The Short Line War

by Samuel Merwin; Henry Kitchell Webster

They fought there during four long hours, until the thin line of blue could hold no longer, and gray ranks under Ewell and Fender had enveloped both flanks. Then sullenly they came back through the town, still firing defiantly, and cursing the help that had not come. It was during this retreat that Jim was hit, but he did not drop. Somehow—though as in a dream—he kept with his regiment, and it was not until they were rallied in the cemetery on the other side of the town that he pitched forward and lay quite still.

Everybody knows how the Eleventh Corps held the cemetery through the two bloody days that followed. But Jim was unconscious of it all, for he lay on a cot in the Sanitary Commission tent, raving in delirium. And the surgeons and nurses looked at him gravely and wondered with every hour why he did not die.

But, as one of his comrades had said, “it took a lot of pounding to lick Jim Weeks,” and in a surprisingly short time he was strong enough to be taken home.

When he first saw his grandfather he was dimly conscious of a change in him, and as he grew stronger and better able to observe closely he became surer of it. Jonathan had been a young old man when Jim went away; now he looked every one of his seventy-three years, and instead of the tireless energy of former times Jim noted a listlessness hard to understand.

One night after both had gone to bed Jim heard his grandfather groping his way down the stairs and out upon the veranda. He listened intently until he heard the creak of the rocking chair, which told him that the old man was visiting again with old friends and old fancies. The slow rhythm lulled Jim into a doze, and then into sleep. He awakened with a start; his pioneer blood made him a light sleeper, and he knew that the old man could not have got upstairs and past his door without waking him. “He must have gone to sleep down there,” thought Jim, and rising he went down to the veranda. Jonathan had gone to sleep, but the black cob pipe was clenched between rigid jaws; his sightless eyes were open and seemed to be looking at the stars.

At first Jim felt that sails, helm, and compass had been swept clean away, but he was strong enough to recover his bearings quickly. His grandfather's death marked an end and a beginning, and just as a needle when a magnet is taken away swings unerringly into the line of force of the original magnet, the earth, so Jim's life swung to a new direction. There was no one whose life could direct or influence his, and alone he started on what business men of the next generation knew as his career.

The war had lessened but not destroyed Jonathan's fortune, and it went without reservation to Jim. The times offered golden opportunities to a man with ready money and good business training, and his success was almost inevitable. His life from this time was the logical working out of what he had in him.

He turned naturally to the railroad business, and those who know the history of Western railroads from '65 to '90 will understand what a field it was for a man who was at once fearless and level-headed. The craze for construction and then the equally mad competition did not confuse him, they simply gave him opportunities. When the reaction against the railroads set in, and the Granger movement wrecked nearly all the Western roads, Jim bowed to the inevitable, but he saved himself—no one knew just how—and when the State legislators were over their midsummer madness he was again in the field, and again succeeding.

With the details of these struggles we are not concerned. The “inside” history of many of them will never be known; in almost every case it differs materially from the story which appeared in the papers. Jim became famous and was libelled and flattered, respected and abused, by turns; but always he was feared. He was supposed to be dishonest, and it is true he did not scruple to use his enemies' weapons; but at directors' meetings it was the interest of the stockholders that he fought for.

Men wondered at his success, and over their cigars gravely discussed the reasons for it. Some said it was sheer good luck that turned what he touched to gold, some laid it to his start, and others to his cool, dispassionate strategy. To some extent it was all of these things; but more than anything else he had won as a bulldog does, by hanging on. Often he had beaten better strategists simply by keeping up the fight when by all the rules he was beaten. For as the comrade of long ago had said, “it took a lot of pounding to lick Jim Weeks.”