Part 2 (1/2)
A few years ago, in the room of the great mahogany table, with its clean blotting pad, its writing tablet, and its superb rose rising from a green vase in the midst of the s.h.i.+ning unlittered expanse, there was a plain, heavy mahogany wainscoting reaching chin-high to the average man. A few soft-toned pictures adorned the dull gray walls above the wainscoting, and directly over a ma.s.sive desk that never was seen open hung a framed letter. The letter was written on blue-lined paper in red pokeberry ink. At the top of the letter was the advertis.e.m.e.nt of a hotel, done in quaint, old-fas.h.i.+oned, fancy script with many curly-cues and printers' ornaments. The advertis.e.m.e.nt set forth that the Thayer House at Sycamore Ridge was ”First cla.s.s in every particular,” and that ”Especial attention was paid to transient custom.” On a line in the right-hand corner the reader was notified that the tavern was founded by the Emigrant Aid Society, and balancing this line, in the left-hand corner, were these words: ”The only livery-stable west of Lawrence.” John Barclay's eyes have read it a thousand times, and yet he always smiled when he scanned the letter that followed the advertis.e.m.e.nt. The letter read:--
”Dear Ma I am going to war. Doan crye. Iff father was here he wood go; so why should not I. I will be very caerfull not to get hurt & stay by Cap Ward all the time. So G.o.dby yours truly J. Barclay Jr.”
It was five hours after the soldiers had gone when Mrs. Barclay came home from her work in the aid room, and the first thing that attracted her attention was her son's letter, lying folded on the table. When she read it, she ran with the open letter across the common to the town. It was a woman's town that morning,--not a man was left in it,--for Ezra Lane, the only old man living in the Ridge, had left _Freedom's Banner_ to s.h.i.+ft for itself while he rode to Leavenworth with the soldiers to bring back the teams; and when Mrs. Barclay came into the street, she found some small stir there, made by Miss Hendricks--the only mother the Hendricks boys remembered--who was inquiring for her lost boys. Mrs. Barclay displayed her note, and in a moment the whole population of Sycamore Ridge, with hands under its ap.r.o.ns, was standing in front of the post-office. Then Ellen Culpepper found her tongue, and Mrs. Barclay began to look for a horse. Elmer Hendricks' pony in the pasture was the only horse Ward had left within twenty miles. When Ellen Culpepper and her little sister Molly came back from the pasture and announced that Elmer's pony was gone also, the women surmised that he had taken it with him, for they could not know that after he was spanked from the provision wagon, he had slipped out to the pasture and ridden by a circuitous route to the main road.
It was Captain Ward, dismounting from his driver's seat on the provision wagon at noon, who discovered two boys: a little boy eleven years old in a dead faint, and a bigger boy panting with the heat.
They threw cold spring water on John Barclay's face, and finally his eyes opened, and he grinned as he whispered, ”Hullo, Captain,” to the man bending over him. The man held water to the boy's lips, and he sipped a little and swam out into the blackness again, and then the man reappeared and the boy tried to smile and whispered, ”Aw--I'm all right.” They saw he was coming out of his faint, and one by one the crowd dropped away from him; but Ward stayed, and when the child could speak, he replied to Ward's question, ”'Cause I wanted to.” And then again when the question was repeated, the boy said, ”I tell you 'cause I wanted to.” He shook his head feebly and grinned again and tried to rise, but the man gently held him down, and kept bathing his temples with cold water from the spring beside them. Finally, when the man seemed a little harsh in his questions, the boy's eyes brimmed and he said: ”Whur'd my pa be if he was alive to-day? I just guess I got as much right here as you have.” He made a funny little picture lying on the lush gra.s.s by the spring in the woods; his browned face, washed clean on the forehead and temples, showed almost white under the dirt.
There were tear-stained rings about the eyes, and his pink s.h.i.+rt and blue trousers were grimy with dust, and the red clay of the Sycamore still was on the sides of his dust-brown bare feet. Around a big toe was a rag which showed a woman's tying--neat and firm, but red with clay.
Ward left, and Bob Hendricks came and stood over the prostrate boy.
Bob was carrying a bucket of water to the cook as a peace offering.
”What did they do?” asked the boy on the ground.
”Just shook me--and then said father'd tend to me for this.” The boys exchanged comments on the situation without words, and then Bob said as he drew the dripping bucket from the spring, ”We're going clear on to Leavenworth, and they say then we've got to come back with Ezra Lane and the teams.”
The boy on the ground raised himself by rolling over and catching hold of a sapling. He panted a moment, and ”I'll bet y' I don't.” The other boy went away with a weak ”Me neither,” thrown over his shoulder.
