stood massed together, transfixed with horror, and staring
at the grated windows of the jail. Behind the iron bars,
and tugging frantically at them, and screaming for help,
stood the tramp; he seemed like a black object set against
a sun, so white and intense was the light at his back.
That marshal could not be found, and he had the only key.
A battering-ram was quickly improvised, and the thunder of its
blows upon the door had so encouraging a sound that the spectators
broke into wild cheering, and believed the merciful battle won.
But it was not so. The timbers were too strong; they did not yield.
It was said that the man’s death-grip still held fast to the bars
after he was dead; and that in this position the fires wrapped him
about and consumed him. As to this, I do not know. What was seen
after I recognized the face that was pleading through the bars
was seen by others, not by me.
I saw that face, so situated, every night for a long time afterward;
and I believed myself as guilty of the man’s death as if I had given
him the matches purposely that he might burn himself up with them.
I had not a doubt that I should be hanged if my connection with
this tragedy were found out. The happenings and the impressions
of that time are burnt into my memory, and the study of them
entertains me as much now as they themselves distressed me then.
If anybody spoke of that grisly matter, I was all ears in a moment,
and alert to hear what might be said, for I was always dreading
and expecting to find out that I was suspected; and so fine
and so delicate was the perception of my guilty conscience,
that it often detected suspicion in the most purposeless remarks,
and in looks, gestures, glances of the eye which had no significance,
but which sent me shivering away in a panic of fright, just the same.
And how sick it made me when somebody dropped, howsoever carelessly
and barren of intent, the remark that ‘murder will out!’
For a boy of ten years, I was carrying a pretty weighty cargo.
All this time I was blessedly forgetting one thing–
the fact that I was an inveterate talker in my sleep.
But one night I awoke and found my bed-mate–my younger brother–
sitting up in bed and contemplating me by the light of the moon.
I said–
‘What is the matter?’
‘You talk so much I can’t sleep.’
I came to a sitting posture in an instant, with my kidneys in my throat
and my hair on end.
‘What did I say. Quick–out with it–what did I say?’
‘Nothing much.’
‘It’s a lie–you know everything.’
‘Everything about what?’
‘You know well enough. About THAT.’
‘About WHAT?–I don’t know what you are talking about.
I think you are sick or crazy or something. But anyway,
you’re awake, and I’ll get to sleep while I’ve got a chance.’
He fell asleep and I lay there in a cold sweat, turning this
new terror over in the whirling chaos which did duty as my mind.
The burden of my thought was, How much did I divulge?
How much does he know?–what a distress is this uncertainty!
But by and by I evolved an idea–I would wake my brother and probe him
with a supposititious case. I shook him up, and said–
‘Suppose a man should come to you drunk–‘
‘This is foolish–I never get drunk.’
‘I don’t mean you, idiot–I mean the man. Suppose a MAN
should come to you drunk, and borrow a knife, or a tomahawk,
or a pistol, and you forgot to tell him it was loaded, and–‘
‘How could you load a tomahawk?’
‘I don’t mean the tomahawk, and I didn’t say the tomahawk; I said the pistol.
Now don’t you keep breaking in that way, because this is serious.
There’s been a man killed.’
‘What! in this town?’
‘Yes, in this town.’
‘Well, go on–I won’t say a single word.’
‘Well, then, suppose you forgot to tell him to be careful with it,
because it was loaded, and he went off and shot himself with that pistol–