A few years ago, in the room of the great mahogany table, with its clean blotting pad, its writing tablet, and its superb rose rising from a green vase in the midst of the shining unlittered expanse, there was a plain, heavy mahogany wainscoting reaching chin-high to the average man. A few soft-toned pictures adorned the dull gray walls above the wainscoting, and directly over a ma.s.sive desk that never was seen open hung a framed letter. The letter was written on blue-lined paper in red pokeberry ink. At the top of the letter was the advertis.e.m.e.nt of a hotel, done in quaint, old-fashioned, fancy script with many curly-cues and printers" ornaments. The advertis.e.m.e.nt set forth that the Thayer House at Sycamore Ridge was "First cla.s.s in every particular," and that "Especial attention was paid to transient custom." On a line in the right-hand corner the reader was notified that the tavern was founded by the Emigrant Aid Society, and balancing this line, in the left-hand corner, were these words: "The only livery-stable west of Lawrence." John Barclay"s eyes have read it a thousand times, and yet he always smiled when he scanned the letter that followed the advertis.e.m.e.nt. The letter read:--
"Dear Ma I am going to war. Doan crye. Iff father was here he wood go; so why should not I. I will be very caerfull not to get hurt & stay by Cap Ward all the time. So G.o.dby yours truly J. Barclay Jr."
It was five hours after the soldiers had gone when Mrs. Barclay came home from her work in the aid room, and the first thing that attracted her attention was her son"s letter, lying folded on the table. When she read it, she ran with the open letter across the common to the town. It was a woman"s town that morning,--not a man was left in it,--for Ezra Lane, the only old man living in the Ridge, had left _Freedom"s Banner_ to shift for itself while he rode to Leavenworth with the soldiers to bring back the teams; and when Mrs. Barclay came into the street, she found some small stir there, made by Miss Hendricks--the only mother the Hendricks boys remembered--who was inquiring for her lost boys. Mrs. Barclay displayed her note, and in a moment the whole population of Sycamore Ridge, with hands under its ap.r.o.ns, was standing in front of the post-office. Then Ellen Culpepper found her tongue, and Mrs. Barclay began to look for a horse. Elmer Hendricks" pony in the pasture was the only horse Ward had left within twenty miles. When Ellen Culpepper and her little sister Molly came back from the pasture and announced that Elmer"s pony was gone also, the women surmised that he had taken it with him, for they could not know that after he was spanked from the provision wagon, he had slipped out to the pasture and ridden by a circuitous route to the main road.
It was Captain Ward, dismounting from his driver"s seat on the provision wagon at noon, who discovered two boys: a little boy eleven years old in a dead faint, and a bigger boy panting with the heat.
They threw cold spring water on John Barclay"s face, and finally his eyes opened, and he grinned as he whispered, "Hullo, Captain," to the man bending over him. The man held water to the boy"s lips, and he sipped a little and swam out into the blackness again, and then the man reappeared and the boy tried to smile and whispered, "Aw--I"m all right." They saw he was coming out of his faint, and one by one the crowd dropped away from him; but Ward stayed, and when the child could speak, he replied to Ward"s question, ""Cause I wanted to." And then again when the question was repeated, the boy said, "I tell you "cause I wanted to." He shook his head feebly and grinned again and tried to rise, but the man gently held him down, and kept bathing his temples with cold water from the spring beside them. Finally, when the man seemed a little harsh in his questions, the boy"s eyes brimmed and he said: "Whur"d my pa be if he was alive to-day? I just guess I got as much right here as you have." He made a funny little picture lying on the lush gra.s.s by the spring in the woods; his browned face, washed clean on the forehead and temples, showed almost white under the dirt.
There were tear-stained rings about the eyes, and his pink shirt and blue trousers were grimy with dust, and the red clay of the Sycamore still was on the sides of his dust-brown bare feet. Around a big toe was a rag which showed a woman"s tying--neat and firm, but red with clay.
Ward left, and Bob Hendricks came and stood over the prostrate boy.
Bob was carrying a bucket of water to the cook as a peace offering.
"What did they do?" asked the boy on the ground.
