[Illustration: “Get into the hall there and shut the door behind you."]
DAD
BY
ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE
_Author of_
“THE FIGHTER,”
“CALEB CONOVER,” “THE WOMAN,” etc.
FRONTISPIECE BY
W. D. GOLDBECK
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK
W. J. WATT & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT 1914 BY
W. J. WATT & COMPANY
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
TO
“The Sunnybank People”
THIS STORY IS
LOVINGLY DEDICATED
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Interruption 1
II. Disgrace 11
III. Outcast 19
IV. Fourteen Years Later 30
V. Past-Worthy 40
VI. The Chums 48
VII. Left Behind 55
VIII. Council of War 63
IX. A Lesson in Manners 75
X. Sergeant Dadd 84
XI. Devil and Deep Sea 97
XII. The Little Lady 103
XIII. The Alarm 112
XIV. Dad the Paladin 124
XV. Fighting Joe 132
XVI. The Chickahominy 139
XVII. “Battle Jimmie” 148
XVIII. “General” Dadd 155
XIX. The Clash 165
XX. The Prodigal Father 174
XXI. The Little Lady Again 181
XXII. The Afterglow 189
XXIII. The Attack 200
XXIV. A Lost Burden 209
XXV. The Three Comrades 218
XXVI. The Iron Chess-Game 226
XXVII. A Stern Chase 237
XXVIII. Check and Countercheck 248
XXIX. The End of the Fight 260
XXX. Battle Jimmie, Courier 266
XXXI. Jimmie and the Generals 273
XXXII. Love 283
XXXIII. War! 290
XXXIV. The Man at Washington 297
“DAD”
CHAPTER I
THE INTERRUPTION
Across the plaza, under the white sun-glare, marched and countermarched
the crack regiment’s bronzed men in their heavy high caps and the rest
of the odd regimentals of the late Forties.
From walls and roofs hung a myriad of more or less soiled American
flags. On the plaza band stand a group of Mexican musicians were
wrestling with “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.”
This last feature of the celebration was a bit of tragic irony
attributed to no less a humorist than the arch-victor, the hero of the
day--Major-General Winfield Scott. The native musicians were in no wise
loath, on patriotic grounds, to play “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.”
They were professional performers. One tune meant as much, and as
little, to them as another.
They had not the faintest notion that they were playing a national air
of their nation’s conquerors. The pained looks on their simian little
faces and the sad havoc they wrought upon a noble melody were due
solely to the fact that the tune was new to them, unlike anything they
had ever before heard; and that they had had insufficient time to
rehearse it.
But the effect was there.
At the first halting notes, a grin of wondering delight twisted the
faces of the marching regiment. The episode appealed to their Yankee
humor. The grin was reflected on the visages of the crowd of officers
and civilians who filled the dais at the plaza’s northern end.
The onlooking Mexicans--from peon to hidalgo--who fringed the square’s
edges, listened in stark apathy. Most of them were ignorant of the air’s
import. To them it was but a gringo melody; far inferior to “La Paloma.”
The few who recognized it showed no resentment. To their Spanish-Indian
minds it was but natural that the victors should thus crow.
They themselves were beaten; hopelessly beaten. They and their country.
They were glad enough to get off as easily as they seemed like to.
A little vaunting--the playing of their new masters’ national song--was
nothing to what they would have done had the conditions been reversed.
General Scott sat at the center of the dais-front. Portly, his round,
red face framed by white chin-whiskers and thin white hair, he was
decked out in all the blue-and-gold glory of a United States
major-general’s dress uniform.
This was perhaps the crowning day of his career. At all events he was
celebrating it in accord with that idea.
Mexico had fallen. The hectic, iniquitous war was at an end. Vera Cruz
and Popocatepetl had become names of new meaning. The capital city
itself had surrendered.
To-day, the United States, in the person of its armies’ commander, was
to receive formal notification of the fall of the last native
stronghold.
And Scott had turned the war-drama’s last scene into a pageant.
