The Conquest of America Part 26

"What thing? What is it she wants you to do?"

"Get rid of you to begin with," he snapped out. "It's easy enough. We go to the prison--this key lets us in. I leave you in the cell with Edison and--you saw that package in my room? It's a bomb. I explode it under the cell and--there you are!"

"You promised to do this?"

"Yes! I'm to get five thousand dollars."

"But you didn't do it, you stopped in time," I said soothingly. "You've told me the truth now and--we'll see what we can do about it."

He scowled at me.

"You're crazy. We can't do anything about it. The Germans are in control of Richmond. They're watching this hotel."

Ryerson glanced at his watch.

"Half-past three. I have four hours to live."

"What!"

"They'll come for me at seven o'clock when they find I haven't carried out my orders, and I'll be taken to the prison yard and--shot or--hanged.

It's the best thing that can happen to me, but--I'm sorry for you."

"See here, Ryerson," I broke in. "If you're such a rotten coward and liar and sneak as you say you are, what are you doing here? Why didn't you go ahead with your bomb business?"

He sat rocking back and forth on the side of the bed, with his head bent forward, his eyes closed and his lips moving in a sort of thick mumbling.

"I've tried to, but--it's my sister. G.o.d! She won't leave me alone. She said she'd be praying for me and--all night I've seen her face. I've seen her when we were kids together, playing around in the old home--with Mother there and--oh, Christ!"

I pa.s.s over a desperate hour that followed. Ryerson tried to kill himself and, when I took the weapon from him, he begged me to put an end to his sufferings. Never until now had I realised how hard is the way of the transgressor.

I have often wondered how this terrible night would have ended had not Providence suddenly intervened. The city hall clock had just tolled five when there came a volley of shots from the direction of Monument Avenue.

"What's that?" cried my poor friend, his haggard face lighting.

We rushed to the window, where the pink and purple lights of dawn were spreading over the spires and gardens of the sleeping city.

The shots grew in volume and presently we heard the dull boom of a siege gun, then another and another.

"It's a battle! They're bombarding the city. Look!" He pointed towards Capitol Square. "They've struck the tower of the city hall. And over there! The gas works!" He swept his arm towards an angry red glow that showed where another sh.e.l.l had found its target.

I shall not attempt to describe the burning of Richmond (for the third time in its history) on this fateful day, January 20th, 1922, nor to detail the horrors that attended the destruction of the enemy's force of occupation. Historians are agreed that the Germans must be held blameless for firing on the city, since they naturally supposed this daybreak attack upon their own lines to be an effort of the American army and retaliated, as best they could, with their heavy guns.

It was days before the whole truth was known, although I cabled the London _Times_ that night, explaining that the American army had nothing to do with this attack, which was the work of an unorganised and irresponsible band of ten or twelve thousand mountaineers gathered from the wilds of Virginia, North Carolina and Kentucky and Tennessee.

They were moon-shiners, feudists, hilly-billies, small farmers and basket-makers, men of lean and saturnine appearance, some of them horse thieves, pirates of the forest who cared little for the laws of G.o.d or man and fought as naturally as they breathed.

These men came without flags, without officers, without uniforms. They crawled on their bellies and carried logs as shields. They knew and cared nothing for military tactics and their strategy was that of the wild Indian. They fought to kill and they took no prisoners. It seems that a Virginia mountain girl had been wronged by a German officer and that was enough.

For weeks the mountaineers had been advancing stealthily through the wilderness, pushing on by night, hiding in the hills and forests by day; and they had come the last fifty miles on foot, leaving their horses back in the hills. They were armed with Winchester rifles, with old-time squirrel rifles, with muzzle loaders having long octagonal barrels and fired by cups. Some carried shot guns and cartridges stuffed with buckshot and some poured in buckshot by the handful. They had no artillery and they needed none.

The skill in marksmanship of these men is beyond belief, there is nothing like it in the world. With a rifle they will shoot off a turkey's head at a hundred yards (this is a common amus.e.m.e.nt) and as boys, when they go after squirrels, they are taught to hit the animals' noses only so as not to spoil the skins. It was such natural fighters as these that George Washington led against the French and the Indians, when he saved the wreck of Braddock's army.

The Germans were beaten before they began to fight. They were surrounded on two sides before they had the least idea that an enemy was near. Their sentries were shot down before they could give the alarm and the first warning of danger to the sleeping Teutons was the furious rush of ten thousand wild men who came on and came on and came on, never asking quarter and never giving it.

When the Germans tried to charge, the mountaineers threw themselves flat on the ground and fought with the craft of Indians, dodging from tree to tree, from rock to rock, but always advancing. When the Germans sent up two of their scouting aeroplanes to report the number of the enemy's forces, the enemy picked off the German pilots before the machines were over the tree tops. Here was a mixture of native savagery and efficiency, plus the lynching spirit, plus the pre-revolutionary American spirit and against which, with unequal numbers and complete surprise, no mathematically trained European force had the slightest chance.

