CHAPTER I.

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HARRINGTON:

A STORY OF TRUE LOVE.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “WHAT CHEER,” “THE GHOST: A

CHRISTMAS STORY,” “A TALE OF LYNN,” ETC.

“Herein may be seen noble chivalrye, curtosye, humanyte,

friendlyenesse, hardyenesse, love, friendshype, cowardyse,

murder, hate, vertue and synne. Doo after the good, and

leve the evyl, and it shall brynge you to good fame and

renomme.”—SIR THOMAS MALORY: _Preface to Morte D’Arthur_.

BOSTON:

THAYER & ELDRIDGE,

114 & 116 WASHINGTON STREET.

1860.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1860, by

THAYER & ELDRIDGE,

In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court, of the District of

Massachusetts.

W. H. TINSON, Stereotyper.

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO MY WIFE.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

PROLOGUE, 7

CHAPTER I.—THE REIGN OF TERROR, 69

II.—THE FENCING SCHOOL, 81

III.—QUARTE AND TIERCE, 90

IV.—MURIEL AND EMILY, 116

V.—LA BOSTONIENNE, 127

VI.—AN EPISODE OF THE REIGN OF TERROR, 138

VII.—ROUX, 146

VIII.—THE SHADOW OF THE HUNTER, 163

IX.—SCHOLAR AND SOLDIER, 173

X.—CONVERSATION, 181

XI.—NORTH AND SOUTH, 191

XII.—STARTLING DEVELOPMENTS, 210

XIII.—THE FAIRY PRINCE, 228

XIV.—THE ANTI-SLAVERY CONVENTION, 240

XV.—WAR AND PEACE, 252

XVI.—THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON, 268

XVII.—NOCTURNAL, 276

XVIII.—THE PRETTY PASS THINGS CAME TO, 290

XIX.—THE ROAR OF ST. DOMINGO, 302

XX.—EXPLANATIONS, 316

XXI.—THE BREAKING OF THE SPELL, 328

XXII.—INTERSTITIAL, 340

XXIII.—THE BLOOMING OF THE LILY, 349

XXIV.—THE BLOWING OF THE ROSE, 358

XXV.—WITHERLEE, 376

XXVI.—A MAN OF RUINED BLOOD, 402

XXVII.—REVELATIONS, 412

XXVIII.—THE SABBATH MORNING, 421

XXIX.—HELL ON HEAVEN IMPINGING, 428

XXX.—THE HEARTS OF CHEVALIERS, 443

XXXI.—WRECK AND RUIN, 453

XXXII.—HERALD SHADOWS, 467

XXXIII.—THE OLD ACHAIAN HOUR, 485

XXXIV.—IN LIBERTY’S DEFENCE, 502

XXXV.—PALLIDA MORS, 517

XXXVI.—IO TRIUMPHE, 534

EPILOGUE, 549

NOTE, 557

HARRINGTON.

PROLOGUE.

I.

As hot a day as ever blazed on the lowlands of Louisiana, blazed once in

mid-April on the plantation of Mr. Torwood Lafitte, parish of Avoyelles,

in the Red River region. Perhaps it was because the heat was so

unseasonable that it seemed as if never, not even in midsummer, had there

been so hot a day. One might have been pardoned for imagining that heat

not of this world. Mr. William Tassle, overseer to Lafitte, was a profane

man, but he might have been considered as only a profane poet aiming at

the vivid expression of a mystical dark truth, when, speaking of the day,

he said it was as hot as Hell.

It was the Sabbath, but an active fancy, brooding over the general

condition of man and nature on Mr. Lafitte’s plantation, might have

thought it rather the Devil’s Sabbath than the Sabbath of the Lord.

Through the vaporous atmosphere, simmering with the heat, swarming with

insect life, and reeking with the dense, sickly sweetness of tropic

plants and flowers, the fierce sun poured a flood of stagnant, yellow

light, which lay in a broad and brassy glare over the low landscape.

Veiled by the cruel radiance, rose afar in the west and north the Pine

Woods of Avoyelles, and in the southern distance the solemn masses of

gloom formed by the cotton-woods, live-oaks and cypresses of the Great

Pacondrie Swamp. The eye wandering backward from the depths of the

morass, saw the smouldering fire of the atmosphere envelop the enormous

trees, draped everywhere with long streamers of black moss, and kindle

the broad palmetto bottoms, and the multi-colored luxuriance of tropical

vegetation, which sprang into ranker life beneath the vivid and sullen

ray. The sluggish tide of the bayou basked with snaky gleams in the

quivering lustre; the red marl of the plantation where mules and negroes

were toiling painfully under the oaths and blows of the drivers and

overseer, darkly glowed in it; the bright, rank green of the lawn before

the mansion was aflare with it; and the mansion itself, with its rose and

jasmin vines drooping around the posts of the veranda, looked scorched to

a deeper brown in the hot, thick, yellow, intolerable glare.

Shadows that day were the demons of the landscape. Shadows of intense and

peculiar blackness, so compact that they seemed to have a substantial

being of their own, lurked in the yellow light around and beneath every

object. A dark fancy might have dreamed them a host of devils, disguised

as shadows, and mustered to prevent the escape of a soul from Hell.

Black with a strange blackness, shaped to an ugly goblin resemblance of

the thing they accompanied, they were scattered like a host of demon

sentries all over the scene, and had watch and ward of everything. The

gaunt, stilted bittern standing motionless near the water, had his black

goblin duplicate beneath him on the glistering clay. The mud-hued,

warty-hided, abominable alligator, as he raised himself on his short

legs, had his black, misshapen, shadow-caricature to lumber up with him

on the trodden mire, and it went with him as he took his lumpish plunge

into the foul bayou. Every plant or shrub had its scraggy imp of shadow

sprawling beneath it, and darting and dodging as if to catch it whenever

it moved. Every tree—cypress, live-oak, sycamore, cotton-wood, or gum,

all solemnly draped with black moss—had its scrawny phantom to toss and

flicker fantastically with the tangled motion of a hundred darting arms,

if the branches or their streamers swayed in the furnace-breath of the

light wind. Every fallen trunk, or log, or stump, or standing post had

its immovable, black sentinel shape of shadow projected beyond it, or

crouching by its side. Along the running fences on the plantation ran

black, spectral bars on the red marl. In the fields, among the new-sprung

corn, sown with the pain and sweat of slaves, a demon-crop of shadow

mocked with its ugly color and fantastic shape the green beauty of the

pennoned grain. The reeking mules, panting and straining, with drooping

heads, as they dragged the groaning ploughs through the soil of the

cotton fields, or pulled the clanking harrows over the furrowed rows,

had their monstrous jags of sooty shadow, like the malformed beasts of a

devil’s dream, jerking along with shapeless instruments beside them. The

black drudges, men and women, plodding and tottering in the sweltering

heat, behind the ploughs, beside the harrows, or dropping seed into

the drills, had hunched and ugly goblin dwarfs of shadow, vigilantly

dogging their footsteps, and bobbing and dodging with their more active

movements. The burly overseer on horseback had his horsed demon of lubber

shadow, which aped his every gesture and movement, ambling fantastically

with him hither and thither among the rows, and grotesquely motioning

into squirms of phantom glee the shadows of the writhing slaves on whom

his frequent whip-lash fell. Up around the planter’s mansion, shadows

as fantastical, as black and demoniacal as these, wavered or lay in the

fierce, yellow glow. And among them all there was none uglier or more

seemingly sentient than one within the room opening on the veranda—a

black, hellion shape which floated softly as in a pool of oil, on an

oblong square of sluggish sunshine shimmering on the floor, just behind

the chair of Mr. Lafitte.

Angry words had been uttered in that room within the last few

minutes—angry at least on the part of Madame Lafitte, who sat away from

the sunlight, opposite her husband, with a table laid with fruit and wine

between them. She was of the superbest type of southern beauty—and there

is no beauty more exquisite; but now her lovely olive face was dusky

white with fury and agony—its pallor heightened by contrast with her

intense black hair, which she wore in heavy tresses drooping almost to

the broad gold ornaments in her ears. Silent at present, she sat with her

white arms tightly clasped below her bosom, which convulsively rose and

fell beneath its muslin folds, and with dilated nostrils, and pale lips

curved with hate and grief, kept her dark eyes, lustrous with passion,

fixed on the evil visage of her husband.

“You are well named,” she broke forth again, her voice, a rich contralto,

trembling with vehemence; “but you are worse than your pirate namesake.

Worse than the worst of that Baratarian crew. Lafitte! Lafitte, indeed!

You are worse than he. Worse than Murrell. Worse than anybody. Devil that

you are!”

She paused again, speechless with fury. The tornado which many thought

the brassy flare upon the landscape portended, had its proper fulfillment

in the raging whirl of passions within her. Mr. Lafitte sat at ease,

slowly tilting his chair to and fro, the jewelled fingers of his brown

left hand clasped around the stem of a crystal goblet on the table, his

right hand carelessly thrust into a side pocket of his white coat, and

regarded her with a sardonic smile on his dark visage, while slipping to

and fro in the sluggish pool of light upon the floor, his shadow, like a

black familiar, moved with an oily motion behind him.

“Anything more, my angel?” he asked in a soft, smooth, courteous voice,

habitual with him: “any more epithets? Pray continue. Go on, light of my

life, go on. Indulge your own Lafitte—your pirate lover. He loves to hear

you.”

Maddened by his calm mockery, she did not reply, but kept her blazing

eyes fixed upon his face. A weaker man than Mr. Lafitte might have

shrunk from that gaze. But its burning fire was wasted on his eyes as

flame upon asbestos. Strange eyes had Mr. Lafitte—true tokens of the

nature which else his other features might have betrayed less surely.

His form was muscular and manly, and his face, though dark and sinister,

might have been justly called handsome, if only for the richness of its

brunette complexion. Dark, wavy auburn hair, which he wore long, and a

thick moustache of the same color, drooping over the mouth, conferred a

certain lordly grace upon the countenance. The nose, not finely cut, was

bold, aquiline, and deeply curved in the nostrils, and the line of the

jaw and chin was vigorous and masterful. In the full visage, suffused

with the dense and sultry glow of a highly vascular organization, tropic

passions basked in strong repose. But the motor passion of all was

evident in the eyes. Large eyes which at a yard’s distance might have

seemed grey, but nearer were tawny and flecked with minute blood-specks.

Steadfast, watchful, glossy, unwinking eyes—without depth, without

sympathy—obdurate, rapacious and cruel—they confirmed the expression

of the receding brow above them, which, broad and full, with a marked

depression down its centre, was thus divided into two lobes, and bore

resemblance to the forehead of the tiger. A physiognomist, looking at

that face, would have declared Mr. Lafitte a man organized for ferocity

as the beast he resembled is organized. A believer in the doctrine of

transmigration might have held that the spirit of a tiger dwelt in his

frame, and looked out of those tawny, blood-specked orbs.

It looked out of them now as with a feline playfulness he spoke his

smooth taunts, meanwhile swaying slowly to and fro in his chair, as

though balancing for a spring.

“Go on, my beautiful one,” he continued. “Favor me with more of those

choice similitudes. Choice? And yet—as a matter of taste, my angel,

purely as a matter of taste—that phrase—pirate, though bold and graphic,

I admit, might be artistically improved. Corsair, now. What do you think

of corsair? Is not corsair better, more poetical, more Byronesque? Yes,”

he went on reflectively, as though the proposed change were a matter

of vital seriousness, “yes, corsair is a finer word. Soul of my soul,

let it be corsair. Suffer Lafitte to be your Conrad; you shall be his

Zuleika. Have I ‘one virtue,’ my Zuleika? You will readily concede me the

‘thousand crimes,’ I know, but have I the ‘one virtue?’”

“Why,” she wailed passionately, taking no heed of his badinage; “why am

I treated thus! Why am I kept here on this hateful plantation, in this

remote parish, without life, without society, without pleasure of any

kind. Nothing but this routine of dull farm life. No faces but your

servants’ and your overseer’s around me. No company but these planters,

these planters’ wives, these planters’ daughters, these people that ride

over here sometimes, that I fatigue myself with visiting, that I care

nothing about, anyway. Bad enough to come here once a year for the hot

months—but three years, winter and summer, have I spent here. Three,

Lafitte. Not once have I been in New Orleans for three years. Not once

near the house where seven years of marriage with you were endurable

with friends, with society, with life, with pleasures, with things I

cared for, and which diverted me. Cut off from them all. You go when you

please. Weeks, months, you are away, and leave me here sick, mad, frantic

with ennui. Here, up the river, alone, what have I here to enjoy?”

“Here, my Josephine,” he replied, in an unruffled voice; “here, do you

ask? What have you here? Here you have books, novels, without end, music

in reams, your guitar, your piano, this elegant simplicity, this charming

country prospect, your own sweet thoughts, the pleasures of imagination,

the pleasures of memory, the pleasures—yes, even the pleasures of hope.

And then, too,” sinking his voice to a softer tone, while his smile

became a shade more sardonic and his eyes more cruel, “then, too, you

have me.”

“You,” she raved, her pallid face convulsed with the refluent fury, and

her eyes flashing. “You! Yes, I have you. Whom I hate, whom I loathe,

whom I abhor! Yes, I have you; you who torture me.”

“I who torture you?” interrupted Mr. Lafitte blandly. “And yet, my angel,

they say we are a model couple. They are never tired of talking of my

unvarying gallant courtesy to you. You, yourself, could not name this

moment in a court of law one word or action that would seem incompatible

with the tenderest affection for you.”

“I know it,” she moaned. “Yes, that is the misery of it. I am insulted,

I am profaned, I am outraged, I am tortured till I could go mad, or kill

myself; and it is all done—my God! I know not how. Done with smoothness

and calmness and courtesy; done with civility; done with sweet stabbing

words. Others could only see the sweetness; none but I can feel the

stabs. But they kill me daily, and you know it. Subtle and sweet is your

cruelty to me—cruel, cruel devil that you are! Cruel to me, cruel to your

slaves, cruel to everyone.”

“Cruel to my slaves, eh,” said Mr. Lafitte, tranquilly, his voice still

equable, his face still wearing its sardonic smile: “Cruel to you and

cruel to my slaves. Antony, for example.”

“Yes, Antony,” she replied, speaking in a calmer voice, as of one whose

sufferings, whatever they might be, were remote from her, or as nothing

to her own, “Antony is one. I saw the wretch just now, as I went down to

the cabins. There you have him bucked in this scorching heat, his head

bleeding where you and Tassle beat him with your whipstocks, and the

flies tormenting him. Is there another planter in the parish that would

treat that boy so? No wonder he ran away, like his brother before him. He

might as well be in Hell as on this plantation. They might all as well be

in Hell—as they are. Sweltering in the cotton-field, on a Sunday, too,

there they are, fifty miserable wretches—hark, now! Tassle is laying it

on to some of them. That is the howl of some of the wenches. Listen to

that!”

Softened by the distance, but heard distinctly in the sultry stillness,

came up from the cotton-fields a confusion of dismal screeches. Madame

Lafitte sullenly listened, till they wailed away, the planter meanwhile

calmly drinking his goblet of iced claret, and then filling the glass

again from a slender bottle standing in a cooler on the table.

“These are the sounds I have to listen to, day after day, and year after

year,” hoarsely murmured Madame Lafitte, her bosom heaving convulsively

above her clasped arms, and her eyes burning with dark fire in the pale

gloom of her face. “Every hour in the day they come from the field. All

through the evening from the gin-house. Day and night, night and day, the

yelling of those unhappy creatures is dinned into my ears. That is my

music.”

Mr. Lafitte, who had resumed his former attitude, and was still tilting

his chair, paused, with his eyes fixed upon his wife, and shook with

long, silent, devilish merriment, his black familiar wobbling meanwhile

in the pool beneath him. Then, in his softest, smoothest voice, he began

to curse and swear, if what was rather a flood of profane exclamations

may be so described. All names held sacred, grotesquely conjoined

with secular names and titles, and poured forth in fluent and rapid

succession, composed the outflow of a profanity inexpressibly awful, both

from its nature and from the smooth and serene tones in which it found

utterance. Madame Lafitte listened to him aghast, for she had never heard

this from his lips before, and a dim, blind foreboding that it portended

some horrible change in his attitude toward her, filled her soul. Ending

it presently in another spasm of chuckling merriment, as if what seemed a

mere depraved desire for blasphemy was satisfied, Mr. Lafitte took up the

conversation.

“It is positively delightful, Josephine,” he remarked, “to hear you

lamenting the trouncing of the dear negroes. But, not to dwell upon this

touching outbreak of philanthropy, permit me—for I feel refreshingly

wicked to-day—permit me to ask you, my angel, if you know what made me

marry you?”

She looked at him for a moment with a face of mingled wonder, scorn and

loathing.

“What made you marry me?” she repeated, “your love, I suppose—at least,

what you call love.”

“Indeed, no Josephine,” he coolly replied. “It was not love at all. What

makes a man keep a mistress? For that was it, and nothing more.”

At this atrocious declaration, Madame Lafitte, the very inmost temple of

her soul profaned and defiled, as it never had been till then, bowed her

head in an agony of shame.

