Part 1

Produced by Annie R. McGuire

Copyright, 1896, by HARPER & BROTHERS. All Rights Reserved.

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PUBLISHED WEEKLY. NEW YORK, TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1896. FIVE CENTS A COPY.

VOL. XVIII.--NO. 888. TWO DOLLARS A YEAR.

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A LOYAL TRAITOR.

A STORY OF THE WAR OF 1812 BETWEEN AMERICA AND ENGLAND.

BY JAMES BARNES.

Memories of John Hurdiss, of Stonington, Connecticut, written by himself, in order to ease his mind and, incidentally, to interest any one who might enjoy an unembellished narrative, told by a pen untried but truthful. It represents the labor of spare moments taken from a busy life, and is dedicated to those who may bear the writer's name. He therefore craves a kind indulgence.--J. H.

EDITOR'S NOTE.--The manuscript from which the following auto-biographical story is printed was found in an old desk that had been hidden away in the garret of a shipping-office in the town of Stonington, Connecticut. It narrowly escaped being destroyed at the time of discovery. Parts of it required a great deal of care in the putting together, as the mice had unfortunately commenced their work of destruction. However, it has been deciphered without loss of a paragraph, and, it is to be hoped, contains sufficient that will interest the reader. John Hurdiss is well remembered by one or two of Stonington's oldest inhabitants, although he moved from that town to the West some time in the forties. His grandchildren (for whom he probably wrote the story) are now given a chance to read of the strange adventures of their ancestor under three flags. The mystery which is referred to, and which has little to do with the story itself, perhaps, we leave for their unravelling. Thus, without further preamble, it is presented as it came from his pen and in his words. The main title is taken from one of Captain Hurdiss's own expressions; the titles to some of the chapters had to be supplied, as the original author left them in blank.

Chapter I.

AB INITIO.

In sitting down to write a tale in which I myself am the central figure and most prominent actor, I cannot help at first feeling a fear that any one who perchance shall read all that is to follow (if I ever succeed in the finishing of it) will judge me a person whose opinion of himself is high in the extreme.

While possessing the proper self-respect, without which no man is ever truthful or successful, I do not claim to have accomplished anything for the reason that I am gifted beyond the ordinary. I am not. But circumstances of my early youth gave to me chances for adventure, and fate probably led me, under the guiding hand of Providence, through much that is outside of the usual walks of life.

Although, as I write, I am only in late middle age and hale and hearty, all that I intend to record seems long ago indeed. Yet truthfully, and in such ways as memory recalls it, do I intend to put it down. If I am discursive, it is because I am led away by the vividness with which my eye puts the scenes again before me; that is all there is to it.

In going over many events of the past in the half-waking hours at night--a habit I have long been prone to--I have felt, often, my heart-beats quicken, and more than once I have scarce restrained an inclination to speak or to cry aloud in accordance with my feelings. Perhaps the placing of all this upon paper may reduce the intensity with which I relive a life that is gone. And thus, to begin:

My earliest childhood's recollection is of a warm summer's day. I know it was warm, because the sand in which I was playing sparkled and shone as it ran through my fingers, and the long stretch of beach, whose whiteness dazzled my eyes, was hot to the touch of my bare feet. A great brown curly dog playing up and down the water's edge makes part of the picture, and an old colored mammy, crooning softly to herself, was shading my head with the green branch of a tree. Then a tall man with gray hair came and lifted me on his shoulder and carried me through a wood whose trees seemed to touch the clouds; then out of the shadows, by a path through a meadow (in which were some great fierce hogs that frightened me most dreadfully), up to a large house, where a beautiful woman took me in her arms and kissed me and called me pet names that I was glad to hear. This, I say, is the first day of all my life that I can remember--which is beginning at the beginning, and no mistake.

Gradually it came to me, so that I can remember it, that I began to love things. I loved my beautiful mother, who spoke to me in a language very different from that of the three old colored people whom I saw every day, namely, Aunt Sheba, Ann Martha, and Ol' Peter; and I loved them also, and I loved the dog.

I seemed to understand the two kinds of speaking very well (my mother's and the rest of the world's, I mean), although I did not know that one was French and the other darky English pure and simple.

The tall man, whom I sometimes called "_père_," and at others "daddy," was not always with us. Very often it was long months between his visits, and he generally remarked how I had grown and how much heavier I had become since last he had lifted me up on his shoulder.

Then came the time when I began to think--strange thoughts that were never answered, because for the most part I confided them to no one except, maybe, to the brown curly dog, who was called "Maréchal" by my mother, and "Maa'shal" by the colored people. Like myself, he seemed to understand either language perfectly, and replied to each in his own fashion.

