Chapter VIII: Part 8

At the same time fifty other men seemed to have done the same thing, for flying horses shot out from different parts of the woods, all on the instant. The man in the wagon was half a mile away now, still standing erect. The gray horses were running low, with noses and tails outstretched.

The spread-out riders closed in a mass and followed at terrific speed. The crowd behind seemed to grow silent. We heard the patter-patter of barefoot horses ascending the long, low hill. One rider on a sorrel horse fell behind. He drew his horse to one side, and sitting over with one foot in the long stirrup, plied the sorrel across the flank with a big, white-felt hat. The horse responded, and crept around to the front of the flying mass.

The wagon had disappeared over a gentle rise of ground, and then we lost the horsemen, too. Still we watched, and two miles across the prairie we got a glimpse of running horses in a cloud of dust, and into another valley they settled, and then we lost them for good.

The speaking began again and went on amid applause and tears, with laughter set between.

I do not remember what was said, but after the speaking, as we made our way homeward, we met Little Ramsey and the young man who rode the sorrel horse.

They told us that they had caught the Copperhead after a ten-mile chase, and that he was badly hurt, for the wagon had upset and the fellow was beneath it. Ramsey asked my father to go at once to see what could be done for him.

The man, however, was quite dead when my father reached him. There was a purple mark around his neck: and the opinion seemed to be that he had got tangled up in the harness or something.

* * * * *

The war-time months went dragging by, and the burden of gloom in the air seemed to lift; for when the Chicago "Tribune" was read each evening in the post-office it told of victories on land and sea. Yet it was a joy not untinged with black; for in the church across from our house, funerals had been held for farmer boys who had died in prison-pens and been buried in Georgia trenches.

One youth there was, I remember, who had stopped to get a drink at our pump, and squirted a mouthful of water over me because I was handy.

One night the postmaster was reading aloud the names of the killed at Gettysburg, and he ran right on to the name of this boy. The boy's father sat there on a nail-keg, chewing a straw. The postmaster tried to shuffle over the name and on to the next.

"Hi! Wha--what's that you said?"

"Killed in honorable battle--Snyder, Hiram," said the postmaster with a forced calmness.

The boy's father stood up with a jerk. Then he sat down. Then he stood up again and staggered his way to the door and fumbled for the latch like a blind man.

"God help him! he's gone to tell the old woman," said the postmaster as he blew his nose on a red handkerchief.

The preacher preached a funeral sermon for the boy, and on the little pyramid that marked the family lot in the burying-ground they carved the words: "Killed in honorable battle, Hiram Snyder, aged nineteen." Not long after, strange, yellow, bearded men in faded blue began to arrive. Great welcomes were given them; and at the regular Wednesday evening prayer-meeting thanksgivings were poured out for their safe return, with names of company and regiment duly mentioned for the Lord's better identification. Bees were held for some of these returned farmers, where twenty teams and fifty men, old and young, did a season's farm-work in a day, and split enough wood for a year. At such times the women would bring big baskets of provisions, and long tables would be set, and there were very jolly times, with cracking of many jokes that were veterans, and the day would end with pitching horseshoes, and at last with singing "Auld Lang Syne."

It was at one such gathering that a ghost appeared--a lank, saffron ghost, ragged as a scarecrow--wearing a foolish smile and the cape of a cavalryman's overcoat with no coat beneath it. The apparition was a youth of about twenty, with a downy beard all over his face, and countenance well mellowed with coal-soot, as though he had ridden several days on top of a freight-car that was near the engine.

This ghost was Hiram Snyder.

All forgave him the shock of surprise he caused us--all except the minister who had preached his funeral sermon. Years after I heard this minister remark in a solemn, grieved tone: "Hiram Snyder is a man who can not be relied on."

* * * * *

As the years pass, the miracle of the seasons means less to us. But what country boy can forget the turning of the leaves from green to gold, and the watchings and waitings for the first hard frost that ushers in the nutting season! And then the first fall of snow, with its promise of skates and sleds and tracks of rabbits, and mayhap bears, and strange animals that only come out at night, and that no human eye has ever seen!

