She thought she could conquer—that she had conquered—then, as the breeze died away, and the leaves hung still and limp again, her pride went with the breeze and she fell again on her knees by the big rock, fell and buried her face there in the cool moss and cried: "Oh, and I loved that thing!"

Ten minutes later she sat pale and smiling. The Conway pride had conquered, but it was a dangerous conquest, for steel and tears had mingled to make it.

In her despair she even plucked another cotton bloom from her bosom as if trying to force herself to be happy again in saying:

"One, I love—two, I love, Three, I love, I say—"

But this only hurt her, because she remembered that when she had said it before she had had an idol which now lay shattered, as the petals of the cotton-blossom which she had plucked and thrown away.

Then the breeze sprang up again and with it, borne on it, came the click—click—click of a hammer tapping a rock. It was a small gladey valley through which a gulley ran. Boulders cropped out here and there, and haws, red and white elms, and sassafras grew and shaded it.

Down in the gulch, not a hundred yards from her, she saw a pair of broad shoulders overtopped by a rusty summer hat—the worse for a full season's wear. Around the shoulders was strung a leathern satchel, and she could see that the person beneath the hat was closely inspecting the rocks he chipped off and put into the satchel. Then his hammer rang out again.

She sat and watched him and listened to the tap of his hammer half sadly—half amused. Harry Travis had crushed her as she had never been crushed before in her life, and the pride in a woman which endureth a fall is not to be trifled with afterwards.

She grew calmer—even quiet. The old spirit returned. She knew that she had never been as beautiful in her life, as now—just now—in the halo of the sunset shining on her hair and reflected in the rare old gown she wore.

The person with the leathern satchel was oblivious of everything but his work. The old straw hat bobbed energetically—the big shoulders nodded steadily beneath it. She watched him silently a few minutes and then she called out pleasantly:

"You do seem to be very busy, Clay!"

He stopped and looked up. Then he took off his hat and, awkwardly bowing, wiped his brow, broad, calm and self-reliant, and a deliberate smile spread over his face. Everything he did was deliberate. The smile began in the large friendly mouth and spread in kindred waves upward until it flashed out from his kindly blue eyes, through the heavy double-lens glasses that covered them.

Without a word he picked up the last rock he had broken off and put it into his satchel. Very deliberate, too, was his walk up the hill toward the grape arbor, mopping his brow as he came along—a brow big and full of cause and effect and of quiet deductions and deliberate conclusions. His coat was seedy, his trousers bagged at the knees, his shoes were old, and there were patches on them, but his collar and linen were white and very much starched, and his awkward, shambling gait was honest to the last footfall. A world of depth and soul was in his strong, fine face, lit up now with an honest, humble smile, but, at rest, full of quiet dignity.

He shuffled along and sat down in a big brotherly way by the girl's side.

She sat still, looking at him with a half amused smile on her lips.

He smiled back at her abstractedly. She could see that he had not yet really seen her. He was looking thoughtfully across at the hill beyond:

"It puzzles me," he said in a fine, mellow voice, "why I should find this rotten limestone cropping out here. Now, in the blue limestone of the Niagara period I was as sure of finding it as I am—"

"Of not finding me at all,"—it came queenly, haughtily from her.

He turned, and the thick lenses of his glasses were focused on her—a radiant, superb being. Then there were swept away all his abstractions and deductions, and in their place a real smile—a lover's smile of satisfaction looking on the paradise of his dreams.

"You know I have always worshiped you," he said simply and reverently.

She moved up in a sisterly way to him and looked into his face.

"Clay—Clay—but you must not—I have told you—I am engaged."

He did not appear to hear her. Already his mind was away off in the hills where his eyes were. He went on: "Now, over there I struck a stratum of rotten limestone—it's a curious thing. I traced that vein of coal from Walker County—clear through the carboniferous period, and it is bound to crop out somewhere in this altitude—bound to do it."

"Now it's just this way," he said, taking her hand without being conscious of it and counting off the periods with her fingers. "Here is the carboniferous, the sub-carboniferous—" She jerked her hand away with what would have been an amused laugh except that in a half conscious way she remembered that Harry had held her hand but half an hour ago; and it ended in a frigid shaft feathered with a smile—the arrow which came from the bow of her pretty mouth.

He came to himself with a boyish laugh and a blush that made Helen look at him again and watch it roll down his cheek and neck, under the fine white skin there.

Then he looked at her closely again—the romantic face, the coil of brown hair, the old gown of rich silk, the old-fashioned corsage and the rich old gold necklace around her throat.

"If there's a queen on earth—it's you," he said simply.

He reddened again, and to divert it felt in his satchel and took out a rock. Then he looked across at the hills again:

"If I do trace up that vein of coal and the iron which is needed with it—when I do—for I know it is here as well as Leverrier knew that Neptune was in our planetary system by the attraction exerted—when I do—"

He looked at her again. He could not say the words. Real love has ideas, but never words. It feels, but cannot speak. That which comes out of the mouth, being words, is ever a poor substitute for that which comes from the heart and is spirit.

"Clay," she said, "you keep forgetting. I say I—I am—was—" She stopped confused.

He looked hurt for a moment and smiled in his frank way: "I know it is here," he said holding up a bit of coal—"here, by the million tons, and it is mine by right of birth and education and breeding. It is my heritage to find it. One day Alabama steel will outrank Pittsburgh's. Oh, to put my name there as the discoverer!"

"Then you"—he turned and said it fondly—reverently—"you should be mine by right of—of love."

She sighed.

"Clay—I am sorry for you. I can never love you that way. You have told me that, since—oh, since I can remember, and I have always told you—you know we are cousins, anyway—second cousins." She shook her head.

"Under the heart of the flinty hill lies the coal," he said simply.

But she did not understand him. She had looked down and seen Harry's foot-track on the moss.

And so they sat until the first star arose and shimmered through the blue mist which lay around the far off purpling hill tops. Then there was the clang of a dinner bell.

"It is Mammy Maria," she said—"I must go. No—you must not walk home with me. I'd rather be alone."

She did not intend it, but it was brutal to have said it that way—to the sensitive heart it went to. He looked hurt for a moment and then tried to smile in a weak way. Then he raised his hat gallantly, turned and went off down the gulch.

Helen stood looking for the last time on the pretty arbor. Here she had lost her heart—her life. She fell on the moss again and kissed the stone. Then she walked home—in tears.



CHAPTER VII

HILLARD WATTS

It is good for the world now and then to go back to first principles in religion. It would be better for it never to get away from them; but, since it has that way of doing—of breeding away and breaking away from the innate good—it is well that a man should be born in any age with the faith of Abraham.

It matters not from what source such a man may spring. And he need have no known pedigree at all, except an honest ancestry behind him.

Such a man was Hillard Watts, the Cottontown preacher.

Sprung from the common people of the South, he was a most uncommon man, in that he had an absolute faith in God and His justice, and an absolute belief that some redeeming goodness lay in every human being, however depraved he may seem to the world. And so firm was his faith, so simple his religion—so contrary to the worldliness of the religion of his day,—that the very practice of it made him an uncommon man.

As the overseer of General Jeremiah Travis's large estate before the war, he proved by his success that even slaves work better for kindness. Of infinite good sense, but little education, he had a mind that went to the heart of things, and years ago the fame of his homely but pithy sayings stuck in the community. In connection with kindness to his negroes one of his sayings was, "Oh, kindness can't be classified—it takes in the whole world or nothin'."

When General Travis got into dire financial straits once, he sent for his overseer, and advised with him as to the expediency of giving up. The overseer, who knew the world and its ways with all the good judgment of his nature, dryly remarked: "That'll never do. Never let the world know you've quit; an' let the undertaker that buries you be the fust man to find out you're busted."

General Travis laughed, and that season one of his horses won the Tennessee Valley Futurity, worth thirty-thousand dollars—and the splendid estate was again free from debt.

There was not a negro on the place who did not love the overseer, not one who did not carry that love to the extent of doing his best to please him. He had never been known to punish one, and yet the work done by the Travis hands was proverbial.

Among his duties as overseer, the entire charge of the Westmore stable of thoroughbreds fell to his care. This was as much from love as choice, for never was a man born with more innate love of all dumb creatures than the preacher-overseer.

"I've allers contended that a man could love God an' raise horses, too," he would say; and it was ludicrous to see him when he went off to the races, filling the tent trunk with religious tracts, which, after the races, he would distribute to all who would read them. And when night came he would regularly hold prayers in his tent—prayer-meetings in which his auditors were touts, stable-boys and gamblers. And woe to the stable-boy who uttered an oath in his presence or dared to strike or maltreat any of his horses!

He preached constantly against gambling on the races. "That's the Devil's end of it," he would say—"The Almighty lets us raise good horses as a benefit to mankind, an' the best one wins the purse. It was the Devil's idea that turned 'em into gambling machines."

No one ever doubted the honesty of his races. When the Travis horses ran, the racing world knew they ran for blood.

Physically, he had been an athlete—a giant, and unconscious of his strength. Incidentally, he had taken to wrestling when a boy, and as a man his fame as a wrestler was coincident with the Tennessee Valley. It was a manly sport which gave him great pleasure, just as would the physical development of one of his race horses. Had he lived in the early days of Greece, he would have won in the Olympian wrestling match.

There was in Hillard Watts a trait which is one of the most pronounced of his type of folks,—a sturdy, honest humor. Humor, but of the Cromwell type—and withal, a kind that went with praying and fighting. Possessed, naturally, of a strong mind of great good sense, he had learned to read and write by studying the Bible—the only book he had ever read through and through and which he seemed to know by heart. He was earnest and honest in all things, but in his earnestness and strong fight for right living there was the twinkle of humor. Life, with him, was a serious fight, but ever through the smoke of its battle there gleamed the bright sun of a kindly humor.

The overseer's home was a double log hut on the side of the mountain. His plantation, he called it,—for having been General Travis's overseer, he could not imagine any farm being less than a plantation.

It consisted of forty acres of flinty land on the mountain side—"too po' to sprout cow-peas," as his old wife would always add—"but hits pow'ful for blackberries, an' if we can just live till blackberry time comes we can take keer ourselves."

Mrs. Watts had not a lazy bone in her body. Her religion was work: "Hit's nature's remedy," she would add—"wuck and five draps o' turpentine if you're feelin' po'ly."

She despised her husband's ways and thought little of his religion. Her tongue was frightful—her temper worse. Her mission on earth—aside from work—work—work—was to see that too much peace and good will did not abide long in the same place.

Elder Butts, the Hard-Shell preacher, used to say: "She can go to the full of the moon mighty nigh every month 'thout raisin' a row, if hard pressed for time an' she thinks everybody else around her is miser'ble. But if things look too peaceful and happy, she'll raise sand in the last quarter or bust. The Bishop's a good man, but if he ever gits to heaven, the bigges' diamon' in his crown'll be because he's lived with that old 'oman an' ain't committed murder. I don't believe in law suits, but if he ain't got a damage case agin the preacher that married him, then I'm wrong."

But no one ever heard the old man use harsher language in speaking of her than to remark that she was "a female Jineral—that's what Tabitha is."

Perhaps she was, and but for her the Bishop and his household had starved long ago.

"Furagin' is her strong point"—he would always add—"she'd made Albert Sydney Johnston a great chief of commissary."

And there was not an herb of any value that Mrs. Watts did not know all about. Any fair day she might be seen on the mountain side plucking edibles. Ginseng was her money crop, and every spring she would daily go into the mountain forests and come back with enough of its roots to help them out in the winter's pinch.

"Now, if anybody'll study Nature," she would say, "they'll see she never cal'c'lated to fetch us here 'ithout makin' 'lowance fur to feed us. The fus' thing that comes up is dandelions—an' I don't want to stick my tooth in anything that's better than dandelion greens biled with hog-jowl. I like a biled dinner any way. Sas'fras tea comes mighty handy with dandelions in the spring, an' them two'll carry us through April. Then comes wild lettice an' tansy-tea—that's fur May. Blackberries is good fur June an' the jam'll take us through winter if Bull Run and Appomattox ain' too healthy. In the summer we can live on garden truck, an' in the fall there is wild reddishes an' water-cresses an' spatterdock, an' nuts an' pertatoes come in mighty handy fur winter wuck. Why, I was born wuckin'—when I was a gal I cooked, washed and done house-work for a family of ten, an' then had time to spin ten hanks o' yarn a day."

"Now there's the old man—he's too lazy to wuck—he's like all parsons, he'd rather preach aroun' all his life on a promise of heaven than to wuck on earth for cash!"

"How did I ever come to marry Hillard Watts? Wal, he wa'n't that triflin' when I married him. He didn't have so much religiun then. But I've allers noticed a man's heredity for no-countness craps out after he's married. Lookin' back now I reckin' I married him jes' to res' myself. When I'm wuckin' an' git tired, I watches Hillard doin' nothin' awhile an' it hopes me pow'ful."

"He gits so busy at it an' seems so contented an' happy."

Besides his wife there were five grandchildren in his family—children of the old man's son by his second wife. "Their father tuck after his stepmother," he would explain regretfully, "an' wucked hisself to death in the cotton factory. The dust an' lint give him consumption. He was the only man I ever seed that tuck after his stepmother"—he added sadly.

An old soldier never gets over the war. It has left a nervous shock in his make-up—a memory in all his after life which takes precedence over all other things. The old man had the naming of the grandchildren, and he named them after the battles of the Civil war. Bull Run and Seven Days were the boys. Atlanta, Appomattox and Shiloh were the girls. His apology for Shiloh was: "You see I thout I'd name the last one Appomattox. Then came a little one befo' her mammy died, so weak an' pitiful I named her Shiloh."

It was the boast of their grandmother—that these children—even little Shiloh—aged seven—worked from ten to twelve hours every day in the cotton factory, rising before day and working often into the night, with forty minutes at noon for lunch.

They had not had a holiday since Christmas, and on the last anniversary of that day they had worked until ten o'clock, making up for lost time. Their pay was twenty-five cents a day—except Shiloh, who received fifteen.

"But I'll soon be worth mo', pap," she would say as she crawled up into the old man's lap—her usual place when she had eaten her supper and wanted to rest. "An you know what I'm gwine do with my other nickel every day? I'm gwine give it to the po' people of Indy an' China you preaches about."

And thus she would prattle—too young to know that, through the cupidity of white men, in this—the land of freedom and progress—she—this blue-eyed, white-skinned child of the Saxon race, was making the same wages as the Indian sepoy and the Chinese coolie.

It was Saturday night and after the old man had put Shiloh to bed, he mounted his horse and rode across the mountain to Westmoreland.

"Oh," said the old lady—"he's gwine over to Miss Alice's to git his Sunday School less'n. An' I'd like to know what good Sunday school less'ns 'll do any body. If folks'd git in the habit of wuckin' mo' an' prayin' less, the worl'ud be better off, an' they'd really have somethin' to be thankful fur when Sunday comes, 'stid of livin' frum han' to mouth an' trustin' in some unknown God to cram feed in you' crops."

Hardened by poverty, work, and misfortune, she was the soul of pessimism.



CHAPTER VIII

WESTMORELAND

From The Gaffs to Westmoreland, the home of Alice Westmore, was barely two miles up the level white pike.

Jim sat in the buggy at The Gaffs holding the horses while Richard Travis, having eaten his supper, was lighting a cigar and drawing on his overcoat, preparatory to riding over to Westmoreland.

The trotters stood at the door tossing their heads and eager to be off. They were cherry bays and so much alike that even Jim sometimes got them mixed. They were clean-limbed and racy looking, with flanks well drawn up, but with a broad bunch of powerful muscles which rolled from hip to back, making a sturdy back for the splendid full tails which almost touched the ground. In front they stood up straight, deep-chested, with clean bony heads, large luminous eyes and long slender ears, tapering into a point as velvety and soft as the tendril-bud on the tip of a Virginia creeper.

They stood shifting the bits nervously. The night air was cool and they wanted to go.

Travis came out and sprang from the porch to the buggy seat with the quick, sure footing of an athlete. Jim sat on the offside and passed him the lines just as he sang cheerily out:

"Heigh-ho—my honies—go!"

The two mares bounded away so quickly and keenly that the near mare struck her quarters and jumped up into the air, running. Her off mate settled to work, trotting as steadily as a bolting Caribou, but pulling viciously.

Travis twisted the near bit with a deft turn of his left wrist, and as the two mares settled to their strides there was but one stroke from their shoes, so evenly and in unison did they trot. Down the level road they flew, Travis sitting gracefully upright and holding the lines in that sure, yet careless way which comes to the expert driver with power in his arms.

"How many times must I tell you, Jim," he said at last rather gruffly—"never to bring them out, even for the road, without their boots? Didn't you see Lizette grab her quarters and fly up just now?"

Jim was duly penitent.

Travis let them out a link. They flew down a soft, cool graveled stretch. He drew them in at the sound of an ominous click. It came from Sadie B.

"Sadie B.'s forging again. Didn't I tell you to have the blacksmith move her hind shoes back a little?"

"I did, sir," said Jim.

"You've got no weight on her front feet, then," said Travis critically.

"Not to-night, sir—I took off the two ounces thinking you'd not speed them to-night, sir."

"You never know when I'm going to speed them. The night is as good as the day when I want a tonic."

They had reached the big stone posts which marked the boundary of Westmoreland. A little farther on the mares wheeled into the gate, for it was open and lay, half on the ground, hanging by one hinge. It had not been painted for years. The driveway, too, had been neglected. The old home, beautiful even in its decay, sat in a fine beech grove on the slope of a hill. A wide veranda, with marble flag-stones as a base, ran across the front. Eight Corinthian pillars sentineled it, resting on a marble base which seemed to spring up out of the flag-stones themselves, and towering to the projecting entablature above.

On one side an ell could be seen, covered with ivy. On the other the roof of a hot-house, with the glass broken out.

It touched even Richard Travis—this decay. He had known the place in the days of its glory before its proprietor, Colonel Theodore Westmore, broken by the war, in spirit and in pocket, had sent a bullet into his brain and ended the bitter fight with debt. Since then, no one but the widow and her daughter knew what the fight had been, for Clay Westmore, the brother, was but a boy and in college at the time. He had graduated only a few months before, and was now at home, wrapped up, as Richard Travis had heard, in what to him was a visionary scheme of some sort for discovering a large area of coal and iron thereabouts. He had heard, too, that the young man had taken hold of what had been left, and that often he had been seen following the plough himself.

Travis drove through the driveway—then he pulled up the mares very gently, got out and felt of their flanks.

"Take them to the barn and rub them off," he said, "while you wait. And for a half hour bandage their hind legs—I don't want any wind puffs from road work."

He started into the house. Then he turned and said: "Be here at the door, Jim, by ten o'clock, sharp. I shall make another call after this. Mind you now, ten o'clock, sharp."

At the library he knocked and walked in.

Mrs. Westmore sat by the fire. She was a small, daintily-made woman, and beautiful even at fifty-five. She had keen, black eyes and nervous, flighty ways. A smile, half cynical, half inviting, lit up continuously her face.

"Richard?" she said, rising and taking his hand.

"Cousin Alethea—I thought you were Alice and I was going to surprise her."

Mrs. Westmore laughed her metallic little laugh. It was habit. She intended it to be reassuring, but too much of it made one nervous. It was the laugh without the soul in it—the eye open and lighted, but dead. It was a Damascus blade falling from the stricken arm to the stone pavement and not against the ringing steel of an opponent.

"You will guess, of course, where she is," she said after they were seated.

"No?" from Travis.

"Getting their Sunday School lesson—she, Uncle Bisco, and the Bishop."

Travis frowned and gave a nervous twitch of his shoulders as he turned around to find himself a chair.

"No one knows just how we feel towards Uncle Bisco and his wife," went on Mrs. Westmore in half apology—"she has been with us so long and is now so old and helpless since they were freed; their children have all left them—gone—no one knows where. And so Uncle Bisco and Aunt Charity are as helpless as babes, and but for Alice they would suffer greatly."

A sudden impulse seized Travis: "Let us go and peep in on them. We shall have a good joke on Her Majesty."

Mrs. Westmore laughed, and they slipped quietly out to Uncle Bisco's cabin. Down a shrubbery-lined walk they went—then through the woods across a field. It was a long walk, but the path was firm and good, and the moon lit it up. They came to the little cabin at last, in the edge of another wood. Then they slipped around and peeped in the window.

A small kerosene lamp sat on a table lighting up a room scrupulously clean.

Uncle Bisco was very old. His head was, in truth, a cotton plant full open. His face was intelligent, grave—such a face as Howard Weeden only could draw from memory. He had finished his supper, and from the remnants left on the plate it was plain that Alice Westmore had prepared for the old man dainties which she, herself, could not afford to indulge in.

By him sat his old wife, and on the other side of the fireplace was the old overseer, his head also white, his face strong and thoughtful. He was clean shaven, save a patch of short white chin-whiskers, and his big straight nose had a slight hook of shrewdness in it.

