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Title: The old mine's secret

Author: Edna Henry Lee Turpin

Illustrator: George Wright

Release date: October 13, 2022 [eBook #69146]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: The MacMillan Company, 1921

Credits: Carla Foust, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OLD MINE'S SECRET ***





THE OLD MINE’S SECRET




  [Illustration]

  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
  ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

  MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
  LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
  MELBOURNE

  THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
  TORONTO


[Illustration: “There was Dick, waving his hand tauntingly”--_page 18_]




  THE
  OLD MINE’S SECRET

  BY
  EDNA TURPIN

  AUTHOR OF “HONEY SWEET,” “PEGGY OF
  ROUNDABOUT LANE,” “TREASURE
  MOUNTAIN,” ETC.

  FRONTISPIECE BY
  GEORGE WRIGHT

  New York
  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  1921

  _All rights reserved_




  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  COPYRIGHT, 1921,
  BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

  Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1921.

  Press of
  J. J. Little & Ives Company
  New York, U. S. A.




  TO
  REBECCA BROCKENBROUGH
  AND
  TERRY LEE ROBERTS




THE OLD MINE’S SECRET




CHAPTER I


“O-O-Oh! oh me-e!” Dick made the sigh very sad and pitiful.

His father did not seem to hear it. He tilted his chair farther back,
perched his feet on the porch railing, and unfolded his newspaper.

It was a mild April morning, and the Osborne family had drifted out
on the porch,--Mr. Osborne with his papers and Mrs. Osborne with her
sewing; Sweet William was playing jackstraws with himself, Patsy sat on
the steps with her back to the others, especially Dick, who, however,
was pitying himself too much to notice her.

“I always get blamed for everything I do,” he said mournfully, “but
David----”

“‘House for War: Vote 373 to 50.’” Mr. Osborne read the headline.
“That is the answer to the President’s message four days ago. Now the
Senate----”

“Father! If you’ll just let me off to-day, I’ll work from school-out
till dark every day next week. I certainly will. Father, please----”

“Richard Randolph Osborne! You are to work your assigned part of the
garden to-day, _to-day_, without further pleas for postponement.” Mr.
Osborne’s mild voice and red flabby face stiffened with determination.
This was not the first week that Dick had neglected his garden task.

“Yes, sir,” Dick answered meekly, wriggling a little. That was all he
could do--wriggle a little--because he was made into a sort of merman
by having an old Persian shawl wrapped about him, from the waist down.
“I think you might let me off,” he persisted in an undertone; “just
this one more time. If mother had patched my trousers last night--if
she’d let me put on my Sundays now--I could get that hateful old garden
worked this morning. I’ve got something else to do to-day, something
awfully important.”

“I’m sorry I forgot, son,” said his mother. “I certainly meant to mend
them last night. I was reading, and forgot. I wish you had reminded
me.” She took quicker stitches and her thread snarled so that she had
to break it and begin again. “I am so sorry,” she repeated in the
delicious voice that made her words seem as fresh and sweet as the red
roses that fell from the mouth of the fairy-tale maiden.

Mrs. Osborne was a dear, sunny-hearted little woman with dark hair,
irregular features, and a vivid, eager face. She loved to read;
indeed, she could no more resist a book than a toper could refuse a
drink, but she was always so sorry and so ashamed when she neglected
home duties that every one except the person who suffered from it
forgave her freely.

Patsy, Dick’s twin sister, came now to her mother’s defense. “It’s your
fault, Dick,” she said. “It’s all your own fault. If you had locked the
bookcase door, it would have reminded her there was something to do.
And then she would have thought of the trousers.”

“I forgot,” Dick confessed. That put him clearly in the wrong, and made
him the crosser. He turned on his sister, growling: “What business is
it of yours, miss? You please let my affairs alone and attend to your
own. What are you doing, Patsy?”

He tried to wriggle near enough to see, but Patsy made a face at him
and ran into the yard. Dick was such a tease! She was not going to tell
him that she had decided to be a poet and was composing a wonderful
ballad. How surprised he would be when it came out in the _Atlantic_ or
_St. Nicholas_, with her name in big black letters--Pocahontas Virginia
Osborne, as it was in the family Bible. Or would she have a pen-name,
like ‘Marion Harland’? If she could think of a lovely original
name---- But perhaps she had better finish the poem first.

She perched herself in the swing and chewed her pencil and read over
the four lines she had written:

  “Johnny was a sailor,
    He was brave and bold;
  He thought he would make an adventure
    To find the North Pole.”

She could not think of anything else to say, so she read that over
again; and then again. While inspiration tarried, an interruption
came. It took the shape of her small brother William with two of
his followers--Hop-o-hop, a lame duck that he had adopted when its
hen mother pecked it and cast it off, and Scalawag, a sand-colored,
bob-tailed stray dog that had adopted him.

“Hey, Patsy! I think I’ll give you a kiss,” announced Sweet William,
raising his fair, serious face to hers. “I think I might give you two
kisses. You are so sweet. Patsy,” he went on coaxingly, “wouldn’t you
want to lend me a pencil? Just one little minute, to make you a picture
of a horse.”

“Oh, Sweet William, you’re such a nuisance!” said Patsy. “I’m awfully
busy. How can I ever finish this, if you bother me?”

But she gave him pencil and paper, and sat swinging back and forth,
looking idly about the spacious yard where the budding oaks made
lacelike shadows, on that April morning.

In the center of the yard was a great heap of bricks. That was the
remains of Osborne’s Rest, the family mansion that had been burned
in a raid during The War, as those southern Virginians called the
War of Secession from which they dated everything. Since then, two
generations of Osbornes had dwelt in The Roost, a cottage in one corner
of the yard. It was now the home of Patsy, her father and mother, her
two brothers, Dick and Sweet William, and a motherless cousin, David
Spotswood.

The big front gate opened on The Street, the one thoroughfare of The
Village. There were a church, a tavern, two shops, a dozen frame and
brick dwellings set far back in spacious grounds, and the county
Court-house in a square by itself. Behind the Court-house rambled The
Back Way which had once expected to become a street, but remained
always The Back Way with only a blacksmith’s shop, a basket-maker’s
shed, and a few cabins on it.

A century and a half before, three royal-grant estates, Broad Acres and
Larkland and Mattoax, cornered at a stone now on Court-house Green.
These plantations had long ago been divided into small farms; but in
The Village still lived Wilsons and Mayos and Osbornes who counted as
outsiders all whose grandfathers were not born in the neighborhood and
the kinship.

While we have been looking about, Sweet William lay flat on the ground,
holding his tongue between his teeth, to assist his artistic efforts.

“Look at my horse, Patsy!” he crowed, holding up the paper.

“Hm-m! I don’t call that much like a horse,” observed Patsy.

Sweet William’s face clouded, and then brightened. “Tell you what!”
he said. “It’ll be a cow. I’ll kick out one hind leg and put a bucket
here. Now! She’s spilt all the milk.”

Patsy laughed; and then one knew that she was pretty, seeing the merry
crinkles around her twinkling hazel eyes, and the upward curve of her
lips that brought out dimples on her freckled pink cheeks.

“I love you when you laugh, Patsy!” exclaimed Sweet William, hugging
her knees. “You may have my picture. And I’ll sit in the swing with
you.”

“You and Scalawag and Hop-o-hop may have the swing,” said Patsy. “I’m
going in. I’ll finish my poem to-morrow. I want to find out--I think
Dick has a secret.”

She jumped out of the swing, gave Sweet William’s ear a “love pinch,”
and strolled back to the porch.

“Dick,” she asked in an offhand way, “what are you going to do with
that candle you got this morning?”

Dick’s gloom relaxed and he winked tantalizingly.

“You wish you knew,” he said. “But--you’ll--never--find--out. Ah,
ha-a-a!”

“Don’t you tell, Mister Dick!” said Patsy. “I don’t want you to tell.
I’d rather find out for myself. And I certainly will find out, sir. You
just see if I don’t.”

Mr. Osborne still had his nose in his day-old paper; news younger than
that seldom, came to The Village. “‘Army plans call for a million men
the first year.’ That is a gigantic undertaking, Miranda, and--”

“It certainly is,” she agreed placidly. “Mayo, Black Mayo has bought
some more pigeons; and Polly says he’ll not tell what he paid for them,
so she knows it’s some absurd sum that he can’t afford.”

“Yes.” Her husband agreed absently. “And a million men means not
only men, but arms, equipment, food. Bless my life! Is that clock
striking--it can’t be!--is it ten? And I here instead of at the
Court-house.” He got up and stuffed the newspaper and a _Congressional
Record_ in his pocket.

“What are you going to do, dear?” asked his wife.

“We want to find out if the Board of Supervisors can appropriate money
to send our Confederate veterans to the Reunion in June. There have
been so many unusual expenses, bridges washed away and that smallpox
quarantine, that funds are low. I hope they can raise the requisite
amount.”

“Of course they will. They must,” Mrs. Osborne said quickly and
positively. “Why, the yearly reunion--seeing old comrades, being
heroized, recalling the glorious past--is the one bright spot in their
gray old lives.”

“Mr. Tavis and Cap’n Anderson were talking about the Reunion at the
post office yesterday,” said Dick. “They are just crazy about having it
in Washington. Cap’n has never been there. But he was telling how near
he and old Jube Early came to it, in ’64.”

“What an experience it will be, taking peaceful possession in old age
of the Capital they campaigned against when they were soldier boys,
over fifty years ago!” said Mrs. Osborne. “Certainly they must go. How
many are there, Mayo?”

“Nine in our district,” answered her husband. “Last year there were
sixteen. Three have died, and four are bedridden.”

“Ah! so few are left; so many have passed on.” Mrs. Osborne glanced
through the open door at a portrait, her father in a colonel’s gray
uniform. “Of course they must go, our nine old soldiers.”

“Sure!” said Dick. “If there isn’t money enough, we boys can help
raise it. Mr. Tavis says he’ll pay me to plant corn, afternoons and
Saturdays. I wasn’t thinking about doing it. But our old Confeds
mustn’t miss their Reunion.”

“Good boy! that’s the right spirit,” exclaimed Mrs. Osborne.

She adored the memory of her gallant father and of the Confederate
cause to which he had devoted himself. The quiet, uneventful years
had brought no new deep, inspiring interests to the little Southern
community. Its love and loyalty clung to the past. To the children
the Lost Cause was a tradition as heroic and romantic as the legends
of Roland and Arthur; but it was a tradition linked to reality by the
old gray-clad men who had fought with Lee and Jackson. As Jones and
Tavis and Walthall, they were ordinary old men, rather tiresome and
absurd; but call them “Confederate veterans” and they were transformed
to heroes whom it was an honor to serve. Dick, shirking the work that
meant food for his family, would toil gladly to send them to their
Reunion.

“They must have this, perhaps their last--”

Mrs. Osborne paused, and her husband said: “We’ll manage it; we’ll
manage it somehow. If there is a deficit, we may be able to make it up
by private subscription. Perhaps I’ll get a case next term of court,
and can make a liberal contribution.” He laughed.

Mr. Osborne--called Red Mayo to distinguish him from a dark-haired
cousin of the same name, called Black Mayo--was a lawyer more by
profession than by practice; there were not enough law crumbs in The
Village, he said, to support a sparrow.

He strolled toward the Court-house while Mrs. Osborne took her last
hurried stitches. Then she handed the patched trousers to her son, who
rolled indoors and put them on. He went into the garden and gloomily
eyed the neglected square where peas and potatoes and onions were
merely green lines among crowding weeds.

“I certainly can’t finish it this morning,” he growled. “There’s too
much to do.”

“If you work hard, you can finish by sundown,” said his cousin, David
Spotswood, who was planting a row of beets on the other side of the
garden.

“I can’t work after dinner,” said Dick. “I’ve got something else to do.
I just can’t finish it to-day.”

“You’d better,” said Patsy, who had followed him into the garden. “When
father says ‘Richard’ and shuts his mouth--so! he means business. Say,
Dick! What were you getting that candle for? What are you going to do?
Let us go with you, Anne Lewis and me, and I’ll help you here.”

“You help!” Dick spoke in his most superior masculine manner. “Girls
haven’t any business in gardens. They ought to stay in the house and
make bed-quilts. They’re too afraid of dirty hands and freckled faces.”

Patsy flared up and answered so quickly that her words stepped on one
another’s heels. “That’s mean and unfair! You know I hate gloves and
bonnets, and I just wear them because mother makes me. But anyway, sir,
I think they’re nicer than great-grandmother’s shawl for trousers.”

She went back up the boxwood-bordered walk.

“I’ll keep my eyes on you, Mr. Richard Randolph Osborne,” she said to
herself. “Where you go to-day, I’ll follow.”

Halfway up the long walk, she came upon Sweet William, sitting on the
ground, holding a maple bough over his head.

“Won’t you come to our picnic, Patsy?” he said. “Me and Scalawag are
having a loverly picnic in the woods down by Tinkling Water.”

“No, thank you,” said Patsy. “I want to see Anne Lewis about going
somewhere after dinner.”

“Where?” asked Sweet William.

“I don’t know--till I find out,” laughed Patsy. “But Anne and I will do
that; we certainly will.”

“I wish Anne was staying here,” Sweet William said wistfully.

“So do I,” agreed Patsy. “Easter holiday is too short to divide with
Ruth. Oh! I’ll be so glad when it’s summer and Anne comes to stay a
long time.”

“It isn’t ever a long time where Anne is,” said Sweet William. “I’m
going with you to see her, Patsy, and I’ll have my picnic another day.”

They went off and left Dick raking and weeding and hoeing very
diligently; but, working his best, he had not half finished his task
when the dinner bell rang. He surveyed the garden with a scowl.

“It’ll take hours and hours to get it done,” he said. “And then it
would be too late to go where I’m going. Maybe I can work the potato
patch after supper.”

“You can’t,” said David, who had a straightforward way of facing facts.

“Oh! maybe I can,” said Dick, who had a picturesque way of evading
them. “You might help me. You might work on it awhile after dinner.”

“Thank you! I’ve something else to do. I’m going to harrow my corn
acre. I want to plant it next week,” said David, who was a blue-ribbon
member of the Boys’ Corn Club.

At the dinner table the boys were joined by Sweet William, Patsy,
and Anne Lewis, a cousin who was spending her Easter holiday in The
Village. The two girls watched Dick like hawks, and jumped up from
the table as soon as he went out of the dining room. He hurried to
the little upstairs room he shared with David that was called the
“tumble-up room” because the steps were so steep. Presently he came
down and showed off the things he was putting in his pockets--a candle,
a box of matches, and a ball of stout twine. He sharpened his hatchet
and fastened it to his belt.

“Yah! You wish you knew what that’s for,” he said, with a derisive face
at Patsy and then at Anne.

He strutted across the yard toward the front gate, but he was not to
march off in undisturbed triumph.

“Dick! uh Dick!” called his mother. “Remember you’ve your garden work
to finish.”

“Yes’m.” He scowled, then he said doggedly: “There’s something else
I’ve promised myself to do first.”

Anne and Patsy waited only to see that he turned up, not down, The
Street; then they ran around The Back Way and came out just behind him
at the church; there The Street turned to a road which led past the
mill and on to Redville. Dick walked quickly, and the girls hurried
after him; then he walked slowly, and they loitered so as to keep just
behind him.

“Where are you going?” he turned and challenged them.

“Oh! we might go to the mill to see Cousin Giles, or to Larkland to
look at Cousin Mayo’s new pigeons, or to Happy Acres,” answered Patsy.

Dick strode on, and the girls trotted behind him, making amicable
efforts at conversation.

“Steve Tavis has gone fishing with John and Baldie Eppes,” Anne
remarked. “He said we girls might go, too. But Patsy and I thought
there might be something--something more fun to do.”

No answer.

Patsy made an effort. “Dick,” she said, “I hope you’ll finish your
garden work to-day. Father’s tired of excuses and he’s made up his mind
for punishing. But even if we do get home late, I can help you.”

Silence.

“It’s a mighty nice day,” Patsy went on pleadingly, “to--to do outdoor
things. You say yourself I’m as good as a boy to have around. I
wouldn’t be in the way at all; and I could hold the candle for you.”

By this time they were at the mill where the Larkland road and the
Happy Acres path turned from the highway. Dick kept to the main road
and the girls followed. He stopped and faced them.

“You said you were going to the mill, or Larkland, or Happy Acres. Trot
along!”

“I said we might go there,” Patsy amended. “Or we might go--’most
anywhere. Do let us go with you; please, Dick.”

“Where?”

“Oh! wherever you are going. We’ll not tell.”

“You certainly will not,” he declared; “for a mighty good reason: you
are not going to know anything to tell.”

Patsy’s eyes flashed. “We’ll show you,” she said. “We are going to
follow you, like your shadow. You know good and well I can run as fast
as you. Now take your choice, sir; let us go with you, or give up and
toddle home and finish your task so as not to get punished.”

“Hm!” he jeered. “If I’ve got something on hand good enough to take
punishment for, it’s too good to spoil with girls tagging along.”

He walked briskly up the road. Anne and Patsy followed him for a silent
mile--up and down hills scarred with red gulleys, through woods,
by brown plowed fields and green grain land. They passed several
log cabins; the Spencer place, an old mansion amid tumbled-down
out-buildings; Gordan Jones’s trim new house gay with gables and fresh
paint. Then they came to an old farmhouse surrounded by neglected
fields.

“Why, that door’s open!” Anne remarked with surprise. “Is somebody
living at the old Tolliver place?”

“A new man; Mr. Smith. He came here last winter,” explained Patsy.

“Somebody new in the neighborhood!” laughed Anne. “Doesn’t that seem
queer? What sort of folks are they?”

“Um-mm; unfolksy,” said Patsy. “There’s just Mr. Smith, and his nephew
Albert that goes to our school. We’ve never got acquainted with Albert.
He’s sort of stand-offish; not as if he wanted to be, but as if he were
afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” asked Anne.

“Oh! I don’t know. Nothing. I reckon he’s just shy.”

“What sort of man is Mr. Smith?” inquired Anne.

“Ugly; and grins. He’s away from home most of the time. He’s a salesman
or agent of some kind. Dick,” Patsy returned to a more interesting
subject, “do please tell us what you are going to do.”

“We-ell,” Dick began as if he were about to yield reluctantly; then he
interrupted himself eagerly: “Oh! look at that squirrel!”

Their eyes followed his pointing finger, and crying, “Easy marks!” he
darted into a dense thicket of pines on the other side of the road. The
girls followed quickly, but he made good use of his moment’s start and
they caught only glimpses of him here and there behind the trees.

“Run, Anne!” Patsy called presently. “To the left. Here! Let’s head him
off!”

They ran around a thick clump of pines to meet him--and he was not
there. He did not seem to be anywhere. He had vanished as completely as
if the earth had opened and swallowed him.

“We may as well give up,” Anne sighed at last.

“Yes,” Patsy agreed reluctantly. “I reckon he’s miles away by this
time.”

Crestfallen and disappointed, they went back to the road and started
slowly down the hill.

Then a red-brown head rose out of a heap of pine brush, so cautiously
that it did not disturb the woodpecker drumming on a nearby stump. A
pair of merry brown eyes watched the girls till they were at a safe
distance; then Dick, to the terror and hasty flight of the woodpecker,
scrambled out of the brush heap.

“Cock-a-doodle-doo-_oo-oo_!” he called deridingly.

Anne and Patsy started and looked back.

“There he is!” groaned Patsy.

Yes, there he was, standing in the middle of the road, waving his hand
tauntingly.

“Shall we chase him again?” asked Anne.

“Yes,” said Patsy; and then: “No, it’s no use. He’s too far away;
before we could get halfway up the hill, he’d be out of sight again.”

“Oh, well!” laughed Anne. “We don’t care, Patsy-pet. Let’s go to Happy
Acres and see what flowers are in bloom.”

They went back to Larkland mill that had been a mill ever since The
Village had been a village; crossed a foot bridge over Tinkling Water;
and followed the path to the woodland nook they called Happy Acres.
Long ago a house had been there, and persistent garden bulbs and shrubs
gave beauty and fragrance to the place. One spring, Anne had adopted
it and christened it Happy Acres, and she and her friends had made it
a little woodland park that was a joy to all the neighborhood. It was
fragrant now with a blossoming plum-tree and gay with the pink and
scarlet of flowering almond and japonica.

Anne and Patsy plucked a few sprays to carry home the beauty of it,
and started down the path for a little visit to their cousin, Giles
Spotswood, the miller.

Patsy, who was in front, stopped suddenly. “What’s that?” she whispered.

“It sounds like men quarreling,” Anne whispered back. “Who on earth--”

“Look there!”

Anne crept to Patsy’s side and peeped through the bushes. There were
two men on the roadside. One was their cousin, Black Mayo Osborne.

“Who’s that man?” asked Anne.

“Mr. Smith; the new man at the Tolliver place.”

“Ugh! he’s horrid! snarling like a spiteful cur dog!” exclaimed Anne.

The stranger was indeed odd and unpleasant-looking. He had long
loose-jointed limbs and such a short body that it seemed as if its
only function was to hold his head and limbs together. The two sides
of his blond face were quite unlike. The left side was handsome with
its straight brow and wide blue eye; but the right eye, half hidden by
its drooping lid, slanted outward and down, the tip of the nose turned
toward the bulging right nostril, and the mouth drooped at the right
corner and ended in a heavy downward line.

“Easy! go easy, my German friend!” Black Mayo’s voice rang out clear
and mocking.

“I am not a German; that am I not!” screamed Smith. “I am an American
citizen. I can my papers show. I am more American than you. What are
your peoples here? _Ach!_ what do they? This morning they did the last
cent out of their treasury take, the expenses of old traitors and
rebels to pay--”

The sentence was not finished. A quick blow from the shoulder stretched
him on the ground.

“Hey! lie there a minute!” cried Black Mayo, with an impish light
twinkling in his dark eyes. “Listen! Here’s a tune you’ve got to
respect in this part of the world.” He whistled “Dixie” with vim and
vigor, over and over again. Then he stepped aside and held out his
hand, saying: “Ah, well! You didn’t know any better. Forget it!”

The man glared up at him, without a word.

“Oh! if that’s the way you feel about it--” Mr. Osborne laughed,
shrugged his shoulders, and, still whistling “Dixie,” took the road
that led to his home at Larkland.

Mr. Smith scrambled to his feet and looked after Black Mayo, from under
down-drawn brows, with his thin wide lips writhing like serpents; then
he went limping up the road.

The girls turned white amazed faces to each other.

“Ugh!” said Patsy. “Let’s go home. Do--do you reckon he’ll hurt Cousin
Mayo?”

“Of course not. He can’t. How can he?” said Anne. After a pause she
added: “He certainly will if he can.”




CHAPTER II


Exulting at the way he had diddled the girls, Dick pranced along the
Redville road. He did not meet any one, for it was a fair spring day
and the country people were busy; but he saw men and boys he knew,
plowing and grubbing, hallooing to their teams and to one another.

About two miles from The Village, Dick turned off on the Old Plank
Road. Twenty years before, this had been a highway going through The
Village, on its long way to Richmond. Then the railroad was built. It
wanted to come through The Village, between court-house and church,
but the people rose up in arms. They did not want shrieking, grinding
trains, to scare horses and bring in outsiders, nor an iron track
parting their homes from their graves in the churchyard. So the
railroad went by Redville that was six miles from The Village in summer
and three or four times as far in the winter season of ruts and red mud.

After the railway was built, however, the road by Redville station
became the thoroughfare; the Old Plank Road was seldom traveled except
by negroes who lived in clearings in the Big Woods that covered miles
of the rocky, infertile ridge land.

Dick was near one of these clearings, a patch of stumpy land around a
log cabin, when he heard a voice calling loudly, “Whoa! Gee! Whoa, I
say!”

An old negro was coming up the hill, in a cart drawn by bony,
long-horned oxen.

“Hey, Unc’ Isham!” said Dick. “What are you making such a racket for?”

Isham Baskerfield jumped nervously; but when he recognized the speaker,
he grinned and said: “Howdy, little marster! howdy! I was jest talkin’
to my oxes. I tuk ’em down to de creek to gin ’em some water.”

“You sounded scared,” commented Dick. “And you looked scared, too.”

“Skeered? Course I aint skeered. Huccome I be skeered?” Isham replied
loudly. Then he mumbled: “I aint nuver liked to go down dis road since
dat old man--Whar you gwine, Marse Dick?” he interrupted himself.
“Don’t you fool ’round dat lowermos’ cabin. Dat’s”--he breathed the
name in a whisper--“Solomon Gabe’s house, dat is. An’ he can shore
cunjer folks.”

Dick laughed. “So that’s what you are afraid of. You--”

“Sh--sh, little marster!” The old negro looked around, as if afraid of
being overheard. He stopped his oxcart in front of his cabin. “I got to
git my meal bag,” he said. “Lily Belle emptied it to make a hoecake for
dinner, so I got to go to mill an’ git some corn ground ’fore supper
time. I don’t worry ’bout nothin’ long as my meal bag can stan’ up for
itself, but when it lays down I got to stir about. What you doin’,
Marse Dick, strayin’ so fur from home?”

“Oh! I’m just strolling ’round,” Dick answered vaguely.

“Umph! When I fust see you, I thought you mought be gwine fishin’; but
you aint got no fishin’ pole.”

“No use to carry a pole in the woods, when you’ve got a knife,” said
Dick. “Where is a good place to go?”

“Uh! any o’ dem holes in Mine Creek below de ford,” said the old man;
“taint good fishin’ ’bove thar.”

“O. K.!” said Dick. “If I catch more fish than I can carry, I’ll leave
you what I can’t tote home.”

“Yas, suh; yas, suh! I reckon you will,” chuckled the old negro.

Dick went on down the road. But his merry whistle died on his lips as
he passed Solomon Gabe’s cabin.

It stood, like a dark, poisonous fungus, under low-branching evergreens
in a dank, somber hollow a little away from the road. The squat old log
hovel had not even a window; the door stood open, not hospitably, but
like the yawning mouth of a pit.

Dick ran on down the road and came presently to Mine Creek, a little
stream straggling along a rocky, weed-fringed bed. Near the ford,
there was a pile of rotting logs and fallen stones that had once been
a cabin. He left the road here, but he did not take Isham’s advice and
go down Mine Creek. Instead, he went up stream, following a vague old
path that presently crossed the creek and climbed a little hill. There
was a small enclosure fenced in with rotting rails. In and around the
enclosure were piles of earth and broken stones of such ancient date
that saplings and even trees were growing on them.

Dick paused on the hilltop and looked around cautiously. No one was in
sight; and all was still except for the chatter of squirrels and the
drumming of woodpeckers. He jumped over the old fence and advanced to
the edge of a well-like opening. Again he stopped and looked around.
Then he took out of his pocket a ball of string. He tied a stone to
one end of it; dropped the stone into the hole; played out his line
until it rested on the bottom; and tied a knot in the string at the
ground level.

Then he went into the woods and cut down a hickory sapling; he measured
it with his line and cut it off at the top; and trimmed the branches,
leaving stout prongs at intervals of about eighteen inches. Every now
and then, he stopped and looked about, to make sure that he was not
observed. After nearly an hour’s work, he finished an improvised ladder
which he carried to the hole and slid over the edge. Then with a final
sharp lookout, he descended.

He found himself in a pit about ten feet in diameter, heaped knee-deep
with twigs and leaves swept there by winds of many winters. At one side
there was an opening four feet wide and five or six feet high, the
mouth of a tunnel that was roofed with logs supported on the sides by
stout rough timbers.

Dick lighted his candle and started down this tunnel. But after a few
steps he turned back, set down his candle, and pulled his ladder into
the hole.

“Now,” he said. “Anybody’s welcome to look in here. I reckon they’ll
not find little Dick.”

He picked up his candle and went along the tunnel. Now and then it
dropped down abruptly, but there were timbers and old ladders that made
the way passable. At last the tunnel broadened into a room about thirty
feet square and high enough to stand upright in. This room also was
roofed with logs and poles propped by stout timbers of white oak. Here
and there were heaps of earth and stones and piles of rotting timbers;
on the left side there was another tunnel.

Dick hesitated a minute, then he muttered: “I reckon I’ll find _it_
here. But I’ll look around first.”

He followed the lower tunnel. It, too, slanted downward, but it was
longer than the upper one and had several short spurs. It ended in
a pit a dozen feet deep, that had an old ladder in it. Dick climbed
down and looked around, then he went back to the main room and began
examining the clay and stone between the supporting timbers.

“It certainly seems as if they would have left some,” he said earnestly
to himself. “I ought to see little bits sparkling somewhere. If they
were ever so little, they would show me where to work.”

His tour of investigation brought him at last to a corner where
there was a heap of earth and stones. He scrambled on top of the
mound,--and, in a twinkling, he landed at the bottom of a hole.

For a minute he was stunned. Then he staggered to his feet, lighted the
candle which had been extinguished in his fall, and looked around. He
had fallen into a pit ten or twelve feet deep--probably an opening of
the mine that had been abandoned with the failure of a vein that was
being followed. The place had been covered with a layer of logs and
poles on top of which earth and stones had been thrown. The rotting
timbers--how many years they had been there!--had given way under his
weight.

How was he to get out? The walls of the pit, stone in one place and
clay on the other sides, were steep, almost perpendicular.

After considering awhile, he set his candle on a projecting rock, took
out his knife, and dug some crannies for finger-holds and toe-holds,
to serve as a ladder. But when he put his weight in them and tried
to climb up, the clay slipped under his feet and he slid back. He
made the holes larger and deeper, but after he mounted two or three
steps he slid back again; and again; and again. At last he gave up
this plan. Anyway, if he could climb to the top, how could he get
out? He had crashed through the middle of the pit, and the broken
downward-slanting poles barred the sides.

Must he stay here and wait for help to come? Help? What help? No one
knew where he was. Oh! how he regretted now his careful plans to put
every one off the trail. Anne and Patsy could only say that they had
last seen him on the main road to Redville. And Isham thought he had
gone down Mine Creek.

If only he had left the ladder in place, there would be a chance that
when they missed him and made search, they would look in the mine. But
he had taken that chance away from himself by pulling the ladder into
the pit.

He must dig his way out. He _must_! There was no other way of escape.
He selected a place that seemed free from rocks, and began to hack at
the wall. He toiled till his arms ached and his hands were sore and
blistered. It was a slow and painful task, but he was making progress.
He piled up loose rocks and stood on tiptoe, so as to reach higher
on the wall. In spite of his weariness and his tormented hands, his
spirits rose.

“A tight place like this is lots of fun--after you get out. Won’t Dave
and Steve pop their eyes when I tell ’em about it?”

He laughed and, with renewed vigor, drove his knife into the hard
clay. There was a sharp scratch and a snap. Something fell, click! on
a stone. It was his knife blade, broken against a rock that extended
shelf-like above him, and formed an impassable barrier. All these
hours of work and pain were wasted. He must begin again and dig out in
another place; or try to, and perhaps run against rock again. And with
this broken knife!

He groaned and looked around.

“O-oh!” he gave a sharp, startled cry. His candle! Only an inch of it
was left. Oh! he _must_ get out! How terrible it would be here in the
pitch-black, shut-in dark!

He seized a broken bit of timber for a makeshift spade, and gave a
hurried stroke. Alas! The old timber snapped in two, bruising and
cutting his hands cruelly. He threw aside the useless fragment and
then, as if he had lost the power of motion, he stood staring at his
bit of candle that shortened with every passing second.

He pulled himself together. He must view every foot, every inch of the
pit, so that he could work to purpose in the dark, not just dig, dig,
dig, and get nowhere. He scrutinized the wall, noting every angle and
projection; then he looked up, and studied the position of every log,
every broken pole. For the first time, he observed a log that did not
extend across the pit; its end was about two feet from the wall. Ah!
perhaps, perhaps--

He jerked the string out of his pocket, made a slip noose, and threw
it at the end of the log; the noose fell short. He threw it again; and
again it went aside. The next time, it caught a broken pole, and to
get it off he had to poke and push with a piece of timber for two or
three minutes--minutes that seemed hours as he glanced fearfully at
the flickering candle. He threw the noose again; and at last it went
over the log. He tried to pull it along. He wanted to get it near the
middle, free of the broken poles, and pull himself up by it, if--oh!
how he prayed it was!--stout enough to bear his weight; but now it was
fast on a knot and he could not move it.

He glanced at the candle. It was a mere bit of wick in a gob of grease;
every flicker threatened to be its last. He could not wait any longer!
he must do something! something! He would pull himself up to the end of
the log and try to break through the poles.

As he pulled, the log began to move. Ah! If he could pull the end into
the pit, it would be a bridge to climb out on. He jerked with all his
might, and it moved, slid, slipped downward; the end caught against a
projecting rock about four feet from the top; there it held fast.

The candle flame flared and dropped and--no, it was not out; not yet.

Dick jumped up and caught hold of the log. The movement fanned the
failing light; it spurted and went out. No matter now! He had firm hold
of the log. He scrambled up on it and managed presently to push and
pull himself between the broken poles. At last, at last, thank Heaven!
he was out of that awful pit.

He staggered along, feeling his way by the wall, making one ascent
after another, until a light glimmered before him and he reached the
entrance well. He raised his ladder and climbed out. Then his strength
gave way. He dropped down on a pile of leaves at the mine entrance, and
lay there, gazing blankly at the blue sky shining beyond the fretwork
of budding branches.

Suddenly he began to laugh. He sat up and slapped his knees. “I’ll pass
it on to them,” he said. “I’ll cover up that hole, and I’ll take Dave
and Steve there--after I find _it_--and let them tumble in without a
light. Then I’ll go off and pretend I don’t hear them, and--oh! I’ll
let them stay there long enough for them to think, to feel--” His face
was suddenly solemn. “I might have stayed there and died. Died!”

He got up and dragged the ladder out, and hid it under the leaves piled
against the fence.

“I reckon I ought not to expect to find it right away,” he sighed.
“I’ve got to keep on looking and looking and looking. And I say I will!
But I need some real tools. A knife, specially a broken one, isn’t much
force for mining.”

He went toward home, but he was in no hurry to complete the journey at
the end of which were his unfinished task and his father. Instead of
going down The Street, he took The Back Way behind the Court-house, and
slipped around the corner of the blacksmith shop.

Mr. Mallett, the blacksmith, with only his corncob pipe for company,
was sitting in a chair tilted against the door jamb of the grimy log
cabin. He was a vivacious little man with blue eyes and dark hair, and
a face that would have been sallow if it had been visible under the
grime. All the Village boys liked to loaf at his shop, but Dick had now
a special reason for visiting him.

“Mr. Mallett--” Dick began.

The smith started. “You young imp!” he exclaimed. “What do you mean by
jumping at me, sudden as a jack-in-the-box? I wasn’t thinking ’bout
you--and here you are, close enough to hear my very thoughts. I never
see such a boy. Why, what’s the matter with your face?”

“I fell down. It got scratched,” Dick explained briefly. “Mr.
Mallett, I was thinking about the Old Sterling Mine, near your
great-grandfather’s shop. Do you reckon it was silver, real silver, he
got there?”

“Do I reckon? No, I don’t! I know it, sure and certain as I’m setting
here in this chair, smoking my corncob pipe. Aint I heard my father
tell time and again what his granddad told him? Why, my father could
remember him good. He was a little quick man with blue eyes and
black hair--we all get our favor from him. He never did learn to
talk like folks over here; he always mixed his words and gave ’em
curious-sounding twists. He come from France, one of Lafayette’s
soldiers he was.”

“Why didn’t he go back with Lafayette?” asked Dick. “I should think
he’d have been lonesome here, away from his own home and folks.”

“Certainly he was lonesome,” said Mr. Mallett. “My father said, when he
was old and child-like, he’d set in the corner, jabbering French by the
hour, with tears dripping down his face.”

“I don’t see why he stayed here,” persisted Dick.

“He just stayed and kept staying,” said the smith. “Maybe that old
silver mine had something to do with it. He was always expecting to get
out a fortune. He come with the Frenchers to chase Cornwallis, and they
stopped here, two or three days, to mend shoes and get victuals.

“The old Mr. Osborne that owned Larkland in them days see what a good
blacksmith my great-grandad was, and told him when the war was over to
come back here and he should have a home. So he did, and the squire
helped him get some of the old glebe land, and he married Mr. Osborne’s
overseer’s daughter. He had a smithy on the Old Plank Road by Mine
Creek. I reckon you know the place.”

Dick nodded. He did not say he had been there that very afternoon.

“And he found silver on that hill. My grand-daddy used to tell us
children about seeing his father getting silver out of the ground and
beating it on his anvil with his sledge hammer. And Black Mayo that’s
always finding out something ’bout everything, he found them old
_ree_cord papers.”

“And they proved about the silver mine?” asked Dick.