"Just shook me--and then said father"d tend to me for this." The boys exchanged comments on the situation without words, and then Bob said as he drew the dripping bucket from the spring, "We"re going clear on to Leavenworth, and they say then we"ve got to come back with Ezra Lane and the teams."
The boy on the ground raised himself by rolling over and catching hold of a sapling. He panted a moment, and "I"ll bet y" I don"t." The other boy went away with a weak "Me neither," thrown over his shoulder.
During that long afternoon, and all the next day and the next, the boys ran from wagon to wagon, climbing over end gates, wriggling among the men, running with the horses through the shady woods, paddling in the fords, and only refusing to move when the men got out of the wagons and walked up the long clay hills that rise above the Kaw River. At night they camped by the prairie streams, and the men sang and wondered what they were doing at home, and Philemon Ward took John Barclay out into the silence of the woods and made him say his prayers. And Ward would look toward the west and say, "Well, Johnnie,--there"s home," and once they stood in an open place in the timber, and Ward gazed at a bright star sinking in the west, and said, "I guess that"s about over Sycamore Ridge." They went on, and the boy, looking back to see why the man had stopped, caught him throwing a kiss at the star. And they could not know, as they walked back together through the woods abashed, that two women sitting before a cabin door under a sycamore tree were looking at an eastern star, and one threw kisses at it unashamed while the other wept. And on other nights, many other nights, the two, Miss Lucy and Mrs. Barclay, sat looking at their star while the terror in their hearts made their lips mute. G.o.d makes men brave who stand where bullets fly, yet always they can run away. But G.o.d seems to give no alternative to women at home who have to wait and dread.
Forty years later John Barclay took from a box in a safety vault back of his office in the city a newspaper. It was the Sycamore Ridge _Banner_, yellow and creased and pungent with age. "This," he said to Senator Myton, spreading the wrinkled sheet out on the mahogany table, "this is my enlistment paper." He smiled as he read aloud:--
"At noon of our first day out we came across two stowaways. Hendricks, aged twelve, son of our well-known and popular Mayor, and J. Barclay, aged eleven, son of Mrs. M. Barclay, who, owing to the suddenness of the departure of our troops for the seat of war in Missouri, and certain business delays made necessary in ye editor"s return, were slipped out with our company rather than left in the rough and uncertain city of Leavenworth. They are called by the boys of "C"
company respectively "the little sergeant and the little corporal, Good Luck boys.""
A little farther down the column was this paragraph:
"Aug. 2nd we went into camp on Sugar Creek, and some sport was had by the men who went in bathing, taking the horses with them."
"Ever go in swimming with the horses, Senator?" asked Barclay. The senator shook his head doubtfully.
"Well--you haven"t. For if you had you"d remember it," answered Barclay, and a hundred naked young men and two skinny, bony boys splashed and yelled and ducked and wrestled and locked their strong wet arms about the necks of the plunging horses and dived under them, and rolled across them and played with them like young satyrs in the cool water under the overhanging elms with the stars twinkling in the shining mahogany as Barclay folded the paper and put it away. He thrummed the polished surface a moment and looked back into the past to see Philemon Ward straight, lean, and glistening like a G.o.d standing on a horse ready to dive, and as he huddled, crouched for the leap, Barclay said, "Well, come on, Senator, we must go to lunch now."
It was late in the afternoon of their third day"s journey that the men from Sycamore Ridge rode in close order, singing, through the streets of Leavenworth. Watts McHurdie was playing his accordion, and the people turned to look at the uncouth crowd in civilian"s clothes that went bellowing "O My Darling Nellie Gray," across the town and out to the Fort. Ezra Lane promised to call at the Fort for the two boys and with drivers for the teams early the next morning--but to Sycamore Ridge, Leavenworth in those days was the great city with its pitfalls, and when Ezra Lane, grizzled though he was, came to a realizing sense of his responsibilities, the next day was gone and the third was waning. When he went to the Fort, he found the Sycamore Ridge men had been hurried into Missouri to meet General Price, who was threatening Springfield, and no word had been left for him about the boys. As he left the gate at the Fort, a troop of cavalry rode by gaily, and a boy, a big overgrown fourteen-year-old boy in a blue uniform, pa.s.sed and waved his hand at the befuddled old man, and cried, "Good-by, Mr.
