Pickett's Gap

by Homer Greene

Nicholson was still standing where the sheriff found him, studying angrily the contents of the writ. After a minute or two, he folded the paper savagely, thrust it into his pocket, and started back up the road.

When Gabriel, who had stood for fifteen minutes in complete readiness to do his employer’s will, saw the backs of their enemies turned to them and in retreat, he could not repress some outward manifestation of his inward exultation; whereupon he drew his faithful horn from his pocket, and blew on it a blast that sent the echoes tumbling through the glen.

“Put up that fool’s plaything!” commanded the old man.

Ten minutes later Dannie and his grandfather walked back up the road with far lighter hearts than when they came down. The graveyard had been saved, at least for the present, from despoliation, and Abner Pickett felt confident that through the medium of the law and its peaceful operation, he could defeat any future plans of aggression by the railroad companies. But, after the stirring events of the first day of October, there was no attempt on the part of either company to begin the construction of a railroad, or to take possession of any property along the line of survey. All parties were quietly awaiting the determination of the equity suit begun by the injunction proceedings. And that suit could not come on for trial before the December term of court.

But for Dannie the situation remained practically as complicated and as harassing as ever. The service of the injunction and the frustration of the attempt to tear up the soil of the graveyard had given him only temporary relief. The main issue was yet to be determined; and his responsibility for the whole dreadful state of things, and his daily liability to be called to account for his unaccountable conduct, rested an ever increasing burden on his mind. It was with him daytime and night-time. Never, not even for a moment, could he shake it off. Many a night he awoke from some dreadful dream of incarceration in the county jail, or, still worse, of fierce denunciation from his grandfather, or, bitterest of all, of sorrowing reproof from the engineer who had been his companion on the night walk up the glen. Many a night, in his wakeful hours, he determined that when morning broke he would go to his grandfather, to Aunt Martha, to the engineer, to somebody, and make a clean breast of the whole wretched business. But when day dawned, and people were about their usual avocations, and things wore such a different complexion, his resolution always failed him, and the secret remained still in his breast. He plied himself constantly, too, with good reasons and excuses for keeping it. If his conduct should become known, then there would be no further question about the prior right of the D. V. & E. company to the location through the gap. Nicholson would be triumphant. His friend, the engineer of the night survey, would be made the subject of jest and ridicule. His grandfather would most likely be held to his agreement to sell a right of way through the graveyard, and sooner or later the soil of that sacred place would be torn and trampled with the ploughs and picks and spades of a score of swarthy and unfeeling workmen. And then, after it was known, to meet the looks and words of those who had known and loved him,—Gran’pap, Aunt Martha, the engineer, Gabriel, even Max, the dog. That would be terrible. And always, as he pondered, there was before him, sharply or dimly, a vision of the gray and forbidding front of the county jail with its stone-paved corridor and its iron-barred cells. It cannot be denied that personal fear was a prime factor in his mind. He was but human and a boy.

Yet his conscience urged him always to confess. There was one phase of the situation, indeed, against which his conscience constantly rebelled. The D. V. & E. people were not now claiming the last line of stakes as their own, but they were alleging, by inference, if not directly, that the stakes set by Nicholson were removed in the night by the engineer of the T. & W. before he replaced them with his own. To meet this charge there was only the declaration of the members of the corps that made the night survey that there were no stakes in the gap when they went through. And against their contention was the impossibility of explaining in any other way how the evidences of Nicholson’s work could have so completely vanished between six o’clock and midnight of the same evening.

It cut Dannie to the heart to hear this charge made and reiterated against the man who, in the short space of an hour, in the gray of one morning, had taken so powerful a hold upon his fancy, his boyish admiration, his heart-deep affection. Try as he would he could not rid himself of the vision of those clear blue eyes looking him through in sorrowful reproof. And yet—and yet he could not bring himself to an acknowledgment of his fault. Oh, those were wretched, dreadful autumn days.

Now and again Aunt Martha tried to comfort him. She saw plainly enough that something was preying on his mind, and in her gentle, unobtrusive way she gave him opportunity to confide in her, but thus far she had not been gratified by the first whisper of his trouble.

Abner Pickett, too, saw that the boy was suffering, but he imagined that it was from some physical disorder; and one day, when Dr. Chubbuck was driving by, he insisted that Dannie should submit to an examination by this old and trusted physician. The doctor, being unable to make a diagnosis of any physical trouble, left a prescription for some simple tonic, and promised to call again when he passed that way.