* * * * *
I remember a day in the early spring when we were compelled to move out of one house and into another. The rent for the house in which we had lived all during the winter had been long unpaid and mother had no money. Father had just returned from one of his long adventures, but early in the day of the moving he disappeared again and, as we could not afford a moving wagon, mother and we boys carted our poor belongings to the new place on our backs.
As for father, he had managed to borrow a horse and a spring wagon from a neighbor and had set off again into the country. The house to which we were moving was far out at the edge of the town and next to it was a field in which there was a great straw stack—a convenience, as what we called our “bed ticks,” on which we slept, had to be emptied of the straw that had become fine and dustlike from long use, and then refilled with the new straw.
When all was done and we were quite settled in the new place, father drove into the yard. He had noticed, he explained, a special kind of straw at a farmhouse some five miles away, at a place he had visited during his wanderings of the winter just past, and he had thought he would give us all a treat by getting that particular kind of straw for our beds.
And so he had driven off at daybreak, and, while we packed our furniture to the new place, had dined with the farmer and his family and had now returned. Although our beds had been made for the night the bed ticks must all be brought down again, the straw tumbled out and the special straw put in. “There,” he said, with one of his grand gestures, as we lads tramped wearily up the stairs with the refilled bags and as mother stood smiling—a little resentfully perhaps, but still smiling; “there, you kids, try sleeping on that. There is nothing on earth too good for my kids.”
NOTE IV
LET us, however, return to father and the tale he is telling as he sits in the farmhouse on the winter’s evening. I am too good a son of my father to leave such a tale hanging forever thus, in the air.
As it turned out on that night, when it rained and when he in his young manhood stood just outside the door of that southern mansion house of his childhood, and when his mother, that proud woman of the Southland, spat at him and his companions in misery, so that a white speck of her spittle landed on his beard—where, as he said, it lay like a thing of fire burning into his soul—on that night, I say, he did, by a stroke of fortune, escape the fate that seemed to have him in its clutches.
Dawn was just beginning to break when the two Confederate officers came out at the door of the house and marched their prisoners away.
“We went off into the gray dawn, up out of the valley and over the hills, and then I turned to look back,” father explained. Gray and weary and half dead with starvation, he turned to look. If he dropped dead from starvation and weariness on his way to the prison pen, what did it matter now? The light of his life had gone out. He was never again to see any of his own people, that he knew.