And then I started putting my plan into execution—a mad plan which had
only its madness to recommend it. The sentry approached and came
opposite where I stood, and I leaped for the eaves as I had leaped for
the eaves of the prison pen at Chicago, only this time I leaped from the
outside where the eaves are closer to the ground and so the task was
easier. I leaped for them and caught them, and then I scrambled up
behind the sentry and before his dull wits told him that there was
someone behind him I was upon his back and the same fingers that threw a
mad bull closed upon his wind pipe. The struggle was brief—he died
quickly and I lowered him to the roof. Then I took his uniform from him
and donned it, with his ammunition belt, and I took his bayonetted rifle
and started out upon his post, walking with slow tread and with my chin
upon my breast as he had walked.
At the end of my post I waited for the sentry I saw coming upon the next
and when he was close to me I turned back and he turned back away from
me and then I wheeled and struck him an awful blow upon the head with my
rifle. He died more quickly than the other—instantly, I should say.
I took his rifle and ammunition from him and lowered them inside the pen
to waiting hands, and then I went on to the next sentry and the next,
until I had slain five more and passed their rifles to the prisoners
below and while I was doing this, five prisoners who had volunteered to
Father climbed to the roof of the shed and stripped the dead men of
their uniforms and donned them.
It was all done quietly and in the black night none might see what was
going on fifty feet away. I had to stop when I came near to the guard
house. There I turned back and presently slid into the pen with my
accomplices who had been going among the other prisoners with Father,
arousing them to mutiny. Now were most of them ready to follow me, for
so far my plan had proven successful. With equal quietness we overcame
the men at the guard house and then moved on in a silent body toward the
barracks.
So sudden and so unexpected was our attack that we met with little
resistance and we were almost five thousand to forty now. We swarmed in
upon them like wild bees upon a foe and we shot them and bayonetted them
until none remained alive. Not one escaped. And now we were flushed with
success so that the most spiritless became a veritable lion for courage.
We who had taken the uniforms of the Kash Guard discarded them for our
own garb as we had no mind to go abroad in the hated livery of our
oppressors. That very night we saddled their horses with the fifty
saddles that were there and fifty men rode the balance of the horses
bareback—that made one hundred mounted men and the others were to
follow on foot—on to Chicago. On to Chicago, was our first slogan.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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