It was irregular and hardly in good taste, but the boy had waited till the ladies were gone, and it touched the Major that he should want to make such a public acknowledgment that there should be no false colors in the flag he meant henceforth to bear.

The startled guests drank blindly to the confused Major, though they knew not why, but as the lads disappeared the lawyer asked:

"Who is that boy, Major?"

Outside, the same question had been asked among the ladies and the same story told. The three girls remembered him vaguely, they said, and when Chad reappeared, in the eyes of the poetess at least, the halo of romance floated above his head.

She was waiting for Chad when he came out on the porch, and she shook her curls and flashed her eyes in a way that almost alarmed him. Old Mammy dropped him a curtsey, for she had had her orders, and, behind her, Snowball, now a tall, fine-looking coal-black youth, grinned a welcome. The three girls were walking under the trees, with their arms mysteriously twined about one anther's waists, and the poetess walked down toward them with the three lads, Richard Hunt following. Chad could not know how it happened, but, a moment later, Dan was walking away with Nellie Hunt one way; Harry with Elizabeth Morgan the other; the Lieutenant had Margaret alone, and Miss Overstreet was leading him away, raving meanwhile about the beauty of field and sky. As they went toward the gate he could not help flashing one look toward the pair under the fir tree. An amused smile was playing under the Lieutenant's beautiful mustache, his eyes were dancing with mischief, and Margaret was blushing with anything else than displeasure.

"Oho!" he said, as Chad and his companion passed on. "Sits the wind in that corner? Bless me, if looks could kill, I'd have a happy death here at your feet, Mistress Margaret. SEE the young man! It's the second time he has almost slain me."

Chad could scarcely hear Miss Jennie's happy chatter, scarcely saw the shaking curls, the eyes all but in a frenzy of rolling. His eyes were in the back of his head, and his backward-listening ears heard only Margaret's laugh behind him.

"Oh, I do love the autumn"—it was at the foot of those steps, thought Chad, that he first saw Margaret springing to the back of her pony and dashing off under the fir trees—"and it's coming. There's one scarlet leaf already"—Chad could see the rock fence where he had sat that spring day—"it's curious and mournful that you can see in any season a sign of the next to come." And there was the creek where he found Dan fishing, and there the road led to the ford where Margaret had spurned his offer of a slimy fish—ugh! "I do love the autumn. It makes me feel like the young woman who told Emerson that she had such mammoth thoughts she couldn't give them utterance—why, wake up, Mr. Buford, wake up!" Chad came to with a start.

"Do you know you aren't very polite, Mr. Buford?" Mr. Buford! That did sound funny.

"But I know what the matter is," she went on. "I saw you look"—she nodded her head backward. "Can you keep a secret?" Chad nodded; he had not yet opened his lips.

"Thae's going to be a match back there. He's only a few years older. The French say that a woman should be half a man's age plus seven years. That would make her only a few years too young, and she can wait." Chad was scarlet under the girl's mischievous torture, but a cry from the house saved him. Dan was calling them back.

"Mr. Hunt has to go back early to drill the Rifles. Can you keep another secret?" Again Chad nodded gravely. "Well, he is going to drive me back. I'll tell him what a dangerous rival he has." Chad was dumb; there was much yet for him to learn before he could parry with a tongue like hers.

"He's very good-looking," said Miss Jennie, when she joined the girls, "but oh, so stupid."

Margaret turned quickly and unsuspiciously. "Stupid! Why, he's the first man in his class."

"Oh," said Miss Jennie, with a demure smile, "perhaps I couldn't draw him out," and Margaret flushed to have caught the deftly tossed bait so readily.

A moment later the Lieutenant was gathering up the reins, with Miss Jennie by his side. He gave a bow to Margaret, and Miss Jennie nodded to Chad.

"Come see me when you come to town, Mr. Buford," she called, as though to an old friend, and still Chad was dumb, though he lifted his hat gravely.

At no time was Chad alone with Margaret, and he was not sorry—her manner so puzzled him. The three lads and three girls walked together through Mrs. Dean's garden with its grass walks and flower beds and vegetable patches surrounded with rose bushes. At the lower edge they could see the barn with sheep in the yard around it, and there were the very stiles where Harry and Margaret had sat in state when Dan and Chad were charging in the tournament. The thing might never have happened for any sign from Harry or Dan or Margaret, and Chad began to wonder if his past or his present were a dream.

How fine this courtesy was Chad could not realize. Neither could he know that the favor Margaret had shown him when he was little more than outcast he must now, as an equal, win for himself. Miss Jennie had called him "Mr. Buford." He wondered what Margaret would call him when he came to say good-by. She called him nothing. She only smiled at him.

"You must come to see us soon again," she said, graciously, and so said all the Deans.

The Major was quiet going home, and Miss Lucy drowsed. All evening the Major was quiet.

"If a fight does come," he said, when they were going to bed, "I reckon I'm not too old to take a hand."

"And I reckon I'm not too young," said Chad.



CHAPTER 18.

THE SPIRIT OF '76 AND THE SHADOW OF '61

One night, in the following April, there was a great dance in Lexington. Next day the news of Sumter came. Chad pleaded to be let off from the dance, but the Major would not hear of it. It was a fancy-dress ball, and the Major had a pet purpose of his own that he wanted gratified and Chad had promised to aid him. That fancy was that Chad should go in regimentals, as the stern, old soldier on the wall, of whom the Major swore the boy was the "spit and image." The Major himself helped Chad dress in wig, peruke, stock, breeches, boots, spurs, cocked hat, sword and all. And then he led the boy down into the parlor, where Miss Lucy was waiting for them, and stood him up on one side of the portrait. To please the old fellow, Chad laughingly struck the attitude of the pictured soldier, and the Major cried:

"What'd I tell you, Lucy!" Then he advanced and made a low bow.

"General Buford," he said, "General Washington's compliments, and will General Buford plant the flag on that hill where the left wing of the British is entrenched?"

"Hush, Cal," said Miss Lucy, laughing.

"General Buford's compliments to General Washington. General Buford will plant that flag on ANY hill that ANY enemy holds against it."

The lad's face paled as the words, by some curious impulse, sprang to his lips, but the unsuspecting Major saw no lurking significance in his manner, nor in what he said, and then there was a rumble of carriage wheels at the door.

The winter had sped swiftly. Chad had done his work in college only fairly well, for Margaret had been a disturbing factor. The girl was an impenetrable mystery to him, for the past between them was not only wiped clean—it seemed quite gone. Once only had he dared to open his lips about the old days, and the girl's flushed silence made a like mistake forever impossible. He came and went at the Deans' as he pleased. Always they were kind, courteous, hospitable—no more, no less, unvaryingly. During the Christmas holidays he and Margaret had had a foolish quarrel, and it was then that Chad took his little fling at his little world—a fling that was foolish, but harmful, chiefly in that it took his time and his mind and his energy from his work. He not only neglected his studies, but he fell in with the wild young bucks of the town, learned to play cards, took more wine than was good for him sometimes, was on the verge of several duels, and night after night raced home in his buggy against the coming dawn. Though Miss Lucy looked worried, the indulgent old Major made no protest. Indeed he was rather pleased. Chad was sowing his wild oats—it was in the blood, and the mood would pass. It did pass, naturally enough, on the very day that the breach between him and Margaret was partly healed; and the heart of Caleb Hazel, whom Chad, for months, had not dared to face, was made glad when the boy came back to him remorseful and repentant—the old Chad once more.

They were late in getting to the dance. Every window in the old Hunt home was brilliant with light. Chinese lanterns swung in the big yard. The scent of early spring flowers smote the fresh night air. Music and the murmur of nimble feet and happy laughter swept out the wide-open doors past which white figures flitted swiftly. Scarcely anybody knew Chad in his regimentals, and the Major, with the delight of a boy, led him around, gravely presenting him as General Buford here and there. Indeed, the lad made a noble figure with his superb height and bearing, and he wore sword and spurs as though born to them. Margaret was dancing with Richard Hunt when she saw his eyes searching for her through the room, and she gave him a radiant smile that almost stunned him. She had been haughty and distant when he went to her to plead forgiveness: she had been too hard, and Margaret, too, was repentant.

"Why, who's that?" asked Richard Hunt. "Oh, yes," he added, getting his answer from Margaret's face. "Bless me, but he's fine—the very spirit of '76. I must have him in the Rifles."

"Will you make him a lieutenant?" asked Margaret.

"Why, yes, I will," said Mr. Hunt, decisively. "I'll resign myself in his favor, if it pleases you."

"Oh, no, no—no one could fill your place."

"Well, he can, I fear—and here he comes to do it. I'll have to retreat some time, and I suppose I'd as well begin now." And the gallant gentleman bowed to Chad.

"Will you pardon me, Miss Margaret? My mother is calling me."

"You must have keen ears," said Margaret; "your mother is upstairs."

"Yes; but she wants me. Everybody wants me, but—" he bowed again with an imperturbable smile and went his way.

Margaret looked demurely into Chad's eager eyes.

