THE fan-formation made the Federal line wide-scattered, as in “deploying skirmishers.” Every man had fully fifty feet of space between himself and the next soldier.
This formation, and the eccentric method of advance and retreat, combined with the long range, made the Yankee regiments extremely difficult targets for volley fire.
Almost unscathed, they had made their advance. And almost unscathed they were coming back.
It was not a battle. It was merely a bit of bull-baiting.
And now it was over; and the two regiments, at a command, were withdrawing from range, preparatory to massing and resuming their march, to catch up with their own main body.
The few men who had fallen were easily “brought in” by their comrades.
But Dad’s alert eyes had just seen, from his point of vantage, what the half-wriggling, half-crawling skirmishers had not. A man at the extreme left of the “fan” had jumped to his feet midway in the return, had whirled clean about and had fallen.
The wounded man got to his hands and knees, tried to move back, and fell again.
And now, from a roof in the village, two or three sharpshooters were evidently at work amid the din of useless volleying. And one or more of these sharpshooters began to single out this crawling man—the only Federal still within range—as a mark.
The fellow had once more risen to his knees, and was working his way back toward his unseeing comrades.
A bullet whipped up a puff of dust just behind him. A second carried away his cap. A third grazed him on hand or wrist and knocked him from his balance.
Then it was that Dad shouted aloud. For, as the stumbling man lurched forward, head thrown backward like a hurt animal’s, Dad had seen his face.
“Jimmie!” cried the old man. “It’s—it’s Joe! He’s bronzed and he’s got a beard; but it’s Joe! And those sharpshooters back there are testing their aim on him. Wait for me here, son, for a minute!”
As he spoke a bugle sounded—the bugle that summoned the re-formed Federal regiments to the march.
Dad, running low, and darting eccentrically from side to side to confuse the aim of the sharpshooters, dashed out onto the deserted field.
Quickly he was seen, as was tested by renewed spits of fire from a roof. And bullets began to whine past him.
Untouched, he gained the spot where his son lay momentarily senseless from pain.
He bent over the fallen man, caught him up in hisarms, and started heavily back toward the tree, keeping his own body between Joseph and the village.
Then it was that Dad discovered Jimmie close at his side.
“I told you to wait—back there—for me to come back!” he panted.
“I couldn’t!” muttered Jimmie in the same short-of-breath tone. “Gimme his feet to carry—I want to help some way.”
Dad assented, and the limp weight was shifted between the two.
Bullets spatted the ground near them. One rifle-ball ripped through the wooden sides of Jimmie’s worshiped drum slung at the lad’s hip.
“Over to the right,” ordered Dad. “To that cottage over yonder. We can get him there, I guess. And then you can cut ahead and see if you can overhaul a company of our men to come back for us.”
A one-story stone hut stood some fifty yards distant; and thither they bore the injured man.
It was no longer a task of peril, for suddenly the firing had stopped from the now-beyond-range rooftops of the village.
Dad, as they reached the cottage porch, glanced back toward the town to learn the reason; pessimistically certain that the cessation of firing meant a detachment of Confederates had been detailed to capture them.
But a single look relieved his fears and explained the situation to him. The village was a-buzz with hurrying men. They were pouring out of houses and barns like ants from a hill in an excited swarm.
The Confederates had evidently just discovered the meaning of the Federal ruse and the fact that the two regiments which had attacked them were again on the march.
Wherefore, to seize at least a remnant of glory from the day of defeats, the Confederate leader was taking his men in pursuit of the withdrawing regiments in the hope of overhauling and thrashing them before they could come up with the remainder of the demi-corps, which had now passed out of sight.
At such a moment the capture or killing of three fugitive Yankees was too trivial a matter to think of. The village was emptied with incredible speed.
The hut’s occupants were as devoid of danger as they were devoid of reasonable chance, by this move on the part of the enemy, of rescue.
Dad explained this in a dozen words to Jimmie as they laid Joseph’s body on a truckle bed in the half-furnished front room of the cottage.
“We’ve got to tend to him ourselves,” he ended. “We can’t carry him, wounded like this, to headquarters. It might kill him. If there was just someone here who understood something more than we do about nursing—”
“There is!” spoke up Jimmie.
“What?”
“When that general of yours hustled all the guns and the baggage along he left the two biggest wagonsto follow. I know why, too. They’re Red Cross wagons. Volunteer nurses, sawbones, and all that sort of thing. They’re immune from getting shot or nabbed. So he didn’t clog up the ‘rush’ baggage with ’em.
“I got all that while I was waiting for leave to go ahead with my drum. They can’t be over a mile or so off. They’ll be on that main road over yonder somewhere.”
“Go and find one of the wagons if you can,” ordered Dad. “Beg a nurse and a surgeon—both, if you can, and get back as quickly as possible. You’ve got a good head, son, to remember all that. It’s the real man who stores up petty details and makes use of them. Hurry!
“Wait!” he exclaimed, the memory of a woman’s chance words flashing athwart his mind. “Wait! She—she said she might become a nurse. Ask if there is a Mrs. Sessions—remember the name—Sessions—in the corps of nurses there. If there is, ask if she can be detailed for this work!”
