I heard the door burst open, and the muttered oaths as the party discovered that the car usually there was that night, unluckily for them, gone. It was then that I was seized with an irresistible desire to cough; in vain I struggled against it; it would come, and it did.
I had hardly time to dart away when they were in full pursuit, and despite my utmost efforts, I was caught, knocked down, and borne back to the station; and now my heart failed me entirely, for I was completely disarmed, and I knew by the scowling glances, that I was in the deadliest peril. Still, I had only done my duty, and I determined if I must die, to do so like a man.
There was little said to me, but I saw that they were deliberating as to the best way of disposing of me, and when two of them approached me, I thought that my time was come, indeed; but it was not to be so yet, for they pushed me into the empty car-house, and shut the door, leaving me to my reflections.
I soon found out the motives of this; the house was to be fired, and I was to be burned alive! to destroy every evidence of guilt! I attempted to cry out, but the roll of thick cloth in my mouth stopped that effectually.
The thought of my poor wife and child drove me to despair; could I have had a chance to die in conflict, selling my life as dearly as possible, it would be easy to such a death as this; but to be confined in a dark room, unable to move or speak, or to make a single effort for my own relief, to helplessly lie and listen to the crackling of the fire, and feel the gentle warmth at first, grow to a savage, terrible, horrid torture fiend eventually lapping the moisture from my bones and blood, and swelling my black and blistering tongue till, consumed by its own rage, it fell a foul and withered cinder in the common ruin.
What a decree of deadly, deadly fate it seemed that only a week before, the night train that would at least have saved me from this kind of death, had been taken off, and no relief could come until eight o’clock the next morning, before which time nothing distinguishable would be left of me.
I already choked with the smoke that came rushing in through the loose sides of the building, when something tore past the station with what seemed to me a scream of frantic exulting joy and hope. My heart leaped at the sound, and with a tremendous effort I snapped the cords that bound my arms.
It was the whistle of an approaching engine, and I knew that, as this was one of the few watering places on the road, they would certainly stop there.
My captors heard it, too, and in a minute I heard them at the door. I prepared myself for a rush, and, as it hastily swung open, I darted out, and struck wildly right and left at the desperate fellows who surrounded me.
They fell upon me with knives, and I felt myself, although a very powerful man, and fighting as only a strong man can fight in the last extremity, half-blinded, badly cut, and gradually sinking under the terrible assaults of one huge fellow in particular. I slipped over an old dry-goods box that stood near. The fiend had me by the throat in an instant, and, poising his monstrous bowie-knife over my head, cried out—