THE COPPERHEAD

[BY HAROLD FREDERIC.]

THE COPPERHEAD

BY
HAROLD FREDERIC

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1893

COPYRIGHT, 1893, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.

[CONTENTS]

THE COPPERHEAD

[CHAPTER I
ABNER BEECH]

It was on the night of my thirteenth birthday, I know, that the old farm-house was burned over our heads. By that reckoning I must have been six or seven when I went to live with Farmer Beech, because at the time he testified I had been with him half my life.

Abner Beech had often been supervisor for his town, and could have gone to the Assembly, it was said, had he chosen. He was a stalwart, thick-shouldered, big man, with shaggy dark eyebrows shading stern hazel eyes, and with a long, straight nose, and a broad, firmly shut mouth. His expansive upper lip was blue from many years of shaving; all the rest was bushing beard, mounting high upon the cheeks and rolling downward in iron-gray billows over his breast. That shaven upper lip, which still may be found among the farmers of the old blood in our district was, I dare say, a survival from the time of the Puritan protest against the mustaches of the Cavaliers. If Abner Beech, in the latter days, had been told that this shaving on Wednesday and Saturday nights was a New England rite, I feel sure he would never have touched razor again.

He was a well-to-do man in the earlier time—a tremendous worker, a “good provider,” a citizen of weight and substance in the community. In all large matters the neighborhood looked to him to take the lead. He was the first farmer roundabout to set a mowing-machine to work in his meadows, and to put up lightning-rods on his buildings. At one period he was, too, the chief pillar in the church, but that was before the episode of the lightning-rods. Our little Union meeting-house was supplied in those days by an irregular procession of itinerant preachers, who came when the spirit moved and spoke with that entire frankness which is induced by knowledge that the night is to be spent somewhere else. One of these strolling ministers regarded all attempts to protect property from lightning as an insolent defiance of the Divine Will, and said so very pointedly in the pulpit, and the congregation sat still and listened and grinned. Farmer Beech never forgave them.

There came in good time other causes for ill-feeling. It is beyond the power of my memory to pick out and arrange in proper sequence the events which, in the final result, separated Abner Beech from his fellows. My own recollections go with distinctness back to the reception of the news that Virginia had hanged John Brown; in a vaguer way they cover the two or three preceding years. Very likely Farmer Beech had begun to fall out of touch with his neighbors even before that.

The circumstances of my adoption into his household—an orphan without relations or other friends—were not of the sort to serve this narrative. I was taken in to be raised as a farm-hand, and was no more expected to be grateful than as if I had been a young steer purchased to toil in the yoke. No suggestion was ever made that I had incurred any debt of obligation to the Beeches. In a little community where everyone worked as a matter of course till there was no more work to do, and all shared alike the simple food, the tired, heavy sleep, and the infrequent spells of recreation, no one talked or thought of benefits conferred or received. My rights in the house and about the place were neither less nor more than those of Jeff Beech, the farmer's only son.

In the course of time I came, indeed, to be a more sympathetic unit in the household, so to speak, than poor Jeff himself. But that was only because he had been drawn off after strange gods.

At all times—even when nothing else good was said of him—Abner Beech was spoken of by the people of the district as a “great hand for reading.” His pre-eminence in this matter remained unquestioned to the end. No other farmer for miles owned half the number of books which he had on the shelves above his writing-desk. Still less was there anyone roundabout who could for a moment stand up with him in a discussion involving book-learning in general. This at first secured for him the respect of the whole country-side, and men were proud to be agreed with by such a scholar. But when affairs changed, this, oddly enough, became a formidable popular grievance against Abner Beech. They said then that his opinions were worthless because he got them from printed books, instead of from his heart.

What these opinions were may in some measure be guessed from the titles of the farmer's books. Perhaps there were some thirty of them behind the glass doors of the old mahogany bookcase. With one or two agricultural or veterinary exceptions, they related exclusively to American history and politics. There were, I recall, the first two volumes of Bancroft, and Lossing's “Lives of the Signers,” and “Field-Books” of the two wars with England; Thomas H. Benton's “Thirty Years' View;” the four green-black volumes of Hammond's “Political History of the State of New York;” campaign lives of Lewis Cass and Franklin Pierce, and larger biographies of Jefferson and Jackson, and, most imposing of all, a whole long row of big calf-bound volumes of the Congressional Globe, which carried the minutiæ of politics at Washington back into the forties.

These books constituted the entire literary side of my boyish education. I have only the faintest and haziest recollections of what happened when I went during the winter months to the school-house at the Four Corners. But I can recall the very form of the type in the farmer's books. Everyone of those quaint, austere, and beardless faces, framed in high collars and stocks and waving hair—the Marcys, Calhouns, DeWitt Clintons, and Silas Wrights of the daguerreotype and Sartain's primitive graver—gives back to me now the lineaments of an old-time friend.

Whenever I could with decency escape from playing checkers with Jeff, and had no harness to grease or other indoor jobs, I spent the winter evenings in poring over some of these books—generally with Abner Beech at the opposite side of the table immersed in another. On some rare occasion one of the hired men would take down a volume and look through it—the farmer watching him covertly the while to see that he did not wet his big thumbs to turn over the leaves—but for the most part we two had the books to ourselves. The others would sit about till bedtime, amusing themselves as best they could, the women-folk knitting or mending, the men cracking butternuts, or dallying with cider and apples and fried-cakes, as they talked over the work and gossip of the district and tempted the scorching impulses of the stovehearth with their stockinged feet.

This tacit separation of the farmer and myself from the rest of the household in the course of time begat confidences between us. He grew, from brief and casual beginnings, into a habit of speaking to me about the things we read. As it became apparent, year by year, that young Jeff was never going to read anything at all, Abner Beech more and more distinguished me with conversational favor. It cannot be said that the favoritism showed itself in other directions. I had to work as hard as ever, and got no more playtime than before. The master's eye was everywhere as keen, alert, and unsparing as if I had not known even my alphabet. But when there were breathing spells, we talked together—or rather he talked and I listened—as if we were folk quite apart from the rest.

Two fixed ideas thus arose in my boyish mind, and dominated all my little notions of the world. One was that Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall were among the most infamous characters in history. The other was that every true American ought to hold himself in daily readiness to fight with England. I gave a great deal of thought to both these matters. I had early convictions, too, I remember, with regard to Daniel Webster, who had been very bad, and then all at once became a very good man. For some obscure reason I always connected him in my imagination with Zaccheus up a tree, and clung to the queer association of images long after I learned that the Marshfield statesman had been physically a large man.

Gradually the old blood-feud with the Britisher became obscured by fresher antagonisms, and there sprouted up a crop of new sons of Belial who deserved to be hated more even than had Hamilton and Marshall. With me the two stages of indignation glided into one another so imperceptibly that I can now hardly distinguish between them. What I do recall is that the farmer came in time to neglect the hereditary enemy, England, and to seem to have quite forgotten our own historic foes to liberty, so enraged was he over the modern Abolitionists. He told me about them as we paced up the seed rows together in the spring, as we drove homeward on the hay-load in the cool of the summer evening, as we shovelled out a path for the women to the pumps in the farm-yard through December snows. It took me a long time to even approximately grasp the wickedness of these new men, who desired to establish negro sovereignty in the Republic, and to compel each white girl to marry a black man.

The fact that I had never seen any negro “close to,” and had indeed only caught passing glimpses of one or more of the colored race on the streets of our nearest big town, added, no doubt, to the mystified alarm with which I contemplated these monstrous proposals. When finally an old darky on his travels did stroll our way, and I beheld him, incredibly ragged, dirty, and light-hearted, shuffling through “Jump Jim Crow” down at the Four Corners, for the ribald delectation of the village loafers, the revelation fairly made me shudder. I marvelled that the others could laugh, with this unspeakable fate hanging over their silly heads.

At first the Abolitionists were to me a remote and intangible class, who lived and wrought their evil deeds in distant places—chiefly New England way. I rarely heard mention of any names of persons among them. They seemed to be an impersonal mass, like a herd of buffaloes or a swarm of hornets. The first individuality in their ranks which attracted my attention, I remember, was that of Theodore Parker. The farmer one day brought home with him from town a pamphlet composed of anti-slavery sermons or addresses by this person. In the evening he read it, or as far into it as his temper would permit, beating the table with his huge fist from time to time, and snorting with wrathful amazement. At last he sprang to his feet, marched over to the wood-stove, kicked the door open with his boot, and thrust the offending print into the blaze. It is vivid in my memory still—the way the red flame-light flared over his big burly front, and sparkled on his beard, and made his face to shine like that of Moses.

But soon I learned that there were Abolitionists everywhere—Abolitionists right here in our own little farmland township of northern New York! The impression which this discovery made upon me was not unlike that produced on Robinson Crusoe by the immortal footprint. I could think of nothing else. Great events, which really covered a space of years, came and went as in a bunch together, while I was still pondering upon this. John Brown was hanged, Lincoln was elected, Sumter was fired on, the first regiment was raised and despatched from our rustic end of Dearborn County—and all the time it seems now as if my mind was concentrated upon the amazing fact that some of our neighbors were Abolitionists.

There was a certain dreamlike tricksiness of transformation in it all. At first there was only one Abolitionist, old “Jee” Hagadorn. Then, somehow, there came to be a number of them—and then, all at once, lo! everybody was an Abolitionist—that is to say, everybody but Abner Beech. The more general and enthusiastic the conversion of the others became, the more resolutely and doggedly he dug his heels into the ground, and braced his broad shoulders, and pulled in the opposite direction. The skies darkened, the wind rose, the storm of angry popular feeling burst swooping over the country-side, but Beech only stiffened his back and never budged an inch.

