The Spy, James Fenimore Cooper [uplifting book club books TXT] 📗

“Answer me as I put the questions, or this musket shall send you to keep the old driveler company: where is your pack?”

“I will tell you nothing, unless you let me go to my father,” said the peddler, resolutely.

His persecutor raised his arm with a malicious sneer, and was about to execute his threat, when one of his companions checked him.

“What would you do?” he said. “You surely forget the reward. Tell us where are your goods, and you shall go to your father.”

Birch complied instantly, and a man was dispatched in quest of the booty; he soon returned, throwing the bundle on the floor, swearing it was as light as feathers.

“Aye,” cried the leader, “there must be gold somewhere for what it did contain. Give us your gold, Mr. Birch; we know you have it; you will not take continental, not you.”

“You break your faith,” said Harvey.

“Give us your gold,” exclaimed the other, furiously, pricking the
peddler with his bayonet until the blood followed his pushes in streams.
At this instant a slight movement was heard in the adjoining room, and
Harvey cried,—

“Let me—let me go to my father, and you shall have all.”

“I swear you shall go then,” said the Skinner.

“Here, take the trash,” cried Birch, as he threw aside the purse, which he had contrived to conceal, notwithstanding the change in his garments.

The robber raised it from the floor with a hellish laugh.

“Aye, but it shall be to your father in heaven.”

“Monster! have you no feeling, no faith, no honesty?”

“To hear him, one would think there was not a rope around his neck already,” said the other, laughing. “There is no necessity for your being uneasy, Mr. Birch; if the old man gets a few hours the start of you in the journey, you will be sure to follow him before noon to-morrow.”

This unfeeling communication had no effect on the peddler, who listened with gasping breath to every sound from the room of his parent until he heard his own name spoken in the hollow, sepulchral tones of death. Birch could endure no more, but shrieking out,—

“Father! hush—father! I come—I come!” he darted by his keeper and was the next moment pinned to the wall by the bayonet of another of the band. Fortunately, his quick motion had caused him to escape a thrust aimed at his life, and it was by his clothes only that he was confined.

“No, Mr. Birch,” said the Skinner, “we know you too well to trust you out of sight—your gold, your gold!”

“You have it,” said the peddler, writhing with agony.

“Aye, we have the purse, but you have more purses. King George is a prompt paymaster, and you have done him many a piece of good service. Where is your hoard? Without it you will never see your father.”

“Remove the stone underneath the woman,” cried the peddler, eagerly—“remove the stone.”

“He raves! he raves!” said Katy, instinctively moving her position to a different stone from the one on which she had been standing. In a moment it was torn from its bed, and nothing but earth was seen beneath.

“He raves! You have driven him from his right mind,” continued the trembling spinster. “Would any man in his senses keep gold under a hearth?”

“Peace, babbling fool!” cried Harvey. “Lift the corner stone, and you will find that which will make you rich, and me a beggar.”

“And then you will be despisable,” said the housekeeper bitterly. “A peddler without goods and without money is sure to be despisable.”

“There will be enough left to pay for his halter,” cried the Skinner, who was not slow to follow the instructions of Harvey, soon lighting upon a store of English guineas. The money was quickly transferred to a bag, notwithstanding the declarations of the spinster, that her dues were unsatisfied, and that, of right, ten of the guineas were her property.

Delighted with a prize that greatly exceeded their expectations, the band prepared to depart, intending to take the peddler with them, in order to give him up to the American troops above, and to claim the reward offered for his apprehension. Everything was ready, and they were about to lift Birch in their arms, for he resolutely refused to move an inch, when a form appeared in their midst, which appalled the stoutest heart among them. The father had arisen from his bed, and he tottered forth at the cries of his son. Around his body was thrown the sheet of the bed, and his fixed eye and haggard face gave him the appearance of a being from another world. Even Katy and Caesar thought it was the spirit of the elder Birch, and they fled the house, followed by the alarmed Skinners in a body.

The excitement which had given the sick man strength, soon vanished, and the peddler, lifting him in his arms, reconveyed him to his bed. The reaction of the system which followed hastened to close the scene.

