The Sheriffs’ Children by Charles W. Chesnutt
Branson County, North Carolina, is in a sequestered district of one of the staidest and most conservative States of the Union. Society in Branson County is almost primitive in its simplicity. Most of the white people own the farms they till, and even before the war there were no very wealthy families to force their neighbors, by comparison, into the category of “poor whites.”
To Branson County, as to most rural communities in the South, the war is the one historical event that overshadows all others. It is the era from which all local chronicles are dated,–births, deaths, marriages, storms, freshets. No description of the life of any Southern community would be perfect that failed to emphasize the all pervading influence of the great conflict.
Yet the fierce tide of war that had rushed through the cities and along the great highways of the country had comparatively speaking but slightly disturbed the sluggish current of life in this region, remote from railroads and navigable streams. To the north in Virginia, to the west in Tennessee, and all along the seaboard the war had raged; but the thunder of its cannon had not disturbed the echoes of Branson County, where the loudest sounds heard were the crack of some hunter’s rifle, the baying of some deep-mouthed hound, or the yodel of some tuneful negro on his way through the pine forest. To the east, Sherman’s army had passed on its march to the sea; but no straggling band of “bummers” had penetrated the confines of Branson County. The war, it is true, had robbed the county of the flower of its young manhood; but the burden of taxation, the doubt and uncertainty of the conflict, and the sting of ultimate defeat, had been borne by the people with an apathy that robbed misfortune of half its sharpness.
The nearest approach to town life afforded by Branson County is found in the little village of Troy, the county seat, a hamlet with a population of four or five hundred.
Ten years make little difference in the appearance of these remote Southern towns. If a railroad is built through one of them, it infuses some enterprise; the social corpse is galvanized by the fresh blood of civilization that pulses along the farthest ramifications of our great system of commercial highways. At the period of which I write, no railroad had come to Troy. If a traveler, accustomed to the bustling life of cities, could have ridden through Troy on a summer day, he might easily have fancied himself in a deserted village. Around him he would have seen weather-beaten houses, innocent of paint, the shingled roofs in many instances covered with a rich growth of moss. Here and there he would have met a razor-backed hog lazily rooting his way along the principal thoroughfare; and more than once he would probably have had to disturb the slumbers of some yellow dog, dozing away the hours in the ardent sunshine, and reluctantly yielding up his place in the middle of the dusty road.
On Saturdays the village presented a somewhat livelier appearance, and the shade trees around the court house square and along Front Street served as hitching-posts for a goodly number of horses and mules and stunted oxen, belonging to the farmer-folk who had come in to trade at the two or three local stores.
A murder was a rare event in Branson County. Every well-informed citizen could tell the number of homicides committed in the county for fifty years back, and whether the slayer, in any given instance, had escaped, either by flight or acquittal, or had suffered the penalty of the law. So, when it became known in Troy early one Friday morning in summer, about ten years after the war, that old Captain Walker, who had served in Mexico under Scott, and had left an arm on the field of Gettysburg, had been foully murdered during the night, there was intense excitement in the village. Business was practically suspended, and the citizens gathered in little groups to discuss the murder, and speculate upon the identity of the murderer. It transpired from testimony at the coroner’s inquest, held during the morning, that a strange mulatto had been seen going in the direction of Captain Walker’s house the night before, and had been met going away from Troy early Friday morning, by a farmer on his way to town. Other circumstances seemed to connect the stranger with the crime. The sheriff organized a posse to search for him, and early in the evening, when most of the citizens of Troy were at supper, the suspected man was brought in and lodged in the county jail.
By the following morning the news of the capture had spread to the farthest limits of the county. A much larger number of people than usual came to town that Saturday,–bearded men in straw hats and blue homespun shirts, and butternut trousers of great amplitude of material and vagueness of outline; women in homespun frocks and slat-bonnets, with faces as expressionless as the dreary sandhills which gave them a meagre sustenance.
