II
We caught Nathan duly as the Castilian spy, and made him “surrender his papers.” A court-martial passed fatal judgment upon him. He was led out beneath one of the trees in Mrs. Fairbank’s orchard and ordered to mount “the scaffold”, a dilapidated barrel. Around a high limb I succeeded in tying one end of a rope. It had a slip noose at its dangling end about eight feet from the ground. After much perspiration I got this noose over Nathan’s head.
“There’s too much slack in it,” the condemned man suggested, anxious that there should be no bungle in the ceremony to spoil the grandeur. “When I’m hung, my feet’ll touch the ground and then I won’t be! You better slip it further down, Billy—under my arms or round my waist.”
Rather than reclimb the tree and retie the rope, I conceded.
A little French boy named Beauchamp was commissioned to kick away the barrel and “send the miserable felon to the wrath of a jealous God.” We had somewhere heard it phrased so.
Rolland Beauchamp played his part perfectly. In fact, the whole execution was a bit too perfect. On a frenzied run our mothers started for that orchard when from under the biggest, highest tree began the wildest and most horrible howling that ever disturbed the quiet of pastoral Vermont.
The spy, on being hung, had thought better of his fate. It wasn’t a bit of fun to be hung. Yet one could not altogether blame him. Never was a spy hung as our spy was hung.
I had slipped the noose too far down Nathan’s body. When the barrel went out, the upper half of his torso outweighed his legs. He was whipped upside down in a twinkling and hung there ignominiously, kicking wildly ’twixt terra firma and the stars.
This in itself wouldn’t have been so distressing if he had not been suspended in a slipnoose. The more he kicked and bellowed the sharper it tightened.
“We tried to hang him!” cried the terrified little French boy.
“Tried!” wailed a wrathful mother when she beheld her offspring suspended upside down, just out of reach.
“We could get him down with a ladder, if we only had one!” volunteered the small Mayo boy who had been responsible for all this brilliant business. “Mr. Simpson’s got one, a mile down the river. I tell you what!” he suggested enthusiastically to Mrs. Forge, “you come and ask my mother if I can hitch up our horse and I’ll go after it! I could make it in less’n an hour an’ not half try!”
“And leave this boy to be squeezed to death? I never saw a Mayo around Foxboro yet that wasn’t a fool!” Mrs. Forge wrung her hands. “Oh, oh, oh! Somebody’s got to climb that tree and cut this boy down and do it quickly, or he’ll die o’ pinched vitals! Oh! oh! oh!”
“But if he’s cut down sudden, he’ll land on his head and break his neck,” groaned Mrs. Harper. “Why on earth should they hang him upside down?”
Nat’s unpremeditated inversion had complicated matters. And all this time the spy was kicking and struggling and bellowing until it was a mystery why he wasn’t heard down in the business part of the town. Moreover, the prospects were that if he were left there much longer, any attempts to cut him down would be superfluous; he was coming down himself—in halves!
But the Providence that looks after children, drunken men and fools was proverbially kind that afternoon. It sent old Amos Winch riding past atop a load of oats. Amos took note of a kicking, shrieking boy suspended from an apple bough above a group of distraught women and children and came down through that orchard in jumps. As he ran, he unclasped a big pocketknife. Out on the limb, he wound a taut rope twice about his mighty hand. Then he hacked and cut above it. Hand over hand he hauled the little Forge boy up, caught him firmly by the collar and straightened him out.
Immediately that he was down and manifestly unhurt, Mrs. Forge walked over to a lower apple bough and pulled off a “sucker.” She stripped the switch clean of leaves and grasped her youngster firmly by the collar.
“But Ma!—I didn’t mean to do it! Please, Ma, don’t whip me. I didn’t mean to do it!”
“I suppose you got hung upside down like that accidentally.”
“We was only just playing ‘Hang the Spy’!”
“And scaring your good, dear mother in consequence so she’s nearly a nervous wreck. I’m going to see you remember never to do such a thing again.”
“Anna!” interposed my mother, “don’t be a fool!”
“You keep out of this!” snapped Mrs. Forge. “I can run my own young ones without assistance from the neighbors.”
And there, before that distressed audience, Nathan “got it good.”