And then they shouldered arms and showed how fields were won. Boom! went Sigel's guns out of the past, and crash! came the Texas cavalry, and the whoop of the Louisiana Pelicans rang in their ears. They marched south after Hindman, and then came back with Grant to Vicksburg, where they fought and bled and died. The general left them and went east, where he "deployed on our right" and executed flank movements, and watched Pickett's column come fling itself to death at Gettysburg. And Watts McHurdie rode with the artillery through the rear of the rebel lines at Pittsburg Landing, and when the rebel officer saw the little man's bravery, and watched him making for the Union lines bringing three guns, he waved his hat and told his soldiers not to shoot at that boy. The colonel took a stick and marked out on the floor our position at Antietam, and showed where the reserves were supposed to be and how the enemy masked his guns behind that hill, and we planted our artillery on the opposite ridge; and he marched with the infantry and lay in ambush while the enemy came marching in force through the wood. In time Watts McHurdie was talking to Lincoln in the streets of Richmond, and telling for the hundredth time what Lincoln said of the song and how he had sung it. But who cares now what Lincoln said? It was something kind, you may be sure, with a tear and a laugh in it, and the veterans laughed, while their eyes grew moist as they always did when Watts told it. Then they fell to carnage again—a fierce fight against time, against the moment when they must leave their old companion alone. Up hills they charged and down dales, and the moon rose high, and cast its shadow to the eastward before they parted. First Dolan edged away, and then the general went, waving his hand military fashion; and the colonel returned the salute. When the gate had clanged, Watts rose to go. He did not speak, nor did the colonel. Arm in arm, they walked down the steps together, and halfway down the garden path the colonel rested his hand on the little man's shoulder as they walked in silence. At the gate they saw each other's tears, and the little man's voice failed him when the colonel said, "Well, good-by, comrade—good night." So Watts turned and ran, while the colonel, for the first time in his manhood, loosed the cords of his sorrow and stood alone in the moonlight with upturned face, swaying like an old tree in a storm.
CHAPTER XXI
And now those who have avoided the gray unpainted shame of these unimportant people of the Ridge may here take up again for a moment the trailing clouds of glory that shimmer over John Barclay's office in the big City. For here there is the sounding brass and tinkling cymbal of great worldly power. Here sits John Barclay, a little gray-haired, gray-clad, lynx-eyed man, in a big light room at the corner of a tower high over the City in the Corn Exchange Building, the brain from which a million nerves radiate that run all over the world and move thousands of men. Forty years before, when John was playing in the dust of the road leading up from the Sycamore, no king in all the world knew so much of the day's doings as John knows now, sitting there at the polished mahogany table with the green blotting paper upon it, under the green vase adorned with the red rose. A blight may threaten the wheat in Argentine, and John Barclay knows every cloud that sails the sky above that wheat, and when the cloud bursts into rain he sighs, for it means something to him, though heaven only knows what, and we and heaven do not care. But a dry day in India or a wet day in Russia or a cloudy day in the Dakotas are all taken into account in the little man's plans. And if princes quarrel and kings grow weary of peace, and money bags refuse them war, John Barclay knows it and puts the episode into figures on the clean white pad of paper before him.
It is a privilege to be in this office; one passes three doors to get here, and even at the third door our statesmen often cool their toes. Mr. Barclay is about to admit one now. And when Senator Myton comes in, deferentially of course, to tell Mr. Barclay the details of the long fight in executive session which ended in the confirmation by the senate of Lige Bemis as a federal judge, the little gray man waves the senator to a chair, and runs his pencil up a column of figures, presses a button, writes a word on a sheet of paper, and when the messenger appears, hands the paper to him and says, "For Judge Bemis."
"I have just dismissed a Persian satrap," expands Barclay, "who won't let his people use our binders; that country eventually will be a great field for our Mediterranean branch."
Myton is properly impressed. For a man who can make a senator out of Red River clay and a federal judge out of Lige Bemis is a superhuman creature, and Myton does not doubt Barclay's power over satraps.
When the business of the moment between the two men is done, Barclay, rampant with power, says: "Myton" (it is always "Myton," never "Senator," with Barclay; he finds it just as well to let his inferiors know their relation to the universe), "Myton, I ran across a queer thing last week when I took over that little jerkwater New England coast line. The Yankees are a methodical lot of old maids. I find they had been made agents of a lot of the big fellows—insurance people, packing-houses, and transcontinental railroads—two of my lines were paying them, though I'd forgotten about it until I looked it up—and the good old sewing society had card-indexed the politics of the United States—the whole blessed country, by state and congressional districts. I took over the chap who runs it, and I've got the whole kit in the offices here now. It's great. If a man bobs up for something in Florida or Nebraska, we just run him down on the card index, and there he stands—everything he ever did, every interview he ever gave, every lawsuit he ever had, every stand he ever took in politics—right there in the index, in an envelope ready for use, and all the mean things ever written about him. I simply can't make a mistake now in getting the wrong kind of fellows in. Commend me to a Yankee or a Jap for pains. I can tell you in five minutes just what influences are behind every governor, congressman, senator, judge, most of the legislators in every state, the federal courts clear up to the Supreme Court. There was a man appointed on that court less than a dozen years ago who swapped railroad receiverships like a tin peddler with his senator for his job, when he was on the circuit bench. And he was considerable of a judge in the bean country for a time. Just to verify my index, I asked Bemis about this judge. 'Lige,' I said, 'was Judge So-and-So a pretty honest judge?' 'Oh, hell,' says Lige, and that was all I could get out of him. So I guess they had him indexed right." And Barclay rattles on; he has become vociferous and loquacious, and seems to like to hear the roar of his voice in his head. The habit has been growing on him.
But do not laugh at the blindness of John Barclay, sitting there in his power, admiring himself, boasting in the strength of his card-index to Senator Myton. For the tide of his power was running in, and soon it would be high tide with John Barclay—high tide of his power, high tide of his fame, high tide of his pride. So let us watch the complacent smile crack his features as he sits listening to Senator Myton: "Mr. Barclay, do you know, I sometimes think that Providence manifests itself in minds like yours, even as in the days of old it was manifest in the hearts of the prophets. In those days it was piety that fitted the heart for higher things; to-day it is business. You and a score of men like you in America are intrusted with the destiny of this republic, as surely as the fate of the children of Israel was in the hands of Moses and Aaron!"