the pure spirit that gave birth to the nation
was fighting for life. Ah, God! what should he do--what should he do?

CHAPTER 20.

OFF TO THE WAR

Throughout that summer Chad fought his fight, daily swaying this way
and that--fought it in secret until the phantom of neutrality faded and
gave place to the grim spectre of war--until with each hand Kentucky
drew a sword and made ready to plunge both into her own stout heart.
When Sumter fell, she shook her head resolutely to both North and
South. Crittenden, in the name of Union lovers and the dead Clay,
pleaded with the State to take no part in the fratricidal crime. From
the mothers, wives, sisters and daughters of thirty-one counties came
piteously the same appeal. Neutrality, to be held inviolate, was the
answer to the cry from both the North and the South; but armed
neutrality, said Kentucky. The State had not the moral right to secede;
the Nation, no constitutional right to coerce: if both the North and
the South left their paths of duty and fought--let both keep their
battles from her soil. Straightway State Guards went into camp and Home
Guards were held in reserve, but there was not a fool in the
Commonwealth who did not know that, in sympathy, the State Guards were
already for the Confederacy and the Home Guards for the Union cause.
This was in May.

In June, Federals were enlisting across the Ohio; Confederates, just
over the border of Dixie which begins in Tennessee. Within a month
Stonewall Jackson sat on his horse, after Bull Run, watching the routed
Yankees, praying for fresh men that he might go on and take the
Capitol, and, from the Federal dream of a sixty-days' riot, the North
woke with a gasp. A week or two later, Camp Dick Robinson squatted down
on the edge of the Bluegrass, the first violation of the State's
neutrality, and beckoned with both hands for Yankee recruits. Soon an
order went round to disarm the State Guards, and on that very day the
State Guards made ready for Dixie. On that day the crisis came at the
Deans', and on that day Chad Buford made up his mind. When the Major
and Miss Lucy went to bed that night, he slipped out of the house and
walked through the yard and across the pike, following the little creek
half unconsciously toward the Deans', until he could see the light in
Margaret's window, and there he climbed the worm fence and sat leaning
his head against one of the forked stakes with his hat in his lap. He
would probably