CHAPTER 20.  OFF TO THE WAR

Throughout that summer Chad fought his fight, daily swaying this way and that—­ fought it in secret until the phantom of neutrality faded and gave place to the grim spectre of war—­until with each hand Kentucky drew a sword and made ready to plunge both into her own stout heart.  When Sumter fell, she shook her head resolutely to both North and South.  Crittenden, in the name of Union lovers and the dead Clay, pleaded with the State to take no part in the fratricidal crime.  From the mothers, wives, sisters and daughters of thirty-one counties came piteously the same appeal.  Neutrality, to be held inviolate, was the answer to the cry from both the North and the South; but armed neutrality, said Kentucky.  The State had not the moral right to secede; the Nation, no constitutional right to coerce:  if both the North and the South left their paths of duty and fought—­let both keep their battles from her soil.  Straightway State Guards went into camp and Home Guards were held in reserve, but there was not a fool in the Commonwealth who did not know that, in sympathy, the State Guards were already for the Confederacy and the Home Guards for the Union cause.  This was in May.

In June, Federals were enlisting across the Ohio; Confederates, just over the border of Dixie which begins in Tennessee.  Within a month Stonewall Jackson sat on his horse, after Bull Run, watching the routed Yankees, praying for fresh men that he might go on and take the Capitol, and, from the Federal dream of a sixty-days’ riot, the North woke with a gasp.  A week or two later, Camp Dick Robinson squatted down on the edge of the Bluegrass, the first violation of the State’s neutrality, and beckoned with both hands for Yankee recruits.  Soon an order went round to disarm the State Guards, and on that very day the State Guards made ready for Dixie.  On that day the crisis came at the Deans’, and on that day Chad Buford made up his mind.  When the Major and Miss Lucy went to bed that night, he slipped out of the house and walked through the yard and across the pike, following the little creek half unconsciously toward the Deans’, until he could see the light in Margaret’s window, and there he climbed the worm fence and sat leaning his head against one of the forked stakes with his hat in his lap.  He would probably not see her again.  He would send her word next morning to ask that he might, and he feared what the result of that word would be.  Several times his longing eyes saw her shadow pass the curtain, and when her light was out, he closed his eyes and sat motionless—­how long he hardly knew; but, when he sprang down, he was stiffened from the midnight chill and his unchanged posture.  He went back to his room then, and wrote Margaret a letter and tore it up and went to bed.  There was little sleep for him that night, and when the glimmer of morning brightened at his window, he rose listlessly, dipped his hot head in a bowl of water and stole out to the barn.  His little mare whinnied a welcome as he opened the barn door.  He patted her on the neck.