CHAPTER VIII

COUNCIL OF WAR

Dad lay on a bed a little too short for him and looked up wide-eyed at the rafters above his head.

The room to which Marcia had assigned him was under the eaves and had not yet been ceiled. Through its one window poured in a flood of summer moonlight.

To the old campaigner the bare quarters were not physically uncomfortable. He had slept--and slept snug--in worse beds, and indeed in no bed at all.

But his thoughts were stretching him on a couch of fire.

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 wave of angry shame would scourge him.

This was his post of responsibility, of protectorship--to be assigned to the office of unpaid servant and unwelcome hanger-on in the house of his own son! To endure weeks, perhaps months of snubs, of petty insults, of orders worse than insults. To have his cronies of the Eagle see him pottering around town on household errands such as in those days were usually performed in Ideala by negro servants.

He could hear in anticipation old Stage’s disgusting toothful chuckle.

To drink he had turned for refuge, in every crisis or bitterness, for the past fourteen years. And to drink and its nepenthe his mind now rushed. He was prompted to get up and dress and go to the Eagle. The barroom there would not be closed for another half-hour.

Then he remembered that Marcia, following her nightly custom, had locked the lower doors and had put their keys into her housewife-bag. The lower windows, too, were lock-shuttered.

There was, clearly, no egress by the ordinary route.

As difficulties arose, his thirst increased with them, and grew to a gnawing, sentient thing. And with added desire came calculation.

Before going to bed he had looked out of the window at the moonlit town below. And subconsciously he had noted the stout iron waterpipe--nearly a foot wide, including its supports--that ran transversely down the eaves, crossing just under the window and extending at the same angle to within a few feet of the ground, before turning and going directly downward.

An agile and cool-headed man might readily descend by means of this pipe. Whether or not he could return by the same route was quite another problem and one that the man’s rapidly wakening drink-lust did not trouble to take into account.

At worst he would be but anticipating a disgrace that was morally certain to come, soon or late.

Dad raised himself on his elbow. As he did so the door of his room opened and closed in utter noiselessness, and a square-shouldered little figure clad in white stood beside his bed.

“I knew I’d find you awake,” whispered Jimmie, perching on the bed’s edge. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Dad. I wanted to tell you before. But mother kept me in the room all the time the folks were here. It’s awful hard lines.”

“It can’t be helped,” said Dad, with an effort at philosophy.

“I got a hint of how it was going to be,” said the boy. “I heard mother and father talking. But I didn’t have the sand to tell you when you were so tickled at being asked here. And, anyway, I didn’t know how bad it would turn out. Mother is--”

“Mother is mother, Jim. Let’s try to remember that. She’s a good woman. She means it all for the best.”

“You told me once that Uncle Zach Taylor said the hot place was paved with the failures of folks who ‘meant it all for the best,’ Dad.”

“He never meant people like your mother, son. She does what she thinks is right. Remember we’re soldiers, you and I. And when soldiers are expecting a square meal and the commissary train gets lost they don’t whine. They just buckle their belts tighter and keep on the best they can. That’s the way it’s got to be with me for a while. It can’t be helped, and--”

“It _can_ be helped, Dad. That’s why I sneaked in here to-night. We got to hold a council of war, you and I. And I guess I’m the one with the only idea.”

“Fire away, general, but make it brief. It’s time little boys--I mean little generals--were asleep.”

“No,” contradicted Jimmie. “It’s time they woke up, if they’re going to save Colonel Brinton. Listen, Dad: how far did you tell me you tramped in one day when you went on that hunting trip last April? Twenty-two miles, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, about twenty-two. Why?”

“Tuckered out after it?”

“Not a bit. You see, I’m used to exercise. And the work I do in my garden keeps me in pretty good shape. But why--”

“Dad, you can’t stay here.”

“What? Has your mother--”

“She hasn’t said a thing. I guess there’s nothing left for her to say. She’s said about everything already. But you can’t. It will be like being in jail. You saw how it was to-day. Well, it’ll be like that to-morrow and the next day and the next day after that and all the days. And it’ll keep getting worse.”

The old man shuddered involuntarily at the prospect.

Jimmie pressed his advantage.

“There’s just one thing you got to do, colonel,” he declared, “you got to break prison.”

“To--”

“Yep. To--to absquatulate. To run away.”

“Jimmie! I--”

“Wait a second. I’m the general and this is a council of war. You got to run away. I’ve planned it all out. And I’ve planned where you’ve got to run away to.”

“Where, general?” asked Dad in mild amusement as the boy paused for dramatic effect. “To sea, or the North Pole, or--”

“To the front!”