Beautiful are the seasons; and glad I am that I have not yet quite lost my love for each. But now they parade past with a curious swiftness! They look at me out of wistful eyes, and sometimes one calls to me as she goes by and asks, "Why have you done so little since I saw you last?" And I can only answer, "I was thinking of you."

I do not need another incarnation to live my life over again. I can do that now, and the resurrection of the past, through memory, that sees through closed eyes, is just as satisfactory as the thing itself.

Were we talking of the seasons? Very well, dearie, the seasons it shall be. They are all charming, but if I were to wed any it would be Spring. How well I remember the gentle perfume of her comings, and her warm, languid breath!

There was a time when I would go out of the house some morning, and the snow would be melting, and Spring would kiss my cheek, and then I would be all aglow with joy and would burst into the house, and cry: "Spring is here! Spring is here!" For you know we always have to divide our joy with some one. One can bear grief, but it takes two to be glad.

And then my mother would smile and say, "Yes, my son, but do not wake the baby!"

Then I would go out and watch the snow turn to water, and run down the road in little rivulets to the creek, that would swell until it became a regular Mississippi, so that when we waded the horse across, the water would come to the saddlegirth.

Then once, I remember, the bridge was washed away, and all the teams had to go around and through the water, and some used to get stuck in the mud on the other bank. It was great fun!

The first "Spring beauties" bloomed very early in that year; violets came out on the south side of rotting logs, and cowslips blossomed in the slough as they never had done before. Over on the knoll, prairie-chickens strutted pompously and proudly drummed. The war was over! Lincoln had won, and the country was safe!

The jubilee was infectious, and the neighbors who used to come and visit us would tell of the men and boys who would soon be back. The war was over!

My father and mother talked of it across the table, and the men talked of it at the store, and earth, sky and water called to each other in glad relief, "The war is over!"

But there came a morning when my father walked up from the railroad-station very fast, and looking very serious. He pushed right past me as I sat in the doorway. I followed him into the kitchen where my mother was washing dishes, and heard him say, "They have killed Lincoln!" and then he burst into tears. I had never before seen my father shed tears--in fact, I had never seen a man cry. There is something terrible in the grief of a man.

Soon the church-bell across the road began to toll. It tolled all that day. Three men--I can give you their names--rang the bell all day long, tolling, slowly tolling, tolling until night came and the stars came out. I thought it a little curious that the stars should come out, for Lincoln was dead; but they did, for I saw them as I trotted by my father's side down to the post-office.

There was a great crowd of men there. At the long line of peeled-hickory hitching-poles were dozens of saddle-horses. The farmers had come for miles to get details of the news.

On the long counters that ran down each side of the store men were seated, swinging their feet, and listening intently to some one who was reading aloud from a newspaper. We worked our way past the men who were standing about, and with several of these my father shook hands solemnly.

Leaning against the wall near the window was a big, red-faced man, whom I knew as a Copperhead. He had been drinking, evidently, for he was making boozy efforts to stand very straight. There were only heard a subdued buzz of whispers and the monotonous voice of the reader, as he stood there in the center, his newspaper in one hand and a lighted candle in the other.

The red-faced man lurched two steps forward, and in a loud voice said, "L--L--Lincoln is dead--an' I'm damn glad of it!"

Across the room I saw two men struggling with Little Ramsey. Why they should struggle with him I could not imagine, but ere I could think the matter out, I saw him shake himself loose from the strong hands that sought to hold him. He sprang upon the counter, and in one hand I saw he held a scale-weight. Just an instant he stood there, and then the weight shot straight at the red-faced man. The missile glanced on his shoulder and shot through the window. In another second the red-faced man plunged through the window, taking the entire sash with him.

"You'll have to pay for that window!" called the alarmed postmaster out into the night.

The store was quickly emptied, and on following outside no trace of the red man could be found. The earth had swallowed both the man and the five-pound scale-weight.