At some early stage of this great change, we ceased going to church at all. The pulpit of our rustic meeting-house had become a platform from which the farmer found himself denounced with hopeless regularity on every recurring Sabbath, and that, too, without any chance whatever of talking back. This in itself was hardly to be borne. But when others, mere laymen of the church, took up the theme, and began in class-meetings and the Sunday-school to talk about Antichrist and the Beast with Ten Horns and Seven Heads, in obvious connection with Southern sympathizers, it became frankly insufferable. The farmer did not give in without a fierce resistance. He collected all the texts he could find in the Bible, such as “Servants obey your masters,” “Cursed be Canaan,” and the like, and hurled them vehemently, with strong, deep voice, and sternly glowing eyes, full at their heads. But the others had many more texts—we learned afterwards that old “Jee” Hagadorn enjoyed the unfair advantage of a Cruden's Concordance—and their tongues were as forty to one, so we left off going to church altogether.

Not long after this, I should think, came the miserable affair of the cheese-factory.

The idea of doing all the dairy work of a neighborhood under a common roof, which originated not many miles from us, was now nearly ten years old. In those days it was regarded as having in it possibilities of vastly greater things than mere cheese-making. Its success among us had stirred up in men's minds big sanguine notions of co-operation as the answer to all American farm problems—as the gateway through which we were to march into the rural millennium. These high hopes one recalls now with a smile and a sigh. Farmers' wives continued to break down and die under the strain, or to be drafted off to the lunatic asylums; the farmers kept on hanging themselves in their barns, or flying westward before the locustlike cloud of mortgages; the boys and girls turned their steps townward in an ever-increasing host. The millennium never came at all.

But at that time—in the late fifties and early sixties—the cheese-factory was the centre of an impressive constellation of dreams and roseate promises. Its managers were the very elect of the district; their disfavor was more to be dreaded than any condemnation of a town-meeting; their chief officers were even more important personages than the supervisor and assessor.

Abner Beech had literally been the founder of our cheese-factory. I fancy he gave the very land on which it was built, and where you will see it still, under the willows by the upper-creek bridge. He sent to it in those days the milk of the biggest herd owned by any farmer for miles around, reaching at seasons nearly one hundred cows. His voice, too, outweighed all others in its co-operative councils.

But when our church-going community had reached the conclusion that a man couldn't be a Christian and hold such views on the slave question as Beech held, it was only a very short step to the conviction that such a man would water his milk. In some parts of the world the theft of a horse is the most heinous of conceivable crimes; other sections exalt to this pinnacle of sacredness in property a sheep or a pheasant or a woman. Among our dairymen the thing of special sanctity was milk. A man in our neighborhood might almost better be accused of forgery or bigamy outright, than to fall under the dreadful suspicion of putting water into his cans.

Whether it was mere stupid prejudice or malignant invention I know not—who started the story was never to be learned—but of a sudden everybody seemed to have heard that Abner Beech's milk had been refused at the cheese-factory. This was not true, any more than it was true that there could possibly have been warrant for such a proceeding. But what did happen was that the cheese-maker took elaborate pains each morning to test our cans with such primitive appliances as preceded the lactometer, and sniffed suspiciously as he entered our figures in a separate book, and behaved generally so that our hired man knocked him head over heels into one of his whey vats. Then the managers complained to the farmer. He went down to meet them, boiling over with rage. There was an evil spirit in the air, and bitter words were exchanged. The outcome was that Abner Beech renounced the co-operative curds of his earlier manhood, so to speak, sold part of his cattle at a heavy loss, and began making butter at home with the milk of the remainder.

Then we became pariahs in good earnest.

[CHAPTER II
JEFF'S MUTINY]

The farmer came in from the fields somewhat earlier than usual on this August afternoon. He walked, I remember, with a heavy step and bowed head, and, when he had come into the shade on the porch and taken off his hat, looked about him with a wearied air. The great heat, with its motionless atmosphere and sultry closeness, had well-nigh wilted everybody. But one could see that Abner was suffering more than the rest, and from something beyond the enervation of dog-days.

He sank weightily into the arm-chair by the desk, and stretched out his legs with a querulous note in his accustomed grunt of relief. On the moment Mrs. Beech came in from the kitchen, with the big china washbowl filled with cold water, and the towel and clean socks over her arm, and knelt before her husband. She proceeded to pull off his big, dust-baked boots and the woollen foot-gear, put his feet into the bowl, bathe and dry them, and draw on the fresh covering, all without a word.

The ceremony was one I had watched many hundreds of times. Mrs. Beech was a tall, dark, silent woman, whom I could well believe to have been handsome in her youth. She belonged to one of the old Mohawk-Dutch families, and when some of her sisters came to visit at the farm I noted that they too were all dusky as squaws, with jet-black shiny curls and eyes like the midnight hawk. I used always to be afraid of them on this account, but I dare say they were in reality most kindly women. Mrs. Beech herself represented to my boyish eyes the ideal of a saturnine and masterful queen. She performed great quantities of work with no apparent effort—as if she had merely willed it to be done. Her household was governed with a cold impassive exactitude; there were never any hitches, or even high words. The hired-girls, of course, called her “M'rye,” as the rest of us mostly did, but they rarely carried familiarity further, and as a rule respected her dislike for much talk. During all the years I spent under her roof I was never clear in my mind as to whether she liked me or not. Her own son, even, passed his boyhood in much the same state of dubiety.

But to her husband, Abner Beech, she was always most affectionately docile and humble. Her snapping black eyes followed him about and rested on him with an almost canine fidelity of liking. She spoke to him habitually in a voice quite different from that which others heard addressed to them. This, indeed, was measurably true of us all. By instinct the whole household deferred in tone and manner to our big, bearded chief, as if he were an Arab sheik ruling over us in a tent on the desert. The word “patriarch” still seems best to describe him, and his attitude toward us and the world in general, as I recall him sitting there in the half-darkened living-room, with his wife bending over his feet in true Oriental submission.

“Do you know where Jeff is?” the farmer suddenly asked, without turning his head to where I sat braiding a whiplash, but indicating by the volume of voice that his query was put to me.

“He went off about two o'clock,” I replied, “with his fish-pole. They say they are biting like everything down in the creek.”

“Well, you keep to work and they won't bite you,” said Abner Beech. This was a very old joke with him, and usually the opportunity of using it once more tended to lighten his mood. Now, though mere force of habit led him to repeat the pleasantry, he had no pleasure in it. He sat with his head bent, and his huge hairy hands spread listlessly on the chair-arms.

Mrs. Beech finished her task, and rose, lifting the bowl from the floor. She paused, and looked wistfully into her husband's face.

“You ain't a bit well, Abner!” she said.

“Well as I'm likely ever to be again,” he made answer, gloomily.

“Has any more of 'em been sayin' or doin' anything?” the wife asked, with diffident hesitation.

The farmer spoke with more animation. “D'ye suppose I care a picayune what they say or do?” he demanded. “Not I! But when a man's own kith and kin turn agin him, into the bargain—” he left the sentence unfinished, and shook his head to indicate the impossibility of such a situation.

“Has Jeff—then—” Mrs. Beech began to ask.

“Yes—Jeff!” thundered the farmer, striking his fist on the arm of the chair. “Yes—by the Eternal!—Jeff!”

When Abner Beech swore by the Eternal we knew that things were pretty bad. His wife put the bowl down on a chair, and seated herself in another. “What's Jeff been doin'?” she asked.

“Why, where d'ye suppose he was last night, 'n' the night before that? Where d'ye suppose he is this minute? They ain't no mistake about it, Lee Watkins saw 'em with his own eyes, and ta'nted me with it. He's down by the red bridge—that's where he is—hangin' round that Hagadorn gal!”

Mrs. Beech looked properly aghast at the intelligence. Even to me it was apparent that the unhappy Jeff might better have been employed in committing any other crime under the sun. It was only to be expected that his mother would be horrified.

“I never could abide that Lee Watkins,” was what she said.

The farmer did not comment on the relevancy of this. “Yes,” he went on, “the daughter of mine enemy, the child of that whining, backbiting old scoundrel who's been eating his way into me like a deer-tick for years—the whelp that I owe every mean and miserable thing that's ever happened to me—yes, of all living human creatures, by the Eternal! it's his daughter that that blamed fool of a Jeff must take a shine to, and hang around after!”

“He'll come of age the fourteenth of next month,” remarked the mother, tentatively.

“Yes—and march up and vote the Woolly-head ticket. I suppose that's what'll come next!” said the farmer, bitterly. “It only needed that!”

“And it was you who got her the job of teachin' the school, too,” put in Mrs. Beech.

“That's nothing to do with it,” Abner continued. “I ain't blamin' her—that is, on her own account. She's a good enough gal so far's I know. But everything and everybody under that tumble-down Hagadorn roof ought to be pizen to any son of mine! That's what I say! And I tell you this, mother”—the farmer rose, and spread his broad chest, towering over the seated woman as he spoke—“I tell you this; if he ain't got pride enough to keep him away from that house—away from that gal—then he can keep away from this house—away from me!”

The wife looked up at him mutely, then bowed her head in tacit consent.

“He brings it on himself!” Abner cried, with clenched fists, beginning to pace up and down the room. “Who's the one man I've reason to curse with my dying breath? Who began the infernal Abolition cackle here? Who drove me out of the church? Who started that outrageous lie about the milk at the factory, and chased me out of that, too? Who's been a layin' for years behind every stump and every bush, waitin' for the chance to stab me in the back, an' ruin my business, an' set my neighbors agin me, an' land me an' mine in the poorhouse or the lockup? You know as well as I do—‘Jee’ Hagadorn! If I'd wrung his scrawny little neck for him the first time I ever laid eyes on him, it 'd 'a' been money in my pocket and years added onto my life. And then my son—my son! must go taggin' around—oh-h!”

He ended with an inarticulate growl of impatience and wrath.

“Mebbe, if you spoke to the boy—” Mrs. Beech began.

