Two days after the battle of Antietam, Dick went with Colonel Winchester
to Washington on official duty. His nerves, shaken so severely by that
awful battle, were not yet fully restored and he was glad of the little
respite, and change of scene. The sights of the city and the talk of men
were a restorative to him.
The capital was undoubtedly gay. The deep depression and fear that
had hung over it a few weeks ago were gone. Men had believed after the
Second Manassas that Lee might take Washington and this fear was not
decreased when he passed into Maryland on what seemed to be an invasion.
Many had begun to believe that he was invincible, that every Northern
commander whoever he might be, would be beaten by him, but Antietam,
although there were bitter complaints that Lee might have been destroyed
instead of merely being checked, had changed a sky of steel into a sky
of blue.
Washington was not only gay, it was brilliant. Life flowed fast and it
was astonishingly vivid. A restless society, always seeking something
new flitted from house to house. Dick, young and impressionable, would
have been glad to share a little in it, but his time was too short. He
went once with Colonel Winchester to the theatre, and the boy who had
thrice seen a hundred and fifty thousand men in deadly action hung
breathless over the mimic struggles of a few men and women on a painted
stage.
The second day after his arrival he received a letter from his mother
that had been awaiting him there. It had come by the way of Louisville
through the Northern lines, and it was long and full of news. Pendleton,
she said, was a sad town in these days. All of the older boys and
young men had gone away to the armies, and many of them had been killed
already, or had died in hospitals. Here she gave names and Dick's heart
grew heavy, because in this fatal list were old friends of his.
It was not alone the boys and young men who had gone, wrote Mrs. Mason,
but the middle-aged men, too. Dr. Russell had kept the Pendleton Academy
open, but he had no pupil over sixteen years of age. There were no
trustees, because they had all gone to the war. Senator Culver had been
killed in the fighting in Tennessee, but she heard that Colonel Kenton
was alive and well and with Bragg's army.
The affairs of the Union, she continued, were not going well in
Tennessee and Kentucky. The terrible Confederate cavalryman Forrest had
suddenly raided Murfreesborough in Tennessee, where Union regiments were
stationed, and had destroyed or captured them all. Throughout the west
the Southerners were raising their heads again. General Bragg, it was
said, was advancing with a strong army, and was already farther north
than the army of General Buell, which was in Tennessee. It was said that
Louisville, one of the largest and richest of the border cities, would
surely fall into the hands of the South.
Dick read the letter with changing and strong emotions. Amid the
terrible struggles in the east, the west was almost blotted out of
his mind. The Second Manassas and Antietam had great power to absorb
attention wholly upon themselves. He had wholly forgotten for the time
about Pendleton, the people whom he knew, and even his mother. Now
they returned with increased strength. His memory was flooded with
recollections of the little town, every house and face of which he knew.
And so the Confederates were coming north again with a great army.
Shiloh had been far from crushing them in the west. The letter had
been written before the Second Manassas, and that and Lee's great fight
against odds at Antietam would certainly arouse in them the wish for
like achievements. He inferred that since the armies in the east were
exhausted, the great field for action would be for a while, in the west,
and he was seized with an intense longing for that region which was his
own.
It was not coincidence, but the need for men that made Dick's wish come
true almost at once. A few hours after he received his letter Colonel
Winchester found him sitting in the lobby of the hotel in which Dick had
twice talked with the contractor. But the boy was alone this time, and
as Colonel Winchester sat down beside him he said:
“Dick, the capital has received alarming news from Kentucky. Buoyed
up by their successes in the east the Confederacy is going to make an
effort to secure that state. Bragg with a powerful force is already on
his way toward Louisville, and we fear that he has slipped away from
Buell.”
“So I've heard. I found here a letter from my mother, and she told me
all the reports from that section.”
“And is Mrs. Mason well? She has not been troubled by guerillas, or in
any other way?”
“Not at all. Mother's health is always good, and she has not been
molested.”
“Dick, it's possible that we may see Kentucky again soon.”
“Can that be true, and how is it so, sir?”
