It was now the fifth night of his watch. He began to despair
of his object. He had seen nothing to give the least confirmation
to his suspicions. His wife had appeared only as she was, as
pure as an angel;—his ancient enemy not less so. He was
furious that he could find no good cause of fury, and weary of a
watch which was so much at variance with his habits. He determined
that night to end it. With the night, and at the usual
hour, came the unfailing Arthur. He placed his bowl of milk
upon the steps, his sack of meal, a small vessel of butter, and a
neat little basket of apples. For a moment he lingered by the
fence, then slipping back, adroitly ensconced himself in a neighbouring
thicket, from whence he could see every movement of
the fair sufferer by whom they were withdrawn. This last
movement of the young farmer had not been unseen by the
guilty husband. Indeed, it was this part of the proceeding
which, more than any thing beside, had forced upon him the
conviction that the parties did not meet. She came, and she, too,
lingered by the steps, before she proceeded to remove the provisions.
Deep was the sigh that escaped her—deeper than usual
were her emotions. She sank upon one of the steps—she clasped
her hands convulsively—her lips moved—she was evidently
breathing a spontaneous prayer to heaven, at the close of which
she wept bitterly, the deep sobs seeming to burst from a heart
that felt itself relieved by this mournful power of expression.

Was it the echo of her own sighs—her sobs—that came to her
from the thicket? She started, and with wild eye gazing around
her, proceeded with all haste to gather up her little stores. But
in this she was prevented. The answering sigh, the sob,—coming
from the lips of his hated rival and ancient enemy, had gone,
hissingly, as it were, into the very brain of John Houston. He
darted from his place of concealment, dashed the provisions from
the hands of his wife, and, with a single blow, smote her to the
earth, while he cried out to Holt in the opposite thicket, some incoherent
language of insults and opprobrium. The movement
of the latter was quite as prompt, though not in season to prevent
the unmanly blow. He sprang forward, and, grasping the
offender about the body, lifted him with powerful effort from the
earth, upon which he was about to hurl him again with all the

[figure description] Page 018.[end figure description]

fury of indignant manhood, when Leda leapt to her feet, and
interposed. At the sound of her voice, the very tones of which
declared her wish, Arthur released his enemy, but with no easy
effort. The latter, regaining his feet, and recovering in some
degree his composure, turned to his wife and commanded her
absence.

“I cannot go—I will not—while there is a prospect of blood-shed,”
was her firm reply.

“What! you would see it, would you? Doubtless, the sight
of my blood would delight your eyes! But hope not for it!—
Arthur Holt, are you for ever to cross my path, and with impunity?
Shall there never be a settlement between us? Is the day
of reckoning never to come? Speak! Shall we fight it out here,
in the presence of this woman, or go elsewhere, where there will
be no tell-tale witnesses? Will you follow me?”

“Go not,—follow him not,—Arthur Holt. Go to your home!
I thank you, I bless you for what you have done for me and
mine;—for the mother who looks on us from heaven,—for the
child that still looks to me on earth. May God bless you for
your charity and goodness! Go now, Arthur Holt—go to your
own home—and look not again upon mine. Once more, God's
blessings be upon you! May you never want them.”

There was a warmth, an earnestness, almost a violence in the
tone and manner of this adjuration, so new to the usually meek
and calm deportment of his wife, that seemed, on a sudden, to
confound the brutal husband. He turned on her a vacant look
of astonishment. He was very far from looking for such boldness—
such audacity—in that quarter. But his forbearance was
not of long duration, and he was already beginning a fierce and
almost frenzied repetition of his blasphemies, when the subdued,
but firm answer of Arthur Holt again diverted his attention. The
good sense of the young farmer made him at once sensible of the
danger to the unhappy woman of using any language calculated
to provoke the always too prompt brutality of the husband, and,
stifling his own indignation with all his strength, he calmly promised
compliance with her requisitions.

“There are many reasons,” he added, “why there should be
no strife between John Houston and myself; we were boys

[figure description] Page 019.[end figure description]

together, our fathers loved one another; we have slept in the same
bed.”

“That shall not be your excuse, Arthur Holt,” exclaimed the
other, interrupting him; “you shall not escape me by any such
pretences. My father's name shall not shelter your cowardice.”

“Cowardice!”

“Ay, cowardice! cowardice! What are you but an unmanly
coward!”

There was a deep, but quiet struggle, in the breast of Arthur,
to keep down the rising devil in his mood; but he succeeded,
and turning away, he contented himself with saying simply:

“You know that I am no coward, John Houston—nobody better
than yourself. You will take good heed how you approach
such cowardice as mine.”

“Do you dare me!”

“Yes!”

“No! no!” cried the wife, again flinging herself between
them. Away, Arthur Holt, why will you remain when you see
what I am doomed to suffer?”

“I go, Leda, but I dread to leave you in such hands. God
have you in his holy keeping!”

CHAPTER IV.

[figure description] Page 020.[end figure description]

We pass over a period of eighteen months. In this time John
Houston had sold out the little cottage near Reedy River, and
had removed his wife to the residence of his mother near Paris
Mountain. Why he had not adopted this measure on the demise
of Widow Heywood is matter of conjecture only. His own mother
was now dead, and it was the opinion of those around, that it
was only after this latter event that he could venture upon a step
which might seem to divide the sceptre of household authority—
a point about which despotical old ladies are apt to be very
jealous. His household was as badly provided for as ever, but
some good angel, whose presence might have been suspected,
still watched over the wants of the suffering wife, and the hollow
of an ancient chestnut now received the stores which we have
formerly seen placed upon the rude blocks near the thicket fence
in Greenville. Whether John Houston still suspected the interference
of his hated playmate we cannot say. The prudent
caution of the latter availed so that they did not often meet, and
never under circumstances which could justify a quarrel. But
events were ripening which were to bring them unavoidably into
collision. We are now in the midst of the year 1776. The
strife had already begun, of Whig and Tory, in the upper part
of South Carolina. It happened some time in 1774 that the afterwards
notorious Moses Kirkland stopped one night at the dwelling
of John Houston. This man was already busy in stirring up
disaffection to the popular party of the State. He was a man of
loose, vicious habits, and irregular propensities. He and John
Houston were kindred spirits; and the hunter was soon enlisted
under his banners. He was out with Kirkland in the campaign
of 1775, when the Tories were dispersed and put down by the
decisive measures of General Williamson and William Henry
Drayton. It so happened that Arthur Holt made his appearance
in the field, also for the first time, in the army of Williamson.

[figure description] Page 021.[end figure description]

The two knew that they were now opponents as they had long
been enemies. But they did not meet. The designs of Kirkland
were baffled, his troops dispersed, and the country settled down
into a condition of seeming quiet. But it was a seeming quiet
only. The old wounds festered, and when, in 1780, the metropolis
of the State fell into the hands of the British, yielding to
captivity nearly the whole of its military power, the Tories resumed
their arms and impulses with a fury which long forbearance
had heightened into perfect madness. Upon the long and
melancholy history of that savage warfare which followed, we
need not dwell. The story is already sufficiently well known.
It is enough to say that John Houston distinguished himself by his
cruelties. Arthur Holt threw by the plough, and was one of
Butler's men for a season. With the decline of British power in
the lower, the ascendancy in the upper country finally passed
over to the Whigs. Both parties were now broken up into little
squads of from ten to fifty persons;—the Tories, the better to
avoid pursuit, the Whigs, the better to compass them in all their
hiding-places.

It was a cold and cheerless evening in the month of November
that Arthur Holt, armed to the teeth, stopped for the night, with a
party of eleven men, at a cottage about fourteen miles from his
own dwelling on the banks of Reedy River.

An hour had not well elapsed, before Arthur Holt found some
one jerking at his shoulder. He opened his eyes and recognised
the epileptic of whom mention was made in the early part of our
narrative. Acker was still an epileptic, and still, to all appearance,
a boy;—he was small, decrepit, pale, and still liable to the
shocking disease, the effects of which were apparent equally in
his withered face and shrivelled person. But he was not without
intelligence, and his memory was singularly tenacious of benefits
and injuries. Eagerly challenging the attention of Arthur Holt,
he proceeded to tell him that John Houston had only two hours
before been seen with a party of seven, on his way to the farm at
Paris Mountain, where, at that very moment, he might in all
probability be found. By this time the troopers, accustomed to
sudden rousings, were awake and in possession of the intelligence.
It was greedily listened to by all but Arthur Holt. John Houston

[figure description] Page 022.[end figure description]

was particularly odious in his own neighbourhood. Several of
the inhabitants had fallen victims to his brutality and hate. To
take him, living or dead,—to feed the vengeance for which they
thirsted,—was at once the passion of the party. It was with
some surprise that they found their leader apathetic and disposed
to fling doubt upon the information.

“I know not how you could have seen John Houston, Peter
Acker, with seven men, when we left him behind us, going below,
and crossing at Daniel's Ford on the Ennoree, only two days
ago.”

“ 'Twas him I seed, Captain, and no other. Don't you think I
knows John Houston? Oughtn't I to know him? Wasn't it he
that used to beat me, and duck me in the water? I knows him.
'Twas John Houston, I tell you, and no other person.”

“You are mistaken, Peter—you must be mistaken. No horse
could have brought him from the Ennoree so soon.”

“He's on his own horse, the great bay. 'Tis John Houston,
and you must catch him and hang him.”

One of the party, a spirited young man, named Fletchall, now
said:

“Whether it's Houston and his men or not, Captain Holt, we
should see who the fellows are. Acker ought to know Houston,
and though we heard of him on the Ennoree, we may have
heard wrong. It's my notion that Acker is right; and every
man of Reedy River, that claims to be a man, ought to see to it.”

There was a sting in this speech that made it tell. They did
not understand the delicacy of their Captain's situation, nor could
he explain it. He could only sigh and submit. Buckling on his
armour, he obeyed the necessity, and his eager troop was soon in
motion for the cottage of Houston at Paris Mountain. There, two
hours before, John Houston had arrived. He had separated from
his companions. It was not affection for his wife that brought
Houston to his home. On the contrary, his salutation was that
of scorn and suspicion. He seemed to have returned, brooding
on some dark imagination or project. When his wife brought
his child, and put him on his knees, saying with a mournful look
of reproach, “You do not even ask for your son!” the reply, betraying
the foulest of fancies—“How know I that he is!” showed

[figure description] Page 023.[end figure description]

too plainly the character of the demon that was struggling in his
soul. The miserable woman shrunk back in horror, while his
eyes, lightened by a cold malignant smile, pursued her as if in
mockery. When she placed before him a little bread and meat,
he repulsed it, exclaiming: “Would you have me fed by your
Arthur?” And when she meekly replied by an assurance that
the food did not come from him, his answer, “Ay, but I am not
so sure of the sauce!” indicated a doubt so horrible, that the poor
woman rushed from the apartment with every feeling and fibre
of her frame convulsed. Without a purpose, except to escape
from suspicions by which she was tortured, she had turned the
corner of the enclosure, hurrying, it would seem, to a little thicket,
where her sorrows would be unseen, when she suddenly encountered
Arthur Holt, with a cocked pistol in his grasp. The troopers
had dismounted and left their horses in the woods. They
were approaching the house cautiously, on foot, and from different
quarters. The object was to effect a surprise of the Tory;—
since, armed and desperate, any other more open mode of approach
might, even if successful, endanger valuable life. The
plan had been devised by Arthur. He had taken to himself that
route which brought him first to the cottage. His object was
explained in the few first words with Leda Houston.

“Arthur Holt!—you here!” was her exclamation, as she
started at his approach.

“Ay; and your husband is here!”

“No, no!” was the prompt reply.

“Nay, deny not! I would save him—away! let him fly at
once. We shall soon be upon him!”

A mute but expressive look of gratitude rewarded him, while,
forgetting the recent indignities to which she had been subjected,
Leda hurried back to the cottage and put Houston in possession
of the facts. He started to his feet, put the child from his knee,
though still keeping his hand upon its shoulder, and glaring upon
her with eyes of equal jealousy and rage, he exclaimed—

“Woman! you have brought my enemy upon me!”

To this charge the high-souled woman made no answer, but
her form became more erect, and her cheek grew paler, while
her exquisitely chiselled lips were compressed with the effort to

[figure description] Page 024.[end figure description]

keep down her stifling indignation. She approached him as if
to relieve him of the child; but he repulsed her, and grasping
the little fellow firmly in his hands, with no tenderness of hold,
he lifted him to his shoulder, exclaiming—

“No! he shares my danger! he goes with me. He is at least
your child—he shall protect me from your—”

The sentence was left unfinished as he darted through the
door! With a mother's scream she bounded after him, as he
took his way to the edge of the little coppice in which his horse
was fastened. The agony of a mother's soul lent wings to her
feet. She reached him ere he could undo the fastenings of his
horse, and, seizing him by his arm, arrested his progress.

“What!” he exclaimed; “you would seize—you would deliver
me!”

“My child! my child!” was her only answer, as she clung
to his arm, and endeavoured to tear the infant from his grasp.

“He goes with me! He shall protect me from the shot!”

“You will not, cannot risk his precious life.”

“Do I not risk mine?”

“My son—your son!”

“Were I sure of that!”

“God of heaven! help me! Save him! save him!”

But there was no time for parley. A pistol-shot was fired
from the opposite quarter of the house, whether by accident, or
for the purpose of alarm, is not known, but it prompted the
instant movement of the ruffian, who, in order to extricate himself
from the grasp of his wife, smote her to the earth, and in
the midst of the child's screams hurried forward with his prize.
To reach the coppice, to draw forth and mount his horse, was
the work of an instant only. The life of the hunter and the
partisan had made him expert enough in such performances.
Mounted on a splendid bay, of the largest size and greatest
speed, he lingered but a moment in sight, the child conspicuously
elevated in his grasp, its head raised above his left shoulder, while one
of its little arms might be seen stretching towards his motner, now
rising from the earth. At this instant Arthur Holt made his appearance.
From the wood, where he had remained as long as he
might, he had beheld the brutal action of his enemy. It was the

[figure description] Page 025.[end figure description]

second time that he had witnessed such a deed, and his hand now
convulsively grasped and cocked his pistol, as he rushed forward
to revenge it. But the unhappy woman rose in time to prevent
him. Her extended arms were thrown across his path. He
raised the deadly weapon above them.

“Would you shoot! oh, my God! would you shoot! Do you
not see my child! my child!”

The action of Arthur was suspended at the mother's words;
and, lifting the child aloft with a powerful arm, as if in triumph
and defiance, the brutal father, putting spurs to his horse, went
off at full speed. A single bound enabled the noble animal to
clear the enclosure, and, appearing but a single moment upon the
hillside, the mother had one more glimpse of her child, whose
screams, in another moment, were drowned in the clatter of the
horse's feet. She sunk to the ground at the foot of Arthur, as his
comrades leapt over the surrounding fence.

CHAPTER V.

[figure description] Page 026.[end figure description]

Pursuit under present circumstances was pretty much out of
the question—yet Arthur Holt determined upon it. John Houston
was mounted upon one of the most famous horses of the
country. He had enjoyed a rest of a couple of hours before the
troopers came upon him. The steeds of the latter, at all times
inferior, were jaded with the day's journey. Any attempt at
direct pursuit would, therefore, in all probability, only end in
driving the Tory out of the neighbourhood, thus increasing the
chances of his final escape. This was by no means the object
of the party, and when Arthur ordered the pursuit, some of his
men remonstrated by showing, or endeavouring to show, that such
must be the effect of it. Arthur Holt, however, had his own
objects. But his commands were resisted by no less a person
than Leda herself.

“Do not pursue, Arthur, for my sake, do not pursue. My
child!—he will slay my child if you press him hard. He is desperate.
You know him not. Press him not, for my sake,—for
the child's sake,—but let him go free.”

The entreaty, urged strenuously and with all those tears and
prayers which can only flow from a mother's heart, was effectual—
at least to prevent that direct pursuit which Arthur had
meditated. But, though his companions favoured the prayers of
the wife and mother, they were very far from being disposed to
let the Tory go free. On the contrary, when, a little after, they
drew aside to the copse for the purpose of farther consultation,
Arthur Holt found, to his chagrin, that his course with regard
to Houston was certainly suspected. His comrades assumed a
decision in the matter which seemed to take the business out of
his hands. Young Fletchall did not scruple to say, that he was
not satisfied with the spirit which Arthur had shown in the pursuit;
and the hints conveyed by more than one, in the course of
the discussion, were of such a nature, that the mortified Arthur

[figure description] Page 027.[end figure description]

threw up his command; a proceeding which seemed to occasion
no regret or dissatisfaction. Fletchall was immediately invested
with it, and proceeded to exercise it with a degree of acuteness
and vigour which soon satisfied the party of his peculiar fitness
for its duties. His plan was simple but comprehensive. He
said: “We cannot press the pursuit, or we drive him off; but
we can so fix it as to keep him where he is. If we do not press
him, he will keep in the woods, near abouts, till he can find some
chance of getting the child to the mother again. There's no
doubt an understanding between them. She knows where to find
him in the woods, or he'll come back at night to the farm. We
must put somebody to watch over all her movements. Who will
that be?”

The question was answered by the epileptic, Acker, who, unasked,
had hung upon the skirts of the party.

“I will watch her!”

“You!”

“Yes! I'm as good a one as you can get.”

“Very well! but suppose you have one of your fits, Acker!”

“I won't have one now for two weeks. My time's over for
this month.”

“Well, in two weeks, I trust, his time will be over too. We
will get some twenty more fellows and make a ring round him.
That's my plan. Don't press, for I wouldn't have him hurt the
child; but mark him when he aims to pass the ring.”

The plan thus agreed on, with numerous details which need
not be given here, was immediately entered upon by all parties.
Arthur Holt alone took no share in the adventure. The design
was resolved upon even without his privity, though the general
object could not be concealed from his knowledge. On throwing
up his commission he had withdrawn from his comrades, under a
show of mortification, which was regarded as sufficiently natural
by those around him to justify such a course. He returned to
his farm on Reedy River, but he was no indifferent or inactive
spectator of events.

Meanwhile, John Houston had found a temporary retreat some
six miles distant from the dwelling of his wife. It was a spot
seemingly impervious, in the density of its woods, to the steps of

[figure description] Page 028.[end figure description]

man. A small natural cavity in a hillside had been artificially
deepened, in all probability, by the bear, who had left it as a
heritage to the hunter to whom he had yielded up his ears.
The retreat was known to the hunter only. He had added, from
time to time, certain little improvements of his own. Cells were
opened on one side, and then the other. These were strewn with
dried leaves and rushes, and, at the remote inner extremity,
a fourth hollow had been prepared so as to admit of fire, the
smoke finding its way through a small and simple opening
at the top. All around this rude retreat the woods were dense,
the hunter being at particular pains to preserve it as a place of
secrecy and concealment. Its approach was circuitous, and the
very entrance upon it, one of those happy discoveries, by which
nature is made to accomplish the subtlest purposes of art. Two
gigantic shafts, shooting out from the same root, had run up in
diverging but parallel lines, leaving between them an opening
through which, at a moderate bound, a steed might make his
way. On each side of this mighty tree the herbage crowded
closely; the tree itself seemed to close the passage, and behind
it care was taken, by freely scattering brush and leaves, to remove
any traces of horse or human footsteps. In this place
John Houston found refuge. To this place, in the dead of night,
the unhappy Leda found her way. How she knew of the spot
may be conjectured only. But, prompted by a mother's love
and a mother's fears, she did not shrink from the task of exploring
the dreary forest alone. Here she found her miserable
husband, and was once more permitted to clasp her infant to
her bosom. The little fellow slept soundly upon the rushes, in
one of the recesses of the cave. The father sat at the entrance,
keeping watch over him. His stern eye looked upon the embrace
of mother and child with a keen and painful interest; and
when the child, awakened out of sleep, shrieking with joy, clung
to the neck of the mother, sobbing her name with a convulsive
delight, he turned from the spectacle with a single sentence,
muttered through his closed teeth, by which we may see what
his meditations had been—“Had the brat but called me father!”
The words were unheard by the mother, too full of joy to be
conscious of any thing but her child and her child's recovery.

[figure description] Page 029.[end figure description]

When, however, before the dawn of day, she proposed to leave
him and take the child with her, she was confounded to meet
with denial.

