up into my throat! If you have a mother–any of you–or if any of you
have ever had a mother–or a–grandmother–or a–”
“Cheese it! Will you give up your money, or have we got to–. There–
there–none of that! Put up your hands!”
“Gentlemen–I know you are gentlemen by your–”
“Silence! If you want to be facetious, young man, there are times and
places more fitting. This is a serious business.”
“You prick the marrow of my opinion. The funerals I have attended in my
time were comedies compared to it. Now I think–”
“Curse your palaver! Your money!–your money!–your money! Hold!–put
up your hands!”
“Gentlemen, listen to reason. You see how I am situated–now don’t put
those pistols so close–I smell the powder.
You see how I am situated. If I had four hands–so that I could hold up
two and–”
“Throttle him! Gag him! Kill him!”
“Gentlemen, don’t! Nobody’s watching the other fellow. Why don’t some
of you–. Ouch! Take it away, please!
Gentlemen, you see that I’ve got to hold up my hands; and so I can’t take
out my money–but if you’ll be so kind as to take it out for me, I will
do as much for you some–”
“Search him Beauregard–and stop his jaw with a bullet, quick, if he wags
it again. Help Beauregard, Stonewall.”
Then three of them, with the small, spry leader, adjourned to Mike and
fell to searching him. I was so excited that my lawless fancy tortured
me to ask my two men all manner of facetious questions about their rebel
brother-generals of the South, but, considering the order they had
received, it was but common prudence to keep still. When everything had
been taken from me,–watch, money, and a multitude of trifles of small
value,–I supposed I was free, and forthwith put my cold hands into my
empty pockets and began an inoffensive jig to warm my feet and stir up
some latent courage–but instantly all pistols were at my head, and the
order came again:
They stood Mike up alongside of me, with strict orders to keep his hands
above his head, too, and then the chief highwayman said:
“Beauregard, hide behind that boulder; Phil Sheridan, you hide behind
that other one; Stonewall Jackson, put yourself behind that sage-bush
there. Keep your pistols bearing on these fellows, and if they take down
their hands within ten minutes, or move a single peg, let them have it!”
Then three disappeared in the gloom toward the several ambushes, and the
other three disappeared down the road toward Virginia.
It was depressingly still, and miserably cold. Now this whole thing was
a practical joke, and the robbers were personal friends of ours in
disguise, and twenty more lay hidden within ten feet of us during the
whole operation, listening. Mike knew all this, and was in the joke, but
I suspected nothing of it. To me it was most uncomfortably genuine.
When we had stood there in the middle of the road five minutes, like a
couple of idiots, with our hands aloft, freezing to death by inches,
Mike’s interest in the joke began to wane. He said:
“The time’s up, now, aint it?”
“No, you keep still. Do you want to take any chances with these bloody
savages?”
Presently Mike said:
“Now the time’s up, anyway. I’m freezing.”
“Well freeze. Better freeze than carry your brains home in a basket.
Maybe the time is up, but how do we know?–got no watch to tell by.
I mean to give them good measure. I calculate to stand here fifteen
minutes or die. Don’t you move.”
So, without knowing it, I was making one joker very sick of his contract.
When we took our arms down at last, they were aching with cold and
fatigue, and when we went sneaking off, the dread I was in that the time
might not yet be up and that we would feel bullets in a moment, was not
sufficient to draw all my attention from the misery that racked my
stiffened body.
The joke of these highwayman friends of ours was mainly a joke upon
themselves; for they had waited for me on the cold hill-top two full