The Way of a Man

I did not see Colonel Meriwether. He passed on through to his seat in Albemarle without stopping in our valley longer than over night. Part of the next morning I spent in writin...

So it was war. We drew apart into hostile camps. By midwinter South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, had withdrawn from the Union. There arose...

Captain Stevenson left us soon after dinner, he being one of the officers' committee on preparations for the ball, so that I spent a little time alone at his quarters, Orme and...

If remorse, mental or physical, affected any of the dwellers at Jefferson Barracks on the morning following the officers' ball, at least neither was in evidence. By noon all tra...

Sudden disaster usually brings sudden calm, the pause before resolution or resignation. For the first instant after the shock of the boat upon the impaling snag I stood irresolu...

Presently once more I departed. My mother also ended her visit at Dixiana, preferring to return to the quiet of her two little whitewashed rooms, and the old fireplace, and the...

The next morning at the proper hour I started for the Sheraton mansion. This time it was not my old horse Satan that I rode. My mother told me that Satan had been given over und...

In those days travel was not so easy as it is now. I went by carriage to Washington, and thence by stage to the village of York in Pennsylvania, and again by stage thence to Car...

We stepped over to the gallery of the little tavern, where the shade was deep and the chairs were wide and the honeysuckles sweet. I threw myself rather discontentedly into a ch...

It was a young woman who left the step of the ambulance and stood for a moment shading her eyes with her hand and looking out over the shimmering expanse of the broad river. All...

It is not necessary for me to state that dinner in the Sheraton hall, with its dull mahogany and its shining silver and glass, was barely better than a nightmare to me, who shou...

Our forces passed up the valley of Virginia and rolled through the old Rockfish Gap--where once the Knights of the Golden Horn paused and took possession, in the name of King Ch...

We lay in our hot camp on the sandy valley for some days, and buried two more of our men who finally succumbed to their wounds. Gloom sat on us all, for fever now raged among ou...

Before dawn had broken, the clear bugle notes of reveille sounded and set the camp astir. Presently the smokes of the cook fires arose, and in the gray light we could see the ho...

Even as we were putting together our small belongings for the resumption of our journey, I looked up and saw what I took to be a wolf, stalking along in the grass near the edge...

To the delirious or the perishing man, time has no measuring. I do not know how we spent the night, or how long it was. Some time it became morning, if morning might be called t...

I had enough to do when it came to mounting my horse Satan. Few cared to ride Satan, since it meant a battle each time he was mounted. He was a splendid brute, black and clean,...

When finally our entire party had been gotten across the Platte, and we had resumed our westward journey, the routine of travel was, for the time, broken, and our line of march...

Silently we made our way toward the edge of the thicket where it faced upon the open valley. All about me I could hear the tinkling and crashing of fairy crystal walls, the ruin...

I made friends with many of these strange travelers, and was attracted especially by one, a reticent man of perhaps sixty odd years, in Western garb, full of beard and with long...

The question of food ever arose for settlement, and early the next morning I set out upon a short exploring expedition through our new country, to learn what I might of its reso...

At our little village on the following morning, Auberry and I learned that the _River Bell_ would lie up indefinitely for repairs, and that at least one, perhaps several days wo...

During the next morning Harry Sheraton galloped down to the village after the morning's mail. On his return he handed me two letters. One was from Captain Matthew Stevenson, dat...

Strength came to us as we had need, and gradually even the weaker of us two became able to complete the day's journey without the exhaustion it at first had cost her. Summer was...

When I rode up our lane in the dusk, I found my father and mother sitting in the cool of the front gallery, and giving my rein to one of our boys, I flung myself down on the ste...

I awoke, I knew not how much later, into a world which at first had a certain warm comfort and languid luxury about it. Then I felt a sharp wrenching and a great pain in my neck...

Poor, indeed, in worldly goods must be those to whom the discarded refuse of an abandoned Indian camp seems wealth. Yet such was the case with us, two representatives of the hig...

Perhaps I should not have done so. Perhaps I would not do so again. Had I known what was to come I could not have done so. Nevertheless I did.

The record of this part of my life comes to me sometimes as a series of vivid pictures. I can see this picture now--the wide gray of the flat valley, edged with green at the cou...

I shall never forget the scene there under the oak of the Sheraton front yard, which met my gaze when Miss Grace and I came about the corner of the house.

"That was a very noble thing of you," Miss Grace Sheraton was saying to me, as we passed slowly among the big trees of the Sheraton apple orchard. Her eyes were rather soft and...

We sent our carriage down to Wallingford that evening and had my new friend, Mr. Orme, out to Cowles' Farms for that night. He was a stranger in the land, and that was enough. I...

When we started to the south on the following morning, I rode far at the rear, under guard. I recall little of our journey toward Laramie, save that after a day or two we swung...

Our slow travel finally brought us near to the historic forks of the Platte where that shallow stream stretches out two arms, one running to the mountains far to the south, the...

"I do not know," said I to her soberly; "but since there is water here and a little shelter, it is my belief that we ought to stop here for the night."

She did not rebel or draw away, but there was that on her face, I say, which left me only reverent. Her hand fell into mine. We sat there, plighted, plighted in our rags and mis...

It was at last borne in upon me that I must leave without any word from Ellen. She was hedged about by all the stern and cold machinery of an Army Post, out of whose calculation...

Later in the evening, Mandy McGovern having left me, perhaps for the purpose of assisting her protégée in the somewhat difficult art of drying buckskin clothing, I was again alo...

I Found her at the churchyard of the old meetinghouse. She was just turning toward the gate in the low sandstone wall which surrounded the burying ground and separated it from t...

How long it was I hardly knew, for I had slink into a sort of dull apathy in which one day was much like another; but at last we gathered our crippled party together and broke c...

Within the few days following the battle, the newspapers paused in their warnings and rebukes on the one side, their paeans of victory on the other, and turned to the sober busi...

Hitherto, while I was weak, exhausted, and unable to reason beyond the vague factors of anxiety and dread, she had cared for me simply, as though she were a young boy and I an o...

A vast dizziness and a throbbing of the head remained after they were quite done with me, but something of this left me when finally I sat leaning back against the wagon body an...

Events had somewhat hurried me in the two days since my arrival at Jefferson Barracks, but on the morning following the awkward ending of my match with Orme I had both opportuni...

Soon now we would be able to travel; but whither, and for what purpose? I began to shrink from the thought of change. This wild world was enough for me. So long as we might eat...