Instantly he acted. Instantly his great heart, as true for the truth as a hound for the trail, saw the nobility of the savage towering above the littleness and ignominy of the greater race. And there flashed in his broader vision Pensacola and New Orleans. He turned to his troops: “Who’d kill so brave a man as this would rob the dead.”
Weatherford then threw his game at his feet. “Take it, my General, for Weatherford is starving.”
Jackson seized his hand: “No, by God, you come in and eat with me.”
(The next paper will be “The Road to New Orleans.”)
Mike Kelley
By Ben McCulloch Hord
NOTE—If anything better than this has ever been written about the war I have never seen it. It is worthy of the great masters—of Sterne, of Thackery and Dickens. So pleased is Trotwood’s with this sketch that we have secured the picture of its author, Major Ben M. Hord, one of the best and truest of men and beloved by all who know him. Major Hord has held many positions of trust and confidence, was a gallant soldier in the big unpleasantness and was for a term Commissioner of Agriculture for Tennessee. He is still young, and this sketch shows he is gifted as a writer. We will publish another story from him soon.—Editor.
He was an Irishman by birth, and a blacksmith by trade, but gave up his bellows and tongs to “follow the feather” of his gallant countryman, Gen. Pat Cleburne, in the Confederate Army, and became a gunner in a battery. In many of his characteristics Mike was strikingly like his great captain. Though possessed of a rich vein of Irish wit and humor he did not have that volatile, bubbling over-flow of spirits so natural to his people; on the contrary, he was quiet and retiring in his disposition, even to apparent timidity. His only form of dissipation was tobacco. I well remember his dirty little cob pipe, black with age and tobacco, with a stem not three inches long, of the same color, and from the same causes.
Every old soldier who saw much active service in the field, in thinking of the close places he has passed through, will recall vividly the sunburnt face and form of some comrade, friend or acquaintance, conspicuous for his courage, brave where all were brave, but he the bravest of them all. In this light dear old lion-hearted Mike always appears to me, when memory harks back to the stirring scenes of forty odd years ago. With the courage of a game-cock, the modesty of a woman, and a sunny temperament, he was indeed a lovable companion, and when by your side in action, made you feel as if you had two right arms and a double pair of eyes. It is not, however, to speak of his courage that I write, but of some ludicrous incidents that happened to him after he “jined the cavalry.”
