Speaker 1: And arrest by Ambrose Bierce, having murdered his brother in
law or In Brower of Kentucky was a fugitive from
justice from the county jail, where he had been confined
to await his trial. He had escaped by knocking down
his jailer with an iron bar, robbing him of his keys,
and opening the outer door, walking out into the night.
The jailer being unarmed, Brower got no weapon with which
to defend his recovered liberty. As soon as he was
out of town, he had the folly to enter a forest.
This was many years ago, when the region was wilder
than it is now. The night was pretty dark, with
neither moon nor stars visible, and as Brower had never
dwelt hereabout and knew nothing of the lay of the land,
he was naturally not long in losing himself. He could
not have said if he were getting further away from
the town or going back to it, a most important
fact to Ornbrower. He knew in either case a posse
of citizens with a pack of bloodhounds would soon be
on his track, and his chance of escape was very slender.
But he did not wish to assist in his own
pursuit even an added hour of freedom was worth having.
Suddenly he emerged from the forest into an old road,
and there before him saw indistinctly the figure of a man,
motionless in the gloom. It was too late to retreat.
The fugitive felt that at the first movement back toward
the woods he would be, as he afterward explained, filled
with buckshot. So the two stood there like trees, Brower
nearly suffocated by the activity of his own heart, the other.
The emotions of the other are not recorded. A moment later,
it might have been an hour, the moon sailed into
a patch of unclouded sky, and the hunted man saw
that visible embodiment of law lift an arm and point
significantly toward and beyond him, he understood. Turning his back
to his captor, he walked submissively away in the direction indicated,
looking to neither the right nor left his head, and back,
actually aching with a prophecy of buckshot. Brower was as
courageous a criminal as ever lived to be hanged. That
was shown by the conditions of awful personal peril in
which he had coolly killed his brother in law. It
is needless to relate them here. They came out at
his trial, and the revelation of his calmness in confronting
them came near to saving his neck. But what would
you have when a brave man is beaten? He submits.
Only once did Brower venture a turn of the head,
just once, when he was in deep shadow, and he
knew that the other was in moonlight. He looked backward.
His captor was Burton Duff, the jailer, as white as death,
and bearing upon his brow the livid mark of the
iron bar or in Browerer had no further curiosity. He
eventually they entered the town, which was all alight but deserted.
Only the women and children remained, and they were off
the streets straight toward the jail. The criminal held his
way straight up to the main entrance. He walked, laid
his hand upon the knob of the heavy iron door,
pushed it open without command, entered, and found himself in
the presence of a half dozen armed men. Then he
turned nobody else entered. On a table in the corridor
lay the dead body of Burton Duff. The end of
an arrest by Ambrose Bierce