Jimmie was gone.
Dad turned back to the couch and loosened the throat of his son’s jacket and shirt.
Joseph had grown thinner and darker and older this past year. The smugly self-sufficient look seemed gone from his face, as his father bent solicitously to scan it.
Dad’s hands ran over his body in search of the wound.
The graze on the wrist was a mere nothing. But aspent ball had struck the shoulder and, without piercing the skin, had snapped the shoulder-blade by its impact—one of the most painful and least perilous of injuries.
It was this hurt which had caused Joseph to spring up, stumble and fall, and whose pain had later made him swoon.
The man came back to his senses. Opening his eyes and seeing above him an officer in the uniform of a captain, he raised his uninjured arm with difficulty in an all-but-involuntary salute.
“Joe!” cried the old man. “Don’t you know me? Don’t you know me? It’s Dad. I—mean ‘father.’”
Joseph Brinton looked up dully; with eyes that had in them no faintest glint of recognition. He had known the uniform. He did not at all know the face.
His father, to the best of his son’s belief, was still spending the bulk of his days and nights lording it in frowzy dignity in the Eagle bar; his long, silvery hair hanging down above his film-eyed and somewhat bloated face; his pursy form incased in the shiny old-fashioned frock suit.
Mrs. Joseph Brinton had not thought best to notify her absent lord that his father had run away.
Partly for fear of worrying the soldier-husband; partly lest Joseph be inclined in his primly perfect way to blame her for not keeping closer watch on the old man, or of making his stay at the big house happier than had been her frigid course in reality.
Of Jimmie’s deflection from the home nest, Josephknew nothing, for the very good reason that Mrs. Brinton, still in Europe, had not herself been to date apprised of the fact. Her family had feared her lofty wrath, and they still hoped that, his war craze satiated, Jimmie might return home before his mother should arrive back at Ideala.
In the alert and muscular soldierly figure and the lean, strong face bent above him, Joseph now saw not one lineament of a father whose vagaries he had borne so long and with such exemplary patience.
But at a repetition of the words: “Don’t you know me, Joe?” something in the voice struck him as vaguely familiar. Not in the intonation which was wholly new; but the timber.
He blinked perplexedly. Then a new twinge of pain made him wince.
“You are not dangerously hurt,” said Dad. “It is a painful wound, but it is not serious. Try to stand it like a soldier.”
“Yes, sir,” answered Joseph.
“You still don’t know me? Think, man! I am your father.”
“My—myfather!” echoed Joseph incredulously.
DAD looked up, and his gaze through the window fell on Jimmie. The boy had paused in his flight across the field—almost at the threshold of the cottage.
His grandfather passed out to see what was delaying him.
On the porch Dad halted, staring into the hot haze of sunshine and dust that rolled up from the fields.
In the shade of a magnolia, Battle Jimmie was squatting on all fours, pulling a bayonet out of the ground.
“What are you doing?” asked Dad.
The boy looked up half guiltily.
“I saw this bayonet stuck here,” he explained. “And—”
“And your father is waiting for a nurse,” reproved Dad.
“I know. I’m sorry. But I thought this would be nice to take along. I’ve always wanted one. There isn’t any great hurry about father. He isn’t badly hurt. I knew that as soon as I looked at him. I’ve seen enough of them to know. I guess he’s mostly scared.”
“Jimmie!”
“When I saw him it seemed like I was almost a kid again. You don’t suppose he’ll make me go back to school again, do you, Dad? I—I wonder who used to own this bayonet, and why he threw it away, whoever he was? Or if he had no more use for bayonets and things.”
The boy fell silent there in the acrid haze, looking into unnamable distances, seeing in his mind’s eye the ceaseless columns of sternly marching men.
Dad looked at the bayonet. On its haft there was a dried spot—a spot that had once been red and wet—
It was the jack-knife that war gives its children. Dad felt a queer sensation in the corners of his eyes, and, surreptitiously wiping them, muttered something about “this blamed hay-fever,” and pretended to be very brusk and ordered, with an abominably poor imitation of sarcasm:
“When—when you get through with all the important duties that seem to be worrying you so, you skedaddle across the fields and see if you can find me that nurse or surgeon for your father. Get out! Keep a running! It isn’t like you to loaf like this. And I’m surprised at you. And—remember to ask for a Mrs. Sessions, as I told you. It is an off-chance. But in war, off-chances are the kind that happen. Now, scurry. Stop wasting time.”
“I’m sorry,” said Jimmie. “I guess it’s the sight of father that’s somehow taken all the ginger out of me. I’m going.”
Boyish memories of the dread men he had seen marching—marching—marching—faded from Jimmie’s face. He sprang up to attention, his eyes bright and keen, his thin, brown little hand at his temple in a cocky salute, while he cried:
“As you order, captain!”
He started off across lots.
He was not a small boy going on an errand. He was a well-trained and extremely weary and unconsciously pathetic little soldier who had seen death ride down the ranks of drawn battle. His reaction had, boylike, taken the form of mischievous perverseness.
He was very tired. He made his short legs carry him on and on, though he wanted to drop; while his eyes swept every thicket for possible Confederate stragglers or skirmishers along his way.
