“They will be!” shouted a farmer.
“Don’t you worry about that.”
“We want to get into some sort of shape,”
cried Eph.
“Shape, hell!” said Hartley Bowlder.
There was a hiss and clang and rattle behind him,
and a steam whistle shrieked. The crowd divided,
and Hartley’s sorrel jumped just in time as
the westbound accommodation rushed through on its way
to Rouen. From the rear platform leaned the sheriff,
Horner, waving his hands frantically as he flew by,
but no one understood—or cared—what
he said, or, in the general excitement, even wondered
why he was leaving the scene of his duty at such a
time. When the train had dwindled to a dot and
disappeared, and the noise of its rush grew faint,
the court-house bell was heard ringing, and the mob
was piling pell-mell into the village to form on the
Square. The judge stood alone on the embankment.
“That settles it,” he said aloud, gloomily,
watching the last figures. He took off his hat
and pushed back the thick, white hair from his forehead.
“Nothing to do but wait. Might as well go
home for that. Blast it!” he exclaimed,
impatiently. “I don’t want to go there.
It’s too hard on the little girl. If she
hadn’t come till next week she’d never
have known John Harkless.”
JOHN BROWN’S BODY
All morning horsemen had been galloping through Six-Cross-Roads,
sometimes singly, oftener in company. At one-o’clock
the last posse passed through on its return to the
county-seat, and after that there was a long, complete
silence, while the miry corners were undisturbed by
a single hoof-beat. No unkempt colt nickered
from his musty stall; the sparse young corn that was
used to rasp and chuckle greenly stood rigid in the
fields. Up the Plattville pike despairingly cackled
one old hen, with her wabbling sailor run, smit with
a superstitious horror of nothing, in the stillness;
she hid herself in the shadow underneath a rickety
barn, and her shrieking ceased.
Only on the Wimby farm were there signs of life.
The old lady who had sent Harkless roses sat by the
window all morning and wiped her eyes, watching the
horsemen ride by; sometimes they would hail her and
tell her there was nothing yet. About two-o’clock,
her husband rattled up in a buckboard, and got out
the late, and more authentic, Mr. Wimby’s shot-gun,
which he carefully cleaned and oiled, in spite of
its hammerless and quite useless condition, sitting,
meanwhile, by the window opposite his wife, and often
looking up from his work to shake his weak fist at
his neighbors’ domiciles and creak decrepit
curses and denunciations.
But the Cross-Roads was ready. It knew what was
coming now. Frightened, desperate, sullen, it
was ready.
