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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7b82bc --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +*.txt text eol=lf +*.htm text eol=lf +*.html text eol=lf +*.md text eol=lf diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..7a7aa1e --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #54764 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/54764) diff --git a/old/54764-0.txt b/old/54764-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index bccd817..0000000 --- a/old/54764-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8660 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of In The Sixties, by Harold Frederic - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most -other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - - - -Title: In The Sixties - -Author: Harold Frederic - -Release Date: May 23, 2017 [EBook #54764] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE SIXTIES *** - - - - -Produced by David Widger from page images generously -provided by the Internet Archive - - - - - - - - - - -IN THE SIXTIES - -By Harold Frederic - -New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons - -1893 - -[Illustration: 0007] - - - - -PREFACE TO A UNIFORM EDITION - -In nothing else under the latter-day sun-not even in the mysterious -department of woman’s attire-has Fashion been more variable, or more -eccentric in its variations, than in the matter of prefaces. The eternal -revolution of letters devours its own children so rapidly that for the -hardiest of them ten years count as a generation; each succeeding decade -has whims of its own about prefaces. Now it has been the rule to make -them long and didactic, and now brief and with a twist toward flippancy. -Upon occasion it has been thought desirable to throw upon this -introductory formula the responsibility of explaining everything that -was to follow in the book, and, again, nothing has seemed further from -the proper function of a preface than elucidation of any sort. Sometimes -the prevalent mode has discouraged prefaces altogether--and thus it -happens that the present author, doomed to be doing in England at least -something of what the English do, has never before chanced to write one. -Yet now it seems that in America prefaces are much in vogue-and this is -an American edition. - -The apology of the exile ends abruptly, however, with this confession -that the preface is strange ground. The four volumes under comment were -all, it is true, written in England, but they do not belong to the Old -World in any other sense. - -In three of them the very existence of Europe is scarcely so much as -hinted at. The fourth concerns itself, indeed, with events in which -Europeans took an active part; but what they were doing, on the one side -and on the other, was in its results very strictly American. - -The idea which finally found shape and substance in this last-named -book, “In the Valley,” seems now in retrospect to have been always in -my mind. All four of my great-grandfathers had borne arms in the -Revolutionary War, and one of them indeed somewhat indefinitely expanded -this record by fighting on both sides. My earliest recollections are of -tales told by my grandmother about local heroes of this conflict, who -were but middle-aged people when she was a child. She herself had come -into curious relation with one of the terrible realities of that period. -At the age of six it was her task to beat linen upon the stones of a -brook running through the Valley farm upon which she was reared, and the -deep-hole close beside where she worked was the spot in which the owner -of the farm had lain hidden in the alders, immersed to his chin, for two -days and nights while Brant’s Indians were looking for him. Thus, by a -single remove, I came myself into contact with the men who held Tryon -County against the King, and my boyish head was full of them. Before -I left school, at the age of twelve, I had composed several short but -lurid introductions to a narrative which should have for its central -feature the battle of Oriskany; for the writing of one of these, indeed, -or rather for my contumacy in refusing to give up my manuscript to the -teacher when my crime was detected, I was expelled from the school. - -The plan of the book itself dated from 1877, the early months of which I -busied myself greatly in inciting my fellow-citizens to form what is now -the Oneida Historical Society, and to prepare for a befitting -celebration of the coming hundredth anniversary of Oriskany. The -circumstance that I had not two dollars to spare prevented my becoming a -member of the Society, but in no way affected the marked success of the -celebration it organized and superintended. It was at this time that I -gathered the first materials for my projected work, from members of the -Fonda and other families. Eight years later I was in the position of -having made at least as many attempts to begin this book, which I had -never ceased to desire to write, and for which I had steadily collected -books and other data; one of these essays ran to more than twenty -thousand words, and several others were half that length, but they were -all failures. - -In 1885, after I had been a year in London, the fact that a journalist -friend of mine got two hundred and fifty dollars from the _Weekly Echo_ -for a serial story, based upon his own observations as a youngster in -Ireland, gave me a new idea. He seemed to make his book with extreme -facility, never touching the weekly instalment until the day for sending -it to the printer’s had arrived, and then walking up and down dictating -the new chapters in a very loud voice, to drown the racket of his -secretary’s typewriter. This appeared to be a highly simple way of -earning two hundred and fifty dollars, and I went home to start a story -of my own at once. When I had written the opening chapter, I took it to -the editor of the _Weekly Echo_, who happened to be a friend of mine as -well. He read it, suggested the word “comely” instead of some other on -the first page, and said it was too American for any English paper, but -might do well in America. The fading away of the two hundred and fifty -dollars depressed me a good deal, but after a time a helpful reaction -came. I realized that I had consumed nearly ten years in fruitless -mooning over my Revolutionary novel, and was no nearer achievement than -at the outset, simply because I did not know how to make a book of any -kind, let alone a historical book of the kind which should be the most -difficult and exacting of all. This determined me to proceed with the -contemporary story I had begun--if only to learn what it was really like -to cover a whole canvas. The result was “Seth’s Brother’s Wife”--which -still has the _Echo_ man’s suggested “comely” in its opening description -of the barn-yard. - -At the time, I thought of this novel almost wholly in the light of -preparation for the bigger task I had to do, and it is still easiest for -me to so regard it. Certainly its completion, and perhaps still more the -praise which was given to it by those who first saw it, gave me a degree -of confidence that I had mastered the art of fiction which I look back -upon now with surprise--and not a little envy. It was in the fine flush -of this confidence that I hastened to take up the real work, the book -I had been dreaming of so long, and, despite the immense amount -of material in the shape of notes, cross-references, dates, maps, -biographical facts, and the like, which I had perforce to drag along -with me, my ardor maintained itself to the finish. “In the Valley” was -written in eight months--and that, too, at a time when I had also a -great deal of newspaper work to do as well. - -“The Lawton Girl” suggested itself at the outset as a kind of sequel to -“Seth’s Brother’s Wife,” but here I found myself confronted by agencies -and influences the existence of which I had not previously suspected. In -“Seth’s Brother’s Wife” I had made the characters do just what I wanted -them to do, and the notion that my will was not altogether supreme had -occurred neither to them nor to me. The same had been true of “In the -Valley,” where indeed the people were so necessarily subordinated to the -evolution of the story which they illustrated rather than shaped, that -their personalities always remained shadowy in my own mind. But in -“The Lawton Girl,” to my surprise at first, and then to my interested -delight, the people took matters into their own hands quite from the -start. It seemed only by courtesy that I even presided over their -meetings, and that my sanction was asked for their comings and goings. -As one of many examples, I may cite the interview between Jessica and -Horace in the latter’s office. In my folly, I had prepared for her here -a part of violent and embittered denunciation, full of scornful epithets -and merciless jibes; to my discomfiture, she relented at the first sight -of his gray hair and troubled mien, when I had brought her in, and would -have none of my heroics whatever. Once reconciled to the posture of a -spectator, I grew so interested in the doings of these people that I -lost sight of a time-limit; they wandered along for two years, making -the story in leisurely fashion as they went. At the end I did assert my -authority, and kill Jessica--she who had not deserved or intended at all -to die--but I see now more clearly than any one else that it was a false -and cowardly thing to do. - -There remains the volume of collected stories, long and short, dealing -with varying aspects of home life in the North--or rather in my little -part of the North--during the Civil War. These stories are by far closer -to my heart than any other work of mine, partly because they seem to me -to contain the best things I have done or ever shall do, partly -because they are so closely interwoven with the personal memories and -experiences of my own childhood--and a little also, no doubt, for the -reason that they have not had quite the treatment outside that paternal -affection had desired for them. Of all the writers whose books affected -my younger years, I think that MM. Erckmann-Chatrian exerted upon me the -deepest and most vital influence. I know that my ambition to paint some -small pictures of the life of my Valley, under the shadow of the vast -black cloud which was belching fire and death on its southern side, in -humble imitation of their studies of Alsatian life in the days of the -Napoleonic terror, was much more powerful than any impulse directly -inspired by any other writers. By this confession I do not at all wish -to suggest comparisons. The French writers dealt with a period remote -enough to be invested with a haze of romance, and they wrote for a -reading public vehemently interested in everything that could be told -them about that period. These stories of mine lack these aids--and -doubtless much else beside. But they are in large part my own -recollections of the dreadful time--the actual things that a boy from -five to nine saw and heard about him, while his own relatives were being -killed, and his school-fellows orphaned, and women of his neighborhood -forced into mourning and despair--and they had a right to be recorded. - -A single word in addition to an already over-long preface. The locality -which furnishes the scenes of the two contemporary novels and all the -War stories may be identified in a general way with Central New York, -but in no case is it possible to connect any specific village or town -with one actually in existence. The political exigencies of “Seth’s -Brother’s Wife” made it necessary to invent a Congressional District, -composed of three counties, to which the names of Adams, Jay, and -Dearborn were given. Afterwards the smaller places naturally took names -reflecting the quaint operation of the accident which sprinkled our -section, as it were, with the contents of a classical pepper-box. Thus -Octavius, Thessaly, Tyre, and the rest came into being, and one tries to -remember and respect the characteristics they have severally developed, -but no exact counterparts exist for them in real life, and no map of the -district has as yet been drawn, even in my own mind. - -H. F. - -London, February 16, 1897. - - - - - -THE COPPERHEAD - - - - -CHAPTER I--ABNER BEECH - -It was on the night of my thirteenth birthday, I know, that the old -farm-house was burned over our heads. By that reckoning I must have been -six or seven when I went to live with Farmer Beech, because at the time -he testified I had been with him half my life. - -Abner Beech had often been supervisor for his town, and could have -gone to the Assembly, it was said, had he chosen. He was a stalwart, -thick-shouldered, big man, with shaggy dark eyebrows shading stern hazel -eyes, and with a long, straight nose, and a broad, firmly shut mouth. -His expansive upper lip was blue from many years of shaving; all the -rest was bushing beard, mounting high upon the cheeks and rolling -downward in iron-gray billows over his breast. That shaven upper lip, -which still may be found among the farmers of the old blood in our -district, was, I dare say, a survival from the time of the Puritan -protest against the mustaches of the Cavaliers. If Abner Beech, in the -latter days, had been told that this shaving on Wednesday and Saturday -nights was a New England rite, I feel sure he would never have touched -razor again. - -He was a well-to-do man in the earlier time--a tremendous worker, a -“good provider,” a citizen of weight and substance in the community. In -all large matters the neighborhood looked to him to take the lead. He -was the first farmer roundabout to set a mowing-machine to work in his -meadows, and to put up lightning-rods on his buildings. At one period -he was, too, the chief pillar in the church, but that was before the -episode of the lightning-rods. Our little Union meeting-house was -supplied in those days by an irregular procession of itinerant -preachers, who came when the spirit moved and spoke with that entire -frankness which is induced by knowledge that the night is to be spent -somewhere else. One of these strolling ministers regarded all attempts -to protect property from lightning as an insolent defiance of the Divine -Will, and said so very pointedly in the pulpit, and the congregation -sat still and listened and grinned. Farmer Beech never forgave them. - -There came in good time other causes for ill-feeling. It is beyond the -power of my memory to pick out and arrange in proper sequence the events -which, in the final result, separated Abner Beech from his fellows. My -own recollections go with distinctness back to the reception of the news -that Virginia had hanged John Brown; in a vaguer way they cover the two -or three preceding years. Very likely Farmer Beech had begun to fall out -of touch with his neighbors even before that. - -The circumstances of my adoption into his household--an orphan -without relations or other friends--were not of the sort to serve this -narrative. I was taken in to be raised as a farm-hand, and was no more -expected to be grateful than as if I had been a young steer purchased -to toil in the yoke. No suggestion was ever made that I had incurred any -debt of obligation to the Beeches. In a little community where every one -worked as a matter of course till there was no more work to do, and all -shared alike the simple food, the tired, heavy sleep, and the infrequent -spells of recreation, no one talked or thought of benefits conferred or -received. My rights in the house and about the place were neither less -nor more than those of Jeff Beech, the farmer’s only son. - -In the course of time I came, indeed, to be a more sympathetic unit in -the household, so to speak, than poor Jeff himself. But that was only -because he had been drawn off after strange gods. - -At all times--even when nothing else good was said of him--Abner -Beech was spoken of by the people of the district as a “great hand for -reading.” His pre-eminence in this matter remained unquestioned to the -end. No other farmer for miles owned half the number of books which he -had on the shelves above his writing-desk. Still less was there any -one roundabout who could for a moment stand up with him in a discussion -involving book-learning in general. This at first secured for him the -respect of the whole country-side, and men were proud to be agreed with -by such a scholar. But when affairs changed, this, oddly enough, became -a formidable popular grievance against Abner Beech. They said then that -his opinions were worthless because he got them from printed books, -instead of from his heart. - -What these opinions were may in some measure be guessed from the titles -of the farmer’s books. Perhaps there were some thirty of them behind the -glass doors of the old mahogany bookcase. With one or two agricultural -or veterinary exceptions, they related exclusively to American history -and politics. There were, I recall, the first two volumes of Bancroft, -and Lossing’s “Lives of the Signers,” and “Field-Books” of the two -wars with England; Thomas H. Benton’s “Thirty Years’ View;” the four -green-black volumes of Hammond’s “Political History of the State of -New York:” campaign lives of Lewis Cass and Franklin Pierce and larger -biographies of Jefferson and Jackson, and, most imposing of all, a whole -long row of big calf-bound volumes of the Congressional Globe, which -carried the minutiae of politics at Washington back into the forties. - -These books constituted the entire literary side of my boyish education. -I have only the faintest and haziest recollections of what happened when -I went during the winter months to the school-house at the Four Corners. -But I can recall the very form of the type in the farmer’s books. -Every one of those quaint, austere, and beardless faces, framed in -high collars and stocks and waving hair--the Marcys, Calhouns, DeWitt -Clintons, and Silas Wrights of the daguerreotype and Sartain’s primitive -graver--gives back to me now the lineaments of an old-time friend. - -Whenever I could with decency escape from playing checkers with Jeff, -and had no harness to grease or other indoor jobs, I spent the winter -evenings in poring over some of these books--generally with Abner Beech -at the opposite side of the table immersed in another. On some rare -occasion one of the hired men would take down a volume and look through -it--the farmer watching him covertly the while to see that he did not -wet his big thumbs to turn over the leaves--but for the most part we -two had the books to ourselves. The others would sit about till bedtime, -amusing themselves as best they could, the women-folk knitting or -mending, the men cracking butternuts, or dallying with cider and apples -and fried-cakes, as they talked over the work and gossip of the district -and tempted the scorching impulses of the stovehearth with their -stockinged feet. - -This tacit separation of the farmer and myself from the rest of the -household in the course of time begat confidences between us. He grew, -from brief and casual beginnings, into a habit of speaking to me about -the things we read. As it became apparent, year by year, that young -Jeff was never going to read anything at all, Abner Beech more and more -distinguished me with conversational favor. It cannot be said that the -favoritism showed itself in other directions. I had to work as hard -as ever, and got no more play-time than before. The master’s eye was -everywhere as keen, alert, and unsparing as if I had not known even my -alphabet. But when there were breathing spells, we talked together--or -rather he talked and I listened--as if we were folk quite apart from the -rest. - -Two fixed ideas thus arose in my boyish mind, and dominated all my -little notions of the world. One was that Alexander Hamilton and John -Marshall were among the most infamous characters in history. The other -was that every true American ought to hold himself in daily readiness -to fight with England. I gave a great deal of thought to both these -matters. I had early convictions, too, I remember, with regard to Daniel -Webster, who had been very bad, and then all at once became a very good -man. For some obscure reason I always connected him in my imagination -with Zaccheus up a tree, and clung to the queer association of images -long after I learned that the Marshfield statesman had been physically a -large man. - -Gradually the old blood-feud with the Britisher became obscured by -fresher antagonisms, and there sprouted up a crop of new sons of Belial -who deserved to be hated more even than had Hamilton and Marshall. -With me the two stages of indignation glided into one another so -imperceptibly that I can now hardly distinguish between them. What I do -recall is that the farmer came in time to neglect the hereditary enemy, -England, and to seem to have quite forgotten our own historic foes to -liberty, so enraged was he over the modern Abolitionists. He told me -about them as we paced up the seed rows together in the spring, as we -drove homeward on the hay-load in the cool of the summer evening, as we -shovelled out a path for the women to the pumps in the farm-yard through -December snows. It took me a long time to even approximately grasp the -wickedness of these new men, who desired to establish negro sovereignty -in the Republic, and to compel each white girl to marry a black man. - -The fact that I had never seen any negro “close to,” and had indeed -only caught passing glimpses of one or more of the colored race on the -streets of our nearest big town, added, no doubt, to the mystified alarm -with which I contemplated these monstrous proposals. When finally an old -darky on his travels did stroll our way, and I beheld him, incredibly -ragged, dirty, and light-hearted, shuffling through “Jump Jim Crow” down -at the Four Corners, for the ribald delectation of the village loafers, -the revelation fairly made me shudder. I marvelled that the others could -laugh, with this unspeakable fate hanging over their silly heads. - -At first the Abolitionists were to me a remote and intangible class, -who lived and wrought their evil deeds in distant places--chiefly New -England way. I rarely heard mention of any names of persons among them. -They seemed to be an impersonal mass, like a herd of buffaloes or a -swarm of hornets. The first individuality in their ranks which attracted -my attention, I remember, was that of Theodore Parker. The farmer one -day brought home with him from town a pamphlet composed of anti-slavery -sermons or addresses by this person. In the evening he read it, or as -far into it as his temper would permit, beating the table with his huge -fist from time to time, and snorting with wrathful amazement. At last he -sprang to his feet, marched over to the wood-stove, kicked the door -open with his boot, and thrust the offending print into the blaze. It -is vivid in my memory still--the way the red flame-light flared over his -big burly front, and sparkled on his beard, and made his face to shine -like that of Moses. - -But soon I learned that there were Abolitionists -everywhere--Abolitionists right here in our own little farmland township -of northern New York! The impression which this discovery made upon -me was not unlike that produced on Robinson Crusoe by the immortal -footprint. I could think of nothing else. Great events, which really -covered a space of years, came and went as in a bunch together, while -I was still pondering upon this. John Brown was hanged, Lincoln -was elected, Sumter was fired on, the first regiment was raised and -despatched from our rustic end of Dearborn County--and all the time it -seems now as if my mind was concentrated upon the amazing fact that some -of our neighbors were Abolitionists. - -There was a certain dreamlike tricksiness of transformation in it all. -At first there was only one Abolitionist, old “Jee” Hagadorn. Then, -somehow, there came to be a number of them--and then, all at once, -lo! everybody was an Abolitionist--that is to say, everybody but Abner -Beech. The more general and enthusiastic the conversion of the others -became, the more resolutely and doggedly he dug his heels into the -ground, and braced his broad shoulders, and pulled in the opposite -direction. The skies darkened, the wind rose, the storm of angry popular -feeling burst swooping over the countryside, but Beech only stiffened -his back and never budged an inch. - -At some early stage of this great change, we ceased going to church at -all. The pulpit of our rustic meeting-house had become a platform from -which the farmer found himself denounced with hopeless regularity on -every recurring Sabbath, and that, too, without any chance whatever of -talking back. This in itself was hardly to be borne. But when -others, mere laymen of the church, took up the theme, and began in -class-meetings and the Sunday-school to talk about Antichrist and -the Beast with Ten Horns and Seven Heads, in obvious connection with -Southern sympathizers, it became frankly insufferable. The farmer did -not give in without a fierce resistance. He collected all the texts he -could find in the Bible, such as “Servants, obey your masters,” “Cursed -be Canaan,” and the like, and hurled them vehemently, with strong, deep -voice, and sternly glowing eyes, full at their heads. But the others had -many more texts--we learned afterwards that old “Jee” Hagadorn enjoyed -the unfair advantage of a Cruden’s Concordance--and their tongues were -as forty to one, so we left off going to church altogether. - -Not long after this, I should think, came the miserable affair of the -cheese-factory. - -The idea of doing all the dairy work of a neighborhood under a common -roof, which originated not many miles from us, was now nearly ten years -old. In those days it was regarded as having in it possibilities of -vastly greater things than mere cheesemaking. Its success among us had -stirred up in men’s minds big sanguine notions of co-operation as the -answer to all American farm problems--as the gateway through which we -were to march into the rural millennium. These high hopes one recalls -now with a smile and a sigh. Farmers’ wives continued to break down and -die under the strain, or to be drafted off to the lunatic asylums; -the farmers kept on hanging themselves in their barns, or flying off -westward before the locust-like cloud of mortgages; the boys and girls -turned their steps townward in an ever-increasing host. The millennium -never came at all. - -But at that time--in the late fifties and early sixties--the -cheese-factory was the centre of an impressive constellation of dreams -and roseate promises. Its managers were the very elect of the district; -their disfavor was more to be dreaded than any condemnation of a -town-meeting; their chief officers were even more important personages -than the supervisor and assessor. - -Abner Beech had literally been the founder of our cheese-factory. I -fancy he gave the very land on which it was built, and where you will -see it still, under the willows by the upper-creek bridge. He sent to it -in those days the milk of the biggest herd owned by any farmer for miles -around, reaching at seasons nearly one hundred cows. His voice, too, -outweighed all others in its co-operative councils. - -But when our church-going community had reached the conclusion that a -man couldn’t be a Christian and hold such views on the slave question as -Beech held, it was only a very short step to the conviction that such -a man would water his milk. In some parts of the world the theft of a -horse is the most heinous of conceivable crimes; other sections exalt -to this pinnacle of sacredness in property a sheep or a pheasant or a -woman. Among our dairymen the thing of special sanctity was milk. A man -in our neighborhood might almost better be accused of forgery or bigamy -outright, than to fall under the dreadful suspicion of putting water -into his cans. - -Whether it was mere stupid prejudice or malignant invention I know -not--who started the story was never to be learned--but of a sudden -everybody seemed to have heard that Abner Beech’s milk had been refused -at the cheese-factory. This was not true, any more than it was true that -there could possibly have been warrant for such a proceeding. But what -did happen was that the cheese-maker took elaborate pains each morning -to test our cans with such primitive appliances as preceded the -lactometer, and sniffed suspiciously as he entered our figures in a -separate book, and behaved generally so that our hired man knocked him -head over heels into one of his whey vats. Then the managers complained -to the farmer. He went down to meet them, boiling over with rage. There -was an evil spirit in the air, and bitter words were exchanged. The -outcome was that Abner Beech renounced the co-operative curds of his -earlier manhood, so to speak, sold part of his cattle at a heavy loss, -and began making butter at home with the milk of the remainder. - -Then we became pariahs in good earnest. - - - - -CHAPTER II--JEFF’S MUTINY - -The farmer came in from the fields somewhat earlier than usual on this -August afternoon. He walked, I remember, with a heavy step and bowed -head, and, when he had come into the shade on the porch and taken off -his hat, looked about him with a wearied air. The great heat, with -its motionless atmosphere and sultry closeness, had well-nigh wilted -everybody. But one could see that Abner was suffering more than the -rest, and from something beyond the enervation of dog-days. - -He sank weightily into the arm-chair by the desk, and stretched out his -legs with a querulous note in his accustomed grunt of relief. On the -moment Mrs. Beech came in from the kitchen, with the big china wash-bowl -filled with cold water, and the towel and clean socks over her arm, and -knelt before her husband. She proceeded to pull off his big, dust-baked -boots and the woollen foot-gear, put his feet into the bowl, bathe and -dry them, and draw on the fresh covering, all without a word. - -The ceremony was one I had watched many hundreds of times. Mrs. Beech -was a tall, dark, silent woman, whom I could well believe to have been -handsome in her youth. She belonged to one of the old Mohawk-Dutch -families, and when some of her sisters came to visit at the farm I noted -that they too were all dusky as squaws, with jet-black shiny curls and -eyes like the midnight hawk. I used always to be afraid of them on this -account, but I dare say they were in reality most kindly women. Mrs. -Beech herself, represented to my boyish eyes the ideal of a saturnine -and masterful queen. She performed great quantities of work with -no apparent effort--as if she had merely willed it to be done. Her -household was governed with a cold impassive exactitude; there were -never any hitches, or even high words. The hired girls, of course, -called her “M’rye,” as the rest of us mostly did, but they rarely -carried familiarity further, and as a rule respected her dislike for -much talk. During all the years I spent under her roof I was never clear -in my mind as to whether she liked me or not. Her own son, even, passed -his boyhood in much the same state of dubiety. - -But to her husband, Abner Beech, she was always most affectionately -docile and humble. Her snapping black eyes followed him about and -rested on him with an almost canine fidelity of liking. She spoke to -him habitually in a voice quite different from that which others heard -addressed to them. This, indeed, was measurably true of us all. By -instinct the whole household deferred in tone and manner to our big, -bearded chief, as if he were an Arab sheik ruling over us in a tent on -the desert. The word “patriarch” still seems best to describe him, and -his attitude toward us and the world in general, as I recall him sitting -there in the half-darkened living-room, with his wife bending over his -feet in true Oriental submission. - -“Do you know where Jeff is?” the farmer suddenly asked, without turning -his head to where I sat braiding a whiplash, but indicating by the -volume of voice that his query was put to me. - -“He went off about two o’clock,” I replied, “with his fish-pole. They -say they are biting like everything down in the creek.” - -“Well, you keep to work and they won’t bite you,” said Abner Beech. This -was a very old joke with him, and usually the opportunity of using it -once more tended to lighten his mood. Now, though mere force of habit -led him to repeat the pleasantry, he had no pleasure in it. He sat -with his head bent, and his huge hairy hands spread listlessly on the -chair-arms. - -Mrs. Beech finished her task, and rose, lifting the bowl from the floor. -She paused, and looked wistfully into her husband’s face. - -“You ain’t a bit well, Abner!” she said. - -“Well as I’m likely ever to be again,” he made answer, gloomily. - -“Has any more of’em been sayin’ or doin’ anything?” the wife asked, with -diffident hesitation. - -The farmer spoke with more animation. “D’ye suppose I care a picayune -what _they_ say or do?” he demanded. “Not I! But when a man’s own -kith and kin turn agin him, into the bargain--” He left the sentence -unfinished, and shook his head to indicate the impossibility of such a -situation. - -“Has Jeff--then--” Mrs. Beech began to ask. - -“Yes--Jeff!” thundered the farmer, striking his fist on the arm of the -chair. “Yes--by the Eternal!--Jeff!” - -When Abner Beech swore by the Eternal we knew that things were pretty -bad. His wife put the bowl down on a chair, and seated herself in -another. “What’s Jeff been doin’?” she asked. - -“Why, where d’ye suppose he was last night, ’n’ the night before that? -Where d’ye suppose he is this minute? They ain’t no mistake about it, -Lee Watkins saw ’em with his own eyes, and ta’nted me with it. He’s down -by the red bridge--that’s where he is--hangin’ round that Hagadorn gal!” - -Mrs. Beech looked properly aghast at the intelligence. Even to me it -was apparent that the unhappy Jeff might better have been employed in -committing any other crime under the sun. It was only to be expected -that his mother would be horrified. - -“I never could abide that Lee Watkins,” was what she said. - -The farmer did not comment on the relevancy of this. “Yes,” he went on, -“the daughter of mine enemy, the child of that whining, backbiting -old scoundrel who’s been eating his way into me like a deer-tick for -years--the whelp that I owe every mean and miserable thing that’s ever -happened to me--yes, of all living human creatures, by the Eternal! it’s -_his_ daughter that that blamed fool of a Jeff must take a shine to, and -hang around after!” - -“He’ll come of age the fourteenth of next month,” remarked the mother, -tentatively. - -“Yes--and march up and vote the Woollyhead ticket. I suppose that’s -what’ll come next!” said the farmer, bitterly. “It only needed that!” - -“And it was you who got her the job of teachin’ the school, too,” put in -Mrs. Beech. - -“That’s nothing to do with it,” Abner continued. “I ain’t blamin’ -her--that is, on her own account. She’s a good enough gal so far’s I -know. But everything and everybody under that tumble-down Hagadorn roof -ought to be pizen to any son of mine! _That’s_ what I say! And I tell -you this, mother”--the farmer rose, and spread his broad chest, towering -over the seated woman as he spoke--“I tell you this; if he ain’t got -pride enough to keep him away from that house--away from that gal--then -he can keep away from _this_ house--away from me!” - -The wife looked up at him mutely, then bowed her head in tacit consent. - -“He brings it on himself!” Abner cried, with clenched fists, beginning -to pace up and down the room. “Who’s the one man I’ve reason to curse -with my dying breath? Who began the infernal Abolition cackle here? Who -drove me out of the church? Who started that outrageous lie about the -milk at the factory, and chased me out of that, too? Who’s been a layin’ -for years behind every stump and every bush, waitin’ for the chance to -stab me in the back, an’ ruin my business, an’ set my neighbors agin me, -an’ land me an’ mine in the poorhouse or the lockup? You know as well as -I do--‘Jee’ Hagadorn! If I’d wrung his scrawny little neck for him -the first time I ever laid eyes on him, it ’d ’a’ been money in my -pocket and years added onto my life. And then my son--my son! must go -taggin’ around--oh-h!” - -He ended with an inarticulate growl of impatience and wrath. - -“Mebbe, if you spoke to the boy--” Mrs. Beech began. - -“Yes, I’ll speak to him!” the farmer burst forth, with grim emphasis. -“I’ll speak to him so’t he’ll hear!” He turned abruptly to me. “Here, -boy,” he said, “you go down the creek-road an’ look for Jeff. If he -ain’t loafin’ round the school-house he’ll be in the neighborhood of -Hagadorn’s. You tell him I say for him to get back here as quick as he -can. You needn’t tell him what it’s about. Pick up your feet, now!” - -As luck would have it, I had scarcely got out to the road before I heard -the loose-spoked wheels of the local butcher’s wagon rattling behind me -down the hill. Looking round, I saw through the accompanying puffs of -dust that young “Ni” Hagadorn was driving, and that he was alone. I -stopped and waited for him to come up, questioning my mind whether it -would be fair to beg a lift from him, when the purpose of my journey was -so hostile to his family. Even after he had halted, and I had climbed up -to the seat beside him, this consciousness of treachery disturbed me. - -But no one thought long of being serious with “Ni.” He was along in -the teens somewhere, not large for his years but extremely wiry and -muscular, and the funniest boy any of us ever knew of. How the son of -such a sad-faced, gloomy, old licensed exhorter as “Jee” Hagadorn could -be such a running spring of jokes and odd sayings and general deviltry -as “Ni,” passed all our understandings. His very face made you laugh, -with its wilderness of freckles, its snub nose, and the comical curl to -its mouth. He must have been a profitable investment to the butcher who -hired him to drive about the country. The farmers’ wives all came out -to laugh and chat with him, and under the influence of his good spirits -they went on buying the toughest steaks and bull-beef flanks, at more -than city prices, year after year. But anybody who thought “Ni” was soft -because he was full of fun made a great mistake. - -“I see you ain’t doin’ much ditchin’ this year,” “Ni” remarked, glancing -over our fields as he started up the horse. “I should think you’d be -tickled to death.” - -Well, in one sense I was glad. There used to be no other such -back-aching work in all the year as that picking up of stones to fill -into the trenches which the hired men began digging as soon as the -hay and grain were in. But, on the other hand, I knew that the present -idleness meant--as everything else now seemed to mean--that the Beech -farm was going to the dogs. - -“No,” I made rueful answer. “Our land don’t need drainin’ any more. It’s -dry as a powder-horn now.” - -“Ni” clucked knowingly at the old horse. “Guess it’s Abner that can’t -stand much more drainin’,” he said. “They say he’s looking all round for -a mortgage, and can’t raise one.” - -“No such thing!” I replied. “His health’s poorly this summer, that’s -all. And Jeff--he don’t seem to take hold, somehow, like he used to.” - -My companion laughed outright. “Mustn’t call him Jeff any more,” he -remarked with a grin. “He was telling us down at the house that he was -going to have people call him Tom after this. He can’t stand answerin’ -to the same name as Jeff Davis,” he says. - -“I suppose you folks put him up to that,” I made bold to comment, -indignantly. - -The suggestion did not annoy “Ni.” “Mebbe so,” he said. “You know Dad -lots a good deal on names. He’s downright mortified that I don’t get up -and kill people because my name’s Benaiah. ‘Why,’ he keeps on saying to -me, ‘Here you are, Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, as it was in Holy Writ, -and instid of preparin’ to make ready to go out and fall on the enemies -of righteousness, like your namesake did, all you do is read dime novels -and cut up monkey-shines generally, for all the world as if you’d been -named Pete or Steve or William Henry.’ That’s what he gives me pretty -nearly every day.” - -I was familiar enough with the quaint mysticism which the old -Abolitionist cooper wove around the Scriptural names of himself and his -son. We understood that these two appellations had alternated among his -ancestors as well, and I had often heard him read from Samuel and Kings -and Chronicles about them, his stiff red hair standing upright, and the -blue veins swelling on his narrow temples with proud excitement. But -that, of course, was in the old days, before the trouble came, and when -I still went to church. To hear it all now again seemed to give me a -novel impression of wild fanaticism in “Jee” Hagadorn. - -His son was chuckling on his seat over something he had just remembered. -“Last time,” he began, gurgling with laughter--“last time he went for me -because I wasn’t measurin’ up to his idee of what a Benaiah ought to be -like, I up an’ said to him, ‘Look a-here now, people who live in glass -houses mustn’t heave rocks. If I’m Benaiah, you’re Jehoiada. Well, it -says in the Bible that Jehoiada made a covenant. Do you make cove-nants? -Not a bit of it! all you make is butter firkins, with now an’ then an -odd pork barrel.’” - -“What did he say to that?” I asked, as my companion’s merriment abated. - -“Well, I come away just then; I seemed to have business outside,” - replied “Ni,” still grinning. - -We had reached the Corners now, and my companion obligingly drew up to -let me get down. He called out some merry quip or other as he drove off, -framed in a haze of golden dust against the sinking sun, and I stood -looking after him with the pleasantest thoughts my mind had known for -days. It was almost a shock to remember that he was one of the abhorrent -and hated Hagadorns. - -And his sister, too. It was not at all easy to keep one’s loathing up to -the proper pitch where so nice a girl as Esther Hagadorn was its object. - -She was years and years my senior--she was even older than “Ni”--and -had been my teacher for the past two winters. She had never spoken to me -save across that yawning gulf which separates little barefooted urchins -from tall young women, with long dresses and their hair done up in a -net, and I could hardly be said to know her at all. Yet now, perversely -enough, I could think of nothing but her manifest superiority to all the -farm-girls round about. She had been to a school in some remote city, -where she had relations. Her hands were fabulously white, and even -on the hottest of days her dresses rustled pleasantly with starched -primness. People talked about her singing at church as something -remarkable; to my mind, the real music was when she just spoke to you, -even if it was no more than “Good-morning, Jimmy!” - -I clambered up on the window-sill of the school-house, to make sure -there was no one inside, and then set off down the creek-road toward the -red or lower bridge. Milking-time was about over, and one or two teams -passed me on the way to the cheese-factory, the handles of the cans -rattling as they went, and the low sun throwing huge shadows of drivers -and horses sprawling eastward over the stubble-field. I cut across lots -to avoid the cheese-factory itself, with some vague feeling that it was -not a fitting spectacle for any one who lived on the Beech farm. - -A few moments brought me to the bank of the wandering stream below the -factory, but so near that I could hear the creaking of the chain drawing -up the cans over the tackle, or as we called it, the “teekle;” The -willows under which I walked stretched without a break from the clump by -the factory bridge. And now, lo and behold! beneath still other of these -willows, farther down the stream, whom should I see strolling together -but my schoolteacher and the delinquent Jeff! - -Young Beech bore still the fish-pole I had seen him take from our shed -some hours earlier, but the line twisted round it was very white and -dry. He was extremely close to the girl, and kept his head bent down -over her as they sauntered along the meadow-path. They seemed not to be -talking, but just idly drifting forward like the deep slow water -beside them. I had never realized before how tall Jeff was. Though the -school-ma’am always seemed to me of an exceeding stature, here was Jeff -rounding his shoulders and inclining his neck in order to look under her -broad-brimmed Leghorn hat. - -There could be no imaginable excuse for my not overtaking them. Instinct -prompted me to start up a whistling tune as I advanced--a casual -and indolently unobtrusive tune--at sound of which Jeff straightened -himself, and gave his companion a little more room on the path. In a -moment or two he stopped, and looked intently over the bank into the -water, as if he hoped it might turn out to be a likely place for fish. -And the school-ma’am, too, after a few aimless steps, halted to help him -look. - -“Abner wants you to come right straight home!” was the form in which my -message delivered itself when I had come close up to them. - -They both shifted their gaze from the sluggish stream below to me upon -the instant. Then Esther Hagadorn looked away, but Jeff--good, big, -honest Jeff, who had been like a fond elder brother to me since I could -remember--knitted his brows and regarded me with something like a scowl. - -“Did pa send you to say that?” he demanded, holding my eye with a glance -of such stern inquiry that I could only nod my head in confusion. - -“An’ he knew that you’d find me here, did he?” - -“He said either at the school-house or around here somewhere,” I -admitted, weakly. ‘An’ there ain’t nothin’ the matter at the farm?’ - -“He don’t want me for nothin’ special?” pursued Jeff, still looking me -through and through. - -“He didn’t say,” I made hesitating answer, but for the life of me, I -could not keep from throwing a tell-tale look in the direction of his -companion in the blue gingham dress. - -A wink could not have told Jeff more. He gave a little bitter laugh, and -stared above my head at the willow-plumes fora minute’s meditation. Then -he tossed his fish-pole over to me and laughed again. - -“Keep that for yourself, if you want it,” he said, in a voice not quite -his own, but robustly enough. “I sha’n’t need it any more. Tell pa I -ain’t a-comin’!” - -“Oh, Tom!” Esther broke in, anxiously, “would you do that?” - -He held up his hand with a quiet, masterful gesture, as if she were the -pupil and he the teacher. “Tell him,” he went on, the tone falling now -strong and true, “tell him and ma that I’m goin’ to Tecumseh to-night to -enlist. If they’re willin’ to say good-by, they can let me know there, -and I’ll manage to slip back for the day. If they ain’t willin’--why, -they--they needn’t send word; that’s all.” - -Esther had come up to him, and held his arm now in hers. - -“You’re wrong to leave them like that!” she pleaded, earnestly, but Jeff -shook his head. - -“You don’t know him!” was all he said. - -In another minute I had shaken hands with Jeff, and had started on my -homeward way, with his parting “Good-by, youngster!” benumbing my ears. -When, after a while, I turned to look back, they were still standing -where I had left them, gazing over the bank into the water. - -Then, as I trudged onward once more, I began to quake at the thought of -how Farmer Beech would take the news. - - - - -CHAPTER III--ABSALOM - -Once, in the duck-season, as I lay hidden among the marsh-reeds with -an older boy, a crow passed over us, flying low. Looking up at him, I -realized for the first time how beautiful a creature was this common -black thief of ours--how splendid his strength and the sheen of his -coat, how proudly graceful the sweep and curves of his great slow -wings. The boy beside me fired, and in a flash what I had been admiring -changed--even as it stopped headlong in mid-air--into a hideous thing, -an evil confusion of jumbled feathers. The awful swiftness of that -transition from beauty and power to hateful carrion haunted me for a -long time. - -I half expected that Abner Beech would crumple up in some such -distressing way, all of a sudden, when I told him that his son Jeff was -in open rebellion, and intended to go off and enlist. It was incredible -to the senses that any member of the household should set at defiance -the patriarchal will of its head. But that the offence should come from -placid, slow-witted, good-natured Jeff, and that it should involve the -appearance of a Beech in a blue uniform--these things staggered the -imagination. It was clear that something prodigious must happen. - -As it turned out, nothing happened at all. The farmer and his wife -sat out on the veranda, as was their wont of a summer evening, rarely -exchanging a word, but getting a restful sort of satisfaction in -together surveying their barns and haystacks and the yellow-brown -stretch of fields beyond. - -“Jeff says he’s goin’ to-night to Tecumseh, an’ he’s goin’ to enlist, -an’ if you want him to run over to say good-by you’re to let him know -there.” - -I leant upon my newly-acquired fish-pole for support, as I unburdened -myself of these sinister tidings. The old pair looked at me in calm-eyed -silence, as if I had related the most trivial of village occurrences. -Neither moved a muscle nor uttered a sound, but just gazed, till it felt -as if their eyes were burning holes into me. - -“That’s what he said,” I repeated, after a pause, to mitigate the -embarrassment of that dumb steadfast stare. - -The mother it was who spoke at last. “You’d better go round and get your -supper,” she said, quietly. - -The table was spread, as usual, in the big, low-ceilinged room which -during the winter was used as a kitchen. What was unusual was to -discover a strange man seated alone in his shirt-sleeves at this table, -eating his supper. As I took my chair, however, I saw that he was not -altogether a stranger. I recognized in him the little old Irishman who -had farmed at Ezra Tracy’s beaver-meadow the previous year on shares, -and done badly, and had since been hiring out for odd jobs at hoeing and -haying. He had lately lost his wife, I recalled now, and lived alone in -a tumble-down old shanty beyond Parker’s saw-mill. He had come to us in -the spring, I remembered, when the brindled calf was born, to beg a pail -of what he called “basteings,” and I speculated in my mind whether -it was this repellent mess that had killed his wife. Above all these -thoughts rose the impression that Abner must have decided to do a -heap of ditching and wall-building, to have hired a new hand in this -otherwise slack season--and at this my back began to ache prophetically. - -“How are yeh!” the new-comer remarked, affably, as I sat down and -reached for the bread. “An’ did yeh see the boys march away? An’ had -they a drum wid ’em?” - -“What boys?” I asked, in blank ignorance as to what he was at. - -“I’m told there’s a baker’s dozen of’em gone, more or less,” he replied. -“Well, glory be to the Lord, ’tis an ill wind blows nobody good. Here -am I aitin’ butter on my bread, an’ cheese on top o’ that.” - -I should still have been in the dark, had not one of the hired girls, -Janey Wilcox, come in from the butter-room, to ask me in turn much the -same thing, and to add the explanation that a whole lot of the young men -of the neighborhood had privately arranged among themselves to enlist -together as soon as the harvesting was over, and had this day gone off -in a body. Among them, I learned now, were our two hired men, Warner -Pitts and Ray Watkins. This, then, accounted for the presence of the -Irishman. - -As a matter of fact, there had been no secrecy about the thing save with -the contingent which our household furnished, and that was only because -of the fear which Abner Beech inspired. His son and his servants alike -preferred to hook it, rather than explain their patriotic impulses to -him. But naturally enough, our farm-girls took it for granted that all -the others had gone in the same surreptitious fashion, and this threw an -air of fascinating mystery about the whole occurrence. They were deeply -surprised that I should have been down past the Corners, and even beyond -the cheese-factory, and seen nothing of these extraordinary martial -preparations; and I myself was ashamed of it. - -Opinions differed, I remember, as to the behavior of our two hired men. -“Till” Babcock and the Underwood girl defended them, but Janey took the -other side, not without various unpleasant personal insinuations, and -the Irishman and I were outspoken in their condemnation. But nobody said -a word about Jeff, though it was plain enough that every one knew. - -Dusk fell while we still talked of these astounding events--my thoughts -meantime dividing themselves between efforts to realize these neighbors -of ours as soldiers on the tented field, and uneasy speculation as to -whether I should at last get a bed to myself or be expected to sleep -with the Irishman. - -Janey Wilcox had taken the lamp into the living-room. She returned now, -with an uplifted hand and a face covered over with lines of surprise. - -“You’re to all of you come in,” she whispered, impressively. “Abner’s -got the Bible down. We’re goin’ to have fam’ly prayers, or somethin’.” - -With one accord we looked at the Irishman. The question had never before -arisen on our farm, but we all knew about other cases, in which Catholic -hands held aloof from the household’s devotions. There were even stories -of their refusal to eat meat on some one day of the week, but this -we hardly brought ourselves to credit. Our surprise at the fact that -domestic religious observances were to be resumed under the Beech -roof-tree--where they had completely lapsed ever since the trouble at -the church--was as nothing compared with our curiosity to see what the -new-comer would do. - -What he did was to get up and come along with the rest of us, quite as a -matter of course. I felt sure that he could not have understood what was -going on. - -We filed into the living-room. The Beeches had come in and shut the -veranda door, and “M’rye” was seated in her rocking-chair, in the -darkness beyond the bookcase. Her husband had the big book open before -him on the table; the lamp-light threw the shadow of his long nose down -into the gray of his beard with a strange effect of fierceness. His lips -were tight-set and his shaggy brows drawn into a commanding frown, as he -bent over the pages. - -Abner did not look up till we had taken our seats. Then he raised his -eyes toward the Irishman. - -“I don’t know, Hurley,” he said, in a grave, deep-booming voice, -“whether you feel it right for you to join us--we bein’ Protestants--” - -“Ah, it’s all right, sir,” replied Hurley, reassuringly, “I’ll take no -harm by it.” - -A minute’s silence followed upon this magnanimous declaration. Then -Abner, clearing his throat, began solemnly to read the story of -Absalom’s revolt. He had the knack, not uncommon in those primitive -class-meeting days, of making his strong, low-pitched voice quaver -and wail in the most tear-compelling fashion when he read from the -Old Testament. You could hardly listen to him going through even the -genealogical tables of Chronicles dry-eyed. His Jeremiah and Ezekiel -were equal to the funeral of a well-beloved relation. - -This night he read as I had never heard him read before. The whole grim -story of the son’s treason and final misadventure, of the ferocious -battle in the wood of Ephraim, of Joab’s savagery, and of the rival -runners, made the air vibrate about us, and took possession of our minds -and kneaded them like dough, as we sat in the mute circle in the old -living-room. From my chair I could see Hurley without turning my head, -and the spectacle of excitement he presented--bending forward with -dropped jaw and wild, glistening gray eyes, a hand behind his ear to -miss no syllable of this strange new tale--only added to the effect it -produced on me. - -Then there came the terrible picture of the King’s despair. I had -trembled as we neared this part, foreseeing what heart-wringing anguish -Abner, in his present mood, would give to that cry of the stricken -father--“O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died -for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!” To my great surprise, he made very -little of it. The words came coldly, almost contemptuously, so that the -listener could not but feel that David’s lamentations were out of place, -and might better have been left unuttered. - -But now the farmer, leaping over into the next chapter, brought swart, -stalwart, blood-stained Joab on the scene before us, and in an instant -we saw why the King’s outburst of mourning had fallen so flat upon our -ears. Abner Beech’s voice rose and filled the room with its passionate -fervor as he read out Joab’s speech--wherein the King is roundly told -that his son was a worthless fellow, and was killed not a bit too soon, -and that for the father to thus publicly lament him is to put to shame -all his household and his loyal friends and servants. - -While these sonorous words of protest against paternal weakness still -rang in the air, Abner abruptly closed the book with a snap. We looked -at him and at one another for a bewildered moment, and then “Till” - Babcock stooped as if to kneel by her chair, but Janey nudged her, and -we all rose and made our way silently out again into the kitchen. It -had been apparent enough that no spirit of prayer abode in the farmer’s -breast. - -“‘Twas a fine bold sinsible man, that Job!” remarked Hurley to me, when -the door was closed behind us, and the women had gone off to talk the -scene over among themselves in the butter-room. “Would it be him that -had thim lean turkeys?” - -With some difficulty I made out his meaning. - -“Oh, no!” I exclaimed, “the man Abner read about was Jo-ab, not Job. -They were quite different people.” - -“I thought as much,” replied the Irishman. “‘Twould not be in so grand a -man’s nature to let his fowls go hungry. And do we be hearing such tales -every night?” - -“Maybe Abner ’ll keep on, now he’s started again,” I said. “We ain’t had -any Bible-reading before since he had his row down at the church, and we -left off going.” - -Hurley displayed such a lively interest in this matter that I went over -it pretty fully, setting forth Abner’s position and the intolerable -provocations which had been forced upon him. It took him a long time to -grasp the idea that in Protestant gatherings not only the pastor spoke, -but the class-leaders and all others who were conscious of a call might -have their word as well, and that in this way even the lowliest and -meanest of the farmer’s neighbors had been able to affront him in the -church itself. - -“Too many cooks spoil the broth,” was his comment upon this. “’Tis far -better to hearken to one man only. If he’s right, you’re right. If he’s -wrong, why, thin, there ye have him in front of ye for protection.” - -Bedtime came soon after, and Mrs. Beech appeared in her nightly round of -the house to see that the doors were all fastened. The candle she bore -threw up a flaring yellow light upon her chin, but made the face above -it by contrast still darker and more saturnine. She moved about in erect -impassiveness, trying the bolts and the window-catches, and went away -again, having said never a word. I had planned to ask her if I might -now have a bed to myself, but somehow my courage failed me, so stern and -majestic was her aspect. - -I took the desired boon without asking, and dreamed of her as a darkling -and relentless Joab in petticoats, slaying her own son Jeff as he hung -by his hay-colored hair in one of the apple-trees of our orchard. - - - - -CHAPTER IV--ANTIETAM - -On all the other farms roundabout, this mid-August was a slack season. -The hired men and boys did a little early fruit-picking, a little -berrying, a little stone-drawing, but for the most part they could be -seen idling about the woods or along the river down below Juno Mills, -with gun or fish-pole. Only upon the one farm whose turn it was that -week to be visited by the itinerant threshing-machine, was any special -activity visible. - -It was well known, however, that we were not to get the -threshing-machine at all. How it was managed, I never understood. -Perhaps the other farmers combined in some way to over-awe or persuade -the owners of the machine into refusing it to Abner Beech. More likely -he scented the chance of a refusal and was too proud to put himself in -its way by asking. At all events, we three--Abner, Hurley, and I--had -to manage the threshing ourselves, on the matched wood floor of the -carriage barn. All the fishing I did that year was in the prolific but -unsubstantial waters of dreamland. - -I did not work much, it is true, with the flail, but I lived all day -in an atmosphere choked with dust and chaff, my ears deafened with the -ceaseless whack! whack! of the hard-wood clubs, bringing on fresh shocks -of grain, and acting as general helper. - -By toiling late and early we got this task out of the way just when the -corn was ready to cut. This great job taxed all the energies of the two -men, the one cutting, the other stacking, as they went. My own share of -the labor was to dig the potatoes and pick the eating-apples--a quite -portentous enough undertaking for a lad of twelve. All this kept me very -much to myself. There was no chance to talk during the day, and at night -I was glad to drag my tired limbs off to bed before the girls had fairly -cleared the supper things away. A weekly newspaper--_The World_--came -regularly to the postoffice at the Corners for us, but we were so -overworked that often it lay there for weeks at a time, and even when -some one went after it, nobody but Abner cared to read it. - -So far as I know, no word ever came from Jeff. His name was never -mentioned among us. - -It was now past the middle of September. Except for the fall ploughing -on fields that were to be put to grass under the grain in the -spring--which would come much later--the getting in of the root crops, -and the husking, our season’s labors were pretty well behind us. The -women folk had toiled like slaves as well, taking almost all the -chores about the cattle-barns off our shoulders, and carrying on the -butter-making without bothering us. Now that a good many cows were -drying up, it was their turn to take things easy, too. But the girls, -instead of being glad at this, began to borrow unhappiness over the -certainty that there would be no husking-bees on the Beech farm. - -One heard no other subject discussed now, as we sat of a night in the -kitchen. Even when we foregathered in the living-room instead, the -Babcock and the Underwood girl talked in ostentatiously low tones of -the hardship of missing such opportunities for getting beaux, and having -fun. They recalled to each other, with tones of longing, this and that -husking-bee of other years--now one held of a moonlight night in the -field itself, where the young men pulled the stacks down and dragged -them to where the girls sat in a ring on big pumpkins, and merriment, -songs, and chorused laughter chased the happy hours along; now of a bee -held in the late wintry weather, where the men went off to the barn by -themselves and husked till they were tired, and then with warning -whoops came back to where the girls were waiting for them in the warm, -hospitable farm-house, and the frolic began, with cider and apples and -pumpkin-pies, and old Lem Hornbeck’s fiddle to lead the dancing. - -Alas! they shook their empty heads and mourned, there would be no more -of these delightful times! Nothing definite was ever said as to the -reason for our ostracism from the sports and social enjoyments of the -season. There was no need for that. We all knew too well that it was -Abner Beech’s politics which made us outcasts, but even these two -complaining girls did not venture to say so in his hearing. Their talk, -however, grew at last so persistently querulous that “M’rye” bluntly -told them one night to “shut up about husking-bees,” following them -out into the kitchen for that purpose, and speaking with unaccustomed -acerbity. Thereafter we heard no more of their grumbling, but in a week -or two “Till” Babcock left for her home over on the Dutch Road, and -began circulating the report that we prayed every night for the success -of Jeff Davis. - -It was on a day in the latter half of September, perhaps the 20th or -21st--as nearly as I am able to make out from the records now--that -Hurley and I started off with a double team and our big box-wagon, just -after breakfast, on a long day’s journey. We were taking a heavy load of -potatoes into market at Octavius, twelve miles distant; thence we were -to drive out an additional three miles to a cooper-shop and bring back -as many butter-firkins as we could stack up behind us, not to mention a -lot of groceries of which “M’rye” gave me a list. - -It was a warm, sweet-aired, hazy autumn day, with a dusky red sun -sauntering idly about in the sky, too indolent to cast more than the -dimmest and most casual suggestion of a shadow for anything or anybody. -The Irishman sat round-backed and contented on the very high seat -overhanging the horses, his elbows on his knees, and a little black pipe -turned upside down in his mouth. He would suck satisfiedly at this -for hours after the fire had gone out, until, my patience exhausted, -I begged him to light it again. He seemed almost never to put any new -tobacco into this pipe, and to this day it remains a twin-mystery to me -why its contents neither burned themselves to nothing nor fell out. - -We talked a good deal, in a desultory fashion, as the team plodded their -slow way into Octavius. Hurley told me, in answer to the questions of -a curious boy, many interesting and remarkable things about the old -country, as he always called it, and more particularly about his native -part of it, which was on the sea-shore within sight of Skibbereen. He -professed always to be filled with longing to go back, but at the same -time guarded his tiny personal expenditure with the greatest solicitude, -in order to save money to help one of his relations to get away. Once, -when I taxed him with this inconsistency, he explained that life in -Ireland was the most delicious thing on earth, but you had to get off at -a distance of some thousands of miles to really appreciate it. - -Naturally there was considerable talk between us, as well, about Abner -Beech and his troubles. I don’t know where I could have heard it, but -when Hurley first came to us I at once took it for granted that the -fact of his nationality made him a sympathizer with the views of our -household. Perhaps I only jumped at this conclusion from the general -ground that the few Irish who in those days found their way into the -farm-country were held rather at arm’s-length by the community, and must -in the nature of things feel drawn to other outcasts. At all events, -I made no mistake. Hurley could not have well been more vehemently -embittered against abolitionism and the war than Abner was, but he -expressed his feelings with much greater vivacity and fluency of -speech. It was surprising to see how much he knew about the politics -and political institutions of a strange country, and how excited he grew -about them when any one would listen to him. But as he was a small -man, getting on in years, he did not dare air these views down at -the Corners. The result was that he and Abner were driven to -commune together, and mutually inflamed each other’s passionate -prejudices--which was not at all needful. - -When at last, shortly before noon, we drove into Octavius, I jumped off -to fill one portion of the grocery errands, leaving Hurley to drive -on with the potatoes. We were to meet at the little village tavern for -dinner. - -He was feeding the horses in the hotel shed when I rejoined him an hour -or so later. I came in, bursting with the importance of the news I had -picked up--scattered, incomplete, and even incoherent news, but of a -most exciting sort. The awful battle of Antietam had happened two or -three days before, and nobody in all Octavius was talking or thinking of -anything else. Both the Dearborn County regiments had been in the thick -of the fight, and I could see from afar, as I stood on the outskirts of -the throng in front of the post-office, some long strips of paper posted -up beside the door, which men said contained a list of our local dead -and wounded. It was hopeless, however, to attempt to get anywhere near -this list, and nobody whom I questioned, knew anything about the names -of those young men who had marched away from our Four Corners. Some one -did call out, though, that the telegraph had broken down, or gone wrong, -and that not half the news had come in as yet. But they were all so -deeply stirred up, so fiercely pushing and hauling to get toward the -door, that I could learn little else. - -This was what I began to tell Hurley, with eager volubility, as soon -as I got in under the shed. He went on with his back to me, impassively -measuring out the oats from the bag, and clearing aside the stale hay -in the manger, the impatient horses rubbing at his shoulders with their -noses the while. Then, as I was nearly done, he turned and came out to -me, slapping the fodder-mess off his hands. - -He had a big, fresh cut running transversely across his nose and cheek, -and there were stains of blood in the gray stubble of beard on his chin. -I saw too that his clothes looked as if he had been rolled on the dusty -road outside. - -“Sure, then, I’m after hearin’ the news myself,” was all he said. - -He drew out from beneath the wagon seat a bag of crackers and a hunk of -cheese, and, seating himself on an overturned barrel, began to eat. By -a gesture I was invited to share this meal, and did so, sitting beside -him. Something had happened, apparently, to prevent our having dinner in -the tavern. - -I fairly yearned to ask him what this something was, and what was the -matter with his face, but it did not seem quite the right thing to do, -and presently he began mumbling, as much to himself as to me, a long -and broken discourse, from which I picked out that he had mingled with a -group of lusty young farmers in the market-place, asking for the latest -intelligence, and that while they were conversing in a wholly amiable -manner, one of them had suddenly knocked him down and kicked him, -and that thereafter they had pursued him with curses and loud threats -half-way to the tavern. This and much more he proclaimed between -mouthfuls, speaking with great rapidity and in so much more marked a -brogue than usual, that I understood only a fraction of what he said. - -He professed entire innocence of offence in the affair, and either could -not or would not tell what it was he had said to invite the blow. I dare -say he did in truth richly provoke the violence he encountered, but at -the time I regarded him as a martyr, and swelled with indignation every -time I looked at his nose. - -I remained angry, indeed, long after he himself had altogether recovered -his equanimity and whimsical good spirits. He waited outside on the seat -while I went in to pay for the baiting of the horses, and it was as well -that he did, I fancy, because there were half a dozen brawny farm-hands -and villagers standing about the bar, who were laughing in a stormy way -over the episode of the “Copperhead Paddy” in the market. - -We drove away, however, without incident of any sort--sagaciously -turning off the main street before we reached the post-office block, -where the congregated crowd seemed larger than ever. There seemed to be -some fresh tidings, for several scattering outbursts of cheering reached -our ears after we could no longer see the throng; but, so far from -stopping to inquire what it was, Hurley put whip to the horses, and -we rattled smartly along out of the excited village into the tranquil, -scythe-shorn country. - -The cooper to whom we now went for our butter-firkins was a long-nosed, -lean, and taciturn man, whom I think of always as with his apron tucked -up at the corner, and his spectacles on his forehead, close under the -edge of his square brown-paper cap. He had had word that we were coming, -and the firkins were ready for us. He helped us load them in dead -silence, and with a gloomy air. - -Hurley desired the sound of his own voice. “Well, then, sir,” he said, -as our task neared completion, “’tis worth coming out of our way -these fifteen miles to lay eyes on such fine, grand firkins as these -same--such an elegant shape on ’em, an’ put together with such -nateness!” - -“You could get ’em just as good at Hagadorn’s,” said the cooper, -curtly, “within a mile of your place.” - -“Huh!” cried Hurley, with contempt, “Haggy-dorn is it? Faith, we’ll not -touch him or his firkins ayether! Why, man, they’re not fit to mention -the same day wid yours. Ah, just look at the darlin’s, will ye, that -nate an’ clane a Christian could ate from ’em!” - -The cooper was blarney-proof. “Hagadorn’s are every smitch as good!” he -repeated, ungraciously. - -The Irishman looked at him perplexedly, then shook his head as if the -problem were too much for him, and slowly clambered up to the seat. -He had gathered up the lines, and we were ready to start, before any -suitable words came to his tongue. - -“Well, then, sir,” he said, “anything to be agreeable. If I hear a man -speaking a good word for your firkins, I’ll dispute him.” - -“The firkins are well enough,” growled the cooper at us, “an’ they’re -made to sell, but I ain’t so almighty tickled about takin’ Copperhead -money for ‘em that I want to clap my wings an’ crow over it.” - -He turned scornfully on his heel at this, and we drove away. The new -revelation of our friendlessness depressed me, but Hurley did not seem -to mind it at all. After a philosophic comparative remark about the -manners of pigs run wild in a bog, he dismissed the affair from his -thoughts altogether, and hummed cheerful words to melancholy tunes half -the way home, what time he was not talking to the horses or tossing -stray conversational fragments at me. - -My own mind soon enough surrendered itself to harrowing speculations -about the battle we had heard of. The war had been going on now, for -over a year, but most of the fighting had been away off in Missouri -and Tennessee, or on the lower Mississippi, and the reports had not -possessed for me any keen direct interest. The idea of men from our -own district--young men whom I had seen, perhaps fooled with, in the -hayfield only ten weeks before--being in an actual storm of shot and -shell, produced a faintness at the pit of my stomach. Both Dearborn -County regiments were in it, the crowd said. Then of course our men must -have been there--our hired men, and the Phillips boys, and Byron Truax, -and his cousin Alonzo, and our Jeff! And if so many others had been -killed, why not they as well? - -“Antietam” still has a power to arrest my eyes on the printed page, and -disturb my ears in the hearing, possessed by no other battle name. It -seems now as if the very word itself had a terrible meaning of its -own to me, when I first heard it that September afternoon--as if I -recognized it to be the label of some awful novelty, before I knew -anything else. It had its fascination for Hurley, too, for presently I -heard him crooning to himself, to one of his queer old Irish tunes, some -doggerel lines which he had made up to rhyme with it--three lines with -“cheat ’em,” “beat ’em,” and “Antietam,” and then his pet refrain, “Says -the Shan van Vocht.” - -This levity jarred unpleasantly upon the mood into which I had worked -myself, and I turned to speak of it, but the sight of his bruised nose -and cheek restrained me. He had suffered too much for the faith that -was in him to be lightly questioned now. So I returned to my grisly -thoughts, which now all at once resolved themselves into a conviction -that Jeff had been killed outright. My fancy darted to meet this notion, -and straightway pictured for me a fantastic battle-field by moonlight, -such as was depicted in Lossing’s books, with overturned cannon-wheels -and dead horses in the foreground, and in the centre, conspicuous above -all else, the inanimate form of Jeff Beech, with its face coldly radiant -in the moonshine. - -“I guess I’ll hop off and walk a spell,” I said, under the sudden -impulse of this distressing visitation. - -It was only when I was on the ground, trudging along by the side of the -wagon, that I knew why I had got down. We were within a few rods of the -Corners, where one road turned off to go to the postoffice. “Perhaps -it’d be a good idea for me to find out if they’ve heard anything more--I -mean--anything about Jeff,” I suggested. “I’ll just look in and see, and -then I can cut home cross lots.” - -The Irishman nodded and drove on. - -I hung behind, at the Corners, till the wagon had begun the ascent of -the hill, and the looming bulk of the firkins made it impossible that -Hurley could see which way I went. Then, without hesitation, I turned -instead down the other road which led to “Jee” Hagadorn’s. - - - - -CHAPTER V--“JEE’S” TIDINGS - -Time was when I had known the Hagadorn house, from the outside at -least, as well as any other in the whole township. But I had avoided -that road so long now, that when I came up to the place it seemed quite -strange to my eyes. - -For one thing, the flower garden was much bigger than it had formerly -been. To state it differently, Miss Esther’s marigolds and columbines, -hollyhocks and peonies, had been allowed to usurp a lot of space where -sweet-corn, potatoes, and other table-truck used to be raised. This not -only greatly altered the aspect of the place, but it lowered my idea of -the practical good-sense of its owners. - -What was more striking still, was the general air of decrepitude and -decay about the house itself. An eaves-trough had fallen down; half -the cellar door was off its hinges, standing up against the wall; the -chimney was ragged and broken at the top; the clapboards had never been -painted, and now were almost black with weather-stain and dry rot. It -positively appeared to me as if the house was tipping sideways, over -against the little cooper-shop adjoining it--but perhaps that was a -trick of the waning evening light? I said to myself that if we were not -prospering on the Beech farm, at least our foe “Jee” Hagadorn did not -seem to be doing much better himself. - -In truth, Hagadorn had always been among the poorest members of our -community, though this by no means involves what people in cities think -of as poverty. He had a little place of nearly two acres, and then -he had his coopering business; with the two he ought to have got on -comfortably enough. But a certain contrariness in his nature seemed to -be continually interfering with this. - -This strain of conscientious perversity ran through all we knew of his -life before he came to us, just as it dominated the remainder of his -career. He had been a well-to-do man some ten years before, in a city in -the western part of the State, with a big cooper-shop, and a lot of -men under him, making the barrels for a large brewery. (It was in these -days, I fancy, that Esther took on that urban polish which the younger -Benaiah missed.) Then he got the notion in his head that it was wrong to -make barrels for beer, and threw the whole thing up. He moved into our -neighborhood with only money enough to buy the old Andrews place, and -build a little shop. - -It was a good opening for a cooper, and Hagadorn might have flourished -if he had been able to mind his own business. The very first thing he -did was to offend a number of our biggest butter-makers by taxing them -with sinfulness in also raising hops, which went to make beer. For -a long time they would buy no firkins of him. Then, too, he made an -unpleasant impression at church. As has been said, our meeting-house -was a union affair; that is to say, no one denomination being -numerous enough to have an edifice of its own, all the farmers -roundabout--Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and so on--joined in -paying the expenses. The travelling preachers who came to us represented -these great sects, with lots of minute shadings off into Hardshell, -Soft-shell, Freewill, and other subdivided mysteries which I never -understood. Hagadorn had a denomination all to himself, as might have -been expected from the man. What the name of it was I seem never to have -heard; perhaps it had no name at all. People used to say, though, that -he behaved like a Shouting Methodist. - -This was another way of saying that he made a nuisance of himself in -church. At prayer-meetings, in the slack seasons of the year, he would -pray so long, and with such tremendous shouting and fury of gestures, -that he had regularly to be asked to stop, so that those who had taken -the trouble to learn and practise new hymns might have a chance to be -heard. And then he would out-sing all the others, not knowing the tune -in the least, and cause added confusion by yelling out shrill “Amens!” - between the bars. At one time quite a number of the leading people -ceased attending church at all, on account of his conduct. - -He added heavily to his theological unpopularity, too, by his action in -another matter. There was a wealthy and important farmer living over on -the west side of Agrippa Hill, who was a Universalist. The expenses of -our Union meeting-house were felt to be a good deal of a burden, and our -elders, conferring together, decided that it would be a good thing to -waive ordinary prejudices, and let the Universalists come in, and have -their share of the preaching. It would be more neighborly, they felt, -and they would get a subscription from the Agrippa Hill farmer. He -assented to the project, and came over four or five Sundays with his -family and hired help, listened unflinchingly to orthodox sermons full -of sulphur and blue flames, and put money on the plate every time. Then -a Universalist preacher occupied the pulpit one Sunday, and preached a -highly inoffensive and non-committal sermon, and “Jee” Hagadorn stood -up in his pew and violently denounced him as an infidel, before he -had descended the pulpit steps. This created a painful scandal. The -Universalist farmer, of course, never darkened that church door again. -Some of our young men went so far as to discuss the ducking of -the obnoxious’ cooper in the duck-pond. But he himself was neither -frightened nor ashamed. - -At the beginning, too, I suppose that his taking up Abolitionism made -him enemies. Dearborn County gave Franklin Pierce a big majority in -’52, and the bulk of our farmers, I know, were in that majority. But -I have already dwelt upon the way in which all this changed in the years -just before the war. Naturally enough, Hagadorn’s position also changed. -The rejected stone became the head of the corner. The tiresome fanatic -of the ’fifties was the inspired prophet of the ’sixties. People -still shrank from giving him undue credit for their conversion, but they -felt themselves swept along under his influence none the less. - -But just as his unpopularity kept him poor in the old days, it seemed -that now the reversed condition was making him still poorer. The truth -was, he was too excited to pay any attention to his business. He went -off to Octavius three or four days a week to hear the news, and when -he remained at home, he spent much more time standing out in the road -discussing politics and the conduct of the war with passers-by, than he -did over his staves and hoops. No wonder his place was run down. - -The house was dark and silent, but there was some sort of a light in the -cooper-shop beyond. My hope had been to see Esther rather than her wild -old father, but there was nothing for it but to go over to the shop. I -pushed the loosely fitting door back on its leathern hinges, and stepped -over the threshold. The resinous scent of newly cut wood, and the rustle -of the shavings under my feet, had the effect, somehow, of filling me -with timidity. It required an effort to not turn and go out again. - -The darkened; and crowded interior of the tiny work-place smelt as -well, I noted now, of smoke. On the floor before me was crouched a -shapeless figure--bending in front of the little furnace, made of a -section of stove-pipe, which the cooper used to dry the insides of newly -fashioned barrels. A fire in this, half-blaze, half-smudge--gave forth -the light I had seen from without, and the smoke which was making my -nostrils tingle. Then I had to sneeze, and the kneeling figure sprang on -the instant from the floor. - -It was Esther who stood before me, coughing a little from the smoke, and -peering inquiringly at me. “Oh--is that you, Jimmy?” she asked, after a -moment of puzzled inspection in the dark. - -She went on, before I had time to speak, in a nervous, half-laughing -way: “I’ve been trying to roast an ear of corn here, but it’s the worst -kind of a failure. I’ve watched ’Ni’ do it a hundred times, but with -me it always comes out half-scorched and half-smoked. I guess the corn -is too old now, anyway. At all events, it’s tougher than Pharaoh’s -heart.” - -She held out to me, in proof of her words, a blackened and unseemly -roasting-ear. I took it, and turned it slowly over, looking at it with -the grave scrutiny of an expert. Several torn and opened sections showed -where she had been testing it with her teeth. In obedience to her -“See if you don’t think it’s too old,” I took a diffident bite, at a -respectful distance from the marks of her experiments. It was the worst -I had ever tasted. - -“I came over to see if you’d heard anything--any news,” I said, desiring -to get away from the corn subject. - -“You mean about Tom?” she asked, moving so that she might see me more -plainly. - -I had stupidly forgotten about that transformation of names. “Our Jeff, -I mean,” I made answer. - -“His name is Thomas Jefferson. _We_ call him Tom,” she explained; “that -other name is too horrid. Did--did his people tell you to come and ask -_me?_” - -I shook my head. “Oh, no!” I replied with emphasis, implying by my tone, -I dare say, that they would have had themselves cut up into sausage-meat -first. - -The girl walked past me to the door, and out to the road-side, looking -down toward the bridge with a lingering, anxious gaze. Then she came -back, slowly. - -“No, we have no news!” she said, with an effort at calmness. “He wasn’t -an officer, that’s why. All we know is that the brigade his regiment is -in lost 141 killed, 560 wounded, and 38 missing. That’s all!” She stood -in the doorway, her hands clasped tight, pressed against her bosom. - -“_That’s all!_” she repeated, with a choking voice. - -Suddenly she started forward, almost ran across the few yards of floor, -and, throwing herself down in the darkest corner, where only dimly -one could see an old buffalo-robe spread over a heap of staves, began -sobbing as if her heart must break. - -Her dress had brushed over the stove-pipe, and scattered some of the -embers beyond the sheet of tin it stood on. I stamped these out, and -carried the other remnants of the fire out doors. Then I returned, and -stood about in the smoky little shop, quite helplessly listening to the -moans and convulsive sobs which rose from the obscure corner. A bit of a -candle in a bottle stood on the shelf by the window. I lighted this, but -it hardly seemed to improve the situation. I could see her now, as well -as hear her--huddled face downward upon the skin, her whole form shaking -with the violence of her grief. I had never been so unhappy before in my -life. - -At last--it may not have been very long, but it seemed hours--there rose -the sound of voices outside on the road. A wagon had stopped, and some -words were being exchanged. One of the voices grew louder--came nearer; -the other died off, ceased altogether, and the wagon could be heard -driving away. On the instant the door was pushed sharply open, and -“Jee” Hagadorn stood on the threshold, surveying the interior of his -cooper-shop with gleaming eyes. - -He looked at me; he looked at his daughter lying in the corner; he -looked at the charred mess on the floor--yet seemed to see nothing of -what he looked at. His face glowed with a strange excitement--which in -another man I should have set down to drink. - -“Glory be to God! Praise to the Most High! Mine eyes have seen the glory -of the coming of the Lord!” he called out, stretching forth his hands in -a rapturous sort of gesture I remembered from classmeeting days. - -Esther had leaped to her feet with squirrel-like swiftness at the sound -of his voice, and now stood before him, her hands nervously clutching at -each other, her reddened, tear-stained face afire with eagerness. - -“Has word come?--is he safe?--have you heard?” so her excited questions -tumbled over one another, as she grasped “Jee’s” sleeve and shook it in -feverish impatience. - -“The day has come! The year of Jubilee is here!” he cried, brushing -her hand aside, and staring with a fixed, ecstatic, open-mouthed smile -straight ahead of him. “The words of the Prophet are fulfilled!” - -“But Tom!--_Tom!_” pleaded the girl, piteously. “The list has come? You -know he is safe?” - -“Tom! _Tom!_” old “Jee” repeated after her, but with an emphasis -contemptuous, not solicitous. “Perish a hundred Toms--yea--ten -thousand! for one such day as this! ‘For the Scarlet Woman of Babylon -is overthrown, and bound with chains and cast into the lake of fire. -Therefore, in one day shall her plagues come, death, and mourning, and -famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the -Lord God which judged her!’” - -He declaimed these words in a shrill, high-pitched voice, his face -upturned, and his eyes half-closed. Esther plucked despairingly at his -sleeve once more. - -“But have you seen?--is _his_ name?--you must have seen!” she moaned, -incoherently. - -“Jee” descended for the moment from his plane of exaltation. “I _didn’t_ -see!” he said, almost peevishly. “Lincoln has signed a proclamation -freeing all the slaves! What do you suppose I care for your Toms and -Dicks and Harrys, on such a day as this? ‘Woe! woe! the great city of -Babylon, the strong city! For in one hour is thy judgment come!’” - -The girl tottered back to her corner, and threw herself limply down upon -the buffalo-robe again, hiding her face in her hands. - -I pushed my way past the cooper, and trudged cross-lots home in the -dark, tired, disturbed, and very hungry, but thinking most of all that -if I had been worth my salt, I would have hit “Jee” Hagadorn with the -adze that stood up against the door-stile. - - - - -CHAPTER VI--NI’S TALK WITH ABNER - -It must have been a fortnight before we learned that Jeff Beech and -Byron Truax had been reported missing. I say “we,” but I do not know -when Abner Beech came to hear about it. One of the hired girls had seen -the farmer get up from his chair, with the newly arrived weekly _World_ -in his hand, walk over to where his wife sat, and direct her attention -to a line of the print with his finger. Then, still in silence, he -had gone over to the bookcase, opened the drawer where he kept his -account-books, and locked the journal up therein. - -We took it for granted that thus the elderly couple had learned the news -about their son. They said so little nowadays, either to each other or -to us, that we were driven to speculate upon their dumb-show, and find -meanings for ourselves in their glances and actions. No one of us could -imagine himself or herself venturing to mention Jeff’s name in their -hearing. - -Down at the Corners, though, and all about our district, people talked -of very little else. Antietam had given a bloody welcome to our little -group of warriors. Ray Watkins and Lon Truax had been killed outright, -and Ed Phillips was in the hospital, with the chances thought to be -against him. Warner Pitts, our other hired man, had been wounded in the -arm, but not seriously, and thereafter behaved with such conspicuous -valor that it was said he was to be promoted from being a sergeant to -a lieutenancy. All these things, however, paled in interest after the -first few days before the fascinating mystery of what had become of Jeff -and Byron. The loungers about the grocery-store evenings took sides -as to the definition of “missing.” Some said it meant being taken -prisoners; but it was known that at Antietam the Rebels made next to no -captives. Others held that “missing” soldiers were those who had been -shot, and who crawled off somewhere in the woods out of sight to die. A -lumberman from Juno Mills, who was up on a horse-trade, went so far as -to broach still a third theory, viz., that “missing” soldiers were those -who had run away under fire, and were ashamed to show their faces -again. But this malicious suggestion could not, of course, be seriously -considered. - -Meanwhile, what little remained of the fall farm-work went on as if -nothing had happened. The root-crops were dug, the fodder got in, and -the late apples gathered. Abner had a cider-mill of his own, but we sold -a much larger share of our winter apples than usual. Less manure was -drawn out onto the fields than in other autumns, and it looked as if -there was to be little or no fall ploughing. Abner went about his tasks -in a heavy, spiritless way these days, doggedly enough, but with none of -his old-time vim. He no longer had pleasure even in abusing Lincoln and -the war with Hurley. Not Antietam itself could have broken his nerve, -but at least it silenced his tongue. - -Warner Pitts came home on a furlough, with a fine new uniform, -shoulder-straps and sword, and his arm in a sling. I say “home,” but the -only roof he had ever slept under in these parts was ours, and now he -stayed as a guest at Squire Avery’s house, and never came near our farm. -He was a tall, brown-faced, sinewy fellow, with curly hair and a pushing -manner. Although he had been only a hired man he now cut a great dash -down at the Corners, with his shoulder-straps and his officer’s cape. It -was said that he had declined several invitations to husking-bees, and -that when he left the service, at the end of his time, he had a place -ready for him in some city as a clerk in a drygoods-store--that is, of -course, if he did not get to be colonel or general. From time to time -he was seen walking out through the dry, rustling leaves with Squire -Avery’s oldest daughter. - -This important military genius did not seem able, however, to throw much -light upon the whereabouts of the two “missing” boys. From what I myself -heard him say about the battle, and from what others reported of his -talk, it seems that in the very early morning Hooker’s line--a part -of which consisted of Dearborn County men--moved forward through a -big cornfield, the stalks of which were much higher than the soldiers’ -heads. When they came out, the Rebels opened such a hideous fire of -cannon and musketry upon them from the woods close by, that those who -did not fall were glad to run back again into the corn for shelter. Thus -all became confusion, and the men were so mixed up that there was no -getting them together again. Some went one way, some another, through -the tall corn-rows, and Warner Pitts could not remember having seen -either Jeff or Byron at all after the march began. Parts of the regiment -formed again out on the road toward the Dunker church, but other parts -found themselves half a mile away among the fragments of a Michigan -regiment, and a good many more were left lying in the fatal cornfield. -Our boys had not been traced among the dead, but that did not prove that -they were alive. And so we were no wiser than before. - -Warner Pitts only nodded in a distant way to me when he saw me first, -with a cool “Hello, youngster!” I expected that he would ask after the -folks at the farm which had been so long his home, but he turned to talk -with some one else, and said never a word. Once, some days afterward, -he called out as I passed him, “How’s the old Copperhead?” and the Avery -girl who was with him laughed aloud, but I went on without answering. He -was already down in my black-books, in company with pretty nearly every -other human being roundabout. - -This list of enemies was indeed so full that there were times when -I felt like crying over my isolation. It may be guessed, then, how -rejoiced I was one afternoon to see Ni Hagadorn squeeze his way through -our orchard-bars, and saunter across under the trees to where I was at -work sorting a heap of apples into barrels. I could have run to meet -him, so grateful was the sight of any friendly, boyish face. The thought -that perhaps after all he had not come to see me in particular, and that -possibly he brought some news about Jeff, only flashed across my mind -after I had smiled a broad welcome upon him, and he stood leaning -against a barrel munching the biggest russet he had been able to pick -out. - -“Abner to home?” he asked, after a pause of neighborly silence. He -hadn’t come to see me after all. - -“He’s around the barns somewhere,” I replied; adding, upon reflection, -“Have you heard something fresh?” - -Ni shook his sorrel head and buried his teeth deep into the apple. “No, -nothin’,” he said, at last, with his mouth full, “only thought I’d come -up an’ talk it over with Abner.” - -The calm audacity of the proposition took my breath away. “He’ll boot -you off’m the place if you try it,” I warned him. - -But Ni did not scare easily. “Oh, no,” he said, with light confidence, -“me an’ Abner’s all right.” - -As if to put this assurance to the test, the figure of the farmer was at -this moment visible, coming toward us down the orchard road. He was in -his shirt-sleeves, with the limp, discolored old broad-brimmed felt hat -he always wore pulled down over his eyes. Though he no longer held -his head so proudly erect as I could remember it, there were still -suggestions of great force and mastership in his broad shoulders and big -beard, and in the solid, long-gaited manner of his walk. He carried a -pitchfork in his hand. - -“Hello, Abner!” said Ni, as the farmer came up and halted, surveying -each of us in turn with an impassive scrutiny. - -“How ’r’ ye?” returned Abner, with cold civility. I fancied he must -be surprised to see the son of his enemy here, calmly gnawing his way -through one of our apples, and acting as if the place belonged to him. -But he gave no signs of astonishment, and after some words of direction -to me concerning my work, started to move on again toward the barns. - -Ni was not disposed to be thus cheated out of his conversation: “Seen -Warner Pitts since he’s got back?” he called out, and at this the farmer -stopped and turned round. “You’d hardly know him now,” the butcher’s -assistant went on, with cheerful briskness. “Why you’d think he’d never -hoofed it over ploughed land in all his life. He’s got his boots blacked -up every day, an’ his hair greased, an’ a whole new suit of broadcloth, -with shoulder-straps an’ brass buttons, an’ a sword--he brings it -down to the Corners every evening, so’t the boys at the store can heft -it--an’ he’s--” - -“What do I care about all this?” broke in Abner. His voice was heavy, -with a growling ground-note, and his eyes threw out an angry light under -the shading hat-brim. “He can go to the devil, an’ take his sword with -him, for all o’ me!” - -Hostile as was his tone, the farmer did not again turn on his heel. -Instead, he seemed to suspect that Ni had something more important to -say, and looked him steadfastly in the face. - -“That’s what I say, too,” replied Ni, lightly. “What’s beat me is -how such a fellow as that got to be an officer right from the word -‘go!’--an’ him the poorest shote in the whole lot. Now if it had a’ ben -Spencer Phillips I could understand it--or Bi Truax, or--or your Jeff--” - -The farmer raised his fork menacingly, with a wrathful gesture. “Shet -up!” he shouted; “shet up, I say! or I’ll make ye!” - -To my great amazement Ni was not at all affected by this demonstration. -He leaned smilingly against the barrel, and picked out another apple--a -spitzenberg this time. - -“Now look a-here, Abner,” he said, argumentatively, “what’s the good -o’ gittin’ mad? When I’ve had my say out, why, if you don’t like it you -needn’t, an’ nobody’s a cent the wuss off. Of course, if you come down -to hard-pan, it ain’t none o’ my business--” - -“No,” interjected Abner, in grim assent, “it ain’t none o’ your -business!” - -“But there is such a thing as being neighborly,” Ni went on, undismayed, -“an’ meanin’ things kindly, an’ takin’ ’em as they’re meant.” - -“Yes, I know them kindly neighbors o’ mine!” broke in the farmer with -acrid irony. “I’ve summered ’em an’ I’ve wintered ’em, an’ the Lord -deliver me from the whole caboodle of ’em! A meaner lot o’ cusses -never cumbered this footstool!” - -“It takes all sorts o’ people to make up a world,” commented this -freckled and sandy-headed young philosopher, testing the crimson skin -of his apple with a tentative thumb-nail. “Now you ain’t got anything in -particular agin me, have you?” - -“Nothin’ except your breed,” the farmer admitted. The frown with which -he had been regarding Ni had softened just the least bit in the world. - -“That don’t count,” said Ni, with easy confidence. “Why, what does breed -amount to, anyway? You ought to be the last man alive to lug _that_ -in--you, who’ve up an’ soured on your own breed--your own son Jeff!” - -I looked to see Abner lift his fork again, and perhaps go even further -in his rage. Strangely enough, there crept into his sunburnt, massive -face, at the corners of the eyes and mouth, something like the -beginnings of a puzzled smile. “You’re a cheeky little cuss, anyway!” - was his final comment. Then his expression hardened again. “Who put you -up to cornin’ here, an’ talkin’ like this to me?” he demanded, sternly. - -“Nobody--hope to die!” protested Ni. “It’s all my own spec. It riled -me to see you mopin’ round up here all alone by yourself, not knowin’ -what’d become of Jeff, an’ makin’ b’lieve to yourself you didn’t care, -an’ so givin’ yourself away to the whole neighborhood.” - -“Damn the neighborhood!” said Abner, fervently. - -“Well, they talk about the same of you,” Ni proceeded with an air of -impartial candor. “But all that don’t do you no good, an’ don’t do Jeff -no good!” - -“He made his own bed, and he must lay on it,” said the farmer, with -dogged firmness. - -“I ain’t sayin’ he mustn’t,” remonstrated the other. “What I’m gittin’ -at is that you’d feel easier in your mind if you knew where that bed -was--an’ so’d M’rye!” - -Abner lifted his head. “His mother feels jest as I do,” he said. “He -sneaked off behind our backs to jine Lincoln’s nigger-worshippers, -an’ levy war on fellow-countrymen o’ his’n who’d done him no harm, an’ -whatever happens to him it serves him right. I ain’t much of a hand -to lug in Scripter to back up my argyments--like some folks you know -of--but my feelin’ is: ‘Whoso taketh up the sword shall perish by the -sword!’ An’ so says his mother too!” - -“Hm-m!” grunted Ni, with ostentatious incredulity. He bit into his -apple, and there ensued a momentary silence. Then, as soon as he was -able to speak, this astonishing boy said: “Guess I’ll have a talk with -M’rye about that herself.” - -The farmer’s patience was running emptings. - -“No!” he said, severely, “I forbid ye! Don’t ye dare say a word to -her about it. She don’t want to listen to ye--an’ I don’t know what’s -possessed _me_ to stand round an’ gab about my private affairs with you -like this, either. I don’t bear ye no ill-will. If fathers can’t help -the kind o’ sons they \ bring up, why, still less can ye blame sons on -account o’ their fathers. But it ain’t a thing I want to talk about any -more, either now or any other time. That’s all.” - -Abner put the fork over his shoulder, as a sign that he was going, and -that the interview was at an end. But the persistent Ni had a last word -to offer--and he left his barrel and walked over to the farmer. - -“See here,” he said, in more urgent tones than he had used before, “I’m -goin’ South, an’ I’m goin’ to find Jeff if it takes a leg! I don’t -know how much it’ll cost--I’ve got a little of my own saved up--an’ I -thought--p’r’aps--p’r’aps you’d like to--” - -After a moment’s thought the farmer shook his head. “No,” he said, -gravely, almost reluctantly. “It’s agin my principles. You know -me--Ni--you know I’ve never b’en a near man, let alone a mean man. An’ -ye know, too, that if Je--if that boy had behaved half-way decent, -there ain’t anything under the sun I wouldn’t’a’ done for him. But this -thing--I’m obleeged to ye for offrin’--but--No! it’s agin my principles. -Still, I’m obleeged to ye. Fill your pockets with them spitzenbergs, if -they taste good to ye.” - -With this Abner Beech turned and walked resolutely off. - -Left alone with me, Ni threw away the half-eaten apple he had held in -his hand. “I don’t want any of his dummed old spitzenbergs,” he said, -pushing his foot into the heap of fruit on the ground, in a meditative -way. - -“Then you ain’t agoin’ South?” I queried. - -“Yes, I am!” he replied, with decision. “I can work my way somehow. Only -don’t you whisper a word about it to any livin’ soul, d’ye mind!” - -***** - -Two or three days after that we heard that Ni Hagadorn had left for -unknown parts. Some said he had gone to enlist--it seems that, despite -his youth and small stature in my eyes, he would have been acceptable to -the enlistment standards of the day--but the major opinion was that -much dime-novel reading had inspired him with the notion of becoming a -trapper in the mystic Far West. - -I alone possessed the secret of his disappearance--unless, indeed, his -sister knew--and no one will ever know what struggles I had to keep from -confiding it to Hurley. - - - - -CHAPTER VII--THE ELECTION - -SOON the fine weather was at an end. One day it was soft and warm, with -a tender blue haze over the distant woods and a sun like a blood-orange -in the tranquil sky, and birds twittering about among the elders and -sumac along the rail-fences. And the next day everything was gray and -lifeless and desolate, with fierce winds sweeping over the bare fields, -and driving the cold rain in sheets before them. - -Some people--among them Hurley--said it was the equinoctial that was -upon us. Abner Beech ridiculed this, and proved by the dictionary that -the equinoctial meant September 22d, whereas it was now well-nigh the -end of October. The Irishman conceded that in books this might be so, -but stuck wilfully to it that in practice the equinoctial came just -before winter set in. After so long a period of saddened silence -brooding over our household, it was quite a relief to hear the men argue -this question of the weather. - -Down at the Corners old farmers had wrangled over the identity of the -equinoctial ever since I could remember. It was pretty generally agreed -that each year along some time during the fall, there came a storm which -was properly entitled to that name, but at this point harmony ended. -Some insisted that it came before Indian Summer, some that it followed -that season, and this was further complicated by the fact that no one -was ever quite sure when it was Indian Summer. There were all sorts of -rules for recognizing this delectable time of year, rules connected, I -recall, with the opening of the chestnut burrs, the movement of birds, -and various other incidents in nature’s great processional, but these -rules rarely came right in our rough latitude, and sometimes never came -at all--at least did not bring with them anything remotely resembling -Indian Summer, but made our autumn one prolonged and miserable -succession of storms. And then it was an especially trying trick to -pick out the equinoctial from the lot--and even harder still to prove to -sceptical neighbors that you were right. - -Whatever this particular storm may have been it came too soon. Being so -short-handed on the farm, we were much behind in the matter of drawing -our produce to market. And now, after the first day or two of rain, the -roads were things to shudder at. It was not so bad getting to and from -the Corners, for Agrippa Hill had a gravel formation, but beyond the -Corners, whichever way one went over the bottom lands of the Nedahma -Valley, it was a matter of lashing the panting teams through seas of mud -punctuated by abysmal pitch-holes, into which the wheels slumped over -their hubs, and quite generally stuck till they were pried out with -fence-rails. - -Abner Beech was exceptionally tender in his treatment of live-stock. The -only occasion I ever heard of on which he was tempted into using his big -fists upon a fellow-creature, was once, long before my time, when one of -his hired men struck a refractory cow over its haunches with a shovel. -He knocked this man clear through the stanchions. Often Jeff and I -used to feel that he carried his solicitude for horse-flesh too -far--particularly when we wanted to drive down to the creek for a summer -evening swim, and he thought the teams were too tired. - -So now he would not let us hitch up and drive into Octavius with even -the lightest loads, on account of the horses. It would be better to -wait, he said, until there was sledding; then we could slip in in no -time. He pretended that all the signs this year pointed to an early -winter. - -The result was that we were more than ever shut off from news of the -outer world. The weekly paper which came to us was full, I remember, of -political arguments and speeches--for a Congress and Governor were to -be elected a few weeks hence--but there were next to no tidings from the -front. The war, in fact, seemed to have almost stopped altogether, and -this paper spoke of it as a confessed failure. Farmer Beech and Hurley, -of course, took the same view, and their remarks quite prepared me from -day to day to hear that peace had been concluded. - -But down at the Corners a strikingly different spirit reigned. It quite -surprised me, I know, when I went down on occasion for odds and ends -of groceries which the bad roads prevented us from getting in town, to -discover that the talk there was all in favor of having a great deal -more war than ever. - -This store at the Corners was also the post-office, and, more important -still, it served as a general rallying place for the men-folks of the -neighborhood after supper. Lee Watkins, who kept it, would rather have -missed a meal of victuals any day than not to have the “boys” come in of -an evening, and sit or lounge around discussing the situation. Many of -them were very old boys now, garrulous seniors who remembered -“Matty” Van Buren, as they called him, and told weird stories of the -Anti-Masonry days. - -These had the well-worn arm-chairs nearest the stove, in cold weather, -and spat tobacco-juice on its hottest parts with a precision born of -long-time experience. The younger fellows accommodated themselves about -the outer circle, squatting on boxes, or with one leg over a barrel, -sampling the sugar and crackers and raisins in an absent-minded way each -evening, till Mrs. Watkins came out and put the covers on. She was a -stout, peevish woman in bloomers, and they said that her husband, Lee, -couldn’t have run the post-office for twenty-four hours if it hadn’t -been for her. We understood that she was a Woman’s Rights’ woman, which -some held was much the same as believing in Free Love. All that was -certain, however, was that she did not believe in free lunches out of -her husband’s barrels and cases. - -The chief flaw in this village parliament was the absence of an -opposition. Among all the accustomed assemblage of men who sat about, -their hats well back on their heads, their mouths full of strong -language and tobacco, there was none to disagree upon any essential -feature of the situation with the others. To secure even the merest -semblance of variety, those whose instincts were cross-grained had to -go out of their way to pick up trifling points of difference, and the -arguments over these had to be spun out with the greatest possible care, -to be kept going at all. I should fancy, however, that this apparent -concord only served to keep before their minds, with added persistency, -the fact that there was an opposition, nursing its heretical wrath in -solitude up on the Beech farm. At all events, I seemed never to go into -the grocery of a night without hearing bitter remarks, or even curses, -levelled at our household. - -It was from these casual visits--standing about on the outskirts of the -gathering, beyond the feeble ring of light thrown out by the kerosene -lamp on the counter--that I learned how deeply the Corners were opposed -to peace. It appeared from the talk here that there was something very -like treason at the front. The victory at Antietam--so dearly bought -with the blood of our own people--had been, they said, of worse than no -use at all. The defeated Rebels had been allowed to take their own -time in crossing the Potomac comfortably. They had not been pursued -or molested since, and the Corners could only account for this on the -theory of treachery at Union headquarters. Some only hinted guardedly -at this. Others declared openly that the North was being sold out by its -own generals. As for old “Jee” Hagadorn, who came in almost every night, -and monopolized the talking all the while he was present, he made no -bones of denouncing McClellan and Porter as traitors who must be hanged. - -Quivering with excitement, the red stubbly hair standing up all round -his drawn and livid face, his knuckles rapping out one fierce point -after another on the candle-box, as he filled the little hot room with -angry declamation. “Go it, Jee!” - -“Give ’em Hell!” - -“Hangin’s too good for ’em!” his auditors used to exclaim in -encouragement, whenever he paused for breath, and then he would start -off again still more furiously, till he had to gasp after every word, -and screamed “Lincoln-ah!” “Lee-ah!” “Antietam-ah!” and so on, into -our perturbed ears. Then I would go home, recalling how he had formerly -shouted about “Adam-ah!” and “Eve-ah!” in church, and marvelling that he -had never worked himself into a fit, or broken a bloodvessel. - -So between what Abner and Hurley said on the farm, and what was -proclaimed at the Corners, it was pretty hard to figure out whether the -war was going to stop, or go on much worse than ever. - -Things were still in this doubtful state, when election Tuesday came -round. I had not known or thought about it, until at the breakfast-table -Abner said that he guessed he and Hurley would go down and vote before -dinner. He had some days before. - -He comes before me as I write--this thin form secured a package of -ballots from the organization of his party at Octavius, and these he now -took from one of the bookcase drawers, and divided between himself and -Hurley. - -“They won’t be much use, I dessay, peddlin’ ’em at the polls,” he said, -with a grim momentary smile, “but, by the Eternal, we’ll vote ’em!” - -“As many of ’em as they’ll be allowin’ us,” added Hurley, in chuckling -qualification. - -They were very pretty tickets in those days, with marbled and plaided -backs in brilliant colors, and spreading eagles in front, over the -printed captions. In other years I had shared with the urchins of the -neighborhood the excitement of scrambling for a share of these ballots, -after they had been counted, and tossed out of the boxes. The conditions -did not seem to be favorable for a repetition of that this year, and -apparently this occurred to Abner, for of his own accord he handed me -over some dozen of the little packets, each tied with a thread, and -labelled, “State,” “Congressional,” “Judiciary,” and the like. He, -moreover, consented--the morning chores being out of the way--that I -should accompany them to the Corners. The ground had frozen stiff -overnight, and the road lay in hard uncompromising ridges between the -tracks of yesterday’s wheels. The two men swung along down the hill -ahead of me, with resolute strides and their heads proudly thrown back, -as if they had been going into battle. I shuffled, on behind in my new -boots, also much excited. The day was cold and raw. - -The polls were fixed up in a little building next to the post-office--a -one-story frame structure where Lee Watkins kept his bob-sleigh and -oil barrels, as a rule. These had been cleared out into the yard, and -a table and some chairs put in in their place. A pane of glass had been -taken out of the window. Through this aperture the voters, each in -his turn, passed their ballots, to be placed by the inspectors in the -several boxes ranged along the window-sill inside. A dozen or more men, -mainly in army overcoats, stood about on the sidewalk or in the road -outside, stamping their feet for warmth, and slapping their shoulders -with their hands, between the fingers of which they held little packets -of tickets like mine--that is to say, they were like mine in form and -brilliancy of color, but I knew well enough that there the resemblance -ended abruptly. A yard or so from the window two posts had been driven -into the ground, with a board nailed across to prevent undue crowding. - -Abner and Hurley marched up to the polls without a word to any one, or -any sign of recognition from the bystanders. Their appearance, however, -visibly awakened the interest of the Corners, and several young fellows -who were standing on the grocery steps sauntered over in their wake to -see what was going on. These, with the ticket-peddlers, crowded up close -to the window now, behind our two men. - -“Abner Beech!” called the farmer through the open pane, in a defiant -voice. Standing on tiptoe, I could just see the heads of some men -inside, apparently looking through the election books. No questions were -asked, and in a minute or so Abner had voted and stood aside a little, -to make room for his companion. - -“Timothy Joseph Hurley!” shouted our hired man, standing on his toes to -make himself taller, and squaring his weazened shoulders. - -“Got your naturalization papers?” came out a sharp, gruff inquiry -through the window-sash. - -“That I have!” said the Irishman, wagging his head in satisfaction at -having foreseen this trick, and winking blandly into the wall of stolid, -hostile faces encircling him. “That I have!” - -He drew forth an old and crumpled envelope, from his breast-pocket, and -extracted some papers from its ragged folds, which he passed through -to the inspector. The latter just cast his eye over the documents and -handed them back. - -“Them ain’t no good!” he said, curtly. - -“What’s that you’re saying?” cried the Irishman. “Sure I’ve voted on -thim same papers every year since 1856, an’ niver a man gainsaid me. No -good, is it? Huh!” - -“Why ain’t they no good?” boomed in Abner Beech’s deep, angry voice. He -had moved back to the window. - -“Because they ain’t, that’s enough!” returned the inspector. “Don’t -block up the window, there! Others want to vote!” - -“I’ll have the law on yez!” shouted Hurley. “I’ll swear me vote in! -I’ll--I’ll--” - -“Aw, shut up, you Mick!” some one called out close by, and then there -rose another voice farther back in the group: “Don’t let him vote! One -Copperhead’s enough in Agrippa!” - -“I’ll have the law--” I heard Hurley begin again, at the top of his -voice, and Abner roared out something I could not catch. Then as in a -flash the whole cluster of men became one confused whirling tangle of -arms and legs, sprawling and wrestling on the ground, and from it rising -the repellent sound of blows upon flesh, and a discordant chorus of -grunts and curses. Big chunks of icy mud flew through the air, kicked up -by the boots of the men as they struggled. I saw the two posts with the -board weave under the strain, then give way, some of the embattled group -tumbling over them as they fell. It was wholly impossible to guess who -was who in this writhing and tossing mass of fighters. I danced up and -down in a frenzy of excitement, watching this wild spectacle, and, so I -was told years afterward, screaming with all my might and main. - -Then all at once there was a mighty upheaval, and a big man -half-scrambled, half-hurled himself to his feet. It was Abner, who had -wrenched one of the posts bodily from under the others, and swung it -now high in air. Some one clutched it, and for the moment stayed its -descent, yelling, meanwhile, “Look out! Look out!” as though life itself -depended on the volume of his voice. - -The ground cleared itself as if by magic. On the instant there was -only Abner standing there with the post in his hands, and little Hurley -beside him, the lower part of his face covered with blood, and his -coat torn half from his back. The others had drawn off, and formed -a semicircle just out of reach of the stake, like farm-dogs round a -wounded bear at bay. Two or three of them had blood about their heads -and necks. - -There were cries of “Kill him!” and it was said afterward that Roselle -Upman drew a pistol, but if he did others dissuaded him from using it. -Abner stood with his back to the building, breathing hard, and a good -deal covered with mud, but eyeing the crowd with a masterful ferocity, -and from time to time shifting his hands to get a new grip on that -tremendous weapon of his. He said not a word. - -The Irishman, after a moment’s hesitation, wiped some of the blood -from his mouth and jaw, and turned to the window again. “Timothy Joseph -Hurley!” he shouted in, defiantly. - -This time another inspector came to the front--the owner of the tanyard -over on the Dutch road, and a man of importance in the district. -Evidently there had been a discussion inside. - -“We will take your vote if you want to swear it in,” he said, in a -pacific tone, and though there were some dissenting cries from the crowd -without, he read the oath, and Hurley mumbled it after him. - -Then, with some difficulty, he sorted out from his pocket some torn and -mud-stained packets of tickets, picked the cleanest out from each, and -voted them--all with a fine air of unconcern. - -Abner Beech marched out behind him now with a resolute clutch on the -stake. The crowd made reluctant way for them, not without a good many -truculent remarks, but with no offer of actual violence. Some of the -more boisterous ones, led by Roselle Upman, were for following them, -and renewing the encounter beyond the Corners. But this, too, came to -nothing, and when I at last ventured to cross the road and join Abner -and Hurley, even the cries of “Copperhead” had died away. - -The sun had come out, and the frosty ruts had softened to stickiness. -The men’s heavy boots picked up whole sections of plastic earth as they -walked in the middle of the road up the hill. - -“What’s the matter with your mouth?” asked Abner at last, casting a -sidelong glance at his companion. “It’s be’n a-bleedin’.” - -Hurley passed an investigating hand carefully over the lower part of -his face, looked at his reddened fingers, and laughed aloud. “I’d a fine -grand bite at the ear of one of them,” he said, in explanation. “‘Tis no -blood o’ mine.” Abner knitted his brows. “That ain’t the way we fight -in this country,” he said, in tones of displeasure. “Bitin’ men’s ears -ain’t no civilized way of behavin’.” - -“’Twas not much of a day for civilization,” remarked Hurley, lightly; -and there was no further conversation on our homeward tramp. - - - - -CHAPTER VIII--THE ELECTION BONFIRE - -The election had been on Tuesday, November 4th. Our paper, containing -the news of the result, was to be expected at the Corners on Friday -morning. But long before that date we had learned--I think it was Hurley -who found it out--that the Abolitionists had actually been beaten in -our Congressional district. It was so amazing a thing that Abner could -scarcely credit it, but it was apparently beyond dispute. For that -matter, one hardly needed further evidence than the dejected way in -which Philo Andrews and Myron Pierce and other followers of “Jee” - Hagadorn hung their heads as they drove past our place. - -Of course it had all been done by the vote in the big town of Tecumseh, -way at the other end of the district, and by those towns surrounding it -where the Mohawk Dutch were still very numerous. But this did not at all -lessen the exhilaration with which the discovery that the Radicals of -our own Dearborn County had been snowed under, filled our breasts. Was -it not wonderful to think of, that these heroes of remote Adams and Jay -Counties should have been at work redeeming the district on the very day -when the two votes of our farm marked the almost despairing low-water -mark of the cause in Agrippa? - -Abner could hardly keep his feet down on the ground or floor when he -walked, so powerfully did the tidings of this achievement thrill his -veins. He said the springs of his knees kept jerking upward, so that he -wanted to kick and dance all the while. Janey Wilcox, who, though a -meek and silent girl, was a wildly bitter partisan, was all eagerness to -light a bonfire out on the knoll in front of the house Thursday night, -so that every mother’s son of them down at the Corners might see it, but -Abner thought it would be better to wait until we had the printed facts -before us. - -I could hardly wait to finish breakfast Friday morning, so great was my -zeal to be off to the postoffice. It was indeed not altogether daylight -when I started at quick step down the hill. Yet, early as I was, there -were some twenty people inside Lee Watkins’s store when I arrived, all -standing clustered about the high square row of glass-faced pigeonholes -reared on the farther end of the counter, behind which could be seen -Lee and his sour-faced wife sorting over the mail by lamp-light. “Jee” - Hagadorn was in this group and Squire Avery, and most of the other -prominent citizens of the neighborhood. All were deeply restless. - -Every minute or two some one of them would shout: “Come, Lee, give us -out one of the papers, anyway!” But for some reason Mrs. Watkins was -inexorable. Her pursed-up lips and resolute expression told us plainly -that none would be served till all were sorted. So the impatient waiters -bided their time under protest, exchanging splenetic remarks under their -breath. We must have stood there three-quarters of an hour. - -At last Mrs. Watkins wiped her hands on the apron over her bloomers. -Everybody knew the signal, and on the instant a dozen arms were -stretched vehemently toward Lee, struggling for precedence. In another -moment wrappers had been ripped off and sheets flung open. Then -the store was alive with excited voices. “Yes, sir! It’s true! The -Copperheads have won!” - -“_Tribune_ concedes Seymour’s election!” - -“We’re beaten in the district by less’n a hundred!” - -“Good-by, human liberty!” “Now we know how Lazarus felt when he -was licked by the dogs!” and so on--a stormy warfare of wrathful -ejaculations. - -In my turn I crowded up, and held out my hand for the paper I saw in the -box. Lee Watkins recognized me, and took the paper out to deliver to -me. But at the same moment his wife, who had been hastily scanning the -columns of some other journal, looked up and also saw who I was. With a -lightning gesture she threw out her hand, snatched our _World_ from her -husband’s grasp, and threw it spitefully under the counter. - -“There ain’t nothing for _you!_” she snapped at me. “Pesky Copperhead -rag!” she muttered to herself. - -Although I had plainly seen the familiar wrapper, and understood her -action well enough, it never occurred to me to argue the question with -Mrs. - -Watkins. Her bustling, determined demeanor, perhaps also her bloomers, -had always filled me with awe. I hung about for a time, avoiding her -range of vision, until she went out into her kitchen. Then I spoke with -resolution to Lee: - -“If you don’t give me that paper,” I said, “I’ll tell Abner, an’ he’ll -make you sweat for it!” - -The postmaster stole a cautious glance kitchen-ward. Then he made a -swift, diving movement under the counter, and furtively thrust the paper -out at me. - -“Scoot!” he said, briefly, and I obeyed him. - -Abner was simply wild with bewildered delight over what this paper had -to tell him. Even my narrative about Mrs. Watkins, which ordinarily -would have thrown him into transports of rage, provoked only a passing -sniff. “They’ve only got two more years to hold that post-office,” was -his only remark upon it. - -Hurley and Janey Wilcox and even the Underwood girl came in, and -listened to Abner reading out the news. He shirked nothing, but waded -manfully through long tables of figures and meaningless catalogues of -counties in other States, the names of which he scarcely knew how to -pronounce: “‘Five hundred and thirty-one townships in Wisconsin give -Brown 21,409, Smith 16,329, Ferguson 802, a Republican loss of 26.’ Do -you see that, Hurley? It’s everywhere the same.” - -“‘Kalapoosas County elects Republican Sheriff for first time in history -of party.’ That isn’t so good, but it’s only one out of ten thousand.” - -“‘Four hundred and six townships in New Hampshire show a net Democratic -loss of--’ pshaw! there ain’t nothing in that! Wait till the other towns -are heard from!” - -So Abner read on and on, slapping his thigh with his free hand whenever -anything specially good turned up. And there was a great deal that we -felt to be good. The State had been carried. Besides our Congressman, -many others had been elected in unlooked-for places--so much so that the -paper held out the hope that Congress itself might be ours. Of course -Abner at once talked as if it were already ours. Resting between -paragraphs, he told Hurley and the others that this settled it. The war -must now surely be abandoned, and the seceding States invited to return -to the Union on terms honorable to both sides. - -Hurley had assented with acquiescent nods to everything else. He seemed -to have a reservation on this last point. “An’ what if they won’t come?” - he asked. - -“Let ’em stay out, then,” replied Abner, dogmatically. “This war--this -wicked war between brothers--must stop. That’s the meaning of Tuesday’s -votes. What did you and I go down to the Corners and cast our ballots -for?--why, for peace!” - -“Well, somebody else got my share of it, then,” remarked Hurley, with a -rueful chuckle. - -Abner was too intent upon his theme to notice. “Yes, peace!” he -repeated, in the deep vibrating tones of his class-meeting manner. “Why, -just think what’s been a-goin’ on! Great armies raised, hundreds of -thousands of honest men taken from their-work an’ set to murderin’ -each other, whole deestricks of country torn up by the roots, homes -desolated, the land filled with widows an’ orphans, an’ every house a -house of mournin’.” - -Mrs. Beech had been sitting, with her mending-basket on her knee, -listening to her husband like the rest of us. She shot to her feet now -as these last words of his quivered in the air, paying no heed to the -basket or its scattered contents on the floor, but putting her apron -to her eyes, and making her way thus past us, half-blindly, into her -bedroom. I thought I heard the sound of a sob as she closed the door. - -That the stately, proud, self-contained mistress of our household should -act like this before us all was even more surprising than Seymour’s -election. We stared at one another in silent astonishment. - -“M’rye ain’t feelin’ over’n’ above well,” Abner said at last, -apologetically. “You girls ought to spare her all you kin.” - -One could see, however, that he was as puzzled as the rest of us. He -rose to his feet, walked over to the stove, rubbed his boot meditatively -against the hearth for a minute or two, then came back again to the -table. It was with a visible effort that he finally shook off this mood, -and forced a smile to his lips. - -“Well, Janey,” he said, with an effort at briskness, “ye kin go ahead -with your bonfire, now. I guess I’ve got some old bar’ls for ye over’n -the cow-barn.” - -But having said this, he turned abruptly and followed his wife into the -little chamber off the living-room. - - - - -CHAPTER IX--ESTHER’S VISIT - -The next day, Saturday, was my birthday. I celebrated it by a heavy -cold, with a bursting headache, and chills chasing each other down my -back. I went out to the cow-barn with the two men before daylight, -as usual, but felt so bad that I had to come back to the house before -milking was half over. The moment M’rye saw me, I was ordered on to the -sick-list. - -The Beech homestead was a good place to be sick in. Both M’rye and Janey -had a talent in the way of fixing up tasty little dishes for invalids, -and otherwise ministering to their comfort, which year after year went -a-begging, simply because all the men-folk kept so well. Therefore, when -the rare opportunity did arrive, they made the most of it. I had my feet -and legs put into a bucket of hot water, and wrapped round with burdock -leaves. Janey prepared for my breakfast some soft toast--not the insipid -and common milk-toast--but each golden-brown slice treated separately on -a plate, first moistened with scalding water, then peppered, salted, and -buttered, with a little cold milk on top of all. I ate this -sumptuous breakfast at my leisure, ensconced in M’rye’s big cushioned -rocking-chair, with my feet and legs, well tucked up in a blanket-shawl, -stretched out on another chair, comfortably near the stove. - -It was taken for granted that I had caught my cold out around the -bonfire the previous evening--and this conviction threw a sort of -patriotic glamour about my illness, at least in my own mind. - -The bonfire had been a famous success. Though there was a trifle of rain -in the air, the barrels and mossy discarded old fence-rails burned like -pitch-pine, and when Hurley and I threw on armfuls of brush, the sparks -burst up with a roar into a flaming column which we felt must be visible -all over our side of Dearborn County. At all events, there was no doubt -about its being seen and understood down at the Corners, for presently -our enemies there started an answering bonfire, which glowed from time -to time with such a peculiarly concentrated radiance that Abner said -Lee Watkins must have given them some of his kerosene-oil barrels. The -thought of such a sacrifice as this on the part of the postmaster rather -disturbed Abner’s mind, raising, as it did, the hideous suggestion that -possibly later returns might have altered the election results. But when -Hurley and I dragged forward and tipped over into the blaze the whole -side of an old abandoned corn-crib, and heaped dry brush on top of that, -till the very sky seemed afire above us, and the stubblefields down -the hill-side were all ruddy in the light, Abner confessed himself -reassured. Our enthusiasm was so great that it was nearly ten o’clock -before we went to bed, having first put the fire pretty well out, lest a -rising wind during the night should scatter sparks and work mischief. - -I had all these splendid things to think of next day, along with my -headache and the shivering spine, and they tipped the balance toward -satisfaction. Shortly after breakfast M’rye made a flaxseed poultice and -muffled it flabbily about my neck, and brought me also some boneset-tea -to drink. There was a debate in the air as between castor-oil and senna, -fragments of which were borne in to me when the kitchen door was -open. The Underwood girl alarmed me by steadily insisting that her -sister-in-law always broke up sick-headaches with a mustard-plaster put -raw on the back of the neck. Every once in a while one of them would -come in and address to me the stereotyped formula: “Feel any better?” - and I as invariably answered, “No.” In reality, though, I was lazily -comfortable all the time, with Lossing’s “Field-Book of the War of 1812” - lying open on my lap, to look at when I felt inclined. This book was not -nearly so interesting as the one about the Revolution, but a grandfather -of mine had marched as a soldier up to Sackett’s Harbor in the later -war, though he did not seem to have had any fighting to do after he got -there, and in my serious moods I always felt it my duty to read about -his war instead of the other. - -So the day passed along, and dusk began to gather in the living-room. -The men were off outdoors somewhere, and the girls were churning in the -butter-room. M’rye had come in with her mending, and sat on the opposite -side of the stove, at intervals casting glances over its flat top to -satisfy herself that my poultice had not sagged down from its proper -place, and that I was in other respects doing as well as could be -expected. - -Conversation between us was hardly to be thought of, even if I had not -been so drowsily indolent. M’rye was not a talker, and preferred always -to sit in silence, listening to others, or, better still, going on -at her work with no sounds at all to disturb her thoughts. These long -periods of meditation, and the sedate gaze of her black, penetrating -eyes, gave me the feeling that she must be much wiser than other women, -who could not keep still at all, but gabbled everything the moment it -came into their heads. - -We had sat thus for a long, long time, until I began to wonder how she -could sew in the waning light, when all at once, without lifting her -eyes from her work, she spoke to me. - -“D’ you know where Ni Hagadorn’s gone to?” she asked me, in a measured, -impressive voice. - -“He--he--told me he was a-goin’ away,” I made answer, with weak -evasiveness. - -“But where? Down South?” She looked up, as I hesitated, and flashed that -darkling glance of hers at me. “Out with it!” she commanded. “Tell me -the truth!” - -Thus adjured, I promptly admitted that Ni had said he was going South, -and could work his way somehow. “He’s gone, you know,” I added, after a -pause, “to try and find--that is, to hunt around after--” - -“Yes, I know,” said M’rye, sententiously, and another long silence -ensued. - -She rose after a time, and went out into the kitchen, returning with the -lighted lamp. She set this on the table, putting the shade down on one -side so that the light should not hurt my eyes, and resumed her -mending. The yellow glow thus falling upon her gave to her dark, severe, -high-featured face a duskier effect than ever. It occurred to me that -Molly Brant, that mysteriously fascinating and bloody Mohawk queen who -left such an awful reddened mark upon the history of her native Valley, -must have been like our M’rye. My mind began sleepily to clothe the -farmer’s wife in blankets and chains of wampum, with eagles’ feathers -in her raven hair, and then to drift vaguely off over the threshold of -Indian dreamland, when suddenly, with a start, I became conscious that -some unexpected person had entered the room by the veranda-door behind -me. - -The rush of cold air from without had awakened me and told me of the -entrance. A glance at M’rye’s face revealed the rest. She was staring -at the newcomer with a dumfounded expression of countenance, her mouth -half-open with sheer surprise. Still staring, she rose and tilted the -lampshade in yet another direction, so that the light was thrown upon -the stranger. At this I turned in my chair to look. - -It was Esther Hagadorn who had come in! - -There was a moment’s awkward silence, and then the school-teacher began -hurriedly to speak. “I saw you were alone from the veranda--I was so -nervous it never occurred to me to rap--the curtains being up--I--I -walked straight in.” - -As if in comment upon this statement, M’rye marched across the room, and -pulled down both curtains over the veranda windows. With her hand still -upon the cord of the second shade, she turned and again dumbly surveyed -her visitor. - -Esther flushed visibly at this reception, and had to choke down the -first words that came to her lips. Then she went on better: “I hope -you’ll excuse my rudeness. I really did forget to rap. I came upon very -special business. Is Ab--Mr. Beech at home?” - -“Won’t you sit down?” said M’rye, with a glum effort at civility. “I -expect him in presently.” - -The school-ma’am, displaying some diffidence, seated herself in the -nearest chair, and gazed at the wall-paper with intentness. She had -never seemed to notice me at all--indeed had spoken of seeing M’rye -alone through the window--and now I coughed, and stirred to readjust my -poultice, but she did not look my way. M’rye had gone back to her chair -by the stove, and taken up her mending again. - -“You’d better lay off your things. You won’t feel ’em when you go -out,” she remarked, after an embarrassing period of silence, investing -the formal phrases with chilling intention. - -Esther made a fumbling motion at the loop of her big mink cape, but did -not unfasten it. - -“I--I don’t know _what_ you think of me,” she began, at last, and then -nervously halted. - -“Mebbe it’s just as well you don’t,” said M’rye, significantly, darning -away with long sweeps of her arm, and bending attentively over her -stocking and ball. - -“I can understand your feeling hard,” Esther went on, still eyeing the -sprawling blue figures on the wall, and plucking with her fingers at -the furry tails on her cape. “And--I _am_ to blame, _some_, I can see -now--but it didn’t seem so, _then_, to either of us.” - -“It ain’t no affair of mine,” remarked M’rye, when the pause came, “but -if that’s your business with Abner, you won’t make much by waitin’. Of -course it’s nothing to me, one way or t’other.” - -Not another word was exchanged for a long time. From where I sat I could -see the girl’s lips tremble, as she looked steadfastly into the wall. I -felt certain that M’rye was darning the same place over and over again, -so furiously did she keep her needle flying. - -All at once she looked up angrily. “Well,” she said, in loud, bitter -tones: “Why not out with what you’ve come to say, ’n’ be done with it? -You’ve heard something, _I_ know!” - -Esther shook her head. “No, Mrs. Beech,” she said, with a piteous quaver -in her voice, “I--I haven’t heard anything!” - -The sound of her own broken utterances seemed to affect her deeply. Her -eyes filled with tears, and she hastily got out a handkerchief from her -muff, and began drying them. She could not keep from sobbing aloud a -little. - -M’rye deliberately took another stocking from the heap in the basket, -fitted it over the ball, and began a fresh task--all without a glance at -the weeping girl. - -Thus the two women still sat, when Janey came in to lay the table for -supper. She lifted the lamp off to spread the cloth, and put it on -again; she brought in plates and knives and spoons, and arranged them in -their accustomed places--all the while furtively regarding Miss Hagadorn -with an incredulous surprise. When she had quite finished she went over -to her mistress and, bending low, whispered so that we could all hear -quite distinctly: “Is _she_ goin’ to stay to supper?” - -M’rye hesitated, but Esther lifted her head and put down the -handkerchief instantly. “Oh, no!” she said, eagerly: “don’t think of it! -I must hurry home as soon as I’ve seen Mr. Beech.” Janey went out with -an obvious air of relief. - -Presently there was a sound of heavy boots out in the kitchen being -thrown on to the floor, and then Abner came in. He halted in the -doorway, his massive form seeming to completely fill it, and devoted a -moment or so taking in the novel spectacle of a neighbor under his roof. -Then he advanced, walking obliquely till he could see distinctly -the face of the visitor. It stands to reason that he must have been -surprised, but he gave no sign of it. - -“How d’ do, Miss,” he said, with grave politeness, coming up and -offering her his big hand. - -Esther rose abruptly, peony-red with pleasurable confusion, and took the -hand stretched out to her. “How d’ do, Mr. Beech,” she responded with -eagerness, “I--I came up to see you--a--about something that’s very -pressing.” - -“It’s blowing up quite a gale outside,” the farmer remarked, evidently -to gain time the while he scanned her face in a solemn, thoughtful way, -noting, I doubt not, the swollen eyelids and stains of tears, and trying -to guess her errand. “Shouldn’t wonder if we had a foot o’ snow before -morning.” - -The school-teacher seemed in doubt how best to begin what she had to -say, so that Abner had time, after he lifted his inquiring gaze from -her, to run a master’s eye over the table. - -“Have Janey lay another place!” he said, with authoritative brevity. - -As M’rye rose to obey, Esther broke forth: “Oh, no, please don’t! Thank -you so much, Mr. Beech--but really I can’t stop--truly, I mustn’t think -of it.” - -The farmer merely nodded a confirmation of his order to M’rye, who -hastened out to the kitchen. - -“It’ll be there for ye, anyway,” he said. “Now set down again, please.” - -It was all as if he was the one who had the news to tell, so naturally -did he take command of the situation. The girl seated herself, and the -farmer drew up his arm-chair and planted himself before her, keeping his -stockinged feet under the rungs for politeness’ sake. - -“Now, Miss,” he began, just making it civilly plain that he preferred -not to utter her hated paternal name, “I don’t know no more’n a babe -unborn what’s brought you here. I’m sure, from what I know of ye, that -you wouldn’t come to this house jest for the sake of comin’, or to argy -things that can’t be, an’ mustn’t be, argied. In one sense, we ain’t -friends of yours here, and there’s a heap o’ things that you an’ me -don’t want to talk about, because they’d only lead to bad feelin’, an’ -so we’ll leave ’em all severely alone. But in another way, I’ve -always had a liking for you. You’re a smart girl, an’ a scholar into the -bargain, an’ there ain’t so many o’ that sort knockin’ around in these -parts that a man like myself, who’s fond o’ books an’ learnin’, wants -to be unfriendly to them there is. So now you can figure out pretty well -where the chalk line lays, and we’ll walk on it.” - -Esther nodded her head. “Yes, I understand,” she remarked, and seemed -not to dislike what Abner had said. - -“That being so, what is it?” the farmer asked, with his hands on his -knees. - -“Well, Mr. Beech,” the school-teacher began, noting with a swift -side-glance that M’rye had returned, and was herself rearranging the -table. “I don’t think you can have heard it, but some important news -has come in during the day. There seems to be different stories, but the -gist of them is that a number of the leading Union generals have been -discovered to be traitors, and McClellan has been dismissed from his -place at the head of the army, and ordered to return to his home in New -Jersey under arrest, and they say others are to be treated in the same -way, and Fath--_some_ people think it will be a hanging matter, and--” - -Abner waved all this aside with a motion of his hand. “It don’t amount -to a hill o’ beans,” he said, placidly. “It’s jest spite, because we -licked ’em at the elections. Don’t you worry your head about _that!_” - -Esther was not reassured. “That isn’t all,” she went on, nervously. -“They say there’s been discovered a big conspiracy, with secret -sympathizers all over the North.” - -“Pooh!” commented Abner. “We’ve heer’n tell o’ that before!” - -“All over the North,” she continued, “with the intention of bringing -across infected clothes from Canada, and spreading the small-pox among -us, and--” - -The farmer laughed outright; a laugh embittered by contempt. “What -cock-’n’-bull story’ll be hatched next!” he said. “You don’t mean to say -you--a girl with a head on her shoulders like _you_--give ear to such -tomfoolery as that! Come, now, honest Injin, do you mean to tell me -_you_ believe all this?” - -“It don’t so much matter, Mr. Beech,” the girl replied, raising her face -to his, and speaking more confidently--“it don’t matter at all what I -believe. I’m talking of what they believe down at the Corners.” - -“The Corners be jiggered!” exclaimed Abner, politely, but with emphasis. - -Esther rose from the chair. “Mr. Beech,” she declared, impressively; -“they’re coming up here to-night! That bonfire of yours made ’em mad. -It’s no matter how I learned it--it wasn’t from father--I don’t know -that he knows anything about it, but they’re coming _here!_ and--and -Heaven only knows what they’re going to do when they get here!” - -The farmer rose also, his huge figure towering above that of the girl, -as he looked down at her over his beard. He no longer dissembled his -stockinged feet. After a moment’s pause he said: “So that’s what you -came to tell me, eh?” - -The school-ma’am nodded her head. “I couldn’t bear not to,” she -explained, simply. - -“Well, I’m obleeged to ye!” Abner remarked, with gravity. “Whatever -comes of it, I’m obleeged to ye!” - -He turned at this, and walked slowly out into the kitchen, leaving the -door open behind him. “Pull on your boots again!” we heard him say, -presumably to Hurley. In a minute or two he returned, with his own boots -on, and bearing over his arm the old double-barrelled shot-gun which -always hung above the kitchen mantel-piece. In his hands he had two -shot-flasks, the little tobacco-bag full of buckshot, and a powder-horn. -He laid these on the open shelf of the bookcase, and, after fitting -fresh caps on the nipples, put the gun beside them. - -“I’d be all the more sot on your stayin’ to supper,” he remarked, -looking again at Esther, “only if there _should_ be any unpleasantness, -why, I’d hate like sin to have you mixed up in it. You see how I’m -placed.” - -Esther did not hesitate a moment. She walked over to where M’rye stood -by the table replenishing the butter-plate. “I’d be very glad indeed to -stay, Mr. Beech,” she said, with winning frankness, “if I may.” - -“There’s the place laid for you,” commented M’rye, impassively. Then, -catching her husband’s eye, she added the perfunctory assurance, “You’re -entirely welcome.” - -Hurley and the girls came in now, and all except me took their seats -about the table. Both Abner and the Irishman had their coats on, out -of compliment to company. M’rye brought over a thick slice of fresh -buttered bread with brown sugar on it, and a cup of weak tea, and put -them beside me on a chair. Then the evening meal went forward, the -farmer talking in a fragmentary way about the crops and the weather. -Save for an occasional response from our visitor, the rest maintained -silence. The Underwood girl could not keep her fearful eyes from the -gun lying on the bookcase, and protested that she had no appetite, -but Hurley ate vigorously, and had a smile on his wrinkled and swarthy -little face. - -The wind outside whistled shrilly at the windows, rattling the shutters, -and trying its force in explosive blasts which seemed to rock the house -on its stone foundations. Once or twice it shook the veranda door with -such violence that the folk at the table instinctively lifted their -heads, thinking some one was there. - -Then, all at once, above the confusion of the storm’s noises, we heard a -voice rise, high and clear, crying: - -“_Smoke the damned Copperhead out!_” - - - - -CHAPTER X--THE FIRE - -“That was Roselle Upman that hollered,” remarked Janey Wilcox, breaking -the agitated silence which had fallen upon the supper table. “You can -tell it’s him because he’s had all his front teeth pulled out.” - -“I wasn’t born in the woods to be skeert by an owl!” replied Abner, with -a great show of tranquillity, helping himself to another slice of bread. -“Miss, you ain’t half makin’ out a supper!” - -But this bravado could not maintain itself. In another minute there came -a loud chorus of angry yells, heightened at its finish by two or three -pistol-shots. Then Abner pushed back his chair and rose slowly to his -feet, and the rest sprang up all around the table. - -“Hurley,” said the farmer, speaking as deliberately as he knew how, -doubtless with the idea of reassuring the others, “you go out into the -kitchen with the women-folks, an’ bar the woodshed door, an’ bring in -the axe with you to stan’ guard over the kitchen door. I’ll look out for -this part o’ the house myself.” - -“I want to stay in here with you, Abner,” said M’rye. - -“No, you go out with the others!” commanded the master with firmness, -and so they all filed out with no hint whatever of me. The shadow of the -lamp-shade had cut me off altogether from their thoughts. - -Perhaps it is not surprising that my recollections of what now ensued -should lack definiteness and sequence. The truth is, that my terror -at my own predicament, sitting there with no covering for my feet and -calves but the burdock leaves and that absurd shawl, swamped everything -else in my mind. Still, I do remember some of it. - -Abner strode across to the bookcase and took up the gun, his big thumb -resting determinedly on the hammers. Then he marched to the door, threw -it wide open, and planted himself on the threshold, looking out into the -darkness. - -“What’s your business here, whoever you are?” he called out, in deep -defiant tones. - -“We’ve come to take you an’ Paddy out for a little ride on a rail!” - answered the same shrill, mocking voice we had heard at first. Then -others took up the hostile chorus. “We’ve got some pitch a-heatin’ round -in the backyard!” - -“You won’t catch cold; there’s plenty o’ feathers!” - -“Tell the Irishman here’s some more ears for him to chaw on!” - -“Come out an’ take your Copperhead medicine!” - -There were yet other cries which the howling wind tore up into -inarticulate fragments, and then a scattering volley of cheers, again -emphasized by pistol-shots. While the crack of these still chilled my -blood, a more than usually violent gust swooped round Abner’s burly -figure, and blew out the lamp. - -Terrifying as the first instant of utter darkness was, the second was -recognizable as a relief. I at once threw myself out of the chair, and -crept along back of the stove to where my stockings and boots had been -put to dry. These I hastened, with much trembling awkwardness, to pull -on, taking pains to keep the big square old stove between me and that -open veranda door. - -“Guess we won’t take no ride to-night!” I heard Abner roar out, after -the shouting had for the moment died away. - -“You got to have one!” came back the original voice. “It’s needful for -your complaint!” - -“I’ve got somethin’ here that’ll fit _your_ complaint!” bellowed the -farmer, raising his gun. “Take warnin’--the first cuss that sets foot -on this stoop, I’ll bore a four-inch hole clean through him. I’ve got -squirrel-shot, an’ I’ve got buckshot, an’ there’s plenty more behind--so -take your choice!” - -There were a good many derisive answering yells and hoots, and some one -again fired a pistol in the air, but nobody offered to come up on the -veranda. - -Emboldened by this, I stole across the room now to one of the windows, -and lifting a corner of the shade, strove to look out. At first there -was nothing whatever to be seen in the utter blackness. Then I made out -some faint reddish sort of diffused light in the upper air, which barely -sufficed to indicate the presence of some score or more dark figures out -in the direction of the pump. Evidently they _had_ built a fire around -in the back yard, as they said--probably starting it there so that its -light might not disclose their identity. - -This looked as if they really meant to tar-and-feather Abner and Hurley. -The expression was familiar enough to my ears, and, from pictures in -stray illustrated weeklies that found their way to the Corners, I had -gathered some general notion of the procedure involved. The victim was -stripped, I knew, and daubed over with hot melted pitch; then a -pillow-case of feathers was emptied over him, and he was forced astride -a fence-rail, which the rabble hoisted on their shoulders and ran about -with. But my fancy balked at and refused the task of imagining Abner -Beech in this humiliating posture. At least it was clear to my mind that -a good many fierce and bloody things would happen first. - -Apparently this had become clear to the throng outside as well. Whole -minutes had gone by, and still no one mounted the veranda to seek close -quarters with the farmer--who stood braced with his legs wide apart, -bare-headed and erect, the wind blowing his huge beard sidewise over his -shoulder. - -“Well! ain’t none o’ you a-comin’?” he called out at last, with -impatient sarcasm. “Thought you was so sot on takin’ me out an’ havin’ -some fun with me!” After a brief pause, another taunt occurred to him. -“Why, even the niggers you’re so in love with,” he shouted, “they ain’t -such dod-rotted cowards as you be!” - -A general movement was discernible among the shadowy forms outside. -I thought for the instant that it meant a swarming attack upon the -veranda. But no! suddenly it had grown much lighter, and the mob was -moving away toward the rear of the house. The men were shouting things -to one another, but the wind for the moment was at such a turbulent -pitch that all their words were drowned. The reddened light waxed -brighter still--and now there was nobody to be seen at all from the -window. - -“Hurry here! Mr. Beech! _We’re all afire!”_ cried a frightened voice in -the room behind me. - -It may be guessed how I turned. - -The kitchen door was open, and the figure of a woman stood on the -threshold, indefinitely black against a strange yellowish-drab half -light which framed it. This woman--one knew from the voice that it was -Esther Hagadorn--seemed to be wringing her hands. - -“Hurry! Hurry!” she cried again, and I could see now that the little -passage was full of gray luminous smoke, which was drifting past her -into the living-room. Even as I looked, it had half obscured her form, -and was rolling in, in waves. - -Abner had heard her, and strode across the room now, gun still in hand, -into the thick of the smoke, pushing Esther before him and shutting -the kitchen door with a bang as he passed through. I put in a terrified -minute or two alone in the dark, amazed and half-benumbed by the -confused sounds that at first came from the kitchen, and by the horrible -suspense, when a still more sinister silence ensued. Then there rose a -loud crackling noise, like the incessant popping of some giant variety -of corn. - -The door burst open again, and M’rye’s tall form seemed literally flung -into the room by the sweeping volume of dense smoke which poured in. She -pulled the door to behind her--then gave a snarl of excited emotion at -seeing me by the dusky reddened radiance which began forcing its way -from outside through the holland window shades. - -“Light the lamp, you gump!” she commanded, breathlessly, and fell with -fierce concentration upon the task of dragging furniture out from the -bedroom. I helped her in a frantic, bewildered fashion, after I had -lighted the lamp, which flared and smoked without its shade, as we -toiled. M’rye seemed all at once to have the strength of a dozen men. -She swung the ponderous chest of drawers out end on end; she fairly -lifted the still bigger bookcase, after I had hustled the books out on -to the table; she swept off the bedding, slashed the cords, and jerked -the bed-posts and side-pieces out of their connecting sockets with -furious energy, till it seemed as if both rooms must have been -dismantled in less time than I have taken to tell of it. - -The crackling overhead had swollen now to a wrathful roar, rising above -the gusty voices of the wind. The noise, the heat, the smoke, and terror -of it all made me sick and faint. I grew dizzy, and did foolish things -in an aimless way, fumbling about among the stuff M’rye was hurling -forth. Then all at once her darkling, smoke-wrapped figure shot up to -an enormous height, the lamp began to go round, and I felt myself with -nothing but space under my feet, plunging downward with awful velocity, -surrounded by whirling skies full of stars. - -***** - -There was a black night-sky overhead when I came to my senses again, -with flecks of snow in the cold air on my face. The wind had fallen, -everything was as still as death, and some one was carrying me in his -arms. I tried to lift my head. - -“Anyhow!” came Hurley’s admonitory voice, close to my ear. “We’ll be -there in a minyut.” - -“No--I’m all right--let me down,” I urged. He set me on my feet, and I -looked amazedly about me. - -The red-brown front of our larger hay-barn loomed in a faint unnatural -light, at close quarters, upon my first inquiring gaze. The big sliding -doors were open, and the slanting wagon-bridge running down from their -threshold was piled high with chairs, bedding, crockery, milk-pans, -clothing--the jumbled remnants of our household gods. Turning, I looked -across the yard upon what was left of the Beech homestead--a glare of -cherry light glowing above a fiery hole in the ground. - -Strangely enough this glare seemed to perpetuate in its outlines the -shape and dimensions of the vanished house. It was as if the house were -still there, but transmuted from joists and clap-boards and shingles, -into an illuminated and impalpable ghost of itself. There was a weird -effect of transparency about it. Through the spectral bulk of red light -I could see the naked and gnarled apple-trees in the home-orchard on -the further side; and I remembered at once that painful and striking -parallel of Scrooge gazing through the re-edified body of Jacob Marley, -and beholding the buttons at the back of his coat. It all seemed some -monstrous dream. - -But no, here the others were. Janey Wilcox and the Underwood girl had -come out from the barn, and were carrying in more things. I perceived -now that there was a candle burning inside, and presently Esther -Hagadorn was to be seen. Hurley had disappeared, and so I went up the -sloping platform to join the women--noting with weak surprise that my -knees seemed to have acquired new double joints and behaved as if they -were going in the other direction. I stumbled clumsily once I was inside -the barn, and sat down with great abruptness on a milking-stool, leaning -my head back against the haymow, and conscious of an entire indifference -as to whether school kept or not. - -The feeble light of the candle was losing itself upon the broad high -walls of new hay; the huge shadows in the rafters overhead; the -women-folk silently moving about, fixing up on the barn floor some -pitiful imitation, poor souls, of the home that had been swept off the -face of the earth, and outside, through the wide sprawling doors, the -dying away effulgence of the embers of our roof-tree lingering in the -air of the winter night. - -Abner Beech came in presently, with the gun in one hand, and a blackened -and outlandish-looking object in the other, which turned out to be the -big pink sea-shell that used to decorate the parlor. - -Again it was like some half-waking vision--the mantel. He held it up for -M’rye to see, with a grave, tired smile on his face. - -“We got it out, after all--just by the skin of our teeth,” he said, and -Hurley, behind him, confirmed this by an eloquent grimace. - -M’rye’s black eyes snapped and sparkled as she lifted the candle and saw -what this something was. Then she boldly put up her face and kissed her -husband with a resounding smack. Truly it was a night of surprises. - -“That’s about the only thing I had to call my own when I was married,” - she offered in explanation of her fervor, speaking to the company at -large. Then she added in a lower tone, to Esther: “_He_ used to play -with it for hours at a stretch--when he was a baby.” - -“‘Member how he used to hold it up to his ear, eh, mother?” asked Abner, -softly. - -M’rye nodded her head, and then put her apron up to her eyes for a brief -moment. When she lowered it, we saw an unaccustomed smile mellowing her -hard-set, swarthy face. - -The candle-light flashed upon a tear on her cheek that the apron had -missed. - -‘“I guess I _do_ remember!” she said, with a voice full of tenderness. - -Then Esther’s hand stole into M’rye’s and the two women stood together -before Abner, erect and with beaming countenances, and he smiled upon -them both. - -It seemed that we were all much happier in our minds, now that our house -had been burned down over our heads. - - - - -CHAPTER XI--THE CONQUEST OF ABNER - -Some time during the night, I was awakened by the mice frisking through -the hay about my ears. My head was aching again, and I could not get -back into sleep. Besides, Hurley was snoring mercilessly. - -We two had chosen for our resting-place the little mow of half a load or -so, which had not been stowed away above, but lay ready for present use -over by the side-door opening on the cow-yard. Temporary beds had been -spread for the women with fresh straw and blankets at the further end of -the central threshing-floor. Abner himself had taken one of the rescued -ticks and a quilt over to the other end, and stretched his ponderous -length out across the big doors, with the gun by his side. No one had, -of course, dreamed of undressing. - -Only a few minutes of wakefulness sufficed to throw me into a desperate -state of fidgets. The hay seemed full of strange creeping noises. The -whole big barn echoed with the boisterous ticking of the old eight-day -clock which had been saved from the wreck of the kitchen, and which -M’rye had set going again on the seat of the democrat wagon. And then -Hurley! - -I began to be convinced, now, that I was coming down with a great spell -of sickness--perhaps even “the fever.” Yes, it undoubtedly was the -fever. I could feel it in my bones, which now started up queer prickly -sensations on novel lines, quite as if they were somebody else’s bones -instead. My breathing, indeed, left a good deal to be desired from the -true fever standpoint. It was not nearly so rapid or convulsive as I -understood that the breathing of a genuine fever victim ought to be. But -that, no doubt, would come soon enough--nay! was it not already coming? -I thought, upon examination, that I did breathe more swiftly than -before. And oh! that Hurley! - -As noiselessly as possible I made my way, half-rolling, half-sliding, off -the hay, and got on my feet on the floor. It was pitch dark, but I could -feel along the old disused stanchion-row to the corner; thence it was -plain sailing over to where Abner was sleeping by the big front doors. -I would not dream of rousing him if he was in truth asleep, but it would -be something to be nigh him, in case the fever should take a fatal turn -before morning. I would just cuddle down on the floor near to him, and -await events. - -When I had turned the corner, it surprised me greatly to see ahead of -me, over at the front of the barn, the reflection of a light. Creeping -along toward it, I came out upon Abner, seated with his back against -one of the doors, looking over an account-book by the aid of a -lantern perched on a box at his side. He had stood the frame of an old -bob-sleigh on end close by, and hung a horse-blanket over it, so that -the light might not disturb the women-folk at the other end of the barn. -The gun lay on the floor beside him. - -He looked up at my approach, and regarded me with something, I fancied, -of disapprobation in his habitually grave expression. - -“Well, old seventy-six, what’s the matter with you?” he asked, keeping -his voice down to make as little noise as possible. - -I answered in the same cautious tones that I was feeling bad. Had any -encouragement suggested itself in the farmer’s mien, I was prepared to -overwhelm him with a relation of my symptoms in detail. But he shook his -head instead. - -“You’ll have to wait till morning, to be sick,” he said--“that is, -to get ’tended to. I don’t know anything about such things, an’ I -wouldn’t wake M’rye up now for a whole baker’s dozen o’ you chaps.” - Seeing my face fall at this sweeping declaration, he proceeded to modify -it in a kindlier tone. “Now you just lay down again, sonny,” he added, -“an’ you’ll be to sleep in no time, an’ in the morning M’rye ’ll fix -up something for ye. This ain’t no fit time for white folks to be -belly-achin’ around.” - -“I kind o’ thought I’d feel better if I was sleeping over here near -you,” I ventured now to explain, and his nod was my warrant for -tiptoeing across to the heap of disorganized furniture, and getting -out some blankets and a comforter, which I arranged in the corner a few -yards away and simply rolled myself up in, with my face turned away from -the light? It was better over here than with Hurley, and though that -prompt sleep which the farmer had promised did not come, I at least was -drowsily conscious of an improved physical condition. - -Perhaps I drifted off more than half-way into dreamland, for it was with -a start that all at once I heard some one close by talking with Abner. - -“I saw you were up, Mr. Beech”--it was Esther Hagadorn who spoke--“and -I don’t seem able to sleep, and I thought, if you didn’t mind, I’d come -over here.” - -“Why, of course,” the farmer responded. “Just bring up a chair there, -an’ sit down. That’s it--wrap the shawl around you good. It’s a cold -night--snowin’ hard outside.” - -Both had spoken in muffled tones, so as not to disturb the others. This -same dominant notion of keeping still deterred me from turning over, -in order to be able to see them. I expected to hear them discuss my -illness, but they never referred to it. Instead, there was what seemed -a long silence. Then the school-ma’am spoke. “I can’t begin to tell you,” - she said, “how glad I am that you and your wife aren’t a bit cast down -by the--the calamity.” - -“No,” came back Abner’s voice, buoyant even in its half-whisper, “we’re -all right. I’ve be’n sort o’ figurin’ up here, an’ they ain’t much real -harm done. I’m insured pretty well. Of course, this bein’ obleeged -to camp out in a hay-barn might be improved on, but then it’s a -change--somethin’ out o’ the ordinary rut--an’ it’ll do us good. I’ll -have the carpenters over from Juno Mills in the forenoon, an’ if they -push things, we can have a roof over us again before Christmas. It could -be done even sooner, p’raps, only they ain’t any neighbors to help -_me_ with a raisin’ bee. They’re willin’ enough to burn my house down, -though. However, I don’t want them not an atom more’n they want me.” - -There was no trace of anger in his voice. He spoke like one -contemplating the unalterable conditions of life. - -“Did they really, do you believe, _set_ it on fire?” Esther asked, -intently. - -“No, _I_ think it caught from that fool fire they started around back -of the house, to heat their fool tar by. The wind was blowing a regular -gale, you know. Janey Wilcox, she will have it that that Roselle Upman -set it on purpose. But then, she don’t like him--an’ I can’t blame her -much, for that matter. Once Otis Barnum was seein’ her home from singin’ -school, an’ when he was goin’ back alone this Roselle Upman waylaid him -in the dark, an’ pitched onto him, an’ broke his collar-bone. I always -thought it puffed Janey up some, this bein’ fought over like that, but -it made her mad to have Otis hurt on her account, an’ then nothing come -of it. I wouldn’t ’a’ minded pepperin’ Roselle’s legs a trifle, if I’d -had a barrel loaded, say, with bird-shot. He’s a nuisance to the whole -neighborhood. He kicks up a fight at every dance he goes to, all winter -long, an’ hangs around the taverns day in an’ day out, inducin’ young -men to drink an’ loaf. I thought a fellow like him ’d be sure to go -off to the war, an’ so good riddance; but no! darned if the coward don’t -go an’ get his front teeth pulled, so’t he can’t bite ca’tridges, an’ -jest stay around; a worse nuisance than ever! I’d half forgive that -miserable war if it--only took off the--the right men.” - -“Mr. Beech,” said Esther, in low fervent tones, measuring each word as -it fell, “you and I, we must forgive that war together!” - -I seemed to feel the farmer shaking his head. He said nothing in reply. - -“I’m beginning to understand how you’ve felt about it all along,” the -girl went on, after a pause. “I knew the fault must be in my ignorance, -that our opinions of plain right and plain wrong should be such poles -apart. I got a school-friend of mine, whose father is your way of -thinking, to send me all the papers that came to their house, and I’ve -been going through them religiously--whenever I could be quite alone. I -don’t say I don’t think you’re wrong, because I _do_, but I am getting -to understand how you should believe yourself to be right.” - -She paused as if expecting a reply, but Abner only said, “Go on,” after -some hesitation, and she went on: - -“Now take the neighbors all about here--” - -“Excuse _me!_” broke in the farmer. “I guess if it’s all the same to -you, I’d rather not. They’re too rich for my blood.” - -“Take these very neighbors,” pursued Esther, with gentle determination. -“Something must be very wrong indeed when they behave to you the way -they do. Why, I know that even now, right down in their hearts, they -recognize that you’re far and away the best man in Agrippa. Why, -I remember, Mr. Beech, when I first applied, and you were -school-commissioner, and you sat there through the examination--why, you -were the only one whose opinion I gave a rap for. When you praised -me, why, I was prouder of it than if you had been a Regent of the -University. And I tell you, everybody all around here feels at bottom -just as I do.” - -“They take a dummed curious way o’ showin’ it, then,” commented Abner, -roundly. - -“It isn’t _that_ they’re trying to show at all,” said Esther. “They feel -that other things are more important. They’re all wrought up over the -war. How could it be otherwise when almost every one of them has got -a brother, or a father, or--or--_a son_--down there in the South, and -every day brings news that some of these have been shot dead, and more -still wounded and crippled, and others--_others_, that God only knows -_what_ has become of them--oh, how can they help feeling that way? I -don’t know that I ought to say it”--the school-ma’am stopped to catch -her breath, and hesitated, then went on--“but yes, you’ll understand -me _now_--there was a time here, not so long ago, Mr. Beech, when I -downright hated you--you and M’rye both!” - -This was important enough to turn over for. I flopped as -unostentatiously as possible, and neither of them gave any sign of -having noted my presence. The farmer sat with his back against the door, -the quilt drawn up to his waist, his head bent in silent meditation. His -whole profile was in deep shadow from where I lay--darkly massive and -powerful and solemn. Esther was watching him with all her eyes, leaning -forward from her chair, the lantern-light full upon her eager face. - -“M’rye an’ I don’t lay ourselves out to be specially bad folks, as folks -go,” the farmer said at last, by way of deprecation. “We’ve got our -faults, of course, like the rest, but--” - -“No,” interrupted Esther, with a half-tearful smile in her eyes. “You -only pretend to have faults. You really haven’t got any at all.” - -The shadowed outline of Abner’s face softened. “Why, that _is_ a fault -itself, ain’t it?” he said, as if pleased with his logical acuteness. - -The crowing of some foolish rooster, growing tired of waiting for -the belated November daylight, fell upon the silence from one of the -buildings near by. - -Abner Beech rose to his feet with ponderous slowness, pushing the -bedclothes aside with his boot, and stood beside Esther’s chair. He laid -his big hand on her shoulder with a patriarchal gesture. - -“Come now,” he said, gently, “you go back to bed, like a good girl, an’ -get some sleep. It’ll be all right.” - -The girl rose in turn, bearing her shoulder so that the fatherly hand -might still remain upon it. “Truly?” she asked, with a new light upon -her pale face. - -“Yes--truly!” Abner replied, gravely nodding his head. - -Esther took the hand from her shoulder, and shook it in both of hers. -“Good-night again, then,” she said, and turned to go. - -Suddenly there resounded the loud rapping of a stick on the barn-door, -close by my head. - -Abner squared his huge shoulders and threw a downright glance at the gun -on the floor “Well?” he called out.. - -“_Is my da’ater inside there?_” - -We all knew that thin, high-pitched, querulous voice. It was old “Jee”’ -Hagadorn who was outside. - - - - -CHAPTER XII--THE UNWELCOME GUEST - -Abner and Esther stood for a bewildered minute, staring at the rough -unpainted boards through which this astonishing inquiry had come. I -scrambled to my feet and kicked aside the tick and blankets. Whatever -else happened, it did not seem likely that there was any more sleeping -to be done. Then the farmer strode forward and dragged one of the doors -back on its squeaking rollers. Some snow fell in upon his boots from the -ridge that had formed against it over night. Save for a vaguely faint -snow-light in the air, it was still dark. - -“Yes, she’s here,” said Abner, with his hand on the open door. - -“Then I’d like to know--” the invisible Jee began excitedly shouting -from without. - -“Sh-h! You’ll wake everybody up!” the farmer interposed. “Come inside, -so that I can shut the door.” - -“Never under your roof!” came back the shrill hostile voice. “I swore I -never would, and I won’t!” - -“You’d have to take a crowbar to get under my roof,” returned Abner, -grimly conscious of a certain humor in the thought. “What’s left of it -is layin’ over yonder in what used to be the cellar. So you needn’t -stand on ceremony on _that_ account. I ain’t got no house now, so’t your -oath ain’t bindin’. Besides, the Bible says, ‘Swear not at all!’” - -A momentary silence ensued; then Abner rattled the door on its wheels. -“Well, what are you goin’ to do?” he asked, impatiently. “I can’t keep -this door open all night, freezin’ everybody to death. If you won’t come -in, you’ll have to stay out!” and again there was an ominous creaking of -the rollers. - -“I want my da’ater!” insisted Jehoiada, vehemently. “I stan’ on a -father’s rights.” - -“A father ain’t got no more right to make a fool of himself than anybody -else,” replied Abner, gravely. “What kind of a time o’ night is this, -with the snow knee-deep, for a girl to be out o’ doors? She’s all right -here, with my women-folks, an’ I’ll bring her down with the cutter in -the mornin’--that is, if she wants to come. An’ now, once for all, will -you step inside or not?” - -Esther had taken up the lantern and advanced with it now to the -open door. “Come in, father,” she said, in tones which seemed to be -authoritative, “They’ve been very kind to me. Come in!” Then, to my -surprise, the lean and scrawny figure of the cooper emerged from the -darkness, and stepping high over the snow, entered the barn, Abner -sending the door to behind him with a mighty sweep of the arm. - -Old Hagadorn came in grumbling under his breath, and stamping the snow -from his feet with sullen kicks. He bore a sledge-stake in one of his -mittened hands. A worsted comforter was wrapped around his neck and ears -and partially over his conical-peaked cap. He rubbed his long thin nose -against his mitten and blinked sulkily at the lantern and the girl who -held it. - -“So here you be!” he said at last, in vexed tones. “An’ me traipsin’ -around in the snow the best part of the night lookin’ for you!” - -“See here, father,” said Esther, speaking in a measured, deliberate way, -“we won’t talk about that at all. If a thousand times worse things had -happened to both of us than have, it still wouldn’t be worth mentioning -compared with what has befallen these good people here. They’ve been -attacked by a mob of rowdies and loafers, and had their house and home -burned down over their heads and been driven to take refuge here in this -barn of a winter’s night. They’ve shared their shelter with me and -been kindness itself, and now that you’re here, if you can’t think of -anything pleasant to say to them, if I were you I’d say nothing at all.” - -This was plain talk, but it seemed to produce a satisfactory effect upon -Jehoiada. He unwound his comforter enough to liberate his straggling -sandy beard and took off his mittens. After a moment or two he seated -himself in the chair, with a murmured “I’m jest about tuckered out,” in -apology for the action. He did, in truth, present a woeful picture of -fatigue and physical feebleness, now that we saw him in repose. The -bones seemed ready to start through the parchment-like skin on his -gaunt cheeks, and, his eyes glowed with an unhealthy fire, as he sat, -breathing hard and staring at the jumbled heaps of furniture on the -floor. - -Esther had put the lantern again on the box and drawn forward a chair -for Abner, but the farmer declined it with a wave of the hand and -continued to stand in the background, looking his ancient enemy over -from head to foot with a meditative gaze. Jehoiada grew visibly nervous -under this inspection; he fidgeted on his chair and then fell to -coughing--a dry, rasping cough which had an evil sound, and which he -seemed to make the worse by fumbling aimlessly at the button that held -the overcoat collar round his throat. - -At last Abner walked slowly over to the shadowed masses of piled-up -household things and lifted out one of the drawers that had been taken -from the framework of the bureau and brought over with their contents. -Apparently it was not the right one, for he dragged aside a good many -objects to get at another, and rummaged about in this for several -minutes. Then he came out again into the small segment of the lantern’s -radiance with a pair of long thick woollen stockings of his own in his -hand. - -“You better pull off them wet boots an’ draw these on,” he said, -addressing Hagadorn, but looking fixedly just over his head. “It won’t -do that cough o’ yours no good, settin’ around with wet feet.” - -The cooper looked in a puzzled way at the huge butternut-yarn stockings -held out under his nose, but he seemed too much taken aback to speak or -to offer to touch them. - -“Yes, father!” said Esther, with quite an air of command. “You know what -that cough means,” and straightway Hagadorn lifted one of his feet to -his knee and started tugging at the boot-heel in a desultory way. He -desisted after a few half-hearted attempts, and began coughing again, -this time more distressingly than ever. - -His daughter sprang forward to help him, but Abner pushed her aside, put -the stockings under his arm, and himself undertook the job. He did -not bend his back overmuch; but hoisted Jee’s foot well in the air and -pulled. - -“Brace your foot agin mine an’ hold on to the chair!” he ordered, -sharply, for the first effect of his herculean pull had been to nearly -drag the cooper to the floor. He went at it more gently now, easing the -soaked leather up and down over the instep until the boots were off. He -looked furtively at the bottoms of these before he tossed them aside, -noting, no doubt, as I did, how old and broken and run down at the heel -they were. Jee himself peeled off the drenched stockings, and they too -were flimsy old things, darned and mended almost out of their original -color. - -These facts served only to deepen my existing low opinion of Hagadorn, -but they appeared to affect Abner Beech differently. He stood by and -watched the cooper dry his feet and then draw on the warm dry hose over -his shrunken shanks, with almost a friendly interest. Then he shoved -along one of the blankets across the floor to Hagadorn’s chair that he -might wrap his feet in it. - -“That’s it,” he said, approvingly. “They ain’t no means o’ building a -fire here right now, but as luck would have it we’d jest set up an old -kitchen stove in the little cow-barn to warm up gruel for the caves -with, an’ the first thing we’ll do ’ll be to rig it up in here to cook -breakfast by, an’ then we’ll dry them boots o’ yourn in no time. You go -an’ pour some oats into ’em now,” Abner added, turning to me. “And you -might as well call Hurley. We’ve got considerable to do, an’ daylight’s -breakin’.” - -The Irishman lay on his back where I had left him, still snoring -tempestuously. As a rule he was a light sleeper, but this time I had to -shake him again and again before he understood that it was morning. I -opened the side-door, and sure enough, the day had begun. The clouds had -cleared away. The sky was still ashen gray overhead, but the light from -the horizon, added to the whiteness of the unaccustomed snow, rendered -it quite easy to see one’s way about inside. I went to the oat-bin. - -Hurley, sitting up and rubbing his eyes, regarded me and my task with -curiosity. “An’ is it a stovepipe for a measure ye have?” he asked. - -“No; it’s one of Jee Hagadorn’s boots,” I replied. “I’m filling ’em -so’t they’ll swell when they’re dryin’.” - -He slid down off the hay as if some one had pushed him. “What’s that ye -say? Haggydorn? _Ould_ Haggydorn?” he demanded. - -I nodded assent. “Yes, he’s inside with Abner,” I explained. “An’ -he’s got on Abner’s stockin’s, an’ it looks like he’s goin’ to stay to -breakfast.” - -Hurley opened his mouth in sheer surprise and gazed at me with hanging -jaw and round eyes. - -“’Tis the fever that’s on ye,” he said, at last. “Ye’re wandherin’ in -yer mind!” - -“You just go in and see for yourself,” I replied, and Hurley promptly -took me at my word. - -He came back presently, turning the corner of the stanchions in a -depressed and rambling way, quite at variance with his accustomed -swinging gait. He hung his head, too, and shook it over and over again -perplexedly. - -“Abner ‘n’ me ’ll be bringin’ in the stove,” he said.”’Tis not fit for -you to go out wid that sickness on ye.” - -“Well, anyway,” I retorted, “you see I wasn’t wanderin’ much in my -mind.” - -Hurley shook his head again. “Well, then,” he began, lapsing into deep -brogue and speaking rapidly, “I’ve meself seen the woman wid the head of -a horse on her in the lake forninst the Three Castles, an’ me sister’s -first man, sure he broke down the ditch round-about the Danes’ fort on -Dunkelly, an’ a foine grand young man, small for his strength an’ wid -a red cap on his head, flew out an’ wint up in the sky, an’ whin he -related it up comes Father Forrest to him in the potaties, an’ says he, -‘I do be suprised wid you, O’Driscoll, for to be relatin’ such loies.’ -‘I’ll take me Bible oat’ on ’em!’” says he. - -“‘Tis your imagination!’ says the priest. ‘No imagination at all!’ says -O’Driscoll; ‘sure, I saw it wid dese two eyes, as plain as I’m lookin’ -at your riverence, an’ a far grander sight it was too!’ An’ me own -mother, faith, manny’s the toime I’ve seen her makin’ up dhrops for the -yellow sicknest wid woodlice, an’ sayin’ Hail Marys over ’em, an’ thim -same_ ‘_ud cure annything from sore teeth to a wooden leg for moiles -round. But, saints help me! I never seen the loikes o’ _this!_ Haggydorn -is it? _Ould_ Haggydorn! _Huh!’_” - -Then the Irishman, still with a dejected air, started off across the -yards through the snow to the cow-barns, mumbling to himself as he went. - -I had heard Abner’s heavy tread coming along the stanchions toward me, -but now all at once it stopped. The farmer’s wife had followed him into -the passage, and he had halted to speak with her. - -“They ain’t no two ways about it, mother,” he expostulated. “We jest got -to put the best face on it we kin, an’ act civil, an’ pass the time o’ -day as if nothing’d ever happened atween us. He’ll be goin’ the first -thing after breakfast.” - -“Oh! I ain’t agoin’ to sass him, or say anything uncivil,” M’rye broke -in, reassuringly. “What I mean is, I don’t want to come into the -for’ard end of the barn at all. They ain’t no need of it. I kin cook the -breakfast in back, and Janey kin fetch it for’ard for yeh, an’ nobody -need say anythin’, or be any the wiser.” - -“Yes, I know,” argued Abner, “but there’s the looks o’ the thing. _I_ -say, if you’re goin’ to do a thing, why, do it right up to the handle, -or else don’t do it at all. An’ then there’s the girl to consider, and -_her_ feelin’s.” - -“Dunno’t her feelin’s are such a pesky sight more importance than other -folkses,” remarked M’rye, callously. - -This unaccustomed recalcitrancy seemed to take Abner aback. He moved -a few steps forward so that he became visible from where I stood, then -halted again and turned, his shoulders rounded, his hands clasped behind -his back. I could see him regarding M’rye from under his broad hat-brim -with a gaze at once dubious and severe. - -“I ain’t much in the habit o’ hearin’ you talk this way to me, mother,” - he said at last, with grave depth of tones and significant deliberation. - -“Well, I can’t help it, Abner!” rejoined M’rye, bursting forth in -vehement utterance, all the more excited from the necessity she felt of -keeping it out of hearing of the unwelcome guest. “I don’t want to do -anything to aggravate you, or go contrary to your notions, but with -even the willin’est pack-horse there is such a thing as pilin’ it on too -thick. I can stan’ bein’ burnt out o’ house ‘_n’ home, an’ seein’ pretty -nigh every rag an’ stick I had in the world go kitin’ up the chimney, -an’ campin’ out here in a barn--My Glory, yes!--an’ as much more on top -o’ that, but, I tell you flat-footed, I can’t stomach Jee Hagadorn, an’ -I _won’t!” - -Abner continued to contemplate the revolted - -M’rye with displeased amazement written all over his face. Once or twice -I thought he was going to speak, but nothing came of it. He only looked -and looked, as if he had the greatest difficulty in crediting what he -saw. - -Finally, with a deep-chested sigh, he turned again. “I s’pose this is -still more or less of a free country,” he said. “If you’re sot on it, -I can’t hender you,” and he began walking once more toward me. - -M’rye followed him out and put a hand on his arm. “Don’t go off like -that, Abner!” she adjured him. “You _know_ there ain’t nothin’ in this -whole wide world I wouldn’t do to please you--if I _could!_ But this -thing jest goes agin my grain. It’s the way folks are made. It’s your -nater to be forgivin’ an’ do good to them that despitefully use you.” - -“No, it ain’t!” declared Abner, vigorously. - -“No, sirree! ‘Holdfast’ is my nater. I stan’ out agin my enemies till -the last cow comes home. But when they come wadin’ in through the snow, -with their feet soppin’ wet, an’ coughin’ fit to turn themselves inside -out, an’ their daughter is there, an’ you’ve sort o’ made it up with -her, an’ we’re all campin’ out in a barn, don’t you see--” - -“No, I can’t see it,” replied M’rye, regretful but firm. “They always -said we Ramswells had Injun blood in us somewhere. An’ when I get an -Injun streak on me, right down in the marrow o’ my bones, why, you -mustn’t blame me--or feel hard if--if I--” - -“No-o,” said Abner, with reluctant conviction, - -“I s’pose not. I dare say you’re actin’ accordin’ to your lights. An’ -besides, he’ll be goin’ the first thing after breakfast.” - -“An’ you ain’t mad, Abner?” pleaded M’rye, almost tremulously, as if -frightened at the dimensions of the victory she had won. - -“Why, bless your heart, no,” answered the farmer, with a glaring -simulation of easy-mindedness. - -“No--that’s all right, mother!” - -Then with long heavy-footed strides the farmer marched past me and out -into the cow-yard. - - - - -CHAPTER XIII--THE BREAKFAST - -If there was ever a more curious meal in Dearborn County than that -first breakfast of ours in the barn, I never heard of it. - -The big table was among the things saved from the living-room, and -Esther spread it again with the cloth which had been in use on the -previous evening. There was the stain of the tea which the Underwood -girl had spilled in the excitement of the supper’s rough interruption; -there were other marks of calamity upon it as well--the smudge of -cinders, for one thing, and a general diffused effect of smokiness. But -it was the only table-cloth we had. The dishes, too, were a queer lot, -representing two or three sets of widely different patterns and value, -other portions of which we should never see again. - -When it was announced that breakfast was ready, Abner took his -accustomed arm-chair at the head of the table. He only half turned his -head toward Hagadorn and said in formal tones, over his shoulder, “Won’t -you draw up and have some breakfast?” - -Jee was still sitting where he had planted himself two hours or so -before. He still wore his round cap, with the tabs tied down over his -ears. In addition to his overcoat, some one--probably his daughter--had -wrapped a shawl about his thin shoulders. The boots had not come in, as -yet, from the stove, and the blanket was drawn up over his stockinged -feet to the knees. From time to time his lips moved, as if he were -reciting Scripture texts to himself, but so far as I knew, he had said -nothing to any one. His cough seemed rather worse than better. - -“Yes, come, father!” Esther added to the farmer’s invitation, and drew a -chair back for him two plates away from Abner. Thus adjured he rose and -hobbled stiffly over to the place indicated, bringing his foot-blanket -with him. Esther stooped to arrange this for him and then seated herself -next the host. - -“You see, I’m going to sit beside you, Mr. Beech,” she said, with a wan -little smile. - -“Glad to have you,” remarked Abner, gravely. - -The Underwood girl brought in a first plate of buckwheat cakes, set it -down in front of Abner, and took her seat opposite Hagadorn and next to -me. There remained three vacant places, down at the foot of the table, -and though we all began eating without comment, everybody continually -encountered some other’s glance straying significantly toward these -empty seats. Janey Wilcox, very straight and with an uppish air, came in -with another plate of cakes and marched out again in tell-tale silence. - -“Hurley! Come along in here an’ git your breakfast!” - -The farmer fairly roared out this command, then added in a lower, -apologetic tone: “I ’spec’ the women-folks’ve got their hands full -with that broken-down old stove.” - -We all looked toward the point, half-way down the central barn-floor, -where the democrat wagon, drawn crosswise, served to divide our -improvised living-room and kitchen. Through the wheels, and under its -uplifted pole, we could vaguely discern two petticoated figures at the -extreme other end, moving about the stove, the pipe of which was carried -up and out through a little window above the door. Then Hurley appeared, -ducking his head under the wagon-pole. - -“I’m aitin’ out here, convanient to the stove,” he shouted from this -dividing-line. - -“No, come and take your proper place!” bawled back the farmer, and -Hurley had nothing to do but obey. He advanced with obvious reluctance, -and halted at the foot of the table, eyeing with awkward indecision the -three vacant chairs. One was M’rye’s; the others would place him either -next to the hated cooper or diagonally opposite, where he must look at -him all the while. - -“Sure, I’m better out there!” he ventured to insist, in a wheedling -tone; but Abner thundered forth an angry “No, sir!” and the Irishman -sank abruptly into the seat beside Hagadorn. From this place he eyed -the Underwood girl with a glare of contemptuous disapproval. I learned -afterward that M’rye and Janey Wilcox regarded her desertion of them as -the meanest episode of the whole miserable morning, and beguiled their -labors over the stove by recounting to each other all the low-down -qualities illustrated by the general history of her “sapheaded tribe.” - -Meanwhile conversation languished. - -With the third or fourth instalment of cakes, Janey Wilcox had halted -long enough to deliver herself of a few remarks, sternly limited to -the necessities of the occasion. “M’rye says,” she declaimed, coldly, -looking the while with great fixedness at the hay-wall, “if the cakes -are sour she can’t help it. We saved what was left over of the batter, -but the Graham flour and the sody are both burnt up,” and with that -stalked out again. - -Not even politeness could excuse the pretence on any one’s part that the -cakes were _not_ sour, but Abner seized upon the general subject as an -opening for talk. - -“‘Member when I was a little shaver,” he remarked, with an effort -at amiability, “my sisters kicked about havin’ to bake the cakes, on -account of the hot stove makin’ their faces red an’ spoilin’ their -complexions, an’ they wanted specially to go to some fandango or other, -an’ look their pootiest, an’ so father sent us boys out into the kitchen -to bake ’em instid. Old Lorenzo Dow the Methodist preacher, was -stoppin’ overnight at our house, an’ mother was jest beside herself to -have everything go off ship-shape--an’ then them cakes begun comin’ in. -Fust my brother William, he baked one the shape of a horse, an’ then -Josh, he made one like a jackass with ears as long as the griddle would -allow of lengthwise, and I’d got jest comfortably started in on one that -I begun as a pig, an’ then was going to alter into a ship with sails up, -when father, he come out with hold-back strap, an’--well--mine never got -finished to this day. Mother, she was mortified most to death, but old -Dow, he jest lay back and laughed--laughed till you’d thought he’d split -himself.” - -“It was from Lorenzo Dow’s lips that I had my first awakening call unto -righteousness,” said Jee Hagadorn, speaking with solemn unction in high, -quavering tones. - -The fact that he should have spoken at all was enough to take even the -sourness out of M’rye’s cakes. - -Abner took up the ball with solicitous promptitude. “A very great man, -Lorenzo Dow was--in his way,” he remarked. - -“By grace he was spared the shame and humiliation,” said Hagadorn, -lifting his voice as he went on--“the humiliation of living to see one -whole branch of the Church separate itself from the rest--withdraw and -call itself the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in defence of human -slavery!” - -Esther, red-faced with embarrassment, intervened peremptorily. “How -_can_ you, father!” she broke in. “For all you know he might have been -red-hot on that side himself! In fact, I dare say he would have been. -How on earth can _you_ know to the contrary, anyway?” - -Jee was all excitement on the instant, at the promise of an argument. -His eyes flashed; he half rose from his seat and opened his mouth to -reply. - -So much had he to say, indeed, that the words stumbled over one another -on his tongue, and produced nothing, but an incoherent stammering -sound, which all at once was supplanted by a violent fit of coughing. So -terrible were the paroxysms of this seizure that when they had at last -spent their fury the poor man was trembling like a leaf and toppled in -his chair as if about to swoon. Esther had hovered about over him from -the outset of the fit, and now looked up appealingly to Abner. The -farmer rose, walked down the table-side, and gathered Jee’s fragile form -up under one big engirdling arm. Then, as the girl hastily dragged forth -the tick and blankets again and spread them into the rough semblance of -a bed, Abner half led, half carried the cooper over and gently laid him -down thereon. Together they fixed up some sort of pillow for him with -hay under the blanket, and piled him snugly over with quilts and my -comfortable. - -“There--you’ll be better layin’ down,” said Abner, soothingly. Hagadorn -closed his eyes wearily and made no answer. They left him after a minute -or two and returned to the table. - -The rest of the breakfast was finished almost in silence. Every once in -a while Abner and Esther would exchange looks, his gravely kind, hers -gratefully contented, and these seemed really to render speech needless. -For my own part, I foresaw with some degree of depression that there -would soon be no chance whatever of my securing attention in the _rôle_ -of an invalid, at least in this part of the barn. - -Perhaps, however, they might welcome me in the kitchen part, as a sort -of home-product rival to the sick cooper. I rose and walked languidly -out into M’rye’s domain. But the two women were occupied with a furious -scrubbing of rescued pans for the morning’s milk, and they allowed me -to sit feebly down on the wood-box behind the stove without so much as a -glance of sympathy. - -By and by we heard one of the great front doors rolled back on its -shrieking wheels and then shut to again. Some one had entered, and in -a moment there came some strange, inarticulate sounds of voices which -showed that the arrival had created a commotion. M’rye lifted her head, -and I shall never forget the wild, expectant flashing of her black eyes -in that moment of suspense. - -“Come in here, mother!” we heard Abner’s deep voice call out from beyond -the democrat wagon. “Here’s somebody wants to see you!” - -M’rye swiftly wiped her hands on her apron and glided rather than walked -toward the forward end of the barn. Janey Wilcox and I followed close -upon her heels, dodging together under the wagon-pole, and emerging, -breathless and wild with curiosity, on the fringe of an excited group. - -In the centre of this group, standing with a satisfied smile on his -face, his general appearance considerably the worse for wear, but in -demeanor, to quote M’rye’s subsequent phrase, “as cool as Cuffy,” was Ni -Hagadorn. - - - - -CHAPTER XIV--FINIS - -HE’S all right; you can look for him here right along now, any day; he -_was_ hurt a leetle, but he’s as peart an’ chipper now as a blue-jay on -a hick’ry limb; yes, he’s a-comin’ right smack home!” - -This was the gist of the assurances which Ni vouchsafed to the first -rush of eager questions--to his sister, and M’rye, and Janey Wilcox. - -Abner had held a little aloof, to give the weaker sex a chance. Now he -reasserted himself once more: “Stan’ back, now, and give the young man -breathin’ room. Janey, hand a chair for’ard--that’s it. Now set ye down, -Ni, an’ take your own time, an’ tell us all about it. So you reely found -him, eh?” - -“Pshaw! there ain’t anything to that,” expostulated Ni, seating himself -with nonchalance, and tilting back his chair. “_That_ was easy as -rollin’ off a log. But what’s the matter _here?_ That’s what knocks me. -We--that is to say, I--come up on a freight train to a ways beyond Juno -Junction, an’ got the conductor to slow up and let me drop off, an’ -footed it over the hill. It was jest about broad daylight when I turned -the divide. Then I began lookin’ for your house, an’ I’m lookin’ for it -still. There’s a hole out there, full o’ snow an’ smoke, but nary a -house. How’d it happen?” - -“‘Lection bonfire--high wind--woodshed must ‘a’ caught,” replied Abner, -sententiously. “So you reely got down South, eh?” - -“An’ Siss here, too,” commented Ni, with provoking disregard for the -farmer’s suggestions; “a reg’lar family party. An’, hello!” - -His roving eye had fallen upon the recumbent form on the made-up bed, -under the muffling blankets, and he lifted his sandy wisps of eyebrows -in inquiry. - -“Sh! It’s father,” explained Esther. “He isn’t feeling very well. I -think he’s asleep.” - -The boy’s freckled, whimsical face melted upon reflection into a -distinct grin. “Why,” he said, “you’ve been havin’ a reg’lar old -love-feast up here. I guess it was _that_ that set the house on fire! -An’ speakin’ o’ feasts, if you’ve got a mouthful o’ somethin’ to eat -handy--” - -The women were off like a shot to the impromptu larder at the far end of -the barn. - -“Well, thin,” put in Hurley, taking advantage of their absence, “an’ had -ye the luck to see anny rale fightin’?” - -“Never mind that,” said Abner; “when he gits around to it he’ll tell us -everything. But, fust of all--why, he knows what I want to hear about.” - -“Why, the last time I talked with you, Abner--” Ni began, squinting up -one of his eyes and giving a quaint drawl to his words. - -“That’s a good while ago,” said the farmer, quietly. - -“Things have took a change, eh?” inquired Ni. - -“That’s neither here nor there,” replied Abner, somewhat testily. “You -oughtn’t to need so dummed much explainin’. I’ve told you what I want -specially to hear. An’ that’s what we all want to hear.” - -When the women had returned, and Ni, with much deliberation, had filled -both hands with selected eatables, the recital at last got under way. -It progress was blocked from time to time by sheer force of tantalizing -perversity on the part of the narrator, and it suffered steadily from -the incidental hitches of mastication; but such as it was we listened -to it with all our ears, sitting or standing about, and keeping our eyes -intently upon the freckled young hero. - -“It wasn’t so much of a job to git down there as I’d figured on,” Ni -said, between mouthfuls. “I got along on freight trains--once worked my -way a while on a hand-car--as far as Albany, an’ on down to New York on -a river-boat, cheap, an’ then, after foolin’ round a few days, I hitched -up with the Sanitary Commission folks, an’ got them to let me sail on -one o’ their boats round to ’Napolis. I thought I was goin’ to die -most o’ the voyage, but I didn’t, you see, an’ when I struck ’Napolis -I hung around Camp Parole there quite a spell, talkin’ with fellers -that’d bin pris’ners down in Richmond an’ got exchanged an’ sent North. -They said there was a whole slew of our fellers down there still that’d -been brought in after Antietam. They didn’t know none o’ their names, -but they said they’d all be sent North in time, in exchange for Johnny -Rebs that we’d captured. An’ so I waited round--” - -“You _might_ have written!” interrupted Esther, reproachfully. - -“What’d bin the good o’ writin’? I hadn’t anything to tell. Besides -writin’ letters is for girls. Well, one day a man come up from -Libby--that’s the prison at Richmond--an’ he said there _was_ a tall -feller there from York State, a farmer, an’ he died. He thought the name -was Birch, but it might’a’ been Beech--or Body-Maple, for that matter. I -s’pose you’d like to had me write _that_ home!” - -“No--oh, no!” murmured Esther, speaking the sense of all the company. - -“Well, then I waited some more, an’ kep’ on waitin’, an’ then waited -agin, until bimeby, one fine day, along comes Mr. Blue-jay himself. -There here was, stan’in’ up on the paddle-box with a face on him as -long as your arm, an’ I sung out, ‘Way there, Agrippa Hill!’ an’ he come -mighty nigh failin’ head over heels into the water. So then he come off, -an’ we shook han’s, an’ went up to the commissioners to see about his -exchange, an’--an’ as soon’s that’s fixed, an’ the papers drawn up all -correct, why, he’ll come home. An’ that’s all there is to it.” - -“And even _then_ you never wrote!” said Esther, plaintively. - -“Hold on a minute,” put in Abner. “You say he’s comin’ home. That -wouldn’t be unless he was disabled. They’d keep him to fight agin, till -his time was up. Come, now, tell the truth--he’s be’n hurt bad!” - -Ni shook his unkempt red head. “No, no,” he said. “This is how it was. -Fust he was fightin’ in a cornfield, an’ him an’ Bi Truax, they got -chased out, an’ lost their regiment, an’ got in with some other fellers, -and then they all waded a creek breast-high, an’ had to run up a long -stretch o’ slopin’ ploughed ground to capture a battery they was on top -o’ the knoll. But they didn’t see a regiment of sharp-shooters layin’ -hidden behind a rail-fence, an’ these fellers riz up all to once an’ -give it to ’em straight, an’ they wilted right there, an’ laid down, -an’ there they was after dusk when the rebs come out an’ started lookin’ -round for guns an’ blankets an’ prisoners. Most of ’em was dead, or -badly hurt, but they was a few who’d simply lain there in the hollow -because it’d have bin death to git up. An’ Jeff was one o’ _them_.” - -“You said yourself ’t he had been hurt--some,” interposed M’rye, with -snapping eyes. - -“Jest a scratch on his arm,” declared Ni. “Well, then they marched the -well ones back to the rear of the reb line, an’ there they jest skinned -’em of everything they had--watch an’ jack-knife an’ wallet an’ -everything--an’ put ’em to sleep on the bare ground. Next day they -started ’em out on the march toward Richmond, an’ after four or five -days o’ that, they got to a railroad, and there was cattle cars for -’em to ride the rest o’ the way in. An’ that’s how it was.” - -“No,” said Abner, sternly; “you haven’t told us. How badly is he hurt?” - -“Well,” replied Ni, “it was only a scratch, as I said, but it got worse -on that march, an’ I s’pose it wasn’t tended to anyways decently, an’ -so--an’ so--” - -M’rye had sprung to her feet and stood now drawn up to her full height, -with her sharp nose in air as if upon some strange scent, and her eyes -fairly glowing in eager excitement. All at once she made a bound past -us and ran to the doors, furiously digging her fingers in the crevice -between them, then, with a superb sweep of the shoulders, sending them -both rattling back on their wheels with a bang. - -“I knew it!” she screamed in triumph. - -We who looked out beheld M’rye’s black hair and brown calico dress -suddenly suffer a partial eclipse of pale blue, which for the moment -seemed in some way a part of the bright winter sky beyond. Then we saw -that it was a soldier who had his arm about M’rye, and his cap bent down -tenderly over the head she had laid on his shoulder. - -Our Jeff had come home. - -A general instinct rooted us to our places and kept us silent, the while -mother and son stood there in the broad open doorway. - -Then the two advanced toward us, M’rye breathing hard, and with tears -and smiles struggling together on her face under the shadow of a -wrathful frown. We noted nothing of Jeff’s appearance save that he had -grown a big yellow beard, and seemed to be smiling. It was the mother’s -distraught countenance at which we looked instead. - -She halted in front of Abner, and lifted the blue cape from Jeff’s left -shoulder, with an abrupt gesture. - -“Look there!” she said, hoarsely. “See what they’ve done to my boy!” - -We now saw that the left sleeve of Jeff’s army overcoat was empty and -hung pinned against his breast. On the instant we were all swarming -about him, shaking the hand that remained to him and striving against -one another in a babel of questions, comments, and expressions of -sympathy with his loss, satisfaction at his return. It seemed the most -natural thing in the world that he should kiss Esther Hagadorn, and that -Janey Wilcox should reach up on tiptoes and kiss him. When the Underwood -girl would have done the same, however, M’rye brusquely shouldered her -aside. - -So beside ourselves with excitement were we all, each in turn seeking to -get in a word edgewise, that no one noticed the approach and entrance of -a stranger, who paused just over the threshold of the barn and coughed -in a loud perfunctory way to attract our attention. I had to nudge Abner -twice before he turned from where he stood at Jeff’s side, with his hand -on the luckless shoulder, and surveyed the newcomer. - -The sun was shining so brightly on the snow outside, that it was not for -the moment easy to make out the identity of this shadowed figure. Abner -took a forward step or two before he recognized his visitor. It was -Squire Avery, the rich man of the Corners, and justice of the peace, who -had once even run for Congress. - -“How d’ do?” said Abner, shading his eyes with a massive hand. “Won’t -you step in?” - -The Squire moved forward a little and held forth his hand, which the -farmer took and shook doubtfully. We others were as silent now as the -grave, feeling this visit to be even stranger than all that had gone -before. - -“I drove up right after breakfast, Mr. Beech,” said the Squire, making -his accustomed slow delivery a trifle more pompous and circumspect than -usual, “to express to you the feeling of such neighbors as I have, in -this limited space of time, being able to foregather with. I believe, -sir, that I may speak for them all when I say that we regret, deplore, -and contemplate with indignation the outrage and injury to which certain -thoughtless elements of the community last night, sir, subjected you and -your household.” - -“It’s right neighborly of you, Square, to come an’ say so,” remarked -Abner. “Won’t you set down? You see, my son Jeff’s jest come home from -the war, an’ the house bein’ burnt, an’ so on, we’re rather upset for -the minute.” - -The Squire put on his spectacles and smiled with surprise at seeing -Jeff. He shook hands with him warmly, and spoke with what we felt to be -the right feeling about that missing arm; but he could not sit down, he -said. The cutter was waiting for him, and he must hurry back. - -“I am glad, however,” he added, “to have been the first, Mr. Beech, to -welcome your brave son back, and to express to you the hope, sir, that -with this additional link of sympathy between us, sir, bygones may be -allowed to become bygones.” - -“I don’t bear no ill will,” said Abner, guardedly. “I s’pose in the long -run folks act pooty close to about what they think is right. I’m willin’ -to give ’em that credit--the same as I take to myself. They ain’t been -much disposition to give _me_ that credit, but then, as our school-ma’am -here was a-sayin’ last night, people ’ve been a good deal worked up about -the war--havin’ them that’s close to ’em right down in the thick of -it--an’ I dessay it was natural enough they should git hot in the collar -about it. As I said afore, I don’t bear no ill will--though prob’ly I’m -entitled to.” - -The Squire shook hands with Abner again. “Your sentiments, Mr. Beech,” - he said, in his stateliest manner, “do credit alike to your heart and -your head. There is a feeling, sir, that this would be an auspicious -occasion for you to resume sending your milk to the cheese-factory.” - -Abner pondered the suggestion for a moment. “It would be handier,” he -said, slowly; “but, you know, I ain’t goin’ to eat no humble pie. That -Rod Bidwell was downright insultin’ to my man, an’ me too--” - -“It was all, I assure you, sir, an unfortunate misunderstanding,” - pursued the Squire, “and is now buried deep in oblivion. And it is -further suggested, that, when you have reached that stage of preparation -for your new house, if you will communicate with me, the neighbors -will be glad to come up and extend their assistance to you in what is -commonly known as a raising-bee. They will desire, I believe, to bring -with them their own provisions. And, moreover, Mr. Beech”--here the -Squire dropped his oratorical voice and stepped close to the -farmer--“if this thing has cramped you any, that is to say, if you find -yourself in need of--of--any accommodation--” - -“No, nothin’ o’ that sort,” said Abner. He stopped at that, and kept -silence for a little, with his head down and his gaze meditatively fixed -on the barn floor. At last he raised his face and spoke again, his deep -voice shaking a little in spite of itself. - -“What you’ve said, Square, an’ your comin’ here, has done me a lot o’ -good. It’s pooty nigh wuth bein’ burnt out for--to have this sort o’ -thing come \ on behind as an after-clap. Sometimes, I tell you, sir, -I’ve despaired o’ the republic. I admit it, though it’s to my shame. -I’ve said to myself that when American citizens, born an’ raised -right on the same hill-side, got to behavin’ to each other in such an -all-fired mean an’ cantankerous way, why, the hull blamed thing wasn’t -worth tryin’ to save. But you see I was wrong--I admit I was wrong. It -was jest a passin’ flurry--a kind o’ snow-squall in hayin’ time. All the -while, right down ’t the bottom, their hearts was sound an’ sweet as a -butternut. It fetches me--that does--it makes me prouder than ever I was -before in all my born days to be an American--yes, sir--that’s the way -I--I feel about it.” - -There were actually tears in the big farmer’s eyes, and he got out those -finishing words of his in fragmentary gulps. None of us had ever seen -him so affected before. - -After the Squire had shaken hands again and started off, Abner stood at -the open door, looking after him, then gazing in a contemplative general -way upon all out-doors. The vivid sunlight reflected up from the melting -snow made his face to shine as if from an inner radiance. He stood still -and looked across the yards with their piles of wet straw smoking in the -forenoon heat, and the black puddles eating into the snow as the thaw -went on; over the further prospect, made weirdly unfamiliar by the -disappearance of the big old farm-house; down the long broad sloping -hill-side with its winding road, its checkered irregular patches of -yellow stubble and stacked fodder, of deep umber ploughed land and warm -gray woodland, all pushing aside their premature mantle of sparkling -white, and the scattered homesteads and red barns beyond--and there was -in his eyes the far-away look of one who saw still other things. - -He turned at last and came in, walking over to where Jeff and Esther -stood hand in hand beside the bed on the floor. Old Jee Hagadorn was -sitting up now, and had exchanged some words with the couple. - -“Well, Brother Hagadorn,” said the farmer, “I hope you’re feelin’ -better.” - -“Yes, a good deal--B--Brother Beech, thank’ee,” replied the cooper, -slowly and with hesitation. - -Abner laid a fatherly hand on Esther’s shoulder and another on Jeff’s. A -smile began to steal over his big face, broadening the square which his -mouth cut down into his beard, and deepening the pleasant wrinkles about -his eyes. He called M’rye over to the group with beckoning nod of the -head. - -“It’s jest occurred to me, mother,” he said, with the mock gravity of -tone we once had known so well and of late had heard so little--“I -jest be’n thinkin’ we might’a’ killed two birds with one stun while the -Square was up here. He’s justice o’ the peace, you know--an’ they say -them kind o’ marriages turn out better ’n all the others.” - -“Go ’long with yeh!” said Ma’rye, vivaciously. But she too put a hand on -Esther’s other shoulder. - -The school-teacher nestled against M’rye’s side. “I tell you what,” she -said, softly, “if Jeff ever turns out to be half the man his father is, -I’ll just be prouder than my skin can hold.” - - - - -MARSENA - - - - -I - -Marsena Pulford, what time the village of Octavius knew him, was -a slender and tall man, apparently skirting upon the thirties, with -sloping shoulders and a romantic aspect. - -It was not alone his flowing black hair, and his broad shirt-collars -turned down after the ascertained manner of the British poets, which -stamped him in our humble minds as a living brother to “The Corsair,” - “The Last of the Suliotes,” and other heroic personages engraved in the -albums and keepsakes of the period. His face, with its darkling eyes -and distinguished features, conveyed wherever it went an impression -of proudly silent melancholy. In those days--that is, just before the -war--one could not look so convincingly and uniformly sad as Marsena did -without raising the general presumption of having been crossed in love. -We had a respectful feeling, in his case, that the lady ought to have -been named Iñez, or at the very least Oriana. - -Although he went to the Presbyterian Church with entire regularity, was -never seen in public save in a long-tailed black coat, and in the winter -wore gloves instead of mittens, the local conscience had always, I -think, sundry reservations about the moral character of his past. It -would not have been reckoned against him, then, that he was obviously -poor. We had not learned in those primitive times to measure people by -dollar-mark standards. Under ordinary conditions, too, the fact that -he came from New England--had indeed lived in Boston--must have counted -rather in his favor than otherwise. But it was known that he had been -an artist, a professional painter of pictures and portraits, and we -understood in Octavius that this involved acquaintanceship, if not even -familiarity, with all sorts of occult and deleterious phases of city -life. - -Our village held all vice, and especially the vice of other and larger -places, in stern reprobation. Yet, though it turned this matter of the -newcomer’s previous occupation over a good deal in its mind, Marsena -carried himself with such a gentle picturesqueness of subdued sorrow -that these suspicions were disarmed, or, at the worst, only added to the -fascinated interest with which Octavius watched his spare and solitary -figure upon its streets, and noted the progress of his efforts to find a -footing for himself in its social economy. - -It was taken for granted among us that he possessed a fine and -well-cultivated mind, to match that thoughtful countenance and that -dignified deportment. - -This assumption continued to hold its own in the face of a long series -of failures in the attempt to draw him out. Almost everybody who -was anybody at one time or another tried to tap Marsena’s mental -reservoirs--and all in vain. Beyond the barest commonplaces of -civil conversation he could, never be tempted. Once, indeed, he had -volunteered to the Rev. Mr. Bunce the statement that he regarded -Washington Allston as in several respects superior to Copley; but as -no one in Octavius knew who these men were, the remark did not help us -much. It was quoted frequently, however, as indicating the lofty and -recondite nature of the thoughts with which Mr. Pulford occupied his -intellect. As it became more apparent, too, that his reserve must be -the outgrowth of some crushing and incurable heart grief, people grew to -defer to it and to avoid vexing his silent moods with talk. - -Thus, when he had been a resident and neighbor for over two years, -though no one knew him at all well, the whole community regarded him -with kindly and even respectful emotions, and the girls in particular -felt that he was a distinct acquisition to the place. - -I have said that Marsena Pulford was poor. Hardly anybody in Octavius -ever knew to what pathetic depths his poverty during the second winter -descended. There was a period of several months, in sober truth, during -which he fed himself upon six or seven cents a day. As he was too proud -to dream of asking credit at the grocer’s and butcher’s, and walked -about more primly erect than ever, meantime, in his frock-coat and -gloves, no idea of these privations got abroad. And at the end of this -long evil winter there came a remarkable spring, which altered in a -violent way the fortunes of millions of people--among them Marsena. We -have to do with events somewhat subsequent to that even, and with the -period of Mr. Pulford’s prosperity. - -***** - -The last discredited strips of snow up in the ravines on the hill-sides -were melting away; the robins had come again, and were bustling busily -across between the willows, already in the leaf, and the budded elms; -men were going about the village streets without their overcoats, and -boys were telling exciting tales about the suckers in the creek; our old -friend Homer Sage had returned from his winter’s sojourn in the county -poorhouse at Thessaly, and could be seen daily sitting in the sunshine -on the broad stoop of the Excelsior Hotel. It was April of 1862. - -A whole year had gone by since that sudden and memorable turn in Marsena -Pulford’s luck. So far from there being signs now of a possible adverse -change, this new springtide brought such an increase of good fortune, -with its attendant responsibilities, that Marsena was unable to bear -the halcyon burden alone. He took in a partner to help him, and then the -firm jointly hired a boy. The partner painted a signboard to mark this -double event, in bold red letters of independent form upon a yellow -ground: - - PULFORD & SHULL. - - Empire State Portrait Athenæum and - - Studio. - - War Likenesses at Peace Prices. - -Marsena discouraged the idea of hanging this out on the street; and, as -a compromise, it was finally placed at the end of the operating-room, -where for years thereafter it served for the sitters to stare at when -their skulls had been clasped in the iron headrest and they had been -adjured to look pleasant. A more modest and conventional announcement -of the new firm’s existence was put outside, and Octavius accepted it as -proof that the liberal arts were at last established within its borders -on a firm and lucrative basis. - -The head of the firm was not much altered by this great wave of -prosperity. He had been drilled by adversity into such careful ways with -his wardrobe that he did not need to get any new clothes. Although the -villagers, always kindly, sought now with cordial effusiveness to -make him feel one of themselves, and although he accepted all their -invitations and showed himself at every public meeting in his capacity -as a representative and even prominent citizen, yet the heart of his -mystery remained unplucked. Marsena was too busy in these days to be -much upon the streets. When he did appear he still walked alone, slowly -and with an air of settled gloom. He saluted such passers-by as he knew -in stately silence. If they stopped him or joined him in his progress, -at the most he would talk sparingly of the weather and the roads. - -Neither at the fortnightly sociables of the Ladies’ Church Mite Society, -given in turn at the more important members’ homes, nor in the more -casual social assemblages of the place, did Marsena ever unbend. It -was not that he held himself aloof, as some others did, from the simple -amusements of the evening. He never shrank from bearing his part in -“pillow,” “clap in and clap out,” “post-office,” or in whatever other -game was to be played, and he went through the kissing penalties and -rewards involved without apparent aversion. It was also to be noted, in -fairness, that, if any one smiled at him full in the face, he instantly -smiled in response. But neither smile nor chaste salute served to lift -for even the fleeting instant that veil of reserve which hung over him. - -Those who thought that by having Marsena Pul-ford take their pictures -they would get on more intimate terms with him fell into grievous error. -He was more sententious and unapproachable in his studio, as he called -it, than anywhere else. In the old days, before the partnership, when -he did everything himself, his manner in the reception-room downstairs, -where he showed samples, gave the prices of frames, and took orders, -had no equal for formal frigidity--except his subsequent demeanor in -the operating-room upstairs. The girls used to declare that they always -emerged from the gallery with “cold shivers all over them.” This, -however, did not deter them from going again, repeatedly, after the -outbreak of the war had started up the universal notion of being -photographed. - -When the new partner came in, in this April of 1862, Marsena was able to -devote himself exclusively to the technical business of the camera and -the dark-room, on the second floor. He signalled this change by wearing -now every day an old russet-colored velveteen jacket, which we had never -seen before. This made him look even more romantically melancholy -and picturesque than ever, and revived something of the fascinating -curiosity as to his hidden past; but it did nothing toward thawing the -icebound shell which somehow came at every point between him and the -good-fellowship of the community. - -The partnership was scarcely a week old when something happened. The -new partner, standing behind the little show-case in the reception-room, -transacted some preliminary business with two customers who had come in. -Then, while the sound of their ascending footsteps was still to be heard -on the stairs, he hastily left his post and entered the little work-room -at the back of the counter. - -“You couldn’t guess in a baker’s dozen of tries who’s gone upstairs,” - he said to the boy. Without waiting for even one effort, he added: -“It’s the Parmalee girl, and Dwight Ransom’s with her, and he’s got a -Lootenant’s uniform on, and they’re goin’ to be took together!” - -“What of it?” asked the unimaginative boy. He was bending over a crock -of nitric acid, transferring from it one by one to a tub of water a lot -of spoiled glass plates. The sickening fumes from the jar, and the sting -of the acid on his cracked skin, still further diminished his interest -in contemporary sociology. “Well, what of it?” he repeated, sulkily. - -“Oh, I don’t know,” said the new partner, in a listless, disappointed -way. “It seemed kind o’ curious, that’s all. Holdin’ her head up as high -in the air as she does, you wouldn’t think she’d so much as look at an -ordinary fellow like Dwight Ransom.” - -“I suppose this is a free country,” remarked the boy, rising to rest his -back. - -“Oh, my, yes,” returned the other; “if she’s pleased, I’m quite -agreeable. And--I don’t know, too--I dare say she’s gettin’ pretty well -along. Maybe she thinks they ain’t any too much time to lose, and is -making a grab at what comes handiest. Still, I should ’a’ thought she -could ’a’ done better than Dwight. I worked with him for a spell once, -you know.” - -There seemed to be very few people with whom Newton Shull had not at one -time or another worked. Apparently there was no craft or calling which -he did not know something about. The old phrase, “Jack of all trades,” - must surely have been coined in prophecy for him. He had turned up in -Octavius originally, some years before, as the general manager of a -“Whaler’s Life on the Rolling Deep” show, which was specially adapted -for moral exhibitions in connection with church fairs. Calamity, -however, had long marked this enterprise for its own, and at our village -its career culminated under the auspices of a sheriff’s officer. The -boat, the harpoons, the panorama sheet and rollers, the whale’s jaw, the -music-box with its nautical tunes--these were sold and dispersed. Newton -Shull remained, and began work as a mender of clocks. Incidentally, he -cut out stencil-plates for farmers to label their cheese-boxes with, and -painted or gilded ornamental designs on chair-backs through perforated -paper patterns. For a time he was a maker of children’s sleds. In slack -seasons he got jobs to help the druggist, the tinsmith, the dentist, -or the Town Clerk, and was equally at home with each. He was one of -the founders of the Octavius Philharmonics, and offered to play any -instrument they liked, though his preference was for what he called the -bull fiddle. He spoke often of having travelled as a bandsman with a -circus. We boys believed that he was quite capable of riding a horse -bareback as well. - -When Marsena Pulford, then, decided that he must have some help, Newton -Shull was obviously the man. How the arrangement came to take the form -of a partnership was never explained, save on the conservative village -theory that Marsena must have reasoned that a partner would be safer -with the cash-box downstairs, while he was taking pictures upstairs, -than a mere hired man. More likely it grew out of their temperamental -affinity. Shull was also a man of grave and depressed moods (as, indeed, -is the case with all who play the bass viol), only his melancholy -differed from Marsena’s in being of a tirelessly garrulous character. -This was not always an advantage. When customers came in, in the -afternoon, it was his friendly impulse to engage them in conversation at -such length that frequently the light would fail altogether before -they got upstairs. He recognized this tendency as a fault, and manfully -combated it--leaving the reception-room with abruptness at the earliest -possible moment, and talking to the boy in the work-room instead. - -Mr. Shull was a short, round man, with a beard which was beginning to -show gray under the lip. His reception-room manners were urbane and -persuasive to a degree, and he particularly excelled in convincing -people that the portraits of themselves, which Marsena had sent down -to him in the dummy to be dried and varnished, and which they hated -vehemently at first sight, were really unique and precious works of art. -He had also much success in inducing country folks to despise the cheap -ferrotype which they had intended to have made, and to venture upon the -costlier ambrotype, daguerreotype, or even photograph instead. If they -did not go away with a family album or an assortment of frames that -would come in handy as well, it was no fault of his. - -He made these frames himself, on a bench which he had fitted up in the -work-room. Here he constructed show-cases, too, cut out mats and mounts, -and did many other things as adjuncts to the business, which honest -Marsena had never dreamed of. - -“Yes,” he went on now, “I carried a chain for Dwight the best part o’ -one whole summer, when he was layin’ levels for that Nedahma Valley -Railroad they were figurin’ on buildin’. Guess they ruther let him -in over that job--though he paid me fair enough. It ain’t much of a -business, that surveyin’. You spend about half your time in findin’ out -for people the way they could do things if they only had the money to do -’em, and the other half in settlin’ miserable farmers’ squabbles about -the boundaries of their land. You’ve got to pay a man day’s wages for -totin’ round your chain and axe and stakes--and, as like as not, you -never get even that money back, let alone any pay for yourself. I know -something about a good many trades, and I say surveyin’ is pretty nigh -the poorest of ’em all.” - -“George Washington was a surveyor,” commented the boy, stooping down to -his task once more. - -“Yes,” admitted Mr. Shull; “so he was, for a fact. But then he had -influence enough to get government jobs. I don’t say there ain’t money -in that. If Dwight, now, could get a berth on the canal, say, it ’ud -be a horse of another color. They say, there’s some places there that -pay as much as $3 a day. That’s how George Washington got his start, -and, besides, he owned his own house and lot to begin with. But you’ll -take notice that he dropped surveyin’ like a hot potato the minute there -was any soldierin’ to do. He knew which side _his_ bread was buttered -on!” - -“Well,” said the boy, slapping the last plates sharply into the tub, -“that’s just what Dwight’s doin’ too, ain’t it?” - -“Yes,” Mr. Shull conceded; “but it ain’t the same thing. You won’t find -Dwight Ransom get-tin’ to be general, or much of anything else. He’s a -nice fellow enough, in his way, of course; but, somehow, after it’s all -said and done, there ain’t much to him. I always sort o’ felt, when I -was out with him, that by good rights I ought to be working the level -and him hammerin’ in the stakes.” - -The boy sniffed audibly as he bore away the acid-jar. - -Mr. Shull went over to the bench, and took up a chisel with a meditative -air. After a moment he lifted his head and listened, with aroused -interest written all over his face. - -There had been audible from the floor above, at intervals, the customary -noises of the camera being wheeled about to different points under -the skylight. There came echoing downward now quite other and most -unfamiliar sounds--the clatter of animated, even gay, conversation, -punctuated by frank outbursts of laughter. Newton Shull could hardly -believe his ears: but they certainly did tell him that there were three -parties to that merriment overhead. It was so strange that he laid aside -the chisel, and tiptoed out into the reception-room, with a notion of -listening at the stair door. Then he even more hurriedly ran back again. -They were coming downstairs. - -It might have been a whole wedding-party that trooped down the -resounding stairway, the voices rising above the clump of Dwight’s -artillery boots and sword on step after step, and overflowed into the -stuffy little reception-room with a cheerful tumult of babble. The new -partner and the boy looked at each other, then directed a joint stare of -bewilderment toward the door. - -Julia Parmalee had pushed her way behind the show-case, and stood in -the entrance to the workroom, peering about her with an affectation of -excited curiosity which she may have thought pretty and playful, but -which the boy, at least, held to be absurd. - -She had been talking thirteen to the dozen all the time. “Oh, I really -must see everything!” she rattled on now. “If I could be trusted alone -in the dark-room with you, Mr. Pulford, I surely may be allowed to -explore all these minor mysteries. Oh, I see,” she added, glancing -round, and incidentally looking quite through Mr. Shull and the boy, as -if they had been transparent: “here’s where the frames and the washing -are done. How interesting!” - -What really was interesting was the face of Marsena Pulford, discernible -in the shadow over her shoulder. No one in Octavius had ever seen such a -beaming smile on his saturnine countenance before. - - - - -II - -Next to the War, the chief topic of interest and conversation in -Octavius at this time was easily Miss Julia Parmalee. - -To begin with, her family had for two generations or more been the most -important family in the village. When Lafayette stopped here to receive -an address of welcome, on his tour through the State in 1825, it was a -Parmalee who read that address, and who also, as tradition runs, made on -his own account several remarks to the hero in the French language, all -of which were understood. The elder son of this man has a secure place -in history. He is the Judge Parmalee whose portrait hangs in the Court -House, and whose learned work on “The Treaties of the Tuscarora Nation,” - handsomely bound in morocco, used to have a place of honor on the parlor -table of every well-to-do and cultured Octavius home. - -This Judge was a banker, too, and did pretty well for himself in a -number of other commercial paths. He it was who built the big Parmalee -house, with a stone wall in front and the great garden and orchard -stretching back to the next street, and the buff-colored statues on -either side of the gravelled walk, where the Second National Dearborn -County Bank now stands. The Judge had no children, and, on his widow’s -death, the property went to his much younger brother Charles, who, from -having been as a stripling on some forgotten Governor’s staff, bore -through life the title of Colonel in the local speech. - -This Colonel Parmalee had a certain distinction, too, though not of a -martial character. His home was in New York, and for many years Octavius -never laid eyes on him. He was understood to occupy a respected place -among American men of letters, though exactly what he wrote did not come -to our knowledge. It was said that he had been at Brook Farm. I have not -been able to find any one who remembers him there, but the report is of -use as showing the impression of superior intellectual force which he -created, even by hearsay, in his native village. When he finally came -back to us, to play his part as the head of the Parmalee house, we saw -at intervals, when the sun was warm and the sidewalks were dry, the lean -and bent figure of an old man, with a very yellow face and a sharp-edged -brown wig, moving feebly about with a thick gray shawl over his -shoulders. His housekeeper was an elderly maiden cousin, who seemed -never to come out at all, whether the sun was shining or not. - -There were three or four of the Colonel’s daughters--all tall, well-made -girls, with strikingly dark skins, and what we took to be gypsyish -faces. Their appearance certainly bore out the rumor that their mother -had been an opera-singer--some said an Italian, others a lady of -Louisiana Creole extraction. No information, except that she was dead, -ever came to hand about this person. Her daughters, however, were very -much in evidence. They seemed always to wear white dresses, and they -were always to be seen somewhere, either on their lawn playing croquet, -or in the streets, or at the windows of their house. The consciousness -of their existence pervaded the whole village from morning till night. -To watch their goings and comings, and to speculate upon the identity -and business of the friends from strange parts who were continually -arriving to visit them, grew to be quite the standing occupation of the -idler portion of the community. - -Before such of our young people as naturally took the lead in these -matters had had time to decide how best to utilize for the general good -this influx of beauty, wealth, and ancestral dignity, the village was -startled by an unlooked-for occurrence. A red carpet was spread one -forenoon from the curb to the doorway of the Episcopal church: the -old-fashioned Parmalee carriage turned out, with its driver clasping -white reins in white cotton gloves; we had a confused glimpse of the -dark Parmalee girls with bouquets in their hands, and dressed rather -more in white than usual: and then astonished Octavius learned that -two of them had been married, right there under its very eyes, and had -departed with their husbands. It gave an angry twist to the discovery to -find that the bridegrooms were both strangers, presumably from New York. - -This episode had the figurative effect of doubling or trebling the -height of that stone wall which stood between the Parmalee place and the -public. Such budding hopes and projects of intimacy as our villagers -may have entertained toward these polished newcomers fell nipped and -lifeless on the stroke. Shortly afterward--that is to say, in the autumn -of 1860--the family went away, and the big house was shut up. News came -in time that the Colonel was dead: something was said about another -daughter’s marriage; then the war broke out, and gave us other things to -think of. We forgot all about the Parmalees. - -It must have been in the last weeks of 1861 that our vagrant attention -was recalled to the subject by the appearance in the village of an -elderly married couple of servants, who took up their quarters in the -long empty mansion, and began fitting it once more for habitation. They -set all the chimneys smoking, shovelled the garden paths clear of snow, -laid in huge supplies of firewood, vegetables, and the like, and turned -the whole place inside out in a vigorous convulsion of housecleaning. -Their preparations were on such a bold, large scale that we assumed the -property must have passed to some voluminous collateral branch of the -family, hitherto unknown to us. It came indeed to be stated among us, -with an air of certainty, that a remote relation named Amos or Erasmus -Parmalee, with eight or more children and a numerous adult household, -was coming to live there. The legend of this wholly mythical personage -had nearly a fortnight’s vogue, and reached a point of distinctness -where we clearly understood that the coming stranger was a violent -secessionist. This seemed to open up a troubled and sinister prospect -before loyal Octavius, and there was a good deal of plain talk in the -barroom of the Excelsior Hotel as to how this impending crisis should be -met. - -It was just after New Year’s that our suspense was ended. The new -Parmalees came, and Octavius noted with a sort of disappointed surprise -that they turned out to be merely a shorn and trivial remnant of the old -Parmalees. They were in fact only a couple of women--the elderly maiden -cousin who had presided before over the Colonel’s household, and the -youngest of his daughters, by name Miss Julia. What was more, word -was now passed round upon authority that these were the sole remaining -members of the family--that there never had been any Amos or Erasmus -Parmalee at all. - -The discovery cast the more heroic of our village home-guards into a -temporary depression. It could hardly have been otherwise, for here were -all their fine and strong resolves, their publicly registered vows -about scowling at the odious Southern sympathizer in the street, about -a “horning” party outside his house at night, about, perhaps, actually -riding him on a rail--all brought to nothing. A less earnest body of men -might have suspected in the situation some elements of the ridiculous. -They let themselves down gently, however, and with a certain dignified -sense of consolation that they had, at all events, shown unmistakably -how they would have dealt with Amos or Erasmus Parmalee if there had -been such a man, and he had moved to Octavius and had ventured to flaunt -his rebel sentiments in their outraged faces. - -The village, as a whole, consoled itself on more tangible grounds. It -has been stated that Miss Julia Parmalee arrived at the family homestead -in early January. Before April had brought the buds and birds, this -young woman had become President of the St. Mark’s Episcopal Ladies’ Aid -Society; had organized a local branch of the Sanitary Commission, and -assumed active control of all its executive and clerical functions; -had committed the principal people of the community to holding a grand -festival and fair in May for the Field Hospital and Nurse Fund; had -exhibited in the chief store window on Main Street a crayon portrait of -her late father, and four water-color drawings of European scenery, all -her own handiwork; had published over her signature, in the Thessaly -_Banner of Liberty_, an original and spirited poem on “Pale Columbia, -Shriek to Arms!” which no one could read without patriotic thrills; and -had been reported, on more or less warrant of appearances, to be engaged -to four different young men of the place. Truly a remarkable young -woman! - -We were only able in a dim kind of way to identify her with one of -the group of girls in white dresses whom the village had stared at and -studied from a distance two years before. There was no mystery about -it, however: she was the youngest of them. They had all looked so much -alike, with their precocious growth, their olive skins and foreign -features, that we were quite surprised to find now that this one, -regarded by herself, must be a great deal younger than the others. -Perhaps it was only our rustic shyness which had imputed to the -sisterhood, in that earlier experience, the hauteur and icy reserve of -the rich and exclusive. We recognized now that if the others were at all -like Julia, we had made an absurd mistake. It was impossible that any -one could be freer from arrogance or pretence than Octavius found her -to be. There were some, indeed, who deemed her emancipation almost too -complete. - -Some there were, too, who denied that she was beautiful, or even very -good-looking. There is an old daguerreotype of her as she was in those -days--or rather as she seemed to be to the unskilled sunbeams of the -sixties--which gives these censorious people the lie direct. It is true -that her hair is confined in a net at the sides and drawn stiffly across -her temples from the parting. The full throat rises sheer from a flat -horizon of striped dress goods, and is offered no relief whatever by the -wide falling-away collar of coarse lace. And oh! the strangeness of that -frock! The shoulder seams are to be looked for half-way down the upper -arm, the sleeves swell themselves out into shapeless bags, the waist -front might be the cover of a chair, of a guitar, of the documents in -a corporation suit--of anything under the sun rather than the form of -a charming girl. Yet, when you look at this thin old picture, all the -same, you feel that you understand how it was that Julia Parmalee took -the shine out of all the other girls in Octavius. - -This is the likeness of her which always seemed to me the best, but -Marsena Pulford made a great many others as well. When you reflect, -indeed, that his output of portraits of Julia Parmalee was limited in -time to the two months of April and May, their number suggests that he -could hardly have done anything else the while. - -The first of this large series of pictures was the one which Marsena -liked least. It is true that Julia looked well in it, standing erect, -with a proud, fine backward tilt to her dark face and a delicately -formed white hand resting gracefully on the back of a chair. But it -happened that in that chair was seated Lieut. Dwight Ransom, all spick -and span in his new uniform, with his big gauntlets and sword hilt -brought prominently forward, and with a kind of fatuous smile on his -ruddy face, as if he felt the presence of those fair fingers on the -chair-back, so teasingly close to his shoulder-strap. - -Marsena, in truth, had a strong impulse to run a destroying thumbnail -over the seated figure on this plate, when the action of the developer -began to reveal its outlines under the faint yellow light in the -dark-room. Of all the myriad pictures he had washed and drained and -nursed in their wet growth over this tank, no other had ever stirred up -in his breast such a swift and sharp hostility. He lavished the deadly -cyanide upon that portion of the plate, too, with grim unction, and -noted the results with a scornful curl on his lip. Like his partner -downstairs, he was wondering what on earth possessed Miss Parmalee to -take up with a Dwight Ransom. - -The frown was still on his brow when he opened the dark-room door. Then -he started back, flushed red, and labored at an embarrassed smile. Miss -Parmalee had left her place, and stood right in front of him, so near -that he almost ran against her. She beamed confidently and reassuringly -upon him. - -“Oh, I want to come in and see you do all that,” she exclaimed, with -vivacity. “It didn’t occur to me till after you’d shut the door, or I’d -have asked to come in with you. I have the greatest curiosity about -all these matters. Oh, it is all done? That’s too bad! But you can -make another one--and that I can see from the beginning. You know, I’m -something of an artist myself; I’ve taken lessons for years--and this -all interests me so much! No, Lieutenant!”--she called out from where -she was standing just inside the open door, at sound of her companion’s -rising--“you stay where you are! There’s going to be another, and it’s -such trouble to get you posed properly. Try and keep exactly as you -were!” - -Thus it happened that she stood very close to Marsena, as he took out -another plate, flooded it with the sweet-smelling, pungent collodion, -and, with furtive precautions against the light, lowered it down into -the silver bath. Then he had to shut the door, and she was still there -just beside him. He heard himself pretending to explain the processes -of the films to her, but his mind was concentrated instead upon a -suggestion of perfume which she had brought into the reeking little -cupboard of a room, and which mingled languorously with the scents -of ether and creosote in the air. He had known her by sight for but a -couple of months; he had been introduced to her only a week or so ago, -and that in the most casual way; yet, strange enough, he could feel his -hand trembling as it perfunctorily moved the plate dipper up and down in -the bath. - -A gentle voice fell upon the darkness. “Do you know, Mr. Pulford,” it -murmured, “I felt sure that you were an artist, the very first time I -saw you.” - -Marsena heaved a long sigh--a sigh with a tremulous catch in it, as -where sorrow and sweet solace should meet. “I did start out to be one,” - he answered, “but I--I never amounted to anything at it. I tried for -years, but I wasn’t any good. I had to give it up--at last--and take to -this instead.” - -He lifted the plate with caution, bent to look obliquely across its -surface, and lowered it again. Then all at once he turned abruptly and -faced her. They were so close to each other that even in the obscure -gloom she caught the sudden flash of resolution in his eyes. - -“I’ll tell you what I never told any other living soul,” he said, -beginning with husky eagerness, but lapsing now into grave deliberation -of emphasis: “I hate--this--like pizen!” - -In the silence which followed, Marsena mechanically took the plate from -the bath, fastened it in the holder, and stepped to the door. Then he -halted, to prolong for one little instant this tender spell of magic -which had stolen over him. Here, in the close darkness beside him, was -a sorceress, a siren, who had at a glance read his sore heart’s deepest -secret--at a word drawn the confession of his maimed and embittered -pride. It was like being shut up with an angel, who was also a beautiful -woman. Oh, the wonder of it! Broad sunlit landscapes with Italian skies -seemed to be forming themselves before his mind’s eye; his soul sang -songs within him. He very nearly dropped the plate-holder. - -The soft, hovering, half touch of a hand upon his arm, the cool, restful -tones of the voice in the darkness, came to complete the witchery. - -“I know,” she said, “I can sympathize with you. I also had my dreams, my -aspirations. But you are wrong to think that you have failed. Why, this -beautiful work of yours, it all is Art--pure Art. No person who really -knows could look at it and not see that. No, Mr. Pulford, you do -yourself an injustice; believe me, you do. Why, you couldn’t help being -an artist if you tried; it’s born in you. It shows in everything you do. -I saw it from the very first.” - -The unmistakable sound of Dwight Ransom’s large artillery boots moving -on the floor outside intervened here, and Marsena hurriedly opened the -door. The Lieutenant glanced with good-natured raillery at the couple -who stood revealed, blinking in the sharp light. - -“One of my legs got asleep,” he remarked, by way of explanation, “so I -had to get up and stamp around. I began to think,” he added, “that you -folks were going to set up housekeeping in there, and not come out any -more at all.” - -“Don’t be vulgar, if you please,” said Julia Par-malee, with a dash of -asperity in what purported to be a bantering tone. “We were talking of -matters quite beyond you--of Art, if you desire to know. Mr. Pulford and -I discover that we have a great many opinions and sentiments about Art -in common. It is a feeling that no one can understand unless they have -it.” - -“It’s the same with getting one’s leg asleep,” said Dwight, “quite the -same, I assure you;” and then came the laughter which Newton Shull heard -downstairs. - - - - -III - -A DAY or two later Battery G left Octavius for the seat of war. - -It was not nearly so imposing an event as a good many others which had -stirred the community during the previous twelve months. There were -already two regiments in the field recruited from our end of Dearborn -County, and in these at least six or seven companies were made up wholly -of Octavius men. There had been big crowds, with speeches and music by -the band, to see them off at the old depot. - -When they returned, their short term of service having expired, there -were still more fervent demonstrations, to which zest was added by -the knowledge that they were all to enlist again, and then we shortly -celebrated their second departure. Some there were who returned in mute -and cold finality--term of enlistment and life alike cut short--and -these were borne through our streets with sombre martial pageantry, the -long wail of the funeral march reaching out to include the whole valley -side in its note of lamentation. Besides all this, hardly a week passed -that those of us who hung about the station could not see a train full -of troops on their way to or from the South. A year of these experiences -had left us seasoned veterans in sightseeing, by no means to be -fluttered by trifles. - -As a matter of fact, the village did not take Battery G very seriously. -To begin with, it mustered only some dozen men, at least so far as our -local contribution went, and there was a feeling that we couldn’t be -expected to go much out of our way for such a paltry number. Then, -again, an artillery force was somehow out of joint with our notion of -what Octavius should do to help suppress the Rebellion. Infantrymen with -muskets we could all understand--could all be, if necessary. Many of the -farmer boys round about, too, made good cavalrymen, because they knew -both how to ride and how to groom a horse. But in the name of all that -was mysterious, why artillerymen? There had never been a cannon within -fifty miles of Octavius; that is, since the Revolution. Certainly none -of our citizens had the least idea how to fire one off. These enlisted -men of Battery G were no better posted than the rest; it would take them -a three days’ journey to reach the point where, for the first time, they -were to see their strange weapon of warfare. This seemed to us rather -foolish. - -Moreover, there was a government proclamation just out, it was said, -discontinuing further enlistments and disbanding the recruiting offices -scattered over the North. This appeared to imply that the war was about -over, or at least that they had more soldiers already than they knew -what to do with. There were some who questioned whether, under these -circumstances, it was worth while for Battery G to go at all. - -But go it did, and at the last moment quite a throng of people found -themselves gathered at the station to say good-by. A good many of these -were the relations and friends of the dozen ordinary recruits, who would -not even get their uniforms and swords till they reached Tecumseh. But -the larger portion, I should think, had come on account of Lieutenant -Ransom. - -Dwight was hail-fellow-well-met with more people within a radius of -twenty miles or so, probably, than any other man in the district. He was -a goodlooking young man, rather stocky in build and deeply sunburned. -Through the decent months of the year he was always out of doors, either -tramping over the country with a level over his shoulder, or improving -the days with a shotgun or fishpole. At these seasons he was generally -to be found of an evening at the barber’s shop, where he told more new -stories than any one else. When winter came his chief work was in his -office, drawing maps and plans. He let his beard grow then, and spent -his leisure for the most part playing checkers at the Excelsior Hotel. - -His habitual free-and-easy dress and amiable laxity of manners tended to -obscure in the village mind the facts that he came from one of the best -families of the section, that he had been through college, and that he -had some means of his own. His mother and sisters were very respectable -people indeed, and had one of the most expensive pews in the Episcopal -church. It was not observed, however, that Dwight ever accompanied them -thither or that he devoted much of his time to their society at home. -It began to be remarked, here and there, that it was getting to be about -time for Dwight Ransom to steady down, if he was ever going to. Although -everybody liked him and was glad to see him about, an impression was -gradually shaping itself that he never would amount to much. - -All at once Dwight staggered the public consciousness by putting on his -best clothes one Sunday and going with his folks to church. Those who -saw him on the way there could not make it out at all, except on -the hypothesis that there had been a death in the family. Those who -encountered him upon his return from the sacred edifice, however, -found a clue to the mystery ready made. He was walking home with Julia -Parmalee. - -There were others whose passionate desire it was to walk home with -Julia. They had been enlivening Octavius with public displays of their -rivalry for something like two months when Dwight appeared on the scene -as a competitor. Easy-going as he was in ordinary matters, he revealed -himself now to be a hustler in the Courts of love. It took him but a -single day to drive the teller of the bank from the field. The Principal -of the Seminary, a rising young lawyer, and the head bookkeeper at the -freight-house, severally went by the board within a fortnight. - -There remained old Dr. Conger’s son Emory, who was of a tougher fibre -and gave Dwight several added weeks of combat. He enjoyed the advantage -of having nothing whatever to do. He possessed, moreover, a remarkably -varied wardrobe and white hands, and loomed unique among the males of -our town in his ability to play on the piano. With such aids a young -man may go far in a quiet neighborhood, and for a time Emory Conger -certainly seemed to be holding his own, if not more. His discomfiture, -when it came, was dramatic in its swift completeness. One forenoon we -saw Dwight on the street in a new and resplendent officer’s uniform, -and learned that he had been commissioned to raise a battery. That -very evening the doctor’s son left town, and the news went round that -Lieutenant Ransom was engaged to Miss Parmalee. - -An impression prevailed that Dwight would not have objected to let the -matter rest there. He had gained his point, and might well regard the -battery and the war itself as things which had served their purpose -and could now be dispensed with. No one would have blamed him much for -feeling that way about it. - -But this was not Julia’s view. She adopted the battery for her own while -it was still little more than a name, and swept it forward with such -a swirling rush of enthusiasm that the men were all enlisted, the -organization settled, and the date of departure for the front sternly -fastened, before anybody could lay a hand to the brakes. Her St. Mark’s -Ladies’ Aid Society presented Dwight with a sword. Her branch of the -Sanitary Commission voted to entertain the battery with a hot meal in -the depot yard before it took the train. We have seen how she went and -had herself photographed standing proudly behind the belted and martial -Dwight. After these things it was impossible for Battery G to back out. - -The artillerymen had a bright blue sky and a warm sunlit noontide for -their departure. Even the most cynical of those who had come to see them -off yielded toward the end to the genial influence of the weather and -the impulse of good-fellowship, and joined in the handshaking at the car -windows, and in the volley of cheers which were raised as the train drew -slowly out of the yard. - -At this moment the ladies of the Sanitary Commission had to bestir -themselves to save the remnant of oranges and sandwiches on their -tables from the swooping raid of the youth of Octavius, and, what with -administering cuffs and shakings, and keeping their garments out of -the way of coffee-cups overturned in the scramble, had no time to watch -Julia Parmalee. - -The men gathered in the yard kept her steadily in view, however, as she -stood prominently in front of the throng, on the top of a baggage truck, -and waved her handkerchief until the train had dwindled into nothingness -down the valley. These observers had an eye also on three young men -who had got as near this truck as possible. Interest in Dwight and -his battery was already giving place to curiosity as to which of these -three--the bank-teller, the freight-house clerk, or the rising young -lawyer--would win the chance of helping Julia down off her perch. - -No one was prepared for what really happened. - -Miss Parmalee turned and looked thoughtfully, one might say -abstractedly, about her. Somehow she seemed not to see any of the hands -which were eagerly uplifted toward her. Instead, her musing gaze roved -lightly over the predatory scuffle among the tables, over the ancient -depot building, over the assembled throng of citizens in the background, -then wandered nearer, with the pretty inconsequence of a butterfly’s -flight. Of course it was the farewell to Dwight which had left that -soft, rosy flush in her dark, round cheeks. The glance that she was -sending idly fluttering here and there did not seem so obviously -connected with the Lieutenant. Of a sudden it halted and went into a -smile. - -“Oh, Mr. Pulford! May I trouble you?” she said in very distinct tones, -bending forward over the edge of the truck, and holding forth two white -and most shapely hands. - -Marsena was standing fully six feet away. Like the others, he had been -looking at Miss Parmalee, but with no hint of expectation in his eyes. -This abrupt summons seemed to surprise him even more than it did the -crowd. He started, changed color, fixed a wistful, almost pleading stare -upon the sunlit vacancy just above the head of the enchantress, and -confusedly fumbled with his glove tips, as if to make bare his hands for -this great function. Then, straightening himself, he slowly moved toward -her like one in a trance. - -The rivals edged out of Marsena’s way in dum-founded silence, as if he -had been walking in his sleep, and waking were dangerous. He came up, -made a formal bow, and lifted his gloved hands in chivalrous pretence -of guiding the graceful little jump which brought Miss Parmalee to -the ground--all with a pale, motionless face upon which shone a solemn -ecstasy. - -It was Marsena’s habit, when out of doors, to carry his right hand in -the breast of his frock-coat. As he made an angle of his elbow now, from -sheer force of custom, Julia promptly took the movement as a proffer -of physical support, and availed herself of it. Marsena felt himself -thrilling from top to toe at the touch of her hand upon his sleeve. If -there rose in his mind an awkward consciousness that this sort of -thing was unusual in Octavius by daylight, the embarrassment was only -momentary. He held himself proudly erect, and marched out of the depot -yard with Miss Parmalee on his arm. - -As Homer Sage remarked that evening on the stoop of the Excelsior Hotel, -this event made the departure of Battery G seem by comparison very small -potatoes indeed. - -It was impossible for the twain not to realize that everybody was -looking at them, as they made their way up the shady side of the main -street. But there is another language of the hands than that taught -in deaf-mute schools, and Julia’s hand seemed to tell Marsena’s arm -distinctly that she didn’t care a bit. As for him, after that first -nervous minute or two, the experience was all joy--joy so profound and -overwhelming that he could only ponder it in dazzled silence. It is true -that Julia was talking--rattling on with sprightly volubility about all -sorts of things--but to Marsena her remarks no more invited answers -than does so much enthralling music. When she stopped for a breath he -did not remember what she had been saying. He only knew how he felt. - -“I wish you’d come straight to the gallery with me,” he said; “I’d like -first-rate to make a real picture of you--by yourself.” - -***** - -“Well, I swow!” remarked Mr. Newton Shull, along in the later afternoon; -“I didn’t expect we’d make our salt to-day, with Marsena away pretty -near the whole forenoon, and all the folks down to the depot, and here -it turns out way the best day we’ve had yet. Actually had to send people -away!” - -“Guess that didn’t worry him much,” commented the boy, from where he sat -on the work-bench swinging his legs in idleness. - -Mr. Shull nodded his head suggestively. “No, I dare say not,” he said. -“I kind o’ begrudge not bein’ an operator myself, when such setters as -that come in. She must have been up there a full two hours--them two -all by themselves--and the countrymen loafin’ around out in the -reception-room there, stompin’ their feet and grindin’ their teeth, jest -tired to death o’ waitin’. It went agin my grain to tell them last two -lots they’d have to come some other day; but--I dunno--perhaps it’s -jest as well. They’ll go and tell it around that we’ve got more’n we can -do--and that’s good for business. But, all the same, it seemed to me as -if he took considerable more time than was really needful. He can turn -out four farmers in fifteen minutes, if he puts on a spurt; and here he -was a full two hours, and only five pictures of her to show for it.” - -“Six,” said the boy. - -“Yes, so it was--countin’ the one with her hair let down,” Mr. Shull -admitted. “I dunno whether that one oughtn’t to be a little extry. I -thought o’ tellin’ her that it would be, on account of so much hair -consumin’ more chemicals; but--I dunno--somehow--she sort o’ looked as -if she knew better. Did you ever notice them eyes o’ hern, how they look -as if they could see straight through you, and out on the other side?” - -The boy shook his head. “I don’t bother my head about women,” he said. -“Got somethin’ better to do.” - -“Guess that’s a pretty good plan too,” mused Mr. Shull. “Somehow you -can’t seem to make ’em out at all. Now, I’ve been around a good deal, -and yet somehow I don’t feel as if I knew much about women. I’m bound -to say, though,” he added upon reflection, “they know considerable about -me.” - -“I suppose the first thing we know now,” remarked the boy, impatiently -changing the subject, “McClellan ’ll be in Richmond. They say it’s liable -to happen now any day.” - -Newton Shull was but a lukewarm patriot. “They needn’t hurry on my -account,” he said. “It would be kind o’ mean to have the whole thing -fizzle out now, jest when the picture business has begun to amount to -something. Why, we must have took in up’ards of $11 to-day--frames -and all--and two years ago we’d ’a’ been lucky to get in $3. Let’s see: -there’s two fifties and five thirty-fives, that’s $2.75, and the Dutch -boy with the drum, that’s $3.40, counting the mat, and then there’s Miss -Parmalee--four daguerreotypes, and two negatives, and small frames for -each, and two large frames for crayons she’s going to do herself, and -cord and nails--I suppose she’ll think them ought to be thrown in--” - -“What! didn’t you make her pay in advance?” asked the boy. “I thought -everybody had to.” - -“You got to humor some folks,” explained Mr. Shull, with a note of -regret in his voice. “These big bugs with plenty o’ money always have to -be waited on. It ain’t right, but it has to be. Besides, you can always -slide on an extra quarter or so when you send in the bill. That sort o’ -evens the thing up. Now, in her case, for instance, where we’d charge -ordinary folks a dollar for two daguerreotypes, we can send her in a -bill for--” - -Neither Mr. Shull nor the boy had heard Mar-sena’s descending steps on -the staircase, yet at this moment he entered the little work-room and -walked across it to the bay window, where the printing was done. There -was an unusual degree of abstraction in his face and mien--unusual even -for him--and he drummed absent-mindedly on the panes as he stood looking -out at the street or the sky, or ‘whatever it was his listless gaze -beheld. - -“How much do you think it ’ud be safe to stick Miss Parmalee apiece -for them daguerreotypes?” asked Newton Shull of his partner. - -Marsena turned and stared for a moment as if he doubted having heard -aright. Then he made curt answer: “She is not to be charged anything at -all. They were made for her as presents.” - -It was the other partner’s turn to stare. - -“Well, of course--if you say it’s all right,” he managed to get out, -“but I suppose on the frames we can--” - -“The frames are presents, too,” said Marsena, with decision. - - - - -IV - -During the fortnight or three weeks following the departure of Battery -G it became clear to every one that the war was as good as over. It had -lasted already a whole year, but now the end was obviously at hand. The -Union army had the Rebels cooped up in Yorktown--the identical place -where the British had been compelled to surrender at the close of the -Revolution--and it was impossible that they should get away. The very -coincidence of locality was enough in itself to convince the most -skeptical. - -We read that Fitz John Porter had a balloon fastened by a rope, in -which he daily went up and took a look through his field-glasses at the -Rebels, all miserably huddled together in their trap, awaiting their -doom. Our soldiers wrote home now that final victory could only be a -matter of a few weeks, or months at the most. Some of them said they -would surely be home by haying time. Their letters no longer dwelt upon -battles, or the prospect of battles, but gossiped about the jealousies -and quarrels among our generals, who seemed to dislike one another -much more than they did the common enemy, and told us long and quite -incredible tales about the mud in Virginia. No soldier’s letter that -spring was complete without a chapter on the mud. There were many -stories about mules and their contraband drivers being bodily sunk out -of sight in these weltering seas of mire, and of new boots being made -for the officers to come up to their armpits, which we hardly knew -whether to believe or not. But about the fact that peace was practically -within view there could be no doubt. - -Under the influence of this mood, Miss Parma-lee’s ambitious project for -a grand fair and festival in aid of the Field Hospital and Nurse Fund -naturally languished. If the war was coming to a close so soon, there -could be no use in going to so much worry and trouble, to say nothing of -the expense. - -Miss Julia seemed to take this view of it herself. She ceased active -preparations for the fair, and printed in the Thessaly _Banner of -Liberty_ a beautiful poem over her own name entitled “The Dovelike -Dawn of White-winged Peace.” She also got herself some new and summery -dresses, of gay tints and very fashionable form, and went to be -photographed in each. Her almost daily presence at the gallery came, -indeed, to be a leading topic of conversation in Octavius. Some -said that she was taking lessons of Marsena--learning to make -photographs--but others put a different construction on the matter and -winked as they did so. - -As for Marsena, he moved about the streets these days with his head -among the stars, in a state of rapt and reverent exaltation. He had -never been what might be called a talker, but now it was as much as the -best of us could do to get any kind of word from him. He did not seem to -talk to Julia any more than to the general public, but just luxuriated -with a dumb solemnity of joy in her company, sitting sometimes for hours -beside her on the piazza of the Parmalee house, or focusing her pretty -image with silent delight on the ground glass of his best camera day -after day, or walking with her, arm in arm, to the Episcopal church -on Sundays. He had always been a Presbyterian before, but now he -bore himself in the prominent Parmalee pew at St. Mark’s with stately -correctness, rising, kneeling, seating himself, just as the others did, -and helping Miss Julia hold her Prayer Book with an air of having known -the ritual from childhood. - -No doubt a good many people felt that all this was rough on the absent -Dwight Ransom, and probably some of them talked openly about it; but -interest in this aspect of the case was swallowed up in the larger -attention now given to Marsena Pulford himself. It began to be reported -that he really came of an extraordinarily good family in New England, -and that an uncle of his had been in Congress. The legend that he had -means of his own did not take much root, but it was admitted that he -must now be simply coining money. Some went so far as to estimate his -annual profits as high as $1,500, which sounded to the average Octavian -like a dream. It was commonly understood that he had abandoned an -earlier intention to buy a house and lot of his own, and this clearly -seemed to show that he counted upon going presently to live in the -Parmalee mansion. People speculated with idle curiosity as to the -likelihood of this coming to pass before the war ended and Battery G -returned home. - -Suddenly great and stirring news fell upon the startled North and set -Octavius thrilling with excitement, along with every other community far -and near. It was in the first week or so of May that the surprise came; -the Rebels, whom we had supposed to be securely locked up in Yorktown, -with no alternative save starvation or surrender, decided not to -remain there any longer, and accordingly marched comfortably off in the -direction of Richmond! - -Quick upon the heels of this came tidings that the Union army was in -pursuit, and that there had been savage fighting with the Confederate -rear-guard at Williamsburg. The papers said that the war, so far from -ending, must now be fought all over again. The marvellous story of -the Monitor and Merrimac sent our men folks into a frenzy of patriotic -fervor. Our women learned with sinking hearts that the new corps which -included our Dearborn County regiments was to bear the brunt of the -conflict in this changed order of things. We were all off again in a -hysterical whirl of emotions--now pride, now horror, now bitter wrath on -top. - -In the middle of all this the famous Field Hospital and Nurse Fund Fair -was held. The project had slumbered the while people thought peace so -near. It sprang up with renewed and vigorous life the moment the echo of -those guns at Williamsburg reached our ears. And of course at its head -was Julia Parmalee. - -It would take a long time and a powerful ransacking of memory to -catalogue the remarkable things which this active young woman did toward -making that fair the success it undoubtedly was. Even more notable were -the things which she coaxed, argued, or shamed other folks into doing -for it. Years afterward there were old people who would tell you that -Octavius had never been quite the same place since. - -For one thing, instead of the Fireman’s Hall, with its dingy aspect and -somewhat rowdyish associations, the fair was held in the Court House, -and we all understood that Miss Julia had been able to secure this favor -on account of her late uncle, the Judge, when any one else would have -been refused. It was under her tireless and ubiquitous supervision that -this solemn old interior now took on a gay and festal face. Under the -inspiration of her glance the members of the Fire Company and the Alert -Baseball Club vied with each other in borrowing flags and hanging them -from the most inaccessible and adventurous points. The rivalry between -the local Freemasons and Odd Fellows was utilized to build contemporary -booths at the sides and down the centre--on a floor laid over the -benches by the Carpenters’ Benevolent Association. The ladies’ -organizations of the various churches, out of devotion to the Union and -jealousy of one another, did all the rest. - -At the sides were the stalls for the sale of useful household articles, -and sedate and elderly matrons found themselves now dragged from the -mild obscurity of homes where they did their own work, and thrust -forward to preside over the sales in these booths, while thrifty, not -to say penurious, merchants came and stood around and regarded with -amazement the merchandise which they had been wheedled into contributing -gratis out of their own stores. The suggestion that they should now -buy it back again paralyzed their faculties, and imparted a distinct -restraint to the festivities at the sides of the big court-room. - -In the centre was a double row of booths for the sale of articles not so -strictly useful, and here the young people congregated. All the girls -of Octavius seemed to have been gathered here--the pretty ones and the -plain ones, the saucy ones and the shy, the maidens who were “getting -along” and the damsels not yet out of their teens. Stiff, spreading -crinolines brushed juvenile pantalettes, and the dark head of long, -shaving-like ringlets contrasted itself with the bold waterfall of -blonde hair. These girls did not know one another very well, save by -little groups formed around the nucleus of a church association, and -very few of them knew Miss Par-malee at all, except, of course, by -sight. But now, astonishing to relate, she recognized them by name as -old friends, shook hands warmly right and left, and blithely set them -all to work and at their ease. The idea of selling things to young men -abashed them by its weird and unmaidenly novelty. She showed them how it -should be done--bringing forward for the purpose a sheepishly obstinate -drugstore clerk, and publicly dragooning him into paying eighty cents -for a leather dog-collar, despite his protests that he had no dog and -hated the whole canine species, and could get such a strap as that -anywhere for fifteen cents--all amid the greatest merriment. Her -influence was so pervasive, indeed, that even the nicest girls soon got -into a state of giggling familiarity with comparative strangers, which -gave their elders concern, and which in some cases it took many months -to straighten out again. But for the time all was sparkling gaiety. On -the second and final evening, after the oyster supper, the Philharmonics -played and a choir of girls sang patriotic songs. Then the gas was -turned down and the stereopticon show began. - -As the last concerted achievement of the firm of Pulford & Shull, -this magic-lantern performance is still remembered. The idea of it, -of course, was Julia’s. She suggested it to Marsena, and he gladly -volunteered to make any number of positive plates from appropriate -pictures and portraits for the purpose. Then she pressed Newton Shull -into the service to get a stereopticon on hire, to rig up the platform -and canvas for it, and finally to consent to quit his post among the -Philharmonics when the music ceased, and to go off up into the gallery -to work the slides. He also, during Marsena’s absence one day, made a -slide on his own account. - -Mr. Shull had not taken very kindly to the idea when Miss Julia first -broached it to him. - -“No, I don’t know as I ever worked a stereopticon,” he said, striving to -look with cold placidity into the winsome and beaming smile with which -she confronted him one day out in the reception-room. She had never -smiled at him before or pretended even to know his name. “I guess you’d -better hire a man up from Tecumseh to bring the machine and run it -himself.” - -“But you can do it so much better, my dear Mr. Shull!” she urged. “You -do everything so much better! Mr. Pulford often says that he never -knew such a handyman in all his life. It seems that there is literally -nothing that you can’t do--except--perhaps--refuse a lady a great -personal favor.” - -Miss Julia put this last so delicately, and with such a pretty little -arch nod of the head and turn of the eyes, that Newton Shull surrendered -at discretion. He promised everything on the spot, and he kept his word. -In fact, he more than kept it. - -The great evening came, as I have said, and when the lights were turned -down to extinction’s verge those who were nearest the front could -distinguish the vacant chair which Mr. Shull had been occupying, with -his bass viol leaning against it. They whispered from one to another -that he had gone up in the gallery to work this new-fangled contrivance. -Then came a flashing broad disk of light on the screen above the judges’ -bench, a spreading sibilant murmur of interest, and the show began. - -It was an oddly limited collection of pictures--mainly thin and feeble -copies of newspaper engravings, photographic portraits, and ideal heads -from the magazines. Winfield Scott followed in the wake of Kossuth, and -Garibaldi led the way for John C. Frémont and Lola Montez. There was -applause for the long, homely, familiar face of Lincoln, and a derisive -snicker for the likeness of Jeff Davis turned upside down. Then came -local heroes from the district round about--Gen. Boyce, Col. McIntyre, -and young Adjt. Heron, who had died so bravely at Ball’s Bluff--mixed -with some landscapes and statuary, and a comic caricature or two. The -rapt assemblage murmured its recognitions, sighed its deeper emotions, -chuckled over the funny plates--deeming it all a most delightful -entertainment. From time to time there were long hitches, marked by a -curious spluttering noise above, and the abortive flashes of meaningless -light on the screen, and the explanation was passed about in undertones -that Mr. Shull was having difficulties with the machine. - -It was after the longest of these delays that, all at once, an extremely -vivid picture was jerked suddenly upon the canvas, and, after a few -preliminary twitches, settled in place to stare us out of countenance. -There was no room for mistake. It was the portrait of Miss Julia -Parmalee standing proudly erect in statuesque posture, with one hand -resting on the back of a chair, and seated in this chair was Lieut. -Dwight Ransom, smiling amiably. - -There was a moment’s deadly hush, while we gazed at this unlooked-for -apparition. It seemed, upon examination, as if there was a certain irony -in the Lieutenant’s grin. Some one in the darkness emitted an abrupt -snort of amusement, and a general titter arose, hung in the air for an -awkward instant, and then was drowned by a generous burst of applause. -While the people were still clapping their hands the picture was -withdrawn from the screen, and we heard Newton Shull call down from his -perch in the gallery: - -“You kin turn up the lights now. They ain’t no more to this.” - -In another minute we were sitting once again in the broad glare of -the gaslight, blinking confusedly at one another, and with a dazed -consciousness that something rather embarrassing had happened. The -boldest of us began to steal glances across to where Miss Parmalee and -Marsena sat, just in front of the steps to the bench. - -What Miss Julia felt was beyond guessing, but there she was, at any -rate, bending over and talking vivaciously, all smiles and collected -nerves, to a lady two seats removed. But Marsena displayed no such -presence of mind. He sat bolt upright, with an extraordinarily white -face and a drooping jaw, staring fixedly at the empty canvas on the -wall before him. Such absolute astonishment was never depicted on human -visage before. - -Perhaps from native inability to mind his own business, perhaps with a -kindly view of saving an anxious situation, the Baptist minister rose -now to his feet, coughed loudly to secure attention, and began some -florid remarks about the success of the fair, the especial beauty of the -lantern exhibition they had just witnessed, and the felicitous way -in which it had terminated with a portrait of the beautiful and -distinguished young lady to whose genius and unwearying efforts they -were all so deeply indebted. In these times of national travail and -distress, he said, there was a peculiar satisfaction in seeing her -portrait accompanied by that of one of the courageous and noble young -men who had sprung to the defence of their country. The poet had -averred, he continued, that none but the brave deserved the fair, and so -on, and so on. - -Miss Julia listened to it all with her head on one side and a modestly -deprecatory half-smile on her face. At its finish she rose, turned to -face everybody, made a pert, laughing little bow, and sat down again, -apparently all happiness. But it was noted that Marsena did not take his -pained and fascinated gaze from that mocking white screen on the wall -straight in front. - -***** - -They walked in silence that evening to almost the gate of the Parmalee -mansion. Julia had taken his arm, as usual; but Marsena could not but -feel that the touch was different. It was in the nature of a relief to -him that for once she did not talk. His heart was too sore, his brain -too bewildered, for the task of even a one-sided conversation, such as -theirs was wont to be. Then all at once the silence grew terrible to -him--a weight to be lifted at all hazards on the instant. - -“Shull must have made that last slide himself,” he blurted out. “I never -dreamt of its being made.” - -“I thought it came out very well indeed,” remarked Miss Parmalee, -“especially his uniform. You could quite see the eagles on the buttons. -You must thank Mr. Shull for me.” - -“I’ll speak to him in the morning about it,” said Marsena, with gloomy -emphasis. He sighed, bit his lip, fixed an intent gaze upon the big -dark bulk of the Parmalee house looming before them, and spoke again. -“There’s something that I want to say to _you_, though, that won’t -keep till morning.” A tiny movement of the hand on his arm was the only -response. “I see now,” Marsena went on, “that I ain’t been making any -real headway with you at all. I thought--well--I don’t know as I -know just what I did think--but I guess now that it was a mistake.” - Yes--there was a distinct flutter of the little gloved hand. It put a -wild thought into Marsena’s head. - -“Would you,” he began boldly--“I never spoke of it before--but would -you--that is, if I was to enlist and go to the war--would that make any -difference?--you know what I mean.” - -She looked up at him with magnetic sweetness in her dusky, shadowed -glance. “How can any ablebodied young patriot hesitate at such a time as -this?” she made answer, and pressed his arm. - - - - -V - -It was in this same May, not more than a week after the momentous -episode of the Field Hospital and Nurse Fund Fair, that Marsena Pulford -went off to the war. - -There was no ostentation about his departure. He had indeed been gone -for a day or two before it became known in Octavius that his absence -from town meant that he had enlisted down at Tecumseh. We learned that -he had started as a common private, but everybody made sure that a man -of his distinguished appearance and deportment would speedily get a -commission. Everybody, too, had a theory of some sort as to the motives -for this sudden and strange behavior of his. These theories agreed -in linking Miss Parmalee with the affair, but there were hopeless -divergencies as to the exact part she played in it. One party held that -Marsena had been driven to seek death on the tented field by despair -at having been given the “mitten.” Others insisted that he had not been -given the “mitten” at all, but had gone because her well-known martial -ardor made the sacrifice of her betrothed necessary to her peace of -mind. A minority took the view which Homer Sage promulgated from his -tilted-back chair on the stoop of the Excelsior Hotel. - -“They ain’t nothin’ settled betwixt ’em,” this student of human nature -declared. “She jest dared him to go, and he went. And if you only give -her time, she’ll have the whole male unmarried population of Octavius, -between the ages of sixteen and sixty, down there wallerin’ around in -the Virginny swamps, feedin’ the muskeeters and makin’ a bid for glory.” - -But in a few days there came the terribly exciting news of Seven -Pines and Fair Oaks--that first great combat of the revived war in the -East--and we ceased to bother our heads about the photographer and his -love. The enlisting fever sprang up again, and our young men began -to make their way by dozens and scores to the recruiting office at -Tecumseh. There were more farewells, more tears and prayers, not to -mention several funerals of soldiers killed at Hanover Court House, -where that Fifth Corps, which contained most of our volunteers, had its -first spring smell of blood. And soon thereafter burst upon us the awful -sustained carnage of the Seven Days’ fighting, which drove out of -our minds even the recollection that Miss Julia Parmalee herself had -volunteered for active service in the Sanitary Commission, and gone -South to take up her work. - -And so July 3d came, bringing with it the bare tidings of that closing -desperate battle of the week at Malvern Hill, and the movement of what -was left of the Army of the Potomac to a safe resting place on the James -River. We were beginning to get the details of local interest by the -slow single wire from Thessaly, and sickening enough they were. The -village streets were filled with silent, horror-stricken crowds. The -whole community seemed to have but a single face, repeated upon the -mental vision at every step--a terrible face with distended, empty eyes, -riven brows, and an open drawn mouth like the old Greek mask of tragedy. - -“I swan! I don’t know whether to keep open to-morrow or not,” said Mr. -Newton Shull, for perhaps the twentieth time, as he wandered once again -from the reception-room into the little workshop behind. “In some ways -it’s kind of agin my principles to work on Independence Day--but, then -again, if I thought there was likely to be a good many farmers comin’ -into town--” - -“They’ll be plenty of ’em cornin’ in,” said the boy, over his -shoulder, “but they’ll steer clear of here.” - -“I’m ’fraid so,” sighed Mr. Shull. He advanced a listless step or two -and gazed with dejected apathy at the newspaper map tacked to the wall, -on which the boy was making red and blue crosses with a colored pencil. -“I don’t see much good o’ that,” he said. “Still, of course, if it eases -your mind any--” - -“That’s where the fightin’ finished,” observed the boy, pointing to a -big mark on the map. “That’s Malvern Hill there, and here--down where -the river takes the big bend--that’s Harrison’s Landing, where the -army’s movin’ to. See them seven rings? Them are the battles, one each -day, as our men forced their way down through the Chickahominy swamps, -beginnin’ up in the corner with Beaver Dam Creek. If the map was a -little higher it ’ud show the Pamunkey, where they started from. My -uncle says that the whole mistake was in ever abandoning the Pamunkey.” - -“Pa-monkey or Ma-monkey,” said Newton Shull, gloomily, “it wouldn’t be -no comfort to me to see it, even on a map. It’s jest taken and busted me -and my business here clean as a whistle. We ain’t paid expenses two -days in a week sence Marseny went. Here I’ve got now so ’t I kin take a -plain, everyday sort o’ picture jest about as well as he did--a little -streakid sometimes, perhaps, and more or less pinholes--but still pretty -middlin’ fair on an average, and then, darn my buttons if they don’t -all stop comin’. It positively don’t seem to me as if there was a single -human bein’ in Dearborn County that ’ud have his picture took as a -gift. All they want now is to have enlargements thrown up from little -likenesses of their men folks that have been killed, and them I don’t -know how to do no more’n a babe unborn.” - -“You knew well enough how to make that stere-opticon slide,” remarked -the boy with severity. - -“Yes,” mused Mr. Shull, “that darned thing--that made a peck o’ trouble, -didn’t it? I dunno what on earth possessed me; I kind o’ seemed to git -the notion o’ doin’ it into my head all to once ’t, and somehow I never -dreamt of its rilin’ Marseny so; you couldn’t tell that a man ’ud be -so blamed touchy as all that, could you?--and I dunno, like as not he’d -’a’ enlisted anyhow. But I do wish he’d showed me how to make them -pesky enlargements afore he went. If I’d only seen him do one, even -once, I could ’a’ picked the thing up, but I never did. It’s just my -luck!” - -“Say,” said the boy, looking up with a sudden thought, “do you know what -my mother heard yesterday? It’s all over the place that before Marseny -left he went to Squire Schermerhorn’s and made his will, and left -everything he’s got to the Parmalee girl, in case he gits killed. So, if -anything happens she’d be your partner, wouldn’t she?” - -Newton Shull stared with surprise. “Well, now, that beats creation,” he -said, after a little. “Somehow you know that never occurred to me, and -yet, of course, that ’ud be jest his style.” - -“Yes, sir,” repeated the other, “they say he’s left her every identical -thing.” - -“It’s allus that way in this world,” reflected Mr. Shull, sadly. “Them -that don’t need it one solitary atom, they’re eternally gettin’ every -mortal thing left to ’em. Why, that girl’s so rich already she don’t -know what to do with her money. If I was her, I bet a cooky I wouldn’t -go pikin’ off to the battlefield, doin’ nursin’ and tyin’ on bandages, -and fannin’ men while they were gittin’ their legs cut off. No, sirree; -I’d let the Sanitary Commission scuffle along without me, I can tell -you! A hoss and buggy and a fust-class two-dollar-a-day hotel, and goin’ -to the theatre jest when I took the notion--that’d be good enough for -me.” - -“I suppose the sign then ’ud be ‘Shull & Parmalee,’ wouldn’t it?” - queried the boy. - -“Well, now, I ain’t so sure about that,” said Mr. Shull, thoughtfully. -“It might be that, bein’ a woman, her name ’ud come first, out o’ -politeness. But then, of course, most prob’ly she’d want to sell out -instid, and then I’d make the valuation, and she could give me time. Or -she might want to stay in, only on the quiet, you know--what they call a -silent partner.” - -“Nobody’d ever call her a silent partner,” observed the boy. “She -couldn’t keep still if she tried.” - -“I wouldn’t care how much she talked,” said Mr. Shull, “if she only put -enough more money into the business. I didn’t take much to her, somehow, -along at fust, but the more I’ve seen of her the more I like the cut of -her jib. She’s got ‘go’ in her, that gal has; she jest figures out what -she wants, and then she sails in and gits it. It don’t matter who the -man is, she jest takes and winds him round her little finger. Why, -Marseny, here, he wasn’t no more than so much putty in her hands. I lost -all patience with him. You wouldn’t catch me being run by a woman that -way.” - -“So far’s I could see,” suggested the other, “she seemed to git pretty -much all she wanted out of you, too. You were dancin’ round, helpin’ her -at the fair there, like a hen on a hot griddle.” - -“It was all on his account,” put in the partner, with emphasis. “Jest to -please him; he seemed so much sot on her bein’ humored in everything. I -did feel kind o’ foolish about it at the time--I never somehow believed -much in doin’ work for nothin’--but maybe it was all for the best. If -what they say about his makin’ a will is true, why it won’t do me no -harm to be on good terms with her--in case--in case--” - -Mr. Shull was standing at the window, and his idle gaze had been vaguely -taking in the general; prospect of the street below the while he spoke. -At this moment he discovered that some one on the opposite sidewalk was -making vehement gestures to attract his attention. He lifted the sash -and put his head out to listen, but the message came across loud enough -for even the boy inside to hear. - -“You’d better hurry round to the telegraph office!” this hoarse, -anonymous voice cried. “Malvern Hill list is a-comin’ in--and they say -your pardner’s been shot--shot bad, too!” - -Newton Shull drew in his head and stood for some moments staring -blankly at the map on the wall. “Well, I swan!” he began, with confused -hesitation, “I dunno--it seems to me--well, yes, I guess prob’ly the -best thing ’ll be for her to put more money into the business--yes, -that’s the plan--and we kin hire an operator up from Tecumseh.” - -But there was no one to pass an opinion on his project. The boy had -snatched his hat, and could be heard even now dashing his way furiously -down the outer stairs. - -***** - -The summer dusk had begun to gather before Octavius heard all that was -to be learned of the frightful calamity which had befallen its absent -sons. The local roll of death and disaster from Gaines’s Mill earlier in -the week had seemed incredibly awful. This new budget of horrors from -Malvern was far worse. - -“Wa’n’t the rest of the North doin’ anything at all?” a wild-eyed, -dishevelled old farmer cried out in a shaking, half-frenzied shriek -from the press of the crowd round the telegraph office. “Do they -think Dearborn County’s got to suppress this whole damned rebellion -single-handed?” - -It seemed to the dazed and horrified throng as if some such idea must -be in the minds of the rest of the Union. Surely no other little -community--or big community, either--could have had such a hideous blow -dealt to it as this under which Octavius reeled. The list of the week -for the county, including Gaines’s Mill, showed one hundred and eight -dead outright, and very nearly five hundred more wounded in battle. It -was too shocking for comprehension. - -As evening drew on, men gathered the nerve to say to one another that -there was something very glorious in the way the two regiments had been -thrust into the front, and had shown themselves heroically fit for that -grim honor. They tried, too, to extract solace from the news that -the regiments in question had been mentioned by name in the general -despatches as having distinguished themselves and their county above all -the rest--but it was an empty and heart-sickened pretence at best, and -when, about dark, the women folks, who had waited in vain for them to -come home to supper, began to appear on the skirts of the crowd, it was -given up altogether. In after years Octavius got so that it could cheer -those sinister names of Gaines’s Mill and Malvern Hill, and swell with -pride at the memories they evoked. But that evening no one cheered. It -was too terrible. - -There was, indeed, a single partial exception to this rule. The regular -service of news had ceased--in those days, before the duplex invention, -the single wire had most melancholy limitations--but the throng still -lingered; and when, in the failing light, the postmaster was seen to -step up again on the chair by the door with a bit of paper in his hand, -a solemn hush ran over the assemblage. - -“It is a private telegram sent to me personally,” he explained, in the -loud clear tones of one who had earned his office by years of stump -speaking; “but it is intended for you all, I should presume.” - -The silent crowd pushed nearer, and listened with strained attention as -this despatch was read: - - Headquarters Sanitary Commission, - - Harrison’s Landing, Va., Wednesday Morning. - -_To Postmaster Octavius, N. Y.:_ - -_No words can describe magnificent record soldiers of Dearborn County, -especially Starbuck, made past week. I bless fate which identified my -poor services with such superb heroism. After second sleepless night, -Col. Starbuck now reposing peacefully; doctor says crisis past; he -surely recover, though process be slow. You will learn with pride he -been brevetted Brigadier, fact which it was my privilege to announce -to him last evening. He feebly thanked me, murmuring, “Tell them at -home.”_ - -_Julia Parmalee._ - -In the silence which ensued the postmaster held the paper up and -scanned it narrowly by the waning light. “There is something else,” he -said--“Oh, yes, I see; ‘Franked despatch Sanitary Commission.’ That’s -all.” - -Another figure was seen suddenly clambering upon the chair, with an arm -around the postmaster for support. It was the teller of the bank. He -waved his free arm excitedly, as he faced the crowd, and cried: - -“Our women are as brave as our men! Three cheers for Miss Julia -Parmalee! Hip-hip!” - -The loyal teller’s first “Hurrah!” fell upon the air quite by itself. -Perhaps a dozen voices helped him half-heartedly with the second. The -third died off again miserably, and he stepped down off the chair amid a -general consciousness of failure. - -“Who the hell is Starbuck?” was to be heard in whispered interrogatory -passed along through the throng. Hardly anybody could answer. Boyce we -knew, and McIntyre, and many others, but Star-buck was a mystery. Then -it was explained that it must be the son of old Alanson Starbuck, of -Juno Mills, who had gone away to Philadelphia seven or eight years -before. He had not enlisted with any Dearborn County regiment, but held -a staff appointment of some kind, presumably in a Pennsylvania command. -We were quite unable to work up any emotion over him. - -In fact, the more we thought it over, the more we were disposed to -resent this planting of Starbuck upon us, in the very van of Dearborn -County’s heroes. His father was a rich old curmudgeon, whom no one -liked. The son was nothing to us whatever. - -As at last, in the deepening twilight, the people reluctantly began -moving toward home, such conversation as they had the heart for seemed -to be exclusively centred upon Miss Parmalee, and this queer despatch -of hers. Slow-paced, strolling groups wended their way along the main -street, and then up this side thoroughfare and that, passing in every -block some dark and close-shuttered house of mourning, and instinctively -sinking still lower their muffled tones as they passed, and carrying -in their breasts, heaven only knows what torturing loads of anguish and -stricken despair--but finding a certain relief in dwelling, instead, -upon this lighter topic. - -One of these groups--an elderly lady in black attire and two younger -women of sober mien--walked apart from the others and exchanged no words -at all until, turning a corner, their way led them past the Parmalee -house. The looming bulk of the old mansion and the fragrant spaciousness -of the garden about it seemed to attract the attention of Mrs. Ransom -and her daughters. They halted as by a common impulse, and fastened a -hostile gaze upon the shadowy outlines of the house and its surrounding -foliage. - -“If Dwight dies of his wound,” the mother said, in a voice all chilled -to calmness, “his murderess will live in there.” - -“I always hated her!” said one of the daughters, with a shudder. - -“But he isn’t going to die, mamma,” put in the other. “You mustn’t think -of such a thing! You know how healthy he always has been, and this is -only his shoulder. For my part, we may think ourselves very fortunate. -Remember how many have been killed or mortally wounded. It seems as if -half the people we know are in mourning. We get off very lightly with -Dwight only wounded. Did you happen to hear the details about Mr. -Pulford?--you know, the photographer--some one was saying that he was -mortally wounded.” - -“She sent him to his death, then, too,” said the elder Miss Ransom, -raising her clenched hand against the black shadow of the house. - -“I don’t care about that man,” broke in the mother, icily. “Nobody knows -anything of him, or where he came from. People ran after him because he -was good-looking, but he never seemed to me to know enough to come in -when it rained. If she made a fool of him, it was his own lookout. But -Dwight--my Dwight--!” - -The mother’s mannered voice broke into a gasp, and she bent her head -helplessly. The daughters went to her side, and the group passed on into -the darkness. - - - - -VI - -It was a dark, soft, summer night in Virginia, that of the 1st of July. -After the tropical heat of the day, the air was being mercifully -cooled, here on the hilltop, by a gentle breeze, laden with just a moist -suggestion of the mist rising from the river flats and marshes down -below. It was not Mother Nature’s fault that this zephyr stirring along -the parched brow of the hill did not bear with it, too, the scents of -fruits and flowers, of new-mown hay and the yellow grain in shock, and -minister soothingly to rest and pleasant dreams. - -Instead, this breeze, moving mildly in the darkness, was one vile, -embodied stench of sulphur and blood, and pestilential abominations. Go -where you would, there was no escaping this insufferable burden of foul -smells. If they were a horror on the hilltop, they were worse below. - -It was one of the occasions on which Man had expended all his powers to -prove his superiority to Nature. The elements in their wildest and -most savage mood could never have wrought such butchery as this. The -vine-wrapped fences, stretching down from the plateau toward the meadow -lands below, were buttressed by piles of dead men, some in butternut, -some in blue. Clumps of stiffened bodies curled supine at the base of -every stump on the fringe of the woodland to the right and among the -tumbled sheaves of grain to the left. Out in the open, the broad, -sloping hillside and the valley bottom lay literally hidden under ridge -upon ridge of smashed and riddled human forms, and the heaped débris of -human battle. The clouds hung thick and close above, as if to keep the -stars from beholding this repellent sample of earth’s titanic beast, -Man, at his worst. An Egyptian blackness was over it all. - -At intervals a lightning flash from the crest of the outermost knoll -tore this evil pall of darkness asunder, and then, with a roar and a -scream, a spluttering line of vivid flame would arch its sinister way -across the sky. A thousand little dots of light moved and zigzagged -ceaselessly on the wide expanse of obscurity underneath this crest, and -when the bursts of wrathful fireworks came from overhead it could be -seen that these were lanterns being borne about in and out among the -winrows of maimed and slain. Above all, through all, without even an -instant’s lull, there arose a terrible babel of chorused groans -and prayers and howls and curses. This noise could be heard for -miles--almost as far as the boom of the howitzers above could carry--and -at a distance sounded like the moaning of a storm through a great -pine-forest. Near at hand, it sounded like nothing else this side of -hell. - -An hour or so after nightfall the battery on the crest of the knoll -stopped firing. The wails and shrieks from the slope below went on all -through the night, and the lanterns of the search parties burned till -the morning sunlight put them out. - -Up on the top of the hill--a broad expanse of rolling plateaus--the -scene wore a different aspect. At widely separated points bonfires and -glittering lights showed where some general of the victorious army held -his headquarters in a farm-house; and unless one pried too curiously -about these parts, there were few enough evidences on the summit of the -day’s barbaric doings. - -The chief of these houses--a stately and ancient structure, built -in colonial days of brick proudly brought from Europe--had begun the -forenoon of the battle as the headquarters of the Fifth Corps. Then the -General and his staff had reduced their needs to a couple of rooms, to -leave space for wounded men. Then they had moved out altogether, to let -the whole house be used as a hospital. Then as the backwash of calamity -from the line of conflict swelled in size and volume, the stables and -barns had been turned over to the medical staff. Later, as the savage -evening fight went on, tons of new hay had been brought out and -strewn in sheltered places under the open sky to serve as beds for -the sufferers. Before night fell, even these impromptu hospitals were -overtaxed, and rows of stricken soldiers lay on the bare ground. - -The day of intelligent and efficient hospital service had not yet -dawned for our army. The breakdown of what service we had had, under the -frightful stress of the battles culminating in this blood-soaked Malvern -Hill, is a matter of history, and it can be viewed the more calmly -now as the collapse of itself brought about an improved condition -of affairs. But at the time it was a woful thing, with a lax and -conflicting organization, insufficient material, a ridiculous lack of -nurses, a mere handful of really competent surgeons and, most of all, -a great crowd of volunteer medical students and ignorant practitioners, -who flocked southward for the mere excitement and practice of sawing, -cutting, slashing right and left. So it was that army surgery lent new -terrors to death on the battle-field in the year 1862. - -The sky overhead was just beginning to show the ashen touch of twilight, -when two men lying stretched on the hay in a corner of the smaller -barnyard chanced to turn on their hard couch and to recognize each -other. It was a slow and almost scowling recognition, and at first bore -no fruit of words. - -One was in the dress of a lieutenant of artillery, muddy and begrimed -with smoke, and having its right shoulder torn or cut open from collar -to elbow. The man himself had now such a waving, tangled growth of -chestnut beard and so grimly blackened a face, that it would have been -hard to place him as our easy-going, smiling Dwight Ransom. - -The new movement had not brought ease, and now, after a few grunts of -pain and impatience, he got himself laboriously up in a sitting posture, -dragged a knapsack within reach up to support his back, and looked at -his companion again. - -“I heard that you were down here somewhere,” he remarked, at last. “My -sister wrote me.” - -Marsena Pulford stared up at him, made a little nodding motion of the -head, and turned his glance again into the sky straight above. He also -was a spectacle of dry mud and dust, and was bearded to the eyes. - -“Where are you hit?” asked Dwight, after a pause. - -For answer, Marsena slowly, and with an effort, put a hand to his -breast--to the left, below the heart. “Here, somewhere,” he said, in a -low, drylipped murmur. He did not look at Dwight again, but presently -asked, “Could you fix me--settin’ up--too?” - -“I guess so,” responded Dwight. With the help of his unhurt arm he -clambered to his feet and began moving dizzily about among the row of -wounded men to his left. These groaned or snarled at him as he passed -over them, but to this he paid no attention whatever. He returned from -the end of the line, bringing two knapsacks and the battered frame of -a drum, in which some one had been trying to carry water, and with some -difficulty arranged these in a satisfactory heap. Then he knelt, pushed -his arm under Marsena’s shoulders, and lifted him up and backward to the -support. Both men grimaced and winced under the smart of the effort, and -for some minutes sat in silence, with closed eyes. - -When they opened them finally it was with a sudden start at the sound -of a woman’s voice. Their ears had for long hours been inured to a -ceaseless din of other noises--an ear-splitting confusion of cannon -and musketry roar from the field less than an eighth of a mile away, -of yelping shells overhead, and of screams and hoarse shouts all about -them. Yet their senses caught this strange note of a woman’s voice as if -it had fallen upon the hush of midnight. - -They looked up, and beheld Miss Julia Parmalee! - -Upon such a background of heated squalor, dirt, and murderous disorder, -it did not seem surprising to them that this lady should present a -picture of cool, fresh neatness. She wore a snow-white nurse’s cap, and -broad, spotless bands of white linen were crossed over the shoulders of -her pale dove-colored dress. Her dark face, dusky pink at the cheeks, -glowed with a proud excitement. Her big brown eyes swept along the row -of recumbent figures at her feet with the glance of a born conqueror. - -“This is not a fit place for him,” she said. “It is absurd to bring a -gentleman--an officer of the headquarters staff--out to such a place as -this!” - -Then the two volunteers from Octavius saw that behind her were four -men, bearing a laden stretcher, and that at her side was a regimental -hospital steward, who also looked speculatively along the rows of -sufferers. - -“It’s the best thing we can do, anyway,” he replied, not over-politely; -“and for that matter, there’s hardly room here.” - -“Oh, there’d be no trouble about that,” retorted Miss Julia, calmly. “We -could move any of these people here. The General told me I was always -to do just what I thought best. I am sure that if I could see him now he -would insist at once that Colonel Starbuck should have a bed to himself, -inside the house.” - -“I’ll bet he wouldn’t!” said the hospital steward, with emphasis. - -“Perhaps you don’t realize,” put in Miss Julia, coldly, “that Colonel -Starbuck is a staff officer--and a friend of mine.” - -“I don’t care if he was on all the staffs there are,” said the hospital -steward, “he’s got to take his chance with the rest. And it don’t matter -about his being a friend, either; we ain’t playing favorites much just -now. I don’t see no room here, Miss. You’ll have to take him out in the -open lot there.” - -“Oh, never!” protested Miss Julia, vehemently. “It’s disgraceful! Why, -the place is under fire there. I saw them running away from a shell -there only a minute ago. No, if we can’t do anything better, we’ll have -one of these men moved.” - -“Well, do something pretty quick!” growled one of the men supporting the -stretcher. - -Miss Parmalee had looked two or three times in an absent-minded way at -the two men on the ground nearest her--obviously without recognizing -either of them. There was a definite purpose in the glance she now -bent upon Dwight Ransom--a glance framed in the resourceful smile he -remembered so well. - -“You seem to be able to sit up, my man,” she said, ingratiatingly, to -him; “would you be so very kind as to let me have that place for Colonel -Star-buck, here--he is on the headquarters staff--and I am sure we -should be so very much obliged. You will easily get a nice place -somewhere else for yourself. Oh, thank you so much! It is so good of -you!” - -Suppressing a groan at the pain the movement involved, and without -a word, Dwight lifted himself slowly to his feet, and stepped aside, -waving a hand toward the hay and knapsack in token of their surrender. - -Then Miss Julia helped lift from the litter the object of her anxiety. -Colonel Starbuck was of a slender, genteel figure, and had the top -of his head swathed heavily in bandages. He wore long, curly, brown -side-whiskers, and his chin had been shaved that very morning. This was -enough in itself to indicate that he belonged to the headquarters staff, -but the fact was proclaimed afresh by everything else about him--his -speckless uniform, his spick-and-span gauntlets, his carefully polished -boots, the glittering newness of his shoulder-straps, sword scabbard, -buttons, and spurs. It was clear that, whatever else had happened, his -line of communication with the headquarters baggage train had never been -interrupted. - -“It is so kind of you!” Miss Parmalee murmured again, when the staff -officer had been helped off the stretcher, and in a dazed and languid -way had settled himself down into the place vacated for him. “Would -you”--she whispered, looking up now, and noting that the hospital -steward and the litter-men had gone away--“would you mind stepping -over to the house, or to one of the tents beyond--you’ll find him -somewhere--and asking Dr. Willoughby to come at once? Tell him it is for -Colonel Starbuck of the headquarters staff, and you’d better mention my -name--Miss Parmalee of the Sanitary Commission. You won’t forget the -name--Parmalee?” - -“I don’t fancy I shall forget it,” said Dwight, gravely. “I’ve got a -better memory than some.” - -Miss Julia caught the tone of voice on the instant, and looked up again -from where she knelt beside the Colonel, with a swift smile. - -“Why, it’s Mr. Ransom, I do believe!” she exclaimed. “I should never -have known you with your beard. It’s so good of you to take this -trouble--you always were so obliging! Any one will tell you where Dr. -Willoughby is. He’s the surgeon of the Eighteenth, you know. I’m sure -he’ll come at once--to please me--and time is so precious, you know!” - -Without further words, Dwight moved off slowly and unsteadily toward the -house. - -Miss Parmalee, seating herself so that some of her mouse-tinted -draperies almost touched the face of Dwight’s companion, unhooked a fan -from her girdle and began softly fanning Colonel Starbuck. “The doctor -won’t be long,” she said, in low, cooing tones, after a little; “do you -feel easier now?” - -“I am rather dizzy still, and a little faint,” replied the Colonel, -languorously. “That fanning is so delicious though, that I’m really very -happy. At least I would be if I weren’t nervous about you. You have -been through such tremendous exertions all day--out in the sun, amid all -these horrid sights and this infernal roar--without a parasol, too. Are -you quite sure it has not been too much for you?” - -“You are always so thoughtful of others, dear Colonel Starbuck,” - murmured Miss Julia, reducing the fanning to a gentle, measured -movement, and fixing her lustrous eyes pensively upon the clouds above -the horizon. “You never think of yourself!” - -“Only to think how happy my fate is, to be rescued and nursed by an -angel,” sighed the Colonel. - -A smile of gentle deprecation played upon Miss Julia’s red lips, and -imparted to her eyes the expression they would wear if they had been -gazing upon a tenderly entrancing vision in the sky. Then, all at once; -she gave a little start of aroused attention, looked puzzled, and after -a moment’s pause bent her head over close to the Colonel’s. - -“The man behind me has taken tight hold of my dress,” she whispered, -hurriedly. “I don’t want to turn around, but can you see him? He isn’t -having a fit or anything, is he?” - -Colonel Starbuck lifted himself a trifle, and looked across. “No,” he -whispered in return, “he appears to be asleep. Probably he is dreaming. -He is a corporal--some infantry regiment. They do manage to get so--what -shall I say--so unwashed! Shall I move his hand for you?” - -Miss Julia shook her head, with an arch little half smile. - -“No, poor man,” she murmured. “It gives me almost a sense of the -romantic. Perhaps he is dreaming of home--of some one dear to him. -Corporals do have their romances, you know, as well as--” - -“As well as colonels,” the staff officer playfully finished the sentence -for her. “Well, I congratulate him, if his is a thousandth part as -joyful as mine.” - -“Oh, then, you have one!” pursued Miss Parma-lee, allowing her eyes -to sparkle for an instant before they were coyly raised again to the -clouds. Darkness was gathering there rapidly. - -“Why pretend that you don’t understand?” pleaded Colonel Starbuck--and -there seemed to be no answer forthcoming. The fan moved even more -sedately now, with a tender flutter at the end of each downward sweep. - -Presently the preoccupation of the couple--one might not call it silence -in such an unbroken uproar as rose around them and smashed through the -air above--was interrupted by the appearance of a young, sharp-faced -man, who marched straight across the yard toward them and, halting, -spoke hurriedly. - -“I was asked specially to come here for a moment,” he said, “but it can -only be a minute. We’re just over our heads in work. What is it?” - -Miss Parmalee looked at the young man with a favorless eye. He was -unshaven, dishevelled, brusque of manner and speech. He was bareheaded, -and his unimportant figure was almost hidden beneath a huge, revoltingly -stained apron. - -“I asked for my friend, Dr. Willoughby,” she said. “But if he could -not come, I must insist upon immediate attention for Colonel Starbuck -here--an officer of the headquarters staff.” - -While she spoke the young surgeon had thrown himself on one knee, -adroitly though roughly lifted the Colonel’s bandages, run an inquiring -finger over his skull, and plumped the linen back again. He sprang to -his feet with an impatient grunt. “Paltry scalp wound,” he snorted. -Then, turning on his heel, he almost knocked against Dwight Ransom, who -had come slowly up behind him. “You had no business to drag me off for -foolishness of this sort,” he said, in vexed tones. “Here are thousands -of men waiting their turn who really need help, and I’ve been working -twenty hours a day for a week, and couldn’t keep up with the work if -every day had two hundred hours. It’s ridiculous!” - -Dwight shrugged his unhurt shoulder. “I didn’t ask you for myself,” - he replied. “I’m quite willing to wait my turn--but the lady here--she -asked me to bring help--” - -“It can’t be that this gentleman understands,” put in Miss Julia, “that -his assistance was desired for an officer of the headquarters staff.” - -“Madame,” said the young surgeon, “with your permission, damn the -headquarters staff!” and, turning abruptly, he strode off. - -“I will go and see the General myself,” exclaimed Miss Parmalee, -flushing with wrath. “I will see whether he will permit the Sanitary -Commission to be affronted in this outrageous--” - -She stopped short. Her indignant effort to rise to her feet had been -checked by a hand on the ground, which held firmly in its grasp a -fold of her skirt. She turned, pulled the cloth from the clutch of -the tightened fingers, looked at the hand as it sprawled limply on the -grass, and gave a little, shuddering, half-hysterical laugh. “Mercy me!” - was what she said. - -“You know who it is, don’t you?” asked Dwight Ransom. - -The meaning in his voice struck Miss Julia, and she bent a careful -scrutiny through the dusk upon the face of the man stretched out beside -her. His head had slipped sidewise on the knapsack, and his bearded -chin was unnaturally sunk into his collar. Through the grime on his -face could be discerned an unearthly pallor. His wide-opened eyes seemed -staring fixedly, reproachfully, at the hand which had lost its hold upon -Miss Julia’s dress. - -“It does seem as if I’d seen the face before somewhere,” she remarked, -“but I don’t appear to place it. It is getting so dark, too. No, I can’t -imagine. Who is it?” - -She had risen to her feet and was peering down at the dead man, her -pretty brows knitted in perplexity. - -“He recognized you!” said Dwight, with significant gravity. “It’s -Marsena Pulford.” - -“Oh, poor man!” exclaimed Julia. “If he’d only spoken to me I would -gladly have fanned him, too. But I was so anxious about the Colonel -here that I never took a fair look at him. I dare say I shouldn’t have -recognized him, even then. Beards do change one so, don’t they!” - -Then she turned to Colonel Starbuck and made answer to the inquiry of -his lifted eyebrows. - -“The unfortunate man,” she explained, “was our village photographer. I -sat to him for my picture several times. I think I have one of them over -at the Commission tent now.” - -“I’ll go this minute and seize it!” the gallant Colonel vowed, getting -to his feet. - -“Take care! We unprotected females have a man trap there!” Julia warned -him; but fear did not deter the staff officer from taking her arm and -leaning on it as they walked away in the twilight. Then the night fell, -and Dwight buried Marsena. - - - - -THE WAR WIDOW - - - - -I - -Although we had been one man short all day, and there was a plain -threat of rain in the hot air, everybody left the hay-field long before -sundown. It was too much to ask of human nature to stay off in the -remote meadows when such remarkable things were happening down around -the house. - -Marcellus Jones and I were in the pasture, watching the dog get the -cows together for the homeward march. He did it so well and, withal, so -willingly, that there was no call for us to trouble ourselves in keeping -up with him. We waited instead at the open bars until the hay-wagon had -passed through, rocking so heavily in the ancient pitch-hole, as it did -so, that the driver was nearly thrown off his perch on the top of -the high load. Then we put up the bars, and fell in close behind the -haymakers. A rich cloud of dust, far ahead on the road, suggested that -the dog was doing his work even too willingly, but for the once we -feared no rebuke. Almost anything might be condoned that day. - -Five grown-up men walked abreast down the highway, in the shadow of the -towering wagon mow, clad much alike in battered straw hats, gray -woollen shirts open at the neck, and rough old trousers bulging over the -swollen, creased ankles of thick boots. One had a scythe on his arm; two -others bore forks over their shoulders. By request, Hi Tuckerman allowed -me to carry his sickle. - -Although my present visit to the farm had been of only a few days’ -duration--and those days of strenuous activity darkened by a terrible -grief--I had come to be very friendly with Mr. Tuckerman. He took a good -deal more notice of me than the others did; and, when chance and leisure -afforded, addressed the bulk of his remarks to me. This favoritism, -though it fascinated me, was not without its embarrassing side. Hi -Tuckerman had taken part in the battle of Gaines’s Mill two years -before, and had been shot straight through the tongue. One could still -see the deep scar on each of his cheeks, a sunken and hairless pit in -among his sandy beard. His heroism in the war and his good qualities as -a citizen had earned for him the esteem of his neighbors, and they saw -to it that he never wanted for work. But their present respect for -him stopped short of the pretence that they enjoyed hearing him -talk. Whenever he attempted conversation, people moved away, or -began boisterous dialogues with one another to drown him out. Being -a sensitive man, he had come to prefer silence to these rebuffs -among those he knew. But he still had a try at the occasional polite -stranger--and I suppose it was in this capacity that I won his heart. -Though I never of my own initiative understood a word he said, Marcellus -sometimes interpreted a sentence or so for me, and I listened to all the -rest with a fraudulently wise face. To give only a solitary illustration -of the tax thus levied on our friendship, I may mention that when Hi -Tuckerman said “_Aak!-ah-aak!-uh_,” he meant “Rappahannock,” and he did -this rather better than a good many words. - -“Rappahannock,” alas! was a word we heard often enough in those days, -along with Chickahom-iny and Rapidan, and that odd Chattahoochee, the -sound of which raised always in my boyish mind the notion that the -geography-makers must have achieved it in their baby-talk period. These -strange Southern river names and many more were as familiar to the ears -of these four other untravelled Dearborn County farmers as the noise -of their own shallow Nedahma rattling over its pebbles in the valley -yonder. Only when their slow fancy fitted substance to these names they -saw in mind’s eye dark, sinister, swampy currents, deep and silent, and -discolored with human blood. - -Two of these men who strode along behind the wagon were young -half-uncles of mine, Myron and Warren Turnbull, stout, thick-shouldered, -honest fellows not much out of their teens, who worked hard, said -little, and were always lumped together in speech, by their family, the -hired help, and the neighbors, as “the boys.” They asserted themselves -so rarely, and took everything as it came with such docility, that I -myself, being in my eleventh year, thought of them as very young indeed. -Next them walked a man, hired just for the haying, named Philleo, and -then, scuffling along over the uneven humps and hollows on the outer -edge of the road, came Si Hummaston, with the empty ginger-beer pail -knocking against his knees. - -As Tuckerman’s “Hi” stood for Hiram, so I assume the other’s “Si” meant -Silas, or possibly Cyrus. I dare say no one, not even his mother, had -ever called him by his full name. I know that my companion, Marcellus -Jones, who wouldn’t be thirteen until after Thanksgiving, habitually -addressed him as Si, and almost daily I resolved that I would do so -myself. He was a man of more than fifty, I should think, tall, lean, and -what Marcellus called “bible-backed.” He had a short iron-gray beard -and long hair. Whenever there was any very hard or steady work going, -he generally gave out and went to sit in the shade, holding a hand flat -over his heart, and shaking his head dolefully. This kept a good many -from hiring him, and even in haying time, when everybody on two legs is -of some use, I fancy he would often have been left out if it hadn’t been -for my grandparents. They respected him on account of his piety and his -moral character, and always had him down when extra work began. He was -said to be the only hired man in the township who could not be goaded -in some way into swearing. He looked at one slowly, with the mild -expression of a heifer calf. - -We had come to the crown of the hill, and the wagon started down the -steeper incline, with a great groaning of the brake. The men, by some -tacit understanding, halted and overlooked the scene. - -The big old stone farm-house--part of which is said to date almost -to the Revolutionary times--was just below us, so near, indeed, that -Marcellus said he had once skipped a scaling-stone from where we stood -to its roof. The dense, big-leafed foliage of a sap-bush, sheltered in -the basin which dipped from our feet, pretty well hid this roof now from -view. Farther on, heavy patches of a paler, brighter green marked the -orchard, and framed one side of a cluster of barns and stables, at the -end of which three or four belated cows were loitering by the trough. -It was so still that we could hear the clatter of the stanchions as the -rest of the herd sought their places inside the milking-barn. - -The men, though, had no eyes for all this, but bent their gaze fixedly -on the road, down at the bottom. For a long way this thoroughfare was -bordered by a row of tall poplars, which, as we were placed, receded -from the vision in so straight a line that they seemed one high, fat -tree. Beyond these one saw only a line of richer green, where the -vine-wrapped rail-fences cleft their way between the ripening fields. - -“I’d ’a’ took my oath it was them,” said Philleo. “I can spot them -grays as fur’s I can see ’em. They turned by the school-house there, -or I’ll eat it, school-ma’am ’n’ all. And the buggy was fol-lerin’ ’em, -too.” - -“Yes, I thought it was them,” said Myron, shading his eyes with his -brown hand. - -“But they ought to got past the poplars by this time, then,” remarked -Warren. - -“Why, they’ll be drivin’ as slow as molasses in January,” put in Si -Hummaston. “When you come to think of it, it _is_ pretty nigh the same -as a regular funeral. You mark my words, your father’ll have walked them -grays every step of the road. I s’pose he’ll drive himself--he wouldn’t -trust bringin’ Alvy home to nobody else, would he? I know I wouldn’t, if -the Lord had given _me_ such a son; but then he didn’t!” - -“No, He didn’t!” commented the first speaker, in an unnaturally loud -tone of voice, to break in upon the chance that Hi Tuckerman was -going to try to talk. But Hi only stretched out his arm, pointing the -forefinger toward the poplars. - -Sure enough, something was in motion down at the base of the shadows -on the road. Then it crept forward, out in the sunlight, and separated -itself into two vehicles. A farm wagon came first, drawn by a team of -gray horses. Close after it came a buggy, with its black top raised. -Both advanced so slowly that they seemed scarcely to be moving at all. - -“Well, I swan!” exclaimed Si Hummaston, after a minute, “it’s Dana -Pillsbury drivin’ the wagon after all! Well--I dunno--yes, I guess -that’s prob’bly what I’d ’a’ done too, if I’d b’n your father. Yes, it -does look more correct, his follerin’ on behind, like that. I s’pose -that’s Alvy’s widder in the buggy there with him.” - -“Yes, that’s Serena--it looks like her little girl with her,” said -Myron, gravely. - -“I s’pose we might’s well be movin’ along down,” observed his brother, -and at that we all started. - -We walked more slowly now, matching our gait to the snail-like progress -of those coming toward us. As we drew near to the gate, the three hired -men instinctively fell behind the brothers, and in that position the -group halted on the grass, facing the driveway where it left the main -road. Not a word was uttered by any one. When at last the wagon came up, -Myron and Warren took off their hats, and the others followed suit, all -holding them poised at the level of their shoulders. - -Dana Pillsbury, carrying himself rigidly upright on the box-seat, -drove past us with eyes fixed straight ahead, and a face as coldly -expressionless as that of a wooden Indian. The wagon was covered all -over with rubber blankets, so that whatever it bore was hidden. Only -a few paces behind came the buggy, and my grandfather, old Arphaxed -Turnbull, went by in his turn with the same averted, faraway gaze, -and the same resolutely stolid countenance. He held the restive young -carriage horse down to a decorous walk, a single firm hand on the tight -reins, without so much as looking at it. The strong yellow light of the -declining sun poured full upon his long gray beard, his shaven upper -lip, his dark-skinned, lean, domineering face--and made me think of some -hard and gloomy old prophet seeing a vision, in the back part of the Old -Testament. If that woman beside him, swathed in heavy black raiment, and -holding a child up against her arm, was my Aunt Serena, I should never -have guessed it. - -We put on our hats again, and walked up the driveway with measured step -behind the carriage till it stopped at the side-piazza stoop. The wagon -had passed on toward the big new red barn--and crossing its course I -saw my Aunt Em, bareheaded and with her sleeves rolled up, going to the -cow-barn with a milking-pail in her hand. She was walking quickly, as if -in a great hurry. - -“There’s your Ma,” I whispered to Marcellus, assuming that he would -share my surprise at her rushing off like this, instead of waiting to -say “How-d’-do” to Serena. He only nodded knowingly, and said nothing. - -No one else said much of anything. Myron and Warren shook hands in stiff -solemnity with the veiled and craped sister-in-law, when their father -had helped her and her daughter from the buggy, and one of them remarked -in a constrained way that the hot spell seemed to keep up right along. -The newcomers ascended the steps to the open door, and the woman and the -child went inside. Old Arphaxed turned on the threshold, and seemed to -behold us for the first time. - -“After you’ve put out the horse,” he said, “I want the most of yeh to -come up to the new barn. Si Hummaston and Marcellus can do the milkin’.” - -“I kind o’ rinched my wrist this forenoon,” put in Si, with a note of -entreaty in his voice. He wanted sorely to be one of the party at the -red barn. - -“Mebbe milkin’ ’ll be good for it,” said Arphaxed, curtly. “You and -Marcellus do what I say, and keep Sidney with you.” With this he, too, -went into the house. - - - - -II - -It wasn’t an easy matter for even a member of the family like myself -to keep clearly and untangled in his head all the relationships which -existed under this patriarchal Turnbull roof. - -Old Arphaxed had been married twice. His first wife was the mother of -two children, who grew up, and the older of these was my father, Wilbur -Turnbull. He never liked farm-life, and left home early, not without -some hard feeling, which neither father nor son ever quite forgot. My -father made a certain success of it as a business man in Albany until, -in the thirties, his health broke down. He died when I was seven and, -although he left some property, my mother was forced to supplement this -help by herself going to work as forewoman in a large store. She was -too busy to have much time for visiting, and I don’t think there was -any great love lost between her and the people on the farm; but it was -a good healthy place for me to be sent to when the summer vacation came, -and withal inexpensive, and so the first of July each year generally -found me out at the homestead, where, indeed, nobody pretended to be -heatedly fond of me, but where I was still treated well and enjoyed -myself. This year it was understood that my mother was coming out to -bring me home later on. - -The other child of that first marriage was a girl who was spoken of in -youth as Emmeline, but whom I knew now as Aunt Em. She was a silent, -tough-fibred, hard-working creature, not at all goodlooking, but -relentlessly neat, and the best cook I ever knew. Even when the house -was filled with extra hired men, no one ever thought of getting in any -female help, so tireless and so resourceful was Em. She did all the -housework there was to do, from cellar to garret, was continually -lending a hand in the men’s chores, made more butter than the household -could eat up, managed a large kitchen-garden, and still had a good -deal of spare time, which she spent in sitting out in the piazza in a -starched pink calico gown, knitting the while she watched who went up -and down the road. When you knew her, you understood how it was that the -original Turnbulls had come into that part of the country just after the -Revolution, and in a few years chopped down all the forests, dug up all -the stumps, drained the swale-lands, and turned the entire place from a -wilderness into a flourishing and fertile home for civilized people. I -used to feel, when I looked at her, that she would have been quite equal -to doing the whole thing herself. - -All at once, when she was something over thirty, Em had up and married a -mowing-machine agent named Abel Jones, whom no one knew anything about, -and who, indeed, had only been in the neighborhood for a week or so. The -family was struck dumb with amazement. The idea of Em’s dallying with -the notion of matrimony had never crossed anybody’s mind. As a girl she -had never had any patience with husking-bees or dances or sleigh-ride -parties. No young man had ever seen her home from anywhere, or had had -the remotest encouragement to hang around the house. She had never been -pretty--so my mother told me--and as she got along in years grew dumpy -and thick in figure, with a plain, fat face, a rather scowling brow, and -an abrupt, ungracious manner. She had no conversational gifts -whatever, and, through years of increasing taciturnity and confirmed -unsociability, built up in everybody’s mind the conviction that, if -there could be a man so wild and unsettled in intellect as to suggest a -tender thought to Em, he would get his ears cuffed off his head for his -pains. - -Judge, then, how like a thunderbolt the episode of the mowing-machine -agent fell upon the family. To bewildered astonishment there soon enough -succeeded rage. This Jones was a curly-headed man, with a crinkly black -beard like those of Joseph’s brethren in the Bible picture. He had -no home and no property, and didn’t seem to amount to much even as a -salesman of other people’s goods. His machine was quite the worst then -in the market, and it could not be learned that he had sold a single one -in the county. But he had married Em, and it was calmly proposed that he -should henceforth regard the farm as his home. After this point had been -sullenly conceded, it turned out that Jones was a widower, and had a -boy nine or ten years old, named Marcellus, who was in a sort of orphan -asylum in Vermont. There were more angry scenes between father and -daughter, and a good deal more bad blood, before it was finally agreed -that the boy also should come and live on the farm. - -All this had happened in 1860 or 1861. Jones had somewhat improved on -acquaintance. He knew about lightning-rods, and had been able to fit out -all the farm buildings with them at cost price. He had turned a little -money now and again in trades with hop-poles, butter-firkins, shingles, -and the like, and he was very ingenious in mending and fixing up odds -and ends. He made shelves and painted the woodwork, and put a tar roof -on the summer kitchen. Even Martha, the second Mrs. Turnbull, came -finally to admit that he was handy about a house. - -This Martha became the head of the household while Em was still a little -girl. She was a heavy woman, mentally as well as bodily, rather prone to -a peevish view of things, and greatly given to pride in herself and her -position, but honest, charitable in her way, and not unkindly at heart. -On the whole she was a good stepmother, and Em probably got on quite as -well with her as she would have done with her own mother--even in the -matter of the mowing-machine agent. - -To Martha three sons were born. The two younger ones, Myron and Warren, -have already been seen. The eldest boy, Alva, was the pride of the -family, and, for that matter, of the whole section. - -Alva was the first Turnbull to go to college. From his smallest boyhood -it had been manifest that he had great things before him, so handsome -and clever and winning a lad was he. Through each of his schooling years -he was the honor man of his class, and he finished in a blaze of glory -by taking the Clark Prize, and practically everything else within reach -in the way of academic distinctions. He studied law at Octavius, in the -office of Judge Schermerhorn, and in a little time was not only that -distinguished man’s partner, but distinctly the more important figure -in the firm. At the age of twenty-five he was sent to the Assembly. The -next year they made him District Attorney, and it was quite understood -that it rested with him whether he should be sent to Congress later on, -or be presented by the Dearborn County bar for the next vacancy on the -Supreme Court bench. - -At this point in his brilliant career he married Miss Serena Wadsworth, -of Wadsworth’s Falls. The wedding was one of the most imposing social -events the county had known, so it was said, since the visit of -Lafayette. The Wadsworths were an older family, even, than the -Fairchilds, and infinitely more fastidious and refined. The daughters -of the household, indeed, carried their refinement to such a pitch that -they lived an almost solitary life, and grew to the parlous verge of -old-maidhood simply because there was nobody good enough to marry them. -Alva Turnbull was, however, up to the standard. It could not be said, -of course, that his home surroundings quite matched those of his bride; -but, on the other hand, she was nearly two years his senior, and this -was held to make matters about even. - -In a year or so came the war, and nowhere in the North did patriotic -excitement run higher than in this old abolition stronghold of upper -Dearborn. Public meetings were held, and nearly a whole regiment was -raised in Octavius and the surrounding towns alone. Alva Turnbull made -the most stirring and important speech at the first big gathering, and -sent a thrill through the whole country-side by claiming the privilege -of heading the list of volunteers. He was made a captain by general -acclaim, and went off with his company in time to get chased from the -field of Bull Run. When he came home on a furlough in 1863 he was a -major, and later on he rose to be lieutenant-colonel. We understood -vaguely that he might have climbed vastly higher in promotion but for -the fact that he was too moral and conscientious to get on very well -with his immediate superior, General Boyce, of Thessaly, who was -notoriously a drinking man. - -It was glory enough to have him at the farm, on that visit of his, even -as a major. His old parents literally abased themselves at his feet, -quite tremulous in their awed pride at his greatness. It made it almost -too much to have Serena there also, this fair, thin-faced, prim-spoken -daughter of the Wadsworths, and actually to call her by her first name. -It was haying time, I remember, but the hired men that year did not -eat their meals with the family, and there was even a question whether -Marcellus and I were socially advanced enough to come to the table, -where Serena and her husband were feeding themselves in state with a -novel kind of silver implement called a four-tined fork. If Em hadn’t -put her foot down, out to the kitchen we should both have gone, I fancy. -As it was, we sat decorously at the far end of the table, and asked with -great politeness to have things passed to us, which by standing up we -could have reached as well as not. It was slow, but it made us feel -immensely respectable, almost as if we had been born Wadsworths -ourselves. - -We agreed that Serena was “stuck up,” and Mar-cellus reported Aunt Em -as feeling that her bringing along with her a nursemaid to be waited on -hand and foot, just to take care of a baby, was an imposition bordering -upon the intolerable. He said that that was the sort of thing the -English did until George Washington rose and drove them out. But we both -felt that Alva was splendid. - -He was a fine creature physically--taller even than old Arphaxed, with -huge square shoulders and a mighty frame. I could recall him as without -whiskers, but now he had a waving lustrous brown beard, the longest -and biggest I ever saw. He didn’t pay much attention to us boys, it was -true; but he was affable when we came in his way, and he gave Myron and -Warren each a dollar bill when they went to Octavius to see the Fourth -of July doings. In the evening some of the more important neighbors -would drop in, and then Alva would talk about the war, and patriotism, -and saving the Union, till it was like listening to Congress itself. He -had a rich, big voice which filled the whole room, so that the hired men -could hear every word out in the kitchen; but it was even more affecting -to see him walking with his father down under the poplars, with his -hands making orator’s gestures as he spoke, and old Arphaxed looking at -him and listening with shining eyes. - -Well, then, he and his wife went away to visit her folks, and then we -heard he had left to join his regiment. From time to time he wrote -to his father--letters full of high and loyal sentiments, which were -printed next week in the Octavius _Transcript_, and the week after in -the Thessaly _Banner of Liberty_. Whenever any of us thought about the -war--and who thought much of anything else?--it was always with Alva as -the predominant figure in every picture. - -Sometimes the arrival of a letter for Aunt Em, or a chance remark about -a broken chair or a clock hopelessly out of kilter, would recall for -the moment the fact that Abel Jones was also at the seat of war. He had -enlisted on that very night when Alva headed the roll of honor, and -he marched away in Alva’s company. Somehow he got no promotion, but -remained in the ranks. Not even the members of the family were shown the -letters Aunt Em received, much less the printers of the newspapers. They -were indeed poor misspelled scrawls, about which no one displayed any -interest or questioned Aunt Em. Even Marcellus rarely spoke of his -father, and seemed to share to the full the family’s concentration of -thought upon Alva. - -Thus matters stood when spring began to play at being summer in the year -of ‘64. The birds came and the trees burst forth into green, the sun -grew hotter and the days longer, the strawberries hidden under the big -leaves in our yard started into shape, where the blossoms had been, -quite in the ordinary, annual way, with us up North. But down where -that dread thing they called “The War” was going on, this coming of warm -weather meant more awful massacre, more tortured hearts, and desolated -homes, than ever before. I can’t be at all sure how much later reading -and associations have helped out and patched up what seem to be my -boyish recollections of this period; but it is, at all events, much -clearer in my mind than are the occurrences of the week before last. - -We heard a good deal about how deep the mud was in Virginia that spring. -All the photographs and tin-types of officers which found their way -to relatives at home, now, showed them in boots that came up to their -thighs. Everybody understood that as soon as this mud dried up a little, -there was to be most terrific doings. The two great lines of armies -lay scowling at each other, still on that blood-soaked fighting ground -between Washington and Richmond where they were three years before. -Only now things were to go differently. A new general was at the head -of affairs, and he was going in, with jaws set and nerves of steel, to -smash, kill, burn, annihilate, sparing nothing, looking not to right or -left, till the red road had been hewed through to Richmond. In the first -week of May this thing began--a push forward all along the line--and the -North, with scared eyes and fluttering heart, held its breath. - -My chief personal recollection of these historic forty days is that one -morning I was awakened early by a noise in my bedroom, and saw my -mother looking over the contents of the big chest of drawers which stood -against the wall. She was getting out some black articles of apparel. -When she discovered that I was awake, she told me in a low voice that my -Uncle Alva had been killed. Then a few weeks later my school closed, and -I was packed off to the farm for the vacation. It will be better to tell -what had happened as I learned it there from Marcellus and the others. - -Along about the middle of May, the weekly paper came up from Octavius, -and old Arphaxed Turnbull, as was his wont, read it over out on the -piazza before supper. Presently he called his wife to him, and showed -her something in it. Martha went out into the kitchen, where Aunt Em was -getting the meal ready, and told her, as gently as she could, that there -was very bad news for her; in fact, her husband, Abel Jones, had been -killed in the first day’s battle in the Wilderness, something like a -week before. Aunt Em said she didn’t believe it, and Martha brought in -the paper and pointed out the fatal line to her. It was not quite clear -whether this convinced Aunt Em or not. She finished getting supper, and -sat silently through the meal, afterwards, but she went upstairs to her -room before family prayers. The next day she was about as usual, doing -the work and saying nothing. Marcellus told me that to the best of his -belief no one had said anything to her on the subject. The old people -were a shade more ceremonious in their manner toward her, and “the boys” - and the hired men were on the lookout to bring in water for her from the -well, and to spare her as much as possible in the routine of chores, but -no one talked about Jones. Aunt Em did not put on mourning. She made -a black necktie for Marcellus to wear to church, but stayed away from -meeting herself. - -A little more than a fortnight afterwards, Myron was walking down the -road from the meadows one afternoon, when he saw a man on horseback -coming up from the poplars, galloping like mad in a cloud of dust. -The two met at the gate. The man was one of the hired helps of the -Wadsworths, and he had ridden as hard as he could pelt from the Falls, -fifteen miles away, with a message, which now he gave Myron to read. -Both man and beast dripped sweat, and trembled with fatigued excitement. -The youngster eyed them, and then gazed meditatively at the sealed -envelope in his hand. - -“I s’pose you know what’s inside?” he asked, looking up at last. - -The man in the saddle nodded, with a tell-tale look on his face, and -breathing heavily. - -Myron handed the letter back, and pushed the gate open. “You’d better go -up and give it to father yourself,” he said. “I ain’t got the heart to -face him--jest now, at any rate.” - -Marcellus was fishing that afternoon, over in the creek which ran -through the woods. Just as at last he was making up his mind that it -must be about time to go after the cows, he saw Myron sitting on a -log beside the forest path, whittling mechanically, and staring at the -foliage before him, in an obvious brown study. Marcellus went up to him, -and had to speak twice before Myron turned his head and looked up. - -“Oh! it’s you, eh, Bubb?” he remarked dreamily, and began gazing once -more into the thicket. - -“What’s the matter?” asked the puzzled boy. - -“I guess Alvy’s dead,” replied Myron. To the lad’s comments and -questions he made small answer. “No,” he said at last, “I don’t feel -much like goin’ home jest now. Lea’ me alone here; I’ll prob’ly turn up -later on.” And Marcellus went alone to the pasture, and thence, at the -tail of his bovine procession, home. - -When he arrived he regretted not having remained with Myron in the -woods. It was like coming into something which was prison, hospital, and -tomb in one. The household was paralyzed with horror and fright. Martha -had gone to bed, or rather had been put there by Em, and all through -the night, when he woke up, he heard her broken and hysterical voice -in moans and screams. The men had hitched up the grays, and Arphaxed -Turnbull was getting into the buggy to drive to Octavius for news when -the boy came up. He looked twenty years older than he had at noon--all -at once turned into a chalkfaced, trembling, infirm old man--and could -hardly see to put his foot on the carriage-step. His son Warren had -offered to go with him, and had been rebuffed almost with fierceness. -Warren and the others silently bowed their heads before this mood; -instinct told them that nothing but Arphaxed’s show of temper held him -from collapse--from falling at their feet and grovelling on the grass -with cries and sobs of anguish, perhaps even dying in a fit. After he -had driven off they forbore to talk to one another, but went about a -chalkfaced, trembling, infirm old man--and could hardly see to put his -foot on the carriage-step. His son Warren had offered to go with him, -and had been rebuffed almost with fierceness. Warren and the others -silently bowed their heads before this mood; instinct told them that -nothing but Arphaxed’s show of temper held him from collapse--from -falling at their feet and grovelling on the grass with cries and sobs of -anguish, perhaps even dying in a fit. After he had driven off they -forbore to talk to one another, but went about noiselessly with drooping -chins and knotted brows. - -“It jest took the tuck out of everything,” said Marcellus, relating -these tragic events to me. There was not much else to tell. Martha had -had what they call brain fever, and had emerged from this some weeks -afterward a pallid and dim-eyed ghost of her former self, sitting for -hours together in her rocking-chair in the unused parlor, her hands idly -in her lap, her poor thoughts glued ceaselessly to that vague, far-off -Virginia which folks told about as hot and sunny, but which her mind’s -eye saw under the gloom of an endless and dreadful night. Arphaxed had -gone South, still defiantly alone, to bring back the body of his boy. -An acquaintance wrote to them of his being down sick in Washington, -prostrated by the heat and strange water; but even from his sick-bed he -had sent on orders to an undertaking firm out at the front, along with a -hundred dollars, their price in advance for embalming. Then, recovering, -he had himself pushed down to headquarters, or as near them as civilians -might approach, only to learn that he had passed the precious freight on -the way. He posted back again, besieging the railroad officials at every -point with inquiries, scolding, arguing, beseeching in turn, until at -last he overtook his quest at Juno Mills Junction, only a score of miles -from home. - -Then only he wrote, telling people his plans. He came first to Octavius, -where a funeral service was held in the forenoon, with military honors, -the Wadsworths as the principal mourners, and a memorable turnout of -distinguished citizens. The town-hall was draped with mourning, and -so was Alva’s pew in the Episcopal Church, which he had deserted his -ancestral Methodism to join after his marriage. Old Arphaxed listened -to the novel burial service of his son’s communion, and watched the -clergyman in his curious white and black vestments, with sombre pride. -He himself needed and desired only a plain and homely religion, but -it was fitting that his boy should have organ music and flowers and a -ritual. - -Dana Pillsbury had arrived in town early in the morning with the grays, -and a neighbor’s boy had brought in the buggy. Immediately after dinner -Arphaxed had gathered up Alva’s widow and little daughter, and started -the funeral cortège upon its final homeward stage. - -And so I saw them arrive on that July afternoon. - - - - -III - -For so good and patient a man, Si Hummaston bore himself rather -vehemently during the milking. It was hotter in the barn than it was -outside in the sun, and the stifling air swarmed with flies, which -seemed to follow Si perversely from stall to stall and settle on his -cow. One beast put her hoof square in his pail, and another refused -altogether to “give down,” while the rest kept up a tireless slapping -and swishing of their tails very hard to bear, even if one had the help -of profanity. Marcellus and I listened carefully to hear him at last -provoked to an oath, but the worst thing he uttered, even when the cow -stepped in the milk, was “Dum your buttons!” which Marcellus said -might conceivably be investigated by a church committee, but was hardly -out-and-out swearing. - -I remember Si’s groans and objurgations, his querulous “Hyst there, will -ye!” his hypocritical “So-boss! So-boss!” his despondent “They never -will give down for me!” because presently there was crossed upon this -woof of peevish impatience the web of a curious conversation. - -Si had been so slow in his headway against flapping tails and restive -hoofs that, before he had got up to the end of the row, Aunt Em had -finished her side. She brought over her stool and pail, and seated -herself at the next cow to Hummaston’s. For a little, one heard only the -resonant din of the stout streams against the tin; then, as the bottom -was covered, there came the ploughing plash of milk on milk, and Si -could hear himself talk. - -“S’pose you know S’reny’s come, ’long with your father,” he remarked, -ingratiatingly. - -“I saw ’em drive in,” replied Em. - -“_Whoa! Hyst there! Hole still, can’t ye?_ I didn’t know if you -quite made out who she was, you was scootin’ ’long so fast. They -ain’t--_Whoa there!_--they ain’t nothin’ the matter ’twixt you and -her, is they?” - -“I don’t know as there is,” said Em, curtly. “The world’s big enough for -both of us--we ain’t no call to bunk into each other.” - -“No, of course--_Now you stop it!_--but it looked kind o’ curious to -me, your pikin’ off like that, without waitin’ to say ‘How-d’-do?’ Of -course, I never had no relation by marriage that was stuck-up at all, or -looked down on me--_Stiddy there now!_--but I guess I can reelize pretty -much how you feel about it. I’m a good deal of a hand at that. It’s -what they call imagination. It’s a gift, you know, like good looks, or -preachin’, or the knack o’ makin’ money. But you can’t help what you’re -born with, can you? I’d been a heap better off if my gift’d be’n in -some other direction; but, as I tell ’em, it ain’t my fault. And my -imagination--_Hi, there! git over, will ye?_--it’s downright cur’ous -sometimes, how it works. Now I could tell, you see, that you ‘n’ S’reny -didn’t pull together. I s’pose she never writ a line to you, when your -husband was killed?” - -“Why should she?” demanded Em. “We never did correspond. What’d be the -sense of beginning then? She minds her affairs, ’n’ I mind mine. Who -wanted her to write?” - -“Oh, of course not,” said Si lightly. “Prob’ly you’ll get along better -together, though, now that you’ll see more of one another. I s’pose -S’reny’s figurin’ on stayin’ here right along now, her ’n’ her little -girl. Well, it’ll be nice for the old folks to have somebody they’re -fond of. They jest worshipped the ground Alvy walked on--and I s’pose -they won’t be anything in this wide world too good for that little girl -of his. Le’s see, she must be comin’ on three now, ain’t she?” - -“I don’t know anything about her!” snapped Aunt Em with emphasis. - -“Of course, it’s natural the old folks should feel so--she bein’ Alvy’s -child. I hain’t noticed anything special, but does it--_Well, I swan! -Hyst there!_--does it seem to you that they’re as good to Marcellus, -quite, as they used to be? I don’t hear ’em sayin’ nothin’ about his -goin’ to school next winter.” - -Aunt Em said nothing, too, but milked doggedly on. Si told her about the -thickness and profusion of Serena’s mourning, guardedly hinting at the -injustice done him by not allowing him to go to the red barn with the -others, speculated on the likelihood of the Wadsworths’ contributing to -their daughter’s support, and generally exhibited his interest in the -family through a monologue which finished only with the milking; but -Aunt Em made no response whatever. - -When the last pails had been emptied into the big cans at the -door--Marcellus and I had let the cows out one by one into the yard, as -their individual share in the milking ended--Si and Em saw old Arphaxed -wending his way across from the house to the red barn. He appeared -more bent than ever, but he walked with a slowness which seemed born of -reluctance even more than of infirmity. - -“Well, now,” mused Si, aloud, “Brother Turnbull an’ me’s be’n friends -for a good long spell. I don’t believe he’d be mad if I cut over now to -the red barn too, seein’ the milkin’s all out of the way. Of course I -don’t want to do what ain’t right--what d’you think now, Em, honest? -Think it ’ud rile him?” - -“I don’t know anything about it!” my aunt replied, with increased vigor -of emphasis. “But for the land sake go somewhere! Don’t hang around -botherin’ me. I got enough else to think of besides your everlasting -cackle.” - -Thus rebuffed, Si meandered sadly into the cow-yard, shaking his head as -he came. Seeing us seated on an upturned plough, over by the fence, from -which point we had a perfect view of the red barn, he sauntered toward -us, and, halting at our side, looked to see if there was room enough for -him to sit also. But Marcellus, in quite a casual way, remarked, “Oh! -wheeled the milk over to the house, already, Si?” and at this -the doleful man lounged off again in new despondency, got out the -wheelbarrow, and, with ostentatious groans of travail hoisted a can upon -it and started off. - -“He’s takin’ advantage of Arphaxed’s being so worked up to play ‘ole -soldier’ on him,” said Mar-cellus. “All of us have to stir him up the -whole time to keep him from takin’ root somewhere. I told him this -afternoon ’t if there had to be any settin’ around under the bushes an’ -cryin’, the fam’ly ’ud do it.” - -We talked in hushed tones as we sat there watching the shut doors of the -red barn, in boyish conjecture about what was going on behind them. I -recall much of this talk with curious distinctness, but candidly it -jars now upon my maturer nerves. The individual man looks back upon -his boyhood with much the same amused amazement that the race feels in -contemplating the memorials of its own cave-dwelling or bronze period. -What strange savages we were! In those days Marcellus and I used to find -our very highest delight in getting off on Thursdays, and going over to -Dave Bushnell’s slaughter-house, to witness with stony hearts, and from -as close a coign of vantage as might be, the slaying of some score of -barnyard animals--the very thought of which now revolts our grown-up -minds. In the same way we sat there on the plough, and criticised -old Arphaxed’s meanness in excluding us from the red barn, where the -men-folks were coming in final contact with the “pride of the family.” - Some of the cows wandering toward us began to “moo” with impatience for -the pasture, but Mar-cellus said there was no hurry. - -All at once we discovered that Aunt Em was standing a few yards away -from us, on the other side of the fence. We could see her from where we -sat by only turning a little--a motionless, stout, upright figure, with -a pail in her hand, and a sternly impassive look on her face. She, too, -had her gaze fixed upon the red barn, and, though the declining sun was -full in her eyes, seemed incapable of blinking, but just stared coldly, -straight ahead. - -Suddenly an unaccustomed voice fell upon our ears. Turning, we saw that -a black-robed woman, with a black wrap of some sort about her head, -had come up to where Aunt Em stood, and was at her shoulder. Marcellus -nudged me, and whispered, “It’s S’reny. Look out for squalls!” And then -we listened in silence. - -“Won’t you speak to me at all, Emmeline?” we heard this new voice say. - -Aunt Em’s face, sharply outlined in profile against the sky, never -moved. Her lips were pressed into a single line, and she kept her eyes -on the barn. - -“If there’s anything I’ve done, tell me,” pursued the other. “In such -an hour as this--when both our hearts are bleeding so, and--and every -breath we draw is like a curse upon us--it doesn’t seem a fit time -for us--for us to--” The voice faltered and broke, leaving the speech -unfinished. - -Aunt Em kept silence so long that we fancied this appeal, too, had -failed. Then abruptly, and without moving her head, she dropped a -few ungracious words as it were over her shoulder. “If I had anything -special to say, most likely I’d say it,” she remarked. - -We could hear the sigh that Serena drew. She lifted her shawled head, -and for a moment seemed as if about to turn. Then she changed her mind, -apparently, for she took a step nearer to the other. - -“See here, Emmeline,” she said, in a more confident tone. “Nobody in the -world knows better than I do how thoroughly good a woman you are, how -you have done your duty, and more than your duty, by your parents and -your brothers, and your little step-son. You have never spared yourself -for them, day or night. I have said often to--to him who has gone--that -I didn’t believe there was anywhere on earth a worthier or more devoted -woman than you, his sister. And--now that he is gone--and we are both -more sisters than ever in affliction--why in Heaven’s name should you -behave like this to me?” - -Aunt Em spoke more readily this time. “I don’t know as I’ve done -anything to you,” she said in defence. “I’ve just let you alone, that’s -all. An’ that’s doin’ as I’d like to be done by.” Still she did not turn -her head, or lift her steady gaze from those closed doors. - -“Don’t let us split words!” entreated the other, venturing a thin, white -hand upon Aunt Em’s shoulder. “That isn’t the way we two ought to stand -to each other. Why, you were friendly enough when I was here before. -Can’t it be the same again? What has happened to change it? Only to-day, -on our way up here, I was speaking to your father about you, and my deep -sympathy for you, and--” - -Aunt Em wheeled like a flash. “Yes, ’n’ what did _he_ say? Come, don’t -make up anything! Out with it! What did he say?” She shook off the hand -on her shoulder as she spoke. - -Gesture and voice and frowning vigor of mien were all so imperative and -rough that they seemed to bewilder Serena. She, too, had turned now, so -that I could see her wan and delicate face, framed in the laced festoons -of black, like the fabulous countenance of “The Lady Iñez” in my -mother’s “Album of Beauty.” She bent her brows in hurried thought, and -began stammering, “Well, he said--Let’s see--he said--” - -“Oh, yes!” broke in Aunt Em, with raucous irony, “I know well enough -what he said! He said I was a good worker--that they’d never had to -have a hired girl since I was big enough to wag a churn dash, an’ they -wouldn’t known what to do without me. I know all that; I’ve heard it on -an’ off for twenty years. What I’d like to hear is, did he tell you that -he went down South to bring back _your_ husband, an’ that he never so -much as give a thought to fetchin’ _my_ husband, who was just as good a -soldier and died just as bravely as yours did? I’d like to know--did he -tell you that?” - -What could Serena do but shake her head, and bow it in silence before -this bitter gale of words? - -“An’ tell me this, too,” Aunt Em went on, lifting her harsh voice -mercilessly, “when you was settin’ there in church this forenoon, with -the soldiers out, an’ the bells tollin’ an’ all that--did he say, -‘This is some for Alvy, an’ some for Abel, who went to the war together, -an’ was killed together, or within a month o’ one another?’ Did he say -that, or look for one solitary minute as if he thought it? I’ll bet he -didn’t!” - -Serena’s head sank lower still, and she put up, in a blinded sort of a -way, a little white handkerchief to her eyes. “But why blame _me?