"Will the President be there, Captain?" asked Mrs. Cameron.

"Yes, Madam, with General and Mrs. Grant—it's really a great public function in celebration of peace and victory. To-day the flag was raised over Fort Sumter, the anniversary of its surrender four years ago. The city will be illuminated."

"Then, of course, you can go. I will sit with Ben. I wish you to see the President."

At seven o'clock Phil called for Margaret. They walked to the Capitol hill and down Pennsylvania Avenue.

The city was in a ferment. Vast crowds thronged the streets. In front of the hotel where General Grant stopped the throng was so dense the streets were completely blocked. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, at every turn, in squads, in companies, in regimental crowds, shouting cries of victory.

The display of lights was dazzling in its splendour. Every building in every street, in every nook and corner of the city, was lighted from attic to cellar. The public buildings and churches vied with each other in the magnificence of their decorations and splendour of illuminations.

They turned a corner, and suddenly the Capitol on the throne of its imperial hill loomed a grand constellation in the heavens! Another look, and it seemed a huge bonfire against the background of the dark skies. Every window in its labyrinths of marble, from the massive base to its crowning statue of Freedom, gleamed and flashed with light—more than ten thousand jets poured their rays through its windows, besides the innumerable lights that circled the mighty dome within and without.

Margaret stopped, and Phil felt her soft hand grip his arm with sudden emotion.

"Isn't it sublime!" she whispered.

"Glorious!" he echoed.

But he was thinking of the pressure of her hand on his arm and the subtle tones of her voice. Somehow he felt that the light came from her eyes. He forgot the Capitol and the surging crowds before the sweeter creative wonder silently growing in his soul.

"And yet," she faltered, "when I think of what all this means for our people at home—their sorrow and poverty and ruin—you know it makes me faint."

Phil's hand timidly sought the soft one resting on his arm and touched it reverently.

"Believe me, Miss Margaret, it will be all for the best in the end. The South will yet rise to a nobler life than she has ever lived in the past. This is her victory as well as ours."

"I wish I could think so," she answered.

They passed the City Hall and saw across its front, in giant letters of fire thirty feet deep, the words:

"UNION, SHERMAN, AND GRANT"

On Pennsylvania Avenue the hotels and stores had hung every window, awning, cornice, and swaying tree-top with lanterns. The grand avenue was bridged by tri-coloured balloons floating and shimmering ghostlike far up in the dark sky. Above these, in the blacker zone toward the stars, the heavens were flashing sheets of chameleon flames from bursting rockets.

Margaret had never dreamed such a spectacle. She walked in awed silence, now and then suppressing a sob for the memory of those she had loved and lost. A moment of bitterness would cloud her heart, and then with the sense of Phil's nearness, his generous nature, the beauty and goodness of his sister, and all they owed to her for Ben's life, the cloud would pass.

At every public building, and in front of every great hotel, bands were playing. The wild war strains, floating skyward, seemed part of the changing scheme of light. The odour of burnt powder and smouldering rockets filled the warm spring air.

The deep bay of the great fort guns now began to echo from every hilltop commanding the city, while a thousand smaller guns barked and growled from every square and park and crossing.

Jay Cooke & Co's. banking-house had stretched across its front, in enormous blazing letters, the words:

"THE BUSY B'S—BALLS, BALLOTS, AND BONDS"

Every telegraph and newspaper office was a roaring whirlpool of excitement, for the same scenes were being enacted in every centre of the North. The whole city was now a fairy dream, its dirt and sin, shame and crime, all wrapped in glorious light.

But above all other impressions was the contagion of the thunder shouts of hosts of men surging through the streets—the human roar with its animal and spiritual magnetism, wild, resistless, unlike any other force in the universe!

Margaret's hand again and again unconsciously tightened its hold on Phil's arm, and he felt that the whole celebration had been gotten up for his benefit.

They passed through a little park on their way to Ford's Theatre on 10th Street, and the eye of the Southern girl was quick to note the budding flowers and full-blown lilacs.

"See what an early spring!" she cried. "I know the flowers at home are gorgeous now."

"I shall hope to see you among them some day, when all the clouds have lifted," he said.

She smiled and replied with simple earnestness:

"A warm welcome will await your coming."

And Phil resolved to lose no time in testing it.

They turned into 10th Street, and in the middle of the block stood the plain three-story brick structure of Ford's Theatre, an enormous crowd surging about its five doorways and spreading out on the sidewalk and half across the driveway.

"Is that the theatre?" asked Margaret.

"Yes."

"Why, it looks like a church without a steeple."

"Exactly what it really is, Miss Margaret. It was a Baptist church. They turned it into a playhouse, by remodelling its gallery into a dress-circle and balcony and adding another gallery above. My grandmother Stoneman is a devoted Baptist, and was an attendant at this church. My father never goes to church, but he used to go here occasionally to please her. Elsie and I frequently came."

Phil pushed his way rapidly through the crowd with a peculiar sense of pleasure in making a way for Margaret and in defending her from the jostling throng.

They found Elsie at the door, stamping her foot with impatience.

"Well, I must say, Phil, this is prompt for a soldier who had positive orders," she cried. "I've been here an hour."

"Nonsense, Sis, I'm ahead of time," he protested.

Elsie held up her watch.

"It's a quarter past eight. Every seat is filled, and they've stopped selling standing-room. I hope you have good seats."

"The best in the house to-night, the first row in the balcony dress-circle, opposite the President's box. We can see everything on the stage, in the box, and every nook and corner of the house."

"Then I'll forgive you for keeping me waiting."

They ascended the stairs, pushed through the throng standing, and at last reached the seats.

What a crowd! The building was a mass of throbbing humanity, and, over all, the hum of the thrilling wonder of peace and victory!

The women in magnificent costumes, officers in uniforms flashing with gold, the show of wealth and power, the perfume of flowers and the music of violin and flutes gave Margaret the impression of a dream, so sharp was the contrast with her own life and people in the South.

The interior of the house was a billow of red, white, and blue. The President's box was wrapped in two enormous silk flags with gold-fringed edges gracefully draped and hanging in festoons.

Withers, the leader of the orchestra, was in high feather. He raised his baton with quick, inspired movement. It was for him a personal triumph, too. He had composed the music of a song for the occasion. It was dedicated to the President, and the programme announced that it would be rendered during the evening between the acts by a famous quartet, assisted by the whole company in chorus. The National flag would be draped about each singer, worn as the togas of ancient Greece and Rome.

It was already known by the crowd that General and Mrs. Grant had left the city for the North and could not be present, but every eye was fixed on the door through which the President and Mrs. Lincoln would enter. It was the hour of his supreme triumph.



What a romance his life! The thought of it thrilled the crowd as they waited. A few years ago this tall, sad-faced man had floated down the Sangamon River into a rough Illinois town, ragged, penniless, friendless, alone, begging for work. Four years before he had entered Washington as President of the United States—but he came under cover of the night with a handful of personal friends, amid universal contempt for his ability and the loud expressed conviction of his failure from within and without his party. He faced a divided Nation and the most awful civil convulsion in history. Through it all he had led the Nation in safety, growing each day in power and fame, until to-night, amid the victorious shouts of millions of a Union fixed in eternal granite, he stood forth the idol of the people, the first great American, the foremost man of the world.

There was a stir at the door, and the tall figure suddenly loomed in view of the crowd. With one impulse they leaped to their feet, and shout after shout shook the building. The orchestra was playing "Hail to the Chief!" but nobody heard it. They saw the Chief! They were crying their own welcome in music that came from the rhythmic beat of human hearts.

As the President walked along the aisle with Mrs. Lincoln, accompanied by Senator Harris' daughter and Major Rathbone, cheer after cheer burst from the crowd. He turned, his face beaming with pleasure, and bowed as he passed.

The answer of the crowd shook the building to its foundations, and the President paused. His dark face flashed with emotion as he looked over the sea of cheering humanity. It was a moment of supreme exaltation. The people had grown to know and love and trust him, and it was sweet. His face, lit with the responsive fires of emotion, was transfigured. The soul seemed to separate itself from its dreamy, rugged dwelling-place and flash its inspiration from the spirit world.

As around this man's personality had gathered the agony and horror of war, so now about his head glowed and gleamed in imagination the splendours of victory.

Margaret impulsively put her hand on Phil's arm:

"Why, how Southern he looks! How tall and dark and typical his whole figure!"

"Yes, and his traits of character even more typical," said Phil. "On the surface, easy friendly ways and the tenderness of a woman—beneath, an iron will and lion heart. I like him. And what always amazes me is his universality. A Southerner finds in him the South, the Western man the West, even Charles Sumner, from Boston, almost loves him. You know I think he is the first great all-round American who ever lived in the White House."

The President's party had now entered the box, and as Mr. Lincoln took the armchair nearest the audience, in full view of every eye in the house, again the cheers rent the air. In vain Withers' baton flew, and the orchestra did its best. The music was drowned as in the roar of the sea. Again he rose and bowed and smiled, his face radiant with pleasure. The soul beneath those deep-cut lines had long pined for the sunlight. His love of the theatre and the humorous story were the protest of his heart against pain and tragedy. He stood there bowing to the people, the grandest, gentlest figure of the fiercest war of human history—a man who was always doing merciful things stealthily as others do crimes. Little sunlight had come into his life, yet to-night he felt that the sun of a new day in his history and the history of the people was already tingeing the horizon with glory.

