At the fence I ceased to lead, and we crept near the gin-house from
three sides, warily, though all the chances were that wherever Oliver
lay he was heavy with drink. The Colonel stole in alone. He was lost to
us for, I should say, five minutes; they seemed thirty; then there
pealed upon the stillness an uproarious laugh mingled with oaths and
curses, sounds of a plunge, a struggle, a groan, and old Dismukes
calling "Come, boys, I've got him! Take it easy, take it easy, I've got
him on the floor by the hair of his head; call Gholson!"
Gholson brought the mulatress. In the feeble rays of an old tin lantern,
on some gunny-sacking that lay about the gin-room floor, sat old
Dismukes cross-legged and smiling, with arms folded and revolver
dangling from his right hand, at full cock. On one side crouched Harry
and I, on the other side Gholson and the slave woman. Facing him, half
sat, half knelt Oliver, bound hand and foot, and gagged with his own
knotted handkerchief. The lantern hung from a low beam just above his
face; his eyes blazed across the short interval with the splendor of a
hawk's. The dread issue of the hour seemed all at once to have taken
from his outward aspect the baser signs of his habits and crimes, and I
saw large extenuation for Charlotte's great mistake. From the big
Colonel's face, too, the heaviness of drink was gone, and its smile grew
almost fine as he spoke.
"Ten minutes for prayer is a good while to allow you, my amiable friend;
we ain't heard for our much speaking, are we, Brother Gholson? Still,
we've given you that, and it's half gone. If you don't want the other
half we won't force it on you; we've got that wedding to go to, and I'm
afraid we'll be late."
The bound man sat like a statue. The slave girl went upon her knees and
began to pray for her master,--with whom she had remained after every
other servant on the place had run off to the Federals, supplicating
with a piteous fervor that drew tears down Harry's cheeks. "Humph!" said
the Arkansan, still smiling straight into Oliver's eyes, "she'd better
be thanking God for her freedom, for that's what we're going to give her
to-night; we're going to take her and your poor old crippled father to
the outposts and turn 'em loose, and if either of 'em ever shows up
inside our lines after to-night, we'll hang 'em. You fixed the date of
your death last June, and we're not going to let it be changed; that's
when you died. Ain't it, Gholson? Whoever says it ain't fixes the date
of his own funeral, eh, boys? I take pleasure in telling you we're not
going to hang your father, because I believe in my bones you'd rather
we'd hang him than not. Mr. Gholson, you're our most pious believer in
obedience to orders; well, I'm going to give you one, and if you don't
make a botch of it I sha'n't have to make a botch of you; understand?"
Gholson's lips moved inaudibly, his jaws set hard, and he blanched; but
the Colonel smiled once more: "I've heard that at one time you said, or
implied, that Captain Ferry had betrayed his office, because when he had
a fair chance to shoot this varmint he omitted, for private reasons, to
do it. And I've heard you say, myself, that this isn't your own little
private war. So,--just change seats with me."
They exchanged. The slave girl sank forward upon her face moaning and
sobbing. Harry silently wept. "Now, Gholson, you know me; draw--pistol."
Gholson drew; I grew sick. "Ready,"--Gholson came to a ready and so did
the Colonel; "aim," Gholson slowly aimed, the Colonel kept a ready, and
Oliver, for the first time took his eyes from him and gazed at Gholson.
"Fire!" Gholson fired; Oliver silently fell forward; with a stifled cry
the girl sprang to him and drew his head into her lap, and he softly
straightened out and was still. "Oh, sweet Jesus!" she cried, "Oh,
sweet Jesus!"
The amused Colonel held the lantern close down. "He's all right, Brother
Gholson," was his verdict; the ball had gone to the heart. "Still, just
to clinch the thing, we'll calcine him, gin-house and all."
Gin-house and all, we burned him up. On our horses out in the open road
to the house, we sat, the girl perched behind the Colonel, and watched
the fire mount and whirl and crackle behind the awful black arms of the
cotton-press. The Arkansan shook his head: "It's too fine; 'tain't a
dog's death, after all. Lord! why didn't I think of it in time? we'd
ought to 'a' just dropped him alive into that lint-box and turned the
press down onto him with our horses!"
When the pile was in one great flame we rode to the dwelling, and the
girl was sent in to bid old Lucius begone. The doors stood open, a soft
firelight shone from his room. We saw her form darken his chamber
threshold and halt, and then she wailed: "Oh, Lawd God A'mighty! Oh,
Lawd God A'mighty!"
"Stop that noise! Gholson, hold the horses. Come. Lieutenant, come
Smith, maybe he's killed himself, but it seems too good to be true.
Here, girl, go cram what you can get into a pillow-case, and mount
behind my saddle again; be quick, we're going to burn this hornet's
nest too." Harry and I had already run to the old man's room, and, sure
enough, there lay the aged assassin hideous in his fallen bulk, with his
own bullet in his brain.
Once more the Arkansan shook his head at the leaping flames. "Too good,
too good for either of 'em, entirely; we've let 'em settle at five cents
on the dollar. Here girl,"--he reached back and handed her a wad of
greenbacks,--"here's your dividend; you're a preferred creditor." He had
rifled the pockets of both the dead men, and this was their contents.
"Now, boys, we'll dust, or we'll be getting shot at by some fool or
other. We're leaving a fine horse hid away somewhere hereabouts, but we
can't help that; come on."
In due time the Colonel, with the slave girl, and Harry with her
pillow-case of duds, turned toward Fayette, and Gholson and I toward the
brigade, at Union Church. Then, at last, my old friend and
co-religionist let his wrath loose. He began with a flood of curses,
lifting high a loaded carbine which we had found with Oliver and which
he was ordered to turn in. As he gave his ecstasy utterance it grew; he
brandished the weapon like a Bedouin, dug the rowels into his overspent
beast and curbed him back to his haunches, fisted him about the ears,
gnashed with the pain of his own blows, and howled, and stood up in the
stirrups and cursed again. I had heard church-members curse, but they
were new church-members, camp converts, and their curses were an
infant's cooing, to this. Unwittingly he caused his horse to stumble,
and the torrent of his passion gathered force like rain after a peal of
thunder; he clubbed the gun to bring it down upon the beautiful
creature's head, and when I caught it on the rise he wrenched it from me
as if I were a girl, threw it fifty feet away, sprang to the ground and
caught it up, fired it in the air, and with one blow against a tree sent
the stock flying, threw the barrel underfoot, leapt upon it, tore his
hair and his hat, and cursed and champed and howled. I sat holding his
horse and feeling my satisfaction rise like the mercury in a warmed
thermometer. Contrasting this mood with the cold malignancy and resolve
of his temper in the soldiers' room at Sessions's, I saw, to my delight,
that our secret was forever imprisoned in his breast, gagged and chained
down by the iron of his own inextricable infamy. At dawn he awakened me
that he might persuade me to reject the evidences brought against his
character by his doings and endurings of the night, and that he might
rebuild the old house of words in which habitually he found shelter, too
abysmally self-conceited ever to see his own hypocrisy. We breakfasted
with the "attatchays"; after which he had barely secured my final
assurance that our friendship remained unmarred, when old Dismukes and
Harry mounted at the Colonel's tent, and the old brute, as they trotted
out into the Gallatin road, beckoned me to join them.