Transcriber’s Note: New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY

Contents

Copyright 1906 by Trotwood Publishing Co. All rights reserved. Entered as second class
matter Sept. 8, 1905, at the Postoffice at Nashville, Tenn., under the
Act of Congress of March 3, 1879.

Historic Highways of the South

PAPER V—THE OLD MILITARY ROAD

By John Trotwood Moore

The verdict of another century is sure to crystallize in the now growing belief that the two greatest military geniuses of the first century of the Republic were both named Jackson—Andrew and Stonewall.

The battles of all other commanders—the slow, ponderous, red-tape, unimaginative stands and retreats of Washington; the stubborn, mathematical defenses of the perfectly poised Lee; the ponderous hammerings of the stoical, machine-made Grant—all these were generals after a rule and a school. But the two Jacksons were a law unto themselves. They were comets among fixed stars, meteors in a still heaven. After the frightful holocausts of the Civil War, everything before it looks small.

But there are tragedies, even in an ant hill, and the life of the Republic came nearer going out in the wilderness of 1815 than at Bull Run, Shiloh or Gettysburg, fifty years later.

As the fighting savior of his country, posterity is ultimately bound to rank Jackson ahead of Washington; for Jackson finished the War of Independence, begun in 1776, on the eighth day of January, 1815.

And he finished it forever.

England never considered the matter closed at Yorktown, and when she marched through the North, burning Washington in wantonness and derision, knocking her generals about as so many dummies and their soldiers as so many tenpins, she was thinking of King’s Mountain and Yorktown.

Before Jackson’s day nothing was possible for the young Republic. She was gagged and bound, lying between England’s devil, on the north and west, and Spain’s deep, blue sea, on the south.

Since Jackson’s day everything has been possible for her; a century of progress and peace; the great Republic; the Monroe doctrine; the fighting prestige that could originate the cheek of a Venezuela bluff, and the remark the British admiral made to the German admiral at Manila.

The Civil War was a Johnstown flood, that made everything before it look like the breaking of a mill dam on Coon Creek; but the Civil War established nothing—literally nothing. Two peoples of the same blood and ideals had merely theorized themselves apart and into a war brought on by shadows bent on holding office and hence incapable of telling the truth. The two things they thought they were fighting to decide are just as strongly fixed to-day as they then were, to wit: that the town clerk is still the man to attend to the town pump, and that white is not black and never will be.

The only thing settled was whether there should be one town pump or forty-five, and whether it were better for the white to work the black under a life lease or a yearly one. The ideals, aims, purposes and principles of the Republic are the same to-day as they were before the big fight, and that it was a family scrap in which both sides would quickly double on any meddling intruder was demonstrated to the undoing of the arrogant Spaniard, who first trampled on the Republic’s ideals until she got to the fighting point and then foolishly brought on the war, believing, among other things, that the “Southern Confederacy would rise again” and help her in the fight.

And the Confederacy arose—at Manila and Santiago.

But so much has happened since Jackson and New Orleans, and so few really knew on what a narrow thread the life of all American ideals hung in those gloomy January days of 1815, and so long has it been crowded out for meaner things that it needs telling again, that the children may know it. For the grown people of to-day, born under lucky stars, made possible by the genius of Jackson’s work and the glory of his sacrifices, have been so busy picking up dollars that they have neglected to look up, even at the stars. This story is to show them the star.

The gamest thing God ever gave to the human race was Andrew Jackson. I hesitate, in a brief story like this, to attempt to tell the hardships, sickness, sufferings, mutiny, bickerings, jealousies, insults, lies, treacheries, butcheries called battles, and starvations that he overcame to save his people and his country from Indians, Spain and England, and the Republic from that spirit of disintegration beginning with the Hartford Convention and ending with nullification. For be it known to all men and remembered, not in malice, but in forgiveness, that the first secession convention that ever assembled to dissolve this Union of States came together at Hartford, Conn., the very day Jackson was fighting to the death to save the Union at New Orleans.

The beautiful Horse Shoe Bend (Tohopcka), on the Tallapoosa River, Alabama—the last stand of the Creek Nation, and where, in a bloody fight, it was destroyed by Jackson.

(Taken April 9, 1906, for Trotwood’s Monthly by C. W. Thomas, Dadeville, Ala.)

And I say, not in malice, for there was in this, as there was in the other attempts of it in 1861, no question either of right or of wrong. Nation—Country—Republic—Empire—these are all merely abstract things bound up in the concrete idea of a home. As long as the home maximizes and the Nation minimizes, the latter is safe. But when it is reversed, when doubt and uncertainty and discontent come in, the abstract thing is lost in the struggle for the concrete. And every home idea has the right to fight for its existence.

But winning is another thing, and if they fail no man has any license to whisper traitor.

But for Jackson and the peace brought at Ghent by his destruction of the most formidable savage allies England ever had, and the menace of the struggling Republic’s existence; by his prompt unmasking of treacherous Spain at Pensacola and startling the hitherto unbeaten Briton by knocking his forts down about his ears at Mobile and sinking their ships in the bay, Gettysburg would doubtless have been fought a half century earlier, and in Massachusetts.

Let us see: The War of 1812 was forced on the States intentionally and with all the emphasis of a bully who meets a timid enemy on the highway and kicks and cuffs him for pure cussedness. New England was for standing the kicking so long as her ships and schooners might still traffic in negro slaves, rum, codfish and castor oil. The war tied up her hulls to rotting at the wharves.

The war, until Jackson was discovered, had been a farce. From the Great Lakes to the South the bull-dozing, beef-eating, bloody-shirted Briton simply walked over the Yankee. “You’ll be setting the dogs on us next,” said a squad of Yankee soldiers, who staggered into a British camp to surrender and got cursed for coming.

Not one victory had they won. The British had burned the capital and run the President out of the back door. They had murdered citizens in the streets, and so empty was the treasury, and so degraded her credit that the Secretary of War had to pledge his private credit to get money enough to send Jackson to New Orleans. There was not money or credit enough left to buy wood to keep the cadets warm at West Point, and the young soldiers of the Republic’s future wars had to go into the woods and cut it and bring it in.

And all the time New England, the head and front of the Republic, sat sullen, secretly aiding the enemy and watching for a chance to secede. “Is there a Federalist, a patriot in America,” said the Boston Gazette, “who conceives it his duty to shed his blood for Bonaparte, for Madison and Jefferson, and that host of ruffians in Congress who have set their faces against us for years and spirited up the brutal part of the populace to destroy us? Not one. Shall we then be held in slavery and driven to desperate poverty by such a graceless faction? No more taxes for New England until the administration makes peace.” As if the cuffed and cudgeled administration was not doing its best, even to parting with the last raiment on the back of its self-respect!

Since the beginning of things there have been two kinds of great men—talkers and doers. The former are called orators when they talk so much and so well that their talk becomes natural.

Clay was a talker—Jackson a doer. There was a time when these two men ran side by side in the minds and memories of the living public. But that public is dead now, and they are far apart. Only the doer lives, as only the doer should live. Talk, since the beginning of time, has been the cheapest commodity of the human race. “And Moses said unto the Lord, O my Lord, I am not eloquent.... But I am slow of speech and of a slow tongue.... And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses, and he said. Is not Aaron the Levite thy brother? I know that he can speak well.... And he shall be to thee instead of a mouth.” That is the Biblical precedent for placing the orator over the doer.

Jackson was a Moses, Clay an Aaron. Clay, oily and brainy, and a man who “can speak well,” was sent over to make peace, with Bayard, and Gallatin, and Crawford and Adams—all Aarons and orators, and, praise God, all now dead and fast being forgotten. And they had been in Europe twelve long months, cooling their heels at the doors of diplomacy, or begging at the back door of its kitchen for such crumbs as the children might sweep off for the dogs. And after a while they got a few crumbs—England might be induced to quit her laying on of the lash if certain things were done to salve her wounded honor, including the fact that she could still impress American seaman wherever she could find them, and certain territory transferred to England, including what is now Wisconsin and Michigan and parts of Illinois and Indiana. For England of that day was the England of this day—a bully and a land-grabber.

And then the climax came—Bonaparte went under. Bonaparte, who had kept England so busy she hadn’t had time to whip us before, now in his fall unfettered the one thousand warships of Britain that had kept him out of the Channel and the Mediterranean and the army that later sent him to his Waterloo, and all these were free to fight the helpless under-dog across the waters.

And then the Aarons gave it up. One of them, Gallatin, wrote home from England: “The war is popular here, and that their national pride, inflated by their last unexpected success, cannot be satisfied without what they call the chastisement of America, cannot be doubted. They do not even suspect that we have any just cause of complaint, and consider us altogether the aggressor and the allies of Bonaparte.”

Lake Tensaw, Ala. Known as the old Boatyard Lake. It was here that Aaron Burr was landed as he was being conveyed from Washington to Fort Stoddard, and near where the horrible massacre of Fort Mims occurred.

Here is a sample of their contempt and billingsgate from the London Sun, one of England’s great papers, of September 3, 1814: “The American army of copper captains and Falstaff recruits defy the pen of satire to paint them worse than they are—worthless, lying, treacherous, slanderous, cowardly and vaporing heroes, with boastings in their loud tongues and terror in their quaking hearts. Were it not that the course of punishment they are undergoing is necessary to the ends of moral and religious justice, we declare before our country that we should feel ashamed of victory over such ignoble foes. The quarrel resembles one between a gentleman and a chimney sweeper—the former may beat the low scoundrel to his heart’s contentment, but there is no honor in the exploit, and he is sure to be covered with the soil and dirt of his ignominious antagonist. But necessity will sometimes compel us to descend from our station to chastise a vagabond, and endure the disgrace of a contest in order to repress, by wholesome correction, the presumptuous insolence and mischievous designs of the basest assailant.”

And the Times—the so-called thunderer—speaking of President Madison: “This fellow, notorious for lying, for imposture of all kind, for his barbarous warfare both in Canada and against the Creek Indians, for everything, in short, that can debase and degrade a government.”

When word came to Lord Castlereagh of the capture of Washington and the King of France said he doubted the truth of it, Castlereagh said: “It is true beyond all question, and I expect that by now most of the large seaport towns of America are laid in ashes, that we are in possession of New Orleans and have command of all the waters of the Mississippi and lakes. So that the Americans are now but little better than prisoners at large in their own country.”