Back of those smiles what a story! Many a night he had paced back and forth in the telegraph office of the War Department, read its awful news of defeat, and alone sat down and cried over the list of the dead. Many a black hour his soul had seen when the honours of earth were forgotten and his great heart throbbed on his sleeve. His character had grown so evenly and silently with the burdens he had borne, working mighty deeds with such little friction, he could not know, nor could the crowd to whom he bowed, how deep into the core of the people's life the love of him had grown.

As he looked again over the surging crowd his tall figure seemed to straighten, erect and buoyant, with the new dignity of conscious triumphant leadership. He knew that he had come unto his own at last, and his brain was teeming with dreams of mercy and healing.

The President resumed his seat, the tumult died away, and the play began amid a low hum of whispered comment directed at the flag-draped box. The actors struggled in vain to hold the attention of the audience, until finally Hawk, the actor playing Dundreary, determined to catch their ear, paused and said:

"Now, that reminds me of a little story, as Mr. Lincoln says——"

Instantly the crowd burst into a storm of applause, the President laughed, leaned over and spoke to his wife, and the electric connection was made between the stage, the box, and the people.

After this the play ran its smooth course, and the audience settled into its accustomed humour of sympathetic attention.

In spite of the novelty of this, her first view of a theatre, the President fascinated Margaret. She watched the changing lights and shadows of his sensitive face with untiring interest, and the wonder of his life grew upon her imagination. This man who was the idol of the North and yet to her so purely Southern, who had come out of the West and yet was greater than the West or the North, and yet always supremely human—this man who sprang to his feet from the chair of State and bowed to a sorrowing woman with the deference of a knight, every man's friend, good-natured, sensible, masterful and clear in intellect, strong, yet modest, kind and gentle—yes, he was more interesting than all the drama and romance of the stage!

He held her imagination in a spell. Elsie, divining her abstraction, looked toward the President's box and saw approaching it along the balcony aisle the figure of John Wilkes Booth.

"Look," she cried, touching Margaret's arm. "There's John Wilkes Booth, the actor! Isn't he handsome? They say he's in love with my chum, a senator's daughter whose father hates Mr. Lincoln with perfect fury."

"He is handsome," Margaret answered. "But I'd be afraid of him, with that raven hair and eyes shining like something wild."

"They say he is wild and dissipated, yet half the silly girls in town are in love with him. He's as vain as a peacock."

Booth, accustomed to free access to the theatre, paused near the entrance to the box and looked deliberately over the great crowd, his magnetic face flushed with deep emotion, while his fiery inspiring eyes glittered with excitement.

Dressed in a suit of black broadcloth of faultless fit, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet he was physically without blemish. A figure of perfect symmetry and proportion, his dark eyes flashing, his marble forehead crowned with curling black hair, agility and grace stamped on every line of his being—beyond a doubt he was the handsomest man in America. A flutter of feminine excitement rippled the surface of the crowd in the balcony as his well-known figure caught the wandering eyes of the women.

He turned and entered the door leading to the President's box, and Margaret once more gave her attention to the stage.

Hawk, as Dundreary, was speaking his lines and looking directly at the President instead of at the audience:

"Society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old woman, you darned old sockdologing man trap!"

Margaret winced at the coarse words, but the galleries burst into shouts of laughter that lingered in ripples and murmurs and the shuffling of feet.

The muffled crack of a pistol in the President's box hushed the laughter for an instant.

No one realized what had happened, and when the assassin suddenly leaped from the box, with a blood-marked knife flashing in his right hand, caught his foot in the flags and fell to his knees on the stage, many thought it a part of the programme, and a boy, leaning over the gallery rail, giggled. When Booth turned his face of statuesque beauty lit by eyes flashing with insane desperation and cried, "Sic semper tyrannis," they were only confirmed in this impression.

A sudden, piercing scream from Mrs. Lincoln, quivering, soul harrowing! Leaning far out of the box, from ashen cheeks and lips leaped the piteous cry of appeal, her hand pointing to the retreating figure:

"The President is shot! He has killed the President!"

Every heart stood still for one awful moment. The brain refused to record the message—and then the storm burst!

A wild roar of helpless fury and despair! Men hurled themselves over the footlights in vain pursuit of the assassin. Already the clatter of his horse's feet could be heard in the distance. A surgeon threw himself against the door of the box, but it had been barred within by the cunning hand. Another leaped on the stage, and the people lifted him up in their arms and over the fatal railing.

Women began to faint, and strong men trampled down the weak in mad rushes from side to side.

The stage in a moment was a seething mass of crazed men, among them the actors and actresses in costumes and painted faces, their mortal terror shining through the rouge. They passed water up to the box, and some tried to climb up and enter it.

The two hundred soldiers of the President's guard suddenly burst in, and, amid screams and groans of the weak and injured, stormed the house with fixed bayonets, cursing, yelling, and shouting at the top of their voices:

"Clear out! Clear out! You sons of hell!"

One of them suddenly bore down with fixed bayonet toward Phil.

Margaret shrank in terror close to his side and tremblingly held his arm.

Elsie sprang forward, her face aflame, her eyes flashing fire, her little figure tense, erect, and quivering with rage:

"How dare you, idiot, brute!"

The soldier, brought to his senses, saw Phil in full captain's uniform before him, and suddenly drew himself up, saluting. Phil ordered him to guard Margaret and Elsie for a moment, drew his sword, leaped between the crazed soldiers and their victims and stopped their insane rush.

Within the box the great head lay in the surgeon's arms, the blood slowly dripping down, and the tiny death bubbles forming on the kindly lips. They carried him tenderly out, and another group bore after him the unconscious wife. The people tore the seats from their fastenings and heaped them in piles to make way for the precious burdens.

As Phil pressed forward with Margaret and Elsie through the open door came the roar of the mob without, shouting its cries:

"The President is shot!"

"Seward is murdered!"

"Where is Grant?"

"Where is Stanton?"

"To arms! To arms!"

The peal of signal guns could now be heard, the roll of drums and the hurried tramp of soldiers' feet. They marched none too soon. The mob had attacked the stockade holding ten thousand unarmed Confederate prisoners.

At the corner of the block in which the theatre stood they seized a man who looked like a Southerner and hung him to the lamp-post. Two heroic policemen fought their way to his side and rescued him.

If the temper of the people during the war had been convulsive, now it was insane—with one mad impulse and one thought—vengeance! Horror, anger, terror, uncertainty, each passion fanned the one animal instinct into fury.

Through this awful night, with the lights still gleaming as if to mock the celebration of victory, the crowds swayed in impotent rage through the streets, while the telegraph bore on the wings of lightning the awe-inspiring news. Men caught it from the wires, and stood in silent groups weeping, and their wrath against the fallen South began to rise as the moaning of the sea under a coming storm.

At dawn black clouds hung threatening on the eastern horizon. As the sun rose, tingeing them for a moment with scarlet and purple glory, Abraham Lincoln breathed his last.

Even grim Stanton, the iron-hearted, stood by his bedside and through blinding tears exclaimed:

"Now he belongs to the ages!"

The deed was done. The wheel of things had moved. Vice-President Johnson took the oath of office, and men hailed him Chief; but the seat of Empire had moved from the White House to a little dark house on the Capitol hill, where dwelt an old club-footed man, alone, attended by a strange brown woman of sinister animal beauty and the restless eyes of a leopardess.



CHAPTER VII

THE FRENZY OF A NATION

Phil hurried through the excited crowds with Margaret and Elsie, left them at the hospital door, and ran to the War Department to report for duty. Already the tramp of regiments echoed down every great avenue.

Even as he ran, his heart beat with a strange new stroke when he recalled the look of appeal in Margaret's dark eyes as she nestled close to his side and clung to his arm for protection. He remembered with a smile the almost resistless impulse of the moment to slip his arm around her and assure her of safety. If he had only dared!

Elsie begged Mrs. Cameron and Margaret to go home with her until the city was quiet.

"No," said the mother. "I am not afraid. Death has no terrors for me any longer. We will not leave Ben a moment now, day or night. My soul is sick with dread for what this awful tragedy will mean for the South! I can't think of my own safety. Can any one undo this pardon now?" she asked anxiously.

"I am sure they cannot. The name on that paper should be mightier dead than living."

"Ah, but will it be? Do you know Mr. Johnson? Can he control Stanton? He seemed to be more powerful than the President himself. What will that man do now with those who fall into his hands."

"He can do nothing with your son, rest assured."

"I wish I knew it," said the mother wistfully.

* * * * *

A few moments after the President died on Saturday morning, the rain began to pour in torrents. The flags that flew from a thousand gilt-tipped peaks in celebration of victory drooped to half-mast and hung weeping around their staffs. The litter of burnt fireworks, limp and crumbling, strewed the streets, and the tri-coloured lanterns and balloons, hanging pathetically from their wires, began to fall to pieces.

Never in all the history of man had such a conjunction of events befallen a nation. From the heights of heaven's rejoicing to be suddenly hurled to the depths of hell in piteous helpless grief! Noon to midnight without a moment between. A pall of voiceless horror spread its shadows over the land. Nothing short of an earthquake or the sound of the archangel's trumpet could have produced the sense of helpless consternation, the black and speechless despair. The people read their papers in tears. The morning meal was untouched. By no other single feat could death have carried such peculiar horror to every home. Around this giant figure the heartstrings of the people had been unconsciously knit. Even his political enemies had come to love him.

