Well, it started slow and seemed to stay slow. Morning come, and outside the armory walls by the dawn’s light, you could see the town waking up, and despite all that yelling from the night before, not a soul among them seemed to know what to do. People walked back and forth up and down the street to work like it weren’t nothing, but at the train station, there was some growing activity. Several gathered there, I reckon, wondering where the engineer and coal man was, for the B&O locomotive engine sat there dead in the water, the engine quit, dried up, for it was plumb out of water and the engineer was gone from it, being that he and the coal man was our prisoners. Next to the Gault House, there was general confusion, and at the Wager House next to that—that was a saloon and hotel just like the Gault—there was some milling around as well. Several of those ’bout was passengers who got off the train and wandered up to the station, wondering what had happened. Several passengers held their luggage, motioning and gesturing and so forth, and I reckon they was tellin’ different stories, and I heard tell that several had murmured they seen a bunch of Negroes running off out the baggage car. But there was a festive atmosphere to the whole thing, to be honest. Folks standing ’round, gossiping. In fact, several workmen walked past the crowd, straight into the armory gate that morning to go to work, thinking nothing of it, and walked right into the barrels of the Captain’s men, who said, “We has come to free the Negro. And you is our prisoner.”
Several didn’t believe it, but they was hustled into the engine house sure enough, and by ten a.m. we had damn near fifty people in there, milling around. They weren’t disbelieving so much like the others from the night before, for the Captain put the Emperor to watch them, and the Emperor was dreadful serious to look at. He was a dark-skinned, proud-looking Negro with a thick chest and wore a dead-serious expression, sporting that Sharps rifle. He was all business.
By eleven a.m. the Old Man begun making one mistake after another. I say that now, looking back. But at the time it didn’t seem so bad. He was delaying, see, waiting for the Negro. Many a fool has done that, waiting for the Negro to do something, including the Negro himself. And that’s gone on a hundred years. But the Old Man didn’t have a hundred years. He had but a few hours, and it cost him.
He stared out the window at the train and the angry passengers spilling off it, more and more of ’em, huffing and puffing, mad ’bout their delay, not knowing what was going on. He turned to Taylor and said, “I sees no reason to hold up all them people from doing their business and their travels, for they has paid for those train tickets. Turn loose the engineer and the coal man.”
Taylor done as he was told, cut the train engineer and coal man loose, following behind them to the train so as to give word to Oliver, who was holding the train at the bridge, to let the train roll on.
In doing so, in letting that train go, the Old Man released ’bout two hundred hostages.
The engineer and coal man didn’t stop at the gate, not with Taylor following behind them, for he hustled them ’round the other side of the trestle bridge out the back entrance of the armory, direct to the steam engine. They got the steam up in thirty minutes, the passengers clattered on board, and they had that train rolling to Wheeling, Virginia, full out in record time.
“They’ll stop at the first town and telegraph the news out,” Stevens said.
“I see no reason to hold up the U.S. Mail,” the Old Man said. “Besides, we wants the world to know what we’re doing here.”
Well, the world did know by noon, for what begun as a festive event that morning with fellers taking shots of rotgut and chatting amongst themselves with gossip, had now wheedled down to disbelief, to irritation to finally cursing and gathering near the armory walls. We could hear them hollering rumors and guesses to one another ’bout the cause of the Old Man’s holding up the engine house. One man said a crazed group of robbers was trying to bust open the armory’s vault. Another hollered that a doctor killed his wife and was hiding there. Another ventured that a nigger girl lost her mind and killed her master and run into the engine house for protection. Another said the B&O train was sabotaged by a baggage handler over a love affair. Everything but what the Old Man had declared. The notion that a group of white fellers had taken over the country’s biggest armory to help free the colored race was just too much for ’em to handle, I reckon.