“Yes, Josephine,” he continued, “that was it. You were a queen of a girl

when I first saw you. Young, innocent, gentle, enchanting, the most

beautiful woman then, as I think you are now, that I ever beheld, and

though your family was poor, you were accomplished as few of your sex

ever become. I wanted you for one of my mistresses, and I got you at the

little expense of a marriage ceremony. A strict moralist might say that,

at best, you were only my— ah, the coarse word! but in this country you

are called my wife. And, _apropos_, do you know what they call this union

of ours, contracted on my part from such a motive? They call it holy

matrimony.”

Mr. Lafitte, with a negrine _ptchih_, went off in a spasm of devilish

merriment, keeping his eyes fixed on the bowed and pallid face of the

woman opposite him.

“You were in love with young Raynal when I married you,” he continued,

“and you were bullied and badgered by your amiable family into wedlock

with me. Of that, however, I will not speak now. But suppose, Josephine,

that you wish a divorce. How are you going to get it? On what grounds?

Now _apropos_ of my mistresses: by the law of Louisiana, were you false

to me, I could get a divorce from you. By the same laws—oh, how I love

them!—you could only get that divorce from me if I kept my mistress

in your dwelling, or publicly and openly. Suppose you emigrated to

another State where they grant divorces on the ground of the husband’s

infidelity. Could you get a separation then? No. Why not? Because you

have no evidence, and I have taken good care that you can have none. Ha!

my dear, what do you think of your position?”

“My God, my God!” she moaned, “what have I done that I should be outraged

thus! How have I borne this life—how can I bear it! I tell you, Lafitte,”

she cried, raising her voice, hoarse with anger and agony, into a higher

key, and throwing out her arms with a furious gesture, “I tell you that

this life is Hell. I know now, what I wondered when I was a child—where

Hell is and what it looks like. It is here and it looks like this. This

is one of its chambers, and this one of its mansions. These walls, those

books, those pictures, this furniture, that fruit, that wine, they all

belong to it. Those are its flowers clambering around the windows—this

is its light and these are its shadows—this scorching heat is the heat

of it, that sun is the sun of it, these slaves swelter in it—I, a slave

like them, am tortured in it, and you are the fiend of it, hard, cruel,

sensual, heartless, pitiless devil that you are!”

Flinging her arms together again in a convulsive clasp on her bosom, her

frame shuddering, her breath coming and going in quick gasps through her

clenched teeth, which gleamed behind lips deadly white and tensely drawn,

she glared at him with fixed nostrils and flaming eyes, like a beautiful

maniac. Save that he had ceased his balancing, that his eyes were a shade

more tigerish, and that his form crouched slightly forward in his chair,

Mr. Lafitte was as cool and collected as ever, and his face wore the same

sardonic smile.

“Now Josephine,” he remarked in a tone more nonchalant, serene and soft

than before, if that could be, “let me close this delightful conversation

by a few brief observations on the value of opportunity. First, with

regard to the dear negroes. I am a rich, but I have my little desire to

be a _very_ rich planter. Therefore I lay plans for a large cotton crop,

on which, by the way, I have heavy bets pending. In order that I may have

the large crop, which means a great deal of money, and in order that I

may win my bets, which are considerable, I make the dear negroes work

furiously. But in order that they shall work with due ardor, and lest

that tender bond of fidelity and devotion to their master’s interests

which the good divines up north expatiate so eloquently upon—lest that

should not sufficiently inspire them, I get my excellent William Tassle

to stimulate them with a plantation whip, and I stimulate them myself

with another when I feel like it, which I often do. And they labor like

angels—dear me! how they do spring to it, to be sure! It is enchanting.

Indeed I get a great deal out of them. But in order that I may get a

great deal out of them, I must flog them up handsomely at their work, and

punish them profusely after their work if their work has not been what

the ardent soul of Lafitte could wish. Hence the cruelty, as you harshly

call it, my Josephine—hence the floggings, the paddlings, the buckings,

hence the howlings that annoy you, my angel, and which, by the way, I

really cannot help, since the black beasts will make a clamor—unless,

indeed, I could induce some of those cursedly ingenious Yankees to

invent me a patent anti-howling machine for their abominable throats.

Positively, it is an idea, and I must reflect upon it. But see now. In

doing all this, I only avail myself of my legal opportunities. Could I

do it if I had not my opportunities? Alas, no. Could I do it up North?

Alas, no. I should not have my opportunities. I should have to calculate,

and circumvent, and plot and scheme till my poor brain would be fatigued,

and then be bothered and baffled with strikes for higher wages, and ten

hour systems, and God knows what else. Now here, thanks to our good

Livingstone, who was really a fine jurist, I have a code which gives me

all the advantages and puts my black laborers completely and comfortably

under my thumb. They have no opportunities, and so they work without

wages and are well flogged into the bargain. I have my opportunities,

which I improve, and hence they work for me. Ha! it is charming! They get

their two plantation suits a year, their three and a half pounds of bacon

and their peck of meal apiece a week, which is not costly, and keeps them

in working order. They are up early and down late, and so profits accrue.

Hence the value of opportunities with regard to the dear negroes—my

little exactions of whom wound your sensibilities, my angelic Josephine.”

He paused to drink his claret slowly and refill his glass, keeping his

eyes fixed upon his wife, who sat secretly wondering what he meant by all

this devilish frankness.

“Now,” resumed the planter, “observe again the value of opportunities

in relation to yourself, _ma chère_. I marry you. Good. We live in much

elegance, to your soul’s delight, in New Orleans. Good again. But one

fine day I bring you up here, and here I keep you, where you don’t want

to stay. Why do you stay, then? Ah! the beautiful social system gives me

the opportunity to make you. Could you bring me up here? Oh, no. Could

you make me stay? Oh, no. The beautiful social system does not give you

that opportunity.”

“No,” she cried, “it gives me nothing.”

“And why?” he continued. “Is it because you are morally, mentally, or in

any way, my inferior? Oh, no. Why, then? Simply because you are a woman.

You are less than I by virtue of your sex, my angel. Ha! it is curious.

The beautiful social system makes you something like my slave, dear wife.

I bring my negroes here, and I bring you here. None of you want to come,

but you can’t help yourselves, and so come you do. But my negroes cannot

bring me here. No. Nor can you bring me here. No. Do my negroes run away?

I set Dunwoodie’s hounds after them, and run them down. Do you run away?

That dear old Mrs. Grundy sets her hounds after you, and runs you down.

Ah!”

He paused to drink a little claret, keeping his eyes fixed upon her face.

“Meanwhile,” he pursued, “I keep you in perpetual torment, as you say.

Try divorce. You have no cause in law, for I take care to give you

none. My little, delicate, subtle, intangible, polite aggravations—all

my skillful outrages and profanations of your soul and body, which

drive you mad, or kill you slowly like poison, are not recognized in

law. My courteous, maddening words and actions, which work, it is true,

the effect, and worse than the effect, of the most brutal physical

cruelty—they are all perfectly legal. It is doubtful whether they could

even be stated for the purposes of a divorce suit. They are so subtle, so

veiled in good nature, courtesy, kindness, legality, that if they were

stated, people probably would laugh at you, and think you dishonest or

deranged. At all events, though they slowly madden or murder you, they

constitute no breach of holy matrimony.”

“They do,” she cried. “I do not care what the law says; such matrimony as

I live in is not holy. It is”—

“Ah, no, dear Josephine,” he interrupted. “Decidedly you are wrong. Go

to court—swear that you hate me, loathe me, abhor me—swear that life is

insupportable with me, and plead for release, and the blessed old law

will tell you that you are living, and must live, in holy matrimony!

Go to any southern State—go to South Carolina, and state my refined

and delicate cruelty. Why, Judge Somebody or other, in the next State,

boasts that it is the unfading honor, as he calls it, of South Carolina,

that she never has granted a divorce for any cause whatever. Well, go

North—go to New York, for instance. Why, their great Panjandrum up there,

the ‘Tribune’ man—what’s his name—Greeley—he will tell you that you are

living, and must live, in holy matrimony. Bless him!” said Mr. Lafitte,

piously. “I love him. I love him well. I hate him for his Abolitionism: I

love him for his views on holy matrimony. I hate him because he tries to

weaken my power over my slaves: I love him because he tries to strengthen

my power over you, my angel. So do the rest of them. Go to any State you

like, and they will all tell you that you are living, and must live, in

holy matrimony. Every one, except that naughty, naughty Indiana. Ah, the

bad State! The wicked, wicked State, that says a discordant marriage is

hell, and saves people from it at the expense of holy matrimony! But you

couldn’t go there even with your complaint of cruelty, for you haven’t

a single witness—not one; and if you had, you wouldn’t go there, and

presently I’ll tell you why. Meanwhile, the result is, that there’s no

help for you anywhere. As for alleging any little infidelities on my

part, that is clearly absurd. Thanks to our good Edward Livingstone’s

code, you can get no testimony from the yellow girls, for slaves are not

witnesses, you know, in law; and as for getting any legal testimony on

that point, that I take care you can’t get, and your convictions are not

evidence, my angel. Then, too, observe how the beautiful social system

favors me. My little gaieties are reported, for instance, in New Orleans.

Well, society does not taboo me. Mrs. Grundy smiles blandly upon me

still. The men laugh, and say, ‘Ah, Lafitte, you gay dog!’ The women are

soft as cream, and sweet as sugar. Whereas you—suppose even a whisper

of that sort about you—even an idle rumor—ah, what a fine howl! You are

quite finished at once, my dear.”

He shrugged his shoulders, and elevated his eyebrows with a grimace of

mock pity, keeping his carnivorous eyes still fixed upon the raging

silence of her face.

“And now,” he went on, “why do I keep you here? Why do I torture you

daily? I answer—are you listening, my cherished one?—I answer that it

is my little vengeance. Harken, Josephine. You and that handsome young

Raynal were in love with each other when I first saw you. You were both

poor. Raynal has got rich since, but he was then poor as charity. I, on

the contrary, was wealthy, and your family wouldn’t let you marry Raynal,

but were anxious that you should marry me, for they wanted to make a rich

match for you. You liked me well enough then, for you only knew the best

side of me, which the ladies say is charming; but you did not love me.

I pressed my suit, however, and your family worried and drove you—poor

young girl of fifteen, that you were—till, unable—for I will be strictly

fair to you, Josephine—unable to resist longer, you yielded, and I got

you.”

“Yes, you got me with a lie,” she passionately cried. “Never would I have

yielded, had you and they not lied me into believing Raynal had abandoned

me and engaged himself to another.”

“Oh,” returned Mr. Lafitte, with a leer, “you have found that out, have

you? No matter. I got you, and you discovered your mistake in yielding as

time passed on. Then, the year before I brought you here, when you were

in much suffering—for I will be just to you, Josephine—you and Raynal had

a little correspondence. Ha! you thought I did not know it! But I found

it out. Your treacherous young Creole wench sold me your secret, and I

took copies of every letter you wrote before I let her carry them to

Raynal. I took copies also of his before they went to you. They are all

eloquent, and I love to read them. And they put you both in my power, my

lady!”

He saw that the blow struck home. She sat mute and still as marble, but

all expression had gone from her face; the fire had faded from her eyes;

her arms, still clasped on her bosom, were relaxed; and her bosom had

ceased to heave. The planter watched her with an infernal smile on his

dark visage.

“With those letters in my possession,” he continued, “you could not

seek release even in Indiana. For writing them, you have to be tortured

most exquisitely till you die, as before you wrote them, you had to be

tortured for having loved Raynal. And yet, Josephine, I believe you and

Raynal to be people of honor, and, though you loved, to have written

those letters with innocent hearts. You were in loveless suffering, and

you wanted the consolation a friend could give, and which Raynal gave.

See how justly I state it! I will go further—I will admit that the

letters are such as two friends might have written to each other. There

is really nothing wrong in them. But they are full of passages which are

too equivocal to be read in a court of law. There innocent words are made

to seem guilty. And those letters, without much twisting, would convict

you of conjugal infidelity, my beloved Josephine.”

He looked at her with fiendish enjoyment, but she sat still, and her face

did not change.

“Ah yes, _ma chère_!” he observed after a long pause, slowly beginning

his rocking again, and thus setting in motion the lurking shadow beneath

him—“you and that dear handsome young Raynal are certainly compromised.

Still there is one consolation for you, Josephine. Really a great

consolation. Namely, that you are reputably married. You have the

honorable position of a legal wife, my dear. Is it not consoling?”

He sat for a full minute sardonically smiling at her. She did not turn

away, nor did her face lose its blank immobility.

“That is your consolation, sweet wife,” he continued. “It is the— Hallo,

there! Tassle, is that you? Come in.”

He had the ear of a cat to have heard the steps of the overseer coming

up the grassy lawn. It was a full half minute before the heavy sluff of

boots was audible to an ordinary ear. Then came their lazy thud on the

veranda, and the overseer lounged in. A short, stocky, burly man, with

heavy, sallow, stolid features. He had a broad, straw hat set back on his

head, was dressed in coarse, light clothes, and was revolving tobacco in

his open mouth.

“Ha!” said Mr. Lafitte, “it is he. Good William Tassle. Faithful William

Tassle. Excellent William Tassle.”

The overseer, with his dull eye fixed on the planter, stopped chewing,

and closing his mouth, slowly smiled.

“It is hot, my Tassle,” blandly observed Mr. Lafitte.

“Hot as—beg pardon, madame”—said Mr. Tassle, checking himself in a torrid

comparison, with a rude gesture of deference to the planter’s wife, who

took no notice of his presence. “It singes a man’s nostrils to breathe

it, Mr. Lafitte.”

“Yes?” replied the planter, as if the fact were of great interest. “Then

how it must singe that Antony’s nostrils, William. That poor Antony. We

must have him up here. I must admonish him. Fetch him along, Tassle. And

Tassle”—the overseer, who was going, paused—“just bring that iron collar

that hangs in the gin-house. You know.”

II.

The overseer nodded, and chewing stolidly, lounged out into the yard,

where stood the kitchen, smoke-house, and other outbuildings, and going

on through the orchard, emerged upon a blinding space where a row of

white-washed cabins, with the gin-house hard by, glared in the hot light.

A few negro children, half naked, with a lean and sickly old hound, were

grouped in the shade of the gin-house. Near them, in the full blaze of

the sunlight, a negro man, in coarse plantation clothes of a dirty white,

sat on the ground in a squatting posture, feebly shaking his bare head,

to keep off the swarm of insects that tormented him. This was Antony.

He was bound in a peculiar manner—bucked, as the plantation slang has

it. The ankles were firmly lashed together—the knees drawn up to the

chest—the wrists also firmly pinioned and passed over the knees, and

between the elbow-joints and the knee-pits, a short stick was inserted,

thus holding movelessly in a bundle of agonizing cramp the limbs of the

victim. This infernal torture—practised by the tyrants of our marine

on their sailors—that class whose helplessness and wrongs most nearly

resemble those of slaves—practised also on wretched criminals by the

tyrants of our jails—Antony had endured from midnight till now, about two

o’clock in the afternoon.

Nine years Lafitte’s chattel, he had been badly used from time to time,

and, of late, dreadfully. He had learned to read and write a little

before he had come to the plantation, and a week before the present

time he had picked up a scrap of newspaper on which was a fragment of

one of those declamations about liberty, which southern politicians

are fools enough to be making on all opportunities, amidst a land of

slaves. The fragment had some swagger about the northern oppression of

the South, which Antony did not understand any more than anybody else;

but it rounded up with Patrick Henry’s famous “Give me Liberty or give

me Death!” which he understood very well; for from that moment Liberty

or Death was a phrase which spoke like a voice in his mind, urging him

to escape from his bondage. The next thing was to write a pass, make a

package addressed to the house of Lafitte Brothers, New Orleans, and with

this evidence of his assumed mission endeavor to reach that city, where

he meant to smuggle himself into the hold of some vessel northward bound.

Clad in an old suit of Mr. Tassle’s, which he had taken from the

gin-house, and boldly riding away the night before, on a mare borrowed

from Mr. Lafitte’s stables, he had been suddenly met on a turn of the

road—unaccountably met at midnight—by his master and the overseer, who

seized him and found his forged credentials upon him. At once, he had

been violently beaten over the head with their whip-stocks driven back

to the plantation, reclothed in his plantation suit, securely bound, and

left with horrid threats of torment on the morrow. The morrow had come,

and here he was in utter misery, half crazy, and more than half fancying

that he was in Hell.

Mr. William Tassle, his tobacco revolving slowly in his open mouth, stood

and stolidly surveyed him. A pitiable object, truly! His face was bruised

and swollen, and from wounds in his brow and cheek, made by the blows of

the whip-handles, a dull ooze of blood, thinned by his sweat, had spread

its stain over the whole countenance. Around the wounds buzzed and clung

greedy clusters of black flies, hardly driven off by the feeble motions

of his head, and returning every instant. His dark face, ashen grey and

flaccid under the crimson stain, and faint with suffering, wore a look of

dumb endurance; his eyelids drooped heavily over his downcast eyes; and

his breath came in short gasps through the bloody froth that had gathered

on his loose mouth. His wrists were cut with the tight cords that bound

them, and his hands were discolored and swollen, as were his ankles. Even

the overseer felt a sort of rude pity for him.

“Well, Ant’ny,” said Mr. Tassle, slowly, pausing and turning his head

aside to eject a vigorous squirt of tobacco juice, which lit upon a small

chip and deluged a fly thereon, throwing the insect into quivering spasms

of torture; “you’re in for it, you poor, mis’ble devil. Yer master’s

goin’ to admonish ye, so he says. Know what that means, don’t ye? It’s

all up with _you_, Ant’ny.”

