Within one week afterward four young lightweights in the village proclaimed themselves abolitionists! In life Hardy had not been able to make a convert; everybody laughed at him; but nobody could laugh at his legacy.The four swaggered around with their slouch-hats pulled down over their faces, and hinted darkly at awful possibilities.The people were troubled and afraid, and showed it.And they were stunned, too; they could not understand it."Abolitionist" had always been a term of shame and horror;yet here were four young men who were not only not ashamed to bear that name, but were grimly proud of it.Respectable young men they were, too--of good families, and brought up in the church.Ed Smith, the printer's apprentice, nineteen, had been the head Sunday-school boy, and had once recited three thousand Bible verses without making a break.Dick Savage, twenty, the baker's apprentice; Will Joyce, twenty-two, journeyman blacksmith; and Henry Taylor, twenty-four, tobacco-stemmer--were the other three.They were all of a sentimental cast; they were all romance-readers; they all wrote poetry, such as it was; they were all vain and foolish; but they had never before been suspected of having anything bad in them.
They withdrew from society, and grew more and more mysterious and dreadful.They presently achieved the distinction of being denounced by names from the pulpit--which made an immense stir! This was grandeur, this was fame.They were envied by all the other young fellows now.This was natural.
Their company grew--grew alarmingly.They took a name.It was a secret name, and was divulged to no outsider; publicly they were simply the abolitionists.They had pass-words, grips, and signs;they had secret meetings; their initiations were conducted with gloomy pomps and ceremonies, at midnight.
They always spoke of Hardy as "the Martyr," and every little while they moved through the principal street in procession--at midnight, black-robed, masked, to the measured tap of the solemn drum--on pilgrimage to the Martyr's grave, where they went through with some majestic fooleries and swore vengeance upon his murderers.They gave previous notice of the pilgrimage by small posters, and warned everybody to keep indoors and darken all houses along the route, and leave the road empty.These warnings were obeyed, for there was a skull and crossbones at the top of the poster.
When this kind of thing had been going on about eight weeks, a quite natural thing happened.A few men of character and grit woke up out of the nightmare of fear which had been stupefying their faculties, and began to discharge scorn and scoffings at themselves and the community for enduring this child's-play; and at the same time they proposed to end it straightway.Everybody felt an uplift; life was breathed into their dead spirits; their courage rose and they began to feel like men again.This was on a Saturday.All day the new feeling grew and strengthened; it grew with a rush; it brought inspiration and cheer with it.
Midnight saw a united community, full of zeal and pluck, and with a clearly defined and welcome piece of work in front of it.The best organizer and strongest and bitterest talker on that great Saturday was the Presbyterian clergyman who had denounced the original four from his pulpit--Rev.Hiram Fletcher--and he promised to use his pulpit in the public interest again now.On the morrow he had revelations to make, he said--secrets of the dreadful society.
But the revelations were never made.At half past two in the morning the dead silence of the village was broken by a crashing explosion, and the town patrol saw the preacher's house spring in a wreck of whirling fragments into the sky.The preacher was killed, together with a negro woman, his only slave and servant.
The town was paralyzed again, and with reason.To struggle against a visible enemy is a thing worth while, and there is a plenty of men who stand always ready to undertake it; but to struggle against an invisible one--an invisible one who sneaks in and does his awful work in the dark and leaves no trace--that is another matter.That is a thing to make the bravest tremble and hold back.
The cowed populace were afraid to go to the funeral.The man who was to have had a packed church to hear him expose and denounce the common enemy had but a handful to see him buried.
The coroner's jury had brought in a verdict of "death by the visitation of God," for no witness came forward; if any existed they prudently kept out of the way.Nobody seemed sorry.Nobody wanted to see the terrible secret society provoked into the commission of further outrages.Everybody wanted the tragedy hushed up, ignored, forgotten, if possible.
And so there was a bitter surprise and an unwelcome one when Will Joyce, the blacksmith's journeyman, came out and proclaimed himself the assassin! Plainly he was not minded to be robbed of his glory.He made his proclamation, and stuck to it.Stuck to it, and insisted upon a trial.Here was an ominous thing; here was a new and peculiarly formidable terror, for a motive was revealed here which society could not hope to deal with successfully--VANITY, thirst for notoriety.If men were going to kill for notoriety's sake, and to win the glory of newspaper renown, a big trial, and a showy execution, what possible invention of man could discourage or deter them? The town was in a sort of panic; it did not know what to do.