Page:The American review - a Whig journal of politics, literature, art, and science (1845).djvu/146

 being repeated four or five times, till they were left for dead, and all to make them confess their connection with the murders! I will not further particularize.

One evening after a deed of this kind, which had afforded them the opportunity of displaying such unusual resource of ingenuity in torture that they were glutted to exultation, they were returning to the grocery with the determination of holding a drunken revel in honor of the event. As they rode on with shouts of laughter and curses, one of their number, named Winter, noticed that a portion of his horse-equipment was gone. He remembered having seen it in a place a mile or so back, and told them to ride on and he would return to get it and rejoin them by the time the frolic commenced. He left them, but never came back. They went on to the grocery and commencing their orgies, at once forgot, or did not notice his absence till the next day, when they were roused from their hoggish sleep by a negro messenger from his family in great haste, with the news that his master's horse had returned home without its rider. They were instantly sobered by this announcement, which had grown to be particularly significant of late. They immediately mounted their horses and went back on their trail. They were not long kept in suspense. The buzzards and wolves, gathered in numbers about the edge of a thicket which bordered the prairie ahead of them, soon designated the where-abouts of the object of their search. The unclean beasts and birds scattered as they galloped up, and there lay the torn and bloody fragments of their comrade! Hard as these men were, they shuddered, and the cold drops started from their ghastly and bloated faces. It was stunning. The third of their number consigned to this horrible fate—eaten up by the wolves—all within a week! Were they doomed? What shadowy, inscrutable foe was this, who struck always when least expected, and with such fearful certainty, yet left no trace behind? Was it, indeed, some supernatural agent of judgment, visited upon their enormities? Awed and panic-stricken beyond all that may be conceived of guilty fear, without any examination of the neighborhood or of the bones, they wheeled and galloped back, carrying the alarm on foaming horses in every direction. The whole county shared in their consternation. I never witnessed such a tumult of wild excitement among any population. It was the association of ghostly attributes, derived from Henry's story, with the probable author of these unaccountable, assassinations which so much roused all classes, and this effect was not a little heightened when the report got out that this last man had been shot in the same way as the others—through the back of the head. Hundreds of persons went out to bring in the bones, making, as they said, the strictest search on every side, for traces of the murderer, without being able to discover the slightest.

These things struck me as so peculiar and difficult to be reasoned upon, that I must confess I felt no little sympathy with the popular sentiment which assigned to them something of a supernatural origin. But Henry laughed at the idea, and insisted that it must be a maniac. In confirmation of this opinion, he related many instances, given by half-romancing medical writers, of the remarkable cunning of such patients in avoiding detection and baffling pursuit in the accomplishment of some purpose on which their bewildered energies had strangely been concentrated. This was the opinion most favored among the more intelligent planters; but the popular rumors assumed the most egregious and phantastic features. The Bearded host, as he was now generally named from Henry's description, had been seen by this, that, and the other person; now striding rapidly like a tall, thin spectre across some open glade between two thickets and disappearing before the affrighted observer could summon courage to address it—now standing beneath some old tree by the road side, still as its shadow, the keen, sepulchral eyes shining steadily through the gloom, but melting bodily away if a word was spoken—now he was to be seen mounted, careering like a form of vapor past the dark trunks of the old forest-aisles, or hurrying swiftly away like a rain-cloud before the wind across wide prairies, always hair-clad and gaunt, with a streaming beard, and the long, heavy rifle on his shoulder. I soon began to note that it was only men of a particular class who pretended to say that they had actually seen with their own eyes these wonderful sights, and they were those Emigrant Hunters who had particularly suffered from the persecutions of the rangers. I observed too that they always located