Dad

In the middle distance the hazy mountains brave in their spring panoply. And, between mountains and apple-orchard, a line of trampled grain-fields, sown now with hundreds of spr...

Dad sat in the late September sunlight at the door of the hospital tent where for ten days he had lain. Slowly, but very surely, the old, wiry strength was beginning to creep ba...

Now that the miserable day was over, he had time to think, time to realize. And his reflections turned him heart-sick. At times he would sink into an apathy of misery. Again a w...

Dad received the weapon from her hands as reverently as she had tendered it. His fingers closed about the fretted ivory hilt, and he read in the fading light the inscription on...

Dad wheeled. At the hillock’s foot, just in front of him, a bare ten feet away, stood a man in the frayed and stained gray uniform of a captain of Confederate cavalry.

War is not a matter of prancing steeds, troops charging, heroic feats of arms. These spectacular adjuncts typify war as the little finger-nail of one hand might typify the whole...

While Jimmie was hastening over across the sun-sodden fields in search of a nurse, Captain James Dadd returned to the cottage and stood by the cot of his son, looking down at hi...

A stretch of yellow ground broken here and there by black-green foliage patches and gray rocks. Above, a blazing white sun in a copper sky; the hot expanse broken by an occasion...

His shining frock coat was thrown back wide from a vest that had once been white. A slouch hat was pushed far back on his head, and a mass of gray-white hair fell carelessly ove...

Crossing the field to right of the road and at an acute angle to it, a full quarter of a mile ahead, thundered a runaway horse. And on the horse’s back, clutching frantically to...

Meantime, Dad was saying to his grandson: “Maybe you think we’ve won a little victory. We have. Maybe you think the retreat of those Confeds was our victory. It wasn’t. The vict...

The two men had spun about from the window as the small human whirlwind burst into the room. Jimmie’s first words had been launched at McClellan with almost incoherent velocity.

Thanks to Dad’s foresight, or to the Confederate leader’s confidence in his flank movement’s power to detain his proposed prey, the hilltop was gained by the Yankee vanguard whi...

Gritting his teeth to keep his will-power up to the task, Dad began mounting the spiral stairs that led from the big hallway to the upper regions of the house. He leaned heavily...

Ten days later an interminably long transport-train puffed out of the Cincinnati station. Its three engines were gay in polished brass and red smokestacks. All three were decked...

Across the plaza, under the white sun-glare, marched and countermarched the crack regiment’s bronzed men in their heavy high caps and the rest of the odd regimentals of the late...

The corps commander, for a miracle, had been as honest as he was inexpert, and had made full report to General McClellan, through Hooker, of the part Dad had played in drawing f...

The general had discarded his gaudy dress uniform in favor of a fatigue suit that left his chest unpadded and allowed far more waist room for a no longer gracefully restricted c...

A delightful place for duck and quail shooting in midwinter. In summer a rank plague spot--and incidentally, on this particular summer of 1862, the camping ground of the army of...

The unwonted fit of purpose that had brought him so aggressively into the sacred private office, however, had now begun slowly but noticeably to ebb. And, as ever, he felt curio...

Main Street was alive with bunting and with multicolored dresses. Across the thoroughfare hung banners. Flags were draped from window to window. The sidewalks were jammed with p...

“Drat that child!” said Mrs. Sessions almost viciously. “James, I’ll give your boy Joseph an earful. He’s a fretful, suspicious fellow, and if ’twa’n’t for his father and his so...

“No,” corrected Dad, his practiced ear having enumerated the hoof-beats. “Not more than four or five, I should say. Probably the men who chased me this morning. They’ve come bac...

“I know. I’m sorry. But I thought this would be nice to take along. I’ve always wanted one. There isn’t any great hurry about father. He isn’t badly hurt. I knew that as soon as...

Seated cross-legged on a blanket roll facing the cot where sat his grandfather, was Battle Jimmie. Between the boy’s knees reclined the tent’s third inmate, his Canine Majesty,...

“I saw you go in,” hailed the boy, “and I was laying for you. I didn’t want to go in there with you because I’m not very popular with father to-day. What’s the matter, Dad? You...

Briefly Dad outlined the orders given him by his brigade commander, the adventures he had undergone on the previous day, and the clever scout work and hard riding which had mark...

And now it was over; and the two regiments, at a command, were withdrawing from range, preparatory to massing and resuming their march, to catch up with their own main body.

All day, that red 17th of September, 1862--“the bloodiest single day’s fighting of the Civil War”--the Army of the Potomac had flung itself in dogged fury upon the V-shaped posi...

If his general posture on the black thoroughbred’s back tended to suggest a monkey strapped to the back of a circus pony, he was none the less riding. And at a breakneck speed.

There is a baffling yet no less true psychological element in man which, after he has come to the uttermost limit of his powers, enables him to keep on past all seemingly possib...

From the sentry at the outposts whom he questioned he had learned of Jimmie’s whirlwind passage down the road, and at the head of the main street of Frederick another query to a...

A cavalry company at that, from the captain’s uniform and saber. Probably one of the many small bodies of horse thrown out to guard the rear of Lee’s army and to forage.

The campaigner instinct told Dad what raised so odd a cloud on the dry dust of the road. From its position and formation, he knew it hung above a cavalry column of considerable...