"And how is the spirit of '76?"

"The spirit of '76 is unchanged."

"Oh, yes, he is; I scarcely knew him."

"But he's unchanged; he never will change."

Margaret dropped her eyes and Chad looked around.

"I wish we could get out of here."

"We can," said Margaret, demurely.

"We will!" said Chad, and he made for a door, outside which lanterns were swinging in the wind. Margaret caught up some flimsy garment and wound it about her pretty round throat—they call it a "fascinator" in the South.

Chad looked down at her.

"I wish you could see yourself; I wish I could tell you how you look."

"I have," said Margaret, "every time I passed a mirror. And other people have told me. Mr. Hunt did. He didn't seem to have much trouble."

"I wish I had his tongue."

"If you had, and nothing else, you wouldn't have me"—Chad started as the little witch paused a second, drawling—"leaving my friends and this jolly dance to go out into a freezing yard and talk to an aged Colonial who doesn't appreciate his modern blessings. The next thing you'll be wanting, I suppose—will be—"

"You, Margaret; you—YOU!"

It had come at last and Margaret hardly knew the choked voice that interrupted her. She had turned her back to him to sit down. She paused a moment, standing. Her eyes closed; a slight tremor ran through her, and she sank with her face in her hands. Chad stood silent, trembling. Voices murmured about them, but like the music in the house, they seemed strangely far away. The stirring of the wind made the sudden damp on his forehead icy-cold. Margaret's hands slowly left her face, which had changed as by a miracle. Every trace of coquetry was gone. It was the face of a woman who knew her own heart, and had the sweet frankness to speak it, that was lifted now to Chad.

"I'm so glad you are what you are, Chad; but had you been otherwise—that would have made no difference to me. You believe that, don't you, Chad? They might not have let me marry you, but I should have cared, just the same. They may not now, but that, too, will make no difference." She turned her eyes from his for an instant, as though she were looking far backward. "Ever since that day," she said, slowly, "when I heard you say, 'Tell the little gurl I didn't mean nothin' callin' her a little gal'"—there was a low, delicious gurgle in the throat as she tried to imitate his odd speech, and then her eyes suddenly filled with tears, but she brushed them away, smiling brightly. "Ever since then, Chad—" she stopped—a shadow fell across the door of the little summer house.

"Here I am, Mr. Hunt," she said, lightly; "is this your dance?" She rose and was gone. "Thank you, Mr. Buford," she called back, sweetly.

For a moment Chad stood where he was, quite dazed—so quickly, so unexpectedly had the crisis come. The blood had rushed to his face and flooded him with triumphant happiness. A terrible doubt chilled him as quickly. Had he heard aright?—could he have misunderstood her? Had the dream of years really come true? What was it she had said? He stumbled around in the half darkness, wondering. Was this another phase of her unceasing coquetry? How quickly her tone had changed when Richard Hunt's shadow came. At that moment, he neither could nor would have changed a hair had some genie dropped them both in the midst of the crowded ball-room. He turned swiftly toward the dancers. He must see, know—now!

The dance was a quadrille and the figure was "Grand right and left." Margaret had met Richard Hunt opposite, half-way, when Chad reached the door and was curtseying to him with a radiant smile. Again the boy's doubts beat him fiercely; and then Margaret turned her head, as though she knew he must be standing there. Her face grew so suddenly serious and her eyes softened with such swift tenderness when they met his, that a wave of guilty shame swept through him. And when she came around to him and passed, she leaned from the circle toward him, merry and mock-reproachful:

"You mustn't look at me like that," she whispered, and Hunt, close at hand, saw, guessed and smiled. Chad turned quickly away again.

That happy dawn—going home! The Major drowsed and fell asleep. The first coming light, the first cool breath that was stealing over the awakening fields, the first spring leaves with their weight of dew, were not more fresh and pure than the love that was in the boy's heart. He held his right hand in his left, as though he were imprisoning there the memory of the last little clasp that she had given it. He looked at the Major, and he wondered how anybody on earth, at that hour, could be asleep. He thought of the wasted days of the past few months; the silly, foolish life he had led, and thanked God that, in the memory of them, there was not one sting of shame. How he would work for her now! Little guessing how proud she already was, he swore to himself how proud she should be of him some day. He wondered where she was, and what she was doing. She could not be asleep, and he must have cried aloud could he have known—could he have heard her on her knees at her bedside, whispering his name for the first time in her prayers; could he have seen her, a little later, at her open window, looking across the fields, as though her eyes must reach him through the morning dusk.

That happy dawn—for both, that happy dawn!

It was well that neither, at that hour, could see beyond the rim of his own little world. In a far Southern city another ball, that night, had been going on. Down there the air was charged with the prescience of dark trouble, but, while the music moaned to many a heart like a god in pain, there was no brooding—only a deeper flush to the cheek, a brighter sparkle to the eye, a keener wit to the tongue; to the dance, a merrier swing. And at that very hour of dawn, ladies, slippered, bare of head, and in evening gowns, were fluttering like white moths along the streets of old Charleston, and down to the Battery, where Fort Sumter lay, gray and quiet in the morning mist—to await with jest and laughter the hissing shriek of one shell that lighted the fires of a four years' hell in a happy land of God-fearing peace and God-given plenty, and the hissing shriek of another that Anderson, Kentuckian, hurled back, in heroic defence of the flag struck for the first time by other than an alien hand.



CHAPTER 19.

THE BLUE OR THE GRAY

In the far North, as in the far South, men had but to drift with the tide. Among the Kentuckians, the forces that moulded her sons—Davis and Lincoln—were at war in the State, as they were at war in the nation. By ties of blood, sympathies, institutions, Kentucky was bound fast to the South. Yet, ten years before, Kentuckians had demanded the gradual emancipation of the slave. That far back, they had carved a pledge on a block of Kentucky marble, which should be placed in the Washington monument, that Kentucky would be the last to give up the Union. For ten years, they had felt the shadow of the war creeping toward them. In the dark hours of that dismal year, before the dawn of final decision, the men, women, and children of Kentucky talked of little else save war, and the skeleton of war took its place in the closet of every home from the Ohio to the crest of the Cumberland. When the dawn of that decision came, Kentucky spread before the world a record of independent-mindedness, patriotism, as each side gave the word, and sacrifice that has no parallel in history. She sent the flower of her youth—forty thousand strong—into the Confederacy; she lifted the lid of her treasury to Lincoln, and in answer to his every call, sent him a soldier, practically without a bounty and without a draft. And when the curtain fell on the last act of the great tragedy, half of her manhood was behind it—helpless from disease, wounded, or dead on the battle-field.

So, on a gentle April day, when the great news came, it came like a sword that, with one stroke, slashed the State in twain, shearing through the strongest bonds that link one man to another, whether of blood, business, politics or religion, as though they were no more than threads of wool. Nowhere in the Union was the National drama so played to the bitter end in the confines of a single State. As the nation was rent apart, so was the commonwealth; as the State, so was the county; as the county, the neighborhood; as the neighborhood, the family; and as the family, so brother and brother, father and son. In the nation the kinship was racial only. Brother knew not the face of brother. There was distance between them, antagonism, prejudice, a smouldering dislike easily fanned to flaming hatred. In Kentucky the brothers had been born in the same bed, slept in the same cradle, played under the same roof, sat side by side in the same schoolroom, and stood now on the threshold of manhood arm in arm, with mutual interests, mutual love, mutual pride in family that made clan feeling peculiarly intense. For antislavery fanaticism, or honest unionism, one needed not to go to the far North; as, for imperious, hotheaded, non-interference or pure State sovereignty, one needed not to go to the far South. They were all there in the State, the county, the family—under the same roof. Along the border alone did feeling approach uniformity—the border of Kentucky hills. There unionism was free from prejudice as nowhere else on the continent save elsewhere throughout the Southern mountains. Those Southern Yankees knew nothing about the valley aristocrat, nothing about his slaves, and cared as little for one as for the other. Since '76 they had known but one flag, and one flag only, and to that flag instinctively they rallied. But that the State should be swept from border to border with horror, there was division even here: for, in the Kentucky mountains, there was, here and there, a patriarch like Joel Turner who owned slaves, and he and his sons fought for them as he and his sons would have fought for their horses, or their cattle, or their sheep.

It was the prescient horror of such a condition that had no little part in the neutral stand that Kentucky strove to maintain. She knew what war was—for every fireside was rich in memories that men and women had of kindred who had fallen on numberless battle-fields—back even to St. Clair's defeat and the Raisin massacre; and though she did not fear war for its harvest of dangers and death, she did look with terror on a conflict between neighbors, friends, and brothers. So she refused troops to Lincoln; she refused them to Davis. Both pledged her immunity from invasion, and, to enforce that pledge, she raised Home Guards as she had already raised State Guards for internal protection and peace. And there—as a State—she stood: but the tragedy went on in the Kentucky home—a tragedy of peculiar intensity and pathos in one Kentucky home—the Deans'.

