Ep. 606 - Father and Son - An American Folktale

It was three soldiers, escaping from the rout of Braddock's forces, who caught the alleged betrayer of their general and put him to the death. They threw his purse of ill-gotten Louis D'Or into the river, and sent him swinging from the edge of a ravine, with a vine about his neck and a placard on his breast. And so they left him.

Twenty years pass, and the war-fires burn more fiercely in the vales of Pennsylvania, but, too old to fight, the schoolmaster sits at his door near Chad's Ford and smokes and broods upon the past. He thinks of the time when he marched with Washington, when with two wounded comrades he returned along the lonely trail; then comes the vision of a blackening face, and he rises and wipes his brow. “It was right,” he mutters. “He sent a thousand of his brothers to their deaths.”