“Raising his cap and bowing to the weeping women who lined the streets, he was driven from their sight forever!”
“Half an hour afterward six musket balls had pierced his noble heart, and his white silk vest was torn and dyed with his martyr blood!”
“There was poor old Willis Baker, his head whitened with the snows of more than seventy winters—”
“Heroic old man!”
“With his white hair streaming in the wind, he seated himself on his rude coffin and died without a shudder; refusing with his last breath to forgive his executioners, and swearing he would ‘meet them and torment them in hell through all eternity.’ ”
“There was that helpless, half-idiot boy from Lewis county, who allowed himself to be blindfolded; then hearing Sidener and the others refuse, slipped up one corner of the bandage, and seeing the rest with their eyes uncovered, removed the handkerchief from his own, died as innocent as a lamb.”
“There were Humstead and Bixler, and Lake, and McPheeters.”
“And there was that most wondrous martyr of them all—young Smith, of Knox county—who died for another man.”
“Humphrey was the doomed man.”
“His heart-broken wife, in widow's weeds, with her eight helpless little ones in deep mourning, that was only less black than the anguish they endured, or the heart of him to whom they appealed, rushed to the feet of McNeil, and in accents so piteous that a soul of adamant must have melted under it, besought him for the life of the husband and father.”