Above all, in just this moment he was the incarnation of the Triumphant Union on the altar of whose life every house had laid the offering of its first-born. The tragedy was stupefying—it was unthinkable—it was the mockery of Fate!

Men walked the streets of the cities, dazed with the sense of blind grief. Every note of music and rejoicing became a dirge. All business ceased. Every wheel in every mill stopped. The roar of the great city was hushed, and Greed for a moment forgot his cunning.

The army only moved with swifter spring, tightening its mighty grip on the throat of the bleeding prostrate South.

As the day wore on its gloomy hours, and men began to find speech, they spoke to each other at first in low tones of Fate, of Life, of Death, of Immortality, of God—and then as grief found words the measureless rage of baffled strength grew slowly to madness.

On every breeze from the North came the deep-muttered curses.

Easter Sunday dawned after the storm, clear and beautiful in a flood of glorious sunshine. The churches were thronged as never in their history. All had been decorated for the double celebration of Easter and the triumph of the Union. The preachers had prepared sermons pitched in the highest anthem key of victory—victory over death and the grave of Calvary, and victory for the Nation opening a future of boundless glory. The churches were labyrinths of flowers, and around every pulpit and from every Gothic arch hung the red, white, and blue flags of the Republic.

And now, as if to mock this gorgeous pageant, Death had in the night flung a black mantle over every flag and wound a strangling web of crape round every Easter flower.

When the preachers faced the silent crowds before them, looking into the faces of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and lovers whose dear ones had been slain in battle or died in prison pens, the tide of grief and rage rose and swept them from their feet! The Easter sermon was laid aside. Fifty thousand Christian ministers, stunned and crazed by insane passion, standing before the altars of God, hurled into the broken hearts before them the wildest cries of vengeance—cries incoherent, chaotic, unreasoning, blind in their awful fury!

The pulpits of New York and Brooklyn led in the madness.

Next morning old Stoneman read his paper with a cold smile playing about his big stern mouth, while his furrowed brow flushed with triumph, as again and again he exclaimed: "At last! At last!"

Even Beecher, who had just spoken his generous words at Fort Sumter, declared:

"Never while time lasts, while heaven lasts, while hell rocks and groans, will it be forgotten that Slavery, by its minions, slew him, and slaying him made manifest its whole nature. A man cannot be bred in its tainted air. I shall find saints in hell sooner than I shall find true manhood under its accursed influences. The breeding-ground of such monsters must be utterly and forever destroyed."

Dr. Stephen Tyng said:

"The leaders of this rebellion deserve no pity from any human being. Now let them go. Some other land must be their home. Their property is justly forfeited to the Nation they have attempted to destroy!"

In big black-faced type stood Dr. Charles S. Robinson's bitter words:

"This is the earliest reply which chivalry makes to our forbearance. Talk to me no more of the same race, of the same blood. He is no brother of mine and of no race of mine who crowns the barbarism of treason with the murder of an unarmed husband in the sight of his wife. On the villains who led this rebellion let justice fall swift and relentless. Death to every traitor of the South! Pursue them one by one! Let every door be closed upon them and judgment follow swift and implacable as death!"

Dr. Theodore Cuyler exclaimed:

"This is no time to talk of leniency and conciliation! I say before God, make no terms with rebellion short of extinction. Booth wielding the assassin's weapon is but the embodiment of the bowie-knife barbarism of a slaveholding oligarchy."

Dr. J. P. Thompson said:

"Blot every Southern State from the map. Strip every rebel of property and citizenship, and send them into exile beggared and infamous outcasts."

Bishop Littlejohn, in his impassioned appeal, declared:

"The deed is worthy of the Southern cause which was conceived in sin, brought forth in iniquity, and consummated in crime. This murderous hand is the same hand which lashed the slave's bared back, struck down New England's senator for daring to speak, lifted the torch of rebellion, slaughtered in cold blood its thousands, and starved our helpless prisoners. Its end is not martyrdom, but dishonour."

Bishop Simpson said:

"Let every man who was a member of Congress and aided this rebellion be brought to speedy punishment. Let every officer educated at public expense, who turned his sword against his country, be doomed to a traitor's death!"

With the last note of this wild music lingering in the old Commoner's soul, he sat as if dreaming, laughed cynically, turned to the brown woman and said:

"My speeches have not been lost after all. Prepare dinner for six. My cabinet will meet here to-night."

While the press was reechoing these sermons, gathering strength as they were caught and repeated in every town, village, and hamlet in the North, the funeral procession started westward. It passed in grandeur through the great cities on its journey of one thousand six hundred miles to the tomb. By day, by night, by dawn, by sunlight, by twilight, and lit by solemn torches, millions of silent men and women looked on his dead face. Around the person of this tall, lonely man, rugged, yet full of sombre dignity and spiritual beauty, the thoughts, hopes, dreams, and ideals of the people had gathered in four years of agony and death, until they had come to feel their own hearts beat in his breast and their own life throb in his life. The assassin's bullet had crashed into their own brains, and torn their souls and bodies asunder.

The masses were swept from their moorings, and reason destroyed. All historic perspective was lost. Our first assassination, there was no precedent for comparison. It had been over two hundred years in the world's history since the last murder of a great ruler, when William of Orange fell.

On the day set for the public funeral twenty million people bowed at the same hour.

When the procession reached New York the streets were lined with a million people. Not a sound could be heard save the tramp of soldiers' feet and the muffled cry of the dirge. Though on every foot of earth stood a human being, the silence of the desert and of death! The Nation's living heroes rode in that procession, and passed without a sign from the people.

Four years ago he drove down Broadway as President-elect, unnoticed and with soldiers in disguise attending him lest the mob should stone him.

To-day, at the mention of his name in the churches, the preachers' voices in prayer wavered and broke into silence while strong men among the crowd burst into sobs. Flags flew at half-mast from their steeples, and their bells tolled in grief.

Every house that flew but yesterday its banner of victory was shrouded in mourning. The flags and pennants of a thousand ships in the harbour drooped at half-mast, and from every staff in the city streamed across the sky the black mists of crape like strange meteors in the troubled heavens.

For three days every theatre, school, court, bank, shop, and mill was closed.

And with muttered curses men looked Southward.

Across Broadway the cortege passed under a huge transparency on which appeared the words:

"A Nation bowed in grief Will rise in might to exterminate The leaders of this accursed Rebellion."

Farther along swung the black-draped banner:

"Justice to Traitors is Mercy to the People."

Another flapped its grim message:

"The Barbarism of Slavery. Can Barbarism go Further?"

Across the Ninth Regiment Armoury, in gigantic letters, were the words:

"Time for Weeping But Vengeance is not Sleeping!"

When the procession reached Buffalo, the house of Millard Fillmore was mobbed because the ex-President, stricken on a bed of illness, had neglected to drape his house in mourning. The procession passed to Springfield through miles of bowed heads dumb with grief. The plough stopped in the furrow, the smith dropped his hammer, the carpenter his plane, the merchant closed his door, the clink of coin ceased, and over all hung brooding silence with low-muttered curses, fierce and incoherent.

No man who walked the earth ever passed to his tomb through such a storm of human tears. The pageants of Alexander, Caesar, and Wellington were tinsel to this. Nor did the spirit of Napoleon, the Corsican Lieutenant of Artillery who once presided over a congress of kings whom he had conquered, look down on its like even in France.

And now that its pomp was done and its memory but bitterness and ashes, but one man knew exactly what he wanted and what he meant to do. Others were stunned by the blow. But the cold eyes of the Great Commoner, leader of leaders, sparkled, and his grim lips smiled. From him not a word of praise or fawning sorrow for the dead. Whatever he might be, he was not a liar: when he hated, he hated.

The drooping flags, the city's black shrouds, processions, torches, silent seas of faces and bared heads, the dirges and the bells, the dim-lit churches, wailing organs, fierce invectives from the altar, and the perfume of flowers piled in heaps by silent hearts—to all these was he heir.

And more—the fierce unwritten, unspoken, and unspeakable horrors of the war itself, its passions, its cruelties, its hideous crimes and sufferings, the wailing of its women, the graves of its men—all these now were his.

The new President bowed to the storm. In one breath he promised to fulfil the plans of Lincoln. In the next he, too, breathed threats of vengeance.

The edict went forth for the arrest of General Lee.

Would Grant, the Commanding General of the Army, dare protest? There were those who said that if Lee were arrested and Grant's plighted word at Appomattox smirched, the silent soldier would not only protest, but draw his sword, if need be, to defend his honour and the honour of the Nation. Yet—would he dare? It remained to be seen.

The jails were now packed with Southern men, taken unarmed from their homes. The old Capitol Prison was full, and every cell of every grated building in the city, and they were filling the rooms of the Capitol itself.

Margaret, hurrying from the market in the early morning with her flowers, was startled to find her mother bowed in anguish over a paragraph in the morning paper.

She rose and handed it to the daughter, who read:

"Dr. Richard Cameron, of South Carolina, arrived in Washington and was placed in jail last night, charged with complicity in the murder of President Lincoln. It was discovered that Jeff Davis spent the night at his home in Piedmont, under the pretence of needing medical attention. Beyond all doubt, Booth, the assassin, merely acted under orders from the Arch Traitor. May the gallows have a rich and early harvest!"

