“To march into our land in that thing and claim my daughter—” he shouted. “To join that John Brown gang of abolitionists who are trying to overrun our country! Your father was a Southern gentleman and the bosom friend of my youth, but I'll see you damned before you shall ever again come under my roof, unless you can use your pistols quicker than I can use mine.”
“Oh, Tom,” said Alice when they were alone—“how—how could you do it?”
“But it is my side,” he said quietly. “I was born, reared, educated in the love of the Union. My grandfather himself taught it to me. He fought with Jackson at New Orleans. My father died for it in Mexico. I swore fidelity to it at West Point, and the Union gave me my military education on the faith of my oath. Farragut is a Tennessean—Thomas a Virginian—and there are hundreds of others, men who love the Union more than they do their State. Alice—Alice—I do not love you less because I am true to my oath—my flag.”
“Your flag,” said Alice hotly—“your flag that would overrun our country and kill our people? It can never be my flag!”
She had never been angry before in all her life, but now the hot blood of her Southern clime and ancestry surged in her cheeks. She arose with a dignity she had never before imagined, even, with Cousin Tom. “You will choose between us now,” she said.
“Alice—surely you will not put me to that test. I will go—” he said, rising. “Some day, if I live, you can tell me to come back to you without sacrificing my conscience and my word of honor—my sacred oath—write me and—and—I will come.”
And that is the way it ended—in tears for both.
Thomas Travis had always been his grandsire's favorite. His other grandson, Richard Travis, was away in Europe, where he had gone as soon as rumors of the war began to be heard.
That night the old man did not even speak to him. He could not. Alone in his room, he walked the floor all night in deep sorrow and thought.
He loved Thomas Travis as he did no other living being, and when morning came his great nature shook with contending emotions. It ended in the grandson receiving this note, a few minutes before he rode away: