Copperhead
WHEN Sumter was fired upon David Dean had been in Riverbank not quite a year, but he had passed through the first difficult test of the young minister, and Mary Wiggett's smile seemed to have driven from the minds of his people the opposition they had felt when it seemed he was, or might become, too fond of 'Thusia Fragg. Poor little 'Thusia! The bright, flirting, reckless butterfly of a girl, captured soul, mind and body by her first glimpse of David's cool gray eyes, knew—as soon as Mary Wiggett announced that David had proposed and had been accepted—that David was not for her. Mary Wiggett, inheriting much of hard-headed old Samuel Wiggett's common sense, was not apt to let David escape and David had no desire to escape from the quite satisfactory position of future husband of Mary Wiggett. As the months of the engagement lengthened he liked Mary more and more.
The announcement of the dominie's engagement settled many things. It settled the uneasiness that is bound to exist while a young, unmarried minister is still free to make a choice, and it settled the fear that David might make a fool of himself over 'Thusia Fragg. While his congregation did not realize what an attraction 'Thusia had had for David, they had feared her general effect on him. With David engaged to the leading elder's daughter, and that daughter such a fine, efficient blond young woman as Mary was, there was peace and David was happy. He had no trouble in stifling the feeling for 'Thusia that he felt had come dangerously near being love.
Until Riverbank was thrown into a rage by the news from Fort Sumter David, with due regard for his motto, “Keep an even mind under all circumstances,” had prepared to settle down into a state of gentle usefulness and to become the affectionate husband of the town's richest man's daughter. The wedding was to be when Mary decided she was quite ready. She was in no great haste, and in the flame of patriotism that swept all Iowa with the first call for troops and the subsequent excitement as the town and county responded and the streets were filled with volunteers Mary postponed setting a day. David and Mary were both busy during those early war days. Almost too soon for belief lists of dead and wounded came back to Riverbank, followed by the pale cripples and convalescents. Loyal entertainments and “sanitary fairs” kept every young woman busy, and there is no doubt that David did more to aid the cause by staying at home than by going to the front. He was willing enough to go, but all Iowa was afire and there were more volunteers than could be accepted. No one expected the war to last over ninety days. More said sixty days.
Little 'Thusia Fragg, forgiven by Mary and become her protégée, was taken into the councils of the women of David's church in all the loyal charitable efforts. She was still the butterfly 'Thusia; she still danced and appeared in gay raiment and giggled and chattered; but she was a forgiven 'Thusia and did her best to be “good.” Like all the young women of the town she was intensely loyal to the North, but her loyalty was more like the fiery spirit of the Southern women than the calmer Northern loyalty of her friends.
As the lists of dead grew and the war, at the end of ninety days, seemed hardly begun, loyalty and hatred and bitterness became almost synonymous. Riverbank, on the Mississippi, held not a few families of Southern sympathizers, and the position of any who ventured to doubt the right of the North to coerce the South became most unpleasant. Wise “Copperheads” kept low and said nothing, but they were generally known from their antebellum utterances, and they were looked upon with distrust and hatred. The title “Copperhead” was the worst one man could give another in those days. As the war lengthened one or two hot outspoken Democrats were ridden out of the town on rails and the rest, for the most part, found their sympathies change naturally into tacit agreement with those of their neighbors. It was early in the second year of the war that old Merlin Hinch came to Riverbank County. It was a time when public feeling against Copperheads was reaching the point of exasperation.
Merlin Hinch, with his few earthly goods and his wife and daughter, crossed the Mississippi on the ferry in a weather-beaten prairie schooner a few weeks before plowing time. He came from the East but he volunteered nothing about his past. He was a misshapen, pain-racked man, hard-handed and close-mouthed. He rested one day in Riverbank, got from some real estate man information about the farms in the back townships of the county, and drove on. There were plenty of farms to be had—rented on shares or bought with a mortgage—and he passed on his way, a silent, forbidding old man.
In the days that followed he sometimes drove into town to make such purchases as necessity required. Sometimes his wife—a faded, work-worn woman—came with him, and sometimes his daughter, but more often he came alone.
Old Hinch—“Copperhead Hinch,” he came to be called—was not beautiful. He seldom wore a hat, coming to town with his iron-gray hair matted on his head and his iron-gray beard tangled and tobacco-stained. Some long-past accident had left him with a scar above the left eyebrow, lowering it, and his eyebrows were like long, down-curving gray bristles, so that his left eye looked out through a bristly covert, giving him a leering scowl. The same accident had wrenched his left shoulder so that his left arm seemed to drag behind him and he walked bent forward with an ugly sidewise gait. At times he rested his left hand on his hip. He looked like a hard character, but, as David came to know, he was neither hard nor soft but a man like other men. Sun and rain and hard weather seemed to have turned his flesh to leather.
In those days the post office was in the Wiggett Building, some sixty feet off the main street, and it was there those who liked to talk of the war met, for on a bulletin board just outside the door the lists of dead and wounded were posted as they arrived, and there head-lined pages of the newspapers were pasted. To the post office old Hinch came on each trip to town, stopping there last before driving back to Griggs Township. Old Hinch issued from the post office one afternoon just as the postmaster was pasting the news of a Union victory on the board, and some jubilant reader, dancing and waving his cap, grasped old Hinch and shouted the news in his ear. The old man uttered an oath and with his elbow knocked his tormentor aside. He shouldered his way roughly through the crowd and clambered into his wagon.
“Yeh! you Copperhead!” the old man's tormentor shouted after him.
The crowd turned and saw the old man and jeered at him. Hinch muttered and mumbled as he arranged the scrap of old blanket on his wagon seat. He gathered up his reins and, without looking back, drove down the street, around the corner into the main street and out of the town. After that old Hinch was “that Copperhead from Griggs Township.” Silent and surly always, he was left more completely alone than ever. When he came to town the storekeepers paid him scant courtesy; the manner in which they received him indicated that they did not want his trade, and would be better satisfied if he stayed away. The children on the street sometimes shouted at him.
