many of them, for half the day they rode, saving every strain they
could upon their horses. A three-hour rest. Then over the southern
divide and down the slope they thundered to strike the railroad at
Leavit's bridge.
IX
THE COMING OF THE SHEPHERD
The wires coming down from the north were flashing the railroad's call
for help. A band of madmen had struck the end of the line at Leavit's
Creek and had destroyed the half-finished bridge. They had raced down
the line, driving the frightened labourers before them, tearing up the
ties and making huge fires of them on which they threw the new rails,
heating and twisting these beyond any hope of future usefulness.
Labourers, foremen and engineers of construction had fled literally
for their lives. The men of the hills had no quarrel with them. They
preferred not to injure them. But they were infuriated men with their
wrongs fresh in mind and with deadly hunting rifles in hand. The
workmen on the line needed no second warning. They would take no
chances with an enemy of this kind. They were used to violence and
rioting in their own labour troubles, but this was different. This was
war. They threw themselves headlong upon handcars and work engines and
bolted down the line, carrying panic before them.
In a single night the hill men with Jeffrey Whiting at their head had
ridden down and destroyed nearly twenty miles of very costly
construction work. There were yet thirty miles of the line left in the
hills and if the men were not stopped they would not leave a single
rail in all the hill country where they were masters.
The call of the railroad was at first frantic with panic and fright.
That was while little men who had lost their wits were nominally in
charge of a situation in which nobody knew what to do. Then suddenly
the tone of the railroad's call changed. Big men, used to meeting all
sorts of things quickly and efficiently, had taken hold. They had the
telegraph lines of the State in their hands. There was no more
frightened appeal. Orders were snapped over the wires to sheriffs in
Adirondack and Tupper and Alexander counties. They were told to swear
in as many deputies as they could lead. They were to forget the
consideration of expense. The railroad would pay and feed the men.
They were to think of nothing but to get the greatest possible number
of fighting men upon the line at once.
Then a single great man, a man who sat in a great office building in
New York and held his hand upon every activity in the State, saw the
gravity of the business in the hills and put himself to work upon it.
He took no half measures. He had no faith in little local authorities,
who would be bound to sympathise somewhat with the hill people in this
battle.
He called the Governor of the State from Albany to his office. He
ordered the Governor to turn out the State's armed forces and set them
in motion toward the hills. He wondered autocratically that the
Governor had not had the sense to do this of himself. The Governor
bridled and hesitated. The Governor had been living on the fiction
that he was the executive head of the State. It took Clifford W.
Stanton just three minutes to disabuse him completely and forever of
this illusion. He explained to him just why he was Governor and by
whose permission. Also he pointed out that the permission of the great
railroad system that covered the State would again be necessary in
order that Governor Foster might succeed himself. Then the great man
sent Wilbur Foster back to Albany to order out the nearest regiment of
the National Guard for service in the hills.
Before the second night three companies of the militia had passed
through Utica and had gone up the line of the U. & M. Their orders
were to avoid killing where possible and to capture all of the hill
men that they could. The railroad wished to have them tried and
imprisoned by the impartial law of the land. For it was characteristic
of the great power which in those days ruled the State that when it
had outraged every sense of fair play and common humanity to attain
its ends it was then ready to spend much money creating public opinion
in favour of itself.
Jeffrey Whiting stood in the evening in the cover of the woods above
Milton's Crossing and watched a train load of soldiers on flat cars
come creeping up the grade from the south. This was the last of the
hills. He had refused to let his men go farther. Behind him lay fifty
miles of new railroad in ruins. Before him lay the open, settled
country. His men, once the fever of destruction had begun to run in
their blood, had wished to sweep on down into the villages and carry
their work through them. But he had stood firm. This was their own
country where they belonged and where the railroad was the interloper.
Here they were at home. Here there was a certain measure of safety for
them even in the destructive and lawless work that they had begun.
They had done enough. They had pushed the railroad back to the edge of
the hills. They had roused the men of the hills behind them. Where he
had started with his seventy-two friends, there were now three hundred
well-armed men in the woods around him. Here in their cover they could
hold the line of the railroad indefinitely against almost any force
that might be sent against them.
But the inevitable sobering sense of leadership and responsibility was
already at work upon him. The burning, rankling anger that had driven
him onward so that he had carried everything and everybody near him
into this business of destruction was now dulled down to a slow, dull
hate that while it had lost nothing of its bitterness yet gave him
time to think. Those men coming up there on the cars were not
professional soldiers, paid to fight wherever there was fighting to be
done. Neither did they care anything for the railroad that they should
come up here to fight for it. Why did they come?
