CHAPTER XVIII.

KAGI.

THEY went into the yard, and the watch-house was seen to now have an overflow of prisoners, so that some of them were loose and unarmed in the grounds. Stevens was in command here, striding to and fro in the beauty and regularity of manly form and accustomed soldiership. He glanced at Quantrell and spoke : "Hostage, my boy? Well, if you've got a guardeen angel, no harm can come to you."

"Beautiful words!" thought Quantrell. "I know that I am guarded, from heaven and from this world, by my mother and by Katy's prayers!"

He saw that the two bridges were still guarded, by Oliver Brown and by William Thompson, and that the armory-gate was held. An ominous lull in the spluttering firing seemed to have taken place, and nothing stirred in the streets but hogs which had missed their breakfast, and dogs which discovered some evil abroad but could not locate it. Around the Loudoun Heights the crows were flocked together curiously, and their cawing and croaking came down through the chilly and spotted air like swallows' notes down a smoky chimney on a rainy day.

"Turn that way, Quantrell!" Lehman said, pointing up Shenandoah Street.

Quantrell looked back, and both men were watching him with all the calculation of self-protection.

'If you make one jump to escape," Hazlett spoke, divining Quantrell's mind, "I'll drop you in your shoes."

"He can't tell how to go, Albert," muttered Lehman, more generously; "I'll go ahead, and you bring up the rear."

Lehman led on, and soon they came to a yellow, plastered school-house of two stories, with a cupola and tin globe on the roof.

"No school to-day," Lehman cried back to Hazlett. It makes me feel sorry that we've shut up the school. Here John Cook was teacher, but the teacher's played the truant to-day. And the little log school in Maryland-Will Thompson says they stopped that, too, and that the little children begin to cry to see John Cook bring in the arms and put 'em down by the desks."

As they looked at this shapely school, standing under the walls of rock upon a little shelf of grass, like a child's toy banking-house upon a cottage mantel, it seemed to Quantrell that there came out of its open door a sound of children's laughing.

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“Stop!" he said. Have the little ones had the simplicity to come to school this bloody day?”

Again, upon the air, or upon the haunted mind of Quantrell, came children's gleeful laughter through the parted door.

"I think I hear children," Lehman said. "Never before did it sound sad to me."

"Look in!" suggested Hazlett.

At that moment half a dozen shots from muskets poured down the street from sward, shelter, or steep ahead of them.

"Muskets!" exclaimed Hazlett, his gun at his eye, peering for an enemy. "They've got Harper's Ferry muskets from somewhere: I know the sound."

"You're right!" Quantrell spoke. “I saw them taking fixed ammunition out of the very armory you were guarding. Men who can be as bold as that, can fight you!"

Retreating from the fire, they had ascended to the school-house green, and in the pause their attenuated nerves seemed to tremble with the peal of play-yard laughter again.

'Surely there are children there!" Lehman exclaimed, his dark eyes in surprise dancing upon his boyish face.

"Guardian angels for you, my lad!" Quantrell thought to say. "Then they are gone!"

Lehman had put his ear to the open door, and all was still.

"This school is open for the war," added Lehman, with a pallid smile. 'If we have luck, we'll make a black folks' college on Jefferson's Rock!"

Across the road they were advancing up, a band of men appeared around a point of rock, and some signs of military trimmings were in their caps and coats.

Albert, charge them!"

"Soldiers!" exclaimed Lehman. With Quantrell pushed before, these two men undauntedly marched on, firing rapidly as they proceeded. Hazlett felt a sharp pain in his foot and stopped: his shoe had been ripped by a bullet. Bill," he said, "look there! It's a whole company. We can't get to Kagi by this road."

A large company of armed men, indeed, filled the road and part

of the bushy steeps in the débris of the mountain, but they had been frightened by the decision of the two marauders, whom they probably considered to be the skirmishers of a larger force.

Advancing with fine courage, the two men drove the company around a turn of the road, and then swiftly fell back to the shadow of the Catholic church, and, still driving Quantrell before them up the cliffs, attained a dizzy street of naked rocks which led them into the High Street and well into the upper town.

They kept along the sides of this street wherever open lots or paling gardens gave space, and so rose into the air till, at one point, they commanded the great amphitheatre of rivers and yawning mountains.

'What's that?" asked Hazlett, looking up the Potomac. they our re-enforcements?"

"Are

Following his eye, Quantrell saw men down by the shallow river as if intending to cross; and military accoutrements sparkled gaudily also there.

"I'm afraid the country is up against us," Lehman remarked, "but we've got our orders to obey and to reach Kagi, if he's alive!"

There was a sadness in Lehman's face which gave his resolution the beauty of courage. Hazlett, harsher, duller, without external grace, had no less courage, but his promptness was like ferocity, as if his nervous system could not carry in the tone of nature the strain of the occasion.

