Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/295

Rh He replied: "It was to help my fellow men out of bondage. You know nothing of slavery—I know a great deal. It is the crime of crimes. I hate it more and more the longer I live. Even since I have been lying in this cell, I have heard the crying of slave-children torn from their parents."

Cook was also a Connecticut man of twenty-nine years, tall, blue-eyed, golden-haired and handsome, but a far different type from Stevens. He was talkative, impulsive and restless, eager for adventure but hardly steadfast. He followed John Brown as he would have followed any one else whom he liked, dreaming his dreams, rushing ahead in the face of danger and shrinking back appalled and pitiful before the grim face of death. He was the most thoroughly human figure in the band.

One other deserves mention, because it was probably his slowness or obstinacy that ruined the success of John Brown's raid. This was Charles P. Tidd. He was from Maine, twenty-seven years old, trained in Kansas warfare—a nervous, overbearing and quarrelsome man. He bitterly opposed the plan of capturing Harper's Ferry when it was finally revealed, and as Anne Brown said, "got so warm that he left the farm and went down to Cook's dwelling near Harper's Ferry to let his wrath cool off." A week passed before he sullenly gave in.

Beside these there were six other men of more or less indistinct personalities. Five were young