Several didn’t believe it, but they was hustled into the engine house sure enough, and by ten a.m. we had damn near fifty people in there, milling around. They weren’t disbelieving so much like the others from the night before, for the Captain put the Emperor to watch them, and the Emperor was dreadful serious to look at. He was a dark-skinned, proud-looking Negro with a thick chest and wore a dead-serious expression, sporting that Sharps rifle. He was all business.
By eleven a.m. the Old Man begun making one mistake after another. I say that now, looking back. But at the time it didn’t seem so bad. He was delaying, see, waiting for the Negro. Many a fool has done that, waiting for the Negro to do something, including the Negro himself. And that’s gone on a hundred years. But the Old Man didn’t have a hundred years. He had but a few hours, and it cost him.
He stared out the window at the train and the angry passengers spilling off it, more and more of ’em, huffing and puffing, mad ’bout their delay, not knowing what was going on. He turned to Taylor and said, “I sees no reason to hold up all them people from doing their business and their travels, for they has paid for those train tickets. Turn loose the engineer and the coal man.”
Taylor done as he was told, cut the train engineer and coal man loose, following behind them to the train so as to give word to Oliver, who was holding the train at the bridge, to let the train roll on.
In doing so, in letting that train go, the Old Man released ’bout two hundred hostages.
The engineer and coal man didn’t stop at the gate, not with Taylor following behind them, for he hustled them ’round the other side of the trestle bridge out the back entrance of the armory, direct to the steam engine. They got the steam up in thirty minutes, the passengers clattered on board, and they had that train rolling to Wheeling, Virginia, full out in record time.
“They’ll stop at the first town and telegraph the news out,” Stevens said.
“I see no reason to hold up the U.S. Mail,” the Old Man said. “Besides, we wants the world to know what we’re doing here.”
Well, the world did know by noon, for what begun as a festive event that morning with fellers taking shots of rotgut and chatting amongst themselves with gossip, had now wheedled down to disbelief, to irritation to finally cursing and gathering near the armory walls. We could hear them hollering rumors and guesses to one another ’bout the cause of the Old Man’s holding up the engine house. One man said a crazed group of robbers was trying to bust open the armory’s vault. Another hollered that a doctor killed his wife and was hiding there. Another ventured that a nigger girl lost her mind and killed her master and run into the engine house for protection. Another said the B&O train was sabotaged by a baggage handler over a love affair. Everything but what the Old Man had declared. The notion that a group of white fellers had taken over the country’s biggest armory to help free the colored race was just too much for ’em to handle, I reckon.
Finally, they sent an emissary to talk to the Old Man, an important-looking feller in a linen suit and bowler hat, likely a politician of sorts. He marched a few feet into the gate, shouted out at the Old Man to cut out the fooling and stop being a sot, and was met by a rifle shot over his head. That drummer whistled out the gate so fast his hat pulled off his head, and he was back across the road before that thing hit the ground.
Finally around one o’clock, a very old man, dressed like a common worker, broke from the crowd of mumblers and ruffled bystanders standing at the gate at a safe distance across the road in front of the Gault House, shuffled slowly across Shenandoah Street, walked dead into the armory, strode to the front of the engine house door, and knocked. The Old Man peeked at him through the window, his Sharps at the ready. It was full daylight now, and nobody had slept. The Old Man’s face was lined and tight.
“We understands you is Old John Brown of Osawatomie, Kansas,” the old man said politely. “Is that right?”
“That be me.”
“Well, seeing you close, you is old all right,” the feller said.
“I’m fifty-nine,” the Old Man said. “How old are you?”
“I has got you by eight years, sir. I’m sixty-seven. Now, you has got my younger brother in there. He’s sixty-two. And I’d appreciate if you’d let him out, for he is ill.”
“What’s his name?”
“Odgin Hayes.”
The Old Man turned to the room. “Who here’s Odgin Hayes?”
Three old fellers raised their hands and stood up.
The Captain frowned. “That won’t work,” he said. And he commenced to giving all three a lecture on the Bible and the book of Kings, ’bout how Solomon had two women each claiming the same baby, till the king said, I’ll cut the baby in two and give you both half, and one woman said, give it to the other mother, for I can’t stand to see my baby cut in two, so the king gived it to her, for he knowed she was the real mother.
That shamed ’em, or maybe it was the part ’bout being cut in two, or maybe him giving the lecture using his broadsword to make points in this way and that. Whatever it was, two of ’em confessed outright they was lying and sat down, and the real Odgin stayed standing up, and the Old Man let him out.
The old feller outside appreciated the gesture and said so, but as he walked across the armory back out to Shenandoah Street, the crowd had growed now, and several fellers in militia uniforms could be seen milling around, waving swords and guns. The Gault House and the Wager House, both saloons, was doing booming business, and the crowd was full-out drunk, boisterous and unruly, cursing and so forth.
Meanwhile, the prisoners inside, not to mention Stevens, was getting hungry and begun bellowing ’bout food. The Old Man seen this and said, “Hold on.” He hollered out the window at the gate. “Gentlemen. The people here is hungry. I got fifty prisoners here who has not ate since last night, and neither has my men. I’ll exchange one of my prisoners for breakfast.”
“Who you sending out?” someone hollered.
The Old Man named a feller, the drunk who had staggered in the night before and been captured and announced he was the cook at the Gault House.
“Don’t send that souse,” somebody shouted. “He can’t cook to save his life. Keep him in there.”
There was laughing, but then more grumbling and cursing, and finally they agreed on letting the feller out. The cook shuffled over to the Gault House, and in a couple of hours come back with three men carrying plates of food, which he gived out to the prisoners, and a bottle of whiskey. Then he took a drink and went to sleep again. He forgot all ’bout going free.
By now it was near four p.m. The sun was high overhead, and the crowd outside was hot. Apparently the doctor who had treated the Rail Man spread word to the town that the Rail Man was dying. Several men on horseback was seen galloping up through Bolivar Heights—you could see them running up the roads to the houses tucked up there just above the armory, and you could hear them yelling rumors that echoed down the hilclass="underline" shouts that the armory was taken by a Negro insurrection. That made the thing electric. All the fun went out of it then. The drunk cursing turned to ranting and full-out cussing and swearing and talking ’bout people’s mothers and the raping of white women, and several rifles and guns could be seen brandished among the crowd, but there weren’t no firing from them yet.