"Young men," spoke Quantrell, "don't deceive yourselves. I know, by the opportunities Captain Brown has given me, the smallness of your numbers. Around you are strong towns, and they have marched upon you from Martinsburg and from Cumberland, from Hagerstown and Frederick, from Charlestown and Winchester, from Lexington and Richmond! Yes, from Baltimore and from Washington! You look so lonely to me on this ragged mountain, like little sprats in the jaws of a whale, that I want to see you escape!"

"Here's John Cook's mother-in-law's," Hazlett said, pointing to a house in the cross-street, called by the name of The Union of the American States, so much imperiled this day; "John's safe across the river, anyway."

"It's just like him to return," the boyish Lehman answered; "but I hope he won't, and maybe he won't, because his wife's safe in Pennsylvania. I hope she'll draw him there."

"Lehman, were you ever in love?"

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A little; not enough to hurt. I'm glad no girl will break her heart for me when-"

"You die," finished Quantrell. "I'm afraid, Lehman, you will never see that lowering sun go down again."

'There's heaven, I calkelate," said Lehman, looking up; "and they say that's ever sunny. Mr. Quantrell, I wish we could get somewhere down here among the bushes and rocks and hear you sing Home, Sweet Home' again. It seems as if I wanted to hear it now. What is this music that it takes hold of people so? Do men make it up, or do they hear it from somewheres and remember it?"

The dark-eyed boy, with no tremor in his voice or steps, asked this question on the high plateau with the simplicity of innocence, though beleaguered round till there seemed no outlet for him but some miracle of wings by which he might fly into the gray and hungry heaven he had spoken of.

"O men, why did you come here?" Lloyd Quantrell asked, almost in bitterness, thinking of scenes of cruelty he might live to witness upon these men, as living and perceiving as himself.

"I heard a call," young Lehman simply said; "I thought it came from God. If it came from the devil, that's another sin of his'n to answer for."

"I heard an invitation," Hazlett said. ""Tain't often I wake to poetry or glory, but I thought this invitation was about right. I hefted of it, and it was jus' comfor❜ble like."

As Hazlett spoke, he balanced his carbine in one hand, for practical examplification.

"How could John Cook marry a young wife here and become a father, while planning all this blood and insurrection? How could he teach children in Harper's Ferry, and be so treacherous?"

“Oh,” Lehman answered, “God had his Hebrew spies. Love grows anywhere. John didn't come here to get in love, but he was lonesome, and love, I calkelate, peeped into the school-house. You are sent to school, maybe, to study and improve your time, but some day you look up from your book and see a little girl swinging her pretty feet as she hums, 'B-a ba; b-e be; b-i bi!' The book flies out of your head; the girl slips into your heart, and next thing it's b-i by, and b-a ba, and by-o-baby by !”

Singing this like a lullaby, Lehman and his companions both laughed cordially, but not long, for Hazlett said, reflectively:

"There's no doubt about John Cook loving his wife. If he hadn't been a man of some 'sand' she'd have weaned him from his work. He did all the dangerous work: peddled books from farm to farm among the savage dogs, and finding where we had friends or foes. If any negro had betrayed his talk, the white men here would have burned John alive. John Cook's vain, but he's a better spy than Major André ever was, and he never was trapped."

Thus talking, they descended open lots and fields between the officers' dwellings on the high upland and the raveling houses of Union Street, which continued toward the Shenandoah like another town, unaware of Harper's Ferry proper. Many thickets of cedar and pine, chestnut and brush, girted the hill-slopes between which this street picked its precarious way, and so they kept somewhat concealed until they reached an open rock right over the Shenandoah, and so close upon it that only the roofs of the Rifle-works beneath them could be seen; bell-tower and chimneys, foaming waste water, sycamore and willow trees, trim walls and comely grounds, and, beyond, the river singing its plaint to the stern mountains and captive town; and far away, to the southwest, this river ascended in light-green islets like an archipelago of moss in crystalline cascades, miles upward, as if the forests had opened for the blue horizon to melt through.

"What's that out yonder?" Hazlett exclaimed. "Is that Kagi? They're firing at him! He's not going without a shot?"

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'Captain Brown told him not to use force," Lehman said; only to hold the Rifle-works if he could.”

Rattling musketry from unseen places below, and white smoke rising subsequently up the rocks, showed that a conflict of some kind was taking place.

Following Hazlett's eyes, Quantrell saw a few men in blankets and wool hats, and carrying short guns, run along from cover to cover, fired upon as they were exposed, but only pretending to fire back, and as they reached the Shenandoah shore one of them threw up his hands and fell into the river.

They all disappeared in a few minutes, and next were seen other men, with longer guns, following from cover to cover until they replaced the others near the river-brink, and there crouched down or found some shelter, and proceeded to load and fire with great energy and method.

In a little while there appeared at some distance in the river, men