4. CHAPTER IV.
Containing illustrations of the advantages of dying an unusual death,
in times of high political excitement.
I never felt the slightest inclination to revisit
the scenes of my late trouble and discontent; but
the newspapers, which are the lights of the age,
though occasionally somewhat smoky, acquainted
me with the events that followed after my marvellous
disappearance. “What has become of Sheppard
Lee?” was the cry, after his creditors had
sought for him in vain during a space of two
weeks and more. No vestige of him was discovered,
not the slightest clew to indicate his fate,
beyond those already brought to light in the Owl-roost.
It was impossible he could have fled without
leaving some traces; and none were found.
“And why should he fly?” men at last began to
ask. He was in debt, it was true; but what could
he gain by absconding, since his little property
was necessarily left behind him?
In a word, the improbabilities of his having voluntarily
fled were so great, that men began to
recur to their original idea of his having been
murdered. But why was he murdered? and by
whom? Some few began to revive the charges
against me—that is to say, against John H. Higginson;
but brighter ideas were struck out, and
John H. Higginson was forgotten. An old friend
of mine, who never cared a fig for me, but who
was ambitious to create a tumult, and become the
leader of a party, got up in a public place, and
recounted the history of William Morgan, and his
mysterious abduction and murder by the masons
of the empire state. A terrible agitation at once
seized his listeners. “Poor, dear, unfortunate
Sheppard Lee!” they cried; “the masons have
Morganized him, for apostatizing from his oaths,
and revealing the secrets of the society! Yes,
he has been Morganized!” And, giving way to
their rage, they were on the point of tarring and
feathering all the free-masons they could lay their
hands on; when,
presto—as the conjurers say,
they suddenly made discovery that the masons
could
not have murdered me for divulging secrets,
inasmuch as I had never known them, nor for apostatizing,
as I had never been a mason in my life.
But the tumult was not allowed to subside.
My old friends of the administration, finding that
their strength was dwindling away in the country,
and dreading the event of the coming election, unless
a reaction could be got up in their favour,
suddenly burst into a fury, swore that I had been
made away with by the opposition, on account
of my remarkable zeal, energy, and success, as
an electioneerer and political missionary; and
taking my old hat and shoe, and carrying them
round the village in solemn procession, they stopped
in the market-place, where one of their chief
orators—my faithful friend, the new postmaster
—delivered a sort of funeral address, in which he
compared the opponents of the administration to
cut-throats and cannibals, pronounced them the
enemies of liberty, swore that no honest patriot was
safe among them, and declared—his declaration
being illustrated by shouts, and groans, and grim
faces—that I had perished, “the.victim of a murderous
opposition!”
But, as if that was not immortality enough for
one of my humble pretensions, the opposition
instantly turned the tables upon their accusers.
Witnesses stepped forward to prove that, on the
night when I was seen for the last time, I had, in
the bar-room of the first hotel in the village, publicly
denounced the hurrah party, as being based
upon deception and fraud, and avowed my determination
not only instantly to leave it, but to go
my death thenceforth in opposition. “See the
bloody vindictiveness and malice of the hurrah
party!” they cried; “before the sun rose upon
this unfortunate and honest man—honest, because
he deserted his party the moment his eyes were
opened to its corruption—he was a living man no
longer. The bravoes of this horrible gang of mid-night
murderers, who have trampled on our rights
and liberties, and now trample on our lives, met
the unlucky patriot as he returned to his lowly
cot, and—just Heavens!—where was he now, save
in his bloody and untimely grave? he, the humble,
the unoffending, the honest, the universally-esteemed,
the widely-beloved, the patriotic Sheppard Lee!
—waylaid and ambushed! killed, slain, murdered,
massacred! the victim of a despotic and vindictive
cabal,—the martyr of liberty, the—” In short,
the noblest, honestest, dearest, best, and most ill-used
creature that ever dabbled in the puddle of
politics. One might suppose that this outcry of
the antis, backed as it was by the full proof of my
change of politics, would have stopped the mouths
of the hurrah-boys. But it did no such thing;
they only raved the louder. As for the proof of my
backsliding, they treated that with contempt; proofs
being as little regarded in politics as arguments.
They accused the antis more zealously than before;
and the antis recriminated with equal enthusiasm.
There were some men in the village who strove
to appease the ferment, by directing suspicion upon
the German doctor, and divers other personages,
just as the humour of suspicion seized them, furiously
accusing these suspected individuals of having
had some hand in the catastrophe. But the
German doctor and the other persons accused had
nothing to do with politics, and were therefore
suffered to go their ways. It is a great protection
to one's reputation to keep clear of politics. The
guilt of my murder was left to be borne by the
hurrah-boys and the antis, one party or the
other; but as the evidence was equally strong
against either party, and just as strong against any
one individual of either party as another, it resulted
that I was murdered not only by both parties, but
by every man of both parties;—a peculiarity in
my history that proved me to have possessed,
though I never dreamed it before, a vaster number
both of energetic friends and bloodthirsty enemies
(each man being both friend and enemy) than any
other man in the whole world.
How the antis and the hurrah-boys settled the
affair among them, I did not care to inquire. I
was engrossed by the novelties and charms of a
new being, and willing to forget that such a poor
devil as Sheppard Lee had ever existed.
