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CHAPTER VII

THE FRENZY OF A NATION

HIL hurried through the excited crowds with Mar

garet and Elsie, left them at the hospital door,

and ran to the War Department to report for duty. Already the tramp of regiments echoed down every great avenue.

Even as he ran, his heart beat with a strange new stroke when he recalled the look of appeal in Margaret's dark eyes as she nestled close to his side and clung to his arm for protection. He remembered with a smile the almost resistless impulse of the moment to slip his arm around her and assure her of safety. If he had only

dared!

Elsie begged Mrs. Cameron and Margaret to go home with her until the city was quiet.

"No," said the mother. "I am not afraid. Death has no terrors for me any longer. We will not leave Ben a moment now, day or night. My soul is sick with dread for what this awful tragedy will mean for the South! I can't think of my own safety. Can any one undo this pardon now?" she asked anxiously.

"I am sure they can not. The name on that paper should be mightier dead than living."

"Ah, but will it be? Do you know Mr. Johnson?

wounds, pain or poverty, jails and revolutions-it was the dawn of life!

He sent her a flower every day and pinned one just like it on his coat. And every night found him seated by her side. She greeted him cordially, but the gulf yawned between them. His courtesy and self-control struck her with surprise and admiration. In the face of her coldness he carried about him an air of smiling deference and gallantry.

She finally told him of her determination to go to New York to pursue her studies until Phil had finished the term of his enlistment in his regiment, which had been ordered on permanent duty in the West.

He laughed with his eyes at this announcement, blinking the lashes rapidly without moving his lips. It was a peculiar habit of his when deeply moved by a sudden thought. It had flashed over him like lightning that she was trying to get away from him. She would not do that unless she cared.

"When are you going?" he asked, quietly.

"Day after to-morrow.'

"Then you will give me one afternoon for a sail on the river to say good-bye and thank you for what you have done for me and mine?”

She hesitated, laughed, and refused.

"To-morrow at four o'clock I'll call for you," he said firmly. "If there's no wind, we can drift with the tide." "I will not have time to go."

"Promptly at four," he repeated as he left.

Ben spent hours that night weighing the question of how far he should dare to speak his love. It had been such an easy thing before. Now it seemed a question of life and death. Twice the magic words had been on his lips, and each time something in her manner chilled him into silence.

Was she cold and incapable of love? No; this manner of the North was on the surface. He knew that deep down within her nature lay banked and smouldering fires of passion for the one man whose breath could stir it into flame. He felt this all the keener now that the spell of her companionship and the sweet intimacy of her daily ministry to him had been broken. The memory of little movements of her petite figure, the glance of her warm amber eyes, and the touch of her hand-all had their tongues of revelation to his eager spirit.

He found her ready at four o'clock.

"You see I decided to go after all," she said. "Yes, I knew you would," he answered.

She was dressed in a simple suit of navy-blue cloth cut V-shaped at the throat, showing the graceful lines of her exquisite neck as it melted into the plump shoulders. She had scorned hoop-skirts.

He admired her for this, and yet it made him uneasy. A woman who could defy an edict of fashion was a new thing under the sun, and it scared him.

They were seated in the little sail-boat now, drifting out with the tide. It was a perfect day in October, one of those matchless days of Indian summer in the Virginia climate when an infinite peace and vast brooding silence

in the night flung a black mantle over every flag and wound a strangling web of crape round every Easter flower.

When the preachers faced the silent crowds before them, looking into the faces of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and lovers whose dear ones had been slain in battle or died in prison pens, the tide of grief and rage rose and swept them from their feet! The Easter sermon was laid aside. Fifty thousand Christian ministers, stunned and crazed by insane passion, standing before the altars of God, hurled into the broken hearts before them the wildest cries of vengeance- cries incoherent, chaotic, unreasoning, blind in their awful fury!

The pulpits of New York and Brooklyn led in the madness.

Next morning old Stoneman read his paper with a cold smile playing about his big stern mouth, while his furrowed brow flushed with triumph, as again and again he exclaimed: "At last! At last!"

Even Beecher, who had just spoken his generous words at Fort Sumter, declared:

"Never while time lasts, while heaven lasts, while hell rocks and groans, will it be forgotten that Slavery, by its minions, slew him, and slaying him made manifest its whole nature. A man can not be bred in its tainted air. I shall find saints in hell sooner than I shall find true manhood under its accursed influences. The breedingground of such monsters must be utterly and forever destroyed."

Dr. Stephen Tyng said:

"The leaders of this rebellion deserve no pity from any human being. Now let them go. Some other land must be their home. Their property is justly forfeited to the Nation they have attempted to destroy!"

In big black-faced type stood Dr. Charles S. Robinson's bitter words:

"This is the earliest reply which chivalry makes to our forbearance. Talk to me no more of the same race, of the same blood. He is no brother of mine and of no race of mine who crowns the barbarism of Treason with the murder of an unarmed husband in the sight of his wife. On the villains who led this Rebellion let justice fall swift and relentless. Death to every traitor of the South! Pursue them one by one! Let every door be closed upon them and judgment follow swift and implacable as death!"

Dr. Theodore Cuyler exclaimed:

"This is no time to talk of leniency and conciliation! I say before God, make no terms with rebellion short of extinction. Booth wielding the assassin's weapon is but the embodiment of the bowie-knife barbarism of a slaveholding oligarchy."

Dr. J. P. Thompson said:

"Blot every Southern state from the map. Strip every rebel of property and citizenship, and send them into exile beggared and infamous outcasts."

Bishop Littlejohn, in his impassioned appeal, declared: "The deed is worthy of the Southern cause which was conceived in sin, brought forth in iniquity, and consummated in crime. This murderous hand is the same hand