During that long afternoon, and all the next day and the next, the boys ran from wagon to wagon, climbing over end gates, wriggling among the men, running with the horses through the shady woods, paddling in the fords, and only refusing to move when the men got out of the wagons and walked up the long clay hills that rise above the Kaw River. At night they camped by the prairie streams, and the men sang and wondered what they were doing at home, and Philemon Ward took John Barclay out into the silence of the woods and made him say his prayers. And Ward would look toward the west and say, ”Well, Johnnie,--there's home,” and once they stood in an open place in the timber, and Ward gazed at a bright star sinking in the west, and said, ”I guess that's about over Sycamore Ridge.” They went on, and the boy, looking back to see why the man had stopped, caught him throwing a kiss at the star. And they could not know, as they walked back together through the woods abashed, that two women sitting before a cabin door under a sycamore tree were looking at an eastern star, and one threw kisses at it unashamed while the other wept. And on other nights, many other nights, the two, Miss Lucy and Mrs. Barclay, sat looking at their star while the terror in their hearts made their lips mute. G.o.d makes men brave who stand where bullets fly, yet always they can run away. But G.o.d seems to give no alternative to women at home who have to wait and dread.
Forty years later John Barclay took from a box in a safety vault back of his office in the city a newspaper. It was the Sycamore Ridge _Banner_, yellow and creased and pungent with age. ”This,” he said to Senator Myton, spreading the wrinkled sheet out on the mahogany table, ”this is my enlistment paper.” He smiled as he read aloud:--
”At noon of our first day out we came across two stowaways. Hendricks, aged twelve, son of our well-known and popular Mayor, and J. Barclay, aged eleven, son of Mrs. M. Barclay, who, owing to the suddenness of the departure of our troops for the seat of war in Missouri, and certain business delays made necessary in ye editor's return, were slipped out with our company rather than left in the rough and uncertain city of Leavenworth. They are called by the boys of 'C'
company respectively 'the little sergeant and the little corporal, Good Luck boys.'”
A little farther down the column was this paragraph:
”Aug. 2nd we went into camp on Sugar Creek, and some sport was had by the men who went in bathing, taking the horses with them.”
”Ever go in swimming with the horses, Senator?” asked Barclay. The senator shook his head doubtfully.
”Well--you haven't. For if you had you'd remember it,” answered Barclay, and a hundred naked young men and two skinny, bony boys splashed and yelled and ducked and wrestled and locked their strong wet arms about the necks of the plunging horses and dived under them, and rolled across them and played with them like young satyrs in the cool water under the overhanging elms with the stars twinkling in the s.h.i.+ning mahogany as Barclay folded the paper and put it away. He thrummed the polished surface a moment and looked back into the past to see Philemon Ward straight, lean, and glistening like a G.o.d standing on a horse ready to dive, and as he huddled, crouched for the leap, Barclay said, ”Well, come on, Senator, we must go to lunch now.”
It was late in the afternoon of their third day's journey that the men from Sycamore Ridge rode in close order, singing, through the streets of Leavenworth. Watts McHurdie was playing his accordion, and the people turned to look at the uncouth crowd in civilian's clothes that went bellowing ”O My Darling Nellie Gray,” across the town and out to the Fort. Ezra Lane promised to call at the Fort for the two boys and with drivers for the teams early the next morning--but to Sycamore Ridge, Leavenworth in those days was the great city with its pitfalls, and when Ezra Lane, grizzled though he was, came to a realizing sense of his responsibilities, the next day was gone and the third was waning. When he went to the Fort, he found the Sycamore Ridge men had been hurried into Missouri to meet General Price, who was threatening Springfield, and no word had been left for him about the boys. As he left the gate at the Fort, a troop of cavalry rode by gaily, and a boy, a big overgrown fourteen-year-old boy in a blue uniform, pa.s.sed and waved his hand at the befuddled old man, and cried, ”Good-by, Mr.
Lane,--tell 'em you saw me.” He knew the boy was from Sycamore Ridge, but he knew also that he was not one of the boys who had come with the soldiers; and being an old man, far removed from the boy world, he could not place the child in his blue uniform, so he drove away puzzled.
The afternoon the men from Sycamore Ridge came to Leavenworth they were hurriedly examined again, signed the muster rolls, and were sent away without uniforms all in twenty-four hours. But not before they had found time to have their pictures taken in borrowed regimentals.
For twenty years after the war the daguerreotypes of the soldiers taken at Leavenworth that day were the proudest adornments of the centre-tables of Sycamore Ridge, and even now on Lincoln Avenue, in a little white cottage with green blinds, that sits in a broad smooth lawn with elm trees on it, stands an easel. On the easel is a picture--an enlarged crayon drawing of a straight, handsome young fellow in a captain's uniform. One hand is in his coat, and the other at his hip. His head is thrown back with a fierce determination into the photographer's iron rest and all together the picture is marked with the wrinkled front of war. For over one corner of the easel hangs a sword with an ivory handle, and upon it is an inscription proclaiming the fact that the sword was presented to Captain Philemon R. Ward by his company for gallant conduct on the field of battle on the night of August 4, 1861. Above the easel in the corner hangs another picture--that of a sweet-faced old man of seventy, beaming rather benignly over his white lawn necktie. The forty-five years that have pa.s.sed between the two faces have trimmed the hair away from the temples and the brow, have softened the mouth, and have put patience into the eyes--the patience of a great faith often tried but never broken. The five young women of the household know that the crayon portrait on the bamboo easel is highly improper as a parlour ornament--for do they not teach school, and do they not take all the educational journals and the crafty magazines of art? But the hand that put it there was proud of its handiwork, and she who hung the sword upon the easel is gone away, so the girls smile at the fierce young boyish face in the picture as they pa.s.s it, and throw a kiss at the face above it, and the easel is not moved.
