Books: The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come

J >> John Fox, Jr. >> The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come

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"Here I am, Mr. Hunt," she said, lightly; "is this your dance?" She rose and
was gone. "Thank you, Mr. Buford," she called back, sweetly.

For a moment Chad stood where he was, quite dazed--so quickly, so unexpectedly
had the crisis come. The blood had rushed to his face and flooded him with
triumphant happiness. A terrible doubt chilled him as quickly. Had he heard
aright?--could he have misunderstood her? Had the dream of years really come
true? What was it she had said? He stumbled around in the half darkness,
wondering. Was this another phase of her unceasing coquetry? How quickly her
tone had changed when Richard Hunt's shadow came. At that moment, he neither
could nor would have changed a hair had some genie dropped them both in the
midst of the crowded ball-room. He turned swiftly toward the dancers. He must
see, know--now!

The dance was a quadrille and the figure was "Grand right and left." Margaret
had met Richard Hunt opposite, half-way, when Chad reached the door and was
curtseying to him with a radiant smile. Again the boy's doubts beat him
fiercely; and then Margaret turned her head, as though she knew he must be
standing there. Her face grew so suddenly serious and her eyes softened with
such swift tenderness when they met his, that a wave of guilty shame swept
through him. And when she came around to him and passed, she leaned from the
circle toward him, merry and mock-reproachful:

"You mustn't look at me like that," she whispered, and Hunt, close at hand,
saw, guessed and smiled. Chad turned quickly away again.

That happy dawn--going home! The Major drowsed and fell asleep. The first
coming light, the first cool breath that was stealing over the awakening
fields, the first spring leaves with their weight of dew, were not more fresh
and pure than the love that was in the boy's heart. He held his right hand in
his left, as though he were imprisoning there the memory of the last little
clasp that she had given it. He looked at the Major, and he wondered how
anybody on earth, at that hour, could be asleep. He thought of the wasted days
of the past few months; the silly, foolish life he had led, and thanked God
that, in the memory of them, there was not one sting of shame. How he would
work for her now! Little guessing how proud she already was, he swore to
himself how proud she should be of him some day. He wondered where she was,
and what she was doing. She could not be asleep, and he must have cried aloud
could he have known--could he have heard her on her knees at her bedside,
whispering his name for the first time in her prayers; could he have seen her,
a little later, at her open window, looking across the fields, as though her
eyes must reach him through the morning dusk.

That happy dawn--for both, that happy dawn!

It was well that neither, at that hour, could see beyond the rim of his own
little world. In a far Southern city another ball, that night, had been going
on. Down there the air was charged with the prescience of dark trouble, but,
while the music moaned to many a heart like a god in pain, there was no
brooding--only a deeper flush to the cheek, a brighter sparkle to the eye, a
keener wit to the tongue; to the dance, a merrier swing. And at that very hour
of dawn, ladies, slippered, bare of head, and in evening gowns, were
fluttering like white moths along the streets of old Charleston, and down to
the Battery, where Fort Sumter lay, gray and quiet in the morning mist--to
await with jest and laughter the hissing shriek of one shell that lighted the
fires of a four years' hell in a happy land of God-fearing peace and God-given
plenty, and the hissing shriek of another that Anderson, Kentuckian, hurled
back, in heroic defence of the flag struck for the first time by other than an
alien hand.

CHAPTER 19. THE BLUE OR THE GRAY

In the far North, as in the far South, men had but to drift with the tide.
Among the Kentuckians, the forces that moulded her sons--Davis and
Lincoln--were at war in the State, as they were at war in the nation. By ties
of blood, sympathies, institutions, Kentucky was bound fast to the South. Yet,
ten years before, Kentuckians had demanded the gradual emancipation of the
slave. That far back, they had carved a pledge on a block of Kentucky marble,
which should be placed in the Washington monument, that Kentucky would be the
last to give up the Union. For ten years, they had felt the shadow of the war
creeping toward them. In the dark hours of that dismal year, before the dawn
of final decision, the men, women, and children of Kentucky talked of little
else save war, and the skeleton of war took its place in the closet of every
home from the Ohio to the crest of the Cumberland. When the dawn of that
decision came, Kentucky spread before the world a record of
independent-mindedness, patriotism, as each side gave the word, and sacrifice
that has no parallel in history. She sent the flower of her youth--forty
thousand strong--into the Confederacy; she lifted the lid of her treasury to
Lincoln, and in answer to his every call, sent him a soldier, practically
without a bounty and without a draft. And when the curtain fell on the last
act of the great tragedy, half of her manhood was behind it--helpless from
disease, wounded, or dead on the battle-field.