The attack began at five o'clock and at eight everything was over; the Germans had been driven into the slough of Chickahominy swamp to the northeast of Richmond (where McClellan lost an army) and slaughtered here to the last man; whereupon the mountaineers, having done what they came to do, started back to their mountains.

Meantime Richmond was burning, and my poor friend Ryerson and I were facing new dangers.

"Come on!" he cried with new hope in his eyes. "We've got a chance, half a chance."

Our one thought now was to reach the prison before it was too late, and we ran as fast as we could through streets that were filled with terrified and scantily clad citizens who were as ignorant as we were of what was really happening. A German guard at the prison gates recognised Ryerson, and we pa.s.sed inside just as a sh.e.l.l struck one of the tobacco factories along the river below us with a violent explosion. A moment later another sh.e.l.l struck the railway station and set fire to it.

Screams of terror arose from all parts of the prison, many of the inmates being negroes, and in the general confusion, we were able to reach the unused wing where Edison was confined.

"Give me that big key--quick," whispered Ryerson. "Wait here."

I obeyed and a few minutes later he beckoned to me excitedly from a pa.s.sageway that led into a central court yard, and I saw a white-faced figure bundled in a long coat hurrying after him. It was Thomas A.

Edison.

Just then there came a rush of footsteps behind us with German shouts and curses.

"They're after us," panted Randolph. "I've got two guns and I'll hold 'em while you two make a break for it. Take this key. It opens a red door at the end of this pa.s.sage after you turn to the right. Run and--tell my sister I--made good--at the last."

I clasped his hand with a hurried "G.o.d bless you" and darted ahead. It was our only chance and, even as we turned the corner of the pa.s.sage, Ryerson began to fire at our pursuers. I heard afterwards that he wounded five and killed two of them. I don't know whether that was the count, but I know he held them until we made our escape out into the blazing city.

And I know he gave his life there with a fierce joy, realising that the end of it, at least, was brave and useful.

CHAPTER XXVI

RIOTS IN CHICAGO AND GERMAN PLOT TO RESCUE THE CROWN PRINCE

The first weeks of January, 1922, brought increasing difficulties and perplexities for the German forces of occupation in America. With comparative ease the enemy had conquered our Atlantic seaboard, but now they faced the harder problem of holding it against a large and intelligent and totally unreconciled population. What was to be done with ten million people who, having been deprived of their arms, their cities and their liberties, had kept their hatred?

The Germans had suffered heavy losses. The disaster to von Hindenburg's army in the battle of the Susquehanna had cost them over a hundred thousand men. The revolt of Boston, the ma.s.sacre of Richmond, had weakened the Teuton prestige and had set American patriotism boiling, seething, from Maine to Texas, from Long Island to the Golden Gate. There were rumours of strange plots and counter-plots, also of a new great army of invasion that was about to set sail from Kiel. Evidently the Germans must have more men if they were to ride safely on this furious American avalanche that they had set in motion, if they were to tame the fiery American volcano that was smouldering beneath them.

In this connection I must speak of the famous woman's plot that resulted in the death of several hundred German officers and soldiers and that would have caused the death of thousands but for unforeseen developments.

This plot was originated by women leaders of the militant suffrage party in New York and Pennsylvania (the faction led by Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont not approving) and soon grew to nation-wide importance with an enrolled body of twenty thousand militant young women, each one of whom was pledged to accomplish the destruction of one of the enemy on a certain Sat.u.r.day night between the hours of sunset and sunrise.

By a miracle these women kept their vow of secrecy until the fatal evening, but at eight o'clock the plot was revealed to Germans in Philadelphia through the confession of a young Quakeress who, after playing her part for weeks, had fallen genuinely in love with a Prussian lieutenant and simply could not bring herself to kill him when the time came.

I come now to a sensational happening that I witnessed in Chicago, to which city I had journeyed after the Richmond affair for very personal reasons. If this were a romance and not a plain recital of facts I should dwell upon my meeting with Mary Ryerson and our mutual joy in each finding that the other had escaped unharmed from the perils of our recent adventures.

Miss Ryerson, it appeared, after the discovery of her daring disguise had been released on parole by order of General Langthorne, who believed her story that she had taken this desperate chance as the only means of saving Thomas A. Edison. Mary had heard the story of her brother's heroic death and to still her grief, had thrown herself into work for the Red Cross fund under Miss Boardman and Mrs. C.C. Rumsey. She had hit upon a charming way of raising money by having little girls dressed in white with American flags for sashes, lead white lambs through the streets, the lambs bearing Red Cross contribution boxes on their backs. By this means thousands of dollars had been secured.

On the evening following my arrival in Chicago, I had arranged to take Miss Ryerson to a great recruiting rally in the huge lake-front auditorium building, but when I called at her boarding-house on Wabash Avenue, I found her much disturbed over a strange warning that she had just received.