The dumb, bruised face, with its blood-shot eyes, feebly turned up to his

for a moment, then drooped away.

“Come, now,” said Mr. Tassle, cutting the negro’s bonds with two strokes

of a jack-knife, “up with ye.”

Antony, suddenly released from his cramped posture, fell over; then made

a feeble effort to crawl up on his hands and knees, tottered, sank down,

and lay panting. Mr. Tassle started with alacrity for the gin-house,

the black piccaninnies scampering and tumbling over each other in their

scramble to get away, and the old hound sneaking after them. Presently he

came back with a bucket of water and a gourd. Antony raised himself and

drank from the gourd; then sat up, panting, but relieved.

“Strip,” said Mr. Tassle.

Antony tried, and was helped roughly by the overseer, who then dashed the

bucket of water over his naked body. It revived him, for he presently

began to wipe himself feebly with his trowsers. In the midst of this

operation, Mr. Tassle seized him, rolled him over from the wet ground to

a dry spot, and began to rub his arms and knees vigorously with his horny

hand, chewing and expectorating rapidly as he did so. Soon the arrested

circulation began to be restored, and Antony, getting his clothes on, was

able to walk up and down in a brisk, tottering walk, the calves of his

legs loosely shaking, and his legs trembling with exhaustion.

“That’ll do,” said Mr. Tassle, at length; “you’ll be ready for your

floggin’ right soon. Here, you dam cuss of a nigger, drink a swallow of

this. That’ll set you up.”

Antony took the proffered whisky-flask—Mr. Tassle’s pocket companion—and

gulped the liquor. It went to his poor, famished heart like fire, and

shot some vigor through his numbed veins.

“Damned if I aint a philanthroper,” growled Mr. Tassle. “Lettin’ a

hell-bent cuss of a sooty nigger drink my whisky. No matter. Have it out

o’ yer hide, Ant’ny, afore supper time. Now pick up yer feet for the

house. Yer master has to settle with yer.”

Antony went on to the house, Mr. Tassle following, and contemplatively

regarding, as he spat and chewed, the shaking calves of the negro’s legs,

which he had a chance to do, as the old trowsers, too short in the first

instance, were now split up the backs, nearly to the knees, and feebly

flapped as the slave tottered on. Antony himself, giddy with his long

exposure in the sun, and with the glow of the liquor he had drank, felt

his poor mind wander a little, and was conscious of nothing so much as

of the queer tattered shadow that bobbed around him, and which he half

fancied would trip him up if he were to try to run away now.

An indefinite sense, which fell upon him as he entered the house, and

slowly walked through the passage, that this guarding shadow had fallen

behind and left him, was succeeded by a sense as vague, that the shadow

he now saw lurking in the sunlight on the floor beneath his master’s

chair, was the same, and that it had gone on before when he came into

the passage, and would leap from that place and chase him were he to

flee. Dimly conscious of this fancy, he kept his hot eyes fixed upon the

shadow—conscious also of a dreadful sullen hatred rising in his heart,

and prompting him to spring upon his tyrant and strangle him, though he

died for it afterward. Beyond this, he was vaguely aware that Tassle had

put something that clanked on the table, and had gone; and that the

madame, as he would have called her, was present, sitting very still, and

apparently indifferent to him or anything that might happen to him.

Suddenly he heard the smooth and quiet voice of his master, seeming

nearer to him than it should have seemed.

“Well, Antony, so it appears that I have a learned nigger on my

plantation. Cousin to the learned pig, I suppose. Did you ever hear of

the learned pig, Antony?”

“Never did, Marster.”

“Indeed. Then you never heard what happened to him?”

“Never did hear, Marster.”

“Ah! Indeed! Well, he ran away, and was caught, and flogged, and bucked,

to begin with. Just like you, Antony. After which he was treated so that

he wished he was dead, Antony. Just as you are going to be, my learned

nigger. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Marster.”

In this colloquy, Mr. Lafitte’s voice was as smooth and tranquil as

though he were promising his servant pleasures instead of pains. Antony

had answered mechanically, in a voice as quiet and subdued as his

tyrant’s, with the slightest possible quaver in his husky tones.

“So you can read and write, Antony,” said the planter, after a pause.

“A little bit, Marster.”

“A little bit, eh? Yes. Come, now, let’s have a specimen. Here’s the

‘Picayune,’ with something that suits your case.” Mr. Lafitte took the

paper from the table as he spoke. “A little bit of abolition pleasantry

that your British friends fling at the South, and this booby editor

circulates. Here, read it out.”

Antony saw his master’s hand extending the paper to him, with the thumb

indicating a paragraph. Moving nearer, he mechanically took the paper.

The print swam dizzily before his eyes, as, with a halting voice, he

slowly read aloud what was, in fact, one of the most pungent anti-slavery

sarcasms of the day:

“‘From the—London—Morning Advertiser. One million dollars—reward.

Ran away—from—the—subscriber—on the 18th August—a likely—Magyar

fellow (Antony boggled terribly over ‘Magyar’ which he thought must

mean mulatto), named—Louis—Kossuth. He is—about—45—years old—5 feet—6

inches—high. Dark—complexion, marked—eyebrows, and—grey eyes.’”

“Not a bad description of you, Antony,” interpolated Mr. Lafitte. “Quite

like you, in fact. Go ahead.”

Antony stammered on, losing the place, and beginning lower down.

“‘Captains and—masters—of

vessels—are—particularly—cautioned—against—harboring—or—concealing—the

said—fugitive—on board—their ships—as the—full—penalty—of the

law—will—be—rigorously—enforced.’”

“You see, Antony,” again interrupted the planter. “You reckoned, I

suppose, on getting off in a ship, when your nice scheme got you to New

Orleans. Didn’t you, my nigger Kossuth? You’d be advertised though, and

caught, just like him. Go on.”

Unheeding this sally of Mr. Lafitte’s cheerful fancy, Antony went on,

losing the place again, and getting to the bottom of the paragraph.

“‘N.B.—If the—fellow—cannot—be taken—alive—I will pay—a—reward—of

(Antony boggled again over the ‘250,000 ducats’ named, and

called it twenty-five dollars), for his—scalp. Terms as—above.

Francis—Joseph—Emperor—of—Austria.’”

“Good,” said the planter. “Your scalp, you woolly-headed curse, wouldn’t

bring that in the market, or I’d have it off, and your hide with it. Lay

the paper down. You read atrociously.”

Antony laid the paper on the table, and without looking at his master,

fixed his blurred eyes on the floor again.

“You see,” continued the planter, “how runaways get served. You have

been told both by Tassle and myself that even if you got North you’d be

sent back. We’ve got a Fugitive Slave Law now for runaway niggers, and

back they come. You go to Philadelphia. That good Ingraham—that good

Judge Kane—that dear Judge Cadwallader—they send you back. You go to New

York. Lord! There everybody sends you back! You go to Boston. That dear

Ben Hallett grabs you. That good Sprague—that good Curtis—all these good

people grab you, as they grabbed that nigger Sims, and back you come. Yet

you try it, you foolish Antony. Your cursed brother got off from me nine

years ago, and so you think you’ll try it too. Fine fellows both of you.

He leaves Cayenne pepper in his tracks, which plays the devil with the

hounds, and off he gets. But you’ve had to smart for him. All you’ve got

since has been on his account. Now you’ll get something on your own. I’ll

teach you to steal my horse and make off for the river with your forged

pass and package. Do you see this?”

Lifting his dizzy eyes to the level of his master’s hand, Antony saw that

it held a heavy iron collar with a prong, on which he read in stamped

letters, LAFITTE BROTHERS, NEW ORLEANS.

“My brother had a nigger that wore this collar once,” said the smooth,

cruel voice, “and now you’ll wear it. If you ever get away again, which

I’ll take care you never will, people will know who you belong to, my

fine boy. Kneel down here.”

Antony felt the sullen hatred seethe up in his heart, and his brain

reeled.

“I won’t have that collar on me, Marster,” he huskily muttered. “You may

kill me, Marster, but I won’t have that collar on me.”

“You won’t, eh?” returned Mr. Lafitte, tranquilly. “Oh, well then, if you

won’t, you won’t. By the way,” he pursued, carelessly taking the paper

from the table, and fanning himself gently, “do you know how I knew you

were going to run away? I’ll tell you. I was standing near the gin-house

last night when you came there to steal Tassle’s old clothes, and I heard

you say to yourself—‘Now for liberty or death.’ Ah, ha, Antony, you

shouldn’t talk aloud! Tassle and I saw you go to the stable and take the

mare, and then we saddled and headed you off, my nigger. That’s the way

of it. Pick up that paper.”

Raising his eyes to his tyrant’s feet, Antony saw the folded paper there

where it had been dropped. Approaching, he painfully stooped to pick it

up, when he felt himself seized, thrown down upon his knees, and the

collar, which opened in the centre on a strong hinge, was around his

neck! He struggled to free himself, but he was held, and the collar

closed. In an instant a key of peculiar wards inserted in one of the

cusps of this devilish necklace, shot a bolt into the socket of the

other, and Mr. Lafitte, taking out the key, and putting it into his

pocket, quietly spat in the face of the man whose neck he had just

fettered, and spurning him violently with his foot, hurled him backward

from his knees with a dreadful shock over on the floor.

Stunned for a moment, Antony lay motionless on his side. He knew that

his master had risen, for as he turned his head, he saw the hideous

shadow dart suddenly from the pool, and vanish, as though it had entered

the planter. On his feet the next instant, with a dark cloud of blood

bellowing in his brain, he saw with bloodshot eyes, Lafitte standing

before him, with a calm, infernal smile on his visage, and all the tiger

in his tawny orbs. The next second Madame Lafitte swept, like a superb

ghost, between him and his revenge.

“Stay, Josephine,” yelled the planter, his voice no longer issuing smooth

and soft from the throat, but tearing up from his lungs in a loud, harsh

snarl—“remain here. This entertainment is for you. You object to the

howls of my black curs. I bring one here—into this room—whose howls shall

split your ears.”

She turned, as he spoke, on the threshold of the room, and advancing

toward him, paused. For one instant she stood, imperial in her beauty,

her magnificent form drawn to its full height, her haughty brow

corrugated, her eyes burning like bale-fires, her outraged blood flooding

her countenance with one vivid crimson glow. The next instant she strode

forward, and smote him a sounding buffet on the face. Then, without a

word, and with the step of an empress, she swept from the room.

Lafitte turned purple and livid in spots, and tottering back, fell into

his chair. Struck! By her! Before his slave! Glaring up, he met the

blood-shot eyes of Antony.

“Dog!” he yelled; “you are there, are you! Wash my spittle from your face

with this!”

For a second, Antony stood holding his breath, with the wine the

planter had dashed into his face, dripping from him, and steaming in

his nostrils. For a second afterward, he stood unwincing, the fragments

of the shattered goblet which followed, stinging his flesh. The next,

his whole being rose in a wild, red burst of lightning, and the throat

of Lafitte was in his right hand, his left crushing back the hand which

had struck at him with a bowie-knife as he sprung. With his right knee

set solid on the abdomen of the planter, pinning the writhing form to

the chair, he saw the devilish face beneath him redden in his gripe, and

deepen into horrible purple, and blacken into the visage of a fiend, with

bloody, starting eyeballs, and protruding tongue. Still keeping that iron

clutch of an aroused manhood on his tyrant’s throat, he heard the mad,

hoarse gurgle of his agony, and felt the struggling limbs relax and lose

their vigor beneath him. And then yielding to an impulse of compassion

his master never knew, and which rose louder than the bellowing voices of

his revenge, he unclasped his hold, and saw the body slide flaccid and

gasping to the floor.

Away, Antony! The bitter term of your bondage is over, and there is

nothing now but Liberty or Death for you! Death? Ay, Death in the land of

Liberty for the man who repays long years of outrage with one brave grip

on the throttle of his oppressor! Death, when the savage planters muster

to avenge their fellow, and drag you down to yon bayou, to shriek and

scorch your life away among the sappy fagots of the slow fire! Death like

this, or else by gnawing famine, or the beasts and reptiles of the swamp

whose beckoning horrors soon must close around you! Liberty or Death—and

Liberty a desperate chance, a thousand miles away.

He stood for an instant, panting, with a wild exultation pouring like

fire through his veins. Then snatching the heavy bowie-knife from the

floor, he sprang from the room, and leaped on the veranda just as the

overseer, who had come up again from the fields, had set one foot on the

steps to ascend. Flying against him full shock, he threw him backward

clear and clean off his feet, and saw his head bounce with a terrific

concussion on the grass as he sped on over the stunned body. He did not

pause, nor look behind, but flew with the rush of a race-horse for the

swamp. The light wind had risen, and the grain in the fields and the

scattered trees on either side, and in the skirting woods beyond, and

all the lurking shadows, waved, and tossed, and lifted under the sultry

vault, as he sped his desperate course, while the hot landscape rushed

to meet him, and ran whirling by, closing around and behind him, and

seeming to follow as he flew. Across the lawn, its grass and wildflowers

sliding dizzily beneath him—up with a flying leap across the fence, which

vanished below him—and down with a light shock on the red plantation

marl which rose to meet him, and reeled from under him as he bounded on.

Away, with frantic speed, over rows of cotton-plants, bruised beneath his

feet, and gliding from under him—away, with a wilder leap, as the loud

shouts of the slaves in full chorus struck his ear, and he saw them all,

men and women, with open mouths and upthrown arms, stand with the mules

and ploughs in the field on one side, and vanish from his flying glimpse

as he fled by. Away, with every nerve and sinew desperately strung—with

his pained heart knocking against his side—with his held breath bursting

from him in short gasps—with the sweat reeking and pouring down his body,

and dropping in big drops from his face, to be caught upon his clothes

in his speed—with the bright knife, as his last refuge, clutched in his

grasp—with the one thought of Liberty or Death burning in the whirl of

his brain. Past the plantation now, his feet thudding heavily on a hard,

black soil—on, with the swarming hum of innumerable insects, murmurously

swirling by—on, with the light and rapid current of the hot south wind

cool on the pain and fervor of his face, and swiftly purring in his

ears—on, over rushing grass and flowers, and stunted shrubs and butts

of trees—up again with a furious leap over a fence that sinks, and down

again with a heavy thump on ground that rises—on and away at headlong

speed over a field of monstrous stumps, scattering the light chips as

he flies—in now with a bound among the bright-green leaves of a thick

palmetto bottom, and on with a rush through the swish, swish, swish of

their loud and angry rustle, as he crashes forward to the still gleam of

the bayou. Now his feet swash heavily on a grassy turf that yields like

sponge, and water fills his shoes at every bound. Now the water deepens,

and he sinks above his ankles or midway to his knees, as he splashes

forward with headlong velocity, half-conscious and wholly careless in his

desperate exultation that black venomous water-snakes writhe up behind

him as he plunges through their pools. Now he bounds over a bank of black

mire, and swerves in his course as something like a dirty log changes

to an alligator, and lumbers swiftly toward him with yawning jaws. And

now splashing through the green slime of the margin, he bursts with a

plunge into the glistening waters of the bayou, and swims with vigorous

strokes, while the gaunt bittern on the bank beyond scrambles away with

squawking screams. Swimming till the water shoals, he flounders on again

through slime to mire, and over another bog of pools and water-plants and

spongy sod, till gaining the outskirts of the dense forest, and reaching

a patch of damp, black earth under an enormous cypress-tree, he slackens

his pace, stops suddenly, and throwing up his arms upon the trunk, drops

his head upon them, panting and blowing—and the first mile-heat of the

dreadful race for Liberty or Death is run!

III.

For a few minutes, exhausted with the terrible speed he had maintained,

Antony leaned upon his arms with closed eyes, his breath suffocating

him, his heart painfully throbbing, his limbs aching and trembling,

and the water dripping from his clothes and trickling away on the

black soil in small streams. The trees whispered over him as he panted

beneath them, and their mysterious murmurs were the only sounds, save

his own stertorous breathings, that were heard in the dead stillness.

Recovering his breath in a few minutes, he lifted his head and turned

around, letting his pained arms fall heavily by his side. He was no

longer oppressed with heat, for the plunge in the bayou had cooled him;

but his whole body ached not only with the exertions of the last few

minutes, but from the previous torture of the bucking, and already his

strength, heavily taxed by his long abstinence from food (for it was now

more than fifteen hours since he had eaten), and only sustained by the

intense excitement he had undergone, began to flag. His brain reeled and

whirled still, and his apprehension was confused and dull. Gradually he

began to be more sensible of the sore and swollen condition of his wrists

and ankles, of the smart of the wounds in his forehead, and the stinging

of the fragments of glass in his face. There was one sore spot in his

chest just beneath his shoulder, which for a few moments he was at a loss

to account for, till he suddenly remembered that his tyrant’s foot had

struck him there when he had kicked him over upon the floor. At the same

instant he felt the chafe of the iron collar on his neck, and raising his

hand suddenly, it struck against the blunt point of the prong. Gnashing

his teeth with rage as the scene in that room rose in his mind, he seized

the collar with both hands, and with a fierce imprecation, strove to rend

it asunder. But the lock remained firm, and convulsed with a bitter sense

of humiliation, as he thought of that accursed badge of his servitude

inexorably riveted to his neck, the miserable man burst into tears.