“Certainly they did,” asserted Mr. Mallett. “Would folks try a
man in law court for making money out of silver he didn’t have?
Great-granddad didn’t deny making of it. He just said he wasn’t making
no false coins. He was hammering out sterling pure silver. That’s why
they call it the Sterling Mine. And he was making pieces like Spanish
six shilling pieces--our folks counted money by shillings in them
days--and was giving them, in place of what they called alloy; he was
giving better and purer money than the law. And what could folks say to
that? Why, nothing; for it was the truth.”

“And so they didn’t punish him?” asked Dick.

“Punish him? What for? For doing better than the law of the land? No,
sirree!”

“I don’t reckon he got out all the silver,” said Dick, more to himself
than to Mr. Mallett.

“Course not! Some was got out in my father’s day, by the Mr. Mayo that
owned the land before The War.”

“How did they get it out?” asked Dick.

“Dug it out with tools, of course. Aint there the old picks and sledges
and things, setting there in that shed, that my father made for them?
And Mr. Mayo--”

“Are they--”

Dick tried to interrupt, but Mr. Mallett went on with what he had to
say: “He aint made much out of it. They say it was what they call ‘free
silver’, and great-granddad chanced to strike where it was rich. It
petered out, and silver was so scarce and the rock so hard it didn’t
pay to work the mine. Some folks say that. There was a tale that the
manager wasn’t trying to make it pay; he wanted to get the mine for
himself. He tried to buy it. But he didn’t. He died. Anyway, The War
came, and ’twasn’t worked any more.”

“Yes.” Dick accepted the fact that The War ended everything, even the
worth of the silver mine. “It does seem, if it was real silver, we
could see it there now,” he said thoughtfully.

“Shucks!” Mr. Mallett got up and knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
“Course they took out all in sight. Folks would have to dig for any
more they got.”

“And the tools; will you--” Dick checked himself. If he asked for the
tools now, Mr. Mallett would guess what he was planning to do and
somehow all The Village would know before sunset. He must wait and
manage to get them, without betraying his purpose.

Mr. Mallett was looking at the westering sun. “Fayett ought to be
home,” he said. “He went to Redville, and he was to be back in time to
help me with a little work.”

“Fayett!” exclaimed Dick. “Why, I didn’t know he came home for Easter.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Mallett. “He’s mighty stirred up ’bout this war. What
have we got to do with Europe’s war that started with the killing of a
little prince in a country I’d never heard tell of? But Fayett’s got a
notion in his head-- Here! I’ve got to fix some rivets. Don’t you want
to blow the bellows?”

“I wish I had time,” said Dick. “I’ve got to go home. I--I haven’t
finished my garden work.”

“Then I reckon you’ll save it for another day,” said the smith. “Sun’s
’most down.”

Its long rays lay like a red-gold band across The Street, as Dick
started home, wishing--too late!--that he had finished his garden task
and postponed his adventuring to another day. Seeing his father on the
porch, the truant slipped behind the boxwood at the edge of the walk.
But Mr. Osborne called, “Dick!” and then more sternly, “Richard!”

It was useless to pretend not to hear.

“Sir!” Dick answered meekly.

“Have you completed your garden work?”

“Not--not quite, sir,” said Dick. “I am just going to it now, sir. I
can get a lot done before dark. And I’ll get up soon Monday morning,
and finish it, sir, indeed I will.”

“My son,--” Mr. Osborne spoke in a magisterial voice and took Dick by
the arm.

Just then the front gate clicked, and Black Mayo came up the walk.

“War has been declared,” he said without a word of greeting. “War! The
United States has declared war with Germany.”

Red Mayo dropped Dick’s arm. “How’d you hear?”

“I met Fayett Mallett coming from Redville. He’d heard the news, if we
can call it news. We knew it was coming.”

“Of course; it was inevitable. We knew that the minute we read the
President’s War Message. He held off as long as he could.”

“Yes. Now the War Resolution has passed Congress and the President has
signed it.”

Dick stood listening a minute, then slipped indoors just as his mother
came out.

“What are you talking about?” she asked. “What is the matter?”

“War!” said her husband. “The United States is in the War, Miranda.”

Sweet William was at his mother’s elbow. He spoke in a puzzled little
voice. “I thought The War was done. I thought the Confedacy was
overrun.”

“This is another war, son,” laughed Mr. Osborne. “This is war with
Germany.”




CHAPTER III


Just then Emma came to the door. Emma was the Osbornes’ old servant,
brown and plump as one of her own baked apple dumplings, and as much a
part of the family as the tall clock in “the chamber.”

“Supper is ready, Miss M’randa, an’ you-all come right away, please’m,”
she said. “De muffins is light as a feather. Come on an’ butter ’em. If
you-all will live on corn bread, please’m eat it hot.”

“Poor Emma!” laughed Mrs. Osborne. “She cannot reconcile herself to our
food program.”

“I tell Emma ’bout the Belgians,” complained Sweet William. “But she
says ‘them folks is too far off for her to bother ’bout; corn bread
don’t set good on her stomach; and she’s going to eat what she likes,
long as she can get it.’ And, mother, she has light bread and hot
biscuits for herself every day, and--”

“Sh-sh, son boy!” said Mrs. Osborne. “Emma doesn’t know any better, and
we do. Come, Mayo, and Mayo. Come to the hot corn muffins!”

“I ought to go home,” said Black Mayo. “Polly’ll be expecting me.”

“Indeed she will not,” said Mrs. Osborne. “Polly never expects you till
she sees you coming in the gate. How is she, and how are your pigeons?
I understand they are a part of your family now. Of course you’ll stay
to supper, Mayo. Patsy, tell Emma to put another plate on the table.”

A visit from their Cousin Mayo, always a delight, was now especially
welcome to Dick because it postponed, perhaps prevented, a disagreeable
interview with his father. He slipped to his place and quietly devoted
himself to the hot muffins, cold ham, and damson preserves.

“Why, Dick! What have you done to your face?” asked his mother.

“Nothing. It got scratched,” he mumbled, glancing at his father.

But Mr. Osborne was not thinking of the garden; he was about to present
to his family an amazing piece of news. He prepared for it by an
impressive “Ahem!” with his eyes fixed on Black Mayo.

“A client came to my office to-day,” he said solemnly.

“Really, Mayo!” exclaimed his wife.

“What is a client?” asked Sweet William.

“Who disturbed the hoary dust of your sanctum?” asked Black Mayo.

“Well may you inquire!” said the Village lawyer. “You are responsible
for his coming.”

“I?” There was a look of blank astonishment, followed by a peal of
laughter. “You don’t mean to say that scoundrel Smith--”

“Yes. He wants to take action against you for assault and battery.”

“What is a client?” Sweet William asked again.

“What in the world are you talking about?” inquired Mrs. Osborne.

“Oh, I reckon I know.” Patsy eagerly aired her knowledge. “That Smith,
the new man at the Tolliver place, quarreled with Cousin Mayo, and
Cousin Mayo knocked him down. We saw it, Anne and I.”

“Oh, Princess Pocahontas! Are you and Lady Anne taking the witness
stand against me?” Black Mayo said in mock reproach. “Well, it’s true.”

Mrs. Osborne gave a little exclamation of horror. “Oh, Mayo!” she said,
frowning at her husband. “I’ve begged you not to let outside people buy
land around here. And now Mayo’s had to knock one of them down.”

“But, Miranda dear, when a man sells his farm and the purchaser comes
to get me to look up the title--”

“You just ought to tell him we don’t want him here,” said Mrs. Osborne.
“What is the use of being a lawyer if you can’t put some law on
outsiders to keep them from spoiling The Village?”

The two men laughed.

Then Black Mayo said: “I suppose he told you about it, Mayo. The ‘I
saids’ and ‘he saids’?”

“Yes; oh, yes!”

“H’m! I hope you’ll make him pay you a good fat fee for the case.”

“Fee!” Red Mayo stared in amazement. “Assuredly you don’t think I’d
accept his dirty money! Case! I informed him he had none.”

“But I did knock him down.”

“Of course you did. When he repeated what he said, I’d have knocked
him down myself, if he hadn’t been in my own office. I told him if The
Village heard such talk, he’d be tarred and feathered and drummed out
of the community. Then I ordered him out of my office.”

“And that is how you treat your _rara avis_, a client!” said Black Mayo.

“What is a client?” repeated Sweet William, whose questions were always
answered because he never stopped asking till they were.

“A client, young man, is the golden-egg goose that a lawyer tries
to lure into his coop,” Black Mayo explained. “One fluttered to your
father and he shooed it away.”

“I wish I had a goose that laid gold eggs,” said Sweet William. “I
wouldn’t kill it, like the silly man in that story.”

“Perhaps I can find one and trade it to you for Hop-o-hop,” suggested
his cousin.

Sweet William considered and shook his head. “Hop-o-hop couldn’t get on
without me,” he said gravely.

“Ah, it’s a family failing,” laughed Black Mayo, as they left the
table. “None of you is willing to pay the price for the goose.”

The evening was so mild that they settled themselves again on the
porch. The men resumed their discussion of the war; David pored over
a bulletin about corn; Dick snuggled down in a corner with “The Days
of Bruce”; Anne and Patsy brought out their Red Cross knitting, and
whispered and giggled together. Sweet William put a stool beside his
mother’s chair and cuddled against her knee, with Scalawag at his feet.

Mrs. Osborne left the discussion of public affairs to the menfolks. She
was intent on her own task, the making out of a program for the Village
Literary Society. What pleasant meetings they would have, reading about
the Plantagenet kings, supplementing Hume’s history with Waverley
novels and Shakespeare plays. She smiled and folded her paper.

As the twilight deepened, Dick shut his book and grinned at the girls.

“Too bad not to have your company on my walk to-day, after you promised
it, too!”

“Oh! we thought of a nicer place to go, where we wouldn’t scratch our
faces,” said Anne.

“We’ll go with you some day, after you tear down all the barbed wire
and briers,” said Patsy.

“I dare you!” Dick defied them.

“You say that because you know I’m going away so soon,” said Anne.

“You’re coming back in June. I dare and double dare you for then,”
replied Dick. “I’ll be going to this place--oh! right along.”

“All right,” said Anne. “We’ll follow you; see if we don’t. We’ll not
take a dare; will we, Patsy-pet?”

Their bickering was interrupted by the approach of guests. Three men
strolled across the yard--Giles Spotswood, the cousin from the mill;
Will Blair, another cousin, who kept the Village post office; and old
Mr. Tavis, a villager outside the cousinship.

“We saw Black Mayo here, and we dropped in to talk over the news,”
said Mr. Blair. “Giles says Fayett Mallett heard at Redville that the
United States has declared war. That’s what comes of sinking American
ships; eh, Mayo?”

“Yes,” answered Black Mayo; “the German sinking of American ships was
the overt act which brought on this war, just as the Stamp Tax brought
on the Revolution. But at bottom, in both cases, the real cause is the
same: it’s a fight against a despotic government for liberty and human
rights.”

“It’s strange the Germans kept up submarine fighting after the United
States’ protests,” said Mr. Blair; “getting another powerful enemy.”

“I reckon they count on winning the war with U-boats before the United
States gets over there with both feet,” answered Black Mayo. “But I’ll
bet on the British Navy; it’s saved the Allies so far.”

“You said the Belgians saved them by that ten days of defense that gave
the French and British time to come,” said David.

“You told me the French saved them by driving the Germans back at the
battle of the Marne,” said Dick.

“Oh! but you said the stubborn retreat of that first little British
army was a real victory that made possible the Marne victory,” Patsy
reminded him.

“Well, well! a good deal of saving is necessary; and maybe the old
United States will jump in and do the final saving.”

“The French and British are pushing forward now,” said Mr. Blair.
“Yesterday’s paper says----”

The men discussed the war news in an interested but remote way, just as
they had discussed plagues in India, famines in China, the Boer War.
Their sympathies were as wide as humanity; but, after all, these things
did not touch them, really and personally, as did the death of Joe
Spencer’s little daughter or the burning of a negro cabin with a baby
in it. No one said “we” about the war; it was always “they.”

“What do you reckon they will do?” asked Mr. Spotswood. “Will they send
an army over, do you think?”

“Oh, no!” Red Mayo answered confidently. “The war will be over before
they could send men abroad, even if they had a trained army ready to
start. They’ll lend the Allies money; they’ll give some--large amounts,
millions, no doubt. And they’ll supply food and munitions; they must
hustle around and get ships.”

“The main job will be to get the food to send,” said Mr. Spotswood.
“There’s an alarming shortage of grain. I never saw it so scarce and
high, since I’ve been milling. The first war work is the farmers’, to
raise a bumper crop.”

“Then I’m in war work, father,” said David. “I’m going to beat the
record on my corn acre this year.”

Dick laughed. “A poor war worker! Not even a one-horse farmer, just a
one-acre boy!”

“My one-acre boy multiplied by hundreds of thousands makes the Boys’
Corn Club a big thing,” said Mr. Spotswood. “Why aren’t you in it,
Dick?”

“I’ve got something better to do,” said Dick, confidently and
mysteriously.

“Isn’t it strange the Germans don’t see they are beaten?” said Mr.
Blair.

“Man, man! What are you talking about?” Black Mayo exclaimed. “Beaten?
In three years of war, German soil has been trampled by enemy feet
only once, those few days in that first August when the French invaded
Alsace. I fear there’s a hard struggle and dark days ahead.”

This speech amazed every one.

“Why, Cousin Mayo! Can’t the United States whip the world?” exclaimed
David.

“Aren’t most of the nations against Germany?” asked Dick.

“Oh, yes! A score of nations are united against Germany and her sister
autocracies, Austria-Hungary and Turkey and Bulgaria.”

“Is Germany so much the best fighter?” David wanted to know.

“No! But she has the inside lines, and she was ready for war. For
nearly forty years she was preparing for ‘the day,’ while the rest of
the world was busy with works of peace.”

“Didn’t the other countries have armies and navies, too?” David
persisted.

“No country ever built up such a perfect war machine as Germany,”
said Mr. Osborne. “Every point was prepared. Optical and dye experts
produced an inconspicuous gray-green uniform; engineers constructed
the Kiel Canal and a network of railroads leading to Belgium and
France; scientists captured nitrogen from the air for explosives and
fertilizers, and devised Zeppelins, huge guns, submarines, and poison
gas; experts made war plans; officers were drilled to carry them out
with soldiers trained by years of service. And the minds of people were
prepared--abroad by propaganda, and at home by patriotic-sounding talk
about ‘the seas must be free’ and ‘we demand our place in the sun.’
Even Kuno----” He paused and then said to himself, “I wonder where Kuno
is!”

“Kuno?” said Red Mayo, questioningly.

“Kuno Kleist, a German friend of mine with whom I tramped through
Mexico. He was coming home with me, but he had news that his mother was
ill, so he went back to Germany. Such a clever, merry, kind-hearted
fellow he was; confident that the eternal jubilee of peace and
brotherhood was at hand, ‘made in Germany,’ by his Socialist brethren.”

Mr. Blair laughed. “Now we are seeing what is really ‘made in Germany’
by your friend Kuno Kleist and the others.”

Black Mayo shook his head. “Not Kuno, not the will and heart of him.
They may have his body--I hope not, I hope not--as a cog in this
terrible military machine, crushing helpless nations and people with
its awful policy of frightfulness.”

“They ought all to be killed, them German scoundrels ought,” wheezed
old Mr. Tavis. “They ought to be treated like they treat the Belgians
and them other people Will Blair reads us about in his newspaper.”

“No and no!” Black Mayo said emphatically; then he went on, looking not
at Mr. Tavis, but at David and Dick: “The worst thing that could happen
to the world, to us, would be to be infected by the germ of hate.”

“But the Germans do such mean things, Cousin Mayo. How can we not hate
them?” Patsy looked up with a frown. “Father read in the paper to-day
that two more relief ships have been sunk, ships loaded with food for
the starving Belgians.”

“And I gave all my money to buy it,” said Sweet William, indignantly.
“I’m saving my sugar for the poor little Belgians. Do you reckon the
Germans’ll sink that, too?”

“Relief ships!” said David. “Why, they sink hospital ships, with
wounded soldiers and doctors and nurses; and ships with women and
babies. Remember the _Lusitania_!”

“I think we ought to hate them,” said Anne.

“No, dear, no,” said Black Mayo. “We ought to fight fair and hard and
without hate, for our own rights and the rights of all people, the
Germans, too. Why, the German people had no voice in making this war.
It was declared by the kaiser without consulting the _Reichstag_ in
which the people are represented.

“Remember, children, most wars are made by governments, against the
wishes and interests of the people. War is a disaster, a scourge;
war, more than famine, is the seven blasted ears of corn, the seven
lean-fleshed kine, destroying the full and the well-favored. All the
waste and woe of this World War will be worth while if they make people
realize the horror and wickedness of war and put an end to it forever.”

“You are talking over their heads,” laughed Red Mayo.

“I am not sure of that,” said Black Mayo, looking at David’s thoughtful
face. “And if I am, it is not a bad thing for young folks to have
things above them to grow up to.”

“Dick, get a chair for Cousin Alice Blair,” said Mrs. Osborne, as a
fat, smiling woman waddled up the path. “She likes the big rocker. Get
two chairs, son. There’s Miss Fanny coming down The Street, and she’ll
stop to find out what we are talking about.”

Sure enough, Miss Fanny Morrison turned in at the gate. She was the
Village seamstress, a blunt-featured, blunt-mannered, kind-hearted
woman who lived with an invalid sister in a cottage across the street
from the Osborne home.

“I saw you-all out here and I just had to come in,” she said. “Oh!
you’re talking about this war. Is it really true that the United States
is in it? Isn’t it awful? War is a terrible thing. I certainly am
glad I don’t live in a country that is in it, I mean, really in it.
My mother said that during The War they used to----” She carried the
conversation away from the war that was convulsing the world, to their
“The War,” fought before they were born.

“Did the supervisors appropriate money for our veterans to go to the
Reunion, Mayo?” Mrs. Osborne asked presently.

“The treasury’s almost empty,” answered her husband. “They gave what
they had. And we started a subscription to make up the deficit.”

“We can raise part of the money by selling lunches on the Green during
court week,” said Mrs. Osborne.

Patsy spoke quickly. “Oh, no, mother! You forget I told you the
school’s going to serve lunches that week for the Red Cross.”

Mrs. Osborne turned a surprised, indignant face to her daughter. “Why,
my dear! Aren’t you patriotic enough to give up any other plans for the
sake of our dear old Confederate soldiers?”

Patsy hung her head, with a submissive mumble.

Sweet William, now nestling against his mother’s knee, put a caressing
hand on her cheek to demand attention.

“Mother, is Virginia the United States, too?” he inquired.

“Virginia the United States?” repeated his mother.

“Virginians used to be accused of thinking so, son,” said Mr. Osborne,
laughing. “It is the general opinion that our State is a part of the
Union; it’s so on the map.”

“Then if Virginia is in the United States, we are, too; aren’t we,
father?”

“We certainly are, son; we are whatever Virginia is,” declared Mr.
Osborne.

“Then we are in this war.” Sweet William imparted the information
solemnly, as his own special discovery. “Virginia’s the United States,
and we are Virginia; and so we are in the war!”

“It sounds reasonable, son,” remarked his father, with a dry chuckle,
“but you are the first of us who has thought of it.”

While they were laughing over Sweet William’s great discovery, two men,
one leading a horse, turned from The Back Way into The Street and came
toward the Osborne home.

Black Mayo jumped up.

“There’s Jack Mallett bringing Rosinante,” he said. “I left her at the
shop to be shod, and told him I’d be back in ten minutes.”

“We all know the length of your ‘ten minutes,’” laughed Mrs. Osborne.

“It’s your fault, Miranda, all your fault,” Black Mayo turned on her.
“You asked me to stay to supper; and you know I never know when to go
home.”

By this time, Mr. Mallett and his son were at the steps, receiving a
cordial greeting. They were a little circle of friends, gentlefolks and
seamstress and blacksmith, who had grown up together in The Village.

As children and men and women, in school and shop and church, they
played and worked and worshipped together. Each stood on his own
merits, and only old negroes spoke slightingly of “poor white trash.”
But the class lines were there, as deep or even deeper than when they
were marked by wealth and land and slaves. An Osborne or Wilson or Mayo
was--oh, well! an Osborne or Wilson or Mayo, and not a Tavis or Jones
or Hight.

“I’m awfully sorry, Jack----” began Black Mayo, going to get his horse.

“Oh! that’s all right,” interrupted Mr. Mallett. “I was shutting up the
shop and I saw you here, so I thought I’d bring the mare. She don’t
like to stand tied.”

“Thank you, Jack.”

“Come in, Jack; come in, you and Fayett, and sit awhile,” said Red
Mayo, heartily.

“No, Red; no, Miss Miranda, thank you,” replied Mr. Mallett. “I can’t
set down. I’ve got to go straight home. I promised my old woman I
would.” But he tarried to share his news with them. “You’ve been
talking ’bout the war, I reckon. Fayett heard to-day at Redville the
Congress has voted for it. And--what do you think?--he’s going to give
up agricultural school and be a soldier.”

“Fayett a soldier!” exclaimed Dick, looking at his neighbor with
amazement and a sort of awe.

The elders, too, were exclaiming and questioning, looking at the
boy whom they had known all his life as if he had suddenly become a
stranger. That a Village boy was going as a soldier did not bring home
to them the fact that the World War had become an American war; it
merely seemed to carry him away from them, making him a part of that
mighty overseas conflict.

“Is Fayett really going?” asked Miss Fanny Morrison.

“Well, he wants to, and my old woman and me’ve been talking it over and
we’ve done both give our consent; so I reckon it’s settled,” was the
answer.

“How could his mother agree?” As Mrs. Osborne asked the question, her
hold tightened on the man child drowsing at her knee.

“He told us he felt he ought to go, and she says she wouldn’t stand
in the way of anything he thought he ought to do,” Mr. Mallett said
quietly. “And if his mother can give him up, I’ve got no right to hold
him back.”

“But, Fayett,--” Mr. Blair turned to the boy--“I don’t understand your
wanting to go. You were always such a peaceable fellow.”

“Yes, sir,” said the lad, as if that were a reason for him to fight in
this war. “And now that the United States is in it, it seems like I
must go. Of free will. Not waiting to be sent.”

He spoke as an American, but those listening remembered that he was the
great-great-grandson of a Frenchman.

Black Mayo turned to Mr. Mallett. “Well, well, well! Your
great-grandfather came here to fight for American liberty, and now your
son is going to France to fight for freedom there. Wouldn’t that old
Mallett of the mine be proud of Fayett? Ah, it’s fine to act so that
our ancestors might be proud of us! God bless you, boy!”

He wrung Fayett’s hand, man to man, and then took his bridle rein.

“Thank you, Jack,” he said again. “Good night, folks. It’s ten minutes
to eight. Polly is locking the back door this minute, and when I get
there she’ll be settled with her knitting. Come to see us, all of you.”

He paused in the yard and said, “Mayo, a word with you.” Then he said
in an undertone: “It’s best to keep quiet about what happened to-day.
Tell Anne and Patsy so. That fellow Smith doesn’t understand how we
feel about things. If his foolish speech gets abroad, it will injure
him. Maybe I was a little too quick on the trigger.”

He swung into the saddle and the roan mare galloped away.

While the other guests were saying good night, Dick slipped to his
bedroom, avoiding a private interview with his father.

“He won’t punish me to-morrow,” he said. “It’s Sunday, Easter Sunday.”

Easter Sunday! And America, that had striven so hard for peace, had
been whirled into the red World War.

But it was not of the nation that Mrs. Osborne was thinking as she put
Sweet William to bed.

“Poor Mrs. Mallett!” she said to herself. “What if it were my boy that
is going?” And she kissed her little son so fiercely that he stirred
and opened his eyes.

“Mother,” he said drowsily, “will my sugar be enough----”

He was asleep before the question was finished.




CHAPTER IV


Dick was up early Monday morning, meekly and diligently hoeing the
potato patch. But his father had seen this humility and industry follow
too many offenses to overlook Saturday’s disobedience; so the culprit
received a severe lecture ending with the command to spend his Saturday
afternoons for a month working in the garden.

A month! A whole month before he could go back to the Old Sterling
Mine! All that he could do, in the meantime, to help carry out his plan
of working the mine and making a fortune, was to get tools and collect
candles.

He rummaged among the old irons in the blacksmith’s shed on several
afternoons, under pretense of finding horseshoes.

“What’s this old tool; and that one?” he asked with assumed
carelessness, pulling out one after another, until he identified and
set aside some that the miners had used.

Then he chose an occasion when Mr. Mallett was busy shoeing a fractious
mule and said in an offhand way: “Mr. Mallett, I want to dig a hole,
where I reckon there’s rock. May I take some of the old tools out of
your shed?”

“Help yourself.”

“And I needn’t bring them back right away?”

Mr. Mallett did not look up from his task. “Keep ’em long as you
please. They’re there to sell for old iron. Whoa, you brute!”

“Thank you!” Dick went away then, but at dusk that evening he slipped
back to the shop and got the pick and spade and sledge hammer he had
set aside, and sped down the unlighted street and deposited them under
the churchyard hedge.

Many an hour, during the days that followed, while he sat with a
textbook in his hand, he was in fancy unearthing vast treasures and
displaying them to the envy and admiration of his comrades. Slowly, oh!
very slowly, the days went by that kept him chained to his tasks at
home.

One pleasant afternoon in mid-April, the children drifted out of
school, in the usual merry chattering groups. The Village schoolhouse
was across The Street from The Roost. It was a quaint, ivy-mantled
brick cottage, the old “office,” in the corner of the yard at Broad
Acres. Broad Acres, once a lordly estate, was now “broad acres” in name
only. Farm after farm, field after field, had passed from the family
ownership until the mansion, with the rambling yard and garden, was
all that was left.

The house was a stately red-brick building with wide halls and
spacious, high-ceilinged rooms. Mrs. Wilson, who lived there with her
daughter Ruth, spent her days teaching A B C’s to babies and preparing
Dick and the older boys for the university. People who were able paid
her in money or wood or meal or shoes, and she accepted their pupils
and fees, but oh! how she struggled to get the children whose parents
were too poor to pay for schooling or to realize its value.

“I wish and I wish you weren’t going away, Anne, you precious darling
Anne!” Patsy wailed for the twentieth time, giving Anne Lewis a frantic
embrace.

“It’s a horrid shame!” exclaimed Ruth Wilson.

“But I’m coming back in the summer,” Anne said, to comfort them and
herself. “Oh! and, Patsy, won’t we have a lovely time, going around
with Dick!” she said, with a mischievous glance at Patsy’s twin.

“Bet you will--not!” declared Dick.

“And think what a good time we’ll all have at Happy Acres.”

“Let’s go to Happy Acres now,” suggested David Spotswood. “We boys will
catch some fish--maybe, and you girls can get flowers, and we’ll come
home by the mill.”

“Oh, yes! let’s do that,” exclaimed Anne. “You can go, can’t you,
Patsy? Ruth? Alice?”

“I don’t see how I can, to stay all afternoon,” Patsy said regretfully.
“Our Red Cross box is to go off next week and I’m not half done my
sweater.”

“I’ve got to f-finish my scarf,” stammered Ruth.

“I want to knit another pair of socks, if I have time,” said Alice.

The Village was working and denying itself to help stricken France and
Belgium. If the contributions were not large in dollars and cents, they
were great in the efforts and self-sacrifice of the little country
neighborhood. But the offerings came from the hands of good Samaritans,
not of patriots. America had accepted the war; it had not yet come home
to The Village. Later on, it was to--but we shall see what we see.

“Oh, you girls!” grumbled Stephen Tavis. “You are doing that Red Cross
stuff all the time.”

“And you boys are playing while we work,” said Patsy, tossing her head.

“We are saving flour and sugar for the Belgians. Do you want us to knit
and sew?” laughed Dick.

“Some of the boys in Washington are knitting,” Anne said gravely; “and
lots of men, real men, like firemen and soldiers. And they--we--are all
making gardens, so there will be more food to send to hungry France and
Belgium.”

“Father read from the paper last night something the President said,”
said Patsy. “‘Every one who makes or works a garden helps to solve the
problem of feeding the nations.’”

“Yes, the President says the fate of the nation and the world rests
largely on the farmer,” said David, importantly. “He wants them to
plant food crops; and that’s what I am doing.”

“Oh, your old corn acre! You’re so biggity about it,” jeered Dick.

“I wouldn’t mind a little farm work or gardening; but I certainly draw
the line at knitting,” said Steve.

“Oh! oh! oh!” Anne jumped up and down, uttering little squeals
of excitement. “Steve! David! Dick! Why don’t you have a school
war garden?”

“A school garden?” questioned Steve.

“Yes; like we have in Washington, that all the pupils work in,” said
Anne.

“Thank you! I get enough gardening at home,” said Dick, sourly. “I
don’t want to spend all my life hung to one end of a stick with a hoe
at the other end.”

“Oh! but this is fun, and good war work too. It takes just a few
hours a week from each of us. The more there are to help, the less
there is for each one to do.” Then Anne went on indignantly: “It seems
to me you’d want to help, you boys, when you think about all those
poor people over there, old folks and children and women with babies,
homeless and without food. Hundreds and thousands of them stand in line
for hours every day to get a little soup and a piece of bread; and if
we in America don’t provide that bread and soup, they’ll starve.”

“I’ll make a garden for them,” said a high, sweet voice, quavering on
the verge of tears. “If I had a hoe and a place to work, I’d begin
right away. I ain’t quite as big as Dick, but father says I’ve got
mighty good muscle. Just you feel it, Anne,” said Sweet William.
“Where’s a hoe? And where’s the garden going to be?”

“Yes; where could we have a garden?” said Steve. “I don’t mind working
a little, enough to keep up with Sweet William, if we had a good place.”

There was a pause.

“There isn’t any place. You see we can’t have it,” Dick said
triumphantly.

“There is; you can,” Anne declared vehemently. “You may have my Happy
Acres that Cousin Rodney gave me. I’ll--yes, I’ll be willing and glad
to dig up the flowers for potatoes and things.” Her voice broke and she
winked back her tears.

“O-oh!”

“Why, Anne!”

“Of course you wouldn’t!”

“What’s this about digging up flowers?” Mrs. Wilson, coming out of the
schoolroom, with her hands full of papers, heard Anne’s last words and
the horrified exclamations they excited. “Surely you aren’t talking
about dear Happy Acres?”

“Anne wants us to have a garden, a sort of war garden,” explained Patsy.

“We have them in Washington, you know, Cousin Agnes,” Anne said. “We
raise lots of vegetables, and it isn’t hard work, with so many to help;
and anyway, it’s worth working hard for, to help feed the world when
it’s hungry and starving.”

“And Steve asked where the garden could be,” Patsy continued her
explanation. “Anne says it can be Happy Acres, even if they have to dig
up the flowers.”

“That would be dreadful!” exclaimed Alice Blair.

“It’s dreadfuller for people to be starving,” said Anne.

“Shucks! We couldn’t work a garden at Happy Acres,” said Dick. “By the
time we walked there after school, it would be time to walk back to do
our home work.”

“We could run,” suggested Sweet William.

Mrs. Wilson laughed with the others; then she said: “Possibly you are
right, Dick; and certainly Anne is. Let me think a minute. If you boys
are willing to give part of your time to work for the hungry, I will
give part of my garden and my help. What do you say?”

“Yes, ma’am, thank you!” screeched Sweet William.

“I’m Sweet William’s partner,” said Steve.

“I’ll help,” said Tom Walthall, “if you don’t ask me to do too much.”

“So will I,” said Tom Mallett.

“I’ll help when pa can spare me,” promised Joe Spencer.

“I will, if Baldie will,” said John Eppes, who never wished to do
anything without his brother Archibald.

“Oh! I’ll be in it with the others,” said Archie.

“Of course you will, David?” Anne appealed to the silent boy whose
voice she had expected to hear first.

“There’s my corn acre----” David began hesitatingly.

“Of course!” laughed Dick.

“That’s just it,” Anne said eagerly. “You’ve done such splendid work,
raising such fine corn and winning prizes. You know so much more than
the rest of us about working crops that--why, we need you dreadfully.”

David tried not to look pleased. “I’ll do what I can,” he agreed. “But
I just tell you, I’m not going to neglect my corn acre for anything;
that I’m not.”

“Of course not,” said Mrs. Wilson. “And you, Dick--you’ll help, of
course?”

“No; no, Cousin Agnes,” Dick answered positively. “I’m getting enough
garden work to last my lifetime. And besides, I’ve got something else
to do, if I ever get a chance at it.”

“What part of the garden are you going to give us, Cousin Agnes?” asked
David.

“Let’s go and look over the ground,” said Mrs. Wilson. “I’ve just had
it plowed and harrowed, ready for planting.”

She led the way to the big, old-fashioned garden. In front were beds
of hardy flowers, and arbors and summerhouses covered with roses and
jasmine and honeysuckle. Back of the flowers were vegetable beds and
rows of raspberries and gooseberries and fig bushes. And in a far
corner, hedged by boxwood and carpeted with blue-starred periwinkle,
rose the lichened marble slabs of the family burying-ground.

David, the star member of the county Corn Club, looked admiringly at
the fertile vegetable beds. “Gee!” he exclaimed. “I’d beat the record
if my corn acre was like this; it’s rich as cream.”

“It has been a garden more than a hundred years,” said Mrs. Wilson.
“Broad Acres was the first clearing in the wilderness where The Village
is now. Here, boys, I am going to give you this sunny southeast square.
Now, let’s see who are our gardeners. You’ll join, won’t you, Albert?”
she said kindly to Albert Smith, who stood uncomfortably apart from any
of the friendly groups.

“No. I can’t,” he said abruptly. Then he turned his head with a queer
little gesture as if he were listening to hear how his speech sounded.
He added confusedly: “My uncle needs me to come home. I came to ask the
arithmetic page lesson.”

Mrs. Wilson indicated the page and then, as he slipped away, she turned
to the other boys. All except Dick Osborne enrolled as members of The
Village War-Garden Club. Meanwhile, the girls were whispering together,
and Patsy became their spokeswoman.

“Cousin Agnes,” she said, “we want to war-garden, too.”

“Y-yes, mother,” said Ruth. “We’ve been having flower gardens; why
c-can’t we raise real things, beans and potatoes?”

“You can; of course you can,” said her mother.

There was a howl from the boys.

“We don’t want girls bothering around,” said Archie. “Let them stay in
the house and sew.”

“They’ve got their Red Cross stuff,” said Steve. “That’s enough for
them.”

“We girls have Red Cross work in Washington, and we do war gardening,
too. And who suggested this garden, I’d like to know?” Anne asked.

“That’s all right; suggest,” said Joe. “Girls are good at talking; but
we don’t want them around in our way when we are working.”

There was a clamor of indignation from the girls.

“Boys! Girls!” Mrs. Wilson said in her schoolroom voice. In the silence
that it brought, she went on: “Of course the girls may have a garden,
if they wish. I’ll give them the strip of land by the rose garden.”

But the girls scornfully rejected this offer.

“We don’t want a little ribbon like that,” said Patsy. “We want a real
garden or none at all. We don’t care if you give us a bigger place
than the boys have--I’m sure we can manage it--but we don’t want an
inch less. There are more of us than there are of them; two more,
counting Anne, who’s coming back in June.”

“Give us the square by the one the b-b-boys have,” said Ruth.

“Oh, you greedy!” said David. “That would be taking nearly all of
Cousin Agnes’s garden, these two big squares.”

“Make the boys divide their square with us, Cousin Agnes,” suggested
Patsy.

“No! no! no!” the boys objected loudly.

“Who’s greedy now?” Patsy inquired scornfully.

“G-g-give us that s-southwest square, mother,” urged Ruth. “You and I
don’t need such a big garden. Let’s l-l-let the Belgians have it.”

“Well,” Mrs. Wilson agreed. She and Ruth did need the garden; it was
their main support; but in this time of world need, they must give not
only all they were able, but more and still more. She and Ruth would
get on, somehow. “You girls may have the square next to the boys,” she
said.

There were groans and cheers.

“We’ll see which do the best work. To-morrow morning let’s meet here
and start the planting. Bring hoes and rakes. I,” she added, “will
supply seeds.”

That meant another sacrifice. She and Ruth would stint themselves to
give for seed the peas and beans and potatoes they had stored for food.

On the way home, Dick and some of the others stopped at the post
office. It occupied a corner of Mr. Blair’s general merchandise shop
and it was, Black Mayo said, the Village club where young and old
gathered in the afternoons for mail and gossip.

When Dick went in, there were a dozen villagers and countrymen lounging
in the room, Mr. Blair was sorting the mail, and Black Mayo was perched
on the counter, reading the news in Mr. Blair’s paper the only daily
that came to The Village.

“The British are holding Vimy Ridge,” he said.

“What about Congress and army plans?” asked Red Mayo.

“Congress is still discussing, discussing. Why doesn’t it go ahead and
put a draft bill in shape? The President’s right; that’s the way to
raise an army.”

