What the First Latin and Pop and Halsey and Beach now longed to know, however, was, where was Snipe, and why had Mrs. Park failed in her mission? The rector and his head-master had now good reason to know that whether Lawton had anything to do with the disappearance of Joy's watch (which none of them could really believe), he was not the only thief in the school, for the loss of the hundred dollars long after his disappearance conclusively settled that. There were now not more than half a dozen lads who believed that Snipe was dishonest to the extent of stealing a watch, not more than a dozen who doubted his integrity at all, and as for his saying in his letter that he could be reached through the Massasoit at Bridgeport, there were theories in abundance to explain the fact that neither in person nor by letter had Snipe "reported." He never said where he had found work; he had not given the address of his benefactors; he still, it seemed, dreaded that his step-father would enforce his return to a life that was torment to a boy of his character and spirit. He had merely told Shorty that a letter addressed care of the Massasoit, Bridgeport, would reach him; and, learning this through the admissions wrung from his sorely badgered "chum," and never waiting to write, the impulsive woman had gone at once in person, and the Massasoit people knew nothing whatever of the son. No one answering his description had been there, and as for letters being sent in care of the house, they showed her a bundle of missives so addressed. Every day guests would arrive, register, ask if letters had come for them, ransack the packet, select their own, and toss the others back. Some they showed her had been waiting a month for claimants. If she were to leave a letter addressed in their care for her son and if he were to call for it, they would telegraph to her, but that was all they could promise, and, after consulting the city authorities and, of course, the minister of the church to whose doctrines she had pinned her faith, and all without hearing of a lad who in the least resembled her George, the sad-hearted woman had gone miserably back to Gotham and to Pop.
Then, of course, she wrote, and so did Shorty. Both letters begged Snipe to return, but by this time Mr. Park himself had come to New York to persuade his wife to go back to her home and to promise that he himself would seek and find the wandering boy and fetch him to her arms,—the worst piece of strategy that could have been adopted, as Shorty, boy that he was, could have told her and would have told Park. Left to his mother and to his chum, the lad's heart might have relented and his stubborn pride dissolved, but there are men sublimely gifted with the faith that they alone are competent to deal with affairs, either public or personal,—that without their aid and guidance everything is sure to go amiss. Park sped away to the Massasoit on the heels of the letters, and when George Lawton drove in with the hope of finding the longed-for messages from home, and went from the stable where they had put up the sleigh straight and eager to the Massasoit, there, with his back to the huge, red-hot stove and facing the office desk, as though to guard that package of letters, there, grim, unbending, repellent as ever, stood George Lawton's step-father, and the lad, scenting treachery, turned and fled.
When the school assembled for the eventful year of '61, the First Latin found itself reduced to twenty-five. Hoover, it was announced, would spend some months in Mobile with a private tutor and rejoin after Easter. From Snipe Lawton there came neither message, missive, nor token. A rumor flew from lip to lip one April morning that a lad answering every description of the missing boy had fallen from the steps of a New Haven train through a gap between the beams of the Harlem bridge and was lost in the murky waters. The brakeman who saw the accident was well known to members of the school who lived at New Rochelle, and so impressed the Doctor with his story that reward was offered for the body, and men dragged the river for several days. "What you need," said one of the wiseacres of the First Latin, "is to fire cannon over the stream, and that'll bring him up if anything will," and the words were recalled when, within another day, the guns of Sumter boomed from shore to shore, rousing a nation from its lethargy, bringing many a man and boy to vivid life and action such as they had never known or dreamed before.
CHAPTER XIV.
The great city had gone wild. Not a month before many of Pop's boys had ridiculed the lads of a rival school who had employed a drill-master from the Ninth Regiment and met two evenings a week. But Shorty, after vainly trying to start a rival company among his own mates, had gone over and enlisted in the ranks at Mulholland's. As a drum-boy he was not allowed to handle a musket and "fall in" with the famous regiment to which he was attached. Indeed, he would have had to stand on a step-ladder to load "according to tactics" the long, glistening musket with which the troops were at that time armed. Mulholland's boys had hired a lot of old-fashioned cadet musquetoons, heavy and cumbrous, but they were marvellous weapons in the eyes of the lads. Officers on duty at Governor's Island were frequent visitors at the Primes' at Fourteenth Street, and Shorty could not but hear of the preparations at the arsenal, the effort to send reinforcements and provisions to Major Anderson at Fort Sumter. All the world knew at this time how the "Star of the West" was fired on and forced to put back to sea, but still not one man in five would admit there should be war, and, in the great Democratic community, hundreds and hundreds of people and not a few papers almost openly took sides with the South. Two lads at Pop's actually came to school wearing the colors of South Carolina in their waistcoats, and in the First Latin the Ballous, whose father had embarked his capital in steamships trading with Charleston and Savannah, and Seymour, whose relatives were nearly all Southern, and the Graysons, who were Northerners by birth, but had many kindred in Virginia and Alabama, were all openly "secesh" in their talk. And still lessons went on, and the boys even had time to talk of Snipe and wish him back, and of Hoover and wish him in Jericho. Long ere this, now that there were two absent and Briggs had not a friend or a believer left in the school, all the First Latin had swung round into the conviction that poor Snipe was the victim of circumstances and conspiracy, and that Hoover was the cause of all his woes. The story of the hundred-dollar stealing had begun to be accepted as a fact, though Pop and his assistants could never be got to admit it. The further fact that Hoover and those notorious scamps, the