It was but a brief spasm, and summoning up new courage to his failing

heart as he remembered that his dreadful journey lay still before him,

he cast his eyes around into the swamp. Softened by the foliage of the

wilderness of gigantic trees, and duskily lighting the long streamers of

melancholy moss which greyed their green, the sultry sunlight, slanting

athwart the enormous trunks, and tinting with sullen brilliance the

scarlet, blue and yellow blossoms of parasitical plants which sprinkled

the boles and branches in thick-millioned profusion, glistered on the

muddy shallows of the morass, whose dismal level, broken here and there

by masses of shadow, and huge bulks of fallen timber, stretched far away,

like some abominable tarn of slush and suds, into vistas of horrid gloom.

Here and there, stranded on shoals of mire, or basking on pieces of

floodwood, alligators, great and small, sunned their barky hides; while

from every shallow pool, or wriggling around drifting logs or trunks of

fallen trees, the venomous moccasin-snakes, whose bite is certain death,

lifted their black devilish heads by scores, and made the loathsome marsh

more loathsome with their presence. Over the frightful quagmire brooded

an oppressive stillness, broken only by the mournful and evil whispering

of the trees, or by the faint wriggling plash of the water-serpents.

Thick, sickly odors of plants and flowers, blent with the stench of the

morass, burdened the stagnant air, through whose languid warmth chill

breaths crept from the dank and dense arcades of the forest. Vast,

malignant, desolate and monstrous, loomed in the eyes of the wretched

fugitive, the awful road to Liberty or Death.

His soul shrank from treading it. The fire had faded from his heart,

and in that moment death by his own hand, for he would not be captured,

seemed preferable to the terrors of the fen. Faint, weak, famished, weary

unto agony, his whole body one breathing ache, his spirit all unnerved

with the sense of his past and present misery, and nothing but despair

before him, how could he hope to go on and live. Yet he could not remain

here. Soon the hounds would be on his track—they would cross the bayou

he had swam, and strike his trail. He must plunge still further into the

swamp to distance them, or he must die here by the knife in his hand.

He turned and looked over the bayou far up the lowland to the plantation

a mile away. Suddenly he started, clutching the knife with a firm grasp,

his eyes flashing, his teeth and nostrils set, and his manhood once

again flooding his heart with fire. Figures near the mansion—figures on

horseback, guns, flashing in the sun, in their hands—one, two, three,

four, five, six—six mounted horsemen—and, lower down on the lawn, what

are those things running in circles? Hark! Far off a long, harsh, savage,

yelling bay. The hunt is afoot, and the hounds have struck the trail!

Away, Antony, for Liberty or Death!

Eyes flashing, teeth and nostrils set, every nerve and sinew valorously

strung, he turned with a leap, and rushed straight into the morass.

Before the headlong, desperate courage of his charge, the loathsome

tenants of the swamp gave way. Plunging from the floodwood, the

affrighted alligator trundled off, and the startled moccasins slipped and

writhed from his path at the noise of his coming. Hark, again! Nearer

than before the booming yell of the hounds. Speed, Antony! It is the

Sabbath of the Lord our God, and we hunt you down. What man shall there

be among us that shall have one slave, and if it fly into the morass on

the Sabbath day, shall he not set hounds upon it and hunt it down? Speed

on, dark chattel! The good Christians of St. Landry and Avoyelles are

spurring hard upon your trail, and in the land over which the memory of

Christ stretches like the sky, well-doing such as theirs is lawful on the

Sabbath as on every other day!

Splashing and swashing on over the slushy surface of the quagmire, now

sinking no deeper than the soles of his shoes, now plashing up to his

shins, now to his knees, now nearly to his thighs, now bounding upon logs

and fallen trunks, or rushing over masses of brushwood and briers, which

switched and stung his ankles, he could still hear, at brief intervals,

the savage yowling of the hounds. As yet there was no safety, for the

dogs could still scent his trail, here and there, on the shoals of mire

or clumps of bog over which he had passed. His hope was in reaching

deeper water, or arriving at some broad bayou which would effectually

impede their course. Goaded by his imminent peril, for he soon heard

the long yells much nearer, and knew that the cruel brutes were rapidly

gaining on him—he floundered frantically on, his heart leaping in his

throat at every howl, and the sweat gathering in cold drops on his face.

Soon, to his great joy, the foul lagoons began to deepen, the water

reaching more uniformly above his knees, and at length he came upon a

space through which he floundered for more than half an hour, sinking to

his thighs at every plunge, and knew by the confused and lessening clamor

of the dogs, that he was leaving them. He did not slacken his pace,

though the depth of the water made it still more difficult to travel,

till at last he entered a horrid grove of gloom, where the pyramidal

clumps from which shot up the straight, dark pillars of the cypresses,

were submerged in the inky flood, and sinking above his hips, he was

forced to move more slowly. Fiercely plunging on through the cold black

tarn, over a soft bottom of leaves and moss, which sank loathsomely

beneath his tread, like a subfluvial field of sponge, he heard again

the harsh yells of the dogs, and they now seemed nearer than before.

He strove, but vainly, to move on faster, and his fancy ran riot as he

thought of the hounds slopping on through the fen, and coming into sight

of him. Already, in his delirious fancy, he heard the wild and savage

yowls of that moment, and the exulting halloos of his pursuers. The

dogs would leap into the shallow ponds—they would swim faster than he

could wade—he would hear their savage panting close behind him—he would

turn and feel them flop upon him, and their sharp teeth crush into his

flesh—he would strike them with his bowie-knife—he would see the black

water redden with their blood—they would overbear him and drag him down

with yelling, and howling, and frantic splashing and struggling, while

the shouting planters would come riding through the swamp and seize him.

Lashed into frenzy by the anticipated drama, he brandished the knife,

with a hoarse cry, and staggering forward, suddenly sank to his arm-pits.

An instant of alarm, succeeded by wild joy, for the water had deepened,

and striking out, he swam. Clogged by his heavy shoes, now filled with

mud, and soaked to an added weight with water, it was hard swimming; but

his fear and fury gave him superhuman energy, and nerved with unnatural

vigor his weakened thews. He swam for a long time, with the solemn night

of the dense cypress dusking his form and shadowing the tarn. At length

the dreadful twilight of the grove began to lighten, and far beyond he

saw the sunlight illuminating the grey and green of the trees, and the

many colored parasites and flowers, and shining on the mud and water

of the marsh. Presently he struck bottom, and wading again for a long

distance, emerged at length into the sunlight, among the shallows and

mud-shoals, and rushed on as before, till at last, as the sun was near

its setting, he stood on the banks of an unknown river, which, whispering

sullenly past its margin of sedge and water-flowers, moved, with an

imperceptible motion, through the solemn and horrible wilderness of

forest.

He stood gazing across it with a haggard and mournful countenance. The

croak of frogs came faintly from its border, and mingled with the distant

quacking of crowds of mallard ducks from the opposite shore, the vague

hooting of owls in the swamp beyond, and the occasional plunge of an

alligator from the adjacent margin. Dreary and ominous sounds, which

yet hardly disturbed the stagnant stillness around him. The wind had

lulled, and no whisper came from the bearded trees, which stood like

boding shapes on every side. Hope was faint in the heart of the fugitive.

Relieved from the engrossment of the immediate peril, his spirit began to

come under the sole dominion of the brooding horrors around him, and as

he vainly pondered on the dark problem of his deliverance, Death seemed

ever gathering slowly toward him, and Liberty lessening in ever-growing

distance.

Liberty or Death. The historic phrase came to him again like a voice that

urged him forward. He paused only a little longer, to tear a strip from

his coarse shirt and tie the bowie-knife at the back of his neck to the

iron collar. Then tearing another strip, he pulled off his heavy brogans,

shook the mud out of them, and passing the strip through the eyelets, he

also secured them to the collar, one on each shoulder. So accoutred, he

braced himself anew for effort, and taking up a slender sapling from

the ground to beat the pools between him and the bayou—for he now feared

the moccasins—in a few moments he was in the water, steadily swimming

forward, with the sapling held in his teeth.

Gaining the opposite bank, he stopped on a patch of black mire, to put on

his shoes, and then went forward, beating the path before him. Dreadful

apprehensions of the beasts and reptiles which inhabited the swamp,

now crowded on his mind, while to add to his distress, the sunlight in

the forest spaces was stealing rapidly upward from the foliage of the

loftiest trees. Quickening his pace, he staggered on through the haunted

dusk of the tree-trunks, with the hooting of the swamp owls, the quacking

of innumerable ducks, the bellowing and plunging of alligators, the

screeching and screaming of strange, semi-tropic birds, the howling of

distant beasts, and the multitudinous croak of frogs, sounding on every

side around him.

He broke into a heavy run, came at length to a thinner part of the

forest, and presently emerged upon a vast open space of quagmire,

stretching two or three miles away, with scattered trees standing and

leaning in all directions in its broad expanse. Here he paused.

The sun had sunk behind the distant forest, tinging the misty sky far up

the zenith with lowering red, and suddenly, as by some fell enchantment,

the swamp had become a sullen slough of blood. Shadows of inky blackness

stretched athwart the red expanse, and the distorted trees that crossed

and intercrossed each other here and there, were giant eldritch shapes

of unimaginable things. Lank and hairy—all askew and bristling—clothed

as with fearful rags—with monstrous heads ahunch in unnatural places,

and shaggy jags of drooping beards, and dusky arms grotesquely forked

and twisted, and huge lengths of gaunt body that abruptly splayed and

sprawled in malformed feet—they loomed from the fen of murky gore against

the angry color of the sky, like some black congress of ambiguous mongrel

wizards whose spell was on the scene. All around beneath them, protruding

from the red lagoons, huge butts of logs, gnarled stumps, and black

knees of cypress, squatted and crouched like water-fiends. Through

the dusky air, laden with the damp smell of the swamp, frightful brown

bats whirled clacking to and fro in the red light like lesser demons on

the wing. From every side came hootings and croakings, screechings and

wailings, howlings and bellowings and sullen plunges, like the riotous

clamor of devils at some tremendous incantation. A sense of supernatural

horror pervaded all, and weighed upon the appalled heart of the trembling

fugitive.

He hesitated a few moments whether to cross this dreary expanse, or

strike off into the denser forest, but decided to go forward. Whipping a

pool before him which did not move, he was just setting his foot in it,

when the venomous face of a moccasin rose at him with a dark slapping

flash. He sprang back simultaneously, and saw the monster vanish, feeling

at the same time a sharp pang just above his ankle. He was bitten! All

was over!

Stooping slowly, with a wild terror shuddering through his veins, he

looked at the wounded limb. But no, there was no bite. The snake had

missed him. In his backward leap, he had struck his leg against the

upturned spike of a broken branch which lay behind him. The revulsion in

his spirit at this discovery was so great that he broke into a quaver of

hysterical laughter, which echoed dismally through the swamp, and woke

such an answering chorus of demoniacal hooting and screeching in the

adjacent boughs, that he was affrighted, and turning away from the open

space, he was about to rush into the forest on his flank, when he saw

with a leap of heart, two round glistening balls in the dark foliage of a

tree a few yards before him, and something long and dark crouching along

the bough. It was a panther! He wheeled at once with a bound, and fled

headlong into the red morass.

Recovering presently from his shock of alarm, he trudged along through

the inky water, quivering at every step lest he should feel the sting

of the moccasin, or the crunching gripe of the alligator. It was a long

journey across the open fen. The red light had faded from sky and water,

and the full moon, which had lain like a pallid shell in the heavens

when he left the forest behind him, had deepened into a lustrous orb of

silver, and glistened on the gray water, as he approached the solid sable

gloom of the thick-wooded wilderness.

An awful fancy had haunted his mind during his journey across the open

fen—quiet, but very awful. A strange man, with a single dog, had followed

him, at a considerable distance the whole way. A strange man, silent,

with a silent dog, and plodding just at that distance, without coming,

or trying to come, any nearer him. He knew that this was so, though he

did not dare to turn his head to see if it was so. He knew too just how

the man looked—a dark figure with a dark slouched hat, and the dog, also

dark, by his side, just a little behind him. Oh, God!

The fancy fell from him as he came under the black trees again.

Staggering on through thick darkness, broken only here and there by an

uncertain glimmer or a pale ray of moonlight, or the blue flicker of a

dancing and vanishing fen-light, he found the water still ankle or knee

deep, and the walking difficult and dangerous, with logs and fallen trees

and stumps and masses of bushes and briers, and with the deadly tenants

of the pools. The fen seemed alive with the latter, and all about him,

and in the branches overhead, there were such plungings and crashings,

and such a clamor of flutterings and hootings and screechings, that his

blood ran cold. He held his course, however, hoping to come upon some

dry spot in the great swamp where he could stop and consider what to do

to escape from this dreadful region. Rest he must have soon, for his

body was giving way with hunger and fatigue. He was drenched from head

to foot, and spite of the exertion of walking, he shivered with cold.

His vitals were weak and aching for want of food; his head was light

with sleeplessness; and insane fancies ran riot in his terror-goaded and

horror-laden mind. One was that his legs, which felt numb and seemed

heavier every time he lifted them, were slowly changing to iron, and that

he would soon be unable to raise them for their weight, and would be

obliged to stand there in the quagmire. Then in the glimmering darkness

the moccasins would rise from the pools and surround him in a circle.

They would gather in from all the swamp around, and pile on top of each

other, till they made a high, high writhing wall about him of devilish

serpent faces, swaying and bristling, and above them in the branches all

the panthers would gather, savagely grinning at him, and every one would

have the visage of Lafitte. Then all at once the writhing wall of snakes

would sway forward, and strike him with a million fangs, and rebound and

strike again with a regular and even motion, while his body would slowly

swell, and his shrieks would ring in the darkness, and the panthers would

look on with the face of his master, and laugh softly with the smooth

voice of his master. And the writhing wall would dilate and expand till

every snake was vaster than an anaconda, and the mass together would

fall away at every rebound to a horrible distance, and reach up to the

sky, and his body would swell at every million-fanged stroke till its

monstrous bloat filled the dark world, and his shrieks would rise and

resound through space, and the panthers and the tigers would dilate

with the rest, and look on with enormous faces like his master’s, and

their smooth laughter would grow louder and louder into smooth thunders

of laughter, and the bristling and the striking and the swelling and

the shrieking and the roaring mirth, would go on increasing forever and

forever.

“Lord God Almighty help me! I’m going crazy!”

The words burst from him suddenly, as he felt the horrible fancy rush

upon him with dreadful reality, and almost master him. All aghast with

a new terror at the foreign and incongruous effect of his own tones in

that haunted darkness, and amidst the unhuman voices around him, he was

utterly appalled and confounded the next instant at the frightful clamor

which rose with a simultaneous outburst, volleying tumultuously around

him on every side like the multitudinous rush and uproar of devils when

the silence of the magic circle has been broken and the enchanter is

to be torn to pieces. Whooping, hooting, screaming, wailing, yelling,

whirring, flapping, cackling, howling, bellowing and roaring—all rose

together in a long continued and reverberating whirl and brawl, filling

the darkness with a deafening din. Staggering madly forward, the

terrified fugitive broke into a blind and frantic run, feeling as in a

horrible dream, that the pools had changed to ground which was sloping

rapidly up to strike him in the face and stop him; till at last with a

sudden lightening of the darkness, something caught his feet and threw

him headlong, and with an awful sense that he was seized, and with the

hideous tintamar swirling downward like the gurgling roar of water in the

ears of a drowning man, he swooned away.

IV.

Slowly that sluggish sea of swoon gave up its dead, and life revived.

How long he had lain in that blank trance, he knew not. He felt that he

was lying on bare, damp ground, and that the moonlight was around him.

The din had sunk into confused and broken noises, sounding and echoing

distantly through the darker depths of the moonlit forest, and the air

around him was desolate and still. A clear, cold, remote stillness

filled his mind. Gradually a dim sense of the former terror, mixed with

consciousness of all he had passed through, and of the place he was in,

began to invade the silent vacancy, and crept upon him as from afar.

Shuddering slightly, with icy thrills crawling through his torpid blood,

he slowly raised himself to his knees, and looked around him. With a

vague relief, which was almost pleasure, he saw that he was kneeling

on dry ground—a low acclivity sloping from the morass, clothed with

giant trees, and barred with large spaces of grey moonlight and sable

shadow. Behind him was the tough cordage of a ground-vine, in which his

foot was still entangled. Disengaging the limb without rising from his

knees, he continued to gaze, gradually yielding to an overwhelming sense

of awe, as he took in more fully the dark and dreadful magnificence of

the forest which loomed before him, like the interior of some infernal

cathedral. Far away, through immense irregular vistas, diminishing in

interminable perspective, the ground stretched in vast mosaics of sable

and silver, bunched and ridged with low flowers and herbage and running

vines, all moveless and colorless in the rich pallor of the moonlight,

and in the solemn shadow, as though wrought in stone. Upborne on the

enormous clustered columns of the trees, every trunk rising sheer like

a massive shaft of rough ebony, darkly shining, and fretted and starred

with the gleaming leaves and flowers of parasitical vines—masses of

gloomy frondage, touched here and there with sullen glory, spread aloft

and interwove like the groined concave of some tremendous gothic roof,

while from the leaf-embossed and splendor-dappled arches, the long mosses

drooped heavily, like black innumerable banners, above the giant aisles.

