Mr. William Adee Whitehead is roused in the middle of the night by an urgent rapping on the front door of his house. He has been having a restless night. All Key West is on the qui vive. Nerves are raw. Every scrap of the news from Indian Key is scarifying. Many of the people who were killed in the recent massacre there had kinfolk in Key West, and anecdotes of the terrors suffered during the raid have been flying around town.
We now see Mr. Whitehead, having lit a kerosene lantern, descending the stairs to the street door in his nightgown, nightcap, and slippers, to see who has been knocking at this unpropitious hour. He is tall and broad-shouldered, and even with his slouching tasseled nightcap and in a sweat-dampened cotton nightgown that reaches below his knees, his bearing is impressive. He is still a young man—in his late twenties—but he is looked up to, as if he were a graybeard, by the townspeople. What counts, of course, is that his family holds a quarter interest in the ownership of the island. His house is on the street—so far barely more than a wide dirt track—that bears his surname. The street was in fact named for his older brother John, who bought a quarter share of the island from John Simonton sixteen years ago, for a price rumored to have been six hundred dollars. John Whitehead no longer lives in Key West—he has gone on to higher flights of finance in New Orleans—and William has taken his place as a kind of proprietary elder (though youngish) statesman in town. William moved here a decade ago, at the age of eighteen, surveyed and mapped the entire island when he was nineteen, and became collector of customs before he had had enough birthdays to be called a man. He still holds that lucrative post.
He opens the door. He holds the lantern high, and its dim light washes a face that is haggard with anxiety. It belongs to Mr. Alden A. M. Jackson, who, besides being the schoolmaster, is a respected, hardheaded town councilman. Tonight, as it happens, his turn has come to serve as captain of the Guard, in command of the rotating land patrol of citizen volunteers who range round the town every night for the security of the townspeople. The Guard has chartered a schooner to fetch arms and ammunition from Havana. For two years the Indian wars on the Florida mainland have had everyone in Key West fearful that the natives would string the wampum of their rage down the necklace of the Keys, and now the recent nearby massacre on Indian Key has brought the town to the edge of panic.
Mr. Whitehead can plainly see that Mr. Jackson, habitually a sobersides, is at this moment wildly a-twitter. He is practically incoherent. “Indians!” he says in a hoarse whisper, looking over his shoulder as if expecting to be jumped and scalped at that very moment. “A raid! They’re signaling!”
Mr. Whitehead worms it out of Mr. Jackson that a mysterious drumming has been heard. It cannot be heard from here; it comes from near the burying ground, or perhaps from inside it. Its rhythms are irregular, sometimes syncopated, sometimes agitated and speedy, interrupted now and then by brief pauses and ominous silences. The Guard has so far not dared to close in on the place from which the signals are coming. They fear an ambush, for which the drumming might be designed as a lure. Mr. Jackson urges Mr. Whitehead to come with him to the barracks, to see if the Guards drum has by any chance been stolen. If it has, a general alarm should surely go out.
In ordinary circumstances, Mr. Whitehead would undoubtedly have been skeptical of this errand. Did it make sense that the Indians would risk stealing a drum from the stronghold of the Guard? But he, too, has heard from the mouths of some of the survivors their reports of what had so recently happened on Indian Key, and he has become credulous.
About two weeks ago, Indian spies evidently observed that the revenue cutters Flint and Atrego, carrying a force of men stationed at Tea Table Key, a mile from Indian Key, sailed north for Cape Florida and Cape Sable as reinforcements for the white men’s mainland troops. Only one officer and ten sick men were left at Tea Table—forlorn protection for Indian Key.
At between two and three in the morning, a night or two after the departure of the cutters, Mr. J. Glass, who lived on the waterfront of Indian Key, happening to be awake, looked out his window and saw in the moonlight many canoes pulled up among the rocks on his shoreline. He ran next door and wakened Mr. J. F. Beiglet, and the two men hurried to give the alarm to Captain Housman, a wily wrecker and more or less the king of the key, but as they crossed the town square, they were surprised by some Indians who were slinking along the fence of Captain Housman’s yard. The Indians at once began screaming and shooting. Mr. Glass ran and hid under the Second Street Wharf, and Mr. Beiglet let himself down into a cistern under Captain Housman’s warehouse. Those two survived.
Others were less fortunate. Hearing the shouting and shooting, Captain Elliott Smith, on Fourth Street, went down into the cistern under his house, along with his wife and baby daughter and his wife’s twelve-year-old brother, and they stayed there, up to their necks in water, for six hours, during which time the house was burned down over their heads, causing them hideous torments. The little brother was suffocated to death.
