trudging along the same road with his cap in his hand, a long rifle over one shoulder and a dog trotting at his heels. Now and then the boy would look back and scold the dog and the dog would drop his muzzle with shame, until the boy stooped to pat him on the head, when he would leap frisking before him, until another affectionate scolding was due. The old mare turned her head when she heard them coming, and nickered. Without a moment’s hesitation the lad untied her, mounted and rode up the mountain. For two days the man and the boy had been “riding and tying,” as this way of travel for two men and one horse is still known in the hills, and over the mountain, they were to come together for the night. At the foot of the spur on the other side, boy and dog came upon the tall man sprawled at full length across a moss-covered bowlder. The dog dropped behind, but the man’s quick eye caught him:
“Where’d that dog come from, Chad?” Jack put his belly to the earth and crawled slowly forward–penitent, but determined.
“He broke loose, I reckon. He come tearin’ up behind me ’bout an hour ago, like a house afire. Let him go.” Caleb Hazel frowned.
“I told you, Chad, that we’d have no place to keep him.”
“Well, we can send him home as easy from up thar as we can from hyeh–let him go.”
“All right!” Chad understood not a whit better than the dog; for Jack leaped to his feet and jumped around the school-master, trying to lick his hands, but the school-master was absorbed and would none of him. There, the mountain-path turned into a wagon-road and the school-master pointed with one finger.
“Do you know what that is, Chad?”
“No, sir.” Chad said “sir” to the school-master now.
“Well, that’s”–the school-master paused to give his words effect–“that’s the old Wilderness Road.”
Ah, did he not know the old, old Wilderness Road! The boy gripped his rifle unconsciously, as though there might yet be a savage lying in ambush in some covert of rhododendron close by. And, as they trudged ahead, side by side now, for it was growing late, the school-master told him, as often before, the story of that road and the pioneers who had trod it–the hunters, adventurers, emigrants, fine ladies and fine gentlemen who had stained it with their blood; and how that road had broadened into the mighty way for a great civilization from sea to sea. The lad could see it all, as he listened, wishing that he had lived in those stirring days, never dreaming in how little was he of different mould from the stout-hearted pioneers who beat out the path with their moccasined feet; how little less full of danger were his own days to be; how little different had been his own life, and was his our pose now–how little different after all was the bourn to which his own
restless feet were bearing him.
Chad had changed a good deal since that night after Jack’s trial, when the kind-hearted old Major had turned up at Joel’s cabin to take him back to the Bluegrass. He was taller, broader at shoulder, deeper of chest; his mouth and eyes were prematurely grave from much brooding and looked a little defiant, as though the boy expected hostility from the world and was prepared to meet it, but there was no bitterness in them, and luminous about the lad was the old atmosphere of brave, sunny cheer and simple self-trust that won people to him.
The Major and old Joel had talked late that night after Jack’s trial. The Major had come down to find out who Chad was, if possible, and to take him back home, no matter who he might be. The old hunter looked long into the fire.
“Co’se I know hit ‘ud be better fer Chad, but, Lawd, how we’d hate to give him up. Still, I reckon I’ll have to let him go, but I can stand hit better, if you can git him to leave Jack hyeh.” The Major smiled. Did old Joel know where Nathan Cherry lived? The old hunter did. Nathan was a “damned old skinflint who lived across the mountain on Stone Creek–who stole other folks’ farms and if he knew anything about Chad the old hunter would squeeze it out of his throat; and if old Nathan, learning where Chad now was, tried to pester him he would break every bone in the skinflint’s body.” So the Major and old Joel rode over next day to see Nathan, and Nathan with his shifting eyes told them Chad’s story in a high, cracked voice that, recalling Chad’s imitation of it, made the Major laugh. Chad was a foundling, Nathan said: his mother was dead and his father had gone off to the Mexican War and never come back: he had taken the mother in himself and Chad had been born in his own house, when he lived farther up the river, and the boy had begun to run away as soon as he was old enough to toddle. And with each sentence Nathan would call for confirmation on a silent, dark-faced daughter who sat inside: “Didn’t he, Betsy?” or “Wasn’t he, gal?” And the girl would nod sullenly, but say nothing. It seemed a hopeless mission except that, on the way back, the Major learned that there were one or two Bufords living down the Cumberland, and like old Joel, shook his head over Nathan’s pharisaical philanthropy to a homeless boy and wondered what the motive under it was–but he went back with the old hunter and tried to get Chad to go home with him. The boy was rock-firm in his refusal.
“I’m obleeged to you, Major, but I reckon I better stay in the mountains.” That was all Chad would say, and at last the Major gave up and rode back over the mountain and down the Cumberland alone, still on his quest. At a blacksmith’s shop far down the river he found a man who had “heerd tell of a Chad Buford who had been killed in the Mexican War and whose daddy lived ’bout fifteen mile down the river.” The Major found that Buford dead, but an old woman told him his name was Chad, that he had “fit in the War o’ 1812 when he was nothin’ but a chunk of a boy, and that his daddy, whose name, too, was Chad, had been killed by Injuns some’eres aroun’ Cumberland Gap.” By this time the Major was as keen as a hound on the scent, and, in a cabin at the foot of the sheer gray wall that crumbles into the Gap, he had the amazing luck to find an octogenarian with an unclouded memory who could recollect a queer-looking old man who had been killed by Indians –“a ole feller with the curiosest hair I ever did see,” added the patriarch. His name was Colonel Buford, and the old man knew where he was buried, for he himself was old enough at the time to help bury him. Greatly excited, the Major hired mountaineers to dig into the little hill that the old man pointed out, on which there was, however, no sign of a grave, and, at last, they uncovered the skeleton of an old gentleman in a wig and peruke! There was little doubt now that the boy, no matter what the blot on his ‘scutcheon, was of his own flesh and blood, and the Major was tempted to go back at once for him, but it was a long way, and he was ill and anxious to get back home. So he took the Wilderness Road for the Bluegrass, and wrote old Joel the facts and asked him to send Chad to him whenever he would come. But the boy would not go. There was no definite reason in his mind. It was a stubborn instinct merely–the instinct of pride, of stubborn independence–of shame that festered in his soul like a hornet’s sting. Even Melissa urged him. She never tired of hearing Chad tell about the Bluegrass country, and when she knew that the Major wanted him to go back, she followed him out in the yard that night and found him on the fence whittling. A red star was sinking behind the mountains. “Why won’t you go back no more, Chad?” she said.
“‘Cause I HAIN’T got no daddy er mammy.” Then Melissa startled him.
“Well, I’d go–an’ I hain’t got no daddy er mammy.” Chad stopped his whittling.
“Whut’d you say, Lissy?” he asked, gravely.
Melissa was frightened–the boy looked so serious.
“Cross yo’ heart an’ body that you won’t NUVER tell NO body.” Chad crossed.
“Well, mammy said I mustn’t ever tell nobody–but I HAIN’T got no daddy er mammy. I heerd her a-tellin’ the school-teacher.” And the little girl shook her head over her frightful crime of disobedience.
“You HAIN’T?”
“I HAIN’T!”
Melissa, too, was a waif, and Chad looked at her with a wave of new affection and pity.
“Now, why won’t you go back just because you hain’t got no daddy an’ mammy?”
Chad hesitated. There was no use making Melissa unhappy.
“Oh, I’d just ruther stay hyeh in the mountains,” he said, carelessly–lying suddenly like the little gentleman that he was–lying as he knew, and as Melissa some day would come to know. Then Chad looked at the little girl a long while, and in such a queer way that Melissa turned her face shyly to the red star.
“I’m goin’ to stay right hyeh. Ain’t you glad, Lissy?”
The little girl turned her eyes shyly back again. “Yes, Chad,” she said.
He would stay in the mountains and work hard; and when he grew up he would marry Melissa and they would go away where nobody knew him or her: or they would stay right there in the mountains where nobody blamed him for what he was nor Melissa for what she was; and he would study law like Caleb Hazel, and go to the Legislature–but Melissa! And with the thought of Melissa in the mountains came always the thought of dainty Margaret in the Bluegrass and the chasm that lay between the two–between Margaret and him, for that matter; and when Mother Turner called Melissa from him in the orchard next day, Chad lay on his back under an apple-tree, for a long while, thinking; and then he whistled for Jack and climbed the spur above the river where he could look down on the shadowed water and out to the clouded heaps of rose and green and crimson, where the sun was going down under one faint white star. Melissa was the glow-worm that, when darkness came, would be a watch-fire at his feet–Margaret, the star to which his eyes were lifted night and day–and so runs the world. He lay long watching that star. It hung almost over the world of which he had dreamed so long and upon which he had turned his back forever. Forever? Perhaps, but he went back home that night with a trouble in his soul that was not to pass, and while he sat by the fire he awoke from the same dream to find Melissa’s big eyes fixed on him, and in them was a vague trouble that was more than his own reflected back to him.
Still the boy went back sturdily to his old life, working in the fields, busy about the house and stable, going to school, reading and studying with the school-master at nights, and wandering in the woods with Jack and his rifle. And he hungered for spring to come again when he should go with the Turner boys to take another raft of logs down the river to the capital. Spring came, and going out to the back pasture one morning, Chad found a long-legged, ungainly creature stumbling awkwardly about his old mare–a colt! That, too, he owed the Major, and he would have burst with pride had he known that the colt’s sire was a famous stallion in the Bluegrass. That spring he did go down the river again. He did not let the Major know he was coming and, through a nameless shyness, he could not bring himself to go to see his old friend and kinsman, but in Lexington, while he and the school-master were standing on Cheapside, the Major whirled around a corner on them in his carriage, and, as on the turnpike a year before, old Tom, the driver, called out:
“Look dar, Mars Cal!” And there stood Chad.
“Why, bless my soul! Chad–why, boy! How you have grown!” For Chad had grown, and his face was curiously aged and thoughtful. The Major insisted on taking him home, and the school-master, too, who went reluctantly. Miss Lucy was there, looking whiter and more fragile than ever, and she greeted Chad with a sweet kindliness that took the sting from his unjust remembrance of her. And what that failure to understand her must have been Chad better knew when he saw the embarrassed awe, in her presence, of the school-master, for whom all in the mountains had so much reverence. At the table was Thankyma’am waiting. Around the quarters and the stable the pickaninnies and servants seemed to remember the boy in a kindly genuine way that touched him, and even Jerome Conners, the overseer, seemed glad to see him. The Major was drawn at once to the grave school-master, and he had a long talk with him that night. It was no use, Caleb Hazel said, trying to persuade the boy to live with the Major–not yet. And the Major was more content when he came to know in what good hands the boy was, and, down in his heart, he loved the lad the more for his sturdy independence, and for the pride that made him shrink from facing the world with the shame of his birth; knowing that Chad thought of him perhaps more than of himself. Such unwillingness to give others trouble seemed remarkable in so young a lad. Not once did the Major mention the Deans to the boy, and about them Chad asked no questions–not even when he saw their carriage passing the Major’s gate. When they came to leave the Major said:
“Well, Chad, when that filly of yours is a year old, I’ll buy ’em both from you, if you’ll sell ’em, and I reckon you can come up and go to school then.”
