MOB SPIRIT OF LICK SKILLET.
At the time of this dramatic period in the life of “Uncle” Alex, the
greatest excitement prevailed elsewhere in Lick Skillet neighborhood,
as Allen Dodson and his neighbors, armed with rifles and led by blood
hounds, pursued the trail of Leslie Duncan, a son of Laura, whom the
reader met in the first chapter of this story, firmly determined to
hang him to the first convenient limb and riddle his body with bullets.
With a pitch-fork he had stabbed Willie Hudson, Allen’s 15 year old
son and inflicted a severe wound in the stomach, for whipping him with
a lash. Besides, in leaving the Dodson farm he had broken a labor
contract which he had made with Mr. Dodson at one dollar per week and
board, and deserved to be captured and shot without the expense and
formality of a trial in a legalized court of justice!
“Unless we make an example of this ‘nigger,’” said the leader of the
party, as they took a short rest, propped up on their guns, “it will
soon come to a pass that we might as well try to control the winds as
these terrifying black brutes. If we don’t subdue them they will subdue
us. That’s what old Ben Tillman says, and he knows. Good God, fellows,
you ought to have heard that old one-eyed rebel speak the other night
at Daleyville. I’d vote for him for any position he might want. I would
even vote to change the form of government in America and make him
Emperor if I only had the chance!”
Long, loud and enthusiastic cheering followed this declaration by
Millard Dodson, the eldest son of Allen, whose eternal enmity for
Leslie was quite well understood by all members of the mob as well as
by others of his neighbors. Those who refused to join in the attempted
capture and assassination said that the boy had a right to defend
himself, and intimated that the quarrel and fight were precipitated by
Millard to rid the community of Leslie who was paying entirely too
much attention to Matilda Deas, a nineteen year old mulatto employed
as cook in the Dodson home, whose affection for Leslie dated back to
their school days together eight years before, to suit Millard. His
wife had on one occasion abandoned him and threatened a separation on
account of the gossip of intimacy between him and Matilda. Leslie, who
had departed in haste after wounding the boy, which incident took place
three hours before it was timed by Millard to come off made good use of
the spare moments at his disposal for eluding the mob, which he knew in
his own mind would follow him, unopposed by the police authorities, and
execute him if his capture could be effected.
With him it was a case of life, with Matilda and children and a happy
home, although he knew the sacred purity and virtue of his betrothed
had been despoiled by the lust of one of the men, at least, seeking
his life; if he could escape this was possible; otherwise it was death
with all the tortures of the damned. So he spurred himself on and
onward in his flight, through tangled woods and swamps, across deep and
swift flowing streams, over hills and high precipices, down through
the valleys and old fashioned fields, stopping only once in ten hours
to rest at a Negro farm home, where he was given some food and a small
bit of change to aid him along on his journey to a place of safety, if
place of safety beyond the grave there was! Twice or thrice he heard
the barking of dogs and the voices of men as nearer and nearer they
approached and his heart almost stopped beating. It developed that
what he did hear was the reports of cattle buyers from the West who
were in the South buying up the “scrub stock” to take to the plains
to fatten for the Chicago packing houses. As fear of being overtaken
and summarily put to death, without a last word or look or kiss from
his sweetheart, would tend to accelerate his speed, so would that joy
he felt over the possibility of escape and final reunion with Matilda
cause him to double and redouble his energies in his onward course in
the mad race for life.
His pursuers discounting the cleverness of the Negro in selecting only
unfrequented roads and abandoned farm-houses, as places of travel and
concealment when a rest became imperative, had lost the trail at the
beginning of the hunt and on the second morning, although they searched
diligently until midnight on the evening before, found the hunters and
their bird of prey some thirty odd miles apart. Dissentions had arisen
among the members over the conduct of the chase at the beginning which
for a while threatened to break up the party, but about this time Ben
Milligan, who was drunk when the party first set out and unable to go
at first call joined them with a gallon of “Old North Carolina Corn,”
and the information that Leslie had been seen only a few hours before
in the Shinburnally neighborhood. Under the stimulation of the whiskey
and the false promises of the leader of the mob to pay the party first
to lay hands on Leslie Duncan the sum of twenty-five dollars, new
momentum was injected into the chase and as long as the whiskey lasted
it was energetic enough to elicit the praise of the most pronounced
grouch among the men.
But miscalculations were again made, as Leslie was many miles from
Shinburnally and was going as fast as his tired legs could carry him on
and on in an opposite direction.
In the meantime, Mrs. Millard Dodson in a rage of indignation over the
report going the rounds of the neighborhood and gaining credence each
day that the ‘yaller woman’ at her home had succeeded in alienating
the affections of her husband completely, had taken advantage of
Millard’s absence to rid her household of the presence of the person
she conceived to be the source of much of her domestic infelicity,
shame and disgrace. With the aid of John Quincy, her eldest son, she
had administered a terrible beating to the woman and at the point of a
gun had marched her three miles from the farm and after commanding her
to go and admonishing her never to show herself in Lick Skillet again
on penalty of death, left her and returned to the house, stopping at
each of the neighbor’s houses to inform them of what she had done.
