The Gentleman From Indiana

B >> Booth Tarkington >> The Gentleman From Indiana

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"I don't believe it! He knew how to take care of himself too well. He'd
have got away from them."

Her father shook his head. "Then why hasn't he turned up? He'd have gone
home after the storm if something bad wasn't the matter."

"But nothing--nothing _that_ bad could have happened. They haven't found--
any--anything."

"But why hasn't he come back, child?"

"Well, he's lying hurt somewhere, that's all."

"Then why haven't they found him?"

"I don't care!" she cried, and choked with the words and tossed her
dishevelled hair from her temples; "it isn't true. Helen won't believe it
--why should I? It's only a few hours since he was right here in our yard,
talking to us all. I won't believe it till they've searched every stick
and stone of Six-Cross-Roads and found him."

"It wasn't the Cross-Roads," said the old gentleman, pushing the table
away and relaxing his limbs on the sofa. "They probably didn't have
anything to do with it. We thought they had at first, but everybody's
about come to believe it was those two devils that he had arrested
yesterday."

"Not the Cross-Roads!" echoed Minnie, and she began to tremble violently.
"Haven't they been out there yet?"

"What use? They are out of it, and they can thank God they are!"

"They are not!" she cried excitedly. "They did it. It was the White-Caps.
We saw them, Helen and I."

The judge got upon his feet with an oath. He had not sworn for years until
that morning. "What's this?" he said sharply.

"I ought to have told you before, but we were so frightened, and--and you
went off in such a rush after Mr. Wiley was here. I never dreamed
everybody wouldn't know it was the Cross-Roads; that they would _think_ of
any one else. And I looked for the scarecrow as soon as it was light and
it was 'way off from where we saw them, and wasn't blown down at all, and
Helen saw them in the field besides--saw all of them----"

He interrupted her. "What do you mean? Try to tell me about it quietly,
child." He laid his hand on her shoulder.

She told him breathlessly (while he grew more and more visibly perturbed
and uneasy, biting his cigar to pieces and groaning at intervals) what she
and Helen had seen in the storm. When she finished he took a few quick
turns about the room with his hands thrust deep in his coat pockets, and
then, charging her to repeat the story to no one, left the house, and,
forgetting his fatigue, rapidly crossed the fields to the point where the
bizarre figures of the night had shown themselves to the two girls at the
window.

The soft ground had been trampled by many feet. The boot-prints pointed to
the northeast. He traced them backward to the southwest through the field,
and saw where they had come from near the road, going northeast. Then,
returning, he climbed the fence and followed them northward through the
next field. From there, the next, beyond the road that was a continuation
of Main Street, stretched to the railroad embankment. The track, raggedly
defined in trampled loam and muddy furrow, bent in a direction which
indicated that its terminus might be the switch where the empty cars had
stood last night, waiting for the one-o'clock freight. Though the fields
had been trampled down in many places by the searching parties, he felt
sure of the direction taken by the Cross-Roads men, and he perceived that
the searchers had mistaken the tracks he followed for those of earlier
parties in the hunt. On the embankment he saw a number of men, walking
west and examining the ground on each side, and a long line of people
following them out from town. He stopped. He held the fate of Six-Cross-
Roads in his hand and he knew it.

He knew that if he spoke, his evidence would damn the Cross-Roads, and
that it meant that more than the White-Caps would be hurt, for the Cross-
Roads would fight. If he had believed that the dissemination of his
knowledge could have helped Harkless, he would have called to the men near
him at once; but he had no hope that the young man was alive. They would
not have dragged him out to their shanties wounded, or as a prisoner; such
a proceeding would have courted detection, and, also, they were not that
kind; they had been "looking for him" a long time, and their one idea was
to kill him.

And Harkless, for all his gentleness, was the sort of man, Briscoe
believed, who would have to be killed before he could be touched. Of one
thing the old gentleman was sure; the editor had not been tied up and
whipped while yet alive. In spite of his easy manners and geniality, there
was a dignity in him that would have made him kill and be killed before
the dirty fingers of a Cross-Roads "White-Cap" could have been laid upon
him in chastisement. A great many good Americans of Carlow who knew him
well always Mistered him as they would have Mistered only an untitled
Morton or Hendricks who might have lived amongst them. He was the only man
the old darky, Uncle Xenophon, had ever addressed as "Marse" since he came
to Plattville, thirty years ago.

