________________________________________________
_ Windy McPherson, the father of the Caxton newsboy, Sam McPherson, had been
war touched. The civilian clothes that he wore caused an itching of the
skin. He could not forget that he had once been a sergeant in a regiment
of infantry and had commanded a company through a battle fought in ditches
along a Virginia country road. He chafed under the fact of his present
obscure position in life. Had he been able to replace his regimentals with
the robes of a judge, the felt hat of a statesman, or even with the night
stick of a village marshal life might have retained something of its
sweetness, but to have ended by becoming an obscure housepainter in a
village that lived by raising corn and by feeding that corn to red steers
--ugh!--the thought made him shudder. He looked with envy at the blue coat
and the brass buttons of the railroad agent; he tried vainly to get into
the Caxton Cornet Band; he got drunk to forget his humiliation and in the
end he fell to loud boasting and to the nursing of a belief within himself
that in truth not Lincoln nor Grant but he himself had thrown the winning
die in the great struggle. In his cups he said as much and the Caxton corn
grower, punching his neighbour in the ribs, shook with delight over the
statement.
When Sam was a twelve year old, barefooted boy upon the streets a kind of
backwash of the wave of glory that had swept over Windy McPherson in the
days of '61 lapped upon the shores of the Iowa village. That strange
manifestation called the A. P. A. movement brought the old soldier to a
position of prominence in the community. He founded a local branch of the
organisation; he marched at the head of a procession through the streets;
he stood on a corner and pointing a trembling forefinger to where the flag
on the schoolhouse waved beside the cross of Rome, shouted hoarsely, "See,
the cross rears itself above the flag! We shall end by being murdered in
our beds!"
But although some of the hard-headed, money-making men of Caxton joined
the movement started by the boasting old soldier and although for the
moment they vied with him in stealthy creepings through the streets to
secret meetings and in mysterious mutterings behind hands the movement
subsided as suddenly as it had begun and only left its leader more
desolate.
In the little house at the end of the street by the shores of Squirrel
Creek, Sam and his sister Kate regarded their father's warlike pretensions
with scorn. "The butter is low, father's army leg will ache to-night,"
they whispered to each other across the kitchen table.
Following her mother's example, Kate, a tall slender girl of sixteen and
already a bread winner with a clerkship in Winney's drygoods store,
remained silent under Windy's boasting, but Sam, striving to emulate them,
did not always succeed. There was now and then a rebellious muttering that
should have warned Windy. It had once burst into an open quarrel in which
the victor of a hundred battles withdrew defeated from the field. Windy,
half-drunk, had taken an old account book from a shelf in the kitchen, a
relic of his days as a prosperous merchant when he had first come to
Caxton, and had begun reading to the little family a list of names of men
who, he claimed, had been the cause of his ruin.
"There is Tom Newman, now," he exclaimed excitedly. "Owns a hundred acres
of good corn-growing land and won't pay for the harness on the backs of
his horses or for the ploughs in his barn. The receipt he has from me is
forged. I could put him in prison if I chose. To beat an old soldier!--to
beat one of the boys of '61!--it is shameful!"
"I have heard of what you owed and what men owed you; you had none the
worst of it," Sam protested coldly, while Kate held her breath and Jane
McPherson, at work over the ironing board in the corner, half turned and
looked silently at the man and the boy, the slightly increased pallor of
her long face the only sign that she had heard.
Windy had not pressed the quarrel. Standing for a moment in the middle of
the kitchen, holding the book in his hand, he looked from the pale silent
mother by the ironing board to the son now standing and staring at him,
and, throwing the book upon the table with a bang, fled the house. "You
don't understand," he had cried, "you don't understand the heart of a
soldier."
In a way the man was right. The two children did not understand the
blustering, pretending, inefficient old man. Having moved shoulder to
shoulder with grim, silent men to the consummation of great deeds Windy
could not get the flavour of those days out of his outlook upon life.
