One by one the guerrillas drew in their exhausted horses. No hoof-beats or any other sound came to them on the summer night’s still air.
Shamefacedly the men looked at one another. Then, without a word, they set off at a walk for their camp, five miles away.
Dawn was breaking as Dad rode into a tent-street and up its long, straight course. At his side was aUnion cavalry captain whom he had encountered when the first sentry and corporal of the guard at Hooker’s outposts had halted him.
On a little rise of ground, from which the streets of tents fell away on every side, was a farmhouse, commandeered by Major-General Hooker as temporary headquarters. And into a front room of this house, five minutes after his arrival, Dad was conducted.
General Hooker was picturesquely clad in a mere fraction of his uniform and was gulping down large mouthfuls of very black and very hot coffee from a tin dipper. In his other hand was a slice of unbuttered bread.
“Sergeant James Dadd, of the Blankth Ohio Infantry,” announced Dad, saluting, “with dispatches from Brigadier-General——”
He paused in consternation midway in his formal announcement.
To his amaze, General Hooker set down his portable breakfast on a window-sill, gaped in wonder for an instant at the courier, then burst into a fit of unextinguishable laughter.
“The dispatches, sir,” volunteered Dad, “are of the utmost importance, so I was told by General——”
“Importance!” gasped Hooker, weak with laughter. “Oh, man!Importance?Do you mean to say he didn’t tell you? Didn’t you evenguess?”
“GUESS?” echoed Dad, returning the general’s amused gaze with an expression upon his own face of gross perplexity. “I—I don’t understand, sir.”
General Hooker seemed to realize that his habitual, easy informality toward his subordinates—for which they adored him and whereon none had been known to presume—had gone well-nigh beyond bounds.
For he checked his laughter and, with a touch of authority in his big voice, said:
“Make your report.”
Briefly Dad outlined the orders given him by his brigade commander, the adventures he had undergone on the previous day, and the clever scout work and hard riding which had marked the night stage of his journey.
Hooker listened with real interest; his eyes, under half-closed lids, narrowly reading the speaker’s features. Yet when the short recital was finished the mirth sprang back unbidden into the general’s tanned face.
“Sergeant Dadd,” he asked whimsically, “do you ever think?”
The odd question, tenfold more strange coming froma general officer to an enlisted man, deepened Dad’s bewilderment.
“Think?” he repeated.
“Yes. Or do you prefer to be the supposedly model soldier who works like a machine and who leaves to his superior officers the task of thinking?”
“When thinking can help,” answered Dad, “I suppose I do my share of it. But I don’t let it interfere with the orders given me.”
“Did you happen to think when you were told to ride across nearly forty miles of hostile country with these dispatches for me?” insisted the general, the same quizzical look in his half-shut eyes.
“Frankly, sir,” returned Dad, “I did. I remember that I thought—”
“Well?” urged Hooker impatiently. “Out with it, man! If it wasn’t complimentary to anyone in particular don’t be afraid to say so.”
“I thought, sir,” answered Dad, “that if those documents weren’t all-important it was strange that a man’s life or freedom should be risked in delivering them. And I thought if theywereall-important there must be some safer and surer way of getting them to you than by sending that same man through a region where there was barely one chance in a dozen—in a score—of his being successful in reaching you.”
Hooker nodded approval.
“Good!” he vouchsafed. “And, wondering that, you still did all in your power to win through safely?”
“I had orders, sir.”
“And you set out to obey them? Well, sergeant, you did not obey them.”
“The envelope—” began Dad.
“Is here. With its contents undisturbed. But it doesn’t belong here. By this time it ought to be in Jackson’s hands. Perhaps even in Lee’s. You still do not understand?”
Dad essayed to speak; then hesitated.
“You set down your general for a fool,” insisted Hooker. “Don’t deny it, man. Well, he isn’t one. He hit on a wise scheme. The scheme he proposed to me last week and which had my endorsement. These papers were carefully made out—lists, maps, directions, and all. For the exclusive benefit of—Jackson and Lee.
“Do some more thinking for a moment and then see if you can’t guess the riddle.”
Dad had forestalled the command. Already his brain was hot on a trail of conjecture. He recalled what his general had said of the chances against the mission’s success, and of the unaccustomed care that same general had taken in warning him to lose liberty rather than life should danger threaten.
He fell to rehearsing what General Hooker had first said. And, bit by bit, the truth came to him.
“You begin to understand?” asked General Hooker, reading his every expression.
“I hope, sir,” returned Dad stiffly, his color rising, “that I am mistaken in supposing that my commanding officer sent me into the enemy’s country, expectingme to be captured. He said the chances against my reaching you were ten to one, and even worse. But—”
“Ten to one?” mocked Hooker. “A hundred to one—that’s how much worse—a thousand to one. Humanly speaking, there wasnochance that a Federal courier—least of all a mounted courier—could get through. For forty miles the whole country is alive with Confederates. A trained spy might have hoped to do it; yes. In disguise and on foot and with three days to make the trip. But a mounted man in uniform, with instructions to hurry—there was no chance. Such a man could not possibly have avoided capture. Yet you did.”
“The dispatches, then, that I have just now handed you—”
“The dispatches you just handed me are no longer worth the paper they’re scrawled on. Yet, in the Confederates’ hands, they would have been worth their weight in gold—no, diamonds—tous.”
“Then—”
“They were very carefully prepared—for the enemy. They are crammed with vital and categorical misinformation of the most interesting kind as to our movements, our numbers, our disposition. It is an old trick. But the papers were so carefully prepared that, carried by a palpably honest man—”
“I see, sir,” broke in Dad, a wave of honest hot wrath driving all thought of discipline momentarily from his brain. “And I was the dupe. The honest fool who would make a blundering effort to get through to youand would honestly and vehemently resist capture; so that on my dead or captured body the false information would be found. I catch the idea.”
