"I was grown then, and Aleck was six or seven years older. We were on
the border-line, and one morning the Union soldiers opened fire, and all
that was left of the house, barns, outbuildings, and negro quarters was
a heap of ashes.
"That sent me South, of course, feeling pretty ugly and bitter, and I
don't know that I've gotten over it since. My father was too old to go,
and he and my mother moved into the village and lived in two rooms over
my father's office. The negroes, of course, had to shift for themselves,
and hard shifting it was--the women and children herding in the towns
and the men working as teamsters and doing what they could.
"The night before I left home Aleck crawled out to see me. I was hidden
in a hayrick in the lower pasture. He begged me to let him go with me,
but I knew father would want him, and he finally gave in and promised
to stay with him, and I left. But no one was his own master in those
days, and in a few months they had drafted Aleck and carried him off.
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