Alice Westmore was reading the chapter—her voice added to it an hundred fold: "Let not your heart be troubled.... Ye believe in God, believe also in me.... In my Father's house are many mansions...!"

The lamplight fell on her hair. It was brown where the light flashed over it, and lay in rippling waves around her temples in a splendid coil down the arch of her neck, and shining in strong contrast through the gauzy dark sheen of her black gown. But where the light fell, there was that suspicion of red which the last faint tendril a dying sunbeam throws out in a parting clutch at the bosom of a cloud.

It gave one a feeling of the benediction of twilight.

And when she looked up, her eyes were the blessings poured out—luminous, helpful, uplifting, restful,—certain of life and immortality, full of all that which one sees not, when awake, but only when in the borderland of sleep, and memory, unleashed, tracks back on the trail of sweet days which once were.

They spake indeed always thus: "Let not your heart be troubled.... Peace, be still."

Her face did not seem to be a separate thing—apart—as with most women. For there are women whose hair is one thing and whose face is another. The hair is beautiful, pure, refined. The face beautiful, merely. The hair decorous, quiet, unadorned and debauched not by powder and paint, stands aloof as Desdemona, Ophelia or Rosalind. The face, brazen, with a sharp-tongued, vulgar queen of a thing in its center, on a throne, surrounded by perfumed nymphs, under the sensual glare of two rose-colored lamps, sits and holds a Du Barry court.

They are neighbors, but not friends, and they live in the same sphere, held together only by the law of gravity which holds to one spot of earth the rose and the ragwort. And the hair, like the rose, in all the purity of its own rich sweetness, all the naturalness of its soul, sits and looks down upon the face as a queen would over the painted yellow thing thrust by the law of life into her presence.

But the face of Alice Westmore was companion to her hair. The firelight fell on it; and while the glow from the lamp fell on her hair in sweet twilight shadows of good night, the rosy, purple beams of the cheerful firelight lit up her face with the sweet glory of a perpetual good morning.

Travis stood looking at her forgetful of all else. His lips were firmly set, as of a strong mind looking on its life-dream, the quarry of his hunter-soul all but in his grasp. Flashes of hope and little twists of fear were there; then, as he looked again, she raised, half timidly, her face as a Madonna asking for a blessing; and around his, crept in the smile which told of hope long deferred.

Selfish, impure, ambitious, forceful and masterful as he was, he stood hopeless and hungry-hearted before this pure woman. She had been the dream of his life—all times—always—since he could remember.

To own her—to win her!

As he looked up, the hardness of his face attracted even Mrs. Westmore, smiling by his side at the scene before her. She looked up at Travis, but when she saw his face the smile went out of hers. It changed to fear.

All the other passions in his face had settled into one cruel cynical smile around his mouth—a smile of winning or of death.

For the first time in her life she feared Richard Travis.

"I must go now," said Alice Westmore to the old men—"but I'll sing you a verse or two."

The overseer leaned back in his chair. Uncle Bisco stooped forward, his chin resting on his hickory staff.

And then like the clear notes of a spring, dripping drop by drop with a lengthening cadence into the covered pool of a rock-lined basin, came a simple Sunday School song the two old men loved so well.

There were tears in the old negro's eyes when she had finished. Then he sobbed like a child.

Alice Westmore arose to go.

"Now, Bishop—" she smiled at the overseer—"don't keep Uncle Bisco up all night talking about the war, and if you don't come by the house and chat with mamma and me awhile, we'll be jealous."

The overseer looked up: "Miss Alice—I'm an ole man an' we ole men all dream dreams when night comes. Moods come over us and, look where we will, it all leads back to the sweet paths of the past. To-day—all day—my mind has been on"—he stopped, afraid to pronounce the word and hunting around in the scanty lexicon of his mind for some phrase of speech, some word even that might not awaken in Alice Westmore memories of the past.

Richard Travis had an intuition of things as naturally as an eagle has the homing instinct, however high in air and beyond all earth's boundaries he flies. In this instance Mrs. Westmore also had it, for she looked up quickly at the man beside her. All the other emotions had vanished from his face save the one appealing look which said: "Come, let us go—we have heard enough."

Then they slipped back into the house.

Alice Westmore had stopped, smiling back from the doorway.

"On what, Bishop?" she finally asked.

He shook his head. "Jus' the dream of an ole man," he said. "Don't bother about us two ole men. I'll be 'long presently."

"Bisco," said the old preacher after a while, "come mighty nigh makin' a break then—but I've been thinkin' of Cap'n Tom all day. I can't throw it off."

Bisco shook his head solemnly. "So have I—so have I. The older I gits, the mo' I miss Marse Tom."

"I don't like the way things are goin'—in yonder"—and the preacher nodded his head toward the house.

Uncle Bisco looked cautiously around to see that no one was near: "He's doin' his bes'—the only thing is whether she can forgit Marse Tom."

"Bisco, it ain't human nature for her to stan' up agin all that's brought to bear on her. Cap'n Tom is dead. Love is only human at las', an' like all else that's human it mus' fade away if it ain't fed. It's been ten years an' mo'—sence—Cap'n Tom's light went out."

"The last day of November—'64—" said Uncle Bisco, "I was thar an' seed it. It was at the Franklin fight."

"An' Dick Travis has loved her from his youth," went on the overseer, "an' he loves her now, an' he's a masterful man."

"So is the Devil," whispered Uncle Bisco, "an' didn't he battle with the angels of the Lord an' mighty nigh hurled 'em from the crystal battlements."

"Bisco, I know him—I've knowed him from youth. He's a conjurin' man—a man who does things—he'll win her—he'll marry her yet. She'll not love him as she did Cap'n Tom. No—she'll never love again. But life is one thing an' love is another, an' it ain't often they meet in the same person. Youth mus' live even if it don't love, an' the law of nature is the law of life."

"I'm afeered so," said the old negro, shaking his head, "I'm afeered it'll be that way—but—I'd ruther see her die to-night."

"If God lets it be," said the preacher, "Bisco, if God lets it be—" he said excitedly, "if he'll let Cap'n Tom die an' suffer the martyrdom he suffered for conscience sake an' be robbed, as he was robbed, of his home, an' of his love—if God'll do that, then all I can say is, that after a long life walkin' with God, it'll be the fus' time I've ever knowed Him to let the wrong win out in the end. An' that ain't the kind of God I'm lookin' fur."

"Do you say that, Marse Hillyard?" asked the old negro quickly—his eyes taking on the light of hope as one who, weak, comes under the influence of a stronger mind. "Marse Hillyard, do you believe it? Praise God."

"Bisco—I'm—I'm ashamed—why should I doubt Him—He's told me a thousand truths an' never a lie."

"Praise God," replied the old man softly.

And so the two old men talked on, and their talk was of Captain Tom. No wonder when the old preacher mounted his horse to go back to his little cabin, all of his thoughts were of Captain Tom. No wonder Uncle Bisco, who had raised him, went to bed and dreamed of Captain Tom—dreamed and saw again the bloody Franklin fight.



CHAPTER IX

A MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING

In the library, Travis and Mrs. Westmore sat for some time in silence. Travis, as usual, smoked, in his thoughtful way watching the firelight which flickered now and then, half lighting up the room. It was plain that both were thinking of a subject that neither wished to be the first to bring up.

"I have been wanting all day to ask you about the mortgage," she said to him, finally.

"Oh," said Travis, indifferently enough—"that's all right. I arranged it at the bank to-day."

"I am so much obliged to you; it has been so on my mind," said his companion. "We women are such poor financiers, I wonder how you men ever have patience to bother with us. Did you get Mr. Shipton to carry it at the bank for another year?"

"Why—I—you see, Cousin Alethea—Shipton's a close dog—and the most unaccommodating fellow that ever lived when it comes to money. And so—er—well—the truth is—is—I had to act quickly and for what I thought was your interest."

Mrs. Westmore looked up quickly, and Travis saw the pained look in her face. "So I bought it in myself," he went on, carelessly flecking his cigar ashes into the fire. "I just had the judgment and sale transferred to me—to accommodate you—Cousin Alethea—you understand that—entirely for you. I hate to see you bothered this way—I'll carry it as long as you wish."

She thanked him again, more with her eyes than her voice. Then there crept over her face that look of trouble and sorrow, unlike any Travis had ever seen there. Once seen on any human face it is always remembered, for it is the same, the world over, upon its millions and millions—that deadened look of trouble which carries with it the knowledge that the spot called home is lost forever.

There are many shifting photographs from the camera called sorrow, pictured on the delicate plate of the human soul or focused in the face. There is the crushed look when Death takes the loved one, the hardened look when an ideal is shattered, the look of dismay from wrecked hopes and the cynical look from wrecked happiness—but none of these is the numbed and dumb look of despair which confronts humanity when the home is gone.

It runs not alone through the man family, but every other animal as well, from the broken-hearted bird which sits on the nearby limb, and sees the wreck of her home by the ravages of a night-prowling marauder, to the squalidest of human beings, turning their backs forever on the mud-hut that had once sheltered them.

To Mrs. Westmore it was a keen grief. Here had she come as a bride—here had she lived since—here had been born her two children—here occurred the great sorrow of her life.

And the sacredest memory, at last, of life, lies not in the handclasp of a coming joy, but in the footfall of a vanishing sorrow.

Westmoreland meant everything to Mrs. Westmore—the pride of birth, of social standing, the ties of motherhood, the very altar of her life. And it was her husband's name and her own family. It meant she was not of common clay, nor unknown, nor without influence. It was bound around and woven into her life, and part of her very existence.

Home in the South means more than it does anywhere else on earth; for local self-government—wherever the principle came from—finds its very altar there. States-right is nothing but the home idea, stretched over the state and bounded by certain lines. The peculiar institutions of the South made every home a castle, a town, a government, a kingdom in itself, in which the real ruler is a queen.

Ask the first negro or child met in the road, whose home is this, or that, and one would think the entire Southland was widowed.

From the day she had entered it as a bride, Westmoreland, throughout the County, had been known as the home of Mrs. Westmore.

She was proud of it. She loved it with that love which had come down through a long line of cavaliers loving their castles.

And now she knew it must go, as well as that, sooner or later, Death itself must come.

She knew Richard Travis, and she knew that, if from his life were snatched the chance of making Alice Westmore his wife he would sell the place as cold-bloodedly as Shipton would.

