The Iron Game - Henry Francis Keenan
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[Transcriber's Note: The spelling inconsistencies of the original have
been retained in this etext.]
The Iron Game
A TALE OF THE WAR
BY
HENRY F. KEENAN
"Heavy and solemn the cloudy column
Over the green fields marching came,
Measureless spread like a table bread
For the cold grim dice of the iron game."
1898
TO
BERNARD JOHN McGRANN
WHOSE LIFE AND CONDUCT EMBODY AND ILLUSTRATE
THE MANLINESS, MODESTY, AND WORTH
THAT FANCY DELIGHTS TO EMBALM IN FICTION
THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED
BY ONE AMONG THE MANY WITNESSES OF HIS NOBLE CAREER
HENRY F. KEENAN
NEW YORK, _25th March, 1891_.
CONTENTS
BOOK I.
_THE CARIBEES_.
CHAPTER
I.--THE BOY IN BLUE
II.--FLAG AND FAITH
III.--MALBROOK S'EN VA-T-EN GUERRE
IV.--GUELPH AND GHIBELLINE
V.--A NAPOLEONIC EPIGRAM
VI.--ON THE POTOMAC
VII.--THE STEP THAT COSTS
VIII.--AN ARMY WITH BANNERS
IX.--"THE ASSYRIAN CAME DOWN LIKE THE WOLF ON THE FOLD"
X.--BLOOD AND IRON
XI.--THE LEGIONS OF VARUS
BOOK II.
_THE HOSTAGES_.
XII.--THE AFTERMATH
XIII.--A COMEDY OF TERRORS
XIV.--UNDER TWO FLAGS
XV.--ROSEDALE
XVI.--A MASQUE IN ARCADY
XVII.--TREASON AND STRATAGEMS
XVIII.--A CAMPAIGN OF PLOTS
XIX.--"HE EITHER FEARS HIS FATE TOO MUCH"
XX.--A CATASTROPHE
XXI.--THE STORY OF THE NIGHT
XXII.--A CARPET-KNIGHT
XXIII.--ALL'S FAIR IN LOVE AND WAR
BOOK III.
_THE DESERTERS._
XXIV.--BETWEEN THE LINES
XXV.--PHANTASMAGORIA
XXVI.--IN THE UNION LINES
XXVII.--"THE ABSENT ARE ALWAYS IN THE WRONG"
XXVIII.--THE WORLD WENT VERY ILL THEN
XXIX.--A WOMAN'S REASON
XXX.--A GAME OF CHANCE
XXXI.--TWO BLADES OF THE SAME STEEL
XXXII.--THE LOST CARIBEES
XXXIII.--FATHER ABRAHAM'S JOKE
BOOK I.
_THE CARIBEES_.
CHAPTER I.
THE BOY IN BLUE.
When expulsion from college, in his junior years, was visited upon Jack
Sprague, he straightway became the hero of Acredale. And, though the
grave faculty had felt constrained to vindicate college authority, it
was well known that they sympathized with the infraction of decorum that
obliged them to put this mark of disgrace upon one of the most promising
of their students.
All his young life Jack had dreamed of West Point and the years of
training that were to fit him for the glories of war. He knew the
battles of the Revolution as other boys knew the child-lore of the
nursery. He had the campaigns of Marlborough, the strategy of Turenne,
the inspirations of the great Frederick, and the prodigies of Napoleon,
as readily on the end of his tongue as his comrades had the struggles of
the Giant Killer or the tactics of Robinson Crusoe. When, inspired by
the promise of West Point, he had mastered the repugnant rubrics of the
village academy, the statesman of his district conferred the promised
nomination upon his school rival, Wesley Boone, Jack passionately
refused to pursue the arid paths of learning, and declared his purpose
of becoming a pirate, a scout, or some other equally fascinating child
of nature delightful to the boyish mind.
When Jack Sprague entered Warchester College, he carried with him the
light baggage of learning picked up at the Acredale Academy. At his
entrance to the sequestered quadrangles of Dessau Hall, Jack's frame of
mind was very much like the passionate discontent of the younger son of
a feudal lord whose discrepant birthright doomed him to the gown instead
of the sword.
Long before the senior year he had allured a chosen band about him who
shared his eager aspiration for war, and when the other fellows dawdled
in society or wrangled in debate, these young Alexanders set their tents
in the college campus and fought the campaigns of Frederick or Napoleon
over again. Jack did not give much heed to the menacing signs of civil
war that came day by day from the tempestuous spirits North and South. A
Democrat, as his fathers had been before him, he saw no probability of
the pomp and circumstance of glorious war in the noisy wrangling of
politicians. The defeat of Douglas, the Navarre of the young Democracy
of the North, amazed him: but all thought of Lincoln asserting the
national authority, and reviving the splendor of Jackson and Madison,
was looked upon as the step between the sublime and the ridiculous that
reasoning men refuse to consider.
When, however, the stupefying news came that a national garrison had
been fired upon by the South Carolinians, in Charleston Harbor, the
college boys took sides strongly. There were many in the classes from
Maryland and Virginia. These were as ardent in admiration of their
Southern compatriots as the Northern boys were for the insulted Union.
Months passed, and, although the forces of war were arraying themselves
behind the thin veil of compromise and negotiation, the public mind only
languidly convinced itself that actual war would come.
The college was divided into hostile camps. The "Secessionists," led by
Vincent Atterbury, Jack's old-time chief crony, went so far as to hoist
the flag of the Montgomery (Jeff Davis's) government on the campus pole,
one morning in April. A fierce fight followed, in which Jack's ardent
partisans made painful havoc with the limbs of the enemy--Atterbury,
their leader, being carted from the campus, under the horrified eyes of
the faculty, dying, as it was thought. Then followed expulsion. When the
solemn words were spoken in chapel, the culprit bore up with great
serenity. But when he announced that he had enlisted in the army, then
such an uproar, such an outburst, that the session was at an end. Even
the grave president looked sympathetic. The like of it was never seen in
a sober college since Antony with Cleopatra invaded the Academy at
Alexandria. The boys flung themselves upon the abashed Jack. They hugged
him, raised him on their shoulders, carried him out on the campus, and,
forming a ring round him, swore, in the classic form dear to collegians,
that they would follow him; that they would be his soldiers, and fight
for the _patria_ in danger.
"I have nothing to offer you, boys. I'm only sergeant; but if you will
join now, I'm authorized to swear you in provisionally," Jack said,
shrewdly, seizing the flood at high tide.
So soon as the names could be written the whole senior class
(forty-three) were enrolled. Jack refused the prayerful urgings of the
juniors, who pleaded tearfully to join him. But the president coming out
confirmed Jack's decision until the juniors could get the written
consent of their parents.
The recitations were sadly disjointed that day, and the excited
professors were glad when rest came. The humanities had received
disjointed exposition during that session. Jack had been summoned to the
president's sanctuary, where he had been received with a parental
tenderness that brought the tears to his big brown eyes.
"Ah, ha! soldiers mustn't know tears. You must be made of sterner stuff
now, sergeant," the doctor cried, cheerily, as the culprit stood
confusedly before him. "O Jack, Jack, why did you put this hard task
upon me? Why make me drive from Dessau the brightest fellow in the
classes? What will your mother say? I would as soon have lost my own
child as be forced to put this mark on you? But you know I am bound by
the laws of the college. You know I have time and again overlooked your
wild pranks. We have already suffered a good deal from the press for
winking at the sympathy the college has shown in this political quarrel."
"Yes, professor, I haven't a word to say. You did your duty. Now I want
you to bear witness how I do mine. I do not complain that I am condemned
rather through the form than the fact. I was carried out of my senses by
the sight of that rebel flag."
The Warchester press, known for many years as the most sprightly and
enterprising of the country, was too much taken up with the direful news
from Baltimore to even make a note of Jack Sprague's expulsion, and the
soldier boy was spared that mortification. Nor did he meet the tearful
lament and heart-broken remonstrance at home, to which he had looked
forward with lively dread. His friends in the village of Acredale were
so astonished by his blue regimentals that he reached the homestead door
unquestioned. His mother, at the dining-room window, caught sight of the
uniform, and did not recognize her son until she was almost smothered in
his hearty embrace.
"Why, John! What does this mean? What--what have you on?"
"Mother, I am twenty-two years old. A man who won't fight for his
country isn't a good son. He has no right to stay in a country that he
isn't willing to fight for!" and with this specious dictum he drew
himself up and met the astonished eyes of his sister Olympia, who had
been apprised of his coming. But the maternal fears clouded patriotic
conceptions where her darling was involved, and his mother sobbed:
"O Jack, Jack! what shall we do? How can we live without you! And oh, my
son, you are too young to go to the war. You will break down. You can't
manage a--a musket, and the--the heavy load the soldiers carry. My son,
don't break your mother's heart. Don't go--don't, Jack, Jack! What shall
I do?--O Polly, what shall we do?"
"What shall we do? Why, we'll just show Jack that all of war isn't in
soldiering; that the women who stay at home help the heroes, though they
may not take part in the battle. As to you and me, mamma, we shall be
the proudest women in Acredale, for our Jack's the first--" she was
going to say "boy," but, catching the coming protest in the warrior's
glowing eye, substituted "man" with timely magnanimity--"the first man
that volunteered from Acredale. And how shamed you would have been--we
would have been--if Jack hadn't kept up the tradition of the family! He
comes naturally by his sense of duty. Your father's father was the first
to join Gates at Saratoga. My father's father was the right hand of
Warren, at Bunker Hill! If ever blood ran like water in our Jack's
veins, I should put on--trousers and go to the war myself. I'm not sure
that I sha'n't as it is," and, affecting Spartan fortitude, Olympia
pretended to be deeply absorbed in adjusting a disarranged furbelow in
her attire to conceal the quavering in her voice and the dewy something
in her dark eyes. The mother, disconcerted by this defection where she
had counted on the blindest adhesion, sank back in the cane rocker,
helpless, speechless.
"Yes, mother, Polly is right. How could you ever lift up your head if it
were said that son of John Sprague's--Governor, Senator, minister
abroad--was the last to fly to his country's call? Why, Jackson would
turn in his grave if a son of John Sprague were not the first to take up
arms when the Union that he loved, as he loved his life, was in peril!"
Mrs. Sprague listened with woe-begone perplexity to these sounding
periods, conscious only that her darling, her adored scapegrace, had
suddenly turned serious, and was using the weapons she had so often
employed to justify his conduct. For it was using one of the standing
arms in the maternal arsenal, to remind the wild and headstrong lad that
his father had been Jackson's confidant, that he had been Governor of
Imperia, that he had enforced the demands of the United States upon
European statesmen, that after a life spent in the public service he had
died, reverenced by his party and by his neighbors. Jack, as an infant,
had been fondled by Webster, by Clay, and, one never-to-be-forgotten
day, Jackson, the Scipio of the republic, had placed his brawny hand
upon the infant's head and declared that he would be "worthy of Jack
Sprague, who was man enough to make two Kentuckians."
"But you--you, ought to be a colonel. Your father was a major-general in
the Mexican War at twenty-five. A Sprague can't be a private soldier!"
she cried, seizing on this as the only tenable ground where she could
begin the contest against the two children confederated against her.
"I don't want to owe everything to my father. This is a republic, mamma,
and a man is, or ought to be, what he makes himself. I saw in a paper,
the other day, that the Government has more brigadiers and colonels
and--and--officers than it knows what to do with. I saw it stated that a
stone thrown from Willard's Hotel in Washington hit a dozen brigadiers.
I want to earn a commission before I assume it. I'll be an officer soon
enough, no fear. I could have had a lieutenant's commission if I had
gone in Blandon's regiment. But I hate Blandon. He is one of those
canting sneaks father detested, and I won't serve under such cattle."
Mrs. Sprague, like millions of mothers in those days, was cruelly
divided in mind. When the neighbors felicitated her on the valor and
patriotism of Mr. Jack she was elated and fitfully reconciled. When, in
the long watches of the night, she reflected on the hardships,
temptations, the dreadful companions her darling must be thrown with,
country, lineage, everything faded into the dreadful reality that her
darling was in peril, body and soul. He was so like his father--gay,
impressionable, easily influenced--he would be saint or sinner, just as
his surroundings incited him. This was the woe that ate the mother's
heart; this was the sorrow that clouded millions of homes when mothers
saw their boys pranked out in the trappings of war.
Our jaunty Jack enjoyed the worship that came to him. He was the first
boy in blue that appeared in the sandy streets of Acredale. Never had
the rascal been so petted, so feted, so adored. He might have been a
pasha, had he been a Turk. The promising down on his upper lip--the
object of his own secret solicitude and Olympia's gibes during the
junior year--was quite worn away by the kissing he underwent among the
impulsive Jeannettes of the village, who had a vague notion that
soldiers, like sailors, were indurated for battle by adosculation. Jack
may have believed this himself, for he took no pains to disabuse the
maidens as to the inefficacy of the rite, and bore with galliard
fortitude the wear and tear of the nascent mustache, without which, to
his mind, a soldier would figure very much as a monk without a shaven
crown or a mandarin without a queue. And though presently big Tom
Tooker, chief of the rival faction in Acredale, gave his name to the
recruiting officer in Warchester, and a score more of Jack's rivals and
cronies, he was the soldier of the village. For hadn't he given up the
glory of graduation and the delights of "commencement" to take up his
musket for the Union? And then the fife was heard in the village
street--delicious airs from Arcady--and a great flag was flung out from
the post-office, and Master Jack was installed recruiting sergeant for
Colonel Ulrich Oswald's regiment, that was to be raised in Warchester
County. For Colonel Oswald, having failed in a third nomination for
Congress, had gallantly proffered his services to the Governor of the
State, and, in consideration of his influence with his German
compatriots, had been granted a commission, though with reluctance, as
he had supported the Democratic party and was not yet trusted in the
Republican councils.
CHAPTER II.
FLAG AND FAITH.
If Acredale had not been for a century the ancestral seat of the
Spragues, and in its widest sense typical of the suburban Northern town,
there would be merely an objective and extrinsic interest in portraying
its sequestered life, its monotonous activities. But Acredale was not
only a very complete reflex of Northern local sentiment; its war epoch
represented the normal conduct of every hamlet in the land during the
conflict with the South. Now that the war is becoming a memory, even to
those who were actors in it, the facts distorted and the incidents
warped to serve partisan ends or personal pique, the photograph of the
time may have its value.
Made up of thriving farmers and semi-retired city men, Acredale mingled
the simple conditions of a country village and the easy refinement of
city life. The houses were large, the grounds ornate and ample, the
society decorously convivial. People could be fine--at least they were
thought very fine--without going to the British isles to recast their
home manners or take hints for the fashioning of their grounds and
mansions. There was what would be called to-day the English air about
the place and some of the people; but it was an inheritance, not an
imitation. Save in the bustling business segment, abutting the four
corners, where the old United States road bore off westward to Bucephalo
and the lakes, the few score houses were set far back from the highway
in a wilderness of shrubbery, secluded by hedges and shaded by an almost
primeval growth of elms or maples. The whole hamlet might be mistaken
for a lordly park or an old-fashioned German Spa. Family marketing was
mostly done in Warchester; hence the village shops were like Arabian
bazaars, few but all-supplying. The most pregnant evidence of the
approach of modern ways that tinged the primitive color of the village
life, was the then new railway skirting furtively through the meadows on
the northern limits, as if decently ashamed of intruding upon such
idyllic tranquillity. The little Gothic station, cunningly hidden behind
a clustering grove of oaks at a respectful distance from the Corners,
like the lodge of a great estate, reconciled those who had at first
fought the iron mischief-maker.
The public edifices of the town--the Episcopal church, the free academy,
the bank, the young ladies' seminary--were very unlike such institutions
in the bustling, treeless towns of to-day. Corinthian columns and Greek
friezes adorned these architectural evidences of Acredale's affluence
and taste. The village had grown up on private grounds, conceded to the
public year by year as the children and dependents of the founders
increased. The Spragues were the founders, and they had never been
anxious to alienate their patrimony. Acredale is not now the sylvan
sanctuary of rural simplicity it was thirty years ago--before the war.
The febrile tentacles of Warchester had not yet reached out to make its
vernal recesses the court quarter for the "new rich." In Jack Sprague's
young warrior days the village was three miles from the most suburban
limits of the city. There was not even a horse-car, or, as fashionable
Warchesterians have it, a "tram," to remind the tranquil villagers that
life had any need more pressing than a jaunt to the post twice a day.
Some "city folks" did hold villas on the outskirts, but they used them
only for short seasons in the late summer, when the air at the lake
began to grow too sharp for outdoor pleasures.
Society in the place was patriarchal as an English shire town. The large
Sprague mansion, about which the village clustered at a respectful
distance, was the "Castle" of local phrase. Much of the glory of early
days had departed, however, when the Senator--Jack's papa--died. The
widow found herself unable to maintain the affluent state her lord had
loved. His legal practice, rather than the wide acres of his domain, had
supported a hospitality famous from Bucephalo to Washington. But with
prudent management the family had abundance, and, as Jack often said, he
was a fortune in himself. When the time came he would revive the
splendors his father loved to associate with the home of his ancestors.
"But where are we to get this splendor now, Jack?" Olympia inquired, as
the youth was dilating to his mother on the wonders to come. "Private
soldiers get just thirteen dollars a month; and if you continue
smoking--as I am informed all men do in the army--I expect to have to
stint my pin-money expenses to eke out your tobacco bills."
"Oh, I'll bring home glory. Napoleon said that every soldier carried a
marshal's _baton_ in his knapsack."
"I'm afraid you won't have room for it if you carry all the things that
I know of intended for you in this and other families."
"Yes; but, Polly, you know, or perhaps you don't know, a _baton_ is like
a college love--no matter how full your heart is, you can always find
room for another!"
"John," Mistress Sprague reproves mildly; "how can you? I don't like to
hear my son talk like that even in jest. Don't get the idea that it is
soldierly to treat sacred things with levity. Love is a very sacred
thing; it ought to be part of a man's religion; it was of your
father's."
"Then Jack must be a high priest, for there are a dozen girls here and
in the city who believe themselves enshrined in that elastic heart."
"Olympia, you are a baleful influence on your brother. If anything could
reconcile me to his going it is the thought that he will escape the
extraordinary speech and manners you have brought back from New York. Do
the Misses Pomfret graduate all their young ladies with such a tone and
laxity of speech as you have lately shown? Strangers would naturally
think that you had no training at home."
"Don't fear, mamma; strangers are not favored with my lighter vein; I
assume that for you and Jack, to keep your minds from graver things. I
preserve the senatorial suavity of speech and the Sprague austerity of
manner 'before folks,' as Aunt Merry would say. Which reminds me, Jack,
Kitty Moore declares that you are responsible for Barney's enlisting.
The family look to you to bring him home safe--a colonel at least."
"Well, by George, I like that! Why, the beggar was bent on going long
ago. He was the first to ask me to run away and enlist. The other day he
wanted me to have him sworn in, and I told him to wait until--until I
got a commission." Jack was going to say until he was older, but he
suddenly recollected that Barney was his own age, and that, in view of
his mother's argument, struck him as unfortunate. He saw Olympia smiling
mischievously and turned the subject abruptly. "I suppose you know,
Polly, that Vincent is going home to join the rebels?"
"Is he?" She had turned swiftly to gather a ball of worsted, and when it
was secured began to rummage in her work-basket for something that
seemed from her intentness to be vitally necessary to her at the moment.
"Yes, he wrote to President Grandison that he should go as soon as his
passports and remittances came. He's promised a captain's commission.
I'm very, very sorry. Vint is the noblest of fellows. I hate to think of
him in the rebel army."
"That's the reason you half killed him the other day, I suppose,"
Olympia said, sweetly, still investigating the contents of the basket.
"What, John, you've not been in a broil--fighting?" and Mistress Sprague
could not, even in imagination, go further in such an odious direction,
and let her eyes finish the interrogatory.
Jack, a good deal subdued by what Olympia had left unsaid, rather than
what she had said, blurted out: "It was a campus shindy: Vint led the
rebel side and they got licked, that's all."
"Oh, was that all?" Olympia had ended her search in the basket and
fastened a glance of satiric good humor upon the culprit, which did not
tend to relieve the awkwardness of the moment. Jack blushed under the
glance and began to hum an air from Figaro, as if the conversation had
ebbed into an impass from which it could only be rescued by a
lively air.
Mrs. Sprague looked at the uneasy warrior, then at her daughter, darting
the crochet-needles placidly through the wool.
"Well," she said, "never mind what's past; we must have Vincent out here
for a visit before he goes. I must send Mrs. Atterbury a number of
things. I hope she won't think that we intend to let the war make any
difference in our feeling toward the family."
Jack was very glad to set out at once for his quondam foe, and in ten
minutes was driving down the road to Warchester. Vincent's bruises were
nearly healed, and he saluted Jack as a "chum" rather than as the agent
of his late discomfiture.
"I'm mighty glad you've come to day. I didn't know whether you meant to
break off or not. I don't cherish any rancor. I don't see any use in
carrying the war into friendships. We made the best fight we could. We
did better than your side. You had the most men and the biggest fellows.
We showed good pluck, if we did get licked. If you hadn't come to-day I
should have been gone without seeing you, for I began to think that you
were as narrow as these prating abolitionists. My commission is ready
for me now at Richmond, and I'm just aching to get my regimentals on.
I'm to be with Johnston in the Shenandoah, you know, and--"
"You mustn't tell me your army plans, Vint. I'm a soldier," and Jack
drew himself up with martial pomposity, "and--and--perhaps I ought to
arrest you now as an enemy, you know. I will look in the articles of war
and find out my duty in such cases." Jack waved his arm reassuringly, as
if to bid the rebel take heart for the moment--he would not hurry in the
matter. Vincent eyed his comrade with such a woe-begone mingling of
alarm and comic indignation that Jack forgot his possible part as agent
of his country's laws, and said, soothingly: "Never mind, Vint, I'm not
really a full soldier in the technical sense until the regiment is
mustered in at Washington. After that, of course, you know very well it
would he treason to give aid or comfort to the country's enemies."