“Hey, Black Mayo! Here’s a letter for Polly,” said Mr. Blair. “And here
are two letters for Mr. Carl Schmidt.” He looked around.

The man who lived at the old Tolliver place came forward. “I guess they
are for me,” he said, “from somebody that did not know my name; it’s
Smith, good American Charley Smith.”

“Carl Schmidt; that’s a queer-sounding name. What is it?” asked Mr.
Jones, a stout, red-faced countryman.

“It is a German name,” Black Mayo said crisply.

“My father did from Germany come,” the man who called himself Smith
said hastily, darting an angry glance at Black Mayo and then looking
around without meeting any one’s eyes. “He was sensible, and he did
come to America. I was here born. I am an American citizen.”

“I’d hate to be one of them low-down Germans,” said Pete Walthall,
taking a chew of tobacco.

“_Ach!_ so would I,” Smith proclaimed loudly. “They are bad people.
Awful bad people.” He met defiantly Black Mayo’s quizzical eyes. “I got
no use for them German peoples.”

“Nobody has,” said Mr. Tavis.

“Oh, yes!” Black Mayo declared. “I have. One of my best friends is a
German, a fine fellow named Kuno Kleist that I spent months with, in
Mexico, helping him collect bugs and butterflies.”

“Why, Mr. Mayo!” said Pete. “You mean to say you don’t hate Germany?”

“I hate the Germany of Prussianism, power-mad Junkerism, the ‘blood and
iron’ of Frederick the Great and Bismarck and Kaiser William,” said
Black Mayo; “but I love the Germany of Goethe and Schiller and Luther
and Beethoven.”

“Germany is one!” Mr. Smith’s voice rang out. “It is one, I say.”

“So are we all, all one.” Black Mayo looked around with a sudden
winning smile. “Remember that first Christmas when German and British
soldiers came out of the trenches to exchange food and to talk
together. ‘You are of the same religion as we, and to-day is the Day of
Peace,’ a German said to a Scottish officer. And those men had to be
transferred to other parts of the line; they were enemies no longer,
but friends; they could not fight one another.

“Facts come out now and then that show the difference in spirit between
people and war lords. A German paper recently announced that the people
of a certain town had been jailed for improper conduct to prisoners
and their names were printed, to make their shame known to coming
generations.

“An American consul investigated the case. He found that a trainload of
Canadian prisoners had been sidetracked in the little town, and the
citizens had found out they were thirsty and starving; so they brought
food and drink. This was the crime for which they were imprisoned and
held up to shame!

“Oh! the war lords are trying to carry out their policy of
frightfulness. But they have studied history to little purpose if
they think Edith Cavell and the _Lusitania_ victims and the murdered
Belgians and the tortured prisoners are dead.”

“What do you mean, Cousin Mayo,” asked Dick.

“Are the Greeks of Thermopylæ dead? Or Roland and King Arthur, who
perhaps never lived?” Leaving Dick to make his own explanation, Mr.
Osborne turned to Mr. Blair. “Will, give me two pounds of nails,
please. I must be going.”

“Going!” said Mr. Blair, in surprise. It was an unwritten law that when
a man came to the post office he was to loaf there until night drove
him home.

“I’m busy making a new pigeon cote.”

“So you’ve gone back to the amusement of your boyhood, eh?” said Mr.
Blair, as he weighed the nails.

There had always been pigeons at Larkland, Black Mayo Osborne’s home.
When the house was built, the master, the first Osborne in Virginia,
erected a dovecote and stocked it with birds from the family home in
England. There they had been ever since. Sometimes they were carefully
bred; sometimes they were neglected; but always they were there,
flying, cooing, nesting in the quiet old country place.

As a boy, Black Mayo took great interest in raising and training them.
And this spring he had sent to a famous breeder for new stock and had
begun again to train carrier pigeons.

He answered Mr. Blair with a smile and a nod, and started out. “Hey,
Dickon!” he said. “It’s a long time since you came to see the pigeons.
Have you lost interest in them?”

“No; no, sir,” answered Dick, looking embarrassed. “I--I--that I
haven’t.”

“Richard is--h’m!--keeping bounds this month,” Red Mayo said austerely.
“He diso----”

“I understand.” Black Mayo spared Dick a public explanation. “Well,
come when you can. I’ll bring you one of my young birds to-morrow, to
turn loose for a trial flight.”

“Oh, thank you, Cousin Mayo!”

Mr. Smith sidled to the door and looked after Mr. Osborne, with a
malignant scowl.

“He, the one you call ‘Black Mayo,’ is--isn’t he queer?” he said to
Jake Andrews and Mac Hight, who were sitting on the porch.

“What do you mean?” asked Jake Andrews.

“He takes up for the Germans; says they are such good, kind people and
he loves them. It sounds to me strange to hear a man call himself now a
friend of the German peoples.”

“Shucks! Black Mayo ain’t said that; is he, Mr. Tavis?” Jake appealed
to the old man who now came shuffling out on the porch.

“Yes, he did,” said Mr. Tavis. “He explained at it somehow; but he
certainly said he loved them Germans that are tearing the world to
pieces over yonder.”

“And here, too,” said Jake. “Ain’t they been blowing up railroad
bridges, and factories, and public buildings? Why, they’ve got soldiers
guarding the warehouses at South City; near us as that!”

“That’s what South City gets for being on the railroad where all sorts
of folks go traipsing up and down,” said Mr. Tavis. “I stand to what
I’ve always said, I’m glad the railroad don’t come a-nigh The Village.”

“It’s good that Mr. Osborne so talks here where you permit him what he
pleases to say,” said Mr. Smith. “In New York State a man for that talk
would be arrested and punished.”

“Shucks!” said Mr. Tavis. “Black Mayo didn’t mean no harm. He always
had a funny way of talking.”

“You heard him say he loves the Germans; not so?” insisted Mr. Smith.

“Well, yes; he certainly said that,” admitted Mr. Tavis again.

“H-m-m! That’s mighty curious talk,” said Jake.




CHAPTER V


The next morning the young folks gathered at Broad Acres. All the
school children were there except Albert Smith and Dick Osborne; and
Dick, poor boy, was toiling sullenly and alone in the garden at home.

The young war gardeners became so interested in the task they had set
themselves that they returned to it in the afternoon, and there Black
Mayo found them when he came to bring Mrs. Wilson some tomato plants.

“What is this, Agnes? a Chatterbox Club?” he inquired, setting a basket
carefully in a shaded place. “From the noise I heard at a distance, I
thought crows or blue jays might be holding a caucus in your garden.”

The young folks were duly indignant at the slander, and asserted that
their hands--most of them, anyway, and--well, most of the time--were
going as fast as their tongues.

“Come and see what we are doing,” invited Patsy. “Here are our
potatoes; we are giving half of our garden to them. Isn’t the soil
fine, and aren’t the rows pretty and even? Cousin Agnes showed us how
to lay them off, by a string tied to sticks at the ends of the row.”

“I wish the potatoes would hurry and come up,” said Sweet William, “so
I can get the bugs off them.”

“Hey, old scout!” said Black Mayo. “Are you in it, too?”

“Course I am,” was the complacent answer. “I was the first to join.
Wasn’t I, Cousin Agnes? I reckon I’ve walked ten miles--well, I know
I’ve walked a mile--to-day, carrying buckets of potatoes to the
children to plant. Didn’t I, Cousin Agnes?”

“You’ve been helping, dear. We couldn’t get on without you. Nothing in
The Village could get on without our Sweet William,” said Mrs. Wilson,
kissing him.

He accepted the caress soberly and then said with a little frown: “I
reckon I’m ’most too big for ladies to kiss.”

“Ah, Billy boy, you’ll change your mind in a few years,” laughed Black
Mayo. “What’s that bag-of-bonesy thing at your heels?”

“He’s my dog; he’s Scalawag,” the youngster explained with dignity.

“A dog, eh? A poor excuse for a dog! Where’d you get it?”

“I didn’t get him. He came and adopted me,” explained Sweet William.
“He’s a mighty good dog. See! He’s watching me like he wants to help.”

“Cousin Mayo, look at the bean rows I am laying off,” called Patsy.

“Really and truly, Cousin Mayo,” said Anne, “don’t you think it’s good
for us to have a garden?”

“Truly and really, my dear,” he said, “I think it’s splendid. You are
helping--and how much the willing, diligent children all over the
land can help!--in America’s work of saving the world from starving.
The fighters can’t farm, so we must feed the armies; and we have the
people of France and Belgium on our hearts and hands; and there are the
U-boats--we must have food enough to send another shipload for every
one they sink. It’s a big job.”

“We gardeners will do our part. I’m going to help when I come back in
June,” said Anne.

“She’s helping while she’s away, Cousin Mayo,” said Patsy. “She
suggested our having a garden. And her Happy Acres, all except the
flower part, is to be put in corn. Our Canning Club is going to can
corn and butterbeans and tomatoes together, to make Brunswick stew.
Cousin Agnes says we can surely sell all we put up.”

“The girls think pie of their old Canning Club,” said David, jealously.
“We boys are doing real work in our Corn Club, and we are going to have
a real garden; not dawdle around, like a parcel of girls.”

“Come, come!” chided Mr. Osborne. “You are working for the same cause.
You are in friendly camps, not hostile ones. By the way, what are their
names?”

“Names? They haven’t any,” said Patsy.

“Pshaw! They must have names; of course they must. Camp Feed Friend,
isn’t that a good name for yours, Patsy? And the boys’ plot can be Camp
Fight Foe.”

“All right,” said David; then he laughed. “Maybe the girls will raise
enough to feed Friend Humming Bird!”

“Here, my boy!” said Mr. Osborne. “It isn’t a sign of wisdom or
experience to be scornful of girls and women. You may do better work
than the girls; and then again you may not. Time will prove. Suppose
you keep a record of your work and have a competitive exhibition of
garden products this autumn. I’ll give a prize, the silver cup I cut my
teeth on, to the best gardeners.”

“Fine!” said Steve. “That cup is as good as ours.”

  “‘There’s many a slip
  ’Twixt cup and lip,’”

Patsy reminded him, with a saucy tilt of her chin.

Mr. Osborne laughed. “Well, while I loaf here, my work’s getting no
forwarder. I must go home. By the way, Agnes, I have two or three
bushels of potatoes for you that I’ll send----”

“But, Mayo, you can’t spare----”

“Neither could you,” he said, looking at the war-garden rows. “G’by!
Oh, I was forgetting the pigeon I brought Dick.” He picked up his
basket. “Poor hungry bird!”

“Hungry? Let me feed it,” said Mrs. Wilson. “Here are a few peas left
in my seed box.”

“Oh, no! no, thank you,” he answered. “It is a racing pigeon that I’m
beginning to train. It must start off hungry, so it will fly home to be
fed.”

“Let me see it, Cousin Mayo; please let me take it in my hands,” said
Anne. She cuddled the dove against her cheek. “What a pretty, gentle
bird it is! The emblem of peace, isn’t it? Oh, what a shame it seems to
send it from this quiet, sweet place to those terrible battlefields!”

Mr. Osborne put one caressing hand on the bird and the other on Anne’s
head.

“These God’s dear creatures bear messages of help and rescue through
the battle cloud; they soar above and beyond it, and their wings catch
the eternal sunshine. Ah! our doves of war are still--are more than
ever--the birds of peace. For this war isn’t just a fight for territory
and undisturbed sea ways; it is a war for freedom and human rights, and
so for true and lasting peace. Agnes,” he turned to Mrs. Wilson, “have
you given our young folks the President’s message?”

“Not yet,” she answered.

“Not yet!” he repeated reproachfully. “And already it is being read in
French schools. It is a part of the history of our times, of all time;
it’s like the Declaration of Independence, but wider, higher, grander.”

“I’m going to read it to my history class,” said Mrs. Wilson.

“To every one of these young folks, from primer babies up, and
now,” Black Mayo said impetuously. “Get the paper. Let’s sit in
the summerhouse here and fancy it’s the Capitol and this is the
history-making night of April 2d.

“Here we are, waiting for the President. He’s coming. The throngs on
the streets are cheering him at every step. The floor of the House is
crowded,--its own members, senators, Cabinet officers, judges of the
Supreme Court, representatives of the Allied nations. The galleries,
too, are crowded; people waited at the doors for hours for the precious
privilege of a seat.

“The President rises, solemn and resolute with a great duty. He stands
there before the House, before the world for all time. He is America
speaking. He gives the message that devotes a hundred million people to
war for American rights and world freedom.

“It is done. He turns to go. And now, ah! now statesmen are not
Democrats, not Republicans; they are only patriots. Men who have stood
with the President, men who have stood against him, throng shoulder to
shoulder to clasp his hand and pledge themselves to support him in this
sacred cause. Only the ‘little group of willful men’ stands shamefully
apart.

“Here are the words that expressed and inspired the soul of America.”

And then Mayo Osborne read the President’s war message.

“‘The wrongs against which we now array ourselves are no common wrongs;
they cut to the very roots of human life....

“‘We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted
that the same standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong
done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are
observed among the individual citizens of civilized states....

“‘The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted
upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish
ends to serve. We desire no conquests, no dominion. We seek no
indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices
we shall freely make....

“‘The right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the
things which we have always carried nearest our hearts--for democracy,
for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their
own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a
universal dominion of right by such a concert of free people as shall
bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last
free.

“‘To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything
that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those
who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend
her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and
happiness and the peace which she has treasured.

“‘God helping her, she can do no other.’”

There was a minute of silence at the end.

With eyes shining through tears, Mrs. Wilson turned to her daughter.

“Oh, Ruth, Ruth!” she said. “If only you were a boy in khaki, and I at
your side!”

“Oh, mother! I w-w-wish I were!” cried Ruth.

“It’s wonderful!” Black Mayo tapped the paper with a thoughtful finger.
“He Americanizes the war, and does it by putting aside everything for
which the ‘land of dollars’ is supposed to stand and upholding our old
high ideals. No indemnity, no conquests. The _Lusitania_ was an insult
to our flag; more than that, it was a dishonor to humanity.”

“He starts us on a high-going road,” said Mrs. Wilson.

“Please,” broke in David, “let’s finish planting our corn before dark.”

“Righto, boy!” exclaimed Black Mayo, jumping up. “And my plow’s
standing still. Geminy! how time flies!”

He hurried away and the war gardeners went back to work.

“Will you look who’s coming?” Patsy exclaimed presently, glancing
toward the gate. “Jeff Spencer and Will Eppes!”

Mrs. Wilson hastened to meet the visitors who had been her pupils from
A B C days till they went to university and engineering corps.

“Why, Jeff! I didn’t know you were at home!” she said, shaking hands
with the boy in front, a pleasant-looking, round-faced fellow, so fat
that he resembled a well-stuffed pincushion.

“I--I am not at the University any longer, Miss Agnes,” he said soberly.

“Not at the University!” She looked at him in dismay. He had always
been a mischievous chap, and she had had her doubts and fears about his
college course, but gradually these had subsided. Now he was in his
senior year; and here he was back home. What scrape had he got into?

Jeff’s light-blue eyes were twinkling, and now he laughed till his
fair, freckled face reddened to the roots of his sandy hair.

“I always could get a rise out of you, Miss Agnes!” he said. “Here you
are wondering what I’ve done to get sent away from the University, just
as mother did. And it never occurred to you that I’ve left of my own
free will.” A new light came into the bright eyes. “I’ve enlisted. And,
gee! won’t a uniform be full of me!”

“Enlisted!” she echoed. “But, Jeff, your mother--she always said she
could never consent to----”

“Oh, she’s a trump, the ace of trumps! Of course she hates war. The War
took so many of her people--her father and both her uncles--and all the
things. She knows what war is. But when I put it up to her, she said
‘Go!’ Of course I’d have had to do it anyway. I couldn’t look myself in
the face in a mirror if I sat safe at home and let others risk their
lives to make the world a decent place for me to live in. So I’ve come
to say good-by to you who”--he returned to his waggish tone--“put me up
to going.”

“I?” She was amazed. “Why, Jeff, I’ve not seen you even to say
‘how-dye-do’ since war was declared.”

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking about lately. It was the way you taught us
history; not Jack’s book that was so dry every time we turned a page it
raised dust, but in spite of it you made us know what America stands
for, the things for which a man ought to be willing and glad to risk
his life. Grandmother says”--he grinned--“I’m fighting for Confederate
principles, the right of self-government. Isn’t she a darling, red-hot
old Southerner?”

“And I’m going, too, Cousin Agnes,” said William Eppes. “I didn’t know
it till yesterday; but father knew it.”

“Your father knew it?” she repeated.

“Yes’m. He’d been might quiet lately, and at last he came out with,
‘there never had been an American war without an Eppes in it, and here
are the two of us, and I can take my choice; but he hoped I’d stay at
home and let him go, being a Spanish-American vet.’ I asked him if
he knew what a whopper he was telling. Why, he’d have dropped in his
tracks if I had showed the white feather and said I wasn’t willing to
go. But I just hadn’t thought of it. It didn’t take me two secs to
decide. Of course I’m going.”

“And so you boys are joining the army; going to France to fight.”

It seemed but yesterday since they were little fellows in her primer
class. And now they were going, with the bodies and hearts of men, to
do men’s work in the world. Through the mist in her eyes she had a
vision: New pages of the history book opened, heroes walked out, took
form and life; lo! they were her own schoolboys--shy Fayett Mallett,
mischievous Jeff Spencer, slow William Eppes--and others, others would
come. Why, here were the youngsters, even little Sweet William, putting
aside play to do their part.

“Oh, goody! goody!” Sweet William was saying now, in his high, eager
little voice. “We’ve got soldiers, our own soldiers, to send things
to. Come on, Jeff; you and Will, look at our gardens.”

And then half a dozen, talking at once, explained about Camp Fight Foe
and Camp Feed Friend.

“I’m surely glad to see these gardens,” said Jeff. “I always was a
hearty eater, and my ‘stomach for fighting’ needs to be a full one.
We’re going to claim the best food we see over there, aren’t we, Bill?
biggest potatoes and sweetest beans, for I know they’ll come from The
Village straight to us.”

“We’ll think of you when the weather gets warm, and we’ll work hard and
not loaf on the job,” said Alice Blair.

“Thank you,” said William. “It seems a shame for you to tan your face
and blister your hands--for us.”

“I like to do it--for you,” said Alice; and then she blushed.

“I should think you’d be going to Fort Myer, Jeff,” said David.

“Well, I did think about the O. T. C.,” answered Jeff; “but I felt
sorry for those poor officers. It seemed to me they need a few privates
under them; so I decided to be in the ranks. And I’m going to try to
get with Northern boys.”

“Jeff Spencer! Why----”

“So I can do missionary work,” he explained. “Those Harvard chaps I
met on our last game--bully fellows they were!--thought the old United
States began in 1620 on Plymouth Rock. I broke to ’em the news about
1607 and Jamestown,--that before their _Mayflower_ sailed, Virginia was
here, with a House of Burgesses standing for freemen’s rights, just as
we’re standing to-day. Hurrah for Jamestown and Woodrow Wilson!”

The enthusiasm excited by the President’s message and the volunteers
extended to the smallest small boys. For weeks they had been carrying
on a war play on their way home from school. Now the game was blocked.
The boys who had composed the kaiser’s forces refused to be Germans;
they were Americans.

At last, after a whispered consultation with Jeff Spencer, Joe Eppes
said with a grin: “Oh, wait a minute. I’ll be the Germans one more
time; I’ll be them all, kaiser and generals and army.”

He ran home and soon came back, wearing a German helmet made of an old
derby hat with a tin oil can fastened on top of it.

He did the goosestep backward down the hill, shouting, “On! on! on!
straight to Paris!” At Tinkling Water, he swaggered on the foot log
and tumbled, with a mighty splash, into the water, to the huge delight
of the other children who loudly applauded the ignominious end of the
German forces.




CHAPTER VI


The first Saturday afternoon in May found a busy group of ladies and
girls in the big parlor at Broad Acres which Mrs. Wilson had given up
to Red Cross work.

Saturday was usually sacred to needle and broom and cookstove, in
preparation for the quiet, strictly kept Presbyterian Sunday; but
to-day was an exception. A Red Cross box was to be sent off next week,
and everything else was put aside to get it ready.

Mrs. Wilson was cutting out hospital shirts.

“This finishes our last piece of cloth,” she said regretfully. “I do
wish we had some money.”

There was an awkward silence. Money had to be mentioned sometimes
in a shop--asking Mr. Blair the price of shoes and umbrellas, in an
apologetic tone. But to wish for it, in public and aloud! No one had
ever before heard a Village lady do such a thing.

Miss Fanny Morrison, who had charge of the work, broke the embarrassing
silence. “These shirts ain’t ready to pack,” she said with a frown, as
she pushed aside a bundle she had just opened. “I’ve got to rip ’em
and do ’em over. Every seam is crooked or puckered.”

“If you would tell whoever did them----” began Mrs. Blair.

“Course I can’t tell her,” said the seamstress, who was supposed to
have a tongue as sharp as her needle. “It’s Mrs. Tavis. Ain’t she doing
her best, with her dim old eyes and trembly old hands? I can’t tell
her it would save me time for her to sit and twirl her thumbs, and let
me make the shirts instead of unmaking ’em and making ’em over. Well,
we’ve got a lot done. And you girls have certainly worked splendid. I
thought you-all--Alice and Ruth and Patsy and Mary Spencer and Essie
Walthall, the bunch of you--would just be a lot of trouble. But you’re
faithful and painstaking, and you do as good work as anybody.”

“We like to do it,” said Patsy, whose fingers were flying in the effort
to finish a sweater.

“This will be six pairs of socks I’ve knit,” said Alice Blair; “and I
thought I’d never get done that first pair!”

“You’ve learned how,” said her mother; then she chuckled: “Will says he
expects to wake up some night and find me knitting in my sleep!”

“Ah, dears!” Mrs. Spencer said in her gentle, quavering old voice.
“This takes me back to The War. We used to gather here, in this
very room, to knit socks and make bandages and tear linen sheets and
underwear into lint for our poor, dear, wounded soldiers.”

“Those awful days!” said Miss Fanny. “I certainly am thankful we are
not really in this war; in it with our men and our homes.”

“I am beginning to feel,” Mrs. Wilson said quietly, “that we _are_ in
it, and that this _is_ our war. There are Fayett and Jeff and William;
and the President’s war message; and now the draft.”

“It’s awful to think they may make our boys go to foreign parts to
fight,” groaned Mrs. Blair.

“They don’t seem to need much making,” remarked Mrs. Wilson.

“Europe doesn’t seem so far off as it used to,” said Mrs. Red Mayo
Osborne, who had locked herself out of the bookcase for a whole week.
“Who’d have thought, three years ago, we’d be giving up our Saturday
duties to make things to send to France and Belgium?”

“Europe isn’t so far off,” Mrs. Wilson replied. “The Germans gave us
two object lessons last year, to prove that--sending the _Deutschland_
and _U-53_ to our very harbors. And next thing we know, aircraft will
cross the ocean.”

The others laughed at the idea of such a thing.

“Well, there are other nearnesses,” said Mrs. Wilson. “The ties are
tightening among English-speaking people. Didn’t it thrill you to read
about the Stars and Stripes floating from the highest tower of the
Parliament buildings?--the first time a foreign flag was ever displayed
there.”

“I didn’t care so much about that.” Miss Fanny tossed up her chin; she
prided herself on being an “unreconstructed rebel” and kept a little
Confederate flag draped over a chromo of “Lee and his generals.” “But,”
she went on, “it did give me a queer feeling to read about that great
service the English had in St. Paul’s, to celebrate America’s joining
in the war. They sang ‘O God! our help in ages past,’ the very hymn we
were singing Sunday morning.”

“We people of the same tongue and blood, are getting together,” said
Mrs. Red Mayo.

“I don’t see anything good anywhere outside The Village” declared Mrs.
Walthall. “When my old man comes home and tells the cruel, wicked,
dreadful, terrible things”--Mrs. Walthall’s language was broken out
with adjectives like smallpox--“Will Blair reads in his paper--you feel
as if the world was upside down and something mean and awful might even
happen here!”

This was such a wild flight of fancy that every one laughed.

“Why, even during The War,” said Mrs. Spencer, “The War that we were
in, bodies of all the men and hearts of all the women and children,
even that, my dears, didn’t come to The Village, except the one raid
from Sherman’s army marching north that awful April.”

“I am glad we are shut up here in this safe, quiet little corner,” said
Mrs. Blair; “for, as Mrs. Walthall says, terrible things are happening.
Not only factories and munition plants destroyed in the North, but
railroad bridges and trestles right here in Virginia; a bridge near
Norfolk, a bridge that trains with troops and supplies and munitions
have to cross, was saturated with oil and set afire, by foreigners and
negroes.” Her voice dropped.

“There is our bridge----” began Mrs. Walthall.

She was interrupted by a little indignant stir. Mrs. Osborne said
crisply, “That bridge is just as safe as our own doorsteps.”

“They say,” Mrs. Walthall said, “that in New York poison has been put
in Red Cross bandages and dressings. I declare, I feel like we ought to
inspect our things and keep them locked up.”

“Nonsense, Anna!” exclaimed Mrs. Red Mayo. “Inspect things! And lock
them up! Who ever locks up anything in The Village? Why, we never lock
our outside doors, and in summer-time they stand wide open every night.”

“Strange and curious and terrible things are happening in other
places,” said Mrs. Walthall.

“In other places,” Mrs. Osborne repeated, dryly and emphatically.

The ladies were so absorbed in work and talk that they did not hear the
click of the front gate and the stumbling and stamping of feet coming
up the steps.

Susan opened the parlor door. “There’s some menfolks out here, Miss
Agnes,” she said to her mistress. “They say please’m they want to see
the Red Cross ladies.”

“To see me?” asked Mrs. Wilson.

“To see the Red Cross ladies; that’s what they say, Miss Agnes.”

“Ask them to come in,” said Mrs. Wilson.

Miss Fanny modestly hid a hospital shirt she was ripping and began to
knit a wristlet. Susan opened the door and ushered in nine old men.
They were feeble and broken with years, years not only of age but of
poverty and many hardships. They shuffled in, some on wooden legs, some
dragging paralyzed feet, some supporting rheumatic limbs with canes
and crutches. There were palsied arms and more than one empty sleeve.

The old fellows came in panting and wheezing from the exertion of
climbing the steps. At the door they took off their hats, baring bald
pates and straggling white locks, and stood in line.

Mrs. Wilson went forward swiftly and greeted them with gracious
courtesy, but they did not respond as friends and neighbors.

“We came on an errand to you Red Cross ladies,” Captain Anderson said
formally. “We”--he straightened his old shoulders--“are Confederate
veterans.”

At the words the ladies came to their feet, in respect and homage.

“Confederate veterans!” Captain Anderson repeated.

The bent, stiff forms stirred with a memory rather than a reality of
soldierly bearing; the bleared, dim old eyes brightened.

Their spokesman went on in his thin, quavering voice: “Ladies, fair
flowers of Virginia womanhood, we, the little remnant surviving of the
gallant defenders of our glorious Lost Cause, greet you. By the noble
generosity of The Village, funds have been raised for us to attend the
Reunion at Washington.

“It is a grand and glorious place to hold the Reunion. We are glad and
proud that--that our old comrades are to meet there--in the capital
they threatened six times by their dauntless and renowned valor, but
the streets of which they were never to tread in uniform and under
flag until now, after a half century of peace. They are to camp in the
very shadow of the Capitol of our glorious and reunited country, and
their battle-shattered and death-thinned ranks are to parade before the
President and be addressed by him--the first President since The War
born on the sacred soil of old Virginia, and the greatest President
since Washington. Three cheers for President Wilson!”

They were given with a will by the thin, cracked old voices.

“And--and----” stammered Captain Anderson.

“Gettysburg,” said old Mr. Tavis, in a stage whisper.

“Yes. Gettysburg; Gettysburg. That comes presently.” He mopped his brow
with a bandanna handkerchief. “A-ah! The President to address us. Yes,
yes! No more is needed to make it a grand and perfect occasion. But
more is to be added. The veterans in gray and their brethren in blue
are to make a pilgrimage to Gettysburg, that was the high-water mark
of our glorious and unsuccessful war; there is to be erected a monument
to our brave comrades, the heroes that fell on that bloody field. I
tell you, ladies, we are as glad and proud of it all as if we were
going to that Reunion ourselves.”

“But you are going!” cried Patsy.

“And now here’s war again--we don’t count that little skirmish with
Spain--but now the United States is in a real war, and South and North
and East and West are standing shoulder to shoulder together.

“This isn’t like The War we fought, a decent war of man against man
on the earth God gave them to fight over. This war--it’s like nothing
that ever was before in civilized times--robbing and burning towns by
the hundred, shooting down unarmed people in gangs, killing men with
poisonous gases like you would so many rats, sinking ships without
giving folks a chance for their lives, dropping bombs from airships on
homes and schools and hospitals.

“It makes our hearts sick for people to suffer such things; and it
makes our blood boil for people to do them. So we’ve talked it over
together, we old Confeds, and we’re all of one mind. We want to help
the women and children and the pieces of men left by this hellish
fighting. So here is the money, please, ma’am”--he held out a purse
to Mrs. Wilson--“that you-all so generously raised to send us to the
Reunion. We bring it to you as our contribution to the Red Cross.”

“Oh!” cried Patsy, “but you mustn’t miss it, the grandest of all
Reunions. You must go.”

He shook his head.

“This is what Marse Robert would do, if he was here to-day,” he said
simply, looking up now in his old age, as to a beacon, to the hero he
had adoringly followed in youth.

Mrs. Wilson controlled her voice and spoke: “We accept your offering;
don’t we?” She turned to her companions, and every head was bowed. “We
accept it in the noble spirit in which it is given, a spirit worthy of
your peerless leader. And we thank you from our hearts, in the name of
suffering humanity, to whose service it is consecrated.”

“But for you to give up the Reunion, the Reunion that you’ve looked
forward to!” mourned Miss Fanny.

The old men glanced at one another with a sort of shy glee. Then
Captain Anderson said: “That isn’t all. We are going to volunteer!
They’re going to have that draft and raise soldiers. Folks said at
first they’d just need American dollars and food and steel; but they’re
calling for soldiers now. And I tell you they’ll need American valor.
As long as war is war, they’ll want _men_. The young soldiers, the
drafted boys, will do their best. But we--well, we are going to write
to the President and tell him we are ready to go, and we seasoned old
soldiers will show those youngsters what fighting is!”

While the old heroes were making their offering, Dick Osborne was
creeping along the edge of a field near The Village, carrying in his
arms something bundled up in a newspaper. He scrambled through the
churchyard hedge and crept into the woodshed at the back of the church.
Now that its winter uses were over, no one else gave the shed a look or
a thought, and Dick had hidden here his mining tools and a bundle with
something white in it.

His garden task was off his hands at last, and he had planned to spend
to-day at the old mine; but Patsy had watched him keenly all the
morning, and this afternoon David and Steve were at work in a cornfield
near the road. Usually it would be easy enough to elude them, but not
to-day, burdened with the tools he had to carry. And anyway, he had
devised a plan to lend interest and excitement to the long, weary way
to the mine. In order to carry out his plan and avoid embarrassing
questions, he had obtained permission to spend the night with his
cousin at the mill.

Safe in the shed, he opened the package he had been carrying so
carefully and chuckled as he looked at its contents. It was a cow’s
skull!

“Uh, it’s a beauty!” he said, gazing admiringly at the bleached and
whitened old thing. “And when I fix it----!”

He proceeded to “fix it” by pasting green tissue paper over the
eyeholes and fastening his flashlight inside. Then he stood back and
looked at it. Ah, it was as fearful looking as he had hoped it would
be! He opened the other package and took out a sheet which he smeared
with phosphorus. It was getting dark now; late enough, Dick thought,
for him to venture out. He fastened the tools together with an old
chain and slung them over his shoulder; then he draped the sheet around
him and fastened the skull on his head. He crept out of the shed,
slipped around the corner of the church, and looked up and down the
road.

The coast was clear, and he took the road to Redville. For a mile he
had it to himself. Then he heard wheels and voices behind him. He
hesitated a minute, then prudently withdrew to the wayside. It might be
people who would accept him as a ghost; or it might not. Ah! It was
Mr. Spencer, trotting homeward from The Village, with his son Joe. Dick
crouched in the bushes.

“Wait a minute, pa,” said Joe. “There’s something queer in those
chinquapin bushes; something white and light looking. Let’s see what it
is.”

“Shuh! It’s just Gordan Jones’s old white cow,” replied Mr. Spencer.
“We haven’t time to stop. We’re late for supper already.”

When they were safely out of sight, Dick came back to the highway and
hurried along till he came to the Old Plank Road and the Big Woods.
From here on, there were only a few negro cabins, and he felt secure in
his ghostly array.

Isham Baskerfield’s cabin was dark and seemingly deserted, but the door
of the next house was open and from within came a bright light and
loud voices and laughter. Peter Jim Jones was having a “frolic.” The
guests were overflowing on the porch, and the barking of dogs and the
squealing of children mingled with the jovial voices of men and women.

As Dick stalked down the road toward the cabin, a dog began to bark
and then subsided into a whine. One of the negroes on the porch looked
around and caught a glimpse of the white, tall figure.

“Wh-what’s dat?” he stammered.

“What’s what?”

Dick took a few steps forward, clanking and rattling his chains, and
stood still in an open space, revealed and concealed by the light of a
fading young moon. His white drapery glimmered and gleamed with pale
phosphorescent light, and the green eyes in the ghastly old skull
glared like a demon’s. He uttered a sepulchral moan.

The negroes rushed pell-mell into the cabin, tumbling over one another.

“A ha’nt! a ha’nt! a ha’nt!”

Dick’s moan broke into a laugh, but that came to an abrupt end. For a
dozen dogs ran to investigate the strange appearance which, after all,
had a human scent. Dick in his flowing drapery stood for a moment at a
disadvantage. But he jerked up the sheet and gave a kick that sent one
cur yelping away. And then he laid about him so vigorously with his
bundle of tools that the dogs retreated, yelping and howling, while
their masters crouched indoors, shaking with terror.

Mightily amused and pleased with himself, Dick went on down the road.
He passed the hollow where Solomon Gabe’s cabin stood, and came to Mine
Creek. He paused to look at his gruesome image in the still, dark
water. Then he turned to follow the path to the mine.

As he turned, he faced a pile of logs, the ruins of the old
blacksmith’s hut. It was in shadow except for a ray of moonlight at
one side. In that streak of moonshine, there rose, as if the earth
had yawned and let forth a demon, a little, dark, bowed figure with a
black, evil face. It was horribly contorted, the eyes wide and staring,
the lips writhing in terror.

For a minute Dick and the fiendlike figure stood silent, face to face.
Then the boy stepped back. His foot caught on a root; he stumbled and,
with a wild gesture and an awful clanking of chains, fell flat on the
ground.

A screech quivered through the air, so sudden, so wild and terrified
that it seemed like a live, tormented thing. The dark form crashed
through the bushes and was gone.

Dick recovered himself in a minute. He scrambled to his feet and,
clutching his drapery, ran up the hill toward the old mine. He
hurriedly rid himself of his ghostly apparel, took out his flashlight,
and threw the skull and the tools into the mine hole. Then, with the
sheet bundled under his arm, he sped homeward. As he passed Peter Jim’s
cabin, he heard fervent prayers and pious groans; the “frolic” had
been turned into a prayer meeting.

Dick smiled ruefully. “I don’t reckon they were much worse scared than
I was,” he said to himself. “What--who on earth could that have been?”




CHAPTER VII


At last and at last, school was out! Patsy, free and merry as a bird,
wrote a long letter to Anne Lewis.

She begged Anne to hurry and come to The Village. There were so many
things to do! Camp Feed Friend was getting on famously; Anne would see
it was better than the boys’ Camp Fight Foe. Happy Acres was a bower
of roses; they would take their knitting to the summerhouse every day.
Anne remembered--of course she remembered--Dick’s dare and double dare
about their following him and finding out what he was doing? They must
certainly do that. He went off every few days, no one knew where. David
and Steve had tried to follow him, but Dick led them a chase--like an
old red fox, Cousin Mayo said--for miles and miles, and then back home.
It was certainly a _secret_, and she and Anne must find it out. And
Patsy ended as she began; begging Anne to hurry and come to The Village.

It was such an important letter that Patsy took it to the post office
herself to put it into Mr. Blair’s own hand, feeling that would make
it go more surely and safely than if she dropped it into the letter
box. She had to wait awhile, for he was talking to Mr. Spencer who had
come in just before her.

“We missed you at church yesterday, Joe,” said Mr. Blair. “What’s the
matter? You look seedy.”

“It’s malaria, I reckon,” Mr. Spencer said in a weak, listless voice.
“I stayed in bed yesterday, but I don’t feel much better to-day.”

