The Gothic Terror MEGAPACK™: 17 Classic Tales (7 page)

We then advanced to the closet-door, at which we knocked, but without receiving any answer.

We next tried to open the door, but in vain—it was locked upon the inside. We knocked more loudly, but in vain.

Seriously alarmed, I desired the servant to force the door, which was, after several violent efforts, accomplished, and we entered the closet.

Lord Glenfallen was lying on his face upon a sofa.

“Hush!” said I, “he is asleep.” We paused for a moment.

“He is too still for that,” said my father.

We all of us felt a strong reluctance to approach the figure.

“Edward,” said I, “try whether your master sleeps.”

The servant approached the sofa where Lord Glenfallen lay. He leant his ear towards the head of the recumbent figure, to ascertain whether the sound of breathing was audible. He turned towards us, and said:

“My lady, you had better not wait here; I am sure he is dead!”

“Let me see the face,” said I, terribly agitated; “you
may
be mistaken.”

The man then, in obedience to my command, turned the body round, and, gracious God! what a sight met my view. He was, indeed, perfectly dead.

The whole breast of the shirt, with its lace frill, was drenched with gore, as was the couch underneath the spot where he lay.

The head hung back, as it seemed, almost severed from the body by a frightful gash, which yawned across the throat. The instrument which had inflicted it was found under his body.

All, then, was over; I was never to learn the history in whose termination I had been so deeply and so tragically involved.

The severe discipline which my mind had undergone was not bestowed in vain. I directed my thoughts and my hopes to that place where there is no more sin, nor danger, nor sorrow.

Thus ends a brief tale whose prominent incidents many will recognise as having marked the history of a distinguished family; and though it refers to a somewhat distant date, we shall be found not to have taken, upon that account, any liberties with the facts, but in our statement of all the incidents to have rigorously and faithfully adhered to the truth.

[1]
  I have carefully altered the names as they appear in the original MSS., for the reader will see that some of the circumstances recorded are not of a kind to reflect honour upon those involved in them; and as many are still living, in every way honoured and honourable, who stand in close relation to the principal actors in this drama, the reader will see the necessity of the course which we have adopted.

[2]
  The residuary legatee of the late Frances Purcell, who has the honour of selecting such of his lamented old friend’s manuscripts as may appear fit for publication, in order that the lore which they contain may reach the world before scepticism and utility have robbed our species of the precious gift of credulity, and scornfully kicked before them, or trampled into annihilation those harmless fragments of picturesque superstition which it is our object to preserve, has been subjected to the charge of dealing too largely in the marvellous; and it has been half insinuated that such is his love for diablerie, that he is content to wander a mile out of his way, in order to meet a fiend or a goblin, and thus to sacrifice all regard for truth and accuracy to the idle hope of affrighting the imagination, and thus pandering to the bad taste of his reader. He begs leave, then, to take this opportunity of asserting his perfect innocence of all the crimes laid to his charge, and to assure his reader that he never
pandered to his bad taste
, nor went one inch out of his way to introduce witch, fairy, devil, ghost, or any other of the grim fraternity of the redoubted Raw-head-and-bloody-bones. His province, touching these tales, has been attended with no difficulty and little responsibility; indeed, he is accountable for nothing more than an alteration in the names of persons mentioned therein, when such a step seemed necessary, and for an occasional note, whenever he conceived it possible, innocently, to edge in a word. These tales have been
written down
, as the heading of each announces, by the Rev. Francis Purcell, P.P., of Drumcoolagh; and in all the instances, which are many, in which the present writer has had an opportunity of comparing the manuscript of his departed friend with the actual traditions which are current amongst the families whose fortunes they pretend to illustrate, he has uniformly found that whatever of supernatural occurred in the story, so far from having been exaggerated by him, had been rather softened down, and, wherever it could be attempted, accounted for.