They had joined their organisation for various reasons that usually
had very little to do with fighting. They were clerks and office men,
for the most part, from the villages and factories of the central part
of the State. The militia companies had attracted them because the
armouries in the towns had social advantages to offer, because
uniforms and parade appeal to all boys, because they were sons of
veterans and the military tradition was strong in them. Jeffrey
Whiting's strong natural sense told him the substance of these things.
He could not regard these boys as deadly enemies to be shot down
without mercy or warning. They had taken their arms at a word of
command and had come up here to uphold the arm of the State. If the
railroad was able to control the politics of the State and so was able
to send these boys up here on its own business, then other people were
to blame for the situation. Certainly these boys, coming up here to do
nothing but what their duty to the State compelled them to do; they
were not to be blamed.
His men were now urging him to withdraw a little distance into the
hills to where the bed of the road ran through a defile between two
hills. The soldiers would no doubt advance directly up the line of
what had been the railroad, covering the workmen and engineers who
would be coming on behind them. If they were allowed to go on up into
the defile without warning or opposition they could be shot down by
the hill men from almost absolute safety. If he had been dealing with
a hated enemy Jeffrey Whiting perhaps could have agreed to that. But
to shoot down from ambush these boys, who had come up here many of
them probably thinking they were coming to a sort of picnic or outing
in the September woods, was a thing which he could not contemplate.
Before he would attack them these boys must know just what they were
to expect.
He saw them leave the cars at the end of the broken line and take up
their march in a rough column of fours along the roadbed. He was
surprised and puzzled. He had expected them to work along the line
only as fast as the men repaired the rails behind them. He had not
thought that they would go away from their cars.
Then he understood. They were not coming merely to protect the
rebuilding of the railroad. They had their orders to come straight
into the hills, to attack and capture him and his men. The railroad
was not only able to call the State to protect itself. It had called
upon the State to avenge its wrongs, to exterminate its enemies. His
men had understood this better than he. Probably they were right. This
thing might as well be fought out from the first. In the end there
would be no quarter. They could defeat this handful of troops and
drive them back out of the hills with an ease that would be almost
ridiculous. But that would not be the end.
The State would send other men, unlimited numbers of them, for it must
and would uphold the authority of its law. Jeffrey Whiting did not
deceive himself. Probably he had not from the beginning had any doubt
as to what would be the outcome of this raid upon the railroad. The
railroad itself had broken the law of the State and the law of
humanity. It had defied every principle of justice and common decency.
It had burned the homes of law-supporting, good men in the hills. Yet
the law had not raised a hand to punish it. But now when the railroad
itself had suffered, the whole might of the State was ready to be set
in motion to punish the men of the hills who had merely paid their
debt.
But Jeffrey Whiting could not say to himself that he had not
foreseen all this from the outset. Those days of thinking in jail had
given him an insight into realities that years of growth and
observation of things outside might not have produced in him. He had
been given time to see that some things are insurmountable, that
things may be wrong and unsound and utterly unjust and still persist
and go on indefinitely. Youth does not readily admit this. Jeffrey
Whiting had recognised it as a fact. And yet, knowing this, he had
led these men, his friends, men who trusted him, upon this mad
raid. They had come without the clear vision of the end which he now
realised had been his from the start. They had thought that they
could accomplish something, that they had some chance of winning a
victory over the railroad. They had believed that the power of the
State would intervene to settle the differences between them and
their enemy. Jeffrey Whiting knew, must have known all along, that the
moment a tie was torn up on the railroad the whole strength of the
State would be put forth to capture these men and punish them. There
would be no compromise. There would be no bargaining. If they
surrendered and gave themselves up now they would be jailed for
varying terms. If they did not, if they stayed here and fought, some
of them would be killed and injured and in one way or another all
would suffer in the end.
He had done them a cruel wrong. The truth of this struck him with
startling clearness now. He had led them into this without letting
them see the full extent of what they were doing, as he must have seen
it.
There was but one thing to do. If they dispersed now and scattered
themselves through the hills few of them would ever be identified. And
if he went down and surrendered alone the railroad would be almost
satisfied with punishing him. It was the one just and right thing to
do.
He went swiftly among the men where they stood among the trees,
waiting with poised rifles for the word to fire upon the advancing
soldiers, and told them what they must do. He had deceived them. He
had not told them the whole truth as he himself knew it. They must
leave at once, scattering up among the hills and keeping close mouths
as to where they had been and what they had done. He would go down and
give himself up, for if the railroad people once had him in custody
they would not bother so very much about bringing the others to
punishment.
His men looked at him in a sort of puzzled wonder. They did not
understand, unless it might be that he had suddenly gone crazy. There
was an enemy marching up the line toward them, bent upon killing or
capturing them. They turned from him and without a spoken word,
without a signal of any sort, loosed a rifle volley across the front
of the oncoming troops. The battle was on!
