Painted Windows | Page 5

a good nip at the creek."
I was watching by the faint light of the lantern, and noticing how unnat-

ural father and Sheridan looked. They seemed to be blocked out in a
rude kind of way, like some wooden toys I had at home.
"Here we are," said father, "like Robinson Crusoes. It was hard luck for
Robinson, not having his little girl along. He'd have had her to pick up
sticks and twigs to make a fire, and that would have been a great help
to him."
Father began breaking fallen branches over his knee, and I groped
round and filled my arms again and again with little fagots. So after a
few minutes we had a fine fire crackling in a place where it could not
catch the branches of the trees. Father had scraped the needles of the
pines to- gether in such a way that a bare rim of earth was left all
around the fire, so that it could not spread along the ground; and
presently the coffee-pot was over the fire and bacon was sizzling in the
frying-pan. The good, hearty odours came out to mingle with the
delicious scent of the pines, and I, setting out our dishes, began to feel a
happiness different from anything I had ever known.
Pioneers and wanderers and soldiers have joys of their own -- joys of
which I had heard often enough, for there had been more stories told
than read in our house. But now for the first time I knew what my
grandmother and my uncles had meant when they told me about the
way they had come into the wilderness, and about the great happi- ness
and freedom of those first days. I, too, felt this freedom, and it seemed
to me as if I never again wanted walls to close in on me. All my fear
was gone, and I felt wild and glad. I could not believe that I was only a
little girl. I felt taller even than my father.
Father's mood was like mine in a way. He had memories to add to his
emotion, but then, on the other hand, he lacked the sense of discovery I
had, for he had known often such feelings as were coming to me for the
first time. When he was a young man he had been a colporteur for the
American Bible So- ciety among the Lake Superior Indians, and in that
way had earned part of the money for his course at the University of
Michigan; afterward he had gone with other gold-seekers to Pike's Peak,
and had crossed the plains with oxen, in the company of many other
adven- turers; then, when President Lincoln called for troops, he had

returned to enlist with the Michigan men, and had served more than
three years with Mc- Clellan and Grant.
So, naturally, there was nothing he did not know about making himself
comfortable in the open. He knew all the sorrow and all the joy of the
home- less man, and now, as he cooked, he be- gan to sing the old
songs -- "Marching Through Georgia," and "Bury Me Not on the Lone
Prairie," and "In the Prison Cell I Sit." He had been in a Southern
prison after the Battle of the Wilderness, and so he knew how to sing
that song with particular feeling.
I had heard war stories all my life, though usually father told such tales
in a half-joking way, as if to make light of everything he had gone
through. But now, as we ate there under the tossing pines, and the wild
chorus in the tree- tops swelled like a rising sea, the spirit of the old
days came over him. He was a good "stump speaker," and he knew how
to make a story come to life, and never did all his simple natural gifts
show themselves better than on this night, when he dwelt on his old
cam- paigns.
For the first time I was to look into the heart of a kindly natured man,
forced by terrible necessity to go through the dread experience of war. I
gained an idea of the unspeakable homesickness of the man who leaves
his family to an unimagined fate, and sacrifices years in the service of
his country. I saw that the mere foregoing of roof and bed is an
indescribable dis- tress; I learned something of what the palpitant
anxiety before a battle must be, and the quaking fear at the first rattle of
bullets, and the half-mad rush of determination with which men force
valour into their faltering hearts; I was made to know something of the
blight of war -- the horror of the battle- field, the waste of bounty, the
ruin of