too, began to sing,
taking off their hats as they joined in; and soon the whole concourse,
solemn, earnest, and uncovered, was singing--a thunderous requiem for
John Harkless.

The sun was swinging lower and the edges of the world were embroidered
with gold while that deep volume of sound shook the air, the song of a
stern, savage, just cause--sung, perhaps, as some of the ancestors of
these men sang with Hampden before the bristling walls of a hostile
city. It had iron and steel in it. The men lying on their guns in the
ambuscade along the fence heard the dirge rise and grow to its mighty
fulness, and they shivered. One of them, posted nearest the advance,
had his rifle carefully levelled at Lige Willetts, a fair target in the
road. When he heard the singing, he turned to the man next behind
him and laughed harshly: "I reckon we'll see a big jamboree in hell
to-night, huh?"

The huge murmur of the chorus expanded, and gathered in rhythmic
strength, and swelled to power, and rolled and thundered across the
plain.

"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground,
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground,
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the ground,
His soul goes marching on!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
His soul goes marching on!"

A gun spat from the higher ground, and Willetts dropped where he stood,
but was up again in a second, with a red line across his forehead where
the ball had grazed his temple. Then the mob spread out like a fan,
hundreds of men climbing the fence and beginning the advance through
the fields, dosing on the ambuscade from both sides. Mr. Watts, wading
through the high grass in the field north of the road, perceived the
barrel of a gun shining from a bush some distance in front of him, and,
although in the same second no weapon was seen in his hand, discharged a
revolver at the bush behind the gun. Instantly ten or twelve men leaped
from their hiding-places along the fences of both fields, and, firing
hurriedly and harmlessly into the scattered ranks of the oncoming mob,
broke for the shelter of the houses, where their fellows were posted.
Taken on the flanks and from the rear, there was but one thing for
them to do to keep from being hemmed in and shot or captured. (They
excessively preferred being shot.) With a wild, high, joyous yell,
sounding like the ba