CHAPTER XI.
MOB SPIRIT OF LICK SKILLET.
At the time of this dramatic period in the life of “Uncle” Alex, the greatest excitement prevailed elsewhere in Lick Skillet neighborhood, as Allen Dodson and his neighbors, armed with rifles and led by blood hounds, pursued the trail of Leslie Duncan, a son of Laura, whom the reader met in the first chapter of this story, firmly determined to hang him to the first convenient limb and riddle his body with bullets. With a pitch-fork he had stabbed Willie Hudson, Allen’s 15 year old son and inflicted a severe wound in the stomach, for whipping him with a lash. Besides, in leaving the Dodson farm he had broken a labor contract which he had made with Mr. Dodson at one dollar per week and board, and deserved to be captured and shot without the expense and formality of a trial in a legalized court of justice!
“Unless we make an example of this ‘nigger,’” said the leader of the party, as they took a short rest, propped up on their guns, “it will soon come to a pass that we might as well try to control the winds as these terrifying black brutes. If we don’t subdue them they will subdue us. That’s what old Ben Tillman says, and he knows. Good God, fellows, you ought to have heard that old one-eyed rebel speak the other night at Daleyville. I’d vote for him for any position he might want. I would even vote to change the form of government in America and make him Emperor if I only had the chance!”
Long, loud and enthusiastic cheering followed this declaration by Millard Dodson, the eldest son of Allen, whose eternal enmity for Leslie was quite well understood by all members of the mob as well as by others of his neighbors. Those who refused to join in the attempted capture and assassination said that the boy had a right to defend himself, and intimated that the quarrel and fight were precipitated by Millard to rid the community of Leslie who was paying entirely too much attention to Matilda Deas, a nineteen year old mulatto employed as cook in the Dodson home, whose affection for Leslie dated back to their school days together eight years before, to suit Millard. His wife had on one occasion abandoned him and threatened a separation on account of the gossip of intimacy between him and Matilda. Leslie, who had departed in haste after wounding the boy, which incident took place three hours before it was timed by Millard to come off made good use of the spare moments at his disposal for eluding the mob, which he knew in his own mind would follow him, unopposed by the police authorities, and execute him if his capture could be effected.
With him it was a case of life, with Matilda and children and a happy home, although he knew the sacred purity and virtue of his betrothed had been despoiled by the lust of one of the men, at least, seeking his life; if he could escape this was possible; otherwise it was death with all the tortures of the damned. So he spurred himself on and onward in his flight, through tangled woods and swamps, across deep and swift flowing streams, over hills and high precipices, down through the valleys and old fashioned fields, stopping only once in ten hours to rest at a Negro farm home, where he was given some food and a small bit of change to aid him along on his journey to a place of safety, if place of safety beyond the grave there was! Twice or thrice he heard the barking of dogs and the voices of men as nearer and nearer they approached and his heart almost stopped beating. It developed that what he did hear was the reports of cattle buyers from the West who were in the South buying up the “scrub stock” to take to the plains to fatten for the Chicago packing houses. As fear of being overtaken and summarily put to death, without a last word or look or kiss from his sweetheart, would tend to accelerate his speed, so would that joy he felt over the possibility of escape and final reunion with Matilda cause him to double and redouble his energies in his onward course in the mad race for life.
His pursuers discounting the cleverness of the Negro in selecting only unfrequented roads and abandoned farm-houses, as places of travel and concealment when a rest became imperative, had lost the trail at the beginning of the hunt and on the second morning, although they searched diligently until midnight on the evening before, found the hunters and their bird of prey some thirty odd miles apart. Dissentions had arisen among the members over the conduct of the chase at the beginning which for a while threatened to break up the party, but about this time Ben Milligan, who was drunk when the party first set out and unable to go at first call joined them with a gallon of “Old North Carolina Corn,” and the information that Leslie had been seen only a few hours before in the Shinburnally neighborhood. Under the stimulation of the whiskey and the false promises of the leader of the mob to pay the party first to lay hands on Leslie Duncan the sum of twenty-five dollars, new momentum was injected into the chase and as long as the whiskey lasted it was energetic enough to elicit the praise of the most pronounced grouch among the men.
But miscalculations were again made, as Leslie was many miles from Shinburnally and was going as fast as his tired legs could carry him on and on in an opposite direction.
In the meantime, Mrs. Millard Dodson in a rage of indignation over the report going the rounds of the neighborhood and gaining credence each day that the ‘yaller woman’ at her home had succeeded in alienating the affections of her husband completely, had taken advantage of Millard’s absence to rid her household of the presence of the person she conceived to be the source of much of her domestic infelicity, shame and disgrace. With the aid of John Quincy, her eldest son, she had administered a terrible beating to the woman and at the point of a gun had marched her three miles from the farm and after commanding her to go and admonishing her never to show herself in Lick Skillet again on penalty of death, left her and returned to the house, stopping at each of the neighbor’s houses to inform them of what she had done.