And that is exactly what might have happened but for one backwoods Moses. And this Moses—it is ludicrous, even in its tragedy, to think what he was doing when the event happened that first started him in his fame-crowned career.

A lank, fiery, swearing, drinking frontier lawyer, and general of coon-skin militia, sharp and sallow of face, blue of eye, peaked of head, his hair grizzled and tied with eel-skin, anointed with bear’s oil. Fighting chickens or duels, running horse races or hounds, buying land and negroes, standing stallions and for every office worth while, from Major General to Supreme Judge, and in all of it and every thing, getting there.

“Getting there” more nearly fitted him in every thing he ever attempted than any man of his day and generation. No American save Grant, Forrest, Stonewall Jackson and Roosevelt has ever come anywhere near his record of accomplishing things, and the latter has never yet had half a chance for showing what he might do in a pinch.

“Jim,” said one of Old Hickory’s negroes to another, the day after the old warrior died, “does yo’ think ole Marster has gone to heab’n?”

“Nigger,” said the other one, with becoming scorn, “does you think ole Marster has gone to de other place?”

“No, no! I don’t think dat—in course ole Marster couldn’t go to hell—he wus too good an’ kind a man fur dat, an’ too nice a gemman; but I jes’ can’t xackly see how he cu’d go to heab’n. De good Book say you mustn’t kill an’ you mustn’t cuss, an’ you know ole Marster wus right peart at both.”

“Nigger,” said the other, with emphasis, “if ole Marster tuk a noshun to go into heab’n jes’ tell me who gwine ter keep him out—jes tell me!”

Great men are teeth in the cog-wheels of things, and sooner or later the grooves they were made to fit will come to them.

The opportunity that knocked at Jackson’s door came from the arm of as gallant an Indian as ever made his word his bond—William Weatherford, the Red Eagle, war chief of the fighting Creeks.

Years before, a Scotch boy, Lachlan McGillivray, sixteen years old, ran away from home in a ship bound for Charleston, S. C. He reached there penniless, joined some Indian traders, and drove their pack horses into the Creek nation—for a jack knife! He traded this to the Indians for some deerskins and laid the foundation of a fortune that made him the greatest man in the Creek Nation and a power that three nations—Spain, England and America—courted till his death. He married Sehoy Marchand, a half-breed, sixteen-year-old Indian girl, with the sprightliness of her French father and the black eyes of her princess mother, Sehoy, a full-blooded Creek of the tribe of the Wind. Their son, Alexander McGillivray, though three-quarters white, became the most powerful and influential Indian of his day. He held his own in diplomacy and statesmanship with England, France and Spain. He was more than a match for the feeble government at Washington. His sister, Sehoy McGillivray, married a Georgian, Charles Weatherford, who lived with the Indians, owned land by counties, upon it the first race track in Alabama, owned negroes, thoroughbred horses, sheep and kine, ran the first cotton gin and held the first place of power among his people.

Weatherford, the Red Eagle, seven-eighths white, was his son, and Sehoy McGillivray was his mother. In his veins was Scotch, English, French and she whose family was of the Wind. He was an extraordinary man.

“His bearing,” said Pickett, who knew him well, “was gentlemanly and dignified. His eyes were large, dark, brilliant and flashing. He was one of nature’s noblemen—a man of strict honor and unsurpassed courage.”

Tecumseh, the greatest of all Indians, and a general in the English army, stirred up the Creeks as they were never aroused before. Acting for England with Spain, holding Florida as a secret and treacherous ally, he induced Weatherford to lead his Indians against Ft. Mims, in South Alabama, filled with men, women and children who had fled there for safety and were guarded by a lot of drunken, bragging American troops. The tragedy was inevitable, for both Spain and England were behind the Indians, England offering a reward for every American scalp—man’s or woman’s or child’s. And when the sun went down on the 30th day of August, 1813, unless she lied to the Indians, as is likely, she paid for five hundred and thirty of them.

Money payment for the scalps of helpless women and children! Grand old England of Shakespeare, Drake and Wellington! Glorious vandals of Ft. Mims and Washington and New Orleans! When I think of her in those days I remember only Davy Crockett’s famous toast to her: “The British,” said old Davy, holding up a horn full of whiskey, “an’ may their ribs make the gridirons of hell!”

The road to old Fort Mims, as it is to-day.

But it was not all a one-sided fight—they died game, even the little children—and the Indians buried six hundred of their warriors among the potato vines outside the stockade.

Weatherford and Tecumseh sowed the wind. In vain the Red Eagle pleaded for the lives of the women and children of the fort. For them he almost lost his own life and with clubs and guns drawn on him was forced to flee to save his life.

Not knowing this, the Americans marked him for death first and branded him “the butcher of Ft. Mims.”

Five days after this massacre, which changed the boundaries of the continent and threw Jackson into an arena calling for every quality of his grit and brain for years afterwards, Jackson, all unconscious of this opportunity of his life—for the sweat-covered courier did not reach Nashville with the news until September 19th—was engaged in a street fight to a finish with Thomas H. and Jesse Benton—two men who were afterwards his political champions.

It was a foolish, silly quarrel, more like that of boys than men. Jackson was drawn into it through the eternal fiber in him that forced him to make his friend’s quarrel his own. This friend was William Carroll, afterwards the gallant general who stood by him to a finish at New Orleans. Both Thomas H. and Jesse Benton were young lawyers living in Nashville. They were friends of Jackson. Thomas H. at the time was away in Philadelphia on business of great importance to Jackson. Jesse possessed much of his brother’s fluency with none of his brains. He was eccentric and excitable. In a dispute he challenged Captain Carroll. It was all because some younger officers were jealous of Carroll and wanted to break his influence with Jackson.

In the duel with Carroll (which was harmless) he involved Jackson, and it ended in Jackson and the two Bentons fighting, in the streets of Nashville, a bloody duel, in which Jackson was shot, his arm and shoulder shattered, and the two Bentons found themselves, one in the bottom of a cellar, and the other’s life saved by the luckiest chance. Jackson almost bled to death. It was three weeks before he could leave his bed.

That was September 4, 1813. Even then a horseman was riding day and night through the wilderness of Alabama with news of the Indian butchery. Even then the Creeks, victorious and bloodthirsty, had collected an army greater than any which confronted for years and baffled Miles, Crook, Custer and Canby, and were marching toward the Tennessee and Georgia frontiers, with Weatherford, the Invincible, at their head. And Jackson, the man who was to save them and fight the most brilliant Indian war ever fought on American soil, maimed, half-dead and soaking mattresses with his blood.

The news made him forget his wounds and his feuds. Tennessee acted and placed her treasury and her sons at the service of the man who would lead them against the Indians. Jackson was in command, but Jackson was dead—so they said. But when a member of the committee of the Legislature came to his room and propped him up long enough to hear the committee’s report, and regrets that he was not able to take the field—“The devil in hell I can’t!” he shouted, as he got out of bed and began then and there his campaign against the Creeks. His proclamation followed. Propped up in bed, he wrote: “The horrid butcheries perpetrated on our defenseless fellow-citizens near Ft. Stoddard cannot fail to excite in every bosom a spirit of revenge.... It surely never would be said that the brave Tennesseeans wanted other inducements than patriotism and humanity to rush to the aid of our bleeding neighbors and friends and relatives.”

October 4 was the day he designated for the troops to meet at Fayetteville, Tenn., and on October 4 Jackson was there.

A book might be written on Jackson’s Creek war. The Duke of Wellington said that if Jackson had done nothing else this war would have ranked him among the greatest generals.

I cannot accept this as meant literally. But what a record of hardships, grit, perseverance, gameness, generalship, resourcefulness, agony of overcoming it is! Just one month from the day of his street duel in Nashville he rendezvoused his troops at Fayetteville. He could not mount his horse without help. He could not bear for a coat collar to touch his shattered shoulder. The least unguarded movement, and a thrill of agony went through his bloodless frame.

We all remember the lives and years and treasure it took to subdue even the Sioux of the Northwest. Ask Crook and Miles and also poor Custer—soldiers all, equipped to a king’s taste and backed by the best army of Indian fighters the world ever saw—except one, and that one the smaller army that Jackson had to subdue in a twelve months the most powerful federation of the most intelligent Indians living.

Jackson marched into their territory October, 1813. By April, 1814, they were killed or conquered, and those who remained, even their greatest chief, William Weatherford, were his friends and allies.

Old oak near Fort Mims.

The infallible proof of a great general is his ability to turn his conquered foes into friends. This was Alexander’s, Caesar’s, Jackson’s, and Grant’s decoration. It was lacking in William the Conqueror, in Wellington, Sherman and Sheridan. From Nashville to Fayetteville is eighty miles along the old military road, now as prosperous a farming country as ever an army tramped across. At one o’clock, October 11, a courier dashed into camp from John Coffee, guarding the frontier at the Tennessee river, crying that the Creeks were coming. He started back in five minutes, saying that Jackson was coming instantly. Instantly was always the better part of his religion. He acted instantly at New Orleans, and it was all that saved him. And no general, by the record, who ever lived before or since, save perhaps Stonewall Jackson, would have done it. Incredulous as it seems, by eight o’clock that same night these 2,500 Tennesseeans, with their sick and wounded general, had marched, footing it, thirty-two miles to Huntsville. Thirty-two miles in less than seven hours!

They crossed the river at Ditto’s Landing, and then began that remarkable war of the civilized against the barbarian, equaled only when Caesar marched into the woods of Germany and fought their great Teutonic hordes from daylight till death.

And the Nervit were not braver than the Creeks under Weatherford, the Red Eagle. Canby was an Indian fighter, tried and resourceful. He fought through the Mexican War, on the plains with Albert Sidney Johnston, through the Civil War, capturing Mobile, and proved to be a hard-fighting and an iron soldier. But the Modocs butchered him.

Custer—his fate is yet fresh in the minds of the living. In the war between whites he was the equal of Wheeler. With as many men and far better equipped than Jackson ever dreamed that men could be, he attacked a mere handful of Indians compared to the great wilderness of them. Jackson marched into and conquered, and yet they killed Custer, and every man of his brave but unthinking force. “Twenty-five hundred men and thirteen hundred horses on the bluffs of the Tennessee,” writes Parton, “on the borders of the civilization, about to plunge into pathless woods and march, no one knew how far, into the fastnesses and secret retreats of a savage enemy! Such a body will consume ten wagon loads of provisions every day. For a week’s subsistence they require a thousand bushels of grain, twenty tons of flesh, a thousand gallons of whisky, and many hundredweight of miscellaneous stores.” Yet Jackson fed them, with little aid from any outside source, often eating nothing but parched acorns himself. His pathetic letters begging, commanding, beseeching the governors of Tennessee and Georgia for food for his troops are written with an ink of fire. “There is an enemy I dread more than I do the hostile Creeks,” he wrote, “and whose power, I am fearful I shall first be made to feel. I mean that meager monster, famine. I shall leave this encampment in the morning direct for Ten Islands, and hence with as little delay as possible to the junction of the Coosa and Tallapoosa, and yet I have not on hand two days’ supply of breadstuffs.”

Hunger and mutiny—what would Custer and Crook and Canby and Miles have done had these been added to the Indians? He ate acorns, and with a single rifle barring the path of his starved and mutining troops, he literally bluffed and drove them on. Seeing it all clearly now, his victory over the Indians was the lesser one.

Fighting Indians, fighting mutiny, fighting famine, fighting the terrible enervating, blood-sucking disease that preyed on his very vitals—this was the Andrew Jackson in the pitiless forests of that pitiless age, with one arm in a sling, sallow, bloodless and emaciated, resting his rifle across his horse’s neck in front of the column of starved and mutinous troops homeward bound and with eyes blazing, his grizzled hair bristling with fury, exclaiming: “By the Eternal, I will blow the first damned villain into eternity that advances another step! I will hold this fort if only two men will stay with me!”

Here are two pictures of him, then that go into you and stay—one of his innate tenderness, the other his undying grit. At the battle of Tallushatchee an Indian mother was found dead with a half-starved babe at her breast. “Let it die,” said the other squaws; “all its people are dead. It is the law of our race.” Jackson had it taken to his own tent and found a little brown sugar to make it a tea. He had it cared for, took it home, adopted it, raised and educated it. It knew no father or mother save the conquering Jackson and the good Aunt Rachel.

Imagine Caesar coming out of Gaul with a fair-haired white child in his tent! This man was greater than Caesar, ay, than ten Caesars.

The other was his grit. Unable to eat what little he had, unable to sleep, there were times even when he could not sit his horse for the griping pains of an outraged stomach. Only one thing gave him relief, and how he discovered it no one ever knew. Down from his horse he would slide, have a young sapling bent down, and hang over it, head down, till he deadened the terrible pain. Imagine Alexander’s Greeks marching across Asia and beholding their god hanging over a young tree, head down, racked with the pain of a woman.

On Lake Tensaw, near Fort Mims. It was here Jackson camped on his way to Fort Mims, after the massacre.

The finish came at Tohopeka (the Horse Shoe) on the banks of the sweet-running Tallapoosa, as beautiful to-day as then. Never had Indians fortified before—breastworks invulnerable, with portholes. Behind that, logs and brushwood, from behind which Indians love to fight, and all unseen. And the Creek Nation died there almost to a man and a woman.

The scene of the Red Eagle’s surrender is worthy a great artist. In the forests of Alabama. Sentinels—soldiers. The marquee of General Jackson. Big Warrior, a scalawag Creek, sunning himself by the door. Riding through the forest on the same gray, half-thoroughbred horse that leaped the bluff with him at the Holy Ground the Red Eagle comes to give himself up, that his starving people might live. Tell me not this was martyrdom and patriotism of the highest, for well did he know what they thought of him, “the butcher of Ft. Mims,” and easily could he have escaped and gone in to the British in Florida, as many of his comrades had done.

But if he had gone who would protect and plead for the starving women and children? Besides, he had found out the British and the Spaniards, and he hated their ways. He knew that his life alone would atone for it all, and so he rode up to surrender and be shot for his people. A deer crosses his path. He kills it with his rifle and flings it over the pommel of the saddle. Some sentinels stop him. One points out the General’s tent, but none suspects it is he, else he had not lived to reach the door.

Astonished, dumbfounded, Big Warrior rubs his eyes and looks. Is he asleep? Can it be—can it be—

“Ha, Bill Weatherford! Have we got you at last?”

Weatherford looked at him. “You traitor, speak not to me, or I will put a ball through your heart.”

General Jackson heard, and, furious, stalked out with Hawkins at his heels. “How dare you, sir, ride up to my tent, having murdered the women and children of Ft. Mims?”

Soldiers near by sprang up with bitter oaths. Not one but would have given an arm for the honor of killing him. A dozen guns leap up in the wild shout and babble for precedence, but Weatherford sits and calmly looks into their muzzles, while Jackson waves his hand and says: “Silence, and let him speak!”

“I am not afraid of you, General Jackson—I fear no man, for I am a Creek warrior. I have nothing to ask for myself. Kill me if you wish. I come to plead for the women and children starving in the woods. Their fields are destroyed, their homes gone, their cribs empty. They have nothing to eat. Send out your men and bring them in. I did all I could to stop the massacre at Ft. Mims. I am done fighting. My warriors all are killed. Kill me now, if you wish, but save the remnant of our noble race.”

“Kill him! Kill him!” shouted the soldiers, as their guns came up again. But as he spoke Jackson had seen and understood. Over the head of the chief he saw, over the clamoring, cursing troops who begged for his blood, over the past, over Ft. Mims, over all—to Pensacola—to the British sheltered there, waiting to march into his land to plunder and burn; to the Spanish, two-faced and deceitful, urging them on.

Instantly he acted. Instantly his great heart, as true for the truth as a hound for the trail, saw the nobility of the savage towering above the littleness and ignominy of the greater race. And there flashed in his broader vision Pensacola and New Orleans. He turned to his troops: “Who’d kill so brave a man as this would rob the dead.”

Weatherford then threw his game at his feet. “Take it, my General, for Weatherford is starving.”

Jackson seized his hand: “No, by God, you come in and eat with me.”

(The next paper will be “The Road to New Orleans.”)

Mike Kelley

By Ben McCulloch Hord

NOTE—If anything better than this has ever been written about the war I have never seen it. It is worthy of the great masters—of Sterne, of Thackery and Dickens. So pleased is Trotwood’s with this sketch that we have secured the picture of its author, Major Ben M. Hord, one of the best and truest of men and beloved by all who know him. Major Hord has held many positions of trust and confidence, was a gallant soldier in the big unpleasantness and was for a term Commissioner of Agriculture for Tennessee. He is still young, and this sketch shows he is gifted as a writer. We will publish another story from him soon.—Editor.

He was an Irishman by birth, and a blacksmith by trade, but gave up his bellows and tongs to “follow the feather” of his gallant countryman, Gen. Pat Cleburne, in the Confederate Army, and became a gunner in a battery. In many of his characteristics Mike was strikingly like his great captain. Though possessed of a rich vein of Irish wit and humor he did not have that volatile, bubbling over-flow of spirits so natural to his people; on the contrary, he was quiet and retiring in his disposition, even to apparent timidity. His only form of dissipation was tobacco. I well remember his dirty little cob pipe, black with age and tobacco, with a stem not three inches long, of the same color, and from the same causes.

Every old soldier who saw much active service in the field, in thinking of the close places he has passed through, will recall vividly the sunburnt face and form of some comrade, friend or acquaintance, conspicuous for his courage, brave where all were brave, but he the bravest of them all. In this light dear old lion-hearted Mike always appears to me, when memory harks back to the stirring scenes of forty odd years ago. With the courage of a game-cock, the modesty of a woman, and a sunny temperament, he was indeed a lovable companion, and when by your side in action, made you feel as if you had two right arms and a double pair of eyes. It is not, however, to speak of his courage that I write, but of some ludicrous incidents that happened to him after he “jined the cavalry.”

BEN M. HORD.

Mike was torn nearly in two by a canister shot the second day at Shiloh, while his battery was engaged with one of the enemy’s, and as soon as he was able to stand the journey, his surgeon sent him to his home in Helena, Ark., to die, as he thought, but which Mike, with an Irishman’s perversity, refused to do, and which he explained to me afterwards, in a half apologetic tone for not doing, that the shot really didn’t damage his “in’ards.” It, however, incapacitated him for service in the infantry, and as the Federal forces by that time had the river as far down as Vicksburg, he could not well get back to his old battery, so he reluctantly joined the cavalry. I say reluctantly, because while he knew every bone and nerve in a horse’s foot, and was perfectly at home when he had that article between his knees tacking on a shoe, put him on a horse’s back and he was as helpless as a new born babe. I doubt if he was ever on a horse half a dozen times in his life, until he joined Capt. Rufe Anderson’s company of scouts of Colonel Dobbins’ regiment, Walker’s Brigade of Arkansas Cavalry, of which I was also a member at that time. Seeing him one day, shortly after he had joined, hesitate on the bank of a little stream, as if debating with himself which would be wiser, to attempt to ride across or to get down and wade and lead his horse, I called out to him: “Grip him with your knees, Mike, and your back will keep dry.”

“Grip him with me knase, is it?” he replied. “Then, be jimminy, I’ll git down and wade, for it’s myself that’s as bow-legged as a barrel hoop, and it’s me grub, not me back, I’m afther kaping thry.”

Several months had passed since Mike had joined us and he had improved in his horsemanship to such an extent that he would even venture sometimes, when very much aggravated, to punish the “brute of a baste” he was riding with the spur, instead of dismounting and larruping the horse with a sprout, as he did at first. But notwithstanding his poor skill as a rider, Mike’s love of anything that might lead up to a brush with “our friends, the enemy,” was so strong he was always ready and anxious to go on our scouting expeditions.

Anderson, the captain of our company, was a superb rider. Having spent many years of his life on the Texas frontier, he could perform all the tricks in the saddle so common to the cowboys of the present day, but rarely ever seen then, such as scooping down and picking up his glove, hat, or pistol from the ground, with his horse at full speed. The frequent encounters his company had with the cavalry of the enemy made him pretty well known and much sought after by them, and through the citizens they had obtained, not only a good description of him, but also a thorough knowledge of his dexterity as a rider.