The air was dank and chill, and laden with thick and stagnant odors

from the night-blowing flowers. Fire-flies flitted and glimmered with

crimson and emerald flames; fen-lights flickered and quivered bluely down

the arcades in the morass; and all around from the bordering quagmire,

and from the crypts and vaults of the shadows, the demon-voices of the

region, sounding from above and below, and rapidly swelling into full

choir, chanted in discordant chorus. Listening to their subterranean and

aërial stridor, which rose in wild accordance with the ghastly pomp,

the horrible and sombre grandeur of the scene, a dark imagination might

have dreamed that some hellish mass in celebration of the monstrous

crime against mankind which centered in this region, was pealing through

the vaulted aisles and arches of a church whose bishop was the enemy

of human souls. Here, to this dread cathedral, might gather in his

wide and wicked diocese—the millions callous to the woes and wrongs of

slaves—the myriads careless of all ills their fellows suffer, while their

own selfish strivings prosper, and wealth and sensual comforts thrive

around them. Peopling the vast and drear nocturnal solitudes, under the

moonlit arches, here they might come, while the screaming, hooting,

bellowing chant resounded, and kneel, a motley and innumerable concourse

of base powers, in fell communion. Statesmen who hold the great object of

government to be the protection of property in man, and wield the mighty

engine of the state for the oppression of the weak; placemen who suck on

office, deaf and blind to the interests of the poor; scurvy politicians,

intent on pelf and power, who plot and scheme for tyranny, and legislate

away the inalienable rights of men; Jesuit jurists, mocking at natural

law, who decree that black men have no rights that white men are bound to

respect; scholars, bastard to the blood of the learned and the brave, who

prate with learned ignorance of manifest destiny and inferior races, to

justify against all human instincts the cruel practice of the oppressor;

hide-bound priests, who would turn the hunted fugitive from their doors,

or consent that their brothers should go into slavery to save the Union;

traders and slavers, an innumerable throng, mad-ravening with never-sated

avarice, and furious against liberty and justice as lesseners of their

gains; these, and their rabblement of catch-poles, and jail-birds, and

kidnappers, and men-hunters, and slave-law commissioners—here they might

assemble to pray that their conspiracy against mankind might prosper, and

love and reverence for the soul die down in darkness, and man degrade

into the brute and fiend. Fit place and time, and fit surroundings for

such rites as these; fitter far than for the trembling murmurs of a

solitary slave, kneeling in the dreary moonlight, and pouring out the

forlorn agony of his spirit in prayer to the God of the poor.

Some dim association of the aspect of the forest with the cathedrals

he had seen many years before when he was a slave in New Orleans; some

dim sense that he was on his knees in the attitude of supplication,

had mixed with the overwhelming consciousness of his helplessness, his

wretchedness, and his danger, and impelled him to pray. Fervently,

in uncouth words and broken tones, he poured forth the mournful and

despairing litany of a soul haunted with horror, encompassed with perils,

and yearning for deliverance. The demoniac clamor of the forest rose

louder and louder as he went on, breaking his communion with God, till

at length, appalled by the unhallowed din, he ceased, and rising to his

feet, uncomforted and terrified, staggered weakly on his way.

He was very feeble now, and his strength was so nearly gone that he

tottered. His setting forward again was a mere mechanical action, but

it continued for some minutes before the dull thought came to him that

his movement was useless. In his agonizing desire for sleep, he tried to

climb a tree, where, lodged in a fork of the branches, he thought he

would be safer and more comfortable than on the ground; but even with the

advantage of the parasitical vine which covered its trunk, his strength

was not equal to the effort. He was in the last stages of exhaustion.

Sitting upon the ground, he resolved to keep awake till morning, when

there would be less danger of wild beasts, and he might dare to repose.

He sat for a long time shuddering with cold, and watching intently all

about him, lest some panther should spring upon him unawares. Once or

twice, with a start of terror, he caught himself nodding; and at length,

affrighted at the possible consequences of his dropping off into slumber,

he strove to occupy his mind by observing minutely the various details

of the scene before him. He had been busy at this for some time, when

he became suddenly and quietly perplexed with the feeling that there

was something he ought to take notice of, but was unable to remember or

define what it was. All the while he was vacantly gazing at the hole of a

gigantic cypress rising from a dense clump of dwarf palmettoes, slightly

silvered by a faint ray of moonlight, and from time to time he saw,

without receiving any impression therefrom, a dim vapor glide athwart the

palmetto leaves. Suddenly but quietly it came to him that what he ought

to have noticed was a peculiar odor, and startled a little, he strove to

shake the torpor from his mind, and think. What could it be? As suddenly

and quietly as before it came to him, and at the same moment his eye took

in the meaning of that curious mist gliding over the palmettoes. It was

the smell of smoke, and yonder was its source. Thoroughly roused now,

and vaguely alarmed, he scrambled up on his feet, with a little strength

returning to his body, and gazed in stupefaction at the misty ringlets

lazily stealing across the leaves. It certainly was smoke; he smelled

now very distinctly the dry scent of burning wood. Who could have a fire

in the heart of the swamp at this time of night? At first, superstitious

fancies rose in his mind, for the thought that any person could be here

with him was inconceivable. But gradually recovering self-possession, he

resolved, for he was naturally courageous, to go forward and solve the

mystery; and taking the knife from the back of his neck, he cautiously

approached the palmettoes, his blood thrilling, and his heart beating,

and all the forest resonant around him. Peering through the leaves, he

saw with amazement a pile of smouldering embers duskily glimmering in

front of a large hole in the trunk. The tree was hollow. A sort of fright

fell upon him, and he retreated; but recovering instantly, he again

advanced, and nerved to desperation, spoke in a voice faint both from

weakness and trepidation:

“Ho, there! Ho, you in there! You there, whoever you are!”

There was no answer, nor movement, but at the sound of his voice, a

tremendous uproar burst forth again in the forest. Desperate at this, he

again spoke in a louder tone:

“Ho, now, you in there! You just say who you are. I’m coming in now!”

No answer, but the uproar in the branches and from the swamp increased

like a tempest. Strung up now to his highest pitch, Antony clutched his

knife, and setting his teeth hard, plunged in through the hole.

It was densely dark within. The immense cypress was completely hollow,

as he could feel, for stretching out his arms he encountered nothing. He

began to grope about, but stopped suddenly, thinking it better to get a

light. Quite overcome by the strangeness of his discovery, and by the

novel circumstance of a fire being found smouldering before an empty

tree, he stooped down through the low entrance to the brands, and blowing

upon one till it flamed, withdrew himself again into the tree, and looked

around. Suddenly, with a hoarse gasp of horror, he tottered back, falling

from his squatting posture over upon the ground, and dropping the brand,

which at once went out, leaving him in utter darkness. In that instant

he had caught a glimpse, by the fitful flame, of a lank figure, duskily

clothed, lying on its back, with a mop of thick white hair, a leathern

face hideously grinning, and glassy eyes which had met his; and he felt

like one who had entered the lair of a fiend.

So paralyzed was he with affright, that instead of scrambling out of

the tree, he sat motionless, leaning back on his hands, with his blood

curdling, and cold thrills crawling under his hair. A wild fancy that

he would be instantly sprung upon by this thing, held him still and

breathless. But all remained silent and moveless, and at last, venturing

to stir, he got up on one knee, and pressed his hands on his heart to

stop its mad beating. By degrees his courage came back to him, or, at

least, his dreadful fear became blended with desperation. Then came wild

wonder at the horrible strangeness of that figure, and slowly this melted

into a savage and frenzied curiosity. Seizing the smoking brand from the

earth, he backed out through the hole (for he absolutely did not dare to

turn his back to the dread tenant of the cavern), and, once outside, blew

upon the stick till it reflamed. Waiting a moment till the light burned

strongly, he thrust it through the hole, and holding it above his head,

glared with starting eyes upon the face of the figure.

He saw in a moment that it was nothing unearthly—only the form of an

aged woman, and of his own race. Instantly it struck him that she was

a fugitive, probably a dweller in the swamp. Reëntering the tree, he

approached and held the blazing brand over her countenance. With a

terrible sensation of awe he saw that it was the countenance of the

dead. She lay on a couch of the forest moss, her gaunt figure decently

composed, with the hands crossed, as if she had known that she was dying.

She was apparently very old; the woolly hair was white; the black face

was deeply wrinkled, and much emaciated; the mouth was open, and had

fallen back, showing the white teeth, which were perfectly sound as

in her youth; and the glassy eyes were unclosed and fixed aslant with

that look which had so terrified the fugitive. He felt no terror now,

however, only awe; for with the discovery of the truth, the hideousness

of the face was gone. Bending down, he touched the cheek. It was still

tepid—almost warm; the life had not been long extinct, a fact of which

the smouldering brands of the fire she had kindled was another evidence.

Poring upon the features, a confused feeling gathered in his mind that

he had seen them before, and he strove to resolve it into certainty.

Suddenly, as the flickering of the burning brand he held brought out a

new expression on the dark, withered lineaments, it flashed upon him that

this was old Nancy. She had been a slave on Mellott’s plantation, near

Lafitte’s, and had disappeared five or six years before, after a terrible

whipping. They had hunted the swamp for her without avail, and it was

supposed that she had perished. Here she had lived, however, and here she

was now, all her earthly troubles over.

Turning away from the body in wild wonderment, the fugitive looked

around him. The space within the tree must have been at least six feet

in diameter. It had been hollowed out by time in the form of an upright

cone, the apex of which was at least a dozen feet above the ground.

The hole had probably been eaten out by a sort of dry rot, or perhaps

by insects, for the wooden walls were not damp, nor was the corrugated

floor. The only furniture was the couch of Spanish moss on which the body

lay, a block of wood fashioned for a seat out of the butt end of a log,

and a long paddle, bladed at both ends, which leaned upright against

the wall. Looking around further, Antony noticed some little niches cut

in the walls, with the handle of a hatchet sticking out of one of them.

On the blade was a parcel wrapped in cotton cloth, in which he found

three or four corn-cob pipes, a bundle of dried tobacco-leaf, bunches of

matches, and two or three knick-knacks of no great use. Evidently Nancy

had made occasional excursions from her hiding-place, for these things

must all have been borrowed from the race of the taskmasters. This was

still more evident as Antony pursued his observations. In another niche,

he found at least half a peck of corn done up in a cloth, and in a wooden

quart measure there was some more, parched. His hunger rose so suddenly

and fiercely at sight of the food that he at once crammed a handful

of the parched corn into his mouth, and with the measure in his hand,

continued to crunch, although his throat was so swollen with his long

fast that he could scarcely swallow. Continuing his search while he ate,

he found in a third niche an oblong tin pan and a gourd, but in the pan,

to his astonishment and delight, there was a dead opossum and a small

fish. They were both fresh—Nancy must have captured them that very day.

She had lived a woodman’s life in the heart of the morass, setting her

fishtraps on the bayou, and catching the smaller animals in the forest.

Forgetting to pursue his search further in the desire to appease his

ravening hunger, Antony only paused to lay one of the pieces of cotton

cloth over the face of the dead, and then set to work to rake the fire

into a bed of coals, and hastily dressing the meat with his bowie-knife,

broiled it, and ate with the eager voracity of a man half starved.

A mad repast, not given to appetite, but famine, and void of all

enjoyment. Not himself, but his hunger as a thing apart from himself,

was fed by those gross gobbets. Kneeling before the embers, in the dusky

glimmer, he hurried down the half-cooked food, tasting of smoke and

cinders, as to some wild wolf that gnawed his vitals. In the darkness

behind him lay the swart corpse, and the thought of it was a quiet horror

in his mind. Blent with that horror, and with his raging famine, was a

dull, stupefied sense of the chafe of the collar on his neck, the swollen

pains and weakness of his limbs, the steady suck of the sleeplessness in

his jaded brain, the tepid clinging of his wet clothes, the filthy smell

of the muck and slime that covered him, and all was mixed confusedly

with a dimmer apprehension of the smoky warmth of the cavern, the sullen

smoulder of the embers, and the resonance of the vast drear forest.

His meal ended, he still knelt in the murk contraction of all his

sensations and apprehensions, before the dull fire. The fierce gnawing at

his stomach had changed to an uneasy distention, as if something huge and

bloated lay dead within him. His horror of the corpse had grown stronger

even than the heavy weariness and frowsy misery of body and spirit,

and he now begun to consider what he should do with it. It ought to be

buried, he felt, but in his utter torpor of fatigue, he shrunk from the

labor of making it a grave.

Slowly his inertia yielded, and he set to work with the hatchet, chopping

out a burial-place in an oblong space near the tree between the

palmettoes, and scooping up the soft soil with his hands. It was a long

and painful task for his weak and sore body; but at length it was ended,

and bringing out the corpse, he laid it in the cavity, heaped the earth

over it, and left it to its rest.

The forest was still resounding with the unhuman noises when he entered

the cypress hollow again. He heard them dully, with torpid indifference.

The tree seemed strangely empty to him now. He sat for a moment on the

block, watching, with an utter prostration of heart, the dusky glimmer

faintly lighting the smoky gloom. Rising presently, he arranged the

embers so that they would outlast the night to keep away the wild beasts;

and then throwing himself upon the heap of moss where the corpse had

lain, he sank away in a dead slumber. Soon the hooting and flapping, the

screaming and the howling sunk away also, and the vast forest lay still

and weird and desolate in the pallor of the moon.

V.

He woke with the feeling that he had dropped off and slept a minute, but

at the same instant gazing with stiff and smarting eyes through the brown

dusk of the hollow, he was confused at seeing the palmetto leaves at the

entrance plainly visible, and of a deep, cool green. He knew now that

it was broad day, and that he had slept long. Raising himself suddenly,

a mass of cramping stitches wrenched his frame, and made him gasp with

pain. He remained for a minute supporting himself on his hands, and then

slowly and painfully arose. Refreshed in mind by his slumber, he was even

worse off in body than when he had lain down. His limbs were stiff, and

every joint and muscle ached. His wrists and ankles were much swollen

where the ropes of the bucking had cut them. He felt as if he had been

switched all over with nettles, from the stings and scratches of the

thorns and briers through which he had travelled. His face pained him

especially, the atoms of glass still smarting in the cuts, and all its

wounds and bruises sore and burning. Worse than all to his sense at that

moment were the weight and chafe of the accursed collar. His flesh was

raw with it. It hurt him so much that almost the first thing he did was

to tie one of the pieces of cotton cloth around his neck for the edge of

the iron to rest on. Relieved somewhat by this, he began to limp to and

fro, gasping and panting at every step with pain.

After a few minutes of this exercise, he felt a little easier, and

stopped walking to examine the paddle. It convinced him that Nancy must

have a boat somewhere, and the pilfered articles he had found in the

hollow confirmed his belief. To get away from the swamp was his fixed

purpose, and in that land of streams, if he could only find Nancy’s boat,

he might avoid the loathsome and dangerous journey across the morass.

Nancy’s boat, he thought, must be a periagua, and the question was,

where did she keep it. Crawling out of the tree to commence a search

for it, he saw it right at the base of the trunk under the palmettoes.

But Nancy’s periagua was a canoe! A canoe of buffalo hide on a frame of

slender wattles. Had she purloined it from the Indians in the Pine Woods

of Avoyelles, and had it been a present to them from some visiting tribe

from Texas or the Indian Territory? For all the boats Antony had ever

seen among them were periaguas. At all events here it was, and elated

with its discovery, the fugitive instantly brought forth the paddle, the

hatchet, the bowie-knife, the corn, the tin pan, and the matches, and

placed them in it. Going in again to see if there was anything else that

might serve him in his flight, he saw an end of dyed cotton cloth hanging

out from the couch of moss. With a pull out it came—an old blue cotton

gown. Turning over the moss, he uncovered an old blue flannel shirt, an

old pair of grey trowsers, a jean jacket torn up the back, a slipper and

one stocking. Rejoiced that Nancy’s purloinings had furnished him with a

change of clothes, he put the gown, shirt and trowsers into the canoe,

and lifting the latter, plunged out through the palmettoes into the

forest.

A thrill of alarm shot through him as he saw by the sunlight that it

was late in the afternoon. So accustomed had he been in the enforced

habits of plantation life to rise at daybreak, that on waking in the

hollow he naturally thought he had awakened at the usual morning hour.

He shuddered now with the consciousness that so much time had been lost,

when the dogs, guided by some professional expert at man-hunting, might

be coming straight toward him. That Lafitte would, in his burning lust

for vengeance, hunt the swamp for weeks to find him, he had no doubt, and

he must at once speed away.

He stood for a moment debating which direction to take, when looking down

he happened to see a spot where the earth had been harrowed by the claws

of some wild beast, and upon the scratches was the distinct imprint of

a naked foot. It came to him at once that this was a footmark Nancy had

made going up from the water, and he at once resolved to pursue a track,

in a bee-line from the heel of the print. Limping along painfully with

the canoe on his shoulders and cautiously, for by the sudden slipping

and rustling in the grass and herbage he knew that snakes were around

him, suddenly his heart and blood jumped, and he sprang backward with a

leap that shot a flood of wrenching pangs through his whole frame. He

had nearly stepped upon a rattlesnake which lay in a faint glimmer of

sunshine on a strip of thinly tufted earth. The sluggish reptile quivered

slightly throughout its mottled length, and lifting its head with venom

in its sparkling eyes and devilish yawning jaws, sounded its rattle and

swiftly slid from view. Antony shuddered, and the old dark fancy that he

was in Hell flickered through his mind. Trembling in spite of himself at

every buzzard that flew from his path, or small animal that crossed it,

and feeling that everything was watching him, and that the multitudinous

chatter of the birds that filled the forest was concerning him, he went

on his way. Soon he came to the pools, and beating the moccasins from his

path, arrived at a shoal of black mire, and a narrow bayou. A fallen tree

lay with its branches dipped in the stream, half way across; a rotten log

floated in the water; stumps and snags projected here and there; waifs

of moss, slivers of branches, broken boughs, leaves, flowers, and bits of

forest debris floated idly on the shining surface or among the shadows.

