heard
A whistle near and strong,
And in the night a fiery light
The thickets flashed among:
The demon of the engine rushed
Along on blazing beams--
The hound the murderer had flushed,
The outlaw's path was Steam's!"

* * * * *

The cry of hate from the crowd around the whipping-post, as it awoke
Patty Cannon's last anger, also determined her last crime.

Fear was relative in her: she had neither the fear of men nor of shame,
and only of death as it involved a hereafter. Whether that hereafter was
a latent conviction in her mind, or the vivid admonition of guilt and
dead men's eyes peering over her dreams and into the silent, lonely
watches of haunted midnights, who shall tell? There is no analysis of a
native and ancient depravity: it was sown in the marrow, it strengthens
in the bone, and, with a cunning, daring self-assertion, gambles upon
the faith of living and of dying not. Its very fears push it onward in
crime, and make it cruelly tantalize its own fate, as cowards lean over
graveyard walls, and shout, with an inner trembling, "Come forth--I dare
you!"

So had this woman, conscious of her deserts, bullied eternal justice
through its long postponements, never doubting, while ever vexing, the
Spirit of God, until the number of her crimes crowded the tablet of her
memory, and out of the hideous gulf of her past life gazed faces without
names and deeds without memoranda; a procession the longer that
strangers were in it, and, shrinking from her, yet pressing on,
exclaimed her name or only shrieked "'Tis she!" as if her name was
nothing to her curse.

Sleeping in her chains, there were children's eyes watching her from
far-off corners, as if to say, "Give us the whole life we would have
lived but for you!"

As her swollen limbs festered to the irons, there were babies' cries
floating in the air, that seemed to draw near her breasts, as if for
food, and suddenly convulse there in screams of pain, and move away with
the sounds of suffocation she had heard as they expired.

All night there were callers on her, and whom they were no one could
tell; but the jailer's family saw her lips moving and her eyes consult
the air, as if she was faintly trying bravado upon certain
business-speaking ghosts who had come with bills long overdue and
demanded payment, and went out only to come again and again.

Some of these mystic visitors she would jeer at and defy,