As he reached the main road running back to the town and the distant Federal lines, he saw a movement in the sumac-bushes, now glittering with the fire of approaching autumn.
What was it? He couldn’t afford to get shot or captured now. He had to bring a nurse. Dad had told him to.
Jimmie instantly dropped to the ground and lay without movement.
He could almost see the stern, quiet, deadly face of the foeman who must be hidden there in that nearest bush, perhaps already aware of him and taking his aim—perhaps taking aim right at his breast as he lay there so quietly. But he did not move. He waited.
Then the sumac-bushes parted, and out from between the roots peered the furry, eager face of a dog; impudent, inquiring, with his ragged left ear flapping gayly over his eyes while he stared indignantly at the silent figure in the roadside ditch.
That eye seemed to be volubly remarking:
“What the dickens are you doing there? Trying to fool a poor dog that ain’t either Johnnie Reb or Yank; but just a plain, ornery, scared mongrel, boy’s dog as can hunt you out gophers?”
At least, that’s what Jimmie would have sworn the forlorn mongrel said as he peered out from the sumacs.
“Howdy, dog? Where y’ going?” Jimmie inquired, sitting up.
The dog himself said nothing but “Y-e-e-e-e-e-h.” But his tail, going flippety-flip, flippety-flip against the brush, announced its entire friendliness.
The answer was much the same as before, while the dog looked still more friendly and whined a little. He cocked his ears up over his head.
“Think you’re Napoleon Bonaparte, don’t you, with your cocked hat made out of ears? All right; that’s your name, then—let’s see?—Emperor Napoleon Peter Bub Bonaparte Brinton Dog, Esquire. I give you that name all for your own. Got a master? Well, come on then. Gotta hurry. Come on, boy!” He whistled.
And down the road started the boy afresh, cheered by companionship. And the dog, which seemed to take it for granted that he had a new owner, followed.
As they drew up to the line of sentries about the hospital bivouac, panting with haste, a sentry stopped them, mumbling: “Wh’ go th’r’?”
“Aw—y’ know me!” snapped Jimmie. “Lemme by. I’m in a hurry.”
“Sure I know you,” grinned the sentry. “You’re Gen’ral McClellan. But who’s that four-footed gent with you? He must be a gen’ral, too—ain’t he? I notice he’s a little gray—all of him as ain’t brown or red or yaller or just plain dirt-colored.”
Jimmie drew himself up to the dread height of his full four foot seven and stalked by, meekly followed by Napoleon Peter Bub Bonaparte Brinton Dog, Esq., while the sentry scoffed after the twain:
“He’s a well-bred trick, all right; he’s got more kinds o’ breedin’ in him than all the dogs I ever see. Them forepaws look to me like South Boston bull, but I guess his second toe-nail on his lift hind foot is St. Bernard.”
Across the camp trailed a couple of Q. M. wagons drawn by tired mules, which had come pounding down the turnpike laden with nurses. The lieutenant-surgeon in charge cantered beside them on a bay mare. Running up to him, Jimmie bawled out in a commanding treble:
“Halt! Beg pardon, loot’nant, but—”
“Well, well, well, well, well!” snapped the surgeon, drawing rein sharply. “What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it?”
“Jimminy crickets! Zif once saying it wouldn’t beenough!” complained Jimmie, down inside himself; while aloud he begged, quickly:
“Captain James Dadd sent me for a nurse for an awful dangerous wounded man he’s looking after down there in the cottage off to the right from the road.”
“Captain Dadd, eh? But who’re you?”
“Battle Jimmie, sir.”
“Oh, yes! Sure! I’ve heard of you. All right. I’ll detail—”
“I was to ask,” piped Jimmie, belatedly remembering—“I was to ask if there’s a Mrs. Sessions in the nurse corps. If there is, please—”
“Me?” suggested a pleasant voice from the foremost wagon of nurses which had stopped during the colloquy.
The officer and Jimmie looked to see, peering out from under the canvas cover, a rosy-cheeked, delicate-skinned, smiling little old lady—a sweet and silvery-voiced little old lady—with sleek white hair shining under the edge of her nurse’s cap.
“Eh?” snapped the officer.
“I know Captain Dadd, and I’m going to help him,” said the old lady in nurse’s uniform, sweetly but decisively, starting to climb out of the wagon. “Especially since he’s bothered to ask for me.”
While the newly appointed officer stared in wrathy silence, wondering just what the military regulations for volunteer army surgeons said about the proper method of coercing nurse-ladies almost old enough to be one’s mother, the old lady climbed briskly down fromthe wagon, one trim foot, in a neat slipper with a coquettish silver buckle, on the wheel hub.
She seized Jimmie’s arm, patted Napoleon on the head, and started trotting off without another look back, while the surgeon wheeled, shouted “Forward!” and moved off.
“Do you know, my dear, I fancy you must be Jimmie Brinton,” laughed the old lady, panting a little with the fast walk into which she had led Jimmie.
“Yessum,” wondered Jimmie, looking up adoringly at the rosy-cheeked old lady.