Harry had grown up tall, pale, studious, brooding. He had always been the pet of his Uncle Brutus—the old Lion of White Hall. Visiting the Hall, he had drunk in the poison, or consecration, as was the point of view, of abolitionism. At the first sign he was never allowed to go again. But the poison had gone deep. Whenever he could he went to hear old Brutus speak. Eagerly he heard stories of the fearless abolitionist's hand-to-hand fights with men who sought to skewer his fiery tongue. Deeply he brooded on every word that his retentive ear had caught from the old man's lips, and on the wrongs he endured in behalf of his cause and for freedom of speech.

One other hero did he place above him—the great commoner after whom he had been christened, Henry Clay Dean. He knew how Clay's life had been devoted to averting the coming war, and how his last days had been darkly shadowed by the belief that, when he was gone, the war must come. At times he could hear that clarion voice as it rang through the Senate with the bold challenge to his own people that paramount was his duty to the nation—subordinate his duty to his State. Who can tell what the nation owed, in Kentucky, at least, to the passionate allegiance that was broadcast through the State to Henry Clay? It was not in the boy's blood to be driven an inch, and no one tried to drive him. In his own home he was a spectre of gnawing anguish to his mother and Margaret, of unspeakable bitterness and disappointment to his father, and an impenetrable sphinx to Dan. For in Dan there was no shaking doubt. He was the spirit, incarnate, of the young, unquestioning, unthinking, generous, reckless, hotheaded, passionate South.

And Chad? The news reached Major Buford's farm at noon, and Chad went to the woods and came in at dusk, haggard and spent. Miserably now he held his tongue and tortured his brain. Purposely, he never opened his lips to Harry Dean. He tried to make known to the Major the struggle going on within him, but the iron-willed old man brushed away all argument with an impatient wave of his hand. With Margaret he talked once, and straightway the question was dropped like a living coal. So, Chad withdrew from his fellows. The social life of the town, gayer than ever now, knew him no more. He kept up his college work, but when he was not at his books, he walked the fields, and many a moonlit midnight found him striding along a white turnpike, or sitting motionless on top of a fence along the border of some woodland, his chin in both hands, fighting his fight out in the cool stillness alone. He himself little knew the unmeant significance there was in the old Continental uniform he had worn to the dance. Even his old rifle, had he but known it, had been carried with Daniel Morgan from Virginia to Washington's aid in Cambridge. His earliest memories of war were rooted in thrilling stories of King's Mountain. He had heard old men tell of pointing deadly rifles at red-coats at New Orleans, and had absorbed their own love of Old Hickory. The school-master himself, when a mere lad, had been with Scott in Mexico. The spirit of the back-woodsman had been caught in the hills, and was alive and unchanged at that very hour. The boy was practically born in Revolutionary days, and that was why, like all mountaineers, Chad had little love of State and only love of country—was first, last and all the time, simply American. It was not reason—it was instinct. The heroes the school-master had taught him to love and some day to emulate, had fought under one flag, and, like them, the mountaineers never dreamed there could be another. And so the boy was an unconscious reincarnation of that old spirit, uninfluenced by temporary apostasies in the outside world, untouched absolutely by sectional prejudice or the appeal of the slave. The mountaineer had no hatred of the valley aristocrat, because he knew nothing of him, and envied no man what he was, what he had, or the life he led. So, as for slavery, that question, singularly enough, never troubled his soul. To him slaves were hewers of wood and drawers of water. The Lord had made them so and the Bible said that it was right. That the school-master had taught Chad. He had read "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and the story made him smile. The tragedies of it he had never known and he did not believe. Slaves were sleek, well-fed, well-housed, loved and trusted, rightly inferior and happy; and no aristocrat ever moved among them with a more lordly, righteous air of authority than did this mountain lad who had known them little more than half a dozen years. Unlike the North, the boy had no prejudice, no antagonism, no jealousy, no grievance to help him in his struggle. Unlike Harry, he had no slave sympathy to stir him to the depths, no stubborn, rebellious pride to prod him on. In the days when the school-master thundered at him some speech of the Prince of Kentuckians, it was always the national thrill in the fiery utterance that had shaken him even then. So that unconsciously the boy was the embodiment of pure Americanism, and for that reason he and the people among whom he was born stood among the millions on either side, quite alone.

What was he fighting then—ah, what? If the bed-rock of his character was not loyalty, it was nothing. In the mountains the Turners had taken him from the Wilderness. In the Bluegrass the old Major had taken him from the hills. His very life he owed to the simple, kindly mountaineers, and what he valued more than his life he owed to the simple gentleman who had picked him up from the roadside and, almost without question, had taken him to his heart and to his home. The Turners, he knew, would fight for their slaves as they would have fought Dillon or Devil had either proposed to take from them a cow, a hog, or a sheep. For that Chad could not blame them. And the Major was going to fight, as he believed, for his liberty, his State, his country, his property, his fireside. So in the eyes of both, Chad must be the snake who had warmed his frozen body on their hearthstones and bitten the kindly hands that had warmed him back to life. What would Melissa say? Mentally he shrank from the fire of her eyes and the scorn of her tongue when she should know. And Margaret—the thought of her brought always a voiceless groan. To her, he had let his doubts be known, and her white silence closed his own lips then and there. The simple fact that he had doubts was an entering wedge of coldness between them that Chad saw must force them apart for he knew that the truth must come soon, and what would be the bitter cost of that truth. She could never see him as she saw Harry. Harry was a beloved and erring brother. Hatred of slavery had been cunningly planted in his heart by her father's own brother, upon whose head the blame for Harry's sin was set. The boy had been taunted until his own father's scorn had stirred his proud independence into stubborn resistance and intensified his resolution to do what he pleased and what he thought was right. But Chad—she would never understand him. She would never understand his love for the Government that had once abandoned her people to savages and forced her State and his to seek aid from a foreign land. In her eyes, too, he would be rending the hearts that had been tenderest to him in all the world: and that was all. Of what fate she would deal out to him he dared not think. If he lifted his hand against the South, he must strike at the heart of all he loved best, to which he owed most. If against the Union, at the heart of all that was best in himself. In him the pure spirit that gave birth to the nation was fighting for life. Ah, God! what should he do—what should he do?



CHAPTER 20.

OFF TO THE WAR

Throughout that summer Chad fought his fight, daily swaying this way and that—fought it in secret until the phantom of neutrality faded and gave place to the grim spectre of war—until with each hand Kentucky drew a sword and made ready to plunge both into her own stout heart. When Sumter fell, she shook her head resolutely to both North and South. Crittenden, in the name of Union lovers and the dead Clay, pleaded with the State to take no part in the fratricidal crime. From the mothers, wives, sisters and daughters of thirty-one counties came piteously the same appeal. Neutrality, to be held inviolate, was the answer to the cry from both the North and the South; but armed neutrality, said Kentucky. The State had not the moral right to secede; the Nation, no constitutional right to coerce: if both the North and the South left their paths of duty and fought—let both keep their battles from her soil. Straightway State Guards went into camp and Home Guards were held in reserve, but there was not a fool in the Commonwealth who did not know that, in sympathy, the State Guards were already for the Confederacy and the Home Guards for the Union cause. This was in May.

In June, Federals were enlisting across the Ohio; Confederates, just over the border of Dixie which begins in Tennessee. Within a month Stonewall Jackson sat on his horse, after Bull Run, watching the routed Yankees, praying for fresh men that he might go on and take the Capitol, and, from the Federal dream of a sixty-days' riot, the North woke with a gasp. A week or two later, Camp Dick Robinson squatted down on the edge of the Bluegrass, the first violation of the State's neutrality, and beckoned with both hands for Yankee recruits. Soon an order went round to disarm the State Guards, and on that very day the State Guards made ready for Dixie. On that day the crisis came at the Deans', and on that day Chad Buford made up his mind. When the Major and Miss Lucy went to bed that night, he slipped out of the house and walked through the yard and across the pike, following the little creek half unconsciously toward the Deans', until he could see the light in Margaret's window, and there he climbed the worm fence and sat leaning his head against one of the forked stakes with his hat in his lap. He would probably not see her again. He would send her word next morning to ask that he might, and he feared what the result of that word would be. Several times his longing eyes saw her shadow pass the curtain, and when her light was out, he closed his eyes and sat motionless—how long he hardly knew; but, when he sprang down, he was stiffened from the midnight chill and his unchanged posture. He went back to his room then, and wrote Margaret a letter and tore it up and went to bed. There was little sleep for him that night, and when the glimmer of morning brightened at his window, he rose listlessly, dipped his hot head in a bowl of water and stole out to the barn. His little mare whinnied a welcome as he opened the barn door. He patted her on the neck.

"Good-by, little girl," he said. He started to call her by name and stopped. Margaret had named the beautiful creature "Dixie." The servants were stirring.

"Good-mawnin', Mars Chad," said each, and with each he shook hands, saying simply that he was going away that morning. Only old Tom asked him a question.

"Foh Gawd, Mars Chad," said the old fellow, "old Mars Buford can't git along widout you. You gwine to come back soon?"