_” she -asked. - -Aunt Em heard her own voice so seldom that the sound of it now seemed to -intoxicate her. “No!” she shouted. “It’s like the Bible. One was taken -an’ the other left. It was always Alvy this, an’ Alvy that, nothin’ -for any one but Alvy. That was all right; nobody complained: prob’ly he -deserved it all; at any rate, we didn’t begrudge him any of it, while he -was livin’. But there ought to be a limit somewhere. When a man’s dead, -he’s pretty much about on an equality with other dead men, one would -think. But it ain’t so. One man get’s hunted after when he’s shot, an’ -there’s a hundred dollars for embalmin’ him an’ a journey after him, an’ -bringin’ him home, an’ two big funerals, an’ crape for his widow that’d -stand by itself. The _other_ man--he can lay where he fell! Them that’s -lookin’ for the first one are right close by--it ain’t more’n a few -miles from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, so Hi Tuckerman tells me, -an’ he was all over the ground two years ago--but nobody looks for this -other man! Oh, no! Nobody so much as remembers to think of him! They -ain’t no hundred dollars, no, not so much as fifty cents, for embalmin’ -_him!_ No--_he_ could be shovelled in anywhere, or maybe burned up when -the woods got on fire that night, the night of the sixth. They ain’t no -funeral for him--no bells tolled--unless it may be a cowbell up in the -pasture that he hammered out himself. An’ _his_ widow can go around, -week days an’ Sundays, in her old calico dresses. Nobody ever mentions -the word ‘mournin’ crape’ to her, or asks her if she’d like to put on -black. I s’pose they thought if they gave me the money for some mournin’ -I’d buy _candy_ with it instead!” - -With this climax of flaming sarcasm Aunt Em stopped, her eyes aglow, her -thick breast heaving in a flurry of breathlessness. She had never talked -so much or so fast before in her life. She swung the empty tin-pail now -defiantly at her side to hide the fact that her arms were shaking with -excitement. Every instant it looked as if she was going to begin again. - -Serena had taken the handkerchief down from her eyes and held her arms -stiff and straight by her side. Her chin seemed to have grown longer -or to be thrust forward more. When she spoke it was in a colder -voice--almost mincing in the way it cut off the words. - -“All this is not my doing,” she said. “I am to blame for nothing of it. -As I tried to tell you, I sympathize deeply with your grief. But grief -ought to make people at least fair, even if it cannot make them gentle -and soften their hearts. I shall trouble you with no more offers of -friendship. I--I think I will go back to the house now--to my little -girl.” - -Even as she spoke, there came from the direction of the red barn a -shrill, creaking noise which we all knew. At the sound Marcellus and I -stood up, and Serena forgot her intention to go away. The barn doors, -yelping as they moved on their dry rollers, had been pushed wide open. - - - - -IV - -The first one to emerge from the barn was Hi Tuckerman. He started to -make for the house, but, when he caught sight of our group, came running -toward us at the top of his speed, uttering incoherent shouts as he -advanced, and waving his arms excitedly. It was apparent that something -out of the ordinary had happened. - -We were but little the wiser as to this something, when Hi had come to -a halt before us, and was pouring out a volley of explanations, -accompanied by earnest grimaces and strenuous gestures. Even Marcellus -could make next to nothing of what he was trying to convey; but Aunt Em, -strangely enough, seemed to understand him. Still slightly trembling, -and with a little occasional catch in her breath, she bent an intent -scrutiny upon Hi, and nodded comprehendingly from time to time, with -encouraging exclamations, “He did, eh!” - -“Is that so?” and “I expected as much.” Listening and watching, I formed -the uncharitable conviction that she did not really understand Hi -at all, but was only pretending to do so in order further to harrow -Serena’s feelings. - -Doubtless I was wrong, for presently she turned, with an effort, to her -sister-in-law, and remarked, “P’rhaps you don’t quite follow what he’s -say-in’?” - -“Not a word!” said Serena, eagerly. “Tell me, please, Emmeline!” - -Aunt Em seemed to hesitate. “He was shot through the mouth at Gaines’s -Mills, you know--that’s right near Cold Harbor and--the Wilderness,” she -said, obviously making talk. - -“That isn’t what he’s saying,” broke in Serena. “What _is_ it, -Emmeline?” - -“Well,” rejoined the other, after an instant’s pause, “if you want to -know--he says that it ain’t Alvy at all that they’ve got there in the -barn.” - -Serena turned swiftly, so that we could not see her face. - -“He says it’s some strange man,” continued Em, “a yaller-headed man, all -packed an’ stuffed with charcoal, so’t his own mother wouldn’t know him. -Who it is nobody knows, but it ain’t Alvy.” - -“They’re a pack of robbers ’n’ swindlers!” cried old Arphaxed, shaking -his long gray beard with wrath. - -He had come up without our noticing his approach, so rapt had been our -absorption in the strange discovery reported by Hi Tuckerman. Behind -him straggled the boys and the hired men, whom Si Hummaston had scurried -across from the house to join. No one said anything now, but tacitly -deferred to the old man’s principal right to speak. It was a relief to -hear that terrible silence of his broken at all. - -“They ought to all be hung!” he cried, in a voice to which the excess of -passion over physical strength gave a melancholy quaver. “I paid ’em -what they asked--they took a hundred dollars o’ my money--an’ they -ain’t sent me _him_ at all! There I went, at my age, all through the -Wilderness, almost clear to Cold Harbor, an’ that, too, gittin’ up from -a sick bed in Washington, and then huntin’ for the box at New York an’ -Albany, an’ all the way back, an’ holdin’ a funeral over it only this -very day--an’ here it ain’t _him_ at all! I’ll have the law on ‘em -though, if it costs the last cent I’ve got in the world!” - -Poor old man! These weeks of crushing grief and strain had fairly -broken him down. We listened to his fierce outpourings with sympathetic -silence, almost thankful that he had left strength and vitality enough -still to get angry and shout. He had been always a hard and gusty man; -we felt by instinct, I suppose, that his best chance of weathering this -terrible month of calamity was to batter his way furiously through it, -in a rage with everything and everybody. - -“If there’s any justice in the land,” put in Si Hummaston, “you’d ought -to get your hundred dollars back. I shouldn’t wonder if you could, too, -if you sued ’em afore a Jestice that was a friend of yours.” - -“Why, the man’s a fool!” burst forth Arphaxed, turning toward him with -a snort. “I don’t want the hundred dollars--I wouldn’t’a’ begrudged a -thousand--if only they’d dealt honestly by me. I paid ’em their own -figure, without beatin’ ’em down a penny. If it’d be’n double, I’d -’a’ paid it. What _I_ wanted was _my boy!_ It ain’t so much their -cheatin’ _me_ I mind, either, if it ’d be’n about anything else. But -to think of Alvy--_my boy_--after all the trouble I took, an’ the -journey, an’ my sickness there among strangers--to think that after it -all he’s buried down there, no one knows where, p’raps in some trench -with private soldiers, shovelled in anyhow--oh-h! they ought to be -hung!” - -The two women had stood motionless, with their gaze on the grass; Aunt -Em lifted her head at this. - -“If a place is good enough for private soldiers to be buried in,” she -said, vehemently, “it’s good enough for the best man in the army. On -Resurrection Day, do you think them with shoulder-straps ’ll be called -fust an’ given all the front places? I reckon the men that carried a -musket are every whit as good, there in the trench, as them that wore -swords. They gave their lives as much as the others did, an’ the best -man that ever stepped couldn’t do no more.” - -Old Arphaxed bent upon her a long look, which had in it much surprise -and some elements of menace. Reflection seemed, however, to make him -think better of an attack on Aunt Em. He went on, instead, with rambling -exclamations to his auditors at large. - -“Makin’ me the butt of the whole county!” he cried. “There was that -funeral to-day--with a parade an’ a choir of music an’ so on: an’ now -it’ll come out in the papers that it wasn’t Alvy at all I brought back -with me, but only some perfect stranger--by what you can make out from -his clothes, not even an officer at all. I tell you the war’s a jedgment -on this country for its wickedness, for its cheatin’ an’ robbin’ -of honest men! They wa’n’t no sense in that battle at Cold Harbor -anyway--everybody admits that! It was murder an’ massacre in cold -blood--fifty thousand men mowed down, an’ nothin’ gained by it! An’ then -not even to git my boy’s dead body back! I say hangin’s too good for -’em!” - -“Yes, father,” said Myron, soothingly; “but do you stick to what you -said about the--the box? Wouldn’t it look better--” - -“_No!_” shouted Arphaxed, with emphasis. “Let Dana do what I told -him--take it down this very night to the poor-master, an’ let him bury -it where he likes. It’s no affair of mine. I wash my hands of it. There -won’t be no funeral held here!” - -It was then that Serena spoke. Strangely enough, old Arphaxed had not -seemed to notice her presence in our group, and his jaw visibly dropped -as he beheld her now standing before him. He made a gesture signifying -his disturbance at finding her among his hearers, and would have spoken, -but she held up her hand. - -“Yes, I heard it all,” she said, in answer to his deprecatory movement. -“I am glad I did. It has given me time to get over the shock of -learning--our mistake--and it gives me the chance now to say something -which I--I feel keenly. The poor man you have brought home was, you say, -a private soldier. Well, isn’t this a good time to remember that there -was a private soldier who went out from this farm--belonging right -to this family--and who, as a private, laid down his life as nobly as -General Sedgwick or General Wadsworth, or even our dear Alva, or any one -else? I never met Emmeline’s husband, but Alva liked him, and spoke -to me often of him. Men who fall in the ranks don’t get identified, or -brought home, but they deserve funerals as much as the others--just -as much. Now, this is my idea: let us feel that the mistake which has -brought this poor stranger to us is God’s way of giving us a chance to -remember and do honor to Abel Jones. Let him be buried in the family -lot up yonder, where we had thought to lay Alva, and let us do it -reverently, in the name of Emmeline’s husband, and of all others who -have fought and died for our country, and with sympathy in our hearts -for the women who, somewhere in the North, are mourning, just as we -mourn here, for the stranger there in the red barn.” - -Arphaxed had watched her intently. He nodded now, and blinked at the -moisture gathering in his old eyes. “I could e’en a’most ’a’ thought -it was Alvy talkin’,” was what he said. Then he turned abruptly, but we -all knew, without further words, that what Serena had suggested was to -be done. - -The men-folk, wondering doubtless much among themselves, moved slowly -off toward the house or the cow-barns, leaving the two women alone. A -minute of silence passed before we saw Serena creep gently up to Aunt -Em’s side, and lay the thin white hand again upon her shoulder. This -time it was not shaken off, but stretched itself forward, little by -little, until its palm rested against Aunt Em’s further cheek. We heard -the tin-pail fall resonantly against the stones under the rail-fence, -and there was a confused movement as if the two women were somehow -melting into one. - -“Come on, Sid!” said Marcellus Jones to me; “let’s start them cows -along. If there’s anything I hate to see it’s women cryin’ on each -other’s necks.” - - - - -THE EVE OF THE FOURTH - -It was well on toward evening before this Third of July all at once -made itself gloriously different from other days in my mind. - -There was a very long afternoon, I remember, hot and overcast, with -continual threats of rain, which never came to anything. The other boys -were too excited about the morrow to care for present play. They sat -instead along the edge of the broad platform-stoop in front of Delos -Ingersoll’s grocery-store, their brown feet swinging at varying -heights above the sidewalk, and bragged about the manner in which they -contemplated celebrating the anniversary of their Independence. Most of -the elder lads were very independent indeed; they were already secure in -the parental permission to stay up all night, so that the Fourth might -be ushered in with its full quota of ceremonial. The smaller urchins -pretended that they also had this permission, or were sure of getting -it. Little Denny Cregan attracted admiring attention by vowing that he -should remain out, even if his father chased him with a policeman all -around the ward, and he had to go and live in a cave in the gulf until -he was grown up. - -My inferiority to these companions of mine depressed me. They were -allowed to go without shoes and stockings; they wore loose and -comfortable old clothes, and were under no responsibility to keep them -dry or clean or whole; they had their pockets literally bulging now -with all sorts of portentous engines of noise and racket--huge brown -“double-enders,” bound with waxed cord; long, slim, vicious-looking -“nigger-chasers;” big “Union torpedoes,” covered with clay, which made a -report like a horse-pistol, and were invaluable for frightening farmers’ -horses; and so on through an extended catalogue of recondite and -sinister explosives upon which I looked with awe, as their owners -from time to time exhibited them with the proud simplicity of those -accustomed to greatness. Several of these boys also possessed toy -cannons, which would be brought forth at twilight. They spoke firmly of -ramming them to the muzzle with grass, to produce a greater noise--even -if it burst them and killed everybody. - -By comparison, my lot was one of abasement. I was a solitary child, and -a victim to conventions. A blue necktie was daily pinned under my Byron -collar, and there were gilt buttons on my zouave jacket. When we were -away in the pasture playground near the gulf, and I ventured to take off -my foot-gear, every dry old thistle-point in the whole territory seemed -to arrange itself to be stepped upon by my whitened and tender soles. -I could not swim; so, while my lithe bold comrades dived out of sight -under the deep water, and darted about chasing one another far beyond -their depth, I paddled ignobly around the “baby-hole” close to the bank, -in the warm and muddy shallows. - -Especially apparent was my state of humiliation on this July afternoon. -I had no “double-enders,” nor might hope for any. The mere thought of -a private cannon seemed monstrous and unnatural to me. By some unknown -process of reasoning my mother had years before reached the theory that -a good boy ought to have two ten-cent packs of small fire-crackers on -the Fourth of July. Four or five succeeding anniversaries had hardened -this theory into an orthodox tenet of faith, with all its observances -rigidly fixed. The fire-crackers were bought for me overnight, and -placed on the hall table. Beside them lay a long rod of punk. When I -hastened down and out in the morning, with these ceremonial implements -in my hands, the hired girl would give me, in an old kettle, some embers -from the wood-fire in the summer kitchen. Thus furnished, I went into -the front yard, and in solemn solitude fired off these crackers one by -one. Those which, by reason of having lost their tails, were only fit -for “fizzes,” I saved till after breakfast. With the exhaustion of -these, I fell reluctantly back upon the public for entertainment. -I could see the soldiers, hear the band and the oration, and in the -evening, if it didn’t rain, enjoy the fireworks; but my own contribution -to the patriotic noise was always over before the breakfast dishes had -been washed. - -My mother scorned the little paper torpedoes as flippant and wasteful -things. You merely threw one of them, and it went off, she said, and -there you were. I don’t know that I ever grasped this objection in its -entirety, but it impressed my whole childhood with its unanswerableness. -Years and years afterward, when my own children asked for torpedoes, I -found myself unconsciously advising against them on quite the maternal -lines. Nor was it easy to budge the good lady from her position on the -great two-packs issue. I seem to recall having successfully undermined -it once or twice, but two was the rule. When I called her attention to -the fact that our neighbor, Tom Hemingway, thought nothing of exploding -a whole pack at a time inside their wash-boiler, she was not dazzled, -but only replied: “Wilful waste makes woful want.” - -Of course the idea of the Hemingways ever knowing what want meant was -absurd. They lived a dozen doors or so from us, in a big white house -with stately white columns rising from veranda to gable across the whole -front, and a large garden, flowers and shrubs in front, fruit-trees and -vegetables behind. Squire Hemingway was the most important man in our -part of the town. I know now that he was never anything more than United -States Commissioner of Deeds, but in those days, when he walked down the -street with his gold-headed cane, his blanket-shawl folded over his arm, -and his severe, dignified, close-shaven face held well up in the air, I -seemed to behold a companion of Presidents. - -This great man had two sons. The elder of them, - -De Witt Hemingway, was a man grown, and was at the front. I had seen him -march away, over a year before, with a bright drawn sword, at the side -of his company. The other son, Tom, was my senior by only a twelvemonth. -He was by nature proud, but often consented to consort with me when the -selection of other available associates was at low ebb. - -It was to this Tom that I listened with most envious eagerness, in front -of the grocery-store, on the afternoon of which I speak. He did not -sit on the stoop with the others--no one expected quite that degree of -condescension--but leaned nonchalantly against a post, whittling out a -new ramrod for his cannon. He said that this year he was not going to -have any ordinary fire-crackers at all; they, he added with a meaning -glance at me, were only fit for girls. He might do a little in -“double-enders,” but his real point would be in “ringers”--an incredible -giant variety of cracker, Turkey-red like the other, but in size almost -a rolling-pin. Some of these he would fire off singly, between volleys -from his cannon. But a good many he intended to explode, in bunches say -of six, inside the tin wash-boiler, brought out into the middle of the -road for that purpose. It would doubtless blow the old thing sky-high, -but that didn’t matter. They could get a new one. - -Even as he spoke, the big bell in the tower of the town-hall burst forth -in a loud clangor of swift-repeated strokes. It was half a mile away, -but the moist air brought the urgent, clamorous sounds to our ears as if -the belfry had stood close above us. - -We sprang off the stoop and stood poised, waiting to hear the number of -the ward struck, and ready to scamper off on the instant if the fire was -anywhere in our part of the town. But the excited peal went on and on, -without a pause. It became obvious that this meant something besides a -fire. Perhaps some of us wondered vaguely what that something might be, -but as a body our interest had lapsed. Billy Norris, who was the son of -poor parents, but could whip even Tom Hemingway, said he had been told -that the German boys on the other side of the gulf were coming over to -“rush” us on the following day, and that we ought all to collect nails -to fire at them from our cannon. This we pledged ourselves to do--the -bell keeping up its throbbing tumult ceaselessly. - -Suddenly we saw the familiar figure of Johnson running up the street -toward us. What his first name was I never knew. To every one, little -or big, he was just Johnson. He and his family had moved into our town -after the war began; I fancy they moved away again before it ended. I -do not even know what he did for a living. But he seemed always drunk, -always turbulently good-natured, and always shouting out the news at the -top of his lungs. I cannot pretend to guess how he found out everything -as he did, or why, having found it out, he straightway rushed homeward, -scattering the intelligence as he ran. Most probably Johnson was moulded -by Nature as a town-crier, but was born by accident some generations -after the race of bellmen had disappeared. Our neighborhood did not like -him; our mothers did not know Mrs. Johnson, and we boys behaved with -snobbish roughness to his children. He seemed not to mind this at all, -but came up unwearyingly to shout out the tidings of the day for our -benefit. - -“Vicksburg’s fell! Vicksburg’s fell!” was what we heard him yelling as -he approached. - -Delos Ingersoll and his hired boy ran out of the grocery. Doors opened -along the street and heads were thrust inquiringly out. - -“Vicksburg’s fell!” he kept hoarsely proclaiming, his arms waving in -the air, as he staggered along at a dog-trot past us, and went into the -saloon next to the grocery. - -I cannot say how definite an idea these tidings conveyed to our boyish -minds. I have a notion that at the time I assumed that Vicksburg had -something to do with Gettysburg, where I knew, from the talk of my -elders, that an awful fight had been proceeding since the middle of the -week. Doubtless this confusion was aided by the fact that an hour or so -later, on that same wonderful day, the wire brought us word that this -terrible battle on Pennsylvanian soil had at last taken the form of a -Union victory. It is difficult now to see how we could have known both -these things on the Third of July--that is to say, before the people -actually concerned seemed to have been sure of them. Perhaps it was only -inspired guesswork, but I know that my town went wild over the news, and -that the clouds overhead cleared away as if by magic. - -The sun did well to spread that summer sky at eventide with all the -pageantry of color the spectrum knows. It would have been preposterous -that such a day should slink off in dull, Quaker drabs. Men were -shouting in the streets now. The old cannon left over from the Mexican -war had been dragged out on to the rickety covered river-bridge, and was -frightening the fishes, and shaking the dry, worm-eaten rafters, as fast -as the swab and rammer could work. Our town bandsmen were playing -as they had never played before, down in the square in front of the -post-office. The management of the Universe could not hurl enough wild -fireworks into the exultant sunset to fit our mood. - -The very air was filled with the scent of triumph--the spirit of -conquest. It seemed only natural that I should march off to my mother -and quite collectedly tell her that I desired to stay out all night with -the other boys. I had never dreamed of daring to prefer such a request -in other years. Now I was scarcely conscious of surprise when she gave -her permission, adding with a smile that I would be glad enough to come -in and go to bed before half the night was over. - -I steeled my heart after supper with the proud resolve that if the night -turned out to be as protracted as one of those Lapland winter nights we -read about in the geography, I still would not surrender. - -The boys outside were not so excited over the tidings of my unlooked-for -victory as I had expected them to be. They received the news, in fact, -with a rather mortifying stoicism. Tom Hemingway, however, took enough -interest in the affair to suggest that, instead of spending my twenty -cents in paltry fire-crackers, I might go down town and buy another -can of powder for his cannon. By doing so, he pointed out, I would be -a part-proprietor, as it were, of the night’s performance, and would be -entitled to occasionally touch the cannon off. This generosity affected -me, and I hastened down the long hill-street to show myself worthy of -it, repeating the instruction of “Kentucky Bear-Hunter-coarse-grain” - over and over again to myself as I went. - -Half-way on my journey I overtook a person whom, even in the gathering -twilight, I recognized as Miss Stratford, the school-teacher. She also -was walking down the hill and rapidly. It did not need the sight of a -letter in her hand to tell me that she was going to the post-office. In -those cruel war-days everybody went to the post-office. I myself went -regularly to get our mail, and to exchange shin-plasters for one-cent -stamps with which to buy yeast and other commodities that called for -minute fractional currency. - -Although I was very fond of Miss Stratford--I still recall her gentle -eyes, and pretty, rounded, dark face, in its frame of long, black curls, -with tender liking--I now coldly resolved to hurry past, pretending not -to know her. It was a mean thing to do; Miss Stratford had always been -good to me, shining in that respect in brilliant contrast to my -other teachers, whom I hated bitterly. Still, the “Kentucky -Bear-Hunter-coarse-grain” was too important a matter to wait upon any -mere female friendships, and I quickened my pace into a trot, hoping to -scurry by unrecognized. - -“Oh, Andrew! is that you?” I heard her call out as I ran past. For the -instant I thought of rushing on, quite as if I had not heard. Then I -stopped and walked beside her. - -“I am going to stay up all night: mother says I may; and I am going to -fire off Tom Hemingway’s big cannon every fourth time, straight through -till breakfast time,” I announced to her loftily. - -“Dear me! I ought to be proud to be seen walking with such an important -citizen,” she answered, with kindly playfulness. She added more gravely, -after a moment’s pause: “Then Tom is out playing with the other boys, is -he?” - -“Why, of course!” I responded. “He always lets us stand around when he -fires off his cannon. He’s got some ‘ringers’ this year too.” - -I heard Miss Stratford murmur an impulsive “Thank God!” under her -breath. - -Full as the day had been of surprises, I could not help wondering that -the fact of Tom’s ringers should stir up such profound emotions in the -teacher’s breast. Since the subject so interested her, I went on with a -long catalogue of Tom’s other pyrotechnic possessions, and from that to -an account of his almost supernatural collection of postage-stamps. In -a few minutes more I am sure I should have revealed to her the great -secret of my life, which was my determination, in case I came to assume -the victorious rôle and rank of Napoleon, to immediately make Tom a -Marshal of the Empire. - -But we had reached the post-office square. I had never before seen it so -full of people. - -Even to my boyish eyes the tragic line of division which cleft this -crowd in twain was apparent. On one side, over by the Seminary, the -youngsters had lighted a bonfire, and were running about it--some of -the bolder ones jumping through it in frolicsome recklessness. Close by -stood the band, now valiantly thumping out “John Brown’s Body” upon the -noisy night air. It was quite dark by this time, but the musicians knew -the tune by heart. So did the throng about them, and sang it with lusty -fervor. The doors of the saloon toward the corner of the square were -flung wide open. Two black streams of men kept in motion under the -radiance of the big reflector-lamp over these doors--one going in, one -coming out. They slapped one another on the back as they passed, with -exultant screams and shouts. Every once in a while, when movement was -for the instant blocked, some voice lifted above the others would begin -“Hip-hip-hip-hip--” and then would come a roar that fairly drowned the -music. - -On the post-office side of the square there was no bonfire. No one -raised a cheer. A densely packed mass of men and women stood in front -of the big square stone building, with its closed doors, and curtained -windows upon which, from time to time, the shadow of some passing clerk, -bareheaded and hurried, would be momentarily thrown. They waited in -silence for the night mail to be sorted. If they spoke to one another, -it was in whispers--as if they had been standing with uncovered heads at -a funeral service in a graveyard. The dim light reflected over from -the bonfire, or down from the shaded windows of the post-office, showed -solemn, hard-lined, anxious faces. Their lips scarcely moved when they -muttered little low-toned remarks to their neighbors. They spoke from -the side of the mouth, and only on one subject. - -“He went all through Fredericksburg without a scratch--” - -“He looks so much like me--General Palmer told my brother he’d have -known his hide in a tan-yard--” - -“He’s been gone--let’s see--it was a year some time last April--” - -“He was counting on a furlough the first of this month. I suppose nobody -got one as things turned out--‘’ - -“He said, ‘No; it ain’t my style. I’ll fight as much as you like, but I -won’t be nigger-waiter for no man, captain or no captain ‘--” - -Thus I heard the scattered murmurs among the grown-up heads above me, as -we pushed into the outskirts of the throng, and stood there, waiting for -the rest. There was no sentence without a “he” in it. A stranger might -have fancied that they were all talking of one man. I knew better. They -were the fathers and mothers, the sisters, brothers, wives of the -men whose regiments had been in that horrible three days’ fight at -Gettysburg. Each was thinking and speaking of his own, and took it -for granted the others would understand. For that matter, they all -did understand. The town knew the name and family of every one of the -twelve-score sons she had in this battle. - -It is not very clear to me now why people all went to the post-office -to wait for the evening papers that came in from the nearest big city. -Nowadays they would be brought in bulk and sold on the street before the -mail-bags had reached the post-office. Apparently that had not yet been -thought of in our slow old town. - -The band across the square had started up afresh with “Annie Lisle”--the -sweet old refrain of “Wave willows, murmur waters,” comes back to me now -after a quarter-century of forgetfulness--when all at once there was a -sharp forward movement of the crowd. The doors had been thrown open, -and the hallway was on the instant filled with a swarming multitude. -The band had stopped as suddenly as it began, and no more cheering was -heard. We could see whole troops of dark forms scudding toward us from -the other side of the square. - -“Run in for me--that’s a good boy--ask for Dr. Stratford’s mail,” the -teacher whispered, bending over me. - -It seemed an age before I finally got back to her, with the paper in its -postmarked wrapper buttoned up inside my jacket. I had never been in -so fierce and determined a crowd before, and I emerged from it at last, -confused in wits and panting for breath. - -I was still looking about through the gloom in a foolish way for Miss -Stratford, when I felt her hand laid sharply on my shoulder. - -“Well--where is it?--did nothing come?” she asked, her voice trembling -with eagerness, and the eyes which I had thought so soft and dove-like -flashing down upon me as if she were Miss Pritchard, and I had been -caught chewing gum in school. - -I drew the paper out from under my roundabout, and gave it to her. She -grasped it, and thrust a finger under the cover to tear it off. Then she -hesitated for a moment, and looked about her. “Come where there is some -light,” she said, and started up the street. Although she seemed to have -spoken more to herself than to me, I followed her in silence, close to -her side. - -For a long way the sidewalk in front of every lighted store-window was -thronged with a group of people clustered tight about some one who had -a paper, and was reading from it aloud. Beside broken snatches of this -monologue, we caught, now groans of sorrow and horror, now exclamations -of proud approval, and even the beginnings of cheers, broken in upon by -a general “’Sh-h!” as we hurried past outside the curb. - -It was under a lamp in the little park nearly halfway up the hill that -Miss Stratford stopped, and spread the paper open. I see her still, -white-faced, under the flickering gaslight, her black curls making -a strange dark bar between the pale-straw hat and the white of her -shoulder shawl and muslin dress, her hands trembling as they held up the -extended sheet. She scanned the columns swiftly, skimmingly for a time, -as I could see by the way she moved her round chin up and down. Then -she came to a part which called for closer reading. The paper shook -perceptibly now, as she bent her eyes upon it. Then all at once it fell -from her hands, and without a sound she walked away. - -I picked the paper up and followed her along the gravelled path. It was -like pursuing a ghost, so weirdly white did her summer attire now look -to my frightened eyes, with such a swift and deathly silence did she -move. The path upon which we were described a circle touching the four -sides of the square. She did not quit it when the intersection with our -street was reached, but followed straight round again toward the point -where we had entered the park. This, too, in turn, she passed, gliding -noiselessly forward under the black arches of the overhanging elms. The -suggestion that she did not know she was going round and round in a ring -startled my brain. I would have run up to her now if I had dared. - -Suddenly she turned, and saw that I was behind her. She sank slowly -into one of the garden-seats, by the path, and held out for a moment a -hesitating hand toward me. I went up at this and looked into her face. -Shadowed as it was, the change I saw there chilled my blood. It was like -the face of some one I had never seen before, with fixed, wide-open, -staring eyes which seemed to look beyond me through the darkness, upon -some terrible sight no other could see. - -“Go--run and tell--Tom--to go home! His brother--his brother has been -killed,” she said to me, choking over the words as if they hurt her -throat, and still with the same strange dry-eyed, far-away gaze covering -yet not seeing me. - -I held out the paper for her to take, but she made no sign, and I -gingerly laid it on the seat beside her. I hung about for a minute or -two longer, imagining that she might have something else to say--but no -word came. Then, with a feebly inopportune “Well, good-by,” I started -off alone up the hill. - -It was a distinct relief to find that my companions were congregated at -the lower end of the common, instead of their accustomed haunt farther -up near my home, for the walk had been a lonely one, and I was deeply -depressed by what had happened. Tom, it seems, had been called away some -quarter of an hour before. All the boys knew of the calamity which had -befallen the Hemingways. We talked about it, from time to time, as we -loaded and fired the cannon which Tom had obligingly turned over to my -friends. It had been out of deference to the feelings of the stricken -household that they had betaken themselves and their racket off to the -remote corner of the common. The solemnity of the occasion silenced -criticism upon my conduct in forgetting to buy the powder. “There would -be enough as long as it lasted,” Billy Norris said, with philosophic -decision. - -We speculated upon the likelihood of De Witt Hemingway’s being given a -military funeral. These mournful pageants had by this time become such -familiar things to us that the prospect of one more had no element of -excitement in it, save as it involved a gloomy sort of distinction for -Tom. He would ride in the first mourning-carriage with his parents, and -this would associate us, as we walked along ahead of the band, with the -most intimate aspects of the demonstration. We regretted now that -the soldier company which we had so long projected remained still -unorganized. Had it been otherwise we would probably have been awarded -the right of the line in the procession. Some one suggested that it was -not too late--and we promptly bound ourselves to meet after breakfast -next day to organize and begin drilling. If we worked at this night and -day, and our parents instantaneously provided us with uniforms and guns, -we should be in time. It was also arranged that we should be called the -De Witt C. Hemingway Fire Zouaves, and that Billy Norris should be side -captain. The chief command would, of course, be reserved for Tom. We -would specially salute him as he rode past in the closed carriage, and -then fall in behind, forming his honorary escort. - -None of us had known the dead officer closely, owing to his advanced -age. He was seven or eight years older than even Tom. But the more -elderly among our group had seen him play base-ball in the academy nine, -and our neighborhood was still alive with legends of his early audacity -and skill in collecting barrels and dry-goods boxes at night for -election bonfires. It was remembered that once he carried away a whole -front-stoop from the house of a little German tailor on one of the -back streets. As we stood around the heated cannon, in the great black -solitude of the common, our fancies pictured this redoubtable young man -once more among us--not in his blue uniform, with crimson sash and sword -laid by his side, and the gauntlets drawn over his lifeless hands, but -as a taller and glorified Tom, in a roundabout jacket and copper-toed -boots, giving the law on this his playground. The very cannon at our -feet had once been his. The night air became peopled with ghosts of his -contemporaries--handsome boys who had grown up before us, and had gone -away to lay down their lives in far-off Virginia or Tennessee. - -These heroic shades brought drowsiness in their train. We lapsed into -long silences, punctuated by yawns, when it was not our turn to ram and -touch off the cannon. Finally some of us stretched ourselves out on the -grass, in the warm darkness, to wait comfortably for this turn to come. - -What did come instead was daybreak--finding Billy Norris and myself -alone constant to our all night vow. We sat up and shivered as we rubbed -our eyes. The morning air had a chilling freshness that went to my -bones--and these, moreover, were filled with those novel aches and -stiffnesses which beds were invented to prevent. We stood up, stretching -out our arms, and gaping at the pearland-rose beginnings of the sunrise -in the eastern sky. The other boys had all gone home, and taken the -cannon with them. Only scraps of torn paper and tiny patches of burnt -grass marked the site of our celebration. - -My first weak impulse was to march home without delay, and get into bed -as quickly as might be. But Billy Norris looked so finely resolute and -resourceful that I hesitated to suggest this, and said nothing, leaving -the initiative to him. One could see, by the most casual glance, that -he was superior to mere considerations of unseasonableness in hours. -I remembered now that he was one of that remarkable body of boys, the -paper-carriers, who rose when all others were asleep in their warm -nests, and trudged about long before breakfast distributing the -_Clarion_ among the well-to-do households. This fact had given him his -position in our neighborhood as quite the next in leadership to Tom -Hemingway. - -He presently outlined his plans to me, after having tried the centre -of light on the horizon, where soon the sun would be, by an old brass -compass he had in his pocket--a process which enabled him, he said, to -tell pretty well what time it was. The paper wouldn’t be out for nearly -two hours yet--and if it were not for the fact of a great battle, there -would have been no paper at all on this glorious anniversary--but he -thought we would go downtown and see what was going on around about the -newspaper office. Forthwith we started. He cheered my faint spirits by -assuring me that I would soon cease to be sleepy, and would, in fact, -feel better than usual. I dragged my feet along at his side, waiting for -this revival to come, and meantime furtively yawning against my sleeve. - -Billy seemed to have dreamed a good deal, during our nap on the common, -about the De Witt C. Hemingway Fire Zouaves. At least he had now in his -head a marvellously elaborated system of organization, which he unfolded -as we went along. I felt that I had never before realized his greatness, -his born genius for command. His scheme halted nowhere. He allotted -offices with discriminating firmness; he treated the question of -uniforms and guns as a trivial detail which would settle itself; he -spoke with calm confidence of our offering our services to the -Republic in the autumn; his clear vision saw even the materials for a -fife-and-drum corps among the German boys in the back streets. It was -true that I appeared personally to play a meagre part in these great -projects; the most that was said about me was that I might make a fair -third-corporal. But Fate had thrown in my way such a wonderful chance of -becoming intimate with Billy that I made sure I should swiftly advance -in rank--the more so as I discerned in the background of his thoughts, -as it were, a grim determination to make short work of Tom Hemingway’s -aristocratic pretensions, once the funeral was over. - -We were forced to make a detour of the park on our way down, because -Billy observed some halfdozen Irish boys at play with a cannon inside, -whom he knew to be hostile. If there had been only four, he said, he -would have gone in and routed them. He could whip any two of them, he -added, with one hand tied behind his back. I listened with admiration. -Billy was not tall, but he possessed great thickness of chest and length -of arm. His skin was so dark that we canvassed the theory from time -to time of his having Indian blood. He did not discourage this, and he -admitted himself that he was double-jointed. - -The streets of the business part of the town, into which we now made -our way, were quite deserted. We went around into the yard behind the -printing-office, where the carrier-boys were wont to wait for the press -to get to work; and Billy displayed some impatience at discovering that -here too there was no one. It was now broad daylight, but through the -windows of the composing-room we could see some of the printers still -setting type by kerosene lamps. - -We seated ourselves at the end of the yard on a big, flat, smooth-faced -stone, and Billy produced from his pocket a number of “em” quads, so he -called them, and with which the carriers had learned from the printers’ -boys to play a very beautiful game. You shook the pieces of metal in -your hands and threw them on the stone; your score depended upon the -number of nicked sides that were turned uppermost. We played this game -in the interest of good-fellowship for a little. Then Billy told me that -the carriers always played it for pennies, and that it was unmanly for -us to do otherwise. He had no pennies at that precise moment, but would -pay at the end of the week what he had lost; in the meantime there was -my twenty cents to go on with. After this Billy threw so many nicks -uppermost that my courage gave way, and I made an attempt to stop the -game; but a single remark from him as to the military destiny which he -was reserving for me, if I only displayed true soldierly nerve and grit, -sufficed to quiet me once more, and the play went on. I had now only -five cents left. - -Suddenly a shadow interposed itself between the sunlight and the stone. -I looked up, to behold a small boy with bare arms and a blackened apron -standing over me, watching our game. There was a great deal of ink on -his face and hands, and a hardened, not to say rakish expression in his -eye. - -“Why don’t you ‘jeff’ with somebody of your own size?” he demanded of -Billy after having looked me over critically. - -He was not nearly so big as Billy, and I expected to see the latter -instantly rise and crush him, but Billy only laughed and said we were -playing for fun; he was going to give me all my money back. I was -rejoiced to hear this, but still felt surprised at the propitiatory -manner Billy adopted toward this diminutive inky boy. It was not the -demeanor befitting a side-captain--and what made it worse was that the -strange boy loftily declined to be cajoled by it. He sniffed when Billy -told him about the military company we were forming; he coldly shook his -head, with a curt “Nixie!” when invited to join it; and he laughed aloud -at hearing the name our organization was to bear. - -“He ain’t dead at all--that De Witt Hemingway,” he said, with jeering -contempt. - -“Hain’t he though!” exclaimed Billy. “The news come last night. Tom had -to go home--his mother sent for him--on account of it!” - -“I’ll bet you a quarter he ain’t dead,” responded the practical inky -boy. “Money up, though!” - -“I’ve only got fifteen cents. I’ll bet you that, though,” rejoined -Billy, producing my torn and dishevelled shin-plasters. - -“All right! Wait here!” said the boy, running off to the building and -disappearing through the door. There was barely time for me to learn -from my companion that this printer’s apprentice was called “the devil,” - and could not only whistle between his teeth and crack his fingers, but -chew tobacco, when he reappeared, with a long narrow strip of paper -in his hand. This he held out for us to see, indicating with an ebon -forefinger the special paragraph we were to read. Billy looked at it -sharply, for several moments in silence. Then he said to me: “What does -it say there? I must ’a’ got some powder in my eyes last night.” - -I read this paragraph aloud, not without an unworthy feeling that the -inky boy would now respect me deeply: - -_“Correction. Lieutenant De Witt C. Hemingway, of Company A, --th New -York, reported in earlier despatches among the killed, is uninjured. The -officer killed is Lieutenant Carl Heinninge, Company F, same regiment.”_ - -Billy’s face visibly lengthened as I read this out, and he felt us both -looking at him. He made a pretence of examining the slip of paper again, -but in a half-hearted way. Then he ruefully handed over the fifteen -cents and, rising from the stone, shook himself. - -“Them Dutchmen never was no good!” was what he said. - -The inky boy had put the money in the pocket under his apron, and -grinned now with as much enjoyment as dignity would permit him to show. -He did not seem to mind any longer the original source of his winnings, -and it was apparent that I could not with decency recall it to him. Some -odd impulse prompted me, however, to ask him if I might have the paper -he had in his hand. He was magnanimous enough to present me with the -proof-sheet on the spot. Then with another grin he turned and left us. - -Billy stood sullenly kicking with his bare toes into a sand-heap by the -stone. He would not answer me when I spoke to him. It flashed across my -perceptive faculties that he was not such a great man, after all, as I -had imagined. In another instant or two it had become quite clear to me -that I had no admiration for him whatever. Without a word I turned on -my heel and walked determinedly out of the yard and into the street, -homeward bent. - -All at once I quickened my pace; something had occurred to me. The -purpose thus conceived grew so swiftly that soon I found myself running. -Up the hill I sped, and straight through the park. If the Irish boys -shouted after me I knew it not, but dashed on heedless of all else save -the one idea. I only halted, breathless and panting, when I stood on Dr. -Stratford’s doorstep, and heard the night-bell inside jangling shrilly -in response to my excited pull. - -As I waited, I pictured to myself the old doctor as he would presently -come down, half-dressed and pulling on his coat as he advanced. He would -ask, eagerly, “Who is sick? Where am I to go?” and I would calmly -reply that he unduly alarmed himself, and that I had a message for his -daughter. He would, of course, ask me what it was, and I, politely but -firmly, would decline to explain to any one but the lady in person. -Just what might ensue was not clear--but I beheld myself throughout -commanding the situation, at once benevolent, polished, and inexorable. - -The door opened with unlooked-for promptness, while my self-complacent -vision still hung in midair. Instead of the bald and spectacled old -doctor, there confronted me a white-faced, solemn-eyed lady in a black -dress, whom I did not seem to know. I stared at her, tongue-tied, till -she said, in a low, grave voice, “Well, Andrew, what is it?” - -Then of course I saw that it was Miss Stratford, my teacher, the person -whom I had come to see. Some vague sense of what the sleepless night had -meant in this house came to me as I gazed confusedly at her mourning, -and heard the echo of her sad tones in my ears. - -“Is some one ill?” she asked again. - -“No; some one--some one is very well!” I managed to reply, lifting my -eyes again to her wan face. The spectacle of its drawn lines and pallor -all at once assailed my wearied and overtaxed nerves with crushing -weight. I felt myself beginning to whimper, and rushing tears scalded my -eyes. Something inside my breast seemed to be dragging me down through -the stoop. - -I have now only the recollection of Miss Stratford’s kneeling by my -side, with a supporting arm around me, and of her thus unrolling and -reading the proof-paper I had in my hand. We were in the hall now, -instead of on the stoop, and there was a long silence. Then she put her -head on my shoulder and wept. I could hear and feel her sobs as if they -were my own. - -“I--I didn’t think you’d cry--that you’d be so sorry,” I heard myself -saying, at last, in despondent self-defence. - -Miss Stratford lifted her head and, still kneeling as she was, put a -finger under my chin to make me look her in her face. Lo! the eyes were -laughing through their tears; the whole countenance was radiant once -more with the light of happy youth and with that other glory which youth -knows only once. - -“Why, Andrew, boy,” she said, trembling, smiling, sobbing, beaming all -at once, “didn’t you know that people cry for very joy sometimes?” - -And as I shook my head she bent down and kissed me. - -MY AUNT SUSAN - -MY AUNT SUSAN - -I HELD the lamp, while Aunt Susan cut up the Pig. - -The whole day had been devoted, I remember, to preparations for this -great event. Early in the morning I had been to the butcher’s to set in -train the annual negotiations for a loan of cleaver and meat-saw; and -hours afterward had borne these implements proudly homeward through the -village street. In the interval I had turned the grindstone, over at -the Four Corners, while the grocer’s hired man obligingly sharpened our -carving-knife. Then there had been the even more back-aching task of -clearing away the hard snow from the accustomed site of our wood-pile in -the yard, and scraping together a frosted heap of chips and bark for the -smudge in the smoke-barrel. - -From time to time I sweetened this toil, and helped the laggard hours to -a swifter pace, by paying visits to the wood-shed to have still another -look at the pig. He was frozen very stiff, and there were small icicles -in the crevices whence his eyes had altogether disappeared. My emotions -as I viewed his big, cold, pink carcass, with its extended legs, its -bland and pasty countenance, and that awful emptiness underneath, were -much mixed. Although I was his elder by seven or eight years, we had -been close friends during all his life--or all except a very few weeks -of his earliest sucking pig-hood, spent on his native farm. I had fed -him daily; I had watched him grow week by week; more than once I had -poked him with a stick as he ran around in his sty, to make him squeal -for the edification of neighbors’ boys who had come into our yard, and -would now be sharply ordered out again by Aunt Susan. - -As these kindly memories surged over me I could not but feel like a -traitor to my old companion, as he lay thus hairless and pallid before -my eyes. But then I would remember how good he was going to be to -eat--and straightway return with a light heart to the work of kicking up -more chips from the ice. - -From the living-room in the rear of our little house came the monotonous -incessant clatter of Aunt Susan’s carpet loom. Through the window I -could see the outlines of her figure and the back of her head as she -sat on her high bench. It was to me the most familiar of all spectacles, -this tireless woman bending resolutely over her work. She was there when -I first cautiously ventured my nose out from under the warm blanket of -a winter’s morning. Very, very often I fell asleep at night in my bed in -the recess, lulled off by the murmur of the diligent loom. - -Presently I went in to warm myself, and stood with my red fingers over -the stove top. She cast but one vague glance at me, through the open -frame of the loom between us, and went on with her work. It was not -our habit to talk much in that house. She was too busy a woman, for -one thing, to have much time for conversation. The impression that she -preferred not to talk was always present in my boyish mind. I call up -the picture of her still as I saw her then under the top bar of the -cumbrous old machine, sitting with lips tight together, and resolute, -masterful eyes bent upon the twining intricacy of warp and woof before -her. At her side were piled a dozen or more big balls of carpet rags, -which the village wives and daughters cut up, sewed together and -wound in the long winter evenings, while the men-folks sat with their -stockinged feet on the stove hearth, and read out the latest “news from -the front” in their _Weekly Tribune_. - -I knew all these rag balls by the names of their owners. Not only did -I often go to their houses for them, upon the strength of the general -village rumor that they were ready, and always carry back the finished -lengths of carpet; but I had long since unconsciously grown to watch -all the varying garments and shifts of fashion in the raiment of our -neighbors, with an eye single to the likelihood of their eventually -turning up at Aunt Susan’s loom. When Hiram Mabie’s checkered butternut -coat was cut down for his son Roswell, I noted the fact merely as a -stage of its progress toward carpet rags. If Mrs. Wilkins concluded to -turn her flowered delaine dress a third year, or Sarah Northrup had her -bright saffron shawl dyed black, I was sensible of a wrong having been -done our little household. I felt like crossing the street whenever I -saw approaching the portly figure of Cyrus Husted’s mother, the woman -who dragged everybody into her house to show them the ingrain carpet she -had bought at Tecumseh, and assured them that it was much cheaper in the -long run than the products of my aunt’s industry. I tingled with -indignation as she passed me on the sidewalk, puffing for breath and -stepping mincingly because her shoes were too tight for her. - -Nearly all the knowledge of our neighbors’ sayings and doings which -reached Aunt Susan came to her from me. She kept herself to herself with -a vengeance, toiling early and late, rarely going beyond the confines of -her yard save on Sunday mornings, when we went to church, and treating -with frosty curtness the few people who ventured to come to our house -on business or from social curiosity. For one thing, this Juno Mills in -which we lived was not really our home. We had only been there for four -or five years--a space which indeed spanned all my recollections of -life--but left my Aunt more or less a stranger and a new-comer. She -spared no pains to maintain that condition. I can see now that there -were good reasons for this stern aloofness. At the time I thought it was -altogether due to the proud and unsociable nature of my Aunt. - -In my child’s mind I regarded her as distinctly an elderly person. -People outside, I know, spoke of her as an old maid, sometimes winking -furtively over my head as they did so. But she was not really old at -all--was in truth just barely in the thirties. - -Doubtless the fact that she was tall and dark, with very black hair, -and that years of steady concentration of sight, upon the strings and -threads of the loom, had scored a scowling vertical wrinkle between her -near-sighted eyes gave me my notion of her advanced maturity. And in -all her ways and words, too, she was so far removed from any idea of -youthful softness! I could not remember her having ever kissed me. My -imagination never evolved the conceit of her kissing anybody. I had -always had at her hands uniformly good treatment, good food, good -clothes; after I had learned my letters from the old maroon plush label -on the Babbitt’s soap box which held the wood behind the stove, and -expanded this knowledge by a study of street signs, she had herself -taught me how to read, and later provided me with books for the village -school. She was my only known relative--the only person in the world -who had ever done anything for me. Yet it could not be said that I loved -her. Indeed she no more raised the suggestion of tenderness in my mind -than did the loom at which she spent her waking hours. - -“The Perkinses asked me why you didn’t get the butcher to cut up the -pig,” I remarked at last, rubbing my hands together over the hot stove -griddles. - -“It’s none of their business!” said Aunt Susan, with laconic promptness. - -“And Devillo Pollard’s got a new overcoat,” I added. “He hasn’t worn the -old army one now for upward of a week.” - -“If this war goes on much longer,” commented my Aunt, “every carpet in -Dearborn County ‘ll be as blue as a whetstone.” - -I think that must have been the entire conversation of the afternoon. I -especially recall the remark about the overcoat. For two years now -the balls of rags had contained an increasing proportion of pale blue -woollen strips, as the men of the country round about came home from -the South, or bought cheap garments from the second-hand dealers in -Tecumseh. All other colors had died out. There was only this light blue, -and the black of bombazine or worsted mourning into which the news in -each week’s papers forced one or another of the neighboring families. -To obviate this monotony, some of the women dyed their white rags with -butternut or even cochineal, but this was a mere drop in the bucket, -so to speak. The loom spun out only long, depressing rolls of black and -blue. - -My memory leaps lightly forward now to the early evening, when I held -the lamp in the woodshed, and Aunt Susan cut up the pig. - -How joyfully I watched her every operation! Every now and again my -interest grew so beyond proper bounds that I held the lamp sidewise, -and the flame smoked the chimney. I was in mortal terror over this lamp, -even when it was standing on the table quite by itself. We often read -in the paper of explosions from this new kerosene by which people were -instantly killed and houses wrapped in an unquenchable fire. Aunt Susan -had stood out against the strange invention, long after most of the -other homes of Juno Mills were familiar with the idea of the lamp. Even -after she had yielded, and I went to the grocery for more oil and fresh -chimneys and wicks, like other boys, she refused to believe that this -inflammable fluid was really squeezed out of hard coal, as they said. -And for years we lived in momentary belief that our lamp was about to -explode. - -My fears of sudden death could not, however, for a moment stand up -against the delighted excitement with which I viewed the dismemberment -of the pig. It was very cold in the shed, but neither of us noticed -that. My Aunt attacked the job with skilful resolution and energy, as -was her way, chopping small bones, sawing vehemently through big ones, -hacking and slicing with the knife, like a strong man in a hurry. - -For a long time no word was spoken. I gazed in silence as the head was -detached, and then resolved itself slowly into souse--always tacitly set -aside as my special portion. In prophecy I saw the big pan, filled with -ears, cheeks, snout, feet, and tail, all boiled and allowed to grow cold -in their own jelly--that pan to which I was free to repair any time of -day until everything was gone. I thought of myself, too, with apron tied -round my neck and the chopping-bowl on my knees, reducing what remained -of the head into small bits, to be seasoned by my Aunt, and then fill -other pans as head-cheese. The sage and summer savory hung in paper -flour-bags from the rafters overhead. I looked up at them with rapture. -It seemed as if my mouth already tasted them in head-cheese and sausage -and in the hot gravy which basted the succulent spare-rib. Only the -abiding menace of the lamp kept me from dancing with delight. - -Gradually, however, as my Aunt passed from the tid-bits to the more -substantial portions of her task, getting out the shoulders, the -hams for smoking, the pieces for salting down in the brine-barrel, my -enthusiasm languished a trifle. The lamp grew heavy as I changed it from -hand to hand, holding the free fingers at a respectful distance over the -chimney-top for warmth, and shuffling my feet about. It was truly very -cold. I strove to divert myself by smiling at the big shadow my bustling -Aunt cast against the house side of the shed, and by moving the lamp to -affect its proportions, but broke out into yawns instead. A mouse ran -swiftly across the scantling just under the lean-to roof. At the same -time I thought I caught the muffled sound of distant rapping, as if at -our own rarely used front door. I was too sleepy to decide whether I had -really heard a noise or not. - -All at once I roused myself with a start. The lamp had nearly slipped -from my hands, and the horror of what might have happened frightened me -into wakefulness. - -“The Perkins girls keep on calling me ‘Wise child.’ They yell it after -me all the while,” I said, desperately clutching at a subject which I -hoped would interest my Aunt. I had spoken to her about it a week or so -before, and it had stirred her quite out of her wonted stern calm. If -anything would induce her to talk now, it would be this. - -“They do, eh?” she said, with an alert sharpness of voice, which -dwindled away into a sigh. Then, after a moment, she added, “Well, -never you mind. You just keep right on, tending to your own affairs, and -studying your lessons, and in time it’ll be you who can laugh at them -and all their low-down lot. They only do it to make you feel bad. Just -don’t you humor them.” - -“But I don’t see,” I went on, “why--what do they call me ‘wise child’ -_for?_ I asked Hi Budd, up at the Corners, but he only just chuckled and -chuckled to himself, and wouldn’t say a word.” - -My Aunt suspended work for the moment, and looked severely down upon -me. “Well! Ira Clarence Blodgett!” she said, with grim emphasis, “I am -ashamed of you! I thought you had more pride! The idea of talking about -things like that with a coarse, rough, hired man--in a barn!” - -To hear my full name thus pronounced, syllable by syllable, sent me -fairly weltering, as it were, under Aunt Susan’s utmost condemnation. It -was the punishment reserved for my gravest crimes. I hung my head, and -felt the lamp wagging nervelessly in my hands. I could not deny even her -speculative impeachment as to the barn; it was blankly apparent in my -mind that the fact of the barn made matters much worse. “I was helping -him wash their two-seated sleigh,” I submitted, weakly. “He asked me -to.” - -“What does that matter?” she asked, peremptorily. “What business have -you got going around talking with men about me?” - -“Why, it wasn’t about you at all, Aunt Susan,” I put in more -confidently. “I said the Perkins girls kept calling me ‘wise child,’ and -I asked Hi--” - -Aunt Susan sighed once more, and interrupted me to inspect the wick of -the lamp. Then she turned again to her work, but less spiritedly now. -She took up the cleaver with almost an air of sadness. - -“You don’t understand--yet,” she said. “But don’t make it any harder -for me by talking. Just go along and say nothing to nobody. People will -think more of you.” - -My mind strove in vain to grapple with this suggested picture of myself, -moving about in perpetual dumbness, followed everywhere by universal -admiration. The lamp would _not_ hold itself straight. - -All at once we both distinctly heard the sound of footsteps close -outside. The noise of crunching on the dry, frozen snow came through -the thin clapboards with sharp resonance. Aunt Susan ceased cutting and -listened. - -“I heard somebody rapping at the front door a spell ago,” I ventured -to whisper. My Aunt looked at me, and probably realized that I was too -sleepy to be accountable for my actions. At all events she said nothing, -but moved toward the low door of the shed, cleaver in hand. - -“Who’s there?” she called out in shrill, belligerent tones; and this -demand she repeated, after an interval of silence, when an irresolute -knocking was heard on the door. - -We heard a man coughing immediately outside the door. I saw Aunt Susan -start at the sound--almost as if she recognized it. A moment later this -man, whoever he was, mastered his cough sufficiently to call out, in a -hesitating way: - -“Is that you, Susan?” - -Aunt Susan raised her chin on the instant, her nostrils drawn in, her -eyes flashing like those of a pointer when he sees a gun lifted. I had -never seen her so excited. She wheeled round once, and covered me with -a swift, penetrating, comprehensive glance, under which my knees smote -together, and the lamp lurched perilously. Then she turned again, glided -toward the door, halted, moved backward two or three steps--looked again -at me, and this time spoke. - -“Well, I _swan!_” was what she said, and I felt that she looked it. - -“Susan! Is that you?” came the voice again, hoarsely appealing. It was -not the voice of any neighbor. I made sure I had never heard it before. -I could have smiled to myself at the presumption of any man calling my -Aunt by her first name, if I had not been too deeply mystified. - -“I’ve been directed here to find Miss Susan Pike,” the man outside -explained, between fresh coughings. - -“Well, then, mog your boots out of this as quick as ever you can!” my -Aunt replied, with great promptitude. “You won’t find her here!” - -“But I _have_ found her!” the stranger protested, with an accent of -wearied deprecation. “Don’t you know me, Susan? I am not strong, this -cold air is very bad for me.” - -“I say ‘get out!’” my Aunt replied, sharply. Her tone was unrelenting -enough, but I noted that she had tipped her head a little to one side, -a clear sign to me that she was opening her mind to argument. I felt -certain that presently I should see this man. - -And, sure enough, after some further parley, Susan went to the door, -and, with a half-defiant gesture, knocked the hook up out of the staple. - -“Come along then, if you must!” she said, in scornful tones. Then she -marched back till she stood beside me, angry resolution written all over -her face and the cleaver in her hand. - -A tall, dark figure, opaque against a gleaming background of moonlight -and snowlight, was what I for a moment saw in the frame of the open -doorway. Then, as he entered, shut and hooked the door behind him, and -stood looking in a dazed way over at our lamplit group, I saw that he -was a slender, delicately featured man, with a long beard of yellowish -brown, and gentle eyes. He was clad as a soldier, heavy azure-hued -caped overcoat and all, and I already knew enough of uniforms--cruel -familiarity of my war-time infancy--to tell by his cap that he was an -officer. He coughed again before a word was spoken. He looked the -last man in the world to go about routing up peaceful households of a -winter’s night. - -“Well, now--what is your business?” demanded Aunt Susan. She put her -hand on my shoulder as she spoke, something I had never known her to -do before. I felt confused under this novel caress, and it seemed only -natural that the stranger, having studied my Aunt’s face in a wistful -way for a moment, should turn his gaze upon me. I was truly a remarkable -object, with Aunt Susan’s hand on my shoulder. - -“I could make no one hear at the other door. I saw the light through the -window here, and came around,” the stranger explained. He sent little -straying glances at the remains of the pig and at the weapon my Aunt -held at her side, but for the most part looked steadily at me. - -“That doesn’t matter,” said Aunt Susan, coldly. - -“What do you want, now that you _are_ here? Why did you come at all? -What business had you to think that I ever wanted to lay eyes on you -again? How could you have the courage to show your face here--in _my_ -house?” - -The man’s shoulders shivered under their cape, and a wan smile curled in -his beard. “You keep your house at a very low temperature,” he said with -grave pleasantry. He did not seem to mind Aunt Susan’s hostile demeanor -at all. - -“I was badly wounded last September,” he went on, quite as if that was -what she had asked him, “and lay at the point of death for weeks. Then -they sent me North, and I have been in the hospital at Albany ever -since. One of the nurses there, struck by my name, asked me if I had -any relatives in her village--that is, Juno Mills. In that way I learned -where you were living. I suppose I ought not to have come--against -doctor’s orders--the journey has been too much--I have suffered a good -deal these last two hours.” - -I felt my Aunt’s hand shake a little on my shoulder. Her voice, though, -was as implacable as ever. - -“There is a much better reason than that why you should not have come,” - she said, bitterly. - -The stranger was talking to her, but looking at me. He took a step -toward me now, with a softened sparkle in his eyes and an outstretched -hand. “This--this then is the boy, is it?” he asked. - -With a gesture of amazing swiftness Aunt Susan threw her arm about me, -and drew me close to her side, lamp and all. With her other hand she -lifted and almost brandished the cleaver. - -“No, you don’t!” she cried. “You don’t touch him! He’s mine! I’ve worked -for him day and night ever since I took him from his dying mother’s -breast. I closed her eyes. I forgave her. Blood is thicker ’n water after -all. She was my sister. Yes, I forgave poor Emmeline, and I kissed her -before she died. She gave the boy to me, and he’s mine! Mine, do you -hear?--_mine!_” - -“My dear Susan--” our visitor began. “Don’t ‘dear Susan’ me! I heard it -once--once too often. Oh, never again! You left me to run away with her. -I don’t speak of that. I forgave that when I forgave her. But that was -the least of it. You left her to herself for months before she died. -You’ve left the boy to himself ever since. You can’t begin now. I’ve -worked my fingers to the bone for him--you can’t make me stop now.” - -“I went to California,” he went on in a low voice, speaking with -difficulty. “We didn’t get on together as smoothly as we might perhaps, -but I had no earthly notion of deserting her. I was ill myself, lying in -yellow-fever quarantine off Key West, at the very time she died. When -I finally got back you and the child were both gone. I could not trace -you. I went to the war. I had made money in California. It is trebled -now. I rose to be Colonel--I have a Brigadier’s brevet in my pocket now. -Yet I give you my word I never have desired anything so much, all the -time, as to find you again--you and the boy.” - -My Aunt nodded her head comprehendingly. I felt from the tremor of -her hand that she was forcing herself against her own desires to be -disagreeable. - -“Yes, that war,” was what she said. “I know about that war! The honest -men that go get killed. But you--_you_ come back!” - -The man frowned wearily, and gave a little groan of discouragement. -“Then this is final, is it? You don’t wish to speak with me; you really -desire to keep the boy--you are set against my ever seeing him--touching -him. Why, then, of course--of course--excuse my--” - -And then for the first time I saw a human being tumble in a dead swoon. -My little brain, dazed and bewildered by the strange new things I was -hearing, lagged behind my eyes in following the sudden pallor on the -man’s face--lagged behind my ears in noting the tell-tale quaver and -gasp in his voice. Before I comprehended what was toward--lo! there was -no man standing in front of me at all. - -Like a flash Aunt Susan snatched the lamp from my grasp and flung -herself upon her knees beside the limp and huddled figure. After a -momentary inspection of the white, bearded face, she set the lamp down -on the frozen earth floor and took his head upon her lap. - -“Take the lamp, run to the buttery, and bring the bottle of hartshorn!” - she commanded me, hurriedly. “Or, no--wait--open the door--that’s -it--walk ahead with the light!” - -The strong woman stood upright as she spoke, her shoulders braced -against the burden she bore in her arms. Unaided, with slow steps, she -carried the senseless form of the soldier into the living-room, and held -it without rest of any sort, the while I, under her direction, wildly -tore off quilts, blankets, sheets, and feather-tick from my bed and -heaped them up on the floor beside the stove. Then, when I had spread -them to her liking, she bent and gently laid him down. - -“_Now_ get the hartshorn,” she said.. I heard her putting more wood on -the fire, but when I returned with the phial she sat once again with the -stranger’s head upon her knee. She was softly stroking the fine, waving -brown hair upon his brow, but her eyes were lifted, looking dreamily at -far-away things. I could have sworn to the beginnings of a smile about -her parted lips. It was not like my Aunt Susan at all. - -“Come here, Ira,” I heard her say at last, after a long time had been -spent in silence. I walked over and stood at her shoulder, looking down -upon the pale face upturned against the black of her worn dress. -The blue veins just discernible in temples and closed eyelids, the -delicately turned features, the way his brown beard curled, the fact -that his breathing was gently regular once more--these are what I saw. -But my Aunt seemed to demand that I should see more. - -“Well?” she asked, in a tone mellowed beyond all recognition. “Don’t -you--don’t you see who it is?” - -I suppose I really must have had an idea by this time. But I remember -that I shook my head. - -My Aunt positively did smile this time. “The Perkins girls were wrong,” - she said; “there isn’t the least smitch of a ‘wise child’ about _you!_” - -There was another pause. Emboldened by consciousness of a change in -the emotional atmosphere, I was moved to lay my hand upon my Aunt’s -shoulder. The action did not seem to displease her, and we remained thus -for some minutes, watching together this strange addition to our family -party. - -Finally she told me to get on my cap, comforter, and mittens, and run -over to Dr. Peabody’s and fetch him back with me. The purport of my -mission oppressed me. - -“Is he going to die then?” I asked. - -Aunt Susan laughed outright. “You little goose,” she said; “do you think -the doctors kill people _every_ time?” - -And, laughing again, with a trembling softness in her voice and tears -upon her black eyelashes, she lifted her face to mine--and kissed me! - -***** - -No fatality dogged good old Doctor Peabody’s big footsteps through the -snow that night. I fell asleep while he was still at my Aunt’s house, -but not before the stranger had recovered consciousness, and was sitting -up in the large rocking-chair, and it was clearly understood that he was -soon to be well again. - -The kindly, garrulous doctor did more than reassure our little -household. He must have spent most of the night going about reassuring -the other households of Juno Mills. At all events, when I first went -out next morning--while our neighbors were still eating their buckwheat -cakes and pork fat by lamplight--everybody seemed to know that my -father, the distinguished Colonel Blodgett, had returned from the war on -sick-leave, and was lying ill at the house of his sister-in-law. I -felt at once the altered attitude of the village toward me. Important -citizens who had never spoken to me before--dignified and portly men -in blue cutaway coats with brass buttons, and high stiff hats of shaggy -white silk--stopped now to lay their hands on the top of my head and ask -me how my father, the Colonel, was getting along. The grocer’s hired man -gave me a Jackson ball and two molasses cookies the very first time I -saw him. Even the Perkins girls, during the course of the afternoon, -strolled over to our front gate, and, instead of hurling enigmatic -objurgations at me, invited me to come out and play. The butcher of his -own accord came and finished cutting up the pig. - -These changes came back to me as one part of the great metamorphosis -which the night’s events had wrought. Another part was the definite -disappearance of the stern-faced, tirelessly toiling old maid I had -known all my life as Aunt Susan. In her place there was now a much -younger woman, with pleasant lines about her pretty mouth, and eyes that -twinkled when they looked at me, and who paid no attention to the loom -whatever, but bustled cheerily about the house instead, thinking only of -good things for us to eat. - -I remember that I marked my sense of the difference by abandoning the -old name of Aunt Susan, and calling her now just “Auntie.” And one day, -in the mid-spring, after she and her convalescent patient had returned -from their first drive together in the country round about, she told -me, as she took off her new bonnet in an absent-minded way, and looked -meditatively at the old disused loom, and then bent down to brush my -forehead with her warm lips--she told me that henceforth I was to call -her Mother. - - - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of In The Sixties, by Harold Frederic - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE SIXTIES *** - -***** This file should be named 54764-0.txt or 54764-0.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/4/7/6/54764/ - -Produced by David Widger from page images generously -provided by the Internet Archive - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - - - -Title: In The Sixties - -Author: Harold Frederic - -Release Date: May 23, 2017 [EBook #54764] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE SIXTIES *** - - - - -Produced by David Widger from page images generously -provided by the Internet Archive - - - - - - -</pre> - - <div style="height: 8em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h1> - IN THE SIXTIES - </h1> - <h2> - By Harold Frederic - </h2> - <h4> - New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons - </h4> - <h3> - 1893 - </h3> - <p> - <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001"> </a> - </p> - <div class="fig" style="width:50%;"> - <img src="images/0007.jpg" alt="0007 " width="100%" /><br /> - </div> - <h5> - <a href="images/0007.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a> - </h5> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <p> - <b>CONTENTS</b> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE TO A UNIFORM EDITION </a> - </p> - <p> - <br /> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> <b>THE COPPERHEAD</b> </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I—ABNER BEECH </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II—JEFF’S MUTINY </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III—ABSALOM </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV—ANTIETAM </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V—“JEE’S” TIDINGS </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI—NI’S TALK WITH ABNER </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII—THE ELECTION </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII—THE ELECTION BONFIRE </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX—ESTHER’S VISIT </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X—THE FIRE </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI—THE CONQUEST OF ABNER </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII—THE UNWELCOME GUEST </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII—THE BREAKFAST </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV—FINIS </a> - </p> - <p> - <br /> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> <b>MARSENA</b> </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> I </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> II </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> III </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> IV </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> V </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2H_4_0023"> VI </a> - </p> - <p> - <br /> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2H_4_0024"> <b>THE WAR WIDOW</b> </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2H_4_0025"> I </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2H_4_0026"> II </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2H_4_0027"> III </a> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2H_4_0028"> IV </a> - </p> - <p> - <br /> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2H_4_0029"> <b>THE EVE OF THE FOURTH</b> </a> - </p> - <p> - <br /> - </p> - <p class="toc"> - <a href="#link2H_4_0030"> <b>MY AUNT SUSAN</b> </a> - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - PREFACE TO A UNIFORM EDITION - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>n nothing else - under the latter-day sun-not even in the mysterious department of woman’s - attire-has Fashion been more variable, or more eccentric in its - variations, than in the matter of prefaces. The eternal revolution of - letters devours its own children so rapidly that for the hardiest of them - ten years count as a generation; each succeeding decade has whims of its - own about prefaces. Now it has been the rule to make them long and - didactic, and now brief and with a twist toward flippancy. Upon occasion - it has been thought desirable to throw upon this introductory formula the - responsibility of explaining everything that was to follow in the book, - and, again, nothing has seemed further from the proper function of a - preface than elucidation of any sort. Sometimes the prevalent mode has - discouraged prefaces altogether—and thus it happens that the present - author, doomed to be doing in England at least something of what the - English do, has never before chanced to write one. Yet now it seems that - in America prefaces are much in vogue-and this is an American edition. - </p> - <p> - The apology of the exile ends abruptly, however, with this confession that - the preface is strange ground. The four volumes under comment were all, it - is true, written in England, but they do not belong to the Old World in - any other sense. - </p> - <p> - In three of them the very existence of Europe is scarcely so much as - hinted at. The fourth concerns itself, indeed, with events in which - Europeans took an active part; but what they were doing, on the one side - and on the other, was in its results very strictly American. - </p> - <p> - The idea which finally found shape and substance in this last-named book, - “In the Valley,” seems now in retrospect to have been always in my mind. - All four of my great-grandfathers had borne arms in the Revolutionary War, - and one of them indeed somewhat indefinitely expanded this record by - fighting on both sides. My earliest recollections are of tales told by my - grandmother about local heroes of this conflict, who were but middle-aged - people when she was a child. She herself had come into curious relation - with one of the terrible realities of that period. At the age of six it - was her task to beat linen upon the stones of a brook running through the - Valley farm upon which she was reared, and the deep-hole close beside - where she worked was the spot in which the owner of the farm had lain - hidden in the alders, immersed to his chin, for two days and nights while - Brant’s Indians were looking for him. Thus, by a single remove, I came - myself into contact with the men who held Tryon County against the King, - and my boyish head was full of them. Before I left school, at the age of - twelve, I had composed several short but lurid introductions to a - narrative which should have for its central feature the battle of - Oriskany; for the writing of one of these, indeed, or rather for my - contumacy in refusing to give up my manuscript to the teacher when my - crime was detected, I was expelled from the school. - </p> - <p> - The plan of the book itself dated from 1877, the early months of which I - busied myself greatly in inciting my fellow-citizens to form what is now - the Oneida Historical Society, and to prepare for a befitting celebration - of the coming hundredth anniversary of Oriskany. The circumstance that I - had not two dollars to spare prevented my becoming a member of the - Society, but in no way affected the marked success of the celebration it - organized and superintended. It was at this time that I gathered the first - materials for my projected work, from members of the Fonda and other - families. Eight years later I was in the position of having made at least - as many attempts to begin this book, which I had never ceased to desire to - write, and for which I had steadily collected books and other data; one of - these essays ran to more than twenty thousand words, and several others - were half that length, but they were all failures. - </p> - <p> - In 1885, after I had been a year in London, the fact that a journalist - friend of mine got two hundred and fifty dollars from the <i>Weekly Echo</i> - for a serial story, based upon his own observations as a youngster in - Ireland, gave me a new idea. He seemed to make his book with extreme - facility, never touching the weekly instalment until the day for sending - it to the printer’s had arrived, and then walking up and down dictating - the new chapters in a very loud voice, to drown the racket of his - secretary’s typewriter. This appeared to be a highly simple way of earning - two hundred and fifty dollars, and I went home to start a story of my own - at once. When I had written the opening chapter, I took it to the editor - of the <i>Weekly Echo</i>, who happened to be a friend of mine as well. He - read it, suggested the word “comely” instead of some other on the first - page, and said it was too American for any English paper, but might do - well in America. The fading away of the two hundred and fifty dollars - depressed me a good deal, but after a time a helpful reaction came. I - realized that I had consumed nearly ten years in fruitless mooning over my - Revolutionary novel, and was no nearer achievement than at the outset, - simply because I did not know how to make a book of any kind, let alone a - historical book of the kind which should be the most difficult and - exacting of all. This determined me to proceed with the contemporary story - I had begun—if only to learn what it was really like to cover a - whole canvas. The result was “Seth’s Brother’s Wife”—which still has - the <i>Echo</i> man’s suggested “comely” in its opening description of the - barn-yard. - </p> - <p> - At the time, I thought of this novel almost wholly in the light of - preparation for the bigger task I had to do, and it is still easiest for - me to so regard it. Certainly its completion, and perhaps still more the - praise which was given to it by those who first saw it, gave me a degree - of confidence that I had mastered the art of fiction which I look back - upon now with surprise—and not a little envy. It was in the fine - flush of this confidence that I hastened to take up the real work, the - book I had been dreaming of so long, and, despite the immense amount of - material in the shape of notes, cross-references, dates, maps, - biographical facts, and the like, which I had perforce to drag along with - me, my ardor maintained itself to the finish. “In the Valley” was written - in eight months—and that, too, at a time when I had also a great - deal of newspaper work to do as well. - </p> - <p> - “The Lawton Girl” suggested itself at the outset as a kind of sequel to - “Seth’s Brother’s Wife,” but here I found myself confronted by agencies - and influences the existence of which I had not previously suspected. In - “Seth’s Brother’s Wife” I had made the characters do just what I wanted - them to do, and the notion that my will was not altogether supreme had - occurred neither to them nor to me. The same had been true of “In the - Valley,” where indeed the people were so necessarily subordinated to the - evolution of the story which they illustrated rather than shaped, that - their personalities always remained shadowy in my own mind. But in “The - Lawton Girl,” to my surprise at first, and then to my interested delight, - the people took matters into their own hands quite from the start. It - seemed only by courtesy that I even presided over their meetings, and that - my sanction was asked for their comings and goings. As one of many - examples, I may cite the interview between Jessica and Horace in the - latter’s office. In my folly, I had prepared for her here a part of - violent and embittered denunciation, full of scornful epithets and - merciless jibes; to my discomfiture, she relented at the first sight of - his gray hair and troubled mien, when I had brought her in, and would have - none of my heroics whatever. Once reconciled to the posture of a - spectator, I grew so interested in the doings of these people that I lost - sight of a time-limit; they wandered along for two years, making the story - in leisurely fashion as they went. At the end I did assert my authority, - and kill Jessica—she who had not deserved or intended at all to die—but - I see now more clearly than any one else that it was a false and cowardly - thing to do. - </p> - <p> - There remains the volume of collected stories, long and short, dealing - with varying aspects of home life in the North—or rather in my - little part of the North—during the Civil War. These stories are by - far closer to my heart than any other work of mine, partly because they - seem to me to contain the best things I have done or ever shall do, partly - because they are so closely interwoven with the personal memories and - experiences of my own childhood—and a little also, no doubt, for the - reason that they have not had quite the treatment outside that paternal - affection had desired for them. Of all the writers whose books affected my - younger years, I think that MM. Erckmann-Chatrian exerted upon me the - deepest and most vital influence. I know that my ambition to paint some - small pictures of the life of my Valley, under the shadow of the vast - black cloud which was belching fire and death on its southern side, in - humble imitation of their studies of Alsatian life in the days of the - Napoleonic terror, was much more powerful than any impulse directly - inspired by any other writers. By this confession I do not at all wish to - suggest comparisons. The French writers dealt with a period remote enough - to be invested with a haze of romance, and they wrote for a reading public - vehemently interested in everything that could be told them about that - period. These stories of mine lack these aids—and doubtless much - else beside. But they are in large part my own recollections of the - dreadful time—the actual things that a boy from five to nine saw and - heard about him, while his own relatives were being killed, and his - school-fellows orphaned, and women of his neighborhood forced into - mourning and despair—and they had a right to be recorded. - </p> - <p> - A single word in addition to an already over-long preface. The locality - which furnishes the scenes of the two contemporary novels and all the War - stories may be identified in a general way with Central New York, but in - no case is it possible to connect any specific village or town with one - actually in existence. The political exigencies of “Seth’s Brother’s Wife” - made it necessary to invent a Congressional District, composed of three - counties, to which the names of Adams, Jay, and Dearborn were given. - Afterwards the smaller places naturally took names reflecting the quaint - operation of the accident which sprinkled our section, as it were, with - the contents of a classical pepper-box. Thus Octavius, Thessaly, Tyre, and - the rest came into being, and one tries to remember and respect the - characteristics they have severally developed, but no exact counterparts - exist for them in real life, and no map of the district has as yet been - drawn, even in my own mind. - </p> - <h3> - H. F. - </h3> - <p> - London, February 16, 1897. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - THE COPPERHEAD - </h2> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER I—ABNER BEECH - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t was on the night - of my thirteenth birthday, I know, that the old farm-house was burned over - our heads. By that reckoning I must have been six or seven when I went to - live with Farmer Beech, because at the time he testified I had been with - him half my life. - </p> - <p> - Abner Beech had often been supervisor for his town, and could have gone to - the Assembly, it was said, had he chosen. He was a stalwart, - thick-shouldered, big man, with shaggy dark eyebrows shading stern hazel - eyes, and with a long, straight nose, and a broad, firmly shut mouth. His - expansive upper lip was blue from many years of shaving; all the rest was - bushing beard, mounting high upon the cheeks and rolling downward in - iron-gray billows over his breast. That shaven upper lip, which still may - be found among the farmers of the old blood in our district, was, I dare - say, a survival from the time of the Puritan protest against the mustaches - of the Cavaliers. If Abner Beech, in the latter days, had been told that - this shaving on Wednesday and Saturday nights was a New England rite, I - feel sure he would never have touched razor again. - </p> - <p> - He was a well-to-do man in the earlier time—a tremendous worker, a - “good provider,” a citizen of weight and substance in the community. In - all large matters the neighborhood looked to him to take the lead. He was - the first farmer roundabout to set a mowing-machine to work in his - meadows, and to put up lightning-rods on his buildings. At one period he - was, too, the chief pillar in the church, but that was before the episode - of the lightning-rods. Our little Union meeting-house was supplied in - those days by an irregular procession of itinerant preachers, who came - when the spirit moved and spoke with that entire frankness which is - induced by knowledge that the night is to be spent somewhere else. One of - these strolling ministers regarded all attempts to protect property from - lightning as an insolent defiance of the Divine Will, and said so very - pointedly in the pulpit, and the congregation sat still and listened and - grinned. Farmer Beech never forgave them. - </p> - <p> - There came in good time other causes for ill-feeling. It is beyond the - power of my memory to pick out and arrange in proper sequence the events - which, in the final result, separated Abner Beech from his fellows. My own - recollections go with distinctness back to the reception of the news that - Virginia had hanged John Brown; in a vaguer way they cover the two or - three preceding years. Very likely Farmer Beech had begun to fall out of - touch with his neighbors even before that. - </p> - <p> - The circumstances of my adoption into his household—an orphan - without relations or other friends—were not of the sort to serve - this narrative. I was taken in to be raised as a farm-hand, and was no - more expected to be grateful than as if I had been a young steer purchased - to toil in the yoke. No suggestion was ever made that I had incurred any - debt of obligation to the Beeches. In a little community where every one - worked as a matter of course till there was no more work to do, and all - shared alike the simple food, the tired, heavy sleep, and the infrequent - spells of recreation, no one talked or thought of benefits conferred or - received. My rights in the house and about the place were neither less nor - more than those of Jeff Beech, the farmer’s only son. - </p> - <p> - In the course of time I came, indeed, to be a more sympathetic unit in the - household, so to speak, than poor Jeff himself. But that was only because - he had been drawn off after strange gods. - </p> - <p> - At all times—even when nothing else good was said of him—Abner - Beech was spoken of by the people of the district as a “great hand for - reading.” His pre-eminence in this matter remained unquestioned to the - end. No other farmer for miles owned half the number of books which he had - on the shelves above his writing-desk. Still less was there any one - roundabout who could for a moment stand up with him in a discussion - involving book-learning in general. This at first secured for him the - respect of the whole country-side, and men were proud to be agreed with by - such a scholar. But when affairs changed, this, oddly enough, became a - formidable popular grievance against Abner Beech. They said then that his - opinions were worthless because he got them from printed books, instead of - from his heart. - </p> - <p> - What these opinions were may in some measure be guessed from the titles of - the farmer’s books. Perhaps there were some thirty of them behind the - glass doors of the old mahogany bookcase. With one or two agricultural or - veterinary exceptions, they related exclusively to American history and - politics. There were, I recall, the first two volumes of Bancroft, and - Lossing’s “Lives of the Signers,” and “Field-Books” of the two wars with - England; Thomas H. Benton’s “Thirty Years’ View;” the four green-black - volumes of Hammond’s “Political History of the State of New York:” - campaign lives of Lewis Cass and Franklin Pierce and larger biographies of - Jefferson and Jackson, and, most imposing of all, a whole long row of big - calf-bound volumes of the Congressional Globe, which carried the minutiae - of politics at Washington back into the forties. - </p> - <p> - These books constituted the entire literary side of my boyish education. I - have only the faintest and haziest recollections of what happened when I - went during the winter months to the school-house at the Four Corners. But - I can recall the very form of the type in the farmer’s books. Every one of - those quaint, austere, and beardless faces, framed in high collars and - stocks and waving hair—the Marcys, Calhouns, DeWitt Clintons, and - Silas Wrights of the daguerreotype and Sartain’s primitive graver—gives - back to me now the lineaments of an old-time friend. - </p> - <p> - Whenever I could with decency escape from playing checkers with Jeff, and - had no harness to grease or other indoor jobs, I spent the winter evenings - in poring over some of these books—generally with Abner Beech at the - opposite side of the table immersed in another. On some rare occasion one - of the hired men would take down a volume and look through it—the - farmer watching him covertly the while to see that he did not wet his big - thumbs to turn over the leaves—but for the most part we two had the - books to ourselves. The others would sit about till bedtime, amusing - themselves as best they could, the women-folk knitting or mending, the men - cracking butternuts, or dallying with cider and apples and fried-cakes, as - they talked over the work and gossip of the district and tempted the - scorching impulses of the stovehearth with their stockinged feet. - </p> - <p> - This tacit separation of the farmer and myself from the rest of the - household in the course of time begat confidences between us. He grew, - from brief and casual beginnings, into a habit of speaking to me about the - things we read. As it became apparent, year by year, that young Jeff was - never going to read anything at all, Abner Beech more and more - distinguished me with conversational favor. It cannot be said that the - favoritism showed itself in other directions. I had to work as hard as - ever, and got no more play-time than before. The master’s eye was - everywhere as keen, alert, and unsparing as if I had not known even my - alphabet. But when there were breathing spells, we talked together—or - rather he talked and I listened—as if we were folk quite apart from - the rest. - </p> - <p> - Two fixed ideas thus arose in my boyish mind, and dominated all my little - notions of the world. One was that Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall - were among the most infamous characters in history. The other was that - every true American ought to hold himself in daily readiness to fight with - England. I gave a great deal of thought to both these matters. I had early - convictions, too, I remember, with regard to Daniel Webster, who had been - very bad, and then all at once became a very good man. For some obscure - reason I always connected him in my imagination with Zaccheus up a tree, - and clung to the queer association of images long after I learned that the - Marshfield statesman had been physically a large man. - </p> - <p> - Gradually the old blood-feud with the Britisher became obscured by fresher - antagonisms, and there sprouted up a crop of new sons of Belial who - deserved to be hated more even than had Hamilton and Marshall. With me the - two stages of indignation glided into one another so imperceptibly that I - can now hardly distinguish between them. What I do recall is that the - farmer came in time to neglect the hereditary enemy, England, and to seem - to have quite forgotten our own historic foes to liberty, so enraged was - he over the modern Abolitionists. He told me about them as we paced up the - seed rows together in the spring, as we drove homeward on the hay-load in - the cool of the summer evening, as we shovelled out a path for the women - to the pumps in the farm-yard through December snows. It took me a long - time to even approximately grasp the wickedness of these new men, who - desired to establish negro sovereignty in the Republic, and to compel each - white girl to marry a black man. - </p> - <p> - The fact that I had never seen any negro “close to,” and had indeed only - caught passing glimpses of one or more of the colored race on the streets - of our nearest big town, added, no doubt, to the mystified alarm with - which I contemplated these monstrous proposals. When finally an old darky - on his travels did stroll our way, and I beheld him, incredibly ragged, - dirty, and light-hearted, shuffling through “Jump Jim Crow” down at the - Four Corners, for the ribald delectation of the village loafers, the - revelation fairly made me shudder. I marvelled that the others could - laugh, with this unspeakable fate hanging over their silly heads. - </p> - <p> - At first the Abolitionists were to me a remote and intangible class, who - lived and wrought their evil deeds in distant places—chiefly New - England way. I rarely heard mention of any names of persons among them. - They seemed to be an impersonal mass, like a herd of buffaloes or a swarm - of hornets. The first individuality in their ranks which attracted my - attention, I remember, was that of Theodore Parker. The farmer one day - brought home with him from town a pamphlet composed of anti-slavery - sermons or addresses by this person. In the evening he read it, or as far - into it as his temper would permit, beating the table with his huge fist - from time to time, and snorting with wrathful amazement. At last he sprang - to his feet, marched over to the wood-stove, kicked the door open with his - boot, and thrust the offending print into the blaze. It is vivid in my - memory still—the way the red flame-light flared over his big burly - front, and sparkled on his beard, and made his face to shine like that of - Moses. - </p> - <p> - But soon I learned that there were Abolitionists everywhere—Abolitionists - right here in our own little farmland township of northern New York! The - impression which this discovery made upon me was not unlike that produced - on Robinson Crusoe by the immortal footprint. I could think of nothing - else. Great events, which really covered a space of years, came and went - as in a bunch together, while I was still pondering upon this. John Brown - was hanged, Lincoln was elected, Sumter was fired on, the first regiment - was raised and despatched from our rustic end of Dearborn County—and - all the time it seems now as if my mind was concentrated upon the amazing - fact that some of our neighbors were Abolitionists. - </p> - <p> - There was a certain dreamlike tricksiness of transformation in it all. At - first there was only one Abolitionist, old “Jee” Hagadorn. Then, somehow, - there came to be a number of them—and then, all at once, lo! - everybody was an Abolitionist—that is to say, everybody but Abner - Beech. The more general and enthusiastic the conversion of the others - became, the more resolutely and doggedly he dug his heels into the ground, - and braced his broad shoulders, and pulled in the opposite direction. The - skies darkened, the wind rose, the storm of angry popular feeling burst - swooping over the countryside, but Beech only stiffened his back and never - budged an inch. - </p> - <p> - At some early stage of this great change, we ceased going to church at - all. The pulpit of our rustic meeting-house had become a platform from - which the farmer found himself denounced with hopeless regularity on every - recurring Sabbath, and that, too, without any chance whatever of talking - back. This in itself was hardly to be borne. But when others, mere laymen - of the church, took up the theme, and began in class-meetings and the - Sunday-school to talk about Antichrist and the Beast with Ten Horns and - Seven Heads, in obvious connection with Southern sympathizers, it became - frankly insufferable. The farmer did not give in without a fierce - resistance. He collected all the texts he could find in the Bible, such as - “Servants, obey your masters,” “Cursed be Canaan,” and the like, and - hurled them vehemently, with strong, deep voice, and sternly glowing eyes, - full at their heads. But the others had many more texts—we learned - afterwards that old “Jee” Hagadorn enjoyed the unfair advantage of a - Cruden’s Concordance—and their tongues were as forty to one, so we - left off going to church altogether. - </p> - <p> - Not long after this, I should think, came the miserable affair of the - cheese-factory. - </p> - <p> - The idea of doing all the dairy work of a neighborhood under a common - roof, which originated not many miles from us, was now nearly ten years - old. In those days it was regarded as having in it possibilities of vastly - greater things than mere cheesemaking. Its success among us had stirred up - in men’s minds big sanguine notions of co-operation as the answer to all - American farm problems—as the gateway through which we were to march - into the rural millennium. These high hopes one recalls now with a smile - and a sigh. Farmers’ wives continued to break down and die under the - strain, or to be drafted off to the lunatic asylums; the farmers kept on - hanging themselves in their barns, or flying off westward before the - locust-like cloud of mortgages; the boys and girls turned their steps - townward in an ever-increasing host. The millennium never came at all. - </p> - <p> - But at that time—in the late fifties and early sixties—the - cheese-factory was the centre of an impressive constellation of dreams and - roseate promises. Its managers were the very elect of the district; their - disfavor was more to be dreaded than any condemnation of a town-meeting; - their chief officers were even more important personages than the - supervisor and assessor. - </p> - <p> - Abner Beech had literally been the founder of our cheese-factory. I fancy - he gave the very land on which it was built, and where you will see it - still, under the willows by the upper-creek bridge. He sent to it in those - days the milk of the biggest herd owned by any farmer for miles around, - reaching at seasons nearly one hundred cows. His voice, too, outweighed - all others in its co-operative councils. - </p> - <p> - But when our church-going community had reached the conclusion that a man - couldn’t be a Christian and hold such views on the slave question as Beech - held, it was only a very short step to the conviction that such a man - would water his milk. In some parts of the world the theft of a horse is - the most heinous of conceivable crimes; other sections exalt to this - pinnacle of sacredness in property a sheep or a pheasant or a woman. Among - our dairymen the thing of special sanctity was milk. A man in our - neighborhood might almost better be accused of forgery or bigamy outright, - than to fall under the dreadful suspicion of putting water into his cans. - </p> - <p> - Whether it was mere stupid prejudice or malignant invention I know not—who - started the story was never to be learned—but of a sudden everybody - seemed to have heard that Abner Beech’s milk had been refused at the - cheese-factory. This was not true, any more than it was true that there - could possibly have been warrant for such a proceeding. But what did - happen was that the cheese-maker took elaborate pains each morning to test - our cans with such primitive appliances as preceded the lactometer, and - sniffed suspiciously as he entered our figures in a separate book, and - behaved generally so that our hired man knocked him head over heels into - one of his whey vats. Then the managers complained to the farmer. He went - down to meet them, boiling over with rage. There was an evil spirit in the - air, and bitter words were exchanged. The outcome was that Abner Beech - renounced the co-operative curds of his earlier manhood, so to speak, sold - part of his cattle at a heavy loss, and began making butter at home with - the milk of the remainder. - </p> - <p> - Then we became pariahs in good earnest. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER II—JEFF’S MUTINY - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>he farmer came in - from the fields somewhat earlier than usual on this August afternoon. He - walked, I remember, with a heavy step and bowed head, and, when he had - come into the shade on the porch and taken off his hat, looked about him - with a wearied air. The great heat, with its motionless atmosphere and - sultry closeness, had well-nigh wilted everybody. But one could see that - Abner was suffering more than the rest, and from something beyond the - enervation of dog-days. - </p> - <p> - He sank weightily into the arm-chair by the desk, and stretched out his - legs with a querulous note in his accustomed grunt of relief. On the - moment Mrs. Beech came in from the kitchen, with the big china wash-bowl - filled with cold water, and the towel and clean socks over her arm, and - knelt before her husband. She proceeded to pull off his big, dust-baked - boots and the woollen foot-gear, put his feet into the bowl, bathe and dry - them, and draw on the fresh covering, all without a word. - </p> - <p> - The ceremony was one I had watched many hundreds of times. Mrs. Beech was - a tall, dark, silent woman, whom I could well believe to have been - handsome in her youth. She belonged to one of the old Mohawk-Dutch - families, and when some of her sisters came to visit at the farm I noted - that they too were all dusky as squaws, with jet-black shiny curls and - eyes like the midnight hawk. I used always to be afraid of them on this - account, but I dare say they were in reality most kindly women. Mrs. Beech - herself, represented to my boyish eyes the ideal of a saturnine and - masterful queen. She performed great quantities of work with no apparent - effort—as if she had merely willed it to be done. Her household was - governed with a cold impassive exactitude; there were never any hitches, - or even high words. The hired girls, of course, called her “M’rye,” as the - rest of us mostly did, but they rarely carried familiarity further, and as - a rule respected her dislike for much talk. During all the years I spent - under her roof I was never clear in my mind as to whether she liked me or - not. Her own son, even, passed his boyhood in much the same state of - dubiety. - </p> - <p> - But to her husband, Abner Beech, she was always most affectionately docile - and humble. Her snapping black eyes followed him about and rested on him - with an almost canine fidelity of liking. She spoke to him habitually in a - voice quite different from that which others heard addressed to them. - This, indeed, was measurably true of us all. By instinct the whole - household deferred in tone and manner to our big, bearded chief, as if he - were an Arab sheik ruling over us in a tent on the desert. The word - “patriarch” still seems best to describe him, and his attitude toward us - and the world in general, as I recall him sitting there in the - half-darkened living-room, with his wife bending over his feet in true - Oriental submission. - </p> - <p> - “Do you know where Jeff is?” the farmer suddenly asked, without turning - his head to where I sat braiding a whiplash, but indicating by the volume - of voice that his query was put to me. - </p> - <p> - “He went off about two o’clock,” I replied, “with his fish-pole. They say - they are biting like everything down in the creek.” - </p> - <p> - “Well, you keep to work and they won’t bite you,” said Abner Beech. This - was a very old joke with him, and usually the opportunity of using it once - more tended to lighten his mood. Now, though mere force of habit led him - to repeat the pleasantry, he had no pleasure in it. He sat with his head - bent, and his huge hairy hands spread listlessly on the chair-arms. - </p> - <p> - Mrs. Beech finished her task, and rose, lifting the bowl from the floor. - She paused, and looked wistfully into her husband’s face. - </p> - <p> - “You ain’t a bit well, Abner!” she said. - </p> - <p> - “Well as I’m likely ever to be again,” he made answer, gloomily. - </p> - <p> - “Has any more of’em been sayin’ or doin’ anything?” the wife asked, with - diffident hesitation. - </p> - <p> - The farmer spoke with more animation. “D’ye suppose I care a picayune what - <i>they</i> say or do?” he demanded. “Not I! But when a man’s own kith and - kin turn agin him, into the bargain—” He left the sentence - unfinished, and shook his head to indicate the impossibility of such a - situation. - </p> - <p> - “Has Jeff—then—” Mrs. Beech began to ask. - </p> - <p> - “Yes—Jeff!” thundered the farmer, striking his fist on the arm of - the chair. “Yes—by the Eternal!—Jeff!” - </p> - <p> - When Abner Beech swore by the Eternal we knew that things were pretty bad. - His wife put the bowl down on a chair, and seated herself in another. - “What’s Jeff been doin’?” she asked. - </p> - <p> - “Why, where d’ye suppose he was last night, ’n’ the night before - that? Where d’ye suppose he is this minute? They ain’t no mistake about - it, Lee Watkins saw ’em with his own eyes, and ta’nted me with it. - He’s down by the red bridge—that’s where he is—hangin’ round - that Hagadorn gal!” - </p> - <p> - Mrs. Beech looked properly aghast at the intelligence. Even to me it was - apparent that the unhappy Jeff might better have been employed in - committing any other crime under the sun. It was only to be expected that - his mother would be horrified. - </p> - <p> - “I never could abide that Lee Watkins,” was what she said. - </p> - <p> - The farmer did not comment on the relevancy of this. “Yes,” he went on, - “the daughter of mine enemy, the child of that whining, backbiting old - scoundrel who’s been eating his way into me like a deer-tick for years—the - whelp that I owe every mean and miserable thing that’s ever happened to me—yes, - of all living human creatures, by the Eternal! it’s <i>his</i> daughter - that that blamed fool of a Jeff must take a shine to, and hang around - after!” - </p> - <p> - “He’ll come of age the fourteenth of next month,” remarked the mother, - tentatively. - </p> - <p> - “Yes—and march up and vote the Woollyhead ticket. I suppose that’s - what’ll come next!” said the farmer, bitterly. “It only needed that!” - </p> - <p> - “And it was you who got her the job of teachin’ the school, too,” put in - Mrs. Beech. - </p> - <p> - “That’s nothing to do with it,” Abner continued. “I ain’t blamin’ her—that - is, on her own account. She’s a good enough gal so far’s I know. But - everything and everybody under that tumble-down Hagadorn roof ought to be - pizen to any son of mine! <i>That’s</i> what I say! And I tell you this, - mother”—the farmer rose, and spread his broad chest, towering over - the seated woman as he spoke—“I tell you this; if he ain’t got pride - enough to keep him away from that house—away from that gal—then - he can keep away from <i>this</i> house—away from me!” - </p> - <p> - The wife looked up at him mutely, then bowed her head in tacit consent. - </p> - <p> - “He brings it on himself!” Abner cried, with clenched fists, beginning to - pace up and down the room. “Who’s the one man I’ve reason to curse with my - dying breath? Who began the infernal Abolition cackle here? Who drove me - out of the church? Who started that outrageous lie about the milk at the - factory, and chased me out of that, too? Who’s been a layin’ for years - behind every stump and every bush, waitin’ for the chance to stab me in - the back, an’ ruin my business, an’ set my neighbors agin me, an’ land me - an’ mine in the poorhouse or the lockup? You know as well as I do—‘Jee’ - Hagadorn! If I’d wrung his scrawny little neck for him the first time I - ever laid eyes on him, it ’d ’a’ been money in my pocket and - years added onto my life. And then my son—my son! must go taggin’ - around—oh-h!” - </p> - <p> - He ended with an inarticulate growl of impatience and wrath. - </p> - <p> - “Mebbe, if you spoke to the boy—” Mrs. Beech began. - </p> - <p> - “Yes, I’ll speak to him!” the farmer burst forth, with grim emphasis. - “I’ll speak to him so’t he’ll hear!” He turned abruptly to me. “Here, - boy,” he said, “you go down the creek-road an’ look for Jeff. If he ain’t - loafin’ round the school-house he’ll be in the neighborhood of Hagadorn’s. - You tell him I say for him to get back here as quick as he can. You - needn’t tell him what it’s about. Pick up your feet, now!” - </p> - <p> - As luck would have it, I had scarcely got out to the road before I heard - the loose-spoked wheels of the local butcher’s wagon rattling behind me - down the hill. Looking round, I saw through the accompanying puffs of dust - that young “Ni” Hagadorn was driving, and that he was alone. I stopped and - waited for him to come up, questioning my mind whether it would be fair to - beg a lift from him, when the purpose of my journey was so hostile to his - family. Even after he had halted, and I had climbed up to the seat beside - him, this consciousness of treachery disturbed me. - </p> - <p> - But no one thought long of being serious with “Ni.” He was along in the - teens somewhere, not large for his years but extremely wiry and muscular, - and the funniest boy any of us ever knew of. How the son of such a - sad-faced, gloomy, old licensed exhorter as “Jee” Hagadorn could be such a - running spring of jokes and odd sayings and general deviltry as “Ni,” - passed all our understandings. His very face made you laugh, with its - wilderness of freckles, its snub nose, and the comical curl to its mouth. - He must have been a profitable investment to the butcher who hired him to - drive about the country. The farmers’ wives all came out to laugh and chat - with him, and under the influence of his good spirits they went on buying - the toughest steaks and bull-beef flanks, at more than city prices, year - after year. But anybody who thought “Ni” was soft because he was full of - fun made a great mistake. - </p> - <p> - “I see you ain’t doin’ much ditchin’ this year,” “Ni” remarked, glancing - over our fields as he started up the horse. “I should think you’d be - tickled to death.” - </p> - <p> - Well, in one sense I was glad. There used to be no other such back-aching - work in all the year as that picking up of stones to fill into the - trenches which the hired men began digging as soon as the hay and grain - were in. But, on the other hand, I knew that the present idleness meant—as - everything else now seemed to mean—that the Beech farm was going to - the dogs. - </p> - <p> - “No,” I made rueful answer. “Our land don’t need drainin’ any more. It’s - dry as a powder-horn now.” - </p> - <p> - “Ni” clucked knowingly at the old horse. “Guess it’s Abner that can’t - stand much more drainin’,” he said. “They say he’s looking all round for a - mortgage, and can’t raise one.” - </p> - <p> - “No such thing!” I replied. “His health’s poorly this summer, that’s all. - And Jeff—he don’t seem to take hold, somehow, like he used to.” - </p> - <p> - My companion laughed outright. “Mustn’t call him Jeff any more,” he - remarked with a grin. “He was telling us down at the house that he was - going to have people call him Tom after this. He can’t stand answerin’ to - the same name as Jeff Davis,” he says. - </p> - <p> - “I suppose you folks put him up to that,” I made bold to comment, - indignantly. - </p> - <p> - The suggestion did not annoy “Ni.” “Mebbe so,” he said. “You know Dad lots - a good deal on names. He’s downright mortified that I don’t get up and - kill people because my name’s Benaiah. ‘Why,’ he keeps on saying to me, - ‘Here you are, Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, as it was in Holy Writ, and - instid of preparin’ to make ready to go out and fall on the enemies of - righteousness, like your namesake did, all you do is read dime novels and - cut up monkey-shines generally, for all the world as if you’d been named - Pete or Steve or William Henry.’ That’s what he gives me pretty nearly - every day.” - </p> - <p> - I was familiar enough with the quaint mysticism which the old Abolitionist - cooper wove around the Scriptural names of himself and his son. We - understood that these two appellations had alternated among his ancestors - as well, and I had often heard him read from Samuel and Kings and - Chronicles about them, his stiff red hair standing upright, and the blue - veins swelling on his narrow temples with proud excitement. But that, of - course, was in the old days, before the trouble came, and when I still - went to church. To hear it all now again seemed to give me a novel - impression of wild fanaticism in “Jee” Hagadorn. - </p> - <p> - His son was chuckling on his seat over something he had just remembered. - “Last time,” he began, gurgling with laughter—“last time he went for - me because I wasn’t measurin’ up to his idee of what a Benaiah ought to be - like, I up an’ said to him, ‘Look a-here now, people who live in glass - houses mustn’t heave rocks. If I’m Benaiah, you’re Jehoiada. Well, it says - in the Bible that Jehoiada made a covenant. Do you make cove-nants? Not a - bit of it! all you make is butter firkins, with now an’ then an odd pork - barrel.’” - </p> - <p> - “What did he say to that?” I asked, as my companion’s merriment abated. - </p> - <p> - “Well, I come away just then; I seemed to have business outside,” replied - “Ni,” still grinning. - </p> - <p> - We had reached the Corners now, and my companion obligingly drew up to let - me get down. He called out some merry quip or other as he drove off, - framed in a haze of golden dust against the sinking sun, and I stood - looking after him with the pleasantest thoughts my mind had known for - days. It was almost a shock to remember that he was one of the abhorrent - and hated Hagadorns. - </p> - <p> - And his sister, too. It was not at all easy to keep one’s loathing up to - the proper pitch where so nice a girl as Esther Hagadorn was its object. - </p> - <p> - She was years and years my senior—she was even older than “Ni”—and - had been my teacher for the past two winters. She had never spoken to me - save across that yawning gulf which separates little barefooted urchins - from tall young women, with long dresses and their hair done up in a net, - and I could hardly be said to know her at all. Yet now, perversely enough, - I could think of nothing but her manifest superiority to all the - farm-girls round about. She had been to a school in some remote city, - where she had relations. Her hands were fabulously white, and even on the - hottest of days her dresses rustled pleasantly with starched primness. - People talked about her singing at church as something remarkable; to my - mind, the real music was when she just spoke to you, even if it was no - more than “Good-morning, Jimmy!” - </p> - <p> - I clambered up on the window-sill of the school-house, to make sure there - was no one inside, and then set off down the creek-road toward the red or - lower bridge. Milking-time was about over, and one or two teams passed me - on the way to the cheese-factory, the handles of the cans rattling as they - went, and the low sun throwing huge shadows of drivers and horses - sprawling eastward over the stubble-field. I cut across lots to avoid the - cheese-factory itself, with some vague feeling that it was not a fitting - spectacle for any one who lived on the Beech farm. - </p> - <p> - A few moments brought me to the bank of the wandering stream below the - factory, but so near that I could hear the creaking of the chain drawing - up the cans over the tackle, or as we called it, the “teekle;” The willows - under which I walked stretched without a break from the clump by the - factory bridge. And now, lo and behold! beneath still other of these - willows, farther down the stream, whom should I see strolling together but - my schoolteacher and the delinquent Jeff! - </p> - <p> - Young Beech bore still the fish-pole I had seen him take from our shed - some hours earlier, but the line twisted round it was very white and dry. - He was extremely close to the girl, and kept his head bent down over her - as they sauntered along the meadow-path. They seemed not to be talking, - but just idly drifting forward like the deep slow water beside them. I had - never realized before how tall Jeff was. Though the school-ma’am always - seemed to me of an exceeding stature, here was Jeff rounding his shoulders - and inclining his neck in order to look under her broad-brimmed Leghorn - hat. - </p> - <p> - There could be no imaginable excuse for my not overtaking them. Instinct - prompted me to start up a whistling tune as I advanced—a casual and - indolently unobtrusive tune—at sound of which Jeff straightened - himself, and gave his companion a little more room on the path. In a - moment or two he stopped, and looked intently over the bank into the - water, as if he hoped it might turn out to be a likely place for fish. And - the school-ma’am, too, after a few aimless steps, halted to help him look. - </p> - <p> - “Abner wants you to come right straight home!” was the form in which my - message delivered itself when I had come close up to them. - </p> - <p> - They both shifted their gaze from the sluggish stream below to me upon the - instant. Then Esther Hagadorn looked away, but Jeff—good, big, - honest Jeff, who had been like a fond elder brother to me since I could - remember—knitted his brows and regarded me with something like a - scowl. - </p> - <p> - “Did pa send you to say that?” he demanded, holding my eye with a glance - of such stern inquiry that I could only nod my head in confusion. - </p> - <p> - “An’ he knew that you’d find me here, did he?” - </p> - <p> - “He said either at the school-house or around here somewhere,” I admitted, - weakly. ‘An’ there ain’t nothin’ the matter at the farm?’ - </p> - <p> - “He don’t want me for nothin’ special?” pursued Jeff, still looking me - through and through. - </p> - <p> - “He didn’t say,” I made hesitating answer, but for the life of me, I could - not keep from throwing a tell-tale look in the direction of his companion - in the blue gingham dress. - </p> - <p> - A wink could not have told Jeff more. He gave a little bitter laugh, and - stared above my head at the willow-plumes fora minute’s meditation. Then - he tossed his fish-pole over to me and laughed again. - </p> - <p> - “Keep that for yourself, if you want it,” he said, in a voice not quite - his own, but robustly enough. “I sha’n’t need it any more. Tell pa I ain’t - a-comin’!” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, Tom!” Esther broke in, anxiously, “would you do that?” - </p> - <p> - He held up his hand with a quiet, masterful gesture, as if she were the - pupil and he the teacher. “Tell him,” he went on, the tone falling now - strong and true, “tell him and ma that I’m goin’ to Tecumseh to-night to - enlist. If they’re willin’ to say good-by, they can let me know there, and - I’ll manage to slip back for the day. If they ain’t willin’—why, - they—they needn’t send word; that’s all.” - </p> - <p> - Esther had come up to him, and held his arm now in hers. - </p> - <p> - “You’re wrong to leave them like that!” she pleaded, earnestly, but Jeff - shook his head. - </p> - <p> - “You don’t know him!” was all he said. - </p> - <p> - In another minute I had shaken hands with Jeff, and had started on my - homeward way, with his parting “Good-by, youngster!” benumbing my ears. - When, after a while, I turned to look back, they were still standing where - I had left them, gazing over the bank into the water. - </p> - <p> - Then, as I trudged onward once more, I began to quake at the thought of - how Farmer Beech would take the news. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER III—ABSALOM - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span>nce, in the - duck-season, as I lay hidden among the marsh-reeds with an older boy, a - crow passed over us, flying low. Looking up at him, I realized for the - first time how beautiful a creature was this common black thief of ours—how - splendid his strength and the sheen of his coat, how proudly graceful the - sweep and curves of his great slow wings. The boy beside me fired, and in - a flash what I had been admiring changed—even as it stopped headlong - in mid-air—into a hideous thing, an evil confusion of jumbled - feathers. The awful swiftness of that transition from beauty and power to - hateful carrion haunted me for a long time. - </p> - <p> - I half expected that Abner Beech would crumple up in some such distressing - way, all of a sudden, when I told him that his son Jeff was in open - rebellion, and intended to go off and enlist. It was incredible to the - senses that any member of the household should set at defiance the - patriarchal will of its head. But that the offence should come from - placid, slow-witted, good-natured Jeff, and that it should involve the - appearance of a Beech in a blue uniform—these things staggered the - imagination. It was clear that something prodigious must happen. - </p> - <p> - As it turned out, nothing happened at all. The farmer and his wife sat out - on the veranda, as was their wont of a summer evening, rarely exchanging a - word, but getting a restful sort of satisfaction in together surveying - their barns and haystacks and the yellow-brown stretch of fields beyond. - </p> - <p> - “Jeff says he’s goin’ to-night to Tecumseh, an’ he’s goin’ to enlist, an’ - if you want him to run over to say good-by you’re to let him know there.” - </p> - <p> - I leant upon my newly-acquired fish-pole for support, as I unburdened - myself of these sinister tidings. The old pair looked at me in calm-eyed - silence, as if I had related the most trivial of village occurrences. - Neither moved a muscle nor uttered a sound, but just gazed, till it felt - as if their eyes were burning holes into me. - </p> - <p> - “That’s what he said,” I repeated, after a pause, to mitigate the - embarrassment of that dumb steadfast stare. - </p> - <p> - The mother it was who spoke at last. “You’d better go round and get your - supper,” she said, quietly. - </p> - <p> - The table was spread, as usual, in the big, low-ceilinged room which - during the winter was used as a kitchen. What was unusual was to discover - a strange man seated alone in his shirt-sleeves at this table, eating his - supper. As I took my chair, however, I saw that he was not altogether a - stranger. I recognized in him the little old Irishman who had farmed at - Ezra Tracy’s beaver-meadow the previous year on shares, and done badly, - and had since been hiring out for odd jobs at hoeing and haying. He had - lately lost his wife, I recalled now, and lived alone in a tumble-down old - shanty beyond Parker’s saw-mill. He had come to us in the spring, I - remembered, when the brindled calf was born, to beg a pail of what he - called “basteings,” and I speculated in my mind whether it was this - repellent mess that had killed his wife. Above all these thoughts rose the - impression that Abner must have decided to do a heap of ditching and - wall-building, to have hired a new hand in this otherwise slack season—and - at this my back began to ache prophetically. - </p> - <p> - “How are yeh!” the new-comer remarked, affably, as I sat down and reached - for the bread. “An’ did yeh see the boys march away? An’ had they a drum - wid ’em?” - </p> - <p> - “What boys?” I asked, in blank ignorance as to what he was at. - </p> - <p> - “I’m told there’s a baker’s dozen of’em gone, more or less,” he replied. - “Well, glory be to the Lord, ’tis an ill wind blows nobody good. - Here am I aitin’ butter on my bread, an’ cheese on top o’ that.” - </p> - <p> - I should still have been in the dark, had not one of the hired girls, - Janey Wilcox, come in from the butter-room, to ask me in turn much the - same thing, and to add the explanation that a whole lot of the young men - of the neighborhood had privately arranged among themselves to enlist - together as soon as the harvesting was over, and had this day gone off in - a body. Among them, I learned now, were our two hired men, Warner Pitts - and Ray Watkins. This, then, accounted for the presence of the Irishman. - </p> - <p> - As a matter of fact, there had been no secrecy about the thing save with - the contingent which our household furnished, and that was only because of - the fear which Abner Beech inspired. His son and his servants alike - preferred to hook it, rather than explain their patriotic impulses to him. - But naturally enough, our farm-girls took it for granted that all the - others had gone in the same surreptitious fashion, and this threw an air - of fascinating mystery about the whole occurrence. They were deeply - surprised that I should have been down past the Corners, and even beyond - the cheese-factory, and seen nothing of these extraordinary martial - preparations; and I myself was ashamed of it. - </p> - <p> - Opinions differed, I remember, as to the behavior of our two hired men. - “Till” Babcock and the Underwood girl defended them, but Janey took the - other side, not without various unpleasant personal insinuations, and the - Irishman and I were outspoken in their condemnation. But nobody said a - word about Jeff, though it was plain enough that every one knew. - </p> - <p> - Dusk fell while we still talked of these astounding events—my - thoughts meantime dividing themselves between efforts to realize these - neighbors of ours as soldiers on the tented field, and uneasy speculation - as to whether I should at last get a bed to myself or be expected to sleep - with the Irishman. - </p> - <p> - Janey Wilcox had taken the lamp into the living-room. She returned now, - with an uplifted hand and a face covered over with lines of surprise. - </p> - <p> - “You’re to all of you come in,” she whispered, impressively. “Abner’s got - the Bible down. We’re goin’ to have fam’ly prayers, or somethin’.” - </p> - <p> - With one accord we looked at the Irishman. The question had never before - arisen on our farm, but we all knew about other cases, in which Catholic - hands held aloof from the household’s devotions. There were even stories - of their refusal to eat meat on some one day of the week, but this we - hardly brought ourselves to credit. Our surprise at the fact that domestic - religious observances were to be resumed under the Beech roof-tree—where - they had completely lapsed ever since the trouble at the church—was - as nothing compared with our curiosity to see what the new-comer would do. - </p> - <p> - What he did was to get up and come along with the rest of us, quite as a - matter of course. I felt sure that he could not have understood what was - going on. - </p> - <p> - We filed into the living-room. The Beeches had come in and shut the - veranda door, and “M’rye” was seated in her rocking-chair, in the darkness - beyond the bookcase. Her husband had the big book open before him on the - table; the lamp-light threw the shadow of his long nose down into the gray - of his beard with a strange effect of fierceness. His lips were tight-set - and his shaggy brows drawn into a commanding frown, as he bent over the - pages. - </p> - <p> - Abner did not look up till we had taken our seats. Then he raised his eyes - toward the Irishman. - </p> - <p> - “I don’t know, Hurley,” he said, in a grave, deep-booming voice, “whether - you feel it right for you to join us—we bein’ Protestants—” - </p> - <p> - “Ah, it’s all right, sir,” replied Hurley, reassuringly, “I’ll take no - harm by it.” - </p> - <p> - A minute’s silence followed upon this magnanimous declaration. Then Abner, - clearing his throat, began solemnly to read the story of Absalom’s revolt. - He had the knack, not uncommon in those primitive class-meeting days, of - making his strong, low-pitched voice quaver and wail in the most - tear-compelling fashion when he read from the Old Testament. You could - hardly listen to him going through even the genealogical tables of - Chronicles dry-eyed. His Jeremiah and Ezekiel were equal to the funeral of - a well-beloved relation. - </p> - <p> - This night he read as I had never heard him read before. The whole grim - story of the son’s treason and final misadventure, of the ferocious battle - in the wood of Ephraim, of Joab’s savagery, and of the rival runners, made - the air vibrate about us, and took possession of our minds and kneaded - them like dough, as we sat in the mute circle in the old living-room. From - my chair I could see Hurley without turning my head, and the spectacle of - excitement he presented—bending forward with dropped jaw and wild, - glistening gray eyes, a hand behind his ear to miss no syllable of this - strange new tale—only added to the effect it produced on me. - </p> - <p> - Then there came the terrible picture of the King’s despair. I had trembled - as we neared this part, foreseeing what heart-wringing anguish Abner, in - his present mood, would give to that cry of the stricken father—“O - my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O - Absalom, my son, my son!” To my great surprise, he made very little of it. - The words came coldly, almost contemptuously, so that the listener could - not but feel that David’s lamentations were out of place, and might better - have been left unuttered. - </p> - <p> - But now the farmer, leaping over into the next chapter, brought swart, - stalwart, blood-stained Joab on the scene before us, and in an instant we - saw why the King’s outburst of mourning had fallen so flat upon our ears. - Abner Beech’s voice rose and filled the room with its passionate fervor as - he read out Joab’s speech—wherein the King is roundly told that his - son was a worthless fellow, and was killed not a bit too soon, and that - for the father to thus publicly lament him is to put to shame all his - household and his loyal friends and servants. - </p> - <p> - While these sonorous words of protest against paternal weakness still rang - in the air, Abner abruptly closed the book with a snap. We looked at him - and at one another for a bewildered moment, and then “Till” Babcock - stooped as if to kneel by her chair, but Janey nudged her, and we all rose - and made our way silently out again into the kitchen. It had been apparent - enough that no spirit of prayer abode in the farmer’s breast. - </p> - <p> - “‘Twas a fine bold sinsible man, that Job!” remarked Hurley to me, when - the door was closed behind us, and the women had gone off to talk the - scene over among themselves in the butter-room. “Would it be him that had - thim lean turkeys?” - </p> - <p> - With some difficulty I made out his meaning. - </p> - <p> - “Oh, no!” I exclaimed, “the man Abner read about was Jo-ab, not Job. They - were quite different people.” - </p> - <p> - “I thought as much,” replied the Irishman. “‘Twould not be in so grand a - man’s nature to let his fowls go hungry. And do we be hearing such tales - every night?” - </p> - <p> - “Maybe Abner ’ll keep on, now he’s started again,” I said. “We - ain’t had any Bible-reading before since he had his row down at the - church, and we left off going.” - </p> - <p> - Hurley displayed such a lively interest in this matter that I went over it - pretty fully, setting forth Abner’s position and the intolerable - provocations which had been forced upon him. It took him a long time to - grasp the idea that in Protestant gatherings not only the pastor spoke, - but the class-leaders and all others who were conscious of a call might - have their word as well, and that in this way even the lowliest and - meanest of the farmer’s neighbors had been able to affront him in the - church itself. - </p> - <p> - “Too many cooks spoil the broth,” was his comment upon this. “’Tis - far better to hearken to one man only. If he’s right, you’re right. If - he’s wrong, why, thin, there ye have him in front of ye for protection.” - </p> - <p> - Bedtime came soon after, and Mrs. Beech appeared in her nightly round of - the house to see that the doors were all fastened. The candle she bore - threw up a flaring yellow light upon her chin, but made the face above it - by contrast still darker and more saturnine. She moved about in erect - impassiveness, trying the bolts and the window-catches, and went away - again, having said never a word. I had planned to ask her if I might now - have a bed to myself, but somehow my courage failed me, so stern and - majestic was her aspect. - </p> - <p> - I took the desired boon without asking, and dreamed of her as a darkling - and relentless Joab in petticoats, slaying her own son Jeff as he hung by - his hay-colored hair in one of the apple-trees of our orchard. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER IV—ANTIETAM - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span>n all the other - farms roundabout, this mid-August was a slack season. The hired men and - boys did a little early fruit-picking, a little berrying, a little - stone-drawing, but for the most part they could be seen idling about the - woods or along the river down below Juno Mills, with gun or fish-pole. - Only upon the one farm whose turn it was that week to be visited by the - itinerant threshing-machine, was any special activity visible. - </p> - <p> - It was well known, however, that we were not to get the threshing-machine - at all. How it was managed, I never understood. Perhaps the other farmers - combined in some way to over-awe or persuade the owners of the machine - into refusing it to Abner Beech. More likely he scented the chance of a - refusal and was too proud to put himself in its way by asking. At all - events, we three—Abner, Hurley, and I—had to manage the - threshing ourselves, on the matched wood floor of the carriage barn. All - the fishing I did that year was in the prolific but unsubstantial waters - of dreamland. - </p> - <p> - I did not work much, it is true, with the flail, but I lived all day in an - atmosphere choked with dust and chaff, my ears deafened with the ceaseless - whack! whack! of the hard-wood clubs, bringing on fresh shocks of grain, - and acting as general helper. - </p> - <p> - By toiling late and early we got this task out of the way just when the - corn was ready to cut. This great job taxed all the energies of the two - men, the one cutting, the other stacking, as they went. My own share of - the labor was to dig the potatoes and pick the eating-apples—a quite - portentous enough undertaking for a lad of twelve. All this kept me very - much to myself. There was no chance to talk during the day, and at night I - was glad to drag my tired limbs off to bed before the girls had fairly - cleared the supper things away. A weekly newspaper—<i>The World</i>—came - regularly to the postoffice at the Corners for us, but we were so - overworked that often it lay there for weeks at a time, and even when some - one went after it, nobody but Abner cared to read it. - </p> - <p> - So far as I know, no word ever came from Jeff. His name was never - mentioned among us. - </p> - <p> - It was now past the middle of September. Except for the fall ploughing on - fields that were to be put to grass under the grain in the spring—which - would come much later—the getting in of the root crops, and the - husking, our season’s labors were pretty well behind us. The women folk - had toiled like slaves as well, taking almost all the chores about the - cattle-barns off our shoulders, and carrying on the butter-making without - bothering us. Now that a good many cows were drying up, it was their turn - to take things easy, too. But the girls, instead of being glad at this, - began to borrow unhappiness over the certainty that there would be no - husking-bees on the Beech farm. - </p> - <p> - One heard no other subject discussed now, as we sat of a night in the - kitchen. Even when we foregathered in the living-room instead, the Babcock - and the Underwood girl talked in ostentatiously low tones of the hardship - of missing such opportunities for getting beaux, and having fun. They - recalled to each other, with tones of longing, this and that husking-bee - of other years—now one held of a moonlight night in the field - itself, where the young men pulled the stacks down and dragged them to - where the girls sat in a ring on big pumpkins, and merriment, songs, and - chorused laughter chased the happy hours along; now of a bee held in the - late wintry weather, where the men went off to the barn by themselves and - husked till they were tired, and then with warning whoops came back to - where the girls were waiting for them in the warm, hospitable farm-house, - and the frolic began, with cider and apples and pumpkin-pies, and old Lem - Hornbeck’s fiddle to lead the dancing. - </p> - <p> - Alas! they shook their empty heads and mourned, there would be no more of - these delightful times! Nothing definite was ever said as to the reason - for our ostracism from the sports and social enjoyments of the season. - There was no need for that. We all knew too well that it was Abner Beech’s - politics which made us outcasts, but even these two complaining girls did - not venture to say so in his hearing. Their talk, however, grew at last so - persistently querulous that “M’rye” bluntly told them one night to “shut - up about husking-bees,” following them out into the kitchen for that - purpose, and speaking with unaccustomed acerbity. Thereafter we heard no - more of their grumbling, but in a week or two “Till” Babcock left for her - home over on the Dutch Road, and began circulating the report that we - prayed every night for the success of Jeff Davis. - </p> - <p> - It was on a day in the latter half of September, perhaps the 20th or 21st—as - nearly as I am able to make out from the records now—that Hurley and - I started off with a double team and our big box-wagon, just after - breakfast, on a long day’s journey. We were taking a heavy load of - potatoes into market at Octavius, twelve miles distant; thence we were to - drive out an additional three miles to a cooper-shop and bring back as - many butter-firkins as we could stack up behind us, not to mention a lot - of groceries of which “M’rye” gave me a list. - </p> - <p> - It was a warm, sweet-aired, hazy autumn day, with a dusky red sun - sauntering idly about in the sky, too indolent to cast more than the - dimmest and most casual suggestion of a shadow for anything or anybody. - The Irishman sat round-backed and contented on the very high seat - overhanging the horses, his elbows on his knees, and a little black pipe - turned upside down in his mouth. He would suck satisfiedly at this for - hours after the fire had gone out, until, my patience exhausted, I begged - him to light it again. He seemed almost never to put any new tobacco into - this pipe, and to this day it remains a twin-mystery to me why its - contents neither burned themselves to nothing nor fell out. - </p> - <p> - We talked a good deal, in a desultory fashion, as the team plodded their - slow way into Octavius. Hurley told me, in answer to the questions of a - curious boy, many interesting and remarkable things about the old country, - as he always called it, and more particularly about his native part of it, - which was on the sea-shore within sight of Skibbereen. He professed always - to be filled with longing to go back, but at the same time guarded his - tiny personal expenditure with the greatest solicitude, in order to save - money to help one of his relations to get away. Once, when I taxed him - with this inconsistency, he explained that life in Ireland was the most - delicious thing on earth, but you had to get off at a distance of some - thousands of miles to really appreciate it. - </p> - <p> - Naturally there was considerable talk between us, as well, about Abner - Beech and his troubles. I don’t know where I could have heard it, but when - Hurley first came to us I at once took it for granted that the fact of his - nationality made him a sympathizer with the views of our household. - Perhaps I only jumped at this conclusion from the general ground that the - few Irish who in those days found their way into the farm-country were - held rather at arm’s-length by the community, and must in the nature of - things feel drawn to other outcasts. At all events, I made no mistake. - Hurley could not have well been more vehemently embittered against - abolitionism and the war than Abner was, but he expressed his feelings - with much greater vivacity and fluency of speech. It was surprising to see - how much he knew about the politics and political institutions of a - strange country, and how excited he grew about them when any one would - listen to him. But as he was a small man, getting on in years, he did not - dare air these views down at the Corners. The result was that he and Abner - were driven to commune together, and mutually inflamed each other’s - passionate prejudices—which was not at all needful. - </p> - <p> - When at last, shortly before noon, we drove into Octavius, I jumped off to - fill one portion of the grocery errands, leaving Hurley to drive on with - the potatoes. We were to meet at the little village tavern for dinner. - </p> - <p> - He was feeding the horses in the hotel shed when I rejoined him an hour or - so later. I came in, bursting with the importance of the news I had picked - up—scattered, incomplete, and even incoherent news, but of a most - exciting sort. The awful battle of Antietam had happened two or three days - before, and nobody in all Octavius was talking or thinking of anything - else. Both the Dearborn County regiments had been in the thick of the - fight, and I could see from afar, as I stood on the outskirts of the - throng in front of the post-office, some long strips of paper posted up - beside the door, which men said contained a list of our local dead and - wounded. It was hopeless, however, to attempt to get anywhere near this - list, and nobody whom I questioned, knew anything about the names of those - young men who had marched away from our Four Corners. Some one did call - out, though, that the telegraph had broken down, or gone wrong, and that - not half the news had come in as yet. But they were all so deeply stirred - up, so fiercely pushing and hauling to get toward the door, that I could - learn little else. - </p> - <p> - This was what I began to tell Hurley, with eager volubility, as soon as I - got in under the shed. He went on with his back to me, impassively - measuring out the oats from the bag, and clearing aside the stale hay in - the manger, the impatient horses rubbing at his shoulders with their noses - the while. Then, as I was nearly done, he turned and came out to me, - slapping the fodder-mess off his hands. - </p> - <p> - He had a big, fresh cut running transversely across his nose and cheek, - and there were stains of blood in the gray stubble of beard on his chin. I - saw too that his clothes looked as if he had been rolled on the dusty road - outside. - </p> - <p> - “Sure, then, I’m after hearin’ the news myself,” was all he said. - </p> - <p> - He drew out from beneath the wagon seat a bag of crackers and a hunk of - cheese, and, seating himself on an overturned barrel, began to eat. By a - gesture I was invited to share this meal, and did so, sitting beside him. - Something had happened, apparently, to prevent our having dinner in the - tavern. - </p> - <p> - I fairly yearned to ask him what this something was, and what was the - matter with his face, but it did not seem quite the right thing to do, and - presently he began mumbling, as much to himself as to me, a long and - broken discourse, from which I picked out that he had mingled with a group - of lusty young farmers in the market-place, asking for the latest - intelligence, and that while they were conversing in a wholly amiable - manner, one of them had suddenly knocked him down and kicked him, and that - thereafter they had pursued him with curses and loud threats half-way to - the tavern. This and much more he proclaimed between mouthfuls, speaking - with great rapidity and in so much more marked a brogue than usual, that I - understood only a fraction of what he said. - </p> - <p> - He professed entire innocence of offence in the affair, and either could - not or would not tell what it was he had said to invite the blow. I dare - say he did in truth richly provoke the violence he encountered, but at the - time I regarded him as a martyr, and swelled with indignation every time I - looked at his nose. - </p> - <p> - I remained angry, indeed, long after he himself had altogether recovered - his equanimity and whimsical good spirits. He waited outside on the seat - while I went in to pay for the baiting of the horses, and it was as well - that he did, I fancy, because there were half a dozen brawny farm-hands - and villagers standing about the bar, who were laughing in a stormy way - over the episode of the “Copperhead Paddy” in the market. - </p> - <p> - We drove away, however, without incident of any sort—sagaciously - turning off the main street before we reached the post-office block, where - the congregated crowd seemed larger than ever. There seemed to be some - fresh tidings, for several scattering outbursts of cheering reached our - ears after we could no longer see the throng; but, so far from stopping to - inquire what it was, Hurley put whip to the horses, and we rattled smartly - along out of the excited village into the tranquil, scythe-shorn country. - </p> - <p> - The cooper to whom we now went for our butter-firkins was a long-nosed, - lean, and taciturn man, whom I think of always as with his apron tucked up - at the corner, and his spectacles on his forehead, close under the edge of - his square brown-paper cap. He had had word that we were coming, and the - firkins were ready for us. He helped us load them in dead silence, and - with a gloomy air. - </p> - <p> - Hurley desired the sound of his own voice. “Well, then, sir,” he said, as - our task neared completion, “’tis worth coming out of our way these - fifteen miles to lay eyes on such fine, grand firkins as these same—such - an elegant shape on ’em, an’ put together with such nateness!” - </p> - <p> - “You could get ’em just as good at Hagadorn’s,” said the cooper, - curtly, “within a mile of your place.” - </p> - <p> - “Huh!” cried Hurley, with contempt, “Haggy-dorn is it? Faith, we’ll not - touch him or his firkins ayether! Why, man, they’re not fit to mention the - same day wid yours. Ah, just look at the darlin’s, will ye, that nate an’ - clane a Christian could ate from ’em!” - </p> - <p> - The cooper was blarney-proof. “Hagadorn’s are every smitch as good!” he - repeated, ungraciously. - </p> - <p> - The Irishman looked at him perplexedly, then shook his head as if the - problem were too much for him, and slowly clambered up to the seat. He had - gathered up the lines, and we were ready to start, before any suitable - words came to his tongue. - </p> - <p> - “Well, then, sir,” he said, “anything to be agreeable. If I hear a man - speaking a good word for your firkins, I’ll dispute him.” - </p> - <p> - “The firkins are well enough,” growled the cooper at us, “an’ they’re made - to sell, but I ain’t so almighty tickled about takin’ Copperhead money for - ‘em that I want to clap my wings an’ crow over it.” - </p> - <p> - He turned scornfully on his heel at this, and we drove away. The new - revelation of our friendlessness depressed me, but Hurley did not seem to - mind it at all. After a philosophic comparative remark about the manners - of pigs run wild in a bog, he dismissed the affair from his thoughts - altogether, and hummed cheerful words to melancholy tunes half the way - home, what time he was not talking to the horses or tossing stray - conversational fragments at me. - </p> - <p> - My own mind soon enough surrendered itself to harrowing speculations about - the battle we had heard of. The war had been going on now, for over a - year, but most of the fighting had been away off in Missouri and - Tennessee, or on the lower Mississippi, and the reports had not possessed - for me any keen direct interest. The idea of men from our own district—young - men whom I had seen, perhaps fooled with, in the hayfield only ten weeks - before—being in an actual storm of shot and shell, produced a - faintness at the pit of my stomach. Both Dearborn County regiments were in - it, the crowd said. Then of course our men must have been there—our - hired men, and the Phillips boys, and Byron Truax, and his cousin Alonzo, - and our Jeff! And if so many others had been killed, why not they as well? - </p> - <p> - “Antietam” still has a power to arrest my eyes on the printed page, and - disturb my ears in the hearing, possessed by no other battle name. It - seems now as if the very word itself had a terrible meaning of its own to - me, when I first heard it that September afternoon—as if I - recognized it to be the label of some awful novelty, before I knew - anything else. It had its fascination for Hurley, too, for presently I - heard him crooning to himself, to one of his queer old Irish tunes, some - doggerel lines which he had made up to rhyme with it—three lines - with “cheat ’em,” “beat ’em,” and “Antietam,” and then his - pet refrain, “Says the Shan van Vocht.” - </p> - <p> - This levity jarred unpleasantly upon the mood into which I had worked - myself, and I turned to speak of it, but the sight of his bruised nose and - cheek restrained me. He had suffered too much for the faith that was in - him to be lightly questioned now. So I returned to my grisly thoughts, - which now all at once resolved themselves into a conviction that Jeff had - been killed outright. My fancy darted to meet this notion, and straightway - pictured for me a fantastic battle-field by moonlight, such as was - depicted in Lossing’s books, with overturned cannon-wheels and dead horses - in the foreground, and in the centre, conspicuous above all else, the - inanimate form of Jeff Beech, with its face coldly radiant in the - moonshine. - </p> - <p> - “I guess I’ll hop off and walk a spell,” I said, under the sudden impulse - of this distressing visitation. - </p> - <p> - It was only when I was on the ground, trudging along by the side of the - wagon, that I knew why I had got down. We were within a few rods of the - Corners, where one road turned off to go to the postoffice. “Perhaps it’d - be a good idea for me to find out if they’ve heard anything more—I - mean—anything about Jeff,” I suggested. “I’ll just look in and see, - and then I can cut home cross lots.” - </p> - <p> - The Irishman nodded and drove on. - </p> - <p> - I hung behind, at the Corners, till the wagon had begun the ascent of the - hill, and the looming bulk of the firkins made it impossible that Hurley - could see which way I went. Then, without hesitation, I turned instead - down the other road which led to “Jee” Hagadorn’s. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER V—“JEE’S” TIDINGS - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>ime was when I had - known the Hagadorn house, from the outside at least, as well as any other - in the whole township. But I had avoided that road so long now, that when - I came up to the place it seemed quite strange to my eyes. - </p> - <p> - For one thing, the flower garden was much bigger than it had formerly - been. To state it differently, Miss Esther’s marigolds and columbines, - hollyhocks and peonies, had been allowed to usurp a lot of space where - sweet-corn, potatoes, and other table-truck used to be raised. This not - only greatly altered the aspect of the place, but it lowered my idea of - the practical good-sense of its owners. - </p> - <p> - What was more striking still, was the general air of decrepitude and decay - about the house itself. An eaves-trough had fallen down; half the cellar - door was off its hinges, standing up against the wall; the chimney was - ragged and broken at the top; the clapboards had never been painted, and - now were almost black with weather-stain and dry rot. It positively - appeared to me as if the house was tipping sideways, over against the - little cooper-shop adjoining it—but perhaps that was a trick of the - waning evening light? I said to myself that if we were not prospering on - the Beech farm, at least our foe “Jee” Hagadorn did not seem to be doing - much better himself. - </p> - <p> - In truth, Hagadorn had always been among the poorest members of our - community, though this by no means involves what people in cities think of - as poverty. He had a little place of nearly two acres, and then he had his - coopering business; with the two he ought to have got on comfortably - enough. But a certain contrariness in his nature seemed to be continually - interfering with this. - </p> - <p> - This strain of conscientious perversity ran through all we knew of his - life before he came to us, just as it dominated the remainder of his - career. He had been a well-to-do man some ten years before, in a city in - the western part of the State, with a big cooper-shop, and a lot of men - under him, making the barrels for a large brewery. (It was in these days, - I fancy, that Esther took on that urban polish which the younger Benaiah - missed.) Then he got the notion in his head that it was wrong to make - barrels for beer, and threw the whole thing up. He moved into our - neighborhood with only money enough to buy the old Andrews place, and - build a little shop. - </p> - <p> - It was a good opening for a cooper, and Hagadorn might have flourished if - he had been able to mind his own business. The very first thing he did was - to offend a number of our biggest butter-makers by taxing them with - sinfulness in also raising hops, which went to make beer. For a long time - they would buy no firkins of him. Then, too, he made an unpleasant - impression at church. As has been said, our meeting-house was a union - affair; that is to say, no one denomination being numerous enough to have - an edifice of its own, all the farmers roundabout—Methodists, - Baptists, Presbyterians, and so on—joined in paying the expenses. - The travelling preachers who came to us represented these great sects, - with lots of minute shadings off into Hardshell, Soft-shell, Freewill, and - other subdivided mysteries which I never understood. Hagadorn had a - denomination all to himself, as might have been expected from the man. - What the name of it was I seem never to have heard; perhaps it had no name - at all. People used to say, though, that he behaved like a Shouting - Methodist. - </p> - <p> - This was another way of saying that he made a nuisance of himself in - church. At prayer-meetings, in the slack seasons of the year, he would - pray so long, and with such tremendous shouting and fury of gestures, that - he had regularly to be asked to stop, so that those who had taken the - trouble to learn and practise new hymns might have a chance to be heard. - And then he would out-sing all the others, not knowing the tune in the - least, and cause added confusion by yelling out shrill “Amens!” between - the bars. At one time quite a number of the leading people ceased - attending church at all, on account of his conduct. - </p> - <p> - He added heavily to his theological unpopularity, too, by his action in - another matter. There was a wealthy and important farmer living over on - the west side of Agrippa Hill, who was a Universalist. The expenses of our - Union meeting-house were felt to be a good deal of a burden, and our - elders, conferring together, decided that it would be a good thing to - waive ordinary prejudices, and let the Universalists come in, and have - their share of the preaching. It would be more neighborly, they felt, and - they would get a subscription from the Agrippa Hill farmer. He assented to - the project, and came over four or five Sundays with his family and hired - help, listened unflinchingly to orthodox sermons full of sulphur and blue - flames, and put money on the plate every time. Then a Universalist - preacher occupied the pulpit one Sunday, and preached a highly inoffensive - and non-committal sermon, and “Jee” Hagadorn stood up in his pew and - violently denounced him as an infidel, before he had descended the pulpit - steps. This created a painful scandal. The Universalist farmer, of course, - never darkened that church door again. Some of our young men went so far - as to discuss the ducking of the obnoxious’ cooper in the duck-pond. But - he himself was neither frightened nor ashamed. - </p> - <p> - At the beginning, too, I suppose that his taking up Abolitionism made him - enemies. Dearborn County gave Franklin Pierce a big majority in ’52, - and the bulk of our farmers, I know, were in that majority. But I have - already dwelt upon the way in which all this changed in the years just - before the war. Naturally enough, Hagadorn’s position also changed. The - rejected stone became the head of the corner. The tiresome fanatic of the - ’fifties was the inspired prophet of the ’sixties. People - still shrank from giving him undue credit for their conversion, but they - felt themselves swept along under his influence none the less. - </p> - <p> - But just as his unpopularity kept him poor in the old days, it seemed that - now the reversed condition was making him still poorer. The truth was, he - was too excited to pay any attention to his business. He went off to - Octavius three or four days a week to hear the news, and when he remained - at home, he spent much more time standing out in the road discussing - politics and the conduct of the war with passers-by, than he did over his - staves and hoops. No wonder his place was run down. - </p> - <p> - The house was dark and silent, but there was some sort of a light in the - cooper-shop beyond. My hope had been to see Esther rather than her wild - old father, but there was nothing for it but to go over to the shop. I - pushed the loosely fitting door back on its leathern hinges, and stepped - over the threshold. The resinous scent of newly cut wood, and the rustle - of the shavings under my feet, had the effect, somehow, of filling me with - timidity. It required an effort to not turn and go out again. - </p> - <p> - The darkened; and crowded interior of the tiny work-place smelt as well, I - noted now, of smoke. On the floor before me was crouched a shapeless - figure—bending in front of the little furnace, made of a section of - stove-pipe, which the cooper used to dry the insides of newly fashioned - barrels. A fire in this, half-blaze, half-smudge—gave forth the - light I had seen from without, and the smoke which was making my nostrils - tingle. Then I had to sneeze, and the kneeling figure sprang on the - instant from the floor. - </p> - <p> - It was Esther who stood before me, coughing a little from the smoke, and - peering inquiringly at me. “Oh—is that you, Jimmy?” she asked, after - a moment of puzzled inspection in the dark. - </p> - <p> - She went on, before I had time to speak, in a nervous, half-laughing way: - “I’ve been trying to roast an ear of corn here, but it’s the worst kind of - a failure. I’ve watched ’Ni’ do it a hundred times, but with me it - always comes out half-scorched and half-smoked. I guess the corn is too - old now, anyway. At all events, it’s tougher than Pharaoh’s heart.” - </p> - <p> - She held out to me, in proof of her words, a blackened and unseemly - roasting-ear. I took it, and turned it slowly over, looking at it with the - grave scrutiny of an expert. Several torn and opened sections showed where - she had been testing it with her teeth. In obedience to her “See if you - don’t think it’s too old,” I took a diffident bite, at a respectful - distance from the marks of her experiments. It was the worst I had ever - tasted. - </p> - <p> - “I came over to see if you’d heard anything—any news,” I said, - desiring to get away from the corn subject. - </p> - <p> - “You mean about Tom?” she asked, moving so that she might see me more - plainly. - </p> - <p> - I had stupidly forgotten about that transformation of names. “Our Jeff, I - mean,” I made answer. - </p> - <p> - “His name is Thomas Jefferson. <i>We</i> call him Tom,” she explained; - “that other name is too horrid. Did—did his people tell you to come - and ask <i>me?</i>” - </p> - <p> - I shook my head. “Oh, no!” I replied with emphasis, implying by my tone, I - dare say, that they would have had themselves cut up into sausage-meat - first. - </p> - <p> - The girl walked past me to the door, and out to the road-side, looking - down toward the bridge with a lingering, anxious gaze. Then she came back, - slowly. - </p> - <p> - “No, we have no news!” she said, with an effort at calmness. “He wasn’t an - officer, that’s why. All we know is that the brigade his regiment is in - lost 141 killed, 560 wounded, and 38 missing. That’s all!” She stood in - the doorway, her hands clasped tight, pressed against her bosom. - </p> - <p> - “<i>That’s all!</i>” she repeated, with a choking voice. - </p> - <p> - Suddenly she started forward, almost ran across the few yards of floor, - and, throwing herself down in the darkest corner, where only dimly one - could see an old buffalo-robe spread over a heap of staves, began sobbing - as if her heart must break. - </p> - <p> - Her dress had brushed over the stove-pipe, and scattered some of the - embers beyond the sheet of tin it stood on. I stamped these out, and - carried the other remnants of the fire out doors. Then I returned, and - stood about in the smoky little shop, quite helplessly listening to the - moans and convulsive sobs which rose from the obscure corner. A bit of a - candle in a bottle stood on the shelf by the window. I lighted this, but - it hardly seemed to improve the situation. I could see her now, as well as - hear her—huddled face downward upon the skin, her whole form shaking - with the violence of her grief. I had never been so unhappy before in my - life. - </p> - <p> - At last—it may not have been very long, but it seemed hours—there - rose the sound of voices outside on the road. A wagon had stopped, and - some words were being exchanged. One of the voices grew louder—came - nearer; the other died off, ceased altogether, and the wagon could be - heard driving away. On the instant the door was pushed sharply open, and - “Jee” Hagadorn stood on the threshold, surveying the interior of his - cooper-shop with gleaming eyes. - </p> - <p> - He looked at me; he looked at his daughter lying in the corner; he looked - at the charred mess on the floor—yet seemed to see nothing of what - he looked at. His face glowed with a strange excitement—which in - another man I should have set down to drink. - </p> - <p> - “Glory be to God! Praise to the Most High! Mine eyes have seen the glory - of the coming of the Lord!” he called out, stretching forth his hands in a - rapturous sort of gesture I remembered from classmeeting days. - </p> - <p> - Esther had leaped to her feet with squirrel-like swiftness at the sound of - his voice, and now stood before him, her hands nervously clutching at each - other, her reddened, tear-stained face afire with eagerness. - </p> - <p> - “Has word come?—is he safe?—have you heard?” so her excited - questions tumbled over one another, as she grasped “Jee’s” sleeve and - shook it in feverish impatience. - </p> - <p> - “The day has come! The year of Jubilee is here!” he cried, brushing her - hand aside, and staring with a fixed, ecstatic, open-mouthed smile - straight ahead of him. “The words of the Prophet are fulfilled!” - </p> - <p> - “But Tom!—<i>Tom!</i>” pleaded the girl, piteously. “The list has - come? You know he is safe?” - </p> - <p> - “Tom! <i>Tom!</i>” old “Jee” repeated after her, but with an emphasis - contemptuous, not solicitous. “Perish a hundred Toms—yea—ten - thousand! for one such day as this! ‘For the Scarlet Woman of Babylon is - overthrown, and bound with chains and cast into the lake of fire. - Therefore, in one day shall her plagues come, death, and mourning, and - famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord - God which judged her!’” - </p> - <p> - He declaimed these words in a shrill, high-pitched voice, his face - upturned, and his eyes half-closed. Esther plucked despairingly at his - sleeve once more. - </p> - <p> - “But have you seen?—is <i>his</i> name?—you must have seen!” - she moaned, incoherently. - </p> - <p> - “Jee” descended for the moment from his plane of exaltation. “I <i>didn’t</i> - see!” he said, almost peevishly. “Lincoln has signed a proclamation - freeing all the slaves! What do you suppose I care for your Toms and Dicks - and Harrys, on such a day as this? ‘Woe! woe! the great city of Babylon, - the strong city! For in one hour is thy judgment come!’” - </p> - <p> - The girl tottered back to her corner, and threw herself limply down upon - the buffalo-robe again, hiding her face in her hands. - </p> - <p> - I pushed my way past the cooper, and trudged cross-lots home in the dark, - tired, disturbed, and very hungry, but thinking most of all that if I had - been worth my salt, I would have hit “Jee” Hagadorn with the adze that - stood up against the door-stile. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER VI—NI’S TALK WITH ABNER - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t must have been a - fortnight before we learned that Jeff Beech and Byron Truax had been - reported missing. I say “we,” but I do not know when Abner Beech came to - hear about it. One of the hired girls had seen the farmer get up from his - chair, with the newly arrived weekly <i>World</i> in his hand, walk over - to where his wife sat, and direct her attention to a line of the print - with his finger. Then, still in silence, he had gone over to the bookcase, - opened the drawer where he kept his account-books, and locked the journal - up therein. - </p> - <p> - We took it for granted that thus the elderly couple had learned the news - about their son. They said so little nowadays, either to each other or to - us, that we were driven to speculate upon their dumb-show, and find - meanings for ourselves in their glances and actions. No one of us could - imagine himself or herself venturing to mention Jeff’s name in their - hearing. - </p> - <p> - Down at the Corners, though, and all about our district, people talked of - very little else. Antietam had given a bloody welcome to our little group - of warriors. Ray Watkins and Lon Truax had been killed outright, and Ed - Phillips was in the hospital, with the chances thought to be against him. - Warner Pitts, our other hired man, had been wounded in the arm, but not - seriously, and thereafter behaved with such conspicuous valor that it was - said he was to be promoted from being a sergeant to a lieutenancy. All - these things, however, paled in interest after the first few days before - the fascinating mystery of what had become of Jeff and Byron. The loungers - about the grocery-store evenings took sides as to the definition of - “missing.” Some said it meant being taken prisoners; but it was known that - at Antietam the Rebels made next to no captives. Others held that - “missing” soldiers were those who had been shot, and who crawled off - somewhere in the woods out of sight to die. A lumberman from Juno Mills, - who was up on a horse-trade, went so far as to broach still a third - theory, viz., that “missing” soldiers were those who had run away under - fire, and were ashamed to show their faces again. But this malicious - suggestion could not, of course, be seriously considered. - </p> - <p> - Meanwhile, what little remained of the fall farm-work went on as if - nothing had happened. The root-crops were dug, the fodder got in, and the - late apples gathered. Abner had a cider-mill of his own, but we sold a - much larger share of our winter apples than usual. Less manure was drawn - out onto the fields than in other autumns, and it looked as if there was - to be little or no fall ploughing. Abner went about his tasks in a heavy, - spiritless way these days, doggedly enough, but with none of his old-time - vim. He no longer had pleasure even in abusing Lincoln and the war with - Hurley. Not Antietam itself could have broken his nerve, but at least it - silenced his tongue. - </p> - <p> - Warner Pitts came home on a furlough, with a fine new uniform, - shoulder-straps and sword, and his arm in a sling. I say “home,” but the - only roof he had ever slept under in these parts was ours, and now he - stayed as a guest at Squire Avery’s house, and never came near our farm. - He was a tall, brown-faced, sinewy fellow, with curly hair and a pushing - manner. Although he had been only a hired man he now cut a great dash down - at the Corners, with his shoulder-straps and his officer’s cape. It was - said that he had declined several invitations to husking-bees, and that - when he left the service, at the end of his time, he had a place ready for - him in some city as a clerk in a drygoods-store—that is, of course, - if he did not get to be colonel or general. From time to time he was seen - walking out through the dry, rustling leaves with Squire Avery’s oldest - daughter. - </p> - <p> - This important military genius did not seem able, however, to throw much - light upon the whereabouts of the two “missing” boys. From what I myself - heard him say about the battle, and from what others reported of his talk, - it seems that in the very early morning Hooker’s line—a part of - which consisted of Dearborn County men—moved forward through a big - cornfield, the stalks of which were much higher than the soldiers’ heads. - When they came out, the Rebels opened such a hideous fire of cannon and - musketry upon them from the woods close by, that those who did not fall - were glad to run back again into the corn for shelter. Thus all became - confusion, and the men were so mixed up that there was no getting them - together again. Some went one way, some another, through the tall - corn-rows, and Warner Pitts could not remember having seen either Jeff or - Byron at all after the march began. Parts of the regiment formed again out - on the road toward the Dunker church, but other parts found themselves - half a mile away among the fragments of a Michigan regiment, and a good - many more were left lying in the fatal cornfield. Our boys had not been - traced among the dead, but that did not prove that they were alive. And so - we were no wiser than before. - </p> - <p> - Warner Pitts only nodded in a distant way to me when he saw me first, with - a cool “Hello, youngster!” I expected that he would ask after the folks at - the farm which had been so long his home, but he turned to talk with some - one else, and said never a word. Once, some days afterward, he called out - as I passed him, “How’s the old Copperhead?” and the Avery girl who was - with him laughed aloud, but I went on without answering. He was already - down in my black-books, in company with pretty nearly every other human - being roundabout. - </p> - <p> - This list of enemies was indeed so full that there were times when I felt - like crying over my isolation. It may be guessed, then, how rejoiced I was - one afternoon to see Ni Hagadorn squeeze his way through our orchard-bars, - and saunter across under the trees to where I was at work sorting a heap - of apples into barrels. I could have run to meet him, so grateful was the - sight of any friendly, boyish face. The thought that perhaps after all he - had not come to see me in particular, and that possibly he brought some - news about Jeff, only flashed across my mind after I had smiled a broad - welcome upon him, and he stood leaning against a barrel munching the - biggest russet he had been able to pick out. - </p> - <p> - “Abner to home?” he asked, after a pause of neighborly silence. He hadn’t - come to see me after all. - </p> - <p> - “He’s around the barns somewhere,” I replied; adding, upon reflection, - “Have you heard something fresh?” - </p> - <p> - Ni shook his sorrel head and buried his teeth deep into the apple. “No, - nothin’,” he said, at last, with his mouth full, “only thought I’d come up - an’ talk it over with Abner.” - </p> - <p> - The calm audacity of the proposition took my breath away. “He’ll boot you - off’m the place if you try it,” I warned him. - </p> - <p> - But Ni did not scare easily. “Oh, no,” he said, with light confidence, “me - an’ Abner’s all right.” - </p> - <p> - As if to put this assurance to the test, the figure of the farmer was at - this moment visible, coming toward us down the orchard road. He was in his - shirt-sleeves, with the limp, discolored old broad-brimmed felt hat he - always wore pulled down over his eyes. Though he no longer held his head - so proudly erect as I could remember it, there were still suggestions of - great force and mastership in his broad shoulders and big beard, and in - the solid, long-gaited manner of his walk. He carried a pitchfork in his - hand. - </p> - <p> - “Hello, Abner!” said Ni, as the farmer came up and halted, surveying each - of us in turn with an impassive scrutiny. - </p> - <p> - “How ’r’ ye?” returned Abner, with cold civility. I fancied he must - be surprised to see the son of his enemy here, calmly gnawing his way - through one of our apples, and acting as if the place belonged to him. But - he gave no signs of astonishment, and after some words of direction to me - concerning my work, started to move on again toward the barns. - </p> - <p> - Ni was not disposed to be thus cheated out of his conversation: “Seen - Warner Pitts since he’s got back?” he called out, and at this the farmer - stopped and turned round. “You’d hardly know him now,” the butcher’s - assistant went on, with cheerful briskness. “Why you’d think he’d never - hoofed it over ploughed land in all his life. He’s got his boots blacked - up every day, an’ his hair greased, an’ a whole new suit of broadcloth, - with shoulder-straps an’ brass buttons, an’ a sword—he brings it - down to the Corners every evening, so’t the boys at the store can heft it—an’ - he’s—” - </p> - <p> - “What do I care about all this?” broke in Abner. His voice was heavy, with - a growling ground-note, and his eyes threw out an angry light under the - shading hat-brim. “He can go to the devil, an’ take his sword with him, - for all o’ me!” - </p> - <p> - Hostile as was his tone, the farmer did not again turn on his heel. - Instead, he seemed to suspect that Ni had something more important to say, - and looked him steadfastly in the face. - </p> - <p> - “That’s what I say, too,” replied Ni, lightly. “What’s beat me is how such - a fellow as that got to be an officer right from the word ‘go!’