“The administration is greatly alarmed about Kentucky and the west. This
movement of Bragg's army is formidable, and it would be a great blow for
us if he took Louisville. Dispatches have been sent east for help. My
regiment and several others that really belong in the west have been
asked for, and we are to start in three days. Dick, do you know how many
men of the Winchester regiment are left? We shall be able to start with
only one hundred and five men, and when we attacked at Donelson we were
a thousand strong.”
“And the end of the war, sir, seems as far off as ever.”
“So it does, Dick, but we'll go, and we'll do our best. Starting from
Washington we can reach Louisville in two days by train. Bragg, no
matter what progress he may make across the state, cannot be there then.
If any big battle is to be fought we're likely to be in it.”
The scanty remainder of the regiment was brought to Washington and two
days later they were in Louisville, which they found full of alarm.
The famous Southern partisan leader, John Morgan, had been roaming
everywhere over the state, capturing towns, taking prisoners and
throwing all the Union communications into confusion by means of false
dispatches.
People told with mingled amusement and apprehension of Morgan's
telegrapher, Ellsworth, who cut the wires, attached his own instrument,
and replied to the Union messages and sent answers as his general
pleased. It was said that Bragg was already approaching Munfordville
where there was a Northern fort and garrison. And it was said that Buell
on another line was endeavoring to march past Bragg and get between him
and Louisville.
But Dick found that the western states across the Ohio were responding
as usual. Hardy volunteers from the prairies and plains were pouring
into Louisville. While Dick waited there the news came that Bragg
had captured the entire Northern garrison of four thousand men at
Munfordville, the crossing of Green River, and was continuing his steady
advance.
But there was yet hope that the rapid march of Buell and the gathering
force at Louisville would cause Bragg to turn aside.
At last the welcome news came. Bragg had suddenly turned to the east,
and then Buell arrived in Louisville. With his own force, the army
already gathered there and a division sent by Grant from his station at
Corinth, in Mississippi, he was at the head of a hundred thousand men,
and Bragg could not muster more than half as many.
So rapid had been the passage of events that Dick found himself a member
of Buell's reorganized army, and ready to march, only thirteen days
after the sun set on the bloody field of Antietam, seven hundred miles
away. Bragg, they said, was at Lexington, in the heart of the state, and
the Union army was in motion to punish him for his temerity in venturing
out of the far south.
Dick felt a great elation as he rode once more over the soil of his
native state. He beheld again many of the officers whom he had seen at
Donelson, and also he spoke to General Buell, who although as taciturn
and somber as ever, remembered him.
Warner and Pennington were by his side, the colonel rode before, and the
Winchester regiment marched behind. Volunteers from Kentucky and other
states had raised it to about three hundred men, and the new lads
listened with amazement, while the unbearded veterans told them of
Shiloh, the Second Manassas and Antietam.
“Good country, this of yours, Dick,” said Warner, as they rode through
the rich lands east of Louisville. “Worth saving. I'm glad the doctor
ordered me west for my health.”
“He didn't order you west for your health,” said Pennington. “He ordered
you west to get killed for your country.”
“Well, at any rate, I'm here, and as I said, this looks like a land
worth saving.”
“It's still finer when you get eastward into the Bluegrass,” said Dick,
“but it isn't showing at its best. I never before saw the ground looking
so burnt and parched. They say it's the dryest summer known since the
country was settled eighty or ninety years ago.”
Dick hoped that their line of march would take them near Pendleton, and
as it soon dropped southward he saw that his hope had come true. They
would pass within twenty miles of his mother's home, and at Dick's
urgent and repeated request, Colonel Winchester strained a point and
allowed him to go. He was permitted to select a horse of unusual power
and speed, and he departed just before sundown.
“Remember that you're to rejoin us to-morrow,” said Colonel Winchester.
“Beware of guerillas. I hope you'll find your mother well.”
“I feel sure of it, and I shall tell her how very kind and helpful
you've been to me, sir.”
“Thank you, Dick.”
Dick, in his haste to be off did not notice that the colonel's voice
quivered and that his face flushed as he uttered the emphatic “thank
you.” A few minutes later he was riding swiftly southward over a road
that he knew well. His start was made at six o'clock and he was sure
that by ten o'clock he would be in Pendleton.