"I don't know, Uncle Tom," said Chad, sadly.

"Whar you gwine, Mars Chad?"

"Into the army."

"De ahmy?" The old man smiled. "You gwine to fight de Yankees?"

"I'm going to fight WITH the Yankees."

The old driver looked as though he could not have heard aright.

"You foolin' this ole nigger, Mars Chad, ain't you?"

Chad shook his head, and the old man straightened himself a bit.

"I'se sorry to heah it, suh," he said, with dignity, and he turned to his work.

Miss Lucy was not feeling well that morning and did not come down to breakfast. The boy was so pale and haggard that the Major looked at him anxiously.

"What's the matter with you, Chad? Are you—?"

"I didn't sleep very well last night, Major."

The Major chuckled. "I reckon you ain't gettin' enough sleep these days. I reckon I wouldn't, either, if I were in your place."

Chad did not answer. After breakfast he sat with the Major on the porch in the fresh, sunny air. The Major smoked his pipe, taking the stem out of his mouth now and then to shout some order as a servant passed under his eye.

"What's the news, Chad?"

"Mr. Crittenden is back."

"What did old Lincoln say?"

"That Camp Dick Robinson was formed for Kentuckians by Kentuckians, and he did not believe that it was the wish of the State that it should be removed."

"Well, by ——! after his promise. What did Davis say?"

"That if Kentucky opened the Northern door for invasion, she must not close the Southern door to entrance for defence."

"And dead right he is," growled the Major with satisfaction.

"Governor Magoffin asked Ohio and Indiana to join in an effort for a peace Congress," Chad added.

"Well?"

"Both governors refused."

"I tell you, boy, the hour has come."

The hour had come.

"I'm going away this morning, Major."

The Major did not even turn his head.

"I thought this was coming," he said quietly. Chad's face grew even paler, and he steeled his heart for the revelation.

"I've already spoken to Lieutenant Hunt," the Major went on. "He expects to be a captain, and he says that, maybe, he can make you a lieutenant. You can take that boy Brutus as a body servant." He brought his fist down on the railing of the porch. "God, but I'd give the rest of my life to be ten years younger than I am now."

"Major, I'm GOING INTO THE UNION ARMY."

The Major's pipe almost dropped from between his lips. Catching the arms of his chair with both hands, he turned heavily and with dazed wonder, as though the boy had struck him with his fist from behind, and, without a word, stared hard into Chad's tortured face. The keen old eye had not long to look before it saw the truth, and then, silently, the old man turned back. His hands trembled on the chair, and he slowly thrust them into his pockets, breathing hard through his nose. The boy expected an outbreak, but none came. A bee buzzed above them. A yellow butterfly zigzagged by. Blackbirds chattered in the firs. The screech of a peacock shrilled across the yard, and a ploughman's singing wailed across the fields:

Trouble, O Lawd! Nothin' but trouble in de lan' of Canaan.

The boy knew he had given his old friend a mortal hurt.

"Don't, Major," he pleaded. "You don't know how I have fought against this. I tried to be on your side. I thought I was. I joined the Rifles. I found first that I couldn't fight WITH the South, and—then—I—found that I had to fight FOR the North. It almost kills me when I think of all you have done."

The Major waved his hand imperiously. He was not the man to hear his favors recounted, much less refer to them himself. He straightened and got up from his chair. His manner had grown formal, stately, coldly courteous.

"I cannot understand, but you are old enough, sir, to know your own mind. You should have prepared me for this. You will excuse me a moment." Chad rose and the Major walked toward the door, his step not very steady, and his shoulders a bit shrunken—his back, somehow, looked suddenly old.

"Brutus!" he called sharply to a black boy who was training rosebushes in the yard. "Saddle Mr. Chad's horse." Then, without looking again at Chad, he turned into his office, and Chad, standing where he was, with a breaking heart, could hear, through the open window, the rustling of papers and the scratching of a pen.

In a few minutes he heard the Major rise and he turned to meet him. The old man held a roll of bills in one hand and a paper in the other.

"Here is the balance due you on our last trade," he said, quietly. "The mare is yours—Dixie," he added, grimly. "The old mare is in foal. I will keep her and send you your due when the time comes. We are quite even," he went on in a level tone of business. "Indeed, what you have done about the place more than exceeds any expense that you have ever caused me. If anything, I am still in your debt."

"I can't take it!" said Chad, choking back a sob.

"You will have to take it," the Major broke in, curtly, "unless—" the Major held back the bitter speech that was on his lips and Chad understood. The old man did not want to feel under any obligations to him.

"I would offer you Brutus, as was my intention, except that I know you would not take him," again he added, grimly, "and Brutus would run away from you."

"No, Major," said Chad, sadly, "I would not take Brutus," and he stepped down one step of the porch backward.

"I tried to tell you, Major, but you wouldn't listen. I don't wonder, for I couldn't explain to you what I couldn't understand myself. I—" the boy choked and tears filled his eyes. He was afraid to hold out his hand.

"Good-by, Major," he said, brokenly.

"Good-by, sir," answered the Major, with a stiff bow, but the old man's lip shook and he turned abruptly within.

Chad did not trust himself to look back, but, as he rode through the pasture to the pike gate, his ears heard, never to forget, the chatter of the blackbirds, the noises around the barn, the cry of the peacock, and the wailing of the ploughman:

Trouble, O Lawd! Nothin' but trouble—

At the gate the little mare turned her head toward town and started away in the easy swinging lope for which she was famous. From a cornfield Jerome Conners, the overseer, watched horse and rider for a while, and then his lips were lifted over his protruding teeth in one of his ghastly, infrequent smiles. Chad Buford was out of his way at last. At the Deans' gate, Snowball was just going in on Margaret's pony and Chad pulled up.

"Where's Mr. Dan, Snowball?—and Mr. Harry?"

"Mars Dan he gwine to de wah—an' I'se gwine wid him."

"Is Mr. Harry going, too?" Snowball hesitated. He did not like to gossip about family matters, but it was a friend of the family who was questioning him.

"Yessuh! But Mammy say Mars Harry's teched in de haid. He gwine to fight wid de po' white trash."

"Is Miss Margaret at home?"

"Yessuh."

Chad had his note to Margaret, unsealed. He little felt like seeing her now, but he had just as well have it all over at once. He took it out and looked it over once more—irresolute.

"I'm going away to join the Union army, Margaret. May I come to tell you good-by? If not, God bless you always. CHAD."

"Take this to Miss Margaret, Snowball, and bring me an answer here as soon as you can."

"Yessuh."

The black boy was not gone long. Chad saw him go up the steps, and in a few moments he reappeared and galloped back.

"Ole Mistis say dey ain't no answer."

"Thank you, Snowball." Chad pitched him a coin and loped on toward Lexington with his head bent, his hands folded on the pommel, and the reins flapping loosely. Within one mile of Lexington he turned into a cross-road and set his face toward the mountains.

An hour later, the General and Harry and Dan stood on the big portico. Inside, the mother and Margaret were weeping in each other's arms. Two negro boys were each leading a saddled horse from the stable, while Snowball was blubbering at the corner of the house. At the last moment Dan had decided to leave him behind. If Harry could have no servant, Dan, too, would have none. Dan was crying without shame. Harry's face was as white and stern as his father's. As the horses drew near the General stretched out the sabre in his hand to Dan.

"This should belong to you, Harry."

"It is yours to give, father," said Harry, gently.

"It shall never be drawn against my roof and your mother."

The boy was silent.

"You are going far North?" asked the General, more gently. "You will not fight on Kentucky soil?"

"You taught me that the first duty of a soldier is obedience. I must go where I'm ordered."

"God grant that you two may never meet."

"Father!" It was a cry of horror from both the lads.

The horses were waiting at the stiles. The General took Dan in his arms and the boy broke away and ran down the steps, weeping.

"Father," said Harry, with trembling lips, "I hope you won't be too hard on me. Perhaps the day will come when you won't be so ashamed of me. I hope you and mother will forgive me. I can't do otherwise than I must. Will you shake hands with me, father?"

"Yes, my son. God be with you both."

And then, as he watched the boys ride side by side to the gate, he added:

"I could kill my own brother with my own hand for this."

He saw them stop a moment at the gate; saw them clasp hands and turn opposite ways—one with his face set for Tennessee, the other making for the Ohio. Dan waved his cap in a last sad good-by. Harry rode over the hill without turning his head. The General stood rigid, with his hands clasped behind his back, staring across the gray fields between them. Through the winds, came the low sound of sobbing.



CHAPTER 21.