“Yes, I'll speak to him!” the farmer burst forth, with grim emphasis. “I'll speak to him so't he'll hear!” He turned abruptly to me. “Here, boy,” he said, “you go down the creek-road an' look for Jeff. If he ain't loafin' round the school-house he'll be in the neighborhood of Hagadorn's. You tell him I say for him to get back here as quick as he can. You needn't tell him what it's about. Pick up your feet, now!”

As luck would have it, I had scarcely got out to the road before I heard the loose-spoked wheels of the local butcher's wagon rattling behind me down the hill. Looking round, I saw through the accompanying puffs of dust that young “Ni” Hagadorn was driving, and that he was alone. I stopped and waited for him to come up, questioning my mind whether it would be fair to beg a lift from him, when the purpose of my journey was so hostile to his family. Even after he had halted, and I had climbed up to the seat beside him, this consciousness of treachery disturbed me.

But no one thought long of being serious with “Ni.” He was along in the teens somewhere, not large for his years but extremely wiry and muscular, and the funniest boy any of us ever knew of. How the son of such a sad-faced, gloomy, old licensed exhorter as “Jee” Hagadorn could be such a running spring of jokes and odd sayings and general deviltry as “Ni,” passed all our understandings. His very face made you laugh, with its wilderness of freckles, its snub nose, and the comical curl to its mouth. He must have been a profitable investment to the butcher who hired him to drive about the country. The farmers' wives all came out to laugh and chat with him, and under the influence of his good spirits they went on buying the toughest steaks and bull-beef flanks, at more than city prices, year after year. But anybody who thought “Ni” was soft because he was full of fun made a great mistake.

“I see you ain't doin' much ditchin' this year,” “Ni” remarked, glancing over our fields as he started up the horse. “I should think you'd be tickled to death.”

Well, in one sense I was glad. There used to be no other such back-aching work in all the year as that picking up of stones to fill into the trenches which the hired men began digging as soon as the hay and grain were in. But on the other hand, I knew that the present idleness meant—as everything else now seemed to mean—that the Beech farm was going to the dogs.

“No,” I made rueful answer. “Our land don't need drainin' any more. It's dry as a powder-horn now.”

“Ni” clucked knowingly at the old horse. “Guess it's Abner that can't stand much more drainin',” he said. “They say he's looking all round for a mortgage, and can't raise one.”

“No such thing!” I replied. “His health's poorly this summer, that's all. And Jeff—he dont seem to take hold, somehow, like he used to.”

My companion laughed outright. “Mustn't call him Jeff any more,” he remarked with a grin. “He was telling us down at the house that he was going to have people call him Tom after this. He can't stand answerin' to the same name as Jeff Davis,” he says.

“I suppose you folks put him up to that,” I made bold to comment, indignantly.

The suggestion did not annoy “Ni.” “Mebbe so,” he said. “You know Dad lots a good deal on names. He's down-right mortified that I don't get up and kill people because my name's Benaiah. ‘Why,’ he keeps on saying to me, ‘Here you are, Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, as it was in Holy Writ, and instid of preparin’ to make ready to go out and fall on the enemies of righteousness, like your namesake did, all you do is read dime novels and cut up monkey-shines generally, for all the world as if you'd been named Pete or Steve or William Henry.' That's what he gives me pretty nearly every day.”

I was familiar enough with the quaint mysticism which the old Abolitionist cooper wove around the Scriptural names of himself and his son. We understood that these two appellations had alternated among his ancestors as well, and I had often heard him read from Samuel and Kings and Chronicles about them, his stiff red hair standing upright, and the blue veins swelling on his narrow temples with proud excitement. But that, of course, was in the old days, before the trouble came, and when I still went to church. To hear it all now again seemed to give me a novel impression of wild fanaticism in “Jee” Hagadorn.

His son was chuckling on his seat over something he had just remembered. “Last time,” he began, gurgling with laughter—“last time he went for me because I wasn't measurin' up to his idee of what a Benaiah ought to be like, I up an' said to him, ‘Look a-here now, people who live in glass houses mustn't heave rocks. If I'm Benaiah, you're Jehoiada. Well, it says in the Bible that Jehoiada made a covenant. Do you make cove-nants? Not a bit of it! all you make is butter firkins, with now an' then an odd pork barrel.’”

“What did he say to that?” I asked, as my companion's merriment abated.

“Well, I come away just then; I seemed to have business outside,” replied “Ni,” still grinning.

We had reached the Corners now, and my companion obligingly drew up to let me get down. He called out some merry quip or other as he drove off, framed in a haze of golden dust against the sinking sun, and I stood looking after him with the pleasantest thoughts my mind had known for days. It was almost a shock to remember that he was one of the abhorrent and hated Hagadorns.

And his sister, too. It was not at all easy to keep one's loathing up to the proper pitch where so nice a girl as Esther Hagadorn was its object. She was years and years my senior—she was even older than “Ni”—and had been my teacher for the past two winters. She had never spoken to me save across that yawning gulf which separates little barefooted urchins from tall young women, with long dresses and their hair done up in a net, and I could hardly be said to know her at all. Yet now, perversely enough, I could think of nothing but her manifest superiority to all the farm girls round about. She had been to a school in some remote city, where she had relations. Her hands were fabulously white, and even on the hottest of days her dresses rustled pleasantly with starched primness. People talked about her singing at church as something remarkable; to my mind, the real music was when she just spoke to you, even if it was no more than “Good-morning, Jimmy!”

I clambered up on the window-sill of the school-house, to make sure there was no one inside, and then set off down the creek-road toward the red or lower bridge. Milking-time was about over, and one or two teams passed me on the way to the cheese-factory, the handles of the cans rattling as they went, and the low sun throwing huge shadows of drivers and horses sprawling eastward over the stubble-field. I cut across lots to avoid the cheese-factory itself, with some vague feeling that it was not a fitting spectacle for anyone who lived on the Beech farm.

A few moments brought me to the bank of the wandering stream below the factory, but so near that I could hear the creaking of the chain drawing up the cans over the tackle, or as we called it, the “teekle.” The willows under which I walked stretched without a break from the clump by the factory bridge. And now, low and behold! beneath still other of these willows, farther down the stream, whom should I see strolling together but my school-teacher and the delinquent Jeff!

Young Beech bore still the fish-pole I had seen him take from our shed some hours earlier, but the line twisted round it was very white and dry. He was extremely close to the girl, and kept his head bent down over her as they sauntered along the meadow-path. They seemed not to be talking, but just idly drifting forward like the deep slow water beside them. I had never realized before how tall Jeff was. Though the school-ma'am always seemed to me of an exceeding stature, here was Jeff rounding his shoulders and inclining his neck in order to look under her broad-brimmed Leghorn hat.

There could be no imaginable excuse for my not overtaking them. Instinct prompted me to start up a whistling tune as I advanced—a casual and indolently unobtrusive tune—at sound of which Jeff straightened himself, and gave his companion a little more room on the path. In a moment or two he stopped, and looked intently over the bank into the water, as if he hoped it might turn out to be a likely place for fish. And the school-ma'am, too, after a few aimless steps, halted to help him look.

“Abner wants you to come right straight home!” was the form in which my message delivered itself when I had come close up to them.

They both shifted their gaze from the sluggish stream below to me upon the instant. Then Esther Hagadorn looked away, but Jeff—good, big, honest Jeff, who had been like a fond elder brother to me since I could remember—knitted his brows and regarded me with something like a scowl.

“Did pa send you to say that?” he demanded, holding my eye with a glance of such stern inquiry that I could only nod my head in confusion.

“An' he knew that you'd find me here, did he?”

“He said either at the school-house or around here somewhere,” I admitted, weakly.

“An' there ain't nothin' the matter at the farm? He don't want me for nothin' special?” pursued Jeff, still looking me through and through.

“He didn't say,” I made hesitating answer, but for the life of me, I could not keep from throwing a tell-tale look in the direction of his companion in the blue gingham dress.

A wink could not have told Jeff more. He gave a little bitter laugh, and stared above my head at the willow-plumes for a minute's meditation. Then he tossed his fish-pole over to me and laughed again.

“Keep that for yourself, if you want it,” he said, in a voice not quite his own, but robustly enough. “I sha'n't need it any more. Tell pa I ain't a-comin'!”

“Oh, Tom!” Esther broke in, anxiously, “would you do that?”

He held up his hand with a quiet, masterful gesture, as if she were the pupil and he the teacher, “Tell him,” he went on, the tone falling now strong and true, “tell him and ma that I'm goin' to Tecumseh to-night to enlist. If they're willin' to say good-by, they can let me know there, and I'll manage to slip back for the day. If they ain't willin'—why, they—they needn't send word; that's all.”

Esther had come up to him, and held his arm now in hers.

“You're wrong to leave them like that!” she pleaded, earnestly, but Jeff shook his head.

“You don't know him!” was all he said.

In another minute I had shaken hands with Jeff, and had started on my homeward way, with his parting “Good-by, youngster!” benumbing my ears. When, after a while, I turned to look back, they were still standing where I had left them, gazing over the bank into the water.

Then, as I trudged onward once more, I began to quake at the thought of how Farmer Beech would take the news.

[CHAPTER III
ABSALOM]

Once, in the duck-season, as I lay hidden among the marsh-reeds with an older boy, a crow passed over us, flying low. Looking up at him, I realized for the first time how beautiful a creature was this common black thief of ours—how splendid his strength and the sheen of his coat, how proudly graceful the sweep and curves of his great slow wings. The boy beside me fired, and in a flash what I had been admiring changed—even as it stopped headlong in mid-air—into a hideous thing, an evil confusion of jumbled feathers. The awful swiftness of that transition from beauty and power to hateful carrion haunted me for a long time.

I half expected that Abner Beech would crumple up in some such distressing way, all of a sudden, when I told him that his son Jeff was in open rebellion, and intended to go off and enlist. It was incredible to the senses that any member of the household should set at defiance the patriarchal will of its head. But that the offence should come from placid, slow-witted, good-natured Jeff, and that it should involve the appearance of a Beech in a blue uniform—these things staggered the imagination. It was clear that something prodigious must happen.