Old Sam Wiggett, Mary's father, was by that time known as the most bitter hater of the South in Riverbank. Later there were some who said he assumed the greater part of his virulent fanaticism to cover his speculations in the Union paper currency and his tax sale purchases of the property of dead or impoverished Union soldiers, but this was not so. Heavy-bodied and heavy-jowled, he was also heavy-minded. That which he was against he hated with all the bitterness his soul could command, and he was sincere in his desire that every captured Confederate be hanged. He considered Lincoln a soft-hearted namby-pamby and would have had every Confederate home burned to the ground and the women and children driven into Mexico. In business he had the same harsh but honest single-mindedness. Money was something to get and any honest way of getting it was right. There were but two or three men in Riverbank County who would bid in the property of the unfortunate soldiers at tax sale, but Sam Wiggett had no scruples. The South, and not he, killed and ruined the soldiers, and the county, not he, forced the property to tax sale. He bought with depreciated currency that he had bought at a discount. That was business.
It was not unnatural that Mary Wiggett should have absorbed some share of this ultraloyalism from her father. The women of Riverbank were not, as a rule, bitterly angry. They were staunch and true to their cause; they worked eagerly with their hands, scraping lint, making “housewives” and doing what they could for their soldiers; they were cheered by victories and depressed by defeats, and they wept over their slain and wounded, but their attitude was one of pity and love for their own rather than of hard hatred against the South. With Mary Wiggett patriotism was more militant. Could she have arranged it the lint she scraped would never have been used to dress the wounds of a captured Confederate soldier boy. 'Thusia, even more intense, hated the South as a personal enemy.
David felt this without, at first, taking much notice of it. He was happy in his engagement and he liked Mary better each day. There was a wholesome, full-blooded womanliness in all she did and a frankness in her affection that satisfied him. The first shock to his evenly balanced mind came one day when he was walking through the main street with her.
The young dominie was swinging down the street at her side, his head high and his clear gray eyes looking straight ahead, when something whizzed past his face. They were near the corner of a street. Along the edge of the walk a half dozen farm wagons stood and in the nearest sat Mrs. Hinch, her sunbonnet thrown back and her Paisley shawl—her finest possession—over her shoulders. Old Hinch was clambering into the wagon and had his best foot on the hub of a wheel. The missile that whizzed past David's face was an egg. It struck old Hinch on the temple and broke, scattering the yolk upon the waist of Mrs. Hinch's calico dress and upon her shawl and her face. Some boy had grasped an egg from a box before a grocer's window and had thrown it. The lad darted around the corner and old Hinch turned, grasping his whip and scowling through his bristly eyebrows. The corner loafers laughed.
What David did was not much. He drew his handkerchief from his pocket and gave it to the faded woman in the wagon, that she might remove the stain of egg. She wiped her face and began removing the egg from her garments and David and Mary moved on.
“Why did you do that!” Mary asked. “Don't you know them! They're Copperheads.”
“She was badly spattered. She seemed at a loss what to do.”
“Didn't youknowthey were Copperheads!”
“I did not know. That would have made no difference. She was distressed.”
“Well, please, David, do not help any more distressed Copperheads when I am with you,” Mary said. “Everyone in front of the store saw you. Oh! I wouldn't raise my little finger to help a Copperhead if she was dying! I hate them! They ought to be egged out of town, all of them.”
Some two weeks later old Hinch drove up to the little manse and knocked on David's door. He had the handkerchief, washed, ironed and folded in a bit of white paper, and a dozen fresh-laid eggs in a small basket.
“Ma sent me 'round with these,” old Hinch said. “Sort of a 'thank you.' She 'minded me particular not to throw the eggs at you.”
There was almost a twinkle in his eyes as he repeated his wife's little joke. He would not enter the manse but sidled himself back to his wagon and drove away.
It was from 'Thusia Fragg that David had the next word of old Hinch. Even in those days David had acquired a great taste for a certain sugared bun made by Keller, the baker. Long years after the buns were still made by Riverbank bakers and known as “Keller buns” and the last sight many had of David was as an old man with a paper bag in his hand, trudging up the hill to his home for a little feast on “Keller buns.” He used to stop and offer his favorite pastry to little children. Sometimes the paper bag was quite empty by the time he reached home.
It was no great disgrace, in those days, to carry parcels, for many of the Riverbankers had come from St. Louis or Cincinnati, where the best housewives went to market with basket on arm, but David would have thought nothing of his paper parcel of buns in any event. The buns were at the baker's and he liked them and wanted some at home, so he went to the baker's and bought them and carried them home. He was coming out of Keller's doorway when 'Thusia, as gayly dressed as ever, hurrying by, saw him and stopped. She was frightened and agitated and she grasped David's arm.
“Oh, Mr. Dean!” she cried. “Can't you do something! They're beating an old man! There!” she almost wept, pointing down the street toward the post office. David stood a moment, tense and breathing deeply.
“Who is it!” he asked.
“That Copperhead farmer,” said 'Thusia.
David forgot the motto over his desk in his study. He saw the small mob massed in front of the post office and men running toward it from across the street, and he too ran. He saw the crowd sway back and forth and a fist raised in the air, and then he was on the edge of the group, pushing his way into it.
“Stop this! Stop this!” he cried.
His voice had the ring of authority and those who turned knew him to be the dominie. They had done old Hinch no great harm. A few blows had been struck, but the old man had received them with his arm thrown over his head. He was tough and a few blows could not harm him. He carried a stout hickory club, and as the crowd hesitated old Hinch sidled his way to the edge of the walk and scrambled into his wagon.
Someone laughed. Old Hinch did not drive away.