Travis sat smoking, but reading her. He spelled her thoughts as easily as if they had been written on her forehead, for he was a man who spelled. He smoked calmly and indifferently, but the one question of his heart—the winning of Alice,—surged in his breast and it said: "Now is the time—now—buy her—the mother. This is the one thing which is her price."

He looked at Mrs. Westmore again. He scanned her closely, from her foot to the dainty head of beautiful, half-grey hair. He could read her as an open book—her veneration of all Westmoreland things—her vanity—her pride of home and name and position; the overpowering independence of that vanity which made her hold up her head in company, just as in the former days, tho' to do it she must work, scrub, pinch, ay, even go hungry.

He knew it all and he knew it better than she guessed—that it had actually come to a question of food with them; that her son was a geological dreamer, just out of college, and that Alice's meagre salary at the run-down female college where she taught music was all that stood between them and poverty of the bitterest kind.

For there is no poverty like the tyranny of that which sits on the erstwhile throne of plenty.

He glanced around the room—the hall—the home—in his mind's eye—and wondered how she did it—how she managed that poverty should leave no trace of itself in the home, the well furnished and elegant old home, from its shining, polished furniture and old silver to the oiled floor of oak and ash.

Could he buy her—bribe her, win her to work for him? He started to speak and say: "Cousin Alethea, may not all this be stopped, this debt and poverty and make-believe—this suffering of pride, transfixed by the spears of poverty? Let you and me arrange it, and all so satisfactorily. I have loved Alice all my life."

There is the fool in every one of us. And that is what the fool in Richard Travis wished him to say. What he did say was:

"Oh, it was nothing but purely business on my part—purely business. I had the money and was looking for a good investment. I was glad to find it. There are a hundred acres and the house left. And by the way, Cousin Alethea, I just added five-hundred dollars more to the principal,—thought, perhaps, you'd need it, you know? You'll find it to your credit at Shipton's bank."

He smoked on as if he thought it was nothing. As a business fact he knew the place was already mortgaged for all it was worth.

"Oh, how can we ever thank you enough?"

Travis glanced at her when she spoke. He flushed when he heard her place a slight accent on the we. She glanced at him and then looked into the fire. But in their glances which met, they both saw that the other knew and understood.

"And by the way, Cousin Alethea," said Travis after a while, "of course it is not necessary to let Alice know anything of this business. It will only worry her unnecessarily."

"Of course not," said Mrs. Westmore.



CHAPTER X

A STAR AND A SATELLITE

An hour later Mrs. Westmore had gone to her room and Alice had been singing his favorite songs. Her singing always had a peculiar influence over Richard Travis—a moral influence, which, perhaps, was the secret of its power; and all influence which is permanent is moral. There was in it for him an uplifting force that he never experienced save in her presence and under the influence of her songs.

He was a brilliant man and he knew that if he won Alice Westmore it must be done on a high plane. Women were his playthings—he had won them by the score and flung them away when won. But all his life—even when a boy—he had dreamed of finally winning Alice Westmore and settling down.

Like all men who were impure, he made the mistake of thinking that one day, when he wished, he could be pure.

Such a man may marry, but it is a thing of convenience, a matter in which he selects some woman, who he knows will not be his mistress, to become his housekeeper.

And thus she plods along in life, differing eventually only from his mistress in that she is the mother of his children.

In all Richard's longings, too, for Alice Westmore, there was an unconscious cause. He did not know it because he could not know.

Sooner or later love, which is loose, surfeits and sours. It is then that it turns instinctively to the pure, as the Jews, straying from their true God and meeting the chastisement of the sword of Babylon, turned in their anguish to the city of their King.

Nature is inexorable, and love has its laws as fixed as those which hold the stars in their course. And woe to the man or woman who transgresses! He who, ere it is ripe, deflowers the bud of blossoming love in wantonness and waste, in after years will watch and wait and water it with tears, in vain, for that bloom will never come.

She came over by the fire. Her face was flushed; her beautiful sad eyes lighted with excitement.

"Do you remember the first time I ever heard you sing, Alice?"

His voice was earnest and full of pathos, for him.

"Was it not when father dressed me as a gypsy girl and I rode my pony over to The Gaffs and sang from horse-back for your grandfather?"

He nodded: "I thought you were the prettiest thing I ever saw, and I have thought so ever since. That's when I fell in love with you."

"I remember quite distinctly what you did," she said. "You were a big boy and you came up behind my pony and jumped on, frightening us dreadfully."

"Tried to kiss you, didn't I?"

She laughed: "That was ever a chronic endeavor of your youth."

How pretty she looked. Had it been any other woman he would have reached over and taken her hand.

"Overpower her, master her, make her love you by force of arms"—his inner voice said.

He turned to the musing woman beside him and mechanically reached out his hand. Hers lay on the arm of her chair. The next instant he would have dropped his upon it and held it there. But as he made the motion her eyes looked up into his, so passion-free and holy that his own arm fell by his side.

But the little wave of passion in him only stirred him to his depths. Ere she knew it or could stop him he was telling her the story of his love for her. Poetry,—romance,—and with it the strength of saying,—fell from his lips as naturally as snow from the clouds. He went into the history of old loves—how, of all loves they are the greatest—of Jacob who served his fourteen years for Rachel, of the love of Petrarch, of Dante.

"Do you know Browning's most beautiful poem?" he asked at last. His voice was tenderly mellow:

"All that I know of a certain star Is, it can throw (like the angled spar) Now a dart of red, now a dart of blue; Till my friends have said they would fain see, too, My star that dartles the red and the blue! Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled: They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it. What matter to me if their star is a world? Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it."

"Alice," he said, drawing his chair closer to her, "I know I have no such life to offer as you would bring to me. The best we men can do is to do the best we can. We are saved only because there is one woman we can look to always as our star. There is much of our past that we all might wish to change, but change, like work, is the law of life, and we must not always dream."

Quietly he had dropped his hand upon hers. Her own eyes were far off—they were dreaming. So deep was her dream that she had not noticed it. Passion practised, as he was, the torch of her hand thrilled him as with wine; and as with wine was he daring.

"I know where your thoughts have been," he went on.

She looked up with a start and her hand slipped from under his into her lap. It was a simple movement and involuntary—like that of the little brown quail when she slips from the sedge-grass into the tangled depths of the blossoming wild blackberry bushes at the far off flash of a sharp-shinned hawk-wing, up in the blue. Nor could she say whether she saw it, or whether it was merely a shadow, an instinctive signal from the innocent courts of the sky to the brood-children of her innocence below.

But he saw it and said quickly, changing with it the subject: "At least were—but all that has passed. I need you, Alice," he went on passionately—"in my life, in my work. My home is there, waiting! It has been waiting all these years for you—its mistress—the only mistress it shall ever have. Your mother"—Alice looked at him surprised.

"Your mother—you,—perhaps, had not thought of that—your mother needs the rest and the care we could give her. Our lives are not always our own," he went on gravely—"oftentimes it belongs partly to others—for their happiness."

He felt that he was striking a winning chord.

"You can love me if you would say so," he said, bending low over her.

This time, when his hand fell on hers, she did not move. Surprised, he looked into her eyes. There were tears there.

Travis knew when he had gone far enough. Reverently he kissed her hand as he said:

"Never mind—in your own time, Alice. I can wait—I have waited long. Twenty years," he added, patiently, even sweetly, "and if need be, I'll wait twenty more."

"I'll go now," he said, after a moment.

She looked at him gratefully, and arose. "One moment, Richard," she said—"but you were speaking of mother, and knowing your zeal for her I was afraid you might—might—the mortgage has been troubling her."

"Oh, no—no"—he broke in quickly—"I did nothing—absolutely nothing—though I wanted to for your sake."

"I'm so glad," she said—"we will manage somehow. I am so sensitive about such things."

"I'll come to-morrow afternoon and bring your mare."

She smiled, surprised.

"Yes, your mare—I happened on her quite unexpectedly in Tennessee. I have bought her for you—she is elegant, and I wish you to ride her often. I have given Jim orders that no one but you shall ride her. If it is a pretty day to-morrow I shall be around in the afternoon, and we will ride down to the bluffs five miles away to see the sunset."

The trotters were at the door. He took her hand as he said good-bye, and held it while he added:

"Maybe you'd better forget all I said to-night—be patient with me—remember how long I have waited."

He was off and sprang into the buggy, elated. Never before had she let him hold her hand even for a moment. He felt, he knew, that he would win her.

He turned the horses and drove off.

From Westmoreland Travis drove straight toward the town. The trotters, keen and full of play, flew along, tossing their queenly heads in the very exuberance of life.

At The Gaffs, he drew rein: "Now, Jim, I'll be back at midnight. You sleep light until I come in, and have their bedding dry and blankets ready."

He tossed the boy a dollar as he drove off.

Up the road toward the town he drove, finally slackening his trotters' speed as he came into the more thickly settled part of the outskirts. Sand Mountain loomed high in the faint moonlight, and at its base, in the outposts of the town, arose the smoke-stack of the cotton mills.

Around it lay Cottontown.

Slowly he brought the nettled trotters down to a walk. Quietly he turned them into a shaded lane, overhung with forest trees, near which a cottage, one of the many belonging to the mill, stood in the shadow of the forest.

Stopping his horses in the shadow, he drew out his watch and pressed the stem. It struck eleven.

He drew up the buggy-top and taking the little silver whistle from his pocket, gave a low whistle.

It was ten minutes later before the side door of the cottage opened softly and a girl came noiselessly out. She slipped out, following the shadow line of the trees until she came up to the buggy. Then she threw the shawl from off her face and head and stood smiling up at Travis. It had been a pretty face, but now it was pinched by overwork and there was the mingling both of sadness and gladness in her eyes. But at sight of Travis she blushed joyfully, and deeper still when he held out his hand and drew her into the buggy and up to the seat beside him.

"Maggie"—was all he whispered. Then he kissed her passionately on her lips. "I am glad I came," he went on, as he put one arm around her and drew her to him—"you're flushed and the ride will do you good."

She was satisfied to let her head lie on his shoulder.

"They are beauties"—she said after a while, as the trotters' thrilling, quick step brought the blood tingling to her veins.

"Beauties for the beauty," said Travis, kissing her again. Her brown hair was in his face and the perfume of it went through him like the whistling flash of the first wild doe he had killed in his first boyish hunt and which he never forgot.

"You do love me," she said at last, looking up into his face, where her head rested. She could not move because his arm held her girlish form to him with an overpowering clasp.

"Why?" he asked, kissing her again and in sheer passionate excess holding his lips on hers until she could not speak, but only look love with her eyes. When she could, she sighed and said:

"Because, you could not make me so happy if you didn't."