—an’ - him the poorest shote in the whole lot. Now if it had a’ ben Spencer - Phillips I could understand it—or Bi Truax, or—or your Jeff—” - </p> - <p> - The farmer raised his fork menacingly, with a wrathful gesture. “Shet up!” - he shouted; “shet up, I say! or I’ll make ye!” - </p> - <p> - To my great amazement Ni was not at all affected by this demonstration. He - leaned smilingly against the barrel, and picked out another apple—a - spitzenberg this time. - </p> - <p> - “Now look a-here, Abner,” he said, argumentatively, “what’s the good o’ - gittin’ mad? When I’ve had my say out, why, if you don’t like it you - needn’t, an’ nobody’s a cent the wuss off. Of course, if you come down to - hard-pan, it ain’t none o’ my business—” - </p> - <p> - “No,” interjected Abner, in grim assent, “it ain’t none o’ your business!” - </p> - <p> - “But there is such a thing as being neighborly,” Ni went on, undismayed, - “an’ meanin’ things kindly, an’ takin’ ’em as they’re meant.” - </p> - <p> - “Yes, I know them kindly neighbors o’ mine!” broke in the farmer with - acrid irony. “I’ve summered ’em an’ I’ve wintered ’em, an’ - the Lord deliver me from the whole caboodle of ’em! A meaner lot o’ - cusses never cumbered this footstool!” - </p> - <p> - “It takes all sorts o’ people to make up a world,” commented this freckled - and sandy-headed young philosopher, testing the crimson skin of his apple - with a tentative thumb-nail. “Now you ain’t got anything in particular - agin me, have you?” - </p> - <p> - “Nothin’ except your breed,” the farmer admitted. The frown with which he - had been regarding Ni had softened just the least bit in the world. - </p> - <p> - “That don’t count,” said Ni, with easy confidence. “Why, what does breed - amount to, anyway? You ought to be the last man alive to lug <i>that</i> - in—you, who’ve up an’ soured on your own breed—your own son - Jeff!” - </p> - <p> - I looked to see Abner lift his fork again, and perhaps go even further in - his rage. Strangely enough, there crept into his sunburnt, massive face, - at the corners of the eyes and mouth, something like the beginnings of a - puzzled smile. “You’re a cheeky little cuss, anyway!” was his final - comment. Then his expression hardened again. “Who put you up to cornin’ - here, an’ talkin’ like this to me?” he demanded, sternly. - </p> - <p> - “Nobody—hope to die!” protested Ni. “It’s all my own spec. It riled - me to see you mopin’ round up here all alone by yourself, not knowin’ - what’d become of Jeff, an’ makin’ b’lieve to yourself you didn’t care, an’ - so givin’ yourself away to the whole neighborhood.” - </p> - <p> - “Damn the neighborhood!” said Abner, fervently. - </p> - <p> - “Well, they talk about the same of you,” Ni proceeded with an air of - impartial candor. “But all that don’t do you no good, an’ don’t do Jeff no - good!” - </p> - <p> - “He made his own bed, and he must lay on it,” said the farmer, with dogged - firmness. - </p> - <p> - “I ain’t sayin’ he mustn’t,” remonstrated the other. “What I’m gittin’ at - is that you’d feel easier in your mind if you knew where that bed was—an’ - so’d M’rye!” - </p> - <p> - Abner lifted his head. “His mother feels jest as I do,” he said. “He - sneaked off behind our backs to jine Lincoln’s nigger-worshippers, an’ - levy war on fellow-countrymen o’ his’n who’d done him no harm, an’ - whatever happens to him it serves him right. I ain’t much of a hand to lug - in Scripter to back up my argyments—like some folks you know of—but - my feelin’ is: ‘Whoso taketh up the sword shall perish by the sword!’ An’ - so says his mother too!” - </p> - <p> - “Hm-m!” grunted Ni, with ostentatious incredulity. He bit into his apple, - and there ensued a momentary silence. Then, as soon as he was able to - speak, this astonishing boy said: “Guess I’ll have a talk with M’rye about - that herself.” - </p> - <p> - The farmer’s patience was running emptings. - </p> - <p> - “No!” he said, severely, “I forbid ye! Don’t ye dare say a word to her - about it. She don’t want to listen to ye—an’ I don’t know what’s - possessed <i>me</i> to stand round an’ gab about my private affairs with - you like this, either. I don’t bear ye no ill-will. If fathers can’t help - the kind o’ sons they \ bring up, why, still less can ye blame sons on - account o’ their fathers. But it ain’t a thing I want to talk about any - more, either now or any other time. That’s all.” - </p> - <p> - Abner put the fork over his shoulder, as a sign that he was going, and - that the interview was at an end. But the persistent Ni had a last word to - offer—and he left his barrel and walked over to the farmer. - </p> - <p> - “See here,” he said, in more urgent tones than he had used before, “I’m - goin’ South, an’ I’m goin’ to find Jeff if it takes a leg! I don’t know - how much it’ll cost—I’ve got a little of my own saved up—an’ I - thought—p’r’aps—p’r’aps you’d like to—” - </p> - <p> - After a moment’s thought the farmer shook his head. “No,” he said, - gravely, almost reluctantly. “It’s agin my principles. You know me—Ni—you - know I’ve never b’en a near man, let alone a mean man. An’ ye know, too, - that if Je—if that boy had behaved half-way decent, there ain’t - anything under the sun I wouldn’t’a’ done for him. But this thing—I’m - obleeged to ye for offrin’—but—No! it’s agin my principles. - Still, I’m obleeged to ye. Fill your pockets with them spitzenbergs, if - they taste good to ye.” - </p> - <p> - With this Abner Beech turned and walked resolutely off. - </p> - <p> - Left alone with me, Ni threw away the half-eaten apple he had held in his - hand. “I don’t want any of his dummed old spitzenbergs,” he said, pushing - his foot into the heap of fruit on the ground, in a meditative way. - </p> - <p> - “Then you ain’t agoin’ South?” I queried. - </p> - <p> - “Yes, I am!” he replied, with decision. “I can work my way somehow. Only - don’t you whisper a word about it to any livin’ soul, d’ye mind!” - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <p> - Two or three days after that we heard that Ni Hagadorn had left for - unknown parts. Some said he had gone to enlist—it seems that, - despite his youth and small stature in my eyes, he would have been - acceptable to the enlistment standards of the day—but the major - opinion was that much dime-novel reading had inspired him with the notion - of becoming a trapper in the mystic Far West. - </p> - <p> - I alone possessed the secret of his disappearance—unless, indeed, - his sister knew—and no one will ever know what struggles I had to - keep from confiding it to Hurley. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER VII—THE ELECTION - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">S</span>OON the fine - weather was at an end. One day it was soft and warm, with a tender blue - haze over the distant woods and a sun like a blood-orange in the tranquil - sky, and birds twittering about among the elders and sumac along the - rail-fences. And the next day everything was gray and lifeless and - desolate, with fierce winds sweeping over the bare fields, and driving the - cold rain in sheets before them. - </p> - <p> - Some people—among them Hurley—said it was the equinoctial that - was upon us. Abner Beech ridiculed this, and proved by the dictionary that - the equinoctial meant September 22d, whereas it was now well-nigh the end - of October. The Irishman conceded that in books this might be so, but - stuck wilfully to it that in practice the equinoctial came just before - winter set in. After so long a period of saddened silence brooding over - our household, it was quite a relief to hear the men argue this question - of the weather. - </p> - <p> - Down at the Corners old farmers had wrangled over the identity of the - equinoctial ever since I could remember. It was pretty generally agreed - that each year along some time during the fall, there came a storm which - was properly entitled to that name, but at this point harmony ended. Some - insisted that it came before Indian Summer, some that it followed that - season, and this was further complicated by the fact that no one was ever - quite sure when it was Indian Summer. There were all sorts of rules for - recognizing this delectable time of year, rules connected, I recall, with - the opening of the chestnut burrs, the movement of birds, and various - other incidents in nature’s great processional, but these rules rarely - came right in our rough latitude, and sometimes never came at all—at - least did not bring with them anything remotely resembling Indian Summer, - but made our autumn one prolonged and miserable succession of storms. And - then it was an especially trying trick to pick out the equinoctial from - the lot—and even harder still to prove to sceptical neighbors that - you were right. - </p> - <p> - Whatever this particular storm may have been it came too soon. Being so - short-handed on the farm, we were much behind in the matter of drawing our - produce to market. And now, after the first day or two of rain, the roads - were things to shudder at. It was not so bad getting to and from the - Corners, for Agrippa Hill had a gravel formation, but beyond the Corners, - whichever way one went over the bottom lands of the Nedahma Valley, it was - a matter of lashing the panting teams through seas of mud punctuated by - abysmal pitch-holes, into which the wheels slumped over their hubs, and - quite generally stuck till they were pried out with fence-rails. - </p> - <p> - Abner Beech was exceptionally tender in his treatment of live-stock. The - only occasion I ever heard of on which he was tempted into using his big - fists upon a fellow-creature, was once, long before my time, when one of - his hired men struck a refractory cow over its haunches with a shovel. He - knocked this man clear through the stanchions. Often Jeff and I used to - feel that he carried his solicitude for horse-flesh too far—particularly - when we wanted to drive down to the creek for a summer evening swim, and - he thought the teams were too tired. - </p> - <p> - So now he would not let us hitch up and drive into Octavius with even the - lightest loads, on account of the horses. It would be better to wait, he - said, until there was sledding; then we could slip in in no time. He - pretended that all the signs this year pointed to an early winter. - </p> - <p> - The result was that we were more than ever shut off from news of the outer - world. The weekly paper which came to us was full, I remember, of - political arguments and speeches—for a Congress and Governor were to - be elected a few weeks hence—but there were next to no tidings from - the front. The war, in fact, seemed to have almost stopped altogether, and - this paper spoke of it as a confessed failure. Farmer Beech and Hurley, of - course, took the same view, and their remarks quite prepared me from day - to day to hear that peace had been concluded. - </p> - <p> - But down at the Corners a strikingly different spirit reigned. It quite - surprised me, I know, when I went down on occasion for odds and ends of - groceries which the bad roads prevented us from getting in town, to - discover that the talk there was all in favor of having a great deal more - war than ever. - </p> - <p> - This store at the Corners was also the post-office, and, more important - still, it served as a general rallying place for the men-folks of the - neighborhood after supper. Lee Watkins, who kept it, would rather have - missed a meal of victuals any day than not to have the “boys” come in of - an evening, and sit or lounge around discussing the situation. Many of - them were very old boys now, garrulous seniors who remembered “Matty” Van - Buren, as they called him, and told weird stories of the Anti-Masonry - days. - </p> - <p> - These had the well-worn arm-chairs nearest the stove, in cold weather, and - spat tobacco-juice on its hottest parts with a precision born of long-time - experience. The younger fellows accommodated themselves about the outer - circle, squatting on boxes, or with one leg over a barrel, sampling the - sugar and crackers and raisins in an absent-minded way each evening, till - Mrs. Watkins came out and put the covers on. She was a stout, peevish - woman in bloomers, and they said that her husband, Lee, couldn’t have run - the post-office for twenty-four hours if it hadn’t been for her. We - understood that she was a Woman’s Rights’ woman, which some held was much - the same as believing in Free Love. All that was certain, however, was - that she did not believe in free lunches out of her husband’s barrels and - cases. - </p> - <p> - The chief flaw in this village parliament was the absence of an - opposition. Among all the accustomed assemblage of men who sat about, - their hats well back on their heads, their mouths full of strong language - and tobacco, there was none to disagree upon any essential feature of the - situation with the others. To secure even the merest semblance of variety, - those whose instincts were cross-grained had to go out of their way to - pick up trifling points of difference, and the arguments over these had to - be spun out with the greatest possible care, to be kept going at all. I - should fancy, however, that this apparent concord only served to keep - before their minds, with added persistency, the fact that there was an - opposition, nursing its heretical wrath in solitude up on the Beech farm. - At all events, I seemed never to go into the grocery of a night without - hearing bitter remarks, or even curses, levelled at our household. - </p> - <p> - It was from these casual visits—standing about on the outskirts of - the gathering, beyond the feeble ring of light thrown out by the kerosene - lamp on the counter—that I learned how deeply the Corners were - opposed to peace. It appeared from the talk here that there was something - very like treason at the front. The victory at Antietam—so dearly - bought with the blood of our own people—had been, they said, of - worse than no use at all. The defeated Rebels had been allowed to take - their own time in crossing the Potomac comfortably. They had not been - pursued or molested since, and the Corners could only account for this on - the theory of treachery at Union headquarters. Some only hinted guardedly - at this. Others declared openly that the North was being sold out by its - own generals. As for old “Jee” Hagadorn, who came in almost every night, - and monopolized the talking all the while he was present, he made no bones - of denouncing McClellan and Porter as traitors who must be hanged. - </p> - <p> - Quivering with excitement, the red stubbly hair standing up all round his - drawn and livid face, his knuckles rapping out one fierce point after - another on the candle-box, as he filled the little hot room with angry - declamation. “Go it, Jee!” - </p> - <p> - “Give ’em Hell!” - </p> - <p> - “Hangin’s too good for ’em!” his auditors used to exclaim in - encouragement, whenever he paused for breath, and then he would start off - again still more furiously, till he had to gasp after every word, and - screamed “Lincoln-ah!” “Lee-ah!” “Antietam-ah!” and so on, into our - perturbed ears. Then I would go home, recalling how he had formerly - shouted about “Adam-ah!” and “Eve-ah!” in church, and marvelling that he - had never worked himself into a fit, or broken a bloodvessel. - </p> - <p> - So between what Abner and Hurley said on the farm, and what was proclaimed - at the Corners, it was pretty hard to figure out whether the war was going - to stop, or go on much worse than ever. - </p> - <p> - Things were still in this doubtful state, when election Tuesday came - round. I had not known or thought about it, until at the breakfast-table - Abner said that he guessed he and Hurley would go down and vote before - dinner. He had some days before. - </p> - <p> - He comes before me as I write—this thin form secured a package of - ballots from the organization of his party at Octavius, and these he now - took from one of the bookcase drawers, and divided between himself and - Hurley. - </p> - <p> - “They won’t be much use, I dessay, peddlin’ ’em at the polls,” he - said, with a grim momentary smile, “but, by the Eternal, we’ll vote ’em!” - </p> - <p> - “As many of ’em as they’ll be allowin’ us,” added Hurley, in - chuckling qualification. - </p> - <p> - They were very pretty tickets in those days, with marbled and plaided - backs in brilliant colors, and spreading eagles in front, over the printed - captions. In other years I had shared with the urchins of the neighborhood - the excitement of scrambling for a share of these ballots, after they had - been counted, and tossed out of the boxes. The conditions did not seem to - be favorable for a repetition of that this year, and apparently this - occurred to Abner, for of his own accord he handed me over some dozen of - the little packets, each tied with a thread, and labelled, “State,” - “Congressional,” “Judiciary,” and the like. He, moreover, consented—the - morning chores being out of the way—that I should accompany them to - the Corners. The ground had frozen stiff overnight, and the road lay in - hard uncompromising ridges between the tracks of yesterday’s wheels. The - two men swung along down the hill ahead of me, with resolute strides and - their heads proudly thrown back, as if they had been going into battle. I - shuffled, on behind in my new boots, also much excited. The day was cold - and raw. - </p> - <p> - The polls were fixed up in a little building next to the post-office—a - one-story frame structure where Lee Watkins kept his bob-sleigh and oil - barrels, as a rule. These had been cleared out into the yard, and a table - and some chairs put in in their place. A pane of glass had been taken out - of the window. Through this aperture the voters, each in his turn, passed - their ballots, to be placed by the inspectors in the several boxes ranged - along the window-sill inside. A dozen or more men, mainly in army - overcoats, stood about on the sidewalk or in the road outside, stamping - their feet for warmth, and slapping their shoulders with their hands, - between the fingers of which they held little packets of tickets like mine—that - is to say, they were like mine in form and brilliancy of color, but I knew - well enough that there the resemblance ended abruptly. A yard or so from - the window two posts had been driven into the ground, with a board nailed - across to prevent undue crowding. - </p> - <p> - Abner and Hurley marched up to the polls without a word to any one, or any - sign of recognition from the bystanders. Their appearance, however, - visibly awakened the interest of the Corners, and several young fellows - who were standing on the grocery steps sauntered over in their wake to see - what was going on. These, with the ticket-peddlers, crowded up close to - the window now, behind our two men. - </p> - <p> - “Abner Beech!” called the farmer through the open pane, in a defiant - voice. Standing on tiptoe, I could just see the heads of some men inside, - apparently looking through the election books. No questions were asked, - and in a minute or so Abner had voted and stood aside a little, to make - room for his companion. - </p> - <p> - “Timothy Joseph Hurley!” shouted our hired man, standing on his toes to - make himself taller, and squaring his weazened shoulders. - </p> - <p> - “Got your naturalization papers?” came out a sharp, gruff inquiry through - the window-sash. - </p> - <p> - “That I have!” said the Irishman, wagging his head in satisfaction at - having foreseen this trick, and winking blandly into the wall of stolid, - hostile faces encircling him. “That I have!” - </p> - <p> - He drew forth an old and crumpled envelope, from his breast-pocket, and - extracted some papers from its ragged folds, which he passed through to - the inspector. The latter just cast his eye over the documents and handed - them back. - </p> - <p> - “Them ain’t no good!” he said, curtly. - </p> - <p> - “What’s that you’re saying?” cried the Irishman. “Sure I’ve voted on thim - same papers every year since 1856, an’ niver a man gainsaid me. No good, - is it? Huh!” - </p> - <p> - “Why ain’t they no good?” boomed in Abner Beech’s deep, angry voice. He - had moved back to the window. - </p> - <p> - “Because they ain’t, that’s enough!” returned the inspector. “Don’t block - up the window, there! Others want to vote!” - </p> - <p> - “I’ll have the law on yez!” shouted Hurley. “I’ll swear me vote in! I’ll—I’ll—” - </p> - <p> - “Aw, shut up, you Mick!” some one called out close by, and then there rose - another voice farther back in the group: “Don’t let him vote! One - Copperhead’s enough in Agrippa!” - </p> - <p> - “I’ll have the law—” I heard Hurley begin again, at the top of his - voice, and Abner roared out something I could not catch. Then as in a - flash the whole cluster of men became one confused whirling tangle of arms - and legs, sprawling and wrestling on the ground, and from it rising the - repellent sound of blows upon flesh, and a discordant chorus of grunts and - curses. Big chunks of icy mud flew through the air, kicked up by the boots - of the men as they struggled. I saw the two posts with the board weave - under the strain, then give way, some of the embattled group tumbling over - them as they fell. It was wholly impossible to guess who was who in this - writhing and tossing mass of fighters. I danced up and down in a frenzy of - excitement, watching this wild spectacle, and, so I was told years - afterward, screaming with all my might and main. - </p> - <p> - Then all at once there was a mighty upheaval, and a big man - half-scrambled, half-hurled himself to his feet. It was Abner, who had - wrenched one of the posts bodily from under the others, and swung it now - high in air. Some one clutched it, and for the moment stayed its descent, - yelling, meanwhile, “Look out! Look out!” as though life itself depended - on the volume of his voice. - </p> - <p> - The ground cleared itself as if by magic. On the instant there was only - Abner standing there with the post in his hands, and little Hurley beside - him, the lower part of his face covered with blood, and his coat torn half - from his back. The others had drawn off, and formed a semicircle just out - of reach of the stake, like farm-dogs round a wounded bear at bay. Two or - three of them had blood about their heads and necks. - </p> - <p> - There were cries of “Kill him!” and it was said afterward that Roselle - Upman drew a pistol, but if he did others dissuaded him from using it. - Abner stood with his back to the building, breathing hard, and a good deal - covered with mud, but eyeing the crowd with a masterful ferocity, and from - time to time shifting his hands to get a new grip on that tremendous - weapon of his. He said not a word. - </p> - <p> - The Irishman, after a moment’s hesitation, wiped some of the blood from - his mouth and jaw, and turned to the window again. “Timothy Joseph - Hurley!” he shouted in, defiantly. - </p> - <p> - This time another inspector came to the front—the owner of the - tanyard over on the Dutch road, and a man of importance in the district. - Evidently there had been a discussion inside. - </p> - <p> - “We will take your vote if you want to swear it in,” he said, in a pacific - tone, and though there were some dissenting cries from the crowd without, - he read the oath, and Hurley mumbled it after him. - </p> - <p> - Then, with some difficulty, he sorted out from his pocket some torn and - mud-stained packets of tickets, picked the cleanest out from each, and - voted them—all with a fine air of unconcern. - </p> - <p> - Abner Beech marched out behind him now with a resolute clutch on the - stake. The crowd made reluctant way for them, not without a good many - truculent remarks, but with no offer of actual violence. Some of the more - boisterous ones, led by Roselle Upman, were for following them, and - renewing the encounter beyond the Corners. But this, too, came to nothing, - and when I at last ventured to cross the road and join Abner and Hurley, - even the cries of “Copperhead” had died away. - </p> - <p> - The sun had come out, and the frosty ruts had softened to stickiness. The - men’s heavy boots picked up whole sections of plastic earth as they walked - in the middle of the road up the hill. - </p> - <p> - “What’s the matter with your mouth?” asked Abner at last, casting a - sidelong glance at his companion. “It’s be’n a-bleedin’.” - </p> - <p> - Hurley passed an investigating hand carefully over the lower part of his - face, looked at his reddened fingers, and laughed aloud. “I’d a fine grand - bite at the ear of one of them,” he said, in explanation. “‘Tis no blood - o’ mine.” Abner knitted his brows. “That ain’t the way we fight in this - country,” he said, in tones of displeasure. “Bitin’ men’s ears ain’t no - civilized way of behavin’.” - </p> - <p> - “’Twas not much of a day for civilization,” remarked Hurley, - lightly; and there was no further conversation on our homeward tramp. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER VIII—THE ELECTION BONFIRE - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>he election had - been on Tuesday, November 4th. Our paper, containing the news of the - result, was to be expected at the Corners on Friday morning. But long - before that date we had learned—I think it was Hurley who found it - out—that the Abolitionists had actually been beaten in our - Congressional district. It was so amazing a thing that Abner could - scarcely credit it, but it was apparently beyond dispute. For that matter, - one hardly needed further evidence than the dejected way in which Philo - Andrews and Myron Pierce and other followers of “Jee” Hagadorn hung their - heads as they drove past our place. - </p> - <p> - Of course it had all been done by the vote in the big town of Tecumseh, - way at the other end of the district, and by those towns surrounding it - where the Mohawk Dutch were still very numerous. But this did not at all - lessen the exhilaration with which the discovery that the Radicals of our - own Dearborn County had been snowed under, filled our breasts. Was it not - wonderful to think of, that these heroes of remote Adams and Jay Counties - should have been at work redeeming the district on the very day when the - two votes of our farm marked the almost despairing low-water mark of the - cause in Agrippa? - </p> - <p> - Abner could hardly keep his feet down on the ground or floor when he - walked, so powerfully did the tidings of this achievement thrill his - veins. He said the springs of his knees kept jerking upward, so that he - wanted to kick and dance all the while. Janey Wilcox, who, though a meek - and silent girl, was a wildly bitter partisan, was all eagerness to light - a bonfire out on the knoll in front of the house Thursday night, so that - every mother’s son of them down at the Corners might see it, but Abner - thought it would be better to wait until we had the printed facts before - us. - </p> - <p> - I could hardly wait to finish breakfast Friday morning, so great was my - zeal to be off to the postoffice. It was indeed not altogether daylight - when I started at quick step down the hill. Yet, early as I was, there - were some twenty people inside Lee Watkins’s store when I arrived, all - standing clustered about the high square row of glass-faced pigeonholes - reared on the farther end of the counter, behind which could be seen Lee - and his sour-faced wife sorting over the mail by lamp-light. “Jee” - Hagadorn was in this group and Squire Avery, and most of the other - prominent citizens of the neighborhood. All were deeply restless. - </p> - <p> - Every minute or two some one of them would shout: “Come, Lee, give us out - one of the papers, anyway!” But for some reason Mrs. Watkins was - inexorable. Her pursed-up lips and resolute expression told us plainly - that none would be served till all were sorted. So the impatient waiters - bided their time under protest, exchanging splenetic remarks under their - breath. We must have stood there three-quarters of an hour. - </p> - <p> - At last Mrs. Watkins wiped her hands on the apron over her bloomers. - Everybody knew the signal, and on the instant a dozen arms were stretched - vehemently toward Lee, struggling for precedence. In another moment - wrappers had been ripped off and sheets flung open. Then the store was - alive with excited voices. “Yes, sir! It’s true! The Copperheads have - won!” - </p> - <p> - “<i>Tribune</i> concedes Seymour’s election!” - </p> - <p> - “We’re beaten in the district by less’n a hundred!” - </p> - <p> - “Good-by, human liberty!” “Now we know how Lazarus felt when he was licked - by the dogs!” and so on—a stormy warfare of wrathful ejaculations. - </p> - <p> - In my turn I crowded up, and held out my hand for the paper I saw in the - box. Lee Watkins recognized me, and took the paper out to deliver to me. - But at the same moment his wife, who had been hastily scanning the columns - of some other journal, looked up and also saw who I was. With a lightning - gesture she threw out her hand, snatched our <i>World</i> from her - husband’s grasp, and threw it spitefully under the counter. - </p> - <p> - “There ain’t nothing for <i>you!</i>” she snapped at me. “Pesky Copperhead - rag!” she muttered to herself. - </p> - <p> - Although I had plainly seen the familiar wrapper, and understood her - action well enough, it never occurred to me to argue the question with - Mrs. - </p> - <p> - Watkins. Her bustling, determined demeanor, perhaps also her bloomers, had - always filled me with awe. I hung about for a time, avoiding her range of - vision, until she went out into her kitchen. Then I spoke with resolution - to Lee: - </p> - <p> - “If you don’t give me that paper,” I said, “I’ll tell Abner, an’ he’ll - make you sweat for it!” - </p> - <p> - The postmaster stole a cautious glance kitchen-ward. Then he made a swift, - diving movement under the counter, and furtively thrust the paper out at - me. - </p> - <p> - “Scoot!” he said, briefly, and I obeyed him. - </p> - <p> - Abner was simply wild with bewildered delight over what this paper had to - tell him. Even my narrative about Mrs. Watkins, which ordinarily would - have thrown him into transports of rage, provoked only a passing sniff. - “They’ve only got two more years to hold that post-office,” was his only - remark upon it. - </p> - <p> - Hurley and Janey Wilcox and even the Underwood girl came in, and listened - to Abner reading out the news. He shirked nothing, but waded manfully - through long tables of figures and meaningless catalogues of counties in - other States, the names of which he scarcely knew how to pronounce: “‘Five - hundred and thirty-one townships in Wisconsin give Brown 21,409, Smith - 16,329, Ferguson 802, a Republican loss of 26.’ Do you see that, Hurley? - It’s everywhere the same.” - </p> - <p> - “‘Kalapoosas County elects Republican Sheriff for first time in history of - party.’ That isn’t so good, but it’s only one out of ten thousand.” - </p> - <p> - “‘Four hundred and six townships in New Hampshire show a net Democratic - loss of—’ pshaw! there ain’t nothing in that! Wait till the other - towns are heard from!” - </p> - <p> - So Abner read on and on, slapping his thigh with his free hand whenever - anything specially good turned up. And there was a great deal that we felt - to be good. The State had been carried. Besides our Congressman, many - others had been elected in unlooked-for places—so much so that the - paper held out the hope that Congress itself might be ours. Of course - Abner at once talked as if it were already ours. Resting between - paragraphs, he told Hurley and the others that this settled it. The war - must now surely be abandoned, and the seceding States invited to return to - the Union on terms honorable to both sides. - </p> - <p> - Hurley had assented with acquiescent nods to everything else. He seemed to - have a reservation on this last point. “An’ what if they won’t come?” he - asked. - </p> - <p> - “Let ’em stay out, then,” replied Abner, dogmatically. “This war—this - wicked war between brothers—must stop. That’s the meaning of - Tuesday’s votes. What did you and I go down to the Corners and cast our - ballots for?—why, for peace!” - </p> - <p> - “Well, somebody else got my share of it, then,” remarked Hurley, with a - rueful chuckle. - </p> - <p> - Abner was too intent upon his theme to notice. “Yes, peace!” he repeated, - in the deep vibrating tones of his class-meeting manner. “Why, just think - what’s been a-goin’ on! Great armies raised, hundreds of thousands of - honest men taken from their-work an’ set to murderin’ each other, whole - deestricks of country torn up by the roots, homes desolated, the land - filled with widows an’ orphans, an’ every house a house of mournin’.” - </p> - <p> - Mrs. Beech had been sitting, with her mending-basket on her knee, - listening to her husband like the rest of us. She shot to her feet now as - these last words of his quivered in the air, paying no heed to the basket - or its scattered contents on the floor, but putting her apron to her eyes, - and making her way thus past us, half-blindly, into her bedroom. I thought - I heard the sound of a sob as she closed the door. - </p> - <p> - That the stately, proud, self-contained mistress of our household should - act like this before us all was even more surprising than Seymour’s - election. We stared at one another in silent astonishment. - </p> - <p> - “M’rye ain’t feelin’ over’n’ above well,” Abner said at last, - apologetically. “You girls ought to spare her all you kin.” - </p> - <p> - One could see, however, that he was as puzzled as the rest of us. He rose - to his feet, walked over to the stove, rubbed his boot meditatively - against the hearth for a minute or two, then came back again to the table. - It was with a visible effort that he finally shook off this mood, and - forced a smile to his lips. - </p> - <p> - “Well, Janey,” he said, with an effort at briskness, “ye kin go ahead with - your bonfire, now. I guess I’ve got some old bar’ls for ye over’n the - cow-barn.” - </p> - <p> - But having said this, he turned abruptly and followed his wife into the - little chamber off the living-room. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER IX—ESTHER’S VISIT - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>he next day, - Saturday, was my birthday. I celebrated it by a heavy cold, with a - bursting headache, and chills chasing each other down my back. I went out - to the cow-barn with the two men before daylight, as usual, but felt so - bad that I had to come back to the house before milking was half over. The - moment M’rye saw me, I was ordered on to the sick-list. - </p> - <p> - The Beech homestead was a good place to be sick in. Both M’rye and Janey - had a talent in the way of fixing up tasty little dishes for invalids, and - otherwise ministering to their comfort, which year after year went - a-begging, simply because all the men-folk kept so well. Therefore, when - the rare opportunity did arrive, they made the most of it. I had my feet - and legs put into a bucket of hot water, and wrapped round with burdock - leaves. Janey prepared for my breakfast some soft toast—not the - insipid and common milk-toast—but each golden-brown slice treated - separately on a plate, first moistened with scalding water, then peppered, - salted, and buttered, with a little cold milk on top of all. I ate this - sumptuous breakfast at my leisure, ensconced in M’rye’s big cushioned - rocking-chair, with my feet and legs, well tucked up in a blanket-shawl, - stretched out on another chair, comfortably near the stove. - </p> - <p> - It was taken for granted that I had caught my cold out around the bonfire - the previous evening—and this conviction threw a sort of patriotic - glamour about my illness, at least in my own mind. - </p> - <p> - The bonfire had been a famous success. Though there was a trifle of rain - in the air, the barrels and mossy discarded old fence-rails burned like - pitch-pine, and when Hurley and I threw on armfuls of brush, the sparks - burst up with a roar into a flaming column which we felt must be visible - all over our side of Dearborn County. At all events, there was no doubt - about its being seen and understood down at the Corners, for presently our - enemies there started an answering bonfire, which glowed from time to time - with such a peculiarly concentrated radiance that Abner said Lee Watkins - must have given them some of his kerosene-oil barrels. The thought of such - a sacrifice as this on the part of the postmaster rather disturbed Abner’s - mind, raising, as it did, the hideous suggestion that possibly later - returns might have altered the election results. But when Hurley and I - dragged forward and tipped over into the blaze the whole side of an old - abandoned corn-crib, and heaped dry brush on top of that, till the very - sky seemed afire above us, and the stubblefields down the hill-side were - all ruddy in the light, Abner confessed himself reassured. Our enthusiasm - was so great that it was nearly ten o’clock before we went to bed, having - first put the fire pretty well out, lest a rising wind during the night - should scatter sparks and work mischief. - </p> - <p> - I had all these splendid things to think of next day, along with my - headache and the shivering spine, and they tipped the balance toward - satisfaction. Shortly after breakfast M’rye made a flaxseed poultice and - muffled it flabbily about my neck, and brought me also some boneset-tea to - drink. There was a debate in the air as between castor-oil and senna, - fragments of which were borne in to me when the kitchen door was open. The - Underwood girl alarmed me by steadily insisting that her sister-in-law - always broke up sick-headaches with a mustard-plaster put raw on the back - of the neck. Every once in a while one of them would come in and address - to me the stereotyped formula: “Feel any better?” and I as invariably - answered, “No.” In reality, though, I was lazily comfortable all the time, - with Lossing’s “Field-Book of the War of 1812” lying open on my lap, to - look at when I felt inclined. This book was not nearly so interesting as - the one about the Revolution, but a grandfather of mine had marched as a - soldier up to Sackett’s Harbor in the later war, though he did not seem to - have had any fighting to do after he got there, and in my serious moods I - always felt it my duty to read about his war instead of the other. - </p> - <p> - So the day passed along, and dusk began to gather in the living-room. The - men were off outdoors somewhere, and the girls were churning in the - butter-room. M’rye had come in with her mending, and sat on the opposite - side of the stove, at intervals casting glances over its flat top to - satisfy herself that my poultice had not sagged down from its proper - place, and that I was in other respects doing as well as could be - expected. - </p> - <p> - Conversation between us was hardly to be thought of, even if I had not - been so drowsily indolent. M’rye was not a talker, and preferred always to - sit in silence, listening to others, or, better still, going on at her - work with no sounds at all to disturb her thoughts. These long periods of - meditation, and the sedate gaze of her black, penetrating eyes, gave me - the feeling that she must be much wiser than other women, who could not - keep still at all, but gabbled everything the moment it came into their - heads. - </p> - <p> - We had sat thus for a long, long time, until I began to wonder how she - could sew in the waning light, when all at once, without lifting her eyes - from her work, she spoke to me. - </p> - <p> - “D’ you know where Ni Hagadorn’s gone to?” she asked me, in a measured, - impressive voice. - </p> - <p> - “He—he—told me he was a-goin’ away,” I made answer, with weak - evasiveness. - </p> - <p> - “But where? Down South?” She looked up, as I hesitated, and flashed that - darkling glance of hers at me. “Out with it!” she commanded. “Tell me the - truth!” - </p> - <p> - Thus adjured, I promptly admitted that Ni had said he was going South, and - could work his way somehow. “He’s gone, you know,” I added, after a pause, - “to try and find—that is, to hunt around after—” - </p> - <p> - “Yes, I know,” said M’rye, sententiously, and another long silence ensued. - </p> - <p> - She rose after a time, and went out into the kitchen, returning with the - lighted lamp. She set this on the table, putting the shade down on one - side so that the light should not hurt my eyes, and resumed her mending. - The yellow glow thus falling upon her gave to her dark, severe, - high-featured face a duskier effect than ever. It occurred to me that - Molly Brant, that mysteriously fascinating and bloody Mohawk queen who - left such an awful reddened mark upon the history of her native Valley, - must have been like our M’rye. My mind began sleepily to clothe the - farmer’s wife in blankets and chains of wampum, with eagles’ feathers in - her raven hair, and then to drift vaguely off over the threshold of Indian - dreamland, when suddenly, with a start, I became conscious that some - unexpected person had entered the room by the veranda-door behind me. - </p> - <p> - The rush of cold air from without had awakened me and told me of the - entrance. A glance at M’rye’s face revealed the rest. She was staring at - the newcomer with a dumfounded expression of countenance, her mouth - half-open with sheer surprise. Still staring, she rose and tilted the - lampshade in yet another direction, so that the light was thrown upon the - stranger. At this I turned in my chair to look. - </p> - <p> - It was Esther Hagadorn who had come in! - </p> - <p> - There was a moment’s awkward silence, and then the school-teacher began - hurriedly to speak. “I saw you were alone from the veranda—I was so - nervous it never occurred to me to rap—the curtains being up—I—I - walked straight in.” - </p> - <p> - As if in comment upon this statement, M’rye marched across the room, and - pulled down both curtains over the veranda windows. With her hand still - upon the cord of the second shade, she turned and again dumbly surveyed - her visitor. - </p> - <p> - Esther flushed visibly at this reception, and had to choke down the first - words that came to her lips. Then she went on better: “I hope you’ll - excuse my rudeness. I really did forget to rap. I came upon very special - business. Is Ab—Mr. Beech at home?” - </p> - <p> - “Won’t you sit down?” said M’rye, with a glum effort at civility. “I - expect him in presently.” - </p> - <p> - The school-ma’am, displaying some diffidence, seated herself in the - nearest chair, and gazed at the wall-paper with intentness. She had never - seemed to notice me at all—indeed had spoken of seeing M’rye alone - through the window—and now I coughed, and stirred to readjust my - poultice, but she did not look my way. M’rye had gone back to her chair by - the stove, and taken up her mending again. - </p> - <p> - “You’d better lay off your things. You won’t feel ’em when you go - out,” she remarked, after an embarrassing period of silence, investing the - formal phrases with chilling intention. - </p> - <p> - Esther made a fumbling motion at the loop of her big mink cape, but did - not unfasten it. - </p> - <p> - “I—I don’t know <i>what</i> you think of me,” she began, at last, - and then nervously halted. - </p> - <p> - “Mebbe it’s just as well you don’t,” said M’rye, significantly, darning - away with long sweeps of her arm, and bending attentively over her - stocking and ball. - </p> - <p> - “I can understand your feeling hard,” Esther went on, still eyeing the - sprawling blue figures on the wall, and plucking with her fingers at the - furry tails on her cape. “And—I <i>am</i> to blame, <i>some</i>, I - can see now—but it didn’t seem so, <i>then</i>, to either of us.” - </p> - <p> - “It ain’t no affair of mine,” remarked M’rye, when the pause came, “but if - that’s your business with Abner, you won’t make much by waitin’. Of course - it’s nothing to me, one way or t’other.” - </p> - <p> - Not another word was exchanged for a long time. From where I sat I could - see the girl’s lips tremble, as she looked steadfastly into the wall. I - felt certain that M’rye was darning the same place over and over again, so - furiously did she keep her needle flying. - </p> - <p> - All at once she looked up angrily. “Well,” she said, in loud, bitter - tones: “Why not out with what you’ve come to say, ’n’ be done with - it? You’ve heard something, <i>I</i> know!” - </p> - <p> - Esther shook her head. “No, Mrs. Beech,” she said, with a piteous quaver - in her voice, “I—I haven’t heard anything!” - </p> - <p> - The sound of her own broken utterances seemed to affect her deeply. Her - eyes filled with tears, and she hastily got out a handkerchief from her - muff, and began drying them. She could not keep from sobbing aloud a - little. - </p> - <p> - M’rye deliberately took another stocking from the heap in the basket, - fitted it over the ball, and began a fresh task—all without a glance - at the weeping girl. - </p> - <p> - Thus the two women still sat, when Janey came in to lay the table for - supper. She lifted the lamp off to spread the cloth, and put it on again; - she brought in plates and knives and spoons, and arranged them in their - accustomed places—all the while furtively regarding Miss Hagadorn - with an incredulous surprise. When she had quite finished she went over to - her mistress and, bending low, whispered so that we could all hear quite - distinctly: “Is <i>she</i> goin’ to stay to supper?” - </p> - <p> - M’rye hesitated, but Esther lifted her head and put down the handkerchief - instantly. “Oh, no!” she said, eagerly: “don’t think of it! I must hurry - home as soon as I’ve seen Mr. Beech.” Janey went out with an obvious air - of relief. - </p> - <p> - Presently there was a sound of heavy boots out in the kitchen being thrown - on to the floor, and then Abner came in. He halted in the doorway, his - massive form seeming to completely fill it, and devoted a moment or so - taking in the novel spectacle of a neighbor under his roof. Then he - advanced, walking obliquely till he could see distinctly the face of the - visitor. It stands to reason that he must have been surprised, but he gave - no sign of it. - </p> - <p> - “How d’ do, Miss,” he said, with grave politeness, coming up and offering - her his big hand. - </p> - <p> - Esther rose abruptly, peony-red with pleasurable confusion, and took the - hand stretched out to her. “How d’ do, Mr. Beech,” she responded with - eagerness, “I—I came up to see you—a—about something - that’s very pressing.” - </p> - <p> - “It’s blowing up quite a gale outside,” the farmer remarked, evidently to - gain time the while he scanned her face in a solemn, thoughtful way, - noting, I doubt not, the swollen eyelids and stains of tears, and trying - to guess her errand. “Shouldn’t wonder if we had a foot o’ snow before - morning.” - </p> - <p> - The school-teacher seemed in doubt how best to begin what she had to say, - so that Abner had time, after he lifted his inquiring gaze from her, to - run a master’s eye over the table. - </p> - <p> - “Have Janey lay another place!” he said, with authoritative brevity. - </p> - <p> - As M’rye rose to obey, Esther broke forth: “Oh, no, please don’t! Thank - you so much, Mr. Beech—but really I can’t stop—truly, I - mustn’t think of it.” - </p> - <p> - The farmer merely nodded a confirmation of his order to M’rye, who - hastened out to the kitchen. - </p> - <p> - “It’ll be there for ye, anyway,” he said. “Now set down again, please.” - </p> - <p> - It was all as if he was the one who had the news to tell, so naturally did - he take command of the situation. The girl seated herself, and the farmer - drew up his arm-chair and planted himself before her, keeping his - stockinged feet under the rungs for politeness’ sake. - </p> - <p> - “Now, Miss,” he began, just making it civilly plain that he preferred not - to utter her hated paternal name, “I don’t know no more’n a babe unborn - what’s brought you here. I’m sure, from what I know of ye, that you - wouldn’t come to this house jest for the sake of comin’, or to argy things - that can’t be, an’ mustn’t be, argied. In one sense, we ain’t friends of - yours here, and there’s a heap o’ things that you an’ me don’t want to - talk about, because they’d only lead to bad feelin’, an’ so we’ll leave ’em - all severely alone. But in another way, I’ve always had a liking for you. - You’re a smart girl, an’ a scholar into the bargain, an’ there ain’t so - many o’ that sort knockin’ around in these parts that a man like myself, - who’s fond o’ books an’ learnin’, wants to be unfriendly to them there is. - So now you can figure out pretty well where the chalk line lays, and we’ll - walk on it.” - </p> - <p> - Esther nodded her head. “Yes, I understand,” she remarked, and seemed not - to dislike what Abner had said. - </p> - <p> - “That being so, what is it?” the farmer asked, with his hands on his - knees. - </p> - <p> - “Well, Mr. Beech,” the school-teacher began, noting with a swift - side-glance that M’rye had returned, and was herself rearranging the - table. “I don’t think you can have heard it, but some important news has - come in during the day. There seems to be different stories, but the gist - of them is that a number of the leading Union generals have been - discovered to be traitors, and McClellan has been dismissed from his place - at the head of the army, and ordered to return to his home in New Jersey - under arrest, and they say others are to be treated in the same way, and - Fath—<i>some</i> people think it will be a hanging matter, and—” - </p> - <p> - Abner waved all this aside with a motion of his hand. “It don’t amount to - a hill o’ beans,” he said, placidly. “It’s jest spite, because we licked - ’em at the elections. Don’t you worry your head about <i>that!</i>” - </p> - <p> - Esther was not reassured. “That isn’t all,” she went on, nervously. “They - say there’s been discovered a big conspiracy, with secret sympathizers all - over the North.” - </p> - <p> - “Pooh!” commented Abner. “We’ve heer’n tell o’ that before!” - </p> - <p> - “All over the North,” she continued, “with the intention of bringing - across infected clothes from Canada, and spreading the small-pox among us, - and—” - </p> - <p> - The farmer laughed outright; a laugh embittered by contempt. “What - cock-’n’-bull story’ll be hatched next!” he said. “You don’t mean to say - you—a girl with a head on her shoulders like <i>you</i>—give - ear to such tomfoolery as that! Come, now, honest Injin, do you mean to - tell me <i>you</i> believe all this?” - </p> - <p> - “It don’t so much matter, Mr. Beech,” the girl replied, raising her face - to his, and speaking more confidently—“it don’t matter at all what I - believe. I’m talking of what they believe down at the Corners.” - </p> - <p> - “The Corners be jiggered!” exclaimed Abner, politely, but with emphasis. - </p> - <p> - Esther rose from the chair. “Mr. Beech,” she declared, impressively; - “they’re coming up here to-night! That bonfire of yours made ’em - mad. It’s no matter how I learned it—it wasn’t from father—I - don’t know that he knows anything about it, but they’re coming <i>here!</i> - and—and Heaven only knows what they’re going to do when they get - here!” - </p> - <p> - The farmer rose also, his huge figure towering above that of the girl, as - he looked down at her over his beard. He no longer dissembled his - stockinged feet. After a moment’s pause he said: “So that’s what you came - to tell me, eh?” - </p> - <p> - The school-ma’am nodded her head. “I couldn’t bear not to,” she explained, - simply. - </p> - <p> - “Well, I’m obleeged to ye!” Abner remarked, with gravity. “Whatever comes - of it, I’m obleeged to ye!” - </p> - <p> - He turned at this, and walked slowly out into the kitchen, leaving the - door open behind him. “Pull on your boots again!” we heard him say, - presumably to Hurley. In a minute or two he returned, with his own boots - on, and bearing over his arm the old double-barrelled shot-gun which - always hung above the kitchen mantel-piece. In his hands he had two - shot-flasks, the little tobacco-bag full of buckshot, and a powder-horn. - He laid these on the open shelf of the bookcase, and, after fitting fresh - caps on the nipples, put the gun beside them. - </p> - <p> - “I’d be all the more sot on your stayin’ to supper,” he remarked, looking - again at Esther, “only if there <i>should</i> be any unpleasantness, why, - I’d hate like sin to have you mixed up in it. You see how I’m placed.” - </p> - <p> - Esther did not hesitate a moment. She walked over to where M’rye stood by - the table replenishing the butter-plate. “I’d be very glad indeed to stay, - Mr. Beech,” she said, with winning frankness, “if I may.” - </p> - <p> - “There’s the place laid for you,” commented M’rye, impassively. Then, - catching her husband’s eye, she added the perfunctory assurance, “You’re - entirely welcome.” - </p> - <p> - Hurley and the girls came in now, and all except me took their seats about - the table. Both Abner and the Irishman had their coats on, out of - compliment to company. M’rye brought over a thick slice of fresh buttered - bread with brown sugar on it, and a cup of weak tea, and put them beside - me on a chair. Then the evening meal went forward, the farmer talking in a - fragmentary way about the crops and the weather. Save for an occasional - response from our visitor, the rest maintained silence. The Underwood girl - could not keep her fearful eyes from the gun lying on the bookcase, and - protested that she had no appetite, but Hurley ate vigorously, and had a - smile on his wrinkled and swarthy little face. - </p> - <p> - The wind outside whistled shrilly at the windows, rattling the shutters, - and trying its force in explosive blasts which seemed to rock the house on - its stone foundations. Once or twice it shook the veranda door with such - violence that the folk at the table instinctively lifted their heads, - thinking some one was there. - </p> - <p> - Then, all at once, above the confusion of the storm’s noises, we heard a - voice rise, high and clear, crying: - </p> - <p> - “<i>Smoke the damned Copperhead out!</i>” - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER X—THE FIRE - </h2> - <p> - “That was Roselle Upman that hollered,” remarked Janey Wilcox, breaking - the agitated silence which had fallen upon the supper table. “You can tell - it’s him because he’s had all his front teeth pulled out.” - </p> - <p> - “I wasn’t born in the woods to be skeert by an owl!” replied Abner, with a - great show of tranquillity, helping himself to another slice of bread. - “Miss, you ain’t half makin’ out a supper!” - </p> - <p> - But this bravado could not maintain itself. In another minute there came a - loud chorus of angry yells, heightened at its finish by two or three - pistol-shots. Then Abner pushed back his chair and rose slowly to his - feet, and the rest sprang up all around the table. - </p> - <p> - “Hurley,” said the farmer, speaking as deliberately as he knew how, - doubtless with the idea of reassuring the others, “you go out into the - kitchen with the women-folks, an’ bar the woodshed door, an’ bring in the - axe with you to stan’ guard over the kitchen door. I’ll look out for this - part o’ the house myself.” - </p> - <p> - “I want to stay in here with you, Abner,” said M’rye. - </p> - <p> - “No, you go out with the others!” commanded the master with firmness, and - so they all filed out with no hint whatever of me. The shadow of the - lamp-shade had cut me off altogether from their thoughts. - </p> - <p> - Perhaps it is not surprising that my recollections | of what now ensued - should lack definiteness and sequence. The truth is, that my terror at my - own predicament, sitting there with no covering for my feet and calves but - the burdock leaves and that absurd shawl, swamped everything else in my - mind. Still, I do remember some of it. - </p> - <p> - Abner strode across to the bookcase and took up the gun, his big thumb - resting determinedly on the hammers. Then he marched to the door, threw it - wide open, and planted himself on the threshold, looking out into the - darkness. - </p> - <p> - “What’s your business here, whoever you are?” he called out, in deep - defiant tones. - </p> - <p> - “We’ve come to take you an’ Paddy out for a little ride on a rail!” - answered the same shrill, mocking voice we had heard at first. Then others - took up the hostile chorus. “We’ve got some pitch a-heatin’ round in the - backyard!” - </p> - <p> - “You won’t catch cold; there’s plenty o’ feathers!” - </p> - <p> - “Tell the Irishman here’s some more ears for him to chaw on!” - </p> - <p> - “Come out an’ take your Copperhead medicine!” - </p> - <p> - There were yet other cries which the howling wind tore up into - inarticulate fragments, and then a scattering volley of cheers, again - emphasized by pistol-shots. While the crack of these still chilled my - blood, a more than usually violent gust swooped round Abner’s burly - figure, and blew out the lamp. - </p> - <p> - Terrifying as the first instant of utter darkness was, the second was - recognizable as a relief. I at once threw myself out of the chair, and - crept along back of the stove to where my stockings and boots had been put - to dry. These I hastened, with much trembling awkwardness, to pull on, - taking pains to keep the big square old stove between me and that open - veranda door. - </p> - <p> - “Guess we won’t take no ride to-night!” I heard Abner roar out, after the - shouting had for the moment died away. - </p> - <p> - “You got to have one!” came back the original voice. “It’s needful for - your complaint!” - </p> - <p> - “I’ve got somethin’ here that’ll fit <i>your</i> complaint!” bellowed the - farmer, raising his gun. “Take warnin’—the first cuss that sets foot - on this stoop, I’ll bore a four-inch hole clean through him. I’ve got - squirrel-shot, an’ I’ve got buckshot, an’ there’s plenty more behind—so - take your choice!” - </p> - <p> - There were a good many derisive answering yells and hoots, and some one - again fired a pistol in the air, but nobody offered to come up on the - veranda. - </p> - <p> - Emboldened by this, I stole across the room now to one of the windows, and - lifting a corner of the shade, strove to look out. At first there was - nothing whatever to be seen in the utter blackness. Then I made out some - faint reddish sort of diffused light in the upper air, which barely - sufficed to indicate the presence of some score or more dark figures out - in the direction of the pump. Evidently they <i>had</i> built a fire - around in the back yard, as they said—probably starting it there so - that its light might not disclose their identity. - </p> - <p> - This looked as if they really meant to tar-and-feather Abner and Hurley. - The expression was familiar enough to my ears, and, from pictures in stray - illustrated weeklies that found their way to the Corners, I had gathered - some general notion of the procedure involved. The victim was stripped, I - knew, and daubed over with hot melted pitch; then a pillow-case of - feathers was emptied over him, and he was forced astride a fence-rail, - which the rabble hoisted on their shoulders and ran about with. But my - fancy balked at and refused the task of imagining Abner Beech in this - humiliating posture. At least it was clear to my mind that a good many - fierce and bloody things would happen first. - </p> - <p> - Apparently this had become clear to the throng outside as well. Whole - minutes had gone by, and still no one mounted the veranda to seek close - quarters with the farmer—who stood braced with his legs wide apart, - bare-headed and erect, the wind blowing his huge beard sidewise over his - shoulder. - </p> - <p> - “Well! ain’t none o’ you a-comin’?” he called out at last, with impatient - sarcasm. “Thought you was so sot on takin’ me out an’ havin’ some fun with - me!” After a brief pause, another taunt occurred to him. “Why, even the - niggers you’re so in love with,” he shouted, “they ain’t such dod-rotted - cowards as you be!” - </p> - <p> - A general movement was discernible among the shadowy forms outside. I - thought for the instant that it meant a swarming attack upon the veranda. - But no! suddenly it had grown much lighter, and the mob was moving away - toward the rear of the house. The men were shouting things to one another, - but the wind for the moment was at such a turbulent pitch that all their - words were drowned. The reddened light waxed brighter still—and now - there was nobody to be seen at all from the window. - </p> - <p> - “Hurry here! Mr. Beech! <i>We’re all afire!”</i> cried a frightened voice - in the room behind me. - </p> - <p> - It may be guessed how I turned. - </p> - <p> - The kitchen door was open, and the figure of a woman stood on the - threshold, indefinitely black against a strange yellowish-drab half light - which framed it. This woman—one knew from the voice that it was - Esther Hagadorn—seemed to be wringing her hands. - </p> - <p> - “Hurry! Hurry!” she cried again, and I could see now that the little - passage was full of gray luminous smoke, which was drifting past her into - the living-room. Even as I looked, it had half obscured her form, and was - rolling in, in waves. - </p> - <p> - Abner had heard her, and strode across the room now, gun still in hand, - into the thick of the smoke, pushing Esther before him and shutting the - kitchen door with a bang as he passed through. I put in a terrified minute - or two alone in the dark, amazed and half-benumbed by the confused sounds - that at first came from the kitchen, and by the horrible suspense, when a - still more sinister silence ensued. Then there rose a loud crackling - noise, like the incessant popping of some giant variety of corn. - </p> - <p> - The door burst open again, and M’rye’s tall form seemed literally flung - into the room by the sweeping volume of dense smoke which poured in. She - pulled the door to behind her—then gave a snarl of excited emotion - at seeing me by the dusky reddened radiance which began forcing its way - from outside through the holland window shades. - </p> - <p> - “Light the lamp, you gump!” she commanded, breathlessly, and fell with - fierce concentration upon the task of dragging furniture out from the - bedroom. I helped her in a frantic, bewildered fashion, after I had - lighted the lamp, which flared and smoked without its shade, as we toiled. - M’rye seemed all at once to have the strength of a dozen men. She swung - the ponderous chest of drawers out end on end; she fairly lifted the still - bigger bookcase, after I had hustled the books out on to the table; she - swept off the bedding, slashed the cords, and jerked the bed-posts and - side-pieces out of their connecting sockets with furious energy, till it - seemed as if both rooms must have been dismantled in less time than I have - taken to tell of it. - </p> - <p> - The crackling overhead had swollen now to a wrathful roar, rising above - the gusty voices of the wind. The noise, the heat, the smoke, and terror - of it all made me sick and faint. I grew dizzy, and did foolish things in - an aimless way, fumbling about among the stuff M’rye was hurling forth. - Then all at once her darkling, smoke-wrapped figure shot up to an enormous - height, the lamp began to go round, and I felt myself with nothing but - space under my feet, plunging downward with awful velocity, surrounded by - whirling skies full of stars. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <p> - There was a black night-sky overhead when I came to my senses again, with - flecks of snow in the cold air on my face. The wind had fallen, everything - was as still as death, and some one was carrying me in his arms. I tried - to lift my head. - </p> - <p> - “Anyhow!” came Hurley’s admonitory voice, close to my ear. “We’ll be there - in a minyut.” - </p> - <p> - “No—I’m all right—let me down,” I urged. He set me on my feet, - and I looked amazedly about me. - </p> - <p> - The red-brown front of our larger hay-barn loomed in a faint unnatural - light, at close quarters, upon my first inquiring gaze. The big sliding - doors were open, and the slanting wagon-bridge running down from their - threshold was piled high with chairs, bedding, crockery, milk-pans, - clothing—the jumbled remnants of our household gods. Turning, I - looked across the yard upon what was left of the Beech homestead—a - glare of cherry light glowing above a fiery hole in the ground. - </p> - <p> - Strangely enough this glare seemed to perpetuate in its outlines the shape - and dimensions of the vanished house. It was as if the house were still - there, but transmuted from joists and clap-boards and shingles, into an - illuminated and impalpable ghost of itself. There was a weird effect of - transparency about it. Through the spectral bulk of red light I could see - the naked and gnarled apple-trees in the home-orchard on the further side; - and I remembered at once that painful and striking parallel of Scrooge - gazing through the re-edified body of Jacob Marley, and beholding the - buttons at the back of his coat. It all seemed some monstrous dream. - </p> - <p> - But no, here the others were. Janey Wilcox and the Underwood girl had come - out from the barn, and were carrying in more things. I perceived now that - there was a candle burning inside, and presently Esther Hagadorn was to be - seen. Hurley had disappeared, and so I went up the sloping platform to - join the women—noting with weak surprise that my knees seemed to - have acquired new double joints and behaved as if they were going in the - other direction. I stumbled clumsily once I was inside the barn, and sat - down with great abruptness on a milking-stool, leaning my head back - against the haymow, and conscious of an entire indifference as to whether - school kept or not. - </p> - <p> - The feeble light of the candle was losing itself upon the broad high walls - of new hay; the huge shadows in the rafters overhead; the women-folk - silently moving about, fixing up on the barn floor some pitiful imitation, - poor souls, of the home that had been swept off the face of the earth, and - outside, through the wide sprawling doors, the dying away effulgence of - the embers of our roof-tree lingering in the air of the winter night. - </p> - <p> - Abner Beech came in presently, with the gun in one hand, and a blackened - and outlandish-looking object in the other, which turned out to be the big - pink sea-shell that used to decorate the parlor. - </p> - <p> - Again it was like some half-waking vision—the mantel. He held it up - for M’rye to see, with a grave, tired smile on his face. - </p> - <p> - “We got it out, after all—just by the skin of our teeth,” he said, - and Hurley, behind him, confirmed this by an eloquent grimace. - </p> - <p> - M’rye’s black eyes snapped and sparkled as she lifted the candle and saw - what this something was. Then she boldly put up her face and kissed her - husband with a resounding smack. Truly it was a night of surprises. - </p> - <p> - “That’s about the only thing I had to call my own when I was married,” she - offered in explanation of her fervor, speaking to the company at large. - Then she added in a lower tone, to Esther: “<i>He</i> used to play with it - for hours at a stretch—when he was a baby.” - </p> - <p> - “‘Member how he used to hold it up to his ear, eh, mother?” asked Abner, - softly. - </p> - <p> - M’rye nodded her head, and then put her apron up to her eyes for a brief - moment. When she lowered it, we saw an unaccustomed smile mellowing her - hard-set, swarthy face. - </p> - <p> - The candle-light flashed upon a tear on her cheek that the apron had - missed. - </p> - <p> - ‘“I guess I <i>do</i> remember!” she said, with a voice full of - tenderness. - </p> - <p> - Then Esther’s hand stole into M’rye’s and the two women stood together - before Abner, erect and with beaming countenances, and he smiled upon them - both. - </p> - <p> - It seemed that we were all much happier in our minds, now that our house - had been burned down over our heads. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XI—THE CONQUEST OF ABNER - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">S</span>ome time during - the night, I was awakened by the mice frisking through the hay about my - ears. My head was aching again, and I could not get back into sleep. - Besides, Hurley was snoring mercilessly. - </p> - <p> - We two had chosen for our resting-place the little mow of half a load or - so, which had not been stowed away above, but lay ready for present use - over by the side-door opening on the cow-yard. Temporary beds had been - spread for the women with fresh straw and blankets at the further end of - the central threshing-floor. Abner himself had taken one of the rescued - ticks and a quilt over to the other end, and stretched his ponderous - length out across the big doors, with the gun by his side. No one had, of - course, dreamed of undressing. - </p> - <p> - Only a few minutes of wakefulness sufficed to throw me into a desperate - state of fidgets. The hay seemed full of strange creeping noises. The - whole big barn echoed with the boisterous ticking of the old eight-day - clock which had been saved from the wreck of the kitchen, and which M’rye - had set going again on the seat of the democrat wagon. And then Hurley! - </p> - <p> - I began to be convinced, now, that I was coming down with a great spell of - sickness—perhaps even “the fever.” Yes, it undoubtedly was the - fever. I could feel it in my bones, which now started up queer prickly - sensations on novel lines, quite as if they were somebody else’s bones - instead. My breathing, indeed, left a good deal to be desired from the - true fever standpoint. It was not nearly so rapid or convulsive as I - understood that the breathing of a genuine fever victim ought to be. But - that, no doubt, would come soon enough—nay! was it not already - coming? I thought, upon examination, that I did breathe more swiftly than - before. And oh! that Hurley! - </p> - <p> - As noiselessly as possible I made my way, half-rolling, half-sliding, off - the hay, and got on my feet on the floor. It was pitch dark, but I could - feel along the old disused stanchion-row to the corner; thence it was - plain sailing over to where Abner was sleeping by the big front doors. I - would not dream of rousing him if he was in truth asleep, but it would be - something to be nigh him, in case the fever should take a fatal turn - before morning. I would just cuddle down on the floor near to him, and - await events. - </p> - <p> - When I had turned the corner, it surprised me greatly to see ahead of me, - over at the front of the barn, the reflection of a light. Creeping along - toward it, I came out upon Abner, seated with his back against one of the - doors, looking over an account-book by the aid of a lantern perched on a - box at his side. He had stood the frame of an old bob-sleigh on end close - by, and hung a horse-blanket over it, so that the light might not disturb - the women-folk at the other end of the barn. The gun lay on the floor - beside him. - </p> - <p> - He looked up at my approach, and regarded me with something, I fancied, of - disapprobation in his habitually grave expression. - </p> - <p> - “Well, old seventy-six, what’s the matter with you?” he asked, keeping his - voice down to make as little noise as possible. - </p> - <p> - I answered in the same cautious tones that I was feeling bad. Had any - encouragement suggested itself in the farmer’s mien, I was prepared to - overwhelm him with a relation of my symptoms in detail. But he shook his - head instead. - </p> - <p> - “You’ll have to wait till morning, to be sick,” he said—“that is, to - get ’tended to. I don’t know anything about such things, an’ I - wouldn’t wake M’rye up now for a whole baker’s dozen o’ you chaps.” Seeing - my face fall at this sweeping declaration, he proceeded to modify it in a - kindlier tone. “Now you just lay down again, sonny,” he added, “an’ you’ll - be to sleep in no time, an’ in the morning M’rye ’ll fix up - something for ye. This ain’t no fit time for white folks to be - belly-achin’ around.” - </p> - <p> - “I kind o’ thought I’d feel better if I was sleeping over here near you,” - I ventured now to explain, and his nod was my warrant for tiptoeing across - to the heap of disorganized furniture, and getting out some blankets and a - comforter, which I arranged in the corner a few yards away and simply - rolled myself up in, with my face turned away from the light? It was - better over here than with Hurley, and though that prompt sleep which the - farmer had promised did not come, I at least was drowsily conscious of an - improved physical condition. - </p> - <p> - Perhaps I drifted off more than half-way into dreamland, for it was with a - start that all at once I heard some one close by talking with Abner. - </p> - <p> - “I saw you were up, Mr. Beech”—it was Esther Hagadorn who spoke—“and - I don’t seem able to sleep, and I thought, if you didn’t mind, I’d come - over here.” - </p> - <p> - “Why, of course,” the farmer responded. “Just bring up a chair there, an’ - sit down. That’s it—wrap the shawl around you good. It’s a cold - night—snowin’ hard outside.” - </p> - <p> - Both had spoken in muffled tones, so as not to disturb the others. This - same dominant notion of keeping still deterred me from turning over, in - order to be able to see them. I expected to hear them discuss my illness, - but they never referred to it. Instead, there was what seemed a long - silence. Then the school-ma’am spoke. “I can’t begin to tell you,” she - said, “how glad I am that you and your wife aren’t a bit cast down by the—the - calamity.” - </p> - <p> - “No,” came back Abner’s voice, buoyant even in its half-whisper, “we’re - all right. I’ve be’n sort o’ figurin’ up here, an’ they ain’t much real - harm done. I’m insured pretty well. Of course, this bein’ obleeged to camp - out in a hay-barn might be improved on, but then it’s a change—somethin’ - out o’ the ordinary rut—an’ it’ll do us good. I’ll have the - carpenters over from Juno Mills in the forenoon, an’ if they push things, - we can have a roof over us again before Christmas. It could be done even - sooner, p’raps, only they ain’t any neighbors to help <i>me</i> with a - raisin’ bee. They’re willin’ enough to burn my house down, though. - However, I don’t want them not an atom more’n they want me.” - </p> - <p> - There was no trace of anger in his voice. He spoke like one contemplating - the unalterable conditions of life. - </p> - <p> - “Did they really, do you believe, <i>set</i> it on fire?” Esther asked, - intently. - </p> - <p> - “No, <i>I</i> think it caught from that fool fire they started around back - of the house, to heat their fool tar by. The wind was blowing a regular - gale, you know. Janey Wilcox, she will have it that that Roselle Upman set - it on purpose. But then, she don’t like him—an’ I can’t blame her - much, for that matter. Once Otis Barnum was seein’ her home from singin’ - school, an’ when he was goin’ back alone this Roselle Upman waylaid him in - the dark, an’ pitched onto him, an’ broke his collar-bone. I always - thought it puffed Janey up some, this bein’ fought over like that, but it - made her mad to have Otis hurt on her account, an’ then nothing come of - it. I wouldn’t ’a’ minded pepperin’ Roselle’s legs a trifle, if I’d - had a barrel loaded, say, with bird-shot. He’s a nuisance to the whole - neighborhood. He kicks up a fight at every dance he goes to, all winter - long, an’ hangs around the taverns day in an’ day out, inducin’ young men - to drink an’ loaf. I thought a fellow like him ’d be sure to go off - to the war, an’ so good riddance; but no! darned if the coward don’t go - an’ get his front teeth pulled, so’t he can’t bite ca’tridges, an’ jest - stay around; a worse nuisance than ever! I’d half forgive that miserable - war if it—only took off the—the right men.” - </p> - <p> - “Mr. Beech,” said Esther, in low fervent tones, measuring each word as it - fell, “you and I, we must forgive that war together!” - </p> - <p> - I seemed to feel the farmer shaking his head. He said nothing in reply. - </p> - <p> - “I’m beginning to understand how you’ve felt about it all along,” the girl - went on, after a pause. “I knew the fault must be in my ignorance, that - our opinions of plain right and plain wrong should be such poles apart. I - got a school-friend of mine, whose father is your way of thinking, to send - me all the papers that came to their house, and I’ve been going through - them religiously—whenever I could be quite alone. I don’t say I - don’t think you’re wrong, because I <i>do</i>, but I am getting to - understand how you should believe yourself to be right.” - </p> - <p> - She paused as if expecting a reply, but Abner only said, “Go on,” after - some hesitation, and she went on: - </p> - <p> - “Now take the neighbors all about here—” - </p> - <p> - “Excuse <i>me!</i>” broke in the farmer. “I guess if it’s all the same to - you, I’d rather not. They’re too rich for my blood.” - </p> - <p> - “Take these very neighbors,” pursued Esther, with gentle determination. - “Something must be very wrong indeed when they behave to you the way they - do. Why, I know that even now, right down in their hearts, they recognize - that you’re far and away the best man in Agrippa. Why, I remember, Mr. - Beech, when I first applied, and you were school-commissioner, and you sat - there through the examination—why, you were the only one whose - opinion I gave a rap for. When you praised me, why, I was prouder of it - than if you had been a Regent of the University. And I tell you, everybody - all around here feels at bottom just as I do.” - </p> - <p> - “They take a dummed curious way o’ showin’ it, then,” commented Abner, - roundly. - </p> - <p> - “It isn’t <i>that</i> they’re trying to show at all,” said Esther. “They - feel that other things are more important. They’re all wrought up over the - war. How could it be otherwise when almost every one of them has got a - brother, or a father, or—or—<i>a son</i>—down there in - the South, and every day brings news that some of these have been shot - dead, and more still wounded and crippled, and others—<i>others</i>, - that God only knows <i>what</i> has become of them—oh, how can they - help feeling that way? I don’t know that I ought to say it”—the - school-ma’am stopped to catch her breath, and hesitated, then went on—“but - yes, you’ll understand me <i>now</i>—there was a time here, not so - long ago, Mr. Beech, when I downright hated you—you and M’rye both!” - </p> - <p> - This was important enough to turn over for. I flopped as unostentatiously - as possible, and neither of them gave any sign of having noted my - presence. The farmer sat with his back against the door, the quilt drawn - up to his waist, his head bent in silent meditation. His whole profile was - in deep shadow from where I lay—darkly massive and powerful and - solemn. Esther was watching him with all her eyes, leaning forward from - her chair, the lantern-light full upon her eager face. - </p> - <p> - “M’rye an’ I don’t lay ourselves out to be specially bad folks, as folks - go,” the farmer said at last, by way of deprecation. “We’ve got our - faults, of course, like the rest, but—” - </p> - <p> - “No,” interrupted Esther, with a half-tearful smile in her eyes. “You only - pretend to have faults. You really haven’t got any at all.” - </p> - <p> - The shadowed outline of Abner’s face softened. “Why, that <i>is</i> a - fault itself, ain’t it?” he said, as if pleased with his logical - acuteness. - </p> - <p> - The crowing of some foolish rooster, growing tired of waiting for the - belated November daylight, fell upon the silence from one of the buildings - near by. - </p> - <p> - Abner Beech rose to his feet with ponderous slowness, pushing the - bedclothes aside with his boot, and stood beside Esther’s chair. He laid - his big hand on her shoulder with a patriarchal gesture. - </p> - <p> - “Come now,” he said, gently, “you go back to bed, like a good girl, an’ - get some sleep. It’ll be all right.” - </p> - <p> - The girl rose in turn, bearing her shoulder so that the fatherly hand - might still remain upon it. “Truly?” she asked, with a new light upon her - pale face. - </p> - <p> - “Yes—truly!” Abner replied, gravely nodding his head. - </p> - <p> - Esther took the hand from her shoulder, and shook it in both of hers. - “Good-night again, then,” she said, and turned to go. - </p> - <p> - Suddenly there resounded the loud rapping of a stick on the barn-door, - close by my head. - </p> - <p> - Abner squared his huge shoulders and threw a downright glance at the gun - on the floor “Well?” he called out.. - </p> - <p> - “<i>Is my da’ater inside there?</i>” - </p> - <p> - We all knew that thin, high-pitched, querulous voice. It was old “Jee”’ - Hagadorn who was outside. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XII—THE UNWELCOME GUEST - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>bner and Esther - stood for a bewildered minute, staring at the rough unpainted boards - through which this astonishing inquiry had come. I scrambled to my feet - and kicked aside the tick and blankets. Whatever else happened, it did not - seem likely that there was any more sleeping to be done. Then the farmer - strode forward and dragged one of the doors back on its squeaking rollers. - Some snow fell in upon his boots from the ridge that had formed against it - over night. Save for a vaguely faint snow-light in the air, it was still - dark. - </p> - <p> - “Yes, she’s here,” said Abner, with his hand on the open door. - </p> - <p> - “Then I’d like to know—” the invisible Jee began excitedly shouting - from without. - </p> - <p> - “Sh-h! You’ll wake everybody up!” the farmer interposed. “Come inside, so - that I can shut the door.” - </p> - <p> - “Never under your roof!” came back the shrill hostile voice. “I swore I - never would, and I won’t!” - </p> - <p> - “You’d have to take a crowbar to get under my roof,” returned Abner, - grimly conscious of a certain humor in the thought. “What’s left of it is - layin’ over yonder in what used to be the cellar. So you needn’t stand on - ceremony on <i>that</i> account. I ain’t got no house now, so’t your oath - ain’t bindin’. Besides, the Bible says, ‘Swear not at all!’” - </p> - <p> - A momentary silence ensued; then Abner rattled the door on its wheels. - “Well, what are you goin’ to do?” he asked, impatiently. “I can’t keep - this door open all night, freezin’ everybody to death. If you won’t come - in, you’ll have to stay out!” and again there was an ominous creaking of - the rollers. - </p> - <p> - “I want my da’ater!” insisted Jehoiada, vehemently. “I stan’ on a father’s - rights.” - </p> - <p> - “A father ain’t got no more right to make a fool of himself than anybody - else,” replied Abner, gravely. “What kind of a time o’ night is this, with - the snow knee-deep, for a girl to be out o’ doors? She’s all right here, - with my women-folks, an’ I’ll bring her down with the cutter in the - mornin’—that is, if she wants to come. An’ now, once for all, will - you step inside or not?” - </p> - <p> - Esther had taken up the lantern and advanced with it now to the open door. - “Come in, father,” she said, in tones which seemed to be authoritative, - “They’ve been very kind to me. Come in!” Then, to my surprise, the lean - and scrawny figure of the cooper emerged from the darkness, and stepping - high over the snow, entered the barn, Abner sending the door to behind him - with a mighty sweep of the arm. - </p> - <p> - Old Hagadorn came in grumbling under his breath, and stamping the snow - from his feet with sullen kicks. He bore a sledge-stake in one of his - mittened hands. A worsted comforter was wrapped around his neck and ears - and partially over his conical-peaked cap. He rubbed his long thin nose - against his mitten and blinked sulkily at the lantern and the girl who - held it. - </p> - <p> - “So here you be!” he said at last, in vexed tones. “An’ me traipsin’ - around in the snow the best part of the night lookin’ for you!” - </p> - <p> - “See here, father,” said Esther, speaking in a measured, deliberate way, - “we won’t talk about that at all. If a thousand times worse things had - happened to both of us than have, it still wouldn’t be worth mentioning - compared with what has befallen these good people here. They’ve been - attacked by a mob of rowdies and loafers, and had their house and home - burned down over their heads and been driven to take refuge here in this - barn of a winter’s night. They’ve shared their shelter with me and been - kindness itself, and now that you’re here, if you can’t think of anything - pleasant to say to them, if I were you I’d say nothing at all.” - </p> - <p> - This was plain talk, but it seemed to produce a satisfactory effect upon - Jehoiada. He unwound his comforter enough to liberate his straggling sandy - beard and took off his mittens. After a moment or two he seated himself in - the chair, with a murmured “I’m jest about tuckered out,” in apology for - the action. He did, in truth, present a woeful picture of fatigue and - physical feebleness, now that we saw him in repose. The bones seemed ready - to start through the parchment-like skin on his gaunt cheeks, and, his - eyes glowed with an unhealthy fire, as he sat, breathing hard and staring - at the jumbled heaps of furniture on the floor. - </p> - <p> - Esther had put the lantern again on the box and drawn forward a chair for - Abner, but the farmer declined it with a wave of the hand and continued to - stand in the background, looking his ancient enemy over from head to foot - with a meditative gaze. Jehoiada grew visibly nervous under this - inspection; he fidgeted on his chair and then fell to coughing—a - dry, rasping cough which had an evil sound, and which he seemed to make - the worse by fumbling aimlessly at the button that held the overcoat - collar round his throat. - </p> - <p> - At last Abner walked slowly over to the shadowed masses of piled-up - household things and lifted out one of the drawers that had been taken - from the framework of the bureau and brought over with their contents. - Apparently it was not the right one, for he dragged aside a good many - objects to get at another, and rummaged about in this for several minutes. - Then he came out again into the small segment of the lantern’s radiance - with a pair of long thick woollen stockings of his own in his hand. - </p> - <p> - “You better pull off them wet boots an’ draw these on,” he said, - addressing Hagadorn, but looking fixedly just over his head. “It won’t do - that cough o’ yours no good, settin’ around with wet feet.” - </p> - <p> - The cooper looked in a puzzled way at the huge butternut-yarn stockings - held out under his nose, but he seemed too much taken aback to speak or to - offer to touch them. - </p> - <p> - “Yes, father!” said Esther, with quite an air of command. “You know what - that cough means,” and straightway Hagadorn lifted one of his feet to his - knee and started tugging at the boot-heel in a desultory way. He desisted - after a few half-hearted attempts, and began coughing again, this time - more distressingly than ever. - </p> - <p> - His daughter sprang forward to help him, but Abner pushed her aside, put - the stockings under his arm, and himself undertook the job. He did not - bend his back overmuch; but hoisted Jee’s foot well in the air and pulled. - </p> - <p> - “Brace your foot agin mine an’ hold on to the chair!” he ordered, sharply, - for the first effect of his herculean pull had been to nearly drag the - cooper to the floor. He went at it more gently now, easing the soaked - leather up and down over the instep until the boots were off. He looked - furtively at the bottoms of these before he tossed them aside, noting, no - doubt, as I did, how old and broken and run down at the heel they were. - Jee himself peeled off the drenched stockings, and they too were flimsy - old things, darned and mended almost out of their original color. - </p> - <p> - These facts served only to deepen my existing low opinion of Hagadorn, but - they appeared to affect Abner Beech differently. He stood by and watched - the cooper dry his feet and then draw on the warm dry hose over his - shrunken shanks, with almost a friendly interest. Then he shoved along one - of the blankets across the floor to Hagadorn’s chair that he might wrap - his feet in it. - </p> - <p> - “That’s it,” he said, approvingly. “They ain’t no means o’ building a fire - here right now, but as luck would have it we’d jest set up an old kitchen - stove in the little cow-barn to warm up gruel for the caves with, an’ the - first thing we’ll do ’ll be to rig it up in here to cook breakfast - by, an’ then we’ll dry them boots o’ yourn in no time. You go an’ pour - some oats into ’em now,” Abner added, turning to me. “And you might - as well call Hurley. We’ve got considerable to do, an’ daylight’s - breakin’.” - </p> - <p> - The Irishman lay on his back where I had left him, still snoring - tempestuously. As a rule he was a light sleeper, but this time I had to - shake him again and again before he understood that it was morning. I - opened the side-door, and sure enough, the day had begun. The clouds had - cleared away. The sky was still ashen gray overhead, but the light from - the horizon, added to the whiteness of the unaccustomed snow, rendered it - quite easy to see one’s way about inside. I went to the oat-bin. - </p> - <p> - Hurley, sitting up and rubbing his eyes, regarded me and my task with - curiosity. “An’ is it a stovepipe for a measure ye have?” he asked. - </p> - <p> - “No; it’s one of Jee Hagadorn’s boots,” I replied. “I’m filling ’em - so’t they’ll swell when they’re dryin’.” - </p> - <p> - He slid down off the hay as if some one had pushed him. “What’s that ye - say? Haggydorn? <i>Ould</i> Haggydorn?” he demanded. - </p> - <p> - I nodded assent. “Yes, he’s inside with Abner,” I explained. “An’ he’s got - on Abner’s stockin’s, an’ it looks like he’s goin’ to stay to breakfast.” - </p> - <p> - Hurley opened his mouth in sheer surprise and gazed at me with hanging jaw - and round eyes. - </p> - <p> - “’Tis the fever that’s on ye,” he said, at last. “Ye’re wandherin’ - in yer mind!” - </p> - <p> - “You just go in and see for yourself,” I replied, and Hurley promptly took - me at my word. - </p> - <p> - He came back presently, turning the corner of the stanchions in a - depressed and rambling way, quite at variance with his accustomed swinging - gait. He hung his head, too, and shook it over and over again perplexedly. - </p> - <p> - “Abner ‘n’ me ’ll be bringin’ in the stove,” he said.“’Tis - not fit for you to go out wid that sickness on ye.” - </p> - <p> - “Well, anyway,” I retorted, “you see I wasn’t wanderin’ much in my mind.” - </p> - <p> - Hurley shook his head again. “Well, then,” he began, lapsing into deep - brogue and speaking rapidly, “I’ve meself seen the woman wid the head of a - horse on her in the lake forninst the Three Castles, an’ me sister’s first - man, sure he broke down the ditch round-about the Danes’ fort on Dunkelly, - an’ a foine grand young man, small for his strength an’ wid a red cap on - his head, flew out an’ wint up in the sky, an’ whin he related it up comes - Father Forrest to him in the potaties, an’ says he, ‘I do be suprised wid - you, O’Driscoll, for to be relatin’ such loies.’ ‘I’ll take me Bible oat’ - on ’em!’” says he. - </p> - <p> - “‘Tis your imagination!’ says the priest. ‘No imagination at all!’ says - O’Driscoll; ‘sure, I saw it wid dese two eyes, as plain as I’m lookin’ at - your riverence, an’ a far grander sight it was too!’ An’ me own mother, - faith, manny’s the toime I’ve seen her makin’ up dhrops for the yellow - sicknest wid woodlice, an’ sayin’ Hail Marys over ’em, an’ thim - same<i> ‘</i>ud cure annything from sore teeth to a wooden leg for moiles - round. But, saints help me! I never seen the loikes o’ <i>this!</i> - Haggydorn is it? <i>Ould</i> Haggydorn! <i>Huh!’’</i>” - </p> - <p> - Then the Irishman, still with a dejected air, started off across the yards - through the snow to the cow-barns, mumbling to himself as he went. - </p> - <p> - I had heard Abner’s heavy tread coming along the stanchions toward me, but - now all at once it stopped. The farmer’s wife had followed him into the - passage, and he had halted to speak with her. - </p> - <p> - “They ain’t no two ways about it, mother,” he expostulated. “We jest got - to put the best face on it we kin, an’ act civil, an’ pass the time o’ day - as if nothing’d ever happened atween us. He’ll be goin’ the first thing - after breakfast.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh! I ain’t agoin’ to sass him, or say anything uncivil,” M’rye broke in, - reassuringly. “What I mean is, I don’t want to come into the for’ard end - of the barn at all. They ain’t no need of it. I kin cook the breakfast in - back, and Janey kin fetch it for’ard for yeh, an’ nobody need say - anythin’, or be any the wiser.” - </p> - <p> - “Yes, I know,” argued Abner, “but there’s the looks o’ the thing. <i>I</i> - say, if you’re goin’ to do a thing, why, do it right up to the handle, or - else don’t do it at all. An’ then there’s the girl to consider, and <i>her</i> - feelin’s.” - </p> - <p> - “Dunno’t her feelin’s are such a pesky sight more importance than other - folkses,” remarked M’rye, callously. - </p> - <p> - This unaccustomed recalcitrancy seemed to take Abner aback. He moved a few - steps forward so that he became visible from where I stood, then halted - again and turned, his shoulders rounded, his hands clasped behind his - back. I could see him regarding M’rye from under his broad hat-brim with a - gaze at once dubious and severe. - </p> - <p> - “I ain’t much in the habit o’ hearin’ you talk this way to me, mother,” he - said at last, with grave depth of tones and significant deliberation. - </p> - <p> - “Well, I can’t help it, Abner!” rejoined M’rye, bursting forth in vehement - utterance, all the more excited from the necessity she felt of keeping it - out of hearing of the unwelcome guest. “I don’t want to do anything to - aggravate you, or go contrary to your notions, but with even the - willin’est pack-horse there is such a thing as pilin’ it on too thick. I - can stan’ bein’ burnt out o’ house ‘<i>n’ home, an’ seein’ pretty nigh - every rag an’ stick I had in the world go kitin’ up the chimney, an’ - campin’ out here in a barn—My Glory, yes!—an’ as much more on - top o’ that, but, I tell you flat-footed, I can’t stomach Jee Hagadorn, - an’ I </i>won’t!” - </p> - <p> - Abner continued to contemplate the revolted - </p> - <p> - M’rye with displeased amazement written all over his face. Once or twice I - thought he was going to speak, but nothing came of it. He only looked and - looked, as if he had the greatest difficulty in crediting what he saw. - </p> - <p> - Finally, with a deep-chested sigh, he turned again. “I s’pose this is - still more or less of a free country,” he said. “If you’re sot on it, I - can’t hender you,” and he began walking once more toward me. - </p> - <p> - M’rye followed him out and put a hand on his arm. “Don’t go off like that, - Abner!” she adjured him. “You <i>know</i> there ain’t nothin’ in this - whole wide world I wouldn’t do to please you—if I <i>could!</i> But - this thing jest goes agin my grain. It’s the way folks are made. It’s your - nater to be forgivin’ an’ do good to them that despitefully use you.” - </p> - <p> - “No, it ain’t!” declared Abner, vigorously. - </p> - <p> - “No, sirree! ‘Holdfast’ is my nater. I stan’ out agin my enemies till the - last cow comes home. But when they come wadin’ in through the snow, with - their feet soppin’ wet, an’ coughin’ fit to turn themselves inside out, - an’ their daughter is there, an’ you’ve sort o’ made it up with her, an’ - we’re all campin’ out in a barn, don’t you see—” - </p> - <p> - “No, I can’t see it,” replied M’rye, regretful but firm. “They always said - we Ramswells had Injun blood in us somewhere. An’ when I get an Injun - streak on me, right down in the marrow o’ my bones, why, you mustn’t blame - me—or feel hard if—if I—” - </p> - <p> - “No-o,” said Abner, with reluctant conviction, - </p> - <p> - “I s’pose not. I dare say you’re actin’ accordin’ to your lights. An’ - besides, he’ll be goin’ the first thing after breakfast.” - </p> - <p> - “An’ you ain’t mad, Abner?” pleaded M’rye, almost tremulously, as if - frightened at the dimensions of the victory she had won. - </p> - <p> - “Why, bless your heart, no,” answered the farmer, with a glaring - simulation of easy-mindedness. - </p> - <p> - “No—that’s all right, mother!” - </p> - <p> - Then with long heavy-footed strides the farmer marched past me and out - into the cow-yard. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XIII—THE BREAKFAST - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>f there was ever a - more curious meal in Dearborn County than that first breakfast of ours in - the barn, I never heard of it. - </p> - <p> - The big table was among the things saved from the living-room, and Esther - spread it again with the cloth which had been in use on the previous - evening. There was the stain of the tea which the Underwood girl had - spilled in the excitement of the supper’s rough interruption; there were - other marks of calamity upon it as well—the smudge of cinders, for - one thing, and a general diffused effect of smokiness. But it was the only - table-cloth we had. The dishes, too, were a queer lot, representing two or - three sets of widely different patterns and value, other portions of which - we should never see again. - </p> - <p> - When it was announced that breakfast was ready, Abner took his accustomed - arm-chair at the head of the table. He only half turned his head toward - Hagadorn and said in formal tones, over his shoulder, “Won’t you draw up - and have some breakfast?” - </p> - <p> - Jee was still sitting where he had planted himself two hours or so before. - He still wore his round cap, with the tabs tied down over his ears. In - addition to his overcoat, some one—probably his daughter—had - wrapped a shawl about his thin shoulders. The boots had not come in, as - yet, from the stove, and the blanket was drawn up over his stockinged feet - to the knees. From time to time his lips moved, as if he were reciting - Scripture texts to himself, but so far as I knew, he had said nothing to - any one. His cough seemed rather worse than better. - </p> - <p> - “Yes, come, father!” Esther added to the farmer’s invitation, and drew a - chair back for him two plates away from Abner. Thus adjured he rose and - hobbled stiffly over to the place indicated, bringing his foot-blanket - with him. Esther stooped to arrange this for him and then seated herself - next the host. - </p> - <p> - “You see, I’m going to sit beside you, Mr. Beech,” she said, with a wan - little smile. - </p> - <p> - “Glad to have you,” remarked Abner, gravely. - </p> - <p> - The Underwood girl brought in a first plate of buckwheat cakes, set it - down in front of Abner, and took her seat opposite Hagadorn and next to - me. There remained three vacant places, down at the foot of the table, and - though we all began eating without comment, everybody continually - encountered some other’s glance straying significantly toward these empty - seats. Janey Wilcox, very straight and with an uppish air, came in with - another plate of cakes and marched out again in tell-tale silence. - </p> - <p> - “Hurley! Come along in here an’ git your breakfast!” - </p> - <p> - The farmer fairly roared out this command, then added in a lower, - apologetic tone: “I ’spec’ the women-folks’ve got their hands full - with that broken-down old stove.” - </p> - <p> - We all looked toward the point, half-way down the central barn-floor, - where the democrat wagon, drawn crosswise, served to divide our improvised - living-room and kitchen. Through the wheels, and under its uplifted pole, - we could vaguely discern two petticoated figures at the extreme other end, - moving about the stove, the pipe of which was carried up and out through a - little window above the door. Then Hurley appeared, ducking his head under - the wagon-pole. - </p> - <p> - “I’m aitin’ out here, convanient to the stove,” he shouted from this - dividing-line. - </p> - <p> - “No, come and take your proper place!” bawled back the farmer, and Hurley - had nothing to do but obey. He advanced with obvious reluctance, and - halted at the foot of the table, eyeing with awkward indecision the three - vacant chairs. One was M’rye’s; the others would place him either next to - the hated cooper or diagonally opposite, where he must look at him all the - while. - </p> - <p> - “Sure, I’m better out there!” he ventured to insist, in a wheedling tone; - but Abner thundered forth an angry “No, sir!” and the Irishman sank - abruptly into the seat beside Hagadorn. From this place he eyed the - Underwood girl with a glare of contemptuous disapproval. I learned - afterward that M’rye and Janey Wilcox regarded her desertion of them as - the meanest episode of the whole miserable morning, and beguiled their - labors over the stove by recounting to each other all the low-down - qualities illustrated by the general history of her “sapheaded tribe.” - </p> - <p> - Meanwhile conversation languished. - </p> - <p> - With the third or fourth instalment of cakes, Janey Wilcox had halted long - enough to deliver herself of a few remarks, sternly limited to the - necessities of the occasion. “M’rye says,” she declaimed, coldly, looking - the while with great fixedness at the hay-wall, “if the cakes are sour she - can’t help it. We saved what was left over of the batter, but the Graham - flour and the sody are both burnt up,” and with that stalked out again. - </p> - <p> - Not even politeness could excuse the pretence on any one’s part that the - cakes were <i>not</i> sour, but Abner seized upon the general subject as - an opening for talk. - </p> - <p> - “‘Member when I was a little shaver,” he remarked, with an effort at - amiability, “my sisters kicked about havin’ to bake the cakes, on account - of the hot stove makin’ their faces red an’ spoilin’ their complexions, - an’ they wanted specially to go to some fandango or other, an’ look their - pootiest, an’ so father sent us boys out into the kitchen to bake ’em - instid. Old Lorenzo Dow the Methodist preacher, was stoppin’ overnight at - our house, an’ mother was jest beside herself to have everything go off - ship-shape—an’ then them cakes begun comin’ in. Fust my brother - William, he baked one the shape of a horse, an’ then Josh, he made one - like a jackass with ears as long as the griddle would allow of lengthwise, - and I’d got jest comfortably started in on one that I begun as a pig, an’ - then was going to alter into a ship with sails up, when father, he come - out with hold-back strap, an’—well—mine never got finished to - this day. Mother, she was mortified most to death, but old Dow, he jest - lay back and laughed—laughed till you’d thought he’d split himself.” - </p> - <p> - “It was from Lorenzo Dow’s lips that I had my first awakening call unto - righteousness,” said Jee Hagadorn, speaking with solemn unction in high, - quavering tones. - </p> - <p> - The fact that he should have spoken at all was enough to take even the - sourness out of M’rye’s cakes. - </p> - <p> - Abner took up the ball with solicitous promptitude. “A very great man, - Lorenzo Dow was—in his way,” he remarked. - </p> - <p> - “By grace he was spared the shame and humiliation,” said Hagadorn, lifting - his voice as he went on—“the humiliation of living to see one whole - branch of the Church separate itself from the rest—withdraw and call - itself the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in defence of human - slavery!” - </p> - <p> - Esther, red-faced with embarrassment, intervened peremptorily. “How <i>can</i> - you, father!” she broke in. “For all you know he might have been red-hot - on that side himself! In fact, I dare say he would have been. How on earth - can <i>you</i> know to the contrary, anyway?” - </p> - <p> - Jee was all excitement on the instant, at the promise of an argument. His - eyes flashed; he half rose from his seat and opened his mouth to reply. - </p> - <p> - So much had he to say, indeed, that the words stumbled over one another on - his tongue, and produced nothing, but an incoherent stammering sound, - which all at once was supplanted by a violent fit of coughing. So terrible - were the paroxysms of this seizure that when they had at last spent their - fury the poor man was trembling like a leaf and toppled in his chair as if - about to swoon. Esther had hovered about over him from the outset of the - fit, and now looked up appealingly to Abner. The farmer rose, walked down - the table-side, and gathered Jee’s fragile form up under one big - engirdling arm. Then, as the girl hastily dragged forth the tick and - blankets again and spread them into the rough semblance of a bed, Abner - half led, half carried the cooper over and gently laid him down thereon. - Together they fixed up some sort of pillow for him with hay under the - blanket, and piled him snugly over with quilts and my comfortable. - </p> - <p> - “There—you’ll be better layin’ down,” said Abner, soothingly. - Hagadorn closed his eyes wearily and made no answer. They left him after a - minute or two and returned to the table. - </p> - <p> - The rest of the breakfast was finished almost in silence. Every once in a - while Abner and Esther would exchange looks, his gravely kind, hers - gratefully contented, and these seemed really to render speech needless. - For my own part, I foresaw with some degree of depression that there would - soon be no chance whatever of my securing attention in the <i>rôle</i> of - an invalid, at least in this part of the barn. - </p> - <p> - Perhaps, however, they might welcome me in the kitchen part, as a sort of - home-product rival to the sick cooper. I rose and walked languidly out - into M’rye’s domain. But the two women were occupied with a furious - scrubbing of rescued pans for the morning’s milk, and they allowed me to - sit feebly down on the wood-box behind the stove without so much as a - glance of sympathy. - </p> - <p> - By and by we heard one of the great front doors rolled back on its - shrieking wheels and then shut to again. Some one had entered, and in a - moment there came some strange, inarticulate sounds of voices which showed - that the arrival had created a commotion. M’rye lifted her head, and I - shall never forget the wild, expectant flashing of her black eyes in that - moment of suspense. - </p> - <p> - “Come in here, mother!” we heard Abner’s deep voice call out from beyond - the democrat wagon. “Here’s somebody wants to see you!” - </p> - <p> - M’rye swiftly wiped her hands on her apron and glided rather than walked - toward the forward end of the barn. Janey Wilcox and I followed close upon - her heels, dodging together under the wagon-pole, and emerging, breathless - and wild with curiosity, on the fringe of an excited group. - </p> - <p> - In the centre of this group, standing with a satisfied smile on his face, - his general appearance considerably the worse for wear, but in demeanor, - to quote M’rye’s subsequent phrase, “as cool as Cuffy,” was Ni Hagadorn. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - CHAPTER XIV—FINIS - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>E’S all right; you - can look for him here right along now, any day; he <i>was</i> hurt a - leetle, but he’s as peart an’ chipper now as a blue-jay on a hick’ry limb; - yes, he’s a-comin’ right smack home!” - </p> - <p> - This was the gist of the assurances which Ni vouchsafed to the first rush - of eager questions—to his sister, and M’rye, and Janey Wilcox. - </p> - <p> - Abner had held a little aloof, to give the weaker sex a chance. Now he - reasserted himself once more: “Stan’ back, now, and give the young man - breathin’ room. Janey, hand a chair for’ard—that’s it. Now set ye - down, Ni, an’ take your own time, an’ tell us all about it. So you reely - found him, eh?” - </p> - <p> - “Pshaw! there ain’t anything to that,” expostulated Ni, seating himself - with nonchalance, and tilting back his chair. “<i>That</i> was easy as - rollin’ off a log. But what’s the matter <i>here?</i> That’s what knocks - me. We—that is to say, I—come up on a freight train to a ways - beyond Juno Junction, an’ got the conductor to slow up and let me drop - off, an’ footed it over the hill. It was jest about broad daylight when I - turned the divide. Then I began lookin’ for your house, an’ I’m lookin’ - for it still. There’s a hole out there, full o’ snow an’ smoke, but nary a - house. How’d it happen?” - </p> - <p> - “‘Lection bonfire—high wind—woodshed must ‘a’ caught,” replied - Abner, sententiously. “So you reely got down South, eh?” - </p> - <p> - “An’ Siss here, too,” commented Ni, with provoking disregard for the - farmer’s suggestions; “a reg’lar family party. An’, hello!” - </p> - <p> - His roving eye had fallen upon the recumbent form on the made-up bed, - under the muffling blankets, and he lifted his sandy wisps of eyebrows in - inquiry. - </p> - <p> - “Sh! It’s father,” explained Esther. “He isn’t feeling very well. I think - he’s asleep.” - </p> - <p> - The boy’s freckled, whimsical face melted upon reflection into a distinct - grin. “Why,” he said, “you’ve been havin’ a reg’lar old love-feast up - here. I guess it was <i>that</i> that set the house on fire! An’ speakin’ - o’ feasts, if you’ve got a mouthful o’ somethin’ to eat handy—” - </p> - <p> - The women were off like a shot to the impromptu larder at the far end of - the barn. - </p> - <p> - “Well, thin,” put in Hurley, taking advantage of their absence, “an’ had - ye the luck to see anny rale fightin’?” - </p> - <p> - “Never mind that,” said Abner; “when he gits around to it he’ll tell us - everything. But, fust of all—why, he knows what I want to hear - about.” - </p> - <p> - “Why, the last time I talked with you, Abner—” Ni began, squinting - up one of his eyes and giving a quaint drawl to his words. - </p> - <p> - “That’s a good while ago,” said the farmer, quietly. - </p> - <p> - “Things have took a change, eh?” inquired Ni. - </p> - <p> - “That’s neither here nor there,” replied Abner, somewhat testily. “You - oughtn’t to need so dummed much explainin’. I’ve told you what I want - specially to hear. An’ that’s what we all want to hear.” - </p> - <p> - When the women had returned, and Ni, with much deliberation, had filled - both hands with selected eatables, the recital at last got under way. It - progress was blocked from time to time by sheer force of tantalizing - perversity on the part of the narrator, and it suffered steadily from the - incidental hitches of mastication; but such as it was we listened to it - with all our ears, sitting or standing about, and keeping our eyes - intently upon the freckled young hero. - </p> - <p> - “It wasn’t so much of a job to git down there as I’d figured on,” Ni said, - between mouthfuls. “I got along on freight trains—once worked my way - a while on a hand-car—as far as Albany, an’ on down to New York on a - river-boat, cheap, an’ then, after foolin’ round a few days, I hitched up - with the Sanitary Commission folks, an’ got them to let me sail on one o’ - their boats round to ’Napolis. I thought I was goin’ to die most o’ - the voyage, but I didn’t, you see, an’ when I struck ’Napolis I - hung around Camp Parole there quite a spell, talkin’ with fellers that’d - bin pris’ners down in Richmond an’ got exchanged an’ sent North. They said - there was a whole slew of our fellers down there still that’d been brought - in after Antietam. They didn’t know none o’ their names, but they said - they’d all be sent North in time, in exchange for Johnny Rebs that we’d - captured. An’ so I waited round—” - </p> - <p> - “You <i>might</i> have written!” interrupted Esther, reproachfully. - </p> - <p> - “What’d bin the good o’ writin’? I hadn’t anything to tell. Besides - writin’ letters is for girls. Well, one day a man come up from Libby—that’s - the prison at Richmond—an’ he said there <i>was</i> a tall feller - there from York State, a farmer, an’ he died. He thought the name was - Birch, but it might’a’ been Beech—or Body-Maple, for that matter. I - s’pose you’d like to had me write <i>that</i> home!” - </p> - <p> - “No—oh, no!” murmured Esther, speaking the sense of all the company. - </p> - <p> - “Well, then I waited some more, an’ kep’ on waitin’, an’ then waited agin, - until bimeby, one fine day, along comes Mr. Blue-jay himself. There here - was, stan’in’ up on the paddle-box with a face on him as long as your arm, - an’ I sung out, ‘Way there, Agrippa Hill!’ an’ he come mighty nigh failin’ - head over heels into the water. So then he come off, an’ we shook han’s, - an’ went up to the commissioners to see about his exchange, an’—an’ - as soon’s that’s fixed, an’ the papers drawn up all correct, why, he’ll - come home. An’ that’s all there is to it.” - </p> - <p> - “And even <i>then</i> you never wrote!” said Esther, plaintively. - </p> - <p> - “Hold on a minute,” put in Abner. “You say he’s comin’ home. That wouldn’t - be unless he was disabled. They’d keep him to fight agin, till his time - was up. Come, now, tell the truth—he’s be’n hurt bad!” - </p> - <p> - Ni shook his unkempt red head. “No, no,” he said. “This is how it was. - Fust he was fightin’ in a cornfield, an’ him an’ Bi Truax, they got chased - out, an’ lost their regiment, an’ got in with some other fellers, and then - they all waded a creek breast-high, an’ had to run up a long stretch o’ - slopin’ ploughed ground to capture a battery they was on top o’ the knoll. - But they didn’t see a regiment of sharp-shooters layin’ hidden behind a - rail-fence, an’ these fellers riz up all to once an’ give it to ’em - straight, an’ they wilted right there, an’ laid down, an’ there they was - after dusk when the rebs come out an’ started lookin’ round for guns an’ - blankets an’ prisoners. Most of ’em was dead, or badly hurt, but - they was a few who’d simply lain there in the hollow because it’d have bin - death to git up. An’ Jeff was one o’ <i>them</i>.” - </p> - <p> - “You said yourself ’t he had been hurt—some,” interposed - M’rye, with snapping eyes. - </p> - <p> - “Jest a scratch on his arm,” declared Ni. “Well, then they marched the - well ones back to the rear of the reb line, an’ there they jest skinned ’em - of everything they had—watch an’ jack-knife an’ wallet an’ - everything—an’ put ’em to sleep on the bare ground. Next day - they started ’em out on the march toward Richmond, an’ after four - or five days o’ that, they got to a railroad, and there was cattle cars - for ’em to ride the rest o’ the way in. An’ that’s how it was.” - </p> - <p> - “No,” said Abner, sternly; “you haven’t told us. How badly is he hurt?” - </p> - <p> - “Well,” replied Ni, “it was only a scratch, as I said, but it got worse on - that march, an’ I s’pose it wasn’t tended to anyways decently, an’ so—an’ - so—” - </p> - <p> - M’rye had sprung to her feet and stood now drawn up to her full height, - with her sharp nose in air as if upon some strange scent, and her eyes - fairly glowing in eager excitement. All at once she made a bound past us - and ran to the doors, furiously digging her fingers in the crevice between - them, then, with a superb sweep of the shoulders, sending them both - rattling back on their wheels with a bang. - </p> - <p> - “I knew it!” she screamed in triumph. - </p> - <p> - We who looked out beheld M’rye’s black hair and brown calico dress - suddenly suffer a partial eclipse of pale blue, which for the moment - seemed in some way a part of the bright winter sky beyond. Then we saw - that it was a soldier who had his arm about M’rye, and his cap bent down - tenderly over the head she had laid on his shoulder. - </p> - <p> - Our Jeff had come home. - </p> - <p> - A general instinct rooted us to our places and kept us silent, the while - mother and son stood there in the broad open doorway. - </p> - <p> - Then the two advanced toward us, M’rye breathing hard, and with tears and - smiles struggling together on her face under the shadow of a wrathful - frown. We noted nothing of Jeff’s appearance save that he had grown a big - yellow beard, and seemed to be smiling. It was the mother’s distraught - countenance at which we looked instead. - </p> - <p> - She halted in front of Abner, and lifted the blue cape from Jeff’s left - shoulder, with an abrupt gesture. - </p> - <p> - “Look there!” she said, hoarsely. “See what they’ve done to my boy!” - </p> - <p> - We now saw that the left sleeve of Jeff’s army overcoat was empty and hung - pinned against his breast. On the instant we were all swarming about him, - shaking the hand that remained to him and striving against one another in - a babel of questions, comments, and expressions of sympathy with his loss, - satisfaction at his return. It seemed the most natural thing in the world - that he should kiss Esther Hagadorn, and that Janey Wilcox should reach up - on tiptoes and kiss him. When the Underwood girl would have done the same, - however, M’rye brusquely shouldered her aside. - </p> - <p> - So beside ourselves with excitement were we all, each in turn seeking to - get in a word edgewise, that no one noticed the approach and entrance of a - stranger, who paused just over the threshold of the barn and coughed in a - loud perfunctory way to attract our attention. I had to nudge Abner twice - before he turned from where he stood at Jeff’s side, with his hand on the - luckless shoulder, and surveyed the newcomer. - </p> - <p> - The sun was shining so brightly on the snow outside, that it was not for - the moment easy to make out the identity of this shadowed figure. Abner - took a forward step or two before he recognized his visitor. It was Squire - Avery, the rich man of the Corners, and justice of the peace, who had once - even run for Congress. - </p> - <p> - “How d’ do?” said Abner, shading his eyes with a massive hand. “Won’t you - step in?” - </p> - <p> - The Squire moved forward a little and held forth his hand, which the - farmer took and shook doubtfully. We others were as silent now as the - grave, feeling this visit to be even stranger than all that had gone - before. - </p> - <p> - “I drove up right after breakfast, Mr. Beech,” said the Squire, making his - accustomed slow delivery a trifle more pompous and circumspect than usual, - “to express to you the feeling of such neighbors as I have, in this - limited space of time, being able to foregather with. I believe, sir, that - I may speak for them all when I say that we regret, deplore, and - contemplate with indignation the outrage and injury to which certain - thoughtless elements of the community last night, sir, subjected you and - your household.” - </p> - <p> - “It’s right neighborly of you, Square, to come an’ say so,” remarked - Abner. “Won’t you set down? You see, my son Jeff’s jest come home from the - war, an’ the house bein’ burnt, an’ so on, we’re rather upset for the - minute.” - </p> - <p> - The Squire put on his spectacles and smiled with surprise at seeing Jeff. - He shook hands with him warmly, and spoke with what we felt to be the - right feeling about that missing arm; but he could not sit down, he said. - The cutter was waiting for him, and he must hurry back. - </p> - <p> - “I am glad, however,” he added, “to have been the first, Mr. Beech, to - welcome your brave son back, and to express to you the hope, sir, that - with this additional link of sympathy between us, sir, bygones may be - allowed to become bygones.” - </p> - <p> - “I don’t bear no ill will,” said Abner, guardedly. “I s’pose in the long - run folks act pooty close to about what they think is right. I’m willin’ - to give ’em that credit—the same as I take to myself. They - ain’t been much disposition to give <i>me</i> that credit, but then, as - our school-ma’am here was a-sayin’ last night, people ’ve been a - good deal worked up about the war—havin’ them that’s close to ’em - right down in the thick of it—an’ I dessay it was natural enough - they should git hot in the collar about it. As I said afore, I don’t bear - no ill will—though prob’ly I’m entitled to.” - </p> - <p> - The Squire shook hands with Abner again. “Your sentiments, Mr. Beech,” he - said, in his stateliest manner, “do credit alike to your heart and your - head. There is a feeling, sir, that this would be an auspicious occasion - for you to resume sending your milk to the cheese-factory.” - </p> - <p> - Abner pondered the suggestion for a moment. “It would be handier,” he - said, slowly; “but, you know, I ain’t goin’ to eat no humble pie. That Rod - Bidwell was downright insultin’ to my man, an’ me too—” - </p> - <p> - “It was all, I assure you, sir, an unfortunate misunderstanding,” pursued - the Squire, “and is now buried deep in oblivion. And it is further - suggested, that, when you have reached that stage of preparation for your - new house, if you will communicate with me, the neighbors will be glad to - come up and extend their assistance to you in what is commonly known as a - raising-bee. They will desire, I believe, to bring with them their own - provisions. And, moreover, Mr. Beech”—here the Squire dropped his - oratorical voice and stepped close to the farmer—“if this thing has - cramped you any, that is to say, if you find yourself in need of—of—any - accommodation—” - </p> - <p> - “No, nothin’ o’ that sort,” said Abner. He stopped at that, and kept - silence for a little, with his head down and his gaze meditatively fixed - on the barn floor. At last he raised his face and spoke again, his deep - voice shaking a little in spite of itself. - </p> - <p> - “What you’ve said, Square, an’ your comin’ here, has done me a lot o’ - good. It’s pooty nigh wuth bein’ burnt out for—to have this sort o’ - thing come \ on behind as an after-clap. Sometimes, I tell you, sir, I’ve - despaired o’ the republic. I admit it, though it’s to my shame. I’ve said - to myself that when American citizens, born an’ raised right on the same - hill-side, got to behavin’ to each other in such an all-fired mean an’ - cantankerous way, why, the hull blamed thing wasn’t worth tryin’ to save. - But you see I was wrong—I admit I was wrong. It was jest a passin’ - flurry—a kind o’ snow-squall in hayin’ time. All the while, right - down ’t the bottom, their hearts was sound an’ sweet as a - butternut. It fetches me—that does—it makes me prouder than - ever I was before in all my born days to be an American—yes, sir—that’s - the way I—I feel about it.” - </p> - <p> - There were actually tears in the big farmer’s eyes, and he got out those - finishing words of his in fragmentary gulps. None of us had ever seen him - so affected before. - </p> - <p> - After the Squire had shaken hands again and started off, Abner stood at - the open door, looking after him, then gazing in a contemplative general - way upon all out-doors. The vivid sunlight reflected up from the melting - snow made his face to shine as if from an inner radiance. He stood still - and looked across the yards with their piles of wet straw smoking in the - forenoon heat, and the black puddles eating into the snow as the thaw went - on; over the further prospect, made weirdly unfamiliar by the - disappearance of the big old farm-house; down the long broad sloping - hill-side with its winding road, its checkered irregular patches of yellow - stubble and stacked fodder, of deep umber ploughed land and warm gray - woodland, all pushing aside their premature mantle of sparkling white, and - the scattered homesteads and red barns beyond—and there was in his - eyes the far-away look of one who saw still other things. - </p> - <p> - He turned at last and came in, walking over to where Jeff and Esther stood - hand in hand beside the bed on the floor. Old Jee Hagadorn was sitting up - now, and had exchanged some words with the couple. - </p> - <p> - “Well, Brother Hagadorn,” said the farmer, “I hope you’re feelin’ better.” - </p> - <p> - “Yes, a good deal—B—Brother Beech, thank’ee,” replied the - cooper, slowly and with hesitation. - </p> - <p> - Abner laid a fatherly hand on Esther’s shoulder and another on Jeff’s. A - smile began to steal over his big face, broadening the square which his - mouth cut down into his beard, and deepening the pleasant wrinkles about - his eyes. He called M’rye over to the group with beckoning nod of the - head. - </p> - <p> - “It’s jest occurred to me, mother,” he said, with the mock gravity of tone - we once had known so well and of late had heard so little—“I jest - be’n thinkin’ we might’a’ killed two birds with one stun while the Square - was up here. He’s justice o’ the peace, you know—an’ they say them - kind o’ marriages turn out better ’n all the others.” - </p> - <p> - “Go ’long with yeh!” said Ma’rye, vivaciously. But she too put a - hand on Esther’s other shoulder. - </p> - <p> - The school-teacher nestled against M’rye’s side. “I tell you what,” she - said, softly, “if Jeff ever turns out to be half the man his father is, - I’ll just be prouder than my skin can hold.” - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - MARSENA - </h2> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - I - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">M</span>arsena Pulford, - what time the village of Octavius knew him, was a slender and tall man, - apparently skirting upon the thirties, with sloping shoulders and a - romantic aspect. - </p> - <p> - It was not alone his flowing black hair, and his broad shirt-collars - turned down after the ascertained manner of the British poets, which - stamped him in our humble minds as a living brother to “The Corsair,” “The - Last of the Suliotes,” and other heroic personages engraved in the albums - and keepsakes of the period. His face, with its darkling eyes and - distinguished features, conveyed wherever it went an impression of proudly - silent melancholy. In those days—that is, just before the war—one - could not look so convincingly and uniformly sad as Marsena did without - raising the general presumption of having been crossed in love. We had a - respectful feeling, in his case, that the lady ought to have been named - Iñez, or at the very least Oriana. - </p> - <p> - Although he went to the Presbyterian Church with entire regularity, was - never seen in public save in a long-tailed black coat, and in the winter - wore gloves instead of mittens, the local conscience had always, I think, - sundry reservations about the moral character of his past. It would not - have been reckoned against him, then, that he was obviously poor. We had - not learned in those primitive times to measure people by dollar-mark - standards. Under ordinary conditions, too, the fact that he came from New - England—had indeed lived in Boston—must have counted rather in - his favor than otherwise. But it was known that he had been an artist, a - professional painter of pictures and portraits, and we understood in - Octavius that this involved acquaintanceship, if not even familiarity, - with all sorts of occult and deleterious phases of city life. - </p> - <p> - Our village held all vice, and especially the vice of other and larger - places, in stern reprobation. Yet, though it turned this matter of the - newcomer’s previous occupation over a good deal in its mind, Marsena - carried himself with such a gentle picturesqueness of subdued sorrow that - these suspicions were disarmed, or, at the worst, only added to the - fascinated interest with which Octavius watched his spare and solitary - figure upon its streets, and noted the progress of his efforts to find a - footing for himself in its social economy. - </p> - <p> - It was taken for granted among us that he possessed a fine and - well-cultivated mind, to match that thoughtful countenance and that - dignified deportment. - </p> - <p> - This assumption continued to hold its own in the face of a long series of - failures in the attempt to draw him out. Almost everybody who was anybody - at one time or another tried to tap Marsena’s mental reservoirs—and - all in vain. Beyond the barest commonplaces of civil conversation he - could, never be tempted. Once, indeed, he had volunteered to the Rev. Mr. - Bunce the statement that he regarded Washington Allston as in several - respects superior to Copley; but as no one in Octavius knew who these men - were, the remark did not help us much. It was quoted frequently, however, - as indicating the lofty and recondite nature of the thoughts with which - Mr. Pulford occupied his intellect. As it became more apparent, too, that - his reserve must be the outgrowth of some crushing and incurable heart - grief, people grew to defer to it and to avoid vexing his silent moods - with talk. - </p> - <p> - Thus, when he had been a resident and neighbor for over two years, though - no one knew him at all well, the whole community regarded him with kindly - and even respectful emotions, and the girls in particular felt that he was - a distinct acquisition to the place. - </p> - <p> - I have said that Marsena Pulford was poor. Hardly anybody in Octavius ever - knew to what pathetic depths his poverty during the second winter - descended. There was a period of several months, in sober truth, during - which he fed himself upon six or seven cents a day. As he was too proud to - dream of asking credit at the grocer’s and butcher’s, and walked about - more primly erect than ever, meantime, in his frock-coat and gloves, no - idea of these privations got abroad. And at the end of this long evil - winter there came a remarkable spring, which altered in a violent way the - fortunes of millions of people—among them Marsena. We have to do - with events somewhat subsequent to that even, and with the period of Mr. - Pulford’s prosperity. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <p> - The last discredited strips of snow up in the ravines on the hill-sides - were melting away; the robins had come again, and were bustling busily - across between the willows, already in the leaf, and the budded elms; men - were going about the village streets without their overcoats, and boys - were telling exciting tales about the suckers in the creek; our old friend - Homer Sage had returned from his winter’s sojourn in the county poorhouse - at Thessaly, and could be seen daily sitting in the sunshine on the broad - stoop of the Excelsior Hotel. It was April of 1862. - </p> - <p> - A whole year had gone by since that sudden and memorable turn in Marsena - Pulford’s luck. So far from there being signs now of a possible adverse - change, this new springtide brought such an increase of good fortune, with - its attendant responsibilities, that Marsena was unable to bear the - halcyon burden alone. He took in a partner to help him, and then the firm - jointly hired a boy. The partner painted a signboard to mark this double - event, in bold red letters of independent form upon a yellow ground:= - </p> - <h3> - ````PULFORD & SHULL. - </h3> - <p> - ```Empire State Portrait Athenæum and - </p> - <p> - `````Studio. - </p> - <p> - ```War Likenesses at Peace Prices.= - </p> - <p> - Marsena discouraged the idea of hanging this out on the street; and, as a - compromise, it was finally placed at the end of the operating-room, where - for years thereafter it served for the sitters to stare at when their - skulls had been clasped in the iron headrest and they had been adjured to - look pleasant. A more modest and conventional announcement of the new - firm’s existence was put outside, and Octavius accepted it as proof that - the liberal arts were at last established within its borders on a firm and - lucrative basis. - </p> - <p> - The head of the firm was not much altered by this great wave of - prosperity. He had been drilled by adversity into such careful ways with - his wardrobe that he did not need to get any new clothes. Although the - villagers, always kindly, sought now with cordial effusiveness to make him - feel one of themselves, and although he accepted all their invitations and - showed himself at every public meeting in his capacity as a representative - and even prominent citizen, yet the heart of his mystery remained - unplucked. Marsena was too busy in these days to be much upon the streets. - When he did appear he still walked alone, slowly and with an air of - settled gloom. He saluted such passers-by as he knew in stately silence. - If they stopped him or joined him in his progress, at the most he would - talk sparingly of the weather and the roads. - </p> - <p> - Neither at the fortnightly sociables of the Ladies’ Church Mite Society, - given in turn at the more important members’ homes, nor in the more casual - social assemblages of the place, did Marsena ever unbend. It was not that - he held himself aloof, as some others did, from the simple amusements of - the evening. He never shrank from bearing his part in “pillow,” “clap in - and clap out,” “post-office,” or in whatever other game was to be played, - and he went through the kissing penalties and rewards involved without - apparent aversion. It was also to be noted, in fairness, that, if any one - smiled at him full in the face, he instantly smiled in response. But - neither smile nor chaste salute served to lift for even the fleeting - instant that veil of reserve which hung over him. - </p> - <p> - Those who thought that by having Marsena Pul-ford take their pictures they - would get on more intimate terms with him fell into grievous error. He was - more sententious and unapproachable in his studio, as he called it, than - anywhere else. In the old days, before the partnership, when he did - everything himself, his manner in the reception-room downstairs, where he - showed samples, gave the prices of frames, and took orders, had no equal - for formal frigidity—except his subsequent demeanor in the - operating-room upstairs. The girls used to declare that they always - emerged from the gallery with “cold shivers all over them.” This, however, - did not deter them from going again, repeatedly, after the outbreak of the - war had started up the universal notion of being photographed. - </p> - <p> - When the new partner came in, in this April of 1862, Marsena was able to - devote himself exclusively to the technical business of the camera and the - dark-room, on the second floor. He signalled this change by wearing now - every day an old russet-colored velveteen jacket, which we had never seen - before. This made him look even more romantically melancholy and - picturesque than ever, and revived something of the fascinating curiosity - as to his hidden past; but it did nothing toward thawing the icebound - shell which somehow came at every point between him and the - good-fellowship of the community. - </p> - <p> - The partnership was scarcely a week old when something happened. The new - partner, standing behind the little show-case in the reception-room, - transacted some preliminary business with two customers who had come in. - Then, while the sound of their ascending footsteps was still to be heard - on the stairs, he hastily left his post and entered the little work-room - at the back of the counter. - </p> - <p> - “You couldn’t guess in a baker’s dozen of tries who’s gone upstairs,” he - said to the boy. Without waiting for even one effort, he added: “It’s the - Parmalee girl, and Dwight Ransom’s with her, and he’s got a Lootenant’s - uniform on, and they’re goin’ to be took together!” - </p> - <p> - “What of it?” asked the unimaginative boy. He was bending over a crock of - nitric acid, transferring from it one by one to a tub of water a lot of - spoiled glass plates. The sickening fumes from the jar, and the sting of - the acid on his cracked skin, still further diminished his interest in - contemporary sociology. “Well, what of it?” he repeated, sulkily. - </p> - <p> - “Oh, I don’t know,” said the new partner, in a listless, disappointed way. - “It seemed kind o’ curious, that’s all. Holdin’ her head up as high in the - air as she does, you wouldn’t think she’d so much as look at an ordinary - fellow like Dwight Ransom.” - </p> - <p> - “I suppose this is a free country,” remarked the boy, rising to rest his - back. - </p> - <p> - “Oh, my, yes,” returned the other; “if she’s pleased, I’m quite agreeable. - And—I don’t know, too—I dare say she’s gettin’ pretty well - along. Maybe she thinks they ain’t any too much time to lose, and is - making a grab at what comes handiest. Still, I should ’a’ thought - she could ’a’ done better than Dwight. I worked with him for a - spell once, you know.” - </p> - <p> - There seemed to be very few people with whom Newton Shull had not at one - time or another worked. Apparently there was no craft or calling which he - did not know something about. The old phrase, “Jack of all trades,” must - surely have been coined in prophecy for him. He had turned up in Octavius - originally, some years before, as the general manager of a “Whaler’s Life - on the Rolling Deep” show, which was specially adapted for moral - exhibitions in connection with church fairs. Calamity, however, had long - marked this enterprise for its own, and at our village its career - culminated under the auspices of a sheriff’s officer. The boat, the - harpoons, the panorama sheet and rollers, the whale’s jaw, the music-box - with its nautical tunes—these were sold and dispersed. Newton Shull - remained, and began work as a mender of clocks. Incidentally, he cut out - stencil-plates for farmers to label their cheese-boxes with, and painted - or gilded ornamental designs on chair-backs through perforated paper - patterns. For a time he was a maker of children’s sleds. In slack seasons - he got jobs to help the druggist, the tinsmith, the dentist, or the Town - Clerk, and was equally at home with each. He was one of the founders of - the Octavius Philharmonics, and offered to play any instrument they liked, - though his preference was for what he called the bull fiddle. He spoke - often of having travelled as a bandsman with a circus. We boys believed - that he was quite capable of riding a horse bareback as well. - </p> - <p> - When Marsena Pulford, then, decided that he must have some help, Newton - Shull was obviously the man. How the arrangement came to take the form of - a partnership was never explained, save on the conservative village theory - that Marsena must have reasoned that a partner would be safer with the - cash-box downstairs, while he was taking pictures upstairs, than a mere - hired man. More likely it grew out of their temperamental affinity. Shull - was also a man of grave and depressed moods (as, indeed, is the case with - all who play the bass viol), only his melancholy differed from Marsena’s - in being of a tirelessly garrulous character. This was not always an - advantage. When customers came in, in the afternoon, it was his friendly - impulse to engage them in conversation at such length that frequently the - light would fail altogether before they got upstairs. He recognized this - tendency as a fault, and manfully combated it—leaving the - reception-room with abruptness at the earliest possible moment, and - talking to the boy in the work-room instead. - </p> - <p> - Mr. Shull was a short, round man, with a beard which was beginning to show - gray under the lip. His reception-room manners were urbane and persuasive - to a degree, and he particularly excelled in convincing people that the - portraits of themselves, which Marsena had sent down to him in the dummy - to be dried and varnished, and which they hated vehemently at first sight, - were really unique and precious works of art. He had also much success in - inducing country folks to despise the cheap ferrotype which they had - intended to have made, and to venture upon the costlier ambrotype, - daguerreotype, or even photograph instead. If they did not go away with a - family album or an assortment of frames that would come in handy as well, - it was no fault of his. - </p> - <p> - He made these frames himself, on a bench which he had fitted up in the - work-room. Here he constructed show-cases, too, cut out mats and mounts, - and did many other things as adjuncts to the business, which honest - Marsena had never dreamed of. - </p> - <p> - “Yes,” he went on now, “I carried a chain for Dwight the best part o’ one - whole summer, when he was layin’ levels for that Nedahma Valley Railroad - they were figurin’ on buildin’. Guess they ruther let him in over that job—though - he paid me fair enough. It ain’t much of a business, that surveyin’. You - spend about half your time in findin’ out for people the way they could do - things if they only had the money to do ’em, and the other half in - settlin’ miserable farmers’ squabbles about the boundaries of their land. - You’ve got to pay a man day’s wages for totin’ round your chain and axe - and stakes—and, as like as not, you never get even that money back, - let alone any pay for yourself. I know something about a good many trades, - and I say surveyin’ is pretty nigh the poorest of ’em all.” - </p> - <p> - “George Washington was a surveyor,” commented the boy, stooping down to - his task once more. - </p> - <p> - “Yes,” admitted Mr. Shull; “so he was, for a fact. But then he had - influence enough to get government jobs. I don’t say there ain’t money in - that. If Dwight, now, could get a berth on the canal, say, it ’ud - be a horse of another color. They say, there’s some places there that pay - as much as $3 a day. That’s how George Washington got his start, and, - besides, he owned his own house and lot to begin with. But you’ll take - notice that he dropped surveyin’ like a hot potato the minute there was - any soldierin’ to do. He knew which side <i>his</i> bread was buttered - on!” - </p> - <p> - “Well,” said the boy, slapping the last plates sharply into the tub, - “that’s just what Dwight’s doin’ too, ain’t it?” - </p> - <p> - “Yes,” Mr. Shull conceded; “but it ain’t the same thing. You won’t find - Dwight Ransom get-tin’ to be general, or much of anything else. He’s a - nice fellow enough, in his way, of course; but, somehow, after it’s all - said and done, there ain’t much to him. I always sort o’ felt, when I was - out with him, that by good rights I ought to be working the level and him - hammerin’ in the stakes.” - </p> - <p> - The boy sniffed audibly as he bore away the acid-jar. - </p> - <p> - Mr. Shull went over to the bench, and took up a chisel with a meditative - air. After a moment he lifted his head and listened, with aroused interest - written all over his face. - </p> - <p> - There had been audible from the floor above, at intervals, the customary - noises of the camera being wheeled about to different points under the - skylight. There came echoing downward now quite other and most unfamiliar - sounds—the clatter of animated, even gay, conversation, punctuated - by frank outbursts of laughter. Newton Shull could hardly believe his - ears: but they certainly did tell him that there were three parties to - that merriment overhead. It was so strange that he laid aside the chisel, - and tiptoed out into the reception-room, with a notion of listening at the - stair door. Then he even more hurriedly ran back again. They were coming - downstairs. - </p> - <p> - It might have been a whole wedding-party that trooped down the resounding - stairway, the voices rising above the clump of Dwight’s artillery boots - and sword on step after step, and overflowed into the stuffy little - reception-room with a cheerful tumult of babble. The new partner and the - boy looked at each other, then directed a joint stare of bewilderment - toward the door. - </p> - <p> - Julia Parmalee had pushed her way behind the show-case, and stood in the - entrance to the workroom, peering about her with an affectation of excited - curiosity which she may have thought pretty and playful, but which the - boy, at least, held to be absurd. - </p> - <p> - She had been talking thirteen to the dozen all the time. “Oh, I really - must see everything!” she rattled on now. “If I could be trusted alone in - the dark-room with you, Mr. Pulford, I surely may be allowed to explore - all these minor mysteries. Oh, I see,” she added, glancing round, and - incidentally looking quite through Mr. Shull and the boy, as if they had - been transparent: “here’s where the frames and the washing are done. How - interesting!” - </p> - <p> - What really was interesting was the face of Marsena Pulford, discernible - in the shadow over her shoulder. No one in Octavius had ever seen such a - beaming smile on his saturnine countenance before. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - II - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">N</span>ext to the War, - the chief topic of interest and conversation in Octavius at this time was - easily Miss Julia Parmalee. - </p> - <p> - To begin with, her family had for two generations or more been the most - important family in the village. When Lafayette stopped here to receive an - address of welcome, on his tour through the State in 1825, it was a - Parmalee who read that address, and who also, as tradition runs, made on - his own account several remarks to the hero in the French language, all of - which were understood. The elder son of this man has a secure place in - history. He is the Judge Parmalee whose portrait hangs in the Court House, - and whose learned work on “The Treaties of the Tuscarora Nation,” - handsomely bound in morocco, used to have a place of honor on the parlor - table of every well-to-do and cultured Octavius home. - </p> - <p> - This Judge was a banker, too, and did pretty well for himself in a number - of other commercial paths. He it was who built the big Parmalee house, - with a stone wall in front and the great garden and orchard stretching - back to the next street, and the buff-colored statues on either side of - the gravelled walk, where the Second National Dearborn County Bank now - stands. The Judge had no children, and, on his widow’s death, the property - went to his much younger brother Charles, who, from having been as a - stripling on some forgotten Governor’s staff, bore through life the title - of Colonel in the local speech. - </p> - <p> - This Colonel Parmalee had a certain distinction, too, though not of a - martial character. His home was in New York, and for many years Octavius - never laid eyes on him. He was understood to occupy a respected place - among American men of letters, though exactly what he wrote did not come - to our knowledge. It was said that he had been at Brook Farm. I have not - been able to find any one who remembers him there, but the report is of - use as showing the impression of superior intellectual force which he - created, even by hearsay, in his native village. When he finally came back - to us, to play his part as the head of the Parmalee house, we saw at - intervals, when the sun was warm and the sidewalks were dry, the lean and - bent figure of an old man, with a very yellow face and a sharp-edged brown - wig, moving feebly about with a thick gray shawl over his shoulders. His - housekeeper was an elderly maiden cousin, who seemed never to come out at - all, whether the sun was shining or not. - </p> - <p> - There were three or four of the Colonel’s daughters—all tall, - well-made girls, with strikingly dark skins, and what we took to be - gypsyish faces. Their appearance certainly bore out the rumor that their - mother had been an opera-singer—some said an Italian, others a lady - of Louisiana Creole extraction. No information, except that she was dead, - ever came to hand about this person. Her daughters, however, were very - much in evidence. They seemed always to wear white dresses, and they were - always to be seen somewhere, either on their lawn playing croquet, or in - the streets, or at the windows of their house. The consciousness of their - existence pervaded the whole village from morning till night. To watch - their goings and comings, and to speculate upon the identity and business - of the friends from strange parts who were continually arriving to visit - them, grew to be quite the standing occupation of the idler portion of the - community. - </p> - <p> - Before such of our young people as naturally took the lead in these - matters had had time to decide how best to utilize for the general good - this influx of beauty, wealth, and ancestral dignity, the village was - startled by an unlooked-for occurrence. A red carpet was spread one - forenoon from the curb to the doorway of the Episcopal church: the - old-fashioned Parmalee carriage turned out, with its driver clasping white - reins in white cotton gloves; we had a confused glimpse of the dark - Parmalee girls with bouquets in their hands, and dressed rather more in - white than usual: and then astonished Octavius learned that two of them - had been married, right there under its very eyes, and had departed with - their husbands. It gave an angry twist to the discovery to find that the - bridegrooms were both strangers, presumably from New York. - </p> - <p> - This episode had the figurative effect of doubling or trebling the height - of that stone wall which stood between the Parmalee place and the public. - Such budding hopes and projects of intimacy as our villagers may have - entertained toward these polished newcomers fell nipped and lifeless on - the stroke. Shortly afterward—that is to say, in the autumn of 1860—the - family went away, and the big house was shut up. News came in time that - the Colonel was dead: something was said about another daughter’s - marriage; then the war broke out, and gave us other things to think of. We - forgot all about the Parmalees. - </p> - <p> - It must have been in the last weeks of 1861 that our vagrant attention was - recalled to the subject by the appearance in the village of an elderly - married couple of servants, who took up their quarters in the long empty - mansion, and began fitting it once more for habitation. They set all the - chimneys smoking, shovelled the garden paths clear of snow, laid in huge - supplies of firewood, vegetables, and the like, and turned the whole place - inside out in a vigorous convulsion of housecleaning. Their preparations - were on such a bold, large scale that we assumed the property must have - passed to some voluminous collateral branch of the family, hitherto - unknown to us. It came indeed to be stated among us, with an air of - certainty, that a remote relation named Amos or Erasmus Parmalee, with - eight or more children and a numerous adult household, was coming to live - there. The legend of this wholly mythical personage had nearly a - fortnight’s vogue, and reached a point of distinctness where we clearly - understood that the coming stranger was a violent secessionist. This - seemed to open up a troubled and sinister prospect before loyal Octavius, - and there was a good deal of plain talk in the barroom of the Excelsior - Hotel as to how this impending crisis should be met. - </p> - <p> - It was just after New Year’s that our suspense was ended. The new - Parmalees came, and Octavius noted with a sort of disappointed surprise - that they turned out to be merely a shorn and trivial remnant of the old - Parmalees. They were in fact only a couple of women—the elderly - maiden cousin who had presided before over the Colonel’s household, and - the youngest of his daughters, by name Miss Julia. What was more, word was - now passed round upon authority that these were the sole remaining members - of the family—that there never had been any Amos or Erasmus Parmalee - at all. - </p> - <p> - The discovery cast the more heroic of our village home-guards into a - temporary depression. It could hardly have been otherwise, for here were - all their fine and strong resolves, their publicly registered vows about - scowling at the odious Southern sympathizer in the street, about a - “horning” party outside his house at night, about, perhaps, actually - riding him on a rail—all brought to nothing. A less earnest body of - men might have suspected in the situation some elements of the ridiculous. - They let themselves down gently, however, and with a certain dignified - sense of consolation that they had, at all events, shown unmistakably how - they would have dealt with Amos or Erasmus Parmalee if there had been such - a man, and he had moved to Octavius and had ventured to flaunt his rebel - sentiments in their outraged faces. - </p> - <p> - The village, as a whole, consoled itself on more tangible grounds. It has - been stated that Miss Julia Parmalee arrived at the family homestead in - early January. Before April had brought the buds and birds, this young - woman had become President of the St. Mark’s Episcopal Ladies’ Aid - Society; had organized a local branch of the Sanitary Commission, and - assumed active control of all its executive and clerical functions; had - committed the principal people of the community to holding a grand - festival and fair in May for the Field Hospital and Nurse Fund; had - exhibited in the chief store window on Main Street a crayon portrait of - her late father, and four water-color drawings of European scenery, all - her own handiwork; had published over her signature, in the Thessaly <i>Banner - of Liberty</i>, an original and spirited poem on “Pale Columbia, Shriek to - Arms!” which no one could read without patriotic thrills; and had been - reported, on more or less warrant of appearances, to be engaged to four - different young men of the place. Truly a remarkable young woman! - </p> - <p> - We were only able in a dim kind of way to identify her with one of the - group of girls in white dresses whom the village had stared at and studied - from a distance two years before. There was no mystery about it, however: - she was the youngest of them. They had all looked so much alike, with - their precocious growth, their olive skins and foreign features, that we - were quite surprised to find now that this one, regarded by herself, must - be a great deal younger than the others. Perhaps it was only our rustic - shyness which had imputed to the sisterhood, in that earlier experience, - the hauteur and icy reserve of the rich and exclusive. We recognized now - that if the others were at all like Julia, we had made an absurd mistake. - It was impossible that any one could be freer from arrogance or pretence - than Octavius found her to be. There were some, indeed, who deemed her - emancipation almost too complete. - </p> - <p> - Some there were, too, who denied that she was beautiful, or even very - good-looking. There is an old daguerreotype of her as she was in those - days—or rather as she seemed to be to the unskilled sunbeams of the - sixties—which gives these censorious people the lie direct. It is - true that her hair is confined in a net at the sides and drawn stiffly - across her temples from the parting. The full throat rises sheer from a - flat horizon of striped dress goods, and is offered no relief whatever by - the wide falling-away collar of coarse lace. And oh! the strangeness of - that frock! The shoulder seams are to be looked for half-way down the - upper arm, the sleeves swell themselves out into shapeless bags, the waist - front might be the cover of a chair, of a guitar, of the documents in a - corporation suit—of anything under the sun rather than the form of a - charming girl. Yet, when you look at this thin old picture, all the same, - you feel that you understand how it was that Julia Parmalee took the shine - out of all the other girls in Octavius. - </p> - <p> - This is the likeness of her which always seemed to me the best, but - Marsena Pulford made a great many others as well. When you reflect, - indeed, that his output of portraits of Julia Parmalee was limited in time - to the two months of April and May, their number suggests that he could - hardly have done anything else the while. - </p> - <p> - The first of this large series of pictures was the one which Marsena liked - least. It is true that Julia looked well in it, standing erect, with a - proud, fine backward tilt to her dark face and a delicately formed white - hand resting gracefully on the back of a chair. But it happened that in - that chair was seated Lieut. Dwight Ransom, all spick and span in his new - uniform, with his big gauntlets and sword hilt brought prominently - forward, and with a kind of fatuous smile on his ruddy face, as if he felt - the presence of those fair fingers on the chair-back, so teasingly close - to his shoulder-strap. - </p> - <p> - Marsena, in truth, had a strong impulse to run a destroying thumbnail over - the seated figure on this plate, when the action of the developer began to - reveal its outlines under the faint yellow light in the dark-room. Of all - the myriad pictures he had washed and drained and nursed in their wet - growth over this tank, no other had ever stirred up in his breast such a - swift and sharp hostility. He lavished the deadly cyanide upon that - portion of the plate, too, with grim unction, and noted the results with a - scornful curl on his lip. Like his partner downstairs, he was wondering - what on earth possessed Miss Parmalee to take up with a Dwight Ransom. - </p> - <p> - The frown was still on his brow when he opened the dark-room door. Then he - started back, flushed red, and labored at an embarrassed smile. Miss - Parmalee had left her place, and stood right in front of him, so near that - he almost ran against her. She beamed confidently and reassuringly upon - him. - </p> - <p> - “Oh, I want to come in and see you do all that,” she exclaimed, with - vivacity. “It didn’t occur to me till after you’d shut the door, or I’d - have asked to come in with you. I have the greatest curiosity about all - these matters. Oh, it is all done? That’s too bad! But you can make - another one—and that I can see from the beginning. You know, I’m - something of an artist myself; I’ve taken lessons for years—and this - all interests me so much! No, Lieutenant!”—she called out from where - she was standing just inside the open door, at sound of her companion’s - rising—“you stay where you are! There’s going to be another, and - it’s such trouble to get you posed properly. Try and keep exactly as you - were!” - </p> - <p> - Thus it happened that she stood very close to Marsena, as he took out - another plate, flooded it with the sweet-smelling, pungent collodion, and, - with furtive precautions against the light, lowered it down into the - silver bath. Then he had to shut the door, and she was still there just - beside him. He heard himself pretending to explain the processes of the - films to her, but his mind was concentrated instead upon a suggestion of - perfume which she had brought into the reeking little cupboard of a room, - and which mingled languorously with the scents of ether and creosote in - the air. He had known her by sight for but a couple of months; he had been - introduced to her only a week or so ago, and that in the most casual way; - yet, strange enough, he could feel his hand trembling as it perfunctorily - moved the plate dipper up and down in the bath. - </p> - <p> - A gentle voice fell upon the darkness. “Do you know, Mr. Pulford,” it - murmured, “I felt sure that you were an artist, the very first time I saw - you.” - </p> - <p> - Marsena heaved a long sigh—a sigh with a tremulous catch in it, as - where sorrow and sweet solace should meet. “I did start out to be one,” he - answered, “but I—I never amounted to anything at it. I tried for - years, but I wasn’t any good. I had to give it up—at last—and - take to this instead.” - </p> - <p> - He lifted the plate with caution, bent to look obliquely across its - surface, and lowered it again. Then all at once he turned abruptly and - faced her. They were so close to each other that even in the obscure gloom - she caught the sudden flash of resolution in his eyes. - </p> - <p> - “I’ll tell you what I never told any other living soul,” he said, - beginning with husky eagerness, but lapsing now into grave deliberation of - emphasis: “I hate—this—like pizen!” - </p> - <p> - In the silence which followed, Marsena mechanically took the plate from - the bath, fastened it in the holder, and stepped to the door. Then he - halted, to prolong for one little instant this tender spell of magic which - had stolen over him. Here, in the close darkness beside him, was a - sorceress, a siren, who had at a glance read his sore heart’s deepest - secret—at a word drawn the confession of his maimed and embittered - pride. It was like being shut up with an angel, who was also a beautiful - woman. Oh, the wonder of it! Broad sunlit landscapes with Italian skies - seemed to be forming themselves before his mind’s eye; his soul sang songs - within him. He very nearly dropped the plate-holder. - </p> - <p> - The soft, hovering, half touch of a hand upon his arm, the cool, restful - tones of the voice in the darkness, came to complete the witchery. - </p> - <p> - “I know,” she said, “I can sympathize with you. I also had my dreams, my - aspirations. But you are wrong to think that you have failed. Why, this - beautiful work of yours, it all is Art—pure Art. No person who - really knows could look at it and not see that. No, Mr. Pulford, you do - yourself an injustice; believe me, you do. Why, you couldn’t help being an - artist if you tried; it’s born in you. It shows in everything you do. I - saw it from the very first.” - </p> - <p> - The unmistakable sound of Dwight Ransom’s large artillery boots moving on - the floor outside intervened here, and Marsena hurriedly opened the door. - The Lieutenant glanced with good-natured raillery at the couple who stood - revealed, blinking in the sharp light. - </p> - <p> - “One of my legs got asleep,” he remarked, by way of explanation, “so I had - to get up and stamp around. I began to think,” he added, “that you folks - were going to set up housekeeping in there, and not come out any more at - all.” - </p> - <p> - “Don’t be vulgar, if you please,” said Julia Par-malee, with a dash of - asperity in what purported to be a bantering tone. “We were talking of - matters quite beyond you—of Art, if you desire to know. Mr. Pulford - and I discover that we have a great many opinions and sentiments about Art - in common. It is a feeling that no one can understand unless they have - it.” - </p> - <p> - “It’s the same with getting one’s leg asleep,” said Dwight, “quite the - same, I assure you;” and then came the laughter which Newton Shull heard - downstairs. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - III - </h2> - <h3> - |A DAY or two later Battery G left Octavius for the seat of war. - </h3> - <p> - It was not nearly so imposing an event as a good many others which had - stirred the community during the previous twelve months. There were - already two regiments in the field recruited from our end of Dearborn - County, and in these at least six or seven companies were made up wholly - of Octavius men. There had been big crowds, with speeches and music by the - band, to see them off at the old depot. - </p> - <p> - When they returned, their short term of service having expired, there were - still more fervent demonstrations, to which zest was added by the - knowledge that they were all to enlist again, and then we shortly - celebrated their second departure. Some there were who returned in mute - and cold finality—term of enlistment and life alike cut short—and - these were borne through our streets with sombre martial pageantry, the - long wail of the funeral march reaching out to include the whole valley - side in its note of lamentation. Besides all this, hardly a week passed - that those of us who hung about the station could not see a train full of - troops on their way to or from the South. A year of these experiences had - left us seasoned veterans in sightseeing, by no means to be fluttered by - trifles. - </p> - <p> - As a matter of fact, the village did not take Battery G very seriously. To - begin with, it mustered only some dozen men, at least so far as our local - contribution went, and there was a feeling that we couldn’t be expected to - go much out of our way for such a paltry number. Then, again, an artillery - force was somehow out of joint with our notion of what Octavius should do - to help suppress the Rebellion. Infantrymen with muskets we could all - understand—could all be, if necessary. Many of the farmer boys round - about, too, made good cavalrymen, because they knew both how to ride and - how to groom a horse. But in the name of all that was mysterious, why - artillerymen? There had never been a cannon within fifty miles of - Octavius; that is, since the Revolution. Certainly none of our citizens - had the least idea how to fire one off. These enlisted men of Battery G - were no better posted than the rest; it would take them a three days’ - journey to reach the point where, for the first time, they were to see - their strange weapon of warfare. This seemed to us rather foolish. - </p> - <p> - Moreover, there was a government proclamation just out, it was said, - discontinuing further enlistments and disbanding the recruiting offices - scattered over the North. This appeared to imply that the war was about - over, or at least that they had more soldiers already than they knew what - to do with. There were some who questioned whether, under these - circumstances, it was worth while for Battery G to go at all. - </p> - <p> - But go it did, and at the last moment quite a throng of people found - themselves gathered at the station to say good-by. A good many of these - were the relations and friends of the dozen ordinary recruits, who would - not even get their uniforms and swords till they reached Tecumseh. But the - larger portion, I should think, had come on account of Lieutenant Ransom. - </p> - <p> - Dwight was hail-fellow-well-met with more people within a radius of twenty - miles or so, probably, than any other man in the district. He was a - goodlooking young man, rather stocky in build and deeply sunburned. - Through the decent months of the year he was always out of doors, either - tramping over the country with a level over his shoulder, or improving the - days with a shotgun or fishpole. At these seasons he was generally to be - found of an evening at the barber’s shop, where he told more new stories - than any one else. When winter came his chief work was in his office, - drawing maps and plans. He let his beard grow then, and spent his leisure - for the most part playing checkers at the Excelsior Hotel. - </p> - <p> - His habitual free-and-easy dress and amiable laxity of manners tended to - obscure in the village mind the facts that he came from one of the best - families of the section, that he had been through college, and that he had - some means of his own. His mother and sisters were very respectable people - indeed, and had one of the most expensive pews in the Episcopal church. It - was not observed, however, that Dwight ever accompanied them thither or - that he devoted much of his time to their society at home. It began to be - remarked, here and there, that it was getting to be about time for Dwight - Ransom to steady down, if he was ever going to. Although everybody liked - him and was glad to see him about, an impression was gradually shaping - itself that he never would amount to much. - </p> - <p> - All at once Dwight staggered the public consciousness by putting on his - best clothes one Sunday and going with his folks to church. Those who saw - him on the way there could not make it out at all, except on the - hypothesis that there had been a death in the family. Those who - encountered him upon his return from the sacred edifice, however, found a - clue to the mystery ready made. He was walking home with Julia Parmalee. - </p> - <p> - There were others whose passionate desire it was to walk home with Julia. - They had been enlivening Octavius with public displays of their rivalry - for something like two months when Dwight appeared on the scene as a - competitor. Easy-going as he was in ordinary matters, he revealed himself - now to be a hustler in the Courts of love. It took him but a single day to - drive the teller of the bank from the field. The Principal of the - Seminary, a rising young lawyer, and the head bookkeeper at the - freight-house, severally went by the board within a fortnight. - </p> - <p> - There remained old Dr. Conger’s son Emory, who was of a tougher fibre and - gave Dwight several added weeks of combat. He enjoyed the advantage of - having nothing whatever to do. He possessed, moreover, a remarkably varied - wardrobe and white hands, and loomed unique among the males of our town in - his ability to play on the piano. With such aids a young man may go far in - a quiet neighborhood, and for a time Emory Conger certainly seemed to be - holding his own, if not more. His discomfiture, when it came, was dramatic - in its swift completeness. One forenoon we saw Dwight on the street in a - new and resplendent officer’s uniform, and learned that he had been - commissioned to raise a battery. That very evening the doctor’s son left - town, and the news went round that Lieutenant Ransom was engaged to Miss - Parmalee. - </p> - <p> - An impression prevailed that Dwight would not have objected to let the - matter rest there. He had gained his point, and might well regard the - battery and the war itself as things which had served their purpose and - could now be dispensed with. No one would have blamed him much for feeling - that way about it. - </p> - <p> - But this was not Julia’s view. She adopted the battery for her own while - it was still little more than a name, and swept it forward with such a - swirling rush of enthusiasm that the men were all enlisted, the - organization settled, and the date of departure for the front sternly - fastened, before anybody could lay a hand to the brakes. Her St. Mark’s - Ladies’ Aid Society presented Dwight with a sword. Her branch of the - Sanitary Commission voted to entertain the battery with a hot meal in the - depot yard before it took the train. We have seen how she went and had - herself photographed standing proudly behind the belted and martial - Dwight. After these things it was impossible for Battery G to back out. - </p> - <p> - The artillerymen had a bright blue sky and a warm sunlit noontide for - their departure. Even the most cynical of those who had come to see them - off yielded toward the end to the genial influence of the weather and the - impulse of good-fellowship, and joined in the handshaking at the car - windows, and in the volley of cheers which were raised as the train drew - slowly out of the yard. - </p> - <p> - At this moment the ladies of the Sanitary Commission had to bestir - themselves to save the remnant of oranges and sandwiches on their tables - from the swooping raid of the youth of Octavius, and, what with - administering cuffs and shakings, and keeping their garments out of the - way of coffee-cups overturned in the scramble, had no time to watch Julia - Parmalee. - </p> - <p> - The men gathered in the yard kept her steadily in view, however, as she - stood prominently in front of the throng, on the top of a baggage truck, - and waved her handkerchief until the train had dwindled into nothingness - down the valley. These observers had an eye also on three young men who - had got as near this truck as possible. Interest in Dwight and his battery - was already giving place to curiosity as to which of these three—the - bank-teller, the freight-house clerk, or the rising young lawyer—would - win the chance of helping Julia down off her perch. - </p> - <p> - No one was prepared for what really happened. - </p> - <p> - Miss Parmalee turned and looked thoughtfully, one might say abstractedly, - about her. Somehow she seemed not to see any of the hands which were - eagerly uplifted toward her. Instead, her musing gaze roved lightly over - the predatory scuffle among the tables, over the ancient depot building, - over the assembled throng of citizens in the background, then wandered - nearer, with the pretty inconsequence of a butterfly’s flight. Of course - it was the farewell to Dwight which had left that soft, rosy flush in her - dark, round cheeks. The glance that she was sending idly fluttering here - and there did not seem so obviously connected with the Lieutenant. Of a - sudden it halted and went into a smile. - </p> - <p> - “Oh, Mr. Pulford! May I trouble you?” she said in very distinct tones, - bending forward over the edge of the truck, and holding forth two white - and most shapely hands. - </p> - <p> - Marsena was standing fully six feet away. Like the others, he had been - looking at Miss Parmalee, but with no hint of expectation in his eyes. - This abrupt summons seemed to surprise him even more than it did the - crowd. He started, changed color, fixed a wistful, almost pleading stare - upon the sunlit vacancy just above the head of the enchantress, and - confusedly fumbled with his glove tips, as if to make bare his hands for - this great function. Then, straightening himself, he slowly moved toward - her like one in a trance. - </p> - <p> - The rivals edged out of Marsena’s way in dum-founded silence, as if he had - been walking in his sleep, and waking were dangerous. He came up, made a - formal bow, and lifted his gloved hands in chivalrous pretence of guiding - the graceful little jump which brought Miss Parmalee to the ground—all - with a pale, motionless face upon which shone a solemn ecstasy. - </p> - <p> - It was Marsena’s habit, when out of doors, to carry his right hand in the - breast of his frock-coat. As he made an angle of his elbow now, from sheer - force of custom, Julia promptly took the movement as a proffer of physical - support, and availed herself of it. Marsena felt himself thrilling from - top to toe at the touch of her hand upon his sleeve. If there rose in his - mind an awkward consciousness that this sort of thing was unusual in - Octavius by daylight, the embarrassment was only momentary. He held - himself proudly erect, and marched out of the depot yard with Miss - Parmalee on his arm. - </p> - <p> - As Homer Sage remarked that evening on the stoop of the Excelsior Hotel, - this event made the departure of Battery G seem by comparison very small - potatoes indeed. - </p> - <p> - It was impossible for the twain not to realize that everybody was looking - at them, as they made their way up the shady side of the main street. But - there is another language of the hands than that taught in deaf-mute - schools, and Julia’s hand seemed to tell Marsena’s arm distinctly that she - didn’t care a bit. As for him, after that first nervous minute or two, the - experience was all joy—joy so profound and overwhelming that he - could only ponder it in dazzled silence. It is true that Julia was talking—rattling - on with sprightly volubility about all sorts of things—but to - Marsena her remarks no more invited answers than does so much enthralling - music. When she stopped for a breath he did not remember what she had been - saying. He only knew how he felt. - </p> - <p> - “I wish you’d come straight to the gallery with me,” he said; “I’d like - first-rate to make a real picture of you—by yourself.” - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <p> - “Well, I swow!” remarked Mr. Newton Shull, along in the later afternoon; - “I didn’t expect we’d make our salt to-day, with Marsena away pretty near - the whole forenoon, and all the folks down to the depot, and here it turns - out way the best day we’ve had yet. Actually had to send people away!” - </p> - <p> - “Guess that didn’t worry him much,” commented the boy, from where he sat - on the work-bench swinging his legs in idleness. - </p> - <p> - Mr. Shull nodded his head suggestively. “No, I dare say not,” he said. “I - kind o’ begrudge not bein’ an operator myself, when such setters as that - come in. She must have been up there a full two hours—them two all - by themselves—and the countrymen loafin’ around out in the - reception-room there, stompin’ their feet and grindin’ their teeth, jest - tired to death o’ waitin’. It went agin my grain to tell them last two - lots they’d have to come some other day; but—I dunno—perhaps - it’s jest as well. They’ll go and tell it around that we’ve got more’n we - can do—and that’s good for business. But, all the same, it seemed to - me as if he took considerable more time than was really needful. He can - turn out four farmers in fifteen minutes, if he puts on a spurt; and here - he was a full two hours, and only five pictures of her to show for it.” - </p> - <p> - “Six,” said the boy. - </p> - <p> - “Yes, so it was—countin’ the one with her hair let down,” Mr. Shull - admitted. “I dunno whether that one oughtn’t to be a little extry. I - thought o’ tellin’ her that it would be, on account of so much hair - consumin’ more chemicals; but—I dunno—somehow—she sort - o’ looked as if she knew better. Did you ever notice them eyes o’ hern, - how they look as if they could see straight through you, and out on the - other side?” - </p> - <p> - The boy shook his head. “I don’t bother my head about women,” he said. - “Got somethin’ better to do.” - </p> - <p> - “Guess that’s a pretty good plan too,” mused Mr. Shull. “Somehow you can’t - seem to make ’em out at all. Now, I’ve been around a good deal, and - yet somehow I don’t feel as if I knew much about women. I’m bound to say, - though,” he added upon reflection, “they know considerable about me.” - </p> - <p> - “I suppose the first thing we know now,” remarked the boy, impatiently - changing the subject, “McClellan ’ll be in Richmond. They say it’s - liable to happen now any day.” - </p> - <p> - Newton Shull was but a lukewarm patriot. “They needn’t hurry on my - account,” he said. “It would be kind o’ mean to have the whole thing - fizzle out now, jest when the picture business has begun to amount to - something. Why, we must have took in up’ards of $11 to-day—frames - and all—and two years ago we’d ’a’ been lucky to get in $3. - Let’s see: there’s two fifties and five thirty-fives, that’s $2.75, and - the Dutch boy with the drum, that’s $3.40, counting the mat, and then - there’s Miss Parmalee—four daguerreotypes, and two negatives, and - small frames for each, and two large frames for crayons she’s going to do - herself, and cord and nails—I suppose she’ll think them ought to be - thrown in—” - </p> - <p> - “What! didn’t you make her pay in advance?” asked the boy. “I thought - everybody had to.” - </p> - <p> - “You got to humor some folks,” explained Mr. Shull, with a note of regret - in his voice. “These big bugs with plenty o’ money always have to be - waited on. It ain’t right, but it has to be. Besides, you can always slide - on an extra quarter or so when you send in the bill. That sort o’ evens - the thing up. Now, in her case, for instance, where we’d charge ordinary - folks a dollar for two daguerreotypes, we can send her in a bill for—” - </p> - <p> - Neither Mr. Shull nor the boy had heard Mar-sena’s descending steps on the - staircase, yet at this moment he entered the little work-room and walked - across it to the bay window, where the printing was done. There was an - unusual degree of abstraction in his face and mien—unusual even for - him—and he drummed absent-mindedly on the panes as he stood looking - out at the street or the sky, or ‘whatever it was his listless gaze - beheld. - </p> - <p> - “How much do you think it ’ud be safe to stick Miss Parmalee apiece - for them daguerreotypes?” asked Newton Shull of his partner. - </p> - <p> - Marsena turned and stared for a moment as if he doubted having heard - aright. Then he made curt answer: “She is not to be charged anything at - all. They were made for her as presents.” - </p> - <p> - It was the other partner’s turn to stare. - </p> - <p> - “Well, of course—if you say it’s all right,” he managed to get out, - “but I suppose on the frames we can—” - </p> - <p> - “The frames are presents, too,” said Marsena, with decision. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - IV - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">D</span>uring the - fortnight or three weeks following the departure of Battery G it became - clear to every one that the war was as good as over. It had lasted already - a whole year, but now the end was obviously at hand. The Union army had - the Rebels cooped up in Yorktown—the identical place where the - British had been compelled to surrender at the close of the Revolution—and - it was impossible that they should get away. The very coincidence of - locality was enough in itself to convince the most skeptical. - </p> - <p> - We read that Fitz John Porter had a balloon fastened by a rope, in which - he daily went up and took a look through his field-glasses at the Rebels, - all miserably huddled together in their trap, awaiting their doom. Our - soldiers wrote home now that final victory could only be a matter of a few - weeks, or months at the most. Some of them said they would surely be home - by haying time. Their letters no longer dwelt upon battles, or the - prospect of battles, but gossiped about the jealousies and quarrels among - our generals, who seemed to dislike one another much more than they did - the common enemy, and told us long and quite incredible tales about the - mud in Virginia. No soldier’s letter that spring was complete without a - chapter on the mud. There were many stories about mules and their - contraband drivers being bodily sunk out of sight in these weltering seas - of mire, and of new boots being made for the officers to come up to their - armpits, which we hardly knew whether to believe or not. But about the - fact that peace was practically within view there could be no doubt. - </p> - <p> - Under the influence of this mood, Miss Parma-lee’s ambitious project for a - grand fair and festival in aid of the Field Hospital and Nurse Fund - naturally languished. If the war was coming to a close so soon, there - could be no use in going to so much worry and trouble, to say nothing of - the expense. - </p> - <p> - Miss Julia seemed to take this view of it herself. She ceased active - preparations for the fair, and printed in the Thessaly <i>Banner of - Liberty</i> a beautiful poem over her own name entitled “The Dovelike Dawn - of White-winged Peace.” She also got herself some new and summery dresses, - of gay tints and very fashionable form, and went to be photographed in - each. Her almost daily presence at the gallery came, indeed, to be a - leading topic of conversation in Octavius. Some said that she was taking - lessons of Marsena—learning to make photographs—but others put - a different construction on the matter and winked as they did so. - </p> - <p> - As for Marsena, he moved about the streets these days with his head among - the stars, in a state of rapt and reverent exaltation. He had never been - what might be called a talker, but now it was as much as the best of us - could do to get any kind of word from him. He did not seem to talk to - Julia any more than to the general public, but just luxuriated with a dumb - solemnity of joy in her company, sitting sometimes for hours beside her on - the piazza of the Parmalee house, or focusing her pretty image with silent - delight on the ground glass of his best camera day after day, or walking - with her, arm in arm, to the Episcopal church on Sundays. He had always - been a Presbyterian before, but now he bore himself in the prominent - Parmalee pew at St. Mark’s with stately correctness, rising, kneeling, - seating himself, just as the others did, and helping Miss Julia hold her - Prayer Book with an air of having known the ritual from childhood. - </p> - <p> - No doubt a good many people felt that all this was rough on the absent - Dwight Ransom, and probably some of them talked openly about it; but - interest in this aspect of the case was swallowed up in the larger - attention now given to Marsena Pulford himself. It began to be reported - that he really came of an extraordinarily good family in New England, and - that an uncle of his had been in Congress. The legend that he had means of - his own did not take much root, but it was admitted that he must now be - simply coining money. Some went so far as to estimate his annual profits - as high as $1,500, which sounded to the average Octavian like a dream. It - was commonly understood that he had abandoned an earlier intention to buy - a house and lot of his own, and this clearly seemed to show that he - counted upon going presently to live in the Parmalee mansion. People - speculated with idle curiosity as to the likelihood of this coming to pass - before the war ended and Battery G returned home. - </p> - <p> - Suddenly great and stirring news fell upon the startled North and set - Octavius thrilling with excitement, along with every other community far - and near. It was in the first week or so of May that the surprise came; - the Rebels, whom we had supposed to be securely locked up in Yorktown, - with no alternative save starvation or surrender, decided not to remain - there any longer, and accordingly marched comfortably off in the direction - of Richmond! - </p> - <p> - Quick upon the heels of this came tidings that the Union army was in - pursuit, and that there had been savage fighting with the Confederate - rear-guard at Williamsburg. The papers said that the war, so far from - ending, must now be fought all over again. The marvellous story of the - Monitor and Merrimac sent our men folks into a frenzy of patriotic fervor. - Our women learned with sinking hearts that the new corps which included - our Dearborn County regiments was to bear the brunt of the conflict in - this changed order of things. We were all off again in a hysterical whirl - of emotions—now pride, now horror, now bitter wrath on top. - </p> - <p> - In the middle of all this the famous Field Hospital and Nurse Fund Fair - was held. The project had slumbered the while people thought peace so - near. It sprang up with renewed and vigorous life the moment the echo of - those guns at Williamsburg reached our ears. And of course at its head was - Julia Parmalee. - </p> - <p> - It would take a long time and a powerful ransacking of memory to catalogue - the remarkable things which this active young woman did toward making that - fair the success it undoubtedly was. Even more notable were the things - which she coaxed, argued, or shamed other folks into doing for it. Years - afterward there were old people who would tell you that Octavius had never - been quite the same place since. - </p> - <p> - For one thing, instead of the Fireman’s Hall, with its dingy aspect and - somewhat rowdyish associations, the fair was held in the Court House, and - we all understood that Miss Julia had been able to secure this favor on - account of her late uncle, the Judge, when any one else would have been - refused. It was under her tireless and ubiquitous supervision that this - solemn old interior now took on a gay and festal face. Under the - inspiration of her glance the members of the Fire Company and the Alert - Baseball Club vied with each other in borrowing flags and hanging them - from the most inaccessible and adventurous points. The rivalry between the - local Freemasons and Odd Fellows was utilized to build contemporary booths - at the sides and down the centre—on a floor laid over the benches by - the Carpenters’ Benevolent Association. The ladies’ organizations of the - various churches, out of devotion to the Union and jealousy of one - another, did all the rest. - </p> - <p> - At the sides were the stalls for the sale of useful household articles, - and sedate and elderly matrons found themselves now dragged from the mild - obscurity of homes where they did their own work, and thrust forward to - preside over the sales in these booths, while thrifty, not to say - penurious, merchants came and stood around and regarded with amazement the - merchandise which they had been wheedled into contributing gratis out of - their own stores. The suggestion that they should now buy it back again - paralyzed their faculties, and imparted a distinct restraint to the - festivities at the sides of the big court-room. - </p> - <p> - In the centre was a double row of booths for the sale of articles not so - strictly useful, and here the young people congregated. All the girls of - Octavius seemed to have been gathered here—the pretty ones and the - plain ones, the saucy ones and the shy, the maidens who were “getting - along” and the damsels not yet out of their teens. Stiff, spreading - crinolines brushed juvenile pantalettes, and the dark head of long, - shaving-like ringlets contrasted itself with the bold waterfall of blonde - hair. These girls did not know one another very well, save by little - groups formed around the nucleus of a church association, and very few of - them knew Miss Par-malee at all, except, of course, by sight. But now, - astonishing to relate, she recognized them by name as old friends, shook - hands warmly right and left, and blithely set them all to work and at - their ease. The idea of selling things to young men abashed them by its - weird and unmaidenly novelty. She showed them how it should be done—bringing - forward for the purpose a sheepishly obstinate drugstore clerk, and - publicly dragooning him into paying eighty cents for a leather dog-collar, - despite his protests that he had no dog and hated the whole canine - species, and could get such a strap as that anywhere for fifteen cents—all - amid the greatest merriment. Her influence was so pervasive, indeed, that - even the nicest girls soon got into a state of giggling familiarity with - comparative strangers, which gave their elders concern, and which in some - cases it took many months to straighten out again. But for the time all - was sparkling gaiety. On the second and final evening, after the oyster - supper, the Philharmonics played and a choir of girls sang patriotic - songs. Then the gas was turned down and the stereopticon show began. - </p> - <p> - As the last concerted achievement of the firm of Pulford & Shull, this - magic-lantern performance is still remembered. The idea of it, of course, - was Julia’s. She suggested it to Marsena, and he gladly volunteered to - make any number of positive plates from appropriate pictures and portraits - for the purpose. Then she pressed Newton Shull into the service to get a - stereopticon on hire, to rig up the platform and canvas for it, and - finally to consent to quit his post among the Philharmonics when the music - ceased, and to go off up into the gallery to work the slides. He also, - during Marsena’s absence one day, made a slide on his own account. - </p> - <p> - Mr. Shull had not taken very kindly to the idea when Miss Julia first - broached it to him. - </p> - <p> - “No, I don’t know as I ever worked a stereopticon,” he said, striving to - look with cold placidity into the winsome and beaming smile with which she - confronted him one day out in the reception-room. She had never smiled at - him before or pretended even to know his name. “I guess you’d better hire - a man up from Tecumseh to bring the machine and run it himself.” - </p> - <p> - “But you can do it so much better, my dear Mr. Shull!” she urged. “You do - everything so much better! Mr. Pulford often says that he never knew such - a handyman in all his life. It seems that there is literally nothing that - you can’t do—except—perhaps—refuse a lady a great - personal favor.” - </p> - <p> - Miss Julia put this last so delicately, and with such a pretty little arch - nod of the head and turn of the eyes, that Newton Shull surrendered at - discretion. He promised everything on the spot, and he kept his word. In - fact, he more than kept it. - </p> - <p> - The great evening came, as I have said, and when the lights were turned - down to extinction’s verge those who were nearest the front could - distinguish the vacant chair which Mr. Shull had been occupying, with his - bass viol leaning against it. They whispered from one to another that he - had gone up in the gallery to work this new-fangled contrivance. Then came - a flashing broad disk of light on the screen above the judges’ bench, a - spreading sibilant murmur of interest, and the show began. - </p> - <p> - It was an oddly limited collection of pictures—mainly thin and - feeble copies of newspaper engravings, photographic portraits, and ideal - heads from the magazines. Winfield Scott followed in the wake of Kossuth, - and Garibaldi led the way for John C. Frémont and Lola Montez. There was - applause for the long, homely, familiar face of Lincoln, and a derisive - snicker for the likeness of Jeff Davis turned upside down. Then came local - heroes from the district round about—Gen. Boyce, Col. McIntyre, and - young Adjt. Heron, who had died so bravely at Ball’s Bluff—mixed - with some landscapes and statuary, and a comic caricature or two. The rapt - assemblage murmured its recognitions, sighed its deeper emotions, chuckled - over the funny plates—deeming it all a most delightful - entertainment. From time to time there were long hitches, marked by a - curious spluttering noise above, and the abortive flashes of meaningless - light on the screen, and the explanation was passed about in undertones - that Mr. Shull was having difficulties with the machine. - </p> - <p> - It was after the longest of these delays that, all at once, an extremely - vivid picture was jerked suddenly upon the canvas, and, after a few - preliminary twitches, settled in place to stare us out of countenance. - There was no room for mistake. It was the portrait of Miss Julia Parmalee - standing proudly erect in statuesque posture, with one hand resting on the - back of a chair, and seated in this chair was Lieut. Dwight Ransom, - smiling amiably. - </p> - <p> - There was a moment’s deadly hush, while we gazed at this unlooked-for - apparition. It seemed, upon examination, as if there was a certain irony - in the Lieutenant’s grin. Some one in the darkness emitted an abrupt snort - of amusement, and a general titter arose, hung in the air for an awkward - instant, and then was drowned by a generous burst of applause. While the - people were still clapping their hands the picture was withdrawn from the - screen, and we heard Newton Shull call down from his perch in the gallery: - </p> - <p> - “You kin turn up the lights now. They ain’t no more to this.” - </p> - <p> - In another minute we were sitting once again in the broad glare of the - gaslight, blinking confusedly at one another, and with a dazed - consciousness that something rather embarrassing had happened. The boldest - of us began to steal glances across to where Miss Parmalee and Marsena - sat, just in front of the steps to the bench. - </p> - <p> - What Miss Julia felt was beyond guessing, but there she was, at any rate, - bending over and talking vivaciously, all smiles and collected nerves, to - a lady two seats removed. But Marsena displayed no such presence of mind. - He sat bolt upright, with an extraordinarily white face and a drooping - jaw, staring fixedly at the empty canvas on the wall before him. Such - absolute astonishment was never depicted on human visage before. - </p> - <p> - Perhaps from native inability to mind his own business, perhaps with a - kindly view of saving an anxious situation, the Baptist minister rose now - to his feet, coughed loudly to secure attention, and began some florid - remarks about the success of the fair, the especial beauty of the lantern - exhibition they had just witnessed, and the felicitous way in which it had - terminated with a portrait of the beautiful and distinguished young lady - to whose genius and unwearying efforts they were all so deeply indebted. - In these times of national travail and distress, he said, there was a - peculiar satisfaction in seeing her portrait accompanied by that of one of - the courageous and noble young men who had sprung to the defence of their - country. The poet had averred, he continued, that none but the brave - deserved the fair, and so on, and so on. - </p> - <p> - Miss Julia listened to it all with her head on one side and a modestly - deprecatory half-smile on her face. At its finish she rose, turned to face - everybody, made a pert, laughing little bow, and sat down again, - apparently all happiness. But it was noted that Marsena did not take his - pained and fascinated gaze from that mocking white screen on the wall - straight in front. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <p> - They walked in silence that evening to almost the gate of the Parmalee - mansion. Julia had taken his arm, as usual; but Marsena could not but feel - that the touch was different. It was in the nature of a relief to him that - for once she did not talk. His heart was too sore, his brain too - bewildered, for the task of even a one-sided conversation, such as theirs - was wont to be. Then all at once the silence grew terrible to him—a - weight to be lifted at all hazards on the instant. - </p> - <p> - “Shull must have made that last slide himself,” he blurted out. “I never - dreamt of its being made.” - </p> - <p> - “I thought it came out very well indeed,” remarked Miss Parmalee, - “especially his uniform. You could quite see the eagles on the buttons. - You must thank Mr. Shull for me.” - </p> - <p> - “I’ll speak to him in the morning about it,” said Marsena, with gloomy - emphasis. He sighed, bit his lip, fixed an intent gaze upon the big dark - bulk of the Parmalee house looming before them, and spoke again. “There’s - something that I want to say to <i>you</i>, though, that won’t keep till - morning.” A tiny movement of the hand on his arm was the only response. “I - see now,” Marsena went on, “that I ain’t been making any real headway with - you at all. I thought—well—I don’t know as I know just what I - did think—but I guess now that it was a mistake.” Yes—there - was a distinct flutter of the little gloved hand. It put a wild thought - into Marsena’s head. - </p> - <p> - “Would you,” he began boldly—“I never spoke of it before—but - would you—that is, if I was to enlist and go to the war—would - that make any difference?—you know what I mean.” - </p> - <p> - She looked up at him with magnetic sweetness in her dusky, shadowed - glance. “How can any ablebodied young patriot hesitate at such a time as - this?” she made answer, and pressed his arm. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - V - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t was in this same - May, not more than a week after the momentous episode of the Field - Hospital and Nurse Fund Fair, that Marsena Pulford went off to the war. - </p> - <p> - There was no ostentation about his departure. He had indeed been gone for - a day or two before it became known in Octavius that his absence from town - meant that he had enlisted down at Tecumseh. We learned that he had - started as a common private, but everybody made sure that a man of his - distinguished appearance and deportment would speedily get a commission. - Everybody, too, had a theory of some sort as to the motives for this - sudden and strange behavior of his. These theories agreed in linking Miss - Parmalee with the affair, but there were hopeless divergencies as to the - exact part she played in it. One party held that Marsena had been driven - to seek death on the tented field by despair at having been given the - “mitten.” Others insisted that he had not been given the “mitten” at all, - but had gone because her well-known martial ardor made the sacrifice of - her betrothed necessary to her peace of mind. A minority took the view - which Homer Sage promulgated from his tilted-back chair on the stoop of - the Excelsior Hotel. - </p> - <p> - “They ain’t nothin’ settled betwixt ’em,” this student of human - nature declared. “She jest dared him to go, and he went. And if you only - give her time, she’ll have the whole male unmarried population of - Octavius, between the ages of sixteen and sixty, down there wallerin’ - around in the Virginny swamps, feedin’ the muskeeters and makin’ a bid for - glory.” - </p> - <p> - But in a few days there came the terribly exciting news of Seven Pines and - Fair Oaks—that first great combat of the revived war in the East—and - we ceased to bother our heads about the photographer and his love. The - enlisting fever sprang up again, and our young men began to make their way - by dozens and scores to the recruiting office at Tecumseh. There were more - farewells, more tears and prayers, not to mention several funerals of - soldiers killed at Hanover Court House, where that Fifth Corps, which - contained most of our volunteers, had its first spring smell of blood. And - soon thereafter burst upon us the awful sustained carnage of the Seven - Days’ fighting, which drove out of our minds even the recollection that - Miss Julia Parmalee herself had volunteered for active service in the - Sanitary Commission, and gone South to take up her work. - </p> - <p> - And so July 3d came, bringing with it the bare tidings of that closing - desperate battle of the week at Malvern Hill, and the movement of what was - left of the Army of the Potomac to a safe resting place on the James - River. We were beginning to get the details of local interest by the slow - single wire from Thessaly, and sickening enough they were. The village - streets were filled with silent, horror-stricken crowds. The whole - community seemed to have but a single face, repeated upon the mental - vision at every step—a terrible face with distended, empty eyes, - riven brows, and an open drawn mouth like the old Greek mask of tragedy. - </p> - <p> - “I swan! I don’t know whether to keep open to-morrow or not,” said Mr. - Newton Shull, for perhaps the twentieth time, as he wandered once again - from the reception-room into the little workshop behind. “In some ways - it’s kind of agin my principles to work on Independence Day—but, - then again, if I thought there was likely to be a good many farmers comin’ - into town—” - </p> - <p> - “They’ll be plenty of ’em cornin’ in,” said the boy, over his - shoulder, “but they’ll steer clear of here.” - </p> - <p> - “I’m ’fraid so,” sighed Mr. Shull. He advanced a listless step or - two and gazed with dejected apathy at the newspaper map tacked to the - wall, on which the boy was making red and blue crosses with a colored - pencil. “I don’t see much good o’ that,” he said. “Still, of course, if it - eases your mind any—” - </p> - <p> - “That’s where the fightin’ finished,” observed the boy, pointing to a big - mark on the map. “That’s Malvern Hill there, and here—down where the - river takes the big bend—that’s Harrison’s Landing, where the army’s - movin’ to. See them seven rings? Them are the battles, one each day, as - our men forced their way down through the Chickahominy swamps, beginnin’ - up in the corner with Beaver Dam Creek. If the map was a little higher it - ’ud show the Pamunkey, where they started from. My uncle says that - the whole mistake was in ever abandoning the Pamunkey.” - </p> - <p> - “Pa-monkey or Ma-monkey,” said Newton Shull, gloomily, “it wouldn’t be no - comfort to me to see it, even on a map. It’s jest taken and busted me and - my business here clean as a whistle. We ain’t paid expenses two days in a - week sence Marseny went. Here I’ve got now so ’t I kin take a - plain, everyday sort o’ picture jest about as well as he did—a - little streakid sometimes, perhaps, and more or less pinholes—but - still pretty middlin’ fair on an average, and then, darn my buttons if - they don’t all stop comin’. It positively don’t seem to me as if there was - a single human bein’ in Dearborn County that ’ud have his picture - took as a gift. All they want now is to have enlargements thrown up from - little likenesses of their men folks that have been killed, and them I - don’t know how to do no more’n a babe unborn.” - </p> - <p> - “You knew well enough how to make that stere-opticon slide,” remarked the - boy with severity. - </p> - <p> - “Yes,” mused Mr. Shull, “that darned thing—that made a peck o’ - trouble, didn’t it? I dunno what on earth possessed me; I kind o’ seemed - to git the notion o’ doin’ it into my head all to once ’t, and - somehow I never dreamt of its rilin’ Marseny so; you couldn’t tell that a - man ’ud be so blamed touchy as all that, could you?—and I - dunno, like as not he’d ’a’ enlisted anyhow. But I do wish he’d - showed me how to make them pesky enlargements afore he went. If I’d only - seen him do one, even once, I could ’a’ picked the thing up, but I - never did. It’s just my luck!” - </p> - <p> - “Say,” said the boy, looking up with a sudden thought, “do you know what - my mother heard yesterday? It’s all over the place that before Marseny - left he went to Squire Schermerhorn’s and made his will, and left - everything he’s got to the Parmalee girl, in case he gits killed. So, if - anything happens she’d be your partner, wouldn’t she?” - </p> - <p> - Newton Shull stared with surprise. “Well, now, that beats creation,” he - said, after a little. “Somehow you know that never occurred to me, and - yet, of course, that ’ud be jest his style.” - </p> - <p> - “Yes, sir,” repeated the other, “they say he’s left her every identical - thing.” - </p> - <p> - “It’s allus that way in this world,” reflected Mr. Shull, sadly. “Them - that don’t need it one solitary atom, they’re eternally gettin’ every - mortal thing left to ’em. Why, that girl’s so rich already she - don’t know what to do with her money. If I was her, I bet a cooky I - wouldn’t go pikin’ off to the battlefield, doin’ nursin’ and tyin’ on - bandages, and fannin’ men while they were gittin’ their legs cut off. No, - sirree; I’d let the Sanitary Commission scuffle along without me, I can - tell you! A hoss and buggy and a fust-class two-dollar-a-day hotel, and - goin’ to the theatre jest when I took the notion—that’d be good - enough for me.” - </p> - <p> - “I suppose the sign then ’ud be ‘Shull & Parmalee,’ wouldn’t - it?” queried the boy. - </p> - <p> - “Well, now, I ain’t so sure about that,” said Mr. Shull, thoughtfully. “It - might be that, bein’ a woman, her name ’ud come first, out o’ - politeness. But then, of course, most prob’ly she’d want to sell out - instid, and then I’d make the valuation, and she could give me time. Or - she might want to stay in, only on the quiet, you know—what they - call a silent partner.” - </p> - <p> - “Nobody’d ever call her a silent partner,” observed the boy. “She couldn’t - keep still if she tried.” - </p> - <p> - “I wouldn’t care how much she talked,” said Mr. Shull, “if she only put - enough more money into the business. I didn’t take much to her, somehow, - along at fust, but the more I’ve seen of her the more I like the cut of - her jib. She’s got ‘go’ in her, that gal has; she jest figures out what - she wants, and then she sails in and gits it. It don’t matter who the man - is, she jest takes and winds him round her little finger. Why, Marseny, - here, he wasn’t no more than so much putty in her hands. I lost all - patience with him. You wouldn’t catch me being run by a woman that way.” - </p> - <p> - “So far’s I could see,” suggested the other, “she seemed to git pretty - much all she wanted out of you, too. You were dancin’ round, helpin’ her - at the fair there, like a hen on a hot griddle.” - </p> - <p> - “It was all on his account,” put in the partner, with emphasis. “Jest to - please him; he seemed so much sot on her bein’ humored in everything. I - did feel kind o’ foolish about it at the time—I never somehow - believed much in doin’ work for nothin’—but maybe it was all for the - best. If what they say about his makin’ a will is true, why it won’t do me - no harm to be on good terms with her—in case—in case—” - </p> - <p> - Mr. Shull was standing at the window, and his idle gaze had been vaguely - taking in the general; prospect of the street below the while he spoke. At - this moment he discovered that some one on the opposite sidewalk was - making vehement gestures to attract his attention. He lifted the sash and - put his head out to listen, but the message came across loud enough for - even the boy inside to hear. - </p> - <p> - “You’d better hurry round to the telegraph office!” this hoarse, anonymous - voice cried. “Malvern Hill list is a-comin’ in—and they say your - pardner’s been shot—shot bad, too!” - </p> - <p> - Newton Shull drew in his head and stood for some moments staring blankly - at the map on the wall. “Well, I swan!” he began, with confused - hesitation, “I dunno—it seems to me—well, yes, I guess prob’ly - the best thing ’ll be for her to put more money into the business—yes, - that’s the plan—and we kin hire an operator up from Tecumseh.” - </p> - <p> - But there was no one to pass an opinion on his project. The boy had - snatched his hat, and could be heard even now dashing his way furiously - down the outer stairs. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <p> - The summer dusk had begun to gather before Octavius heard all that was to - be learned of the frightful calamity which had befallen its absent sons. - The local roll of death and disaster from Gaines’s Mill earlier in the - week had seemed incredibly awful. This new budget of horrors from Malvern - was far worse. - </p> - <p> - “Wa’n’t the rest of the North doin’ anything at all?” a wild-eyed, - dishevelled old farmer cried out in a shaking, half-frenzied shriek from - the press of the crowd round the telegraph office. “Do they think Dearborn - County’s got to suppress this whole damned rebellion single-handed?” - </p> - <p> - It seemed to the dazed and horrified throng as if some such idea must be - in the minds of the rest of the Union. Surely no other little community—or - big community, either—could have had such a hideous blow dealt to it - as this under which Octavius reeled. The list of the week for the county, - including Gaines’s Mill, showed one hundred and eight dead outright, and - very nearly five hundred more wounded in battle. It was too shocking for - comprehension. - </p> - <p> - As evening drew on, men gathered the nerve to say to one another that - there was something very glorious in the way the two regiments had been - thrust into the front, and had shown themselves heroically fit for that - grim honor. They tried, too, to extract solace from the news that the - regiments in question had been mentioned by name in the general despatches - as having distinguished themselves and their county above all the rest—but - it was an empty and heart-sickened pretence at best, and when, about dark, - the women folks, who had waited in vain for them to come home to supper, - began to appear on the skirts of the crowd, it was given up altogether. In - after years Octavius got so that it could cheer those sinister names of - Gaines’s Mill and Malvern Hill, and swell with pride at the memories they - evoked. But that evening no one cheered. It was too terrible. - </p> - <p> - There was, indeed, a single partial exception to this rule. The regular - service of news had ceased—in those days, before the duplex - invention, the single wire had most melancholy limitations—but the - throng still lingered; and when, in the failing light, the postmaster was - seen to step up again on the chair by the door with a bit of paper in his - hand, a solemn hush ran over the assemblage. - </p> - <p> - “It is a private telegram sent to me personally,” he explained, in the - loud clear tones of one who had earned his office by years of stump - speaking; “but it is intended for you all, I should presume.” - </p> - <p> - The silent crowd pushed nearer, and listened with strained attention as - this despatch was read:= - </p> - <p> - ```Headquarters Sanitary Commission, - </p> - <p> - ````Harrison’s Landing, Va., Wednesday Morning.= - </p> - <p> - <i>To Postmaster Octavius, N. Y.:</i> - </p> - <p> - <i>No words can describe magnificent record soldiers of Dearborn County, - especially Starbuck, made past week. I bless fate which identified my poor - services with such superb heroism. After second sleepless night, Col. - Starbuck now reposing peacefully; doctor says crisis past; he surely - recover, though process be slow. You will learn with pride he been - brevetted Brigadier, fact which it was my privilege to announce to him - last evening. He feebly thanked me, murmuring, “Tell them at home.”</i> - </p> - <p> - <i>Julia Parmalee.</i> - </p> - <p> - In the silence which ensued the postmaster held the paper up and scanned - it narrowly by the waning light. “There is something else,” he said—“Oh, - yes, I see; ‘Franked despatch Sanitary Commission.’ That’s all.” - </p> - <p> - Another figure was seen suddenly clambering upon the chair, with an arm - around the postmaster for support. It was the teller of the bank. He waved - his free arm excitedly, as he faced the crowd, and cried: - </p> - <p> - “Our women are as brave as our men! Three cheers for Miss Julia Parmalee! - Hip-hip!” - </p> - <p> - The loyal teller’s first “Hurrah!” fell upon the air quite by itself. - Perhaps a dozen voices helped him half-heartedly with the second. The - third died off again miserably, and he stepped down off the chair amid a - general consciousness of failure. - </p> - <p> - “Who the hell is Starbuck?” was to be heard in whispered interrogatory - passed along through the throng. Hardly anybody could answer. Boyce we - knew, and McIntyre, and many others, but Star-buck was a mystery. Then it - was explained that it must be the son of old Alanson Starbuck, of Juno - Mills, who had gone away to Philadelphia seven or eight years before. He - had not enlisted with any Dearborn County regiment, but held a staff - appointment of some kind, presumably in a Pennsylvania command. We were - quite unable to work up any emotion over him. - </p> - <p> - In fact, the more we thought it over, the more we were disposed to resent - this planting of Starbuck upon us, in the very van of Dearborn County’s - heroes. His father was a rich old curmudgeon, whom no one liked. The son - was nothing to us whatever. - </p> - <p> - As at last, in the deepening twilight, the people reluctantly began moving - toward home, such conversation as they had the heart for seemed to be - exclusively centred upon Miss Parmalee, and this queer despatch of hers. - Slow-paced, strolling groups wended their way along the main street, and - then up this side thoroughfare and that, passing in every block some dark - and close-shuttered house of mourning, and instinctively sinking still - lower their muffled tones as they passed, and carrying in their breasts, - heaven only knows what torturing loads of anguish and stricken despair—but - finding a certain relief in dwelling, instead, upon this lighter topic. - </p> - <p> - One of these groups—an elderly lady in black attire and two younger - women of sober mien—walked apart from the others and exchanged no - words at all until, turning a corner, their way led them past the Parmalee - house. The looming bulk of the old mansion and the fragrant spaciousness - of the garden about it seemed to attract the attention of Mrs. Ransom and - her daughters. They halted as by a common impulse, and fastened a hostile - gaze upon the shadowy outlines of the house and its surrounding foliage. - </p> - <p> - “If Dwight dies of his wound,” the mother said, in a voice all chilled to - calmness, “his murderess will live in there.” - </p> - <p> - “I always hated her!” said one of the daughters, with a shudder. - </p> - <p> - “But he isn’t going to die, mamma,” put in the other. “You mustn’t think - of such a thing! You know how healthy he always has been, and this is only - his shoulder. For my part, we may think ourselves very fortunate. Remember - how many have been killed or mortally wounded. It seems as if half the - people we know are in mourning. We get off very lightly with Dwight only - wounded. Did you happen to hear the details about Mr. Pulford?—you - know, the photographer—some one was saying that he was mortally - wounded.” - </p> - <p> - “She sent him to his death, then, too,” said the elder Miss Ransom, - raising her clenched hand against the black shadow of the house. - </p> - <p> - “I don’t care about that man,” broke in the mother, icily. “Nobody knows - anything of him, or where he came from. People ran after him because he - was good-looking, but he never seemed to me to know enough to come in when - it rained. If she made a fool of him, it was his own lookout. But Dwight—my - Dwight—!” - </p> - <p> - The mother’s mannered voice broke into a gasp, and she bent her head - helplessly. The daughters went to her side, and the group passed on into - the darkness. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - VI - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t was a dark, - soft, summer night in Virginia, that of the 1st of July. After the - tropical heat of the day, the air was being mercifully cooled, here on the - hilltop, by a gentle breeze, laden with just a moist suggestion of the - mist rising from the river flats and marshes down below. It was not Mother - Nature’s fault that this zephyr stirring along the parched brow of the - hill did not bear with it, too, the scents of fruits and flowers, of - new-mown hay and the yellow grain in shock, and minister soothingly to - rest and pleasant dreams. - </p> - <p> - Instead, this breeze, moving mildly in the darkness, was one vile, - embodied stench of sulphur and blood, and pestilential abominations. Go - where you would, there was no escaping this insufferable burden of foul - smells. If they were a horror on the hilltop, they were worse below. - </p> - <p> - It was one of the occasions on which Man had expended all his powers to - prove his superiority to Nature. The elements in their wildest and most - savage mood could never have wrought such butchery as this. The - vine-wrapped fences, stretching down from the plateau toward the meadow - lands below, were buttressed by piles of dead men, some in butternut, some - in blue. Clumps of stiffened bodies curled supine at the base of every - stump on the fringe of the woodland to the right and among the tumbled - sheaves of grain to the left. Out in the open, the broad, sloping hillside - and the valley bottom lay literally hidden under ridge upon ridge of - smashed and riddled human forms, and the heaped débris of human battle. - The clouds hung thick and close above, as if to keep the stars from - beholding this repellent sample of earth’s titanic beast, Man, at his - worst. An Egyptian blackness was over it all. - </p> - <p> - At intervals a lightning flash from the crest of the outermost knoll tore - this evil pall of darkness asunder, and then, with a roar and a scream, a - spluttering line of vivid flame would arch its sinister way across the - sky. A thousand little dots of light moved and zigzagged ceaselessly on - the wide expanse of obscurity underneath this crest, and when the bursts - of wrathful fireworks came from overhead it could be seen that these were - lanterns being borne about in and out among the winrows of maimed and - slain. Above all, through all, without even an instant’s lull, there arose - a terrible babel of chorused groans and prayers and howls and curses. This - noise could be heard for miles—almost as far as the boom of the - howitzers above could carry—and at a distance sounded like the - moaning of a storm through a great pine-forest. Near at hand, it sounded - like nothing else this side of hell. - </p> - <p> - An hour or so after nightfall the battery on the crest of the knoll - stopped firing. The wails and shrieks from the slope below went on all - through the night, and the lanterns of the search parties burned till the - morning sunlight put them out. - </p> - <p> - Up on the top of the hill—a broad expanse of rolling plateaus—the - scene wore a different aspect. At widely separated points bonfires and - glittering lights showed where some general of the victorious army held - his headquarters in a farm-house; and unless one pried too curiously about - these parts, there were few enough evidences on the summit of the day’s - barbaric doings. - </p> - <p> - The chief of these houses—a stately and ancient structure, built in - colonial days of brick proudly brought from Europe—had begun the - forenoon of the battle as the headquarters of the Fifth Corps. Then the - General and his staff had reduced their needs to a couple of rooms, to - leave space for wounded men. Then they had moved out altogether, to let - the whole house be used as a hospital. Then as the backwash of calamity - from the line of conflict swelled in size and volume, the stables and - barns had been turned over to the medical staff. Later, as the savage - evening fight went on, tons of new hay had been brought out and strewn in - sheltered places under the open sky to serve as beds for the sufferers. - Before night fell, even these impromptu hospitals were overtaxed, and rows - of stricken soldiers lay on the bare ground. - </p> - <p> - The day of intelligent and efficient hospital service had not yet dawned - for our army. The breakdown of what service we had had, under the - frightful stress of the battles culminating in this blood-soaked Malvern - Hill, is a matter of history, and it can be viewed the more calmly now as - the collapse of itself brought about an improved condition of affairs. But - at the time it was a woful thing, with a lax and conflicting organization, - insufficient material, a ridiculous lack of nurses, a mere handful of - really competent surgeons and, most of all, a great crowd of volunteer - medical students and ignorant practitioners, who flocked southward for the - mere excitement and practice of sawing, cutting, slashing right and left. - So it was that army surgery lent new terrors to death on the battle-field - in the year 1862. - </p> - <p> - The sky overhead was just beginning to show the ashen touch of twilight, - when two men lying stretched on the hay in a corner of the smaller - barnyard chanced to turn on their hard couch and to recognize each other. - It was a slow and almost scowling recognition, and at first bore no fruit - of words. - </p> - <p> - One was in the dress of a lieutenant of artillery, muddy and begrimed with - smoke, and having its right shoulder torn or cut open from collar to - elbow. The man himself had now such a waving, tangled growth of chestnut - beard and so grimly blackened a face, that it would have been hard to - place him as our easy-going, smiling Dwight Ransom. - </p> - <p> - The new movement had not brought ease, and now, after a few grunts of pain - and impatience, he got himself laboriously up in a sitting posture, - dragged a knapsack within reach up to support his back, and looked at his - companion again. - </p> - <p> - “I heard that you were down here somewhere,” he remarked, at last. “My - sister wrote me.” - </p> - <p> - Marsena Pulford stared up at him, made a little nodding motion of the - head, and turned his glance again into the sky straight above. He also was - a spectacle of dry mud and dust, and was bearded to the eyes. - </p> - <p> - “Where are you hit?” asked Dwight, after a pause. - </p> - <p> - For answer, Marsena slowly, and with an effort, put a hand to his breast—to - the left, below the heart. “Here, somewhere,” he said, in a low, drylipped - murmur. He did not look at Dwight again, but presently asked, “Could you - fix me—settin’ up—too?” - </p> - <p> - “I guess so,” responded Dwight. With the help of his unhurt arm he - clambered to his feet and began moving dizzily about among the row of - wounded men to his left. These groaned or snarled at him as he passed over - them, but to this he paid no attention whatever. He returned from the end - of the line, bringing two knapsacks and the battered frame of a drum, in - which some one had been trying to carry water, and with some difficulty - arranged these in a satisfactory heap. Then he knelt, pushed his arm under - Marsena’s shoulders, and lifted him up and backward to the support. Both - men grimaced and winced under the smart of the effort, and for some - minutes sat in silence, with closed eyes. - </p> - <p> - When they opened them finally it was with a sudden start at the sound of a - woman’s voice. Their ears had for long hours been inured to a ceaseless - din of other noises—an ear-splitting confusion of cannon and - musketry roar from the field less than an eighth of a mile away, of - yelping shells overhead, and of screams and hoarse shouts all about them. - Yet their senses caught this strange note of a woman’s voice as if it had - fallen upon the hush of midnight. - </p> - <p> - They looked up, and beheld Miss Julia Parmalee! - </p> - <p> - Upon such a background of heated squalor, dirt, and murderous disorder, it - did not seem surprising to them that this lady should present a picture of - cool, fresh neatness. She wore a snow-white nurse’s cap, and broad, - spotless bands of white linen were crossed over the shoulders of her pale - dove-colored dress. Her dark face, dusky pink at the cheeks, glowed with a - proud excitement. Her big brown eyes swept along the row of recumbent - figures at her feet with the glance of a born conqueror. - </p> - <p> - “This is not a fit place for him,” she said. “It is absurd to bring a - gentleman—an officer of the headquarters staff—out to such a - place as this!” - </p> - <p> - Then the two volunteers from Octavius saw that behind her were four men, - bearing a laden stretcher, and that at her side was a regimental hospital - steward, who also looked speculatively along the rows of sufferers. - </p> - <p> - “It’s the best thing we can do, anyway,” he replied, not over-politely; - “and for that matter, there’s hardly room here.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, there’d be no trouble about that,” retorted Miss Julia, calmly. “We - could move any of these people here. The General told me I was always to - do just what I thought best. I am sure that if I could see him now he - would insist at once that Colonel Starbuck should have a bed to himself, - inside the house.” - </p> - <p> - “I’ll bet he wouldn’t!” said the hospital steward, with emphasis. - </p> - <p> - “Perhaps you don’t realize,” put in Miss Julia, coldly, “that Colonel - Starbuck is a staff officer—and a friend of mine.” - </p> - <p> - “I don’t care if he was on all the staffs there are,” said the hospital - steward, “he’s got to take his chance with the rest. And it don’t matter - about his being a friend, either; we ain’t playing favorites much just - now. I don’t see no room here, Miss. You’ll have to take him out in the - open lot there.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, never!” protested Miss Julia, vehemently. “It’s disgraceful! Why, the - place is under fire there. I saw them running away from a shell there only - a minute ago. No, if we can’t do anything better, we’ll have one of these - men moved.” - </p> - <p> - “Well, do something pretty quick!” growled one of the men supporting the - stretcher. - </p> - <p> - Miss Parmalee had looked two or three times in an absent-minded way at the - two men on the ground nearest her—obviously without recognizing - either of them. There was a definite purpose in the glance she now bent - upon Dwight Ransom—a glance framed in the resourceful smile he - remembered so well. - </p> - <p> - “You seem to be able to sit up, my man,” she said, ingratiatingly, to him; - “would you be so very kind as to let me have that place for Colonel - Star-buck, here—he is on the headquarters staff—and I am sure - we should be so very much obliged. You will easily get a nice place - somewhere else for yourself. Oh, thank you so much! It is so good of you!” - </p> - <p> - Suppressing a groan at the pain the movement involved, and without a word, - Dwight lifted himself slowly to his feet, and stepped aside, waving a hand - toward the hay and knapsack in token of their surrender. - </p> - <p> - Then Miss Julia helped lift from the litter the object of her anxiety. - Colonel Starbuck was of a slender, genteel figure, and had the top of his - head swathed heavily in bandages. He wore long, curly, brown - side-whiskers, and his chin had been shaved that very morning. This was - enough in itself to indicate that he belonged to the headquarters staff, - but the fact was proclaimed afresh by everything else about him—his - speckless uniform, his spick-and-span gauntlets, his carefully polished - boots, the glittering newness of his shoulder-straps, sword scabbard, - buttons, and spurs. It was clear that, whatever else had happened, his - line of communication with the headquarters baggage train had never been - interrupted. - </p> - <p> - “It is so kind of you!” Miss Parmalee murmured again, when the staff - officer had been helped off the stretcher, and in a dazed and languid way - had settled himself down into the place vacated for him. “Would you”—she - whispered, looking up now, and noting that the hospital steward and the - litter-men had gone away—“would you mind stepping over to the house, - or to one of the tents beyond—you’ll find him somewhere—and - asking Dr. Willoughby to come at once? Tell him it is for Colonel Starbuck - of the headquarters staff, and you’d better mention my name—Miss - Parmalee of the Sanitary Commission. You won’t forget the name—Parmalee?” - </p> - <p> - “I don’t fancy I shall forget it,” said Dwight, gravely. “I’ve got a - better memory than some.” - </p> - <p> - Miss Julia caught the tone of voice on the instant, and looked up again - from where she knelt beside the Colonel, with a swift smile. - </p> - <p> - “Why, it’s Mr. Ransom, I do believe!” she exclaimed. “I should never have - known you with your beard. It’s so good of you to take this trouble—you - always were so obliging! Any one will tell you where Dr. Willoughby is. - He’s the surgeon of the Eighteenth, you know. I’m sure he’ll come at once—to - please me—and time is so precious, you know!” - </p> - <p> - Without further words, Dwight moved off slowly and unsteadily toward the - house. - </p> - <p> - Miss Parmalee, seating herself so that some of her mouse-tinted draperies - almost touched the face of Dwight’s companion, unhooked a fan from her - girdle and began softly fanning Colonel Starbuck. “The doctor won’t be - long,” she said, in low, cooing tones, after a little; “do you feel easier - now?” - </p> - <p> - “I am rather dizzy still, and a little faint,” replied the Colonel, - languorously. “That fanning is so delicious though, that I’m really very - happy. At least I would be if I weren’t nervous about you. You have been - through such tremendous exertions all day—out in the sun, amid all - these horrid sights and this infernal roar—without a parasol, too. - Are you quite sure it has not been too much for you?” - </p> - <p> - “You are always so thoughtful of others, dear Colonel Starbuck,” murmured - Miss Julia, reducing the fanning to a gentle, measured movement, and - fixing her lustrous eyes pensively upon the clouds above the horizon. “You - never think of yourself!” - </p> - <p> - “Only to think how happy my fate is, to be rescued and nursed by an - angel,” sighed the Colonel. - </p> - <p> - A smile of gentle deprecation played upon Miss Julia’s red lips, and - imparted to her eyes the expression they would wear if they had been - gazing upon a tenderly entrancing vision in the sky. Then, all at once; - she gave a little start of aroused attention, looked puzzled, and after a - moment’s pause bent her head over close to the Colonel’s. - </p> - <p> - “The man behind me has taken tight hold of my dress,” she whispered, - hurriedly. “I don’t want to turn around, but can you see him? He isn’t - having a fit or anything, is he?” - </p> - <p> - Colonel Starbuck lifted himself a trifle, and looked across. “No,” he - whispered in return, “he appears to be asleep. Probably he is dreaming. He - is a corporal—some infantry regiment. They do manage to get so—what - shall I say—so unwashed! Shall I move his hand for you?” - </p> - <p> - Miss Julia shook her head, with an arch little half smile. - </p> - <p> - “No, poor man,” she murmured. “It gives me almost a sense of the romantic. - Perhaps he is dreaming of home—of some one dear to him. Corporals do - have their romances, you know, as well as—” - </p> - <p> - “As well as colonels,” the staff officer playfully finished the sentence - for her. “Well, I congratulate him, if his is a thousandth part as joyful - as mine.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, then, you have one!” pursued Miss Parma-lee, allowing her eyes to - sparkle for an instant before they were coyly raised again to the clouds. - Darkness was gathering there rapidly. - </p> - <p> - “Why pretend that you don’t understand?” pleaded Colonel Starbuck—and - there seemed to be no answer forthcoming. The fan moved even more sedately - now, with a tender flutter at the end of each downward sweep. - </p> - <p> - Presently the preoccupation of the couple—one might not call it - silence in such an unbroken uproar as rose around them and smashed through - the air above—was interrupted by the appearance of a young, - sharp-faced man, who marched straight across the yard toward them and, - halting, spoke hurriedly. - </p> - <p> - “I was asked specially to come here for a moment,” he said, “but it can - only be a minute. We’re just over our heads in work. What is it?” - </p> - <p> - Miss Parmalee looked at the young man with a favorless eye. He was - unshaven, dishevelled, brusque of manner and speech. He was bareheaded, - and his unimportant figure was almost hidden beneath a huge, revoltingly - stained apron. - </p> - <p> - “I asked for my friend, Dr. Willoughby,” she said. “But if he could not - come, I must insist upon immediate attention for Colonel Starbuck here—an - officer of the headquarters staff.” - </p> - <p> - While she spoke the young surgeon had thrown himself on one knee, adroitly - though roughly lifted the Colonel’s bandages, run an inquiring finger over - his skull, and plumped the linen back again. He sprang to his feet with an - impatient grunt. “Paltry scalp wound,” he snorted. Then, turning on his - heel, he almost knocked against Dwight Ransom, who had come slowly up - behind him. “You had no business to drag me off for foolishness of this - sort,” he said, in vexed tones. “Here are thousands of men waiting their - turn who really need help, and I’ve been working twenty hours a day for a - week, and couldn’t keep up with the work if every day had two hundred - hours. It’s ridiculous!” - </p> - <p> - Dwight shrugged his unhurt shoulder. “I didn’t ask you for myself,” he - replied. “I’m quite willing to wait my turn—but the lady here—she - asked me to bring help—” - </p> - <p> - “It can’t be that this gentleman understands,” put in Miss Julia, “that - his assistance was desired for an officer of the headquarters staff.” - </p> - <p> - “Madame,” said the young surgeon, “with your permission, damn the - headquarters staff!” and, turning abruptly, he strode off. - </p> - <p> - “I will go and see the General myself,” exclaimed Miss Parmalee, flushing - with wrath. “I will see whether he will permit the Sanitary Commission to - be affronted in this outrageous—” - </p> - <p> - She stopped short. Her indignant effort to rise to her feet had been - checked by a hand on the ground, which held firmly in its grasp a fold of - her skirt. She turned, pulled the cloth from the clutch of the tightened - fingers, looked at the hand as it sprawled limply on the grass, and gave a - little, shuddering, half-hysterical laugh. “Mercy me!” was what she said. - </p> - <p> - “You know who it is, don’t you?” asked Dwight Ransom. - </p> - <p> - The meaning in his voice struck Miss Julia, and she bent a careful - scrutiny through the dusk upon the face of the man stretched out beside - her. His head had slipped sidewise on the knapsack, and his bearded chin - was unnaturally sunk into his collar. Through the grime on his face could - be discerned an unearthly pallor. His wide-opened eyes seemed staring - fixedly, reproachfully, at the hand which had lost its hold upon Miss - Julia’s dress. - </p> - <p> - “It does seem as if I’d seen the face before somewhere,” she remarked, - “but I don’t appear to place it. It is getting so dark, too. No, I can’t - imagine. Who is it?” - </p> - <p> - She had risen to her feet and was peering down at the dead man, her pretty - brows knitted in perplexity. - </p> - <p> - “He recognized you!” said Dwight, with significant gravity. “It’s Marsena - Pulford.” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, poor man!” exclaimed Julia. “If he’d only spoken to me I would gladly - have fanned him, too. But I was so anxious about the Colonel here that I - never took a fair look at him. I dare say I shouldn’t have recognized him, - even then. Beards do change one so, don’t they!” - </p> - <p> - Then she turned to Colonel Starbuck and made answer to the inquiry of his - lifted eyebrows. - </p> - <p> - “The unfortunate man,” she explained, “was our village photographer. I sat - to him for my picture several times. I think I have one of them over at - the Commission tent now.” - </p> - <p> - “I’ll go this minute and seize it!” the gallant Colonel vowed, getting to - his feet. - </p> - <p> - “Take care! We unprotected females have a man trap there!” Julia warned - him; but fear did not deter the staff officer from taking her arm and - leaning on it as they walked away in the twilight. Then the night fell, - and Dwight buried Marsena. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2H_4_0024" id="link2H_4_0024"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - THE WAR WIDOW - </h2> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2H_4_0025" id="link2H_4_0025"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - I - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>lthough we had - been one man short all day, and there was a plain threat of rain in the - hot air, everybody left the hay-field long before sundown. It was too much - to ask of human nature to stay off in the remote meadows when such - remarkable things were happening down around the house. - </p> - <p> - Marcellus Jones and I were in the pasture, watching the dog get the cows - together for the homeward march. He did it so well and, withal, so - willingly, that there was no call for us to trouble ourselves in keeping - up with him. We waited instead at the open bars until the hay-wagon had - passed through, rocking so heavily in the ancient pitch-hole, as it did - so, that the driver was nearly thrown off his perch on the top of the high - load. Then we put up the bars, and fell in close behind the haymakers. A - rich cloud of dust, far ahead on the road, suggested that the dog was - doing his work even too willingly, but for the once we feared no rebuke. - Almost anything might be condoned that day. - </p> - <p> - Five grown-up men walked abreast down the highway, in the shadow of the - towering wagon mow, clad much alike in battered straw hats, gray woollen - shirts open at the neck, and rough old trousers bulging over the swollen, - creased ankles of thick boots. One had a scythe on his arm; two others - bore forks over their shoulders. By request, Hi Tuckerman allowed me to - carry his sickle. - </p> - <p> - Although my present visit to the farm had been of only a few days’ - duration—and those days of strenuous activity darkened by a terrible - grief—I had come to be very friendly with Mr. Tuckerman. He took a - good deal more notice of me than the others did; and, when chance and - leisure afforded, addressed the bulk of his remarks to me. This - favoritism, though it fascinated me, was not without its embarrassing - side. Hi Tuckerman had taken part in the battle of Gaines’s Mill two years - before, and had been shot straight through the tongue. One could still see - the deep scar on each of his cheeks, a sunken and hairless pit in among - his sandy beard. His heroism in the war and his good qualities as a - citizen had earned for him the esteem of his neighbors, and they saw to it - that he never wanted for work. But their present respect for him stopped - short of the pretence that they enjoyed hearing him talk. Whenever he - attempted conversation, people moved away, or began boisterous dialogues - with one another to drown him out. Being a sensitive man, he had come to - prefer silence to these rebuffs among those he knew. But he still had a - try at the occasional polite stranger—and I suppose it was in this - capacity that I won his heart. Though I never of my own initiative - understood a word he said, Marcellus sometimes interpreted a sentence or - so for me, and I listened to all the rest with a fraudulently wise face. - To give only a solitary illustration of the tax thus levied on our - friendship, I may mention that when Hi Tuckerman said “<i>Aak!-ah-aak!-uh</i>,” - he meant “Rappahannock,” and he did this rather better than a good many - words. - </p> - <p> - “Rappahannock,” alas! was a word we heard often enough in those days, - along with Chickahom-iny and Rapidan, and that odd Chattahoochee, the - sound of which raised always in my boyish mind the notion that the - geography-makers must have achieved it in their baby-talk period. These - strange Southern river names and many more were as familiar to the ears of - these four other untravelled Dearborn County farmers as the noise of their - own shallow Nedahma rattling over its pebbles in the valley yonder. Only - when their slow fancy fitted substance to these names they saw in mind’s - eye dark, sinister, swampy currents, deep and silent, and discolored with - human blood. - </p> - <p> - Two of these men who strode along behind the wagon were young half-uncles - of mine, Myron and Warren Turnbull, stout, thick-shouldered, honest - fellows not much out of their teens, who worked hard, said little, and - were always lumped together in speech, by their family, the hired help, - and the neighbors, as “the boys.” They asserted themselves so rarely, and - took everything as it came with such docility, that I myself, being in my - eleventh year, thought of them as very young indeed. Next them walked a - man, hired just for the haying, named Philleo, and then, scuffling along - over the uneven humps and hollows on the outer edge of the road, came Si - Hummaston, with the empty ginger-beer pail knocking against his knees. - </p> - <p> - As Tuckerman’s “Hi” stood for Hiram, so I assume the other’s “Si” meant - Silas, or possibly Cyrus. I dare say no one, not even his mother, had ever - called him by his full name. I know that my companion, Marcellus Jones, - who wouldn’t be thirteen until after Thanksgiving, habitually addressed - him as Si, and almost daily I resolved that I would do so myself. He was a - man of more than fifty, I should think, tall, lean, and what Marcellus - called “bible-backed.” He had a short iron-gray beard and long hair. - Whenever there was any very hard or steady work going, he generally gave - out and went to sit in the shade, holding a hand flat over his heart, and - shaking his head dolefully. This kept a good many from hiring him, and - even in haying time, when everybody on two legs is of some use, I fancy he - would often have been left out if it hadn’t been for my grandparents. They - respected him on account of his piety and his moral character, and always - had him down when extra work began. He was said to be the only hired man - in the township who could not be goaded in some way into swearing. He - looked at one slowly, with the mild expression of a heifer calf. - </p> - <p> - We had come to the crown of the hill, and the wagon started down the - steeper incline, with a great groaning of the brake. The men, by some - tacit understanding, halted and overlooked the scene. - </p> - <p> - The big old stone farm-house—part of which is said to date almost to - the Revolutionary times—was just below us, so near, indeed, that - Marcellus said he had once skipped a scaling-stone from where we stood to - its roof. The dense, big-leafed foliage of a sap-bush, sheltered in the - basin which dipped from our feet, pretty well hid this roof now from view. - Farther on, heavy patches of a paler, brighter green marked the orchard, - and framed one side of a cluster of barns and stables, at the end of which - three or four belated cows were loitering by the trough. It was so still - that we could hear the clatter of the stanchions as the rest of the herd - sought their places inside the milking-barn. - </p> - <p> - The men, though, had no eyes for all this, but bent their gaze fixedly on - the road, down at the bottom. For a long way this thoroughfare was - bordered by a row of tall poplars, which, as we were placed, receded from - the vision in so straight a line that they seemed one high, fat tree. - Beyond these one saw only a line of richer green, where the vine-wrapped - rail-fences cleft their way between the ripening fields. - </p> - <p> - “I’d ’a’ took my oath it was them,” said Philleo. “I can spot them - grays as fur’s I can see ’em. They turned by the school-house - there, or I’ll eat it, school-ma’am ’n’ all. And the buggy was - fol-lerin’ ’em, too.” - </p> - <p> - “Yes, I thought it was them,” said Myron, shading his eyes with his brown - hand. - </p> - <p> - “But they ought to got past the poplars by this time, then,” remarked - Warren. - </p> - <p> - “Why, they’ll be drivin’ as slow as molasses in January,” put in Si - Hummaston. “When you come to think of it, it <i>is</i> pretty nigh the - same as a regular funeral. You mark my words, your father’ll have walked - them grays every step of the road. I s’pose he’ll drive himself—he - wouldn’t trust bringin’ Alvy home to nobody else, would he? I know I - wouldn’t, if the Lord had given <i>me</i> such a son; but then he didn’t!” - </p> - <p> - “No, He didn’t!” commented the first speaker, in an unnaturally loud tone - of voice, to break in upon the chance that Hi Tuckerman was going to try - to talk. But Hi only stretched out his arm, pointing the forefinger toward - the poplars. - </p> - <p> - Sure enough, something was in motion down at the base of the shadows on - the road. Then it crept forward, out in the sunlight, and separated itself - into two vehicles. A farm wagon came first, drawn by a team of gray - horses. Close after it came a buggy, with its black top raised. Both - advanced so slowly that they seemed scarcely to be moving at all. - </p> - <p> - “Well, I swan!” exclaimed Si Hummaston, after a minute, “it’s Dana - Pillsbury drivin’ the wagon after all! Well—I dunno—yes, I - guess that’s prob’bly what I’d ’a’ done too, if I’d b’n your - father. Yes, it does look more correct, his follerin’ on behind, like - that. I s’pose that’s Alvy’s widder in the buggy there with him.” - </p> - <p> - “Yes, that’s Serena—it looks like her little girl with her,” said - Myron, gravely. - </p> - <p> - “I s’pose we might’s well be movin’ along down,” observed his brother, and - at that we all started. - </p> - <p> - We walked more slowly now, matching our gait to the snail-like progress of - those coming toward us. As we drew near to the gate, the three hired men - instinctively fell behind the brothers, and in that position the group - halted on the grass, facing the driveway where it left the main road. Not - a word was uttered by any one. When at last the wagon came up, Myron and - Warren took off their hats, and the others followed suit, all holding them - poised at the level of their shoulders. - </p> - <p> - Dana Pillsbury, carrying himself rigidly upright on the box-seat, drove - past us with eyes fixed straight ahead, and a face as coldly - expressionless as that of a wooden Indian. The wagon was covered all over - with rubber blankets, so that whatever it bore was hidden. Only a few - paces behind came the buggy, and my grandfather, old Arphaxed Turnbull, - went by in his turn with the same averted, faraway gaze, and the same - resolutely stolid countenance. He held the restive young carriage horse - down to a decorous walk, a single firm hand on the tight reins, without so - much as looking at it. The strong yellow light of the declining sun poured - full upon his long gray beard, his shaven upper lip, his dark-skinned, - lean, domineering face—and made me think of some hard and gloomy old - prophet seeing a vision, in the back part of the Old Testament. If that - woman beside him, swathed in heavy black raiment, and holding a child up - against her arm, was my Aunt Serena, I should never have guessed it. - </p> - <p> - We put on our hats again, and walked up the driveway with measured step - behind the carriage till it stopped at the side-piazza stoop. The wagon - had passed on toward the big new red barn—and crossing its course I - saw my Aunt Em, bareheaded and with her sleeves rolled up, going to the - cow-barn with a milking-pail in her hand. She was walking quickly, as if - in a great hurry. - </p> - <p> - “There’s your Ma,” I whispered to Marcellus, assuming that he would share - my surprise at her rushing off like this, instead of waiting to say - “How-d’-do” to Serena. He only nodded knowingly, and said nothing. - </p> - <p> - No one else said much of anything. Myron and Warren shook hands in stiff - solemnity with the veiled and craped sister-in-law, when their father had - helped her and her daughter from the buggy, and one of them remarked in a - constrained way that the hot spell seemed to keep up right along. The - newcomers ascended the steps to the open door, and the woman and the child - went inside. Old Arphaxed turned on the threshold, and seemed to behold us - for the first time. - </p> - <p> - “After you’ve put out the horse,” he said, “I want the most of yeh to come - up to the new barn. Si Hummaston and Marcellus can do the milkin’.” - </p> - <p> - “I kind o’ rinched my wrist this forenoon,” put in Si, with a note of - entreaty in his voice. He wanted sorely to be one of the party at the red - barn. - </p> - <p> - “Mebbe milkin’ ’ll be good for it,” said Arphaxed, curtly. “You and - Marcellus do what I say, and keep Sidney with you.” With this he, too, - went into the house. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2H_4_0026" id="link2H_4_0026"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - II - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t wasn’t an easy - matter for even a member of the family like myself to keep clearly and - untangled in his head all the relationships which existed under this - patriarchal Turnbull roof. - </p> - <p> - Old Arphaxed had been married twice. His first wife was the mother of two - children, who grew up, and the older of these was my father, Wilbur - Turnbull. He never liked farm-life, and left home early, not without some - hard feeling, which neither father nor son ever quite forgot. My father - made a certain success of it as a business man in Albany until, in the - thirties, his health broke down. He died when I was seven and, although he - left some property, my mother was forced to supplement this help by - herself going to work as forewoman in a large store. She was too busy to - have much time for visiting, and I don’t think there was any great love - lost between her and the people on the farm; but it was a good healthy - place for me to be sent to when the summer vacation came, and withal - inexpensive, and so the first of July each year generally found me out at - the homestead, where, indeed, nobody pretended to be heatedly fond of me, - but where I was still treated well and enjoyed myself. This year it was - understood that my mother was coming out to bring me home later on. - </p> - <p> - The other child of that first marriage was a girl who was spoken of in - youth as Emmeline, but whom I knew now as Aunt Em. She was a silent, - tough-fibred, hard-working creature, not at all goodlooking, but - relentlessly neat, and the best cook I ever knew. Even when the house was - filled with extra hired men, no one ever thought of getting in any female - help, so tireless and so resourceful was Em. She did all the housework - there was to do, from cellar to garret, was continually lending a hand in - the men’s chores, made more butter than the household could eat up, - managed a large kitchen-garden, and still had a good deal of spare time, - which she spent in sitting out in the piazza in a starched pink calico - gown, knitting the while she watched who went up and down the road. When - you knew her, you understood how it was that the original Turnbulls had - come into that part of the country just after the Revolution, and in a few - years chopped down all the forests, dug up all the stumps, drained the - swale-lands, and turned the entire place from a wilderness into a - flourishing and fertile home for civilized people. I used to feel, when I - looked at her, that she would have been quite equal to doing the whole - thing herself. - </p> - <p> - All at once, when she was something over thirty, Em had up and married a - mowing-machine agent named Abel Jones, whom no one knew anything about, - and who, indeed, had only been in the neighborhood for a week or so. The - family was struck dumb with amazement. The idea of Em’s dallying with the - notion of matrimony had never crossed anybody’s mind. As a girl she had - never had any patience with husking-bees or dances or sleigh-ride parties. - No young man had ever seen her home from anywhere, or had had the remotest - encouragement to hang around the house. She had never been pretty—so - my mother told me—and as she got along in years grew dumpy and thick - in figure, with a plain, fat face, a rather scowling brow, and an abrupt, - ungracious manner. She had no conversational gifts whatever, and, through - years of increasing taciturnity and confirmed unsociability, built up in - everybody’s mind the conviction that, if there could be a man so wild and - unsettled in intellect as to suggest a tender thought to Em, he would get - his ears cuffed off his head for his pains. - </p> - <p> - Judge, then, how like a thunderbolt the episode of the mowing-machine - agent fell upon the family. To bewildered astonishment there soon enough - succeeded rage. This Jones was a curly-headed man, with a crinkly black - beard like those of Joseph’s brethren in the Bible picture. He had no home - and no property, and didn’t seem to amount to much even as a salesman of - other people’s goods. His machine was quite the worst then in the market, - and it could not be learned that he had sold a single one in the county. - But he had married Em, and it was calmly proposed that he should - henceforth regard the farm as his home. After this point had been sullenly - conceded, it turned out that Jones was a widower, and had a boy nine or - ten years old, named Marcellus, who was in a sort of orphan asylum in - Vermont. There were more angry scenes between father and daughter, and a - good deal more bad blood, before it was finally agreed that the boy also - should come and live on the farm. - </p> - <p> - All this had happened in 1860 or 1861. Jones had somewhat improved on - acquaintance. He knew about lightning-rods, and had been able to fit out - all the farm buildings with them at cost price. He had turned a little - money now and again in trades with hop-poles, butter-firkins, shingles, - and the like, and he was very ingenious in mending and fixing up odds and - ends. He made shelves and painted the woodwork, and put a tar roof on the - summer kitchen. Even Martha, the second Mrs. Turnbull, came finally to - admit that he was handy about a house. - </p> - <p> - This Martha became the head of the household while Em was still a little - girl. She was a heavy woman, mentally as well as bodily, rather prone to a - peevish view of things, and greatly given to pride in herself and her - position, but honest, charitable in her way, and not unkindly at heart. On - the whole she was a good stepmother, and Em probably got on quite as well - with her as she would have done with her own mother—even in the - matter of the mowing-machine agent. - </p> - <p> - To Martha three sons were born. The two younger ones, Myron and Warren, - have already been seen. The eldest boy, Alva, was the pride of the family, - and, for that matter, of the whole section. - </p> - <p> - Alva was the first Turnbull to go to college. From his smallest boyhood it - had been manifest that he had great things before him, so handsome and - clever and winning a lad was he. Through each of his schooling years he - was the honor man of his class, and he finished in a blaze of glory by - taking the Clark Prize, and practically everything else within reach in - the way of academic distinctions. He studied law at Octavius, in the - office of Judge Schermerhorn, and in a little time was not only that - distinguished man’s partner, but distinctly the more important figure in - the firm. At the age of twenty-five he was sent to the Assembly. The next - year they made him District Attorney, and it was quite understood that it - rested with him whether he should be sent to Congress later on, or be - presented by the Dearborn County bar for the next vacancy on the Supreme - Court bench. - </p> - <p> - At this point in his brilliant career he married Miss Serena Wadsworth, of - Wadsworth’s Falls. The wedding was one of the most imposing social events - the county had known, so it was said, since the visit of Lafayette. The - Wadsworths were an older family, even, than the Fairchilds, and infinitely - more fastidious and refined. The daughters of the household, indeed, - carried their refinement to such a pitch that they lived an almost - solitary life, and grew to the parlous verge of old-maidhood simply - because there was nobody good enough to marry them. Alva Turnbull was, - however, up to the standard. It could not be said, of course, that his - home surroundings quite matched those of his bride; but, on the other - hand, she was nearly two years his senior, and this was held to make - matters about even. - </p> - <p> - In a year or so came the war, and nowhere in the North did patriotic - excitement run higher than in this old abolition stronghold of upper - Dearborn. Public meetings were held, and nearly a whole regiment was - raised in Octavius and the surrounding towns alone. Alva Turnbull made the - most stirring and important speech at the first big gathering, and sent a - thrill through the whole country-side by claiming the privilege of heading - the list of volunteers. He was made a captain by general acclaim, and went - off with his company in time to get chased from the field of Bull Run. - When he came home on a furlough in 1863 he was a major, and later on he - rose to be lieutenant-colonel. We understood vaguely that he might have - climbed vastly higher in promotion but for the fact that he was too moral - and conscientious to get on very well with his immediate superior, General - Boyce, of Thessaly, who was notoriously a drinking man. - </p> - <p> - It was glory enough to have him at the farm, on that visit of his, even as - a major. His old parents literally abased themselves at his feet, quite - tremulous in their awed pride at his greatness. It made it almost too much - to have Serena there also, this fair, thin-faced, prim-spoken daughter of - the Wadsworths, and actually to call her by her first name. It was haying - time, I remember, but the hired men that year did not eat their meals with - the family, and there was even a question whether Marcellus and I were - socially advanced enough to come to the table, where Serena and her - husband were feeding themselves in state with a novel kind of silver - implement called a four-tined fork. If Em hadn’t put her foot down, out to - the kitchen we should both have gone, I fancy. As it was, we sat - decorously at the far end of the table, and asked with great politeness to - have things passed to us, which by standing up we could have reached as - well as not. It was slow, but it made us feel immensely respectable, - almost as if we had been born Wadsworths ourselves. - </p> - <p> - We agreed that Serena was “stuck up,” and Mar-cellus reported Aunt Em as - feeling that her bringing along with her a nursemaid to be waited on hand - and foot, just to take care of a baby, was an imposition bordering upon - the intolerable. He said that that was the sort of thing the English did - until George Washington rose and drove them out. But we both felt that - Alva was splendid. - </p> - <p> - He was a fine creature physically—taller even than old Arphaxed, - with huge square shoulders and a mighty frame. I could recall him as - without whiskers, but now he had a waving lustrous brown beard, the - longest and biggest I ever saw. He didn’t pay much attention to us boys, - it was true; but he was affable when we came in his way, and he gave Myron - and Warren each a dollar bill when they went to Octavius to see the Fourth - of July doings. In the evening some of the more important neighbors would - drop in, and then Alva would talk about the war, and patriotism, and - saving the Union, till it was like listening to Congress itself. He had a - rich, big voice which filled the whole room, so that the hired men could - hear every word out in the kitchen; but it was even more affecting to see - him walking with his father down under the poplars, with his hands making - orator’s gestures as he spoke, and old Arphaxed looking at him and - listening with shining eyes. - </p> - <p> - Well, then, he and his wife went away to visit her folks, and then we - heard he had left to join his regiment. From time to time he wrote to his - father—letters full of high and loyal sentiments, which were printed - next week in the Octavius <i>Transcript</i>, and the week after in the - Thessaly <i>Banner of Liberty</i>. Whenever any of us thought about the - war—and who thought much of anything else?—it was always with - Alva as the predominant figure in every picture. - </p> - <p> - Sometimes the arrival of a letter for Aunt Em, or a chance remark about a - broken chair or a clock hopelessly out of kilter, would recall for the - moment the fact that Abel Jones was also at the seat of war. He had - enlisted on that very night when Alva headed the roll of honor, and he - marched away in Alva’s company. Somehow he got no promotion, but remained - in the ranks. Not even the members of the family were shown the letters - Aunt Em received, much less the printers of the newspapers. They were - indeed poor misspelled scrawls, about which no one displayed any interest - or questioned Aunt Em. Even Marcellus rarely spoke of his father, and - seemed to share to the full the family’s concentration of thought upon - Alva. - </p> - <p> - Thus matters stood when spring began to play at being summer in the year - of ‘64. The birds came and the trees burst forth into green, the sun grew - hotter and the days longer, the strawberries hidden under the big leaves - in our yard started into shape, where the blossoms had been, quite in the - ordinary, annual way, with us up North. But down where that dread thing - they called “The War” was going on, this coming of warm weather meant more - awful massacre, more tortured hearts, and desolated homes, than ever - before. I can’t be at all sure how much later reading and associations - have helped out and patched up what seem to be my boyish recollections of - this period; but it is, at all events, much clearer in my mind than are - the occurrences of the week before last. - </p> - <p> - We heard a good deal about how deep the mud was in Virginia that spring. - All the photographs and tin-types of officers which found their way to - relatives at home, now, showed them in boots that came up to their thighs. - Everybody understood that as soon as this mud dried up a little, there was - to be most terrific doings. The two great lines of armies lay scowling at - each other, still on that blood-soaked fighting ground between Washington - and Richmond where they were three years before. Only now things were to - go differently. A new general was at the head of affairs, and he was going - in, with jaws set and nerves of steel, to smash, kill, burn, annihilate, - sparing nothing, looking not to right or left, till the red road had been - hewed through to Richmond. In the first week of May this thing began—a - push forward all along the line—and the North, with scared eyes and - fluttering heart, held its breath. - </p> - <p> - My chief personal recollection of these historic forty days is that one - morning I was awakened early by a noise in my bedroom, and saw my mother - looking over the contents of the big chest of drawers which stood against - the wall. She was getting out some black articles of apparel. When she - discovered that I was awake, she told me in a low voice that my Uncle Alva - had been killed. Then a few weeks later my school closed, and I was packed - off to the farm for the vacation. It will be better to tell what had - happened as I learned it there from Marcellus and the others. - </p> - <p> - Along about the middle of May, the weekly paper came up from Octavius, and - old Arphaxed Turnbull, as was his wont, read it over out on the piazza - before supper. Presently he called his wife to him, and showed her - something in it. Martha went out into the kitchen, where Aunt Em was - getting the meal ready, and told her, as gently as she could, that there - was very bad news for her; in fact, her husband, Abel Jones, had been - killed in the first day’s battle in the Wilderness, something like a week - before. Aunt Em said she didn’t believe it, and Martha brought in the - paper and pointed out the fatal line to her. It was not quite clear - whether this convinced Aunt Em or not. She finished getting supper, and - sat silently through the meal, afterwards, but she went upstairs to her - room before family prayers. The next day she was about as usual, doing the - work and saying nothing. Marcellus told me that to the best of his belief - no one had said anything to her on the subject. The old people were a - shade more ceremonious in their manner toward her, and “the boys” and the - hired men were on the lookout to bring in water for her from the well, and - to spare her as much as possible in the routine of chores, but no one - talked about Jones. Aunt Em did not put on mourning. She made a black - necktie for Marcellus to wear to church, but stayed away from meeting - herself. - </p> - <p> - A little more than a fortnight afterwards, Myron was walking down the road - from the meadows one afternoon, when he saw a man on horseback coming up - from the poplars, galloping like mad in a cloud of dust. The two met at - the gate. The man was one of the hired helps of the Wadsworths, and he had - ridden as hard as he could pelt from the Falls, fifteen miles away, with a - message, which now he gave Myron to read. Both man and beast dripped - sweat, and trembled with fatigued excitement. The youngster eyed them, and - then gazed meditatively at the sealed envelope in his hand. - </p> - <p> - “I s’pose you know what’s inside?” he asked, looking up at last. - </p> - <p> - The man in the saddle nodded, with a tell-tale look on his face, and - breathing heavily. - </p> - <p> - Myron handed the letter back, and pushed the gate open. “You’d better go - up and give it to father yourself,” he said. “I ain’t got the heart to - face him—jest now, at any rate.” - </p> - <p> - Marcellus was fishing that afternoon, over in the creek which ran through - the woods. Just as at last he was making up his mind that it must be about - time to go after the cows, he saw Myron sitting on a log beside the forest - path, whittling mechanically, and staring at the foliage before him, in an - obvious brown study. Marcellus went up to him, and had to speak twice - before Myron turned his head and looked up. - </p> - <p> - “Oh! it’s you, eh, Bubb?” he remarked dreamily, and began gazing once more - into the thicket. - </p> - <p> - “What’s the matter?” asked the puzzled boy. - </p> - <p> - “I guess Alvy’s dead,” replied Myron. To the lad’s comments and questions - he made small answer. “No,” he said at last, “I don’t feel much like goin’ - home jest now. Lea’ me alone here; I’ll prob’ly turn up later on.” And - Marcellus went alone to the pasture, and thence, at the tail of his bovine - procession, home. - </p> - <p> - When he arrived he regretted not having remained with Myron in the woods. - It was like coming into something which was prison, hospital, and tomb in - one. The household was paralyzed with horror and fright. Martha had gone - to bed, or rather had been put there by Em, and all through the night, - when he woke up, he heard her broken and hysterical voice in moans and - screams. The men had hitched up the grays, and Arphaxed Turnbull was - getting into the buggy to drive to Octavius for news when the boy came up. - He looked twenty years older than he had at noon—all at once turned - into a chalkfaced, trembling, infirm old man—and could hardly see to - put his foot on the carriage-step. His son Warren had offered to go with - him, and had been rebuffed almost with fierceness. Warren and the others - silently bowed their heads before this mood; instinct told them that - nothing but Arphaxed’s show of temper held him from collapse—from - falling at their feet and grovelling on the grass with cries and sobs of - anguish, perhaps even dying in a fit. After he had driven off they forbore - to talk to one another, but went about a chalkfaced, trembling, infirm old - man—and could hardly see to put his foot on the carriage-step. His - son Warren had offered to go with him, and had been rebuffed almost with - fierceness. Warren and the others silently bowed their heads before this - mood; instinct told them that nothing but Arphaxed’s show of temper held - him from collapse—from falling at their feet and grovelling on the - grass with cries and sobs of anguish, perhaps even dying in a fit. After - he had driven off they forbore to talk to one another, but went about - noiselessly with drooping chins and knotted brows. - </p> - <p> - “It jest took the tuck out of everything,” said Marcellus, relating these - tragic events to me. There was not much else to tell. Martha had had what - they call brain fever, and had emerged from this some weeks afterward a - pallid and dim-eyed ghost of her former self, sitting for hours together - in her rocking-chair in the unused parlor, her hands idly in her lap, her - poor thoughts glued ceaselessly to that vague, far-off Virginia which - folks told about as hot and sunny, but which her mind’s eye saw under the - gloom of an endless and dreadful night. Arphaxed had gone South, still - defiantly alone, to bring back the body of his boy. An acquaintance wrote - to them of his being down sick in Washington, prostrated by the heat and - strange water; but even from his sick-bed he had sent on orders to an - undertaking firm out at the front, along with a hundred dollars, their - price in advance for embalming. Then, recovering, he had himself pushed - down to headquarters, or as near them as civilians might approach, only to - learn that he had passed the precious freight on the way. He posted back - again, besieging the railroad officials at every point with inquiries, - scolding, arguing, beseeching in turn, until at last he overtook his quest - at Juno Mills Junction, only a score of miles from home. - </p> - <p> - Then only he wrote, telling people his plans. He came first to Octavius, - where a funeral service was held in the forenoon, with military honors, - the Wadsworths as the principal mourners, and a memorable turnout of - distinguished citizens. The town-hall was draped with mourning, and so was - Alva’s pew in the Episcopal Church, which he had deserted his ancestral - Methodism to join after his marriage. Old Arphaxed listened to the novel - burial service of his son’s communion, and watched the clergyman in his - curious white and black vestments, with sombre pride. He himself needed - and desired only a plain and homely religion, but it was fitting that his - boy should have organ music and flowers and a ritual. - </p> - <p> - Dana Pillsbury had arrived in town early in the morning with the grays, - and a neighbor’s boy had brought in the buggy. Immediately after dinner - Arphaxed had gathered up Alva’s widow and little daughter, and started the - funeral cortège upon its final homeward stage. - </p> - <p> - And so I saw them arrive on that July afternoon. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2H_4_0027" id="link2H_4_0027"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - III - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">F</span>or so good and - patient a man, Si Hummaston bore himself rather vehemently during the - milking. It was hotter in the barn than it was outside in the sun, and the - stifling air swarmed with flies, which seemed to follow Si perversely from - stall to stall and settle on his cow. One beast put her hoof square in his - pail, and another refused altogether to “give down,” while the rest kept - up a tireless slapping and swishing of their tails very hard to bear, even - if one had the help of profanity. Marcellus and I listened carefully to - hear him at last provoked to an oath, but the worst thing he uttered, even - when the cow stepped in the milk, was “Dum your buttons!” which Marcellus - said might conceivably be investigated by a church committee, but was - hardly out-and-out swearing. - </p> - <p> - I remember Si’s groans and objurgations, his querulous “Hyst there, will - ye!” his hypocritical “So-boss! So-boss!” his despondent “They never will - give down for me!” because presently there was crossed upon this woof of - peevish impatience the web of a curious conversation. - </p> - <p> - Si had been so slow in his headway against flapping tails and restive - hoofs that, before he had got up to the end of the row, Aunt Em had - finished her side. She brought over her stool and pail, and seated herself - at the next cow to Hummaston’s. For a little, one heard only the resonant - din of the stout streams against the tin; then, as the bottom was covered, - there came the ploughing plash of milk on milk, and Si could hear himself - talk. - </p> - <p> - “S’pose you know S’reny’s come, ’long with your father,” he - remarked, ingratiatingly. - </p> - <p> - “I saw ’em drive in,” replied Em. - </p> - <p> - “<i>Whoa! Hyst there! Hole still, can’t ye?</i> I didn’t know if you quite - made out who she was, you was scootin’ ’long so fast. They ain’t—<i>Whoa - there!</i>—they ain’t nothin’ the matter ’twixt you and her, - is they?” - </p> - <p> - “I don’t know as there is,” said Em, curtly. “The world’s big enough for - both of us—we ain’t no call to bunk into each other.” - </p> - <p> - “No, of course—<i>Now you stop it!</i>—but it looked kind o’ - curious to me, your pikin’ off like that, without waitin’ to say - ‘How-d’-do?’ Of course, I never had no relation by marriage that was - stuck-up at all, or looked down on me—<i>Stiddy there now!</i>—but - I guess I can reelize pretty much how you feel about it. I’m a good deal - of a hand at that. It’s what they call imagination. It’s a gift, you know, - like good looks, or preachin’, or the knack o’ makin’ money. But you can’t - help what you’re born with, can you? I’d been a heap better off if my - gift’d be’n in some other direction; but, as I tell ’em, it ain’t - my fault. And my imagination—<i>Hi, there! git over, will ye?</i>—it’s - downright cur’ous sometimes, how it works. Now I could tell, you see, that - you ‘n’ S’reny didn’t pull together. I s’pose she never writ a line to - you, when your husband was killed?” - </p> - <p> - “Why should she?” demanded Em. “We never did correspond. What’d be the - sense of beginning then? She minds her affairs, ’n’ I mind mine. - Who wanted her to write?” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, of course not,” said Si lightly. “Prob’ly you’ll get along better - together, though, now that you’ll see more of one another. I s’pose - S’reny’s figurin’ on stayin’ here right along now, her ’n’ her - little girl. Well, it’ll be nice for the old folks to have somebody - they’re fond of. They jest worshipped the ground Alvy walked on—and - I s’pose they won’t be anything in this wide world too good for that - little girl of his. Le’s see, she must be comin’ on three now, ain’t she?” - </p> - <p> - “I don’t know anything about her!” snapped Aunt Em with emphasis. - </p> - <p> - “Of course, it’s natural the old folks should feel so—she bein’ - Alvy’s child. I hain’t noticed anything special, but does it—<i>Well, - I swan! Hyst there!</i>—does it seem to you that they’re as good to - Marcellus, quite, as they used to be? I don’t hear ’em sayin’ - nothin’ about his goin’ to school next winter.” - </p> - <p> - Aunt Em said nothing, too, but milked doggedly on. Si told her about the - thickness and profusion of Serena’s mourning, guardedly hinting at the - injustice done him by not allowing him to go to the red barn with the - others, speculated on the likelihood of the Wadsworths’ contributing to - their daughter’s support, and generally exhibited his interest in the - family through a monologue which finished only with the milking; but Aunt - Em made no response whatever. - </p> - <p> - When the last pails had been emptied into the big cans at the door—Marcellus - and I had let the cows out one by one into the yard, as their individual - share in the milking ended—Si and Em saw old Arphaxed wending his - way across from the house to the red barn. He appeared more bent than - ever, but he walked with a slowness which seemed born of reluctance even - more than of infirmity. - </p> - <p> - “Well, now,” mused Si, aloud, “Brother Turnbull an’ me’s be’n friends for - a good long spell. I don’t believe he’d be mad if I cut over now to the - red barn too, seein’ the milkin’s all out of the way. Of course I don’t - want to do what ain’t right—what d’you think now, Em, honest? Think - it ’ud rile him?” - </p> - <p> - “I don’t know anything about it!” my aunt replied, with increased vigor of - emphasis. “But for the land sake go somewhere! Don’t hang around botherin’ - me. I got enough else to think of besides your everlasting cackle.” - </p> - <p> - Thus rebuffed, Si meandered sadly into the cow-yard, shaking his head as - he came. Seeing us seated on an upturned plough, over by the fence, from - which point we had a perfect view of the red barn, he sauntered toward us, - and, halting at our side, looked to see if there was room enough for him - to sit also. But Marcellus, in quite a casual way, remarked, “Oh! wheeled - the milk over to the house, already, Si?” and at this the doleful man - lounged off again in new despondency, got out the wheelbarrow, and, with - ostentatious groans of travail hoisted a can upon it and started off. - </p> - <p> - “He’s takin’ advantage of Arphaxed’s being so worked up to play ‘ole - soldier’ on him,” said Mar-cellus. “All of us have to stir him up the - whole time to keep him from takin’ root somewhere. I told him this - afternoon ’t if there had to be any settin’ around under the bushes - an’ cryin’, the fam’ly ’ud do it.” - </p> - <p> - We talked in hushed tones as we sat there watching the shut doors of the - red barn, in boyish conjecture about what was going on behind them. I - recall much of this talk with curious distinctness, but candidly it jars - now upon my maturer nerves. The individual man looks back upon his boyhood - with much the same amused amazement that the race feels in contemplating - the memorials of its own cave-dwelling or bronze period. What strange - savages we were! In those days Marcellus and I used to find our very - highest delight in getting off on Thursdays, and going over to Dave - Bushnell’s slaughter-house, to witness with stony hearts, and from as - close a coign of vantage as might be, the slaying of some score of - barnyard animals—the very thought of which now revolts our grown-up - minds. In the same way we sat there on the plough, and criticised old - Arphaxed’s meanness in excluding us from the red barn, where the men-folks - were coming in final contact with the “pride of the family.” Some of the - cows wandering toward us began to “moo” with impatience for the pasture, - but Mar-cellus said there was no hurry. - </p> - <p> - All at once we discovered that Aunt Em was standing a few yards away from - us, on the other side of the fence. We could see her from where we sat by - only turning a little—a motionless, stout, upright figure, with a - pail in her hand, and a sternly impassive look on her face. She, too, had - her gaze fixed upon the red barn, and, though the declining sun was full - in her eyes, seemed incapable of blinking, but just stared coldly, - straight ahead. - </p> - <p> - Suddenly an unaccustomed voice fell upon our ears. Turning, we saw that a - black-robed woman, with a black wrap of some sort about her head, had come - up to where Aunt Em stood, and was at her shoulder. Marcellus nudged me, - and whispered, “It’s S’reny. Look out for squalls!” And then we listened - in silence. - </p> - <p> - “Won’t you speak to me at all, Emmeline?” we heard this new voice say. - </p> - <p> - Aunt Em’s face, sharply outlined in profile against the sky, never moved. - Her lips were pressed into a single line, and she kept her eyes on the - barn. - </p> - <p> - “If there’s anything I’ve done, tell me,” pursued the other. “In such an - hour as this—when both our hearts are bleeding so, and—and - every breath we draw is like a curse upon us—it doesn’t seem a fit - time for us—for us to—” The voice faltered and broke, leaving - the speech unfinished. - </p> - <p> - Aunt Em kept silence so long that we fancied this appeal, too, had failed. - Then abruptly, and without moving her head, she dropped a few ungracious - words as it were over her shoulder. “If I had anything special to say, - most likely I’d say it,” she remarked. - </p> - <p> - We could hear the sigh that Serena drew. She lifted her shawled head, and - for a moment seemed as if about to turn. Then she changed her mind, - apparently, for she took a step nearer to the other. - </p> - <p> - “See here, Emmeline,” she said, in a more confident tone. “Nobody in the - world knows better than I do how thoroughly good a woman you are, how you - have done your duty, and more than your duty, by your parents and your - brothers, and your little step-son. You have never spared yourself for - them, day or night. I have said often to—to him who has gone—that - I didn’t believe there was anywhere on earth a worthier or more devoted - woman than you, his sister. And—now that he is gone—and we are - both more sisters than ever in affliction—why in Heaven’s name - should you behave like this to me?” - </p> - <p> - Aunt Em spoke more readily this time. “I don’t know as I’ve done anything - to you,” she said in defence. “I’ve just let you alone, that’s all. An’ - that’s doin’ as I’d like to be done by.” Still she did not turn her head, - or lift her steady gaze from those closed doors. - </p> - <p> - “Don’t let us split words!” entreated the other, venturing a thin, white - hand upon Aunt Em’s shoulder. “That isn’t the way we two ought to stand to - each other. Why, you were friendly enough when I was here before. Can’t it - be the same again? What has happened to change it? Only to-day, on our way - up here, I was speaking to your father about you, and my deep sympathy for - you, and—” - </p> - <p> - Aunt Em wheeled like a flash. “Yes, ’n’ what did <i>he</i> say? - Come, don’t make up anything! Out with it! What did he say?” She shook off - the hand on her shoulder as she spoke. - </p> - <p> - Gesture and voice and frowning vigor of mien were all so imperative and - rough that they seemed to bewilder Serena. She, too, had turned now, so - that I could see her wan and delicate face, framed in the laced festoons - of black, like the fabulous countenance of “The Lady Iñez” in my mother’s - “Album of Beauty.” She bent her brows in hurried thought, and began - stammering, “Well, he said—Let’s see—he said—” - </p> - <p> - “Oh, yes!” broke in Aunt Em, with raucous irony, “I know well enough what - he said! He said I was a good worker—that they’d never had to have a - hired girl since I was big enough to wag a churn dash, an’ they wouldn’t - known what to do without me. I know all that; I’ve heard it on an’ off for - twenty years. What I’d like to hear is, did he tell you that he went down - South to bring back <i>your</i> husband, an’ that he never so much as give - a thought to fetchin’ <i>my</i> husband, who was just as good a soldier - and died just as bravely as yours did? I’d like to know—did he tell - you that?” - </p> - <p> - What could Serena do but shake her head, and bow it in silence before this - bitter gale of words? - </p> - <p> - “An’ tell me this, too,” Aunt Em went on, lifting her harsh voice - mercilessly, “when you was settin’ there in church this forenoon, with the - soldiers out, an’ the bells tollin’ an’ all that—did he say, ‘This - is some for Alvy, an’ some for Abel, who went to the war together, an’ was - killed together, or within a month o’ one another?’ Did he say that, or - look for one solitary minute as if he thought it? I’ll bet he didn’t!” - </p> - <p> - Serena’s head sank lower still, and she put up, in a blinded sort of a - way, a little white handkerchief to her eyes. “But why blame <i>me?</i>” - she asked. - </p> - <p> - Aunt Em heard her own voice so seldom that the sound of it now seemed to - intoxicate her. “No!” she shouted. “It’s like the Bible. One was taken an’ - the other left. It was always Alvy this, an’ Alvy that, nothin’ for any - one but Alvy. That was all right; nobody complained: prob’ly he deserved - it all; at any rate, we didn’t begrudge him any of it, while he was - livin’. But there ought to be a limit somewhere. When a man’s dead, he’s - pretty much about on an equality with other dead men, one would think. But - it ain’t so. One man get’s hunted after when he’s shot, an’ there’s a - hundred dollars for embalmin’ him an’ a journey after him, an’ bringin’ - him home, an’ two big funerals, an’ crape for his widow that’d stand by - itself. The <i>other</i> man—he can lay where he fell! Them that’s - lookin’ for the first one are right close by—it ain’t more’n a few - miles from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, so Hi Tuckerman tells me, an’ he - was all over the ground two years ago—but nobody looks for this - other man! Oh, no! Nobody so much as remembers to think of him! They ain’t - no hundred dollars, no, not so much as fifty cents, for embalmin’ <i>him!</i> - No—<i>he</i> could be shovelled in anywhere, or maybe burned up when - the woods got on fire that night, the night of the sixth. They ain’t no - funeral for him—no bells tolled—unless it may be a cowbell up - in the pasture that he hammered out himself. An’ <i>his</i> widow can go - around, week days an’ Sundays, in her old calico dresses. Nobody ever - mentions the word ‘mournin’ crape’ to her, or asks her if she’d like to - put on black. I s’pose they thought if they gave me the money for some - mournin’ I’d buy <i>candy</i> with it instead!” - </p> - <p> - With this climax of flaming sarcasm Aunt Em stopped, her eyes aglow, her - thick breast heaving in a flurry of breathlessness. She had never talked - so much or so fast before in her life. She swung the empty tin-pail now - defiantly at her side to hide the fact that her arms were shaking with - excitement. Every instant it looked as if she was going to begin again. - </p> - <p> - Serena had taken the handkerchief down from her eyes and held her arms - stiff and straight by her side. Her chin seemed to have grown longer or to - be thrust forward more. When she spoke it was in a colder voice—almost - mincing in the way it cut off the words. - </p> - <p> - “All this is not my doing,” she said. “I am to blame for nothing of it. As - I tried to tell you, I sympathize deeply with your grief. But grief ought - to make people at least fair, even if it cannot make them gentle and - soften their hearts. I shall trouble you with no more offers of - friendship. I—I think I will go back to the house now—to my - little girl.” - </p> - <p> - Even as she spoke, there came from the direction of the red barn a shrill, - creaking noise which we all knew. At the sound Marcellus and I stood up, - and Serena forgot her intention to go away. The barn doors, yelping as - they moved on their dry rollers, had been pushed wide open. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2H_4_0028" id="link2H_4_0028"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - IV - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>he first one to - emerge from the barn was Hi Tuckerman. He started to make for the house, - but, when he caught sight of our group, came running toward us at the top - of his speed, uttering incoherent shouts as he advanced, and waving his - arms excitedly. It was apparent that something out of the ordinary had - happened. - </p> - <p> - We were but little the wiser as to this something, when Hi had come to a - halt before us, and was pouring out a volley of explanations, accompanied - by earnest grimaces and strenuous gestures. Even Marcellus could make next - to nothing of what he was trying to convey; but Aunt Em, strangely enough, - seemed to understand him. Still slightly trembling, and with a little - occasional catch in her breath, she bent an intent scrutiny upon Hi, and - nodded comprehendingly from time to time, with encouraging exclamations, - “He did, eh!” - </p> - <p> - “Is that so?” and “I expected as much.” Listening and watching, I formed - the uncharitable conviction that she did not really understand Hi at all, - but was only pretending to do so in order further to harrow Serena’s - feelings. - </p> - <p> - Doubtless I was wrong, for presently she turned, with an effort, to her - sister-in-law, and remarked, “P’rhaps you don’t quite follow what he’s - say-in’?” - </p> - <p> - “Not a word!” said Serena, eagerly. “Tell me, please, Emmeline!” - </p> - <p> - Aunt Em seemed to hesitate. “He was shot through the mouth at Gaines’s - Mills, you know—that’s right near Cold Harbor and—the - Wilderness,” she said, obviously making talk. - </p> - <p> - “That isn’t what he’s saying,” broke in Serena. “What <i>is</i> it, - Emmeline?” - </p> - <p> - “Well,” rejoined the other, after an instant’s pause, “if you want to know—he - says that it ain’t Alvy at all that they’ve got there in the barn.” - </p> - <p> - Serena turned swiftly, so that we could not see her face. - </p> - <p> - “He says it’s some strange man,” continued Em, “a yaller-headed man, all - packed an’ stuffed with charcoal, so’t his own mother wouldn’t know him. - Who it is nobody knows, but it ain’t Alvy.” - </p> - <p> - “They’re a pack of robbers ’n’ swindlers!” cried old Arphaxed, - shaking his long gray beard with wrath. - </p> - <p> - He had come up without our noticing his approach, so rapt had been our - absorption in the strange discovery reported by Hi Tuckerman. Behind him - straggled the boys and the hired men, whom Si Hummaston had scurried - across from the house to join. No one said anything now, but tacitly - deferred to the old man’s principal right to speak. It was a relief to - hear that terrible silence of his broken at all. - </p> - <p> - “They ought to all be hung!” he cried, in a voice to which the excess of - passion over physical strength gave a melancholy quaver. “I paid ’em - what they asked—they took a hundred dollars o’ my money—an’ - they ain’t sent me <i>him</i> at all! There I went, at my age, all through - the Wilderness, almost clear to Cold Harbor, an’ that, too, gittin’ up - from a sick bed in Washington, and then huntin’ for the box at New York - an’ Albany, an’ all the way back, an’ holdin’ a funeral over it only this - very day—an’ here it ain’t <i>him</i> at all! I’ll have the law on - ‘em though, if it costs the last cent I’ve got in the world!” - </p> - <p> - Poor old man! These weeks of crushing grief and strain had fairly broken - him down. We listened to his fierce outpourings with sympathetic silence, - almost thankful that he had left strength and vitality enough still to get - angry and shout. He had been always a hard and gusty man; we felt by - instinct, I suppose, that his best chance of weathering this terrible - month of calamity was to batter his way furiously through it, in a rage - with everything and everybody. - </p> - <p> - “If there’s any justice in the land,” put in Si Hummaston, “you’d ought to - get your hundred dollars back. I shouldn’t wonder if you could, too, if - you sued ’em afore a Jestice that was a friend of yours.” - </p> - <p> - “Why, the man’s a fool!” burst forth Arphaxed, turning toward him with a - snort. “I don’t want the hundred dollars—I wouldn’t’a’ begrudged a - thousand—if only they’d dealt honestly by me. I paid ’em - their own figure, without beatin’ ’em down a penny. If it’d be’n - double, I’d ’a’ paid it. What <i>I</i> wanted was <i>my boy!</i> It - ain’t so much their cheatin’ <i>me</i> I mind, either, if it ’d - be’n about anything else. But to think of Alvy—<i>my boy</i>—after - all the trouble I took, an’ the journey, an’ my sickness there among - strangers—to think that after it all he’s buried down there, no one - knows where, p’raps in some trench with private soldiers, shovelled in - anyhow—oh-h! they ought to be hung!” - </p> - <p> - The two women had stood motionless, with their gaze on the grass; Aunt Em - lifted her head at this. - </p> - <p> - “If a place is good enough for private soldiers to be buried in,” she - said, vehemently, “it’s good enough for the best man in the army. On - Resurrection Day, do you think them with shoulder-straps ’ll be - called fust an’ given all the front places? I reckon the men that carried - a musket are every whit as good, there in the trench, as them that wore - swords. They gave their lives as much as the others did, an’ the best man - that ever stepped couldn’t do no more.” - </p> - <p> - Old Arphaxed bent upon her a long look, which had in it much surprise and - some elements of menace. Reflection seemed, however, to make him think - better of an attack on Aunt Em. He went on, instead, with rambling - exclamations to his auditors at large. - </p> - <p> - “Makin’ me the butt of the whole county!” he cried. “There was that - funeral to-day—with a parade an’ a choir of music an’ so on: an’ now - it’ll come out in the papers that it wasn’t Alvy at all I brought back - with me, but only some perfect stranger—by what you can make out - from his clothes, not even an officer at all. I tell you the war’s a - jedgment on this country for its wickedness, for its cheatin’ an’ robbin’ - of honest men! They wa’n’t no sense in that battle at Cold Harbor anyway—everybody - admits that! It was murder an’ massacre in cold blood—fifty thousand - men mowed down, an’ nothin’ gained by it! An’ then not even to git my - boy’s dead body back! I say hangin’s too good for ’em!” - </p> - <p> - “Yes, father,” said Myron, soothingly; “but do you stick to what you said - about the—the box? Wouldn’t it look better—” - </p> - <p> - “<i>No!</i>” shouted Arphaxed, with emphasis. “Let Dana do what I told him—take - it down this very night to the poor-master, an’ let him bury it where he - likes. It’s no affair of mine. I wash my hands of it. There won’t be no - funeral held here!” - </p> - <p> - It was then that Serena spoke. Strangely enough, old Arphaxed had not - seemed to notice her presence in our group, and his jaw visibly dropped as - he beheld her now standing before him. He made a gesture signifying his - disturbance at finding her among his hearers, and would have spoken, but - she held up her hand. - </p> - <p> - “Yes, I heard it all,” she said, in answer to his deprecatory movement. “I - am glad I did. It has given me time to get over the shock of learning—our - mistake—and it gives me the chance now to say something which I—I - feel keenly. The poor man you have brought home was, you say, a private - soldier. Well, isn’t this a good time to remember that there was a private - soldier who went out from this farm—belonging right to this family—and - who, as a private, laid down his life as nobly as General Sedgwick or - General Wadsworth, or even our dear Alva, or any one else? I never met - Emmeline’s husband, but Alva liked him, and spoke to me often of him. Men - who fall in the ranks don’t get identified, or brought home, but they - deserve funerals as much as the others—just as much. Now, this is my - idea: let us feel that the mistake which has brought this poor stranger to - us is God’s way of giving us a chance to remember and do honor to Abel - Jones. Let him be buried in the family lot up yonder, where we had thought - to lay Alva, and let us do it reverently, in the name of Emmeline’s - husband, and of all others who have fought and died for our country, and - with sympathy in our hearts for the women who, somewhere in the North, are - mourning, just as we mourn here, for the stranger there in the red barn.” - </p> - <p> - Arphaxed had watched her intently. He nodded now, and blinked at the - moisture gathering in his old eyes. “I could e’en a’most ’a’ - thought it was Alvy talkin’,” was what he said. Then he turned abruptly, - but we all knew, without further words, that what Serena had suggested was - to be done. - </p> - <p> - The men-folk, wondering doubtless much among themselves, moved slowly off - toward the house or the cow-barns, leaving the two women alone. A minute - of silence passed before we saw Serena creep gently up to Aunt Em’s side, - and lay the thin white hand again upon her shoulder. This time it was not - shaken off, but stretched itself forward, little by little, until its palm - rested against Aunt Em’s further cheek. We heard the tin-pail fall - resonantly against the stones under the rail-fence, and there was a - confused movement as if the two women were somehow melting into one. - </p> - <p> - “Come on, Sid!” said Marcellus Jones to me; “let’s start them cows along. - If there’s anything I hate to see it’s women cryin’ on each other’s - necks.” - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2H_4_0029" id="link2H_4_0029"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - THE EVE OF THE FOURTH - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t was well on - toward evening before this Third of July all at once made itself - gloriously different from other days in my mind. - </p> - <p> - There was a very long afternoon, I remember, hot and overcast, with - continual threats of rain, which never came to anything. The other boys - were too excited about the morrow to care for present play. They sat - instead along the edge of the broad platform-stoop in front of Delos - Ingersoll’s grocery-store, their brown feet swinging at varying heights - above the sidewalk, and bragged about the manner in which they - contemplated celebrating the anniversary of their Independence. Most of - the elder lads were very independent indeed; they were already secure in - the parental permission to stay up all night, so that the Fourth might be - ushered in with its full quota of ceremonial. The smaller urchins - pretended that they also had this permission, or were sure of getting it. - Little Denny Cregan attracted admiring attention by vowing that he should - remain out, even if his father chased him with a policeman all around the - ward, and he had to go and live in a cave in the gulf until he was grown - up. - </p> - <p> - My inferiority to these companions of mine depressed me. They were allowed - to go without shoes and stockings; they wore loose and comfortable old - clothes, and were under no responsibility to keep them dry or clean or - whole; they had their pockets literally bulging now with all sorts of - portentous engines of noise and racket—huge brown “double-enders,” - bound with waxed cord; long, slim, vicious-looking “nigger-chasers;” big - “Union torpedoes,” covered with clay, which made a report like a - horse-pistol, and were invaluable for frightening farmers’ horses; and so - on through an extended catalogue of recondite and sinister explosives upon - which I looked with awe, as their owners from time to time exhibited them - with the proud simplicity of those accustomed to greatness. Several of - these boys also possessed toy cannons, which would be brought forth at - twilight. They spoke firmly of ramming them to the muzzle with grass, to - produce a greater noise—even if it burst them and killed everybody. - </p> - <p> - By comparison, my lot was one of abasement. I was a solitary child, and a - victim to conventions. A blue necktie was daily pinned under my Byron - collar, and there were gilt buttons on my zouave jacket. When we were away - in the pasture playground near the gulf, and I ventured to take off my - foot-gear, every dry old thistle-point in the whole territory seemed to - arrange itself to be stepped upon by my whitened and tender soles. I could - not swim; so, while my lithe bold comrades dived out of sight under the - deep water, and darted about chasing one another far beyond their depth, I - paddled ignobly around the “baby-hole” close to the bank, in the warm and - muddy shallows. - </p> - <p> - Especially apparent was my state of humiliation on this July afternoon. I - had no “double-enders,” nor might hope for any. The mere thought of a - private cannon seemed monstrous and unnatural to me. By some unknown - process of reasoning my mother had years before reached the theory that a - good boy ought to have two ten-cent packs of small fire-crackers on the - Fourth of July. Four or five succeeding anniversaries had hardened this - theory into an orthodox tenet of faith, with all its observances rigidly - fixed. The fire-crackers were bought for me overnight, and placed on the - hall table. Beside them lay a long rod of punk. When I hastened down and - out in the morning, with these ceremonial implements in my hands, the - hired girl would give me, in an old kettle, some embers from the wood-fire - in the summer kitchen. Thus furnished, I went into the front yard, and in - solemn solitude fired off these crackers one by one. Those which, by - reason of having lost their tails, were only fit for “fizzes,” I saved - till after breakfast. With the exhaustion of these, I fell reluctantly - back upon the public for entertainment. I could see the soldiers, hear the - band and the oration, and in the evening, if it didn’t rain, enjoy the - fireworks; but my own contribution to the patriotic noise was always over - before the breakfast dishes had been washed. - </p> - <p> - My mother scorned the little paper torpedoes as flippant and wasteful - things. You merely threw one of them, and it went off, she said, and there - you were. I don’t know that I ever grasped this objection in its entirety, - but it impressed my whole childhood with its unanswerableness. Years and - years afterward, when my own children asked for torpedoes, I found myself - unconsciously advising against them on quite the maternal lines. Nor was - it easy to budge the good lady from her position on the great two-packs - issue. I seem to recall having successfully undermined it once or twice, - but two was the rule. When I called her attention to the fact that our - neighbor, Tom Hemingway, thought nothing of exploding a whole pack at a - time inside their wash-boiler, she was not dazzled, but only replied: - “Wilful waste makes woful want.” - </p> - <p> - Of course the idea of the Hemingways ever knowing what want meant was - absurd. They lived a dozen doors or so from us, in a big white house with - stately white columns rising from veranda to gable across the whole front, - and a large garden, flowers and shrubs in front, fruit-trees and - vegetables behind. Squire Hemingway was the most important man in our part - of the town. I know now that he was never anything more than United States - Commissioner of Deeds, but in those days, when he walked down the street - with his gold-headed cane, his blanket-shawl folded over his arm, and his - severe, dignified, close-shaven face held well up in the air, I seemed to - behold a companion of Presidents. - </p> - <p> - This great man had two sons. The elder of them, - </p> - <p> - De Witt Hemingway, was a man grown, and was at the front. I had seen him - march away, over a year before, with a bright drawn sword, at the side of - his company. The other son, Tom, was my senior by only a twelvemonth. He - was by nature proud, but often consented to consort with me when the - selection of other available associates was at low ebb. - </p> - <p> - It was to this Tom that I listened with most envious eagerness, in front - of the grocery-store, on the afternoon of which I speak. He did not sit on - the stoop with the others—no one expected quite that degree of - condescension—but leaned nonchalantly against a post, whittling out - a new ramrod for his cannon. He said that this year he was not going to - have any ordinary fire-crackers at all; they, he added with a meaning - glance at me, were only fit for girls. He might do a little in - “double-enders,” but his real point would be in “ringers”—an - incredible giant variety of cracker, Turkey-red like the other, but in - size almost a rolling-pin. Some of these he would fire off singly, between - volleys from his cannon. But a good many he intended to explode, in - bunches say of six, inside the tin wash-boiler, brought out into the - middle of the road for that purpose. It would doubtless blow the old thing - sky-high, but that didn’t matter. They could get a new one. - </p> - <p> - Even as he spoke, the big bell in the tower of the town-hall burst forth - in a loud clangor of swift-repeated strokes. It was half a mile away, but - the moist air brought the urgent, clamorous sounds to our ears as if the - belfry had stood close above us. - </p> - <p> - We sprang off the stoop and stood poised, waiting to hear the number of - the ward struck, and ready to scamper off on the instant if the fire was - anywhere in our part of the town. But the excited peal went on and on, - without a pause. It became obvious that this meant something besides a - fire. Perhaps some of us wondered vaguely what that something might be, - but as a body our interest had lapsed. Billy Norris, who was the son of - poor parents, but could whip even Tom Hemingway, said he had been told - that the German boys on the other side of the gulf were coming over to - “rush” us on the following day, and that we ought all to collect nails to - fire at them from our cannon. This we pledged ourselves to do—the - bell keeping up its throbbing tumult ceaselessly. - </p> - <p> - Suddenly we saw the familiar figure of Johnson running up the street - toward us. What his first name was I never knew. To every one, little or - big, he was just Johnson. He and his family had moved into our town after - the war began; I fancy they moved away again before it ended. I do not - even know what he did for a living. But he seemed always drunk, always - turbulently good-natured, and always shouting out the news at the top of - his lungs. I cannot pretend to guess how he found out everything as he - did, or why, having found it out, he straightway rushed homeward, - scattering the intelligence as he ran. Most probably Johnson was moulded - by Nature as a town-crier, but was born by accident some generations after - the race of bellmen had disappeared. Our neighborhood did not like him; - our mothers did not know Mrs. Johnson, and we boys behaved with snobbish - roughness to his children. He seemed not to mind this at all, but came up - unwearyingly to shout out the tidings of the day for our benefit. - </p> - <p> - “Vicksburg’s fell! Vicksburg’s fell!” was what we heard him yelling as he - approached. - </p> - <p> - Delos Ingersoll and his hired boy ran out of the grocery. Doors opened - along the street and heads were thrust inquiringly out. - </p> - <p> - “Vicksburg’s fell!” he kept hoarsely proclaiming, his arms waving in the - air, as he staggered along at a dog-trot past us, and went into the saloon - next to the grocery. - </p> - <p> - I cannot say how definite an idea these tidings conveyed to our boyish - minds. I have a notion that at the time I assumed that Vicksburg had - something to do with Gettysburg, where I knew, from the talk of my elders, - that an awful fight had been proceeding since the middle of the week. - Doubtless this confusion was aided by the fact that an hour or so later, - on that same wonderful day, the wire brought us word that this terrible - battle on Pennsylvanian soil had at last taken the form of a Union - victory. It is difficult now to see how we could have known both these - things on the Third of July—that is to say, before the people - actually concerned seemed to have been sure of them. Perhaps it was only - inspired guesswork, but I know that my town went wild over the news, and - that the clouds overhead cleared away as if by magic. - </p> - <p> - The sun did well to spread that summer sky at eventide with all the - pageantry of color the spectrum knows. It would have been preposterous - that such a day should slink off in dull, Quaker drabs. Men were shouting - in the streets now. The old cannon left over from the Mexican war had been - dragged out on to the rickety covered river-bridge, and was frightening - the fishes, and shaking the dry, worm-eaten rafters, as fast as the swab - and rammer could work. Our town bandsmen were playing as they had never - played before, down in the square in front of the post-office. The - management of the Universe could not hurl enough wild fireworks into the - exultant sunset to fit our mood. - </p> - <p> - The very air was filled with the scent of triumph—the spirit of - conquest. It seemed only natural that I should march off to my mother and - quite collectedly tell her that I desired to stay out all night with the - other boys. I had never dreamed of daring to prefer such a request in - other years. Now I was scarcely conscious of surprise when she gave her - permission, adding with a smile that I would be glad enough to come in and - go to bed before half the night was over. - </p> - <p> - I steeled my heart after supper with the proud resolve that if the night - turned out to be as protracted as one of those Lapland winter nights we - read about in the geography, I still would not surrender. - </p> - <p> - The boys outside were not so excited over the tidings of my unlooked-for - victory as I had expected them to be. They received the news, in fact, - with a rather mortifying stoicism. Tom Hemingway, however, took enough - interest in the affair to suggest that, instead of spending my twenty - cents in paltry fire-crackers, I might go down town and buy another can of - powder for his cannon. By doing so, he pointed out, I would be a - part-proprietor, as it were, of the night’s performance, and would be - entitled to occasionally touch the cannon off. This generosity affected - me, and I hastened down the long hill-street to show myself worthy of it, - repeating the instruction of “Kentucky Bear-Hunter-coarse-grain” over and - over again to myself as I went. - </p> - <p> - Half-way on my journey I overtook a person whom, even in the gathering - twilight, I recognized as Miss Stratford, the school-teacher. She also was - walking down the hill and rapidly. It did not need the sight of a letter - in her hand to tell me that she was going to the post-office. In those - cruel war-days everybody went to the post-office. I myself went regularly - to get our mail, and to exchange shin-plasters for one-cent stamps with - which to buy yeast and other commodities that called for minute fractional - currency. - </p> - <p> - Although I was very fond of Miss Stratford—I still recall her gentle - eyes, and pretty, rounded, dark face, in its frame of long, black curls, - with tender liking—I now coldly resolved to hurry past, pretending - not to know her. It was a mean thing to do; Miss Stratford had always been - good to me, shining in that respect in brilliant contrast to my other - teachers, whom I hated bitterly. Still, the “Kentucky - Bear-Hunter-coarse-grain” was too important a matter to wait upon any mere - female friendships, and I quickened my pace into a trot, hoping to scurry - by unrecognized. - </p> - <p> - “Oh, Andrew! is that you?” I heard her call out as I ran past. For the - instant I thought of rushing on, quite as if I had not heard. Then I - stopped and walked beside her. - </p> - <p> - “I am going to stay up all night: mother says I may; and I am going to - fire off Tom Hemingway’s big cannon every fourth time, straight through - till breakfast time,” I announced to her loftily. - </p> - <p> - “Dear me! I ought to be proud to be seen walking with such an important - citizen,” she answered, with kindly playfulness. She added more gravely, - after a moment’s pause: “Then Tom is out playing with the other boys, is - he?” - </p> - <p> - “Why, of course!” I responded. “He always lets us stand around when he - fires off his cannon. He’s got some ‘ringers’ this year too.” - </p> - <p> - I heard Miss Stratford murmur an impulsive “Thank God!” under her breath. - </p> - <p> - Full as the day had been of surprises, I could not help wondering that the - fact of Tom’s ringers should stir up such profound emotions in the - teacher’s breast. Since the subject so interested her, I went on with a - long catalogue of Tom’s other pyrotechnic possessions, and from that to an - account of his almost supernatural collection of postage-stamps. In a few - minutes more I am sure I should have revealed to her the great secret of - my life, which was my determination, in case I came to assume the - victorious rôle and rank of Napoleon, to immediately make Tom a Marshal of - the Empire. - </p> - <p> - But we had reached the post-office square. I had never before seen it so - full of people. - </p> - <p> - Even to my boyish eyes the tragic line of division which cleft this crowd - in twain was apparent. On one side, over by the Seminary, the youngsters - had lighted a bonfire, and were running about it—some of the bolder - ones jumping through it in frolicsome recklessness. Close by stood the - band, now valiantly thumping out “John Brown’s Body” upon the noisy night - air. It was quite dark by this time, but the musicians knew the tune by - heart. So did the throng about them, and sang it with lusty fervor. The - doors of the saloon toward the corner of the square were flung wide open. - Two black streams of men kept in motion under the radiance of the big - reflector-lamp over these doors—one going in, one coming out. They - slapped one another on the back as they passed, with exultant screams and - shouts. Every once in a while, when movement was for the instant blocked, - some voice lifted above the others would begin “Hip-hip-hip-hip—” - and then would come a roar that fairly drowned the music. - </p> - <p> - On the post-office side of the square there was no bonfire. No one raised - a cheer. A densely packed mass of men and women stood in front of the big - square stone building, with its closed doors, and curtained windows upon - which, from time to time, the shadow of some passing clerk, bareheaded and - hurried, would be momentarily thrown. They waited in silence for the night - mail to be sorted. If they spoke to one another, it was in whispers—as - if they had been standing with uncovered heads at a funeral service in a - graveyard. The dim light reflected over from the bonfire, or down from the - shaded windows of the post-office, showed solemn, hard-lined, anxious - faces. Their lips scarcely moved when they muttered little low-toned - remarks to their neighbors. They spoke from the side of the mouth, and - only on one subject. - </p> - <p> - “He went all through Fredericksburg without a scratch—” - </p> - <p> - “He looks so much like me—General Palmer told my brother he’d have - known his hide in a tan-yard—” - </p> - <p> - “He’s been gone—let’s see—it was a year some time last April—” - </p> - <p> - “He was counting on a furlough the first of this month. I suppose nobody - got one as things turned out—‘’ - </p> - <p> - “He said, ‘No; it ain’t my style. I’ll fight as much as you like, but I - won’t be nigger-waiter for no man, captain or no captain ‘—” - </p> - <p> - Thus I heard the scattered murmurs among the grown-up heads above me, as - we pushed into the outskirts of the throng, and stood there, waiting for - the rest. There was no sentence without a “he” in it. A stranger might - have fancied that they were all talking of one man. I knew better. They - were the fathers and mothers, the sisters, brothers, wives of the men - whose regiments had been in that horrible three days’ fight at Gettysburg. - Each was thinking and speaking of his own, and took it for granted the - others would understand. For that matter, they all did understand. The - town knew the name and family of every one of the twelve-score sons she - had in this battle. - </p> - <p> - It is not very clear to me now why people all went to the post-office to - wait for the evening papers that came in from the nearest big city. - Nowadays they would be brought in bulk and sold on the street before the - mail-bags had reached the post-office. Apparently that had not yet been - thought of in our slow old town. - </p> - <p> - The band across the square had started up afresh with “Annie Lisle”—the - sweet old refrain of “Wave willows, murmur waters,” comes back to me now - after a quarter-century of forgetfulness—when all at once there was - a sharp forward movement of the crowd. The doors had been thrown open, and - the hallway was on the instant filled with a swarming multitude. The band - had stopped as suddenly as it began, and no more cheering was heard. We - could see whole troops of dark forms scudding toward us from the other - side of the square. - </p> - <p> - “Run in for me—that’s a good boy—ask for Dr. Stratford’s - mail,” the teacher whispered, bending over me. - </p> - <p> - It seemed an age before I finally got back to her, with the paper in its - postmarked wrapper buttoned up inside my jacket. I had never been in so - fierce and determined a crowd before, and I emerged from it at last, - confused in wits and panting for breath. - </p> - <p> - I was still looking about through the gloom in a foolish way for Miss - Stratford, when I felt her hand laid sharply on my shoulder. - </p> - <p> - “Well—where is it?—did nothing come?” she asked, her voice - trembling with eagerness, and the eyes which I had thought so soft and - dove-like flashing down upon me as if she were Miss Pritchard, and I had - been caught chewing gum in school. - </p> - <p> - I drew the paper out from under my roundabout, and gave it to her. She - grasped it, and thrust a finger under the cover to tear it off. Then she - hesitated for a moment, and looked about her. “Come where there is some - light,” she said, and started up the street. Although she seemed to have - spoken more to herself than to me, I followed her in silence, close to her - side. - </p> - <p> - For a long way the sidewalk in front of every lighted store-window was - thronged with a group of people clustered tight about some one who had a - paper, and was reading from it aloud. Beside broken snatches of this - monologue, we caught, now groans of sorrow and horror, now exclamations of - proud approval, and even the beginnings of cheers, broken in upon by a - general “’Sh-h!” as we hurried past outside the curb. - </p> - <p> - It was under a lamp in the little park nearly halfway up the hill that - Miss Stratford stopped, and spread the paper open. I see her still, - white-faced, under the flickering gaslight, her black curls making a - strange dark bar between the pale-straw hat and the white of her shoulder - shawl and muslin dress, her hands trembling as they held up the extended - sheet. She scanned the columns swiftly, skimmingly for a time, as I could - see by the way she moved her round chin up and down. Then she came to a - part which called for closer reading. The paper shook perceptibly now, as - she bent her eyes upon it. Then all at once it fell from her hands, and - without a sound she walked away. - </p> - <p> - I picked the paper up and followed her along the gravelled path. It was - like pursuing a ghost, so weirdly white did her summer attire now look to - my frightened eyes, with such a swift and deathly silence did she move. - The path upon which we were described a circle touching the four sides of - the square. She did not quit it when the intersection with our street was - reached, but followed straight round again toward the point where we had - entered the park. This, too, in turn, she passed, gliding noiselessly - forward under the black arches of the overhanging elms. The suggestion - that she did not know she was going round and round in a ring startled my - brain. I would have run up to her now if I had dared. - </p> - <p> - Suddenly she turned, and saw that I was behind her. She sank slowly into - one of the garden-seats, by the path, and held out for a moment a - hesitating hand toward me. I went up at this and looked into her face. - Shadowed as it was, the change I saw there chilled my blood. It was like - the face of some one I had never seen before, with fixed, wide-open, - staring eyes which seemed to look beyond me through the darkness, upon - some terrible sight no other could see. - </p> - <p> - “Go—run and tell—Tom—to go home! His brother—his - brother has been killed,” she said to me, choking over the words as if - they hurt her throat, and still with the same strange dry-eyed, far-away - gaze covering yet not seeing me. - </p> - <p> - I held out the paper for her to take, but she made no sign, and I gingerly - laid it on the seat beside her. I hung about for a minute or two longer, - imagining that she might have something else to say—but no word - came. Then, with a feebly inopportune “Well, good-by,” I started off alone - up the hill. - </p> - <p> - It was a distinct relief to find that my companions were congregated at - the lower end of the common, instead of their accustomed haunt farther up - near my home, for the walk had been a lonely one, and I was deeply - depressed by what had happened. Tom, it seems, had been called away some - quarter of an hour before. All the boys knew of the calamity which had - befallen the Hemingways. We talked about it, from time to time, as we - loaded and fired the cannon which Tom had obligingly turned over to my - friends. It had been out of deference to the feelings of the stricken - household that they had betaken themselves and their racket off to the - remote corner of the common. The solemnity of the occasion silenced - criticism upon my conduct in forgetting to buy the powder. “There would be - enough as long as it lasted,” Billy Norris said, with philosophic - decision. - </p> - <p> - We speculated upon the likelihood of De Witt Hemingway’s being given a - military funeral. These mournful pageants had by this time become such - familiar things to us that the prospect of one more had no element of - excitement in it, save as it involved a gloomy sort of distinction for - Tom. He would ride in the first mourning-carriage with his parents, and - this would associate us, as we walked along ahead of the band, with the - most intimate aspects of the demonstration. We regretted now that the - soldier company which we had so long projected remained still unorganized. - Had it been otherwise we would probably have been awarded the right of the - line in the procession. Some one suggested that it was not too late—and - we promptly bound ourselves to meet after breakfast next day to organize - and begin drilling. If we worked at this night and day, and our parents - instantaneously provided us with uniforms and guns, we should be in time. - It was also arranged that we should be called the De Witt C. Hemingway - Fire Zouaves, and that Billy Norris should be side captain. The chief - command would, of course, be reserved for Tom. We would specially salute - him as he rode past in the closed carriage, and then fall in behind, - forming his honorary escort. - </p> - <p> - None of us had known the dead officer closely, owing to his advanced age. - He was seven or eight years older than even Tom. But the more elderly - among our group had seen him play base-ball in the academy nine, and our - neighborhood was still alive with legends of his early audacity and skill - in collecting barrels and dry-goods boxes at night for election bonfires. - It was remembered that once he carried away a whole front-stoop from the - house of a little German tailor on one of the back streets. As we stood - around the heated cannon, in the great black solitude of the common, our - fancies pictured this redoubtable young man once more among us—not - in his blue uniform, with crimson sash and sword laid by his side, and the - gauntlets drawn over his lifeless hands, but as a taller and glorified - Tom, in a roundabout jacket and copper-toed boots, giving the law on this - his playground. The very cannon at our feet had once been his. The night - air became peopled with ghosts of his contemporaries—handsome boys - who had grown up before us, and had gone away to lay down their lives in - far-off Virginia or Tennessee. - </p> - <p> - These heroic shades brought drowsiness in their train. We lapsed into long - silences, punctuated by yawns, when it was not our turn to ram and touch - off the cannon. Finally some of us stretched ourselves out on the grass, - in the warm darkness, to wait comfortably for this turn to come. - </p> - <p> - What did come instead was daybreak—finding Billy Norris and myself - alone constant to our all night vow. We sat up and shivered as we rubbed - our eyes. The morning air had a chilling freshness that went to my bones—and - these, moreover, were filled with those novel aches and stiffnesses which - beds were invented to prevent. We stood up, stretching out our arms, and - gaping at the pearland-rose beginnings of the sunrise in the eastern sky. - The other boys had all gone home, and taken the cannon with them. Only - scraps of torn paper and tiny patches of burnt grass marked the site of - our celebration. - </p> - <p> - My first weak impulse was to march home without delay, and get into bed as - quickly as might be. But Billy Norris looked so finely resolute and - resourceful that I hesitated to suggest this, and said nothing, leaving - the initiative to him. One could see, by the most casual glance, that he - was superior to mere considerations of unseasonableness in hours. I - remembered now that he was one of that remarkable body of boys, the - paper-carriers, who rose when all others were asleep in their warm nests, - and trudged about long before breakfast distributing the <i>Clarion</i> - among the well-to-do households. This fact had given him his position in - our neighborhood as quite the next in leadership to Tom Hemingway. - </p> - <p> - He presently outlined his plans to me, after having tried the centre of - light on the horizon, where soon the sun would be, by an old brass compass - he had in his pocket—a process which enabled him, he said, to tell - pretty well what time it was. The paper wouldn’t be out for nearly two - hours yet—and if it were not for the fact of a great battle, there - would have been no paper at all on this glorious anniversary—but he - thought we would go downtown and see what was going on around about the - newspaper office. Forthwith we started. He cheered my faint spirits by - assuring me that I would soon cease to be sleepy, and would, in fact, feel - better than usual. I dragged my feet along at his side, waiting for this - revival to come, and meantime furtively yawning against my sleeve. - </p> - <p> - Billy seemed to have dreamed a good deal, during our nap on the common, - about the De Witt C. Hemingway Fire Zouaves. At least he had now in his - head a marvellously elaborated system of organization, which he unfolded - as we went along. I felt that I had never before realized his greatness, - his born genius for command. His scheme halted nowhere. He allotted - offices with discriminating firmness; he treated the question of uniforms - and guns as a trivial detail which would settle itself; he spoke with calm - confidence of our offering our services to the Republic in the autumn; his - clear vision saw even the materials for a fife-and-drum corps among the - German boys in the back streets. It was true that I appeared personally to - play a meagre part in these great projects; the most that was said about - me was that I might make a fair third-corporal. But Fate had thrown in my - way such a wonderful chance of becoming intimate with Billy that I made - sure I should swiftly advance in rank—the more so as I discerned in - the background of his thoughts, as it were, a grim determination to make - short work of Tom Hemingway’s aristocratic pretensions, once the funeral - was over. - </p> - <p> - We were forced to make a detour of the park on our way down, because Billy - observed some halfdozen Irish boys at play with a cannon inside, whom he - knew to be hostile. If there had been only four, he said, he would have - gone in and routed them. He could whip any two of them, he added, with one - hand tied behind his back. I listened with admiration. Billy was not tall, - but he possessed great thickness of chest and length of arm. His skin was - so dark that we canvassed the theory from time to time of his having - Indian blood. He did not discourage this, and he admitted himself that he - was double-jointed. - </p> - <p> - The streets of the business part of the town, into which we now made our - way, were quite deserted. We went around into the yard behind the - printing-office, where the carrier-boys were wont to wait for the press to - get to work; and Billy displayed some impatience at discovering that here - too there was no one. It was now broad daylight, but through the windows - of the composing-room we could see some of the printers still setting type - by kerosene lamps. - </p> - <p> - We seated ourselves at the end of the yard on a big, flat, smooth-faced - stone, and Billy produced from his pocket a number of “em” quads, so he - called them, and with which the carriers had learned from the printers’ - boys to play a very beautiful game. You shook the pieces of metal in your - hands and threw them on the stone; your score depended upon the number of - nicked sides that were turned uppermost. We played this game in the - interest of good-fellowship for a little. Then Billy told me that the - carriers always played it for pennies, and that it was unmanly for us to - do otherwise. He had no pennies at that precise moment, but would pay at - the end of the week what he had lost; in the meantime there was my twenty - cents to go on with. After this Billy threw so many nicks uppermost that - my courage gave way, and I made an attempt to stop the game; but a single - remark from him as to the military destiny which he was reserving for me, - if I only displayed true soldierly nerve and grit, sufficed to quiet me - once more, and the play went on. I had now only five cents left. - </p> - <p> - Suddenly a shadow interposed itself between the sunlight and the stone. I - looked up, to behold a small boy with bare arms and a blackened apron - standing over me, watching our game. There was a great deal of ink on his - face and hands, and a hardened, not to say rakish expression in his eye. - </p> - <p> - “Why don’t you ‘jeff’ with somebody of your own size?” he demanded of - Billy after having looked me over critically. - </p> - <p> - He was not nearly so big as Billy, and I expected to see the latter - instantly rise and crush him, but Billy only laughed and said we were - playing for fun; he was going to give me all my money back. I was rejoiced - to hear this, but still felt surprised at the propitiatory manner Billy - adopted toward this diminutive inky boy. It was not the demeanor befitting - a side-captain—and what made it worse was that the strange boy - loftily declined to be cajoled by it. He sniffed when Billy told him about - the military company we were forming; he coldly shook his head, with a - curt “Nixie!” when invited to join it; and he laughed aloud at hearing the - name our organization was to bear. - </p> - <p> - “He ain’t dead at all—that De Witt Hemingway,” he said, with jeering - contempt. - </p> - <p> - “Hain’t he though!” exclaimed Billy. “The news come last night. Tom had to - go home—his mother sent for him—on account of it!” - </p> - <p> - “I’ll bet you a quarter he ain’t dead,” responded the practical inky boy. - “Money up, though!” - </p> - <p> - “I’ve only got fifteen cents. I’ll bet you that, though,” rejoined Billy, - producing my torn and dishevelled shin-plasters. - </p> - <p> - “All right! Wait here!” said the boy, running off to the building and - disappearing through the door. There was barely time for me to learn from - my companion that this printer’s apprentice was called “the devil,” and - could not only whistle between his teeth and crack his fingers, but chew - tobacco, when he reappeared, with a long narrow strip of paper in his - hand. This he held out for us to see, indicating with an ebon forefinger - the special paragraph we were to read. Billy looked at it sharply, for - several moments in silence. Then he said to me: “What does it say there? I - must ’a’ got some powder in my eyes last night.” - </p> - <p> - I read this paragraph aloud, not without an unworthy feeling that the inky - boy would now respect me deeply: - </p> - <p> - <i>“Correction. Lieutenant De Witt C. Hemingway, of Company A, —th - New York, reported in earlier despatches among the killed, is uninjured. - The officer killed is Lieutenant Carl Heinninge, Company F, same - regiment.”</i> - </p> - <p> - Billy’s face visibly lengthened as I read this out, and he felt us both - looking at him. He made a pretence of examining the slip of paper again, - but in a half-hearted way. Then he ruefully handed over the fifteen cents - and, rising from the stone, shook himself. - </p> - <p> - “Them Dutchmen never was no good!” was what he said. - </p> - <p> - The inky boy had put the money in the pocket under his apron, and grinned - now with as much enjoyment as dignity would permit him to show. He did not - seem to mind any longer the original source of his winnings, and it was - apparent that I could not with decency recall it to him. Some odd impulse - prompted me, however, to ask him if I might have the paper he had in his - hand. He was magnanimous enough to present me with the proof-sheet on the - spot. Then with another grin he turned and left us. - </p> - <p> - Billy stood sullenly kicking with his bare toes into a sand-heap by the - stone. He would not answer me when I spoke to him. It flashed across my - perceptive faculties that he was not such a great man, after all, as I had - imagined. In another instant or two it had become quite clear to me that I - had no admiration for him whatever. Without a word I turned on my heel and - walked determinedly out of the yard and into the street, homeward bent. - </p> - <p> - All at once I quickened my pace; something had occurred to me. The purpose - thus conceived grew so swiftly that soon I found myself running. Up the - hill I sped, and straight through the park. If the Irish boys shouted - after me I knew it not, but dashed on heedless of all else save the one - idea. I only halted, breathless and panting, when I stood on Dr. - Stratford’s doorstep, and heard the night-bell inside jangling shrilly in - response to my excited pull. - </p> - <p> - As I waited, I pictured to myself the old doctor as he would presently - come down, half-dressed and pulling on his coat as he advanced. He would - ask, eagerly, “Who is sick? Where am I to go?” and I would calmly reply - that he unduly alarmed himself, and that I had a message for his daughter. - He would, of course, ask me what it was, and I, politely but firmly, would - decline to explain to any one but the lady in person. Just what might - ensue was not clear—but I beheld myself throughout commanding the - situation, at once benevolent, polished, and inexorable. - </p> - <p> - The door opened with unlooked-for promptness, while my self-complacent - vision still hung in midair. Instead of the bald and spectacled old - doctor, there confronted me a white-faced, solemn-eyed lady in a black - dress, whom I did not seem to know. I stared at her, tongue-tied, till she - said, in a low, grave voice, “Well, Andrew, what is it?” - </p> - <p> - Then of course I saw that it was Miss Stratford, my teacher, the person - whom I had come to see. Some vague sense of what the sleepless night had - meant in this house came to me as I gazed confusedly at her mourning, and - heard the echo of her sad tones in my ears. - </p> - <p> - “Is some one ill?” she asked again. - </p> - <p> - “No; some one—some one is very well!” I managed to reply, lifting my - eyes again to her wan face. The spectacle of its drawn lines and pallor - all at once assailed my wearied and overtaxed nerves with crushing weight. - I felt myself beginning to whimper, and rushing tears scalded my eyes. - Something inside my breast seemed to be dragging me down through the - stoop. - </p> - <p> - I have now only the recollection of Miss Stratford’s kneeling by my side, - with a supporting arm around me, and of her thus unrolling and reading the - proof-paper I had in my hand. We were in the hall now, instead of on the - stoop, and there was a long silence. Then she put her head on my shoulder - and wept. I could hear and feel her sobs as if they were my own. - </p> - <p> - “I—I didn’t think you’d cry—that you’d be so sorry,” I heard - myself saying, at last, in despondent self-defence. - </p> - <p> - Miss Stratford lifted her head and, still kneeling as she was, put a - finger under my chin to make me look her in her face. Lo! the eyes were - laughing through their tears; the whole countenance was radiant once more - with the light of happy youth and with that other glory which youth knows - only once. - </p> - <p> - “Why, Andrew, boy,” she said, trembling, smiling, sobbing, beaming all at - once, “didn’t you know that people cry for very joy sometimes?” - </p> - <p> - And as I shook my head she bent down and kissed me. - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <a name="link2H_4_0030" id="link2H_4_0030"> </a> - </p> - <div style="height: 4em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - <h2> - MY AUNT SUSAN - </h2> - <p class="pfirst"> - <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> HELD the lamp, - while Aunt Susan cut up the Pig. - </p> - <p> - The whole day had been devoted, I remember, to preparations for this great - event. Early in the morning I had been to the butcher’s to set in train - the annual negotiations for a loan of cleaver and meat-saw; and hours - afterward had borne these implements proudly homeward through the village - street. In the interval I had turned the grindstone, over at the Four - Corners, while the grocer’s hired man obligingly sharpened our - carving-knife. Then there had been the even more back-aching task of - clearing away the hard snow from the accustomed site of our wood-pile in - the yard, and scraping together a frosted heap of chips and bark for the - smudge in the smoke-barrel. - </p> - <p> - From time to time I sweetened this toil, and helped the laggard hours to a - swifter pace, by paying visits to the wood-shed to have still another look - at the pig. He was frozen very stiff, and there were small icicles in the - crevices whence his eyes had altogether disappeared. My emotions as I - viewed his big, cold, pink carcass, with its extended legs, its bland and - pasty countenance, and that awful emptiness underneath, were much mixed. - Although I was his elder by seven or eight years, we had been close - friends during all his life—or all except a very few weeks of his - earliest sucking pig-hood, spent on his native farm. I had fed him daily; - I had watched him grow week by week; more than once I had poked him with a - stick as he ran around in his sty, to make him squeal for the edification - of neighbors’ boys who had come into our yard, and would now be sharply - ordered out again by Aunt Susan. - </p> - <p> - As these kindly memories surged over me I could not but feel like a - traitor to my old companion, as he lay thus hairless and pallid before my - eyes. But then I would remember how good he was going to be to eat—and - straightway return with a light heart to the work of kicking up more chips - from the ice. - </p> - <p> - From the living-room in the rear of our little house came the monotonous - incessant clatter of Aunt Susan’s carpet loom. Through the window I could - see the outlines of her figure and the back of her head as she sat on her - high bench. It was to me the most familiar of all spectacles, this - tireless woman bending resolutely over her work. She was there when I - first cautiously ventured my nose out from under the warm blanket of a - winter’s morning. Very, very often I fell asleep at night in my bed in the - recess, lulled off by the murmur of the diligent loom. - </p> - <p> - Presently I went in to warm myself, and stood with my red fingers over the - stove top. She cast but one vague glance at me, through the open frame of - the loom between us, and went on with her work. It was not our habit to - talk much in that house. She was too busy a woman, for one thing, to have - much time for conversation. The impression that she preferred not to talk - was always present in my boyish mind. I call up the picture of her still - as I saw her then under the top bar of the cumbrous old machine, sitting - with lips tight together, and resolute, masterful eyes bent upon the - twining intricacy of warp and woof before her. At her side were piled a - dozen or more big balls of carpet rags, which the village wives and - daughters cut up, sewed together and wound in the long winter evenings, - while the men-folks sat with their stockinged feet on the stove hearth, - and read out the latest “news from the front” in their <i>Weekly Tribune</i>. - </p> - <p> - I knew all these rag balls by the names of their owners. Not only did I - often go to their houses for them, upon the strength of the general - village rumor that they were ready, and always carry back the finished - lengths of carpet; but I had long since unconsciously grown to watch all - the varying garments and shifts of fashion in the raiment of our - neighbors, with an eye single to the likelihood of their eventually - turning up at Aunt Susan’s loom. When Hiram Mabie’s checkered butternut - coat was cut down for his son Roswell, I noted the fact merely as a stage - of its progress toward carpet rags. If Mrs. Wilkins concluded to turn her - flowered delaine dress a third year, or Sarah Northrup had her bright - saffron shawl dyed black, I was sensible of a wrong having been done our - little household. I felt like crossing the street whenever I saw - approaching the portly figure of Cyrus Husted’s mother, the woman who - dragged everybody into her house to show them the ingrain carpet she had - bought at Tecumseh, and assured them that it was much cheaper in the long - run than the products of my aunt’s industry. I tingled with indignation as - she passed me on the sidewalk, puffing for breath and stepping mincingly - because her shoes were too tight for her. - </p> - <p> - Nearly all the knowledge of our neighbors’ sayings and doings which - reached Aunt Susan came to her from me. She kept herself to herself with a - vengeance, toiling early and late, rarely going beyond the confines of her - yard save on Sunday mornings, when we went to church, and treating with - frosty curtness the few people who ventured to come to our house on - business or from social curiosity. For one thing, this Juno Mills in which - we lived was not really our home. We had only been there for four or five - years—a space which indeed spanned all my recollections of life—but - left my Aunt more or less a stranger and a new-comer. She spared no pains - to maintain that condition. I can see now that there were good reasons for - this stern aloofness. At the time I thought it was altogether due to the - proud and unsociable nature of my Aunt. - </p> - <p> - In my child’s mind I regarded her as distinctly an elderly person. People - outside, I know, spoke of her as an old maid, sometimes winking furtively - over my head as they did so. But she was not really old at all—was - in truth just barely in the thirties. - </p> - <p> - Doubtless the fact that she was tall and dark, with very black hair, and - that years of steady concentration of sight, upon the strings and threads - of the loom, had scored a scowling vertical wrinkle between her - near-sighted eyes gave me my notion of her advanced maturity. And in all - her ways and words, too, she was so far removed from any idea of youthful - softness! I could not remember her having ever kissed me. My imagination - never evolved the conceit of her kissing anybody. I had always had at her - hands uniformly good treatment, good food, good clothes; after I had - learned my letters from the old maroon plush label on the Babbitt’s soap - box which held the wood behind the stove, and expanded this knowledge by a - study of street signs, she had herself taught me how to read, and later - provided me with books for the village school. She was my only known - relative—the only person in the world who had ever done anything for - me. Yet it could not be said that I loved her. Indeed she no more raised - the suggestion of tenderness in my mind than did the loom at which she - spent her waking hours. - </p> - <p> - “The Perkinses asked me why you didn’t get the butcher to cut up the pig,” - I remarked at last, rubbing my hands together over the hot stove griddles. - </p> - <p> - “It’s none of their business!” said Aunt Susan, with laconic promptness. - </p> - <p> - “And Devillo Pollard’s got a new overcoat,” I added. “He hasn’t worn the - old army one now for upward of a week.” - </p> - <p> - “If this war goes on much longer,” commented my Aunt, “every carpet in - Dearborn County ‘ll be as blue as a whetstone.” - </p> - <p> - I think that must have been the entire conversation of the afternoon. I - especially recall the remark about the overcoat. For two years now the - balls of rags had contained an increasing proportion of pale blue woollen - strips, as the men of the country round about came home from the South, or - bought cheap garments from the second-hand dealers in Tecumseh. All other - colors had died out. There was only this light blue, and the black of - bombazine or worsted mourning into which the news in each week’s papers - forced one or another of the neighboring families. To obviate this - monotony, some of the women dyed their white rags with butternut or even - cochineal, but this was a mere drop in the bucket, so to speak. The loom - spun out only long, depressing rolls of black and blue. - </p> - <p> - My memory leaps lightly forward now to the early evening, when I held the - lamp in the woodshed, and Aunt Susan cut up the pig. - </p> - <p> - How joyfully I watched her every operation! Every now and again my - interest grew so beyond proper bounds that I held the lamp sidewise, and - the flame smoked the chimney. I was in mortal terror over this lamp, even - when it was standing on the table quite by itself. We often read in the - paper of explosions from this new kerosene by which people were instantly - killed and houses wrapped in an unquenchable fire. Aunt Susan had stood - out against the strange invention, long after most of the other homes of - Juno Mills were familiar with the idea of the lamp. Even after she had - yielded, and I went to the grocery for more oil and fresh chimneys and - wicks, like other boys, she refused to believe that this inflammable fluid - was really squeezed out of hard coal, as they said. And for years we lived - in momentary belief that our lamp was about to explode. - </p> - <p> - My fears of sudden death could not, however, for a moment stand up against - the delighted excitement with which I viewed the dismemberment of the pig. - It was very cold in the shed, but neither of us noticed that. My Aunt - attacked the job with skilful resolution and energy, as was her way, - chopping small bones, sawing vehemently through big ones, hacking and - slicing with the knife, like a strong man in a hurry. - </p> - <p> - For a long time no word was spoken. I gazed in silence as the head was - detached, and then resolved itself slowly into souse—always tacitly - set aside as my special portion. In prophecy I saw the big pan, filled - with ears, cheeks, snout, feet, and tail, all boiled and allowed to grow - cold in their own jelly—that pan to which I was free to repair any - time of day until everything was gone. I thought of myself, too, with - apron tied round my neck and the chopping-bowl on my knees, reducing what - remained of the head into small bits, to be seasoned by my Aunt, and then - fill other pans as head-cheese. The sage and summer savory hung in paper - flour-bags from the rafters overhead. I looked up at them with rapture. It - seemed as if my mouth already tasted them in head-cheese and sausage and - in the hot gravy which basted the succulent spare-rib. Only the abiding - menace of the lamp kept me from dancing with delight. - </p> - <p> - Gradually, however, as my Aunt passed from the tid-bits to the more - substantial portions of her task, getting out the shoulders, the hams for - smoking, the pieces for salting down in the brine-barrel, my enthusiasm - languished a trifle. The lamp grew heavy as I changed it from hand to - hand, holding the free fingers at a respectful distance over the - chimney-top for warmth, and shuffling my feet about. It was truly very - cold. I strove to divert myself by smiling at the big shadow my bustling - Aunt cast against the house side of the shed, and by moving the lamp to - affect its proportions, but broke out into yawns instead. A mouse ran - swiftly across the scantling just under the lean-to roof. At the same time - I thought I caught the muffled sound of distant rapping, as if at our own - rarely used front door. I was too sleepy to decide whether I had really - heard a noise or not. - </p> - <p> - All at once I roused myself with a start. The lamp had nearly slipped from - my hands, and the horror of what might have happened frightened me into - wakefulness. - </p> - <p> - “The Perkins girls keep on calling me ‘Wise child.’ They yell it after me - all the while,” I said, desperately clutching at a subject which I hoped - would interest my Aunt. I had spoken to her about it a week or so before, - and it had stirred her quite out of her wonted stern calm. If anything - would induce her to talk now, it would be this. - </p> - <p> - “They do, eh?” she said, with an alert sharpness of voice, which dwindled - away into a sigh. Then, after a moment, she added, “Well, never you mind. - You just keep right on, tending to your own affairs, and studying your - lessons, and in time it’ll be you who can laugh at them and all their - low-down lot. They only do it to make you feel bad. Just don’t you humor - them.” - </p> - <p> - “But I don’t see,” I went on, “why—what do they call me ‘wise child’ - <i>for?</i> I asked Hi Budd, up at the Corners, but he only just chuckled - and chuckled to himself, and wouldn’t say a word.” - </p> - <p> - My Aunt suspended work for the moment, and looked severely down upon me. - “Well! Ira Clarence Blodgett!” she said, with grim emphasis, “I am ashamed - of you! I thought you had more pride! The idea of talking about things - like that with a coarse, rough, hired man—in a barn!” - </p> - <p> - To hear my full name thus pronounced, syllable by syllable, sent me fairly - weltering, as it were, under Aunt Susan’s utmost condemnation. It was the - punishment reserved for my gravest crimes. I hung my head, and felt the - lamp wagging nervelessly in my hands. I could not deny even her - speculative impeachment as to the barn; it was blankly apparent in my mind - that the fact of the barn made matters much worse. “I was helping him wash - their two-seated sleigh,” I submitted, weakly. “He asked me to.” - </p> - <p> - “What does that matter?” she asked, peremptorily. “What business have you - got going around talking with men about me?” - </p> - <p> - “Why, it wasn’t about you at all, Aunt Susan,” I put in more confidently. - “I said the Perkins girls kept calling me ‘wise child,’ and I asked Hi—” - </p> - <p> - Aunt Susan sighed once more, and interrupted me to inspect the wick of the - lamp. Then she turned again to her work, but less spiritedly now. She took - up the cleaver with almost an air of sadness. - </p> - <p> - “You don’t understand—yet,” she said. “But don’t make it any harder - for me by talking. Just go along and say nothing to nobody. People will - think more of you.” - </p> - <p> - My mind strove in vain to grapple with this suggested picture of myself, - moving about in perpetual dumbness, followed everywhere by universal - admiration. The lamp would <i>not</i> hold itself straight. - </p> - <p> - All at once we both distinctly heard the sound of footsteps close outside. - The noise of crunching on the dry, frozen snow came through the thin - clapboards with sharp resonance. Aunt Susan ceased cutting and listened. - </p> - <p> - “I heard somebody rapping at the front door a spell ago,” I ventured to - whisper. My Aunt looked at me, and probably realized that I was too sleepy - to be accountable for my actions. At all events she said nothing, but - moved toward the low door of the shed, cleaver in hand. - </p> - <p> - “Who’s there?” she called out in shrill, belligerent tones; and this - demand she repeated, after an interval of silence, when an irresolute - knocking was heard on the door. - </p> - <p> - We heard a man coughing immediately outside the door. I saw Aunt Susan - start at the sound—almost as if she recognized it. A moment later - this man, whoever he was, mastered his cough sufficiently to call out, in - a hesitating way: - </p> - <p> - “Is that you, Susan?” - </p> - <p> - Aunt Susan raised her chin on the instant, her nostrils drawn in, her eyes - flashing like those of a pointer when he sees a gun lifted. I had never - seen her so excited. She wheeled round once, and covered me with a swift, - penetrating, comprehensive glance, under which my knees smote together, - and the lamp lurched perilously. Then she turned again, glided toward the - door, halted, moved backward two or three steps—looked again at me, - and this time spoke. - </p> - <p> - “Well, I <i>swan!</i>” was what she said, and I felt that she looked it. - </p> - <p> - “Susan! Is that you?” came the voice again, hoarsely appealing. It was not - the voice of any neighbor. I made sure I had never heard it before. I - could have smiled to myself at the presumption of any man calling my Aunt - by her first name, if I had not been too deeply mystified. - </p> - <p> - “I’ve been directed here to find Miss Susan Pike,” the man outside - explained, between fresh coughings. - </p> - <p> - “Well, then, mog your boots out of this as quick as ever you can!” my Aunt - replied, with great promptitude. “You won’t find her here!” - </p> - <p> - “But I <i>have</i> found her!” the stranger protested, with an accent of - wearied deprecation. “Don’t you know me, Susan? I am not strong, this cold - air is very bad for me.” - </p> - <p> - “I say ‘get out!’” my Aunt replied, sharply. Her tone was unrelenting - enough, but I noted that she had tipped her head a little to one side, a - clear sign to me that she was opening her mind to argument. I felt certain - that presently I should see this man. - </p> - <p> - And, sure enough, after some further parley, Susan went to the door, and, - with a half-defiant gesture, knocked the hook up out of the staple. - </p> - <p> - “Come along then, if you must!” she said, in scornful tones. Then she - marched back till she stood beside me, angry resolution written all over - her face and the cleaver in her hand. - </p> - <p> - A tall, dark figure, opaque against a gleaming background of moonlight and - snowlight, was what I for a moment saw in the frame of the open doorway. - Then, as he entered, shut and hooked the door behind him, and stood - looking in a dazed way over at our lamplit group, I saw that he was a - slender, delicately featured man, with a long beard of yellowish brown, - and gentle eyes. He was clad as a soldier, heavy azure-hued caped overcoat - and all, and I already knew enough of uniforms—cruel familiarity of - my war-time infancy—to tell by his cap that he was an officer. He - coughed again before a word was spoken. He looked the last man in the - world to go about routing up peaceful households of a winter’s night. - </p> - <p> - “Well, now—what is your business?” demanded Aunt Susan. She put her - hand on my shoulder as she spoke, something I had never known her to do - before. I felt confused under this novel caress, and it seemed only - natural that the stranger, having studied my Aunt’s face in a wistful way - for a moment, should turn his gaze upon me. I was truly a remarkable - object, with Aunt Susan’s hand on my shoulder. - </p> - <p> - “I could make no one hear at the other door. I saw the light through the - window here, and came around,” the stranger explained. He sent little - straying glances at the remains of the pig and at the weapon my Aunt held - at her side, but for the most part looked steadily at me. - </p> - <p> - “That doesn’t matter,” said Aunt Susan, coldly. - </p> - <p> - “What do you want, now that you <i>are</i> here? Why did you come at all? - What business had you to think that I ever wanted to lay eyes on you - again? How could you have the courage to show your face here—in <i>my</i> - house?” - </p> - <p> - The man’s shoulders shivered under their cape, and a wan smile curled in - his beard. “You keep your house at a very low temperature,” he said with - grave pleasantry. He did not seem to mind Aunt Susan’s hostile demeanor at - all. - </p> - <p> - “I was badly wounded last September,” he went on, quite as if that was - what she had asked him, “and lay at the point of death for weeks. Then - they sent me North, and I have been in the hospital at Albany ever since. - One of the nurses there, struck by my name, asked me if I had any - relatives in her village—that is, Juno Mills. In that way I learned - where you were living. I suppose I ought not to have come—against - doctor’s orders—the journey has been too much—I have suffered - a good deal these last two hours.” - </p> - <p> - I felt my Aunt’s hand shake a little on my shoulder. Her voice, though, - was as implacable as ever. - </p> - <p> - “There is a much better reason than that why you should not have come,” - she said, bitterly. - </p> - <p> - The stranger was talking to her, but looking at me. He took a step toward - me now, with a softened sparkle in his eyes and an outstretched hand. - “This—this then is the boy, is it?” he asked. - </p> - <p> - With a gesture of amazing swiftness Aunt Susan threw her arm about me, and - drew me close to her side, lamp and all. With her other hand she lifted - and almost brandished the cleaver. - </p> - <p> - “No, you don’t!” she cried. “You don’t touch him! He’s mine! I’ve worked - for him day and night ever since I took him from his dying mother’s - breast. I closed her eyes. I forgave her. Blood is thicker ’n water - after all. She was my sister. Yes, I forgave poor Emmeline, and I kissed - her before she died. She gave the boy to me, and he’s mine! Mine, do you - hear?—<i>mine!</i>” - </p> - <p> - “My dear Susan—” our visitor began. “Don’t ‘dear Susan’ me! I heard - it once—once too often. Oh, never again! You left me to run away - with her. I don’t speak of that. I forgave that when I forgave her. But - that was the least of it. You left her to herself for months before she - died. You’ve left the boy to himself ever since. You can’t begin now. I’ve - worked my fingers to the bone for him—you can’t make me stop now.” - </p> - <p> - “I went to California,” he went on in a low voice, speaking with - difficulty. “We didn’t get on together as smoothly as we might perhaps, - but I had no earthly notion of deserting her. I was ill myself, lying in - yellow-fever quarantine off Key West, at the very time she died. When I - finally got back you and the child were both gone. I could not trace you. - I went to the war. I had made money in California. It is trebled now. I - rose to be Colonel—I have a Brigadier’s brevet in my pocket now. Yet - I give you my word I never have desired anything so much, all the time, as - to find you again—you and the boy.” - </p> - <p> - My Aunt nodded her head comprehendingly. I felt from the tremor of her - hand that she was forcing herself against her own desires to be - disagreeable. - </p> - <p> - “Yes, that war,” was what she said. “I know about that war! The honest men - that go get killed. But you—<i>you</i> come back!” - </p> - <p> - The man frowned wearily, and gave a little groan of discouragement. “Then - this is final, is it? You don’t wish to speak with me; you really desire - to keep the boy—you are set against my ever seeing him—touching - him. Why, then, of course—of course—excuse my—” - </p> - <p> - And then for the first time I saw a human being tumble in a dead swoon. My - little brain, dazed and bewildered by the strange new things I was - hearing, lagged behind my eyes in following the sudden pallor on the man’s - face—lagged behind my ears in noting the tell-tale quaver and gasp - in his voice. Before I comprehended what was toward—lo! there was no - man standing in front of me at all. - </p> - <p> - Like a flash Aunt Susan snatched the lamp from my grasp and flung herself - upon her knees beside the limp and huddled figure. After a momentary - inspection of the white, bearded face, she set the lamp down on the frozen - earth floor and took his head upon her lap. - </p> - <p> - “Take the lamp, run to the buttery, and bring the bottle of hartshorn!” - she commanded me, hurriedly. “Or, no—wait—open the door—that’s - it—walk ahead with the light!” - </p> - <p> - The strong woman stood upright as she spoke, her shoulders braced against - the burden she bore in her arms. Unaided, with slow steps, she carried the - senseless form of the soldier into the living-room, and held it without - rest of any sort, the while I, under her direction, wildly tore off - quilts, blankets, sheets, and feather-tick from my bed and heaped them up - on the floor beside the stove. Then, when I had spread them to her liking, - she bent and gently laid him down. - </p> - <p> - “<i>Now</i> get the hartshorn,” she said.. I heard her putting more wood - on the fire, but when I returned with the phial she sat once again with - the stranger’s head upon her knee. She was softly stroking the fine, - waving brown hair upon his brow, but her eyes were lifted, looking - dreamily at far-away things. I could have sworn to the beginnings of a - smile about her parted lips. It was not like my Aunt Susan at all. - </p> - <p> - “Come here, Ira,” I heard her say at last, after a long time had been - spent in silence. I walked over and stood at her shoulder, looking down - upon the pale face upturned against the black of her worn dress. The blue - veins just discernible in temples and closed eyelids, the delicately - turned features, the way his brown beard curled, the fact that his - breathing was gently regular once more—these are what I saw. But my - Aunt seemed to demand that I should see more. - </p> - <p> - “Well?” she asked, in a tone mellowed beyond all recognition. “Don’t you—don’t - you see who it is?” - </p> - <p> - I suppose I really must have had an idea by this time. But I remember that - I shook my head. - </p> - <p> - My Aunt positively did smile this time. “The Perkins girls were wrong,” - she said; “there isn’t the least smitch of a ‘wise child’ about <i>you!</i>” - </p> - <p> - There was another pause. Emboldened by consciousness of a change in the - emotional atmosphere, I was moved to lay my hand upon my Aunt’s shoulder. - The action did not seem to displease her, and we remained thus for some - minutes, watching together this strange addition to our family party. - </p> - <p> - Finally she told me to get on my cap, comforter, and mittens, and run over - to Dr. Peabody’s and fetch him back with me. The purport of my mission - oppressed me. - </p> - <p> - “Is he going to die then?” I asked. - </p> - <p> - Aunt Susan laughed outright. “You little goose,” she said; “do you think - the doctors kill people <i>every</i> time?” - </p> - <p> - And, laughing again, with a trembling softness in her voice and tears upon - her black eyelashes, she lifted her face to mine—and kissed me! - </p> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <hr /> - <p> - <br /><br /> - </p> - <p> - No fatality dogged good old Doctor Peabody’s big footsteps through the - snow that night. I fell asleep while he was still at my Aunt’s house, but - not before the stranger had recovered consciousness, and was sitting up in - the large rocking-chair, and it was clearly understood that he was soon to - be well again. - </p> - <p> - The kindly, garrulous doctor did more than reassure our little household. - He must have spent most of the night going about reassuring the other - households of Juno Mills. At all events, when I first went out next - morning—while our neighbors were still eating their buckwheat cakes - and pork fat by lamplight—everybody seemed to know that my father, - the distinguished Colonel Blodgett, had returned from the war on - sick-leave, and was lying ill at the house of his sister-in-law. I felt at - once the altered attitude of the village toward me. Important citizens who - had never spoken to me before—dignified and portly men in blue - cutaway coats with brass buttons, and high stiff hats of shaggy white silk—stopped - now to lay their hands on the top of my head and ask me how my father, the - Colonel, was getting along. The grocer’s hired man gave me a Jackson ball - and two molasses cookies the very first time I saw him. Even the Perkins - girls, during the course of the afternoon, strolled over to our front - gate, and, instead of hurling enigmatic objurgations at me, invited me to - come out and play. The butcher of his own accord came and finished cutting - up the pig. - </p> - <p> - These changes came back to me as one part of the great metamorphosis which - the night’s events had wrought. Another part was the definite - disappearance of the stern-faced, tirelessly toiling old maid I had known - all my life as Aunt Susan. In her place there was now a much younger - woman, with pleasant lines about her pretty mouth, and eyes that twinkled - when they looked at me, and who paid no attention to the loom whatever, - but bustled cheerily about the house instead, thinking only of good things - for us to eat. - </p> - <p> - I remember that I marked my sense of the difference by abandoning the old - name of Aunt Susan, and calling her now just “Auntie.” And one day, in the - mid-spring, after she and her convalescent patient had returned from their - first drive together in the country round about, she told me, as she took - off her new bonnet in an absent-minded way, and looked meditatively at the - old disused loom, and then bent down to brush my forehead with her warm - lips—she told me that henceforth I was to call her Mother. - </p> - <div style="height: 6em;"> - <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> - </div> - - - - - - - -<pre> - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of In The Sixties, by Harold Frederic - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE SIXTIES *** - -***** This file should be named 54764-h.htm or 54764-h.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/4/7/6/54764/ - -Produced by David Widger from page images generously -provided by the Internet Archive - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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-<pre>
-
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of In The Sixties, by Harold Frederic
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-Title: In The Sixties
-
-Author: Harold Frederic
-
-Release Date: May 23, 2017 [EBook #54764]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE SIXTIES ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-
-
-
-
-</pre>
-
- <div style="height: 8em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h1>
- IN THE SIXTIES
- </h1>
- <h2>
- By Harold Frederic
- </h2>
- <h4>
- New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons
- </h4>
- <h3>
- 1893
- </h3>
- <p>
- <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001"> </a>
- </p>
- <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
- <img src="images/0007.jpg" alt="0007 " width="100%" /><br />
- </div>
- <h5>
- <a href="images/0007.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
- </h5>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <p>
- <b>CONTENTS</b>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE TO A UNIFORM EDITION </a>
- </p>
- <p>
- <br />
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> <b>THE COPPERHEAD</b> </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I—ABNER BEECH </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II—JEFF’S MUTINY </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III—ABSALOM </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV—ANTIETAM </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V—“JEE’S” TIDINGS </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI—NI’S TALK WITH ABNER </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII—THE ELECTION </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII—THE ELECTION BONFIRE </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX—ESTHER’S VISIT </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X—THE FIRE </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI—THE CONQUEST OF ABNER </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII—THE UNWELCOME GUEST </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII—THE BREAKFAST </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV—FINIS </a>
- </p>
- <p>
- <br />
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> <b>MARSENA</b> </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> I </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> II </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> III </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> IV </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> V </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2H_4_0023"> VI </a>
- </p>
- <p>
- <br />
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2H_4_0024"> <b>THE WAR WIDOW</b> </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2H_4_0025"> I </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2H_4_0026"> II </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2H_4_0027"> III </a>
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2H_4_0028"> IV </a>
- </p>
- <p>
- <br />
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2H_4_0029"> <b>THE EVE OF THE FOURTH</b> </a>
- </p>
- <p>
- <br />
- </p>
- <p class="toc">
- <a href="#link2H_4_0030"> <b>MY AUNT SUSAN</b> </a>
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- PREFACE TO A UNIFORM EDITION
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>n nothing else
- under the latter-day sun-not even in the mysterious department of woman’s
- attire-has Fashion been more variable, or more eccentric in its
- variations, than in the matter of prefaces. The eternal revolution of
- letters devours its own children so rapidly that for the hardiest of them
- ten years count as a generation; each succeeding decade has whims of its
- own about prefaces. Now it has been the rule to make them long and
- didactic, and now brief and with a twist toward flippancy. Upon occasion
- it has been thought desirable to throw upon this introductory formula the
- responsibility of explaining everything that was to follow in the book,
- and, again, nothing has seemed further from the proper function of a
- preface than elucidation of any sort. Sometimes the prevalent mode has
- discouraged prefaces altogether—and thus it happens that the present
- author, doomed to be doing in England at least something of what the
- English do, has never before chanced to write one. Yet now it seems that
- in America prefaces are much in vogue-and this is an American edition.