“Don’t, son!” expostulated Dad in sharp pain. “Don’t talk that way.”

“Why not? You said you’d stay here because you thought you could be of use to mother. Well, you see what kind of use you are to her and how much she’d miss you if you were gone. Say, Dad--colonel--honest, I hate like poison to hurt your feelings by talking like that, but it’s true. So why don’t you hike out for the front? You’re crazy to go to the war. Just as I am. Only, you can do it and I can’t. No one’s got the right to stop _you_ or pack you back to school.”

Dad fell back on the hard pillow, again staring wide-eyed up at the bare rafters. The drink-longing had left him, driven out by a fifty-fold stronger yearning.

“To go to the front!” he muttered.

“That’s it,” encouraged Jimmie. “That’s the idea, Dad. Why don’t you?”

Dad sighed, the bright vision fading.

“I can’t, boy,” he said simply.

“Because--” began Jimmie with a queer shyness, “because you think maybe they wouldn’t take you back?”

“You’ve guessed it, son.”

Jimmie reached forward and patted the man’s cheek in rough sympathy.

“I know,” he answered. “It’s a rotten shame. But I’ve thought all that out, too. I got the idea to-night when Uncle Cephus was telling how a boy up at Cleveland ran away to the war--under another name.”

“Another name?” repeated Dad, a confused hope jumping into life within him.

“That’s it. Now the gov’ment was silly enough not to want Lieutenant-Colonel Brinton back in the army. Even as a private, most likely. But how is the gov’ment going to know you’re Lieutenant-Colonel James Brinton unless you tell ’em so? Why, there ain’t a chance in a billion you’ll run across anyone you used to know. And if you did--well, a man changes a whole lot in fourteen years. I know _I_ have.”

The veteran’s mind blazed with the new thought--a plan so simple, so safe, so feasible that he marveled at his own drink-dulled brain for not sooner seizing upon it.

Details were still in a jumble; but the basic thought possessed him to the very soul.

“I read in the _Herald_,” went on Jimmie, his voice cracking with excitement, “that there’s a new recruiting camp at Cincinnati. Go there. It’s only forty miles. You can make it in two days easy. And there you won’t run into any of the home folks. They’re all enlisting at Columbus.”

Dad was sitting bolt upright in bed, his every nerve tense. Twenty years had tumbled from his suddenly straightened shoulders.

“Jimmie!” he gasped. “Jimmie! Oh, son, you’re a wonder!”

“You--you’ll _do_ it, Dad?” cried the boy.

“Do it?” echoed Brinton. “_Yes!_”

The boy gave his grandfather a rapturous hug and squealed aloud in glee.

“Mother won’t be very nice about it,” he said presently, “but--”

“No,” agreed Dad, a shade of his elation ebbing. “She won’t. I hadn’t thought of that. That’ll be the only hard part of it all. Somehow, son, I’m such a rank old coward I’d rather face a dozen crazy men armed with knives than one terribly good woman armed with a righteous temper. But I’ll have to go through with it some way. I’ll speak to her the first thing in the morning.”

“You don’t have to.”

“But how--”

“Remember the night I went cat-fishing with you? Well, how do you s’pose I got out of the house? By that window just behind you. I shinned down the water-pipe. It’s dead easy. _I_ did it. I stump _you_ to. Right this very night. It isn’t twelve o’clock yet. You could be ten miles out of town before to-morrow morning at sunrise.”

Dad was on his feet, drawing on his clothes with the careful haste of a veteran.

“I’ll do it!” he said, feeling delightfully like a runaway schoolboy. “I’ll do it, Jimmie. Oh, lad, you’re such a little brick!”

“Don’t go off half-cocked,” adjured Jimmie. “There’s something else you’ve got to think of. What name are you going to have them call you?”

“Any name will do,” said Brinton impatiently as he bent to lace his shoes. “John Smith is as good as another, I suppose.”

“Well, you s’pose wrong,” chided Jimmie. “S’pose an off’cer or one of the men says: ‘Hey, there, Smith!’ Half the time you won’t remember you’re John Smith at all, and you won’t know enough to answer. And then everybody’ll know it isn’t your own name.”

“That’s so!” laughed Brinton. “I’ll have to teach myself my new name as I go along. That’ll be the way to get around _that_!”

“It takes an awful long time to get used to a name,” philosophized Jimmie. “Even now, when mother calls me ‘James’ I don’t always catch on, because I’m so much useder to being Jimmie.

“But I’ve thought out that, too. You’re name is Dadd. D-A-D-D. You pronounce it just the same as D-A-D. James Dadd. It ain’t as swell a name as Claude Reginald de Montmorency. But it’s safer.