“My letter,” he growled, and David stooped and picked up the letter that lay on the walk and handed it to him. Then Hinch struck his horses a blow with the club and the wagon bumped over the loose stones and away. The letter had been trampled upon by dusty feet and David's coat had received a smear of dust from the wagon wheel. He brushed his hands together, and someone began knocking the dust from the skirt of his coat. It eased the tension. Someone explained.
“We told the Copperhead to take off his hat to the flag,” they told David, “and he damned the war. Somebody hit him.”
“He is an old man,” said David. “You can show your patriotism better than by striking an old man.”
It was not a diplomatic thing to say and it was still less diplomatic for David to preach, the next Sunday, on the prodigal son. Many shook their heads over the sermon, saying David went too far in asking them to prepare their hearts for the day when the war would be ended and it would be necessary to take the South back into the brotherhood of States, and to look upon the Confederates as returning prodigals. Old Wiggett was furiously angry. Forty years were to elapse before some of David's hearers were ready to forgive the South, and many went to their graves unforgiving. The feeling after the sermon was that David sympathized entirely too strongly with the South. Those who heard his following sermons knew David was still staunchly loyal, but through the byways of the town the word passed that Dominie Dean was “about as bad as any Copperhead in the county.”
Rose 058
IT was during that week that Benedict, the medical man-of-all-work of the county, David's closest friend, carried David out to Griggs Township to see old Hinch. Doctor Benedict had his faults, medical and otherwise. Calomel in tooth-destroying quantities was one and his periodical sprees were all the rest. His list of professional calls and undemanded bills qualified him for a saintship, for his heart was right and it hurt him to take money from a poor man even when it was willingly proffered.
“Davy,” he said, putting his beaver hat on David's desk and sinking into David's easy-chair with a yawn (people would not let him have a good night's rest once a week), “one of my patients gave you a dozen eggs. Remember her?”
“Yes. The Copperhead's wife. She's not sick, I hope.”
“Malaria, backache, pain in the joints, headache, touch of sciatica. No, she's well. She don't complain. It's her husband, David. He's in a bad way.”
“What ails him!” David asked.
“He's blaspheming his God and Maker, Davy,” said Benedict. “He's blaspheming himself into his grave. He has hardened his heart and he curses the God that made him. Davy, he's dying of a breaking heart. He is breaking his heart against the pillars of Heaven.”
David turned in his chair.
“And you came for me? You were right, Benedict. You want me to go to him!”
“I want to take you to him,” said Benedict. “Get on your duds, Davy; the horse is outside.” It is a long drive to Griggs Township and Benedict had ample time to tell all he knew of Hinch. For five days the man had refused to eat. He sat in his chair and cursed his God for bringing the war upon the country; sat in his chair with a letter crumpled in his hand, with his eyes glassy hard and his face in a hideous scowl.
“I heard from the wife of what you did the other day when those loafers would have beaten the old man. He hates all mankind, Davy, but if there is one of the kind can soften his heart you are the one. Hates?” The doctor shook his head. “No, he thinks he hates man and God. It is grief, Davy. He's killing himself with grief.” David was silent. He knew Benedict would continue.
“The day you mixed up in his affair he got a letter at the post office. It's the letter he keeps crushed in his hand.”
“I remember. I picked it up and gave it to him.”
“He read it before he came out of the post office, I dare say,” said the doctor. He flicked his whip over the haunches of his horse. “You don't know why he came West? He was burned out where he came from. He spent his life and his wife's life, too, building up a farm and Fate made it a battlefield. Raiders took his stock first, then one army, and after that the other, made his farm a camp and between them they made it a desert, burning his buildings. He had a boy of fourteen, and they were trying to keep alive in the cellar hole where the house had been. A chance bullet killed the lad. I think the boy was running to the well for a pail of water. It has made, the old man bitter, Davy. It has made him hate the war.”
“It might well make him hate the war,” said David.
“There was another son,” said Benedict. “I take it he was a fine lad, from what the mother tells me. He was nineteen. The letter that came the other day said the lad had been killed in battle. Yes, the old man hates the war. He does not love the war, Davy.”
“He may well hate it,” said David.
They found old Hinch as Benedict had left him, bent down in his chair with his eyes set in a hard glare. He was very weak—much weaker than when Dr. Benedict had left him—but his lips still moved in ceaseless blasphemy. The wife let David and the doctor in. No doubt she felt the loss of her son as deeply as old Hinch himself felt it, but Fate had taken vigor out of her soul before this blow fell. Her nervous hands clasped and unclasped, and she looked at Benedict with the pitiful pleading of a dumb animal. When the two men went up to Hinch she seated herself at the far side of the room, still clasping and unclasping her hands. The tragedy that had occurred seemed lost in the tragedy that impended.
David fell on his knees beside the old man's chair and, with his hand on old Hinch's arm and his forehead on the chair arm, prayed. He prayed aloud and as he prayed he tightened his grasp on the old man's arm. It was more than a prayer; it was a stream of comfort flowing straight from his heart. He prayed long. The wife ceased her nervous clasping and unclasping of her hands and knelt beside her own chair. Benedict stole to the far corner of the room and dropped noiselessly into a seat. An hour passed and still David prayed.
The room was poverty-stricken in the extreme. There was no carpet on the floor and no drapery at the windows. The table was of pine, and a squat lamp of glass stood on it, the lamp chimney broken and patched with scorched paper. The afternoon waned and old Hinch ceased his muttering, but David prayed on. He was fighting for the man's soul and life. Dusk fell, and with a sudden great sob old Hinch buried his face between his knees. Then David clasped his hand.
The wife silently lighted the lamp and went to the kitchen, and, as if the light had been a signal, the door opened and Rose Hinch came in. She stood a moment in the doorway, her sunbonnet pushed back, taking in the scene, and then she came and stood beside her father and put her hand on his head. Then David looked up and saw her.
