I could not
have judged by word or manner whether he cared one whit or not. He was
studying me, if toying with a locust branch and whistling softly and
gazing off at Burnett's Mound are marks of study. He had nothing of
himself to reveal. "I have heard it several times," he went on. "Judson
has made the announcement quietly, but generally."

He threw away the locust branch, shook down his cuff and settled it in
his sleeve, lifted his hat from his forehead and reset it on his head,
and then added as a final conclusion, "I don't believe it."

He had always managed me most skilfully when he wanted to find out
anything; and when the time came that I began in turn to manage him,
being of his own blood, the game was interesting. But before I knew it,
we had drifted far away from the subject, and I had no opportunity to
come back to it. My father had found out all he wanted to know.

"Phil, I must leave on the train for Kansas City this evening," he said
as we rose to go back to town. "I'm to meet Morton there, and we may go
on East together. He will have the best surgeons look after that wound
of his, Governor Crawford tells me."

Then laying his hand affectionately on my shoulder he said, "I
congratulate you on the result of your first campaign. I had hoped it
would be your last; but you are a man, and must choose for yourself.
Yet, if you mean to give yourself to your State now, if you choose a
man's work, do it like a man, not like a schoolboy on a picnic
excursion. The history of Kansas is made as much by the privates down in
the ranks as by the men whose names and faces adorn its record. You are
making that record now. Make it strong and clean. Let the glory side go,
only do your part well. When you have finished this six months and are
mustered out, I want you to come home at once. There are some business
matters and family matters demanding it. But I must go to Kansas City,
and from there to New York on important business. And since nobody has a
lease on life, I may as well say now that if you get back and I'm not
there, O'mie left his will with me before he went away."

"His will? Now what had he to leave? And who is his beneficiary?"

"That's all in the will," my father said, smiling, "but it is a matter
that must not be overlooked. In the nature of things the boy will go
before I do. He's marked, I take it; never has gotten over the hardships
of his earliest years and that fever in '63. Le Claire came back to s