Henry F. Keenan

“ I am yours, Elisha Boone, but my boy is not yours. He was born in my shape, but he has his mother's soul. He will be a man; he will be your vengeance; he will undo all his father has done. You've robbed me; you've made me rob others. But if you touch, if you look at my boy, my first-born, you might as well hold a pistol at your head. I'm no longer mad. You must treat with him. Ah! yes; I'll do your bidding with the others. I'll make young Jack as much trouble as you ask, but you must make a path of gold for my boy. ”

“ Figure to yourself any predicament in life in which vital stakes hang on the issue; figure to yourself the shipwrecked seizing ice where he had hoped for timber; the condemned criminal walking into the jailer's toils where he had laboriously dug through solid walls; the captain of an army leaving the field victor, to find his legions rushing upon him in rout; figure any monstrous overturn in well-laid schemes, and you have but a faint reflex of poor Jack's heart-breaking anguish when this jocular fate stood above him, with the five gaping barrels pointed at his miserable head. ”

“ Before the words had fairly ended, Jack is off like a shot, forgetting Barney, forgetting everything but the extrication of this grand young Roman. As he skurried along, sometimes on hands and knees, he blames himself for not learning the captain's name. He feels sure that a day will come when the world will know and admire it. He has gained the other corner, and in a moment he will be in the thick copse where the Union flag had been seen, but as he makes a dash through a clump of laurel he is confronted by two men, muskets in hand. ”

“ He holds to the soft, unpaved, outlying streets, that his pace may not attract remark. He passes horsemen, like himself spurring fleetly in the darkness. He is near the river at last—dismounts and reconnoitres. He easily finds a place to tie the horse, and, familiar with every inch of the outlying ground about the prison, crawls close to the wall, listening intently. He can hear no sound save the weary clank of the sentry on the wooden walk. He reaches the wall where the prisoners Jones and Barney were to emerge. There is no sign of a break! Where can Jack be? ”

“ But I dare to love you; if you cast that love from you, love will lose its tenderness, bravery its daring. One of the high mountains of hope whereon I sun my fainting soul is the knowledge that you love no one else. I won't say that you should in love hold to the ride 'first come first served,' but I do say, 'first dare, first win.' And when you reflect on what you said about the accident of war separating us, just put Jack in my place. What would you think of a Southern girl who should refuse him because he fought on the side of his family and his State? ”

“ This was not the gay, the brilliant, the fascinating bon viveur who had been the life of society from Warchester to Bucephalo, from Pentica to New York. Ah! what were the mystic terrors of the night, what the oppressive surroundings of this charnel-house of Nature, to the awful spectacle of this unmanned mind, this delirious echo of past guilt, past cowardice, past shame?
To lessen the somber gloom, Dick had lighted many torches and set them about the high mound where the sleeper lay in a huddle. ”

“ How could you ever lift up your head if it were said that son of John Sprague's—Governor, Senator, minister abroad—was the last to fly to his country's call? Why, Jackson would turn in his grave if a son of John Sprague were not the first to take up arms when the Union that he loved, as he loved his life, was in peril!"
Mrs. Sprague listened with woe-begone perplexity to these sounding periods, conscious only that her darling, her adored scapegrace, had suddenly turned serious, and was using the weapons she had so often employed to justify his conduct. ”

“ Dick, too, had flown to his adored Jack, and Acredale, confounded by the swift alternations in the young soldier's fortunes, settled down to wait the outcome with a tender sorrow for the bright young life eclipsed in disgrace so awful, death so ignominious.
We have looked on while most of the people in this history worked through night to light in the moral perplexities besetting them. We have seen warriors in love and danger gallantly extricating themselves and plucking the bloom of safety from the dragon path of danger. ”

“ There was a great shout of laughter as the fun of the incident flashed upon the listeners, many of whom had heard the ingenuous Jack often in other days sighing for war, and the chance that Napoleon said every man had of finding a marshal's bâton in his knapsack. Jack bore the banter very equably, knowing that Olympia was rather striving to keep his spirits up and divert him from the tears in his mother's eyes than indulge her own humor. Indeed, most of the gayety at this moment was contributed by those whose hearts were heaviest. ”