The murder was almost the sole topic of conversation. A steady stream of curious observers visited the house of mourning, and gazed upon the rugged face of the old veteran, now stiff and cold in death; and more than one eye dropped a tear at the remembrance of the cheery smile, and the joke–sometimes superannuated, generally feeble, but always good-natured–with which the captain had been wont to greet his acquaintances. There was a growing sentiment of anger among these stern men, toward the murderer who had thus cut down their friend, and a strong feeling that ordinary justice was too slight a punishment for such a crime.
Toward noon there was an informal gathering of citizens in Dan Tyson’s store.
“I hear it ‘lowed that Square Kyahtah’s too sick ter hol’ co’te this evenin’,” said one, “an’ that the purlim’nary hearin’ ‘ll haf ter go over ‘tel nex’ week.”
A look of disappointment went round the crowd.
“Hit ‘s the durndes’, meanes’ murder ever committed in this caounty,” said another, with moody emphasis.
“I s’pose the nigger ‘lowed the Cap’n had some green-backs,” observed a third speaker.
“The Cap’n,” said another, with an air of superior information, “has left two bairls of Confedrit money, which he ‘spected ‘ud be good some day er nuther.”
This statement gave rise to a discussion of the speculative value of Confederate money; but in a little while the conversation returned to the murder.
“Hangin’ air too good fer the murderer,” said one; “he oughter be burnt, stidier bein’ hung.”
There was an impressive pause at this point, during which a jug of moonlight whiskey went the round of the crowd.
“Well,” said a round-shouldered farmer, who, in spite of his peaceable expression and faded gray eye, was known to have been one of the most daring followers of a rebel guerrilla chieftain, “what air yer gwine ter do about it? Ef you fellers air gwine ter set down an’ let a wuthless nigger kill the bes’ white man in Branson, an’ not say nuthin’ ner do nuthin’, I ‘ll move outen the caounty.”
This speech gave tone and direction to the rest of the conversation. Whether the fear of losing the round-shouldered farmer operated to bring about the result or not is immaterial to this narrative; but, at all events, the crowd decided to lynch the negro. They agreed that this was the least that could be done to avenge the death of their murdered friend, and that it was a becoming way in which to honor his memory. They had some vague notions of the majesty of the law and the rights of the citizen, but in the passion of the moment these sunk into oblivion; a white man had been killed by a negro.
“The Cap’n was an ole sodger,” said one of his friends solemnly. “He ‘ll sleep better when he knows that a co’te-martial has be’n hilt an’ jestice done.”
By agreement the lynchers were to meet at Tyson’s store at five o’clock in the afternoon, and proceed thence to the jail, which was situated down the Lumberton Dirt Road (as the old turnpike antedating the plank-road was called), about half a mile south of the court-house. When the preliminaries of the lynching had been arranged, and a committee appointed to manage the affair, the crowd dispersed, some to go to their dinners, and some to secure recruits for the lynching party.
It was twenty minutes to five o’clock, when an excited negro, panting and perspiring, rushed up to the back door of Sheriff Campbell’s dwelling, which stood at a little distance from the jail and somewhat farther than the latter building from the court-house. A turbaned colored woman came to the door in response to the negro’s knock.
“Hoddy, Sis’ Nance.”
“Hoddy, Brer Sam.”
“Is de shurff in,” inquired the negro.
“Yas, Brer Sam, he ‘s eatin’ his dinner,” was the answer.
“Will yer ax ‘im ter step ter de do’ a minute, Sis’ Nance?”
The woman went into the dining-room, and a moment later the sheriff came to the door. He was a tall, muscular man, of a ruddier complexion than is usual among Southerners. A pair of keen, deep-set gray eyes looked out from under bushy eyebrows, and about his mouth was a masterful expression, which a full beard, once sandy in color, but now profusely sprinkled with gray, could not entirely conceal. The day was hot; the sheriff had discarded his coat and vest, and had his white shirt open at the throat.
“What do you want, Sam?” he inquired of the negro, who stood hat in hand, wiping the moisture from his face with a ragged shirt-sleeve.