Margaret tremblingly wound her arms around her mother's neck. No words broke the pitiful silence—only blinding tears and broken sobs.

————————————————————————————————————-

Book II—The Revolution



CHAPTER I

THE FIRST LADY OF THE LAND

The little house on the Capitol hill now became the centre of fevered activity. This house, selected by its grim master to become the executive mansion of the Nation, was perhaps the most modest structure ever chosen for such high uses.

It stood, a small, two-story brick building, in an unpretentious street. Seven windows opened on the front with black solid-panelled shutters. The front parlour was scantily furnished. A huge mirror covered one wall, and on the other hung a life-size oil portrait of Stoneman, and between the windows were a portrait of Washington Irving and a picture of a nun. Among his many charities he had always given liberally to an orphanage conducted by a Roman Catholic sisterhood.

The back parlour, whose single window looked out on a small garden, he had fitted up as a library, with leather-upholstered furniture, a large desk and table, and scattered on the mantel and about its walls were the photographs of his personal friends and a few costly prints. This room he used as his executive office, and no person was allowed to enter it without first stating his business or presenting a petition to the tawny brown woman with restless eyes who sat in state in the front parlour and received his visitors. The books in their cases gave evidence of little use for many years, although their character indicated the tastes of a man of culture. His Pliny, Caesar, Cicero, Tacitus, Sophocles, and Homer had evidently been read by a man who knew their beauties and loved them for their own sake.

This house was now the Mecca of the party in power and the storm-centre of the forces destined to shape the Nation's life. Senators, representatives, politicians of low and high degree, artists, correspondents, foreign ministers, and cabinet officers hurried to acknowledge their fealty to the uncrowned king, and hail the strange brown woman who held the keys of his house as the first lady of the land.

When Charles Sumner called, a curious thing happened. By a code agreed on between them, Lydia Brown touched an electric signal which informed the old Commoner of his appearance. Stoneman hobbled to the folding-doors and watched through the slight opening the manner in which the icy senator greeted the negress whom he was compelled to meet thus as his social equal, though she was always particular to pose as the superior of all who bowed the knee to the old man whose house she kept.

Sumner at this time was supposed to be the most powerful man in Congress. It was a harmless fiction which pleased him, and at which Stoneman loved to laugh.

The senator from Massachusetts had just made a speech in Boston expounding the "Equality of Man," yet he could not endure personal contact with a negro. He would go secretly miles out of the way to avoid it.

Stoneman watched him slowly and daintily approach this negress and touch her jewelled hand gingerly with the tips of his classic fingers as if she were a toad. Convulsed, he scrambled back to his desk and hugged himself while he listened to the flow of Lydia's condescending patronage in the next room.

"This world's too good a thing to lose!" he chuckled. "I think I'll live always."

When Sumner left, the hour for dinner had arrived, and by special invitation two men dined with him.

On his right sat an army officer who had been dismissed from the service, a victim of the mania for gambling. His ruddy face, iron-gray hair, and jovial mien indicated that he enjoyed life in spite of troubles.

There were no clubs in Washington at this time except the regular gambling-houses, of which there were more than one hundred in full blast.

Stoneman was himself a gambler, and spent a part of almost every night at Hall & Pemberton's Faro Palace on Pennsylvania Avenue, a place noted for its famous restaurant. It was here that he met Colonel Howle and learned to like him. He was a man of talent, cool and audacious, and a liar of such singular fluency that he quite captivated the old Commoner's imagination.

"Upon my soul, Howle," he declared soon after they met, "you made the mistake of your life going into the army. You're a born politician. You're what I call a natural liar, just as a horse is a pacer, a dog a setter. You lie without effort, with an ease and grace that excels all art. Had you gone into politics, you could easily have been Secretary of State, to say nothing of the vice-presidency. I would say President but for the fact that men of the highest genius never attain it."

From that moment Colonel Howle had become his charmed henchman. Stoneman owned this man body and soul, not merely because he had befriended him when he was in trouble and friendless, but because the colonel recognized the power of the leader's daring spirit and revolutionary genius.

On his left sat a negro of perhaps forty years, a man of charming features for a mulatto, who had evidently inherited the full physical characteristics of the Aryan race, while his dark yellowish eyes beneath his heavy brows glowed with the brightness of the African jungle. It was impossible to look at his superb face, with its large, finely chiselled lips and massive nose, his big neck and broad shoulders, and watch his eyes gleam beneath the projecting forehead, without seeing pictures of the primeval forest. "The head of a Caesar and the eyes of the jungle" was the phrase coined by an artist who painted his portrait.

His hair was black and glossy and stood in dishevelled profusion on his head between a kink and a curl. He was an orator of great power, and stirred a negro audience as by magic.

Lydia Brown had called Stoneman's attention to this man, Silas Lynch, and induced the statesman to send him to college. He had graduated with credit and had entered the Methodist ministry. In his preaching to the freedmen he had already become a marked man. No house could hold his audiences.

As he stepped briskly into the dining-room and passed the brown woman, a close observer might have seen him suddenly press her hand and caught her sly answering smile, but the old man waiting at the head of the table saw nothing.

The woman took her seat opposite Stoneman and presided over this curious group with the easy assurance of conscious power. Whatever her real position, she knew how to play the role she had chosen to assume.

No more curious or sinister figure ever cast a shadow across the history of a great nation than did this mulatto woman in the most corrupt hour of American life. The grim old man who looked into her sleek tawny face and followed her catlike eyes was steadily gripping the Nation by the throat. Did he aim to make this woman the arbiter of its social life, and her ethics the limit of its moral laws?

Even the white satellite who sat opposite Lynch flushed for a moment as the thought flashed through his brain.

The old cynic, who alone knew his real purpose, was in his most genial mood to-night, and the grim lines of his powerful face relaxed into something like a smile as they ate and chatted and told good stories.

Lynch watched him with keen interest. He knew his history and character, and had built on his genius a brilliant scheme of life.

This man who meant to become the dictator of the Republic had come from the humblest early conditions. His father was a worthless character, from whom he had learned the trade of a shoemaker, but his mother, a woman of vigorous intellect and indomitable will, had succeeded in giving her lame boy a college education. He had early sworn to be a man of wealth, and to this purpose he had throttled the dreams and ideals of a wayward imagination.

His hope of great wealth had not been realized. His iron mills in Pennsylvania had been destroyed by Lee's army. He had developed the habit of gambling, which brought its train of extravagant habits, tastes, and inevitable debts. In his vigorous manhood, in spite of his lameness, he had kept a pack of hounds and a stable of fine horses. He had used his skill in shoemaking to construct a set of stirrups to fit his lame feet, and had become an expert hunter to hounds.

One thing he never neglected—to be in his seat in the House of Representatives and wear its royal crown of leadership, sick or well, day or night. The love of power was the breath of his nostrils, and his ambitions had at one time been boundless. His enormous power to-day was due to the fact that he had given up all hope of office beyond the robes of the king of his party. He had been offered a cabinet position by the elder Harrison and for some reason it had been withdrawn. He had been promised a place in Lincoln's cabinet, but some mysterious power had snatched it away. He was the one great man who had now no ambition for which to trim and fawn and lie, and for the very reason that he had abolished himself he was the most powerful leader who ever walked the halls of Congress.

His contempt for public opinion was boundless. Bold, original, scornful of advice, of all the men who ever lived in our history he was the one man born to rule in the chaos which followed the assassination of the chief magistrate.

Audacity was stamped in every line of his magnificent head. His choicest curses were for the cowards of his own party before whose blanched faces he shouted out the hidden things until they sank back in helpless silence and dismay. His speech was curt, his humour sardonic, his wit biting, cruel, and coarse.

The incarnate soul of revolution, he despised convention and ridiculed respectability.

There was but one weak spot in his armour—and the world never suspected it: the consuming passion with which he loved his two children. This was the side of his nature he had hidden from the eyes of man. A refined egotism, this passion, perhaps—for he meant to live his own life over in them—yet it was the one utterly human and lovable thing about him. And if his public policy was one of stupendous avarice, this dream of millions of confiscated wealth he meant to seize, it was not for himself but for his children.

As he looked at Howle and Lynch seated in his library after dinner, with his great plans seething in his brain, his eyes were flashing, intense, and fiery, yet without colour—simply two centres of cold light.

"Gentlemen," he said at length. "I am going to ask you to undertake for the Government, the Nation, and yourselves a dangerous and important mission. I say yourselves, because, in spite of all our beautiful lies, self is the centre of all human action. Mr. Lincoln has fortunately gone to his reward—fortunately for him and for his country. His death was necessary to save his life. He was a useful man living, more useful dead. Our party has lost its first President, but gained a god—why mourn?"

"We will recover from our grief," said Howle.

The old man went on, ignoring the interruption:

"Things have somehow come my way. I am almost persuaded late in life that the gods love me. The insane fury of the North against the South for a crime which they were the last people on earth to dream of committing is, of course, a power to be used—but with caution. The first execution of a Southern leader on such an idiotic charge would produce a revolution of sentiment. The people are an aggregation of hysterical fools."

"I thought you favoured the execution of the leaders of the rebellion?" said Lynch with surprise.