Chad shook his head. Sell that colt? He would as soon have thought of selling Jack. But the temptation took root, just the same, then and there, and grew steadily until, after another year in the mountains, it grew too strong. For, in that year, Chad grew to look the fact of his birth steadily in the face, and in his heart grew steadily a proud resolution to make his way in the world despite it. It was curious how Melissa came to know the struggle that was going on within him and how Chad came to know that she knew– though no word passed between them: more curious still, how it came with a shock to Chad one day to realize how little was the tragedy of his life in comparison with the tragedy in hers, and to learn that the little girl with swift vision had already reached that truth and with sweet unselfishness had reconciled herself. He was a boy–he could go out in the world and conquer it, while her life was as rigid and straight before her as though it ran between close walls of rock as steep and sheer as the cliff across the river. One thing he never guessed–what it cost the little girl to support him bravely in his purpose, and to stand with smiling face when the first breath of one sombre autumn stole through the hills, and Chad and the school-master left the Turner home for the Bluegrass, this time to stay.
She stood in the doorway after they had waved good-by from the head of the river–the smile gone and her face in a sudden dark eclipse. The wise old mother went in-doors. Once the girl started through the yard as though she would rush after them and stopped at the gate, clinching it hard with both hands. As suddenly she became quiet.
She went in-doors to her work and worked quietly and without a word. Thus she did all day while her mind and her heart ached. When she went after the cows before sunset she stopped at the barn where Beelzebub had been tied. She lifted her eyes to the hay-loft where she and Chad had hunted for hens’ eggs and played hide-and-seek. She passed through the orchard where they had worked and played so many happy hours, and on to the back pasture where the Dillon sheep had been killed and she had kept the Sheriff from shooting Jack. And she saw and noted everything with a piteous pain and dry eyes. But she gave no sign that night, and not until she was in bed did she with covered head give way. Then the bed shook with her smothered sobs. This is the sad way with women. After the way of men, Chad proudly marched the old Wilderness Road that led to a big, bright, beautiful world where one had but to do and dare to reach the stars. The men who had trod that road had made that big world beyond, and their life Chad himself had lived so far. Only, where they had lived he had been born–in a log cabin. Their weapons–the axe and the rifle– had been his. He had had the same fight with Nature as they. He knew as well as they what life in the woods in “a half-faced camp” was. Their rude sports and pastimes, their log-rollings, house-raisings, quilting parties, corn-huskings, feats of strength, had been his. He had the same lynx eyes, cool courage, swiftness of foot, readiness of resource that had been trained into them. His heart was as stout and his life as simple and pure. He was taking their path and, in the far West, beyond the Bluegrass world where he was going, he could, if he pleased, take up the same life at the precise point where they had left off. At sunset, Chad and the school-master stood on the summit of the Cumberland foothills and looked over the rolling land with little less of a thrill, doubtless, than the first hunters felt when the land before them was as much a wilderness as the wilds through which they had made their way. Below them a farmhouse shrank half out of sight into a little hollow, and toward it they went down.
The outside world had moved swiftly during the two years that they had been buried in the hills as they learned at the farm-house that night. Already the national storm was threatening, the air was electrically charged with alarms, and already here and there the lightning had flashed. The underground railway was busy with black freight, and John Brown, fanatic, was boldly lifting his shaggy head. Old Brutus Dean was even publishing an abolitionist paper at Lexington, the aristocratic heart of the State. He was making abolition speeches throughout the Bluegrass with a dagger thrust in the table before him–shaking his black mane and roaring defiance like a lion. The news thrilled Chad unaccountably, as did the shadow of any danger, but it threw the school-master into gloom. There was more. A dark little man by the name of Douglas and a sinewy giant by the name of Lincoln were thrilling the West. Phillips and Garrison were thundering in Massachusetts, and fiery tongues in the South were flashing back scornful challenges and threats that would imperil a nation. An invisible air-line shot suddenly between the North and the South, destined to drop some day and lie a dead-line on the earth, and on each side of it two hordes of brothers, who thought themselves two hostile peoples, were shrinking away from each other with the half-conscious purpose of making ready for a charge. In no other State in the Union was the fratricidal character of the coming war to be so marked as in Kentucky, in no other State was the national drama to be so fully played to the bitter end.
That night even, Brutus Dean was going to speak near by, and Chad and Caleb Hazel went to hear him. The fierce abolitionist first placed a Bible before him.
“This is for those who believe in religion,” he said; then a copy of the Constitution: “this for those who believe in the laws and in freedom of speech. And this,” he thundered, driving a dagger into the table and leaving it to quiver there, “is for the rest!” Then he went on and no man dared to interrupt.
And only next day came the rush of wind that heralds the storm. Just outside of Lexington Chad and the school-master left the mare and colt at a farm-house and with Jack went into town on foot. It was Saturday afternoon, the town was full of people, and an excited crowd was pressing along Main Street toward Cheapside. The man and the boy followed eagerly. Cheapside was thronged–thickest around a frame building that bore a newspaper sign on which was the name of Brutus Dean. A man dashed from a hardware store with an axe, followed by several others with heavy hammers in their hands. One swing of the axe, the door was crashed open and the crowd went in like wolves. Shattered windows, sashes and all, flew out into the street, followed by showers of type, chair-legs, table-tops, and then, piece by piece, the battered cogs, wheels, and forms of a printing-press. The crowd made little noise. In fifteen minutes the house was a shell with gaping windows, surrounded with a pile of chaotic rubbish, and the men who had done the work quietly disappeared. Chad looked at the school-master for the first time: neither of them had uttered a word. The school-master’s face was white with anger, his hands were clinched, and his eyes were so fierce and burning that the boy was frightened.
CHAPTER 15. TO COLLEGE IN THE BLUEGRASS
As the school-master had foretold, there was no room at college for Jack. Several times Major Buford took the dog home with him, but Jack would not stay. The next morning the dog would turn up at the door of the dormitory where Chad and the school-master slept, and as a last resort the boy had to send Jack home. So, one Sunday morning Chad led Jack out of the town for several miles, and at the top of a high hill pointed toward the mountains and sternly told him to go home. And Jack, understanding that the boy was in earnest, trotted sadly away with a placard around his neck:
I own this dog. His name is Jack. He is on his way to Kingdom Come. Please feed him. Uncle Joel Turner will shoot any man who steels him. CHAD.
It was no little consolation to Chad to think that the faithful sheep-dog would in no small measure repay the Turners for all they had done for him. But Jack was the closest link that bound him to the mountains, and dropping out of sight behind the crest of the hill, Chad crept to the top again and watched Jack until he trotted out of sight, and the link was broken. Then Chad went slowly and sorrowfully back to his room.
It was the smallest room in the dormitory that the school-master had chosen for himself and Chad, and in it were one closet, one table, one lamp, two chairs and one bed–no more. There were two windows in the little room–one almost swept by the branches of a locust-tree and overlooking the brown-gray sloping campus and the roofs and church-steeples of the town–the other opening to the east on a sweep of field and woodland over which the sun rose with a daily message from the unseen mountains far beyond and toward which Chad had sent Jack trotting home. It was a proud day for Chad when Caleb Hazel took him to “matriculate”–leading him from one to another of the professors, who awed the lad with their preternatural dignity, but it was a sad blow when he was told that in everything but mathematics he must go to the preparatory department until the second session of the term–the “kitchen,” as it was called by the students. He bore it bravely, though, and the school-master took him down the shady streets to the busy thoroughfare, where the official book-store was, and where Chad, with pure ecstasy, caught his first new books under one arm and trudged back, bending his head now and then to catch the delicious smell of the fresh leaves and print. It was while he was standing with his treasures under the big elm at the turnstile, looking across the campus at the sundown that two boys came down the gravel path. He knew them both at once as Dan and Harry Dean. Both looked at him curiously, as he thought, but he saw that neither knew him and no one spoke. The sound of wheels came up the street behind him just then, and a carriage halted at the turnstile to take them in. Turning, Chad saw a slender girl with dark hair and eyes and heard her call brightly to the boys. He almost caught his breath at the sound of her voice, but he kept sturdily on his way, and the girl’s laugh rang in his ears as it rang the first time he heard it, was ringing when he reached his room, ringing when he went to bed that night, and lay sleepless, looking through his window at the quiet stars.
For some time, indeed, no one recognized him, and Chad was glad. Once he met Richard Hunt riding with Margaret, and the piercing dark eyes that the boy remembered so well turned again to look at him. Chad colored and bravely met them with his own, but there was no recognition. And he saw John Morgan–Captain John Morgan–at the head of the “Lexington Rifles,” which he had just formed from the best blood of the town, as though in long preparation for that coming war–saw him and Richard Hunt, as lieutenant, drilling them in the campus, and the sight thrilled him as nothing else, except Margaret, had ever done. Many times he met the Dean brothers on the playground and in the streets, but there was no sign that he was known until he was called to the blackboard one day in geometry, the only course in which he had not been sent to the “kitchen.” Then Chad saw Harry turn quickly when the professor called his name. Confused though he was for a moment, he gave his demonstration in his quaint speech with perfect clearness and without interruption from the professor, who gave the boy a keen look as he said, quietly:
“Very good, sir!” And Harry could see his fingers tracing in his class-book the figures that meant a perfect recitation.
“How are you, Chad?” he said in the hallway afterward.
“Howdye!” said Chad, shaking the proffered hand.
“I didn’t know you–you’ve grown so tall. Didn’t you know me?”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t you speak to me?”
“‘Cause you didn’t know ME.”
Harry laughed. “Well, that isn’t fair. See you again.”
“All right,” said Chad.
That very afternoon Chad met Dan in a football game–an old-fashioned game, in which there were twenty or thirty howling lads on each side and nobody touched the ball except with his foot–met him so violently that, clasped in each other’s arms, they tumbled to the ground.
“Leggo!” said Dan.
“S’pose you leggo!” said Chad.
As Dan started after the ball he turned to look at Chad and after the game he went up to him.
“Why, aren’t you the boy who was out at Major Buford’s once?”
“Yes.” Dan thrust out his hand and began to laugh. So did Chad, and each knew that the other was thinking of the tournament.
“In college?”
“Math’matics,” said Chad. “I’m in the kitchen fer the rest.”
“Oh!” said Dan. “Where you living?” Chad pointed to the dormitory, and again Dan said “Oh!” in a way that made Chad flush, but added, quickly:
“You better play on our side to-morrow.”
Chad looked at his clothes–foot-ball seemed pretty hard on clothes–“I don’t know,” he said–“mebbe.”
It was plain that neither of the boys was holding anything against Chad, but neither had asked the mountain lad to come to see him–an omission that was almost unforgivable according to Chad’s social ethics. So Chad proudly went into his shell again, and while the three boys met often, no intimacy developed. Often he saw them with Margaret, on the street, in a carriage or walking with a laughing crowd of boys and girls; on the porticos of old houses or in the yards; and, one night, Chad saw, through the wide-open door of a certain old house on the corner of Mill and Market Streets, a party going on; and Margaret, all in white, dancing, and he stood in the shade of the trees opposite with new pangs shooting through him and went back to his room in desolate loneliness, but with a new grip on his resolution that his own day should yet come.
Steadily the boy worked, forging his way slowly but surely toward the head of his class in the “kitchen,” and the school-master helped him unwearyingly. And it was a great help–mental and spiritual–to be near the stern Puritan, who loved the boy as a brother and was ever ready to guide him with counsel and aid him with his studies. In time the Major went to the president to ask him about Chad, and that august dignitary spoke of the lad in a way that made the Major, on his way through the campus, swish through the grass with his cane in great satisfaction. He always spoke of the boy now as his adopted son and, whenever it was possible, he came in to take Chad out home to spend Sunday with him; but, being a wise man and loving Chad’s independence, he let the boy have his own way. He had bought the filly–and would hold her, he said, until Chad could buy her back, and he would keep the old nag as a broodmare and would divide profits with Chad–to all of which the boy agreed. The question of the lad’s birth was ignored between them, and the Major rarely spoke to Chad of the Deans, who were living in town during the winter, nor questioned him about Dan or Harry or Margaret. But Chad had found out where the little girl went to church, and every Sunday, despite Caleb Hazel’s protest, he would slip into the Episcopal church, with a queer feeling — little Calvinist of the hills that he was — that it was not quite right for him even to enter that church; and he would watch the little girl come in with her family and, after the queer way of these “furriners,” kneel first in prayer. And there, with soul uplifted by the dim rich light and the peal of the organ, he would sit watching her; rising when she rose, watching the light from the windows on her shining hair and sweet-spirited face, watching her reverent little head bend in obeisance to the name of the Master, though he kept his own held straight, for no Popery like that was for him. Always, however, he would slip out before the service was quite over and never wait even to see her come out of church. He was too proud for that and, anyhow, it made him lonely to see the people greeting one another and chatting and going off home together when there was not a soul to speak to him. It was just one such Sunday that they came face to face for the first time. Chad had gone down the street after leaving the church, had changed his mind and was going back to his room. People were pouring from the church, as he went by, but Chad did not even look across. A clatter rose behind him and he turned to see a horse and rockaway coming at a gallop up the street, which was narrow. The negro driver, frightened though he was, had sense enough to pull his running horse away from the line of vehicles in front of the church so that the beast stumbled against the curb-stone, crashed into a tree, and dropped struggling in the gutter below another line of vehicles waiting on the other side of the street. Like lightning, Chad leaped and landed full length on the horse’s head and was tossed violently to and fro, but he held on until the animal lay still.
“Unhitch the hoss,” he called, sharply.
“Well, that was pretty quick work for a boy,” said a voice across the street that sounded familiar, and Chad looked across to see General Dean and Margaret watching him. The boy blushed furiously when his eyes met Margaret’s and he thought he saw her start slightly, but he lowered his eyes and hurried away.
It was only a few days later that, going up from town toward the campus, he turned a corner and there was Margaret alone and moving slowly ahead of him. Hearing his steps she turned her head to see who it was, but Chad kept his eyes on the ground and passed her without looking up. And thus he went on, although she was close behind him, across the street and to the turnstile. As he was passing through, a voice rose behind him:
“You aren’t very polite, little boy.” He turned quickly–Margaret had not gone around the corner: she, too, was coming through the campus and there she stood, grave and demure, though her eyes were dancing.
“My mamma says a NICE little boy always lets a little GIRL go FIRST.”
“I didn’t know you was comin’ through.”
“Was comin’ through!” Margaret made a little face as though to say–“Oh, dear.”
“I said I didn’t know you were coming through this way.”
Margaret shook her head. “No,” she said; “no, you didn’t.”
“Well, that’s what I meant to say.” Chad was having a hard time with his English. He had snatched his cap from his head, had stepped back outside the stile and was waiting to turn it for her. Margaret passed through and waited where the paths forked.
“Are you going up to the college?” she asked.
“I was–but I ain’t now–if you’ll let me walk a piece with you.” He was scarlet with confusion–a tribute that Chad rarely paid his kind. His way of talking was very funny, to be sure, but had she not heard her father say that “the poor little chap had had no chance in life;” and Harry, that some day he would be the best in his class?
“Aren’t you–Chad?”
“Yes–ain’t you Margaret–Miss Margaret?”
“Yes, I’m Margaret.” She was pleased with the hesitant title and the boy’s halting reverence.
“An’ I called you a little gal.” Margaret’s laugh tinkled in merry remembrance. “An’ you wouldn’t take my fish.”
“I can’t bear to touch them.”
“I know,” said Chad, remembering Melissa.
They passed a boy who knew Chad, but not Margaret. The lad took off his hat, but Chad did not lift his; then a boy and a girl and, when only the two girls spoke, the other boy lifted his hat, though he did not speak to Margaret. Still Chad’s hat was untouched and when Margaret looked up, Chad’s face was red with confusion again. But it never took the boy long to learn and, thereafter, during the walk his hat came off unfailingly. Everyone looked at the two with some surprise and Chad noticed that the little girl’s chin was being lifted higher and higher. His intuition told him what the matter was, and when they reached the stile across the campus and Chad saw a crowd of Margaret’s friends coming down the street, he halted as if to turn back, but the little girl told him imperiously to come on. It was a strange escort for haughty Margaret–the country-looking boy, in coarse homespun–but Margaret spoke cheerily to her friends and went on, looking up at Chad and talking to him as though he were the dearest friend she had on earth.
At the edge of town she suggested that they walk across a pasture and go back by another street, and not until they were passing through the woodland did Chad come to himself.
“You know I didn’t rickollect when you called me ‘little boy.'”
“Indeed!”
“Not at fust, I mean,” stammered Chad.
Margaret grew mock-haughty and Chad grew grave. He spoke very slowly and steadily. “I reckon I rickollect ever’thing that happened out thar a sight better’n you. I ain’t forgot nothin’–anything.”
The boy’s sober and half-sullen tone made Margaret catch her breath with a sudden vague alarm.
Unconsciously she quickened her pace, but, already, she was mistress of an art to which she was born and she said, lightly:
“Now, that’s MUCH better.” A piece of pasteboard dropped from Chad’s jacket just then, and, taking the little girl’s cue to swerve from the point at issue, he picked it up and held it out for Margaret to read. It was the first copy of the placard which he had tied around Jack’s neck when he sent him home, and it set Margaret to laughing and asking questions. Before he knew it Chad was telling her about Jack and the mountains; how he had run away; about the Turners and about Melissa and coming down the river on a raft–all he had done and all he meant to do. And from looking at Chad now and then, Margaret finally kept her eyes fixed on his–and thus they stood when they reached the gate, while crows flew cawing over them and the air grew chill.
“And did Jack go home?”
Chad laughed.
“No, he didn’t. He come back, and I had to hide fer two days. Then, because he couldn’t find me he did go, thinking I had gone back to the mountains, too. He went to look fer me.”
“Well, if he comes back again I’ll ask my papa to get them to let you keep Jack at college,” said Margaret.
Chad shook his head.
“Then I’ll keep him for you myself.” The boy looked his gratitude, but shook his head again.
“He won’t stay.”
Margaret asked for the placard again as they moved down the street.
“You’ve got it spelled wrong,” she said, pointing to “steel.” Chad blushed. “I can’t spell when I write,” he said. “I can’t even talk–right.”
“But you’ll learn,” she said.
“Will you help me?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me when I say things wrong?”
“Yes.”
“Where’m I goin’ to see you?”
Margaret shook her head thoughtfully: then the reason for her speaking first to Chad came out.
“Papa and I saw you on Sunday, and papa said you must be very strong as well as brave, and that you knew something about horses. Harry told us who you were when papa described you, and then I remembered. Papa told Harry to bring you to see us. And you must come,” she said, decisively.
They had reached the turnstile at the campus again.
“Have you had any more tournaments?” asked Margaret.
“No,” said Chad, apprehensively.
“Do you remember the last thing I said to you?”
“I rickollect that better’n anything,” said Chad.
“Well, I didn’t hate you. I’m sorry I said that,” she said gently. Chad looked very serious.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I seed–I saw you on Sunday, too.”
“Did you know me?”
“I reckon I did. And that wasn’t the fust time.” Margaret’s eyes were opening with surprise.
“I been goin’ to church ever’ Sunday fer nothin’ else but just to see you.” Again his tone gave her vague alarm, but she asked:
“Why didn’t you speak to me?”
They were nearing the turnstile across the campus now, and Chad did not answer.
“Why didn’t you speak to me?”
Chad stopped suddenly, and Margaret looked quickly at him, and saw that his face was scarlet. The little girl started and her own face flamed. There was one thing she had forgotten, and even now she could not recall what it was–only that it was something terrible she must not know–old Mammy’s words when Dan was carried in senseless after the tournament. Frightened and helpless, she shrank toward the turnstile, but Chad did not wait. With his cap in his hand, he turned abruptly, without a sound, and strode away.
CHAPTER 16. AGAIN THE BAR SINISTER
And yet, the next time Chad saw Margaret, she spoke to him shyly but cordially, and when he did not come near her, she stopped him on the street one day and reminded him of his promise to come and see them. And Chad knew the truth at once–that she had never asked her father about him, but had not wanted to know what she had been told she must not know, and had properly taken it for granted that her father would not ask Chad to his house, if there were a good reason why he should not come. But Chad did not go even to the Christmas party that Margaret gave in town, though the Major urged him. He spent Christmas with the Major, and he did go to a country party, where the Major was delighted with the boy’s grace and agility dancing the quadrille, and where the lad occasioned no little amusement with his improvisations in the way of cutting pigeon’s wings and shuffling, which he had learned in the mountains. So the Major made him accept a loan and buy a suit for social purposes after Christmas, and had him go to Madam Blake’s dancing school, and promise to go to the next party to which he was asked. And that Chad did–to the big gray house on the corner, through whose widespread doors his longing eyes had watched Margaret and her friends flitting like butterflies months before.
It intoxicated the boy–the lights, music, flowers, the little girls in white–and Margaret. For the first time he met her friends, Nellie Hunt, sister to Richard; Elizabeth Morgan, cousin to John Morgan; and Miss Jennie Overstreet, who, young as she was, wrote poems–but Chad had eyes only for Margaret. It was while he was dancing a quadrille with her, that he noticed a tall, pale youth with black hair, glaring at him, and he recognized Georgie Forbes, a champion of Margaret, and the old enemy who had caused his first trouble in his new home. Chad laughed with fearless gladness, and Margaret tossed her head. It was Georgie now who blackened and spread the blot on Chad’s good name, and it was Georgie to whom Chad–fast learning the ways of gentlemen–promptly sent a pompous challenge, that the difficulty might be settled “in any way the gentleman saw fit.” Georgie insultingly declined to fight with one who was not his equal, and Chad boxed his jaws in the presence of a crowd, floored him with one blow, and contemptuously twisted his nose. Thereafter open comment ceased. Chad was making himself known. He was the swiftest runner on the football field; he had the quickest brain in mathematics; he was elected to the Periclean Society, and astonished his fellow-members with a fiery denunciation of the men who banished Napoleon to St. Helena–so fiery was it, indeed, that his opponents themselves began to wonder how that crime had ever come to pass. He would fight at the drop of a hat, and he always won; and by-and-by the boy began to take a fierce joy in battling his way upward against a block that would have crushed a weaker soul. It was only with Margaret that that soul was in awe. He began to love her with a pure reverence that he could never know at another age. Every Saturday night, when dusk fell, he was mounting the steps of her house. Every Sunday morning he was waiting to take her home from church. Every afternoon he looked for her, hoping to catch sight of her on the streets, and it was only when Dan and Harry got indignant, and after Margaret had made a passionate defence of Chad in the presence of the family, that the General and Mrs. Dean took the matter in hand. It was a childish thing, of course; a girlish whim. It was right that they should be kind to the boy–for Major Buford’s sake, if not for his own; but they could not have even the pretence of more than a friendly intimacy between the two, and so Margaret was told the truth. Immediately, when Chad next saw her, her honest eyes sadly told him that she knew the truth, and Chad gave up then. Thereafter he disappeared from sports and from his kind every way, except in the classroom and in the debating hall. Sullenly he stuck to his books. From five o’clock in the morning until ten o’clock at night, he was at them steadily, in his room, or at recitation except for an hour’s walk with the school-master and the three half-hours that his meals kept him away. He grew so pale and thin that the Major and Caleb Hazel were greatly worried, but protest from both was useless. Before the end of the term he had mounted into college in every study, and was holding his own. At the end he knew his power–knew what he COULD do, and his face was set, for his future, dauntless. When vacation came, he went at once to the Major’s farm, but not to be idle. In a week or two he was taking some of the reins into his own hands as a valuable assistant to the Major. He knew a good horse, could guess the weight of a steer with surprising accuracy, and was a past master in knowledge of sheep. By instinct he was canny at a trade–what mountaineer is not?–and he astonished the Major with the shrewd deals he made. Authority seemed to come naturally to him, and the Major swore that he could get more work out of the “hands” than the overseer himself, who sullenly resented Chad’s interference, but dared not open his lips. Not once did he go to the Deans’, and neither Harry nor Dan came near him. There was little intercourse between the Major and the General, as well; for, while the Major could not, under the circumstances, blame the General, inconsistently, he could not quite forgive him, and the line of polite coolness between the neighbors was never overstepped. At the end of July, Chad went to the mountains to see the Turners and Jack and Melissa. He wore his roughest clothes, put on no airs, and, to all eyes, save Melissa’s, he was the same old Chad. But feminine subtlety knows no social or geographical lines, and while Melissa knew what had happened as well as Chad, she never let him see that she knew. Apparently she was giving open encouragement to Dave Hilton, a tawny youth from down the river, who was hanging, dog-like, about the house, and foolish Chad began to let himself dream of Margaret with a light heart. On the third day before he was to go back to the Bluegrass, a boy came from over Black Mountain with a message from old Nathan Cherry. Old Nathan had joined the church, had fallen ill, and, fearing he was going to die, wanted to see Chad. Chad went over with curious premonitions that were not in vain, and he came back with a strange story that he told only to old Joel, under promise that he would never make it known to Melissa. Then he started for the Bluegrass, going over Pine Mountain and down through Cumberland Gap. He would come back every year of his life, he told Melissa and the Turners, but Chad knew he was bidding a last farewell to the life he had known in the mountains. At Melissa’s wish and old Joel’s, he left Jack behind, though he sorely wanted to take the dog with him. It was little enough for him to do in return for their kindness, and he could see that Melissa’s affection for Jack was even greater than his own: and how incomparably lonelier than his life was the life that she must lead! This time Melissa did not rush to the yard gate when he was gone. She sank slowly where she stood to the steps of the porch, and there she sat stone-still. Old Joel passed her on the way to the barn. Several times the old mother walked to the door behind her, and each time starting to speak, stopped and turned back, but the girl neither saw nor heard them. Jack trotted by, whimpering. He sat down in front of her, looking up at her unseeing eyes, and it was only when he crept to her and put his head in her lap, that she put her arms around him and bent her own head down; but no tears came.
