Chapter 16

Then he understood. They were not coming merely to protect the rebuilding of the railroad. They had their orders to come straight into the hills, to attack and capture him and his men. The railroad was not only able to call the State to protect itself. It had called upon the State to avenge its wrongs, to exterminate its enemies. His men had understood this better than he. Probably they were right. This thing might as well be fought out from the first. In the end there would be no quarter. They could defeat this handful of troops and drive them back out of the hills with an ease that would be almost ridiculous. But that would not be the end.

The State would send other men, unlimited numbers of them, for it must and would uphold the authority of its law. Jeffrey Whiting did not deceive himself. Probably he had not from the beginning had any doubt as to what would be the outcome of this raid upon the railroad. The railroad itself had broken the law of the State and the law of humanity. It had defied every principle of justice and common decency. It had burned the homes of law-supporting, good men in the hills. Yet the law had not raised a hand to punish it. But now when the railroad itself had suffered, the whole might of the State was ready to be set in motion to punish the men of the hills who had merely paid their debt.

But Jeffrey Whiting could not say to himself that he had not foreseen all this from the outset. Those days of thinking in jail had given him an insight into realities that years of growth and observation of things outside might not have produced in him. He had been given time to see that some things are insurmountable, that things may be wrong and unsound and utterly unjust and still persist and go on indefinitely. Youth does not readily admit this. Jeffrey Whiting had recognised it as a fact. And yet, knowing this, he had led these men, his friends, men who trusted him, upon this mad raid. They had come without the clear vision of the end which he now realised had been his from the start. They had thought that they could accomplish something, that they had some chance of winning a victory over the railroad. They had believed that the power of the State would intervene to settle the differences between them and their enemy. Jeffrey Whiting knew, must have known all along, that the moment a tie was torn up on the railroad the whole strength of the State would be put forth to capture these men and punish them. There would be no compromise. There would be no bargaining. If they surrendered and gave themselves up now they would be jailed for varying terms. If they did not, if they stayed here and fought, some of them would be killed and injured and in one way or another all would suffer in the end.

He had done them a cruel wrong. The truth of this struck him with startling clearness now. He had led them into this without letting them see the full extent of what they were doing, as he must have seen it.

There was but one thing to do. If they dispersed now and scattered themselves through the hills few of them would ever be identified. And if he went down and surrendered alone the railroad would be almost satisfied with punishing him. It was the one just and right thing to do.

He went swiftly among the men where they stood among the trees, waiting with poised rifles for the word to fire upon the advancing soldiers, and told them what they must do. He had deceived them. He had not told them the whole truth as he himself knew it. They must leave at once, scattering up among the hills and keeping close mouths as to where they had been and what they had done. He would go down and give himself up, for if the railroad people once had him in custody they would not bother so very much about bringing the others to punishment.

His men looked at him in a sort of puzzled wonder. They did not understand, unless it might be that he had suddenly gone crazy. There was an enemy marching up the line toward them, bent upon killing or capturing them. They turned from him and without a spoken word, without a signal of any sort, loosed a rifle volley across the front of the oncoming troops. The battle was on!

The volley had been fired by men who were accustomed to shoot deer and foxes from distances greater than this. The first two ranks of the soldiers fell as if they had been cut down with scythes. Not one of them was hit above the knees. The firing stopped suddenly as it had begun. The hill men had given a terse, emphatic warning. It was as though they had marked a dead line beyond which there must be no advance.

These soldiers had never before been shot at. The very restraint which the hill men had shown in not killing any of them in that volley proved to the soldiers even in their fright and surprise how deadly was the aim and the judgment of the invisible enemy somewhere in the woods there before them. To their credit, they did not drop their arms or run. They stood stunned and paralysed, as much by the suddenness with which the firing had ceased as by the surprise of its beginning.

Their officers ran forward, shouting the superfluous command for them to halt, and ordering them to carry the wounded men back to the cars. For a moment it seemed doubtful whether they would again advance or would put themselves into some kind of defence formation and hold the ground on which they stood.

Jeffrey Whiting, looking beyond them, saw two other trains come slowly creeping up the line. From the second train he saw men leaping down who did not take up any sort of military formation. These he knew were sheriffs' posses, fighting men sworn in because they were known to be fighters. They were natural man hunters who delighted in the chase of the human animal. He had often seen them in the hills on the hunt, and he knew that they were an enemy of a character far different from those harmless boys who could not hit a mark smaller than the side of a hill. These men would follow doggedly, persistently into the highest of the hills, saving themselves, but never letting the prey slip from their sight, dividing the hill men, separating them, cornering them until they should have tracked them down one by one and either captured or killed them all.