On one occasion our scouts reported a foraging train of the enemy coming out from Helena escorted by a squadron of cavalry. Weatherly, our first lieutenant, was in command of our troop that day, Anderson being absent, and as the old man was of a naturally quarrelsome disposition and never lost an opportunity to pick a fuss or make a fight, either in or out of the army, we were soon in the saddle and on our way to strike the escort of the foragers. We were considerably outnumbered, but Weatherly thought that if he would dismount part of his men, place them in ambush, and when they opened fire on the blue-coats, charge with his mounted men on their rear, the advantage of the surprise would about even the thing up. So part of us were dismounted, Mike and I of the number, and placed in a dense thicket not more than twenty paces from the road. The Federal column soon rode in, and at the word “Fire” the thicket blazed, and at the same time Weatherly charged, as he thought, on their rear with his mounted men. A number of men and horses went down under our fire and the head of the Federal column was thrown into confusion, but only for a moment, for we had struck the Fifth Kansas, commanded by Maj. Sam Walker, as good a body of cavalry and as brave an officer as there was in either army. At command they wheeled and formed, fronting the thicket, and charged in the face of our second volley. At the same time a yell, distinctly “Yankee,” and a heavy discharge of carbines farther down the road to our right, told us as plainly as if we had seen it, that Weatherly had wedged himself in between the advance guard and main column of the enemy. At this unexpected turn of affairs, with nothing but our six-shooters to hold back such odds (we did not have time to reload our guns), it did not take long to determine what to do. “Fall back to your horses,” was the order, and we fell.

Mike and I were together. Partly on account of his old wound, but mostly, I think, on account of his contentious disposition under such circumstances, he was the poorest runner I ever saw—at least it impressed me so at the time—and when we reached our horse-holder he was mounted, the others all gone, and throwing the reins to us he followed in hot haste. I was in my saddle instantly; Mike was not so fortunate. His horse, a long, lank old bay, as thin as a fence rail, excited by the shooting, shouting, and running, was plunging viciously around in the brush dragging Mike, who was pawing the air with first one foot and then the other in fruitless efforts to catch the stirrup, at the same time keeping up a continuous string of comments upon the situation generally, interspersed with bits of advice to me and curses at his horse, such as: “Give’m a taste of your shooting, boy,” “Whoa, you d—d old brute of a baste,” “Look at the blue divils how they swarm,” “What a d—d fool old Weatherly was,” “Struck’m in the middle,” “Divil take the cavalry service,” “Whoa, you—”

In the meantime the Federals, finding nothing in front of them, were coming on as fast as the nature of the ground would admit, firing at random, for the bushes were so thick they could not see ten feet ahead of them.

Although expecting to show a clean pair of heels to the enemy, I had instinctively drawn a fresh pistol from my holster when I mounted, and according to Mike’s advice was using it to the best advantage I could, at the same time anxiously watching his circus performance with the old bay, and inwardly praying that it would come to a speedy close, or both of us would be either killed or captured, in a half minute more. I couldn’t leave him under the circumstances, for he had more than once stood between me and “the other shore,” in places equally as close, and to desert him now, would look like rank ingratitude and cowardice.

“Turn him loose, Mike, and jump up behind me, it’s our last chance,” I yelled, and at that instant the front line of the enemy burst through the thicket into the open woods within thirty steps of us. Bang! bang! bang! went the carbines. “Halt! halt! surrender! surrender!” they called out. I wheeled, to pick up Mike, if possible, and take my chances running, just in time to see his horse lunge forward and he lying like a sack of meal crosswise in the saddle, with one hand clutching the mane about midway his horse’s neck. My first impression was that he had been shot, and I was relieved to see him wiggle his leg over the blanket strapped behind his saddle, and straighten up. Our horses were going at racing speed and Mike was doing some wonderful riding. He was bouncing about like a ball, neither foot in a stirrup, and he showed no partiality for any particular place to sit. Every time his old horse would make a jump, Mike would come down on him in a different place—behind the cantle, in the saddle, over the pommel on his neck, then back again, up one side and down the other—he literally rode the old bay from his ears to his tail. A fallen tree was in front of us, both horses took the leap at the same time, and Mike disappeared on the far side of his old “brute of a baste”—gone this time, sure, I thought, but the next instant, bare-headed he bounced back on top again. Our pursuers, not liking to follow us too far in the woods, fired a parting volley of lead and curses at us and pulled up. A few hundred yards farther on we run into our scattered squad, that had halted and reformed.

An hour later, Weatherly having gotten the company together, we were pegging away at the rear guard of the enemy as they leisurely fell back into Helena, having sent their well-loaded wagons on in front. I stopped a moment to get a drink of water at a farm house the enemy had just left. The old man had a son in our company, and was anxious to hear from him, and learn something of the skirmish.

“I tell you they came very near getting Captain Anderson,” he said, after learning that his boy was all right.

“How’s that?” I asked, “Captain Anderson wasn’t in the skirmish at all.”

“Oh, yes he was,” he replied. “That Yankee captain that just left here told me he rode right up on Anderson. Knew it was him from his riding; never saw such devilish fine riding in all his life; said Anderson just played along in front of him, cutting up all kinds of antics on his horse, and he could have caught him had he not been afraid Anderson was just trying to decoy him into another ambush.”

I knew at once that Mike’s remarkable performance had been taken for Anderson’s skill. The story was too good to keep, and no one enjoyed it more than Captain Anderson. When the boys run it on Mike, however, he replied:

“It’s all right, me lads, but there’s no danger of any of you blackguards ever being misthaken for your betthers.”

It was not long after the above episode before Mike had another opportunity, of which he took advantage, to masquerade as his captain on horseback. One morning a scout came in and reported a strong body of Federal cavalry coming out from Helena, on what was known as the “middle road” to Little Rock, on a scouting expedition; which for the benefit of the younger generation I will say simply meant they were hunting for a fight. I remember very distinctly I thought those Western fellows were exceedingly quarrelsome, and as Mike said, “a meddlesome set of divils,” in those days, and uncommonly handy with a sabre or six-shooter; but I have met many of them since then, and together we have imbibed the juices of the corn and rye, and even of the grape, while talking over old times, and I have found it simply astonishing how erroneous early impressions sometimes are.

There were two or three public roads that branched off from this “middle road” at different points between our camp and where the Federal column was last seen, and after sending couriers to draw in all of our pickets and assemble the regiment for action, the Colonel ordered me to take four or five men, go down and observe the enemy, get their strength, report from time to time which road they were advancing on, so that he could place his command and strike them on ground of his own choosing. Mike went with me; he always did when there were any prospects of fun or a fight, and while the probabilities were rather slim for either in this case, for I was instructed to keep myself concealed and after getting the desired information rejoin the regiment as quickly as possible, Mike took the chances of something turning up that would give him an opportunity to “bust a cap at the meddlesome divils,” and asked to be one of the men to accompany me.

I was perfectly familiar with the country, and taking the little squad started on an air line through the forest for the point where the first road branched off, which I hoped to reach before the Federals came up, so that I could take a position suitable for my purpose and send a man back with the required information without being seen by them.

A half-hour’s rapid riding through the timber brought us close to the place where the roads forked and where I intended to take my first look at the blue-coats. The road here ran through thick woods. I knew I was close to it, but the undergrowth, through which we were riding, was so dense I could not see it. I also knew that if the enemy had not already passed this point, allowing them ordinary marching time, they could not be far off. Placing the men in line, some ten or fifteen steps apart, so they would be less likely to attract attention, we rode slowly and cautiously forward, feeling for the road. I took the place of lookout, and the men were to stop or move forward according to the motion of my hand. Mike was next to me on my right, some ten or fifteen steps away, and while I watched for the enemy, he was to watch me, and when I signaled him, he was to signal the next man, he the next, etc.

We had gone perhaps fifty or seventy-five yards in this way, when I heard that dull, rumbling sound familiar to every old cavalryman, that told me we were in close vicinity of a large body of moving horses. Peering through the bushes in the direction of the sound, and without turning my head towards my men, I motioned them to stop. The rumbling noise grew louder and nearer. For a few seconds my little party were perfectly quiet, then Mike’s horse grew restless and began to move about. Watching intently in the direction of the approaching noise and without looking around, I again motioned Mike to keep quiet, but it did no good. I could hear him swearing vigorously in a low tone at the old “baste of a brute,” but it only seemed to make the horse worse; he not only continued to twist and turn about, but began to sneeze and stamp the ground. At that instant I saw the advance guard of the Federal column file around a bend in the road not two hundred yards below us. I could tell from the direction they were coming, that we were much nearer the road than I had supposed, and that they would pass dangerously close to where we were standing; at the same time Mike’s horse began to lunge around, snorting, sneezing, kicking and keeping up as much racket in the brush as a train of army wagons, while Mike himself was swearing by note and loud enough to be heard above it all.

“Here they come, Mike! In the devil’s name keep quiet or they’ll bag every mother’s son of us,” I said as I turned my face toward him to see what was the matter. A glance explained it all. The old horse, in twisting about, had knocked over a rotten stump and uncovered a yellow jackets’ nest, that held a half bushel, it looked to me, of the maddest jackets I had ever seen. They had sampled the legs of Mike’s horse several times, but when they began to swarm up and pop it to him on his thighs and sides, the old fellow could stand it no longer and bolted straight forward through the brush, kicking, snorting, squealing like a mustang, and inside of fifty yards of where we were standing jumped into the open road.

Mike and his steed were about the busiest pair just then I ever saw; the old horse was kicking, squealing, stamping, plunging and biting in his frantic efforts to get rid of his tormentors, while Mike was giving his whole time, and undivided attention, to swearing and sticking on. He made no effort to guide him, but by the luckiest chance on earth the horse turned up the road, instead of down towards the enemy.

It was evidently a startling apparition that thus suddenly appeared in the road in front of the Federal cavalry, for they came abruptly to a halt, and for a moment seemed undecided as to what it was, or what to do, for the old horse had his busiest end towards them and they could see, what must have appeared to them, a dozen or more horses’ tails flirting up and down, around and around in the air (for the old brute was swinging it vigorously and with lightning rapidity), and a countless number of heels and legs flying out of this cloud of horse hair in all directions. At the same time a shapeless bundle of something gray, was bouncing about on top, for Mike in his gymnastic exercise in holding on assumed many inconceivable attitudes, all of which were enveloped in a thin yellow cloud that certainly was not dust, and out of which came curses, groans, squeals, and snorts. The old horse did everything but lie down to rid himself of the torture. Finally he made up his mind to run, and such running—a streak of lightning would have been distanced at the rate he went. He looked as if he was literally flying and would only touch the earth at intervals long enough to sling his heels out in vicious kicks, first on one side and then the other. At this part of the performance Mike would bounce up a frightful distance, but always managed to come down on the neck, back, or side of his horse. I never in my life saw such running, and can truthfully say no circus ever gave a greater variety of styles in riding.