CHAPTER 17. CHADWICK BUFORD, GENTLEMAN
And so, returned to the Bluegrass, the midsummer of that year, Chadwick Buford gentleman. A youth of eighteen, with the self-possession of a man, and a pair of level, clear eyes, that looked the world in the face as proudly as ever but with no defiance and no secret sense of shame It was a curious story that Chad brought back and told to the Major, on the porch under the honeysuckle vines, but it seemed to surprise the Major very little: how old Nathan had sent for him to come to his death-bed and had told Chad that he was no foundling; that one of his farms belonged to the boy; that he had lied to the Major about Chad’s mother, who was a lawful wife, in order to keep the land for himself; how old Nathan had offered to give back the farm, or pay him the price of it in livestock, and how, at old Joel’s advice he had taken the stock and turned the stock into money. How, after he had found his mother’s grave, his first act had been to take up the rough bee-gum coffin that held her remains, and carry it down the river, and bury her where she had the right to lie, side by side with her grandfather and his–the old gentleman who slept in wig and peruke on the hill-side–that her good name and memory should never again suffer insult from any living tongue. It was then that Major took Chad by the shoulders roughly, and, with tears in his eyes, swore that he would have no more nonsense from the boy; that Chad was flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; that he would adopt him and make him live where he belonged, and break his damned pride. And it was then that Chad told him how gladly he would come, now that he could bring him an untarnished name. And the two walked together down to the old family graveyard, where the Major said that the two in the mountains should be brought some day and where the two brothers who had parted nearly fourscore years ago could, side by side, await Judgment Day.
When they went back into the house the Major went to the sideboard.
“Have a drink, Chad?”
Chad laughed: “Do you think it will stunt my growth?”
“Stand up here, and let’s see,” said the Major.
The two stood up, back to back, in front of a long mirror, and Chad’s shaggy hair rose at least an inch above the Major’s thin locks of gray. The Major turned and looked at him from head to foot with affectionate pride.
“Six feet in your socks, to the inch, without that hair. I reckon it won’t stunt you–not now.”
“All right,” laughed Chad, “then I’ll take that drink.” And together they drank.
Thus, Chadwick Buford, gentleman, after the lapse of three-quarters of a century, came back to his own: and what that own, at that day and in that land, was!
It was the rose of Virginia, springing, in full bloom, from new and richer soil–a rose of a deeper scarlet and a stronger stem: and the big village where the old University reared its noble front was the very heart of that rose. There were the proudest families, the stateliest homes, the broadest culture, the most gracious hospitality, the gentlest courtesies, the finest chivalry, that the State has ever known. There lived the political idols; there, under the low sky, rose the memorial shaft to Clay. There had lived beaux and belles, memories of whom hang still about the town, people it with phantom shapes, and give an individual or a family here and there a subtle distinction to-day. There the grasp of Calvinism was most lax. There were the dance, the ready sideboard, the card table, the love of the horse and the dog, and but little passion for the game-cock. There were as manly virtues, as manly vices, as the world has ever known. And there, love was as far from lust as heaven from hell.
It was on the threshold of this life that Chad stood. Kentucky had given birth to the man who was to uphold the Union–birth to the man who would seek to shatter it. Fate had given Chad the early life of one, and like blood with the other; and, curiously enough, in his own short life, he already epitomized the social development of the nation, from its birth in a log cabin to its swift maturity behind the columns of a Greek portico. Against the uncounted generations of gentlepeople that ran behind him to sunny England, how little could the short sleep of three in the hills count! It may take three generations to make a gentleman, but one is enough, if the blood be there, the heart be right, and the brain and hand come early under discipline.
It was to General Dean that the Major told Chad’s story first. The two old friends silently grasped hands, and the cloud between them passed like mist.
“Bring him over to dinner on Saturday, Cal–you and Miss Lucy, won’t you? Some people are coming out from town.” In making amends, there was no half-way with General Dean.
“I will,” said the Major, “gladly.”
The cool of the coming autumn was already in the air that Saturday when Miss Lucy and the Major and Chad, in the old carriage, with old Tom as driver and the pickaninny behind, started for General Dean’s. The Major was beautiful to behold, in his flowered waistcoat, his ruffled shirt, white trousers strapped beneath his highly polished, high-heeled boots, high hat and frock coat, with only the lowest button fastened, in order to give a glimpse of that wonderful waistcoat, just as that, too, was unbuttoned at the top that the ruffles might peep out upon the world. Chad’s raiment, too, was a Solomon’s–for him. He had protested, but in vain; and he, too, wore white trousers with straps, high-heeled boots, and a wine-colored waistcoat and slouch hat, and a brave, though very conscious, figure he made, with his tall body, well-poised head, strong shoulders and thick hair. It was a rare thing for Miss Lucy to do, but the old gentlewoman could not resist the Major, and she, too, rode in state with them, smiling indulgently at the Major’s quips, and now, kindly, on Chad. A drowsy peace lay over the magnificent woodlands, unravaged then except for firewood; the seared pastures, just beginning to show green again for the second spring; the flashing creek, the seas of still hemp and yellow corn, and Chad saw a wistful shadow cross Miss Lucy’s pale face, and a darker one anxiously sweep over the Major’s jesting lips.
Guests were arriving, when they entered the yard gate, and guests were coming behind them. General and Mrs. Dean were receiving them on the porch, and Harry and Dan were helping the ladies out of their carriages, while, leaning against one of the columns, in pure white, was the graceful figure of Margaret. That there could ever have been any feeling in any member of the family other than simple, gracious kindliness toward him, Chad could neither see nor feel. At once every trace of embarrassment in him was gone, and he could but wonder at the swift justice done him in a way that was so simple and effective. Even with Margaret there was no trace of consciousness. The past was wiped clean of all save courtesy and kindness. There were the Hunts–Nellie, and the Lieutenant of the Lexington Rifles, Richard Hunt, a dauntless-looking dare-devil, with the ready tongue of a coffee-house wit and the grace of a
cavalier. There was Elizabeth Morgan, to whom Harry’s grave eyes were always wandering, and Miss Jennie Overstreet, who was romantic and openly now wrote poems for the Observer, and who looked at Chad with no attempt to conceal her admiration of his appearance and her wonder as to who he was. And there were the neighbors roundabout–the Talbotts, Quisenberrys, Clays, Prestons, Morgans–surely no less than forty strong, and all for dinner. It was no little trial for Chad in that crowd of fine ladies, judges, soldiers, lawyers, statesmen–but he stood it well. While his self-consciousness made him awkward, he had pronounced dignity of bearing; his diffidence emphasized his modesty, and he had the good sense to stand and keep still. Soon they were at table–and what a table and what a dinner that was! The dining-room was the biggest and sunniest room in the house; its walls covered with hunting prints, pictures of game and stag heads. The table ran the length of it. The snowy tablecloth hung almost to the floor. At the head sat Mrs. Dean, with a great tureen of calf’s head soup in front of her. Before the General was the saddle of venison that was to follow, drenched in a bottle of ancient Madeira, and flanked by flakes of red-currant jelly. Before the Major rested broiled wild ducks, on which he could show his carving skill–on game as well as men. A great turkey supplanted the venison, and last to come, and before Richard Hunt, Lieutenant of the Rifles, was a Kentucky ham. That ham! Mellow, aged, boiled in champagne, baked brown, spiced deeply, rosy pink within, and of a flavor and fragrance to shatter the fast of a Pope; and without, a brown-edged white layer, so firm that the lieutenant’s deft carving knife, passing through, gave no hint to the eye that it was delicious fat. There had been merry jest and laughter and banter and gallant compliment before, but it was Richard Hunt’s turn now, and story after story he told, as the rose-flakes dropped under his knife in such thin slices that their edges coiled. It was full half an hour before the carver and story-teller were done. After that ham the tablecloth was lifted, and the dessert spread on another lying beneath; then that, too, was raised, and the nuts and wines were placed on a third–red damask this time.
Then came the toasts: to the gracious hostess from Major Buford; to Miss Lucy from General Dean; from valiant Richard Hunt to blushing Margaret, and then the ladies were gone, and the talk was politics–the election of Lincoln, slavery, disunion.
“If Lincoln is elected, no power but God’s can avert war,” said Richard Hunt, gravely.
Dan’s eyes flashed. “Will you take me?”
The lieutenant lifted his glass. “Gladly, my boy.”
“Kentucky’s convictions are with the Union; her kinship and sympathies with the South,” said a deep-voiced lawyer. “She must remain neutral.”
“Straddling the fence,” said the Major, sarcastically.
“No; to avert the war, if possible, or to act the peacemaker when the tragedy is over.”
“Well, I can see Kentuckians keeping out of a fight,” laughed the General, and he looked around. Three out of five of the men present had been in the Mexican war. The General had been wounded at Cerro Gordo, and the Major had brought his dead home in leaden coffins.
“The fanatics of Boston, the hot-heads of South Carolina–they are making the mischief.”
“And New England began with slavery,” said the lawyer again.
“And naturally, with that conscience that is a national calamity, was the first to give it up,” said Richard Hunt, “when the market price of slaves fell to sixpence a pound in the open Boston markets.” There was an incredulous murmur.