I well remember the day I first began to wonder at the vastness of the world. It was upon an occasion when my father and Ol' Peter took me for a sail in a _tremendous_ boat that they afterwards hauled up on the beach out at the mouth of the river--this is very clear in my mind--and the next morning after this excursion I went down with my mother to the end of the little wharf, and lo and behold! a great ship was lying at anchor in the broad stretch of water beyond the reedy point of land. My mother was crying softly, and my father kissed her, and me, too, over and over again. Then he stepped in a boat rowed by dark men with beards on their faces, and put off to the ship, spread her sails like a great bird and swept out into the bay.

When she had gone beyond the point, and we could no longer see a tall figure standing on the after-deck waving his hat, my mother burst out crying harder than ever, and we went back to the house. I never saw my father again.

I call him "my father," in thus looking back at the great spring-time, because I always think of him as such, and because I bear his name. Long years afterwards I learned much that this story will tell, if it goes on to the end, but it is now too early to indulge in explanations--I must relate things as they come to me.

Well, when I was six or seven years of age--when these first days I have touched on were even then but a memory--I began to enjoy life in new ways. I had never a play-mate but the dog, who had grown too old for romping; but my mother would read long and wonderful stories to me in her beautiful low voice, in French, of course, and I, listening, pictured the outside world as something strange and beautiful, and just waiting and yearning for _my_ coming to see it and enjoy it.

The ships that sailed up and down the bay, long distances off, were all bound somewhere that only _I_ knew, and my thoughts would follow them to enchanted islands where fairies and beautiful creatures lived, and where wonderful birds sang from the branches of wonderful trees. I had begun to study with my mother about this period. Dull work it often appeared to be, and I dare say many a rebellion had to be put down and many an outbreak silenced, although I can recollect no chastisements. But at last, before I was ten years old, I would take a book, and followed by the sedately plodding Maréchal, seek a shady spot down at the point, where I read myself to sleep often enough.

Of course now, by this time, I knew that the name of the river on which our plantation bordered was the Gunpowder, that the blue waters were the waters of Chesapeake Bay, that I lived on the shores of Maryland, and that the ships were bound not to fairy islands (except now and then when I _wanted_ them to be), but to Baltimore and Annapolis and Havre de Grace, and to a dozen other places whose inhabitants sought their living by trading and sailing on the sea.

I had also heard from Ol' Peter that there had been a war between our country and another, named England, and that a great man named Washington had once stopped at this very house in which we lived. Ol' Peter described to me the surrender of Cornwallis (at which he had been present, according to accounts); but my mother's talk and all she read about was of France, that I gradually came to believe must have been the most beautiful country in the world. Yet my mother always spoke as if France were dead, which puzzled me not a little. Of a truth, there were many things that puzzled me in those days. I had so many times received the answer, "You will learn all some day--_On vous dira tout ça un de ces jours, mon petit_," that at last I learned to hold back my curiosity, or to answer with my own imagination.

Our neighbors, who were not very neighborly, lived at long distances from us. They had no children, and up to my tenth year I had never exchanged a thought with any one of my own age. To tell the truth I am afraid my mother did not encourage the people near us to be very friendly, and I suppose that they talked much, and perhaps said spiteful things about her. I can remember how I began to notice that she seldom walked farther than the rose-bush at the end of the garden path, and that she was growing thinner and thinner, yet more beautiful every day.

We led a very simple existence, living mostly on what we raised in the garden and what Ol' Peter brought back from the "cross-roads"--a collection of three houses five or six miles distant from our plantation.

But I was growing big and strong for my age--so strong, indeed, that I could handle the heavy oars when Peter and I went out on the river to tend the nets; and never shall I forget the first time I was allowed to fire the old fowling-piece that occasionally brought a fat canvas-back duck, lusciously reeking of wild celery, to grace our table.

The furnishings of the big house we lived in I can recall in detail; they were very rich, although there were no carpets in any of the rooms except in the room my mother slept in. But there were great nail-studded chairs, and two carved oak sideboards, and a wonderful clock, upon which, by-the-way, I took my first lesson in geography; it was shaped like a golden earth, with the hours marked upon its circumference, and a hand that pointed them out as each came around in turn.

The rooms upstairs were empty, except for some packing-cases and rubbish--all but one small chamber, to which my mother alone had the key, and which contained a great iron-bound chest that I stood much in awe of. In the wide hallway downstairs were three portraits; one before which my mother often used to stand and weep (I knew it to be he who had sailed away in the ship and used to carry me on his shoulder). The second was a handsome pale-faced man whose hair fell in long ringlets over his steel armor, and who looked forth, very proud and haughty, from his piercing gray eyes that would follow one even out of the door on to the piazza. (I have often peered around the corners to see if they would discover me, and they never failed in it.) The third was a beautiful one of a woman whom I thought to be my mother. One day she told me, however, that it was not--that it was her twin sister, at which I marvelled.