- </p>
- <p>
- The apology of the exile ends abruptly, however, with this confession that
- the preface is strange ground. The four volumes under comment were all, it
- is true, written in England, but they do not belong to the Old World in
- any other sense.
- </p>
- <p>
- In three of them the very existence of Europe is scarcely so much as
- hinted at. The fourth concerns itself, indeed, with events in which
- Europeans took an active part; but what they were doing, on the one side
- and on the other, was in its results very strictly American.
- </p>
- <p>
- The idea which finally found shape and substance in this last-named book,
- “In the Valley,” seems now in retrospect to have been always in my mind.
- All four of my great-grandfathers had borne arms in the Revolutionary War,
- and one of them indeed somewhat indefinitely expanded this record by
- fighting on both sides. My earliest recollections are of tales told by my
- grandmother about local heroes of this conflict, who were but middle-aged
- people when she was a child. She herself had come into curious relation
- with one of the terrible realities of that period. At the age of six it
- was her task to beat linen upon the stones of a brook running through the
- Valley farm upon which she was reared, and the deep-hole close beside
- where she worked was the spot in which the owner of the farm had lain
- hidden in the alders, immersed to his chin, for two days and nights while
- Brant’s Indians were looking for him. Thus, by a single remove, I came
- myself into contact with the men who held Tryon County against the King,
- and my boyish head was full of them. Before I left school, at the age of
- twelve, I had composed several short but lurid introductions to a
- narrative which should have for its central feature the battle of
- Oriskany; for the writing of one of these, indeed, or rather for my
- contumacy in refusing to give up my manuscript to the teacher when my
- crime was detected, I was expelled from the school.
- </p>
- <p>
- The plan of the book itself dated from 1877, the early months of which I
- busied myself greatly in inciting my fellow-citizens to form what is now
- the Oneida Historical Society, and to prepare for a befitting celebration
- of the coming hundredth anniversary of Oriskany. The circumstance that I
- had not two dollars to spare prevented my becoming a member of the
- Society, but in no way affected the marked success of the celebration it
- organized and superintended. It was at this time that I gathered the first
- materials for my projected work, from members of the Fonda and other
- families. Eight years later I was in the position of having made at least
- as many attempts to begin this book, which I had never ceased to desire to
- write, and for which I had steadily collected books and other data; one of
- these essays ran to more than twenty thousand words, and several others
- were half that length, but they were all failures.
- </p>
- <p>
- In 1885, after I had been a year in London, the fact that a journalist
- friend of mine got two hundred and fifty dollars from the <i>Weekly Echo</i>
- for a serial story, based upon his own observations as a youngster in
- Ireland, gave me a new idea. He seemed to make his book with extreme
- facility, never touching the weekly instalment until the day for sending
- it to the printer’s had arrived, and then walking up and down dictating
- the new chapters in a very loud voice, to drown the racket of his
- secretary’s typewriter. This appeared to be a highly simple way of earning
- two hundred and fifty dollars, and I went home to start a story of my own
- at once. When I had written the opening chapter, I took it to the editor
- of the <i>Weekly Echo</i>, who happened to be a friend of mine as well. He
- read it, suggested the word “comely” instead of some other on the first
- page, and said it was too American for any English paper, but might do
- well in America. The fading away of the two hundred and fifty dollars
- depressed me a good deal, but after a time a helpful reaction came. I
- realized that I had consumed nearly ten years in fruitless mooning over my
- Revolutionary novel, and was no nearer achievement than at the outset,
- simply because I did not know how to make a book of any kind, let alone a
- historical book of the kind which should be the most difficult and
- exacting of all. This determined me to proceed with the contemporary story
- I had begun—if only to learn what it was really like to cover a
- whole canvas. The result was “Seth’s Brother’s Wife”—which still has
- the <i>Echo</i> man’s suggested “comely” in its opening description of the
- barn-yard.
- </p>
- <p>
- At the time, I thought of this novel almost wholly in the light of
- preparation for the bigger task I had to do, and it is still easiest for
- me to so regard it. Certainly its completion, and perhaps still more the
- praise which was given to it by those who first saw it, gave me a degree
- of confidence that I had mastered the art of fiction which I look back
- upon now with surprise—and not a little envy. It was in the fine
- flush of this confidence that I hastened to take up the real work, the
- book I had been dreaming of so long, and, despite the immense amount of
- material in the shape of notes, cross-references, dates, maps,
- biographical facts, and the like, which I had perforce to drag along with
- me, my ardor maintained itself to the finish. “In the Valley” was written
- in eight months—and that, too, at a time when I had also a great
- deal of newspaper work to do as well.
- </p>
- <p>
- “The Lawton Girl” suggested itself at the outset as a kind of sequel to
- “Seth’s Brother’s Wife,” but here I found myself confronted by agencies
- and influences the existence of which I had not previously suspected. In
- “Seth’s Brother’s Wife” I had made the characters do just what I wanted
- them to do, and the notion that my will was not altogether supreme had
- occurred neither to them nor to me. The same had been true of “In the
- Valley,” where indeed the people were so necessarily subordinated to the
- evolution of the story which they illustrated rather than shaped, that
- their personalities always remained shadowy in my own mind. But in “The
- Lawton Girl,” to my surprise at first, and then to my interested delight,
- the people took matters into their own hands quite from the start. It
- seemed only by courtesy that I even presided over their meetings, and that
- my sanction was asked for their comings and goings. As one of many
- examples, I may cite the interview between Jessica and Horace in the
- latter’s office. In my folly, I had prepared for her here a part of
- violent and embittered denunciation, full of scornful epithets and
- merciless jibes; to my discomfiture, she relented at the first sight of
- his gray hair and troubled mien, when I had brought her in, and would have
- none of my heroics whatever. Once reconciled to the posture of a
- spectator, I grew so interested in the doings of these people that I lost
- sight of a time-limit; they wandered along for two years, making the story
- in leisurely fashion as they went. At the end I did assert my authority,
- and kill Jessica—she who had not deserved or intended at all to die—but
- I see now more clearly than any one else that it was a false and cowardly
- thing to do.
- </p>
- <p>
- There remains the volume of collected stories, long and short, dealing
- with varying aspects of home life in the North—or rather in my
- little part of the North—during the Civil War. These stories are by
- far closer to my heart than any other work of mine, partly because they
- seem to me to contain the best things I have done or ever shall do, partly
- because they are so closely interwoven with the personal memories and
- experiences of my own childhood—and a little also, no doubt, for the
- reason that they have not had quite the treatment outside that paternal
- affection had desired for them. Of all the writers whose books affected my
- younger years, I think that MM. Erckmann-Chatrian exerted upon me the
- deepest and most vital influence. I know that my ambition to paint some
- small pictures of the life of my Valley, under the shadow of the vast
- black cloud which was belching fire and death on its southern side, in
- humble imitation of their studies of Alsatian life in the days of the
- Napoleonic terror, was much more powerful than any impulse directly
- inspired by any other writers. By this confession I do not at all wish to
- suggest comparisons. The French writers dealt with a period remote enough
- to be invested with a haze of romance, and they wrote for a reading public
- vehemently interested in everything that could be told them about that
- period. These stories of mine lack these aids—and doubtless much
- else beside. But they are in large part my own recollections of the
- dreadful time—the actual things that a boy from five to nine saw and
- heard about him, while his own relatives were being killed, and his
- school-fellows orphaned, and women of his neighborhood forced into
- mourning and despair—and they had a right to be recorded.
- </p>
- <p>
- A single word in addition to an already over-long preface. The locality
- which furnishes the scenes of the two contemporary novels and all the War
- stories may be identified in a general way with Central New York, but in
- no case is it possible to connect any specific village or town with one
- actually in existence. The political exigencies of “Seth’s Brother’s Wife”
- made it necessary to invent a Congressional District, composed of three
- counties, to which the names of Adams, Jay, and Dearborn were given.
- Afterwards the smaller places naturally took names reflecting the quaint
- operation of the accident which sprinkled our section, as it were, with
- the contents of a classical pepper-box. Thus Octavius, Thessaly, Tyre, and
- the rest came into being, and one tries to remember and respect the
- characteristics they have severally developed, but no exact counterparts
- exist for them in real life, and no map of the district has as yet been
- drawn, even in my own mind.
- </p>
- <h3>
- H. F.
- </h3>
- <p>
- London, February 16, 1897.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- THE COPPERHEAD
- </h2>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER I—ABNER BEECH
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t was on the night
- of my thirteenth birthday, I know, that the old farm-house was burned over
- our heads. By that reckoning I must have been six or seven when I went to
- live with Farmer Beech, because at the time he testified I had been with
- him half my life.
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner Beech had often been supervisor for his town, and could have gone to
- the Assembly, it was said, had he chosen. He was a stalwart,
- thick-shouldered, big man, with shaggy dark eyebrows shading stern hazel
- eyes, and with a long, straight nose, and a broad, firmly shut mouth. His
- expansive upper lip was blue from many years of shaving; all the rest was
- bushing beard, mounting high upon the cheeks and rolling downward in
- iron-gray billows over his breast. That shaven upper lip, which still may
- be found among the farmers of the old blood in our district, was, I dare
- say, a survival from the time of the Puritan protest against the mustaches
- of the Cavaliers. If Abner Beech, in the latter days, had been told that
- this shaving on Wednesday and Saturday nights was a New England rite, I
- feel sure he would never have touched razor again.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was a well-to-do man in the earlier time—a tremendous worker, a
- “good provider,” a citizen of weight and substance in the community. In
- all large matters the neighborhood looked to him to take the lead. He was
- the first farmer roundabout to set a mowing-machine to work in his
- meadows, and to put up lightning-rods on his buildings. At one period he
- was, too, the chief pillar in the church, but that was before the episode
- of the lightning-rods. Our little Union meeting-house was supplied in
- those days by an irregular procession of itinerant preachers, who came
- when the spirit moved and spoke with that entire frankness which is
- induced by knowledge that the night is to be spent somewhere else. One of
- these strolling ministers regarded all attempts to protect property from
- lightning as an insolent defiance of the Divine Will, and said so very
- pointedly in the pulpit, and the congregation sat still and listened and
- grinned. Farmer Beech never forgave them.
- </p>
- <p>
- There came in good time other causes for ill-feeling. It is beyond the
- power of my memory to pick out and arrange in proper sequence the events
- which, in the final result, separated Abner Beech from his fellows. My own
- recollections go with distinctness back to the reception of the news that
- Virginia had hanged John Brown; in a vaguer way they cover the two or
- three preceding years. Very likely Farmer Beech had begun to fall out of
- touch with his neighbors even before that.
- </p>
- <p>
- The circumstances of my adoption into his household—an orphan
- without relations or other friends—were not of the sort to serve
- this narrative. I was taken in to be raised as a farm-hand, and was no
- more expected to be grateful than as if I had been a young steer purchased
- to toil in the yoke. No suggestion was ever made that I had incurred any
- debt of obligation to the Beeches. In a little community where every one
- worked as a matter of course till there was no more work to do, and all
- shared alike the simple food, the tired, heavy sleep, and the infrequent
- spells of recreation, no one talked or thought of benefits conferred or
- received. My rights in the house and about the place were neither less nor
- more than those of Jeff Beech, the farmer’s only son.
- </p>
- <p>
- In the course of time I came, indeed, to be a more sympathetic unit in the
- household, so to speak, than poor Jeff himself. But that was only because
- he had been drawn off after strange gods.
- </p>
- <p>
- At all times—even when nothing else good was said of him—Abner
- Beech was spoken of by the people of the district as a “great hand for
- reading.” His pre-eminence in this matter remained unquestioned to the
- end. No other farmer for miles owned half the number of books which he had
- on the shelves above his writing-desk. Still less was there any one
- roundabout who could for a moment stand up with him in a discussion
- involving book-learning in general. This at first secured for him the
- respect of the whole country-side, and men were proud to be agreed with by
- such a scholar. But when affairs changed, this, oddly enough, became a
- formidable popular grievance against Abner Beech. They said then that his
- opinions were worthless because he got them from printed books, instead of
- from his heart.
- </p>
- <p>
- What these opinions were may in some measure be guessed from the titles of
- the farmer’s books. Perhaps there were some thirty of them behind the
- glass doors of the old mahogany bookcase. With one or two agricultural or
- veterinary exceptions, they related exclusively to American history and
- politics. There were, I recall, the first two volumes of Bancroft, and
- Lossing’s “Lives of the Signers,” and “Field-Books” of the two wars with
- England; Thomas H. Benton’s “Thirty Years’ View;” the four green-black
- volumes of Hammond’s “Political History of the State of New York:”
- campaign lives of Lewis Cass and Franklin Pierce and larger biographies of
- Jefferson and Jackson, and, most imposing of all, a whole long row of big
- calf-bound volumes of the Congressional Globe, which carried the minutiae
- of politics at Washington back into the forties.
- </p>
- <p>
- These books constituted the entire literary side of my boyish education. I
- have only the faintest and haziest recollections of what happened when I
- went during the winter months to the school-house at the Four Corners. But
- I can recall the very form of the type in the farmer’s books. Every one of
- those quaint, austere, and beardless faces, framed in high collars and
- stocks and waving hair—the Marcys, Calhouns, DeWitt Clintons, and
- Silas Wrights of the daguerreotype and Sartain’s primitive graver—gives
- back to me now the lineaments of an old-time friend.
- </p>
- <p>
- Whenever I could with decency escape from playing checkers with Jeff, and
- had no harness to grease or other indoor jobs, I spent the winter evenings
- in poring over some of these books—generally with Abner Beech at the
- opposite side of the table immersed in another. On some rare occasion one
- of the hired men would take down a volume and look through it—the
- farmer watching him covertly the while to see that he did not wet his big
- thumbs to turn over the leaves—but for the most part we two had the
- books to ourselves. The others would sit about till bedtime, amusing
- themselves as best they could, the women-folk knitting or mending, the men
- cracking butternuts, or dallying with cider and apples and fried-cakes, as
- they talked over the work and gossip of the district and tempted the
- scorching impulses of the stovehearth with their stockinged feet.
- </p>
- <p>
- This tacit separation of the farmer and myself from the rest of the
- household in the course of time begat confidences between us. He grew,
- from brief and casual beginnings, into a habit of speaking to me about the
- things we read. As it became apparent, year by year, that young Jeff was
- never going to read anything at all, Abner Beech more and more
- distinguished me with conversational favor. It cannot be said that the
- favoritism showed itself in other directions. I had to work as hard as
- ever, and got no more play-time than before. The master’s eye was
- everywhere as keen, alert, and unsparing as if I had not known even my
- alphabet. But when there were breathing spells, we talked together—or
- rather he talked and I listened—as if we were folk quite apart from
- the rest.
- </p>
- <p>
- Two fixed ideas thus arose in my boyish mind, and dominated all my little
- notions of the world. One was that Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall
- were among the most infamous characters in history. The other was that
- every true American ought to hold himself in daily readiness to fight with
- England. I gave a great deal of thought to both these matters. I had early
- convictions, too, I remember, with regard to Daniel Webster, who had been
- very bad, and then all at once became a very good man. For some obscure
- reason I always connected him in my imagination with Zaccheus up a tree,
- and clung to the queer association of images long after I learned that the
- Marshfield statesman had been physically a large man.
- </p>
- <p>
- Gradually the old blood-feud with the Britisher became obscured by fresher
- antagonisms, and there sprouted up a crop of new sons of Belial who
- deserved to be hated more even than had Hamilton and Marshall. With me the
- two stages of indignation glided into one another so imperceptibly that I
- can now hardly distinguish between them. What I do recall is that the
- farmer came in time to neglect the hereditary enemy, England, and to seem
- to have quite forgotten our own historic foes to liberty, so enraged was
- he over the modern Abolitionists. He told me about them as we paced up the
- seed rows together in the spring, as we drove homeward on the hay-load in
- the cool of the summer evening, as we shovelled out a path for the women
- to the pumps in the farm-yard through December snows. It took me a long
- time to even approximately grasp the wickedness of these new men, who
- desired to establish negro sovereignty in the Republic, and to compel each
- white girl to marry a black man.
- </p>
- <p>
- The fact that I had never seen any negro “close to,” and had indeed only
- caught passing glimpses of one or more of the colored race on the streets
- of our nearest big town, added, no doubt, to the mystified alarm with
- which I contemplated these monstrous proposals. When finally an old darky
- on his travels did stroll our way, and I beheld him, incredibly ragged,
- dirty, and light-hearted, shuffling through “Jump Jim Crow” down at the
- Four Corners, for the ribald delectation of the village loafers, the
- revelation fairly made me shudder. I marvelled that the others could
- laugh, with this unspeakable fate hanging over their silly heads.
- </p>
- <p>
- At first the Abolitionists were to me a remote and intangible class, who
- lived and wrought their evil deeds in distant places—chiefly New
- England way. I rarely heard mention of any names of persons among them.
- They seemed to be an impersonal mass, like a herd of buffaloes or a swarm
- of hornets. The first individuality in their ranks which attracted my
- attention, I remember, was that of Theodore Parker. The farmer one day
- brought home with him from town a pamphlet composed of anti-slavery
- sermons or addresses by this person. In the evening he read it, or as far
- into it as his temper would permit, beating the table with his huge fist
- from time to time, and snorting with wrathful amazement. At last he sprang
- to his feet, marched over to the wood-stove, kicked the door open with his
- boot, and thrust the offending print into the blaze. It is vivid in my
- memory still—the way the red flame-light flared over his big burly
- front, and sparkled on his beard, and made his face to shine like that of
- Moses.
- </p>
- <p>
- But soon I learned that there were Abolitionists everywhere—Abolitionists
- right here in our own little farmland township of northern New York! The
- impression which this discovery made upon me was not unlike that produced
- on Robinson Crusoe by the immortal footprint. I could think of nothing
- else. Great events, which really covered a space of years, came and went
- as in a bunch together, while I was still pondering upon this. John Brown
- was hanged, Lincoln was elected, Sumter was fired on, the first regiment
- was raised and despatched from our rustic end of Dearborn County—and
- all the time it seems now as if my mind was concentrated upon the amazing
- fact that some of our neighbors were Abolitionists.
- </p>
- <p>
- There was a certain dreamlike tricksiness of transformation in it all. At
- first there was only one Abolitionist, old “Jee” Hagadorn. Then, somehow,
- there came to be a number of them—and then, all at once, lo!
- everybody was an Abolitionist—that is to say, everybody but Abner
- Beech. The more general and enthusiastic the conversion of the others
- became, the more resolutely and doggedly he dug his heels into the ground,
- and braced his broad shoulders, and pulled in the opposite direction. The
- skies darkened, the wind rose, the storm of angry popular feeling burst
- swooping over the countryside, but Beech only stiffened his back and never
- budged an inch.
- </p>
- <p>
- At some early stage of this great change, we ceased going to church at
- all. The pulpit of our rustic meeting-house had become a platform from
- which the farmer found himself denounced with hopeless regularity on every
- recurring Sabbath, and that, too, without any chance whatever of talking
- back. This in itself was hardly to be borne. But when others, mere laymen
- of the church, took up the theme, and began in class-meetings and the
- Sunday-school to talk about Antichrist and the Beast with Ten Horns and
- Seven Heads, in obvious connection with Southern sympathizers, it became
- frankly insufferable. The farmer did not give in without a fierce
- resistance. He collected all the texts he could find in the Bible, such as
- “Servants, obey your masters,” “Cursed be Canaan,” and the like, and
- hurled them vehemently, with strong, deep voice, and sternly glowing eyes,
- full at their heads. But the others had many more texts—we learned
- afterwards that old “Jee” Hagadorn enjoyed the unfair advantage of a
- Cruden’s Concordance—and their tongues were as forty to one, so we
- left off going to church altogether.
- </p>
- <p>
- Not long after this, I should think, came the miserable affair of the
- cheese-factory.
- </p>
- <p>
- The idea of doing all the dairy work of a neighborhood under a common
- roof, which originated not many miles from us, was now nearly ten years
- old. In those days it was regarded as having in it possibilities of vastly
- greater things than mere cheesemaking. Its success among us had stirred up
- in men’s minds big sanguine notions of co-operation as the answer to all
- American farm problems—as the gateway through which we were to march
- into the rural millennium. These high hopes one recalls now with a smile
- and a sigh. Farmers’ wives continued to break down and die under the
- strain, or to be drafted off to the lunatic asylums; the farmers kept on
- hanging themselves in their barns, or flying off westward before the
- locust-like cloud of mortgages; the boys and girls turned their steps
- townward in an ever-increasing host. The millennium never came at all.
- </p>
- <p>
- But at that time—in the late fifties and early sixties—the
- cheese-factory was the centre of an impressive constellation of dreams and
- roseate promises. Its managers were the very elect of the district; their
- disfavor was more to be dreaded than any condemnation of a town-meeting;
- their chief officers were even more important personages than the
- supervisor and assessor.
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner Beech had literally been the founder of our cheese-factory. I fancy
- he gave the very land on which it was built, and where you will see it
- still, under the willows by the upper-creek bridge. He sent to it in those
- days the milk of the biggest herd owned by any farmer for miles around,
- reaching at seasons nearly one hundred cows. His voice, too, outweighed
- all others in its co-operative councils.
- </p>
- <p>
- But when our church-going community had reached the conclusion that a man
- couldn’t be a Christian and hold such views on the slave question as Beech
- held, it was only a very short step to the conviction that such a man
- would water his milk. In some parts of the world the theft of a horse is
- the most heinous of conceivable crimes; other sections exalt to this
- pinnacle of sacredness in property a sheep or a pheasant or a woman. Among
- our dairymen the thing of special sanctity was milk. A man in our
- neighborhood might almost better be accused of forgery or bigamy outright,
- than to fall under the dreadful suspicion of putting water into his cans.
- </p>
- <p>
- Whether it was mere stupid prejudice or malignant invention I know not—who
- started the story was never to be learned—but of a sudden everybody
- seemed to have heard that Abner Beech’s milk had been refused at the
- cheese-factory. This was not true, any more than it was true that there
- could possibly have been warrant for such a proceeding. But what did
- happen was that the cheese-maker took elaborate pains each morning to test
- our cans with such primitive appliances as preceded the lactometer, and
- sniffed suspiciously as he entered our figures in a separate book, and
- behaved generally so that our hired man knocked him head over heels into
- one of his whey vats. Then the managers complained to the farmer. He went
- down to meet them, boiling over with rage. There was an evil spirit in the
- air, and bitter words were exchanged. The outcome was that Abner Beech
- renounced the co-operative curds of his earlier manhood, so to speak, sold
- part of his cattle at a heavy loss, and began making butter at home with
- the milk of the remainder.
- </p>
- <p>
- Then we became pariahs in good earnest.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER II—JEFF’S MUTINY
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>he farmer came in
- from the fields somewhat earlier than usual on this August afternoon. He
- walked, I remember, with a heavy step and bowed head, and, when he had
- come into the shade on the porch and taken off his hat, looked about him
- with a wearied air. The great heat, with its motionless atmosphere and
- sultry closeness, had well-nigh wilted everybody. But one could see that
- Abner was suffering more than the rest, and from something beyond the
- enervation of dog-days.
- </p>
- <p>
- He sank weightily into the arm-chair by the desk, and stretched out his
- legs with a querulous note in his accustomed grunt of relief. On the
- moment Mrs. Beech came in from the kitchen, with the big china wash-bowl
- filled with cold water, and the towel and clean socks over her arm, and
- knelt before her husband. She proceeded to pull off his big, dust-baked
- boots and the woollen foot-gear, put his feet into the bowl, bathe and dry
- them, and draw on the fresh covering, all without a word.
- </p>
- <p>
- The ceremony was one I had watched many hundreds of times. Mrs. Beech was
- a tall, dark, silent woman, whom I could well believe to have been
- handsome in her youth. She belonged to one of the old Mohawk-Dutch
- families, and when some of her sisters came to visit at the farm I noted
- that they too were all dusky as squaws, with jet-black shiny curls and
- eyes like the midnight hawk. I used always to be afraid of them on this
- account, but I dare say they were in reality most kindly women. Mrs. Beech
- herself, represented to my boyish eyes the ideal of a saturnine and
- masterful queen. She performed great quantities of work with no apparent
- effort—as if she had merely willed it to be done. Her household was
- governed with a cold impassive exactitude; there were never any hitches,
- or even high words. The hired girls, of course, called her “M’rye,” as the
- rest of us mostly did, but they rarely carried familiarity further, and as
- a rule respected her dislike for much talk. During all the years I spent
- under her roof I was never clear in my mind as to whether she liked me or
- not. Her own son, even, passed his boyhood in much the same state of
- dubiety.
- </p>
- <p>
- But to her husband, Abner Beech, she was always most affectionately docile
- and humble. Her snapping black eyes followed him about and rested on him
- with an almost canine fidelity of liking. She spoke to him habitually in a
- voice quite different from that which others heard addressed to them.
- This, indeed, was measurably true of us all. By instinct the whole
- household deferred in tone and manner to our big, bearded chief, as if he
- were an Arab sheik ruling over us in a tent on the desert. The word
- “patriarch” still seems best to describe him, and his attitude toward us
- and the world in general, as I recall him sitting there in the
- half-darkened living-room, with his wife bending over his feet in true
- Oriental submission.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Do you know where Jeff is?” the farmer suddenly asked, without turning
- his head to where I sat braiding a whiplash, but indicating by the volume
- of voice that his query was put to me.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He went off about two o’clock,” I replied, “with his fish-pole. They say
- they are biting like everything down in the creek.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, you keep to work and they won’t bite you,” said Abner Beech. This
- was a very old joke with him, and usually the opportunity of using it once
- more tended to lighten his mood. Now, though mere force of habit led him
- to repeat the pleasantry, he had no pleasure in it. He sat with his head
- bent, and his huge hairy hands spread listlessly on the chair-arms.
- </p>
- <p>
- Mrs. Beech finished her task, and rose, lifting the bowl from the floor.
- She paused, and looked wistfully into her husband’s face.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You ain’t a bit well, Abner!” she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well as I’m likely ever to be again,” he made answer, gloomily.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Has any more of’em been sayin’ or doin’ anything?” the wife asked, with
- diffident hesitation.
- </p>
- <p>
- The farmer spoke with more animation. “D’ye suppose I care a picayune what
- <i>they</i> say or do?” he demanded. “Not I! But when a man’s own kith and
- kin turn agin him, into the bargain—” He left the sentence
- unfinished, and shook his head to indicate the impossibility of such a
- situation.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Has Jeff—then—” Mrs. Beech began to ask.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes—Jeff!” thundered the farmer, striking his fist on the arm of
- the chair. “Yes—by the Eternal!—Jeff!”
- </p>
- <p>
- When Abner Beech swore by the Eternal we knew that things were pretty bad.
- His wife put the bowl down on a chair, and seated herself in another.
- “What’s Jeff been doin’?” she asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, where d’ye suppose he was last night, ’n’ the night before
- that? Where d’ye suppose he is this minute? They ain’t no mistake about
- it, Lee Watkins saw ’em with his own eyes, and ta’nted me with it.
- He’s down by the red bridge—that’s where he is—hangin’ round
- that Hagadorn gal!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Mrs. Beech looked properly aghast at the intelligence. Even to me it was
- apparent that the unhappy Jeff might better have been employed in
- committing any other crime under the sun. It was only to be expected that
- his mother would be horrified.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I never could abide that Lee Watkins,” was what she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- The farmer did not comment on the relevancy of this. “Yes,” he went on,
- “the daughter of mine enemy, the child of that whining, backbiting old
- scoundrel who’s been eating his way into me like a deer-tick for years—the
- whelp that I owe every mean and miserable thing that’s ever happened to me—yes,
- of all living human creatures, by the Eternal! it’s <i>his</i> daughter
- that that blamed fool of a Jeff must take a shine to, and hang around
- after!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He’ll come of age the fourteenth of next month,” remarked the mother,
- tentatively.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes—and march up and vote the Woollyhead ticket. I suppose that’s
- what’ll come next!” said the farmer, bitterly. “It only needed that!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And it was you who got her the job of teachin’ the school, too,” put in
- Mrs. Beech.
- </p>
- <p>
- “That’s nothing to do with it,” Abner continued. “I ain’t blamin’ her—that
- is, on her own account. She’s a good enough gal so far’s I know. But
- everything and everybody under that tumble-down Hagadorn roof ought to be
- pizen to any son of mine! <i>That’s</i> what I say! And I tell you this,
- mother”—the farmer rose, and spread his broad chest, towering over
- the seated woman as he spoke—“I tell you this; if he ain’t got pride
- enough to keep him away from that house—away from that gal—then
- he can keep away from <i>this</i> house—away from me!”
- </p>
- <p>
- The wife looked up at him mutely, then bowed her head in tacit consent.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He brings it on himself!” Abner cried, with clenched fists, beginning to
- pace up and down the room. “Who’s the one man I’ve reason to curse with my
- dying breath? Who began the infernal Abolition cackle here? Who drove me
- out of the church? Who started that outrageous lie about the milk at the
- factory, and chased me out of that, too? Who’s been a layin’ for years
- behind every stump and every bush, waitin’ for the chance to stab me in
- the back, an’ ruin my business, an’ set my neighbors agin me, an’ land me
- an’ mine in the poorhouse or the lockup? You know as well as I do—‘Jee’
- Hagadorn! If I’d wrung his scrawny little neck for him the first time I
- ever laid eyes on him, it ’d ’a’ been money in my pocket and
- years added onto my life. And then my son—my son! must go taggin’
- around—oh-h!”
- </p>
- <p>
- He ended with an inarticulate growl of impatience and wrath.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mebbe, if you spoke to the boy—” Mrs. Beech began.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, I’ll speak to him!” the farmer burst forth, with grim emphasis.
- “I’ll speak to him so’t he’ll hear!” He turned abruptly to me. “Here,
- boy,” he said, “you go down the creek-road an’ look for Jeff. If he ain’t
- loafin’ round the school-house he’ll be in the neighborhood of Hagadorn’s.
- You tell him I say for him to get back here as quick as he can. You
- needn’t tell him what it’s about. Pick up your feet, now!”
- </p>
- <p>
- As luck would have it, I had scarcely got out to the road before I heard
- the loose-spoked wheels of the local butcher’s wagon rattling behind me
- down the hill. Looking round, I saw through the accompanying puffs of dust
- that young “Ni” Hagadorn was driving, and that he was alone. I stopped and
- waited for him to come up, questioning my mind whether it would be fair to
- beg a lift from him, when the purpose of my journey was so hostile to his
- family. Even after he had halted, and I had climbed up to the seat beside
- him, this consciousness of treachery disturbed me.
- </p>
- <p>
- But no one thought long of being serious with “Ni.” He was along in the
- teens somewhere, not large for his years but extremely wiry and muscular,
- and the funniest boy any of us ever knew of. How the son of such a
- sad-faced, gloomy, old licensed exhorter as “Jee” Hagadorn could be such a
- running spring of jokes and odd sayings and general deviltry as “Ni,”
- passed all our understandings. His very face made you laugh, with its
- wilderness of freckles, its snub nose, and the comical curl to its mouth.
- He must have been a profitable investment to the butcher who hired him to
- drive about the country. The farmers’ wives all came out to laugh and chat
- with him, and under the influence of his good spirits they went on buying
- the toughest steaks and bull-beef flanks, at more than city prices, year
- after year. But anybody who thought “Ni” was soft because he was full of
- fun made a great mistake.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I see you ain’t doin’ much ditchin’ this year,” “Ni” remarked, glancing
- over our fields as he started up the horse. “I should think you’d be
- tickled to death.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Well, in one sense I was glad. There used to be no other such back-aching
- work in all the year as that picking up of stones to fill into the
- trenches which the hired men began digging as soon as the hay and grain
- were in. But, on the other hand, I knew that the present idleness meant—as
- everything else now seemed to mean—that the Beech farm was going to
- the dogs.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” I made rueful answer. “Our land don’t need drainin’ any more. It’s
- dry as a powder-horn now.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ni” clucked knowingly at the old horse. “Guess it’s Abner that can’t
- stand much more drainin’,” he said. “They say he’s looking all round for a
- mortgage, and can’t raise one.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No such thing!” I replied. “His health’s poorly this summer, that’s all.
- And Jeff—he don’t seem to take hold, somehow, like he used to.”
- </p>
- <p>
- My companion laughed outright. “Mustn’t call him Jeff any more,” he
- remarked with a grin. “He was telling us down at the house that he was
- going to have people call him Tom after this. He can’t stand answerin’ to
- the same name as Jeff Davis,” he says.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I suppose you folks put him up to that,” I made bold to comment,
- indignantly.
- </p>
- <p>
- The suggestion did not annoy “Ni.” “Mebbe so,” he said. “You know Dad lots
- a good deal on names. He’s downright mortified that I don’t get up and
- kill people because my name’s Benaiah. ‘Why,’ he keeps on saying to me,
- ‘Here you are, Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, as it was in Holy Writ, and
- instid of preparin’ to make ready to go out and fall on the enemies of
- righteousness, like your namesake did, all you do is read dime novels and
- cut up monkey-shines generally, for all the world as if you’d been named
- Pete or Steve or William Henry.’ That’s what he gives me pretty nearly
- every day.”
- </p>
- <p>
- I was familiar enough with the quaint mysticism which the old Abolitionist
- cooper wove around the Scriptural names of himself and his son. We
- understood that these two appellations had alternated among his ancestors
- as well, and I had often heard him read from Samuel and Kings and
- Chronicles about them, his stiff red hair standing upright, and the blue
- veins swelling on his narrow temples with proud excitement. But that, of
- course, was in the old days, before the trouble came, and when I still
- went to church. To hear it all now again seemed to give me a novel
- impression of wild fanaticism in “Jee” Hagadorn.
- </p>
- <p>
- His son was chuckling on his seat over something he had just remembered.
- “Last time,” he began, gurgling with laughter—“last time he went for
- me because I wasn’t measurin’ up to his idee of what a Benaiah ought to be
- like, I up an’ said to him, ‘Look a-here now, people who live in glass
- houses mustn’t heave rocks. If I’m Benaiah, you’re Jehoiada. Well, it says
- in the Bible that Jehoiada made a covenant. Do you make cove-nants? Not a
- bit of it! all you make is butter firkins, with now an’ then an odd pork
- barrel.’”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What did he say to that?” I asked, as my companion’s merriment abated.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, I come away just then; I seemed to have business outside,” replied
- “Ni,” still grinning.
- </p>
- <p>
- We had reached the Corners now, and my companion obligingly drew up to let
- me get down. He called out some merry quip or other as he drove off,
- framed in a haze of golden dust against the sinking sun, and I stood
- looking after him with the pleasantest thoughts my mind had known for
- days. It was almost a shock to remember that he was one of the abhorrent
- and hated Hagadorns.
- </p>
- <p>
- And his sister, too. It was not at all easy to keep one’s loathing up to
- the proper pitch where so nice a girl as Esther Hagadorn was its object.
- </p>
- <p>
- She was years and years my senior—she was even older than “Ni”—and
- had been my teacher for the past two winters. She had never spoken to me
- save across that yawning gulf which separates little barefooted urchins
- from tall young women, with long dresses and their hair done up in a net,
- and I could hardly be said to know her at all. Yet now, perversely enough,
- I could think of nothing but her manifest superiority to all the
- farm-girls round about. She had been to a school in some remote city,
- where she had relations. Her hands were fabulously white, and even on the
- hottest of days her dresses rustled pleasantly with starched primness.
- People talked about her singing at church as something remarkable; to my
- mind, the real music was when she just spoke to you, even if it was no
- more than “Good-morning, Jimmy!”
- </p>
- <p>
- I clambered up on the window-sill of the school-house, to make sure there
- was no one inside, and then set off down the creek-road toward the red or
- lower bridge. Milking-time was about over, and one or two teams passed me
- on the way to the cheese-factory, the handles of the cans rattling as they
- went, and the low sun throwing huge shadows of drivers and horses
- sprawling eastward over the stubble-field. I cut across lots to avoid the
- cheese-factory itself, with some vague feeling that it was not a fitting
- spectacle for any one who lived on the Beech farm.
- </p>
- <p>
- A few moments brought me to the bank of the wandering stream below the
- factory, but so near that I could hear the creaking of the chain drawing
- up the cans over the tackle, or as we called it, the “teekle;” The willows
- under which I walked stretched without a break from the clump by the
- factory bridge. And now, lo and behold! beneath still other of these
- willows, farther down the stream, whom should I see strolling together but
- my schoolteacher and the delinquent Jeff!
- </p>
- <p>
- Young Beech bore still the fish-pole I had seen him take from our shed
- some hours earlier, but the line twisted round it was very white and dry.
- He was extremely close to the girl, and kept his head bent down over her
- as they sauntered along the meadow-path. They seemed not to be talking,
- but just idly drifting forward like the deep slow water beside them. I had
- never realized before how tall Jeff was. Though the school-ma’am always
- seemed to me of an exceeding stature, here was Jeff rounding his shoulders
- and inclining his neck in order to look under her broad-brimmed Leghorn
- hat.
- </p>
- <p>
- There could be no imaginable excuse for my not overtaking them. Instinct
- prompted me to start up a whistling tune as I advanced—a casual and
- indolently unobtrusive tune—at sound of which Jeff straightened
- himself, and gave his companion a little more room on the path. In a
- moment or two he stopped, and looked intently over the bank into the
- water, as if he hoped it might turn out to be a likely place for fish. And
- the school-ma’am, too, after a few aimless steps, halted to help him look.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Abner wants you to come right straight home!” was the form in which my
- message delivered itself when I had come close up to them.
- </p>
- <p>
- They both shifted their gaze from the sluggish stream below to me upon the
- instant. Then Esther Hagadorn looked away, but Jeff—good, big,
- honest Jeff, who had been like a fond elder brother to me since I could
- remember—knitted his brows and regarded me with something like a
- scowl.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Did pa send you to say that?” he demanded, holding my eye with a glance
- of such stern inquiry that I could only nod my head in confusion.
- </p>
- <p>
- “An’ he knew that you’d find me here, did he?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He said either at the school-house or around here somewhere,” I admitted,
- weakly. ‘An’ there ain’t nothin’ the matter at the farm?’
- </p>
- <p>
- “He don’t want me for nothin’ special?” pursued Jeff, still looking me
- through and through.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He didn’t say,” I made hesitating answer, but for the life of me, I could
- not keep from throwing a tell-tale look in the direction of his companion
- in the blue gingham dress.
- </p>
- <p>
- A wink could not have told Jeff more. He gave a little bitter laugh, and
- stared above my head at the willow-plumes fora minute’s meditation. Then
- he tossed his fish-pole over to me and laughed again.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Keep that for yourself, if you want it,” he said, in a voice not quite
- his own, but robustly enough. “I sha’n’t need it any more. Tell pa I ain’t
- a-comin’!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, Tom!” Esther broke in, anxiously, “would you do that?”
- </p>
- <p>
- He held up his hand with a quiet, masterful gesture, as if she were the
- pupil and he the teacher. “Tell him,” he went on, the tone falling now
- strong and true, “tell him and ma that I’m goin’ to Tecumseh to-night to
- enlist. If they’re willin’ to say good-by, they can let me know there, and
- I’ll manage to slip back for the day. If they ain’t willin’—why,
- they—they needn’t send word; that’s all.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Esther had come up to him, and held his arm now in hers.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’re wrong to leave them like that!” she pleaded, earnestly, but Jeff
- shook his head.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You don’t know him!” was all he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- In another minute I had shaken hands with Jeff, and had started on my
- homeward way, with his parting “Good-by, youngster!” benumbing my ears.
- When, after a while, I turned to look back, they were still standing where
- I had left them, gazing over the bank into the water.
- </p>
- <p>
- Then, as I trudged onward once more, I began to quake at the thought of
- how Farmer Beech would take the news.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER III—ABSALOM
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span>nce, in the
- duck-season, as I lay hidden among the marsh-reeds with an older boy, a
- crow passed over us, flying low. Looking up at him, I realized for the
- first time how beautiful a creature was this common black thief of ours—how
- splendid his strength and the sheen of his coat, how proudly graceful the
- sweep and curves of his great slow wings. The boy beside me fired, and in
- a flash what I had been admiring changed—even as it stopped headlong
- in mid-air—into a hideous thing, an evil confusion of jumbled
- feathers. The awful swiftness of that transition from beauty and power to
- hateful carrion haunted me for a long time.
- </p>
- <p>
- I half expected that Abner Beech would crumple up in some such distressing
- way, all of a sudden, when I told him that his son Jeff was in open
- rebellion, and intended to go off and enlist. It was incredible to the
- senses that any member of the household should set at defiance the
- patriarchal will of its head. But that the offence should come from
- placid, slow-witted, good-natured Jeff, and that it should involve the
- appearance of a Beech in a blue uniform—these things staggered the
- imagination. It was clear that something prodigious must happen.
- </p>
- <p>
- As it turned out, nothing happened at all. The farmer and his wife sat out
- on the veranda, as was their wont of a summer evening, rarely exchanging a
- word, but getting a restful sort of satisfaction in together surveying
- their barns and haystacks and the yellow-brown stretch of fields beyond.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Jeff says he’s goin’ to-night to Tecumseh, an’ he’s goin’ to enlist, an’
- if you want him to run over to say good-by you’re to let him know there.”
- </p>
- <p>
- I leant upon my newly-acquired fish-pole for support, as I unburdened
- myself of these sinister tidings. The old pair looked at me in calm-eyed
- silence, as if I had related the most trivial of village occurrences.
- Neither moved a muscle nor uttered a sound, but just gazed, till it felt
- as if their eyes were burning holes into me.
- </p>
- <p>
- “That’s what he said,” I repeated, after a pause, to mitigate the
- embarrassment of that dumb steadfast stare.
- </p>
- <p>
- The mother it was who spoke at last. “You’d better go round and get your
- supper,” she said, quietly.
- </p>
- <p>
- The table was spread, as usual, in the big, low-ceilinged room which
- during the winter was used as a kitchen. What was unusual was to discover
- a strange man seated alone in his shirt-sleeves at this table, eating his
- supper. As I took my chair, however, I saw that he was not altogether a
- stranger. I recognized in him the little old Irishman who had farmed at
- Ezra Tracy’s beaver-meadow the previous year on shares, and done badly,
- and had since been hiring out for odd jobs at hoeing and haying. He had
- lately lost his wife, I recalled now, and lived alone in a tumble-down old
- shanty beyond Parker’s saw-mill. He had come to us in the spring, I
- remembered, when the brindled calf was born, to beg a pail of what he
- called “basteings,” and I speculated in my mind whether it was this
- repellent mess that had killed his wife. Above all these thoughts rose the
- impression that Abner must have decided to do a heap of ditching and
- wall-building, to have hired a new hand in this otherwise slack season—and
- at this my back began to ache prophetically.
- </p>
- <p>
- “How are yeh!” the new-comer remarked, affably, as I sat down and reached
- for the bread. “An’ did yeh see the boys march away? An’ had they a drum
- wid ’em?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What boys?” I asked, in blank ignorance as to what he was at.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m told there’s a baker’s dozen of’em gone, more or less,” he replied.
- “Well, glory be to the Lord, ’tis an ill wind blows nobody good.
- Here am I aitin’ butter on my bread, an’ cheese on top o’ that.”
- </p>
- <p>
- I should still have been in the dark, had not one of the hired girls,
- Janey Wilcox, come in from the butter-room, to ask me in turn much the
- same thing, and to add the explanation that a whole lot of the young men
- of the neighborhood had privately arranged among themselves to enlist
- together as soon as the harvesting was over, and had this day gone off in
- a body. Among them, I learned now, were our two hired men, Warner Pitts
- and Ray Watkins. This, then, accounted for the presence of the Irishman.
- </p>
- <p>
- As a matter of fact, there had been no secrecy about the thing save with
- the contingent which our household furnished, and that was only because of
- the fear which Abner Beech inspired. His son and his servants alike
- preferred to hook it, rather than explain their patriotic impulses to him.
- But naturally enough, our farm-girls took it for granted that all the
- others had gone in the same surreptitious fashion, and this threw an air
- of fascinating mystery about the whole occurrence. They were deeply
- surprised that I should have been down past the Corners, and even beyond
- the cheese-factory, and seen nothing of these extraordinary martial
- preparations; and I myself was ashamed of it.
- </p>
- <p>
- Opinions differed, I remember, as to the behavior of our two hired men.
- “Till” Babcock and the Underwood girl defended them, but Janey took the
- other side, not without various unpleasant personal insinuations, and the
- Irishman and I were outspoken in their condemnation. But nobody said a
- word about Jeff, though it was plain enough that every one knew.
- </p>
- <p>
- Dusk fell while we still talked of these astounding events—my
- thoughts meantime dividing themselves between efforts to realize these
- neighbors of ours as soldiers on the tented field, and uneasy speculation
- as to whether I should at last get a bed to myself or be expected to sleep
- with the Irishman.
- </p>
- <p>
- Janey Wilcox had taken the lamp into the living-room. She returned now,
- with an uplifted hand and a face covered over with lines of surprise.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’re to all of you come in,” she whispered, impressively. “Abner’s got
- the Bible down. We’re goin’ to have fam’ly prayers, or somethin’.”
- </p>
- <p>
- With one accord we looked at the Irishman. The question had never before
- arisen on our farm, but we all knew about other cases, in which Catholic
- hands held aloof from the household’s devotions. There were even stories
- of their refusal to eat meat on some one day of the week, but this we
- hardly brought ourselves to credit. Our surprise at the fact that domestic
- religious observances were to be resumed under the Beech roof-tree—where
- they had completely lapsed ever since the trouble at the church—was
- as nothing compared with our curiosity to see what the new-comer would do.
- </p>
- <p>
- What he did was to get up and come along with the rest of us, quite as a
- matter of course. I felt sure that he could not have understood what was
- going on.
- </p>
- <p>
- We filed into the living-room. The Beeches had come in and shut the
- veranda door, and “M’rye” was seated in her rocking-chair, in the darkness
- beyond the bookcase. Her husband had the big book open before him on the
- table; the lamp-light threw the shadow of his long nose down into the gray
- of his beard with a strange effect of fierceness. His lips were tight-set
- and his shaggy brows drawn into a commanding frown, as he bent over the
- pages.
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner did not look up till we had taken our seats. Then he raised his eyes
- toward the Irishman.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t know, Hurley,” he said, in a grave, deep-booming voice, “whether
- you feel it right for you to join us—we bein’ Protestants—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Ah, it’s all right, sir,” replied Hurley, reassuringly, “I’ll take no
- harm by it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- A minute’s silence followed upon this magnanimous declaration. Then Abner,
- clearing his throat, began solemnly to read the story of Absalom’s revolt.
- He had the knack, not uncommon in those primitive class-meeting days, of
- making his strong, low-pitched voice quaver and wail in the most
- tear-compelling fashion when he read from the Old Testament. You could
- hardly listen to him going through even the genealogical tables of
- Chronicles dry-eyed. His Jeremiah and Ezekiel were equal to the funeral of
- a well-beloved relation.
- </p>
- <p>
- This night he read as I had never heard him read before. The whole grim
- story of the son’s treason and final misadventure, of the ferocious battle
- in the wood of Ephraim, of Joab’s savagery, and of the rival runners, made
- the air vibrate about us, and took possession of our minds and kneaded
- them like dough, as we sat in the mute circle in the old living-room. From
- my chair I could see Hurley without turning my head, and the spectacle of
- excitement he presented—bending forward with dropped jaw and wild,
- glistening gray eyes, a hand behind his ear to miss no syllable of this
- strange new tale—only added to the effect it produced on me.
- </p>
- <p>
- Then there came the terrible picture of the King’s despair. I had trembled
- as we neared this part, foreseeing what heart-wringing anguish Abner, in
- his present mood, would give to that cry of the stricken father—“O
- my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O
- Absalom, my son, my son!” To my great surprise, he made very little of it.
- The words came coldly, almost contemptuously, so that the listener could
- not but feel that David’s lamentations were out of place, and might better
- have been left unuttered.
- </p>
- <p>
- But now the farmer, leaping over into the next chapter, brought swart,
- stalwart, blood-stained Joab on the scene before us, and in an instant we
- saw why the King’s outburst of mourning had fallen so flat upon our ears.
- Abner Beech’s voice rose and filled the room with its passionate fervor as
- he read out Joab’s speech—wherein the King is roundly told that his
- son was a worthless fellow, and was killed not a bit too soon, and that
- for the father to thus publicly lament him is to put to shame all his
- household and his loyal friends and servants.
- </p>
- <p>
- While these sonorous words of protest against paternal weakness still rang
- in the air, Abner abruptly closed the book with a snap. We looked at him
- and at one another for a bewildered moment, and then “Till” Babcock
- stooped as if to kneel by her chair, but Janey nudged her, and we all rose
- and made our way silently out again into the kitchen. It had been apparent
- enough that no spirit of prayer abode in the farmer’s breast.
- </p>
- <p>
- “‘Twas a fine bold sinsible man, that Job!” remarked Hurley to me, when
- the door was closed behind us, and the women had gone off to talk the
- scene over among themselves in the butter-room. “Would it be him that had
- thim lean turkeys?”
- </p>
- <p>
- With some difficulty I made out his meaning.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, no!” I exclaimed, “the man Abner read about was Jo-ab, not Job. They
- were quite different people.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I thought as much,” replied the Irishman. “‘Twould not be in so grand a
- man’s nature to let his fowls go hungry. And do we be hearing such tales
- every night?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Maybe Abner ’ll keep on, now he’s started again,” I said. “We
- ain’t had any Bible-reading before since he had his row down at the
- church, and we left off going.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hurley displayed such a lively interest in this matter that I went over it
- pretty fully, setting forth Abner’s position and the intolerable
- provocations which had been forced upon him. It took him a long time to
- grasp the idea that in Protestant gatherings not only the pastor spoke,
- but the class-leaders and all others who were conscious of a call might
- have their word as well, and that in this way even the lowliest and
- meanest of the farmer’s neighbors had been able to affront him in the
- church itself.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Too many cooks spoil the broth,” was his comment upon this. “’Tis
- far better to hearken to one man only. If he’s right, you’re right. If
- he’s wrong, why, thin, there ye have him in front of ye for protection.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Bedtime came soon after, and Mrs. Beech appeared in her nightly round of
- the house to see that the doors were all fastened. The candle she bore
- threw up a flaring yellow light upon her chin, but made the face above it
- by contrast still darker and more saturnine. She moved about in erect
- impassiveness, trying the bolts and the window-catches, and went away
- again, having said never a word. I had planned to ask her if I might now
- have a bed to myself, but somehow my courage failed me, so stern and
- majestic was her aspect.
- </p>
- <p>
- I took the desired boon without asking, and dreamed of her as a darkling
- and relentless Joab in petticoats, slaying her own son Jeff as he hung by
- his hay-colored hair in one of the apple-trees of our orchard.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER IV—ANTIETAM
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">O</span>n all the other
- farms roundabout, this mid-August was a slack season. The hired men and
- boys did a little early fruit-picking, a little berrying, a little
- stone-drawing, but for the most part they could be seen idling about the
- woods or along the river down below Juno Mills, with gun or fish-pole.
- Only upon the one farm whose turn it was that week to be visited by the
- itinerant threshing-machine, was any special activity visible.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was well known, however, that we were not to get the threshing-machine
- at all. How it was managed, I never understood. Perhaps the other farmers
- combined in some way to over-awe or persuade the owners of the machine
- into refusing it to Abner Beech. More likely he scented the chance of a
- refusal and was too proud to put himself in its way by asking. At all
- events, we three—Abner, Hurley, and I—had to manage the
- threshing ourselves, on the matched wood floor of the carriage barn. All
- the fishing I did that year was in the prolific but unsubstantial waters
- of dreamland.
- </p>
- <p>
- I did not work much, it is true, with the flail, but I lived all day in an
- atmosphere choked with dust and chaff, my ears deafened with the ceaseless
- whack! whack! of the hard-wood clubs, bringing on fresh shocks of grain,
- and acting as general helper.
- </p>
- <p>
- By toiling late and early we got this task out of the way just when the
- corn was ready to cut. This great job taxed all the energies of the two
- men, the one cutting, the other stacking, as they went. My own share of
- the labor was to dig the potatoes and pick the eating-apples—a quite
- portentous enough undertaking for a lad of twelve. All this kept me very
- much to myself. There was no chance to talk during the day, and at night I
- was glad to drag my tired limbs off to bed before the girls had fairly
- cleared the supper things away. A weekly newspaper—<i>The World</i>—came
- regularly to the postoffice at the Corners for us, but we were so
- overworked that often it lay there for weeks at a time, and even when some
- one went after it, nobody but Abner cared to read it.
- </p>
- <p>
- So far as I know, no word ever came from Jeff. His name was never
- mentioned among us.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was now past the middle of September. Except for the fall ploughing on
- fields that were to be put to grass under the grain in the spring—which
- would come much later—the getting in of the root crops, and the
- husking, our season’s labors were pretty well behind us. The women folk
- had toiled like slaves as well, taking almost all the chores about the
- cattle-barns off our shoulders, and carrying on the butter-making without
- bothering us. Now that a good many cows were drying up, it was their turn
- to take things easy, too. But the girls, instead of being glad at this,
- began to borrow unhappiness over the certainty that there would be no
- husking-bees on the Beech farm.
- </p>
- <p>
- One heard no other subject discussed now, as we sat of a night in the
- kitchen. Even when we foregathered in the living-room instead, the Babcock
- and the Underwood girl talked in ostentatiously low tones of the hardship
- of missing such opportunities for getting beaux, and having fun. They
- recalled to each other, with tones of longing, this and that husking-bee
- of other years—now one held of a moonlight night in the field
- itself, where the young men pulled the stacks down and dragged them to
- where the girls sat in a ring on big pumpkins, and merriment, songs, and
- chorused laughter chased the happy hours along; now of a bee held in the
- late wintry weather, where the men went off to the barn by themselves and
- husked till they were tired, and then with warning whoops came back to
- where the girls were waiting for them in the warm, hospitable farm-house,
- and the frolic began, with cider and apples and pumpkin-pies, and old Lem
- Hornbeck’s fiddle to lead the dancing.
- </p>
- <p>
- Alas! they shook their empty heads and mourned, there would be no more of
- these delightful times! Nothing definite was ever said as to the reason
- for our ostracism from the sports and social enjoyments of the season.
- There was no need for that. We all knew too well that it was Abner Beech’s
- politics which made us outcasts, but even these two complaining girls did
- not venture to say so in his hearing. Their talk, however, grew at last so
- persistently querulous that “M’rye” bluntly told them one night to “shut
- up about husking-bees,” following them out into the kitchen for that
- purpose, and speaking with unaccustomed acerbity. Thereafter we heard no
- more of their grumbling, but in a week or two “Till” Babcock left for her
- home over on the Dutch Road, and began circulating the report that we
- prayed every night for the success of Jeff Davis.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was on a day in the latter half of September, perhaps the 20th or 21st—as
- nearly as I am able to make out from the records now—that Hurley and
- I started off with a double team and our big box-wagon, just after
- breakfast, on a long day’s journey. We were taking a heavy load of
- potatoes into market at Octavius, twelve miles distant; thence we were to
- drive out an additional three miles to a cooper-shop and bring back as
- many butter-firkins as we could stack up behind us, not to mention a lot
- of groceries of which “M’rye” gave me a list.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was a warm, sweet-aired, hazy autumn day, with a dusky red sun
- sauntering idly about in the sky, too indolent to cast more than the
- dimmest and most casual suggestion of a shadow for anything or anybody.
- The Irishman sat round-backed and contented on the very high seat
- overhanging the horses, his elbows on his knees, and a little black pipe
- turned upside down in his mouth. He would suck satisfiedly at this for
- hours after the fire had gone out, until, my patience exhausted, I begged
- him to light it again. He seemed almost never to put any new tobacco into
- this pipe, and to this day it remains a twin-mystery to me why its
- contents neither burned themselves to nothing nor fell out.
- </p>
- <p>
- We talked a good deal, in a desultory fashion, as the team plodded their
- slow way into Octavius. Hurley told me, in answer to the questions of a
- curious boy, many interesting and remarkable things about the old country,
- as he always called it, and more particularly about his native part of it,
- which was on the sea-shore within sight of Skibbereen. He professed always
- to be filled with longing to go back, but at the same time guarded his
- tiny personal expenditure with the greatest solicitude, in order to save
- money to help one of his relations to get away. Once, when I taxed him
- with this inconsistency, he explained that life in Ireland was the most
- delicious thing on earth, but you had to get off at a distance of some
- thousands of miles to really appreciate it.
- </p>
- <p>
- Naturally there was considerable talk between us, as well, about Abner
- Beech and his troubles. I don’t know where I could have heard it, but when
- Hurley first came to us I at once took it for granted that the fact of his
- nationality made him a sympathizer with the views of our household.
- Perhaps I only jumped at this conclusion from the general ground that the
- few Irish who in those days found their way into the farm-country were
- held rather at arm’s-length by the community, and must in the nature of
- things feel drawn to other outcasts. At all events, I made no mistake.
- Hurley could not have well been more vehemently embittered against
- abolitionism and the war than Abner was, but he expressed his feelings
- with much greater vivacity and fluency of speech. It was surprising to see
- how much he knew about the politics and political institutions of a
- strange country, and how excited he grew about them when any one would
- listen to him. But as he was a small man, getting on in years, he did not
- dare air these views down at the Corners. The result was that he and Abner
- were driven to commune together, and mutually inflamed each other’s
- passionate prejudices—which was not at all needful.
- </p>
- <p>
- When at last, shortly before noon, we drove into Octavius, I jumped off to
- fill one portion of the grocery errands, leaving Hurley to drive on with
- the potatoes. We were to meet at the little village tavern for dinner.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was feeding the horses in the hotel shed when I rejoined him an hour or
- so later. I came in, bursting with the importance of the news I had picked
- up—scattered, incomplete, and even incoherent news, but of a most
- exciting sort. The awful battle of Antietam had happened two or three days
- before, and nobody in all Octavius was talking or thinking of anything
- else. Both the Dearborn County regiments had been in the thick of the
- fight, and I could see from afar, as I stood on the outskirts of the
- throng in front of the post-office, some long strips of paper posted up
- beside the door, which men said contained a list of our local dead and
- wounded. It was hopeless, however, to attempt to get anywhere near this
- list, and nobody whom I questioned, knew anything about the names of those
- young men who had marched away from our Four Corners. Some one did call
- out, though, that the telegraph had broken down, or gone wrong, and that
- not half the news had come in as yet. But they were all so deeply stirred
- up, so fiercely pushing and hauling to get toward the door, that I could
- learn little else.
- </p>
- <p>
- This was what I began to tell Hurley, with eager volubility, as soon as I
- got in under the shed. He went on with his back to me, impassively
- measuring out the oats from the bag, and clearing aside the stale hay in
- the manger, the impatient horses rubbing at his shoulders with their noses
- the while. Then, as I was nearly done, he turned and came out to me,
- slapping the fodder-mess off his hands.
- </p>
- <p>
- He had a big, fresh cut running transversely across his nose and cheek,
- and there were stains of blood in the gray stubble of beard on his chin. I
- saw too that his clothes looked as if he had been rolled on the dusty road
- outside.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Sure, then, I’m after hearin’ the news myself,” was all he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- He drew out from beneath the wagon seat a bag of crackers and a hunk of
- cheese, and, seating himself on an overturned barrel, began to eat. By a
- gesture I was invited to share this meal, and did so, sitting beside him.
- Something had happened, apparently, to prevent our having dinner in the
- tavern.
- </p>
- <p>
- I fairly yearned to ask him what this something was, and what was the
- matter with his face, but it did not seem quite the right thing to do, and
- presently he began mumbling, as much to himself as to me, a long and
- broken discourse, from which I picked out that he had mingled with a group
- of lusty young farmers in the market-place, asking for the latest
- intelligence, and that while they were conversing in a wholly amiable
- manner, one of them had suddenly knocked him down and kicked him, and that
- thereafter they had pursued him with curses and loud threats half-way to
- the tavern. This and much more he proclaimed between mouthfuls, speaking
- with great rapidity and in so much more marked a brogue than usual, that I
- understood only a fraction of what he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- He professed entire innocence of offence in the affair, and either could
- not or would not tell what it was he had said to invite the blow. I dare
- say he did in truth richly provoke the violence he encountered, but at the
- time I regarded him as a martyr, and swelled with indignation every time I
- looked at his nose.
- </p>
- <p>
- I remained angry, indeed, long after he himself had altogether recovered
- his equanimity and whimsical good spirits. He waited outside on the seat
- while I went in to pay for the baiting of the horses, and it was as well
- that he did, I fancy, because there were half a dozen brawny farm-hands
- and villagers standing about the bar, who were laughing in a stormy way
- over the episode of the “Copperhead Paddy” in the market.
- </p>
- <p>
- We drove away, however, without incident of any sort—sagaciously
- turning off the main street before we reached the post-office block, where
- the congregated crowd seemed larger than ever. There seemed to be some
- fresh tidings, for several scattering outbursts of cheering reached our
- ears after we could no longer see the throng; but, so far from stopping to
- inquire what it was, Hurley put whip to the horses, and we rattled smartly
- along out of the excited village into the tranquil, scythe-shorn country.
- </p>
- <p>
- The cooper to whom we now went for our butter-firkins was a long-nosed,
- lean, and taciturn man, whom I think of always as with his apron tucked up
- at the corner, and his spectacles on his forehead, close under the edge of
- his square brown-paper cap. He had had word that we were coming, and the
- firkins were ready for us. He helped us load them in dead silence, and
- with a gloomy air.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hurley desired the sound of his own voice. “Well, then, sir,” he said, as
- our task neared completion, “’tis worth coming out of our way these
- fifteen miles to lay eyes on such fine, grand firkins as these same—such
- an elegant shape on ’em, an’ put together with such nateness!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You could get ’em just as good at Hagadorn’s,” said the cooper,
- curtly, “within a mile of your place.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Huh!” cried Hurley, with contempt, “Haggy-dorn is it? Faith, we’ll not
- touch him or his firkins ayether! Why, man, they’re not fit to mention the
- same day wid yours. Ah, just look at the darlin’s, will ye, that nate an’
- clane a Christian could ate from ’em!”
- </p>
- <p>
- The cooper was blarney-proof. “Hagadorn’s are every smitch as good!” he
- repeated, ungraciously.
- </p>
- <p>
- The Irishman looked at him perplexedly, then shook his head as if the
- problem were too much for him, and slowly clambered up to the seat. He had
- gathered up the lines, and we were ready to start, before any suitable
- words came to his tongue.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, then, sir,” he said, “anything to be agreeable. If I hear a man
- speaking a good word for your firkins, I’ll dispute him.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “The firkins are well enough,” growled the cooper at us, “an’ they’re made
- to sell, but I ain’t so almighty tickled about takin’ Copperhead money for
- ‘em that I want to clap my wings an’ crow over it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He turned scornfully on his heel at this, and we drove away. The new
- revelation of our friendlessness depressed me, but Hurley did not seem to
- mind it at all. After a philosophic comparative remark about the manners
- of pigs run wild in a bog, he dismissed the affair from his thoughts
- altogether, and hummed cheerful words to melancholy tunes half the way
- home, what time he was not talking to the horses or tossing stray
- conversational fragments at me.
- </p>
- <p>
- My own mind soon enough surrendered itself to harrowing speculations about
- the battle we had heard of. The war had been going on now, for over a
- year, but most of the fighting had been away off in Missouri and
- Tennessee, or on the lower Mississippi, and the reports had not possessed
- for me any keen direct interest. The idea of men from our own district—young
- men whom I had seen, perhaps fooled with, in the hayfield only ten weeks
- before—being in an actual storm of shot and shell, produced a
- faintness at the pit of my stomach. Both Dearborn County regiments were in
- it, the crowd said. Then of course our men must have been there—our
- hired men, and the Phillips boys, and Byron Truax, and his cousin Alonzo,
- and our Jeff! And if so many others had been killed, why not they as well?
- </p>
- <p>
- “Antietam” still has a power to arrest my eyes on the printed page, and
- disturb my ears in the hearing, possessed by no other battle name. It
- seems now as if the very word itself had a terrible meaning of its own to
- me, when I first heard it that September afternoon—as if I
- recognized it to be the label of some awful novelty, before I knew
- anything else. It had its fascination for Hurley, too, for presently I
- heard him crooning to himself, to one of his queer old Irish tunes, some
- doggerel lines which he had made up to rhyme with it—three lines
- with “cheat ’em,” “beat ’em,” and “Antietam,” and then his
- pet refrain, “Says the Shan van Vocht.”
- </p>
- <p>
- This levity jarred unpleasantly upon the mood into which I had worked
- myself, and I turned to speak of it, but the sight of his bruised nose and
- cheek restrained me. He had suffered too much for the faith that was in
- him to be lightly questioned now. So I returned to my grisly thoughts,
- which now all at once resolved themselves into a conviction that Jeff had
- been killed outright. My fancy darted to meet this notion, and straightway
- pictured for me a fantastic battle-field by moonlight, such as was
- depicted in Lossing’s books, with overturned cannon-wheels and dead horses
- in the foreground, and in the centre, conspicuous above all else, the
- inanimate form of Jeff Beech, with its face coldly radiant in the
- moonshine.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I guess I’ll hop off and walk a spell,” I said, under the sudden impulse
- of this distressing visitation.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was only when I was on the ground, trudging along by the side of the
- wagon, that I knew why I had got down. We were within a few rods of the
- Corners, where one road turned off to go to the postoffice. “Perhaps it’d
- be a good idea for me to find out if they’ve heard anything more—I
- mean—anything about Jeff,” I suggested. “I’ll just look in and see,
- and then I can cut home cross lots.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The Irishman nodded and drove on.
- </p>
- <p>
- I hung behind, at the Corners, till the wagon had begun the ascent of the
- hill, and the looming bulk of the firkins made it impossible that Hurley
- could see which way I went. Then, without hesitation, I turned instead
- down the other road which led to “Jee” Hagadorn’s.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER V—“JEE’S” TIDINGS
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>ime was when I had
- known the Hagadorn house, from the outside at least, as well as any other
- in the whole township. But I had avoided that road so long now, that when
- I came up to the place it seemed quite strange to my eyes.
- </p>
- <p>
- For one thing, the flower garden was much bigger than it had formerly
- been. To state it differently, Miss Esther’s marigolds and columbines,
- hollyhocks and peonies, had been allowed to usurp a lot of space where
- sweet-corn, potatoes, and other table-truck used to be raised. This not
- only greatly altered the aspect of the place, but it lowered my idea of
- the practical good-sense of its owners.
- </p>
- <p>
- What was more striking still, was the general air of decrepitude and decay
- about the house itself. An eaves-trough had fallen down; half the cellar
- door was off its hinges, standing up against the wall; the chimney was
- ragged and broken at the top; the clapboards had never been painted, and
- now were almost black with weather-stain and dry rot. It positively
- appeared to me as if the house was tipping sideways, over against the
- little cooper-shop adjoining it—but perhaps that was a trick of the
- waning evening light? I said to myself that if we were not prospering on
- the Beech farm, at least our foe “Jee” Hagadorn did not seem to be doing
- much better himself.
- </p>
- <p>
- In truth, Hagadorn had always been among the poorest members of our
- community, though this by no means involves what people in cities think of
- as poverty. He had a little place of nearly two acres, and then he had his
- coopering business; with the two he ought to have got on comfortably
- enough. But a certain contrariness in his nature seemed to be continually
- interfering with this.
- </p>
- <p>
- This strain of conscientious perversity ran through all we knew of his
- life before he came to us, just as it dominated the remainder of his
- career. He had been a well-to-do man some ten years before, in a city in
- the western part of the State, with a big cooper-shop, and a lot of men
- under him, making the barrels for a large brewery. (It was in these days,
- I fancy, that Esther took on that urban polish which the younger Benaiah
- missed.) Then he got the notion in his head that it was wrong to make
- barrels for beer, and threw the whole thing up. He moved into our
- neighborhood with only money enough to buy the old Andrews place, and
- build a little shop.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was a good opening for a cooper, and Hagadorn might have flourished if
- he had been able to mind his own business. The very first thing he did was
- to offend a number of our biggest butter-makers by taxing them with
- sinfulness in also raising hops, which went to make beer. For a long time
- they would buy no firkins of him. Then, too, he made an unpleasant
- impression at church. As has been said, our meeting-house was a union
- affair; that is to say, no one denomination being numerous enough to have
- an edifice of its own, all the farmers roundabout—Methodists,
- Baptists, Presbyterians, and so on—joined in paying the expenses.
- The travelling preachers who came to us represented these great sects,
- with lots of minute shadings off into Hardshell, Soft-shell, Freewill, and
- other subdivided mysteries which I never understood. Hagadorn had a
- denomination all to himself, as might have been expected from the man.
- What the name of it was I seem never to have heard; perhaps it had no name
- at all. People used to say, though, that he behaved like a Shouting
- Methodist.
- </p>
- <p>
- This was another way of saying that he made a nuisance of himself in
- church. At prayer-meetings, in the slack seasons of the year, he would
- pray so long, and with such tremendous shouting and fury of gestures, that
- he had regularly to be asked to stop, so that those who had taken the
- trouble to learn and practise new hymns might have a chance to be heard.
- And then he would out-sing all the others, not knowing the tune in the
- least, and cause added confusion by yelling out shrill “Amens!” between
- the bars. At one time quite a number of the leading people ceased
- attending church at all, on account of his conduct.
- </p>
- <p>
- He added heavily to his theological unpopularity, too, by his action in
- another matter. There was a wealthy and important farmer living over on
- the west side of Agrippa Hill, who was a Universalist. The expenses of our
- Union meeting-house were felt to be a good deal of a burden, and our
- elders, conferring together, decided that it would be a good thing to
- waive ordinary prejudices, and let the Universalists come in, and have
- their share of the preaching. It would be more neighborly, they felt, and
- they would get a subscription from the Agrippa Hill farmer. He assented to
- the project, and came over four or five Sundays with his family and hired
- help, listened unflinchingly to orthodox sermons full of sulphur and blue
- flames, and put money on the plate every time. Then a Universalist
- preacher occupied the pulpit one Sunday, and preached a highly inoffensive
- and non-committal sermon, and “Jee” Hagadorn stood up in his pew and
- violently denounced him as an infidel, before he had descended the pulpit
- steps. This created a painful scandal. The Universalist farmer, of course,
- never darkened that church door again. Some of our young men went so far
- as to discuss the ducking of the obnoxious’ cooper in the duck-pond. But
- he himself was neither frightened nor ashamed.
- </p>
- <p>
- At the beginning, too, I suppose that his taking up Abolitionism made him
- enemies. Dearborn County gave Franklin Pierce a big majority in ’52,
- and the bulk of our farmers, I know, were in that majority. But I have
- already dwelt upon the way in which all this changed in the years just
- before the war. Naturally enough, Hagadorn’s position also changed. The
- rejected stone became the head of the corner. The tiresome fanatic of the
- ’fifties was the inspired prophet of the ’sixties. People
- still shrank from giving him undue credit for their conversion, but they
- felt themselves swept along under his influence none the less.
- </p>
- <p>
- But just as his unpopularity kept him poor in the old days, it seemed that
- now the reversed condition was making him still poorer. The truth was, he
- was too excited to pay any attention to his business. He went off to
- Octavius three or four days a week to hear the news, and when he remained
- at home, he spent much more time standing out in the road discussing
- politics and the conduct of the war with passers-by, than he did over his
- staves and hoops. No wonder his place was run down.
- </p>
- <p>
- The house was dark and silent, but there was some sort of a light in the
- cooper-shop beyond. My hope had been to see Esther rather than her wild
- old father, but there was nothing for it but to go over to the shop. I
- pushed the loosely fitting door back on its leathern hinges, and stepped
- over the threshold. The resinous scent of newly cut wood, and the rustle
- of the shavings under my feet, had the effect, somehow, of filling me with
- timidity. It required an effort to not turn and go out again.
- </p>
- <p>
- The darkened; and crowded interior of the tiny work-place smelt as well, I
- noted now, of smoke. On the floor before me was crouched a shapeless
- figure—bending in front of the little furnace, made of a section of
- stove-pipe, which the cooper used to dry the insides of newly fashioned
- barrels. A fire in this, half-blaze, half-smudge—gave forth the
- light I had seen from without, and the smoke which was making my nostrils
- tingle. Then I had to sneeze, and the kneeling figure sprang on the
- instant from the floor.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was Esther who stood before me, coughing a little from the smoke, and
- peering inquiringly at me. “Oh—is that you, Jimmy?” she asked, after
- a moment of puzzled inspection in the dark.
- </p>
- <p>
- She went on, before I had time to speak, in a nervous, half-laughing way:
- “I’ve been trying to roast an ear of corn here, but it’s the worst kind of
- a failure. I’ve watched ’Ni’ do it a hundred times, but with me it
- always comes out half-scorched and half-smoked. I guess the corn is too
- old now, anyway. At all events, it’s tougher than Pharaoh’s heart.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She held out to me, in proof of her words, a blackened and unseemly
- roasting-ear. I took it, and turned it slowly over, looking at it with the
- grave scrutiny of an expert. Several torn and opened sections showed where
- she had been testing it with her teeth. In obedience to her “See if you
- don’t think it’s too old,” I took a diffident bite, at a respectful
- distance from the marks of her experiments. It was the worst I had ever
- tasted.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I came over to see if you’d heard anything—any news,” I said,
- desiring to get away from the corn subject.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You mean about Tom?” she asked, moving so that she might see me more
- plainly.
- </p>
- <p>
- I had stupidly forgotten about that transformation of names. “Our Jeff, I
- mean,” I made answer.
- </p>
- <p>
- “His name is Thomas Jefferson. <i>We</i> call him Tom,” she explained;
- “that other name is too horrid. Did—did his people tell you to come
- and ask <i>me?</i>”
- </p>
- <p>
- I shook my head. “Oh, no!” I replied with emphasis, implying by my tone, I
- dare say, that they would have had themselves cut up into sausage-meat
- first.
- </p>
- <p>
- The girl walked past me to the door, and out to the road-side, looking
- down toward the bridge with a lingering, anxious gaze. Then she came back,
- slowly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, we have no news!” she said, with an effort at calmness. “He wasn’t an
- officer, that’s why. All we know is that the brigade his regiment is in
- lost 141 killed, 560 wounded, and 38 missing. That’s all!” She stood in
- the doorway, her hands clasped tight, pressed against her bosom.
- </p>
- <p>
- “<i>That’s all!</i>” she repeated, with a choking voice.
- </p>
- <p>
- Suddenly she started forward, almost ran across the few yards of floor,
- and, throwing herself down in the darkest corner, where only dimly one
- could see an old buffalo-robe spread over a heap of staves, began sobbing
- as if her heart must break.
- </p>
- <p>
- Her dress had brushed over the stove-pipe, and scattered some of the
- embers beyond the sheet of tin it stood on. I stamped these out, and
- carried the other remnants of the fire out doors. Then I returned, and
- stood about in the smoky little shop, quite helplessly listening to the
- moans and convulsive sobs which rose from the obscure corner. A bit of a
- candle in a bottle stood on the shelf by the window. I lighted this, but
- it hardly seemed to improve the situation. I could see her now, as well as
- hear her—huddled face downward upon the skin, her whole form shaking
- with the violence of her grief. I had never been so unhappy before in my
- life.
- </p>
- <p>
- At last—it may not have been very long, but it seemed hours—there
- rose the sound of voices outside on the road. A wagon had stopped, and
- some words were being exchanged. One of the voices grew louder—came
- nearer; the other died off, ceased altogether, and the wagon could be
- heard driving away. On the instant the door was pushed sharply open, and
- “Jee” Hagadorn stood on the threshold, surveying the interior of his
- cooper-shop with gleaming eyes.
- </p>
- <p>
- He looked at me; he looked at his daughter lying in the corner; he looked
- at the charred mess on the floor—yet seemed to see nothing of what
- he looked at. His face glowed with a strange excitement—which in
- another man I should have set down to drink.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Glory be to God! Praise to the Most High! Mine eyes have seen the glory
- of the coming of the Lord!” he called out, stretching forth his hands in a
- rapturous sort of gesture I remembered from classmeeting days.
- </p>
- <p>
- Esther had leaped to her feet with squirrel-like swiftness at the sound of
- his voice, and now stood before him, her hands nervously clutching at each
- other, her reddened, tear-stained face afire with eagerness.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Has word come?—is he safe?—have you heard?” so her excited
- questions tumbled over one another, as she grasped “Jee’s” sleeve and
- shook it in feverish impatience.
- </p>
- <p>
- “The day has come! The year of Jubilee is here!” he cried, brushing her
- hand aside, and staring with a fixed, ecstatic, open-mouthed smile
- straight ahead of him. “The words of the Prophet are fulfilled!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But Tom!—<i>Tom!</i>” pleaded the girl, piteously. “The list has
- come? You know he is safe?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Tom! <i>Tom!</i>” old “Jee” repeated after her, but with an emphasis
- contemptuous, not solicitous. “Perish a hundred Toms—yea—ten
- thousand! for one such day as this! ‘For the Scarlet Woman of Babylon is
- overthrown, and bound with chains and cast into the lake of fire.
- Therefore, in one day shall her plagues come, death, and mourning, and
- famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord
- God which judged her!’”
- </p>
- <p>
- He declaimed these words in a shrill, high-pitched voice, his face
- upturned, and his eyes half-closed. Esther plucked despairingly at his
- sleeve once more.
- </p>
- <p>
- “But have you seen?—is <i>his</i> name?—you must have seen!”
- she moaned, incoherently.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Jee” descended for the moment from his plane of exaltation. “I <i>didn’t</i>
- see!” he said, almost peevishly. “Lincoln has signed a proclamation
- freeing all the slaves! What do you suppose I care for your Toms and Dicks
- and Harrys, on such a day as this? ‘Woe! woe! the great city of Babylon,
- the strong city! For in one hour is thy judgment come!’”
- </p>
- <p>
- The girl tottered back to her corner, and threw herself limply down upon
- the buffalo-robe again, hiding her face in her hands.
- </p>
- <p>
- I pushed my way past the cooper, and trudged cross-lots home in the dark,
- tired, disturbed, and very hungry, but thinking most of all that if I had
- been worth my salt, I would have hit “Jee” Hagadorn with the adze that
- stood up against the door-stile.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER VI—NI’S TALK WITH ABNER
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t must have been a
- fortnight before we learned that Jeff Beech and Byron Truax had been
- reported missing. I say “we,” but I do not know when Abner Beech came to
- hear about it. One of the hired girls had seen the farmer get up from his
- chair, with the newly arrived weekly <i>World</i> in his hand, walk over
- to where his wife sat, and direct her attention to a line of the print
- with his finger. Then, still in silence, he had gone over to the bookcase,
- opened the drawer where he kept his account-books, and locked the journal
- up therein.
- </p>
- <p>
- We took it for granted that thus the elderly couple had learned the news
- about their son. They said so little nowadays, either to each other or to
- us, that we were driven to speculate upon their dumb-show, and find
- meanings for ourselves in their glances and actions. No one of us could
- imagine himself or herself venturing to mention Jeff’s name in their
- hearing.
- </p>
- <p>
- Down at the Corners, though, and all about our district, people talked of
- very little else. Antietam had given a bloody welcome to our little group
- of warriors. Ray Watkins and Lon Truax had been killed outright, and Ed
- Phillips was in the hospital, with the chances thought to be against him.
- Warner Pitts, our other hired man, had been wounded in the arm, but not
- seriously, and thereafter behaved with such conspicuous valor that it was
- said he was to be promoted from being a sergeant to a lieutenancy. All
- these things, however, paled in interest after the first few days before
- the fascinating mystery of what had become of Jeff and Byron. The loungers
- about the grocery-store evenings took sides as to the definition of
- “missing.” Some said it meant being taken prisoners; but it was known that
- at Antietam the Rebels made next to no captives. Others held that
- “missing” soldiers were those who had been shot, and who crawled off
- somewhere in the woods out of sight to die. A lumberman from Juno Mills,
- who was up on a horse-trade, went so far as to broach still a third
- theory, viz., that “missing” soldiers were those who had run away under
- fire, and were ashamed to show their faces again. But this malicious
- suggestion could not, of course, be seriously considered.
- </p>
- <p>
- Meanwhile, what little remained of the fall farm-work went on as if
- nothing had happened. The root-crops were dug, the fodder got in, and the
- late apples gathered. Abner had a cider-mill of his own, but we sold a
- much larger share of our winter apples than usual. Less manure was drawn
- out onto the fields than in other autumns, and it looked as if there was
- to be little or no fall ploughing. Abner went about his tasks in a heavy,
- spiritless way these days, doggedly enough, but with none of his old-time
- vim. He no longer had pleasure even in abusing Lincoln and the war with
- Hurley. Not Antietam itself could have broken his nerve, but at least it
- silenced his tongue.
- </p>
- <p>
- Warner Pitts came home on a furlough, with a fine new uniform,
- shoulder-straps and sword, and his arm in a sling. I say “home,” but the
- only roof he had ever slept under in these parts was ours, and now he
- stayed as a guest at Squire Avery’s house, and never came near our farm.
- He was a tall, brown-faced, sinewy fellow, with curly hair and a pushing
- manner. Although he had been only a hired man he now cut a great dash down
- at the Corners, with his shoulder-straps and his officer’s cape. It was
- said that he had declined several invitations to husking-bees, and that
- when he left the service, at the end of his time, he had a place ready for
- him in some city as a clerk in a drygoods-store—that is, of course,
- if he did not get to be colonel or general. From time to time he was seen
- walking out through the dry, rustling leaves with Squire Avery’s oldest
- daughter.
- </p>
- <p>
- This important military genius did not seem able, however, to throw much
- light upon the whereabouts of the two “missing” boys. From what I myself
- heard him say about the battle, and from what others reported of his talk,
- it seems that in the very early morning Hooker’s line—a part of
- which consisted of Dearborn County men—moved forward through a big
- cornfield, the stalks of which were much higher than the soldiers’ heads.
- When they came out, the Rebels opened such a hideous fire of cannon and
- musketry upon them from the woods close by, that those who did not fall
- were glad to run back again into the corn for shelter. Thus all became
- confusion, and the men were so mixed up that there was no getting them
- together again. Some went one way, some another, through the tall
- corn-rows, and Warner Pitts could not remember having seen either Jeff or
- Byron at all after the march began. Parts of the regiment formed again out
- on the road toward the Dunker church, but other parts found themselves
- half a mile away among the fragments of a Michigan regiment, and a good
- many more were left lying in the fatal cornfield. Our boys had not been
- traced among the dead, but that did not prove that they were alive. And so
- we were no wiser than before.
- </p>
- <p>
- Warner Pitts only nodded in a distant way to me when he saw me first, with
- a cool “Hello, youngster!” I expected that he would ask after the folks at
- the farm which had been so long his home, but he turned to talk with some
- one else, and said never a word. Once, some days afterward, he called out
- as I passed him, “How’s the old Copperhead?” and the Avery girl who was
- with him laughed aloud, but I went on without answering. He was already
- down in my black-books, in company with pretty nearly every other human
- being roundabout.
- </p>
- <p>
- This list of enemies was indeed so full that there were times when I felt
- like crying over my isolation. It may be guessed, then, how rejoiced I was
- one afternoon to see Ni Hagadorn squeeze his way through our orchard-bars,
- and saunter across under the trees to where I was at work sorting a heap
- of apples into barrels. I could have run to meet him, so grateful was the
- sight of any friendly, boyish face. The thought that perhaps after all he
- had not come to see me in particular, and that possibly he brought some
- news about Jeff, only flashed across my mind after I had smiled a broad
- welcome upon him, and he stood leaning against a barrel munching the
- biggest russet he had been able to pick out.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Abner to home?” he asked, after a pause of neighborly silence. He hadn’t
- come to see me after all.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He’s around the barns somewhere,” I replied; adding, upon reflection,
- “Have you heard something fresh?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Ni shook his sorrel head and buried his teeth deep into the apple. “No,
- nothin’,” he said, at last, with his mouth full, “only thought I’d come up
- an’ talk it over with Abner.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The calm audacity of the proposition took my breath away. “He’ll boot you
- off’m the place if you try it,” I warned him.
- </p>
- <p>
- But Ni did not scare easily. “Oh, no,” he said, with light confidence, “me
- an’ Abner’s all right.”
- </p>
- <p>
- As if to put this assurance to the test, the figure of the farmer was at
- this moment visible, coming toward us down the orchard road. He was in his
- shirt-sleeves, with the limp, discolored old broad-brimmed felt hat he
- always wore pulled down over his eyes. Though he no longer held his head
- so proudly erect as I could remember it, there were still suggestions of
- great force and mastership in his broad shoulders and big beard, and in
- the solid, long-gaited manner of his walk. He carried a pitchfork in his
- hand.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hello, Abner!” said Ni, as the farmer came up and halted, surveying each
- of us in turn with an impassive scrutiny.
- </p>
- <p>
- “How ’r’ ye?” returned Abner, with cold civility. I fancied he must
- be surprised to see the son of his enemy here, calmly gnawing his way
- through one of our apples, and acting as if the place belonged to him. But
- he gave no signs of astonishment, and after some words of direction to me
- concerning my work, started to move on again toward the barns.
- </p>
- <p>
- Ni was not disposed to be thus cheated out of his conversation: “Seen
- Warner Pitts since he’s got back?” he called out, and at this the farmer
- stopped and turned round. “You’d hardly know him now,” the butcher’s
- assistant went on, with cheerful briskness. “Why you’d think he’d never
- hoofed it over ploughed land in all his life. He’s got his boots blacked
- up every day, an’ his hair greased, an’ a whole new suit of broadcloth,
- with shoulder-straps an’ brass buttons, an’ a sword—he brings it
- down to the Corners every evening, so’t the boys at the store can heft it—an’
- he’s—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What do I care about all this?” broke in Abner. His voice was heavy, with
- a growling ground-note, and his eyes threw out an angry light under the
- shading hat-brim. “He can go to the devil, an’ take his sword with him,
- for all o’ me!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hostile as was his tone, the farmer did not again turn on his heel.
- Instead, he seemed to suspect that Ni had something more important to say,
- and looked him steadfastly in the face.
- </p>
- <p>
- “That’s what I say, too,” replied Ni, lightly. “What’s beat me is how such
- a fellow as that got to be an officer right from the word ‘go!’—an’
- him the poorest shote in the whole lot. Now if it had a’ ben Spencer
- Phillips I could understand it—or Bi Truax, or—or your Jeff—”
- </p>
- <p>
- The farmer raised his fork menacingly, with a wrathful gesture. “Shet up!”
- he shouted; “shet up, I say! or I’ll make ye!”
- </p>
- <p>
- To my great amazement Ni was not at all affected by this demonstration. He
- leaned smilingly against the barrel, and picked out another apple—a
- spitzenberg this time.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Now look a-here, Abner,” he said, argumentatively, “what’s the good o’
- gittin’ mad? When I’ve had my say out, why, if you don’t like it you
- needn’t, an’ nobody’s a cent the wuss off. Of course, if you come down to
- hard-pan, it ain’t none o’ my business—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” interjected Abner, in grim assent, “it ain’t none o’ your business!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But there is such a thing as being neighborly,” Ni went on, undismayed,
- “an’ meanin’ things kindly, an’ takin’ ’em as they’re meant.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, I know them kindly neighbors o’ mine!” broke in the farmer with
- acrid irony. “I’ve summered ’em an’ I’ve wintered ’em, an’
- the Lord deliver me from the whole caboodle of ’em! A meaner lot o’
- cusses never cumbered this footstool!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It takes all sorts o’ people to make up a world,” commented this freckled
- and sandy-headed young philosopher, testing the crimson skin of his apple
- with a tentative thumb-nail. “Now you ain’t got anything in particular
- agin me, have you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Nothin’ except your breed,” the farmer admitted. The frown with which he
- had been regarding Ni had softened just the least bit in the world.
- </p>
- <p>
- “That don’t count,” said Ni, with easy confidence. “Why, what does breed
- amount to, anyway? You ought to be the last man alive to lug <i>that</i>
- in—you, who’ve up an’ soured on your own breed—your own son
- Jeff!”
- </p>
- <p>
- I looked to see Abner lift his fork again, and perhaps go even further in
- his rage. Strangely enough, there crept into his sunburnt, massive face,
- at the corners of the eyes and mouth, something like the beginnings of a
- puzzled smile. “You’re a cheeky little cuss, anyway!” was his final
- comment. Then his expression hardened again. “Who put you up to cornin’
- here, an’ talkin’ like this to me?” he demanded, sternly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Nobody—hope to die!” protested Ni. “It’s all my own spec. It riled
- me to see you mopin’ round up here all alone by yourself, not knowin’
- what’d become of Jeff, an’ makin’ b’lieve to yourself you didn’t care, an’
- so givin’ yourself away to the whole neighborhood.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Damn the neighborhood!” said Abner, fervently.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, they talk about the same of you,” Ni proceeded with an air of
- impartial candor. “But all that don’t do you no good, an’ don’t do Jeff no
- good!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He made his own bed, and he must lay on it,” said the farmer, with dogged
- firmness.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I ain’t sayin’ he mustn’t,” remonstrated the other. “What I’m gittin’ at
- is that you’d feel easier in your mind if you knew where that bed was—an’
- so’d M’rye!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner lifted his head. “His mother feels jest as I do,” he said. “He
- sneaked off behind our backs to jine Lincoln’s nigger-worshippers, an’
- levy war on fellow-countrymen o’ his’n who’d done him no harm, an’
- whatever happens to him it serves him right. I ain’t much of a hand to lug
- in Scripter to back up my argyments—like some folks you know of—but
- my feelin’ is: ‘Whoso taketh up the sword shall perish by the sword!’ An’
- so says his mother too!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hm-m!” grunted Ni, with ostentatious incredulity. He bit into his apple,
- and there ensued a momentary silence. Then, as soon as he was able to
- speak, this astonishing boy said: “Guess I’ll have a talk with M’rye about
- that herself.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The farmer’s patience was running emptings.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No!” he said, severely, “I forbid ye! Don’t ye dare say a word to her
- about it. She don’t want to listen to ye—an’ I don’t know what’s
- possessed <i>me</i> to stand round an’ gab about my private affairs with
- you like this, either. I don’t bear ye no ill-will. If fathers can’t help
- the kind o’ sons they \ bring up, why, still less can ye blame sons on
- account o’ their fathers. But it ain’t a thing I want to talk about any
- more, either now or any other time. That’s all.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner put the fork over his shoulder, as a sign that he was going, and
- that the interview was at an end. But the persistent Ni had a last word to
- offer—and he left his barrel and walked over to the farmer.
- </p>
- <p>
- “See here,” he said, in more urgent tones than he had used before, “I’m
- goin’ South, an’ I’m goin’ to find Jeff if it takes a leg! I don’t know
- how much it’ll cost—I’ve got a little of my own saved up—an’ I
- thought—p’r’aps—p’r’aps you’d like to—”
- </p>
- <p>
- After a moment’s thought the farmer shook his head. “No,” he said,
- gravely, almost reluctantly. “It’s agin my principles. You know me—Ni—you
- know I’ve never b’en a near man, let alone a mean man. An’ ye know, too,
- that if Je—if that boy had behaved half-way decent, there ain’t
- anything under the sun I wouldn’t’a’ done for him. But this thing—I’m
- obleeged to ye for offrin’—but—No! it’s agin my principles.
- Still, I’m obleeged to ye. Fill your pockets with them spitzenbergs, if
- they taste good to ye.”
- </p>
- <p>
- With this Abner Beech turned and walked resolutely off.
- </p>
- <p>
- Left alone with me, Ni threw away the half-eaten apple he had held in his
- hand. “I don’t want any of his dummed old spitzenbergs,” he said, pushing
- his foot into the heap of fruit on the ground, in a meditative way.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then you ain’t agoin’ South?” I queried.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, I am!” he replied, with decision. “I can work my way somehow. Only
- don’t you whisper a word about it to any livin’ soul, d’ye mind!”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <p>
- Two or three days after that we heard that Ni Hagadorn had left for
- unknown parts. Some said he had gone to enlist—it seems that,
- despite his youth and small stature in my eyes, he would have been
- acceptable to the enlistment standards of the day—but the major
- opinion was that much dime-novel reading had inspired him with the notion
- of becoming a trapper in the mystic Far West.
- </p>
- <p>
- I alone possessed the secret of his disappearance—unless, indeed,
- his sister knew—and no one will ever know what struggles I had to
- keep from confiding it to Hurley.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER VII—THE ELECTION
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">S</span>OON the fine
- weather was at an end. One day it was soft and warm, with a tender blue
- haze over the distant woods and a sun like a blood-orange in the tranquil
- sky, and birds twittering about among the elders and sumac along the
- rail-fences. And the next day everything was gray and lifeless and
- desolate, with fierce winds sweeping over the bare fields, and driving the
- cold rain in sheets before them.
- </p>
- <p>
- Some people—among them Hurley—said it was the equinoctial that
- was upon us. Abner Beech ridiculed this, and proved by the dictionary that
- the equinoctial meant September 22d, whereas it was now well-nigh the end
- of October. The Irishman conceded that in books this might be so, but
- stuck wilfully to it that in practice the equinoctial came just before
- winter set in. After so long a period of saddened silence brooding over
- our household, it was quite a relief to hear the men argue this question
- of the weather.
- </p>
- <p>
- Down at the Corners old farmers had wrangled over the identity of the
- equinoctial ever since I could remember. It was pretty generally agreed
- that each year along some time during the fall, there came a storm which
- was properly entitled to that name, but at this point harmony ended. Some
- insisted that it came before Indian Summer, some that it followed that
- season, and this was further complicated by the fact that no one was ever
- quite sure when it was Indian Summer. There were all sorts of rules for
- recognizing this delectable time of year, rules connected, I recall, with
- the opening of the chestnut burrs, the movement of birds, and various
- other incidents in nature’s great processional, but these rules rarely
- came right in our rough latitude, and sometimes never came at all—at
- least did not bring with them anything remotely resembling Indian Summer,
- but made our autumn one prolonged and miserable succession of storms. And
- then it was an especially trying trick to pick out the equinoctial from
- the lot—and even harder still to prove to sceptical neighbors that
- you were right.
- </p>
- <p>
- Whatever this particular storm may have been it came too soon. Being so
- short-handed on the farm, we were much behind in the matter of drawing our
- produce to market. And now, after the first day or two of rain, the roads
- were things to shudder at. It was not so bad getting to and from the
- Corners, for Agrippa Hill had a gravel formation, but beyond the Corners,
- whichever way one went over the bottom lands of the Nedahma Valley, it was
- a matter of lashing the panting teams through seas of mud punctuated by
- abysmal pitch-holes, into which the wheels slumped over their hubs, and
- quite generally stuck till they were pried out with fence-rails.
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner Beech was exceptionally tender in his treatment of live-stock. The
- only occasion I ever heard of on which he was tempted into using his big
- fists upon a fellow-creature, was once, long before my time, when one of
- his hired men struck a refractory cow over its haunches with a shovel. He
- knocked this man clear through the stanchions. Often Jeff and I used to
- feel that he carried his solicitude for horse-flesh too far—particularly
- when we wanted to drive down to the creek for a summer evening swim, and
- he thought the teams were too tired.
- </p>
- <p>
- So now he would not let us hitch up and drive into Octavius with even the
- lightest loads, on account of the horses. It would be better to wait, he
- said, until there was sledding; then we could slip in in no time. He
- pretended that all the signs this year pointed to an early winter.
- </p>
- <p>
- The result was that we were more than ever shut off from news of the outer
- world. The weekly paper which came to us was full, I remember, of
- political arguments and speeches—for a Congress and Governor were to
- be elected a few weeks hence—but there were next to no tidings from
- the front. The war, in fact, seemed to have almost stopped altogether, and
- this paper spoke of it as a confessed failure. Farmer Beech and Hurley, of
- course, took the same view, and their remarks quite prepared me from day
- to day to hear that peace had been concluded.
- </p>
- <p>
- But down at the Corners a strikingly different spirit reigned. It quite
- surprised me, I know, when I went down on occasion for odds and ends of
- groceries which the bad roads prevented us from getting in town, to
- discover that the talk there was all in favor of having a great deal more
- war than ever.
- </p>
- <p>
- This store at the Corners was also the post-office, and, more important
- still, it served as a general rallying place for the men-folks of the
- neighborhood after supper. Lee Watkins, who kept it, would rather have
- missed a meal of victuals any day than not to have the “boys” come in of
- an evening, and sit or lounge around discussing the situation. Many of
- them were very old boys now, garrulous seniors who remembered “Matty” Van
- Buren, as they called him, and told weird stories of the Anti-Masonry
- days.
- </p>
- <p>
- These had the well-worn arm-chairs nearest the stove, in cold weather, and
- spat tobacco-juice on its hottest parts with a precision born of long-time
- experience. The younger fellows accommodated themselves about the outer
- circle, squatting on boxes, or with one leg over a barrel, sampling the
- sugar and crackers and raisins in an absent-minded way each evening, till
- Mrs. Watkins came out and put the covers on. She was a stout, peevish
- woman in bloomers, and they said that her husband, Lee, couldn’t have run
- the post-office for twenty-four hours if it hadn’t been for her. We
- understood that she was a Woman’s Rights’ woman, which some held was much
- the same as believing in Free Love. All that was certain, however, was
- that she did not believe in free lunches out of her husband’s barrels and
- cases.
- </p>
- <p>
- The chief flaw in this village parliament was the absence of an
- opposition. Among all the accustomed assemblage of men who sat about,
- their hats well back on their heads, their mouths full of strong language
- and tobacco, there was none to disagree upon any essential feature of the
- situation with the others. To secure even the merest semblance of variety,
- those whose instincts were cross-grained had to go out of their way to
- pick up trifling points of difference, and the arguments over these had to
- be spun out with the greatest possible care, to be kept going at all. I
- should fancy, however, that this apparent concord only served to keep
- before their minds, with added persistency, the fact that there was an
- opposition, nursing its heretical wrath in solitude up on the Beech farm.
- At all events, I seemed never to go into the grocery of a night without
- hearing bitter remarks, or even curses, levelled at our household.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was from these casual visits—standing about on the outskirts of
- the gathering, beyond the feeble ring of light thrown out by the kerosene
- lamp on the counter—that I learned how deeply the Corners were
- opposed to peace. It appeared from the talk here that there was something
- very like treason at the front. The victory at Antietam—so dearly
- bought with the blood of our own people—had been, they said, of
- worse than no use at all. The defeated Rebels had been allowed to take
- their own time in crossing the Potomac comfortably. They had not been
- pursued or molested since, and the Corners could only account for this on
- the theory of treachery at Union headquarters. Some only hinted guardedly
- at this. Others declared openly that the North was being sold out by its
- own generals. As for old “Jee” Hagadorn, who came in almost every night,
- and monopolized the talking all the while he was present, he made no bones
- of denouncing McClellan and Porter as traitors who must be hanged.
- </p>
- <p>
- Quivering with excitement, the red stubbly hair standing up all round his
- drawn and livid face, his knuckles rapping out one fierce point after
- another on the candle-box, as he filled the little hot room with angry
- declamation. “Go it, Jee!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Give ’em Hell!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hangin’s too good for ’em!” his auditors used to exclaim in
- encouragement, whenever he paused for breath, and then he would start off
- again still more furiously, till he had to gasp after every word, and
- screamed “Lincoln-ah!” “Lee-ah!” “Antietam-ah!” and so on, into our
- perturbed ears. Then I would go home, recalling how he had formerly
- shouted about “Adam-ah!” and “Eve-ah!” in church, and marvelling that he
- had never worked himself into a fit, or broken a bloodvessel.
- </p>
- <p>
- So between what Abner and Hurley said on the farm, and what was proclaimed
- at the Corners, it was pretty hard to figure out whether the war was going
- to stop, or go on much worse than ever.
- </p>
- <p>
- Things were still in this doubtful state, when election Tuesday came
- round. I had not known or thought about it, until at the breakfast-table
- Abner said that he guessed he and Hurley would go down and vote before
- dinner. He had some days before.
- </p>
- <p>
- He comes before me as I write—this thin form secured a package of
- ballots from the organization of his party at Octavius, and these he now
- took from one of the bookcase drawers, and divided between himself and
- Hurley.
- </p>
- <p>
- “They won’t be much use, I dessay, peddlin’ ’em at the polls,” he
- said, with a grim momentary smile, “but, by the Eternal, we’ll vote ’em!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “As many of ’em as they’ll be allowin’ us,” added Hurley, in
- chuckling qualification.
- </p>
- <p>
- They were very pretty tickets in those days, with marbled and plaided
- backs in brilliant colors, and spreading eagles in front, over the printed
- captions. In other years I had shared with the urchins of the neighborhood
- the excitement of scrambling for a share of these ballots, after they had
- been counted, and tossed out of the boxes. The conditions did not seem to
- be favorable for a repetition of that this year, and apparently this
- occurred to Abner, for of his own accord he handed me over some dozen of
- the little packets, each tied with a thread, and labelled, “State,”
- “Congressional,” “Judiciary,” and the like. He, moreover, consented—the
- morning chores being out of the way—that I should accompany them to
- the Corners. The ground had frozen stiff overnight, and the road lay in
- hard uncompromising ridges between the tracks of yesterday’s wheels. The
- two men swung along down the hill ahead of me, with resolute strides and
- their heads proudly thrown back, as if they had been going into battle. I
- shuffled, on behind in my new boots, also much excited. The day was cold
- and raw.
- </p>
- <p>
- The polls were fixed up in a little building next to the post-office—a
- one-story frame structure where Lee Watkins kept his bob-sleigh and oil
- barrels, as a rule. These had been cleared out into the yard, and a table
- and some chairs put in in their place. A pane of glass had been taken out
- of the window. Through this aperture the voters, each in his turn, passed
- their ballots, to be placed by the inspectors in the several boxes ranged
- along the window-sill inside. A dozen or more men, mainly in army
- overcoats, stood about on the sidewalk or in the road outside, stamping
- their feet for warmth, and slapping their shoulders with their hands,
- between the fingers of which they held little packets of tickets like mine—that
- is to say, they were like mine in form and brilliancy of color, but I knew
- well enough that there the resemblance ended abruptly. A yard or so from
- the window two posts had been driven into the ground, with a board nailed
- across to prevent undue crowding.
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner and Hurley marched up to the polls without a word to any one, or any
- sign of recognition from the bystanders. Their appearance, however,
- visibly awakened the interest of the Corners, and several young fellows
- who were standing on the grocery steps sauntered over in their wake to see
- what was going on. These, with the ticket-peddlers, crowded up close to
- the window now, behind our two men.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Abner Beech!” called the farmer through the open pane, in a defiant
- voice. Standing on tiptoe, I could just see the heads of some men inside,
- apparently looking through the election books. No questions were asked,
- and in a minute or so Abner had voted and stood aside a little, to make
- room for his companion.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Timothy Joseph Hurley!” shouted our hired man, standing on his toes to
- make himself taller, and squaring his weazened shoulders.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Got your naturalization papers?” came out a sharp, gruff inquiry through
- the window-sash.
- </p>
- <p>
- “That I have!” said the Irishman, wagging his head in satisfaction at
- having foreseen this trick, and winking blandly into the wall of stolid,
- hostile faces encircling him. “That I have!”
- </p>
- <p>
- He drew forth an old and crumpled envelope, from his breast-pocket, and
- extracted some papers from its ragged folds, which he passed through to
- the inspector. The latter just cast his eye over the documents and handed
- them back.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Them ain’t no good!” he said, curtly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What’s that you’re saying?” cried the Irishman. “Sure I’ve voted on thim
- same papers every year since 1856, an’ niver a man gainsaid me. No good,
- is it? Huh!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why ain’t they no good?” boomed in Abner Beech’s deep, angry voice. He
- had moved back to the window.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Because they ain’t, that’s enough!” returned the inspector. “Don’t block
- up the window, there! Others want to vote!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ll have the law on yez!” shouted Hurley. “I’ll swear me vote in! I’ll—I’ll—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Aw, shut up, you Mick!” some one called out close by, and then there rose
- another voice farther back in the group: “Don’t let him vote! One
- Copperhead’s enough in Agrippa!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ll have the law—” I heard Hurley begin again, at the top of his
- voice, and Abner roared out something I could not catch. Then as in a
- flash the whole cluster of men became one confused whirling tangle of arms
- and legs, sprawling and wrestling on the ground, and from it rising the
- repellent sound of blows upon flesh, and a discordant chorus of grunts and
- curses. Big chunks of icy mud flew through the air, kicked up by the boots
- of the men as they struggled. I saw the two posts with the board weave
- under the strain, then give way, some of the embattled group tumbling over
- them as they fell. It was wholly impossible to guess who was who in this
- writhing and tossing mass of fighters. I danced up and down in a frenzy of
- excitement, watching this wild spectacle, and, so I was told years
- afterward, screaming with all my might and main.
- </p>
- <p>
- Then all at once there was a mighty upheaval, and a big man
- half-scrambled, half-hurled himself to his feet. It was Abner, who had
- wrenched one of the posts bodily from under the others, and swung it now
- high in air. Some one clutched it, and for the moment stayed its descent,
- yelling, meanwhile, “Look out! Look out!” as though life itself depended
- on the volume of his voice.
- </p>
- <p>
- The ground cleared itself as if by magic. On the instant there was only
- Abner standing there with the post in his hands, and little Hurley beside
- him, the lower part of his face covered with blood, and his coat torn half
- from his back. The others had drawn off, and formed a semicircle just out
- of reach of the stake, like farm-dogs round a wounded bear at bay. Two or
- three of them had blood about their heads and necks.
- </p>
- <p>
- There were cries of “Kill him!” and it was said afterward that Roselle
- Upman drew a pistol, but if he did others dissuaded him from using it.
- Abner stood with his back to the building, breathing hard, and a good deal
- covered with mud, but eyeing the crowd with a masterful ferocity, and from
- time to time shifting his hands to get a new grip on that tremendous
- weapon of his. He said not a word.
- </p>
- <p>
- The Irishman, after a moment’s hesitation, wiped some of the blood from
- his mouth and jaw, and turned to the window again. “Timothy Joseph
- Hurley!” he shouted in, defiantly.
- </p>
- <p>
- This time another inspector came to the front—the owner of the
- tanyard over on the Dutch road, and a man of importance in the district.
- Evidently there had been a discussion inside.
- </p>
- <p>
- “We will take your vote if you want to swear it in,” he said, in a pacific
- tone, and though there were some dissenting cries from the crowd without,
- he read the oath, and Hurley mumbled it after him.
- </p>
- <p>
- Then, with some difficulty, he sorted out from his pocket some torn and
- mud-stained packets of tickets, picked the cleanest out from each, and
- voted them—all with a fine air of unconcern.
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner Beech marched out behind him now with a resolute clutch on the
- stake. The crowd made reluctant way for them, not without a good many
- truculent remarks, but with no offer of actual violence. Some of the more
- boisterous ones, led by Roselle Upman, were for following them, and
- renewing the encounter beyond the Corners. But this, too, came to nothing,
- and when I at last ventured to cross the road and join Abner and Hurley,
- even the cries of “Copperhead” had died away.
