The Victim: A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis Part 101

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'Do your duty--put them on him'"]

As the workman bent with his chain Davis hurled him to the other side of the cell and lifted his chair.

The sentinel c.o.c.ked and lowered his musket advancing on the prisoner who met him defiantly with bared breast.

The Captain sprang between them:

"Put down your gun. I'll give you orders to fire when necessary."

He turned to the officer at the door:

"Bring in four of your strongest men--unarmed--you understand?"

"Yes, sir--"

The men entered, sprang on their helpless victim, bore him to the floor, pinned him down with their heavy bodies and held him securely while the blacksmiths riveted the chains on one leg and fastened the clasp on the other with a heavy padlock.

He had resented this cowardly insult for himself and his people. He had resisted with the hope that he might be killed before it was accomplished. He saw now with clear vision that the purpose of his jailer was to torture him to death. His proud spirit rose in fierce rebellion. He would cheat them of their prey. They might take his life but it should be done under the forms of law in open day. He would live.

His will would defy death. He would learn to sleep with the tramp of three sets of sentinels in his ears. He would eat their coa.r.s.e food at whatever cost to his feelings. He would learn to bury his face in his bedding to avoid the rays of the lamp with which they were trying to blind him.

He had need of all his fierce resolution.

He had resolved to ask no favors, but his suffering had been so acute, his determination melted at the doctor's kind expressions.

The physician found him stretched on his pallet, horribly emaciated and breathing with difficulty, his whole body a mere fascine of raw and tremulous nerves, his eyes restless and fevered, his head continually shifting from side to side searching instinctively for a cool spot on the hot coa.r.s.e hair pillow.

"Tell me," Dr. Craven said kindly, "what I can do to add to your comfort?"

The question was asked with such genuine sympathy it was impossible to resist it.

A smile flickered about his thin mouth, "This camp mattress, Doctor," he slowly replied, "I find a little thin. The slats beneath chafe my poor bones. I've a frail body--though in my youth and young manhood, while soldiering in the West, I have done some rough camping and campaigning.

There was flesh then to cover my nerves and bones."

The doctor called an attendant:

"Bring this prisoner another mattress and a softer pillow."

"Thank you," Davis responded cordially.

"You are a smoker?" the doctor asked.

"I have been all my life, until General Miles took my pipe and tobacco."

The doctor wrote to the Adjutant General and asked that his patient be given the use of his pipe.

On his visit two days later the doctor said:

"You must spend as little time in bed as possible. Exercise will be your best medicine."

The prisoner drew back the cover and showed the lacerated ankles.

"Impossible you see--the pain is so intense I can't stand erect. These shackles are very heavy. If I stand, the weight of them cuts into my flesh--they have already torn broad patches of skin from the places they touch. If you can pad a cushion there, I will gladly try to drag them about--"

Dr. Craven sought the jailer:

"General Miles," he began respectfully, "in my opinion the condition of state-prisoner Davis requires the removal of those shackles until such time as his health shall be established on a firmer basis. Exercise he must have."

"You believe that is a medical necessity?"

"I do, most earnestly."

About the same time General Miles had heard from the country. The incident had already aroused sharp criticism of the Government. Stanton had come down to Fortress Monroe and peeped through the bars at the victim he was torturing, and had extracted all the comfort possible from the incident. The shackles were removed.

His jailer persisted in denying him the most innocent books to read. He asked the doctor to get for him if possible the geology or the botany of the South. General Miles thought them dangerous subjects. At least the names sounded treasonable. He denied the request.

The prisoner asked for his trunk and clothes. Miles decided to keep them in his own office and dole out the linen by his own standards of need.

Davis turned to his physician with a flash of anger.

"It's contemptible that they should thus dole out my clothes as if I were a convict in some penitentiary. They mean to degrade me. It can't be done. No man can be degraded by unmerited insult heaped upon the helpless. Such acts can only degrade their perpetrators. The day will come when the people will blush at the memory of such treatment--"

At last the loss of sleep proved beyond his endurance. He had tried to fight it out but gave up in a burst of pa.s.sionate protest to Dr. Craven.

The sight of his eye was failing. The horror of blindness chilled his soul.

"My treatment here," he began with an effort at restraint, "is killing me by inches. Let them make shorter work of it. I can't sleep. No man can live without sleep. My jailers know this. I am never alone a moment--always the eye of a guard staring at me day and night. If I doze a feverish moment the noise of the relieving guard each two hours wakes me and the blazing lamp pours its glare into my aching throbbing eyes.

There must be a change or I shall go mad or blind or both."

He paused a moment and lifted his hollow face to the physician pathetically.

"Have you ever been conscious of being watched? Of having an eye fixed on you every moment, scrutinizing your smallest act, the change of the muscles of your face or the pose of your body? To have a human eye riveted on you every moment, waking, sleeping, sitting, walking, is a refinement of torture never dreamed of by a Comanche Indian--it is the eye of a spy or an enemy gloating over the pain and humiliation which it creates. The lamp burning in my eyes is a form of torment devised by someone who knew my habit of life never to sleep except in total darkness. When I took old Black Hawk the Indian Chief a captive to our barracks at St. Louis I shielded him from the vulgar gaze of the curious. I have lived too long in the woods to be frightened by an owl and I've seen Death too often to flinch at any form of pain--but this torture of being forever watched is beginning to prey on my reason."

The doctor's report that day was written in plain English:

"I find Mr. Davis in a very critical state, his nervous debility extreme, his mind despondent, his appet.i.te gone, complexion livid, and pulse denoting deep prostration of all vital energies. I am alarmed and anxious over the responsibility of my position. If he should die in prison without trial, subject to such severities as have been inflicted on his attenuated frame the world will form conclusions and with enough color to pa.s.s them into history."

Dr. Craven was getting too troublesome. General Miles dismissed him, and called in Dr. George Cooper, a physician whose political opinions were supposed to be sounder.

CHAPTER XLV

THE MASTER MIND

Socola read the story of the chaining of the Confederate Chieftain with indignation. His intimate a.s.sociation with Jefferson Davis had convinced him of his singular purity of character and loftiness of soul. That he was capable of conspiring to murder Abraham Lincoln was inconceivable.

That the charge should be made and pressed seriously by the National Government was a disgrace to the country.