The road was deserted. This was a well-peopled country, and he saw many
houses, but nearly always the doors and shutters of the windows were
closed. The men were away, and the women and children were shutting out
the bands that robbed in the name of either army.
The night came down, and Dick still sped southward with no one appearing
to stop him. He did not know just where the Southern army lay, but he
did not believe that he would come in contact with any of its flankers.
His horse was so good and true, that earlier than he had hoped, he was
approaching Pendleton. The moon was up now, and every foot of the ground
was familiar. He crossed brooks in which he and Harry Kenton and other
boys of his age had waded--but he had never seen them so low before--and
he marked the tree in which he had shot his first squirrel.
It had not been so many months since he had been in Pendleton, and
yet it seemed years and years. Three great battles in which seventy or
eighty thousand men had fallen were enough to make anybody older.
Dick paused on the crest of a little hill and looked toward the place
where his mother's house stood. He had come just in this way in the
winter, and he looked forward to another meeting as happy. The moonlight
was very clear now and he saw no smoke rising from the chimneys, but
this was summer, and of course they would not have a fire burning at
such an hour.
He rode on a little further and paused again at the crest of another
hill. His view of Pendleton here was still better. He could see more
roofs, and walls, but he noticed that no smoke rose from any house.
Pendleton lay very still in its hollow. On the far side he saw the white
walls of Colonel Kenton's house shining in the moonlight. Something
leaped in his brain. He seemed to have been looking upon such white
walls only yesterday, white walls that stood out in a fiery haze, white
walls that he could never forget though he lived to be a hundred.
Then he remembered. The white walls were those of the Dunkard church at
Antietam, around which the blue and the gray had piled their bodies in
masses. The vast battlefield ranged past him like a moving panorama, and
then he was merely looking at Pendleton lying there below, so still.
Dick was sensitive and his affections were strong. He loved his mother
with a remarkable devotion, and his friends were for all time. Highly
imaginative, he felt a powerful stirring of the heart, at his second
return to Pendleton since his departure for the war. Yet he was chilled
somewhat by the strange silence hanging over the little town that he
loved so well. It was night, it was true, but not even a dog barked at
his coming, and there was not the faintest trail of smoke across the
sky. A brilliant moon shone, and white stars unnumbered glittered and
danced, yet they showed no movement of man in the town below.
He shook off the feeling, believing that it was merely a sensitiveness
born of time and place, and rode straight for his mother's house. Then
he dismounted, tied his horse to one of the pines, and ran up the walk
to the front door, where he knocked softly at first, and then more
loudly.
No answer came and Dick's heart sank within him like a plummet in a
pool. He went to the edge of the walk, gathered up some gravel and threw
it against a window in his mother's room on the second floor. That would
arouse her, because he knew that she slept lightly in these times, when
her son was off to the wars. But the window was not raised, and he could
hear no sound of movement in the room.
Alarmed, he went back to the front door, and he noticed that while the
door was locked the keyhole was empty. Then his mother was gone away.
The sign was almost infallible. Had any one been at home the key would
have been on the inside.
His heart grew lighter. There had been no violence. No roving band had
come there to plunder. He whistled and shouted through the keyhole,
although he did not want anyone who might possibly be passing in
the road to hear him, as this town was almost wholly Southern in its
sympathies.
There was still no answer, and leading his horse behind one of the pine
trees on the lawn, where it would not be observed, he went to the rear
of the house, and taking a stick pried open a kitchen window. He had
learned this trick when he was a young boy, and climbing lightly inside
he closed the window behind him and fastened the catch.
He knew of course every hall and room of the house, but the moment he
entered it he felt that it was deserted. The air was close and heavy,
showing that no fresh breeze had blown through it for days. It was
impossible that his mother or the faithful colored woman could have
lived there so long a time with closed doors and shuttered windows.
When he passed into the main part of his home, and touched a door
or chair, a fine dust grated slightly under his fingers. Here was
confirmation, if further confirmation was needed. Dust on chairs
and tables and sofas in the house in which his mother was present.
