"Wouldn't take the pistol? the fool!" muttered the farmer. "But I'll see what I can do for him." He grasped the boy's collar, and said in a suppressed but terribly earnest voice, "Swear never to breathe a word of what I'm going to show you!"
Stackridge took him by the wrist, and drew him after him into the passage. It was utterly dark, and Carl had to stoop in order to avoid hitting his head. As they approached the end of it, he could distinguish the sound of voices,--one louder than the rest giving the word of command.
The farmer knocked on the head of a cask, which rolled aside, and opened the way into a cellar beyond, under an old storehouse, which was likewise a part of Barber Jim's property.
The second cellar was much larger and better lighted than the first, and rendered picturesque by heavy festoons of cobwebs hanging from the dark beams above. The rays of the lamps flashed upon gun-barrels, and cast against the damp and mouldy walls gigantic shadows of groups of men. Some were conversing, others were practising the soldiers' drill.
"Neighbors!" said Stackridge, in a voice which commanded instant attention, and drew around him and Carl an eager group. "It's just as I told you,--Ropes and his gang are lynching Hapgood!"
"It's the fellow's own fault," said a stern, dark man, the same who had been drilling the men. "He should have taken care of himself."
"Young Hapgood's a decent sort of cuss," said another whom Carl knew,--a farmer named Withers,--"and I like him. I believe he means well; but he ain't one of us."
"I've been deceived in him," said a third. "He always minded his own business, and kept so quiet about our institutions, I never suspected he was anti-slavery till I talked with him t'other day about joining us--then he out with it."
"He thinks we're all wrong," said a bigoted pro-slavery man named Deslow. "He says slavery's the cause of the war, and it's absurd in us to go in for the Union and slavery too!" For these men, though loyal to the government, and bitterly opposed to secession, were nearly all slaveholders or believers in slavery.
"May be the fellow ain't far wrong there," said he who had been drilling his comrades. "I think myself slavery's the cause of the war, and that's what puts us in such a hard place. The time may come when we will have to take a different stand--go the whole figure with the free north, or drift with the cotton states. But that time hain't come yet."