Briscoe considered it probable that a few people were wearing bandages, in
the closed shanties over to the west to-day. A thought of the number they
had brought against one man; a picture of the unequal struggle, of the
young fellow he had liked so well, unarmed and fighting hopelessly in a
trap, and a sense of the cruelty of it, made the hot anger surge up in his
breast, and he started on again. Then he stopped once more. Though long
retired from faithful service on the bench, he had been all his life a
serious exponent of the law, and what he went to tell meant lawlessness
that no one could hope to check. He knew the temper of the people; their
long suffering was at an end, and they would go over at last and wipe out
the Cross-Roads. It depended on him. If the mob could be held off over
to-day, if men's minds could cool over night, the law could strike and the
innocent and the hotheaded be spared from suffering. He would wait; he
would lay his information before the sheriff; and Horner would go quietly
with a strong posse, for he would need a strong one. He began to retrace
his steps.

The men on the embankment were walking slowly, bending far over, their
eyes fixed on the ground. Suddenly one of them stood erect and tossed his
arms in the air and shouted loudly. Other men ran to him, and another far
down the track repeated the shout and the gesture to another far in his
rear; this man took it up, and shouted and waved to a fourth man, and so
they passed the signal back to town. There came, almost immediately three
long, loud whistles from a mill near the station, and the embankment grew
black with people pouring out from town, while the searchers came running
from the fields and woods and underbrush on both sides of the railway.

Briscoe paused for the last time; then he began to walk slowly toward the
embankment.

The track lay level and straight, not dimming in the middle distances, the
rails converging to points, both northwest and southeast, in the clean-
washed air, like examples of perspective in a child's drawing-book. About
seventy miles to the west and north lay Rouen; and, in the same direction,
nearly six miles from where the signal was given, the track was crossed by
a road leading directly south to Six-Cross-Roads.

The embankment had been newly ballasted with sand. What had been
discovered was a broad brown stain on the south slope near the top. There
were smaller stains above and below; none beyond it to left or right; and
there were deep boot-prints in the sand. Men were examining the place
excitedly, talking and gesticulating. It was Lige Willetts who had found
it. His horse was tethered to a fence near by, at the end of a lane
through a cornfield. Jared Wiley, the deputy, was talking to a group near
the stain, explaining.

"You see them two must have knowed about the one-o'clock freight, and that
it was to stop here to take on the empty lumber cars. I don't know how
they knowed it, but they did. It was this way: when they dropped from the
window, they beat through the storm, straight for this side-track. At the
same time Mr. Harkless leaves Briscoes' goin' west. It begins to rain. He
cuts across to the railroad to have a sure footing, and strikin' for the
deepo for shelter--near place as any except Briscoes' where he'd said
good-night already and prob'ly don't wish to go back, 'fear of givin'
trouble or keepin' 'em up--anybody can understand that. He comes along,
and gets to where we are precisely at the time _they_ do, them comin' from
town, him strikin' for it. They run right into each other. That's what
happened. They re-_cog_-nized him and raised up on him and let him have
it. What they done it with, I don't know; we took everything in that line
off of 'em; prob'ly used railroad iron; and what they done with him
afterwards we don't know; but we will by night. They'll sweat it out of
'em up at Rouen when they get 'em."

"I reckon maybe some of us might help," remarked Mr. Watts, reflectively.

Jim Bardlock swore a violent oath. "That's the talk!" he shouted. "Ef I
ain't the first man of this crowd to set my foot in Roowun, an' first to
beat in that jail door, an' take 'em out an' hang 'em by the neck till
they're dead, dead, dead, I'm not Town Marshal of Plattville, County of
Carlow, State of Indiana, and the Lord have mercy on our souls!"

Tom Martin looked at the brown stain and quickly turned away; then he went
back slowly to the village. On the way he passed Warren Smith.

"Is it so?" asked the lawyer.

Martin answered with a dry throat. He looked out dimly over the sunlit
fields, and swallowed once or twice. "Yes, it's so. There's a good deal of
it there. Little more than a boy he was." The old fellow passed his seamy
hand over his eyes without concealment. "Peter ain't very bright,
sometimes, it seems to me," he added, brokenly; "overlook Bodeffer and
Fisbee and me and all of us old husks, and--and--" he gulped suddenly,
then finished--"and act the fool and take a boy that's the best we had. I
wish the Almighty would take Peter off the gate; he ain't fit fer it."

When the attorney reached the spot where the crowd was thickest, way was
made for him. The old colored man, Xenophon, approached at the same time,
leaning on a hickory stick and bent very far over, one hand resting on his
hip as if to ease a rusty joint. The negro's age was an incentive to
fable; from his appearance he might have known the prophets, and he wore
that hoary look of unearthly wisdom many decades of superstitious
experience sometimes give to members of his race. His face, so tortured
with wrinkles that it might have been made of innumerable black threads
woven together, was a living mask of the mystery of his blood. Harkless
had once said that Uncle Xenophon had visited heaven before Swedenborg and
hell before Dante. To-day, as he slowly limped over the ties, his eyes
were bright and dry under the solemn lids, and, though his heavy nostrils
were unusually distended in the effort for regular breathing, the deeply
puckered lips beneath them were set firmly.