As it turned out, nothing happened at all. The farmer and his wife sat out on the veranda, as was their wont of a summer evening, rarely exchanging a word, but getting a restful sort of satisfaction in together surveying their barns and haystacks and the yellow-brown stretch of fields beyond.

“Jeff says he's goin' to-night to Tecumseh, an' he's goin' to enlist, an' if you want him to run over to say good-by you're to let him know there.”

I leant upon my newly-acquired fish-pole for support, as I unburdened myself of these sinister tidings. The old pair looked at me in calm-eyed silence, as if I had related the most trivial of village occurrences. Neither moved a muscle nor uttered a sound, but just gazed, till it felt as if their eyes were burning holes into me.

“That's what he said,” I repeated, after a pause, to mitigate the embarrassment of that dumb steadfast stare.

The mother it was who spoke at last. “You'd better go round and get your supper,” she said, quietly.

The table was spread, as usual, in the big, low-ceilinged room which during the winter was used as a kitchen. What was unusual was to discover a strange man seated alone in his shirt-sleeves at this table, eating his supper. As I took my chair, however, I saw that he was not altogether a stranger. I recognized in him the little old Irishman who had farmed Ezra Tracy's beaver-meadow the previous year on shares, and done badly, and had since been hiring out for odd jobs at hoeing and haying. He had lately lost his wife, I recalled now, and lived alone in a tumble-down old shanty beyond Parker's saw-mill. He had come to us in the spring, I remembered, when the brindled calf was born, to beg a pail of what he called “basteings,” and I speculated in my mind whether it was this repellent mess that had killed his wife. Above all these thoughts rose the impression that Abner must have decided to do a heap of ditching and wall-building, to have hired a new hand in this otherwise slack season—and at this my back began to ache prophetically.

“How are yeh!” the new-comer remarked, affably, as I sat down and reached for the bread. “An' did yeh see the boys march away? An' had they a drum wid 'em?”

“What boys?” I asked, in blank ignorance as to what he was at.

“I'm told there's a baker's dozen of 'em gone, more or less,” he replied. “Well, glory be to the Lord, 'tis an ill wind blows nobody good. Here am I aitin' butter on my bread, an' cheese on top o' that.”

I should still have been in the dark, had not one of the hired girls, Janey Wilcox, come in from the butter-room, to ask me in turn much the same thing, and to add the explanation that a whole lot of the young men of the neighborhood had privately arranged among themselves to enlist together as soon as the harvesting was over, and had this day gone off in a body. Among them, I learned now, were our two hired men, Warner Pitts and Ray Watkins. This, then, accounted for the presence of the Irishman.

As a matter of fact, there had been no secrecy about the thing save with the contingent which our household furnished, and that was only because of the fear which Abner Beech inspired. His son and his servants alike preferred to hook it, rather than explain their patriotic impulses to him. But naturally enough, our farm-girls took it for granted that all the others had gone in the same surreptitious fashion, and this threw an air of fascinating mystery about the whole occurrence. They were deeply surprised that I should have been down past the Corners, and even beyond the cheese-factory, and seen nothing of these extraordinary martial preparations; and I myself was ashamed of it.

Opinions differed, I remember, as to the behavior of our two hired men. “Till” Babcock and the Underwood girl defended them, but Janey took the other side, not without various unpleasant personal insinuations, and the Irishman and I were outspoken in their condemnation. But nobody said a word about Jeff, though it was plain enough that everyone knew.

Dusk fell while we still talked of these astounding events—my thoughts meantime dividing themselves between efforts to realize these neighbors of ours as soldiers on the tented field, and uneasy speculation as to whether I should at last get a bed to myself or be expected to sleep with the Irishman.

Janey Wilcox had taken the lamp into the living-room. She returned now, with an uplifted hand and a face covered over with lines of surprise.

“You're to all of you come in,” she whispered, impressively. “Abner's got the Bible down. We're goin' to have fam'ly prayers, or somethin'.”

With one accord we looked at the Irishman. The question had never before arisen on our farm, but we all knew about other cases, in which Catholic hands held aloof from the household's devotions. There were even stories of their refusal to eat meat on some one day of the week, but this we hardly brought ourselves to credit. Our surprise at the fact that domestic religious observances were to be resumed under the Beech roof-tree—where they had completely lapsed ever since the trouble at the church—was as nothing compared with our curiosity to see what the new-comer would do.

What he did was to get up and come along with the rest of us, quite as a matter of course. I felt sure that he could not have understood what was going on.

We filed into the living-room. The Beeches had come in and shut the veranda door, and “M'rye” was seated in her rocking-chair, in the darkness beyond the bookcase. Her husband had the big book open before him on the table; the lamp-light threw the shadow of his long nose down into the gray of his beard with a strange effect of fierceness. His lips were tight-set and his shaggy brows drawn into a commanding frown, as he bent over the pages.

Abner did not look up till we had taken our seats. Then he raised his eyes toward the Irishman.

“I don't know, Hurley,” he said, in a grave, deep-booming voice, “whether you feel it right for you to join us—we bein' Protestants—”

“Ah, it's all right, sir,” replied Hurley, reassuringly, “I'll take no harm by it.”

A minute's silence followed upon this magnanimous declaration. Then Abner, clearing his throat, began solemnly to read the story of Absalom's revolt. He had the knack, not uncommon in those primitive class-meeting days, of making his strong, low-pitched voice quaver and wail in the most tear-compelling fashion when he read from the Old Testament. You could hardly listen to him going through even the genealogical tables of Chronicles dry-eyed. His Jeremiah and Ezekiel were equal to the funeral of a well-beloved relation.

This night he read as I had never heard him read before. The whole grim story of the son's treason and final misadventure, of the ferocious battle in the wood of Ephraim, of Joab's savagery, and of the rival runners, made the air vibrate about us, and took possession of our minds and kneaded them like dough, as we sat in the mute circle in the old living-room. From my chair I could see Hurley without turning my head, and the spectacle of excitement he presented—bending forward with dropped jaw and wild, glistening gray eyes, a hand behind his ear to miss no syllable of this strange new tale—only added to the effect it produced on me.

Then there came the terrible picture of the King's despair. I had trembled as we neared this part, foreseeing what heart-wringing anguish Abner, in his present mood, would give to that cry of the stricken father—“O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!” To my great surprise, he made very little of it. The words came coldly, almost contemptuously, so that the listener could not but feel that David's lamentations were out of place, and might better have been left unuttered.

But now the farmer, leaping over into the next chapter, brought swart, stalwart, blood-stained Joab on the scene before us, and in an instant we saw why the King's outburst of mourning had fallen so flat upon our ears. Abner Beech's voice rose and filled the room with its passionate fervor as he read out Joab's speech—wherein the King is roundly told that his son was a worthless fellow, and was killed not a bit too soon, and that for the father to thus publicly lament him is to put to shame all his household and his loyal friends and servants.

While these sonorous words of protest against paternal weakness still rang in the air, Abner abruptly closed the book with a snap. We looked at him and at one another for a bewildered moment, and then “Till” Babcock stooped as if to kneel by her chair, but Janey nudged her, and we all rose and made our way silently out again into the kitchen. It had been apparent enough that no spirit of prayer abode in the farmer's breast.

“'Twas a fine bold sinsible man, that Job!” remarked Hurley to me, when the door was closed behind us, and the women had gone off to talk the scene over among themselves in the butter-room. “Would it be him that had thim lean turkeys?”

With some difficulty I made out his meaning. “Oh, no!” I exclaimed, “the man Abner read about was Jo-ab, not Job. They were quite different people.”

“I thought as much,” replied the Irishman. “'Twould not be in so grand a man's nature to let his fowls go hungry. And do we be hearing such tales every night?”

“Maybe Abner'll keep on, now he's started again,” I said. “We ain't had any Bible-reading before since he had his row down at the church, and we left off going.”

Hurley displayed such a lively interest in this matter that I went over it pretty fully, setting forth Abner's position and the intolerable provocations which had been forced upon him. It took him a long time to grasp the idea that in Protestant gatherings not only the pastor spoke, but the class-leaders and all others who were conscious of a call might have their word as well, and that in this way even the lowliest and meanest of the farmer's neighbors had been able to affront him in the church itself.

“Too many cooks spoil the broth,” was his comment upon this. “'Tis far better to hearken to one man only. If he's right, you're right. If he's wrong, why, thin, there ye have him in front of ye for protection.”

Bed-time came soon after, and Mrs. Beech appeared in her nightly round of the house to see that the doors were all fastened. The candle she bore threw up a flaring yellow light upon her chin, but made the face above it by contrast still darker and more saturnine. She moved about in erect impassiveness, trying the bolts and the window catches, and went away again, having said never a word. I had planned to ask her if I might now have a bed to myself, but somehow my courage failed me, so stern and majestic was her aspect.

I took the desired boon without asking, and dreamed of her as a darkling and relentless Joab in petticoats, slaying her own son Jeff as he hung by his hay-colored hair in one of the apple-trees of our orchard.

[CHAPTER IV
ANTIETAM]

On all the other farms roundabout, this mid-August was a slack season. The hired men and boys did a little early fruit-picking, a little berrying, a little stone-drawing, but for the most part they could be seen idling about the woods or along the river down below Juno Mills, with gun or fish-pole. Only upon the one farm whose turn it was that week to be visited by the itinerant threshing-machine, was any special activity visible.

It was well known, however, that we were not to get the threshing-machine at all. How it was managed, I never understood. Perhaps the other farmers combined in some way to over-awe or persuade the owners of the machine into refusing it to Abner Beech. More likely he scented the chance of a refusal and was too proud to put himself in its way by asking. At all events, we three—Abner, Hurley, and I—had to manage the threshing ourselves, on the matched wood floor of the carriage barn. All the fishing I did that year was in the prolific but unsubstantial waters of dreamland.