She had been all day in the field, doing the work her father had left undone, and her shoes were covered with loam and her hands burned to a brown-red. Her garments were rough and patched, but her face, protected by the sunbonnet, was untouched by tan. It was a face like that of a madonna, sweet and calm. Her hair, parted in the middle, had been drawn back smoothly, but now it fell rather loosely over her forehead, and was brown, as were her eyes. She let her hand rest a moment on her father's head, and then passed on into the kitchen.
Benedict left immediately after the supper, but David remained for the night. Old Hinch drank a bowl of broth and permitted himself to be led to bed. He was very weak but he blasphemed no more; his mood was one of saner sorrow. The wife sat with him, and David, seeing that Rose—after a day of man's work in the field—must care for the scanty stock, insisted on aiding her. When Benedict arrived the next morning old Hinch was much better physically and quite himself mentally, and David drove back to town with the doctor.
Three times in the next two weeks David drove out to Griggs Township with Benedict. Things had returned to their miserable normal state when he made his last visit, but when David arrived Samuel Wiggett was there. No doubt the farm was to be put up at tax sale and Wiggett had come out to see whether it was worth bidding in. It would have pleased him to be able to put old Hinch, a Copperhead, off the place.
Wiggett, like many sober and respectable men, had little respect for men like Benedict, and he was never any too well pleased to see David in the doctor's company. To see David and Benedict together at the home of the Copperhead was bad indeed, and to see the evident friendship existing between David and the Copperhead and the Copperhead's wife and daughter was worse. Wiggett climbed into his buggy after a gruff greeting and drove away.
For several days after David's meeting with Wiggett at the farm the young dominie did not see Mary Wiggett. War times were busy times for the ministers as well as for the men at the front, and David's pastoral duties seemed to crowd upon him. Three of the “boys,” sent home to die, lay in their beds and longed for David's visits. He tried to grasp a few minutes to see Mary, but it was often long past midnight when he fell exhausted on his bed.
Gossip, once started in a small town, does not travel—it leaps, growing with each leap. It builds itself up like conglomerate, that mass of pebbles of every sort, shells and mud. In no two heads did the stories that were told about David during those days agree. The tales were a conglomerate of unpleasant lies in which disloyalty, infatuation for the Copperhead's daughter, hypocrisy, unhallowed love and much else were illogically combined. Of all this David suspected nothing. What Mary Wiggett heard can only be guessed, but it set her burning with jealousy of Rose Hinch and weeping with hurt pride.
It was not a week after his last visit to the Hinches that Sam Wiggett's man-of-all-work stopped at the manse, leaving a small parcel and a note for David. The parcel held the cheap little ring David had given Mary as a token of their engagement and the letter broke their engagement.
David was horrified. Again and again he read the letter, seeking to find in it some clew to Mary's act, but in vain. He hastened to her home, but she would not see him. He wrote, and she replied. It was a calmly sensible letter, but it left him more bewildered than ever. She begged him not to be persistent, and said her mind was made up and she could never marry him. She said he could see that if he forced his attentions or even insisted on making a quarrel of what was not one it would be harder for both, since she was a member of his church and, if he became annoying, one of them must leave.
Before giving up all hope David persuaded Dr. Benedict to see Mary. The good doctor returned somewhat dazed.
“She sat on me, Davy; she sat on me hard,” he said. “My general impression is that she meant to convey the idea that what Samuel Wiggett's daughter chooses to do is none of a drunken doctor's infernal business.”
“But would she give you no reason?” asked David.
“Now as to that,” said Benedict, “she implied quite plainly that if you don't know the reason it is none of your business either. She knows the reason and that's enough for the three of us.” David wrote again, and finally Mary consented to see him and set the day and hour; but, as if Fate meant to make everything as bad as possible for David, Benedict came that very afternoon to carry him out to Griggs Township to minister to Mrs. Hinch, who had broken down and was near her end. It was not strange that she should ask for David, but the town found in the two or three visits he made the dying woman additional cause for umbrage, and Mary, receiving David's message telling why he could not keep his appointment, refused to make another.
Through all this David went his way, head high and with an even mind. He felt the change in his people toward him and he felt the changed attitude of the town in general, but until the news reached him through little 'Thusia Fragg he did not know there was talk in some of the barrooms of riding him out of town on a rail.
He was sitting in his study trying to work on his sermon for the next Sunday morning, but thinking as much of Mary as of his sermon, when 'Thusia came to the door of the manse. Mary Ann, the old housekeeper, admitted her, leaving her sitting in the shaded parlor while she went to call David. He came immediately, raising one of the window shades that he might better see the face of his visitor, and when he saw it was 'Thusia he held out his hand. It was the first time 'Thusia had been inside the manse.
“Well, 'Thusia!” he queried.
She was greatly agitated. As she talked she began to cry, wringing her hands as she poured out what she had heard. David was in danger; in danger of disgrace and perhaps of bodily harm or even worse. From her father she had heard of the threats; Mr. Fragg had heard the word passed among the loafers who hung out among the saloons on the street facing the river. David was to be ridden out of town on a rail; perhaps tarred and feathered before the ride.
David listened quietly. When 'Thusia had ended, he sat looking out of the window, thinking.
He knew the men of the town were irritated. For a time all the news from the Union armies had been news of reverses. The war had lasted long and bad news increased the irritation. Riots and lawlessness always occur in the face of adverse reports; news of a defeat embitters the non-combatants and brings their hatred to the surface. At such a time the innocent, if suspected, suffered along with the known enemy.
“And they think I am a Copperhead!” said David at length.
“Because you are friendly with Mr. Hinch,” 'Thusia repeated. “They don't know you as I do. It is because you are kind to the Hinches when no one else is. And they say—” she said, her voice falling and her fingers twisting the fringe of her jacket—“they say you are in love with—with the daughter.”
“It is all because they do not understand,” said David, rising. “I can tell them. When I explain they will understand.”