MELISSA

Shortly after dusk, that night, two or three wagons moved quietly out of Lexington, under a little guard with guns loaded and bayonets fixed. Back at the old Armory—the home of the "Rifles"—a dozen youngsters drilled vigorously with faces in a broad grin, as they swept under the motto of the company—"Our laws the commands of our Captain." They were following out those commands most literally. Never did Lieutenant Hunt give his orders more sonorously—he could be heard for blocks away. Never did young soldiers stamp out maneuvers more lustily—they made more noise than a regiment. Not a man carried a gun, though ringing orders to "Carry arms" and "Present arms" made the windows rattle. It was John Morgan's first ruse. While that mock-drill was going on, and listening Unionists outside were laughing to think how those Rifles were going to be fooled next day, the guns of the company were moving in those wagons toward Dixie—toward mocking-bird-haunted Bowling Green, where the underfed, unclothed, unarmed body of Albert Sydney Johnston's army lay, with one half-feathered wing stretching into the Cumberland hills and the frayed edge of the other touching the Ohio.

Next morning, the Home Guards came gayly around to the Armory to seize those guns, and the wily youngsters left temporarily behind (they, too, fled for Dixie, that night) gibed them unmercifully; so that, then and there, a little interchange of powder-and-ball civilities followed; and thus, on the very first day, Daniel Dean smelled the one and heard the other whistle right harmlessly and merrily. Straightway, more guards were called out; cannon were planted to sweep the principal streets, and from that hour the old town was under the rule of a Northern or Southern sword for the four years' reign of the war.

Meanwhile, Chad Buford was giving a strange journey to Dixie. Whenever he dismounted, she would turn her head toward the Bluegrass, as though it surely were time they were starting for home. When they reached the end of the turnpike, she lifted her feet daintily along the muddy road, and leaped pools of water like a cat. Climbing the first foot-hills, she turned her beautiful head to right and left, and with pointed ears snorted now and then at the strange dark woods on either side and the tumbling water-falls. The red of her wide nostrils was showing when she reached the top of the first mountain, and from that high point of vantage she turned her wondering eyes over the wide rolling stretch that waved homeward, and whinnied with distinct uneasiness when Chad started her down into the wilderness beyond. Distinctly that road was no path for a lady to tread, but Dixie was to know it better in the coming war.

Within ten miles of the Turners', Chad met the first man that he knew—Hence Sturgill from Kingdom Come. He was driving a wagon.

"Howdye, Hence!" said Chad, reining in.

"Whoa!" said Hence, pulling in and staring at Chad's horse and at Chad from hat to spur.

"Don't you know me, Hence?"

"Well, God—I—may—die, if it ain't Chad! How air ye, Chad? Goin' up to ole Joel's?"

"Yes. How are things on Kingdom Come?"

Hence spat on the ground and raised one hand high over his head:

"God—I—may—die, if thar hain't hell to pay on Kingdom Come. You better keep offo' Kingdom Come," and then he stopped with an expression of quick alarm, looked around him into the bushes and dropped his voice to a whisper:

"But I hain't sayin' a word—rickollect now—not a word!"

Chad laughed aloud. "What's the matter with you, Hence?"

Hence put one finger on one side of his nose—still speaking in a low tone:

"Whut'd I say, Chad? D'I say one word?" He gathered up his reins. "You rickollect Jake and Jerry Dillon?" Chad nodded. "You know Jerry was al'ays a-runnin' over Jake 'cause Jake' didn't have good sense. Jake was drapped when he was a baby. Well, Jerry struck Jake over the head with a fence-rail 'bout two months ago, an when Jake come to, he had just as good sense as anybody, and now he hates Jerry like pizen, an Jerry's half afeard of him. An' they do say a how them two brothers air a-goin'" Again Hence stopped abruptly and clucked to his team "But I ain't a-sayin' a word, now, mind ye—not a word!"

Chad rode on, amused, and thinking that Hence had gone daft, but he was to learn better. A reign of forty years' terror was starting in those hills.

Not a soul was in sight when he reached the top of the hill from which he could see the Turner home below—about the house or the orchard or in the fields. No one answered his halloo at the Turner gate, though Chad was sure that he saw a woman's figure flit past the door. It was a full minute before Mother Turner cautiously thrust her head outside the door and peered at him.

"Why, Aunt Betsey," called Chad, "don't you know me?"

At the sound of his voice Melissa sprang out the door with a welcoming cry, and ran to him, Mother Turner following with a broad smile on her kind old face. Chad felt the tears almost come—these were friends indeed. How tall Melissa had grown, and how lovely she was, with her tangled hair and flashing eyes and delicately modelled face. She went with him to the stable to help him put up his horse, blushing when he looked at her and talking very little, while the old mother, from the fence, followed him with her dim eyes. At once Chad began to ply both with questions—where was Uncle Joel and the boys and the school-master? And, straightway, Chad felt a reticence in both—a curious reticence even with him. On each side of the fireplace, on each side of the door, and on each side of the window, he saw narrow blocks fixed to the logs. One was turned horizontal, and through the hole under it Chad saw daylight—portholes they were. At the door were taken blocks as catches for a piece of upright wood nearby, which was plainly used to bar the door. The cabin was a fortress. By degrees the story came out. The neighborhood was in a turmoil of bloodshed and terror. Tom and Dolph had gone off to the war—Rebels. Old Joel had been called to the door one night, a few weeks since, and had been shot down without warning. They had fought all night. Melissa herself had handled a rifle at one of the portholes. Rube was out in the woods now, with Jack guarding and taking care of his wounded father. A Home Guard had been organized, and Daws Dillon was captain. They were driving out of the mountains every man who owned a negro, for nearly every man who owned a negro had taken, or was forced to take, the Rebel side. The Dillons were all Yankees, except Jerry, who had gone off with Tom; and the giant brothers, Rebel Jerry and Yankee Jake—as both were already known—had sworn to kill each other on sight. Bushwhacking had already begun. When Chad asked about the school-master, the old woman's face grew stern, and Melissa's lip curled with scorn.

"Yankee!" The girl spat the word out with such vindictive bitterness that Chad's face turned slowly scarlet, while the girl's keen eyes pierced him like a knife, and narrowed as, with pale face and heaving breast, she rose suddenly from her chair and faced him—amazed, bewildered, burning with sudden hatred. "And you're another!" The girl's voice was like a hiss.

"Why, 'Lissy!" cried the old mother, startled, horrified.

"Look at him!" said the girl. The old woman looked; her face grew hard and frightened, and she rose feebly, moving toward the girl as though for protection against him. Chad's very heart seemed suddenly to turn to water. He had been dreading the moment to come when he must tell. He knew it would be hard, but he was not looking for this.

"You better git away!" quavered the old woman, "afore Joel and Rube come in."

"Hush!" said the girl, sharply, her hands clinched like claws, her whole body stiff, like a tigress ready to attack, or awaiting attack.

"Mebbe he come hyeh to find out whar they air—don't tell him!"

"Lissy!" said Chad, brokenly.

"Then whut did you come fer?"

"To tell you good-by, I came to see all of you, Lissy."

The girl laughed scornfully, and Chad knew he was helpless. He could not explain, and they could not understand—nobody had understood.

"Aunt Betsey," he said, "you took Jack and me in, and you took care of me just as though I had been your own child. You know I'd give my life for you or Uncle Joel, or any one of the boys"—his voice grew a little stern—"and you know it, too, Lissy—"

"You're makin' things wuss," interrupted the girl, stridently, "an' now you're goin' to do all you can to kill us. I reckon you can see that door. Why don't you go over to the Dillons?" she panted. "They're friends o' your'n. An' don't let Uncle Joel or Rube ketch you anywhar round hyeh!"

"I'm not afraid to see Uncle Joel or Rube, Lissy."

"You must git away, Chad," quavered the old woman. "They mought hurt ye!"

"I'm sorry not to see Jack. He's the only friend I have now."

"Why, Jack would snarl at ye," said the girl, bitterly. "He hates a Yankee." She pointed again with her finger. "I reckon you can see that door."

They followed him, Melissa going on the porch and the old woman standing in the doorway. On one side of the walk Chad saw a rose-bush that he had brought from the Bluegrass for Melissa. It was dying. He took one step toward it, his foot sinking in the soft earth where the girl had evidently been working around it, and broke off the one green leaf that was left.

"Here, Lissy! You'll be sorry you were so hard on me. I'd never get over it if I didn't think you would. Keep this, won't you, and let's be friends, not enemies."

He held it out, and the girl angrily struck the rose-leaf from his hand to her feet.

Chad rode away at a walk. Two hundred yards below, where the hill rose, the road was hock-deep with sand, and Dixie's feet were as noiseless as a cat's. A few yards beyond a ravine on the right, a stone rolled from the bushes into the road. Instinctively Chad drew rein, and Dixie stood motionless. A moment later, a crouching figure, with a long squirrel rifle, slipped out of the bushes and started noiselessly across the ravine. Chad's pistol flashed.

"Stop!"

The figure crouched more, and turned a terror-stricken face—Daws Dillon's.

"Oh, it's you, is it—Well, drop that gun and come down here."

The Dillon boy rose, leaving his gun on the ground, and came down, trembling.

"What're you doin' sneaking around in the brush?"

"Nothin'!" The Dillon had to make two efforts before he could speak at all. "Nothin', jes' a-huntin'!"

"Huntin'!" repeated Chad. He lowered his pistol and looked at the sorry figure silently.

