of the new Osage orange from the blood-red fields of Kansas, and where gum-trees matched the sycamores in strength in some old sedgy pasture, they rolled in the reddish road, and now and then saw the Catoctin Mountain’s purple-green sides, and black crest and yellowing foliage, bound up and fall.

At the first little hamlet they turned their backs upon the Catoctin range and faced the South Mountain to the northwest, and Katy at the little towns pointed out the United Brethren and the Lutheran churches ready for worship.

Going between the high, billowy corn-hills to cross the main Catoctin Creek, they rose upon a bold mound in their way, and only three miles ahead saw their road scale the Blue Ridge, which, like a giant child playing through the sky, showed dimples of turning foliage in his austere countenance, and grace and sweetness nursed by storm.

Near the foot of the mountain, at a road coming in from the north, Luther Bosler and Nelly Harbaugh were waiting in a buggy.

Nelly now had a dress of bright colors and a straw hat of city jauntiness trimmed with natural flowers, and Lloyd smiled to see, as she put her straight foot from the buggy, that she wore hoops and flounces.

“Katy,” he said to his little girl, who sat in a black Dunker hood and cape and gown, her hair plaited down her back, and her white Dunker cap transparent at her little ears, “why don’t you dress like Nelly?”

“I am not so peautiful,” Katy said, looking down at her dark gown and white apron, “and, Lloyd, I want to love God, who has let you love me.”

“My child,” Lloyd said, not repelling some tears which came to his eyes, “why do you not see the wicked fellow I am and turn away from me? I am not worthy of your pure heart, Katy!”

“Yes, you are,” Katy said; “maybe I can pring you to God if I try hard. What else is woman for?”

The tears came again and yet again to the young man’s eyes; at last they streamed upon his cheeks, and he felt them dropping like blood from a fresh wound into his hands, as he held his palms open and thought they would fill. It was the first mention of God, the first affection bestowed upon him, so hungry-hearted, since his Christian mother’s death.

Katy threw her arms around him and drew his head upon her little neck.

“Tese is love-feast tears,” she said. “Our Saviour made tem holy, darling, at his last supper. Come, take it with me to-day and pe happy.”

He sobbed so hard he could not speak: a past world of love now faded in the grave, another world of fatherly affection he had sought but could not find; recollections of prayers long taught but long unuttered, of gentle feelings brutalized by coarse city contacts, of the sense of home not yet obliterated but blunted, and of being at this moment too well, too nobly, if humbly beloved, stirred all the nature of the young man up and melted into rills of tears the ice in caverns long denied the air.

“My God!” he spoke at last, “can love do this? Was I experimenting with love, and finding such religion? — Katy,” he suddenly looked up and pushed her from him, “you must let me go!”

“Nefer, now,” said Katy, looking with all her heart and great deep eyes upon him. — “God, gif me this soul, and let it feed with me of thy supper and drink thy precious blood!”

Coming to the wagon to find Lloyd in tears and Katy clinging to him, Luther Bosler exclaimed:

“Wass treibsht olla weil? Are you two quarreling?”

“No, Luther,” answered Lloyd, wiping his eyes; “Katy is trying to make something good out of me. Yonder mountains ought to be between us.”

“‘Faith,’” observed Luther, mildly, “‘can remove mountains,’ it says. Let us cross them together.”

He took the reins, and Nelly Harbaugh sat by him, and so they slowly went up the pebbly mountain-road, old Jake going before in the buggy, with the parting words:

“Love-feast. Bi’m-by!”

Sitting with his arm around Katy, and with sweetly troubled feelings, yet manlier than he had ever known, Lloyd looked back into Catoctin Valley and remarked:

“Luther, why can’t I see the houses and towns now?”

“Because te upper valley is hilly and tey puilt te houses py te springs petween te hills. But tey is all tere, Lloyd, and whoefer has pusiness with tem can find tem. When their country calls for tem, up will run te flag eferywheres and pe peautiful.”

“We’ll be there, Luther, won’t we? This great, free Union is worth fighting for!”

“Yes, Lloyd. A pity it ain’t free, too, and ten, I think, we should always have peace.”

“What a singular Dutchman!” Lloyd thought to himself. “What he says seems eloquent, because he is so honest. How came he to be so grave and parental? I am not so. He is like a father to his father because, I suppose, he is so good a son. My father! Why will he not give me his confidence? Do I deserve it?”

“I live yonder where the hills are all rocky and wild, past Wolfsville,” said Nelly Harbaugh, pointing north. “Mount Misery, where the counterfeiters had their cave in the Revolutionary War, is close by me. The Tories hid there, too, that were caught and hanged. I’m bad root, Lloyd,” blushed Nelly, with a deep look on Luther.

“The heart is the true rest,” Luther said. “Keep that steady, and your pad ancestors will not trouble you. But whose dogs are those?”

He pointed back, and coming together in the road were Fritz and Albion, the latter leading on, as if he had proposed the excursion; Fritz hanging back, yet looking at the carriage sturdily, as ready to take his reproof.

“Fritz, wo gaesht hee?” spoke Luther, without temper, to his dog, but looking serious, and stopping the horses on the mountain-top.

The Sugar-Loaf Mountain far away was peeping hazily over the giant ramparts of Catoctin, and up from the depths behind them followed the solemn green woods to where, upon this summit, lay ledges of sandstone, and the oak and chestnut trees shook with a coming tempest of wind and rain.

Fritz came straight up to the carriage, looked at Luther unhappily, and barked.

The city dog, with a vicious barking at Lloyd, took to the woodside and disappeared ahead in the road.

“Evil communications corrupt good manners, Luther,” Lloyd said. “My dog has tempted yours away.”

“Fritz,” spoke Luther to his dog, shaking his head, “was not in the hapit of leafing home, where he is my friend and guard.”

The dog came right up under the whip and barked with an excitement above apprehension, as if to say, “Whip me, but spare my pride!”

“Unfortunate dog!” exclaimed Luther, but more tenderly. “Can I do anything put send him home?”

The dog started back with head down, needing no further humiliation.

“Stop, Fritz!” Luther continued, his face lighting up, “does any person here speak for this tisopedient friend of mine, who has, perhaps, peen under pad atvice to-day?”

The dog had stopped, and when both Katy and Lloyd cried “Yes, do forgive him!” and Luther replied, “Very well, then,” the dog took his place meekly under the wagon, and they entered the summit forest.

The winding road-track through the fallen chestnut-leaves and stone-heaps reminded them of Atzerodt’s story, as they saw the pale, lemon-yellow leaves twirl in the rising gust like witches in a circle, and the squirrels run when mischievous lightning chased them from tree to tree. The clean trunks arose smoothly from stony ledges, and, ever young in form and foliage, though in their autumn days, the chestnut forest had an appearance pleasing even now in the grasp of coming storm. Something of the light and straight nature of the French was in it, tender in greenness, comely in maturity, engaging in the burr, and toothsome in the nut. However lofty the mighty shafts might rise, though monarchs of the forest, they had the complaisance and sentiment of kings in France.

Nothing crossed their way but wood-cutters’ paths barely traceable through the translucent goldness of the trees and litter, and the rail-splitters’ piles and chips seemed only larger yellow leaves and ferns that strewed the vistas. A cool, small cedar-tree occasionally appeared, like a green parasol in the bright sunshine; but nothing of man or domestic beast broke the Sabbath stillness of the mountain-tops — hardly the eagle yonder, so near overhead he almost touched the trees, like Jove taking his jealous watch and throwing from his eyes upon the woods below the citron glisten of Olympus.

“See!” whispered Nelly Harbaugh to Luther, “yonder are men — negroes — runaway slaves. There’s money for catching them, Luther! Quick!”

Across the road, not fifty yards before, passed two black men, one carrying the other.

The younger was barefooted and had no coat, and limped as he labored under the older man’s weight.

The old man seemed in the palsy of fear, or age, or disease, and, as he saw the carriage coming and women in it, a habit of courtesy, too old to be forgotten, made him take off the old straw hat he wore and bow almost idiotically and make a chattering noise.

Attracted by the movement, the young man turned and saw the carriage, and at a run, still limping, he bore the old man into the woods, flying to the north.

“Oh!” cried Nelly, “they’re gone; we might have caught them. Along this mountain they travel at nights. It’s hardly thirty miles across Maryland to the free State. We have got people here who live by catching them and get hundreds of dollars reward.”

“And a millstone it will pe around their necks,” exclaimed Luther.

“I reckon so, too,” Lloyd said. “Niggers oughtn’t to run away, but let somebody else than me do the catching.”

At this moment the pointer-dog, Albion, reappeared out of the place in the woods where the fugitives first emerged, and his delicate brown kid nose was trailing something.

“Hist!” cried Lloyd; “come here, Albion!”

Raising his head only to bark ill-naturedly, and striving to lick his torn ear once, the white and yellow pointer dropped to the scent again and darted into the opposite woods, barking.

“I hope he won’t petray those poor fellows,” Luther said, “but we can’t stop for him, for te rain is coming hard, and tere’s no shelter till we get to Smoketown.”

“Oh,” cried Nelly Harbaugh, “stop there at the fortune-teller’s!”

The storm now burst in half-sunny nonchalance upon the mountain they were on, and yet, while its lightnings leaped vengefully here, the parallel mountain, beyond the gorge they were overhanging, seemed to be serene as Sabbath, and through the mist of sheet-rain, at pauses, they could see its happy countenance of chestnut woods and sulphur-tinted leaves, waiting like one beatified martyr for another to pass through his fires.

With cool, executioner-like method, the spirits of the storm whipped the longer mountain’s back with rods of forked fire until it smoked, and the sound of riven trees beneath the thunderbolts seemed like the broken rods of Pilate’s soldiery shivered upon the unanswering Pioneer. Yet, sometimes red as blood, the electric current flowed along the hairy woodlands till rain, like floods of tears from heaven, streamed down to cool the mountain’s anguish, and groans, from none knew where, feebly or wail-like accompanied the tempest.

The road grew black; the steady gray wagon-horses shrank as if they would crawl upon their bellies; dust and water, thunder and flame mutinied against each other in their common purpose, and fought together without proceeding, while the great dike of the Blue Ridge Mountain buried itself in mystery or melted away.

“Why, this is hell, or the portent of it!” Lloyd Quantrell spoke, covering Katy with his body and arms.

“Say ‘Te Words,’ Lloyd,” he heard her whispering, “and we will pe happy.”

“Steaty, Jim! Steaty, Sam! Holt steaty, poys!” Luther Bosler’s voice spoke calmly; “it will soon pe ofer.”

A scream from Nelly Harbaugh at this moment, and the horses leaping in their harness and striving to break from the driver’s practiced hands, were occasioned by a sight in the road which seemed almost supernatural: a strange, half-transparent, rose-colored mist, like lava dissolved in wine, sprang up as if the lightning had been distilled and held a long moment in atmospheric solution, and through it were seen at the horses’ heads two men and two large hounds, gazing up at the carriage, and themselves surprised as much as its occupants.

The men were burly, coarse-looking, neither good nor evil of countenance, and clearly people of this world.

While the occupants of the carriage gazed at them for a period of time measured only by its vividness upon the nerves and heart, blackness, as of a cloud, came down again like a mighty crow alighting in the road, and with it a silence that was the Sabbath of the dead.

Slowly this yielded to the influences of a gentle shower and returning sun, and soon they saw the road before them plainly open, and the freshly twisted and prostrate trees embarrassing the way.

“What made you scream, Nelly?” asked Luther, stooping to kiss her.

“The slave-catchers,” cried Nelly. “Didn’t you see them?”

“Did you know their faces?”

“Oh, yes — Lew and Ben Logan. They watch at nights and on all the stormy days; for then the slaves are running. They’re rich, I reckon.”

“Not in conscience, I think,” mused Luther, getting down to examine his harness. “We must stop at te first house in Smoketown to tie up this breeching.”

“Oh, I’m so glad!” Nelly Harbaugh exclaimed. “That’s Hannah Ritner’s, the fortune-teller.”

“Lloyd,” cried little Katy, “I wasn’t frightened at all — you held me so close. And then you said ‘Te Words’ last night, and all your body was God’s.”

---

 

CHAPTER VII.

WITCH OF SMOKETOWN.

A LITTLE farther the South Mountain opened like an amphitheatre, and showed some patches of fields and farms at the base of their broken mounds; but the landscape was yet ragged and almost uninhabited till, on the descending road before them, some small houses of a poor appearance were finally seen straggling along, each to itself, as if they came together by accident and had hardly discovered each other, so embowered were they, in fruit-trees, weeds, gardens, and corn.

“There’s Smoketown,” Nelly Harbaugh cried; “some calls it Ginny Winders’s town. Old Ginny keeps a groggery for the blackberry-pickers, chestnut-sellers, wood-choppers, charcoal-burners, and slave-catchers. Oh, it’s a hard place!”

“I should think so,” Lloyd Quantrell remarked, looking at the near mountains and at a deep gorge behind him, like the wide-open throat of a wild beast ready to devour the scattered place; “it seems to me to be running away, like the children in the Bible chased by Elisha’s bears. Who is this Hannah Ritner?”

“She’s a stranger, but I reckon she’s lived here for years,” Nelly replied; “she’s religious, and teaches the poor children to spell and to sew. Some say she’s crazy, and that’s why they go to her to get their fortunes told. She tells them real true.”

By this time they had come to the first house in the place on the right-hand side — a small, very neat, whitewashed cottage, with an old blackened roof, and with a little portico in front, the latter covered with a trained blackberry-vine.

The house stood in a small arbored garden, and the mock-orange and gourd vines could be seen dropping their yellow or roan-gold fruit from these small arbors, and also from the locust-trees along the roadside paling. Yellow marigolds grew against the gable; bright flowers in whitewashed flower-pots showed along the path leading back to the door from the gate; and a willow-tree in the garden seemed to weep for an unmarked grave which was not there.

The fruit-trees and bean-poles and shocked corn added a look of rankness and weediness in the midst of such providence and taste, and the forest coming down from the stony hills behind, in bits of chestnut thicket and brush, seemed to wrap the small cottage in.

An old stable was at the edge of this forest, and paths went back from it into the rain-raveled mountain-spurs.

Nothing else Lloyd Quantrell could see but a large preserving-kettle in the garden, hung on a wooden crane; and while he looked at this, a gray and yellow fox, licking his chops of sirup, leaped up from the kettle and ran into the woods, followed hotly by Fritz.

Nelly Harbaugh stepped out first, at the entrance of a little lane, deeply shaded with cherry and plum trees, which crept back almost mysteriously to the stable; a horse was tied here, and she had barely seen it when a man came through the garden and stopped her in the lane.

“Andrew!” she exclaimed, and started to run back.

“Nelly!” cried Atzerodt — for it was he — and he seized her by the wrist.

The girl, a moment shrinking, drew her graceful figure up haughtily and cried, “If you strike me, I’ll have you repent in Hagerstown jail!”

“Going to haf your fortune told, Miss Nelly?” muttered the sallow, outcast man. “I’ll tell it to you, py Jing!”

His lips trembled with excitement. The girl tore her arm away, and with a quick gesture she picked up a stick from a flower-pot, rending out the deep-red rose which grew upon it. Lloyd Quantrell had quickly come upon the scene, and he marked the fine beauty of the girl thus impassioned and defiant.

“I declare, Nelly,” he said, “you’re as splendid now as a great actress on the stage!”

The words seemed to have a power to arrest Nelly Harbaugh’s attention even in her apprehensions.

“Am I, Lloyd?” she replied. “Oh, I would rather be that than anything in the world!”

“Dat is shoost what you are fit for, py Jing!” Atzerodt broke in. — “Luter Bosler, you got my girl; she’ll pe no good to you.”

“Come, Antrew, forget and forgive,” Luther remarked, coming forward from the horses; “pad words putter no parsnips.”

He reached out his hand, which the other repelled, and Atzerodt continued in a reckless yet suffering tone:

“Luter, she’ll get you in love and preak your heart. She is false to eferypody.”

“You lie!” exclaimed the girl, herself the dangerous person now, seeking to get past Quantrell and ply her stick on Atzerodt.

Lloyd interposed good-naturedly.

“She wants your money, Luter. She’s a cold-hearted Swisser, you pet. She’ll nefer marry you if somepody else will gif her petter clothes. Your poor heart will hang where mine is now, and den you’ll feel for me.”

He broke down in almost touching, though maudlin drunken misery, and the girl dropped her stake of wood and pushed past Lloyd Quantrell.

“I could not love you,” she said to Atzerodt. “You earn nothing; you can not support a wife. Never do you come near me again, but say good-by forever now.”

He called her an ugly word, which he had barely done when Lloyd, with a flat-hand blow, struck him to the grass, and stood over him, saying:

“What do you say before Katy?”

“Dear Andrew,” spoke Katy, coming forward, “come to church at Beaver Creek and be a petter man. If you don’t like us Dunkers, there is te Luteran church, and te Mennese church and te Brethren too, all close together.”

“Nelly Harbaugh,” continued Atzerodt from the ground, cowed but still revengeful, “you’ll nefer let me forgit you. Some day I’ll be hung on te gallows for you, I tink.”

He remained on the wet ground with his face in the weeds, and all left him there and went forward to the cottage.

As they approached it there was a sound of musical water, and across the embowered yard flowed a mountain stream so wide they could hardly step across it, and foaming now with the rain which no longer fell, but in the sky a rainbow took its place and spanned the mountain like an arch of beauty.

“My love,” spoke Lloyd, taking Katy’s arm, “the bow of promise is come already for us.”

“Lloyd,” she replied, “poor Andrew suffers so, it clouds my heart.”

The cottage seemed to be empty, and consisted of only one room and a kitchen, the latter low as the ground, the main room higher and containing a bed, an open Franklin stove, and a large flag-bottomed rocking-chair painted green. There was no other chair, but in a corner a glass-faced cupboard contained Delft plates and coffee service, and many bottles of cordials and home-made wines, and a line of jars of preserves, and also several books.

A Bible was on the window-sill and a candlestick beside it, and on the wall was a print in colors of Hagar and Ishmael, showing a large hand, as of a man, protruding from a door, with the palm raised against the mother and son, who were thus shut out.

Everything in this room was clean as it was plain, the bed-quilt sewn by hand from little rag savings, the wood scrubbed white, the stove polished, and flowers in water, on a little shallow mantel, diffused a subtle perfume.

“Hannah Ritner keeps no servant,” said Nelly Harbaugh. “See this beautiful candle! She makes it herself of bear’s grease and beeswax, and they say her light never goes out the longest night.”

Lloyd saw a movement at the stable in the rear of the house, and a tall woman came from it and walked at a dignified pace toward him.

She had coal-black hair, like the crow’s wing, falling in combed tresses below her waist, so that her shoulders and fine, straight, matronly form were half covered with these splendid waves of hair, in which some silver threads made barely an impression.

She was one of the finest women Lloyd had ever seen, with something almost grand in her stature and bearing, unbent, and her skin of a clear, pure tint, as if its roses could be called back if she would only exercise the will.

Her face was rather large than long, the jaws being of fine, ample mold, and her hair was cut off between the tresses in front, and the short tassel of jet-black frontlet there half covered her forehead, or nearly meeting the rich black eyebrows, and under these were dark eyes, large, melting, sad, compassionate, and full of thought, with black lashes sweeping her cheeks, and a nose long and fine, but neither straight nor aquiline, and like an inverted bow.

She was dressed in a dark gown, with a dark apron tied round her waist. No ornament was in her ears or on her neck or hands.

As she approached, this woman, seeing Lloyd, opened her large eyes wider, but did not stop nor hesitate, yet continued to look straight at him till his own eyes sank down under the soul-searching gaze of this noble-seeming and mysterious being.

Still advancing upon him — for he stood in the door between the house and kitchen, looking outward through another door — the woman made a grave, sweet inclination of her head and countenance, and said, nearly like a question, yet with recognition:

“Quantrell!”

He started with astonishment.

“Lloyd, is it not?” she continued, with a slightly German accent, but in a voice of deep music, worthy of a prophetess.

“Lloyd Quantrell is what they named me,” he exclaimed.

“Is your mother dead?”

“Yes, madam.”

“I read so. Have you come to see the fortune-teller? That is a sweet child I see behind you. Do you pretend to love her?”

“Pretend, madam?” Lloyd answered with indignation, yet also with accusation and fear. “I hope you are not tempting me.”

“God forbid!” she exclaimed, with stately reproof; “yet ye have golden tongues. What do you find to kill in these mountains like these simple birds of sex?”

She waved her hand toward the women.

At that moment Luther Bosler perceived the dog Albion come out of the woods and begin to scratch and whine around the little stable.

“Is that your dog?” the woman spoke, also looking toward the stable as if with some new interest. “Go bring him away, instantly!”

Luther, not Lloyd, started to do so. He found his own dog, Fritz, returned, and Fritz followed him obediently; but the English pointer was not tractable, and ran back into the chestnut and chinquapin brush, whither Luther followed, calling his name.

“Hannah,” spoke Nelly Harbaugh to the woman, “the harness is a bit broke, and we stopped to mend it. Won’t you tell our fortunes?”

“Idle request upon the Sabbath-day!” Hannah Ritner replied. “I have told one fortune for you to-day already. Is not your lover yonder?”

She pointed to where Atzerodt’s horse was tied in the secluded path.

Lloyd Quantrell, looking there, saw Atzerodt standing up and looking intently toward the stable.

“Give me your hand!” the seer commanded, taking Nelly’s in her own palm, and gazing with great candor and beauty of expression into her eyes.

Lloyd thought he had never seen together three more beautiful women than these.

Hannah Ritner then slowly spoke these lines, with such deep, distinct, and eloquent diction that Lloyd hoped she would speak more:

“Ebbes dunkel und weiss marrick ich,
 Mit dunkla soll’s b’marricka dich!
 Gaed der roth-fogel uf ’n reis’,
 Dann waersht net dunkel or net weiss!”

Nelly Harbaugh muttered something Lloyd believed to be the protecting “Words,” and dropped her fine blue eyes.

The fortune-teller, turning her own eyes to Lloyd, exclaimed:

“It is not my wont to tell on poor girls secrets that may smirch them in a man’s eyes. Here is her fortune as I gave it, put in English words.”

Still holding Nelly Harbaugh’s hand, Hannah Ritner recited to Lloyd and little Katy as follows, studying Katy meanwhile, and only once looking at the hand:

“Something dark and white I mark,
  It shall mark thee with the dark!
  When the red-bird takes his flight,
  Thou shalt not be dark or white!”

“Look out for the red-bird, Nelly,” Lloyd exclaimed; “the dove is my warning.”

Hannah Ritner caught the word and repeated it:

“Die Dowb: that was the bird of the Holy Spirit which descended on the baptizers, cooing as it flew from heaven, ‘This is my beloved Son!’ My well-beloved son!” she turned to Lloyd, with something very tender, yet sorrowful, in her great eyes, “you may be baptized with fire. Seek even in the fire for that immortal dove which bravely swept the Deluge with his tired pinions, and returned to the little ark of love at last. Why do you seek this simple maiden’s eyes as if their luster was the window of that ark to you? — She trembles while I ask. — Fear not, my little peasant-maid! I’ll tell your lover’s fortune, and, if I tell it true, never need you fear to come to Hannah Ritner and ask her counsel. — Lloyd, give me your hand!”

She took Lloyd’s hand, and little Katy, full of faith and yearning, took his other hand almost in stealth, and looked in Hannah Ritner’s eyes with simple pleading.

At that moment, Lloyd Quantrell, cool and undisturbed, saw the stable-door unclose, and a negro emerge, carrying an old man on his back, and, looking backward agonizingly, the negro stole down the embowered lane.

Lloyd looked again in Hannah Ritner’s eyes. He could not see them, for they were bent upon his hand, and, to his astonishment, some tears fell from somewhere on his palm.

“Why do you weep?” he asked; “I am nothing to you.”

“This is a large, strong hand,” answered Hannah Ritner, with deep feeling. “I see the marks of conflicts upon it, but not of toil. Oh, find some task to do, my son, and bless your Maker for sweet, constant occupation!”

“Tell my fortune!” spoke Lloyd. “I am not afraid to hear it. You will not hurt this little girl’s feelings, I know; for she is dear to me, Mother Hannah!”

At this familiar salutation, tears fell from Hannah Ritner’s eyes again, and she was unable to proceed for some time.

Throwing an arm around each, she drew both Lloyd and Katy to her breast, and, looking down on them, the silent tears fell from her splendid eyes all the more, and not like the tears of anguish, but of great commiseration.

Lloyd thought she was like the Virgin he had seen a picture of at the Catholic school, whose everlasting cause of love and woe was the successive ages of mankind, and their many sorrows, ever to recur.

Little Katy, also tearful and tender, reached up her lips and kissed the prophetess’s mouth, saying:

“Fergeb uns unser shoolda! You must be good, I know.”

“God bless you, my child, for those sweet words!” said Hannah Ritner, quieted and strong again.

Looking now at Lloyd with deep interest, she repeated what he could not understand, in her beautiful intonation, thus:

“All’s game’s unna die Sunn Ich sae,
 Fer deina Flindt fleegt in die Höh;
 Und wann aw dodt sheest allum ort,
 Dann singt die Darddle-Daub doch fort!”

“Come, Mother Ritner!” Lloyd pleasantly entreated, yet feeling something remarkable to be in this person, and a slight sense of superstition in himself, “you will not leave my fate such a Dutch riddle as that? Tell my coming luck in English, too!”

The strange, stately woman tapped her forehead as if seeking to recollect or to compose, or, at least, to translate something.

“I have spent so much of my time, my children, among these mountain poor, teaching them in Dutch, that my English verse comes slowly back to me, and I am growing old, too, and memory and wit are weaker.”

With the same slight German accent she then made the translation of Lloyd’s fortune, not readily, yet with eloquence, like profound conviction:

“All the game beneath the sun
 Shall rise up before thy gun;
 When thou killest everything,
 Still the turtle-dove will sing!

“Thank God for that, Katy!” Lloyd exclaimed. “Let the turtledove be heard, whatever happens to us. — And now, Mother Ritner, dear little Katy is waiting to have her fate told before she goes to church; for Luther, I reckon, has mended the harness by this time.”

“I must be quick,” Hannah Ritner said; “for I am strangely nervous this morning. It seems to me I hear the baying of dogs. Katy, let me see your hand! Why, my darling, the lines in it are almost like my own. I can tell your fortune easily.”

As she repeated the following lines, Katy listened with deepening awe and final trembling, so that Lloyd kissed her to his heart, at the end:

“In dara hond sae Ich en Ring
 Ferleera, sollsht du’s, schoenes ding!”

Katy heard with prayerful wonder and fear. The seer spoke to her with deep and solemn tones the next couplet, as follows:

“Doch bawdst du fer’s im krickly noof,
 Dan sollsht du’s finna bei ’ma Buch!”*

[* These predictions are all translated into Pennsylvania Dutch by Thomas C. Zimmerman, of Reading, Pa.]

As she spoke, Hannah Ritner accidentally laid her hand upon the Bible.

“Now for the English, Mother Hannah!” Lloyd exclaimed seeing that Katy Bosler looked pale and frightened.

“What noises are those?” Hannah Ritner whispered. “Surely it is the blood-hound’s bark I hear! Who is at my stable?”

She strode through the kitchen and shouted:

“What do you there? Stealers are ye of the souls and bodies of your fellow-men!”

Lloyd, Katy, and Nelly following, they beheld come out of the small chestnuts behind the stable, first the dog Albion, very animated and frolicsome, and he threw himself into the attitude of pointing game a few steps from the stable-door.

Next there bounded from the same thicket three dogs apparently fighting, and one of these was engaged in a clinched struggle with another, which bayed deep and loud; and the third dog, a great blood-hound, rushed upon the stouter of these dogs and bit him terribly, while Albion also barked as he “pointed,” and so the air was full of fierce, savage noises.

Luther Bosler, going to the relief of the injured dog, which was now seen to be his own Fritz, was himself set upon by the two hounds, and they seemed to be on the point of tearing him to pieces, when out of the thicket rushed the two men already related to have crossed the mountain during the thunderstorm, and both of these shouted loudly to the blood-hounds and pulled them separate ways.

“It’s the Logan boys,” exclaimed Nelly Harbaugh; “husht se g’sana? There must be runaway slaves hiding about Hannah Ritner’s house.”

“Go in there at your peril, hyenas!” shouted Hannah Ritner, throwing herself between the stable and the pursuers. “This land is mine, and I will defend it with my life!”

She had drawn upon her head a large leghorn hat, and as she spread her arms across the stable-door and put her back against it and threw her fine white throat and strongly pointed chin up, the long elf-hair fell so wildly and so dead black down from her pallid face that both the men halted a moment irresolutely.

Lloyd Quantrell’s ill-starred dog, however, dashed at Hannah and barked his ill-tempered and short, snappish dislike. Lloyd himself knocked the dog over with a stone, and it retired yelping a little distance, and again, with one fore-leg extended and the other lifted crookedly as if lame, raised its muzzle toward the stable, put its tail out straight, and cast its eyes trancefully sidewise like a somnambulist.

The long hounds bounded against the stable as if resolved to throw it down.

“Infernal dog!” thought Lloyd; “but a pointer’s a hound, too, bred on a spaniel. — Open that door, Hannah!” Lloyd raised his voice. “If their niggers are not there, I’ll fill both these loafers’ hounds with shot.”

“They shall not go in!” Hannah Ritner cried.

“Interfere with us at your peril, young man!” the taller of the ruffians said, but without any temper. “We’ve suspected this place a good while, and now we’ve got a warrant to search it. The dogs trailed right yer.”

He produced his warrant, and, as he walked to Hannah Ritner and presented it, his companion slipped in at the rotten stable-side.

Hannah moved a little way to examine the warrant, and the stable-door, pushed open from within, showed nothing there but a lady’s horse, all saddled, and nibbling at his fodder.

The two slave-catchers hastily examined the inside of the stable; their dogs, assisted by Albion, smelling and seeking everywhere, but in vain.

“We may be mistaken,” said one of the men, a little pale, and hitching up his wet water-proof boots, “but we shall now search the house.”

“There’s nothing there,” Lloyd Quantrell sternly interposed, “and now I’ll pepper both your dogs with my gun, as I have promised.”

Lloyd started at a quick stride toward the wagon at the end of the lane. He had walked but a step, however, when a voice was heard to cry:

“Coom on! Te niggers is here, poys, and te reward is mine, py Jing!”

At the end of the little lane, the black boy before observed, with the old negro man upon his back, was receding and trembling before Lloyd Quantrell’s gun cocked at Andrew Atzerodt’s shoulder.

“I shoost found tis gun in te wagon,” Atzerodt exclaimed, “and took it and headed off tese niggers after tey had walked ofer me in tis lane.”

The hunters and their dogs dashed forward; the young man was overthrown and the old man fell heavily to the ground, and the wild dogs set upon them till dragged away.

When silence was restored after the baying thunder, the old black man still lay where he had fallen, and the younger man, bloody and nearly naked after struggling with the dogs, looked down upon him in despair.

“Father!” he cried, “is you hurt? Oh, speak to me, father!”

With a painful effort the old man turned from his side to his back, looked up into his son’s face with a convulsive shudder of his lineaments, and saying, “Honey, I’s mos’ gone,” straightened out, stone dead.

The young man knelt, clammy with the sweat for life and freedom, and raising his hands, clasped together, above his head, sobbed out the words:

“Father! Daddy! Don’t die now, when I’se carried ye so fur. I’ll go back to ole missis and take it all on me!”

The old man’s jaw had fallen; his gray hairs only moved in the mountain zephyrs; he seemed worn out with age and terror, and very quiet in the light of God.

“Oh!” shouted the young man, turning toward the spectators of the scene, his hands still lifted prayerfully together, “kill me, won’t you, and let me reign with daddy? — Reign, Lord!” he screamed with sudden, awful ecstasy, “and let me die and reign with father, too. I kin die under de whip if I kin reign!”

His streaming eyes were strained with this religious despair, till their gleaming pupils grew small upon the great white disks of his eyeballs. He was a sinewy, high-purposed young man, and the dogs came forward and glared at him as if he might be dangerous yet.

But as he prayed for human hands to give him death, his own long toil in night and storm, bramble and mountain, carrying that old man, and the excitement of his sorrow, threw him in a fit upon the earth — blind, silent, desolate.

The handcuffs of the Logans were fastened on his wrists, even before he fell, and while he appealed to human nature and to God.

“Off with him, while he’s quiet!” spoke the elder Logan to his brother. “There’s no reward for the older chap, and so we’ll leave his body here for the neighbors, or the birds.”

The two short, thick-set men, tying the unconscious negro’s limbs, lifted him on their shoulders and started to go.

“Stop!” interposed Andrew Atzerodt; “I caught dat nigger, and want my money for him.”

“The reward is three hundred dollars,” replied the slave-dealer; “here is a hundred for your share, if you put in no further claim.”

He passed a bank-note to the haggard man, who looked at it with fervor and accepted it, and then, turning to Nelly Harbaugh in a moment of revulsion and triumph, he cried:

“I earn nothing? Heigh? I can’t support a wife? Heigh? Take it, Nelly, and I’ll pecome a nigger-ketcher and make you rich, py Jing!”

The girl seemed attracted by so much money. She hesitated.

“Off with you!” hoarsely spoke Luther Bosler. “It is te Sabbath, and I would not fight. But this insult to a lady excites me. Plood-money to a woman engaged to be married to an honest man?”

His slow, intense exasperation was like some giant’s aroused power — infectious, because so deep and real. Lloyd Quantrell felt it, and wresting his gun from Atzerodt’s hand, he cried:

“Luther, I’m with you. We two can clean all three of these ruffians out.”

He looked at his caps and raised the bright twisted barrel. The dogs perceived disorder near and growled ominously.

“You are too good a citizen, Bosler, to break the law,” exclaimed the slave-taker. “Let us go in peace. We only do our duty under the compromise laws of the United States and the warrant of the State of Virginia.”

“Put down that man!” Lloyd Quantrell said to the speaker, with the cool zest of collision in him.

“I’ll put him down,” the mountain ranger answered, “at the town of Harper’s Ferry, and not before!”

The two girls became alarmed at the scene before them, and Atzerodt moved toward his horse.

“Go!” spoke Luther Bosler, with deadly calm. “God’s vengeance hovers ofer tis guilty land!”

“It will come to-night!” pealed the deep tones of Hannah Ritner, as she walked forward. “Let me prophesy with head uncovered, as the Scripture commands woman to do!”

She threw her hat upon the ground and turned her face to the south. Her long, wild hair she threw behind her shoulders with sudden nervous energy, and her large dark eyes seemed inverted and gazing inward, and her tones were like a woman’s who had never spoken with human people, but had wandered alone, talking loudly with herself.

“These are the two angels sent to Sodom” — she indicated the slave-catchers. “Turn in, my lords, and tarry in my house and wash your feet! For ye are compassed round. The mountain fires shall drown ye and yon city to which ye go. The cry of the poor, waxed great before God’s face, calls for destruction, and it will not be put off. I see the chimneys reel, the hearth-stone shattered, the churches hollow, and the rivers flowing red. Escape? Ye can not! Brimstone and fire shall mingle this night, and the smoke of the country go up as the smoke of a furnace!”

She ceased, as if still talking to herself. The dogs whined, and the men looked at each other.

“She’s crazy,” said Lew Logan.

“Come, leave her,” spoke his brother Ben; “we are twenty miles from Harper’s Ferry.”

They went at a rapid walk up the gorge, followed by Atzerodt.

A moment after they had disappeared from view, Hannah Ritner, resuming her natural tones, turned to the remaining persons and said:

“You will be late at love-feast. I thought to go there with you. But I must take a long ride.”

As they were getting into the wagon, she went past on a nimble-footed saddle-horse, dropping them a courteous farewell.

“It seems to me I have seen a horse like that before,” Lloyd Quantrell thought; “she’s mounted like a huntress.”

---

 

CHAPTER VIII.

BEAVER CREEK DUNKERS.

ALL made spasmodic remarks, with no great intelligibility of plan or reflection, on the foregoing scene — the law to capture and return fugitive slaves having been in recent years established by Congress with the aid of all the great statesmen and the President of the United States, for the purpose of composing the country, which seemed, indeed, perfectly tranquil now, excepting many such agonizing episodes as that just given, but which it was thought unpatriotic and disturbing to describe or discuss.

“What was your fortune, Katy?” Lloyd asked as they came to the top of a hill and saw before them a bounding prospect of fields uptilted, and woods in plumes and crowns, giving every well-plowed farm a human look like hair worn strong, yet comely.

“Hush, Lloyd!” Katy said, “it was not good; so let me be still and think of the Lord’s supper till we come to church.”

“Yonder is Beaver Creek Dunker meeting-house,” Nelly Harbaugh spoke to Lloyd, indicating nearly two miles away a low white building like a long school-house half sunken behind a moundy brown hill, and defined against a higher crest of green. At the foot of the hills they descended, woods and notches in the bottoms were signs of a stream there, and the far eastern horizon rose up like a mighty rampart as if it were an ocean’s confines.

“That is the Antietam country,” Luther exclaimed, “and Peaver Creek is a part of it. Our mother, Nelly, was from Antietam, put she loved Peaver Creek pecause she met father there one love-feast week. Tey slept in te garret of te church, as us Tunkers do, and many a marriage, Nelly, comes out of tese homely ways we haf of living like te tisciples, watching with our Master, and eating of te Passover lamb.”

“Passover!” exclaimed Lloyd; “that’s a Jew jubilee of some kind, I reckon?”

“Yes, and all te early Christians were Jews. When te Lord slew te first-born of all te Egyptians, te Jews in Egypt killed a lamb and marked teir doors, so te angel of death would see te lamb’s plood-mark and go past. Tey always eat te Passover afterward, and so did te Christian Jews, and so do we. Tunkers and Moravians, I pelieve, is all that does it now. Te sacrament is not te love-feast, put te Lord’s supper. We keep te feast; we kill a lamb, and Jew and Catholic is welcome. We don’t drive te hungry away like Saint Paul; for it can’t pe any harm in peing hungry.”

“Ah! Luther,” Lloyd exclaimed, “Judas was at the last supper, and got the sop above all the others. Money was what ailed him. Are not you good Dutch fond of money?”

“Luther worships it,” Nelly Harbaugh exclaimed, patting her lover on the back. “He and his father want to be rich and nothing else. If I was rich I would want more than that: education, admiration, and splendor. But I can make Luther love them, too, and bring them to me.”

“Money,” Luther reflected aloud, “is te convenient result of industry and care. Whatever else we want, money fetches it. We Dutch puys land with it for our children.”

Nelly blushed as he looked at her.

“Her first blush,” Lloyd Quantrell thought, “since I have seen her. Then she loves that man! She will not blush for me.”

“We can not spend our money, Lloyd,” Luther continued, “if we keep diligent, pecause we have no fashions. Our clothes is te same from year to year. We do not take usury, so we do not take risks, and we do not go to law to maintain corrupting lawyers who create quarrels; Tunkers never sue one another. Te man who cheats, cheats only himself. We never fight, nor swear, nor shave our peards; so we require no barbers. Our women work and do not strain the men for their luxury. Children are plenty here, and we puy more land for tem. Education is good if it does not make people saucy and tisputatious and lazy; occupation is te only thing that peats education. Te world has plenty if people live simple and love their neighbor, who is their fellow-man. That was a fellowman tey carried back to slavery. No good can come of it.”