During her absence from the house, Millard and his party, which had
postponed the chase for want of more whiskey, had returned and were
ransacking the pantries and side boards in the dining room as she
entered, in quest of food which they had gone without for nearly
thirty-six hours.
“Where’s Matilda?” inquired Millard, as his wife suddenly entered the
house.
“That Negro wench is gone” she told him in a calm, unimpassioned
voice, “and gone forever. I have borne the disgrace of the reported
relation between her and you as long as I can, much longer and far more
patiently than I should have been expected to, so I gave her a whipping
which she will never forget and took the gun and marched her away with
such a warning that will be heeded.”
Millard tried hard to conceal the effect which the temporary loss of
his paramour had on him by approving the action of his wife; at the
same time he assured her that the common gossip of the neighborhood
was without the least foundation, and that it would have aided in the
capture had Matilda been retained for a few days longer. But that
indescribable inner consciousness which betrays guilt and convicts the
criminal beyond the hope of escape, except through suicide, and suicide
is not escape, marked the stain of dishonor and shame all over his
countenance with its brush of indelible guilt.
After the departure of the members of the mob, pandemonium broke loose
in the Dodson home over Millard’s attempt to chastise his wife for
running Matilda away, being intercepted by his two daughters and the
energetic pugilistic activities of the wife. When the resounding,
reverberating atmosphere had cleared away the father found two large
bruises on his face and a slight wound in the back from a knife as
evidence, proof and positive, that his was essentially a family of
fighters on the mother’s side at least. Matilda, at this time, was more
than ten miles away and happy as a bird suddenly freed from its cage
except for one thing which burdened her soul as no other event had
ever done since the evening that the beastly Dodson had forced her to
surrender her body to his passion in satisfying his greedy lust, and
that one thing was the ignorance in which she lived of the safety and
security of her lover, Leslie, whom she felt quite sure by or before
that hour had been captured and lynched.
Maybe he had made good his escape. For the latter she had hoped and
prayed with the earnestness, desperation and despair with which she
so long warded off the entreaties and appeals of Dodson when he first
made the advances which finally culminated in the degradation of her
life. Her miserable life was spent in his home only under compulsion,
the compulsion of a labor contract entered into by her in legal form,
a breach of which she knew from the experience of other colored women
employed under such terms and conditions meant only one thing--a term
of penal servitude at the hardest of the most degraded sort of labor!
So she had determined to carry out her part of the contract and at the
end of it marry Leslie and settle down in a home of her own, to bless
it, perhaps, with the voices of children and all the endearments which
the relations of father, mother and child mean to mankind.
But in a world of strange and unfriendly relations, the only sort of
a world which she had ever known, having been but eight years old on
the day of the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, in the great
white-heat of the conflict being waged by the whites of the North and
the whites and the Negroes of the South in that great historical drama
known all over the civilized world as the “Reconstruction Period!” What
blighted hopes they should have been! Meditating over the hopelessness
of her present plight, separated from her lover, whose body at that
moment for all she knew might be dangling at the end of a rope, stung
to the heart by hundreds of bullets from the guns of armed murderers;
and without the reach, comfort and consolation of her father, who was
at that time serving a sentence in the penitentiary for disposing of
a crop under lien, the spirit of despair was rapidly enveloping her
troubled soul, when lo, and behold, there appeared before her no other
a person than Dodson on his swiftest mare with Leslie in tow, tied hard
and fast to his saddle! As unexpected as a bolt of lightning from the
clear blue sky and with the vigor and fierceness of a tiger she sprang
between the horse and the bound boy and began biting and knawing at the
rope with the voracity of a starving lion in contact with its hunk of
meat.
At first Millard drew his pistol and threatened to shoot if she did
not desist but paying no attention at all to his demands she kept on
chewing the rope as if she had not heard, when Leslie managed to secure
his knife from his pocket and get it into her hands with which she cut
the rope in two, and set her lover free. Then facing her traducer and
heaping curse after curse upon him and daring him to shoot, she managed
to distract his attention from Leslie and give the latter time to get
out of reach, which he did, remaining, however, near by in concealment
ready at any moment to spring upon his adversary and engage him in
mortal combat if further harm threatened his sweetheart.
For the purpose of making Leslie’s escape secure. Matilda consented to
return with Dodson on condition that the charges against her lover be
withdrawn and he be allowed to leave the country unmolested by any mob
or officers of the law; and seating herself behind him on his swift,
gay, young horse the two had scarcely begun the journey back home when
the girl spied Leslie in hiding. With the dexterity of a born adroit
sleuth she extracted from one of the pockets in the back of Dodson’s
pants the pistol with which he had failed to frighten her and dropped
it silently in the dust before the eyes of Leslie, all unknown to
Dodson. In the next few moments the latter was looking down the barrel
of his own gun, his teeth chattering as if suddenly attacked by a
chill and his whole body shaking and quivering as if in the throes of
an ague. He very quickly consented to be bound hand and foot and tied
to a tree in the woods some distance from the road-side and forever
abandon the prosecution of Leslie, and permit Matilda to go in peace
and trouble her no more, as the price of his life, now at the mercy
of those whose liberty of body and soul less than an hour before was
entirely in his hands to be dealt with as he wished.
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