As soon as the horse stretched out into a run, and the enemy could see what it was in front of them, they unslung their carbines, fired a volley at Mike and a half dozen or them darted out at full speed after him. As they passed I heard one fellow call out:

“Look at the damned rebel how he rides, will you?” And a sergeant mounted on a big gray horse shouted:

“It’s Anderson himself, boys, come on!” and he drove the spurs in the sides of his horse.

They were too intent on catching, as they thought, the noted captain and expert rider in front of them, to notice us in the brush, but being quite familiar with their methods, I was satisfied they would at once throw out flankers to prevent an ambush, so I moved back promptly to a safe position, and after following and watching them for several miles, and getting all the information desired, finally locating them on the proper road, all of which I reported to the colonel from time to time by sending a man back, I rejoined the command myself just in time to take a part in the wind-up of a sharp little fight that was claimed a draw by both sides. We held the ground, but the enemy was drawing off in good order down the road they had advanced on. We lost some men and had killed and captured some of theirs. Amongst the latter I recognized the sergeant, on the big gray horse, who had been so intent that morning on capturing Mike, thinking it was Anderson. He was battered up a little, had caught a pistol ball in his bridle-arm and evidently from the cut on his head had been knocked off of his big gray in the skirmish by some of our fellows.

Mike and I were standing by while his wounds were being dressed by our surgeon. He happened to be a countryman of Mike’s, and with that never failing, but indescribable bond of sympathy that the gallant sons of the Emerald Isle always have for each other, it matters not under what sky or flag they meet, they were soon engaged in an animated, but amicable discussion as to the merits of the two respective armies. With the truthfulness of a saint depicted on his countenance, Mike made the most startling and exaggerated statement concerning the strength and resources of our troops, and turning toward Captain Anderson, who had just walked up, he said: “I’ll l’ave it to Cap’n Anderson if I’m not right.”

At the mention of Anderson’s name and rank, the prisoner turned quickly and with much curiosity expressed in his face, critically eyed, over and over, the light but sinewy figure of the noted captain and skillful rider. Anderson noticed that he was being closely scrutinized, but without knowing any special cause therefor, he nodded pleasantly at the captive trooper and remarked: “That was a pretty sharp rap some of our fellows gave you over your head, sergeant.”

“Right ye are, Cap’n,” he replied, “but it’s meself that would be afther takin’ tin times as many, only to have caught ye this mornin’, whin we chased ye down the road.”

I had not yet mentioned to the captain any of the minor details of my morning’s work, so he knew nothing of Mike’s adventure with the hornets, for that worthy gentleman, when he joined the command at the end of his wild ride, had simply reported that we had met the Yankees unexpectedly at a bend in the road and they had chased him some distance, but that I, with the rest of the men, was yet in the brush and would get all of the information wanted. The other men that I sent in afterwards, had reported direct to the colonel and were at once sent off by him to hurry up different detachments consequently, Mike’s last feat in horsemanship had not yet gained circulation.

Anderson looked at the prisoner when he made the above statement, and shook his head doubtfully. Mike looked at me and shook his head slyly.

“You are mistaken, my man,” said Anderson. “I admit I have had to show you my heels occasionally, but it was not on the cards to-day. That don’t look like it, does it?” he added, as he pointed down the road to the cloud of dust that marked the retreat of our late adversaries.

The sergeant was not to be denied, however, for he had seen him, as he thought, with his own eyes and had shot at him; lowering his voice to a half whisper he said:

“Faith, Cap’n, and it’s no shame to ye that ye run, for didn’t we have the howl command at our back? But it’s a beautiful rider ye are to be sure; it’s yourself that can tache the best one that iver sthradled a horse, and Jim Sullivan would give a month’s pay to see ye do it again and take a dozen more knocks like this on his head besides.”

Anderson turned to me with a look of bewilderment on his face and asked: “What is the fellow talking about? What does he mean?”

“Ask Mike,” was all I could say, for I was convulsed with suppressed laughter. With a sly wink at Anderson and a droll look on his dusty, smoke-begrimed face, Mike replied:

“To be sure, Cap’n, it was meself that did the thrick on horseback this mornin’ the fellow is sp’aking of, jist for me own devarsion, and to show the bloody divils how ye have taught your men to ride as well as fight.” And he gave another confidential and assuring wink at Anderson.

“Why, of course—certainly, Mike—certainly,” said Anderson, anxious to confirm any statement Mike would make, but not yet certain of his ground.

“It’s the blissid truth I’m afther tilling ye, Jim Sullivan, if that’s yer name,” continued Mike, turning to the sergeant, with a face as serious as a Quaker’s prayer meeting, “whin I say I’m the poorest rider in the company, bad luck to the old horse for the same, but as ye had the least bit of a taste this mornin’ of what I can do in the saddle, whin I’m a mind to, jist scratch yer head and think what the cap’n and the rest of the boys can do whin they thry.”

The sergeant looked with open-eyed astonishment from Anderson to Mike, then grasping the latter’s hand with a proud look on his face he said:

“It’s ould Ireland, me lad, that can bate the world. Ye may be a poor rider in your company, but ye can make the best man in the ould Fifth (his regiment) ashamed of himself in the saddle, and by the same token some of’m were rocked, whin babies, in horse troughs for cradles.”

The captain and myself left Mike and his countryman discussing horses and how to ride them, but we were satisfied Mike would change the subject as soon as possible, for he knew no more about either than a Digger Indian does of the Greek alphabet.

It was not long after this before Mike had his “innings” on our friends in blue, although he did not come out as scathless as in the two scrapes above mentioned.

Our pickets reported a body of Federal cavalry advancing towards LaGrange from Helena, on the St. Francis road. Our regiment was badly scattered, having to picket some twelve or fifteen miles of country, but at the sounds of “boots and saddle” a hundred and forty or fifty men “fell in,” and with the colonel at our head we went trotting through LaGrange to meet the enemy.

Some two or three miles below the little village, the road ran through one of those large cotton plantations common in that section, with a high rail fence on either side. In the woods just at the end of this lane there was a thick, heavy growth of young paw-paws. Dismounting Weatherly, who had in the meantime been promoted to a captaincy, and thirty-five or forty of his men, were placed in ambush along the road with instructions to open fire on the enemy as soon as they came up. The colonel took the rest of the command, skirted the plantation and came to the lane a half mile further down and in their rear. We had scarcely reached this position and formed in the timber before Weatherly’s guns opened. We swung by fours out into the lane and with a yell went at them under full speed, Colonel Dobbins and Captain Anderson (the latter’s company being in front), leading the charge on the right and left of the column. The road was as open and level as a billiard table, every man was driving the steel in his horse, and we were going at racing speed. The rear companies of the Federal squadron promptly wheeled to meet us and poured a steady fire from their carbines on us as we came up. I happened to be one of the first fours and was within a few feet of the colonel, when I saw him glance over his shoulder, slacken his speed somewhat, throw up his hand and call to Captain Anderson: “Let the men close up!” At the rate we had been coming, we were necessarily badly strung out, and the Federals were standing solid across the entire road, not more than seventy-five yards from us.

I pulled up my horse slightly and had half turned my head to look back, when, like a red streak, a trooper dashed by me. There was no mistaking the rider. The reins were flying loose, the old horse’s blood was up, and so was Mike’s. He couldn’t have stopped him if he would and he wouldn’t if he could, for “Charge” to Mike meant “go in” whether there was one man or a thousand at his back. He was unslinging his gun for action as he passed (a double-barrel shotgun loaded with buck and ball, and, by the way, the best weapon cavalry could be armed with in those days for close work). I had only time to notice this before our rear had closed up and the colonel again gave the order to charge. The delay was only the fractional part of a second, but Mike was then flying fifty yards in front of us. I saw two puffs of smoke fly over his shoulder and he disappeared in the cloud. The next instant we were “mixing with ’em.” The action was short, sharp and fierce, the Federals using the sabre, we six-shooters, and was too hot to last long. Their rear gave way, we went through, joined Weatherly, and never gave them time to reform until they were driven inside of their lines.

I was hurrying back to the place where I had last seen Mike, when I came up on our surgeon gouging into a poor fellow after a ball and inquired if he had found Mike.

“Yes.”

“Dead?”

“No, but wounded and on ahead in an ambulance.”

I didn’t have an opportunity to see him until some time after midnight. I found him stretched out on some straw, with others, in a barn that had been converted into a hospital. His head was swathed in bandages and looked as big as a half bushel. His face was so swollen he could not see, and the poor fellow was delirious.

From the surgeon I learned that Mike had marched a couple of prisoners up to him, saying: “Take charge of ’em, Doc,” when he keeled over at his feet with an empty six-shooter in his hand. An examination showed that his head had been terribly beaten; the cuts were to the skull in five different places.

I afterwards learned from Mike, as soon as he was able to crawl out and suck his cob pipe, that after emptying both barrels of his gun, he did not have time to draw his pistol before he was wedged in the Federal column, and clubbing his gun, he was “knocking the spalpeens” right and left, when some “dirty blackguard” struck him over the head, knocking him from his horse. In falling he was caught between the horses of a couple of Federal troopers, his arms pinned to his sides as the horses were crowded together in the lane, and the last thing he remembered they were beating a tattoo on his head. When he recovered consciousness he was lying in the timber and two Federal soldiers were standing close by, their command gone and they undecided whether to try and escape or surrender. Mike decided the question for them. Struggling to his feet and taking a pistol from the ground, having lost his own, doubtless in his tumble, he promptly ordered them to throw up their hands, which they did, and were marched back as above stated. Neither Mike nor his prisoners knew at the time that the pistol he pointed at them was empty.

Mike was a great favorite with the colonel, who, like the rest of us, would occasionally joke him about his riding. Shortly after the incident just mentioned Mike was out sunning himself. The colonel passed by and began to rig him about letting his horse run away in the charge, and carry him into the Yankee lines. “Run away, is it,” said Mike. “Och, colonel, now it’s yerself that’s fond of a joke. Whin we swung out in the lane ’n ye told us to charge, if ye had jist tipped me a wink, and said, ‘Mike, me lad, I don’t mane it, I’m only joking,’ me head would be as sound this minit as your own.”

