CHAPTER III

MAD WHATELY


Mr. Baron was one of the few of the landed gentry in the region who
was not known by a military title, and he rather prided himself on
the fact. "I'm a man of peace," he was accustomed to say, and his
neighbors often remarked, "Yes, Baron is peaceable if he has his own
way in everything, but there's no young blood in the county more
ready for a fray than he for a lawsuit." "Law and order" was Mr.
Baron's motto, but by these terms he meant the perpetuity of the
conditions under which he and his ancestors had thus far lived. To
distrust these conditions was the crime of crimes. In his
estimation, therefore, a Northern soldier was a monster surpassed
only by the out-and-out abolitionist. While it had so happened that,
even as a young man, his tastes had been legal rather than military,
he regarded the war of secession as more sacred than any conflict of
the past, and was willing to make great sacrifices for its
maintenance. He had invested all his funds as well as those of his
niece in Confederate bonds, and he had annually contributed a large
portion of the product of his lands to the support of the army.
Living remote from the scenes of actual strife, he had been able to
maintain his illusions and hopes to a far greater extent than many
others of like mind with himself; but as the war drew toward its
close, even the few newspapers he read were compelled to justify
their name in some degree by giving very unpalatable information. As
none are so blind as those who will not see, the old man had testily