When he had carefully read the notice a second time, Bannister folded it and laid it on the desk.
“I have ten days of peace,” he said, “in which to prepare for war.”
Thereafter he was very busy. He cleaned up many odds and ends of work as though he were preparing for a long journey. Oddly enough, however, he spent much time in making repairs to his windmill. He carried the boxing of the shaft higher above the roof of his shop, closed the top of it over carefully, and made a little window in each of the four sides. He appeared anxious to get it completed before a storm should come up. Little was said about the draft, or about his personal liability for service, and the subject of commutation money, or a substitute, was not again so much as mentioned. But it was with a sense of dread and apprehension that Mrs. Bannister and Bob saw the days go by, saw the preparations going forward for the approaching crisis, noted the fixed lips and the unfaltering eye that always indicated that Rhett Bannister’s mind was made up and that wild horses could not drag him from his purpose. Once, the thought flashed across Bob’s mind that possibly, instead of attempting to resist the draft, his father had decided to accept the inevitable and report for duty as a soldier of the United States. And the idea sent such a thrill of joy through him, so set the blood to bounding in his veins, opened up to him such a vision of pride and exultation, that it was hard for him to get back to the level of the stubborn fact that all the work being done by his father was being done simply for the purpose of being better prepared to resist the officers of the law.
So, on the evening of the tenth day from the date of service of notice of the draft, Rhett Bannister was still at his home. With apparent unconcern he sat at the table in his sitting-room reading a late copy of the New York Day-Book, a violent anti-administration journal which had that day reached him.
“The Day-Book is right,” he said, laying down the paper, “in declaring that if there was any manhood left in Pennsylvania, her citizens would rise in armed rebellion against the enforcement of this cruel and obnoxious draft as did the citizens of New York city in July. If the army had both ways to face, North and South, the war would soon be at end. Well, I am but one against the powers at Washington, but all the armies of the United States cannot force me to wear their uniform and bear their weapons against my will.”
By that speech, Bob’s hopes, if he still cherished any, were completely dashed. He knew by that that his father would resist the enforcement of the draft to the end, bitter and bloody though the end might be.
The ten days had expired. All the other drafted men from Mount Hermon had gone to Easton. But Rhett Bannister had not responded to the call. Henceforth, by the terms of the conscription act, he was classed as a deserter, subject to arrest, court-martial, and speedy execution. He himself said that a price was now on his head.
Mrs. Bannister went about the house, pale, apprehensive, starting fearfully at every unusual sound, peering constantly up the road, yet in dread of what she might see there.
For Bob, his days were miserable and his nights were sleepless. He turned over constantly in his mind scheme after scheme to save the honor of the family and to relieve his father from the desperate situation in which he had placed himself. But all schemes were useless, impractical, impossible.
On the fourth day after the expiration of the time-limit, a rumor from a friendly source floated down secretly to the Bannister homestead, to the effect that a detachment of United States soldiers, members of the invalid corps, on provost-guard duty, had reached the county seat and were about to start out to round up deserters, and drafted men who had failed to respond. They were likely, the warning went, to appear at Mount Hermon at any hour. Loyal citizens said that Rhett Bannister had reached the end of his rope; and radical Unionists remarked that the end of that rope had a loop in it.