The laugh was on the colonel, and he enjoyed it most heartily.

Dear old Mike! He answered the last “roll call” only a few years ago, and “passed over the river.”

The first time I met him after the war was at the general reunion of the U. C. V. Association in this city in 1897. I had gone to the headquarters of the Arkansas veterans looking for him, and learned he was out looking for me. There were a number of the old company present, and as I stood chatting with them about the old days, some one remarked, “Yonder comes Kelley now.” Looking up the street we saw him coming, with his hat off, mopping the perspiration from his face.

“Let’s see if he will know him, boys,” said one, as they clustered around me.

“Find him, Mike?” one of them asked, as he came up.

“No, bad luck to it; but I’ve been hot on his thrail these two hours past, ’n have nearly run the legs uv me off intirely. The little devil is as hard to catch now as he was thirty years ago, when he was riding that old gray horse,” he answered, as he threw himself down in the shade with a grunt of disgust.

There was a general laugh, but my heart was in my throat, and I did not join in until the others had ceased. In an instant he was on his feet. “I would know that laugh in a thousand,” he exclaimed, looking eagerly around. I pushed my way through and stood before him.

The steel-gray eyes I had so often seen flash defiance in the face of death were dim with tears as his hand clasped mine, and when I felt his arm around my shoulder, his bearded cheek against mine, there were drops that were not perspiration falling from my own face.

Maudlin sentiment of two old men, you say? Yes, if you choose to call it such; but a sentiment formed and welded together over and over and over again in the fiery crucible of battle and one that death alone can break.

Crop Residue and Its Benefit to the Soil

By William Dennison, Fargo, N. D.

How varied, great and wonderful are the blessings which a beneficent Creator showers universally upon this cosmos of ours for the benefit of mankind, and is it not strange that a majority of us fail to see these blessings, which are everywhere before our eyes? One of these blessings which the tillers of the soil are the recipients thereof, and which very few of them recognize, is the beneficial results derived therefrom. That is the importance of crop residue as a help in maintaining the fertility of the soil. Nature is a great economist—she allows nothing to go to waste. Everything is turned to some account in the grand, economic plan. Even the stubble which is left after the grain is harvested, there is a use for it. Yet many of our farmers fail to see it. The farmers in the great wheat-raising states of the Northwest burn up their straw stacks when they want to plow the land for another wheat crop. This ought not to be. Nature has an important use for this crop residue. It ought to be returned to the land as manure. It was prodigality on their part to have sold the fertility of their land in the wheat. But it was compounding the offense when they burned up their crop residue. Because the axiom is, the more crop, the more crop residue, and the more crop residue the more dead vegetable matter to be oxidized. But for this wise provision made by an all-wise Creator, humanity would long since have perished with hunger from off the face of the earth. We do not wish to give out the impression that crop residue alone will maintain the fertility of the land, but to convey the idea of the importance of crop residue as a help in delaying the period when land which has been under cultivation for years, without manure (which is the rule in the United States) ceases to be profitable to cultivate.

“It is a fact both of scientific interest and of great practical importance, that the enrichment of a soil with nitrogen is confined to certain limits, which can, with great difficulty, be exceeded. The limit varies according to the conditions in which the soil is placed. A familiar instance of the limit is afforded by a pasture.

“We have seen when the arable land is laid down in grass an accumulation of nitrogen takes place in the surface soil. This accumulation may be slow or rapid, according to the treatment of the field, but in the case of an ordinary meadow the accumulation does not pass a certain point. After a certain number of years no further rise in nitrogen appears in the soil, although the external conditions of the meadow remain precisely the same as they were when the former accumulation of nitrogen took place. The influence of crop residue, Prof. Warington says, “where the ammonium salts were applied without ash constituents the produce was the smallest, and so was the nitrogen in the soil, and this nitrogen, like the crops, was a diminishing quantity. Where superphosphate was supplied with the ammonia the crop was considerably increased, and so was the nitrogen of the soil, which has shown little change in sixteen years. Where the ammonia was used with a full supply of phosphate and potash the produce was the largest; the nitrogen, too, of the soil was largest, and shows a tendency to rise.” “We see here at once a relation between the amount of the crop and the rise or fall of the nitrogen in the soil. The quantity of nitrogenous matter in a surface soil can only be maintained when the crop grown on the soil reaches a certain annual amount. There is, in fact, an annual waste of the nitrogenous capital of the soil, and if the proportion of the nitrogen of the soil is to be maintained there must be an equal annual addition of fresh nitrogenous organic matter. This is furnished to the soil in the form of crop residue, consisting of dead roots, leaves and stubble of a former crop, and the dead matter of weeds. When this crop residue is of large amount, as in the cultivation of red clover or in any case of green manuring, or when smaller residues are left untouched by the plow and allowed to accumulate, as in the case of a pasture, the conditions for an increase in the nitrogen of the soil are present. When, on the other hand, the crop residue is nil, as in the case of a bare fallow, or very small, as upon unmanured land, there is either none, or an insufficient replacement of the annual loss of organic matter in the soil, and the nitrogen of the soil consequently falls.” “The proportion of nitrogen in a soil can only be maintained when the supply of ash constituents (phosphates and potash) is sufficient to furnish the necessary amount of crop and crop residue.”

The nitrogenous organic matter contained in soils is for the most part an insoluble substance, a fact of the greatest importance for the maintenance of the fertility of the soil. While in this condition it is of little use to the higher order of plants among which our ordinary crops are included. To become available as plant food, it must be oxidized and rendered soluble, but as soon as this step is effected it becomes liable to be lost by drainage. Not many years ago we would have been satisfied in explaining the oxidation which occurs in soil as due to a simple contact with oxygen. We now take a different view of these changes. We know that the organic matter of a soil is split up and oxidized by means of living agents. A fertile soil is, in fact, teeming with life of many kinds. Many of these living agents are quite invisible to our eyes, and yet are performing changes on a great scale, upon the accomplishment of which the growth of our food crops depends.

The living agents which attack the organic matter of soil may be classed as (1) animal life—worms and insects; (2) fungi; (3) bacteria. The worms, beetles, larvae, etc., in a surface soil feed on the recently dead vegetable matter left by the crop or weeds which previously had possession of the soil. The carbon of this vegetable food is oxidized in their bodies and exhaled as carbonic acid, while the nitrogen is excreted in simple forms of combination. The fungi also feed on the nitrogenous organic matter of soil; carbon is oxidized in their cells and exhaled as carbonic acid, while their dead nitrogenous tissues restore to the soil a great part of the nitrogen which they had assimilated.

The conditions which favor the complete oxidation effected by bacteria are aeration of the soil by tillage, the presence of a suitable amount of water and of calcium carbonate, and a high temperature.

It has been mentioned above of the natural limits to the accumulation of nitrogen in the soil. Prof. Warington thinks he can now perceive some of the causes of such limits.

“The addition of organic matter to a soil either as crop or weed residue, or as farmyard manure, at once makes that soil a suitable home for the animal life—the fungi—and the bacteria, whose function it is to reduce organic matter to the condition of inorganic matter. An increase of organic plant residue or manure thus creates some of the conditions favorable to its own destruction. The rate of oxidation in the soil is now no longer what it was; the oxidizing agents have increased with the material to be oxidized. If, therefore, a soil is laid down in pasture or receives an annual dressing of farmyard manure, the nitrogen in that soil will only increase so long as the annual increment of organic matter exceeds the annual decrement by oxidation. If this increment is a limited quantity it will be met before long with an army of destroyers competent to effect its destruction. The richest soils are thus the most liable to waste and demand the greatest exercise of the farmer’s skill to preserve their condition. When the conditions of the soil are changed, when the pasture is plowed up or the arable land is left without manure, there is at first a rapid loss of nitrogen, but the rate of loss soon diminishes. The organic matter most easily attacked has disappeared. The army of oxidizing organisms has been reduced to starvation. A partial equilibrium is established when the annual destruction of organic matter amounts to little more than the annual residue of crop and weeds; but an absolute equilibrium is reached only when the annual loss by nitrogen is equaled by the atmospheric supply. In every case nature seeks to establish an equilibrium.”

For the American farmer to obtain good heavy crops, and consequently, large crop residues, there is only one way to do it. Invest some money in ground phosphate rock, and after applying it, plant a legume—cow peas, red clover, etc., and the investment will pay you the biggest dividend you ever received in your life.

Alfalfa-Growing in the South

By Joseph E. Wing, Mechanicsburg, Ohio.

JOSEPH E. WING.

(Ed. Note—Mr. Joseph E. Wing is regarded as the best authority in the United States on Alfalfa. He was born in 1861, took a common school education and worked with his father on a stock farm. Went to the Rocky Mountains when twenty-five years old, and became a cowboy, learning the business thoroughly and becoming manager of a large ranch. While in the West he saw the wonderful value of the alfalfa plant growing there, and determining to grow it in Ohio he came back to that State, bought the old home and went to work. He enriched and drained the old farm, laying fourteen miles of tile underdrain in a 320-acre farm. Last season he grew on that farm 400 tons of alfalfa hay. His two brothers, Charles and Willis, are partners with him on the farm, and they made last year, besides the alfalfa and other products, 50,000 pounds of lamb wool.—Ed. Trotwood’s.)

Alfalfa will grow as well in the South, under right conditions, as it will in any country in the world without irrigation. Alfalfa sown in the South under wrong conditions will prove a discouraging failure. So, therefore, it is far from any desire of mine to encourage unwise experimentation or lead men to make unavailing efforts to grow alfalfa upon unfit soils or with wrong methods.

Let us consider the few essential things that alfalfa demands. First, a soil that is not sour.

Next, a soil that is well enough drained so that water does not saturate it at any time of the year, unless for a day or two following very heavy rainfalls.

Then a soil that is rich in the mineral elements that go to make plants grow, phosphorus and potash, and well supplied, too, with nitrogen.

And, to crown all, a soil supplied with abundant vegetable matter or “humus.”

Given these things, and the South’s sun and skies, alfalfa will grow in most any part of the South and will yield annually four or five cuttings a year of the richest forage either to feed green, or to cure into hay.

An acre of proper soil devoted to alfalfa will produce double the total amount of available food for animals that an acre of corn will, and of a higher class of nutrients. That is because the alfalfa is so rich in protein, the muscle and blood-building elements that are so much needed in a ration for all young animals, for dairy cows or any animals giving milk to their young.

