* A saying having its origin, no doubt, in the worthlessness of the paper money issued by the Continental Congress.
Young rawbones had repeated this statement a dozen times already since leaving home with the prisoner. But he liked to tell it. Morton made the best defense he could, and asked them to send to Hissawachee and inquire, but the crowd thought that this was only a ruse to gain time, and that if they delayed his execution long, Micajah Harp and his whole band would be upon them.
The mob-court was unanimously in favor of hanging. The cry of "Come on, boys, let's string him up," was raised several times, and "rushes" at him were attempted, but these rushes never went further than the incipient stage, for the very good reason that while many were anxious to have him hung, none were quite ready to adjust the rope. The law threatened them on one side, and a dread of the vengeance of Micajah Harp's cut-throats appalled them on the other. The predicament in which the crowd found themselves was a very embarrassing one, but these administrators of impromptu justice consoled themselves by whispering that it was best to wait till night.
And the rawboned young man, who had given such eager testimony that he "warn't afeard of the whole gang with ole Micajah throw'd onto the top," concluded about noon that he had better go home—the ole woman mout git skeered, you know. She wuz powerful skeery and mout git fits liker'n not, you know.
The weary hours of suspense drew on. However ready Morton may have been to commit suicide in a moment of rash despair, life looked very attractive to him now that its duration was measured by the descending sun. And what a quickener of conscience is the prospect of immediate death! In these hours the voice of Kike, reproving him for his reckless living, rang in his memory ceaselessly. He saw what a distorted failure he had made of life; he longed for a chance to try it over again. But unless help should come from some unexpected quarter, he saw that his probation was ended.
It is barely possible that the crowd might have become so demoralized by waiting as to have let Morton go, or at least to have handed him over to the authorities, had there not come along at that moment Mr. Mellen, the stern and ungrammatical Methodist preacher of whom Morton had made so much sport in Wilkins's Settlement. Having to preach at fifty-eight appointments in four weeks, he was somewhat itinerant, and was now hastening to a preaching place near by. One of the crowd, seeing Mr. Mellen, suggested that Morton had orter be allowed to see a preacher, and git "fixed up," afore he died. Some of the others disagreed. They warn't nothin' in the nex' world too bad fer a hoss-thief, by jeeminy hoe-cakes. They warn't a stringin' men up to send 'em to heaven, but to t' other place.
Mellen was called in, however, and at once recognized Morton as the ungodly young man who had insulted him and disturbed the worship of God. He exhorted him to repent, and to tell who was the owner of the horse, and to seek a Saviour who was ready to forgive even the dying thief upon the cross. In vain Morton protested his innocence. Mellen told him that he could not escape, though he advised the crowd to hand him over to the sheriff. But Mellen's additional testimony to Morton's bad character had destroyed his last chance of being given up to the courts. As soon as Mr. Mellen went away, the arrangements for hanging him at nightfall began to take definite shape, and a rope was hung over a limb, in full sight of the condemned man. Mr. Mellen used with telling effect, at every one of the fifty-eight places upon his next round, the story of the sad end of this hardened young man, who had begun as a scoffer and ended as an impenitent thief.
Morton sat in a sort of stupor, watching the sun descending toward the horizon. He heard the rude voices of the mob about him. But he thought of Patty and his mother.
While the mob was thus waiting for night, and Morton waiting for death, there passed upon the road an elderly man. He was just going out of sight, when Morton roused himself enough to observe him. When he had disappeared, Goodwin was haunted with the notion that it must be Mr. Donaldson, the old Presbyterian preacher, whose sermons he had so often heard at the Scotch Settlement. Could it be that thoughts of home and mother had suggested Donaldson? At least, the faintest hope was worth clutching at in a time of despair.
"Call him back!" cried Morton. "Won't somebody call that old man back? He knows me."