Lane,--tell "em you saw me." He knew the boy was from Sycamore Ridge, but he knew also that he was not one of the boys who had come with the soldiers; and being an old man, far removed from the boy world, he could not place the child in his blue uniform, so he drove away puzzled.
The afternoon the men from Sycamore Ridge came to Leavenworth they were hurriedly examined again, signed the muster rolls, and were sent away without uniforms all in twenty-four hours. But not before they had found time to have their pictures taken in borrowed regimentals.
For twenty years after the war the daguerreotypes of the soldiers taken at Leavenworth that day were the proudest adornments of the centre-tables of Sycamore Ridge, and even now on Lincoln Avenue, in a little white cottage with green blinds, that sits in a broad smooth lawn with elm trees on it, stands an easel. On the easel is a picture--an enlarged crayon drawing of a straight, handsome young fellow in a captain"s uniform. One hand is in his coat, and the other at his hip. His head is thrown back with a fierce determination into the photographer"s iron rest and all together the picture is marked with the wrinkled front of war. For over one corner of the easel hangs a sword with an ivory handle, and upon it is an inscription proclaiming the fact that the sword was presented to Captain Philemon R. Ward by his company for gallant conduct on the field of battle on the night of August 4, 1861. Above the easel in the corner hangs another picture--that of a sweet-faced old man of seventy, beaming rather benignly over his white lawn necktie. The forty-five years that have pa.s.sed between the two faces have trimmed the hair away from the temples and the brow, have softened the mouth, and have put patience into the eyes--the patience of a great faith often tried but never broken. The five young women of the household know that the crayon portrait on the bamboo easel is highly improper as a parlour ornament--for do they not teach school, and do they not take all the educational journals and the crafty magazines of art? But the hand that put it there was proud of its handiwork, and she who hung the sword upon the easel is gone away, so the girls smile at the fierce young boyish face in the picture as they pa.s.s it, and throw a kiss at the face above it, and the easel is not moved.
And the man,--the tall old man with a slight stoop in his shoulders, the old man who wears the alpaca coat and the white lawn tie seen in the upper picture,--sometimes he wanders into the stately front room with a finger in a census bulletin as a problem in his head creases his brow--and the sight of the sword always makes him smile, and sometimes the smile is a chuckle that stirs the c.o.c.kles of his heart.
For his mind goes back to that summer night of August 4, 1861, and he sees himself riding on a horse with a little boy behind with his arms in the soldier"s belt. It is dusk, and "C" Company on foot is filing down a Missouri hill. It is a muddy road, and the men are tired and dirty. There is no singing now. A man driving an ox team has turned out of the road to let the soldiers pa.s.s. Some one in the line asks the man, "Where"s Price?"
"Over the hill yonder," replies the man, pointing with his hickory whip-stock. The word buzzes up and down the line. The captain on his horse with the boy clutching at his belt does not hear it. But the line lags and finally halts. The men have been only two days under military discipline. That day last week Phil Ward--who was he, anyway? Henry Schnitzler and Oscar Fernald could have bought him and sold him twice over. So the line halted. Then the captain halted. Then he called Second Lieutenant Dolan and asked to know what was the matter. "They say they are going to camp," responded Dolan, touching his cap. Captain Ward"s face flushed. He told Dolan to give the order to march. There were shouts and laughter, and Gabriel Carnine cried, "Say, Phil, this here Missourian we pa.s.sed says old General Price is over that hill." The boys laughed again, and Ward saw that trouble was before him. The men stood waiting while he controlled his rage before he spoke. Dolan said under his breath from the ground beside the horse, "They"re awful tired, Cap, and they don"t want to tackle Price"s army all by their lonelies." Some one in the company called out, "We"ve voted on this thing, Cap. Don"t the majority rule in this country?"