Impossible! Such a thing could not occur with her there. It was not the
white dust of the road or fields, but the black dust that gathers in
closed chambers.
He went up to his mother's room, and, opening one of the shutters a few
inches, let in a little light. It was in perfect order. Everything
was in its place. Upon the dresser was a little vase containing some
shrivelled flowers. The water in the vase had dried up days ago, and the
flowers had dried up with it.
In this room and in all the others everything was arranged with order
and method, as if one were going away for a long time. Dick drew a chair
near the window, that he had opened slightly, and sat down. Much of
his fear for his mother disappeared. It was obvious that she and her
faithful attendant, Juliana, had gone, probably to be out of the track
of the armies or to escape plundering bands like Skelly's.
He wondered where she had gone, whether northward or southward. There
were many places that would gladly receive her. Nearly all the people in
this part of the state were more or less related, and with them the tie
of kinship was strong. It was probable that she would go north, or east.
She might have gone to Lexington, or Winchester, or Richmond, or even in
the hills to Somerset.
Well, he could not solve it. He was deeply disappointed because he had
not found her there, but he was relieved from his first fear that the
guerillas had come. He closed and fastened the window again, and then
walked all through the house once more. His eyes had now grown so used
to the darkness that he could see everything dimly. He went into his own
room. A picture of himself that used to hang on the wall now stood on
the dresser. He knew very well why, and he knew, too, that his mother
often passed hours in that room.
Below stairs everything was neatness and in order. He went into the
parlor, of which he had stood in so much awe, when he was a little
child. The floor was covered with an imported carpet, mingled brown and
red. A great Bible lay upon a small marble-topped table in the center
of the room. Two larger tables stood against the wall. Upon them lay
volumes of the English classics, and a cluster of wax flowers under a
glass cover, that had seemed wonderful to Dick in his childhood.
But the room awed him no more, and he turned at once to the great
squares of light that faced each other from wall to wall.
A famous portrait painter had arisen at Lexington when the canebrake
was scarcely yet cleared away from the heart of Kentucky. His work
was astonishing to have come out of a country yet a wilderness, and a
century later he is ranked among the great painters. But it is said that
the best work he ever did is the pair of portraits that face each other
in the Mason home, and the other pair, the exact duplicates that face
each other in the same manner in the Kenton house.
Dick opened a shutter entirely, and the light of the white moon, white
like marble, streamed in. The sudden inpouring illuminated the room so
vividly that Dick's heart missed a beat. It seemed, for a minute, that
the two men in the portraits were stepping from the wall. Then his heart
beat steadily again and the color returned to his face. They had always
been there, those two portraits. Men had never lived more intensely than
they, and the artist, at the instant his genius was burning brightest,
had caught them in the moment of extraordinary concentration. Their
souls had looked through their eyes and his own soul looking through his
had met theirs.
Dick gazed at one and then at the other. There was his great
grandfather, Paul Cotter, a man of vision and inspiration, the greatest
scholar the west had ever produced, and there facing him was his comrade
of a long life-time, Henry Ware, the famous borderer, afterward the
great governor of the state. They had been painted in hunting suits of
deerskin, with the fringed borders and beaded moccasins, and raccoon
skin caps.
These were men, Dick's great grandfather and Harry's. An immense pride
that he was the great-grandson of one of them suddenly swelled up in his
bosom, and he was proud, too, that the descendants of the borderers, and
of the earlier borderers in the east, should show the same spirit and
stamina. No one could look upon the fields of Shiloh, and Manassas and
Antietam and say that any braver men ever lived.
He drew his chair into the middle of the room and sat and looked at them
a long time. His steady gazing and his own imaginative brain, keyed to
the point of excitement, brought back into the portraits that singular
quality of intense life. Had they moved he would not have been
surprised, and the eyes certainly looked down at him in full and ample
recognition.
What did they say? He gazed straight into the eyes of one and then
straight into the eyes of the other, and over and over again. But the
expression there was Delphic. He must choose for himself, as they had
chosen for themselves, and remembering that he was lingering, when he
should not linger, he closed and fastened the window, slipped out at the
kitchen window and returned to his horse.