Lloyd Quantrell had prejudices the stronger for his superficial good-humor, and he flushed as quickly as he spoke:

“You Dutch and Yankees — for I reckon you’re the same breed — declare war on interest and property till you get some of it. I can say that from some experience,” Lloyd remarked apologetically, for Katy had raised her large eyes at his suppressed tones, “because my father was a Yankee, and once had your ideas, but shaving notes and leasing my niggers are now his chief interests.”

“You must be rich,” Nelly Harbaugh exclaimed. “Have you got slaves, too?”

“Yes,” said Lloyd, “fifty slaves, worth to-day thirty-five thousand dollars. That is, my father is my trustee for them. My mother left me her slaves. My father leases them in Charles County.”

“Has your father slaves also?” Luther Bosler asked.

“No. He took my mother’s land and personal property. The slaves are more salable. I suspect he took the less advantageous property because he had prejudices like yours, Luther.”

Nelly Harbaugh stared at Lloyd with all her might, hearing he was so rich.

“Katy,” she cried, with a breath from her fine aquiline nose, “your lover is the richest man you ever saw. Now make him marry you!”

This time the blush was Lloyd’s. He glanced at Katy, whose face was turned toward her lap, and she, looking up, now showed her eyes all wet with tears.

“Darling,” cried Lloyd, “Nelly has hurt your feelings. You do not love me for my money.”

“Oh!” Katy murmured through her sobs, “der auram mon hut koe haimat.”

“What does she say?” Lloyd asked of Nelly, drawing Katy’s head into his hands.

“She says, ‘That poor man has no home.’ I guess she’s thinking of that lazy, runaway slave.”

“We can go to the feast,” Katy sobbed convulsively, “to the Lord’s feast. He must go back and be whipped. Ich con sell net shtande.”

“If he can stand it, you can, Kate,” Nelly Harbaugh answered, gayly. “Lloyd has fifty slaves, he says. Did you hear that?”

“I wish,” said Katy, “that he was poor. It’s selfish, but I do. For now I see that the fortune-teller’s verse is coming true.”

“What was it, my gentle dove?” whispered Lloyd.

“I nefer saw so many doves, I think, as this morning,” Luther Bosler remarked, overhearing the word. “See them flying down the pike before us!”

They all looked out, and behold! the doves were in the stony road, trotting across it or perching on the worm-fence rails at the sides, or flying like little living windmills straight before, picking sustenance in the grass, tame and trusting, coy and fluttered, and seeming to wonder why the dog Albion chased them so fiercely, while his companion, Fritz, kept demurely at the wagon’s tail as if Fritz also had religious inclinations as he drew near church.

“Wild pigeons come by millions on the high Alleghany Mountains,” Lloyd exclaimed. “These ring, and ground, and turtle doves are plentiful. They can’t sing, and yet that fortune-teller thought so, for she ignorantly said to me:

‘When thou killest everything,
 Still the turtle-dove will sing.’

Nonsense!” concluded Lloyd Quantrell, still looking at the flying doves with queer feelings at his heart.

“Here is Peaver Creek mills,” Luther remarked, “where te Tunkers paptizes.”

A large stone mill with low door and hoisting-gear in the gable stood on the right, and beyond it was a mill-pond falling across a stone dam, and bordered by thick willows and tall sycamores, and in the running waste below the dam were islets, over one of which a noble water-oak spread its branches.

Beyond the creek a large stone house and some barns clung between the water and the hill, and on the left of the road, by a store and post-office, were a few other limestone dwellings and barns, giving the hidden hamlet that picturesqueness and mystic social drone in which old mills resemble old matrons with their spinning-wheels and family brood.

People were seen going to other churches off on the right in smart spring wagons or finer market carryalls.

Luther drove to the rack and tied his horses. A hundred or more worldly looking rustics saw the Dunker family descend and pass through the open gate, and gazed at Lloyd Quantrell’s tall, city-clad figure with surprise, hardly dissembled by politeness.

Nelly Harbaugh, gathering up her hoops and flounces, spoke to several of these intruders as she passed through them. Little Katy, with her eyes to the ground, took her brother’s arm and passed in.

The meeting-house was plain and long, and its low ceiling admitted no galleries. Wooden benches were stretched along its width, and faced that only side which had no door, while two aisles crossed each other at the middle of the church, entered by a door in each of the other three walls.

The door opposite the gable was open, and looking there Lloyd saw, to his astonishment, a great fireplace and an immense cook-stove before it, and in the fireplace something was roasting from a crane and hooks, while the stove was nearly red-hot, and large pots were steaming upon it and emitting the savor of animal food.

A man came down a winding stairway in the corner of the church, and closed a cupboard door there behind him, and, passing to some naked tables at the blank side of the church, opened a little trap in the wall and took out a Bible and hymn-book. This man was dressed, like Jake Bosler and Luther, in a coat of dark drab color, or rather pepper-and-salt mixture, and vest and trousers of the same.

As the man lined out a hymn in English, Luther Bosler took the front seat on one side of the preacher, beside his father and other Dunker men, and Katy took the front seat on the other side of the aisle among the women, and, slipping off her sun-bonnet, sat in her white night-cap, as it seemed to be, corresponding to the dress of her companions.

Lloyd hesitated where to sit, till Nelly Harbaugh drew him into a long seat at right angles to the preacher and to Katy and to the congregation. Behind them was the cupboard door opening upon the garret stairs.

“The church will be full of the family,” Nelly whispered — “they call the membership the ‘family’ — and there may be no room for us.”

The singing had already commenced, and Katy’s child’s voice and Luther’s strong tenor were heard in the strain, and without further delay Lloyd Quantrell, catching the tune, also dropped his bass notes in, and Katy thrilled to hear the bold, manly music, going to her heart.

The Dunker men and women turned their faces toward the church corner to see the brown-haired, broad-headed young man unaffectedly singing there, and then they looked at Katy, wondering.

Lloyd Quantrell was a large man, several inches more than six feet high, with a broad back, large hips, straight legs, and erect carriage. His hands and feet were large and strong, his neck was powerful; his eyes were a greenish gray, very clear-sighted, with large dark centers, and he had jaws full of strong, white, clean teeth, almost too large for a gentleman.

Ready, joyous, mildly imaginative, voluptuous, nearly tender — one feared, while Lloyd smiled, that some day he might think and frown.

He was now looking with a Marylander’s patriotism at a kind of worship he had never before heard of.

The preacher had prayed, and was saying something in broken English, and one by one the brethren first, and then the Dunker sisters, arose and passed by him and whispered, and he made for each a mark in a book.

“What is it?” Lloyd asked in a whisper.

“They’re making a preacher,” whispered Nelly Harbaugh. “After love-feast they’ll tell his name.”*

[* A Dunker love-feast generally occupies two or more week-days. For purposes of narration it is here condensed into a Sunday.]

The window was open near Quantrell, and showed the Blue Ridge or South Mountain soft as a line of deep-green melons with some dull citron in their rind, lying along the horizon, but so near to the eye, it seemed as if they ripened on the window-sill.

So limpid was the air, so soft the mountain tints, Lloyd thought they were his morning thoughts reflected in the mirror of his conscience, and softly impelled onward by his delighted heart; yet, as he looked, shadows of clouds rippled those bars of mountain, like swans in lakes, and they seemed transparent and to reveal their dreams.

Tingling, warming, ebbing, flowing, he felt his blood quicken to the love he encouraged yet forbade, and the mountains stretching across the pastoral upland flushed, cooled, sparkled, darkened, and thrilled with his own feelings.

“Why is everything so painfully distinct, so full of meaning and presentiment, so rapt, so haunted and so haunting?” Lloyd asked himself. “Is it love? I will not have it so, but so it is!”

The crowd outside the church increased in numbers and irreverence. They were playing games upon the slope, “Puss in the Corner” and kissing-games like “Copenhagen,” and now and then loud laughter, or the scream of some hoyden, broke the quiet tones of the preacher and the singing.

Within the church nearly every seat was full of communicants: plain men in long, straight hair falling back upon their shoulders, and beards unshaved and unshorn except the mustache, which none wore; women in well-fitting black frocks with a little cape sewed upon them, and small white caps, almost transparent, tied beneath the chin and showing the smooth hair combed within.

Some of these women were comely to look upon, with skins of temperance and eyes of zest; others were fat and dull, and merely amiable; and others yet were old and wrinkled, and submissive, like women in whom beauty and life have ceased to strive.

Katy sat there conscious, repentant, seeking, listening to the words with submission, fluttered by worldly passions, ready to cry out with pain, tender with gratitude.

Lloyd saw her hymn-book in her hand, and thought of her belief in witches, strong as her faith in God; and his brain framed the words:

“The dear little Dutch darling!”

Turning to Nelly Harbaugh, he beheld a finer woman in everything but sensibility, to whose eagle strength Katy continued the similitude of the dove.

Nelly had a Roman nose, giving masculinity to her face, a nose which a man might have envied, so finely cut it was, and so like leadership. And the blue eyes and heavy arched eyebrows equally became a resolute, ambitious man’s face. But the lower lip and chin, however heroically modeled — the chin square — took the softness of maidenhood. The eyes also looked longing, as for love.

The hand in her lap was large but fine, and the arm beside it, which Lloyd drew into his own, was modeled handsomely, and hard like ivory.

“Don’t!” Nelly whispered, “you sly, rich man. They’re going to make the preacher now.”

There was already a commotion of some kind about the front of the congregation, and new arrivals pouring in forced the mere spectators from their benches, and, their places being demanded, Lloyd opened the stairway door, and he and Nelly went up a few steps and could see over the heads of all.

“My Lord!” Nelly Harbaugh whispered, “Luther is the new preacher!”

The elder minister or Bishop was standing by Luther Bosler, and little Katy was between them. The minister shook Katy’s hand, and, putting his arm around Luther’s neck, deliberately kissed him upon the bearded mouth.

Lloyd Quantrell pulled the door nearly fast, to hide his involuntary laughter.

“Don’t mock us!” Nelly Harbaugh said, with a look of pain. “I shall have to stand there with him when we are married, and promise to do his work while he keeps the church together. They don’t often make single men preachers. Katy takes my place to-day.”

Opening the door, Lloyd saw a procession of the members, one by one rising and going toward the altar-space, and there each man kissed Luther Bosler, each woman kissed Katy Bosler, the women shook Luther’s hand, the men shook Katy’s hand, and so they passed on, till Jake Bosler’s turn came, and he fastened his wild, hairy face to his son’s mouth and rich dark beard, and coming away full of tears and emotion, was heard to articulate:

“Luter — Himmel— mootter — Bi’m-by!”

Lloyd had to laugh again, and pulled the door upon his delight, never having seen in his life one man kiss another.

“Excuse me, Nelly,” he sighed between his spasms of laughter, “but this grizzly-bear kissing really beats the Dutch!”

“You must kiss men, too,” Nelly said, “when you become a Dunker. Oh, Katy will make you one! She never gives up anything.”

This increased Lloyd’s laughter. When he again widened the aperture, Luther Bosler was standing alone, and the brethren and sisters were in prayer. As they rose and burst into singing, the young Baltimorean again contributed his melodious voice, and Katy stole a glance to see her lover, as far in piety as music would advance him, singing straight toward her humble heart.

“Oh,” thought Katy, “if he could only know how religion makes us love! He will love the world till God brings him to me.”

She heard her brother commence to speak, and something almost like pride started in her mind, that she had a brother great and wise enough to be a minister.

Lloyd Quantrell also heard, in spite of the silly laughter and interruptions through the church-windows, the manly tones of Katy’s brother, reading from the Bible the epistle old Saint Paul dispatched to them under the golden cornices of Corinth, in the day when, like a carrier-bird, the Christian carried the straw from the manger to build a nest in the acanthus capitals of the temple columns of the pagan gods.

With a slightly reproving look at the careless crowd without, Luther read:

“One is hungry and another is drunken. What! have ye not houses to eat and to drink in? Despise ye the church of God?

“As often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come.

“Whosoever shall eat and drink unworthily shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.

“Wherefore, my brethren, when ye come together to eat, tarry one for another.

“I would have ye know that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man.”

Luther turned from the word and began to speak, plainly, slowly, modestly.

He told of the long struggle to extricate the Christian life from the pomp of ecclesiasticism and the caprices of theologians, and find in it the example of the disciples.

Princes and armies surrounded the Lutherans and kept them worldly; the Calvinists imitated their enemies, and wanted rebellion and conquest. Some found comfort in an intellectual formula like “justification by faith,” or “the republic of the saints.”

A few simple men like Menno and Landis, some of them Catholic priests, some students by prayer of the four Evangelists, resisted all conformity and formality, clinging to the holy life of the Son of woman.

Like a little thread from the land of Palestine trailing to the Alpine valleys, where the Waldenses lived in brotherhood, and thence to the springs of the Rhine and Danube, the tradition of the simple truth preceded the worldly Reformation which was irritated by its perseverance.

The spirit of St. Peter with the sword, the spirit of St. Paul with his dogma, resented the quiet faith of St. James, who was baptized again, and mirrored his brother Jesus in his calm heart.

Burned alive, banished, forbidden sepulture, exposed in cages to starve, torn between contending armies, the Baptist brethren, Swiss, Dutch, or German, bided their time till William Penn, at the end of one hundred and fifty years, heard of them, and opened the New World to those faithful sheep.

Non-resistants, submissionists, with an unpaid clergy, without other doctrine than what Christ did, they preserved in their Western vales the brotherhood of the disciples — not faith, not chiefly hope, but greatest of them all, love, which could die, but could not hate.

A tender intelligence and conviction spread from Luther’s tones and eyes, and Lloyd forgot his uncouth dress and shaggy hair.

Luther was animated, by his engagement to Nelly, to dwell upon the family rest, where, at the table, every day, sat the almost visible Christ, saying, “Abide with me.”

Quantrell turned to Nelly, and her eyes were wet with tears.

---

 

CHAPTER IX.

THE SACRAMENT.

A SUDDEN rising of the congregation, and clearing of certain benches, pressed the Dunker people back upon the spectators, and again the twain withdrew into the staircase, and this time they passed into the loft. It was lighted by the round window in the end, and, looking down into the yard, they saw the parasites of the love-feast eating bread, and meat, and pickles, and sweet things, as they came in procession from the kitchen door.

The loft was divided by pine planks across the middle, and the men’s side, which they were in, was strewn with clean straw and some straw mattresses, for the lodgers at the love-feast.

“It will be full,” Nelly said. “The Dunkers love to imagine themselves the disciples living together, like the Christian family. How can I ever be good enough for such a life?”

She seemed in real penitence and awe, and it occurred to Lloyd Quantrell to test the depth of her feeling. He took her hand and drew her to him, and in the low garret passed his arm around her.

“Do you love this obscure preacher,” he asked, “so much that, if I were to tell you I admired you, you would refuse for him — Baltimore?”

Her eyes shone, and next they flashed. She pushed him away.

“Do not deceive yourself, Lloyd,” she said, with dignity. “You can not deceive me. Katy is your passion. If she were not, I would prefer Luther Bosler to you.”

“You are complimentary, queen!”

“You are rich, I suppose, but you have no ambition. He has — to be a good man. That is better than being a play-boy. Oh, how I love that man!” Nelly exclaimed, bursting into tears.

“Forgive me!” Lloyd spoke, in an impulse of respect and regret. “I had not given you credit for such feelings. Why do you cry?”

“Because I am so absolutely unworthy of him,” answered the girl, permitting herself to be caressed. “He is peaceful and just; I am full of restless things, and know that I am beautiful. Am I not, Lloyd?” she asked, almost with eagerness, suddenly drying her tears. “You live in a great city: do I compare with the fine ladies there?”

“Few have such splendid style,” Lloyd replied, slowly and with judgment. “But it is no place for you. Men who would marry you in Baltimore would not have the respect for you — they do not possess the sober merits — that Luther has.”

“What can I do?” Nelly Harbaugh asked. “If I could make Luther an ambitious man, and turn his mind to the world, we might be made for each other. We are for each other. I love him with fear and rest. But out yonder” — she pointed beyond the mountains — is a life that often calls me. I think I have talent as well as beauty.”

“Beware, Nelly,” Lloyd spoke low and sagely; “you heard what Luther read, ‘The head of the woman is the man’ —”

“‘And the head of the man’ — my man — ‘is Christ’; that condemns me to be buried in these mountains — a Dunker preacher’s wife.”

“But you are poor and he is prosperous. He has been indulgent to you. He knows it will be hard to reduce you to his image, but, in love, he takes the chance.”

The girl’s face softened in all its bold and spirited outlines, and she seemed profoundly moved.

“Why can’t I feel religious?” she asked. “Why won’t I submit? What makes me fear when I ought to be so happy? Last night I would have married Andrew Atzerodt. To-day, engaged to the man I respect above all in the world, I want to tear him from his content and conscience.”

She threw herself upon one of the freshly filled beds, with her head in her hands.

Her almost extravagant splendor of form, and straightness of neck, and spine, and limbs, and her length of tresses, in color like the straw, Lloyd Quantrell beheld, with rising dislike and dread of this woman continuing to be Katy’s friend.

“Sis,” spoke Lloyd, with cool familiarity, “you must be what they call an adventuress. It means a woman who would rather fool many men than not cheat herself. Be honest with this honest fellow Luther, and quarrel with him to-day!”

Nelly Harbaugh started up, and the spark of temper in her brain gave passionate character to her countenance, which Lloyd admired without losing his coolness.

“And you be honest with Luther’s honest sister!” the girl exclaimed. “Take your advice to yourself. God knows I love Luther Bosler, and always shall!”

Jake Bosler’s head appeared above the stairs looking at them, both in ill temper now, and he said:

“Nelly — Lloyd — love-feast — Bi’m-by!”

When they descended the wooden steps, the church had been darkened by closing all the shutters, and some tin lamps and candlesticks gave, with their flame, the aspect of night to the curious scene.

Every third bench had been turned over and made into a table upon the other two. The front benches remained full of worshipers, and the kitchen door, wide open, disclosed some beams of day, and also a pantry of dishes and of jars, and the stove and fireplace with diminished heat.

Through this door Dunker men were bringing white table-cloths, and piles of tin pans and plates, and iron spoons and knives and forks. All was clatter and decisive tread, yet with sobriety and respect.

After the tables were ready, large tubs were brought in, steaming with broth, and meat and pickles and apple-butter were placed up and down the table, and bread, in slices and quarter loaves.

Next two tubs were brought in and set one before the men and one before the women on the front line of benches.

“What’s coming now?” Lloyd Quantrell inquired.

“The feet-washing,” whispered Nelly Harbaugh.

By this time the tables, covering much of the church space, were occupied everywhere with waiting rows of Dunker brethren and sisters sitting neatly and by sexes. The dim light shone on the silver hairs of many, and here and there were sleeping babies at their mothers’ breasts.

Suddenly the Dunker bishop began to read the story of the last supper, from St. John:

“Jesus riseth from supper and laid aside his garments.”

At this two stalwart Dunkers arose and took off their coats, and two women arose on the women’s side.

“And he took a towel and girded himself.”

The attending Dunkers wrapped towels around their waists, and knelt by the tubs of clean water.

“After that he poureth water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded. . . . Jesus said, ‘If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.’”

The Dunker men and women on the front row were taking off their shoes and stockings.

Jake Bosler’s feet seemed to stray around everywhere as they were disclosed under the lamp-light.

Little Katy’s feet barely flashed a moment in the Dunker woman’s hands, and the sound of splashing water was heard. An instant more, Lloyd saw the little girl’s feet shine in the woman’s towel as they were being wiped.

Then the Dunker quadrant went on washing and wiping others, till their own turn came, when they submitted to be also bathed and wiped.

The men kissed every man whose feet they washed; the women kissed every woman after wiping her feet.

A disposition to laugh was deterred by the solemn reading of the gospel — at times in Luther’s deliberate voice:

“If I, then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s feet. Now I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.”

“Is that in the Bible?” Lloyd Quantrell asked himself. “Then perhaps these people are the only obedient disciples.”

The feet-washing ended with a hymn, and then the love-feast began.

“Lloyd!” a resonant voice called. It was Luther Bosler, unable to press his way to where they stood.

“Come, sir,” Nelly Harbaugh whispered, “or they will all be looking at us.”

Hardly aware why, Lloyd followed the girl, for whom Katy had kept a seat beside herself.

“You sit over here, Lloyd; Katy wants you to do so,” Luther Bosler spoke, showing Quantrell a place among the Dunker men.

These with kind countenances seemed to welcome him. In a minute the tin plates down the table were filled with hot mutton broth, and a man handed Lloyd a spoon and motioned to the full plate before him.

As the young man put his spoon into it, three other Dunker men did the same, all eating from the same dish.

With difficulty Lloyd refrained from choking himself with the savory mouthful, such laughter shook his stomach.

“By George! some Dutchman will kiss me next,” Lloyd thought, “and then I must either laugh out, or hit him.”

But the broth was good, and the four men continued to eat together; and one Dunker gave Lloyd some pickles, another handed him a slice of bread spread with meat and apple-butter, and a third pushed over a cup of coffee.

Quantrell adapted himself to the strange conditions easily, observing that all over the church, by fours, the men and women were eating; and he now remembered that it was at such primitive feasting when Christ had spoken to “one leaning on his bosom,” saying, “He shall betray me to whom I shall give a sop when I have dipped it.”

Quantrell had hardly thought of this, when a voice in broken English rang through the church:

“And after te sop, Satan entered into him. Den said Jesus, ‘Dat tou doest, do quickly!’ And Judas had te bag. He den, having received te sop, went immediately out, and it was night.”

A sudden, strange fear fell upon the young hunter.

He wondered if this did not describe himself, who carried the game-bag, and had no right part in this solemn feast before the crucifixion of his Lord!

Old legends learned in the Catholic college, old ghosts and miracles and coincidences, came back to his mind. The dim candles and lamps seemed to be the same which shone upon the Last Supper, and these long-bearded, simple men were the real disciples, and yonder women were the friends of the Madonna and her gifted boy.

“Where, then, is Christ?” Lloyd Quantrell asked himself in scarce admitted awe — “the Christ I shall betray?”

He looked up, almost expecting to see the halo-lighted face and searching eyes.

The nearest to them in beauty and pity and glory, were those of Katy Bosler, looking at him!

A hymn was now lined out, as the love-feast was done, and some one handed Lloyd a great hymn-book in the old German language. He looked at the title with astonishment, as the translation had been penciled beneath the old black German text:

“The song of the solitary and abandoned Turtle-Dove.”

He wondered if he could be dreaming.

No; the words were really there, and the date and printing-place of the book:

“EPHRATA, PENNA., 1747.”

“Here, Lloyd,” the voice of Luther Bosler said again, “Katy wants you at the communion!”

He found himself sitting on the front bench among the Dunker men. A cup was in his hand filled with grape-wine, strong and sweet, and in the other hand was a cake of curious bread. On each side of him the Dunker men sat with the very expressions he had seen in old engravings of the Lord’s Supper.

“I haf desired to eat tis passover with you,” spoke the resonant voice again, “pefore I suffer. . . . Dis is my pody which is gifen for you . . . . Dis cup is te New Testament in my plood, to pe shed for you . . . . Pehold! te hand of him dat petrayeth me, is with me on dis table!”

Lloyd gazed up again. It seemed to be Katy’s illuminated eyes which had spoken.

He drank the wine, and the bread stuck in his throat.

Slowly there rose upon his mind a feeling of religious consecration.

He had been called to the Lord’s Supper like other fishermen of old, and had dared to drink the blood of the Virgin and the divine Father, whose love had overshadowed her. This day he had taken part in the crucifixion of his Lord.

He thought his mother might be here, who had so fervently believed all this mystery, and dedicated him to Heaven with her dying breath. He looked among the women to see if one like her might not be happy now, in the wondrous accident of his coming to this supper and eating with these humble Christians.

Katy was all he saw, but the Dunker bishop was reading:

“‘Lord, why can not I follow thee now? I will lay down my life for thy sake!’”

A sense of wishing to be a nobler, gentler man, followed the words, in the young man’s heart.

“Verily, verily,” continued the bishop, “the cock shall not crow till thou hast denied me!”

The cock did not crow, but a loud bark disturbed the worship.

It was Bosler’s dog, Fritz, standing in the kitchen door of the church and barking for some one.

Lloyd’s foot touched something soft.

Crouched at his feet, whither Albion had stealthily insinuated himself, that dog was lying and looking into Lloyd’s face with an unsocial discontent.

The moment’s serious feelings passed from the young man’s mind.

Lloyd rose and motioned his dog to leave the church, and led the way.

The Dunkers had commenced to pray, and did not look up to see him go.

Mingling with the idle spectators in the church-yard, who had been fed like friends of the members, Lloyd fed the two dogs, and looked at his own with some dislike.

This dog was of full English pointer blood and valuable. Lloyd Quantrell’s father, in a moment of unexpected generosity at the club, had allowed five hundred dollars to an English gentleman for his dog, said English gentleman having lost to Mr. Abel Quantrell one thousand pounds in a night’s encounter at draw-poker, and therefore having no further use for the dog, which he had brought over to assist him in killing a vast vision of American game.

He had gone to the club, met Mr. Quantrell and party, liked their terrapin and wine, and, after an introduction to the pleasures of the city, relapsed to his normal love of game, and particularly of this rapid, bantering, bluffing, mettlesome American institution which had been till recently unknown east of Kentucky.

With a full knowledge of the game of poker, and but little of plover and partridge, the young man had obeyed a letter of instructions from his father — in answer to his own for a further remittance — by taking passage for Liverpool, leaving no lasting recollections of himself in Baltimore except this blooded pointer, which, in his honor, was called Albion.

Albion was trim-built like all the pointer class, and, except for his speed and activity, would have been a dandy among dogs. But his strength of loins and hips, and the powerful curve of his hind legs, and a certain blunt strength of neck as it solidly joined the more delicate head, indicated him further as a pugilist dandy, such as were not uncommon in those days, in Baltimore.

Withal, he was more alert than bold, and had his insinuating side.

Looking into his hazel, yellow eyes, soft yet with flame, as in the Kentucky beauty, their pupils almost black like deep wells in amber, one said, “What depth of sensibility!”

But closely watched, a sly, possibly sneaking management of those beautiful eyes, arrested the critical student. They did not like close watching, and would languidly close as if just dropping away to doze, but would open half-way and peep, and, if the spectator turned his head, would be found wide open, taking an inventory and laying away gossip.

Again, the high blood and careful inbreeding of Albion, though expressed in his warm head-colors and almost dainty white skin, could, in the observer’s skeptical mood, be spotted with a certain manginess.

Superficially he was a beautiful white animal, with a small, delicate, lemon-colored bar on the back, and a head where the dark-brown hanging ear, like a loop of lady’s hair, fell from reddish, deer-colored brows, whose warm tint extended around the eyes and to the top of the brain, and back a little way on the neck, opening to let a streak of white, with a diamond form between the brows, go down the profile and cover all the muzzle except the brown kid nose, so sensitive, familiar, yet precise, as if it were the organ of fastidious taste, and found sublimated odor in a lady’s palm.

But that white muzzle was spotted with a dirty gray, as if obscurer tastes in the animal had led it to eat the bird it betrayed to the gunner.

Spots less objectionable, yet spots, like freckles on a gentleman, went all over the white back and flanks, slight yet visible to examination.

His flews just overhung the mouth without dropping, as in the lips of a man with no unclean habit except a mouth full of tobacco-juice.

And as for Albion’s tail, it was like a cart-whip well flogged out, beginning as if it were meant to be grasped by a large hand, then dropping off to a mere string. It was still his courageous part, and, although his eyes looked mild and delicate, when another dog came along his tail would go out and up, like a wasp’s sting, and, if that was not alarming enough, he would stiffen his back, lift his jowls, and show his row of grinders. Yet often he would affect sleep till the dog had passed.

He spared no birds, but seldom took up a challenge even from a terrier. It was generally remarked that he had a delicate barrel of a muzzle, and an intellectual, literary contour, but often it looked hollow as an exquisite’s in consumption.

These defects in a valuable animal could have occurred to only censorious people. Almost everybody beheld the finest pointer in Maryland, soft yet with dignity, like a mistress, but a king’s one.

At this moment his raveled ear, still raw and bloody, made the dog feverish and snappish.

“I have heard,” thought Quantrell, “of the devil taking the form of a dog, and I begin to be afraid of mine.”

Jake Bosler, when the congregation was dismissed, introduced Lloyd to many of the Dunker men, all of whom seemed to be neighborly and cordial, and asked Lloyd to come to see them.

Luther had received an order to attend some Dunker conference at another church such a considerable distance off, that he requested his party to get at once into the dearborn, and Jake Bosler took Lloyd by the hand, and saying —

“Coom twict — coom, Lloyd — Bi’m-by” — Jake executed the Dunker kiss upon the blushing Baltimorean.

They drove away to the south by a cross-road, and getting on the great National road, turned off to the west and crossed the Antietam Creek at a mill-town, by a bridge of such unconsciously beautiful stone arches that it seemed never to have been made by man, but to have condensed from the limestone mists, in the forms of those old mill-wheels which stirred the sluggish current.

Between sycamores and willows the green Antietam, like a veil, went winding among the corn-clad hills, and, at a cross-lane beyond it, Luther turned up a scarcely trodden track where ledges of limestone cropped out here and there and crumbled into clover.

Passing through some corn-fields whose long barrels and plumes were stacked in rusty lines, they saw at the side of another turnpike- road in a beautiful woods of hickory, oak, and chestnut, a square, chunky brick church with a steep roof. The clean, park-like woods revealed the limestone strata in parallel lines, and separate rocks and bowlders strewn about; and here, descending, Katy spread the lunch from her basket.

Nelly Harbaugh was very attentive to Luther, and when he went into the Dunker church she begged to go with him also.

“I am afraid to let you leave me an hour,” sighed the girl; “there is such comfort, Luther, in being with you.”

Then Lloyd and Katy strolled to a neighboring burial-ground, and, sitting there in sight of the mountains, felt all the tender joys of love compressed and ardent.

He told her all about himself, his temptations and his needs, the instincts for a purer life within him and the consolation of this great round day, hastening to its eve — the first eventful one in all his life.

“Lloyd,” said Katy, “I feel all you say, too. But it is dangerous for a poor girl to trust a man like you. I haf been thinking about it, and I haf been warned.”

“Katy,” said Lloyd, “you have kept a secret from me. What evil thing did that fortune-teller say?”

“Here it is,” answered Katy, “in English. I can make poetry a little.”

“Read it, you timid little goose!”

Katy read, between shyness and a shudder, these lines:

“In this hand I see a ring:
 Thou shalt lose it, pretty thing!
 Wading for it down a brook,
 Thou shalt find it by a book.”

“What do you make of it, Katy?” Lloyd asked.

“Some one will try to deceive me.”

“I never will, my darling!”

“Do you mean to marry me, perhaps?” asked Katy, rallying all her courage to her eyes.

“Yes. I have my father’s consent to get. He is a Catholic. But I will engage myself this day to make you my wife. Give me your dear little hand!”

She placed it in his with the excitement of delight and fear. He slipped a ring upon her finger which he had worn upon his watch-stem.

“Katy,” said he, “that was my mother’s mourning and wedding ring; her father, the foremost gentleman in Maryland, left it to her by his will. Take it with this kiss, and promise to be my wife.”

“Whenefer you ask me, Lloyd,” the girl replied with eyes gemmed with bright tears. “You haf taken of Christ’s sacrament with me this day, and your heart is clean. We are near my mother’s grave, who went to Antietam church.”

He kissed her as purely as the fond young heart in passion can intend, and then, opening her basket, she brought out her accordion.

“I had nothing else I loved so much as this,” said Katy, “and I fetched it to gif you. When you play it you will, I hope, think of me; for when you are gone, I can play it no more.”

He felt the tears come to his own eyes as he touched the keys and valves, and played a little love-tune in the fields of Antietam.

“What’s that?” Quantrell asked, when he had finished.

“Some other music, somewhere,” Katy replied. “May pe it’s on te canal; for te Potomac River is pack yonder through te woods.”

“I thought I heard a drum and fife in the corn-field yonder,” Lloyd spoke.

“I thought I heard soldiers’ music too,” Katy whispered. “Te dog hears it, Lloyd.”

The big gray mastiff stood with his ears up. Albion was fairly gamboling, as if he danced to the mystic instruments.

The sound, if it were not the insects in the trees or crops, died away, and only the Dunkers were heard singing in their lowly meeting.

“Lloyd,” Katy murmured, “let us go stand at mother’s grave and say te Words.”

---

 

CHAPTER X.

ISAAC SMITH’S FARM.

A SMALL town of limestone, log, and painted brick houses, with a sunny square in the middle, was near the Dunker church, and as Luther and Lloyd rode the uncoupled horses into an arched spring of water which gushed from the ground close by, a person came to ask them if they could deliver a letter on one of the mountain roads.

“It’s to a Mr. Isaac Smith, who rents our farm there,” said the letter-bearer. “We want him to send our cow up here to Sharpsburg.”

“I don’t go that road,” Luther replied. “My horses will pe tired, and I shall cross te mountain at Crampton’s Gap.”

“I’ll take the letter,” Lloyd exclaimed, “for I shall leave you, Luther, at the road this side the mountain, and walk down to Harper’s Ferry. I know Isaac Smith very well.”

They crossed the Antietam by another blue-stone bridge of arches, hidden under the hills, and late in the afternoon reached a wild road which ran parallel with the Blue Ridge.

“I must save my horses, Lloyd, or I would trife you to te Ferry; put tey must plow pefore sunrise. Let me gif you a Tunker brother’s kiss pefore you go.”

Again the bearded mouth of Luther met Lloyd’s nearly hairless lips. Nelly Harbaugh said, “Lloyd, we are friends: I forgive you, and shall disappoint your fears of me.” Little Katy received the last kiss, and again the tears shone in her large eyes as Lloyd said, “I won’t go home, my darling, till I see you again.”

He stood waving his hat till the rattle of the disappearing wagon turned into that sound he had heard by the Antietam church — of a fife and a drum, in the distance, toward Crampton’s Gap.

“These mountains are haunted everywhere,” Lloyd Quantrell said, and turned down the stony road.

He had not walked far before his dog became suspicious and, growling, ran into the dogwood and alder brush. A woman on a single-footed racker came toward him, rapidly riding, and, glancing at him, reined her horse without stopping and pointed across the mountain.

“Yonder is your way to-night, Lloyd Quantrell,” she cried — “to the Catoctin Valley. This road is rough and dangerous, and spirits are abroad upon it after dark.”

“Let the spirits come, Mother Ritner! I have a dog and a gun, and have eaten the sacrament to-day.”

“You will find that to-night,” exclaimed the woman, “which will change your destiny!”

She was gone in a cloud of dust, and the sun, now sinking below the North Mountain, left a cool shadow on the Blue Ridge like billows on a sea. Lloyd walked rapidly, whistling for his dog, and when Albion reappeared the big mastiff Fritz was in his company. He stamped for Bosler’s dog to go back, but the influence of the pointer was still greatest, and both dogs bounded down the road to the south and were soon out of sight.

“Dear little Katy!” exclaimed the traveler — “to give me her accordion and forget it was so heavy! I have more money, too, than it is safe to travel with — five hundred dollars — and Harper’s Ferry has hard people in it — Poles, Dutch, Jews, Scotch, the scum of the earth!”

He reflected that this day had made him softer toward one Dutch family.

“Heigh-ho!” continued Quantrell, “we know not what a day may bring forth. I told my father, who called me a ‘rowdy’ before I left Baltimore, that I would marry any wife he would recommend. I hope he hasn’t taken me at my word, but he is quick on the trigger. Let me see!”

He looked at his watch, and remembered that a train went through Harper’s Ferry to Baltimore after midnight.

“I will stay up for that train,” said Lloyd, “and go and tell my father I am caught and engaged. He believes in love-matches, he once told me, and my mother never thought she had his real heart, though he was kind to her. No, I must not waste a single day, for, next to Katy’s affection, I want my father’s.”

The road seemed to get a peculiar, reflected light from the higher Elk Mountain as it kept well up on the lesser range, and every object dwelt in as much distinctness as the evening cow-bells made distinctest music; yet everything startled the heart a little, while keeping it in a sunset tone of ecstasy.

The log-houses grew small and seldom, and the stony farms were dry. Sometimes small pines darkened the way, and made Lloyd, as he entered their defile, keep his gun cocked.

“I can’t be far from Isaac Smith’s,” he thought. “If it’s not the next clearing, I will get rid of this accordion, for my arm is sore, carrying the rough-shaped thing.”

It was not the next clearing, nor the next, and he was resolved to hide the accordion somewhere or throw it away. Katy, he considered, would not miss it, or would take a better one for it. Darkness was settling upon the twilight, and he was thirsty for water.

The sound of a flowing stream soon tinkled in the cool evening. Lloyd knelt to drink of a blackish branch which crossed the road. As he arose, a voice, from the dusk somewhere, cried:

“Halt!”

“Isaac Smith’s house — is it far?” Lloyd cocked his gun as he spoke.

“Yar it is,” answered the voice, not very welcoming, nor yet confident.

“Thank St. Paul!” exclaimed the gunner, dropping his caution. “If you had said ‘No,’ I should have thrown poor Katy’s accordion away. Now I can leave it here.”

He stepped forward and saw a colored man standing in a kind of lane, and exclaimed:

“Ashby! who set you? free?”

“I don’t know,” answered the negro — the same who had been carried back to slavery that morning from Smoketown; “somebody did it. Them yer!” He indicated, with a shining something in his hand, a sign of habitation up the lane.

“What’s this?” Lloyd asked. “A spear? No, I see; it’s Smith’s fishing-gig. What are you doing with it, after dark? Robbing Smith?”

“No,” answered the negro, confused and uncertain. “I’se sot yer. I don’t know what fur. If you know them yer, I s’posen you kin go in.”

Lloyd’s attention was now called to the dogs reappearing and lapping of the brook. As he called them to him, Albion snarled at the negro, who awkwardly brought his singular weapon down to defend himself.

“Search on!” commanded the gunner, and Fritz led the way up the lane.

The moon and stars came out from some lowering clouds as he advanced, and showed upon a low ridge before him some scattered buildings, and he stopped upon a small bridge in the lane to listen to some human sounds he heard. The stream under his feet ran from an old log spring-house in a kind of bottom or hollow, and a torch moved under some oaks at this spring; and a torch, likewise, on the crest of the field, shone upon some forms of men around a little house. A metallic voice Lloyd was not unfamiliar with was speaking, and the stranger caught only these words:

“If it is necessary to take life in order to save your own, then make sure work of it. . . . And look to no dissolution of the Union, but simply to amendment and repeal; and our flag shall be the same that our fathers fought under in the Revolution!”

“Why, that’s dear old Smith’s voice!” exclaimed Lloyd. “Still crazy on the subject of the Revolutionary War! I’m glad he’s home.”

He continued up the rough, stony lane nearly to some low barns, and, turning in at the top, entered a little yard, in which were fruit-trees. A small log-house was built against the hill-side, with a high porch along its eaves, and, between this house and a Dutch oven, a small open space was filled with men. Advancing among these, Lloyd exclaimed, cheerfully:

“Mr. Smith — pop, I’m in luck again to find you here.”

To his astonishment, a powerful hand immediately seized his collar and held him tight.

“Bring that torch here!” spoke the firm voice of Isaac Smith.

A torch came near, and, as it flashed upon Lloyd Quantrell’s face, a person twisted his gun out of his hand and another person seized the accordion.