So, on a gentle April day, when the great news came, it came like a sword
that, with one stroke, slashed the State in twain, shearing through the
strongest bonds that link one man to another, whether of blood, business,
politics or religion, as though they were no more than threads of wool.
Nowhere in the Union was the National drama so played to the bitter end in the
confines of a single State. As the nation was rent apart, so was the
commonwealth; as the State, so was the county; as the county, the
neighborhood; as the neighborhood, the family; and as the family, so brother
and brother, father and son. In the nation the kinship was racial only.
Brother knew not the face of brother. There was distance between them,
antagonism, prejudice, a smouldering dislike easily fanned to flaming hatred.
In Kentucky the brothers had been born in the same bed, slept in the same
cradle, played under the same roof, sat side by side in the same schoolroom,
and stood now on the threshold of manhood arm in arm, with mutual interests,
mutual love, mutual pride in family that made clan feeling peculiarly intense.
For antislavery fanaticism, or honest unionism, one needed not to go to the
far North; as, for imperious, hotheaded, non-interference or pure State
sovereignty, one needed not to go to the far South. They were all there in the
State, the county, the family--under the same roof. Along the border alone did
feeling approach uniformity--the border of Kentucky hills. There unionism was
free from prejudice as nowhere else on the continent save elsewhere throughout
the Southern mountains. Those Southern Yankees knew nothing about the valley
aristocrat, nothing about his slaves, and cared as little for one as for the
other. Since '76 they had known but one flag, and one flag only, and to that
flag instinctively they rallied. But that the State should be swept from
border to border with horror, there was division even here: for, in the
Kentucky mountains, there was, here and there, a patriarch like Joel Turner
who owned slaves, and he and his sons fought for them as he and his sons would
have fought for their horses, or their cattle, or their sheep.

It was the prescient horror of such a condition that had no little part in the
neutral stand that Kentucky strove to maintain. She knew what war was--for
every fireside was rich in memories that men and women had of kindred who had
fallen on numberless battle-fields--back even to St. Clair's defeat and the
Raisin massacre; and though she did not fear war for its harvest of dangers
and death, she did look with terror on a conflict between neighbors, friends,
and brothers. So she refused troops to Lincoln; she refused them to Davis.
Both pledged her immunity from invasion, and, to enforce that pledge, she
raised Home Guards as she had already raised State Guards for internal
protection and peace. And there--as a State--she stood: but the tragedy went
on in the Kentucky home--a tragedy of peculiar intensity and pathos in one
Kentucky home--the Deans'.

Harry had grown up tall, pale, studious, brooding. He had always been the pet
of his Uncle Brutus--the old Lion of White Hall. Visiting the Hall, he had
drunk in the poison, or consecration, as was the point of view, of
abolitionism. At the first sign he was never allowed to go again. But the
poison had gone deep. Whenever he could he went to hear old Brutus speak.
Eagerly he heard stories of the fearless abolitionist's hand-to-hand fights
with men who sought to skewer his fiery tongue. Deeply he brooded on every
word that his retentive ear had caught from the old man's lips, and on the
wrongs he endured in behalf of his cause and for freedom of speech.

One other hero did he place above him--the great commoner after whom he had
been christened, Henry Clay Dean. He knew how Clay's life had been devoted to
averting the coming war, and how his last days had been darkly shadowed by the
belief that, when he was gone, the war must come. At times he could hear that
clarion voice as it rang through the Senate with the bold challenge to his own
people that paramount was his duty to the nation--subordinate his duty to his
State. Who can tell what the nation owed, in Kentucky, at least, to the
passionate allegiance that was broadcast through the State to Henry Clay? It
was not in the boy's blood to be driven an inch, and no one tried to drive
him. In his own home he was a spectre of gnawing anguish to his mother and
Margaret, of unspeakable bitterness and disappointment to his father, and an
impenetrable sphinx to Dan. For in Dan there was no shaking doubt. He was the
spirit, incarnate, of the young, unquestioning, unthinking, generous,
reckless, hotheaded, passionate South.

