"It's all gone," Kaperton said dully.
He was as limp as an empty doll, Elim thought contemptuously. He, Elim,
felt like hickory, like iron; his mind was clear, vindicative. He rose,
sweeping back the hair from his high austere brow. Kaperton had slid
forward in his chair with hanging open hands and mouth.
The drumming in Elim's ears grew louder, a hum of voices was added to
it, and it grew nearer, actual. A crowd of men was entering the
boarding house, carrying about them a pressure of excited exclamations
and a more subtle disturbance. Elim Meikeljohn left Kaperton and went
out into the hall. An ascending man met him.
"War!" he cried. "The damned rebels have assaulted and taken Sumter!
Lincoln has called for fifty thousand volunteers!" He hurried past and
left Elim grasping the handrail of the stair.
War! The word carried an overwhelming significance to his mind
dominated by the intangible drumming, to his newly released freedom.
War upon oppression, upon the criminal slaveholders of the South! He
descended the stairs, pausing above the small agitated throng in the
hall.
A passionate elation swept over him. He held his long arms upward and
out.
"How many of the fifty thousand are here?" he asked. His ringing voice
was answered in an assent that rolled in a solid volume of sound up the
stairs. Elim Meikeljohn's soul leaped in the supreme kinship that linked
him, man to man, with all.
V
It was again April, extremely early in the morning and month, and
thickly cold, when Brevet-Major Elim Meikeljohn, burning with the fever
of a re-opened old saber wound, strayed away from his command in the
direction of Richmond.
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