“No, Jack, I do not. From boyhood there has existed an indescribable bond
of sympathy between my brother and myself that has always conveyed to
each of us, no matter how far apart, a feeling of anxiety if trouble or
danger threatened either one. For days this feeling has been increasing
upon me, until it now has become unbearable. I regret that I did not take
passage on the steamer that sailed today for New York. Now I must wait a
week.” As Mr. Dunlap came to the end of his sentence, a chanting, croning
kind of sound was heard coming from some spot just beyond the wall around
his place.
“Confound that old hag!” cried the impatient old gentleman, as he heard
the first notes of the weird incantation, “for the last month, night and
day, she has been haunting my premises, wailing out some everlasting
song about Tu Konk, white cows, black kids, and such stuff, all in that
infernal jargon of the mountain blacks. She looks more like the devil
than anything else. I tried to bribe her to go away, but the old witch
only laughed in my face. I then ordered her driven away, but the servants
are all afraid of her and can’t be induced to molest her.”
“She probably is only some half-witted old woman, whom the superstitious
negroes suppose possessed of supernatural power. I don’t think the matter
worthy of your notice,” said Jack.
“I suppose it is foolish, but her hanging about my place just now, makes
me nervous; but never mind the hag at present. I was going to say to you,
when that howling stopped me, that so strong has become my feeling of
apprehension within the last few hours that could I do so, I should leave
Port au Prince tonight and hurry straight to Boston and my brother. This
cursed Haitian loan, for which the English and American bankers hold our
house morally, if not legally, responsible, has held me in Haiti this
late in the hot season, and, tonight, I would gladly assume the entire
obligation legally, to be placed instantly on Boston Common.”
The positiveness and seriousness with which his kinsman spoke caused even
Jack’s steady nerves to become somewhat shaken. Just then footsteps were
heard coming rapidly up the walk that led to the roadway. As the two
Dunlaps reached the top step of the veranda a telegraph messenger sprang
up the stairs and handed an envelope to Mr. John Dunlap. With trembling
fingers he opened the paper and going to a lamp that hung in the hallway
read it. Then with a cry of pain he would have fallen to the floor had
not Jack’s strong arms been around him.
“I knew it, I knew it,” he moaned.
Jack took the message from the cold, numb hand of the grief-stricken man
and read:
“Come immediately; your brother dying, Lucy in great danger. David
Chapman.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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