Meanwhile the cause of all this terror was made the object of desperate search.  On September 17th the Governor offered a reward of five hundred dollars for his capture, and there were other rewards swelling the amount to eleven hundred dollars,—­but in vain.  No one could track or trap him.  On September 30th a minute account of his capture appeared in the newspapers, but it was wholly false.  On October 7th there was another, and on October 18th another; yet all without foundation.  Worn out by confinement in his little cave, Nat Turner grew more adventurous, and began to move about stealthily by night, afraid to speak to any human being, but hoping to obtain some information that might aid his escape.  Returning regularly to his retreat before daybreak, he might possibly have continued this mode of life until pursuit had ceased, had not a dog succeeded where men had failed.  The creature accidentally smelt out the provisions hid in the cave, and finally led thither his masters, two negroes, one of whom was named Nelson.  On discovering the terrible fugitive, they fled precipitately, when he hastened to retreat in an opposite direction.  This was on October 15th, and from this moment the neighborhood was all alive with excitement, and five or six hundred men undertook the pursuit.

It shows a more than Indian adroitness in Nat Turner to have escaped capture any longer.  The cave, the arms, the provisions were found; and lying among them the notched stick of this miserable Robinson Crusoe, marked with five weary weeks and six days.  But the man was gone.  For ten days more he concealed himself among the wheat-stacks on Mr. Francis’s plantation, and during this time was reduced almost to despair.  Once he decided to surrender himself, and walked by night within two miles of Jerusalem before his purpose failed him.  Three times he tried to get out of that neighborhood, but in vain:  travelling by day was, of course, out of the question, and by night he found it impossible to elude the patrol.  Again and again, therefore, he returned to his hiding-place, and during his whole two months’ liberty never went five miles from the Cross Keys.  On the 25th of October, he was at last discovered by Mr. Francis, as he was emerging from a stack.  A load of buckshot was instantly discharged at him, twelve of which passed through his hat as he fell to the ground.  He escaped even then, but his pursuers were rapidly concentrating upon him, and it is perfectly astonishing that he could have eluded them for five days more.

On Sunday, October 30th, a man named Benjamin Phipps, going out for the first time on patrol duty, was passing at noon a clearing in the woods where a number of pine-trees had long since been felled.  There was a motion among their boughs; he stopped to watch it; and through a gap in the branches he saw, emerging from a hole in the earth beneath, the face of Nat Turner.  Aiming his gun instantly, Phipps called on him to surrender.  The fugitive, exhausted