He relaxed his arm to control the trotters, which were going too fast down the road. She sat up by his side and went on.

"Do you know I have thought lots about what you said last Saturday night?"

"Why, what?" he asked.

She looked pained that he had forgotten.

"About—about—our bein' married to each other—even—even—if—if—there's no preacher. You know—that true love makes marriages, and not a ceremony—and—and—that the heart is the priest to all of us, you know!"

Travis said nothing. He had forgotten all about it.

"One thing I wrote down in my little book when I got back home an' memorized it—Oh, you can say such beautiful things."

He seized her and kissed her again.

"I am so happy with you—always—" she laughed.

He drove toward the shaded trees down by the river.

"I want you to see how the setting moonlight looks on the river," he said. "There is nothing in all nature like it. It floats like a crescent above, falling into the arms of its companion below. All nature is love and never fails to paint a love scene in preference to all others, if permitted. How else can you account for it making two lover moons fall into each other's arms," he laughed.

She looked at him enraptured. It was the tribute which mediocrity pays to genius.

Presently they passed by Westmoreland, and from Alice's window a light shone far out into the golden tinged leaves of the beeches near.

Travis glanced up at it. Then at the pretty mill-girl by his side:

"A star and—a satellite!"—he smiled to himself.



CHAPTER XI

A MIDNIGHT BURIAL

It was growing late when the old preacher left Westmoreland and rode leisurely back toward the cabin on Sand Mountain. The horse he was riding—a dilapidated roan—was old and blind, but fox-trotted along with the easy assurance of having often travelled the same road.

The bridle rested on the pommel of the saddle. The old man's head was bent in deep thought, and the roan, his head also down and half dreaming, jogged into the dark shadows which formed a wooded gulch, leading into the valley and from thence into the river.

There is in us an unnameable spiritual quality which, from lack of a more specific name, we call mental telepathy. Some day we shall know more about it, just as some day we shall know what unknown force it is which draws the needle to the pole.

It is the border land of the spiritual—a touch of it, given, to let us know there is more and in great abundance in the country to which we ultimately shall go,—a glimpse of the kingdom which is to be.

To-night, this influence was on the old man. The theme of his thoughts was, Captain Tom. Somehow he felt that even then Captain Tom was near him. How—where—why—he could not tell. He merely felt it.

And so the very shadows of the trees grew uncanny to him as he rode by them and the slight wind among them mourned Captain Tom—Captain Tom.

It was a desolate place in the narrow mountain road and scarcely could the old man see the white sand which wound in and through it, and then out again on the opposite side into the clearing beyond the scraggy side of Sand Mountain. But the horse knew every foot of the way, and though it was always night with him, instinct had taught him a sure footing.

Suddenly the rider was awakened from his reverie by the old horse stopping so suddenly as almost to unseat him. With a snort the roan had stopped and had thrown up his head, quivering with fear, while with his nose he was trying to smell out the queer thing which stood in his path.

The moon broke out from behind a cloud at the same moment, and there, in the middle of the road, not ten yards from him, stood a heavily built, rugged, black-bearded man in a ragged slouched hat and pointing a heavy revolver at the rider's head.

"Hands up, Hillard Watts!"

The old man looked quietly into the muzzle of the revolver and said, with a laugh:

"This ain't 'zactly my benediction time, Jack Bracken, an' I've no notion of h'istin' my arms an' axin' a blessin' over you an' that old pistol. Put it up an' tell me what you want," he said more softly.

"Well, you do know me," said the man, coming forward and thrusting his pistol into its case. "I wa'nt sho' it was you," he said, "and I wa'nt sho' you'd kno' me if it was. In my business I have to be mighty keerful," he added with a slight laugh.

He came up to the saddle-skirt and held out his hand, half hesitatingly, as he spoke.

The Bishop—as every one knew him—glanced into the face before him and saw something which touched him quickly. It was grief-stricken, and sorrow sat in the fierce eyes, and in the shadows of the dark face. And through it all, a pleading, beseeching appeal for sympathy ran as he half doubtingly held out his hand.

"Why,—yes—, I'll take it, Jack, robber that you are," said the old man cheerily. "You may not be as bad as they say, an' no man is worse than his heart. But what in the worl' do you want to hold up as po' a man as me—an' if I do say it, yo' frien' when you was a boy?"

"I know," said the other—"I know. I don't want yo' money, even if you had it. I want you. You've come as a God-send. I—I couldn't bury him till you'd said somethin'."

His voice choked—he shook with a suppressed sob.

The bishop slid off his horse: "What is it, Jack? You hain't kilt anybody, have you?"

"No—no"—said the other—"it's little—little Jack—he's dead."

The Bishop looked at him inquiringly. He had never before heard of little Jack.

"I—I dunno', Jack," he said. "You'll have to tell me all. I hain't seed you sence you started in your robber career after the war—sence I buried yo' father," he added. "An' a fine, brave man he was, Jack—a fine, brave man—an' I've wondered how sech a man's son could ever do as you've done."

"Come," said the other—"I'll tell you. Come, an' say a prayer over little Jack fust. You must do it"—he said almost fiercely—"I won't bury him without a prayer—him that was an angel an' all I had on earth. Hitch yo' hoss just outer the road, in the thicket, an' follow me."

The Bishop did as he was told, and Jack Bracken led the way down a rocky gulch under the shaggy sides of Sand Mountain, furzed with scraggy trees and thick with underbrush and weeds.

It was a tortuous path and one in which the old man himself, knowing, as he thought he did, every foot of the country around, could easily have been lost. Above, through the trees, the moon shone dimly, and no path could be seen under foot. But Jack Bracken slouched heavily along, in a wabbling, awkward gait, never once looking back to see if his companion followed.

For a half mile they went through what the Bishop had always thought was an almost impenetrable cattle trail. At last they wound around a curve on the densely wooded side of the mountain, beyond which lay the broad river breathing out frosty mist and vapor from its sleeping bosom.

Following a dry gulch until it ended abruptly at the river's bluff, around the mouth of which great loose rocks lay as they had been washed by the waters of many centuries, and bushes grew about, the path terminated abruptly. It overlooked the river romantically, with a natural rock gallery in front.

Jack Bracken stopped and sat down on one of the rocks. From underneath he drew forth a lantern and prepared to light it. "This is my home," he said laconically.

The Bishop looked around: "Well, Jack, but this is part of my own leetle forty-acre farm. Why, thar's my cabin up yander. We've wound in an' aroun' the back of my place down by the river! I never seed this hole befo'."

"I knew it was yo's," said the outlaw quietly. "That's why I come here. Many a Sunday night I've slipped up to the little church winder an' heard you preach—me an' po' little Jack. Oh, he loved to hear the Bible read an' he never forgot nothin' you ever said. He knowed all about Joseph an' Moses an' Jesus, an' last night when he died o' that croup befo' I c'ud get him help or anything, he wanted you, an' he said he was goin' to the lan' where you said Jesus was—"

He broke down—he could not say it.

Stepping into the mouth of the cave, he struck a match, when out of sight of the entrance way, and stepping from stone to stone he guided the Bishop down some twenty feet, following the channel the water had cut on its way underground to the river. Here another opening entered into the dry channel, and into it he stepped.

It was a nicely turned cave—a natural room,—arched above with beautiful white lime-rock, the stalactites hanging in pointed clusters, their starry points twinkling above like stars in a winter sky. Underneath, the soft sand made a clean, warm floor, and the entire cave was so beautiful that the old man could do nothing but look and admire, as the light fell on stalagmite and ghostly columns and white sanded floors.

"Beautiful," he said—"Jack, you cudn't he'p gettin' relig'un here."

"Little Jack loved 'em," said the outlaw. "He'd lay here ev'y night befo' he'd go to sleep an' look up an' call it his heaven; an' he said that big column thar was the great white throne, an' them big things up yander with wings was angels. He had all them other columns named for the fellers you preached about—Moses an' Aaron an' Joseph an' all of 'em, an' that kind o' double one lookin' like a woman holding her child, he called Mary an' little Jesus."

"He's gone to a prettier heaven than this," said the Bishop looking down on the little figure, with face as pale and white as any of the columns around him, neatly dressed and wrapped, save his face, in an old oil cloth and lying on the little bed that sat in a corner.

The old man sat down very tenderly by the little dead boy and, pulling out a testament from his pocket, read to the outlaw, whose whole soul was centered in all he said, the comforting chapter which Miss Alice had that night read to the old negro: "Let not your hearts be troubled...."

He explained as he read, and told the father how little Jack was now in one of the many mansions and far better off than living in a cave, the child of an outlaw, for the Bishop did not mince his words. He dwelt on it, that God had taken the little boy for love of him, and to give him a better home and perhaps as a means of changing the father, and when he said the last prayer over the dead child asking for forgiveness for the father's sins, that he might meet the little one in heaven, the heart of the outlaw burst with grief and repentance within him.

He fell at the old man's feet, on his knees—he laid his big shaggy head in the Bishop's lap and wept as he had never wept before.

"There can't be—you don't mean," he said—"that there is forgiveness for me—that I can so live that I'll see little Jack again!"

"That's just what I mean, Jack," said the old man—"here it all is—here—in a book that never lies, an' all vouched for by Him who could walk in here to-night and lay His sweet hands on little Jack an' tell him to rise an' laugh agin, an' he'd do it. You turn about now an' see if it ain't so—an' that you'll be better an' happier."

"But—my God, man—you don't know—you don't understan'. I've robbed, I've killed. Men have gone down befo' my bullets like sheep. They was shootin' at me, too—but I shot best. I'm a murderer."

The old Bishop looked at him calmly.

"So was Moses and David," he replied—"men after God's own heart. An' so was many another that's now called a saint, from old Hickory Jackson up."

"But I'm a robber—a thief"—began Jack Bracken.

"We all steal," said the old man sadly shaking his head—"it's human nature. There's a thief in every trade, an' every idle hand is a robber, an' every idle tongue is a thief an' a liar. We all steal. But there's somethin' of God an' divinity in all of us, an' in spite of our shortcomin' it'll bring us back at last to our Father's home if we'll give it a chance. God's Book can't lie, an' it says: 'Tho' your sins be as scarlet they shall be white as snow!' ... an' then agin, shall have life everlasting!"

"Life everlastin'," repeated the outlaw. "Do you believe that? Oh, if it was only so! To live always up there an' with little Jack. How do you know it ain't lyin'?—It's too gran' to be so. How do you know it ain't lyin', I say? Hillard Watts, are you handin' it out to me straight about this here Jesus Christ?" he cried bitterly.