“A soldier’s duty,” began Hooker, “is to—”
“Is to obey orders. And in a war like this most soldiers enlisted prepared to throw away their lives blithely for their endangered country.
“I am no exception. If my commanding officer had told me what I was expected to do those documents would be in General Jackson’s camp now, and I would be on my way to the hell of a Southern war-prison. I am not indignant at being used in this way for the good of my country, nor even at being used as a catspaw. But Iamindignant at failing to serve the cause through my very effort to succeed in doing it.
“If I have spoken too freely I ask your pardon, sir. But, if I may suggest it, it would be better another time to tell me frankly what I am supposed to do, or else to choose some less zealous man as dupe.”
Hooker, no whit offended by his subordinate’s unusual language, listened patiently to the close of the angered outburst.
“What is that for?” he asked as Dad paused for breath.
And as he asked he pointed toward the courier’s left hip. Dad glanced down, following the direction of the inquiring gesture.
Thrust through his belt was the naked sword Mrs. Sessions had given him. Vaguely he remembered placing it there for safe keeping and to have it out of hisway, as he had ridden on after the four fleeing guerrillas had galloped up the by-way. In the night’s stirring perils and need for eternal watchfulness he had forgotten it.
Now, blushing like a schoolboy—his keen soldier-sense horrified by so glaring an error in his equipment—more chagrined at the unpardonable lapse than had he been caught going barefoot to a Presidential review—shame swallowed his former resentment.
“I—I apologize, sir,” he said contritely, “for appearing in your presence wearing a commissioned officer’s sword.”
“Where did you happen on it?”
“I lost my revolver. The sword was—was given me for self-defense at a house where I hid when guerrillas were after me. I used it in getting away again; then stuck it in my belt in case I should be attacked in close quarters at some time during the night.”
“You need not apologize to me or to anyone,” said Hooker slowly, “from this time on, for wearing a commissioned officer’s sword. Your commission as first lieutenant of infantry will be signed by President Lincoln as soon as my next courier goes to him. In the meantime you are an acting-lieutenant.
“Keep the sword. I wish all newly commissioned officers had as good a right to one as you have just shown yourself to possess.”
Dad’s head swam. He tried to stammer out halting phrases of gratitude. Hooker cut him short with another brusk laugh.
“If we played a trick and you were chosen as the catspaw,” said he, “you’ll at least bear witness that I know how to reward a catspaw whose claws are as alert as yours. Go across to the staff mess and get some breakfast. Then take a few hours of sleep. You look as if you could make use of it.”
Dad saluted with the sword he had drawn and turned to go. Hooker recalled him as he reached the threshold of the tent door.
“Lieutenant Dadd,” he said inquisitively, “do you chance to have been at the Point?”
“No, sir. I am not a West Point man.”
“Were you ever an officer in the army?”
“You will not find the name, ‘James Dadd,’ on any army list, I am afraid, sir,” answered the new-made lieutenant, shaking inwardly.
“H’m!” mused Hooker. “Probably not. Probably not. It’s no affair of mine or of anyone’s. But don’t deny it too strenuously to other people who may ask you—or, rather, if you don’t want them to ask you, don’t draw a sword and salute with it as if you had handled such weapons for years.
“Infantry privates do not carry swords. And when they are first promoted, they don’t handle them as you do. That is all. Good-by, Lieutenant—Dadd.”
ABOGGY, tree-strewn stretch of lowlands where whitish mists hung thick at dawn and whence miasma vapors rose under the broiling sun of midday.
A delightful place for duck and quail shooting in midwinter. In summer a rank plague spot—and incidentally, on this particular summer of 1862, the camping ground of the army of the Potomac. The malarial region whose name, even to-day, sends a shudder along the bent spine of many an oldster.
Chickahominy Swamp.
For months Major-General McClellan, commander of the army of the Potomac, had pursued his fated peninsula campaign. Along the peninsula in early spring he had marched his mighty army to the speedy capture of Richmond.
Battles were lost; battles were won. Chances were lost; chances were blindly thrown away.
More than once the spires of Richmond were in plain view to the grim, tired men of the ranks. On one occasion, had they been allowed to press their advantage, they could have charged into the Confederate capital’s streets at the heels of a lesser body of foes who were in headlong flight.
But that one golden chance had been lost through official hesitation; and it could never come again.
For Lee and Jackson, by massing their scattered forces, rendered the city impregnable. Whenever fresh danger seemed to threaten Richmond, Lee made a demonstration toward Washington, which caused a rushing of Federal regiments to repel the supposed danger and rendered a mass attack on Richmond out of the question.
So, through a terrible summer of non-achievement, the once redoubtable army of the Potomac lay for the most part in Chickahominy Swamp. Lay there and rotted.
Pestilence did not “stalk” through the camps. It swept through them like the lightning breath of the death-angel.
To one man who died in battle four died of disease. A locality that even the heat-hardened Virginians were wont to shun in summer, Chickahominy Swamp exacted horrible toll of lives from the Northern invaders.
Thus rested, wearily inactive, the army that was the hope and pride of the Union. And at every turn Lee and Jackson outgeneraled its leaders; the Confederate force opposing to the ill-led Northerners’ greater bulk a speed and deftness that paralyzed its foe.
So that at last the North, which had so excitedly shouted “On to Richmond!” beheld in growing amaze the reverses of its bravest sons, and clamored vainly for a change. From Washington, too, came first protests,then rebukes, then an imperative command that the peninsula campaign be brought to an end and the army of the Potomac remove from the Chickahominy pesthole.
Back from the swamp and to less fatal ground, farther away from the lost goal of its ambition, the huge army was withdrawn, the Confederates working havoc upon their retreating foes.
It was in one of these flank attacks—a mere fleabite for the main body of the army, but as vital as Gettysburg itself to the army corps directly concerned in it—that Lieutenant James Dadd won his captaincy for gallant conduct in the face of the enemy.
