Crittenden

The train slackened speed and stopped. There was his

horse--Raincrow--and his buggy waiting for him when he stepped from the

platform; and, as he went forward with his fishing tackle, a

livery-stable boy sprang out of the buggy and went to the horse's head.

"Bob lef' yo' hoss in town las' night, Mistuh Crittenden," he said.

"Miss Rachel said yestiddy she jes knowed you was comin' home this

mornin'."

Crittenden smiled--it was one of his mother's premonitions; she seemed

always to know when he was coming home.

"Come get these things," he said, and went on with his paper.

"Yessuh!"

Things had gone swiftly while he was in the hills. Old ex-Confederates

were answering the call from the Capitol. One of his father's old

comrades--little Jerry Carter--was to be made a major-general. Among the

regulars mobilizing at Chickamauga was the regiment to which Rivers, a

friend of his boyhood, belonged. There, three days later, his State was

going to dedicate two monuments to her sons who had fallen on the old

battlefield, where his father, fighting with one wing of the Legion for

the Lost Cause, and his father's young brother, fighting with the other

against it, had fought face to face; where his uncle met death on the

field and his father got the wound that brought death to him years after

the war. And then he saw something that for a moment quite blotted the

war from his brain and made him close the paper quickly. Judith had come

home--Judith was to unveil those statues--Judith Page.

The town was asleep, except for the rattle of milk-carts, the banging of

shutters, and the hum of a street-car, and Crittenden moved through

empty streets to the broad smooth turnpike on the south, where Raincrow

shook his head, settled his haunches, and broke into the swinging trot

peculiar to his breed--for home.

Spring in the Bluegrass! The earth spiritual as it never is except under

new-fallen snow--in the first shy green. The leaves, a floating mist of

green, so buoyant that, if loosed, they must, it seemed, have floated

upward--never to know the blight of frost or the droop of age. The air,

rich with the smell of new earth and sprouting grass, the long, low

skies newly washed and, through radiant distances, clouds light as

thistledown and white as snow. And the birds! Wrens in the hedges,

sparrows by the wayside and on fence-rails, starlings poised over

meadows brilliant with glistening dew, larks in the pastures--all

singing as they sang at the first dawn, and the mood of nature that

perfect blending of earth and heaven that is given her children but

rarely to know. It was good to be alive at the breaking of such a

day--good to be young and strong, and eager and unafraid, when the

nation called for its young men and red Mars was the morning star. The

blood of dead fighters began to leap again in his veins. His nostrils

dilated and his chin was raised proudly--a racial chord touched within

him that had been dumb a long while. And that was all it was--the blood

of his fathers; for it was honor and not love that bound him to his own

flag. He was his mother's son, and the unspoken bitterness that lurked

in her heart lurked, likewise, on her account, in his.