The Long Roll | Page 8

to some negroes, too, and for a deal of harm
to almost all whites. And I, for one, will be powerful glad when every
negro, man and woman, is free. They can never really grow until they
are free--I'll acknowledge that. And if they want to go back to their own
country I'd pay my mite to help them along. I think I owe it to
them--even though as far as I know I haven't a forbear that ever did
them wrong. Trouble is, don't any of them want to go back! You
couldn't scare them worse than to tell them you were going to help
them back to their fatherland! The Lauderdale negroes, for
instance--never see one that he isn't laughing! And Tullius at Three
Oaks,--he'd say he couldn't possibly think of going--must stay at Three
Oaks and look after Miss Margaret and the children! No, it isn't an easy
subject, look at it any way you will. But as between us and the North, it
ain't the main subject of quarrel--not by a long shot it ain't! The
quarrel's that a man wants to take all the grist, mine as well as his, and
grind it in his mill! Well, I won't let him--that's all. And here's your
road to Thunder Run."
Allan strode on alone over the frozen hills. Before him sprang the
rampart of the mountains, magnificently drawn against the eastern sky.
To either hand lay the fallow fields, rolled the brown hills, rose the
shadowy bulk of forest trees, showed the green of winter wheat. The
evening was cold, but without wind and soundless. The birds had flown
south, the cattle were stalled, the sheep folded. There was only the earth,
field and hill and mountain, the up and down of a narrow road, and the
glimmer of a distant stream. The sunset had been red, and it left a
colour that flared to the zenith.
The young man, tall, blond, with grey-blue eyes and short, fair beard,
covered with long strides the frozen road. It led him over a lofty hill
whose summit commanded a wide prospect. Allan, reaching this height,
hesitated a moment, then crossed to a grey zigzag of rail fence, and,
leaning his arms upon it, looked forth over hill and vale, forest and

stream. The afterglow was upon the land. He looked at the mountains,
the great mountains, long and clean of line as the marching rollers of a
giant sea, not split or jagged, but even, unbroken, and old, old, the
oldest almost in the world. Now the ancient forest clothed them, while
they were given, by some constant trick of the light, the distant, dreamy
blue from which they took their name. The Blue Ridge--the Blue
Ridge--and then the hills and the valleys, and all the rushing creeks,
and the grandeur of the trees, and to the east, steel clear between the
sycamores and the willows, the river--the upper reaches of the river
James.
The glow deepened. From a farmhouse in the valley came the sound of
a bell. Allan straightened himself, lifting his arms from the grey old
rails. He spoke aloud.
Breathes there the man with soul so dead,--
The bell rang again, the rose suffused the sky to the zenith. The young
man drew a long breath, and, turning, began to descend the hill.
Before him, at a turn of the road and overhanging a precipitous hollow,
in the spring carpeted with bloodroot, but now thick with dead leaves,
lay a giant oak, long ago struck down by lightning. The branches had
been cut away, but the blackened trunk remained, and from it as
vantage point one received another great view of the rolling mountains
and the valleys between. Allan Gold, coming down the hill, became
aware, first of a horse fastened to a wayside sapling, then of a man
seated upon the fallen oak, his back to the road, his face to the
darkening prospect. Below him the winter wind made a rustling in the
dead leaves. Evidently another had paused to admire the view, or to
collect and mould between the hands of the soul the crowding
impressions of a decisive day. It was, apparently, the latter purpose; for
as Allan approached the ravine there came to him out of the dusk, in a
controlled but vibrant voice, the following statement, repeated three
times: "We are going to have war.--We are going to have war.--We are
going to have war."
Allan sent his own voice before him. "I trust in God that's not true!--It's

Richard Cleave, there, isn't it?"
The figure on the oak, swinging itself around, sat outlined against the
violet sky. "Yes, Richard Cleave. It's a night to make one think,
Allan--to make one think--to make one think!" Laying his hand on the