And Chad? The news reached Major Buford's farm at noon, and Chad went to the
woods and came in at dusk, haggard and spent. Miserably now he held his tongue
and tortured his brain. Purposely, he never opened his lips to Harry Dean. He
tried to make known to the Major the struggle going on within him, but the
iron-willed old man brushed away all argument with an impatient wave of his
hand. With Margaret he talked once, and straightway the question was dropped
like a living coal. So, Chad withdrew from his fellows. The social life of the
town, gayer than ever now, knew him no more. He kept up his college work, but
when he was not at his books, he walked the fields, and many a moonlit
midnight found him striding along a white turnpike, or sitting motionless on
top of a fence along the border of some woodland, his chin in both hands,
fighting his fight out in the cool stillness alone. He himself little knew the
unmeant significance there was in the old Continental uniform he had worn to
the dance. Even his old rifle, had he but known it, had been carried with
Daniel Morgan from Virginia to Washington's aid in Cambridge. His earliest
memories of war were rooted in thrilling stories of King's Mountain. He had
heard old men tell of pointing deadly rifles at red-coats at New Orleans, and
had absorbed their own love of Old Hickory. The school-master himself, when a
mere lad, had been with Scott in Mexico. The spirit of the back-woodsman had
been caught in the hills, and was alive and unchanged at that very hour. The
boy was practically born in Revolutionary days, and that was why, like all
mountaineers, Chad had little love of State and only love of country--was
first, last and all the time, simply American. It was not reason--it was
instinct. The heroes the school-master had taught him to love and some day to
emulate, had fought under one flag, and, like them, the mountaineers never
dreamed there could be another. And so the boy was an unconscious
reincarnation of that old spirit, uninfluenced by temporary apostasies in the
outside world, untouched absolutely by sectional prejudice or the appeal of
the slave. The mountaineer had no hatred of the valley aristocrat, because he
knew nothing of him, and envied no man what he was, what he had, or the life
he led. So, as for slavery, that question, singularly enough, never troubled
his soul. To him slaves were hewers of wood and drawers of water. The Lord had
made them so and the Bible said that it was right. That the school-master had
taught Chad. He had read "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and the story made him smile.
The tragedies of it he had never known and he did not believe. Slaves were
sleek, well-fed, well-housed, loved and trusted, rightly inferior and happy;
and no aristocrat ever moved among them with a more lordly, righteous air of
authority than did this mountain lad who had known them little more than half
a dozen years. Unlike the North, the boy had no prejudice, no antagonism, no
jealousy, no grievance to help him in his struggle. Unlike Harry, he had no
slave sympathy to stir him to the depths, no stubborn, rebellious pride to
prod him on. In the days when the school-master thundered at him some speech
of the Prince of Kentuckians, it was always the national thrill in the fiery
utterance that had shaken him even then. So that unconsciously the boy was the
embodiment of pure Americanism, and for that reason he and the people among
whom he was born stood among the millions on either side, quite alone.

What was he fighting then--ah, what? If the bed-rock of his character was not
loyalty, it was nothing. In the mountains the Turners had taken him from the
Wilderness. In the Bluegrass the old Major had taken him from the hills. His
very life he owed to the simple, kindly mountaineers, and what he valued more
than his life he owed to the simple gentleman who had picked him up from the
roadside and, almost without question, had taken him to his heart and to his
home. The Turners, he knew, would fight for their slaves as they would have
fought Dillon or Devil had either proposed to take from them a cow, a hog, or
a sheep. For that Chad could not blame them. And the Major was going to fight,
as he believed, for his liberty, his State, his country, his property, his
fireside. So in the eyes of both, Chad must be the snake who had warmed his
frozen body on their hearthstones and bitten the kindly hands that had warmed
him back to life. What would Melissa say? Mentally he shrank from the fire of
her eyes and the scorn of her tongue when she should know. And Margaret--the
thought of her brought always a voiceless groan. To her, he had let his doubts
be known, and her white silence closed his own lips then and there. The simple
fact that he had doubts was an entering wedge of coldness between them that
Chad saw must force them apart for he knew that the truth must come soon, and
what would be the bitter cost of that truth. She could never see him as she
saw Harry. Harry was a beloved and erring brother. Hatred of slavery had been
cunningly planted in his heart by her father's own brother, upon whose head
the blame for Harry's sin was set. The boy had been taunted until his own
father's scorn had stirred his proud independence into stubborn resistance and
intensified his resolution to do what he pleased and what he thought was
right. But Chad--she would never understand him. She would never understand
his love for the Government that had once abandoned her people to savages and
forced her State and his to seek aid from a foreign land. In her eyes, too, he
would be rending the hearts that had been tenderest to him in all the world:
and that was all. Of what fate she would deal out to him he dared not think.
If he lifted his hand against the South, he must strike at the heart of all he
loved best, to which he owed most. If against the Union, at the heart of all
that was best in himself. In him the pure spirit that gave birth to the nation
was fighting for life. Ah, God! what should he do--what should he do?