“Father, it’s Mr. Quantrell,” spoke up the voice of young Watson Smith.

“How did you pass the picket?” asked Oliver Smith, with a wondering face.

“Why, friends,” Lloyd said, “a black fellow at the gate found I knew you. He wasn’t as uncivil as this other nigger who has got my gun!”

Turning, Lloyd indicated a large, handsome mulatto man, who stood looking at him with an alert, undismayed eye, unlike that of any negro Lloyd had ever seen.

“Newby,” spoke Oliver Smith, “go away! Give me the gun.”

It was good advice, for the laws of hospitality could hardly keep the white Marylander in check when treated disrespectfully by a slave.

“A man prowling through the mountains with a gun, on the Sabbath-night, must give an account of himself, sir,” spoke Isaac Smith.

“Why, my dear old man, I came to bring you a letter from your landlord, who wants his cow. I think I wouldn’t have taken the trouble, but that I was going to the Ferry to get the train. — Don’t look at me so hard, men; the worst about me is — I’m hungry.”

Isaac Smith took the letter, and, with a perplexed look, remarked:

“I don’t want to treat you uncivil, sir, if you came upon an honest errand. — Stevens, you and Mr. Kagi get some of that pork for Mr. Quantrell, and take him to the spring-house and examine him.”

Greatly puzzled to know what it could all mean, Lloyd, with a slavery-bred man’s instinct for guessing wild, and being easily satisfied, considered that Smith might be a lunatic keeping a sort of mountain sanitarium for other lunatics.

The two men led him down the path to the old log dairy with its hooded roof, and, sitting there, looked at him intently and silently while he ate some lean pork and filled his flask-cup.

“We can get three drinks out of this old thing yet, if we divide fair,” cried Lloyd.

“Take it all yourself,” said the man addressed as Stevens, with a certain cool, bold self-reliance.

“That will be cleared off the earth too, some day, I calkelate,” added the other man, who had been addressed as Kagi.

“You mean whisky?” laughed Quantrell, holding the glass up to the torch, which now illuminated the old spring-house till some bats or swallows there sailed out into the night; “it’s cleared off the earth every rye-harvest now, and given, like man, to the worm.”

“Cool chap!” said Stevens, looking at Kagi.

“What’s that about the worm?” asked Kagi, not informed about distilling processes.

“The worm,” replied Lloyd. “is what alcohol ascends to spirit through, and, so, another worm eats man before he can be a saint. So here’s to the worm!”

As Quantrell raised the glass and emptied it, a look of dislike, and then of pallor, came over Kagi’s face. The torch in his hand drooped nearly to the water, and oil or pitch ran out of it upon the bubbling spring.

“He is not safe,” muttered Kagi to Stevens.

“He believes, like me, in the world of spirits,” Stevens said. “Give me your glass, Quantrell! Here’s to the Worm that distills us to the stars!”

As Stevens handed the cup back, Lloyd looked at these two with an interest always inspired by self-contained men.

Both were of fine, if uncultivated, appearance. Kagi seemed to be the more intelligent of the two, Stevens the more independent. Lloyd felt that he had not made an impression upon either of them, but Stevens seemed indifferent or careless to his approaches; Kagi was almost aggressive, yet disturbed.

Kagi was large, almost portly, with black beard, weather-exposed, and long black hair. Stevens was not so tall but more symmetrical and powerful, with military shoulders, straight, clean-made hands, a head poised in conscious strength of animal life, a skin soft as a woman’s, dark-brown hair, beard over all his jaws, and hazel eyes which were both contumacious and keen.

“Did Pop Smith buy the dark fellow I passed at the gate?” Lloyd asked.

“Traded for him,” Stevens replied.

“Give ’em a little something — to boot,” put in Kagi, shaking off his heaviness.

Both men laughed.

“Well,” said Lloyd, “that was my idea of Father Smith, that he was kind to people. That’s why I can’t understand his way of treating me to-night.”

“Have you got any slaves to trade him?” asked Kagi, with interest.

“None I can control; mine won’t come into my possession for more than a year.”

“Quantrell,” said Stevens, “Mr. Smith is about moving from the farm. You got here just as everything was packed. That’s why you see so many people around; moving a neighbor, you know.”

“Why, that’s just it,” exclaimed the young stranger, throwing away all offense. “Let’s go up and make him apologize.”

“No,” said Stevens, “he’s peculiar. Go up and bid him good-night — unless he makes you stay.”

“Can’t stay,” laughed Lloyd, gayly; “I’m just in love to-day, and going to ask my governor’s consent, by to-night’s train.”

They found comparatively few persons now at the dwelling, which was a miserable home for a man with six slaves — a long hut, half buried in the hill, so that there was a mere cellar under its high, rickety porch, and a small story and loft above. A candle assisted to reveal thus much, and boxes, trunks, and cheap valises, recently packed or emptied, were seen within this cellar. Not far behind the house the small pines grew dense and black, and clouds were hurrying in the sky as the winds rose and whistled.

“Is it correct, gentlemen?” asked Isaac Smith.

“Fuddled,” said Stevens.

“Mysterious,” said Kagi.

“Who is that young person making free with my girl’s accordion?” spoke up Quantrell, hearing the instrument awkwardly played.

“That’s Captain Cook,” answered Isaac Smith. “He’s quite a cultivated person and a teacher.”

---

 

CHAPTER XI.

KATY’S ACCORDION.

A SMALL, stooping, light-haired lad came out with the accordion and looked at Lloyd through pale-blue eyes, which seemed to feel his accomplishments.

Lloyd took Katy’s gift and put his fingers to the keys.

A little culture, if learned in engine-houses and partisan clubs, helps many a man through life.

Something about these people seemed still suspectful and forbidding. Quantrell had tried his temperament upon them in vain, and now he had only some rude tunes to lull them with.

He began to play “Home, Sweet Home.”

After a few strains, other persons seemed to come in, as if from the barns and corn-cribs and pine thickets. At first sullen, next wondering, and soon affected tenderly, they lay in blankets upon the autumn earth, or stood around in curious groups, while he played the air that the simple and the cot-bred of the British races know everywhere.

Some of the people who ventured near were negroes, strange-looking negroes for Maryland or for the American States anywhere — so wanting in politeness or even hospitality; preoccupied, too, as if with the morrow’s house-moving occupations; but these soon felt the infection of the tender tune, and one young, handsome white boy came up and sat by Lloyd upon an old hair-trunk and listening, filled with tears at his bright eyes. Lloyd sang the words in his own melodious voice:

“An exile from home, pleasure dazzles in vain,
 Ah! give me my lowly thatched cottage again;
 The birds singing sweetly that came to my call,
 Give them back, and my peace of mind, dearer than all.”

As the song finished, a sob was heard at Quantrell’s elbow. Watson Smith came up and said to the young man sitting there:

“Ned, what ails you?”

“I’ve got people in Iowa and my own land there.”

“Isabel,” was the answer, in a broken tone.

“Play something, Mr. Quantrell,” spoke Isaac Smith, “which will remind us of the Sabbath and the heavenly rest; for here we have no abiding-place.”

A camp-meeting tune, the favorite of his deceased mother, came to Quantrell’s memory and art, and in the cool mountain air these simple strains ascended:

“I’m a pilgrim and I’m a stranger;
        I can tarry, I can tarry but a night;
 Do not detain me, for I am going
        to where the streamlets are ever flowing;
 I’m a pilgrim and I’m a stranger —
        I can tarry, I can tarry but a night!

“There the sunbeams are ever shining,
        and I’m longing, I am longing for the sight;
 Within a country unknown and dreary,
        I have been wandering forlorn and weary;
 I’m a pilgrim and I’m a stranger —
        I can tarry, I can tarry but a night.

“Of that country to which I’m going,
        my Redeemer, my Redeemer is the Light!
 There is no sorrow nor any sighing,
        nor any sin there, nor any dying;
 I’m a pilgrim and I’m a stranger —
        I can tarry, I can tarry but a night!”

During this singing a torch had been procured, which showed all the faces, even to the outer parts of the humble circle. There seemed to be at least twenty men present, and not a single woman. Of Smith’s own sons there were manifestly three, resembling each other even in their differences; and two young men, addressed as Thompson, of very pleasing countenances, Lloyd found to be old Mr. Smith’s sons-in-law. One of these, of a most cordial face and manly figure, was looking at the stranger as he finished the last tune, and Quantrell spoke up:

“Now, William — I heard friend Watson say ‘Isabel’ just now. That’s your sister, I reckon?”

“You’re right, sir,” the young man exclaimed; “my sister’s married to him, and his sister Ruth’s married to my brother.”

Well, now, in honor of that union I’ll play you one more tune before I say ‘Good-night.’”

Mr. Thompson hesitated.

“Do you know ‘America’?” he asked.

“Is this it, William?”

Lloyd found in his mind the measure and the words, and other voices joined in as he proceeded, till the last stanza pealed on the mountain night in trembling tones the player never forgot:

“My country! ’tis of thee,
  Sweet land of Liberty,
      Of thee I sing;
  Land where my fathers died,
  Land of the Pilgrim’s pride,
  From every mountain-side
      Let Freedom ring!

“Let music swell the breeze,
  And ring from all the trees
      Sweet Freedom’s song!
  Let mortal tongues awake,
  Let all that breathe partake,
  Let rocks their silence break,
      The sound prolong!”

Whites sang it; blacks seemed singing, too; but it was not, to Lloyd’s idea, a tune for blacks, though they might hear it.

At the resounding end, where “God, the author of Liberty,” is appealed to, to keep us “in Freedom’s holy light,” and “protect us by his might,” Isaac Smith made all rise.

“We will pray in the spirit of that hymn,” he said, “and send each other on his way with God’s blessing!”

Lloyd looked around, and the words of the prayer impressed him less than the manner of the listeners.

Stevens and Kagi were looking at Lloyd. Cook was stooping by the accordion as if he meditated a tune after the prayer which would put Lloyd’s performances out of praise; nearly all the rest, whites and blacks, were standing or leaning with the expressions of people at a funeral where the dead was being re-hearsed by the preacher. Some had hands over their eyes; others with eyes closed seemed muttering responses; a few knelt on the ground and bowed low.

The imperfect light of torch and stars and fiery clouds showed chiefly the Mosaic old man in the midst, surrounded by his sons and sons-in-law, plainly praying, without the least excitement, in the practical tones he might have used to order his farm-work to be done. The words would have seemed full of feeling if the manner had not been so orderly and precise, and Lloyd remarked to himself:

“Pop Smith isn’t the actor he was on the mountain yesterday. What can these people be so much interested for?”

He heard himself alluded to, toward the last, as “the young friend who, taking our hearts by music to home, admonishes us of them whose hearts and homes are never recognized. Those dear tunes of home, country, and heaven must be our only drum and fife, Lord! — as here we tarry but a night.”

A sob seemed to go around somewhere in the dark, and there were sounds as of negroes in convulsive prayer. Seeking to separate these mystic noises, Quantrell felt his hand grasped by long, bony fingers, and as if still praying, Isaac Smith was talking to him:

“Go, young man! The Lord bless you for the music you have brought and the pious mother, perhaps, who taught you tunes so comforting to these poor people! Keep off the streets! Don’t expose yourself! Don’t stand on the corners, particularly! — Captain Cook, go with him past the limits.”

“I must be getting a reputation all over Maryland,” Lloyd thought, “for standing at the street corners in Baltimore. My governor lectured me about it when he sent me off gunning. Well, now I am in love I shall stop loafing.”

“Will you take the accordion along, Quantrell?” said Captain Cook, looking at it wistfully.

“I would like to leave my accordion here and my dog Fritz,” Lloyd replied, looking around upon the people, who still watched him curiously; “but, if you are going to move, they won’t be safe.”

“Oh,” said Stevens, “Mr. Smith is only going to move to his other house, across the road yonder.”

Following the gesture, Lloyd saw a light a good way off, moving at some windows.

“Is this the dog?” old Isaac Smith asked, bringing Fritz forward. To Lloyd’s admiration that sturdy mastiff made no resistance as Smith tied him fast to the railing of the little porch above.

“Copeland — Green,” Smith spoke to two of the negroes, “put food and water by Mr. Quantrell’s dog. — You will be sure to find him here, sir, when you return.”

As Fritz yielded to the gentle hand and firm control of Isaac Smith, the highly bred Albion, seeing the companion he had misled now tied fast and apparently in subjection, darted upon Fritz with treachery and fury, and seemed resolved to get an ear for an ear. He reckoned without his host, however, for Isaac Smith, kicking Albion almost without effort, caught him also by the muzzle and tail as he turned in pain, and threw him right over the railing. Half a dozen persons below kicked him along their line, and, frightened almost to death, the pointer fled down the lane.

“He’ll go along with you meekly, now, Mr. Quantrell,” Smith remarked, without apology. “You’ll never get much pleasure from him, sir. The spaniel crossed on the cruel hound, however high he is bred, does not get the stability of such useful and faithful domestic mongrels as this!”

Putting his hand upon Fritz, that big creature set his head between Isaac Smith’s knees and wagged his tail.

“Come,” said little Captain Cook to Quantrell.

“Good-night, my mountain friends!” Lloyd Quantrell cried, cheerily, at the head of the lane. “You’re rough, but ready, I know. We’ll meet, I hope, again.”

“Good-night!” rang out many voices; and still the sense of some dislike or doubt of himself seemed to linger in those sounds, and the last looks from the by-standers had something predatory in them.

He felt this so instinctively that he walked very slowly and cool-hearted down the lane, as if there might be an enemy behind him.

Near the gate stood a black man with the shining something still in his hand, and to him Cook dropped a word.

“Now, Quantrell,” said Cook, after walking some distance along the road, “you’ll find this accordion in the garret under the eaves, if they can’t find it for you. You owe to it more than you at present know. If I hadn’t my hands full now, I would learn to play it before you came back. Anyway, I know I’m a better shot than you. You’ll be proud some day that you knew me. Good-night!”

“Good-night, Cook. With that good opinion of yourself I know you’ll be heard from,” spoke Lloyd, laughing — “Come, Albion!”

The dog now truckled low to Quantrell, and almost retarded his way, so obsequious was he after his late contemptuous chastisement; but his master was depressed in spirits from some unknown reason, and the animal’s attentions did not compose the dangers of the road.

A slight sense of bodily fear which he had been ashamed to recognize in all these mountain wanderings, was over him to-night. Those strange, unclassifiable faces he had just parted from were the only ones he had been unable to reduce to fraternity; and even his music, while it touched them for its sentiments, had not softened them to himself.

He, somehow, felt that Katy’s simple instrument had been his talisman.

Had they meant to rob him? Were they following him now with that intent? Lloyd stopped to listen, and on the disturbed air came the sound of the accordion, and a womanly voice to the old tune:

“The season’s in for partridges,
  Let’s take our guns and dogs;
  It sha’n’t be said that we’re afraid
  Of quagmires or of bogs,
     When a shooting we do go, do go, do go,
     When a shooting we do go.”

“That fellow Cook’s too simple to rob anybody,” thought Lloyd. “No, they must have been honest mountaineers, too inexperienced not to stare at me. Besides, they all prayed — all but one or two. Yet old Smith was working on the Sabbath-day, spite of his religion. I reckon he’s one of those Seventh-Day Baptists I’ve heard of, farther up the Antietam, who work Sundays and worship Saturdays. That would account for his praying more devoutly yesterday than to-day. Come to think of it,” concluded Lloyd, “the Seventh-Day Baptists, Luther told me, did not believe in marriage. That may be why I saw no women on the farm. I would trust Isaac Smith anywhere. The fact is, I have seen so many queer things in the last twenty-four hours that everything looks queer to me. Two men have kissed me, and I have had my fortune told!”

As the dog came up with its insidious attentions now, the singular explicitness of Katy’s fortune, and the vagueness of his own, as told by Hannah Ritner, occurred to his mind. How could all the game on earth rise before his gun?

Not unless the wilderness was restored here.

But the prediction that Katy should lose a ring?

Whatever that meant, it had for a moment — an evil, wicked moment, which he dispelled with indignation as a wanton idea tried to enter his mind — been verified in his own experience.

Last night he had gone to bed all fluttered and fickle-hearted after holding Katy in his arms.

To-day her pure, religious nature had made him see the womanhood latent in her, and aroused a manhood higher than he thought he possessed.

“God protect her, and lay me dead ere I can do her harm!” Lloyd Quantrell fervently exclaimed, looking up at the agitated wind and rain-clouds which seemed seeking to overrun heaven.

The dog Albion barked.

It seemed to him strange that after such a passionate prayer his mind should again be suddenly possessed by worldly and selfish thoughts.

In a few minutes he suppressed them, but only to be attacked by other forebodings.

Now the recollection of Hannah Ritner’s last prediction, that by taking this very road his destiny would be altered, oppressed his nerves.

The road was growing worse and worse as it wound down the plateau through the hills.

Sometimes the Elk Ridge, almost transparent, would ride through the night like a long, cylindrical billow, and seem to be rolling toward him in phosphoric sparklings; and then he would go down into depths like midnight, where some small stream could be heard hollow and distrustful, accompanying the road in some deep wash or gulf, and in the darkness the great grape-vines seemed to exhale a chill as they struggled up to the top branches of the basswood, or rank and giant wild-cherry trees.

In other ravines the rocks fairly grew across the way, as if planted in rows, and on the summits the gentle but melancholy locust-trees shook in the wind which the angry and plunging moon seemed to blow from its lurid bag.

A pale-faced woman would peep from some occasional hut where the candle-light revealed her, and the turkeys roosting in the trees would cluck together, like people laughing in the ague’s clutch; but on the glimmering wheat-stubble at the clearings the moon lay with a circling, partial light, like an insatiate sickle, which wanted next year’s seedlings, too, before their birth, or Herod searching for the scarce-born babes.

Then mighty rocks would overhang the road, so big that they seemed masses of foliage, and for spaces the mullein-stalks stood up desolately, and no more bent to the wind than aged maidens to a smile.

At one level place a stream, winding through a kind of copse of alder and brake, came out of the thicket tunefully, and spread itself over sandy shallows, and compelled some soft grass to receive the subdued light twinkling through old sycamores which kept the clouds off with their speckled arms. Here, amid the willows, a little log school-house stood in a sort of fork of the road, and, as Lloyd rested on its sill, a screech-owl within, like the last schoolmaster, raised a dreary, quivering wail.

Repelled with superstition from the spot, Quantrell proceeded on, till at a summit there broke upon his view the lights of a town in the mountains.

Even this sense of relief was accompanied by superstition, since it seemed unnatural to find a town so high in the air as this manifestly was, and right in his road; but as he proceeded there opened between him and the lights a deep, black, glistening gulf or wilderness, which he soon recognized, by white riffles or dark rocks, and blacker heights hugging it round, to be the river Potomac.

Then he remembered that the town of Harper’s Ferry hung around the base of an inhabited height, like the mountain he was descending, and that the town or suburb on the height was called Bolivar.

Hastening down a frightfully torn road, the music of a brook at its side was soon drowned in the roaring of the river, and a canal and locks were on the river’s border, barely leaving space for Lloyd’s road to creep beneath the mighty Elk Mountain that now began to tower almost perpendicularly, and become a buttress to the Blue Ridge which, two furlongs in advance, stepped across the river, leaving a ghastly rift between.

The dog in real companionship shrank close to Quantrell now, seeing the steeps above, amid the hurrying clouds, apparently falling down to close the chasm and bury them; while the wind, caught in this funnel, went wildly to and fro, shaking the trees in the crevices of the precipice, and rattling down roots and stones, and the river raised its thousand riffling voices as if birds and wolves in flocks dreaded to pass this storm-infested gap.

“Poor Albion!” Lloyd spoke sympathetically, “no wonder the dog’s afraid! This place by moonlight is like the devil’s throne, but, with storm threatening it, is like being swallowed by a sea-serpent.”

He walked fast over the stony road till the great mountain was as directly over him — stepping from Maryland into Virginia — as if he had been between a giant’s legs. Here, lying low to the water, a covered bridge, almost concealed in the mountain shadows, received at once the road and a railroad, which, meeting each other beneath the toppling mountain thirteen hundred feet above them, ran into the bridge and shivered there side by side.

A lock-house was near the bridge and a bargeman’s tavern, and, across the wide flood, a thousand feet away, the railroad lights of red, and household candles of Harper’s Ferry, shone and reflected in the water like jewels in an elephant’s foot, whose great head and back supported the higher town.

Quantrell entered the solemn bridge, and the river beneath him seemed to sigh like the hurrying souls of all the Indian tribes drowned here, even in the whoop of war and chase.

He emerged at a place where the bridge had two outlets, like the letter Y, a railroad-track in each, and that to the left ended near another bridge which spanned a different river, not visible before, beneath the long Virginia mountain and the town. This river, the Shenandoah, was almost as fierce and wide as the Potomac, which it assisted to break through the mountain gate.

Lloyd took the other bridge outlet and came into the little inhabited strand or sill of Harper’s Ferry, which lined two streets, one along either river-bank. The bridge was the key to the town, like a key to a trunk.

In the eye of the bridge and close by it was the gate of some stately institution, all noble with lines of lamps and walks and regular buildings, and between it and the bridge a hotel clung to the narrow railroad passage. Opposite this hotel was a detached part of the beautiful institution beyond, with similar walls of stone and fence panels of musket-barrels or spears.

It did not need a Marylander to tell that this was the great war-factory of the American Republic, where the muskets and rifles which equipped its little army had been made since the rule of President Washington.

The stately institution beneath the Potomac heights was the national armory; the detached buildings on the Shenandoah side were the arsenal; the two rivers meeting at the spot furnished unceasing water-power.

Leaving his gun and trappings at the hotel, Lloyd was directed to a saloon where a stealthy bar was open Sundays. It was a little place by the Shenandoah side, and, when he entered, it was quite full of men, some drinking, some drunk.

“Here’s one of tem tam apolitionists, py Jing!” cried a voice, and a man came up to Lloyd sneeringly.

“You here, Andrew Atzerodt!” exclaimed Quantrell. “Spending your blood-money, I reckon.”

“Tidn’t I capture tat nigger, Lloyd?” the tipsy fellow inquired. “Tey want to take teir money back, pecause tey let him git away.”

“You here, Logan?” Lloyd spoke up, seeing the two slave-hunters, also sullen with disappointment and drink. “Then your prey escaped you!”

“Why not,” answered the man, “when this Dutch braggart stopped everybody in the road to proclaim he had tuk a nigger? We was waylaid and beat.”

“Not me, py Jing!” shouted Atzerodt.

“No,” said a Logan, “you took to your heels. We was licked, but we fought fur our nigger.”

“Who did it?” asked Quantrell.

“That’s what we’d give five hundred dollars to know.”

“If I knew I wouldn’t tell you,” Lloyd replied. “Such fellows as you, without any interest in slavery, do its dirty work.”

“Go fur him, poys!” screamed Atzerodt, getting behind the Logans. “He’s a spy and a nigger-lover.”

The larger Logan came up to Lloyd, while everybody stopped drinking at the bar and crowded around, hopeful of some “difficulty.” His brother slipped around to Quantrell’s side with a treacherous face.

“I think you’re the man who wanted to take that slave, Ashby, from us at Smoketown,” said Logan. “You wanted to fight me there. Take that!”

“Take that!” exclaimed the brother.

Both struck Quantrell in the head with their hard fists.

“Take this!” answered Lloyd, staggering but not falling, and without raising his voice, while he planted a blow in the face of each mountaineer, and followed them up with the rapidity of a pugilist, his countenance more smiling than angry, and his strength prodigious.

“Take this home to the children,” Lloyd said as he struck again. “Take it carefully! Don’t drop it and break it!”

The meaner Logan was down in a minute, crying anxiously, “Lew, he’s armed!” The larger Logan fought well and tried to get in close and wrestle with Quantrell, whose skill kept him off and punished him terribly. In a few seconds he, too, was down and crying “Enough!”

The landlord had meantime drawn a long revolver pistol from the bar, but was too much interested in the fight to point it, and, before he could determine what to do, Quantrell twisted it out of his hand.

“Gentlemen,” said the man, “my license will be taken away unless you all hurry out.”

“Go out!” spoke Lloyd, indicating the Logans, the pistol in his hand. “Put that bridge between you and Harper’s Ferry! This gun may kill better men.”

As they slipped out gratefully, Quantrell turned to the landlord and spoke:

“Whoever is not ashamed to drink with a true American, is my guest!”

Silently, admiringly, everybody in sight came to the bar. As they waited for the champion to set the health, he deliberately raised his arms and shook them, wing-fashion, and crowed like a cock.

“Cock-Robin cock of the walk to-night!” exclaimed Quantrell merrily, emptying his glass.

They drank with even more quiet awe, for they recognized in “Cock-Robin” one of the dreaded Baltimore anti-foreign clubs.

When all had finished drinking, Andrew Atzerodt crawled out from behind a barrel and executed a crow with all Lloyd’s nonchalance.

“Where’s my drink, Lloyd?” he spoke, loudly; “tidn’t we tackle ’em, py Jing!”

In the midst of the roar of laughter a stranger drew Lloyd away, saying:

“Come, sir, this place is beneath a man of your courage.”

Handing the pistol back to the owner, Lloyd walked with the stranger to the hotel, and, giving him a cigar, drew chairs upon the railroad platform which extended on high trestles between the Potomac and the armory-yard. The tall brick edifices, plots of grass, high flag-staff, and chimneys, reposed among the lights beneath the profile of the upper town, where a great rock, like an anvil, overhung the Shenandoah, and the fiery-edged clouds seemed like red-hot horseshoes shifted upon it by the blacksmith of the Night.

“That is Jefferson’s Rock, sir,” said the stranger, in reserved tones; “I suppose you know it.”

“No, my friend.”

“Mr. Jefferson wrote his ‘Notes on Virginia’ sitting up there. My deceased father, who was a strong State-rights man, had a tradition that some day a child would come and push that rock over. It is nearly balanced, you see, by its own weight. Then, my father said, the State-rights of Jefferson would be no more.”

“Your county here is called Jefferson, I think?”

“Yes. At the county-seat, a few miles south of this place. General Washington’s brother Charles settled, and his descendant is my neighbor.”

“Your name, my friend?”

“Beall — John Beall.”

“Why, John, that’s an old Maryland name around Washington city.”

“Yes, sir,” the young man, who was near Quantrell’s own age, answered, with a subdued voice, like one naturally reticent; “I am of the McGruders and Bealls, Rob Roy’s own blood.”

Lloyd Quantrell put his hand on John Beall’s shoulder affectionately, and could almost feel the young man’s reserved countenance smile as Lloyd hummed the tune:

“‘But doomed and devoted by vassal and lord,
   McGregor has still both his heart and his sword:
   Then courage, courage, courage, Grigalach!

“‘Our signal for fight, which from monarchs we drew,
   Must be heard but by night in our vengeful halloo:
   Then halloo, halloo, halloo, Grigalach!’”

“You sing as well as you fight, sir. You must be a gentleman.”

“Ah,” said Quantrell, “that’s the highest degree in Masonry. I’m afraid not. Lloyd Quantrell is my name, however.”

“I’ll take you for a gentleman, Mr. Quantrell. My grandfather was an Englishman; he lived most of his life in Virginia. He never would be naturalized here, though he was a Federalist and disliked Mr. Jefferson. I went to England with him to see him die there in his old Norman homestead. He said to me in his last illness, ‘The man who can fight without hate and sing without invitation is a citizen anywhere.’”

“Well, John, I’ll answer to being a citizen, then. With you, I’ll be a Virginian. We can squeeze a small drink out of my flask.”

“Thank you,” Beall answered, accepting the Marylander’s hand, “but I seldom drink. I went through the form at the saloon in compliment to your prowess. The fact is, I’m a communicant in our Episcopal Church. A large family — my widowed mother’s — depend on me. I came here to-night for a poor neighbor who expected to recover her slave. She is a preacher’s widow, and had an old negro man. His son, to satisfy the old man’s wife, who lived North, came down and stole the father. The son himself made his escape not long ago.”

“John,” said Quantrell, “the old man has got his freedom. He is dead.”

“I’m not surprised to hear it,” said Beall, unmoved. “He was too old to run away. But I considered it my religious duty to unite with others in offering a reward for his son Ashby, whose bold deed in coming into a slave State to make a capture shows a frightful demoralization in negroes.”

“What is he worth, John?”

“Probably not as much as the reward, since the extension of slavery has been defeated in Kansas. What an outrage on State-rights was that!”

With a warm invitation to come to his farm, Mr. Beall mounted his horse in the street below, and turned him up the hill through the middle of the town.

“A little inflexible,” Quantrell reflected, “but a true-hearted Virginian all the same.”

He took a room in the hotel, where only a very tall and very black negro, probably six and a half feet high, seemed to be awake. The railroad agent, also a powerful man, was continually bantering this negro, who seemed fully as independent.

“Ain’t yo’ nigger, noway,” exclaimed this black giant, while looking for Lloyd’s key. “Jess call myseff yo’ nigger fo’ convenience. Want a better-lookin’ man than yo’ to be my mossta!”

“So ho, now! so ho!” exclaimed the big white man, sleepily holding up his red lamp. “Ain’t you ’shamed, Heywood? I’m ’shamed faw you. Anybody can see you’re no Vurgeenian by your manners. Talkin’ that a-way to a man o’ my age!”

“Dat’s what’s de fack,” said Heywood; “yo’s too ole to be my mossta. Yo’s a ole widower. Don’t you ‘so ho’ me. I’m a free man, I am! Don’t go nowhar for nobody if dey don’t treat me right.”

“I’m sorry faw you, Heywood. I hope your wife and childern won’t hear how you talk to me. You may be a widowaw, too, Heywood.”

As the big man walked up the platform as mechanically as he had been quarreling, swinging the red lamp, the gigantic negro, paying no attention to Lloyd, seized a cloak and darted after him.

“Yer, squire, yo’ ole dunce! Moss Beckham, you put on dis yer cloak. Do you hyar? Dat cole wind’ll fall on to yo’ kidneys. Den yo’ll be ’busin’ of me mo’.”

“I won’t have it, Heywood,” Lloyd heard the squire say; “nobody can pet me aftaw spilin’ of my feelin’s. So ho, now! go ho, Heywood!”

“Dar!” exclaimed the negro, “wrap it round yo’ now and go to bed. Gi’ me de lamp. You sha’n’t stay up no mo’ dis night.”

Coming back with the lamp, the negro selected a key and took Lloyd to an upper room overlooking the town, promising to call him for the Baltimore train.

“Does the squire own you, Heywood?” asked Lloyd.

“No. De prejudice ag’inst free colored men is so big heah, dat I’s a kine of ward to him, to keep my property at Winchester. He’s de bes’ friend I got. Ef I didn’t sass him a little, reckon he wouldn’t like me!”

“Here,” said Lloyd, giving the negro a silver piece, “try, the next time he tempts you, to answer the squire kindly. We can’t tell what word will be our last, Heywood, with them we love.”

“Thank you, mossta. Reckon I will treat de squire better. Why, he’d die fur me!”

As the sound of the negro’s feet ceased in the bare halls and stairs, Lloyd drew off his boots and sat at the window, tired and bruised, looking sleepily out upon the great Loudoun Heights and the dark, riffle-fleeced Shenandoah, and the mill-races on both river-banks carrying strong water-power to State and private machinery. The sky was cloudy and windy, and brazen lights contended there with inky scud. The watchman at the granite gate-post below locked up the armory-yard, and Harper’s Ferry expressed no sound but the hurrying, moaning rivers.

“Nothing has happened to-night to change my destiny,” Lloyd remarked, nodding. “I got away with the two Logan brutes easily. I shall see my father at breakfast, and tell him, boldly, I am in love. Will he oppose me? No. I am my mother’s bequest to him; and he does not despise beauty and virtue because they are poor.”

A low whine rang through the room.

“Lie down, Albion!” Lloyd exclaimed. “I shall give you to little Katy of Catoctin. God bless her!”

He fell asleep, the high-bred pointer at his feet. His mother came to him there in dreams, and seemed to say:

“Tired boy, sleep, for you have a long walk before you, and no shoes.”

He did not know how long he had been sleeping when a shock, as if the Loudoun Heights had fallen, awoke him. A splitting, resounding, appalling noise thundered through the black village.

“Has a powder-magazine exploded?” asked Lloyd, gazing out and rubbing his eyes. “I couldn’t have dreamed anything as real and loud as that! No, I see what it is now by yonder dim moon-rime reflected from the Virginia mountain — a part of Jefferson’s Rock has fallen. Some infant must have been born here to-night and pushed it over.”

---

 

CHAPTER XII.

JAYHAWKERS.

HIS watch showed that it was about eleven o’clock.

From the street below came up a sound of loose, creaking wheels and some footsteps, and the word:

“Halt!”

Lloyd Quantrell looked down from his window in the close yet damp night, and his sight slowly separated the objects in the little piece of street which has already been called the key of Harper’s Ferry, and which led from the bridge to the armory-gate in a nearly straight line.

The saloon where Quantrell had been attacked, a little building of wood, confronted this street near the bridge, and was probably four hundred feet from the government gate. Between saloon and gate some small private offices and shops clung along the arsenal’s wall, and the railroad tavern was a basement story lower on the street than upon the railroad.

Another street, at right angles, ran along the armory gate and yard, at the corner of which yard it sent off an oblique street, and a short block farther on, a steep street, both nearly parallel to the Potomac; while the first street, called Shenandoah, kept along between the houses and cliffs till, at a far distance, it ended at another armory, indistinctly seen by Lloyd, and called the Rifle-works.

Thus an armory closed up the town by either river, except for the passage of the two railways, and only the second or steep street led over the rough hill of Bolivar into the great upland Valley of Virginia.

Before the armory gate some things were moving and shining like steel, and suppressed voices spoke sententiously there:

“Open this gate!”

“Who is it?”

“Open this gate!”

“Where is the key?”

“You are a dead man!”

“Oh-h — mercy!”

“Make any noise, and you are a dead man!”

With this strange colloquy there seemed to be a jumping up on the wall, and a jumping down and a scuffle. Then came the words:

“That key, or you are—”

“Oh, don’t! I’m the pore watchman!”

“Never mind him,” spoke another voice, firm and cool. “Bring the crow-bar and the big hammer!”

A rattling, twisting, snapping sound followed, and the word —

“March!”

The wagon creaked again, the shining things in the streets moved within the gate, and the foliage of shade-trees and the shadows of the armory buildings swallowed up the episode.

“What brutes these semi-military officials are!” Quantrell reflected. “Drunken superintendents and privileged political clerks, no doubt, who have lost their keys, and will conclude a Sunday’s excursion by sleeping in ‘Uncle Sam’s’ offices. But who could expect anything better with Wise Governor of Virginia, and his Dutch and Irish on top of true Americans?”

He had nearly fallen to sleep again when there came a sober sound from the open gate below.

“All’s well!”

A voice replied, like a negro’s:

“All’s well!”

“I’m glad of that,” muttered Quantrell, “for I thought everything was sick. Why, they’re coming away quick! Found the demijohn empty, I reckon!”

He was now able to perceive a small wagon drawn by one horse, and it seemed to be nearly full of men, though others walked by its side. They passed up Shenandoah Street, and seemed to divide at the second corner; and, at the gate below, there remained two other men standing still, with something shining in their hands.

“Close the gate,” said a voice within, “and halt everybody now!”

“Having had the horse stolen,” Quantrell mused, sleepily, “of course they lock the stable-door now. I think everybody hates the government.”

He noted the sharp, black rim of Loudoun Heights again, like a ragged shell inclosing the oyster of the town, and the sighing, whispering rivers. As he dozed, voices in the still street seemed to say:

“Who goes there?”

“Prisoner! From the bridge.”

“Who goes there?”

“Prisoner! From the rifle-works.”

“All’s well!”

“All’s well!”

“Now,” considered Quantrell, “these official parasites are concluding their spree by arresting all the sober men on duty! When I get to Baltimore I’ll just describe in the ‘Clipper’ what sort of rule Buchanan and Floyd and Wise have clapped on Old Virginia, the mother of our Presidents. Meanwhile, I’ll lie on the bed and not be disturbed.”

He slept longer this time, and was awakened by a wheezing, grinding noise which made him leap to his feet and seize his gun and hunter’s outfit and dash down the stairs. An engine and passenger train, pointed for Baltimore, stood at the station adjoining the tavern.

“You scoundrel!” Lloyd exclaimed to the negro porter, “why didn’t you call me?”

“Couldn’t hyar from de train,” answered the negro; “telegraph wires all down somehow. Whar’s dat ar’ bridge watchman?”

“Where is anybody, responsible?” Lloyd exclaimed. “Everything seems left to one impudent nigger.”

“Don’ yo’ say I ain’t ’sponsible, now!” the porter vociferated, shaking his lamp. “I know my business! Squire Beckham, come out hyar! Nobody can’t be foun’, and I’m blamed by everybody.”

The negro continued toward the bridge, and Lloyd threw his dog into the smoking-caboose and climbed upon the train, which in a moment proceeded along the river-side, and the engine entered the bridge. He was settling down for a doze, when he heard clear voices in the hollow cavity of this long viaduct:

“Halt there, or you are a dead man!”

The engine had suddenly stopped, and continued to snore and tremble as if it dreamed all this indignity to the United States mail.

“What do you want?”

“Liberty. And we mean to have it!”

“What kind of liberty do you mean?”

“Like yours and mine. Go back!”

The train started back with a jerk, as if the lever had been pulled in panic. In a moment two or three persons came excitedly through the smoking-car, from the engine, running and ejaculating.

“What’s ahead there?” Lloyd cried.

“Robbers, or lunatics, or Indians. Things with guns anyhow!” one of the railroad men replied, hastening on.

Qnantrell jumped into the aisle and ran to the front platform near the engine and looked ahead.

Three men, as they seemed to be, lined a railing in the bridge. Bright metal shone in their hands. The light was afforded by a lantern in the hands of a big colored man who had advanced beyond the engine and seemed more courageous or less impressionable than the whites.

“Halt! halt! halt!”

In rapid succession and with high nervous meaning had come these words from the obstruction ahead.

“Who’s you?” hoarsely replied the great negro Heywood, slightly moving back. “Who you a-haltin’? Free man, I am!”

“Halt! halt!”

“Sha’n’t halt for no such damned rascals. Free man—”

“Boom!”

A loud report rang through the bridge, which made Lloyd turn and look at his own gun, to see if it had not been accidentally discharged.

Before he could look from the platform to the track again, a human cry, so piteous, so long, so profound, came from close beside him, that it rang in his ears for years after this night.

It was the cry extorted by a mortal wound in the first violent incursion into the house of life.

The negro, still clinging to his lamp, was running over the bridge-ties in such terror as to put his late defiance and tardy retirement to the blush. The train was also backing rapidly. As soon as the starlight came down upon the platform again, Quantrell leaped off.

“What is it, Heywood?” he called to the negro, whose face expressed in outlines and dim eyeballs an agony insupportable.

“Death!” answered the negro, staggering on.

“There — there’s the man who shot him!” exclaimed the conductor of the train, indicating an agile figure which, between a walk and a slide, came out of the bridge and seemed to have some short weapon in the blanket he was wrapped in. As this figure went rapidly toward the armory-gate, Lloyd Quantrell raised his gun and fired upon it, yet with the want of aim which comes from an uncertain conviction. His mind was dazed, too, by a suspicion that he had seen that youthful figure before.

The moment Lloyd fired, two shots from the armory-gate replied to his own, and one of them cut a strand from his hair.

