[Illustration: Copperhead 046]
WHEN Sumter was fired upon David Dean had been in Riverbank not quite
a year, but he had passed through the first difficult test of the young
minister, and Mary Wiggett's smile seemed to have driven from the minds
of his people the opposition they had felt when it seemed he was,
or might become, too fond of 'Thusia Fragg. Poor little 'Thusia! The
bright, flirting, reckless butterfly of a girl, captured soul, mind and
body by her first glimpse of David's cool gray eyes, knew--as soon
as Mary Wiggett announced that David had proposed and had been
accepted--that David was not for her. Mary Wiggett, inheriting much of
hard-headed old Samuel Wiggett's common sense, was not apt to let David
escape and David had no desire to escape from the quite satisfactory
position of future husband of Mary Wiggett. As the months of the
engagement lengthened he liked Mary more and more.
The announcement of the dominie's engagement settled many things. It
settled the uneasiness that is bound to exist while a young, unmarried
minister is still free to make a choice, and it settled the fear
that David might make a fool of himself over 'Thusia Fragg. While his
congregation did not realize what an attraction 'Thusia had had for
David, they had feared her general effect on him. With David engaged to
the leading elder's daughter, and that daughter such a fine, efficient
blond young woman as Mary was, there was peace and David was happy. He
had no trouble in stifling the feeling for 'Thusia that he felt had come
dangerously near being love.
Until Riverbank was thrown into a rage by the news from Fort Sumter
David, with due regard for his motto, “Keep an even mind under all
circumstances,” had prepared to settle down into a state of gentle
usefulness and to become the affectionate husband of the town's richest
man's daughter. The wedding was to be when Mary decided she was quite
ready. She was in no great haste, and in the flame of patriotism
that swept all Iowa with the first call for troops and the subsequent
excitement as the town and county responded and the streets were filled
with volunteers Mary postponed setting a day. David and Mary were both
busy during those early war days. Almost too soon for belief lists of
dead and wounded came back to Riverbank, followed by the pale cripples
and convalescents. Loyal entertainments and “sanitary fairs” kept every
young woman busy, and there is no doubt that David did more to aid the
cause by staying at home than by going to the front. He was willing
enough to go, but all Iowa was afire and there were more volunteers than
could be accepted. No one expected the war to last over ninety days.
More said sixty days.
Little 'Thusia Fragg, forgiven by Mary and become her protégée, was
taken into the councils of the women of David's church in all the loyal
charitable efforts. She was still the butterfly 'Thusia; she still
danced and appeared in gay raiment and giggled and chattered; but she
was a forgiven 'Thusia and did her best to be “good.” Like all the young
women of the town she was intensely loyal to the North, but her loyalty
was more like the fiery spirit of the Southern women than the calmer
Northern loyalty of her friends.
As the lists of dead grew and the war, at the end of ninety days,
seemed hardly begun, loyalty and hatred and bitterness became almost
synonymous. Riverbank, on the Mississippi, held not a few families of
Southern sympathizers, and the position of any who ventured to doubt
the right of the North to coerce the South became most unpleasant. Wise
“Copperheads” kept low and said nothing, but they were generally
known from their antebellum utterances, and they were looked upon with
distrust and hatred. The title “Copperhead” was the worst one man
could give another in those days. As the war lengthened one or two hot
outspoken Democrats were ridden out of the town on rails and the rest,
for the most part, found their sympathies change naturally into tacit
agreement with those of their neighbors. It was early in the second year
of the war that old Merlin Hinch came to Riverbank County. It was a
time when public feeling against Copperheads was reaching the point of
exasperation.
Merlin Hinch, with his few earthly goods and his wife and daughter,
crossed the Mississippi on the ferry in a weather-beaten prairie
schooner a few weeks before plowing time. He came from the East but he
volunteered nothing about his past. He was a misshapen, pain-racked man,
hard-handed and close-mouthed. He rested one day in Riverbank, got from
some real estate man information about the farms in the back townships
of the county, and drove on. There were plenty of farms to be
had--rented on shares or bought with a mortgage--and he passed on his
way, a silent, forbidding old man.
In the days that followed he sometimes drove into town to make such
purchases as necessity required. Sometimes his wife--a faded, work-worn
woman--came with him, and sometimes his daughter, but more often he came
alone.
Old Hinch--“Copperhead Hinch,” he came to be called--was not beautiful.
