[“I’VE DISCOVERED A WAY TO GET RID OF THESE MEN.”]
“Oh, Robbie! they don’t mean any harm to you?”
“None at all, mother. But tell father—tell father not to go into the windmill tower again. They might find out—somehow—that that’s his hiding-place, and come back here before I do, to get him. Tell him not to go into the tower again, not for anything.”
He kissed his mother good-by and hurried out into the hall. His little sister stood there, clad in her nightdress, with flushed cheeks and rumpled hair and wondering eyes.
“Good-by, Dotty!” he called back to her as he hurried down the stairs. “I’ve got to go up to town early this morning. I’m off now. You jump back into bed and get your beauty sleep.”
In another minute he was out in the road with the sergeant and his three men, and they went marching away toward Mount Hermon. The young officer was inclined to be silent and severe at first, but he soon thawed out, and then Bob found his conversation to be most interesting. He said, in answer to the boy’s inquiry, that he had been in the service since almost the beginning of the war. He had been with McClellan all through the Peninsular Campaign. He had fought at Antietam and at Fredericksburg and Gettysburg. In that last great battle a bullet had pierced his thigh, severing a small artery, and he had nearly bled to death before receiving surgical attention. But he was almost well now, and ready again for active service.
And as they walked on, and the young man told of his battles and his marches and his wounds, of the glory of fighting for the old flag, and of his ardent hope for ultimate victory and peace, and above all, of his reverence for the great and noble President at Washington, whom all the soldiers loved and honored, and for whom they would cheerfully have died, Bob felt the tides of patriotism rising high and higher in his breast; and, notwithstanding the errand which the young soldier had tried his best to perform, the boy could not help feeling in his heart that here indeed was a hero worthy of his admiration.
Absorbed in the story, carried away by his enthusiasm for a cause which could command such fealty as this, he forgot, for the time, that his father, a despised copperhead, a fugitive from the execution of the draft, with the penalty for desertion hanging over his head, was still back at the old home, ready to shed the blood of any who might dare seek to apprehend him. He forgot that he himself was under arrest as a traitor, charged with aiding and abetting his father, on his way to the office of the provost-marshal, where he must either purge himself from contempt, by answering the questions put to him, or suffer the penalty of his disobedience. So, with glowing eyes and flushed cheeks and swiftly beating heart, he told of his own hopes and beliefs and desires, of his own longing for the ascendency of the Union cause, of his faith in the great generals, Meade, Sheridan, Sherman, Grant, and of his absolute devotion to the one overmastering hero of the mighty war, Abraham Lincoln. And when he had told all these things, with an earnestness and enthusiasm that stamped them as unmistakably genuine, and his own patriotism as quite unsullied, it is small wonder that the heart of the young soldier warmed to him, and, before either of them was aware of it, they were the best of friends.
At a turn in the road the perspective of the long straight street that led through the village lay before them. The leafage of October, red and yellow and glorious along the maple-bordered highway, grew brilliant in the morning light. Back in the valley below them, as they turned and looked, they saw the fog-banks, which had lain heavy and close to the earth, beginning to break and drift away under the influence of the morning sun. The young sergeant bared his head and gazed in admiration at the rolling landscape, as it broadened away to the east.