A THUMB-PRINT AND WHAT CAMS OP IT. 301
long. You already know how I came to go to America, and how I
came to settle in that lonely region in the South. But you do not
know that I had a wife. My wife was young, beautiful, loving, and
oh, so divinely good and blameless and gentle ! And our little girl
was her mother in miniature. It was the happiest of happy house-
holds.
One night—it was toward the close of the war—I woke up out of
a sodden lethargy, and found myself bound and gagged, and the air
tainted with chloroform I I saw two men in the room, and one waa
saying to the other, in a hoarse whisper, * I told her I would, if she
made a noise, and as for the child—'
The other man interrupted in a low, half-crying voice—
* You said we'd only gag them and rob them, not hurt them; or
I wouldn't have come.'
* Shut up your whining; had to change the plan when they waked
up; you done all you could to protect them, now let that satisfy you ;
come, help rummage*'
Both men were masked, and wore coarse, ragged (nigger' clothes ;
they had a bull's-eye lantern, and by its light I noticed that the gentler
robber had no thumb on his right hand. They rummaged around
3ny poor cabin for a moment; the head bandit then said, in his stage
whisper—
c It's a waste of time—he shall tell where it's hid. Undo his gag,
and revive him up/
The other said—
* All right—provided no clubbing.*
* No clubbing it is, then—provided he keeps still.*
They approached me; just then there was a sound outside; a
sound of voices and trampling hoofs; the robbers held their breatu
and listened; the sounds came slowly nearer and nearer; then came
a shout—
e Hello, the house ! Show a light, we want water.'
* The captain's voice, by G------!' said the stage-whispering ruffian,
and both robbers fled by the way of the back door, shutting off their
bull's-eye as they ran.
The strangers shouted several times more, then rode by—there
seemed to be a dozen of the horses—and I heard nothing more.