Chapter I

There was but one letter for Jeff Sharp to-day; and the village postmaster himself put it in his hand. It had not been this way always. Only recently it was that white-haired Pompey, the oldest and most respected of Jeff’s colored boys, always served up the daily mail along with his master’s breakfast. Jeff used to go over his letters as he sipped the black drip-coffee that was now fashionable in the South—sitting alone at the head of his massive table, the friendly sun pouring through the wide, clear windows. Jeff had never believed that the Emancipation Proclamation could come between him and Pompey’s adoring service; but this had been an idle fancy like many other things. Pompey had been lost sight of in those unforgettable days following his master’s return from war; and being now a freeman, he no longer ran the white man’s errands to the postoffice. The table of old mahogany had been chopped up, so Jeff had heard, for the fuel of an invader’s campfire. The sun still beamed through the windows of the dining room, but Jeff was not there to feel it. The old Sharp mansion had gone with the rest. A man who had once been Jeff’s foreman owned it now.

Letters had come by the dozen there, not one by one. There were dainty perfumed notes from the belles of Richmond and Augusta, New Orleans and Memphis; there were invitations quaintly expressed; there were friendly messages from old schoolmates. Had the black disaster of the war stifled the sociability that was the Southern people’s dearest trait—or had his friends simply forgotten him, Jeff Sharp of Bull Run and Shiloh, Lookout Mountain and Gettysburg. People did not have the heart to write, these bitter days, he thought. Besides, many of his friends were missing or dead, the price of a lost cause.

Such thoughts had come rather frequently of late. The two years since Lee, tremendous even in defeat, had shaken hands with him in farewell had not seemed to heal the grievous wounds of bitterness and sorrow. He was called from his reflections now more by the postmaster’s look of resentment rather than by any interest in the white envelope in his hand.

The postmaster was a veteran too, as was practically every white man under fifty in the town, and although the carpetbaggers had not yet come to take over his humble office, he also had known better days. Now he stood watching Jeff, a curious, strained, and somewhat sullen expression on his youthful face. His curiosity was not, however, the childish kind that is the country postmaster’s special prerogative. He looked rather grim, Jeff thought—a look he had seen so many times in men’s faces these past two years. He was evidently waiting for Jeff to read the return card on the top of the envelope.

Jeff glanced at it, and his tall figure stiffened ever so slightly as he read the printed words:

From
WILLIAM H. SEWARD,
Secretary of State,
Washington, D. C.

Jeff’s full lip curled, his bold nostrils expanded, and his eye roved to the wastebasket. He could not, however, throw the great statesman’s letter away. Really, he had no personal animosity toward his mother’s old friend—her sweetheart, in fact, in happier days before the great rebellion. Seward’s genius had gone far toward crushing the Confederacy, but such had been his idea of duty. Jeff had admired him once and still conceded him immeasurable superiority over the rabble (so Jeff was fond of speaking of the Yankees) that he helped to govern. It was the thing he stood for that Jeff hated—the North, the Union, the Stars and Stripes. Secretary of State indeed! Jeff’s heart seemed to swell with resentment.

“If I were you I wouldn’t do him the honor of reading it,” he heard the postmaster say. “He was next to Lincoln! I put him in the same class with Sherman.”

Jeff looked into the man’s indignant eyes—and his own eyes held visions of men fighting and dying—but he smiled quietly and started to open the letter. “He was an old friend of the family, Roger,” he explained. “He is our enemy, but he was rather an honorable enemy, as Yankees go. I believe he did what he thought was right—according to his lights. I always considered him a gentleman.”

Jeff was not aware that he pronounced the last word with a singular inflection. It was evident that he set great store by the term; that it had tremendous meaning to him. Of course his homeland had always been a stronghold of aristocracy, but now, when so much was gone and so little was left to cling to, pride of birth had become very close indeed to a religion to such men as he. His entire manner showed that this was the key-word of his cult. He stood erect, his curly brown hair brushed back from his temples, his shoulders straight, his black eyes flashing.

“There is no such thing—as a _Yankee_ gentleman,” Roger persisted. “You’ve always said that.”

