Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/433

"Where he soldered leaky milk pans and tinkered clocks."

And that shows how two brothers, who have been boys together, men together, and soldiers together, may drift apart. For years Uncle Tommy and Uncle Luther had not met, except at gatherings of old soldiers, and these were not pleasant meetings. For the two little towns, albeit they lay out on the wide Minnesota prairie, with only an imaginary line between them, could not agree. It was the kind of dissension that grows rank and strong in little communities where there are few outside interests to occupy the intervals of attention. And the old soldiers took it up, and fought it out as valiantly as they had marched on Vicksburg. They might have had a Grand Army post, with reminiscent camp-fires, and they might have had Fourth of July celebrations and Memorial Day parades; but as certainly as Uncle Tommy led the hosts of West Alden in one direction, Amery and Captain Enoch Bradley could be depended upon to march in exactly the opposite direction.

As for Uncle Luther, he always followed Uncle Tommy's procession, wherever it might lead. Again and again the old soldiers of the two towns met in the interests of harmony. Uncle Tommy would come to preside, and Uncle Luther would second the motions, and then they all would slump off into the quagmire of dissension. At such times the fires of a stirring past would blaze up in Uncle Luther's faded eyes, his stooped shoulders would stiffen back, a faint flush would steal into his cheeks, and he would nod his old gray head as if in time to martial music that none but he could hear. Sometimes the tears came up to his eyes, and the boy who was fortunate enough to hear him talk thrilled with the quick pride of strife, and longed to shoulder a carbine and march away to the music of fife and drum.

For two years the towns had held Memorial Day services, but they had been mournfully dispirited. Uncle Tommy, by sheer force of character, had been marshal of the day, and Uncle Luther and a few stragglers from Amery had marched with the parade; but Captain Enoch and his supporters stood by with gloomy forbearance, and offered no word of encouragement. There was really little need of Memorial Day services, except in the abstract. The cemetery, where the discord of the two towns was buried, lay on a bare prairie knoll, set around with precise rows of spindling cottonwoods that languished half the summer with thirst and whipping winds and dust—and it contained no soldiers' graves. But Uncle Tommy's parades marched up the road to the cemetery gate and back again, and Uncle Luther felt that the country's dead, wherever they might lie, had been honored.

On the third year the old soldiers met again, thoroughly determined to be harmonious. In ten minutes' time Uncle Tommy was thumping on the pine table with his cane, and several of the other old soldiers were clinging to Captain Enoch's coat-tails, while the two men glared and threatened. And then Captain Enoch executed a well-planned flank movement, routed Uncle Tommy, and ran up the Amery colors. A few minutes later his faction, acting with the right of might, had decided upon all the important features of the parade. And to further rout Uncle Tommy and his retainers, they appointed Uncle Luther to the honored position of marshal of the day.

At first Uncle Luther was dumb with astonishment. He had as good right to be marshal as Uncle Tommy. They had be-