I did not work much, it is true, with the flail, but I lived all day in an atmosphere choked with dust and chaff, my ears deafened with the ceaseless whack! whack! of the hard wood clubs, bringing on fresh shocks of grain, and acting as general helper.

By toiling late and early we got this task out of the way just when the corn was ready to cut. This great job taxed all the energies of the two men, the one cutting, the other stacking, as they went. My own share of the labor was to dig the potatoes and pick the eating-apples—a quite portentous enough undertaking for a lad of twelve. All this kept me very much to myself. There was no chance to talk during the day, and at night I was glad to drag my tired limbs off to bed before the girls had fairly cleared the supper things away. A weekly newspaper—The World—came regularly to the post-office at the Corners for us, but we were so over-worked that often it lay there for weeks at a time, and even when someone went after it, nobody but Abner cared to read it.

So far as I know, no word ever came from Jeff. His name was never mentioned among us.

It was now past the middle of September. Except for the fall ploughing on fields that were to be put to grass under the grain in the spring—which would come much later—the getting in of the root crops, and the husking, our season's labors were pretty well behind us. The women folk had toiled like slaves as well, taking almost all the chores about the cattle-barns off our shoulders, and carrying on the butter-making without bothering us. Now that a good many cows were drying up, it was their turn to take things easy, too. But the girls, instead of being glad at this, began to borrow unhappiness over the certainty that there would be no husking-bees on the Beech farm.

One heard no other subject discussed now, as we sat of a night in the kitchen. Even when we foregathered in the living-room instead, the Babcock and the Underwood girl talked in ostentatiously low tones of the hardship of missing such opportunities for getting beaux, and having fun. They recalled to each other, with tones of longing, this and that husking-bee of other years—now one held of a moonlight night in the field itself, where the young men pulled the stacks down and dragged them to where the girls sat in a ring on big pumpkins, and merriment, songs, and chorused laughter chased the happy hours along; now of a bee held in the late wintry weather, where the men went off to the barn by themselves and husked till they were tired, and then with warning whoops came back to where the girls were waiting for them in the warm, hospitable farm-house, and the frolic began, with cider and apples and pumpkin-pies, and old Lem Hornbeck's fiddle to lead the dancing.

Alas! they shook their empty heads and mourned, there would be no more of these delightful times! Nothing definite was ever said as to the reason for our ostracism from the sports and social enjoyments of the season. There was no need for that. We all knew too well that it was Abner Beech's politics which made us outcasts, but even these two complaining girls did not venture to say so in his hearing. Their talk, however, grew at last so persistently querulous that “M'rye” bluntly told them one night to “shut up about husking-bees,” following them out into the kitchen for that purpose, and speaking with unaccustomed acerbity. Thereafter we heard no more of their grumbling, but in a week or two “Till” Babcock left for her home over on the Dutch Road, and began circulating the report that we prayed every night for the success of Jeff Davis.

It was on a day in the latter half of September, perhaps the 20th or 21st—as nearly as I am able to make out from the records now—that Hurley and I started off with a double team and our big box-wagon, just after breakfast, on a long day's journey. We were taking a heavy load of potatoes in to market at Octavius, twelve miles distant; thence we were to drive out an additional three miles to a cooper-shop and bring back as many butter-firkins as we could stack up behind us, not to mention a lot of groceries of which “M'rye” gave me a list.

It was a warm, sweet aired, hazy autumn day, with a dusky red sun sauntering idly about in the sky, too indolent to cast more than the dimmest and most casual suggestion of a shadow for anything or anybody. The Irishman sat round-backed and contented on the very high seat overhanging the horses, his elbows on his knees, and a little black pipe turned upside down in his mouth. He would suck satisfiedly at this for hours after the fire had gone out, until, my patience exhausted, I begged him to light it again. He seemed almost never to put any new tobacco into this pipe, and to this day it remains a twin-mystery to me why its contents neither burned themselves to nothing nor fell out.

We talked a good deal, in a desultory fashion, as the team plodded their slow way into Octavius. Hurley told me, in answer to the questions of a curious boy, many interesting and remarkable things about the old country, as he always called it, and more particularly about his native part of it, which was on the sea-shore within sight of Skibbereen. He professed always to be filled with longing to go back, but at the same time guarded his tiny personal expenditure with the greatest solicitude, in order to save money to help one of his relations to get away. Once, when I taxed him with this inconsistency, he explained that life in Ireland was the most delicious thing on earth, but you had to get off at a distance of some thousands of miles to really appreciate it.

Naturally there was considerable talk between us, as well, about Abner Beech and his troubles. I don't know where I could have heard it, but when Hurley first came to us I at once took it for granted that the fact of his nationality made him a sympathizer with the views of our household. Perhaps I only jumped at this conclusion from the general ground that the few Irish who in those days found their way into the farm-country were held rather at arms-length by the community, and must in the nature of things feel drawn to other outcasts. At all events, I made no mistake. Hurley could not have well been more vehemently embittered against abolitionism and the war than Abner was, but he expressed his feelings with much greater vivacity and fluency of speech. It was surprising to see how much he knew about the politics and political institutions of a strange country, and how excited he grew about them when anyone would listen to him. But as he was a small man, getting on in years, he did not dare air these views down at the Corners. The result was that he and Abner were driven to commune together, and mutually inflamed each other's passionate prejudices—which was not at all needful.

When at last, shortly before noon, we drove into Octavius, I jumped off to fill one portion of the grocery errands, leaving Hurley to drive on with the potatoes. We were to meet at the little village tavern for dinner.

He was feeding the horses in the hotel shed when I rejoined him an hour or so later. I came in, bursting with the importance of the news I had picked up—scattered, incomplete, and even incoherent news, but of a most exciting sort. The awful battle of Antietam had happened two or three days before, and nobody in all Octavius was talking or thinking of anything else. Both the Dearborn County regiments had been in the thick of the fight, and I could see from afar, as I stood on the outskirts of the throng in front of the post-office, some long strips of paper posted up beside the door, which men said contained a list of our local dead and wounded. It was hopeless, however, to attempt to get anywhere near this list, and nobody whom I questioned, knew anything about the names of those young men who had marched away from our Four Corners. Someone did call out, though, that the telegraph had broken down, or gone wrong, and that not half the news had come in as yet. But they were all so deeply stirred up, so fiercely pushing and hauling to get toward the door, that I could learn little else.

This was what I began to tell Hurley, with eager volubility, as soon as I got in under the shed. He went on with his back to me, impassively measuring out the oats from the bag, and clearing aside the stale hay in the manger, the impatient horses rubbing at his shoulders with their noses the while. Then, as I was nearly done, he turned and came out to me, slapping the fodder-mess off his hands.

He had a big, fresh cut running transversely across his nose and cheek, and there were stains of blood in the gray stubble of beard on his chin. I saw too that his clothes looked as if he had been rolled on the dusty road outside.

“Sure, then, I'm after hearin' the news myself,” was all he said.

He drew out from beneath the wagon seat a bag of crackers and a hunk of cheese, and, seating himself on an overturned barrel, began to eat. By a gesture I was invited to share this meal, and did so, sitting beside him. Something had happened, apparently, to prevent our having dinner in the tavern.

I fairly yearned to ask him what this something was, and what was the matter with his face, but it did not seem quite the right thing to do, and presently he began mumbling, as much to himself as to me, a long and broken discourse, from which I picked out that he had mingled with a group of lusty young farmers in the market-place, asking for the latest intelligence, and that while they were conversing in a wholly amiable manner, one of them had suddenly knocked him down and kicked him, and that thereafter they had pursued him with curses and loud threats half-way to the tavern. This and much more he proclaimed between mouthfuls, speaking with great rapidity and in so much more marked a brogue than usual, that I understood only a fraction of what he said.

He professed entire innocence of offence in the affair, and either could not or would not tell what it was he had said to invite the blow. I dare say he did in truth richly provoke the violence he encountered, but at the time I regarded him as a martyr, and swelled with indignation every time I looked at his nose.

I remained angry, indeed, long after he himself had altogether recovered his equanimity and whimsical good spirits. He waited outside on the seat while I went in to pay for the baiting of the horses, and it was as well that he did, I fancy, because there were half a dozen brawny farm-hands and villagers standing about the bar, who were laughing in a stormy way over the episode of the “Copperhead Paddy” in the market.

We drove away, however, without incident of any sort—sagaciously turning off the main street before we reached the post-office block, where the congregated crowd seemed larger than ever. There seemed to be some fresh tidings, for several scattering outbursts of cheering reached our ears after we could no longer see the throng; but, so far from stopping to inquire what it was, Hurley put whip to the horses, and we rattled smartly along out of the excited village into the tranquil, scythe-shorn country.

The cooper to whom we now went for our butter-firkins was a long-nosed, lean, and taciturn man, whom I think of always as with his apron tucked up at the corner, and his spectacles on his forehead, close under the edge of his square brown-paper cap. He had had word that we were coming, and the firkins were ready for us. He helped us load them in dead silence, and with a gloomy air.

Hurley desired the sound of his own voice. “Well, then, sir,” he said, as our task neared completion, “'tis worth coming out of our way these fifteen miles to lay eyes on such fine, grand firkins as these same—such an elegant shape on 'em, an' put together wid such nateness!”

“You could git 'em just as good at Hagadorn's,” said the cooper, curtly, “within a mile of your place.”

“Huh!” cried Hurley, with contempt, “Haggydorn is it? Faith, we'll not touch him or his firkins ayether! Why, man, they're not fit to mention the same day wid yours. Ah, just look at the darlins, will ye, that nate an' clane a Christian could ate from 'em!”

The cooper was blarney-proof. “Hagadorn's are every smitch as good!” he repeated, ungraciously.