A smile twitched at Ward"s mouth and the boy in him p.r.i.c.ked a twinkle in his eyes, for he was only twenty-six, and he laughed--threw his head back and then leaned over and slapped the horse"s neck and finally straightened up and said, "Gentlemen, I bow to the will of the people."
And so it happened that when they drew their first month"s pay, Martin Culpepper and Jake Dolan suggested to the company that they buy Ward a sword to commemorate the victory of the people. And Martin Culpepper made a great presentation speech in which he said that to the infantry, cavalry, and artillery arms of military service, "C" Company had added the "vox populi." But the night after the presentation Oscar Fernald and Watts McHurdie crawled under the captain"s tent and stole the sword and p.a.w.ned it for beer, and there was a sound of revelry by night.
When they found the great camp near Springfield, it seemed to John Barclay that all the soldiers in the world were gathered. It is difficult for a boy under a dozen years to remember things consecutively; because boys do not do things consecutively. They flit around like b.u.t.terflies, and so the picture that they make of events jumps from scene to scene. One film on a roll of John"s memory showed a hot August day in the camp of "C" Company; the men are hurrying about the place. The tents are down; the boys--John and Bob--are kicking around the vacant camp looking for trophies. But there the film broke and did not record the fact that Captain Ward put Bob and John on a commissary wagon that stood in a side street as the soldiers moved out. John remembered looking into a street filled with marching soldiers. First the regulars and the artillery came swinging down the street. At their head the boy saw General Lyon, the commanding officer, and around him was a bodyguard whose plumed hats, with the left brim pinned up, caught the boys" eyes. The regulars marched by silently. It was part of their day"s work; but following them came a detachment of Germans singing "Marchen Rote," and then the battery of six guns and then the Kansans. Small wonder Captain Gordon Granger told Colonel Mitchel that the Kansas soldiers were only an armed mob.
They filed out of Springfield, some in rags and some in tags and some in velvet gowns. They carried guns; but they looked like delegates to a convention, and as the boys saw their own company, they waved their hands, but they were almost ashamed of the shabby clothes of the men from Sycamore Ridge; for a boy always notices clothes on others. When the Germans stopped singing "Marchen Rote," the boys heard Watts McHurdie"s high tenor voice start up "The Dutch Companee," and the crowd that was lining the street cheered and cheered. A Missouri regiment followed and more regulars, and then a battery of four guns pa.s.sed, and then came more Kansans still going to that everlasting convention. And a band came roaring by,--with its crashing bra.s.s and rumbling drums,--and then after the band had turned the corner, came Iowa in gray blouses and such other garments as the clothes-lines of the country afforded. They were singing as they pa.s.sed--a song the boy had never heard, being all about the "happy land of Canaan." And before the sun had set again, after that night, hundreds of those who sang of the happy land were there. In the rear were the ambulances and the ammunition and the hospital vans, and the wagon which held the boys wheeled into the line. After they had pa.s.sed, the streets were clogged with carts and drays and wagons of all sorts, for the citizens were moving to places of safety.
As a man, the boy"s memory did not tell him how the boys fared, but he does remember that it was dark in the timber where they camped that night, and that they slipped away into the woods to lie down together.
The chirping of the birds at dawn wakened them, and as John sat up rubbing his eyes, he heard a rifle"s crack. They were at the edge of a field, and half a mile from him, troops were marching by columns across a clearing. The rifle-shot was followed by another, and another, and then by a half-dozen. "Wake up, Bob--wake up--they"s a battle," he cried, and the two boys stumbled to their feet. The shots were far in front of the marching soldiers, and the boys could not make out what the firing meant. The line formed and ran up the hill, and the boys saw the morning sun flashing on the guns of the enemy.
The battery roared, and the boys were filled with terror. They ran through the woods like dogs until they came to the soldiers from Sycamore Ridge. The boys crawled on their bellies to their friends, and lay with their faces all but buried in the ground. The men were lying at the edge of the timber talking, and Watts McHurdie was on his back.
"What"s the matter with you, Watts?" asked Oscar Fernald.
"Os," replied Watts, "I got a presentiment I"m goin" to be shot in the rear. It will kill me to be shot in the back, and I"ve got a notion that"s how I am goin" to die."
