Key after key was tried, but none fitted. Throwing down the bunch, Harrington looked at the watch, and went up-stairs to stop the water. He came back presently, took the shade from the lamp, and holding the light to the collar, inspected its make carefully. He saw that it opened on a hinge behind, and was secured by a lock before. Putting the lamp on the table, he reflected for a moment.
“Lie down on the floor,” he said, presently.
The fugitive obeyed, with as much alacrity as his feebleness permitted. He already had the most entire and perfect confidence in his protector.
Bending over him, Harrington turned him on his side. Then taking up the poker, he inserted it between the neck of the fugitive and the under side of the collar, and putting his foot on this for a purchase, thus holding the collar firmly to the floor, he seized the upper side near the lock with both hands.
“Now lie still,” he said. “I don’t know whether I’m strong enough to break the lock, but, by mankind!” he shouted, “I’ll try!”
Slowly, the muscles in Harrington’s arms straightened, his bent leg grew firm as iron, the arms became two stiff, white corded bars, the muscles in his back and shoulders tensely trembled, the blood mounted to his face and body, and in the midst of the slow, tremendous strain, there was a faint clicking gride, a sudden snap, a screaking wrench, and one half the collar rose on its rusty hinge in his hands. The deed was done! Harrington stood up, and stepped back, exercising his arms, while the bought thrall of Lafitte scrambled erect, ghastlily grinning, and stood surveying the accursed necklace, which lay open as his neck had abandoned it, with the bent poker lying on its inner surface.
“To-morrow,” said Harrington, quietly, “you are to tell me all about this. Now undress yourself.”
“Yes, Marster,” and the fugitive, with a sort of ghastly joyfulness, hastily divested himself of his foul rags, which Harrington at once threw into the yard.
An awful sight was that black skeleton of a body. As it lankly straddled across the room, and up the ladder, following Harrington, Holbein might have taken it as Death come for the Scholar—a grimmer and grislier figure than any in the Dance Macaber. Few men would have borne to abide even for a moment in the same room with it. The very dog in the yard, himself the Pariah of brutes, would have bayed at it and shrunk into his kennel.
Our free and happy country had been at work upon that form. North and South had wrought together to bring it to perfection. The old scars which covered it, the horny wheals of many a scourging, the thick ring of callosed flesh left by the iron collar around its neck—these were the special tool-marks of the South. The recent cuts and bruises, the swollen contusions left by fist and boot upon it, the raw, blue sores, the general offence and stench it had contracted in the noisome pit of a vessel’s noisome hold—these showed the tooling of the North. That ghastly gauntness, that lank emaciation, that livid swarth, those signs and tokens of ferocious abuse, of cold and hunger and sickness and privation—our free and happy country had done it all!