The volley had been fired by men who were accustomed to shoot deer and
foxes from distances greater than this. The first two ranks of the
soldiers fell as if they had been cut down with scythes. Not one of
them was hit above the knees. The firing stopped suddenly as it had
begun. The hill men had given a terse, emphatic warning. It was as
though they had marked a dead line beyond which there must be no
advance.
These soldiers had never before been shot at. The very restraint which
the hill men had shown in not killing any of them in that volley
proved to the soldiers even in their fright and surprise how deadly
was the aim and the judgment of the invisible enemy somewhere in the
woods there before them. To their credit, they did not drop their arms
or run. They stood stunned and paralysed, as much by the suddenness
with which the firing had ceased as by the surprise of its beginning.
Their officers ran forward, shouting the superfluous command for them
to halt, and ordering them to carry the wounded men back to the cars.
For a moment it seemed doubtful whether they would again advance or
would put themselves into some kind of defence formation and hold the
ground on which they stood.
Jeffrey Whiting, looking beyond them, saw two other trains come slowly
creeping up the line. From the second train he saw men leaping down
who did not take up any sort of military formation. These he knew were
sheriffs' posses, fighting men sworn in because they were known to be
fighters. They were natural man hunters who delighted in the chase of
the human animal. He had often seen them in the hills on the hunt, and
he knew that they were an enemy of a character far different from
those harmless boys who could not hit a mark smaller than the side of
a hill. These men would follow doggedly, persistently into the highest
of the hills, saving themselves, but never letting the prey slip from
their sight, dividing the hill men, separating them, cornering them
until they should have tracked them down one by one and either
captured or killed them all.
These men did not attempt to advance along the line of the road. They
stepped quickly out into the undergrowth and began spreading a thin
line of men to either side.
Then he saw that the third train, although they were soldiers, took
their lesson from the men who had just preceded them. They left the
tracks and spreading still farther out took up the wings of a long
line that was now stretching east to west along the fringe of the
hills. The soldiers in the centre retired a little way down the
roadbed, stood bunched together for a little time while their officers
evidently conferred together, then left the road by twos and fours and
began spreading out and pushing the other lines out still farther. It
was perfect and systematic work, he agreed, that could not have been
better done if he and his companions had planned it for their own
capture.
There were easily eight hundred men there in front, he judged; men
well armed and ready for an indefinite stay in the hills, with a
railroad at their back to bring up supplies, and with the entire State
behind them. And the State was ready to send more and more men after
these if it should be necessary. He had no doubt that hundreds of
other men were being held in readiness to follow these or were perhaps
already on their way. He saw the end.
Those lines would sweep up slowly, remorselessly and surround his men.
If they stood together they would be massacred. If they separated they
would be hunted down one by one.
Their only chance was to scatter at once and ride back to where their
homes had been. This time he implored them to take their chance,
begged them to save themselves while they could. But he might have
known that they would do nothing of the kind. Already they were
breaking away and spreading out to meet that distending line in front
of them. Nothing short of a miracle could now save them from
annihilation, and Jeffrey Whiting was not expecting a miracle. There
was nothing to be done but to take command and sell his life along
with theirs as dearly as possible.
* * * * *
The echoes of the outbreak in the hills ran up and down the State. Men
who had followed the course of things through the past months, men
who knew the spoken story of the fire in the hills which no newspaper
had dared to print openly, understood just what it meant. The men up
there had been goaded to desperation at last. But wise men agreed
quietly with each other that they had done the very worst thing that
could have been done. The injury they had done the railroad would
amount to very little, comparatively, in the end, while it would give
the railroad an absolutely free hand from now on. The people would be
driven forever out of the lands which the railroad wished to possess.
There would be no legislative hindrances now. The people had doomed
themselves.
The echoes reached also to two million other men throughout the State
who did not understand the matter in the least. These looked up a
moment from the work of living and earning a living to sympathise
vaguely with the foolish men up there in the hills who had attacked
the sacred and awful rights of railroad property. It was too bad.
Maybe there were some rights somewhere in the case. But who could
tell? And the two million, the rulers and sovereigns of the State,
went back again to their business.
The echo came to Joseph Winthrop, Bishop of Alden, almost before a
blow had been struck. It is hardly too much to say that he was
listening for it. He knew his people, kindly, lagging of speech, slow
to anger; but, once past a certain point of aggravation, absolutely
heedless and reckless of consequences.
He did not stop to compute just how much he himself was bound up in
the causes and consequences of what had happened and what was
happening in the hills. He had given advice. He had thought with the
people and only for the people.
He saw, long before it was told him in words, the wild ride down
through the hills to strike the railroad, the fury of destruction, the
gathering of the forces of the State to punish.
Here was no time for self-examination or self-judgment. Wherein Joseph
Winthrop had done well, or had failed, or had done wrong, was of no
moment now.