“Oh, yes,” said Hunt, easily, “I can show you advertisements in Boston papers of slaves for sale at sixpence a pound.”
Perhaps it never occurred to a soul present that the word “slave” was never heard in that region except in some such way. With Southerners, the negroes were “our servants” or “our people”–never slaves. Two lads at that table were growing white–Chad and Harry–and Chad’s lips opened first.
“I don’t think slavery has much to do with the question, really,” he said, “not even with Mr. Lincoln.” The silent surprise that followed the boy’s embarrassed statement ended in a gasp of astonishment when Harry leaned across the table and said, hotly:
“Slavery has EVERYTHING to do with the question.”
The Major looked bewildered; the General frowned, and the keen-eyed lawyer spoke again:
“The struggle was written in the Constitution. The framers evaded it. Logic leads one way as well as another and no man can logically blame another for the way he goes.”
“No more politics now, gentlemen,” said the General quickly. “We will join the ladies. Harry,” he added, with some sternness, “lead the way!”
As the three boys rose, Chad lifted his glass. His face was pale and his lips trembled.
“May I propose a toast, General Dean?”
“Why, certainly,” said the General, kindly.
“I want to drink to one man but for whom I might be in a log cabin now, and might have died there for all I know–my friend and, thank God! my kinsman–Major Buford.”
It was irregular and hardly in good taste, but the boy had waited till the ladies were gone, and it touched the Major that he should want to make such a public acknowledgment that there should be no false colors in the flag he meant henceforth to bear.
The startled guests drank blindly to the confused Major, though they knew not why, but as the lads disappeared the lawyer asked:
“Who is that boy, Major?”
Outside, the same question had been asked among the ladies and the same story told. The three girls remembered him vaguely, they said, and when Chad reappeared, in the eyes of the poetess at least, the halo of romance floated above his head.
She was waiting for Chad when he came out on the porch, and she shook her curls and flashed her eyes in a way that almost alarmed him. Old Mammy dropped him a curtsey, for she had had her orders, and, behind her, Snowball, now a tall, fine-looking coal-black youth, grinned a welcome. The three girls were walking under the trees, with their arms mysteriously twined about one anther’s waists, and the poetess walked down toward them with the three lads, Richard Hunt following. Chad could not know how it happened, but, a moment later, Dan was walking away with Nellie Hunt one way; Harry with Elizabeth Morgan the other; the Lieutenant had Margaret alone, and Miss Overstreet was leading him away, raving meanwhile about the beauty of field and sky. As they went toward the gate he could not help flashing one look toward the pair under the fir tree. An amused smile was playing under the Lieutenant’s beautiful mustache, his eyes were dancing with mischief, and Margaret was blushing with anything else than displeasure.
“Oho!” he said, as Chad and his companion passed on. “Sits the wind in that corner? Bless me, if looks could kill, I’d have a happy death here at your feet, Mistress Margaret. SEE the young man! It’s the second time he has almost slain me.”
Chad could scarcely hear Miss Jennie’s happy chatter, scarcely saw the shaking curls, the eyes all but in a frenzy of rolling. His eyes were in the back of his head, and his backward-listening ears heard only Margaret’s laugh behind him.
“Oh, I do love the autumn”–it was at the foot of those steps, thought Chad, that he first saw Margaret springing to the back of her pony and dashing off under the fir trees–” and it’s coming. There’s one scarlet leaf already”–Chad could see the rock fence where he had sat that spring day– “it’s curious and mournful that you can see in any season a sign of the next to come.” And there was the creek where he found Dan fishing, and there the road led to the ford where Margaret had spurned his offer of a slimy fish–ugh! “I do love the autumn. It makes me feel like the young woman who told Emerson that she had such mammoth thoughts she couldn’t give them utterance–why, wake up, Mr. Buford, wake up!” Chad came to with a start.
“Do you know you aren’t very polite, Mr. Buford?” Mr. Buford! That did sound funny.
“But I know what the matter is,” she went on. “I saw you look”–she nodded her head backward. “Can you keep a secret?” Chad nodded; he had not yet opened his lips.
“Thae’s going to be a match back there. He’s only a few years older. The French say that a woman should be half a man’s age plus seven years. That would make her only a few years too young, and she can wait.” Chad was scarlet under the girl’s mischievous torture, but a cry from the house saved him. Dan was calling them back.
“Mr. Hunt has to go back early to drill the Rifles. Can you keep another secret?” Again Chad nodded gravely. “Well, he is going to drive me back. I’ll tell him what a dangerous rival he has.” Chad was dumb; there was much yet for him to learn before he could parry with a tongue like hers.
“He’s very good-looking,” said Miss Jennie, when she joined the girls, “but oh, so stupid.”
Margaret turned quickly and unsuspiciously. “Stupid! Why, he’s the first man in his class.”
“Oh,” said Miss Jennie, with a demure smile, “perhaps I couldn’t draw him out,” and Margaret flushed to have caught the deftly tossed bait so readily.
A moment later the Lieutenant was gathering up the reins, with Miss Jennie by his side. He gave a bow to Margaret, and Miss Jennie nodded to Chad.
“Come see me when you come to town, Mr. Buford,” she called, as though to an old friend, and still Chad was dumb, though he lifted his hat gravely.
At no time was Chad alone with Margaret, and he was not sorry–her manner so puzzled him. The three lads and three girls walked together through Mrs. Dean’s garden with its grass walks and flower beds and vegetable patches surrounded with rose bushes. At the lower edge they could see the barn with sheep in the yard around it, and there were the very stiles where Harry and Margaret had sat in state when Dan and Chad were charging in the tournament. The thing might never have happened for any sign from Harry or Dan or Margaret, and Chad began to wonder if his past or his present were a dream.
How fine this courtesy was Chad could not realize. Neither could he know that the favor Margaret had shown him when he was little more than outcast he must now, as an equal, win for himself. Miss Jennie had called him “Mr. Buford.” He wondered what Margaret would call him when he came to say good-by. She called him nothing. She only smiled at him.
“You must come to see us soon again,” she said, graciously, and so said all the Deans.
The Major was quiet going home, and Miss Lucy drowsed. All evening the Major was quiet.
“If a fight does come,” he said, when they were going to bed, “I reckon I’m not too old to take a hand.”
“And I reckon I’m not too young,” said Chad.
CHAPTER 18. THE SPIRIT OF ’76 AND THE SHADOW OF ’61
One night, in the following April, there was a great dance in Lexington. Next day the news of Sumter came. Chad pleaded to be let off from the dance, but the Major would not hear of it. It was a fancy-dress ball, and the Major had a pet purpose of his own that he wanted gratified and Chad had promised to aid him. That fancy was that Chad should go in regimentals, as the stern, old soldier on the wall, of whom the Major swore the boy was the “spit and image.” The Major himself helped Chad dress in wig, peruke, stock, breeches, boots, spurs, cocked hat, sword and all. And then he led the boy down into the parlor, where Miss Lucy was waiting for them, and stood him up on one side of the portrait. To please the old fellow, Chad laughingly struck the attitude of the pictured soldier, and the Major cried:
“What’d I tell you, Lucy!” Then he advanced and made a low bow.
“General Buford,” he said, “General Washington’s compliments, and will General Buford plant the flag on that hill where the left wing of the British is entrenched?”
“Hush, Cal,” said Miss Lucy, laughing.
“General Buford’s compliments to General Washington. General Buford will plant that flag on ANY hill that ANY enemy holds against it.”
The lad’s face paled as the words, by some curious impulse, sprang to his lips, but the unsuspecting Major saw no lurking significance in his manner, nor in what he said, and then there was a rumble of carriage wheels at the door.
The winter had sped swiftly. Chad had done his work in college only fairly well, for Margaret had been a disturbing factor. The girl was an impenetrable mystery to him, for the past between them was not only wiped clean–it seemed quite gone. Once only had he dared to open his lips about the old days, and the girl’s flushed silence made a like mistake forever impossible. He came and went at the Deans’ as he pleased. Always they were kind, courteous, hospitable–no more, no less, unvaryingly. During the Christmas holidays he and Margaret had had a foolish quarrel, and it was then that Chad took his little fling at his little world–a fling that was foolish, but harmful, chiefly in that it took his time and his mind and his energy from his work. He not only neglected his studies, but he fell in with the wild young bucks of the town, learned to play cards, took more wine than was good for him sometimes, was on the verge of several duels, and night after night raced home in his buggy against the coming dawn. Though Miss Lucy looked worried, the indulgent old Major made no protest. Indeed he was rather pleased. Chad was sowing his wild oats–it was in the blood, and the mood would pass. It did pass, naturally enough, on the very day that the breach between him and Margaret was partly healed; and the heart of Caleb Hazel, whom Chad, for months, had not dared to face, was made glad when the boy came back to him remorseful and repentant–the old Chad once more.
They were late in getting to the dance. Every window in the old Hunt home was brilliant with light. Chinese lanterns swung in the big yard. The scent of early spring flowers smote the fresh night air. Music and the murmur of nimble feet and happy laughter swept out the wide-open doors past which white figures flitted swiftly. Scarcely anybody knew Chad in his regimentals, and the Major, with the delight of a boy, led him around, gravely presenting him as General Buford here and there. Indeed, the lad made a noble figure with his superb height and bearing, and he wore sword and spurs as though born to them. Margaret was dancing with Richard Hunt when she saw his eyes searching for her through the room, and she gave him a radiant smile that almost stunned him. She had been haughty and distant when he went to her to plead forgiveness: she had been too hard. and Margaret, too, was repentant.
“Why, who’s that?” asked Richard Hunt. “Oh, yes,” he added, getting his answer from Margaret’s face. “Bless me, but he’s fine–the very spirit of ’76. I must have him in the Rifles.”
“Will you make him a lieutenant?” asked Margaret.
“Why, yes, I will,” said Mr. Hunt, decisively. “I’ll resign myself in his favor, if it pleases you.”
“Oh, no, no–no one could fill your place.”
“Well, he can, I fear–and here he comes to do it. I’ll have to retreat some time, and I suppose I’d as well begin now.” And the gallant gentleman bowed to Chad.
“Will you pardon me, Miss Margaret? My mother is calling me.”
“You must have keen ears,” said Margaret; “your mother is upstairs.”
“Yes; but she wants me. Everybody wants me, but–” he bowed again with an imperturbable smile and went his way.
Margaret looked demurely into Chad’s eager eyes.
“And how is the spirit of ’76?”
“The spirit of ’76 is unchanged.”
“Oh, yes, he is; I scarcely knew him.”
“But he’s unchanged; he never will change.”
Margaret dropped her eyes and Chad looked around.
“I wish we could get out of here.”
“We can,” said Margaret, demurely.
“We will!” said Chad, and he made for a door, outside which lanterns were swinging in the wind. Margaret caught up some flimsy garment and wound it about her pretty round throat–they call it a “fascinator” in the South.
Chad looked down at her.
“I wish you could see yourself; I wish I could tell you how you look.”
“I have,” said Margaret, “every time I passed a mirror. And other people have told me. Mr. Hunt did. He didn’t seem to have much trouble.”
“I wish I had his tongue.”
“If you had, and nothing else, you wouldn’t have me”–Chad started as the little witch paused a second, drawling–“leaving my friends and this jolly dance to go out into a freezing yard and talk to an aged Colonial who doesn’t appreciate his modern blessings. The next thing you’ll be wanting, I suppose–will be–“
“You, Margaret; you–YOU!”