He had, as yet, no definite plan. A letter to the editor of the daily newspaper occurred to him; he might also make a plain statement in the pulpit before his next Sunday sermon, setting himself right with his congregation. In the meanwhile he must show himself on the street; by word of mouth he could explain what the townspeople did not know. He blamed himself for not having explained before. He stood at the window, looking out, and saw Dr. Benedict drive up. The doctor came toward the house.
David met him at the door.
“Davy,” the doctor said, clasping his hand, “she is dead,” and David knew; he meant Mrs. Hinch.
“And Hinch?”
“He's taking it hard, Davy. He is in town. He is in that mood of sullen hate again. He will need you—you are the only man that can soften him, Davy. It is hard—we left the girl alone with her dead mother. Some woman is needed there.” 'Thusia had come to the parlor door.
“Will I do! Can I go!” she asked.
“Yes, and bless you for it!” the doctor exclaimed. “Get in my buggy. You'll come, David!”
“Of course! But Hinch—he came to town! Why?”
“He had to get the coffin, Davy.”
David hurried into his coat.
“We must find him at once and get him out of town,” he said. “They're threatening to tar and feather him if he shows his face in town again. We may stop them if we are in time; please God we may stop them!”
They found old Hinch's wagon tied opposite the post office. They knew it by the coarse pine coffin that lay in the wagon bed. A crowd—a dozen or more men—stood before the bulletin board watching the postmaster post a new bulletin and, as David leaped from the buggy, the men cheered, for the tide had turned and the news was news of victory. As they cheered, old Hinch came out of the post office. He had in his right hand the hickory club he always carried and in the left a letter, doubled over and crushed in his gnarled fingers. He leaned his weight on the club. All the strength seemed gone out of his bent body. Someone saw him and shouted “Here's the Copperhead!” and before David could reach his side the crowd had gathered around old Hinch.
The old man stood in the doorway, under the flag that hung limply from its pole. His fingers twitched as they grasped the letter in his hand. He glared through his long eyebrows like an angry animal.
“Kill the Copperhead!” someone shouted and an arm shot out to grasp the old man.
“Stop!” David cried. He struggled to fight his way to Hinch, but the old man, maddened out of all reason, raised his club above his head. It caught in the edge of the flag above his head and he uttered a curse—not at the flag, not at his tormentors, but at war and all war had done to him. The knotted end of the club caught the margin of the flag and tore the weather-rotten fabric.
Those in front had stepped back before the menace of the raised club, but one man stood his ground. He held a pistol in his hand and as the flag parted he leveled the weapon at the old man's head and calmly and in cold blood pulled the trigger.
“That's how we treat a Copperhead!” he cried, and the old man, a bullet hole in his forehead, fell forward at his feet.
You will not find a word regarding the murder in theRiverbank Eagleof that period. They hustled the murderer out of town until it was safe for him to return; indeed, he was never in any danger. The matter was hushed up; but few knew old Hinch. It was an “incident of the war.” But David, breaking through the crowd one moment too late, dropped to his knees beside the old man's dead body and raised his head while Benedict made the hurried examination. Some members of the crowd stole away, but other men came running, from all directions and, standing beside the dead man, David told them why old Hinch had damned the war and why he hated it—not because he was a Copperhead but because one son and then another had been taken from life by it—one son killed by a stray Confederate bullet and the other shot while serving in the Union army. He made no plea for himself; it was enough that he told them that old Hinch was not a Copperhead but a grief-maddened father. As he ended Benedict handed him the letter that had slipped from the old man's hand as he fell. It bore the army frank and was from the colonel of a Kentucky regiment. There was only a few lines, but they told that old Hinch's oldest son, the last of his three boys, had fallen bravely in battle. It was with this new grief in his mind that the old man had stepped out to confront his tormentors.
David read the letter, his clear voice carrying beyond the edges of the crowd, and when he finished he said, “We will pray for one who died in anger,” and on the step of the post office and face to face with those who but a few minutes before would have driven him from the town in disgrace, he prayed the prayer that made him the best-loved man in Riverbank.
Some of our old men still talk of that prayer and liken it to the address Lincoln made at Gettysburg. It was never written down and we can never know David's words, but those who heard knew they were listening to a real man speaking to a real God, and they never doubted David again.
As David raised his head at the close he saw Mary Wiggett and her father in their carriage at the far edge of the crowd, that filled the street. Mary half arose and turned her face toward David, but old Wiggett drove on, and, while hands now willing raised the body of old Hinch, David crossed the street to where 'Thusia Fragg was waiting for him.
When old Sam Wiggett drove away from in front of the post office, little imagining David had just counteracted all the baseless gossip that had threatened him, Mary placed her hand on his arm and urged him to turn back, but cold common sense urged him to drive on. He did not want to be known as having seen any of the tragedy, for he did not relish having to enter a witness chair. Had he turned back as Mary wished David's whole life might have been different, and certainly his end would have been.
Once safely home Mary did not hesitate to write to David. Whatever else she may have been, and however old Sam's wealth had affected her mode of thought, Mary was sincere, and she now wrote David she was sorry and asked him to come to her. It was too late. With 'Thusia David walked up the hill. At the gate of the manse they paused. They had spoken of nothing but the tragedy.
“Rose Hinch will be all alone now,” 'Thusia said.
“Yes,” David said.
'Thusia looked down.
“Do you—will she get work,” she asked, “or is she going to marry someone.”
“I know she is not going to marry,” David said promptly. “She knows no one—no young men.”
“Except you,” 'Thusia suggested, looking up. As she met David's dear eyes her face reddened as it had on that first day at the wharf. The hand that lay on the gate trembled visibly; she withdrew it and hid it at her side.
“I like Rose, but I am not a candidate for her hand, if that is what you mean,” said David.
'Thusia suddenly felt infinitely silly and childish.
