Wanted: An Heir

HAVE you ever observed, after a storm on the sea-coast, what a dismal array of black and water-worn fragments are left on the beach, brought − the waves alone know − whence? Nothing tells of their first estate. You would never know that they were once gay bits of painted ships, or of other shipwrecked treasures which the storm had stolen from the capacious pocket of the ocean.

I have often thought that the war stranded just such a forlorn collection of human drift, and I have in my memory more than one nondescript who came ashore on our own retired coast.

I smile, even now, to remember the sort of mild despotism which was established over their patients by the women who occupied themselves in the care of the war’s wounded and sick. They were perhaps sovereign simply through the courteous consent of these invalided warriors ; but, by whatever tenure they held their office, it yielded them, for a brief time, the dear opportunity of exercising those yet untried administrative powers in which woman unquestionably delights and for which she so publicly pines.

Here was a creature who had carried a dangerous musket and had even stood and faced a volley, without dodging, lying quite helpless, surrendered unconditionally to feminine authority ! What profound ignorance these heroic children exhibited on subjects which any woman’s instinct could master ! They had, for instance, so little money and so much less idea of its proper use : what could be of more value than a little feminine advice on the point? I, for one, was half melancholy when our last sick man recovered, or rebelled and went home to the legally appointed domestic authorities, to be scolded and coddled. I felt like Napoleon on St. Helena, and for a time almost regretted that there was no further supply of semi-detached soldiers to manage.

It is true that there remained at the close of the war, and still exists, a queer precipitate of disabled men, who either would not or could not recover, and who preferred a peripatetic career to a less exciting but more respectable existence in a National Asylum. They made starring tours through the provinces, which proved highly remunerative ; for although we all know that it seems at least a century ago that these heroes fought and bled, they still find, here and there, a remote shrine where a little patriotic fire smoulders, not yet dead in its white ashes. Of a drama whose chief actor belonged to this wandering race, and whose several acts were performed within my own observation, I propose to sketch the plot.

How Pat Diamond ever happened to be enlisted is a mystery which must forever remain unsolved. Drafted he must of necessity have been ; yet as it was his wont to remain very brief periods in one habitation, the problem still continues obscure. He was probably caught on the wing − if even poetic license dare suggest in such terms thy slow and meditative motion, O Patrick! − by some nimble enrolling officer.

After the summer of 1865 care for the bodies of our disabled protégés resolved itself into solicitude for their pecuniary welfare, and fostering attention to their interests in the account between themselves and their employer, Uncle Sam. Consequently, even before shutters were put up over the windows of the Soldiers’ Homes and dreary invitations to purchasers adorned their doors, the Sanitary Commission offices were some of them turned into improvised claims-agencies, and the world of discharged soldiers, who could muster faith in services for which they paid nothing, were invited to appear and register their claims upon the government.

They came : a few − alas their number was small ! − because they really believed it the best way to secure their dues ; others because having already settled the whole matter satisfactorily with another agent, it could do no harm to repeat the process ; others, again, who preferred to save the customary fees in any legitimate manner.

Pat Diamond applied at an early period in the history of our own agency to engage its services in securing his pension. He was a person who at once appealed to the sympathy of every respectable breast. Let me make a pen-and-ink sketch of him, as he first appeared to us. A thin, meagre man of unknown age, with drooping head and uncertain gait, red, uncombed hair, and lustreless eyes which sought yours with so plaintive and humble a look, that your last cent was instantly magnetized from the pocket’s depths profound. Then was that gaze enforced by the tattered blue army coat which hung in festoons from his arms, and waved banners of distress from every quarter; and overboard went your last remaining scruple.

Occasionally our feminine corps had been taken in − I grieve to write it − by men as deficient in worth as in worldly goods, but on this occasion we said unanimously : “ Pat is certainly fearfully dirty, ragged, and forlorn. We must clothe and feed him.”

The inner man of our client was speedily refreshed, but without, it must be owned, producing visible improvement in its external representative. We also bought him a warm greatcoat and a pair of stout shoes, and, as his individual responsibility in his claim was fully discharged, we dismissed him to his home, pro tem., in a country village some thirty miles distant, where he proposed to await action upon his case.

“ When we require further proof we will send for you,” we said, “ and, of course, we will write you as soon as your pension is granted.”

Away he went, but only a short time elapsed before one morning found him again standing near the door of our small office, silent, ragged, melancholy.

“ Well, Pat, what do you want now ?” with slight surprise.

“ Nothing, ma’am. Only to get my money.”

“ Already ! Why, man, your claim is just sent on. Don’t you know, we told you it might take a long time to settle it ? There are thousands of other men who want pensions, and you ’ll have to take your turn.”

“Very well, ma’am,” turning away and shuffling through the door.

