Tell you my
history - for you will see Napoleon, Arkansas; and for my sake you will
stop there, and do a certain thing for me - a thing which you will
willingly undertake after you shall have heard my narrative.
Let us shorten the story wherever we can, for it will need it, being
long. You already know how I came to go to America, and how I came to
settle in that lonely region in the South. But you do not know that I
had a wife. My wife was young, beautiful, loving, and oh, so divinely
good and blameless and gentle! And our little girl was her mother in
miniature. It was the happiest of happy households.
One night - it was toward the close of the war - I woke up out of a sodden
lethargy, and found myself bound and gagged, and the air tainted with
chloroform! I saw two men in the room, and one was saying to the other,
in a hoarse whisper, 'I told her I would, if she made a noise, and as
for the child - '
The other man interrupted in a low, half-crying voice -
'You said we'd only gag them and rob them, not hurt them; or I wouldn't
have come.'
'Shut up your whining; had to change the plan when they waked up; you
done all you could to protect them, now let that satisfy you; come, help
rummage.'
Both men were masked, and wore coarse, ragged 'nigger' clothes; they had
a bull's-eye lantern, and by its light I noticed that the gentler robber
had no thumb on his right hand. They rummaged around my poor cabin for a
moment; the head bandit then said, in his stage whisper -
'It's a waste of time - he shall tell where it's hid. Undo his gag, and
revive him up.'
The other said -
'All right - provided no clubbing.'
'No clubbing it is, then - provided he keeps still.'
They approached me; just then there was a sound outside; a sound of
voices and trampling hoofs; the robbers held their breath and listened;
the sounds came slowly nearer and nearer; then came a shout -
'HELLO, the house! Show a light, we want water.'
'The captain's voice, by G - !' said the stage-whispering ruffian, and
both robbers fled by the way of the back door, shutting off their
bull's-eye as they ran.
The strangers shouted several times more, then rode by - there seemed to
be a dozen of the horses - and I heard nothing more.
I struggled, but could not free myself from my bonds. I tried to speak,
but the gag was effective; I could not make a sound. I listened for my
wife's voice and my child's - listened long and intently, but no sound
came from the other end of the room where their bed was. This silence
became more and more awful, more and more ominous, every moment. Could
you have endured an hour of it, do you think? Pity me, then, who had to
endure three. Three hours - ? it was three ages! Whenever the clock
struck, it seemed as if years had gone by since I had heard it last.
All this time I was struggling in my bonds; and at last, about dawn, I
got myself free, and rose up and stretched my stiff limbs. I was able
to distinguish details pretty well. The floor was littered with things
thrown there by the robbers during their search for my savings. The
first object that caught my particular attention was a document of mine
which I had seen the rougher of the two ruffians glance at and then cast
away. It had blood on it! I staggered to the other end of the room. Oh,
poor unoffending, helpless ones, there they lay, their troubles ended,
mine begun!
Did I appeal to the law - I? Does it quench the pauper's thirst if the
King drink for him? Oh, no, no, no - I wanted no impertinent
interference of the law. Laws and the gallows could not pay the debt
that was owing to me! Let the laws leave the matter in my hands, and
have no fears: I would find the debtor and collect the debt. How
accomplish this, do you say? How accomplish it, and feel so sure about
it, when I had neither seen the robbers' faces, nor heard their natural
voices, nor had any idea who they might be? Nevertheless, I WAS sure -
quite sure, quite confident. I had a clue - a clue which you would not
have valued - a clue which would not have greatly helped even a
detective, since he would lack the secret of how to apply it. I shall
come to that, presently - you shall see. Let us go on, now, taking things
in their due order. There was one circumstance which gave me a slant in
a definite direction to begin with: Those two robbers were manifestly
soldiers in tramp disguise; and not new to military service, but old in
it - regulars, perhaps; they did not acquire their soldierly attitude,
gestures, carriage, in a day, nor a month, nor yet in a year. So I
thought, but said nothing. And one of them had said, 'the captain's
voice, by G - !' - the one whose life I would have. Two miles away,
several regiments were in camp, and two companies of U.S. cavalry. When
I learned that Captain Blakely, of Company C had passed our way, that
night, with an escort, I said nothing, but in that company I resolved to
seek my man. In conversation I studiously and persistently described
the robbers as tramps, camp followers; and among this class the people
made useless search, none suspecting the soldiers but me.
Working patiently, by night, in my desolated home, I made a disguise for
myself out of various odds and ends of clothing; in the nearest village
I bought a pair of blue goggles.
