The old man thought for a moment, apparently passed the lad’s life in review before the judge that abided in his memory, and then he said:
“I don’t remember that William was ever in any scrape of any kind.”
Then he waited for a moment, filled his pipe, lighted it reflectively and added as he pinched out the flame before throwing the match away:
“And if I did I wouldn’t tell it.”
The incident proves one of two things. Either young William had all his life the studious regard for the rights of others which has marked his manhood, or he had unconsciously enrolled this staunch old man among the friends who could not possibly be induced to “tell on him.” And either view shows the subject of their conversation in a very creditable light.
From infancy until he had attained the age of ten years, the family lived at Niles. The removal from there to Poland, where the Academy could offer better educational advantages to the children, was the last breaking up of home the boy knew. He retained the latter city as his home until after his return from the army, until after the completion of his law studies, when he cast about for a location that promised best for the life he had planned for himself.
But about the old town of Poland are still resident many men and women who knew him as a child, who watched him grow up to sturdy boyhood, and who learned to love him through the years that were adding to his stature and his wisdom. Those friendships he held to the very end. And there is no place in the United States where the blow that came with the news of his assassination fell more heavily than in the boyhood home of William McKinley.
CHAPTER XI.
McKINLEY AS A SOLDIER IN THE CIVIL WAR.
William McKinley was but eighteen years old when the war of the rebellion began.
His enlistment was in every way typical of the man, and representative of the motive and action of the American volunteer. With his cousin, William McKinley Osborne, now United States Consul General at London, he drove to Youngstown, Ohio, in the early summer of 1861, to watch a recently enlisted company of infantrymen at their drill, preparatory to marching away for the field of battle. William McKinley, Sr., was a union man, a Republican, and had been a supporter of both Fremont and Lincoln at the polls. Of course the son had voted for neither, as he still lacked several years of that age at which American youth may exercise the elective franchise. But no man, of any age, had taken a more intense interest in the progress of affairs. He felt the need of supporting the President, and the necessity of preserving the integrity of the nation in all its borders. Nothing could exceed the avidity with which he watched the swiftly accumulating clouds of war and disaster. The love of human freedom, of personal liberty and loyalty to his country were cardinal virtues in the young man’s composition. And when war really began he felt a strong desire to give his labor and even his life, if necessary, in the cause which he was certain was the right.