He remounted in the road and rode a few paces nearer to Pendleton, which
still lay silent in the white moonlight. He had no doubt now that many
of the people had fled like his mother. Most of the houses must be
closed and shuttered like hers. That was why the town was so silent.
He would have been glad to see Dr. Russell and old Judge Kendrick and
others again, but it would have been risky to go into the center of the
place, and it would have been a breach, too, of the faith that Colonel
Winchester had put in him.
He crushed the wish and turned away. Then he saw the white walls of
Colonel Kenton's house shining upon a hill among the pines beyond the
town. He was quite sure that it would be deserted, and there was no
harm in passing it. He knew it as well as his own home. He and Harry had
played in every part of it, and it was, in truth, a second home to him.
He rode slowly along the road which led to the quiet house. Colonel
Kenton had all the instincts so strong in the Kentuckians and Virginians
of his type. A portion of his wealth had been devoted to decoration and
beauty. The white, sanded road led upward through a great park, splendid
with oak and beech and maple, and elms of great size. Nearer the house
he came to the cedars and clipped pines, like those surrounding his
mother's own home.
He opened the iron gate that led to the house, and tied his horse
inside. Here was the same desolation and silence that he had beheld at
his own home. The grass on the lawn, although withered and dry from the
intense drought that had prevailed in Kentucky that summer, was long and
showed signs of neglect. The great stone pillars of the portico, from
the shelter of which Harry and his father and their friends had fought
Skelly and his mountaineers, were stained, and around their bases were
dirty from the sand and earth blown against them. The lawn and even the
portico were littered with autumn leaves.
Dick felt the chill settling down on him again. War, not war with
armies, but war in its results, had swept over his uncle's home as truly
as it had swept over his mother's. There was no sign of a human being.
Doubtless the colored servants had fled to the Union armies, and to the
freedom which they as yet knew so little how to use. He felt a sudden
access of anger against them, because they had deserted a master so kind
and just, forgetting, for the moment that he was fighting to free them
from that very master.
All the windows were dark, but he walked upon the portico and the dry
autumn leaves rustled under his feet. He would have turned away, but
he noticed that the front door stood ajar six or eight inches. The fact
amazed him. If a servant was about, he would not leave it open, and if
robbers were in the house, they would close it in order not to attract
attention. It was a great door of massive and magnificent oak, highly
polished, with heavy bands of glittering bronze running across it. But
it was so lightly poised on its hinges, that, despite its great weight,
a child could have swung it back and forth with his little finger.
Henry Ware, who built the house after his term as governor was over, was
always proud of this door.
Dick ran his hand along one of the polished bronze bars as he had often
done when he was a boy, enjoying the cool touch of the metal. Then
he put his thumb against the edge of the door, and pushed it a little
further open. Something was wrong here, and he meant to see what it was.
He had no scruples about entering. He did not consider himself in the
least an intruder. This was his uncle's house, and his uncle and his
cousin were far away.
The door made no sound as it swung back, and soundless, too, was Dick as
he stepped within. It was dark in the big hall, but as he stood there,
listening, he became conscious of a light. It proceeded from one of the
rooms opening into the hall on the right, and a door nearly closed only
allowed a narrow band of it to fall upon the hall floor.
Dick, believing now that a robber had indeed come, drew a pistol from
his pocket, stepped lightly across the hall and looked in at the door.
He checked a cry, and it was his first thought to go away as quietly as
he had come. He had seen a man in the uniform of a Confederate colonel,
sitting in a chair, and staring out at one of the little side windows
which Dick could not see from the front, and which was now open. It was
his own uncle, Colonel George Kenton, C. S. A., his gold braided cap on
the window sill, and his sword in its scabbard lying across his knees.
But Dick changed his mind. His uncle was a colonel on one side, and he
was a lieutenant on the other, and from one point of view it was almost
high treason for them to meet there and talk quietly together, but from
another it was the most natural thing in the world, commanded alike by
duty and affection.
He pushed open the door a little further and stepped inside.