A score or so of books were in a great case in one of the bare front rooms, some of them bound in handsome leather bindings and filled with fine engravings. What would I not give to possess them now!

One day was so much like another that, were it not for the seasons that flew by quickly, the world would have apparently been standing still; but that the oars were becoming less heavy and the distances not so great. Very soon I tended the nets alone or wandered along the shore with the old flintlock fowling-piece over my shoulder; ducks, or perhaps a wild goose or a swan, during the spring and fall, were always ready to be cooked, hanging in the spring-house at the end of the garden.

I began to roam farther and farther in my lonely excursions. Poor old Maréchal would follow me no longer than reached the shadow of the house.

I suppose that many people who travelled by the coach that passed the cross-roads every day wondered who the boy was that used to stand with a tall gun beside him at a fence corner, silently watching the lumbering vehicle go down the highway in a cloud of dust. I must have presented a quaint sight, no doubt, for my clothes were of home manufacture and I kept growing out of them. But the buttons, I recollect, on the rough cloth, were very beautiful, and inscribed with the same crest that was painted on one corner of the portrait with the flowing brown hair; these buttons played an important part in subsequent adventures, and I would give a finger to possess one at the present writing. But I am forging ahead of my story. To get back to it in quick order:

One day my mother and I and Ol' Peter mounted the rickety wagon to which our one lone mule was harnessed, and drove to the cross-roads. It was the first time that I could remember my mother leaving the plantation. I did not know then that it was on my account that she was making this departure, but I can see it plainly enough in looking over the time. A question that I had asked of her some days before had more than probably decided her upon doing so.

"Mamma," I had inquired, "are we always going to live here?"

I remember that she had looked at me strangely, and the next day the preparations were made for the great change. It is little things that occasion them usually in life, I notice.

When the coach stopped at the cross-roads tavern, the passengers gazed at us most curiously. The guard nudged his companion and whispered something, and a tall man in an officer's uniform politely handed my mother to a seat inside. Then the horn blew, the driver touched up the horses, and away we went.

I began to feel frightened. We passed houses and plantations with hundreds of colored people working in the fields, and at last, a little past noonday, we entered the town of Baltimore, and drove to an inn. The sight of so many people and of boys of my own age playing in the streets, the near-by glimpses of the shipping at the wharfs, thrilled and excited me; and as we descended from the coach, I held fast to my mother's skirt and would have hidden. The landlord of the inn hastened out and received us with the greatest consideration. After some bowing and scraping, and many orders to the negro servants, he turned from my mother, and poking out his finger in my direction, addressed a question to me, to which I falteringly replied in a manner that was evidently unintelligible, from the look on his face. I must have spoken French in my embarrassment.

We did not stay long at the inn--two or three days at the most; then we went to live in a little house that my mother had rented at the corner of the street. Aunt Sheba and the two other servants joined us. It was my mother's intention to go back to the plantation for the rest of the property she had left behind her; but she put off the expedition time after time, although she often spoke of doing so as if it were a duty neglected.

Now I went to school at a Mr. Thompson's, a cross-faced, snuffy individual, who wondered at my knowledge of Latin and marvelled at my simplicity. But it did not take me long to adapt myself to circumstances. After I had fought two or three battles with the lads of my own age, they decided that I was better as a friend than as an enemy, and I grew, more than likely, to think and behave as any one of them.

And so two years went by--two years like those of any boy's life--playing along the wharfs, climbing into orchards, talking with the fishermen, swimming, racing, fighting, and all. But my poor mother could now hardly leave her room; she passed most of her time in a chair by the window waiting for me, I take it. The people were very kind to her, and the doctor who lived near the inn used to come and see her frequently. Major Taliaferro (pronounced "Tolliver") was a devoted attendant; he was Captain of the county train-band. He and I grew very friendly; by-the-way, he was the officer who was so polite to us on the stage-coach. One afternoon when I returned from school I found my mother sitting talking to a gentleman whom I recognized as a Mr. Edgerton, a well-known lawyer of the neighborhood (he afterwards went to the Legislature, I might record, and became well known).

Upon my entrance the gentleman regarded me most curiously, and when he left bowed low at the door. The next week was to be the saddest and perhaps the most misfortunate of all my life.

I was seated on the hard little bench in Mr. Thompson's school-room, longing to be back once more with my old gun and my boat paddling along the marshy shore of the Gunpowder, when a shadow fell across the threshold. I looked up; it was the doctor. I cannot recollect his name, which is a pity, as I would like to set it down; but he was a kind man, and I am grateful to him. He stepped quickly to Mr. Thompson's side and whispered a few words in his ear. The latter coughed and looked at me over the great bows of his spectacles; then he called my name.

The doctor caught me by the hand, and I followed him out into the sunny street.

"Be a brave lad; be a brave lad, John," he repeated.

He almost dragged me up the road, so fast he walked, and a nameless fear coming into my heart, I began to sob aloud. There were two or three people gathered in front of our little house. Back in the garden I saw a strange sight. It was Ol' Peter leaning across the picket-fence; his head was bowed on his arms, and his shoulders were moving up and down. The people spoke in whispers as we went up the little path. Once inside the door the doctor bent down and kissed me on the forehead.

"Be a brave lad, my son," he said. "Your mother has left us"-- He turned away without finishing something he was going to say.

It did not require the sight of Aunt Sheba's tearful face beside me to tell what had happened. I knew it with a chill all through me; boy that I was, I fainted dead away. After a while, when I came to myself, they brought me to the room and left me there.

The second day afterwards was the funeral. It seemed to me that all of the town was present--from curiosity, mayhap, the largest part; yet, since she had come to the town, my mother's gentle manner had made her many friends. The doctor said she had long suffered from trouble of the heart.

But I could scarcely realize what had happened. What it meant to me of course I did not know.

It was the fall of the year. The blackbirds were chattering in the hedges, and off in the fields a bob-white had begun to pipe his cheery whistle. It was all the same, but there was a great blank somewhere. I could not even cry. My heart and senses were deadened by my sorrow, and yet I felt angry, as if I had been robbed.

When we returned to the house after the funeral, Mr. Edgerton, the lawyer, was waiting.

"I have here Madam Hurdiss's warrant to examine her effects, and the key to a certain strong-box which she has directed me to open and take care of," he said. "We will start for the Gunpowder to-morrow morning. You will go with us, doctor?"

My kind friend nodded. "The young gentleman will accompany us," he replied, with a hand on my head. "He is the party most interested."

"Of course," returned the lawyer. "And we will start early."

Then he said something about its being "a most interesting case," and the two gentlemen left the room. That night, for the third time, I sobbed myself to sleep, Aunt Sheba holding my hand and crooning the old Congo song that had lulled me many times on her wide bosom.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

Friend Paul has crossed the Atlantic in a small vessel with all the things he has bought, and you and he will explore the country together.

It is very important that the explorer be exceedingly careful at first, and that he watch the treacherous climate. Many white men in Africa have lost their lives by their own rashness. They go in the sun all day long after flowers, butterflies, insects, birds, or animals, and they perish in a few days, victims of the tropical climate. In the next place, one must not drink spirits. Many lives along the coast have also been lost on that account. The buoyant spirit of youth is quite enough to carry you through all kinds of hardships. It is very nice for every young fellow to rough it, to go through hardships, to have plenty of walking, to eat all kinds of food, to paddle or row. If he does these, he will have plenty of health for the future and no dyspepsia.

The explorer in a wild country should be always on the alert, and think that there is danger lurking everywhere--that an enemy in the shape of a man, or of a wild beast, or of a snake is hiding behind every tree; he must look inside of his hat, on the ground upon which he treads, and in scores of other places, for venomous reptiles or insects.

One has to be patient among savage tribes. One must be very slow to anger, must use great forbearance, and adapt himself to their ways of thinking, remembering always that their ways are not his ways, especially in regard to time, for they seem to think that what can be done one day will be better done the next. In a word, they have no idea whatever of the value of time. Be kind and sympathetic with them. Never do an unjust thing. Act in such a way that they will believe implicitly in your word. Nevertheless, use great firmness, never show any sign of fear; otherwise you are doomed. Use force only in the last extremity. Pay in beads or with other trinkets for everything you get. Never take food by force, for in no country, including our own, would farmers tolerate a band of strangers plundering their fields and killing cattle to feed themselves. They would rise in a body to drive those thieves or marauders away. So we must not find fault with the poor natives when they rise in arms against the travellers and their followers who come to plunder their fields and forage their country.

As I have told you, the explorer has to be wary, to look out for danger everywhere. So Friend Paul thought a great deal of his rifles and guns and revolvers--they were his friends. A brace of revolvers always lay under my head, and were used as pillows. When I suspected danger, I slept with them in the belt round my waist. A couple of rifles were always lying by my side or within my arms during my sleep. I slept with my boots on, so as to be ready at once in case of emergency or sudden attack. During the daytime I never went anywhere without carrying my revolvers, and then I had a rifle or shot-gun in my hand--just as a man carries his umbrella.

No matter how friendly a people appeared, I thought a sudden attack might be made at any time. In my pouch or bag were at least fifty cartridges for rifles, and the same number for my revolvers.