"So we tink. All right." And the soldiers, seizing her, tied her thumbs as Lysander had taught them, passed the cords over the hook as they had passed the clothesline over the crossbeam the night before, and drew the shrieking woman's hands above her head, precisely as they had hauled up Toby's. They then turned her skirts up over her head, and fastened them. This also they had been instructed to do by Lysander. It was, you will say, shameful; for this woman was free and white. Had she been a slave, with a different complexion, although perhaps quite as white, would it have been any the less shameful? Answer, ye believers in the divine rights of slave-masters!
"Now you vill tell?" said the phlegmatic Teutons, measuring out their whips.
"Go for my son! My son is Capting Sprowl!" gasped the stifled and terror-stricken widow.
"Dat trick won't do. You shpeak, or we shtrike."
"It is true, it is true! I am Mrs. Sprowl, and my husband is dead, and my son is Capting Sprowl, and a poor lone widder, that if you strike her a single blow he'll have you took and hung!"
"If he is your son, den by your own son's orders we whip you. He vill not hang us for dat. You vill not tell? Den we give you ten lash."
Blow upon blow, shriek upon shriek, followed. The soldiers counted the strokes aloud, deliberately, conscientiously, as they gave them, "Vun, two, tree," &c., up to ten. There they stopped. But the screams did not stop. This punishment, which it was sport to inflict upon a faithful old negro, which it would have been such a good joke to have bestowed upon the wife of a stanch Unionist, was no sport, no joke, but altogether a tragic affair to thy mother, O Lysander!
Then she, who had so often wished that she too owned slaves, that when she was angry she might have them strung up and flogged, knew by fearful experience what it was to be strung up and flogged. Then she, who sympathized with her son in his desire to see every man, woman, and child, that loved the old Union, served in this fashion, felt in her own writhing and bleeding flesh the stings of that inhuman vengeance. Terrible blunder, for which she had only herself to thank! Robbery of her neighbor's house—the dishonest "borrowing," not of these ill-gotten goods only, but also of her neighbor's name—had brought her, by what we call fatality, to this strait.
Fatality is but another name for Providence.
The soldiers waited for a lull in the shrieks, then put once more the question.