“You see,” he explained, “when anyone calls you ‘James,’ then, or ‘Dadd,’ why, you’ll be so used to both names that you’ll answer to either of ’em right straight off without having to stop to think about it at all. That’s the idea. Do you see what I mean?”

“Jimmie,” said Dad, with heartfelt conviction, “if you had one speck more sense your brain would explode! I take off my hat to you. You’re not a wonder. You’re two wonders--even three. James Dadd it shall be.”

Fully dressed now, he paused, and, dropping his hands on his grandson’s shoulders, looked down at the ugly, earnest little face upturned to his own in the white moonshine that filtered into the room.

“My boy,” he said very tenderly, very earnestly, “the Book of Books says something about ‘out of the mouths of babes.’ And, as usual, the Book is right. For fourteen years I’ve been wandering off the path and into dirtier sloughs than you’d understand about if I were to tell you. To-night you’ve put my feet on the firm, hard road again. And, please God, they’ve strayed from it for the last time.

“I’m no hand at sermonizing, and this is no time to preach. But I’m going to make up for what I’ve lost. I’m going to make you proud of me. I’m going to serve this dear country of ours as only a man who loves her as I do _can_ serve her. I’m going to break with the worthless sot I’ve been for fourteen years. And I’m going to win back so help me! I’m going to be a man--a _man_!”

He paused, his clasp tightening on his little grandson’s shoulders, the expression in his eyes as he looked down into the still rigidly upturned face before him softening to warmer tenderness.

“And, son, it’s you who have shown me the way. Just remember that always. And--if it turns out that I shouldn’t happen to come back, just remember it’s the cleanest, whitest way a man could wish to die. And remember, then, that it’ll some day be your turn to take the place that’s come down to you through the generations--to be a Fighting Brinton.”

His voice choked. Stooping down, he kissed the boy; then, lightly as a man of twenty, he swung over the sill and let himself down to the pipe below.

* * * * *

Dad halted in his long, nervous stride; turned and looked back.

He had reached the highest ground in the lowland region; the top of a low, rolling hillock. Five miles away, in the valley, lay Ideala, the town he had quitted less than an hour and a half earlier.

Under the flood of summer moonlight it lay, it’s ugly lines almost beautiful in the soft radiance.

Dad gazed long and earnestly at the town that had been his home since babyhood; the town whose foremost merchant and leading citizen he had once been; the town that had laughingly witnessed his disgrace and had for fourteen miserable years been the scene of his daily degradation.

He looked back at the place with much the feeling wherewith a released soul might view the twisted and crippled body that had so long been its prison-house.

The disgrace, the sneers, the shame, dulled by liquor--all were things of the past. Ahead--somewhere to the southward--lay a new world, a new career, a new chance under a new name. The shackles had been struck away. The convict was free.

Dad’s keen eyes traced the bulk of a big house on a rise of ground at the town’s northern end. In a room of that house a boy was lying awake, praying for the good fortune of his grandfather. A boy--the only being on earth who loved James Brinton and whom James Brinton loved.

Unwitting his own quick impulse, the man fell heavily to his knees, gripped his hands tight across his chest, and stared up into the moon-illumined sky.

“God bless him and keep him!” he muttered incoherently.

“God bless my little boy and make me halfway the man he thinks I am!”

A spasm as of physical pain seized and shook the kneeling man. The very depths were stirred.

Something to which he had long been a stranger possessed and mastered him. His eyes still upraised, the white moon glare beating upon his face, he spoke aloud--spoke as though addressing a visible friend, not an unseen God.

“You’ve lifted me out of the mire,” he breathed. “You have shown me the light after all these black years. You have given me the chance to strike for this country that You made free and great. Make my deeds thank You as my words can’t!”

The voice ceased; then continued once more, firm yet vibrant with mighty emotion:

“You have made good Your promise that ‘a little child shall lead them.’ A child has been Your instrument in starting me in the right direction. Keep me on that road, nor let my grosser self triumph over my manhood again. I offer my life to You--it is all I have to offer in atonement. Make it clean and strong as once it was. Give me the chance to lay it on Your altar as a sacrifice to liberty and patriotism. Oh, teach me to deserve the chance that has come to me this night!”

He rose to his feet, full of a strange, exalted calm. He felt that every word of his heart-wrung prayer had reached beyond the frontier of the star country overhead and to the very throne of the Hearer and Answerer.

Somewhere on that dusty, moonlit road Dad Brinton, town drunkard, was forever left behind.

And hastening blithely to his country’s service marched James Dadd, army recruit!