“ Pat! ” After a glance at the streaming tatters : “ Have you had anything to eat to-day ? ”

“ Nothing, ma’am.”

“Where are you going to sleep tonight ?”

“ I don’t know, ma’am.”

“ What have you done with your new coat ? ”

“ Here it is, ma’am.” And drawing aside the blue rags, he displayed his recently acquired garment concealed carefully beneath.

We still had an expansive, everready Soldiers’ Home, and Pat was soon ambling thitherward, armed with an order for food, lodging, and a railroad pass to his home, for use on the following day.

The superintendent reported the conduct of Patrick Diamond, while he remained in the Home, as quite unexceptionable, save in one point, to which he directed our attention. Patrick refused to remove his overcoat before retiring, and, displaying unexpected firmness on the point, proceeded to get into the neat white cot assigned to him in full military array. There

Should the superintendent enforce the rules of the establishment and consider such eccentricity as a breach of good order on future occasions ?

We, his superior officers, decided that this defender of his country should be permitted to enjoy his slumbers in the manner most congenial to his feelings. Besides, how extremely improbable was it that we should again be called upon to extend hospitality to Pat Diamond ! Vain hope ! Delusive dream !

The nature of Pat’s disability was of the vaguest description, and shone with an ignis fatuus gleam upon our comprehensions. It was as difficult to define as the boundaries of the new States to one whose geographical principles were acquired twenty years ago. To put your legal finger upon one disability was to discover another, and so general was the collapse that the difficulty in his case seemed almost to consist in the question whether anything mortal to be pensioned remained. I very much fear his military record was inglorious, for even the most easy-conscienced of his regimental officers declined to testify that the service was responsible for his present dilapidated condition, and even failed to remember him at all.

Meanwhile time rolled on. One officer after another was solicited to testify that Patrick Diamond, age forty years, hair red, eyes blue, height five feet six, native of Ireland, did Incur his disability in the service of the United States and in the line of duty. Again and again did their refusals thus to perjure themselves arrive by return mail. Not one of them either could or would remember said Patrick Diamond, or believe him to have been a member of any given regiment.

Our hearts bled for Pat, so humble, so needy, so upright, and so unjustly ignored ! Indeed, as to the fact of his enlistment there was no doubt, nor was there any doubt that he was discharged from the service for disability. Yet the case looked dark, and the Pension Office, which through many printed forms had requested explanation of various discrepancies, remained unsatisfied.

Is it asked where, meanwhile, was the client? I answer, in constant progression from one extreme of his orbit to the other. Did Fortune and a passing train favor him, we saw him at frequent intervals ; did conductors frown, he walked the whole weary distance and appeared, with much of the thirty miles’ mud and clay upon his garments and the old refrain on his lips, “ Can I get my money?”

It I asserted that his agents were entirely free from spasms of momentary impatience, under these repeated aggravations, I should not be a reliable historian, which is my laudable aim. I can say, however, that the feeling was most evanescent, and that a glance at the pitiful, pleading face and dismal figure alone was necessary to translate the anger into unclouded compassion. Time would fail me were I to recount the breakfasts, the dinners, the suppers that slipped down that melancholy being’s throat at our expense. Nor could I undertake to record the free excursions in which he indulged through the long-suffering of the railroad company. But to all things there is a limit. One fatal day we received the following message from the conductor of a train which Diamond habitually patronized: “Never send me that man again.”

Thereafter Pat walked sixty miles instead of thirty, to inquire weekly into the progress of his claim.

That the case was finally adjusted was, I persist in thinking, due to a little exercise of mother-wit. We had finally discovered a former officer of Pat’s own company, whose military glory had long lain concealed under the disguise of a civil occupation. Pat, happening singularly enough to be in town at the time, was sent, personaly, to recall the facts of the case to his former commander, and presto! the thing was done. Not long afterwards Patrick Diamond was duly sworn to be a victim of the late war, over the signature of-, late Captain or Lieutenant-V. I. The name of Diamond had sunk into oblivion, but its owner’s face preserved the history.

I remember how eagerly we anticipated Pat’s face of joy when the favorable decision upon his case should be made known to him. We imagined how great would be the pleasure of giving him the crisp new certificate, and prayed that we might none of us be absent when the day of his triumph arrived. We secretly resolved to have a finger in the pie, as regarded the spending of that money.

The intelligent reader may perhaps divine what we actually experienced. Pat showed no emotion whatever, no gladness, no relief, no surprise, only a sort of feverish eagerness, which flushed his sunken cheeks and sent an additional tremor through his thin hands. As he sat at the desk, endeavoring with much labor of lips and fingers to fashion the hieroglyphics, which represented Patrick to himself, he looked more shrivelled and hopeless than ever before. At a sudden noise behind him he started violently, and with a quick, convulsive movement drew his tattered coat hastily together and looked around him with wild eyes. At that significant gesture a revelation was made to one, at least, of his audience, which subsequent events fully justified.

