Crittenden | Page 2

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.

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 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