Walking half drunk in the darkness along the sidewalks of Caxton on the
evening of the quarrel the man became inspired. He threw back his
shoulders and walked with martial tread; he drew an imaginary sword from
its scabbard and waved it aloft; stopping, he aimed carefully at a body of
imaginary men who advanced yelling toward him across a wheatfield; he felt
that life in making him a housepainter in a farming village in Iowa and in
giving him an unappreciative son had been cruelly unfair; he wept at the
injustice of it.
The American Civil War was a thing so passionate, so inflaming, so vast,
so absorbing, it so touched to the quick the men and women of those
pregnant days that but a faint echo of it has been able to penetrate down
to our days and to our minds; no real sense of it has as yet crept into
the pages of a printed book; it yet wants its Thomas Carlyle; and in the
end we are put to the need of listening to old fellows boasting on our
village streets to get upon our cheeks the living breath of it. For four
years the men of American cities, villages and farms walked across the
smoking embers of a burning land, advancing and receding as the flame of
that universal, passionate, death-spitting thing swept down upon them or
receded toward the smoking sky-line. Is it so strange that they could not
come home and begin again peacefully painting houses or mending broken
shoes? A something in them cried out. It sent them to bluster and boast
upon the street corners. When people passing continued to think only of
their brick laying and of their shovelling of corn into cars, when the
sons of these war gods walking home at evening and hearing the vain
boastings of the fathers began to doubt even the facts of the great
struggle, a something snapped in their brains and they fell to chattering
and shouting their vain boastings to all as they looked hungrily about for
believing eyes.
When our own Thomas Carlyle comes to write of our Civil War he will make
much of our Windy McPhersons. He will see something big and pathetic in
their hungry search for auditors and in their endless war talk. He will go
filled with eager curiosity into little G. A. R. halls in the villages and
think of the men who coming there night after night, year after year, told
and re-told endlessly, monotonously, their story of battle.
Let us hope that in his fervour for the old fellows he will not fail to
treat tenderly the families of those veteran talkers; the families that
with their breakfasts and their dinners, by the fire at evening, through
fast day and feast day, at weddings and at funerals got again and again
endlessly, everlastingly this flow of war words. Let him reflect that
peaceful men in corn-growing counties do not by choice sleep among the
dogs of war nor wash their linen in the blood of their country's foe. Let
him, in his sympathy with the talkers, remember with kindness the heroism
of the listeners.
* * * * *
On a summer day Sam McPherson sat on a box before Wildman's grocery lost
in thought. In his hand he held the little yellow account book and in this
he buried himself, striving to wipe from his consciousness a scene being
enacted before his eyes upon the street.
The realisation of the fact that his father was a confirmed liar and
braggart had for years cast a shadow over his days and the shadow had been
made blacker by the fact that in a land where the least fortunate can
laugh in the face of want he had more than once stood face to face with
poverty. He believed that the logical answer to the situation was money in
the bank and with all the ardour of his boy's heart he strove to realise
that answer. He wanted to be a money-maker and the totals at the foot of
the pages in the soiled yellow bankbook were the milestones that marked
the progress he had already made. They told him that the daily struggles
with Fatty, the long tramps through Caxton's streets on bleak winter
evenings, and the never-ending Saturday nights when crowds filled the
stores, the sidewalks, and the drinking places, and he worked among them
tirelessly and persistently were not without fruit.
Suddenly, above the murmur of men's voices on the street, his father's
voice rose loud and insistent. A block further down the street, leaning
against the door of Hunter's jewelry store, Windy talked at the top of his
lungs, pumping his arms up and down with the air of a man making a stump
speech.
"He is making a fool of himself," thought Sam, and returned to his
bankbook, striving in the contemplation of the totals at the foot of the
pages to shake off the dull anger that had begun to burn in his brain.
Glancing up again, he saw that Joe Wildman, son of the grocer and a boy of
his own age, had joined the group of men laughing and jeering at Windy.
The shadow on Sam's face grew heavier.