The line laughed. Captain Ward, who was sitting a few paces in the rear of the men, went over to Watts, and scuffled the man over with his foot. A bullet went through Ward"s hat before he got back to his place. The men were sticking up ramrods and betting on the number of minutes they would last. No ramrod stood more than ten minutes. Martin Culpepper threw up his hat five times before a bullet hit it; but he went bareheaded the rest of the day, and John Barclay, in sheer fear, began to dig a hole under him. After he had been on his belly for an hour, Henry Schnitzler got tired and rose. The men begged him to lie down. But his only reply when they told him he was a fool was, "Vell, vot of it?" And when they said he would be shot, he answered again, "Vell, vot of it?" And when Jake Dolan cried, "You pot-gutted Dutchman, sit down or there"ll be a sauer-kraut shower in h.e.l.l pretty quick," Henry shook his fat sides a moment and laughed, "Vell, vot of dot--altzo!" For an hour, that seemed ten, he moved back and forth on the line, firing and joking, and then the spell broke and a bullet took part of his jaw. As he dropped to his position, with the blood gushing from his face, his eyes blazed, and he spat out, "By h.e.l.l-tam, now I vos mad," and he fought the day out and died that night. But as he sank to his place when the bullet hit him, Watts McHurdie saw Schnitzler stagger, and through the smoke, knew that he was wounded.
Watts rushed to Schnitzler and bent over him, when a ball hit Watts and went ripping through the fleshy part of his hip. "Shot in the back--d.a.m.n it, shot in the back!" he screamed, as he jumped into the air. "What did I tell you, boys, I"m shot in the back." And he crawled bleeding to the rear.
All the long forenoon the camp of the enemy continued to belch out men. The battery mowed them down, and once the Kansans were ordered to charge the hill, and the boys were left alone. It was there that the two were separated. John saw men sink in awful silence, and the blood ooze from their heads. He saw men cramp in agony and choke with blood, and he saw Martin Culpepper, perhaps with the large white plumes still dancing in his eyes, dash out of the line and pick up a Union banner that Sigel"s men had lost, and that the enemy was flaunting just before the artillery mowed the gray line down. He heard the hoa.r.s.e men cheer Martin, and as the tall swart figure came running back waving the flag, the boy prayed to his father"s G.o.d to save the man.
When the battle lulled, the boy found himself parted from "C" Company, and fled back through the woods to the rear. There he came upon a smell that was familiar. He had known it in the slaughter-house at home. It was the smell of fresh blood, and with it came the sickening drone of flies. In an instant he stood under a tree where men were working smeared with blood. He stumbled over a little pile of dismembered legs and hands. A man with a b.l.o.o.d.y knife was bending over a human form stretched on a b.l.o.o.d.y and, it seemed to the boy, a greasy table. Another was helping the big man. They were cutting the bullet out of Watts McHurdie, who was lying white and unconscious and with flies crawling over him, half naked and blood-smeared, on the table.
The boy screamed, and the man turned his head and snarled through his clenched teeth that held the knife, "Get out of here--no--go get me a bucket of water from the creek." Some one handed the boy a bucket, and he ran where he was told to go, with the awful sight burned on his brain, with the sickening smell in his nose, and with the drone of flies in his ears. When he came back the firing had begun again. The surgeon was saying, "Well, that"s all that"s waiting--now I"m going for a minute." He grabbed a gun standing by the table and ran toward the front; he did not take off his blood-splotched ap.r.o.n, and the boy fled from the place in terror. In a few moments the firing ceased; but the boy ran on, hunting for a hiding-place. He saw a troop of Alabamians plunge over a log in a charge, and roll in an awful, writhing, screaming pile of dying men and horses, and in the heap he saw the terror-stricken face of a youth, who was shrieking for help; John carried that fear-distorted face in his memory for years, until long afterwards it appeared in Sycamore Ridge.
But that day John fled from the death-trap almost mad with fear.
