ept an enigmatical letter not understood by the
authorities at the time. This circumstance, coupled with the coolness and
consummate acting of the pair of suspected leaders, perplexed and deceived
the authorities to such a degree that they ordered the discharge of the
prisoners. But the fright and anxiety of the city were not so readily got
rid of. They held Charleston uneasy and apprehensive of danger, and so
kept it suspicious and watchful.

Things remained in this state of watchfulness anxiety, on both sides, for
about a week. Vesey on his part remitted nothing of his preparations for
the coming 16th of June, but pushed them if possible with increased vigor
and secrecy. He held the while nocturnal meetings at his house on Bull
street, where modified arrangements for the execution of his plans were
broached and matured. How he dared at this juncture to incur such extreme
hazard of detection, it is difficult to understand. But he and his
confederates were men of the most indomitable purpose, and took in the
desperate circumstances, in which they were then placed, the most
desperate chances. They had to. They could not do otherwise.

The city on its side, was listening during a part of this same week to a
second confession of that poor fellow whose tongue had outmeasured his
discretion. It was listening with reviving dread to the wild and
incoherent disclosures of this man, whom it had flung into the black
hole of the workhouse. There, crazed by misery and fear of death, he
raved about a plot among the blacks to massacre the whites and to put
the town to fire and pillage. This second installment of William Paul's
excited disclosures, while it increased the sense of impending peril,
did not put the government in better position to avert it. For groping
in the dark still, it knew not yet where or whom to strike. But in this
period of horrible suspense and uncertainty its suspicion fell on
another one of Vesey's principal leaders. This time it was on Ned
Bennett that the city's distrustful eye fastened. Like that game which
children play where the object of search is hidden, and where the
seekers as they approach near and yet nearer to the place of concealment,
grow warm and then warmer, so was the city, in its terrible search for
the source of its danger, growing hot and hotter. That was, indeed, a
frightful moment for the conspirators when Ned Bennett became suspected.
The city, as the children say in their game, was beg