And every one at the table responded heartily, “Amen!”
It was a delicious breakfast and a delightful occasion. They all said so afterward, and many times afterward. In the hearts of these boys in uniform Sarah Jane Stark found a warm place at once. For they were mere boys—not one of them was over twenty-three, and this woman of middle age, with her big heart, her bluff manner, her solicitude for their comfort, her interest in their stories of the war, her intense patriotism, and withal her broad charity, came suddenly into their lives, like a breath from some bigger, better, sweeter world than they had lived in, and they loved her. And one day, in the following June, after the battle and slaughter of Cold Harbor, one of these poor fellows, lying on a rough cot in a field hospital, dying from a dreadful wound, dictated a last letter to his waiting mother at home, and another to Sarah Jane Stark at Mount Hermon. And when she was old and wrinkled and gray, this dear woman, who never had a child of her own, would read over again that brief, pathetic letter from the dying soldier boy of Cold Harbor, and weep as she read.
So, after breakfast, they all went out into the beautiful October morning, and down the footpath to the gate where she had first found them. And she shook hands with every one of the young soldiers, and wished them God-speed, and early and abundant victory, and the blessings of a long peace. Then she turned to Bob and said:—
“Now, you run along back home, and put an end to your mother’s anxiety, and tell your miserable father for me, that the Lord has delivered him this once out of the hands of the Philistines, so that he may enter the armies of Abraham Lincoln like a man, and fight for his country as he ought to; and somehow—I can’t tell you why, but somehow I have an intuition that he’s going to do it.”
And the sergeant and the provost-guard stood by and heard her and said never a word.
So they parted. Sarah Jane Stark walked back up the footpath, across the lawn, to her comfortable home. The young soldiers, refreshed, invigorated and high-spirited, went swinging up through the streets of Mount Hermon to their appointed rendezvous. And Bob Bannister, with newer, bigger thoughts in his mind, with his soul filled with larger enthusiasms, with a determination in his heart to break in some way, any way, the galling bonds of disloyalty that girded and girdled his own home, went back free down the road by which he had come an hour before, a prisoner of the United States.
[CHAPTER VI]
A DESPERATE DECISION
Through all of the day following the breakfast at Sarah Jane Stark’s house, indeed through most of the succeeding night, the thought and ambition loomed large in Bob Bannister’s mind and heart, to lift, in some way, the dark cloud of disloyalty that rested upon the household he loved. His one hour with the soldiers of the United States had inspired and inspirited him to new and greater effort, to the making of any sacrifice, in order to uphold the honor of his country and his home.