“No!” said the brutal father. “He remains with me. If he
is my child, he shall remain as my security and yours. Hear
me, woman! Your ruffians have not pursued me; your Arthur
Holt knows better than to press upon me; but I know their aims.
They have covered the outlets. They would make my captivity
secure. I wish but three days; in that time, Cunningham will
give them employment, and I shall walk over them as I please.
But, during that time, I shall want food for myself and horse—
perhaps you will think there is some necessity for bringing food
to the child. I do not object to that. Bring it then yourself,
nightly, and remember, the first show of treachery seals his
fate!”

He pointed to the child as he spoke.

“Great God!” she exclaimed. “Are you a man, John
Houston! Will you keep the infant from me!”

“Ay!—you should thank heaven that I do not keep you from
him also. But away! Bring the provisions! Be faithful, and
you shall have the child. But, remember! if I am entrapped,
he dies!”

We pass over the horror of the mother. At the dawn of day,
as she was hurrying, but not unseen, along the banks of Reedy
River, she was encountered by Arthur Holt.

“I went to your house at midnight, Leda, to put you on your
guard,” was the salutation of the farmer. “I know where you
have bee, and can guess what duty is before you. I must also
tell you its danger.”

He proceeded to explain to her the watch that was put upon
her movements, and the cordon militaire by which her husband
was surrounded.

“What am I to do!” was her exclamation, as, wringing her
hands, the tears for the first time flowed freely from her eyes.

“I will tell you! Go not back to your cottage, till you can
procure the child. Go now to the stone heap on the river bank
below, which they call the `Giant's Coffin.' There, in an hour
from now, I will bring you a basket of provisions. The place

[figure description] Page 030.[end figure description]

is very secret, and before it is found out that you go there, you
will have got the child. Nightly, I will fill the basket in the
same place, which, at the dawn, you can procure. Go now, before
we are seen, and God be with you!”

They separated—the young farmer for his home, and Leda
for the gloomy vault which popular tradition had dignified with
the title of the “Giant's Coffin.” This was an Indian giant, by
the way, whose exploits, in the erection of Table Mountain, for
gymnastic purposes, would put to shame the inferior feats of the
devil, under direction of Merlin or Michael Scott. But we have
no space in this chapter for such descriptions. Enough if we
give some idea of the sort of coffin and the place of burial which
the giant selected for himself, when he could play his mountain
pranks no longer. The coffin was a vaulted chamber of stone,
lying at the river's edge, and liable to be overflowed in seasons
of freshet. It took its name from its shape. Its area was an
oblong square, something more than twelve feet in length, and
something less than five in breadth. Its depth at the upper end
was about six feet, but it sloped gradually down, until, at the
bottom, the ends lay almost even with the surrounding rocks.
The inner sides were tolerably smooth and upright—the outer
presented the appearance of huge boulders, in no way differing
from the ordinary shape and externals of such detached masses.
The separate parts had evidently, at one period, been united.
Some convulsion of nature had fractured the mass, and left the
parts in a position so relative, that tradition might well be permitted
to assume the labours of art in an achievement which was
really that of nature alone. To complete the fancied resemblance
of this chamber to a coffin, it had a lid; a thin layer of
stone, detached from the rest, which, as the earth around it had
been loosened and washed away by the rains, had gradually
slid down from the heights above, and now in part rested upon
the upper end of the vault. The boys at play, uniting their
strength, had succeeded in forcing it down a foot or more, so
that it now covered, securely from the weather, some four or
five feet of the “Giant's Coffin.” It was at this natural chamber
that Arthur Holt had counselled Leda Houston to remain, until
he could bring the promised supply of provisions. This he did,

[figure description] Page 031.[end figure description]

punctually, at the time appointed, and continued to do until it
ceased to be necessary; to this spot did the wretched wife and
mother repair before dawn of every morning, bearing her burden
with all the uncomplaining meekness of a broken heart. We
must suppose, in the meantime, that the cordon has been drawn
around the tract of country in which it was known that Houston
harboured. The news was spread, at the same time, that an
attack might be expected from Bloody Bill Cunningham, or
some of his men; and the consequence was, that the country
was every where in arms and vigilant. A feeling of pity for
Leda Houston, who was generally beloved, alone prevented the
more daring young men from pressing upon the fugitive, hunting
him, with dog and fire, and bringing the adventure to a fierce
and final issue. Meanwhile, the epileptic, Acker, was active
in the business which he had undertaken. He was partially
successful—but of his proceedings we must speak at another
moment.

The situation of Leda Houston was in no ways improved by
the diligence, the patience, the devotion which she displayed in
her servitude. She did not seem to make any progress in subduing
the inexorable nature of her husband. She was permitted
to be with and to feed her child; to clasp him to her bosom
when she slept, and to watch over his sleep with that mixed
feeling of hope and fear, which none but a mother knows. But
these were all her privileges. The brutal father, still insinuating
base and unworthy suspicions, declared that the child should
remain, a pledge of her fidelity, and a partial guaranty for his
own safety.

Four days had now elapsed in this manner. On the morning
of the fifth, at a somewhat later hour than usual, she re-appeared
with her basket, and, having set down her stores, proceeded to
tell her husband of the arrival of a certain squad of troopers,
“Butler's men,” known for the fierce hostility with which they
hunted the men of “Cunningham.” The tidings gave him some
concern. He saw in it the signs of a dogged determination
of the neighbourhood to secure him at all hazards; since, from
what he knew of the present condition of the war, these men
could be required in that quarter only for some such purpose.

[figure description] Page 032.[end figure description]

They were wanted elsewhere. “Did you see them?” was the
question, which she answered in the negative. “Who told
you then of their arrival?” She was silent! Her countenance
underwent a change. “Woman! you have spoken with
Holt! These are his provisions!” With a blow of his foot he
struck the basket from her hand, and, in his fury, trampled
upon the scattered stores. It was with difficulty that the unhappy
woman gathered up enough to pacify the hunger of the
child. That day was passed in sullen and ferocious silence on
his part—on hers in mute caresses of her boy. His darker
suspicions were in full force, and darker thoughts came with
them. “Could I but know!” he muttered. “The child has
my mouth and nose; but the forehead, the hair, the eyes,—are
his!” Convulsed with terrible fancies, the miserable man hurried
to the entrance of the cavern, and throwing himself upon
the earth, leaned back, and looked up through the leafy openings
at the bits of sky that were suffered to appear above. In this
gloomy mood and posture, hours passed by as moments. It was
midnight. A change of weather was at hand. The stars were
hidden—the sky overcast with clouds, while the winds, seeming
to subside, were moaning through the woods as one in a deep
and painful sleep. The sound, the scene, were congenial with
the outlaw's soul. It was full of angry elements that only
waited the signal to break forth in storm. Suddenly, he was
roused from his meditations by the cessation of all sounds from
within the cave. The mother slept there, she had been playing
with the child, and he upon her bosom. Nature, in her case,
had sunk, in spite of sorrow, under fatigue. And she slept
deeply, her slumbers broken only by a plaintive moaning of
those griefs that would not sleep. With a strange curiosity
Houston seated himself quietly beside the pair, while his eyes
keenly perused the calm and innocent features of the child.
Long was the study, and productive of conflicting emotions. It
was interrupted with a start, and his eyes involuntarily turned,
with even a less satisfied expression, upon the features of his
wife.

But it was not to watch or to enjoy the beauty which he beheld,
that John Houston now bent his dark brows over the sleeping

[figure description] Page 033.[end figure description]

countenance of his wife. The expression in his looks was that
of a wild and fearful curiosity suddenly aroused. She had spoken
in her sleep. She had uttered a word—a name—which, of
all others, was most likely, from any lips, to awaken his most
angry emotions,—from her lips, most terrible. The name was
that of Arthur Holt,—and she still murmured. The ears of the
suspicious husband were placed close to her lips, that none of
the whispered sounds might escape him. He heard enough to open
to him a vista, at the extremity of which his diseased imagination
saw the worst shapes of hate and jealousy. With the pressing
thought in her memory of the tasks before her, she spoke of the
little basket—the bread—the bottle of milk, the slender slices of
ham or venison—which she had been accustomed to receive and
bring. Then came the two words, “Giant's Coffin,” and the
quick fancy of the outlaw, stimulated by hate and other passions,
immediately reached, at a bound, the whole narrative of her dependence
upon Holt and her meetings with him at the “Giant's
Coffin!”

A dark smile passed over his countenance. It was the smile
of a demon, who is at length, after long being baffled, in possession
of his prey. Leda slept on—soundly slept—for nature had at
length coerced the debtor, and compelled her rights—and the
hour was approaching when it was usual for her to set out on
her nightly progress. The resolution came, quick as lightning,
to the mind of the ruffian. He rose stealthily from the rushes,—
drew his pistols from his belt, silently examined the flints, and,
looking at the knife in his bosom, stole forth from the cavern.
With a spirit exulting with the demonaic hope of assuring himself
of a secret long suspected, and of realizing a vengeance
long delayed,—and familiar, night and day, with every step in
his progress, he hurried directly across the country to the banks
of Reedy River. The night, by this time, had become tempestuous.
Big drops of rain already began to fall; but these caused
no delay to the hardy outlaw. He reached the river, and,
moving now with cautious steps from rock to rock, he approached
the “Giant's Coffin” with the manner of one who expects
to find a victim and an enemy. One hand grasped a pistol,
the other a knife!—and, stealing onward with the pace of the Indian,

[figure description] Page 034.[end figure description]

he hung over the sides of the “Coffin,” and peered into its dark
chamber with his keenest eyes. It was untenanted. “I am too
soon,” he muttered. “Well! I can wait!” And where better
to await the victim—where more secure from detection—than in
the vault which lay before him!—one half covered from the
weather and shut in from all inspection,—that alone excepted, for
which he had come prepared. The keen gusts of wind which
now came across the stream laden with rain, was an additional
motive to this movement. He obeyed the suggestion, passed into
the mouth of the “Coffin;” and, crouching from sight, in a sitting
posture, in the upper or covered part of the chamber, he sat
with the anxiety of a passion which did not, however, impair its
patience, awaiting for his foe.

He had not reached this position unseen or unaccompanied.
We have already intimated that Acker, the epileptic, had made
some progress in his discoveries. With the singular cunning,
and the wonderful acuteness which distinguish some of the
faculties, where others are impaired in the same individual, he
had contrived, unseen and unsuspected, to track Leda Houston
to the place of her husband's concealment. He had discovered
the periods of her incoming and departure, and, taking his rest
at all other periods, he was always prepared to renew his surveillance
at those moments when the wife was to go forth. He had
barely resumed his watch, on the night in question, when he
was surprised to see Houston himself and not his wife emerging
from the cave. He followed cautiously his footsteps. Light of
foot, and keeping at convenient distance, his espionage was
farther assisted by the wind, which, coming in their faces,
effectually kept all sounds of pursuit from the ears of the outlaw.
His progress was not so easy when the latter emerged from the
woods, and stood upon the banks of the river. His approach
now required more caution; but, stealing on from shrub to shrub,
and rock to rock, Acker at length stood—or rather crouched—
upon the brink of the river also, and at but small distance from
the other. But of this distance he had ceased to be conscious.
He was better informed, however, when, a moment after, he
heard a dull, clattering, but low sound, which he rightly conjectured
to have been caused by some pressure upon the lower lid

[figure description] Page 035.[end figure description]

of the Coffin, which, being somewhat pendulous, was apt to
vibrate slightly, in spite of its great length and weight, under
any pressure from above. This sound apprised Acker of the
exact whereabouts of the outlaw, and his keen eyes at length
detected the dim outline of the latter's form, as he stood upon
the lid of the Coffin, the moment before he disappeared within its
recesses. Encouraged to advance, by the disappearance of the
other, the Epileptic did so with extreme caution. He was
favoured by the hoarse tumbling of the water as it poured its
way among the rocks, and by the increasing discords of the
wind and rain, which now came down in heavy showers. As
he crawled from rock to rock, with the stealthy movement of a
cat along some precipitous ledge, shrinking and shivering beneath
the storm, his own desire for shelter led him suddenly to the
natural conclusion that Houston had found his within the vault.
The ideas of Acker came to him slowly; but, gradually, as he
continued to approach, he remembered the clattering of the Coffin-lid,—
he remembered how, in his more youthful days, the boys,
with joint strength, had forced it to its present place, and he
conceived the sudden purpose of making the Coffin of the Giant,
that also of the deadly enemy whose boyish persecutions he had
neither forgot nor forgiven. To effect his present object, which,
suddenly conceived, became for the time an absorbing thirst, a
positive frenzy, in his breast,—he concentrated all his faculties,
whether of mind or of body, upon his task. His pace was
deliberate, and, so stealthy, that he reached the upper end of
the Coffin, laid himself down beside it, and, applying his ear to
one of the crevices, distinctly heard the suppressed breathings of
the man within. Crawling back, he laid his hands lightly and
with the greatest care upon the upper and heavier end of the
stone. His simple touch, so nicely did it seem to be balanced,
caused its vibration; and with the first consciousness of its
movement, Houston, whom we must suppose to have been lying
down, raising his pistol with one hand, laid the other on one of
the sides of the vault, with the view, as it was thought, to lift
himself from his recumbent position. He did so just as the
huge plate of stone was set in motion, and the member was
caught and closely wedged between the mass and the side of the

[figure description] Page 036.[end figure description]

Coffin upon which it rested. A slight cry broke from the outlaw.
The fingers were crushed, the hand was effectually secured. But
for this, so slow was the progress of the stone, that it would
have been very easy for Houston to have scrambled out before the
vault was entirely closed in. Slowly, but certainly, the lid went
down. Ignorant of the peculiar occasion of the outlaw's groans,
the Epileptic answered them with a chuckle, which, had the
former been conscious, would have taught him his enemy. But
he had fainted. The excruciating agony of his hurt had been
too much for his strength. Acker finished his work without
interruption; then piling upon the plate a mountain of smaller
stones, he dashed away in the direction of Holt's cottage. Here
he encountered the young farmer, busy, as was usual about that
hour, in making up his little basket of provisions. A few words
from the Epileptic sufficed to inform him that they were no longer
necessary—that Houston was gone—fled—utterly escaped, and
now, in all probability, beyond pursuit. Such was the tale he
told. He had his policy in it. The characteristic malignant
cunning which had prompted him to the fearful revenge which
he had taken upon his enemy, was studious now to keep it
from being defeated. To have told the truth, would have been
to open the “Giant's Coffin,” to undo all that had been done,
and once more let free the hated tyrant upon whose head he had
visited the meditated retribution of more than twenty years.
Acker well knew the generous nature of the young farmer, and
did not doubt that, if he declared the facts, Arthur would have
proceeded at once to the rescue of the common enemy. He
suppressed all show of exultation, made a plausible story—it
matters not of what sort—by which to account for the flight of
Houston; and, the consequence was, that, instead of proceeding
as before to the “Giant's Coffin,” Arthur Holt now prepared to
set out for the “Hunter's Cave.” But the day had broke in
tempest. A fearful storm was raging. The windows of heaven
were opened, the rain came down in torrents, and the wind went
forth with equal violence, as if from the whole four quarters of
the earth. The young farmer got out his little wagon, and
jumping in, Acker prepared to guide him to the place of retreat.

“The river is rising fast, Peter,” was the remark of Arthur

[figure description] Page 037.[end figure description]

as he caught a glimpse of the swollen stream as it foamed along
its way.

“Yes!” said the other, with a sort of hiccough, by which he
suppressed emotions which he did not venture to declare: “Yes!
I reckon 'twon't be many hours afore it fills the `Coffin.' ”

“If it keeps on at this rate,” returned the other, “one hour
will be enough to do that.”

“Only one, you think?”

“Yes! one will do!”

Another hiccough of the Epileptic appropriately finished the
dialogue.

CHAPTER VI.

[figure description] Page 038.[end figure description]

Leda awakened from her deep sleep to find herself alone with
the child. She was startled and alarmed at the absence of her
husband; but as the child was left—the great, and we may add,
the only, object for which she could have borne so much—she
was satisfied. On assuring herself of the departure of Houston
from the cave, she would unhesitatingly have taken hers also—
but the storm was now raging without, and, persuaded that her
husband had taken advantage of its violence to cross the barriers,
she gathered up the fragments of the last night's supper, and
was busy in giving her boy his little breakfast, when roused by
the voice of Arthur Holt. The story of the Epileptic was soon
told—as he had related it to Arthur. In this story, as there was
nothing improbable, both parties put implicit faith; and, cloaking
mother and child as well as he might, the young farmer bore
them through the close thicket to the place, some three hundred
yards without, where, on account of the denseness of the wood,
he had been compelled to leave the wagon. The horse of
Houston, the “Big Bay,” was next brought forth, but as Acker
could neither be persuaded to mount, or take him in charge, he
was restored to the covert until a better opportunity for removing
him. To the surprise of the young farmer, the Epileptic was
equally firm in refusing to go with him in the wagon. “I don't
mind the rain,” said he, “it can't hurt me.” “He will get his
death,” said Leda. “Not he,” replied Arthur, as Acker scampered
through the woods; “the water always helps him in his
fits.” While the wagon took one course, he took another.
Little did they suspect his route. A terrible feeling carried him
back to Reedy River—to a pitiless watch above that natural tomb
in which he had buried his living victim.

Meanwhile, what of Houston? When he recovered his consciousness,
the vault had been closed upon him; the flat mass,
once set in motion, had slid down the smooth edges of the

[figure description] Page 039.[end figure description]

upright sides with uninterrupted progress, and now lay above
him, shutting out light almost equally with hope. But a faint
glimmering reached the interior of the cell, from a crevice on
one side, where, in consequence of some inequality of the edges,
the lid had not settled fairly down upon it. It was the side
opposite to that in which his fingers had been crushed, and
where the stone still maintained its hold upon the mutilated
member. He heard the whistling of the wind, the hoarse rush
of the waters, and the heavy fall of the rain without, and a shuddering
sense of his true situation rushed instantly upon his soul.
For a moment he sank back, appalled, oppressed; but the
numbing pain of his injured hand and wrist, up to his elbow,
recalled him to the necessity of effort. Houston was a man of
strong will and great energies. Though at the first moment of
consciousness oppressed and overcome, the outlaw soon recovered
himself. It was necessary that he should do something
for his extrication. The light shut out, if not entirely the air,
is one of those fearful facts to rouse a man in his situation and
of his character, to all his energies. But the very first movement
was one to awaken him still more sensibly to his dangers.
Having arisen to grasp the sides of the vault, which, in the place
where he had laid his hand was fully five feet high, his position
when fixed there, was that of a man partially supended in the
air. His right hand could barely touch the floor of the chamber.
His left was utterly useless. In this position he could not even
exert the strength which he possessed; and, after an ineffectual
effort, he sank back again in momentary consternation. The
horror of that moment, passed in thought,—the despair which it
occasioned—was the parent of new strength. He came to a
terrible decision. To avail himself of his right hand, it was
necessary that he should extricate the other. He had already
tried to do so, by a vain effort at lifting the massive lid of his
coffin. The heavy plate no longer vibrated upon a pivot. It
had sunk into a natural position, which each upright evenly
maintained. The hand was already lost to him. He resolved
that it should not render the other useless. With a firmness
which might well excite admiration, he drew the couteau de
chasse from his bosom, and deliberately smote off the mutilated

[figure description] Page 040.[end figure description]

fingers at the joints; dividing the crushed parts—bone and tendon,—
from the uninjured,—falling heavily back upon the stone floor
the moment the hand was freed. But this time he had not
fainted, though the operation tended to restore the hand, which
had been deadened by the pressure and pain of its position, to
something like sensibility. But such pain was now but slightly
felt; and, wrapping the hand up in his handkerchief, he prepared
with due courage for the difficult task before him. But the very
first effort almost convinced him of its hopelessness. In vain
did he apply the strength of his muscular arm, the force of his
broad shoulders, his sinewy and well-supported frame. Forced
to crouch in his narrow limits, it was not possible for him to
apply, to advantage, the strength which he really possessed; and,
from the extreme shallowness of his cell in the lower extremity,
he was unable to address his efforts to that part where the stone
was thinnest. At the upper part, where he could labour, the
mass was greatly thicker than the rest; and it was the weight
of this mass, rather than the strength of Acker,—the momentum
once given it from above,—that carried the plate along to the foot
of the plane. His exertions were increased as his strength
diminished—the cold sweat poured from his brow,—and, toiling
against conviction—in the face of his increasing terrors,—he at
length sunk back in exhaustion. From time to time, at brief
intervals, he renewed his toils, each time with new hope, each
time with a new scheme for more successful exertion. But the
result was, on each occasion, the same; and, yielding to despair,
he threw himself upon the bottom of his cell and called death to
his relief.