"I did, but it is too late. Had they been tried by drum-head court-martial and shot dead red-handed as they stood on the field in their uniforms, all would have been well. Now sentiment is too strong. Grant showed his teeth to Stanton and he backed down from Lee's arrest. Sherman refused to shake hands with Stanton on the grandstand the day his army passed in review, and it's a wonder he didn't knock him down. Sherman was denounced as a renegade and traitor for giving Joseph E. Johnston the terms Lincoln ordered him to give. Lincoln dead, his terms are treason! Yet had he lived, we should have been called upon to applaud his mercy and patriotism. How can a man live in this world and keep his face straight?"

"I believe God permitted Mr. Lincoln's death to give the great Commoner, the Leader of Leaders, the right of way," cried Lynch with enthusiasm.

The old man smiled. With all his fierce spirit he was as susceptible to flattery as a woman—far more so than the sleek brown woman who carried the keys of his house.

"The man at the other end of the avenue, who pretends to be President, in reality an alien of the conquered province of Tennessee, is pressing Lincoln's plan of 'restoring' the Union. He has organized State governments in the South, and their senators and representatives will appear at the Capitol in December for admission to Congress. He thinks they will enter——"

The old man broke into a low laugh and rubbed his hands.

"My full plans are not for discussion at this juncture. Suffice it to say, I mean to secure the future of our party and the safety of this nation. The one thing on which the success of my plan absolutely depends is the confiscation of the millions of acres of land owned by the white people of the South and its division among the negroes and those who fought and suffered in this war——"

The old Commoner paused, pursed his lips, and fumbled his hands a moment, the nostrils of his eagle-beaked nose breathing rapacity, sensuality throbbing in his massive jaws, and despotism frowning from his heavy brows.

"Stanton will probably add to the hilarity of nations, and amuse himself by hanging a few rebels," he went on, "but we will address ourselves to serious work. All men have their price, including the present company, with due apologies to the speaker——"

Howle's eyes danced, and he licked his lips.

"If I haven't suffered in this war, who has?"

"Your reward will not be in accordance with your sufferings. It will be based on the efficiency with which you obey my orders. Read that——"

He handed to him a piece of paper on which he had scrawled his secret instructions.

Another he gave to Lynch.

"Hand them back to me when you read them, and I will burn them. These instructions are not to pass the lips of any man until the time is ripe—four bare walls are not to hear them whispered."

Both men handed to the leader the slips of paper simultaneously.

"Are we agreed, gentlemen?"

"Perfectly," answered Howle.

"Your word is law to me, sir," said Lynch.

"Then you will draw on me personally for your expenses, and leave for the South within forty-eight hours. I wish your reports delivered to me two weeks before the meeting of Congress."

As Lynch passed through the hall on his way to the door, the brown woman bade him good-night and pressed into his hand a letter.

As his yellow fingers closed on the missive, his eyes flashed for a moment with catlike humour.

The woman's face wore the mask of a sphinx.



CHAPTER II

SWEETHEARTS

When the first shock of horror at her husband's peril passed, it left a strange new light in Mrs. Cameron's eyes.

The heritage of centuries of heroic blood from the martyrs of old Scotland began to flash its inspiration from the past. Her heart beat with the unconscious life of men and women who had stood in the stocks, and walked in chains to the stake with songs on their lips.

The threat against the life of Doctor Cameron had not only stirred her martyr blood: it had roused the latent heroism of a beautiful girlhood. To her he had ever been the lover and the undimmed hero of her girlish dreams. She spent whole hours locked in her room alone. Margaret knew that she was on her knees. She always came forth with shining face and with soft words on her lips.

She struggled for two months in vain efforts to obtain a single interview with him, or to obtain a copy of the charges. Doctor Cameron had been placed in the old Capitol Prison, already crowded to the utmost. He was in delicate health, and so ill when she had left home he could not accompany her to Richmond.

Not a written or spoken word was allowed to pass those prison doors. She could communicate with him only through the officers in charge. Every message from him was the same. "I love you always. Do not worry. Go home the moment you can leave Ben. I fear the worst at Piedmont."

When he had sent this message, he would sit down and write the truth in a little diary he kept:

"Another day of anguish. How long, O Lord? Just one touch of her hand, one last pressure of her lips, and I am content. I have no desire to live—I am tired."

The officers repeated the verbal messages, but they made no impression on Mrs. Cameron. By a mental telepathy which had always linked her life with his her soul had passed those prison bars. If he had written the pitiful record with a dagger's point on her heart, she could not have felt it more keenly.

At times overwhelmed, she lay prostrate and sobbed in half-articulate cries. And then from the silence and mystery of the spirit world in which she felt the beat of the heart of Eternal Love would come again the strange peace that passeth understanding. She would rise and go forth to her task with a smile.

In July she saw Mrs. Surratt taken from this old Capitol Prison to be hung with Payne, Herold, and Atzerodt for complicity in the assassination. The military commission before whom this farce of justice was enacted, suspicious of the testimony of the perjured wretches who had sworn her life away, had filed a memorandum with their verdict asking the President for mercy.

President Johnson never saw this memorandum. It was secretly removed in the War Department, and only replaced after he had signed the death warrant.

In vain Annie Surratt, the weeping daughter, flung herself on the steps of the White House on the fatal day, begging and praying to see the President. She could not believe they would allow her mother to be murdered in the face of a recommendation of mercy. The fatal hour struck at last, and the girl left the White House with set eyes and blanched face, muttering incoherent curses.

The Chief Magistrate sat within, unconscious of the hideous tragedy that was being enacted in his name. When he discovered the infamy by which he had been made the executioner of an innocent woman, he made his first demand that Edwin M. Stanton resign from his cabinet as Secretary of War. And for the first time in the history of America, a cabinet officer waived the question of honour and refused to resign.

With a shudder and blush of shame, strong men saw that day the executioner gather the ropes tightly three times around the dress of an innocent American mother and bind her ankles with cords. She fainted and sank backward upon the attendants, the poor limbs yielding at last to the mortal terror of death. But they propped her up and sprung the fatal trap.

A feeling of uncertainty and horror crept over the city and the Nation, as rumours of the strange doings of the "Bureau of Military Justice," with its secret factory of testimony and powers of tampering with verdicts, began to find their way in whispered stories among the people.

Public opinion, however, had as yet no power of adjustment. It was an hour of lapse to tribal insanity. Things had gone wrong. The demand for a scapegoat, blind, savage, and unreasoning, had not spent itself. The Government could do anything as yet, and the people would applaud.

Mrs. Cameron had tried in vain to gain a hearing before the President. Each time she was directed to apply to Mr. Stanton. She refused to attempt to see him, and again turned to Elsie for help. She had learned that the same witnesses who had testified against Mrs. Surratt were being used to convict Doctor Cameron, and her heart was sick with fear.

"Ask your father," she pleaded, "to write President Johnson a letter in my behalf. Whatever his politics, he can't be your father and not be good at heart."

Elsie paled for a moment. It was the one request she had dreaded. She thought of her father and Stanton with dread. How far he was supporting the Secretary of War she could only vaguely guess. He rarely spoke of politics to her, much as he loved her.

"I'll try, Mrs. Cameron," she faltered. "My father is in town to-day and takes dinner with us before he leaves for Pennsylvania to-night. I'll go at once."

With fear, and yet boldly, she went straight home to present her request. She knew he was a man who never cherished small resentments, however cruel and implacable might be his public policies. And yet she dreaded to put it to the test.

"Father, I've a very important request to make of you," she said gravely.

"Very well, my child, you need not be so solemn. What is it?"

"I've some friends in great distress—Mrs. Cameron, of South Carolina, and her daughter Margaret."

"Friends of yours?" he asked with an incredulous smile. "Where on earth did you find them?"

"In the hospital, of course. Mrs. Cameron is not allowed to see her husband, who has been here in jail for over two months. He cannot write to her, nor can he receive a letter from her. He is on trial for his life, is ill and helpless, and is not allowed to know the charges against him, while hired witnesses and detectives have broken open his house, searched his papers, and are ransacking heaven and earth to convict him of a crime of which he never dreamed. It's a shame. You don't approve of such things, I know?"

"What's the use of my expressing an opinion when you have already settled it?" he answered good-humouredly.

"You don't approve of such injustice?"

"Certainly not, my child. Stanton's frantic efforts to hang a lot of prominent Southern men for complicity in Booth's crime is sheer insanity. Nobody who has any sense believes them guilty. As a politician I use popular clamour for my purposes, but I am not an idiot. When I go gunning, I never use a popgun or hunt small game."

"Then you will write the President a letter asking that they be allowed to see Doctor Cameron?"

The old man frowned.

"Think, father, if you were in jail and friendless, and I were trying to see you——"

"Tut, tut, my dear, it's not that I am unwilling—I was only thinking of the unconscious humour of my making a request of the man who at present accidentally occupies the White House. Of all the men on earth, this alien from the province of Tennessee! But I'll do it for you. When did you ever know me to deny my help to a weak man or woman in distress?"

"Never, father. I was sure you would do it," she answered warmly.

He wrote the letter at once and handed it to her.

She bent and kissed him.

"I can't tell you how glad I am to know that you have no part in such injustice."

