The Cup of Trembling, and Other Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

Little Ross Henniker—named for that mythical great Scotchman, his supposed grandfather—was deeply disappointed because he did not see the soldiers go. To have lived next door to them all his life, seven whole years, and watched them practicing and preparing to be fit and ready to go, and then not to see them when they did march away for actual service in the field, was hard indeed.

Ross was not only one of those brightest boys of his age known to parents and grand-parents by the million, but he was really a very bright and handsome child. If Mother Meadows, now "granny," had ever had any doubts at all about the Scottish chief of the Hudson's Bay Company, the style and presence of that incomparable boy were proof enough. It was a marked case of "throwing-back." There was none of the Bannock here. Could he not be trusted like a man to do whatever things he liked to do; as riding to fetch the cows and driving them hillward again, on the weird little spotted pony, hardly bigger than a dog, with a huge head and a furry cheek and a hanging under-lip, which the tributary Bannocks had brought him? It was while he was on cow-duty far away, but not out of sight of the post, that he saw the column move. "Great Scott!" how he did ride! He broke his stick over the pony's back, and kicked him with his bare heels, and slapped him with his hat, till the pony bucked him off into a sagebush whence he picked himself up and flew as fast as his own legs would spin; but he was too late. Then, for the first time in six months at least, he howled. Aunt Callie comforted him with fresh strawberry jam for supper, but the lump of grief remained, until, as she was washing the dishes, she glanced at him, laughing out of the corner of her eye, and began to make up the song about Coxey's army. For some time Ross refused to smile, but when it came to the chorus about the soldiers who were going

"To turn back Coxey's army, hallelujah!
To turn back Coxey's army, halleloo!"

he began to sing "hallelujah" too. Then gun-fire broke in with a lonesome sound, as if the cavalry up on the hill missed its comrades of the white stripes who were gone to "turn back" that ridiculous army.

Mother Meadows wished "that man Coxey had never been born," so weary did she get of the Coxey song. Coxeyism had taken complete possession of the young lord of the house, now that his friends the soldiers had gone to take a hand in the business.

In a few days the soldiers came back escorting the Coxey prisoners. The "presence of the troops" had sufficed. The two hundred Coxeyites were to be tried at Bisuka for crimes committed within the State. They were penned meanwhile in a field by the river, below the railroad track, and at night they were shut into a rough barrack which had been hastily put up for the purpose. A skirt of the town little known, except to the Chinese vegetable gardeners and makers of hay on the river meadows and small boys fishing along the shore, now became the centre of popular regard; and "Have you been down to the Coxey camp?" was as common a question as "Are you going to the Natatorium Saturday night?" or "Will there be a mail from the west to-day?"

One evening, Mother Meadows, with little Ross Henniker by the hand, stood close to the dead-line of the Coxey field, watching the groups on the prisoners' side. The woman looked at them with perplexed pity, but the child swung himself away and cried, "Pooh! only a lot of dirty hobos!" and turned to look at the soldiers.

The tents of the guard of regulars stood in a row in front of a rank of tall poplar-trees, their tops swinging slow in the last sunlight. Behind the trees stretched the green river flats in the shadow. Frogs were croaking; voices of girls could be heard in a tennis-court with a high wall that ran back to the street of the railroad.

Roll-call was proceeding in front of the tents, the men firing their quick, harsh answers like scattering shots along the line. Under the trees at a little distance the beautiful sleek cavalry horses were grouped, unsaddled and calling for their supper. Ross Henniker gazed at them with a look of joy; then he turned a contemptuous eye upon the prisoners.

"Which of them two kinds of animals looks most like what a man ought to be?" he asked, pointing to the horses and then to the Coxeyites, who in the cool of the evening were indulging in unbeautiful horse-play, not without a suspicion of showing off before the eyes of visitors. The horses in their free impatience were as unconscious as lords.