The Man in Gray: A Romance of North and South Part 64

"Yes--yes--go on--I understand," she answered quickly.

"I'm from Kansas. I'm a friend of John Cook's. I come all the way here to help him. I joined these guards to get to him. I'm goin' to get him out of here if I can."

"Thank G.o.d--thank G.o.d," she murmured.

"Keep a stiff upper lip and get your hand on some money to follow us."

"I will."

Another guard approached.

"Leave me now. My name's Charles Lenhart. Don't try to talk to me again.

Just watch and wait."

She nodded, brushed the tears from her eyes and left quickly.

He was on the job without delay. Cook and Edwin Coppoc, condemned to die on the same day, occupied the same room in jail. They borrowed a knife from Lenhart as soon as he came on duty and "forgot" to return it. With this knife they worked at night for a week cutting a hole through the brick wall. Under their clothes in a corner they concealed the fragments of bricks.

When the opening had been completed, they cut teeth in the knife blade and made a small saw strong and keen enough to eat through a link in their shackles.

On the night fixed, Lenhart was on guard waiting in breathless suspense for the men to drop the few feet into the prison yard. A brick wall fifteen feet high could he scaled from his shoulders and the last man up could give him a lift.

Through the long, chill hours he paced his beat on the wall and waited to hear the crunching of the bodies slipping through the walls.

What had happened?

Something had gone wrong in the impulsive mind of the blue-eyed adventurer inside. The hole was open, the saw in his hand to cut the manacles, when he suddenly stopped.

"What's the matter?" Coppoc asked.

"We can't do this to-night."

"For G.o.d's sake, why?"

"My sister's in town with Governor Willard to tell me goodbye. They will put the blame of this on them. My sister might be imprisoned. The Governor would be in bad. I've caused them trouble enough--G.o.d knows--"

"When are they going?"

"To-morrow. We'll wait until to-morrow night--after they've gone."

"But Lenhart may not be on guard."

"That's so," Cook agreed. "Coppoc, you can go alone. You'd better do it."

"No."

"You'd better."

"I'm not made out of that sort of goods," the boy answered.

"You've got a good old Quaker mother out in Springdale praying for you.

It's your chance--go--I can't tonight."

Nothing could induce Coppoc to desert his comrade and leave him to certain death when his escape should be known.

They replaced the bricks, covered the debris and waited until the following night.

At eleven o'clock they cut the manacles and Coppoc crawled out first. He had barely touched the ground when Cook followed. They glanced about the yard and it was deserted. They strained their eyes to make out the figure of the guard who pa.s.sed the brick wall. He was not in sight. It was a good omen. Lenhart had no doubt foreseen their escape and dropped to the street outside.

They saw that the timbers of the gallows on which they were to die had not all been fastened.

They secured two pieces of scantling and reached the top of the wall.

Suddenly the dark figure of a guard moved toward them. Cook called the signal to Lenhart. But a loyal son of Virginia stood sentinel that night. The answer was a rifle shot. They started to leap and caught the flash of a bayonet below.

They walked back into the jail and surrendered to Captain Avis, their friendly keeper.

The little wife waited and watched in vain.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

All uncertainty at an end to his execution, John Brown set his hand to finish the work of his life in a supreme triumph. He entered upon the task with religious joy. The old Puritan had always been an habitual writer of letters. The authorities of Virginia allowed him to write daily to his friends and relatives. He quickly took advantage of this power. The sword of Washington which he grasped on that fatal Sunday night had proven a feeble weapon. He seized a pen destined to slay a million human beings.

His soul on fire with the fixed idea that he had been ordained by G.o.d to drench a nation in blood, he joyfully began the task of creating the mob mind.

No man in history had a keener appreciation of the power of the daily press in the propaganda of crowd ideas. The daily newspaper had just blossomed into its full radiance in the modern world. No invention in the history of the race has equaled the cylinder printing press as an engine for creating crowd movements.

The daily newspaper of 1859 spoke only in the language of crowds. They were, in fact, so many mob orators haranguing their subscribers. They wrote down to the standards of the mob. They were molders of public opinion and they were always the creatures of public opinion. They wrote for the ma.s.ses. Their columns were filled with their own peculiar brand of propaganda, illusions, dreams, a.s.sertions, prejudices, sensations, with always a cheap smear of moral plat.i.tude. Our people had grown too busy to do their own thinking. The daily newspapers now did it for them.

There was as little originality in them as in the machines which printed the editions. Yet they were repeated by the crowd as G.o.d-inspired truth.

We no longer needed to seek for the mob in the streets. We had it at the breakfast table, in the office, in the counting room. The process of crowd thinking became the habit of daily life.

John Brown hastened to use this engine of propaganda. From his comfortable room in the jail at Charlestown there poured a daily stream of letters which found their way into print.

A perfect specimen of his art was the concluding paragraph of a letter to his friend and fellow conspirator, George L. Stearns of Boston.

"I have asked to be _spared_ from having any _mock or hypocritical prayers made over me_ when I am publicly _murdered_; and that my only _religious attendants_ be poor, _little, dirty, ragged, bareheaded and barefooted slave boys and girls_, led by old, _gray-headed slave mothers_,"

This message he knew would reach the heart of every Abolitionist of the North, of every reader of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. On the day of his transfiguration on the scaffold he would deliver the final word that would sweep these millions into the whirlpool of the Blood Feud.

To his wife and children he wrote a message which hammered again his fixed idea into a dogma of faith:

"John Rogers wrote to his children, 'Abhor the arrant wh.o.r.e of Rome.'

John Brown writes to his children to abhor with _undying hatred_ also the 'sum of all villainies,' slavery."

Not only did these daily letters find their way into the hands of millions through the press, but the newspapers maintained a staff of reporters at Charlestown to catch every whisper from the prisoner. So brilliantly did these reports visualize his daily life that the crowds who read them could hear the clanking of the chains as he walked and the groans that came from his wounded body.