A few near him, as they stood waiting, began to take up the burden of the
song, singing in slow time like a dirge; then those further away took it
up; it spread, reached the leaders; they, 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 bay of
young hounds breaking into view of their quarry, the Plattville men
followed.