Sam had been at Joe Wildman's house; he knew the air of plenty and of
comfort that hung over it; the table piled high with meat and potatoes;
the group of children laughing and eating to the edge of gluttony; the
quiet, gentle father who amid the clamour and the noise did not raise his
voice, and the well-dressed, bustling, rosy-cheeked mother. As a contrast
to this scene he began to call up in his mind a picture of life in his own
home, getting a kind of perverted pleasure out of his dissatisfaction with
it. He saw the boasting, incompetent father telling his endless tales of
the Civil War and complaining of his wounds; the tall, stoop-shouldered,
silent mother with the deep lines in her long face, everlastingly at work
over her washtub among the soiled clothes; the silent, hurriedly-eaten
meals snatched from the kitchen table; and the long winter days when ice
formed upon his mother's skirts and Windy idled about town while the
little family subsisted upon bowls of cornmeal mush everlastingly
repeated.
Now, even from where he sat, he could see that his father was half gone in
drink, and knew that he was boasting of his part in the Civil War. "He is
either doing that or telling of his aristocratic family or lying about his
birthplace," he thought resentfully, and unable any longer to endure the
sight of what seemed to him his own degradation, he got up and went into
the grocery where a group of Caxton citizens stood talking to Wildman of a
meeting to be held that morning at the town hall.
Caxton was to have a Fourth of July celebration. The idea, born in the
heads of the few, had been taken up by the many. Rumours of it had run
through the streets late in May. It had been talked of in Geiger's drug
store, at the back of Wildman's grocery, and in the street before the New
Leland House. John Telfer, the town's one man of leisure, had for weeks
been going from place to place discussing the details with prominent men.
Now a mass meeting was to be held in the hall over Geiger's drug store and
to a man the citizens of Caxton had turned out for the meeting. The
housepainter had come down off his ladder, the clerks were locking the
doors of the stores, men went along the streets in groups bound for the
hall. As they went they shouted to each other. "The old town has woke up,"
they called.
On a corner by Hunter's jewelry store Windy McPherson leaned against a
building and harangued the passing crowd.
"Let the old flag wave," he shouted excitedly, "let the men of Caxton show
the true blue and rally to the old standards."
"That's right, Windy, expostulate with them," shouted a wit, and a roar of
laughter drowned Windy's reply.
Sam McPherson also went to the meeting in the hall. He came out of the
grocery store with Wildman and went along the street looking at the
sidewalk and trying not to see the drunken man talking in front of the
jewelry store. At the hall other boys stood in the stairway or ran up and
down the sidewalk talking excitedly, but Sam was a figure in the town's
life and his right to push in among the men was not questioned. He
squirmed through the mass of legs and secured a seat in a window ledge
where he could watch the men come in and find seats.
As Caxton's one newsboy Sam had got from his newspaper selling both a
living and a kind of standing in the town's life. To be a newsboy or a
bootblack in a small novel-reading American town is to make a figure in
the world. Do not all of the poor newsboys in the books become great men
and is not this boy who goes among us so industriously day after day
likely to become such a figure? Is it not a duty we of the town owe to
future greatness that we push him forward? So reasoned the men of Caxton
and paid a kind of court to the boy who sat on the window ledge of the
hall while the other boys of the town waited on the sidewalk below.
John Telfer was chairman of the mass meeting. He was always chairman of
public meetings in Caxton. The industrious silent men of position in the
town envied his easy, bantering style of public address, while pretending
to treat it with scorn. "He talks too much," they said, making a virtue of
their own inability with apt and clever words.
Telfer did not wait to be appointed chairman of the meeting, but went
forward, climbed the little raised platform at the end of the hall, and
usurped the chairmanship. He walked up and down on the platform bantering
with the crowd, answering gibes, calling to well-known men, getting and
giving keen satisfaction with his talent. When the hall was filled with
men he called the meeting to order, appointed committees and launched into
a harangue. He told of plans made to advertise the big day in other towns
and to get low railroad rates arranged for excursion parties. The
programme, he said, included a musical carnival with brass bands from
other towns, a sham battle by the military company at the fairgrounds,
horse races, speeches from the steps of the town hall, and fireworks in
the evening. "We'll show them a live town here," he declared, walking up
and down the platform and swinging his cane, while the crowd applauded and
shouted its approval.