JACK LONG; OR, THE SHOT IN THE EYE, by Charles Wilkins Webber

The millions of copies of this story which have been circulated in this country through the daily and weekly press have all been from a mutilated edition which was impudently pirated in an English periodical, under a new name. American editors, in copying, replaced a portion of the original title, to be sure, but took the text as they found it. I would, therefore, present it in book form for the first time, once and for all pronouncing the following to be the only version authorized by me, of a narrative the facts of which are too nearly historical to justify their having been wantonly handled.

It must be confessed that the man of high civilization will find some difficulty in understanding how such a deed as I am about to relate—requiring months to consummate—could have been carried through in the open face of law and of the local authorities—but he who has any knowledge of this Texan frontier, will tell him that the rifle and the bowie knife were, at the period of this narrative, all the law and local authority recognized. Witness the answer President Houston gave when application was first made to him for his interposition with the civil force to quell the bloody “Regulator Wars,” which afterwards sprang up in this very same county—“Fight it out among yourselves, and be d—d to you !” A speech entirely characteristic of the man and the country, as it then was!

It was the period of the first organization of the Regulators to which our story refers. Shelby, in the latter part of —39, was a frontier county, and bordering upon the region known as the Red Lands, was the receptacle of all the vilest men who had been driven across our borders, for crimes of every degree! Horse thieves, and villains of every kind, congregated in such numbers, that the open and bare-faced effort had been made to convert it into a sort of “Alsatia” of the West—a place of refuge for all outlaws, who understood universally that it was only necessary to the most perfect immunity in crime, that they should succeed in effecting an escape to this neighborhood, where they would be publicly protected and pursuit defied.

The extent to which this thing was carried may be conjectured, when it is known that bands of men, disguised as Indians, would sally forth into the neighboring districts, with the view of visiting some obnoxious person with their vengeance—either in the shape of robbery or murder. Returning with great speed, and driving the valuable stock before them, till they were among their friends again, they would re-brand the horses and mules, resume their usual appearance, and laugh at retaliation. Even single men would, in the face of day, commit the most daring crimes, trusting to an escape to Shelby for protection. They seemed determined, at any risk, to hold the county good against the encroachments of all honest citizens; and this came to be so notorious, that no man could move among them with any citizen-like and proper motives, but at the expense of his personal safety or his conscience—for the crime of refusing to take part with them, was in itself sufficient to subject all newcomers to a series of persecutions, which soon brought them into terms, or resulted in their extermination.

We do not wish to be understood that the whole population of the county were avowedly horse thieves and cut-throats! There was one different class of wealthy planters, and another of the old stamp of restless migrating hunters, who first led the tide of population over the Alleghanies. These two classes made some pretensions to outward decorum, and in various ways acted as restraints upon that of the worse disposed; while they, with that utter intolerance of restraint, which so unbounded license necessarily engenders, determined to submit to no presence which should in any way rebuke or embarrass their deeds. Most of these bad men were a kind of small landholders, who only cultivated patches of ground, dotting the spaces between the larger plantations; but they kept very fine horses, and depended more on their speed for acquiring plunder, than any capacity of their own for labor.

They were finally wrought up to the last pitch of restlessness by this closing around of unmanageable persons, and organized themselves into a band of Regulators, as they termed themselves. They proclaimed that the county limits needed purification, and that they felt themselves specially called to the work. Accordingly, under the lead of a man, who was himself a brutal monster, named Hinch, they commenced operations. In this public-spirited and praiseworthy operation, they soon managed to reduce the county to the subjection of fear, if not to an affectionate recognition of the prerogatives they arrogated to themselves.

The richer Planters they compelled to pay a heavy blackmail rent, in fee simple of a right to enjoy their own property and lives, with the further understanding that they were to be protected in these immunities from all danger from without of a similar kind. The Planters, in return, were to wink upon any deeds, whose coloring might otherwise chance to be offensive to eyes polite.