"Well, it's this way, Jack," said the old man, "jes' this away an' plain as the nose on yo' face: Now here's me, ain' it? Well, you know I won't lie to you. You believe me, don't you?"

The outlaw nodded.

"Why?" asked the Bishop.

"Because you ain't never lied to me," said the other. "You've allers told me the truth about the things I know to be so."

"But now, suppose," said the old man, "I'd tell you about somethin' you had never seed—that, for instance, sence you've been an outcast from society an' a livin' in this cave, I've seed men talk to each other a hundred miles apart, with nothin' but a wire betwix' 'em."

"That's mighty hard to believe," said the outlaw grimly.

"But I've seed it done," said the Bishop.

"Do you mean it?" asked the other.

"As I live, I have," said the Bishop.

"Then it's so," said Jack.

"Now that's faith, Jack—an' common sense, too. We know what'll be the earthly end of the liar, an' the thief, an' the murderer, an' him that's impure—because we see 'em come to thar end all the time. It don't lie when it tells you the good are happy, an' the hones' are elevated an' the mem'ry of the just shall not perish, because them things we see come so. Now, if after tellin' you all that, that's true, it axes you to believe when it says there is another life—a spiritual life, which we can't conceive of, an' there we shall live forever, can't you believe that, too, sence it ain't never lied about what you can see, by your own senses? Why ever' star that shines, an' ever' beam of sunlight fallin' on the earth, an' ever' beat of yo' own heart by some force that we know not of, all of them is mo' wonderful than the telegraph, an' the livin' agin of the spirit ain't any mo' wonderful than the law that holds the stars in their places. You'll see little Jack agin as sho' as God lives an' holds the worl' in His hand."

The outlaw sat mute and motionless, and a great light of joy swept over his face.

"By God's help I'll do it"—and he bowed his head in prayer—the first he had uttered since he was a boy.

It was wonderful to see the happy and reconciled change when he arose and tenderly lifted the dead child in his arms. His face was transformed with a peace the old man had never seen before in any human being.

Strong men are always strong—in crime—in sin. When they reform it is the reformation of strength. Such a change came over Jack Bracken, the outlaw.

He carried his dead child to the next room: "I've got his grave already chiseled out of the rocks. I'll bury him here—right under the columns he called Mary and little Jesus, that he loved to talk of so much."

"It's fitten"—said the old man tenderly—"it's fitten an' beautiful. The fust burial we know of in the Bible is where Abraham bought the cave of Machpelah for to bury Sarah, his wife. And as Abraham bought it of Ephron, the Hittite, and offered it to Abraham for to bury his dead out of his sight, so I give this cave to you, Jack Bracken, forever to be the restin' place of little Jack."

And so, tenderly and with many kisses did they bury little Jack, sinless and innocent, deep in the pure white rock, covered as he was with purity and looking ever upwards toward the statue above, wherein Nature's chisel had carved out a Madonna and her child.



CHAPTER XII

JACK BRACKEN

Jack Bracken was comfortably fixed in his underground home. There was every comfort for living. It was warm in winter and cool in summer, and in another apartment adjoining his living room was what he called a kitchen in which a spring of pure water, trickling down from rock to rock, formed in a natural basin of whitest rock below.

"Jack," said the old man, "won't you tell me about yo'self an' how you ever got down to this? I knowed you as a boy, up to the time you went into the army, an' if I do say it to yo' face, you were a brave hon'rble boy that never forgot a frien' nor—"

"A foe," put in Jack quickly. "Bishop, if I cu'd only forgive my foes—that's been the ruin of me."

The old man was thoughtful a while: "Jack, that's a terrible thing in the human heart—unforgiveness. It's to life what a drought is to Nature—an' it spiles mo' people than any other weakness. But that don't make yo' no wuss than the rest of us, nor does robbery nor even murder. So there's a chance for you yet, Jack—a mighty fine chance, too, sence yo' heart is changed."

"Many a time, Jack, many a time when the paper 'ud be full of yo' holdin' up a train or shootin' a shar'ff, or robbin' or killin', I'd tell 'em what a good boy you had been, brave an' game but revengeful when aroused. I'd tell 'em how you dared the bullets of our own men, after the battle of Shiloh, to cut down an' carry off a measley little Yankee they'd hung up as a spy 'cause he had onct saved yo' father's life. You shot two of our boys then, Jack."

"They was a shootin' me, too," he said quietly. "I caught two bullets savin' that Yankee. But he was no spy; he was caught in a Yankee uniform an'—an' he saved my father, as you said—that settled it with me."

"It turned our boys agin you, Jack."

"Yes, an' the Yankees were agin me already—that made all the worl' agin me, an' it's been agin me ever since—they made me an outlaw."

The old man softened: "How was it, Jack? I knowed you was driven to it."

"They shot my father—waylaid and killed him—some home-made Yankee bush-whackers that infested these hills—as you know."

The Bishop nodded. "I know—I know—it was awful. 'But vengeance is mine—I will repay'—saith the Lord."

"Well, I was young, an' my father—you know how I loved him. Befo' I c'ud get home they had burned our house, killed my sick mother from exposure and insulted my sisters."

"Jack," said the old man hotly—"a home-made Yankee is a 'bomination to the Lord. He's a twin brother to the Copperhead up north."

"My little brother—they might have spared him," went on the outlaw—"they might have spared him. He tried to defen' his mother an' sisters an' they shot him down in col' blood."

"'Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord," replied the old man sadly.

"Well, I acted as His agent that time,"—his eyes were hot with a bright glitter. "I put on their uniform an' went after 'em. I j'ined 'em—the devils! An' they had a nigger sarjent an' ten of their twenty-seven was niggers, wearin' a Yankee uniform. I j'ined 'em—yes,—for wasn't I the agent of the Lord?" He laughed bitterly. "An' didn't He say: 'He that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword.' One by one they come up missin', till I had killed all but seven. These got panicky—followed by an unknown doom an' they c'udn't see it, for it come like a thief at midnight an' agin like a pesterlence it wasted 'em at noonday. They separated—they tried to fly—they hid—but I followed 'em 'an I got all but one. He fled to California."

"It was awful, Jack—awful—God he'p you."

"Then a price was put on my head. I was Jack Bracken, the spy and the outlaw. I was not to be captured, but shot and hung. Then I cut down that Yankee an' you all turned agin me. I was hunted and hounded. I shot—they shot. I killed an' they tried to. I was shot down three times. I've got bullets in me now.

"After the war I tried to surrender. I wanted to quit and live a decent life. But no, they put a bigger price on my head. I came home like other soldiers an' went to tillin' my farm. They ran me away—they hunted an' hounded me. Civilization turned ag'in me. Society was my foe. I was up ag'in the fust law of Nature. It is the law of the survival—the wild beast that, cowered, fights for his life. Society turned on me—I turned on Society."

"But there was one thing that happen'd that put the steel in me wuss than all. All through them times was one star I loved and hoped for. I was to marry her when the war closed. She an' her sister—the pretty one—they lived up yander on the mountain side. The pretty one died. But when I lost faith in Margaret Adams, I lost it in mankind. I'd ruther a seen her dead. It staggered me—killed the soul in me—to think that an angel like her could fall an' be false."

"I don't blame you," said the old man. "I've never understood it yet."

"I was to marry Margaret. I love her yet," he added simply. "When I found she was false I went out—and—well, you know the rest."

He took a turn around the room, picked up one of little Jack's shoes, and cried over it.

"So I married his mother—little Jack's mother, a mountain lass that hid me and befriended me. She died when the boy was born. His granny kep' him while I was on my raids—nobody knowed it was my son. His granny died two years ago. This has been our home ever sence, an' not once, sence little Jack has been with me, have I done a wrong deed. Often an' often we've slipt up to hear you preach—what you've said went home to me."

"Jack," said the old man suddenly aroused—"was that you—was it you been puttin' them twenty dollar gol' pieces in the church Bible—between the leds, ever' month for the las' two years? By it I've kep' up the po' of Cottontown. I've puzzled an' wonder'd—I've thought of a dozen fo'ks—but I sed nothin'—was it you?"

The outlaw smiled: "It come from the rich an' it went to the po'. Come," he said—"that's somethin' we must settle."

He took up the lantern and led the way into the other room. Under a ledge of rocks, securely hid, sat, in rows, half a dozen common water buckets, made of red cedar, with tops fitting securely on them.

The outlaw spread a blanket on the sand, then knelt and, taking up a bucket, removed the top and poured out its contents on the blanket. They chuckled and rolled and tumbled over each other, the yellow eagles and half eagles, like thoroughbred colts turned out in the paddocks for a romp.

The old man's knees shook under him. He trembled so that he had to sit down on the blanket. Then he ran his hand through them—his fingers open, letting the coins fall through playfully.

Never before had he seen so much gold. Poor as he was and had ever been—much and often as he had suffered—he and his, for the necessities of life, even, knowing its value and the use he might make of it, it thrilled him with a strange, nervous longing—a childish curiosity to handle it and play with it.

Modest and brave men have looked on low-bosomed women in the glitter of dissipative lights with the same feeling.

The old man gazed, silent—doubtless with the same awe which Keats gave to Cortez, when he first looked on the Pacific and stood

"Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

The outlaw lifted another bucket and took off the lid. It also was full. "There are five mo'," he said—"that last one is silver an' this one—" He lifted the lid of a small cedar box. In it was a large package, wrapped in water-proof. Unravelling it, he shoved out packages of bank bills of such number and denomination as fairly made the old preacher wonder.

"How much in all, Jack?"

"A little the rise of one hundred thousand dollars."

He pushed them back and put the buckets under their ledge of rocks. "I'd give it all just to have little Jack here agin—an'—an'—start out—a new man. This has cost me ten years of outlawry an' fo'teen bullets. Now I've got all this an'—well—a hole in the groun' an' little Jack in the hole. If you wanter preach a sermon on the folly of pilin' up money," he went on half ironically, "here is yo' tex'. All me an' little Jack needed or cu'd use, was a few clothes, some bac'n an' coffee an' flour. Often I'd fill my pockets an' say: 'Well, I'll buy somethin' I want, an' that little Jack will want.' I'd go to town an' see it all, an' think an' puzzle an' wonder—then I'd come home with a few toys, maybe, an' bac'n an' flour an' coffee."

"With all our money we can't buy higher than our source, an' when we go we leave even that behind," he added.

"The world," said the old man quaintly, "is full of folks who have got a big pocket-book an' a bac'n pedigree."

"Do you know who this money belongs to?" he asked the outlaw.