“ DARLING ROSA: You've often said that you would disown Vincent if he were not true to the South. Think of Vincent in my place—dawdling in Acredale or Washington while battles were going on. You would not hold him less contemptible that he was in love; that he let his love, or his life, for you are both to me, stand as a barrier to his duty. You can't love where you can't honor, and you can't hate where you know conscience rules. ”

“ War is less savage now than it was when your ancestors and mine tortured each other in the name of God and the king."
"All murder is done for love of one sort or another: war is love of country; revenge is love of some one else—men rarely kill from hate," Vincent stammered, his heart beating at the nearness of what he was dying to say. ”

“ Dick, in all the agonized uncertainty of that night of peril, thinks with wonder on the mysterious resources Nature provides its helpless outcasts. The hideous shallows, black, glistening, are now a belt of safety, not only for himself and the sleeper, but a refuge for all manner of whirring birds and crawling things, intimidated and harmless in the stifling breath of the fire. The flame, leaping from sedge to sedge, from trunk to trunk, seems to seek, with a human instinct, and more than human pertinacity, food for its ravening hunger ”

“ It was a beautiful ardor that filled the young hosts that waited in leash on the green hills of the Potomac those months of turmoil, when Scott and McDowell were straining the crude machinery of war to get ready for the vital lunge. Jack and his Acredale squad, as the college fellows were called, lived in a perpetual dream, from which the hard realities of drill, now six hours a day, could not waken them. In days of release they scoured the Maryland hills, secretly hoping that an adventurous rebel picket might appear and give them occasion to return to camp decked with preluding laurels. ”

“ Jack turned to Kate, his face quite pale, and whispered:
"It in not a bird. They are negroes. I have read of these sounds. They are marauding slaves, and we must not let them see us. We must get to those thick clumps of bushes. Do you think you can remain bent until we reach them? If not, we will rest every few paces."
"Go on. I can try."
The pibroch strains still continued, rising into a mournful wail, then sinking info the soft cries of the whip-poor-will. In a few minutes the perplexed fugitives were deep in a clump of wild hawberries, invisible to any one who should pass. ”

“ Her father, the Boone faction, all who had access to her, held the shooting to be a craftily planned murder, calculated to bring advantage to the assassin. To check the sacrilegious love she felt in her heart, she too had been forced to believe, to admit the worst. But when the image of Jack came to her mind, as it did day and night, it was as the gay, frank, chivalrous Hotspur, as unlike a murderer as Golgotha to Hesperides. ”

“ Jack was amazed and disheartened at what he saw and heard. The activity, resources, gayety, and confidence of the authorities and people, recalled to his mind, Oxford, the jocund capital of Charles II and the royalists, while the Commonwealth leaders were drilling their armies. But instead of the chaos of rapine, the wanton excesses, the pillage of churches and colleges that marked the tenure of the miserable Charles, Richmond was as orderly, serene, the Congress as deliberate, and the people as content, as the Rome of the conquest of Persia or France after Jemmapes. ”

“ Peter to the pilgrims approaching Rome, that the great dome, towering cloud ward in the perpetual blue, was to the wondering eye of the soldier as his glance first fell upon it; that it was for months—yes, ever after—on the plains of Arlington and in the deadly exhalations of the Chickahominy. Every one looked anxiously to see signs of war—indeed, since leaving Baltimore, there was a delicious feeling of suspense—as the train shot over embankments or skirted the deep pine woods. Perhaps an adventurous rebel vanguard might attack them. ”

“ All his young life Jack had dreamed of West Point and the years of training that were to fit him for the glories of war. He knew the battles of the Revolution as other boys knew the child-lore of the nursery. He had the campaigns of Marlborough, the strategy of Turenne, the inspirations of the great Frederick, and the prodigies of Napoleon, as readily on the end of his tongue as his comrades had the struggles of the Giant Killer or the tactics of Robinson Crusoe. ”

“ How it brought out the shining lines of the white oak, the glistening green of the cypress! Why hadn't he thought of this before? Then, as the curling waves of fire pushed farther and farther up the steins of the trees, and farther and farther endlessly into the undergrowth, an unearthly outcry and stir began. Birds, blinded by the light, whirred and fluttered into the open space above the water, falling helplessly so near Dick that he could have caught and killed a score to surprise Jack with a game breakfast, when he returned. ”

