Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, vol 3 | Page 8

seizes Derwent, and
plunges a knife into his throat. The rebel falls. His blood pools around
him. The British are successful, for two of the young men are bound
and two of them have fallen, and there is a cheer of victory, but the
trooper with the knife in his hand does not raise his voice. He bends
above the farmer as still as one dead, until his captain claps him on the
shoulder. As he rises, the prisoners start in wonder, for the face they see
in the lantern-light is that of their brother, yet strange in its haggardness
and its smear of blood on the cheek. The girl runs from her
hiding-place with a cry, but stands in horror when her foot touches the
gory pool in the road. The trooper opens his coat and offers her a locket.

It contains her picture, and he has worn it above his heart for a year, but
she lets it fall and sinks down, moaning. The soldier tears off his red
coat, tramples it in the dust, then vaulting to his saddle he plunges into
the river, fords it, and crashes through the underbrush on the other side.
In a few minutes he has reached the summit of a rock that rises nearly a
hundred feet above the stream. The horse halts at the edge, but on a
fierce stab of the spur into his flank he takes the leap. With a despairing
yell the traitor and parricide goes into eternity.

THE BLACKSMITH AT BRANDYWINE
Terrible in the field at Brandywine was the figure of a man armed only
with a hammer, who plunged into the ranks of the enemy, heedless of
his own life, yet seeming to escape their shots and sabre cuts by magic,
and with Thor strokes beat them to the earth. But yesterday war had
been to him a distant rumor, a thing as far from his cottage at Dilworth
as if it had been in Europe, but he had revolted at a plot that he had
overheard to capture Washington and had warned the general. In
revenge the Tories had burned his cottage, and his wife and baby had
perished in the flames. All day he had sat beside the smoking ruins,
unable to weep, unable to think, unable almost to suffer, except dumbly,
for as yet he could not understand it. But when the drums were heard
they roused the tiger in him, and gaunt with sleeplessness and hunger
he joined his countrymen and ranged like Ajax on the field. Every cry
for quarter was in vain: to every such appeal he had but one reply, his
wife's name--Mary.
Near the end of the fight he lay beside the road, his leg broken, his flesh
torn, his life ebbing from a dozen wounds. A wagoner, hasting to join
the American retreat, paused to give him drink. "I've only five minutes
more of life in me," said the smith. "Can you lift me into that tree and
put a rifle in my hands?" The powerful teamster raised him to the
crotch of an oak, and gave him the rifle and ammunition that a dying
soldier had dropped there. A band of red-coats came running down the
road, chasing some farmers. The blacksmith took careful aim; there
was a report, and the leader of the band fell dead. A pause; again a
report rang out, and a trooper sprawled upon the ground. The
marksman had been seen, and a lieutenant was urging his men to hurry
on and cut him down. There was a third report, and the lieutenant

reeled forward into the road, bleeding and cursing. "That's for Mary,"
gasped the blacksmith. The rifle dropped from his hands, and he, too,
sank lifeless against the boughs.

FATHER AND SON
It was three soldiers, escaping from the rout of Braddock's forces, who
caught the alleged betrayer of their general and put him to the death.
They threw his purse of ill-gotten louis d'or into the river, and sent him
swinging from the edge of a ravine, with a vine about his neck and a
placard on his breast. And so they left him.
Twenty years pass, and the war-fires burn more fiercely in the vales of
Pennsylvania, but, too old to fight, the schoolmaster sits at his door
near Chad's Ford and smokes and broods upon the past. He thinks of
the time when he marched with Washington, when with two wounded
comrades he returned along the lonely trail; then comes the vision of a
blackening face, and he rises and wipes his brow. "It was right," he
mutters. "He sent a thousand of his brothers to their deaths."
Gilbert Gates comes that evening to see the old man's daughter: a
smooth, polite young fellow, but