“I mean—I don't mean—” she stammered. “I must not keep you standing here. Good-by.”
“Good-by,” David said, and turned away.
He took a dozen steps up the path toward the manse. He stopped short and turned.
“'Thusia!” he called.
“Yes?” she replied, and turned back.
David walked to the gate and leaned upon it.
“What is it,” 'Thusia asked.
“You asked about Rose Hinch. I think we should try to do something for her—”
'Thusia's eyes were on David's hands. Now David's hands and not 'Thusia's were trembling. She watched them as if fascinated. She looked up and the light in his eyes thrilled her.
“'Thusia, I know now!” David said. “I love you and I have always loved you and I shall love you forever.”
Her heart stood still.
“David! but we had better wait. We had better think it over,” she managed to say. “You had better—you're the dominie—I—”
“Don't you care for met” he asked.
She put her hand on his and David clasped it. Kisses 'and embraces usually help carry off a moment that can hardly be anything but awkward, but kisses and embraces are distinctly impossible across a dominie's manse gate in full day, with the Mannings on their porch across the street. 'Thusia laughed a mischievous little laugh.
“What!” David asked.
“I'll be the funniest wife for a dominie!” she said. “Oh, David, do you think I'll do!”
And so, as the fairy tales say, they were married. Fairy tales properly end so, with a brief “and lived happily ever after,” and so may most tales of real life end, but, however the minister's life may run, a minister's wife is apt to find the married years sufficiently interesting. She marries not only a husband but an official position, and the latter is quite apt to lead to plentiful situations.
Mary Wiggett, calling David back too late, did not fall into a decline or die for love. Not until she lost David finally did she realize how deeply she had loved him, but she did not sulk or repine. She even served as a bridesmaid for 'Thusia, and with 'Thusia planned the wedding gown. She almost took the place of a mother, and advised and worked to make 'Thusia's trousseau beautiful. She seemed to wish David's bride to be all she herself would have been had she been David's bride. 'Thusia was too happy to think or care why Mary showed such interest, and David, who could not avoid hearing of it, was pleased and grateful.
The crowning act of Mary's kindness was asking 'Thusia to call Rose Hinch from her poverty to help with the plainer sewing. The three girls spent many days together at the Fraggs' and, although David was mentioned as seldom as ever a bridegroom was mentioned, all three felt they were laboring for him in making his bride fine. Mary, with her calm efficiency, seemed years older than 'Thusia, and thus the three worked—and were to work together for many years—for love of David.
075
THE leaves of the maples before the small white manse were red with their October hue, and the sun rays were slanting low across the little front yard at a late afternoon angle, when David, his hat in his hand and his long black coat thrown open, paused a few moments at his gate to greet Rose Hinch, who was approaching from up the hill.
David had changed little. He was still straight and slender, his yellow hair still curled over his broad forehead, and his gray eyes were still clear and bright. His motto, “Keep an even mind under all circumstances,” still hung above his desk in his study. For nearly six years, happy years, 'Thusia had been David's wife.
The old rivalry between 'Thusia and Mary seemed forgotten. For one year old Wiggett, refusing Mary's pleadings, had sat under a Congregational preacher, but the Congregational Church—being already supplied with leaders—offered him small opportunity to exert his stubborn and somewhat surly desire for dictatorship, and he returned to sit under and glare at David, and resumed his position of most powerful elder.
During the first year of 'Thusia's married life
Mary was often at the manse. 'Thusia's love was still in the frantically eager stage; she would have liked to have lived with one arm around David's neck, and she was unwittingly in constant danger of showing herself all a dominie's wife should not be. Her taste for bright clothes and her carelessness of conventionality threatened a harsh awakening for David. During that dangerous first year Mary made herself almost one of the household.
'Thusia, strange to say, did not resent it. Mary kept, then and always, her love for David, as a good woman can. But little older than 'Thusia, she was far wiser and immeasurably less volatile and, having lost David as a lover, she transmuted her love into service.
Probably she never thought her feelings into a conscious formula. At the most she realized that she was still very fond of David and that she was happier when helping him than at any other time.
'Thusia's gay companions of the days before David's coming were quite impossible now that 'Thusia was a dominie's bride, and 'Thusia recognized this and was grateful for Mary's companionship during the months following the honeymoon. A young bride craves a friend of her own age, and Mary was doubly welcome. Her advice was always sound, and 'Thusia was quick to take it. Mary's friendship also made the congregation's acceptance of 'Thusia far easier, for anyone so promptly taken up by the daughter of the church's richest member and most prominent elder had her way well prepared in advance. Mary, fearing perhaps that 'Thusia might be annoyed by what might seem unwarranted interest in her affairs, was wise enough to have herself elected head of the women's organization that had the care and betterment of the manse and its furnishings. To make the house fit for a bride she suggested and carried through changes and purchases. She opened her own purse freely, and what 'Thusia did not suggest she herself suggested.
“Mary is lovely!” 'Thusia told David.
A year or two after Mary had thus made herself almost indispensable to 'Thusia she married.
“Oh, I knew it long ago!” 'Thusia said in answer to David's expression of surprise at the announcement of the impending wedding. She had known it a month, which was just one day less than Mary herself had known it. Mary's husband, one of the Derlings of Derlingport, was due to inherit wealth some day, but in the meanwhile old Sash-and-Door Derling was glad to shift the nattily dressed, inconsequential young loafer on to Mr. Wiggett's shoulders. Wiggett found him some sort of position in the Riverbank bank and young Derling gradually developed into a cheerful, pattering little business man, accumulating girth and losing hair. 'Thusia rather cruelly but exactly expressed him when she told Rose Hinch he was something soft and blond with a gold toothpick. If Mary was ever dissatisfied with him she gave no sign.