It had come at last and Margaret hardly knew the choked voice that interrupted her. She had turned her back to him to sit down. She paused a moment, standing. Her eyes closed; a slight tremor ran through her, and she sank with her face in her hands. Chad stood silent, trembling. Voices murmured about them, but like the music in the house, they seemed strangely far away. The stirring of the wind made the sudden damp on his forehead icy-cold. Margaret’s hands slowly left her face, which had changed as by a miracle. Every trace of coquetry was gone. It was the face of a woman who knew her own heart, and had the sweet frankness to speak it, that was lifted now to Chad.
“I’m so glad you are what you are, Chad; but had you been otherwise–that would have made no difference to me. You believe that, don’t you, Chad? They might not have let me marry you, but I should have cared, just the same. They may not now, but that, too, will make no difference.” She turned her eyes from his for an instant, as though she were looking far backward. “Ever since that day,” she said, slowly, “when I heard you say, ‘Tell the little gurl I didn’t mean nothin’ callin’ her a little gal'”–there was a low, delicious gurgle in the throat as she tried to imitate his odd speech, and then her eyes suddenly filled with tears, but she brushed them away, smiling brightly. “Ever since then, Chad–” she stopped–a shadow fell across the door of the little summer house.
“Here I am, Mr. Hunt,” she said, lightly; “is this your dance?” She rose and was gone. “Thank you, Mr. Buford,” she called back, sweetly.
For a moment Chad stood where he was, quite dazed–so quickly, so unexpectedly had the crisis come. The blood had rushed to his face and flooded him with triumphant happiness. A terrible doubt chilled him as quickly. Had he heard aright?–could he have misunderstood her? Had the dream of years really come true? What was it she had said? He stumbled around in the half darkness, wondering. Was this another phase of her unceasing coquetry? How quickly her tone had changed when Richard Hunt’s shadow came. At that moment, he neither could nor would have changed a hair had some genie dropped them both in the midst of the crowded ball-room. He turned swiftly toward the dancers. He must see, know–now!
The dance was a quadrille and the figure was “Grand right and left.” Margaret had met Richard Hunt opposite, half-way, when Chad reached the door and was curtseying to him with a radiant smile. Again the boy’s doubts beat him fiercely; and then Margaret turned her head, as though she knew he must be standing there. Her face grew so suddenly serious and her eyes softened with such swift tenderness when they met his, that a wave of guilty shame swept through him. And when she came around to him and passed, she leaned from the circle toward him, merry and mock-reproachful:
“You mustn’t look at me like that,” she whispered, and Hunt, close at hand, saw, guessed and smiled. Chad turned quickly away again.
That happy dawn–going home! The Major drowsed and fell asleep. The first coming light, the first cool breath that was stealing over the awakening fields, the first spring leaves with their weight of dew, were not more fresh and pure than the love that was in the boy’s heart. He held his right hand in his left, as though he were imprisoning there the memory of the last little clasp that she had given it. He looked at the Major, and he wondered how anybody on earth, at that hour, could be asleep. He thought of the wasted days of the past few months; the silly, foolish life he had led, and thanked God that, in the memory of them, there was not one sting of shame. How he would work for her now! Little guessing how proud she already was, he swore to himself how proud she should be of him some day. He wondered where she was, and what she was doing. She could not be asleep, and he must have cried aloud could he have known–could he have heard her on her knees at her bedside, whispering his name for the first time in her prayers; could he have seen her, a little later, at her open window, looking across the fields, as though her eyes must reach him through the morning dusk.
That happy dawn–for both, that happy dawn!
It was well that neither, at that hour, could see beyond the rim of his own little world. In a far Southern city another ball, that night, had been going on. Down there the air was charged with the prescience of dark trouble, but, while the music moaned to many a heart like a god in pain, there was no brooding–only a deeper flush to the cheek, a brighter sparkle to the eye, a keener wit to the tongue; to the dance, a merrier swing. And at that very hour of dawn, ladies, slippered, bare of head, and in evening gowns, were fluttering like white moths along the streets of old Charleston, and down to the Battery, where Fort Sumter lay, gray and quiet in the morning mist–to await with jest and laughter the hissing shriek of one shell that lighted the fires of a four years’ hell in a happy land of God-fearing peace and God-given plenty, and the hissing shriek of another that Anderson, Kentuckian, hurled back, in heroic defence of the flag struck for the first time by other than an alien hand.
CHAPTER 19. THE BLUE OR THE GRAY
In the far North, as in the far South, men had but to drift with the tide. Among the Kentuckians, the forces that moulded her sons–Davis and Lincoln–were at war in the State, as they were at war in the nation. By ties of blood, sympathies, institutions, Kentucky was bound fast to the South. Yet, ten years before, Kentuckians had demanded the gradual emancipation of the slave. That far back, they had carved a pledge on a block of Kentucky marble, which should be placed in the Washington monument, that Kentucky would be the last to give up the Union. For ten years, they had felt the shadow of the war creeping toward them. In the dark hours of that dismal year, before the dawn of final decision, the men, women, and children of Kentucky talked of little else save war, and the skeleton of war took its place in the closet of every home from the Ohio to the crest of the Cumberland. When the dawn of that decision came, Kentucky spread before the world a record of independent-mindedness, patriotism, as each side gave the word, and sacrifice that has no parallel in history. She sent the flower of her youth–forty thousand strong–into the Confederacy; she lifted the lid of her treasury to Lincoln, and in answer to his every call, sent him a soldier, practically without a bounty and without a draft. And when the curtain fell on the last act of the great tragedy, half of her manhood was behind it–helpless from disease, wounded, or dead on the battle-field.
So, on a gentle April day, when the great news came, it came like a sword that, with one stroke, slashed the State in twain, shearing through the strongest bonds that link one man to another, whether of blood, business, politics or religion, as though they were no more than threads of wool. Nowhere in the Union was the National drama so played to the bitter end in the confines of a single State. As the nation was rent apart, so was the commonwealth; as the State, so was the county; as the county, the neighborhood; as the neighborhood, the family; and as the family, so brother and brother, father and son. In the nation the kinship was racial only. Brother knew not the face of brother. There was distance between them, antagonism, prejudice, a smouldering dislike easily fanned to flaming hatred. In Kentucky the brothers had been born in the same bed, slept in the same cradle, played under the same roof, sat side by side in the same schoolroom, and stood now on the threshold of manhood arm in arm, with mutual interests, mutual love, mutual pride in family that made clan feeling peculiarly intense. For antislavery fanaticism, or honest unionism, one needed not to go to the far North; as, for imperious, hotheaded, non-interference or pure State sovereignty, one needed not to go to the far South. They were all there in the State, the county, the family–under the same roof. Along the border alone did feeling approach uniformity–the border of Kentucky hills. There unionism was free from prejudice as nowhere else on the continent save elsewhere throughout the Southern mountains. Those Southern Yankees knew nothing about the valley aristocrat, nothing about his slaves, and cared as little for one as for the other. Since ’76 they had known but one flag, and one flag only, and to that flag instinctively they rallied. But that the State should be swept from border to border with horror, there was division even here: for, in the Kentucky mountains, there was, here and there, a patriarch like Joel Turner who owned slaves, and he and his sons fought for them as he and his sons would have fought for their horses, or their cattle, or their sheep.
It was the prescient horror of such a condition that had no little part in the neutral stand that Kentucky strove to maintain. She knew what war was–for every fireside was rich in memories that men and women had of kindred who had fallen on numberless battle-fields–back even to St. Clair’s defeat and the Raisin massacre; and though she did not fear war for its harvest of dangers and death, she did look with terror on a conflict between neighbors, friends, and brothers. So she refused troops to Lincoln; she refused them to Davis. Both pledged her immunity from invasion, and, to enforce that pledge, she raised Home Guards as she had already raised State Guards for internal protection and peace. And there–as a State–she stood: but the tragedy went on in the Kentucky home–a tragedy of peculiar intensity and pathos in one Kentucky home–the Deans’.
Harry had grown up tall, pale, studious, brooding. He had always been the pet of his Uncle Brutus–the old Lion of White Hall. Visiting the Hall, he had drunk in the poison, or consecration, as was the point of view, of abolitionism. At the first sign he was never allowed to go again. But the poison had gone deep. Whenever he could he went to hear old Brutus speak. Eagerly he heard stories of the fearless abolitionist’s hand-to-hand fights with men who sought to skewer his fiery tongue. Deeply he brooded on every word that his retentive ear had caught from the old man’s lips, and on the wrongs he endured in behalf of his cause and for freedom of speech.
One other hero did he place above him–the great commoner after whom he had been christened, Henry Clay Dean. He knew how Clay’s life had been devoted to averting the coming war, and how his last days had been darkly shadowed by the belief that, when he was gone, the war must come. At times he could hear that clarion voice as it rang through the Senate with the bold challenge to his own people that paramount was his duty to the nation–subordinate his duty to his State. Who can tell what the nation owed, in Kentucky, at least, to the passionate allegiance that was broadcast through the State to Henry Clay? It was not in the boy’s blood to be driven an inch, and no one tried to drive him. In his own home he was a spectre of gnawing anguish to his mother and Margaret, of unspeakable bitterness and disappointment to his father, and an impenetrable sphinx to Dan. For in Dan there was no shaking doubt. He was the spirit, incarnate, of the young, unquestioning, unthinking, generous, reckless, hotheaded, passionate South.
And Chad? The news reached Major Buford’s farm at noon, and Chad went to the woods and came in at dusk, haggard and spent. Miserably now he held his tongue and tortured his brain. Purposely, he never opened his lips to Harry Dean. He tried to make known to the Major the struggle going on within him, but the iron-willed old man brushed away all argument with an impatient wave of his hand. With Margaret he talked once, and straightway the question was dropped like a living coal. So, Chad withdrew from his fellows. The social life of the town, gayer than ever now, knew him no more. He kept up his college work, but when he was not at his books, he walked the fields, and many a moonlit midnight found him striding along a white turnpike, or sitting motionless on top of a fence along the border of some woodland, his chin in both hands, fighting his fight out in the cool stillness alone. He himself little knew the unmeant significance there was in the old Continental uniform he had worn to the dance. Even his old rifle, had he but known it, had been carried with Daniel Morgan from Virginia to Washington’s aid in Cambridge. His earliest memories of war were rooted in thrilling stories of King’s Mountain. He had heard old men tell of pointing deadly rifles at red-coats at New Orleans, and had absorbed their own love of Old Hickory. The school-master himself, when a mere lad, had been with Scott in Mexico. The spirit of the back-woodsman had been caught in the hills, and was alive and unchanged at that very hour. The boy was practically born in Revolutionary days, and that was why, like all mountaineers, Chad had little love of State and only love of country–was first, last and all the time, simply American. It was not reason–it was instinct. The heroes the school-master had taught him to love and some day to emulate, had fought under one flag, and, like them, the mountaineers never dreamed there could be another. And so the boy was an unconscious reincarnation of that old spirit, uninfluenced by temporary apostasies in the outside world, untouched absolutely by sectional prejudice or the appeal of the slave. The mountaineer had no hatred of the valley aristocrat, because he knew nothing of him, and envied no man what he was, what he had, or the life he led. So, as for slavery, that question, singularly enough, never troubled his soul. To him slaves were hewers of wood and drawers of water. The Lord had made them so and the Bible said that it was right. That the school-master had taught Chad. He had read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and the story made him smile. The tragedies of it he had never known and he did not believe. Slaves were sleek, well-fed, well-housed, loved and trusted, rightly inferior and happy; and no aristocrat ever moved among them with a more lordly, righteous air of authority than did this mountain lad who had known them little more than half a dozen years. Unlike the North, the boy had no prejudice, no antagonism, no jealousy, no grievance to help him in his struggle. Unlike Harry, he had no slave sympathy to stir him to the depths, no stubborn, rebellious pride to prod him on. In the days when the school-master thundered at him some speech of the Prince of Kentuckians, it was always the national thrill in the fiery utterance that had shaken him even then. So that unconsciously the boy was the embodiment of pure Americanism, and for that reason he and the people among whom he was born stood among the millions on either side, quite alone.