A week later the demi-corps to which his regiment was attached chanced to be far to the left of the massed army on special detail, and was returning to headquarters.
The regiments, marching in close formation, were ascending the long, gradual slope of an almost interminable hill when their videttes appeared over the summit, riding back like mad, while at almost the same moment from a wood to their left, and slightly to their rear, broke out an irregular line of white smoke.
A masked battery in the forest, supported by several regiments of Confederate riflemen, had opened fire on them.
Before the nearest Federal ranks could wheel to repel the attack the flying videttes from in front reported a large body of Confederates who had somehow gotten between the detachment and the main army, and were approaching at the “double” from the far side of the hill up which the line of march led.
Even the Federal corps commander—a political appointee with three months’ actual military experience—saw the gravity of the position. Cut off from in front and attacked on the left flank, they might well be captured as had been more than one equally large body of Federals during the calamitous year.
And on realizing that fact the newly appointed corps commander, who was still weak in nerve and body from a touch of swamp-fever, proceeded to lose his head.
Regardless of the presumably greater danger that was approaching from behind the far-off hilltop to the front, he noted only the more palpable peril in that booming cannonade and rifle-fire from the wood to the left. Being only a temporary fool and not a coward, he stuttered to his aids a series of orders that sent fully half his attenuated corps swinging leftward in close-formation attack on the forest.
Fully twelve hundred yards of open country lay between the wood-edge and the Federal line.
To charge a seen foe is one thing; to attack an invisible enemy who is ensconced in unknown numbers behind a screen of leaves is quite another. And this the advancing line promptly realized.
The order to charge was given. Across the field of fresh-cut rye-stubble started the Federals.
(A charge, in a picture-book, is an inspiring sight. In real life it consists of various blocks and lines andother formations of uniformed pawns moving awkwardly and with exasperating slowness, all in one direction, athwart the vast checker-board. A retreat is far more picturesque and less geometrical.)
Advancing by order, in close alignment, the blue-clad men offered a mark not to be missed. A nearsighted child in the thick wood-fringe could scarce have failed to wreak vengeance in their ranks.
The whole edge of the forest was white now with belching smoke from which spat jets of yellow and red fire. Solid shot, grape and rifle-fire tore grotesque gaps in the oncoming ranks.
With no opportunity to avenge their losses or even to see their slayers, the Federals plunged onward.
First at the double they moved, their officers trotting, sword in hand, at the side of the companies, barking sharp commands and closing as well as might be each new and ugly rent in the lines. Then the orderly, rhythmic run grew shambling.
One man in a regiment’s front rank wheeled and tried to bolt back—anywhere out of reach of the whizzing, crashing, viewless death that was striking down his companions at every step.
A lieutenant struck the coward across the face with the flat of his sword and howled curses at him, striving to beat him back to his duty.
But by this time another man, and yet other men, had followed the panic example. Here and there, from the chokingly tight front rank, men had begun to drop out, or to plunge back into the line just behind them,throwing out of gear the exactness of company formations, infecting hundreds with their terror.
It was no longer possible for officers to check individual cases of fear. Their whole attention was taken up in keeping the bulk of their men in line and in keeping them advancing.
The dead strewed the stubble ground in windrows. The fire-streaked smoke rolled out in a blinding, acrid wave from the nearing fringe of trees.
And at every yard of distance gained the Confederate volleys waxed more and more accurate, the piles of dead higher and thicker.
Unscathed, the wood’s defenders were killing by wholesale. And a corps commander’s folly was paid for in the lives of hundreds of better, wiser, braver men than himself.
A riderless horse, his back broken by a grapeshot, crawled along the space between the Federals and the wood, dragging his hind legs behind him and screaming hideously above the near-by din.
A major, sword in hand, running ten yards in advance of his regiment and hallooing to them to come on, stopped abruptly, his brown face turning suddenly to a mask of blood, and fell where he stood.
He was major in Dad’s regiment.
And Dad himself, as the men wavered on seeing their loved officer fall, leaped forward, sword aloft, to take the dead man’s place ahead of the line.
His lean body tense, his mild eyes aflame, the sword of old Ehud Sessions whirling in wild encouragementabove his bared head, Captain James Dadd charged onward, yelling to his men to follow. And not only his own company, but the whole regiment, obeyed that call.
For another fifty yards the Federal line—now irregular as a snake-fence—plunged forward; Dad’s regiment, the Blankth Ohio Infantry, forming its foremost point.
But flesh and blood could not stand the increasingly galling fire from the forest. Mortal nerves were not proof against the horrible strain of advancing to be struck down by the invisible, with no chance to strike a single return blow.
To have halted, if only once, and to have fired a chance volley, even ineffective, or its effect unseen, into the trees and underbrush whence poured that hail of death, would have been infinite relief.
But the officers had had their orders from the chattering corps commander. And those orders were to advance at the double and to continue to advance until the Federal line should come to grips with the foe.
Despite the frenzied exertions of their officers, the men began to lag. The trot slacked to a walk. The walk to an almost general and very wavering halt.
Dad, hoarse and exhausted, knew that the next move would be a cave-in of the demoralized line, then a retreat that would change to panic flight and a universal hurling away of rifles and knapsacks. Moreover, that soldiers who once allowed themselves to flee in that fashion would never again be the same men.
Their usefulness in war would be impaired by fullfifty per cent., even as a horse that once has run away is no longer to be trusted.
The old man redoubled his furious efforts to rally his regiment and to force it onward to the charge. The whole crooked line had halted.
It was wavering like the tail of a kite. Presently it must snap.
Then—from nowhere in particular—from the skies, some vowed afterward—came a diversion.
Down the field, in a line parallel to the woods, and a dozen rods in front of the wavering Federal line, galloped a gun-carriage horse, its harness flapping and flying about its flashing hoofs.