“Uncle George,” he said.
Colonel Kenton sprang to his feet, and his sword clattered upon the
floor.
“Good God!” he cried. “You, Dick! Here! To-night!”
“Yes, Uncle George, it's no other.”
“And I suppose you have Yankees without to take me.”
“Those are hard words, sir, and you don't mean them. I'm all alone, just
as you were. I galloped south, sir, to see my mother, whom I found gone,
where, I don't know, and then I couldn't resist the temptation to come
by here and see your house and Harry's, which, as you know, sir, has
been almost a home to me, too.”
“Thank God you came, Dick,” said the colonel putting his arms around
Dick's shoulders, and giving him an affectionate hug. “You were right. I
did not mean what I said. There is only one other in the world whom I'd
rather see than you. Dick, I didn't know whether you were dead or alive,
until I saw your face there in the doorway.”
It was obvious to Dick that his uncle's emotions were deeply stirred.
He felt the strong hands upon his shoulders trembling, but the veteran
soldier soon steadied his nerves, and asked Dick to sit down in a chair
which he drew close beside his own at the window.
“I thank God again that the notion took you to come by the house,” he
said. “It's pleasant and cool here at the window, isn't it, Dick, boy?”
Dick knew that he was thinking nothing about the window and the pleasant
coolness of the night. He knew equally well the question that was
trembling on his lips but which he could not muster the courage to ask.
But he had one of his own to ask first.
“My mother?” he asked. “Do you know where she has gone?”
“Yes, Dick, I came here in secret, but I've seen two men, Judge Kendrick
and Dr. Russell. The armies are passing so close to this place, and the
guerillas from the mountains have become so troublesome, that she has
gone to Danville to stay a while with her relatives. Nearly everybody
else has gone, too. That's why the town is so silent. There were not
many left anyway, except old people and children. But, Dick, I have
ridden as far as you have to-night, and I came to ask a question which
I thought Judge Kendrick or Dr. Russell might answer--news of those who
leave a town often comes back to it--but neither of them could tell
me what I wanted to hear. Dick, I have not heard a word of Harry since
spring. His army has fought since then two great battles and many
smaller ones! It was for this, to get some word of him, that I risked
everything in leaving our army to come to Pendleton!”
He turned upon Dick a face distorted with pain and anxiety, and the boy
quickly said:
“Uncle George, I have every reason to believe that Harry is alive and
well.”
“What do you know? What have you heard about him?”
“I have not merely heard. I have seen him and talked with him. It was
after the Second Manassas, when we were both with burial parties, and
met on the field. I was at Antietam, and he, of course, was there, too,
as he is with Stonewall Jackson. I did not see him in that battle, but I
learned from a prisoner who knew him that he had escaped unwounded, and
had gone with Lee's army into Virginia.”
“I thank God once more, Dick, that you were moved to come by my house.
To know that both Harry and you are alive and well is joy enough for one
man.”
“But it is likely, sir, that we'll soon meet in battle,” said Dick.
“So it would seem.”
And that was all that either said about his army. There was no attempt
to obtain information by direct or indirect methods. This was a family
meeting.
“You have a horse, of course,” said Colonel Kenton.
“Yes, sir. He is on the lawn, tied to your fence. His hoofs may now be
in a flower bed.”
“It doesn't matter, Dick. People are not thinking much of flower beds
nowadays. My own horse is further down the lawn between the pines, and
as he is an impatient beast it is probable that he has already dug up a
square yard or two of turf with his hoofs. How did you get in, Dick?”
“You forgot about the front door, sir, and left it open six or seven
inches. I thought some plunderer was within and entered, to find you.”
“I must have been watched over to-night when forgetfulness was rewarded
so well. Dick, we've found out what we came for and neither should
linger here. Do you need anything?”
“Nothing at all, sir.”
“Then we'll go.”
Colonel Kenton carefully closed and fastened the window and door again
and the two mounted their horses, which they led into the road.
“Dick,” said the colonel, “you and I are on opposing sides, but we can
never be enemies.”
Then, after a strong handclasp, they rode away by different roads, each
riding with a lighter heart.