Hurriedly casting off his foul rags, the fugitive washed himself with the

old gown, and put on the shirt and trowsers. Then laying the canoe on the

water, where it lightly danced, he cautiously got in, grasped the paddle

in the middle, and plying the blades first on one side and then on the

other, shot slowly off with a beating heart up the dull stream.

Heading northward, the brown skiff yawed from right to left, and darted

with an uncertain forward motion, trembling beneath him like a living

thing that shared his agitation. Black banks of mud, pierced here and

there with alligator holes, swamp grass, and pools, and luxuriant clumps

and masses of strange many-colored flowering verdure, fallen trees and

trees leaning to their fall, and trees uptowering in leafy pride, and the

vine-enwreathed and flower-gemmed wilderness of massive trunks uplifting

their vast moss-bearded and leaf-laden branches, spread and loomed in

solemn and splendid confusion on either side as the boat lightly darted

on its sinuous course. Alligators swam through the bayou, or plunged from

floodwood, or raised themselves with brutal bellowings on the margin as

it glided on. Cranes and bitterns fled away from the banks squawking and

screaming; strange birds of gorgeous plumage flew rustling through the

branches; scarlet-gilled black buzzards rose and soared with broad and

steady wing; myriads of ducks and water-fowl of many kinds flapped and

swam away continually before it. Paddled steadily forward, now on one

side, now on the other, on sped the brown canoe, while the shadows grew

inkier on the sombre water, and again under the red reflection of the

sky, the dull bayou became a stream of blood.

Awed by the solemn desolation of the scene, the gloomy color of the

water, the gathering darkness of the wooded fen, the motions and the

voices all around; troubled at the thought of the long and perilous

distance that stretched between him and his far bourn of safety; yet

with a fearful joy and a sustaining hope within, the fugitive oared his

swift darting skiff at length into the river he had swam last the day

before. The red glow had died from sky and water, and the moon silvered

greyly the stream as he paddled on between the black forest on either

side. Heading his prow to the east, and plying his paddle vigorously, he

flew lightly up the stream. Voices of bird and beast called and answered

weirdly in the darkness of the black shores; trees towered and leaned in

ambiguous sable shapes over the dusky stream, and watched him as he shot

swiftly by; the solemn sky spread far above him like a doubtful thought,

half-boding, yet clearing slowly into deep-withdrawn tranquillity, in

the increasing lustre of the tawny moon. Overarched and palisaded by the

phantom sentience of the hour, his dark skiff, gliding and darting with

light tremors and waverings still held its way like a dumb intelligence

over the mysterious water.

Hours went on, and save the scattered hooting and screeching of owls in

the forest, and the occasional clacking of some vagrant bat whirling by,

the moonlit night was still. Only once the fugitive oared his canoe in

to the shore, where on a low projecting bluff under a great tree, he lit

a small fire, and hastily parching some corn in the pan, ate a hurried

meal. Then slaking the fire, he entered the canoe again, and paddled on.

An hour or two later he turned the skiff into a narrow bayou which

debouched into the stream, thus changing his course to the north. His

object was to gain the Red River, where he hoped to smuggle himself

on board some steamboat, and getting to New Orleans, escape from the

steamboat, and hide himself in the hold of some northern vessel. It was

his former plan, and he still clung to it with tenacity, bitterly aware

of its hazards and dangers, yet unable to think of a better. The bayou he

was now in was very narrow, hemmed in on either side by the forest and

the fen, and much obstructed by stumps, snags, fallen trees and lodgments

of logs. To steer his course through these in the uncertain darkness, for

the branches almost shut out the moonlight, was difficult, and several

times he was obliged to clamber on the fallen timber, and pull the canoe

over, or shove aside the huddled floodwood to clear a passage. But his

efforts brought him at length to a sluggish stream, which he judged to be

the Pacoudrie—the stream he had swam first in his escape the day before,

but at a point several miles below the Lafitte plantation. He was now

approaching dangerous ground, and his heart began to beat faster. Turning

his prow eastward again, he paddled down the stream, looking for another

debouching bayou. He soon came upon one, into which he turned, heading

north, and through which his passage was as dark and impeded as before.

He exerted himself to the utmost, and at last, heated and panting, he

saw that he was leaving the morass, and that the moonlit ground, thinly

scattered over with trees, and thickly covered with verdurous underwood,

was gradually rising on either side of him. The bayou, too, grew deeper

and less impeded, and presently he saw on his left, beyond a cluster of

huge trees, the grain of a plantation, and further up, a mansion with

outbuildings. Who lived there he did not know—he only knew that he was

again in the region of his enemies. Light thrills shot through his heated

blood, and the canoe yawed and trembled beneath him, as if conscious

of danger. Paddling forward, he saw before him in the clear moonlight,

for the trees on either side were thinly scattered now, a huge trunk

fallen sheer across the stream, sloping down obliquely, with its crown

of branches dipping in the water, and barring half the passage. From

the other side, crossing the first trunk, a leafless tree, withered or

blasted, had also fallen, and lay, dipped in the water, half way across,

with its broken boughs sticking upward like jagged spikes or horns.

Steering to the left of these, with the intention of shooting through

the space under the large trunk, he gave three or four vigorous strokes

of the paddle on either side of the skiff. The canoe darted forward,

quivering with the impetus of the strokes—stopped suddenly with a tearing

and griding shock, and yawed around, with the water welling up swiftly

through its bottom. Antony, who was kneeling on one knee, had just time

to spring up, catch at the trunk before him, and lift himself up on it.

When he turned, the rim of the canoe was settling in the water. It had

struck one of the jagged spikes just below the surface, which had ripped

its bottom, and it had gone down forever.

Sitting on the tree, stupefied at this unexpected accident, Antony

watched the circling ripples on the moonlit water where his boat had

sunk, and thought with bitter regret that he was now without a single

weapon to fight his way against any opposing white man, or to end his own

existence, should the odds be against him. His hatchet had sunk with the

boat, and his knife also. With a fierce imprecation, he rose, ran up the

trunk, sprang ashore, and pausing only to wrench off a branch, and strip

it of its leaves for a club to defend himself, rushed on through the

underwood.

Heading to the northeast, he gained the plantation, and running over

rows of corn and springing cotton-plant, pale in the paling moon, he

struck upon a fenced road lying between the plantation, with another road

diverging from it in the course he was travelling. Into the latter he

turned, but afraid to take the open path, he kept within the fences and

hedges skirting its side, ready if he saw anybody in the distance to hide

in the rows, or if anybody came upon him, to fight till he was killed.

Rushing on, haggard with apprehension and desperate resolution, with

his teeth set, his large nostrils dilated, and his glaring eyes roving

warily about him, he came to a plantation divided from the one he was on

by a hedge of the osage-orange, and with a similar hedge skirting the

road. To break through this would be difficult, so he took the road and

ran on, with the fresh wind of the coming morning blowing upon him, and

increasing his fear with the thought of the new dangers the daybreak

would bring. It was a large plantation, and it took him some time to

arrive at its terminus, at which a road diverged from the one on which

he was journeying. He reached this road, and there, clad in shabby light

clothes, and coming down the path, not three yards distant from him, was

a man!

Antony swung up his club, and stood with opened nostrils and glaring

eyes, his black face alive with fierce courage. The man halted, and

looked at him with a sullen scowl. In the blank pause all life seemed to

have died from the air, and the moon lay faded in a vacant, sky, ghast

and grey in the pale light of the morning. The man was a large, gaunt

fellow, with a harsh and sallow taciturn face, but to the dark, half

demented fancy of the fugitive, he dimly seemed a devil, and the place

was still vaguely Hell.

“See here, nigger,” he said, in a stern, strident voice, “yer a runaway.

There’s their name as owns yer on yer collar, and I know Lafitte

Brothers, New Orleans, want yer. I’m goin’ down in the first boat, and

yer comin’ with me, right away, and no fuss. What yo’ say, nigger?”

He drew a revolver from his breast, and held it idly, watching the

fugitive with a scowl. Sense flickered through the mind of Antony. Here

was a chance to get safely down the river—beyond, a chance to give his

captor the slip when he reached the city. He flung his club away.

“I’ll go with ye, Marster,” he said, sullenly.

The man put up his pistol.

“What’s yer name, boy?” he asked.

“Bill, Marster.”

“Bill, eh? You’re the Fugitive Slave Bill, I suppose,” said the man, with

a dull grin.

“Yes, Marster.”

“Well, Bill, I collect bills for a livin’, and I reckon I’ve collected

you, Bill. Hope I’ll collect something on yer, too. Come along.”

Antony followed him. Not a word further was said on either side.

Meanwhile, around them the pallor of the sky lightened into daybreak;

horns sounded over the plantations; the black gangs were coming forth

into the fields on every side; the birds darted and sang; the fragrant

wind blew freshly from the east, and the life of day began anew.

Weary, and sore, and aching, with insane fancies flitting through the

horrible lethargy which was creeping on his mind, Antony followed his

taciturn captor, and just as the rising sun shot a low, broad splendor

over the landscape, they came to a solitary landing-place, with a shanty

and a wood-pile, on the border of the wide, gleaming river.

It was all a dim, dread dream. In it came a huge monster, puffing, and

snorting, and clanking, vomiting clouds of black smoke, and lifting

and washing back the drifting trees and logs and refuse on the shining

surge. Then a dream of hurry and tumult, a great heaving mass, a swarm of

people, an air blind with light and heavy with smoke, a roar of voices

laughing, and talking, and hallooing, the clanging of a bell, piles of

cotton and goods of all sorts, the clank of engines, the wallowing of

water, ponderous snorting, and heaving, and surging, all mixed together

in inextricable confusion, and he who dreamed it vaguely knew that he was

sitting, like one drugged, on a heaving deck, with heaps of merchandise

around him. Gradually he sank away into a still heavier lethargy, in

which everything became even more dim and distant, and from thence he

slid into a blank and stupid sleep.

Once again the dream seemed to swim heavily into that death-like

slumber—a vague, spectral dream, in which some one gave him a hunch of

corn bread, which he ate slowly in a glimmering light, remotely conscious

of a dark figure standing near, of distant voices, a far-off snorting and

clanking, a shuddering motion beneath him, and formless bulks around him.

Presently it drowsily dissolved into darkness and silence.

Like one who dreams of awaking, he awoke again, and stupidly strove to

remember where he was and what had befallen him. In the dull gleam of a

hanging lantern, he saw masses of bales and boxes, casks and furniture,

and miscellaneous merchandise, lying in murky gloom. A few dark, uncouth

forms of sleeping men, heavily breathing, were strewn about in various

grotesque attitudes on the piles of cotton. In the stillness, he heard

the regular snort and clank of the engine, the rushing of the water, and

felt with a dull giddiness the floor rocking and swaying in long, regular

undulations.

Somehow, a minute afterward, he found himself out on the edge of the

deck, sick and dizzy, steadying himself against a heap of bales, and

looking out on a broad, dim river, rolling in mighty, languid surges

under a large, low, yellow moon. Logs and trees and masses of chaff

and refuse lifted blackly in the tawny light on the long swells. All

around the water fled by, churned into a mill-race of seething froth and

foam. Beyond was a huge steamboat; black smoke trailing from its double

funnels; fire flaring from them and from its escape-pipes; balls of light

gleaming from hanging lanterns here and there; light streaming out from

the rows of oblong windows, and from every hole and cranny; the strong

current beaten up into a flood of foam beneath its wheel; and the darks

and lights of an inverted phantom steamboat hung below it in the water.

Far away were low, black shores, with here and there a gaunt spectral

tree, and dull lights glimmering. He was on the mighty tide of a river

which ran through Hell.

Sick and dizzy, and with a horror on his mind, he staggered back with

the heavy drowse on all his faculties, through the tortuous lane of

cotton-bales, and sinking down on one of them, fell into his former

lethargy.

He did not sleep through the night, but lay in utter torpor, thinking

of nothing, fearing and hoping nothing, only vaguely conscious of where

he was, and of the forms around him. Overstrung for many years with the

unnatural toils of a slave, and still more tensely overstrung with the

terrible labors of his journey through the morass—overstrung both in

body and spirit, as few but slaves ever are—he had sunk back, now that

a season of relaxation had come, into lassitude as excessive as were

the fatigues and agitations of which it was the reaction. Safe for the

present, with no immediate stimulus to urge him into activity, he lay,

body and spirit, as in the sentient sleep of the tomb.

Toward morning he sank away again into a heavy, dreamless slumber. Once

during the day he dreamed that he was aroused by some one whom he did

not recognize, and bidden to come along and get something to eat. In his

dream he tried to shake the stupor from his bleared eyes, which even the

dim light among the bales pained, and to obey. But the drowse was heavy

upon him, and he could only mumble out that he didn’t want to eat, and

the dream instantly dissolved in oblivion. He was left undisturbed, for

his captor was not without pity for him, and saw that he was terribly

fatigued.

But late that night, when midnight was two hours gone, and the moon was

westering palely from the sky, the trump of Liberty or Death sounded

again in the ear of the fugitive, and his spirit arose from its tomb. A

hand shook him, a voice shouted in his ear that they were near the city,

and instantly springing to his feet, with fresh blood leaping through

his veins, with new pulses throbbing in his heart, and all his faculties

awake and alive, and armed with their utmost cunning, their fullest

courage, and their most desperate resolution, he followed his captor

out on deck. The boat was within a mile of the city, which lay beyond

a forest of masts and hulls, and scattered lights hung in the rigging,

or glimmering on the levee, dark and silent, with its roofs and spires

massed against the purple sky, and glittering in the moon. The night was

hot and still, and a heavy languor hung over the great breadth of regular

rolling swells. Ships lay at anchor all about the stream, lifting with

the lifting of the surge, and here and there a flat-boat with lights on

board, and the men plying their long sweeps, lazily steered its way on

the drift between the hulls. Antony watched the scene, with his heart

fiercely beating at the thought of the coming trial.

Meanwhile the boat, with her bell ringing, was slowly clanking and

snorting on through the foaming and brattling flood around her bows and

wheels, and the passengers were pouring forth, men, women and children,

on her decks. The fugitive stood silently by his captor, on the lower

forward deck, amidst the tumult and crowding of the risen multitude,

biding his time. The moment the boat touched the levee he was determined

to quietly slip aside from his companion and lose himself in the crowd.

To this end he stood a little to one side of him, watching his every

movement.

Suddenly the clatter of conversation and the trampling of feet were

stricken still by a wild yell, above which was heard the slow, impassive

snort and clank of the engine, and the brattling wash of the water. Then

burst forth a shrill clamor of cries and screams from the after deck,

followed by a trampling rush which threw all forward, as by a galvanic

shock, into mad confusion; then behind the pouring crowd, suddenly

lightened a red flare, followed by a tremendous volume of black smoke,

and at once, amidst terrific disorder, uprose a dreadful storm of yells

and screams from the horror-stricken multitude. The next instant the

uproar of voices was stifled in a multitudinous choking and gasping, as

the thick, poisonous smoke swept over the decks, and presently up shot a

sheeting burst of clear flame, with shrivelling ringlets of black vapor

writhing and vanishing away in it, lighting the ghastly pallor of the

hundreds of terrified faces, all turned one way, and throwing its lurid

glare on the churning froth and the lifting swells, and on the myriad

masts and spars and rigging of the surrounding vessels, which started

out suddenly in lines and bars of tawny splendor against a background of

gloom.

Even in that awful moment Antony did not lose sight of his captor. With

his whole soul fiercely bent on getting away from him, he saw him start

back and shout with terror. With his eye fixed upon him, he heard the

rapid jabber of a terrified man behind him shrieking out that a lantern

had fallen and broken, setting fire to a pool of turpentine which had

leaked from a barrel on the after deck, and the fire spreading at once

to the barrel, it had burst and flooded the boat with flame. Still

watching him, he heard the screamed order to reverse the engines, and

amidst howls and cries of anguish and despair, and cursing and praying,

and the heavy thump of men and women falling in swoon upon the deck, or

trampling and fighting over each other in their frantic desperation,

while the advancing flame leaped and writhed, crackling and bristling and

roaring furiously on—amidst all the horror and Bedlam confusion of that

minute—for it was but one—standing still, with his eye riveted on his

captor, he heard the ponderous clank, the long wash and wallow, and felt

the boat drift backward to gain the middle of the stream. That instant he

sprang backward, and rushing through the crowd, kicked off his shoes, and

leaped into the river.