“Shurff, dey gwine ter hang de pris’ner w’at ‘s lock’ up in de jail. Dey ‘re comin’ dis a-way now. I wuz layin’ down on a sack er corn down at de sto’, behine a pile er flour-bairls, w’en I hearn Doc’ Cain en Kunnel Wright talkin’ erbout it. I slip’ outen de back do’, en run here as fas’ as I could. I hearn you say down ter de sto’ once’t dat you would n’t let nobody take a pris’ner ‘way fum you widout walkin’ over yo’ dead body, en I thought I ‘d let you know ‘fo’ dey come, so yer could pertec’ de pris’ner.”
The sheriff listened calmly, but his face grew firmer, and a determined gleam lit up his gray eyes. His frame grew more erect, and he unconsciously assumed the attitude of a soldier who momentarily expects to meet the enemy face to face.
“Much obliged, Sam,” he answered. “I ‘ll protect the prisoner. Who ‘s coming?”
“I dunno who-all is comin’,” replied the negro. “Dere ‘s Mistah McSwayne, en Doc’ Cain, en Maje’ McDonal’, en Kunnel Wright, en a heap er yuthers. I wuz so skeered I done furgot mo’ d’n half un em. I spec’ dey mus’ be mos’ here by dis time, so I ‘ll git outen de way, fer I don’ want nobody fer ter think I wuz mix’ up in dis business.” The negro glanced nervously down the road toward the town, and made a movement as if to go away.
“Won’t you have some dinner first?” asked the sheriff.
The negro looked longingly in at the open door, and sniffed the appetizing odor of boiled pork and collards.
“I ain’t got no time fer ter tarry, Shurff,” he said, “but Sis’ Nance mought gin me sump’n I could kyar in my han’ en eat on de way.”
A moment later Nancy brought him a huge sandwich of split corn-pone, with a thick slice of fat bacon inserted between the halves, and a couple of baked yams. The negro hastily replaced his ragged hat on his head, dropped the yams in the pocket of his capacious trousers, and, taking the sandwich in his hand, hurried across the road and disappeared in the woods beyond.
The sheriff rentered the house, and put on his coat and hat. He then took down a double-barreled shotgun and loaded it with buckshot. Filling the chambers of a revolver with fresh cartridges, he slipped it into the pocket of the sack-coat which he wore.
A comely young woman in a calico dress watched these proceedings with anxious surprise.
“Where are you going, father?” she asked. She had not heard the conversation with the negro.
“I am goin’ over to the jail,” responded the sheriff. “There ‘s a mob comin’ this way to lynch the nigger we ‘ve got locked up. But they won’t do it,” he added, with emphasis.
“Oh, father! don’t go!” pleaded the girl, clinging to his arm; “they ‘ll shoot you if you don’t give him up.”
“You never mind me, Polly,” said her father reassuringly, as he gently unclasped her hands from his arm. “I ‘ll take care of myself and the prisoner, too. There ain’t a man in Branson County that would shoot me. Besides, I have faced fire too often to be scared away from my duty. You keep close in the house,” he continued, “and if any one disturbs you just use the old horse-pistol in the top bureau drawer. It ‘s a little old-fashioned, but it did good work a few years ago.”
The young girl shuddered at this sanguinary allusion, but made no further objection to her father’s departure.
The sheriff of Branson was a man far above the average of the community in wealth, education, and social position. His had been one of the few families in the county that before the war had owned large estates and numerous slaves. He had graduated at the State University at Chapel Hill, and had kept up some acquaintance with current literature and advanced thought. He had traveled some in his youth, and was looked up to in the county as an authority on all subjects connected with the outer world. At first an ardent supporter of the Union, he had opposed the secession movement in his native State as long as opposition availed to stem the tide of public opinion. Yielding at last to the force of circumstances, he had entered the Confederate service rather late in the war, and served with distinction through several campaigns, rising in time to the rank of colonel. After the war he had taken the oath of allegiance, and had been chosen by the people as the most available candidate for the office of sheriff, to which he had been elected without opposition. He had filled the office for several terms, and was universally popular with his constituents.
