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Come, sir, we'll show you how you've done your duty; but listen to me, before we go one foot further if he's dead before my time has come, I'll have your life, if I was to swing on a thousand gallowses." One of the officers here tapped the doctor authoritatively on the shoulder, and said, "Proceed, sir, we are losing time." The doctor saw at once that further resistance was useless.
Instead of the fine old plum and lordly apple trees quite another sort of grove had grown up around the bastions a ghastly grove of gaunt, withered trees, laden with sad fruits, a wood of gallowses, wheels, and spikes, on which the bones of criminals were rotting. The three captured robber bands had largely contributed to this gruesome grove.
And then he jumpt up and run out of the house mad as fire; and he ain't comin' back no more. Boo-hoo, ahoo, boo-hoo!" "Metildy," said the old woman sternly, "stop sniv'lin'. You've made an everlastin' fool of yourself, but your cake ain't all dough yet. It all comes of them no 'count, fashionable sto' gallowses 'spenders' I believe they calls 'em. Never mind, honey!
You see, ma, when he fetcht his cheer clost to mine, and ketcht holt of my hand, and squez it, and dropt on his knees, then it was that his eyes rolled and he began breathin' hard, and his gallowses kept a creakin and a creakin', I till I thought in my soul somethin' terrible was the matter with his in'ards, his vitals; and that flustered and skeered me so that I bust out a-cryin'. Seein' me do that, he creaked worse'n ever, and that made me cry harder; and the harder I cried the harder he creaked, till all of a sudden it came to me that it wasn't nothin' but his gallowses; and then I bust out a laughin' fit to kill myself, right in his face.
They go toddling about like old men who have grown little again, and forgotten everything they ever knew. But Bobby Towpate was not ugly. Under his white hair, which "looked every way for Sunday," were blue eyes and ruddy cheeks, and a mouth as pretty as it was solemn. The comical little fellow wore an unbleached cotton shirt, and tattered pantaloons, with home-made suspenders or "gallowses."
"I wear gallowses no more," he explained, lifting his waistcoat to show that his braces now encircled him as a belt, but even then she did not understand. "Know, then," said Corp, sternly, "I am Ben the Boatswain." "And am I not the Lady Griselda any more?" she asked. "I'm no sure," he confessed; "but if you are, there's a price on your head." "What is Tommy?"
Do you want to be hung, and see your widow a breakin' her heart over your gallowses?" "Oh! I shouldn't get hung. The Government wouldn't do nothin'. The Government feels jest as I do, that it would be wrong to stir up old bitternesses, and race differences. The bloody shirt has been washed, and ironed out; and it wouldn't be right to dirty it up agin.
There was no lack of sympathy with Grizel when the news spread through the town, and unshod men with their gallowses hanging down, and women buttoning as they ran, hurried to the Den. But to all the questions put to her and to all the kindly offers made, as the body was carried to Double Dykes, she only rocked her arms, crying, "I don't want anything to eat. I shall stay all night beside her.
When she was gone he began to ponder over several subjects connected with the principal characters of this narrative until he became drowsy, during which period halters, gibbets, gallowses, hangmen, and judges jumbled each other alternately through his fancy, until he fell fast asleep in his easy-chair.
Hawthorne did not conjure this up wholly out of his imagination, for in 1704 the General Court of Massachusetts Bay passed the following law, which he was no doubt aware of: "Convicted before the Justice of Assize, both Man and Woman to be set on the Gallows an Hour with a Rope about their Necks and the other end cast over the Gallowses.
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