These men did not attempt to advance along the line of the road. They stepped quickly out into the undergrowth and began spreading a thin line of men to either side.

Then he saw that the third train, although they were soldiers, took their lesson from the men who had just preceded them. They left the tracks and spreading still farther out took up the wings of a long line that was now stretching east to west along the fringe of the hills. The soldiers in the centre retired a little way down the roadbed, stood bunched together for a little time while their officers evidently conferred together, then left the road by twos and fours and began spreading out and pushing the other lines out still farther. It was perfect and systematic work, he agreed, that could not have been better done if he and his companions had planned it for their own capture.

There were easily eight hundred men there in front, he judged; men well armed and ready for an indefinite stay in the hills, with a railroad at their back to bring up supplies, and with the entire State behind them. And the State was ready to send more and more men after these if it should be necessary. He had no doubt that hundreds of other men were being held in readiness to follow these or were perhaps already on their way. He saw the end.

Those lines would sweep up slowly, remorselessly and surround his men. If they stood together they would be massacred. If they separated they would be hunted down one by one.

Their only chance was to scatter at once and ride back to where their homes had been. This time he implored them to take their chance, begged them to save themselves while they could. But he might have known that they would do nothing of the kind. Already they were breaking away and spreading out to meet that distending line in front of them. Nothing short of a miracle could now save them from annihilation, and Jeffrey Whiting was not expecting a miracle. There was nothing to be done but to take command and sell his life along with theirs as dearly as possible.

* * * * *

The echoes of the outbreak in the hills ran up and down the State. Men who had followed the course of things through the past months, men who knew the spoken story of the fire in the hills which no newspaper had dared to print openly, understood just what it meant. The men up there had been goaded to desperation at last. But wise men agreed quietly with each other that they had done the very worst thing that could have been done. The injury they had done the railroad would amount to very little, comparatively, in the end, while it would give the railroad an absolutely free hand from now on. The people would be driven forever out of the lands which the railroad wished to possess. There would be no legislative hindrances now. The people had doomed themselves.

The echoes reached also to two million other men throughout the State who did not understand the matter in the least. These looked up a moment from the work of living and earning a living to sympathise vaguely with the foolish men up there in the hills who had attacked the sacred and awful rights of railroad property. It was too bad. Maybe there were some rights somewhere in the case. But who could tell? And the two million, the rulers and sovereigns of the State, went back again to their business.

The echo came to Joseph Winthrop, Bishop of Alden, almost before a blow had been struck. It is hardly too much to say that he was listening for it. He knew his people, kindly, lagging of speech, slow to anger; but, once past a certain point of aggravation, absolutely heedless and reckless of consequences.

He did not stop to compute just how much he himself was bound up in the causes and consequences of what had happened and what was happening in the hills. He had given advice. He had thought with the people and only for the people.

He saw, long before it was told him in words, the wild ride down through the hills to strike the railroad, the fury of destruction, the gathering of the forces of the State to punish.

Here was no time for self-examination or self-judgment. Wherein Joseph Winthrop had done well, or had failed, or had done wrong, was of no moment now.

One man there was in all the State, in all the nation, who could give the word that would now save the people of the hills. Clifford W. Stanton who had sat months ago in his office in New York and had set all these things going, whose ruthless hand was to be recognised in every act of those which had driven the people to this madness, his will and his alone could stay the storm that was now raging in the hills.

Once the Bishop had seen that man do an act of supreme and unselfish bravery. It was an act of both physical and moral courage the like of which the Bishop had never witnessed. It was an act which had revealed in Clifford W. Stanton a depth of strong fineness that no man would have suspected. It was done in the dim, dead time of faraway youth, but the Bishop had not forgotten. And he knew that men do not rise to such heights without having very deep in them the nobility to make it possible and at times inevitable that they should rise to those heights.

After these years and the encrusting strata of compromise and cowardice and selfishness which years and life lay upon the fresh heart of the youth of men, could that depth of nobility in the soul of Clifford W. Stanton again be touched?

Almost before the forces of the State were in motion against the people of the hills, the Bishop, early of a morning, walked into the office of Clifford Stanton.

Stanton was a smaller man than the Bishop, and though younger than the latter by some half-dozen years, it was evident that he had burned up the fuel of life more rapidly. Where the Bishop looked and spoke and moved with the deliberate fixity of the settling years, Stanton acted with a quick nervousness that shook just a perceptible little. The spiritual strength of restraint and inward thinking which had chiselled the Bishop's face into a single, simple expression of will power was not to be found in the other's face. In its stead there was a certain steel-trap impression, as though the man behind the face had all his life refused to be certain of anything until the jaws of the trap had set upon the accomplished fact.

Physically the two men were much of a type. You would have known them anywhere for New Englanders of the generation that has disappeared almost completely in the last twenty years. They had been boys at Harvard together, though not of the same class. They had been together in the Civil War, though the nature of their services had been infinitely diverse. They had met here and there casually and incidentally in the business of life. But they faced each other now virtually as strangers, and with a certain tightening grip upon himself each man realised that he was about to grapple with one of the strongest willed men that he had ever met, and that he must test out the other man to the depths and be himself tried out to the limit of his strength.

"It is some years since I've seen you, Bishop. But we are both busy men. And--well-- You know I am glad to have you come to see me. I need not tell you that."

The Bishop accepted the other man's frank courtesy and took a chair quietly. Stanton watched him carefully. The Bishop was showing the last few years a good deal, he thought. In reality it was the last month that the Bishop was showing. But it did not show in the steady, untroubled glow of his eyes. The Bishop wasted no time on preliminaries.

"I have come on business, of course, Mr. Stanton," he began. "It is a very strange and unusual business. And to come at it rightly I must tell you a story. At the end of the story I will ask you a question. That will be my whole business."

The other man said nothing. He did not understand and he never spoke until he was sure that he understood. The Bishop plunged into his story.

"One January day in 'Sixty-five' I was going up the Shenandoah alone. My command had left me behind for two days of hospital service at Cross Keys. They were probably some twenty miles ahead of me and would be crossing over the divide towards Five Forks and the east. I thought I knew a way by which I could cut off a good part of the distance that separated me from them, so I started across the Ridge by a path which would have been impossible for troops in order.

"I was right. I did cut off the distance which I had expected and came down in the early afternoon upon a good road that ran up the eastern side of the Ridge. I was just congratulating myself that I would be with my men before dark, when a troop of Confederate cavalry came pelting over a rise in the road behind me.

"I leaped my horse back into the brush at the side of the road and waited. They would sweep on past and allow me to go on my way. Behind them came a troop of our own horse pursuing hotly. The Confederate horses were well spent. I saw that the end of the pursuit was not far off. The Confederates--some detached band of Early's men, I imagine--realised that they would soon be run down. Just where I had left the road there was a sharp turn. Here the Confederates threw themselves from their horses and drew themselves across the road. They were in perfect ambush, for they could be seen scarcely fifteen yards back on the narrow road.

"I broke from the bush and fled back along the road to warn our men. But I did no good. They were beyond all stopping, or hearing even, as they came yelling around the turn of the road.

"For three minutes there was some of the sharpest fighting I ever saw, there in the narrow road, before what remained of the Confederates broke after their horses and made off again. In the very middle of the fight I noticed two young officers. One was a captain, the other a lieutenant. I knew them. I knew their story. I believe I was the only man living who knew that story. Probably _I_ did not know the whole of that story.

"The lieutenant had maligned the captain. He had said of him the one thing that a soldier may not say of another. They had fought once. Why they had been kept in the same command I do not know.

"Now in the very hottest of this fight, without apparently the slightest warning, the lieutenant threw himself upon the captain, attacking him viciously with his sword. For a moment they struggled there, unnoticed in the dust of the conflict. Then the captain, swinging free, struck the lieutenant's sword from his hand. The latter drew his pistol and fired, point blank. It missed. By what miracle I do not know. All this time the captain had held his sword poised to lunge, within easy striking distance of the other's throat. But he had made no attempt to thrust. As the pistol missed I saw him stiffen his arm to strike. Instead he looked a long moment into the lieutenant's eyes. The latter was screaming what were evidently taunts into his face. The captain dropped his arm, wheeled, and plunged at the now breaking line of Confederates.

"I have seen brave men kill bravely. I have seen brave men bravely refrain from killing. That was the bravest thing I ever saw."

Clifford Stanton sat staring directly in front of him. He gave no sign of hearing. He was living over for himself that scene on a lonely, forgotten Virginia road. At last he said as to himself:

"The lieutenant died, a soldier's death, the next day."

"I knew," said the Bishop quietly. "My question is: Are you the same brave man with a soldier's brave, great heart that you were that day?"

For a long time Clifford Stanton sat staring directly at something that was not in the visible world. The question had sprung upon him out of the dead past. What right had this man, what right had any man to face him with it?

He wheeled savagely upon the Bishop:

"You sat by the roadside and got a glimpse of the tragedy of my life as it whirled by you on the road! How dare you come here to tell me the little bit of it you saw?"

"Because," said the Bishop swiftly, "you have forgotten how great and brave a man you are."

Stanton stared uncomprehendingly at him. He was stirred to the depths of feelings that he had not known for years. But even in his emotion and bewilderment the steel trap of silence set upon his face. His lifetime of never speaking until he knew what he was going to say kept him waiting to hear more. It was not any conscious caution; it was merely the instinct of self-defence.

"For months," the Bishop was going on quietly, "the people of my hills have been harassed by you in your unfair efforts to get possession of the lands upon which their fathers built their homes. You have tried to cheat them. You have sent men to lie to them. You tried to debauch a legislature in your attempt to overcome them. I have here in my pocket the sworn confessions of two men who stood in the shadow of death and said that they had been sent to burn a whole countryside that you and your associates coveted--to burn the people in their homes like the meadow birds in their nests. I can trace that act to within two men of you. And I can sit here, Clifford Stanton, and look you in the eye man to man and tell you that I _know_ you gave the suggestion. And you cannot look back and deny it. I cannot take you into a court of law in this State and prove it. We both know the futility of talking of that. But I can take you, I do take you this minute into the court of your own heart--where I know a brave man lives--and convict you of this thing. You know it. I know it. If the whole world stood here accusing you would we know it any the better?

"Now my people have made a terrible mistake. They have taken the law into their own hands and have thought to punish you themselves. They have done wrong, they have done foolishly. Who can punish you? You have power above the law. Your interests are above the courts of the land. They did not understand. They did not know you. They have been misled. They have listened to men like me preaching: 'Right shall prevail: Justice shall conquer.' And where does right prevail? And when shall justice conquer? No doubt you have said these phrases yourself. Because your fathers and my fathers taught us to say them. But are they true? Does justice conquer? Does right prevail? You can say. I ask you, who have the answer in your power. Does right prevail? Then give my stricken people what is theirs. Does justice conquer? Then see that they come to no harm.

"I dare to put this thing raw to your face because I know the man that once lived within you. I saw you--!"

"Don't harp on that," Stanton cut in viciously. "You know nothing about it."

"I _do_ harp on that. I have come here to harp on that. Do you think that if I had not with my eyes seen that thing I would have come near you at all? No. I would have branded you before all men for the thing that you have done. I would have given these confessions which I hold to the world. I would have denounced you as far as tongue and pen would go to every man who through four years gave blood at your side. I would have braved the rebuke of my superiors and maybe the discipline of my Church to bring upon you the hard thoughts of men. I would have made your name hated in the ears of little children. But I would not have come to you.

"If I had not seen that thing I would not have come to you, for I would have said: What good? The man is a coward without a heart. A _coward_, do you remember that word?"

The man groaned and struck out with his hand as though to drive away a ghastly thing that would leap upon him.

"A coward without a heart," the Bishop repeated remorselessly, "who has men and women and children in his power and who, because he has no heart, can use his power to crush them.

"If I had not seen, I would have said that.

"But I saw. I _saw_. And I have come here to ask you: Are you the same brave man with a heart that I saw on that day?

"You shall not evade me. Do you think you can put me off with defences and puling arguments of necessity, or policy, or the sacredness of property? No. You and I are here looking at naked truth. I will go down into your very soul and have it out by the roots, the naked truth. But I will have my answer. Are you that same man?

"If you are not that same man; if you have killed that in you which gave life to that man; if that man no longer lives in you; if you are not capable of being that same man with the heart of a great and tender hero, then tell me and I will go. But you shall answer me. I will have my answer."

Clifford Stanton rose heavily from his chair and stood trembling as though in an overpowering rage, and visibly struggling for his command of mind and tongue.

"Words, words, words," he groaned at last. "Your life is made of words. Words are your coin. What do you know?

"Do you think that words can go down into my soul to find the man that was once there? Do you think that words can call him up? When did words ever mean anything to a man's real heart! You come here with your question. It's made of words.

"When did men ever do anything for _words_? Honour is a word. Truth is a word. Bravery is a word. Loyalty is a word. Hero is a word. Do you think men do things for words? No! What do you know? What _could_ you know?

"Men do things and you call them by words. But do they do them for the words? No!

"They do them-- Because _some woman lives, or once lived!_ What do _you_ know?

"Go out there. Stay there." He pointed. "I've got to think."

He fell brokenly into his chair and lay against his desk. The Bishop rose and walked from the room.

When he heard the door close, the man got up and going to the door barred it.