Colonel or Sheriff Campbell, as he was indifferently called, as the military or civil title happened to be most important in the opinion of the person addressing him, had a high sense of the responsibility attaching to his office. He had sworn to do his duty faithfully, and he knew what his duty was, as sheriff, perhaps more clearly than he had apprehended it in other passages of his life. It was, therefore, with no uncertainty in regard to his course that he prepared his weapons and went over to the jail. He had no fears for Polly’s safety.
The sheriff had just locked the heavy front door of the jail behind him when a half dozen horsemen, followed by a crowd of men on foot, came round a bend in the road and drew near the jail. They halted in front of the picket fence that surrounded the building, while several of the committee of arrangements rode on a few rods farther to the sheriff’s house. One of them dismounted and rapped on the door with his riding-whip.
“Is the sheriff at home?” he inquired.
“No, he has just gone out,” replied Polly, who had come to the door.
“We want the jail keys,” he continued.
“They are not here,” said Polly. “The sheriff has them himself.” Then she added, with assumed indifference, “He is at the jail now.”
The man turned away, and Polly went into the front room, from which she peered anxiously between the slats of the green blinds of a window that looked toward the jail. Meanwhile the messenger returned to his companions and announced his discovery. It looked as though the sheriff had learned of their design and was preparing to resist it.
One of them stepped forward and rapped on the jail door.
“Well, what is it?” said the sheriff, from within.
“We want to talk to you, Sheriff,” replied the spokesman.
There was a little wicket in the door; this the sheriff opened, and answered through it.
“All right, boys, talk away. You are all strangers to me, and I don’t know what business you can have.” The sheriff did not think it necessary to recognize anybody in particular on such an occasion; the question of identity sometimes comes up in the investigation of these extra-judicial executions.
“We ‘re a committee of citizens and we want to get into the jail.”
“What for? It ain’t much trouble to get into jail. Most people want to keep out.”
The mob was in no humor to appreciate a joke, and the sheriff’s witticism fell dead upon an unresponsive audience.
“We want to have a talk with the nigger that killed Cap’n Walker.”
“You can talk to that nigger in the court-house, when he ‘s brought out for trial. Court will be in session here next week. I know what you fellows want, but you can’t get my prisoner to-day. Do you want to take the bread out of a poor man’s mouth? I get seventy-five cents a day for keeping this prisoner, and he ‘s the only one in jail. I can’t have my family suffer just to please you fellows.”
One or two young men in the crowd laughed at the idea of Sheriff Campbell’s suffering for want of seventy-five cents a day; but they were frowned into silence by those who stood near them.
“Ef yer don’t let us in,” cried a voice, “we ‘ll bu’s’ the do’ open.”
“Bust away,” answered the sheriff, raising his voice so that all could hear. “But I give you fair warning. The first man that tries it will be filled with buckshot. I ‘m sheriff of this county; I know my duty, and I mean to do it.”
“What ‘s the use of kicking, Sheriff,” argued one of the leaders of the mob. “The nigger is sure to hang anyhow; he richly deserves it; and we ‘ve got to do something to teach the niggers their places, or white people won’t be able to live in the county.”
“There ‘s no use talking, boys,” responded the sheriff. “I ‘m a white man outside, but in this jail I ‘m sheriff; and if this nigger ‘s to be hung in this county, I propose to do the hanging. So you fellows might as well right-about-face, and march back to Troy. You ‘ve had a pleasant trip, and the exercise will be good for you. You know me. I ‘ve got powder and ball, and I ‘ve faced fire before now, with nothing between me and the enemy, and I don’t mean to surrender this jail while I ‘m able to shoot.” Having thus announced his determination, the sheriff closed and fastened the wicket, and looked around for the best position from which to defend the building.
The crowd drew off a little, and the leaders conversed together in low tones.