He seldom wore a hat, coming to town with his iron-gray hair matted
on his head and his iron-gray beard tangled and tobacco-stained. Some
long-past accident had left him with a scar above the left eyebrow,
lowering it, and his eyebrows were like long, down-curving gray
bristles, so that his left eye looked out through a bristly covert,
giving him a leering scowl. The same accident had wrenched his left
shoulder so that his left arm seemed to drag behind him and he walked
bent forward with an ugly sidewise gait. At times he rested his left
hand on his hip. He looked like a hard character, but, as David came
to know, he was neither hard nor soft but a man like other men. Sun and
rain and hard weather seemed to have turned his flesh to leather.
In those days the post office was in the Wiggett Building, some sixty
feet off the main street, and it was there those who liked to talk of
the war met, for on a bulletin board just outside the door the lists of
dead and wounded were posted as they arrived, and there head-lined pages
of the newspapers were pasted. To the post office old Hinch came on
each trip to town, stopping there last before driving back to Griggs
Township. Old Hinch issued from the post office one afternoon just as
the postmaster was pasting the news of a Union victory on the board, and
some jubilant reader, dancing and waving his cap, grasped old Hinch and
shouted the news in his ear. The old man uttered an oath and with his
elbow knocked his tormentor aside. He shouldered his way roughly through
the crowd and clambered into his wagon.
“Yeh! you Copperhead!” the old man's tormentor shouted after him.
The crowd turned and saw the old man and jeered at him. Hinch muttered
and mumbled as he arranged the scrap of old blanket on his wagon seat.
He gathered up his reins and, without looking back, drove down the
street, around the corner into the main street and out of the town.
After that old Hinch was “that Copperhead from Griggs Township.” Silent
and surly always, he was left more completely alone than ever. When he
came to town the storekeepers paid him scant courtesy; the manner in
which they received him indicated that they did not want his trade, and
would be better satisfied if he stayed away. The children on the street
sometimes shouted at him.
Old Sam Wiggett, Mary's father, was by that time known as the most
bitter hater of the South in Riverbank. Later there were some who said
he assumed the greater part of his virulent fanaticism to cover his
speculations in the Union paper currency and his tax sale purchases of
the property of dead or impoverished Union soldiers, but this was not
so. Heavy-bodied and heavy-jowled, he was also heavy-minded. That which
he was against he hated with all the bitterness his soul could command,
and he was sincere in his desire that every captured Confederate be
hanged. He considered Lincoln a soft-hearted namby-pamby and would
have had every Confederate home burned to the ground and the women
and children driven into Mexico. In business he had the same harsh but
honest single-mindedness. Money was something to get and any honest way
of getting it was right. There were but two or three men in Riverbank
County who would bid in the property of the unfortunate soldiers at tax
sale, but Sam Wiggett had no scruples. The South, and not he, killed and
ruined the soldiers, and the county, not he, forced the property to
tax sale. He bought with depreciated currency that he had bought at a
discount. That was business.
It was not unnatural that Mary Wiggett should have absorbed some share
of this ultraloyalism from her father. The women of Riverbank were not,
as a rule, bitterly angry. They were staunch and true to their cause;
they worked eagerly with their hands, scraping lint, making “housewives”
and doing what they could for their soldiers; they were cheered by
victories and depressed by defeats, and they wept over their slain
and wounded, but their attitude was one of pity and love for their
own rather than of hard hatred against the South. With Mary Wiggett
patriotism was more militant. Could she have arranged it the lint she
scraped would never have been used to dress the wounds of a captured
Confederate soldier boy. 'Thusia, even more intense, hated the South as
a personal enemy.
David felt this without, at first, taking much notice of it. He was
happy in his engagement and he liked Mary better each day. There was a
wholesome, full-blooded womanliness in all she did and a frankness in
her affection that satisfied him. The first shock to his evenly balanced
mind came one day when he was walking through the main street with her.
The young dominie was swinging down the street at her side, his head
high and his clear gray eyes looking straight ahead, when something
whizzed past his face. They were near the corner of a street. Along the
edge of the walk a half dozen farm wagons stood and in the nearest sat
Mrs. Hinch, her sunbonnet thrown back and her Paisley shawl--her finest
possession--over her shoulders. Old Hinch was clambering into the wagon
and had his best foot on the hub of a wheel. The missile that whizzed
past David's face was an egg. It struck old Hinch on the temple and
broke, scattering the yolk upon the waist of Mrs. Hinch's calico dress
and upon her shawl and her face. Some boy had grasped an egg from a box
before a grocer's window and had thrown it. The lad darted around the
corner and old Hinch turned, grasping his whip and scowling through his
bristly eyebrows. The corner loafers laughed.