He stopped and looked at the faces before him. When he spoke his voice was
gentle, and though the tremulousness of age harped on the vocal strings,
it was rigidly controlled. "Kin some kine gelmun," he asked, "please t'be
so good ez t' show de ole main whuh de W'ite-Caips is done shoot Marse
Hawkliss?"

"Here was where it happened, Uncle Zen," answered Wiley, leaning him
forward. "Here is the stain."

Xenophon bent over the spot on the sand, making little odd noises in his
throat. Then he painfully resumed his former position. "Dass his blood,"
he said, in the same gentle, quavering tone. "Dass my bes' frien' whut lay
on de groun' whuh yo staind, gelmun."

There was a pause, and no one spoke.

"Dass whuh day laid 'im an' dass whuh he lie," the old negro continued.
"Dey shot 'im in de fiels. Dey ain' shot 'im hear-yondeh dey drugged 'im,
but dis whuh he lie." He bent over again, then knelt, groaningly, and
placed his hand on the stain, one would have said, as a man might place
his hand over a heart to see if it still beat. He was motionless, with the
air of hearkening.

"Marse, honey, is you gone?" He raised his voice as if calling, "Is you
gone, suh?--Marse?"

He looked up at the circle about him, and, still kneeling, not taking his
hand from the sand, seeming to wait for a sign, to listen for a voice, he
said: "Whafo' you gelmun think de good Lawd summon Marse Hawkliss? Kaze he
de mos' fittes'? You know dat man he ketch me in de cole night, wintuh
'to' lais', stealin' 'is wood. You know whut he done t'de ole thief? Tek
an' bull' up big fiah een ole Zen' shainty; say, 'He'p yo'se'f an'
welcome. Reckon you hongry, too, ain' you, Xenophon?' Tek an' feed me. Tek
an' tek keer o' me ev' since. Ah pump de baith full in de mawin'; mek 'is
bed; pull de weeds out'n of de front walk--dass all. He tek me in. When Ah
aisk 'im ain' he fraid keep ole thief he say, jesso: 'Dass all my fault,
Xenophon; ought look you up long 'go; ought know long 'go you be cole dese
baid nights. Reckon Ahm de thievenest one us two, Xenophon, keepin' all
dis wood stock' up when you got none,' he say, jesso. Tek me in; say he
_lahk_ a thief. Pay me sala'y. Feed me. Dass de main whut de Caips gone
shot lais' night." He raised his head sharply, and the mystery in his
gloomy eyes intensified as they opened wide and stared at the sky,
unseeingly.

"Ise bawn wid a cawl!" he exclaimed, loudly. His twisted frame was braced
to an extreme tension. "Ise bawn wid a cawl! De blood anssuh!"

"It wasn't the Cross-Roads, Uncle Xenophon," said Warren Smith, laying his
hand on the old man's shoulder.

Xenophon rose to his feet. He stretched a long, bony arm straight to the
west, where the Cross-Roads lay; stood rigid and silent, like a seer; then
spoke:

"De men whut shot Marse Hawkliss lies yondeh, hidin' f'um de light o' day.
An' _him_"--he swerved his whole rigid body till the arm pointed
northwest--"he lies yondeh. You won't find him heah. Dey fought 'im een de
fiel's an' dey druggen 'im heah. Dis whim dey lay 'im down. Ise bawn wid
a cawl!"

There were exclamations from the listeners, for Xenophon spoke as one
having authority. Suddenly he turned and pointed his outstretched hand
full at Judge Briscoe.

"An' dass de main," he cried, "dass de main kin tell you Ah speak de
trufe."

Before he was answered, Eph Watts looked at Briscoe keenly and then turned
to Lige Willetts and whispered: "Get on your horse, ride in, and ring the
court-house bell like the devil. Do as I say!"

Tears stood in the judge's eyes. "It is so," he said, solemnly. "He speaks
the truth. I didn't mean to tell it to-day, but somehow--" He paused. "The
hounds!" he cried. "They deserve it! My daughter saw them crossing the
fields in the night--saw them climb the fence, hoods, gowns, and all, a
big crowd of them. She and the lady who is visiting us saw them, saw them
plainly. The lady saw them several times, clear as day, by the flashes of
lightning--the scoundrels were coming this way. They must have been
dragging him with them then. He couldn't have had a show for his life
amongst them. Do what you like--maybe they've got him at the Cross-Roads.
If there's a chance of it--dead or alive--bring him back!"