“You ought not to have got up,” said Mr. Blair.

“I have to crawl around and do all the work I can. Crop’s in the grass,
Will. Give me two plow points and half a dozen bolts; I must start a
plow to-morrow. And I ought to be a dozen hoe hands at the same time.”

“Can’t you hire hands?”

Mr. Spencer shook his head. “I never saw labor so scarce and
unreliable. I counted on Jeff to help work the crop after I put it in;
now he’s in the army, you know.”

“You need him mighty bad at home.”

“Yes, but we must do without him; there’s where he ought to be. Well,
if I can’t get hands to chop my cotton this week, I’ll have to plow it
up and sow peas or something that I can raise without hoe work. Cotton
is like tobacco, a ‘gentleman crop’ that requires waiting on; it won’t
stand grass. My crop must be worked this week, or it’s lost.”

Patsy went home, frowning to herself as she thought how sick and
worried Mr. Spencer looked. At the dinner table that day, she told
about seeing him and what he had said about his cotton.

“Poor fellow!” said Mrs. Osborne. “I hope he can get hands. It would be
a serious thing for him to lose his crop.”

“I wish----” began Patsy.

“It would be a severe personal loss,” said Mr. Osborne, “and these
things are national calamities, too; cotton is one of the sinews of
war.”

“Sinews of war? What do you mean, Uncle Mayo?” asked David.

“Cotton is one of the great essentials of war,” explained Mr. Osborne.
“Its fiber is used for tents and soldiers’ uniforms and airplane
wings and automobile tires; its seed supplies food products; and
fiber and seed are used in making the high explosives of modern
warfare--guncotton, nitroglycerin, cordite. Cotton is one of the great
essentials of war.”

“What a lot of things it’s good for!” exclaimed Dick.

Patsy spoke again, and this time she did not say “I wish.” Instead, she
said: “I know we could help Mr. Spencer, and the war. Mother, father,
please let us do it. I’m sure Ruth and Alice and the other girls will
help; and maybe the boys. We can work rows of cotton as well as rows of
beans.”

Dick laughed. “H’m! I was just thinking we boys might get together and
help Mr. Spencer. But you girls!”

“If we all help, the twenty of us, it’ll not take long to chop over Mr.
Spencer’s cotton,” said David. He was more respectful of girls’ work,
since he was seeing their flourishing garden.

“Good!” cried Patsy, clapping her hands.

“My dear!” exclaimed Mrs. Osborne. “You don’t mean, Patsy,--are you
suggesting that you girls work a crop, like common field hands?”

“They’re very uncommon nowadays,” laughed Patsy. “That’s why Mr.
Spencer’s cotton is in the grass. Oh, mother dear! he’s so sick and
miserable looking! We would love to save his crop, and we can, if
you’ll let us. You heard what father said. It will be patriotic as well
as neighborly; with Jeff in the army, too! It’ll not be a bit harder
than gardening. Do say we may, mother.”

Finally it was agreed that the young folks might undertake the task.
As Patsy said, if they could work rows of vegetables in a garden, they
could work rows of cotton in a field. They would use light hoes, and
the soil was sandy and easy to work. But it was a big job to undertake,
those acres and acres of cotton!

Patsy and Dick and David went to see all the members of Camps Feed
Friend and Fight Foe, to enlist them in the little army of crop savers.
They were easily persuaded. It was harder to win over their parents.
The Malletts and Walthalls and Joneses were unwilling to let their
girls “do field work like niggers,” but they consented when they
learned that Alice Blair and Ruth Wilson and Patsy Osborne were in the
party; whatever the Blairs and Wilsons and Osbornes did was right and
proper.

On Tuesday morning, the volunteer workers, with hoes on their
shoulders, presented themselves to Mr. Spencer.

“Why--why,” he stammered, “it’s awfully kind of you. But I can’t let
you do it, you girls, you young ladies! If the boys will help chop my
cotton, and let me pay them----”

“Come on, Mr. Spencer, and do your talking while we work,” laughed
Patsy. “Come on! You may be our overseer and boss the job.”

Before the morning was half over, however, they deposed him. Why, he
wanted them to stop and rest every few minutes; at that rate, it would
be cotton-picking time before they finished chopping the crop! So they
elected David foreman.

Sweet William, as water boy, trotted back and forth to supply cool
drinks; and about the middle of the forenoon, he proudly invited the
workers to a surprise luncheon, where each had half a dozen delicious
little wild strawberries on a sycamore-leaf plate.

At noon they rested and ate their picnic dinner in the grove at the
spring. Evening found them healthily and happily tired, and they went
gladly back to work the next day. Thursday brought showers that gave
them a rest and made the freshly worked crop grow like magic. By noon
on Saturday, they finished hoeing the cotton and, for the time at
least, the crop was saved.

On Saturday afternoon, the young workpeople loafed like real farmers;
for, according to rural custom, that day was a sort of secular Sabbath
on which the men of the community rested from all their labors and
gathered sociably in the post office or on Court-house Green.

What wonderful things they had to talk about these days!

Mr. Blair read the account in his daily paper of the Confederate
Reunion at Washington and the President’s Arlington speech. The old
soldiers chuckled at hearing that foreigners, seeing the Stars and
Bars displayed alongside the Allies’ flags, asked wonderingly, “What
flag is that? What new nation has entered the war?” They straightened
their stooped old shoulders at the description of their ten thousand
comrades, in gray suits and broad hats, marching along the Avenue. And
they said, with a sigh, that the story was as good--almost--as being
there.

Then they rehearsed tales of their battles and marches and sieges, and
compared old feats with new.

Those brilliant Canadian drives were like Jackson’s charges. And like
one of his messages was Foch’s telegram to Joffre in the battle of the
Marne: “The enemy is attacking my flank; my rear is threatened; I am,
therefore, attacking in front.”

The heroic, hopeless, glorious Gallipoli campaign--ah! it was the
epitome of their War of Secession. As long as the world honors high
courage and stanch devotion to a desperate cause, it will remember
those men who, like the Franks in the old story of Roland, beat off
army after army and died, defeated by their own victories, “triumphing
over disaster and death.”

And the trench warfare----

“They learned that from us,” chuckled old Captain Anderson; “and iron
ships. Ah! we showed the world a thing or two.”

But never had they dreamed of trenches like these--stretching in long
lines from the Swiss mountains to the Belgian coast, bent in and out
by great attacks like the British at Neuve-Chapelle, the Germans at
Verdun, and both sides in the bloody battle of the Somme.

And there were strange, new modes of warfare--U-boats hiding underseas,
aircraft battling miles above the earth, tanks pushing forward and
cutting barbed wire like twine.

There were many things besides fighting to discuss.

America was making vast and speedy preparation for its part in the
World War.

Two weeks after war was declared, Congress without a dissenting voice
voted the largest war credit in the history of the world. And there was
a two-billion-dollar issue of Liberty Bonds. The government must be
trying to gather up all the money in the United States, so as to have
enough to carry on the war many years, so these country people said,
little dreaming of the billions and billions to be raised during the
next two years.

There was the draft, too, to discuss. The Selective Conscription
Bill had passed. “They” were having men from the ages of twenty-one
to thirty registered, and “they” were to pick and choose soldiers
from these registered men. It was wonderful how calmly this supreme
assertion of the government’s power was accepted. There was a little
opposition here and there--in the Virginia mountains, in Kansas and
Ohio, in New York City--but all plots were promptly and firmly quelled.

The Draft Act was accepted quietly by The Village. It had its
sentimental, passionate devotion to the past; but now that it was being
tested, it realized the living, sacred strength of the ties that bound
it to the Union.

It heard, with even more horror than of things “over there,” of
outrages at home--the German plot to get Mexico to declare war against
the United States, factories blown up, railroad bridges destroyed, food
poisoned; even here in Virginia, things were happening. “They” said
loyal citizens everywhere ought to be on the lookout.

“There’s one safe place in the world; that’s The Village,” said old Mr.
Tavis, who was sitting on the post office porch with Pete Walthall and
Jake Andrews and Mr. Smith.

Mr. Smith shook his head and smiled. “See who comes there,” he said.

“It’s Black Mayo,” Mr. Tavis said in a constrained tone.

Somehow, no one understood how or why, there had grown up a feeling of
constraint about Black Mayo whenever Mr. Smith was present.

“He’s got a basket,” commented Jake Andrews, “and I bet there are
pigeons in it. Yes, Mr. Smith, it does look foolish for a grown-up man
to be raising birds and carrying them about and playing with them.”

Dick Osborne, who came out of the post office just then, spoke up
indignantly. “Why, Mr. Andrews! Cousin Mayo’s training those pigeons
for war; they use them to carry messages.”

“Shucks!” Jake laughed deridingly.

“Well, they can fetch and carry, you know,” old Mr. Tavis said mildly.
“It’s in the Bible; Noah sent a dove out of the Ark and it came to him
in the evening with an olive leaf pluckt off.”

“That’s all right--in the Bible,” said Jake. “But we’re talking ’bout
our days. My daddy was in The War; I never heard him tell of using
pigeons. You were in The War yourself, Mr. Tavis. I ask you, is you
ever sent your news by a pigeon?”

Mr. Tavis had to confess that he never did.

“And Black Mayo says they can fly a thousand miles. Did you ever see a
pigeon fly a thousand miles, Mr. Tavis?”

“I never went a thousand miles myself,” Mr. Tavis answered.

“I never did neither,” said Jake; “and I don’t believe no pigeon ever
did.”

Black Mayo now came up the porch steps, greeting his neighbors
cordially.

“Hope your ‘rheumatiz’ is better, Mr. Tavis. Hey, Pete! Jake! How are
folks at home? and your crops? Ah, Dick! You are the boy I was looking
for. Here is the pigeon--a fine fellow he is--that I want you to take
this afternoon for a three- or four-mile flight.”

“Good! I was just starting,” said Dick. “What are you going to do with
that other bird, Cousin Mayo?”

“I’m going to send it to Richmond.”

“To Richmond! What for?” asked Jake Andrews.

“To be set free there and fly back here, as a part of its training.”

“Cousin Mayo----” began Dick.

But Pete Walthall interrupted. “To fly back here? You think it’ll come
all that ways?” He laughed incredulously.

“A hundred miles!” It was Black Mayo’s turn to laugh. “He’ll make it in
two or three hours. Why, man, I have had birds fly nine hundred miles,
and they have been known to go eighteen hundred, flying over forty
miles an hour.”

“Whew!” Jake Andrews whistled his unbelief, and Pete Walthall stared
and laughed.

“That beats the dove in the Ark,” Mr. Tavis said doubtingly.

Dick now got in his question. “Cousin Mayo, aren’t carrier pigeons
useful in war?”

“Certainly and indeed they are,” Mr. Osborne answered. Then, as Mr.
Tavis still looked doubtful, he gave an instance. “At Verdun a company
of Allied troops was cut off from the main line, and one man after
another, who tried to go back for help, was shot down. At last a basket
of pigeons was found beside a dead soldier. The birds were weak, almost
starved; but the men, as a desperate last chance, started them off
with notes fastened to their legs. Off they flew, through that curtain
of fire no man could pass. The message was delivered; forces came to
rescue the trapped soldiers--saved by those birds.”

Pete and Jake shook their heads incredulously.

Mr. Tavis pondered a while, and then said: “Well, they could carry that
note just as good as that other dove could carry the olive leaf for
Noah. _I_ am going to believe it, Mr. Mayo.”

“Of course,” said Black Mayo. “What’s the matter with you folks? Don’t
you always believe what I say? And why shouldn’t you?”

No one answered, and he went on into the post office, looking a little
puzzled.

Mr. Smith raised his eyebrows and glanced around with a disagreeable
smile. “Pe-cu-li-ar amusement; pe-cu-li-ar statements; he himself is
pe-cu-li-ar.” The drawled-out word was unfriendly and sinister.

“Black Mayo is all right; all right,” old Mr. Tavis said emphatically.

But Pete and Jake dropped their eyes. Black Mayo Osborne was a queer
fellow. They had known him all their lives. But did they really know
him? Why was he playing about with birds, like a schoolboy, while other
men were working their corn and cotton and tobacco? They looked askance
at him as he came out of the post office and went up The Street toward
The Roost.

He found Mrs. Osborne sitting on the porch with her eyes on a book
propped on the railing and her hands busily knitting a sweater.

“Howdy, Miranda! Where’s David?” he asked.

She looked up with a start. “Oh! it’s you, Mayo,” she said. “David
isn’t here; he’s at his corn acre, I suppose. But, Mayo, come in a
minute. There’s something I want to speak to you about. It’s Dick,” she
went on, as her cousin took off his broad-brimmed straw hat and settled
himself on the porch step.

“What about Dick?”

She hesitated a minute. “The other young folks are working splendidly
in their war garden.”

“Yes; that was a good suggestion of Anne’s. The food question is
serious,” said Black Mayo. “Did you ever know anything like the way
the price of wheat has climbed--and soared? Flour is fifteen dollars a
barrel, and it will go to twenty, if the government doesn’t get those
Food Bills through Congress and take control. I hope it will be a good
crop year. The young folks are doing a splendid work in their war
gardens.”

“And Dick not in it,” said Dick’s mother, frowning. “He goes off alone
somewhere every chance he gets. We’ve never interfered with their
little secrets; but this looks so selfish! We’ve thought of compelling
him to help, but----”

“But you’ll not. This gardening is free-will work.”

“Yes.” Mrs. Osborne agreed. “And we’ve always taken the stand that
after the children do their regular home work, their spare time is
their own. But, if Dick could be persuaded, influenced----” She looked
hopefully at Black Mayo. “You can do anything with him,” she said.
“Your word is law and gospel to all the Village young folks.”

“I refuse to be flattered into coercing Dick,” laughed Black Mayo. “If
you want him spoken to, my dear Miranda, speak to him yourself.” He
leaned back against the porch post, stretched out his long legs, and
then twisted them comfortably together. “Speak to your own erring boy!”

“I have done it,” she said. “I tried to shame him just now. I reminded
him how David and Patsy and even little Sweet William are working
to raise food for the hungry, suffering world. I told him about the
Richmond Boy Scouts who are going on farms, to save the potato crop.”

“And he refused to be shamed?”

“He cocked up his head, with that superior, self-satisfied air--oh, big
as he is, I want to slap him when he does that!--and said, ‘It’s a nice
little thing David and Patsy and the others are doing--the best they
can, I reckon. But I’d rather do a big thing; something to get a lot
of money, enough to buy a whole Liberty Bond at a whop.’ And before I
could get my wits together to answer that amazing foolishness, he said
he’d finished his tasks, hoed the beans, and brought in stove wood, and
couldn’t he go. And off he went. What would you do, Mayo?”

“I think I’d do nothing, Miranda,” her cousin replied. “A boy’s got
to have his adventures. And Dick’s a fellow that can stand a lot of
letting alone. If he’s on the wrong track, he’s got sense enough to
find it out and get on the right one. Don’t worry, Miranda. Will you
tell David he can get one of my plows any day he wants it? And don’t
you worry about Dick, Miranda,” he repeated, untwining his long legs
and getting up.

As he started down the walk, Mrs. Osborne put aside her work and went
out to the kitchen, a one-roomed cabin behind the Roost dwelling-rooms,
to speak to Emma.

The old woman was standing at the door, looking worried and grum.

“Why, Emma, you haven’t kindled your fire!” Mrs. Osborne exclaimed.

Emma started. “Naw’m. My shoe sole was floppin’. I had to go to de shop
to git it sewed on.”

“De shop” was a shed on The Back Way where shoes were cobbled by Lincum
Gabe, old Solomon Gabe’s son.

“I’m gwine to start de fire now.” Emma’s voice was mournful, and as
she rattled the stove lids, she shook her head and sighed dolefully.

“Is anything the matter? Are you sick?” Mrs. Osborne asked anxiously.

“Naw’m, I ain’t sick, Miss M’randa. I don’t reckon I is. I ain’t got
no out’ard pains. I’m just thinkin’ ’bout my boy, an’ wonderin’ who’ll
git him----” She went off into a confused mumble. Suddenly she turned
to her mistress and said earnestly: “If dey take de colored folks back
in slavery, I’ll belong to you; won’t I, Miss M’randa? Like my folks
always did to yore folks?”

“What nonsense are you talking, Emma?” Mrs. Osborne asked sharply. “No
one could put you back in slavery. No one wants to. We hate and abhor
it more than you do. Why, we wouldn’t have you back in slavery for
anything in the world. What put such a silly notion in your head?”

“I ain’t faultin’ you ’bout it, Miss M’randa. It’s dem folks off
yander,” said Emma, vaguely. “Dey done started it. Dey done numbered de
young bucks an’ dey’re goin’ to nomernate ’em to be slaves. Dey’re just
waitin’ for de orders. My boy Tom is one of ’em.”

Patsy, who had followed her mother, laughed and exclaimed: “Why Aunt
Emma! They numbered all the men, white and colored, from twenty-one to
thirty years old, and they are going to select soldiers from them, to
go and fight the Germans.”

“Emma, some due has told you a lie, a wicked, silly lie,” said Mrs.
Osborne. “There isn’t a word of truth in it. As Patsy says, the white
boys are going, too. Why, some of them have gone--Fayett Mallett and
Jeff Spencer and Will Eppes--boys that you know, and lots of others.
They need a great many soldiers, and they are going to select them from
that draft list.”

“Dey say as how dem white ones was took to be offiseers, an’ boss de
colored ones till dey git ’em handcuffed an’ back in slavery,” said
Emma, lowering her voice and glancing fearfully around as if she were
betraying secrets of state.

Mrs. Osborne laughed. “How silly! Who are ‘they’ that say such foolish
things?”

“Uh, it’s jest bein’ talked ’round,” Emma answered evasively.

“It sounds like propaganda,” said Mrs. Osborne, wrinkling her brow.

“Naw’m, ’tain’t no sort o’ gander. It’s just talk dat’s goin’ ’round.
You-all want some seconds batter-cakes, you say, honey?”

And Emma went bustling about her work, deaf to all further questions.




CHAPTER VIII


“Come on, Sweet William! Sweet William!” sang Patsy, catching her small
brother by the hand and dancing down the walk. “Let’s go to Broad Acres
for a look around. Alice! uh, Alice!” She called Alice Blair, who was
sitting in the swing, with her knitting. “Come and see how our gardens
are growing. We’ve been so busy being field hands for Mr. Spencer’s
cotton, I’ve not been to our garden for two whole days.”

“I ran by to look at it this morning,” said Alice. “I feel real
lonesome if I don’t see it every day.”

“So do I,” agreed Patsy. “I know now how David felt that first year he
had corn at Happy Acres, and he used to ‘go by’ to see it every time he
was sent to the store for the mail or a spool of thread.”

At the garden gate they paused and called Ruth. She came out on the
back porch, but stopped at the head of the steps.

“I’ve j-just come in,” she said. “I weeded a row of p-peas. Now I’m
helping mother. I’ll see you p-p-presently.”

The others went into the garden, admired the flourishing vegetables,
and pulled up a few stray weeds.

“Isn’t it beautorious?” exclaimed Patsy. “Things have just been leaping
and bounding along these two days.”

“Scrumptious!” agreed Alice.

“We-all boys have got the biggest potatoes,” said Sweet William,
wagging his head proudly.

“You-all boys! Will you look at those beans? What about them, Mr.
William Taliaferro Osborne?” demanded Patsy. “Anne Lewis had a lot to
say about their Washington gardens. They aren’t a bit better than this;
they can’t be. Just think! Anne is coming next week.”

“Goody, goody, goody!” cried Sweet William, clapping his hands.

As they went chattering back up the walk, Ruth came out to ask them to
stay to supper; her mother had a strawberry shortcake.

“I’ll go and ask----” “If mother knew----” began Patsy and Alice.

“If I had a piece of strawberry shortcake in my hand,” suggested Sweet
William, “I could go home and tell them you were invited. We are going
to have batter-cakes for supper; Emma makes good little batter-cakes
with lacy brown edges.”

Patsy was properly horrified at her small brother’s greediness, but
Mrs. Wilson laughed and sent him home, munching a generous slice of
shortcake.

After supper Mrs. Wilson and the girls went out on the front porch. It
was wide and long, set high on brick pillars, with a flight of steps
leading down to the long boxwood-bordered walk.

“There is a loose railing,” said Mrs. Wilson. “I must nail it in place
to-morrow.”

“You are as careful about mending and tending Broad Acres as you are
about Ruth’s darning and patching,” laughed Patsy.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Wilson. “It’s all in the family. Broad Acres is a dear
old part of the family.”

“How old is it, Cousin Agnes?”

“The house was built in 1762,” said Mrs. Wilson, with quiet pride. “It
was made strong, to be a fort, in case of Indian attacks. That is why
the shutters are so thick, with the little hinged middle pieces for
loopholes to fire from.”

“The Yankees came by here in The War,” said Ruth.

“In April, ’65,” agreed her mother. “The doors and shutters were
closed, with crape hanging from them, in mourning for the dead
Confederacy. Sherman’s men marched past, without disturbing the house,
thinking there was a corpse in it.”

“This very bench we’re s-s-sitting on is c-called the President’s
bench, because W-W-Washington sat here when he was v-visiting my
way-back-grandfather. Tell about that, mother,” said Ruth.

But an interruption came before Mrs. Wilson could begin the story, the
more loved because it was old and well known. The front gate clicked.
Patsy glanced toward it and, seeing a negro girl standing there,
exclaimed in surprise, “Why, there’s Lou Ellen!”

“Go to the side gate, Lou Ellen,” Mrs. Wilson said sharply. “What do
you mean by coming the front way?”

“I ain’t comin’ in,” said Lou Ellen, in a pert, high voice, as she
lounged on the gate. “I jest come to de store an’ stopped to leave you
a message, Miss Agnes. I was comin’ down de mill path an’ a man--I
reckon he was Van--hollered to me an’ said Mr. Black Mayo say for you
please’m to go an’ spen’ de night wid Miss Polly. He got to go ’way an’
she was feelin’ sort o’ puny, an’ he didn’t want to left her at home by
herse’f.”

“It’s strange he didn’t tell me when he was in The Village to-day,”
said Mrs. Wilson. “Van told you, you say?”

“It sounded like Van,” answered Lou Ellen. “He was in de woods an’ I
didn’t see him good.”

She tossed her head and strolled away.

“She’s a horrid thing!” said Ruth.

“How could she help it?” asked Alice. “Her mother, Louviny, is as
trifling as she can be, and so is her father, Lincum; and his father
is that horrid old Solomon Gabe that they call a trick doctor; all the
other darkies are afraid of him.”

“Darkies are queer things,” laughed Patsy. And then she told what Emma
had said about the draft.

“She isn’t the only one who believes that,” said Alice. “Unc’ Isham
told father he’d heard tell they are all going to be put back in
slavery; he said they always told him if the Democrats got strong in
power, they would make the darkies slaves again.”

“I wonder how they get these foolish notions into their heads?” said
Mrs. Wilson. “Well, chickens, Ruth and I must be starting to Larkland.”

“Let Ruth spend the night with me, Cousin Agnes,” entreated Patsy.

Mrs. Wilson consented, and the three girls walked with her as far as
the mill on her way to Larkland. Sweet William did not see them go,
and he was surprised to find the house dark and deserted when he came
running back, with Scalawag at his heels, for his sweater. He went,
with a little feeling of awe, down the somber boxwood walk--it was now
nearly dark--and it was a relief to hear Scalawag, who had run ahead of
him, give a sharp bark.

“Cats-s! cats-s!” hissed Sweet William urgingly.

Scalawag ran to a rose arbor at the back of the garden, but his furious
barking changed to a sudden yelp and whine; he ran back to his master.

“Old tabby cat must have scratched you,” said Sweet William. “Sic her!
sic her, Scalawag!”

But the dog, bristling and growling, kept at his master’s heels, as
if unwilling to encounter again whatever he had found in that dark,
secluded place. Sweet William groped around for his sweater and ran
home. Then he had his bath and went to bed. The older children followed
soon, as behooved those who must be at Sunday school at half past nine
o’clock and know a Psalm and the story of Gideon and be ready to answer
seven new questions in the Shorter Catechism.

The next morning, when the Osbornes were at breakfast, Steve came
running into the room, with a tragic face.

“Our gardens are ruined!” he cried.

“Oh, Steve! What do you mean?”

“Ruined?”

“They can’t be!”

“Ruined!” he repeated, with doleful emphasis. “I went by there, just
after breakfast, taking our cow to pasture. I saw the gate open----”

“Who left it open?” demanded David.

“And Miss Fanny Morrison’s old cow was there, gorging herself on our
corn and peas. Everything is grazed off; trampled down.”

With no more appetites for breakfast, the war gardeners ran to Broad
Acres, to see the wreck of their gardens.

“But who left the gate open?” David demanded sternly.

“We were the last ones here,” said Patsy; “and I know we shut it.”

“I was here about dark,” Sweet William confessed bravely; “I came for
my sweater. But I shut the gate and I fastened it. I had to climb up on
the garden fence to put the hook in the hole.”

“You didn’t put it in,” Patsy said severely. “You let it slip to the
side. And our gardens are ruined.”

“It’s my garden, too. And I did fasten the gate,” sobbed Sweet William.

He seemed so clearly the culprit that black looks and little pity were
being given him when Mrs. Wilson came up.

She, too, was horrified and distressed, but she said: “If Sweet William
is sure he fastened the gate, I am sure he fastened it. There is
something strange about this matter. Mayo did not send for me. He is
away, but Polly had told him she would have Chrissy sleep in the house.
She was surprised--but of course pleased--to see me; I would have come
back home, if it hadn’t been so late.”

“Could Lou Ellen have done it?” suggested Patsy. “She came with that
message; and she’s so pert and horrid.”

They examined the premises carefully. Near the rose arbor, at the back
of the garden, they found footprints, the track of a big, bare, flat
foot. Dick carefully made a copy of it on a piece of paper, and Mr.
Blair and Mr. Red Mayo Osborne went with the gardeners to Lincum’s
cabin on the Redville road, and confronted Lou Ellen. She stoutly
denied the charge, and when her foot was measured it proved to be much
smaller than the print. Evidently, then, she was not the intruder. Who
could it be?

That was a doleful Sabbath for the young villagers. They were thinking
more about their wrecked garden than their Sunday school lesson; the
sermon fell on deaf ears; and in the afternoon they stood mournfully
around the scene of their destroyed hopes.

But with the next morning came cheer and good counsel. Black Mayo,
having come back on an early train, stopped at the post office and was
told about the catastrophe and he went to view the garden.

“It is pretty bad, but it might be worse,” he said cheerily. “Some of
these things will come up from the roots. Some of the rows will have
to be plowed up and planted in things that will still have plenty of
growing time. The soil is in fine condition. Let’s get to work and make
a garden day of it. One of you boys go to Larkland, and get Rosinante
and a plow.”

Mr. Tavis came to help them, and so did Mr. Blair, who shut up the post
office, saying casually that any one who came for mail could look him
up or wait till he got back.

Several hours of diligent, intelligent toil worked wonders. The gardens
would be later, of course, but with a long growing season before them
that was no serious disadvantage; it would require more work, much more
work, but that they were all willing and glad to give. Why, Dick had
offered to help this morning, and he had been just as interested and
busy as any one else. Perhaps he would join the garden club now. But he
did not. When Mr. Osborne went home to dinner, Dick started off with
him, to get a pigeon for a trial flight.

Patsy looked after him and set her lips firmly. “Just you wait, young
man,” she promised him, “till next week when Anne Lewis comes. We’ll
show you what it means to dare and double dare us.”

For weeks Dick had been going off alone every few days, and coming back
late, tired and dirty and with a joyful air of mystery. The others were
too busy with gardening and Red Cross and Corn Club work to make any
real effort to find out where he went.

But he always watched to make sure that he was not followed, and he
never relaxed his precautions at the mine. He pulled his ladder in and
out, blurred his footprints, and stirred up the dead leaves so as not
to make a path. It would take, he proudly thought, a Sherlock Holmes or
a bloodhound to trace his course.

He had examined the main room without seeing any place that it seemed
worth while to work in the crude fashion possible to him. The most
promising places, he thought, were in the spurs of the lower tunnel,
where there was more clay than rock. If he dug a little farther--a few
inches or some feet--perhaps he would find silver that the miners had
missed.

He planned to extend each spur a certain distance; at first he said ten
feet, but a little work convinced him that was too far, so he decided
to go six feet--or five--or four. It was too discouraging to compute
how long it would take to go even four feet, at his snail-like rate of
progress. He could not use alone the drill and sledge hammer he had
brought from Mr. Mallett’s shop. So he had to content himself with
digging along a ledge, breaking off rough bits of rock and eagerly
examining them for silver.

He had inquired furtively about dynamite, but the law made it difficult
for him to get it--fortunately; for in his ignorant, inexperienced
hands there would probably have been an accident which might even have
cost him his life.

On this pleasant June afternoon, Dick went blithely with his Cousin
Mayo to Larkland. He nearly always went there on his way to the Old
Sterling Mine; it was only half a mile off the road; and the distance
to the mine seemed shorter to him when he had a carrier pigeon for
company.

Breeding and blood were telling in the Larkland pigeons. Mr. Osborne
showed Dick that afternoon a marked copy of _The Bird World_ telling,
with big headlines, about the thousand-mile flight of a young pigeon
trained by Mr. Mayo Osborne, of Virginia.

“I bet Snapshot will make a record, too,” said Dick, stroking the
plumage of a petted young bird.

“Dick,” said Mr. Osborne, suddenly, “I’m glad to have your help and
interest about these birds; I want you to learn all you can about
training them. Your Cousin Polly knows all there is to know about their
feeding and care. But when I go away----”

“Oh! you are going away?” interrupted Dick. “When, Cousin Mayo?”

“Early this fall, I hope; as soon as some business matters can be
arranged. I’ve been wanting to be in the army from the first.”

“I said you would go. It wasn’t true you wanted to stay at home playing
with birds.”

Mr. Osborne looked at Dick and started to ask a question, but it did
not seem worth while. So he merely said: “When I leave, I’m going to
ask your father to let you stay here at Larkland with your Cousin Polly
and help her with the doves, our doves of war.”

“Thank you, Cousin Mayo; I’ll do my best,” promised Dick.

Mr. Osborne wrote a note and fastened it to the bird’s leg--that was
always part of the ceremony; then he put it into a makeshift cage, an
old shoe box with holes punched in it, and gave it to Dick.

“Where are you going?” asked Mr. Osborne.

“To the mine--creek,” said Dick, almost telling his secret. It was hard
not to give a forthright answer to his cousin’s direct look.

“Why don’t you boys--do you?--ever go to the Old Sterling Mine?”

“Maybe so. Sometimes,” he mumbled.

Black Mayo did not notice the boy’s conscious air. He was watching his
pigeons fluttering and circling about, white against the woodland, dark
against the shining sky.

“I used to go there;” he said. “Ah! the hours and days I spent, seeking
its treasure. It was one of the great adventures of my boyhood.”

“Did you ever find any?--any silver in the mine, I mean,” Dick asked
eagerly.

His cousin gave a smiling negative.

“Do you suppose?--perhaps there isn’t any.” Dick’s voice dropped in
disappointment.

“I believe there is,” said Black Mayo. “Silver was found there by old
Mallett, not long after the Revolution. You’ve heard the tale handed
down in his family. Some years ago, when I was rummaging through old
court records, I found the account of his trial for ‘feloniously
making, uttering, and passing false and counterfeited Coin in the
likeness and similitude of Spanish milled Dollars of the value of six
shillings Current money of Virginia.’ That was in 1792.”

“But the mine was worked after that, wasn’t it?” asked Dick.

“Oh, yes! My grandfather Mayo, your great-grandfather, had it worked,
but it never paid. It doesn’t seem reasonable that the old blacksmith
spaded out all the silver that was there. There’s a tale that a
valuable vein was struck and lost. You might take a look around to-day,
and you and I might go prospecting some time,” he said, now looking
keenly at Dick.

The boy reddened to the roots of his hair. “Yes, sir,” he said. “It’s
time I was gone.”

Mayo Osborne looked after him with a whimsical smile. “Straight to the
Old Sterling Mine, I’ll wager my head!” he laughed.




CHAPTER IX


Anne Lewis had come, and that was a jubilee for her and her Village
cousins. She and Patsy and Alice and Ruth wanted to go to every place
at once and to tell in one breath everything that had happened since
they had parted in the spring.

There was Happy Acres to be visited, and its budding and blossoming
beauty to be welcomed. There was the mill, Larkland mill that was loved
almost as dearly as the miller, Mr. Giles Spotswood. There were all the
cousins at Larkland, Broad Acres, and The Roost. And there was the dear
outside host, Tavises and Morrisons and Walthalls, and the old servants
and their families, for whom Anne had gifts and greetings. The girls
made a round of visits, with their tongues going like bell clappers.

“And haven’t you found out yet where Dick is going--not yet?” Anne
asked Patsy, privately. “Oh, I’m so glad! It’ll be so much fun to
follow him up!”

“If we can. We’ll certainly do it, if we can,” said Patsy, with less
assurance. “Anne, even Dick has never kept a secret like this.”

“I don’t see why you haven’t found out, in all these weeks,” said Anne;
“though I’m glad you haven’t, so we can do it together.”

“Dick isn’t so easy to catch up with,” answered Patsy. “And then there
are our gardens. The boys won’t stop working for fear we’ll get ahead
of them, and we won’t stop for fear they’ll get ahead of us. No one has
time--and time it would take!--to follow Dick.”

“You must win out in the gardening; we must certainly beat those boys,”
said Anne. “I’m so glad I’m here to help.”

They were on their way now to inspect Camp Feed Friend and Camp Fight
Foe, that were thriving wonderfully after being replanted and reworked
ten days before. Black Mayo said Jack’s famous beanstalk must surely
have grown in the deep, fertile soil of Broad Acres garden; no other
place could produce such magic results.

Patsy and Anne found most of the war gardeners already at Broad Acres,
at work. Black Mayo had lent them Rosinante, and David was plowing
while the others were weeding and hoeing the rows of vegetables. Anne
and Patsy set to work, side by side.

“Don’t you think our garden is the better?” Patsy asked for the dozenth
time.

And for the dozenth time, Anne--partial judge!--answered emphatically:
“I certainly do. Your potatoes are taller than theirs. And your peas
are better; I’ve counted the pods on the biggest vines in both gardens.
It’s just splendid what you’ve done--all but Dick.”

“Oh!--Dick.” Whatever Patsy herself might say about Dick, she could
never bear to have others find fault with her twin brother. “He
helps Cousin Agnes in her garden. He would work here sometimes--real
often--but the boys call him ‘slacker’ because he won’t join them. He’s
working hard over his secret, whatever it is. He comes home so dirty!
And--well, Anne, I know it’s something big, from the way he acts.”

“We’ll find out what it is,” Anne said confidently.

“I hope so,” sighed Patsy.

“But now,” said Anne, “this garden is the most important thing. Oh!
it’s awful to think of all those people with nothing to eat except what
we send them across these thousands of miles of ocean.”

“We’ve been saving our flour and sugar for a long, long time; looks
like they might have enough to eat now,” Sweet William said, frowning.
“Oh! I did want them all to have enough, and leave me sugar for a
birthday cake. It’s such a so-long time since I’ve seen a real cake!”
He sighed. “I don’t reckon we’ll ever have another one; not till I get
old as Miss Fanny Morrison and don’t have any birthdays.”

“Father says conditions are terrible along the Hindenburg Line,” said
Alice. “Cousin Mayo, what is the Hindenburg Line?” she asked her cousin
who, having finished some errands in The Village, was waiting to take
Rosinante home.

He explained. “The first of this year, the Germans realized that they
could not repel Allied attacks in the position they then held. So in
March they drew back and entrenched themselves in northern France in a
position as strong as the nature of the country and their science could
make it; that is their ‘impregnable Hindenburg Line.’ The Allies began,
with the battle of the Aisne in April, the attacks they will continue
till that great Hindenburg Line is smashed.

“Well! The Huns laid waste the country that they left; robbed and
burned homes and villages in that rich farming country, and kidnapped
men and women and children and set them to work in Germany. And
they left behind wrecks of people in wrecks of homes, many of them
little fellows like Sweet William here, half starved and crippled and
shell-shocked.”

Anne put a comforting arm around Sweet William. “Don’t cry, dear,” she
said.

He stiffened his lips bravely. “I--I’m not crying,” he announced. “I--I
think I caught a cold. I’ve got a frog in my throat. I wish I could
find a lot of potato bugs! I want to work _hard_ to help all those poor
people.”

He set to work very diligently, but presently David called out: “You
Bill! You’re wearing out those potato plants, looking for the bugs you
caught yesterday. And every row I plow, you’re in my way.”

“I isn’t not moved since I got out your way the other time you told me
to,” complained Sweet William, stumbling over a furrow.