To prepare an acre of land for alfalfa may in some instances involve considerable labor and expense. If the work is rightly done it will be lavishly repaid by the grateful alfalfa plants, and after they have grown upon the soil for a series of years they will leave it richer than they found it.

If each farm in the South will grow alfalfa, even if no more than two or three acres, it will enormously increase its prosperity and wealth. There are sections of the South where easily there may be developed large alfalfa fields. There are other sections where to grow alfalfa will require thought, effort, expense and care. Success when reached will richly reward all this effort.

It is most unwise to sow alfalfa seed upon unfertile soils or without right preparation of the soil and attention to a few important details.

Nevertheless, the few things needful, are of easy attainment, for there is no mystery about alfalfa growing.

Let us take up the essentials of alfalfa growing: first, that the soil must be sweet.

It is a new thought to Southern farmers, perhaps, that soils are some times sour. They may be sour upon limestone land, but are more apt to be sour away from the lime.

If they are water-logged during part of the year, they are most apt to be sour. This acidity comes probably from the decay within the soil of vegetable matter, though some soils very deficient in humus are acid. An evidence of acidity is seen when clovers fail to thrive, and certain weeds appear in the meadows.

The appearance of “sorrel,” the little red-topped weed that is seen in so many meadows of recent years, is an indication of acidity. A surer indication is the gradual disappearance of red clover and the difficulty experienced in making it grow.

Lime is the cure of acid soils, though drainage is often needed along with lime. It may be applied to a freshly-plowed surface at the rate of from one to two tons per acre of air slaked or ground lime, and in some countries ground limestone is used with good results.

Lime is not itself a fertilizer, but it makes the land sweet so that clovers may grow and by their presence bring about enrichment of the soil.

Alfalfa is a clover, one of the best, since it is of very long life and surprising vigor upon proper soil.

The South needs the use of thousands of tons of lime, in connection with manures. Liming poor soils without manuring may not bring much benefit since there may be too little plant food even when the soil is sweetened.

The older regions of the world, where advanced agriculture has been practiced for centuries, use great amounts of lime. The writer has seen great chalk pits in England whence had been taken thousands of tons of chalk (a soft limestone) to enrich the adjoining farms.

In some parts of the South, however, where red clover thrives, the land has in it enough lime, and is in no need of sweetening. We will then consider the next requirement—drainage.

Alfalfa grows through the aid of little bacteria that inhabit its rootlets. These bacteria must have air. Therefore the flooding of the earth by complete saturation of water destroys the life of the bacteria and of the alfalfa itself.

If a post-hole dug three feet deep in the field where it is desired to sow alfalfa shows water standing in it for more than a few days in the year, that soil needs under-draining before being sown to alfalfa.

In general, the depth to the water level should be about forty feet. If there is a greater depth it is generally better.

Now, we will consider the matter of fertility. Alfalfa feeds deep in the soil after it gets established and it secures a part of its nitrogen through the aid of the bacteria from the air.

Nevertheless, it is a gross feeder upon phosphorus and potash and cannot secure these from the air. Nor will it at first secure all its needed nitrogen from the air.

Therefore, land destined to be sown to alfalfa should be rich when sown. If it is not rich it should be made rich before seed is consigned to it.

Next, comes the need of humus in the soil. Now “humus” is simply decayed vegetable matter, and is best supplied through turning under vegetable growths such as cowpeas, or through the use of stable manures. Humus in the soil does several very needed things.

First, it supplies a direct plant food through the nitrogen, phosphorus and potash that it contains, being especially rich in nitrogen.

Next, in decaying it forms compounds that attack the locked-up mineral elements of the soil and sets them free to be absorbed by the plants. Then it absorbs moisture and makes the soil more slow in drying, besides preventing the close packing that comes with puddling in clay soils deficient in humus.

And as important as anything, perhaps most important of all, it puts “life” into the soil. Soils with humus in them are really alive, for the decaying vegetable matter attracts bacteria of many sorts that in their life and death and decay form many compounds that the plants can absorb and thus directly increase fertility and make plants grow.

Good soils are truly “live” soils, filled with legions of microscopic forms of life, most of it beneficial to the higher orders of growing plants useful to men.

Poor soils, deficient in humus, cold, puddled clays, are literally “dead” soils and speak sadly of a dying civilization and decaying people.

Alfalfa, then, revels in a deep, rich, sweet soil. How are we to provide it in the South?

First, there are many river bottoms that are admirably adapted to alfalfa, being made up of rich alluvial loams, pervious to air and moisture, and not holding a surplus of moisture. On these soils alfalfa usually thrives splendidly.

Next, there are new lands freshly cleared where robber crops have not yet had time to take out the fertility. Often these newer soils will respond wonderfully with alfalfa. Some very steep mountain sides are growing alfalfa finely when sown on freshly-cleared surfaces.

Some lands are naturally fertile enough so that they will, with little aid, grow alfalfa very well. Nevertheless, even the best of the old cleared parts need manure before being sown to alfalfa.

We had best admit at the outset that most of the old fields of the South need enrichment to make them produce good alfalfa. And the best way to enrich them is with liberal coatings of stable manures.

Few farmers are aware of the great value of manures. They enrich far in excess of the actual potash phosphorus and nitrogen carried.

Liberal dressings, then, of barnyard manure, applied before it has leached in rain, is the best preparation for alfalfa sowing.

If one has not enough manure to prepare the soil for ten acres let him attempt to sow but five. If he can’t manure five let him content himself with two. Two acres of vigorous alfalfa will yield as much as ten acres of sickly, thin stuff on unprepared soil.

And the two acres will make forage enough to make a further supply of manure, so that he can next season enrich added acres and sow them to alfalfa. But while stable manure is the best thing and really almost indispensable to success in growing alfalfa upon old Southern fields, it can be greatly helped by being re-enforced by mineral fertilizers.

“Floats,” or finely-ground phosphatic rock not treated with sulphuric acid, is a very cheap supply of phosphorus. This phosphorus is not available when applied to some soils deficient in humus.

But when floats are mixed with stable manure in some way the phosphorus is made available and the plants can get it. Therefore, the wise farmer sprinkles his stables with floats which absorb the ammonia and makes the stable smell sweet, and when the manure is applied its value has been almost doubled. Stable manure fortified with floats is the thing to apply to the soil to make alfalfa grow.

This manure may be applied to a preceding crop of corn or tobacco, if it is applied heavily enough so that there is a large residue left.

Or it may be applied directly before the ground is plowed for alfalfa. This is a safe way. It may be turned under or harrowed in or disked in or left to lie on the surface through the winter and the land plowed in the early spring.

Just get it over the land in any way and as soon as convenient after it is made; it will do the work.

Apply as much as twenty-five tons to the acre and more if you have it. This will be a help, but in strong Southern clays there is no need to fear putting on an abundance; it will not leach away, and the more humus you get in that soil the better your alfalfa will be. Do not be discouraged by this information; you can afford to use the manure to start a crop that maintains itself and makes such a large amount of forage that will, if fed and the manure saved, in turn enrich yet other fields for many years.

Late in winter or early in spring the land may be plowed. It should be broken deep and as soon as the land is ready to work, it should be harrowed to a good seed bed.

Alfalfa wants a firm seed bed, so that the little rootlets find an unbroken way down into the moist earth beneath.

At a little later than time for sowing oats, say the last week in March, after danger of hard freezing is over, sow the seed. A peck of alfalfa seed, fifteen pounds, is enough to the acre; more is waste. There are in a bushel 14,448,000 individual alfalfa seeds. To sow fifteen pounds per acre would put on eighty-three seeds to the square foot. Twelve plants to the square foot are all that will grow to maturity.

The seed may be sown broadcast and harrowed in. It may be sown broadcast and covered by drilling in after it a bushel to the acre of spring barley, an excellent nurse crop. The beardless barley is the best. Or a half bushel of oats sown on an acre will serve as a nurse crop, only that in this case the oats must be cut for hay as soon as bloom appears and before they lodge.

The land after seeding must be left smooth so that the mower may be run over it close to the ground.

There may be sown fertilizer with the alfalfa to help the manure and it will probably be well repaid.

After the alfalfa is sown, if the land is very dry and cloddy it should be rolled. If it is moist, a plank drag should make it smooth and level.

At the time of sowing, if some earth from an old alfalfa field can be had, it is well to make it fine and sow it over the field at the rate of about 100 pounds to the acre, or soil on which sweet clover (mellilotus) has grown. The object of this is to transfer some of the bacteria that thrive on alfalfa roots to the new field. It is as the housewife puts yeast in her bread.

However, if the manure has been put into the soil and it is not sour, the seed itself will carry enough bacteria to shortly innoculate the field. These bacteria increase very rapidly in soils filled with humus.

A good test of whether a field will grow alfalfa or not is to observe whether it contains earthworms (fish worms). If it does not the condition is wrong for alfalfa culture.

After this sowing nothing should be done to the field until the barley is ripe or the oats in bloom. It may then be cut close to the ground. This close cutting is good for the young alfalfa, which needs clipping at this time.

Set the binder then to cut as close as possible, and if it must be cut high for any reason follow at once with the mower and clip the stubble close. Then let the alfalfa alone to make a second growth. If there should come rain it will grow rapidly for about forty-five days or a little longer. After that it may turn yellow and cease to grow.

That means that rust has struck it. Leaf rust is the pest of alfalfa in all Eastern States. The remedy for rust is mowing off the stems as close to the ground as practicable.

If there is enough hay to be worth saving rake it off and cure it. If weeds are the main growth, allow them to lie and mulch the land, supposing them not to be thick enough to smother it.

When winter sets in have a growth a foot high standing to protect the crowns and hold the snow. Do not ever pasture alfalfa the first season. Do not ever allow stock to tramp over it in cold weather, nor drive across it with wagons.

Oftentimes the fall is a good time to sow alfalfa in the South. When there is enough moisture in the land to start it well in August or September it may succeed well, sown alone. The manner would be to plow a wheat stubble as soon as possible after harvest, applying a light coat of manure, and immediately working it down to a good seed bed, using every care to prevent its drying out.

The way to do this is to have a harrow and roller in the field when the breaking is done. Let the plows run a quarter of a day and finish out that half day by rolling and harrowing the ground to bring it to a degree of fineness that will enable it to hold moisture.