While thus prostrate, with his face pressed upon the chilling
pavement, he suddenly starts, almost to his feet, and a new terror
seizes upon his soul. He is made conscious of a new and
pressing danger. Is it the billows of the river—the torrents
swollen above their bounds—that beat against the walls of his
dungeon? Is it the advancing waters that catch his eye glimmering
faint at his feet, as they penetrate the lower crevice of
the coffin? A terrible shudder shook his frame! He cannot
doubt this new danger, and he who, a moment before, called
upon death to relieve him from his terrors, now shouts, under

[figure description] Page 041.[end figure description]

worse terrors, at the prospect of his near approach in an unexpected
shape. It is necessary that he should employ all his
strength—that he should make other and more desperate efforts.
He rises, almost erect. He applies both arms—the maimed as
well as the sound,—almost unconscious of the difference, to the
lid of his tomb. “Buried alive!” he cries aloud—“Buried
alive!” and at each cry, his sinewy arms shoot up—his broad
shoulders are raised:—his utmost powers, concentrated upon the
one point, in the last effort of despair, must surely be successful.
His voice shouts with his straining sinews. He feels the mass
above him yielding. Once more—and once again,—and still he
is encouraged. The lid vibrates—he could not be deceived,—
but oh! how slightly. Another trial—he moves it as before,
but as his strength fails, his efforts relax,—and it sinks down
heavily in its place. Breathless, he crouches in his cell. He
listens! Is it a footstep?—It is a movement!—the stones
fall about the roof of his narrow dwelling. A human agency
is above. “Hurrah!” he cries—“Hurrah! Throw off the
stone—crush it—crush it! There is no time to be lost!”
For a moment he fancies that the movement above is one intended
for his relief. But what mean these rolling stones? A
new apprehension possesses him in the very moment of his
greatest hope. He rises. Once more he extends his arms, he
applies his shoulders; but he labours now in vain. His strength
is not less—his efforts are not more feebler—in this than in
his former endeavours. He cannot doubt the terrible truth!
New stones have been piled above his head. He is doomed!
His utmost powers fail to move the mass from its place. His
human enemy is unrelenting. He cries to him in a voice of
equal inquiry and anguish.

“Who is there? what enemy? who? Speak to me! who is
above me? Who? Who!”

Can it be? He is answered by a chuckle—a fell, fiendish
laugh—the most terrible sort of answer. Can it be that a
mortal would so laugh at such a moment? He tries to recall
those to whom he has given most occasion for vindictiveness and
hate. He names “Arthur Holt!” He is again answered by a
chuckle, and now he knows his enemy.

[figure description] Page 042.[end figure description]

“God of heaven!” he exclaims, in the bitter anguish of his
discovery, “and can it be that I am doomed to perish by this
most miserable of all my foes!”

Once more he rushes against the mass above him, but this
time with his head alone. He sinks down stunned upon the
floor, and is aroused by the water around him. Inch by inch
it rises. He knows the character of the stream. It will be
above him, unless he is relieved, in less than an hour. The proud
and reckless outlaw is humbled. He condescends to entreat
the wretched creature to whom he owes his situation. He implores
forgiveness—he promises reward. He begs—he threatens—
he execrates. He is answered by a chuckle as before; the
Epileptic sits upon his coffin-lid, and the doomed man can hear
his heels without, as they beat time with the winds and waters,
against the sides of his tomb. Meanwhile, the water presses in
upon him—he feels its advance around him—it is now about his
knees—in another moment it is every where. It has gradually
ascended the plane—it now spreads over the entire floor of his
dungeon. He grasps his pistols, which he had laid down beside
him, and applies their muzzles to his head. He is too late.
They are covered with water, and refuse fire. His knife is
no longer to be found. It had dropped from his right hand
when he smote off the fingers of the left, and had probably
rolled down the plane to the bottom, where, covered with water,
it is impossible to recover it. Hope within, and hope from
without, have failed him equally; and, except in prayer, there
is no refuge from the pang of death. But prayer is not easy to
him who has never believed in the efficacy of its virtues. How
can he pray to be forgiven, who has never been taught to forgive.
He tries to pray! The Epileptic without, as he stoops
his ear, can catch the fragmentary plea, the spasmodic adjuration,
the gasping, convulsive utterance, from a throat around
which the waters are already wreathing with close and unrelaxing
grasp. Suddenly the voice ceases—there is a hoarse
murmur—the struggle of the strong man among the waters,
which press through the crevices between the lid and the sides
of the dungeon. As the convulsion ceases, the Epileptic starts to
his feet, with a terror which he had not felt before; and, looking

[figure description] Page 043.[end figure description]

wildly behind him as he ran, bounded up the sides of the neighbouring
hills.

Thus ends our legend of the “Giant's Coffin.” Tradition does
not tell us of the farther fortunes of Leda Houston. Some pages
of the chronicle have dropped. It is very certain, however, that
Arthur Holt, like Benedick, lived to be a married man, and died
the father of several children—the descendants of some of whom
still live in the same region. Of the “Coffin” itself, some fragments,
and, it is thought, one of the sides, may be shown, but it
was “blown up” by the very freshet which we have described,
and the body of Houston drifted down to the opposite shore. It
was not till long after that Acker confessed the share which he
had in the manner of his death and burial.

p371-315 SERGEANT BARNACLE, OR THE RAFTSMAN OF THE EDISTO. CHAPTER I.

Short be the shrift and sure the cord.

[figure description] Page 044.[end figure description]

The pretty little settlement of Orangeburg, in South Carolina,
was an old and flourishing establishment before the Revolution.
It was settled, as well as the contiguous country, by successive
troops of German Palatines, who brought with them all the sober
industry, and regular perseverance, characteristic of their country.
They carried the cultivation of indigo in Carolina to a degree
of perfection, on which they prospered, thriving, without
much state, and growing great in wealth, without provoking the attention
of their neighbours to the fact. To this day their descendants
maintain some of these characteristics, and, in a time
of much cry and little wool, when it is no longer matter of mortification
for a vain people to confess a want of money, they are
said to respond to the “I O U,” of their more needy acquaintance,
by knocking the head out of a flour barrel, and unveiling a
world of specie, which would renovate the credit of many a
mammoth bank. The good old people, their ancestors, were
thrifty in other respects; clean and comfortable in their houses;
raising abundance of pigs and poultry; rich in numerous children,
whom they reared up in good works and godliness, with
quite as much concern, to say no more, as they addressed to
worldly objects. They lived well—knew what surprising moral
benefits accure from a due attention to creature comforts; and,
if they spent little money upon foreign luxuries, it was only because
they had learned to domesticate so many of their own.

[figure description] Page 045.[end figure description]

Home, indeed, was emphatically their world, and they found a
world in it. Frank hospitality, and the simple sorts of merriment
which delight, without impairing the unsophisticated nature,
were enjoyed among them in full perfection; and, from Four
Holes to Poplar Springs, they were emphatically one and the
same, and a very happy people.

Our present business lies in this region, at a period which we
may state in round numbers, as just five years before the Revolution.
The ferment of that event, as we all know, had even then
begun—the dispute and the debate, and the partial preparation—
but the details and the angry feeling had been slow in reaching
our quiet farmers along the Upper Edisto. The people were not
good English scholars, preserving, as they did in many places,
the integrity of the unbroken German. Here and there, it had
suffered an English cross, and, in other places, particularly in the
village, the English began to assert the ascendancy. But of
newspapers they saw nothing, unless it were the venerable South
Carolina Gazette, which did little more than tell them of the
births, marriages and deaths in the royal family, and, at melancholy
intervals, of the arrival in Charleston of some broad-bottomed
lugger from Bremen, or other kindred ports in Faderland.
The events which furnished materials to the village publican and
politician, were of a sort not to extend their influence beyond
their own ten-mile horizon. Their world was very much around
them, and their most foreign thoughts and fancies still had a
savour of each man's stable-yard. They never interfered in the
slightest degree with the concerns of Russia or Constantinople, and
I verily believe that if they had happened to have heard that
the Great Mogul were on his last legs, and knew the secret of
his cure, they would have hesitated so long before advising him
of its nature, that the remedy would come too late to be of any
service. And this, understand me, not because of any lack of
Christian bowels, but simply because of a native modesty, which
made them reluctant to meddle with any matters which did not
obviously and immediately concern themselves. They were,
certainly, sadly deficient in that spirit of modern philanthropy
which seems disposed to meddle with nothing else. Their hopes
and fears, strifes and excitements, were all local. At worst a

[figure description] Page 046.[end figure description]

village scandal, or farm-yard jealousy—a squabble between two
neighbours touching a boundary line, or cattle pound, which ended
in an arbitration and a feast, in which cherry and domestic
grape—by no means the simple juice of either—did the duty of
peacemakers, and were thrice blessed accordingly. Sometimes—
a more serious matter—the tall lad of one household would fail
to make the proper impression upon the laughing damsel of another,
and this would produce a temporary family estrangement,
until Time, that great consoler, would furnish to the injured
heart of the sufferer, that sovereignest of all emollients—indifference!
Beyond such as these, which are of occurrence in the
best regulated and least sophisticated of all communities, there
were precious few troubles among our people of the North Edisto,
which they could not easily overcome.

But the affair which I am about to relate, was an exception to
the uniform harmlessness and simplicity of events among them,
and the better to make the reader understand it, I must take him
with me this pleasant October evening, to a snug farm-house in
the Forks of Edisto—a part of the country thus distinguished, as
it lies in the crotch formed by the gradual approach of the two
branches of Edisto river, a few miles above the spot of their final
junction. Our farmer's name is Cole. He is not rich, but not
poor—one of those substantial, comfortable men of the world,
who has just enough to know what to do with it, and just
little enough to fancy that if he could get more he should
know what to do with that also. His farm, consisting of five or
six hundred acres, is a competence, but a small part of which is
cleared and in cultivation. He has but two slaves, but he has
two strapping sons, one of twelve, the other of fourteen, who
work with the slaves, and upon whom, equally with them, he bestows
the horse-whip when needed, with as bountiful a hand as
he bestows the hommony. But if he counts but precious little
of gold and silver among his treasures, he has some treasures
which, in those days of simplicity, were considered by many to
be much more precious than any gold or silver. Like Jephthah,
Judge of Israel, he has a daughter—nay, for that matter, he has
two of them, and one of them, the eldest, is to be married this
very evening. Philip Cole was no Judge of Israel, but he loved

[figure description] Page 047.[end figure description]

his daughters not the less, and the whole country justified his
love. The eyes of the lads brightened, and their mouths watered
at the bare mention of their names, and the sight of them generally
produced such a commotion in the hearts of the surrounding
swains, that, as I have heard averred a hundred times by
tradition, they could, on such occasions, scarcely keep their feet.
Keep their feet they could not, on such nights as the present,
when they were not only permitted to see the lasses, but to dance
it with them merrily. Dorothy Cole, the eldest, was as fine a specimen
of feminine mortality, as ever blossomed in the eyes of
love; rather plumpish, but so well made, so complete, so brightly
eyed, and so rosily cheeked, that he must be a cold critic indeed,
who should stop to look for flaws—to say, here something might
be pared off, and here something might be added. Such fine
women were never made for such foolish persons. But Margaret,
the younger, a girl of sixteen, was unexceptionable. She was
her sister in miniature. She was beautiful, and faultless in her
beauty, and so graceful, so playful, so pleasantly arch, and tenderly
mischievous—so delightful, in short, in all her ways, that
in looking upon her you ceased to remember that Eve had fallen—
you still thought of her in Eden, the queen of its world of
flowers, as innocent and beautiful as the very last budding rose
amongst them. At all events, this was the opinion of every body
for ten miles round, from Frank Leichenstein, the foreign gentleman—
a German on his travels—to Barnacle Sam, otherwise
Samuel Moore, a plain raftsman of the Edisto.

The occasion, though one of gaiety, which brought the company
together, was also one of gloom. On this night the fair
Dorothy would cease to be a belle. All hopes, of all but one,
were cut off by her lately expressed preference for a farmer
from a neighbouring district, and the young men assembled to
witness nuptials which many of them looked on with envy and
regret. But they bore, as well as they might, with the mortification
which they felt. Love does not often kill in modern
periods, and some little extra phlegm may be allowed to a community
with an origin such as ours. The first ebullitions of public
dissatisfaction had pretty well worn off before the night of the
wedding, and, if the beauty of the bride, when she stood up that

[figure description] Page 048.[end figure description]

night to receive the fatal ring, served to reawaken the ancient
flame in the breasts of any present, its violence was duly overcome
in the reflection that the event was now beyond recall, and
regrets utterly unavailing. The frolic which succeeded, the
good cheer, the uproar, and the presence of numerous other
damsels, all in their best, helped in no small degree to lessen the
discontent and displeasure of the disappointed. Besides, there
was the remaining sister, Margaret, a host in herself, and so gay,
and so good-natured, so ready to dance and sing, and so successful
in the invention of new modes of passing time merrily, that,
before the bride disappeared for the night, she was half chagrined
to discover that nobody—unless her new-made husband—now
looked to where she stood. Her sway was at an end with the
hopes of her host of lovers.

CHAPTER II.

[figure description] Page 049.[end figure description]

The revels were kept up pretty late. What with the ceremony,
the supper, the dancing, and the sundry by-plays which are common
to all such proceedings, time passed away without the proper
consciousness of any of the parties. But all persons present
were not equally successful or equally happy. It was found, after
a while, that though Margaret Cole smiled, and talked, and played,
and danced with every body, there was yet one young fellow
who got rather the largest share of her favours. What rendered
this discovery particularly distressing was the fact that he was a
stranger and a citizen. His name was Wilson Hurst, a genteel
looking youth, who had recently made his appearance in the
neighbourhood, and was engaged in the very respectable business
of a country store. He sold calicoes and ribbons, and combs,
and dimity, and the thousand other neat, nice matters, in which
the thoughts and affections of young damsels are supposed to be
quite too much interested. He was no hobnail, no coarse unmannered
clown; but carried himself with an air of decided ton, as
if he knew his position, and was resolute to make it known to
all around him. His manner was calculated to offend the more
rustic of the assembly, who are always, in every country, rather
jealous of the citizen; and the high head which he carried, the
petty airs of fashion which he assumed, and his singular success
with the belle of the Forks, all combined to render the conceited
young fellow decidedly odious among the male part of the assembly.
A little knot of these might have been seen, toward the
small hours, in earnest discussion of this subject, while sitting in
the piazza they observed the movements of the unconscious pair,
through a half opened window. We will not listen at present to
their remarks, which we may take for granted were sufficiently
bitter; but turn with them to the entrance, where they have discovered
a new arrival. This was a large man, seemingly rather

[figure description] Page 050.[end figure description]

beyond the season of youth, who was now seen advancing up
the narrow avenue which led to the house.

“It's Barnacle Sam!” said one.

“I reckon,” was the reply of another.

“It's he, by thunder!” said a third, “wonder what he'll say
to see Margaret and this city chap? He's just in time for it.
They're mighty close.”

“Reckon he'll bile up again. Jest be quiet now, till he comes.”

From all this we may gather that the person approaching is an
admirer of the fair Margaret. His proximity prevented all further
discussion of this delicate subject, and the speakers at once
surrounded the new comer.

“Well, my lads, how goes it?” demanded this person, in a
clear, manly accent, as he extended a hand to each. “Not too
late, I reckon, for a fling on the floor; but I had to work hard for
it, I reckon. Left Charleston yesterday when the sun was on the
turn; but I swore I'd be in time for one dash with Margaret.”

“Reckon you've walked for nothing, then,” said one with a
significant shake of the head to his fellows.

“For nothing! and why do you think so?”

“Well, I don't know, but I reckon Margaret's better satisfied
to sit down jest now. She don't seem much inclined to foot it
with any of us.”

“That's strange for Margaret,” said the new comer; “but I'll
see how my chance stands, if so be the fiddle has a word to say
in my behalf. She aint sick, fellows?”

“Never was better—but go in and try your luck.”

“To be sure I will. It'll be bad luck, indeed, when I set my
heart on a thing, and walk a matter of seventy miles after it, if I
couldn't get it then, and for no reason that I can see; so here
goes.”

With these words, the speaker passed into the house, and was
soon seen by his companions—who now resumed their places by
the window—in conversation with the damsel. There was a
frank, manly something in the appearance, the face, carriage and
language of this fellow, that, in spite of a somewhat rude exterior
and coarse clothing, insensibly commanded one's respect. It was
very evident that those with whom he had spoken, had accorded

[figure description] Page 051.[end figure description]

him theirs—that he was a favourite among them—and indeed, we
may say, in this place, that he was a very general favourite. He
was generous and good natured, bold, yet inoffensive, and so
liberal that, though one of the most industrious fellows in the
world, and constantly busy, he had long since found that his
resources never enabled him to lay by a copper against a rainy
day. Add to these moral qualities, that he was really a fine
looking fellow, large and well made, with a deep florid complexion,
black hair, good forehead and fine teeth, and we shall wonder to
find that he was not entirely successful with the sex. That he
was not an economist, and was a little over the frontier line of
forty, were perhaps objections, and then he had a plain, direct
way of speaking out his mind, which was calculated, sometimes,
to disturb the equanimity of the very smoothest temper.

It was perceived by his companions that Margaret answered
him with some evident annoyance and embarrassment, while they
beheld, with increasing aversion, the supercilious air of the
stranger youth, the curl of his lips, the simpering, half-scornful
smile which they wore, while their comrade was urging his
claims to the hand of the capricious beauty. The application of
the worthy raftsman—for such was the business of Barnacle Sam—
proved unavailing. The maiden declined dancing, pleading
fatigue. The poor fellow said that he too was fatigued, “tired
down, Miss Margaret, with a walk of seventy miles, only to have
the pleasure of dancing with you.” The maiden was inexorable,
and he turned off to rejoin his companions. The immoderate
laughter in which Margaret and the stranger youth indulged,
immediately after Barnacle Sam's withdrawal, was assumed by
his companions to be at his expense. This was also the secret
feeling of the disappointed suitor, but the generous fellow disclaimed
any such conviction, and, though mortified to the very
heart, he studiously said every thing in his power to excuse the
capricious girl to those around him. She had danced with several
of them, the hour was late, and her fatigue was natural enough.
But the malice of his comrades determined upon a test which
should invalidate all these pleas and excuses. The fiddle was
again put in requisition, and a Virginia reel was resolved upon.
Scarcely were the parties summoned to the floor, before Margaret

[figure description] Page 052.[end figure description]

made her appearance as the partner of young Hurst. Poor Barnacle
walked out into the woods, with his big heart ready to break.
It was generally understood that he was fond of Margaret, but
how fond, nobody but himself could know. She, too, had been
supposed willing to encourage him, and, though by no means a
vain fellow, he was yet very strongly impressed with the belief
that he was quite as near to her affections as any man he knew.
His chagrin and disappointment may be imagined; but a lonely
walk in the woods enabled him to come back to the cottage, to
which he was drawn by a painful sort of fascination, with a face
somewhat calmed, and with feelings, which, if not subdued, were
kept in proper silence and subjection. He was a strong-souled
fellow, who had no small passions. He did not flare up and make
a fuss, as is the wont of a peevish nature, but the feeling and
the pain were the deeper in due proportion to the degree of
restraint which he put upon them. His return to the cottage was
the signal to his companions to renew their assaults upon his temper.
They found a singular satisfaction in making a hitherto
successful suitor partake of their own frequent mortifications.
But they did not confine their efforts to this single object. They
were anxious that Barnacle Sam should be brought to pluck a
quarrel with the stranger, whose conceited airs had so ruffled the
feathers of self-esteem in all of their crests. They dilated accordingly
on all the real or supposed insolences of the new comer—
his obvious triumph—his certain success—and that unbearable
volley of merriment, which, in conjunction with Margaret Cole,
he had discharged at the retreating and baffled applicant for her
hand. Poor Barnacle bore with all these attempts with great
difficulty. He felt the force of their suggestions the more readily,
because the same thoughts and fancies had already been traversing
his own brain. He was not insensible to the seeming indignity
which the unbecoming mirth of the parties had betrayed on
his retiring from the field, and more than once a struggling devil
in his heart rose up to encourage and enforce the suggestions
made by his companions. But love was stronger in his soul than
hate, and served to keep down the suggestions of anger. He
truly loved the girl, and though he felt very much like trouncing the

[figure description] Page 053.[end figure description]

presumptuous stranger, he subdued this inclination entirely on her
account.