Somehow she seemed to mean to him gingerbread cookies—and long stories and sleepy Sunday afternoons when the hammock swung among June roses—and a motherly breast on which to whisper out his griefs and disillusions.
Somehow the halt while he had investigated the grim bayonet rusted with a dead man’s blood, and the hot afternoon, and the pattering footsteps of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte behind him, and the comfortable mother-face of the plump and gentle old lady trotting beside him—they all blurred together, and he knew that he was very tired and wanted to be taken care of.
For a second he was quite sure that he was going to faint with the heat, confessing all the burden of the reaction and his weariness; that he was going to lie down in the shade and just be a tired small boy nursed by a kindly old lady.
Then he straightened himself up and bit his lip tillit stung and clutched her soft arm protectingly, while he mumbled:
“Yessum, I’m Jimmie—Battle Jimmie, they call me—and I’ll watch out for you, I will, if any of them blamed Rebs try to get funny with you, ma’am!”
“Oh, youdearboy!” she caroled in a voice that sounded to him like a running brook and a mother-song and a laughing girl, all at once.
And, without ever for a second ceasing her puffing little trot, she leaned over and kissed his tangle of soft red hair.
“I know your grandfather, my dear, and I’msureyou’ll take care of me, because he says you’re a chip of the old block—and I know it, now I’ve seen you.”
“You know—Dad?” he asked in wonder.
“Yes—and now I know Dad’s dear chum and grandson, too,” she answered, laughing. “I’m the Mrs. Sessions you were sent for. At least, I used to be when I knew your grandfather. But for the last month I’ve been Volunteer Nurse Sessions, of the Army of the Potomac. So, you see, we are all three soldiers together: you and I and—Dad!”
WHILE Jimmie was hastening over across the sun-sodden fields in search of a nurse, Captain James Dadd returned to the cottage and stood by the cot of his son, looking down at him again.
Private Joseph Brinton stared back, trying to make sure that his father, the wastrel, really wore the insignia of an army captain.
Trying to make sure—not to understand. That was beyond him.
“Jimmie’s doing some real brave work, isn’t he?” said the father timidly.
“Why, he’s—Father, I wish you’d tell me how you—”
“Jimmie’s well thought of by everyone—officers and men,” Dad continued hastily, feeling suddenly guilty the moment the conversation turned to his own unworthy self. “I’m glad you have such a son, Joseph. Maybe he’ll make it up to you for my having wasted so much of my life. Because, you see, I do know, I do understand, that your own life has always been founded on big principles. And I guess there has always been something careless about—”
“Stop!” ordered Private Joseph Brinton dazedly; and Captain James Dadd meekly obeyed.
“Stop! As far as I can see, father, you must have done some wonderful work as a soldier—however it all came about—and—”
He paused, blinked, and caught up the thread of his words:
“But honestly, father—and I think you understand that I am not a man who has been accustomed to be apologetic—I really feel that I have learned something during the past year of fighting for the old flag. Somehow, honestly, father—though perhaps you won’t believe it—”
Joseph stopped, almost shy, while his father hastened to assure him.
“Oh, yes, yes! I do believe you, Joseph.”
“Well, father, sometimes nights, when I’ve sat by a camp-fire or paced a lonely post doing sentry-go, I’ve wondered if my business was necessarily as important as I used to think it was; and I wondered if I didn’t make the mistake of thinking that Almighty God created the world just for that business of mine; and if I wasn’t rather harsh with you.”
“Joe!” exclaimed Dad in wonder; but his son plunged on:
“And now when I’ve found how dev’lishly hard—yes, dev’lish, though you know I never did believe in cussing—how dev’lishly hard it was just to be a private, and forget your own cold feet and stinging eyes when you were ordered out in the night to trot down infront—ugh!—down there in the darkness where little flashes showed the enemy were waiting for you—when I found out how hard that was, and now I findyouhere an officer—and you so much older than I—oh!”
His voice rose almost to a shriek.
“Those flashes—us sitting by the fire, thinking of home and the office, and feeling so safe, and then having to shoulder Springfields and trot down there where there might be a Reb behind every tree—father, I swear to you that often—often—it was because I remembered that I was the son of a soldier that I was able to do it.
“Business had killed something in me, but war seems to have brought it to life again, and I’m proud of you—proud—oh, Daddy—oh, I’ve wanted to tell you—”
He choked. The wound and the shock were doing their work on self-contained Joseph Brinton.
Captain James Dadd, falling on his knees beside the rude and cluttered cot, smoothed his son’s hair. He darted out to the spring at the back of the cottage and brought his cap full of water, and bathed Joseph’s forehead, all the while agitatedly insisting:
“There, there, my boy! You were right—I wasn’t much good, and if you did think of me as a soldier, it’s more than I deserved. Don’t—don’t, my boy! I don’t at all understand what you mean about business having killed something in you. You were always an upright man.”
“I—”
“I’ve always been proud of you—I’ve always prayed that the dear God would forgive me for my own useless life because my son was a man who helped build up progress and helped keep his world going. And you were always so honest—”
The prim Joseph Brinton of the office was not yet all transformed into a soldier of the legion. The sick man, his moment of breakdown passing, listened to his father’s praise quite calmly, taking it quite as a matter of fact.
