The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come

But the sun sank next day from a sky that was aflame with rebel victories. It rose on a day rosy with rebel hopes, and the prophetic coolness of autumn was in the early morning...

Chad was awakened by the touch of a cold nose at his ear, the rasp of a warm tongue across his face, and the tug of two paws at his cover. "Git down, Jack!" he said, and Jack, w...

Twice, during the night, Jack roused him by trying to push himself farther under the blanket and Chad rose to rebuild the fire. The third time he was awakened by the subtle pres...

Over the border, in Dixie, two videttes in gray trot briskly from out a leafy woodland, side by side, and looking with keen eyes right and left; one, erect, boyish, bronzed; the...

It was strange to Chad that he should be drifting toward a new life down the river which once before had carried him to a new world. The future then was no darker than now, but...

Meanwhile Morgan was coming on--led by the two videttes in gray--Daniel Dean and Rebel Jerry Dillon--coming on to meet Kirby Smith in Lexington after that general had led the Bl...

The quivering heat of August was giving way and the golden peace of autumn was spreading through the land. The breath of mountain woods by day was as cool as the breath of valle...

On Sunday, the Major and Miss Lucy took Chad to church--a country church built of red brick and overgrown with ivy--and the sermon was very short, Chad thought, for, down in the...

And Chad looked around. He went to the barn to see his old mare and the Major's horses, and to the kennels, where the fox-hounds reared against the palings and sniffed at him cu...

Ahead of them, it was Court Day in Lexington. From the town, as a centre, white turnpikes radiated in every direction like the strands of a spider's web. Along them, on the day...

Shortly after dusk, that night, two or three wagons moved quietly out of Lexington, under a little guard with guns loaded and bayonets fixed. Back at the old Armory--the home of...

And so, returned to the Bluegrass, the midsummer of that year, Chadwick Buford gentleman. A youth of eighteen, with the self-possession of a man, and a pair of level, clear eyes...

By degrees the whole story was told Chad that night. Now and then the Turners would ask him about his stay in the Bluegrass, but the boy would answer as briefly as possible and...

As the school-master had foretold, there was no room at college for Jack. Several times Major Buford took the dog home with him, but Jack would not stay. The next morning the do...

It was the first warm day of spring and the sunshine was very soothing to Melissa as she sat on the old porch early in the afternoon. Perhaps it was a memory of childhood, perha...

It was the tournament that, at last, loosed Mammy's tongue. She was savage in her denunciation of Chad to Mrs. Dean--so savage and in such plain language that her mistress check...

While the corn grew, school went on and, like the corn, Chad's schooling put forth leaves and bore fruit rapidly. The boy's mind was as clear as his eye and, like a mountain-poo...

On the way to God's Country at last! Already Chad had schooled himself for the parting with Jack, and but for this he must--little man that he was--have burst into tears. As it...

Once more, and for the last time, Chadwick Buford jogged along the turnpike from the Ohio to the heart of the Bluegrass. He had filled his empty shoulder-straps with two bars. H...

Throughout that summer Chad fought his fight, daily swaying this way and that--fought it in secret until the phantom of neutrality faded and gave place to the grim spectre of wa...

The days of that April had been days of mist and rain. Sometimes, for hours, there would come a miracle of blue sky, white cloud, and yellow light, but always between dark and d...

Rain fell that night--gentle rain and warm, for the south wind rose at midnight. At four o clock a shower made the shingles over Chad rattle sharply, but without wakening the la...

In the far North, as in the far South, men had but to drift with the tide. Among the Kentuckians, the forces that moulded her sons--Davis and Lincoln--were at war in the State,...

One night, in the following April, there was a great dance in Lexington. Next day the news of Sumter came. Chad pleaded to be let off from the dance, but the Major would not hea...

The rain was falling with a steady roar when General Hunt broke camp a few days before. The mountain-tops were black with thunderclouds, and along the muddy road went Morgan's M...

In May, Grant simply said--Forward! The day he crossed the Rapidan, he said it to Sherman down in Georgia. After the battle of the Wilderness he said it again, and the last brut...

It had been arranged by the school-master that they should all meet at the railway station to go home, next day at noon, and, as the Turner boys had to help the Squire with the...

And yet, the next time Chad saw Margaret, she spoke to him shyly but cordially, and when he did not come near her, she stopped him on the street one day and reminded him of his...

No humor in that phrase to the Bluegrass Kentuckian! There never was--there is none now. To him, the land seems in all the New World, to have been the pet shrine of the Great Mo...

The early spring sunshine lay like a benediction over the Dean household, for Margaret and her mother were home from exile. On the corner of the veranda sat Mrs. Dean, where she...

Mother Turner was sitting in the porch with old Jack at her feet when Chad and Dixie came to the gate--her bonnet off, her eyes turned toward the West. The stillness of death la...

across the fields to the turnpike. When she reached the road-fence the girl was coming around the bend her eyes on the ground, and every now and then she would cough and put her...