“Years afterward, when Abraham Lincoln was President, war came. I’d seen Lincoln often in the years between.” James Thorold stopped his restless pacing and stood at the end of the table away from Peter, leaning over it slightly, as he seemed to keep up his story with difficulty. “He came often to Judge Adams’s house. There were evenings when the three of us sat in the parlor with the dusk drifting in from the lake, and spoke of the future of the nation. Judge Adams thought war inevitable. Abraham Lincoln thought it could be averted. They both dreaded it. I was young, and I hoped for it. ‘What’ll you do, Jim, if war should come?’ they asked me once. ‘I’d go as a private,’ I told them.
“If the war had come then I should have gone with the first regiment out. But when the call sounded Ellsworth had gone to New York and the Zouaves had merged with another regiment. I didn’t go with them in the beginning because I told myself that I wanted to be with the first troop that went from Illinois to the front. I didn’t join until after Lincoln had sent out his call for volunteers.
“You see,” he explained to the silent boy, “I had left Judge Adams’s office and struck out for myself. Chicago was showing me golden opportunities. Before me, if I stayed, stretched a wide road of success.”
“And you didn’t go?” Peter interrupted his father for the first time. “I thought—” His voice broke.
“I went,” James Thorold said. “The regiment, the Nineteenth, was at the border when Lincoln gave the call. There was a bounty being offered to join it. I would have gone anyhow, but I thought that I might just as well take the money. I was giving up so much to go, I reasoned. And so I took the bounty. The provost marshal gave me the money in the office right across the square from the old court-house. I put it in the bank before I started south.
“I left Chicago that night with a great thrill. I was going to fight for a great cause, for Abraham Lincoln’s great dream, for the country my father had died for in Mexico, that my grandfather had fought for at Lundy’s Lane. I think,” he said, “that if I might have gone right down to the fighting, I’d have stood the test. But when I came to Tennessee the regiment had gone stale. We waited, and waited. Every day I lost a little interest. Every day the routine dragged a little harder. I had time to see what opportunities I had left back here in Chicago. I wasn’t afraid of the fighting. But the sheer hatred of what I came to call the uselessness of war gnawed at my soul. I kept thinking of the ways in which I might shape my destiny if only I were free. I kept thinking of the thousand roads to wealth, to personal success, that Chicago held for me. One night I took my chance. I slipped past the lines.”
“Father!” The boy’s voice throbbed with pain. His eyes, dilated with horror at the realization of the older man’s admission, fixed their gaze accusingly on James Thorold. “You weren’t a—a deserter?” He breathed the word fearfully.
“I was a bounty-jumper.”
“Oh!” Peter Thorold’s shoulders drooped as if under the force of a vital blow. Vaguely as he knew the term, the boy knew only too well the burden of disgrace that it carried. Once, in school, he had heard an old tutor apply it to some character of history whom he had especially despised. Again, in a home where he had visited, he had heard another old man use the phrase in contempt for some local personage who had attempted to seek public office. Bounty-jumper! Its province expressed to the lad’s mind a layer of the inferno beneath the one reserved for the Benedict Arnolds and the Aaron Burrs. Vainly he bugled to his own troops of self-control; but they, too, were deserters in the calamity. He flung his arms across the table, surrendering to his sobs.
Almost impassively James Thorold watched him, as if he himself had gone so far back into his thought of the past that he could not bridge the gap to Peter now. With some thought of crossing the chasm he took up his tale of dishonor. Punctuated by the boy’s sobs it went on.