There was no little pride in the manner in which he assented:
“Well, yes, I suppose I always was honest, as you say.”
Nor did he offer any protest as Dad bustled about, bathing his cheeks and twitching his hot pillow into shape, and running to the door to gaze out into the stifling haze for a sign of Jimmie and the nurse.
But when Dad at length settled down beside the cot, patting Joseph’s hand, the two of them sat quiet there in the dusk of the little room.
And for the first time since Joseph had thought of his father as disgraced, there was peace and love hovering about them, glorifying the dingy cottage between the battle lines.
Loud hummed the great locusts outside, a drowsy, distant z-z-z, z-z-z, like the lazy croon of the death-bearing Minie balls which Dad (that inveterate old child, who would never stop his making believe!) half-unconsciously pretended they really were.
Sitting in the little cottage, stroking Joseph’s hands, suddenly he heard voices coming—the shy little laugh of Battle Jimmie and, running through Jimmie’s chatter like a silver thread, a voice which startled him—a familiar voice he could not place, but which seemed rich with a peculiar magic that attaches itself to the beloved.
Softly laying Joseph’s hands back on the cot, he tiptoed to the door and saw—Jimmie and Mrs. Sessions, his dream-lady of the lavender-scented attic!
And his greeting to her might have been the shy effusiveness of a boy lover of eighteen.
“Why—it isn’t you, is it? I told him to ask for you, but I didn’t dare to hope—And it’s reallyyou!”
“Guess it is!” chuckled the old lady delicately. “I—somehow—”
She blushed and hesitated. Then she frowned—oh, such a portentous frown!—as she suddenly remembered that she was a nurse in the service of U. S. A., and said severely:
“Who’s the patient?”
“It’s—my—son,” faltered Dad.
“Oh, mydear! Has he—bullied you again as he used to?” she said, with the quick, familiar affection of two who have gone through the same trials together.
“No, ma’am; he’s never done that, I shouldn’t say. But somehow we do seem a little nearer together now.”
“Let me take a look at him.”
As she entered the cottage the dusty, mildewed airseemed to shiver with a crisp and delicate fragrance of lavender.
And as her nimble, slender fingers, with their one ring—a worn, thin band of chased gold—passed softly over Joseph’s brow, the room seemed to change from a battle hospital to a home of mother love.
“He’s doing fine,” she smiled. “Didyouput on those bandages?”
“Yessum!” mumbled Captain Dadd, again shy and anxiously wondering if he by chance had been so fortunate as to put them on properly.
“Needn’t be so frightened, child,” she laughed. “They’re very nice—very nice, indeed. All I’ll need to do will be to watch him and change them in an hour or two.”
Then she stopped, and blushed again, and fidgeted with the pillow. On the opposite side of the cot Dad fidgeted with his collar and looked embarrassed and wished he could think of something to say.
While the superior Private Joseph Brinton said nothing at all, Jimmie stared with wonder at the sudden silence that had come upon his beloved Dad and the dear lady of the rosy cheeks.
“Uh!” said Dad, who really believed that he was going to say something sound and valuable about the weather.
But, as it occurred to him that, on the whole, it was rather foolish to talk about the weather in a day of battles and sudden death, he didn’t get beyond the “Uh—” only, stopped and looked slightly foolish.
“Yes?” said Mrs. Sessions wistfully, glancing involuntarily at the door.
Dad peeped at the face of Joseph. He was wishing that he could take charge of things. But in the presence of his formidable son dared he say to Mrs. Sessions all the things he wanted to—things that had rung through his brain in lonely nights of marching and hot noons of battle?
It was Jimmie who solved their shyness.
“Say, gee, if you want to talk, why don’t you g’wan outdoors anddoit? I’ll look after father while you’re gone; and do it as well as you can, I guess.”
And Dad, not daring even to glance at Joseph for approval or scorn, offered his arm with slow and stately old-world deference to Mrs. Sessions, and they passed thus together quietly out of the door.
Down by the spring towered a great laurel, which shut off the waves of heat that were dancing their devil-dance across the hot fields. Under it was a weather-grayed wooden bench carved with initials and rude heart-symbols of lovers long since forgotten.
Dad led the little lady to the bench. And she sat there, panting with her recent exertions, but smiling up at him as he stood shyly fingering the hilt of the sword she had given him.
“So you’re a captain—acaptain!” she said, looking proudly at his shoulder insignia, shiny and new on the worn blue coat that had served him for strenuous months.
“Yessum—and—I wanted to tell you, time andtime, that I owe a lot of it to you. I don’t really care so very much whether I’m captain or general or high private, so long as I’m serving this country of ours; except that perhaps as an officer I’m able to use a certain amount of technical knowledge of military tactics which it has been my hobby to acquire. But whatever I have done has largely, I think, been done because you regarded me as aman—not just as an old man—and gave me this sword as a symbol of your belief.”
Suddenly the old lady pulled out of the tiny pocket of her nurse’s costume a frail lavender-scented handkerchief and wiped her eyes. Reaching up her hand, she squeezed the mighty gnarled hand of Dad.