"I know what you were huntin', you rattlesnake! I understand you are captain of the Home Guard. I reckon you don't know that nobody has to go into this war. That a man has the right to stay peaceably at home, and nobody has the right to bother him. If you don't know it, I tell you now. I believe you had something to do with shooting Uncle Joel."

The Dillon shook his head, and fumbled with his hands.

"If I knew it, I'd kill you where you stand, now. But I've got one word to say to you, you hell-pup. I hate to think it, but you and I are on the same side—that is, if you have any side. But in spite of that, if I hear of any harm happening to Aunt Betsey, or Melissa, or Uncle Joel, or Rube, while they are all peaceably at home, I'm goin' to hold you and Tad responsible, whether you are or not, and I'll kill you"—he raised one hand to make the Almighty a witness to his oath—"I'll kill you, if I have to follow you both to hell for doin' it. Now, you take keer of 'em! Turn 'round!"

The Dillon hesitated.

"Turn!" Chad cried, savagely, raising his pistol. "Go back to that gun, an' if you turn your head I'll shoot you where you're sneakin' aroun' to shoot Rube or Uncle Joel—in the back, you cowardly feist. Pick up that gun! Now, let her off! See if you can hit that beech-tree in front of you. Just imagine that it's me."

The rifle cracked and Chad laughed.

"Well, you ain't much of a shot. I reckon you must have chills and fever. Now, come back here. Give me your powder-horn. You'll find it on top of the hill on the right-hand side of the road. Now, you trot—home!"

Then Dillon stared.

"Double-quick!" shouted Chad. "You ought to know what that means if you are a soldier—a soldier!" he repeated, contemptuously.

The Dillon disappeared on a run.

Chad rode all that night. At dawn he reached the foot-hills, and by noon he drew up at the road which turned to Camp Dick Robinson. He sat there a long time thinking, and then pushed on toward Lexington. If he could, he would keep from fighting on Kentucky soil.

Next morning he was going at an easy "running-walk" along the old Maysville road toward the Ohio. Within three miles of Major Buford's, he leaped the fence and stuck across the fields that he might go around and avoid the risk of a painful chance meeting with his old friend or any of the Deans.

What a land of peace and plenty it was—the woodlands, meadows, pasture lands! Fat cattle raised their noses from the thick grass and looked with mild inquiry at him. Sheep ran bleating toward him, as though he were come to salt them. A rabbit leaped from a thorn-bush and whisked his white flag into safety in a hemp-field. Squirrels barked in the big oaks, and a covey of young quail fluttered up from a fence corner and sailed bravely away. 'Possum signs were plentiful, and on the edge of the creek he saw a coon solemnly searching under a rock with one paw for crawfish Every now and then Dixie would turn her head impatiently to the left, for she knew where home was. The Deans' house was just over the hill he would have but the ride to the top to see it and, perhaps, Margaret. There was no need. As he sat, looking up the hill, Margaret herself rode slowly over it, and down, through the sunlight slanting athwart the dreaming woods, straight toward him. Chad sat still. Above him the road curved, and she could not see him until she turned the little thicket just before him. Her pony was more startled than was she. A little leap of color to her face alone showed her surprise.

"Did you get my note?"

"I did. You got my mother's message?"

"I did." Chad paused. "That is why I am passing around you."

The girl said nothing.

"But I'm glad I came so near. I wanted to see you once more. I wish I could make you understand. But nobody understands. I hardly understand myself. But please try to believe that what I say is true. I'm just back from the mountains, and listen, Margaret—" He halted a moment to steady his voice. "The Turners down there took me in when I was a ragged outcast. They clothed me, fed me, educated me. The Major took me when I was little more; and he fed me, clothed me, educated me. The Turners scorned me—Melissa told me to go herd with the Dillons. The Major all but turned me from his door. Your father was bitter toward me, thinking that I had helped turn Harry to the Union cause. But let me tell you! If the Turners died, believing me a traitor; if Lissy died with a curse on her lips for me; if the Major died without, as he believed, ever having polluted his lips again with my name; if Harry were brought back here dead, and your father died, believing that his blood was on my hands; and if I lost you and your love, and you died, believing the same thing—I must still go. Oh, Margaret, I can't understand—I have ceased to reason. I only know I must go!"

The girl in the mountains had let her rage and scorn loose like a storm, but the gentlewoman only grew more calm. Every vestige of color left her, but her eyes never for a moment wavered from his face. Her voice was quiet and even and passionless.

"Then, why don't you go?"

The lash of an overseer's whip across his face could not have made his soul so bleed. Even then he did not lose himself.

"I am in your way," he said, quietly. And backing Dixie from the road, and without bending his head or lowering his eyes, he waited, hat in hand, for Margaret to pass.

All that day Chad rode, and, next morning, Dixie climbed the Union bank of the Ohio and trotted into the recruiting camp of the Fourth Ohio Cavalry. The first man Chad saw was Harry Dean—grave, sombre, taciturn, though he smiled and thrust out his hand eagerly. Chad's eyes dropped to the sergeant's stripes on Harry's sleeves, and again Harry smiled.

"You'll have 'em yourself in a week. These fellows ride like a lot of meal-bags over here. Here's my captain," he added, in a lower voice.

A pompous officer rode slowly up. He pulled in his horse when he saw Chad.

"You want to join the army?"

"Yes," said Chad.

"All right. That's a fine horse you've got."

Chad said nothing.

"What's his name?"

"HER name is Dixie."

The captain stared. Some soldiers behind laughed in a smothered fashion, sobering their' faces quickly when the captain turned upon them, furious.

"Well, change her name!"

"I'll not change her name," said Chad, quietly.

"What!" shouted the officer. "How dare you—" Chad's eyes looked ominous.

"Don't you give any orders to me—not yet. You haven't the right; and when you have, you can save your breath by not giving that one. This horse comes from Kentucky, and so do I; her name will stay Dixie as long as I straddle her, and I propose to straddle her until one of us dies, or,"—he smiled and nodded across the river—"somebody over there gets her who won't object to her name as much as you do."

The astonished captain's lips opened, but a quiet voice behind interrupted him:

"Never mind, Captain." Chad turned and saw a short, thick-set man with a stubbly brown beard, whose eyes were twinkling, though his face was grave. "A boy who wants to fight for the Union, and insists on calling his horse Dixie, must be all right. Come with me, my lad."

As Chad followed, he heard the man saluted as Colonel Grant, but he paid no heed. Few people at that time did pay heed to the name of Ulysses Grant.



CHAPTER 22.

MORGAN'S MEN

Boots and saddles at daybreak!

Over the border, in Dixie, two videttes in gray trot briskly from out a leafy woodland, side by side, and looking with keen eyes right and left; one, erect, boyish, bronzed; the other, slouching, bearded, huge—the boy, Daniel Dean; the man, Rebel Jerry Dillon, one of the giant twins.

Fifty yards behind them emerges a single picket; after him come three more videttes, the same distance apart. Fifty yards behind the last rides "the advance"—a guard of twenty-five picked men. No commission among "Morgan's Men" was more eagerly sought than a place on that guard of hourly risk and honor. Behind it trot still three more videttes, at intervals of one hundred yards, and just that interval behind the last of these ride Morgan's Men, the flower of Kentucky's youth, in columns of fours—Colonel Hunt's regiment in advance, the colors borne by Renfrew the Silent in a brilliant Zouave jacket studded with buttons of red coral. In the rear rumble two Parrot guns, affectionately christened the "Bull Pups."

Skirting the next woodland ran a cross-road. Down one way gallops Dan, and down the other lumbers Rebel Jerry, each two hundred yards. A cry rings from vidette to vidette behind them and back to the guard. Two horsemen spur from the "advance" and take the places of the last two videttes, while the videttes in front take and keep the original formation until the column passes that cross-road, when Dean and Dillon gallop up to their old places in the extreme front again. Far in front, and on both flanks, are scouting parties, miles away.

This was the way Morgan marched.

Yankees ahead! Not many, to be sure—no more numerous than two or three to one; so back fall the videttes and forward charges that advance guard like a thunderbolt, not troubling the column behind. Wild yells, a clattering of hoofs, the crack of pistol-shots, a wild flight, a merry chase, a few riderless horses gathered in from the fleeing Yankees, and the incident is over.

Ten miles more, and many hostile bayonets gleam ahead. A serious fight, this, perhaps—so back drops the advance, this time as a reserve; up gallops the column into single rank and dismounts, while the flank companies, deploying as skirmishers, cover the whole front, one man out of each set of fours and the corporals holding the horses in the rear. The "Bull Pups" bark and the Rebel yell rings as the line—the files two yards apart—"a long flexible line curving forward at each extremity"—slips forward at a half run. This time the Yankees charge.

From every point of that curving line pours a merciless fire, and the charging men in blue recoil—all but one. (War is full of grim humor.) On comes one lone Yankee, hatless, red-headed, pulling on his reins with might and main, his horse beyond control, and not one of the enemy shoot as he sweeps helplessly into their line. A huge rebel grabs his bridle-rein.