The other class of simple-hearted sturdy men were goaded and tortured by the most aggravated annoyances, until, driven in despair to some act of retaliation, they furnished their tyrants with the shadow of an excuse, which even they felt to be needed, and were then either lynched with lashes and warned to leave the county in so many days, or shot if they persisted in remaining! So relentless and vindictive did these wretches show themselves in hunting down every one who dared to oppose himself to them in any way, that very soon their ascendency in the county was almost without any dispute. Indeed, there were very few left who from any cause could presume to do so. Among these few, and one of this last class of wandering hunters, was Jack Long.

Jack had come of a “wild turkey breed,” as I have mentioned the phrase to be in the West for a family remarkable for its wandering propensities. He had already pushed ahead of two States and a Territory, and following the game still farther towards the south, had been pleased with the promise of an abundance of it in Shelby county, and stopped there, just as he would have stopped at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, had it been necessary to have gone so far; without troubling himself or caring to know who his neighbors were.

He had never thought it at all essential to ask leave of any government as to how or where he should make himself a home, or even to inquire what particular nation put in its claim to any region that suited his purposes. His heritage had been the young earth, with its skies, its waters, and its winds, its huge primeval forests, and plains throwing out their broad breasts to the sun:—with all the sights and sounds and living things that moved and were articulate beneath God’s eye—and what cared he for the authority of men!

The first, indeed, that was known or heard of Jack, was when he had already built him a snug log-cabin, on the outskirts of the county, near the bank of a small stream—stowed away his fair-faced young wife and two children cozily into it, and was busily engaged in slaying the deer and bear right and left.

He kept himself so much to himself that for a long time little was thought or said of him. His passion for hunting seemed so absorbing, he did nothing else but follow up the game from morning till night, and it was so abundant that he had full opportunity for indulgence to his entire content. Beyond this he seemed to have no pleasure but in that solitary hut which, however rude, held associations dear enough to fill that big heart and quicken all the sluggish veins of that ungainly body. Sometimes one of the Rangers would come across him alone with his long rifle, amidst the limber island of the plain, or in the deep woods; and he always appeared to have been so successful, that the rumor gradually got abroad that he was a splendid shot. This attracted attention somewhat more to his apparently unsocial and solitary habits. They had the curiosity to watch him, and when they saw how devoted he was to his wife, the gibe became general that he was a “hen-pecked husband, under petticoat government” and other like gratifying expressions.

This, taken in connection with his lolling, awkward gait, and rather excessive expression of simplicity and easy temper, disposed these harsh, rude men, very greatly to sneer at him as a soft fellow, who could be run over with impunity. They even bullied him with taunts—but Jack looked like such a formidable customer to be taken hold of that no one of them felt disposed to push him too far and risk being made, individually, the subject of a display of the strength indicated in the great size of his body and limbs. He was upward of six feet four in height, with shoulders like the buttresses of a tower, a small head, and other proportions developed in fine symmetry. Indeed,—but for a slight inclination to corpulency, and that sluggishness of manner we have spoken of, which made him seem too lazy even to undertake the feat—he looked just the man who could take a buffalo bull by the horns amidst his bellowing peers, and bring him to the ground with all his shaggy bulk.

Finding they could not tempt him to a personal fray, they changed the note and by every sort of cajolery endeavored to enlist the remarkable physical energy and skill he was conjectured to possess in the service of their schemes of brutal violence. But Jack waived all sort of participation in them with a smiling and unvarying good-humor, which, although it enraged the baffled ruffians, gave them no possible excuse for provocation. They would not have regarded this, but there was still less invitation in that formidable person and long rifle; and somehow or other they had an undefined sense that the man was not “at himself,” as the phrase goes in the West—that he had not yet been roused to a consciousness of his own energies and capabilities, and they were, without acknowledging it, a little averse to waking him.

They finally gave him up, therefore, and Jack might have been left in peace to love Molly and the children as hard as he pleased, and indulge his passion for marksmanship only at the expense of the dumb, wild things around him, but that he was led to make an unfortunate display of it.