The Branson County jail was a small, two-story brick building, strongly constructed, with no attempt at architectural ornamentation. Each story was divided into two large cells by a passage running from front to rear. A grated iron door gave entrance from the passage to each of the four cells. The jail seldom had many prisoners in it, and the lower windows had been boarded up. When the sheriff had closed the wicket, he ascended the steep wooden stairs to the upper floor. There was no window at the front of the upper passage, and the most available position from which to watch the movements of the crowd below was the front window of the cell occupied by the solitary prisoner.
The sheriff unlocked the door and entered the cell. The prisoner was crouched in a corner, his yellow face, blanched with terror, looking ghastly in the semi-darkness of the room. A cold perspiration had gathered on his forehead, and his teeth were chattering with affright.
“For God’s sake, Sheriff,” he murmured hoarsely, “don’t let ‘em lynch me; I did n’t kill the old man.”
The sheriff glanced at the cowering wretch with a look of mingled contempt and loathing.
“Get up,” he said sharply. “You will probably be hung sooner or later, but it shall not be to-day, if I can help it. I ‘ll unlock your fetters, and if I can’t hold the jail, you ‘ll have to make the best fight you can. If I ‘m shot, I ‘ll consider my responsibility at an end.”
There were iron fetters on the prisoner’s ankles, and handcuffs on his wrists. These the sheriff unlocked, and they fell clanking to the floor.
“Keep back from the window,” said the sheriff. “They might shoot if they saw you.”
The sheriff drew toward the window a pine bench which formed a part of the scanty furniture of the cell, and laid his revolver upon it. Then he took his gun in hand, and took his stand at the side of the window where he could with least exposure of himself watch the movements of the crowd below.
The lynchers had not anticipated any determined resistance. Of course they had looked for a formal protest, and perhaps a sufficient show of opposition to excuse the sheriff in the eye of any stickler for legal formalities. They had not however come prepared to fight a battle, and no one of them seemed willing to lead an attack upon the jail. The leaders of the party conferred together with a good deal of animated gesticulation, which was visible to the sheriff from his outlook, though the distance was too great for him to hear what was said. At length one of them broke away from the group, and rode back to the main body of the lynchers, who were restlessly awaiting orders.
“Well, boys,” said the messenger, “we ‘ll have to let it go for the present. The sheriff says he ‘ll shoot, and he ‘s got the drop on us this time. There ain’t any of us that want to follow Cap’n Walker jest yet. Besides, the sheriff is a good fellow, and we don’t want to hurt ‘im. But,” he added, as if to reassure the crowd, which began to show signs of disappointment, “the nigger might as well say his prayers, for he ain’t got long to live.”
There was a murmur of dissent from the mob, and several voices insisted that an attack be made on the jail. But pacific counsels finally prevailed, and the mob sullenly withdrew.
The sheriff stood at the window until they had disappeared around the bend in the road. He did not relax his watchfulness when the last one was out of sight. Their withdrawal might be a mere feint, to be followed by a further attempt. So closely, indeed, was his attention drawn to the outside, that he neither saw nor heard the prisoner creep stealthily across the floor, reach out his hand and secure the revolver which lay on the bench behind the sheriff, and creep as noiselessly back to his place in the corner of the room.
A moment after the last of the lynching party had disappeared there was a shot fired from the woods across the road; a bullet whistled by the window and buried itself in the wooden casing a few inches from where the sheriff was standing. Quick as thought, with the instinct born of a semi-guerrilla army experience, he raised his gun and fired twice at the point from which a faint puff of smoke showed the hostile bullet to have been sent. He stood a moment watching, and then rested his gun against the window, and reached behind him mechanically for the other weapon. It was not on the bench. As the sheriff realized this fact, he turned his head and looked into the muzzle of the revolver.
“Stay where you are, Sheriff,” said the prisoner, his eyes glistening, his face almost ruddy with excitement.
