Read Online From Sea to Shining Sea by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom - Free Book Online

locked in a dungeon of St. Andrews Castle back in Scotland two hundred years ago, and then burned at the stake, for being so bold as to believe in God in his own way. All the Rogerses took pride in that ancestor, and seemed to live as if they felt him looking over their shoulders. John Clark appreciated that in their family—after all, he had some of that Rogers blood in him, too—and he was profoundly content in having got Ann Rogers, the most beautiful Rogers daughter, as his bride those long years ago. Not one day,in almost a quarter of a century since, had he ever regretted that choice. Many of the marriages among the gentry that he knew had been marriages for advantage, for fortunes or connections or breeding lines, and if a husband and wife came to loving each other truly, so much the better. But John Clark had adored Ann Rogers from the moment he had seen that fresh, tall, pink-and-rose thirteen-year-old squinting at him in the summer sun twenty-five years ago, and her good character had only deepened and broadened his adoration for her over the years, till now he could not even imagine being without her. “If something took ye away untimely,” he had told her once when she was having trouble with a childbirth, “I shouldn’t even want to live on.” And he had meant that.
    It had been true then and it was even more true now. He had worked like a titan all his life, and every effort he had made, from topping tobacco plants to shaping horseshoes on a forge, had been for the betterment of their life. He knew too that every effort she had made, from the labor of weed-hoeing to the labor of childbearing, had been for that same purpose. And raising their children to feel and understand all God’s intents was also for the betterment of their life together, because it would not be a good thing in life to be ashamed of offspring.
    And so now John Clark was saying, for the benefit of these offspring working near him: “Aye. The wasting o’ lives is man’s worst sin.
War!
” he snorted. “D’ye know how many precious lives are wasted in that abominable business? If one slayin’ is a murder, what’s a thousand a day? Lives wasted because men are too vainglorious to sit face to face and talk things out! My boys, I remember a day a thousand died! Back in ’55, ’twas, when that war was on against the French and Indians. Some militia rode in one day, some bandaged, all thirsty and sooty, they rode up to our house in Albemarle, goin’ home from a lost battle. They told us how the Frenchmen and savages had ambushed General Braddock’s whole army in the woods near Fort Pitt, and killed a thousand of ’em. A
thousand
, boys! One thousand Christian Englishmen, all slain in one day! Think on
that
for the wastin’ of life! I swear that was the worst day I’ve ever had in all my days, when I heard that news. I got sicker than anyone ever got a-slaughterin’ a pig, I’ll tell ye so.” His lips were tight, his eyes darkening with the memory. Then he went on:
    “Now, hear me. Sometimes, like when Georgie comes home, and everybody wants t’ know, ‘have ye kilt any savages yet’ “—he glanced up from his meat-trimming at Edmund, and Edmund’s eyes dropped—“well, it doesn’t please me to hear a question likethat, though I know that’s what everybody wants to hear of. And I know, too, someday it might be George or an Indian, who’s ever quickest, and let us pray then that it’s George who’s quickest. But I’d rather hear him say what he said, that he’s befriended an Indian, than that he’s killed one. For an Indian’s a far higher creature in Creation than is a hog like this, or even a calf, or a pet dog. Indians pray, did y’ know that?” He looked at them one by one, then bent over his knife and went on. “Indians pray. George told me about that Logan’s religion, told me after you all were a-bed. Said for all he knew, that savage’s god was the same one as ours, but just by a different name.