“He ought not to be allowed to get away like that.”
And another one replied:—
“Let him go. After such a night as he has had he deserves his freedom. But I hope his guards will be court-martialed and shot.”
After that no one attempted to detain him, and Rhett Bannister stepped down from the car, a free man. He walked leisurely up the train platform, across the lobby, through the waiting-room, and out into the street. Over the roofs of the houses to the east the sky was beginning to show the first faint streaks of morning gray. An all-night restaurant at the corner attracted his attention, and it occurred to him that he should be hungry. He knew that he was very tired. He entered, and the sleepy and sullen waiter served him with a sandwich and a cup of coffee. Refreshed, he went out once more into the street. It was very quiet in the city at this hour. Only a few stragglers were abroad and they did not notice him.
When he reached Pennsylvania Avenue he turned up toward the Treasury building and sauntered slowly on. Not that he cared particularly which direction he took. But, in other days, he had been familiar with the streets of Washington, and some trend of mind or instinct of memory led his steps that way. He knew that he could not permanently escape, that, sooner or later, he would be recaptured and put to his punishment, and that his punishment would be the more hasty and severe because of his temporary freedom.
The hope that he had dared to entertain on leaving home, that he might be permitted to take his son’s place in the ranks, had now quite vanished. Before him lay only disgrace and death and a stain on his family name in the North for generations. It was the darkest, most desolate hour his life had known. A small squad of soldiers, in command of an officer, approached him, marching up the street through the crisp morning air in brisk time, swinging their arms in unison as they came, and the thought entered his mind that the best thing he could do would be to surrender himself to them. But when he met them he passed without speaking, and they paid no attention to him. A little farther on a crippled veteran with crutches sat on the curb and asked alms as Bannister passed by. And this hater of the Federal blue thrust his hand into his pocket, drew forth a liberal sum, and gave it to the uniformed beggar, without a word. The man was probably a fraud, but what did it matter? It was doubtless a doomed man’s last opportunity to do a charitable deed. So he passed on, up around the Treasury building and along the front of the White House. It was almost daylight now, but the street-lamps had not yet been extinguished, and in the President’s mansion two windows were still brilliantly illuminated.
As Bannister reached the corner by the War Department building he turned and looked back at the White House. There lived the man whom he had ridiculed as a buffoon, whom he had denounced as a tyrant, whom he had decried as a malefactor. And the remark made by Captain Yohe the day before at Easton came back into his mind: “No power on earth can save you from the extreme penalty meted out to deserters unless it be Abraham Lincoln himself.”
So this man held also in his hands dominion over life and death. At his word, spoken or withheld, he, Rhett Bannister, would live or die. At his word, spoken or withheld, soldiers by the thousands had given and would still give their lives that his counsels and his judgments might prevail. What an awful responsibility! How it must weigh on a man’s soul! How it must sober him and search him, and drive from his heart all forms of avarice and selfishness and hatred and hypocrisy! How could this man Lincoln, by any human possibility, be anything but honest and humble and God-fearing, with such an awful load upon his mind and heart!