After some minutes had passed in a vain search for the weight and the Copperhead, we went back into the store and the reading was continued.

But the interruption had relieved the tension, and for the first time that day men in that post-office joked and laughed. It even lifted from my heart the gloom that threatened to smother me, and I went home and told the story to my mother and sisters, and they too smiled, so closely akin are tears and smiles.

* * * * *

The story of Lincoln's life had been ingrained into me long before I ever read a book. For the people who knew Lincoln, and the people who knew the people that Lincoln knew, were the people I knew. I visited at their houses and heard them tell what Lincoln had said when he sat at table where I then sat. I listened long to Lincoln stories, and "and that reminds me" was often on the lips of those I loved. All the tales told by the faithful Herndon and the needlessly loyal Nicolay and Hay were current coin, and the rehearsal of the Lincoln-Douglas debate was commonplace.

When our own poverty was mentioned, we compared it with the poverty that Lincoln had endured, and felt rich. I slept in a garret where the winter's snow used to sift merrily through the slab shingles, but then I was covered with warm buffalo-robes, and a loving mother tucked me in and on my forehead imprinted a goodnight kiss. But Lincoln at the same age had no mother and lived in a hut that had neither windows, doors nor floor, and a pile of leaves and straw in the corner was his bed. Our house had two rooms, but one Winter the Lincoln home was only a shed enclosed on three sides.

I knew of his being a clerk in a country store at the age of twenty, and that up to that time he had read but four books; of his running a flatboat, splitting rails, and poring at night over a dog-eared law-book; of his asking to sleep in the law-office of Joshua Speed, and of Speed's giving him permission to move in. And of his going away after his "worldly goods" and coming back in ten minutes carrying an old pair of saddlebags, which he threw into a corner saying, "Speed, I've moved!".

I knew of his twenty years of country law-practise, when he was considered just about as good and no better than a dozen others on that circuit, and of his making a bare living during that time. Then I knew of his gradually awakening to the wrong of slavery, of the expansion of his mind, so that he began to incur the jealousy of rivals and the hatred of enemies, and of the prophetic feeling in that slow but sure moving mind that "a house divided against itself can not stand. I believe this Government can not endure permanently half-slave and half-free."

I knew of the debates with Douglas and the national attention they attracted, and of Judge Davis' remark, "Lincoln has more commonsense than any other man in America"; and then, chiefly through Judge Davis' influence, of his being nominated for President at the Chicago Convention. I knew of his election, and the coming of the war, and the long, hard fight, when friends and foes beset, and none but he had the patience and the courage that could wait. And then I knew of his death, that death which then seemed a calamity--terrible in its awful blackness.

But now the years have passed, and I comprehend somewhat of the paradox of things, and I know that this death was just what he might have prayed for. It was a fitting close for a life that had done a supreme and mighty work. His face foretold the end.

Lincoln had no home ties. In that plain, frame house, without embellished yard or ornament, where I have been so often, there was no love that held him fast. In that house there was no library, but in the parlor, where six haircloth chairs and a slippery sofa to match stood guard, was a marble table on which were various giftbooks in blue and gilt. He only turned to that home when there was no other place to go. Politics, with its attendant travel and excitement, allowed him to forget the what-might-have-beens. Foolish bickering, silly pride, and stupid misunderstanding pushed him out upon the streets and he sought to lose himself among the people. And to the people at length he gave his time, his talents, his love, his life. Fate took from him his home that the country might call him savior. Dire tragedy was a fitting end; for only the souls who have suffered are well-loved.

Jealousy, disparagement, calumny, have all made way, and North and South alike revere his name.

The memory of his gentleness, his patience, his firm faith, and his great and loving heart are the priceless heritage of a united land. He had charity for all and malice toward none; he gave affection, and affection is his reward.

Honor and love are his.

* * * * *

SO HERE ENDETH "LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF AMERICAN STATESMEN," BEING VOLUME THREE OF THE SERIES, AS WRITTEN BY ELBERT HUBBARD: EDITED AND ARRANGED BY FRED BANN; MCMXXII