Astride the barebacked horse was a small and marvelous figure. The figure of a short and stocky boy, fiery red of hair, his powder-blacked face freckled, his little eyes glaring. He was clad in the obviously chopped-down uniform of an artilleryman.
On his back, suspended by a strap that was fastened around his neck, bounced and rattled an enormous drum. In the boy’s trouser waistband were stuck two drumsticks.
The lad was kicking vehemently with his heels at his horse’s stomach. But as he came midway adown the Federal line he jerked his mount to a halt, slid to earth and, in the same gesture, unslung his drum.
He had halted not twenty feet from Dad.
“Now, then,” shrilled the boy, his harsh young voice ringing out like a trumpet-call, “what’re you longlegged loafers waiting for? Hey? Charge, you chumps! Charge!”
He faced the woods. His drum rolled out a deafening tattoo.
“Battle Jimmie!” shouted someone in the ranks.
“Jimmie!” echoed Dad. “Jimmie! Oh, it’smyboy!”
“Charge!” shrilled Jimmie, his drum seconding the fiery command.
And they charged.
THERE is a baffling yet no less true psychological element in man which, after he has come to the uttermost limit of his powers, enables him to keep on past all seemingly possible bounds.
The Federal line, that had sagged and wavered and was on the brink of retreat, forgot momentarily its panic impulse; forgot the flying death that bit deep into its very vitals; forgot all save the fact that an absurd-looking little boy was advancing—fearlessly, gayly—where they, grown men, had faltered and feared to go.
The mad roll of the drum, the treble shout of “Charge!” the spectacle of a youngster berating middle-aged veterans as though they were bad nursery children—all this infected the line with a queer, half-hysterical impetus.
Someone laughed aloud. The laugh ran along the ranks in every cadence of surprised mirth. Dad and a score of other officers caught up the word “Charge!”
Irregularly, in shockingly bad formation, staggering like drunkards—yet staggeringforward—the men got into motion.
Now they were on the run, a laughing, swearing, wholly unafraid mob.
Following close behind the boy they made for the forest death-trap—the trap they no longer feared.
Fast as they ran, two figures were ever in advance of them: Major James Dadd, and, close at his side, “Battle Jimmie.”
No word did either of the two speak to the other—there was no space for words—and Jimmie had not so much as seen his grandfather. Yet Dad, after that one gasp of recognition, had pressed as close as possible to the lad and, in a daze of dread and incredulous delight, was charging shoulder to shoulder with him.
The Federals crashed pell-mell into the forest edge. There was a long minute of turmoil, of blind hand-to-hand fighting with gray-clad foes, who had all at once for the first time become visible.
Behind the first thick line of chinkapin and hazel underbrush at the forest fringe twisted a somewhat rotted, but still formidable, snake-fence. Behind this excellent double barrier—the tree foliage dropping to beneath the tops of the bushes—were three howitzer batteries and a number of detached pieces of light artillery.
This armament was reënforced by one of the new-fangled “mountain batteries” and a vast, unwieldy swivel-gun (part of the Norfolk navy-yard loot).
Apart from the guns and their crews, a scant two thousand Confederate infantrymen, chiefly made up of such marksmen as at that day were found only south of the Mason-Dixon line, comprised the forest defense.
By the well-established tactical rule that “one man may defend what four men cannot storm,” the odds were comfortably in the Southerners’ favor. These odds and their own invisibility had rendered their flank attack on the Federal demi-corps an all but absolute success.
But for the unforeseen effect that one red-haired child had had upon the charging-line, the Federals would even now have been reeling back upon their main body and helping still further to render that body helpless against the impending attack from the larger Confederate force that had not yet breasted the hill. As it was—
Through natural hedge and through rotting snake-fence crashed the charging Yankees. In a shouting, laughing, cheering mass they flung themselves, bayoneted guns leveled, upon their gray foes.
All at once the wood that had been so murderously easy for the Confederates to hold against their charging enemies grew too hot to contain them.
Back against the batteries the infantrymen were driven. Around the guns—and chiefly around the giant swivel—swirled the fight in tangled blue-gray eddies.
The man who shoots from behind a tree is as terrible as fate—so long as he remains behind his tree and his opponent is in the open. Once routed out of his shelter, he is but a mortal.
And these erstwhile terrifying Confederates, seen nowat close range, were mere humans—and humans who were on the ragged edge of retreat.
Jimmie, drum slung momentarily behind him, had gone through the thicket like a woodchuck. He struck the fence, taller than his own head, and swarmed up its irregular side.
As he reached the top Dad vaulted the barrier and gained the far side, turning to help the boy down. Just then the charging men who followed them collided with the fence, and it went to matchwood under their rush.
Jimmie was sent sprawling through the air, and landed breathless against the bole of a live-oak. Dad lifted the gasping boy to his feet.
Not noticing who had done him this service, nor indeed that it had been done, Jimmie with a single gesture twisted the drum forward, and, running at full speed to regain his lead over the others, set the drum-sticks flying with unimpaired ardor to their noisy task again.
But in the inferno of noise, here among the roaring big guns, where the hand-to-hand fighting was, and where the arching foliage acted as a sounding-board, the drum’s babel went almost unheard.
Its work was done. The fire it had kindled needed now no fuel.
Dad still close at his side, Jimmie plunged on through the biting smoke-whirl. Out of the blinding reek just in front towered a Virginia rifleman, stripped to the waist, his rifle clubbed.
Glimpsing the blue of Jimmie’s uniform, the manaimed his clubbed gun for the lad’s head, doubtless ignorant in that haze and confusion that it was a boy and not a man at whom he smote.
Up whirled the gunbutt.
Jimmie, his eyes straight ahead, did not see the peril. But Dad, his eyes everywhere, saw it.
Saw and forestalled it. Before the impending blow could fall his sword had flashed with the speed of light, and into the rifleman’s bare throat the point bit deep and far.