One more effort should be made in the interests of civilization.

“ Pat, you have two or three hundred dollars now. You must promise to go at once and buy yourself a suit of new clothes.”

“ I can’t, ma’am, I can’t; I owe it all to a man in my place.”

“ You are quite right to wish to pay your honest debts,” we said with mild dignity, “but the most hard-hearted creditor could not object to your having a little something to wear.”

“ I can’t. O, I can’t! I owe it.”

“ But you are not properly protected from the weather. Look at your sleeve ! ” pointing to the coat which could no longer even be called threadbare, that stage of genteel poverty having passed into actual absence of thread in many places.

It was all useless. His distress at being thus urged was evident, and it must be confessed there were no signs of yielding in the plaintive meekness of his refusal. We said no more ; and pocketing his precious papers, he collected his rags, gave a duck of the head by way of farewell, and went away.

There was a flutter of familiar blue through the door, a little hacking cough on the stairs, and Pat Diamond we never saw again.

All this was four years ago. Our clients have turned into respectable, but less interesting civilians, and all the dear old army blue has been cut down and has disappeared in little boy’s trousers and jackets. The heroes of Pittsburg Landing and Stone River, of Mission Ridge and Nashville, are orderly citizens and pine not for another war. I should be glad to know if Fortune has smiled upon many an honest fellow who looked so well in military dress and so commonplace when he came, in checked pantaloons and striped necktie, to bid us and the war a joyful farewell. I have, it is true, some friends who will not consider this cruel war over; but I can't lift my hat to the uniform in conjunction with a hand-organ, and I remonstrate, while I drop my pennies into the plate.

Occasional stray scraps of information about old acquaintances I glean in the letters from country towns which fill up our city newspapers so conveniently, in times of advertising dearth. Here I have perhaps the melancholy pleasure of reading that a certain onearmed soldier has been thrown from a carriage and seriously injured, or that another ex-warrior has been nominated for justice of the peace. It was only a short time since that, mv eye being attracted by a familiar name, I accidentally learned the conclusion of Pat Diamond’s strange history.

Let me give the exact words of our interesting correspondent from - County :−

“On the 9th of March, about sundown, a ragged, repulsive, filthy creature, carrying a bundle of rags and leaning wearily upon a rude staff, applied at the house of Eli Hutsen, about a mile east of Edinburg, for food and lodging for the night. Mr. Hutsen kindly let him in, gave him a supper, and would have given him a bed, but be declined, preferring the floor. He tossed about during the night, and only became quiet towards morning. At six o’clock Mr. Hutsen arose and proceeded to call up his peculiar guest. Once, twice, and even thrice he called, and still the moaning sleeper slumbered on. At last, however, he was awakened and proceeded to arise. After getting upon his feet he fell to the floor, gasped, and died. A coroner’s jury was summoned, and a post mortem examination showed that the cause of the death was disease of the heart. Proceeding to an examination of the clothing of the deceased, to the surprise and wonder of all, concealed in an inner garment, sewed up in three different parcels, was found money, − fifty-dollar notes, twenty dollar notes, ten-dollar notes, and the smaller denominations, the whole amount found thus secreted being one thousand dollars and eightyone cents. From papers on the deceased it was found that he was a native of Ireland, his name Patrick Diamond, his age forty-five years, his stature five feet six inches. He was a soldier in the Union Army, having enlisted in the-V. I., from which he was honorably discharged, on account of a tubercular affection of the lungs. Further than this, there was no clew to the personal history or social relations of the man. A respectable suit of clothes was procured, a burialcase obtained, and then this ‘poor pauper whom nobody owned ’ was interred in a Christian manner. Reserving from the amount of money the sum of one hundred and fifty dollars to pay burial expenses, Justice Sanford deposited the remainder in the First National Bank, to await future development and legal claimants, if such there be.”

I put the paper down, and sighed, yet half smiled as I thought of this queer wandering creature, true to his instincts to the last, and of his sad and pitiful death. Need I say that I also exclaimed, “We were right”?

Here was the secret and the end of all the starving, the pinching want, the cold, the foot-sore wanderings, the homeless life, year after year !

A coroner’s inquest, a grave in an obscure country burial-place, and Patrick Diamond’s name on a tombstone ! It is strange and incongruous, and I cannot drive from my mind the image of that dismal figure, plodding down one long country road after another, this bitter winter, preserved only through the charity of kindly souls from death by cold and hunger, and yet hugging to his breast the charm which could give him warmth, comfort, luxury.

And now, who is to claim this dearly bought gold ? For whom has Pat Diamond saved and died ? Again I write, “Wanted: an Heir.”

E. F. Terry.