In a short time the young men had reached the tavern, where the team and vehicle belonged. As they drew up in front of the door, Jesse Tidwell, continuing and completing his description of the condition of Burrel Bohannon, exclaimed: "Yes, sir, he fell and lay there. He may have kicked a time or two, and I think he mumbled something, but he was as good as dead."
Bridalbin, restless and uneasy, had been wandering about the town, and he came up just in time to hear this last remark. At that moment, a negro issued from the tavern with a lantern, and Bridalbin was not at all surprised to see Gabriel Tolliver with the rest; and he wondered what mischief the young men had been engaged in. Some one had been badly hurt or killed. That much he could gather from Tidwell's declaration; but who?
He went to his lodging and to bed in a very uncomfortable frame of mind.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Fate of Mr. Hotchkiss
Mr. Hotchkiss, after leaving the Union League, had decided not to wait for his co-worker, whom he knew as Boring. So far as he was concerned, he had no fears. He knew, of course, that he was playing with fire, but what of that? He had the Government behind him, and he had two companies of troops within call. What more could any man ask? More than that, he was doing what he conceived to be his duty. He belonged to that large and pestiferous tribe of reformers, who go through the world without fixed principles. He had been an abolitionist, but he was not of the Garrison type. On the contrary, he thought that Garrison was a time-server and a laggard who needed to be spurred and driven. He was one of the men who urged John Brown to stir up an insurrection in which innocent women and children would have been the chief sufferers; and he would have rejoiced sincerely if John Brown had been successful. He mistook his opinions for first principles, and went on the theory that what he thought right could not by any possibility be wrong. He belonged to the Peace Society, and yet nothing would have pleased him better than an uprising of the blacks, followed by the shedding of innocent blood.
In short, there were never two sides to any question that interested Hotchkiss. He held the Southern people responsible for American slavery, and would have refused to listen to any statement of facts calculated to upset his belief. He was narrow-minded, bigoted, and intensely in earnest. Some writer, Newman, perhaps, has said that a man will not become a martyr for the sake of an opinion; but Newman probably never came in contact with the whipper-snappers of Exeter Hall, or their prototypes in this country—the men who believe that philanthropy, and reform, and progress generally are worthless unless it be accompanied by strife, and hate, and, if possible, by bloodshed. You find the type everywhere; it clings like a leech to the skirts of every great movement. The Hotchkisses swarm wherever there is an opening for them, and they always present the same general aspect. They are as productive of isms as a fly is of maggots, and they live and die in the belief that they are promoting the progress of the world; but if their success is to be measured by their operations in the South during the reconstruction period, the world would be much better off without them. They succeeded in dedicating millions of human beings to misery and injustice, and warped the minds of the whites to such an extent that they thought it necessary to bring about peace and good order by means of various acute forms of injustice and lawlessness.
Mr. Hotchkiss was absolutely sincere in believing that the generation of Southern whites who were his contemporaries were personally responsible for slavery in this country, and for all the wrongs that he supposed had been the result of that institution. He felt it in every fibre of his cultivated but narrow mind, and he went about elated at the idea that he was able to contribute his mite of information to the negroes, and breed in their minds hatred of the people among whom they were compelled to live. If there had been a Booker Washington in that day, he would have been denounced by the Hotchkisses as a traitor to his race, and an enemy of the Government, just as they denounced and despised such negroes as Uncle Plato.
Hotchkiss went along the road in high spirits. He had delivered a blistering address to the negroes at the meeting of the league, and he was feeling happy. His work, he thought, was succeeding. Before he delivered his address, he had initiated Ike Varner, who was by all odds the most notorious negro in all that region. Ike was a poet in his way; if he had lived a few centuries earlier, he would have been called a minstrel. He could stand up before a crowd of white men, and spin out rhymes by the yard, embodying in this form of biography the weak points of every citizen. Some of his rhymes were very apt, and there are men living to-day who can repeat some of the extemporaneous satires composed by this negro. He had the reputation among the blacks of being an uncompromising friend of the whites. In the town, he was a privileged character; he could do and say what he pleased. He was a fine cook, and provided possum suppers for those who sat up late at night, and ice-cream for those who went to bed early. He tidied up the rooms of the young bachelors, he sold chicken-pies and ginger-cakes on public days, and Cephas, whose name was mentioned at the beginning of this chronicle, is willing to pay five dollars to the man or woman who can bake a ginger-cake that will taste as well as those that Ike Varner made. He was a happy-go-lucky negro, and spent his money as fast as he made it, not on himself, but on Edie, his wife, who was young, and bright, and handsome. She was almost white, and her face reminded you somehow of the old paintings of the Magdalene, with her large eyes and the melancholy droop of her mouth. Edie was the one creature in the world that Ike really cared for, and he had sense enough to know that she cared for him only when he could supply her with money. Yet he watched her like a hawk, madly jealous of every glance she gave another man; and she gave many, in all directions. Ike's jealousy was the talk of the town among the male population, and was the subject for many a jest at his expense. His nature was such that he could jest about it too, but far below the jests, as any one could see, there was desperation.