The glazed eye of the father was fixed upon the son; his lips moved, but his voice was unheard. Harvey bent down, and, with the parting breath of his parent, received his dying benediction. A life of privation, and of wrongs, embittered most of the future hours of the peddler. But under no sufferings, in no misfortunes, the subject of poverty and obloquy, the remembrance of that blessing never left him; it constantly gleamed over the images of the past, shedding a holy radiance around his saddest hours of despondency; it cheered the prospect of the future with the prayers of a pious spirit; and it brought the sweet assurance of having faithfully discharged the sacred offices of filial love.

The retreat of Caesar and the spinster had been too precipitate to admit of much calculation; yet they themselves instinctively separated from the Skinners. After fleeing a short distance they paused, and the maiden commenced in a solemn voice,—

“Oh! Caesar, was it not dreadful to walk before he had been laid in his grave! It must have been the money that disturbed him; they say Captain Kidd walks near the spot where he buried gold in the old war.”

“I never t’ink Johnny Birch hab such a big eye!” said the African, his teeth yet chattering with the fright.

“I’m sure ’twould be a botherment to a living soul to lose so much money. Harvey will be nothing but an utterly despisable, poverty-stricken wretch. I wonder who he thinks would even be his housekeeper!”

“Maybe a spook take away Harvey, too,” observed Caesar, moving still nearer to the side of the maiden. But a new idea had seized the imagination of the spinster. She thought it not improbable that the prize had been forsaken in the confusion of the retreat; and after deliberating and reasoning for some time with Caesar, they determined to venture back, and ascertain this important fact, and, if possible, learn what had been the fate of the peddler. Much time was spent in cautiously approaching the dreaded spot; and as the spinster had sagaciously placed herself in the line of the retreat of the Skinners, every stone was examined in the progress in search of abandoned gold. But although the suddenness of the alarm and the cry of Caesar had impelled the freebooters to so hasty a retreat, they grasped the hoard with a hold that death itself would not have loosened. Perceiving everything to be quiet within, Katy at length mustered resolution to enter the dwelling, where she found the peddler, with a heavy heart, performing the last sad offices for the dead. A few words sufficed to explain to Katy the nature of her mistake; but Caesar continued to his dying day to astonish the sable inmates of the kitchen with learned dissertations on spooks, and to relate how direful was the appearance of that of Johnny Birch.

The danger compelled the peddler to abridge even the short period that American custom leaves the deceased with us; and, aided by the black and Katy, his painful task was soon ended. Caesar volunteered to walk a couple of miles with orders to a carpenter; and, the body being habited in its ordinary attire, was left, with a sheet thrown decently over it, to await the return of the messenger.

The Skinners had fled precipitately to the wood, which was but a short distance from the house of Birch, and once safely sheltered within its shades, they halted, and mustered their panic-stricken forces.

“What in the name of fury seized your coward hearts?” cried their dissatisfied leader, drawing his breath heavily.

“The same question might be asked of yourself,” returned one of the band, sullenly.

“From your fright, I thought a party of De Lancey’s men were upon us.
Oh! you are brave gentlemen at a race!”

“We follow our captain.”

“Then follow me back, and let us secure the scoundrel, and receive the reward.”

“Yes; and by the time we reach the house, that black rascal will have the mad Virginian upon us. By my soul I would rather meet fifty Cowboys than that single man.”

“Fool,” cried the enraged leader, “don’t you know Dunwoodie’s horse are at the Corners, full two miles from here?”

“I care not where the dragoons are, but I will swear that I saw Captain Lawton enter the house of old Wharton, while I lay watching an opportunity of getting the British colonel’s horse from the stable.”

“And if he should come, won’t a bullet silence a dragoon from the South as well as from old England?”

“Aye, but I don’t choose a hornet’s nest about my ears; rase the skin of one of that corps, and you will never see another peaceable night’s foraging again.”

“Well,” muttered the leader, as they retired deeper into the wood, “this sottish peddler will stay to see the old devil buried; and though we cannot touch him at the funeral (for that would raise every old woman and priest in America against us), he’ll wait to look after the movables, and to-morrow night shall wind up his concerns.”

With this threat they withdrew to one of their usual places of resort, until darkness should again give them an opportunity of marauding on the community without danger of detection.