And the man,--the tall old man with a slight stoop in his shoulders, the old man who wears the alpaca coat and the white lawn tie seen in the upper picture,--sometimes he wanders into the stately front room with a finger in a census bulletin as a problem in his head creases his brow--and the sight of the sword always makes him smile, and sometimes the smile is a chuckle that stirs the c.o.c.kles of his heart.
For his mind goes back to that summer night of August 4, 1861, and he sees himself riding on a horse with a little boy behind with his arms in the soldier's belt. It is dusk, and ”C” Company on foot is filing down a Missouri hill. It is a muddy road, and the men are tired and dirty. There is no singing now. A man driving an ox team has turned out of the road to let the soldiers pa.s.s. Some one in the line asks the man, ”Where's Price?”
”Over the hill yonder,” replies the man, pointing with his hickory whip-stock. The word buzzes up and down the line. The captain on his horse with the boy clutching at his belt does not hear it. But the line lags and finally halts. The men have been only two days under military discipline. That day last week Phil Ward--who was he, anyway? Henry Schnitzler and Oscar Fernald could have bought him and sold him twice over. So the line halted. Then the captain halted. Then he called Second Lieutenant Dolan and asked to know what was the matter. ”They say they are going to camp,” responded Dolan, touching his cap. Captain Ward's face flushed. He told Dolan to give the order to march. There were shouts and laughter, and Gabriel Carnine cried, ”Say, Phil, this here Missourian we pa.s.sed says old General Price is over that hill.” The boys laughed again, and Ward saw that trouble was before him. The men stood waiting while he controlled his rage before he spoke. Dolan said under his breath from the ground beside the horse, ”They're awful tired, Cap, and they don't want to tackle Price's army all by their lonelies.” Some one in the company called out, ”We've voted on this thing, Cap. Don't the majority rule in this country?”
A smile twitched at Ward's mouth and the boy in him p.r.i.c.ked a twinkle in his eyes, for he was only twenty-six, and he laughed--threw his head back and then leaned over and slapped the horse's neck and finally straightened up and said, ”Gentlemen, I bow to the will of the people.”
And so it happened that when they drew their first month's pay, Martin Culpepper and Jake Dolan suggested to the company that they buy Ward a sword to commemorate the victory of the people. And Martin Culpepper made a great presentation speech in which he said that to the infantry, cavalry, and artillery arms of military service, ”C” Company had added the ”vox populi.” But the night after the presentation Oscar Fernald and Watts McHurdie crawled under the captain's tent and stole the sword and p.a.w.ned it for beer, and there was a sound of revelry by night.
When they found the great camp near Springfield, it seemed to John Barclay that all the soldiers in the world were gathered. It is difficult for a boy under a dozen years to remember things consecutively; because boys do not do things consecutively. They flit around like b.u.t.terflies, and so the picture that they make of events jumps from scene to scene. One film on a roll of John's memory showed a hot August day in the camp of ”C” Company; the men are hurrying about the place. The tents are down; the boys--John and Bob--are kicking around the vacant camp looking for trophies. But there the film broke and did not record the fact that Captain Ward put Bob and John on a commissary wagon that stood in a side street as the soldiers moved out. John remembered looking into a street filled with marching soldiers. First the regulars and the artillery came swinging down the street. At their head the boy saw General Lyon, the commanding officer, and around him was a bodyguard whose plumed hats, with the left brim pinned up, caught the boys' eyes. The regulars marched by silently. It was part of their day's work; but following them came a detachment of Germans singing ”Marchen Rote,” and then the battery of six guns and then the Kansans. Small wonder Captain Gordon Granger told Colonel Mitchel that the Kansas soldiers were only an armed mob.
They filed out of Springfield, some in rags and some in tags and some in velvet gowns. They carried guns; but they looked like delegates to a convention, and as the boys saw their own company, they waved their hands, but they were almost ashamed of the shabby clothes of the men from Sycamore Ridge; for a boy always notices clothes on others. When the Germans stopped singing ”Marchen Rote,” the boys heard Watts McHurdie's high tenor voice start up ”The Dutch Companee,” and the crowd that was lining the street cheered and cheered. A Missouri regiment followed and more regulars, and then a battery of four guns pa.s.sed, and then came more Kansans still going to that everlasting convention. And a band came roaring by,--with its cras.h.i.+ng bra.s.s and rumbling drums,--and then after the band had turned the corner, came Iowa in gray blouses and such other garments as the clothes-lines of the country afforded. They were singing as they pa.s.sed--a song the boy had never heard, being all about the ”happy land of Canaan.” And before the sun had set again, after that night, hundreds of those who sang of the happy land were there. In the rear were the ambulances and the ammunition and the hospital vans, and the wagon which held the boys wheeled into the line. After they had pa.s.sed, the streets were clogged with carts and drays and wagons of all sorts, for the citizens were moving to places of safety.