“No! no! my lads,” said he, finally, “Margaret's her own
mistress, and may do as she pleases. She's a good girl and
a kind one, and if her head's turned just now by this stranger,
let's give her time to get it back in the right place. She'll come
right, I reckon, before long. As for him, I see no fun in licking
him, for that's a thing to be done just as soon as said. If he
crosses me, it'll do then—but so long as she seems to have a liking
for him, so long I'll keep my hands off him, if so be he'll
let me.”

“Well,” said one of his comrades, “I never thought the time
would come when Barnacle Sam would take so much from any
man.”

“Oh hush! Peter Stahlen; you know I take nothing that I
don't choose to take. All that know me, know what I am, and
they'll all think rightly in the matter; and those that don't know
me may think just what they please. So good night, my lads.
I'll take another turn in the woods to freshen me.”

CHAPTER III.

[figure description] Page 054.[end figure description]

We pass over much of the minor matter in this history. We
forbear the various details, the visitings and wanderings, the doings
of the several parties, and the scandal which necessarily kept
all tongues busy for a season. The hope so confidently expressed
by Barnacle Sam, that the head of his beauty, which had been
turned by the stranger, would recover its former sensible position after
certain days, did not promise to be soon realized. On the contrary,
every succeeding week seemed to bring the maiden and her
city lover more frequently together; to strengthen his assurance,
and increase his influence over her heart. All his leisure time
was consumed either at her dwelling or in rambles with her
alone, hither and thither, to the equal disquieting of maid and
bachelor. They, however, had eyes for nobody but one another—
lived, as it were, only in each other's regards, and, after a
month of the busiest idleness in which he had ever been engaged,
Barnacle Sam, in very despair, resumed his labours on the river
by taking charge of a very large fleet of rafts. The previous interval
had been spent in a sort of gentlemanly watch upon the heart
and proceedings of the fair Margaret. The result was such as to
put the coup de grace to all his own fond aspirations. But this effect
was not brought about but at great expense of pride and feeling.
His heart was sore and soured. His temper underwent a change.
He was moody and irritable—kept aloof from his companions,
and discouraged and repulsed them when they approached him.
It was a mutual relief to them and himself when he launched upon
the river in his old vocation. But his vocation, like that of
Othello, was fairly gone. He performed his duties punctually,
carried his charge in safety to the city, and evinced, in its management,
quite as much skill and courage as before. But his
performances were now mechanical—therefore carried on doggedly,
and with no portion of his former spirit. There was now
no catch of song, no famous shout or whistle, to be heard by the

[figure description] Page 055.[end figure description]

farmer on the bank, as the canoe or the raft of Barnacle Sam rounded
the headlands. There was no more friendly chat with the
wayfarer—no more kind, queer word, such as had made him the
favourite of all parties before. His eye was now averted—his
countenance troubled—his words few—his whole deportment, as
well as his nature, had undergone a change; and folks pointed
to the caprice of Margaret Cole as the true source of all his misfortunes.
It is, perhaps, her worst reproach that she seemed to
behold them with little concern or commiseration, and, exulting in
the consciousness of a new conquest over a person who seemed to
rate himself very much above his country neighbours, she suffered
herself to speak of the melancholy which had seized upon the
soul of her former lover with a degree of scorn and irreverence
which tended very much to wean from her the regard of the most
intimate and friendly among her own sex.

Months passed away in this manner, and but little of our raftsman
was to be seen. Meanwhile, the manner of Wilson Hurst
became more assured and confident. In his deportment toward
Margaret Cole there was now something of a lordly condescension,
while, in hers, people were struck with a new expression of
timidity and dependence, amounting almost to suffering and grief.
Her face became pale, her eye restless and anxious, and her step
less buoyant. In her father's house she no longer seemed at
home. Her time, when not passed with her lover, was wasted
in the woods, and at her return the traces of tears were still to be
seen upon her cheeks. Suspicion grew active, scandal busied
herself, and the young women, her former associates, were the
first to declare themselves not satisfied with the existing condition
of things. Their interest in the case soon superseded their
charity;


“For every wo a tear may claim,
Except an erring sister's shame.”
Conferences ensued, discussions and declarations, and at length
the bruit reached the ears of her simple, unsuspecting parents.
The father was, when roused, a coarse and harsh old man. Margaret
was his favourite, but it was Margaret in her glory, not
Margaret in her shame. His vanity was stung, and in the

[figure description] Page 056.[end figure description]

interview to which he summoned the unhappy girl, his anger, which
soon discovered sufficient cause of provocation, was totally without
the restraints of policy or humanity.

A traditionary account—over which we confess there hangs
some doubt—is given of the events that followed. There were
guests in the dwelling of the farmer, and the poor girl was conducted
to a neighbouring outhouse, probably the barn. There,
amid the denunciations of the father, the reproaches of the mother,
and the sobs, tears and agonies of the victim, a full acknowledgment
was extorted of her wretched state. But she preserved
one secret, which no violence could make her deliver. She
withheld the name of him to whom she owed all her misfortunes.
It is true, this name was not wanting to inform any to whom her
history was known, by whom the injury was done; but of all
certainty on this head, derived from her own confession, they
were wholly deprived. Sitting on the bare floor, in a state of
comparative stupor, which might have tended somewhat to blunt
and disarm the nicer sensibilities, she bore, in silence, the torrent
of bitter and brutal invective which followed her developments.
With a head drooping to the ground, eyes now tearless, hands
folded upon her lap—self-abandoned, as it were—she was suffered
to remain. Her parents left her and returned to the dwelling,
having closed the door, without locking it, behind them. What
were their plans may not be said; but, whatever they were, they
were defeated by the subsequent steps taken, in her desperation
of soul, by the deserted and dishonoured damsel.

CHAPTER IV.

[figure description] Page 057.[end figure description]

We still continue to report the tradition, though it does not appear
that the subsequent statements of the affair were derived from
any acknowledged witness. It appears that, after the night had
set in, Margaret Cole fled from the barn in which she had been
left by her parents. She was seen, in this proceeding, by her little
brother, a lad of eight years old. Catching him by the arm
as they met, she exclaimed—“Oh, Billy, don't tell, don't tell, if
you love me!” The child kept the secret until her flight was
known, and the alarm which it occasioned awakened his own apprehensions.
He described her as looking and speaking very
wildly; so much so as to frighten him. The hue and cry was
raised, but she was not found for several hours after, and then—
but we must not anticipate.

It appears—and we still take up the legend without being able
to show the authorities—it appears that, as soon as she could
hope for concealment, under cover of the night, she took her way
through unfrequented paths in the forest, running and walking,
toward the store of Wilson Hurst. This person, it appears, kept
his store on the road-side, some four miles from the village of
Orangeburg, the exact spot on which it stood being now only conjectured.
A shed-room, adjoining the store, he occupied as his
chamber. To this shed-room she came a little after midnight,
and tapping beneath the window, she aroused the inmate. He
rose, came to the window, and, without opening it, demanded who
was there. Her voice soon informed him, and the pleading, pitiful,
agonizing tones, broken and incoherent, told him all her painful
story. She related the confession which she had made to her
parents, and implored him at once to take her in, and fulfil those
promises by which he had beguiled her to her ruin. The night
was a cold and cheerless one in February—her chattering teeth
appealed to his humanity, even if her condition had not invoked
his justice. Will it be believed that the wretch refused her?

[figure description] Page 058.[end figure description]

He seemed to have been under the impression that she was accompanied
by her friends, prepared to take advantage of his confessions;
and, under this persuasion, he denied her asseverations—
told her she was mad—mocked at her pleadings, and finally
withdrew once more, as if to his couch and slumbers.

We may fancy what were the feelings of the unhappy woman.
It is not denied to imagination, however it may be to speech, to
conjecture the terrible despair, the mortal agony swelling in her
soul, as she listened to the cold-blooded and fiendish answer to
her poor heart's broken prayer for justice and commiseration.
What an icy shaft must have gone through her soul, to hearken
to such words of falsehood, mockery and scorn, from those lips
which had once pleaded in her ears with all the artful eloquence
of love—and how she must have cowered to the earth, as if the
mountains themselves were falling upon her as she heard his retiring
footsteps—he going to seek those slumbers which she has
never more to seek or find. That was death—the worst death—
the final death of the last hope in her doomed and desolated heart.
But one groan escaped her—one gasping sigh—the utterance, we
may suppose, of her last hope, as it surrendered up the ghost—
and then, all was silence!

CHAPTER V.

[figure description] Page 059.[end figure description]

That one groan spoke more keenly to the conscience of the
miserable wretch within than did all her pleadings. The deep,
midnight silence which succeeded was conclusive of the despair
of the wretched girl. It not only said that she was alone, abandoned
of all others—but that she was abandoned by herself. The
very forbearance of the usual reproaches—her entire submission
to her fate—stung and goaded the base deceiver, by compelling
his own reflections, on his career and conduct, to supply the place
of hers. He was young, and, therefore, not entirely reckless.
He felt that he lacked manliness—that courage which enables a
man to do right from feeling, even where, in matters of principle,
he does not appreciate the supremacy of virtue. Some miserable
fears that her friends might still be in lurking, and, as he could
not conjecture the desperation of a big heart, full of feeling, bursting
with otherwise unutterable emotions, he flattered himself with
the feeble conclusion, that, disappointed in her attempts upon him,
the poor deluded victim had returned home as she came. Still,
his conscience did not suffer him to sleep. He had his doubts.
She might be still in the neighbourhood—she might be swooning
under his window. He rose. We may not divine his intentions.
It may have been—and we hope so for the sake of man and humanity—
it may have been that he rose repentant, and determined
to take the poor victim to his arms, and do all the justice to her
love and sufferings that it yet lay in his power to do. He went
to the window, and leant his ear down to listen. Nothing reached
him but the deep soughing of the wind through the branches, but
even this more than once startled him with such a resemblance
to human moaning that he shuddered at his place of watch. His
window was one of those unglazed openings in the wall, such as
are common in the humbler cottages of a country where the cold
is seldom of long duration, and where the hardy habits of the people
render them comparatively careless of those agents of comfort

[figure description] Page 060.[end figure description]

which would protect against it. It was closed, not very snugly,
by a single shutter, and fastened by a small iron hook within.
Gradually, as he became encouraged by the silence, he raised
this hook, and, still grasping it, suffered the window to expand so
as to enable him to take into his glance, little by little, the prospect
before him. The moon was now rising above the trees, and
shedding a ghastly light upon the unshadowed places around.
The night was growing colder, and in the chill under which his
own frame shivered, he thought of poor Margaret and her cheerless
walk that night. He looked down for her immediately beneath
the window, but she was not there, and for a few moments
his eyes failed to discover any object beyond the ordinary shrubs
and trees. But as his vision became more and more accustomed
to the indistinct outlines and shadowy glimpses under which, in
that doubtful light, objects naturally presented themselves, he
shuddered to behold a whitish form gleaming fitfully, as if waving
in the wind, from a little clump of woods not forty yards from
the house. He recoiled, closed the window with trembling
hands, and got down upon his knees—but it was to cower, not to
pray—and he did not remain in this position for more than a second.
He then dressed himself, with hands that trembled too much
to allow him, without much delay, to perform this ordinary office.
Then he hurried into his shop—opened the door, which he as instantly
bolted again, then returned to his chamber—half undressed
himself, as if again about to seek his bed—resumed his garments,
re-opened the window, and gazed once more upon the indistinct
white outline which had inspired all his terrors. How long he
thus stood gazing, how many were his movements of incertitude,
what were his thoughts and what his purposes, may not be said—
may scarcely be conjectured. It is very certain that every effort
which he made to go forth and examine more closely the object
of his sight and apprehensions, utterly failed—yet a dreadful fascination
bound him to the window. If he fled to the interior and
shut his eyes, it was only for a moment. He still returned to the
spot, and gazed, and gazed, until the awful ghost of the unhappy
girl spoke out audibly, to his ears, and filled his soul with the
most unmitigated horrors.

CHAPTER VI.

[figure description] Page 061.[end figure description]

But the sound of horses' feet, and hurrying voices, aroused him
to the exercise of his leading instinct—that of self-preservation.
His senses seemed to return to him instantly under the pressure of
merely human fears. He hurried to the opposite apartment, silently
unclosed the outer door, and stealing off under cover of the woods,
was soon shrouded from sight in their impenetrable shadows.
But the same fascination which had previously led him to the fatal
window, now conducted him into that part of the forest which contained
the cruel spectacle by which his eyes had been fixed and
fastened. Here, himself concealed, crouching in the thicket, he
beheld the arrival of a motley crowd—white and black—old Cole,
with all the neighbours whom he could collect around him and
gather in his progress. He saw them pass, without noticing, the
object of their search and his own attention—surround his dwelling—
heard them shout his name, and finally force their way into
the premises. Torches were seen to glare through the seams
and apertures of the house, and, at length, as if the examination
had been in vain, the party reappeared without. They gathered
in a group in front of the dwelling, and seemed to be in consultation.
While they were yet in debate, the hoofs of a single horse,
at full speed, were heard beating the frozen ground, and another
person was added to the party. It did not need the shout with
which this new comer was received by all, to announce to the
skulking fugitive that, in the tall, massive form that now alighted
among the rest, he beheld the noble fellow whose love had been
rejected by Margaret for his own—Barnacle Sam. It is remarkable
that, up to this moment, a doubt of his own security had not
troubled the mind of Hurst; but, absorbed by the fearful spectacle
which, though still unseen by the rest, was yet ever waving
before his own spell-bound eyes, he had foregone all farther considerations
of his own safety. But the appearance of this man,
of whose character, by this time, he had full knowledge, had dis

[figure description] Page 062.[end figure description]

pelled this confidence; and, with the instinct of hate and fear,
shuddering and looking back the while, he silently rose to his feet,
and stealing off with as much haste as a proper caution would
justify, he made his way to one of the landings on the river, where
he found a canoe, with which he put off to the opposite side. For
the present, we leave him to his own course and conscience, and
return to the group which we left behind us, and which, by this
time, has realized all the horrors natural to a full discovery of the
truth.

The poor girl was found suspended, as we have already in part
described, to the arm of a tree, but a little removed from the dwelling
of her guilty lover, the swinging boughs of which had been
used commonly for fastening horses. A common handkerchief,
torn in two, and lengthened by the union of the parts, provided the
fatal means of death for the unhappy creature. Her mode of procedure
had been otherwise quite as simple as successful. She had
mounted the stump of a tree which had been left as a horse-block,
and which enabled her to reach the bough over which the kerchief
was thrown. This adjusted, she swung from the stump, and passed
in a few moments—with what remorse, what agonies, what fears,
and what struggles, we will not say—from the vexing world of
time to the doubtful empire of eternity! We dare not condemn
the poor heart, so young, so feeble, so wronged, and, doubtless, so
distraught! Peace to her spirit!

It would be idle to attempt to describe the tumult, the wild uproar
and storm of rage, which, among that friendly group, seemed
for a season to make them even forgetful of their grief.
Their sorrow seemed swallowed up in fury. Barnacle Sam
was alone silent. His hand it was that took down the lifeless
body from the accursed tree—upon his manly bosom it was borne.
He spoke but once on the occasion, in reply to those who proposed
to carry it to the house of the betrayer. “No! not there! not
there!” was all he said, in tones low—almost whispered—yet so
distinctly heard, so deeply felt, that the noisy rage of those around
him was subdued to silence in the sterner grief which they expressed.
And while the noble fellow bore away the victim, with arms
as fond, and a solicitude as tender, as if the lifeless form could still
feel, and the cold defrauded heart could still respond to love, the

[figure description] Page 063.[end figure description]

violent hands of the rest applied fire to the dwelling of the seducer,
and watched the consuming blaze with as much delight as
they would have felt had its proprietor been involved within its
flaming perils. Such, certainly, had he been found, would have
been the sudden, and perhaps deserved judgment to which their
hands would have consigned him. They searched the woods for
him, but in vain. They renewed the search for him by daylight,
and traced his footsteps to the river. The surrounding country
was aroused, but, prompted by his fears, and favoured by his fortune,
he had got so completely the start of his enemies that he
eluded all pursuit; and time, that dulls even the spirit of revenge,
at length served to lessen the interest of the event in the minds
of most of the survivors. Months went by, years followed—the
old man Cole and his wife sunk into the grave; hurried prematurely,
it was thought, by the dreadful history we have given; and of all
that group, assembled on the fatal night we have just described,
but one person seemed to keep its terrible aspect forever fresh before
his eyes—and that was Barnacle Sam.

He was a changed man. If the previous desertion and caprice
of the wretched Margaret, who had paid so heavy a penalty for
the girlish injustice which she had inflicted on his manly heart,
had made him morose and melancholy, her miserable fate increased
this change in a far more surprising degree. He still, it is
true, continued the business of a raftsman, but, had it not been for
his known trustworthiness, his best friends and admirers would
have certainly ceased altogether to give him employment. He
was now the creature of a moodiness which they did not scruple
to pronounce madness. He disdained all sort of conference with
those about him, on ordinary concerns, and devoting himself to the
Bible, he drew from its mystic, and to him unfathomable, resources,
constant subjects of declamation and discussion. Its thousand
dark prophecies became unfolded to his mind. He denounced the
threatened wrath of undesignated ages as already at the door—
called upon the people to fly, and shouted wildly in invocation of
the storm. Sometimes, these moods would disappear, and, at such
times, he would pass through the crowd with drooping head and
hands, the humbled and resigned victim to a sentence which seemed
destined for his utter annihilation. The change in his

[figure description] Page 064.[end figure description]

physical nature had been equally great and sudden. His hair, though
long and massive, suddenly became white as snow; and though
his face still retained a partial fulness, there were long lines and
heavy seams upon his cheeks, which denoted a more than common
struggle of the inner life with the cares, the doubts, and the
agonies of a troubled and vexing existence. After the lapse of a
year, the more violent paroxysms of his mood disappeared, and
gave place to a settled gloom, which was not less significant than
his former condition of an alienated mind. He was still devoted
to religion—that is to say, to that study of religious topics, which,
among ignorant or thoughtless people, is too apt to be mistaken
for religion. But it was not of its peace, its diffusing calm, its
holy promise, that he read and studied. His favourite themes
were to be found among the terrible judgments, the fierce vengeances,
the unexampled woes, inflicted, or predicted, in the prophetic
books of the Old Testament. The language of the prophets,
when they denounced wrath, he made his own language; and
when his soul was roused with any one of these subjects, and
stimulated by surrounding events, he would look the Jeremiah that
he spoke—his eyes glancing with the frenzy of a flaming spirit—
his lips quivering with his deep emotions—his hands and arms
spread abroad, as if the phials of wrath were in them ready to be
emptied—his foot advanced, as if he were then dispensing judgment—
his white hair streaming to the wind, with that meteor-likeness
which was once supposed to be prophetic of “change,
perplexing monarchs.” At other times, going down upon his
rafts, or sitting in the door of his little cabin, you would see him
with the Bible on his knee—his eyes lifted in abstraction, but his
mouth working, as if he then busied himself in calculation of those
wondrous problems, contained in the “times and half times,” the
elucidation of which, it is supposed, will give us the final limit
accorded to this exercise of our human toil in the works of the
devil.

CHAPTER VII.