He emerged presently from his plunge, amidst a shower of fiery cinders,

with the lifting surges all aglare around him, and struck boldly forward

for the levee, seeing at a glance the burning mass drift behind him,

and all the illuminated ships at the piers and in the stream suddenly

alive with shouting figures. Turning for an instant, and treading water,

he saw the boat clanking backward, with her black funnels rising from

a leaping and coiling mountain of smoke and flame, her passengers all

huddled forward in a dense, shrieking mass, black against the fiery glow,

and figures jumping into the water—which was already dotted with dark,

swimming forms, and looked like a turbulent sea of flame ignited from the

spectre of a burning boat below its surface. Among the swimming figures

there was, perhaps, not one but was his enemy—not one who would not

hale him back to the bondage from which he was struggling away. Turning

again, he swam on, heading against the ponderous current which would

bear him down past the city and out to sea. Boats were putting out in

all directions from ships in the stream, and from the shore, to pick up

the swimmers, many of whom were swimming in front of him, or clinging to

pieces of drift-wood or furniture. To avoid being picked up by any of the

boats was a necessary part of his task, for they, too, were manned by his

enemies. Reaching a large brig anchored in the stream, with a few sailors

standing on the bulwarks and in the rigging, watching the burning vessel,

he resolved to cling to its rudder a few moments to recover breath, and

as he approached it, looking up through the shadow, made luminous by the

wan light of the moon, and the reflected glare of the water, he read on

the stern, in white letters, the words, “SOLIMAN, BOSTON.” His heart

throbbed wildly, and clinging to the rudder under an overhanging boat,

he listened to the talking on the deck above him, and presently heard a

voice say:

“Devilish lucky we weren’t set afire, Jones, and we just ready to sail.”

Just ready to sail! He heard those words with his brain aflame. His

chance had come. Setting his knees to the slippery rudder, he began to

climb. It was hard work, for the helm was coated with sea-slime, but at

length he got his toes upon the slight projection of one of the iron

clamps that bound the wood together, and scrambling upward, laid hold of

the boat swinging astern, and softly clambering in, remained still, and

listened. He had not been discovered. The talking above him was still

going on, and presently he heard the tramp of the two men as they moved

away forward. Raising himself in the boat, he cautiously peered in at the

cabin window. A swinging lamp was burning within, and all was quiet. He

put in his head, looked around him for a moment, and then stealthily got

in. Going to the cabin door, he peered out on the deck. Everybody was at

the bows, standing on the bulwarks and in the rigging in the wild glare,

watching the steamboat, which was now one mass of leaping flame, half a

mile away up the river. Cries and screams and shouts were resounding from

the water in all directions. Looking at the deck, he saw that the hatch

nearest him was open, and nerved to desperation, and almost choking with

excitement, he went lightly forward, his bare feet making no sound, and,

unseen by any one, so intent was the general gaze on the conflagration,

stooped and dropped into the hold.

He fell on a cotton-bale, three or four feet from the top, and lay in the

thick darkness, reeking with sweat, and listening, with a wild jumping

in his throat, for any sound that might tell him his entrance had been

observed. He heard none. The talking went on above him, and it was all

about the burning steamboat. He knew that he must not remain where he

was, for there he could be seen, and in a moment he began to grope for a

hiding-place. He was in a sort of square well, formed by the cotton-bales

around him. Above them was a horizontal space under the deck, and

clambering out of the well, he wormed himself into this, a few feet

forward, and lay, panting and fatigued, hot, wet, hungry and thirsty,

half stifled by the foul and musty air of the hold, and by the smell of

the bilge, but safe for the present.

He lay in a sort of stupor, and gradually heard all sounds die away. For

a little while his mind was filled with strange recollections of the

passions and events of the last hour; then lying prone in the foul and

musty darkness, he lapsed into a sleep haunted with dreams, in which he

was again rushing through the swamp, which somehow changed into rolling

water on which a steamboat was burning, and he was holding up Madame

Lafitte, who suddenly turned and bit him on the hand. Starting up in the

thick darkness, he struck his head against the deck, and then remembering

where he was, lay still. The hatch had been closed. In the darkness

he heard light scampering and squealing, and felt the ship shuddering

beneath him.

He forgot his dream in the wild whirl of emotion with which he became

aware that the vessel was on her way. Presently he felt a sort of

pricking in his hand, and touching the spot, found that it was wet, and,

as he again heard the scampering and squealing, he knew that a rat had

bitten him. Startled a little at the new danger of being set upon by

these vermin, and suspicious of poison, he sucked the wound, resolving

to keep awake now as long as he could. He did not know how long he

had slept, but he could hear the incessant snort, snort, snort, of a

steamboat, with the long unbroken wash of the vessel, and knew that the

brig was in the tow of a steam-tug, and so not yet out of the river.

At length there was a change in the noises. Orders were shouted above,

heavy feet were rushing about, there was a bustle of pulling and hauling,

griding and flapping, thudding of ropes on deck, chanting of sailors,

amidst the receding snort of the steam-tug, and in the darkness, Antony

felt the vessel lean and roll and stagger with a sound of swiftly rushing

water, and knew that she was standing out to sea.

Who’ll send me back after all I’ve gone through? Who’ll be mean enough

to do it? That was his constant thought now, and it came in those words

to his mind. He knew the penalties imposed on any captain who took away

a fugitive in his vessel. He had thought of them before, but dimly; now

they came to him vividly, and he trembled. He was resolved to remain in

the hold as long as he could, but he knew the time would come when he

must leave his hiding-place, and face the captain. His plan was to tell

him all he had suffered, to show him his wounds and scars, to beg him

on his knees not to send him back to the Hell he had escaped from. Who

would do it? Who’ll send me back after all I’ve gone through? Who’ll be

mean enough to do it?

Soon the motion of the vessel threw him, already sickened by the horrible

smells and closeness of the hold, into agonies of sea-sickness, and he

lay on the bales vomiting violently, and feeling as if his soul were

rending his aching body asunder. By and by, he crawled down into the

well-like cavity under the hatch, where there was a little more room to

breathe in, and there he lay without food, without drink, almost without

air, for three days.

Days of sickness too loathsome to be described, too dreadful for

permitted language to convey. Days of utter prostration, of griping

pain, of wrenching convulsions, of horror indescribable, of tortured

death-in-life. Days when the ropy and putrid air was sucked into

the feeble lungs as if it were some strangling substance; when the

oppressed heart beat slowly with dull knocks as though it would burst

the bosom, and the bosom labored as though it were loaded down with

tons of iron. Days when sleep came down like a weight of lead upon the

brain, and struggled with infernal dreams, and was broken to fight off

an ever-returning swarm of rats—invisible vermin that swarmed over his

invisible body when it lay still, and were heard squeaking and pattering

off in the sightless darkness when he feebly flung about his limbs to

beat them away. Days whose mad, disgustful horror was desperately borne

for the hope of liberty, for the hatred of slavery—borne till he could

bear it no longer, and he resolved to beat upon the hatch and cry aloud

to let those above him know what a hell of agony raged beneath their feet.

How long he had been immured he did not know. Count time by anguish,

and it might have been centuries. Fearful of discovering himself till

he was too far from the land from which he had fled to be returned, he

had resolved to endure till endurance became impossible. For this he

had clung to life, for this he had silently borne the horrors of his

tomb, for this he had striven a hundred times against the desire to end

his imprisonment by shouting aloud to those above him. Now when heavy

torpor and gradual giddiness were stealing upon him, and the instinct of

his soul told him death was drawing near, he roused himself for the long

deferred effort.

The ship was staggering heavily, and he heard the trampling of feet on

the deck as, with dizzily reeling brain, he feebly and slowly crawled up

on his hands and knees. His strength was almost gone. An infant newly

born could have been hardly more helpless than he found himself. He

slowly lifted one hand to lay it on the bales beside him—lifted it a few

inches like something over which he had no command—and it fell heavily,

and losing his balance he tumbled down on his side. An awful feeling

stole across his mind that he had delayed too long—that his resolution

had outlived his physical powers. Turning over on his back, feebly

panting, slowly suffocating, he drew in his breath for a wild cry for

help. It rushed from him in a hoarse whistling whisper. His voice had

left him!

He lay still now, painfully breathing, but resigned to die.

Quietly—quietly—the fears and desires of the present, the hopes of the

future withdrew, and the vision of all his past floated softly through

his tranquil brain. It faded, and he lay rushing on a fast-rushing tide,

and dilated with a wonderful and mystic change. Power and beauty and joy

ineffable began to glow and spread divinely through his being with the

vague beauteous glimmer of a transcendant life afar. All fierce and dark

and sorrowful passions and emotions gone—all sense of pain and horror and

disgust fled forever—himself happier, greater, nobler than he had ever

dreamed—he lay swiftly drifting to the last repose.

What sound was it that jarred so dully on his failing ear? What sudden

light was it that fell upon him? What faces were those that looked on

him so strangely from above, and vanished with cries that brought down

darkness and silence on him once more?

O blue sky of the nineteenth century, what is this? O pale, fresh light

streaming into the noisome hold, what is this? O wonder-stricken, silent

faces, gazing aghast upon that swart and loathsome figure lying in the

shallow well, with an iron collar on its neck, what does this mean?

The men stood staring at the motionless body on the bales below them,

and then, lost in a trance of wonder, stared at each other. Their wild

amazement at the sight which met their eyes when they had unbattened the

hatch, had burst forth in one cry, and then left them still and dumb.

Presently there was a sound of heavy, hurrying feet, and the captain,

a short, powerfully-built man, came flying over the deck, with strong

excitement working in his sun-burnt face, reached the hold, looked in,

turned livid with rage, slapped his straw hat down on his head with both

hands, and rushed away cursing and raving like a madman. It was highly

natural. A commercial Christian of the nineteenth century breed, the

captain had been educated to think of nothing but his ship and trade, and

his special reflection was of the penalties that would ensue if it became

known that he had carried away a slave from New Orleans.

Recovering from their amazement, the sailors, with uncouth and profane

ejaculations of horror and pity, lifted the inanimate body of Antony,

disgusting even to their rude senses, and touching even to their rude

sensibilities, out of the hold. They had hardly laid it on deck when

the captain came rushing back again, shouting with oaths an order for

a look-out up aloft, with the hope of meeting some vessel bound for

the city he had left that would take the slave back. Then giving the

prostrate body a furious kick, he rushed away again, storming and

stamping and swearing.

At the direction of the mate, the sailors took the faintly-breathing body

of Antony forward to the galley, where the black cook busied himself in

reviving the fugitive. Half a dozen times a day the captain came to the

spot where the feeble man reclined, and glared at him without saying a

word. On the third day, Antony being then weak but able to stand and

talk, the captain demanded him to give an account of himself.

Feebly standing before him, with all the vigor gone from his emaciated

form, and with the deep marks of awful suffering graven on his wasted

lineaments, Antony told his story. As he finished, imploring the

captain in earnest and broken tones not to send him back, the mate, who

stood by, turned away with his mouth twitching, saying it was a damned

shame. The captain burst into a fit of passion, and stamped on the deck,

gesticulating with clenched hands.

“A damned shame, is it, Mr. Jones?” he roared, perfectly livid with rage.

“I should think it was! Rather! A blasted nigger to smuggle his ugly

carcass aboard my brig—what d’ye think they’ll say about it at Orleans,

and what’ll they do about it, Mr. Jones, and what’ll Atkins say when he

hears of it, Mr. Jones, and a load of cotton aboard from the very house

whose junior partner owns this dingy curse, Mr. Jones! Look at the name

of the house on his neck, man. Blast ye,” he howled, turning upon Antony,

and shaking both fists at him, “I’d send ye back, you beggar, if they

were to fry ye in your own black blood when they got ye! Send ye back? If

I don’t, may I be eternally”—

He finished the sentence by a gasp, and dashed both clenched fists into

the haggard and imploring face of the fugitive, who fell to the deck,

covered with blood. Shouting and cursing, the infuriated captain leaped

on him, and seizing him by the hair, beat his head against the planks;

then jumped to his feet, capering like a madman, and brandishing his

clenched fists. The mate stood looking away to the horizon, with a mute,

flushed face, and two or three of the sailors standing not far distant,

dumb witnesses of this brutal scene, glanced at each other with mutinous

brows. Striding off a dozen paces, the captain turned again, bringing

down his clenched fist with a slap into the palm of his hand, and

stamping with his right foot on the deck as he shouted:

“Keep a sharp look-out, Mr. Jones! The first vessel that heaves in sight

for New Orleans shall take him if it costs me a hundred dollars. And if

he gets to Boston, I’ll tie him hand and foot, and send him or fetch him

back the first chance, or my name’s not Bangham!”

He foamed off into the cabin. Who’ll send me back after all I’ve gone

through? Who’ll be mean enough to do it? Antony had received his answer.

CHAPTER I.

THE REIGN OF TERROR.

If, on or about the twenty-fifth of May, 1852, a fugitive from Southern

tyranny were to arrive in Boston, he would probably very soon discover

two things—first, that he must seek refuge with the people of his own

color, in the quarter vulgarly known as Nigger Hill; secondly, that

though they had once lived there in safety, neither he nor they could

live there in safety any more.

There were, at that period, about three thousand colored people, a large

proportion of them fugitives, residing in Boston, and the greater part

of them lived in the quarter above mentioned. It was on the slope of

Beacon Hill—one of the three hills which gave to the town its old name

of Trimount. On the crown of the hill towered the domed State House;

behind and around it rose, street on street descending, the dwellings of

the aristocracy; and behind them, a deep fringe of humble poverty, rose,

street on street, the dingy dwellings of the fugitives. There was a maxim

of statesmanship then current: “Take care of the rich, and the rich will

take care of the poor.” It had been acted upon. The rich had been taken

care of, and they had taken such care of these poor, that at that period

there was no safety for them, as for two years previous there had been

no safety for them in the city of Boston. Sidney’s Latin blazed in gold

on the walls of that State House: _Ense petit placidam sub libertate

quietem_—The State seeks by the sword the calm repose of liberty. But the

holy legend was dim, and not with the sword of Sidney, nor with the sword

of the Spirit, sought Boston the calm repose of liberty for the poor

fugitives who had fled from the meanest and the vilest tyranny that ever

blackened the world.

Yet it was the city of fugitives, and fugitives had laid its old

foundations down in pain and prayer. Winthrop and Dudley, Bellingham,

Leverett, Coddington, the star-sweet Lady Arabella, with their compeers,

men and women of true and gentle blood, and fugitives all, had reared it

from the wilderness. Fugitives who taught a tyrant that he had a joint in

his neck, had fled thither when the reborn tyranny again arose in their

own land. Fugitives dwelling there who remembered in their own sufferings

the sufferings of others, had helped frame the noble statute of 1641,

welcoming to State and city any strangers who might fly thither from the

tyranny or oppression of their persecutors. Fugitive hands—the hands of

the Huguenot Faneuil—had dowered it with the cradling Hall of Liberty

named with his name. Over it all, and through it all, and tincturing its

history in the very grain, was the tradition of the fugitive. Still, in

modern days, fugitives fled thither from the broken hopes, the baffled

efforts, the lost battles of continental freedom. German fugitives,

Italian fugitives, French fugitives, Irish fugitives, flying from their

persecutors, arrived there and nestled under the broad wing of the old

statute. At that period, too, the great Hungarian fugitive, Kossuth, had

come, with a host of other Hungarian fugitives at his back, and the town,

like the land, had roared and blazed in welcome. All these fugitives, of

whatever nation, were safe in Boston. No tyrant could molest them. But

the fugitives from the South—the black Americans, men and women, who had

fled thither for protection from a tyranny in no wise different from any

other, save in its sordid vileness and abominable excess of cruelty and

outrage—there was no safety for them.

They were, for the most part, humble people—their souls crushed and

bruised, as Plato says, with servile employments. Their lives had been

obstructed by slavery; slavery had nurtured in them some vices, had

dwarfed and crippled in them many virtues. They were, in the mass,

uncouth, grotesque, ungainly, repulsive to the eye; they were degraded,

imbruted, low, ignorant, weak and poor; and, therefore, the heart

of every gentleman should have leaped, like Burke’s sword from its

scabbard, to avenge even a look that threatened them with insult. Yet,

on the other hand, there were many among them too comely and noble to

need the defence the hearts of chevaliers fling around those to whom Man

and Nature have been unkind. “In the negro countenance,” says Charles

Lamb, “you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt

yearnings of tenderness toward some of these faces, or rather masks,

that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets

and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls—those ‘images of God

cut in ebony.’” The gentle Londoner could have said it all, and more, of

the negro faces one met in Boston, and he might have added a far prouder

word for the character that matched the faces. For all that is manliest

in manhood, all that is womanliest in womanhood, rose here and there,

with tropic energy, uncrushed by the load of past slavery and present

social wrong, among those people. Piety, rude and simple, it may be, yet

fervent and mighty as ever clasped with tears the Savior’s feet, or rose

through eternity to faint in the raptures of prayer before the throne of

Jehovah; love, none more loyal and tender, for the father, the mother,

the husband, the wife, the child, the home, the country; compassion,

quick and strong for mutual succor; flush-handed hospitality; courtesy

born not of art but nature; patience; cheerfulness; self-respect;

laborious industry; ambition to rise and to excel, despite of fettering

disabilities and thick-strewn obstacles; heroic bravery and endurance,

such as blanch the cheeks and shake the hearts of those who read or

hear the pains and perils negroes have dared for their own freedom, and

nobler still, the freedom of their fellows—these, and many other virtues,

bourgeoned and blossomed in the hearts and lives of the black fugitives.

For these people, whatever pro-slavery snobs and sciolists might say

of them, or however they might prate of their inferiority, were,

nevertheless, of worthy blood. Take as one sure proof of the negro’s

native elegance and gentility of soul, his love and talent for music.

