“Nonsense, Berry!” said Mr. Arnold sharply. “You could run away from anyone. And if you blew your whistle, even if you were too far away for me to hear and come to your assistance, it would make any dangerous person sure that help was close at hand, and would probably frighten him away.”
Berry’s father did not like the idea of the little girl going about in fear. He knew it would destroy all her pleasure in the free woodland life which they had all taken so much happiness in. The whistle of which he spoke had been a gift to Berry from her brother Francis. It was a silver whistle, attached to a long silver chain that Berry always wore about her neck, with the whistle tucked into the pocket of her blouse. During the first year in the cabin Mr. Arnold had not been sufficiently strong to walk far, and it was Francis who had chopped the wood for the cabin fires, journeyed to Corinth for necessary provisions, and fished for bass and pickerel along the river; and Berry had often been his companion. He had given her the whistle so if she lost sight of him in the woodland trails she could instantly call him; and Berry valued it more than anything else and never left the cabin without it.
Nothing more was said that day in regard to the stranger, but in the afternoon Mr. Arnold started off into the forest, telling Berry that he thought she would better stay and keep her mother company. He followed the trail to the Braggs’ cabin, and made his way for some distance up the stream where Berry had encountered the stranger; but he found nothing to cause alarm, and was tempted to believe that, after all, the man might have been only a woodsman journeying across country, who had thought it an amusing game to frighten the small boy for whom he had mistaken Berry.
As he walked along the ridge and down the slope to his cabin Mr. Arnold thought to himself that, as his wife had said that noon, however the conflict went between the armies of the North and the South, there was small danger of its coming nearer to Shiloh church than the defensive line of the Confederates at the river forts, and which stretched on through Kentucky from the Mississippi River to the Cumberland Mountains. The control of this defense was in the hands of General Albert Sidney Johnston, a man respected alike by his opponents and his soldiers. His line of defense included Fort Henry, on the right bank of the Tennessee, and Fort Donelson, on the left bank of the Cumberland River; and Mr. Arnold was confident that General Ulysses S. Grant, the commander of Union forces in the West, would not long delay in an attempt to conquer these river strongholds. “With those forts destroyed Grant’s army could soon break the whole western line of defense,” reflected Mr. Arnold, little realizing that within a month this very thing would be accomplished.