The Iron Game: A Tale of the War. Henry F. Keenan
But in war-time people seem to lose their senses and change their opinions like lake breezes; prejudices grow like gourds, and the people who do least and talk loudest make public sentiment."
"What an outrageous state of things!" Olympia cried, hotly. "Our family sympathize with traitors indeed! Why, it was my father who, in the Senate, upheld Jackson when he stamped out South Carolina in its rebellion. Oh! it is monstrous, such a calumny. Why, just think of it! The only man in the family is a private soldier, when he might have been high in rank, with such influences as we could bring to bear. O Kate! it almost makes one pray for a defeat to punish such ingrates!"
"Yes; but for Heaven's sake don't let any one hear you say such a thing—for your brother's sake! He is already the victim of the feeling I have spoken about. He was to have had the captaincy of the first one hundred men he raised. But the Governor has been made to change the usual rule, and the colonel is to appoint the officers."
"And Jack isn't to have a commission?"
"No, not now; only men of the war party are to be made officers."
"Good heavens! Nobody could be more eager for the war than Jack. It is his passion. His delight in it shocks my mother, who hates war. What stronger evidence of sympathy for the cause could he show than joining the army before finishing college?"
"But he is a Democrat—and—and—only Republicans are to be trusted at first." Miss Boone blushed as she stammered this, for it was her own father, in his function as chairman of the war committee, who had insisted upon this discrimination. Worse still, but this Kate did not mention—it was Boone's own work that kept Jack from his expected epaulets. There had long been a feud between Boone and the late Senator Sprague, and Olympia conjectured most of what the daughter reserved.
"Your brother has done wonders, everybody says; he has the finest fellows in the township, and he ought to be colonel, at least," Miss Boone said, rising to go.
"Oh, I have no fear that he will not win his way," Olympia replied, cheerfully. "The brave in battle are captains, no matter what rank they hold."
The odious partisanship and ready calumny of her own compatriots gave a strange bent to her mind in dealing with another problem. Vincent, too, had suffered from the wretched battle of his family's enemies. After all, might he not be right? Might the war not be a mere game of havoc played by the base and unscrupulous? Country, right or wrong, had been her family watchword since her ancestor flew to fight the British invaders. It was Jack's watchword, too, and his conduct in battle should put these wretches to shame. She thought more kindly of the rebel in this vengeful mood, and straightway ran up-stairs, where, sitting by the open window and lulled by the piping of the robins, she took the letter from its pretty covert, read it again with heightened color, and, smiling rosily at the face she saw in the mirror, raised it to her lips and sighed softly.
When a whole people have but one thought in mind that thought becomes mania. Acredale had but this one thought, "Beat rebellion and punish rebels." "On to Richmond!" was the cry, and forming ranks to go there the business that everybody took in hand. These had been great days to Jack. He began to feel something of the burden that a feudal chief must have borne at the summoning of the clans. So soon as it spread in the country-side that "young Sprague had 'listed," all the "ageable" sons of the soil were fired with a burning zeal to take up arms and bear him company. Boys from sixteen to twenty these were for the most part, and there was bitter grumbling when Jack firmly refused to take the names of any under twenty. Some he solaced with a gun, a pistol, or such object as he knew was dear to the country boy's heart. They returned to the relieved hearthstone loud in Jack's praise, having his promise to enlist them when they were twenty, if the war lasted so long; and if the wise smiled at this, wasn't it well known that the great army now gathering was to set out at latest by the 4th of July? And didn't everybody know that it was going to march direct to Richmond? There were trying scenes too, in the rôle Jack had assumed so gayly. He began to see that war had ministers of pain and sorrow hardly less cruel than those dealing death and wounds. Tearful parents came to him day by day to beg his help in restoring sons who had fled to the wars. Others came to warn him that if their boys applied to him he must refuse them, as they were under age.
In this list the Perley sisters, Dick's three maiden aunts, came on a respectful embassy to implore Jack to discourage their nephew, who had quite deserted school and gave all his time to drilling with the "college squad." Jack pledged himself that he would hand Dick over to the justice of the peace, to be detained at the house of refuge, if he didn't give up his evil designs. But, when that young aspirant appeared, so soon as his aunts had gone, and reminded Jack of years of intimate companionship in dare-deviltry, the elder saw that his own safety would be in flight, and that night, his company was removed to Warchester. There in the great camp, surrounded by sentinels, his Acredale cronies were shut out, and Jack began in earnest his soldier life.
CHAPTER IV.
GUELPH AND GHIBELLINE.
The shifting of Jack's company to the regimental camp in Warchester left a broad gap in the lines of the social life of Acredale. Jack's going alone, to say nothing of the others, would have eclipsed the gayety of many home groups besides his own, in which the Sprague primacy in a social sense was acknowledged. Since the influx of the new-made rich, under the stimulus of the war and Acredale's advantages as a resort, there were a good many who disputed the Sprague leadership—tacitly conceded rather than asserted. Chief of the dissidents was Elisha Boone, who, by virtue of longer tenure, vast wealth, and political precedence, divided not unequally the homage paid the patrician family. Boone was fond of speaking of himself as a "self-made man," and the satirical were not slow to add that he had no other worship than his "creator." This was a gibe made rather for the antithesis than its accuracy, for even Boone's enemies owned that he was a good neighbor, and, where his prejudices were not in question, a man with few distinctly repellent traits. He delighted in showing his affluence—not always in good taste. He filled his fine house with bizarre crowds, and made no stint to his friends who needed his purse or his influence. He had in the early days when he came to Acredale aspired to political leadership in the Democratic party.
But Senator Sprague was too firmly enshrined in the loyalty of the district to be overcome by the parvenu's manoeuvres or his money. His ambition in time turned to rancor as he marked the patrician's disdainful disregard of his (Boone's) efforts to supplant him. Hatred of the Spragues became something like a passion in Boone. Sarcasms and disparagement leveled at his social and political pretensions he attributed to the Senator and his family. All sorts of slurs and gossip were reported to him by busybodies, until it became a settled purpose with Boone to make the Sprague family feel heavy heart-burnings for the sum of the affronts he had endured. It was to them he attributed the whispered gibes about his illiteracy; his shady business methods; the awful story of his handiwork in the ruin of Richard Perley, the spendthrift brother of the Misses Perley. Once, too, when he had so well manipulated the district delegates that he was sure of nomination in the convention, Senator Sprague had hurried home from Washington and defeated him just as the prize was in his grasp. The Senator made a speech to the delegates, in which he pointedly declared that it was men of honor and brains, not men of money, that should be chosen to make the laws.
"The time will come, Senator, that you'll be sorry for this hour's work," Boone said, joining Sprague at the door as he was leaving the hall.
"How's that?" the other asked, with just the shade of superciliousness in the tone admired in the Senate for suavity. "I hope I am always sorry when I do wrong, in speech or act; I teach my children to be."
"Well, if you think it right to run the party for a few lordly idlers too proud to mix with the people—men who think they are better born and better bred than the rest of us—I don't want to have anything more to do with it. I will go elsewhere."
"That's your privilege, sir. The Whigs have plenty of room for self-made men. Though I do think you are taking too personal a view of to-day's contest, your defeat