The old genius of Africa which taught the lips of Memnon those weird

auroral tones which enchanted the valley of the Nile, still haunts the

broken souls of the race on this continent. America has no distinctive

music but her negro melodies. Listening to those merry rigadoon tunes,

wonderful for their jovial sweetness and facile celerity of movement, or

to those melancholy or mournful chants, ineffable in pathos, which thrill

the spirit with their wild, mysterious cadences, he would have little wit

who could deny the spiritual worth of the race whose fugitives at that

period found no safety in Boston.

No safety. None at all. Yet Boston had it to remember that one of the

first five martyrs of her freedom and of the freedom of America, was

a negro—Crispus Attucks. But Boston’s remembrance of that fact seemed

at that time to be almost confined to a certain literary slop-pail who

periodically emptied himself upon the fame of the hero whom John Hancock

and Samuel Adams had thought worthy of funeral honors. Boston had, for

many years, paid her debt of gratitude to Attucks by treating the men

and women of his race something after the fashion that Jews were treated

in the Middle Ages. They had their Ghetto at the west end of the town;

there they lived by sufferance, despised, rejected, borne down by a

social scorn which, to the noblest of them, was daily heartbreak, and

which the lowliest of them could not bear without pain. They had a narrow

range of humble employments and avocations, such as window-cleaning,

white-washing, boot-blacking, cab-driving, porterage, domestic service,

and the like; keeping a barber’s shop or an old clothes shop, was perhaps

the highest occupation open to them; and these they pursued faithfully

and industriously. They were shut out of the mechanic occupations; shut

out of commerce; shut out of the professions. They were excluded from

the omnibuses; excluded from the first-class cars; excluded from the

theatres unless the manager could make a place for them where seeing

or hearing was next to impossible; excluded from some of the churches

by express provision, and from most, if not all, of the others, by

tacit understanding; excluded from the common schools, and allotted

caste-schools where to learn anything was against nature; excluded from

the colleges; excluded from the decent dwellings; excluded from the

decent graveyards; excluded from almost everything. They were, however,

freely admitted to the gallows and the jail. But these, somehow or other,

saw less of them than of the race that despised them.

For all the years anterior to the period under notice, these people

had been, speaking in a general way, safe in Boston. There had, to be

sure, been occasional instances of private kidnapping, little known;

and there had been an abortive attempt to legally clutch into slavery

one negro, Latimer. Still, Boston cherished, sentimentally, at least,

free principles, and the New England traditions and laws, all favoring

liberty, had been strong enough in her borders to protect the fugitives.

Moreover, the caste prejudices against them had for twenty years or so

preceding been slowly breaking down. During that time, thanks to one

heroic saint, Emerson—thanks to one saintly hero, Garrison—the dawn of

a new era was broadening up the northern sky, and all things had begun

to come under the sovereignty of reason. Emerson had shed the new and

free disclosing light of a poet’s soul and a scholar’s mind on the great

problems of spiritual and secular life: straightway the primal soul

held session; the old decisions were unsettled; everything was to be

reëxamined; thought awoke; the breeze streamed; the sun shone; the Dutch

canal fled into a rushing river; all that was generous, all that was

thoughtful, all that was intrepid in New England uprose from lethargy;

and while he—

— “with low tones that decide,

And doubt and reverend use defied—

With a look that solved the sphere,

And stirred the devils everywhere—

Gave his sentiment divine,”—

the contest of reason against authority and precedent began, and amidst

much theological mud-flinging and unable-editor jeering, continued from

year to year, awakening the distinctive intellectual life of America.

On the other hand, Garrison had impeached Slavery before the nation,

as the giant foe of civil and political liberty, democracy, society,

humanity, in a word, civilization; and amidst a roaring storm of rancor,

and the howls of slavers and traders, that tremendous trial also began,

and continued from year to year. At the outset, Boston merchants,

convulsed with sordid fear lest their southern trade should suffer by

this arraignment of the oligarchy, gathered in a mob to hang the gallant

citizen—had, in fact, the rope already around his neck, when the Mayor

put him in jail, as a dastardly way of saving him. At the outset, too,

the gentle Governor of Georgia issued an official proclamation offering

five thousand dollars reward for his assassination. Happy, free America!

But Garrison had in his heart all that made patriots and Puritans, and

amidst a tempest of persecution unequalled since the Dark Ages, dauntless

with pen and voice, he held his course against Slavery like the thunder

storm against the wind. To his aid gathered a little group of gentlemen

and gentlewomen, writers and orators of marked power. Abby Kelley, fair

and eloquent for liberty as ever the Greek Hypatia for science: Lydia

Maria Child, whose generous and exquisite literary genius all know: Mrs.

Chapman, her thought shining in a terse, crystalline diction, like gold

in a mountain stream: Angelina and Sarah Grimke, Carolinians, who knew

what Slavery was, and knew how to flash the heart’s light upon it: Beriah

Green, a master of the old ignited logic: Theodore Weld, a resplendent

and indomitable torrent of brave speech: Edmund Quincy, wit, humorist,

satirist, gentleman, with the best spirit of the days of Queen Anne in

his thought and style: Wendell Phillips, with a fiery glory of classic

oratory, strange, but for him, to the air of America: Burleigh, Francis

Jackson, in later years Theodore Parker, these, and a score of others

gathered around Garrison, sacrificing name and fame, genius, scholarship,

wealth, everything they had to sacrifice, to the heroic task of redeeming

their country from its shame and wo. Outside of this organization was

Channing, with words like morning: John Quincy Adams, too, during those

years, fought the battle of free speech in the halls of Congress:

Webster, also, poured the lightning and thunder of his mind against the

extension of slavery, though never, save in the abstract, against slavery

itself: the Whig party backed him; the men of the Liberty party, and in

later years the Free Soil party, came to the side issues of the war. But

these were not the Abolitionists proper; the Abolitionists were those who

stood with Garrison, and their work was with Slavery itself. Against it

they reared Alps of testimony and argument; they exposed it utterly; they

bent every energy to the task of rousing the nation to its annihilation.

Part of their task was the elevation of the fugitives in Boston, and it

was owing to their efforts that the caste prejudices were breaking down.

The comparative triumph of the present time, whose signal is that the

black child sits on equal terms in the Boston schools with the white,

was not then achieved, but still, at the period under notice, much had

been done. The cars were open to the negro, the omnibuses, the decent

dwellings, some mechanic occupations, some of the churches; and one or

two colored lawyers had been admitted to the Boston Bar. The theatres

still held out; the “respectable” churches, of course—spite of the black

bishops of the days of Paul and Augustine; commerce, also; the schools

and colleges, likewise; but the Abolitionists were battering on the wall,

and it was breaking, breaking, breaking slowly down.

Suddenly over these struggling tides of light and darkness swept the

black refluent surge of barbarism. In the year 1850, Congress passed the

Fugitive Slave Law. The great Humboldt justly called it “the Webster

law”—for with Webster against it, it either could not have passed, or

having passed, it never could have been executed. Webster hostile to

it, and the North would have risen around him as one man. But the time

had come for the Presidential candidates to make their game, and on the

seventh of March, 1850, Webster made his game. The draft of a speech for

freedom lying in his desk, he stood up in the Senate, spoke a speech for

slavery, which was at war with every other speech of his previous life,

and his game was made. He made it, played it, lost it, died, and lies

cursed with forgiveness, and buried in tears.

A cold, hard Southern tyrant, Mason of Virginia, created the black

statute; a sleek, pleasant Northern traitor, Fillmore of New York, then

sitting in the Presidential chair, unleashed it, and it burst forth in

mischief and ruin, upon the homes of the poor. Such a law! The fugitive

to be haled before a Commissioner; no Judge, no Jury; his former slavery

sworn to by any unknown claimant, he was to be sent into bondage; five

dollars to the Commissioner if he set him free, ten dollars if he made

him a slave. Six months imprisonment, and fifteen hundred dollars fine

to any person who gave a fugitive food to eat, water to drink, a room to

rest in. Happy, free America!

At first Boston was horrified at the law, and aghast at the course of

Webster. But the first shock over, Boston became filled with patriotic

ardor, and the black statute not only rose in favor, but slavery itself

became the theme of eulogy. It was about that period that an eminent

Philadelphia surgeon rushed one morning, with a glowing face, before

the college-class, and holding up a horrid mass before their astonished

eyes, screamed, in a voice trembling with passionate enthusiasm: “Oh,

gentlemen! gentlemen, what a _be-a-u_tiful cancer!” With an enthusiasm

not less rapturous than his, the Whig and Democratic politicians of that

period expatiated upon the charms of the obscene and filthy oligarchic

wen which hung from the neck of the South, and the black, accursed

conglomerated pustule of a Fugitive Slave Law, which inoculated from

it, now deformed the whole face of the North. Slavery was a perfectly

paradisaical and divine institution; agitation against it must cease:

the Fugitive Slave Law was instinct with the purest and noblest

patriotism—the fugitive men, women and children must be hunted down

by it with alacrity, or the South would dissolve the Union. To this

effect the beautiful emasculate eloquence of Everett moved forth in

balanced cadence; to this effect raved rancorous in Bedlam beauty, the

intervolved, inextricable, splendor-spotted snarl and coil of Choate’s

bewildering orations; to this effect, all up and down the land, for two

years, rolled Webster’s dark and orotund malignant thunder. Everywhere

in their train a host of blatherers and roarers spouted and bawled—stop

agitation—execute the Slave Law—save the Union! It was a period of

absolute insanity. The Union was not in the slightest danger—proof of

that, the stocks never fell. The South would no more have dared to

dissolve the Union than a man would dare to swim in the Maelstrom. But

the Southern insanity of tyranny demanded the North for its man-hunting

ground; the northern insanity of avarice yielded the demand to get

southern trade; between the slaver and trader, the politicians’ insanity

of power made its game; and the pretext for all was the salvation of the

Union. Millions of the people cried, “Save the Union!” A thousand presses

reëchoed the cry. An immense majority of the clergy echoed it again from

their pulpits. The things ministers said in defence of slavery and its

black statute were only less incredible than the manner in which they

were received. For instance, the Rev. Dr. Dewey, an eminent divine, was

reported to have declared in a public lecture that he would send his

own mother into slavery to save the Union; a storm of rebuke at once

burst upon him from the anti-slavery people, and this sentiment was not

considered satisfactory even by citizens of the highest respectability:

whereupon Dr. Dewey explained that he had not said he would send his own

mother into slavery to save the Union, but that he had said he would

consent that his own brother or his own son should go into slavery to

save the Union—and the citizens of the highest respectability considered

_this_ sentiment as highly satisfactory! So amidst such talk and such

applause as this, the pro-slavery furore pothered on, and the North was

incessantly urged to enforce the black statute as the price of safety

to the nation, and incessantly reminded of the priceless privileges the

Union secured to us. Perhaps it did—but not least prominent among them

was the priceless privilege of paying the debts of South Carolina, and

the other priceless privilege of hunting men and women on the soil of the

old patriots and Puritans.

Meanwhile the Reign of Terror had begun, and the hellhound of a law was

ravening on its victims. It raged chiefly in the great cities, and from

these the fugitives, their years of safety over, were flying by thousands

to the wild Canadian snows. But the Abolitionists were upon the law.

Upon it Theodore Parker dashed the bolted thunder of his speech. Upon it

burst the inextinguishable Greek fire of eloquence from the fortressed

soul of Wendell Phillips. Upon it, in a word, all the men and women, the

Britomarts and Tancreds of the glorious minority, hurtled like a storm

of swords. The Free Soilers, too, were up, and did gallant service.

Giddings, Seward, Wilson, Burlingame, Mann, Sewall, Chase, Sumner, all

the gentlemen and chevaliers of that league, were in the field. Charles

Sumner shook Faneuil Hall with words that beat with the blood of all

the ages. In New York, Beecher burst upon the monster with tempests of

generous flame, and the Hebraic speech of Cheever fought with the prowess

of the Maccabees. All over the North, in country towns and in some

city pulpits, there were valiant clergymen, whose souls went forth in

arms. The Free Soil presses everywhere, became catapults and mangonels,

showering a hail of invective and argument upon the law. But the monster,

panoplied in legal forms, and girt with a myriad of defenders, was hard

to kill. Beaten from some places, crippled sorely, it still lives, and

even at this hour, in New York, in Philadelphia, and in other cities,

drags down and devours its victims. At the period under notice, its power

was strong in Boston. Boston, in the branding phrase of Theodore Parker,

had gone for kidnapping. Her Webster, her city officers, her aristocracy,

her courts, her prominent newspapers, her traders and her rabble, were

all hostile to the unhappy fugitives. That law, however, was doing

the most powerful anti-slavery service ever done in America. But its

results—for it broke up the Whig party, sowed death in the bones of the

Democratic party, sent Charles Sumner to Congress, made the Republicans a

power in the land, and taught the people a detestation of slavery which

they had never known before—its results were not then fully deposited,

or at least clearly seen; they were still operant to their end; and all

noble hearts were bowed in sickening sorrow, for it seemed as if liberty,

humanity, civilization, all, were going down forever.

It was, then, this hell-dog of a law that had made it no longer safe

for the fugitives in Boston. And who is he who shall undertake to paint

the agony of those men and women? He must dip his pencil in the hues of

earthquake and eclipse who aims to do it. Their years of security were

over. The first news of the passage of the law drove scores of them to

Canada, and day by day they were flying. Numbers of their people had

already been taken from other cities into slavery, when the first slave

case, that of Shadrach, occurred in Boston. Ten or twelve gallant black

men burst into the court-room, and took Shadrach from his foes. Boston

howled. Soon another fugitive, Sims, was dragged before the Commissioner.

No rescue for him; the court-house was ringed with chains, under which

the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, and other Judges, crawled to their

seats; the cutlasses and bludgeons of the Government begirt the captive,

and fifteen hundred Boston gentlemen offered to put muskets to their

shoulders, if desired, to insure his being taken into bondage. “The

Fifteen Hundred Scoundrels,” Wendell Phillips christened this brigade of

wretches, praying that bankruptcy might sit on the ledger of every one

of them. Nine days the Abolitionists and Free-Soilers fought the case,

impeded the Jedburgh justice—the bitter mockery of that infamous trial;

then Sims was environed with cutlasses and pistols, marched, at early

dawn, to the vessel a Boston merchant volunteered for his rendition,

and sent into slavery. The only news of him after that, was that he had

been scourged to death at Savannah. His capture and murder completed

the ghastly alarm of the Boston fugitives. From that hour they lived

in an atmosphere of unimaginable fear and gloom. Frequent reports that

kidnappers were in town, harried many of them off to join the thirty

thousand fugitives who had fled from the tender mercies of America

to seek refuge in the bleak wilds or towns of Canada. Churches were

suspended; business arrested; families were broken up; wives and husbands

separated; fathers had to leave their sons; sons their fathers; parents

their children; for the peril was often immediate, and there was no time

for delay. At every fresh rumor that kidnappers were in town, the colored

people would hurry up from their occupations to their homes—some to fly,

aided by their richer brethren, or by the compassion of the anti-slavery

people—others to gather in the streets in excited discussion—and

others, with that desperate and splendid courage which is one of the

distinctive virtues of the negro, to fortify their dwellings, and prepare

for a death-grapple with their hunters. Thick-crowding cares and fears,

distress, alarm, foreboding, agony, few friends, a thousand foes, this

was their bitter portion.

Such, briefly and faintly sketched, was the state of affairs among these

poor people in the City of the Fugitive at that period. What wonder

men of heart desponded? It was not a despised Abolitionist, but an

Abolitionist whom none despise—the Lord of Civilization standing calm

above the ages, he whose spirit slowly wins the world from wrong; it was

Francis Bacon of Verulam who said that when Commerce dominates in the

State, the State is in its decline. Commerce dominated then. Science,

arts, laws, religion, morality, humanity, justice, liberty, the rights,

the hearts of mankind—all must give way to it. Rapacious and insolent, it

ruled and flourished over all.

Yet there were rays of hope and auguries of better days in Boston even

then, and the new was stirring in the old. Emerson was saturating the

intellectual life of the city, and through it the mind of America, with

the nobleness of his thought. Theodore Parker, gigantesque in learning,

courage, devotion to mankind, less a man than a Commonwealth of noble

powers, was in his pulpit, with a strong and growing hold on the minds

and hearts of the people. The Abolitionists were toiling terribly with

all their splendid might of conscience, their genius and their eloquence,

to rouse the North to a settlement with the Slave Oligarchy. The

Free-Soilers were indefatigably laboring to prevent the base and brutal

Democrats from crowding out free American labor from the Territories

and incoming States with the labor of Congo and Ashantee; and laboring

also to get the Government out of the control of the Slave Power. In a

word, Liberty was fighting her battle with Trade, and even the defeats of

Liberty are victories.

Add to all that a fair ray of hope and promise still lingered at that

period in the air of Boston, cast from a little society of Socialists,

under the leadership of William Henry Channing, which had been dissolved

about two years before. They had lit their torch from the old faith that

Human Life has its Science, discovering which we rear earth’s Golden

Age. It was the old idea of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras; it was the

dream of Campanella and More; it was the divine and deathless purpose of

Bacon, and the holy labor of Fourier. The Socialists in Boston had made

a limited but profound impression with it, which had outlasted their

dissolution. The light of the torch still lived when the torch itself was

extinguished; and amidst the sordor and selfishness and cruelty of the

period, it showed that the tradition and the promise of the Good Time

Coming were immortal.