Rushing farther into the woods, he came upon General Lyon and his staff. The plumed hats of the bodyguard told the boy that the sandy-haired man before him was in command, though the man"s face was b.l.o.o.d.y from a wound in his head, and though his clothes were stained with blood and he was hatless. He sat upright on his horse, and as the boy turned, he heard the voices of Captain Ward and his soldiers, begging to be sent into the fight. It was a clamour fierce and piteous, and the general had turned his head to the Kansans, when something at the left startled him. There was no firing, and a column of soldiers was approaching. Doubt paralyzed the group around Lyon for a moment. The men wore gray blouses strangely like those the Iowans wore. The men might be Sigel"s men, coming back from their artillery duel. The general plainly was puzzled. He rode out from the bodyguard a few paces. The boy was staring at him, when the bodyguard with their gay plumed hats came up, and he saw wrath flash into the general"s face as he recognized the enemy. "Shoot them--shoot them--" he shouted. But the gray line vomited its smoke first, and the boy felt his foot afire. The general dropped from his horse, and as the boy looked down, he saw a red blot coming out on his instep. In the same instant he saw Captain Ward rush to the falling general, and saw the bodyguard gather about him, and then the blackness came over the child and he fell. He did not see them bear General Lyon"s body into the brush, nor hear Ward moan his sorrow. But when Ward returned from the thicket, he saw the child lying limp on the gra.s.s.
As Ward ran toward the hospital van carrying the limp little body, he could see that a ball had pierced the boy"s foot. Also he saw the men in retreat who had shot Lyon, and all over the field the firing had ceased. As he hurried through the underbrush, Ward ran into Bob Hendricks hiding in the thicket. Ward took the child"s hand and he began to sob: "I saw Elmer go up that hill, Captain; I saw him go up with the horses and he ain"t come back." But Ward did not understand him, and hurried the little fellow along with John to the surgeon.
Then Ward left them, and when John Barclay opened his eyes, Bob Hendricks was sitting beside him. A great lint bandage was about John"s foot, and they were in a wagon jolting over a rutty road. He did not speak for a long time, and then he asked, "Did we whip "em?"
And Bob nodded and said, "Cap says so!"
The children clasped hands and talked of many things that pa.s.sed from the boy"s mind. But his mind recorded that the next day in the hospital Martin Culpepper said, "Bob can"t come to-day, Johnnie; you know he"s tendin" Elmer"s funeral." The boy must have opened his eyes, for the man said, "Why, Johnnie, I thought you knew; yes; they found him dead that night--right under the reb--under the enemies" guns on the brink of the hill."
The child"s eyes filled with tears, but he did not cry. His emotion was spent. The two sat together for a time, and the little boy said, "Why didn"t you go, Mr. Culpepper?" And the man replied: "Me?
Oh--why--Oh, yes, I got a little scratch here in my leg, and they won"t let me out of here. There"s Watts over there in the next cot; he got a little scratch too--didn"t you, Watts?" Watts and the boy smiled at each other, but John did not see Bob again for years. Miss Hendricks came and took him to their father"s people in Ohio.
One day some one came in the hospital where John and Watts and Martin Culpepper were lying, and began to call out mail for the men, and the third name the corporal called was "Captain Martin Culpepper"; and when they brought him a long official envelope with General Fremont"s name on it, Martin Culpepper held it in his hands, looked at the inscription, read the word "captain" again and again, and could not speak for choked joy. And tears so dimmed his eyes that he could not see the "large white plumes" of chivalry, but the men in the beds cheered as they heard the words the corporal read.
With such music as that in his ears, and with his soul stirred by the events about him, Watts McHurdie, lying in the hospital, wrote the song that made him famous. They know in Sycamore Ridge that Watts is not much of a poet, that his rhymes are sometimes bad and his metre worse. But once his heart took fire and burned for a day sheer white, and in that day he wrote words that a nation sang, and now all the world is singing. And they are proud of him, and when people come to Sycamore Ridge on pilgrimages to see the author of the song, men do not smile in wonder; they show the visitors his shop, and point out the bowed little man bending over his bench, stretching his arms out as he sews, and they point him out with pride. Not even John Barclay with all his millions, or Bob Hendricks, who once refused a place in the President"s cabinet, are more esteemed in Sycamore Ridge than the little harness maker who set the world to singing.