"Every dollar of it," said Jack Bracken. "It come from railroads, banks and express companies. I didn't feel squirmish about takin' it, for all o' them are robbers. The only diff'r'nce betwix' them an' me is that they rob a little every day, till they get their pile, an' I take mine from 'em, all at onct."

He thought awhile, then he said: "But it must all go back to 'em, Jack. Let them answer for their own sins. Leave it here until next week—an' then we will come an' haul it fifty miles to the next town, where you can express it to them without bein' known, or havin' anybody kno' what's in the buckets till you're safe back here in this town. I'll fix it an' the note you are to write. They'll not pester you after they get their money. The crowd you've named never got hot under a gold collar. A clean shave will change you so nobody will suspect you, an' there's a good openin' in town for a blacksmith, an' you can live with me in my cabin."

"But there's one thing I've kept back for the las'," said Jack, after they had gone into the front part of the room and sat down on the deer skins there.

"That sword there"—and he pointed to the wall where it hung.

The Bishop glanced up, and as he did so he felt a strange thrill of recognition run through him—"It belongs to Cap'n Tom," said Jack quietly.

The old man sprang up and took it reverently, fondly down.

"Jack—" he began.

"I was at Franklin," went on Jack proudly. "I charged with old Gen. Travis over the breastworks near the Carter House. I saw Cap'n Tom when he went under."

"Cap'n Tom," repeated the old man slowly.

"Cap'n Tom, yes—he saved my life once, you know. He cut me down when they were about to hang me for a spy—you heard about it?"

The Bishop nodded.

"It was his Company that caught me an' they was glad of any excuse to hang me. An' they mighty nigh done it, but Cap'n Tom came up in time to cut me down an' he said he'd make it hot for any man that teched me, that I was a square prisoner of war, an' he sent me to Johnson Island. Of course it didn't take me long to get out of that hole—I escaped."

The Bishop was silent, looking at the sword.

"Well, at Franklin, when I seed Cap'n Tom dyin' as I tho'rt, shunned by the Yankees as a traitor——"

"As a traitor?" asked the old man hotly—"what, after Shiloh—after he give up Miss Alice for the flag he loved an' his old grand sire an' The Gaffs an' all of us that loved him—you call that a traitor?"

"You never heard," said Jack, "how old Gen'l Travis charged the breastworks at Franklin and hit the line where Cap'n Tom's battery stood. Nine times they had charged Cap'n Tom's battery that night—nine times he stood his ground an' they melted away around it. But when he saw the line led by his own grandsire the blood in him was thicker than water and——"

"An' whut?" gasped the Bishop.

"Well, why they say it was a drunken soldier in his own battery who struck him with the heavy hilt of a sword. Any way I found the old Gen'l cryin' over him: 'My Irish Gray—my Irish Gray,' he kept sayin'. 'I might have known it was you,' and the old Gen'l charged on leaving him for dead. An' so I found him an' tuck him in my arms an' carried him to my own cabin up yonder on the mountain—carried him an'——"

"An' whut?"—asked the old man, grasping the outlaw's shoulder—"Didn't he die? We've never been able to hear from him."

Jack shook his head. "It 'ud been better for him if he had"—and he touched his forehead significantly.

"Tell me, Jack—quick—tell it all," exclaimed the old man, still gripping Jack's shoulder.

"There's nothin' to tell except that I kept him ever sence—here—right here for two years, with little Jack an' Ephrum, the young nigger that was his body servant—he's been our cook an' servant. He never would leave Cap'n Tom, followed me offen the field of Franklin. An' mighty fond of each other was all three of 'em."

The old man turned pale and his voice trembled so with excitement he could hardly say:

"Where is he, Jack? My God—Cap'n Tom—he's been here all this time too—an' me awonderin'—"

"Right here, Bishop—kind an' quiet and teched in his head, where the sword-hilt crushed his skull. All these years I've cared for him—me an' Ephrum, my two boys as I called 'em—him an' little Jack. An' right here he staid contented like till little Jack died last night—then—"

"In God's name—quick!—tell me—Jack—"

"That's the worst of it—Bishop—when he found little Jack was dead he wandered off—"

"When?" almost shouted the old man.

"To-day—this even'. I have sent Eph after him—an' I hope he has found him by now an' tuck him somewhere. Eph'll never stop till he does."

"We must find him, Jack. Cap'n Tom alive—thank God—alive, even if he is teched in his head. Oh, God, I might a knowed it—an' only to-day I was doubtin' You."

He fell on his knees and Jack stood awed in the presence of the great emotion which shook the old man.

Finally he arose. "Come—Jack—let us go an' hunt for Cap'n Tom."

But though they hunted until the moon went down they found no trace of him. For miles they walked, or took turn about in riding the old blind roan.

"It's no use, Bishop," said Jack. "We will sleep a while and begin to-morrow. Besides, Eph is with him. I feel it—he'll take keer o' him."

That is how it came that at midnight, that Saturday night, the old Bishop brought home a strange man to live in the little cabin in his yard.

That is how, a week later, all the South was stirred over the strange return of a fortune to the different corporations from which it had been taken, accompanied by a drawling note from Jack Bracken saying he returned ill-gotten gain to live a better life.

It ended laconically:

"An' maybe you'd better go an' do likewise."

The dim starlight was shining faintly through the cracks of the outlaw's future home when the old man showed him in.

"Now, Jack," he said, "it's nearly mornin' an' the old woman may be wild an' raise sand. But learn to lay low an' shoe hosses. She was bohn disapp'inted—maybe because she wa'n't a boy," he whispered.

There was a whinny outside, in a small paddock, where a nearby stable stood: "That's Cap'n Tom's horse," said the old man—"I mus' go see if he's hungry."

"I've kept his horse these ten years, hopin' maybe he'd come back agin. It's John Paul Jones—the thoroughbred, that the old General give him."

"I remember him," said Jack.

The great bloodlike horse came up and rubbed his nose on the old man's shoulder.

"Hungry, John Paul?"

"It's been a job to get feed fur him, po' as I've been—but—but—he's Cap'n Tom's. You kno'—"

"An' Cap'n Tom will ride him yet," said Jack.

"Do you believe it, Jack?" asked the old man huskily "God be praised!"

That Saturday night was one never to be forgotten by others beside Jack Bracken and the old preacher of Cottontown.

When Helen Conway, after supper, sought her drunken father and learned that he really intended to have Lily and herself go into the cotton mills, she was crushed for the first time in her life.

An hour later she sent a boy with a note to The Gaffs to Harry Travis.

He brought back an answer that made her pale with wounded love and grief. Not even Mammy Maria knew why she had crept off to bed. But in the night the old woman heard sobs from the young girl's room where she and her sister slept.

"What is it, chile?" she asked as she slipped from her own cot in the adjoining little room and went in to Helen's.

The girl had been weeping all night—she had no mother—no one to whom she could unbosom her heart—no one but the old woman who had nursed her from her infancy. This kind old creature sat on the bed and held the girl's sobbing head on her lap and stroked her cheek. She knew and understood—she asked no questions:

"It isn't that I must work in the mill," she sobbed to the old woman—"I can do that—anything to help out—but—but—to think that Harry loves me so little as to give me up for—for—that."

"Don't cry, chile," said Mammy soothingly—"It ain't registered that you gwine wuck in that mill yit—I ain't made my afferdavit yit."

"But Harry doesn't love me—Oh, he doesn't love me," she wept. "He would not give me up for anything if he did."

"I'm gwine give that Marse Harry a piece of my mind when I see him—see if I don't. Don't you cry, chile—hold up yo' haid an' be a Conway. Don't you ever let him know that yo' heart is bustin' for him an' fo' the year is out we'll have that same Marse Harry acrawlin' on his very marrow bones to aix our forgiveness. See if we won't."

It was poor consolation to the romantic spirit of Helen Conway. Daylight found her still heart-broken and sobbing in the old woman's lap.



PART THIRD—THE GIN



CHAPTER I

ALICE WESTMORE

It is remarkable how small a part of our real life the world knows—how little our most intimate friends know of the secret influences which have proven to be climaxes, at the turning points of our existence.

There was no more beautiful woman in Alabama than Alice Westmore; and throughout that state, where the song birds seem to develop, naturally, along with the softness of the air, and the gleam of the sunshine, and the lullaby of the Gulf's soft breeze among the pine trees, there was no one, they say, who could sing as she sang.

And she seemed to have caught it from her native mocking-birds, so natural was it. Not when they sing in the daylight, when everything is bright and joyous and singing is so easy; but when they waken at midnight amid the arbor vitae trees, and under the sweet, sad influence of a winter moon, pour out their half awakened notes to the star-sprays which fall in mist to blend and sparkle around the soft neck of the night.

For like the star-sprays her notes were as clear; and through them ran a sadness as of a mist of moonlight. And just as moonbeams, when they mingle with the mist, make the melancholy of night, so the memory of a dead love ran through everything Alice Westmore sang.

And this made her singing divine.

Why should it be told? What right has a blacksmith to pry into a grand piano to find out wherein the exquisite harmony of the instrument lies? Who has the right to ask the artist how he blended the colors that crowned his picture with immortality, or the poet to explain his pain in the birth of a mood which moved the world?

Born in the mountains of North Alabama, she grew up there and developed this rare voice; and when her father sent her to Italy to complete her musical education, the depth and clearness of it captured even that song nation of the world.

The great of all countries were her friends and princes sought her favors. She sang at courts and in great cathedrals, and her genius and beauty were toasts with society.

"Still, Mademoiselle will never be a great singer, perfect as her voice is,"—said her singing master to her one day—a famous Italian teacher, "until Mademoiselle has suffered. She is now rich and beautiful and happy. Go home and suffer if you would be a great singer," he said, "for great songs come only with great suffering."

If this were true, Alice Westmore was now, indeed, a great singer; for now had she suffered. And it was the death of a life with her when love died. For there be some with whom love is a separate life, and when love dies all that is worth living dies with it.

From childhood she and Cousin Tom—Captain Thomas Travis he lived to be—had been sweethearts. He was the grandson of Colonel Jeremiah Travis of "The Gaffs," and Tom and Alice had grown up together. Their love was one of those earthly loves which comes now and then that we may not altogether lose our faith in heaven.

Both were of a romantic temperament with high ideals, and with keen and sensitive natures.

Their love was the poem of their lives.

And though a toast in society, and courted by the nobility of the old world, Alice Westmore remembered only a moon-lighted night when she told Cousin Tom good-bye. For though they had loved each other all their lives, they had never spoken of it before that night. To them it had been a thing too sacred to profane with ordinary words.