"You should not have believed me such a fool, but I'll forgive you for the kiss. Run now with this letter to your rebel friends, you little traitor! Wait a minute——"

He shuffled to his feet, placed his hand tenderly on her head, and stooped and kissed the shining hair.

"I wonder if you know how I love you? How I've dreamed of your future? I may not see you every day as I wish; I'm absorbed in great affairs. But more and more I think of you and Phil. I'll have a big surprise for you both some day."

"Your love is all I ask," she answered simply.

Within an hour, Mrs. Cameron found herself before the new President. The letter had opened the door as by magic. She poured out her story with impetuous eloquence while Mr. Johnson listened in uneasy silence. His ruddy face, his hesitating manner, and restless eyes were in striking contrast to the conscious power of the tall dark man who had listened so tenderly and sympathetically to her story of Ben but a few weeks before.

The President asked:

"Have you seen Mr. Stanton?"

"I have seen him once," she cried with sudden passion. "It is enough. If that man were God on His throne, I would swear allegiance to the devil and fight him!"

The President lifted his eyebrows and his lips twitched with a smile:

"I shouldn't say that your spirits are exactly drooping! I'd like to be near and hear you make that remark to the distinguished Secretary of War."

"Will you grant my prayer?" she pleaded.

"I will consider the matter," he promised evasively.

Mrs. Cameron's heart sank.

"Mr. President," she cried bitterly, "I have felt sure that I had but to see you face to face and you could not deny me. Surely it is but justice that he have the right to see his loved ones, to consult with counsel, to know the charges against him, and defend his life when attacked in his poverty and ruin by all the power of a mighty government? He is feeble and broken in health and suffering from wounds received carrying the flag of the Union to victory in Mexico. Whatever his errors of judgment in this war, it is a shame that a Nation for which he once bared his breast in battle should treat him as an outlaw without a trial."

"You must remember, madam," interrupted the President, "that these are extraordinary times, and that popular clamour, however unjust, will make itself felt and must be heeded by those in power. I am sorry for you, and I trust it may be possible for me to grant your request."

"But I wish it now," she urged. "He sends me word I must go home. I can't leave without seeing him. I will die first."

She drew closer and continued in throbbing tones:

"Mr. President, you are a native Carolinian—you are of Scotch Covenanter blood. You are of my own people of the great past, whose tears and sufferings are our common glory and birthright. Come, you must hear me—I will take no denial. Give me now the order to see my husband!"

The President hesitated, struggling with deep emotion, called his secretary, and gave the order.

As she hurried away with Elsie, who insisted on accompanying her to the jail door, the girl said:

"Mrs. Cameron, I fear you are without money. You must let me help you until you can return it."

"You are the dearest little heart I've met in all the world, I think sometimes," said the older woman, looking at her tenderly. "I wonder how I can ever pay you for half you've done already."

"The doing of it has been its own reward," was the soft reply. "May I help you?"

"If I need it, yes. But I trust it will not be necessary. I still have a little store of gold Doctor Cameron was wise enough to hoard during the war. I brought half of it with me when I left home, and we buried the rest. I hope to find it on my return. And if we can save the twenty bales of cotton we have hidden we shall be relieved of want."

"I'm ashamed of my country when I think of such ignoble methods as have been used against Doctor Cameron. My father is indignant, too."

The last sentence Elsie spoke with eager girlish pride.

"I am very grateful to your father for his letter. I am sorry he has left the city before I could meet and thank him personally. You must tell him for me."

At the jail the order of the President was not honoured for three hours, and Mrs. Cameron paced the street in angry impatience at first and then in dull despair.

"Do you think that man Stanton would dare defy the President?" she asked anxiously.

"No," said Elsie, "but he is delaying as long as possible as an act of petty tyranny."

At last the messenger arrived from the War Department permitting an order of the Chief Magistrate of the nation, the Commander-in-Chief of its Army and Navy, to be executed.

The grated door swung on its heavy hinges, and the wife and mother lay sobbing in the arms of the lover of her youth.

For two hours they poured into each other's hearts the story of their sorrows and struggles during the six fateful months that had passed. When she would return from every theme back to his danger, he would laugh her fears to scorn.

"Nonsense, my dear, I'm as innocent as a babe. Mr. Davis was suffering from erysipelas, and I kept him in my house that night to relieve his pain. It will all blow over. I'm happy now that I have seen you. Ben will be up in a few days. You must return at once. You have no idea of the wild chaos at home. I left Jake in charge. I have implicit faith in him, but there's no telling what may happen. I will not spend another moment in peace until you go."

The proud old man spoke of his own danger with easy assurance. He was absolutely certain, since the day of Mrs. Surratt's execution, that he would be railroaded to the gallows by the same methods. He had long looked on the end with indifference, and had ceased to desire to live except to see his loved ones again.

In vain she warned him of danger.

"My peril is nothing, my love," he answered quietly. "At home, the horrors of a servile reign of terror have become a reality. These prison walls do not interest me. My heart is with our stricken people. You must go home. Our neighbour, Mr. Lenoir, is slowly dying. His wife will always be a child. Little Marion is older and more self-reliant. I feel as if they are our own children. There are so many who need us. They have always looked to me for guidance and help. You can do more for them than any one else. My calling is to heal others. You have always helped me. Do now as I ask you."

At last she consented to leave for Piedmont on the following day, and he smiled.

"Kiss Ben and Margaret for me and tell them that I'll be with them soon," he said cheerily. He meant in the spirit, not the flesh. Not the faintest hope of life even flickered in his mind.

In the last farewell embrace a faint tremor of the soul, half sigh, half groan, escaped his lips, and he drew her again to his breast, whispering:

"Always my sweetheart, good, beautiful, brave, and true!"



CHAPTER III

THE JOY OF LIVING

Within two weeks after the departure of Mrs. Cameron and Margaret, the wounded soldier had left the hospital with Elsie's hand resting on his arm and her keen eyes watching his faltering steps. She had promised Margaret to take her place until he was strong again. She was afraid to ask herself the meaning of the songs that were welling up from the depth of her own soul. She told herself again and again that she was fulfilling her ideal of unselfish human service.

Ben's recovery was rapid, and he soon began to give evidence of his boundless joy in the mere fact of life.

He utterly refused to believe his father in danger.

"What, my dad a conspirator, an assassin!" he cried, with a laugh. "Why, he wouldn't kill a flea without apologising to it. And as for plots and dark secrets, he never had a secret in his life and couldn't keep one if he had it. My mother keeps all the family secrets. Crime couldn't stick to him any more than dirty water to a duck's back!"

"But we must secure his release on parole, that he may defend himself."

"Of course. But we won't cross any bridges till we come to them. I never saw things so bad they couldn't be worse. Just think what I've been through. The war's over. Don't worry."

He looked at her tenderly.

"Get that banjo and play 'Get out of the Wilderness!'"

His spirit was contagious and his good humour resistless. Elsie spent the days of his convalescence in an unconscious glow of pleasure in his companionship. His handsome boyish face, his bearing, his whole personality, invited frankness and intimacy. It was a divine gift, this magnetism, the subtle meeting of quick intelligence, tact, and sympathy. His voice was tender and penetrating, with soft caresses in its tones. His vision of life was large and generous, with a splendid carelessness about little things that didn't count. Each day Elsie saw new and striking traits of his character which drew her.

"What will we do if Stanton arrests you one of these fine days?" she asked him one day.

"Afraid they'll nab me for something?" he exclaimed. "Well, that is a joke. Don't you worry. The Yankees know who to fool with. I licked 'em too many times for them to bother me any more."

"I was under the impression that you got licked," Elsie observed.

"Don't you believe it. We wore ourselves out whipping the other fellows."

Elsie smiled, took up the banjo, and asked him to sing while she played.

She had no idea that he could sing, yet to her surprise he sang his camp songs boldly, tenderly, and with deep, expressive feeling.

As the girl listened, the memory of the horrible hours of suspense she had spent with his mother when his unconscious life hung on a thread came trooping back into her heart and a tear dimmed her eyes.

And he began to look at her with a new wonder and joy slowly growing in his soul.



CHAPTER IV

HIDDEN TREASURE

Ben had spent a month of vain effort to secure his father's release. He had succeeded in obtaining for him a removal to more comfortable quarters, books to read, and the privilege of a daily walk under guard and parole. The doctor's genial temper, the wide range of his knowledge, the charm of his personality, and his heroism in suffering had captivated the surgeons who attended him and made friends of every jailer and guard.

Elsie was now using all her woman's wit to secure a copy of the charges against him as formulated by the Judge Advocate General, who, in defiance of civil law, still claimed control of these cases.

To the boy's sanguine temperament the whole proceeding had been a huge farce from the beginning, and at the last interview with his father he had literally laughed him into good humour.

"Look here, pa," he cried. "I believe you're trying to slip off and leave us in this mess. It's not fair. It's easy to die."

"Who said I was going to die?"

"I heard you were trying to crawl out that way."

"Well, it's a mistake. I'm going to live just for the fun of disappointing my enemies and to keep you company. But you'd better get hold of a copy of these charges against me—if you don't want me to escape."

"It's a funny world if a man can be condemned to death without any information on the subject."

"My son, we are now in the hands of the revolutionists, army sutlers, contractors, and adventurers. The Nation will touch the lowest tide-mud of its degradation within the next few years. No man can predict the end."

