The Soldier of the Valley

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The Soldier of the Valley

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Title: The Soldier of the Valley
Author: Nelson Lloyd

Release Date: November 26, 2005 [eBook #17156]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
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THE SOLDIER OF THE VALLEY
by
NELSON LLOYD
Illustrated by A. B. Frost

[Frontispiece: They called to me as a boy.]

Charles Scribner's Sons New York ------------ 1904 Copyright, 1904, by Charles Scribner's Sons Published, September, 1904

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
They called to me as a boy . . . . . . Frontispiece "Welcome home--thrice welcome!"
Tim and I had stopped our ploughs to draw lots and he had lost
"Well, old chap!"
Josiah Nummler
He did not stop to hear my answer
Swearing terrible oaths that he will never return
No answer came from the floor above
The tiger story
He had a last look at Black Log
"He pumped me dry"
"Nanny is likely to get one of her religious spells and quit work"
I was back in my prison
"'At my sover-sover-yne's will'"
Perry Thomas stands confronting the English warrior
"You'll begin to think you ain't there at all"
I saw a girl on the store porch
Aaron Kallaberger
Leander
"Her name was Pinky Binn, a dotter of the house of Binn, the Binns of Turkey Walley"
William had felt the hand of "Doogulus"
"Aren't you coming?" young Colonel seemed to say
Sat little Colonel, wailing
The main thing was proper nursing
Well, ain't he tasty
"But there are no ghosts," I argued
"Of course it hurts me a bit here"
"An seein' a light in the room, I looked in"
Tip Pulsifer leaned on my gate
The horse went down
"And I'm his widder"
Then Tim came
Old Captain
When we three sit by the fire

THE SOLDIER OF THE VALLEY
I
I was a soldier. I was a hero. You notice my tenses are past. I am a simple school-teacher now, a prisoner in Black Log. There are no bars to my keep, only the wall of mountains that make the valley; and look at them on a clear day, when sunshine and shadow play over their green slopes, when the clouds all white and gold swing lazily in the blue above them, and they speak of freedom and of life immeasurable. There are no chains to my prison, no steel cuffs to gall the limbs, no guards to threaten and cow me. Yet here I stay year after year. Here I was born and here I shall die.
I am a traveller. In my mind I have gone the world over, and those wanderings have been unhampered by the limitations of mere time, for I know my India of the First Century as well as that of the Twentieth, and the China of Confucius is as real to me as that of Kwang Su. Without stirring from my little porch down here in the valley I have pierced the African jungles and surveyed the Arctic ice-floes. Often the mountains call me to come again, to climb them, to see the real world beyond, to live in it, to be of it, but I am a prisoner. They called to me as a boy, when wandering over the hills, I looked away to them, and over them, into the mysterious blue, picturing my India and my China, my England and my Russia in a geographical jumble that began just beyond the horizon.
Then I was a prisoner in the dungeons of Youth and my mother was my jailer. The day came when I was free, and forth I went full of hope, twenty-three years old by the family Bible, with a strong, agile body and a homely face. I went as a soldier. For months I saw what is called the world; I had glimpses of cities; I slept beneath the palms; I crossed a sea and touched the tropics. Marching beneath a blazing sun, huddling from the storm in the scant shelter of the tent, my spirits were always keyed to the highest by the thought that I was seeing life and that these adventures were but a fore-taste of those to come. But one day when we marched beneath the blazing sun, we met a storm and found no shelter. We charged through a hail of steel. They took me to the sea on a stretcher, and by and by they shipped me home. Then it was that I was a hero--when I came again to Black Log--what was left of me.
My