[figure description] Page 065.[end figure description]

It was while his mind was thus occupied, that the ferment of
colonial patriotism drew to a head. The Revolution was begun,
and the clamours of war and the rattle of arms resounded through
the land. Such an outbreak was the very event to accord with
the humours of our morbid raftsman. Gradually, his mind had
grasped the objects and nature of the issue, not as an event simply
calculated to work out the regeneration of a decaying and impaired
government, but as a sort of purging process, the great beginning
of the end, in fact, by which the whole world was to be again
made new. The exaggerated forms of rhetoric in which the orators
of the time naturally spoke, and in which all stump orators are apt to speak, when liberty and the rights of man are the
themes—and what themes, in their hands, do not swell into these?—
happily chimed in with the chaotic fancies and confused thoughts
which filled the brain of Barnacle Sam. In conveying his rafts
to Charleston, he took every opportunity of hearing the great orators
of that city—Gadsden, Rutledge, Drayton and others—and
imbued with what he had heard, coupling it, in singular union,
with what he had read—he proceeded to propound to his wondering
companions, along the road and river, the equally exciting
doctrines of patriotism and religion. In this way, to a certain
extent, he really proved an auxiliary of no mean importance to a
cause, to which, in Carolina, there was an opposition not less serious
and determined, as it was based upon a natural and not discreditable
principle. Instead now of avoiding the people, and of
dispensing his thoughts among them only when they chanced to
meet, Barnacle Sam now sought them out in their cabins. Returning
from the city after the disposal of his rafts, his course
lay, on foot, a matter of seventy miles through the country. On
this route he loitered and lingered, went into by-places, and sought
in lonely nooks, and “every bosky bower,” “from side to side,”
the rustics of whom he either knew or heard. His own history,

[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]

by this time, was pretty well known throughout the country, and
he was generally received with open hands and that sympathy,
which was naturally educed wherever his misfortunes were understood.
His familiarity with the Bible, his exemplary life, his
habits of self-denial, his imposing manner, his known fearlessness
of heart; these were all so many credentials to the favour of a
simple and unsophisticated people. But we need dwell on this
head no longer. Enough, in this place, to say that, on the first
threat of the invader against the shores of Carolina, Barnacle
Sam leapt from his rafts, and arrayed himself with the regiment
of William Thompson, for the defence of Sullivan's Island. Of
his valour, when the day of trial came, as little need be said.
The important part which Thompson's riflemen had to play at the
eastern end of Sullivan's Island, while Moultrie was rending
with iron hail the British fleet in front, is recorded in another
history. That battle saved Carolina for two years, but, in the interregnum
which followed, our worthy raftsman was not idle.
Sometimes on the river with his rafts, earning the penny which
was necessary to his wants, he was more frequently engaged in
stirring up the people of the humbler classes, by his own peculiar
modes of argument, rousing them to wrath, in order, as he conclusively
showed from Holy Writ, that they might “escape from
the wrath to come.” This logic cost many a tory his life; and,
what with rafting, preaching and fighting, Barnacle Sam was as
busy a prophet as ever sallied forth with short scrip and heavy
sandal on the business of better people than himself.

During the same period of repose in Carolina from the absolute
pressure of foreign war, and from the immediate presence
of the foreign enemy, the city of Charleston was doing a peculiar
and flourishing business. The British fleets covering all the
coast, from St. Augustine to Martha's Vineyard, all commerce by
sea was cut off, and a line of wagons from South, and through
North Carolina, to Virginia and Pennsylvania, enabled the enterprising
merchants of Charleston to snap their fingers at the
blockading squadrons. The business carried on in this way,
though a tedious, was yet a thriving one; and it gave many a
grievous pang to patriotism, in the case of many a swelling
tradesman, when the final investment of the Southern States

[figure description] Page 067.[end figure description]

compelled its discontinuance. Many a Charleston tory owed his defection
from principle, to this unhappy turn in the affairs of local
trade. It happened on one occasion, just before the British army
was ordered to the South, that General Huger, then in command
of a fine regiment of cavalry, somewhere near Lenud's Ferry on
the Santee, received intelligence which led him to suspect the
fidelity of a certain caravan of wagons which had left the city
some ten or twelve days before, and was then considerably advanced
on the road to North Carolina. The intelligence which
caused this suspicion, was brought to him by no less a person
than our friend Barnacle Sam, who was just returning from one
of his ordinary trips down the Edisto. A detachment of twenty
men was immediately ordered to overtake the wagons and sift
them thoroughly, and under the guidance of Barnacle, the detachment
immediately set off. The wagons, eleven in number,
were overhauled after three days' hard riding, and subjected to
as close a scrutiny as was thought necessary by the vigilant officer
in command. But it did not appear that the intelligence
communicated by the raftsman received any confirmation. If
there were treasonable letters, they were concealed securely, or
seasonably destroyed by those to whom they were entrusted; and
the search being over, and night being at hand, the troops and
the persons of the caravan, in great mutual good humour, agreed
to encamp together for the night. Fires were kindled, the wagons
wheeled about, the horses were haltered and fed, and all
things being arranged against surprise, the company broke up into
compact groups around the several fires for supper and for sleep.
The partisan and the wagoner squatted, foot to foot, in circles the
most equal and sociable, and the rice and bacon having been
washed down by copious draughts of rum and sugar, of which
commodities the Carolinas had a copious supply at the time of the
invasion—nothing less could follow but the tale and the song,
the jest and the merry cackle, natural enough to hearty fellows,
under such circumstances of equal freedom and creature comfort.
As might be guessed from his character, as we have described it,
Barnacle Sam took no part in this sort of merriment. He mixed
with none of the several groups, but, with his back against a tree,
with crossed hands, and chin upon his breast, he lay soundly

[figure description] Page 068.[end figure description]

wrapt in contemplation, chewing that cud of thought, founded
upon memory, which is supposed to be equally sweet and bitter.
In this position he lay, not mingling with any of the parties, perhaps
unseen of any, and certainly not yielding himself in any
way to the influences which made them temporarily happy. He
was in a very lonely and far removed land of his own. He had
not supped, neither had he drank, neither had he thirsted, nor
hungered, while others indulged. It was one peculiarity of his
mental infirmities that he seemed, whenever greatly excited by
his own moods, to suffer from none of the animal wants of nature.
His position, however, was not removed from that of the
rest. Had his mind been less absorbed in its own thoughts—
had he willed to hear—he might have been the possessor
of all the good jokes, the glees and every thoughtless or
merry word, which delighted those around him. He lay between
two groups, a few feet only from one, in deep shadow,
which was only fitfully removed as some one of those around
the fire bent forward or writhed about, and thus suffered the
ruddy glare to glisten upon his drooping head or broad manly
bosom. One of these groups—and that nearest him—was composed
entirely of young men. These had necessarily found each
other out, and, by a natural attraction, had got together in the
same circle. Removed from the restraints and presence of their
elders, and after the indulgence of frequent draughts from the
potent beverage, of which there was always a supply adequate to
the purposes of evil, their conversation soon became licentious;
and, from the irreverent jest, they soon gave way to the obscene
story. At length, as one step in vice, naturally and inevitably,—unless promptly resisted—impels another—the thoughtless reprobates
began to boast of their several experiences in sin. Each
strove to outdo his neighbour in the assertion of his prowess, and
while some would magnify the number of their achievements,
others would dilate in their details, and all, at the expense of poor,
dependent woman. It would be difficult to say—nor is it important—
at what particular moment, or from what particular circumstance,
Barnacle Sam was induced to give any attention to
what was going on. The key-note which opened in his own soul
all its dreadful remembrances of horror, was no doubt to be found

[figure description] Page 069.[end figure description]

in some one word, some tone, of undefinable power and import,
which effectually commanded his continued attention, even though
it was yielded with loathing and against the stomach of his sense.
He listened with head no longer drooping, eyes no longer shut,
thought no longer in that far and foreign world of memory.
Memory, indeed, was beginning to recover and have a present
life and occupation. Barnacle Sam was listening to accents
which were not unfamiliar to his ear. He heard one of the
speakers, whose back was turned upon him, engaged in the narrative
of his own triumphs, and every syllable which he uttered was
the echo of a dreadful tale, too truly told already. The story
was not the same—not identical in all its particulars—with that
of poor Margaret Cole; but it was her story. The name of the
victim was not given—and the incidents were so stated, that,
without altering the results, all those portions were altered which
might have placed the speaker in a particularly base or odious
position. He had conquered, he had denied his victim the only
remedy in his power—for was he to confide in a virtue, which he
had been able to overcome?—and she had perished by her own
hands. This was the substance of his story; but this was not
enough for the profligate, unless he could show how superior were
his arts of conquest, how lordly his sway, how indifferent his
love, to the misery which it could occasion; a loud and hearty
laugh followed, and, in the midst of the uproar, while every tongue
was conceding the palm of superiority to the narrator, and his
soul was swelling with the applause for which his wretched vanity
had sacrificed decency and truth, a heavy hand was laid upon
his shoulder, and his eyes, turning round upon the intruder, encountered
those of Barnacle Sam!

“Well, what do you want?” demanded the person addressed.
It was evident that he did not recognize the intruder. How could
he? His own mother could not have known the features of Barnacle
Sam, so changed as he was, from what he had been, by wo
and misery.

“You! I want you! You are wanted, come with me!”

The other hesitated and trembled. The eye of the raftsman
was upon him. It was the eye of his master—the eye of fate.
It was not in his power to resist it. It moved him whither it

[figure description] Page 070.[end figure description]

would. He rose to his feet. He could not help but rise. He
was stationary for an instant, and the hand of Barnacle Sam
rested upon his wrist. The touch appeared to smite him to the
bone. He shuddered, and it was noted that his other arm was
extended, as if in appeal to the group from which he had risen.
Another look of his fate fixed him. He shrunk under the full,
fierce, compelling glance of the other. He shrunk, but went
forward in silence, while the hand of the latter was still slightly
pressed upon his wrist.

CHAPTER VIII.

[figure description] Page 071.[end figure description]

Never was mesmeric fascination more complete. The raftsman
seemed to have full confidence in his powers of compulsion,
for he retained his grasp upon the wrist of the profligate, but a
single moment after they had gone from the company.

“Come! Follow!” said the conductor, when a few moments
more had elapsed, finding the other beginning to falter.

“Where must I go? Who wants me?” demanded the criminal,
with a feeble show of resolution.

“Where must you go—who wants you; oh! man of little
faith—does the soldier ask of the officer such a question—does
the sinner of his judge? of what use to ask, Wilson Hurst, when
the duty must be done—when there is no excuse and no appeal.
Come!”

“Wilson Hurst! Who is it calls me by that name? I will
go no farther.”

The raftsman who had turned to proceed, again paused, and
stooping, fixed his keen eyes upon those of the speaker so closely
that their mutual eyebrows must have met. The night was star-lighted,
and the glances from the eyes of Barnacle Sam flashed
upon the gaze of his subject, with a red energy like that of
Mars. “Come!” he said, even while he looked. “Come, miserable
man, the judgment is given, the day of favour is past, and
lo! the night cometh—the night is here.”

“Oh, now I know you, now I know you—Barnacle Sam!” exclaimed
Hurst, falling upon his knees. “Have mercy upon me—
have mercy upon me!”

“It is a good prayer,” said the other, “a good prayer—the
only prayer for a sinner, but do not address it to me. To the
Judge, man, to the Almighty Judge himself! Pray, pray! I will
give you time. Pour out your heart like water. Let it run upon
the thirsty ground. The contrite heart is blessed though it be

[figure description] Page 072.[end figure description]

doomed. You cannot pray too much—you cannot pray enough.
In the misery of the sinner is the mercy of the Judge.”

“And will you spare me? Will you let me go if I pray?”
demanded the prostrate and wretched criminal with eagerness.

“How can I? I, too, am a sinner. I am not the judge. I
am but the officer commanded to do the will of God. He has
spoken this command in mine ears by day and by night. He has
commanded me at all hours. I have sought for thee, Wilson
Hurst, for seven weary years along the Edisto, and the Congaree
and Santee, the Ashley, and other rivers. It has pleased God to
weary me with toil in this search, that I might the better understand
how hard it is for the sinner to serve him as he should be
served! `For l thy God am a jealous God!' He knew how
little I could be trusted, and he forced me upon a longer search
and upon greater toils. I have wearied and I have prayed; I have
toiled and I have travelled; and it is now, at last, that I have seen
the expected sign, in a dream, even in a vision of the night. Oh,
Father Almighty, I rejoice, I bless thee, that thou hast seen fit to
bring my labours to a close—that I have at length found this
favour in thy sight. Weary have been my watches, long have
I prayed. I glad me that I have not watched and prayed vainly,
and that the hour of my deliverance is at hand. Wilson Hurst,
be speedy with thy prayers. It is not commanded that I shall
cut thee off suddenly and without a sign. Humble thyself with
speed, make thyself acceptable before the Redeemer of souls, for
thy hour is at hand.”

“What mean you?” gasped the other

“Judgment! Death!” And, as he spoke, the raftsman looked
steadfastly to the tree overhead, and extended his arm as if to
grasp the branches. The thought which was in his mind was
immediately comprehended by the instinct of the guilty man. He
immediately turned to fly. The glimmering light from the fires
of the encampment could still be seen fitfully flaring through
the forest.

“Whither would you go?” demanded the raftsman, laying his
hand upon the shoulder of the victim. “Do you hope to fly from
the wrath of God, Wilson Hurst? Foolish man, waste not the
moments which are precious. Busy thyself in prayer. Thou

[figure description] Page 073.[end figure description]

canst not hope for escape. Know that God hath sent me against
thee, now, on this very expedition, after, as I have told thee, after
a weary toil in search of thee for a space of seven years. Thou
hast had all that time for repentance while I have been tasked
vainly to seek thee even for the same period of time. But late,
as I went out from the city, there met me one near Dorchester,
who bade me set forth in pursuit of the wagon-train for the north,
but I heeded not his words, and that night, in a vision, I was yet
farther commanded. In my weak mind and erring faith, methought
I was to search among these wagons for a traitor to the
good cause of the colony. Little did I think to meet with thee,
Wilson Hurst. But when I heard thy own lips openly denounce
thy sins; when I heard thee boastful of thy cruel deed to her
who was the sweetest child that ever Satan robbed from God's
blessed vineyard—then did I see the purpose for which I was sent—
then did I understand that my search was at an end, and that
the final judgment was gone forth against thee. Prepare thyself,
Wilson Hurst, for thy hour is at hand.”

“I will not. You are mad! I will fight, I will halloo to our
people,” said the criminal, with more energetic accents and a
greater show of determination. The other replied with a coolness
which was equally singular and startling.

“I have sometimes thought that I was mad; but now, that the
Lord hath so unexpectedly delivered thee into my hands, I know
that I am not. Thou may'st fight, and thou may'st halloo, but I
cannot think that these will help thee against the positive commandment
of the Lord. Even the strength of a horse avails not
against him for the safety of those whom he hath condemned.
Prepare thee, then, Wilson Hurst, for thy hour is almost up.”

He laid his hand upon the shoulder of the criminal as he spoke.
The latter, meanwhile, had drawn a large knife from his pocket,
and though Barnacle Sam had distinguished the movement and
suspected the object, he made no effort to defeat it.

“Thou art armed,” said he, releasing, as he spoke, his hold
upon the shoulder of Hurst. “Now, shalt thou see how certainly
the Lord hath delivered thee into my hands, for I will not strive
against thee until thou hast striven. Use thy weapon upon me.
Lo! I stand unmoved before thee! Strike boldly and see what

[figure description] Page 074.[end figure description]

thou shalt do, for I tell thee thou hast no hope. Thou art doomed,
and I am sent this hour to execute God's vengeance against
thee.”

The wretch took the speaker at his word, struck with tolerable
boldness and force, twice, thrice upon the breast of the raftsman,
who stood utterly unmoved, and suffering no wound, no hurt of
any sort. The baffled criminal dropped his weapon, and screamed
in feeble and husky accents for help. In his tremour and timidity,
he had, after drawing the knife from his pocket, utterly
forgotten to unclasp the blade. He had struck with the blunted
handle of the weapon, and the result which was due to so simple
and natural a cause, appeared to his cowardly soul and excited
imagination as miraculous. It was not less so to the mind of Barnacle
Sam.

“Did I not tell thee! Look here, Wilson Hurst, look on this,
and see how slight a thing in the hand of Providence may yield
defence against the deadly weapon. This is the handkerchief by
which poor Margaret Cole perished. It has been in my bosom
from the hour I took her body from the tree. It has guarded my
life against thy steel, though I kept it not for this. God has commanded
me to use it in carrying out his judgment upon thee.”

He slipt it over the neck of the criminal as he spoke these
words. The other, feebly struggling, sunk upon his knees. His
nerves had utterly failed him. The coward heart, still more enfeebled
by the coward conscience, served completely to paralyze the
common instinct of self-defence. He had no strength, no manhood.
His muscles had no tension, and even the voice of supplication
died away, in sounds of a faint and husky terror in his
throat—a half-stifled moan, a gurgling breath—and—

CHAPTER IX.

[figure description] Page 075.[end figure description]

When Barnacle Sam returned to the encampment he was
alone. He immediately sought the conductor of the wagons, and,
without apprising him of his object, led him to the place of final
conference between himself and Hurst. The miserable man was
found suspended to a tree, life utterly extinct, the body already stiff
and cold. The horror of the conductor almost deprived him of utterance.
“Who has done this?” he asked.

“The hand of God, by the hand of his servant, which I am!
The judgment of Heaven is satisfied. The evil thing is removed
from among us, and we may now go on our way in peace. I
have brought thee hither that thou may'st see for thyself, and be
a witness to my work which is here ended. For seven weary
years have I striven in this object. Father, I thank thee, that at
the last thou hast been pleased to command that I should behold
it finished!”

These latter words were spoken while he was upon his knees,
at the very feet of the hanging man. The conductor, availing
himself of the utter absorption in prayer of the other, stole away
to the encampment, half-apprehensive that he himself might be
made to taste of the same sharp judgment which had been administered
to his companion. The encampment was soon roused,
and the wagoners hurried in high excitement to the scene. They
found Barnacle Sam still upon his knees. The sight of their
comrade suspended from the tree, enkindled all their anger. They
laid violent hands upon his executioner. He offered no resistance,
but showed no apprehension. To what lengths their fury would
have carried them may only be conjectured, but they had found
a rope, had fitted the noose, and in a few moments more they
would, in all probability, have run up the offender to the same
tree from which they had cut down his victim, when the timely
appearance of the troopers saved him from such a fate. The
esprit de corps came in seasonably for his preservation. It was

[figure description] Page 076.[end figure description]

in vain that the wagoners pointed to the suspended man—in vain
that Barnacle Sam avowed his handiwork—“He is one of us,”
said the troopers; and the slightest movement of the others toward
hostility was resented with a handling so rough, as made it only
a becoming prudence to bear with their loss and abuses as they
best might. The wonder of all was, as they examined the body
of the victim, how it was possible for the executioner to effect his
purpose. Hurst was a man of middle size, rather stoutly built,
and in tolerably good case. He would have weighed about one
hundred and thirty. Barnacle Sam was of powerful frame and
great muscle, tall and stout, yet it seemed impossible, unless endued
with superhuman strength, that, unaided, he could have
achieved his purpose; and some of the troopers charitably surmised
that the wagoner had committed suicide; while the wagoners,
in turn, hurried to the conclusion that the executioner had
found assistance among the troopers. Both parties overlooked
the preternatural strength accruing, in such a case, from the excited
moral and mental condition of the survivor. They were not
philosophers enough to see that, believing himself engaged upon
the work of God, the enthusiast was really in possession of attributes,
the work of a morbid imagination, which seemed almost to
justify his pretensions to a communion with the superior world.
Besides, they assumed a struggle on the part of the victim. They
did not conjecture the influence of that spell by which the dominant
spirit had coerced the inferior, and made it docile as the
squirrel which the fascination of the snake brings to its very jaws,
in spite of all the instincts which teach it to know how fatal is the
enemy that lurks beneath the tree. The imbecile Hurst, conscious
as it were of his fate, seems to have so accorded to the
commands of his superior, as to contribute, in some degree, to his
designs. At all events, the deed was done; and Barnacle Sam
never said that the task was a hard one.

