It was thus that I, dulled, bereft; I, having lived, now dead; I, late
free, now bound again, turned away sullenly, and began my journey back
to the life I had known before I met her.
As I passed East by the Denver stage, I met hurrying throngs always
coming westward, a wavelike migration of population now even denser than
it had been the preceding spring. It was as Colonel Meriwether said, the
wagons almost touched from the Platte to the Rockies. They came on, a
vast, continuous stream of hope, confidence and youth. I, who stemmed
that current, alone was unlike it in all ways.
One thing only quickened my laggard heart, and that was the all
prevalent talk of war. The debates of Lincoln and Douglas, the
consequences of Lincoln's possible election, the growing dissensions in
the Army over Buchanan's practically overt acts of war--these made the
sole topics of conversation. I heard my own section, my own State,
criticised bitterly, and all Southerners called traitors to that flag I
had seen flying over the frontiers of the West. At times, I say, these
things caused my blood to stir once more, though perhaps it was not all
through patriotism.
At last, after weeks of travel across a disturbed country, I finally
reached the angry hive of political dissension at Washington.
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