A voice rang out above the clamor that followed the judge's speech.

"'Bring him back!' God could, maybe, but He won't. Who's travelling my
way? I go west!" Hartley Bowlder had ridden his sorrel up the embankment,
and the horse stood between the rails. There was an angry roar from the
crowd; the prosecutor pleaded and threatened unheeded; and as for the
deputy sheriff, he declared his intention of taking with him all who
wished to go as his posse. Eph Watts succeeded in making himself heard
above the tumult.

"The Square!" he shouted. "Start from the Square. We want everybody, and
we'll need them. We want every one in Carlow to be implicated in this
posse."

"They will be!" shouted a farmer. "Don't you worry about that."

"We want to get into some sort of shape," cried Eph.

"Shape, hell!" said Hartley Bowlder.

There was a hiss and clang and rattle behind him, and a steam whistle
shrieked. The crowd divided, and Hartley's sorrel jumped just in time as
the westbound accommodation rushed through on its way to Rouen. From the
rear platform leaned the sheriff, Horner, waving his hands frantically as
he flew by, but no one understood--or cared--what he said, or, in the
general excitement, even wondered why he was leaving the scene of his duty
at such a time. When the train had dwindled to a dot and disappeared, and
the noise of its rush grew faint, the court-house bell was heard ringing,
and the mob was piling pell-mell into the village to form on the Square.
The judge stood alone on the embankment.

"That settles it," he said aloud, gloomily, watching the last figures. He
took off his hat and pushed back the thick, white hair from his forehead.
"Nothing to do but wait. Might as well go home for that. Blast it!" he
exclaimed, impatiently. "I don't want to go there. It's too hard on the
little girl. If she hadn't come till next week she'd never have known John
Harkless."

CHAPTER XI

JOHN BROWN'S BODY

All morning horsemen had been galloping through Six-Cross-Roads, sometimes
singly, oftener in company. At one-o'clock the last posse passed through
on its return to the county-seat, and after that there was a long,
complete silence, while the miry corners were undisturbed by a single
hoof-beat. No unkempt colt nickered from his musty stall; the sparse young
corn that was used to rasp and chuckle greenly stood rigid in the fields.
Up the Plattville pike despairingly cackled one old hen, with her wabbling
sailor run, smit with a superstitious horror of nothing, in the stillness;
she hid herself in the shadow underneath a rickety barn, and her shrieking
ceased.

Only on the Wimby farm were there signs of life. The old lady who had sent
Harkless roses sat by the window all morning and wiped her eyes, watching
the horsemen ride by; sometimes they would hail her and tell her there was
nothing yet. About two-o'clock, her husband rattled up in a buckboard, and
got out the late, and more authentic, Mr. Wimby's shot-gun, which he
carefully cleaned and oiled, in spite of its hammerless and quite useless
condition, sitting, meanwhile, by the window opposite his wife, and often
looking up from his work to shake his weak fist at his neighbors'
domiciles and creak decrepit curses and denunciations.

But the Cross-Roads was ready. It knew what was coming now. Frightened,
desperate, sullen, it was ready.

The afternoon wore on, and lengthening shadows fell upon a peaceful--one
would have said, a sleeping--country. The sun-dried pike, already dusty,
stretched its serene length between green borders flecked with purple and
yellow and white weedflowers; and the tree shadows were not shade, but
warm blue and lavender glows in the general pervasion of still, bright
light, the sky curving its deep, unburnished, penetrable blue over all,
with no single drift of fleece upon it to be reflected in the creek that
wound along past willow and sycamore. A woodpecker's telegraphy broke the
quiet like a volley of pistol shots.

But far eastward on the pike there slowly developed a soft, white haze. It
grew denser and larger. Gradually it rolled nearer. Dimly behind it could
be discerned a darker, moving nucleus that extended far back upon the
road. A heavy tremor began to stir the air--faint manifold sounds, a
waxing, increasing, multitudinous rumor.

The pike ascended a long, slight slope leading west up to the Cross-Roads.
From a thicket of iron-weed at the foot of this slope was thrust the hard,
lean visage of an undersized girl of fourteen. Her fierce eyes examined
the approaching cloud of dust intently. A redness rose under the burnt
yellow skin and colored the wizened cheeks.

They were coming.

She stepped quickly out of the tangle, and darted up the road, running
with the speed of a fleet little terrier, not opening her lips, not
calling out, but holding her two thin hands high above her head. That was
all. But Birnam wood was come to Dunsinane at last, and the messenger
sped. Out of the weeds in the corners of the snake fence, in the upper
part of the rise, silently lifted the heads of men whose sallowness became
a sickish white as the child flew by.