"Oh, go 'long!" said Ben. "You've got jail cobwebs in your eyes."

"I'm depending on you."

"I'll pull you through if you don't lie down on me and die to get out of trouble. You know you can die if you try hard enough."

"I promise you, my boy," he said with a laugh.

"Then I'll let you read this letter from home," Ben said, suddenly thrusting it before him.

The doctor's hand trembled a little as he put on his glasses and read:

My Dear Boy: I cannot tell you how much good your bright letters have done us. It's like opening the window and letting in the sunlight while fresh breezes blow through one's soul.

Margaret and I have had stirring times. I send you enclosed an order for the last dollar of money we have left. You must hoard it. Make it last until your father is safe at home. I dare not leave it here. Nothing is safe. Every piece of silver and everything that could be carried has been stolen since we returned.

Uncle Aleck betrayed the place Jake had hidden our twenty precious bales of cotton. The war is long since over, but the "Treasury Agent" declared them confiscated, and then offered to relieve us of his order if we gave him five bales, each worth three hundred dollars in gold. I agreed, and within a week another thief came and declared the other fifteen bales confiscated. They steal it, and the Government never gets a cent. We dared not try to sell it in open market, as every bale exposed for sale is "confiscated" at once.

No crop was planted this summer. The negroes are all drawing rations at the Freedman's Bureau.

We have turned our house into a hotel, and our table has become famous. Margaret is a treasure. She has learned to do everything. We tried to raise a crop on the farm when we came home, but the negroes stopped work. The Agent of the Bureau came to us and said he could send them back for a fee of $50. We paid it, and they worked a week. We found it easier to run a hotel. We hope to start the farm next year.

Our new minister at the Presbyterian Church is young, handsome, and eloquent—Rev. Hugh McAlpin.

Mr. Lenoir died last week—but his end was so beautiful, our tears were half joy. He talked incessantly of your father and how the country missed him. He seemed much better the day before the end came, and we took him for a little drive to Lovers' Leap. It was there, sixteen years ago, he made love to Jeannie. When we propped him up on the rustic seat, and he looked out over the cliff and the river below, I have never seen a face so transfigured with peace and joy.

"What a beautiful world it is, my dears!" he exclaimed, taking Jeannie and Marion both by the hand.

They began to cry, and he said with a smile:

"Come now—do you love me?"

And they covered his hands with kisses.

"Well, then you must promise me two things faithfully here, with Mrs. Cameron to witness!"

"We promise," they both said in a breath.

"That when I fall asleep, not one thread of black shall ever cloud the sunlight of our little home, that you will never wear it, and that you will show your love for me by making my flowers grow richer, that you will keep my memory green by always being as beautiful as you are to-day, and make this old world a sweeter place to live in. I wish you, Jeannie, my mate, to keep on making the young people glad. Don't let their joys be less even for a month because I have laid down to rest. Let them sing and dance——"

"Oh, Papa!" cried Marion.

"Certainly, my little serious beauty—I'll not be far away, I'll be near and breathe my songs into their hearts, and into yours—you both promise?"

"Yes, yes!" they both cried.

As we drove back through the woods, he smiled tenderly and said to me:

"My neighbour, Doctor Cameron, pays taxes on these woods, but I own them! Their sighing boughs, stirred by the breezes, have played for me oratorios grander than all the scores of human genius. I'll hear the Choir Invisible play them when I sleep."

He died that night suddenly. With his last breath he sighed:

"Draw the curtains and let me see again the moonlit woods!"

They are trying to carry out his wishes. I found they had nothing to eat, and that he had really died from insufficient nourishment—a polite expression meaning starvation. I've divided half our little store with them and send the rest to you. I think Marion more and more the incarnate soul of her father. I feel as if they are both my children.

My little grandchick, Hugh, is the sweetest youngster alive. He was a wee thing when you left. Mrs. Lenoir kept him when they arrested your father. He is so much like your brother Hugh I feel as if he has come to life again. You should hear him say grace, so solemnly and tenderly, we can't help crying. He made it up himself. This is what he says at every meal:

"God, please give my grandpa something good to eat in jail, keep him well, don't let the pains hurt him any more, and bring him home to me quick, for Jesus' sake. Amen."

I never knew before how the people loved the doctor, nor how dependent they were on him for help and guidance. Men, both white and coloured, come here every day to ask about him. Some of them come from far up in the mountains.

God alone knows how lonely our home and the world has seemed without him. They say that those who love and live the close sweet home life for years grow alike in soul and body, in tastes, ways, and habits. I find it so. People have told me that your father and I are more alike than brother and sister of the same blood. In spirit I'm sure it's true. I know you love him and that you will leave nothing undone for his health and safety. Tell him that my only cure for loneliness in his absence is my fight to keep the wolf from the door, and save our home against his coming.

Lovingly, your Mother.

When the doctor had finished the reading, he looked out the window of the jail at the shining dome of the Capitol for a moment in silence.

"Do you know, my boy, that you have the heritage of royal blood? You are the child of a wonderful mother. I'm ashamed when I think of the helpless stupor under which I have given up, and then remember the deathless courage with which she has braved it all—the loss of her boys, her property, your troubles and mine. She has faced the world alone like a wounded lioness standing over her cubs. And now she turns her home into a hotel, and begins life in a strange new world without one doubt of her success. The South is yet rich even in its ruin."

"Then you'll fight and go back to her with me?"

"Yes, never fear."

"Good! You see, we're so poor now, pa, you're lucky to be saving a board bill here. I'd 'conspire' myself and come in with you but for the fact it would hamper me a little in helping you."



CHAPTER V

ACROSS THE CHASM

When Ben had fully recovered and his father's case looked hopeful, Elsie turned to her study of music, and the Southern boy suddenly waked to the fact that the great mystery of life was upon him. He was in love at last—genuinely, deeply, without one reservation. He had from habit flirted in a harmless way with every girl he knew. He left home with little Marion Lenoir's girlish kiss warm on his lips. He had made love to many a pretty girl in old Virginia as the red tide of war had ebbed and flowed around Stuart's magic camps.

But now the great hour of the soul had struck. No sooner had he dropped the first tender words that might have their double meaning, feeling his way cautiously toward her, than she had placed a gulf of dignity between them, and attempted to cut every tie that bound her life to his.

It had been so sudden it took his breath away. Could he win her? The word "fail" had never been in his vocabulary. It had never run in the speech of his people.

Yes, he would win if it was the only thing he did in this world. And forthwith he set about it. Life took on new meaning and new glory. What mattered war or wounds, pain or poverty, jails and revolutions—it was the dawn of life!

He sent her a flower every day and pinned one just like it on his coat. And every night found him seated by her side. She greeted him cordially, but the gulf yawned between them. His courtesy and self-control struck her with surprise and admiration. In the face of her coldness he carried about him an air of smiling deference and gallantry.

She finally told him of her determination to go to New York to pursue her studies until Phil had finished the term of his enlistment in his regiment, which had been ordered on permanent duty in the West.

He laughed with his eyes at this announcement, blinking the lashes rapidly without moving his lips. It was a peculiar habit of his when deeply moved by a sudden thought. It had flashed over him like lightning that she was trying to get away from him. She would not do that unless she cared.

"When are you going?" he asked quietly.

"Day after to-morrow."

"Then you will give me one afternoon for a sail on the river to say good-bye and thank you for what you have done for me and mine?"

She hesitated, laughed, and refused.

"To-morrow at four o'clock I'll call for you," he said firmly. "If there's no wind, we can drift with the tide."

"I will not have time to go."

"Promptly at four," he repeated as he left.

Ben spent hours that night weighing the question of how far he should dare to speak his love. It had been such an easy thing before. Now it seemed a question of life and death. Twice the magic words had been on his lips, and each time something in her manner chilled him into silence.

Was she cold and incapable of love? No; this manner of the North was on the surface. He knew that deep down within her nature lay banked and smouldering fires of passion for the one man whose breath could stir it into flame. He felt this all the keener now that the spell of her companionship and the sweet intimacy of her daily ministry to him had been broken. The memory of little movements of her petite figure, the glance of her warm amber eyes, and the touch of her hand—all had their tongues of revelation to his eager spirit.

He found her ready at four o'clock.

"You see I decided to go after all," she said.

"Yes, I knew you would," he answered.

She was dressed in a simple suit of navy-blue cloth cut V-shaped at the throat, showing the graceful lines of her exquisite neck as it melted into the plump shoulders. She had scorned hoop skirts.

He admired her for this, and yet it made him uneasy. A woman who could defy an edict of fashion was a new thing under the sun, and it scared him.

They were seated in the little sailboat now, drifting out with the tide. It was a perfect day in October, one of those matchless days of Indian summer in the Virginia climate when an infinite peace and vast brooding silence fill the earth and sky until one feels that words are a sacrilege.

Neither of them spoke for minutes, and his heart grew bold in the stillness. No girl could be still who was unmoved.

She was seated just in front of him on the left, with her hand idly rippling the surface of the silvery waters, gazing at the wooded cliff on the river banks clothed now in their gorgeous robes of yellow, purple, scarlet, and gold.

The soft strains of distant music came from a band in the fort, and her hand in the rippling water seemed its accompaniment.

Ben was conscious only of her presence. Every sight and sound of nature seemed to be blended in her presence. Never in all his life had he seen anything so delicately beautiful as the ripe rose colour of her cheeks, and all the tints of autumn's glory seemed to melt into the gold of her hair.

