“I’ll touch him,” said the fiery young man, “but not with prayers. Farewell father! to-morrow I’ll be here to tell you I have stopped the mouth of the king’s witness.”
Anson, promptly answering the challenge of young Derode, was at Chalk Farm at daylight. When he surveyed the slightly formed, but noble looking youth who stood before him, prepared for deadly contest, he remembered his unremitting pistol-practice, his unerring aim, and one human feeling, one pulsation of pity played around his heart. They were evanescent. He recalled his deserted home, his violated hearth, his vow for REVENGE, and at the fatal signal, his youthful antagonist lay on the frozen earth, with his life-blood bubbling out.
Could Anson have seen Derode when his son’s death was communicated to him, he would have deemed the destroyer’s cup of bitterness full.
Anson was arraigned for this murder, and underwent a trial, which was mere mockery, for having plied his gold freely—flaws, defective evidence, and questions of identity, as usual, in cases of dueling, hoodwinked justice.
“Plate sin with gold, and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks,
Clothe it with rags, a pigmy’s straw will pierce it.”
Well, the day of trial came. Public excitement was at its highest pitch. The jailor, accompanied by sheriffs and tipstaves, proceeded to the cell of the prisoner, to escort him to the tribunal of justice. But lo! the apartment was tenantless. The criminal had escaped. A brief survey of his cell revealed the means of his egress. The heavy stones forming the sides of his grated window, were displaced. Large tools lay scattered about—files, chisels, and other articles, plainly indicating a bold confederacy. And such was indeed the case:—for the officers belonging to the same regiment with Derode had contrived his escape.
Words cannot depict Anson’s feelings of mingled rage and disappointment when he learned that his victim had fled. At his own expense, he instituted a search that pervaded the three kingdoms. He himself flew to the continent, and offered a thousand guineas for the capture of the murderer. His efforts were fruitless. The men who liberated Derode did not withdraw their protection until they had placed him in safety.
For more than a year Anson wandered about Europe, in hopes to light upon the fugitive. Weary at length with the vain pursuit, and thinking that the fire in his heart was consuming his life, he returned home, as he thought, to die. He remained in Philadelphia a few months, during which time he conveyed a great part of the remainder of his property to some of our public charities, and then retired from the haunts of men to live and die alone. With a strong tinge of romance, he selected a wild, mountainous country, in the interior of our state, never leaving the precincts of the hovel where he dwelt, except to purchase a stock of the homeliest food.
He had been living thus more than eight years without any thing occurring to disturb the monotony of his life, when one blustering night, a cry from a creature in distress reached his ear, as he sat in his mountain hut, poring over a black-letter folio. Surprised that any one should invade his dangerous premises, and on such a night, he ignited a fragment of resinous wood, and sallied forth. As he descended the path that left his door, and struck into that which wound round a precipitous ledge, the voice came nearer on the blast. Anson shouted loudly to the stranger not to approach, until he reached him, as another step in the dark might be certain destruction. Proceeding hastily onward, he found the traveller standing on the outermost edge of the fearful precipice. The torrent was heard boiling and dashing far below, and the wind swept in eddying blasts round the dizzy cliff. Anson extended his hand to the wanderer, and the blaze of the torch flashed brightly in the faces of both men. Anson riveted his eyes on the features of the stranger, and with a yell of demoniac joy fastened on his throat. It was the miserable Derode, who, in the last stage of poverty, was wandering from the far west, to the sea-board, on foot. In the darkness, he had mistaken the mountain path for a bye-road, which had been described to him as greatly shortening the distance to the village. He quailed beneath the iron grasp of Anson, and struggled to say:—“dreaded man! are you not surfeited with revenge? My ruined daughter!—my murdered son!”