The Irishman looked at him perplexedly, then shook his head as if the problem were too much for him, and slowly clambered up to the seat. He had gathered up the lines, and we were ready to start, before any suitable words came to his tongue.

“Well, then, sir,” he said, “anything to be agreeable. If I hear a man speaking a good word for your firkins, I'll dispute him.”

“The firkins are well enough,” growled the cooper at us, “an' they're made to sell, but I ain't so almighty tickled about takin' Copperhead money for 'em that I want to clap my wings an' crow over it.”

He turned scornfully on his heel at this, and we drove away. The new revelation of our friendlessness depressed me, but Hurley did not seem to mind it at all. After a philosophic comparative remark about the manners of pigs run wild in a bog, he dismissed the affair from his thoughts altogether, and hummed cheerful words to melancholy tunes half the way home, what time he was not talking to the horses or tossing stray conversational fragments at me.

My own mind soon enough surrendered itself to harrowing speculations about the battle we had heard of. The war had been going on now, for over a year, but most of the fighting had been away off in Missouri and Tennessee, or on the lower Mississippi, and the reports had not possessed for me any keen direct interest. The idea of men from our own district—young men whom I had seen, perhaps fooled with, in the hayfield only ten weeks before—being in an actual storm of shot and shell, produced a faintness at the pit of my stomach. Both Dearborn County regiments were in it, the crowd said. Then of course our men must have been there—our hired men, and the Phillips boys, and Byron Truax, and his cousin Alonzo, and our Jeff! And if so many others had been killed, why not they as well?

“Antietam” still has a power to arrest my eyes on the printed page, and disturb my ears in the hearing, possessed by no other battle name. It seems now as if the very word itself had a terrible meaning of its own to me, when I first heard it that September afternoon—as if I recognized it to be the label of some awful novelty, before I knew anything else. It had its fascination for Hurley, too, for presently I heard him crooning to himself, to one of his queer old Irish tunes, some doggerel lines which he had made up to rhyme with it—three lines with “cheat 'em,” “beat 'em,” and “Antietam,” and then his pet refrain, “Says the Shan van Vocht.”

This levity jarred unpleasantly upon the mood into which I had worked myself, and I turned to speak of it, but the sight of his bruised nose and cheek restrained me. He had suffered too much for the faith that was in him to be lightly questioned now. So I returned to my grisly thoughts, which now all at once resolved themselves into a conviction that Jeff had been killed outright. My fancy darted to meet this notion, and straightway pictured for me a fantastic battle-field by moonlight, such as was depicted in Lossing's books, with overturned cannon-wheels and dead horses in the foreground, and in the centre, conspicuous above all else, the inanimate form of Jeff Beech, with its face coldly radiant in the moonshine.

“I guess I'll hop off and walk a spell,” I said, under the sudden impulse of this distressing visitation.

It was only when I was on the ground, trudging along by the side of the wagon, that I knew why I had got down. We were within a few rods of the Corners, where one road turned off to go to the post-office. “Perhaps it'd be a good idea for me to find out if they've heard anything more—I mean—anything about Jeff,” I suggested. “I'll just look in and see, and then I can cut home cross lots.”

The Irishman nodded and drove on.

I hung behind, at the Corners, till the wagon had begun the ascent of the hill, and the looming bulk of the firkins made it impossible that Hurley could see which way I went. Then, without hesitation, I turned instead down the other road which led to “Jee” Hagadorn's.

[CHAPTER V
“JEE'S” TIDINGS]

Time was when I had known the Hagadorn house, from the outside at least, as well as any other in the whole township. But I had avoided that road so long now, that when I came up to the place it seemed quite strange to my eyes.

For one thing, the flower garden was much bigger than it had formerly been. To state it differently, Miss Esther's marigolds and columbines, hollyhocks and peonies, had been allowed to usurp a lot of space where sweet-corn, potatoes and other table-truck used to be raised. This not only greatly altered the aspect of the place, but it lowered my idea of the practical good-sense of its owners.

What was more striking still, was the general air of decrepitude and decay about the house itself. An eaves-trough had fallen down; half the cellar door was off its hinges, standing up against the wall; the chimney was ragged and broken at the top; the clap-boards had never been painted, and now were almost black with weather-stain and dry rot. It positively appeared to me as if the house was tipping sideways, over against the little cooper-shop adjoining it—but perhaps that was a trick of the waning evening light. I said to myself that if we were not prospering on the Beech farm, at least our foe “Jee” Hagadorn did not seem to be doing much better himself.

In truth, Hagadorn had always been among the poorest members of our community, though this by no means involves what people in cities think of as poverty. He had a little place of nearly two acres, and then he had his coopering business; with the two he ought to have got on comfortably enough. But a certain contrariness in his nature seemed to be continually interfering with this.

This strain of conscientious perversity ran through all we knew of his life before he came to us, just as it dominated the remainder of his career. He had been a well-to-do man some ten years before, in a city in the western part of the State, with a big cooper-shop, and a lot of men under him, making the barrels for a large brewery. (It was in these days, I fancy, that Esther took on that urban polish which the younger Benaiah missed.) Then he got the notion in his head that it was wrong to make barrels for beer, and threw the whole thing up. He moved into our neighborhood with only money enough to buy the old Andrews place, and build a little shop.

It was a good opening for a cooper, and Hagadorn might have flourished if he had been able to mind his own business. The very first thing he did was to offend a number of our biggest butter-makers by taxing them with sinfulness in also raising hops, which went to make beer. For a long time they would buy no firkins of him. Then, too, he made an unpleasant impression at church. As has been said, our meeting-house was a union affair; that is to say, no one denomination being numerous enough to have an edifice of its own, all the farmers roundabout—Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and so on—joined in paying the expenses. The travelling preachers who came to us represented these great sects, with lots of minute shadings off into Hard-shell, Soft-shell, Freewill, and other subdivided mysteries which I never understood. Hagadorn had a denomination all to himself, as might have been expected from the man. What the name of it was I seem never to have heard; perhaps it had no name at all. People used to say, though, that he behaved like a Shouting Methodist.

This was another way of saying that he made a nuisance of himself in church. At prayer meetings, in the slack seasons of the year, he would pray so long, and with such tremendous shouting and fury of gestures, that he had regularly to be asked to stop, so that those who had taken the trouble to learn and practise new hymns might have a chance to be heard. And then he would out-sing all the others, not knowing the tune in the least, and cause added confusion by yelling out shrill “Amens!” between the bars. At one time quite a number of the leading people ceased attending church at all, on account of his conduct.

He added heavily to his theological unpopularity, too, by his action in another matter. There was a wealthy and important farmer living over on the west side of Agrippa Hill, who was a Universalist. The expenses of our union meeting-house were felt to be a good deal of a burden, and our elders, conferring together, decided that it would be a good thing to waive ordinary prejudices, and let the Universalists come in, and have their share of the preaching. It would be more neighborly, they felt, and they would get a subscription from the Agrippa Hill farmer. He assented to the project, and came over four or five Sundays with his family and hired help, listened unflinchingly to orthodox sermons full of sulphur and blue flames, and put money on the plate every time. Then a Universalist preacher occupied the pulpit one Sunday, and preached a highly inoffensive and non-committal sermon, and “Jee” Hagadorn stood up in his pew and violently denounced him as an infidel, before he had descended the pulpit steps. This created a painful scandal. The Universalist farmer, of course, never darkened that church door again. Some of our young men went so far as to discuss the ducking of the obnoxious cooper in the duck-pond. But he himself was neither frightened nor ashamed.

At the beginning, too, I suppose that his taking up Abolitionism made him enemies. Dearborn County gave Franklin Pierce a big majority in '52, and the bulk of our farmers, I know, were in that majority. But I have already dwelt upon the way in which all this changed in the years just before the war. Naturally enough, Hagadorn's position also changed. The rejected stone became the head of the corner. The tiresome fanatic of the 'fifties was the inspired prophet of the 'sixties. People still shrank from giving him undue credit for their conversion, but they felt themselves swept along under his influence none the less.

But just as his unpopularity kept him poor in the old days, it seemed that now the reversed condition was making him still poorer. The truth was, he was too excited to pay any attention to his business. He went off to Octavius three or four days a week to hear the news, and when he remained at home, he spent much more time standing out in the road discussing politics and the conduct of the war with passers-by, than he did over his staves and hoops. No wonder his place was run down.

The house was dark and silent, but there was some sort of a light in the cooper-shop beyond. My hope had been to see Esther rather than her wild old father, but there was nothing for it but to go over to the shop. I pushed the loosely fitting door back on its leathern hinges, and stepped over the threshold. The resinous scent of newly cut wood, and the rustle of the shavings under my feet, had the effect, somehow, of filling me with timidity. It required an effort to not turn and go out again.

The darkened and crowded interior of the tiny work-place smelt as well, I noted now, of smoke. On the floor before me was crouched a shapeless figure—bending in front of the little furnace, made of a section of stove-pipe, which the cooper used to dry the insides of newly fashioned barrels. A fire in this, half-blaze, half-smudge—gave forth the light I had seen from without, and the smoke which was making my nostrils tingle. Then I had to sneeze, and the kneeling figure sprang on the instant from the floor.

It was Esther who stood before me, coughing a little from the smoke, and peering inquiringly at me. “Oh—is that you, Jimmy?” she asked, after a moment of puzzled inspection in the dark.

She went on, before I had time to speak, in a nervous, half-laughing way: “I've been trying to roast an ear of corn here, but it's the worst kind of a failure. I've watched ‘Ni’ do it a hundred times, but with me it always comes out half-scorched and half-smoked. I guess the corn is too old now, any way. At all events, it's tougher than Pharaoh's heart.”

She held out to me, in proof of her words, a blackened and unseemly roasting-ear. I took it, and turned it slowly over, looking at it with the grave scrutiny of an expert. Several torn and opened sections showed where she had been testing it with her teeth. In obedience to her “See if you don't think it's too old,” I took a diffident bite, at a respectful distance from the marks of her experiments. It was the worst I had ever tasted.

