WHAT IS MAN? AND OTHER ESSAYS OF MARK TWAIN

all romance-readers; they all wrote poetry, such as it was; they

were all vain and foolish; but they had never before been

suspected of having anything bad in them.

They withdrew from society, and grew more and more

mysterious and dreadful. They presently achieved the distinction

of being denounced by names from the pulpit–which made an

immense stir! This was grandeur, this was fame. They were

envied by all the other young fellows now. This was natural.

Their company grew–grew alarmingly. They took a name. It was a

secret name, and was divulged to no outsider; publicly they were

simply the abolitionists. They had pass-words, grips, and signs;

they had secret meetings; their initiations were conducted with

gloomy pomps and ceremonies, at midnight.

They always spoke of Hardy as “the Martyr,” and every little

while they moved through the principal street in procession–at

midnight, black-robed, masked, to the measured tap of the solemn

drum–on pilgrimage to the Martyr’s grave, where they went

through with some majestic fooleries and swore vengeance upon his

murderers. They gave previous notice of the pilgrimage by small

posters, and warned everybody to keep indoors and darken all

houses along the route, and leave the road empty. These warnings

were obeyed, for there was a skull and crossbones at the top of

the poster.

When this kind of thing had been going on about eight weeks,

a quite natural thing happened. A few men of character and grit

woke up out of the nightmare of fear which had been stupefying

their faculties, and began to discharge scorn and scoffings at

themselves and the community for enduring this child’s-play; and

at the same time they proposed to end it straightway. Everybody

felt an uplift; life was breathed into their dead spirits; their

courage rose and they began to feel like men again. This was on

a Saturday. All day the new feeling grew and strengthened; it

grew with a rush; it brought inspiration and cheer with it.

Midnight saw a united community, full of zeal and pluck, and with

a clearly defined and welcome piece of work in front of it. The

best organizer and strongest and bitterest talker on that great

Saturday was the Presbyterian clergyman who had denounced the

original four from his pulpit–Rev. Hiram Fletcher–and he

promised to use his pulpit in the public interest again now. On

the morrow he had revelations to make, he said–secrets of the

dreadful society.

But the revelations were never made. At half past two in

the morning the dead silence of the village was broken by a

crashing explosion, and the town patrol saw the preacher’s house

spring in a wreck of whirling fragments into the sky. The

preacher was killed, together with a negro woman, his only slave

and servant.

The town was paralyzed again, and with reason. To struggle

against a visible enemy is a thing worth while, and there is a

plenty of men who stand always ready to undertake it; but to

struggle against an invisible one–an invisible one who sneaks in

and does his awful work in the dark and leaves no trace–that is

another matter. That is a thing to make the bravest tremble and

hold back.

The cowed populace were afraid to go to the funeral. The

man who was to have had a packed church to hear him expose and

denounce the common enemy had but a handful to see him buried.

The coroner’s jury had brought in a verdict of “death by the

visitation of God,” for no witness came forward; if any existed

they prudently kept out of the way. Nobody seemed sorry. Nobody

wanted to see the terrible secret society provoked into the

commission of further outrages. Everybody wanted the tragedy

hushed up, ignored, forgotten, if possible.

And so there was a bitter surprise and an unwelcome one when

Will Joyce, the blacksmith’s journeyman, came out and proclaimed

himself the assassin! Plainly he was not minded to be robbed of

his glory. He made his proclamation, and stuck to it. Stuck to

it, and insisted upon a trial. Here was an ominous thing; here

was a new and peculiarly formidable terror, for a motive was

revealed here which society could not hope to deal with

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