nd--War! There was a token in the very dawn, a sword-like flame
flashing upward. The man in the White House had called for willing
hands by the thousands to wield it, and the Kentucky Legion, that had
fought in Mexico, had split in twain to fight for the North and for the
South, and had come shoulder to shoulder when the breach was closed--the
Legion of his own loved State--was the first body of volunteers to reach
for the hilt. Regulars were gathering from the four winds to an old
Southern battlefield. Already the Legion was on its way to camp in the
Bluegrass. His town was making ready to welcome it, and among the names
of the speakers who were to voice the welcome, he saw his own--Clay
Crittenden.

II

The train slackened speed and stopped. There was his
horse--Raincrow--and his buggy waiting for him when he stepped from the
platform; and, as he went forward with his fishing tackle, a
livery-stable boy sprang out of the buggy and went to the horse's head.

"Bob lef' yo' hoss in town las' night, Mistuh Crittenden," he said.
"Miss Rachel said yestiddy she jes knowed you was comin' home this
mornin'."

Crittenden smiled--it was one of his mother's premonitions; she seemed
always to know when he was coming home.

"Come get these things," he said, and went on with his paper.

"Yessuh!"

Things had gone swiftly while he was in the hills. Old ex-Confederates
were answering the call from the Capitol. One of his father's old
comrades--little Jerry Carter--was to be made a major-general. Among the
regulars mobilizing at Chickamauga was the regiment to which Rivers, a
friend of his boyhood, belonged. There, three days later, his State was
going to dedicate two monuments to her sons who had fallen on the old
battlefield, where his father, fighting with one wing of the Legion for
the Lost Cause, and his father's young brother, fighting with the other
against it, had fought face to face; where his uncle met death on the
field and his father got the wound that brought death to him years after
the war. And then he saw something that for a moment quite blotted the
war from his brain and made him close the paper quickly. Judith had come
home--Judith was to unveil those statues--Judith Page.

The town was asleep, except for the rattle of milk-carts, the banging of
shutters, and the hum of a street-car, and Crittenden moved through
empty streets to the broad smooth turnpike on the south, where Raincrow
shook his head,