Sadly came Nat Turner at nightfall into those gloomy woods where forty-eight hours before he had revealed the details of his terrible plot to his companions.  At the outset all his plans had succeeded; everything was as he predicted:  the slaves had come readily at his call, the masters had proved perfectly defenceless.  Had he not been persuaded to pause at Parker’s plantation, he would have been master before now of the arms and ammunition at Jerusalem; and with these to aid, and the Dismal Swamp for a refuge, he might have sustained himself indefinitely against his pursuers.

Now the blood was shed, the risk was incurred, his friends were killed or captured, and all for what?  Lasting memories of terror, to be sure, for his oppressors; but on the other hand, hopeless failure for the insurrection, and certain death for him.  What a watch he must have kept that night!  To that excited imagination, which had always seen spirits in the sky and blood-drops on the corn and hieroglyphic marks on the dry leaves, how full the lonely forest must have been of signs and solemn warnings!  Alone with the fox’s bark, the rabbit’s rustle, and the screech-owl’s scream, the self-appointed prophet brooded over his despair.  Once creeping to the edge of the wood, he saw men stealthily approach on horseback.  He fancied them some of his companions; but before he dared to whisper their ominous names, “Hark” or “Dred,”—­for the latter was the name, since famous, of one of his more recent recruits,—­he saw them to be white men, and shrank back stealthily beneath his covert.

There he waited two weary days and two melancholy nights,—­long enough to satisfy himself that no one would rejoin him, and that the insurrection had hopelessly failed.  The determined, desperate spirits who had shared his plans were scattered forever, and longer delay would be destruction for him also.  He found a spot which he judged safe, dug a hole under a pile of fence-rails in a field, and lay there for six weeks, only leaving it for a few moments at midnight to obtain water from a neighboring spring.  Food he had previously provided, without discovery, from a house near by.

Meanwhile an unbounded variety of rumors went flying through the State.  The express which first reached the Governor announced that the militia were retreating before the slaves.  An express to Petersburg further fixed the number of militia at three hundred, and of blacks at eight hundred, and invented a convenient shower of rain to explain the dampened ardor of the whites.  Later reports described the slaves as making three desperate attempts to cross the bridge over the Nottoway between Cross Keys and Jerusalem, and stated that the leader had been shot in the attempt.  Other accounts put the number of negroes at three hundred, all well mounted and armed, with two or three white men as leaders.  Their intention was supposed to be to reach the Dismal Swamp, and they must be hemmed in from that side.