Part 53 (1/2)

As the train pulled out Shepherd Haywood, a freedman, the baggage master of the station, walked toward the bridge to find the missing watchman.

The raiders shot him through the breast and he fell mortally wounded.

The first victim was a faithful colored employee of Mayor Beekham, the station master of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company.

The shot that killed him roused a man of action. Dr. John D. Starry lived but a stone's throw from the spot where Haywood had fallen.

Hearing the shot and the groans of the wounded man, the doctor hastened to his rescue and carried him into the station. He could give no coherent account of what had happened and was already in a dying condition.

The doctor investigated. He approached two groups of the raiders, was challenged and retreated. Satisfied of the seriousness of the attack when he saw two armed white men lead three negroes holding pikes in their hands into the Armory gate, he saddled his horse and rode to his neighbors in town and country and gave the alarm.

While this dangerous messenger was on his foam-flecked horse, Brown, true to his quixotic sense of the dramatic, sent a raiding party of picked men to capture Colonel Was.h.i.+ngton and bring to his headquarters in the a.r.s.enal the sword and pistols. On this foolish mission he despatched Captains Stevens, Cook and Tidd, with three negro privates, Leary, Anderson and Green. He gave positive orders that Colonel Was.h.i.+ngton should be forced to surrender the sword of the first President into the hands of a negro.

Day was dawning as the strange procession on its return pa.s.sed through the Armory gate. In his own carriage was seated Colonel Was.h.i.+ngton and his neighbor, John H. Allstead. Their slaves and valuables were packed in the stolen wagons drawn by stolen horses.

Brown stood rifle in hand to receive them.

”This,” said Stevens to Was.h.i.+ngton, ”is John Brown.”

”Osawatomie Brown of Kansas,” the old man added with a stiffening of his figure.

He then handed a pike to each of the slaves captured at Bellair and Allstead's:

”Stand guard over these white men.”

The negroes took the pikes and held them gingerly.

At sunrise Kagi sent an urgent message to his Chief advising him that the Rifle Works could not be held in the face of an a.s.sault. He begged him to retreat across the Potomac at the earliest possible moment.

Retreat was a word not in the old man's vocabulary. He sent Leary to reinforce him, with orders to hold the works.

He buckled the sword and pistols of Was.h.i.+ngton about his gaunt waist and counted his prisoners. He had forty whites within the enclosure. He counted the slaves whom he had armed with pikes. He had enrolled under his banner less than fifty. They stood in huddled groups of wonder and fear.

The black bees had failed to swarm.

He scanned the horizon and not a single burning home lighted the skies.

It had begun to drizzle rain. Not a torch had been used.

He had lost four precious hours in his quixotic expedition to capture Colonel Was.h.i.+ngton, his sword and slaves. He could not believe this a mistake. G.o.d had shown him the dramatic power of the act. He held a Was.h.i.+ngton in his possession. He was being guarded by his own slaves, armed. The scene would make him famous. It would stir the millions of the North. It would drive the South to desperation.

The thing that stunned him was the failure of the black legions to mobilize under the Captains whom he had appointed to lead them.

It was incredible.

He paced the enclosure, feverishly recalling the histories of mobs which he had studied, especially the fury of the French populace when the restraints of Law and Tradition had been lifted by the tocsin of the Revolution. The moment the beast beneath the skin of religion and culture was unchained, the ma.s.sacres began. Every cruelty known to man had been their pastime.

And these beasts were white men. How much more should he expect of the Blacks? Haiti had given him a.s.surance of darker deeds. The world was s.h.i.+vering with the horrors of the Black uprising in Haiti when he was born. He had drunk the story from his Puritan mother's breast. From childhood he had brooded with secret joy over its b.l.o.o.d.y details.

The Black Bees had swarmed there and Toussaint L'Overture had hived them as he had asked Frederick Douglas to hive them here. They seized the rudest weapons and wiped out the white population. They butchered ten thousand French men, women and children. And not a cry of pity or mercy found an echo in a savage breast.

What was wrong here?