And those eyes he felt that God had never set in such a face before—rich amber, warm and glowing, big and candid, courageous and truthful.

"Are you dead again?" she asked demurely.

"Well, as the Irishman said in answer to his mate's question when he fell off the house, 'not dead—but spacheless.'"

He was quick to see the opening her question with its memories had made, and took advantage of it.

"Look here, Miss Elsie, you're too honest, independent, and candid to play hide-and-seek with me. I want to ask you a plain question. You've been trying to pick a quarrel of late. What have I done?"

"Nothing. It has simply come to me that our lives are far apart. The gulf between us is real and very deep. Your father was but yesterday a slaveholder——"

Ben grinned:

"Yes, your slave-trading grandfather sold them to us the day before."

Elsie blushed and bristled for a fight.

"You won't mind if I give you a few lessons in history, will you?" Ben asked softly.

"Not in the least. I didn't know that Southerners studied history," she answered, with a toss of her head.

"We made a specialty of the history of slavery, at least. I had a dear old teacher at home who fairly blazed with light on this subject. He is one of the best-read men in America. He happens to be in jail just now. But I haven't forgotten—I know it by heart."

"I am waiting for light," she interrupted cynically.

"The South is no more to blame for negro slavery than the North. Our slaves were stolen from Africa by Yankee skippers. When a slaver arrived at Boston, your pious Puritan clergyman offered public prayer of thanks that 'A gracious and overruling Providence had been pleased to bring to this land of freedom another cargo of benighted heathen to enjoy the blessings of a gospel dispensation——'"

She looked at him with angry incredulity and cried:

"Go on."

"Twenty-three times the Legislature of Virginia passed acts against the importation of slaves, which the king vetoed on petition of the Massachusetts slave traders. Jefferson made these acts of the king one of the grievances of the Declaration of Independence, but a Massachusetts member succeeded in striking it out. The Southern men in the convention which framed the Constitution put into it a clause abolishing the slave trade, but the Massachusetts men succeeded in adding a clause extending the trade twenty years——"

He smiled and paused.

"Go on," she said, with impatience.

"In Colonial days a negro woman was publicly burned to death in Boston. The first Abolition paper was published in Tennessee by Embree. Benjamin Lundy, his successor, could not find a single Abolitionist in Boston. In 1828 over half the people of Tennessee favoured Abolition. At this time there were one hundred and forty Abolition Societies in America—one hundred and three in the South, and not one in Massachusetts. It was not until 1836 that Massachusetts led in Abolition—not until all her own slaves had been sold to us at a profit and the slave trade had been destroyed——"

She looked at Ben with anger for a moment and met his tantalizing look of good humour.

"Can you stand any more?"

"Certainly, I enjoy it."

"I'm just breaking down the barriers—so to speak," he said, with the laughter still lurking in his eyes, as he looked steadily ahead.

"By all means go on," she said soberly. "I thought at first you were trying to tease me. I see that you are in earnest."

"Never more so. This is about the only little path of history I'm at home in—I love to show off in it. I heard a cheerful idiot say the other day that your father meant to carry the civilization of Massachusetts to the Rio Grande until we had a Democracy in America. I smiled. While Massachusetts was enforcing laws about the dress of the rich and the poor, founding a church with a whipping-post, jail, and gibbet, and limiting the right to vote to a church membership fixed by pew rents, Carolina was the home of freedom where first the equal rights of men were proclaimed. New England people worth less than one thousand dollars were prohibited by law from wearing the garb of a gentleman, gold or silver lace, buttons on the knees, or to walk in great boots, or their women to wear silk or scarfs, while the Quakers, Maryland Catholics, Baptists, and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians were everywhere in the South the heralds of man's equality before the law."

"But barring our ancestors, I have some things against the men of this generation."

"Have I, too, sinned and come short?" he asked with mock gravity.

"Our ideals of life are far apart," she firmly declared.

"What ails my ideal?"

"Your egotism, for one thing. The air with which you calmly select what pleases your fancy. Northern men are bad enough—the insolence of a Southerner is beyond words!"



"You don't say so!" cried Ben, bursting into a hearty laugh. "Isn't your aunt, Mrs. Farnham, the president of a club?"

"Yes, and she is a very brilliant woman."

"Enlighten me further."

"I deny your heaven-born male kingship. The lord of creation is after all a very inferior animal—nearer the brute creation, weaker in infancy, shorter lived, more imperfectly developed, given to fighting, and addicted to idiocy. I never saw a female idiot in my life—did you?"

"Come to think of it, I never did," acknowledged Ben with comic gravity. "What else?"

"Isn't that enough?"

"It's nothing. I agree with everything you say, but it is irrelevant. I'm studying law, you know."

"I have a personality of my own. You and your kind assume the right to absorb all lesser lights."

"Certainly, I'm a man."

"I don't care to be absorbed by a mere man."

"Don't wish to be protected, sheltered, and cared for?"

"I dream of a life that shall be larger than the four walls of a home. I have never gone into hysterics over the idea of becoming a cook and housekeeper without wages, and snuffing my life out while another grows, expands, and claims the lordship of the world. I can sing. My voice is to me what eloquence is to man. My ideal is an intellectual companion who will inspire and lead me to develop all that I feel within to its highest reach."

She paused a moment and looked defiantly into Ben's brown eyes, about which a smile was constantly playing. He looked away, and again the river echoed with his contagious laughter. She had to join in spite of herself. He laughed with boyish gayety. It danced in his eyes, and gave spring to every movement of his slender wiry body. She felt its contagion enfold her.

His laughter melted into a song. In a voice vibrant with joy he sang, "If you get there before I do, tell 'em I'm comin' too!"

As Elsie listened, her anger grew as she recalled the amazing folly that had induced her to tell the secret feelings of her inmost soul to this man almost a stranger. Whence came this miracle of influence about him, this gift of intimacy? She felt a shock as if she had been immodest. She was in an agony of doubt as to what he was thinking of her, and dreaded to meet his gaze.

And yet, when he turned toward her, his whole being a smiling compound of dark Southern blood and bone and fire, at the sound of his voice all doubt and questioning melted.

"Do you know," he said earnestly, "that you are the funniest, most charming girl I ever met?"

"Thanks. I've heard your experience has been large for one of your age."

Ben's eyes danced.

"Perhaps, yes. You appeal to things in me that I didn't know were there—to all the senses of body and soul at once. Your strength of mind, with its conceits, and your quick little temper seem so odd and out of place, clothed in the gentleness of your beauty."

"I was never more serious in my life. There are other things more personal about you that I do not like."

"What?"

"Your cavalier habits."

"Cavalier fiddlesticks. There are no Cavaliers in my country. We are all Covenanter and Huguenot folks. The idea that Southern boys are lazy loafing dreamers is a myth. I was raised on the catechism."

"You love to fish and hunt and frolic—you flirt with every girl you meet, and you drink sometimes. I often feel that you are cruel and that I do not know you."

Ben's face grew serious, and the red scar in the edge of his hair suddenly became livid with the rush of blood.

"Perhaps I don't mean that you shall know all yet," he said slowly. "My ideal of a man is one that leads, charms, dominates, and yet eludes. I confess that I'm close kin to an angel and a devil, and that I await a woman's hand to lead me into the ways of peace and life."

The spiritual earnestness of the girl was quick to catch the subtle appeal of his last words. His broad, high forehead, straight, masterly nose, with its mobile nostrils, seemed to her very manly at just that moment and very appealing. A soft answer was on her lips.

He saw it, and leaned toward her in impulsive tenderness. A timid look on her face caused him to sink back in silence.

They had now drifted near the city. The sun was slowly sinking in a smother of fiery splendour that mirrored its changing hues in the still water. The hush of the harvest fullness of autumn life was over all nature. They passed a camp of soldiers and then a big hospital on the banks above. A gun flashed from the hill, and the flag dropped from its staff.

The girl's eyes lingered on the flower in his coat a moment and then on the red scar in the edge of his dark hair, and somehow the difference between them seemed to melt into the falling twilight. Only his nearness was real. Again a strange joy held her.

He threw her a look of tenderness, and she began to tremble. A sea gull poised a moment above them and broke into a laugh.

Bending nearer, he gently took her hand, and said:

"I love you!"

A sob caught her breath and she buried her face on her arm.

"I am for you, and you are for me. Why beat your wings against the thing that is and must be? What else matters? With all my sins and faults my land is yours—a land of sunshine, eternal harvests, and everlasting song, old-fashioned and provincial perhaps, but kind and hospitable. Around its humblest cottage song birds live and mate and nest and never leave. The winged ones of your own cold fields have heard their call, and the sky to-night will echo with their chatter as they hurry southward. Elsie, my own, I too have called—come; I love you!"

She lifted her face to him full of tender spiritual charm, her eyes burning their passionate answer.

He bent and kissed her.

"Say it! Say it!" he whispered.

"I love you!" she sighed.



CHAPTER VI

THE GAUGE OF BATTLE

The day of the first meeting of the National Congress after the war was one of intense excitement. The galleries of the House were packed. Elsie was there with Ben in a fever of secret anxiety lest the stirring drama should cloud her own life. She watched her father limp to his seat with every eye fixed on him.