There is an interesting cave a mile or two below Hannibal,
among the bluffs. I would have liked to revisit
it, but had not time. In my time the person
who then owned it turned it into a mausoleum for his
daughter, aged fourteen. The body of this poor
child was put into a copper cylinder filled with alcohol,
and this was suspended in one of the dismal avenues
of the cave. The top of the cylinder was removable;
and it was said to be a common thing for the baser
order of tourists to drag the dead face into view
and examine it and comment upon it.
The slaughter-house is gone from the mouth of
Bear Creek and so is the small jail (or ‘calaboose’)
which once stood in its neighborhood. A citizen
asked, ’Do you remember when Jimmy Finn, the
town drunkard, was burned to death in the calaboose?’
Observe, now, how history becomes defiled, through
lapse of time and the help of the bad memories of
men. Jimmy Finn was not burned in the calaboose,
but died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination
of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion.
When I say natural death, I mean it was a natural
death for Jimmy Finn to die. The calaboose victim
was not a citizen; he was a poor stranger, a harmless
whiskey-sodden tramp. I know more about his case
than anybody else; I knew too much of it, in that
bygone day, to relish speaking of it. That tramp
was wandering about the streets one chilly evening,
with a pipe in his mouth, and begging for a match;
he got neither matches nor courtesy; on the contrary,
a troop of bad little boys followed him around and
amused themselves with nagging and annoying him.
I assisted; but at last, some appeal which the wayfarer
made for forbearance, accompanying it with a pathetic
reference to his forlorn and friendless condition,
touched such sense of shame and remnant of right feeling
as were left in me, and I went away and got him some
matches, and then hied me home and to bed, heavily
weighted as to conscience, and unbuoyant in spirit.
An hour or two afterward, the man was arrested and
locked up in the calaboose by the marshal—large
name for a constable, but that was his title.
At two in the morning, the church bells rang for
fire, and everybody turned out, of course—I
with the rest. The tramp had used his matches
disastrously: he had set his straw bed on fire,
and the oaken sheathing of the room had caught.
When I reached the ground, two hundred men, women,
and children stood massed together, transfixed with
horror, and staring at the grated windows of the jail.
Behind the iron bars, and tugging frantically at
them, and screaming for help, stood the tramp; he
seemed like a black object set against a sun, so white
and intense was the light at his back. That marshal
could not be found, and he had the only key.
A battering-ram was quickly improvised, and the thunder
of its blows upon the door had so encouraging a sound
