CHAPTER XXXI

On the surface only was the Great Deed a failure. Not a single pike had
been thrust into a white man's breast by his slave. Not a single torch
had been applied to a Southern home. His chosen Captains never passed
the sentinel peak into Fauquier county. The Black Bees had not swarmed.
But the keen ear of the old man had heard the rumble of the swarming of
twenty million white hornets in the North.

The moment he had lifted his head a prisoner in the hands of his
courteous captor, he foresaw the power which the role of martyrdom would
give to his cause. Instantly he assumed the part and played it with
genius to the last breath of his indomitable body.

He had stained the soil of Virginia with the blood of innocent and
unoffending citizens. He had raised the Blood Feud at the right moment,
a few months before a Presidential campaign. He had raised it at the
right spot in a mountain gorge that looked southward to the Capitol at
Washington and northward to the beating hearts of the millions, who had
been prepared for this event by the long years of the Abolition Crusade
which had culminated in _Uncle Tom's Cabin_.

A wave of horror for a moment swept the nation, North and South.
Frederick Douglas fled to Europe. Sanborn, the treasurer and manager of
the conspiracy, hurried across the border into Canada. Howe and Stearns
hid. Theodore Parker was already in Europe.

Poor, old, gentle, generous Gerrit Smith collapsed and was led to the
insane asylum at Ithaca, New York.

Two men alone of the conspirators realized the tremendous thing that
had been done--John Brown in jail at Charlestown, and Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, the militant preacher of Massachusetts.

To Brown, life had been an unbroken horror. His tragic Puritan soul had
ever faced it with scorn--scorn for himself and the world. He was used
to failure and disaster. They had been his meat and drink. Bankruptcy,
imprisonment, flight from justice and the death of half his children had
been mere incidents of life.

He had cast scarcely a glance at his dying sons in the Engine House. He
had not tried to minister to them. His hand was tightly gripped on his
carbine.

His grim soul now rose to its first long flight of religious ecstasy.
He saw that the Southerner's reverence for Law and Order would make his
execution inevitable. His dark spirit shouted for joy. His own blood, if
he could succeed in playing the role of martyr, would raise the Blood