- </p>
- <p>
- The sun had come out, and the frosty ruts had softened to stickiness. The
- men’s heavy boots picked up whole sections of plastic earth as they walked
- in the middle of the road up the hill.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What’s the matter with your mouth?” asked Abner at last, casting a
- sidelong glance at his companion. “It’s be’n a-bleedin’.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hurley passed an investigating hand carefully over the lower part of his
- face, looked at his reddened fingers, and laughed aloud. “I’d a fine grand
- bite at the ear of one of them,” he said, in explanation. “‘Tis no blood
- o’ mine.” Abner knitted his brows. “That ain’t the way we fight in this
- country,” he said, in tones of displeasure. “Bitin’ men’s ears ain’t no
- civilized way of behavin’.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “’Twas not much of a day for civilization,” remarked Hurley,
- lightly; and there was no further conversation on our homeward tramp.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER VIII—THE ELECTION BONFIRE
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>he election had
- been on Tuesday, November 4th. Our paper, containing the news of the
- result, was to be expected at the Corners on Friday morning. But long
- before that date we had learned—I think it was Hurley who found it
- out—that the Abolitionists had actually been beaten in our
- Congressional district. It was so amazing a thing that Abner could
- scarcely credit it, but it was apparently beyond dispute. For that matter,
- one hardly needed further evidence than the dejected way in which Philo
- Andrews and Myron Pierce and other followers of “Jee” Hagadorn hung their
- heads as they drove past our place.
- </p>
- <p>
- Of course it had all been done by the vote in the big town of Tecumseh,
- way at the other end of the district, and by those towns surrounding it
- where the Mohawk Dutch were still very numerous. But this did not at all
- lessen the exhilaration with which the discovery that the Radicals of our
- own Dearborn County had been snowed under, filled our breasts. Was it not
- wonderful to think of, that these heroes of remote Adams and Jay Counties
- should have been at work redeeming the district on the very day when the
- two votes of our farm marked the almost despairing low-water mark of the
- cause in Agrippa?
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner could hardly keep his feet down on the ground or floor when he
- walked, so powerfully did the tidings of this achievement thrill his
- veins. He said the springs of his knees kept jerking upward, so that he
- wanted to kick and dance all the while. Janey Wilcox, who, though a meek
- and silent girl, was a wildly bitter partisan, was all eagerness to light
- a bonfire out on the knoll in front of the house Thursday night, so that
- every mother’s son of them down at the Corners might see it, but Abner
- thought it would be better to wait until we had the printed facts before
- us.
- </p>
- <p>
- I could hardly wait to finish breakfast Friday morning, so great was my
- zeal to be off to the postoffice. It was indeed not altogether daylight
- when I started at quick step down the hill. Yet, early as I was, there
- were some twenty people inside Lee Watkins’s store when I arrived, all
- standing clustered about the high square row of glass-faced pigeonholes
- reared on the farther end of the counter, behind which could be seen Lee
- and his sour-faced wife sorting over the mail by lamp-light. “Jee”
- Hagadorn was in this group and Squire Avery, and most of the other
- prominent citizens of the neighborhood. All were deeply restless.
- </p>
- <p>
- Every minute or two some one of them would shout: “Come, Lee, give us out
- one of the papers, anyway!” But for some reason Mrs. Watkins was
- inexorable. Her pursed-up lips and resolute expression told us plainly
- that none would be served till all were sorted. So the impatient waiters
- bided their time under protest, exchanging splenetic remarks under their
- breath. We must have stood there three-quarters of an hour.
- </p>
- <p>
- At last Mrs. Watkins wiped her hands on the apron over her bloomers.
- Everybody knew the signal, and on the instant a dozen arms were stretched
- vehemently toward Lee, struggling for precedence. In another moment
- wrappers had been ripped off and sheets flung open. Then the store was
- alive with excited voices. “Yes, sir! It’s true! The Copperheads have
- won!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “<i>Tribune</i> concedes Seymour’s election!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “We’re beaten in the district by less’n a hundred!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Good-by, human liberty!” “Now we know how Lazarus felt when he was licked
- by the dogs!” and so on—a stormy warfare of wrathful ejaculations.
- </p>
- <p>
- In my turn I crowded up, and held out my hand for the paper I saw in the
- box. Lee Watkins recognized me, and took the paper out to deliver to me.
- But at the same moment his wife, who had been hastily scanning the columns
- of some other journal, looked up and also saw who I was. With a lightning
- gesture she threw out her hand, snatched our <i>World</i> from her
- husband’s grasp, and threw it spitefully under the counter.
- </p>
- <p>
- “There ain’t nothing for <i>you!</i>” she snapped at me. “Pesky Copperhead
- rag!” she muttered to herself.
- </p>
- <p>
- Although I had plainly seen the familiar wrapper, and understood her
- action well enough, it never occurred to me to argue the question with
- Mrs.
- </p>
- <p>
- Watkins. Her bustling, determined demeanor, perhaps also her bloomers, had
- always filled me with awe. I hung about for a time, avoiding her range of
- vision, until she went out into her kitchen. Then I spoke with resolution
- to Lee:
- </p>
- <p>
- “If you don’t give me that paper,” I said, “I’ll tell Abner, an’ he’ll
- make you sweat for it!”
- </p>
- <p>
- The postmaster stole a cautious glance kitchen-ward. Then he made a swift,
- diving movement under the counter, and furtively thrust the paper out at
- me.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Scoot!” he said, briefly, and I obeyed him.
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner was simply wild with bewildered delight over what this paper had to
- tell him. Even my narrative about Mrs. Watkins, which ordinarily would
- have thrown him into transports of rage, provoked only a passing sniff.
- “They’ve only got two more years to hold that post-office,” was his only
- remark upon it.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hurley and Janey Wilcox and even the Underwood girl came in, and listened
- to Abner reading out the news. He shirked nothing, but waded manfully
- through long tables of figures and meaningless catalogues of counties in
- other States, the names of which he scarcely knew how to pronounce: “‘Five
- hundred and thirty-one townships in Wisconsin give Brown 21,409, Smith
- 16,329, Ferguson 802, a Republican loss of 26.’ Do you see that, Hurley?
- It’s everywhere the same.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “‘Kalapoosas County elects Republican Sheriff for first time in history of
- party.’ That isn’t so good, but it’s only one out of ten thousand.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “‘Four hundred and six townships in New Hampshire show a net Democratic
- loss of—’ pshaw! there ain’t nothing in that! Wait till the other
- towns are heard from!”
- </p>
- <p>
- So Abner read on and on, slapping his thigh with his free hand whenever
- anything specially good turned up. And there was a great deal that we felt
- to be good. The State had been carried. Besides our Congressman, many
- others had been elected in unlooked-for places—so much so that the
- paper held out the hope that Congress itself might be ours. Of course
- Abner at once talked as if it were already ours. Resting between
- paragraphs, he told Hurley and the others that this settled it. The war
- must now surely be abandoned, and the seceding States invited to return to
- the Union on terms honorable to both sides.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hurley had assented with acquiescent nods to everything else. He seemed to
- have a reservation on this last point. “An’ what if they won’t come?” he
- asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Let ’em stay out, then,” replied Abner, dogmatically. “This war—this
- wicked war between brothers—must stop. That’s the meaning of
- Tuesday’s votes. What did you and I go down to the Corners and cast our
- ballots for?—why, for peace!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, somebody else got my share of it, then,” remarked Hurley, with a
- rueful chuckle.
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner was too intent upon his theme to notice. “Yes, peace!” he repeated,
- in the deep vibrating tones of his class-meeting manner. “Why, just think
- what’s been a-goin’ on! Great armies raised, hundreds of thousands of
- honest men taken from their-work an’ set to murderin’ each other, whole
- deestricks of country torn up by the roots, homes desolated, the land
- filled with widows an’ orphans, an’ every house a house of mournin’.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Mrs. Beech had been sitting, with her mending-basket on her knee,
- listening to her husband like the rest of us. She shot to her feet now as
- these last words of his quivered in the air, paying no heed to the basket
- or its scattered contents on the floor, but putting her apron to her eyes,
- and making her way thus past us, half-blindly, into her bedroom. I thought
- I heard the sound of a sob as she closed the door.
- </p>
- <p>
- That the stately, proud, self-contained mistress of our household should
- act like this before us all was even more surprising than Seymour’s
- election. We stared at one another in silent astonishment.
- </p>
- <p>
- “M’rye ain’t feelin’ over’n’ above well,” Abner said at last,
- apologetically. “You girls ought to spare her all you kin.”
- </p>
- <p>
- One could see, however, that he was as puzzled as the rest of us. He rose
- to his feet, walked over to the stove, rubbed his boot meditatively
- against the hearth for a minute or two, then came back again to the table.
- It was with a visible effort that he finally shook off this mood, and
- forced a smile to his lips.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, Janey,” he said, with an effort at briskness, “ye kin go ahead with
- your bonfire, now. I guess I’ve got some old bar’ls for ye over’n the
- cow-barn.”
- </p>
- <p>
- But having said this, he turned abruptly and followed his wife into the
- little chamber off the living-room.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER IX—ESTHER’S VISIT
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>he next day,
- Saturday, was my birthday. I celebrated it by a heavy cold, with a
- bursting headache, and chills chasing each other down my back. I went out
- to the cow-barn with the two men before daylight, as usual, but felt so
- bad that I had to come back to the house before milking was half over. The
- moment M’rye saw me, I was ordered on to the sick-list.
- </p>
- <p>
- The Beech homestead was a good place to be sick in. Both M’rye and Janey
- had a talent in the way of fixing up tasty little dishes for invalids, and
- otherwise ministering to their comfort, which year after year went
- a-begging, simply because all the men-folk kept so well. Therefore, when
- the rare opportunity did arrive, they made the most of it. I had my feet
- and legs put into a bucket of hot water, and wrapped round with burdock
- leaves. Janey prepared for my breakfast some soft toast—not the
- insipid and common milk-toast—but each golden-brown slice treated
- separately on a plate, first moistened with scalding water, then peppered,
- salted, and buttered, with a little cold milk on top of all. I ate this
- sumptuous breakfast at my leisure, ensconced in M’rye’s big cushioned
- rocking-chair, with my feet and legs, well tucked up in a blanket-shawl,
- stretched out on another chair, comfortably near the stove.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was taken for granted that I had caught my cold out around the bonfire
- the previous evening—and this conviction threw a sort of patriotic
- glamour about my illness, at least in my own mind.
- </p>
- <p>
- The bonfire had been a famous success. Though there was a trifle of rain
- in the air, the barrels and mossy discarded old fence-rails burned like
- pitch-pine, and when Hurley and I threw on armfuls of brush, the sparks
- burst up with a roar into a flaming column which we felt must be visible
- all over our side of Dearborn County. At all events, there was no doubt
- about its being seen and understood down at the Corners, for presently our
- enemies there started an answering bonfire, which glowed from time to time
- with such a peculiarly concentrated radiance that Abner said Lee Watkins
- must have given them some of his kerosene-oil barrels. The thought of such
- a sacrifice as this on the part of the postmaster rather disturbed Abner’s
- mind, raising, as it did, the hideous suggestion that possibly later
- returns might have altered the election results. But when Hurley and I
- dragged forward and tipped over into the blaze the whole side of an old
- abandoned corn-crib, and heaped dry brush on top of that, till the very
- sky seemed afire above us, and the stubblefields down the hill-side were
- all ruddy in the light, Abner confessed himself reassured. Our enthusiasm
- was so great that it was nearly ten o’clock before we went to bed, having
- first put the fire pretty well out, lest a rising wind during the night
- should scatter sparks and work mischief.
- </p>
- <p>
- I had all these splendid things to think of next day, along with my
- headache and the shivering spine, and they tipped the balance toward
- satisfaction. Shortly after breakfast M’rye made a flaxseed poultice and
- muffled it flabbily about my neck, and brought me also some boneset-tea to
- drink. There was a debate in the air as between castor-oil and senna,
- fragments of which were borne in to me when the kitchen door was open. The
- Underwood girl alarmed me by steadily insisting that her sister-in-law
- always broke up sick-headaches with a mustard-plaster put raw on the back
- of the neck. Every once in a while one of them would come in and address
- to me the stereotyped formula: “Feel any better?” and I as invariably
- answered, “No.” In reality, though, I was lazily comfortable all the time,
- with Lossing’s “Field-Book of the War of 1812” lying open on my lap, to
- look at when I felt inclined. This book was not nearly so interesting as
- the one about the Revolution, but a grandfather of mine had marched as a
- soldier up to Sackett’s Harbor in the later war, though he did not seem to
- have had any fighting to do after he got there, and in my serious moods I
- always felt it my duty to read about his war instead of the other.
- </p>
- <p>
- So the day passed along, and dusk began to gather in the living-room. The
- men were off outdoors somewhere, and the girls were churning in the
- butter-room. M’rye had come in with her mending, and sat on the opposite
- side of the stove, at intervals casting glances over its flat top to
- satisfy herself that my poultice had not sagged down from its proper
- place, and that I was in other respects doing as well as could be
- expected.
- </p>
- <p>
- Conversation between us was hardly to be thought of, even if I had not
- been so drowsily indolent. M’rye was not a talker, and preferred always to
- sit in silence, listening to others, or, better still, going on at her
- work with no sounds at all to disturb her thoughts. These long periods of
- meditation, and the sedate gaze of her black, penetrating eyes, gave me
- the feeling that she must be much wiser than other women, who could not
- keep still at all, but gabbled everything the moment it came into their
- heads.
- </p>
- <p>
- We had sat thus for a long, long time, until I began to wonder how she
- could sew in the waning light, when all at once, without lifting her eyes
- from her work, she spoke to me.
- </p>
- <p>
- “D’ you know where Ni Hagadorn’s gone to?” she asked me, in a measured,
- impressive voice.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He—he—told me he was a-goin’ away,” I made answer, with weak
- evasiveness.
- </p>
- <p>
- “But where? Down South?” She looked up, as I hesitated, and flashed that
- darkling glance of hers at me. “Out with it!” she commanded. “Tell me the
- truth!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Thus adjured, I promptly admitted that Ni had said he was going South, and
- could work his way somehow. “He’s gone, you know,” I added, after a pause,
- “to try and find—that is, to hunt around after—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, I know,” said M’rye, sententiously, and another long silence ensued.
- </p>
- <p>
- She rose after a time, and went out into the kitchen, returning with the
- lighted lamp. She set this on the table, putting the shade down on one
- side so that the light should not hurt my eyes, and resumed her mending.
- The yellow glow thus falling upon her gave to her dark, severe,
- high-featured face a duskier effect than ever. It occurred to me that
- Molly Brant, that mysteriously fascinating and bloody Mohawk queen who
- left such an awful reddened mark upon the history of her native Valley,
- must have been like our M’rye. My mind began sleepily to clothe the
- farmer’s wife in blankets and chains of wampum, with eagles’ feathers in
- her raven hair, and then to drift vaguely off over the threshold of Indian
- dreamland, when suddenly, with a start, I became conscious that some
- unexpected person had entered the room by the veranda-door behind me.
- </p>
- <p>
- The rush of cold air from without had awakened me and told me of the
- entrance. A glance at M’rye’s face revealed the rest. She was staring at
- the newcomer with a dumfounded expression of countenance, her mouth
- half-open with sheer surprise. Still staring, she rose and tilted the
- lampshade in yet another direction, so that the light was thrown upon the
- stranger. At this I turned in my chair to look.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was Esther Hagadorn who had come in!
- </p>
- <p>
- There was a moment’s awkward silence, and then the school-teacher began
- hurriedly to speak. “I saw you were alone from the veranda—I was so
- nervous it never occurred to me to rap—the curtains being up—I—I
- walked straight in.”
- </p>
- <p>
- As if in comment upon this statement, M’rye marched across the room, and
- pulled down both curtains over the veranda windows. With her hand still
- upon the cord of the second shade, she turned and again dumbly surveyed
- her visitor.
- </p>
- <p>
- Esther flushed visibly at this reception, and had to choke down the first
- words that came to her lips. Then she went on better: “I hope you’ll
- excuse my rudeness. I really did forget to rap. I came upon very special
- business. Is Ab—Mr. Beech at home?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Won’t you sit down?” said M’rye, with a glum effort at civility. “I
- expect him in presently.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The school-ma’am, displaying some diffidence, seated herself in the
- nearest chair, and gazed at the wall-paper with intentness. She had never
- seemed to notice me at all—indeed had spoken of seeing M’rye alone
- through the window—and now I coughed, and stirred to readjust my
- poultice, but she did not look my way. M’rye had gone back to her chair by
- the stove, and taken up her mending again.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’d better lay off your things. You won’t feel ’em when you go
- out,” she remarked, after an embarrassing period of silence, investing the
- formal phrases with chilling intention.
- </p>
- <p>
- Esther made a fumbling motion at the loop of her big mink cape, but did
- not unfasten it.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I—I don’t know <i>what</i> you think of me,” she began, at last,
- and then nervously halted.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mebbe it’s just as well you don’t,” said M’rye, significantly, darning
- away with long sweeps of her arm, and bending attentively over her
- stocking and ball.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I can understand your feeling hard,” Esther went on, still eyeing the
- sprawling blue figures on the wall, and plucking with her fingers at the
- furry tails on her cape. “And—I <i>am</i> to blame, <i>some</i>, I
- can see now—but it didn’t seem so, <i>then</i>, to either of us.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It ain’t no affair of mine,” remarked M’rye, when the pause came, “but if
- that’s your business with Abner, you won’t make much by waitin’. Of course
- it’s nothing to me, one way or t’other.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Not another word was exchanged for a long time. From where I sat I could
- see the girl’s lips tremble, as she looked steadfastly into the wall. I
- felt certain that M’rye was darning the same place over and over again, so
- furiously did she keep her needle flying.
- </p>
- <p>
- All at once she looked up angrily. “Well,” she said, in loud, bitter
- tones: “Why not out with what you’ve come to say, ’n’ be done with
- it? You’ve heard something, <i>I</i> know!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Esther shook her head. “No, Mrs. Beech,” she said, with a piteous quaver
- in her voice, “I—I haven’t heard anything!”
- </p>
- <p>
- The sound of her own broken utterances seemed to affect her deeply. Her
- eyes filled with tears, and she hastily got out a handkerchief from her
- muff, and began drying them. She could not keep from sobbing aloud a
- little.
- </p>
- <p>
- M’rye deliberately took another stocking from the heap in the basket,
- fitted it over the ball, and began a fresh task—all without a glance
- at the weeping girl.
- </p>
- <p>
- Thus the two women still sat, when Janey came in to lay the table for
- supper. She lifted the lamp off to spread the cloth, and put it on again;
- she brought in plates and knives and spoons, and arranged them in their
- accustomed places—all the while furtively regarding Miss Hagadorn
- with an incredulous surprise. When she had quite finished she went over to
- her mistress and, bending low, whispered so that we could all hear quite
- distinctly: “Is <i>she</i> goin’ to stay to supper?”
- </p>
- <p>
- M’rye hesitated, but Esther lifted her head and put down the handkerchief
- instantly. “Oh, no!” she said, eagerly: “don’t think of it! I must hurry
- home as soon as I’ve seen Mr. Beech.” Janey went out with an obvious air
- of relief.
- </p>
- <p>
- Presently there was a sound of heavy boots out in the kitchen being thrown
- on to the floor, and then Abner came in. He halted in the doorway, his
- massive form seeming to completely fill it, and devoted a moment or so
- taking in the novel spectacle of a neighbor under his roof. Then he
- advanced, walking obliquely till he could see distinctly the face of the
- visitor. It stands to reason that he must have been surprised, but he gave
- no sign of it.
- </p>
- <p>
- “How d’ do, Miss,” he said, with grave politeness, coming up and offering
- her his big hand.
- </p>
- <p>
- Esther rose abruptly, peony-red with pleasurable confusion, and took the
- hand stretched out to her. “How d’ do, Mr. Beech,” she responded with
- eagerness, “I—I came up to see you—a—about something
- that’s very pressing.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s blowing up quite a gale outside,” the farmer remarked, evidently to
- gain time the while he scanned her face in a solemn, thoughtful way,
- noting, I doubt not, the swollen eyelids and stains of tears, and trying
- to guess her errand. “Shouldn’t wonder if we had a foot o’ snow before
- morning.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The school-teacher seemed in doubt how best to begin what she had to say,
- so that Abner had time, after he lifted his inquiring gaze from her, to
- run a master’s eye over the table.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Have Janey lay another place!” he said, with authoritative brevity.
- </p>
- <p>
- As M’rye rose to obey, Esther broke forth: “Oh, no, please don’t! Thank
- you so much, Mr. Beech—but really I can’t stop—truly, I
- mustn’t think of it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The farmer merely nodded a confirmation of his order to M’rye, who
- hastened out to the kitchen.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’ll be there for ye, anyway,” he said. “Now set down again, please.”
- </p>
- <p>
- It was all as if he was the one who had the news to tell, so naturally did
- he take command of the situation. The girl seated herself, and the farmer
- drew up his arm-chair and planted himself before her, keeping his
- stockinged feet under the rungs for politeness’ sake.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Now, Miss,” he began, just making it civilly plain that he preferred not
- to utter her hated paternal name, “I don’t know no more’n a babe unborn
- what’s brought you here. I’m sure, from what I know of ye, that you
- wouldn’t come to this house jest for the sake of comin’, or to argy things
- that can’t be, an’ mustn’t be, argied. In one sense, we ain’t friends of
- yours here, and there’s a heap o’ things that you an’ me don’t want to
- talk about, because they’d only lead to bad feelin’, an’ so we’ll leave ’em
- all severely alone. But in another way, I’ve always had a liking for you.
- You’re a smart girl, an’ a scholar into the bargain, an’ there ain’t so
- many o’ that sort knockin’ around in these parts that a man like myself,
- who’s fond o’ books an’ learnin’, wants to be unfriendly to them there is.
- So now you can figure out pretty well where the chalk line lays, and we’ll
- walk on it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Esther nodded her head. “Yes, I understand,” she remarked, and seemed not
- to dislike what Abner had said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “That being so, what is it?” the farmer asked, with his hands on his
- knees.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, Mr. Beech,” the school-teacher began, noting with a swift
- side-glance that M’rye had returned, and was herself rearranging the
- table. “I don’t think you can have heard it, but some important news has
- come in during the day. There seems to be different stories, but the gist
- of them is that a number of the leading Union generals have been
- discovered to be traitors, and McClellan has been dismissed from his place
- at the head of the army, and ordered to return to his home in New Jersey
- under arrest, and they say others are to be treated in the same way, and
- Fath—<i>some</i> people think it will be a hanging matter, and—”
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner waved all this aside with a motion of his hand. “It don’t amount to
- a hill o’ beans,” he said, placidly. “It’s jest spite, because we licked
- ’em at the elections. Don’t you worry your head about <i>that!</i>”
- </p>
- <p>
- Esther was not reassured. “That isn’t all,” she went on, nervously. “They
- say there’s been discovered a big conspiracy, with secret sympathizers all
- over the North.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Pooh!” commented Abner. “We’ve heer’n tell o’ that before!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “All over the North,” she continued, “with the intention of bringing
- across infected clothes from Canada, and spreading the small-pox among us,
- and—”
- </p>
- <p>
- The farmer laughed outright; a laugh embittered by contempt. “What
- cock-’n’-bull story’ll be hatched next!” he said. “You don’t mean to say
- you—a girl with a head on her shoulders like <i>you</i>—give
- ear to such tomfoolery as that! Come, now, honest Injin, do you mean to
- tell me <i>you</i> believe all this?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It don’t so much matter, Mr. Beech,” the girl replied, raising her face
- to his, and speaking more confidently—“it don’t matter at all what I
- believe. I’m talking of what they believe down at the Corners.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “The Corners be jiggered!” exclaimed Abner, politely, but with emphasis.
- </p>
- <p>
- Esther rose from the chair. “Mr. Beech,” she declared, impressively;
- “they’re coming up here to-night! That bonfire of yours made ’em
- mad. It’s no matter how I learned it—it wasn’t from father—I
- don’t know that he knows anything about it, but they’re coming <i>here!</i>
- and—and Heaven only knows what they’re going to do when they get
- here!”
- </p>
- <p>
- The farmer rose also, his huge figure towering above that of the girl, as
- he looked down at her over his beard. He no longer dissembled his
- stockinged feet. After a moment’s pause he said: “So that’s what you came
- to tell me, eh?”
- </p>
- <p>
- The school-ma’am nodded her head. “I couldn’t bear not to,” she explained,
- simply.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, I’m obleeged to ye!” Abner remarked, with gravity. “Whatever comes
- of it, I’m obleeged to ye!”
- </p>
- <p>
- He turned at this, and walked slowly out into the kitchen, leaving the
- door open behind him. “Pull on your boots again!” we heard him say,
- presumably to Hurley. In a minute or two he returned, with his own boots
- on, and bearing over his arm the old double-barrelled shot-gun which
- always hung above the kitchen mantel-piece. In his hands he had two
- shot-flasks, the little tobacco-bag full of buckshot, and a powder-horn.
- He laid these on the open shelf of the bookcase, and, after fitting fresh
- caps on the nipples, put the gun beside them.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’d be all the more sot on your stayin’ to supper,” he remarked, looking
- again at Esther, “only if there <i>should</i> be any unpleasantness, why,
- I’d hate like sin to have you mixed up in it. You see how I’m placed.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Esther did not hesitate a moment. She walked over to where M’rye stood by
- the table replenishing the butter-plate. “I’d be very glad indeed to stay,
- Mr. Beech,” she said, with winning frankness, “if I may.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “There’s the place laid for you,” commented M’rye, impassively. Then,
- catching her husband’s eye, she added the perfunctory assurance, “You’re
- entirely welcome.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hurley and the girls came in now, and all except me took their seats about
- the table. Both Abner and the Irishman had their coats on, out of
- compliment to company. M’rye brought over a thick slice of fresh buttered
- bread with brown sugar on it, and a cup of weak tea, and put them beside
- me on a chair. Then the evening meal went forward, the farmer talking in a
- fragmentary way about the crops and the weather. Save for an occasional
- response from our visitor, the rest maintained silence. The Underwood girl
- could not keep her fearful eyes from the gun lying on the bookcase, and
- protested that she had no appetite, but Hurley ate vigorously, and had a
- smile on his wrinkled and swarthy little face.
- </p>
- <p>
- The wind outside whistled shrilly at the windows, rattling the shutters,
- and trying its force in explosive blasts which seemed to rock the house on
- its stone foundations. Once or twice it shook the veranda door with such
- violence that the folk at the table instinctively lifted their heads,
- thinking some one was there.
- </p>
- <p>
- Then, all at once, above the confusion of the storm’s noises, we heard a
- voice rise, high and clear, crying:
- </p>
- <p>
- “<i>Smoke the damned Copperhead out!</i>”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER X—THE FIRE
- </h2>
- <p>
- “That was Roselle Upman that hollered,” remarked Janey Wilcox, breaking
- the agitated silence which had fallen upon the supper table. “You can tell
- it’s him because he’s had all his front teeth pulled out.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I wasn’t born in the woods to be skeert by an owl!” replied Abner, with a
- great show of tranquillity, helping himself to another slice of bread.
- “Miss, you ain’t half makin’ out a supper!”
- </p>
- <p>
- But this bravado could not maintain itself. In another minute there came a
- loud chorus of angry yells, heightened at its finish by two or three
- pistol-shots. Then Abner pushed back his chair and rose slowly to his
- feet, and the rest sprang up all around the table.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hurley,” said the farmer, speaking as deliberately as he knew how,
- doubtless with the idea of reassuring the others, “you go out into the
- kitchen with the women-folks, an’ bar the woodshed door, an’ bring in the
- axe with you to stan’ guard over the kitchen door. I’ll look out for this
- part o’ the house myself.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I want to stay in here with you, Abner,” said M’rye.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, you go out with the others!” commanded the master with firmness, and
- so they all filed out with no hint whatever of me. The shadow of the
- lamp-shade had cut me off altogether from their thoughts.
- </p>
- <p>
- Perhaps it is not surprising that my recollections | of what now ensued
- should lack definiteness and sequence. The truth is, that my terror at my
- own predicament, sitting there with no covering for my feet and calves but
- the burdock leaves and that absurd shawl, swamped everything else in my
- mind. Still, I do remember some of it.
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner strode across to the bookcase and took up the gun, his big thumb
- resting determinedly on the hammers. Then he marched to the door, threw it
- wide open, and planted himself on the threshold, looking out into the
- darkness.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What’s your business here, whoever you are?” he called out, in deep
- defiant tones.
- </p>
- <p>
- “We’ve come to take you an’ Paddy out for a little ride on a rail!”
- answered the same shrill, mocking voice we had heard at first. Then others
- took up the hostile chorus. “We’ve got some pitch a-heatin’ round in the
- backyard!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You won’t catch cold; there’s plenty o’ feathers!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Tell the Irishman here’s some more ears for him to chaw on!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Come out an’ take your Copperhead medicine!”
- </p>
- <p>
- There were yet other cries which the howling wind tore up into
- inarticulate fragments, and then a scattering volley of cheers, again
- emphasized by pistol-shots. While the crack of these still chilled my
- blood, a more than usually violent gust swooped round Abner’s burly
- figure, and blew out the lamp.
- </p>
- <p>
- Terrifying as the first instant of utter darkness was, the second was
- recognizable as a relief. I at once threw myself out of the chair, and
- crept along back of the stove to where my stockings and boots had been put
- to dry. These I hastened, with much trembling awkwardness, to pull on,
- taking pains to keep the big square old stove between me and that open
- veranda door.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Guess we won’t take no ride to-night!” I heard Abner roar out, after the
- shouting had for the moment died away.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You got to have one!” came back the original voice. “It’s needful for
- your complaint!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ve got somethin’ here that’ll fit <i>your</i> complaint!” bellowed the
- farmer, raising his gun. “Take warnin’—the first cuss that sets foot
- on this stoop, I’ll bore a four-inch hole clean through him. I’ve got
- squirrel-shot, an’ I’ve got buckshot, an’ there’s plenty more behind—so
- take your choice!”
- </p>
- <p>
- There were a good many derisive answering yells and hoots, and some one
- again fired a pistol in the air, but nobody offered to come up on the
- veranda.
- </p>
- <p>
- Emboldened by this, I stole across the room now to one of the windows, and
- lifting a corner of the shade, strove to look out. At first there was
- nothing whatever to be seen in the utter blackness. Then I made out some
- faint reddish sort of diffused light in the upper air, which barely
- sufficed to indicate the presence of some score or more dark figures out
- in the direction of the pump. Evidently they <i>had</i> built a fire
- around in the back yard, as they said—probably starting it there so
- that its light might not disclose their identity.
- </p>
- <p>
- This looked as if they really meant to tar-and-feather Abner and Hurley.
- The expression was familiar enough to my ears, and, from pictures in stray
- illustrated weeklies that found their way to the Corners, I had gathered
- some general notion of the procedure involved. The victim was stripped, I
- knew, and daubed over with hot melted pitch; then a pillow-case of
- feathers was emptied over him, and he was forced astride a fence-rail,
- which the rabble hoisted on their shoulders and ran about with. But my
- fancy balked at and refused the task of imagining Abner Beech in this
- humiliating posture. At least it was clear to my mind that a good many
- fierce and bloody things would happen first.
- </p>
- <p>
- Apparently this had become clear to the throng outside as well. Whole
- minutes had gone by, and still no one mounted the veranda to seek close
- quarters with the farmer—who stood braced with his legs wide apart,
- bare-headed and erect, the wind blowing his huge beard sidewise over his
- shoulder.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well! ain’t none o’ you a-comin’?” he called out at last, with impatient
- sarcasm. “Thought you was so sot on takin’ me out an’ havin’ some fun with
- me!” After a brief pause, another taunt occurred to him. “Why, even the
- niggers you’re so in love with,” he shouted, “they ain’t such dod-rotted
- cowards as you be!”
- </p>
- <p>
- A general movement was discernible among the shadowy forms outside. I
- thought for the instant that it meant a swarming attack upon the veranda.
- But no! suddenly it had grown much lighter, and the mob was moving away
- toward the rear of the house. The men were shouting things to one another,
- but the wind for the moment was at such a turbulent pitch that all their
- words were drowned. The reddened light waxed brighter still—and now
- there was nobody to be seen at all from the window.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hurry here! Mr. Beech! <i>We’re all afire!”</i> cried a frightened voice
- in the room behind me.
- </p>
- <p>
- It may be guessed how I turned.
- </p>
- <p>
- The kitchen door was open, and the figure of a woman stood on the
- threshold, indefinitely black against a strange yellowish-drab half light
- which framed it. This woman—one knew from the voice that it was
- Esther Hagadorn—seemed to be wringing her hands.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hurry! Hurry!” she cried again, and I could see now that the little
- passage was full of gray luminous smoke, which was drifting past her into
- the living-room. Even as I looked, it had half obscured her form, and was
- rolling in, in waves.
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner had heard her, and strode across the room now, gun still in hand,
- into the thick of the smoke, pushing Esther before him and shutting the
- kitchen door with a bang as he passed through. I put in a terrified minute
- or two alone in the dark, amazed and half-benumbed by the confused sounds
- that at first came from the kitchen, and by the horrible suspense, when a
- still more sinister silence ensued. Then there rose a loud crackling
- noise, like the incessant popping of some giant variety of corn.
- </p>
- <p>
- The door burst open again, and M’rye’s tall form seemed literally flung
- into the room by the sweeping volume of dense smoke which poured in. She
- pulled the door to behind her—then gave a snarl of excited emotion
- at seeing me by the dusky reddened radiance which began forcing its way
- from outside through the holland window shades.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Light the lamp, you gump!” she commanded, breathlessly, and fell with
- fierce concentration upon the task of dragging furniture out from the
- bedroom. I helped her in a frantic, bewildered fashion, after I had
- lighted the lamp, which flared and smoked without its shade, as we toiled.
- M’rye seemed all at once to have the strength of a dozen men. She swung
- the ponderous chest of drawers out end on end; she fairly lifted the still
- bigger bookcase, after I had hustled the books out on to the table; she
- swept off the bedding, slashed the cords, and jerked the bed-posts and
- side-pieces out of their connecting sockets with furious energy, till it
- seemed as if both rooms must have been dismantled in less time than I have
- taken to tell of it.
- </p>
- <p>
- The crackling overhead had swollen now to a wrathful roar, rising above
- the gusty voices of the wind. The noise, the heat, the smoke, and terror
- of it all made me sick and faint. I grew dizzy, and did foolish things in
- an aimless way, fumbling about among the stuff M’rye was hurling forth.
- Then all at once her darkling, smoke-wrapped figure shot up to an enormous
- height, the lamp began to go round, and I felt myself with nothing but
- space under my feet, plunging downward with awful velocity, surrounded by
- whirling skies full of stars.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <p>
- There was a black night-sky overhead when I came to my senses again, with
- flecks of snow in the cold air on my face. The wind had fallen, everything
- was as still as death, and some one was carrying me in his arms. I tried
- to lift my head.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Anyhow!” came Hurley’s admonitory voice, close to my ear. “We’ll be there
- in a minyut.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No—I’m all right—let me down,” I urged. He set me on my feet,
- and I looked amazedly about me.
- </p>
- <p>
- The red-brown front of our larger hay-barn loomed in a faint unnatural
- light, at close quarters, upon my first inquiring gaze. The big sliding
- doors were open, and the slanting wagon-bridge running down from their
- threshold was piled high with chairs, bedding, crockery, milk-pans,
- clothing—the jumbled remnants of our household gods. Turning, I
- looked across the yard upon what was left of the Beech homestead—a
- glare of cherry light glowing above a fiery hole in the ground.
- </p>
- <p>
- Strangely enough this glare seemed to perpetuate in its outlines the shape
- and dimensions of the vanished house. It was as if the house were still
- there, but transmuted from joists and clap-boards and shingles, into an
- illuminated and impalpable ghost of itself. There was a weird effect of
- transparency about it. Through the spectral bulk of red light I could see
- the naked and gnarled apple-trees in the home-orchard on the further side;
- and I remembered at once that painful and striking parallel of Scrooge
- gazing through the re-edified body of Jacob Marley, and beholding the
- buttons at the back of his coat. It all seemed some monstrous dream.
- </p>
- <p>
- But no, here the others were. Janey Wilcox and the Underwood girl had come
- out from the barn, and were carrying in more things. I perceived now that
- there was a candle burning inside, and presently Esther Hagadorn was to be
- seen. Hurley had disappeared, and so I went up the sloping platform to
- join the women—noting with weak surprise that my knees seemed to
- have acquired new double joints and behaved as if they were going in the
- other direction. I stumbled clumsily once I was inside the barn, and sat
- down with great abruptness on a milking-stool, leaning my head back
- against the haymow, and conscious of an entire indifference as to whether
- school kept or not.
- </p>
- <p>
- The feeble light of the candle was losing itself upon the broad high walls
- of new hay; the huge shadows in the rafters overhead; the women-folk
- silently moving about, fixing up on the barn floor some pitiful imitation,
- poor souls, of the home that had been swept off the face of the earth, and
- outside, through the wide sprawling doors, the dying away effulgence of
- the embers of our roof-tree lingering in the air of the winter night.
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner Beech came in presently, with the gun in one hand, and a blackened
- and outlandish-looking object in the other, which turned out to be the big
- pink sea-shell that used to decorate the parlor.
- </p>
- <p>
- Again it was like some half-waking vision—the mantel. He held it up
- for M’rye to see, with a grave, tired smile on his face.
- </p>
- <p>
- “We got it out, after all—just by the skin of our teeth,” he said,
- and Hurley, behind him, confirmed this by an eloquent grimace.
- </p>
- <p>
- M’rye’s black eyes snapped and sparkled as she lifted the candle and saw
- what this something was. Then she boldly put up her face and kissed her
- husband with a resounding smack. Truly it was a night of surprises.
- </p>
- <p>
- “That’s about the only thing I had to call my own when I was married,” she
- offered in explanation of her fervor, speaking to the company at large.
- Then she added in a lower tone, to Esther: “<i>He</i> used to play with it
- for hours at a stretch—when he was a baby.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “‘Member how he used to hold it up to his ear, eh, mother?” asked Abner,
- softly.
- </p>
- <p>
- M’rye nodded her head, and then put her apron up to her eyes for a brief
- moment. When she lowered it, we saw an unaccustomed smile mellowing her
- hard-set, swarthy face.
- </p>
- <p>
- The candle-light flashed upon a tear on her cheek that the apron had
- missed.
- </p>
- <p>
- ‘“I guess I <i>do</i> remember!” she said, with a voice full of
- tenderness.
- </p>
- <p>
- Then Esther’s hand stole into M’rye’s and the two women stood together
- before Abner, erect and with beaming countenances, and he smiled upon them
- both.
- </p>
- <p>
- It seemed that we were all much happier in our minds, now that our house
- had been burned down over our heads.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XI—THE CONQUEST OF ABNER
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">S</span>ome time during
- the night, I was awakened by the mice frisking through the hay about my
- ears. My head was aching again, and I could not get back into sleep.
- Besides, Hurley was snoring mercilessly.
- </p>
- <p>
- We two had chosen for our resting-place the little mow of half a load or
- so, which had not been stowed away above, but lay ready for present use
- over by the side-door opening on the cow-yard. Temporary beds had been
- spread for the women with fresh straw and blankets at the further end of
- the central threshing-floor. Abner himself had taken one of the rescued
- ticks and a quilt over to the other end, and stretched his ponderous
- length out across the big doors, with the gun by his side. No one had, of
- course, dreamed of undressing.
- </p>
- <p>
- Only a few minutes of wakefulness sufficed to throw me into a desperate
- state of fidgets. The hay seemed full of strange creeping noises. The
- whole big barn echoed with the boisterous ticking of the old eight-day
- clock which had been saved from the wreck of the kitchen, and which M’rye
- had set going again on the seat of the democrat wagon. And then Hurley!
- </p>
- <p>
- I began to be convinced, now, that I was coming down with a great spell of
- sickness—perhaps even “the fever.” Yes, it undoubtedly was the
- fever. I could feel it in my bones, which now started up queer prickly
- sensations on novel lines, quite as if they were somebody else’s bones
- instead. My breathing, indeed, left a good deal to be desired from the
- true fever standpoint. It was not nearly so rapid or convulsive as I
- understood that the breathing of a genuine fever victim ought to be. But
- that, no doubt, would come soon enough—nay! was it not already
- coming? I thought, upon examination, that I did breathe more swiftly than
- before. And oh! that Hurley!
- </p>
- <p>
- As noiselessly as possible I made my way, half-rolling, half-sliding, off
- the hay, and got on my feet on the floor. It was pitch dark, but I could
- feel along the old disused stanchion-row to the corner; thence it was
- plain sailing over to where Abner was sleeping by the big front doors. I
- would not dream of rousing him if he was in truth asleep, but it would be
- something to be nigh him, in case the fever should take a fatal turn
- before morning. I would just cuddle down on the floor near to him, and
- await events.
- </p>
- <p>
- When I had turned the corner, it surprised me greatly to see ahead of me,
- over at the front of the barn, the reflection of a light. Creeping along
- toward it, I came out upon Abner, seated with his back against one of the
- doors, looking over an account-book by the aid of a lantern perched on a
- box at his side. He had stood the frame of an old bob-sleigh on end close
- by, and hung a horse-blanket over it, so that the light might not disturb
- the women-folk at the other end of the barn. The gun lay on the floor
- beside him.
- </p>
- <p>
- He looked up at my approach, and regarded me with something, I fancied, of
- disapprobation in his habitually grave expression.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, old seventy-six, what’s the matter with you?” he asked, keeping his
- voice down to make as little noise as possible.
- </p>
- <p>
- I answered in the same cautious tones that I was feeling bad. Had any
- encouragement suggested itself in the farmer’s mien, I was prepared to
- overwhelm him with a relation of my symptoms in detail. But he shook his
- head instead.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’ll have to wait till morning, to be sick,” he said—“that is, to
- get ’tended to. I don’t know anything about such things, an’ I
- wouldn’t wake M’rye up now for a whole baker’s dozen o’ you chaps.” Seeing
- my face fall at this sweeping declaration, he proceeded to modify it in a
- kindlier tone. “Now you just lay down again, sonny,” he added, “an’ you’ll
- be to sleep in no time, an’ in the morning M’rye ’ll fix up
- something for ye. This ain’t no fit time for white folks to be
- belly-achin’ around.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I kind o’ thought I’d feel better if I was sleeping over here near you,”
- I ventured now to explain, and his nod was my warrant for tiptoeing across
- to the heap of disorganized furniture, and getting out some blankets and a
- comforter, which I arranged in the corner a few yards away and simply
- rolled myself up in, with my face turned away from the light? It was
- better over here than with Hurley, and though that prompt sleep which the
- farmer had promised did not come, I at least was drowsily conscious of an
- improved physical condition.
- </p>
- <p>
- Perhaps I drifted off more than half-way into dreamland, for it was with a
- start that all at once I heard some one close by talking with Abner.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I saw you were up, Mr. Beech”—it was Esther Hagadorn who spoke—“and
- I don’t seem able to sleep, and I thought, if you didn’t mind, I’d come
- over here.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, of course,” the farmer responded. “Just bring up a chair there, an’
- sit down. That’s it—wrap the shawl around you good. It’s a cold
- night—snowin’ hard outside.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Both had spoken in muffled tones, so as not to disturb the others. This
- same dominant notion of keeping still deterred me from turning over, in
- order to be able to see them. I expected to hear them discuss my illness,
- but they never referred to it. Instead, there was what seemed a long
- silence. Then the school-ma’am spoke. “I can’t begin to tell you,” she
- said, “how glad I am that you and your wife aren’t a bit cast down by the—the
- calamity.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” came back Abner’s voice, buoyant even in its half-whisper, “we’re
- all right. I’ve be’n sort o’ figurin’ up here, an’ they ain’t much real
- harm done. I’m insured pretty well. Of course, this bein’ obleeged to camp
- out in a hay-barn might be improved on, but then it’s a change—somethin’
- out o’ the ordinary rut—an’ it’ll do us good. I’ll have the
- carpenters over from Juno Mills in the forenoon, an’ if they push things,
- we can have a roof over us again before Christmas. It could be done even
- sooner, p’raps, only they ain’t any neighbors to help <i>me</i> with a
- raisin’ bee. They’re willin’ enough to burn my house down, though.
- However, I don’t want them not an atom more’n they want me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- There was no trace of anger in his voice. He spoke like one contemplating
- the unalterable conditions of life.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Did they really, do you believe, <i>set</i> it on fire?” Esther asked,
- intently.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, <i>I</i> think it caught from that fool fire they started around back
- of the house, to heat their fool tar by. The wind was blowing a regular
- gale, you know. Janey Wilcox, she will have it that that Roselle Upman set
- it on purpose. But then, she don’t like him—an’ I can’t blame her
- much, for that matter. Once Otis Barnum was seein’ her home from singin’
- school, an’ when he was goin’ back alone this Roselle Upman waylaid him in
- the dark, an’ pitched onto him, an’ broke his collar-bone. I always
- thought it puffed Janey up some, this bein’ fought over like that, but it
- made her mad to have Otis hurt on her account, an’ then nothing come of
- it. I wouldn’t ’a’ minded pepperin’ Roselle’s legs a trifle, if I’d
- had a barrel loaded, say, with bird-shot. He’s a nuisance to the whole
- neighborhood. He kicks up a fight at every dance he goes to, all winter
- long, an’ hangs around the taverns day in an’ day out, inducin’ young men
- to drink an’ loaf. I thought a fellow like him ’d be sure to go off
- to the war, an’ so good riddance; but no! darned if the coward don’t go
- an’ get his front teeth pulled, so’t he can’t bite ca’tridges, an’ jest
- stay around; a worse nuisance than ever! I’d half forgive that miserable
- war if it—only took off the—the right men.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mr. Beech,” said Esther, in low fervent tones, measuring each word as it
- fell, “you and I, we must forgive that war together!”
- </p>
- <p>
- I seemed to feel the farmer shaking his head. He said nothing in reply.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m beginning to understand how you’ve felt about it all along,” the girl
- went on, after a pause. “I knew the fault must be in my ignorance, that
- our opinions of plain right and plain wrong should be such poles apart. I
- got a school-friend of mine, whose father is your way of thinking, to send
- me all the papers that came to their house, and I’ve been going through
- them religiously—whenever I could be quite alone. I don’t say I
- don’t think you’re wrong, because I <i>do</i>, but I am getting to
- understand how you should believe yourself to be right.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She paused as if expecting a reply, but Abner only said, “Go on,” after
- some hesitation, and she went on:
- </p>
- <p>
- “Now take the neighbors all about here—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Excuse <i>me!</i>” broke in the farmer. “I guess if it’s all the same to
- you, I’d rather not. They’re too rich for my blood.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Take these very neighbors,” pursued Esther, with gentle determination.
- “Something must be very wrong indeed when they behave to you the way they
- do. Why, I know that even now, right down in their hearts, they recognize
- that you’re far and away the best man in Agrippa. Why, I remember, Mr.
- Beech, when I first applied, and you were school-commissioner, and you sat
- there through the examination—why, you were the only one whose
- opinion I gave a rap for. When you praised me, why, I was prouder of it
- than if you had been a Regent of the University. And I tell you, everybody
- all around here feels at bottom just as I do.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “They take a dummed curious way o’ showin’ it, then,” commented Abner,
- roundly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It isn’t <i>that</i> they’re trying to show at all,” said Esther. “They
- feel that other things are more important. They’re all wrought up over the
- war. How could it be otherwise when almost every one of them has got a
- brother, or a father, or—or—<i>a son</i>—down there in
- the South, and every day brings news that some of these have been shot
- dead, and more still wounded and crippled, and others—<i>others</i>,
- that God only knows <i>what</i> has become of them—oh, how can they
- help feeling that way? I don’t know that I ought to say it”—the
- school-ma’am stopped to catch her breath, and hesitated, then went on—“but
- yes, you’ll understand me <i>now</i>—there was a time here, not so
- long ago, Mr. Beech, when I downright hated you—you and M’rye both!”
- </p>
- <p>
- This was important enough to turn over for. I flopped as unostentatiously
- as possible, and neither of them gave any sign of having noted my
- presence. The farmer sat with his back against the door, the quilt drawn
- up to his waist, his head bent in silent meditation. His whole profile was
- in deep shadow from where I lay—darkly massive and powerful and
- solemn. Esther was watching him with all her eyes, leaning forward from
- her chair, the lantern-light full upon her eager face.
- </p>
- <p>
- “M’rye an’ I don’t lay ourselves out to be specially bad folks, as folks
- go,” the farmer said at last, by way of deprecation. “We’ve got our
- faults, of course, like the rest, but—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” interrupted Esther, with a half-tearful smile in her eyes. “You only
- pretend to have faults. You really haven’t got any at all.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The shadowed outline of Abner’s face softened. “Why, that <i>is</i> a
- fault itself, ain’t it?” he said, as if pleased with his logical
- acuteness.
- </p>
- <p>
- The crowing of some foolish rooster, growing tired of waiting for the
- belated November daylight, fell upon the silence from one of the buildings
- near by.
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner Beech rose to his feet with ponderous slowness, pushing the
- bedclothes aside with his boot, and stood beside Esther’s chair. He laid
- his big hand on her shoulder with a patriarchal gesture.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Come now,” he said, gently, “you go back to bed, like a good girl, an’
- get some sleep. It’ll be all right.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The girl rose in turn, bearing her shoulder so that the fatherly hand
- might still remain upon it. “Truly?” she asked, with a new light upon her
- pale face.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes—truly!” Abner replied, gravely nodding his head.
- </p>
- <p>
- Esther took the hand from her shoulder, and shook it in both of hers.
- “Good-night again, then,” she said, and turned to go.
- </p>
- <p>
- Suddenly there resounded the loud rapping of a stick on the barn-door,
- close by my head.
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner squared his huge shoulders and threw a downright glance at the gun
- on the floor “Well?” he called out..
- </p>
- <p>
- “<i>Is my da’ater inside there?</i>”
- </p>
- <p>
- We all knew that thin, high-pitched, querulous voice. It was old “Jee”’
- Hagadorn who was outside.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XII—THE UNWELCOME GUEST
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>bner and Esther
- stood for a bewildered minute, staring at the rough unpainted boards
- through which this astonishing inquiry had come. I scrambled to my feet
- and kicked aside the tick and blankets. Whatever else happened, it did not
- seem likely that there was any more sleeping to be done. Then the farmer
- strode forward and dragged one of the doors back on its squeaking rollers.
- Some snow fell in upon his boots from the ridge that had formed against it
- over night. Save for a vaguely faint snow-light in the air, it was still
- dark.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, she’s here,” said Abner, with his hand on the open door.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Then I’d like to know—” the invisible Jee began excitedly shouting
- from without.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Sh-h! You’ll wake everybody up!” the farmer interposed. “Come inside, so
- that I can shut the door.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Never under your roof!” came back the shrill hostile voice. “I swore I
- never would, and I won’t!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’d have to take a crowbar to get under my roof,” returned Abner,
- grimly conscious of a certain humor in the thought. “What’s left of it is
- layin’ over yonder in what used to be the cellar. So you needn’t stand on
- ceremony on <i>that</i> account. I ain’t got no house now, so’t your oath
- ain’t bindin’. Besides, the Bible says, ‘Swear not at all!’”
- </p>
- <p>
- A momentary silence ensued; then Abner rattled the door on its wheels.
- “Well, what are you goin’ to do?” he asked, impatiently. “I can’t keep
- this door open all night, freezin’ everybody to death. If you won’t come
- in, you’ll have to stay out!” and again there was an ominous creaking of
- the rollers.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I want my da’ater!” insisted Jehoiada, vehemently. “I stan’ on a father’s
- rights.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “A father ain’t got no more right to make a fool of himself than anybody
- else,” replied Abner, gravely. “What kind of a time o’ night is this, with
- the snow knee-deep, for a girl to be out o’ doors? She’s all right here,
- with my women-folks, an’ I’ll bring her down with the cutter in the
- mornin’—that is, if she wants to come. An’ now, once for all, will
- you step inside or not?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Esther had taken up the lantern and advanced with it now to the open door.
- “Come in, father,” she said, in tones which seemed to be authoritative,
- “They’ve been very kind to me. Come in!” Then, to my surprise, the lean
- and scrawny figure of the cooper emerged from the darkness, and stepping
- high over the snow, entered the barn, Abner sending the door to behind him
- with a mighty sweep of the arm.
- </p>
- <p>
- Old Hagadorn came in grumbling under his breath, and stamping the snow
- from his feet with sullen kicks. He bore a sledge-stake in one of his
- mittened hands. A worsted comforter was wrapped around his neck and ears
- and partially over his conical-peaked cap. He rubbed his long thin nose
- against his mitten and blinked sulkily at the lantern and the girl who
- held it.
- </p>
- <p>
- “So here you be!” he said at last, in vexed tones. “An’ me traipsin’
- around in the snow the best part of the night lookin’ for you!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “See here, father,” said Esther, speaking in a measured, deliberate way,
- “we won’t talk about that at all. If a thousand times worse things had
- happened to both of us than have, it still wouldn’t be worth mentioning
- compared with what has befallen these good people here. They’ve been
- attacked by a mob of rowdies and loafers, and had their house and home
- burned down over their heads and been driven to take refuge here in this
- barn of a winter’s night. They’ve shared their shelter with me and been
- kindness itself, and now that you’re here, if you can’t think of anything
- pleasant to say to them, if I were you I’d say nothing at all.”
- </p>
- <p>
- This was plain talk, but it seemed to produce a satisfactory effect upon
- Jehoiada. He unwound his comforter enough to liberate his straggling sandy
- beard and took off his mittens. After a moment or two he seated himself in
- the chair, with a murmured “I’m jest about tuckered out,” in apology for
- the action. He did, in truth, present a woeful picture of fatigue and
- physical feebleness, now that we saw him in repose. The bones seemed ready
- to start through the parchment-like skin on his gaunt cheeks, and, his
- eyes glowed with an unhealthy fire, as he sat, breathing hard and staring
- at the jumbled heaps of furniture on the floor.
- </p>
- <p>
- Esther had put the lantern again on the box and drawn forward a chair for
- Abner, but the farmer declined it with a wave of the hand and continued to
- stand in the background, looking his ancient enemy over from head to foot
- with a meditative gaze. Jehoiada grew visibly nervous under this
- inspection; he fidgeted on his chair and then fell to coughing—a
- dry, rasping cough which had an evil sound, and which he seemed to make
- the worse by fumbling aimlessly at the button that held the overcoat
- collar round his throat.
- </p>
- <p>
- At last Abner walked slowly over to the shadowed masses of piled-up
- household things and lifted out one of the drawers that had been taken
- from the framework of the bureau and brought over with their contents.
- Apparently it was not the right one, for he dragged aside a good many
- objects to get at another, and rummaged about in this for several minutes.
- Then he came out again into the small segment of the lantern’s radiance
- with a pair of long thick woollen stockings of his own in his hand.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You better pull off them wet boots an’ draw these on,” he said,
- addressing Hagadorn, but looking fixedly just over his head. “It won’t do
- that cough o’ yours no good, settin’ around with wet feet.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The cooper looked in a puzzled way at the huge butternut-yarn stockings
- held out under his nose, but he seemed too much taken aback to speak or to
- offer to touch them.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, father!” said Esther, with quite an air of command. “You know what
- that cough means,” and straightway Hagadorn lifted one of his feet to his
- knee and started tugging at the boot-heel in a desultory way. He desisted
- after a few half-hearted attempts, and began coughing again, this time
- more distressingly than ever.
- </p>
- <p>
- His daughter sprang forward to help him, but Abner pushed her aside, put
- the stockings under his arm, and himself undertook the job. He did not
- bend his back overmuch; but hoisted Jee’s foot well in the air and pulled.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Brace your foot agin mine an’ hold on to the chair!” he ordered, sharply,
- for the first effect of his herculean pull had been to nearly drag the
- cooper to the floor. He went at it more gently now, easing the soaked
- leather up and down over the instep until the boots were off. He looked
- furtively at the bottoms of these before he tossed them aside, noting, no
- doubt, as I did, how old and broken and run down at the heel they were.
- Jee himself peeled off the drenched stockings, and they too were flimsy
- old things, darned and mended almost out of their original color.
- </p>
- <p>
- These facts served only to deepen my existing low opinion of Hagadorn, but
- they appeared to affect Abner Beech differently. He stood by and watched
- the cooper dry his feet and then draw on the warm dry hose over his
- shrunken shanks, with almost a friendly interest. Then he shoved along one
- of the blankets across the floor to Hagadorn’s chair that he might wrap
- his feet in it.
- </p>
- <p>
- “That’s it,” he said, approvingly. “They ain’t no means o’ building a fire
- here right now, but as luck would have it we’d jest set up an old kitchen
- stove in the little cow-barn to warm up gruel for the caves with, an’ the
- first thing we’ll do ’ll be to rig it up in here to cook breakfast
- by, an’ then we’ll dry them boots o’ yourn in no time. You go an’ pour
- some oats into ’em now,” Abner added, turning to me. “And you might
- as well call Hurley. We’ve got considerable to do, an’ daylight’s
- breakin’.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The Irishman lay on his back where I had left him, still snoring
- tempestuously. As a rule he was a light sleeper, but this time I had to
- shake him again and again before he understood that it was morning. I
- opened the side-door, and sure enough, the day had begun. The clouds had
- cleared away. The sky was still ashen gray overhead, but the light from
- the horizon, added to the whiteness of the unaccustomed snow, rendered it
- quite easy to see one’s way about inside. I went to the oat-bin.
- </p>
- <p>
- Hurley, sitting up and rubbing his eyes, regarded me and my task with
- curiosity. “An’ is it a stovepipe for a measure ye have?” he asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No; it’s one of Jee Hagadorn’s boots,” I replied. “I’m filling ’em
- so’t they’ll swell when they’re dryin’.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He slid down off the hay as if some one had pushed him. “What’s that ye
- say? Haggydorn? <i>Ould</i> Haggydorn?” he demanded.
- </p>
- <p>
- I nodded assent. “Yes, he’s inside with Abner,” I explained. “An’ he’s got
- on Abner’s stockin’s, an’ it looks like he’s goin’ to stay to breakfast.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hurley opened his mouth in sheer surprise and gazed at me with hanging jaw
- and round eyes.
- </p>
- <p>
- “’Tis the fever that’s on ye,” he said, at last. “Ye’re wandherin’
- in yer mind!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You just go in and see for yourself,” I replied, and Hurley promptly took
- me at my word.
- </p>
- <p>
- He came back presently, turning the corner of the stanchions in a
- depressed and rambling way, quite at variance with his accustomed swinging
- gait. He hung his head, too, and shook it over and over again perplexedly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Abner ‘n’ me ’ll be bringin’ in the stove,” he said.“’Tis
- not fit for you to go out wid that sickness on ye.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, anyway,” I retorted, “you see I wasn’t wanderin’ much in my mind.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Hurley shook his head again. “Well, then,” he began, lapsing into deep
- brogue and speaking rapidly, “I’ve meself seen the woman wid the head of a
- horse on her in the lake forninst the Three Castles, an’ me sister’s first
- man, sure he broke down the ditch round-about the Danes’ fort on Dunkelly,
- an’ a foine grand young man, small for his strength an’ wid a red cap on
- his head, flew out an’ wint up in the sky, an’ whin he related it up comes
- Father Forrest to him in the potaties, an’ says he, ‘I do be suprised wid
- you, O’Driscoll, for to be relatin’ such loies.’ ‘I’ll take me Bible oat’
- on ’em!’” says he.
- </p>
- <p>
- “‘Tis your imagination!’ says the priest. ‘No imagination at all!’ says
- O’Driscoll; ‘sure, I saw it wid dese two eyes, as plain as I’m lookin’ at
- your riverence, an’ a far grander sight it was too!’ An’ me own mother,
- faith, manny’s the toime I’ve seen her makin’ up dhrops for the yellow
- sicknest wid woodlice, an’ sayin’ Hail Marys over ’em, an’ thim
- same<i> ‘</i>ud cure annything from sore teeth to a wooden leg for moiles
- round. But, saints help me! I never seen the loikes o’ <i>this!</i>
- Haggydorn is it? <i>Ould</i> Haggydorn! <i>Huh!’’</i>”
- </p>
- <p>
- Then the Irishman, still with a dejected air, started off across the yards
- through the snow to the cow-barns, mumbling to himself as he went.
- </p>
- <p>
- I had heard Abner’s heavy tread coming along the stanchions toward me, but
- now all at once it stopped. The farmer’s wife had followed him into the
- passage, and he had halted to speak with her.
- </p>
- <p>
- “They ain’t no two ways about it, mother,” he expostulated. “We jest got
- to put the best face on it we kin, an’ act civil, an’ pass the time o’ day
- as if nothing’d ever happened atween us. He’ll be goin’ the first thing
- after breakfast.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh! I ain’t agoin’ to sass him, or say anything uncivil,” M’rye broke in,
- reassuringly. “What I mean is, I don’t want to come into the for’ard end
- of the barn at all. They ain’t no need of it. I kin cook the breakfast in
- back, and Janey kin fetch it for’ard for yeh, an’ nobody need say
- anythin’, or be any the wiser.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, I know,” argued Abner, “but there’s the looks o’ the thing. <i>I</i>
- say, if you’re goin’ to do a thing, why, do it right up to the handle, or
- else don’t do it at all. An’ then there’s the girl to consider, and <i>her</i>
- feelin’s.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Dunno’t her feelin’s are such a pesky sight more importance than other
- folkses,” remarked M’rye, callously.
- </p>
- <p>
- This unaccustomed recalcitrancy seemed to take Abner aback. He moved a few
- steps forward so that he became visible from where I stood, then halted
- again and turned, his shoulders rounded, his hands clasped behind his
- back. I could see him regarding M’rye from under his broad hat-brim with a
- gaze at once dubious and severe.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I ain’t much in the habit o’ hearin’ you talk this way to me, mother,” he
- said at last, with grave depth of tones and significant deliberation.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, I can’t help it, Abner!” rejoined M’rye, bursting forth in vehement
- utterance, all the more excited from the necessity she felt of keeping it
- out of hearing of the unwelcome guest. “I don’t want to do anything to
- aggravate you, or go contrary to your notions, but with even the
- willin’est pack-horse there is such a thing as pilin’ it on too thick. I
- can stan’ bein’ burnt out o’ house ‘<i>n’ home, an’ seein’ pretty nigh
- every rag an’ stick I had in the world go kitin’ up the chimney, an’
- campin’ out here in a barn—My Glory, yes!—an’ as much more on
- top o’ that, but, I tell you flat-footed, I can’t stomach Jee Hagadorn,
- an’ I </i>won’t!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner continued to contemplate the revolted
- </p>
- <p>
- M’rye with displeased amazement written all over his face. Once or twice I
- thought he was going to speak, but nothing came of it. He only looked and
- looked, as if he had the greatest difficulty in crediting what he saw.
- </p>
- <p>
- Finally, with a deep-chested sigh, he turned again. “I s’pose this is
- still more or less of a free country,” he said. “If you’re sot on it, I
- can’t hender you,” and he began walking once more toward me.
- </p>
- <p>
- M’rye followed him out and put a hand on his arm. “Don’t go off like that,
- Abner!” she adjured him. “You <i>know</i> there ain’t nothin’ in this
- whole wide world I wouldn’t do to please you—if I <i>could!</i> But
- this thing jest goes agin my grain. It’s the way folks are made. It’s your
- nater to be forgivin’ an’ do good to them that despitefully use you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, it ain’t!” declared Abner, vigorously.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, sirree! ‘Holdfast’ is my nater. I stan’ out agin my enemies till the
- last cow comes home. But when they come wadin’ in through the snow, with
- their feet soppin’ wet, an’ coughin’ fit to turn themselves inside out,
- an’ their daughter is there, an’ you’ve sort o’ made it up with her, an’
- we’re all campin’ out in a barn, don’t you see—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, I can’t see it,” replied M’rye, regretful but firm. “They always said
- we Ramswells had Injun blood in us somewhere. An’ when I get an Injun
- streak on me, right down in the marrow o’ my bones, why, you mustn’t blame
- me—or feel hard if—if I—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No-o,” said Abner, with reluctant conviction,
- </p>
- <p>
- “I s’pose not. I dare say you’re actin’ accordin’ to your lights. An’
- besides, he’ll be goin’ the first thing after breakfast.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “An’ you ain’t mad, Abner?” pleaded M’rye, almost tremulously, as if
- frightened at the dimensions of the victory she had won.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, bless your heart, no,” answered the farmer, with a glaring
- simulation of easy-mindedness.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No—that’s all right, mother!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Then with long heavy-footed strides the farmer marched past me and out
- into the cow-yard.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XIII—THE BREAKFAST
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>f there was ever a
- more curious meal in Dearborn County than that first breakfast of ours in
- the barn, I never heard of it.
- </p>
- <p>
- The big table was among the things saved from the living-room, and Esther
- spread it again with the cloth which had been in use on the previous
- evening. There was the stain of the tea which the Underwood girl had
- spilled in the excitement of the supper’s rough interruption; there were
- other marks of calamity upon it as well—the smudge of cinders, for
- one thing, and a general diffused effect of smokiness. But it was the only
- table-cloth we had. The dishes, too, were a queer lot, representing two or
- three sets of widely different patterns and value, other portions of which
- we should never see again.
- </p>
- <p>
- When it was announced that breakfast was ready, Abner took his accustomed
- arm-chair at the head of the table. He only half turned his head toward
- Hagadorn and said in formal tones, over his shoulder, “Won’t you draw up
- and have some breakfast?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Jee was still sitting where he had planted himself two hours or so before.
- He still wore his round cap, with the tabs tied down over his ears. In
- addition to his overcoat, some one—probably his daughter—had
- wrapped a shawl about his thin shoulders. The boots had not come in, as
- yet, from the stove, and the blanket was drawn up over his stockinged feet
- to the knees. From time to time his lips moved, as if he were reciting
- Scripture texts to himself, but so far as I knew, he had said nothing to
- any one. His cough seemed rather worse than better.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, come, father!” Esther added to the farmer’s invitation, and drew a
- chair back for him two plates away from Abner. Thus adjured he rose and
- hobbled stiffly over to the place indicated, bringing his foot-blanket
- with him. Esther stooped to arrange this for him and then seated herself
- next the host.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You see, I’m going to sit beside you, Mr. Beech,” she said, with a wan
- little smile.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Glad to have you,” remarked Abner, gravely.
- </p>
- <p>
- The Underwood girl brought in a first plate of buckwheat cakes, set it
- down in front of Abner, and took her seat opposite Hagadorn and next to
- me. There remained three vacant places, down at the foot of the table, and
- though we all began eating without comment, everybody continually
- encountered some other’s glance straying significantly toward these empty
- seats. Janey Wilcox, very straight and with an uppish air, came in with
- another plate of cakes and marched out again in tell-tale silence.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hurley! Come along in here an’ git your breakfast!”
- </p>
- <p>
- The farmer fairly roared out this command, then added in a lower,
- apologetic tone: “I ’spec’ the women-folks’ve got their hands full
- with that broken-down old stove.”
- </p>
- <p>
- We all looked toward the point, half-way down the central barn-floor,
- where the democrat wagon, drawn crosswise, served to divide our improvised
- living-room and kitchen. Through the wheels, and under its uplifted pole,
- we could vaguely discern two petticoated figures at the extreme other end,
- moving about the stove, the pipe of which was carried up and out through a
- little window above the door. Then Hurley appeared, ducking his head under
- the wagon-pole.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m aitin’ out here, convanient to the stove,” he shouted from this
- dividing-line.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, come and take your proper place!” bawled back the farmer, and Hurley
- had nothing to do but obey. He advanced with obvious reluctance, and
- halted at the foot of the table, eyeing with awkward indecision the three
- vacant chairs. One was M’rye’s; the others would place him either next to
- the hated cooper or diagonally opposite, where he must look at him all the
- while.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Sure, I’m better out there!” he ventured to insist, in a wheedling tone;
- but Abner thundered forth an angry “No, sir!” and the Irishman sank
- abruptly into the seat beside Hagadorn. From this place he eyed the
- Underwood girl with a glare of contemptuous disapproval. I learned
- afterward that M’rye and Janey Wilcox regarded her desertion of them as
- the meanest episode of the whole miserable morning, and beguiled their
- labors over the stove by recounting to each other all the low-down
- qualities illustrated by the general history of her “sapheaded tribe.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Meanwhile conversation languished.
- </p>
- <p>
- With the third or fourth instalment of cakes, Janey Wilcox had halted long
- enough to deliver herself of a few remarks, sternly limited to the
- necessities of the occasion. “M’rye says,” she declaimed, coldly, looking
- the while with great fixedness at the hay-wall, “if the cakes are sour she
- can’t help it. We saved what was left over of the batter, but the Graham
- flour and the sody are both burnt up,” and with that stalked out again.
- </p>
- <p>
- Not even politeness could excuse the pretence on any one’s part that the
- cakes were <i>not</i> sour, but Abner seized upon the general subject as
- an opening for talk.
- </p>
- <p>
- “‘Member when I was a little shaver,” he remarked, with an effort at
- amiability, “my sisters kicked about havin’ to bake the cakes, on account
- of the hot stove makin’ their faces red an’ spoilin’ their complexions,
- an’ they wanted specially to go to some fandango or other, an’ look their
- pootiest, an’ so father sent us boys out into the kitchen to bake ’em
- instid. Old Lorenzo Dow the Methodist preacher, was stoppin’ overnight at
- our house, an’ mother was jest beside herself to have everything go off
- ship-shape—an’ then them cakes begun comin’ in. Fust my brother
- William, he baked one the shape of a horse, an’ then Josh, he made one
- like a jackass with ears as long as the griddle would allow of lengthwise,
- and I’d got jest comfortably started in on one that I begun as a pig, an’
- then was going to alter into a ship with sails up, when father, he come
- out with hold-back strap, an’—well—mine never got finished to
- this day. Mother, she was mortified most to death, but old Dow, he jest
- lay back and laughed—laughed till you’d thought he’d split himself.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It was from Lorenzo Dow’s lips that I had my first awakening call unto
- righteousness,” said Jee Hagadorn, speaking with solemn unction in high,
- quavering tones.
- </p>
- <p>
- The fact that he should have spoken at all was enough to take even the
- sourness out of M’rye’s cakes.
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner took up the ball with solicitous promptitude. “A very great man,
- Lorenzo Dow was—in his way,” he remarked.
- </p>
- <p>
- “By grace he was spared the shame and humiliation,” said Hagadorn, lifting
- his voice as he went on—“the humiliation of living to see one whole
- branch of the Church separate itself from the rest—withdraw and call
- itself the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in defence of human
- slavery!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Esther, red-faced with embarrassment, intervened peremptorily. “How <i>can</i>
- you, father!” she broke in. “For all you know he might have been red-hot
- on that side himself! In fact, I dare say he would have been. How on earth
- can <i>you</i> know to the contrary, anyway?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Jee was all excitement on the instant, at the promise of an argument. His
- eyes flashed; he half rose from his seat and opened his mouth to reply.
- </p>
- <p>
- So much had he to say, indeed, that the words stumbled over one another on
- his tongue, and produced nothing, but an incoherent stammering sound,
- which all at once was supplanted by a violent fit of coughing. So terrible
- were the paroxysms of this seizure that when they had at last spent their
- fury the poor man was trembling like a leaf and toppled in his chair as if
- about to swoon. Esther had hovered about over him from the outset of the
- fit, and now looked up appealingly to Abner. The farmer rose, walked down
- the table-side, and gathered Jee’s fragile form up under one big
- engirdling arm. Then, as the girl hastily dragged forth the tick and
- blankets again and spread them into the rough semblance of a bed, Abner
- half led, half carried the cooper over and gently laid him down thereon.
- Together they fixed up some sort of pillow for him with hay under the
- blanket, and piled him snugly over with quilts and my comfortable.
- </p>
- <p>
- “There—you’ll be better layin’ down,” said Abner, soothingly.
- Hagadorn closed his eyes wearily and made no answer. They left him after a
- minute or two and returned to the table.
- </p>
- <p>
- The rest of the breakfast was finished almost in silence. Every once in a
- while Abner and Esther would exchange looks, his gravely kind, hers
- gratefully contented, and these seemed really to render speech needless.
- For my own part, I foresaw with some degree of depression that there would
- soon be no chance whatever of my securing attention in the <i>rôle</i> of
- an invalid, at least in this part of the barn.
- </p>
- <p>
- Perhaps, however, they might welcome me in the kitchen part, as a sort of
- home-product rival to the sick cooper. I rose and walked languidly out
- into M’rye’s domain. But the two women were occupied with a furious
- scrubbing of rescued pans for the morning’s milk, and they allowed me to
- sit feebly down on the wood-box behind the stove without so much as a
- glance of sympathy.
- </p>
- <p>
- By and by we heard one of the great front doors rolled back on its
- shrieking wheels and then shut to again. Some one had entered, and in a
- moment there came some strange, inarticulate sounds of voices which showed
- that the arrival had created a commotion. M’rye lifted her head, and I
- shall never forget the wild, expectant flashing of her black eyes in that
- moment of suspense.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Come in here, mother!” we heard Abner’s deep voice call out from beyond
- the democrat wagon. “Here’s somebody wants to see you!”
- </p>
- <p>
- M’rye swiftly wiped her hands on her apron and glided rather than walked
- toward the forward end of the barn. Janey Wilcox and I followed close upon
- her heels, dodging together under the wagon-pole, and emerging, breathless
- and wild with curiosity, on the fringe of an excited group.
- </p>
- <p>
- In the centre of this group, standing with a satisfied smile on his face,
- his general appearance considerably the worse for wear, but in demeanor,
- to quote M’rye’s subsequent phrase, “as cool as Cuffy,” was Ni Hagadorn.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- CHAPTER XIV—FINIS
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">H</span>E’S all right; you
- can look for him here right along now, any day; he <i>was</i> hurt a
- leetle, but he’s as peart an’ chipper now as a blue-jay on a hick’ry limb;
- yes, he’s a-comin’ right smack home!”
- </p>
- <p>
- This was the gist of the assurances which Ni vouchsafed to the first rush
- of eager questions—to his sister, and M’rye, and Janey Wilcox.
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner had held a little aloof, to give the weaker sex a chance. Now he
- reasserted himself once more: “Stan’ back, now, and give the young man
- breathin’ room. Janey, hand a chair for’ard—that’s it. Now set ye
- down, Ni, an’ take your own time, an’ tell us all about it. So you reely
- found him, eh?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Pshaw! there ain’t anything to that,” expostulated Ni, seating himself
- with nonchalance, and tilting back his chair. “<i>That</i> was easy as
- rollin’ off a log. But what’s the matter <i>here?</i> That’s what knocks
- me. We—that is to say, I—come up on a freight train to a ways
- beyond Juno Junction, an’ got the conductor to slow up and let me drop
- off, an’ footed it over the hill. It was jest about broad daylight when I
- turned the divide. Then I began lookin’ for your house, an’ I’m lookin’
- for it still. There’s a hole out there, full o’ snow an’ smoke, but nary a
- house. How’d it happen?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “‘Lection bonfire—high wind—woodshed must ‘a’ caught,” replied
- Abner, sententiously. “So you reely got down South, eh?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “An’ Siss here, too,” commented Ni, with provoking disregard for the
- farmer’s suggestions; “a reg’lar family party. An’, hello!”
- </p>
- <p>
- His roving eye had fallen upon the recumbent form on the made-up bed,
- under the muffling blankets, and he lifted his sandy wisps of eyebrows in
- inquiry.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Sh! It’s father,” explained Esther. “He isn’t feeling very well. I think
- he’s asleep.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The boy’s freckled, whimsical face melted upon reflection into a distinct
- grin. “Why,” he said, “you’ve been havin’ a reg’lar old love-feast up
- here. I guess it was <i>that</i> that set the house on fire! An’ speakin’
- o’ feasts, if you’ve got a mouthful o’ somethin’ to eat handy—”
- </p>
- <p>
- The women were off like a shot to the impromptu larder at the far end of
- the barn.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, thin,” put in Hurley, taking advantage of their absence, “an’ had
- ye the luck to see anny rale fightin’?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Never mind that,” said Abner; “when he gits around to it he’ll tell us
- everything. But, fust of all—why, he knows what I want to hear
- about.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, the last time I talked with you, Abner—” Ni began, squinting
- up one of his eyes and giving a quaint drawl to his words.
- </p>
- <p>
- “That’s a good while ago,” said the farmer, quietly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Things have took a change, eh?” inquired Ni.
- </p>
- <p>
- “That’s neither here nor there,” replied Abner, somewhat testily. “You
- oughtn’t to need so dummed much explainin’. I’ve told you what I want
- specially to hear. An’ that’s what we all want to hear.”
- </p>
- <p>
- When the women had returned, and Ni, with much deliberation, had filled
- both hands with selected eatables, the recital at last got under way. It
- progress was blocked from time to time by sheer force of tantalizing
- perversity on the part of the narrator, and it suffered steadily from the
- incidental hitches of mastication; but such as it was we listened to it
- with all our ears, sitting or standing about, and keeping our eyes
- intently upon the freckled young hero.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It wasn’t so much of a job to git down there as I’d figured on,” Ni said,
- between mouthfuls. “I got along on freight trains—once worked my way
- a while on a hand-car—as far as Albany, an’ on down to New York on a
- river-boat, cheap, an’ then, after foolin’ round a few days, I hitched up
- with the Sanitary Commission folks, an’ got them to let me sail on one o’
- their boats round to ’Napolis. I thought I was goin’ to die most o’
- the voyage, but I didn’t, you see, an’ when I struck ’Napolis I
- hung around Camp Parole there quite a spell, talkin’ with fellers that’d
- bin pris’ners down in Richmond an’ got exchanged an’ sent North. They said
- there was a whole slew of our fellers down there still that’d been brought
- in after Antietam. They didn’t know none o’ their names, but they said
- they’d all be sent North in time, in exchange for Johnny Rebs that we’d
- captured. An’ so I waited round—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You <i>might</i> have written!” interrupted Esther, reproachfully.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What’d bin the good o’ writin’? I hadn’t anything to tell. Besides
- writin’ letters is for girls. Well, one day a man come up from Libby—that’s
- the prison at Richmond—an’ he said there <i>was</i> a tall feller
- there from York State, a farmer, an’ he died. He thought the name was
- Birch, but it might’a’ been Beech—or Body-Maple, for that matter. I
- s’pose you’d like to had me write <i>that</i> home!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No—oh, no!” murmured Esther, speaking the sense of all the company.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, then I waited some more, an’ kep’ on waitin’, an’ then waited agin,
- until bimeby, one fine day, along comes Mr. Blue-jay himself. There here
- was, stan’in’ up on the paddle-box with a face on him as long as your arm,
- an’ I sung out, ‘Way there, Agrippa Hill!’ an’ he come mighty nigh failin’
- head over heels into the water. So then he come off, an’ we shook han’s,
- an’ went up to the commissioners to see about his exchange, an’—an’
- as soon’s that’s fixed, an’ the papers drawn up all correct, why, he’ll
- come home. An’ that’s all there is to it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “And even <i>then</i> you never wrote!” said Esther, plaintively.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hold on a minute,” put in Abner. “You say he’s comin’ home. That wouldn’t
- be unless he was disabled. They’d keep him to fight agin, till his time
- was up. Come, now, tell the truth—he’s be’n hurt bad!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Ni shook his unkempt red head. “No, no,” he said. “This is how it was.
- Fust he was fightin’ in a cornfield, an’ him an’ Bi Truax, they got chased
- out, an’ lost their regiment, an’ got in with some other fellers, and then
- they all waded a creek breast-high, an’ had to run up a long stretch o’
- slopin’ ploughed ground to capture a battery they was on top o’ the knoll.
- But they didn’t see a regiment of sharp-shooters layin’ hidden behind a
- rail-fence, an’ these fellers riz up all to once an’ give it to ’em
- straight, an’ they wilted right there, an’ laid down, an’ there they was
- after dusk when the rebs come out an’ started lookin’ round for guns an’
- blankets an’ prisoners. Most of ’em was dead, or badly hurt, but
- they was a few who’d simply lain there in the hollow because it’d have bin
- death to git up. An’ Jeff was one o’ <i>them</i>.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You said yourself ’t he had been hurt—some,” interposed
- M’rye, with snapping eyes.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Jest a scratch on his arm,” declared Ni. “Well, then they marched the
- well ones back to the rear of the reb line, an’ there they jest skinned ’em
- of everything they had—watch an’ jack-knife an’ wallet an’
- everything—an’ put ’em to sleep on the bare ground. Next day
- they started ’em out on the march toward Richmond, an’ after four
- or five days o’ that, they got to a railroad, and there was cattle cars
- for ’em to ride the rest o’ the way in. An’ that’s how it was.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No,” said Abner, sternly; “you haven’t told us. How badly is he hurt?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well,” replied Ni, “it was only a scratch, as I said, but it got worse on
- that march, an’ I s’pose it wasn’t tended to anyways decently, an’ so—an’
- so—”
- </p>
- <p>
- M’rye had sprung to her feet and stood now drawn up to her full height,
- with her sharp nose in air as if upon some strange scent, and her eyes
- fairly glowing in eager excitement. All at once she made a bound past us
- and ran to the doors, furiously digging her fingers in the crevice between
- them, then, with a superb sweep of the shoulders, sending them both
- rattling back on their wheels with a bang.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I knew it!” she screamed in triumph.
- </p>
- <p>
- We who looked out beheld M’rye’s black hair and brown calico dress
- suddenly suffer a partial eclipse of pale blue, which for the moment
- seemed in some way a part of the bright winter sky beyond. Then we saw
- that it was a soldier who had his arm about M’rye, and his cap bent down
- tenderly over the head she had laid on his shoulder.
- </p>
- <p>
- Our Jeff had come home.
- </p>
- <p>
- A general instinct rooted us to our places and kept us silent, the while
- mother and son stood there in the broad open doorway.
- </p>
- <p>
- Then the two advanced toward us, M’rye breathing hard, and with tears and
- smiles struggling together on her face under the shadow of a wrathful
- frown. We noted nothing of Jeff’s appearance save that he had grown a big
- yellow beard, and seemed to be smiling. It was the mother’s distraught
- countenance at which we looked instead.
- </p>
- <p>
- She halted in front of Abner, and lifted the blue cape from Jeff’s left
- shoulder, with an abrupt gesture.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Look there!” she said, hoarsely. “See what they’ve done to my boy!”
- </p>
- <p>
- We now saw that the left sleeve of Jeff’s army overcoat was empty and hung
- pinned against his breast. On the instant we were all swarming about him,
- shaking the hand that remained to him and striving against one another in
- a babel of questions, comments, and expressions of sympathy with his loss,
- satisfaction at his return. It seemed the most natural thing in the world
- that he should kiss Esther Hagadorn, and that Janey Wilcox should reach up
- on tiptoes and kiss him. When the Underwood girl would have done the same,
- however, M’rye brusquely shouldered her aside.
- </p>
- <p>
- So beside ourselves with excitement were we all, each in turn seeking to
- get in a word edgewise, that no one noticed the approach and entrance of a
- stranger, who paused just over the threshold of the barn and coughed in a
- loud perfunctory way to attract our attention. I had to nudge Abner twice
- before he turned from where he stood at Jeff’s side, with his hand on the
- luckless shoulder, and surveyed the newcomer.
- </p>
- <p>
- The sun was shining so brightly on the snow outside, that it was not for
- the moment easy to make out the identity of this shadowed figure. Abner
- took a forward step or two before he recognized his visitor. It was Squire
- Avery, the rich man of the Corners, and justice of the peace, who had once
- even run for Congress.
- </p>
- <p>
- “How d’ do?” said Abner, shading his eyes with a massive hand. “Won’t you
- step in?”
- </p>
- <p>
- The Squire moved forward a little and held forth his hand, which the
- farmer took and shook doubtfully. We others were as silent now as the
- grave, feeling this visit to be even stranger than all that had gone
- before.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I drove up right after breakfast, Mr. Beech,” said the Squire, making his
- accustomed slow delivery a trifle more pompous and circumspect than usual,
- “to express to you the feeling of such neighbors as I have, in this
- limited space of time, being able to foregather with. I believe, sir, that
- I may speak for them all when I say that we regret, deplore, and
- contemplate with indignation the outrage and injury to which certain
- thoughtless elements of the community last night, sir, subjected you and
- your household.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s right neighborly of you, Square, to come an’ say so,” remarked
- Abner. “Won’t you set down? You see, my son Jeff’s jest come home from the
- war, an’ the house bein’ burnt, an’ so on, we’re rather upset for the
- minute.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The Squire put on his spectacles and smiled with surprise at seeing Jeff.
- He shook hands with him warmly, and spoke with what we felt to be the
- right feeling about that missing arm; but he could not sit down, he said.
- The cutter was waiting for him, and he must hurry back.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I am glad, however,” he added, “to have been the first, Mr. Beech, to
- welcome your brave son back, and to express to you the hope, sir, that
- with this additional link of sympathy between us, sir, bygones may be
- allowed to become bygones.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t bear no ill will,” said Abner, guardedly. “I s’pose in the long
- run folks act pooty close to about what they think is right. I’m willin’
- to give ’em that credit—the same as I take to myself. They
- ain’t been much disposition to give <i>me</i> that credit, but then, as
- our school-ma’am here was a-sayin’ last night, people ’ve been a
- good deal worked up about the war—havin’ them that’s close to ’em
- right down in the thick of it—an’ I dessay it was natural enough
- they should git hot in the collar about it. As I said afore, I don’t bear
- no ill will—though prob’ly I’m entitled to.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The Squire shook hands with Abner again. “Your sentiments, Mr. Beech,” he
- said, in his stateliest manner, “do credit alike to your heart and your
- head. There is a feeling, sir, that this would be an auspicious occasion
- for you to resume sending your milk to the cheese-factory.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner pondered the suggestion for a moment. “It would be handier,” he
- said, slowly; “but, you know, I ain’t goin’ to eat no humble pie. That Rod
- Bidwell was downright insultin’ to my man, an’ me too—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It was all, I assure you, sir, an unfortunate misunderstanding,” pursued
- the Squire, “and is now buried deep in oblivion. And it is further
- suggested, that, when you have reached that stage of preparation for your
- new house, if you will communicate with me, the neighbors will be glad to
- come up and extend their assistance to you in what is commonly known as a
- raising-bee. They will desire, I believe, to bring with them their own
- provisions. And, moreover, Mr. Beech”—here the Squire dropped his
- oratorical voice and stepped close to the farmer—“if this thing has
- cramped you any, that is to say, if you find yourself in need of—of—any
- accommodation—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, nothin’ o’ that sort,” said Abner. He stopped at that, and kept
- silence for a little, with his head down and his gaze meditatively fixed
- on the barn floor. At last he raised his face and spoke again, his deep
- voice shaking a little in spite of itself.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What you’ve said, Square, an’ your comin’ here, has done me a lot o’
- good. It’s pooty nigh wuth bein’ burnt out for—to have this sort o’
- thing come \ on behind as an after-clap. Sometimes, I tell you, sir, I’ve
- despaired o’ the republic. I admit it, though it’s to my shame. I’ve said
- to myself that when American citizens, born an’ raised right on the same
- hill-side, got to behavin’ to each other in such an all-fired mean an’
- cantankerous way, why, the hull blamed thing wasn’t worth tryin’ to save.
- But you see I was wrong—I admit I was wrong. It was jest a passin’
- flurry—a kind o’ snow-squall in hayin’ time. All the while, right
- down ’t the bottom, their hearts was sound an’ sweet as a
- butternut. It fetches me—that does—it makes me prouder than
- ever I was before in all my born days to be an American—yes, sir—that’s
- the way I—I feel about it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- There were actually tears in the big farmer’s eyes, and he got out those
- finishing words of his in fragmentary gulps. None of us had ever seen him
- so affected before.
- </p>
- <p>
- After the Squire had shaken hands again and started off, Abner stood at
- the open door, looking after him, then gazing in a contemplative general
- way upon all out-doors. The vivid sunlight reflected up from the melting
- snow made his face to shine as if from an inner radiance. He stood still
- and looked across the yards with their piles of wet straw smoking in the
- forenoon heat, and the black puddles eating into the snow as the thaw went
- on; over the further prospect, made weirdly unfamiliar by the
- disappearance of the big old farm-house; down the long broad sloping
- hill-side with its winding road, its checkered irregular patches of yellow
- stubble and stacked fodder, of deep umber ploughed land and warm gray
- woodland, all pushing aside their premature mantle of sparkling white, and
- the scattered homesteads and red barns beyond—and there was in his
- eyes the far-away look of one who saw still other things.
- </p>
- <p>
- He turned at last and came in, walking over to where Jeff and Esther stood
- hand in hand beside the bed on the floor. Old Jee Hagadorn was sitting up
- now, and had exchanged some words with the couple.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, Brother Hagadorn,” said the farmer, “I hope you’re feelin’ better.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, a good deal—B—Brother Beech, thank’ee,” replied the
- cooper, slowly and with hesitation.
- </p>
- <p>
- Abner laid a fatherly hand on Esther’s shoulder and another on Jeff’s. A
- smile began to steal over his big face, broadening the square which his
- mouth cut down into his beard, and deepening the pleasant wrinkles about
- his eyes. He called M’rye over to the group with beckoning nod of the
- head.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s jest occurred to me, mother,” he said, with the mock gravity of tone
- we once had known so well and of late had heard so little—“I jest
- be’n thinkin’ we might’a’ killed two birds with one stun while the Square
- was up here. He’s justice o’ the peace, you know—an’ they say them
- kind o’ marriages turn out better ’n all the others.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Go ’long with yeh!” said Ma’rye, vivaciously. But she too put a
- hand on Esther’s other shoulder.
- </p>
- <p>
- The school-teacher nestled against M’rye’s side. “I tell you what,” she
- said, softly, “if Jeff ever turns out to be half the man his father is,
- I’ll just be prouder than my skin can hold.”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- MARSENA
- </h2>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- I
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">M</span>arsena Pulford,
- what time the village of Octavius knew him, was a slender and tall man,
- apparently skirting upon the thirties, with sloping shoulders and a
- romantic aspect.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was not alone his flowing black hair, and his broad shirt-collars
- turned down after the ascertained manner of the British poets, which
- stamped him in our humble minds as a living brother to “The Corsair,” “The
- Last of the Suliotes,” and other heroic personages engraved in the albums
- and keepsakes of the period. His face, with its darkling eyes and
- distinguished features, conveyed wherever it went an impression of proudly
- silent melancholy. In those days—that is, just before the war—one
- could not look so convincingly and uniformly sad as Marsena did without
- raising the general presumption of having been crossed in love. We had a
- respectful feeling, in his case, that the lady ought to have been named
- Iñez, or at the very least Oriana.
- </p>
- <p>
- Although he went to the Presbyterian Church with entire regularity, was
- never seen in public save in a long-tailed black coat, and in the winter
- wore gloves instead of mittens, the local conscience had always, I think,
- sundry reservations about the moral character of his past. It would not
- have been reckoned against him, then, that he was obviously poor. We had
- not learned in those primitive times to measure people by dollar-mark
- standards. Under ordinary conditions, too, the fact that he came from New
- England—had indeed lived in Boston—must have counted rather in
- his favor than otherwise. But it was known that he had been an artist, a
- professional painter of pictures and portraits, and we understood in
- Octavius that this involved acquaintanceship, if not even familiarity,
- with all sorts of occult and deleterious phases of city life.
- </p>
- <p>
- Our village held all vice, and especially the vice of other and larger
- places, in stern reprobation. Yet, though it turned this matter of the
- newcomer’s previous occupation over a good deal in its mind, Marsena
- carried himself with such a gentle picturesqueness of subdued sorrow that
- these suspicions were disarmed, or, at the worst, only added to the
- fascinated interest with which Octavius watched his spare and solitary
- figure upon its streets, and noted the progress of his efforts to find a
- footing for himself in its social economy.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was taken for granted among us that he possessed a fine and
- well-cultivated mind, to match that thoughtful countenance and that
- dignified deportment.
- </p>
- <p>
- This assumption continued to hold its own in the face of a long series of
- failures in the attempt to draw him out. Almost everybody who was anybody
- at one time or another tried to tap Marsena’s mental reservoirs—and
- all in vain. Beyond the barest commonplaces of civil conversation he
- could, never be tempted. Once, indeed, he had volunteered to the Rev. Mr.
- Bunce the statement that he regarded Washington Allston as in several
- respects superior to Copley; but as no one in Octavius knew who these men
- were, the remark did not help us much. It was quoted frequently, however,
- as indicating the lofty and recondite nature of the thoughts with which
- Mr. Pulford occupied his intellect. As it became more apparent, too, that
- his reserve must be the outgrowth of some crushing and incurable heart
- grief, people grew to defer to it and to avoid vexing his silent moods
- with talk.
- </p>
- <p>
- Thus, when he had been a resident and neighbor for over two years, though
- no one knew him at all well, the whole community regarded him with kindly
- and even respectful emotions, and the girls in particular felt that he was
- a distinct acquisition to the place.
- </p>
- <p>
- I have said that Marsena Pulford was poor. Hardly anybody in Octavius ever
- knew to what pathetic depths his poverty during the second winter
- descended. There was a period of several months, in sober truth, during
- which he fed himself upon six or seven cents a day. As he was too proud to
- dream of asking credit at the grocer’s and butcher’s, and walked about
- more primly erect than ever, meantime, in his frock-coat and gloves, no
- idea of these privations got abroad. And at the end of this long evil
- winter there came a remarkable spring, which altered in a violent way the
- fortunes of millions of people—among them Marsena. We have to do
- with events somewhat subsequent to that even, and with the period of Mr.
- Pulford’s prosperity.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <p>
- The last discredited strips of snow up in the ravines on the hill-sides
- were melting away; the robins had come again, and were bustling busily
- across between the willows, already in the leaf, and the budded elms; men
- were going about the village streets without their overcoats, and boys
- were telling exciting tales about the suckers in the creek; our old friend
- Homer Sage had returned from his winter’s sojourn in the county poorhouse
- at Thessaly, and could be seen daily sitting in the sunshine on the broad
- stoop of the Excelsior Hotel. It was April of 1862.
- </p>
- <p>
- A whole year had gone by since that sudden and memorable turn in Marsena
- Pulford’s luck. So far from there being signs now of a possible adverse
- change, this new springtide brought such an increase of good fortune, with
- its attendant responsibilities, that Marsena was unable to bear the
- halcyon burden alone. He took in a partner to help him, and then the firm
- jointly hired a boy. The partner painted a signboard to mark this double
- event, in bold red letters of independent form upon a yellow ground:=
- </p>
- <h3>
- ````PULFORD & SHULL.
- </h3>
- <p>
- ```Empire State Portrait Athenæum and
- </p>
- <p>
- `````Studio.
- </p>
- <p>
- ```War Likenesses at Peace Prices.=
- </p>
- <p>
- Marsena discouraged the idea of hanging this out on the street; and, as a
- compromise, it was finally placed at the end of the operating-room, where
- for years thereafter it served for the sitters to stare at when their
- skulls had been clasped in the iron headrest and they had been adjured to
- look pleasant. A more modest and conventional announcement of the new
- firm’s existence was put outside, and Octavius accepted it as proof that
- the liberal arts were at last established within its borders on a firm and
- lucrative basis.
- </p>
- <p>
- The head of the firm was not much altered by this great wave of
- prosperity. He had been drilled by adversity into such careful ways with
- his wardrobe that he did not need to get any new clothes. Although the
- villagers, always kindly, sought now with cordial effusiveness to make him
- feel one of themselves, and although he accepted all their invitations and
- showed himself at every public meeting in his capacity as a representative
- and even prominent citizen, yet the heart of his mystery remained
- unplucked. Marsena was too busy in these days to be much upon the streets.
- When he did appear he still walked alone, slowly and with an air of
- settled gloom. He saluted such passers-by as he knew in stately silence.
- If they stopped him or joined him in his progress, at the most he would
- talk sparingly of the weather and the roads.
- </p>
- <p>
- Neither at the fortnightly sociables of the Ladies’ Church Mite Society,
- given in turn at the more important members’ homes, nor in the more casual
- social assemblages of the place, did Marsena ever unbend. It was not that
- he held himself aloof, as some others did, from the simple amusements of
- the evening. He never shrank from bearing his part in “pillow,” “clap in
- and clap out,” “post-office,” or in whatever other game was to be played,
- and he went through the kissing penalties and rewards involved without
- apparent aversion. It was also to be noted, in fairness, that, if any one
- smiled at him full in the face, he instantly smiled in response. But
- neither smile nor chaste salute served to lift for even the fleeting
- instant that veil of reserve which hung over him.
- </p>
- <p>
- Those who thought that by having Marsena Pul-ford take their pictures they
- would get on more intimate terms with him fell into grievous error. He was
- more sententious and unapproachable in his studio, as he called it, than
- anywhere else. In the old days, before the partnership, when he did
- everything himself, his manner in the reception-room downstairs, where he
- showed samples, gave the prices of frames, and took orders, had no equal
- for formal frigidity—except his subsequent demeanor in the
- operating-room upstairs. The girls used to declare that they always
- emerged from the gallery with “cold shivers all over them.” This, however,
- did not deter them from going again, repeatedly, after the outbreak of the
- war had started up the universal notion of being photographed.
- </p>
- <p>
- When the new partner came in, in this April of 1862, Marsena was able to
- devote himself exclusively to the technical business of the camera and the
- dark-room, on the second floor. He signalled this change by wearing now
- every day an old russet-colored velveteen jacket, which we had never seen
- before. This made him look even more romantically melancholy and
- picturesque than ever, and revived something of the fascinating curiosity
- as to his hidden past; but it did nothing toward thawing the icebound
- shell which somehow came at every point between him and the
- good-fellowship of the community.
- </p>
- <p>
- The partnership was scarcely a week old when something happened. The new
- partner, standing behind the little show-case in the reception-room,
- transacted some preliminary business with two customers who had come in.
- Then, while the sound of their ascending footsteps was still to be heard
- on the stairs, he hastily left his post and entered the little work-room
- at the back of the counter.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You couldn’t guess in a baker’s dozen of tries who’s gone upstairs,” he
- said to the boy. Without waiting for even one effort, he added: “It’s the
- Parmalee girl, and Dwight Ransom’s with her, and he’s got a Lootenant’s
- uniform on, and they’re goin’ to be took together!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What of it?” asked the unimaginative boy. He was bending over a crock of
- nitric acid, transferring from it one by one to a tub of water a lot of
- spoiled glass plates. The sickening fumes from the jar, and the sting of
- the acid on his cracked skin, still further diminished his interest in
- contemporary sociology. “Well, what of it?” he repeated, sulkily.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, I don’t know,” said the new partner, in a listless, disappointed way.
- “It seemed kind o’ curious, that’s all. Holdin’ her head up as high in the
- air as she does, you wouldn’t think she’d so much as look at an ordinary
- fellow like Dwight Ransom.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I suppose this is a free country,” remarked the boy, rising to rest his
- back.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, my, yes,” returned the other; “if she’s pleased, I’m quite agreeable.
- And—I don’t know, too—I dare say she’s gettin’ pretty well
- along. Maybe she thinks they ain’t any too much time to lose, and is
- making a grab at what comes handiest. Still, I should ’a’ thought
- she could ’a’ done better than Dwight. I worked with him for a
- spell once, you know.”
- </p>
- <p>
- There seemed to be very few people with whom Newton Shull had not at one
- time or another worked. Apparently there was no craft or calling which he
- did not know something about. The old phrase, “Jack of all trades,” must
- surely have been coined in prophecy for him. He had turned up in Octavius
- originally, some years before, as the general manager of a “Whaler’s Life
- on the Rolling Deep” show, which was specially adapted for moral
- exhibitions in connection with church fairs. Calamity, however, had long
- marked this enterprise for its own, and at our village its career
- culminated under the auspices of a sheriff’s officer. The boat, the
- harpoons, the panorama sheet and rollers, the whale’s jaw, the music-box
- with its nautical tunes—these were sold and dispersed. Newton Shull
- remained, and began work as a mender of clocks. Incidentally, he cut out
- stencil-plates for farmers to label their cheese-boxes with, and painted
- or gilded ornamental designs on chair-backs through perforated paper
- patterns. For a time he was a maker of children’s sleds. In slack seasons
- he got jobs to help the druggist, the tinsmith, the dentist, or the Town
- Clerk, and was equally at home with each. He was one of the founders of
- the Octavius Philharmonics, and offered to play any instrument they liked,
- though his preference was for what he called the bull fiddle. He spoke
- often of having travelled as a bandsman with a circus. We boys believed
- that he was quite capable of riding a horse bareback as well.
- </p>
- <p>
- When Marsena Pulford, then, decided that he must have some help, Newton
- Shull was obviously the man. How the arrangement came to take the form of
- a partnership was never explained, save on the conservative village theory
- that Marsena must have reasoned that a partner would be safer with the
- cash-box downstairs, while he was taking pictures upstairs, than a mere
- hired man. More likely it grew out of their temperamental affinity. Shull
- was also a man of grave and depressed moods (as, indeed, is the case with
- all who play the bass viol), only his melancholy differed from Marsena’s
- in being of a tirelessly garrulous character. This was not always an
- advantage. When customers came in, in the afternoon, it was his friendly
- impulse to engage them in conversation at such length that frequently the
- light would fail altogether before they got upstairs. He recognized this
- tendency as a fault, and manfully combated it—leaving the
- reception-room with abruptness at the earliest possible moment, and
- talking to the boy in the work-room instead.
- </p>
- <p>
- Mr. Shull was a short, round man, with a beard which was beginning to show
- gray under the lip. His reception-room manners were urbane and persuasive
- to a degree, and he particularly excelled in convincing people that the
- portraits of themselves, which Marsena had sent down to him in the dummy
- to be dried and varnished, and which they hated vehemently at first sight,
- were really unique and precious works of art. He had also much success in
- inducing country folks to despise the cheap ferrotype which they had
- intended to have made, and to venture upon the costlier ambrotype,
- daguerreotype, or even photograph instead. If they did not go away with a
- family album or an assortment of frames that would come in handy as well,
- it was no fault of his.
- </p>
- <p>
- He made these frames himself, on a bench which he had fitted up in the
- work-room. Here he constructed show-cases, too, cut out mats and mounts,
- and did many other things as adjuncts to the business, which honest
- Marsena had never dreamed of.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes,” he went on now, “I carried a chain for Dwight the best part o’ one
- whole summer, when he was layin’ levels for that Nedahma Valley Railroad
- they were figurin’ on buildin’. Guess they ruther let him in over that job—though
- he paid me fair enough. It ain’t much of a business, that surveyin’. You
- spend about half your time in findin’ out for people the way they could do
- things if they only had the money to do ’em, and the other half in
- settlin’ miserable farmers’ squabbles about the boundaries of their land.
- You’ve got to pay a man day’s wages for totin’ round your chain and axe
- and stakes—and, as like as not, you never get even that money back,
- let alone any pay for yourself. I know something about a good many trades,
- and I say surveyin’ is pretty nigh the poorest of ’em all.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “George Washington was a surveyor,” commented the boy, stooping down to
- his task once more.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes,” admitted Mr. Shull; “so he was, for a fact. But then he had
- influence enough to get government jobs. I don’t say there ain’t money in
- that. If Dwight, now, could get a berth on the canal, say, it ’ud
- be a horse of another color. They say, there’s some places there that pay
- as much as $3 a day. That’s how George Washington got his start, and,
- besides, he owned his own house and lot to begin with. But you’ll take
- notice that he dropped surveyin’ like a hot potato the minute there was
- any soldierin’ to do. He knew which side <i>his</i> bread was buttered
- on!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well,” said the boy, slapping the last plates sharply into the tub,
- “that’s just what Dwight’s doin’ too, ain’t it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes,” Mr. Shull conceded; “but it ain’t the same thing. You won’t find
- Dwight Ransom get-tin’ to be general, or much of anything else. He’s a
- nice fellow enough, in his way, of course; but, somehow, after it’s all
- said and done, there ain’t much to him. I always sort o’ felt, when I was
- out with him, that by good rights I ought to be working the level and him
- hammerin’ in the stakes.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The boy sniffed audibly as he bore away the acid-jar.
- </p>
- <p>
- Mr. Shull went over to the bench, and took up a chisel with a meditative
- air. After a moment he lifted his head and listened, with aroused interest
- written all over his face.
- </p>
- <p>
- There had been audible from the floor above, at intervals, the customary
- noises of the camera being wheeled about to different points under the
- skylight. There came echoing downward now quite other and most unfamiliar
- sounds—the clatter of animated, even gay, conversation, punctuated
- by frank outbursts of laughter. Newton Shull could hardly believe his
- ears: but they certainly did tell him that there were three parties to
- that merriment overhead. It was so strange that he laid aside the chisel,
- and tiptoed out into the reception-room, with a notion of listening at the
- stair door. Then he even more hurriedly ran back again. They were coming
- downstairs.
- </p>
- <p>
- It might have been a whole wedding-party that trooped down the resounding
- stairway, the voices rising above the clump of Dwight’s artillery boots
- and sword on step after step, and overflowed into the stuffy little
- reception-room with a cheerful tumult of babble. The new partner and the
- boy looked at each other, then directed a joint stare of bewilderment
- toward the door.
- </p>
- <p>
- Julia Parmalee had pushed her way behind the show-case, and stood in the
- entrance to the workroom, peering about her with an affectation of excited
- curiosity which she may have thought pretty and playful, but which the
- boy, at least, held to be absurd.
- </p>
- <p>
- She had been talking thirteen to the dozen all the time. “Oh, I really
- must see everything!” she rattled on now. “If I could be trusted alone in
- the dark-room with you, Mr. Pulford, I surely may be allowed to explore
- all these minor mysteries. Oh, I see,” she added, glancing round, and
- incidentally looking quite through Mr. Shull and the boy, as if they had
- been transparent: “here’s where the frames and the washing are done. How
- interesting!”
- </p>
- <p>
- What really was interesting was the face of Marsena Pulford, discernible
- in the shadow over her shoulder. No one in Octavius had ever seen such a
- beaming smile on his saturnine countenance before.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- II
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">N</span>ext to the War,
- the chief topic of interest and conversation in Octavius at this time was
- easily Miss Julia Parmalee.
- </p>
- <p>
- To begin with, her family had for two generations or more been the most
- important family in the village. When Lafayette stopped here to receive an
- address of welcome, on his tour through the State in 1825, it was a
- Parmalee who read that address, and who also, as tradition runs, made on
- his own account several remarks to the hero in the French language, all of
- which were understood. The elder son of this man has a secure place in
- history. He is the Judge Parmalee whose portrait hangs in the Court House,
- and whose learned work on “The Treaties of the Tuscarora Nation,”
- handsomely bound in morocco, used to have a place of honor on the parlor
- table of every well-to-do and cultured Octavius home.
- </p>
- <p>
- This Judge was a banker, too, and did pretty well for himself in a number
- of other commercial paths. He it was who built the big Parmalee house,
- with a stone wall in front and the great garden and orchard stretching
- back to the next street, and the buff-colored statues on either side of
- the gravelled walk, where the Second National Dearborn County Bank now
- stands. The Judge had no children, and, on his widow’s death, the property
- went to his much younger brother Charles, who, from having been as a
- stripling on some forgotten Governor’s staff, bore through life the title
- of Colonel in the local speech.
- </p>
- <p>
- This Colonel Parmalee had a certain distinction, too, though not of a
- martial character. His home was in New York, and for many years Octavius
- never laid eyes on him. He was understood to occupy a respected place
- among American men of letters, though exactly what he wrote did not come
- to our knowledge. It was said that he had been at Brook Farm. I have not
- been able to find any one who remembers him there, but the report is of
- use as showing the impression of superior intellectual force which he
- created, even by hearsay, in his native village. When he finally came back
- to us, to play his part as the head of the Parmalee house, we saw at
- intervals, when the sun was warm and the sidewalks were dry, the lean and
- bent figure of an old man, with a very yellow face and a sharp-edged brown
- wig, moving feebly about with a thick gray shawl over his shoulders. His
- housekeeper was an elderly maiden cousin, who seemed never to come out at
- all, whether the sun was shining or not.
- </p>
- <p>
- There were three or four of the Colonel’s daughters—all tall,
- well-made girls, with strikingly dark skins, and what we took to be
- gypsyish faces. Their appearance certainly bore out the rumor that their
- mother had been an opera-singer—some said an Italian, others a lady
- of Louisiana Creole extraction. No information, except that she was dead,
- ever came to hand about this person. Her daughters, however, were very
- much in evidence. They seemed always to wear white dresses, and they were
- always to be seen somewhere, either on their lawn playing croquet, or in
- the streets, or at the windows of their house. The consciousness of their
- existence pervaded the whole village from morning till night. To watch
- their goings and comings, and to speculate upon the identity and business
- of the friends from strange parts who were continually arriving to visit
- them, grew to be quite the standing occupation of the idler portion of the
- community.
- </p>
- <p>
- Before such of our young people as naturally took the lead in these
- matters had had time to decide how best to utilize for the general good
- this influx of beauty, wealth, and ancestral dignity, the village was
- startled by an unlooked-for occurrence. A red carpet was spread one
- forenoon from the curb to the doorway of the Episcopal church: the
- old-fashioned Parmalee carriage turned out, with its driver clasping white
- reins in white cotton gloves; we had a confused glimpse of the dark
- Parmalee girls with bouquets in their hands, and dressed rather more in
- white than usual: and then astonished Octavius learned that two of them
- had been married, right there under its very eyes, and had departed with
- their husbands. It gave an angry twist to the discovery to find that the
- bridegrooms were both strangers, presumably from New York.
- </p>
- <p>
- This episode had the figurative effect of doubling or trebling the height
- of that stone wall which stood between the Parmalee place and the public.
- Such budding hopes and projects of intimacy as our villagers may have
- entertained toward these polished newcomers fell nipped and lifeless on
- the stroke. Shortly afterward—that is to say, in the autumn of 1860—the
- family went away, and the big house was shut up. News came in time that
- the Colonel was dead: something was said about another daughter’s
- marriage; then the war broke out, and gave us other things to think of. We
- forgot all about the Parmalees.
- </p>
- <p>
- It must have been in the last weeks of 1861 that our vagrant attention was
- recalled to the subject by the appearance in the village of an elderly
- married couple of servants, who took up their quarters in the long empty
- mansion, and began fitting it once more for habitation. They set all the
- chimneys smoking, shovelled the garden paths clear of snow, laid in huge
- supplies of firewood, vegetables, and the like, and turned the whole place
- inside out in a vigorous convulsion of housecleaning. Their preparations
- were on such a bold, large scale that we assumed the property must have
- passed to some voluminous collateral branch of the family, hitherto
- unknown to us. It came indeed to be stated among us, with an air of
- certainty, that a remote relation named Amos or Erasmus Parmalee, with
- eight or more children and a numerous adult household, was coming to live
- there. The legend of this wholly mythical personage had nearly a
- fortnight’s vogue, and reached a point of distinctness where we clearly
- understood that the coming stranger was a violent secessionist. This
- seemed to open up a troubled and sinister prospect before loyal Octavius,
- and there was a good deal of plain talk in the barroom of the Excelsior
- Hotel as to how this impending crisis should be met.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was just after New Year’s that our suspense was ended. The new
- Parmalees came, and Octavius noted with a sort of disappointed surprise
- that they turned out to be merely a shorn and trivial remnant of the old
- Parmalees. They were in fact only a couple of women—the elderly
- maiden cousin who had presided before over the Colonel’s household, and
- the youngest of his daughters, by name Miss Julia. What was more, word was
- now passed round upon authority that these were the sole remaining members
- of the family—that there never had been any Amos or Erasmus Parmalee
- at all.
- </p>
- <p>
- The discovery cast the more heroic of our village home-guards into a
- temporary depression. It could hardly have been otherwise, for here were
- all their fine and strong resolves, their publicly registered vows about
- scowling at the odious Southern sympathizer in the street, about a
- “horning” party outside his house at night, about, perhaps, actually
- riding him on a rail—all brought to nothing. A less earnest body of
- men might have suspected in the situation some elements of the ridiculous.
- They let themselves down gently, however, and with a certain dignified
- sense of consolation that they had, at all events, shown unmistakably how
- they would have dealt with Amos or Erasmus Parmalee if there had been such
- a man, and he had moved to Octavius and had ventured to flaunt his rebel
- sentiments in their outraged faces.
- </p>
- <p>
- The village, as a whole, consoled itself on more tangible grounds. It has
- been stated that Miss Julia Parmalee arrived at the family homestead in
- early January. Before April had brought the buds and birds, this young
- woman had become President of the St. Mark’s Episcopal Ladies’ Aid
- Society; had organized a local branch of the Sanitary Commission, and
- assumed active control of all its executive and clerical functions; had
- committed the principal people of the community to holding a grand
- festival and fair in May for the Field Hospital and Nurse Fund; had
- exhibited in the chief store window on Main Street a crayon portrait of
- her late father, and four water-color drawings of European scenery, all
- her own handiwork; had published over her signature, in the Thessaly <i>Banner
- of Liberty</i>, an original and spirited poem on “Pale Columbia, Shriek to
- Arms!” which no one could read without patriotic thrills; and had been
- reported, on more or less warrant of appearances, to be engaged to four
- different young men of the place. Truly a remarkable young woman!
- </p>
- <p>
- We were only able in a dim kind of way to identify her with one of the
- group of girls in white dresses whom the village had stared at and studied
- from a distance two years before. There was no mystery about it, however:
- she was the youngest of them. They had all looked so much alike, with
- their precocious growth, their olive skins and foreign features, that we
- were quite surprised to find now that this one, regarded by herself, must
- be a great deal younger than the others. Perhaps it was only our rustic
- shyness which had imputed to the sisterhood, in that earlier experience,
- the hauteur and icy reserve of the rich and exclusive. We recognized now
- that if the others were at all like Julia, we had made an absurd mistake.
- It was impossible that any one could be freer from arrogance or pretence
- than Octavius found her to be. There were some, indeed, who deemed her
- emancipation almost too complete.
- </p>
- <p>
- Some there were, too, who denied that she was beautiful, or even very
- good-looking. There is an old daguerreotype of her as she was in those
- days—or rather as she seemed to be to the unskilled sunbeams of the
- sixties—which gives these censorious people the lie direct. It is
- true that her hair is confined in a net at the sides and drawn stiffly
- across her temples from the parting. The full throat rises sheer from a
- flat horizon of striped dress goods, and is offered no relief whatever by
- the wide falling-away collar of coarse lace. And oh! the strangeness of
- that frock! The shoulder seams are to be looked for half-way down the
- upper arm, the sleeves swell themselves out into shapeless bags, the waist
- front might be the cover of a chair, of a guitar, of the documents in a
- corporation suit—of anything under the sun rather than the form of a
- charming girl. Yet, when you look at this thin old picture, all the same,
- you feel that you understand how it was that Julia Parmalee took the shine
- out of all the other girls in Octavius.
- </p>
- <p>
- This is the likeness of her which always seemed to me the best, but
- Marsena Pulford made a great many others as well. When you reflect,
- indeed, that his output of portraits of Julia Parmalee was limited in time
- to the two months of April and May, their number suggests that he could
- hardly have done anything else the while.
- </p>
- <p>
- The first of this large series of pictures was the one which Marsena liked
- least. It is true that Julia looked well in it, standing erect, with a
- proud, fine backward tilt to her dark face and a delicately formed white
- hand resting gracefully on the back of a chair. But it happened that in
- that chair was seated Lieut. Dwight Ransom, all spick and span in his new
- uniform, with his big gauntlets and sword hilt brought prominently
- forward, and with a kind of fatuous smile on his ruddy face, as if he felt
- the presence of those fair fingers on the chair-back, so teasingly close
- to his shoulder-strap.
- </p>
- <p>
- Marsena, in truth, had a strong impulse to run a destroying thumbnail over
- the seated figure on this plate, when the action of the developer began to
- reveal its outlines under the faint yellow light in the dark-room. Of all
- the myriad pictures he had washed and drained and nursed in their wet
- growth over this tank, no other had ever stirred up in his breast such a
- swift and sharp hostility. He lavished the deadly cyanide upon that
- portion of the plate, too, with grim unction, and noted the results with a
- scornful curl on his lip. Like his partner downstairs, he was wondering
- what on earth possessed Miss Parmalee to take up with a Dwight Ransom.
- </p>
- <p>
- The frown was still on his brow when he opened the dark-room door. Then he
- started back, flushed red, and labored at an embarrassed smile. Miss
- Parmalee had left her place, and stood right in front of him, so near that
- he almost ran against her. She beamed confidently and reassuringly upon
- him.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, I want to come in and see you do all that,” she exclaimed, with
- vivacity. “It didn’t occur to me till after you’d shut the door, or I’d
- have asked to come in with you. I have the greatest curiosity about all
- these matters. Oh, it is all done? That’s too bad! But you can make
- another one—and that I can see from the beginning. You know, I’m
- something of an artist myself; I’ve taken lessons for years—and this
- all interests me so much! No, Lieutenant!”—she called out from where
- she was standing just inside the open door, at sound of her companion’s
- rising—“you stay where you are! There’s going to be another, and
- it’s such trouble to get you posed properly. Try and keep exactly as you
- were!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Thus it happened that she stood very close to Marsena, as he took out
- another plate, flooded it with the sweet-smelling, pungent collodion, and,
- with furtive precautions against the light, lowered it down into the
- silver bath. Then he had to shut the door, and she was still there just
- beside him. He heard himself pretending to explain the processes of the
- films to her, but his mind was concentrated instead upon a suggestion of
- perfume which she had brought into the reeking little cupboard of a room,
- and which mingled languorously with the scents of ether and creosote in
- the air. He had known her by sight for but a couple of months; he had been
- introduced to her only a week or so ago, and that in the most casual way;
- yet, strange enough, he could feel his hand trembling as it perfunctorily
- moved the plate dipper up and down in the bath.
- </p>
- <p>
- A gentle voice fell upon the darkness. “Do you know, Mr. Pulford,” it
- murmured, “I felt sure that you were an artist, the very first time I saw
- you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Marsena heaved a long sigh—a sigh with a tremulous catch in it, as
- where sorrow and sweet solace should meet. “I did start out to be one,” he
- answered, “but I—I never amounted to anything at it. I tried for
- years, but I wasn’t any good. I had to give it up—at last—and
- take to this instead.”
- </p>
- <p>
- He lifted the plate with caution, bent to look obliquely across its
- surface, and lowered it again. Then all at once he turned abruptly and
- faced her. They were so close to each other that even in the obscure gloom
- she caught the sudden flash of resolution in his eyes.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ll tell you what I never told any other living soul,” he said,
- beginning with husky eagerness, but lapsing now into grave deliberation of
- emphasis: “I hate—this—like pizen!”
- </p>
- <p>
- In the silence which followed, Marsena mechanically took the plate from
- the bath, fastened it in the holder, and stepped to the door. Then he
- halted, to prolong for one little instant this tender spell of magic which
- had stolen over him. Here, in the close darkness beside him, was a
- sorceress, a siren, who had at a glance read his sore heart’s deepest
- secret—at a word drawn the confession of his maimed and embittered
- pride. It was like being shut up with an angel, who was also a beautiful
- woman. Oh, the wonder of it! Broad sunlit landscapes with Italian skies
- seemed to be forming themselves before his mind’s eye; his soul sang songs
- within him. He very nearly dropped the plate-holder.
- </p>
- <p>
- The soft, hovering, half touch of a hand upon his arm, the cool, restful
- tones of the voice in the darkness, came to complete the witchery.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I know,” she said, “I can sympathize with you. I also had my dreams, my
- aspirations. But you are wrong to think that you have failed. Why, this
- beautiful work of yours, it all is Art—pure Art. No person who
- really knows could look at it and not see that. No, Mr. Pulford, you do
- yourself an injustice; believe me, you do. Why, you couldn’t help being an
- artist if you tried; it’s born in you. It shows in everything you do. I
- saw it from the very first.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The unmistakable sound of Dwight Ransom’s large artillery boots moving on
- the floor outside intervened here, and Marsena hurriedly opened the door.
- The Lieutenant glanced with good-natured raillery at the couple who stood
- revealed, blinking in the sharp light.
- </p>
- <p>
- “One of my legs got asleep,” he remarked, by way of explanation, “so I had
- to get up and stamp around. I began to think,” he added, “that you folks
- were going to set up housekeeping in there, and not come out any more at
- all.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Don’t be vulgar, if you please,” said Julia Par-malee, with a dash of
- asperity in what purported to be a bantering tone. “We were talking of
- matters quite beyond you—of Art, if you desire to know. Mr. Pulford
- and I discover that we have a great many opinions and sentiments about Art
- in common. It is a feeling that no one can understand unless they have
- it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s the same with getting one’s leg asleep,” said Dwight, “quite the
- same, I assure you;” and then came the laughter which Newton Shull heard
- downstairs.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- III
- </h2>
- <h3>
- |A DAY or two later Battery G left Octavius for the seat of war.
- </h3>
- <p>
- It was not nearly so imposing an event as a good many others which had
- stirred the community during the previous twelve months. There were
- already two regiments in the field recruited from our end of Dearborn
- County, and in these at least six or seven companies were made up wholly
- of Octavius men. There had been big crowds, with speeches and music by the
- band, to see them off at the old depot.
- </p>
- <p>
- When they returned, their short term of service having expired, there were
- still more fervent demonstrations, to which zest was added by the
- knowledge that they were all to enlist again, and then we shortly
- celebrated their second departure. Some there were who returned in mute
- and cold finality—term of enlistment and life alike cut short—and
- these were borne through our streets with sombre martial pageantry, the
- long wail of the funeral march reaching out to include the whole valley
- side in its note of lamentation. Besides all this, hardly a week passed
- that those of us who hung about the station could not see a train full of
- troops on their way to or from the South. A year of these experiences had
- left us seasoned veterans in sightseeing, by no means to be fluttered by
- trifles.
- </p>
- <p>
- As a matter of fact, the village did not take Battery G very seriously. To
- begin with, it mustered only some dozen men, at least so far as our local
- contribution went, and there was a feeling that we couldn’t be expected to
- go much out of our way for such a paltry number. Then, again, an artillery
- force was somehow out of joint with our notion of what Octavius should do
- to help suppress the Rebellion. Infantrymen with muskets we could all
- understand—could all be, if necessary. Many of the farmer boys round
- about, too, made good cavalrymen, because they knew both how to ride and
- how to groom a horse. But in the name of all that was mysterious, why
- artillerymen? There had never been a cannon within fifty miles of
- Octavius; that is, since the Revolution. Certainly none of our citizens
- had the least idea how to fire one off. These enlisted men of Battery G
- were no better posted than the rest; it would take them a three days’
- journey to reach the point where, for the first time, they were to see
- their strange weapon of warfare. This seemed to us rather foolish.
- </p>
- <p>
- Moreover, there was a government proclamation just out, it was said,
- discontinuing further enlistments and disbanding the recruiting offices
- scattered over the North. This appeared to imply that the war was about
- over, or at least that they had more soldiers already than they knew what
- to do with. There were some who questioned whether, under these
- circumstances, it was worth while for Battery G to go at all.
- </p>
- <p>
- But go it did, and at the last moment quite a throng of people found
- themselves gathered at the station to say good-by. A good many of these
- were the relations and friends of the dozen ordinary recruits, who would
- not even get their uniforms and swords till they reached Tecumseh. But the
- larger portion, I should think, had come on account of Lieutenant Ransom.
- </p>
- <p>
- Dwight was hail-fellow-well-met with more people within a radius of twenty
- miles or so, probably, than any other man in the district. He was a
- goodlooking young man, rather stocky in build and deeply sunburned.
- Through the decent months of the year he was always out of doors, either
- tramping over the country with a level over his shoulder, or improving the
- days with a shotgun or fishpole. At these seasons he was generally to be
- found of an evening at the barber’s shop, where he told more new stories
- than any one else. When winter came his chief work was in his office,
- drawing maps and plans. He let his beard grow then, and spent his leisure
- for the most part playing checkers at the Excelsior Hotel.
- </p>
- <p>
- His habitual free-and-easy dress and amiable laxity of manners tended to
- obscure in the village mind the facts that he came from one of the best
- families of the section, that he had been through college, and that he had
- some means of his own. His mother and sisters were very respectable people
- indeed, and had one of the most expensive pews in the Episcopal church. It
- was not observed, however, that Dwight ever accompanied them thither or
- that he devoted much of his time to their society at home. It began to be
- remarked, here and there, that it was getting to be about time for Dwight
- Ransom to steady down, if he was ever going to. Although everybody liked
- him and was glad to see him about, an impression was gradually shaping
- itself that he never would amount to much.
- </p>
- <p>
- All at once Dwight staggered the public consciousness by putting on his
- best clothes one Sunday and going with his folks to church. Those who saw
- him on the way there could not make it out at all, except on the
- hypothesis that there had been a death in the family. Those who
- encountered him upon his return from the sacred edifice, however, found a
- clue to the mystery ready made. He was walking home with Julia Parmalee.
- </p>
- <p>
- There were others whose passionate desire it was to walk home with Julia.
- They had been enlivening Octavius with public displays of their rivalry
- for something like two months when Dwight appeared on the scene as a
- competitor. Easy-going as he was in ordinary matters, he revealed himself
- now to be a hustler in the Courts of love. It took him but a single day to
- drive the teller of the bank from the field. The Principal of the
- Seminary, a rising young lawyer, and the head bookkeeper at the
- freight-house, severally went by the board within a fortnight.
- </p>
- <p>
- There remained old Dr. Conger’s son Emory, who was of a tougher fibre and
- gave Dwight several added weeks of combat. He enjoyed the advantage of
- having nothing whatever to do. He possessed, moreover, a remarkably varied
- wardrobe and white hands, and loomed unique among the males of our town in
- his ability to play on the piano. With such aids a young man may go far in
- a quiet neighborhood, and for a time Emory Conger certainly seemed to be
- holding his own, if not more. His discomfiture, when it came, was dramatic
- in its swift completeness. One forenoon we saw Dwight on the street in a
- new and resplendent officer’s uniform, and learned that he had been
- commissioned to raise a battery. That very evening the doctor’s son left
- town, and the news went round that Lieutenant Ransom was engaged to Miss
- Parmalee.
- </p>
- <p>
- An impression prevailed that Dwight would not have objected to let the
- matter rest there. He had gained his point, and might well regard the
- battery and the war itself as things which had served their purpose and
- could now be dispensed with. No one would have blamed him much for feeling
- that way about it.
- </p>
- <p>
- But this was not Julia’s view. She adopted the battery for her own while
- it was still little more than a name, and swept it forward with such a
- swirling rush of enthusiasm that the men were all enlisted, the
- organization settled, and the date of departure for the front sternly
- fastened, before anybody could lay a hand to the brakes. Her St. Mark’s
- Ladies’ Aid Society presented Dwight with a sword. Her branch of the
- Sanitary Commission voted to entertain the battery with a hot meal in the
- depot yard before it took the train. We have seen how she went and had
- herself photographed standing proudly behind the belted and martial
- Dwight. After these things it was impossible for Battery G to back out.
- </p>
- <p>
- The artillerymen had a bright blue sky and a warm sunlit noontide for
- their departure. Even the most cynical of those who had come to see them
- off yielded toward the end to the genial influence of the weather and the
- impulse of good-fellowship, and joined in the handshaking at the car
- windows, and in the volley of cheers which were raised as the train drew
- slowly out of the yard.
- </p>
- <p>
- At this moment the ladies of the Sanitary Commission had to bestir
- themselves to save the remnant of oranges and sandwiches on their tables
- from the swooping raid of the youth of Octavius, and, what with
- administering cuffs and shakings, and keeping their garments out of the
- way of coffee-cups overturned in the scramble, had no time to watch Julia
- Parmalee.
- </p>
- <p>
- The men gathered in the yard kept her steadily in view, however, as she
- stood prominently in front of the throng, on the top of a baggage truck,
- and waved her handkerchief until the train had dwindled into nothingness
- down the valley. These observers had an eye also on three young men who
- had got as near this truck as possible. Interest in Dwight and his battery
- was already giving place to curiosity as to which of these three—the
- bank-teller, the freight-house clerk, or the rising young lawyer—would
- win the chance of helping Julia down off her perch.
- </p>
- <p>
- No one was prepared for what really happened.
- </p>
- <p>
- Miss Parmalee turned and looked thoughtfully, one might say abstractedly,
- about her. Somehow she seemed not to see any of the hands which were
- eagerly uplifted toward her. Instead, her musing gaze roved lightly over
- the predatory scuffle among the tables, over the ancient depot building,
- over the assembled throng of citizens in the background, then wandered
- nearer, with the pretty inconsequence of a butterfly’s flight. Of course
- it was the farewell to Dwight which had left that soft, rosy flush in her
- dark, round cheeks. The glance that she was sending idly fluttering here
- and there did not seem so obviously connected with the Lieutenant. Of a
- sudden it halted and went into a smile.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, Mr. Pulford! May I trouble you?” she said in very distinct tones,
- bending forward over the edge of the truck, and holding forth two white
- and most shapely hands.
- </p>
- <p>
- Marsena was standing fully six feet away. Like the others, he had been
- looking at Miss Parmalee, but with no hint of expectation in his eyes.
- This abrupt summons seemed to surprise him even more than it did the
- crowd. He started, changed color, fixed a wistful, almost pleading stare
- upon the sunlit vacancy just above the head of the enchantress, and
- confusedly fumbled with his glove tips, as if to make bare his hands for
- this great function. Then, straightening himself, he slowly moved toward
- her like one in a trance.
- </p>
- <p>
- The rivals edged out of Marsena’s way in dum-founded silence, as if he had
- been walking in his sleep, and waking were dangerous. He came up, made a
- formal bow, and lifted his gloved hands in chivalrous pretence of guiding
- the graceful little jump which brought Miss Parmalee to the ground—all
- with a pale, motionless face upon which shone a solemn ecstasy.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was Marsena’s habit, when out of doors, to carry his right hand in the
- breast of his frock-coat. As he made an angle of his elbow now, from sheer
- force of custom, Julia promptly took the movement as a proffer of physical
- support, and availed herself of it. Marsena felt himself thrilling from
- top to toe at the touch of her hand upon his sleeve. If there rose in his
- mind an awkward consciousness that this sort of thing was unusual in
- Octavius by daylight, the embarrassment was only momentary. He held
- himself proudly erect, and marched out of the depot yard with Miss
- Parmalee on his arm.
- </p>
- <p>
- As Homer Sage remarked that evening on the stoop of the Excelsior Hotel,
- this event made the departure of Battery G seem by comparison very small
- potatoes indeed.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was impossible for the twain not to realize that everybody was looking
- at them, as they made their way up the shady side of the main street. But
- there is another language of the hands than that taught in deaf-mute
- schools, and Julia’s hand seemed to tell Marsena’s arm distinctly that she
- didn’t care a bit. As for him, after that first nervous minute or two, the
- experience was all joy—joy so profound and overwhelming that he
- could only ponder it in dazzled silence. It is true that Julia was talking—rattling
- on with sprightly volubility about all sorts of things—but to
- Marsena her remarks no more invited answers than does so much enthralling
- music. When she stopped for a breath he did not remember what she had been
- saying. He only knew how he felt.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I wish you’d come straight to the gallery with me,” he said; “I’d like
- first-rate to make a real picture of you—by yourself.”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, I swow!” remarked Mr. Newton Shull, along in the later afternoon;
- “I didn’t expect we’d make our salt to-day, with Marsena away pretty near
- the whole forenoon, and all the folks down to the depot, and here it turns
- out way the best day we’ve had yet. Actually had to send people away!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Guess that didn’t worry him much,” commented the boy, from where he sat
- on the work-bench swinging his legs in idleness.
- </p>
- <p>
- Mr. Shull nodded his head suggestively. “No, I dare say not,” he said. “I
- kind o’ begrudge not bein’ an operator myself, when such setters as that
- come in. She must have been up there a full two hours—them two all
- by themselves—and the countrymen loafin’ around out in the
- reception-room there, stompin’ their feet and grindin’ their teeth, jest
- tired to death o’ waitin’. It went agin my grain to tell them last two
- lots they’d have to come some other day; but—I dunno—perhaps
- it’s jest as well. They’ll go and tell it around that we’ve got more’n we
- can do—and that’s good for business. But, all the same, it seemed to
- me as if he took considerable more time than was really needful. He can
- turn out four farmers in fifteen minutes, if he puts on a spurt; and here
- he was a full two hours, and only five pictures of her to show for it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Six,” said the boy.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, so it was—countin’ the one with her hair let down,” Mr. Shull
- admitted. “I dunno whether that one oughtn’t to be a little extry. I
- thought o’ tellin’ her that it would be, on account of so much hair
- consumin’ more chemicals; but—I dunno—somehow—she sort
- o’ looked as if she knew better. Did you ever notice them eyes o’ hern,
- how they look as if they could see straight through you, and out on the
- other side?”
- </p>
- <p>
- The boy shook his head. “I don’t bother my head about women,” he said.
- “Got somethin’ better to do.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Guess that’s a pretty good plan too,” mused Mr. Shull. “Somehow you can’t
- seem to make ’em out at all. Now, I’ve been around a good deal, and
- yet somehow I don’t feel as if I knew much about women. I’m bound to say,
- though,” he added upon reflection, “they know considerable about me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I suppose the first thing we know now,” remarked the boy, impatiently
- changing the subject, “McClellan ’ll be in Richmond. They say it’s
- liable to happen now any day.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Newton Shull was but a lukewarm patriot. “They needn’t hurry on my
- account,” he said. “It would be kind o’ mean to have the whole thing
- fizzle out now, jest when the picture business has begun to amount to
- something. Why, we must have took in up’ards of $11 to-day—frames
- and all—and two years ago we’d ’a’ been lucky to get in $3.
- Let’s see: there’s two fifties and five thirty-fives, that’s $2.75, and
- the Dutch boy with the drum, that’s $3.40, counting the mat, and then
- there’s Miss Parmalee—four daguerreotypes, and two negatives, and
- small frames for each, and two large frames for crayons she’s going to do
- herself, and cord and nails—I suppose she’ll think them ought to be
- thrown in—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What! didn’t you make her pay in advance?” asked the boy. “I thought
- everybody had to.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You got to humor some folks,” explained Mr. Shull, with a note of regret
- in his voice. “These big bugs with plenty o’ money always have to be
- waited on. It ain’t right, but it has to be. Besides, you can always slide
- on an extra quarter or so when you send in the bill. That sort o’ evens
- the thing up. Now, in her case, for instance, where we’d charge ordinary
- folks a dollar for two daguerreotypes, we can send her in a bill for—”
- </p>
- <p>
- Neither Mr. Shull nor the boy had heard Mar-sena’s descending steps on the
- staircase, yet at this moment he entered the little work-room and walked
- across it to the bay window, where the printing was done. There was an
- unusual degree of abstraction in his face and mien—unusual even for
- him—and he drummed absent-mindedly on the panes as he stood looking
- out at the street or the sky, or ‘whatever it was his listless gaze
- beheld.
- </p>
- <p>
- “How much do you think it ’ud be safe to stick Miss Parmalee apiece
- for them daguerreotypes?” asked Newton Shull of his partner.
- </p>
- <p>
- Marsena turned and stared for a moment as if he doubted having heard
- aright. Then he made curt answer: “She is not to be charged anything at
- all. They were made for her as presents.”
- </p>
- <p>
- It was the other partner’s turn to stare.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, of course—if you say it’s all right,” he managed to get out,
- “but I suppose on the frames we can—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “The frames are presents, too,” said Marsena, with decision.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- IV
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">D</span>uring the
- fortnight or three weeks following the departure of Battery G it became
- clear to every one that the war was as good as over. It had lasted already
- a whole year, but now the end was obviously at hand. The Union army had
- the Rebels cooped up in Yorktown—the identical place where the
- British had been compelled to surrender at the close of the Revolution—and
- it was impossible that they should get away. The very coincidence of
- locality was enough in itself to convince the most skeptical.
- </p>
- <p>
- We read that Fitz John Porter had a balloon fastened by a rope, in which
- he daily went up and took a look through his field-glasses at the Rebels,
- all miserably huddled together in their trap, awaiting their doom. Our
- soldiers wrote home now that final victory could only be a matter of a few
- weeks, or months at the most. Some of them said they would surely be home
- by haying time. Their letters no longer dwelt upon battles, or the
- prospect of battles, but gossiped about the jealousies and quarrels among
- our generals, who seemed to dislike one another much more than they did
- the common enemy, and told us long and quite incredible tales about the
- mud in Virginia. No soldier’s letter that spring was complete without a
- chapter on the mud. There were many stories about mules and their
- contraband drivers being bodily sunk out of sight in these weltering seas
- of mire, and of new boots being made for the officers to come up to their
- armpits, which we hardly knew whether to believe or not. But about the
- fact that peace was practically within view there could be no doubt.
- </p>
- <p>
- Under the influence of this mood, Miss Parma-lee’s ambitious project for a
- grand fair and festival in aid of the Field Hospital and Nurse Fund
- naturally languished. If the war was coming to a close so soon, there
- could be no use in going to so much worry and trouble, to say nothing of
- the expense.
- </p>
- <p>
- Miss Julia seemed to take this view of it herself. She ceased active
- preparations for the fair, and printed in the Thessaly <i>Banner of
- Liberty</i> a beautiful poem over her own name entitled “The Dovelike Dawn
- of White-winged Peace.” She also got herself some new and summery dresses,
- of gay tints and very fashionable form, and went to be photographed in
- each. Her almost daily presence at the gallery came, indeed, to be a
- leading topic of conversation in Octavius. Some said that she was taking
- lessons of Marsena—learning to make photographs—but others put
- a different construction on the matter and winked as they did so.
- </p>
- <p>
- As for Marsena, he moved about the streets these days with his head among
- the stars, in a state of rapt and reverent exaltation. He had never been
- what might be called a talker, but now it was as much as the best of us
- could do to get any kind of word from him. He did not seem to talk to
- Julia any more than to the general public, but just luxuriated with a dumb
- solemnity of joy in her company, sitting sometimes for hours beside her on
- the piazza of the Parmalee house, or focusing her pretty image with silent
- delight on the ground glass of his best camera day after day, or walking
- with her, arm in arm, to the Episcopal church on Sundays. He had always
- been a Presbyterian before, but now he bore himself in the prominent
- Parmalee pew at St. Mark’s with stately correctness, rising, kneeling,
- seating himself, just as the others did, and helping Miss Julia hold her
- Prayer Book with an air of having known the ritual from childhood.
- </p>
- <p>
- No doubt a good many people felt that all this was rough on the absent
- Dwight Ransom, and probably some of them talked openly about it; but
- interest in this aspect of the case was swallowed up in the larger
- attention now given to Marsena Pulford himself. It began to be reported
- that he really came of an extraordinarily good family in New England, and
- that an uncle of his had been in Congress. The legend that he had means of
- his own did not take much root, but it was admitted that he must now be
- simply coining money. Some went so far as to estimate his annual profits
- as high as $1,500, which sounded to the average Octavian like a dream. It
- was commonly understood that he had abandoned an earlier intention to buy
- a house and lot of his own, and this clearly seemed to show that he
- counted upon going presently to live in the Parmalee mansion. People
- speculated with idle curiosity as to the likelihood of this coming to pass
- before the war ended and Battery G returned home.
- </p>
- <p>
- Suddenly great and stirring news fell upon the startled North and set
- Octavius thrilling with excitement, along with every other community far
- and near. It was in the first week or so of May that the surprise came;
- the Rebels, whom we had supposed to be securely locked up in Yorktown,
- with no alternative save starvation or surrender, decided not to remain
- there any longer, and accordingly marched comfortably off in the direction
- of Richmond!
- </p>
- <p>
- Quick upon the heels of this came tidings that the Union army was in
- pursuit, and that there had been savage fighting with the Confederate
- rear-guard at Williamsburg. The papers said that the war, so far from
- ending, must now be fought all over again. The marvellous story of the
- Monitor and Merrimac sent our men folks into a frenzy of patriotic fervor.
- Our women learned with sinking hearts that the new corps which included
- our Dearborn County regiments was to bear the brunt of the conflict in
- this changed order of things. We were all off again in a hysterical whirl
- of emotions—now pride, now horror, now bitter wrath on top.
- </p>
- <p>
- In the middle of all this the famous Field Hospital and Nurse Fund Fair
- was held. The project had slumbered the while people thought peace so
- near. It sprang up with renewed and vigorous life the moment the echo of
- those guns at Williamsburg reached our ears. And of course at its head was
- Julia Parmalee.
- </p>
- <p>
- It would take a long time and a powerful ransacking of memory to catalogue
- the remarkable things which this active young woman did toward making that
- fair the success it undoubtedly was. Even more notable were the things
- which she coaxed, argued, or shamed other folks into doing for it. Years
- afterward there were old people who would tell you that Octavius had never
- been quite the same place since.
- </p>
- <p>
- For one thing, instead of the Fireman’s Hall, with its dingy aspect and
- somewhat rowdyish associations, the fair was held in the Court House, and
- we all understood that Miss Julia had been able to secure this favor on
- account of her late uncle, the Judge, when any one else would have been
- refused. It was under her tireless and ubiquitous supervision that this
- solemn old interior now took on a gay and festal face. Under the
- inspiration of her glance the members of the Fire Company and the Alert
- Baseball Club vied with each other in borrowing flags and hanging them
- from the most inaccessible and adventurous points. The rivalry between the
- local Freemasons and Odd Fellows was utilized to build contemporary booths
- at the sides and down the centre—on a floor laid over the benches by
- the Carpenters’ Benevolent Association. The ladies’ organizations of the
- various churches, out of devotion to the Union and jealousy of one
- another, did all the rest.
- </p>
- <p>
- At the sides were the stalls for the sale of useful household articles,
- and sedate and elderly matrons found themselves now dragged from the mild
- obscurity of homes where they did their own work, and thrust forward to
- preside over the sales in these booths, while thrifty, not to say
- penurious, merchants came and stood around and regarded with amazement the
- merchandise which they had been wheedled into contributing gratis out of
- their own stores. The suggestion that they should now buy it back again
- paralyzed their faculties, and imparted a distinct restraint to the
- festivities at the sides of the big court-room.
- </p>
- <p>
- In the centre was a double row of booths for the sale of articles not so
- strictly useful, and here the young people congregated. All the girls of
- Octavius seemed to have been gathered here—the pretty ones and the
- plain ones, the saucy ones and the shy, the maidens who were “getting
- along” and the damsels not yet out of their teens. Stiff, spreading
- crinolines brushed juvenile pantalettes, and the dark head of long,
- shaving-like ringlets contrasted itself with the bold waterfall of blonde
- hair. These girls did not know one another very well, save by little
- groups formed around the nucleus of a church association, and very few of
- them knew Miss Par-malee at all, except, of course, by sight. But now,
- astonishing to relate, she recognized them by name as old friends, shook
- hands warmly right and left, and blithely set them all to work and at
- their ease. The idea of selling things to young men abashed them by its
- weird and unmaidenly novelty. She showed them how it should be done—bringing
- forward for the purpose a sheepishly obstinate drugstore clerk, and
- publicly dragooning him into paying eighty cents for a leather dog-collar,
- despite his protests that he had no dog and hated the whole canine
- species, and could get such a strap as that anywhere for fifteen cents—all
- amid the greatest merriment. Her influence was so pervasive, indeed, that
- even the nicest girls soon got into a state of giggling familiarity with
- comparative strangers, which gave their elders concern, and which in some
- cases it took many months to straighten out again. But for the time all
- was sparkling gaiety. On the second and final evening, after the oyster
- supper, the Philharmonics played and a choir of girls sang patriotic
- songs. Then the gas was turned down and the stereopticon show began.
- </p>
- <p>
- As the last concerted achievement of the firm of Pulford & Shull, this
- magic-lantern performance is still remembered. The idea of it, of course,
- was Julia’s. She suggested it to Marsena, and he gladly volunteered to
- make any number of positive plates from appropriate pictures and portraits
- for the purpose. Then she pressed Newton Shull into the service to get a
- stereopticon on hire, to rig up the platform and canvas for it, and
- finally to consent to quit his post among the Philharmonics when the music
- ceased, and to go off up into the gallery to work the slides. He also,
- during Marsena’s absence one day, made a slide on his own account.
- </p>
- <p>
- Mr. Shull had not taken very kindly to the idea when Miss Julia first
- broached it to him.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, I don’t know as I ever worked a stereopticon,” he said, striving to
- look with cold placidity into the winsome and beaming smile with which she
- confronted him one day out in the reception-room. She had never smiled at
- him before or pretended even to know his name. “I guess you’d better hire
- a man up from Tecumseh to bring the machine and run it himself.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But you can do it so much better, my dear Mr. Shull!” she urged. “You do
- everything so much better! Mr. Pulford often says that he never knew such
- a handyman in all his life. It seems that there is literally nothing that
- you can’t do—except—perhaps—refuse a lady a great
- personal favor.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Miss Julia put this last so delicately, and with such a pretty little arch
- nod of the head and turn of the eyes, that Newton Shull surrendered at
- discretion. He promised everything on the spot, and he kept his word. In
- fact, he more than kept it.
- </p>
- <p>
- The great evening came, as I have said, and when the lights were turned
- down to extinction’s verge those who were nearest the front could
- distinguish the vacant chair which Mr. Shull had been occupying, with his
- bass viol leaning against it. They whispered from one to another that he
- had gone up in the gallery to work this new-fangled contrivance. Then came
- a flashing broad disk of light on the screen above the judges’ bench, a
- spreading sibilant murmur of interest, and the show began.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was an oddly limited collection of pictures—mainly thin and
- feeble copies of newspaper engravings, photographic portraits, and ideal
- heads from the magazines. Winfield Scott followed in the wake of Kossuth,
- and Garibaldi led the way for John C. Frémont and Lola Montez. There was
- applause for the long, homely, familiar face of Lincoln, and a derisive
- snicker for the likeness of Jeff Davis turned upside down. Then came local
- heroes from the district round about—Gen. Boyce, Col. McIntyre, and
- young Adjt. Heron, who had died so bravely at Ball’s Bluff—mixed
- with some landscapes and statuary, and a comic caricature or two. The rapt
- assemblage murmured its recognitions, sighed its deeper emotions, chuckled
- over the funny plates—deeming it all a most delightful
- entertainment. From time to time there were long hitches, marked by a
- curious spluttering noise above, and the abortive flashes of meaningless
- light on the screen, and the explanation was passed about in undertones
- that Mr. Shull was having difficulties with the machine.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was after the longest of these delays that, all at once, an extremely
- vivid picture was jerked suddenly upon the canvas, and, after a few
- preliminary twitches, settled in place to stare us out of countenance.
- There was no room for mistake. It was the portrait of Miss Julia Parmalee
- standing proudly erect in statuesque posture, with one hand resting on the
- back of a chair, and seated in this chair was Lieut. Dwight Ransom,
- smiling amiably.
- </p>
- <p>
- There was a moment’s deadly hush, while we gazed at this unlooked-for
- apparition. It seemed, upon examination, as if there was a certain irony
- in the Lieutenant’s grin. Some one in the darkness emitted an abrupt snort
- of amusement, and a general titter arose, hung in the air for an awkward
- instant, and then was drowned by a generous burst of applause. While the
- people were still clapping their hands the picture was withdrawn from the
- screen, and we heard Newton Shull call down from his perch in the gallery:
- </p>
- <p>
- “You kin turn up the lights now. They ain’t no more to this.”
- </p>
- <p>
- In another minute we were sitting once again in the broad glare of the
- gaslight, blinking confusedly at one another, and with a dazed
- consciousness that something rather embarrassing had happened. The boldest
- of us began to steal glances across to where Miss Parmalee and Marsena
- sat, just in front of the steps to the bench.
- </p>
- <p>
- What Miss Julia felt was beyond guessing, but there she was, at any rate,
- bending over and talking vivaciously, all smiles and collected nerves, to
- a lady two seats removed. But Marsena displayed no such presence of mind.
- He sat bolt upright, with an extraordinarily white face and a drooping
- jaw, staring fixedly at the empty canvas on the wall before him. Such
- absolute astonishment was never depicted on human visage before.