Just before dawn, the Indians found Captain Mott, his wife and two children, and his mother-in-law hiding in a shed behind their house. The captors shot the grandmother, strangled the baby and threw it into the sea, seized the older daughter, a four-year-old, and dashed her brains out on a porch pillar. Finding Mott and his wife still alive, the attackers beat them to death with clubs and set their clothes and their hair on fire.
A sad loss was Dr. Henry Perrine, a horticulturist, who, on a grant from the U.S. Congress, had been successfully planting, on Matecumbe and Lignum Vitae keys, seeds of many varieties of exotic tropical and subtropical plants, including mahogany and other hardwoods, which he had brought from Mexico and Central and South America, to show that Florida’s soil and climate would support all such plants. He had rented Indian Key’s largest house, which stood on stilts at the very edge of the sea and had a trapdoor leading down to the family’s private bathing place, a walled enclosure that admitted the tides through floodgates. Wakened by gunfire and breaking glass and wild yells, Dr. Perrine hurried his family down into the seawater there. He did not join them, because he felt that for his family’s safety he must hide the trapdoor with some bags of flour and corn from the kitchen storeroom. Later, the family heard Dr. Perrine, up above, trying to reason with the Indians in Spanish, but then they heard curdling war whoops and a single shot.
Aware of the hullabaloo on Indian Key, the officer on Tea Table rousted out the ten sick men and loaded them on a small barge with two four-pound swivel guns. The feverish soldiers muddleheadedly put aboard bags of six-pound shot, instead of four-pound shot, and when they simultaneously fired both guns at a crowd of the raiders on the Indian Key wharf, the overloaded guns did back somersaults right off the barge, into the sea. The Indians shot at the vessel and killed one man, and the rescue mission hastily withdrew to its sickbeds.
The next day, only one of the score of houses on Indian Key remained standing. That house belonged to Mr. Charles Howe, who was a Freemason. After the raid, survivors discovered that the Indians had found Mr. Howe’s Masonic apron, with its mystical pyramid and all-seeing eye, and they had carefully spread it out on the kitchen table, no doubt in awe and fear, and had skulked away.
With these and many other pictures vivid in his mind, Mr. Whitehead readily agrees to go with Mr. Jackson to look for the Guard’s drum. He decides that if there are indeed Indians preparing an attack, he should not leave his wife alone in the house. Soon, therefore, we witness a bizarre march: Mr. Jackson, armed, in step with Mr. Whitehead in his nightgown and Mrs. Whitehead in a quilted cotton pinafore, which she has thrown on over her bedclothes, pacing down Front Street in the pale light of a gibbous moon, to the guardsmen’s barracks.
The drum is there; it has not been stolen by the Indians.
What now? Mr. Whitehead is a man who does not like to be puzzled. Unlocking the Guards racks, he takes out a long gun. Then he leaves Mrs. Whitehead under protection of the barracks sentry and orders Mr. Jackson to lead him to the area where the drumming has been heard. The two men go in a generally southeasterly direction, on unpaved streets at first, and later along tracks to isolated houses at the edge of town.
“Hush,” Mr. Jackson whispers, putting his hand on Mr. Whiteheads arm.
Yes. Mr. Whitehead can hear it. The rhythms are strange. Rushed, then slower, then silence for a time, then a slow then again accelerando.
The time has come when a mans mettle must be tested. Mr. Whitehead whispers to Mr. Jackson that he should stay where he is, to provide covering fire if needed. Then he goes down on hands and knees and crawls—awkwardly because of the length of his nightgown—toward the source of the sound. His squirming figure, like that of a fat caterpillar crawling out on a leaf, is all too visible in the half-light from the moon. He is as brave as any Indian brave, and more foolish by far. He recognizes that he is approaching the isolated home of Mr. Charles Schrumm. Have the natives taken the house, killed the owner?
The drumming is louder now. Creeping ever closer, and doing a kind of push-up, the better to see what’s ahead, Mr. Whitehead discovers the drummer. He gasps.
The Schrumms’ dog, a large crossbred hound used for treeing rats, is perched on the wooden cap of the owners cistern, scratching fleas. Its hind leg beats on the wood in varied rhythms, responding to the various degrees of torment the fleas are causing. The hollow cistern below resonates the drummed sounds of doom for Key West town.