No nurse crop is needed when alfalfa is sown in the fall; it must be about an inch deep and should not be sown when there is merely a little moisture in the ground with dry soil beneath, lest it sprout and perish before rains come.

Weeds will not trouble this fall-sown alfalfa much and it makes four crops of hay the next year, though not quite so heavy crops as the spring-sown alfalfa should make.

The time to make alfalfa hay is when it is about half in bloom and before the leaves have fallen from the stem. That will be about the tenth of May. Take this first crop off promptly to secure the hay while it is in its prime and to allow the next crop to come on.

Cure the hay by raking into small windrows while it is yet tough and cocking in rather tall and slender cocks so that the air may get at the hay. Do not delay raking until the hay is dry or you will lose many of the leaves, and they are worth as much, pound for pound, as wheat bran.

The hay may cure in the cocks if the weather is fine, or they may be opened out and sunned and again piled up and hauled to the barn. When only a few tons are put together the hay must be pretty dry else it may mould. When putting many tons in one rick or mow the hay need not be so well dried, as the heat prevents moulding.

Alfalfa hay will keep well in mow or rick, but when ricked it must be covered with wild grass, straw or boards, as it will not shed rain well. There will be four cuttings the second year, and these should be taken off when the proper stage of growth has been reached, whether the alfalfa is long or short. When it begins to bloom, the leaves to rust, and buds appear on the bases of the stems, it must be cut, else it will cease to grow and no subsequent crop need be looked for.

If, perchance from drought, the second or third crop happens to be very short, it must be mown off as promptly as though it was a good growth and then the succeeding crop, should there be rain, may be very much heavier than the poor one removed. Had it not been cut, however, this good crop would not have been secured.

On land rightly prepared, with favorable seasons of sufficient rain, alfalfa in the South may yield as much as six or eight tons to the acre. A yield of four to five tons may more confidently be expected.

Alfalfa will endure in profitable condition on suitable soils for from six to twelve years. Grasses encroach upon it and may be destroyed by disking after the roots are tough enough to endure it. A spike-toothed harrow to follow the disk will more surely tear out the grass. The harrow will not injure the alfalfa roots.

When once well established an annual drilling in of liberal amounts of phosphorus and potash will greatly stimulate growth on most soils and be repaid several times over in the increased yield.

When it is desired to plow the field it may be turned with a very sharp plow and strong team and the roots are readily killed when cut off. Any crop will yield very abundantly after alfalfa, corn and tobacco being perhaps best suited to follow alfalfa, since small grain may lodge because of the exceeding richness of the land.

After one or two crops have been taken off of the land it should again be manured and sown to alfalfa, which will take much more readily and yield much more abundantly than it did the first sowing.

In conclusion I ask the farmers of the South not to sow alfalfa upon poor or unprepared soil or in a wrong manner, since by so doing, failure is almost assured and the whole cause of alfalfa culture will receive a serious setback. I believe, however, that wherever a man has learned to grow alfalfa he will rejoice all his days and be the richer, more intelligent and better man for it and his neighborhood will be helped by the example of good farming.

How Old Wash Died

By John Trotwood Moore.

I had not seen the old man for several months, but I supposed he was still prospering on his little farm, when he walked in the other day without knocking, took his seat by the fire, and casually remarked that March was always a bad month on rheumatism.

“Why, how are you, old man?” I said, laying down my pen and seeing him for the first time. “I haven’t seen you for several months.”

“No, I don’t reck’n you is,” he said quietly, “an’ de reason is, I ain’t seed myself—I’ve been dead!”

“What!” I exclaimed—“dead—are you joking?”

I looked at him closely, but I saw no evidence of insanity—nothing to indicate that he had yet reached his dotage. However, I thought it best to pass him something for his rheumatism. He quaffed it off so naturally that I knew he was all right and would tell it in his own way.

“Ennything happened ter speak of sense I be’n dead?” he asked, indifferently enough, as he smacked his lips and wiped them on the back of his hand.

I was anxious to hear how he had died, but I knew any eagerness on my part would spoil it all, so I replied:

“Why, no, old man—nothing new. But you have heard of Jupiter Pluvius, perhaps, and his home above the clouds. Well, he has kept busy this spring with his watering pot.”

“Heard of ’im?” asked the old man, with a show of wrath—“why, I knowed ’im—he was a blue-gum nigger—that Jupiter was—that c’u’d pick five hundred pounds o’ cotton in a day, an’ he run off wid my secon’ wife an’ jined de Yankees. But he didn’t lib whar you placed de rickerlicshun ob his cohabitashun—he libbed up on Bear Creek. No, I got no hard feelin’s about it—for, onbeknownst to hisse’f he done me a great favor. No, I ain’t got nothin’ ag’in’ him, nur de Yankees, nur’r.”

“I guess not,” I said, “for since the Spanish war we are all Yankees now.”

“All Yankees now? Jes’ lemme tell you, sonny, dah’s one dat ain’t. No, suh, I am a S’uthern gemman, an’ I still b’leeves de nigger was made to belong to somebody dat ’uld feed ’im an’ mek ’im beehave. All Yankees now? Boss, I sho’ am ’shamed of you! De naixt thing you’ll hab us all Jews or Japs. Wal, dat’s all right, but I b’leeves I told you ’bout co’rtin’ dat ’ar widder—”

“You got her, didn’t you?”

“Boss, did you urver kno’ ennybody to go after a widder an’ not get her? I’ve got jes’ one rule fur co’rtin’—set up close, agree on all p’ints, an’ dat’ll fetch on love. Never ’spute wid a widder, ’specially ef you’re c’ortin’ her. Wait twell you’re marri’d an’ den bu’st a wash-bo’rd over her haid ef she don’t beehave.

“Did you urver notice, boss, how cu-is a widder is about dat ur c’ortin’ bus’ness? So diff’unt frum a gal. Now, when you co’rt a gal, she ain’t gwine say nuffin’ fur a long time. She let you co’rt her an’ co’rt her, an’ sum day, when she fin’ she lubs you, she’ll jes’ thro’ her arms aroun’ you’ neck an’ say, ‘Darlint, I am your’n—take me!’

“But wid a widder, nobody ain’t nurver got one of ’em to say ‘yes’ yit—but dey manage to git dar all de same.

“An’ dat wus de way wid dis heah widder I co’rted. De fus’ night I went to see her she ’lowed she hated de very groun’ I walked on, yet she lemme hol’ her han’ all de time. De nex’ night I was wuss’n p’lzen, yet she lemme squeeze her. De third time I was meaner ’n dog-fennel, yet I was good enuff to hug her. De nex’ time I cum she ’lowed I wus de mos’ contempt’us, po’ ignoble, bandy-legged has-been dat ever was, an’ stell I sho’ did kiss her. De las’ night she fix me—I didn’t think she’d hab me to save my life, an’ like a fool I begged her wuss’n a little weaned calf beggin’ fur milk. Dat wus jes’ whut she was layin’ fur, an’ so, entirely onbeknownst to me, she had de preacher wid de license dar hid in de closet, an’ I sw’ar ter goodness, boss, befo’ de cock crow twice dat ’ar ’oman had marri’d me thrice!

“An’ den I died,” he added solemnly. “Yes, boss, I died dead, too. You see, it all happen’ at de weddin’ supper. You see, boss, de ole man had allers been used ter drinkin’ sho’ nuff licker, but dat night dey dose me up wid a konkoction of pine-top, asserfederty an’ buzzard’s bre’f, an’ fo’ I knowed it I wus dead. Why, boss, dey burried me on de fus’ Sat’d’y arter de secon’ Sunday in January, an’ I didn’t rise ergin ’twell de Chusday arter de secon’ Sunday in March, an’ ef dat whiskey hadn’t er bin es good in its raisin’ grace as ’twas in its fallin’ grace, I’d er bin dar yit.”

“Would you like to kno’ what a man sees, an’ how he feels arter he’s dead, boss?”

Would I? I gave the old man another dose of the heaven-brewed to help him along.

“Wal, hit’s about de cu-isest feelin’ dat eber was felt,” he said, after awhile. “One minnit you am libin’ an’ de nex’ you am trablin’ ’long de road to Jurdan, an’ you can’t he’p yo’self to save yo’ life. You can’t stop, you can’t sot down, you can’t turn back. You jes’ seem to be drawed along like you was standin’ on a slidin’ sidewalk run on undergroun’ cables. But de road is buterful. Flowers bloom all aroun’ you. Birds sing in de sunshine on gold trees, an’ fishes swim in lakes of melted di’monds. Inste’d of bein’ outdoors an’ breathin’ air, you ’peer to be movin’ along under de bright roof ob a cut-glass house, or in a big bottle ob rarerfied perfume, wid de sun a blazin’ stopper in de roof.

“I didn’t kno’ whar I wus gwine to, an’ I didn’t keer—all I know’ wus I wus gwine, thang Gord!

“But, bimeby, everthing stop whar two roads met, an’ I know’d one of ’em went to heab’n, but I cudn’t say which one to save my life. I got down on my knees, an’ prayed fur light, but no light cum, an’ ’stid of it I heurd all de little birds singin’ in de gold trees all aroun’ me:

“‘If you foller the road of sorrer an’ sin,

An’ don’t pray fur light in de wurl’ you am in,

No use fur to pray in de nex’.’

“Dat mos’ par’lyze me, boss, an’ I’d a gi’n ennything ef I hadn’t spent so much time aroun’ race-tracks whilst I wus alive an’ had spent mo’ of it lookin’ for dis heah track, an’ tryin’ to fin’ out which road to take. Dar dey bofe lay, jes’ alike, shinin’ in de glow of eternity. An’ yit de very silence seem ter speak in thunder-tones, an’ de stillness was louder dan de noise of battle. It all depended on de path I tuck.

“Bimeby, I thort of Ole Marster’s little boy dat I seed die so long ago, an’ dat I useter nuss an’ carry in my arms, an’ of all de little chillun I seed bohn one day, an’ die de nex’, an’ I got down on my knees in de golden dust ob dat ’ar road an’ I look fur ter see if dar was enny baby tracks dar, fur I knowed whar de baby tracks wus, dat wus de road dat leads to heab’n.”

The old man stopped, and I saw him brush away a tear. He had said something as great as Shakespeare, and I, myself, had to take a turn around the room to stop before the picture of a little curly-head over the mantel, and listen again for the prattle of a laughter which began one spring with a bird’s note and ended with the first snow in a new-made grave.