When a call came for voluntary subscriptions to pay for the fun, the
audience quieted down. One or two men got up and started to go out,
grumbling that it was a waste of money. The fate of the celebration was on
the knees of the gods.
Telfer arose to the occasion. He called out the names of the departing,
and made jests at their expense so that they dropped back into their
chairs unable to face the roaring laughter of the crowd, and shouted to a
man at the back of the hall to close and bolt the door. Men began getting
up in various parts of the hall and calling out sums, Telfer repeating the
name and the amount in a loud voice to young Tom Jedrow, clerk in the
bank, who wrote them down in a book. When the amount subscribed did not
meet with his approval, he protested and the crowd backing him up forced
the increase he demanded. When a man did not rise, he shouted at him and
the man answered back an amount.
Suddenly in the hall a diversion arose. Windy McPherson emerged from the
crowd at the back of the hall and walked down the centre aisle to the
platform. He walked unsteadily straightening his shoulders and thrusting
out his chin. When he got to the front of the hall he took a roll of bills
from his pocket and threw it on the platform at the chairman's feet. "From
one of the boys of '61," he announced in a loud voice.
The crowd shouted and clapped its hands with delight as Telfer picked up
the bills and ran his finger over them. "Seventeen dollars from our hero,
the mighty McPherson," he shouted while the bank clerk wrote the name and
the amount in the book and the crowd continued to make merry over the
title given the drunken soldier by the chairman.
The boy on the window ledge slipped to the floor and stood with burning
cheeks behind the mass of men. He knew that at home his mother was doing a
family washing for Lesley, the shoe merchant, who had given five dollars
to the Fourth-of-July fund, and the resentment he had felt on seeing his
father talking to the crowd before the jewelry store blazed up anew.
After the taking of subscriptions, men in various parts of the hall began
making suggestions for added features for the great day. To some of the
speakers the crowd listened respectfully, at others they hooted. An old
man with a grey beard told a long rambling story of a Fourth-of-July
celebration of his boyhood. When voices interrupted he protested and shook
his fist in the air, pale with indignation.
"Oh, sit down, old daddy," shouted Freedom Smith and a murmur of applause
greeted this sensible suggestion.
Another man got up and began to talk. He had an idea. "We will have," he
said, "a bugler mounted on a white horse who will ride through the town at
dawn blowing the reveille. At midnight he will stand on the steps of the
town hall and blow taps to end the day."
The crowd applauded. The idea had caught their fancy and had instantly
taken a place in their minds as one of the real events of the day.
Again Windy McPherson emerged from the crowd at the back of the hall.
Raising his hand for silence he told the crowd that he was a bugler, that
he had been a regimental bugler for two years during the Civil War. He
said that he would gladly volunteer for the place.
The crowd shouted and John Telfer waved his hand. "The white horse for
you, McPherson," he said.
Sam McPherson wriggled along the wall and out at the now unbolted door. He
was filled with astonishment at his father's folly, and was still more
astonished at the folly of these other men in accepting his statement and
handing over the important place for the big day. He knew that his father
must have had some part in the war as he was a member of the G. A. R., but
he had no faith at all in the stories he had heard him relate of his
experiences in the war. Sometimes he caught himself wondering if there
ever had been such a war and thought that it must be a lie like everything
else in the life of Windy McPherson. For years he had wondered why some
sensible solid person like Valmore or Wildman did not rise, and in a
matter-of-fact way tell the world that no such thing as the Civil War had
ever been fought, that it was merely a figment in the minds of pompous old
men demanding unearned glory of their fellows. Now hurrying along the
street with burning cheeks, he decided that after all there must have been
such a war. He had had the same feeling about birthplaces and there could
be no doubt that people were born. He had heard his father claim as his
birthplace Kentucky, Texas, North Carolina, Louisiana and Scotland. The
thing had left a kind of defect in his mind. To the end of his life when
he heard a man tell the place of his birth he looked up suspiciously, and
a shadow of doubt crossed his mind.