“I came over to see if you'd heard anything—any news,” I said, desiring to get away from the corn subject.

“You mean about Tom?” she asked, moving so that she might see me more plainly.

I had stupidly forgotten about that transformation of names. “Our Jeff, I mean,” I made answer.

“His name is Thomas Jefferson. We call him Tom,” she explained; “that other name is too horrid. Did—did his people tell you to come and ask me?”

I shook my head. “Oh no!” I replied with emphasis, implying by my tone, I dare say, that they would have had themselves cut up into sausage-meat first.

The girl walked past me to the door, and out to the road-side, looking down toward the bridge with a lingering, anxious gaze. Then she came back, slowly.

“No, we have no news!” she said, with an effort at calmness. “He wasn't an officer, that's why. All we know is that the brigade his regiment is in lost 141 killed, 560 wounded, and 38 missing. That's all!” She stood in the doorway, her hands clasped tight, pressed against her bosom. “That's all!” she repeated, with a choking voice.

Suddenly she started forward, almost ran across the few yards of floor, and, throwing herself down in the darkest corner, where only dimly one could see an old buffalo-robe spread over a heap of staves, began sobbing as if her heart must break.

Her dress had brushed over the stove-pipe, and scattered some of the embers beyond the sheet of tin it stood on. I stamped these out, and carried the other remnants of the fire out doors. Then I returned, and stood about in the smoky little shop, quite helplessly listening to the moans and convulsive sobs which rose from the obscure corner. A bit of a candle in a bottle stood on the shelf by the window. I lighted this, but it hardly seemed to improve the situation. I could see her now, as well as hear her—huddled face downward upon the skin, her whole form shaking with the violence of her grief. I had never been so unhappy before in my life.

At last—it may not have been very long, but it seemed hours—there rose the sound of voices outside on the road. A wagon had stopped, and some words were being exchanged. One of the voices grew louder—came nearer; the other died off, ceased altogether, and the wagon could be heard driving away. On the instant the door was pushed sharply open, and “Jee” Hagadorn stood on the threshold, surveying the interior of his cooper-shop with gleaming eyes.

He looked at me; he looked at his daughter lying in the corner; he looked at the charred mess on the floor—yet seemed to see nothing of what he looked at. His face glowed with a strange excitement—which in another man I should have set down to drink.

“Glory be to God! Praise to the Most High! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!” he called out, stretching forth his hands in a rapturous sort of gesture I remembered from class-meeting days.

Esther had leaped to her feet with squirrel-like swiftness at the sound of his voice, and now stood before him, her hands nervously clutching at each other, her reddened, tear-stained face a-fire with eagerness.

“Has word come?—is he safe?—have you heard?” so her excited questions tumbled over one another, as she grasped “Jee's” sleeve and shook it in feverish impatience.

“The day has come! The year of Jubilee is here!” he cried, brushing her hand aside, and staring with a fixed, ecstatic, open-mouthed smile straight ahead of him. “The words of the Prophet are fulfilled!”

“But Tom!—Tom!” pleaded the girl, piteously. “The list has come? You know he is safe?”

“Tom! Tom!” old “Jee” repeated after her, but with an emphasis contemptuous, not solicitous. “Perish a hundred Toms—yea—ten thousand! for one such day as this! ‘For the Scarlet Woman of Babylon is overthrown, and bound with chains and cast into the lake of fire. Therefore, in one day shall her plagues come, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God which judged her!’”

He declaimed these words in a shrill, high-pitched voice, his face upturned, and his eyes half-closed. Esther plucked despairingly at his sleeve once more.

“But have you seen?—is his name?—you must have seen!” she moaned, incoherently.

“Jee” descended for the moment from his plane of exaltation. “I didn't see!” he said, almost peevishly. “Lincoln has signed a proclamation freeing all the slaves! What do you suppose I care for your Toms and Dicks and Harrys, on such a day as this? ‘Woe! woe! the great city Babylon, the strong city! For in one hour is thy judgment come!’”

The girl tottered back to her corner, and threw herself limply down upon the buffalo-robe again, hiding her face in her hands.

I pushed my way past the cooper, and trudged cross-lots home in the dark, tired, disturbed, and very hungry, but thinking most of all that if I had been worth my salt, I would have hit “Jee” Hagadorn with the adze that stood up against the door-still.

[CHAPTER VI
NI'S TALK WITH ABNER]

It must have been a fortnight before we learned that Jeff Beech and Byron Truax had been reported missing. I say “we,” but I do not know when Abner Beech came to hear about it. One of the hired girls had seen the farmer get up from his chair, with the newly arrived weekly World in his hand, walk over to where his wife sat, and direct her attention to a line of the print with his finger. Then, still in silence, he had gone over to the bookcase, opened the drawer where he kept his account-books, and locked the journal up therein.

We took it for granted that thus the elderly couple had learned the news about their son. They said so little nowadays, either to each other or to us, that we were driven to speculate upon their dumb-show, and find meanings for ourselves in their glances and actions. No one of us could imagine himself or herself venturing to mention Jeff's name in their hearing.

Down at the Corners, though, and all about our district, people talked of very little else. Antietam had given a bloody welcome to our little group of warriors. Ray Watkins and Lon Truax had been killed outright, and Ed Phillips was in the hospital, with the chances thought to be against him. Warner Pitts, our other hired man, had been wounded in the arm, but not seriously, and thereafter behaved with such conspicuous valor that it was said he was to be promoted from being a sergeant to a lieutenancy. All these things, however, paled in interest after the first few days before the fascinating mystery of what had become of Jeff and Byron. The loungers about the grocery-store evenings took sides as to the definition of “missing.” Some said it meant being taken prisoners; but it was known that at Antietam the Rebels made next to no captives. Others held that “missing” soldiers were those who had been shot, and who crawled off somewhere in the woods out of sight to die. A lumberman from Juno Mills, who was up on a horse-trade, went so far as to broach still a third theory, viz., that “missing” soldiers were those who had run away under fire, and were ashamed to show their faces again. But this malicious suggestion could not, of course, be seriously considered.

Meanwhile, what little remained of the fall farm-work went on as if nothing had happened. The root-crops were dug, the fodder got in, and the late apples gathered. Abner had a cider-mill of his own, but we sold a much larger share of our winter apples than usual. Less manure was drawn out onto the fields than in other autumns, and it looked as if there was to be little or no fall ploughing. Abner went about his tasks in a heavy, spiritless way these days, doggedly enough, but with none of his old-time vim. He no longer had pleasure even in abusing Lincoln and the war with Hurley. Not Antietam itself could have broken his nerve, but at least it silenced his tongue.

Warner Pitts came home on a furlough, with a fine new uniform, shoulder-straps and sword, and his arm in a sling. I say “home,” but the only roof he had ever slept under in these parts, was ours, and now he stayed as a guest at Squire Avery's house, and never came near our farm. He was a tall, brown-faced, sinewy fellow, with curly hair and a pushing manner. Although he had been only a hired man he now cut a great dash down at the Corners, with his shoulder-straps and his officer's cape. It was said that he had declined several invitations to husking-bees, and that when he left the service, at the end of his time, he had a place ready for him in some city as a clerk in a drygoods store—that is, of course, if he did not get to be colonel or general. From time to time he was seen walking out through the dry, rustling leaves with Squire Avery's oldest daughter.

This important military genius did not seem able, however, to throw much light upon the whereabouts of the two “missing” boys. From what I myself heard him say about the battle, and from what others reported of his talk, it seems that in the very early morning Hooker's line—a part of which consisted of Dearborn County men—moved forward through a big cornfield, the stalks of which were much higher than the soldiers' heads. When they came out, the rebels opened such a hideous fire of cannon and musketry upon them from the woods close by, that those who did not fall were glad to run back again into the corn for shelter. Thus all became confusion, and the men were so mixed up that there was no getting them together again. Some went one way, some another, through the tall corn-rows, and Warner Pitts could not remember having seen either Jeff or Byron at all after the march began. Parts of the regiment formed again out on the road toward the Dunker church, but other parts found themselves half a mile away among the fragments of a Michigan regiment, and a good many more were left lying in the fatal cornfield. Our boys had not been traced among the dead, but that did not prove that they were alive. And so we were no wiser than before.

Warner Pitts only nodded in a distant way to me when he saw me first, with a cool “Hello, youngster!” I expected that he would ask after the folks at the farm which had been so long his home, but he turned to talk with someone else, and said never a word. Once, some days afterward, he called out as I passed him, “How's the old Copperhead?” and the Avery girl who was with him laughed aloud, but I went on without answering. He was already down in my black-books, in company with pretty nearly every other human being roundabout.

This list of enemies was indeed so full that there were times when I felt like crying over my isolation. It may be guessed, then, how rejoiced I was one afternoon to see Ni Hagadorn squeeze his way through our orchard-bars, and saunter across under the trees to where I was at work sorting a heap of apples into barrels. I could have run to meet him, so grateful was the sight of any friendly, boyish face. The thought that perhaps after all he had not come to see me in particular, and that possibly he brought some news about Jeff, only flashed across my mind after I had smiled a broad welcome upon him, and he stood leaning against a barrel munching the biggest russet he had been able to pick out.

“Abner to home?” he asked, after a pause of neighborly silence. He hadn't come to see me after all.

“He's around the barns somewhere,” I replied; adding, upon reflection, “Have you heard something fresh?”

Ni shook his sorrel head, and buried his teeth deep into the apple. “No, nothin',” he said, at last, with his mouth full, “only thought I'd come up an' talk it over with Abner.”

The calm audacity of the proposition took my breath away. “He'll boot you off'm the place if you try it,” I warned him.

But Ni did not scare easily. “Oh, no,” he said, with light confidence, “me an' Abner's all right.”