Thomas Travis had just graduated from West Point, and he was at home on vacation before being assigned to duty. To-night he had ridden John Paul Jones—the pick of his grandfather's stable of thoroughbreds—a present from the sturdy old horse-racing, fox-hunting gentleman to his favorite grandson for graduating first in a class of fifty-six.

How handsome he looked in his dark blue uniform! And there was the music of the crepe-myrtle in the air—the music of it, wet with the night dew—for there are flowers so delicate in their sweetness that they pass out of the realm of sight and smell, into the unheard world of rhythm. Their very existence is the poetry of perfume. And this music of the crepe-myrtle, pulsing through the shower-cooled leaves of that summer night, was accompanied by a mocking-bird from his nest in the tree.

Never did the memory of that night leave Alice Westmore. In after years it hurt her, as the dream of childhood's home with green fields about, and the old spring in the meadow, hurts the fever-stricken one dying far away from it all.

How long they sat on the rustic bench under the crepe-myrtle they did not know. At parting there was the light clasp of hands, and Cousin Tom drew her to him and put his lips reverently to hers. When he had ridden off there was a slender ring on her finger.

There was nothing in Italy that could make her forget that night, though often from her window she had looked out on Venice, moon-becalmed, while the nightingale sang from pomegranate trees in the hedgerows.

Where a woman's love is first given, that, thereafter, is her heart's sanctuary.

Alice Westmore landed at home again amid drum beats. War sweeps even sentiment from the world—sentiment that is stronger than common sense, and which moves the world.

On the retreat of the Southern army from Fort Donelson, Thomas Travis, now Captain of Artillery, followed, with Grant's army, to Pittsburgh Landing. And finding himself within a day's journey of his old home, he lost no time in slipping through the lines to see Alice, whom he had not seen since her return.

He went first to her, and the sight of his blue uniform threw Colonel Westmore into a rage.

"To march into our land in that thing and claim my daughter—" he shouted. "To join that John Brown gang of abolitionists who are trying to overrun our country! Your father was a Southern gentleman and the bosom friend of my youth, but I'll see you damned before you shall ever again come under my roof, unless you can use your pistols quicker than I can use mine."

"Oh, Tom," said Alice when they were alone—"how—how could you do it?"

"But it is my side," he said quietly. "I was born, reared, educated in the love of the Union. My grandfather himself taught it to me. He fought with Jackson at New Orleans. My father died for it in Mexico. I swore fidelity to it at West Point, and the Union gave me my military education on the faith of my oath. Farragut is a Tennessean—Thomas a Virginian—and there are hundreds of others, men who love the Union more than they do their State. Alice—Alice—I do not love you less because I am true to my oath—my flag."

"Your flag," said Alice hotly—"your flag that would overrun our country and kill our people? It can never be my flag!"

She had never been angry before in all her life, but now the hot blood of her Southern clime and ancestry surged in her cheeks. She arose with a dignity she had never before imagined, even, with Cousin Tom. "You will choose between us now," she said.

"Alice—surely you will not put me to that test. I will go—" he said, rising. "Some day, if I live, you can tell me to come back to you without sacrificing my conscience and my word of honor—my sacred oath—write me and—and—I will come."

And that is the way it ended—in tears for both.

Thomas Travis had always been his grandsire's favorite. His other grandson, Richard Travis, was away in Europe, where he had gone as soon as rumors of the war began to be heard.

That night the old man did not even speak to him. He could not. Alone in his room, he walked the floor all night in deep sorrow and thought.

He loved Thomas Travis as he did no other living being, and when morning came his great nature shook with contending emotions. It ended in the grandson receiving this note, a few minutes before he rode away:

"All my life I taught you to love the Union which I helped to make, with my blood in war and my brains in peace. I gave it my beloved boy—your father's life—in Mexico. We buried him in its flag. I sent you to West Point and made you swear to defend that flag with your life. How now can I ask you to repudiate your oath and turn your back on your rearing?

"Believing as I do in the right of the State first and the Union afterwards, I had hoped you might see it differently. But who, but God, controls the course of an honest mind?

"Go, my son—I shall never see you again. But I know you, my son, and I shall die knowing you did what you thought was right."

The young man wept when he read this—he was neither too old nor too hardened for tears—and when he rode away, from the ridge of the Mountain he looked down again—the last time, on all that had been his life's happiness.

It was an hour afterwards when the old General called in his overseer.

"Watts," he said, "in the accursed war which is about to wreck the South and which will eventually end in our going back into the Union as a subdued province and under the heel of our former slaves, there will be many changes. I, myself, will not live to see it. I have two grandsons, as you know, Tom and Richard. Richard is in Europe; he went there following Alice Westmore, and is going to stay, till this fight is over. Now, I have added a codicil to my will and I wish you to hear it."

He took up a lengthy document and read the last codicil:

"Since the above will was written and acknowledged, leaving The Gaffs to be equally divided between my two grandsons, Thomas and Richard Travis, my country has been precipitated into the horrors of Civil War. In view of this I hereby change my will as above and give and bequeath The Gaffs to that one of my grandsons who shall fight—it matters not to me on which side—so that he fights. For The Gaffs shall never go to a Dominecker. If both fight and survive the war, it shall be divided equally between them as above expressed. If one be killed it shall go to the survivor. If both be killed it shall be sold and the money appropriated among those of my slaves who have been faithful to me to the end, one-fifth being set aside for my faithful overseer, Hillard Watts."

In the panel of the wall he opened a small secret drawer, zinc-lined, and put the will in it.

"It shall remain there unchanged," he said, "and only you and I shall know where it is. If I die suddenly, let it remain until after the war, and then do as you think best."



CHAPTER II

THE REAL HEROES

The real heroes of the war have not been decorated yet. They have not even been pensioned, for many of them lie in forgotten graves, and those who do not are not the kind to clamor for honors or emoluments.

On the last Great Day, what a strange awakening for decorations there will be, if such be in store for the just and the brave: Private soldiers, blue and gray, arising from neglected graves with tattered clothes and unmarked brows. Scouts who rode, with stolid faces set, into Death's grim door and died knowing they went out unremembered. Spies, hung like common thieves at the end of a rope—hung, though the bravest of the brave.

Privates, freezing, starving, wounded, dying,—unloved, unsoothed, unpitied—giving their life with a last smile in the joy of martyrdom. Women, North, whose silent tears for husbands who never came back and sons who died of shell and fever, make a tiara around the head of our reunited country. Women, South, glorious Rachels, weeping for children who are not and with brave hearts working amid desolate homes, the star and inspiration of a rebuilded land. Slaves, faithfully guarding and working while their masters went to the front, filling the granaries that the war might go on—faithful to their trust though its success meant their slavery—faithful and true.

O Southland of mine, be gentle, be just to these simple people, for they also were faithful.

Among the heroic things the four years of the American Civil War brought out, the story of Captain Thomas Travis deserves to rank with the greatest of them.

The love of Thomas Travis for the preacher-overseer was the result of a life of devotion on the part of the old man for the boy he had reared. Orphaned as he was early in life, Thomas Travis looked up to the overseer of his grandfather's plantation as a model of all that was great and good.

Tom and Alice,—on the neighboring plantations—ran wild over the place and rode their ponies always on the track of the overseer. He taught them to ride, to trap the rabbit, to boat on the beautiful river. He knew the birds and the trees and all the wild things of Nature, and Tom and Alice were his children.

As they grew up before him, it became the dream of the preacher-overseer to see his two pets married. Imagine his sorrow when the war fell like a thunderbolt out of a harvest sky and, among the thousand of other wrecked dreams, went the dream of the overseer.

The rest is soon told: After the battle of Shiloh, Hillard Watts, Chief of Johnston's scouts, was captured and sent to Camp Chase. Scarcely had he arrived before orders came that twelve prisoners should be shot, by lot, in retaliation for the same number of Federal prisoners which had been executed, it was said, unjustly, by Confederates. The overseer drew one of the black balls. Then happened one of those acts of heroism which now and then occur, perhaps, to redeem war of the base and bloody.

On the morning before the execution, at daylight, Thomas Travis arrived and made arrangements to save his friend at the risk of his own life and reputation. It was a desperate chance and he acted quickly. For Hillard Watts went out a free man dressed in the blue uniform of the Captain of Artillery.

The interposition of the great-hearted Lincoln alone saved the young officer from being shot.

The yellow military order bearing the words of the martyred President is preserved to-day in the library of The Gaffs:

"I present this young man as a Christmas gift to my old friend, his grandsire, Colonel Jeremiah Travis. The man who could fight his guns as he did at Shiloh, and could offer to die for a friend, is good enough to receive pardon, for anything he may have done or may do, from

"A. LINCOLN."

Afterwards came Franklin and the news that Captain Tom had been killed.



CHAPTER III

FRANKLIN

But General Jeremiah Travis could not keep out of the war; for toward the last, when Hood's army marched into Tennessee the Confederacy called for everything—even old age.

And so there rode out of the gates of The Gaffs a white-haired old man, who sat his superb horse well. He was followed by a negro on a mule.

They were General Jeremiah Travis and his body-servant, Bisco.

"I have come to fight for my state," said General Travis to the Confederate General.

"An' I am gwine to take keer of old marster suh," said Bisco as he stuck to his saddle girth.

It was the middle of the afternoon of the last day of November—and also the last day of many a gallant life—when Hood's tired army marched over the brow of the high ridge of hills that looked down on the town of Franklin, in front of which, from railroad to river, behind a long semicircular breastwork lay Schofield's determined army. It was a beautiful view, and as plain as looking down from the gallery into the pit of an amphitheatre.

Just below them lay the little town in a valley, admirably situated for defense, surrounded as it was on three sides by the bend of a small river, the further banks of which were of solid rocks rising above the town. On the highest of these bluffs—Roper's Knob—across and behind the town, directly overlooking it and grimly facing Hood's army two miles away, was a federal fort capped with mighty guns, ready to hurl their shells over the town at the gray lines beyond. From the high ridge where Hood's army stood the ground gradually rolled to the river. A railroad ran through a valley in the ridge to the right of the Confederates, spun along on the banks of the river past the town and crossed it in the heart of the bend to the left of the federal fort. From that railroad on the Confederate right, in front and clear around the town, past an old gin house which stood out clear and distinct in the November sunlight—on past the Carter House, to the extreme left bend of the river on the left—in short, from river to river again and entirely inclosing the town and facing the enemy—ran the newly made and hastily thrown-up breastworks of the federal army, the men rested and ready for battle.