The Last Three Soldiers

by W. H. Shelton

Among the other books there was one entitled "Two-fold Slavery of the United States." This book had been published in London in the year 1854, and contained as a frontispiece a black-and-white map, which, so far west as it extended, was remarkably like the one which hung on the wall of their house. Philip shed new tears over the pathetic lives of Uncle Tom and little Eva, and Lieutenant Coleman and George Bromley grew more and more indignant as they read of the sufferings of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, and the self-confessed cruelties of Captain Canot. However much the soldiers were wrought up by these books, it was left to the mass of pamphlets and periodicals to fill their hearts with an unspeakable bitterness toward the institution which the united efforts of their comrades in arms had failed to overthrow.

It was evident that the old man had kept up some sort of communication by mail with the Boston abolitionists, and that his agent, Josiah, had yielded his views, if he had any, to a liberal supply of gold; for up to the time of his death he had continued to receive these periodicals. As long as he received such dangerous publications, he must have maintained correspondence with their editors; and the more the soldiers became imbued by their reading with the ideas which had made a hermit of Hezekiah Wallstow, the more certain they became that he had willed his money to the cause of abolition, or perhaps that he only held it in trust from the first. Otherwise, why should he have adopted so crafty a method of hiding it from Josiah? To speculate on the cunning of these two men became a favorite occupation of Coleman and Bromley when their eyes were worn out with reading. They were sure that every fresh lot of pamphlets had come, through the settlement and up the mountain, at the bottom of a cask of meal. The old man had no mill or other means of grinding his corn, which he must have cultivated for his cattle, relying upon Josiah for most of his food. Undoubtedly the very keg which the hunters had seen Josiah carrying up by moonlight, and which they believed was filled with whisky, contained seditious literature enough, if they had ever found it, to have put them to the unpleasant necessity of hanging the bearer to the nearest limb.

So the soldiers continued to read, to the neglect of every other duty, through the entire month of August, except that Lieutenant Coleman made a brief entry in the diary each morning, and, when they were out of food, Philip laid by his book long enough to grind another sack of the corn. The few ears which had shown themselves on the plantation had been eaten green, and the yellow and shriveled stalks which had escaped the grub at the root stood in thin, sickly rows. It was an off year even for the chestnuts. When, in addition to this, it was found in September that the potato crop had rotted in the ground, the reading was brought to a sudden end, and the soldiers found themselves face to face with a condition which threatened starvation, and that before the winter began. They remembered the bee-tree, and took up the line where Philip had left it, at the edge of the southern wall, only to find that the bees flew on to some tree in the forest below and beyond the plateau.

When it was quite settled that they would have no supplies for the winter unless they bought them from the people in the valley with their gold pieces, as the old man had done before them, they settled down to their reading again, foraging by turns for every edible thing they could find, and putting off the evil hour when they should be forced to reveal themselves. The more they read of these fiery periodicals the more they loathed their neighbors in the valley and shrank from communicating with them. They knew that these people in the mountains seldom owned slaves themselves; but they felt that they were in full sympathy with all the cruelties of which the yellow-and-blue covered pamphlets treated. If the guineas in the hoard of Hezekiah Wallstow meant anything, they represented the proportion of the gold which had been contributed by antislavery societies in England; and they began seriously to consider their moral obligation to return the entire sum to its rightful owners. In order to accomplish this just purpose, their lives must be preserved during the approaching winter, and seeds secured for another planting. After that, they would find means to replace with iron the gold they had used in the construction of the mill and of various domestic utensils; and when the treasure was restored to the cask, they would find some way to open communication with the benevolent antislavery societies.

By the end of October they had eaten the last of their meal. There were a few clusters of purple grapes on the vines, and to these they turned for food, still dreading to make any signs to their enemies, with a dread which was born of the pamphlets they were reading. For two days more they stained their hands and faces with the juice of the grapes, until an exclusive fruit diet, and meditation day and night on the awful wickedness of men, weakened their bodies and began to affect their minds.

The dread hour had finally come, and they could no longer delay making signs of their distress. To this end they collected a pile of dry wood, and heaped it on the point of rocks, in full view of the settlement of Cashiers. It was growing dusk when everything was ready to start the fire, and Philip had come from the house with a lighted torch. At the moment he was about to touch it to the dry wood, Bromley snatched the torch from his hand and extinguished it in the dirt. Coleman and Philip tried to prevent this rash act of their comrade, and in their excitement gave free expression to their anger; but Bromley stamped out the last spark of the fire without paying any heed to their bad language and frantic gestures.

"Are you mad?" he then cried, retreating a little from what threatened to be an assault. "What do you think will be our fate at the hands of these people, when we are found in possession of such books as we have been reading? We should be imprisoned like Lovejoy, or branded like Walker. We might pay with our lives for your recklessness to-night."

Philip and Coleman were shocked at the danger they had so narrowly escaped, and thanked Bromley for his forethought and prompt action.

Of course they must bury the books, but they would have all of the next day to attend to that; and with many expressions of thankfulness they returned to the house and crept into their bunks. When morning came they were weak and hungry, with nothing whatever to eat; but in spite of all this they heaped the antislavery books and pamphlets on the earthen floor, carefully separating them from the works on temperance. They had come to regard these books as little less than sacred, and they naturally shrank from burying them in the ground. Happy thought!—there was the cave of the bats. So, packing them into the pails, the soldiers carried the books in two toilsome journeys by torch-light to the middle of the cavernous passage, and laid them carefully together on the stone floor. They were well-nigh exhausted by this exertion; but after a rest they found strength to close the entrance with brush and earth, and to cover their work with pine-needles.

Half famished as Lieutenant Coleman and his comrades were, they could only drink from the branch and wait patiently for night. The poor old paralyzed rooster, sitting in the chips by the door, looked so forlorn and hungry that Philip set him out among the dry weeds, and lay down on the ground beside him, so as to be ready to turn him about and set him along when he had plucked the few seeds in his front. As for the bear and the five crippled roosters, they shambled and hobbled about, and shifted bravely for themselves.