From the mass meeting Sam went home to his mother and presented the case
bluntly. "The thing will have to be stopped," he declared, standing with
blazing eyes before her washtub. "It is too public. He can't blow a bugle;
I know he can't. The whole town will have another laugh at our expense."
Jane McPherson listened in silence to the boy's outburst, then, turning,
went back to rubbing clothes, avoiding his eyes.
With his hands thrust into his trousers pocket Sam stared sullenly at the
ground. A sense of justice told him not to press the matter, but as he
walked away from the washtub and out at the kitchen door, he hoped there
would be plain talk of the matter at supper time. "The old fool!" he
protested, addressing the empty street. "He is going to make a show of
himself again."
When Windy McPherson came home that evening, something in the eyes of the
silent wife, and the sullen face of the boy, startled him. He passed over
lightly his wife's silence but looked closely at his son. He felt that he
faced a crisis. In the emergency he was magnificent. With a flourish, he
told of the mass meeting, and declared that the citizens of Caxton had
arisen as one man to demand that he take the responsible place as official
bugler. Then, turning, he glared across the table at his son.
Sam, openly defiant, announced that he did not believe his father capable
of blowing a bugle.
Windy roared with amazement. He rose from the table declaring in a loud
voice that the boy had wronged him; he swore that he had been for two
years bugler on the staff of a colonel, and launched into a long story of
a surprise by the enemy while his regiment lay asleep in their tents, and
of his standing in the face of a storm of bullets and blowing his comrades
to action. Putting one hand on his forehead he rocked back and forth as
though about to fall, declaring that he was striving to keep back the
tears wrenched from him by the injustice of his son's insinuation and,
shouting so that his voice carried far down the street, he declared with
an oath that the town of Caxton should ring and echo with his bugling as
the sleeping camp had echoed with it that night in the Virginia wood. Then
dropping again into his chair, and resting his head upon his hand, he
assumed a look of patient resignation.
Windy McPherson was victorious. In the little house a great stir and
bustle of preparation arose. Putting on his white overalls and forgetting
for the time his honourable wounds the father went day after day to his
work as a housepainter. He dreamed of a new blue uniform for the great day
and in the end achieved the realisation of his dreams, not however without
material assistance from what was known in the house as "Mother's Wash
Money." And the boy, convinced by the story of the midnight attack in the
woods of Virginia, began against his judgment to build once more an old
dream of his father's reformation. Boylike, the scepticism was thrown to
the winds and he entered with zeal into the plans for the great day. As he
went through the quiet residence streets delivering the late evening
papers, he threw back his head and revelled in the thought of a tall blue-
clad figure on a great white horse passing like a knight before the gaping
people. In a fervent moment he even drew money from his carefully built-up
bank account and sent it to a firm in Chicago to pay for a shining new
bugle that would complete the picture he had in his mind. And when the
evening papers were distributed he hurried home to sit on the porch before
the house discussing with his sister Kate the honours that had alighted
upon their family.
* * * * *
With the coming of dawn on the great day the three McPhersons hurried hand
in hand toward Main Street. In the street, on all sides of them, they saw
people coming out of houses rubbing their eyes and buttoning their coats
as they went along the sidewalk. All of Caxton seemed abroad.
In Main Street the people were packed on the sidewalk, and massed on the
curb and in the doorways of the stores. Heads appeared at windows, flags
waved from roofs or hung from ropes stretched across the street, and a
great murmur of voices broke the silence of the dawn.
