no jealousy, no grievance to help him in his struggle.  Unlike Harry, he had no slave sympathy to stir him to the depths, no stubborn, rebellious pride to prod him on.  In the days when the school-master thundered at him some speech of the Prince of Kentuckians, it was always the national thrill in the fiery utterance that had shaken him even then.  So that unconsciously the boy was the embodiment of pure Americanism, and for that reason he and the people among whom he was born stood among the millions on either side, quite alone.

What was he fighting then—­ah, what?  If the bed-rock of his character was not loyalty, it was nothing.  In the mountains the Turners had taken him from the Wilderness.  In the Bluegrass the old Major had taken him from the hills.  His very life he owed to the simple, kindly mountaineers, and what he valued more than his life he owed to the simple gentleman who had picked him up from the roadside and, almost without question, had taken him to his heart and to his home.  The Turners, he knew, would fight for their slaves as they would have fought Dillon or Devil had either proposed to take from them a cow, a hog, or a sheep.  For that Chad could not blame them.  And the Major was going to fight, as he believed, for his liberty, his State, his country, his property, his fireside.  So in the eyes of both, Chad must be the snake who had warmed his frozen body on their hearthstones and bitten the kindly hands that had warmed him back to life.  What would Melissa say?  Mentally he shrank from the fire of her eyes and the scorn of her tongue when she should know.  And Margaret—­the thought of her brought always a voiceless groan.  To her, he had let his doubts be known, and her white silence closed his own lips then and there.  The simple fact that he had doubts was an entering wedge of coldness between them that Chad saw must force them apart for he knew that the truth must come soon, and what would be the bitter cost of that truth.  She could never see him as she saw Harry.  Harry was a beloved and erring brother.  Hatred of slavery had been cunningly planted in his heart by her father’s own brother, upon whose head the blame for Harry’s sin was set.  The boy had been taunted until his own father’s scorn had stirred his proud independence into stubborn resistance and intensified his resolution to do what he pleased and what he thought was right.  But Chad—­she would never understand him.  She would never understand his love for the Government that had once abandoned her people to savages and forced her State and his to seek aid from a foreign land.  In her eyes, too, he would be rending the hearts that had been tenderest to him in all the world:  and that was all.  Of what fate she would deal out to him he dared not think.  If he lifted his hand against the South, he must strike at the heart of all he loved best, to which he owed most.  If against the Union, at the heart of all that was best in himself.  In him the pure spirit that gave birth to the nation was fighting for life.  Ah, God! what should he do—­what should he do?