It was reserved for an examination of the body to find a full
military justification for the executioner, and to silence the clamours
of the wagoners. A screw bullet was found admirably folded
in the knot of his neck kerchief, which, it seems, was not withdrawn
from his neck when the kerchief of Margaret Cole was
employed for a more deadly purpose. In this bullet was a note

[figure description] Page 077.[end figure description]

in cypher, addressed to Clinton, at New York, describing the actual
condition of Savannah, evidently from the hands of some one
in that quarter. In a few months after this period Savannah was
in possession of the British.

Barnacle Sam was tried for the murder of Hurst before a civil
tribunal, and acquitted on the score of insanity; a plea put in for
him, in his own spite, and greatly to his mortification. He retired
from sight, for a space after this verdict, and remained quiet
until a necessity arose for greater activity on the part of the patriots
at home. It was then that he was found among the partisans, always
bold and fearless, fighting and suffering manfully to the
close of the war.

It happened, on one occasion, that the somewhat celebrated
Judge Burke, of South Carolina, was dining with a pleasant party
at the village of Orangeburg. The judge was an Irish gentleman
of curious humour, and many eccentricities. He had more
wit than genius, and quite as much courage as wisdom. The
bench, indeed, is understood to have been the reward of his military
services during the Revolution, and his bulls in that situation
are even better remembered than his deeds in the other. But his
blunders were redeemed by his humour, and the bar overlooked
his mistakes in the enjoyment of his eccentricities. On the
present occasion the judge was in excellent mood, and his companions
equally happy, if not equally humorous with himself.
The cloth had been removed, and the wine was in lively circulation,
when the servant announced a stranger, who was no other
than Barnacle Sam. Our ancient was known to the judge and
to several of the company. But they knew him rather as the
brave soldier, the successful scout, the trusty spy and courier,
than as the unsuccessful lover and the agent of God's judgment
against the wrong doer. His reception was kind; and the judge,
taking for granted that he came to get a certificate for bounty
lands, or a pension, or his seven years' pay, or something of that
sort, supposed that he should get rid of him by a prompt compliance
with his application. No such thing. He had come to get
a reversal of that judgment of the court by which he had been
pronounced insane. His acquittal was not an object of his concern.
In bringing his present wish to the knowledge of the

[figure description] Page 078.[end figure description]

judge he had perforce to tell his story. This task we have already
sufficiently performed. It was found that, though by no
means obtrusive or earnest, the good fellow was firm in his application,
and the judge, in one of his best humours, saw no difficulty
in obliging him.

“Be plaised, gentlemen,” said he, “to fill your glasses. Our
revision of the judgment in the case of our excellent friend, Sergeant
Barnacle, shall be no dry joke. Fill your glasses, and be
raisonably ripe for judgment. Sit down, Sergeant Barnacle, sit
down, and be plaised to take a drhap of the crathur, though you
leave no other crathur a drhap. It sames to me, gentlemen of
the jury, that our friend has been hardly dealt with. To be found
guilty of insanity for hanging a tory and a spy—a fellow actually
bearing despatches to the enemy—sames a most extraordinary
judgment; and it is still more extraordinary, let me tell you, that
a person should be suspected of any deficiency of sense who
should lay hands on a successful rival. I think this hanging a
rival out of the way an excellent expadient; and the only mistake
which, it sames to me, our friend Sergeant Barnacle has
made, in this business, was in not having traed him sooner than
he did.”

“I sought him, may it please your honour, but the Lord did not
deliver him into my hands until his hour had come,” was the interruption
of Barnacle Sam.

“Ah! I see! You would have hung him sooner if you could.
Gentlemen of the jury, our friend, the sergeant, has shown that
he would have hung him sooner if he could. The only ground,
then, upon which, it sames to me, that his sanity could have been
suspected, is thus cleared up; and we are made to say that our
worthy friend was not deficient in that sagacity which counsels
us to execute the criminal before he is guilty, under the good old
rule that prevention is better than cure—that it is better to hang
thirty rogues before they are proved so, rayther than to suffer one
good man to come to avil at their hands.”

It is needless to say that the popular court duly concurred with
the judge's humorous reversal of the former decision; and Barnacle
Sam went his way, perfectly satisfied as to the removal of
all stain from his sanity of mind.

p371-350 THOSE OLD LUNES! OR, WHICH IS THE MADMAN? CHAPTER I.

“I am but mad, North—North-West: when the wind is southerly, I know
a hawk from a handsaw.”

[figure description] Page 079.[end figure description]

We had spent a merry night of it. Our stars had paled their
not ineffectual fires, only in the daylight; and while Dan Phœbus
was yet rising, “jocund on the misty mountain's top,” I was busy
in adjusting my foot in the stirrup and mounting my good steed
“Priam,” to find my way by a close cut, and through narrow
Indian trails, to my lodgings in the little town of C.—,on the very
borders of Mississippi. There were a dozen of us, all merry
larks, half mad with wine and laughter, and the ride of seven
miles proved a short one. In less than two hours, I was snugly
snoozing in my own sheets, and dreaming of the twin daughters
of old Hansford Owens.

Well might one dream of such precious damsels. Verily, they
seemed, all of a sudden, to have become a part of my existence.
They filled my thoughts, excited my imagination, and,—if it be
not an impertinence to say any thing of the heart of a roving lad
of eighteen,—then were they at the very bottom of mine.—Both of
them, let me say,—for they were twins, and were endowed with
equal rights by nature. I was not yet prepared to say what was
the difference, if any, between their claims. One was fair, the
other brown; one pensive, the other merry as the cricket of
Venus. Susannah was meek as became an Elder's daughter;
Emmeline so mischievous, that she might well have worried the

[figure description] Page 080.[end figure description]

meekest of the saints in the calendar from his propriety and position.
I confess, though I thought constantly of Susannah, I always
looked after Emmeline the first. She was the brunette—
one of your flashing, sparkling, effervescing beauties,—perpetually
running over with exultation—brimfull of passionate fancies
that tripped, on tiptoe, half winged, through her thoughts. She
was a creature to make your blood bound in your bosom,—to
take you entirely off your feet, and fancy, for the moment, that
your heels are quite as much entitled to dominion as your head.
Lovely too,—brilliant, if not absolutely perfect in features—she
kept you always in a sort of sunlight. She sung well, talked
well, danced well—was always in air—seemed never herself to
lack repose, and, it must be confessed, seldom suffered it to any
body else. Her dancing was the crowning grace and glory. She
was no Taglioni—not an Ellsler—I do not pretend that. But she
was a born artiste. Every motion was a study. Every look
was life. Her form subsided into the sweetest luxuriance of attitude,
and rose into motion with some such exquisite buoyancy,
as would become Venus issuing from the foam. Her very affectations
were so naturally worn, that you at length looked for them
as essential to her charm. I confess—but no! Why should I
do any thing so foolish?

Susannah was a very different creature. She was a fair girl—
rather pale, perhaps, when her features were in repose. She
had rich soft flaxen hair, and dark blue eyes. She looked rather
than spoke. Her words were few, her glances many. She was
not necessarily silent in silence. On the contrary, her very silence
had frequently a significance, taken with her looks, that
needed no help from speech. She seemed to look through you at
a glance, yet there was a liquid sweetness in her gaze, that disarmed
it of all annoyance. If Emmeline was the glory of the
sunlight—Susannah was the sovereign of the shade. If the song
of the one filled you with exultation, that of the other awakened
all your tenderness. If Emmeline was the creature for the
dance,—Susannah was the wooing, beguiling Egeria, who could
snatch you from yourself in the moments of respite and repose.
For my part, I felt that I could spend all my mornings with the
former, and all my evenings with the latter. Susannah with her

[figure description] Page 081.[end figure description]

large, blue, tearful eyes, and few, murmuring and always gentle
accents, shone out upon me at nightfall, as that last star that
watches in the vault of night for the coming of the sapphire dawn.

So much for the damsels. And all these fancies, not to say
feelings, were the fruit of but three short days acquaintance with
their objects. But these were days when thoughts travel merrily
and fast—when all that concerns the fancies and the affections,
are caught up in a moment, as if the mind were nothing but a
congeries of instincts, and the sensibilities, with a thousand delicate
antennæ, were ever on the grasp for prey.

Squire Owens was a planter of tolerable condition. He was a
widower, with these two lovely and lovable daughters—no more.
But, bless you! Mine was no calculating heart. Very far from
it. Neither the wealth of the father, nor the beauty of the girls,
had yet prompted me to think of marriage. Life was pleasant
enough as it was. Why burden it? Let well enough alone, say
I. I had no wish to be happier. A wife never entered my
thoughts. What might have come of being often with such damsels,
there's no telling; but just then, it was quite enough to
dance with Emmeline, and muse with Susannah, and—vive la
bagatelle!

I need say nothing more of my dreams, since the reader sufficiently
knows the subject. I slept late that day, and only rose in
time for dinner, which, in that almost primitive region, took place
at 12 o'clock, M. I had no appetite. A herring and soda water
might have sufficed, but these were matters foreign to the manor.
I endured the day and headache together, as well as I could,
slept soundly that night, with now the most ravishing fancies of
Emmeline, and now the pleasantest dreams of Susannah, one or
other of whom still usurped the place of a bright particular star in
my most capacious fancy. Truth is, in those heydey days, my
innocent heart never saw any terrors in polygamy. I rose a new
man, refreshed and very eager for a start. I barely swallowed
breakfast when Priam was at the door. While I was about to
mount, with thoughts filled with the meek beauties of Susannah,—
I was arrested by the approach of no less a person than Ephraim
Strong, the village blacksmith.

“You're guine to ride, I see.”

[figure description] Page 082.[end figure description]

“Yes.”

“To Squire Owens, I reckon.”

“Right.”

“Well, keep a sharp look out on the road, for there's news
come down that the famous Archy Dargan has broke Hamilton
gaol.”

“And who's Archy Dargan?”

“What! don't know Archy? Why, he's the madman that's
been shut up there, it's now guine on two years.”

“A madman, eh?”

“Yes, and a mighty sevagerous one at that. He's the cunningest
white man going. Talks like a book, and knows how to
get out of a scrape,—is jest as sensible as any man for a time,
but, sudden, he takes a start, like a shying horse, and before you
knows where you are, his heels are in your jaw. Once he blazes
out, it's knife or gun, hatchet or hickory—any thing he can lay
hands on. He's kill'd two men already, and cut another's throat
a'most to killing. He's an ugly chap to meet on the road, so look
out right and left.”

“What sort of man is he?”

“In looks?”

“Yes!”

“Well, I reckon, he's about your heft. He's young and tallish,
with a fair skin, brown hair, and a mighty quick keen blue eye,
that never looks steddily nowhere. Look sharp for him. The
sheriff with his `spose-you-come-and-take-us'—is out after him,
but he's mighty cute to dodge, and had the start some twelve hours
afore they missed him.”

CHAPTER II.

[figure description] Page 083.[end figure description]

The information thus received did not disquiet me. After the
momentary reflection that it might be awkward to meet a madman,
out of bounds, upon the highway, I quickly dismissed the matter
from my mind. I had no room for any but pleasant meditations.
The fair Susannah was now uppermost in my dreaming fancies,
and, reversing the grasp upon my whip, the ivory handle of which,
lined with an ounce or two of lead, seemed to me a sufficiently
effective weapon for the worst of dangers, I bade my friendly
blacksmith farewell, and dashed forward upon the high road. A
smart canter soon took me out of the settlement, and, once in the
woods, I recommended myself with all the happy facility of youth,
to its most pleasant and beguiling imaginings. I suppose I had
ridden a mile or more—the story of the bedlamite was gone
utterly from my thought—when a sudden turn in the road showed
me a person, also mounted, and coming towards me at an easy
trot, some twenty-five or thirty yards distant. There was nothing
remarkable in his appearance. He was a plain farmer or woodman,
clothed in simple homespun, and riding a short heavy chunk
of an animal, that had just been taken from the plough. The
rider was a spare, long-legged person, probably thirty years or
thereabouts. He looked innocent enough, wearing that simple,
open-mouthed sort of countenance, the owner of which, we
assume, at a glance, will never set any neighbouring stream on
fire. He belonged evidently to a class as humble as he was simple,—
but I had been brought up in a school which taught me that
the claims of poverty were quite as urgent upon courtesy as those
of wealth. Accordingly, as we neared each other, I prepared to
bestow upon him the usual civil recognition of the highway.
What is it Scott says—I am not sure that I quote him rightly—


“When men in distant forests meet,
They pass not as in peaceful street.”

[figure description] Page 084.[end figure description]

And, with the best of good humour, I rounded my lips into a smile,
and got ready my salutation. To account somewhat for its effect
when uttered, I must premise that my own personal appearance
at this time, was rather wild and impressive. My face was full
of laughter and my manners of buoyancy. My hair was very
long, and fell in masses upon my shoulder, unrestrained by the
cap which I habitually wore, and which, as I was riding under
heavy shade trees, was grasped in my hand along with my riding
whip. As the stranger drew nigh, the arm was extended, cap
and whip lifted in air, and with free, generous lungs, I shouted—
“good morning, my friend,—how wags the world with you
to-day?”

The effect of this address was prodigious. The fellow gave no
answer,—not a word, not a syllable—not the slightest nod of the
head,—mais, tout au contraire. But for the dilating of his amazed
pupils, and the dropping of the lower jaw, his features might have
been chiselled out of stone. They wore an expression amounting
to consternation, and I could see that he caught up his bridle with
increased alertness, bent himself to the saddle, half drew up his
horse, and then, as if suddenly resolved, edged him off, as closely
as the woods would allow, to the opposite side of the road. The
undergrowth was too thick to allow of his going into the wood at
the spot where we encountered, or he certainly would have done
so. Somewhat surprised at this, I said something, I cannot now
recollect what, the effect of which was even more impressive upon
him than my former speech. The heads of our horses were
now nearly parallel—the road was an ordinary wagon track, say
twelve feet wide—I could have brushed him with my cap as we
passed, and, waving it still aloft, he seemed to fancy that such
was my intention,—for, inclining his whole body on the off side
of his nag, as the Cumanche does when his aim is to send an arrow
at his enemy beneath his neck—his heels thrown back, though
spurless, were made to belabour with the most surprising rapidity,
the flanks of his drowsy animal. And, not without some effect.
The creature dashed first into a trot, then into a canter, and
finally into a gallop, which, as I was bound one way and he the
other, soon threw a considerable space between us.

“The fellow's mad!” was my reflection and speech, as,

[figure description] Page 085.[end figure description]

wheeling my horse half about, I could see him looking backward, and
driving his heels still into the sides of his reluctant hack. The
next moment gave me a solution of the matter. The simple
countryman had heard of the bedlamite from Hamilton jail. My
bare head, the long hair flying in the wind, my buoyancy of
manner, and the hearty, and, perhaps, novel form of salutation
with which I addressed him, had satisfied him that I was the person.
As the thought struck me, I resolved to play the game out,
and, with a restless love of levity which has been too frequently
my error, I put the whip over my horse's neck, and sent him forward
in pursuit. My nag was a fine one, and very soon the space
was lessened between me and the chase. As he heard the foot-falls
behind, the frightened fugitive redoubled his exertions. He
laid himself to it, his heels paddling in the sides of his donkey
with redoubled industry. And thus I kept him for a good mile,
until the first houses of the settlement grew visible in the distance.
I then once more turned upon the path to the Owens',
laughing merrily at the rare chase, and the undisguised consternation
of the countryman. The story afforded ample merriment
to my fair friends Emmeline and Susannah. “It was so ridiculous
that one of my appearance should be taken for a madman.
The silly fellow deserved the scare.” On these points we were
all perfectly agreed. That night we spent charmingly. The
company did not separate till near one o'clock. We had fun and
fiddles. I danced by turns with the twins, and more than once
with a Miss Gridley, a very pretty girl, who was present. Squire
Owens was in the best of humours, and, no ways loth, I was made
to stay all night.

CHAPTER III.

[figure description] Page 086.[end figure description]

A new day of delight dawned upon us with the next. Our
breakfast made a happy family picture, which I began to think it
would be cruel to interrupt. So snugly did I sit beside Emmeline,
and so sweetly did Susannah minister at the coffee urn, and
so patriarchally did the old man look around upon the circle,
that my meditations were all in favour of certain measures for
perpetuating the scene. The chief difficulty seemed to be, in the
way of a choice between the sisters.

“How happy could one be with either,
Were t'other dear charmer away.”
I turned now from one to the other, only to become more bewildered.
The lively glance and playful remark of Emmeline, her
love smiling visage, and buoyant, unpremeditative air, were triumphant
always while I beheld them; but the pensive, earnest
look of Susannah, the mellow cadences of her tones, seemed always
to sink into my soul, and were certainly remembered longest.
Present, Emmeline was irresistible; absent, I thought
chiefly of Susannah. Breakfast was fairly over before I came
to a decision. We adjourned to the parlour,—and there, with
Emmeline at the piano, and Susannah with her Coleridge in hand—
her favourite poet—I was quite as much distracted as before.
The bravura of the one swept me completely off my feet. And
when I pleaded with the other to read me the touching poem of
“Genevieve”—her low, subdued and exquisitely modulated utterance,
so touching, so true to the plaintive and seductive sentiment,
so harmonious even when broken, so thrilling even when
most checked and hushed, was quite as little to be withstood.
Like the ass betwixt two bundles of hay, my eyes wandered from
one to the other uncertain where to fix. And thus passed the
two first hours after breakfast.

The third brought an acquisition to our party. We heard the

[figure description] Page 087.[end figure description]

trampling of horses' feet in the court below, and all hurried to the
windows, to see the new comer. We had but a glimpse of him—
a tall, good-looking personage, about thirty years of age, with
great whiskers, and a huge military cloak. Squire Owens met
him in the reception room, and they remained some half hour or
three quarters together. It was evidently a business visit. The
girls were all agog to know what it was about, and I was mortified
to think that Emmeline was now far less eager to interest me
than before. She now turned listlessly over the pages of her music
book, or strummed upon the keys of her piano, with the air of
one whose thoughts were elsewhere. Susannah did not seem so
much disturbed,—she still continued to draw my attention to the
more pleasing passages of the poet; but I could see, or I fancied,
that even she was somewhat curious as to the coming of the stranger.
Her eyes turned occasionally to the parlour door at the slightest
approaching sound, and she sometimes looked in my face with
a vacant eye, when I was making some of my most favourable
points of conversation.

At length there was a stir within, a buzz and the scraping of
feet. The door was thrown open, and, ushered by the father, the
stranger made his appearance. His air was rather distingué.
His person was well made, tall and symmetrical. His face was
martial and expressive. His complexion was of a rich dark
brown; his eye was grey, large, and restless—his hair thin, and
dishevelled. His carriage was very erect; his coat, which was
rather seedy, was close buttoned to his chin. His movements were
quick and impetuous, and seemed to obey the slightest sound,
whether of his own, or of the voices of others. He approached
the company with the manner of an old acquaintance; certainly,
with that of a man who had always been conversant with the best
society. His ease was unobtrusive,—a polite deference invariably
distinguishing his deportment whenever he had occasion to
address the ladies. Still, he spoke as one having authority.
There was a lordly something in his tones,—an emphatic assurance
in his gesture,—that seemed to settle every question; and,
after a little while, I found that, hereafter, if I played on any fiddle
at all, in that presence, it was certainly not to be the first.
Emmeline and Susannah had ears for me no longer. There was

[figure description] Page 088.[end figure description]

a something of impatience in the manner of the former whenever
I spoke, as if I had only interrupted much pleasanter sounds;
and, even Susannah, the meek Susannah, put down her Coleridge
upon a stool, and seemed all attention, only for the imposing
stranger.

