Crittenden

Crittenden, by John Fox, Jr.

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Title: Crittenden A Kentucky Story of Love and War
Author: John Fox, Jr.
Release Date: May 5, 2006 [EBook #18318]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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CRITTENDEN ***

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[Illustration: John Fox, Jr.]
CRITTENDEN
A KENTUCKY STORY OF

LOVE AND WAR
BY
JOHN FOX, JR.
ILLUSTRATED BY
F. GRAHAM COOTES
* * * * *
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1911
* * * * *
COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
* * * * *
To
THE MASTER OF
BALLYHOO
* * * * *
ILLUSTRATIONS
John Fox, Jr. (from a photograph) Frontispiece
FACING PAGE

"Go on!" said Judith 76
"Nothin', Ole Cap'n--jes doin' nothin'--jes lookin' for you" 132
* * * * *

CRITTENDEN

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 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