During her absence from the house, Millard and his party, which had postponed the chase for want of more whiskey, had returned and were ransacking the pantries and side boards in the dining room as she entered, in quest of food which they had gone without for nearly thirty-six hours.
“Where’s Matilda?” inquired Millard, as his wife suddenly entered the house.
“That Negro wench is gone” she told him in a calm, unimpassioned voice, “and gone forever. I have borne the disgrace of the reported relation between her and you as long as I can, much longer and far more patiently than I should have been expected to, so I gave her a whipping which she will never forget and took the gun and marched her away with such a warning that will be heeded.”
Millard tried hard to conceal the effect which the temporary loss of his paramour had on him by approving the action of his wife; at the same time he assured her that the common gossip of the neighborhood was without the least foundation, and that it would have aided in the capture had Matilda been retained for a few days longer. But that indescribable inner consciousness which betrays guilt and convicts the criminal beyond the hope of escape, except through suicide, and suicide is not escape, marked the stain of dishonor and shame all over his countenance with its brush of indelible guilt.
After the departure of the members of the mob, pandemonium broke loose in the Dodson home over Millard’s attempt to chastise his wife for running Matilda away, being intercepted by his two daughters and the energetic pugilistic activities of the wife. When the resounding, reverberating atmosphere had cleared away the father found two large bruises on his face and a slight wound in the back from a knife as evidence, proof and positive, that his was essentially a family of fighters on the mother’s side at least. Matilda, at this time, was more than ten miles away and happy as a bird suddenly freed from its cage except for one thing which burdened her soul as no other event had ever done since the evening that the beastly Dodson had forced her to surrender her body to his passion in satisfying his greedy lust, and that one thing was the ignorance in which she lived of the safety and security of her lover, Leslie, whom she felt quite sure by or before that hour had been captured and lynched.
Maybe he had made good his escape. For the latter she had hoped and prayed with the earnestness, desperation and despair with which she so long warded off the entreaties and appeals of Dodson when he first made the advances which finally culminated in the degradation of her life. Her miserable life was spent in his home only under compulsion, the compulsion of a labor contract entered into by her in legal form, a breach of which she knew from the experience of other colored women employed under such terms and conditions meant only one thing—a term of penal servitude at the hardest of the most degraded sort of labor!
So she had determined to carry out her part of the contract and at the end of it marry Leslie and settle down in a home of her own, to bless it, perhaps, with the voices of children and all the endearments which the relations of father, mother and child mean to mankind.
But in a world of strange and unfriendly relations, the only sort of a world which she had ever known, having been but eight years old on the day of the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, in the great white-heat of the conflict being waged by the whites of the North and the whites and the Negroes of the South in that great historical drama known all over the civilized world as the “Reconstruction Period!” What blighted hopes they should have been! Meditating over the hopelessness of her present plight, separated from her lover, whose body at that moment for all she knew might be dangling at the end of a rope, stung to the heart by hundreds of bullets from the guns of armed murderers; and without the reach, comfort and consolation of her father, who was at that time serving a sentence in the penitentiary for disposing of a crop under lien, the spirit of despair was rapidly enveloping her troubled soul, when lo, and behold, there appeared before her no other a person than Dodson on his swiftest mare with Leslie in tow, tied hard and fast to his saddle! As unexpected as a bolt of lightning from the clear blue sky and with the vigor and fierceness of a tiger she sprang between the horse and the bound boy and began biting and knawing at the rope with the voracity of a starving lion in contact with its hunk of meat.
At first Millard drew his pistol and threatened to shoot if she did not desist but paying no attention at all to his demands she kept on chewing the rope as if she had not heard, when Leslie managed to secure his knife from his pocket and get it into her hands with which she cut the rope in two, and set her lover free. Then facing her traducer and heaping curse after curse upon him and daring him to shoot, she managed to distract his attention from Leslie and give the latter time to get out of reach, which he did, remaining, however, near by in concealment ready at any moment to spring upon his adversary and engage him in mortal combat if further harm threatened his sweetheart.
For the purpose of making Leslie’s escape secure. Matilda consented to return with Dodson on condition that the charges against her lover be withdrawn and he be allowed to leave the country unmolested by any mob or officers of the law; and seating herself behind him on his swift, gay, young horse the two had scarcely begun the journey back home when the girl spied Leslie in hiding. With the dexterity of a born adroit sleuth she extracted from one of the pockets in the back of Dodson’s pants the pistol with which he had failed to frighten her and dropped it silently in the dust before the eyes of Leslie, all unknown to Dodson. In the next few moments the latter was looking down the barrel of his own gun, his teeth chattering as if suddenly attacked by a chill and his whole body shaking and quivering as if in the throes of an ague. He very quickly consented to be bound hand and foot and tied to a tree in the woods some distance from the road-side and forever abandon the prosecution of Leslie, and permit Matilda to go in peace and trouble her no more, as the price of his life, now at the mercy of those whose liberty of body and soul less than an hour before was entirely in his hands to be dealt with as he wished.