Those who had wondered what kind of a minister's wife flighty, flirty, little 'Thusia Fragg would make soon decided she made a good one. She can hardly be better described than by saying she sang at her work. David's meager stipend did not permit the employment of a maid, and 'Thusia had little enough leisure between meals for anything but cheerful singing at her tasks. She cooked, swept, baked and washed. There were ministers' wives in Riverbank who were almost as important in church work as their husbands, and this was supposed to be part of their duties. They were expected to lead in all social money-getting affairs, and, in general, to be not merely wives but assistant ministers. If 'Thusia had attempted this there might have been, even with Mary's backing, trouble, for every woman in the church remembered that only a short while before 'Thusia had been an irresponsible, dancing, street-gadding, young harum-scarum of a girl. Her interference would have been resented. With good sense, or good luck, she left this quasi assistant ministry to Mary, who gladly assumed it, and 'Thusia gave all her time to the pleasanter task of being David's happy little wife and housekeeper.
David, at the manse gate, was waiting for Rose Hinch. Rose, when she saw David, came on with a brisker step. Rose had become David's protégée, the first and closest of many that—during his long life—gathered about him, leaning on him for help and sympathy. In return Rose Hinch was always eager to help David in any way she could. She was Riverbank's first precursor of the trained nurse. David and old Benedict had worried about her future, until David suggested that the old doctor give her what training he could and put her in charge of such of his cases as needed especial care. Rose took up the work eagerly. She lived in a tiny room above a store on the main street. To many in Riverbank she represented all that a trained nurse and a lay Sister of Charity might.
“Well, Rose,” David said, “you seem happy. Is this fine October air getting into your blood too?”
“I suppose that helps,” said Rose, “but the Long boy is so far past the crisis that I'm not needed any longer. I'm so glad he's getting well; he is such a dear, patient little fellow. That's why I'm happy, David. And you seem fairly well content with the world, I should judge.”
“I am, Rose!” he answered. “Have you time to see 'Thusia for a minute or two. I know she wants to see you.”
He held the gate open and Rose entered. David put his hat on one of the gateposts and stood with his arms on the top of the gate, “bathing in beauty,” as he told 'Thusia later. The sun, where it touched the maple leaves, turned them to flame. Through a gap in the trees he could catch a glimpse of the Mississippi and the varicolored foliage on the Illinois shore, the reds softened to purple by the October haze. For a few minutes he let himself forget his sick and his soul-sore people and his duties, and stood in happy thoughtlessness, breathing October.
Rose came out.
“It's all settled. I'm coming,” she said, “and, oh, David! I am so glad!”
“We are all glad,” said David.
Thus it happened that no wife ever approached motherhood more happily than motherless little 'Thusia. With David and kind old Doctor Benedict and gentle, efficient Rose Hinch at hand, and Mary as delighted as if the child was to be her own, and all of them loving her, 'Thusia did not give a moment to fear. The baby, when it came, was a boy, and Doctor Benedict said it was the finest in the world, and immediately nominated himself the baby's uncle. He bought the finest solid silver, gold-lined cup to be had in Riverbank and had it engraved, “Davy, Junior, from Uncle Benedict,” with the date. This was more than he did for Mary Derling's baby, which came a month later. He gave a silver spoon there, one of about forty that lucky infant received from near and far.
'Thusia was up and about, singing as before, in due time. Rose Hinch remained for the better part of a. month and departed absolutely refusing any compensation. The winter was as happy as any David ever knew. Davy Junior was a strong and fairly well-behaved baby; 'Thusia was in a state of ecstatic bliss, and in the town all the former opposition to David had been long since forgotten. With the calmness of an older man but with a young man's energy he went up and down the streets of the town on his comforting errands. He was fitting into his niche in the world with no rough edges, all of them having been worn smooth, and it seemed that it was his lot to remain for the rest of his life dominie of the Presbyterian Church of Riverbank, each year better loved and more helpful.
April and May passed blissfully, but by the end of June an unexpected storm had gathered, and David did not know whether he could remain in Riverbank another month.
Late in May an epidemic of diphtheria appeared in Riverbank, several cases being in David's Sunday school and the school was closed. Mary, in a panic, fled to Derlingport with her child. She remained nearly a month with her husband's parents, but by that, time Derlingport was as overrun by the disease as Riverbank had been and conditions were reported better at home; so she came back, bringing the child. She returned to find the church in the throes of one of those violent quarrels that come with all the violence and suddenness of a tropical storm. Her short absence threatened to result in David's expulsion from the church.
On the last Saturday of June old Sam Wiggett sat at the black mahogany desk in his office studying the columns of a New York commercial journal—it was the year when the lumber situation induced him to let who wished think him a fool and to make his first big purchase of Wisconsin timberlands—when his daughter, Mary Derling, entered. She came sweeping into the office dressed in all the fuss and furbelow of the fashionable young matron of that day, and with her was her cousin, Ellen Hardcome. Sam Wiggett turned.
“Huh! what are you down here for!” he asked. He was never pleased when interrupted at his office. “Where's the baby!”
“I left him with nurse in the carriage,” said Mary. “Can't you say good-day to Ellen, father!”
“How are you!” said Mr. Wiggett briefly. Mrs. Hardcome acknowledged the greeting and waited for Mary to proceed.
“Well, father,” said Mary, “this thing simply cannot go on any longer. Something will have to be done. This quarrel is absolutely breaking up the church.”
“Huh!” growled Mr. Wiggett. “What's happening now!”
“David is going to preach to-morrow,” said Mary dropping into a vacant chair and motioning Ellen to be seated. “After all the trouble we took to get Dr. Hotchkiss to come from Derling-port, and after the ladies offering to pay for a vacation for David out of the fund—”
“What!” shouted Wiggett, striking the desk a mighty blow with his fist. “Didn't I tell you you women have no right to use that fund for any such nonsense! That's money raised to pay on the mortgage. You've no right to spend it for vacations for your star-gazing, whipper-snapper preacher. No! Nor for anything else!”