The effect upon the old man was scarcely less agreeable. Col.
Nelson,—so was the stranger called—had come to see about the
purchase of his upper mill-house tract—a body of land containing
some four thousand acres, the sale of which was absolutely necessary
to relieve him from certain incumbrances. From the
conversation which he had already had with his visitor, it appeared
that the preliminaries would be of easy adjustment, and
Squire Owens was in the best of all possible humours. It was
nothing but Col. Nelson,—Col. Nelson. The girls did not seem
to need this influence, though they evidently perceived it; and,
in the course of the first half hour after his introduction, I felt
myself rapidly becoming de trop. The stranger spoke in passionate
bursts,—at first in low tones,—with halting, hesitating manner,
then, as if the idea were fairly grasped, he dilated into a torrent
of utterance, his voice rising with his thought, until he started
from his chair and confronted the listener. I cannot deny
that there was a richness in his language, a warmth and colour in
his thought, which fascinated while it startled me. It was only when
he had fairly ended that one began to ask what had been the provocation
to so much warmth, and whether the thought to which we
had listened was legitimately the growth of previous suggestions.
But I was in no mood to listen to the stranger, or to analyze what
he said. I found my situation quite too mortifying—a mortification
which was not lessened, when I perceived that neither of the two
damsels said a word against my proposed departure. Had they
shown but the slightest solicitude, I might have been reconciled
to my temporary obscuration. But no! they suffered me to rise
and declare my purpose, and made no sign. A cold courtesy
from them, and a stately and polite bow from Col. Nelson, acknowledged
my parting salutation, and Squire Owens attended
me to the threshold, and lingered with me till my horse was got
in readiness. As I dashed through the gateway, I could hear the
rich voice of Emmeline swelling exultingly with the tones of her

[figure description] Page 089.[end figure description]

piano, and my fancy presented me with the images of Col. Nelson,
hanging over her on one hand, while the meek Susannah on
the other, was casting those oblique glances upon him which had
so frequently been addressed to me. “Ah! pestilent jades,” I
exclaimed in the bitterness of a boyish heart; “this then is the
love of woman.”

CHAPTER IV.

[figure description] Page 090.[end figure description]

Chewing such bitter cud as this, I had probably ridden a good
mile, when suddenly I heard the sound of human voices, and
looking up, discovered three men, mounted, and just in front of
me. They had hauled up, and were seemingly awaiting my approach.
A buzzing conversation was going on among them.
“That's he!” said one. “Sure?” was the question of another.
A whistle at my very side caused me to turn my head, and as I
did so, my horse was caught by the bridle, and I received a severe
blow from a club above my ears, which brought me down,
almost unconscious, upon the ground. In an instant, two stout
fellows were upon me, and busy in the praiseworthy toil of roping
me, hands and feet, where I lay. Hurt, stung, and utterly confounded
by the surprise, I was not prepared to suffer this indignity
with patience. I made manful struggle, and for a moment succeeded
shaking off both assailants. But another blow, taking effect upon
my temples, and dealt with no moderate appliance of hickory,
left me insensible. When I recovered consciousness, I found myself
in a cart, my hands tied behind me, my head bandaged with
a red cotton handkerchief, and my breast and arms covered with
blood. A stout fellow rode beside me in the cart, while another
drove, and on each side of the vehicle trotted a man, well armed
with a double-barrelled gun.

“What does all this mean?” I demanded. “Why am I here?
Why this assault? What do you mean to do with me?”

“Don't be obstropolous,” said one of the men. “We don't
mean to hurt you; only put you safe. We had to tap you on
the head a little, for your own good.”

“Indeed!” I exclaimed, the feeling of that unhappy tapping
upon the head, making me only the sorer at every moment—“but
will you tell me what this is for, and in what respect did my good
require that my head should be broken?”

“It might have been worse for you, where you was onbeknown,”

[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]

replied the spokesman,—“but we knowd your situation, and
sarved you off easily. Be quiet now, and—”

“What do you mean—what is my situation?”

“Well, I reckon we know. Only you be quiet, or we'll have
to give you the skin.”

And he held aloft a huge wagon whip as he spoke. I had sufficient
proof already of the unscrupulousness with which my
companions acted, not to be very chary of giving them farther
provocation, and, in silent misgiving, I turned my head to the opposite
side of the vehicle. The first glance in this quarter revealed
to me the true history of my disaster, and furnished an ample
solution of the whole mystery. Who should I behold but the
very fellow whom I had chased into town the day before. The
truth was now apparent. I had been captured as the stray bed-lamite
from Hamilton jail. It was because of this that I had been
“tapped on the head—only for my own good.” As the conjecture
flashed upon me, I could not avoid laughter, particularly as
I beheld the still doubtful and apprehensive visage of the man beside
me. My laughter had a very annoying effect upon all parties.
It was a more fearful sign than my anger might have been.
The fellow whom I had scared, edged a little farther from the
cart, and the man who had played spokesman, and upon whom
the whole business seemed to have devolved, now shook his whip
again—“None of that, my lad,” said he, “or I'll have to bruise
you again. Don't be obstroplous.”

“You've taken me up for a madman, have you?” said I.

“Well, I reckon you ought to know what you are. There's
no disputing it.”

“And this silly fellow has made you believe it?”

“Reckon!”

“You've made a great mistake.”

“Don't think it.”

“But you have: Only take me to C—, and I'll prove it by
General Cocke, himself, or Squire Humphries, or any body in
the town.”

“No! no! my friend,—that cock won't fight. We aint misdoubting
at all, but you're the right man. You answer all the
descriptions, and Jake Sturgis here, has made his affidavy that

[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]

you chased him, neck and neck, as mad as any blind puppy in a
dry September, for an hour by sun yesterday. We don't want
no more proof.”

“And where do you mean to carry me?” I enquired, with
all the coolness I was master of.

“Well, we'll put you up in a pen we've got a small piece
from here; and when the sheriff comes, he'll take you back to
your old quarters at Hamilton jail, where I reckon they'll fix you
a little tighter than they had you before. We've sent after the
sheriff, and his `spose-you-come-and-take-us,' and I reckon they'll
be here about sun-down.”

CHAPTER V.

[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]

Here was a “sitiation” indeed. Burning with indignation, I
was yet sufficiently master of myself to see that any ebullition of
rage on my part, would only confirm the impressions which they
had received of my insanity. I said little therefore, and that little
was confined to an attempt to explain the chase of yesterday,
which Jake Sturgis had made the subject of such a mischievous
“affidavy.” But as I could not do this without laughter, I incurred
the danger of the whip. My laugh was ominous.—Jake
edged off once more to the roadside; the man beside me, got his
bludgeon in readiness, and the potent wagon whip of the leader
of the party, was uplifted in threatening significance. Laughter
was clearly out of the question, and it naturally ceased on my
part, as I got in sight of the “pen” in which I was to be kept secure.
This structure is one well known to the less civilized regions
of the country. It is a common place of safe keeping in
the absence of gaols and proper officers. It is called technically
a “bull pen,” and consists of huge logs, roughly put together,
crossing at right angles, forming a hollow square,—the logs too
massy to be removed, and the structure too high to be climbed,
particularly if the prisoner should happen to be, like myself, fairly
tied up hand and foot together. I relucted terribly at being
put into this place. I pleaded urgently, struggled fiercely, and
was thrust in neck and heels without remorse; and, in sheer hopelessness
and vexation, I lay with my face prone to the earth, and
half buried among the leaves, weeping, I shame to confess it, the
bitter tears of impotence and mortification.

Meantime, the news of my capture went through the country;—
not my capture, mark me, but that of the famous madman,
Archy Dargan, who had broke Hamilton jail. This was an
event, and visitors began to collect. My captors, who kept watch
on the outside of my den, had their hands full in answering questions.
Man, woman and child, Squire and ploughboy, and, finally,

[figure description] Page 094.[end figure description]

dames and damsels, accumulated around me, and such a throng
of eyes as pierced the crevices of my log dungeon, to see the
strange monster by whom they were threatened, now disarmed of
his terrors, were,—to use the language of one of my keepers—“a
power to calkilate.” This was not the smallest part of my annoyance.
The logs were sufficiently far apart to suffer me to
see and to be seen, and I crouched closer to my rushes, and buried
my face more thoroughly than ever, if possible, to screen my dishonoured
visage from their curious scrutiny. This conduct
mightily offended some of the visitors.

“I can't see his face,” said one.

“Stir him with a long pole!”—and I was greatly in danger of
being treated as a surly bear, refusing to dance for his keeper;
since one of mine seemed very much disposed to gratify the spectator,
and had actually begun sharpening the end of a ten foot
hickory, for the purpose of pricking me into more sociableness.
He was prevented from carrying his generous design into effect
by the suggestion of one of his companions.

“Better don't, Bosh; if ever he should git out agen, he'd put
his ear mark upon you.”

“Reckon you're right,” was the reply of the other, as he laid
his rod out of sight.

Meanwhile, the people came and went, each departing visitor
sending others. A couple of hours might have elapsed leaving
me in this humiliating situation, chained to the stake, the beast of
a bear garden, with fifty greedy and still dissatisfied eyes upon me.
Of these, fully one fourth were of the tender gender; some pitied
me, some laughed, and all congratulated themselves that I was
safely laid by the heels, incapable of farther mischief. It was not
the most agreeable part of their remarks, to find that they all universally
agreed that I was a most frightful looking object. Whether
they saw my face or not, they all discovered that I glared
frightfully upon them, and I heard one or two of them ask in under
tones, “did you see his teeth—how sharp!” I gnashed them
with a vengeance all the while, you may be sure.

CHAPTER VI.

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The last and worst humiliation was yet to come—that which
put me for a long season out of humour with all human and woman
nature. Conscious of an unusual degree of bustle without, I
was suddenly startled by sounds of a voice that had been once
pleasingly familiar. It was that of a female, a clear, soft, transparent
sound, which, till this moment, had never been associated
in my thoughts with any thing but the most perfect of all mortal
melodies. It was now jangled harsh, like “sweet bells out of
tune.” The voice was that of Emmeline. “Good heavens!” I
exclaimed to myself—`can she be here?” In another instant, I
heard that of Susannah—the meek Susannah,—she too was among
the curious to examine the features of the bedlamite, Archy Dargan.”

“Dear me,” said Emmeline, “is he in that place?”

“What a horrid place!” said Susannah.

“It's the very place for such a horrid creature,” responded
Emmeline.

“Can't he get out, papa?” said Susannah. “Isn't a mad person
very strong?”

“Oh! don't frighten a body, Susannah, before we have had a
peep,” cried Emmeline; “I declare I'm afraid to look—do, Col.
Nelson, peep first and see if there's no danger.”

And there was the confounded Col. Nelson addressing his eyes
to my person, and assuring his fair companions, my Emmeline,
my Susannah, that there was no sort of danger,—that I was evidently
in one of my fits of apathy.

“The paroxysm is off for the moment, ladies,—and even if he
were violent, it is impossible that he should break through the
pen. He seems quite harmless—you may look with safety.”

“Yes, he's mighty quiet now, Miss,”—said one of my keepers
encouragingly, “but it's all owing to a close sight of my whip.
He was a-guine to be obstroplous more than once, when I shook

[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]

it over him—he's usen to it, I reckon. You can always tell when
the roaring fit is coming on—for he breaks out in such a dreadful
sort of laughing.”

“Ha! Ha!—he laughs does he—Ha! Ha!” such was the
somewhat wild interruption offered by Col. Nelson himself. If my
laugh produced such an effect upon my keeper, his had a very disquieting
effect upon me. But, the instinctive conviction that
Emmeline and Susannah were now gazing upon me, prompted
me with a sort of fascination, to lift my head and look for them.
I saw their eyes quite distinctly. Bright treacheries! I could
distinguish between them—and there were those of Col. Nelson
beside them—the three persons evidently in close propinquity.

“What a dreadful looking creature!” said Susannah.

“Dreadful!” said Emmeline, “I see nothing so dreadful in
him. He seems tame enough. I'm sure, if that's a madman, I
don't see why people should be afraid of them.”

“Poor man, how bloody he is!” said Susannah.

“We had to tap him, Miss, a leetle upon the head, to bring him
quiet. He's tame and innocent now, but you should see him
when he's going to break out. Only just hear him when he
laughs.”

I could not resist the temptation. The last remark of my keeper
fell on my ears like a suggestion, and suddenly shooting up my
head, and glaring fiercely at the spectators, I gave them a yell of
laughter as terrible as I could possibly make it.

“Ah!” was the shriek of Susannah, as she dashed back from
the logs. Before the sounds had well ceased, they were echoed
from without, and in more fearful and natural style from the practised
lungs of Col. Nelson. His yells following mine, were
enough to startle even me.

“What!” he cried, thrusting his fingers through the crevice,
“you would come out, would you,—you would try your strength
with mine. Let him out,—let him out! I am ready for him,
breast to breast, man against man, tooth and nail, forever and forever.
You can laugh too, but—Ha! Ha! Ha!—what do you say
to that? Shut up, shut up, and be ashamed of yourself. Ha!
Ha! Ha!”

There was a sensation without. I could see that Emmeline

[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]

recoiled from the side of her companion. He had thrown himself
into an attitude, had grappled the logs of my dungeon, and
exhibited a degree of strange emotion, which, to say the least,
took every body by surprise. My chief custodian was the first to
speak.

“Don't be scared, Mr.—there's no danger—he can't get out.”

“But I say let him out—let him out. Look at him, ladies—
look at him. You shall see what a madman is—you shall see
how I can manage him. Hark ye, fellow,—out with him at once.
Give me your whip—I know all about his treatment. You shall
see me work him. I'll manage him,—I'll fight with him, and
laugh with him too—how we shall laugh—Ha! Ha! Ha!”

His horrible laughter,—for it was horrible—was cut short by
an unexpected incident. He was knocked down as suddenly as
I had been, with a blow from behind, to the astonishment of all
around. The assailant was the sheriff of Hamilton jail, who had
just arrived and detected the fugitive, Archy Dargan—the most
cunning of all bedlamites, as he afterwards assured me,—in the
person of the handsome Col. Nelson.

“I knew the scamp by his laugh—I heard it half a mile,” said
the sheriff, as he planted himself upon the bosom of the prostrate
man, and proceeded to leash him in proper order. Here was a
concatenation accordingly.

“Who hev' I got in the pen?” was the sapient inquiry of my
captor—the fellow whose whip had been so potent over my imagination.

“Who? Have you any body there?” demanded the sheriff.

“I reckon!—We cocht a chap that Jake made affidavy was
the madman.”

“Let him out then, and beg the man's pardon. I'll answer for
Archy Dargan.”

My appearance before the astonished damsels was gratifying to
neither of us. I was covered with mud and blood,—and they
with confusion.

“Oh! Mr.—, how could we think it was you, such a
fright as they've made you.”

Such was Miss Emmeline's speech after her recovery. Susannah's
was quite as characteristic.

[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]

“I am so very sorry, Mr.—.”

“Spare your regrets, ladies,” I muttered ungraciously, as I
leapt on my horse. “I wish you a very pleasant morning.”

“Ha! Ha! Ha!” yelled the bedlamite, writhing and bounding
in his leash—“a very pleasant morning.”

The damsels took to their heels, and went off in one direction
quite as fast as I did in the other. Since that day, dear reader, I
have never suffered myself to scare a fool, or to fall in love with
a pair of twins; and if ever I marry, take my word for it, the
happy woman shall neither be a Susannah, nor an Emmeline.

p371-370 THE LAZY CROW. A STORY OF THE CORNFIELD. CHAPTER I.

[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]

We were on the Savannah river when the corn was coming
up; at the residence of one of those planters of the middle country,
the staid, sterling, old-time gentlemen of the last century,
the stock of which is so rapidly diminishing. The season was
advanced and beautiful; the flowers every where in odour, and
all things promised well for the crops of the planter. Hopes and
seed, however, set out in March and April, have a long time to
go before ripening, and when I congratulated Mr. Carrington on
the prospect before him, he would shake his head, and smile and
say, in a quizzical inquiring humour, “wet or dry, cold or warm,
which shall it be? what season shall we have? Tell me that,
and I will hearken with more confidence to your congratulations.
We can do no more than plant the seed, scuffle with the grass,
say our prayers, and leave the rest to Him without whose blessing
no labour can avail.”

“There is something more to be done, and of scarcely less importance
it would seem, if I may judge from the movements of
Scipio—kill or keep off the crows.”

Mr. Carrington turned as I spoke these words; we had just left
the breakfast table, where we had enjoyed all the warm comforts
of hot rice-waffles, journey-cake, and glowing biscuit, not to
speak of hominy and hoe-cake, without paying that passing acknowledgment
to dyspeptic dangers upon which modern physicians
so earnestly insist. Scipio, a sleek, well-fed negro, with a round,
good-humoured face, was busy in the corner of the apartment;

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one hand employed in grasping a goodly fragment of bread, half-concealed
in a similar slice of fried bacon, which he had just received
from his young mistress;—while the other carefully selected
from the corner, one of half-a-dozen double-barrelled guns,
which he was about to raise to his shoulder, when my remark
turned the eye of his master upon him.

“How now, Scipio, what are you going to shoot?” was the inquiry
of Mr. Carrington.

“Crow, sa; dere's a dratted ugly crow dat's a-troubling me,
and my heart's set for kill 'um.”

“One only; why Scip, you're well off if you hav'n't a hundred.
Do they trouble you very much in the pine land field?”

“Dare's a plenty, sa; but dis one I guine kill, sa, he's wuss
more nor all de rest. You hab good load in bote barrel, mossa?”

“Yes, but small shot only. Draw the loads, Scip, and put in
some of the high duck; you'll find the bag in the closet. These
crows will hardly let you get nigh enough, Scipio, to do them any
mischief with small shot.”

“Ha! but I will trouble dis black rascal, you see, once I set
eye 'pon um. He's a cussed ugly nigger, and he a'n't feared.
I can git close 'nough, mossa.”

The expression of Scipio's face, while uttering the brief declaration
of war against the innumerable, and almost licensed pirates
of the cornfield, or rather against one in particular, was
full of the direst hostility. His accents were not less marked by
malignity, and could not fail to command our attention.

“Why, you seem angry about it, Scipio; this crow must be
one of the most impudent of his tribe, and a distinguished character.”

“I'll 'stinguish um, mossa,—you'll see. Jist as you say, he's
a mos' impudent nigger. He no feared of me 't all. When I
stan' and look 'pon him, he stan' and look 'pon me. I tak' up
dirt and stick, and trow at um, but he no scare. When I chase
um, he fly dis way, he fly dat, but he nebber gone so far, but he
can turn round and cock he tail at me, jist when he see me 'top.
He's a mos' cussed sassy crow, as ebber walk in a cornfield.”

“But Scip, you surprise me. You don't mean to say that it is
one crow in particular that annoys you in this manner.”

[figure description] Page 101.[end figure description]

“De same one ebbery day, mossa; de same one;” was the reply.

“How long has this been?”

“Mos' a week now, massa; ebber sence las' Friday.”

“Indeed! but what makes you think this troublesome crow always
the same one, Scipio? Do you think the crows never
change their spies?”

“Enty, I know um, mossa; dis da same crow been trouble me,
ebber since las' Friday. He's a crow by hese'f, mossa. I
nebber see him wid t'oder crows he no hab complexion ob t'oder
crow, yet he's crow, all de same.”

“Is he not black like all his tribe?”

“Yes, he black, but he ain't black like de t'oder ones. Dere's
someting like a grey dirt 'pon he wing. He's black, but he no
pot black—no jet;—he hab dirt, I tell you, mossa, on he wing,
jis' by de skirt ob he jacket—jis yer;” and he lifted the lappel
of his master's coat as he concluded his description of the bird
that troubled him.

“A strange sort of crow indeed, Scipio, if he answers your
description. Should you kill him, be sure and bring him to me.
I can scarcely think him a crow.”

“How, no crow, mossa? Enty, I know crow good as any
body! He's a crow, mossa,—a dirty, black nigger ob a crow,
and I'll shoot um t'rough he head, sure as a gun. He trouble
me too much; look hard 'pon me as ef you bin gib um wages
for obersee. Nobody ax um for watch me, see wha' I do!
Who mak' him obersheer?”

“A useful crow, Scipio; and now I think of it, it might be just
as well that you shouldn't shoot him. If he does such good service
in the cornfield as to see that you all do your work, I'll
make him my overseer in my absence!”

This speech almost astounded the negro. He dropped the butt
of the gun upon the floor, suffered the muzzle to rest in the hollow
of his arm, and thus boldly expostulated with his master
against so strange a decision.