Hulkers, had not been seen in New York since the Christmas holidays had set afloat a story that they had been discovered to be connected in many a piece of rascality. Everything missing at school for over a year was now attributed to Hoover. He had been able, said the boys, to dispose of his plunder through those Hulker fellows, who, despite the money lavished on them by their foolish mother, had debts in many a bar-, billiard-, and pool-room, and were known to have pawned valuable jewelry from time to time. She was with them somewhere in the South, and the gloomy old house in Twenty-first Street was cared for by the servants, who were glad enough to have their young masters away and suspicion attaching to themselves at last removed. But still that watch of Joy's and certain valuables of Aunt Lawrence's remained unaccounted for. Still the police were baffled. Still there came no news as to Snipe's whereabouts, and his mother, deeply distressed, had gone home to Rhinebeck and had to be content with receiving once a month a few lines saying her boy was well, working, and would return to her one of these days when he had earned enough to make him independent. Those letters bore only the date, which often differed by three days from that of the post-mark, but the post-mark helped them not at all. One letter was posted in New York, another in Boston, a third in Philadelphia. It was evident that Snipe was determined to give his step-father no further chance to find him. Once he wrote to Shorty, upbraiding him gently for being instrumental in putting "old Park" on his track, but that was all. Shorty felt it keenly, but with that poor mother and the Doctor and his home people all importuning him and telling him what was his duty, the boy had weakened and given the clue, with the result that they had gained nothing and he had lost his friend. There was little comfort in the assertions of the one whom he referred to as his "Sunday-school aunt," that he ought to be thankful to be rid of so undutiful and undesirable a companion. Shorty, to use the vernacular of the day, "couldn't see it," and fell from grace for saying so. But now the thrilling days of suspense were on the nation, and, while everybody who knew the South knew well the South meant fight, the baa lambs of the pulpit and the braying leaders of the press kept on preaching about the ties of brotherly love, the right of the people to assemble peaceably ("even when under arms"), and the wrong of interference or intimidation, so "Let the erring sisters go in peace." As late as the 8th of April, one night when the boys were drilling in the big gymnasium on the upper floor of Mulholland's school, and quite a number of people were looking on, a venerable patron of the school stepped forward during the rest and proceeded to address them.
"Cease all this waste of time, boys. Put away your cruel weapons. Abandon this senseless strutting and marching. War is a relic of the dark ages,—of barbarism. The world has grown wise with years, and of the enlightened nations of the earth America stands foremost. Trust to the broad views of our statesmen and the good sense of the people. They will ever stand between us and the horrors of a civil war."
There was much applause among certain mothers and sisters sitting along among the spectators, but Mulholland and the boys did not join. It was significant of what the drill sergeant thought that the moment the handclapping subsided he commanded attention and then "Fix bayonet!" Within the week that followed, the broad views of many a Southern statesman were manifest in the shotted guns trained on Sumter. The good sense of the people, so far from "standing between us and the horrors of civil war," boiled over in a genuine Anglo-Saxon exuberance of battle fervor. The news that the stars and stripes were lowered in Charleston Harbor sent them to the peak of every staff throughout the North, and men, women, and children swarmed upon the streets, decked with the badges of red, white, and blue. All Gotham had caught the war fever. The President's call for the services of the State militia to defend the capital until the volunteers could be enrolled sent the Sixth Massachusetts through the city the very next morning, the famous New York Seventh following by special train late the following day, and the Eighth Massachusetts marched down Fifth Avenue the same evening the Seventh went away. The best blood and brawn of the metropolis and of the Bay State were the first to respond. The Sixty-ninth, Seventy-first, and Seventy-ninth, Irish, American, and Scotch regiments of the great city, followed within the week, the jaunty Frenchmen of the Fifty-fifth, the Grays of the Eighth, the Blues of the Twelfth were promptly under arms. Every able-bodied man of the tribe of Prime was in uniform and away to the front before the month of May was ushered in, and Shorty, with breaking heart, had shut himself in his room and sobbed himself sick because he was forbidden to even think of going. He listened to the thrilling strains of the Seventh's splendid band until the last sound of their favorite "Skyrockets" was drowned in the hoarse cheers of the crowds that saw them off. He went to school as ordered and got "flunked" in every lesson. He sat on the mourners' bench in utter misery and despond all through the week that followed the going of the city troops, after having deliberately absented himself from every session during which a regiment happened to be marching away, and in all the two weeks that followed the coming of the news from Sumter only once had there come into his life a moment of joy and comfort, and that was the day following the departure of the Seventy-first (red-jacketed drum corps and all,—all except poor Shorty), when, as the First Latin bustled out into the street at recess, and Shorty, last of all, came drearily down with his hands in his pockets, ordered out, in fact, by Mr. Beach, he was greeted on the sidewalk by a jeering laugh and Briggs's taunting, sneering words. "Hullo, drummer! So you thought you'd better stay home where there wasn't going to be any show of fighting, did you?" and Briggs might have known what would happen. Just as before, in a sudden whirl of fury, the youngster flew at him, landed both fists on the freckled "mug" before Briggs could either dodge or guard; bore him backward in the full force of the instant attack; the carroty head banged on the curb and knocked him stupid, and then the peace-makers really might have been less deliberate in pulling Shorty off. Briggs was a wreck when his raging assailant was dragged away, and Halsey, wild-eyed, came rushing out to stop the fray. "Prime, Prime!" he said, as he held him by the collar. "You've tried the rector's patience to the utmost this last week, and I fear this will end it all."