The lid of the box was nailed down, lines were taken from the harness of one of the teams standing by and were placed around the long box, and it was lowered with a splash into the hole.  Then several men seized spades and the clods fell with clatter and echo.  The men shoveled very hard, filling up the hole, and when it was full and heaped up, they patted it all over with the backs of their spades.

Everybody remained until this was done, and then we got into the wagons and drove away.

Nearly a dozen of the folks came over to our house for dinner, including the preacher, and they all talked of the man who was dead and how he came to die.

Only two days before, this man, Si Johnson, stood in the doorway of his house and looked out at the falling rain.  It had rained for three days, so that they could not plow, and Si was angry.  Besides this, his two brothers had enlisted and gone away to the War and left him all the work to do.  He did not go to War because he was a “Copperhead”; and as he stood there in the doorway looking at the rain, he took a chew of tobacco, and then he swore a terrible oath.

And ere the swear-words had escaped from his lips, there came a blinding flash of lightning, and the man fell all in a heap like a sack of oats.

And he was dead.

Whether he died because he was a Copperhead, or because he took a chew of tobacco, or because he swore, I could not exactly understand.  I waited for a convenient lull in the conversation and asked the preacher why the man died, and he patted me on the head and told me it was “the vengeance of God,” and that he hoped I would grow up and be a good man and never chew tobacco nor swear.

The preacher is alive now.  He is an old, old man with long, white whiskers, and I never see him but that I am tempted to ask for the exact truth as to why Si Johnson was struck by lightning.

Yet I suppose it was because he was a Copperhead:  all Copperheads chewed tobacco and swore, and that his fate was merited no one but the living Copperheads in that community doubted.

That was an eventful day to me.  Like men whose hair turns from black to gray in a night, I had left babyhood behind at a bound, and the problems of the world were upon me, clamoring for solution.

* * * * *

There was war in the land.  When it began I did not know, but that it was something terrible I could guess.  I thought of it all the rest of the day and dreamed of it at night.  Many men had gone away; and every day men in blue straggled by, all going south, forever south.

And all the men straggling along that road stopped to get a drink at our well, drawing the water with the sweep, and drinking out of the bucket, and squirting a mouthful of water over each other.  They looked at my father’s creaking doctor’s sign, and sang, “Old Mother Hubbard, she went to the cupboard.”