"I don't know whether to kill you now," he says, with pretended ferocity, "or wait till the fight is over."

"For God's sake, don't kill me at all!" shouts the Yankee. "I'm a dissipated character, and not prepared to die."

Shots from the right flank and rear, and the line is thrown about like a rope. But the main body of the Yankees is to the left.

"Left face! Double-quick!" is the ringing order, and, by magic, the line concentrates in a solid phalanx and sweeps forward.

This was the way Morgan fought.

And thus, marching and fighting, he went his triumphant way into the land of the enemy, without sabres, without artillery, without even the "Bull Pups," sometimes—fighting infantry, cavalry, artillery with only muzzle-loading rifles, pistols, and shotguns; scattering Home Guards like turkeys; destroying railroads and bridges; taking towns and burning Government stores, and encompassed, usually, with forces treble his own.

This was what Morgan did on a raid, was what he had done, what he was starting out now to do again.

Darkness threatens, and the column halts to bivouac for the night on the very spot where, nearly a year before, Morgan's Men first joined Johnston's army, which, like a great, lean, hungry hawk, guarded the Southern border.

Daniel Dean was a war-worn veteran now. He could ride twenty hours out of the twenty-four; he could sleep in his saddle or anywhere but on picket duty, and there was no trick of the trade in camp, or on the march, that was not at his finger's end.

Fire first! Nobody had a match, the leaves were wet and the twigs soggy, but by some magic a tiny spark glows under some shadowy figure, bites at the twigs, snaps at the branches, and wraps a log in flames.

Water next! A tin cup rattles in a bucket, and another shadowy figure steals off into the darkness, with an instinct as unerring as the skill of a water-witch with a willow wand. The Yankees chose open fields for camps, but your rebel took to the woods. Each man and his chum picked a tree for a home, hung up canteens and spread blankets at the foot of it. Supper—Heavens, what luck—fresh beef! One man broils it on coals, pinning pieces of fat to it to make gravy; another roasts it on a forked stick, for Morgan carried no cooking utensils on a raid.

Here, one man made up bread in an oilcloth (and every Morgan's man had one soon after they were issued to the Federals); another worked up corn-meal into dough in the scooped-out half of a pumpkin; one baked bread on a flat rock, another on a board, while a third had twisted his dough around his ram-rod; if it were spring-time, a fourth might be fitting his into a cornshuck to roast in ashes. All this Dan Dean could do.

The roaring fire thickens the gloom of the woods where the lonely pickets stand. Pipes are out now. An oracle outlines the general campaign of the war as it will be and as it should have been. A long-winded, innocent braggart tells of his personal prowess that day. A little group is guying the new recruit. A wag shaves a bearded comrade on one side of his face, pockets his razor and refuses to shave the other side. A poet, with a bandaged eye, and hair like a windblown hay-stack, recites "I am dying, Egypt—dying," and then a pure, clear, tenor voice starts through the forest-aisles, and there is sudden silence. Every man knows that voice, and loves the boy who owns it—little Tom Morgan, Dan's brother-in-arms, the General's seventeen-year-old brother—and there he stands leaning against a tree, full in the light of the fire, a handsome, gallant figure—a song like a seraph's pouring from his lips. One bearded soldier is gazing at him with curious intentness, and when the song ceases, lies down with a suddenly troubled face. He has seen the "death-look" in the boy's eyes—that prophetic death-look in which he has unshaken faith. The night deepens, figures roll up in blankets, quiet comes, and Dan lies wide awake and deep in memories, and looking back on those early helpless days of the war with a tolerant smile.

He was a war-worn veteran now, but how vividly he could recall that first night in the camp of a big army, in the very woods where he now lay—dusk settling over the Green River country, which Morgan's Men grew to love so well; a mocking-bird singing a farewell song from the top of a stunted oak to the dead summer and the dying day; Morgan seated on a cracker-box in front of his tent, contemplatively chewing one end of his mustache; Lieutenant Hunt swinging from his horse, smiling grimly.

"It would make a horse laugh—a Yankee cavalry horse, anyhow—to see this army."

Hunt had been over the camp that first afternoon on a personal tour of investigation. They were not a thousand Springfield and Enfield rifles at that time in Johnston's army. Half of the soldiers were armed with shotguns and squirrel rifle and the greater part of the other half with flintlock muskets. But nearly every man, thinking he was in for a rough-and-tumble fight, had a bowie knife and a revolver swung to his belt.

"Those Arkansas and Texas fellows have got knives that would make a Malay's blood run cold."

"Well, they'll do to hew firewood and cut meat," laughed Morgan.

The troops were not only badly armed. On his tour, Hunt had seen men making blankets of pieces of old carpet, lined on one side with a piece of cotton cloth; men wearing ox-hide buskins, or complicated wrapping of rags, for shoes; orderly sergeants making out reports on shingles; surgeon using a twisted handkerchief instead of a tourniquet. There was a total lack of medicine, and camp diseases were already breaking out—measles, typhoid fever, pneumonia, bowel troubles—each fatal, it seemed, in time of war.

"General Johnston has asked Richmond for a stand of thirty thousand arms," Morgan had mused, and Hunt looked up inquiringly.

"Mr. Davis can only spare a thousand."

"That's lucky," said Hunt, grimly.

And then the military organization of that army, so characteristic of the Southerner! An officer who wanted to be more than a colonel, and couldn't be a brigadier, would have a "legion"—a hybrid unit between a regiment and a brigade. Sometimes there was a regiment whose roll-call was more than two thousand men, so popular was its colonel. Companies would often refuse to designate themselves by letter, but by the thrilling titles they had given themselves. How Morgan and Hunt had laughed over "The Yellow Jackets," "The Dead Shots," "The Earthquakes," "The Chickasha Desperadoes," and "The Hell Roarers"! Regiments would bear the names of their commanders—a singular instance of the Southerner's passion for individuality, as a man, a company, a regiment, or a brigade. And there was little or no discipline, as the word is understood among the military elect, and with no army that the world has ever seen, Richard Hunt always claimed, was there so little need of it. For Southern soldiers, he argued, were, from the start, obedient, zealous, and tolerably patient, from good sense and a strong sense of duty. They were born fighters; a spirit of emulation induced them to learn the drill; pride and patriotism kept them true and patient to the last, but they could not be made, by punishment or the fear of it, into machines. They read their chance of success, not in opposing numbers, but in the character and reputation of their commanders, who, in turn, believed, as a rule, that "the unthinking automaton, formed by routine and punishment, could no more stand before the high-strung young soldier with brains and good blood, and some practice and knowledge of warfare, than a tree could resist a stroke of lightning." So that with Southern soldiers discipline came to mean "the pride which made soldiers learn their duties rather than incur disgrace; the subordination that came from self-respect and respect for the man whom they thought worthy to command them."

Boots and saddles again at daybreak! By noon the column reached Green River, over the Kentucky line, where Morgan, even on his way down to join Johnston, had begun the operations which were to make him famous. No picket duty that infantry could do as well, for Morgan's cavalry! He wanted it kept out on the front or the flanks of an army, and as close as possible upon the enemy. Right away, there had been thrilling times for Dan in the Green River country—setting out at dark, chasing countrymen in Federal pay or sympathy, prowling all night around and among pickets and outposts; entrapping the unwary; taking a position on the line of retreat at daybreak, and turning leisurely back to camp with prisoners and information. How memories thronged! At this very turn of the road, Dan remembered, they had their first brush with the enemy. No plan of battle had been adopted, other than to hide on both sides of the road and send their horses to the rear.

"I think we ought to charge 'em," said Georgie Forbes, Chad's old enemy. Dan saw that his lip trembled, and, a moment later, Georgie, muttering something, disappeared.

The Yankees had come on, and, discovering them, halted. Morgan himself stepped out in the road and shot the officer riding at the head of the column. His men fell back without returning the fire, deployed and opened up. Dan recognized the very tree behind which he had stood, and again he could almost hear Richard Hunt chuckling from behind another close by.

"We would be in bad shape," said Richard Hunt, as the bullets whistled high overhead, "if we were in the tops of these trees instead of behind them." There had been no maneuvering, no command given among the Confederates. Each man fought his own fight. In ten minutes a horse-holder ran up from the rear, breathless, and announced that the Yankees were flanking. Every man withdrew, straightway, after his own fashion, and in his own time. One man was wounded and several were shot through the clothes.

"That was like a camp-meeting or an election row," laughed Morgan, when they were in camp.

"Or an affair between Austrian and Italian outposts," said Hunt.

A chuckle rose behind them. A lame colonel was limping past.

"I got your courier," he said.

"I sent no courier," said Morgan.

"It was Forbes who wanted to charge 'em," said Dan.

Again the Colonel chuckled.

"The Yankees ran when you did," he said, and limped, chuckling, away.

