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CRITTENDEN

A KENTUCKY STORY OF

LOVE AND WAR

BY

JOHN FOX, JR.

ILLUSTRATED BY

F. GRAHAM COOTES

* * * * *

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

1911

* * * * *


CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

* * * * *

To

THE MASTER OF

BALLYHOO

* * * * *











ILLUSTRATIONS

John Fox, Jr. (from a photograph) Frontispiece


“Go on! ” said Judith

“Nothin’, Ole Cap’n—jes doin’ nothin’—jes lookin’ for you”





Crittenden
1

I

Day breaking on the edge of the Bluegrass and birds singing the
dawn in. Ten minutes swiftly along the sunrise and the world is
changed: from nervous exaltation of atmosphere to an air of balm
and peace; from grim hills to the rolling sweep of green slopes; from
a high mist of thin verdure to low wind-shaken banners of young
leaves; from giant poplar to white ash and sugar-tree; from log-cabin
to homesteads of brick and stone; from wood-thrush to meadow-
lark; rhododendron to bluegrass; from mountain to lowland,
Crittenden was passing home.

He had been in the backwoods for more than a month, ostensibly to
fish and look at coal lands, but, really, to get away for a while, as his
custom was, from his worse self to the better self that he was when
he was in the mountains—alone. As usual, he had gone in with
bitterness and, as usual, he had set his face homeward with but half
a heart for the old fight against fate and himself that seemed
destined always to end in defeat. At dusk, he heard the word of the
outer world from the lips of an old mountaineer at the foot of the
Cumberland—the first heard, except from his mother, for full thirty
days—and the word was—war. He smiled incredulously at the old
fellow, but, unconsciously, he pushed his horse on a little faster up
the mountain, pushed him, as the moon rose, aslant the breast of a
mighty hill and, winding at a gallop about the last downward turn of
the snaky path, went at full speed alongside the big gray wall that,
above him, rose sheer a thousand feet and, straight ahead, broke
wildly and crumbled into historic Cumberland Gap. From a little
knoll he saw the railway station in the shadow of the wall, and, on
one prong of a switch, his train panting lazily; and, with a laugh, he
pulled his horse down to a walk and then to a dead stop—his face
grave again and uplifted. Where his eyes rested and plain in the
moonlight was a rocky path winding upward—the old Wilderness
Trail that the Kentucky pioneers had worn with moccasined feet
more than a century before. He had seen it a hundred times before—
moved always; but it thrilled him now, and he rode on slowly,
looking up at it. His forefathers had helped blaze that trail. On one
side of that wall they had fought savage and Briton for a home and a
country, and on the other side they had done it again. Later, they
had fought the Mexican and in time they came to fight each other,
for and against the nation they had done so much to upbuild. It was
even true that a Crittenden had already given his life for the very
Crittenden
2
cause that was so tardily thrilling the nation now. Thus it had always
been with his people straight down the bloody national highway
from Yorktown to Appomattox, and if there was war, he thought
proudly, as he swung from his horse—thus it would now be with
him.

If there was war? He had lain awake in his berth a long while,
looking out the window and wondering. He had been born among
the bleeding memories of one war. The tales of his nursery had been
tales of war. And though there had been talk of war through the land
for weeks before he left home, it had no more seemed possible that
in his lifetime could come another war than that he should live to see
any other myth of his childhood come true.

Now, it was daybreak on the edge of the Bluegrass, and, like a dark
truth from a white light, three tall letters leaped from the paper in his
hand—War! There was a token in the very dawn, a sword-like flame
flashing upward. The man in the White House had called for willing
hands by the thousands to wield it, and the Kentucky Legion, that
had fought in Mexico, had split in twain to fight for the North and
for the South, and had come shoulder to shoulder when the breach
was closed—the Legion of his own loved State—was the first body of
volunteers to reach for the hilt. Regulars were gathering from the
four winds to an old Southern battlefield. Already the Legion was on
its way to camp in the Bluegrass. His town was making ready to
welcome it, and among the names of the speakers who were to voice
the welcome, he saw his own—Clay Crittenden.

