The day set by the court, upon which Ephriam Cooley was to pay the
penalty for the crime of which he had been adjudged guilty, was the
thirteenth of June.
Long before that time, the colored population had been aroused to a
lively interest in their convicted brother. There was a movement on
foot to make a fight for his life. The negroes had gained the idea that
the evidence of the woman at whose house Cooley had been arrested,
and who could not be found to give evidence at the trial, would have
cleared him. It was now rumored that she had been located away up in
the East Kentucky mountains, where she had moved the year before. This
story flew like thistle-down in the wind. Negro petitions were got up
calling for mercy and commutation and were poured in upon the governor
from all parts of the state.
Sometimes it was rumored that the governor would commute the sentence
to penal servitude for life. Then the rumor was contradicted, and so it
went on. The governor had an eye to his own reelection and it was the
current belief that he was not averse to doing that which might further
the ends of his own ambition.
It was well on in June and up to this time the governor had arrived at
no decision, or if he had, had given no indication of it.
Elliott was almost prostrate, the prey of a long drawn agony. This
effort to soften the sentence weighed upon his weak nerves so that the
phantom silence of his nights had been peopled by visions. His life
became one oppression and a terror, and rest a thing never to be his.
Again and again, amid the whirl of memory, he pressed the sad accusing
words, “Are you my country’s foe and therefore mine?” upon the inward
wound, tasting, cherishing the smart of them.
He no longer had opinions: his opinions had become sympathies.
There had come a day when, in his room alone, he took a pile of
manuscript from his desk and looked at it long and hard, then held it
to a blaze and watched it burn to a charred tissue on the hearthstone.
It was his book.