第43章 CHAPTER VIII THE FIGHT FOR A STATE(5)

"We are here," he said, "looking the enemy in the face. Langdon and Iare in the same company and I see Colonel Talbot and Major St. Hilaire every day. We are going to the front soon, and before the summer is out there will be a big battle followed by our taking of Washington.""But you must come, Harry, to Richmond and join us before we march.

This is a fine town and all the celebrities are crowding in. You never saw such confidence and enthusiasm. Virginia was slow in joining us, but, since she has joined, she is with us heart and soul. Troops are pouring in all the time. Cannon and wagons loaded with ammunition and supplies are hurrying to the front. The Yankees are not threatening Richmond; we are threatening Washington. Be sure and get yourself transferred to the East, Harry, where the great things are going to happen. Friends are waiting for you here. Colonel Talbot and Major St. Hilaire have a lot of power and they will use it for you."Harry was walking on the hills that look down on the Capitol, when he read the letter and its warm words made his pulses leap with pleasure.

He felt now the pull of opposing magnets. He wanted to remain in Frankfort with his father and see the issue, and he also wanted to join those South Carolina comrades of his in the East, where the battle fronts now lowered so ominously.

He thought long over the letter, and, at last sat down by the monument to the Kentucky volunteers who fell at the battle of Buena Vista.

The pull of the East was gradually growing the stronger. He did not see what he could do at Frankfort, and he wanted to be off there on the Virginia fields where the bayonets would soon meet.

The curious feeling that war could not come here in his own land persisted in Harry. It was late in the afternoon with the lower tip of the sun just hid behind the far hills and the landscape that he looked upon was soft and beautiful. The green of spring was deep and tender.

Everything rough or ugly was smoothed away by the first mellow touch of the advancing twilight. The hills were clothed in the same robe of green that lay over the valleys, and through the center of the circle flowed the deep Kentucky, serene and blue.

While Harry's thoughts at that moment were on war, he really had no feeling against anybody. It was all general and impersonal. There is something pure and noble about a boy who comes out of a good home, something lofty to which the man later looks back with pride, not because the boy was wise or powerful, but because his heart was good.

The twilight slowly darkened over green fields and blue river. But the noble stone, with its sculptured lines, by the side of which Harry sat, seemed to grow whiter, despite the veil of dusk that was drooping softly over it. The houses in the town below began to sink out of sight and lights appeared in their place.

Night came and found the boy still at his place. He could see only the tint of the blue river now, and the far hills were lost in the darkness.

The chill of evening was coming on, and rising, he shook himself a little. Then he followed a path down the steep hill and along the edge of the river. But he paused, standing by the side of a great oak that grew at the Water's margin, and looked up the Kentucky.

Harry could see from the point where he stood no sign of human life.

He heard only the murmur of deep waters as they flowed slowly and peacefully by. The spirit of his great ancestor, the famous Henry Ware, who had been the sword of the border, was strong upon him. The Kentucky was to him the most romantic of all rivers, clustered thick with the facts and legends of the great days, when the first of the pioneers came and built homes along its banks. It flowed out of mountains still mysterious, and, for a few moments, Harry's thoughts floated from the strife of the present to a time far back when the slightest noise in the canebrake might mean to the hunter the coming of his quarry.

A faint musical sound, not more than the sigh of a stray breeze, came from a point far up the stream. He listened and the sound pleased him.

The lone, weird note was in full accord with the night and his mood, and presently he knew it. It was some mountaineer on a raft singing a plaintive song of his own distant hills. Huge rafts launched on the headwaters of the stream in the mountains in the eastern part of the state came in great numbers down the river, but oftenest at this time of the year. Some stopped at Frankfort, and others went into the Ohio for the cities down that stream.