"I'm leaving in an hour. Don't you think it's foolish for two brothers who have been what you and I have been to each other to part like this? We may not see one another again." John hesitated and then slowly slipped his arm around the younger man, holding him in silence. When his voice was steady he said: "Forgive me, Boy. I was blind with anger. It meant so much to me. But we'll face it. We'll have to fight it out--as God gives us wisdom to see the right----" Ned's hand found his, and clasped it firmly: "As God gives us to see the right, John--Good-bye." "Good-bye, Boy,--it's hard to say it!" They clung to each other for a moment and slowly drew apart as the shadows of the soft spring night deepened. CHAPTER VIII THE TRIAL BY FIRE The troops transformed Washington from a lazy Southern town of sixty thousand inhabitants into an armed fortress of the frontier, swarming with a quarter of a million excited men and women. Soldiers thronged the streets and sidewalks and sprawled over every inch of greensward, their uniforms of every cut and color on which the sun of heaven had shone during the past two hundred years of history. When the tumult and the shouts of departing regiments had died away from the home towns in the North and the flags that were flying from every house had begun to fade under the hot rays of the advancing summer, the patriotic orators and editors began to demand of their President why his grand army of seventy-five thousand lingered at the Capital. When he mildly suggested the necessity of drilling, equipping and properly arming them he was laughed at by the wise, and scoffed at as a coward by the brave. Mutterings of discontent grew deeper and more threatening. They demanded a short, sharp, decisive campaign. Let the army wheel into line, march straight into Richmond, take Jefferson Davis a prisoner, hang him and a few leaders of the "rebellion," and the trouble would be over. This demand became at length the maddened cry of a mob: "On to Richmond!" Every demagogue howled it. Every newspaper repeated it. As city after city, and State after State took up the cry, the pressure on the man at the helm of Government became resistless. It was a political necessity to fight a battle and fight at once or lose control of the people he had been called to lead. The Abolitionists only sneered at this cry. They demanded an answer to a single insistent question: "What are you going to fight about?" A battle which does not settle the question of Slavery they declared to be a waste of blood and treasure. If the slave was not the issue, why fight? The South would return to the Union which they had always ruled if let alone. Why fight them for nothing? Gilbert Winter, their spokesman at Washington, again confronted the President with his uncompromising demand: "An immediate proclamation of emancipation!" And the President with quiet dignity refused to consider it. "Why?" again thundered the Senator.