“ The night-wood is a world by itself, filled with its own atmosphere, as oppressive to valor as the electric reefs that drew the nails from the ships of Sindbad. Among familiar scenes and well-known shapes, it is all the delight the poets sing—so tranquillizing, inspiring, fecund, that in comparison the thought of day brings up garish hues, flaunting figures—the hardness, harshness and unlovely in life. But night in the goblin-land, where Dick found himself suddenly deserted, with fantastic forms swaying in the lazy wind, would have had terrors for the most constant mind ”

“ We have seen a moral combat in the minds of most of the people who have had to do with our luckless Jack. But all herein set down has been the merest November melancholy compared to the charnel-house of dead hopes and baffled purposes that tortured Elisha Boone. Unlovely as Boone has seemed to us, he had one of the prime conditions of human goodness—he loved. He had loved very fondly his son Wesley. He loved very tenderly his daughter Kate. ”

“ I have a friend who doesn't think so."
"No, because she considers your tongue part of herself now."
"I don't see why she should; she has enough of her own."
"In wooing-time no woman ever had enough tongue."
"How changed you are from what you were at Acredale, Jack! I never heard you talk so deep and bookish."
"I had no need at Acredale, Dick. There I was a boy—lived as a boy, romped as a boy, and loved boyish things. But a man ripens swiftly in war—you yourself have. You are no longer the mischief-maker and tom-boy that terrified your family and set the gossips agog in the dear old village. ”

“ She is as easily influenced as a baby. Jack is her darling, remember. All the world is a small affair to her compared with our poor boy. I fancy, if we were as much wrapped up in him as she is, we should make poor pioneers in the wilderness before us."
But Kate could stand no more of this. With a choking sob she turned and fled up the stairway, crying as she disappeared: "Wait—wait a moment; I must get my purse."
When she reappeared, the heavy mourning-veil was drawn down, and
Olympia, with a reassured glance, opened the door.
"You must affect confidence, if you have it not—even gayety. ”

“ The men's backs bulged out with such a pack of supplies that when the regiment halted each man was forced to kneel and let a comrade take off or put on his knapsack. And then the march through the streets—every man known to scores in the throng! The brisk, high-stepping drum corps rat-a-tatting at intervals; then tempests of cheers, flashing banners and patriotic symbols at every window; tears, laughter, humorous cries, jokes, sobbing outbreaks. The whole city was in march as the Caribees reached the thronged main thoroughfare. ”

“ Ah, with what fervent joy Jack marks the Union banner, flapping its twin streamers among the hurtling pines! They are near it; they are under it! Their own guns are no longer available; hundreds are lying at hand; they seize them. The line is firing in retreat. It is a sadly depleted battalion of Keyes's regulars, steadfast, imperturbable, devoted. A handful of them has been forgotten or misdirected. The rebels, uncertain whether it was not a trap to snare them, move with caution, while far to the left a turning column is hurrying to hem the Union group in on every side. ”

“ I always distrust men that clamor to be led on; they are the first to break when the brush comes. Jack will tell you that, for we are agreed on it."
"Jack himself was eager for battle," Mrs. Sprague said, sighing.
"No, Jack was eager for the field. When the battle comes he meets it coolly, but he has no hunger for it, nor have I. General Johnston is as brave a man as ever headed an army, yet he has often told us that his blood freezes when the guns open. I'm sure no one would ever suspect it, for he is as calm and confident as if he were in a quadrille when he rides to the field." ”

“ Die he did, when the yelling horde in the sudden outrush grazed the edge of the Union besom sweeping over the plain in a rush of death. Then behind these spectral shapes came others—thousands—with wild, fierce shouts. The blue mass is thinned to a single line. Men in command look anxiously to the rear. Where is Burnside? Where are the twelve thousand men whom Hunter and Heintzelman deployed in these woods two hours since? Back, slowly, fiercely, but backward, the slender wall of blue is forced; not defeated, but not victorious. All this Jack sees, and he turns heartsick from the sight. ”