“At last!” Quantrell spoke, coolly, “I have seen something that came very near changing my destiny — for life!”

He put the railroad building and hotel between him and the armory. The passengers were now generally alarmed, and were peeping around the corner of the thin rim of buildings between the railroad platform and the armory-yard. A water-tank for the locomotives was at this corner, and some of the hotel people or passengers were exchanging shots from this cover with a group of people who stood in the armory-yard around a small low building near the gate. These people, whatever they might be, were distinctly heard loading their guns.

“Come away from that corner and tank!” Lloyd exclaimed. “Those robbers are firing rifle-balls that will go through these thin boards.”

“You think they are robbers?” asked a very straight, clean-ribbed man with a thoughtful but not at all excited countenance, turning on Lloyd.

“Of course. Foreigners, I reckon, come to take the rest of our liberties. They can’t be Indians, so they must be robbers!”

“O papa! robbers? Isn’t it romantic! Such mountains, too! Such nature! Oh, let us stay here all night and see what they are.”

A large, enthusiastic, handsome girl was sitting at the open window of a passenger-coach. She looked at Lloyd with a beaming countenance and a certain fine energy of impulse.

“Surely there is a hotel here, sir,” she addressed Lloyd. “Can we not witness this unexpected tournament? Oh, it is so advantageous to be a man and see everything romantic!”

“Here is one poor man, dear miss, who will hardly agree with you,” Quantrell replied. “Hear the railroad porter’s dying groans!”

They listened, and sighs like a sick child’s came from the little station, and the words:

“O Heywood! what will yo’ wife say? A exposin’ of yourself, Heywood, when I should have been the man! It ’twan’t kyind of you, Heywood! It ’twan’t thoughtful! What kin I do without you?”

“Po’ friend,” the negro said, “look aftaw my chillen. Forgive me for my sassy tongue. It’s got me in this trouble, mossta. Oh! kill me — I’m dyin’ and I can’t die!”

“There, Light!” exclaimed the lithe, quiet man, looking at the girl. “You hear the real tones of romance; the poor, sick notes of glory. It is the poor, helpless people, the women and the servants, who suffer for romantic ventures.”

“Oh, that is dreadful!” said Miss Light; “I supposed they died fighting gloriously. But, senator — papa — may they not be Indians? We have seen the Indians in their beautiful eagles’ feathers prepare for war. I suppose these robbers, as this gentleman says, must be foreigners — Italians, or Spaniards, or Garibaldians — in beautiful costumes!”

“Here is one, perhaps,” replied the senator; “look at him, Light!”

A young man with a short gun in his hand, a rough, slouching hat on his head, coarse clothes, and a belt around him with weapons in it, appeared at the head of the train and called out, in a somewhat nasal tone:

“Conductor, bring on that train! Our commander has allowed you to cross the bridge and proceed.”

“That a robber?” Miss Light remarked; “why, he’s a mere boy. He must be fooling you.”

“That’s one of ’em,” spoke the conductor; “I know that’s one.”

“Give me your gun!” exclaimed the aged railroad agent, running out and reaching for Lloyd’s fowling-piece; “if that’s one of those scoundrels, I want his life. He’s killed my pore, faithful servant!”

The young man, who was not fully revealed in the imperfect light of the train’s windows, half raised his piece and said negligently but frankly:

“Citizens are not allowed to carry guns! We are in possession of this town, and mean no harm to peaceable people. Put that gun down!”

Lloyd got on the train, out of the way.

“My friend,” he said to the excited railroad agent, “I have shot my last load off. We must wait for daylight.”

“Who are you?” cried the conductor again; “we can’t understand you. What is your purpose in this town?”

“We want Liberty,” spoke the young man, “and we intend to have it!”

“Oh, beautiful!” exclaimed the senator’s daughter at the window. “So bold, and such a boy! If he only had some beautiful clothes!”

“He’d look well in a good long shroud!” Lloyd Quantrell exclaimed, grinding his teeth.

“I won’t move my train,” called the conductor; “one of the railroad’s servants has been shot on that bridge. I am responsible for the lives of these passengers, and I am afraid to cross the bridge before daylight.”

The young man retired into the shadows of night like an apparition.

The pointer-dog followed and indicated him with its instinct for an object doomed.

“Will you oblige me with your father’s name?” Lloyd asked the communicative young lady.

“Oh! with pleasure. Mr. Edgar Pittson. We are just going to the capital for the first time. My father is a new senator from the West. I have never seen the East. If it continues as sublime and romantic as this, will it not be delightful? Such mountains! Such adventures! Are they always occurring like this, sir?”

“Ever since I have been in these mountains,” replied Lloyd, between excitement and amusement, “something wonderful has been taking place. Perhaps they wanted to surprise us,” concluded Lloyd.

The people on the train and the platform were all this while in the greatest agitation and wonder, while the town of Harper’s Ferry was in absolute sleep. A doctor, whose office was at the station, alone had been aroused by the shooting, and he reported that the negro was dying. The ball, entering his back, had passed entirely through the body near the heart.

“Gentlemen,” whispered the doctor to Senator Pittson and Quantrell, “what can this midnight rebellion be? We who live here fear it is a bold and strong attempt to rob the armory of the treasure-chest. Mechanics of all countries live here, and some of them may be very desperate characters.”

“Beautiful!” exclaimed Miss Light Pittson, overhearing the doctor; “what contrasts and heroes exist in the East! Washington city must be full of such revolutions. How else could it be our capital?”

“Young gentleman,” said the senator to Lloyd, “I have been wondering if this émeute to-night can have anything to do with the Kansas troubles. I hope not, because the unjustifiable attempts to subjugate Kansas and give it to the slave system have entirely failed. She is on the threshold of the Union as a free State, and I hope one of my first duties at Washington will be to vote for her admission. It is for this reason that I would deprecate any such invasion of Virginia as some of our free-State bands have retaliated upon Missouri.”

He conversed as quietly on this dread subject as if he had been in his Western settlement.

Lloyd wondered, and remarked:

“Have you seen anything to lead to that idea, sir? I am ignorant of the Kansas troubles. The slavery question is a bore to me. I am enlisted in the Native American question.”

“I looked at that young man’s gun just now. I think it is a Sharp’s rifle, a new Philadelphia carbine, loading at the breech. A quantity of those rifles disappeared some time ago from one of our Western States and have not been found. The persons responsible for them fear some of the jayhawkers have got them.”

“Jayhawkers? Are they something like our ‘Blue Jays’ in Baltimore?”

“Yes,” said the senator, smiling; “they were free-State young men who got a taste of war and blood when the armed ruffians from Missouri and the South invaded Kansas, and they could not be composed to peace after the moral victory was won. They went hunting for an enemy. They felt that they had beaten both slavery and the United States Government which tried to foster it in Kansas. Some of them invaded Missouri and took slaves out and carried them to Canada.”

“Who did that, Senator Pittson?” asked Lloyd, with a flushed face.

“I forget whether it was Montgomery or Brown. I rather think it was Brown. He had lost a son or two when the Missourians invaded Kansas. He won quite a battle out there at Ossawattomie. It seemed to bring out a latent pugnacity in him, entirely foreign to his long and steady life. Perhaps it unsettled a somewhat intense brain. Oh, my young friend! war is very close to human society everywhere. It is like the rats in the sewers of towns; whole armies of them are hidden under the gentlest homesteads. It is most unwise for our more warlike Southern countrymen to bring the argument of force into the comparatively tranquil North; for the war-rat is under every human skin, and at a pin’s prick it may come forth in eruption.”

They were walking up the platform as they spoke, and stopped to see the silent audacity of these unknown strangers, who guarded the two bridges, sentineled the street-corners, communicated with each other patrol-fashion, still held the armory gate and yard and the arsenal, and all this while the town of which they were masters slept, with its nearly five thousand people, in the funnel of the black mountains, like dumb animals in a stall.

“This is indeed wonderful,” remarked the senator. “My daughter, you perceive, has read romantic novels; but what is taking place here is a little more curious than any such reading of mine. These strangers can not be a foreign enemy. Virginia can hardly have seized the General Government’s armory. Mere thieves would not take such chances, for, when the brawny armorers in that town awaken, Death will keep a holiday here! Do you know what I think I shall do?”

Lloyd looked at him a moment by the variable lights of the environment, and saw something in the senator’s long, fine, quiet face, which, in sympathy with Lloyd’s own temperament, educed the reply:

“Yes, senator! You think you will go down to that gate with your life in your hand and ask the miscreants there for an explanation.”

The young senator — he seemed hardly forty — looked also at Lloyd with mild-eyed penetration.

“How did you guess that?” he said. “But you were right. I am a fresh senator, without record or much ambition. I might save life by interposing here, while night and sleep keep this thing yet a nightmare dream. I can say, at least, I am a senator of the United States—”

A loud, long, heart-searching wail came from the dying negro’s agony.

“Sir, you shall not go to that gate!” spoke Quantrell. “Because you are a senator you shall not go. Because, also, you are a father! I will go myself. A prophecy is already on my head — that I shall see that to-night which will change my destiny.”

“Magnificent!” exclaimed a voice at his elbow. “O papa, I could not stay and hear that poor man. So I have been fortunate to hear this gentleman’s gallant offering. Isn’t he a hero?”

“I fear, Light, he has been reading Monsieur Dumas and Mr. Ainsworth, like you, when he speaks of a prophecy and his destiny.”

“I felt there was something like myself in him — like you, too, papa — when I spoke to him so unconventionally. Something quiet and unflinching. Something like Robin Hood and Fra Diavolo. Who does he resemble that we know? Of course he shall go and demand of the robbers, ‘What ho!’”

Both Quantrell and the senator had to laugh heartily at the unaffected enthusiasm of this large, somewhat masculine-statured Western girl, who might have been eighteen, but was cast in that mold between the handsome and the noble that is commonly called “fine-looking.”

“Miss Light,” Lloyd said, joyously, “don’t try to make an impression on me! You might succeed, and that would be wrong; for I have only this day engaged myself to the prettiest maid in these mountains.”

“Splendid! Romantic! A hunter, a hero, a lover, everything noble in one! — Oh, he must go and challenge these robbers, papa!”

As they walked along, talking and speculating, and waiting for an opportunity, or for some decision, on the subject of these marauders, the sky gradually became overspread with clouds and it grew cold and chilling. The robbers within the gates had built a fire in the small square building there, and could be seen stooping before it, or counseling together.

“Are you an abolitionist?” Lloyd asked Senator Pittson.

“No, no; I am a Republican.”

“A Black Republican?” asked Quantrell, suspiciously.

“That’s a mere nickname. The few abolitionists also call us names, because we will not assault slavery in the old States, or break up the Union, so dear, I hope, to everybody. The Republicans merely reassert the doctrine of nature and of the founders of the republic, that slavery is a colonial thing, not in the blood and circulation of our system, and therefore not to be allowed in the external, new domain of the country. It has taken the noble empire of Texas, by colonizing there, and using American patriotic ambition to acquiesce in the evil. It shall not so colonize and pervert the noble empire of the Missouri. With pity for our countrymen tied up in old slavery, we shall not pity ourselves if we give it our Northern heritage.”

“It seems to me, sir,” Quantrell dubiously remarked, “that if slavery is so bad a thing, it is in danger from your people everywhere. Do you think a Northern man is as brave as a Southern one?”

“Not as fierce, but I think as brave. Not as decided, but I think more persevering. They are not as conscious of their principles as your friends are, because theirs are older and apparently forgotten, while the tremors of slavery have raised new and glittering doctrines which must perish if liberty is to live. When the great power of Britain was exerted to suppress the young American Republic, the only people they never overran were New England and the Alleghany mountaineers. King’s Mountain echoed to Bunker Hill. Since that day, has come the West, the new power on this planet, I believe!”

They went in silence to watch the mysterious people again, and Light Pittson cried:

“Why, look! Papa, they are carrying spears. See how they flash against that firelight! This is glorious! — When are you going to challenge them, sir?”

“This is a good time,” Quantrell replied; “I see the gate has been opened to admit wagons and horses. Please keep my gun and dog, Senator Pittson!”

People crowded around to see what Quantrell, who had become a man of leadership in the eyes of the passengers, meant now to do.

“I don’t like to see you go down there alone,” the senator said. “It appears too much like going vicariously for me, who suggested it.”

“Let me tie this ribbon to your jacket, sir,” Miss Light exclaimed. “I took it from my neck. Some lady always crowned the brave knight.”

She tied the blue ribbon upon him in real admiration.

---

 

CHAPTER XIII.

LLOYD’S DESTINY CHANGED.

THE armory-gate was open wide, and a carriage drawn by two horses had already passed in, and four horses, pulling a large farmwagon, had stopped in the gateway.

“Jump out, you colored men, and take a spear apiece. We’re short of hands for a spell yet, and want you to do guard duty. Be lively!”

Certain negro men, impelled by others who carried guns, dropped clumsily out of the wagon and almost immediately were seen carrying sharp things on poles. The same nasal, military voice continued:

“Get out here, colonel! — You, too, old man! Fetch in your son! All report yonder, to the commander!”

Lloyd looked at the man, endeavoring in the moving crowd to distinguish him, but, before he could be satisfied, the same voice exclaimed at Quantrell’s ear:

“What! You captured, too, minstrel?”

The young hunter turned, and, recognizing the face, he spoke in astonishment:

“Stevens?”

“Anything you like. Come right to me! Don’t you put down your hands, or I’ll tickle your heart!”

Stevens — the same he had drunk with at the spring-house, it seemed — thrust a pistol at Lloyd Quantrell’s body. There was no doubt about his earnestness, and Quantrell walked at once to the pistol’s muzzle, saying there:

“Then you’re one of these robbers?”

“Anything you like. You’re my prisoner. Go ’lang there, now!”

He pointed to some low buildings, and the gates behind him closed with a jangling sound. In the same direction had gone the other persons; and Lloyd, getting the instinct of obedience from his finely strung automatic captor, walked promptly up to the front of the nearest building.

It had three doors, and the farther door opened into a separate and smaller apartment, which contained only a bench and a stove, and some persons huddllng by the fire.

The larger room was nearly square, and contained two engines to suppress fires — low engines on wheels, with hand levers at the sides to be worked by double rows of men — and leather hose and a hose-cart; and also axes and other appurtenances of a fire company hung up under the open-beamed roof. The floor and walls were of brick, and were littered with arms, fagots, tools, and blankets, hastily distributed there.

Quantrell walked uninvited into the engine-house amid blacks and whites, all armed and standing listlessly or nervously about, and he picked up the fireman’s horn:

“Put her right in now!” shouted Lloyd; “run her for all she’s worth! Liberty’s the bird!”

“That’s the case to-night,” grimly spoke Stevens, “but you’ll cut no more loud capers like that, friend Quantrell! This engine-room is for the troops, white and black; you must go into the watchman’s part with the prisoners.”

Two fagots were burning in black men’s hands in the engine-house.

“Hold on!” Lloyd exclaimed; “what are these things?”

The negro he seized the fagot from gave it up with mouth ajar, and in the other hand held awkwardly a spear — the very fisherman’s gig, as the burning fagot showed, that Quantrell had twice seen in the Maryland mountains.

“Ashby,” he said, looking up at the negro’s face, “you here, and a robber?”

“I spec so,” the negro hoarsely urged; “dey say I’m one of ’em. I don’t know.”

The fagot was seen to be splints of hard and soft wood bound together; the fisherman’s gig was the pattern of many spears seen in black men’s hands or leaning against the wall of the engine-house — bright, glittering spears, too small, sharp, and narrow for display.

“Stevens,” spoke Lloyd, “what does this mean? Spears — slaves? Are you arming negroes?”

“Arming everybody!” cried Stevens, with a cool imprecation. “Slavery is war and everlasting captivity. We’ve armed the under dog in the fight. The boot shall be upon the other leg.”

The blood left Quantrell’s lips and head, to hear this hard avowal, which seemed to the Marylander like hollow blasphemy, unmeant and merely pretended.

“You will need an army, my indomitable friend, to carry out that idea.”

“We have got it,” Stevens exclaimed, in something between mockery and rapture; “see it hurrying yonder in the spirit realm — the cloud-bannered army of the Lord!”

As he raised his hand toward the small, wind-driven clouds trooping down the pallid gulf of sky between the black banks of mountains, Stevens seemed in a species of ecstasy, yet cold, like fishes disporting; and the weapons belted around him — pistols and a knife — shone coldly red in the flare of the fagots which burned, alarmed and drooping, like some of the negro robbers; yet others of these negroes had the appearance of boldness, like all the whites in the band, and, taking in the scene an instant as carefully as his stirred feelings would allow, Quantrell observed:

“Stevens, if you’re a lunatic, you’re a good one. And I suppose you are the commander of these people?”

“I?” Stevens answered, self-scornfully. “Why, our commander is a man so great, I am not fit to be his orderly sergeant! I happen, through want of better recruits, to be third in the command, but I’m willing to be the last.”

“Who is your captain?”

“Come, you shall see him; for he is talking to the prisoners.”

As they stepped out of the cold engine-room, the night wind came in a shriek down the long, grassy corridor between the great armories, bringing some autumnal leaves from the regular lines of trees, and, in the softened wind-wail which followed, was blended a dog’s inquiring howl.

“Albion!” spoke Lloyd, as his dog came with obsequious gladness to his feet.

The narrow watch-room contained men standing and others sitting, and all trying to get some warmth from the stove, for the weather was unusually keen for October on the Potomac. A voice of somewhat nervous tension, and of metallic sounding in that brick-walled corridor, spoke up from among the group:

“Your name will be a help to me, sir. Are you his grandson?”

“Ah — great-grandson, captain; descended, sah, from his youngest brother, Charles, sah.”

The person standing was a portly man who seemed endeavoring to rally his spirits into some complacency as he spoke these sentences in the nearly dark place.

“Lewis Washington, great-grand-nephew of General George Washington,” repeated the voice of him sitting, which thrilled through Lloyd Quantrell and made him turn pale.

“And this is General Washington’s sword, captain,” spoke up a prompt little voice. “I had the tact, captain, to make him show it to me a month ago, and I said, ‘We shall want that, for prestige!’”

“And don’t forget, captain, that Frederick the Great gave it to old Washington,” spoke up Stevens, over the heads of those standing; “he said it was from the oldest general in Europe to the greatest of the age. We think another great man can wear it again!”

“No flattery, Stevens!” exclaimed the metallic voice, low among the huddling people. — “Colonel Washington, I will exchange you as soon as it is daylight, and you can see to write an order, for any able-bodied negro whatever. Your great ancestor’s sword I will fight with for liberty again. Did you ever hear of me?”

“Ah, no, captain, sah,” the voice of the portly man answered, quite subdued.

“Then, sir, you are not as familiar as General Washington with the great occurrences of your times. I have fought for American freedom in greater battles than Lexington and Concord. To-night I have come to make Virginia free, and travel on this mountain-line as far as God will let me march, to startle slavery in the vales. I went to Kansas by the trail and sowed my children’s blood there, and came away with a reward offered for my head. I shall go to Texas by the pike, or make my head a premium again. I am—”

The speaker had risen and come forward, and a way had been cleared for him.

“I know you now, old fox!” Lloyd Quantrell interposed, standing at the door by the light of one of the torches held by an armed negro — “you are Isaac Smith!”

Quantrell had already identified the voice, and now he saw the gnarled and bearded visage of the mountaineer farmer stand in the watch-house door, dressed as before, except in two particulars: a great gray army overcoat with a cape attached dropped from his shoulders, and his head was covered with a heavy cap of wild-animal skin, rimmed with shining leather. In his hand was an uncocked carbine. He looked to be a rustic gunner or teamster out, betimes, for game or work before the break of day.

“I was Isaac Smith for a stratagem,” the old man replied. “Now I am John Brown, and in that name I am come to cleanse with blood, if necessary, the crime of slavery from the land.”

“You, Pop Smith — crazy Pop Smith — are you Brown of Kansas?”

“John Brown of Black Jack; Brown of Ossawattomie! I see you have more intelligence, Mr. Quantrell, than Colonel Washington and these gentlemen.”

He pronounced the “John” long and nasal, like Jo-aw-en, dwelling upon it in that Indian guttural which abides in the resonant nomenclature of the land. A second torch held by a negro revealed his Indian figure clearer.

Between his old army-cloak skirts a belt revealed pistols, and a knife in its sheath, and the dress-sword hilt of the great Frederick thrust in the belt.

“There he stands, Quantrell,” Stevens exclaimed, “lighted up by two native citizens of Virginia, both of African descent, and I think you’ll never forget him.”

Quantrell had to look, for fascination and fear, and the plain, nearly aged figure he observed by the directions, was illuminated by the torches of that large mulatto man, who had seized his gun at the mountain farm, and the sad-cast countenance of Ashby, the fugitive.

The dog Albion, snarling once loudly at his recent chastiser, and crouching next to “point him” well, as if at some curious kind of game, finally leaped and gamboled, in the apparent idea that a gunning party was about to start and take him along.

“He sees doves,” thought Quantrell, in a moment of horror, “and doves will be left to mourn this expedition.”

Quantrell next saw at his elbow the small, stooping figure of Cook.

“Why, Captain Cook,” Lloyd exclaimed, “are you a prisoner, too?”

“Ha! that’s good!” answered the childish little man. “Don’t you know I’m a captain in the provisional government? I took the slave census of this county for Captain Brown. I spotted all the big slaveholders, Washington and Allstadt, and now I’m going into Maryland to arrest our neighbor, Mr. Byrne.”

“You treacherous spaniel!” Quantrell exclaimed, while his dog snapped at Cook’s legs. “To think I let you play on Katy’s accordion!”

“Take care!” spoke Cook, cocking his gun. “You make the mistake they made in Kansas about me — that I’m a little boy, and not a shooter. Sir, my brother-in-law is the Democratic Governor of Indiana, hating abolitionists like poison. But I’m a jayhawker to the heart!”

“What’s this?” exclaimed a harsher voice, “prisoners quarreling with our officers? This gunner-spy here? — Go in there!”

It was the dark, raven-haired Kagi, the picture of a bandit, and he and Cook menaced Quantrell with their short rifles and urged him toward the watchman’s chamber.

“Oliver! Watson! Captain Brown!” Lloyd called in the excitement of rage even more than fear, “are these cursed abolitionists to abuse and confine me?”

“We’re all abolitionists, Mr. Quantrell,” spoke Oliver Brown, at Quantrell’s side.

“We glory in the name,” said the voice of Watson Brown, at the other side.

“Pop Smith! Captain Brown!”

Lloyd had turned to the old Kansas chief, who was giving some directions at the wagon-side.

“Mr. Quantrell,” observed that person, severely, looking up, “I let you go at the farm, when my officers wanted to take your life. You were instructed, sir, to keep off the streets. The first thing we hear of you is a shot from your fowling-piece at my son Watson, which I returned. The next shot I fire at you will be at closer quarters, sir! Then you walk into my headquarters and blow the fire-horn, sir. Let me have no more of your rowdy capers, but go in there among the prisoners!”

As John Brown spoke, the fagots flashed into his eyes, and something of a wild beast sparkled there.

Quantrell turned and fled into the narrow part of the engine-house.

For an instant the fickle torches shone upon the fresh, untarnished spears of moving negroes, and low, firm, military commands were heard upon the night, and then the door closed and all was dark except the reddening clay of the little stove and dark sky coming in at a large round window above the watch-house door.

He heard a robber sentry pacing on the ground without, and the call of “Halt!” or “Who comes there?”

Lloyd leaned against the door in actual terror — not merely the fear of death, but the mental paralysis following these startling discoveries.

Not thirty-six hours had passed since he met this resolute bandit on the mountains. Now he realized everything.

The strange and mystic sermon of Isaac Smith on the mountain-top, upon war and military strategy, had been the personal cogitation of John Brown, the Border murderer, upon the campaign he meant next day to begin in Virginia.

The fisherman’s “gig” carried in the mountains by Smith’s sons was one of many spears, to arm negro slaves, who would be unfamiliar with more complex weapons.

The boast of Isaac Smith, that he owned a certain number of negroes, meant that John Brown controlled them for a war against their masters.

The reflections of Smith on Broderick’s death were incitements of John Brown to his sons to revenge blood, shed by pro-slavery men.

The mountain farm of Isaac Smith and sons was the rendezvous for a vast recruitment of abolitionists and negroes to drop upon Virginia in a single night from the great Northern State close by, and to aid John Brown, the fanatical bandit, to capture the tens of thousands of stands of muskets in Harper’s Ferry, and arm a mighty insurrection!

Now Quantrell could understand the suspicious and even harsh treatment of himself at the rude mountain farm, his examination by Kagi and Stevens, and the deadly danger he had been in, as a supposed spy, entering their lair in the very instant of their descent upon a peaceful State.

He felt with agony and wonder that if he had discarded, before he came to that farm, Katy Bosler’s poor little accordion, and had brought no music to be his intercessor, his body might now be lying in the upland thickets for the mountain crows to pick.

This dark and superstitious Kagi was, no doubt, the second to Ossawattomie Brown in command, and had power of life and death over Lloyd and every innocent prisoner.

As these coincidences and emotions rushed together, the young man felt not wholly a sense of despair, but of mental occupation too great and oppressive for his trifling and heedless mind, to which all his youth had been like a schoolboy’s truant day, spent amid the wild haws and mountain plums, and by the rivulets, stoning the birds. In a day and a night he had come to the great crises of love, religious conviction, marriage engagement, fear of death, and prophecy.

Had he yet seen that which could change his destiny?

This question he asked himself slowly, and the sense of fear slowly dissipated from his clearing and cooling brain.

He felt again as he had in the saloon, but a few rods distant, when he measured physical strength and address with the “soul-drivers” and slave-catchers there, and at every blow had rejoiced and delighted in the perfect clairvoyance of his mind; yet, with this transference of purpose and returning courage, came also a cold, appetizing instinct, like the shark’s, for human prey, and he almost smiled out of his late excitement, though he ground his teeth.

“If I ever get out of here,” Lloyd Quantrell muttered, “death, death to all abolitionists!”

He felt so nonchalantly that he had found somebody to distinctly hate, that he softly, musically, forgetfully, uttered the rooster’s crow of victory, as in the saloon when he smote the Logans down.

A dog barked at his feet.

“Ha, my faithful Albion, you here?” said Lloyd aloud, stooping and lifting his dog in his arms. “Bark again, and I will crow again, and they shall be our challenge. ‘Death, death to abolitionists!’”

The dog replied right earnestly. The young man, with spirits fully recovered, crowed clear and loud.

In a minute the chanticleers of Harper’s Ferry were heard responding, showing that it was nearly morn.

---

 

CHAPTER XIV.

LEXINGTON, NOT CONCORD.

THE watch-house was about twenty-four feet deep and half as wide, and had windows on all sides except in the brick partition, which was a solid wall, and which left the engine-house portion nearly square. The windows in this structure were generally of an arched form, very high above the ground, being, indeed, segments of the brick arches which composed the walls, and the watch-house door was uniform with the two doors in the engine-house portion — a broad double door with a wicket in it.

These high windows showed the dark sky, and from the room-corners showed the blacker mountain shoulders and perhaps some few garrets of houses up the cliff. In one of these garrets a candle burned, and Lloyd wondered if there the infant was not being born whose baby hand had pushed down Jefferson’s Rock and fulfilled the prophecy.

His mind reverted to the Dunker love-feast and that other babe which had been born in a stable like this; for the watch-house might have originally been the stall of horses to pull the fire-engine. Across the way was the inn of Nativity, perhaps, with travelers delayed, going up to their capital. “And here,” concluded Quantrell, “may be Herod’s soldiery seeking the young child’s life.”

A quiet awe fell upon him like the cold water of the Dunker baptism chilling the convert. He thought of Katy’s prayer for his soul, and her solemn words inclined him to devotion now:

“God gif me this soul, and let it drink thy precious blood!”

He put his hand to his eyes and repeated the first prayer he had ever made with deep sincerity, though the words had been his task at school:

“Parce nobis, Jesu! Libera nos a malo!”

In asking mercy and deliverance from evil, he bowed his head and added, “God bless Katy!”

The dog began to scratch the door and to whine.

Quantrell touched something at his button-hole — the ribbon of Miss Light Pittson.

At once the phantom of Katy Bosler seemed to disappear, and the ardent and noble youth of the lady whose admiration he had so candidly received, awoke a more worldly flutter in his breast.

“Something makes me want to see that fine girl once more,” Quantrell thought; “she called me her knight. Her father is a senator!”

The pointer-dog leaped upon him fondly and touched his cold muzzle to Lloyd’s face.

“If I had not seen Katy first, Albion,” mused Lloyd, “I should have fallen in love with Light. But the light in Katy’s eyes outshines hers.”

He turned and walked back into the cell or corridor.

Talking in low tones together were several prisoners, awed and suspicious, and they looked up at Quantrell by the stove’s poor light, and some greeted him with a thin laugh and others ceased to speak.

“Captain, ah — sah!” spoke a portly man whom Lloyd guessed to be Colonel Washington, and who had begun his sentence with courtly intentions, but judged it best to round up without saying anything.

“I’m not one of the captains,” Lloyd answered; “my uncle Quantrell keeps a slave-pen at Baltimore, and I guess that ought to be guarantee for me, with you men, at least.”

“Ah! yes — sah!” said the colonel, but hardly more considerate, as if his suspicions had been satisfied but not his scruples.

“What’s yourn?” asked an old man who had been sitting, and who started up and looked at Lloyd unsteadily. “Bitters? Gin, did you say? Tansy? Fi’penny bit — fi’penny bit.”

“Watty! Watty!” interposed another man of age, but less infirm, “you’re not tending bar this morning. You’re tuk, Watty! — He’s a little off his Americanus, sir; I mean he’s not just right in his head, since he’s been tuk.”

“Fi’penny bit! Come ag’in!” muttered the old bar-keeper, settling to his bench.

“And what are you, my friend?” Quantrell asked of the third person.

“Me? Oh, I’m the armory bell-ringer. I’ve rung that bell thirty-five year. I never missed but of a Sunday and a holiday. Dear me! ef Cap’n Brown don’t let me go ring it at six o’clock, I’ll go off of my Americanus. What’ll old Ball say?”

“Oh, yes, what will old Ball say?” cried half a dozen voices. “Old Ball ’ll come and git tuk.”

“Ah! yes — sah!” coincided Colonel Washington, not yet settled that he ought to say something. In the pause, after waiting for him, the bar-keeper mumbled:

“Medford, Jamaikey, or Santycroo? He-he! All same bottle, gen’lemen. Fi’penny bit — fi’penny bit! Come ag’in.”

“Watty has to git up fur the airly trade at the bar,” explained the bell-ringer. “You see they’ll all git tuk — them airly birds — this mornin’; fur they’ll come to git their drams, an’ Cap’n Brown ’ll git ’em all.”

“An’ git ole Ball, too — ha! ha!” shouted the great body of the prisoners.

“Dear me!” spoke the bell-ringer, again absently, “ef I can’t ring the bell at the minute, may be I’ll git discharged. That would set me clar off of my Americanus.”

The door opened, and three more prisoners were brought in, followed by three of the Kansas party, whom Lloyd identified to be Kagi, young Ned Coppock, from Iowa, and Newby, the handsome mulatto man who had been rude to Quantrell.

“Cold night for October,” Kagi said.

“Colder morning for you!” Quantrell spoke up, with deep meaning and dislike.

“Blathering yet, are you?” Kagi replied, his cocked gun across his lap, leaning to the stove.

“That worm is crawling toward you,” Quantrell said, remembering the man’s pallor and superstition.

Kagi showed the same ghastly skin for a minute amid his long, dead hair, and then spoke in a tone of enforced quiet:

“Then that star is drawing near me.”

He looked at Lloyd with a determination in which high fanaticism was blent, and without further anger.

“No quarrelin’ in the bar, gen’lemen,” old Watty, the bar-keeper, started up; “drink with the house! Whisky? Ahalt’s or Horsey’s? Lemon-peel? Fi’penny bit — fi’penny bit! Come ag’in.”

“There, now, see what you’ll come to!” Kagi observed, looking straight at Quantrell and indicating old Watty with his head. “Whisky will fetch you there. Slavery and whisky are distilled out of each other.”

“Did you ever drink whisky?” asked Lloyd.

“No.”

“Did you ever have a slave?”

“I’m not that kind of a serpent.”

“That’s just what I supposed,” said Lloyd; “you’re an ignorant fanatic.”

“Ah, sah — sah!” put in Colonel Washington, a little apprehensive of a murder, and about to say something, but reconsidering it.

“Washington,” spoke Kagi, “if you was worthy of the only celebrity in your family, you would have them pistols of Lafayette and the sword of the King of Prooshey, and be leading this expedeetion, instead of throwing it on to an old saint like Captain Brown. Freedom might build you up, as slavery has about buried you!”

“Ah, sah!” Colonel Washington exclaimed, with an instant’s asperity, and then after a pause concluded with great docility — “indeed, sah, captain!”

“Solgers,” spoke up the bell-ringer, “what ’ll ole Ball do to me? what’ll the sup’rintindon do? I must ring that bell, or I’ll go off of my Americanus clar.”

“Not this mornin’!” spoke up the bright-faced, negligently-dressed Coppock. “You and us and all can ring it, when slavery is over. Then, I calkelate, it’ll be glad enough to ring itself.”

“He-he!” chuckled a prisoner, “ole Ball — when he’s tuk, what ’ll he say?”

A low laugh, somewhat suppressed by awe, went around the humbler set of prisoners, and old Watty, who had been dozing, started up, saying:

“What’s yourn? I’m gwyn to close the bar and git some sleep. Hollin? Ole Tom? Peppermint? Be quick! Fi’penny bit — fi’penny bit!”

“Ned,” said Quantrell, familiarly, to young Coppock, “you’re not a bad-looking fellow. Don’t you know you’ll be hanged for this freak to-night? What got you into it?”

“Common sense, I calkelate!” Coppock answered, amiably. “If I saw you working and spending the sweat of your brow for a man who stood over you with a whip and didn’t pay you wages, wouldn’t it be my duty to interfere? Wouldn’t you interfere for me, oppressed like that? I think you would.”

“Not for a nigger,” answered Lloyd Quantrell.

“I didn’t see no exceptions made against negroes in my Bible,” Coppock spoke, unexcitedly. “Nor in my Declaration of Independence, neither! Captain Brown — he was ready to throw his life in. So I throwed in mine!”

Coppock tightened his belt, full of arms, which he had loosened while warming, looked at the breech-loading of his gun, and started up.

“What do you think of my being heah?”

The voice was that of the fine-looking but fierce mulatto man, and he was looking right at Quantrell, who replied with indignation:

“I think you will stay here, when you get your deserts.”

“Thank you,” said the man, armed like a Turk, with pistols, dirk, and small, cunning rifle. “I know you mean I ought to die heah; but you never told as much truth in yo’ life. Heah, in the county of Jefferson, I was born. So was Mr. Kagi’s folks. The paymaster’s clerk of this armory is in the family that owned me. I run away to be a free man! I left behind me a wife I love as much as you kin love yo’ sweetheart, God knows that! She’s had nine childern.”

He stopped, still fierce, but trembling at the throat, as if agony was close behind his audacity.

“Don’t cry, now,” Lloyd said; “I can feel for you.”

“I can’t cry,” spoke the man, with a proud intensity. “I come heah to fight, not to cry. These rocks around Harper’s Ferry, I’s seen so many years, is full of crows. Not a black crow that makes his nest in them rocks won’t fight for his young against the eagles that tries to eat them. Do you think I could stay yonder in Ohio when my little childern called me heah, and Captain Brown called me, too? I had to be a man!”

“Oh, yes!” exclaimed Watty, the bar-keeper, starting up, “I reckon I’ll sell a nigger a drink! Brandy? (good enough for you!) Tansy? Fi’penny bit — fi’penny bit.”

“Where is your wife now?” Lloyd Quantrell inquired, interested, notwithstanding his repulsion.

Newby, the mulatto, hesitated, and a furious scowl came upon his brow.

“It’s not my shame, nor hers,” he continued; “it’s the shame of this infamous slavery! She’s got another family of childern by her master’s son, and his and mine will both be slaves, unless I make them free.”

Unable longer to suppress his sensibilities and excitement, the spirited mulatto arose and disappeared into the night.

“What do you think of that, Colonel Washington?” asked Kagi, turning his strong, almost gloomy countenance upon the chief prisoner. “Is that man merely an intruder in the land of his birth? Or has he here rights strengthened by wrongs — injuries which would make you die for shame, or fight for shame?”

“Captain, never did I hea’ such rebellious and unconstitutional opinions advanced, sah — ah, sah!”

The legatee of the Father of his Country had reconsidered his reply before he made it.

Kagi also departed, and Quantrell asked Colonel Washington what he expected Smith, or Brown, would do with his prisoners.

“Sah,” answered the colonel, with a deep outburst of feeling, “they’ll sacrifice us all! Men with no respect, sah, for the Constitution, sah, can have no respect for human life or the ten commandments — ah, sah!”

The colonel was cut short by the entrance of William Thompson, the chief outlaw’s connection.

“Mr. Quantrell,” said this young man, “there’s a lady on the train our chief has stopped, who wants to know why the cars can’t proceed.”

“Light Pittson!” exclaimed the prisoner; “she asked me to do her a service. William, you must get me permission to go. It is a woman, dear to me already.”

“Some of our superior officers will have to give you leave, Mr. Quantrell. I’m only a lieutenant.”

“Go see Captain Brown for me, or Captain Stevens! You may want me, William Thompson, when you will have no other friend in the world. Do this, and then I will hear your call!”

“I should like to do anything right, sir. But here is Captain Stevens.”

Stevens entered, and Quantrell addressed him with insinuating heartiness:

“Cap, why do you keep that train, full of innocent passengers, standing frightened and tired all night? It’s got the mail. You might as well be robbing the mail as to be alarming all those females. The Government and the women will both resent it.”

“It’s not my idee,” said Stevens, shaking his head. “It wa’n’t in the plan of our campaign, neither. But here’s the commander-in-chief!”

Isaac Smith, as Lloyd still named him, came in and looked around calmly, like one settled in mind by warlike responsibility.

“What are you debating, Stevens, with the prisoners?” he asked.

“There are passengers out yonder at the station,” young Thompson spoke, “who have sent me here to speak to Mr. Quantrell and get them permission to proceed to their destination. They are hungry and some are sick. I don’t see, father, why you keep them there. They’ll only join against us.”

“Hasn’t that train proceeded?” the wiry, bearded bandit exclaimed; “I have been inspecting the posts, and supposed it had gone on. Who stopped it?”

“Watson Brown and Stuart Taylor. You told them to let nothing cross the bridge.”

“It was my oversight and their mistake,” the leader said, with a serious look. “All military orders ought to be obeyed, but with intelligence. I have been made to antagonize the Government.”

“And to murder a railroad hand — a black man, too — I have seen him dying, Pop Smith,” Quantrell spoke, clear and indignant. “You can not lose a moment in repairing a part of your offense. Senator Pittson is on that train with his family. He told me he suspected you to be the unknown marauder here. His daughter has sent for me to come to their relief. We’ll go, old man, together!”

Concluding kindly, as he had commenced sternly, Quantrell’s suggestion was accompanied by a stride forward and a hand upon the old leader’s arm. They walked into the night, and Brown or Smith went up to his guards and spoke:

“Hazlett, Lehman, go find the conductor of that train — one of you; the other go order my son upon the bridge to let the train go safely past. I will myself guard it across the river. — Bring your light here, my man!”

