ings opposite. Shots were heard occasionally in the upper town, as if citizens might be firing old loads from their guns or making ready for resistance. The breakfasts were brought over from the hotel, and Brown invited the prisoners to partake thereof in the engine-house; but some nervous skeptic whispered that it might be poisoned food, and only a few, among whom was Quantrell, took advantage of the request. John Brown bowed his head before he ate, and seemed to be asking a blessing upon his meal. Albion, seeking to steal a piece of fried ham, ran against the great bandit's claws, and was thrown toward the yard, but slipped over the old man's arm and ran beneath one of the engines, where he howled dismally. His meal being done, Quantrell asked permission to remain in the engine-room, which contained no other prisoners. John Brown made no answer, but went off to inspect his posts. Quantrell began to think of Katy in Catoctin Valley, of Light Pittson in Washington, of his mother in her grave, and of the new and solemn feelings which had impelled him to intone a portion of a public prayer. “Am I infirm in my affections?" he asked himself. "I feel no guilt. Till Sunday I never was in love; no ladies' man have I ever been. Yet I seemed to make a conquest of the senator's daughter as easily as of Katy. What do I mean?" He found the pointer-dog insidiously climbing upon him, and drowsiness was in his brain; so he drew the dog to a place beneath a fire-engine, and, crawling there upon some leather harness and blankets, fell asleep. A loud discharge of guns, so close that they seemed to have been fired at the engine-house door, awoke Quantrell, and he rushed against the door and into the armory-yard, unconscious for a moment of his whereabout. Nobody paid any attention to him in the yard, and the guards there were crouching behind the stone gateposts and handling their pieces as if to kill some expected foe. Availing himself of the confusion, the young man ran across the open plaza and along the railroad side of the yard, until he could look over the iron railing and up into the town, by the Shenandoah street. He saw nothing but blowing smoke in front of some high brick stores, and an object fallen in the street, and feebly moving. In another instant the object was still. The smell of brimstone was in the air. The streets were per fectly deserted except by dogs, which were smelling and snapping at the fallen object-his own dog the most forward and conspicuous. While Quantrell looked, a rifle sounded from one of the bridges he could not see, and a piece of brick, or lead, or splinter seemed to fly from the front of one of the tall houses in line with the armorygate. In a moment the front of this house flashed smoke and fire, as if several guns had been shot off together. From the bridge and the stone gate-piers, shots went responsive against the concealed enemy in the house. Quantrell distinctly noted a difference in the quality of sound of the opposing guns. "Breech-loaders," he thought, "against the muskets of Harper's Ferry. The Virginians have got arms." He noticed that no store in the village had opened its windows, though the sun was coming over the tall Loudoun Heights, some hours high. As he looked at this sun, the crows, flying around the chimneys of Loudoun Mountain, arrested his attention, and he thought of the black man Newby's saying, that not a black crow was in those rocks but would fight for its young. "My God!" spoke Quantrell, slowly, seeking with his eyes the object fallen in the street again, "I know that man lying yonder. It is a mulatto. It is Newby himself!" Obeying an impulse of mingled mercy and horror, Lloyd Quantrell vaulted over a broken angle in the brick wall, and, with both hands raised higher than his head, he ran along the public street, exposed to the concealed marksmen from either side, but barely conscious of their existence. A few shots, fired from the heights around the Catholic church, rattled along the limestone crossings and macadamized roadway and rebounded from the sloping traps of cellar-ways. The golden cross above the Roman chapel seemed also extending its arms in the truce of heavenly intercession and flaming with perturbed light. He reached the fallen object; it was a human creature, tumbled with gun in hand, and belted round with other carnal weapons, but helpless as a turtle upon its back. Quantrell knelt and spoke the sufferer's name; a terrible wound was in his neck, out of which the blood was gushing. "Cap'n Brown called me," the pale lips muttered. “I had to be a man." Feet and chin stiffened together, and the first victim on either side had been a black crow fighting for its young. Quantrell took up the negro soldier's rifle : 66 6 'Poor devil!" he said; "Harper's Ferry is turning out to be a 'suck.'" CHAPTER XVII. ASHBY'S GRATITUDE. WHISTLING bullets past Quantrell's head recalled him to some preserving fear. Looking down toward the armory-gate, he saw a negro from the arsenal leveling a piece at him, and the ball grazed his hair. Quantrell retreated up the hill street, called High Street, and while he turned his head to see if he was followed, his feet stumbled upon something soft, and he was thrown to the sidewalk beside a sleeping man. Scrambling up and seeing that the man did not move, Quantrell touched him and found him cold. "Oh, bring him in!" a voice whispered from a neighboring grocery; "the Mexicans shot him there the matther of two hours ago, and we're afraid to walk in the strate; fur they fires at averybody." A gun, thrown down in the shock of being wounded, lay beside this man, and showed that he had gone forth to kill. He looked to be a herculean Irishman. "This is the man that yonder Newby killed, no doubt," thought Quantrell; and, as he sought to lift the bulky and heavy form, he felt himself seized and being dragged away. Through an alley-way nearly opposite, which descended the slope into an almost unoccupied lane, right under the engine-house and wall, his captors bore him fiercely with firm hands and silent purpose, and he made no resistance whatever, considering that he had no arms and had sought to harm no man. From various garrets, whose dormer windows partly commanded this lane, the popping of guns came momentarily and tore up the dirt around them, and scarred the long government wall. A church-bell somewhere up in the town began to ring an alarm, and over a broken place in the wall, some way ahead, a few men carrying something weighty emerged and fired their pistols at Quantrell's abductors. The latter shook Quantrell loose, but kept him between themselves and the enemy, and began to fire their short, breech-loading guns. Lloyd saw that his captors were both negroes, and under high excitement. The fleeing white men made little response to the guns of these negroes, but continued to bear off their burden; and among them Quantrell thought he recognized the young planter, Beall, and the pale and frowsy Atzerodt. 66 Git ova yer, or we'll kill you in de road!" gasped one of these black men. "Git over!" echoed the other, giving Quantrell a painful blow with the butt of his carbine. They forced him across a picket-fence and up a slope, in a little garden or hog-yard, and near the top of this acclivity was a mighty rock which had been walled up below by human hands and made a cave or cellar for some adjacent house. Into this all three retreated from the bullets, which began to come from everywhere. The negroes, taking breath a moment, turned on Quantrell. Come," said a supple fellow named Green, "you got to die, man!" He drew his gun and raised it. What?" cried Quantrell. "Kill me! What have I done?". "You keeps a slave-pen and sells men like me!" the other negro, who had been called Copeland, exclaimed, with no less sullen ferocity. “We know you, an' you got to die for our brother Newby!" 66 Copeland raised his gun also. The despair of death fell upon Quantrell's soul. 66 'For Christ's dear sake, men, don't murder me! You are under a mistake. My uncle is in that business-not I." He had literally fallen upon his knees. The sense of dying in that cave, of moldering in such a sty, of being hideously cut off in youth and bloom and happy love, made him beg like a child. The pugilist's bravado failed him in this test of death. "De boot's on de oder leg," Copeland continued, while Quantrell grasped the carbine and turned it aside; "it's no harder fo' you to die than fo' Newby, shot fo' his childern!” |