Jack Ballington, Forester

by John Trotwood Moore

June, and June as it breaks only over the Middle Basin.

There had been great rains, saturating the leaves and grasses until they were almost blackened in their deep greenness. There had followed, flushing the grass on all the hills around the Hermitage, the mauve tints of coming dandelions, followed by the red, white, and blue flags of the clovers, until across deep valleys and on distant slopes there was a pale light much like moonlight.

I had been very busy. There was much for me to do, and I sought it eagerly, for I wished to forget and not to see. It is what we fail to forget that hurts. And so I worked.

Colonel Goff, as was his race, had acted straight-forwardly in the matter of his marriage to Eloise. Over a month ago he had sought out Aunt Lucretia and told her frankly that he sought the hand of her ward in marriage, that he wished to marry her and take her at once to England. He said that his brother, the Earl of Carfax, had died without heirs, and that he inherited the estate. The family name, he told her, was Goff, and he had kept it while in America. In the early fall his attorneys would have every legal provision complete for his return, and for immediate occupation of his estate. And he told her with equal frankness why it could not be done sooner, that in his younger days he had married out of his class, and had been blacklisted by his family for it, especially by his elder brother; that they had had not only hot words but a stand-up fight in which he had all but killed, and had really maimed the older brother for life. "I had to get out," he said brusquely, "and get out quick. As it was they tried to disinherit me, but England's laws are greater than England's men. My wife was to follow, but she died."

My Aunt was a woman of great sense and said nothing. But I noticed that she thought much, because she was very silent, and that she grew suddenly very tender to me. When Eloise had gone to Washington my Aunt went with her. Two things happened before they left, which I remember quite distinctly.

My Aunt's admiration for the character and achievements of Andrew Jackson bordered on the idolatrous. As a boy she would take me often to the Hermitage, and tell me of the wilderness giant who lived there. She knew more about him than anyone I ever met. She understood the thousand sides of this man's great nature, from his horse-racing to his religion. In the spot where he had lived so long there was, of course, a world of tradition. It came down from lip to lip. Of these stories my Aunt remembered all. A few days after Goff had talked with her as my Aunt and I were going over the grounds she stopped before the log-cabin in the pasture near the great spring where Jackson lived before he built the present Hermitage.

"Jack," said she, "Andrew Jackson was the gamest thing God ever gave to humanity, and the gentlest. It is staggering to think what he had to overcome to do his life's work. The fights, the sicknesses, the suffering, the slander, the insults, the lies, the butcheries they called battles, starvation, mutinies of his own men, all met and overcome by one tall, slim, sallow, pain-wracked man, on one thoroughbred horse, with a gun in his hand, and two in his eyes. Talk of Indian fights—Mills, and Cooks and Custers—they were child's play to the great Creek Nation Jackson had to fight. And England behind them—selfish always and forever wanting that of others."

She looked at me quickly, and went on: "But he waited and then hit them hard. No one, from Hannibal to Cæsar and Bonaparte, would ever have attacked Keane and his troops, just landed and in an open plain with New Orleans at their mercy before them, in the night-time as did Jackson and his ragged, half-armed militia. No one would ever have risked it but Jackson; he was greater than them all! For that seemingly foolhardy night attack saved him. He cut the very vitals out of them in the dark. He hacked them as a game cock does when he sticks his gaffs into the very heart of his foe. That was why on January eighth they could not go over his breastworks, even with the combined force of Packenham and Gibbs and the troops that afterwards won Waterloo. He had gaffed them in the ditch in the dark. He cut them into giblets. It was hell with the lid on. They say it was a useless battle, but they lie, Jack. If Jackson hadn't stopped them, they would never have given up the Louisiana Purchase until we drove them out with another war. There are two kinds of men, Jack—talkers and doers. The talkers are all orators—they are all liars. They began with Aaron, whom God made a mouthpiece to Moses. Moses was the doer, but he could not talk. Aaron, the orator, talked for him, but it is Moses who lives. Jackson was a Moses, Clay an Aaron, a dead one, Jack, as all Aarons are, and growing deader every year. All orators, being liars, fool people while they live. Dead, they do not even fool themselves.

It was Clay and Crawford who let the British make that treaty of December twenty-fourth in which they said that they would not be bound by Bonaparte's constructions. At that time Lord Castlereagh had every reason to believe that Packenham, sent out November twenty-fourth, with the best army and navy that ever left Portsmouth for a foreign shore, had taken the 'crown colony of Louisiana,' as they called it. And under that treaty they would have held it. It was Jackson who stopped them, just one day before that treaty was signed.

"Yes, Clay is dead," she said laconically; "he ought to be.