And curiously enough, John Barclay was with Watts McHurdie when he wrote the song. They brought him an accordion one day while he was getting well, and the two sat together. Watts droned along and shut his eyes and mumbled some words, and then burst out with the chorus.
Over and over he sang it and exclaimed between breaths: "Say--ain"t that fine? I just made it up." He was exalted with his performance, and some women came loitering down the corridor where the wounded man and the boy were lying. The visitors gazed compa.s.sionately at them--little Watts not much larger than the boy. A woman asked, "And where were you wounded, son?" looking at Watts with his accordion. His face flushed up at the thought of his shame, and he could not keep back the tears that always betrayed him when he was deeply moved.
"Ten--ten miles from Springfield, madam, ten miles from Springfield."
And to hide his embarra.s.sment he began sawing at his accordion, chanting his famous song. But being only a little boy, John Barclay t.i.ttered.
A few days after the battle Captain Ward wrote to Miss Lucy telling her that some soldiers slightly wounded would go home on a furlough to Lawrence, and that they would take John with them and put him on the stage at Lawrence for Sycamore Ridge. Then Ward"s letter continued: "It is all so horrible--this curse of war; sometimes I think it is worse than the curse of slavery. There is no "pomp and circ.u.mstance of glorious war." Men died screaming in agony, or dumb with fear. They were covered with dirt, and when they were dead they merged into the landscape like inanimate things. What vital difference is there between a living man and a dead man, that one stands out in a scene big and obtrusive, and the other begins to fade into the earth as soon as death touches the body? The horror of death is upon me, and I cannot shake it off. It is a fearful thing to see a human soul pa.s.s "in any shape, in any mood." And I have seen so many deaths--we lost one man out of every three--that I am all unnerved. I saw General Lyon die--the only abolitionist in the regular army, they say. He died like a soldier--but not as the soldiers die in pictures. He sank off his horse so limp, and so like an animal with its death wound, and gasped so weakly, "I"m killed--take care of my body," that when we covered his face and bore him away, we could not realize we were carrying a man"s body. And now, my dear, if I should go as these men go, I have neither kith nor kin to mourn me--only you, and you must not mourn, for I shall be near you always and always, without sign or token, and when you feel my presence near, know that it is real, and not a seeming. For the great force of life that moves events in this world has but one symbol, but one vital manifestation, and that is love, and when a soul is touched with that, it is immortal."
But Martin Culpepper, with his dancing plumes, saw things in another light. Perhaps we always see things in another light when forty years have pa.s.sed over them. But in his chapter "The Shrill Trump," in the Biography, he writes: ""O you mortal engines, whose rude throats the immortal Jove"s dread clamours counterfeit," O for the "spirit-stirring drum, and the ear-splitting fife" "in these piping times of peace."
Small wonder it was that with the clang and clank of sabre and artillery in his ears, with the huzzas of comrades and the sparkle of the wine of war in his eyes, our hero wrote the never dying words that made him famous. How the day comes back with all its pageantry, the caparisoned horses, the handsome men stepping to the music of inspiring melody, the clarion commands of the officers, and the steady rumble of a thousand feet upon the battle ground, going careless whether to death or immortality in deathless fame."
A curious thing is that deathless fame which Martin speaks of--a pa.s.sing curious thing; for when word came of Henry Schnitzler"s death, Mary Murphy, of the Thayer House, put off Gabriel Carnine"s ring, and wept many tears in the stage driver"s coffee and wore black in her hat for a year, and when Gabriel came home, she married him and all went as merrily as a wedding-bell. What covert tenderness or dream of gauzy romance was in her memory, the town could never know; but the Carnines" first boy was named Henry, and for many years after the war, she was known among the men, who do not understand a woman"s heart, as the "War widow by brevet." Yet that was Henry"s "deathless fame" in Sycamore Ridge, for the town has long since forgotten him, and even his name means nothing to our children, who see it on the bronze statue set up by the rich John Barclay to commemorate our soldier dead.