“No shoot um, mossa; no shoot crow dat's a-troubling you.
Dickens, mossa, dat's too foolish now, I mus' tell you; and
to tell you de blessed trut', ef you don't shoot dis lazy crow
I tell you ob, or le' me shoot 'um, one or t'oder, den you

[figure description] Page 102.[end figure description]

mus' take Scip out ob de cornfiel', and put 'noder nigger in
he place. I can't work wid dat ugly ting, looking at me so
sassy. When I turn, he turn; if I go to dis hand, why, he's
dere; if I change 'bout, and go t'oder hand, dere's de critter,
jis de same. He nebber git out ob de way, 'till I run at um
wid stick.”

“Well, well, Scipio, kill your crow, but be sure and bring him
in when you do so. You may go now.”

“I hab um to-night for you, mossa, ef God spare me. Look
ya, young missis, you hab any coffee lef' in de pot; I tanks
you.”

Jane Carrington,—a gentle and lovely girl of seventeen—who
did the honours of the table, supplied Scipio's wants, and leaving
him to the enjoyment of his mug of coffee, Mr. C. and myself
walked forth into the plantation.

The little dialogue just narrated had almost entirely passed out
of my mind, when, at evening, returning from his labours in the
cornfield, who should make his appearance but Scipio. He came
to place the gun in the corner from which he had taken it; but
he brought with him no trophies of victory. He had failed to
scalp his crow. The inquiry of his master as to his failure,
drew my attention to the negro, who had simply placed the weapon
in the rest, and was about to retire, with a countenance, as
I thought, rather sullen and dissatisfied, and a hang-dog, sneaking
manner, as if anxious to escape observation. He had utterly
lost that air of confidence which he had worn in the morning.

“What, Scipio! no crow?” demanded his master.

“I no shoot, sa,” replied the negro, moving off as he spoke,
as if willing that the examination should rest there. But Mr.
Carrington, who was something of a quiz, and saw that the poor
fellow laboured under a feeling of mortified self-conceit, was not
unwilling to worry him a little further.

“Ah, Scip, I always thought you a poor shot, in spite of your
bragging; now I'm sure of it. A crow comes and stares you
out of countenance, walks round you, and scarcely flies when
you pelt him, and yet, when the gun is in your hands, you do
nothing. How's that?”

[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]

“I tell you, mossa, I no bin shoot. Ef I bin shoot, I bin hurt
um in he head for true; but dere' no use for shoot, tel you can
get shot, enty? Wha' for trow 'way de shot?—you buy 'em,—
he cos' you money; well, you hab money for trow 'way?
No! Wha' den—Scip's a big rascal for true, ef he trow 'way
you money. Dat's trow 'way you money, wha's trow 'way you
shot,—wha's trow you corn, you peas, you fodder, you hog-meat,
you chickens and eggs. Scip nebber trow 'way you property,
mossa; nobody nebber say sich ting.”

“Cunning dog—nobody accuses you, Scipio. I believe you to
be as honest as the rest, Scipio, but haven't you been throwing
away time; haven't you been poking about after this crow to the
neglect of your duty. Come, in plain language, did you get
through your task to-day?”

“Task done, mossa; I finish um by tree 'clock.”

“Well, what did you do with the rest of your time? Have
you been at your own garden, Scipio?”

“No, sa; I no touch de garden.”

“Why not? what employed you from three o'clock?”

“Dis same crow, mossa; I tell you, mossa, 'tis dis same dirty
nigger ob a crow I bin looking arter, ebber since I git over de
task. He's a ting da's too sassy and aggrabates me berry much.
I follow um tel de sun shut he eye, and nebber can git shot. Ef
I bin git shot, I nebber miss um, mossa, I tell you.”

“But why did you not get a shot? You must have bungled
monstrously, Scipio, not to succeed in getting a shot at a bird that
is always about you. Does he bother you less than he did before,
now that you have the gun?”

“I spec' he mus' know, mossa, da's de reason; but he bodder
me jis' de same. He nebber leff me all day I bin in de cornfield,
but he nebber come so close for be shoot. He say to he sef,
dat gun good at sixty yard, in Scip hand; I stan' sixty, I stan'
a hundred; ef he shoot so far, I laugh at 'em. Da's wha' he say.”

“Well, even at seventy or eighty yards, you should have tried
him, Scipio. The gun that tells at sixty, will be very apt to tell
at seventy or eighty yards, if the nerves be good that hold it,
and the eye close. Try him even at a hundred, Scipio, rather
than lose your crow; but put in your biggest shot.”

CHAPTER II.

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The conference ended with this counsel of the master. The
fellow promised to obey, and the next morning he sallied forth
with the gun as before. By this time, both Mr. Carrington and
myself had begun to take some interest in the issue thus tacitly
made up between the field negro and his annoying visiter. The
anxiety which the former manifested, to destroy, in particular,
one of a tribe, of which the corn-planter has an aversion so
great as to prompt the frequent desire of the Roman tyrant touching
his enemies, and make him wish that they had but one neck
that a single blow might despatch them—was no less ridiculous
than strange; and we both fell to our fancies to account for an
hostility, which could not certainly be accounted for by any ordinary
anxiety of the good planter on such an occasion. It was
evident to both of us that the imagination of Scipio was not inactive
in the strife, and, knowing how exceeding superstitious the
negroes generally are, (and indeed, all inferior people,) after canvassing
the subject in various lights, without coming to any rational
solution, we concluded that the difficulty arose from some
grotesque fear or fancy, with which the fellow had been inspired,
probably by some other negro, on a circumstance as casual as
any one of the thousand by which the Roman augur divined, and
the soothsayer gave forth his oracular responses. Scipio had
good authority for attaching no small importance to the flight or
stoppage of a bird; and, with this grave justification of his troubles,
we resolved to let the matter rest till we could join the
negro in the cornfield, and look for ourselves into the condition of
the rival parties.

This we did that very morning. “'Possum Place,”—for such
had been the whimsical name conferred upon his estate by the
proprietor, in reference to the vast numbers of the little animal,
nightly found upon it, the opossum, the meat of which a sagacious
negro will always prefer to that of a pig,—lay upon the Santee

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swamp, and consisted pretty evenly of reclaimed swamp-land, in
which he raised his cotton, and fine high pine-land hammock, on
which he made his corn. To one of the fields of the latter we
made our way about mid-day, and were happy to find Scipio in
actual controversy with the crow that troubled him. Controversy
is scarce the word, but I can find no fitter at this moment.
The parties were some hundred yards asunder. The negro was
busy with his hoe, and the gun leaned conveniently at hand on a
contiguous and charred pine stump, one of a thousand that dotted
the entire surface of the spacious field in which he laboured.
The crow leisurely passed to and fro along the alleys, now lost
among the little hollows and hillocks, and now emerging into sight,
sometimes at a less, sometimes at a greater distance, but always
with a deportment of the most lord-like indifference to the
world around him. His gait was certainly as stately and as lazy
as that of a Castilian the third remove from a king and the tenth
from a shirt. We could discover in him no other singularity but
this marked audacity; and both Mr. Carrington's eyes and mine
were stretched beyond their orbits, but in vain, to discover that
speck of “gray dirt upon he wing,” which Scipio had been very
careful to describe with the particularity of one who felt that the
duty would devolve on him to brush the jacket of the intruder.
We learned from the negro that his sooty visiter had come alone
as usual,—for though there might have been a sprinkling of some
fifty crows here and there about the field, we could not perceive
that any of them had approached to any more familiarity with
the one that annoyed him, than with himself. He had been able
to get no shot as yet, though he did not despair of better fortune
through the day; and, in order to the better assurance of his
hopes, the poor fellow had borne what he seemed to consider the
taunting swagger of the crow all around him, without so much
as lifting weapon, or making a single step towards him.

“Give me your gun,” said Mr. Carrington. “If he walks no
faster than now, I'll give him greater weight to carry.”

But the lazy crow treated the white man with a degree of deference
that made the negro stare. He made off at full speed
with the first movement towards him, and disappeared from sight

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in a few seconds. We lost him seemingly among the willows
and fern of a little bay that lay a few hundred yards beyond us.

“What think you of that, Scip?” demanded the master. “I've
done more with a single motion than you've done for days, with
all your poking and pelting. He'll hardly trouble you in a hurry
again, though, if he does, you know well enough now, how to get
rid of him.”

“The negro's face brightened for an instant, but suddenly
changed, while he replied,—

“Ah, mossa, when you back turn, he will come 'gen—he dah
watch you now.”

Sure enough,—we had not proceeded a hundred yards, before
the calls of Scipio drew our attention to the scene we had left.
The bedevilled negro had his hand uplifted with something of an
air of horror, while a finger guided us to the spot where the lazy
crow was taking his rounds, almost in the very place from whence
the hostile advance of Mr. Carrington had driven him; and with
a listless, lounging strut of aristocratic composure, that provoked
our wonder quite as much as the negro's indignation.

“Let us see it out,” said Mr. C., returning to the scene of
action. “At him, Scipio; take your gun and do your best.”

But this did not seem necessary. Our return had the effect of
sending the sooty intruder to a distance, and, after lingering some
time to see if he would reappear while we were present, but without
success, we concluded to retire from the ground. At night,
we gathered from the poor negro that our departure was the signal
for the crow's return. He walked the course with impunity,
though Scipio pursued him several times, and towards the close
of day, in utter desperation, gave him both barrels, not only
without fracturing a feather, but actually, according to Scip's
story, without occasioning in him the slightest discomposure or
alarm. He merely changed his place at each onset, doubled on
his own ground, made a brief circuit, and back again to the old
station, looking as impudently, and walking along as lazily as
ever.

CHAPTER III.

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Some days passed by and I saw nothing of Scipio. It appears,
however, that his singular conflict with the lazy crow was carried
on with as much pertinacity on the one side, and as little patience
on the other, as before. Still, daily, did he provide himself
with the weapon and munitions of war, making as much fuss in
loading it, and putting in shot as large as if he purposed warfare
on some of the more imposing occupants of the forest, rather than
a simple bird, so innocent in all respects except the single one
of corn-stealing, as the crow. A fact, of which we obtained
possession some time after, and from the other negroes, enlightened
us somewhat on the subject of Scipio's own faith as to the true
character of his enemy. In loading his gun, he counted out his
shot, being careful to get an odd number. In using big buck he
numbered two sevens for a load; the small buck, three; and
seven times seven duck shot, when he used the latter, were
counted out as a charge, with the studious nicety of the jeweller
at his pearls and diamonds. Then followed the mystic process of
depositing the load within the tube, from which it was to issue
forth in death and devastation. His face was turned from the
sunlight; the blaze was not suffered to rest upon the bore or barrel;
and when the weapon was charged, it was carried into the
field only on his left shoulder. In spite of all these preparations,
the lazy crow came and went as before. He betrayed no change
of demeanour; he showed no more consciousness of danger; he
submitted to pursuit quietly, never seeming to hurry himself in
escaping, and was quite as close an overseer of Scipio's conduct,
as he had shown himself from the first. Not a day passed that
the negro failed to shoot at him; always, however, by his own
account, at disadvantage, and never, it appears, with any success.
The consequence of all this was, that Scipio fell sick. What
with the constant annoyance of the thing, and a too excitable
imagination, Scipio, a stout fellow nearly six feet high, and half

[figure description] Page 108.[end figure description]

as many broad, laid himself at length in his cabin, at the end of
the week, and was placed on the sick-list accordingly. But as a
negro will never take physic if he can help it, however ready he
may be to complain, it was not till Sunday afternoon, that Jane
Carrington, taking her customary stroll on that day to the negro
quarters, ascertained the fact. She at once apprised her father,
who was something of a physician, (as every planter should be,)
and who immediately proceeded to visit the invalid. He found
him without any of the customary signs of sickness. His pulse
was low and feeble, rather than full or fast; his tongue tolerably
clean; his skin not unpleasant, and, in all ordinary respects
Scipio would have been pronounced in very good condition for his
daily task, and his hog and hominy. But he was an honest fellow,
and the master well knew that there was no negro-on his
plantation so little given to “playing 'possum,” as Scipio. He
complained of being very unwell, though he found it difficult to
designate his annoyances, and say where or in what respect his ailing
lay. Questions only confused and seemed to vex him, and,
though really skilful in the cure of such complaints as ordinarily
occur on a plantation, Mr. Carrington, in the case before him,
was really at a loss. The only feature of Scipio's disease that
was apparent, was a full and raised expression of the eye, that
seemed to swell out whenever he spoke, or when he was required
to direct his attention to any object, or answer to any specific inquiry.
The more the master observed him, the more difficult it
became to utter an opinion, and he was finally compelled to leave
him for the night, without medicine, judging it wiser to let nature
take the subject in hand until he could properly determine
in what respect he suffered. But the morrow brought no alleviation
of Scipio's sufferings. He was still sick as before—incapable
of work,—indeed, as he alleged, unable to leave his bed,
though his pulse was a little exaggerated from the night previous,
and exhibited only that degree of energy and fulness, which
might be supposed natural to one moved by sudden physical excitement.
His master half-suspected him of shamming, but the
lugubrious expression of the fellow's face, could scarcely be assumed
for any purpose, and was to all eyes as natural as could
be. He evidently thought himself in a bad way. I suggested

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some simple medicine, such as salts or castor oil—any thing, indeed,
which could do no harm, and which could lessen the patient's
apprehensions, which seemed to increase with the evident
inability of his master to give him help. Still he could scarcely
tell where it hurt him; his pains were every where, in head,
back, shoulder, heels, and strange to say, at the tips of his ears.
Mr. C. was puzzled, and concluded to avoid the responsibility of
such a case, by sending for the neighbouring physician.

Dr. C—, a very clever and well-read man, soon made his
appearance, and was regularly introduced to the patient. His replies
to the physician were as little satisfactory as those which he
had made to us; and, after a long and tedious cross examination
by doctor and master, the conclusion was still the same. Some
few things, however, transpired in the inquiry, which led us all to
the same inference with the doctor, who ascribed Scipio's condition
to some mental hallucination. While the conversation had
been going on in his cabin—a dwelling like most negro houses,
made with poles, and the chinks stopped with clay,—he turned
abruptly from the physician to a negro girl that brought him soup,
and asked the following question.

“Who bin tell Gullah Sam for come in yer yesserday?”

The girl looked confused, and made no answer.

“Answer him,” said the master.

“Da's him—why you no talk, nigger?” said the patient authoritatively.
“I ax you who bin tell Gullah Sam for come in
yer yesserday?”

“He bin come?” responded the girl with another inquiry.

“Sure, he bin come—enty I see um wid he dirty gray jacket,
like dirt on a crow wing. He tink I no see um—he 'tan dere in
dis corner, close de chimney, and look wha's a cook in de pot.
Oh, how my ear bu'n—somebody's a talking bad tings 'bout
Scipio now.”

There was a good deal in this speech to interest Mr. Carrington
and myself; we could trace something of his illness to his strife
with the crow; but who was Gullah Sam? This was a question
put both by the doctor and myself, at the same moment.

“You no know Gullah Sam, enty? Ha! better you don't

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know 'um—he's a nigger da's more dan nigger—wish he min'
he own bis'ness.”

With these words the patient turned his face to the wall of his
habitation, and seemed unwilling to vouchsafe us any farther
speech. It was thought unnecessary to annoy him with farther
inquiries, and, leaving the cabin, we obtained the desired information
from his master.

“Gullah Sam,” said he, “is a native born African from the
Gold Coast, who belongs to my neighbour, Mr. Jamison, and was
bought by his father out of a Rhode Island slaver, some time before
the Revolution. He is now, as you may suppose, rather an
old man; and, to all appearances, would seem a simple and silly
one enough; but the negroes all around conceive him to be a great
conjurer, and look upon his powers as a wizard, with a degree of
dread, only to be accounted for by the notorious superstition of ignorance.
I have vainly endeavoured to overcome their fears and
prejudices on this subject; but the object of fear is most commonly,
at the same time, an object of veneration, and they hold on to
the faith which has been taught them, with a tenacity like that
with which the heathen clings to the idol, the wrath of which he
seeks to deprecate, and which he worships only because he fears.
The little conversation which we have had with Scipio, in his
partial delirium, has revealed to me what a sense of shame has
kept him from declaring before. He believes himself to be bewitched
by Gullah Sam, and, whether the African possesses any
power such as he pretends to or not, is still the same to Scipio, if
his mind has a full conviction that he does, and that he has become
its victim. A superstitious negro might as well be bewitched,
as to fancy that he is so.”

“And what do you propose to do?” was my inquiry.

“Nay, that question I cannot answer you. It is a work of
philosophy, rather than of physic, and we must become the masters
of the case, before we can prescribe for it. We must note
the fancies of the patient himself, and make these subservient to
the cure. I know of no other remedy.”

CHAPTER IV.

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That evening, we all returned to the cabin of Scipio. We
found him more composed—sane, perhaps, would be the proper
word—than in the morning, and, accordingly, perfectly silent on
the subject of Gullah Sam. His master took the opportunity of
speaking to him in plain language.

“Scipio, why do you try to keep the truth from me? Have
you ever found me a bad master, that you should fear to tell me
the truth?”

“Nebber say sich ting! Who tell you, mossa, I say you bad?”
replied the negro with a lofty air of indignation, rising on his arm
in the bed.

“Why should you keep the truth from me?” was the reply.

“Wha' trut' I keep from you, mossa?”

“The cause of your sickness, Scipio. Why did you not tell me
that Gullah Sam had bewitched you?”

The negro was confounded.

“How you know, mossa?” was his demand.

“It matters not,” replied the master, “but how came Gullah
Sam to bewitch you?”

“He kin 'witch den, mossa?” was the rather triumphant demand
of the negro, who saw, in his master's remark, a concession
to his faith, which had always been withheld before. Mr. Carrington
extricated himself from the dilemma with sufficient
promptness and ingenuity.

“The devil has power, Scipio, over all that believe in him. If
you believe that Gullah Sam can do with you what he pleases, in
spite of God and the Saviour, there is no doubt that he can; and
God and the Saviour will alike give you up to his power, since,
when you believe in the devil, you refuse to believe in them.
They have told you, and the preacher has told you, and I have
told you, that Gullah Sam can do you no sort of harm, if you will
refuse to believe in what he tells you. Why then do you believe

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in that miserable and ignorant old African, sooner than in God,
and the preacher, and myself?”

“I can't help it, mossa—de ting's de ting, and you can't change
'um. Dis Gullah Sam—he wus more nor ten debble—I jis' laugh
at 'um t'oder day—tree week 'go, when he tumble in de hoss
pond, and he shake he finger at me, and ebber since he put he bad
mout' pon me. Ebber sence dat time, dat ugly crow bin stand
in my eyes, whichebber way I tu'n. He hab gray dirt on he
wing, and enty dere's a gray patch on Gullah Sam jacket?
Gullah Sam hab close 'quaintan' wid dat same lazy crow da's
walk roun' me in de cornfield, mossa. I bin tink so from de fuss;
and when he 'tan and le' me shoot at 'um, and no 'fraid, den I
sartain.”

“Well, Scipio,” said the master, “I will soon put an end to
Sam's power. I will see Mr. Jamison, and will have Sam well
flogged for his witchcraft. I think you ought to be convinced
that a wizard who suffers himself to be flogged, is but a poor
devil after all.”

The answer of the negro was full of consternation.

“For Chris' sake, mossa, I beg you do no sich ting. You
lick Gullah Sam, den you lose Scipio for eber and eber, amen.
Gullah Sam nebber guine take off de bad mout' he put on
Scip, once you lick em. De pains will keep in de bones—de leg
will dead, fuss de right leg, den de lef, one arter t'oder, and you
nigger will dead, up and up, till noting lef for dead but he head.
He head will hab life, when you kin put he body in de hole, and
cubbur um up wid du't. You mus' try n'oder tings, mossa, for
get you nigger cure—you lick Gullah Sam, 'tis kill um for
ebber.”

A long conversation ensued among us, Scipio taking occasional
part in it; for, now that his secret was known, he seemed somewhat
relieved, and gave utterance freely to his fears and superstitions;
and determined for and against the remedies which we
severally proposed, with the authority of one, not only more deeply
interested in the case than any one beside, but who also knew
more about it. Having unscrupulously opposed nearly every plan,
even in its inception, which was suggested, his master, out of all
patience, at last exclaimed,

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