To the strains of “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” the local army’s
best regiment was going through wondrous evolutions before coming to a
halt opposite the dais. The local Mexican authorities, their speeches
ready, stood waiting to step forward to the dais and deliver them.
Among the dais’s civilian occupants, a Congressman and a foreign chargé
d’affaires were to follow with suitable addresses. And General Scott
himself was to reply with a few well-chosen remarks; his military
secretary having done the choosing.
Altogether, it was an affair worthy of full-page accounts in all the
administration newspapers throughout the United States, and for a
paragraph or two in history.
(That neither the newspapers nor history made much if anything of it was
wholly due to a dusty man in fatigue uniform who was just then riding a
very tired horse toward the plaza.)
Mexico had fallen.
More than a decade earlier the gringo pioneers in Texas had clashed with
the Mexican lords of the soil. And, after many a bloody conflict, red
with mediæval barbarity, they had seized Texas from Mexico and made a
republic of it.
Later the Lone Star republic had been annexed to the United States.
Mexico had protested. Then our government had declared that Texas not
only belonged to the United States, but that its southern boundary was
the Rio Grande, instead of the Nueces River.
Again Mexico had protested.
Whereat, President Polk had sent an old Indian fighter, Zachary Taylor,
to the Rio Grande with four thousand troops, to maintain the frontier.
Taylor, with his handful of men, had calmly plowed his way southward,
thrashing Mexican armies double the size of his own, until all northern
Mexico was his.
President Polk, “viewing with alarm” the repute that Taylor, a political
foe of his own, was gleaning, hustled the army’s commander-in-chief,
General Scott, south to snatch any remaining laurels.
Scott stripped Taylor’s little band of its best officers and men and
continued the war to a triumphant end; Taylor, meantime, at Buena Vista,
opposing his own remnant of an army to a Mexican force five times its
size and nearly annihilating the enemy in the most important and
spectacular battle of the whole war.
But now that the conflict was over, Scott was in his element. He was the
ideal god of war; a far more impressive figure on this climax day than
down-at-heel, tobacco-chewing old Zachary Taylor could have hoped to be.
The regiment came to a halt. At a barked order, eight hundred cumbrous
muzzle-loading muskets clicked to the “present,” then, with a double
click, to the “carry.”
The last off-key strains of “Columbia” moaned out, and the sweating
musicians laid aside their instruments.
A gold-laced Mexican, whose uniform coat bore as many decorations as a
champion swimmer’s, stepped into the open space in front of the
platform, unrolled a terrifying parchment document that jingled with
seals, cleared his throat and prepared to read. General Scott folded his
plump arms across his plumper chest, assumed an air of gracious dignity,
and prepared to listen.
His staff and the civilians on the dais stood in impressive attitudes to
hear a document in a tongue few of them had troubled to master; and
prepared to be bored.
None of the three sets of preparations was destined to ripen into
fulfillment.
For just then, riding unceremoniously through the close-packed crowd of
natives at the left of the dais, appeared a horseman in the fatigue
uniform of a colonel of cavalry. His uniform was stained and old, and
was further disfigured by a coating of white dust and foam-fleck. The
big sorrel horse was sweat-streaked and evidently half-exhausted.
The man took in the scene in a single quick look. Touching his tired
horse with the spur, he rode straight up to the dais, almost tramping
the Mexican dignitary under foot; saluted mechanically, and then sat
blinking in moody reverie at General Scott.
There was a moment’s hush through which a bugle call was drifted, faint
but wholly audible from the American camp far to the east of the plaza.
Scott squinted in annoyed perplexity at the newcomer.
The latter suddenly straightened in the saddle, saluted again and rasped
out:
“Lieutenant-Colonel James Brinton of General Taylor’s personal staff.
Present in reply to General Scott’s request that General Taylor send a
representative to this celebration.”
Real pleasure effaced the annoyance in Scott’s face. Even as no Roman
triumph was complete without the presence of humbled rivals, so his day
of glory was immeasurably sweetened by the fact that the general whose
prowess had all but overshadowed his own was, by proxy at least, a
witness to the scene.