One man there was in all the State, in all the nation, who could give
the word that would now save the people of the hills. Clifford W.
Stanton who had sat months ago in his office in New York and had set
all these things going, whose ruthless hand was to be recognised in
every act of those which had driven the people to this madness, his
will and his alone could stay the storm that was now raging in the
hills.
Once the Bishop had seen that man do an act of supreme and unselfish
bravery. It was an act of both physical and moral courage the like of
which the Bishop had never witnessed. It was an act which had
revealed in Clifford W. Stanton a depth of strong fineness that no man
would have suspected. It was done in the dim, dead time of faraway
youth, but the Bishop had not forgotten. And he knew that men do not
rise to such heights without having very deep in them the nobility to
make it possible and at times inevitable that they should rise to
those heights.
After these years and the encrusting strata of compromise and
cowardice and selfishness which years and life lay upon the fresh
heart of the youth of men, could that depth of nobility in the soul of
Clifford W. Stanton again be touched?
Almost before the forces of the State were in motion against the
people of the hills, the Bishop, early of a morning, walked into the
office of Clifford Stanton.
Stanton was a smaller man than the Bishop, and though younger than the
latter by some half-dozen years, it was evident that he had burned up
the fuel of life more rapidly. Where the Bishop looked and spoke and
moved with the deliberate fixity of the settling years, Stanton acted
with a quick nervousness that shook just a perceptible little. The
spiritual strength of restraint and inward thinking which had
chiselled the Bishop's face into a single, simple expression of will
power was not to be found in the other's face. In its stead there was
a certain steel-trap impression, as though the man behind the face
had all his life refused to be certain of anything until the jaws of
the trap had set upon the accomplished fact.
Physically the two men were much of a type. You would have known them
anywhere for New Englanders of the generation that has disappeared
almost completely in the last twenty years. They had been boys at
Harvard together, though not of the same class. They had been together
in the Civil War, though the nature of their services had been
infinitely diverse. They had met here and there casually and
incidentally in the business of life. But they faced each other now
virtually as strangers, and with a certain tightening grip upon
himself each man realised that he was about to grapple with one of the
strongest willed men that he had ever met, and that he must test out
the other man to the depths and be himself tried out to the limit of
his strength.
"It is some years since I've seen you, Bishop. But we are both busy
men. And--well-- You know I am glad to have you come to see me. I need
not tell you that."
The Bishop accepted the other man's frank courtesy and took a chair
quietly. Stanton watched him carefully. The Bishop was showing the
last few years a good deal, he thought. In reality it was the last
month that the Bishop was showing. But it did not show in the
steady, untroubled glow of his eyes. The Bishop wasted no time on
preliminaries.
"I have come on business, of course, Mr. Stanton," he began. "It is a
very strange and unusual business. And to come at it rightly I must
tell you a story. At the end of the story I will ask you a question.
That will be my whole business."
The other man said nothing. He did not understand and he never spoke
until he was sure that he understood. The Bishop plunged into his
story.
"One January day in 'Sixty-five' I was going up the Shenandoah alone.
My command had left me behind for two days of hospital service at
Cross Keys. They were probably some twenty miles ahead of me and would
be crossing over the divide towards Five Forks and the east. I thought
I knew a way by which I could cut off a good part of the distance that
separated me from them, so I started across the Ridge by a path which
would have been impossible for troops in order.
"I was right. I did cut off the distance which I had expected and came
down in the early afternoon upon a good road that ran up the eastern
side of the Ridge. I was just congratulating myself that I would be
with my men before dark, when a troop of Confederate cavalry came
pelting over a rise in the road behind me.
"I leaped my horse back into the brush at the side of the road and
waited. They would sweep on past and allow me to go on my way. Behind
them came a troop of our own horse pursuing hotly. The Confederate
horses were well spent. I saw that the end of the pursuit was not far
off. The Confederates--some detached band of Early's men, I
imagine--realised that they would soon be run down. Just where I had
left the road there was a sharp turn. Here the Confederates threw
themselves from their horses and drew themselves across the road. They
were in perfect ambush, for they could be seen scarcely fifteen yards
back on the narrow road.
"I broke from the bush and fled back along the road to warn our men.
But I did no good. They were beyond all stopping, or hearing even, as
they came yelling around the turn of the road.
"For three minutes there was some of the sharpest fighting I ever saw,
there in the narrow road, before what remained of the Confederates
broke after their horses and made off again. In the very middle of the
fight I noticed two young officers. One was a captain, the other a
lieutenant. I knew them. I knew their story. I believe I was the only
man living who knew that story. Probably _I_ did not know the whole of
that story.
"The lieutenant had maligned the captain. He had said of him the one
thing that a soldier may not say of another. They had fought once. Why
they had been kept in the same command I do not know.