But it was great fun, those moonlit nights, burning bridges and chasing Home Guards who would flee fifteen or twenty miles sometimes to "rally." Here was a little town through which Dan and Richard Hunt had marched with nine prisoners in a column—taken by them alone—and a captured United States flag, flying in front, scaring Confederate sympathizers and straggling soldiers, as Hunt reported, horribly. Dan chuckled at the memory, for the prisoners were quartered with different messes, and, that night, several bottles of sparkling Catawba happened, by some mystery, to be on hand. The prisoners were told that this was regularly issued by their commissaries, and thereupon they plead, with tears, to be received into the Confederate ranks.

This kind of service was valuable training for Morgan's later work. Slight as it was, it soon brought him thirty old, condemned artillery-horses—Dan smiled now at the memory of those ancient chargers—which were turned over to Morgan to be nursed until they would bear a mount, and, by and by, it gained him a colonelcy and three companies, superbly mounted and equipped, which, as "Morgan's Squadron," became known far and near. Then real service began.

In January, the right wing of Johnston's hungry hawk had been broken in the Cumberland Mountains. Early in February, Johnston had withdrawn it from Kentucky before Buell's hosts, with its beak always to the foe. By the middle of the month, Grant had won the Western border States to the Union, with the capture of Fort Donelson. In April, the sun of Shiloh rose and set on the failure of the first Confederate aggressive campaign at the West; and in that fight Dan saw his first real battle, and Captain Hunt was wounded. In May, Buell had pushed the Confederate lines south and east toward Chattanooga. To retain a hold on the Mississippi valley, the Confederates must make another push for Kentucky, and it was this great Southern need that soon put John Morgan's name on the lips of every rebel and Yankee in the middle South. In June, provost-marshals were appointed in every county in Kentucky; the dogs of war began to be turned locals on the "secesh sympathizers" throughout the State, and Jerome Conners, overseer, began to render sly service to the Union cause.

For it was in June that Morgan paid his first memorable little visit to the Bluegrass, and Daniel Dean wrote his brother Harry the short tale of the raid.

"We left Dixie with nine hundred men," the letter ran, "and got back in twenty-four days with twelve hundred. Travelled over one thousand miles, captured seventeen towns, destroyed all Government supplies and arms in them, scattered fifteen hundred Home Guards, and paroled twelve hundred regular troops. Lost of the original nine hundred, in killed, wounded, and missing, about ninety men. How's that? We kept twenty thousand men busy guarding Government posts or chasing us, and we're going back often. Oh Harry, I AM glad that you are with Grant."

But Harry was not with Grant—not now. While Morgan was marching up from Dixie to help Kirby Smith in the last great effort that the Confederacy was about to make to win Kentucky—down from the yellow river marched the Fourth Ohio Cavalry to go into camp at Lexington; and with it marched Chadwick Buford and Harry Dean who, too, were veterans now—who, too, were going home. Both lads wore a second lieutenant's empty shoulder-straps, which both yet meant to fill with bars, but Chad's promotion had not come as swiftly as Harry had predicted; the Captain, whose displeasure he had incurred, prevented that. It had come, in time, however, and with one leap he had landed, after Shiloh, at Harry's side. In the beginning, young Dean had wanted to go to the Army of the Potomac, as did Chad, but one quiet word from the taciturn colonel with the stubbly reddish-brown beard and the perpetual black cigar kept both where they were.

"Though," said Grant to Chad, as his eye ran over beautiful Dixie from tip of nose to tip of tail, and came back to Chad, slightly twinkling, "I've a great notion to put you in the infantry just to get hold of that horse."

So it was no queer turn of fate that had soon sent both the lads to help hold Zollicoffer at Cumberland Gap, that stopped them at Camp Dick Robinson to join forces with Wolford's cavalry, and brought Chad face to face with an old friend. Wolford's cavalry was gathered from the mountains and the hills, and when some scouts came in that afternoon, Chad, to his great joy, saw, mounted on a gaunt sorrel, none other than his old school-master, Caleb Hazel, who, after shaking hands with both Harry and Chad, pointed silently at a great, strange figure following him on a splendid horse some fifty yards behind. The man wore a slouch hat, tow linen breeches, home-made suspenders, a belt with two pistols, and on his naked heels were two huge Texan spurs. Harry broke into a laugh, and Chad's puzzled face cleared when the man grinned; it was Yankee Jake Dillon, one of the giant twins. Chad looked at him curiously; that blow on the head that his brother, Rebel Jerry, had given him, had wrought a miracle. The lips no longer hung apart, but were set firmly, and the eye was almost keen; the face was still rather stupid, but not foolish—and it was still kind. Chad knew that, somewhere in the Confederate lines, Rebel Jerry was looking for Jake, as Yankee Jake, doubtless, was now looking for Jerry, and he began to think that it might be well for Jerry if neither was ever found. Daws Dillon, so he learned from Caleb Hazel and Jake, was already making his name a watchword of terror along the border of Virginia and Tennessee, and was prowling, like a wolf, now and then, along the edge of the Bluegrass. Old Joel Turner had died of his wound, Rube had gone off to the war and Mother Turner and Melissa were left at home, alone.

"Daws fit fust on one side and then on t'other," said Jake, and then he smiled in a way that Chad understood; "an' sence you was down thar last Daws don't seem to hanker much atter meddlin' with the Turners, though the two women did have to run over into Virginny, once in a while. Melissy," he added, "was a-goin' to marry Dave Hilton, so folks said; and he reckoned they'd already hitched most likely, sence Chad thar—"

A flash from Chad's eyes stopped him, and Chad, seeing Harry's puzzled face, turned away. He was glad that Melissa was going to marry—yes, he was glad; and how he did pray that she might be happy!

Fighting Zollicoffer, only a few days later, Chad and Harry had their baptism of fire, and strange battle orders they heard, that made them smile even in the thick of the fight.

"Huddle up thar!" "Scatterout, now!" "Form a line of fight!" "Wait till you see the shine of their eyes!"

"I see 'em!" shouted a private, and "bang" went his gun. That was the way the fight opened. Chad saw Harry's eyes blazing like stars from his pale face, which looked pained and half sick, and Chad understood—the lads were fighting their own people, and there was no help for it. A voice bellowed from the rear, and a man in a red cap loomed in the smoke-mist ahead:

"Now, now! Git up and git, boys!"

That was the order for the charge, and the blue line went forward. Chad never forgot that first battle-field when he saw it a few hours later strewn with dead and wounded, the dead lying, as they dropped, in every conceivable position, features stark, limbs rigid; one man with a half-smoked cigar on his breast; the faces of so many beardless; some frowning, some as if asleep and dreaming; and the wounded—some talking pitifully, some in delirium, some courteous, patient, anxious to save trouble, others morose, sullen, stolid, independent; never forgot it, even the terrible night after Shiloh, when he searched heaps of wounded and slain for Caleb Hazel, who lay all through the night wounded almost to death.

Later, the Fourth Ohio followed Johnston, as he gave way before Buell, and many times did they skirmish and fight with ubiquitous Morgan's Men. Several times Harry and Dan sent each other messages to say that each was still unhurt, and both were in constant horror of some day coming face to face. Once, indeed, Harry, chasing a rebel and firing at him, saw him lurch in his saddle, and Chad, coming up, found the lad on the ground, crying over a canteen which the rebel had dropped. It was marked with the initials D. D., the strap was cut by the bullet Harry had fired, and not for a week of agonizing torture did Harry learn that the canteen, though Dan's, had been carried that day by another man.

It was on these scouts and skirmishes that the four—Harry and Chad, and Caleb Hazel and Yankee Jake Dillon, whose dog-like devotion to Chad soon became a regimental joke—became known, not only among their own men, but among their enemies, as the shrewdest and most daring scouts in the Federal service. Every Morgan's man came to know the name of Chad Buford; but it was not until Shiloh that Chad got his shoulder-straps, leading a charge under the very eye of General Grant. After Shiloh, the Fourth Ohio went back to its old quarters across the river, and no sooner were Chad and Harry there than Kentucky was put under the Department of the Ohio; and so it was also no queer turn of fate that now they were on their way to new head-quarters in Lexington.

Straight along the turnpike that ran between the Dean and the Buford farms, the Fourth Ohio went in a cloud of thick dust that rose and settled like a gray choking mist on the seared fields. Side by side rode Harry and Chad, and neither spoke when, on the left, the white columns of the Dean house came into view, and, on the right, the red brick of Chad's old home showed through the dusty leaves; not even when both saw on the Dean porch the figures of two women who, standing motionless, were looking at them. Harry's shoulders drooped, and he stared stonily ahead, while Chad turned his head quickly. The front door and shutters of the Buford house were closed, and there were few signs of life about the place. Only at the gate was the slouching figure of Jerome Conners, the overseer, who, waving his hat at the column, recognized Chad, as he rode by, and spoke to him, Chad thought, with a covert sneer. Farther ahead, and on the farthest boundary of the Buford farm, was a Federal fort, now deserted, and the beautiful woodland that had once stood in perfect beauty around it was sadly ravaged and nearly gone, as was the Dean woodland across the road. It was plain that some people were paying the Yankee piper for the death-dance in which a mighty nation was shaking its feet.