The negro Ashby, a little more at ease, came forward with the torch, and it shone upon a raw-boned, tall young man, ten years or more older than Quantrell, with red hair and dull, brown eyes. Quantrell remembered him long afterward by his name being descriptive of the color of those forbidding hazel eyes — Hazle-tt.

“The conductor was too scared to go on when we told him,” Hazlett said, slipping his carbine under his blanket, which was wound around his body.

The other person, addressed as Lehman, was of black hair and bright, boyish face, hardly of citizen age. He measured Quantrell’s strong form an instant and said:

“Captain Brown, you don’t want this man. Put him on the train and send him off!”

He gave a significant look to Lloyd, who had the opportunity to say to Lehman, also, soon afterward, upon the bridge:

“I’ll do you a good turn, my boy. Take your own advice, and never cross that bridge again.”

“And leave my captain and comrades?” the boy replied; “I’ll leave my body on one of them rocks first!” — pointing to the river.

---

 

CHAPTER XVI.

THE SUCK.

John Brown returns Lloyd to the train, which he allows to get underway. But Quantrell is drawn to the action at Harper’s Ferry, and after looking in on the Pittsons, he alights near Sandy Hook, on the Maryland side of the Potomac, where he has lodged the night before his initial encounter with Isaac Smith and sons. As the train moves “eastward under the mountain-crags,” he declares: “I’ll wake my landlord up, and fill my flask, and tell him the news.”

“THEY’RE fighting at the Ferry,” Lloyd said to the landlord, who arose half awake, and was not inquisitive.

“Always fightin’ thar,” the landlord replied, giving him some new country whisky.

“Abolitionists have taken the Ferry,” Lloyd explained.

“Then they’ll git tuk,” the landlord observed, as if the Ferry was “tuk” every night. “Harper’s Ferry is an ole suck.”

“Suck?” repeated Quantrell, struck with the word; “how a suck?”

“That’s the name of it. Injuns called it the Hole and the Suck. Nobody ever gits out that gits in thar. Railroad stuck thar for years. Gov’ment can’t git out. It’s the Suck.”

“‘Sucks people in,’ you mean?”

“Yes; ole Bob Harper tuk it up from Pete Stevens over a hundered years ago. Pete had squatted thar years on Lord Fairfax and couldn’t git out. Bob Harper left his bones thar. The floods gits it, the winds gits it, whisky gits it, and now, did you say, the abolitionists has got it? It’ll be a suck.”

“Old Isaac Smith and sons have took it,” Lloyd said, falling into the syntax of the place. “They and a band of abolitionists. They’re killing people there.”

“Isaac Smith?” the landlord said. “And sons? Is them abolitionists? They stopped with me when they fust come yer. They come to Sandy Hook last July, an’ said they was lookin’ for minerals, an’ sheep-lands an’ farms. Well, well! Is them abolitionists? I thought they was Christians. They’ll find Harper’s Ferry a suck.”

The landlord filled Quantrell’s flask, put up his bottle, and went to bed. Having slept there two nights before, the gunner sought his own room mechanically, and stretching himself on the bed said, sleepily, “False to Katy! — not I”; and then, it seemed to him, the sun rose right into his eyes. He had fallen asleep, probably for hours.

Nobody was awake in the hotel. He strolled up the road leading from the river, and found himself in Pleasant Valley, between the two mountain-lines, in rugged farm-country. He retraced his road under Maryland Heights back toward Harper’s Ferry, and soon saw that picturesque village standing like the nipple above “The Suck.” The sun was just rising up the shining lap of the Potomac, and shooting silver arrows at the little city, which stood out like a target.

Harper’s Ferry appeared between the two rivers, rising like a great green mound, with a road dividing it over the top through a ravine, and another road around the base of the mound; and for a little way up its scarp hung or clung the picturesque little town, which also raveled along the upland road among borders of shade-trees till it disappeared over the summit. This hill was several hundred feet high, and three or four churches presented their gables from its grassy face, as if their pulpits had been buried in the earth. A spire or belfry or mountain graveyard added points of whiteness to the green background or clear gray sky, and some stone walls and terraces and bits of pasture — land where cows were quietly grazing in the airy tops gave a faint sense of inhabitancy. To the right over the Potomac the eastern portion of the mound terminated in a nearly perpendicular crag, out of which grew a pale-green thicket of trees and bushes, leaning almost horizontally. From near this abrupt headland to the low cape of the mound extended the stately line of low brick factories with high chimneys, and in the midst a lofty flag-mast. These buildings in their continuation also turned the cape and extended a little way up the other river, and below the factory line ran railroads coming down the sides of the two rivers and meeting at a covered bridge of wood which spanned the Potomac on arches of stone to the Maryland shore.

In overlapping rows of irregular heights the dormer-windowed houses and other dwellings, more detached, caught in their panes of glass the rising sun which shone through the rifted precipices up the broad, islet-sprinkled, rock-barred rivers, making them seem aisles of silver between borders of green and russet. A canal wound along the larger river like a silver cord under the bare crags of Maryland.

Another bridge, starting from near the commencement of the larger one, passed on slender abutments to the mountain above the Shenandoah. This mountain at the cape above the mingling of the rivers fell in perpendicular ledges or chimneys almost a thousand feet to the woodlands which grew from its débris and spread toward the eye in graceful wreaths of verdurous mountain, along whose sides could be seen the eagles, vultures, and crows circling as if around nests concealed in the rocks. For several miles these Virginia precipices curled over the Potomac as if seeking courage to span it and connect with the bald, scarred wall of Maryland Mountain; but failing to do so till far below, a valley found place in Maryland to empty its creeks into the augmented Potomac between these hesitating ridges.

Thus the town of Harper’s Ferry slumbered at the base of its own acclivity, between the jaws of grander mountains which threatened to fall upon it and drown it in a deluge, like that which had probably broken them asunder. There seemed wanting, to complete the subjugation of the town, some mighty castle of the feudal age to crown its dome of greenness. He who descends the Alpine torrents toward the great plain of Lombardy may see sublimer heights for the old Ghibelline castles which frown toward the Papal sees, but nowhere else could he see two such rivers meet and go forward like white-plumed cavalry to wash the old Catholic counties of the plain of Maryland.

An autumn russet lay inwoven with the green and gray scarps of the desolate mountains, like camp-fires which had gone out, in the awe of what had seized upon the usually whistling and hammering town in the vale. The crows and vultures chattered or circled in wondering gossip or augury about the steepling chimneys of Loudoun Heights, as on that morning when Romulus and Remus watched the birds of omen and spilled the first blood of brethren in cuddling Rome.

The little city hugging the heights, familiar with deluges, forging arms for battle, and often sheeted over by the thunder-storms, was on this day so commonplace amid its great besetments, that it stirred no more than the water-snakes upon the surface of the river rocks, which felt their cold blood grow torpid in the cloudy October air. The insensate and the superstitious, the vulgar and the rapt, lethargy and Nemesis, went together, as on that day when, at the walls of Troy, a wooden horse arose ridiculous, but in the sky a serpent shook the stout soul of the protesting priest.

The Shenandoah, in cool, green rapids and white ripples, came around a shoulder of wooded mountain in a stately curve, and a low stone dike, partly natural, held its current back, to guide the water-power into two milling canals which formed green islands under the mutilated heights of Jefferson’s Rock. These islands were inhabited by artisans and by toilers in the tall grist-mills there, and the upper island was another Government armory, with a line of workshops inclosed by a wall and entered by a bridge across the mill-sluice. Within the wall, a cupola tower in the façade inclosed a bell and upheld a flag-staff, and behind the rifle-works, next to the river, a railway ran toward the great Valley of Virginia.

The sound of the Shenandoah churning among huge rocks and moaning over the low dam never was unheard here in the busiest days, and in the still dawn it seemed to speak a legend in the voice of sobbing, like the legend of bondage by the rivers of Babylon.

Upon the summits above Jefferson’s Rock lived the chief officials of Harper’s Ferry, in roomy mansions, and thus the double river-gorge and rocky redan of the upper town maintained a feudal appearance, and had that military air as of some castellated pass held for a distant emperor by his various mercenary bands.

A little passenger-packet lay in the canal, with steam up, ready to make her trip to Washington city through the many locks. Looking up at the telegraph-poles, Lloyd Quantrell saw that their wires had been torn and the broken strands hung near the bridge-entrance.

“Poor Heywood!” he said, thinking of the wounded negro; “no wonder he could not apprise me of the coming train. Smith’s band had severed communications. But by this time the night express is nearly at Baltimore, and all Maryland will be aroused.”

Within the entrance of the Potomac bridge a form with a spear came out of the dark shadows and sternly ordered Quantrell to halt.

“Ashby! Is that your voice?”

“Halt! Ef you don’t, I’ll kill you!”

The negro drove his spear close to Quantrell’s throat.

“Kill me,” said Quantrell. “Do! because I pitied you when your old father died. Because I was hated for taking your part. Because I fought and whipped your catchers. Come here and look at me, Ashby!”

The darkness, growing familiar, showed the negro to drop his spear and gaze at his prisoner irresolutely. He wore the old straw hat his dead father had worn, but around his nearly naked body a blanket was tied, like the other abolitionists’ uniform; his feet were naked, and he limped.

“Kill the only man who can save you from a horrible death, Ashby! By noon to-day you and the men who have seduced you will be howling on your backs for water to cool your wounds.”

“What kin I do?” the escaped slave exclaimed. “I come for my daddy. Dey killed him and tuk me. De Kinsas men set on to ’em and give me freedom and told me to fight for my race. I must! I know I’ll die, but I must fight. Come with me, or I’ll call Cap’n Watson Brown yonder!”

He raised and clinched his spear again. In the perspective of the bridge-tube, Quantrell saw the forms of two more men. He spoke with quiet decision:

“Ashby, I am going to buy you and send you North to your mother. Mr. Beall has told me your story. Your mother never meant to have you mixed up in a rebellion like this. You have done your duty to your father, and I can pardon and pity you.”

The kind tones brought down the negro’s pike again.

“Where is the man who owned you?”

“Over yer in Marylin.”

“What are you sentinel for at this point?”

“I was goin’ with Cap’n Cook and his party over to git de guns at de farm, but I limped so, dey leff me yer and tole me to take everybody prisoners an’ march ’em to de engine-house.”

“March me there, Ashby. Tell Captain Brown’s officers and men that I was kind to you when your father died. You can help me out of danger, and I will try to save your life in return for it. Hide this piece of money to buy shelter, or food, or conveyance, if you need them. Keep me this day in your humble care and watch, and to-morrow I will not forget it.”

“Mosster,” the negro said, “I’ll do de best I kin for you, for your kindness. My heart’s mos’ broke.”

“Halt! Who comes there?” cried a bold voice from the middle of the bridge as they advanced.

“Friend with a prisoner!”

“Advance, friend with the prisoner! Who is it?” spoke the voice of Watson Brown.

“Isabell!” resonantly answered Quantrell.

There was a startled motion, and the voice was not so bold, as it stammered:

“Isabel? What Isabel — not mine?”

“Watson,” said Quantrell, coming closer, “it’s Lloyd, whom you met on the mountains.”

“Who answered ‘Isabel,’ sir?”

The young man was stern and excited.

“It must have been an echo,” Quantrell replied, carelessly, but watching the young invader closely. “Your father let me out on my parole. I’ve seen my friends off, and I’m coming back.”

“I know I heard my wife’s name,” repeated Watson Brown.

“It’s probably an echo from the wind, my poor fellow — some premonition — some spirit, such as the spirits Captain Stevens sees.”

“I never believed in such things before,” the son of Ossawattomie Brown muttered. “‘Isabel’ is my wife. She has a little baby I never saw, sir. Where she lives, in the great North Woods, the snow drifts into our bedroom and the wind moans in sounds like that I heard, through the long winter soon to begin.”

“You are cruel to Isabel, Watson. What are the moans of negroes to the call of your wife and baby-child?”

“In God’s ears they are the same, my soul tells me. I can’t go home while things are done that I have seen, even in Maryland. Nine black men died and one killed himself near our mountain farm since we have lived there; all on slavery’s cruel account. — Take Mr. Quantrell to headquarters!” he ended, speaking to the negro.

“That was a home shot I gave him,” thought the Baltimorean. “I heard him blubber ‘Isabel’ to Coppock at the mountain farm. What a fanatic! Does he expect retribution for every negro mother’s heart-ache? That would take too long.”

Still, he was out of temper, spiteful but not afraid, and when he emerged from the bridge and saw Oliver Brown, hardly of man’s age, standing there in blanket and gun, he cried, with cold gayety:

“Hallo, Oliver! I’m going to my prison. No wife have I to pine for me. I hope you haven’t.”

“Yes, Mr. Quantrell. I’m sorry to see you back. I have a wife that was with me in Maryland, and I took her and my little sister back to New York before we should be in danger: her next little boy will be a Marylander, I calkelate.”

“Ah! Oliver, wasn’t that selfish, to remove your women from danger, and start insurrection on ours?”

A young connection of the Smiths, named Dolph or Dauph Thompson, as Quantrell had observed, replied to this reproof:

“It was about this time of the morning, I calkelate, that the Border Ruffians moved on Lawrence in Kansas, eight hundred strong. It was only two or three years ago. Artillery with ’em, too! Mississippi rifles, you can calkelate. Georgians, Alabamians, Carolinians! They looked as if the pirates had took the poor-house. Jeff Thompson, of Harper’s Ferry here, and now mayor of the city of Saint Joe, I calkelate was among ’em. United States Senator Atchison addressed ’em — drunk, you can bet! ‘Boys,’ says he, ‘to-day I’m a Kickapoo ranger. If you find a woman armed as a soldier, trample her under foot as you would a snake.’ A tiger was on their flag. They broke the printing-presses, robbed the people, pillaged from men and women, stole ladies’ letters, blew up the buildings, and sacked the town. I calkelate I know, for my brother Henry shed his blood there.”

“My brother Frederick,” said Oliver Brown, “was shot in Kansas and killed. A preacher from Missouri murdered him. My brother John was drove crazy by chains and cruelty. Our wives was threatened with abuse and shame if we didn’t leave free soil. Through the streets of Leavenworth the scalps of men were paraded on poles. In Bloomington a woman who spoke against slavery was outraged by a troop. Where women couldn’t live, men didn’t want to settle, and here we are, outlaws back from Kansas, starting the war at the right end!”

“Prospectin’-like,” added Dolph Thompson, almost merrily.

Quantrell passed on, bitter yet awed, as the dim recollection of past troubles in Kansas was made vivid by these survivors. He thought to himself, “Perhaps they do mean to put us all to death.” As he meditated, the voice of Stevens was heard from the armory-gate. “No parley with prisoners. March your man right here! Shoot him if he hesitates!”

As Stevens spoke, his short rifle was in both hands. From both bridges blanketed guardsmen emerged, with rifles in poise. By the arsenal-gate Coppock was looking intently on, his belt full of weapons and his gun across his arm. The little wooden saloon in the eye of the vista was being opened by its proprietor within, and some of the band were watching it, also.

“March!” spoke the negro Ashby, hoarsely, looking fear, yet fidelity, at his prisoner.

John Brown, or Isaac Smith, whichever he might truly be, came out to the gate and said to Quantrell:

“I allowed you to go away from here, sir. You will be in danger, and yet I warned you carefully. — Take him in there and see that he behaves himself,” addressing the negro. “He will not be discharged again.”

“Still tender on the mourning-doves, Mr. Smith,” Quantrell replied. “Listen!”

Two guns went off close by in the public street, and sounds of running or hustling feet were heard.

“What’s that? Firing?” interestedly asked John Brown.

As they listened, another gun went off, from the arsenal-wall right opposite, and there was a loud cry of a man from up in the chasm of the hill street. Quantrell looked up where this street met the business street, and saw three of the blanketed men emerge, all three with smoking guns.

“Dat time I got him!” said a hoarse voice, as the negro, Newby, quietly wiped his rifle-top with his blanket.

Another scream, or groan, floated from the railway-station, where the negro porter had yet several hours to live.

These awful sounds in the still morning-time, blended by the two rivers in their plaintive wail, were followed by repeated whinings of a dog, and the pointer Albion made his appearance in the armory-yard, crouching or gamboling high in the air, as if the word “dove” had touched his soft and pliant ferocities.

“Spirits!” said the man Stevens. “They’re never faraway! The men has found some citizens with arms, and sent them spirit-way. Now we’ll get prisoners.”

These sounds of war gave nervous impulse to the invaders in the streets: their heads were more erect, their vigilance was renewed. People came sauntering in and were halted and seized with a precision which paralyzed resistance or curiosity.

The evening bacchanal with a parched throat, going for his morning “cocktail,” forgot his need when confronted by an open rifle-barrel and a stranger in the wild garb of blanket, slouched hat, and belted person, bristling with killing arms. The laborer coming toward work on river, store, canal, or farm, saw this apparition, and looking round in fear beheld its duplicate cutting off his retreat, and yielded, limp and docile. The saloons, half open, felt the absence of customers, and seeing these strange forms, both black and white, their keepers dodged within, or, walking forth, were taken from their bottles.

Occasionally some man and even woman would pass along and feel queer at the unexpected sights, yet be without the understanding to pause or inquire, carried onward by a simple instinct which preserved them from arrest. Again some fierce Caucasian laborer, seeing an armed negro in his path, would raise the customary fist to strike the helot down, and, with astonishment that made him dumb, would find that negro brave and deadly, and meekly receive from such a source his own favorite execration. The damning of black souls by fellow-men was impotent that day, because the white man’s spirit had brooded over these black eggs and hatched them to armed men.

There was a sound of hoofs before Quantrell entered the gate, and a man with a pale face, whom he recognized as the village doctor, dashed past upon a horse and galloped up the hill street.

“Be firm but considerate, men,” Quantrell heard John Brown say; “capture them who resist. Take no life unless your own is in peril! But we must hold our ground.”

As he was marched toward the little engine-house, his guard, Ashby, muttered:

“Dat man up de street is dead; I heard ’em say so! Mosster Quantrell, what mus’ I do?”

“Get across that bridge, Ashby, as soon as you can! Go past Sandy Hook and cross the big mountain into Catoctin Valley. Find Jake Bosler’s farm, and say you came from me, and give my love to little Katy.”

“Dey’ll kill me, won’t dey?”

“If you stay here, you are sure to be killed. This place is the Suck, and takes everything to the bottom.”

Entering the watch-house again, Quantrell found it uncomfortably full, and some of the occupants were complaining of thirst and fatigue and hunger. Almost every moment some new prisoner was brought in, and those previously confined scanned the new-comer’s person or timidly listened to the few who had volatility enough to talk.

“What do you think they mean to do with us, Colonel Washington?” asked the young Baltimorean.

“Ah — sah!” The gentleman spoke with such circumspection that Quantrell with asperity said:

“Sir, our situation levels distinctions. You should play the man here, and your suspicions of your fellow-prisoners are unworthy. It is your own State, your native county, that is invaded. I ask you for your ideas in our common emergency.”

The gentleman replied, with subdued effort:

“Nothing in Brown’s history is against my conviction that he will kill us all, sah. I have been searching my poor, breakfastless mind, to recollect what I can of his past in Kansas. I feel sure, sah, that this is the same man who, the day after the abolition settlement of Lawrence was destroyed, took four of his sons and one son-in-law, and grinding their sabers sharp as butcher-knives, they entered a slaveholder’s dwelling, sah, and took a father and two sons out of there prisoners; and this old man shot the father dead, and his boys — the same, no doubt, whom we see around this engine-house — hacked the victim’s sons to pieces with their sabers. The same night the old man set his sons upon two other men, who had been captured in their beds, and saw them cut down with as much indifference as a wolf. The very abolitionists in Kansas denounced such barbarity. Brown was then accused of meditating the massacre of the Kansas State Convention which was enacting a Constitution. He had previously fought two victorious actions with the slave-State settlers, and, being outlawed there, he invaded Missouri and ran off mules and slaves, sah. The mules he sold in Ohio at public auction, and the Yankees there, sah, bought them because stolen. The slaves he stole there, may be in this robber army to-night, sah.”

No rage was in this statement, but a memory barely struggling above despair, and the revelation increased the doubt, and therefore the numb dread, in Lloyd Quantrell’s mind. He asked himself if Watson and Oliver Brown could have done such wonders.

“Colonel,” he whispered, “surely we can fight for our lives?”

“Ah — sah!” the inoffensive, hale, but broken man replied, “we are like butchers’ calves, sah. What I saw when taken from my bed, sah, convinced me I was valuable for nothing but my slaves and the slaughter, sah.”

“Nobody drinkin’?” spoke old Watty, the bar-keeper; among the crowd. “I reckon I’ll turn the lights down. They has to be paid for! Sherry cobblaw? Brandy toddy? Fi’penny-bit! — fi’pennybit!”

“Watty! Watty! you forgit you’re tuk. You’re off of your Americanus, Watty! See all our neighbors comin’ to call on us — all tuk!”

“All but ole Ball!” echoed a few faint and tired voices. “What will ole Ball say?”

“Ole Ball ’ll say, ‘Who didn’t ring that bell accordin’ to my orders?’ That’s what ole Ball ’ll say. Then I’ll be clar off my Americanus!”

There came floating down the gray and sharp October morning a sound like musical vibration. The whine of a dog seemed to protest against it.

“Hark!” spoke the bell-ringer. “Has Captain Brown dared to ring my bell? I’ve had the doin’ of it so many years, to let another do it seems like as if I was dead and heard my funeral-bell.”

With another hesitation and twanging, like some tender bird clearing its glottis of the mist, a bell directly above them began to ring, and through the vales its strong and steady tones went artlessly, in no imperious command, but mellow invitation, as if a cage of linnets had awakened full-throated and tried their hearts in song.

“It’s the Catholic church,” the bell-ringer said. “It’s the angelus they’re ringing for the workmen’s early mass.”

The sound of murmured prayers was heard among some of the humbler prisoners. Lloyd Quantrell called aloud the words of morning prayer as he remembered them at school:

“‘Gratiam tuam quæsumus Domine! Pour down Thy grace into our souls!’”

“Amen!” in whispers filled the little place.

“‘As we have known the incarnation of Christ Thy Son, by the message of an angel, so may we come to the glory of the resurrection. Per eundem Christum dominum nostrum!’”

“Amen!”

The bell hesitated again, continued on a stroke or more, and then a shot was fired.

The bell stopped, trembling; a dog stopped howling, too.

Watty, the bar-keeper, burst into tears.

Tears came to many others at his example. Their depressed feelings, violent superstitions, uncertainty, and fainting hunger, had prepared all for some sudden burst of agony, and the little Christian prayer had touched all hearts.

“Watty’s off of his Americanus,” the bell-ringer cried, coming forward, a sob upon his voice. “Pore Watty! He wants his dram.”

“I try to ’commodate you all,” the old bar-keeper moaned; “sorry I can’t please none of you! Pay me off and — let me go!”

His aged face and straggling hairs, vacant countenance, and inoffensive village ways, touched everybody. The bell-ringer wrapped him in his arms, shed his tears upon the old vagrant head, and seemed himself about to lose his homely self-restraint.

“Who broke the bell?” articulated Watty. “I can’t hear none of ’em. They’s a-callin’ for orders, and I can’t tell. Only let me hyur you, an’ I’ll do my juty. Fi’penny-bit! — fi’penny-bit!”

The bell-ringer, himself an aged man, but of some simple decision of character, here threw himself against the watch-house door.

“You le’ me out!” he shouted. “I’m most off of my Americanus, and I’m not desponsible. I don’t own no slave. I ain’t done no harm. Shoot, if you want to. But this pore man’s got to have his dram!”

“Jimmy! Jimmy!” the bar-keeper muttered, nearly brought to reason by his friend’s exposure. “Don’t take no account at ’em. They fights as soon as they gets a little pizened. — Never mind yo’ money, friends! Go out peaceable. Go, go!”

As the guard opened the door, Quantrell’s dog rushed in, and with a yell of pain — for Smith or Brown, the bandit leader, kicked him, passing, and entered, himself looking poorly.

“Who is it making confusion here? Citizens, this is no child’s play. Two men are dead already — one for not obeying orders, and the other for carrying a weapon.”

“I ain’t got no weapon, but I’ve got a heart!” — the bell-ringer alone had the courage to speak in his fierce captor’s face. “Captain, there’s men here who want their food. They ain’t used to hollow stummicks.”

“Every man who can send me a colored person for a recruit, I will discharge,” the leader said, like one of business propositions, fixing one grayish-green eye upon the bell-ringer, and the other doing the summarizing.

The perfect daylight revealed him now, tired after the night’s exertions, wiry, with one eye preoccupied and the other like a fisher-bird’s, the nose vulturous, and the mouth as hard as intense opinionatedness and severe reflection could make it in man.

He had his arms beneath his old coat-tails, and his cap concealed there; and his unkempt hair flamed up like a beacon in ashes; and the fleece of gray and white beard made a blossom like a snow-ball to his breast-bone. Without an ornament but the dress sword-hilt of a king — no seals, no watch, no watch-guard, not even a pistol now — John Brown seemed terrible by his simplicity and indifference.

Unconstrained, natural, yet wild; not entirely sane in the expression of his eyes; deliberate but unfeeling, ready to become domestic or dreadful, like a house-cat to take a fit, he measured them all as if he was ransoming sheep.

All felt that he could toss them back like lambs to their pens if they sought to assail or evade him. His whole dress a slop-shop might have rejected; but the stringy frame within it, and lean, bushy head, at once patriarchal and animal, gave him the sense of some Calvinistic wolf — a savage qualified by theology.

“My blood,” said this apparition, in a metallic, commercial voice, “is precious to me — tolerably so.” He paused, as if reflecting just how much it might be worth. “Your blood I do not desire.” They felt a dread come over them as if it were merely want of appetite that retarded his meal. “But you are my hostages for the offenses of your disobedient neighbors, who have broken the laws of God. This is war! I mean nothing but right. But I mean all I came here for.”

Quantrell’s chilled spirit recalled the curse of Hannah Ritner, not twenty hours elapsed: “I see the rivers flowing red. Escape ye can not!”

“You may be a great man,” said the bell-ringer, not unimpressed, “and have your idees, but an empty stummick is a cruel neighbor. It’ll make a baby cry of a night. It’ll make a wild beast go catch food for its young at any peril. It’ll do more than that” — the bell-ringer dropped his voice to produce the full, pathetic effect — “it’ll make a nateral being go off of his Americanus!”

He put his hand on Watty’s forehead, and Watty advanced toward John Brown unsteadily and placating:

“Drink with the house!” he said. “Guarantee everything — to come out of the same bar’l. He-he! Medford rum! Parson’s flip! Raw egg an’ hell-fire! He-he!”

“There’s a picture of slavery,” said John Brown — “the slavery of alcohol.”

“I’m one of ’em,” another prisoner cried, coming forward. “Ef you doan le’ me go git my dram, I’ll take the rams an’ git shot fightin’ somebody.”

His red eyes and unsteady hands told that his apprehensions were real.

“I can set slaves free and take them far from their masters,” John Brown remarked, looking at the two men like a magistrate sentencing some vagrants; his great mouth was firm, but his eyes had a little thoughtful pity mixed with their contempt. “Slaves of vile habits no man can set free. The thing these two men serve” — he looked over the crowd — “whips and kicks them, even in their sleep, and then they go and whip and kick their unfortunate fellow-men! Go with him” — he addressed the bell-ringer — “and order breakfast for me for twenty men. I parole you to proceed to the hotel for that purpose. If the breakfasts are not sent, my army will hold you responsible when we take you again. — As for you,” turning to the second toper, “go home, but do not stop to poison yourself anywhere on the way.”

Quantrell had a peep of this proceeding, and saw the bell-ringer turn his eyes toward the bell-station and move that way, till a sentry turned him off. He shook his head disconsolately, but took old Watty’s hand.

“Cap’n,” Watty said to John Brown, “I’ll mix you a Caner of Galilee: sodee an’ hock an’ ole Sassaurek! Then you’ll feel so good, you won’t shoot nobody. He-he!”

The lines of the invading “army,” as Captain Brown had named it, were now perfectly formed. There was a guard on the armory green, another at the yard-top, a third at the gate, and men were upon the bridge. Brown himself went with the hostages to the public street and conferred with sentinels in the two arsenal buildings opposite. Shots were heard occasionally in the upper town, as if citizens might be firing old loads from their guns or making ready for resistance.

The breakfasts were brought over from the hotel, and Brown invited the prisoners to partake thereof in the engine-house; but some nervous skeptic whispered that it might be poisoned food, and only a few, among whom was Quantrell, took advantage of the request. John Brown bowed his head before he ate, and seemed to be asking a blessing upon his meal. Albion, seeking to steal a piece of fried ham, ran against the great bandit’s claws, and was thrown toward the yard, but slipped over the old man’s arm and ran beneath one of the engines, where he howled dismally.

His meal being done, Quantrell asked permission to remain in the engine-room, which contained no other prisoners. John Brown made no answer, but went off to inspect his posts.

Quantrell began to think of Katy in Catoctin Valley, of Light Pittson in Washington, of his mother in her grave, and of the new and solemn feelings which had impelled him to intone a portion of a public prayer.

“Am I infirm in my affections?” he asked himself. “I feel no guilt. Till Sunday I never was in love; no ladies’ man have I ever been. Yet I seemed to make a conquest of the senator’s daughter as easily as of Katy. What do I mean?”

He found the pointer-dog insidiously climbing upon him, and drowsiness was in his brain; so he drew the dog to a place beneath a fire-engine, and, crawling there upon some leather harness and blankets, fell asleep.

A loud discharge of guns, so close that they seemed to have been fired at the engine-house door, awoke Quantrell, and he rushed against the door and into the armory-yard, unconscious for a moment of his whereabout. Nobody paid any attention to him in the yard, and the guards there were crouching behind the stone gateposts and handling their pieces as if to kill some expected foe. Availing himself of the confusion, the young man ran across the open plaza and along the railroad side of the yard, until he could look over the iron railing and up into the town, by the Shenandoah street.

He saw nothing but blowing smoke in front of some high brick stores, and an object fallen in the street, and feebly moving. In another instant the object was still.

The smell of brimstone was in the air. The streets were perfectly deserted except by dogs, which were smelling and snapping at the fallen object — his own dog the most forward and conspicuous.

While Quantrell looked, a rifle sounded from one of the bridges he could not see, and a piece of brick, or lead, or splinter seemed to fly from the front of one of the tall houses in line with the armory-gate. In a moment the front of this house flashed smoke and fire, as if several guns had been shot off together. From the bridge and the stone gate-piers, shots went responsive against the concealed enemy in the house.

Quantrell distinctly noted a difference in the quality of sound of the opposing guns.

“Breech-loaders,” he thought, “against the muskets of Harper’s Ferry. The Virginians have got arms.”

He noticed that no store in the village had opened its windows, though the sun was coming over the tall Loudoun Heights, some hours high. As he looked at this sun, the crows, flying around the chimneys of Loudoun Mountain, arrested his attention, and he thought of the black man Newby’s saying, that not a black crow was in those rocks but would fight for its young.

“My God!” spoke Quantrell, slowly, seeking with his eyes the object fallen in the street again, “I know that man lying yonder. It is a mulatto. It is Newby himself!”

Obeying an impulse of mingled mercy and horror, Lloyd Quantrell vaulted over a broken angle in the brick wall, and, with both hands raised higher than his head, he ran along the public street, exposed to the concealed marksmen from either side, but barely conscious of their existence. A few shots, fired from the heights around the Catholic church, rattled along the limestone crossings and macadamized roadway and rebounded from the sloping traps of cellar-ways. The golden cross above the Roman chapel seemed also extending its arms in the truce of heavenly intercession and flaming with perturbed light.

He reached the fallen object; it was a human creature, tumbled with gun in hand, and belted round with other carnal weapons, but helpless as a turtle upon its back. Quantrell knelt and spoke the sufferer’s name; a terrible wound was in his neck, out of which the blood was gushing.

“Newby, can’t you get up?”

“Cap’n Brown called me,” the pale lips muttered. “I had to be a man.”

Feet and chin stiffened together, and the first victim on either side had been a black crow fighting for its young. Quantrell took up the negro soldier’s rifle:

“‘Poor devil!’” he said; “Harper’s Ferry is turning out to be a ‘suck.’”

---

 

CHAPTER XVII.

ASHBY’S GRATITUDE.

WHISTLING bullets past Quantrell’s head recalled him to some preserving fear. Looking down toward the armory-gate, he saw a negro from the arsenal leveling a piece at him, and the ball grazed his hair.

Quantrell retreated up the hill street, called High Street, and while he turned his head to see if he was followed, his feet stumbled upon something soft, and he was thrown to the sidewalk beside a sleeping man. Scrambling up and seeing that the man did not move, Quantrell touched him and found him cold.

“Oh, bring him in!” a voice whispered from a neighboring grocery; “the Mexicans shot him there the matther of two hours ago, and we’re afraid to walk in the strate; fur they fires at averybody.”

A gun, thrown down in the shock of being wounded, lay beside this man, and showed that he had gone forth to kill. He looked to be a herculean Irishman.

“This is the man that yonder Newby killed, no doubt,” thought Quantrell; and, as he sought to lift the bulky and heavy form, he felt himself seized and being dragged away.

Through an alley-way nearly opposite, which descended the slope into an almost unoccupied lane, right under the engine-house and wall, his captors bore him fiercely with firm hands and silent purpose, and he made no resistance whatever, considering that he had no arms and had sought to harm no man.

From various garrets, whose dormer windows partly commanded this lane, the popping of guns came momentarily and tore up the dirt around them, and scarred the long government wall. A church-bell somewhere up in the town began to ring an alarm, and over a broken place in the wall, some way ahead, a few men carrying something weighty emerged and fired their pistols at Quantrell’s abductors. The latter shook Quantrell loose, but kept him between themselves and the enemy, and began to fire their short, breech-loading guns.

Lloyd saw that his captors were both negroes, and under high excitement.

The fleeing white men made little response to the guns of these negroes, but continued to bear off their burden; and among them Quantrell thought he recognized the young planter, Beall, and the pale and frowsy Atzerodt.

“Git ova yer, or we’ll kill you in de road!” gasped one of these black men.

“Git over!” echoed the other, giving Quantrell a painful blow with the butt of his carbine.

They forced him across a picket-fence and up a slope, in a little garden or hog-yard, and near the top of this acclivity was a mighty rock which had been walled up below by human hands and made a cave or cellar for some adjacent house. Into this all three retreated from the bullets, which began to come from everywhere.

The negroes, taking breath a moment, turned on Quantrell.

“Come,” said a supple fellow named Green, “you got to die, man!”

He drew his gun and raised it.

“What?” cried Quantrell. “Kill me! What have I done?”

“You are a soul-buyer an’ a slave-trader!”

“You keeps a slave-pen and sells men like me!” the other negro, who had been called Copeland, exclaimed, with no less sullen ferocity. “We know you, an’ you got to die for our brother Newby!”

Copeland raised his gun also. The despair of death fell upon Quantrell’s soul.

“For Christ’s dear sake, men, don’t murder me! You are under a mistake. My uncle is in that business — not I.”

He had literally fallen upon his knees. The sense of dying in that cave, of moldering in such a sty, of being hideously cut off in youth and bloom and happy love, made him beg like a child. The pugilist’s bravado failed him in this test of death.

“De boot’s on de oder leg,” Copeland continued, while Quantrell grasped the carbine and turned it aside; “it’s no harder fo’ you to die than fo’ Newby, shot fo his childern!”

“I have never bought a slave, never sold one!” Quantrell gasped; “all my slaves are inherited, all well treated. Don’t bring this blood upon your hands!”

“No man’s well treated with his liberty and wages took away,” the negro Green exclaimed, his rifle at Quantrell’s head. “We’ve all got to die here. Your life for Newby’s! Say your prayers!”

“Nothin’ kin save you,” Copeland spoke, his gun at Quantrell’s heart; “we made up our minds, when you said yo’ family sold men, to kill you if one of us died, and Newby’s gone to heaven. Come!”

At that cold word, so blank yet dreadful, ‘Come!’ Quantrell’s heart and brain seemed to swoon. He said the Catholic names of “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” and threw himself with arms outspread, like the cross he surrendered his life to, upon his face and on the floor of that foul cave.

The sound of both carbines exploding made him await in cold awe the torments of some wounds. He felt nothing; but feet were treading upon him, as if men were wrestling.

“I pushed yo’ guns up. Is he dead? De Lord fo’give you!”

Raising his face at this strange voice, Quantrell saw a fourth man in the cave contending with his enemies.

This man had a negro’s face, but he seemed so bright and radiant in Quantrell’s eyes, that the cry of Nebuchadnezzar appeared to be ringing in that rocky furnace: “Lo! I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God!”

“Dat man didn’t do no black man harm,” said a voice; “dat man’s de black man’s friend. He fought fo’ me. He give me money to git away wid. He’s a kine man!”

As this voice spoke, a piece of gold flashed in his hand — the evidence of Quantrell’s kindness.

“He’s gone dead,” spoke the negro Copeland. “O Green! may be we’s killed a good friend.”

“Ain’t he no soul-seller?” answered Green. “It’s a pity, then.”

They gathered around Quantrell’s outstretched form.

“Po’ man!” said Ashby, the new arrival, feelingly; “de on’y kine words I got, in de lan’ whaw I was raised, dis man said to me. Lord, raise him fo’ me!”

Quantrell raised his head.

The colored men looked down wonderingly.

“Prayer, brother!” said Green to Ashby; “see how it’s answered!”

“Raise him, Lord!” cried Ashby, loudly, in the ecstasy of religious superstition.

“Raise him! Raise him, Lord!” the late assassins repeated fervently.

Quantrell arose, pale as a ghost, and for a moment speechless. He leaned upon all their hands. They watched him like a spirit.

Nothing but gratitude was in his heart, and he felt like giving thanks even to his murderers, so violently had human power been transferred in a few hours from white man to negro.

“Ashby, you turned their guns aside. I am not hurt.”

“Come, den,” Ashby shouted, “we’s mos’ surrounded. De gate’s held open for us a minute. Come!”

Quantrell and the three negroes dashed down the slope, and a wooden gate in the side-wall was held ajar. As they entered it, bullets came from old stone walls and hanging galleries, from garret-windows and from pig-pens.

They were in the armory-yard, and the gate shut fast behind them, before they had been well discovered.

“Here,” said the voice of John Brown as they reached the engine-house, “you men are just in time. I want some loop-holes picked in these brick walls.”

As the sounds of the implements in the brick masonry and of guns of different kinds made the place far from tranquil, Quantrell asked himself how many of these bandits there might be; though he had hardly seen twenty in all, they acted as if they were an army.

“What is this thing of slavery?” Quantrell questioned of a somewhat depressed but not despairing man, whose only crime in John Brown’s eyes had been slaves.

“You mean its value in property?”

“Yes, the strength or weakness of it. I never asked before, and now see, for the first time, that it is the question of questions.”

“In Virginia,” said the farmer, “we have about five hundred thousand slaves — half as many souls as the whites of Virginia.”

“Souls,” thought Quantrell, and added, “you mean that many head, not souls.”

“Wills, anyway,” the farmer replied, “if what we see to-night is representative. Maryland has ninety thousand slaves and nearly as many free blacks, or say two fifths of all her—”

“Souls,” Quantrell finished; “we mean head.”