The Virginian reeled back into the smoke-drift, his rifle clattering harmless to earth. Jimmie, blissfully excited, unaware of the danger averted from him, was running onward as fast as his stocky legs could move.
For now, just in front, the fight was surging about one huge pivot—a point whose center was the great swivel-gun.
Around this well-nigh priceless bit of war treasure—which, by the way, had no place in such an engagement—the Confederates rallied for their final stand.
Ten gunners wheeled its black muzzle into play, but before a shot could be fired the Federals were upon them.
Then it was hand-to-hand work, with no scope for solid shot or other artillery advantage.
Into the mêlée plunged Battle Jimmie, shoulder to shoulder with the man to whose presence he was still oblivious.
There was a confused second of tight-packed, grinding, breathless strife. Then in an instant the gray fighters fled—fled in every direction, leaving the gun and the rest of their artillery.
After them through the shadowy tree-aisles, gray with smoke-clouds, rushed their Northern pursuers.
Dad gripped the fast-following Jimmie by the shoulder, bringing the indignant youngster to a very sudden and fruitlessly wriggling halt.
“Leggo!” snapped Jimmie, his war-lust at full flood. “Leggo, you old fool! They’re needing me out in front there; can’t you see—”
“They’re needing you—and themselves a lot more righthere!” panted Dad, his voice hoarse and spent with the battle. “Sound the recall!”
“What?” yelled Jimmie in the unbelieving tone of a soldier who is ordered to retreat even before the first volley has been fired.
“Sound the recall!” repeated Dad. “Sound it, quick! My voice is gone, and they’re plumb crazy! They’re liable to run into an ambuscade beyond there and lose all we’ve gained. Sound the recall!”
“The recall,” sneered Jimmie insolently as he strove in vain to tug free from the hand on his shoulder, “is the one piece of war-music I’ve never took the trouble to learn, nor wanted to, neither.”
“Jimmie Brinton,” declaimed Dad in a terribly solemn and awe-compelling rumble, “I’ve never laid hand to you in my life, and I hoped I’d never have to. But unless you sound the recall, and sound it loud enough to bring those lunatics back here on the double—why,I’m going to take you over my knee right here and now and—”
“Dad!” screamed Jimmie, the smoke-mists gouged out of his eyes and his gaze for the first time resting on the stern, loving old face above him.
“Dad!” he repeated, his short arms clasping the veteran convulsively about the waist. “Oh, Dad, it’s—it’s—you!”
“Jimmie, dear lad,” broke in his grandfather, “joy can wait, but trouble can’t. Sound that recall!”
Jimmie snatched up his drum.
“I’d play ‘Dixie’ or the ‘Bonnie Blue Flag’ if you ordered it,” he said adoringly, and the roll of the “Recall” cracked out.
Again and again he played it until the pursuing Federals heard it and obeyed; halted and turned back to their duty.
MEANTIME, Dad was saying to his grandson: “Maybe you think we’ve won a little victory. We have. Maybe you think the retreat of those Confeds was our victory. It wasn’t. The victory was our getting these guns of theirs, especially that big swivel-gun.
“If we can save every cannon used here and get them all safe back to our own lines, that’ll spell victory. Not the fact that one crowd made another crowd run away.
“In war the victor isn’t the fellow who chases the other fellow. He’s the man who is able to grab the weapons and provisions and ammunition that make the other fellow dangerous. We can’t buy batteries and guns like these for less than a fortune, and the Confederates can’t replace them at any price.
“That’s how we harm them more than if we killed fifty thousand of them. That’s why I told you to sound the recall.”
“I—I see,” admitted Jimmie shamefacedly. “They’re beginning to come back now. Gee, if a party of Confeds had flanked us and run off the guns while I was refusing to sound the recall, I’d ’a’ wanted to shoot myself.”
“That’s all right, sonny. A man often has to stop to revise his list of the world’s great men and give himself a lower place in it. It’s lucky for him if his blunder’s no worse than yours in telling an old fool—”
“Dad! You know blamed well. I’d ’a’ bit my tongue out sooner’n have called you that if I’d known it wasyouhad a hold of me.”
“No hard feelings, son. No hard feelingseverbetween you and me. Only—you saw I was old. I was fairly certain to be someone’s dad or granddad. Someone wouldn’t relish hearing his dad or granddad called an ‘old fool’ any more than you would. Maybe it’d be well to remember that.”
“I—I understand. I’m sorry. Oh, Dad, it’s gorgeous to be with you again. I’ve asked and I’ve looked and I’ve even—”
“One second, Jimmie!”
Dad turned on the foremost group of the returning Federals. Briefly and clearly he issued a series of orders. Then to a similar approaching group and to a third and to a fourth. Soon the former fighting line was swarming with men at work over the captured guns. Without waiting further, Dad sprang astride a straying troop horse, lifted Jimmie to the saddle in front of him, and set off at a lumbering gallop to render a report to his corps commander.
On the way he scarcely spoke, saying only, as they started:
“If you and I have any sort of luck, Jimmie, we’llhave plenty of years to tell each other what’s happened since we said good-by that night back at Ideala.
“But just this minute we belong to Uncle Sam; and he needs us a lot. Our best, quickest thoughts, most of all. For there’s trouble ahead for the man who isn’t fitted to think it out.
“What’s become of my superior officers back there in the woods I don’t know. They’ll show up when the glory is handed out. But just now they’re a trifle scarce. And there may be work for me. I’ve got to do some planning—some mighty tall planning, too.”
Presently they drew up at a small, cleared space in the center of the portion of the demi-corps that had not been tossed into the forest charge.
Dad dismounted, leaving the horse to an orderly, and, with Jimmie at his side, walked up to the white and wildly excited corps commander. The latter, with his staff, had witnessed through binoculars the hot little charge.
The commander was fairly bubbling with questions.
“Sir,” formally announced Dad, at attention, “I have to announce that we carried the Confederate position at the edge of the woods yonder, and that we have captured between twenty-eight and thirty cannon of various sizes. The exact list, with those of our losses, will be delivered to you as soon as it can be determined. I have returned to—”
“Splendid!” broke in the young general, with a fine fervor. “A complete victory! I shall send full report at once to General McClellan at headquarters; and you can be assured, Captain Dadd, that your own gallant conduct shall by no means be forgotten in my report. As for this little hero with the drum—”
“General,” interposed Dad, dropping his voice and moving a step nearer to the exuberant commander, “may I speak plainly?”
“By all means, sir!” bleated the commander, with his best Napoleon air. “The hero of such a victory as this has just proved may well—”
“This is no victory, general,” urged Dad, with terrible earnestness. “It was a flank movement that amounts to but one move in a big game. Our videttes reported the approach of Confederates in force beyond the hill there, you may recollect. Has—”
“Bless me!” cried the young general, aghast. “I’d forgotten. In the glory of that charge I—”
“In the taking of one trick you have thrown away the whole hand!” burst forth Dad in righteous wrath. “That affair at the woods was just a flank movement to distract and weaken us and later perhaps to enfilade us.
“The real danger lies in front—in the force that lies between us and our main body. A force that has let us get into this trap to catch our whole demi-corps, as Jackson has done more than once with bigger detached bodies of Federals than ours in the past six months. That or drive us back into another Confederate army somewhere to the south.”
“Do you—do you really think—” stammered thegeneral, his horror making him insensible to his adviser’s tone of insubordination. “Do you—”
“I think, sir, that we have one chance, and only one—to strike forward at full speed for that hill-top. The nearer we get to the summit before we come in touch with the enemy, the better our chances.
“Throw the whole force ahead, letting the men who were in the charge at the woods be brought up as quickly as possible to form our rear guard. It is just one chance; but a delay will leave us no chance.”
The young commander, pitiable in the fright of crass inexperience, clung metaphorically to the one stable power in sight. And then he did the one wise thing in his whole brief military career up to this point.
Reading calm self-confidence in Dad’s face, he said loudly:
“Captain Dadd, you are hereby appointed temporarily to my personal staff.” Under his breath he murmured: “What orders?”
Readily and without change of expression Dad whispered a score of successive sentences to his chief—sentences whose technicalities the bewildered politician-general himself did not half-grasp, but which he as promptly transmitted to his couriers.
In almost no time the inert body of men was buzzing with orderly activity. The front ranks—at the double, and their heavier accouterments consigned to the baggage train—were on the march, hastening eagerly toward the hill summit, the successive regiments pressing close after.
“You see, sir,” Dad was explaining to the general, “it is easier to advance fifty yards toward a foe over level ground, or a hundred yards down a slope, than ten yardsupa hill. If we can seize and hold the crest before they reach it, it is so much net gain.
“To prevent that, and to delay us further, the flank movement at the forest edge was planned. In open order, as our men are now marching, and as they must continue to march, they avoid presenting a good target to volley-fire.”
Regiment after regiment wheeled into line and breasted the long slope, the rear being brought up by the returning heroes of the forest fight.
Only the first half of the force was sent ahead at the double. The rest of the demi-corps, baggage and big guns with them, moved at a more sedate pace.
It was needful only to assure the capture of the crest and that it should be held until the entire force could come up.
If there seems something comic-operalike in the idea of a Federal force marching rapidly to battle against a foe whose numbers were unknown and whose vanguard was unseen—a foe whose full description a dozen scouts had not given hours earlier—the reader is respectfully, but very sadly, referred to War Department records of no less than nine similar occurrences in the Virginia campaigns of 1862 and 1863.
Dad (his long years of supposedly aimless reading of military tactics, during such evenings as the Eagle bar had not called him, bearing sudden and gloriousfruit) knew the glow that can be equaled by none other the world has to offer—the inspiration of seeing a mighty mass of fellow men moving and acting on the sole impulse of his own brain.
He grew young again. As he rode close to the general’s bridle rein, briefly mapping out the future movements of the detachment, he felt that failure and he had forever bidden each other adieu.
Then—
A scurrying figure that scuttled up to the general, ducking under his very bridle rein.
“Hey, general!” shouted Jimmie full fiercely. “They sent me back. There’s going to be fun up there ahead by and by. I smell it. I canalwayssmell it in advance. And that’s where I and my drum belong. Give me a chance at those Rebs, won’t you? Oh,please!”
There was a chuckle from a hundred throats as the shrill plea went up. The general glanced inquiringly at Dad, in whose company Jimmie had arrived on the scene.
“He is my grandson, sir,” explained Dad. “Though what he is doing here is beyond all my guessing. I left him back at Ideala, Ohio, a year and more ago. I never heard of him or from him again till to-day. I’d written often, but the letters were never answered. I see now they never were received. The boy’s silence worried me. But not half as much as his presence in this inferno does just at this particular time.”
“Can I please go to the front, gen’ral?” pleaded the boy.
His voice had swelled to a whine. But it was the frantic whine of the leashed hunting-dog when it sees the pack afield.
The general turned to Dad.
“He is your grandson, Captain Dadd,” said he. “Use your own judgment about giving him the permission he wants. I have enough to answer for this day without sending a little boy to probable death.”
“Little boy?” scoffed Jimmie, outraged to the paladin soul. “Littleboy, hey? With a regiment of such ‘little’ boys you could storm Vicksburg. And with a brigade of us you could have Richmond for the asking.
“Littleboy? I take notice that just now when a passel of big, wise men were holding back and wanting to call it a day and run home, it was a little boy that jacked ’em up and showed ’em the way to win. And it’s the same little boy who’ll do the same thing again out front yonder if you’ll give him half a chance. Aw, lemme go! Out there where the fun is. Me and my drum!”
“Jimmie!” reproved Dad sternly—though his eyes softened at manifestation of the fighting spirit he loved—“Apologize! Apologize at once for speaking disrespectfully to your superior officer. He could rightly send you to the guard-house for impertinence. A soldier’s duty is no duty when it lets him criticize his superiors. If nothing else proved you were still a little boy, your behavior just now proves it. Apologize!”
“I—I apologize,” meekly answered Jimmie, accompanying his humble words with a horrible glower at the general by his grandfather’s side.
“Don’t mention it, my lad,” returned the general, choking back a guffaw at the ludicrous contrast between face and voice. “And now, if your grandfather thinks well of it, you can go forward. Take your orders from him.”
Dad’s eyes were wide with sudden distress.
He knew what type of work was likely to be afoot beyond the hill-crest. He knew, too, that where the lead should rain thickest there would this irrepressible grandson of his be found. Once already, that day, the boy had escaped death almost miraculously.
By the law of chance he could scarce count on the intervention of a second miracle in his behalf.
“Jimmie!” he said. “I’ve missed you so, lad. And the world’s been so empty without my chum. It’s hard to risk a longer parting, now that we’ve just had the blind, unbelievable luck to meet again.”
Jimmie sighed, thrust the drum behind him, dutifully saluted, and fell into step alongside his grandfather’s horse with chin stiffly set.
Dad leaned down sideways in the saddle and smote him on the shoulder.
“It takes a good soldier to go willingly into action. But it takes a blamed-sight better soldier to stay out of the action where his spirit is waiting for him to joinit. Go ahead, lad! Forward! Do your own work your own way. I’ve no right to stay you.”
The boy leaped forward, gripped Dad’s hand in an ecstatic instant’s pressure, then scuttled off up the hill ahead of the more slowly advancing staff.
And from every hurrying regiment that he outdistanced rose a laughing cheer for Battle Jimmie. And so he went on toward the hill-crest, and beyond it, where crouched the unknown.
THANKS to Dad’s foresight, or to the Confederate leader’s confidence in his flank movement’s power to detain his proposed prey, the hilltop was gained by the Yankee vanguard while the Confederates were still slowly toiling up its farther and far-steeper slope.
Before the advancing Confederates could clearly realize what was happening the Federal vanguard was bearing down upon them.
This ruse of Dad’s (gleaned by him from the tale of a battle of Frederick the Great) took the enemy wholly and dumfoundedly by surprise.
By every modern tradition of warfare the force on the hilltop, at sight of the approaching enemy, should have halted and thrown up some sort of defenses, or at the least should have awaited the foe’s approach.
Instead the leading Yankee regiments, moving in semi-open formation, started down the hill at the double, straight at the climbing foes.
And other regiments and yet others appearing over the summit joined in the charge. The crest and the upper slope of the hill were alive with running men.
And five yards in advance of the foremost line leapedand ran and yelled and drummed a deliriously excited small boy.
When a man, toiling laboriously up a steep hill, collides with a man running down the same hill, which is the more apt to be bowled over by the impact?
The runner is reënforced by his own great impetus, the climber handicapped by his own fatigue and the sloping of the ground behind.
And what is true of two men is true of two hundred or of two thousand or of any larger number of men.
The Federal line crashed down upon the slow-moving Confederates, smashed their ranks and tore through them with scarce a halt. The Confederates, reeling from the collision, were sent in every direction, with no earthly chance to reform or to battle against the resistless onrush.
The trap, so well planned and so badly sprung, was no longer a trap. For the proposed victims had torn their way out of it ere its proposed iron jaws could close relentlessly upon them.
Straight on moved the Federals; slowly as they neared the hillfoot, to keep their whole depth intact and guard their baggage and heavy guns. But by this time the Confederates on either side of the advancing column were scattered beyond rallying.
And the Confederate center, which had given back before the rush, was running for shelter toward a group of rambling houses that made up a creek-side village a half-mile behind and a bit to the left of the routed lines of gray.
“Straight on,” advised Dad, “closing your formation. Three hours’ march should put us in touch with the main body of the Army of the Potomac. Leave a couple of regiments to make a demonstration against that village, so that the rest can get well out of reach without fear of a flank attack. Then when we have moved past, let them retreat and join us.”
The corps commander, with just sense enough left not to tamper with his own unbelievable good luck, issued orders accordingly, leaving Dad behind as his staff representative with the two regiments and the mountain battery detailed to hold the village’s defenders in play.
Jimmie, the fun being over, found his way back to his grandfather’s side, a very tired, very happy, very flushed little hero.
Dad gripped both the perspiring and weary hands in silent gratitude for the lad’s safety.
Then, as he was not on active duty for the moment, he drew aside under a big tree out of the line of fire, sat down, and lighted his pipe.
The boy dropped with a full sigh of content at his feet.
“The real work is done. You and your drum can take a little holiday,” said Dad. “All these two regiments and the battery are to do is to keep up some sort of fire on the village, and pretend, if necessary, to rush it. Just to keep those fellows on the defensive till the rest of our line is well past.
“One of those is an Ohio regiment, by the way. Itjoined our corps only yesterday. I’ve been wanting to ride over to its quarters, about three miles from ours. Because it was recruited at Columbus, and may have some of our Ideala boys in it.”
He had been speaking lightly, for several officers were loitering within earshot. Now, as the last of them passed out of hearing, Dad laid his hand lovingly on his grandson’s shoulder.
“Jimmie, lad,” he said, “tell me about everything. I’ve wanted so to know. And it’s the first minute when we’ve been alone together and that I’ve had the right to ask. First of all, how do you happen to be here and not in the Ideala high school where you belong?”
“I stood it for a couple of months after you left,” began Jimmie. “And—say, mother was as mad as wrath about your going. I told her, after a while, that you’d enlisted. But I don’t quite think she believed it. Mother said she was going to Europe for a year, now that there was nothing to hold her at home; and she fixed it for me to board with Uncle Cyrus and go to high school while she was gone. And—and—”
“I see,” murmured Dad, readily visualizing the lonely boy’s plight and his yearning to desert such a humdrum, boresome existence as had been mapped out for him in favor of joining the excitement at the front.
“I wrote to you,” said Jimmie, “a lot of letters. But they all came back to me. I didn’t know what department or regiment to address. I wasn’t even sure you’d taken the name ‘James Dadd’ that I’d picked out for you.”
“Why,Iwrote toyou, son. A dozen times. Telling you—”
The boy flushed uncomfortably.
“I—I s’pose mother has a right to do whatever she likes with letters that come to our house,” he mumbled. “It’sherhouse, you know. And after she left—well, I wasn’t there either.”
“Yes. Yes. It’s all right. No one’s to blame. Go on.”
“Two fellers on our block, only a year older’n I was, went away to Columbus to enlist,” pursued Jimmie. “They were pretty big. And they swore they were eighteen. So they got accepted. That was too much for me. Nobody needed me at Uncle Cyrus’s. And I missed you such a lot. And all the time I could hear the war whispering and calling to me the way you said it always does to men who love their country. So—I ran away to Columbus, the way the other fellers had, too.”
“Yes? But you weren’t even fifteen yet, let alone eighteen. How could—”
“That was the trouble. The recruiting sergeant sized me up the minute he set eyes on me—for all I’d stuffed hay in my shoes to make me taller and walked on my toes. But he got a bounty for all the fellers he put through, so he just shoved the Bible at me and told me to put my hand on it and say I was eighteen and it would be all right. And—and—I couldn’t.”
“Of course not, Jimmie,” assented Dad softly. “We’re the fighting Brintons. Not the perjuringBrintons. It’s a terrible thing at best to have to lay your hand on the Book and swear to anything. But when there’s any shadow of doubt about the truth of the thing you swear to—why, a realmancan’t.”
“How about the two other fellers? Aren’t they guilty of—”
“‘Guilty’s’ a pretty big word for anybody except God to use. What happened next?”
“I had eighteen dollars in my window-bank. I bought a second-hand uniform, cut it down myself, and then bought a second-hand drum. And I lit out for the Mississippi, where I heard some of the Ohio regiments were fighting. I had a kind of hope I’d find you.
“I got to a place where our men were trying to storm a battery. I—I couldn’t wait, the way I meant to, to ask some drum major to take me on as drummer-boy. First thing I knew I was in front of our line, banging the drum and telling the men to come on. And—they came.”
“Good boy! Fighting Brinton!”
“After that they kind of adopted me in the army of the West. Let me come and go as I would. And called me ‘Battle Jimmie’ and tried to make a pet of me. Gee! DoIlook like a pet?
“I asked everywhere for you, and I got hold of all the army lists I could. There wasn’t any news of you in the army of the West. But I saw a man there—a man those Western soldiers say is a wonder—who may be the same man you used to tell me about. The one you used to know in Mexico as Captain Grant. I guesshe’s the same one, because he was a captain in the Mexican War. He’s general now. A man without a word in his mouth, but with all the military sense there is.
“One day last month I came across a list of commissioned officers of the Army of the Potomac. It had your name. So here I came.
“I got to the army’s headquarters yesterday and I found what corps you were with and where it was. I borrowed an artillery horse and cut across country to look for you. I got here just as you fellers were charging the woods.
“That’s all about me. Now, how aboutyou, Dad? You’ve succeeded. You’re a captain. Isn’t it wonderful? How did it happen? I knew it would.”
Briefly, Dad sketched his adventures; the hot little hand in his, thrilling with the recital, the boy’s light eyes raised to his in stark hero-worship.
As Dad came to the scene in the old Virginia homestead his voice shook a little with embarrassment. He glossed over all that part of the tale save the little widow’s surpassing goodness to himself. He congratulated himself on the tactful secrecy wherein he was shrouding any hint of sentiment.
Jimmie made no comment, and Dad went on with the rest of the story. At its close the boy said, as though picking up the thread of a long-discussed theme:
“Yes, I shed think she’d make a bully grandmother for any feller.”
“She?” rasped Dad. “Who? What on earth are you bleating about?”
“About Mrs. Sessions, of course, Dad. Why, don’t you?”
“Son,” coldly declaimed his grandfather, “there’s things a fool boy has no right to—to—Oh, Jimmie, lad, how’d you guess? She’s a wonderful little woman. And I told her all about you. And she feels just like a mother to you already. She says so, son, and—
“My lad,” Dad caught himself up pompously, “this is not a subject I care to discuss. Have you heard anything from your father? Or have you seen him?”
“N—no, sir,” said the boy, strangling a laugh at his grandfather’s abrupt change of tone, and wisely humoring the whim of reticence. “I haven’t seen him. I was afraid to look him up for fear he might want to pack me off out of this back to that old school.”
“He might,” agreed Dad. “A year ago he would. But perhaps this past year he’s learned something himself in this war-school that will make him understand you better. It will be great when we are all three home again and can have camp-fires and yarn over our exploits. I make no doubt Joseph is a commissioned officer long ago. He is bound to become one, yes. Unquestionably, a man of his solid wisdom—”
A crackle of musketry broke in on the talk.
The two Federal regiments, in fan-formation, were moving slowly forward toward the village. Advancing a few yards under fire, they would halt, drop to earth, and let fly at the village walls and windows; crawling forward once more and repeating the maneuvers.
“It’s a good move,” Dad approved. “It would be crazy for them to try to carry the village by storm. But they just want to keep the Confeds amused and hold them where they are for a half-hour or so. Our boys will fall back presently, and start the same tactics over again.”
The rippling fire from the Federals was answered by a truly vicious outpour of smoke and flame-jet from the doors and windows and angles of the little village.
Back ran the maneuvering Federals to cover. And as they did so, Dad jumped to his feet with an involuntary cry of dismay.