Rochdale was like some other country towns that you may have heard of. The people, most of whom had been impoverished by the war, were envious of one another, though outwardly they were friendly, and all one had to do to gain enemies was to be successful. If he made money one year by planting potatoes, when the next season came around everybody planted potatoes. If he set up a blacksmith shop or opened a store, and seemed to be prospering, some one was sure to start opposition to him. When David Evans began riding the mail route for Don Gordon’s father, who had the contract, and exchanged his rags for warm and durable clothing, and purchased a fine horse for himself, there were a good many who thought that he was getting on in the world altogether too fast. His most bitter enemy was Mr. Owens, who had tried so hard to secure the contract for his son Bob, the runaway. He generally rode a very dilapidated specimen of horse-flesh, and whenever David passed him on the road, mounted on his high-stepping colt, Mr. Owens always felt as though he wanted to knock him out of his saddle.
“Just look at that beggar on horseback!” he would say to himself. “Things have come to a pretty pass when white trash like that can hold their heads so high in the air. If it hadn’t been for him and that meddlesome Gordon, Bob might have been riding that route now instead of roaming about the world, nobody knows where. If the opportunity ever presents itself I’ll get even with both of them for that piece of business.”
As for Don and Bert, they hardly knew what to do with themselves. Their private tutor left them—being a Northern man he could not stand the climate—and then they were as uneasy as fish out of their native element. They galloped their ponies about the country in search of adventure, paddled around the lake in their canoe, roamed listlessly through the woods with their guns in their hands; in short, to quote from Don, “they[“they] became as shiftless and of as little use in the world as ever Godfrey Evans had been.”
“I don’t at all like this thing,” the general one day said to his wife, “and there must be a stop put to it. The boys will grow up as ignorant as the negroes. I shall pack them both off to school.”
Mrs. Gordon thought of the way in which Don had conducted himself at the last school he attended (he had been expelled from it on account of the “scrapes” that his inordinate love of mischief brought him into), and made no reply.
“I have not forgotten that unfortunate occurrence,” said the general, who well knew what was passing in his wife’s mind. “But I think it was a lesson to Don, and one that will never fade from his memory. Being blessed with wonderful health and strength, he is fairly overflowing with animal spirits, and some of his surplus energy must be worked off in some way. I’ll put him where he will be held with his nose close to the grindstone. I’ll send him to Bridgeport.”
“Do you think he can endure the discipline?” asked the anxious mother, who knew how easily Don could be governed by kindness, and how obstinate he was under harsh treatment.
“He’ll have to; it is just what he needs. After he has spent six hours in racking his brain over the hardest kind of problems in mathematics, and two hours and a half more in handling muskets and broadswords under the eye of a strict drillmaster, he will feel more like going to bed than he will like running the guard to eat Cony Ryan’s pancakes and drink his sour buttermilk. I know, for I have been right there.”
When General Gordon once made up his mind to a course of action he lost no time in carrying it into effect. Before the week was passed he and his two boys were on their way to Bridgeport, where they arrived in time to learn something of the life the students led while they were in camp. The veteran superintendent welcomed the general as an old friend and pupil, received him and his boys into his marquee, and took pains to see that the latter made some agreeable acquaintances among the members of the first class, who showed them every thing there was to be seen. Bert did not have much to say, but Don was all enthusiasm.
“That’s the school for me,” said he to his father when they were on their way to Rochdale, after Don and Bert had passed their examination and been admitted as members of the academy. “How nicely those fellows were drilled, and what good-natured gentlemen all the instructors are! We shall have easy times during the first year. It will seem like play for me to go back to the beginning of algebra again.”