"Neighbors!" said Stackridge, in a voice which commanded instant attention, and drew around him and Carl an eager group. "It's just as I told you,—Ropes and his gang are lynching Hapgood!"
"It's the fellow's own fault," said a stern, dark man, the same who had been drilling the men. "He should have taken care of himself."
"Young Hapgood's a decent sort of cuss," said another whom Carl knew,—a farmer named Withers,—"and I like him. I believe he means well; but he ain't one of us."
"I've been deceived in him," said a third. "He always minded his own business, and kept so quiet about our institutions, I never suspected he was anti-slavery till I talked with him t'other day about joining us—then he out with it."
"He thinks we're all wrong," said a bigoted pro-slavery man named Deslow. "He says slavery's the cause of the war, and it's absurd in us to go in for the Union and slavery too!" For these men, though loyal to the government, and bitterly opposed to secession, were nearly all slaveholders or believers in slavery.
"May be the fellow ain't far wrong there," said he who had been drilling his comrades. "I think myself slavery's the cause of the war, and that's what puts us in such a hard place. The time may come when we will have to take a different stand—go the whole figure with the free north, or drift with the cotton states. But that time hain't come yet."
"But the time has come," said Stackridge, impatiently, "to do something for Hapgood, if we intend to help him at all. While we are talking, he may be hanging."
"And what can we do?" retorted the other. "We can't make a move for him without showing our hand, and it ain't time for that yet."
"True enough, Captain Grudd," said Stackridge. "But three or four of us, with our revolvers, can happen that way, and take him out of the hands of Ropes and his cowardly crew without much difficulty. I, for one, am going."
"Hapgood don't even believe in fighting!" observed Deslow, with immense disgust; "and blast me if I am going to fight for him!"