The mob was carefully organized. They had taken their time and had
prepared everything deliberately, knowing that nothing could stop them. No
one had any thought of concealment; it was all as open as the light of
day, all done in the broad sunshine. Nothing had been determined as to
what was to be done at the Cross-Roads more definite than that the place
was to be wiped out. That was comprehensive enough; the details were quite
certain to occur. They were all on foot, marching in fairly regular ranks.
In front walked Mr. Watts, the man Harkless had abhorred in a public
spirit and befriended in private--to-day he was a hero and a leader,
marching to avenge his professional oppressor and personal brother. Cool,
unruffled, and, to outward vision, unarmed, marching the miles in his
brown frock coat and generous linen, his carefully creased trousers neatly
turned up out of the dust, he led the way. On one side of him were the two
Bowlders, on the other was Lige Willetts, Mr. Watts preserving peace
between the two young men with perfect tact and sang-froid.

They kept good order and a similitude of quiet for so many, except far to
the rear, where old Wilkerson was bringing up the tail of the procession,
dragging a wretched yellow dog by a slip-noose fastened around the poor
cur's protesting neck, the knot carefully arranged under his right ear. In
spite of every command and protest, Wilkerson had marched the whole way
uproariously singing, "John Brown's Body."

The sun was in the west when they came in sight of the Cross-Roads, and
the cabins on the low slope stood out angularly against the radiance
beyond. As they beheld the hated settlement, the heretofore orderly ranks
showed a disposition to depart from the steady advance and rush the
shanties. Willetts, the Bowlders, Parker, Ross, Schofield, and fifty
others did, in fact, break away and set a sharp pace up the slope.

Watts tried to call them back. "What's the use your gettin' killed?" he
shouted.

"Why not?" answered Lige, who, like the others, was increasing his speed
when old "Wimby" rose up suddenly from the roadside ahead of them, and
motioned them frantically to go back. "They're laid out along the fence,
waitin' fer ye," he warned them. "Git out the road. Come by the fields.
Per the Lord's sake, spread!" Then, as suddenly as he had appeared, he
dropped down into the weeds again. Lige and those with him paused, and the
whole body came to a halt while the leaders consulted. There was a sound
of metallic clicking and a thin rattle of steel. From far to the rear came
the voice of old Wilkerson:

"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground,
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground--"

A few near him, as they stood waiting, began to take up the burden of the
song, singing in slow time like a dirge; then those further away took it
up; it spread, reached the leaders; they, too, began to sing, taking off
their hats as they joined in; and soon the whole concourse, solemn,
earnest, and uncovered, was singing--a thunderous requiem for John
Harkless.

The sun was swinging lower and the edges of the world were embroidered
with gold while that deep volume of sound shook the air, the song of a
stern, savage, just cause--sung, perhaps, as some of the ancestors of
these men sang with Hampden before the bristling walls of a hostile city.
It had iron and steel in it. The men lying on their guns in the ambuscade
along the fence heard the dirge rise and grow to its mighty fulness, and
they shivered. One of them, posted nearest the advance, had his rifle
carefully levelled at Lige Willetts, a fair target in the road. When he
heard the singing, he turned to the man next behind him and laughed
harshly: "I reckon we'll see a big jamboree in hell to-night, huh?"

The huge murmur of the chorus expanded, and gathered in rhythmic strength,
and swelled to power, and rolled and thundered across the plain.

"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground,
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground,
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground,
His soul goes marching on!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
His soul goes marching on!"

A gun spat from the higher ground, and Willetts dropped where he stood,
but was up again in a second, with a red line across his forehead where
the ball had grazed his temple. Then the mob spread out like a fan,
hundreds of men climbing the fence and beginning the advance through the
fields, dosing on the ambuscade from both sides. Mr. Watts, wading through
the high grass in the field north of the road, perceived the barrel of a
gun shining from a bush some distance in front of him, and, although in
the same second no weapon was seen in his hand, discharged a revolver at
the bush behind the gun. Instantly ten or twelve men leaped from their
hiding-places along the fences of both fields, and, firing hurriedly and
harmlessly into the scattered ranks of the oncoming mob, broke for the
shelter of the houses, where their fellows were posted. Taken on the
flanks and from the rear, there was but one thing for them to do to keep
from being hemmed in and shot or captured. (They excessively preferred
being shot.) With a wild, high, joyous yell, sounding like the bay of
young hounds breaking into view of their quarry, the Plattville men
followed.

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