“Well, get out of the patch and stay out till I finish this plowing, if
you please,” said David, who was warm and tired and getting cross.

The little fellow turned away with injured dignity and went into
the back yard. He sat on the porch steps for a while, then he began
rummaging around. Presently he came back into the garden, with his arms
full of little sticks, and busied himself in a corner where the war
gardeners had a bed of radishes for work-day refreshment.

“What are you doing now?” Anne stopped to ask.

“Playing this is my garden. I’m building a fence ’round it,” explained
Sweet William.

“Phew! What a horrid smell! It smells like--why, I smell kerosene oil,”
said Anne, sniffing and frowning.

“I reckon it’s these little sticks,” he said. “They’re all smelly.”

“Where did you get them?” asked Anne.

“From under the back-porch steps.”

“That’s queer!” said Anne. “I wonder----”

“Come on, Anne, and let’s start our next rows at the same time, so we
can race--and talk,” called Patsy.

Anne went her way and forgot the little sticks that smelled of oil.

Sweet William put them aside presently and had a party--filling some
oyster shells with make-believe dainties and setting them out on a flat
stone.

Mrs. Mallett, who came to consult Mrs. Wilson about some Red Cross
work, paused to watch the youngster who was the Village pet.

“You are having a fine party, ain’t you?” she said.

“It’s a birthday party,” he said. “But I’m just having ash-cake. I
reckon Mr. Hoover wouldn’t want me to have fruit cake and pie. Mother
says he wants us to save everything we can, so as to feed our armies
and our Allies.”

“Bless your heart!” she said. “I wish the grown folks ’round here
would act that way. You know,” she said, turning to Mrs. Wilson, “those
Andrewses and Joneses and Walthalls aren’t making a mite of change in
the way they eat, for all the government tells them ‘food will win the
war’ and ‘if we waste at home, our boys over there will go hungry.’”

“I know. Food has become sacred; it means life,” said Mrs. Wilson. “It
is dreadful that some of our own people are so slow to realize the
situation and their duty. Miranda Osborne and I carried the government
pamphlets to the Andrewses and Joneses and Walthalls and talked to
them, but they listened as if their minds were shut and locked. They
think, as Gordan Jones said, those who raise wheat and corn and hogs
have a right to use all the flour and meal and meat they please.”

“A right! Who with a heart and conscience wants the right to use
victuals extravagant when other folks are starving? Well, I must go and
take this wool to the women that said they would knit.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Sweet William, scrambling to his feet. “I’d
rather go visiting with you than to stay here and play party by myself.”

Mrs. Mallett gladly accepted his company, and, with Scalawag at his
heels, he trotted along with her, to collect knitted garments and
dispense wool.

Suddenly Scalawag, usually a well-mannered dog that did not interfere
with people on the public road, ran at a negro boy, barking furiously.
The boy jerked up a stone, and Scalawag came back to Sweet William’s
heels, whimpering and growling. As soon as they were at a safe
distance, he again barked angrily.

“I never saw him do that way before,” said Sweet William; “never, but
that night in the garden.”

“Who was he barking at then?” asked Mrs. Mallett.

“I don’t know,” said Scalawag’s master; and then he told about his trip
to Broad Acres the night before the gardens were destroyed and about
the dog’s queer behavior.

“H’m!” Mrs. Mallett said thoughtfully. “Who was that boy we passed?”

“Kit, Lincum Gabe’s boy,” said Sweet William. “Scalawag’s met him a
hundred times, I reckon, and never noticed him before.”

“H’m!” Mrs. Mallett repeated. “Sweet William, you tell Mr. Black Mayo
how this dog acted to-day, and about that night. Some dogs have got a
lot of sense, and some are pure fools; they’re just like folks. Well,
here’s a place we’ve got to stop,” she said, frowning at the pea-green
gabled and turreted house that was the outward and visible sign of
Gordan Jones’s prosperity.

The door was wide open, and in response to Mrs. Mallett’s knock there
was a hearty “Come in!” She and Sweet William walked through the hall
and turned into the dining room where Mr. and Mrs. Jones were sitting
at the dinner table.

“O--oh!” Sweet William stared at the table. It was strangely unlike
what he was used to at home these days. Why, it was loaded with food,
vegetables swimming in sauces and gravies, two or three kinds of meat,
hot biscuits, cakes, and pies. “O-o-oh!” he said again.

“Howdy, folks!” called Mr. Jones, a stout man in shirt sleeves. “Come
in, come in, you-all, and set down to dinner.”

“Howdy, Mrs. Mallett,” said Mrs. Jones, getting up to greet the guests.
“And howdy, little man. It’s Mr. Red Mayo’s little boy, ain’t it?”

“Yes; it’s William, Sweet William Osborne,” said Mrs. Mallett, stiffly.
“I just come to bring you the wool you said----”

“Here, here!” interrupted Mr. Jones’s big voice. “Eat first and then
do your talking. We’ve got plenty victuals for you.” He laughed and
surveyed the table with pride. “Come and eat with us, Mrs. Mallett.
Come on, little boy, and set right here by me.”

“Oh, the little French and Belgians!” exclaimed Sweet William, whose
eyes had never moved from the table.

“No, thank you, Mr. Jones,” said Mrs. Mallett, drawing her lips into a
tight line. “Now, Mrs. Jones, this wool----”

“Aw, come along and set and eat,” urged Mr. Jones, hospitably. “I want
you to sample this old home-cured ham; and that’s prime good bacon with
the greens.”

The little woman’s face flushed and her eyes snapped. “Mr. Jones,” she
said, “them victuals would choke me.”

“Wh-what?” He gazed at her with blank astonishment.

“I can’t set down to a gorge like that,” she said. “I’d be thinking
’bout them hungry mouths over there.”

“Starving Belgians and French,” interjected Sweet William.

Mrs. Mallett hurried on: “Yes, them and our other Allies; they’ve got
no time to raise wheat and such; their farmers are fighting their war
and ours, and the women are working in munition factories and taking
the men’s places at home. And there are our boys--my boy--going over
there, depending on us at home to send them food. If we are lazy and
selfish and don’t raise it, or if we are greedy and selfish and use it
wasteful and extravagant, what’s to become of them?”

“Why, why”--Mr. Jones was bewildered--“I raised all that’s on this
table, ’cept a little sugar and such, that if I didn’t buy somebody
else would. I always was a good provider; we’re used to a good table,
and nobody’s got a right to ask me to live stinting,” he said, with
rising anger.

“They’ve got a right to ask me to give my son, my own flesh and blood,”
said Mrs. Mallett, with a fire of righteous wrath that paled Mr.
Jones’s flicker of temper. “And yet you think they haven’t got a right
to ask you to give up your hot biscuits and meat three times a day!
S’pose you _are_ used to being a good provider? Ain’t I used to going
to bed easy in mind about my boy Fayett--and any day I may hear he’s
dead.”

“They oughtn’t to have sent him, your boy,” mumbled Mr. Jones. “They’ve
got no business to send our men over there to fight, and maybe----”

“They’ve got all the right to send him to fight for his country. But
Fayett didn’t wait for any draft. He went of his free will--I’m glad
and proud of it--to fight for liberty. And if he dies, I want it to be
the Germans that kill him. I don’t want you, that have known him since
he was a curly-headed baby boy, to be the ones to help kill him.”

“Why, Mrs. Mallett!” Mrs. Jones said in a hurt, amazed voice. “We
wouldn’t harm a hair of his head; not for the world, we wouldn’t.”

“I’d do anything I could to bring him back safe home,” said Mr. Jones.

“That’s what you say,” the little woman cried passionately. “But words
don’t count. And you are doing your part to starve him. They can’t get
food over there, unless we send it to them. It’s being rationed out to
folks in France and Italy. The English ships that used to go to South
America to get wheat are busy taking over our soldiers and munitions
and food, food, food. And there’s just so-o much and all the world to
feed--the world and my soldier boy. If we use it wasteful, there won’t
be any to send. Yes, sir! I say your good dinner would choke me. I’d
feel I was helping to kill my own son. You may not mean it, but it’s
true that every time you set down to a meal like this you are helping
kill my son, beat our armies, make the Germans win.”

“I don’t want your cake, your pie,” sobbed Sweet William. “I’m hungry,
but I--I want to be hungry.”

Mrs. Jones pushed back her plate and sobbed with him. “I can’t swallow
a morsel,” she declared. “I can just see Fayett, like when he was a
little boy playing with my Tommy”--her own son who was dead--“when
they’d come in and say, ‘We’re hungry; give us a snack!’ I ain’t never
said ‘no’ to them.” She buried her tear-wet face in her apron.

Mr. Jones winked hard and cleared his throat loudly. “Come, come,
mother,” he said. “Don’t you cry. We hadn’t thought ’bout things like
she put ’em. I reckon you are right, Mrs. Mallett. Yes, you are! A man
that won’t work at home for them that’s fighting over there for him
ain’t much of a man. The world to feed--and Fayett! I’ll double the
crop of wheat I was going to put in, and I’ll--say, Mrs. Mallett, if
you won’t take a feed with me, won’t you and the little boy set and
have a bite?”

“That I will, thank you,” said Mrs. Mallett, smiling through tears. “I
didn’t mean to fault you too rough, Mr. Jones. But when I think ’bout
them things, it’s like I had a pot in me that was boiling over.”

“That’s all right,” answered Mr. Jones. “You put it strong to me; and
we’ll put it strong to other folks. We must see Jake Andrews and Pete
Walthall, and make ’em know what they’ve got to do. We won’t have men
here in our neighborhood that are so low-down and greedy and selfish
they won’t do their part. We’ll see to them! What’ll you have, Mrs.
Mallett? some corn bread and greens and a bit of bacon? Folks have
got to eat, you know, so they can work. Um, um! What’ll I do ’bout my
hounds?”

“Come now, Willie, you’ll have a cake and a piece of pie, being as
they’re here and got to be et,” said Mrs. Jones, bustling about to get
plates and chairs.

Sweet William gravely and wistfully considered the matter. “We don’t
have cakes at home,” he said. “But these cakes are already made--with
icing tops and raisins! I reckon it won’t hurt for me to eat one--maybe
two, to save them. The little Belgians couldn’t get this sugar anyway.”
He sighed, not altogether sad, and fell to with a will.




CHAPTER X


The war gardeners went home at noon, but they came back late in the
afternoon. When they finished the tasks they had set themselves, Mrs.
Wilson suggested that they take eggs and radishes and lettuce, and meal
to make ash-cakes, and have a picnic supper at Happy Acres; they might
find some berries to add to the feast, and the boys were always hoping
to catch fish in Tinkling Water, though they seldom did.

The plan was welcomed with enthusiasm, and they had a merry time and
came home in the twilight. Anne, who was to spend the night at Broad
Acres, sat on the porch with Mrs. Wilson and Ruth, knitting and talking.

“Wasn’t it dear of our old soldiers,” said Ruth, “to g-g-give up going
to the Reunion, and have just the little service and parade here, and
give their money to the Red Cross, to help in the war?”

Anne laughed. “Oh, Ruthie! You said ‘the war’ about this war,” she said.

“Well, why not?” Having used the word inadvertently, Ruth now defended
it. “There never was such a big war in the world. And we are in it; it
is our war; some Village b-boys are there and others are going. It is
The War, isn’t it, mother?”

“Yes,” her mother answered slowly. “This is The War. The other--we’ve
been living in its shine and shadow all these years--it is history now;
a war. Why, our old soldiers put in acts what none of us before have
put in words--that this is The War, our war.”

Presently the girls yawned and their fingers went more and more slowly
with their knitting. Mrs. Wilson said an early bed hour would be the
fitting end to their strenuous day. So they went upstairs, and Ruth
escorted Anne to a spacious guest chamber.

“This is the room W-Washington stayed in,” said Ruth.

“I love it,” said Anne, looking around. “Oh! I love Broad Acres. Don’t
you?”

Ruth laughed. “Love it? Why, it’s a part of us. The
way-back-grandfather that c-c-came from England built it like his home
there, and all our people since have lived here. It’s home.” Her voice
lingered and thrilled on the word. Then she threw her arms around Anne
and kissed her.

Anne had left her own old home early in her orphaned childhood, and
now lived, as an adopted daughter, with friends in Washington. She was
happy there and dearly loved; but Ruth, with her intense devotion to
home and family, was always distressed when she remembered that Anne
“didn’t belong to her own folks.”

“I w-wish you lived with us,” she said, kissing Anne, again and again.

“Then I wouldn’t have the fun of coming to see you,” her cousin
reminded her, returning the caresses.

“Sweet William says having you all the time would be like having
Christmas all the year.”

Anne laughed.

“Anne darling,” said Ruth, “I was g-going to stay with you to-night,
but mother has a headache and may want a hot-water bottle or something.
You’ll not mind my staying with her? We’ll be across the hall, at the
other end.”

“Oh! I’m used to staying alone,” said Anne. “My room at home is across
the hall from Aunt Sarah’s.”

Ruth went out and Anne undressed and climbed into the great bed. She
lay there, looking out into the soft summer night, listening to a
mocking bird’s joyous melody. There was a magnolia tree in blossom near
the front window and the night breeze wafted in the delicious odor of
the blossoms. How beautiful and peaceful it all was! Could anything be
lovelier than those great white magnolia blossoms, shining like moons
in the dark foliage? Blossom-moons--fragrant white moons--moons---- The
moons came nearer and nearer. And as they drew nearer, they changed.
They were no longer white and fragrant. They were red and hot. Why,
they were bombs, bombs that Germans were throwing. They exploded with a
great noise and blinding flame and thick, pungent, choking smoke.

“Whizz-bangs, that’s what they are,” Anne thought, recalling something
she had read about bombs that exploded time and time again, like
Chinese firecrackers.

She wanted to get away from them, but she could not. She was in the
thick of the battle.

Suddenly she sat up in bed and opened her eyes. The room was filled
with smoke and there was a glare and a roar around her. Were the
Germans here, attacking The Village? Then her senses awoke. The sounds
that she heard were not the bursting of bombs, but fire crackling and
voices shouting.

She sprang up and ran to the door. Smoke poured in, and through it she
saw leaping flames, a great column of fire rising from the stairway
between her and her cousin’s room.

“Cousin Agnes! Cousin Agnes! Ruth! oh, Ruth!” she called at the top of
her voice.

There was no answer. There was only the horrible roar of the mounting
flames. She slammed the door to shut out the noise which was more
terrifying than the smoke and the flames. She ran to a front window.
The yard was full of people, her friends and cousins, who seemed very
far away and strange, with their excited, anxious faces lighted by the
red glare of the conflagration.

Some one saw her as soon as she opened the shutter and raised a shout
of relief. “There she is! There’s Anne!”

“Anne, Anne! Oh, Anne!”

There was an agonized screech from old Emma. The words were lost in the
roar of the fire or unheeded in the excitement; but Dick knew afterward
that he heard her yell, “That old devil! he’s burnin’ up little Miss
Anne!”

For a minute Anne stood dazed and motionless at the window. But now the
fire had eaten through the door; the air was stifling with lurid smoke;
the roaring, crackling flames came nearer. She was gasping, choking.
She climbed on the window sill.

“Don’t jump! don’t jump! We’ll get you in a minute!” called Dick.

She stood still. It was a fearful distance; she might break her arm,
leg, neck; but--she moved restlessly--anything would be better than
being caught by those awful flames.

“Wait, Anne, wait!” called Mrs. Osborne. “Wait! They are bringing a
ladder.”

A group of men came around the corner of the house, dragging a ladder.
They raised it, but in their haste it was pushed too far to one side
and caught on the window blind. Anne clutched at a swaying rung.

“Stop, Anne! Steady, old girl, steady!”

Dick pushed past Mr. Mallett, went like a cat up the ladder, steadied
the upper end of it against the window sill, while Anne climbed down.

Explanations came by degrees, piecemeal, in ejaculations. When Mrs.
Wilson and Ruth awakened, the flames had made a wall across the hall
which they could not cross. They called and called Anne, but she did
not answer.

“Oh! that’s what I heard in my sleep!” exclaimed Anne. “I thought you
were the Germans.”

At last they had to shut the door as a temporary barrier to the fire.
When it blazed, they climbed on a trellis below one of the windows.
There they clung till help came.

Miss Fanny Morrison, who lived in the cottage next door, had awakened
at last and she ran out, screaming and beating at doors, and aroused
The Village.

As soon as Mrs. Wilson and Ruth and Anne were rescued, people set to
work to save the contents of the house. But the upper floor was cut off
by the burning of the staircase, and the fire had now made such headway
that they succeeded in getting only a few articles from the lower
rooms. The rapidly advancing flames drove them back and they stood, in
helpless, sorrowful groups, like watchers at a deathbed.

“Oh, my home! my home!” sobbed poor Mrs. Wilson.

Mrs. Osborne threw her arms around her. “Thank God, you and Anne and
Ruth are safe.”

“Yes, yes! Thank God for that. But my home, my precious home!”

“Go with Miranda, Agnes; go to The Roost,” urged Red Mayo. “Don’t
distress yourself staying here. We will put your things in the
schoolhouse; that’s safe, I’m sure.”

But the poor lady stood and watched, with fascinated horror, the flames
racing through the house and thrusting fierce, demonlike tongues out of
the windows.

“Stand back! out of the way!” shouted Red Mayo and Will Blair. The roof
had caught; there was a great burst of flame, burning shingles soared
through the air. Fortunately, it was a windless night and the Village
houses were far apart, in lawns and groves.

After that great upflare, the fire subsided. When the east wall toppled
and crashed down, there was another fierce spurt of flame. Then the
fire died down. And at last they all went sadly home.

In the gray morning, an old, bent, black negro man crept out of a shed
on The Back Way and looked with a curious mixture of triumph and terror
at the smoldering ruin, the blackened walls with the windows like
ghastly loopholes. That was all that was left of Broad Acres, which had
been for over a hundred years a home and a landmark.

“Of course you’ll stay right here with us,” said Mrs. Red Mayo Osborne
to Mrs. Wilson, the next morning.

“Undoubtedly!” Mr. Osborne was surprised that his wife considered it
necessary to say so.

“You and Ruth.” “Of course you will.” “Oh, yes!” and “Sure!” exclaimed
Patsy, Sweet William, David, and Dick.

“Why, dears, you haven’t room for us,” said Mrs. Wilson.

“Certainly, there is plenty of room,” said Mrs. Osborne. “I have it
all planned. You and Ruth will stay in ‘the bedroom,’ Patsy will move
out of it, into the dressing room that Sweet William will give up. He
can sleep on a pallet in ‘the chamber’ or go into the ‘tumble-up room’
with Dick and David. Of course you will stay here.”

“What’s that you are saying?” asked Black Mayo, who came up the walk
just then. “‘Stay here?’ You aren’t hoping you can have Agnes and Ruth
with you?”

“Yes, indeed!” said Patsy. “Now, don’t you come and try to hog them
away. They are going to live with us.”

“Indeed they are not,” declared Black Mayo. “They’re going to Larkland.
Van is on the way with the wagon, Agnes, to carry your things. Of
course you are coming to us. Why, we really need you. Think of all
those big empty rooms. And you’ll be such company for Polly when I’m
away.”

While he was arguing the matter, the Miss Morrisons came up the walk,
followed by Mr. Tavis and Mr. Mallett.

Miss Elmira was an invalid, but she had hobbled across The Street with
Miss Fanny to invite Mrs. Wilson and Ruth to come to their cottage.

“It is so convenient, with just the grove between it and Broad--the
schoolhouse,” said Miss Fanny. “And it’s just right for two families;
there are two rooms on each side, with the hall between, like a street,
and we’ll be just as particular about crossing it, we assure you.”

“We spoke for them first. Stay with us, Cousin Agnes, you and Ruth;
please do,” pleaded Sweet William.

“No; they want a home of their own,” said Mr. Mallett. “Miss Agnes, I
ain’t got a house to ask you to, not to call it a house; it’s just a
hole to put my gang of children in. I come to say we-all are going to
build you a house. We’ve been talking it over, Joe Spencer and Benny
Hight and a bunch of others; everybody wants to help. There’s the
sawmill in the Big Woods, and we’ll cut trees and haul lumber and----”

“Shucks!” said Mr. Tavis, in his high, wheezy voice. “Ain’t no sense
in building a house, when there’s one all ready for Miss Agnes and her
gal to live in. I built a big house with upstairs and all that, ’cause
I had the money and I wanted a place like you-alls. My old woman and me
are used to living in one or two rooms, and it comes awkward to have
so much house ’round us. We’re going to move in the little room next
to the kitchen, and, Miss Agnes, you’re to take the rest of the house;
you’re used to having room to spread yourself. We cert’n’ly will be
thankful to you.”

“Dear people! my people! my own family, all of you!” Mrs. Wilson said;
it was some minutes before she could speak between sobs. “I can’t tell
you--I never can say--how grateful I am--how I love you all, for--for
being so dear and good to me.”

“Dear Agnes!” Mrs. Osborne’s arms were around her.

Mr. Mallett cleared his throat loudly. “Good to you!” he said. “Ain’t
you taught my children and every Village child, never asking if you’d
get pay or not, and beating sense in them that ain’t got no sense,
and----”

“Ain’t I seen you grow up from a baby, age of my girl that’s dead?”
said Mr. Tavis, blowing his nose like a trumpet.

Sweet William wailed aloud.

“Sh, sh, son!” His mother soothed him. “Why are you crying?”

“I don’t know,” sobbed Sweet William. “I--I just got to cry.”

“I didn’t know I could love you all better than I did!” exclaimed Mrs.
Wilson. “Oh, you are so good, so dear! But we’ve made up our minds,
Ruth and I, what we are going to do. We are going to live in the
schoolhouse.”

“But, Agnes----” began Red Mayo.

“But, Mayo!” she said. “It was the Broad Acres ‘office,’ just as The
Roost here where you live was the ‘office’ of Osborne’s Rest, and it’s
almost as large. There are two big rooms and a little one. Oh! there is
room and room enough for Ruth and me.”

“But, Miss Agnes----”

“Oh! Cousin Agnes----”

“Agnes dear----”

“But me no more buts,” she said, laughing through her tears. “It is
best; I know it is best for us to make our home there. There’ll not be
room for the Red Cross work----”

“We’ll take that,” said Miss Fanny, hastily.

“You wont! I will,” asserted Mr. Tavis.

It was at last decided that the Red Cross workers were to occupy the
Miss Morrisons’ spare rooms, and Mr. Tavis was comforted with the
promise of furnishing a schoolroom in the autumn.

Mrs. Wilson had her way about living in the cottage in Broad Acres
yard, but The Village had its way about furnishing the rooms. At
first people came pell-mell, haphazard, with their best and filled
the cottage to overflowing. Then Polly Osborne, who was the soul of
order and common sense, took charge of things. She made a list of
house furnishings that had been saved and of those that were needed,
and accepted and rejected offerings accordingly. She sent back several
center tables and big clocks and three or four dozen parlor chairs, and
asked for kitchen utensils and bed linen.

By nightfall, the little home-to-be contained the choicest offerings
of The Village. In the bedroom were the Blairs’ best mahogany wardrobe
and bureau, and the Black Mayo Osbornes’ four-poster bedstead arrayed
with the Red Mayo Osbornes’ lavendered linen sheets. The kitchen stove
had been saved and a procession of housewives had piled up utensils and
pantry supplies. In the living room Mr. Tavis’s red plush rocking-chair
reposed on the Miss Morrisons’ best rag rug.

Beside the window was a bookcase full of books, clothbound and
sheepskin old volumes that had been read and loved, and that had old
names in them, like Mrs. Wilson’s own dear lost volumes which had
belonged to the forefathers of The Village. There was a note from Black
Mayo, saying of course it did not make any real difference whose house
the books were in, because they belonged to any one who wished to read
them, but he’d rather they’d be in her home so his wife would not have
them to dust.

Mrs. Wilson laughed and cried as she read the note.

A procession of people came in with food that broke all conservation
rules--beaten biscuits, batter-yeast bread, fried chicken, baked ham,
and countless varieties of jams and jellies and pickles and preserves.

It was bedtime when at last Mrs. Wilson and Ruth were left alone. They
undressed and hand in hand, they knelt at their bedside, and then they
lay down to rest in the new home, shadowed by the ruins that had been
home the night before.

Who would have thought it possible for so sad a day to be so happy?




CHAPTER XI


Like most Southern communities, The Village had not the habit of
celebrating the Fourth of July. It had its fireworks and jollifications
at Christmas, which was the gala season of its year, a whole week of
holiday and feasting.

But now that the United States was in the World War, Independence Day
acquired a new and deeper meaning. There were flags and addresses
in the Court-house, and they sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” after
“Dixie.” Then there was a picnic dinner, with plenty of fried chicken
and a hooverized amount of ice cream and cake.

The pleasant new patriotic enthusiasm about the Fourth was tremendously
deepened two days later when Black Mayo came to the war gardens and
told the workers about that wonderful American Fourth of July in France.

The American Expeditionary Force had crossed the submarine-infested
ocean and had landed, every man safe, at “a seaport of France.” On the
Fourth, the splendid, brave, eager fellows in khaki and blue jackets
marched along the streets of Paris, hundreds and thousands of them,
forerunners of hundreds of thousands who were coming.

Paris went wild with joy. The streets were strewn with flowers;
the Stars and Stripes waved a welcome; French bands played “The
Star-Spangled Banner” and American bands responded with the
“Marseillaise.”

“_Vive l’Amérique! vive l’Amérique!_”

“Pershing’s boys are here!”

Ah, what a day it was!

The Americans were sorely needed in 1917.

In the west, British and French and Belgians were bravely holding the
entrenched long line from the Alps to the Channel. But alas! for the
east. There was a revolution in Russia, beginning with bread riots in
Petrograd. Patriots echoed anxiously the prayer of the abdicating Czar:
“May God help Russia!” as she dropped from the ranks of fighting Allies
and became the battleground of warring factions.

German submarines continued to take their toll on the seas. And German
air raids grew more frequent. Night after night Zeppelins swept down,
like huge, evil birds of prey; day after day airplanes darted and dived
like swallows. People heard the whir of motors, the explosion of
bombs, the rattle of anti-aircraft guns; in a few minutes it was over,
all but the counting of the wounded and the dead, chiefly women and
children.

The Village listened with interest to all news from overseas as a part
of “our war.” Then it turned to the work at home.

In June men registered in obedience to the Draft Act. One day in July
the Secretary of War, blindfolded, drew one capsule out of a great jar;
it was opened; on a slip of paper in it was a number. Another capsule
was drawn out; and another; and another. All day and until long after
midnight went on that drawing of capsules containing numbers.

And the numbers, when they came to The Village and to all the country
places and little towns and great cities of the whole nation, were no
longer mere numbers, but names; and when they went to the homes of the
community they were neither numbers nor names, but sons, brothers,
sweethearts, friends--men who had to go to fight, perhaps to die, for
the nation.

The end of the summer found nearly a million men under arms and in
training camps scattered over the country. A great brave, efficient
army of soldiers was being formed. And everywhere men and women and
children were enrolled in the nation’s greater army of service, as
patriotic and brave and efficient and as necessary as soldiers.

The Second Liberty Loan was under way, and people who had thought they
had not a dollar beyond their needs found they could “buy a bond to
help Uncle Sam win the war.”

There was Red Cross work to do--feeding the hungry, clothing the naked,
caring for the sick and wounded; millions of people were helping with
money and service, at home and overseas.

Millions, too, were enrolled in the work of food conservation. During
that spring and summer and autumn of 1917, crop reports were watched as
anxiously as news from the war front, for even the children knew that
“armies march on their feet and on their stomachs.”

At family worship, night and morning, in that little old-fashioned
Presbyterian Village, voices prayed God to bless our homes and soldiers
and Allies, and thanked Him for great ideals and wholesome food, for
President Wilson and bounteous crops.

The crops were, indeed, bounteous. There were record-breaking yields
of corn and oats, and an abundant yield of potatoes. The wheat crop
was smaller; we must stint at home, to send supplies to Europe. But
the country, going calmly through its sugar famine, was ready for
“meatless Tuesdays” and “wheatless Wednesdays”--anything, everything to
help win the war.

The members of Camp Fight Foe and Camp Feed Friend went
enthusiastically to Broad Acres, one pleasant day in early autumn, to
harvest their crop of white potatoes.

Mr. Mallett, who had volunteered to help with his horse and plow, ran a
furrow beside each row; potato diggers had never been heard of in The
Village. Behind him came the young gardeners--collecting the tubers
turned up by the plow, picking them out of the soft soil, or raking out
those that were more deeply embedded. Not one must be overlooked and
left behind, for close was the contest between the rival gardeners.
The bucket- and basketfuls of potatoes were emptied into a half-bushel
measure, over which Mrs. Wilson presided, and then put into bags. The
gardeners were jubilant over the results of their labors, and with
reason. Mrs. Wilson said that Broad Acres had never yielded a better
crop than the one they were harvesting.

“Isn’t this a crackerjack?” cried David, holding up a huge tuber.

“Here’s a better one. It’s just as big as yours, and it’s smooth,
instead of being all bumpy,” Patsy said critically.

“O-oh!” wailed Ruth. “J-just see this lovely one that the plow c-cut in
two. It would have been best of all. Isn’t it a pity?”

“These nice little round ones are loverly,” said Sweet William, who
was making a collection of the tiny, smallest potatoes. “The little
Belgians can play marbles with them first, and then eat them.”

“Alice, empty your basket in the measure and let’s see if we haven’t
another bushel,” called Patsy.

“You girls! Make haste and put your potatoes in a bag, so we can have
the measure,” urged Steve. “We’ll fill it in a hurry.”

When the last measureful was emptied, it was found that the boys had a
half peck more than the girls.

“Yah! yah! Of course we beat you!” cried Steve.

“By measuring all Sweet William’s marbles,” Anne Lewis said scornfully.
“Our potatoes are bigger. And anyway you had four more hills on your
last row.”

“Yes, sirree! And this is the first crop out of our gardens. You wait
till we come to the last,” said Patsy, confidently.

“Our gardens will feed a lot of soldiers,” Sweet William said proudly.
“They’ll take care of our Village boys a year--or a while, anyway.
Jeff’s such a big eater! We’re all working our hardest; and Scalawag’s
helping.”

Sweet William never tired of singing Scalawag’s praises, since by his
aid the destroyer of the war gardens had been discovered and punished.

Kit, closely questioned by Mr. Black Mayo Osborne, confessed that he
had gone into the garden, and had hidden behind the arbor when he heard
some one coming; he had kicked Scalawag, to drive him away; and--he
finally owned--he had driven in the cow from the adjoining pasture.

He gave no reason except “because”; and Mr. Osborne shook his head and
frowned. There was something back of this, he felt sure. What was it?
Were there wanton mischief-makers in The Village? The burning of Broad
Acres--was it an accident, caused by rats and matches, as was generally
believed? He wondered, but he got no clews, and other matters were
disturbing him. For the present, things went on their usual quiet way
in The Village.

When the gardeners started to dig potatoes, Dick shrugged his shoulders
and started off whistling, as if he were having a grand good time.
But, to tell the truth, he was getting tired of these excursions to
the mine. He continued them, at more and more infrequent intervals,
chiefly to plague Anne and Patsy.

Time after time they had left gardening and Red Cross work and
followed him. Sometimes he had turned across a field, and twisted and
doubled--like an old red fox, to which Black Mayo compared him--and
made a successful get-away.

Sometimes, in a teasing humor, he kept just far enough ahead to
encourage them to continue the pursuit and led them over miles of
rough country and back to The Village; then he would ask, with an
exasperating grin, “Haven’t we had a lovely walk?”

Anne looked after him to-day and said, as often before, “Oh! I wish we
could find out Dick’s secret.”

“If just we could!” Patsy replied; “but--well, sometimes I think we
might as well give up. We can’t keep on forever trotting after him,
with the Red Cross and Camp Feed Friend and the Canning Club and Happy
Acres and all the other things there are to do.”

“Oh, no, Pats-pet! We’ll not give up,” Anne said decidedly. “There’s
some way to manage it. But of course we mustn’t take time from the
garden; not now, while there’s so much to do. The main thing is to make
our garden beat those bragging boys’. Oh! I’m so glad I’m going to
stay here this winter and see it through.”

On account of the housing shortage in Washington, Anne’s adoptive
parents had given up their home to war workers, and Anne was to
continue her studies this winter with her cousins in The Village; Mrs.
Wilson was as good as a university for scholarship.

Dick went by Larkland as usual. His Cousin Mayo was silent and seemed
preoccupied as they went to the pigeon cote.

“Here’s a bird for you,” he said, taking one at random.

Dick stood a minute with the caged pigeon in his hand, then said
abruptly: “Cousin Mayo, you told me that you were going in the army.
When?”

“Hey?” Black Mayo gave a start.

Dick repeated his question.

His cousin frowned. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. There are
things here. I don’t see how I can get away.”

Couldn’t get away! Why, Cousin Mayo had always been footloose; he
picked up, on a day’s notice, and went to Alaska or Mexico or the South
Sea Islands, for a month or two, or a year or two. And now to say he
couldn’t get away! People were saying he stayed at home because he was
a coward and a slacker. It was not true. And why were they saying it
about Cousin Mayo and not about other men who didn’t go to war?

Dick went on toward the mine, feeling mystified and worried. He
proceeded cautiously as usual, varying his route and making cut-offs
and circuits to avoid possible observation and pursuit. The door of
Solomon Gabe’s cabin was open, as it often was, revealing nothing in
the gloomy interior. Dick circled behind the hovel, going rather close
to keep away from a little swamp. The place was usually as silent as
the grave. But now he heard two voices--Solomon Gabe’s old monotone and
another voice that he felt he might have recognized if it had been a
little louder. He scurried along the edge of the swamp, and in a minute
he was out of sight and hearing.

He paused at Mine Creek as usual to set free his bird. It perched on
his shoulder a moment; then it soared up and wheeled and was off.

Dick went on to the mine and stood several minutes on the lookout
before he put his ladder into the hole and descended. He always took
precautions against stray passers-by, although in all these months he
had never seen any one thereabouts.

Down in the mine, he lighted a candle and went to one of the lower
spurs and set to work, following the line between a layer of clay and
rock. After a while he came to a projecting ledge of rock and, using
pick and sledge hammer with difficulty, he broke off a piece. He picked
it up--it was very heavy--and looked at it. On the broken surface there
were bright specks and streaks. How they shone and sparkled in the
candlelight! Silver! Ah, he had found it at last!

He sped to the mine opening to examine his find by daylight, and his
eager confidence was confirmed. How beautifully the specks and streaks
glinted and glittered! He climbed out and hid his ladder, and went
homeward on winged feet. He was too hurried and eager to take his usual
roundabout course; but he saw no one as he sped along the Old Plank
Road except Mr. Smith, whom he passed on the hill beyond Peter Jim’s
cabin.

Dick dropped from a trot to a walk when he came to The Village, and
sauntered up The Street to The Roost, where his father was sitting
on the porch reading a _Congressional Record_. With an elaborate
assumption of carelessness, Dick held out the shining stone.

“See what I’ve found, father,” he said. “What do you reckon it is?”

Mr. Osborne examined the stone deliberately.

“H-m! It is----”

A vagrant breeze caught the _Congressional Record_ and tossed it on the
floor.

“Pick up that paper, son,” said Mr. Osborne, “and smooth out the pages;
gently, so as not to tear them. You know I file----”

“Yes, sir. But my rock, father!” Dick interrupted in uncontrollable
impatience.

“It is quartz,” said his father; “quartz with a little silver in it.
These minute particles and streaks are free silver, such as is found
occasionally in the quartz in this section. This looks like a poor
specimen from the Old Sterling Mine. Where did you get it?”

“Oh! I found it,” Dick said vaguely.

“Somewhere along Mine Creek, I presume, my son?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, don’t venture too close to the old mine,” cautioned his father.
“Of course you wouldn’t think of entering it. The timbers are probably
all decayed; there might be a cave-in any time. It is a dangerous
place.”

“Yes, sir,” Dick answered meekly.

And forthwith he went to Mr. Blair’s store and invested his last dime
in two candles. He was very zealous about going to the mine for some
time after that, but he only succeeded in chipping off a few bits
rather worse than better than the one he had first secured.

The glow of that little success died away, and he felt discouraged and
ashamed of himself when his schoolmates held their garden exhibit in
the Tavern parlor.

All The Village and the surrounding country gathered there on the
evening of that crisp autumn day, the last Saturday in October. The
big parlor that had been a gathering place since stagecoach days had a
gala air. It was decorated with American flags, and the vegetables were
piled in pyramids on tables covered with red, white, and blue tissue
paper. Every withered leaf had been cut from the cabbages. Each potato
and onion and tomato had been washed as carefully as a baby’s face. The
ears of corn had the husks turned back and tied, and were fastened in
great bunches on the wall with tri-colored streamers. By the side of
each pile of vegetables was a card saying how many bushels or gallons
or quarts the garden had yielded. The girls had jars and jars of
tomatoes, peas, beans, corn, berries--canned, pickled, preserved.