What was he fighting then–ah, what? If the bed-rock of his character was not loyalty, it was nothing. In the mountains the Turners had taken him from the Wilderness. In the Bluegrass the old Major had taken him from the hills. His very life he owed to the simple, kindly mountaineers, and what he valued more than his life he owed to the simple gentleman who had picked him up from the roadside and, almost without question, had taken him to his heart and to his home. The Turners, he knew, would fight for their slaves as they would have fought Dillon or Devil had either proposed to take from them a cow, a hog, or a sheep. For that Chad could not blame them. And the Major was going to fight, as he believed, for his liberty, his State, his country, his property, his fireside. So in the eyes of both, Chad must be the snake who had warmed his frozen body on their hearthstones and bitten the kindly hands that had warmed him back to life. What would Melissa say? Mentally he shrank from the fire of her eyes and the scorn of her tongue when she should know. And Margaret–the thought of her brought always a voiceless groan. To her, he had let his doubts be known, and her white silence closed his own lips then and there. The simple fact that he had doubts was an entering wedge of coldness between them that Chad saw must force them apart for he knew that the truth must come soon, and what would be the bitter cost of that truth. She could never see him as she saw Harry. Harry was a beloved and erring brother. Hatred of slavery had been cunningly planted in his heart by her father’s own brother, upon whose head the blame for Harry’s sin was set. The boy had been taunted until his own father’s scorn had stirred his proud independence into stubborn resistance and intensified his resolution to do what he pleased and what he thought was right. But Chad–she would never understand him. She would never understand his love for the Government that had once abandoned her people to savages and forced her State and his to seek aid from a foreign land. In her eyes, too, he would be rending the hearts that had been tenderest to him in all the world: and that was all. Of what fate she would deal out to him he dared not think. If he lifted his hand against the South, he must strike at the heart of all he loved best, to which he owed most. If against the Union, at the heart of all that was best in himself. In him the pure spirit that gave birth to the nation was fighting for life. Ah, God! what should he do–what should he do?
CHAPTER 20. OFF TO THE WAR
Throughout that summer Chad fought his fight, daily swaying this way and that– fought it in secret until the phantom of neutrality faded and gave place to the grim spectre of war–until with each hand Kentucky drew a sword and made ready to plunge both into her own stout heart. When Sumter fell, she shook her head resolutely to both North and South. Crittenden, in the name of Union lovers and the dead Clay, pleaded with the State to take no part in the fratricidal crime. From the mothers, wives, sisters and daughters of thirty-one counties came piteously the same appeal. Neutrality, to be held inviolate, was the answer to the cry from both the North and the South; but armed neutrality, said Kentucky. The State had not the moral right to secede; the Nation, no constitutional right to coerce: if both the North and the South left their paths of duty and fought–let both keep their battles from her soil. Straightway State Guards went into camp and Home Guards were held in reserve, but there was not a fool in the Commonwealth who did not know that, in sympathy, the State Guards were already for the Confederacy and the Home Guards for the Union cause. This was in May.
In June, Federals were enlisting across the Ohio; Confederates, just over the border of Dixie which begins in Tennessee. Within a month Stonewall Jackson sat on his horse, after Bull Run, watching the routed Yankees, praying for fresh men that he might go on and take the Capitol, and, from the Federal dream of a sixty-days’ riot, the North woke with a gasp. A week or two later, Camp Dick Robinson squatted down on the edge of the Bluegrass, the first violation of the State’s neutrality, and beckoned with both hands for Yankee recruits. Soon an order went round to disarm the State Guards, and on that very day the State Guards made ready for Dixie. On that day the crisis came at the Deans’, and on that day Chad Buford made up his mind. When the Major and Miss Lucy went to bed that night, he slipped out of the house and walked through the yard and across the pike, following the little creek half unconsciously toward the Deans’, until he could see the light in Margaret’s window, and there he climbed the worm fence and sat leaning his head against one of the forked stakes with his hat in his lap. He would probably not see her again. He would send her word next morning to ask that he might, and he feared what the result of that word would be. Several times his longing eyes saw her shadow pass the curtain, and when her light was out, he closed his eyes and sat motionless–how long he hardly knew; but, when he sprang down, he was stiffened from the midnight chill and his unchanged posture. He went back to his room then, and wrote Margaret a letter and tore it up and went to bed. There was little sleep for him that night, and when the glimmer of morning brightened at his window, he rose listlessly, dipped his hot head in a bowl of water and stole out to the barn. His little mare whinnied a welcome as he opened the barn door. He patted her on the neck.
“Good-by, little girl,” he said. He started to call her by name and stopped. Margaret had named the beautiful creature “Dixie.” The servants were stirring.
“Good-mawnin’, Mars Chad,” said each, and with each he shook hands, saying simply that he was going away that morning. Only old Tom asked him a question.
“Foh Gawd, Mars Chad,” said the old fellow, “old Mars Buford can’t git along widout you. You gwine to come back soon?”
“I don’t know, Uncle Tom,” said Chad, sadly.
“Whar you gwine, Mars Chad?”
“Into the army.”
“De ahmy?” The old man smiled. “You gwine to fight de Yankees?”
“I’m going to fight WITH the Yankees.”
The old driver looked as though he could not have heard aright.
“You foolin’ this ole nigger, Mars Chad, ain’t you?”
Chad shook his head, and the old man straightened himself a bit.
“I’se sorry to heah it, suh,” he said, with dignity, and he turned to his work.
Miss Lucy was not feeling well that morning and did not come down to breakfast. The boy was so pale and haggard that the Major looked at him anxiously.
“What’s the matter with you, Chad? Are you–?”
“I didn’t sleep very well last night, Major.”
The Major chuckled. “I reckon you ain’t gettin’ enough sleep these days. I reckon I wouldn’t, either, if I were in your place.”
Chad did not answer. After breakfast he sat with the Major on the porch in the fresh, sunny air. The Major smoked his pipe, taking the stem out of his mouth now and then to shout some order as a servant passed under his eye.
“What’s the news, Chad?”
“Mr. Crittenden is back.”
“What did old Lincoln say?”
“That Camp Dick Robinson was formed for Kentuckians by Kentuckians, and he did not believe that it was the wish of the State that it should be removed.”
“Well, by –! after his promise. What did Davis say?”
“That if Kentucky opened the Northern door for invasion, she must not close the Southern door to entrance for defence.”
“And dead right he is,” growled the Major with satisfaction.
“Governor Magoffin asked Ohio and Indiana to join in an effort for a peace Congress,” Chad added.
“Well?”
“Both governors refused.”
“I tell you, boy, the hour has come.”
The hour had come.
“I’m going away this morning, Major.”
The Major did not even turn his head.
“I thought this was coming,” he said quietly. Chad’s face grew even paler, and he steeled his heart for the revelation.
“I’ve already spoken to Lieutenant Hunt,” the Major went on. “He expects to be a captain, and he says that, maybe, he can make you a lieutenant. You can take that boy Brutus as a body servant.” He brought his fist down on the railing of the porch. “God, but I’d give the rest of my life to be ten years younger than I am now.”
“Major, I’m GOING INTO THE UNION ARMY.”
The Major’s pipe almost dropped from between his lips. Catching the arms of his chair with both hands, he turned heavily and with dazed wonder, as though the boy had struck him with his fist from behind, and, without a word, stared hard into Chad’s tortured face. The keen old eye had not long to look before it saw the truth, and then, silently, the old man turned back. His hands trembled on the chair, and he slowly thrust them into his pockets, breathing hard through his nose. The boy expected an outbreak, but none came. A bee buzzed above them. A yellow butterfly zigzagged by. Blackbirds chattered in the firs. The screech of a peacock shrilled across the yard, and a ploughman’s singing wailed across the fields:
Trouble, O Lawd!
Nothin’ but trouble in de lan’ of Canaan.
The boy knew he had given his old friend a mortal hurt.
“Don’t, Major,” he pleaded. “You don’t know how I have fought against this. I tried to be on your side. I thought I was. I joined the Rifles. I found first that I couldn’t fight WITH the South, and–then–I–found that I had to fight FOR the North. It almost kills me when I think of all you have done “
The Major waved his hand imperiously. He was not the man to hear his favors recounted, much less refer to them himself. He straightened and got up from his chair. His manner had grown formal, stately, coldly courteous.
“I cannot understand, but you are old enough, sir, to know your own mind. You should have prepared me for this. You will excuse me a moment.” Chad rose and the Major walked toward the door, his step not very steady, and his shoulders a bit shrunken–his back, somehow, looked suddenly old.
“Brutus!” he called sharply to a black boy who was training rosebushes in the yard. “Saddle Mr. Chad’s horse.” Then, without looking again at Chad, he turned into his office, and Chad, standing where he was, with a breaking heart, could hear, through the open window, the rustling of papers and the scratching of a pen.
In a few minutes he heard the Major rise and he turned to meet him. The old man held a roll of bills in one hand and a paper in the other.
“Here is the balance due you on our last trade,” he said, quietly. “The mare is yours–Dixie,” he added, grimly. “The old mare is in foal. I will keep her and send you your due when the time comes. We are quite even,” he went on in a level tone of business. “Indeed, what you have done about the place more than exceeds any expense that you have ever caused me. If anything, I am still in your debt.”
“I can’t take it!” said Chad, choking back a sob.
“You will have to take it,” the Major broke in, curtly, unless–” the Major held back the bitter speech that was on his lips and Chad understood. The old man did not want to feel under any obligations to him.
“I would offer you Brutus, as was my intention, except that I know you would not take him,” again he added, grimly, “and Brutus would run away from you.”
“No, Major,” said Chad, sadly, “I would not take Brutus,” and he stepped down one step of the porch backward.
“I tried to tell you, Major, but you wouldn’t listen. I don’t wonder, for I couldn’t explain to you what I couldn’t understand myself. I–” the boy choked and tears filled his eyes. He was afraid to hold out his hand.
“Good-by, Major,” he said, brokenly.
“Good-by, sir,” answered the Major, with a stiff bow, but the old man’s lip shook and he turned abruptly within.
Chad did not trust himself to look back, but, as he rode through the pasture to the pike gate, his ears heard, never to forget, the chatter of the blackbirds, the noises around the barn, the cry of the peacock, and the wailing of the ploughman:
Trouble, O Lawd!
Nothin’ but trouble–
At the gate the little mare turned her head toward town and started away in the easy swinging lope for which she was famous. From a cornfield Jerome Conners, the overseer, watched horse and rider for a while, and then his lips were lifted over his protruding teeth in one of his ghastly, infrequent smiles. Chad Buford was out of his way at last. At the Deans’ gate, Snowball was just going in on Margaret’s pony and Chad pulled up.
“Where’s Mr. Dan, Snowball?–and Mr. Harry?”
“Mars Dan he gwine to de wah–an’ I’se gwine wid him.”
“Is Mr. Harry going, too?” Snowball hesitated. He did not like to gossip about family matters, but it was a friend of the family who was questioning him.
“Yessuh! But Mammy say Mars Harry’s teched in de haid. He gwine to fight wid de po’ white trash.”
“Is Miss Margaret at home?”
“Yessuh.”