“I had rather have souls into them to-day,” the farmer remarked, “for their soul-fear is what may save our lives.”

“That’s true,” Quantrell noted; “a nigger is a religious animal. But what is the extent of the slavery in all this American Republic which John Brown has rushed against?”

“Four millions at least.”

“Worth—?”

“Oh, a thousand million dollars, I reckon. Twice that, unless this fellow gets up a black insurrection.”

“Has slavery been growing?”

“Yes; seventy years ago we hadn’t but seven hundred thousand in the country. They’re growing three quarters to a million every ten years. We’re pore with ’em, and pore without ’em. Less than thirty year ago Virginia was half minded to give slavery up, but Missouri and Texas got into the Union as slave States, and it become too profitable to let the thing go. This man’s raid to-day cuts down the value of my niggers from a thousand dollars apiece to six or seven hundred.”

“Ditto!” Quantrell remarked. “Yet I have seen times in these few hours when it would have been cheap to me to give up every slave.”

“Dreadful times!” the captive planter moaned. “I don’t see why they may not as well kill us as outrage us in this way; my stomach is in torture.”

“Here, drink from my flask,” the young man said; “don’t show it, for there’s not enough to go round, and we may want it yet for—”

“Our wounds,” replied the planter. “Sir, these men are demons. When they took me, they had studied my house till they knew every hole and corner of it.”

“They come in hyur,” spoke another person, “just befo’ the armory watch changed, and so they tuk everybody. That little Cook sot it all up. We suspected him from the quare people that come to his mother-in-law’s up yer on Union Street. He totched a school—”

“Taught it?” questioned Quantrell.

“Yes, totched our academy school up hyur by the Shinandoh, and, of cose, he picked out of the childern all about the comin’ and goin’.”

As this man ended, Lloyd observed that one of the late slaves of Mr. Washington had just opened daylight in the brick wall, and suddenly a leaden ball from outside struck this spot and came within a hair’s breadth of Isaac Smith and dropped into Quantrell’s hand, rebounding from the wall behind him.

“Here it is, Captain Brown,” Quantrell said; “it’s so hot I can’t hold it.”

“Yo’ kin pick away fur yo’self!” exclaimed the frightened negro, dropping his tool; “I’ll do no mo’ of it.”

As the negro slunk under the engine, his dreams of liberty departed, young Coppock took up the tool and began to widen the loophole. Two holes were thus made and manned, and balls came almost momentarily in the place. Some of the captives shrank, and others quietly looked at each other to give or take courage. The engine-house door was kept ajar, and just outside of it the young marksmen, black or white, replied with their rifles to every enemy. Quantrell now realized that Smith or Brown was at least twenty years the senior of every recruit he possessed.

“Is he a childish man to lead these boys,” thought Quantrell, “or are these boys manful as himself, to seek such danger?”

Through the large round windows near the ceiling the balls would come, ever and anon, making the brick-dust fly, or glinting fire upon the metal of the engine; yet not a person within was struck, and old Brown paid no more attention to these balls than if they had been of paper and thrown at a schoolmaster. Sometimes his look was anxious, and he asked a subordinate once why his re-enforcements did not come. Finally, his son, Watson Brown, came in, with a blanched look, and sank down upon his hams, speechlessly.

“My son, are you wounded?” the old man questioned.

“I think I’m hit,” said Watson Brown, whose skin had become the color of white dust in the street. “I feel queer, father.”

Quantrell had already opened the young man’s coat and removed his accoutrements. He found a perforation in his garment, and blood, and passed his hand around the lad’s body. Watson Brown seemed to have swooned, for he said:

“Is that you, Bell? Oh, let me see the little fellow!”

“Wake up, Watson!” Quantrell spoke; “it’s only a skin-wound. There’s no hole in you. Taste this whisky and you’ll be strong.”

Watson Brown pushed the flask away. His face slowly flushed up.

“Not shot?” he spoke; “no bad wound? Give me my gun!”

He was up, the blood warm again in his hopeful face, and his belt of weapons in his hands.

“Go, my son!” his father said, in a sort of dry interest. “Stand by your companions! We have a great cause.”

The young man fastened his belt around his body, looked at his gun and ammunition, and went cheerfully into the exposed yard.

“For all that,” muttered Quantrell, sinking beside the planter, and himself sick with the sight of blood, “there’s a hole in Watson Brown.”

“Poor boy!” exclaimed the planter; “bad as he is, I pity him.”

John Brown now walked into the armory-yard and began to listen to the sounds of shooting.

“I hear my guns,” he said to Coppock. “They must be my re-enforcements. Or, perhaps, they have disarmed my men.”

“Captain Brown,” said Coppock, “why don’t we hear from Captain Kagi? We’re holding High Street corner open by sentineling the arsenal wall, but nobody comes down from the Rifle-works!”

“I ordered Kagi,” said John Brown, “not to fire upon anybody; merely to hold his ground, and, if attacked, to retire upon us here. He could not defend himself there till re-enforced.”

“I calkelate he’s surrounded,” said Coppock.

John Brown opened the engine-house door and called two men in from their posts:

“Hazlett, come here! Bring Lehman with you!”

The two men appeared, in military precision, belted, blanketed, alert, and armed to the teeth.

“I want you to proceed to the Rifle-works and find how matters go with Kagi. The citizens are behaving very badly, and you will need a hostage.”

He looked around and his eye fell on Quantrell.

“Take that man,” John Brown concluded. “He is intelligent, and will understand that your safety is also his.”

“Come, march!” spoke Hazlett to Quantrell, his dull hazel eyes flashing unamiably.

“Go out in front,” the bright-faced Lehman said, peeping at his gun-stock critically; “the man who can sing ‘Home, Sweet Home’ can find his way back to it, I guess.”

---

 

CHAPTER XIX.

FIRST CADET SLAIN.

Approaching the Rifle-works and the Shenandoah, Lehman, Hazlett, and Quantrell observe the remants of Kagi’s men taking flight, and Kagi’s death at the hands of assorted men from Harper’s Ferry, militia arriving from Martinsburg, and even “little boys, some firing old horse-pistols, others throwing stones.” Retreating back to town, Lloyd and his captors encounter Ashby, along with a hailstorm of gunshots. The firing causes Lehman to say:

“Albert, I shall go by the upper yard. ‘Twon’t do for both of us to be took. You go by the town and take these two men along. One of us, I calkelate, if not both, will get to Captain Brown that way.”

The two men clasped each other’s hands.

“Fight, Will, and never be taken!” Hazlett said.

“I’ll do my best, Albert. If the worst comes, we’ve got friends across the river — and friends up yonder, too!”

He looked to heaven.

“Forward now, both of you!” Hazlett exclaimed, as Lehman disappeared down the raveling face of the heights, and he drove Ashby and Quantrell down the road before him, his rifle and eye equally sentient and ready.

“Ashby,” whispered Quantrell, “by hurrying, you may cross the Potomac Bridge before the troops in Maryland seize it. Remember my directions! Go to Bosler’s, in Catoctin Valley. Here is all my money. Let Luther go and buy you.”

“God bless you, mosster!” said the negro, huskily; “I’ll try to git away!”

No sympathetic light was in the man Hazlett’s eyes, and he watched them both with a merciless energy, the greater because he was now wholly self-dependent.

Quantrell remembered the acts of rowdyism he had assisted in toward unarmed and helpless foreigners, and wondered if it was in the remembrance of mercy to save his life. He remembered the contemptuous idea he had entertained of the courage of “Yankees,” whom he had nearly included among the “foreigners,” and asked himself if he dared, even with the negro Ashby’s neutrality, or possible help, to fall upon this hard, self-reliant, unadorned fellow in the rear, and contend with him to the death.

He turned twice, with this thought in his mind, and, steady as a common, regular soldier of the line, Hazlett was looking at him with his eyes, and, Lloyd thought, with his wrists too, so supple were those wrists with weapons and sensibility.

“He is a Western man,” mused our hero; “all of them are Western men. What is this West I have heard so little of in my geography? When did it arise? And is it all for abolition?”

They now had entered the short, closely settled, down-hill portion of the street, where shops, sign-posts, small bay-windows, lower areas and ladders into back yards, upper verandas, mechanics’ stalls, flights of stairs toward precipices, overhanging dormers, flaunting clothes on clothes-lines, and all the accompaniments of a disturbed or suddenly deserted town, closed around them tattered and grimy in the narrow throat of Harper’s Ferry.

Guns and pistols and old blunderbusses began to rattle again in the hollow depths of the place, and the rain drizzled from the spotted sky above. At the foot of the street they saw the dog Albion, barking at a hog that was too familiar with the dead body of Newby, lying there.

No forms were to be seen in the street, but the heads of some men appeared, beneath the stoops or basements of porches, all turned down toward the dead negro and the street which crossed that one Quantrell was descending. The reason for this was plain when, in a moment, two men, like Brown’s followers, stepped out from the arsenal side there and fired up the street.

The men down in the intrenched and recessed basements of the shops returned the fire in another instant.

“This way!” Hazlett called, hoarsely, pointing up the hill to the right.

A scrap of street found lodgment in there, and, going the same way as the High Street, soon left it far below.

In the intensity of the moment Quantrell saw all things in the view — the chimneys, the chickens picking garbage in the street, carts uptilted at the curbs, plastered walls, and stone and brick escarpments on the roofs, uneven pavements of blue limestone, wild children yet without breakfast screaming or sleeping up the tenement halls and alleys; and, finally, the Catholic church at the cornice and ridge of everything, holding its pale golden cross to the moody heavens, and by its side the bell, suspended in a derrick of timber, seemed to be taking a second nap after having called in vain for others to arise.

Again the Shenandoah was seen beyond the mills and islands, cowering as it ran beneath the great gnarled mountain. Again, the mighty, scarred form of Maryland Heights reared back like a beheaded buffalo. The blended rivers, breaking in ripples over gridirons of rock, went down the mountain vistas like fugitive hosts of dead-faced people, flying from the wrath of Nature; or the volcano’s lava-channel in the sheen of the moon.

But in this general awe there was indifference too — the indifference of the great to the little, of the torpid to the quick; the indifference of the basking crocodile to the bees upon his jaws; the inconsiderateness of mountains, after their convulsion, to the writhing of the birds that serpents in their bowels charm; the languor of old geology in its nap of cycles to the newsboy’s darling revolution of some few people slain in riots.

John Brown had made no impression upon the trance of Nature. The hollow ear of heaven bending overhead considered him not — he, nor the perishing insects he had disciplined for another skirmish in the brief antiquity of freedom.

“Ashby, I see the men in Maryland yonder. You have time to cross the bridge — just time, not a moment to spare!”

“Come on, then, and go before!” cried Hazlett, descending the ragged natural steps from the church to the street.

As they crept down these steps, shot rattled in the High Street below, and Quantrell and Ashby hesitated.

“I’ll take a shot,” spoke Hazlett, with a deadly zest for combat in his heavy eyes; and, stepping down, he raised his gun and fired up the street.

“I left my mark that time,” Hazlett said, surveying his work and opening his rifle-breech. “Now for the next slave-catcher!”

He had barely spoken when a ball or wad, or other instrument of percussion, struck his cartridge-box, and it began to explode, like Chinese fire-crackers. One by one the deadly projectiles broke forth, each with its cylinder of lead, and Hazlett sought in vain to throw it away from him, but the belt would not come loose. He danced in a frenzy of endeavor and apprehension, balls tearing his clothes, others whizzing near Quantrell’s head; and the sight was so ludicrous that, as Lloyd threw himself down, he began to laugh till the tears came to his eyes.

“He’s all fired out, I reckon, now,” Ashby exclaimed, as the explosions ceased. “What mus’ I do?”

“Run for the bridge! Tell him to run with you! Remember Crampton’s Gap, the Catoctin Valley, and Jake Bosler’s farm.”

“I’m goin’,” said the negro. “Come, Mr. Hazlett, fo’ yo’ life!”

As Hazlett turned to look at Quantrell, the latter had a rock in his hand.

“I’ll kill you if you come here!” Quantrell cried; “your carbine is empty and your cartridges are all gone. Keep off!”

Hazlett slipped across the street into the lane by the river. In a moment Lloyd saw him appear in the space before the armory-gate, where he hesitated, as if thinking to turn in. The negro Ashby dashed past him and ran toward the bridge.

Being fired upon from the houses and hill-tops, Hazlett affected to be aiming his empty piece, and, stooping down and backing off, he finally disappeared behind the corner at the arsenal, and next was seen upon the bridge, running after Ashby at the top of his speed.

The soldiers on the Maryland shore were very near the bridge, also, and now began to run toward it, firing their pieces.

It was a race for life with Hazlett and his associate.

In another moment Quantrell saw both these men emerge from the distant end of the bridge, and steal along the base of the heights toward Pleasant Valley and the roofs of Sandy Hook.

“I’ve made a banker of a negro, who has every inducement to run away,” Lloyd Quantrell said, “and yet, I don’t believe he will; for, queerly enough, I never heard of a negro committing a breach of trust.”

He peeped around the abutments of rock and houses at the foot of the stone steps.

Some townspeople were huddled beneath a low porch, looking down intently at an object they also sought to raise.

“That may be Hazlett’s victim,” Quantrell thought. “I’ll see.”

He came unarmed with raised hands among them, merely saying “Prisoner,” and looked down at the form of an athletic, bleeding man on the stones of an old stoop or arcade.

“Lay him back, that-a-way, like a ossifer!” said one of the men, rifle in hand, seeking to see both the street-corner and the dead man. “He’s a West-P’inter, an’ they likes to die with their shoulders stiff.”

Stretched out upon the stones of Harper’s Ferry, the first graduate of the United States Military Academy, to perish in the conflict of slavery, lay trembling in the rich red chevron of his heart’s blood.

---

 

CHAPTER XX.

GAULT HOUSE.

“THREE citizens already killed; that is, two citizens and a nigger,” Quantrell heard remarked, as he slipped across the Shenandoah Street to the railroad there, and, passing behind the arsenal, gained the exposed saloon on the railroad-track, where he had fought the Logans only sixteen hours before.

He now saw a sign over the door of this single-story frame saloon, “Gault House.”

It was a cheap, perishable building, without social position or appearance, and yet, in the inconsistency of time, it remains down to the author’s day, one of the three unimpaired monuments of ruined Harper’s Ferry: these three monuments are the Catholic church on the hill, John Brown’s Engine-House or “Fort” in the desolate armory-yard, and this saloon by the Shenandoah bridge — representatives of the three active principles of our century: Tradition, Revolution, and Alcohol — other words for Faith, Hope, and the Poor-House, or Charity; and now, as of old, the greatest of these is Alcohol or Charity.

“Let me in!” cried Quantrell, and, the door opening, he leaped in, and there was instant darkness.

“Who are you?” said a familiar voice.

“Why, Mr. Beall, I’m Mr. Quantrell, who made your acquaintance last night”; and there arose upon the dark the fine, natural tones of our hero, singing:

“Glenorchy’s proud mountains, Coalchuirn and her towers,
 Glenstrae, and Glenlyon, no longer are ours:
 We’re landless, landless, landless, Grigalach!”

The song brought admiration and low inquiries, “Who is he?” and John Beall vouched for Quantrell’s courage; and when Lloyd told that he had been a prisoner, and what he had seen of Kagi’s band falling, and of Turner’s death but an instant before, all breathlessly listened, and then the back door was thrown open.

It was seen that a narrow and railed veranda ran along the back of the saloon, overhanging the foaming Shenandoah far below, and this veranda almost gave access to the Shenandoah bridge, whose rock abutment adjoined the saloon.

“Mr. Quantrell,” spoke Beall, his face serious to the verge of gloom, “a few of us are holding this place with the greatest caution, because we believe it to be the key of the situation. We keep the front closed and have fired no shot from here because the enemy with his rifles, from the engine-house, can riddle this thin building. We expect to kill him — all that there is left of him — when he retreats across the Potomac bridge. He must pass right in front of this house to get to the bridge, and we want to kill every man he has!”

The suppressed energy of the speaker called Quantrell’s attention.

“Why, John,” he said, “you would pity the poor devils if you had seen them, as I have, falling in the river, lying in the streets, hungry, absurd, misled, weeded out.”

“No,” replied Beall, trembling, “I want to kill every man of them! We’re lying low here, to shoot them down at their last chance! We let one scoundrel pass just now, lest we might draw every rifle in that engine-house upon us and spoil our full revenge, sir.”

“Indeed, you’re a Scotchman, John, and Highlander too, I reckon. But, of course, I’m with you. Where’s William Thompson, the raider who guarded the Shenandoah bridge?”

“Taken. He’s over in the hotel.”

Beall’s eyes smoldered, and his eyebrows and mouth were both drawn straight and hard.

“How did you capture the bridge?”

“From this saloon. We crept upon the guard, an unsuspecting fellow, and getting him fast, sent a detachment across the bridge to kill any who might escape from the Rifle-works.”

Not a smile nor gratulation was in all this; a devout Indian, reciting the fate of the enemies he had doomed for the manes of his father, might have been less intense.

“I saw them die, John. It was a terrible scene.”

“I should like to have witnessed it. But the leader is still yonder!”

He pointed to the engine-house, with a face drawn so hard together from the jaw to the skull, that every feature seemed to be a plain line. Reflective hate lay coldly there, incapable now of other joy.

Quantrell looked at the other occupants of the sinister place — at the saloon-keeper, with long, fox-red beard, who was continually stroking it, and with eyes wide apart.

“Forty drops,” said the saloon-keeper. “Come up!”

He went behind the dusky bar and set the bottle out, and peeped through a hole in the shutter at the engine-house — laying hand, meanwhile, upon the long revolver there, which had been in Lloyd’s custody the night before.

“They’re all caged in the engine-house,” the saloon-man said. “Hello! yonder’s one coming down the yard.”

They peeped successively at the hole, and, when Lloyd’s turn came, he saw in the vista of the armory-yard two men, one with a gun, keeping the other man between him and a party of armed men, who now and then fired a shot, but, seeking not to injure the hostage, they did no execution.

“That’s Lehman!” Quantrell exclaimed. “And, upon my word, the fellow running is Andrew Atzerodt!”

“Here, gentlemen,” the warm-bearded saloon-keeper spoke; “we’ll close the back door, and that will darken the room, so we may see, and be unseen, out of the glass door, by keeping back from the light a little.”

He raised the blind, and they could all see.

The landlord brought out his pistol, which was nearly as long as one of the outlaws’ rifles, and it had a skeleton breech which made it a veritable gun to rest against his shoulder. He rolled the great steel chamber, charged with six slugs like Minié balls, between his thumb and finger, to see if it was true and well oiled.

“I hope there’s a dead man in every cartridge,” he said. “That’s my pious design.”

They all gazed at the boy Lehman, skirmishing with twenty enemies. The balls from the hills and town would tear up the ground around him and cut twigs from the elm and maple trees, and Atzerodt would fall upon the ground till Lehman’s rifle covered him, and then he would start up with wide, imploring arms, only to be paralyzed by the open muzzle of the rifle.

“That boy’s dead game,” the saloon-keeper said; “but our friends are shooting very poor.”

“Lehman don’t want to kill anybody,” Quantrell said. “He can drop a man with every ball, if he wants to.”

They now observed one man at the angle of a building behind Lehman, deliberately aiming at his back. The pistol exploded, but only Atzerodt fell down, and lay like one stone-dead.

Lehman turned upon the man, whose gun was now uncharged, and raised his rifle at him.

The man fell on his knees.

“Now he’ll blow his head right off!” said the saloon-keeper.

As they looked, in the excitement of almost mortal suspense, they saw Lehman knock the pistol out of the man’s hand and disappear behind the same angle of wall from which his assassination had been sought.

Atzerodt jumped up and ran at the top of his speed.

The man whose life had been spared, rose to his feet and quickly reloaded, rammed and capped his pistol, and started in the direction Lehman had gone.

“Forty drops,” said the saloon-keeper. “Come up!”

Every man around the bar had a weapon of some kind, and they drank with the zest of hunters. Beall alone was abstinent and brooding.

“Will this insult upon Virginia ever be wiped off?” he said to Quantrell.

“We entertained your invaders in Maryland,” Quantrell replied; “that must be atoned for.”

All looked carefully at their weapons, like fishermen inspecting their tackle. The splutter of gunnery in the street was continued.

“Gentlemen,” spoke Quantrell, “I want to see the fate of little Lehman, and, by your leave, I’ll make a dash for the railway-station.”

Before there could be objection, he had opened the door and closed it behind him.

A very few steps brought him upon the railroad bridge, and he looked in wonder at the changed scene around him.

Men were everywhere — upon both bridges, on the strands of the rivers, upon both shores opposite, and crowding the railway-station and fringing the hills; and from every safe place guns were shooting at the little engine-house in the armory-yard, which began to show the marks of a bombardment: its doors were ripped and splintered, the trees around it clipped of twigs and stems; and yet it was languidly returning fire from the fresh port-holes and from the partly open doors, where now a man could be seen crouching and another standing.

As Quantrell came to the station and hotel, he heard a voice cry:

“O Heywood, speak! What will yo’ po’ wife say to me. — He’s gone. He’s dead! Now get me a gun. I want a robber’s life!”

Lloyd saw the negro porter lying still, and felt his body, which was already partly cold.

“I know whaw I can find a pistol,” spoke the mayor of the town and station agent; “I’ll git it and return.”

He dashed toward the Gault House saloon, and Quantrell swung down the railway trestle-work to the Potomac strand and crept along that churning river, stooping low. There were men lying flat upon their breasts from point to point, seeking to send a shot into the engine-house, and nearly every trestle-post had thus its revenger.

Running fast, the Baltimorean soon had passed most of the armory buildings, but was arrested by the whizzing of a ball within an inch, as it seemed, of his head.

He glanced across the river, in Maryland, and saw a puff of smoke rising from a place along the lower mountain-side; beneath the smoke was a human form. Quantrell’s eyes were keen, and he made out the person to be his late assailant, little Captain Cook.

If Cook it was, he had a fall in greatness, for shots from Harper’s Ferry hills passed over Quantrell’s head, and the person upon the mountain was seen in another instant to be rolling down the slope and then to lie quite still.

Lloyd’s attention was immediately drawn to a man running from the upper end of the armory-yard right into the brawling and, at places, dangerous Potomac.

From pool to pool, and eddy to eddy, and from rock to rock, this man continued on, rapid, lithe, active, and manifestly meaning to ford the entire river or to perish in it.

The reason was soon manifest: a large body of armed men, in compact order, came across the armory mill-race and fired a volley at the fugitive.

He fell and lost his gun, but in a moment was up again, and he crawled upon a dry rock far out in the river and feebly held up his hands.

Quantrell could see, even then, a cheerful look, like a smile, upon his almost child-like face.

“Lehman!” was Lloyd’s inward recognition; “I’m glad he surrenders — his eyes are so beautiful!”

The firing ceased; but one man was also rapidly wading the river toward Lehman, and something about him seemed familiar.

“Why, that’s the man,” Quantrell inwardly remarked, “whose life Will Lehman saved but a minute ago. It’s natural that he should want to save the poor lad’s life.”

The man went on and did not hesitate, for Lehman continued to show the genial countenance of one submitting to capture, and to spread his hands apart in the hallowed way our common Saviour died.

The man came right upon him but did not grapple with him.

Lehman seemed to speak to him, pleasantly, and Lloyd thought he could see the boy’s large eyes bright with pain and gratitude.

The man suddenly pulled a pistol from his pocket, pointed it at Lehman’s face, so close that he nearly touched it, and fired.

A cry of mixed exultation and horror burst from the soldiers on the shore.

Lehman fell upon the rock helpless, with a great hole in his face.

The man returned the pistol to his garments and drew a knife, and began to cut the skirts and pockets from Lehman’s clothes.

By the stillness of the form upon the rock, Lloyd knew that Death, the invisible vulture, had as instantly alighted there.

The man now waded ashore, bearing papers and other things taken from the dead man.

“Fall in, Martinsburgers!” the command rang out; “we’ll carry the engine-house next!”

They marched down the armory-yard, and Quantrell was left alone.

He also waded into the water and made his way toward Lehman.

The boy lay silent upon the stone, the roaring rapids being his lullaby. His head had fallen backward, and his hairs were toyed with by the cool waters.

“Will, look up! I’m your friend!”

The late tired legs of Lehman, which had walked all night and day upon a willful yet immortal errand — crossing the river to and from the farm three times in one night and morning — clasped the stone in the rigid manner of one who meant to hold fast and to bear testimony.

How solemn, how awful, seemed the sighing waters to Quantrell, waist-deep in them! No noise besides filled the air. It was as lonely as being drowned, to stand alone beside this uncomplaining man.

Quantrell bent over the rock, but only once.

What he saw there was too horrible for him ever to repeat.

Steadying himself upon the stone, Lloyd saved himself from swooning, though sick to the temples. He dipped his head into the waters, but, when he lifted it, some of Lehman’s blood in the water fell down upon his hands.

“He asked me to sing, ‘somewheres down among the bushes and rocks,’ the words of ‘Sweet Home.’ I’ll do it among the waters and rocks, for it will be his only Christian burial.”

Quantrell raised his voice and sang:

“Home, home, sweet home!
 There’s no place like home —
 There’s no place like home.”

“Poor lad!” he finished, “there’s no home for him now but where he ‘calculated’ it was ever sunny.”

With a tear in his eye, Quantrell turned to the shore, and when he gained it he looked back once, and Lehman lay there still, like one of nature’s bowlders rolled in the deluges of time.

As Lloyd picked his way down the armory-yard he marked the powerful water accompanying the long line of shops, conducted behind them in a stone canal and, after driving wheels and cogs, grindstones and automatic turning-lathes, drills and trip-hammers, the mill-water then gushed beneath the ground, in arched places, to be used in a second line of shops, and then to fall back into the Potomac.

Here a gun-stock had fallen to perfection every eight seconds; every day of earnest labor manufactured sixty muskets; the doing of death was the soulful motive of the town; but to-day it was all distraught that barely two of its white men had been killed with arms in their hands.

As he drew near the little engine-house, our hero dropped behind the office-buildings just west of it; a lull had taken place in the firing, for the grimy operatives from the railway-shops of Martinsburg were to charge John Brown’s little fort.

Quantrell saw them deployed to assail the nearest, or watch-house end, on three sides at once.

A man was slinking out of the column, and Quantrell recognized him.

“Contemptible assassin! Give me your gun.”

It was the man whose life Lehman had saved, and who had returned the gift with death.

There was something queer about the gun he had wrested from the man; it came open at the breech, as if there was a hinge in the barrel.

“Pooh!” exclaimed Quantrell, “this is one of Hall’s Harper Ferry rifles, a Yankee invention, thrown out by the regular army board.”

He threw the gun down, yet lived to see the day when the “breech was more honored than the observance” of military boards; for by a similar needle-gun the winding-sheet of Napoleonism came to be sewed by Germany. America fought her great civil war loading muskets at the muzzle, when she could have been foremost of the nations with a Yankee breech-loader, thrown out of Harper’s Ferry by military bigotry, twenty years before.

In the quick revulsions of a day of action and hunger, intemperance and fear, mystery and passion, Lloyd Quantrell had ripped a plank out of the porch of a small building labeled “Superintendent’s Office,” and crying, “Come on!” he dashed among the foremost of the militia, from whom a mighty yell went up.

To the yell the response was the throwing open of the engine-house doors.

Half a dozen boyish men, with John Brown at their head, stepped upon the sward and poured a little volley into these hundred herculean militia.

Among the defenders Quantrell could see the ashen face of Watson Brown, rallying up from death and standing by his rifle. His father waved the sword of King Frederick and called “Fire!”

It was but a minute that this startling picture of a handful of farm-boys, directed by an old man’s face in which was the very delight of battle, lasted upon the afternoon. The militia, after a broken fire, dispersed with groans and curses; and some, in the frenzy of fear, leaped the high brick wall behind the block-house, astonished at their own feat of strength.

As the defenders retired, they dragged one boyish form back with them, which had settled down upon its hands, as if the ligaments of the tough limbs had all at once given way: the face, of unspeakable emotion, was that of young Oliver Brown; he looked like one caught by some reptile and bitten in twain, while he was yet rejoicing.

Quantrell pushed in the round-topped windows of the watch-room end of the engine-house, with the plank he carried, and forced the plank over the window-frames.

“Break out!” he shouted, raising himself by the wrists to the window-level; “they won’t fire on you!”

He also leaped over the tall brick wall and fell into the River Street, exhausted.

In a few minutes the released prisoners from the watch-house also came up.

“Where’s Washington, and Alstadt, and — ole Ball?” Quantrell asked.

“Why, ole Isaac Smith — he picked all them big fish out half a hour ago and tuk ’em in the engine-house part. ‘I want you,’ he says. ‘And you! And you!’ He’s got nine or ten, I reckon, in thar, yit.”

Lloyd returned to the Gault House saloon around the arsenal wall, and at the alley there lay the dead Newby still, staring at eternity.

A strange quiet had fallen upon the town since the determined action of the bandits and their easy defeat of the burly Martinsburgers — several of whom had received wounds; a quiet partly induced, too, by the cold-blooded slaying of Lehman, which few had seen without compassion and awe. There were none in the streets but the dead, and all private attempts to storm John Brown’s fort ceased from that time forward.

Entering the Gault House, a man escaping from the interior fell in the dark into Quantrell’s arms.

“Let me go!” the stranger cried; “I’ve lost my poor black ward. I’ll have a life for Heywood!”

The door closed upon him, and Quantrell breathlessly asked for liquor.

“Forty drops!” said the saloon-keeper. “Come up!”

It was now that Beall, the young Virginian, shook off a portion of his hard demeanor and commenced to ask Lloyd the particulars about Smith’s or Brown’s band: it seemed to have a charmed interest for him, less to appease his indignation than to awaken a latent thirst he betrayed for individual feats of danger, and to concentrate his mind upon the chief enemies of his State and neighborhood.

“Tell me, sir, as nearly as you can, who are the leaders in this foray. We must be sure to kill the right ones; the residue will do for the gallows.”

“Next to Isaac Smith,” replied Lloyd, “who calls himself Brown, was Kagi, who lies dead up the Shenandoah; but the best soldier of them all is the third in command, Captain Stevens.”

“We’ll mark him!” muttered Beall. “What is that coming yonder?”

They looked through the window, keeping well back in the dark, and saw four men coming out of the armory-gate; two of these were unarmed, and one hoisted a white cloth attached to a stick.

“That’s Kitz,” said one of the voices in the dark; “t’other’s a citizen. It seems to be a flag of truce.”

“I know the men behind,” Quantrell added — “the two with rifles; the boyish figure is Ned Coppock. He’s a handsome fellow, and good-natured. The stoutish, manly fellow is Aaron Stevens. He’s a lion.”

“Get your gun,” Beall said. “The time’s come for it!”

“All steady, now,” remarked the saloon-keeper; “no one must speak. I want to let him have every ball.”

He raised the skeleton-breeched revolver to his shoulder and took aim, the rest standing silently in the rear.

Right on walked the four men, the two hostages covering the two raiders in front, until they came abreast of the hotel beneath the station, when, at a word from Stevens, the hostages stepped upon the flanks, thus opening to the saloon-keeper’s revolver the bodies of Stevens and Coppock.

Quantrell, in spite of his late vow of “Death to abolitionists!” felt that he would give the world to cry out and plead: “It is a flag of mercy. Do not kill them!”

Proud of bearing, full-bearded, his brown eyes keen but independent, his military shoulders carried erect without effort or stiffness, his dark-brown hair adding to the warmth of his bright skin and red, youthful lips, Stevens had his gun across his shoulder; he kept his eyes upon the bridge before him, and walked on as confidently as a regular soldier upon parade.

None in the saloon looked at any other person; this man was so strong, superior, and chieftain-like that the light of human eyes shone only upon him and seemed to glaze him into a Rembrandtish brightness and halo, and they could almost hear his broad lungs breathe.

The great pistol went off — once, twice, thrice! Quantrell shut his eyes.

Once, twice, thrice again, it spoke metallic decision, and with that regularity and interval of sound which showed the perfect nerve, deliberation, and aim of the firer.

The saloon was full of sulphur-smell, but of little smoke.

Quantrell opened his eyes.

There lay on the ground, a few paces from the door, an effigy or broken stalk of man, nothing of it moving but the broad chest, and that with a snarling, convulsive sound and struggle.

The hostages were not to be seen. Coppock was entering the armory-gate, and there a little band of the raiders poured out from the engine-house, and he and they fired with spirit, but only to draw upon themselves a roaring volley from near the bridge, like that of soldiery.

“Forty drops.” said the saloon-keeper, wiping his piece with a yellow silk handkerchief. “Come up.”

Amid exclamations of “Glorious!” “Grand!” and the sucking of liquids and the shaking of hands, Lloyd Quantrell opened the door and, despite the glancing of bullets over railroad-iron and street-gravel, he fell upon his hands and knees and crawled toward the prostrate form.

He saw in an instant what errand Stevens had walked forth upon. The Potomac bridge was full of soldiery just come from Maryland, and to these Stevens must have been sent with a proposition of surrender or truce, when the unrespecting assassin had emptied a revolver into his living frame.

“Now some other citizen will surely be killed,” Quantrell reflected, “not only to avenge this dead comrade, but the raiders will kill to protect themselves from massacre. I reckon their blood is up.”

A sound came from the large form stretched upon the ground.

“If you are a man and I am but a dog, come to me!”

There was in this sound something of involuntary woe, like mortal agony soliloquizing to its pain, or the “loud voice about the ninth hour” on Calvary, saying, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”

A woman from the hotel ran toward the prostrate man, careless of danger in the strong impulse of her pity, and Quantrell also rose to his feet.

They lifted the body up; it was limp, and had nothing whole to stand upon — shot in the members, the trunk, the head, and having received, like a target from a practiced hand, every ball where the marksman thought fit to deliver it.

“Save him!” screamed the woman; “he belongs to some home, maybe.”

Quantrell raised the body to his shoulder and slung it there like a dead deer; and stalked away with it to the hotel where he had slept.

“Kill him! Drown him! Tear him to pieces!” yelled many voices, in the safe hiding of the station.

“Curs!” exclaimed Quantrell, facing them once, “go yonder and kill at the engine-house, where you are fifty to one!”

As he entered a room in the hotel where he was directed, another man came forward and said, cheerfully:

“Aaron, do you know me?”

“Good-by, Thompson!” sighed the bleeding form.

“You are not going to die, Aaron?”

“Not me,” Stevens muttered. “Oh, no! Good-by to you!”

“Who tells you that, Aaron?”

“Spirits,” whispered the man, swooning away.

The room filled up with drunken, excited, or cowardly individuals, uttering imprecations, insulting William Thompson, the prisoner, and threatening to throw the body of Stevens out of the window. Quantrell picked out a little guard of weak but better-meaning men, and by a doctor’s aid cleared the room.

“Thompson,” he, said, after this exertion, “what labor you have taken to make all this misery!”

“I didn’t come, Mr. Quantrell, on any picnic. You and me will only die once. I’m just as ready to die for man now as I was yesterday.”

“Don’t you want to live?”

“Of course. Life never was as sweet to me as it is at this minute, because it’s so uncertain now. But I brought my life along and put it in the cause; and, if it’s wanted, I’ll give it to Liberty.”

“Nonsense!” exclaimed Quantrell. “Liberty to slaves, not one of whom has had the courage to fight for his own salvation!”

“No nonsense, Mr. Quantrell, to the many millions more still to be born, and to look back, perhaps, to this day’s sorrows for their deliverance. Women don’t fight for their freedom, neither, but still have men gone to women’s rescue. It was because slaves didn’t fight that we came to fight for them.”

The door here burst open, and a young man entered with a gun. He looked around an instant, and approached the helpless man upon the bed.

“Villain!” he suddenly cried, “you’ve killed my kinsman, and I’m going to kill you this minute!”

Before any person could interfere, he had pulled the trigger, with the muzzle of the gun at Stevens’s throat.

The lock fell, but the cap did not explode.

Stevens had been stripped naked, for the doctor to dress his wounds. As Quantrell sprang forward, he observed the fine hazel eyes of Stevens to be wide open, and gazing with a most undaunted calmness into the assassin’s face.

The other man blanched before that unshaken fortitude and almost eloquent contempt. Well he might have been alarmed, also, at the wounded man’s athletic breast, solid arms, great shoulders, and Apollo-like strength in everything; his white body flawless except where torn by lead, and his soul reinhabiting that mangled frame, like an eagle returned suddenly to its nest.

“If I had a gun and could get off this bed,” said Stevens, without an inflection, “you, and ten more like you, would jump out of that window!”

Quantrell sprang upon the intruder, who had already retreated before Stevens’s steady gaze, and Lloyd put the door behind him.

“You’re a great man, Stevens,” Lloyd Quantrell said, looking down at the hero in admiration. “What made you wake just at that minute of danger?”

“My guardian angel,” Stevens sighed, and closed his eyes in slumber again.

Quantrell locked the door and stretched himself upon the floor within it, and also slumbered a little while. He went to sleep, and he awoke to the continual spluttering explosions of fire-arms.

As he was relieved by other persons of the watch in this prisoner’s place, he stepped out to the railroad platform in time to see an old, stout man peep around the water-tank, desperate to have a shot at the people in the engine-house.

The moment this man peeped, there came a sound of wood ripped by a ball.

“Tey’ve hit te tank!” exclaimed the voice of Atzerodt, at Quantrell’s elbow.

“They’ve hit the man, too,” Quantrell said; for he had seen the large form of the old gentleman pitch forward and fall upon his head, and there lie motionless upon the planks of the platform he so long commanded.

People dragged the old gentleman back by the legs and laid him beside his negro servant, stone-dead; black and white man, loving each other in life, in death had not long been divided.

“The Mayor of Harper’s Ferry,” thought Quantrell, “pays for the violation of the flag of armistice. I believe Ned Coppock fired that shot for Captain Stevens.”

It was now the middle of the afternoon, and whisky had done its work on many an empty stomach, while combat had made courageous men fierce, and cowardly men bloodthirsty.

A cry arose. “Kill that prisoner! Fountain Beckham’s dead!”

If the utterer of this instigation had desired, in the same breath, to call it back, he would have been too late.

The dead mayor had been of a large family connection, and his cousins and nephews heard the cry of “revenge,” in Virginia natures, where Scotch and pioneer traits and traditions lay ever near the passion for private feud and retaliation.

The hotel quickly filled up with young men who had not dared to expose their bodies, like the late rash and loving old man. The woman who had befriended Stevens threw herself before young William Thompson’s body, and begged his life in vain. He was pushed and dragged toward the railway platform, and, for every hand which impelled him onward, another held a pistol to kill him. Voices derided him; and other voices raised the yell of battle, thousands of times repeated in after-years among these “blue-ridged hills.”

“To the bridge! To the bridge with him! Kill him! Kill him!”

Lloyd Quantrell saw his pointer-dog leap joyfully among the murderers and bark with all his venom, and show his yellow eyes, and shake the flies from his blood-clotted ear. Lloyd saw the dirty visage of Atzerodt, crazed with the liquor his blood-money had procured, waving his fluttering hands and full of white-livered zeal, and heard him shout:

“Hang him! Hang him to te bridge!”

The crowd swayed and reeled forward, and the woman threw herself in its path only to be pulled aside. Toward the Potomac bridge it went, and skirmisher’s before it, and stragglers behind, were seen to be picking the locks of rusty fire-arms, and trying flints and percussion-caps, in all the ardor for human prey. The black birds at the chimneys of Loudoun Mountain circled there, indifferent to the carcass that was being prepared for them by mankind.