Crittenden
3

II

The train slackened speed and stopped. There was his horse—
Raincrow—and his buggy waiting for him when he stepped from the
platform; and, as he went forward with his fishing tackle, a livery-
stable boy sprang out of the buggy and went to the horse’s head.

“Bob lef’ yo’ hoss in town las’ night, Mistuh Crittenden, ” he said.
“Miss Rachel said yestiddy she jes knowed you was comin’ home
this mornin’. ”

Crittenden smiled—it was one of his mother’s premonitions; she
seemed always to know when he was coming home.

“Come get these things, ” he said, and went on with his paper.

“Yessuh! ”

Things had gone swiftly while he was in the hills. Old ex-
Confederates were answering the call from the Capitol. One of his
father’s old comrades—little Jerry Carter—was to be made a major-
general. Among the regulars mobilizing at Chickamauga was the
regiment to which Rivers, a friend of his boyhood, belonged. There,
three days later, his State was going to dedicate two monuments to
her sons who had fallen on the old battlefield, where his father,
fighting with one wing of the Legion for the Lost Cause, and his
father’s young brother, fighting with the other against it, had fought
face to face; where his uncle met death on the field and his father got
the wound that brought death to him years after the war. And then
he saw something that for a moment quite blotted the war from his
brain and made him close the paper quickly. Judith had come
home—Judith was to unveil those statues—Judith Page.

The town was asleep, except for the rattle of milk-carts, the banging
of shutters, and the hum of a street-car, and Crittenden moved
through empty streets to the broad smooth turnpike on the south,
where Raincrow shook his head, settled his haunches, and broke into
the swinging trot peculiar to his breed—for home.

Spring in the Bluegrass! The earth spiritual as it never is except
under new-fallen snow—in the first shy green. The leaves, a floating
mist of green, so buoyant that, if loosed, they must, it seemed, have
Crittenden
4
floated upward—never to know the blight of frost or the droop of
age. The air, rich with the smell of new earth and sprouting grass,
the long, low skies newly washed and, through radiant distances,
clouds light as thistledown and white as snow. And the birds! Wrens
in the hedges, sparrows by the wayside and on fence-rails, starlings
poised over meadows brilliant with glistening dew, larks in the
pastures—all singing as they sang at the first dawn, and the mood of
nature that perfect blending of earth and heaven that is given her
children but rarely to know. It was good to be alive at the breaking
of such a day—good to be young and strong, and eager and
unafraid, when the nation called for its young men and red Mars
was the morning star. The blood of dead fighters began to leap again
in his veins. His nostrils dilated and his chin was raised proudly—a
racial chord touched within him that had been dumb a long while.
And that was all it was—the blood of his fathers; for it was honor
and not love that bound him to his own flag. He was his mother’s
son, and the unspoken bitterness that lurked in her heart lurked,
likewise, on her account, in his.

On the top of a low hill, a wind from the dawn struck him, and the
paper in the bottom of the buggy began to snap against the
dashboard. He reached down to keep it from being whisked into the
road, and he saw again that Judith Page had come home. When he
sat up again, his face was quite changed. His head fell a little
forward, his shoulders drooped slightly and, for a moment, his
buoyancy was gone. The corners of the mouth showed a settled
melancholy where before was sunny humour. The eyes, which were
dreamy, kindly, gray, looked backward in a morbid glow of
concentration; and over the rather reckless cast of his features, lay at
once the shadow of suffering and the light of a great tenderness.
Slowly, a little hardness came into his eyes and a little bitterness
about his mouth. His upper lip curved in upon his teeth with self-
scorn—for he had had little cause to be pleased with himself while
Judith was gone, and his eyes showed now how proud was the
scorn—and he shook himself sharply and sat upright. He had
forgotten again. That part of his life belonged to the past and, like the
past, was gone, and was not to come back again. The present had life
and hope now, and the purpose born that day from five blank years
was like the sudden birth of a flower in a desert.