CHAPTER 20. OFF TO THE WAR

Throughout that summer Chad fought his fight, daily swaying this way and
that-- fought it in secret until the phantom of neutrality faded and gave
place to the grim spectre of war--until with each hand Kentucky drew a sword
and made ready to plunge both into her own stout heart. When Sumter fell, she
shook her head resolutely to both North and South. Crittenden, in the name of
Union lovers and the dead Clay, pleaded with the State to take no part in the
fratricidal crime. From the mothers, wives, sisters and daughters of
thirty-one counties came piteously the same appeal. Neutrality, to be held
inviolate, was the answer to the cry from both the North and the South; but
armed neutrality, said Kentucky. The State had not the moral right to secede;
the Nation, no constitutional right to coerce: if both the North and the South
left their paths of duty and fought--let both keep their battles from her
soil. Straightway State Guards went into camp and Home Guards were held in
reserve, but there was not a fool in the Commonwealth who did not know that,
in sympathy, the State Guards were already for the Confederacy and the Home
Guards for the Union cause. This was in May.

In June, Federals were enlisting across the Ohio; Confederates, just over the
border of Dixie which begins in Tennessee. Within a month Stonewall Jackson
sat on his horse, after Bull Run, watching the routed Yankees, praying for
fresh men that he might go on and take the Capitol, and, from the Federal
dream of a sixty-days' riot, the North woke with a gasp. A week or two later,
Camp Dick Robinson squatted down on the edge of the Bluegrass, the first
violation of the State's neutrality, and beckoned with both hands for Yankee
recruits. Soon an order went round to disarm the State Guards, and on that
very day the State Guards made ready for Dixie. On that day the crisis came at
the Deans', and on that day Chad Buford made up his mind. When the Major and
Miss Lucy went to bed that night, he slipped out of the house and walked
through the yard and across the pike, following the little creek half
unconsciously toward the Deans', until he could see the light in Margaret's
window, and there he climbed the worm fence and sat leaning his head against
one of the forked stakes with his hat in his lap. He would probably not see
her again. He would send her word next morning to ask that he might, and he
feared what the result of that word would be. Several times his longing eyes
saw her shadow pass the curtain, and when her light was out, he closed his
eyes and sat motionless--how long he hardly knew; but, when he sprang down, he
was stiffened from the midnight chill and his unchanged posture. He went back
to his room then, and wrote Margaret a letter and tore it up and went to bed.
There was little sleep for him that night, and when the glimmer of morning
brightened at his window, he rose listlessly, dipped his hot head in a bowl of
water and stole out to the barn. His little mare whinnied a welcome as he
opened the barn door. He patted her on the neck.

"Good-by, little girl," he said. He started to call her by name and stopped.
Margaret had named the beautiful creature "Dixie." The servants were stirring.

"Good-mawnin', Mars Chad," said each, and with each he shook hands, saying
simply that he was going away that morning. Only old Tom asked him a question.

"Foh Gawd, Mars Chad," said the old fellow, "old Mars Buford can't git along
widout you. You gwine to come back soon?"

"I don't know, Uncle Tom," said Chad, sadly.

"Whar you gwine, Mars Chad?"

"Into the army."

"De ahmy?" The old man smiled. "You gwine to fight de Yankees?"

"I'm going to fight WITH the Yankees."

The old driver looked as though he could not have heard aright.

"You foolin' this ole nigger, Mars Chad, ain't you?"

Chad shook his head, and the old man straightened himself a bit.

"I'se sorry to heah it, suh," he said, with dignity, and he turned to his
work.

Miss Lucy was not feeling well that morning and did not come down to
breakfast. The boy was so pale and haggard that the Major looked at him
anxiously.

"What's the matter with you, Chad? Are you--?"

"I didn't sleep very well last night, Major."

The Major chuckled. "I reckon you ain't gettin' enough sleep these days. I
reckon I wouldn't, either, if I were in your place."

Chad did not answer. After breakfast he sat with the Major on the porch in the
fresh, sunny air. The Major smoked his pipe, taking the stem out of his mouth
now and then to shout some order as a servant passed under his eye.

"What's the news, Chad?"

"Mr. Crittenden is back."

"What did old Lincoln say?"

"That Camp Dick Robinson was formed for Kentuckians by Kentuckians, and he did
not believe that it was the wish of the State that it should be removed."

"Well, by --! after his promise. What did Davis say?"

"That if Kentucky opened the Northern door for invasion, she must not close
the Southern door to entrance for defence."

"And dead right he is," growled the Major with satisfaction.

"Governor Magoffin asked Ohio and Indiana to join in an effort for a peace
Congress," Chad added.

"Well?"

"Both governors refused."

"I tell you, boy, the hour has come."

The hour had come.

"I'm going away this morning, Major."

The Major did not even turn his head.

"I thought this was coming," he said quietly. Chad's face grew even paler, and
he steeled his heart for the revelation.

"I've already spoken to Lieutenant Hunt," the Major went on. "He expects to be
a captain, and he says that, maybe, he can make you a lieutenant. You can take
that boy Brutus as a body servant." He brought his fist down on the railing of
the porch. "God, but I'd give the rest of my life to be ten years younger than
I am now."

"Major, I'm GOING INTO THE UNION ARMY."

The Major's pipe almost dropped from between his lips. Catching the arms of
his chair with both hands, he turned heavily and with dazed wonder, as though
the boy had struck him with his fist from behind, and, without a word, stared
hard into Chad's tortured face. The keen old eye had not long to look before
it saw the truth, and then, silently, the old man turned back. His hands
trembled on the chair, and he slowly thrust them into his pockets, breathing
hard through his nose. The boy expected an outbreak, but none came. A bee
buzzed above them. A yellow butterfly zigzagged by. Blackbirds chattered in
the firs. The screech of a peacock shrilled across the yard, and a ploughman's
singing wailed across the fields:

Trouble, O Lawd!
Nothin' but trouble in de lan' of Canaan.

The boy knew he had given his old friend a mortal hurt.

"Don't, Major," he pleaded. "You don't know how I have fought against this. I
tried to be on your side. I thought I was. I joined the Rifles. I found first
that I couldn't fight WITH the South, and--then--I--found that I had to fight
FOR the North. It almost kills me when I think of all you have done "

The Major waved his hand imperiously. He was not the man to hear his favors
recounted, much less refer to them himself. He straightened and got up from
his chair. His manner had grown formal, stately, coldly courteous.

"I cannot understand, but you are old enough, sir, to know your own mind. You
should have prepared me for this. You will excuse me a moment." Chad rose and
the Major walked toward the door, his step not very steady, and his shoulders
a bit shrunken--his back, somehow, looked suddenly old.

"Brutus!" he called sharply to a black boy who was training rosebushes in the
yard. "Saddle Mr. Chad's horse." Then, without looking again at Chad, he
turned into his office, and Chad, standing where he was, with a breaking
heart, could hear, through the open window, the rustling of papers and the
scratching of a pen.

In a few minutes he heard the Major rise and he turned to meet him. The old
man held a roll of bills in one hand and a paper in the other.

"Here is the balance due you on our last trade," he said, quietly. "The mare
is yours--Dixie," he added, grimly. "The old mare is in foal. I will keep her
and send you your due when the time comes. We are quite even," he went on in a
level tone of business. "Indeed, what you have done about the place more than
exceeds any expense that you have ever caused me. If anything, I am still in
your debt."

"I can't take it!" said Chad, choking back a sob.

"You will have to take it," the Major broke in, curtly, unless--" the Major
held back the bitter speech that was on his lips and Chad understood. The old
man did not want to feel under any obligations to him.

"I would offer you Brutus, as was my intention, except that I know you would
not take him," again he added, grimly, "and Brutus would run away from you."

"No, Major," said Chad, sadly, "I would not take Brutus," and he stepped down
one step of the porch backward.

"I tried to tell you, Major, but you wouldn't listen. I don't wonder, for I
couldn't explain to you what I couldn't understand myself. I--" the boy choked
and tears filled his eyes. He was afraid to hold out his hand.

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