That was her only answer.
They were silent for a moment. All about them swirled the heat, while the shrill of the locusts was like a wall of sound, pierced only by the very far-off clanking of artillery harnesses, and once or twice by the faint, creepy boom of a cannon.
And into that silence stole a feeling that they had known each other always. They did not have youth’s slow, diffident reticences. They had lived and learned that when one finds an understanding heart it must be linked to one’s own very quickly and surely.
“You have—I am glad it has helped you,” she said softly.
For answer he bent his head and reverently kissed her hand.
“And your son—you are a little closer together?” she asked.
“Yes. I am more glad than I could tell you, ma’am, to say that we are.”
“And I love your grandson. Dear boy, he told me that he would take care of me. And do you know, I didn’t feel a bit like laughing at the tiny fellow, because I felt as though it wereyouspeaking.”
“You knew him then, ma’am?”
“Yes. He spoke your name and—you mustn’t go and think that you’re the only one who has been influenced by things.
“There, now! Laws! Laws! These men folks! They will always be taking the high and sacred rights for themselves, while of course we poor women just sit home and keep the wood-box filled and pick lint and don’t have any high aspirations. Of course my mother back in Wilbr’am never wanted to do anything but cook father’s vittles. Oh, no!”
Her thin, charming little voice pretended to be very severe, but somehow Dad didn’t mind it. Indeed, he grinned a lively, happy, young little grin as he sat down beside her while she ran on.
“Well, if you must know, you had just as much influence over me as I had over you. I got thinking that it was a shame and a disgrace that I should be there at home just sitting and holding my hands that the good Lord gave me to do something with, when you were out fighting for your country. So I up and enlisted as a nurse.
“I did! Land o’ Goshen, if I hadn’t I guess it’d ’a’ pretty near driven me into high strikes to sit there dayafter day while you were riding off, land knows where, being shot and never, never changing your shoes and socks, no matter how wet they got!”
Dad’s hand had slipped along the worn old seat of many lovers toward hers, where it lay pink and soft and everlastingly capable against the weather-gray pine.
“So,” she went on, “I just went out and enlisted as a nurse. But whatdoyou think? That snippet of a little lieutenant—and he’s just a doctor, and no more of a lieutenant than I am—he that was in charge of the nurses—he wa’n’t going to let me come when you called for me, and I just up and went. Captain, can’t you speak to him, you being his superior officer and all, and tell him he mustn’t be so high and mighty to women old enough to be his mother?”
She seemed to take him for the commander of all men—the man who had arranged everything and made everything just and good.
It was balm to Dad. Yet he said: “I’m afraid you were very insubordinate, Mrs.—”
He hesitated a little. The words tripped over one another in his throat. Then he brought out, roundly and commandingly:
“Ma’am, it isn’t right we should go on mistering each other when we’ve been such good friends and all, and—my name’s James.”
“And mine,” said she softly, “is Emily.”
Silence again.
His hand had strayed over to hers, and suddenlyhers curled into a little ball, and his brown, strong hand closed over it protectingly.
“Emily,” he half-whispered, “you didn’t quite forget me.”
“No,” she whispered back.
“And you don’t think I’m just a drunken old—”
“Oh, my dear—oh, no,no!” she half-sobbed. “You’re a good man. You have loved God, and now, in the day of need, He has not forgotten His servant.”
“Emily—”
“FA-ATHER!” rang out a querulous voice from the cottage.
“Drat that child!” said Mrs. Sessions almost viciously. “James, I’ll give your boy Joseph an earful. He’s a fretful, suspicious fellow, and if ’twa’n’t for his father and his son I’d nurse him with a field battery, I would.”
But she marched into the cottage. She turned Battle Jimmie out to talk to Dad. She changed bandages and tenderly smoothed Joseph’s head, through which the pains were shooting like heat lightning, and on the little old cannon-ball stove in the corner made him toast out of a piece of army hardtack she found and split.
Then she sat down beside the cot and straightway began:
“Joseph—I s’pose you’re ‘Mr. Brinton’ to them that works for you; but I’m older than you, my dear, besides being your nurse. And I want to tell you while I have the chance that if you weren’t so badly wounded I’d want to take and spank you like a house afire for always being so snippy to that splendid father of yours. Why, if I wasn’t just an old, old woman,I’d be tempted to fall in love with him right here on the spot, I would.”
She chuckled comfortably and patted the wounded man’s hand. And right there Joseph Brinton made a mistake which, if duplicated in his business, would have ruined the same beyond recall.
We all of us, when we are ill, feel that the world owes us the privilege of being querulous about our pet grievances; and Joseph now lifted his voice and complained:
“I can’t understand why you make all this fuss over my father. If it hadn’t been for the trouble I’ve had all these years in caring for him, and the shame he’s so often brought on me—”
Emily Sessions changed instantly from a kindly and wise, though easy-going, nurse into a small, almost youthful, spitfire.
“D’ you ever see a Newfoundland dog?” she snapped.
“Why, yes,” he said wonderingly.
“A big, gentle, kind, self-respecting Newfoundland dog?”
“Why, yes—I suppose so.”