The sheriff mentally cursed his own carelessness for allowing him to be caught in such a predicament. He had not expected anything of the kind. He had relied on the negro’s cowardice and subordination in the presence of an armed white man as a matter of course. The sheriff was a brave man, but realized that the prisoner had him at an immense disadvantage. The two men stood thus for a moment, fighting a harmless duel with their eyes.
“Well, what do you mean to do?” asked the sheriff with apparent calmness.
“To get away, of course,” said the prisoner, in a tone which caused the sheriff to look at him more closely, and with an involuntary feeling of apprehension; if the man was not mad, he was in a state of mind akin to madness, and quite as dangerous. The sheriff felt that he must speak the prisoner fair, and watch for a chance to turn the tables on him. The keen-eyed, desperate man before him was a different being altogether from the groveling wretch who had begged so piteously for life a few minutes before.
At length the sheriff spoke:—-
“Is this your gratitude to me for saving your life at the risk of my own? If I had not done so, you would now be swinging from the limb of some neighboring tree.”
“True,” said the prisoner, “you saved my life, but for how long? When you came in, you said Court would sit next week. When the crowd went away they said I had not long to live. It is merely a choice of two ropes.”
“While there ‘s life there ‘s hope,” replied the sheriff. He uttered this commonplace mechanically, while his brain was busy in trying to think out some way of escape. “If you are innocent you can prove it.”
The mulatto kept his eye upon the sheriff. “I did n’t kill the old man,” he replied; “but I shall never be able to clear myself. I was at his house at nine o’clock. I stole from it the coat that was on my back when I was taken. I would be convicted, even with a fair trial, unless the real murderer were discovered beforehand.”
The sheriff knew this only too well. While he was thinking what argument next to use, the prisoner continued:—-
“Throw me the keys–no, unlock the door.”
The sheriff stood a moment irresolute. The mulatto’s eye glittered ominously. The sheriff crossed the room and unlocked the door leading into the passage.
“Now go down and unlock the outside door.”
The heart of the sheriff leaped within him. Perhaps he might make a dash for liberty, and gain the outside. He descended the narrow stairs, the prisoner keeping close behind him.
The sheriff inserted the huge iron key into the lock. The rusty bolt yielded slowly. It still remained for him to pull the door open.
“Stop!” thundered the mulatto, who seemed to divine the sheriff’s purpose. “Move a muscle, and I ‘ll blow your brains out.”
The sheriff obeyed; he realized that his chance had not yet come.
“Now keep on that side of the passage, and go back upstairs.”
Keeping the sheriff under cover of the revolver, the mulatto followed him up the stairs. The sheriff expected the prisoner to lock him into the cell and make his own escape. He had about come to the conclusion that the best thing he could do under the circumstances was to submit quietly, and take his chances of recapturing the prisoner after the alarm had been given. The sheriff had faced death more than once upon the battlefield. A few minutes before, well armed, and with a brick wall between him and them he had dared a hundred men to fight; but he felt instinctively that the desperate man confronting him was not to be trifled with, and he was too prudent a man to risk his life against such heavy odds. He had Polly to look after, and there was a limit beyond which devotion to duty would be quixotic and even foolish.
“I want to get away,” said the prisoner, “and I don’t want to be captured; for if I am I know I will be hung on the spot. I am afraid,” he added somewhat reflectively, “that in order to save myself I shall have to kill you.”
“Good God!” exclaimed the sheriff in involuntary terror; “you would not kill the man to whom you owe your own life.”
“You speak more truly than you know,” replied the mulatto. “I indeed owe my life to you.”
The sheriff started, he was capable of surprise, even in that moment of extreme peril. “Who are you?” he asked in amazement.
“Tom, Cicely’s son,” returned the other. He had closed the door and stood talking to the sheriff through the grated opening. “Don’t you remember Cicely–Cicely whom you sold, with her child, to the speculator on his way to Alabama?”
The sheriff did remember. He had been sorry for it many a time since. It had been the old story of debts, mortgages, and bad crops. He had quarreled with the mother. The price offered for her and her child had been unusually large, and he had yielded to the combination of anger and pecuniary stress.
