ink best."

CHAPTER II

THE REAL HEROES

The real heroes of the war have not been decorated yet. They have not
even been pensioned, for many of them lie in forgotten graves, and
those who do not are not the kind to clamor for honors or emoluments.

On the last Great Day, what a strange awakening for decorations there
will be, if such be in store for the just and the brave: Private
soldiers, blue and gray, arising from neglected graves with tattered
clothes and unmarked brows. Scouts who rode, with stolid faces set,
into Death's grim door and died knowing they went out unremembered.
Spies, hung like common thieves at the end of a rope--hung, though
the bravest of the brave.

Privates, freezing, starving, wounded, dying,--unloved, unsoothed,
unpitied--giving their life with a last smile in the joy of
martyrdom. Women, North, whose silent tears for husbands who never
came back and sons who died of shell and fever, make a tiara around
the head of our reunited country. Women, South, glorious Rachels,
weeping for children who are not and with brave hearts working amid
desolate homes, the star and inspiration of a rebuilded land. Slaves,
faithfully guarding and working while their masters went to the
front, filling the granaries that the war might go on--faithful to
their trust though its success meant their slavery--faithful and
true.

O Southland of mine, be gentle, be just to these simple people, for
they also were faithful.

Among the heroic things the four years of the American Civil War
brought out, the story of Captain Thomas Travis deserves to rank with
the greatest of them.

The love of Thomas Travis for the preacher-overseer was the result of
a life of devotion on the part of the old man for the boy he had
reared. Orphaned as he was early in life, Thomas Travis looked up to
the overseer of his grandfather's plantation as a model of all that
was great and good.

Tom and Alice,--on the neighboring plantations--ran wild over the
place and rode their ponies always on the track of the overseer. He
taught them to ride, to trap the rabbit, to boat on the beautiful
river. He knew the birds and the trees and all the wild things of
Nature, and Tom and Alice were his children.

As they grew up before him, it became the dream of the
preacher-overseer to see his two pets married. Imagine his sorrow
when the war fell like a thunderbolt out of a harvest sky and, among
the thousand of other wrecked dreams, wen