What David did was not much. He drew his handkerchief from his pocket
and gave it to the faded woman in the wagon, that she might remove the
stain of egg. She wiped her face and began removing the egg from her
garments and David and Mary moved on.
“Why did you do that!” Mary asked. “Don't you know them! They're
Copperheads.”
“She was badly spattered. She seemed at a loss what to do.”
“Didn't you _know_ they were Copperheads!”
“I did not know. That would have made no difference. She was
distressed.”
“Well, please, David, do not help any more distressed Copperheads when I
am with you,” Mary said. “Everyone in front of the store saw you. Oh! I
wouldn't raise my little finger to help a Copperhead if she was dying! I
hate them! They ought to be egged out of town, all of them.”
Some two weeks later old Hinch drove up to the little manse and knocked
on David's door. He had the handkerchief, washed, ironed and folded in a
bit of white paper, and a dozen fresh-laid eggs in a small basket.
“Ma sent me 'round with these,” old Hinch said. “Sort of a 'thank you.'
She 'minded me particular not to throw the eggs at you.”
There was almost a twinkle in his eyes as he repeated his wife's little
joke. He would not enter the manse but sidled himself back to his wagon
and drove away.
It was from 'Thusia Fragg that David had the next word of old Hinch.
Even in those days David had acquired a great taste for a certain
sugared bun made by Keller, the baker. Long years after the buns were
still made by Riverbank bakers and known as “Keller buns” and the last
sight many had of David was as an old man with a paper bag in his hand,
trudging up the hill to his home for a little feast on “Keller buns.” He
used to stop and offer his favorite pastry to little children. Sometimes
the paper bag was quite empty by the time he reached home.
It was no great disgrace, in those days, to carry parcels, for many of
the Riverbankers had come from St. Louis or Cincinnati, where the best
housewives went to market with basket on arm, but David would have
thought nothing of his paper parcel of buns in any event. The buns were
at the baker's and he liked them and wanted some at home, so he went to
the baker's and bought them and carried them home. He was coming out of
Keller's doorway when 'Thusia, as gayly dressed as ever, hurrying by,
saw him and stopped. She was frightened and agitated and she grasped
David's arm.
“Oh, Mr. Dean!” she cried. “Can't you do something! They're beating an
old man! There!” she almost wept, pointing down the street toward the
post office. David stood a moment, tense and breathing deeply.
“Who is it!” he asked.
“That Copperhead farmer,” said 'Thusia.
David forgot the motto over his desk in his study. He saw the small mob
massed in front of the post office and men running toward it from across
the street, and he too ran. He saw the crowd sway back and forth and
a fist raised in the air, and then he was on the edge of the group,
pushing his way into it.
“Stop this! Stop this!” he cried.
His voice had the ring of authority and those who turned knew him to be
the dominie. They had done old Hinch no great harm. A few blows had been
struck, but the old man had received them with his arm thrown over his
head. He was tough and a few blows could not harm him. He carried a
stout hickory club, and as the crowd hesitated old Hinch sidled his way
to the edge of the walk and scrambled into his wagon.
Someone laughed. Old Hinch did not drive away.
“My letter,” he growled, and David stooped and picked up the letter that
lay on the walk and handed it to him. Then Hinch struck his horses a
blow with the club and the wagon bumped over the loose stones and away.
The letter had been trampled upon by dusty feet and David's coat had
received a smear of dust from the wagon wheel. He brushed his hands
together, and someone began knocking the dust from the skirt of his
coat. It eased the tension. Someone explained.
“We told the Copperhead to take off his hat to the flag,” they told
David, “and he damned the war. Somebody hit him.”
“He is an old man,” said David. “You can show your patriotism better
than by striking an old man.”
It was not a diplomatic thing to say and it was still less diplomatic
for David to preach, the next Sunday, on the prodigal son. Many shook
their heads over the sermon, saying David went too far in asking them
to prepare their hearts for the day when the war would be ended and
it would be necessary to take the South back into the brotherhood of
States, and to look upon the Confederates as returning prodigals. Old
Wiggett was furiously angry. Forty years were to elapse before some of
David's hearers were ready to forgive the South, and many went to
their graves unforgiving. The feeling after the sermon was that David
sympathized entirely too strongly with the South. Those who heard his
following sermons knew David was still staunchly loyal, but through the
byways of the town the word passed that Dominie Dean was “about as bad
as any Copperhead in the county.”