The sun had burst from the horizon now and was shining through
the tops of the trees in the lovely woodland into which Crittenden
turned, and through which a road of brown creek-sand ran to the
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5
pasture beyond and through that to the long avenue of locusts, up
which the noble portico of his old homestead, Canewood, was
visible among cedars and firs and old forest trees. His mother was
not up yet—the shutters of her window were still closed—but the
servants were astir and busy. He could see men and plough-horses
on their way to the fields; and, that far away, he could hear the
sound of old Ephraim’s axe at the woodpile, the noises around the
barn and cowpens, and old Aunt Keziah singing a hymn in the
kitchen, the old wailing cry of the mother-slave.

“Oh I wonder whur my baby’s done gone,
Oh Lawd!
An’ I git on my knees an’ pray. ”

The song stopped, a negro boy sprang out the kitchen-door and ran
for the stiles—a tall, strong, and very black boy with a dancing eye,
white teeth, and a look of welcome that was little short of dumb
idolatry.

“Howdy, Bob. ”

“Howdy, Ole Cap’n. ” Crittenden had been “Ole Captain” with the
servants—since the death of “Ole Master, ” his father—to distinguish
him from “Young Captain, ” who was his brother, Basil. Master and
servant shook hands and Bob’s teeth flashed.

“What’s the matter, Bob? ”

Bob climbed into the buggy.

“You gwine to de wah. ”

Crittenden laughed.

“How do you know, Bob? ”

“Oh, I know—I know. I seed it when you was drivin’ up to de stiles,
an’ lemme tell you, Ole Cap’n. ” The horse started for the barn
suddenly and Bob took a wide circuit in order to catch the eye of a
brown milkmaid in the cowpens, who sniffed the air scornfully, to
show that she did not see him, and buried the waves of her black
hair into the silken sides of a young Jersey.

Crittenden
6
“Yes, ” he said, shaking his head and making threats to himself, “an’
Bob’s gwine wid him. ”

As Crittenden climbed the stiles, old Keziah filled the kitchen-door.

“Time you gittin’ back, suh, ” she cried with mock severity. “I been
studyin’ ’bout you. Little mo’ an’ I’d ’a’ been comin’ fer you myself.
Yes—suh. ”

And she gave a loud laugh that rang through the yard and ended in
a soft, queer little whoop that was musical. Crittenden smiled but,
instead of answering, raised his hand warningly and, as he
approached the portico, he stepped from the gravel-walk to the thick
turf and began to tiptoe. At the foot of the low flight of stone steps he
stopped—smiling.

The big double front door was wide open, and straight through the
big, wide hallway and at the entrance of the dining-room, a sword—
a long cavalry sabre—hung with a jaunty gray cap on the wall.
Under them stood a boy with his hands clasped behind him and his
chin upraised. The lad could see the bullet-hole through the top, and
he knew that on the visor was a faded stain of his father’s blood. As
a child, he had been told never to touch the cap or sword and, until
this moment, he had not wanted to take them down since he was a
child; and even now the habit of obedience held him back for a
while, as he stood looking up at them. Outside, a light wind rustled
the leaves of the rose-bush at his mother’s window, swept through
the open door, and made the curtain at his elbow swell gently. As
the heavy fold fell back to its place and swung out again, it caught
the hilt of the sword and made the metal point of the scabbard clank
softly against the wall. The boy breathed sharply, remembered that
he was grown, and reverently reached upward. There was the stain
where the blood had run down from the furrowed wound that had
caused his father’s death, long after the war and just before the boy
was born. The hilt was tarnished, and when he caught it and pulled,
the blade came out a little way and stuck fast. Some one stepped on
the porch outside and he turned quickly, as he might have turned
had some one caught him unsheathing the weapon when a child.

“Hold on there, little brother. ”

Crittenden stopped in the doorway, smiling affectionately, and the
boy thrust the blade back to the hilt.