On a neatly lettered card above the door were the President’s words:
“Every bushel of potatoes properly stored, every pound of vegetables
properly put by for future use, every jar of fruit preserved, adds
that much to our insurance of victory, adds that much to hasten the end
of this conflict.”

“I tell you, dears,” quavered Mrs. Spencer’s gentle old voice, as she
looked around, “this exhibition would be a credit to grown-up farmers
anywhere. I don’t believe,” she added thoughtfully, “that people worked
during The--that other war, like they are working now. Of course that
was at home, and all our men were in it and our women all felt it as a
personal thing. But people--well, they weren’t organized. Did you ever
know children do anything like this, all this gardening and Red Cross
work? Oh, it’s wonderful, wonderful! And they’ve all worked--even that
dear little dove, Sweet William.”

“Oh, Sweet William! I always knew you’re a bird,” laughed Anne Lewis,
who was standing near. “Now I know the kind. You are a dove; oh, you
are a dove of war, like Cousin Mayo’s birds!”

“Good, Anne!” said Black Mayo. “Sweet William is a dove of war, and so
are all you dear children and all you good and lovely people here and
everywhere. Doves of war, harbingers of real peace that can only come
from winning this war and securing freedom and human rights.”

“Come, come, Mr. Osborne!” called Mr. Martin, who was in charge of the
County Corn Clubs: “Mr. Jones and I are waiting for you. We judges must
get to work. And we’ve got no easy job,” he said, looking around at the
exhibits.

The garden produce was arranged in two groups. No one except the
contestants knew which was the girls’ and which was the boys’. The
judges went from one to the other--looking, admiring, considering,
reconsidering. At last they announced their decision: Both exhibits
were highly creditable, but this was the better.

There was a shout of joy from the girls. They had won, they had won!
After a little pause, the boys--for they were generous rivals--joined
in the applause and congratulations.

Anne Lewis, who had suggested the war gardening, was deputed by the
girls to receive the silver cup presented by Black Mayo Osborne, and
the blue ribbon; and David received the red ribbon for the boys.

Dick Osborne looked so forlorn that David said: “Cheer up, old boy! If
you hadn’t been busy about something else when we started the garden,
you’d have been in it with us.”

“I’m not much forwarder about that than I was in April,” Dick
confessed. “I’m going to keep on trying, though. But if there’s a war
garden next year I’ll be in it.”

“There isn’t any ‘if’ about it,” declared David. “We are going to keep
on gardening, to help win the war. And we’ll get that cup back from the
girls next year; see if we don’t.”

“We’ll see--you don’t,” said Patsy.

Just then there was a little stir at the door. Mr. Mallett, who had
been to Redville on business, came in and said something in an excited
undertone to Black Mayo Osborne. Mr. Osborne asked a quick question or
two, and then jumped on a table and caught the big flag draped over the
mantelpiece and waved it above his head.

“Hurrah! hurrah!” he said. “News, great news!”

“The Liberty Loan has gone over the top,” guessed Red Mayo.

“Of course, of course! But something else is going over the top. Our
American boys! They are facing the Germans in ‘No Man’s Land.’ To-day,
to-day for the first time, our American boys were in the first-line
trenches on the French front. Hurrah! hurrah! We are in The War!”

Every voice joined in a cheer that rang and rang again. Mr. Tavis and
the other old Confederates raised the “rebel yell,” their old valiant
battle cry. The children clapped their hands and shouted: “We are in
it! We are in it! We are in The War!”

Sweet William clapped and cheered with the best. Then he turned to his
mother. “What does it mean, mother, our men ‘in the trenches’?” he
asked. “Does it mean we’ve beat the war?”

“It means our soldiers are over there, fighting side by side with
our Allies against the Germans,” explained his mother. “I don’t know
whether it’s defeat or victory to-day; but we Americans will stay there
till we win The War--if you and I have to go to help, little son--to
conquer the world for peace and freedom.”




CHAPTER XII


In his Christmas sermon, the Village minister gave thanks that the
British, in this twentieth-century crusade of liberty, had accomplished
the purpose of the old Crusades and had wrested Jerusalem, the Holy
City, from the Turks who had held it for nearly seven hundred years.
And a few Sundays later, he charged each citizen to take, as his New
Year’s resolution for the nation, the “fourteen principles of peace”
formulated by the first citizen of America and of the world.

Thanksgiving and peace terms! Those were the things people were taking
as matters of course, feeling sure, that now America was in the war,
the victorious end would come, and that soon. But days began to darken.
The spring of 1918 was a tragic, anxious time.

Germany had failed to clear the seas and win the war with submarines.
Every few minutes a wooden or steel or concrete ship left the New
World, bearing soldiers and food and munitions, and ninety-nine per
cent of them came safe to harbor; soon there would be millions of
trained and equipped doughboys in Europe. Germany’s one chance was to
strike a decisive blow on the Western Front before those fast-coming
Americans were there in full force.

And Germany was ready to strike that blow. The Reds’ shameful peace at
Brest-Litovsk enabled her to mass armies in the west. She had there
Von Hindenburg and Ludendorff and six million soldiers. And having the
inner lines, she could concentrate troops and outnumber the Allies two
or three to one in every attack, although they had eight million men.

Late in March, the great German offensive began.

The first drive was on a fifty-mile front. It swept onward with
terrible force, capturing vast numbers of prisoners and guns. The
monster guns in the St. Gobain Forest dropped shells on a church in the
heart of Paris. Late in April, that drive was checked, but the Germans
had thrust forward thirty-four miles on their way to the French capital.

Before that first drive was halted, the second drive began in Flanders;
its purpose was to reach the Channel ports and to cut off the British
Army from the French and Americans. The British held their broken
ranks and stood “with their backs to the wall.” The Germans were again
checked, but they had advanced ten long, hard-fought miles.

The Village received with growing dismay the tidings from the battle
front. Months ago the older men had offered themselves for war service
and formed a company, and now they drilled regularly on Court-house
Green. They might as well be ready, in case they were needed, said Red
Mayo Osborne.

Black Mayo Osborne did not join the company. Nor did he enter the army
as he had said months before he was going to do. He spent a great deal
of his time wandering about the countryside, with baskets of pigeons,
seemingly unconscious of the sneers at his expense--that came most
frequently and openly from men who were leaving no stone of political
influence unturned, to keep themselves and their sons and brothers out
of the army.

One of Black Mayo’s favorite walks was toward the high bridge, eight
miles from The Village, where frequent trains bearing soldiers and
supplies crawled across the long, high trestle far above the river and
the lowlands.

One day as he was sauntering near the bridge, he saw a man and boy who
were following a by-path through the woods. Circling through a pine
thicket, he came near enough to hear part of their conversation.

The man was not speaking English, but Black Mayo understood what he
was saying: “Not train time. You walk the bridge and”--there Black Mayo
missed some words.

“No,” the boy said curtly.

The man insisted.

“That will I not!” declared the boy, speaking in English. “Nothing to
hurt, all to help!”

“Coward that you are!” the man cried in his guttural language. “You, a
boy as at play, could do it without suspicion. Must I risk, not only
myself, but the Cause?”

Then he discovered Black Mayo, almost at his elbow, apparently intent
on the pigeons--scrawling a line and affixing it to a bird. He released
it; it soared, circled, and was gone.

Mr. Smith knew that, at that nearness, Mr. Osborne must have heard his
words and understood probably his purpose. With an oath he jerked out
a pistol. Albert caught his arm, and before he could free it and take
aim, Black Mayo said: “Look out! That pigeon carried my message home:
‘High bridge. Threatened by Smith.’”

For a minute the two men stood silent, face to face.

Smith thought quickly. To shoot down this unarmed man whom he
hated--only to be arrested as a murderer---- The game was not worth
the candle. He spoke with an angry laugh: “You did startle me. _Ach!_
I was talking nonsense with my nephew. Go, with your little birds!
But if”--he scowled, and his evil left eye became a mere glinting
spark--“if you make harm where there is none, I will shoot you with my
last act.”

Black Mayo considered a moment before he answered: “I will go home and
receive my own message. But I will put another where it will be found
the minute harm comes to me.”

Mr. Smith laughed and put his pistol into his pocket. “Go, save your
skin,” he sneered. Then he said to his nephew: “_Ach!_ That is the man
you adore, a coward who dares not tell on me for fear of himself. It is
well. The German victory is a matter now of the days.”

Was that indeed true? Every day brought new Allied losses; guns and
men and miles; on the north the English were being forced back; in the
south the French were being forced back.

But in that time of dire need, two new factors entered the war. One was
Foch as commander-in-chief; the other was the Americans.

Instead of being many, the Allied armies became one; American Pershing,
British Haig, French Pétain, Italian Diaz, Belgian Albert, served under
Foch, whom all the world knew as a brilliant strategist.

So far the American troops had been in training and held in reserve.
But late in May newspapers had two news items. One announced, in
glaring headlines, that the Germans had advanced ten miles, crossed
two rivers, and taken twenty-five thousand prisoners; the other said,
in small type, that the Americans had advanced their lines and taken
the village of Cantigny and two hundred prisoners. A big advance and a
little one. Ah! but in that day at Cantigny the Americans were tried
and not found wanting.

The Germans, already talking of a “hard peace,” pushed forward on their
“Victory Drive” toward Paris. Hundreds of square miles were taken,
and thousands of prisoners and guns. They crossed the Marne River and
reached Château-Thierry, only forty miles from Paris.

Had Foch and the Americans come too late?

Ah! now they moved, swiftly and successfully, both of them. Foch had
let the Germans advance so as to make flank attacks. The Americans,
given the post of honor at Château-Thierry, drove back the best of
the Germans and carried positions deemed impregnable. Up and down the
long battle line from the Alps to the North Sea, went the tidings:
“The Americans have held the Germans. They are as good as our best. A
million of them are here, and there are millions ready to come.”

The Germans made their last great offensive, a desperate drive on a
sixty-mile front toward Paris. They were checked. They retreated. The
Allies took the offensive.

During these stirring days, The Village could not wait the leisurely
roundabout course of the mail rider and accept day-old papers as
“news.” Some one rode every day to Redville and brought back the
morning _Dispatch_ and then the war news was read aloud in the post
office.

There was a deep personal as well as patriotic interest now, for
Village volunteers and drafted soldiers were overseas. All the
community mourned with the Spencers when Jeff’s name was among the
“missing” after Château-Thierry. They looked every day for news of him,
but hope died as weeks and months passed and none came.

One September Saturday brought an overseas letter for Mrs. Mallett.
Dick Osborne ran to deliver it, and then they waited for her to come as
usual and share its tidings.

An hour passed and she did not come. Then she walked swiftly down The
Street and passed the post office, without turning her head. Her face
was pale and she was biting her lips to keep them steady.

“It’s bad news,” they whispered one to another.

“Awful!” groaned Dick, as she went straight to the pastor’s study at
the back of the church. No one knocked at that door on sermon-sacred
Saturday afternoon unless the need were extreme.

Mr. Harvie met her with grave, kind, questioning eyes. “My dear Mrs.
Mallett----” he began.

Then she broke down and sobbed as if her heart would break.

“It’s Fayett,” she said as soon as she could speak. “He’s in hospital.”

“The Great Physician can heal our dear boy. Let us----”

“He says he’s all right; it was a flesh wound; he was starting back to
the army. It--it isn’t that!”

“Not that? Then what----”

Mrs. Mallett again burst into tears.

“My dear woman, what _is_ it?” asked Mr. Harvie.

“Oh!” she gasped out the awful news. “They’ve got him; those terrible
Catholics. Read--you read for yourself.”

She handed him the letter and sat there sobbing with her face buried in
her apron.

As Mr. Harvie read Fayett’s letter, his face cleared and he set his
lips to keep back a smile.

“Don’t cry, Mrs. Mallett,” he said gently. “You’ve reason to be glad
and proud of your son. And I’m sure he’s just as good a Presbyterian as
when he was here in the Village Sunday school. He----”

“But they’ve give him their cross; he too-ook it!” she sobbed.

“It was given not as a symbol of religion, but as a token of valor,” he
explained. “Don’t you see what he says in this sentence or two?--that
he went under fire from his refuge in a trench to the rescue of two
wounded men in a disabled tank.”

“He had to help them out; they couldn’t get away,” she said.

“Just so; and he saved them at the risk of his own life. That is why
this _Croix de Guerre_ was given. Fayett is a hero.”

“Course he is. Did they think he was a coward?” she asked indignantly.
“But he ain’t any better’n Jack. And Jack, my little Jack, is in this
new draft.”

Jack’s eighteenth birthday was just past, and so he came in the second
draft that included men between eighteen and forty-five. For the most
part, this draft, like the first one, was met frankly and bravely. But
if any one had observed carefully, which no one seemed to be doing, he
might have found two little Village groups where sentiment seemed to
drift away from the current of loyalty.

One was in the shed on The Back Way where Lincum had his cobbler’s
bench. His father, Solomon Gabe, was there oftener than formerly;
perhaps he was lonely now that his other son, Cæsar, had been drafted
for service. The old man sat far at the back of the shed, mumbling to
himself or throwing a sharp sentence into his son’s conversations with
other negroes. They talked in lower tones and laughed less than usual;
and when they went away, they sometimes let fall curious misstatements
and misunderstandings about the war and the draft, like that of Emma’s,
which the white people who heard them laughed at, tried to explain, and
then forgot.

But one would have felt more disturbed at the other group that lounged
on the Tavern porch on Saturday afternoons, chewing and smoking and
whittling. Mr. Charles Smith was generally there, and the most ignorant
and least public-spirited of the men about The Village.

“Now what do you fellows think--” Jake Andrew was saying fiercely
one day. Mr. Smith nudged him, Jake turned, saw Black Mayo Osborne
approaching, and concluded in an entirely different tone, “of--of the
weather?”

Mr. Osborne laughed. “You fellows spend a lot of energy
discussing--weather and crops,” he said, speaking lightly but glancing
keenly about him, “Don’t you ever talk about public affairs, this great
war we are in?”

There was a little embarrassed silence. Mr. Smith’s suave voice broke
it. “We are poor and hard-worker farmers, Mr. Osborne. About crops and
weather we are interested to talk. We have not the gentleman’s time to
amuse with pretty little doves.”

The other men snickered or guffawed. Black Mayo seemed about to speak,
then turned on his heel and walked away.

“Doves! He’ll send them to war; but he ain’t so ready to give his
folks,” said Jake Andrews, who had done a deal of political wirepulling
to get off his drafted sons.

“Or himself,” growled Zack Gordan, a young ne’er-do-well, who had made
the widowed mother who supported him an excuse for evading war service.
“What business have we got in this war anyway? What harm have them
Germans ever done us?”

“Now what?” inquired Mr. Smith. He darted a look of pure venom after
Black Mayo. “That fellow is a queer one. Can one believe he goes,
comes, comes, goes about the little birds?” He gave a scornful,
incredulous laugh. “And you say he had the years of absences? Where?”
He made the question big and condemning.

Ever since the April day that Charles Smith had lain in the mud and
looked up at Black Mayo Osborne’s mocking face, his heart had been full
of hate. For a few weeks after the incident at the bridge, he had been
cautious, perhaps a little fearful. But as time passed and Black Mayo
kept silence, Mr. Smith grew contemptuously bold and missed no chance
for slur and insinuation against the man he hated.

And slur and insinuation were not in vain. The community had always
accepted Black Mayo’s roving habits without question, never surprised
when he went away, welcoming him warmly when he turned up at home a
week or a month or a year later. But now--not one of them could have
said why--they were suspicious of those unknown weeks and months and
years.

“And no one can question him or seek to know his goings, for _he_ is an
a-ris-to-crat.” Mr. Smith’s voice was silky.

Jake Andrews uttered an oath. “’Ristocrat! I’m sick and tired of this
old ’ristocrat business. He ain’t no more’n any other man, for all his
being a Mayo and a Osborne. I’m a law officer, and so’s my Cousin Bill
at Redville. I’m going to look into things. Seems to me----”

“Easy, friend!” Mr. Smith chuckled and pulled at his fingers, making
his knuckles snap in a way he had when he was pleased. “Those girls
come.”

The girls were Anne and Patsy. Mrs. Osborne had asked them to carry a
basket of food to Louviny, Lincum’s wife. He had said she had a “misery
in her back” and was “mightly porely,” so she could not come to help
about Mrs. Osborne’s house-cleaning.

Anne and Patsy gave casual glances and greetings to the group on the
porch.

“Isn’t that Mr. Smith horrid?” said Patsy. “I despise a man like
that--with a mouth that runs up on one cheek when he grins.”

“And I despise a man that’s so hateful about Cousin Mayo--laughing
about his pigeons and saying things about his not being in the army.”

“Cousin Mayo used to speak so often of going; now he never says
anything about it. He looks awfully worried.”

“Dear Cousin Mayo!” Anne said affectionately. “He’s in this draft, and
he may have to go. I don’t want him not to go, but, oh, how we’d miss
him! Even when you don’t see him, you feel The Village is a happier
place to live in because he’s here. It’s a kind of adventure to meet
him on the road.”

“Yes,” said Patsy, “he sets your mind traveling to all sorts of lovely,
unexpected places.”

“Don’t his doves make you feel excited?” said Anne. “Oh, I hope some of
his birds were with our boys fighting at St.-Mihiel. There must have
been! For Cousin Will read in the paper that they had three thousand
carrier pigeons.”

Chattering thus, the girls beguiled their way to Lincum’s cabin, on
the edge of the old Tolliver place. They took a short cut across a
field, and then as they came close to the cabin they heard loud voices
and laughter that was more spiteful than merry. They paused at the old
rail fence. There was a tangle of blackberry vines and sassafras bushes
between them and the house.

“That’ll be a grand day for us.”

They could not see the speaker, but they recognized her voice. She was
Betty Bess, a “trifling” negro girl whom Cæsar had been “going with”
before he was drafted.

“You’re right, honey,” agreed Louviny. She was bustling about, with
no sign of the “misery” that her husband said was keeping her bedrid.
She threw aside the broom and sat down in a splint-bottomed chair.
“I’ve been like old Bet mule in de treadmill--go, go, go, an’ nuver git
nowhar. But now I’m gwine in de promised land. I’m gwine to eat turkey
an’ cake. An’ I’m gwine to have six silk dresses an’ a rockin’-cheer.
An’ Monday mornin’ I’m gwine to put on my blue silk dress an’ set my
cheer on de porch an’ rock--an’ rock--an’ rock!”

She swayed back and forth as she spoke and her voice was shrill and
jubilant.

“An’ Chewsday mornin’ I’m gwine to put on my purple silk dress, an’
Wednesday my green silk dress, an’ Thursday I’ll dress in red, an’
Friday in yaller, an’ Sat’day I’ll put on my pink silk dress. An’
Sunday,” she concluded triumphantly, “I’m gwine to lay out all six my
silk dresses an’ look ’em up an’ down an’ take my ch’ice.”

Patsy laughed. “Did you ever hear such foolishness?” she asked.

“What’s that? Who’s out thar?” queried Betty Bess, sharply.

“I reckon you hearn dat old dominecky hen a-squawkin’,” said Louviny,
bringing her chair down with a thump.

Patsy, followed by Anne, came out of the thicket and went to the door.

“Howdy, Aunt Louviny,” said Patsy. “Lincum said you were mighty bad
off with a misery in your back, and so mother asked us to come to see
you. But we ought to have waited till you had on one of your six silk
dresses.”

She laughed, but the woman looked confused--frightened, Anne would have
said, if that had not been too absurd a thought.

“Wh-what--what you mean, Miss Patsy?” Louviny stammered. “What--what is
you talkin’ ’bout?”

“About what I heard you say,” responded Patsy.

“You--you ain’t hear me say nothin’--nothin’ much,” Louviny said
defensively.

“Oh! yes, I did. I heard you say you were tired working like a mule
in a treadmill, and you are going to have six silk dresses and a
rocking-chair,” said Patsy, laughing.

Louviny, still confused, looked relieved. “Shuh, Miss Patsy! You
mustn’t mind my foolishness. I was just talkin’ ’bout what I would do,
if I had all them things.”

“Lincum said you were ‘mighty porely,’” said Anne. “And so we brought
you some soup and rolls.”

“But you don’t deserve them,” said Patsy; “for you aren’t sick.”

“Lawsy, honey! I’ve been havin’ sech a misery in my back I couldn’t
lay still, neithermore move,” whined Louviny. “Uh, it was turrible,
turrible! I got a little easement just now, an’ I crope out o’ bed to
clean up de house.”

“Here are the soup and rolls,” Patsy said shortly, and she turned away.

“Wasn’t it queer the way Louviny was talking?” Anne said presently. “It
sounds so--so impertinent.”

“Um, h’m,” agreed Patsy. “She’s a trifling thing, and made up that
excuse about being sick, to keep from working for mother.”

“She’s a silly thing!” laughed Anne. “Where’d she expect to get six
silk dresses? Oh, Patsy! Let’s go by Larkland and help Cousin Mayo feed
the pigeons.”

This was evidently their day for appearing where they were not expected
or wanted. As they went up the walk, they saw, through the open front
door, two men in the hall--Cousin Mayo and a stranger, a tall, fair,
youngish man. They had only a glimpse of him, however, for Cousin
Mayo opened the parlor door, ushered him in, and shut the door. Then
Mr. Osborne came forward to greet the girls, went with them into the
sitting room, and looked about for Cousin Polly. He did not mention
the guest shut up in the parlor, and the girls--for the first time at
Larkland--felt themselves in the way. They soon started home, wondering
who the stranger was.

“Oh, I know; I’m sure I know,” Anne exclaimed. “It’s Kuno Kleist,
Cousin Mayo’s German friend. Fair and light-haired; he’s a real German.”

“But what would he be doing here?” asked Patsy.

Anne’s imagination was equal to the occasion. “You know he’s a
Socialist, and he doesn’t like war. Cousin Mayo has brought him here to
hide, to keep the kaiser from making him be a soldier, and he doesn’t
want any one to know he’s here.”

“He might have told us. We’d never let any one know,” said Patsy.

“Never!” Anne agreed emphatically.

The girls took the path by Happy Acres. If they had gone by the mill,
they would have met Dick, who had chosen this afternoon for one of
his visits to the mine that were now rare because of failing interest
and because this year he was heart and hand with the others in war
gardening. But there was nothing to do in the garden now, and this was
too good an outdoors day not to go adventuring. His hopes and spirits
rose with the crisp, brilliant weather. He had found some silver; he
might find a great deal. He had as good tools as the old blacksmith.
How grand it would be to find a big lump of solid silver! He would buy
a Liberty Bond and give a lot of money to the Red Cross. How all the
other boys would envy him! And the girls would know he was “some boy!”

He scurried along the Old Plank Road until he reached Mine Creek,
where the path turned off to the Old Sterling Mine. Suddenly he
stopped stock-still, listening intently. Yes, there were voices; and
coming nearer. A dozen steps away was the tumbled-down cabin, the old
blacksmith shop. He crept into the rubbish pile--it was little more--to
wait till the people passed by. But they did not pass. They stopped at
the creek. Dick, peeping between the logs, could see them plainly; they
were two negro men, Solomon Gabe and his son Lincum.

Old Solomon Gabe, with wild, wandering eyes, was rocking back and
forth, mumbling to himself.

Lincum had a furtive, excited look. He was trying to fix his father’s
attention. “I told him you knowed dat old place. Hey?” he said. “You
c’n tell him all ’bout it, can’t you? Hey? He axed me to come wid him
last night, but I wa’n’t gwine to project on dis road in de dark, not
atter seem’ dat ha’nt so nigh here; up on dat hillside. Um-mm! It was
graveyard white; higher’n de trees; wid gre’t big green eyes!”

For the first time the old man seemed to regard what his son was
saying. He chanted over his last words: “Green eyes; gre’t green eyes;
ghos’ white! Not on de hillside. Right here. I seed it.”

So it was Solomon Gabe Dick had run upon that night he was playing
“ha’nt!” He had been so startled by the sudden appearance and the old
man’s face was so distorted by terror that he had not recognized him.
Of course it was Solomon Gabe!

The old negro was still speaking. “I seed it dat fust night I come to
meet dat man. Right here. Down it went--clank-clankin’ like gallows
chains--in de groun’; right whar yore foot is.”

Lincum moved hastily. “I don’t like dis-here place,” he said. “An’
I don’t like dat white man. If de white folks ’round here finds
out----Thar he is!”

A man was coming down the road. It was Mr. Smith.

“Come!” he said quickly. “Let’s get where we are to go. Some one might
come and see us.”

“Don’t nobody travel dis-here road but we-all colored folks an’ dat
venturesome Dick Osborne,” said Lincum. “An’ don’t nobody pester ’round
de place I tol’ you ’bout.”

“Where is it?” Mr. Smith asked impatiently.

“Up de hill a little piece,” replied Lincum. “Daddy knows all ’bout
it. But his mind’s mighty roamin’ to-day. Looks like he’s done tricked
folks so much he’s gittin’ tricked hi’self.”

“Nonsense!” said Mr. Smith, sharply. “Here! Come, old coon! If you want
that gallon bucket of money to open, you must do what I say.”

Mumbling to himself, “Money! money! money!” the old man took the lead
and went up the path toward the Old Sterling Mine.

Dick came from his hiding place and crept through the woods. The men
were standing by the mine, talking earnestly in low tones.

Had these negroes brought Mr. Smith here to seek its treasure? Gallon
buckets of money! That was queer talk. He would go to Larkland and tell
Cousin Mayo what he had heard.




CHAPTER XIII


As Dick went up the hill, he saw on the porch a spot of blue with an
expanse of white beside it,--Mrs. Osborne in blue gingham, with a dozen
hospital shirts that she was basting, ready for machine work.

Suddenly there was a commotion, a frightened fluttering and squawking
among the fowls in the side yard. Mother hens were warning their
young that a chicken hawk was near. It had alighted in a tall locust
tree, ready to pounce on some defenseless creature. Mrs. Osborne rose
quickly, but unhurriedly, went into the house, and reappeared in the
door with an old shotgun. As the bird poised for its downward dive, she
winged it with a quick, sure shot; it dropped in the midst of the young
things that were to have been its prey.

“Whew! that was a fine shot, Cousin Polly!” Dick said admiringly. “A
hawk on the wing!”

“I am glad to get the rascal,” Mrs. Osborne said quietly. “It has been
raiding my poultry yard, and I was afraid it would get some of Mayo’s
pigeons.”

“Where’s Cousin Mayo?” Dick asked, beginning to feel embarrassed as
soon as he got over the thrill of the hawk-shooting.

Mrs. Osborne always made the boys feel clumsy and untidy and ill at
ease. She was as different as possible from her dark, rugged, merry
husband. Everything about her was neat and prim and small. She had a
pretty little mouth, a little thin nose, little round blue eyes; her
fair glossy hair was plaited and coiled around her small well-shaped
head.

“Mayo has gone away,” she answered. “He may not come back to-night.
Will you come in? Is there any message?”

“No. No, thank you.”

And Dick made his escape.

After all, he was glad Cousin Mayo was not at home and he had not
yielded to the impulse to tell the tale which would have involved the
telling of his own secret. He would watch the mine himself and find out
if Mr. Smith and the two negroes were trying to get its treasure.

At the mill Dick saw the mail hack coming from Redville and ran to get
a ride. Jim Walthall, the driver, had news to tell.

“Three of them drafted niggers from Charleburg County run away from
Camp Lee; deserted, by jinks!--Bill and Martin Toole from the lower
end of the county and Cæsar Gabe. They traced them to a freight
train, and folks think maybe they come back here. I’ve got printed
descriptions of them, to put up at the post office. The sheriff’s on
the search for them.”

“Oh! I hope he’ll find them,” said Dick.

“He won’t,” declared Jim. “Those fellows wouldn’t think of coming back
here where everybody knows them; why, they’d be caught right away. No,
they’ve gone to Richmond or New York, a city somewhere.”

When Dick got home Anne and Patsy were sitting in the swing in the yard.

“There’s Dick! He’s been ‘secreting’ again,” laughed Anne.

“I’ve just come from Larkland,” Dick said shortly. “And at the mill I
met----”

They stopped swinging, and interrupted him before he could tell his
news about the deserter.

“Did you see him?” Patsy asked excitedly.

“Isn’t it Kuno Kleist?” demanded Anne.

“I just saw Cousin Polly. Cousin Mayo’s gone away.”

“With Kuno Kleist, that German friend of his, the one he was in Mexico
with. He was at Larkland. We saw him. And now Cousin Mayo’s gone away
with him and----”

Patsy pinched Anne’s arm. Mr. Jake Andrews was coming up the walk,
was, in fact, close to them before any one saw him. On being told that
Mr. Osborne was not at home, he turned and went away.

“I’m sure he heard me, and I’m awful sorry,” Anne said. “It’s a secret,
Dick, for Cousin Mayo didn’t----” And then she told the whole story.

“Oh, well! What you said didn’t make any difference,” said Dick. “Jake
doesn’t know what you were talking about; he wouldn’t care if he did.”
And then he told them about the deserters.

Anne and Patsy and Dick would have been dismayed if they could have
followed Jake Andrews. He left The Village and went straight along the
Redville road to the old Tolliver place. He gave a shrill whistle, and
a minute later Mr. Smith sauntered out of the back door toward a clump
of trees on a hillock. Andrews cut across the field and joined him on
the wooded eminence where they were secure from observation.

“It’s like you said, Smittie,” declared Andrews; “them dog-gone
old ’ristocrats need watching. Black Mayo Osborne knows a German
spy”--Smith started violently--“friends with him, staying in his house.
Them gals saw him; that German he was with down in Mexico.”

Mr. Smith had regained his composure. “He’s there, you say?”

“Gone now; that mischeevious Dick Osborne was at Larkland after the
gals was there. The man’s gone away, and Black Mayo with him.”

Mr. Smith knit his brows. “To have known this before! What the
devil----” He looked at Jake Andrews and adjusted his face and words.
“You have acted with the wisdom and patriotism in coming to me. It is
service to Government. And there are rewards; much money. But it is
of the most importance that you keep cemetery stillness.” He paused
and his lips writhed and set themselves in a hard, cruel line. Then he
said: “We shall not be surprised now to hear of the outrages. But what
happens, keep you silence except to me.”

The week went by quietly, in spite of Mr. Smith’s prediction. Black
Mayo came home, without a word about his guest or his journey, and went
here and there more busily than ever with his pigeons for trial flights.

And then things did happen.

The Home Guard at Redville had received orders months before to patrol
the high bridge over which troops and supplies were constantly passing
on their way to Camp Lee or to Norfolk. Day and night the youths in
khaki paced to and fro, with guns on their shoulders. And then--what
a thrill of horror it sent through the community!--one of the bridge
guards was killed. The shot came from the heart of a black, rainy night
that hid the criminal. He went free, ready to strike again--where?
whom?--at any minute. Was it one of the deserters? Probably not. Their
one aim would be to “lay low” and avoid arrest; and probably they were
far away; the community had been thoroughly searched without finding
them.

A few days after the bridge guard was killed, Sweet William came
running from the mill in great distress.

“It’s poisoned, mother!” sobbed the little fellow. “There’s glass in
it; the flour we were saving for the Belgians.”

“What’s the matter, dear? What is it, Patsy?” exclaimed Mrs. Osborne.

“It’s so, mother,” cried Patsy. “Oh, mother! Cousin Giles found glass
in a lot of flour. Some one got in and put glass there, to poison it;
in our mill, our own mill here at Larkland.”

The finding of glass in flour at Larkland mill was the one subject
of conversation in The Village that Saturday night. And on Sunday--a
day that in the little Presbyterian town seemed stiller and sweeter
than other days--people stood in troubled groups at the church door,
discussing the matter. The minister even referred to it in his
prayer--not directly, that would have been regarded as irreverent--but
with the veiled allusions considered more acceptable to the Almighty.

Glass in flour at the mill, Larkland mill! The people resented it
with a vehemence that would have puzzled outsiders. Larkland mill was
not merely a mill. It was one of the oldest, most honored, most loyal
members of the community. As the quaint inscription on its wall said,
“This mill was finished building by Hugh Giles Osborne his men, 8 June,
in year of our Lord 1764, ye third year of his gracious majesty King
George III.” On its oaken beams were marks of the fire set to it by
Tarleton’s men because that Hugh Giles Osborne’s sons were fighting
side by side with Washington. Nearly a century later, soldiers in
blue marching from Georgia had taken toll of its stores. And then
Colonel Osborne, coming back in defeat to poverty, had laid aside his
Confederate uniform and become a miller, as his son was to-day.

Larkland mill had served the whole community in peace and war, and it
was loved with a personal feeling. Had not the children even had a
birthday party in its honor at Happy Acres, not so long ago? For it to
deal out poison was like a father’s giving it to his children.

Not that the mill was to blame. Of course not.

Who could have taken advantage of it and put glass in its flour? No
one could even guess. Mr. Spotswood had not seen any suspicious person
around--only the usual frequenters of the mill, which included all the
men of the community, white and black. The evildoer, a stranger and an
outsider of course, must have come in the shielding twilight or the
covering night. Nothing easier. The mill was near the highway; the
doors stood wide open all day, and shutting them at night was a mere
matter of form; there were a dozen easy ways of ingress.

Day after day passed and brought no trace of the criminals. There was
a growing feeling of uneasiness throughout the community. Whispers
went about, tales circulated among the Village loafers, the source and
foundation of which no one could give, but which were repeated, at
first doubtingly; but they were told over and over again and gained
credence with each repetition until they were believed like gospel
truth. These tales were about Black Mayo and his guest.

Dick was in the back room of Mr. Blair’s store one morning, picking
over apples to pay for some candles. He was daydreaming about the mine,
and at first was only conscious of voices in the front room, without
really hearing the conversation. But presently he heard Mrs. Blair
ask excitedly, “Agnes, have you heard these shameful tales about Black
Mayo?”

Shameful tales about Cousin Mayo! Dick listened now.

“What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Wilson.

“People are saying---- Oh, Will! tell her. I am too furious to talk!”

“Jake Andrews is accusing Mayo of being disloyal, a suspicious
character that ought to be watched, arrested.”

“Mayo watched, arrested! Mayo! Jake Andrews accuses him! And, pray, who
is Jake Andrews?”

“A common fellow from the upper end of the county, who schemed to keep
his sons out of the draft. This Andrews and some other fellows went
to Larkland and actually asked Mayo about a guest of his and what his
business was. Mayo refused to tell, and when Andrews persisted, why, he
settled the matter----”

“‘Settled the matter,’ how?” asked Mrs. Wilson.

“Knocked him down, of course. That was all right. The idea of Andrews
catechizing him! It was infernally insolent.”

“I wonder he dared do it,” said Mrs. Blair.

“Oh! The fellow is a justice of the peace or a deputy sheriff or some
sort of little officer,” conceded Mr. Blair. “It seems that Andrews has
been sneaking around, watching Mayo. And he’s found out, he claims,
that Mayo has been harboring an enemy alien, a German----”

“I don’t believe any one at all has been there,” said Mrs. Blair.

“So the thing has gone on, but----” Mr. Blair paused and frowned.

“But what?” asked Mrs. Wilson.

“Why doesn’t Mayo explain?” he exploded. “I gave him the opportunity,
deuce take it! I was so sure he would make it all right that I brought
up the subject yesterday when there was a crowd here in the office,
waiting for the mail. But instead of saying where he went or who his
guest was--I’m a Dutchman if he didn’t walk out of the office without a
word!”

“And that makes it worse than if you had not given him the chance to
explain,” said Mrs. Wilson.

“Of course. But I was so sure of him,” said Mr. Blair. Then he asked
impatiently: “Why doesn’t he tell where he goes and why?”

“Because he doesn’t want to,” said Mrs. Blair. “He thinks people
haven’t any right to ask, and so he won’t tell.”

“But he ought to tell,” said Mr. Blair. “Of course it’s all right; we
know that. But some people---- Dog-gone it!” he said vehemently. “I
wish I had knocked Andrews down when he came drawling his ‘suspicions’
to me. I will beat the scoundrel to a pulp if he comes in my store with
another question. Of course Mayo’s all right.”

“Of course!” said his wife, more vehemently than absolute certainty
required. “I--I wonder why--what--he wouldn’t tell you.”

“Whatever Black Mayo does is right,” Mrs. Wilson said serenely. “He has
some good reason for silence.”

“Of course!” “Of course!” Mr. and Mrs. Blair said, avoiding her eyes
and each other’s.

“I know about it,” Dick thought, with a thrill of pride. “It is all
right. It was Kuno Kleist.” Kuno Kleist! He remembered with dismay Mr.
Blair’s words, “A German, an alien enemy he’s concealing.” Why, that
was what Kuno Kleist was, and for his Cousin Mayo to hide him was not
“all right,” in the eyes of the law, but a crime. “They’ll never find
out from me,” said Dick to himself, gritting his teeth. “I’ll be hanged
and drawn and quartered, like men in ‘The Days of Bruce,’ before I’ll
tell anything to get Cousin Mayo in trouble.”