“Good God!” he gasped, “you would not murder your own father?”
“My father?” replied the mulatto. “It were well enough for me to claim the relationship, but it comes with poor grace from you to ask anything by reason of it. What father’s duty have you ever performed for me? Did you give me your name, or even your protection? Other white men gave their colored sons freedom and money, and sent them to the free States. You sold me to the rice swamps.”
“I at least gave you the life you cling to,” murmured the sheriff.
“Life?” said the prisoner, with a sarcastic laugh. “What kind of a life? You gave me your own blood, your own features,–no man need look at us together twice to see that,–and you gave me a black mother. Poor wretch! She died under the lash, because she had enough womanhood to call her soul her own. You gave me a white man’s spirit, and you made me a slave, and crushed it out.”
“But you are free now,” said the sheriff. He had not doubted, could not doubt, the mulatto’s word. He knew whose passions coursed beneath that swarthy skin and burned in the black eyes opposite his own. He saw in this mulatto what he himself might have become had not the safeguards of parental restraint and public opinion been thrown around him.
“Free to do what?” replied the mulatto. “Free in name, but despised and scorned and set aside by the people to whose race I belong far more than to my mother’s.”
“There are schools,” said the sheriff. “You have been to school.” He had noticed that the mulatto spoke more eloquently and used better language than most Branson County people.
“I have been to school, and dreamed when I went that it would work some marvelous change in my condition. But what did I learn? I learned to feel that no degree of learning or wisdom will change the color of my skin and that I shall always wear what in my own country is a badge of degradation. When I think about it seriously I do not care particularly for such a life. It is the animal in me, not the man, that flees the gallows. I owe you nothing,” he went on, “and expect nothing of you; and it would be no more than justice if I should avenge upon you my mother’s wrongs and my own. But still I hate to shoot you; I have never yet taken human life–for I did not kill the old captain. Will you promise to give no alarm and make no attempt to capture me until morning, if I do not shoot?”
So absorbed were the two men in their colloquy and their own tumultuous thoughts that neither of them had heard the door below move upon its hinges. Neither of them had heard a light step come stealthily up the stairs, nor seen a slender form creep along the darkening passage toward the mulatto.
The sheriff hesitated. The struggle between his love of life and his sense of duty was a terrific one. It may seem strange that a man who could sell his own child into slavery should hesitate at such a moment, when his life was trembling in the balance. But the baleful influence of human slavery poisoned the very fountains of life, and created new standards of right. The sheriff was conscientious; his conscience had merely been warped by his environment. Let no one ask what his answer would have been; he was spared the necessity of a decision.
“Stop,” said the mulatto, “you need not promise. I could not trust you if you did. It is your life for mine; there is but one safe way for me; you must die.”
He raised his arm to fire, when there was a flash–a report from the passage behind him. His arm fell heavily at his side, and the pistol dropped at his feet.
The sheriff recovered first from his surprise, and throwing open the door secured the fallen weapon. Then seizing the prisoner he thrust him into the cell and locked the door upon him; after which he turned to Polly, who leaned half-fainting against the wall, her hands clasped over her heart.
“Oh, father, I was just in time!” she cried hysterically, and, wildly sobbing, threw herself into her father’s arms.
“I watched until they all went away,” she said. “I heard the shot from the woods and I saw you shoot. Then when you did not come out I feared something had happened, that perhaps you had been wounded. I got out the other pistol and ran over here. When I found the door open, I knew something was wrong, and when I heard voices I crept upstairs, and reached the top just in time to hear him say he would kill you. Oh, it was a narrow escape!”
When she had grown somewhat calmer, the sheriff left her standing there and went back into the cell. The prisoner’s arm was bleeding from a flesh wound. His bravado had given place to a stony apathy. There was no sign in his face of fear or disappointment or feeling of any kind. The sheriff sent Polly to the house for cloth, and bound up the prisoner’s wound with a rude skill acquired during his army life.
