Clemens, "Mark Twain's" father, had built.
But there was no trial by law. The next night, through the moonlight and
the pines, a little body of men rode. Up the valley, across the plateau,
they went, and Jamestown was sleeping.
Taking Brooks from the jail they carried him three miles down the road
toward Pall Mall. Here they bound a rope around his feet, unbridled a
horse and tied the other end of the rope to the horse's tail. They
taunted Brooks. But they could not make him break his silence, until he
asked to be allowed to see his wife and baby. Rough men laughed, and
there was the report of a gun. The horse, frightened, galloped down the
road, and bullets were fired into the squirming body as it was dragged
over the rocks.
The war had steeled men for the coming of death and crime, but at the
manner of the death of "Willie" Brooks a shudder passed over the
mountainsides. To Nancy Brooks was born a son a short time afterward,
and he was named after his father.
A silent, broken-hearted woman, Nancy Brooks took up again her life at
her father's home. To the little girl she had carried on her flight to
Michigan and to the boy whose hair had the copper-red of the father, she
devoted herself. The girl had been named Mary, and she inherited the
piquancy and wit that had made her mother the belle of the valley, and
as she grew to womanhood the mountaineers saw again the Nancy Brooks
they had loved before war had come with its cold blighting fingers of
death.
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