A few log huts near the centre, constituted the county town. Here was the grocery or store as it was dignified—at which alone powder and lead and whiskey were to be obtained for many miles around. Jack happened to get out of ammunition, and came into this place for a supply. Attracted by the whiskey, this was the headquarters of the Regulators, and they were all collected for a grand shooting-match, and of course getting drunk as fast as possible, to steady their nerves.

When Jack arrived, he found them gathered in a group under a cluster of trees, several hundred yards from the house. It had been some time since there had been any altercation between any of them and himself and though he supposed it was all forgotten, yet he felt some little disinclination to joining them and had resolved not to do it. But as once, and again and again, that sharp report he loved so well to hear, would ring out, followed by the clamors, exclamations and eager grouping of the men around the target, to critically examine the result of each shot, his passion for the sport, and curiosity to see how others shot, overcame a half-defined feeling that he was going to do what, for Molly’s sake, was an imprudent thing.

Hinch, the Regulator captain, had always been the unrivalled hero of such occasions; for, apart from the fact that he was really an admirable shot, he was known to be so fierce, blustering and vindictive a bully, that nobody dared try very hard to beat him, since he would be sure to make a personal affair of it with whoever presumed to be so lucky or so skillful. Now, everybody in the county was aware of this but Jack, and he was either not aware, or did not care for the matter, if he did know it. He knew, though, that Hinch was a famous shot; and noticing that he was preparing to shoot, started to join them, determined to see for himself what they called good shooting.

He came swinging himself carelessly among them, with long, heavy strides, as they were all vociferating in half-drunken raptures over the glorious shot just made by Hinch—and he, in his customary manner, was swearing and raving at every one around him, and taunting them with their bungling, and defying them to try again.

Observing Jack, he jerked the target away, and with a loud, grating laugh, thrust it, insultingly, close to his face.

“Hah! Jack Long-legs! They say you can shoot! Look at that! Look close, will you?” pushing it close to his eyes. “Can you beat it?”

Jack stepped back, and looking deliberately at the target, said very drily—

“Pshaw! The cross ain’t clean out! I shouldn’t think I was doin’ any great things to beat such shootin’ as that!”

“You shouldn’t, shouldn’t you?” roared Hinch, furious at Jack’s coolness. “You’ll try it, wont you? I’d like to see you! You must try it! You shall try it! We’ll see what sort of a swell you are!”

“Oh!” said Jack, altogether unruffled, “If I must, I must! Put up his board thar, men. If you want to see me shoot through every hole you can make, I’ll do it for ye!”

And walking back to the “off-hand” stand at forty paces, by the time the “markers” had placed the board against the tree, he had wheeled, and, slowly swinging his long rifle down from his shoulders to the level, fired as quick as thought.

“It’s fun of mine!” remarked he, nodding his head towards Hinch, who stood near, while he was lowering his gun to the position for reloading. “It’s a trick I caught from always shooting the varmints’ eyes! I never takes ’em anywhar else! It’s a way I’ve got!”

At this moment the men standing near the target, who had rushed instantly with great eagerness to see the result, shouted, while one of the “markers” held it aloft—“He’s done it! His ball is the biggest—he’s driv it through your hole and made it wider!”

Hinch turned pale. Rushing forward he tore the target away from the “marker” and examining it minutely, shouted hoarsely—

“It’s an accident! He can’t do it again ! He’s a humbug! I’ll bet the ears of a buffalo calf agin his that he can’t do it agin! He’s afraid to shoot with me agin!”

“Oh!” said Jack, winking aside at the men, “If you mean by that bet,
your
ears against mine, I’ll take it up! Boys, fit a new board up thar, with a nice cross in the centre, and I will show the Captain here, the clean thing in shootin’!”

As he said this he laughed good-humoredly, and the men could not help joining him.

Hinch, who was loading his gun, said nothing; but glared around with white compressed lips and a chafed look of stifled fury, which made those who knew the man shudder. The men, who were in reality puzzled to tell whether Jack’s manner indicated contempt or unconscious simplicity, looked on the progress of this scene, and for the result of the coming trial, with intense curiosity.