“But, father!” Mary insisted.
“I don't care anything about your 'but, father.' That's mortgage money. You women ought to have turned it over to the bank long ago. You have no right to keep it. Pay for a vacation! You act like a lot of babies!”
“Father—”
“Pay for a vacation! Much he needs a vacation! Strong as an ox and healthy as a bull; doesn't have anything to do the whole year 'round but potter around town and preach a couple of sermons. It's you women get these notions into your preachers' heads. You turn them into a lot of babies.”
“Father,willyou let me say one word before you quite tear me to pieces! A great many people in our churchlikeDavid Dean. It is all right to bark 'Woof! woof! Throw him out neck and crop!' but you know as well as I do that would split the church.”
“Well, let it split! If we can't have peace—”
“Exactly, father!” Mary said quietly. “If we cannot have peace in the church it will be better for David Dean to go elsewhere, but before that happens—for I think many of our people would leave our church if David goes—shouldn't we do all we can to bring peace? Ellen agrees with me.”
“In a measure I do; yes,” said Ellen Hard-come.
“Ellen and Mr. Hardcome,” Mary continued, “are willing to promise to do nothing immediately if David will go away for a month or two. If we can send him away for a couple of months until some of the bitterest feeling dies everything may be all right. We women will be glad enough to make up and pay back anything we have to borrow from the fund. I think, father, if you spoke to David he might go.”
“Better get rid of him now,” Wiggett growled. Ellen Hardcome smiled. This was what she wanted. Mary looked at the heavy-faced old dictator. She knew her father well enough to feel the hopelessness of her mission. Old Wiggett had never forgiven David for marrying 'Thusia instead of Mary, and because he would a thousand times have preferred David to Derling as a son-in-law he hated David the more.
“It isn't only that David would go, father,” Mary said. “If he is sent away we will lose the Hodges and the Martins and the Ollendorfs and old Peter Grimby. I don't mind those old maid Curlews going, or people like the Hansoms or the Browns, but you know what the Hodges and old Peter Grimby do for the church every year. We thought that if you could get David to take a vacation, explaining to him that it would be a good thing to let everything quiet down—”
Old Sam Wiggett chuckled.
“Who thought! Ellen never thought of that,” he said.
“I thought of it,” said Mary.
“And he won't go!” chuckled Wiggett. “I give him credit—he's a fighter. You women have stirred up the fight in him. I told you to shut up and keep out of this, didn't I! Why—that Dean has more sense than all of you. You must have thought he was a fool, asking him to go on a vacation while Ellen and all stayed here to stir things up against him. He has brains and that wife of his has spunk—do you know what she told me when I met her on the street this morning!”
Mary did not ask him.
“Told me I wasn't fit to clean her husband's shoes!” said Wiggett.
“I hope—” said Mary.
“Well, you needn't, because I didn't,” said her father. “I didn't say anything. Turned my back on her and walked away.”
“And I suppose you haven't heard the latest thing she has said!” said Ellen Hardcome bitterly. “She says I have no voice, and that I would not be in the choir if my husband did not have charge of the music.”
“Said that, did she!” chuckled Wiggett.
“She said my upper register was squeaky, if you please!”
'Thusia had indeed said this. She had said it years before and to a certain Miss Carrol who was then her friend. What Miss Carrol had said about the same voice, she being in the choir with Mrs. Hardcome, does not matter. Miss Carrol had not thought it necessary to tell that to Ellen. With the taking of sides in the present church quarrel all those who were against David racked their brains to recall things 'Thusia had said that could be used to set anyone against the dominie. There were plenty of such harmless, little confidences to recall. 'Thusia, during her first married years—and for long after—was still 'Thusia; she tingled with life and she loved companionship and liked to talk and listen. Every woman expresses her harmless opinions to her friends, but it is easy for the friend, when she becomes an enemy and wishes for recruits, to use this contraband ammunition. It is a woman's privilege, it seems. The women who, like Rose Hinch, and certain women you know, are accepted by men on an equality of friendship, make the least use of it, for even among children there is no term of opprobrium worse than “tattletale.” It was but natural for yellow-visaged Miss Connerton, for instance, who had once said to 'Thusia, “Don't you get tired of Mrs. Hallmeyer's eternal purple dresses,” and who had accepted 'Thusia's “Yes” as a confidential expression of opinion as between one woman and another, to run to Mrs. Hall-meyer, when everyone was against 'Thusia, and say: “And I suppose you know what she said about you, Mrs. Hallmeyer? That she simply got tired to death of seeing your eternal purple dresses!”
David was fighting for his life, for his life was his work in Riverbank. He was not making the fight alone. Seven or more years of faithful service had won him staunch friends who were glad to fight for him, but the miserable feature of a church quarrel is that—win or lose—the minister must suffer. The two months of the quarrel were the unhappiest of his life, and David made the fight, not because he hoped to remain in Riverbank after it was ended, but because he felt it his duty to stand by what he believed was right, until he should be plainly and actually told to go. The majority of his people, he felt, were with him, but that would make little difference in the final outcome. Although he tried in every way to lessen the bitterness of the quarrel, so that his triumph, if he won, might be the less offensive, he knew his triumph could mean but one thing. A body, nearly half the church, would prepare to leave, and his supporters, having won, would suggest that it would be better for David—who could not keep body and soul together on what the remnant of a church could afford to pay him—and better for the church, that he should resign and carry his triumph elsewhere.
Win or lose David was likely to lose, but until the final moment he did not mean to back down. Had he felt himself in the wrong he would have acknowledged it at once; had he been in the right, and no one but himself concerned, he would have preached a farewell sermon and would have departed. He remained and made the fight because he was loyal to 'Thusia!
It was, indeed, 'Thusia against whom the fight was being made, and it was Ellen Hardcome to whom the whole miserable affair was due. It was all brought about by a pair of black prunella gaiters.