Sam's heart beat so that he was hard put to it to keep back the tears from
his eyes. He thought with a gasp of the days of anxiety that had passed
when the new bugle had not come from the Chicago company, and in
retrospect he suffered again the horror of the days of waiting. It had
been all important. He could not blame his father for raving and shouting
about the house, he himself had felt like raving, and had put another
dollar of his savings into telegrams before the treasure was finally in
his hands. Now, the thought that it might not have come sickened him, and
a little prayer of thankfulness rose from his lips. To be sure one might
have been secured from a nearby town, but not a new shining one to go with
his father's new blue uniform.
A cheer broke from the crowd massed along the street. Into the street rode
a tall figure seated upon a white horse. The horse was from Culvert's
livery and the boys there had woven ribbons into its mane and tail. Windy
McPherson, sitting very straight in the saddle and looking wonderfully
striking in the new blue uniform and the broad-brimmed campaign hat, had
the air of a conqueror come to receive the homage of the town.
He wore a gold band across his chest and against his hip rested the
shining bugle. With stern eyes he looked down upon the people.
The lump in the throat of the boy hurt more and more. A great wave of
pride ran over him, submerging him. In a moment he forgot all the past
humiliations the father had brought upon his family, and understood why
his mother remained silent when he, in his blindness, had wanted to
protest against her seeming indifference. Glancing furtively up he saw a
tear lying upon her cheek and felt that he too would like to sob aloud his
pride and happiness.
Slowly and with stately stride the horse walked up the street between the
rows of silent waiting people. In front of the town hall the tall military
figure, rising in the saddle, took one haughty look at the multitude, and
then, putting the bugle to his lips, blew.
Out of the bugle came only a thin piercing shriek followed by a squawk.
Again Windy put the bugle to his lips and again the same dismal squawk was
his only reward. On his face was a look of helpless boyish astonishment.
And in a moment the people knew. It was only another of Windy McPherson's
pretensions. He couldn't blow a bugle at all.
A great shout of laughter rolled down the street. Men and women sat on the
curbstones and laughed until they were tired. Then, looking at the figure
upon the motionless horse, they laughed again.
Windy looked about him with troubled eyes. It is doubtful if he had ever
had a bugle to his lips until that moment, but he was filled with wonder
and astonishment that the reveille did not roll forth. He had heard the
thing a thousand times and had it clearly in his mind; with all his heart
he wanted it to roll forth, and could picture the street ringing with it
and the applause of the people; the thing, he felt, was in him, and it was
only a fatal blunder in nature that it did not come out at the flaring end
of the bugle. He was amazed at this dismal end of his great moment--he was
always amazed and helpless before facts.
The crowd began gathering about the motionless, astonished figure,
laughter continuing to send them off into something near convulsions.
Grasping the bridle of the horse, John Telfer began leading it off up the
street. Boys whooped and shouted at the rider, "Blow! Blow!"
The three McPhersons stood in a doorway leading into a shoe store. The boy
and the mother, white and speechless with humiliation, dared not look at
each other. In the flood of shame sweeping over them they stared straight
before them with hard, stony eyes.
The procession led by John Telfer at the bridle of the white horse marched
down the street. Looking up, the eyes of the laughing, shouting man met
those of the boy and a look of pain shot across his face. Dropping the
bridle he hurried away through the crowd. The procession moved on, and
watching their chance the mother and the two children crept home along
side streets, Kate weeping bitterly. Leaving them at the door Sam went
straight on down a sandy road toward a small wood. "I've got my lesson.
I've got my lesson," he muttered over and over as he went.
At the edge of the wood he stopped and leaning on a rail fence watched
until he saw his mother come out to the pump in the back yard. She had
begun to draw water for the day's washing. For her also the holiday was at
an end. A flood of tears ran down the boy's cheeks, and he shook his fist
in the direction of the town. "You may laugh at that fool Windy, but you
shall never laugh at Sam McPherson," he cried, his voice shaking with
excitement. _
Read next: BOOK I: CHAPTER III
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