This consumptive and I became good friends.
I visited him every day, and we talked about everything.
At least, about everything but wives and children.
Let anybody’s wife or anybody’s child be
mentioned, and three things always followed:
the most gracious and loving and tender light glimmered
in the man’s eyes for a moment; faded out the
next, and in its place came that deadly look which
had flamed there the first time I ever saw his lids
unclose; thirdly, he ceased from speech, there and
then for that day; lay silent, abstracted, and absorbed;
apparently heard nothing that I said; took no notice
of my good-byes, and plainly did not know, by either
sight or hearing, when I left the room.
When I had been this Karl Ritter’s daily and
sole intimate during two months, he one day said,
abruptly—
‘I will tell you my story.’
Then he went on as follows:—
I have never given up, until now. But now I
have given up. I am going to die. I made
up my mind last night that it must be, and very soon,
too. You say you are going to revisit your river,
by-and-bye, when you find opportunity. Very well;
that, together with a certain strange experience which
fell to my lot last night, determines me to tell you
my history—for you will see Napoleon, Arkansas;
and for my sake you will stop there, and do a certain
thing for me—a thing which you will willingly
undertake after you shall have heard my narrative.
Let us shorten the story wherever we can, for it will
need it, being long. You already know how I came
to go to America, and how I came to settle in that
lonely region in the South. But you do not know
that I had a wife. My wife was young, beautiful,
loving, and oh, so divinely good and blameless and
gentle! And our little girl was her mother in
miniature. It was the happiest of happy households.
One night—it was toward the close of the
war—I woke up out of a sodden lethargy,
and found myself bound and gagged, and the air tainted
with chloroform! I saw two men in the room,
and one was saying to the other, in a hoarse whisper,
’I told her I would, if she made a noise, and
as for the child—’
The other man interrupted in a low, half-crying voice—
’You said we’d only gag them and rob them,
not hurt them; or I wouldn’t have come.’
’Shut up your whining; had to change the plan
when they waked up; you done all you could to protect
them, now let that satisfy you; come, help rummage.’
Both men were masked, and wore coarse, ragged ‘nigger’
clothes; they had a bull’s-eye lantern, and
by its light I noticed that the gentler robber had
no thumb on his right hand. They rummaged around
my poor cabin for a moment; the head bandit then said,
in his stage whisper—
’It’s a waste of time—he shall
tell where it’s hid. Undo his gag, and
revive him up.’
