The Judge steadied himself on his hickory stick and walked off without a word.  For a while Captain Lige stood staring after him.  Then he slowly climbed the steps and disappeared.

CHAPTER, XV

MUTTERINGS

Early in the next year, 1861,—­that red year in the Calendar of our history,—­several gentlemen met secretly in the dingy counting-room of a prominent citizen to consider how the state of Missouri might be saved to the Union.  One of these gentlemen was Judge Whipple, another, Mr. Brinsmade; and another a masterly and fearless lawyer who afterward became a general, and who shall be mentioned in these pages as the Leader.  By his dash and boldness and statesmanlike grasp of a black situation St. Louis was snatched from the very bosom of secession.

Alas, that chronicles may not stretch so as to embrace all great men of a time.  There is Captain Nathaniel Lyon,—­name with the fateful ring.  Nathaniel Lyon, with the wild red hair and blue eye, born and bred a soldier, ordered to St. Louis, and become subordinate to a wavering officer of ordnance.  Lyon was one who brooked no trifling.  He had the face of a man who knows his mind and intention; the quick speech and action which go with this.  Red tape made by the reel to bind him, he broke.  Courts-martial had no terrors for him.  He proved the ablest of lieutenants to the strong civilian who was the Leader.  Both were the men of the occasion.  If God had willed that the South should win, there would have been no occasion.

Even as Judge Whipple had said, the time was come for all men to decide.  Out of the way, all hopes of compromises that benumbed Washington.  No Constitutional Unionists, no Douglas Democrats, no Republicans now.

All must work to save the ship.  The speech-making was not done with yet.  Partisanship must be overcome, and patriotism instilled in its place.  One day Stephen Brice saw the Leader go into Judge Whipple’s room, and presently he was sent for.  After that he was heard of in various out-of-the-way neighborhoods, exhorting all men to forget their quarrels and uphold the flag.

The Leader himself knew not night from day in his toil,—­in organizing, conciliating, compelling when necessary.  Letters passed between him and Springfield.  And, after that solemn inauguration, between him and Washington.  It was an open secret that the Governor of Missouri held out his arms to Jefferson Davis, just elected President of the new Southern Confederacy.  It soon became plain to the feeblest brain what the Leader and his friends had perceived long before, that the Governor intended to use the militia (purged of Yankee sympathizers) to save the state for the South.

The Government Arsenal, with its stores of arms and ammunition, was the prize.  This building and its grounds lay to the south of the City, overlooking the river.  It was in command of a doubting major of ordnance; the corps of officers of Jefferson Barracks hard by was mottled with secession.  Trade was still.  The Mississippi below was practically closed.  In all the South, Pickens and Sumter alone stood stanch to the flag.  A general, wearing the uniform of the army of the United States, surrendered the whole state of Texas.