“Black Mayo feels--oh! we know how he feels,” said Mrs. Wilson. “But
in these times there are things we owe to ourselves, and to others.
Mayo ought to tell about his perfectly proper journeys and perfectly
proper guest, and I am going to ask him.”

“Agnes!”

“I know. I never thought I would interfere, would ask a question about
any one’s private affairs,” she said. “But I can’t help it. I am going
to do it. I must. Black Mayo suspected of treason! Black Mayo that
we’ve known and loved all our lives! Why, it is as if some one should
say my Ruth was a thief.”

Mrs. Wilson was not one to postpone a disagreeable duty. She put on
her bonnet and gloves and started at once to Larkland. It was a path
familiar to her childish feet. How often she, like her own child, had
roamed about this dear, quiet country--playing in the mill, roaming
about Larkland, fishing in Tinkling Water. Miranda and Giles Spotswood,
Anne Mayo, Polly Spencer, Beverley Wilson, and Red and Black Mayo
Osborne had been her comrades; Black Mayo, the leader in all their
sports, was the chum of Beverley Wilson whom she married the very June
that Black Mayo married Polly Spencer. The friendship of early days had
lasted and deepened with the years. It was stronger than the tactful
habit of never asking personal questions.

She found Polly Osborne on the porch, busy, as usual, with Red Cross
sewing. She dropped her work and set a comfortable chair in a pleasant
corner of the porch while she called greetings to the approaching
visitor. “How good of you to brave the heat and come to see me!” she
said. “Here is a fan. Take off your bonnet. I’ll get you a glass of
raspberry vinegar. It is so refreshing on a warm day!”

Mrs. Wilson put a protesting hand on her arm. “Don’t, Polly. I can’t
sit down, not now. Where is Mayo? I want to see him--about something
important.”

“Mayo? I reckon he’s in the garden. He has some pigeons there in the
old summerhouse. I’ll find him and tell him you want to see him.”

“No, please, Polly. Let me go there and speak to him. Then I will come
back and see you.”

“Certainly; just as you wish,” said Mrs. Osborne. “You know the
way--all the ways here--as well as I do.”

Mrs. Wilson went along the flagstones across the yard, through the
garden gate, down the boxwood-bordered walk. She turned across the
huge old garden to the summerhouse embowered in microfila and Cherokee
roses, with their dark foliage starred with creamy blossoms. She heard
a merry voice whistling “Dixie,” the only tune that Black Mayo had ever
mastered. There he was in overalls, hard at work, putting up boxes for
nests.

“How do you do, Mayo?” she said, speaking before he saw her.

He dropped his hammer and caught both of her hands in his.

“I wished you on me,” he said gleefully. “I was thinking so hard about
the rainy days when we children used to play here! I found a box with
some of our dominoes in that closet when I was clearing it out to make
a place to keep feed for my pigeons. Don’t you remember----”

“I remember everything, Mayo,” she interrupted, with her lovely clear
eyes meeting his, “from the mud-pie days to the generous sending of
your books when mine were burned. And because I do, I have come to ask
you some questions. Who was your guest three weeks ago? Where did you
go, on what business, when you left home with him?”

He looked her straight in the eyes. “You ask, Agnes----”

He hesitated and she took up his words. “I ask, Mayo, about
your private affairs”--her voice did not falter, but her cheeks
flamed--“because people are saying things about you that I--we--want
you to disprove.”

“Oh!” he said sharply. Then he dropped his voice and his eyes, and
answered: “I--I can’t do it, Agnes.”

“Mayo!” she exclaimed. There was a little silence. Then she said, “Oh,
Mayo!” in a tone that implored him to answer.

He looked away. “If you were asking me for yourself, Agnes,” he said,
“I--I ought not, but I might--probably I should--tell you.”

“I do not ask for myself,” she said. “I trust you utterly. If there
were one little doubt in the thought of my heart, I could not come to
you with this question.”

“A question I must leave unanswered,” he said with a wry smile.

“Oh, no, Mayo!” she said. “You know I don’t wish to force your
confidence, but it seems to me that when people ask--how dare they
ask!--we have no right to refuse to prove our loyalty.”

“Are they asking Giles Spotswood or Will Blair to prove theirs?” he
inquired a little bitterly.

“They say--you can guess what they say, Mayo.” She could not make
herself give words to their suspicions.

“Oh, yes!” he answered quickly. “I know. They’ve been questioning me
about Kuno Kleist, my friend in Mexico. Being a German, he was probably
a Prussian; being a Prussian, he was probably sent by the kaiser to
incite the Mexicans against the United States; being a German and a
Prussian and the kaiser’s emissary, he probably perverted me. Good
reasoning!

“And they want to know about my comings and goings. My old absent
days rise up and damn me with my dear stay-at-home county people. And
I’ve had a guest and I’ve taken a few little trips and I haven’t put
a bulletin in the post office to say who and where and why. And so
they want me to explain. I can’t explain.” His voice grew harsh and
he laughed mirthlessly. “Let them roll their doubts and suspicions
like sweet morsels under their tongues.” Then his voice softened. “It
was like you, Agnes, to come to me in the spirit of our old loyal
friendship, and I thank you----”

She put out her hand to stop him, turning away her head. She could not
give him at that minute the sight of her grieved face.

“Don’t, Mayo,” she said unsteadily. “Not ‘thanks’ between us. You--you
understand why I came. I--I am sorry----”

She walked slowly back across the fair, fragrant garden, taking time to
get control of herself before she went through the gate and along the
flagged walk and around the house corner. There was Polly on the porch,
still busy with her sewing. Mrs. Wilson compelled herself to sit down
and chat a few minutes about gardens and fowls and Red Cross work. Then
she said good-by and started home.

Near the mill she met Dick Osborne and he looked at her with eager
eyes. Then his face fell. Cousin Mayo had not told her; Dick was sure
of that as soon as he saw her face. Why not? It must be a tremendous
secret if Cousin Mayo couldn’t tell Cousin Agnes--and she asking him
to! He remembered uneasily the conversation that Jake Andrews had
overheard; he was sorry that fellow had happened to come along just
then. He must tell Anne and Patsy to keep their lips glued up. Alas! It
was too late now for caution. The secret was out.




CHAPTER XIV


“Cousin Polly dear,” called Anne Lewis, tripping up the Larkland path a
few days later, “here’s the wool you said you’d need to-day. And where
is Cousin Mayo? David wants to know if he’ll lend us a wagon Saturday,
to haul up our potatoes.”

“Mayo will let David know about it. He is away from home now,” said
Mrs. Osborne, in her quiet voice.

“Those pigeons keep him on the go, don’t they?” said Anne.

Mrs. Osborne answered only with a smile. “Come, dear; sit down,” she
said. “Stay to dinner.”

“No, thank you, Cousin Polly. We want to can a lot of butterbeans
to-day,” said Anne. “I’ll just run to the kitchen and say ‘howdy’ to
Chrissy; I haven’t seen her for a long time.”

Anne went to the kitchen, which, according to Village custom, was a
cabin back of the dwelling house, and stopped at the door.

“Well, Chrissy, how are you?” she said pleasantly.

The old woman, usually good-humored and talkative, turned a glum face
toward her young visitor. “Uh! I ain’t nothin’ to-day,” she groaned.
“’Scuse me a minute, Miss Anne. I got to git a dish out de dinin’
room.” She went out of the back kitchen door and took the long way
around to the house.

“Goodness, Chrissy!” Anne said when she came back. “Why did you go that
roundabout way? Why didn’t you come out this door?”

Chrissy looked around, and then said in a cautious undertone, “Miss
Anne, dat doorstep’s cunjered.”

“Cunjered!” laughed Anne.

“Cunjered,” Chrissy repeated solemnly. “Solomon Gabe was here yestiddy.
He tol’ Miss Polly he come to bring her shoes dat Lincum patched, but
I knows better. He come grumblin’ an’ mumblin’ ’roun’ here; an’ he was
puttin’ a spell on dat step, dat’s what he was doin’.”

“What kind of spell?” asked Anne, still mirthful.

“A spell to hurt me, Miss Anne; to give me a misery, maybe to kill me,
if I tromp on it.”

“But I came in this door and it didn’t hurt me,” said Anne.

“Naw’m. It can’t hurt you, ’cause ’twa’n’t laid in yore name. ’Twas put
dar for me.”

“Why do you think Solomon Gabe--he looks mean enough for anything!--put
a spell for you?”

“He’s mad with me, Miss Anne. I--I can’t tell you de why an’ de
wherefore. Dey say de birds o’ de air will let ’em know if I tell
anything. Miss Anne, don’t you breath what I done said.” The old woman
groaned. “Uh, dese is trouble times, trouble times! Who is dem folks
comin’ up de walk, Miss Anne? Dey ain’t de kind o’ folks dat come
visitin’ to Larkland.”

Anne had joined her Cousin Polly in the hall when the three rough,
loud-talking men--Jake Andrews, Bill Jones, and Joe Hight--came
stamping up the front steps. Mrs. Osborne met them with the cordiality
that a Virginia country house has for any guest, even the unexpected
and unknown. Wouldn’t they come in and let Chrissy bring them some
fresh water? She was sorry her husband was not at home.

“We saw him go away,” said Andrews, shortly. “They said he was carrying
pigeons to Richmond, to fly back home.”

“Oh! Yes,” she said in a noncommittal way.

“Was he?” asked Andrews, fixing his beadlike black eyes on her face.

Anne saw her cousin flush; the rude manner of the men was enough to
bring an indignant color to her cheeks.

Mrs. Osborne hesitated a minute, then said quietly: “That is the way
pigeons are trained. They are taken away hungry, and they fly back to
the place where----”

Andrews cut short her explanation. “How fast do they fly?”

“My husband had a bird come six hundred miles last week,” she said. “It
made that flight in fifteen hours.”

“H’m! What made you think so--that it came in that time?”

“Oh! my husband knows all his birds. And there is always a note
fastened to the leg, telling where it came from and where it is going,
so if any one catches it he will turn it loose to finish its flight.”

“Ah!” said Andrews. “If a pigeon was coming from Richmond, it would be
here now. We’ll see if any of them have notes fastened to their legs,
to prove what you say.”

Mrs. Osborne’s eyes blazed in her white face. “What have you to do with
my husband’s birds?” she demanded.

“What I please, with him and them,” answered Andrews, throwing back his
coat and showing a badge. “I’m an officer of the law, I am. And I’m
dog-tired of the old ’ristocrats that been running Charleburg County,
and ain’t no better than other folks--and friends with Germans, in all
sorts of meanness. Now, ma’am, are you ready to prove what you said
about them pigeons?”

There was a brief silence. Mrs. Osborne’s face went from white to
red and back again. At last she said quietly: “You need not wait,
gentlemen. No birds will come home to Larkland to-day. There are none
to come. My husband did not take them with him.”

“Where did he go?” demanded Andrews. “And who’s that strange man that’s
been here with him?”

“I refuse to answer your impertinent questions,” she said, looking over
his head. “Gentlemen, I bid you good day. Come, Anne.”

She marched like a royal procession through the hall, with Anne
following her. They went into the sitting room, and Mrs. Osborne, with
a red patch on each cheek, sat stiffly erect in a straight-backed chair
and talked to Anne, jumping from one subject to another--Red Cross
work, war gardens, Mr. Tavis’s rheumatism, Miss Fanny Morrison’s new
hat--anything and everything except the one subject she and Anne had in
mind.

“Which of your studies do you like best?” she asked.

“Pigeons,” answered Anne. “Oh!” she gasped, and hastily said, “Math,”
which she hated.

Then, very embarrassed and puzzled and troubled, she went back to
The Village. In the midst of her task and the merry chatter of her
companions, her thoughts wandered often to that strange scene at
Larkland. What did it, what could it mean? There was evidently some
secret; so she must not discuss it with any one, not even Patsy. But
what? and why?

By the middle of the afternoon, the task they had set themselves was
finished. Anne went home with Patsy, and they dropped down on the shady
lawn to enjoy their well-earned rest.

“I’m thirsty!” said Anne.

Patsy laughed. “That’s the first time you’ve seemed to know what you
were saying to-day!” Then she called Emma, who brought fresh water,
and filled and refilled for them the big old “house” dipper, a coconut
shell rimmed with silver.

“Oh, for some lemonade!” sighed Patsy. “Sweet and cold, with ice
tinkling in the glass!”

“Hush! You make me so thirsty!” said Anne. “We could get the lemons at
Cousin Will’s store, but we ought not to use the sugar. Mr. Hoover
says we must save more than we’ve been saving.”

“Dat Mr. Hoover shore is stingy wid his sugar,” grumbled Emma. “How
come folks let him have it all, anyway?”

“He wants us to use less so there will be some for our Allies,”
explained Anne.

“H’m!” snorted Emma. “I’ve always been havin’ all de sugar I could buy
an’ pay for. Why can’t dem ’Lies git on like dey always done?”

Anne knew; she had read Mr. Hoover’s appeals. She said: “Our Allies
used to get most of their sugar from Germany and Austria, the countries
we are at war with. Now they can’t get that, so we must divide with
them the sugar from Louisiana and Cuba and the Hawaiian Islands.”

“Wellum, course what you say is so; but I don’t believe a word of it,”
said Emma. “An’ here Miss M’randa come this mornin’ an’ say I can’t
have no sugar to make a cake for Sweet William’s birthday. Um, um, um!
If my old man was livin’, he’d git sweetenin’ for dat cake an’ for
you-all’s lemonade, too.”

“How could he get sugar?” asked Patsy.

“I ain’t say sugar,” answered Emma; “I say sweetenin’. I was talkin’
’bout honey.”

“But we haven’t any honey,” said Anne.

“He’d git it, Amos would. He was a powerful hand for findin’ bee
trees.”

“What is a bee tree?” “How did he find them?” asked Patsy and Anne.

“Shuh, Miss Patsy! You-all know what a bee tree is. It’s a tree whar
bees home an’ lay up honey.”

“Oh, yes! But how can you find it?” inquired Anne.

“My old man was a notable bee courser,” said Emma. “Dis here’s de way
he done: He put some sirup on a chip an’ he took some flour----”

“Flour! What for?” interrupted Patsy.

“I’m a-tryin’ to tell you what for,” said Emma. “Well’m, he’d go wid
dat chip, like out yander whar de bees is on dem white clover blooms;
an’ thar he’d stand. Presen’ly de bees come an’ sip de sirup. Whiles
a bee’s a-sippin’, Amos takes an’ dusts it wid de flour, and den he
watches to see whichaway it goes. It flies ’long home, an’ den comes
back to git more sirup, an’ Amos he takes noticement how long it’s
gone; dat gives him a sort o’ noration ’bout how fur off de tree is.
Well, he follows Mr. Dusty-back fur as he c’n see it, an’ waits; an’
follows, an’ waits; takin’ de course twel he comes smang to de bee
tree. An’ lawdy! de honey he got! We used to sell it, an’ give it ’way,
an’ eat honey an’ honey cakes. Um-mm!”

She smacked her lips reminiscently.

“Oh, Patsy!” said Anne, and “Oh, Anne!” said Patsy; and then both
together, “Let’s do it!”

“Let’s go right away!” said Anne.

Heat and fatigue were forgotten. They ran into the house, and Anne
scooped up a handful of flour while Patsy was getting sirup out of a
preserve jar. They did not have enough confidence in the amiability of
the bees to put the sirup on a chip; instead, they took a long stick,
and Patsy held it with some trepidation while Anne stood by with the
flour.

“Dust that big one; that big fat one!” Patsy whispered excitedly.

The bee buzzed and flirted its wings, and flew away from what must have
seemed to it an avalanche of white dust. Anne and Patsy, on tiptoe to
follow, watched eagerly to see the direction of its flight. It circled
aimlessly about, and then buzzed back to the clover blossoms. The girls
selected another fat bee and dusted it liberally; it flew off, buzzed
about the clover field, and came back to sip the sirup.

“It’s all nonsense!” Patsy said crossly. “Let’s give up.”

“I don’t want to give up,” said Anne. “I reckon Amos did something Emma
doesn’t know about. I wonder----”

“We certainly can’t chase all the bees in the field,” said Patsy. “We
might as well be trying to follow Dick. Come on! I want to scold Emma
for sending us on a wild-goose chase.”

“Wild-bee chase,” corrected Anne, laughing.

Patsy was too warm and tired and cross to laugh. She went to the
kitchen door and said sharply: “Emma, what made you tell us that
foolishness about following bees to a tree? We’ve tried it, and the
bees don’t go anywhere; they just buzz around on the clover and come
back and eat some more sirup.”

“Ump-mm, Miss Patsy. You just ain’t done it right. Maybe you was
coursin’ a bumbler or de wrong kind o’ bee.”

“It was a honey bee. Don’t you reckon I know honey bees?” Patsy replied
indignantly. “Come out here and I’ll show you the kind it was. There!
It was like that.”

“Um-hmm! Dat big fuzzy-end bee; dat’s a droner. You’ve got to chase a
honey-maker. Thar’s one, Miss Anne; dat little fellow. Dust it wid de
flour. Now you follow it.”

Ah! this little creature was no loitering drone. Instead of buzzing
about the field, it took a straight, swift course, a “bee line,” to
the northeast. Anne and Patsy followed as far as they were sure of its
course, and then waited--waited what seemed a very, very long time, and
then dusted another honey bee. A minute later, the first flour-coated
little creature came flying back, to sip and fly away again. Again they
followed, in growing excitement and glee. It led them across a field,
through a swamp that they waded recklessly, across another field, and
into woods where their progress was slow because they could see only a
short distance ahead. They made up for it, however, by dusting several
bees, and at last they had a line of little messengers going in the
same direction.

They followed the swift-flying, busy creatures to--of all lovely,
suitable places in the world--Happy Acres! Happy Acres, their dear
garden plot in an old field surrounded by woodland. There was a big oak
tree at the edge of that charming, beloved place, to which bees were
coming from all directions. The girls forgot caution and ran close to
the tree; there was a hole near the ground, and about eight feet up was
a larger hole black with bees crawling in and out.

“Listen, Patsy!” exclaimed Anne. “It’s humming! the whole tree is
humming like a beehive!”

Oh, there was no doubt of its being a bee tree!

They made their discovery a great sensation in The Village. Mr.
Mallett, whose father had kept bees and who had a charm against stings,
volunteered to get the honey.

The Village turned out that evening to watch the performance.

Mr. Mallett set to work calmly and like a veteran. He stopped the upper
hole and started a smoldering fire of dry leaves and tobacco stalks
near the lower opening. After the smoke stupefied the bees, he sawed
and cut the upper hole, brushed aside the deadened bees by handfuls,
and got out the honey stored in the great hollow tree; there were
bucketfuls and bucketfuls of it. Anne and Patsy had a happy, important
time dividing it among their friends and neighbors.

“They’re welcome to the honey,” laughed Anne. “But, O Patsy! aren’t you
glad you and I had the glory of finding the bee tree?”

“That I am! And now hey for lemonade--cool, and tinkly with ice, and
sweet, sweet, sweet!” rejoiced Patsy.

“Oh, goody! we can’t send this to the Belgians and Frenches,” said
Sweet William. “Anne, I wish you and Patsy’d find a bee tree every
week. Then I wouldn’t mind saving all my sugar. Emma says she’s going
to make me a cake, a real cake. And I am going to eat honey, and eat
honey, and eat honey!” He heaved a sigh of blissful content.

While Anne and Patsy were coursing the bees, Dick was on his way to the
Old Sterling Mine. He had been there several times lately, looking
about jealously to see if Mr. Smith were investigating the mine. He had
not seen any one there again, and he had about decided that Mr. Smith
was looking over the timber in the Big Woods and had merely stopped to
see the old mine as a curiosity.

And so, on this pleasant autumn afternoon, Dick went up the hill from
the creek, carefree and whistling merrily. Suddenly his tune changed to
a sharp, dismayed exclamation, and he stopped to gaze at the ground;
yes, there were footprints; and the tracks led--he followed swiftly and
anxiously--to the mine opening.

“They’ve been here! They’ve been back to my mine!” he exclaimed.

Instead of pulling his improvised ladder from its hiding place beside
the fence, he went to the mine hole and looked in. An old dead pine
branch was hanging on the edge; it might have been tossed there by a
gust of wind. Dick pulled it aside. It covered a ladder made of rough
timber. Some one had been in the mine; might be there now!

Dick stood very still for several minutes, listening intently and
looking sharply around. Then he descended the ladder, with a shivery
feeling that some one might tumble a rock or send a shot on him from
above or drag him down by the legs or thrust a knife through him from
below. Nothing happened. He descended safely, and the tunnel ahead of
him was black and silent. He lighted his candle and went to the main
room. The odor of stale tobacco smoke hung about the place and there
were a few scraps of torn newspaper here and there.

He went on toward the lower tunnel. At a sudden little noise, he jumped
and put out his candle and stood on the alert. There was no glimmer in
the murky darkness. All was still. The noise--if he had really heard
any noise--was probably outside, the fall of a dead bough or the cawing
of a crow.

He relighted his candle and went on and set to work, but his spade made
a horribly loud noise. He felt as if some one were listening; creeping
down the tunnel; slipping behind him. Cold chills ran over him; he
peered into the darkness outside his little circle of light; he dropped
his spade and crouched behind a projecting rock.

Oh, it was useless to try to work! He put his tools under a pile of
old timbers and went back. Just as he was starting up the ladder, he
noticed a pile of leaves between the foot of the ladder and the wall.
It was not there the last time he was in the mine. He kicked the
leaves aside. Under them was an old iron mortar and pestle.

Something in the mortar glittered in the candlelight. Silver; silver,
of course! Dick picked up some of the particles to examine. There was a
little sharp pain and his finger began to bleed. Why, those particles
were glass! And there were bottles and pieces of bottles. What on earth
was any one doing here with a mortar and pestle, breaking up glass? It
was the strangest, silliest, most absurd thing! Why, what---- Oh, the
glass in the flour at Larkland mill! Had Germans, who put that glass in
the flour, been hiding in the mine? Suppose they should come back and
find him here!

He hastily pushed the leaves over the mortar and climbed out. It never
entered his head then to question how German strangers would know of
this deserted place almost forgotten by the community. He sped down the
path, through the woods, took the path to Larkland, and hurried to the
hayfield where he saw Mr. Osborne at work.

“Cousin Mayo!” Dick hardly had breath to speak. “I’ve been in the Old
Sterling Mine and I found----”

“Silver!” his cousin interrupted, in humorous excitement.

“A mortar with broken glass in it. There were the pestle and some
bottles.”

“What!” exclaimed Black Mayo, the fun leaving his face and voice.

“Some one had put a ladder in the hole. I found the mortar and pestle
and bottles at the foot, covered with leaves. They weren’t there last
week. Then I went down on my ladder.”

“You may have got on the track of something of far more importance than
the silver in or out of that old mine,” Mr. Osborne said, frowning
thoughtfully. “Have you seen or heard anything else that might mean
mischief, at any time? Think! and think!”

“No, sir,” said Dick; then he exclaimed: “Oh, Cousin Mayo! I’d
forgotten, but it was queer. The night before Broad Acres was burned,
when Sweet William was undressing, mother asked him how he got oil
on his blouse, and he said he reckoned it was from the little smelly
sticks he got under the steps at Broad Acres. And that night, Emma--she
was standing by me--let out a screech, ‘The devils--burning little Miss
Anne!’”

“I wish you had told me these things before,” said Mr. Osborne. “Now,
keep a still tongue and open eyes.”

“I certainly will,” promised Dick.




CHAPTER XV


That night Patsy was awakened by a hand on her arm, an excited voice in
her ear.

“Patsy, Patsy!” whispered Anne. “Wake up! I’ve something to tell you.
Wake up and listen. I can’t wait till morning. Oh, Patsy! I know how we
are going to find out Dick’s secret!”

“What? How?” Patsy was wide awake at once.

“We’ve failed and failed; it did almost seem as if he could outdo us.
Oh, he would have held it over our heads the rest of our lives!”

“But how----” interrupted Patsy.

“We--it came to me in a flash--we are going to course him,” said Anne.

“Course him?” Patsy made the words an amazed question.

“As we did the bees,” Anne explained. “We’ll follow him as far as
we can see him; and then we’ll take up his course from that place
next time; and so on, till we get to Redville or the end of the
world--wherever he goes!”

“I don’t see how we’ll manage it,” said Patsy.

“Oh, yes you do! Or you will when I tell you from A, B, C to X, Y, Z,”
Anne exclaimed impatiently. “You see, Pats, we’ve got to watch him and
follow him.”

“We’ve tried that dozens of times,” was Patsy’s despondent interjection.

“Will you listen to me? I say we’ll follow him. He nearly always goes
by Larkland, to get a pigeon; then he comes back to the public road and
he goes up Jones’s hill. We know that, for we’ve followed him that far.
Well! Next time we see him getting ready to go, we’ll stroll to the
mill and stop, as if we just meant to visit Cousin Giles; then, while
Dick’s at Larkland, we’ll run along and hide in the pines where he gave
us the slip that first time. You remember?”

Patsy emphatically did.

“And then we’ll follow him. He’ll not be expecting us there, and we’ll
be careful to keep out of recognizing distance. If he gets away, we’ll
come back home and not let him know we followed him. And the next time,
we’ll race ahead and hide at the place where we lost sight of him, and
follow him from there.”

“Oh! I see!” said Patsy. “We are to course him just like the bees.”

“Oh! you see; at last!” laughed Anne. “Maybe we’ll find out the very
first time; or we may have to follow him again and again. Oh, it’ll be
lots and loads of fun!”

The girls were on tiptoe with impatience, and rejoiced mightily when
they saw Dick put a candle into his pocket the next Saturday afternoon.
They went at once to the mill; presently they saw him take the path
to Larkland, and they ran ahead and dived into the pine woods where
he had hidden on that well-remembered April day. Half an hour later,
Dick came whistling along the road, and they crept from their hiding
place and followed at a cautious distance for about three quarters of a
mile; then they lost sight of him at a turn of the Old Plank Road. Anne
stopped.

“Come on,” said Patsy, keen on pursuit. “There aren’t any paths here;
of course he went on down the road.”

“He may have turned off in the woods,” said Anne. “The thing to do is
to course him, follow him as far as we see him. Oh, it’s such fun!”

“It certainly is,” agreed Patsy. “We’ve followed him a long way. Why,
we’re over two miles from The Village. It’s out here somewhere in the
Big Woods that Solomon Gabe lives.”

“Oh! the old ‘cunjer’ darky the others are so afraid of?” asked Anne.

“Yes. And his son Cæsar is one of the deserters they’re looking for.
Oh, Anne! suppose we should walk up--zip, bang!--face to face with a
real deserter?”

“Nonsense! Everybody says those men went to New York or somewhere; they
wouldn’t dare come back here, where people know them. Now, Pats-pet,
next time Dick starts off, we’ll run ahead and come here and--oh,
Patsy! that clump of chinquapin bushes will make a splucious hiding
place.”

“If he sees us, we can just be looking for chinquapins. Anne, this was
a splendid plan of yours.”

“It certainly was,” agreed Anne. “Oh! I do hope next time we’ll get
there--wherever it is--and find out Dick’s secret.”

A few days later, they followed Dick again. He went toward Larkland,
and they hid in the chinquapin bushes as they had planned. And there
they stayed, weary hour after hour. No one passed except a negro man
who went slinking down the road.

“Anne,” whispered Patsy, “that man looks like--I believe it is--Cæsar!”

“Any darky you saw would look like Cæsar to you, now he’s a deserter,”
giggled Anne. “You don’t see anybody that looks like Dick, do you?”

“No; and don’t let’s wait any longer. We’re so crazy to find out about
Dick we’re getting to be real slackers in Red Cross and gardening.”

They “went by” Larkland, and there they found Dick, busy stretching
wire and driving staples, helping Cousin Mayo wire in a new pigeon cote.

The next Saturday was perfect outdoor weather, with blue skies and
crisp air that invited one to the gorgeous October woodlands. Early in
the afternoon, Anne, who was spending the day with Alice Blair, came
running to The Roost.

“Patsy! Patsy! Where’s Patsy?” she called.

“I sent her to carry Mrs. Hight some wool,” said Mrs. Osborne. “She’ll
be back in an hour or so.”

“Oh, dear!” Anne exclaimed. “I can’t wait. Tell her I’ve gone--she
knows where--about _the secret_. Tell her to follow to the last place,
please, Cousin Miranda. She’ll understand. I must run.”

Away she sped, to pass the mill while Dick was at Larkland and get to
the chosen covert on the Old Plank Road. Near the mill the mail hack
passed her, with passengers that excited a sensation when they came to
The Village. They were the sheriff and a deputy with two of the negro
deserters, Bill and Martin Toole.

“Where d’you catch them?” asked Mr. Blair, neglecting his mail bags.

“Not so far from you folks,” answered the sheriff. “Lewis Jones saw two
men sneaking ’round that old sawmill place in the Big Woods; he came
and told me, and Tom Robson and me went and nabbed these fellows. We’ve
brought them here to jail to-night; to-morrow we’ll deliver them to
army folks.”

Just then Mrs. Red Mayo Osborne came in, hurried and anxious looking.

“Will,” she called to Mr. Blair, “have you seen Anne Lewis this
afternoon?”

“Not since directly after dinner,” he answered. “She passed the post
office then.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Osborne. “She came running in and asked for Patsy.
Patsy was away, at the Hights’, and Anne ran off, saying Patsy would
know where she was going. As soon as Patsy came home, she followed, but
she came back half an hour ago; she had looked and looked, and seen no
sign of Anne--on the Old Plank Road, where she expected to find her.”

“Anne ought not to wander off that way,” said Mr. Blair.

“Indeed not,” agreed Mrs. Osborne.

“I’d send the boys to look for her,” suggested Mr. Blair.

“They’ve gone,” said Mrs. Osborne. “David and Steve and Dick. It’s Dick
that made me so uneasy. When Patsy came back and found him at home, she
asked him where Anne was. He said he hadn’t seen her. And Patsy said
she had followed him, as far as the Old Plank Road, she was sure; and
farther. He looked startled, positively frightened. And he asked what
color her dress was; and when I said blue, a blue gingham, he said,
‘Oh, I’m afraid I saw her!’ He was off like a shot before I could ask a
question. He seemed so upset and excited that--well, it frightened me.”

“Nonsense, Miranda!” laughed Mr. Blair. “You let your imagination run
away with you. Anne ought not to roam the woods alone, but she is safe,
perfectly safe.”

Dick had, as his mother said, gone hurriedly in search of Anne. He did
not share Mr. Blair’s feeling of security; he was uneasy, alarmed.

On his way to the Old Sterling Mine that afternoon, he had seen two
negroes going up the path from the creek toward the mine. He crept
into the bushes and followed a little way, but the undergrowth was so
straggling that he could not get near them. One of the negroes was
Solomon Gabe, he was sure; the other negro, a stout, youngish figure,
had his back toward him and was screened by bushes. Dick caught only
a word here and there of their mumbled speech--“hide,” “get away,” and
oaths and oaths.

He crept back to the road, and then, to avoid Isham Baskerfield whose
oxcart was going up the hill, he went down the creek and cut through
the woods. He ran to Larkland to tell his Cousin Mayo what he had seen
and heard. The house was shut up. Perhaps he would find Cousin Mayo in
The Village.

And so Dick ran home--to be greeted by the news that Anne was off alone
somewhere; had followed him, Patsy said, along the Old Plank Road. Then
he remembered something that filled him with vague terror; if that were
Anne, and she should wander to the Old Sterling Mine, and encounter
those men---- He turned and ran to seek her. It was nearly dark when he
came to Isham’s cabin. The old negro was on the porch with his wife,
who was talking in a rapid, excited voice.

“Hey, Unc’ Isham!” Dick called. “Have you seen Anne?”

The man started and the woman was suddenly silent.

Dick called again; then he sprang over the fence and started toward the
cabin.

Lily Belle said something sharply to Isham, who turned and said: “Hey?
Why, it’s little Marse Dick. Was you calling me?” and hobbled down the
path.

“Have you seen Miss Anne Lewis?”

“See who? What you say, Marse Dick? Laws, I’m gittin’ deef!”

“Anne, Anne Lewis,” Dick said impatiently. “Which way did she go?”

“How I know which way she go? I ain’t see her,” mumbled Isham.

“What!” Dick said sharply. “I saw you going up the road in your cart,
and she was there at the top of the hill--in a blue dress.”

Isham looked terribly confused. Then he said: “Was that her? Was that
Miss Anne? My old eyes ain’t no good nowadays. I knowed somebody
passed me, but I was studyin’ ’bout my business, an’ I ain’t took no
noticement who ’twas.”

“But I thought she stopped and spoke to you,” said Dick. “It looked
like---- Didn’t she speak to you?”

As Dick became uncertain, Isham grew positive. “Who? Miss Anne? I don’t
riccermember her speakin’ to me. Naw, Miss Anne ain’t spoke to me.”

After all, Dick was not sure it was Anne. He had only seen a far-off
figure in blue. He thought--he was not certain--it paused by Isham’s
cart. He had not thought of Anne then, but now the conviction grew
that it was she; and he was curiously disturbed by Isham’s manner,
though he was sure the old negro would not hurt Anne.

Perhaps she had gone back, straying in the woods to get chinquapins,
and was now safe at home. Oh! surely she was at home. Twilight was
deepening. He would go home. He started back, examining the road
closely. There in the sand were footprints, slim little tracks, Anne’s
footprints!

So it _was_ Anne that Isham had met. Why did he say he had not seen
her? And why did he look so confused, frightened?

All the tracks led in one direction. There were no homeward-going
footprints. Anne had passed this way, but she had not gone back. Where
was she now? Did Isham know?

Dick ran to the cabin. No one was in sight, and door and shutter were
closed; but--for it was now dusk--he caught glimpses of flickering
firelight. He was just about to bang on the door when he heard a
voice,--not Isham’s and not Lily Belle’s. He peeped through a knothole.
There was a man sitting at the table. His back was turned. Dick crept
to the side of the cabin and looked through a crack. Now Lily Belle was
between him and the man. Isham threw a lightwood knot on the fire and
the blaze flared up. And Lily Belle moved. The man was Cæsar Gabe, the
deserter!

This news ought to go at once to The Village. But Anne! He could not go
back without one effort to find her. He ran down the road to the ford.
There he stopped. After listening intently and hearing nothing but
the usual wood noises, he took out the candle he had brought for his
mining, lighted it, and looked about. There, on the soft, damp ground,
the footprints were distinct; and they went, not up the road, but along
the path toward the mine.

Dick blew out the candle, squared his shoulders, and started up the
hill. If Anne had gone to the Old Sterling Mine, if she had encountered
the deserter--

Close to the mine he lighted his candle and saw rough, heavy tracks and
again that slim little footprint.

Should he go into the mine to search for her? Or should he hurry back
for help--not because of the danger to himself, but because he only
could guide aright the search for Anne; and to tell about the deserter.

As he stood there, trying to decide what was best to do, he heard--he
thought he heard--a faint cry. Anne? Was it Anne? Was she there, in
terror, in danger? He forgot his sober second thoughts about going back
for help. Anne there in need! He must go to her.

He scrambled down the ladder and stumbled along the tunnel to the main
room, not daring to light his candle. There was no glimmer in the
darkness before him, and now he heard no sound; perhaps he had never
heard anything, had just imagined he had. He lighted his candle and
examined the ground, but he could not distinguish footprints, Anne’s or
others. Was he wasting precious time here, when he ought to be on the
way home to give the alarm?

Anyway, he would go on to the second tunnel.

There, about the height of his head, was something hanging on one of
the rough timbers that supported the roofing. It was a piece of blue
ribbon, the gay bow that he had seen on Anne’s hair. He sprang forward,
in certainty and terror now, going straight to the pit at the end of
the tunnel. He stumbled against something and almost fell; it was the
ladder that some one had pulled out of the pit. He pushed it to the
edge, slid it in, and scrambled down.

As he reached the bottom, his arm was clutched, so suddenly that his
hand was jerked upward and his candle was extinguished. For a second
he was frozen with terror, awaiting he knew not what--a pistol at his
brow, a knife at his throat.

And then to him, expecting any terrible thing, came a dear, familiar
voice. “Oh, Dick! Dick!” gasped Anne. “I was so scared! I didn’t dare
look or move! And when I saw it was you---- Oh! I thought no one would
ever come. I thought they were coming back to kill me!”

“They? Who?”

“I don’t know. They threw a hat over my face from behind and
blindfolded me. Then they put me here.”

“Let’s get away, quick as we can,” said Dick. “I saw two men here this
afternoon. That’s why I went back.”

They climbed out of the pit and hurried along the tunnel.

