These words gave Somers another cold sweat; and perhaps he thought it was a mistake that he had not put a bullet through the patriarch’s head when he had been tempted to do so in the room above. He was a double traitor; but I think the conscience of our hero was more at rest as it was than it would have been if he had shot down an unarmed man, even to save himself from prospective capture.
“Where is the place?” demanded the sergeant.
“In yonder, under them barrels and boxes. Jest fotch the trumpery out, and you’ll see the hole,” replied Rigney.
Somers heard the rumble of the barrels, as they were rolled out of the way, with very much the same feelings that a conscious man in a trance would listen to the rumbling of the wheels of the hearse which was bearing him to the church-yard, only that he was to come forth from a hopeless grave to the more gloomy light of a rebel dungeon.
“I can’t see anything in that hole,” said the sergeant. “No man could get into such a place as that.”
“Blessed are your eyes; for they see not!” thought Somers. “May your blindness be equal to that of the scribes and Pharisees!”
“But my son Tom has been in there. I reckon a Yankee could crawl inter as small a hole as anybody.”
The sergeant thought this was funny; and he honored the remark with a hearty laugh, in which Somers was disposed to join, though he regretted for the first time in his life that he was unable to “crawl out at the little end of the horn.” He was encouraged by the skepticism of the soldier, and was satisfied, that, if he attempted to demonstrate the proposition experimentally, he would be fully convinced of its difficulty, if not of its impossibility.
“Go and bring another lamp and a pole,” said the sergeant.
One of the party went up the stairs, and Somers gave himself up for lost. The extra lamp would certainly expose him, to say nothing of the pole; and it seemed to be folly to remain there, and be punched with a stick, like a woodchuck in his hole. Besides, there is something in tumbling down gracefully, when one must inevitably tumble; and he was disposed to surrender gracefully, as the coon did when he learned that Colonel Crockett was about to fire and bring him down. There was no hope; and it is bad generalship, as well as inhuman and useless, to fight a battle which is lost before the first shot is fired.