- end_line
- 10297
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:36.274Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 10262
- text
- folded in martial repose across his chest, Moodily wrapped in his
blanket, and striding like a king on the stage, he promenaded up and
down the rustic streets, exhibiting on the back of his blanket a crowd
of human hands, rudely delineated in red; one of them seemed recently
drawn.
“Who is this warrior?” asked I; “and why marches he here? and for what
are these bloody hands?”
“That warrior is the _Red-Hot Coal_,” said a pioneer in moccasins, by
my side. “He marches here to show-off his last trophy; every one of
those hands attests a foe scalped by his tomahawk; and he has just
emerged from Ben Brown’s, the painter, who has sketched the last red
hand that you see; for last night this _Red-Hot Coal_ outburned the
_Yellow Torch_, the chief of a band of the Foxes.”
Poor savage thought I; and is this the cause of your lofty gait? Do you
straighten yourself to think that you have committed a murder, when a
chance-falling stone has often done the same? Is it a proud thing to
topple down six feet perpendicular of immortal manhood, though that
lofty living tower needed perhaps thirty good growing summers to bring
it to maturity? Poor savage! And you account it so glorious, do you, to
mutilate and destroy what God himself was more than a quarter of a
century in building?
And yet, fellow-Christians, what is the American frigate Macedonian, or
the English frigate President, but as two bloody red hands painted on
this poor savage’s blanket?
Are there no Moravians in the Moon, that not a missionary has yet
visited this poor pagan planet of ours, to civilise civilisation and
christianise Christendom?
- title
- Chunk 2