Anne giggled hysterically. “O Dick!” she said. “I did find out your
secret. I said I would, and I did. But--I wish I hadn’t!”

He started to answer, and then--they were now at the foot of the
ladder--he stopped in terror. He heard voices. The men were returning.

“They’ve got us,” he said.

“Go on, go on,” gasped Anne. “Let’s get out anyway.”

“We’d just meet them,” replied Dick.

“Oh, come on out!” Anne said desperately. “Don’t let them kill us in
this awful hole.”

“A hole!” Dick exclaimed. “Oh! there’s one. Come here!”

He caught Anne by the arm and pulled her along the tunnel, into the
main room, to the pit into which he had fallen on his first visit to
the mine.

“Here’s a hole,” he explained in a rapid whisper; “behind this pile of
dirt. Wait a sec till I move these poles. Now! Grab that pole and slip
in. Feel for the log with your feet. There!”

Instead of following Anne, he poised on the crosswise timber.

“Hold the candle a minute,” he said. “Quick! And steady!”

He dragged back the poles he had pulled aside.

“Put out the light,” he said. “I’ll stay here and watch. If they don’t
step on the poles, they’ll never find us.”

“Oh, Dick! If----”

“Hush! They’re coming!”

They crouched down in silence, listening fearfully to the footsteps
and voices that came nearer and nearer. Three men, the foremost one
carrying a lantern, stopped in the main room of the mine. Dick saw them
clearly; they were Solomon Gabe, Cæsar, and Isham.

Solomon Gabe was moaning over and over: “Uh, my boy! Dey’ll git you,
dey’ll git you! My boy! my boy!”

Cæsar spoke with impatient harshness: “Shet up! Is all yore senses
wandered off, so you can’t see nothin’ but chain gangs an’ gallowses?
I tell you, I’m goin’ to git off. If you’d got any spondulix from dat
white man dat said he had gallon tin buckets o’ money---- Well, I’m
gwine in dat post office to-night. I’m bleeged to have money. Den dat
daybreak train.”

“What you drug me here for?” asked Isham’s frightened voice. “I got
nothin’ to do wid you an’ yore desertin’. You come to my house an’----”

“You reckon I was gwine to stay here an’ starve?” snarled Cæsar.

“An’ makin’ me tell dat lie ’bout not seein’ Miss Anne,” grumbled
Isham. “When dey finds out----”

“If you tell on me I’ll kill you, if it’s my last livin’ act,” Cæsar
said fiercely.

“Uh, I ain’t gwine to tell; I ain’t nuver gwine to tell,” promised
Isham, hastily. “But it don’t need me. Thar’s Miss Anne. What c’n you
do to----”

“Kill her,” said Cæsar.

“Uh, my boy! my boy! Trouble! trouble!” moaned his father.

“Cæsar! Cæsar!” Isham’s voice was shocked and deprecating.

“Killin’ is saftest,” insisted Cæsar. “If you-all’s feered, leave it to
me.”

“Naw! naw!” protested Isham. “Boy, if you do a killin’---- I know dese
here white mens. Dey’re mighty soft an’ easy-goin’ long as you don’t
make ’em mad. But if harm comes to dat gal, dey’ll grub thar way down
to hell wid thar bare hands to git de man dat done it. You’ll nuver git
away. I--I’ve heerd bloodhounds run,” he quavered.

Cæsar cowered. “You want to turn her loose, to start a search an’ git
me cotch?” he asked sullenly.

“Naw. Just left her in dat hole awhile,” said Isham. “She don’t know
yore name or nomernation. An’ ’fore folks find her, you’ll be gone.”

Cæsar thought it over. “Well,” he agreed. “If she stays thar two-three
days---- Le’s take a look ’round to make shore thar ain’t no way she
c’n climb out.”

“Thar wa’n’t nothin’ but de ladder, an’ you done took it out,” said
Isham.

“Le’s make shore. If she come here to de openin’, folks mought hear
her.”

Cæsar, followed by Isham and Solomon Gabe, went down the tunnel toward
the pit.

Anne clutched Dick’s arm. “They’ll miss me and find us here,” she
whispered. “Let’s get out. Let’s run.”

“Too near. Not time enough. Sh-sh!” Dick answered hurriedly.

Even then the negroes were coming back, in great excitement.

“Who put dat ladder thar? Who got her out?” Isham was saying wildly
over and over.

“Come on!” Cæsar was urging, between oaths. “We got to ketch her ’fore
she gits to de Village. Hit’s her life now; or mine!”

“Yas, yas! An’ I’ll stan’ by you!” Old Solomon Gabe ended with an
awful, sobbing shriek.

Anne and Dick, cowering in the hole, felt as if wild, bloodthirsty
beasts were on their trail. The fierce voices, the hurrying feet were
close at hand. But they passed by. They went toward the ladder. And
then voices and footsteps died away in the distance.




CHAPTER XVI


As the voices died away, Dick sprang up and pushed aside the poles.

“Come on, Anne!” he said. “Here! Take my hand. Now! We must get
home--quick!”

“Oh, Dick! What if they come back? What if we meet them?”

“We’ll not meet them,” he answered. “They’re going to The Village,
looking for you. And he’s planning to rob the post office. He may shoot
Cousin Will. We must hurry and let them know at home.”

He took Anne’s hand and they groped through the tunnel and into the
mine opening.

“Why, it’s night!” Anne whispered.

“Late,” said Dick. “It was dark when I came. The moon’s up.”

They crept up the ladder. Dick put his hand on Anne’s arm and they
stood still a minute, straining their eyes and ears into the woodland
night. Above the whir and chirp of insects and the murmur of the little
stream, they heard a trampling on the hillside; no voices.

“Suppose just Cæsar and Isham have gone on?” whispered Anne, terrified.
“Suppose that awful old man is waiting to grab us?”

“Oh, no!” Dick tried to soothe her; then he warned her: “Don’t talk.
Listen. And be on the lookout.”

They went cautiously down the path, starting whenever a twig cracked or
a pebble rolled underfoot. Now and then they stopped to listen and peer
ahead. Thus they went on--across the creek, along the path, on the Old
Plank Road, up the hill by Isham’s cabin.

The door was open, and by the brilliant blaze of the lightwood knots on
the hearth Anne and Dick saw Lily Belle moving restlessly about. She
came to the door and peered out; but she did not see the two figures
that slipped past in the darkness and hurried along the Old Plank Road
to the highway.

At the path that turned off to the mill and Larkland, Anne caught Dick
by the arm. “Wait, Dick!” she said.

“We haven’t time to stop,” he said impatiently. “Come on!”

“But, Dick,” she said, “I’ve been thinking---- Suppose they’re
watching. If we go the straight road home, they’ll be sure to catch us.”

“It’s a chance we’ve got to take, to get home to tell them,” he said.
“I must. Do you want to----”

“If we turn off here and go to Larkland,” said Anne, “we can tell
Cousin Mayo. He’ll know what to do. It isn’t much farther this way, and
it’s a million times safer.”

“Righto!” agreed Dick, turning into the path. “I’d been wondering if
we’d get past them.”

They hurried along the path through the woods and splashed through
Tinkling Water, not taking time to grope for the stepping-stones. The
mill loomed before them, a huge, dark shadow on the shadows.

Dick and Anne ran along the road to Larkland. Presently they heard
horse’s hoofs clattering down the road. There was a pause at the big
gate, and a familiar voice said, “Steady, Rosinante, steady!” as the
rider bent to open the gate.

“Cousin Mayo! Cousin Mayo!” cried Dick and Anne, running toward him.

“Hey! Who’s there?” he called sharply.

“It’s just us,” said Anne; and Dick said, “Anne and me.”

“Anne!--here at this time of night! Why, everybody in The Village is
distracted about you. Get on Rosinante behind me. I’ll take you to The
Roost.”

“Cousin Mayo----”

“Who’s that with you? Dick? Is this one of your fool pranks?”

Mr. Osborne’s indignation for the instant dominated his relief. The
search for Anne had been growing hourly in intensity and uneasiness.
After walking about for hours, he had come home to get his horse, and
was starting off again. And here the girl for whom the community was
searching came strolling up the road to Larkland.

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” he exclaimed.

“We were afraid to go home,” said Anne. “They are looking for me.”

“Of course we are looking for you,” Black Mayo said impatiently. “They
are horribly uneasy about you.”

“I mean, Cæsar’s looking for me,” Anne explained in a hurried, scared
undertone. “The deserter!”

“What!”

“They put her in the Old Sterling Mine. I found her,” said Dick.

“We thought we’d better tell you about it. I ran up on that deserter,
and he’s afraid I’d tell. They’re looking for me, and---- Oh! what’s
that?” Anne gave a stifled cry. The noise that she heard was only--as
she realized on the instant--the crackling fall of a dead bough, but
it left her white and quivering.

“Here, here!” said Black Mayo. “Let’s know what this is all about.”

He sprang from his horse, threw the bridle rein over the gatepost, and
led Anne up the walk and into the house.

“Why, Mayo! I thought you were gone. Anne! Where did you find her,
Mayo? And what is the matter?” asked Mrs. Osborne, as they hurried into
the room where she was sitting.

There was no direct answer to her questions. Mr. Osborne put Anne in
a big chair and knelt down before her, grasping her cold, trembling
hands. “Tell me what happened. Quick!” he commanded.

“I feel as if they are peeping in,” Anne said with a shuddering glance
at the windows.

Mrs. Osborne drew the curtains close, and she and her husband listened
with exclamations and quick questions to the girl’s story. As Mr.
Osborne listened and questioned he was moving about--taking firearms
out of a closet, loading a gun with buckshot, oiling and loading a
revolver, getting out boxes of shells and cartridges.

“They didn’t see you,” he said; “they don’t know where you are--or you
wouldn’t be here. Polly, you and Anne and Dick go into the chimney
room----” He nodded toward a small room opening out of the sitting
room, and called “the chimney room” because it was only the width of
the big old chimney. “Fasten the shutters; nail down the window and
put a blanket over it, so that not a ray of light can get out. Leave
the door ajar and a dim light in the sitting room, so you can see both
doors. Don’t answer any call unless it’s my voice.”

“Your voice? You are going----”

“To The Village. To warn Will and help there. If any one enters the
house, keep still till they open the sitting-room door, and then aim
straight and shoot to kill, Polly, as you do at the chicken hawks.”

“Yes, Mayo; I will.” Her voice was as calm as if she were answering a
request to sew on a button. With an unfaltering hand she took the gun
she was accustomed to use with deadly execution on birds of prey.

“God bless you, dear!” Her husband took her in his arms and kissed her
still, colorless face again and again. “Dick,” he said, “keep the gun
and pistol loaded for your Cousin Polly. She’s better than the best man
I know, in time of need.”

He turned to go.

“But, Mayo,” said his wife. “You must have firearms. Take a gun, the
pistol.”

“No,” he said. “If that villain traces Anne here, you’ll need firearms.
Anyway, the pistol would be mighty little use to me; I’d be an easy
mark--on horseback, for them sneaking along in the dark. But I count on
getting safe to The Village. They aren’t after me, you know. And what’s
a man’s life for but to take in his two hands and put where it is
needed?” He unclasped her hands that clung to him. “If all goes well,
I’ll be back---- Oh! as soon as I can come.”

He went out unarmed into the hostile night. The tense listeners heard
his firm, light tread on the flagged walk, the restive mare’s whinny,
and his soothing, “Whoa there! Gently, girl!” Then he galloped down the
hill, whistling “Dixie.”

Hour after hour passed. Anne tumbled down on the bed, to rest a while,
and Dick, too, fell asleep. Mrs. Osborne sat there alone, very still
and heedful, with the firearms at her hand.

Once the collie sleeping on the porch gave a quick, short bark, yelping
in a dream or at some little meaningless noise. Mrs. Osborne’s face
brightened. “Mayo!” she breathed, bending to listen. But no horse hoofs
rang on the road, no footsteps sounded on the walk; and gradually the
light faded from her face, leaving it bleak and sharp.

At last the early-morning farm noises began to be heard. Roosters
crowed, a restless calf bawled and was answered by its lowing mother,
the collie whined and scratched at the door. The east lightened for
dawn. The gray sky became saffron and brightened to orange. Catbirds
and thrushes sang, wrens twittered and crows cawed. There was the
sweet, melancholy sound of cooing doves. Then came the pause when day
seems to “stand tiptoe.”

Mrs. Osborne went into the sitting room. She looked through the front
window, down the road; quiet and untraveled, it lay there in the
brightening morning light.

“If nothing had happened,” she said to herself; “if he were safe----”

She turned from the window, with her lips pressed tightly together.

Now sunrays were creeping through the eastern shutters, and the farm
creatures were growing insistent in their calls. Mrs. Osborne wakened
Anne and Dick, who were amazed and mortified to find that they had
slept so long and left her to watch alone.

“Why, it’s day, broad day!” exclaimed Anne. “Hasn’t Cousin Mayo come
back?”

“No.”

“Isn’t that queer? I should think he’d be here,” said Dick.

He and Anne ran to look out of the window, but Mrs. Osborne sat silent,
with averted face.

“You look so tired, Cousin Polly!” said Anne. “Do lie down a little
while. We’ll watch.”

“No,” Mrs. Osborne said quietly. “I am not tired. I must go out and
feed the stock, and the pigeons.”

“Let me do it,” said Dick.

“We’ll help you,” said Anne.

“No. You mustn’t go outdoors and risk being seen. I’ll be back in a
little while.”

Mrs. Osborne made the rounds of the farmyard. Last of all, she carried
a bucketful of small grain to the pigeon cote, and scattered it on the
ground. The pretty, gentle birds fluttered around her and alighted on
her arms and shoulders. She stroked the shining plumage of one of her
husband’s pets. Then her lips quivered and she dropped her face in her
hands.

“God help me!” she said. “If he were alive, he would have come back to
me.”

A few painful tears trickled between her fingers. But soon she regained
her self-control and went indoors.

“Anne, Dick,” she said, “if something had not happened, Mayo would have
been back. I’ve stayed here all these hours because he said we must.
Now I’m going to look for him.”

“And we are going with you,” Anne exclaimed.

Mrs. Osborne considered a minute. “You’ll be just as safe, I reckon,”
she said. “Come on.”

Dick ran ahead and opened the door.

“Oh, Cousin Polly!” he cried. “There are people--two men--coming up the
hill. It’s father and----”

“Cousin Giles!” said Anne.

She and Dick ran down the path, followed more slowly by Mrs. Osborne.
She did not even hope to see her husband again, and it was with calm
misery that she met Red Mayo and Giles Spotswood. At least she would
have certainty instead of the terrible suspense of these long hours.

Red Mayo Osborne ran forward and threw his arms around his son and
Anne, and kissed first one and then the other.

“Dick, my boy! Anne, dear little Anne! Thank God, you are safe!”
exclaimed Red Mayo. “Mayo said you were safe with Polly.”

“Where is Cousin Mayo?” asked Anne. “We’ve been looking and looking for
him to come back.”

Red Mayo glanced away. He answered in a queer, hesitating voice.
“He--he couldn’t come now.”

Polly Osborne’s face was as pale as death and drawn with anguish. Red
Mayo, keeping his eyes still averted, did not see it. She spoke in a
firm, low voice: “What about Mayo?”

“The fact is,” Mr. Spotswood said, “Mayo--he told me to tell you,
Polly--Mayo--Mayo has been arrested.”

“Arrested!” she repeated blankly.

“Arrested,” Red Mayo said. “Jake Andrews came with a warrant. Arrested
as--as a pro-German, or something. But--he ran away.”

“What!” exclaimed Anne, in amazement.

By degrees they got the story. Mr. Osborne had ridden to The Village,
without seeing Cæsar or Solomon Gabe or Isham. He quickly told his
tale to the men who were waiting for him to start an organized search
for Anne; had she and Dick reached Larkland a few minutes later, the
deserter would have found all the Villagers away in search of Anne, and
the post office would have been easily rifled. As it was, the Village
men hid in the post office and waited till Cæsar came through a window
and seized him. Only one of the older negroes, probably Solomon Gabe,
came with Cæsar to The Village; he stayed outside the office, and ran
away when the fracas began inside. They sent a few shots after him in
the darkness, but evidently without effect.

They carried Cæsar to the jail and locked him in a cell, to await the
officer who was to take him back to Camp Lee.

And then in the early morning, just as Black Mayo was starting home,
Jake Andrews rode up The Street.

“Huh! You’re the man I’m looking for,” he said to Black Mayo, without
any courtesies of greeting. “I was on my way to your house.”

Black Mayo looked him up and down, without speaking.

“I’ve got a warrant for your arrest,” Andrews said, producing a paper.

“My arrest! On what charge, pray?”

“Oh, there are charges enough; having traitors in your house, and being
one yourself likely, and----”

“Who preferred these charges against me?” inquired Mr. Osborne.

“A good citizen, if he ain’t none of you-all’s aristocrats. You’ll find
out who and what when your trial comes.”

A dozen voices rose in protest.

“That’s high-handed!”

“Come, come, Jake! There’s a mistake somewhere. Why, we all know Mayo
Osborne. He’s all right.”

“I know my duty, and I’ve got my warrant,” Andrews responded doggedly.

Mayo Osborne looked perplexed. “We’ve got to submit to law
and officers,” he said, “Red, you and Giles go to Larkland,
please--Polly’ll be uneasy--and tell her about this arrest business--”
He laughed--“and get Anne and Dick.”

“We’re going to stand by you, you know, Mayo,” said Red Mayo. “We know
it wasn’t--wasn’t an intentional crime. It was perfectly natural you
should not consider that your old friend was an enemy alien and that
you should shelter Kuno Kleist----”

“Kuno Kleist! What do you mean?” demanded Black Mayo.

“He was--wasn’t he?--the man who visited you secretly, who----”

“That tall, fair man with a little pointed beard. If he wasn’t Kuno
Kleist, who was he?”

“I can’t tell you. I submit to arrest. But, Mr. Law Officer, will you
explain why you are such an early bird, out at daybreak?”

“I’m on my job,” replied Andrews. “A good citizen came to me in the
night and said you were fixing to skip the country and----”

Black Mayo considered this with a frown. Suddenly he gave a startled
exclamation. “Charles Smith told you that?” he demanded sharply.

“Yes; he----”

“That express! Redville at seven-thirty!” exclaimed Black Mayo.

Before any one had the ghost of an idea what he was going to do, he was
out of the group, at the horse rack where Rosinante was tied, on her
back, and galloped down the road. Andrews with an oath, jumped on his
horse and pounded after him.

Without a word, the little group watched the fleeing and the pursuing
man till they were out of sight. Then they looked around at one another.

“What on earth’s the meaning of it all?” Will Blair asked everybody.

No one tried to answer.

But David Spotswood said: “I know two things: Cousin Mayo’s all right,
and Jake Andrews will never catch him.”

Red Mayo laughed. “Never! As Emma would say, he might as well try to
plant a rose bush on the tail of a comet. Well, we must go and tell
Polly.” And then his face grew sober.




CHAPTER XVII


Black Mayo did not spare his good horse, but the train whistled long
before he reached Redville, and a desperate spurt of speed only brought
him to the station as the train was pulling out. He flung himself off
Rosinante and ran down the platform--just too late to clutch the rear
railing of the last coach.

There was no one in sight; the station agent did not meet this early
train, and the telegraph office would not be open for another hour.

Mr. Osborne stood a moment, looking after the departing train. Then,
frowning, he got on Rosinante and rode slowly homeward. Half a mile
from the station he met Jake Andrews, coming on merely because he had
started, and much surprised at seeing the fugitive whom he had long ago
given up hopes of overtaking.

“Andrews,” Mr. Osborne said crisply, “come with me to Smith’s place. We
must make certain----”

“Come with you!” Andrews recovered himself enough to sneer. “You’ll
come with me, under arrest.”

“Nonsense, man!” Black Mayo threw open his coat and displayed a badge
that made Andrews stare. “Don’t make yourself a bigger laughingstock
than you’re bound to be when people find out you let yourself be that
scoundrel’s tool.”

“Wh-what do you mean, Mr. Mayo?” stammered Andrews.

“Come and find out,” commanded Mr. Osborne.

Down the road they met a party of horsemen; Mr. Tavis, Mr. Blair--oh!
the whole Village, astonished at Black Mayo’s arrest, was following
after, hoping to have the mystery explained.

But for the moment Black Mayo made no explanation.

“Come!” he said, hurrying on to the old Tolliver place.

Albert Smith came out to meet them. His eyelids were red, and he looked
lonesome and miserable, but he met Mr. Osborne’s eyes bravely and
frankly answered his questions. His uncle had gone away very early that
morning.

“Exit Karl Schmidt, alias Charles Smith, German propagandist, bridge
destroyer, et cetera!” said Black Mayo, looking around at his
companions.

There was a chorus of surprised exclamations.

“Where has he gone?” thundered Andrews, turning to Albert.

“I do not know, I do not want to know. I have nothing to tell you about
my uncle,” the boy answered in a low, firm voice.

“You’d better--”

“Stop that!” Black Mayo checked Andrews’ blustering, and put a
protecting hand on Albert’s shoulder. “But what are you to do, my boy?”

Albert’s lip quivered. “My uncle said I might go to our cousin in New
York. But I do not want that. I like it here. I like to study and
war-garden and help liberty. I want to be American.”

“Well, you can make plans later,” Mr. Osborne said kindly. “Now get
your horse and come home with me and let’s have our breakfast.”

Albert went to the stable, watched suspiciously by Jake Andrews, who
began a mumbling which Black Mayo interrupted. “Oh, I forgot! Mr.
Andrews has a warrant to serve against me. Shall we----”

Andrews, turning fiery red, jerked out his warrant and tore it in two.
“And I let that man make a fool of me!”

“Yes,” Black Mayo agreed tranquilly.

“But if you knew all this--you had authority, being a Secret Service
man--why didn’t you arrest him?” demanded Andrews.

“Because there were things we wanted to find out, details of a plot,
proof against its leaders. I don’t mind telling now--you’re an officer
of the law and these others are friends--the tall, fair man who came to
Larkland was Thomas Milner. You’ve heard of him?”

“Not the big Secret Service chap?” exclaimed Andrews.

“Yes. I was in Washington, to make a report to him, when Smith sent you
fellows to Larkland to nose about.”

“If Mrs. Osborne had told me----” Andrews began to mumble.

“She didn’t know; and she wouldn’t have told you if she had known.”

“But why did Smith set us on you?”

“Oh! partly revenge for a beating I gave him last year and a fracas
we had later, and partly, no doubt, to shield himself from suspicion
by turning it on me and my guest. If he had suspected who that guest
was----” Black Mayo chuckled.

“But what was Smith doing?” asked Mr. Blair.

“This little out-of-the-way corner was a good place for him to
lie quiet between jobs. He didn’t do much right here except some
mischief-making among foolish negroes and silly whites.” Jake Andrews
reddened, but Mr. Osborne did not look at him. “Instead of being a
chewing-gum salesman, as he pretended, Smith had a nice little business
of directing bomb throwers. He got plans of all the railroad bridges in
this section, with a view to their destruction, so as to hinder troop
movements. The high bridge was such a tempting mark that he wanted a
whack at it himself, preferably with a troop train on it. I found out
that just in time.

“Now, Andrews, you’d better go to Redville; the telegraph office will
be open. Mr. Jones comes down on that 8.45 train, and he must wire up
and down the road, and see that Smith is arrested.”

“I’ll do whatever you say, Mr. Osborne,” Andrews said humbly.

“Here comes Albert. Well, folks, let’s go home. A fine morning for an
early ride.”

It was, indeed, a glorious day, early November in Southside Virginia.
The sunshine lighted up the bright gold of hickory and the pale gold
of down-fluttering locust leaves and the tawny purple of black haw and
the rich or flaming reds of oaks and Virginia creeper, all the more
splendid against the steadfast green of pines.

“Our woods look like an army with banners,” said Black Mayo. “Banners
of victory! It’s at hand,” he said confidently.

Ever since Château-Thierry, the Allies had been on the offensive. The
_mittel-Europa_ dream of Germany faded as Bulgaria and Turkey and
Austria-Hungary fell. Only Germany was left now. And all the world, and
none better than the kaiser and Von Hindenburg and Ludendorff, knew
that she soon must yield. “Retreat! retreat! retreat!” was the one
order. Never again, “Forward!”

The victory news came two days later. David had ridden to Redville for
the daily _Dispatch_, and he came galloping up The Street, waving a
paper that had a big black headline:

“ARMISTICE SIGNED!”

The President had gone before Congress and given it the great tidings.
“My fellow countrymen: The armistice was signed this morning.
Everything for which America fought has been accomplished. The war thus
comes to an end.”

For over four years Europe had been a battlefield for the nations of
the world. The conflict was less between nations than between two
principles: The right of kings to govern through armies, and the right
of people to govern themselves by law and justice. When the fate of the
world seemed in doubt, America turned the scale for right and justice.

A day or two after the great armistice news, Black Mayo went with the
Village young folks to the Old Sterling Mine; they were all curious to
see the scene of Anne and Dick’s perilous adventure.

“I wish Albert had come with us,” said David.

“He preferred to stay at home,” said Mr. Osborne. “Naturally he feels
badly about his uncle’s arrest; the fellow’ll probably have a long term
in a federal prison.”

“What’ll become of Albert?” asked Anne.

“Oh, he’ll get on all right. He’s a good little American,” replied Mr.
Osborne. He did not say that he and his wife were planning to adopt the
little fellow who had endeared himself to them both.

“Our boys will be coming back soon,” rejoiced David.

“Those who are left of them,” Anne said soberly.

Alas! there was a gold star for Mrs. Hight’s son William, and Jeff
Spencer was still missing. But the other Village boys would have
honorable discharges, and Fayett Mallett was bringing back a _Croix de
Guerre_.

“If only I had been older----” David began enviously.

“Well,” Mr. Osborne said, “I wanted to go, too, but if I had and we had
lost our bridge and perhaps a trainload of soldiers or supplies----
Ah, David, we stay-at-homes can look our soldier boys in the face and
say, ‘We, too, did our part.’ Those brave fellows over there would have
been helpless if we here hadn’t been brave enough to do our duty.”

Anne had been walking quietly along beside Mr. Osborne. Now she said in
an undertone, “Cousin Mayo, I----” Then she stopped.

“Well, Anne?”

“Cousin Mayo, I--I----” Then she blurted out, “I was to blame about
their thinking--about your arrest.”

“You to blame? Of course not!”

“The stranger I saw at Larkland that morning--I thought--I said it was
Kuno Kleist. And Jake Andrews heard me.”

“It was Mr. Milner. As I did not present you to him, you ought not to
have mentioned him or guessed his name. The lips of an honorable guest
are sealed to the secrets of a house.” Mr. Osborne spoke gravely; The
Village had its standard of good breeding not to be lowered for its
young people; they must rise to it.

“Yes, Cousin Mayo,” said Anne. “I’m awful sorry. I was so excited,
thinking it was Kuno Kleist.”

“I thought so, too,” said Patsy.

“You will never see Kuno, my dears,” Mr. Osborne said sadly. “He is
dead.”

“Dead!”

“Murdered. His sister wrote to me from Switzerland. He came home
once on a furlough, and she asked him if the tales were true about
brutalities to conquered people. He said: ‘I hope those things will not
be required of me; I am a human being before I am a German.’

“A month later came the news that he had been shot for refusing to obey
orders. She learned the details later from a comrade. An old Frenchman
had fired on a drunken German soldier who insulted his daughter,
and Kuno was one of a squad ordered to shoot a dozen citizens in
retaliation--men and women and children drawn by lot. Kuno refused. He
was put in front of the firing squad and was shot by his own comrades.”

“I am so sorry,” Anne said softly.

“I am so glad,” Black Mayo said, with a tender smile. “Death was his
only gate to freedom from the wicked tyranny of Prussia.”

“Old Prussia’s beat at last, thanks be!” said Patsy. “What will the
Allies do to the Germans, Cousin Mayo?”

“Say to them, as Julius Cæsar said to the Germans two thousand years
ago: ‘Go back whence you came, repair the damage you have done, and
give hostages to keep the peace for the future!’”

“Peace!” said Anne. “Your doves are birds of peace now, Cousin Mayo.”

“And again they find a deluged world.”

“Oh, sound gladder, Cousin Mayo!” cried Dick. “We’ve won the war;
and--thanks to Albert and me helping this year--we walloped the girls
in garden work and took the silver cup. Oh, it’s a fine old world!” He
danced a jig on the roadside.

His cousin smiled in sympathy. “I don’t want to be a wet blanket, young
uns,” he said. “We did splendid work in war. When I look ahead, I see
such stupendous peace tasks that--well, it makes me solemn. Oh, well!
we’ll grope and stumble a little, but we are on an upward path, with
old ideals and new vision ahead of us--and thank God for the leader
with vision.”

This talk brought them to the top of the long hill that led to Mine
Creek.

“There’s Unc’ Isham’s cabin, still as a graveyard,” remarked Dick. “I
wonder where he and Aunt Lily Belle are?”

“They ran away because they’re scared of being punished,” said Steve.

“They’d better be scared; mean things!” exclaimed Patsy.

“Oh! Unc’ Isham didn’t want to hurt me,” said Anne. “He was just afraid
to tell where I was. It was mighty comforting to hear the way he
talked.”

“I say it was!” Dick agreed emphatically. “The old nig was in a tight
place, with Cæsar threatening to kill him.”

“And there’s Solomon Gabe’s house,” said David.

The door was open; but the house was a mere shell from which its
occupant had gone forever. When his son was captured, the half-crazed
old negro had rushed back to his poor little home and, overcome by
haste and terror, he had fallen dead on the threshold. There the
officers of the law had found him.

“It was Solomon Gabe--poor old misguided wretch!--who set fire to Broad
Acres,” said Mr. Osborne.

“What! Did he burn Broad Acres?” exclaimed Patsy.

“Oh, Cousin Mayo! How do you know?” asked Alice.

“Dick heard Emma say that night that ‘the old devil was burning little
Miss Anne.’ At first I couldn’t get anything out of her; she insisted
it was Satan she meant. But, now that Solomon Gabe is dead, she
confesses that he told her the night before not to let Mary Jane sleep
at Broad Acres; ‘the torch of the Lord was lit for that house.’ She
kept her daughter at home; and then she was afraid to tell, partly for
fear of being blamed herself and still more from fear of Solomon Gabe.
I’m pretty sure he put the glass in the flour at Larkland. He was at
the mill that day, I remember.”

“Do you reckon any of the other darkies knew about it?” asked Anne.

“They probably knew a little and suspected more; like Emma they were
afraid to tell.”

“Louviny talked mighty queer one day when Patsy and I were there,” said
Anne.

“Smith had made all sorts of promises and threats to her and Lincum,”
said Mr. Osborne. “When Kit destroyed the war gardens, he was merely
acting in the spirit of what he heard at home. Scalawag told us about
that; didn’t he, Billy boy?”

“Yes, sirree!” said Sweet William, waggling his head proudly. “Hasn’t
anybody helped war gardens more than me and Scalawag.”

“Look here, Anne! Here’s where I found your footprints, turning from
the road up to the path,” said Dick.

“I saw somebody through the bushes; I thought it was you, and I
followed, down that ladder; and then that man--I didn’t know who he
was--pushed me in the pit and pulled out the ladder. Oh, Dick! here’s
where I thought they had us, on the way out. I stepped on a twig, and
it snapped--like a pistol shot it sounded.” Anne shuddered at the
memory.

“What--who’s that?” Dick exclaimed, looking earnestly into the woods at
the left.

“Nothing; nobody,” David said carelessly. “Well, here’s your mine hole,
with the ladder in it still.”

They all went into the mine and examined it with a great deal of
interest, especially the hole in which Anne and Dick had hidden. Black
Mayo lingered there after the others were ready to go.

“This place looks as if it had been intentionally and carefully
concealed,” he said; “the hole was covered with poles and then a layer
of dirt over it. I wonder why? Suppose we investigate a little. We have
plenty of time.”

“Mother says she never expects us back till night when we go off with
you,” laughed Patsy.

“Righto!” said Mr. Osborne. “Dickon, haven’t you some mining tools
hereabouts, a spade and pick and shovel?”

“Yes, sir.” Dick grinned.

“Well, we’ll get ready to use them. I’ll show you mining methods used
by the old Phœnicians and by the Mexicans to-day. Let’s pile these
poles and logs against the face of the rock.”

The old timbers were piled as Black Mayo directed. Then he put leaves
and twigs under the dry wood.

“It’s your party, Dick,” he said, when all was ready. “You may stick
a match to the kindling, and then we’ll flee to the open. We couldn’t
stand the smoke. Besides we’ve work to do out there.”

As the bonfire flared and roared, they went scrambling up the ladder.

“Now,” said Black Mayo, “we’ll go to Peter Jim’s cabin and borrow all
his buckets and tubs. We must fill them with water and have it ready.”

“Ready for what?” inquired Dick.

“I’ll show you presently,” said Black Mayo.

The wondering young folks carried out his instructions, and then sat
around the old mine from which smoke poured as from a chimney.

All at once Dick again said sharply, “What’s that?” He looked down the
wooded, rocky slope to the left. “I knew I saw somebody!” he exclaimed,
and ran down the hill.

There was a rustle and stir in a clump of chinquapin bushes. The
foliage parted and a black face peered out, a man’s frightened,
pathetic old face. Suddenly a pair of bony black arms were thrust out
wildly from behind, clutched the woolly head, and dragged it back.
There was a violent struggle, and screeches and sobs and loud, excited
talking.

“Oh, Dick, Dick! Come back!” Patsy screamed in terror.

For Dick had vanished in the thicket, the scene of that strange
commotion. Mr. Osborne and David and Steve ran to find him and to see
what was the matter.

Just then Dick reappeared, followed by an old negro man with a woman
tugging at his coat tails. It was Isham and Lily Belle.

“Come on away!” she was wailing. “Uh, what you let ’em see you for? My
old man, my old man! Dey got to kill me, too, when dey kill you.”

“Hush that racket. You’re all right,” said Dick.

Isham went to Anne and put up appealing hands. “I didn’t mean you no
harm, Miss Anne,” he sobbed. “I wouldn’t ’a’ teched a hair o’ yore
head.”

“I know you wouldn’t, Unc’ Isham,” said Anne. “Oh, don’t cry! Do stop
crying! Oh! we’re so glad to see you. We’ve wondered where you were.”

“We runned away,” said Lily Belle. “We--we started to runned
away--an’--an’----”

“Den we crope back,” said Isham. “We done lived here all our lives,
an’ we couldn’t go traipsin’ ’round strange neighborhoods. We ruther
you-all would kill us here at home.”

“Nobody’s going to hurt you,” Anne assured them. “We know you didn’t
mean any harm. Oh, Uncle Isham! Dick and I were hiding in a hole in the
mine, and we heard you telling Cæsar he mustn’t hurt me. We are all
your friends, and you’re just as safe as we are.”

Lily Belle forgot her fears. “I told you so, old man,” she cried; “I
told you to come on out them bushes. Ain’t nobody gwine to hurt us. Our
white folks is gwine to take keer of us. Um, um! Come on home, old man;
an’ ain’t we glad to git back!”

By this time the smoke came in lessening swirls from the mine hole. Mr.
Osborne and the boys carried the tub into the mine and set it at the
edge of the hole, and filled it with water.

“Now for a smotheration!” he said.

He poured bucketful after bucketful of water on the hot rock. It filled
the air with choking, blinding steam; and through its hissing came time
after time, like pistol shots, the popping of the rock.

As soon as the steam cleared away a little, Black Mayo and the boys set
to work with pick and hammer. In a few minutes a large piece of the
split rock was broken off. The gray-green mass was full of glittering
specks and streaks.

“Well, my boy, you found it!” said Mr. Osborne, turning to Dick.

“Found it?” echoed the boys and girls who were crowding around.

“Found the lost vein of silver. It was true, then, that tale about the
rascally mine manager. Evidently he concealed this place, hoping to get
possession of the mine and work it. But he died without being able to
carry out his plan. And now the mine comes back to its rightful owners.”

“Its rightful owners!” stammered Dick. He had not thought of any right
except the right of discovery. “Rightful owner!” he repeated in dismay,
remembering that this land had been bought by Mr. Smith.

“Yes; to your father and me, among other heirs,” said his cousin. “Our
grandfather never lost faith in the mine, and when he sold the land he
reserved the mineral rights. Your tumbling into this hole was a lucky
accident. But for that, the secret of the old mine’s treasure might
have remained hidden another half century, and you and I might have
died without knowing it.”

“We surely might.” Dick’s eyes grew grave, then he turned with a
shining face to his young cousin. “Ah, Anne! that’s a real treasure
hole. Silver isn’t the”--he went closer to her and dropped his
voice--“the dearest thing it’s kept hidden and safe. But for it--oh!
what would have become of you that awful night?”




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.



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