“I have always said that the North was a nation of peasants—of backwoodsmen and of slovenly, mule-driving women—and that our war was a war between gentlemen and trash. Don’t believe for a minute, Roger, that I take any stock in this stuff that some of the older men are trying to tell us—that there was fault on both sides, that we should forgive and forget, and that it will only be a matter of a few years until real friendly relations are resumed between the North and the South. I am a Rebel now, and I’ll be a Rebel when I die, and the Union is as hateful to me as when, in defeat, we took down the Stars and Bars from the Courthouse. Just the same, I have to be fair to Seward. My mother always told me that he was a man of parts, and I have had many favors from him in the past. He was an abolitionist because he didn’t know any better. He was an enemy, and he’s an enemy still, but just the same I can’t throw away his letter.”

“It’s your letter,” Roger said doggedly. “Go ahead and read it.”

So Jeff read it; and he read as follows:

July 25, 1866.
MY DEAR LITTLE JEFF:—

I suppose it is absurd to call you Little Jeff any more, when
you are long as a giraffe. Apart from those long legs you have
acquired a stature of achievement that withering old age can
never cheat you out of. It was hard for me to believe that
gallant Major Sharp of whom our boys told me so much was the
little boy with curls and an insatiable appetite for New York
apples! It makes me feel a veritable Methuselah myself.

Come down and see me, Jeff, at once. I have a fine opening for a
young fellow like you. Don’t linger, but start to-day. I want to
revive our old friendship now that the clouds are lifting; not
that mine for you has ever flagged. But I know young blood, the
blood of a twenty-five-year-old gentleman from North Carolina;
and I am anxious to prove to you that these black years of war
have not changed me from the man you used to call

UNCLE WILL.
Office of the Secretary
of State,
Washington, D. C.

Jeff Sharp experienced a mixture of emotions as he finished the letter. Try hard as he might to repel it, a warm glow of an old friendship overswept him; and a spark was struck on the flint of his heart. For the moment it was hard to remember that Seward had been the arch enemy of the Confederacy, the very head of the State he hated. He kept remembering a slight, soft-voiced old friend who brought him New York pippins—a gallant gentleman whose one-time courtship of his mother had always been considered an honor to the family. Of course he would not accept the invitation, much less an appointment. Jeff knew perfectly well the kind of openings Seward had for young men: official jobs in the pay of Uncle Sam. Indeed, what did Seward mean by daring to offer such a post to him, Jeff Sharp? Did he for a moment dream that the conquered Rebel would turn about, two years after Lee’s surrender, and serve in any capacity the enemy government? He must think that Jeff was humbled indeed, or he would not ask the conquered soldier so to swallow his pride as to accept a daily wage from the Union.

Yet presently he was brought face to face with an ugly fact which for months past he had been trying to disregard: the swift ebb of his own fortunes. The war had ruined Jefferson Sharp. The estate that otherwise would have sustained him according to the Sharp tradition had been spent and lost during the black years; the half million in confederate currency that remained would not buy a loaf of bread. He knew perfectly and exactly how many American dollars he had left. These would last only a few more days; then he must seek some means of livelihood.

He was not trained in any money-making profession. The profession of being a gentleman had seemed sufficient. He was now struck with the bitter fact that some of his own ex-slaves were better equipped to solve the problem of living than himself simply because they had learned trades. It might be that Seward knew of some business or professional opening, rather than a government position, in which Jeff might have a chance for life and respectability. It might be that this letter had reached him in the precise nick of time.

“It is an offer of a position,” Jeff explained to Roger, the postmaster. “He doesn’t say just what.”

The other veteran stiffened. “He certainly is presumptuous in offering such a thing. I hope you are sufficiently frank in your letter of refusal?”

“How do you know I’m going to write any letter of refusal?” The pleasant way in which Jeff’s full lip drew into his brown cheek was faintly suggestive of a smile.

“Because you are a rebel, like all of us. Because it is a government position—”

Jeff’s grin escaped him completely now and made a big crescent in his handsome, brunette face. “The beam in your own eye first, brother!” he observed. “Speaking of government positions—isn’t this a U. S. postoffice?”

Rightly thinking that this would hold Roger for a while, Jeff turned homeward. He went to pack his bags.