“Suppose!Don’t you suppose me any supposes!”
“Well, then, I have. Though why—”
“Well, now, tell me,” she demanded, sitting more and more erect, “if you ever saw a terrier pup trying to dig out a gopher and busy as he could be, and lands! no more chance of catching that gopher than if he was a hundred miles away.”
“Yes. But—”
“Well, then, that’s your father and you. He’s the Newfoundland; and you’re the little rat of a terrier that’s always been so busy with his own self-important concerns that—”
“The Confeds are coming!” shrilled a voice at the door.
It was Battle Jimmie, outlined against the heat-trembling outdoors.
“What?” groaned Emily Sessions.
“Squadron of Reb cavalry riding hell-bent-for-leather toward us,” cried Jimmie and disappeared.
The old lady ran toward the doorway.
“Don’t leave me!” begged the wounded man; but she disappeared.
Outside she found Captain Dadd standing quietly under the big locust-tree, gazing tranquilly down the turnpike, where a gallop of horses’ hoofs rang out from a cloud of dust, through which gray uniforms now and then flashed forth.
Quiet he stood, but expectant, and his sword hung by its strap from his right hand, while even as Mrs. Sessions looked she saw him gently lift the butt of his Colt’s to see if it was loose in the holster.
She ran up beside him and clutched his arm. He looked down at her, smiled quietly, and even more quietly put his arm about her slender waist. She nodded.
Jimmie stood beside them, in his hand a huge .44—resurrected, like the bayonet, from the stricken field.
And so they waited.
The Confederate troop came swinging up the turnpike; lean, capable, hard-bitten men on a raid.
“Halt!”
They drew up at the gate, with a scrabble of hoofs and a confusion of horses’ bodies.
“Take that man and boy prisoner,” came the voice from the big, black-bearded man at the head—a man with the bars of a captain.
Four troopers spurred into the yard and approached.
“Shoot till they get us,” ordered Captain Dadd. “Better anything than a Southern military prison. Especially for Joe when he’s wounded. Good luck, Emily; good luck, Jimmie. Stand behind that tree there, Emily dear. They’re real men. They won’t pester you. Careful aim, Jimmie. Let ’er go!”
The revolvers of two men—one a boy and one gray of hair, but men both—rang out together.
Two troopers, now but ten feet away, swayed in the saddle and one very quietly slid off.
Again rang the revolvers, but before anyone could tell whether the shots had taken effect, the whole troop came hurtling up the lane, and thundering, whirling around them, caught at the two.
A swift down-swoop by the black-bearded captain of Southern cavalry, and a revolver butt laid Captain Dadd out senseless and bleeding.
A quick twirl of a halter and Jimmie was swung up to a trooper’s saddle, kicking, but helpless. A nasty saber scratch was across the lad’s forehead.
The old lady was left alone beside the fallen body ofDad. She knelt beside him with great tears in her eyes, her voice keening the world-old sob of sorrow that brave women give their dying lovers.
Nurse as she was, she did not now stop to realize that a blow from a pistol butt is far more likely to stun than to kill.
The captain of Confederate cavalry swung off his horse and looked in at the doorway.
Emily Sessions, frantically kissing the forehead of Dad, didn’t hear, but within the cottage the erstwhile sedate Joseph Brinton staggered from his bed, dizzy with pain, and snarled out hysterically:
“You get the hell out of here!”
The huge, black-bearded captain merely smiled and, mounting, rode back along the lane toward the highroad.
He stopped so suddenly that the horse of the trooper behind almost piled up on the haunches of the captain’s horse.
Facing the Confederates in the lane, standing beside the body of her wounded, stood an old lady steadily and ferociously aiming a huge .44.
Beside her, bristling and fearless, was another adversary—Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte Dog, who was tearing his little heart out as he leaped up, trying to reach the boot of the trooper who firmly held the still struggling and kicking Jimmie.
“You stop!” demanded Emily Sessions.
Gone was the rosy and placid look of her. Very old and very terrible were her cold eyes. She seemed toglare into the eyes of death, but gallantly; and she had drawn a bead full on the captain’s heart.
Rather whimsically smiling, the black-bearded captain held up both his hands, crying “Halt!” to his troop, who obeyed the command in somewhat amused wonder.
“You needn’t to smile so nice as all that,” snapped the old lady. “I’ve half a mind to shoot you. And you tell that man of yours to let Jimmie go. You got the captain, but you ain’t goin’ to get Jimmie, too!”
And then she felt around her shoulders the iron arm of one of the Confederate troopers, whose horse had been concealed by the cottage, but who had slipped round in back of her.
Desperately she tried to turn the muzzle of the gun on him, but his strong hand slipped down on her arm, caught the revolver and wrenched it from her.
She faced the captain again, her shoulders up, ready.
“Tell your murderers to finish me, too,” she said.
The captain of cavalry, for all his big bulk, slipped from his horse as easily as a youngster dismounting before his sweetheart.