- </p>
- <p>
- Perhaps from native inability to mind his own business, perhaps with a
- kindly view of saving an anxious situation, the Baptist minister rose now
- to his feet, coughed loudly to secure attention, and began some florid
- remarks about the success of the fair, the especial beauty of the lantern
- exhibition they had just witnessed, and the felicitous way in which it had
- terminated with a portrait of the beautiful and distinguished young lady
- to whose genius and unwearying efforts they were all so deeply indebted.
- In these times of national travail and distress, he said, there was a
- peculiar satisfaction in seeing her portrait accompanied by that of one of
- the courageous and noble young men who had sprung to the defence of their
- country. The poet had averred, he continued, that none but the brave
- deserved the fair, and so on, and so on.
- </p>
- <p>
- Miss Julia listened to it all with her head on one side and a modestly
- deprecatory half-smile on her face. At its finish she rose, turned to face
- everybody, made a pert, laughing little bow, and sat down again,
- apparently all happiness. But it was noted that Marsena did not take his
- pained and fascinated gaze from that mocking white screen on the wall
- straight in front.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <p>
- They walked in silence that evening to almost the gate of the Parmalee
- mansion. Julia had taken his arm, as usual; but Marsena could not but feel
- that the touch was different. It was in the nature of a relief to him that
- for once she did not talk. His heart was too sore, his brain too
- bewildered, for the task of even a one-sided conversation, such as theirs
- was wont to be. Then all at once the silence grew terrible to him—a
- weight to be lifted at all hazards on the instant.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Shull must have made that last slide himself,” he blurted out. “I never
- dreamt of its being made.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I thought it came out very well indeed,” remarked Miss Parmalee,
- “especially his uniform. You could quite see the eagles on the buttons.
- You must thank Mr. Shull for me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ll speak to him in the morning about it,” said Marsena, with gloomy
- emphasis. He sighed, bit his lip, fixed an intent gaze upon the big dark
- bulk of the Parmalee house looming before them, and spoke again. “There’s
- something that I want to say to <i>you</i>, though, that won’t keep till
- morning.” A tiny movement of the hand on his arm was the only response. “I
- see now,” Marsena went on, “that I ain’t been making any real headway with
- you at all. I thought—well—I don’t know as I know just what I
- did think—but I guess now that it was a mistake.” Yes—there
- was a distinct flutter of the little gloved hand. It put a wild thought
- into Marsena’s head.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Would you,” he began boldly—“I never spoke of it before—but
- would you—that is, if I was to enlist and go to the war—would
- that make any difference?—you know what I mean.”
- </p>
- <p>
- She looked up at him with magnetic sweetness in her dusky, shadowed
- glance. “How can any ablebodied young patriot hesitate at such a time as
- this?” she made answer, and pressed his arm.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- V
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t was in this same
- May, not more than a week after the momentous episode of the Field
- Hospital and Nurse Fund Fair, that Marsena Pulford went off to the war.
- </p>
- <p>
- There was no ostentation about his departure. He had indeed been gone for
- a day or two before it became known in Octavius that his absence from town
- meant that he had enlisted down at Tecumseh. We learned that he had
- started as a common private, but everybody made sure that a man of his
- distinguished appearance and deportment would speedily get a commission.
- Everybody, too, had a theory of some sort as to the motives for this
- sudden and strange behavior of his. These theories agreed in linking Miss
- Parmalee with the affair, but there were hopeless divergencies as to the
- exact part she played in it. One party held that Marsena had been driven
- to seek death on the tented field by despair at having been given the
- “mitten.” Others insisted that he had not been given the “mitten” at all,
- but had gone because her well-known martial ardor made the sacrifice of
- her betrothed necessary to her peace of mind. A minority took the view
- which Homer Sage promulgated from his tilted-back chair on the stoop of
- the Excelsior Hotel.
- </p>
- <p>
- “They ain’t nothin’ settled betwixt ’em,” this student of human
- nature declared. “She jest dared him to go, and he went. And if you only
- give her time, she’ll have the whole male unmarried population of
- Octavius, between the ages of sixteen and sixty, down there wallerin’
- around in the Virginny swamps, feedin’ the muskeeters and makin’ a bid for
- glory.”
- </p>
- <p>
- But in a few days there came the terribly exciting news of Seven Pines and
- Fair Oaks—that first great combat of the revived war in the East—and
- we ceased to bother our heads about the photographer and his love. The
- enlisting fever sprang up again, and our young men began to make their way
- by dozens and scores to the recruiting office at Tecumseh. There were more
- farewells, more tears and prayers, not to mention several funerals of
- soldiers killed at Hanover Court House, where that Fifth Corps, which
- contained most of our volunteers, had its first spring smell of blood. And
- soon thereafter burst upon us the awful sustained carnage of the Seven
- Days’ fighting, which drove out of our minds even the recollection that
- Miss Julia Parmalee herself had volunteered for active service in the
- Sanitary Commission, and gone South to take up her work.
- </p>
- <p>
- And so July 3d came, bringing with it the bare tidings of that closing
- desperate battle of the week at Malvern Hill, and the movement of what was
- left of the Army of the Potomac to a safe resting place on the James
- River. We were beginning to get the details of local interest by the slow
- single wire from Thessaly, and sickening enough they were. The village
- streets were filled with silent, horror-stricken crowds. The whole
- community seemed to have but a single face, repeated upon the mental
- vision at every step—a terrible face with distended, empty eyes,
- riven brows, and an open drawn mouth like the old Greek mask of tragedy.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I swan! I don’t know whether to keep open to-morrow or not,” said Mr.
- Newton Shull, for perhaps the twentieth time, as he wandered once again
- from the reception-room into the little workshop behind. “In some ways
- it’s kind of agin my principles to work on Independence Day—but,
- then again, if I thought there was likely to be a good many farmers comin’
- into town—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “They’ll be plenty of ’em cornin’ in,” said the boy, over his
- shoulder, “but they’ll steer clear of here.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’m ’fraid so,” sighed Mr. Shull. He advanced a listless step or
- two and gazed with dejected apathy at the newspaper map tacked to the
- wall, on which the boy was making red and blue crosses with a colored
- pencil. “I don’t see much good o’ that,” he said. “Still, of course, if it
- eases your mind any—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “That’s where the fightin’ finished,” observed the boy, pointing to a big
- mark on the map. “That’s Malvern Hill there, and here—down where the
- river takes the big bend—that’s Harrison’s Landing, where the army’s
- movin’ to. See them seven rings? Them are the battles, one each day, as
- our men forced their way down through the Chickahominy swamps, beginnin’
- up in the corner with Beaver Dam Creek. If the map was a little higher it
- ’ud show the Pamunkey, where they started from. My uncle says that
- the whole mistake was in ever abandoning the Pamunkey.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Pa-monkey or Ma-monkey,” said Newton Shull, gloomily, “it wouldn’t be no
- comfort to me to see it, even on a map. It’s jest taken and busted me and
- my business here clean as a whistle. We ain’t paid expenses two days in a
- week sence Marseny went. Here I’ve got now so ’t I kin take a
- plain, everyday sort o’ picture jest about as well as he did—a
- little streakid sometimes, perhaps, and more or less pinholes—but
- still pretty middlin’ fair on an average, and then, darn my buttons if
- they don’t all stop comin’. It positively don’t seem to me as if there was
- a single human bein’ in Dearborn County that ’ud have his picture
- took as a gift. All they want now is to have enlargements thrown up from
- little likenesses of their men folks that have been killed, and them I
- don’t know how to do no more’n a babe unborn.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You knew well enough how to make that stere-opticon slide,” remarked the
- boy with severity.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes,” mused Mr. Shull, “that darned thing—that made a peck o’
- trouble, didn’t it? I dunno what on earth possessed me; I kind o’ seemed
- to git the notion o’ doin’ it into my head all to once ’t, and
- somehow I never dreamt of its rilin’ Marseny so; you couldn’t tell that a
- man ’ud be so blamed touchy as all that, could you?—and I
- dunno, like as not he’d ’a’ enlisted anyhow. But I do wish he’d
- showed me how to make them pesky enlargements afore he went. If I’d only
- seen him do one, even once, I could ’a’ picked the thing up, but I
- never did. It’s just my luck!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Say,” said the boy, looking up with a sudden thought, “do you know what
- my mother heard yesterday? It’s all over the place that before Marseny
- left he went to Squire Schermerhorn’s and made his will, and left
- everything he’s got to the Parmalee girl, in case he gits killed. So, if
- anything happens she’d be your partner, wouldn’t she?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Newton Shull stared with surprise. “Well, now, that beats creation,” he
- said, after a little. “Somehow you know that never occurred to me, and
- yet, of course, that ’ud be jest his style.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, sir,” repeated the other, “they say he’s left her every identical
- thing.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s allus that way in this world,” reflected Mr. Shull, sadly. “Them
- that don’t need it one solitary atom, they’re eternally gettin’ every
- mortal thing left to ’em. Why, that girl’s so rich already she
- don’t know what to do with her money. If I was her, I bet a cooky I
- wouldn’t go pikin’ off to the battlefield, doin’ nursin’ and tyin’ on
- bandages, and fannin’ men while they were gittin’ their legs cut off. No,
- sirree; I’d let the Sanitary Commission scuffle along without me, I can
- tell you! A hoss and buggy and a fust-class two-dollar-a-day hotel, and
- goin’ to the theatre jest when I took the notion—that’d be good
- enough for me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I suppose the sign then ’ud be ‘Shull & Parmalee,’ wouldn’t
- it?” queried the boy.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, now, I ain’t so sure about that,” said Mr. Shull, thoughtfully. “It
- might be that, bein’ a woman, her name ’ud come first, out o’
- politeness. But then, of course, most prob’ly she’d want to sell out
- instid, and then I’d make the valuation, and she could give me time. Or
- she might want to stay in, only on the quiet, you know—what they
- call a silent partner.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Nobody’d ever call her a silent partner,” observed the boy. “She couldn’t
- keep still if she tried.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I wouldn’t care how much she talked,” said Mr. Shull, “if she only put
- enough more money into the business. I didn’t take much to her, somehow,
- along at fust, but the more I’ve seen of her the more I like the cut of
- her jib. She’s got ‘go’ in her, that gal has; she jest figures out what
- she wants, and then she sails in and gits it. It don’t matter who the man
- is, she jest takes and winds him round her little finger. Why, Marseny,
- here, he wasn’t no more than so much putty in her hands. I lost all
- patience with him. You wouldn’t catch me being run by a woman that way.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “So far’s I could see,” suggested the other, “she seemed to git pretty
- much all she wanted out of you, too. You were dancin’ round, helpin’ her
- at the fair there, like a hen on a hot griddle.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It was all on his account,” put in the partner, with emphasis. “Jest to
- please him; he seemed so much sot on her bein’ humored in everything. I
- did feel kind o’ foolish about it at the time—I never somehow
- believed much in doin’ work for nothin’—but maybe it was all for the
- best. If what they say about his makin’ a will is true, why it won’t do me
- no harm to be on good terms with her—in case—in case—”
- </p>
- <p>
- Mr. Shull was standing at the window, and his idle gaze had been vaguely
- taking in the general; prospect of the street below the while he spoke. At
- this moment he discovered that some one on the opposite sidewalk was
- making vehement gestures to attract his attention. He lifted the sash and
- put his head out to listen, but the message came across loud enough for
- even the boy inside to hear.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You’d better hurry round to the telegraph office!” this hoarse, anonymous
- voice cried. “Malvern Hill list is a-comin’ in—and they say your
- pardner’s been shot—shot bad, too!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Newton Shull drew in his head and stood for some moments staring blankly
- at the map on the wall. “Well, I swan!” he began, with confused
- hesitation, “I dunno—it seems to me—well, yes, I guess prob’ly
- the best thing ’ll be for her to put more money into the business—yes,
- that’s the plan—and we kin hire an operator up from Tecumseh.”
- </p>
- <p>
- But there was no one to pass an opinion on his project. The boy had
- snatched his hat, and could be heard even now dashing his way furiously
- down the outer stairs.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <p>
- The summer dusk had begun to gather before Octavius heard all that was to
- be learned of the frightful calamity which had befallen its absent sons.
- The local roll of death and disaster from Gaines’s Mill earlier in the
- week had seemed incredibly awful. This new budget of horrors from Malvern
- was far worse.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Wa’n’t the rest of the North doin’ anything at all?” a wild-eyed,
- dishevelled old farmer cried out in a shaking, half-frenzied shriek from
- the press of the crowd round the telegraph office. “Do they think Dearborn
- County’s got to suppress this whole damned rebellion single-handed?”
- </p>
- <p>
- It seemed to the dazed and horrified throng as if some such idea must be
- in the minds of the rest of the Union. Surely no other little community—or
- big community, either—could have had such a hideous blow dealt to it
- as this under which Octavius reeled. The list of the week for the county,
- including Gaines’s Mill, showed one hundred and eight dead outright, and
- very nearly five hundred more wounded in battle. It was too shocking for
- comprehension.
- </p>
- <p>
- As evening drew on, men gathered the nerve to say to one another that
- there was something very glorious in the way the two regiments had been
- thrust into the front, and had shown themselves heroically fit for that
- grim honor. They tried, too, to extract solace from the news that the
- regiments in question had been mentioned by name in the general despatches
- as having distinguished themselves and their county above all the rest—but
- it was an empty and heart-sickened pretence at best, and when, about dark,
- the women folks, who had waited in vain for them to come home to supper,
- began to appear on the skirts of the crowd, it was given up altogether. In
- after years Octavius got so that it could cheer those sinister names of
- Gaines’s Mill and Malvern Hill, and swell with pride at the memories they
- evoked. But that evening no one cheered. It was too terrible.
- </p>
- <p>
- There was, indeed, a single partial exception to this rule. The regular
- service of news had ceased—in those days, before the duplex
- invention, the single wire had most melancholy limitations—but the
- throng still lingered; and when, in the failing light, the postmaster was
- seen to step up again on the chair by the door with a bit of paper in his
- hand, a solemn hush ran over the assemblage.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It is a private telegram sent to me personally,” he explained, in the
- loud clear tones of one who had earned his office by years of stump
- speaking; “but it is intended for you all, I should presume.”
- </p>
- <p>
- The silent crowd pushed nearer, and listened with strained attention as
- this despatch was read:=
- </p>
- <p>
- ```Headquarters Sanitary Commission,
- </p>
- <p>
- ````Harrison’s Landing, Va., Wednesday Morning.=
- </p>
- <p>
- <i>To Postmaster Octavius, N. Y.:</i>
- </p>
- <p>
- <i>No words can describe magnificent record soldiers of Dearborn County,
- especially Starbuck, made past week. I bless fate which identified my poor
- services with such superb heroism. After second sleepless night, Col.
- Starbuck now reposing peacefully; doctor says crisis past; he surely
- recover, though process be slow. You will learn with pride he been
- brevetted Brigadier, fact which it was my privilege to announce to him
- last evening. He feebly thanked me, murmuring, “Tell them at home.”</i>
- </p>
- <p>
- <i>Julia Parmalee.</i>
- </p>
- <p>
- In the silence which ensued the postmaster held the paper up and scanned
- it narrowly by the waning light. “There is something else,” he said—“Oh,
- yes, I see; ‘Franked despatch Sanitary Commission.’ That’s all.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Another figure was seen suddenly clambering upon the chair, with an arm
- around the postmaster for support. It was the teller of the bank. He waved
- his free arm excitedly, as he faced the crowd, and cried:
- </p>
- <p>
- “Our women are as brave as our men! Three cheers for Miss Julia Parmalee!
- Hip-hip!”
- </p>
- <p>
- The loyal teller’s first “Hurrah!” fell upon the air quite by itself.
- Perhaps a dozen voices helped him half-heartedly with the second. The
- third died off again miserably, and he stepped down off the chair amid a
- general consciousness of failure.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Who the hell is Starbuck?” was to be heard in whispered interrogatory
- passed along through the throng. Hardly anybody could answer. Boyce we
- knew, and McIntyre, and many others, but Star-buck was a mystery. Then it
- was explained that it must be the son of old Alanson Starbuck, of Juno
- Mills, who had gone away to Philadelphia seven or eight years before. He
- had not enlisted with any Dearborn County regiment, but held a staff
- appointment of some kind, presumably in a Pennsylvania command. We were
- quite unable to work up any emotion over him.
- </p>
- <p>
- In fact, the more we thought it over, the more we were disposed to resent
- this planting of Starbuck upon us, in the very van of Dearborn County’s
- heroes. His father was a rich old curmudgeon, whom no one liked. The son
- was nothing to us whatever.
- </p>
- <p>
- As at last, in the deepening twilight, the people reluctantly began moving
- toward home, such conversation as they had the heart for seemed to be
- exclusively centred upon Miss Parmalee, and this queer despatch of hers.
- Slow-paced, strolling groups wended their way along the main street, and
- then up this side thoroughfare and that, passing in every block some dark
- and close-shuttered house of mourning, and instinctively sinking still
- lower their muffled tones as they passed, and carrying in their breasts,
- heaven only knows what torturing loads of anguish and stricken despair—but
- finding a certain relief in dwelling, instead, upon this lighter topic.
- </p>
- <p>
- One of these groups—an elderly lady in black attire and two younger
- women of sober mien—walked apart from the others and exchanged no
- words at all until, turning a corner, their way led them past the Parmalee
- house. The looming bulk of the old mansion and the fragrant spaciousness
- of the garden about it seemed to attract the attention of Mrs. Ransom and
- her daughters. They halted as by a common impulse, and fastened a hostile
- gaze upon the shadowy outlines of the house and its surrounding foliage.
- </p>
- <p>
- “If Dwight dies of his wound,” the mother said, in a voice all chilled to
- calmness, “his murderess will live in there.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I always hated her!” said one of the daughters, with a shudder.
- </p>
- <p>
- “But he isn’t going to die, mamma,” put in the other. “You mustn’t think
- of such a thing! You know how healthy he always has been, and this is only
- his shoulder. For my part, we may think ourselves very fortunate. Remember
- how many have been killed or mortally wounded. It seems as if half the
- people we know are in mourning. We get off very lightly with Dwight only
- wounded. Did you happen to hear the details about Mr. Pulford?—you
- know, the photographer—some one was saying that he was mortally
- wounded.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “She sent him to his death, then, too,” said the elder Miss Ransom,
- raising her clenched hand against the black shadow of the house.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t care about that man,” broke in the mother, icily. “Nobody knows
- anything of him, or where he came from. People ran after him because he
- was good-looking, but he never seemed to me to know enough to come in when
- it rained. If she made a fool of him, it was his own lookout. But Dwight—my
- Dwight—!”
- </p>
- <p>
- The mother’s mannered voice broke into a gasp, and she bent her head
- helplessly. The daughters went to her side, and the group passed on into
- the darkness.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- VI
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t was a dark,
- soft, summer night in Virginia, that of the 1st of July. After the
- tropical heat of the day, the air was being mercifully cooled, here on the
- hilltop, by a gentle breeze, laden with just a moist suggestion of the
- mist rising from the river flats and marshes down below. It was not Mother
- Nature’s fault that this zephyr stirring along the parched brow of the
- hill did not bear with it, too, the scents of fruits and flowers, of
- new-mown hay and the yellow grain in shock, and minister soothingly to
- rest and pleasant dreams.
- </p>
- <p>
- Instead, this breeze, moving mildly in the darkness, was one vile,
- embodied stench of sulphur and blood, and pestilential abominations. Go
- where you would, there was no escaping this insufferable burden of foul
- smells. If they were a horror on the hilltop, they were worse below.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was one of the occasions on which Man had expended all his powers to
- prove his superiority to Nature. The elements in their wildest and most
- savage mood could never have wrought such butchery as this. The
- vine-wrapped fences, stretching down from the plateau toward the meadow
- lands below, were buttressed by piles of dead men, some in butternut, some
- in blue. Clumps of stiffened bodies curled supine at the base of every
- stump on the fringe of the woodland to the right and among the tumbled
- sheaves of grain to the left. Out in the open, the broad, sloping hillside
- and the valley bottom lay literally hidden under ridge upon ridge of
- smashed and riddled human forms, and the heaped débris of human battle.
- The clouds hung thick and close above, as if to keep the stars from
- beholding this repellent sample of earth’s titanic beast, Man, at his
- worst. An Egyptian blackness was over it all.
- </p>
- <p>
- At intervals a lightning flash from the crest of the outermost knoll tore
- this evil pall of darkness asunder, and then, with a roar and a scream, a
- spluttering line of vivid flame would arch its sinister way across the
- sky. A thousand little dots of light moved and zigzagged ceaselessly on
- the wide expanse of obscurity underneath this crest, and when the bursts
- of wrathful fireworks came from overhead it could be seen that these were
- lanterns being borne about in and out among the winrows of maimed and
- slain. Above all, through all, without even an instant’s lull, there arose
- a terrible babel of chorused groans and prayers and howls and curses. This
- noise could be heard for miles—almost as far as the boom of the
- howitzers above could carry—and at a distance sounded like the
- moaning of a storm through a great pine-forest. Near at hand, it sounded
- like nothing else this side of hell.
- </p>
- <p>
- An hour or so after nightfall the battery on the crest of the knoll
- stopped firing. The wails and shrieks from the slope below went on all
- through the night, and the lanterns of the search parties burned till the
- morning sunlight put them out.
- </p>
- <p>
- Up on the top of the hill—a broad expanse of rolling plateaus—the
- scene wore a different aspect. At widely separated points bonfires and
- glittering lights showed where some general of the victorious army held
- his headquarters in a farm-house; and unless one pried too curiously about
- these parts, there were few enough evidences on the summit of the day’s
- barbaric doings.
- </p>
- <p>
- The chief of these houses—a stately and ancient structure, built in
- colonial days of brick proudly brought from Europe—had begun the
- forenoon of the battle as the headquarters of the Fifth Corps. Then the
- General and his staff had reduced their needs to a couple of rooms, to
- leave space for wounded men. Then they had moved out altogether, to let
- the whole house be used as a hospital. Then as the backwash of calamity
- from the line of conflict swelled in size and volume, the stables and
- barns had been turned over to the medical staff. Later, as the savage
- evening fight went on, tons of new hay had been brought out and strewn in
- sheltered places under the open sky to serve as beds for the sufferers.
- Before night fell, even these impromptu hospitals were overtaxed, and rows
- of stricken soldiers lay on the bare ground.
- </p>
- <p>
- The day of intelligent and efficient hospital service had not yet dawned
- for our army. The breakdown of what service we had had, under the
- frightful stress of the battles culminating in this blood-soaked Malvern
- Hill, is a matter of history, and it can be viewed the more calmly now as
- the collapse of itself brought about an improved condition of affairs. But
- at the time it was a woful thing, with a lax and conflicting organization,
- insufficient material, a ridiculous lack of nurses, a mere handful of
- really competent surgeons and, most of all, a great crowd of volunteer
- medical students and ignorant practitioners, who flocked southward for the
- mere excitement and practice of sawing, cutting, slashing right and left.
- So it was that army surgery lent new terrors to death on the battle-field
- in the year 1862.
- </p>
- <p>
- The sky overhead was just beginning to show the ashen touch of twilight,
- when two men lying stretched on the hay in a corner of the smaller
- barnyard chanced to turn on their hard couch and to recognize each other.
- It was a slow and almost scowling recognition, and at first bore no fruit
- of words.
- </p>
- <p>
- One was in the dress of a lieutenant of artillery, muddy and begrimed with
- smoke, and having its right shoulder torn or cut open from collar to
- elbow. The man himself had now such a waving, tangled growth of chestnut
- beard and so grimly blackened a face, that it would have been hard to
- place him as our easy-going, smiling Dwight Ransom.
- </p>
- <p>
- The new movement had not brought ease, and now, after a few grunts of pain
- and impatience, he got himself laboriously up in a sitting posture,
- dragged a knapsack within reach up to support his back, and looked at his
- companion again.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I heard that you were down here somewhere,” he remarked, at last. “My
- sister wrote me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Marsena Pulford stared up at him, made a little nodding motion of the
- head, and turned his glance again into the sky straight above. He also was
- a spectacle of dry mud and dust, and was bearded to the eyes.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Where are you hit?” asked Dwight, after a pause.
- </p>
- <p>
- For answer, Marsena slowly, and with an effort, put a hand to his breast—to
- the left, below the heart. “Here, somewhere,” he said, in a low, drylipped
- murmur. He did not look at Dwight again, but presently asked, “Could you
- fix me—settin’ up—too?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I guess so,” responded Dwight. With the help of his unhurt arm he
- clambered to his feet and began moving dizzily about among the row of
- wounded men to his left. These groaned or snarled at him as he passed over
- them, but to this he paid no attention whatever. He returned from the end
- of the line, bringing two knapsacks and the battered frame of a drum, in
- which some one had been trying to carry water, and with some difficulty
- arranged these in a satisfactory heap. Then he knelt, pushed his arm under
- Marsena’s shoulders, and lifted him up and backward to the support. Both
- men grimaced and winced under the smart of the effort, and for some
- minutes sat in silence, with closed eyes.
- </p>
- <p>
- When they opened them finally it was with a sudden start at the sound of a
- woman’s voice. Their ears had for long hours been inured to a ceaseless
- din of other noises—an ear-splitting confusion of cannon and
- musketry roar from the field less than an eighth of a mile away, of
- yelping shells overhead, and of screams and hoarse shouts all about them.
- Yet their senses caught this strange note of a woman’s voice as if it had
- fallen upon the hush of midnight.
- </p>
- <p>
- They looked up, and beheld Miss Julia Parmalee!
- </p>
- <p>
- Upon such a background of heated squalor, dirt, and murderous disorder, it
- did not seem surprising to them that this lady should present a picture of
- cool, fresh neatness. She wore a snow-white nurse’s cap, and broad,
- spotless bands of white linen were crossed over the shoulders of her pale
- dove-colored dress. Her dark face, dusky pink at the cheeks, glowed with a
- proud excitement. Her big brown eyes swept along the row of recumbent
- figures at her feet with the glance of a born conqueror.
- </p>
- <p>
- “This is not a fit place for him,” she said. “It is absurd to bring a
- gentleman—an officer of the headquarters staff—out to such a
- place as this!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Then the two volunteers from Octavius saw that behind her were four men,
- bearing a laden stretcher, and that at her side was a regimental hospital
- steward, who also looked speculatively along the rows of sufferers.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s the best thing we can do, anyway,” he replied, not over-politely;
- “and for that matter, there’s hardly room here.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, there’d be no trouble about that,” retorted Miss Julia, calmly. “We
- could move any of these people here. The General told me I was always to
- do just what I thought best. I am sure that if I could see him now he
- would insist at once that Colonel Starbuck should have a bed to himself,
- inside the house.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ll bet he wouldn’t!” said the hospital steward, with emphasis.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Perhaps you don’t realize,” put in Miss Julia, coldly, “that Colonel
- Starbuck is a staff officer—and a friend of mine.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t care if he was on all the staffs there are,” said the hospital
- steward, “he’s got to take his chance with the rest. And it don’t matter
- about his being a friend, either; we ain’t playing favorites much just
- now. I don’t see no room here, Miss. You’ll have to take him out in the
- open lot there.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, never!” protested Miss Julia, vehemently. “It’s disgraceful! Why, the
- place is under fire there. I saw them running away from a shell there only
- a minute ago. No, if we can’t do anything better, we’ll have one of these
- men moved.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, do something pretty quick!” growled one of the men supporting the
- stretcher.
- </p>
- <p>
- Miss Parmalee had looked two or three times in an absent-minded way at the
- two men on the ground nearest her—obviously without recognizing
- either of them. There was a definite purpose in the glance she now bent
- upon Dwight Ransom—a glance framed in the resourceful smile he
- remembered so well.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You seem to be able to sit up, my man,” she said, ingratiatingly, to him;
- “would you be so very kind as to let me have that place for Colonel
- Star-buck, here—he is on the headquarters staff—and I am sure
- we should be so very much obliged. You will easily get a nice place
- somewhere else for yourself. Oh, thank you so much! It is so good of you!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Suppressing a groan at the pain the movement involved, and without a word,
- Dwight lifted himself slowly to his feet, and stepped aside, waving a hand
- toward the hay and knapsack in token of their surrender.
- </p>
- <p>
- Then Miss Julia helped lift from the litter the object of her anxiety.
- Colonel Starbuck was of a slender, genteel figure, and had the top of his
- head swathed heavily in bandages. He wore long, curly, brown
- side-whiskers, and his chin had been shaved that very morning. This was
- enough in itself to indicate that he belonged to the headquarters staff,
- but the fact was proclaimed afresh by everything else about him—his
- speckless uniform, his spick-and-span gauntlets, his carefully polished
- boots, the glittering newness of his shoulder-straps, sword scabbard,
- buttons, and spurs. It was clear that, whatever else had happened, his
- line of communication with the headquarters baggage train had never been
- interrupted.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It is so kind of you!” Miss Parmalee murmured again, when the staff
- officer had been helped off the stretcher, and in a dazed and languid way
- had settled himself down into the place vacated for him. “Would you”—she
- whispered, looking up now, and noting that the hospital steward and the
- litter-men had gone away—“would you mind stepping over to the house,
- or to one of the tents beyond—you’ll find him somewhere—and
- asking Dr. Willoughby to come at once? Tell him it is for Colonel Starbuck
- of the headquarters staff, and you’d better mention my name—Miss
- Parmalee of the Sanitary Commission. You won’t forget the name—Parmalee?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t fancy I shall forget it,” said Dwight, gravely. “I’ve got a
- better memory than some.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Miss Julia caught the tone of voice on the instant, and looked up again
- from where she knelt beside the Colonel, with a swift smile.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, it’s Mr. Ransom, I do believe!” she exclaimed. “I should never have
- known you with your beard. It’s so good of you to take this trouble—you
- always were so obliging! Any one will tell you where Dr. Willoughby is.
- He’s the surgeon of the Eighteenth, you know. I’m sure he’ll come at once—to
- please me—and time is so precious, you know!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Without further words, Dwight moved off slowly and unsteadily toward the
- house.
- </p>
- <p>
- Miss Parmalee, seating herself so that some of her mouse-tinted draperies
- almost touched the face of Dwight’s companion, unhooked a fan from her
- girdle and began softly fanning Colonel Starbuck. “The doctor won’t be
- long,” she said, in low, cooing tones, after a little; “do you feel easier
- now?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I am rather dizzy still, and a little faint,” replied the Colonel,
- languorously. “That fanning is so delicious though, that I’m really very
- happy. At least I would be if I weren’t nervous about you. You have been
- through such tremendous exertions all day—out in the sun, amid all
- these horrid sights and this infernal roar—without a parasol, too.
- Are you quite sure it has not been too much for you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “You are always so thoughtful of others, dear Colonel Starbuck,” murmured
- Miss Julia, reducing the fanning to a gentle, measured movement, and
- fixing her lustrous eyes pensively upon the clouds above the horizon. “You
- never think of yourself!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Only to think how happy my fate is, to be rescued and nursed by an
- angel,” sighed the Colonel.
- </p>
- <p>
- A smile of gentle deprecation played upon Miss Julia’s red lips, and
- imparted to her eyes the expression they would wear if they had been
- gazing upon a tenderly entrancing vision in the sky. Then, all at once;
- she gave a little start of aroused attention, looked puzzled, and after a
- moment’s pause bent her head over close to the Colonel’s.
- </p>
- <p>
- “The man behind me has taken tight hold of my dress,” she whispered,
- hurriedly. “I don’t want to turn around, but can you see him? He isn’t
- having a fit or anything, is he?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Colonel Starbuck lifted himself a trifle, and looked across. “No,” he
- whispered in return, “he appears to be asleep. Probably he is dreaming. He
- is a corporal—some infantry regiment. They do manage to get so—what
- shall I say—so unwashed! Shall I move his hand for you?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Miss Julia shook her head, with an arch little half smile.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, poor man,” she murmured. “It gives me almost a sense of the romantic.
- Perhaps he is dreaming of home—of some one dear to him. Corporals do
- have their romances, you know, as well as—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “As well as colonels,” the staff officer playfully finished the sentence
- for her. “Well, I congratulate him, if his is a thousandth part as joyful
- as mine.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, then, you have one!” pursued Miss Parma-lee, allowing her eyes to
- sparkle for an instant before they were coyly raised again to the clouds.
- Darkness was gathering there rapidly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why pretend that you don’t understand?” pleaded Colonel Starbuck—and
- there seemed to be no answer forthcoming. The fan moved even more sedately
- now, with a tender flutter at the end of each downward sweep.
- </p>
- <p>
- Presently the preoccupation of the couple—one might not call it
- silence in such an unbroken uproar as rose around them and smashed through
- the air above—was interrupted by the appearance of a young,
- sharp-faced man, who marched straight across the yard toward them and,
- halting, spoke hurriedly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I was asked specially to come here for a moment,” he said, “but it can
- only be a minute. We’re just over our heads in work. What is it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Miss Parmalee looked at the young man with a favorless eye. He was
- unshaven, dishevelled, brusque of manner and speech. He was bareheaded,
- and his unimportant figure was almost hidden beneath a huge, revoltingly
- stained apron.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I asked for my friend, Dr. Willoughby,” she said. “But if he could not
- come, I must insist upon immediate attention for Colonel Starbuck here—an
- officer of the headquarters staff.”
- </p>
- <p>
- While she spoke the young surgeon had thrown himself on one knee, adroitly
- though roughly lifted the Colonel’s bandages, run an inquiring finger over
- his skull, and plumped the linen back again. He sprang to his feet with an
- impatient grunt. “Paltry scalp wound,” he snorted. Then, turning on his
- heel, he almost knocked against Dwight Ransom, who had come slowly up
- behind him. “You had no business to drag me off for foolishness of this
- sort,” he said, in vexed tones. “Here are thousands of men waiting their
- turn who really need help, and I’ve been working twenty hours a day for a
- week, and couldn’t keep up with the work if every day had two hundred
- hours. It’s ridiculous!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Dwight shrugged his unhurt shoulder. “I didn’t ask you for myself,” he
- replied. “I’m quite willing to wait my turn—but the lady here—she
- asked me to bring help—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “It can’t be that this gentleman understands,” put in Miss Julia, “that
- his assistance was desired for an officer of the headquarters staff.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Madame,” said the young surgeon, “with your permission, damn the
- headquarters staff!” and, turning abruptly, he strode off.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I will go and see the General myself,” exclaimed Miss Parmalee, flushing
- with wrath. “I will see whether he will permit the Sanitary Commission to
- be affronted in this outrageous—”
- </p>
- <p>
- She stopped short. Her indignant effort to rise to her feet had been
- checked by a hand on the ground, which held firmly in its grasp a fold of
- her skirt. She turned, pulled the cloth from the clutch of the tightened
- fingers, looked at the hand as it sprawled limply on the grass, and gave a
- little, shuddering, half-hysterical laugh. “Mercy me!” was what she said.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You know who it is, don’t you?” asked Dwight Ransom.
- </p>
- <p>
- The meaning in his voice struck Miss Julia, and she bent a careful
- scrutiny through the dusk upon the face of the man stretched out beside
- her. His head had slipped sidewise on the knapsack, and his bearded chin
- was unnaturally sunk into his collar. Through the grime on his face could
- be discerned an unearthly pallor. His wide-opened eyes seemed staring
- fixedly, reproachfully, at the hand which had lost its hold upon Miss
- Julia’s dress.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It does seem as if I’d seen the face before somewhere,” she remarked,
- “but I don’t appear to place it. It is getting so dark, too. No, I can’t
- imagine. Who is it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- She had risen to her feet and was peering down at the dead man, her pretty
- brows knitted in perplexity.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He recognized you!” said Dwight, with significant gravity. “It’s Marsena
- Pulford.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, poor man!” exclaimed Julia. “If he’d only spoken to me I would gladly
- have fanned him, too. But I was so anxious about the Colonel here that I
- never took a fair look at him. I dare say I shouldn’t have recognized him,
- even then. Beards do change one so, don’t they!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Then she turned to Colonel Starbuck and made answer to the inquiry of his
- lifted eyebrows.
- </p>
- <p>
- “The unfortunate man,” she explained, “was our village photographer. I sat
- to him for my picture several times. I think I have one of them over at
- the Commission tent now.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ll go this minute and seize it!” the gallant Colonel vowed, getting to
- his feet.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Take care! We unprotected females have a man trap there!” Julia warned
- him; but fear did not deter the staff officer from taking her arm and
- leaning on it as they walked away in the twilight. Then the night fell,
- and Dwight buried Marsena.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2H_4_0024" id="link2H_4_0024"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- THE WAR WIDOW
- </h2>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2H_4_0025" id="link2H_4_0025"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- I
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>lthough we had
- been one man short all day, and there was a plain threat of rain in the
- hot air, everybody left the hay-field long before sundown. It was too much
- to ask of human nature to stay off in the remote meadows when such
- remarkable things were happening down around the house.
- </p>
- <p>
- Marcellus Jones and I were in the pasture, watching the dog get the cows
- together for the homeward march. He did it so well and, withal, so
- willingly, that there was no call for us to trouble ourselves in keeping
- up with him. We waited instead at the open bars until the hay-wagon had
- passed through, rocking so heavily in the ancient pitch-hole, as it did
- so, that the driver was nearly thrown off his perch on the top of the high
- load. Then we put up the bars, and fell in close behind the haymakers. A
- rich cloud of dust, far ahead on the road, suggested that the dog was
- doing his work even too willingly, but for the once we feared no rebuke.
- Almost anything might be condoned that day.
- </p>
- <p>
- Five grown-up men walked abreast down the highway, in the shadow of the
- towering wagon mow, clad much alike in battered straw hats, gray woollen
- shirts open at the neck, and rough old trousers bulging over the swollen,
- creased ankles of thick boots. One had a scythe on his arm; two others
- bore forks over their shoulders. By request, Hi Tuckerman allowed me to
- carry his sickle.
- </p>
- <p>
- Although my present visit to the farm had been of only a few days’
- duration—and those days of strenuous activity darkened by a terrible
- grief—I had come to be very friendly with Mr. Tuckerman. He took a
- good deal more notice of me than the others did; and, when chance and
- leisure afforded, addressed the bulk of his remarks to me. This
- favoritism, though it fascinated me, was not without its embarrassing
- side. Hi Tuckerman had taken part in the battle of Gaines’s Mill two years
- before, and had been shot straight through the tongue. One could still see
- the deep scar on each of his cheeks, a sunken and hairless pit in among
- his sandy beard. His heroism in the war and his good qualities as a
- citizen had earned for him the esteem of his neighbors, and they saw to it
- that he never wanted for work. But their present respect for him stopped
- short of the pretence that they enjoyed hearing him talk. Whenever he
- attempted conversation, people moved away, or began boisterous dialogues
- with one another to drown him out. Being a sensitive man, he had come to
- prefer silence to these rebuffs among those he knew. But he still had a
- try at the occasional polite stranger—and I suppose it was in this
- capacity that I won his heart. Though I never of my own initiative
- understood a word he said, Marcellus sometimes interpreted a sentence or
- so for me, and I listened to all the rest with a fraudulently wise face.
- To give only a solitary illustration of the tax thus levied on our
- friendship, I may mention that when Hi Tuckerman said “<i>Aak!-ah-aak!-uh</i>,”
- he meant “Rappahannock,” and he did this rather better than a good many
- words.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Rappahannock,” alas! was a word we heard often enough in those days,
- along with Chickahom-iny and Rapidan, and that odd Chattahoochee, the
- sound of which raised always in my boyish mind the notion that the
- geography-makers must have achieved it in their baby-talk period. These
- strange Southern river names and many more were as familiar to the ears of
- these four other untravelled Dearborn County farmers as the noise of their
- own shallow Nedahma rattling over its pebbles in the valley yonder. Only
- when their slow fancy fitted substance to these names they saw in mind’s
- eye dark, sinister, swampy currents, deep and silent, and discolored with
- human blood.
- </p>
- <p>
- Two of these men who strode along behind the wagon were young half-uncles
- of mine, Myron and Warren Turnbull, stout, thick-shouldered, honest
- fellows not much out of their teens, who worked hard, said little, and
- were always lumped together in speech, by their family, the hired help,
- and the neighbors, as “the boys.” They asserted themselves so rarely, and
- took everything as it came with such docility, that I myself, being in my
- eleventh year, thought of them as very young indeed. Next them walked a
- man, hired just for the haying, named Philleo, and then, scuffling along
- over the uneven humps and hollows on the outer edge of the road, came Si
- Hummaston, with the empty ginger-beer pail knocking against his knees.
- </p>
- <p>
- As Tuckerman’s “Hi” stood for Hiram, so I assume the other’s “Si” meant
- Silas, or possibly Cyrus. I dare say no one, not even his mother, had ever
- called him by his full name. I know that my companion, Marcellus Jones,
- who wouldn’t be thirteen until after Thanksgiving, habitually addressed
- him as Si, and almost daily I resolved that I would do so myself. He was a
- man of more than fifty, I should think, tall, lean, and what Marcellus
- called “bible-backed.” He had a short iron-gray beard and long hair.
- Whenever there was any very hard or steady work going, he generally gave
- out and went to sit in the shade, holding a hand flat over his heart, and
- shaking his head dolefully. This kept a good many from hiring him, and
- even in haying time, when everybody on two legs is of some use, I fancy he
- would often have been left out if it hadn’t been for my grandparents. They
- respected him on account of his piety and his moral character, and always
- had him down when extra work began. He was said to be the only hired man
- in the township who could not be goaded in some way into swearing. He
- looked at one slowly, with the mild expression of a heifer calf.
- </p>
- <p>
- We had come to the crown of the hill, and the wagon started down the
- steeper incline, with a great groaning of the brake. The men, by some
- tacit understanding, halted and overlooked the scene.
- </p>
- <p>
- The big old stone farm-house—part of which is said to date almost to
- the Revolutionary times—was just below us, so near, indeed, that
- Marcellus said he had once skipped a scaling-stone from where we stood to
- its roof. The dense, big-leafed foliage of a sap-bush, sheltered in the
- basin which dipped from our feet, pretty well hid this roof now from view.
- Farther on, heavy patches of a paler, brighter green marked the orchard,
- and framed one side of a cluster of barns and stables, at the end of which
- three or four belated cows were loitering by the trough. It was so still
- that we could hear the clatter of the stanchions as the rest of the herd
- sought their places inside the milking-barn.
- </p>
- <p>
- The men, though, had no eyes for all this, but bent their gaze fixedly on
- the road, down at the bottom. For a long way this thoroughfare was
- bordered by a row of tall poplars, which, as we were placed, receded from
- the vision in so straight a line that they seemed one high, fat tree.
- Beyond these one saw only a line of richer green, where the vine-wrapped
- rail-fences cleft their way between the ripening fields.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’d ’a’ took my oath it was them,” said Philleo. “I can spot them
- grays as fur’s I can see ’em. They turned by the school-house
- there, or I’ll eat it, school-ma’am ’n’ all. And the buggy was
- fol-lerin’ ’em, too.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, I thought it was them,” said Myron, shading his eyes with his brown
- hand.
- </p>
- <p>
- “But they ought to got past the poplars by this time, then,” remarked
- Warren.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, they’ll be drivin’ as slow as molasses in January,” put in Si
- Hummaston. “When you come to think of it, it <i>is</i> pretty nigh the
- same as a regular funeral. You mark my words, your father’ll have walked
- them grays every step of the road. I s’pose he’ll drive himself—he
- wouldn’t trust bringin’ Alvy home to nobody else, would he? I know I
- wouldn’t, if the Lord had given <i>me</i> such a son; but then he didn’t!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, He didn’t!” commented the first speaker, in an unnaturally loud tone
- of voice, to break in upon the chance that Hi Tuckerman was going to try
- to talk. But Hi only stretched out his arm, pointing the forefinger toward
- the poplars.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sure enough, something was in motion down at the base of the shadows on
- the road. Then it crept forward, out in the sunlight, and separated itself
- into two vehicles. A farm wagon came first, drawn by a team of gray
- horses. Close after it came a buggy, with its black top raised. Both
- advanced so slowly that they seemed scarcely to be moving at all.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, I swan!” exclaimed Si Hummaston, after a minute, “it’s Dana
- Pillsbury drivin’ the wagon after all! Well—I dunno—yes, I
- guess that’s prob’bly what I’d ’a’ done too, if I’d b’n your
- father. Yes, it does look more correct, his follerin’ on behind, like
- that. I s’pose that’s Alvy’s widder in the buggy there with him.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, that’s Serena—it looks like her little girl with her,” said
- Myron, gravely.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I s’pose we might’s well be movin’ along down,” observed his brother, and
- at that we all started.
- </p>
- <p>
- We walked more slowly now, matching our gait to the snail-like progress of
- those coming toward us. As we drew near to the gate, the three hired men
- instinctively fell behind the brothers, and in that position the group
- halted on the grass, facing the driveway where it left the main road. Not
- a word was uttered by any one. When at last the wagon came up, Myron and
- Warren took off their hats, and the others followed suit, all holding them
- poised at the level of their shoulders.
- </p>
- <p>
- Dana Pillsbury, carrying himself rigidly upright on the box-seat, drove
- past us with eyes fixed straight ahead, and a face as coldly
- expressionless as that of a wooden Indian. The wagon was covered all over
- with rubber blankets, so that whatever it bore was hidden. Only a few
- paces behind came the buggy, and my grandfather, old Arphaxed Turnbull,
- went by in his turn with the same averted, faraway gaze, and the same
- resolutely stolid countenance. He held the restive young carriage horse
- down to a decorous walk, a single firm hand on the tight reins, without so
- much as looking at it. The strong yellow light of the declining sun poured
- full upon his long gray beard, his shaven upper lip, his dark-skinned,
- lean, domineering face—and made me think of some hard and gloomy old
- prophet seeing a vision, in the back part of the Old Testament. If that
- woman beside him, swathed in heavy black raiment, and holding a child up
- against her arm, was my Aunt Serena, I should never have guessed it.
- </p>
- <p>
- We put on our hats again, and walked up the driveway with measured step
- behind the carriage till it stopped at the side-piazza stoop. The wagon
- had passed on toward the big new red barn—and crossing its course I
- saw my Aunt Em, bareheaded and with her sleeves rolled up, going to the
- cow-barn with a milking-pail in her hand. She was walking quickly, as if
- in a great hurry.
- </p>
- <p>
- “There’s your Ma,” I whispered to Marcellus, assuming that he would share
- my surprise at her rushing off like this, instead of waiting to say
- “How-d’-do” to Serena. He only nodded knowingly, and said nothing.
- </p>
- <p>
- No one else said much of anything. Myron and Warren shook hands in stiff
- solemnity with the veiled and craped sister-in-law, when their father had
- helped her and her daughter from the buggy, and one of them remarked in a
- constrained way that the hot spell seemed to keep up right along. The
- newcomers ascended the steps to the open door, and the woman and the child
- went inside. Old Arphaxed turned on the threshold, and seemed to behold us
- for the first time.
- </p>
- <p>
- “After you’ve put out the horse,” he said, “I want the most of yeh to come
- up to the new barn. Si Hummaston and Marcellus can do the milkin’.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I kind o’ rinched my wrist this forenoon,” put in Si, with a note of
- entreaty in his voice. He wanted sorely to be one of the party at the red
- barn.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Mebbe milkin’ ’ll be good for it,” said Arphaxed, curtly. “You and
- Marcellus do what I say, and keep Sidney with you.” With this he, too,
- went into the house.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2H_4_0026" id="link2H_4_0026"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- II
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t wasn’t an easy
- matter for even a member of the family like myself to keep clearly and
- untangled in his head all the relationships which existed under this
- patriarchal Turnbull roof.
- </p>
- <p>
- Old Arphaxed had been married twice. His first wife was the mother of two
- children, who grew up, and the older of these was my father, Wilbur
- Turnbull. He never liked farm-life, and left home early, not without some
- hard feeling, which neither father nor son ever quite forgot. My father
- made a certain success of it as a business man in Albany until, in the
- thirties, his health broke down. He died when I was seven and, although he
- left some property, my mother was forced to supplement this help by
- herself going to work as forewoman in a large store. She was too busy to
- have much time for visiting, and I don’t think there was any great love
- lost between her and the people on the farm; but it was a good healthy
- place for me to be sent to when the summer vacation came, and withal
- inexpensive, and so the first of July each year generally found me out at
- the homestead, where, indeed, nobody pretended to be heatedly fond of me,
- but where I was still treated well and enjoyed myself. This year it was
- understood that my mother was coming out to bring me home later on.
- </p>
- <p>
- The other child of that first marriage was a girl who was spoken of in
- youth as Emmeline, but whom I knew now as Aunt Em. She was a silent,
- tough-fibred, hard-working creature, not at all goodlooking, but
- relentlessly neat, and the best cook I ever knew. Even when the house was
- filled with extra hired men, no one ever thought of getting in any female
- help, so tireless and so resourceful was Em. She did all the housework
- there was to do, from cellar to garret, was continually lending a hand in
- the men’s chores, made more butter than the household could eat up,
- managed a large kitchen-garden, and still had a good deal of spare time,
- which she spent in sitting out in the piazza in a starched pink calico
- gown, knitting the while she watched who went up and down the road. When
- you knew her, you understood how it was that the original Turnbulls had
- come into that part of the country just after the Revolution, and in a few
- years chopped down all the forests, dug up all the stumps, drained the
- swale-lands, and turned the entire place from a wilderness into a
- flourishing and fertile home for civilized people. I used to feel, when I
- looked at her, that she would have been quite equal to doing the whole
- thing herself.
- </p>
- <p>
- All at once, when she was something over thirty, Em had up and married a
- mowing-machine agent named Abel Jones, whom no one knew anything about,
- and who, indeed, had only been in the neighborhood for a week or so. The
- family was struck dumb with amazement. The idea of Em’s dallying with the
- notion of matrimony had never crossed anybody’s mind. As a girl she had
- never had any patience with husking-bees or dances or sleigh-ride parties.
- No young man had ever seen her home from anywhere, or had had the remotest
- encouragement to hang around the house. She had never been pretty—so
- my mother told me—and as she got along in years grew dumpy and thick
- in figure, with a plain, fat face, a rather scowling brow, and an abrupt,
- ungracious manner. She had no conversational gifts whatever, and, through
- years of increasing taciturnity and confirmed unsociability, built up in
- everybody’s mind the conviction that, if there could be a man so wild and
- unsettled in intellect as to suggest a tender thought to Em, he would get
- his ears cuffed off his head for his pains.
- </p>
- <p>
- Judge, then, how like a thunderbolt the episode of the mowing-machine
- agent fell upon the family. To bewildered astonishment there soon enough
- succeeded rage. This Jones was a curly-headed man, with a crinkly black
- beard like those of Joseph’s brethren in the Bible picture. He had no home
- and no property, and didn’t seem to amount to much even as a salesman of
- other people’s goods. His machine was quite the worst then in the market,
- and it could not be learned that he had sold a single one in the county.
- But he had married Em, and it was calmly proposed that he should
- henceforth regard the farm as his home. After this point had been sullenly
- conceded, it turned out that Jones was a widower, and had a boy nine or
- ten years old, named Marcellus, who was in a sort of orphan asylum in
- Vermont. There were more angry scenes between father and daughter, and a
- good deal more bad blood, before it was finally agreed that the boy also
- should come and live on the farm.
- </p>
- <p>
- All this had happened in 1860 or 1861. Jones had somewhat improved on
- acquaintance. He knew about lightning-rods, and had been able to fit out
- all the farm buildings with them at cost price. He had turned a little
- money now and again in trades with hop-poles, butter-firkins, shingles,
- and the like, and he was very ingenious in mending and fixing up odds and
- ends. He made shelves and painted the woodwork, and put a tar roof on the
- summer kitchen. Even Martha, the second Mrs. Turnbull, came finally to
- admit that he was handy about a house.
- </p>
- <p>
- This Martha became the head of the household while Em was still a little
- girl. She was a heavy woman, mentally as well as bodily, rather prone to a
- peevish view of things, and greatly given to pride in herself and her
- position, but honest, charitable in her way, and not unkindly at heart. On
- the whole she was a good stepmother, and Em probably got on quite as well
- with her as she would have done with her own mother—even in the
- matter of the mowing-machine agent.
- </p>
- <p>
- To Martha three sons were born. The two younger ones, Myron and Warren,
- have already been seen. The eldest boy, Alva, was the pride of the family,
- and, for that matter, of the whole section.
- </p>
- <p>
- Alva was the first Turnbull to go to college. From his smallest boyhood it
- had been manifest that he had great things before him, so handsome and
- clever and winning a lad was he. Through each of his schooling years he
- was the honor man of his class, and he finished in a blaze of glory by
- taking the Clark Prize, and practically everything else within reach in
- the way of academic distinctions. He studied law at Octavius, in the
- office of Judge Schermerhorn, and in a little time was not only that
- distinguished man’s partner, but distinctly the more important figure in
- the firm. At the age of twenty-five he was sent to the Assembly. The next
- year they made him District Attorney, and it was quite understood that it
- rested with him whether he should be sent to Congress later on, or be
- presented by the Dearborn County bar for the next vacancy on the Supreme
- Court bench.
- </p>
- <p>
- At this point in his brilliant career he married Miss Serena Wadsworth, of
- Wadsworth’s Falls. The wedding was one of the most imposing social events
- the county had known, so it was said, since the visit of Lafayette. The
- Wadsworths were an older family, even, than the Fairchilds, and infinitely
- more fastidious and refined. The daughters of the household, indeed,
- carried their refinement to such a pitch that they lived an almost
- solitary life, and grew to the parlous verge of old-maidhood simply
- because there was nobody good enough to marry them. Alva Turnbull was,
- however, up to the standard. It could not be said, of course, that his
- home surroundings quite matched those of his bride; but, on the other
- hand, she was nearly two years his senior, and this was held to make
- matters about even.
- </p>
- <p>
- In a year or so came the war, and nowhere in the North did patriotic
- excitement run higher than in this old abolition stronghold of upper
- Dearborn. Public meetings were held, and nearly a whole regiment was
- raised in Octavius and the surrounding towns alone. Alva Turnbull made the
- most stirring and important speech at the first big gathering, and sent a
- thrill through the whole country-side by claiming the privilege of heading
- the list of volunteers. He was made a captain by general acclaim, and went
- off with his company in time to get chased from the field of Bull Run.
- When he came home on a furlough in 1863 he was a major, and later on he
- rose to be lieutenant-colonel. We understood vaguely that he might have
- climbed vastly higher in promotion but for the fact that he was too moral
- and conscientious to get on very well with his immediate superior, General
- Boyce, of Thessaly, who was notoriously a drinking man.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was glory enough to have him at the farm, on that visit of his, even as
- a major. His old parents literally abased themselves at his feet, quite
- tremulous in their awed pride at his greatness. It made it almost too much
- to have Serena there also, this fair, thin-faced, prim-spoken daughter of
- the Wadsworths, and actually to call her by her first name. It was haying
- time, I remember, but the hired men that year did not eat their meals with
- the family, and there was even a question whether Marcellus and I were
- socially advanced enough to come to the table, where Serena and her
- husband were feeding themselves in state with a novel kind of silver
- implement called a four-tined fork. If Em hadn’t put her foot down, out to
- the kitchen we should both have gone, I fancy. As it was, we sat
- decorously at the far end of the table, and asked with great politeness to
- have things passed to us, which by standing up we could have reached as
- well as not. It was slow, but it made us feel immensely respectable,
- almost as if we had been born Wadsworths ourselves.
- </p>
- <p>
- We agreed that Serena was “stuck up,” and Mar-cellus reported Aunt Em as
- feeling that her bringing along with her a nursemaid to be waited on hand
- and foot, just to take care of a baby, was an imposition bordering upon
- the intolerable. He said that that was the sort of thing the English did
- until George Washington rose and drove them out. But we both felt that
- Alva was splendid.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was a fine creature physically—taller even than old Arphaxed,
- with huge square shoulders and a mighty frame. I could recall him as
- without whiskers, but now he had a waving lustrous brown beard, the
- longest and biggest I ever saw. He didn’t pay much attention to us boys,
- it was true; but he was affable when we came in his way, and he gave Myron
- and Warren each a dollar bill when they went to Octavius to see the Fourth
- of July doings. In the evening some of the more important neighbors would
- drop in, and then Alva would talk about the war, and patriotism, and
- saving the Union, till it was like listening to Congress itself. He had a
- rich, big voice which filled the whole room, so that the hired men could
- hear every word out in the kitchen; but it was even more affecting to see
- him walking with his father down under the poplars, with his hands making
- orator’s gestures as he spoke, and old Arphaxed looking at him and
- listening with shining eyes.
- </p>
- <p>
- Well, then, he and his wife went away to visit her folks, and then we
- heard he had left to join his regiment. From time to time he wrote to his
- father—letters full of high and loyal sentiments, which were printed
- next week in the Octavius <i>Transcript</i>, and the week after in the
- Thessaly <i>Banner of Liberty</i>. Whenever any of us thought about the
- war—and who thought much of anything else?—it was always with
- Alva as the predominant figure in every picture.
- </p>
- <p>
- Sometimes the arrival of a letter for Aunt Em, or a chance remark about a
- broken chair or a clock hopelessly out of kilter, would recall for the
- moment the fact that Abel Jones was also at the seat of war. He had
- enlisted on that very night when Alva headed the roll of honor, and he
- marched away in Alva’s company. Somehow he got no promotion, but remained
- in the ranks. Not even the members of the family were shown the letters
- Aunt Em received, much less the printers of the newspapers. They were
- indeed poor misspelled scrawls, about which no one displayed any interest
- or questioned Aunt Em. Even Marcellus rarely spoke of his father, and
- seemed to share to the full the family’s concentration of thought upon
- Alva.
- </p>
- <p>
- Thus matters stood when spring began to play at being summer in the year
- of ‘64. The birds came and the trees burst forth into green, the sun grew
- hotter and the days longer, the strawberries hidden under the big leaves
- in our yard started into shape, where the blossoms had been, quite in the
- ordinary, annual way, with us up North. But down where that dread thing
- they called “The War” was going on, this coming of warm weather meant more
- awful massacre, more tortured hearts, and desolated homes, than ever
- before. I can’t be at all sure how much later reading and associations
- have helped out and patched up what seem to be my boyish recollections of
- this period; but it is, at all events, much clearer in my mind than are
- the occurrences of the week before last.
- </p>
- <p>
- We heard a good deal about how deep the mud was in Virginia that spring.
- All the photographs and tin-types of officers which found their way to
- relatives at home, now, showed them in boots that came up to their thighs.
- Everybody understood that as soon as this mud dried up a little, there was
- to be most terrific doings. The two great lines of armies lay scowling at
- each other, still on that blood-soaked fighting ground between Washington
- and Richmond where they were three years before. Only now things were to
- go differently. A new general was at the head of affairs, and he was going
- in, with jaws set and nerves of steel, to smash, kill, burn, annihilate,
- sparing nothing, looking not to right or left, till the red road had been
- hewed through to Richmond. In the first week of May this thing began—a
- push forward all along the line—and the North, with scared eyes and
- fluttering heart, held its breath.
- </p>
- <p>
- My chief personal recollection of these historic forty days is that one
- morning I was awakened early by a noise in my bedroom, and saw my mother
- looking over the contents of the big chest of drawers which stood against
- the wall. She was getting out some black articles of apparel. When she
- discovered that I was awake, she told me in a low voice that my Uncle Alva
- had been killed. Then a few weeks later my school closed, and I was packed
- off to the farm for the vacation. It will be better to tell what had
- happened as I learned it there from Marcellus and the others.
- </p>
- <p>
- Along about the middle of May, the weekly paper came up from Octavius, and
- old Arphaxed Turnbull, as was his wont, read it over out on the piazza
- before supper. Presently he called his wife to him, and showed her
- something in it. Martha went out into the kitchen, where Aunt Em was
- getting the meal ready, and told her, as gently as she could, that there
- was very bad news for her; in fact, her husband, Abel Jones, had been
- killed in the first day’s battle in the Wilderness, something like a week
- before. Aunt Em said she didn’t believe it, and Martha brought in the
- paper and pointed out the fatal line to her. It was not quite clear
- whether this convinced Aunt Em or not. She finished getting supper, and
- sat silently through the meal, afterwards, but she went upstairs to her
- room before family prayers. The next day she was about as usual, doing the
- work and saying nothing. Marcellus told me that to the best of his belief
- no one had said anything to her on the subject. The old people were a
- shade more ceremonious in their manner toward her, and “the boys” and the
- hired men were on the lookout to bring in water for her from the well, and
- to spare her as much as possible in the routine of chores, but no one
- talked about Jones. Aunt Em did not put on mourning. She made a black
- necktie for Marcellus to wear to church, but stayed away from meeting
- herself.
- </p>
- <p>
- A little more than a fortnight afterwards, Myron was walking down the road
- from the meadows one afternoon, when he saw a man on horseback coming up
- from the poplars, galloping like mad in a cloud of dust. The two met at
- the gate. The man was one of the hired helps of the Wadsworths, and he had
- ridden as hard as he could pelt from the Falls, fifteen miles away, with a
- message, which now he gave Myron to read. Both man and beast dripped
- sweat, and trembled with fatigued excitement. The youngster eyed them, and
- then gazed meditatively at the sealed envelope in his hand.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I s’pose you know what’s inside?” he asked, looking up at last.
- </p>
- <p>
- The man in the saddle nodded, with a tell-tale look on his face, and
- breathing heavily.
- </p>
- <p>
- Myron handed the letter back, and pushed the gate open. “You’d better go
- up and give it to father yourself,” he said. “I ain’t got the heart to
- face him—jest now, at any rate.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Marcellus was fishing that afternoon, over in the creek which ran through
- the woods. Just as at last he was making up his mind that it must be about
- time to go after the cows, he saw Myron sitting on a log beside the forest
- path, whittling mechanically, and staring at the foliage before him, in an
- obvious brown study. Marcellus went up to him, and had to speak twice
- before Myron turned his head and looked up.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh! it’s you, eh, Bubb?” he remarked dreamily, and began gazing once more
- into the thicket.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What’s the matter?” asked the puzzled boy.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I guess Alvy’s dead,” replied Myron. To the lad’s comments and questions
- he made small answer. “No,” he said at last, “I don’t feel much like goin’
- home jest now. Lea’ me alone here; I’ll prob’ly turn up later on.” And
- Marcellus went alone to the pasture, and thence, at the tail of his bovine
- procession, home.
- </p>
- <p>
- When he arrived he regretted not having remained with Myron in the woods.
- It was like coming into something which was prison, hospital, and tomb in
- one. The household was paralyzed with horror and fright. Martha had gone
- to bed, or rather had been put there by Em, and all through the night,
- when he woke up, he heard her broken and hysterical voice in moans and
- screams. The men had hitched up the grays, and Arphaxed Turnbull was
- getting into the buggy to drive to Octavius for news when the boy came up.
- He looked twenty years older than he had at noon—all at once turned
- into a chalkfaced, trembling, infirm old man—and could hardly see to
- put his foot on the carriage-step. His son Warren had offered to go with
- him, and had been rebuffed almost with fierceness. Warren and the others
- silently bowed their heads before this mood; instinct told them that
- nothing but Arphaxed’s show of temper held him from collapse—from
- falling at their feet and grovelling on the grass with cries and sobs of
- anguish, perhaps even dying in a fit. After he had driven off they forbore
- to talk to one another, but went about a chalkfaced, trembling, infirm old
- man—and could hardly see to put his foot on the carriage-step. His
- son Warren had offered to go with him, and had been rebuffed almost with
- fierceness. Warren and the others silently bowed their heads before this
- mood; instinct told them that nothing but Arphaxed’s show of temper held
- him from collapse—from falling at their feet and grovelling on the
- grass with cries and sobs of anguish, perhaps even dying in a fit. After
- he had driven off they forbore to talk to one another, but went about
- noiselessly with drooping chins and knotted brows.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It jest took the tuck out of everything,” said Marcellus, relating these
- tragic events to me. There was not much else to tell. Martha had had what
- they call brain fever, and had emerged from this some weeks afterward a
- pallid and dim-eyed ghost of her former self, sitting for hours together
- in her rocking-chair in the unused parlor, her hands idly in her lap, her
- poor thoughts glued ceaselessly to that vague, far-off Virginia which
- folks told about as hot and sunny, but which her mind’s eye saw under the
- gloom of an endless and dreadful night. Arphaxed had gone South, still
- defiantly alone, to bring back the body of his boy. An acquaintance wrote
- to them of his being down sick in Washington, prostrated by the heat and
- strange water; but even from his sick-bed he had sent on orders to an
- undertaking firm out at the front, along with a hundred dollars, their
- price in advance for embalming. Then, recovering, he had himself pushed
- down to headquarters, or as near them as civilians might approach, only to
- learn that he had passed the precious freight on the way. He posted back
- again, besieging the railroad officials at every point with inquiries,
- scolding, arguing, beseeching in turn, until at last he overtook his quest
- at Juno Mills Junction, only a score of miles from home.
- </p>
- <p>
- Then only he wrote, telling people his plans. He came first to Octavius,
- where a funeral service was held in the forenoon, with military honors,
- the Wadsworths as the principal mourners, and a memorable turnout of
- distinguished citizens. The town-hall was draped with mourning, and so was
- Alva’s pew in the Episcopal Church, which he had deserted his ancestral
- Methodism to join after his marriage. Old Arphaxed listened to the novel
- burial service of his son’s communion, and watched the clergyman in his
- curious white and black vestments, with sombre pride. He himself needed
- and desired only a plain and homely religion, but it was fitting that his
- boy should have organ music and flowers and a ritual.
- </p>
- <p>
- Dana Pillsbury had arrived in town early in the morning with the grays,
- and a neighbor’s boy had brought in the buggy. Immediately after dinner
- Arphaxed had gathered up Alva’s widow and little daughter, and started the
- funeral cortège upon its final homeward stage.
- </p>
- <p>
- And so I saw them arrive on that July afternoon.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2H_4_0027" id="link2H_4_0027"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- III
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">F</span>or so good and
- patient a man, Si Hummaston bore himself rather vehemently during the
- milking. It was hotter in the barn than it was outside in the sun, and the
- stifling air swarmed with flies, which seemed to follow Si perversely from
- stall to stall and settle on his cow. One beast put her hoof square in his
- pail, and another refused altogether to “give down,” while the rest kept
- up a tireless slapping and swishing of their tails very hard to bear, even
- if one had the help of profanity. Marcellus and I listened carefully to
- hear him at last provoked to an oath, but the worst thing he uttered, even
- when the cow stepped in the milk, was “Dum your buttons!” which Marcellus
- said might conceivably be investigated by a church committee, but was
- hardly out-and-out swearing.
- </p>
- <p>
- I remember Si’s groans and objurgations, his querulous “Hyst there, will
- ye!” his hypocritical “So-boss! So-boss!” his despondent “They never will
- give down for me!” because presently there was crossed upon this woof of
- peevish impatience the web of a curious conversation.
- </p>
- <p>
- Si had been so slow in his headway against flapping tails and restive
- hoofs that, before he had got up to the end of the row, Aunt Em had
- finished her side. She brought over her stool and pail, and seated herself
- at the next cow to Hummaston’s. For a little, one heard only the resonant
- din of the stout streams against the tin; then, as the bottom was covered,
- there came the ploughing plash of milk on milk, and Si could hear himself
- talk.
- </p>
- <p>
- “S’pose you know S’reny’s come, ’long with your father,” he
- remarked, ingratiatingly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I saw ’em drive in,” replied Em.
- </p>
- <p>
- “<i>Whoa! Hyst there! Hole still, can’t ye?</i> I didn’t know if you quite
- made out who she was, you was scootin’ ’long so fast. They ain’t—<i>Whoa
- there!</i>—they ain’t nothin’ the matter ’twixt you and her,
- is they?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t know as there is,” said Em, curtly. “The world’s big enough for
- both of us—we ain’t no call to bunk into each other.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, of course—<i>Now you stop it!</i>—but it looked kind o’
- curious to me, your pikin’ off like that, without waitin’ to say
- ‘How-d’-do?’ Of course, I never had no relation by marriage that was
- stuck-up at all, or looked down on me—<i>Stiddy there now!</i>—but
- I guess I can reelize pretty much how you feel about it. I’m a good deal
- of a hand at that. It’s what they call imagination. It’s a gift, you know,
- like good looks, or preachin’, or the knack o’ makin’ money. But you can’t
- help what you’re born with, can you? I’d been a heap better off if my
- gift’d be’n in some other direction; but, as I tell ’em, it ain’t
- my fault. And my imagination—<i>Hi, there! git over, will ye?</i>—it’s
- downright cur’ous sometimes, how it works. Now I could tell, you see, that
- you ‘n’ S’reny didn’t pull together. I s’pose she never writ a line to
- you, when your husband was killed?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why should she?” demanded Em. “We never did correspond. What’d be the
- sense of beginning then? She minds her affairs, ’n’ I mind mine.
- Who wanted her to write?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, of course not,” said Si lightly. “Prob’ly you’ll get along better
- together, though, now that you’ll see more of one another. I s’pose
- S’reny’s figurin’ on stayin’ here right along now, her ’n’ her
- little girl. Well, it’ll be nice for the old folks to have somebody
- they’re fond of. They jest worshipped the ground Alvy walked on—and
- I s’pose they won’t be anything in this wide world too good for that
- little girl of his. Le’s see, she must be comin’ on three now, ain’t she?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t know anything about her!” snapped Aunt Em with emphasis.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Of course, it’s natural the old folks should feel so—she bein’
- Alvy’s child. I hain’t noticed anything special, but does it—<i>Well,
- I swan! Hyst there!</i>—does it seem to you that they’re as good to
- Marcellus, quite, as they used to be? I don’t hear ’em sayin’
- nothin’ about his goin’ to school next winter.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Aunt Em said nothing, too, but milked doggedly on. Si told her about the
- thickness and profusion of Serena’s mourning, guardedly hinting at the
- injustice done him by not allowing him to go to the red barn with the
- others, speculated on the likelihood of the Wadsworths’ contributing to
- their daughter’s support, and generally exhibited his interest in the
- family through a monologue which finished only with the milking; but Aunt
- Em made no response whatever.
- </p>
- <p>
- When the last pails had been emptied into the big cans at the door—Marcellus
- and I had let the cows out one by one into the yard, as their individual
- share in the milking ended—Si and Em saw old Arphaxed wending his
- way across from the house to the red barn. He appeared more bent than
- ever, but he walked with a slowness which seemed born of reluctance even
- more than of infirmity.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, now,” mused Si, aloud, “Brother Turnbull an’ me’s be’n friends for
- a good long spell. I don’t believe he’d be mad if I cut over now to the
- red barn too, seein’ the milkin’s all out of the way. Of course I don’t
- want to do what ain’t right—what d’you think now, Em, honest? Think
- it ’ud rile him?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I don’t know anything about it!” my aunt replied, with increased vigor of
- emphasis. “But for the land sake go somewhere! Don’t hang around botherin’
- me. I got enough else to think of besides your everlasting cackle.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Thus rebuffed, Si meandered sadly into the cow-yard, shaking his head as
- he came. Seeing us seated on an upturned plough, over by the fence, from
- which point we had a perfect view of the red barn, he sauntered toward us,
- and, halting at our side, looked to see if there was room enough for him
- to sit also. But Marcellus, in quite a casual way, remarked, “Oh! wheeled
- the milk over to the house, already, Si?” and at this the doleful man
- lounged off again in new despondency, got out the wheelbarrow, and, with
- ostentatious groans of travail hoisted a can upon it and started off.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He’s takin’ advantage of Arphaxed’s being so worked up to play ‘ole
- soldier’ on him,” said Mar-cellus. “All of us have to stir him up the
- whole time to keep him from takin’ root somewhere. I told him this
- afternoon ’t if there had to be any settin’ around under the bushes
- an’ cryin’, the fam’ly ’ud do it.”
- </p>
- <p>
- We talked in hushed tones as we sat there watching the shut doors of the
- red barn, in boyish conjecture about what was going on behind them. I
- recall much of this talk with curious distinctness, but candidly it jars
- now upon my maturer nerves. The individual man looks back upon his boyhood
- with much the same amused amazement that the race feels in contemplating
- the memorials of its own cave-dwelling or bronze period. What strange
- savages we were! In those days Marcellus and I used to find our very
- highest delight in getting off on Thursdays, and going over to Dave
- Bushnell’s slaughter-house, to witness with stony hearts, and from as
- close a coign of vantage as might be, the slaying of some score of
- barnyard animals—the very thought of which now revolts our grown-up
- minds. In the same way we sat there on the plough, and criticised old
- Arphaxed’s meanness in excluding us from the red barn, where the men-folks
- were coming in final contact with the “pride of the family.” Some of the
- cows wandering toward us began to “moo” with impatience for the pasture,
- but Mar-cellus said there was no hurry.
- </p>
- <p>
- All at once we discovered that Aunt Em was standing a few yards away from
- us, on the other side of the fence. We could see her from where we sat by
- only turning a little—a motionless, stout, upright figure, with a
- pail in her hand, and a sternly impassive look on her face. She, too, had
- her gaze fixed upon the red barn, and, though the declining sun was full
- in her eyes, seemed incapable of blinking, but just stared coldly,
- straight ahead.
- </p>
- <p>
- Suddenly an unaccustomed voice fell upon our ears. Turning, we saw that a
- black-robed woman, with a black wrap of some sort about her head, had come
- up to where Aunt Em stood, and was at her shoulder. Marcellus nudged me,
- and whispered, “It’s S’reny. Look out for squalls!” And then we listened
- in silence.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Won’t you speak to me at all, Emmeline?” we heard this new voice say.
- </p>
- <p>
- Aunt Em’s face, sharply outlined in profile against the sky, never moved.
- Her lips were pressed into a single line, and she kept her eyes on the
- barn.
- </p>
- <p>
- “If there’s anything I’ve done, tell me,” pursued the other. “In such an
- hour as this—when both our hearts are bleeding so, and—and
- every breath we draw is like a curse upon us—it doesn’t seem a fit
- time for us—for us to—” The voice faltered and broke, leaving
- the speech unfinished.
- </p>
- <p>
- Aunt Em kept silence so long that we fancied this appeal, too, had failed.
- Then abruptly, and without moving her head, she dropped a few ungracious
- words as it were over her shoulder. “If I had anything special to say,
- most likely I’d say it,” she remarked.
- </p>
- <p>
- We could hear the sigh that Serena drew. She lifted her shawled head, and
- for a moment seemed as if about to turn. Then she changed her mind,
- apparently, for she took a step nearer to the other.
- </p>
- <p>
- “See here, Emmeline,” she said, in a more confident tone. “Nobody in the
- world knows better than I do how thoroughly good a woman you are, how you
- have done your duty, and more than your duty, by your parents and your
- brothers, and your little step-son. You have never spared yourself for
- them, day or night. I have said often to—to him who has gone—that
- I didn’t believe there was anywhere on earth a worthier or more devoted
- woman than you, his sister. And—now that he is gone—and we are
- both more sisters than ever in affliction—why in Heaven’s name
- should you behave like this to me?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Aunt Em spoke more readily this time. “I don’t know as I’ve done anything
- to you,” she said in defence. “I’ve just let you alone, that’s all. An’
- that’s doin’ as I’d like to be done by.” Still she did not turn her head,
- or lift her steady gaze from those closed doors.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Don’t let us split words!” entreated the other, venturing a thin, white
- hand upon Aunt Em’s shoulder. “That isn’t the way we two ought to stand to
- each other. Why, you were friendly enough when I was here before. Can’t it
- be the same again? What has happened to change it? Only to-day, on our way
- up here, I was speaking to your father about you, and my deep sympathy for
- you, and—”
- </p>
- <p>
- Aunt Em wheeled like a flash. “Yes, ’n’ what did <i>he</i> say?
- Come, don’t make up anything! Out with it! What did he say?” She shook off
- the hand on her shoulder as she spoke.
- </p>
- <p>
- Gesture and voice and frowning vigor of mien were all so imperative and
- rough that they seemed to bewilder Serena. She, too, had turned now, so
- that I could see her wan and delicate face, framed in the laced festoons
- of black, like the fabulous countenance of “The Lady Iñez” in my mother’s
- “Album of Beauty.” She bent her brows in hurried thought, and began
- stammering, “Well, he said—Let’s see—he said—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, yes!” broke in Aunt Em, with raucous irony, “I know well enough what
- he said! He said I was a good worker—that they’d never had to have a
- hired girl since I was big enough to wag a churn dash, an’ they wouldn’t
- known what to do without me. I know all that; I’ve heard it on an’ off for
- twenty years. What I’d like to hear is, did he tell you that he went down
- South to bring back <i>your</i> husband, an’ that he never so much as give
- a thought to fetchin’ <i>my</i> husband, who was just as good a soldier
- and died just as bravely as yours did? I’d like to know—did he tell
- you that?”
- </p>
- <p>
- What could Serena do but shake her head, and bow it in silence before this
- bitter gale of words?
- </p>
- <p>
- “An’ tell me this, too,” Aunt Em went on, lifting her harsh voice
- mercilessly, “when you was settin’ there in church this forenoon, with the
- soldiers out, an’ the bells tollin’ an’ all that—did he say, ‘This
- is some for Alvy, an’ some for Abel, who went to the war together, an’ was
- killed together, or within a month o’ one another?’ Did he say that, or
- look for one solitary minute as if he thought it? I’ll bet he didn’t!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Serena’s head sank lower still, and she put up, in a blinded sort of a
- way, a little white handkerchief to her eyes. “But why blame <i>me?</i>”
- she asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- Aunt Em heard her own voice so seldom that the sound of it now seemed to
- intoxicate her. “No!” she shouted. “It’s like the Bible. One was taken an’
- the other left. It was always Alvy this, an’ Alvy that, nothin’ for any
- one but Alvy. That was all right; nobody complained: prob’ly he deserved
- it all; at any rate, we didn’t begrudge him any of it, while he was
- livin’. But there ought to be a limit somewhere. When a man’s dead, he’s
- pretty much about on an equality with other dead men, one would think. But
- it ain’t so. One man get’s hunted after when he’s shot, an’ there’s a
- hundred dollars for embalmin’ him an’ a journey after him, an’ bringin’
- him home, an’ two big funerals, an’ crape for his widow that’d stand by
- itself. The <i>other</i> man—he can lay where he fell! Them that’s
- lookin’ for the first one are right close by—it ain’t more’n a few
- miles from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, so Hi Tuckerman tells me, an’ he
- was all over the ground two years ago—but nobody looks for this
- other man! Oh, no! Nobody so much as remembers to think of him! They ain’t
- no hundred dollars, no, not so much as fifty cents, for embalmin’ <i>him!</i>
- No—<i>he</i> could be shovelled in anywhere, or maybe burned up when
- the woods got on fire that night, the night of the sixth. They ain’t no
- funeral for him—no bells tolled—unless it may be a cowbell up
- in the pasture that he hammered out himself. An’ <i>his</i> widow can go
- around, week days an’ Sundays, in her old calico dresses. Nobody ever
- mentions the word ‘mournin’ crape’ to her, or asks her if she’d like to
- put on black. I s’pose they thought if they gave me the money for some
- mournin’ I’d buy <i>candy</i> with it instead!”
- </p>
- <p>
- With this climax of flaming sarcasm Aunt Em stopped, her eyes aglow, her
- thick breast heaving in a flurry of breathlessness. She had never talked
- so much or so fast before in her life. She swung the empty tin-pail now
- defiantly at her side to hide the fact that her arms were shaking with
- excitement. Every instant it looked as if she was going to begin again.
- </p>
- <p>
- Serena had taken the handkerchief down from her eyes and held her arms
- stiff and straight by her side. Her chin seemed to have grown longer or to
- be thrust forward more. When she spoke it was in a colder voice—almost
- mincing in the way it cut off the words.
- </p>
- <p>
- “All this is not my doing,” she said. “I am to blame for nothing of it. As
- I tried to tell you, I sympathize deeply with your grief. But grief ought
- to make people at least fair, even if it cannot make them gentle and
- soften their hearts. I shall trouble you with no more offers of
- friendship. I—I think I will go back to the house now—to my
- little girl.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Even as she spoke, there came from the direction of the red barn a shrill,
- creaking noise which we all knew. At the sound Marcellus and I stood up,
- and Serena forgot her intention to go away. The barn doors, yelping as
- they moved on their dry rollers, had been pushed wide open.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2H_4_0028" id="link2H_4_0028"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- IV
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>he first one to
- emerge from the barn was Hi Tuckerman. He started to make for the house,
- but, when he caught sight of our group, came running toward us at the top
- of his speed, uttering incoherent shouts as he advanced, and waving his
- arms excitedly. It was apparent that something out of the ordinary had
- happened.
- </p>
- <p>
- We were but little the wiser as to this something, when Hi had come to a
- halt before us, and was pouring out a volley of explanations, accompanied
- by earnest grimaces and strenuous gestures. Even Marcellus could make next
- to nothing of what he was trying to convey; but Aunt Em, strangely enough,
- seemed to understand him. Still slightly trembling, and with a little
- occasional catch in her breath, she bent an intent scrutiny upon Hi, and
- nodded comprehendingly from time to time, with encouraging exclamations,
- “He did, eh!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Is that so?” and “I expected as much.” Listening and watching, I formed
- the uncharitable conviction that she did not really understand Hi at all,
- but was only pretending to do so in order further to harrow Serena’s
- feelings.
- </p>
- <p>
- Doubtless I was wrong, for presently she turned, with an effort, to her
- sister-in-law, and remarked, “P’rhaps you don’t quite follow what he’s
- say-in’?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Not a word!” said Serena, eagerly. “Tell me, please, Emmeline!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Aunt Em seemed to hesitate. “He was shot through the mouth at Gaines’s
- Mills, you know—that’s right near Cold Harbor and—the
- Wilderness,” she said, obviously making talk.
- </p>
- <p>
- “That isn’t what he’s saying,” broke in Serena. “What <i>is</i> it,
- Emmeline?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well,” rejoined the other, after an instant’s pause, “if you want to know—he
- says that it ain’t Alvy at all that they’ve got there in the barn.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Serena turned swiftly, so that we could not see her face.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He says it’s some strange man,” continued Em, “a yaller-headed man, all
- packed an’ stuffed with charcoal, so’t his own mother wouldn’t know him.
- Who it is nobody knows, but it ain’t Alvy.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “They’re a pack of robbers ’n’ swindlers!” cried old Arphaxed,
- shaking his long gray beard with wrath.
- </p>
- <p>
- He had come up without our noticing his approach, so rapt had been our
- absorption in the strange discovery reported by Hi Tuckerman. Behind him
- straggled the boys and the hired men, whom Si Hummaston had scurried
- across from the house to join. No one said anything now, but tacitly
- deferred to the old man’s principal right to speak. It was a relief to
- hear that terrible silence of his broken at all.
- </p>
- <p>
- “They ought to all be hung!” he cried, in a voice to which the excess of
- passion over physical strength gave a melancholy quaver. “I paid ’em
- what they asked—they took a hundred dollars o’ my money—an’
- they ain’t sent me <i>him</i> at all! There I went, at my age, all through
- the Wilderness, almost clear to Cold Harbor, an’ that, too, gittin’ up
- from a sick bed in Washington, and then huntin’ for the box at New York
- an’ Albany, an’ all the way back, an’ holdin’ a funeral over it only this
- very day—an’ here it ain’t <i>him</i> at all! I’ll have the law on
- ‘em though, if it costs the last cent I’ve got in the world!”
- </p>
- <p>
- Poor old man! These weeks of crushing grief and strain had fairly broken
- him down. We listened to his fierce outpourings with sympathetic silence,
- almost thankful that he had left strength and vitality enough still to get
- angry and shout. He had been always a hard and gusty man; we felt by
- instinct, I suppose, that his best chance of weathering this terrible
- month of calamity was to batter his way furiously through it, in a rage
- with everything and everybody.
- </p>
- <p>
- “If there’s any justice in the land,” put in Si Hummaston, “you’d ought to
- get your hundred dollars back. I shouldn’t wonder if you could, too, if
- you sued ’em afore a Jestice that was a friend of yours.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, the man’s a fool!” burst forth Arphaxed, turning toward him with a
- snort. “I don’t want the hundred dollars—I wouldn’t’a’ begrudged a
- thousand—if only they’d dealt honestly by me. I paid ’em
- their own figure, without beatin’ ’em down a penny. If it’d be’n
- double, I’d ’a’ paid it. What <i>I</i> wanted was <i>my boy!</i> It
- ain’t so much their cheatin’ <i>me</i> I mind, either, if it ’d
- be’n about anything else. But to think of Alvy—<i>my boy</i>—after
- all the trouble I took, an’ the journey, an’ my sickness there among
- strangers—to think that after it all he’s buried down there, no one
- knows where, p’raps in some trench with private soldiers, shovelled in
- anyhow—oh-h! they ought to be hung!”
- </p>
- <p>
- The two women had stood motionless, with their gaze on the grass; Aunt Em
- lifted her head at this.
- </p>
- <p>
- “If a place is good enough for private soldiers to be buried in,” she
- said, vehemently, “it’s good enough for the best man in the army. On
- Resurrection Day, do you think them with shoulder-straps ’ll be
- called fust an’ given all the front places? I reckon the men that carried
- a musket are every whit as good, there in the trench, as them that wore
- swords. They gave their lives as much as the others did, an’ the best man
- that ever stepped couldn’t do no more.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Old Arphaxed bent upon her a long look, which had in it much surprise and
- some elements of menace. Reflection seemed, however, to make him think
- better of an attack on Aunt Em. He went on, instead, with rambling
- exclamations to his auditors at large.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Makin’ me the butt of the whole county!” he cried. “There was that
- funeral to-day—with a parade an’ a choir of music an’ so on: an’ now
- it’ll come out in the papers that it wasn’t Alvy at all I brought back
- with me, but only some perfect stranger—by what you can make out
- from his clothes, not even an officer at all. I tell you the war’s a
- jedgment on this country for its wickedness, for its cheatin’ an’ robbin’
- of honest men! They wa’n’t no sense in that battle at Cold Harbor anyway—everybody
- admits that! It was murder an’ massacre in cold blood—fifty thousand
- men mowed down, an’ nothin’ gained by it! An’ then not even to git my
- boy’s dead body back! I say hangin’s too good for ’em!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, father,” said Myron, soothingly; “but do you stick to what you said
- about the—the box? Wouldn’t it look better—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “<i>No!</i>” shouted Arphaxed, with emphasis. “Let Dana do what I told him—take
- it down this very night to the poor-master, an’ let him bury it where he
- likes. It’s no affair of mine. I wash my hands of it. There won’t be no
- funeral held here!”
- </p>
- <p>
- It was then that Serena spoke. Strangely enough, old Arphaxed had not
- seemed to notice her presence in our group, and his jaw visibly dropped as
- he beheld her now standing before him. He made a gesture signifying his
- disturbance at finding her among his hearers, and would have spoken, but
- she held up her hand.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, I heard it all,” she said, in answer to his deprecatory movement. “I
- am glad I did. It has given me time to get over the shock of learning—our
- mistake—and it gives me the chance now to say something which I—I
- feel keenly. The poor man you have brought home was, you say, a private
- soldier. Well, isn’t this a good time to remember that there was a private
- soldier who went out from this farm—belonging right to this family—and
- who, as a private, laid down his life as nobly as General Sedgwick or
- General Wadsworth, or even our dear Alva, or any one else? I never met
- Emmeline’s husband, but Alva liked him, and spoke to me often of him. Men
- who fall in the ranks don’t get identified, or brought home, but they
- deserve funerals as much as the others—just as much. Now, this is my
- idea: let us feel that the mistake which has brought this poor stranger to
- us is God’s way of giving us a chance to remember and do honor to Abel
- Jones. Let him be buried in the family lot up yonder, where we had thought
- to lay Alva, and let us do it reverently, in the name of Emmeline’s
- husband, and of all others who have fought and died for our country, and
- with sympathy in our hearts for the women who, somewhere in the North, are
- mourning, just as we mourn here, for the stranger there in the red barn.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Arphaxed had watched her intently. He nodded now, and blinked at the
- moisture gathering in his old eyes. “I could e’en a’most ’a’
- thought it was Alvy talkin’,” was what he said. Then he turned abruptly,
- but we all knew, without further words, that what Serena had suggested was
- to be done.
- </p>
- <p>
- The men-folk, wondering doubtless much among themselves, moved slowly off
- toward the house or the cow-barns, leaving the two women alone. A minute
- of silence passed before we saw Serena creep gently up to Aunt Em’s side,
- and lay the thin white hand again upon her shoulder. This time it was not
- shaken off, but stretched itself forward, little by little, until its palm
- rested against Aunt Em’s further cheek. We heard the tin-pail fall
- resonantly against the stones under the rail-fence, and there was a
- confused movement as if the two women were somehow melting into one.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Come on, Sid!” said Marcellus Jones to me; “let’s start them cows along.
- If there’s anything I hate to see it’s women cryin’ on each other’s
- necks.”
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2H_4_0029" id="link2H_4_0029"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- THE EVE OF THE FOURTH
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t was well on
- toward evening before this Third of July all at once made itself
- gloriously different from other days in my mind.
- </p>
- <p>
- There was a very long afternoon, I remember, hot and overcast, with
- continual threats of rain, which never came to anything. The other boys
- were too excited about the morrow to care for present play. They sat
- instead along the edge of the broad platform-stoop in front of Delos
- Ingersoll’s grocery-store, their brown feet swinging at varying heights
- above the sidewalk, and bragged about the manner in which they
- contemplated celebrating the anniversary of their Independence. Most of
- the elder lads were very independent indeed; they were already secure in
- the parental permission to stay up all night, so that the Fourth might be
- ushered in with its full quota of ceremonial. The smaller urchins
- pretended that they also had this permission, or were sure of getting it.
- Little Denny Cregan attracted admiring attention by vowing that he should
- remain out, even if his father chased him with a policeman all around the
- ward, and he had to go and live in a cave in the gulf until he was grown
- up.
- </p>
- <p>
- My inferiority to these companions of mine depressed me. They were allowed
- to go without shoes and stockings; they wore loose and comfortable old
- clothes, and were under no responsibility to keep them dry or clean or
- whole; they had their pockets literally bulging now with all sorts of
- portentous engines of noise and racket—huge brown “double-enders,”
- bound with waxed cord; long, slim, vicious-looking “nigger-chasers;” big
- “Union torpedoes,” covered with clay, which made a report like a
- horse-pistol, and were invaluable for frightening farmers’ horses; and so
- on through an extended catalogue of recondite and sinister explosives upon
- which I looked with awe, as their owners from time to time exhibited them
- with the proud simplicity of those accustomed to greatness. Several of
- these boys also possessed toy cannons, which would be brought forth at
- twilight. They spoke firmly of ramming them to the muzzle with grass, to
- produce a greater noise—even if it burst them and killed everybody.
- </p>
- <p>
- By comparison, my lot was one of abasement. I was a solitary child, and a
- victim to conventions. A blue necktie was daily pinned under my Byron
- collar, and there were gilt buttons on my zouave jacket. When we were away
- in the pasture playground near the gulf, and I ventured to take off my
- foot-gear, every dry old thistle-point in the whole territory seemed to
- arrange itself to be stepped upon by my whitened and tender soles. I could
- not swim; so, while my lithe bold comrades dived out of sight under the
- deep water, and darted about chasing one another far beyond their depth, I
- paddled ignobly around the “baby-hole” close to the bank, in the warm and
- muddy shallows.
- </p>
- <p>
- Especially apparent was my state of humiliation on this July afternoon. I
- had no “double-enders,” nor might hope for any. The mere thought of a
- private cannon seemed monstrous and unnatural to me. By some unknown
- process of reasoning my mother had years before reached the theory that a
- good boy ought to have two ten-cent packs of small fire-crackers on the
- Fourth of July. Four or five succeeding anniversaries had hardened this
- theory into an orthodox tenet of faith, with all its observances rigidly
- fixed. The fire-crackers were bought for me overnight, and placed on the
- hall table. Beside them lay a long rod of punk. When I hastened down and
- out in the morning, with these ceremonial implements in my hands, the
- hired girl would give me, in an old kettle, some embers from the wood-fire
- in the summer kitchen. Thus furnished, I went into the front yard, and in
- solemn solitude fired off these crackers one by one. Those which, by
- reason of having lost their tails, were only fit for “fizzes,” I saved
- till after breakfast. With the exhaustion of these, I fell reluctantly
- back upon the public for entertainment. I could see the soldiers, hear the
- band and the oration, and in the evening, if it didn’t rain, enjoy the
- fireworks; but my own contribution to the patriotic noise was always over
- before the breakfast dishes had been washed.
- </p>
- <p>
- My mother scorned the little paper torpedoes as flippant and wasteful
- things. You merely threw one of them, and it went off, she said, and there
- you were. I don’t know that I ever grasped this objection in its entirety,
- but it impressed my whole childhood with its unanswerableness. Years and
- years afterward, when my own children asked for torpedoes, I found myself
- unconsciously advising against them on quite the maternal lines. Nor was
- it easy to budge the good lady from her position on the great two-packs
- issue. I seem to recall having successfully undermined it once or twice,
- but two was the rule. When I called her attention to the fact that our
- neighbor, Tom Hemingway, thought nothing of exploding a whole pack at a
- time inside their wash-boiler, she was not dazzled, but only replied:
- “Wilful waste makes woful want.”
- </p>
- <p>
- Of course the idea of the Hemingways ever knowing what want meant was
- absurd. They lived a dozen doors or so from us, in a big white house with
- stately white columns rising from veranda to gable across the whole front,
- and a large garden, flowers and shrubs in front, fruit-trees and
- vegetables behind. Squire Hemingway was the most important man in our part
- of the town. I know now that he was never anything more than United States
- Commissioner of Deeds, but in those days, when he walked down the street
- with his gold-headed cane, his blanket-shawl folded over his arm, and his
- severe, dignified, close-shaven face held well up in the air, I seemed to
- behold a companion of Presidents.
- </p>
- <p>
- This great man had two sons. The elder of them,
- </p>
- <p>
- De Witt Hemingway, was a man grown, and was at the front. I had seen him
- march away, over a year before, with a bright drawn sword, at the side of
- his company. The other son, Tom, was my senior by only a twelvemonth. He
- was by nature proud, but often consented to consort with me when the
- selection of other available associates was at low ebb.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was to this Tom that I listened with most envious eagerness, in front
- of the grocery-store, on the afternoon of which I speak. He did not sit on
- the stoop with the others—no one expected quite that degree of
- condescension—but leaned nonchalantly against a post, whittling out
- a new ramrod for his cannon. He said that this year he was not going to
- have any ordinary fire-crackers at all; they, he added with a meaning
- glance at me, were only fit for girls. He might do a little in
- “double-enders,” but his real point would be in “ringers”—an
- incredible giant variety of cracker, Turkey-red like the other, but in
- size almost a rolling-pin. Some of these he would fire off singly, between
- volleys from his cannon. But a good many he intended to explode, in
- bunches say of six, inside the tin wash-boiler, brought out into the
- middle of the road for that purpose. It would doubtless blow the old thing
- sky-high, but that didn’t matter. They could get a new one.
- </p>
- <p>
- Even as he spoke, the big bell in the tower of the town-hall burst forth
- in a loud clangor of swift-repeated strokes. It was half a mile away, but
- the moist air brought the urgent, clamorous sounds to our ears as if the
- belfry had stood close above us.
- </p>
- <p>
- We sprang off the stoop and stood poised, waiting to hear the number of
- the ward struck, and ready to scamper off on the instant if the fire was
- anywhere in our part of the town. But the excited peal went on and on,
- without a pause. It became obvious that this meant something besides a
- fire. Perhaps some of us wondered vaguely what that something might be,
- but as a body our interest had lapsed. Billy Norris, who was the son of
- poor parents, but could whip even Tom Hemingway, said he had been told
- that the German boys on the other side of the gulf were coming over to
- “rush” us on the following day, and that we ought all to collect nails to
- fire at them from our cannon. This we pledged ourselves to do—the
- bell keeping up its throbbing tumult ceaselessly.
- </p>
- <p>
- Suddenly we saw the familiar figure of Johnson running up the street
- toward us. What his first name was I never knew. To every one, little or
- big, he was just Johnson. He and his family had moved into our town after
- the war began; I fancy they moved away again before it ended. I do not
- even know what he did for a living. But he seemed always drunk, always
- turbulently good-natured, and always shouting out the news at the top of
- his lungs. I cannot pretend to guess how he found out everything as he
- did, or why, having found it out, he straightway rushed homeward,
- scattering the intelligence as he ran. Most probably Johnson was moulded
- by Nature as a town-crier, but was born by accident some generations after
- the race of bellmen had disappeared. Our neighborhood did not like him;
- our mothers did not know Mrs. Johnson, and we boys behaved with snobbish
- roughness to his children. He seemed not to mind this at all, but came up
- unwearyingly to shout out the tidings of the day for our benefit.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Vicksburg’s fell! Vicksburg’s fell!” was what we heard him yelling as he
- approached.
- </p>
- <p>
- Delos Ingersoll and his hired boy ran out of the grocery. Doors opened
- along the street and heads were thrust inquiringly out.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Vicksburg’s fell!” he kept hoarsely proclaiming, his arms waving in the
- air, as he staggered along at a dog-trot past us, and went into the saloon
- next to the grocery.
- </p>
- <p>
- I cannot say how definite an idea these tidings conveyed to our boyish
- minds. I have a notion that at the time I assumed that Vicksburg had
- something to do with Gettysburg, where I knew, from the talk of my elders,
- that an awful fight had been proceeding since the middle of the week.
- Doubtless this confusion was aided by the fact that an hour or so later,
- on that same wonderful day, the wire brought us word that this terrible
- battle on Pennsylvanian soil had at last taken the form of a Union
- victory. It is difficult now to see how we could have known both these
- things on the Third of July—that is to say, before the people
- actually concerned seemed to have been sure of them. Perhaps it was only
- inspired guesswork, but I know that my town went wild over the news, and
- that the clouds overhead cleared away as if by magic.
- </p>
- <p>
- The sun did well to spread that summer sky at eventide with all the
- pageantry of color the spectrum knows. It would have been preposterous
- that such a day should slink off in dull, Quaker drabs. Men were shouting
- in the streets now. The old cannon left over from the Mexican war had been
- dragged out on to the rickety covered river-bridge, and was frightening
- the fishes, and shaking the dry, worm-eaten rafters, as fast as the swab
- and rammer could work. Our town bandsmen were playing as they had never
- played before, down in the square in front of the post-office. The
- management of the Universe could not hurl enough wild fireworks into the
- exultant sunset to fit our mood.
- </p>
- <p>
- The very air was filled with the scent of triumph—the spirit of
- conquest. It seemed only natural that I should march off to my mother and
- quite collectedly tell her that I desired to stay out all night with the
- other boys. I had never dreamed of daring to prefer such a request in
- other years. Now I was scarcely conscious of surprise when she gave her
- permission, adding with a smile that I would be glad enough to come in and
- go to bed before half the night was over.
- </p>
- <p>
- I steeled my heart after supper with the proud resolve that if the night
- turned out to be as protracted as one of those Lapland winter nights we
- read about in the geography, I still would not surrender.
- </p>
- <p>
- The boys outside were not so excited over the tidings of my unlooked-for
- victory as I had expected them to be. They received the news, in fact,
- with a rather mortifying stoicism. Tom Hemingway, however, took enough
- interest in the affair to suggest that, instead of spending my twenty
- cents in paltry fire-crackers, I might go down town and buy another can of
- powder for his cannon. By doing so, he pointed out, I would be a
- part-proprietor, as it were, of the night’s performance, and would be
- entitled to occasionally touch the cannon off. This generosity affected
- me, and I hastened down the long hill-street to show myself worthy of it,
- repeating the instruction of “Kentucky Bear-Hunter-coarse-grain” over and
- over again to myself as I went.
- </p>
- <p>
- Half-way on my journey I overtook a person whom, even in the gathering
- twilight, I recognized as Miss Stratford, the school-teacher. She also was
- walking down the hill and rapidly. It did not need the sight of a letter
- in her hand to tell me that she was going to the post-office. In those
- cruel war-days everybody went to the post-office. I myself went regularly
- to get our mail, and to exchange shin-plasters for one-cent stamps with
- which to buy yeast and other commodities that called for minute fractional
- currency.
- </p>
- <p>
- Although I was very fond of Miss Stratford—I still recall her gentle
- eyes, and pretty, rounded, dark face, in its frame of long, black curls,
- with tender liking—I now coldly resolved to hurry past, pretending
- not to know her. It was a mean thing to do; Miss Stratford had always been
- good to me, shining in that respect in brilliant contrast to my other
- teachers, whom I hated bitterly. Still, the “Kentucky
- Bear-Hunter-coarse-grain” was too important a matter to wait upon any mere
- female friendships, and I quickened my pace into a trot, hoping to scurry
- by unrecognized.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Oh, Andrew! is that you?” I heard her call out as I ran past. For the
- instant I thought of rushing on, quite as if I had not heard. Then I
- stopped and walked beside her.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I am going to stay up all night: mother says I may; and I am going to
- fire off Tom Hemingway’s big cannon every fourth time, straight through
- till breakfast time,” I announced to her loftily.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Dear me! I ought to be proud to be seen walking with such an important
- citizen,” she answered, with kindly playfulness. She added more gravely,
- after a moment’s pause: “Then Tom is out playing with the other boys, is
- he?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, of course!” I responded. “He always lets us stand around when he
- fires off his cannon. He’s got some ‘ringers’ this year too.”
- </p>
- <p>
- I heard Miss Stratford murmur an impulsive “Thank God!” under her breath.
- </p>
- <p>
- Full as the day had been of surprises, I could not help wondering that the
- fact of Tom’s ringers should stir up such profound emotions in the
- teacher’s breast. Since the subject so interested her, I went on with a
- long catalogue of Tom’s other pyrotechnic possessions, and from that to an
- account of his almost supernatural collection of postage-stamps. In a few
- minutes more I am sure I should have revealed to her the great secret of
- my life, which was my determination, in case I came to assume the
- victorious rôle and rank of Napoleon, to immediately make Tom a Marshal of
- the Empire.
- </p>
- <p>
- But we had reached the post-office square. I had never before seen it so
- full of people.
- </p>
- <p>
- Even to my boyish eyes the tragic line of division which cleft this crowd
- in twain was apparent. On one side, over by the Seminary, the youngsters
- had lighted a bonfire, and were running about it—some of the bolder
- ones jumping through it in frolicsome recklessness. Close by stood the
- band, now valiantly thumping out “John Brown’s Body” upon the noisy night
- air. It was quite dark by this time, but the musicians knew the tune by
- heart. So did the throng about them, and sang it with lusty fervor. The
- doors of the saloon toward the corner of the square were flung wide open.
- Two black streams of men kept in motion under the radiance of the big
- reflector-lamp over these doors—one going in, one coming out. They
- slapped one another on the back as they passed, with exultant screams and
- shouts. Every once in a while, when movement was for the instant blocked,
- some voice lifted above the others would begin “Hip-hip-hip-hip—”
- and then would come a roar that fairly drowned the music.
- </p>
- <p>
- On the post-office side of the square there was no bonfire. No one raised
- a cheer. A densely packed mass of men and women stood in front of the big
- square stone building, with its closed doors, and curtained windows upon
- which, from time to time, the shadow of some passing clerk, bareheaded and
- hurried, would be momentarily thrown. They waited in silence for the night
- mail to be sorted. If they spoke to one another, it was in whispers—as
- if they had been standing with uncovered heads at a funeral service in a
- graveyard. The dim light reflected over from the bonfire, or down from the
- shaded windows of the post-office, showed solemn, hard-lined, anxious
- faces. Their lips scarcely moved when they muttered little low-toned
- remarks to their neighbors. They spoke from the side of the mouth, and
- only on one subject.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He went all through Fredericksburg without a scratch—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He looks so much like me—General Palmer told my brother he’d have
- known his hide in a tan-yard—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He’s been gone—let’s see—it was a year some time last April—”
- </p>
- <p>
- “He was counting on a furlough the first of this month. I suppose nobody
- got one as things turned out—‘’
- </p>
- <p>
- “He said, ‘No; it ain’t my style. I’ll fight as much as you like, but I
- won’t be nigger-waiter for no man, captain or no captain ‘—”
- </p>
- <p>
- Thus I heard the scattered murmurs among the grown-up heads above me, as
- we pushed into the outskirts of the throng, and stood there, waiting for
- the rest. There was no sentence without a “he” in it. A stranger might
- have fancied that they were all talking of one man. I knew better. They
- were the fathers and mothers, the sisters, brothers, wives of the men
- whose regiments had been in that horrible three days’ fight at Gettysburg.
- Each was thinking and speaking of his own, and took it for granted the
- others would understand. For that matter, they all did understand. The
- town knew the name and family of every one of the twelve-score sons she
- had in this battle.
- </p>
- <p>
- It is not very clear to me now why people all went to the post-office to
- wait for the evening papers that came in from the nearest big city.
- Nowadays they would be brought in bulk and sold on the street before the
- mail-bags had reached the post-office. Apparently that had not yet been
- thought of in our slow old town.
- </p>
- <p>
- The band across the square had started up afresh with “Annie Lisle”—the
- sweet old refrain of “Wave willows, murmur waters,” comes back to me now
- after a quarter-century of forgetfulness—when all at once there was
- a sharp forward movement of the crowd. The doors had been thrown open, and
- the hallway was on the instant filled with a swarming multitude. The band
- had stopped as suddenly as it began, and no more cheering was heard. We
- could see whole troops of dark forms scudding toward us from the other
- side of the square.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Run in for me—that’s a good boy—ask for Dr. Stratford’s
- mail,” the teacher whispered, bending over me.
- </p>
- <p>
- It seemed an age before I finally got back to her, with the paper in its
- postmarked wrapper buttoned up inside my jacket. I had never been in so
- fierce and determined a crowd before, and I emerged from it at last,
- confused in wits and panting for breath.
- </p>
- <p>
- I was still looking about through the gloom in a foolish way for Miss
- Stratford, when I felt her hand laid sharply on my shoulder.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well—where is it?—did nothing come?” she asked, her voice
- trembling with eagerness, and the eyes which I had thought so soft and
- dove-like flashing down upon me as if she were Miss Pritchard, and I had
- been caught chewing gum in school.
- </p>
- <p>
- I drew the paper out from under my roundabout, and gave it to her. She
- grasped it, and thrust a finger under the cover to tear it off. Then she
- hesitated for a moment, and looked about her. “Come where there is some
- light,” she said, and started up the street. Although she seemed to have
- spoken more to herself than to me, I followed her in silence, close to her
- side.
- </p>
- <p>
- For a long way the sidewalk in front of every lighted store-window was
- thronged with a group of people clustered tight about some one who had a
- paper, and was reading from it aloud. Beside broken snatches of this
- monologue, we caught, now groans of sorrow and horror, now exclamations of
- proud approval, and even the beginnings of cheers, broken in upon by a
- general “’Sh-h!” as we hurried past outside the curb.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was under a lamp in the little park nearly halfway up the hill that
- Miss Stratford stopped, and spread the paper open. I see her still,
- white-faced, under the flickering gaslight, her black curls making a
- strange dark bar between the pale-straw hat and the white of her shoulder
- shawl and muslin dress, her hands trembling as they held up the extended
- sheet. She scanned the columns swiftly, skimmingly for a time, as I could
- see by the way she moved her round chin up and down. Then she came to a
- part which called for closer reading. The paper shook perceptibly now, as
- she bent her eyes upon it. Then all at once it fell from her hands, and
- without a sound she walked away.
- </p>
- <p>
- I picked the paper up and followed her along the gravelled path. It was
- like pursuing a ghost, so weirdly white did her summer attire now look to
- my frightened eyes, with such a swift and deathly silence did she move.
- The path upon which we were described a circle touching the four sides of
- the square. She did not quit it when the intersection with our street was
- reached, but followed straight round again toward the point where we had
- entered the park. This, too, in turn, she passed, gliding noiselessly
- forward under the black arches of the overhanging elms. The suggestion
- that she did not know she was going round and round in a ring startled my
- brain. I would have run up to her now if I had dared.
- </p>
- <p>
- Suddenly she turned, and saw that I was behind her. She sank slowly into
- one of the garden-seats, by the path, and held out for a moment a
- hesitating hand toward me. I went up at this and looked into her face.
- Shadowed as it was, the change I saw there chilled my blood. It was like
- the face of some one I had never seen before, with fixed, wide-open,
- staring eyes which seemed to look beyond me through the darkness, upon
- some terrible sight no other could see.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Go—run and tell—Tom—to go home! His brother—his
- brother has been killed,” she said to me, choking over the words as if
- they hurt her throat, and still with the same strange dry-eyed, far-away
- gaze covering yet not seeing me.
- </p>
- <p>
- I held out the paper for her to take, but she made no sign, and I gingerly
- laid it on the seat beside her. I hung about for a minute or two longer,
- imagining that she might have something else to say—but no word
- came. Then, with a feebly inopportune “Well, good-by,” I started off alone
- up the hill.
- </p>
- <p>
- It was a distinct relief to find that my companions were congregated at
- the lower end of the common, instead of their accustomed haunt farther up
- near my home, for the walk had been a lonely one, and I was deeply
- depressed by what had happened. Tom, it seems, had been called away some
- quarter of an hour before. All the boys knew of the calamity which had
- befallen the Hemingways. We talked about it, from time to time, as we
- loaded and fired the cannon which Tom had obligingly turned over to my
- friends. It had been out of deference to the feelings of the stricken
- household that they had betaken themselves and their racket off to the
- remote corner of the common. The solemnity of the occasion silenced
- criticism upon my conduct in forgetting to buy the powder. “There would be
- enough as long as it lasted,” Billy Norris said, with philosophic
- decision.
- </p>
- <p>
- We speculated upon the likelihood of De Witt Hemingway’s being given a
- military funeral. These mournful pageants had by this time become such
- familiar things to us that the prospect of one more had no element of
- excitement in it, save as it involved a gloomy sort of distinction for
- Tom. He would ride in the first mourning-carriage with his parents, and
- this would associate us, as we walked along ahead of the band, with the
- most intimate aspects of the demonstration. We regretted now that the
- soldier company which we had so long projected remained still unorganized.
- Had it been otherwise we would probably have been awarded the right of the
- line in the procession. Some one suggested that it was not too late—and
- we promptly bound ourselves to meet after breakfast next day to organize
- and begin drilling. If we worked at this night and day, and our parents
- instantaneously provided us with uniforms and guns, we should be in time.
- It was also arranged that we should be called the De Witt C. Hemingway
- Fire Zouaves, and that Billy Norris should be side captain. The chief
- command would, of course, be reserved for Tom. We would specially salute
- him as he rode past in the closed carriage, and then fall in behind,
- forming his honorary escort.
- </p>
- <p>
- None of us had known the dead officer closely, owing to his advanced age.
- He was seven or eight years older than even Tom. But the more elderly
- among our group had seen him play base-ball in the academy nine, and our
- neighborhood was still alive with legends of his early audacity and skill
- in collecting barrels and dry-goods boxes at night for election bonfires.
- It was remembered that once he carried away a whole front-stoop from the
- house of a little German tailor on one of the back streets. As we stood
- around the heated cannon, in the great black solitude of the common, our
- fancies pictured this redoubtable young man once more among us—not
- in his blue uniform, with crimson sash and sword laid by his side, and the
- gauntlets drawn over his lifeless hands, but as a taller and glorified
- Tom, in a roundabout jacket and copper-toed boots, giving the law on this
- his playground. The very cannon at our feet had once been his. The night
- air became peopled with ghosts of his contemporaries—handsome boys
- who had grown up before us, and had gone away to lay down their lives in
- far-off Virginia or Tennessee.
- </p>
- <p>
- These heroic shades brought drowsiness in their train. We lapsed into long
- silences, punctuated by yawns, when it was not our turn to ram and touch
- off the cannon. Finally some of us stretched ourselves out on the grass,
- in the warm darkness, to wait comfortably for this turn to come.
- </p>
- <p>
- What did come instead was daybreak—finding Billy Norris and myself
- alone constant to our all night vow. We sat up and shivered as we rubbed
- our eyes. The morning air had a chilling freshness that went to my bones—and
- these, moreover, were filled with those novel aches and stiffnesses which
- beds were invented to prevent. We stood up, stretching out our arms, and
- gaping at the pearland-rose beginnings of the sunrise in the eastern sky.
- The other boys had all gone home, and taken the cannon with them. Only
- scraps of torn paper and tiny patches of burnt grass marked the site of
- our celebration.
- </p>
- <p>
- My first weak impulse was to march home without delay, and get into bed as
- quickly as might be. But Billy Norris looked so finely resolute and
- resourceful that I hesitated to suggest this, and said nothing, leaving
- the initiative to him. One could see, by the most casual glance, that he
- was superior to mere considerations of unseasonableness in hours. I
- remembered now that he was one of that remarkable body of boys, the
- paper-carriers, who rose when all others were asleep in their warm nests,
- and trudged about long before breakfast distributing the <i>Clarion</i>
- among the well-to-do households. This fact had given him his position in
- our neighborhood as quite the next in leadership to Tom Hemingway.
- </p>
- <p>
- He presently outlined his plans to me, after having tried the centre of
- light on the horizon, where soon the sun would be, by an old brass compass
- he had in his pocket—a process which enabled him, he said, to tell
- pretty well what time it was. The paper wouldn’t be out for nearly two
- hours yet—and if it were not for the fact of a great battle, there
- would have been no paper at all on this glorious anniversary—but he
- thought we would go downtown and see what was going on around about the
- newspaper office. Forthwith we started. He cheered my faint spirits by
- assuring me that I would soon cease to be sleepy, and would, in fact, feel
- better than usual. I dragged my feet along at his side, waiting for this
- revival to come, and meantime furtively yawning against my sleeve.
- </p>
- <p>
- Billy seemed to have dreamed a good deal, during our nap on the common,
- about the De Witt C. Hemingway Fire Zouaves. At least he had now in his
- head a marvellously elaborated system of organization, which he unfolded
- as we went along. I felt that I had never before realized his greatness,
- his born genius for command. His scheme halted nowhere. He allotted
- offices with discriminating firmness; he treated the question of uniforms
- and guns as a trivial detail which would settle itself; he spoke with calm
- confidence of our offering our services to the Republic in the autumn; his
- clear vision saw even the materials for a fife-and-drum corps among the
- German boys in the back streets. It was true that I appeared personally to
- play a meagre part in these great projects; the most that was said about
- me was that I might make a fair third-corporal. But Fate had thrown in my
- way such a wonderful chance of becoming intimate with Billy that I made
- sure I should swiftly advance in rank—the more so as I discerned in
- the background of his thoughts, as it were, a grim determination to make
- short work of Tom Hemingway’s aristocratic pretensions, once the funeral
- was over.
- </p>
- <p>
- We were forced to make a detour of the park on our way down, because Billy
- observed some halfdozen Irish boys at play with a cannon inside, whom he
- knew to be hostile. If there had been only four, he said, he would have
- gone in and routed them. He could whip any two of them, he added, with one
- hand tied behind his back. I listened with admiration. Billy was not tall,
- but he possessed great thickness of chest and length of arm. His skin was
- so dark that we canvassed the theory from time to time of his having
- Indian blood. He did not discourage this, and he admitted himself that he
- was double-jointed.
- </p>
- <p>
- The streets of the business part of the town, into which we now made our
- way, were quite deserted. We went around into the yard behind the
- printing-office, where the carrier-boys were wont to wait for the press to
- get to work; and Billy displayed some impatience at discovering that here
- too there was no one. It was now broad daylight, but through the windows
- of the composing-room we could see some of the printers still setting type
- by kerosene lamps.
- </p>
- <p>
- We seated ourselves at the end of the yard on a big, flat, smooth-faced
- stone, and Billy produced from his pocket a number of “em” quads, so he
- called them, and with which the carriers had learned from the printers’
- boys to play a very beautiful game. You shook the pieces of metal in your
- hands and threw them on the stone; your score depended upon the number of
- nicked sides that were turned uppermost. We played this game in the
- interest of good-fellowship for a little. Then Billy told me that the
- carriers always played it for pennies, and that it was unmanly for us to
- do otherwise. He had no pennies at that precise moment, but would pay at
- the end of the week what he had lost; in the meantime there was my twenty
- cents to go on with. After this Billy threw so many nicks uppermost that
- my courage gave way, and I made an attempt to stop the game; but a single
- remark from him as to the military destiny which he was reserving for me,
- if I only displayed true soldierly nerve and grit, sufficed to quiet me
- once more, and the play went on. I had now only five cents left.
- </p>
- <p>
- Suddenly a shadow interposed itself between the sunlight and the stone. I
- looked up, to behold a small boy with bare arms and a blackened apron
- standing over me, watching our game. There was a great deal of ink on his
- face and hands, and a hardened, not to say rakish expression in his eye.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why don’t you ‘jeff’ with somebody of your own size?” he demanded of
- Billy after having looked me over critically.
- </p>
- <p>
- He was not nearly so big as Billy, and I expected to see the latter
- instantly rise and crush him, but Billy only laughed and said we were
- playing for fun; he was going to give me all my money back. I was rejoiced
- to hear this, but still felt surprised at the propitiatory manner Billy
- adopted toward this diminutive inky boy. It was not the demeanor befitting
- a side-captain—and what made it worse was that the strange boy
- loftily declined to be cajoled by it. He sniffed when Billy told him about
- the military company we were forming; he coldly shook his head, with a
- curt “Nixie!” when invited to join it; and he laughed aloud at hearing the
- name our organization was to bear.
- </p>
- <p>
- “He ain’t dead at all—that De Witt Hemingway,” he said, with jeering
- contempt.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Hain’t he though!” exclaimed Billy. “The news come last night. Tom had to
- go home—his mother sent for him—on account of it!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ll bet you a quarter he ain’t dead,” responded the practical inky boy.
- “Money up, though!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ve only got fifteen cents. I’ll bet you that, though,” rejoined Billy,
- producing my torn and dishevelled shin-plasters.
- </p>
- <p>
- “All right! Wait here!” said the boy, running off to the building and
- disappearing through the door. There was barely time for me to learn from
- my companion that this printer’s apprentice was called “the devil,” and
- could not only whistle between his teeth and crack his fingers, but chew
- tobacco, when he reappeared, with a long narrow strip of paper in his
- hand. This he held out for us to see, indicating with an ebon forefinger
- the special paragraph we were to read. Billy looked at it sharply, for
- several moments in silence. Then he said to me: “What does it say there? I
- must ’a’ got some powder in my eyes last night.”
- </p>
- <p>
- I read this paragraph aloud, not without an unworthy feeling that the inky
- boy would now respect me deeply:
- </p>
- <p>
- <i>“Correction. Lieutenant De Witt C. Hemingway, of Company A, —th
- New York, reported in earlier despatches among the killed, is uninjured.
- The officer killed is Lieutenant Carl Heinninge, Company F, same
- regiment.”</i>
- </p>
- <p>
- Billy’s face visibly lengthened as I read this out, and he felt us both
- looking at him. He made a pretence of examining the slip of paper again,
- but in a half-hearted way. Then he ruefully handed over the fifteen cents
- and, rising from the stone, shook himself.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Them Dutchmen never was no good!” was what he said.
- </p>
- <p>
- The inky boy had put the money in the pocket under his apron, and grinned
- now with as much enjoyment as dignity would permit him to show. He did not
- seem to mind any longer the original source of his winnings, and it was
- apparent that I could not with decency recall it to him. Some odd impulse
- prompted me, however, to ask him if I might have the paper he had in his
- hand. He was magnanimous enough to present me with the proof-sheet on the
- spot. Then with another grin he turned and left us.
- </p>
- <p>
- Billy stood sullenly kicking with his bare toes into a sand-heap by the
- stone. He would not answer me when I spoke to him. It flashed across my
- perceptive faculties that he was not such a great man, after all, as I had
- imagined. In another instant or two it had become quite clear to me that I
- had no admiration for him whatever. Without a word I turned on my heel and
- walked determinedly out of the yard and into the street, homeward bent.
- </p>
- <p>
- All at once I quickened my pace; something had occurred to me. The purpose
- thus conceived grew so swiftly that soon I found myself running. Up the
- hill I sped, and straight through the park. If the Irish boys shouted
- after me I knew it not, but dashed on heedless of all else save the one
- idea. I only halted, breathless and panting, when I stood on Dr.
- Stratford’s doorstep, and heard the night-bell inside jangling shrilly in
- response to my excited pull.
- </p>
- <p>
- As I waited, I pictured to myself the old doctor as he would presently
- come down, half-dressed and pulling on his coat as he advanced. He would
- ask, eagerly, “Who is sick? Where am I to go?” and I would calmly reply
- that he unduly alarmed himself, and that I had a message for his daughter.
- He would, of course, ask me what it was, and I, politely but firmly, would
- decline to explain to any one but the lady in person. Just what might
- ensue was not clear—but I beheld myself throughout commanding the
- situation, at once benevolent, polished, and inexorable.
- </p>
- <p>
- The door opened with unlooked-for promptness, while my self-complacent
- vision still hung in midair. Instead of the bald and spectacled old
- doctor, there confronted me a white-faced, solemn-eyed lady in a black
- dress, whom I did not seem to know. I stared at her, tongue-tied, till she
- said, in a low, grave voice, “Well, Andrew, what is it?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Then of course I saw that it was Miss Stratford, my teacher, the person
- whom I had come to see. Some vague sense of what the sleepless night had
- meant in this house came to me as I gazed confusedly at her mourning, and
- heard the echo of her sad tones in my ears.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Is some one ill?” she asked again.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No; some one—some one is very well!” I managed to reply, lifting my
- eyes again to her wan face. The spectacle of its drawn lines and pallor
- all at once assailed my wearied and overtaxed nerves with crushing weight.
- I felt myself beginning to whimper, and rushing tears scalded my eyes.
- Something inside my breast seemed to be dragging me down through the
- stoop.
- </p>
- <p>
- I have now only the recollection of Miss Stratford’s kneeling by my side,
- with a supporting arm around me, and of her thus unrolling and reading the
- proof-paper I had in my hand. We were in the hall now, instead of on the
- stoop, and there was a long silence. Then she put her head on my shoulder
- and wept. I could hear and feel her sobs as if they were my own.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I—I didn’t think you’d cry—that you’d be so sorry,” I heard
- myself saying, at last, in despondent self-defence.
- </p>
- <p>
- Miss Stratford lifted her head and, still kneeling as she was, put a
- finger under my chin to make me look her in her face. Lo! the eyes were
- laughing through their tears; the whole countenance was radiant once more
- with the light of happy youth and with that other glory which youth knows
- only once.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, Andrew, boy,” she said, trembling, smiling, sobbing, beaming all at
- once, “didn’t you know that people cry for very joy sometimes?”
- </p>
- <p>
- And as I shook my head she bent down and kissed me.
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <a name="link2H_4_0030" id="link2H_4_0030"> </a>
- </p>
- <div style="height: 4em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
- <h2>
- MY AUNT SUSAN
- </h2>
- <p class="pfirst">
- <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> HELD the lamp,
- while Aunt Susan cut up the Pig.
- </p>
- <p>
- The whole day had been devoted, I remember, to preparations for this great
- event. Early in the morning I had been to the butcher’s to set in train
- the annual negotiations for a loan of cleaver and meat-saw; and hours
- afterward had borne these implements proudly homeward through the village
- street. In the interval I had turned the grindstone, over at the Four
- Corners, while the grocer’s hired man obligingly sharpened our
- carving-knife. Then there had been the even more back-aching task of
- clearing away the hard snow from the accustomed site of our wood-pile in
- the yard, and scraping together a frosted heap of chips and bark for the
- smudge in the smoke-barrel.
- </p>
- <p>
- From time to time I sweetened this toil, and helped the laggard hours to a
- swifter pace, by paying visits to the wood-shed to have still another look
- at the pig. He was frozen very stiff, and there were small icicles in the
- crevices whence his eyes had altogether disappeared. My emotions as I
- viewed his big, cold, pink carcass, with its extended legs, its bland and
- pasty countenance, and that awful emptiness underneath, were much mixed.
- Although I was his elder by seven or eight years, we had been close
- friends during all his life—or all except a very few weeks of his
- earliest sucking pig-hood, spent on his native farm. I had fed him daily;
- I had watched him grow week by week; more than once I had poked him with a
- stick as he ran around in his sty, to make him squeal for the edification
- of neighbors’ boys who had come into our yard, and would now be sharply
- ordered out again by Aunt Susan.
- </p>
- <p>
- As these kindly memories surged over me I could not but feel like a
- traitor to my old companion, as he lay thus hairless and pallid before my
- eyes. But then I would remember how good he was going to be to eat—and
- straightway return with a light heart to the work of kicking up more chips
- from the ice.
- </p>
- <p>
- From the living-room in the rear of our little house came the monotonous
- incessant clatter of Aunt Susan’s carpet loom. Through the window I could
- see the outlines of her figure and the back of her head as she sat on her
- high bench. It was to me the most familiar of all spectacles, this
- tireless woman bending resolutely over her work. She was there when I
- first cautiously ventured my nose out from under the warm blanket of a
- winter’s morning. Very, very often I fell asleep at night in my bed in the
- recess, lulled off by the murmur of the diligent loom.
- </p>
- <p>
- Presently I went in to warm myself, and stood with my red fingers over the
- stove top. She cast but one vague glance at me, through the open frame of
- the loom between us, and went on with her work. It was not our habit to
- talk much in that house. She was too busy a woman, for one thing, to have
- much time for conversation. The impression that she preferred not to talk
- was always present in my boyish mind. I call up the picture of her still
- as I saw her then under the top bar of the cumbrous old machine, sitting
- with lips tight together, and resolute, masterful eyes bent upon the
- twining intricacy of warp and woof before her. At her side were piled a
- dozen or more big balls of carpet rags, which the village wives and
- daughters cut up, sewed together and wound in the long winter evenings,
- while the men-folks sat with their stockinged feet on the stove hearth,
- and read out the latest “news from the front” in their <i>Weekly Tribune</i>.
- </p>
- <p>
- I knew all these rag balls by the names of their owners. Not only did I
- often go to their houses for them, upon the strength of the general
- village rumor that they were ready, and always carry back the finished
- lengths of carpet; but I had long since unconsciously grown to watch all
- the varying garments and shifts of fashion in the raiment of our
- neighbors, with an eye single to the likelihood of their eventually
- turning up at Aunt Susan’s loom. When Hiram Mabie’s checkered butternut
- coat was cut down for his son Roswell, I noted the fact merely as a stage
- of its progress toward carpet rags. If Mrs. Wilkins concluded to turn her
- flowered delaine dress a third year, or Sarah Northrup had her bright
- saffron shawl dyed black, I was sensible of a wrong having been done our
- little household. I felt like crossing the street whenever I saw
- approaching the portly figure of Cyrus Husted’s mother, the woman who
- dragged everybody into her house to show them the ingrain carpet she had
- bought at Tecumseh, and assured them that it was much cheaper in the long
- run than the products of my aunt’s industry. I tingled with indignation as
- she passed me on the sidewalk, puffing for breath and stepping mincingly
- because her shoes were too tight for her.
- </p>
- <p>
- Nearly all the knowledge of our neighbors’ sayings and doings which
- reached Aunt Susan came to her from me. She kept herself to herself with a
- vengeance, toiling early and late, rarely going beyond the confines of her
- yard save on Sunday mornings, when we went to church, and treating with
- frosty curtness the few people who ventured to come to our house on
- business or from social curiosity. For one thing, this Juno Mills in which
- we lived was not really our home. We had only been there for four or five
- years—a space which indeed spanned all my recollections of life—but
- left my Aunt more or less a stranger and a new-comer. She spared no pains
- to maintain that condition. I can see now that there were good reasons for
- this stern aloofness. At the time I thought it was altogether due to the
- proud and unsociable nature of my Aunt.
- </p>
- <p>
- In my child’s mind I regarded her as distinctly an elderly person. People
- outside, I know, spoke of her as an old maid, sometimes winking furtively
- over my head as they did so. But she was not really old at all—was
- in truth just barely in the thirties.
- </p>
- <p>
- Doubtless the fact that she was tall and dark, with very black hair, and
- that years of steady concentration of sight, upon the strings and threads
- of the loom, had scored a scowling vertical wrinkle between her
- near-sighted eyes gave me my notion of her advanced maturity. And in all
- her ways and words, too, she was so far removed from any idea of youthful
- softness! I could not remember her having ever kissed me. My imagination
- never evolved the conceit of her kissing anybody. I had always had at her
- hands uniformly good treatment, good food, good clothes; after I had
- learned my letters from the old maroon plush label on the Babbitt’s soap
- box which held the wood behind the stove, and expanded this knowledge by a
- study of street signs, she had herself taught me how to read, and later
- provided me with books for the village school. She was my only known
- relative—the only person in the world who had ever done anything for
- me. Yet it could not be said that I loved her. Indeed she no more raised
- the suggestion of tenderness in my mind than did the loom at which she
- spent her waking hours.
- </p>
- <p>
- “The Perkinses asked me why you didn’t get the butcher to cut up the pig,”
- I remarked at last, rubbing my hands together over the hot stove griddles.
- </p>
- <p>
- “It’s none of their business!” said Aunt Susan, with laconic promptness.
- </p>
- <p>
- “And Devillo Pollard’s got a new overcoat,” I added. “He hasn’t worn the
- old army one now for upward of a week.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “If this war goes on much longer,” commented my Aunt, “every carpet in
- Dearborn County ‘ll be as blue as a whetstone.”
- </p>
- <p>
- I think that must have been the entire conversation of the afternoon. I
- especially recall the remark about the overcoat. For two years now the
- balls of rags had contained an increasing proportion of pale blue woollen
- strips, as the men of the country round about came home from the South, or
- bought cheap garments from the second-hand dealers in Tecumseh. All other
- colors had died out. There was only this light blue, and the black of
- bombazine or worsted mourning into which the news in each week’s papers
- forced one or another of the neighboring families. To obviate this
- monotony, some of the women dyed their white rags with butternut or even
- cochineal, but this was a mere drop in the bucket, so to speak. The loom
- spun out only long, depressing rolls of black and blue.
- </p>
- <p>
- My memory leaps lightly forward now to the early evening, when I held the
- lamp in the woodshed, and Aunt Susan cut up the pig.
- </p>
- <p>
- How joyfully I watched her every operation! Every now and again my
- interest grew so beyond proper bounds that I held the lamp sidewise, and
- the flame smoked the chimney. I was in mortal terror over this lamp, even
- when it was standing on the table quite by itself. We often read in the
- paper of explosions from this new kerosene by which people were instantly
- killed and houses wrapped in an unquenchable fire. Aunt Susan had stood
- out against the strange invention, long after most of the other homes of
- Juno Mills were familiar with the idea of the lamp. Even after she had
- yielded, and I went to the grocery for more oil and fresh chimneys and
- wicks, like other boys, she refused to believe that this inflammable fluid
- was really squeezed out of hard coal, as they said. And for years we lived
- in momentary belief that our lamp was about to explode.
- </p>
- <p>
- My fears of sudden death could not, however, for a moment stand up against
- the delighted excitement with which I viewed the dismemberment of the pig.
- It was very cold in the shed, but neither of us noticed that. My Aunt
- attacked the job with skilful resolution and energy, as was her way,
- chopping small bones, sawing vehemently through big ones, hacking and
- slicing with the knife, like a strong man in a hurry.
- </p>
- <p>
- For a long time no word was spoken. I gazed in silence as the head was
- detached, and then resolved itself slowly into souse—always tacitly
- set aside as my special portion. In prophecy I saw the big pan, filled
- with ears, cheeks, snout, feet, and tail, all boiled and allowed to grow
- cold in their own jelly—that pan to which I was free to repair any
- time of day until everything was gone. I thought of myself, too, with
- apron tied round my neck and the chopping-bowl on my knees, reducing what
- remained of the head into small bits, to be seasoned by my Aunt, and then
- fill other pans as head-cheese. The sage and summer savory hung in paper
- flour-bags from the rafters overhead. I looked up at them with rapture. It
- seemed as if my mouth already tasted them in head-cheese and sausage and
- in the hot gravy which basted the succulent spare-rib. Only the abiding
- menace of the lamp kept me from dancing with delight.
- </p>
- <p>
- Gradually, however, as my Aunt passed from the tid-bits to the more
- substantial portions of her task, getting out the shoulders, the hams for
- smoking, the pieces for salting down in the brine-barrel, my enthusiasm
- languished a trifle. The lamp grew heavy as I changed it from hand to
- hand, holding the free fingers at a respectful distance over the
- chimney-top for warmth, and shuffling my feet about. It was truly very
- cold. I strove to divert myself by smiling at the big shadow my bustling
- Aunt cast against the house side of the shed, and by moving the lamp to
- affect its proportions, but broke out into yawns instead. A mouse ran
- swiftly across the scantling just under the lean-to roof. At the same time
- I thought I caught the muffled sound of distant rapping, as if at our own
- rarely used front door. I was too sleepy to decide whether I had really
- heard a noise or not.
- </p>
- <p>
- All at once I roused myself with a start. The lamp had nearly slipped from
- my hands, and the horror of what might have happened frightened me into
- wakefulness.
- </p>
- <p>
- “The Perkins girls keep on calling me ‘Wise child.’ They yell it after me
- all the while,” I said, desperately clutching at a subject which I hoped
- would interest my Aunt. I had spoken to her about it a week or so before,
- and it had stirred her quite out of her wonted stern calm. If anything
- would induce her to talk now, it would be this.
- </p>
- <p>
- “They do, eh?” she said, with an alert sharpness of voice, which dwindled
- away into a sigh. Then, after a moment, she added, “Well, never you mind.
- You just keep right on, tending to your own affairs, and studying your
- lessons, and in time it’ll be you who can laugh at them and all their
- low-down lot. They only do it to make you feel bad. Just don’t you humor
- them.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But I don’t see,” I went on, “why—what do they call me ‘wise child’
- <i>for?</i> I asked Hi Budd, up at the Corners, but he only just chuckled
- and chuckled to himself, and wouldn’t say a word.”
- </p>
- <p>
- My Aunt suspended work for the moment, and looked severely down upon me.
- “Well! Ira Clarence Blodgett!” she said, with grim emphasis, “I am ashamed
- of you! I thought you had more pride! The idea of talking about things
- like that with a coarse, rough, hired man—in a barn!”
- </p>
- <p>
- To hear my full name thus pronounced, syllable by syllable, sent me fairly
- weltering, as it were, under Aunt Susan’s utmost condemnation. It was the
- punishment reserved for my gravest crimes. I hung my head, and felt the
- lamp wagging nervelessly in my hands. I could not deny even her
- speculative impeachment as to the barn; it was blankly apparent in my mind
- that the fact of the barn made matters much worse. “I was helping him wash
- their two-seated sleigh,” I submitted, weakly. “He asked me to.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “What does that matter?” she asked, peremptorily. “What business have you
- got going around talking with men about me?”
- </p>
- <p>
- “Why, it wasn’t about you at all, Aunt Susan,” I put in more confidently.
- “I said the Perkins girls kept calling me ‘wise child,’ and I asked Hi—”
- </p>
- <p>
- Aunt Susan sighed once more, and interrupted me to inspect the wick of the
- lamp. Then she turned again to her work, but less spiritedly now. She took
- up the cleaver with almost an air of sadness.
- </p>
- <p>
- “You don’t understand—yet,” she said. “But don’t make it any harder
- for me by talking. Just go along and say nothing to nobody. People will
- think more of you.”
- </p>
- <p>
- My mind strove in vain to grapple with this suggested picture of myself,
- moving about in perpetual dumbness, followed everywhere by universal
- admiration. The lamp would <i>not</i> hold itself straight.
- </p>
- <p>
- All at once we both distinctly heard the sound of footsteps close outside.
- The noise of crunching on the dry, frozen snow came through the thin
- clapboards with sharp resonance. Aunt Susan ceased cutting and listened.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I heard somebody rapping at the front door a spell ago,” I ventured to
- whisper. My Aunt looked at me, and probably realized that I was too sleepy
- to be accountable for my actions. At all events she said nothing, but
- moved toward the low door of the shed, cleaver in hand.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Who’s there?” she called out in shrill, belligerent tones; and this
- demand she repeated, after an interval of silence, when an irresolute
- knocking was heard on the door.
- </p>
- <p>
- We heard a man coughing immediately outside the door. I saw Aunt Susan
- start at the sound—almost as if she recognized it. A moment later
- this man, whoever he was, mastered his cough sufficiently to call out, in
- a hesitating way:
- </p>
- <p>
- “Is that you, Susan?”
- </p>
- <p>
- Aunt Susan raised her chin on the instant, her nostrils drawn in, her eyes
- flashing like those of a pointer when he sees a gun lifted. I had never
- seen her so excited. She wheeled round once, and covered me with a swift,
- penetrating, comprehensive glance, under which my knees smote together,
- and the lamp lurched perilously. Then she turned again, glided toward the
- door, halted, moved backward two or three steps—looked again at me,
- and this time spoke.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, I <i>swan!</i>” was what she said, and I felt that she looked it.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Susan! Is that you?” came the voice again, hoarsely appealing. It was not
- the voice of any neighbor. I made sure I had never heard it before. I
- could have smiled to myself at the presumption of any man calling my Aunt
- by her first name, if I had not been too deeply mystified.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I’ve been directed here to find Miss Susan Pike,” the man outside
- explained, between fresh coughings.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, then, mog your boots out of this as quick as ever you can!” my Aunt
- replied, with great promptitude. “You won’t find her here!”
- </p>
- <p>
- “But I <i>have</i> found her!” the stranger protested, with an accent of
- wearied deprecation. “Don’t you know me, Susan? I am not strong, this cold
- air is very bad for me.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I say ‘get out!’” my Aunt replied, sharply. Her tone was unrelenting
- enough, but I noted that she had tipped her head a little to one side, a
- clear sign to me that she was opening her mind to argument. I felt certain
- that presently I should see this man.
- </p>
- <p>
- And, sure enough, after some further parley, Susan went to the door, and,
- with a half-defiant gesture, knocked the hook up out of the staple.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Come along then, if you must!” she said, in scornful tones. Then she
- marched back till she stood beside me, angry resolution written all over
- her face and the cleaver in her hand.
- </p>
- <p>
- A tall, dark figure, opaque against a gleaming background of moonlight and
- snowlight, was what I for a moment saw in the frame of the open doorway.
- Then, as he entered, shut and hooked the door behind him, and stood
- looking in a dazed way over at our lamplit group, I saw that he was a
- slender, delicately featured man, with a long beard of yellowish brown,
- and gentle eyes. He was clad as a soldier, heavy azure-hued caped overcoat
- and all, and I already knew enough of uniforms—cruel familiarity of
- my war-time infancy—to tell by his cap that he was an officer. He
- coughed again before a word was spoken. He looked the last man in the
- world to go about routing up peaceful households of a winter’s night.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well, now—what is your business?” demanded Aunt Susan. She put her
- hand on my shoulder as she spoke, something I had never known her to do
- before. I felt confused under this novel caress, and it seemed only
- natural that the stranger, having studied my Aunt’s face in a wistful way
- for a moment, should turn his gaze upon me. I was truly a remarkable
- object, with Aunt Susan’s hand on my shoulder.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I could make no one hear at the other door. I saw the light through the
- window here, and came around,” the stranger explained. He sent little
- straying glances at the remains of the pig and at the weapon my Aunt held
- at her side, but for the most part looked steadily at me.
- </p>
- <p>
- “That doesn’t matter,” said Aunt Susan, coldly.
- </p>
- <p>
- “What do you want, now that you <i>are</i> here? Why did you come at all?
- What business had you to think that I ever wanted to lay eyes on you
- again? How could you have the courage to show your face here—in <i>my</i>
- house?”
- </p>
- <p>
- The man’s shoulders shivered under their cape, and a wan smile curled in
- his beard. “You keep your house at a very low temperature,” he said with
- grave pleasantry. He did not seem to mind Aunt Susan’s hostile demeanor at
- all.
- </p>
- <p>
- “I was badly wounded last September,” he went on, quite as if that was
- what she had asked him, “and lay at the point of death for weeks. Then
- they sent me North, and I have been in the hospital at Albany ever since.
- One of the nurses there, struck by my name, asked me if I had any
- relatives in her village—that is, Juno Mills. In that way I learned
- where you were living. I suppose I ought not to have come—against
- doctor’s orders—the journey has been too much—I have suffered
- a good deal these last two hours.”
- </p>
- <p>
- I felt my Aunt’s hand shake a little on my shoulder. Her voice, though,
- was as implacable as ever.
- </p>
- <p>
- “There is a much better reason than that why you should not have come,”
- she said, bitterly.
- </p>
- <p>
- The stranger was talking to her, but looking at me. He took a step toward
- me now, with a softened sparkle in his eyes and an outstretched hand.
- “This—this then is the boy, is it?” he asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- With a gesture of amazing swiftness Aunt Susan threw her arm about me, and
- drew me close to her side, lamp and all. With her other hand she lifted
- and almost brandished the cleaver.
- </p>
- <p>
- “No, you don’t!” she cried. “You don’t touch him! He’s mine! I’ve worked
- for him day and night ever since I took him from his dying mother’s
- breast. I closed her eyes. I forgave her. Blood is thicker ’n water
- after all. She was my sister. Yes, I forgave poor Emmeline, and I kissed
- her before she died. She gave the boy to me, and he’s mine! Mine, do you
- hear?—<i>mine!</i>”
- </p>
- <p>
- “My dear Susan—” our visitor began. “Don’t ‘dear Susan’ me! I heard
- it once—once too often. Oh, never again! You left me to run away
- with her. I don’t speak of that. I forgave that when I forgave her. But
- that was the least of it. You left her to herself for months before she
- died. You’ve left the boy to himself ever since. You can’t begin now. I’ve
- worked my fingers to the bone for him—you can’t make me stop now.”
- </p>
- <p>
- “I went to California,” he went on in a low voice, speaking with
- difficulty. “We didn’t get on together as smoothly as we might perhaps,
- but I had no earthly notion of deserting her. I was ill myself, lying in
- yellow-fever quarantine off Key West, at the very time she died. When I
- finally got back you and the child were both gone. I could not trace you.
- I went to the war. I had made money in California. It is trebled now. I
- rose to be Colonel—I have a Brigadier’s brevet in my pocket now. Yet
- I give you my word I never have desired anything so much, all the time, as
- to find you again—you and the boy.”
- </p>
- <p>
- My Aunt nodded her head comprehendingly. I felt from the tremor of her
- hand that she was forcing herself against her own desires to be
- disagreeable.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Yes, that war,” was what she said. “I know about that war! The honest men
- that go get killed. But you—<i>you</i> come back!”
- </p>
- <p>
- The man frowned wearily, and gave a little groan of discouragement. “Then
- this is final, is it? You don’t wish to speak with me; you really desire
- to keep the boy—you are set against my ever seeing him—touching
- him. Why, then, of course—of course—excuse my—”
- </p>
- <p>
- And then for the first time I saw a human being tumble in a dead swoon. My
- little brain, dazed and bewildered by the strange new things I was
- hearing, lagged behind my eyes in following the sudden pallor on the man’s
- face—lagged behind my ears in noting the tell-tale quaver and gasp
- in his voice. Before I comprehended what was toward—lo! there was no
- man standing in front of me at all.
- </p>
- <p>
- Like a flash Aunt Susan snatched the lamp from my grasp and flung herself
- upon her knees beside the limp and huddled figure. After a momentary
- inspection of the white, bearded face, she set the lamp down on the frozen
- earth floor and took his head upon her lap.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Take the lamp, run to the buttery, and bring the bottle of hartshorn!”
- she commanded me, hurriedly. “Or, no—wait—open the door—that’s
- it—walk ahead with the light!”
- </p>
- <p>
- The strong woman stood upright as she spoke, her shoulders braced against
- the burden she bore in her arms. Unaided, with slow steps, she carried the
- senseless form of the soldier into the living-room, and held it without
- rest of any sort, the while I, under her direction, wildly tore off
- quilts, blankets, sheets, and feather-tick from my bed and heaped them up
- on the floor beside the stove. Then, when I had spread them to her liking,
- she bent and gently laid him down.
- </p>
- <p>
- “<i>Now</i> get the hartshorn,” she said.. I heard her putting more wood
- on the fire, but when I returned with the phial she sat once again with
- the stranger’s head upon her knee. She was softly stroking the fine,
- waving brown hair upon his brow, but her eyes were lifted, looking
- dreamily at far-away things. I could have sworn to the beginnings of a
- smile about her parted lips. It was not like my Aunt Susan at all.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Come here, Ira,” I heard her say at last, after a long time had been
- spent in silence. I walked over and stood at her shoulder, looking down
- upon the pale face upturned against the black of her worn dress. The blue
- veins just discernible in temples and closed eyelids, the delicately
- turned features, the way his brown beard curled, the fact that his
- breathing was gently regular once more—these are what I saw. But my
- Aunt seemed to demand that I should see more.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Well?” she asked, in a tone mellowed beyond all recognition. “Don’t you—don’t
- you see who it is?”
- </p>
- <p>
- I suppose I really must have had an idea by this time. But I remember that
- I shook my head.
- </p>
- <p>
- My Aunt positively did smile this time. “The Perkins girls were wrong,”
- she said; “there isn’t the least smitch of a ‘wise child’ about <i>you!</i>”
- </p>
- <p>
- There was another pause. Emboldened by consciousness of a change in the
- emotional atmosphere, I was moved to lay my hand upon my Aunt’s shoulder.
- The action did not seem to displease her, and we remained thus for some
- minutes, watching together this strange addition to our family party.
- </p>
- <p>
- Finally she told me to get on my cap, comforter, and mittens, and run over
- to Dr. Peabody’s and fetch him back with me. The purport of my mission
- oppressed me.
- </p>
- <p>
- “Is he going to die then?” I asked.
- </p>
- <p>
- Aunt Susan laughed outright. “You little goose,” she said; “do you think
- the doctors kill people <i>every</i> time?”
- </p>
- <p>
- And, laughing again, with a trembling softness in her voice and tears upon
- her black eyelashes, she lifted her face to mine—and kissed me!
- </p>
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <hr />
- <p>
- <br /><br />
- </p>
- <p>
- No fatality dogged good old Doctor Peabody’s big footsteps through the
- snow that night. I fell asleep while he was still at my Aunt’s house, but
- not before the stranger had recovered consciousness, and was sitting up in
- the large rocking-chair, and it was clearly understood that he was soon to
- be well again.
- </p>
- <p>
- The kindly, garrulous doctor did more than reassure our little household.
- He must have spent most of the night going about reassuring the other
- households of Juno Mills. At all events, when I first went out next
- morning—while our neighbors were still eating their buckwheat cakes
- and pork fat by lamplight—everybody seemed to know that my father,
- the distinguished Colonel Blodgett, had returned from the war on
- sick-leave, and was lying ill at the house of his sister-in-law. I felt at
- once the altered attitude of the village toward me. Important citizens who
- had never spoken to me before—dignified and portly men in blue
- cutaway coats with brass buttons, and high stiff hats of shaggy white silk—stopped
- now to lay their hands on the top of my head and ask me how my father, the
- Colonel, was getting along. The grocer’s hired man gave me a Jackson ball
- and two molasses cookies the very first time I saw him. Even the Perkins
- girls, during the course of the afternoon, strolled over to our front
- gate, and, instead of hurling enigmatic objurgations at me, invited me to
- come out and play. The butcher of his own accord came and finished cutting
- up the pig.
- </p>
- <p>
- These changes came back to me as one part of the great metamorphosis which
- the night’s events had wrought. Another part was the definite
- disappearance of the stern-faced, tirelessly toiling old maid I had known
- all my life as Aunt Susan. In her place there was now a much younger
- woman, with pleasant lines about her pretty mouth, and eyes that twinkled
- when they looked at me, and who paid no attention to the loom whatever,
- but bustled cheerily about the house instead, thinking only of good things
- for us to eat.
- </p>
- <p>
- I remember that I marked my sense of the difference by abandoning the old
- name of Aunt Susan, and calling her now just “Auntie.” And one day, in the
- mid-spring, after she and her convalescent patient had returned from their
- first drive together in the country round about, she told me, as she took
- off her new bonnet in an absent-minded way, and looked meditatively at the
- old disused loom, and then bent down to brush my forehead with her warm
- lips—she told me that henceforth I was to call her Mother.
- </p>
- <div style="height: 6em;">
- <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
- </div>
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-<pre>
-
-
-
-
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