For some reason the men who were hewing the logs in the woods for the jail did not go to work as usual one day, and there was no one to load the timber for the enterprising youth. There was only the alternative of returning to town without any logs, or of loading them himself. The latter expedient would have been sufficiently impossible to deter an ordinary boy from attempting the task. The sticks were very large and heavy, and even the gang of men used levers and handspikes in loading them. But here was Grant standing before Donelson or Vicksburg, with this team,—before the logs, I should say,—and he had either to do a miracle or return logless to his father. If there had been no particular difficulty in the undertaking, perhaps he would not have felt compelled to do it; as it was, he felt obliged to do it, if only as an illustration of his character.
A tree had been felled on the spot, the trunk resting on the branches, and the butt on the ground, forming a convenient inclined plane. The big horse was hitched to the end of the timbers, and three of them were successively "snaked" up on the trunk of the fallen tree, till their ends were high enough to permit the wagon to be backed under them. Taking a long chain, so as to enable the horse to work beyond the vehicle, he whipped the end of it around each stick in turn, and hauled it into the wagon, harnessed up again, and drove to the site of the jail.
I maintain that this was a great achievement for a boy of twelve, very small at that; and the people in the neighborhood talked about it as such, just as they did, years after, about the capture of Vicksburg. The youth had a great deal of engineering skill, and a quickness of perception which enabled him to profit by every favorable circumstance within his reach—a faculty which has contributed in no small degree to his success as a great commander. He was a boy of expedients. The accident of that felled tree, prompt as he was to profit by it, was by no means essential to his success. It was certainly wise to use the inclined plane, which he found ready for service; but if it had not been there, Grant would have made one, or loaded the logs in some other way. He would no more have gone off without them than he would have returned from Vicksburg or Richmond without capturing the city.
There is a sort of unexpectedness about Grant, which he began to develop as a boy. He does just what the beholder does not anticipate, surprises by sticking to anything, when, according to ordinary rules, one ought to give up, or confounds by a course of action hitherto unheard of. He holds on to the pony when he ought to be thrown; he comes home with a load of logs when he ought to have come home empty; he accomplishes many a feat in which he ought to have failed, according to the every-day rules of life. He was fond of playing marbles, which seems to be the only strictly boys' amusement in which he indulged. He bet half a dozen marbles with a school-mate that he would jump twenty-five feet at a single leap, selecting his own ground for the feat. If I had been there, I should have taken that bet, for it seemed as impossible for a little fellow like him to do it, as it did to capture Vicksburg.
Grant went to a perpendicular bluff, having the requisite height, and jumped down at one leap,—for if the terms of the wager had required it, it would hardly have been convenient to make two leaps of it. Though he went down to his middle in the mud below, he won the bet. Doubtless he came out of the slough rather the worse for the leap, so far as personal appearance was concerned, but his plight only assures us that he looked before he leaped, as he always did, for hard pan, or a solid rock, might have been trying even to his nerves, in a jump of twenty-five feet.
In my opinion Lee was as much astonished to see Grant on the south side of Richmond as the boy with whom he made the bet was to see him jump perpendicularly instead of horizontally.
[CHAPTER IV.]
Wherein Captain Galligasken follows the illustrious Soldier to West Point, and dilates admiringly upon the many excellent Traits of Character which the Hero exhibited there.