As if to put this assurance to the test, the figure of the farmer was at this moment visible, coming toward us down the orchard road. He was in his shirt-sleeves, with the limp, discolored old broad-brimmed felt hat he always wore pulled down over his eyes. Though he no longer held his head so proudly erect as I could remember it, there were still suggestions of great force and mastership in his broad shoulders and big beard, and in the solid, long-gaited manner of his walk. He carried a pitchfork in his hand.

“Hello, Abner?” said Ni, as the farmer came up and halted, surveying each of us in turn with an impassive scrutiny.

“How 'r' ye!” returned Abner, with cold civility. I fancied he must be surprised to see the son of his enemy here, calmly gnawing his way through one of our apples, and acting as if the place belonged to him. But he gave no signs of astonishment, and after some words of direction to me concerning my work, started to move on again toward the barns.

Ni was not disposed to be thus cheated out of his conversation: “Seen Warner Pitts since he's got back?” he called out, and at this the farmer stopped and turned round. “You'd hardly know him now,” the butcher's assistant went on, with cheerful briskness. “Why you'd think he'd never hoofed it over ploughed land in all his life. He's got his boots blacked up every day, an' his hair greased, an' a whole new suit of broadcloth, with shoulder-straps an' brass buttons, an' a sword—he brings it down to the Corners every evening, so't the boys at the store can heft it—an' he's—”

“What do I care about all this?” broke in Abner. His voice was heavy, with a growling ground-note, and his eyes threw out an angry light under the shading hat-brim. “He can go to the devil, an' take his sword with him, for all o' me!”

Hostile as was his tone, the farmer did not again turn on his heel. Instead, he seemed to suspect that Ni had something more important to say, and looked him steadfastly in the face.

“That's what I say, too,” replied Ni, lightly. “What's beat me is how such a fellow as that got to be an officer right from the word ‘go!’—an' him the poorest shote in the whole lot. Now if it had a' ben Spencer Phillips I could understand it—or Bi Truax, or—or your Jeff—”

The farmer raised his fork menacingly, with a wrathful gesture. “Shet up!” he shouted; “shet up, I say! or I'll make ye!”

To my great amazement Ni was not at all affected by this demonstration. He leaned smilingly against the barrel, and picked out another apple—a spitzenberg this time.

“Now look a-here, Abner,” he said, argumentatively, “what's the good o' gittin' mad? When I've had my say out, why, if you don't like it you needn't, an' nobody's a cent the wuss off. Of course, if you come down to hard-pan, it ain't none o' my business—”

“No,” interjected Abner, in grim assent, “it ain't none o' your business!”

“But there is such a thing as being neighborly,” Ni went on, undismayed, “an' meanin' things kindly, an' takin' 'em as they're meant.”

“Yes, I know them kindly neighbors o' mine!” broke in the farmer with acrid irony, “I've summered 'em an' I've wintered 'em, an' the Lord deliver me from the whole caboodle of 'em! A meaner lot o' cusses never cumbered this foot-stool!”

“It takes all sorts o' people to make up a world,” commented this freckled and sandy-headed young philosopher, testing the crimson skin of his apple with a tentative thumb-nail. “Now you ain't got anything in particular agin me, have you?”

“Nothin' except your breed,” the farmer admitted. The frown with which he had been regarding Ni had softened just the least bit in the world.

“That don't count,” said Ni, with easy confidence. “Why, what does breed amount to, anyway? You ought to be the last man alive to lug that in—you, who've up an' soured on your own breed—your own son Jeff!”

I looked to see Abner lift his fork again, and perhaps go even further in his rage. Strangely enough, there crept into his sunburnt, massive face, at the corners of the eyes and mouth, something like the beginnings of a puzzled smile. “You're a cheeky little cuss, anyway!” was his final comment. Then his expression hardened again. “Who put you up to comin' here, an' talkin' like this to me?” he demanded, sternly.

“Nobody—hope to die!” protested Ni. “It's all my own spec. It riled me to see you mopin' round up here all alone by yourself, not knowin' what'd become of Jeff, an' makin' b'lieve to yourself you didn't care, an' so givin' yourself away to the whole neighborhood.”

“Damn the neighborhood!” said Abner, fervently.

“Well, they talk about the same of you,” Ni proceeded with an air of impartial candor. “But all that don't do you no good, an' don't do Jeff no good!”

“He made his own bed, and he must lay on it,” said the farmer, with dogged firmness.

“I ain't sayin' he mustn't,” remonstrated the other. “What I'm gittin' at is that you'd feel easier in your mind if you knew where that bed was—an' so'd M'rye!”

Abner lifted his head. “His mother feels jest as I do,” he said. “He sneaked off behind our backs to jine Lincoln's nigger-worshippers, an' levy war on fellow-countrymen o' his'n who'd done him no harm, an' whatever happens to him it serves him right. I ain't much of a hand to lug in Scripter to back up my argyments—like some folks you know of—but my feelin' is: ‘Whoso taketh up the sword shall perish by the sword!’ An' so says his mother too!”

“Hm-m!” grunted Ni, with ostentatious incredulity. He bit into his apple, and there ensued a momentary silence. Then, as soon as he was able to speak, this astonishing boy said: “Guess I'll have a talk with M'rye about that herself.”

The farmer's patience was running emptings. “No!” he said, severely, “I forbid ye! Don't ye dare say a word to her about it. She don't want to listen to ye—an' I don't know what's possessed me to stand round an' gab about my private affairs with you like this, either. I don't bear ye no ill-will. If fathers can't help the kind o' sons they bring up, why, still less can ye blame sons on account o' their fathers. But it ain't a thing I want to talk about any more, either now or any other time. That's all.”

Abner put the fork over his shoulder, as a sign that he was going, and that the interview was at an end. But the persistent Ni had a last word to offer—and he left his barrel and walked over to the farmer.

“See here,” he said, in more urgent tones than he had used before, “I'm goin' South, an' I'm goin' to find Jeff if it takes a leg! I don't know how much it'll cost—I've got a little of my own saved up—an' I thought p'r'aps—p'r'aps you'd like to—”

After a moment's thought the farmer shook his head. “No,” he said, gravely, almost reluctantly. “It's agin my principles. You know me—Ni—you know I've never b'en a near man, let alone a mean man. An' ye know, too, that if Je—if that boy had behaved half-way decent, there ain't anything under the sun I wouldn't 'a' done for him. But this thing—I'm obleeged to ye for offrin—but—No! it's agin my principles. Still, I'm obleeged to ye. Fill your pockets with them spitzenbergs, if they taste good to ye.”

With this Abner Beech turned and walked resolutely off.

Left alone with me, Ni threw away the half-eaten apple he had held in his hand. “I don't want any of his dummed old spitzenbergs,” he said, pushing his foot into the heap of fruit on the ground, in a meditative way.

“Then you ain't agoin' South?” I queried.

“Yes I am!” he replied, with decision. “I can work my way somehow. Only don't you whisper a word about it to any livin' soul, d'ye mind!”

Two or three days after that we heard that Ni Hagadorn had left for unknown parts. Some said he had gone to enlist—it seems that, despite his youth and small stature in my eyes, he would have been acceptable to the enlistment standards of the day—but the major opinion was that much dime-novel reading had inspired him with the notion of becoming a trapper in the mystic Far West.

I alone possessed the secret of his disappearance—unless, indeed, his sister knew—and no one will ever know what struggles I had to keep from confiding it to Hurley.

[CHAPTER VII
THE ELECTION]

Soon the fine weather was at an end. One day it was soft and warm, with a tender blue haze over the distant woods and a sun like a blood-orange in the tranquil sky, and birds twittering about among the elders and sumac along the rail fences. And the next day everything was gray and lifeless and desolate, with fierce winds sweeping over the bare fields, and driving the cold rain in sheets before them.

Some people—among them Hurley—said it was the equinoctial that was upon us. Abner Beech ridiculed this, and proved by the dictionary that the equinoctial meant September 22d, whereas it was now well-nigh the end of October. The Irishman conceded that in books this might be so, but stuck wilfully to it that in practice the equinoctial came just before winter set in. After so long a period of saddened silence brooding over our household, it was quite a relief to hear the men argue this question of the weather.

Down at the Corners old farmers had wrangled over the identity of the equinoctial ever since I could remember. It was pretty generally agreed that each year along some time during the fall, there came a storm which was properly entitled to that name, but at this point harmony ended. Some insisted that it came before Indian Summer, some that it followed that season, and this was further complicated by the fact that no one was ever quite sure when it was Indian Summer. There were all sorts of rules for recognizing this delectable time of year, rules connected, I recall, with the opening of the chestnut burrs, the movement of birds, and various other incidents in nature's great processional, but these rules rarely came right in our rough latitude, and sometimes never came at all—at least did not bring with them anything remotely resembling Indian Summer, but made our autumn one prolonged and miserable succession of storms. And then it was an especially trying trick to pick out the equinoctial from the lot—and even harder still to prove to sceptical neighbors that you were right.

Whatever this particular storm may have been it came too soon. Being so short-handed on the farm, we were much behind in the matter of drawing our produce to market. And now, after the first day or two of rain, the roads were things to shudder at. It was not so bad getting to and from the Corners, for Agrippa Hill had a gravel formation, but beyond the Corners, whichever way one went over the bottom lands of the Nedahma Valley, it was a matter of lashing the panting teams through seas of mud punctuated by abyssmal pitch-holes, into which the wheels slumped over their hubs, and quite generally stuck till they were pried out with fence-rails.

Abner Beech was exceptionally tender in his treatment of live-stock. The only occasion I ever heard of on which he was tempted into using his big fists upon a fellow-creature, was once, long before my time, when one of his hired men struck a refractory cow over its haunches with a shovel. He knocked this man clear through the stanchions. Often Jeff and I used to feel that he carried his solicitude for horse-flesh too far—particularly when we wanted to drive down to the creek for a summer evening swim, and he thought the teams were too tired.