Chad had his note to Margaret, unsealed. He little felt like seeing her now, but he had just as well have it all over at once. He took it out and looked it over once more–irresolute.
“I’m going away to join the Union army, Margaret. May I come to tell you good-by? If not, God bless you always. CHAD.”
“Take this to Miss Margaret, Snowball, and bring me an answer here as soon as you can.”
“Yessuh.”
The black boy was not gone long. Chad saw him go up the steps, and in a few moments he reappeared and galloped back.
“Ole Mistis say dey ain’t no answer.”
“Thank you, Snowball.” Chad pitched him a coin and loped on toward Lexington with his head bent, his hands folded on the pommel, and the reins flapping loosely. Within one mile of Lexington he turned into a cross-road and set his face toward the mountains.
An hour later, the General and Harry and Dan stood on the big portico. Inside, the mother and Margaret were weeping in each other’s arms. Two negro boys were each leading a saddled horse from the stable, while Snowball was blubbering at the corner of the house. At the last moment Dan had decided to leave him behind. If Harry could have no servant, Dan, too, would have none. Dan was crying without shame. Harry’s face was as white and stern as his father’s. As the horses drew near the General stretched out the sabre in his hand to Dan.
“This should belong to you, Harry.”
“It is yours to give, father,” said Harry, gently.
“It shall never be drawn against my roof and your mother.”
The boy was silent.
“You are going far North?” asked the General, more gently. “You will not fight on Kentucky soil?”
“You taught me that the first duty of a soldier is obedience. I must go where I’m ordered.”
“God grant that you two may never meet.”
“Father!” It was a cry of horror from both the lads.
The horses were waiting at the stiles. The General took Dan in his arms and the boy broke away and ran down the steps, weeping.
“Father,” said Harry, with trembling lips, “I hope you won’t be too hard on me. Perhaps the day will come when you won’t be so ashamed of me. I hope you and mother will forgive me. I can’t do otherwise than I must. Will you shake hands with me, father?”
“Yes, my son. God be with you both.”
And then, as he watched the boys ride side by side to the gate, he added:
“I could kill my own brother with my own hand for this.”
He saw them stop a moment at the gate; saw them clasp hands and turn opposite ways–one with his face set for Tennessee, the other making for the Ohio. Dan waved his cap in a last sad good-by. Harry rode over the hill without turning his head. The General stood rigid, with his hands clasped behind his back, staring across the gray fields between them. Through the winds, came the low sound of sobbing.
CHAPTER 21. MELISSA
Shortly after dusk, that night, two or three wagons moved quietly out of Lexington, under a little guard with guns loaded and bayonets fixed. Back at the old Armory–the home of the “Rifles”–a dozen youngsters drilled vigorously with faces in a broad grin, as they swept under the motto of the company–“Our laws the commands of our Captain.” They were following out those commands most literally. Never did Lieutenant Hunt give his orders more sonorously–he could be heard for blocks away. Never did young soldiers stamp out maneuvers more lustily–they made more noise than a regiment. Not a man carried a gun, though ringing orders to “Carry arms” and “Present arms” made the windows rattle. It was John Morgan’s first ruse. While that mock-drill was going on, and listening Unionists outside were laughing to think how those Rifles were going to be fooled next day, the guns of the company were moving in those wagons toward Dixie–toward mocking-bird-haunted Bowling Green, where the underfed, unclothed, unarmed body of Albert Sydney Johnston’s army lay, with one half-feathered wing stretching into the Cumberland hills and the frayed edge of the other touching the Ohio.
Next morning, the Home Guards came gayly around to the Armory to seize those guns, and the wily youngsters left temporarily behind (they, too, fled for Dixie, that night) gibed them unmercifully; so that, then and there, a little interchange of powder-and-ball civilities followed; and thus, on the very first day, Daniel Dean smelled the one and heard the other whistle right harmlessly and merrily. Straightway, more guards were called out; cannon were planted to sweep the principal streets, and from that hour the old town was under the rule of a Northern or Southern sword for the four years’ reign of the war.
Meanwhile, Chad Buford was giving a strange journey to Dixie. Whenever he dismounted, she would turn her head toward the Bluegrass, as though it surely were time they were starting for home. When they reached the end of the turnpike, she lifted her feet daintily along the muddy road, and leaped pools of water like a cat. Climbing the first foot-hills, she turned her beautiful head to right and left, and with pointed ears snorted now and then at the strange dark woods on either side and the tumbling water-falls. The red of her wide nostrils was showing when she reached the top of the first mountain, and from that high point of vantage she turned her wondering eyes over the wide rolling stretch that waved homeward, and whinnied with distinct uneasiness when Chad started her down into the wilderness beyond. Distinctly that road was no path for a lady to tread, but Dixie was to know it better in the coming war.
Within ten miles of the Turners’, Chad met the first man that he knew–Hence Sturgill from Kingdom Come. He was driving a wagon.
“Howdye, Hence!” said Chad, reining in.
“Whoa!” said Hence, pulling in and staring at Chad’s horse and at Chad from hat to spur.
“Don’t you know me, Hence?”
“Well, God–I–may–die, if it ain’t Chad! How air ye, Chad? Goin’ up to ole Joel’s?”
“Yes. How are things on Kingdom Come?”
Hence spat on the ground and raised one hand high over his head:
“God–I–may–die, if thar hain’t hell to pay on Kingdom Come. You better keep offo’ Kingdom Come,” and then he stopped with an expression of quick alarm, looked around him into the bushes and dropped his voice to a whisper:
“But I hain’t sayin’ a word–rickollect now–not a word!”
Chad laughed aloud. “What’s the matter with you, Hence?”
Hence put one finger on one side of his nose–still speaking in a low tone:
“Whut’d I say, Chad? D’I say one word?” He gathered up his reins. “You rickollect Jake and Jerry Dillon?” Chad nodded. “You know Jerry was al’ays a-runnin’ over Jake ’cause Jake’ didn’t have good sense. Jake was drapped when he was a baby. Well, Jerry struck Jake over the head with a fence-rail ’bout two months ago, an when Jake come to, he had just as good sense as anybody, and now he hates Jerry like pizen, an Jerry’s half afeard of him. An’ they do say a how them two brothers air a-goin'” Again Hence stopped abruptly and clucked to his team “But I ain’t a-sayin’ a word, now, mind ye–not a word!”
Chad rode on, amused, and thinking that Hence had gone daft, but he was to learn better. A reign of forty years’ terror was starting in those hills.
Not a soul was in sight when he reached the top of the hill from which he could see the Turner home below–about the house or the orchard or in the fields. No one answered his halloo at the Turner gate, though Chad was sure that he saw a woman’s figure flit past the door. It was a full minute before Mother Turner cautiously thrust her head outside the door and peered at him
“Why, Aunt Betsey,” called Chad, “don’t you know me?”
At the sound of his voice Melissa sprang out the door with a welcoming cry, and ran to him, Mother Turner following with a broad smile on her kind old face. Chad felt the tears almost come–these were friends indeed. How tall Melissa had grown, and how lovely she was, with her tangled hair and flashing eyes and delicately modelled face. She went with him to the stable to help him put up his horse, blushing when he looked at her and talking very little, while the old mother, from the fence, followed him with her dim eyes. At once Chad began to ply both with questions–where was Uncle Joel and the boys and the school-master? And, straightway, Chad felt a reticence in both–a curious reticence even with him. On each side of the fireplace, on each side of the door, and on each side of the window, he saw narrow blocks fixed to the logs. One was turned horizontal, and through the hole under it Chad saw daylight–portholes they were. At the door were taken blocks as catches for a piece of upright wood nearby, which was plainly used to bar the door. The cabin was a fortress. By degrees the story came out. The neighborhood was in a turmoil of bloodshed and terror. Tom and Dolph had gone off to the war–Rebels. Old Joel had been called to the door one night, a few weeks since, and had been shot down without warning. They had fought all night. Melissa herself had handled a rifle at one of the portholes. Rube was out in the woods now, with Jack guarding and taking care of his wounded father. A Home Guard had been organized, and Daws Dillon was captain. They were driving out of the mountains every man who owned a negro, for nearly every man who owned a negro had taken, or was forced to take, the Rebel side. The Dillons were all Yankees, except Jerry, who had gone off with Tom; and the giant brothers, Rebel Jerry and Yankee Jake–as both were already known–had sworn to kill each other on sight. Bushwhacking had already begun. When Chad asked about the school-master, the old woman’s face grew stern, and Melissa’s lip curled with scorn.
“Yankee!” The girl spat the word out with such vindictive bitterness that Chad’s face turned slowly scarlet, while the girl’s keen eyes pierced him like a knife, and narrowed as, with pale face and heaving breast, she rose suddenly from her chair and faced him–amazed, bewildered, burning with sudden hatred. “And you’re another!” The girl’s voice was like a hiss.
“Why, ‘Lissy!” cried the old mother, startled, horrified.
“Look at him!” said the girl. The old woman looked; her face grew hard and frightened, and she rose feebly, moving toward the girl as though for protection against him. Chad’s very heart seemed suddenly to turn to water. He had been dreading the moment to come when he must tell. He knew it would be hard, but he was not looking for this.
“You better git away!” quavered the old woman, “afore Joel and Rube come in.”
“Hush!” said the girl, sharply, her hands clinched like claws, her whole body stiff, like a tigress ready to attack, or awaiting attack.
“Mebbe he come hyeh to find out whar they air–don’t tell him!”
“Lissy!” said Chad, brokenly.
“Then whut did you come fer?”
“To tell you good-by, I came to see all of you, Lissy.”
The girl laughed scornfully, and Chad knew he was helpless. He could not explain, and they could not understand–nobody had understood.
“Aunt Betsey,” he said, “you took Jack and me in, and you took care of me just as though I had been your own child. You know I’d give my life for you or Uncle Joel, or any one of the boys”–his voice grew a little stern–“and you know it, too, Lissy–“
“You’re makin’ things wuss,” interrupted the girl, stridently, “an’ now you’re goin’ to do all you can to kill us. I reckon you can see that door. Why don’t you go over to the Dillons?” she panted. “They’re friends o’ your’n. An’ don’t let Uncle Joel or Rube ketch you anywhar round hyeh!”
“I’m not afraid to see Uncle Joel or Rube, Lissy.”
“You must git away, Chad,” quavered the old woman. “They mought hurt ye!”
“I’m sorry not to see Jack. He’s the only friend I have now.”
“Why, Jack would snarl at ye,” said the girl, bitterly. “He hates a Yankee.” She pointed again with her finger. “I reckon you can see that door.”
They followed him, Melissa going on the porch and the old woman standing in the doorway. On one side of the walk Chad saw a rose-bush that he had brought from the Bluegrass for Melissa. It was dying. He took one step toward it, his foot sinking in the soft earth where the girl had evidently been working around it, and broke off the one green leaf that was left.
“Here, Lissy! You’ll be sorry you were so hard on me. I’d never get over it if I didn’t think you would. Keep this, won’t you, and let’s be friends, not enemies.”
He held it out, and the girl angrily struck the rose-leaf from his hand to her feet.
Chad rode away at a walk. Two hundred yards below, where the hill rose, the road was hock-deep with sand, and Dixie’s feet were as noiseless as a cat’s. A few yards beyond a ravine on the right, a stone rolled from the bushes into the road. Instinctively Chad drew rein, and Dixie stood motionless. A moment later, a crouching figure, with a long squirrel rifle, slipped out of the bushes and started noiselessly across the ravine. Chad’s pistol flashed.
“Stop!”
The figure crouched more, and turned a terror-stricken face–Daws Dillon’s.