millions on either side, quite alone.

What was he fighting then--ah, what? If the bed-rock of his character
was not loyalty, it was nothing. In the mountains the Turners had taken
him from the Wilderness. In the Bluegrass the old Major had taken him
from the hills. His very life he owed to the simple, kindly
mountaineers, and what he valued more than his life he owed to the
simple gentleman who had picked him up from the roadside and, almost
without question, had taken him to his heart and to his home. The
Turners, he knew, would fight for their slaves as they would have
fought Dillon or Devil had either proposed to take from them a cow, a
hog, or a sheep. For that Chad could not blame them. And the Major was
going to fight, as he believed, for his liberty, his State, his
country, his property, his fireside. So in the eyes of both, Chad must
be the snake who had warmed his frozen body on their hearthstones and
bitten the kindly hands that had warmed him back to life. What would
Melissa say? Mentally he shrank from the fire of her eyes and the scorn
of her tongue when she should know. And Margaret--the thought of her
brought always a voiceless groan. To her, he had let his doubts be
known, and her white silence closed his own lips then and there. The
simple fact that he had doubts was an entering wedge of coldness
between them that Chad saw must force them apart for he knew that the
truth must come soon, and what would be the bitter cost of that truth.
She could never see him as she saw Harry. Harry was a beloved and
erring brother. Hatred of slavery had been cunningly planted in his
heart by her father's own brother, upon whose head the blame for
Harry's sin was set. The boy had been taunted until his own father's
scorn had stirred his proud independence into stubborn resistance and
intensified his resolution to do what he pleased and what he thought
was right. But Chad--she would never understand him. She would never
understand his love for the Government that had once abandoned her
people to savages and forced her State and his to seek aid from a
foreign land. In her eyes, too, he would be rending the hearts that had
been tenderest to him in all the world: and that was all. Of what fate
she would deal out to him he dared not think. If he lifted his hand
against the South, he must strike at the heart of all he loved best, to
which he owed most. If against the Union, at the heart of all that was
best in himself. In him