Scott beamed with lofty graciousness on Lieutenant-Colonel James
Brinton. He would vastly have preferred that his rival’s delegate should
have looked more like a military tailor’s dummy, on this day of days,
and less like a dust-sprinkled scarecrow.
But Scott had sent somewhat belated word--an afterthought--to Taylor.
The distance was long. He had scarce expected that any representative of
the other would be able to reach the spot on time. Even more likely his
rival would plead lack of time as excuse for failure to comply.
The evidences of haste and hard riding on Brinton’s part were, perhaps,
in their way as high a tribute to the occasion as could well have been
paid by more gaudy costume. Wherefore, the smile of lofty welcome.
“I thank General Taylor for his courtesy,” said the commanding general,
“and I commend his representative’s speed. Leave your horse with an
orderly, Colonel Brinton. I have had a seat reserved for you here.”
Scott turned again toward the Mexican official who, shuffling and
fidgeting, was trying to find some new position wherefrom to launch his
many-sealed address.
But before the general could request the reader to proceed Brinton
interposed.
With ponderous gravity he maneuvered his horse so that the tired brute’s
flank well-nigh collided with the Mexican. Thus, having sent the
official scuttling out of the exact center of the space before the
platform, Brinton reined his mount into the hurriedly vacated spot.
General Scott scowled. One of the broadcloth-clad civilians snickered.
The staff stared open-eyed. This solemn equestrian with the bloodshot
eyes and drawn face was behaving with strange lack of military decorum
in the presence of his chief.
“General Scott,” declaimed Brinton in a voice which, though not
consciously uplifted, penetrated through the still noonday air to the
far corners of the plaza. “General Scott, I am going to say just a few
words.”
Again the general’s Jovelike displeasure softened. This interruption in
the cut-and-dried proceedings of the day grated harshly upon his craze
for method. Yet, on an instant’s thought, he recognized its probable
value.
That his rival’s proxy should ride up to the dais in this dramatic
fashion and there publicly transmit General Taylor’s respects and
compliments, was an unannounced but none the less acceptable feature of
the programme. It was a tribute that ought to silence forever the
oft-repeated Mexican query as to whether or not Scott outranked Taylor.
With an Olympian nod, the general said:
“Proceed, sir. I am ready to hear General Taylor’s message.”
“General Scott,” began Brinton once more, and this time his deep voice
rose to oratorical volume, “on the platform before me I behold a sea of
upturned faces. And not one honest face in the lot. I see in the place
of honor--the place by rights due to General Taylor--a pompous and fat
popinjay, lovingly known throughout the Union as ‘Old
Fuss-and-Feathers.’ I see--”
The dais was in an uproar. A sheaf of sabers were whipped sibilantly
from their scabbards.
Scott, his rotund face purple, rolled out of his seat and onto his plump
legs.
“Sir!” he bellowed. “Consider yourself under arrest! General Taylor--”
“General Taylor,” snarled Brinton, “sent me here with some fool message
or other. It was congratulatory, I believe, and therefore hypocritical.
I’ve forgotten it. Because it was too good to waste on the man who has
tried to reap where Taylor sowed--the jackal that seeks to ape our lion.
And I left my dress uniform at the _fonda_, back there, too. Why should
I put it on just to humor old Fuss-and-Feathers?”
By this time fifty officers were clambering down from the dais or
running up from the edges of the cleared space to silence the man who
had spoiled their patron’s day of homage.
Brinton heeded their approach not at all. Shifting in his saddle he
faced the throng of gaping natives.
“Mexicanos!” he called in Spanish. “You have been conquered. But it was
by General Taylor. Not by this overdressed old incompetent who has
stolen Taylor’s laurels. He--”
The harangue ended abruptly.
A dozen hands were upon the speaker. A dozen hands dragged him from the
saddle. A dozen hands itched to close on his throat and to choke out
every possibility of future insult.
But there was no need. After a bare second of feeble struggle Brinton
lay inert and moveless in his captors’ grasp.
“Good Lord!” exclaimed an officer, leaning over him in wonder. “The
man’s--the man’s _asleep_!”