Part 62 (1/2)

When the new lawyers appeared the old man made another play at illness to gain delay. The Court ordered him to be brought in on his cot. Again, the physician swore he was lying, that he was gaining in strength daily.

The Judge, however, granted a delay of two days.

The moment the order was issued for an adjournment Brown deliberately rose from his cot and walked back to jail.

The trial was closed on Monday by the speeches of the prosecution and the defense. The judge charged the jury and in three-quarters of an hour they filed back into the jury box.

The crowd jammed every inch of s.p.a.ce in the old Court House, the wide entrance hall, and overflowed into the street.

The foreman solemnly p.r.o.nounced him guilty.

The old man merely pulled the covers of his cot up and stretched his legs, as if he had no interest in the verdict. Entirely recovered from every effect of his wounds, as able to walk as ever, he had refused to walk and had been carried again into the court room. He had determined to receive his sentence on a bed. He knew the effect of this picture on the gathering mob.

The silence of death fell on the crowded room. Not a single cry of triumph from the kindred of the dead. Not a single cheer from the men whose wives and children had been saved from the horrors of ma.s.sacre.

Chilton made his motion for an arrest of judgment and the judge ordered the motion to stand over until the next day. Brown heard the arguments the following day again lying on his cot. The judge reserved his decision and the final scene of the drama was enacted on November second.

The clerk asked John Brown if he had anything to say concerning why sentence should not be p.r.o.nounced upon him.

The crowd stared as they saw the wiry figure of the old man quickly rise. He fixed his eagle eye on them, not on the judge.

Over their heads he talked to the gathering mob of his countrymen. Brown had been a habitual liar from boyhood. In this speech, made on the eve of the sentence of death, he lied in every paragraph. He lied as he had when he grew a beard to play the role of ”Shubel Morgan.” He lied as he had lied to his victims when posing as a surveyor on the Pottawattomie.

He lied as he had done when he crept through the darkness of the night on his sleeping prey. He lied as he had a hundred times about those gruesome murders. He lied for his Sacred Cause.

He lied without stint and without reservation. He lied with such conviction that he convinced himself in the end that he was a hero--a martyr of human liberty and progress. And that he was telling the solemn truth.

”I have, may it please the court, a few words to say:

”In the first place I deny everything but what I have already admitted: of a design on my part to free slaves. I intended certainly to have made a clean thing of that matter, as I did last winter when I went into Missouri and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moving them through the country and finally leading them into Canada. I designed to have done the thing again on a larger scale.

That was all I intended. I never did intend murder or treason, or the destruction of property, or to excite or to incite slaves to rebellion, or to make insurrection.

”Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children--and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust treatment--I say let it be done.”

David Cruise was not there to tell of the bullet that crashed through his heart in Missouri. Frederick Douglas was not there to tell that he abandoned Brown in the old stone quarry outside Chambersburg, precisely because he had changed the plan of carrying off slaves as in Missouri to a scheme of treason, wholesale murders and insurrection.

Cruise was in his grave and Douglas on his way to Europe. There was no one to contradict his statements. The mob mind never asks for facts. It asks only for a.s.sertions. John Brown gave them what he knew they wished to hear and believe.

They heard and they believed.

With due solemnity, the Judge p.r.o.nounced the sentence of death and fixed the date on December the second, thirty days in the future.

The old man's eyes flamed with hidden fires at the unexpected grant of a month in which to complete the raising of the Blood Feud so gloriously begun. He was a master in the coming of mystic phrases in letters. He gloried in religious symbols. Within thirty days he could work with his pen the miracle that would transform a nation into the puppets of his will.

He walked beside the jailer, his eyes glittering, his head uplifted.

The Judge ordered the crowd to keep their seats until the prisoner was removed. In silence he marched through the throng without a hiss or a taunt.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII