Windy McPhersons Son | Page 5

secret meetings and in mysterious mutterings behind hands
the movement subsided as suddenly as it had begun and only left its
leader more desolate.
In the little house at the end of the street by the shores of Squirrel
Creek, Sam and his sister Kate regarded their father's warlike
pretensions with scorn. "The butter is low, father's army leg will ache
to-night," they whispered to each other across the kitchen table.
Following her mother's example, Kate, a tall slender girl of sixteen and
already a bread winner with a clerkship in Winney's drygoods store,
remained silent under Windy's boasting, but Sam, striving to emulate
them, did not always succeed. There was now and then a rebellious
muttering that should have warned Windy. It had once burst into an
open quarrel in which the victor of a hundred battles withdrew defeated
from the field. Windy, half-drunk, had taken an old account book from
a shelf in the kitchen, a relic of his days as a prosperous merchant when
he had first come to Caxton, and had begun reading to the little family
a list of names of men who, he claimed, had been the cause of his ruin.
"There is Tom Newman, now," he exclaimed excitedly. "Owns a
hundred acres of good corn-growing land and won't pay for the harness
on the backs of his horses or for the ploughs in his barn. The receipt he
has from me is forged. I could put him in prison if I chose. To beat an
old soldier!--to beat one of the boys of '61!--it is shameful!"
"I have heard of what you owed and what men owed you; you had none
the worst of it," Sam protested coldly, while Kate held her breath and
Jane McPherson, at work over the ironing board in the corner, half
turned and looked silently at the man and the boy, the slightly increased
pallor of her long face the only sign that she had heard.
Windy had not pressed the quarrel. Standing for a moment in the
middle of the kitchen, holding the book in his hand, he looked from the
pale silent mother by the ironing board to the son now standing and

staring at him, and, throwing the book upon the table with a bang, fled
the house. "You don't understand," he had cried, "you don't understand
the heart of a soldier."
In a way the man was right. The two children did not understand the
blustering, pretending, inefficient old man. Having moved shoulder to
shoulder with grim, silent men to the consummation of great deeds
Windy could not get the flavour of those days out of his outlook upon
life. Walking half drunk in the darkness along the sidewalks of Caxton
on the evening of the quarrel the man became inspired. He threw back
his shoulders and walked with martial tread; he drew an imaginary
sword from its scabbard and waved it aloft; stopping, he aimed
carefully at a body of imaginary men who advanced yelling toward him
across a wheatfield; he felt that life in making him a housepainter in a
farming village in Iowa and in giving him an unappreciative son had
been cruelly unfair; he wept at the injustice of it.
The American Civil War was a thing so passionate, so inflaming, so
vast, so absorbing, it so touched to the quick the men and women of
those pregnant days that but a faint echo of it has been able to penetrate
down to our days and to our minds; no real sense of it has as yet crept
into the pages of a printed book; it yet wants its Thomas Carlyle; and in
the end we are put to the need of listening to old fellows boasting on
our village streets to get upon our cheeks the living breath of it. For
four years the men of American cities, villages and farms walked
across the smoking embers of a burning land, advancing and receding
as the flame of that universal, passionate, death-spitting thing swept
down upon them or receded toward the smoking sky-line. Is it so
strange that they could not come home and begin again peacefully
painting houses or mending broken shoes? A something in them cried
out. It sent them to bluster and boast upon the street corners. When
people passing continued to think only of their brick laying and of their
shovelling of corn into cars, when the sons of these war gods walking
home at evening and hearing the vain boastings of the fathers began to
doubt even the facts of the great struggle, a something snapped in their
brains and they fell to chattering and shouting their vain boastings to all
as they looked hungrily about for believing eyes.

When our own Thomas Carlyle comes to write