The Iron Game: A Tale of the War. Henry F. Keenan
Jack, as an infant, had been fondled by Webster, by Clay, and, one never-to-be-forgotten day, Jackson, the Scipio of the republic, had placed his brawny hand upon the infant's head and declared that he would be "worthy of Jack Sprague, who was man enough to make two Kentuckians."
"But you—you, ought to be a colonel. Your father was a major-general in the Mexican War at twenty-five. A Sprague can't be a private soldier!" she cried, seizing on this as the only tenable ground where she could begin the contest against the two children confederated against her.
"I don't want to owe everything to my father. This is a republic, mamma, and a man is, or ought to be, what he makes himself. I saw in a paper, the other day, that the Government has more brigadiers and colonels and—and—officers than it knows what to do with. I saw it stated that a stone thrown from Willard's Hotel in Washington hit a dozen brigadiers. I want to earn a commission before I assume it. I'll be an officer soon enough, no fear. I could have had a lieutenant's commission if I had gone in Blandon's regiment. But I hate Blandon. He is one of those canting sneaks father detested, and I won't serve under such cattle."
Mrs. Sprague, like millions of mothers in those days, was cruelly divided in mind. When the neighbors felicitated her on the valor and patriotism of Mr. Jack she was elated and fitfully reconciled. When, in the long watches of the night, she reflected on the hardships, temptations, the dreadful companions her darling must be thrown with, country, lineage, everything faded into the dreadful reality that her darling was in peril, body and soul. He was so like his father—gay, impressionable, easily influenced—he would be saint or sinner, just as his surroundings incited him. This was the woe that ate the mother's heart; this was the sorrow that clouded millions of homes when mothers saw their boys pranked out in the trappings of war.
Our jaunty Jack enjoyed the worship that came to him. He was the first boy in blue that appeared in the sandy streets of Acredale. Never had the rascal been so petted, so feted, so adored. He might have been a pasha, had he been a Turk. The promising down on his upper lip—the object of his own secret solicitude and Olympia's gibes during the junior year—was quite worn away by the kissing he underwent among the impulsive Jeannettes of the village, who had a vague notion that soldiers, like sailors, were indurated for battle by adosculation. Jack may have believed this himself, for he took no pains to disabuse the maidens as to the inefficacy of the rite, and bore with galliard fortitude the wear and tear of the nascent mustache, without which, to his mind, a soldier would figure very much as a monk without a shaven crown or a mandarin without a queue. And though presently big Tom Tooker, chief of the rival faction in Acredale, gave his name to the recruiting officer in Warchester, and a score more of Jack's rivals and cronies, he was the soldier of the village. For hadn't he given up the glory of graduation and the delights of "commencement" to take up his musket for the Union? And then the fife was heard in the village street—delicious airs from Arcady—and a great flag was flung out from the post-office, and Master Jack was installed recruiting sergeant for Colonel Ulrich Oswald's regiment, that was to be raised in Warchester County. For Colonel Oswald, having failed in a third nomination for Congress, had gallantly proffered his services to the Governor of the State, and, in consideration of his influence with his German compatriots, had been granted a commission, though with reluctance, as he had supported the Democratic party and was not yet trusted in the Republican councils.
CHAPTER II.
FLAG AND FAITH.
If Acredale had not been for a century the ancestral seat of the Spragues, and in its widest sense typical of the suburban Northern town, there would be merely an objective and extrinsic interest in portraying its sequestered life, its monotonous activities. But Acredale was not only a very complete reflex of Northern local sentiment; its war epoch represented the normal conduct of every hamlet in the land during the conflict with the South. Now that the war is becoming a memory, even to those who were actors in it, the facts distorted and the incidents warped to serve partisan ends or personal pique, the photograph of the time may have its value.
Made up of thriving farmers and semi-retired city men, Acredale mingled the simple conditions of a country village and the easy refinement of city life. The houses were large, the grounds ornate and ample, the society decorously convivial. People could be fine—at least they were thought very fine—without going to the British isles to recast their home manners or take hints for the fashioning of their grounds and mansions. There was what would be called to-day the English air about the place and some of the people; but it was an inheritance, not an imitation. Save in the bustling business segment, abutting the four corners, where the old United States road bore off westward to Bucephalo and the lakes, the few score houses were set far back from the highway in a wilderness of shrubbery, secluded by hedges and shaded by an almost primeval growth of elms or maples. The whole hamlet might be mistaken for a lordly park or an old-fashioned German Spa. Family marketing was mostly done in Warchester; hence the village shops were like Arabian bazaars, few but all-supplying. The most pregnant evidence of the approach of modern ways that tinged the primitive color of the village life, was the then new railway skirting furtively through the meadows on the northern limits, as if decently ashamed of intruding upon such idyllic tranquillity. The little Gothic station, cunningly hidden behind a clustering grove of oaks at a respectful distance from the Corners, like the lodge of a great estate, reconciled those who had at first fought the iron mischief-maker.
The public edifices of the town—the Episcopal church, the free academy, the bank, the young ladies' seminary—were very unlike such institutions in the bustling, treeless towns of to-day. Corinthian columns and Greek friezes adorned these architectural evidences of Acredale's affluence and taste. The village had grown up on private grounds, conceded to the public year by year as the children and dependents of the founders increased. The Spragues were the founders, and they had never been anxious to alienate their patrimony. Acredale is not now the sylvan sanctuary of rural simplicity it was thirty years ago—before the war. The febrile tentacles of Warchester had not yet reached out to make its vernal recesses the court quarter for the "new rich." In Jack Sprague's young warrior days the village was three miles from the most suburban limits of the city. There was not even a horse-car, or, as fashionable Warchesterians have it, a "tram," to remind the tranquil villagers that life had any need more pressing than a jaunt to the post twice a day. Some "city folks" did hold villas on the outskirts, but they used them only for short seasons in the late summer, when the air at the lake began to grow too sharp for outdoor pleasures.
Society in the place was patriarchal as an English shire town. The large Sprague mansion, about which the village clustered at a respectful distance, was the "Castle" of local phrase. Much of the glory of early days had departed, however, when the Senator—Jack's papa—died. The widow found herself unable to maintain the affluent state her lord had loved. His legal practice, rather than the wide acres of his domain, had supported a hospitality famous from Bucephalo to Washington. But with prudent management the family had abundance, and, as Jack often said, he was a fortune in himself. When the time came he would revive the splendors his father loved to associate with the home of his ancestors.
"But where are we to get this splendor now, Jack?" Olympia inquired, as the youth was dilating to his mother on the wonders to come. "Private soldiers get just thirteen dollars a month; and if you continue smoking—as I am informed all men do in the army—I expect to have to stint my pin-money expenses to eke out your tobacco bills."
"Oh, I'll bring home glory. Napoleon said that every soldier carried a marshal's bâton in his knapsack."
"I'm afraid you won't have room for it if you carry all the things that
I know of intended for you in this and other families."
"Yes; but, Polly, you know, or perhaps you don't know, a bâton is like a college love—no matter how full your heart is, you can always find room for another!"
"John," Mistress Sprague reproves mildly; "how can you? I don't like to hear my son talk like that even in jest. Don't get the idea that it is soldierly to