He was still talking to himself when Basil came out to the stiles after

supper to get into his buggy.

"Young Cap'n, dat gal Molly mighty nigh pesterin' de life out o' me. I

done tol' her I'se gwine to de wah."

"What did she say?"

"De fool nigger--she jes laughed--she jes laughed."

The boy, too, laughed, as he gathered the reins and the mare sprang

forward.

"We'll see--we'll see."

And Bob with a triumphant snort turned toward Molly's cabin.

The locust-trees were quiet now and the barn was still except for the

occasional stamp of a horse in his stall or the squeak of a pig that was

pushed out of his warm place by a stronger brother. The night noises

were strong and clear--the cricket in the grass, the croaking frogs from

the pool, the whir of a night-hawk's wings along the edge of the yard,

the persistent wail of a whip-poor-will sitting lengthwise of a willow

limb over the meadow-branch, the occasional sleepy caw of crows from

their roost in the woods beyond, the bark of a house-dog at a

neighbour's home across the fields, and, further still, the fine high

yell of a fox-hunter and the faint answering yelp of a hound.

And inside, in the mother's room, the curtain was rising on a tragedy

that was tearing open the wounds of that other war--the tragedy upon

which a bloody curtain had fallen more than thirty years before. The

mother listened quietly, as had her mother before her, while the son

spoke quietly, for time and again he had gone over the ground to

himself, ending ever with the same unalterable resolve.

There had been a Crittenden in every war of the nation--down to the two

Crittendens who slept side by side in the old graveyard below the

garden.

And the Crittenden--of whom he had spoken that morning--the gallant

Crittenden who led his Kentuckians to death in Cuba, in 1851, was his

father's elder brother. And again he repeated the dying old

Confederate's deathless words with which he had thrilled the Legion that

morning--words heard by her own ears as well as his. What else was left

him to do--when he knew what those three brothers, if they were alive,

would have him do?

And there were other untold reasons, hid in the core of his own heart,

faced only when he was alone, and faced again, that night, after he had

left his mother and was in his own room and looking out at the moonlight

and the big weeping willow that drooped over the one white tomb under

which the two brothers, who had been enemies in the battle, slept side

by side thus in peace. So far he had followed in their footsteps, since

the one part that he was fitted to play was the rôle they and their

ancestors had played beyond the time when the first American among them,

failing to rescue his king from Carisbrooke Castle, set sail for

Virginia on the very day Charles lost his royal head. But for the Civil

War, Crittenden would have played that rôle worthily and without

question to the end. With the close of the war, however, his birthright

was gone--even before he was born--and yet, as he grew to manhood, he

had gone on in the serene and lofty way of his father--there was

nothing else he could do--playing the gentleman still, though with each

year the audience grew more restless and the other and lesser actors in

the drama of Southern reconstruction more and more resented the

particular claims of the star. At last, came with a shock the

realization that with the passing of the war his occupation had forever

gone. And all at once, out on his ancestral farm that had carried its

name Canewood down from pioneer days; that had never been owned by a

white man who was not a Crittenden; that was isolated, and had its

slaves and the children of those slaves still as servants; that still

clung rigidly to old traditions--social, agricultural, and

patriarchal--out there Crittenden found himself one day alone. His

friends--even the boy, his brother--had caught the modern trend of

things quicker than he, and most of them had gone to work--some to law,

some as clerks, railroad men, merchants, civil engineers; some to mining

and speculating in the State's own rich mountains. Of course, he had

studied law--his type of Southerner always studies law--and he tried the

practice of it. He had too much self-confidence, perhaps, based on his

own brilliant record as a college orator, and he never got over the

humiliation of losing his first case, being handled like putty by a

small, black-eyed youth of his own age, who had come from nowhere and

had passed up through a philanthropical old judge's office to the

dignity, by and by, of a license of his own. Losing the suit, through

some absurd little technical mistake, Crittenden not only declined a

fee, but paid the judgment against his client out of his own pocket and

went home with a wound to his foolish, sensitive pride for which there

was no quick cure. A little later, he went to the mountains, when those

wonderful hills first began to give up their wealth to the world; but

the pace was too swift, competition was too undignified and greedy, and

business was won on too low a plane. After a year or two of rough life,

which helped him more than he knew, until long afterward, he went home.

Politics he had not yet tried, and politics he was now persuaded to try.

He made a brilliant canvass, but another element than oratory had crept

in as a new factor in political success. His opponent, Wharton, the

wretched little lawyer who had bested him once before, bested him now,

and the weight of the last straw fell crushingly. It was no use. The

little touch of magic that makes success seemed to have been denied him

at birth, and, therefore, deterioration began to set in--the

deterioration that comes from idleness, from energy that gets the wrong

vent, from strong passions that a definite purpose would have kept

under control--and the worse elements of a nature that, at the bottom,

was true and fine, slowly began to take possession of him as weeds will

take possession of an abandoned field.




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