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Wears the Loyal Legion Button
ABNER M’KINLEY HAD IT PLACED ON HIS DEAD BROTHER’S
BODY.
Buffalo, Sept. l5.—An impressive
and pathetic incident occurred to-day while the body of the President
was lying in the Milburn house. The body was in the rear room on
the second floor, and after it had been prepared by the undertaker
for removal, Abner McKinley went up to look on the face of his brother.
For several moments he stood silently by the side of the coffin
looking down into the face of the one he loved, the boy with whom
he had played, the man he had revered and respected, and now the
dead President for whom the great nation mourned.
The form in the coffin was dressed
in the conventional frock coat, but as Abner McKinley looked down
on it he discovered that the button of the Loyal Legion was not
there. Always, through the years since the organization was formed,
the President had worn it. He was a member of the Loyal Legion,
he had earned his place on the honorable roster of the nation’s
heroes, earned it on the battlefield, and he wore it with the pride
of an American citizen. It was much to be President of the United
States, the Chief Executive of the great Union, but it was more
in the heart of patriotic William McKinley to have been one who
fought for the preservation of that Union, and this simple little
button meant much to him.
Abner McKinley, shaken with grief,
turned away from the coffin and approached one of the attendants,
saying:
“The button of the Loyal Legion is
not in my brother’s coat. Why was it omitted?”
The attendant did not know. He only
knew that he had placed on the dead President such garments as had
been given to him, and the little button was not in the coat that
had been given to him for the President’s burial. Silently and quickly
the attendant was sent to the room where the body had been prepared
for burial, and there was found the coat that he had worn on the
day he was shot. In the lapel was the button, which was removed
and tenderly placed in its accustomed place on the breast of the
great man who had worn it so proudly in his life.
As the ceaseless throng filed into
the City Hall later in the day to look on the placid features of
the president, hundreds of Grand Army men saw and understood, as
none others could, the meaning of the small button in the dead hero’s
coat.
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