“I ‘ll have a doctor come and dress the wound in the morning,” he said to the prisoner. “It will do very well until then, if you will keep quiet. If the doctor asks you how the wound was caused, you can say that you were struck by the bullet fired from the woods. It would do you no good to have it known that you were shot while attempting to escape.”
The prisoner uttered no word of thanks or apology, but sat in sullen silence. When the wounded arm had been bandaged, Polly and her father returned to the house.
The sheriff was in an unusually thoughtful mood that evening. He put salt in his coffee at supper, and poured vinegar over his pancakes. To many of Polly’s questions he returned random answers. When he had gone to bed he lay awake for several hours.
In the silent watches of the night, when he was alone with God, there came into his mind a flood of unaccustomed thoughts. An hour or two before, standing face to face with death, he had experienced a sensation similar to that which drowning men are said to feel–a kind of clarifying of the moral faculty, in which the veil of the flesh, with its obscuring passions and prejudices, is pushed aside for a moment, and all the acts of one’s life stand out, in the clear light of truth, in their correct proportions and relations,–a state of mind in which one sees himself as God may be supposed to see him. In the reaction following his rescue, this feeling had given place for a time to far different emotions. But now, in the silence of midnight, something of this clearness of spirit returned to the sheriff. He saw that he had owed some duty to this son of his,–that neither law nor custom could destroy a responsibility inherent in the nature of mankind. He could not thus, in the eyes of God at least, shake off the consequences of his sin. Had he never sinned, this wayward spirit would never have come back from the vanished past to haunt him. As these thoughts came, his anger against the mulatto died away, and in its place there sprang up a great pity. The hand of parental authority might have restrained the passions he had seen burning in the prisoner’s eyes when the desperate man spoke the words which had seemed to doom his father to death. The sheriff felt that he might have saved this fiery spirit from the slough of slavery; that he might have sent him to the free North, and given him there, or in some other land, an opportunity to turn to usefulness and honorable pursuits the talents that had run to crime, perhaps to madness; he might, still less, have given this son of his the poor simulacrum of liberty which men of his caste could possess in a slave-holding community; or least of all, but still something, he might have kept the boy on the plantation, where the burdens of slavery would have fallen lightly upon him.
The sheriff recalled his own youth. He had inherited an honored name to keep untarnished; he had had a future to make; the picture of a fair young bride had beckoned him on to happiness. The poor wretch now stretched upon a pallet of straw between the brick walls of the jail had had none of these things,–no name, no father, no mother–in the true meaning of motherhood,–and until the past few years no possible future, and then one vague and shadowy in its outline, and dependent for form and substance upon the slow solution of a problem in which there were many unknown quantities.
From what he might have done to what he might yet do was an easy transition for the awakened conscience of the sheriff. It occurred to him, purely as a hypothesis, that he might permit his prisoner to escape; but his oath of office, his duty as sheriff, stood in the way of such a course, and the sheriff dismissed the idea from his mind. He could, however, investigate the circumstances of the murder, and move Heaven and earth to discover the real criminal, for he no longer doubted the prisoner’s innocence; he could employ counsel for the accused, and perhaps influence public opinion in his favor. An acquittal once secured, some plan could be devised by which the sheriff might in some degree atone for his crime against this son of his–against society–against God.
When the sheriff had reached this conclusion he fell into an unquiet slumber, from which he awoke late the next morning.
He went over to the jail before breakfast and found the prisoner lying on his pallet, his face turned to the wall; he did not move when the sheriff rattled the door.
“Good-morning,” said the latter, in a tone intended to waken the prisoner.
There was no response. The sheriff looked more keenly at the recumbent figure; there was an unnatural rigidity about its attitude.
He hastily unlocked the door and, entering the cell, bent over the prostrate form. There was no sound of breathing; he turned the body over–it was cold and stiff. The prisoner had torn the bandage from his wound and bled to death during the night. He had evidently been dead several hours.