Lloyd Quantrell determined to labor for that man’s life. He caught a glimpse of Mr. Beall at the outskirts of the mob and called to him:

“Let us save his life for the law — and for shame!”

Beall shook his head, and muttered, with skull and chin pinched together at the thin lips:

“No, sir. He has dishonored Virginia!”

There were, however, some plaintive old Germanic faces there, ready to kindle to compassion when Quantrell raised the cry:

“Give him a chance! Don’t murder him, gentlemen! Don’t let us disgrace Virginia!”

“To hell mit him!” cried Atzerodt. “He kilt a good man.”

“Revenge for Fountain Beckham!”

“Revenge for George Turner!”

“Revenge for Tom Boerly!”

These victims’ names arose like tongues of fire amid the tiny streams of pity.

“Give him a trial!” shouted Quantrell. “You do not know who he is. His blood may splash you all.”

“Oh, yes, take time!” said a tall old man. “The law will stretch his neck.”

“Don’t kill him here,” cried the woman’s voice; “the court will try him soon enough!”

William Thompson had not spoken; his face was pale but with manly submission in it, and yet the love of life rose to his temples in a great fervor, once or twice.

A man pointed a gun at him; Thompson put his arms around the man and held him close to his breast and spoke across his shoulder in the partial silence of the hard-breathing murderers:

“Let me say a word. Then kill me if you ought to! My blood will never put out the fire started here to-day. A thousand lives like mine won’t do it — no, not a hundred thousand! Murder won’t count in favor of sin. Let all your slaves go free! That’s all we ask. It’s cheaper in the end!”

“Down with the abolitionist!”

“Kill the blasphemer!”

“Shoot the vile fanatic!”

They tried to tear him fast from any other man. Severed from one, he grappled to himself another, in the piteous search for some one feeling breast. He spoke no more, except to cling to living frames and cover his own with living hearts. The contest drew tears from some, and others closed their eyes.

Finally, several men seized him by pinioning his arms, And then with their united power hurled him from them.

Half a dozen guns went off. He tottered and fell upon one hand. More guns were discharged.

“Father!” he cried, looking toward the engine-house, which was concealed by the hotel-building.

They fired upon him again and again.

His eyes, in pain of death, without a friend to call to, fell upon Lloyd Quantrell:

“Mr. Quantrell! Brother!”

“Drop! drop into the river!” Quantrell shouted, and pointed to the cool water below.

The dying man tottered to the edge of the planks and slipped through the hollow places there and fell into the roaring Potomac current.

“I’ll carry the white flag this time!” Quantrell said. “Nobody can save him but John Brown!”

He raised his hat upon a rod and walked straight into the armory-gate and disappeared in the engine-house.

William Thompson floated down the current a little way and lodged against some stones.

A discharge of fire-arms from the bridge stilled his hopes and pains forever.

All the rest of the afternoon his body was used for a target-match between the gunners, shooting from the bridge.

---

 

CHAPTER XXI.

ABEL QUANTRELL.

MONDAY morning, at Jake Bosler’s farm, found corn-shucking and fruit-drying, pickling and stewing sweets, the deep occupation of the women, of whom there were three, since Hannah Ritner had come over from Smoketown, uninvited, at an early hour, driven by Job Snowberger, the Baptist monk, whose Kloster (convent) name was Father Philodulus.

Job had grown up in the nunnery at Snow Hill, just over in Pennsylvania, and was nearly the last of the Monks of Seventh Day. He worked in the fields with threefold energy of Sundays, but his Saturdays were deeply religious ruminations, varied by the singing of Beissel’s Ephrata music, of which he was believed to be the last living renderer.

To look at, Philodulus was a long, thin man with little peeping eyes, and one side of his baggy face seemed cunning and blushing, and the other side mystic and austere. He called Hannah Ritner “Shweshter (sister) Marcella,” and paid great deference to her, while that large, considerate lady called him, according to her passing vein, “Job,” “Job Snow,” and “Philodulus.”

At the sound of “Job!” uttered with Hannah Ritner’s full decision, the hermit celibate would start up like a soldier to his arms; at the practical address of “Job Snow,” he would look wise and reproved; when Hannah called him “Bruder (brother) Philodulus,” blushes came to his froggy, loose skin, and he seemed about to fall upon his knees.

Job, the monk, was now sorely tempted, for Nelly Harbaugh, with mischief hardly delicate, had planted herself on one side of him and had pushed him back against the wall, while Katy Bosler was on Job’s other flank, and the kitchen dresser kept her from moving farther, and just in front of Philodulus was a wash-tub into which they all were peeling fruit, and across the wash-tub from Job, holding him fast, was Hannah Ritner with her great Jewish eyes.

“Bruder,” exclaimed Nelly Harbaugh, summoning Job’s attention by hitting him with her knee, and then leaning over and taking his thin, furzy beard in her hand, “would you take me into the Siebentager and let me be your own little nun?”

“Nay, unfershamed, barefaced! you would possess the whole kloster soon.”

The mystic and austere side of Job’s face was, nevertheless, trembling a little, and he leaned toward Katy Bosler’s large, modest eyes, and then the cunning and blushing side grew all dimpled as he piped in his high, falsetto voice:

“Sister Kate, you would not ask me that?”

Katy, full of laughter, cried:

“Oh, you would not invite me! I’m too little.”

“Unshuldich,” breathed the old bachelor, “sweet innocent, I do.”

“Job Snow!” Hannah Ritner spoke, with recalling common sense.

“There is a difference,” the brother said, throwing away the apple and dropping the apple-peeling in the tub; “te invitation of Nelly is to mock me. Unshicklich!” (Nelly had taken his hand with well-feigned rapture.) “I turn to Katy for to git purity. Te world will take advantage of so much goodness, and in our quiet convent we live like Him of old — like Yasus.”

“Philodulus,” Hannah Ritner spoke in her low, great voice, “when our sex is old and poor, then invite them to your rest; but the world would misunderstand young converts, like these maidens, appearing at Snow Hill.”

“Nay, Sister Marcella, te first of te Vorsteher Beissel’s tisciples was two married women, and one of those, Maria Sower, was very beautiful. It was her beauty he resisted with all his prayers, but half his psalms her beauty was te music of.”

“Sing to my eyes, Job!” Nelly Harbaugh entreated. — “Hannah, he daresn’t look at me without blushing.”

“Oh, sing to my love!” Katy involuntarily added, “and I will play, Job, on te accordion.”

“That is gone, Kate,” said Nelly Harbaugh; “you’ve given all your music away.”

“Nay,” Job Snowberger said, “I’ll sing for Katy te mourning-dove piece py Friedsam, when his soul was at peace, and love plagued it no more.”

“Philodulus,” Hannah Ritner sighed, “love plagues to the last. Often, in my girlhood, have I seen the Dunker nuns, at Ephrata and Snow Hill, carrying a lamb to which they gave the name of ‘Yasus,’ and dandled it upon their knees — it was the substitute for Nature’s human babe, and they professed to be in a mystical union with its divine namesake. But while the women at the nunnery played the mother with these substitutes till themselves grew old and withered, how many of the monks fell away from grace and married, long after domestic happiness had passed its day!”

“I am te last,” said Job Snowberger, “and I will persewere.”

“Pure, good man! Kiss him, Katy, and encourage him to persewere.”

Nelly Harbaugh, speaking, grasped Job Snowberger’s head in both her strong hands, and kissed him down upon Katy, who sat imprisoned there; and she, seeing no escape, and somewhat in the mischief of the moment, also gave the monk of fifty-five a little timid kiss.

He looked from one to the other in rapid changes of austerity and weakness.

“Unshicklich — improper one!” he spoke to Nelly Harbaugh; and then, turning to Katy, his face melted in all its harsher lines as he gave back her kiss and piped high, “Unshuldich!” — the innocent.

“Job!” spoke Hannah Ritner.

He looked at her, thus in Saint Anthony’s temptation, and burst into tears.

Katy was frightened. Nelly was studying Philodulus, the monk, with joyful analysis.

“My children,” Hannah Ritner said, looking with tender humor on the scene, “whichever way you go with Love, or go without him, he makes you cry. His pleasantest mood is spring, with little showers of tears. His summer zest is thunderstorm among these mountains. If Love deserts you, it is winter and frozen tears. But if he never comes at all, you cry, you know not why.”

She looked at the poor man and gave him some cider to drink, fresh from the press.

“Brother Philodulus, swallow your tears, as they drop into the cider; for they will come up many times again, and, after all, the tears of love are sweet — even those we shed to reject love.”

He sat down at her counsel, and behaved like a little boy, doing whatever was requested of him; and while they continued to peel apples, pears, and quinces, a sound came in at the window —

“Ah-coo-roo-coo-roo!”

“It is te doves,” Katy said. “It’s most time, I think, for tem to go South. Tey are waiting for te young ones to pe smart enough to fly. Tey puilt te nest last April. Come see it, Job.”

Job Snowberger’s hand Katy confidingly took in hers, and led him out to a low apple-tree nearly touching the house.

Upon a crotch of this tree, lower than their heads, sat, in an humble nest of dry grasses, two brown young doves. Above them, on the same bough, sat, side by side, the parent birds, unfluttered by visitors, and in brown and chestnut plumage and slate-colored crowns, cooing together.

“Ah-coo-roo-coo-roo!”

The little family had no brilliant marks upon them except a patch of bare pink skin under their chestnut-colored eyes, and toes of brownish red clinging to the boughs. A little purple warmed their breasts, which beat like Katy’s little form beneath her brown gown.

“Ah,-coo-roo-coo-roo!” murmured both the old doves and the young ones, also, as Katy came near.

“Tey are full of love, Job,” Katy said; “tey will fly down among te chickens and eat, and drink out of te trough py te horses. Tey are shy, but not suspicious. Two eggs is all te she-bird lays, and she hatches out of tem always a he-bird and a she:”

“What for?” Job Snowberger asked, with his austere side aggressive, after his late display of weakness.

“Job!” said Katy, “why, you know — to love one another!”

Job’s half-shut eyes looked down at Katy with an idiotic smile as he murmured, half harshly:

“Unshuldich!”

“Oh no, Job. I’m not ‘innocent’ like I was yisterday; I’m in love, too.”

“Unshicklich, Katy!”

“No, indeed. It can’t be ‘improper’ if it comes like religion, dear Job. That’s te way mine come to me.”

“Ah-coo-roo-coo-roo,” assented the she-dove from the tree, and sidling down the bough toward Katy.

“Te she-dove never trifles with another he-bird,” Katy said, “like so many other kinds of birds. I’ve set and watched those, ever since te 15th of April, when tey come here from te South. He’s all attention to her, too, and cares for no bird else.”

“Ah-coo-roo-coo-roo!” emphatically, from the tree, as the male bird trailed his wings, and puffed his breast up large, and paraded before his lady, and then fed her from his own bill.

“Unshicklich!,” improper, intimated Brother Philodulus, with a feminine turn of his head. “Katy, I can do something tender, too. I can sing the turtle-dove psalm.”

“Do, Job! My mate has taken my music with him, or I would help you a little.”

Job Snowberger, with a straightening of his lean figure and an expression between ecstasy and childishness, piped in the German tongue a little psalm we may translate together:

SEVENTH-DAY DUNKER HYMN.

“Coo-roo,” the turtle-dove complains,
   Whose spouse comes never near,
And leaves her, with a mother’s pains,
  Un-nested all the year:
“Coo-roo-ah-coo,” the birdling true
   Doth with itself condole —
So does the dove of Yasus coo
   In every lonely soul.

“Coo-roo,” the stricken monk or nun
   Within the kloster sighs,
By human sin or love undone,
   And hid from human eyes:
“Coo-roo-ah-coo!” that mate untrue
   Still fills dear Yasus’ place,
And you can hear the turtle coo
   In her despairing face.

“Coo-roo,” beside Ephrata’s brooks
   And in Antietam’s vale,
Comes in between the martyr-books
   The tender human tale:
“Coo-roo,” to Peter Miller, too,
   To Beissel and to all —
The turtle-dove so soft will coo,
   It seems like Yasus’ call!

“Coo-roo!” in vain we fly from Love,
   And world and flesh attack,
In vain we kill the human dove
   And set the Sabbath back;
“Coo-roo-ah-coo!” Love will undo
   The washing white of springs,
And only Yasus never knew
   How strong the turtle sings.

“Coo-roo!” in Zion’s wooden house,
   In Kedar’s shingled cells,
Softer than lowing of the cows
   The note of passion wells.
“Coo-roo-ah-coo!” like wood unto
   Whereon was Yasus bound,
Our prison seems; and every coo
   Tears wide a bleeding wound.

“Coo-roo!” sing, more celestial Dove,
   In notes aye pure and clear,
To drown this strong, terrestrial love
   And help us persevere!
“Coo-roo-ah-coo!” dear Yasus, who
   No frailty turned aside,
Thy Dove set in the himmel blue,
   And keep our Church thy bride!

Job Snowberger’s singing had method in it, and caused himself to weep. Katy saw him standing there in his coarse, home-woven and home-dyed clothes, sewn together by the hands of women who had no deeper interest in man than as a fellow-laborer, and she took her needle and pieced him together, saying —

“Dear Job, you have got nobody to love you.”

“Unshicklich!” exploded Philodulus, referring to the needle-work, and then, raising his bashful eyes to Katy’s face, he qualified the remark to “Unshuldich.”

“Nobody will love me,” Job exclaimed, “but Sister Marcella, and she only loves me to send me on arrands. I’m only one of her niggers, and she has many of tem. Katy, can’t you jine the kloster and help me persewere?”

“Ah-coo-roo-coo-roo!” The doves had sidled together in the apple-tree.

“Why, dear Job, I am in love already. I am engaged to a young man. See, his mother’s ring is on my finger! And he has took my accordion. Oh, I am so happy!”

“Unshicklich! Unshuldich, too! No good will come of it, schwester Kate! Oh, come and jine the good Siebentager and help me persewere!”

Job had already burst open his late repairs; for, indeed, his clothes were too small for him, and his emotions had the effect of wind in the laden apple-trees, bringing all their ripeness to the ground. He threw his arms around Katy, and, in ecstasy of groans and tears, piped high:

“Oh, can’t we persewere together, Katy! It is so hard to persewere alone. I can’t remember nothing: the music-writin’ gits blotted; the saw-mill runs wrong; the fullin’-mill wants ile, the cider-press tastes of rotten apples. Come, come, schwester, to Schneeberg and te heilich life!”

“Ah-coo-roo-coo-roo!” very firmly, from the dove family in the tree.

“Don’t kiss me so hard, Job!” Katy cried, fighting in vain against the tall man’s impassioned caresses. “It’s real unshicklich in you, for I’m going to marry another man.”

“Oh, who is it? He must be some sinful one.”

“No, indeed, Job; it’s a Mr. Quantrell!”

“Hallo!” spoke a strange voice. “How do you know me, indeed? — And what rummaging are you engaged at, Snowberger? Fine hypocrite, you!”

“Persewerin’,” Philodulus said, sheepishly; “we was persewerin’ together.”

“No doubt,” said a strange lame man, standing before them; “persewering and perspiring, too! — Young woman, you’re in a fair way to become a convert, unless your people look more carefully after you!”

“Who is it?” Katy spoke; “I do not understand.”

“You ought to know me. You have just mentioned my name. I am Abel Quantrell, of Baltimore. And where is Hannah Ritner?”

“Here, master!” spoke an eloquent voice at the window; “I heard you were coming, and had you directed to this friend’s retired farm; for I was all alone at Smoketown, and the time was full of portents. O master, if I ever needed help and a strong hand to lean upon, it is to-day!”

“Sho! Sho! Ninon, I see you are nervous to-day. Cube yourself! The root is the soul. Cube yourself! Some unusually Quixotic undertaking, perhaps? O child, I feel for you — extracting the cube-root of all this wrong, without the help of man!”

“Be tender with me, master. Oh, come and counsel me! The time is so short; the mountains are so dark; I can not read beyond them. I am so lonely!”

He led her toward the dairy, near the creek, and on the grass they talked together until Nelly Harbaugh took out chairs for them, and then they talked still on, till Luther came in, at dinner, hearing the sounding of the bell, and put up the strange gentleman’s horse and buggy.

Mr. Abel Quantrell came in to dine, and looked at Katy and at Nelly with a sort of sardonic admiration. At Nelly he looked with bold favor; at Katy with no more interest than as at a hoyden child he had found in an old man’s arms.

Katy was afraid of this strange man, and some great distress seemed overhanging in his wonderful appearance here, the very day after her lover had come and gone. She was too unworldly and ignorant to understand that she had been guilty of any error, or to know how to extricate herself, and be recommended in his eyes.

“I will leave it to God,” said Katy, inwardly. “He must know what to do with me.”

Nelly Harbaugh was soon in a running skirmish of merry and satirical talk with Abel Quantrell.

He was a man not to be forgotten nor confounded with any other, and even the splendid carriage of Hannah Ritner seemed to lose its superiority under Abel Quantrell’s plain but strong address and countenance.

In the first place, he was a deformed man: one of his legs was shorter than the other, or the foot was clubbed; for he walked by the aid of a cane, without labor or any look of pain, and with a certain enforced erectness which had imparted a spirit of will, or defiance, or triumph, to the carriage of his head, the swell of his nostrils, the firm parallels of his eyebrows and lips, and even to the poise of a dark wig, younger in tone than the lights in his eyes, which were faded, spite of their fateful and inflexible cast.

His face was all shaved clean; a standing collar barely showed the gray hairs brushed beneath his throat upon the parchment-colored sinews there. At times, unconsciously, or from habit, he thrust his hand into the clean, starched, simple bosom of his shirt, and then he seemed, to those observing him, like one whose back was against a wall.

But for his lameness he would have been a man above the usual stature, and at this table he was easily the chief, as if a magistrate had come in, but not to depress anybody’s spirits. His face was without any ruddy color, and the black wig gave it a certain pallor as if he were older than he seemed.

No Christian resignation was in Abel Quantrell’s portrait — rather the heathen philosopher’s stoic will and coolness. In repose, he seemed an orator with something in his bosom to defend, and covered there by his pallid hand; out of repose, his face assumed a certain earthiness and self-love, sometimes to the degree of coarseness, and this may have been why Nelly Harbaugh soonest grew upon easy terms with him and drew from him some particulars of his career.

“You seem at home among us Swiss and Dutch, and find your way about like an old nochber?”

“Yaw, yung maidle,” Abel Quantrell said, “I came among the old Dutch before your mother had a beau. I was the square root extracted from a small New England family of thirteen — the oldest, my little mother — and as I had kept them poor to send me to college, I needs must feed them all. ‘Cube yourself, Abel,’ said I; ‘a few years at school-teaching will make you a lawyer, and then you can educate your little brothers and sisters, and set them on the way to love and independence.’ Sho, sho! The Scotch-Irish bar, at the town where I taught their college, passed a rule, especially for me, that no school-teacher could enter at the law. They knew I was too poor to sit with my legs out of a lawyer’s window studying for two years, and let my mother starve!”

“What did you do, sir?” Luther Bosler asked, sitting, like his father, at the table in his shirt-sleeves.

“I merely cubed the radius,” Abel Quantrell said, with a firmer grip of his upper lip upon the lip below — that lip which seemed beaked, while his nose was straight as an index-board. “I rode over into Maryland and sat up with the bar of the nearest county there, judge and all, and played a good hand at cards, and staked my quarter’s salary. They asked me a sleepy question or two at daylight and passed me into the law. So I extracted the square root of Pennsylvania smallness and moved my habitation to another Dutch county.”

“Te Dunkers do not go to law,” ventured Katy Bosler.

“Bi’m-by,” Jake Bosler ejaculated, fearing that they had already leanings that way.

“No, bright eyes! And that was what took the square root out of my triumph. I could get love in too generous measure, but business never came. Here sits a pupil of mine: let Ninon tell the rest.”

He turned to Hannah Ritner. She swept his pallid and volcano-scarred face with eyes of woe and pride, and answered:

“Master, you found your only client, after waiting long — in a murderer. He had taken a human life, but by his crime you and your mother’s brood found food. His case was so bad that they gave him to you to defend him, in mockery of your hard condition, for you received not one penny for your toil.”

“Sho, sho!” from Abel Quantrell; “I cubed myself, though.”

“The eloquence of genius in the occasion of despair burst from you like a torrent. The murderer became, in your impetuosity, your only friend. His dark and stony nature poured forth the springs of fervent tears. The judge sat trembling, your rivals were astonished and abashed. All German-derived people, after that, went to you with their suits and cases, and found you just as God. You left us, then, for greater fields of use, and, by prosperity, you fell to be a man!”

“Nothin’ but persewerin’,” from the old-maidish face of Job Snowberger, with his sheepish and insinuating side still set on Katy.

“Job Snow,” Hannah Ritner commanded, “be more respectful to my dear master!”

“Bi’m-by,” meaninglessly from Jake Bosler, who executed the parental feat of throwing some corn “slappers” with his fingers into Katy’s plate, a yard distant.

Only Nelly Harbaugh seemed to blush at this homely method of serving food.

“Teacher,” Nelly said to Abel Quantrell, “which is best to live for — affection or greatness?”

“I have had all my happiness in career,” replied the old man, with his pallid hand in his bosom, laid firmly on his heart. His eyes, ranging around the table, rested with some kindling embers of power upon Luther Bosler. “My career, for a quarter of a century, was to fight Power. Sometimes I fought it when it was rightful power — not often. For power, as I found it in my exile in these Middle States, was the power of old sociability, of cliques and lodges, of amiable ignorance and deadly prejudice resisting innovation. This dull majority had sat upon my heel; I turned and bruised its head.”

“Soon-down, Luter. Bi’m-by!” from Jake Bosler, toward his son, glancing at the half-plowed fields.

Jake had taken off his shoe, and was examining his not very sightly foot with an eye to stone-bruises. No spirituality in the conversation bribed him from thrifty thinking on his crops.

“Retaliation is not the spirit our Lord changed this world in,” Luther Bosler said, his dark eyes intelligently following Abel Quantrell.

Hannah Ritner’s eyes shone with all their might of compassion, as she turned on Luther, before the old man could speak the repartee his folded lip concealed:

“Sir, Master Quantrell’s retaliations were never upon the weak. He soared among the eagles in his indignations. We humble Germans he led by the hand as high as we could go, and there we saw him battling with the power enthroned in the sun. He defended slaves escaping over the free-State line. He assailed Freemasonry in its brutality toward a human life. He broke the power of ignorance in Pennsylvania and made Education one of the tyrants there, with the power to tax, like forked lightning in its hands. We sluggish Germans did not always understand him; we had not his mercurial sensitiveness to the injuries of simple multitudes — of women, of illiterate children, of poor, black slaves. But we felt that something of Messiah had come among us with righteousness in his hands, and we set him in the seats of power until—”

“The lower Yankee interest in his nature made him desert you,” said Abel Quantrell, bitterly. “Yes, Ninon, I gave myself to career like the bright, impetuous waters of the Blue Mountains, which at last subside in the shallow and malarious estuaries of the bay. I laid down career, and I am dead. Look at me — whited, withered, wigged, and limping! Have I not thrown myself away?”

“No, master!” the woman answered in fervent eloquence. “The world has captured you, but not your principles, and, like our old German emperor, Barbarossa, you sleep in the cavern till the freedom of our land shall awaken you.”

“I have a son,” the old man said. “In him I may awake, but never again in my enfettered self.”

Katy cried, before she could think: “Oh, he was here! We took Lloyd to love-feast. He eat with us Dunkers last Sunday.”

“Sho, sho! No doubt he multiplied the base and height of himself together and the product by the breadth. The cube resulting is still a baby’s block.”

“He is a manly lad, master!” said Hannah Ritner, with her great eyes downcast. “Something of his father is there.”

“Yes,” said Abel Quantrell, languidly, “the complement of his father: he will be as rash to support power that is false, as I was to attack it. In my rowdy son, I see the compensation of my own self-indulgence.”

“It is not true!” Katy cried; “Lloyd is a gentleman. He eat te Passover!”

“I guess he’s purty bad, Katy,” Job Snowberger said. “He ain’t a-persewerin’.”

“Job Snow!” from Hannah Ritner, “where is your charity?”

“Come, Ninon,” said Abel Quantrell, with lessening interest in the subject; “I must have my game of cards.”

Luther Bosler and his father went back to the field; Katy and Nelly and Job Snowberger went to fruit-peeling again; Hannah Ritner and Abel Quantrell had chairs under a tree near the creek, and a barrel-head furnished them a table; from the dwelling they could be seen playing for Spanish silver pieces.

Katy was still and troubled, Nelly Harbaugh no less preoccupied and silent, and Job Snowberger, the only talking quantity left, got no reply for his chance remarks.

“Katy,” he said at last, “you is so still, I think you want to come to Kloster Schneeberg.”

“Oh, you old fool!” Nelly Harbaugh spoke, “what does she want with your old stupid nunnery? We women want career.”

She glanced at Katy, who looked up, her eyes full of tears, and said:

“Nelly, what makes me so ignorant?”

“Goodness,” Nelly Harbaugh answered.

---

 

CHAPTER XXII.

THE YANKEE.

TILL late in the day Abel Quantrell played euchre with a spirit compounded of gain and hazard, his opponent sometimes requiring to be stirred from her abstraction, yet seeking to engage him with all her irregular solicitude.

Finally, the old man, as she studied a careful play, closed his eyes, and when she was ready, he did not respond.

The sun was growing low, and Hannah Ritner placed her chair so as to shield him from its glancing rays, as they were dandled on the South Mountain’s crest.

“Oh, that this day would bring its result!” she sighed aloud.

A head was in her lap and a kiss upon her hand; she looked down, and Katy Bosler was kneeling on the ground.

“What is it, simple child?”

“My ring,” whispered Katy. “He wants it.”

She pointed at Abel Quantrell, sleeping.

Katy held up the mourning ring of Lloyd Quantrell’s mother.

“Fortune-teller!” said Katy, “this ring Lloyd’s mother was married with. Oh, must I lose it, as you told me I would? Can’t nothing save it for me? It is all I haf, since I gif Lloyd my accordion.”

Hannah Ritner looked at the ring.

“It is sanctified by death,” she said. “Lord rest the soul who made this ring so dear!”

“Lord, let that soul be kind to me!” responded Katy, fervently. “I only want to gif myself to Lloyd, and nothing selfish haf I got but love — te first of love I ever felt. How strong it is, Mootter Hannah!”

“Drive it away, my child! Exert your mind to be free! Rings like this were never made to be worn by poor, ignorant girls. Give this ring to me, and I will wear it for you, and then it never may be lost.”

“You, Mootter Hannah! Haf you got te power to keep it always for me? If I gif it to you now, maybe I will lose it, all py myself, and pe foolish.”

“Hush, Katy!” Hannah Ritner pointed to the sleeping sire of Lloyd Quantrell. “Leave it with me to conjure with awhile.”

She slipped the ring upon her hand, and Katy stole away.

Abel Quantrell opened his eyes and said:

“The square of self is but half selfish; but the cube of self has higher walls than angels ever scale. Plato, with all his divine reach, could never solve the problem which had baffled the oracle of Apollo.”

“Dear master, what was that?”

“To start with one’s self-indulgence and multiply it into a sacrifice; to double the cube. Geometry, no more than an oracle, can do it.”

“Master, you have always defended the poor.”

“Sho, sho! Too often from pugnacity, reasoning from them to my own fancied injuries. The humility of the Nazarene never was in me. He who seeks to save his life shall lose it, Ninon.”

“Master, have I not been seeking to save my life by losing it? Are we ever all unselfish?”

“You have been, or sacrifice has no God, my child! If ever love was willful, suicidal, and martyr-minded, it was yours. I offered you myself, and you refused me: with every right to me, you sent me on my career and blessed me as another’s bridegroom, and turned back with all your glorious powers of body and of heart to be, like Hagar, the bride of the wolf, and your habitation in the wilderness. What have you been recompensed in?”

“Career, my master. I saw a work to do.”

“Sho, sho! I know what that has been: to take the place of danger on the Underground Road and save a slave or two, whose escape to freedom only aggravated the sorrows of the rest, and made the bloodhound Federal laws invade the North. A hundred Quakers have done as much, Ninon.”

“Master,” said the woman, “I have gained knowledge. I have predicted things which came to pass. I predict that, before you leave this humble farm, the brazen door of bondage will resound to the sledge-hammers of our daring smiths!”

As she spoke, fervidly, she seemed to swoon, and her long hair fell downward to the ground.

He placed his arm around her, and she pushed it away.

“No more of that, master! I am in the very labor of my lifework now, and my soul is in the depths of travail! Oh, be a just man to your son! He loves you.”

“He is too brave to need my justice,” Abel Quantrell said. “Like me, he will not bow the knee to man, and be ashamed of Nature — bountiful and wise in him. Justice is for the commonplace; freedom and independence are for heroes.”

His face, being animated now, had lines of coarseness in it, as if he was of the satyr’s type, and mocked conventionalities.

“Shall I be just to you, Ninon?” continued Abel Quantrell, when he had restored his hand to his bosom, and was restfully proud again.

“I have been just to myself, master.”

“How?”

By my spiritual gift. I am your wife.”

“Sho, sho!”

“See, sir! The dead deliver to me the rights I would not ask for. She who has sought to lose her life, has saved it.”

His faded eyes fell upon the wedding-ring, which she had dropped into his palm, upon her hand.

“Magic!” said Abel Quantrell; “how came it here?”

“Wafted!” Hannah Ritner spoke; “the day of my agony, when my martyr-fires, perhaps, are lighted and my chain is forged, the ring I had refused slides down the rainbow to my feet.”

“Are you one of those Spiritualist fanatics, Ninon? Sho, sho! There is no divination in geometry. Three times from the base is the cube. It was my son you got that ring from.”

“No, master; but from the child he gave it to when he engaged himself.”

“Sho! He had visited no lady when he left Baltimore six days ago. I have found a wife for him, and that brings me here.”

“He has found love here, master. You may give him another wife, but not the one he loves.”

“Who is it?”

“Little Katy, who sits in yonder house of log and stone; the Dunker farmer’s child.”

“Sho, sho! No need of marrying there. He can love in one place and marry in another—”

“And have remorse, like you, master?”

“How do you know that?”

“I heard you bring it from the woodlands of your sleep, saying that self-indulgence never could be expanded into a sacrifice.”

The old man raised his club-foot and looked at it bitterly.

“There is a gnawing in my bosom, Ninon, but it is the decaying principle of life. I am sixty-seven. That self I accuse myself of is the selfishness of career. If I have sacrificed others, here and there, it was to keep the greater compassion in view, and change the systems by which wrong and tyranny were possible. I resigned most passionate love to plant myself in the domestic circle of border-State slavery, and to work its downfall by the social foothold I obtained. My son must marry to strengthen me in the same labor, and make Maryland a free State before I die.”

“You will marry him to a religious woman?”

“Yes, to a Catholic. The strength of slavery in Maryland lies in the old Catholic counties and families, and in the increasing college and conventual institutions of that Church. There was a time when Carroll, of Carrollton, took me by the hand, when we Anti-masons came to Baltimore to overthrow the power of President Jackson. There lie latent in his church resentments against all forms of ruffianism, of which human bondage is the chief. I have sent my son to Catholic school and worship. For me all gates to heaven are too narrow; by freedom I will go in, or be the specter of Heaven’s own injustice, agitating at the gate!”

He spoke with sardonic quietness, yet without quietness of soul.

“Master, is there not the Jesuit’s method in your plan? ‘The quality of mercy is not strained.’ It passes no suffering human creature, to do some greater good, beyond. By Jesus came compassion in the world, and by politicians and by pontiffs came religious craft. The New World was given to tyrants, and its native millions thrown into slavery, that they might be saved from greater damnation. I predict, with truth in my soul, that one brave man this day, without scrip or raiment, and his life for the stone in his sling, will strike every false system down, and be the hero of the world.”

“You wander, Ninon! Sho, sho! you were always wild of mind. Had there been such a man, he would have come to me.”

“You were a politician, master, and he came to me. Oh, I fear I may have done wrong, that good may come of it!”

Abel Quantrell took her head upon his shoulder. She resisted a little moment, and was still.

“How much you have suffered, Ninon!”

“I have died, master, and am raised from the grave. When you married, I prayed for your wife, but all was death to me for days. I came to this world again, people thought a little crazy.”

“Always a little above this world, child.”

“That I might not be a burden and mockery to my great political relatives, I crossed the State line and lived in a little hut. The children came to me for curiosity, the mature to have me tell their fortunes; my cottage light was the polar star of a thousand slaves.”

“All this time, Ninon, I was mismated. Disgrace followed me, also: my brother moved beside me, and became a negro-trader; my son became a corner-lounger and a bully. Sho, sho! My heart sought you out in the dreams of sleep and in the nervous wakefulness of the night. Why did you not take the square root from our troubles and send for me?”

“You were married, master. A great thing had purified my heart.”

“I know, my child. How noble you were, there! Behold my wretched residue of marital ambition! I am too old to love you now.”

“Master, it was from you, in the days of our passion, that I drew the example to think on others’ wrongs. The old Dutch sects — Quakers in other respects — felt no offense at human slavery. I took up the work when you relinquished it. My labors are almost ended. — What man is that yonder, master?”

As she arose, in all her strength and stature, Abell Quantrell saw that she was trembling.

“Sho! Joan d’Arc,” he said, tenderly, “beneath your armor I see the poor child still.”

A black man came forward with Nelly and with Katy; he was half naked, and nearly dead with fatigue.

“Speak, poor man!” called Hannah Ritner. “You were with Isaac Smith across the river?”

“Missy, dey’s fout all day. Mos’ all is tuck an’ killed. Two of us got away — and what was leff in Maryland. Mosster Quantrell sent me.”

He produced gold pieces.

“Good Lord!” cried Nelly Harbaugh; “this is the runaway nigger, and he must have stole the whole reward for himself.”

“Missy, Lloyd tole me to come to Bosler’s farm and give dis money to Luther to buy me with it. He wants to save my life and own me.”

“Yes, do buy the pore man!” Katy cried. “He’s known nothing but misery.”

“I’ll attend to the matter,” Abel Quantrell observed. “Ninon, put yourself across the Pennsylvania line without delay! Has this weakness brought on a civil war?”

Hannah Ritner was the picture of one dying, yet struggling to live.

“Go with her,” Abel Quantrell continued, speaking to the negro Ashby. “I am anxious to gratify all my son’s wishes at this moment, foolish as they may be.”

“Why?” asked Katy Bosler.

“Because I have picked out a wife for him, little Dunker! and would persuade him to my will.”

He called for his carriage and servant. Hannah Ritner and Job Snowberger drove away with the negro Ashby.

Suddenly Nelly Harbaugh cried, as Abel Quantrell also passed from view:

“Katy, fergesht! where is your wedding-ring?”

Awakened from the stupor of several minutes, Katy looked at her hand and screamed.

She ran to the house and rang the bell loudly for the field-hands to come home, and then started up the stairs.

“Where are you going, Katy?”

“To git a-ready for Harper’s Ferry and to see Lloyd.”

---

 

CHAPTER XXIII.

JOHN BROWN’S FORT.

AS Lloyd Quantrell entered the armory-yard with a signal of truce, his quickened apprehension took in the Washington family-carriage on the grass riddled with bullets, the engine-house doors splintered as if by lightning, and at least four short barrels of rifles pointing at himself from the door-crevices and the brick loop-holes.

Expecting each instant to meet the fate of Stevens and wallow on the ground, a hulk of broken bones, he exerted his empty hand with an earnestness which enabled him to gain the door unshot.

“Captain Brown, they are killing your son-in-law, William Thompson! He cried to me for help. None but you can save him!”

At the moment he spoke a shower of balls made a circle around him, and the rod, on which had been his hat, was twisted out of his hand by a bullet which benumbed his whole arm, and from the wood and brick of the engine-house chips and brick-dust were struck. The door opened, and unseen hands pulled him in.

“Prospectin’, heigh?” a merry voice said.

“Your brother, Dauph Thompson, is being murdered on the bridge. Listen!”

The sounds of many guns, a faint women’s wail, and a cheer without a note of joy in it, followed by a sort of silence such as animals keep whose food has suddenly been thrown into their dens, related some horrible story.

Dauph Thompson turned pale, and still his voice was cheery:

“Willy murdered? They wouldn’t do that!”

He threw open the engine-house door sufficiently to crouch in the sill, and said pleasantly, yet troubled:

“Prospectin’.”

In a moment something appeared protruding on sticks and poles from the corner of the hotel and station, where the town mayor had exposed his life.

“That’s something to draw your fire, men; don’t be foolish!” John Brown’s settled, metallic voice spoke from the top of a fire-engine, looking through an arched and shivered window.

Dauph Thompson stood up in the doorway and turned his face inward; it was pale, as if he had a mortal wound.

“Don’t mind me!” he said, in mournful pleasantry. “I’m jess prospectin’.”

“What is it, Dauph? Are you hurt?” Ned Coppock cried, throwing his arm around his comrade.

“Ned — it’s Will’s clothes they’re showing — full — of his blood!”

“Murderers!” muttered Coppock. “Don’t cry, Dauph. He give his all, and all is over now!”

“O Will! Never to see you more, my brother!”

“Yes, Dauph. This is not all the life that good men live.”

Wiping the tears from his eyes, and shaking Coppock’s hand, young Thompson turned his face to Captain Brown, and spoke pleasantly as before:

“Prospectin’, father — jess once more.”

He looked at his gun, closed his lips and opened his nostrils, and a slight flash of spirit, more sportsman-like than serious, came from his eyes.

He stood erect in the crevice of the door, and raised his gun to his eye.

It went off, and with it he spun around, as if from its rebound, and fell upon his face on the brick floor.

Coppock turned him over, and called —

“Dauph!”

“Prospectin’,” replied a faint voice, and his bosom filled with his heart’s blood.

He had been shot, courting death, with a miner’s phrase upon his lips, and had found the eternal treasure where the streets, they say, are paved with gold.

“O Isabel!” a moaning voice came from some muddy and travel-stained clothes upon the floor. “Oh, water, father!”

“Be composed, my son,” spoke the steady voice of John Brown. “Your wife’s brothers have both died like men. Die the man, like your brother Oliver!”

He gave the order to close the doors and risk no further lives, and to keep the prisoners back.

Quantrell would have been killed, to expose himself at the door, so he retired to the side of Watson Brown and leaned Watson’s head upon the cold form of the dead Oliver.

“Drink of this flask, my lad.”

This time the suffering man did not resist the life-infusing draught.

“Give some to Olly,” muttered Watson Brown. “He is so cold.”

Quantrell counted nine prisoners sitting around the edges of this nearly square room — which, as has been said, was some twenty-four feet upon a side; the watch-house, under the same roof, was now deserted by friend and foe.

The prisoners had nothing to do, but seek to get a little rest by sitting upon a narrow sill or coigne, like an abortive bench, which ran around the chamber a little above the damp floor. Some of them John Brown had permitted to shield themselves with the leather hose or any other fireman’s traps which would divert a bullet. All the prisoners were tractable and worried; some nodded for a little while; others ventured a word occasionally with the chief raider or some of his men; and one or two had a thin, genial phrase to say, parrot-fashion, rather as formulae to keep up luck, than to court any popularity.

“Ole Ball” was seen to be a heavy, bacon-fed, middle-aged man, probably of the large Virginia connection of George Washington’s mother, and he paid great deference to “Cappen Smith,” for, notwithstanding his own admissions, and the assurances of his men, the greatest bewilderment still existed as to the true name, location, or purpose of the bandit chief, and, with dogmatic loyalty to hearsay, the Virginians believed John Brown to be still Mr. Isaac Smith, carrying on some little game.

“Josephus!” Ball would say, when a bullet struck one of the engines and disported itself among the wooden girders above, “Cappen Smith, that was close, now!”

A Maryland man, with a little smiling shiver, would on such occasions add in a small, cowed voice:

“Zip! Be on your qui vivy!”

Mr. Washington had so far recovered from his melancholy as to make a suggestion at long intervals, directed ostensibly at Captain Smith’s safety or comfort, but with a generous providence, also, which embraced himself.

“Ah, captain, sah!” he said, soon after Lloyd’s entrance, “don’t your son want a doctaw?”

“My son knows his duty, sir; and makes no complaint,” John Brown remarked, inspecting his revolvers.

“But, ah, captain, sah! He did ask faw wataw, and captain — ah! we all want wataw greatly, captain.”

“Your fellow-citizens, gentlemen, have killed my men sent on errands of our mutual benefit, and I will take no more risks till my re-enforcements come. — Here, men, back that fire-engine against the door, and stretch these ropes across the jambs! Put the engine-tongue so as to hold the door against a battering, and run the other cart forward! Wake up those recruits underneath the engine and let them earn their living!”

The recruits consisted of a few slaves gathered from neighboring “estates,” as the farms were called; and these negroes, debarred from any other excitements all their lives than Whitsuntide or “a licking,” were now expected to take an intelligent, indeed, heroic view of their first opportunity, and the white prisoners faintly smiled at this proof of a natural incapacity for self-government.

“Cappen Brown,” said the master-machinist of the armory, heretofore described as “Ole Ball,” “don’t you think it’s an ongrateful time for these men and brethren to be a-snoozin’ and leave you to earn their salvation? Josephus! cap.”

A ball went whizzing among the men and peeled the rafters above.

“Zip!” said the Maryland man, in an awed voice; “be on the qui vivy now!”

“Ah — sah! Torturing — sah!” from Colonel Washington.

“The disciples,” replied the gnarled old woodsman, in his shrill key, “went to sleep the night on Gethsemane, when their Master asked them to watch with him one little hour. They were continually sleeping, sir, until he requested them not to get up any more, for, said he, ‘the hour is at hand, and the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.’”

A piece of glass, sheared off neatly by a bullet, went sailing through the room. The four men able to stand by their arms returned the courtesy, and the place stank of sulphur, and every palate was coppery and hot.

“Zip! Be on the qui vivy,” the Maryland man was heard to say, and shudder in the smoke.

“Josephus! Cappen Brown, how you kin remember Scripter!”

“Nothing remarkable about that, sir, for I studied for the Christian ministry before I was of age, till an inflammation of the eyes, sir, sent me back to my tan-yard.”

A nail came whistling through one of the sky-windows and played a little tune as it tingled on the levers of one of the engines. The negroes, working there, fell on the brick floor again. The voice of John Brown was heard to say:

“No man is fit to fight for human nature who despairs of it. This world slept in trespasses and sins when the unwelcome Redeemer came. And why should these ignorant slaves, whose forefathers came to Virginia in bondage the same year my ancestor came to Massachusetts in the Mayflower, be awake, when we alone, of all the Mayflower’s children, are awake to their injustice? That is why I am here, prisoners — to awake this land! I expected these slaves to awake last. If a thousand years to the Lord are but as a day, may not these three hundred years of bondage be but as a night of sleep to these?”

“Bang!” “Bang!” “Bang!” “Bang!”

The four guns in the hands of Brown’s surviving fighters went off sequentially, two at the port-holes, two at the doors.

“Josephus!” spoke Mr. Ball, “the place smells like a bad ror egg!”

Answering shots brought down a little shower of flattened lead upon everybody.

“Zip!” said the Marylander’s quaver of a voice. “No use of bein’ on the qui vivy yer!”

“Water! Father! O my God!” a breath sighed up from Watson Brown.

“Ah — captain. Your son! He is thirsty,” Colonel Washington appealed.

“My son is a brave man,” replied John Brown, firmly. “‘I thirst,’ gentlemen, was the cry that let the Christian era in. Your fellow-citizens, to whom we meant no wrong, but justice, give these dying soldiers of mine the hyssop and the sponge of vinegar to cool their thirst.”

“Don’t weaken for me, father!” gasped the ashen face of Watson Brown.

“O man!” Lloyd Quantrell cried, “are you, who rebuked me for killing a dove, so merciless as to hear your son howl like this? And quote your Bible, too!”

The usual momentary salute came tearing through the little fort.

Captain Brown peered out of the door, and the balls struck around his stiff hairs and stooping shoulders. He carried no gun, and returned like one who had merely been examining the weather-indications.

“Men,” said he, “be careful now of your ammunition. My re-enforcements may be somewhat late. What you are to guard against is a sudden rush upon you, or the establishing of a rifle-pit, or a blind, within easy aiming distance of this building. That you must not permit.”

“Captain,” said one of his men named Stewart Taylor, a cool, freckled lad, “how many re-enforcements do you expect?”

“It is only a question of time, Taylor,” Brown answered. “There may be thousands of them.”

“We’ve got the promise of them,” a taller man exclaimed; “and we’re four good men yet, besides our commander.”

“Yes, Anderson,” the leader remarked, stroking his long beard; “we are in stout walls, well armed, and nothing but cannon can batter down our fort, and these prisoners forbid their using any cannon.”

He looked around upon the nine or ten discomfited men, hanging or crouching there, like hams in a smoke-house when the bear family pay it a visit; and the free negro, Green, the surviving one of the pair which had menaced Quantrell, remarked:

“Their lives, I guess, ain’t worth no more than our’n!”

“No, Green,” John Brown replied, “prisoners must take their chances; this is a war.”

Ed Coppock gave a reassuring look at the prisoners and walked out upon the lawn, where his rifle was soon heard to crack. He returned, laughing, pursued by musketry which made the doors sound like rats gnawing through them.

“I gave that Gault House a shot,” he said, “in remembrance of poor Stevens.”

“Isabel, are you here, dearest? I can’t see you!” — from the pale lips of Watson Brown.

“Drink, lad,” said Quantrell.

“Oh, it comes out of my wounds!” the sufferer cried, putting his hand upon his stomach. “I can’t hold anything.”

“You have asked me a question, Mr. Quantrell,” the indurated father observed, returning back along the course of the conversation — “why I could reprove the killing of a dove, and permit the killing of a man, even of my son?”

He came over and felt of Watson’s bleeding abdomen, and covered Oliver’s dead face with a blanket, and, regarding both with an interest which, in its very practicality, was pathetic, he continued:

“Blood is so precious that no man should take it for amusement; and it is the most wholesome sacrifice to the Lord. On Abel’s bleeding altar came the approving fire from heaven, while Cain, whose sacrifice of sticks God did not respect, fell on his brother and slew him. The sole question of bloodshed is: ‘In what spirit do you shed it? what is the motive of your sacrifice?’”

“Zip, cap’n! Be on the qui vivy!” from the Maryland man.

“Oh, kill me! O my Bell!” from the tortured Watson.

“Your cause is just, my son. Bear it like a man,” John Brown proceeded. “Now, sir” (to Quantrell), “it is permitted to man to shed the blood of animals for his necessities. ‘Have dominion over them,’ said the Lord in the beginning. Yet every sparrow is counted, every lamb is measured out, and, in the dove’s domestic love, is heaven made emblematic: the Holy Spirit’s peace. As I have rebuked you for killing the inoffensive dove, I call this nation to account for its cruelty to our fellow-creatures. In either case, sir, the interference may have been gratuitous; but blood of mine, and of the humble doves of peace, in Kansas, was shed before I began.”

“Josephus! Cappen Brown, you don’t shoot us down yer, because out yonder in Kinsas there was a fight, do you?”

“Zip! Be on your qui vivy!”

Colonel Washington’s hired black servant had a considerable wool-clip taken out of his head at this point.

“I want water, too,” he exclaimed, in his terror. “I’m chokin’ fo’ it!”

“That fellow — ah!” Colonel Washington exclaimed, in a low voice, to Quantrell, “came to this resort too willingly when Cook and Stevens ordered him; it would be — ah! — retribution, sah — if he did lose his life, sah.”

“Mus’ we die heah of thirst, an’ de rivers full of water?” exclaimed the negro man, lying beside his abandoned spear.

“There is a river,” sighed Watson Brown, “whose streams shall make glad the city of God. Oh, let me swim there — in the Au Sable! — Bell, Bell, bury me by the water, dear; I want to lap it, darling.”

He opened his eyes, and recognizing Quantrell, added, manfully:

“Yes, bury me by my comrades, by the river-side, away from the cavalry.”

“By the Au Sable, did you say, Watson? Where is that?”

“It’s too far,” spoke the boy, deathly sweat upon his forehead; “by the Kaw; that will do. Or by the Shenandoah. I fought by both streams — where father said it was right.”

The evening came down upon this little scene — of the mysterious invader and his four remaining soldiers, standing by their guns against the assembling country. Toward night the firing became merely drunken about the streets, and Brown let a prisoner or two go out from his little ark, but neither dove nor raven returned again; and the whistling of trains, opposite and above the town, indicated the coming of more and more troops; but still John Brown believed, from time to time, that they were his “re-enforcements.”

He evidently believed this, because he would confer with his men — Anderson and Coppock being the more intelligent of these — and he would, with the woodman-scout’s carefulness of ear, compare the sounds of rifles in the distance, and say, “Surely they are my re-enforcements.” His men had such entire trust in him that they offered no suggestions nor criticisms, and did the whole of the fighting self-directed. His only order, from time to time, was, “Don’t lose your interest, men! Don’t be surprised! My re-enforcements are not far off.” A rifle was seldom in his hand; he sometimes drew the sword of King Frederick; but the negro Green, alone of his men, was suspicious of the white prisoners. Quantrell counted these and sounded some of them upon the propriety of a coup de main — to grapple with this old man’s three whites and one negro, and throw open the doors and call for assistance: it was no longer practicable, for the prisoners, while not less apprehensive than in the morning, had become cowed in all their being, as from the short-learned habit of obedience.

“Why, friend,” whispered Quantrell to one of these, “has one day made white men slaves? What would a hundred years not do, then?”

“Don’t you feel cowed, too?” asked his fellow-prisoner.

“I must admit that I do, every time I re-enter this place and fall under that old man’s influence. But why are not his little band, enveloped by a world of our people, also made timid?”

“Crazy, I reckon!”

“Fanatics, yes,” said Lloyd — “no doubt they are; but if they represent many abolitionists like them, what will be the fate of slavery? This old fellow has the self-deception of Mohammed; he is the prophet of God to all these boys: they pass, fighting, to his paradise.”

“I can’t be kept much longer!” from the dying Watson Brown; “I shall see Fred and Olly, over there, by the river. — Bell, let me kiss my little boy and go!”

“See there!” Quantrell said, “he is worse than a fatalist. Who paid him to come here? He would get none of our land and own none of our slaves, if he should prevail. Fanaticism in its purest, most ignorant and simple form, is behind and in these men. I never would have believed abolitionism could amount to this.”

“Dreadful!” moaned the man; “I’ve leaned agin this yer brick wall till I’m damp as a goose, and my head’s as sore with thinkin’ as t’other end is of tryin’ to soften this ar brick. I didn’t never think I could think so much as I have this yer one day.”

“How much thinking,” said Lloyd, “has old Smith given to this thing? He began it when he was a young man.”

“Oh, he’s a smart old scoundrel. But if the Lord will let me out of yer, I’ll promise him to think about nothing for the rest of my days!”

And so darkness fell upon the dead, upon them in bonds, and upon the living fanatics. Silence followed the darkness, except when Watson Brown cried out in pain and delirium.

At length there came to the door, after some parley, an officer of a company from Maryland, a plain-speaking, German-derived man, whom Brown had met in his rambles, perhaps, and he said:

“Cap’n Smith, I don’t bear no malice to ye. Where in the world did ye come from? Who air ye? What did ye come hyar for? Now, Smith, surrender, and make no further trouble. Ye’re agin the law — you must know that.”

“If you knew who I was — what I have gone through against this thing of slavery — you could understand what brought me here, sir,” the leader replied. “I have tried to send my proposition several times to them in command against me. Who is in command?”

“Why, Governor Wise, of Virginia; he’s near by, they say, and the United States marines from Washington; they’ll be yer soon. Jist at present thar ain’t no commander, ezackly.”

“Then, sir, I shall not surrender to a mob, to have my few men here massacred — before my re-enforcements come.”

Later on, the same kindly disposed militia captain sent a doctor in, to see the suffering son of the bandit. He said he could not determine anything without a light. Brown would not permit a light; it would expose his position and the number of his command, and he might be taken unaware before his “re-enforcements” could arrive. It was agreed, however, to prevent, if possible, firing upon the engine-house for the night, lest the hostages might be injured. The doctor promised to send in some anodyne for Watson, but it never came.

A fear now seized the prisoners that, in the storming of the engine-house, they would have the double danger of being killed by their friends or massacred by their captors; and, this being mooted to Brown, he said:

“In war, prisoners are subject to all the dangers of the belligerents. I will send you to the rear as far as I can. Keep against the back wall there.”

“Oh, can’t I git a brick that ain’t so much kiln-dried,” from the man of sore body and soul — “a brick that’s a leetle damp — outen the mold, like, and that would give just a leetle?”

“Have to be on the qui vivy to find that,” another sore voice from the darkness.

“Josephus!” another voice, like a snore, “if the Government work is like this night’s, I shall resign and settle as fur off as Kinsas.”

“This night,” expressed the voice of weary agony, “O darling, kiss me and say, ‘Husband, go!’ I am so burning! Water, Lord Jesus, water!”

“Patience, Watson!” the old man’s voice. “Your father does not intend to sleep. — Keep ready, men! The enemy is treacherous and cruel.”

All the night long they heard this old man, alone in his responsibilities, keeping up the weary vigilance of his men, and sure of his “re-enforcements.”

Quantrell, busy with all chords of sensibility, from religion and the creeping dread of death to love and retaliation, asked himself, at last, the meaning of Hannah Ritner’s prophecy:

“When thou killest everything.”

He had killed nobody as yet, nor was like to do so.

He tried to nod, but his mind kept recurring to things of life — his father’s half-withheld affection, Light Pittson’s warm attractions and romantic admiration for himself, and Katy Bosler’s nestling confidence and love.

The cool yet thirsty night passed away, and cloudy dawn came in at the hemispherical window-tops.

No food, no certainty, no solution.

Watson Brown had been rolling and vomiting and talking of his wife and baby all the night. His father was more of a satyr than ever, with spiky hair and matted beard, and powder-stains upon his long muzzle of a nose. No other apprehension than anxiety about his “re-enforcements” was in his cold, gray eyes, no tremor in those lean, muscle-jawed cheeks — nothing less than primeval, aboriginal, provincial, warlike purpose, from Hebrew to Scotch Highlander, was in his square mouth and stone-cut eyebrows.

Taking his rifle, he said to his men: “We will exact terms and be allowed to cross the river with our prisoners, or we will join our companions in the heaven of the merciful and the brave! Let no man be a craven now. You have been faithful soldiers. Sometimes re-enforcements fail, but ours must come. They are promised where it says: ‘Strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life,’ and ‘he that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for the truth’s sake shall find it.’”

Sounds of all kinds broke the early morning air — the crowing cocks, the soaring crows, the railroad’s whistle, halloos, cries, and huzzas; and, finally, there came the sound of men marching past with solid, regular tread, upon the grass and graveled walks of the armory-yard.

The raiders were all looking through port-holes and doors ajar, and Stewart Taylor spoke:

“I never saw soldiers like them. What are they?”

“United States marines,” said John Brown.

“We’re not fighting against the United States,” exclaimed the taller man, Anderson, “but against slavery.”

“The United States,” said John Brown, “protects slavery, and is protecting it now, with the marines we pay our taxes to support.”

Directly afterward, while the earliest sun stood in the gateway down which the blended rivers rushed to extinguish it, a rap came on the engine-house door, and a voice, official, not loud, but with reserve in its tone, spoke:

“I want to see the commander here!”

“I am that man,” John Brown spoke, promptly, coming forward with the sword in his hand and the rifle leaning beside him.

“I want you to surrender to the United States authority, of which I am an officer.”

“What terms am I offered?”

“You will be protected from the populace, and handed over to the civil authorities of Virginia for trial.”

“They would hang me and my men.”

“With that I have nothing to do. Do you surrender?”

“I demand permission to cross the river on the bridge, and at the farther end of the bridge I will let my prisoners go, and we shall then have to fight for our lives. I consider this fair, lieutenant.”

“It is inadmissible. You must surrender.”

“I will not surrender. I will die here, resisting the United States!”

“Take the consequences, then.”

“We are ready.”

“Are you John Brown, who fought at Black Jack in Kansas?”

“Yes; I was there. Were you there, too?”

“I am Lieutenant James E. B. Stuart, of the First Regular Cavalry, which prevented you renewing the skirmish.”

“Why, I know you, sir. And now you know, lieutenant, how I came to be here.”

“You won’t surrender, Brown?”

“Not on your conditions.”

“Very well, sir” — in a tone of indifference.

“Stand to your arms, men!” the metallic voice of John Brown exclaimed. “Distribute yourselves to the best advantage. We shall not yield to such terms.”

“Captain Brown,” interposed Taylor, respectfully, “I did not come here to fight the United States.”

“Nor I,” said the other man, Anderson.

“We have fought well, Captain Brown, but we can’t fight our country,” Taylor continued. “Our Canadian constitution reads, ‘Look to no dissolution of the Union, but simply to amendment and repeal.’”

“Yes, Captain Brown,” added Anderson, “and further it says, ‘Our flag shall be the same our fathers fought under in the Revolution.’ I was the first man, captain, to come to Maryland with you; I helped you find the Kennedy farm for our headquarters. I have made war upon Virginia, but not upon the United States.”

“Do as you please, men. I shall fight. In Kansas my son submitted to the regulars, and was marched in chains under the burning sun, fettered to a dragoon’s horse, and he lost his mind.”

The two men, Anderson and Taylor, unbuckled their belts of arms and threw them aside, set their rifles in a corner, and retired without fear or haste to a space within that corner, in line with the doors.

The dying son of John Brown sought to raise himself and take a gun; but his eyes glazed, and he could not see. Ned Coppock went to his relief, and put Watson’s head upon his lap.

The negro man Green, troubled but not dismayed, exclaimed:

“What will become of me? Colored men ain’t got no country an’ no flag.”

“Stand by your gun, Shields,” young Coppock replied. “I won’t see you imposed on. — Captain Brown, we’re three left.”

He resigned Watson Brown’s care to a colored man, and came forward with his rifle.

“We are three,” said John Brown, firmly; “but we shall have re-enforcements.”

As he spoke, the old man vaulted into the upper works of the engine, crouched there, and bent his eye to his rifle.

Green knelt at one side of the engine, and Coppock at the other side, each sheltered by a wheel.

The two dead men were used by some of the prisoners as defenses, among other articles.

In the intensity of that moment, John Brown turned to his prisoners and remarked, calmly:

“Your safety, gentlemen, is in not changing your positions during the assault.”

Probably every prisoner there muttered or thought of some act of his own, or said some reverent word.

Lloyd Quantrell thought of the negro man he had saved, and of the Dunker sacrament he had taken.

Regularly moving men were heard outside; their side-arms were heard to rattle to the decision of their tread, and the words —

“First file, forward! — second file, forward!”

These came close to the doors; their very breathing could be heard. The ragged port-hole revealed them to a few within. So could the prisoners be heard to breathe, and the shivering voice muttered like spell to its own fears:

“Be on the qui vivy!”

“Number one and two!” from outside.

In an instant fierce blows from great hammers were delivered upon the door, and the weight of those hammers expelled the breaths of the men who swung them through the air.

The door trembled with the weight of those blows, but was large enough to distribute their power, and ropes stretched within made the door recoil. Only some ragged parts of the door fell with the shock of the sledges.

Quantrell saw Brown looking down his rifle-breech, keen as a squirrel looking along a bough.

“The first eight from each file — forward!” spoke the same voice of high nervous energy, in tones low pitched.

In a moment a tremendous sound came from the door as if a cannon-ball had struck it. The very building seemed to quiver.

“Are you ready, men?” from the bushy, squirrel-eyed bandit leader.

“Ready, captain!” from two cool voices, of one black man and one white.

“Lord-a-mercy!” and groans from the fugitive negroes of the neighborhood who were back among the prisoners.

“Back!” from the open air. “Forward, now — smart, and all together!”

The door seemed to split and to lose cohesion in all its bolts, yet hung by the upper hinge; and below, where it was unhinged, a bright flash of daylight came in, and the legs of men in blue were seen.

“In there, number one! Next man — file second! In with you! Use the bayonet!”

As the first marine came stooping through the fissure of the door, the colored man Green discharged his rifle; the man fell with a cry, and was dragged back from outside.

“In with you, number two!”

As the second marine came in, Coppock’s gun went off; the man stumbled, but fell forward. Smoke, ascending from these rifles, filled the engine-house and slowly soared upward, and John Brown, lying along the top of the engine, was concealed in the smoke.

Lloyd Quantrell saw a small man in officer’s dress creep in the broken space at the bottom of the door, and peer around like a rat, as the smoke arose.

Suddenly this man, by two switches of a sword in his hand, extorted loud cries from both Taylor and Anderson, who had ceased to fight.

“Murder! Oh!”

“Quarter! God!”

Quantrell saw this small officer’s elbow and bright blade thrust vengefully again and right into the bodies of the same unresisting and unarmed companions, who fell howling to the brick floor.

His attention was for a moment diverted from this marine officer by a second one, possibly superior in rank to the first, who came half-way in and also peered around, and whose countenance was manly but unexcited.

The rifle of John Brown was leveled at this man; Quantrell looked to see him fall dead.

Brown kept the officer under his merciless aim a second, and then, seeing more marines come in, he put his rifle down and drew the sword of King Frederick.

His act was beheld by the first marine-officer, who had been looking everywhere, under strong excitement, as for the leader of this foray.

This officer drew his bloody blade, bounded upon the side of the engine, and with all his might slashed the old leader across the head, and then, by an upward blow, delivered with the whole fury of his feelings, he stabbed John Brown and felled him to the hard floor of the engine-house.

Hands seized one of the engines and hurled it forward. The door fell entirely outward, and the daylight shone upon the little prison and its huddling and furious or frightened beings: upon the smoke, the cries, the curses — the living, the groaning, and the dead.

The next thing Quantrell saw was the rush of a great multitude from the railroads and the river. They came with shrieks of —

“Hang them! hang them!”

While groping his way out, Quantrell saw the maddened lieutenant of marines, who had killed Anderson and Taylor and stabbed John Brown, strike one of his fellow-prisoners, a respectable old Virginia gentleman, with the flat of his sword.

“Shame, sir!” cried Quantrell.

The maniacal officer turned upon our hero and smote him, also, with the flat of the same sword.

Quantrell staggered backward and fell into a strong pair of arms.

“What! Bruder Lloyd. You here?”

It was Luther Bosler. He kissed Lloyd fervently in the Dunker fashion.

The next minute Lloyd Quantrell’s bleeding face was passionately kissed also by Katy of Catoctin.

---

 

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE FREE-STATE LINE.

WHEN Luther Bosler and his father came in from plowing at the premature sounding of the bell, the news of an insurrection at Harper’s Ferry had been confirmed, and Katy was almost distracted by her lover’s danger and the loss of her ring; while Nelly Harbaugh, whose strong, worldly nature kindled at the great neighboring event, prodded Luther Bosler to take both the girls to Virginia.

“Nay,” Father Jake Bosler entreated, “wass is de use? Ich con’s net goot afforde. Te wheat-ground ain’t a-ready, Luter. Stay away from worltly contintions. Trouble comes time enough. Bi’m-by.”

“Fader,” Katy spoke, “Lloyd’s there: sell is olles.”

Saying “That is all,” she broke down, and Nelly Harbaugh cried:

“Dawdy Jake, you’re hard on Katy: she’s nervous; she’s growing; it’s a delicate time of life for Katy.”

Jake Bosler took his child in his arms and called her “leeb” and “dowb,” while the turtle-doves at the window made their plaintive “ah-coo-roo-coo-roo!”

“Katy,” he said, “you is too good for te city mans. Stay with fader, and pe te likeness of my Olty to my poor heart till — Bi’m-by.”

His eyes were full of tears as he called her the only likeness of his dead wife. Katy threw her arms around his neck, crying:

“Oh, my heart pulls both-a-ways! But Lloyd pulls it the most!”

“Jake,” spoke Luther Bosler, after reflection, to his father, “tese great events happens py us for some good purpose. We must not fly from te Lord’s works. I’ll put two hands in my place, and take te girls.”

“No, Luter, stay home. I’m daddy, and I forbid you.”

“I’m minister ofer you, Jake, and you must opey.”

“Tere’s your gal, sohn Luter — Nelly’s giddy. Keep her at home and to work, and you’ll haf her to enjoy. Take her into te world, and she’ll find temptation. Bi’m-by.”

Luther took up the Bible and called to prayers; he prayed for Nelly and for Katy, and for peace in the world.

“Now, girls,” he said, arising, “we’ll make some pusiness out of all this. Harper’s Ferry is, maype, full of hungry strangers. You git to work and cook pies, chickens, ham, whatefer will sell, and I think I can pring home to fader more money than plowing prings.”

Jake Bosler seemed placated at this business outlook, and went to the stable to give special bedding to the horses for the journey.

All night the girls and hands stayed up to cook, and before daylight the big wagon, with two seats in it, was moving down the South Mountain side. Climbing the mountain, they saw Burkettsville’s spires come out of the valley mists, and in Crampton’s Gap the early partridge cried “Bob White!” Katy slept in Nelly’s lap.

“Pure child,” said Nelly, “her worldly love is fresh, Luther, as a new-laid egg in the hen’s nest; what will it hatch?”

“Experience, dear. If you are in love, it will be the same.”

“Luther, you are too wise a merchant to be a Dunker preacher. You will get rich if you take to the world. Oh, take me to see a little of the world, before we settle into everlasting Sabbath! I want experience, too — what Lloyd’s father called ‘career.’ There is no want of love for you, my darling, in my heart, but I am not made” — she blushed as she thought of her own vanity — “to be always unseen.”

“No,” said Luther, “you are peautiful, Nelly. You shall pe seen of children, healthy like yourself, and one of those is more career than any man can have. To be a mother, supreme ofer a family — it is experience only one man efer had, and that was Adam, from whose side the woman came.”

She blushed at the moment’s anticipation of purely brought motherhood; but suddenly men started up between the cross-roads in Crampton’s Gap and seized the horses’ bridles.

“Money!” exclaimed one — a slight, stooping youth, with pale blue eyes; “we want your money to buy subsistence.”

Around them were seven men, one a negro, and all the rest white — travel-worn, stern young men, and revolvers were in their hands.

“You are fugitives from Harper’s Ferry,” spoke Luther, looking at them out of his large, sluggish eyes. “We have food and plenty of it; take, and pay, if you can. But we carry no money in this country.”

They ate like famished men, and inquired about all the roads to the free State.

“Walk on te mountain-ridge,” said Luther; “it is wooded and not often steep, but you may get thirsty for water. When you descend to the springs, look well for enemies. Beware at te free-State line of te kidnappers, who are probably lying in wait for you. Get well into Pennsylvania before you descend te mountain — yes, twenty miles.”

They apologized for rudeness, and went up into the mountain-ridge, northward, while Luther turned at the guide-post in the Gap to the south, and threaded the narrow Pleasant Valley by the winding cascades of Israel’s Creek. They fed at the Dunker churchyard, at Brownsville, and as they drew near Harper’s Ferry, before sunrise, the roads became crowded. All the country was up, and Sandy Hook was like the center of a great camp-meeting. Soldiery were waiting at the bridge, travel from everywhere stopped at this ragged point, and time continued to bring more and more crowds. The old man, Isaac Smith, had suspended the Western world to the wand of his mysterious will.

Luther sold out his load before he crossed the bridge, and awaited the preparations to storm the engine-house. They saw the marines formed, and the quiet Colonel Lee giving the signals to the marine-officers from a place in the armory-yard; and then the rush of thousands to the captured stronghold.

After Katy found her lover, they still paused to see the dying son of Brown led out, and Lloyd Quantrell gave him water, which ran through his wounds; and so, in time, Watson died in Coppock’s arms, peacefully and unconscious.

Colonel Washington was the hero of the delivery, and his gestures, when returning felicitations, had the grandeur of his origin. The mob ran his hired negro into the river Shenandoah and drowned him there, and desired to tear John Brown to pieces, also, but he, from his blood and bruises, exclaimed to the better officer of the marines:

“Sir, I had you covered with my rifle; I expect you to protect my life, as I protected yours.”

The officer saluted the brave old man. “Captain Brown,” said he, “I thank you; in return, I will protect you with my life.”

Very soon the queer old captive was complacently conducting an argument with the Governor of Virginia, a man of great romantic sensibility, who had already planned, on this émeute, a political campaign to make him President of the United States; and the two delightfully vain characters were entertaining reporters, Congressmen, and militia-captains with their sallies: but around one lay his dead-sons, sons-in-law, and comrades; and his political campaign would lead to nothing but the scaffold, to which he had the task to give dignity, if possible.

He turned out to be poor as pauperdom itself, without the means to transport himself back from the slave States to the free States, had he ever repented, and he had begged the little money for this expedition as the last enterprise of a disappointed but once promising career.

The bodies of his sons and connections were either taken by surgeons to the dissecting-room at Winchester, or buried with their comrades in a pit across the Shenandoah, where they lie near the unending grief of the plaintive river — poor bones of boys assembled by a wizard, to be the last relics of a mastodon age, and ever curious to moral, mental, and political science.

Those followers of Brown who survived, fitted to his situation with the anatomical symmetry of his own ribs; they continued to accept the leadership of his dignity, philosophy, and consistency, as they had followed him upon that forlorn hope to which his sincerity had given infatuation and plausibility.

Ned Coppock, taken with his smoking gun, soon became a hero among his captors; Stevens was put together, like a bloody puzzle; and these two were sent to Charlestown jail, eight miles away, with Captain Brown, in a wagon, as also the negroes, Green and Copeland, while the pursuit of the seven fugitives went on in the Maryland and Pennsylvania mountains.

The whole land was finally convinced that John Brown had made his insurrection with an “army” of only twenty-three men, of whom ten had died fighting.

It might have been possible to treat John Brown’s raid as without full moral accountability, and thus to have remanded it, by the contempt of justice, to the silence of a lunatic asylum; but the politician at the head of Virginia became the instrument to connect this little affair with the mightiest revolution of the age.

Governor Wise summoned the military of Virginia to arms, upon the belief, or pretense, that Brown’s was only a portion of a general insurrection and abolition invasion; and the little court-house place of Charlestown became, for five months, a garrisoned spot during the trials and executions of Brown and his survivors, while the example of Virginia led to the arming of every slave State, and thence proceeded the fomentation of the scheme of a separated republic, to assure the safety of slavery.

To Charlestown, therefore, let us soon proceed with our story-people.

Katy Bosler, after fondly receiving her lover, cried:

“Te accordion, Lloyd; where is it?”

“I left it at the old bandit’s farm, Katy.”

“Oh, goodness! And, Lloyd, te fortune-teller, who said I should lose my ring, has run away with it to Pennsylvania. O darling, what shall we do?”

“Go after them both, Kate, if your dear little heart is troubled. I have enlisted in one of the military companies to put down this insurrection, and we are ordered to cross the river and see if the enemy is at his stronghold.”

“Come on, then,” said Luther Bosler; “I’ll trife by John Brown’s farm, and go home by Solomon’s Gap.”

As they were setting out, the English pointer appeared, profuse in his gladness of rejoining friends; and to Katy he was ever a flatterer, cringing at her feet and licking her hand.

“The hound loves you, Kate,” Lloyd Quantrell said; “I’ll give him to you, to keep at the farm in remembrance of me.”

At the school-house in the marsh, boxes of arms were found, ready to be transported to Virginia. At the little rugged farm, they found many evidences of the conspiracy: letters torn to pieces in the short, thick pines, and arms and lead in the tenement of logs across the road; discarded bundles, boxes, and bags; and on the porch the dog Fritz stood tied, and hardly disposed to permit intrusion.

Lloyd attempted to go by this dog, to look for Katy’s accordion, and Fritz seized him by the garments and held him fast.

“Hallo!” Quantrell said; “why, here’s the last of Captain Brown’s recruits, and determined as all the rest.”

“Fritz is a faithful friend,” said Luther Bosler; “not as valuable a dog as yours, Lloyd, but more reliable. Katy will gif him to you.”

“Yes, Lloyd, if I find you took good care of my accordion.”

Quantrell disappeared into the loft of the small cabin, and there he found the humble instrument under the eaves.

“Here it is, Kate,” he cried, returning; “you little goosey, what makes you fear?”

“Now go and find her ring,” Nelly Harbaugh spoke; “it was your mother’s; it will make Katy your wife. Hannah Ritner has gone to the Siebentager Nunnery, only a day’s ride from here, in Pennsylvania.”

“Shall I go, darling?” He turned to Katy.

“O Lloyd, do go! De letsht naucht war’s orrick dunkle.”

“Dark was that night, also, to me, bright eyes, when I expected to be killed and never see you more.”

“Lloyd, your father says he will marry you to a Cordullish — a Catholic, one hochmoot un reich. If you do not find my ring, I shall believe it.”

“Dear old father! But he can no more make me love another than he can love me, dear. How does he know this strange Ritner woman? Why, now I see something!”

“What is it, Lloyd?”

“That pony she rides I have seen in my father’s stable. He, like Hannah Ritner, is an abolitionist.”

As they paused to let the horses blow on Elk Ridge Mountain summit, the vale of John Brown was seen behind them, stony and steep, and before them the verdurous Pleasant Valley, with its stone farm-houses and apple-orchards, and, like a great, green vine swung low, the South Mountain drooped to Crampton’s Gap, to give admission to the Catoctin Valley.

“Katy, good-by,” Lloyd said; “don’t ever fear for me, gentle child! Never in love before, I could not forget you now, if every interest declared against you.”

“I shall nefer let you go,” the child said, with a resolution he had not observed in her before. “Since you haf come, Love has took possession of me. I will pray; I will persevere. I don’t see how I am to get you, Lloyd, but I don’t dare to lose you.”

“O Katy!” exclaimed Nelly Harbaugh, “the difel of love is striving in you as I never saw it before. I could not be so headstrong.”

“Nelly,” spoke Katy, in the tempest of her woe and courage, “you can never love like me!”

Procuring a horse from a Dunker farm, on Minister Luther Bosler’s request, Quantrell made his way to Smoketown, and entered the garden of Hannah Ritner.

The cool mountain-brook gurgled through her lot; the gourds hung from the arbors; the bees were humming drowsily in the hive; but stable and dwelling were empty of furniture, and the mountain behind the house was streaked with the foot-tracks of escaping slaves.

The neighbors told him that the fortune-teller was a great traveler, especially into Pennsylvania, and was now reported to be in Chambersburg.

Quantrell put his horse in Hannah Ritner’s stable, and lay down to sleep alone in the little hut. He was very tired, and not until he had slept off his burden of fatigue did he begin to dream.

He dreamed that his mother’s lost wedding-ring was a great wheel or tire of mourning gold, with black enamel in its rich yellow, and he was trying to roll it like a hoop up the mountain; but it weighed heavily upon his sinews, and he felt it overthrowing him with its backward gravity; he cried for help, but all the response he could hear was a little baby’s cry, until, when he had given up hope and resigned himself to be crushed by the black and gleaming cincture, a pike or spear was hurled from above, as if out of the sky, and it transfixed the mighty ring, like a dart ringed by a golden quoit; at once the ring was fractured, and the black enamel upon it was detached like a separate hoop, and went thundering down South Mountain with a sound like rolling fire, and he could hear it plunge into the Antietam Creek and sizz there, like the red-hot stones which, at hog-butchering time, the farmers boil their scalding hogsheads with.

Dart after dart came ringing from above — the very pikes, it seemed, that he had seen in boxes that day at the bandits’ rendezvous — and each of these entered the other lucent rim of virgin gold remaining there, which, like a mirror, flashed the heavens back, and, becoming magnified to powerful proportions, this ring contained an inscription, “Pure Union.”

Quantrell was afraid to look up and see what valkyrias or spirits had hurled those lances into the nuptial band; but, as the golden rim grew more and more distinct, he began to see faint faces reflected from the sky — faces with blood upon them: the ashen face of Watson Brown, the bloodless blue lips of Oliver Brown, the raven beard and wounds of Kagi, the hollow sphere of Lehman’s skull, the mute, appealing countenance of William Thompson, and others he feared to pause and think on.

He awoke: at the little window of the cabin a golden-ringed light of a burning piece of pine illuminated a group of faces pressed against the panes. Quantrell raised a yell of dread.

The light was extinguished; steps were heard receding.

“This is a witch’s den!” thought Quantrell, his heart bounding in his breast; “surely I saw the faces there of old John Brown, of Ned Coppock, and of Hazlett, Cook, and others of their band.”

He entered Hagerstown next day, and found the whole population talking of the raid, and looking at himself and at all strangers with suspicion. Large rewards were out for Cook and others, guessed at or known, and Isaac Smith, or Brown, had been seen by half the people in the town, hauling away the boxes of arms he had received by rail from Chambersburg.

To that place Quantrell fearlessly proceeded, taking a roundabout course through a famous kidnappers’ settlement called Leitersburg, within sight of the Pennsylvania boundary-line. Here the tavern was beset by wild-looking borderers, and Quantrell narrowly escaped being made to stop and fight, according to the chivalry of those times; he “treated” liberally at the bar, and was relieved to find that the Logan brothers, whose chief rendezvous this was, had gone off in the South Mountain to hunt for John Brown’s fugitives.

Resolved to keep his word to Katy, the young man slowly continued on to Chambersburg, a flourishing shire town, twenty miles within Pennsylvania, and there, too, the excitement about the great abolition raid was universal.

Hundreds of people stood before an old, low warehouse with derrick windows, where John Brown had stored his Kansas rifles so long before employing them; and threatening groups molested a plain boarding-house on a back street, where the recruits for Brown, and that redoubtable captain himself, had been accommodated with Christian shelter.

The keeper of this dwelling bore the same family name as Hannah Ritner, and was said to be a daughter-in-law of a former Governor of Pennsylvania, but Lloyd found such apprehension and terror in the family that he could get no information of their mysterious connection, though he thought, when he said he was the son of Abel Quantrell, that they took a suspicious interest in him for a moment.

The Governor of Pennsylvania was a Democrat, of the same political party as the Governor of Virginia, and would manifestly deliver any of Brown’s band up to the jurisdiction they had offended. The Pennsylvania public considered Brown’s greatest offense to have been the purloining the sword of General Washington; and it was thought hardly less culpable to have provided a “nigger” with bed and board in a white family.

The person that all popular vengeance was now directed against was little Captain Cook, the forerunner and spy of the raiders, and he was believed to be in the very county of Scotch and Irish settlers where Quantrell was now wandering.

Considering that Hannah Ritner might be at the Seventh-Day Baptist kloste