“Ma’am,” he said, “we’re soldiers, but Ah reckon we ain’t quite murderers. Mah mother’s a powerful lot like you, ma’am, and Ah reckon Ah love her most’s well most sons do. Sanders, let that boy go. And Ah hope your husband ain’t killed, ma’am. And, ma’am, Ah reckon you’re a praying woman—will you think of my mother to-night when you say your prayers? LastAh heard, there was a right smart o’ Yanks burnin’ an’ raidin’ near her house, an’—
“Mount! Ride! Trot!”
Standing in the lane, watching the bunch of Confederate cavalry go swirling along the turnpike, bound on a raid right for the Federal lines, the old lady suddenly bent back her shoulders and saluted.
And the boy Jimmie, beside her, saluted their dust-hidden troop with her.
Then immediately:
“Take his feet, Jim dear. He ain’t dead. I hear his heart,” said Mrs. Sessions.
And stooping, straining, she lifted Dad’s shoulders.
They bore him into the house. She ordered Joseph peremptorily to move to the corner, where she laid out a “comfortable” for him to lie on, and she straightened out the still form of Dad on the cot.
“Bring water, Jim!” she commanded almost harshly.
The boy sped back down the lane with a can of cool water, and she sat bathing Dad’s head, sobbing softly, but always with a pitiful, artificial, unreal, golden little smile ready to spring out if he should come to consciousness.
The Confederate captain had called Dad her husband. She caught herself trembling with a soft, happy little emotion, which died swiftly as she realized that Dad might—might never speak to her again.
In a corner of the room Jimmie stood anxiously watching beside the recumbent Joseph. He looked down. His father was looking up as anxiously.
Suddenly all their former lack of sympathy for one another was forgotten.
“Dad—grandad—” gasped the boy.
It was all he could say, but it expressed many things—and Joseph Brinton understood them.
“Yes, yes!” said he gently, and stroked his son’s hair.
The silent, grim woman by the bed still watched and her lips moved in many prayers—prayers that Dad might recover—a prayer, too, for the mother of the Confederate captain.
More than an hour passed. Dad’s heart still beat, evenly, soundly, but he did not awaken.
Perhaps he would not, dreaded the old lady. A passionate tenderness came over her. She crossed to the corner where sat Jimmie and Joseph, and with soft words made her peace with Joseph and renewed his bandages.
Jimmie’s hand she patted. She went to the door and snapped her fingers to Napoleon Bonaparte Dog, who was lying in the shade by the doorstone, but awake, ready for his little god to come out of the cottage again.
Napoleon jumped up and came running. Emily tossed him a corner of hardtack.
As she swiftly stepped to Dad’s cot again she found him lying awake, his eyes on her, filled with a great, soft-shining reverence.
She knelt by the bed.
“All right?” she whispered.
“Yes, Emily.”
Then their cheeks were together.
All at once Mrs. Sessions sprang up and snapped out:
“Well, I declare! We’re a fine lot. Jimmie, you go out and get me some fresh water. Never see such a shiftless lot as we are.”
And up the road jingled the slow-moving hospital wagons.
DAD, his trifling hurts nearly well again, stood at attention in General Hooker’s new headquarters across the Maryland border.
Thither, almost as soon as the Army of the Potomac had mobilized in Maryland, he had been summoned.
The corps commander, for a miracle, had been as honest as he was inexpert, and had made full report to General McClellan, through Hooker, of the part Dad had played in drawing forth the endangered demi-corps from the Confederate trap during the retreat from Virginia.
With the result that Captain James Dadd found himself promoted to the rank of brevet-major, and found himself incidentally the day’s hero of his corps. The latter honor he shared with his grandson, who, as Battle Jimmie, was enthusiastically adopted by the officers and men alike.
The two chums bore their laurels with a similar and schoolboy sheepishness, seeking to hide as much as possible from the noisy adulation that was their meed.
And now, in the thick of it all, came the summons from Hooker. As Dad stood in Fighting Joe’s presence once more he recalled keenly his first interviewwith the eccentric fire-eater, when, despite his error in failing to be captured, he had won the general’s approval and his own first commission.
This time he found Hooker dictating to a military secretary on the porch of a farmhouse. Hooker dismissed the secretary with a nod and turned to the waiting officer.
“Major Dadd,” he began abruptly, “General McClellan has asked me to thank you personally, in his name, for your share in the affair of last week. Which I herewith do. That ends my official business with you at the moment. But I would like to add a question or so on my own account—questions you are not bound to answer unless you choose.”
He hesitated, then went on:
“I am told that several of the officers of your corps planned a little supper in your honor a night or two ago to celebrate your promotion and its cause—also, that you refused to attend it.
“May I ask why you offered this slight to them?
“I repeat—you need not answer unless you wish to do so.”
“Slight?” Dad caught up the word. “I—I surely did not intend it so, sir. And I’m heartily sorry they took it as such. I made my refusal as courteous as I could. And—”
“But why did you refuse?”
“I had done nothing worthy of any special ovation,” evaded Dad.
Hooker frowned.
“Modesty is supposed to be an excellent quality,” said he, “though for my own part I could never see any particular use for it. But false modesty is absurd. You know well enough the worth of what you did. Also, you are dodging the issue. That surely was not your reason for refusing a courtesy tendered you by your brother officers.”
“No, sir,” assented Dad simply. “It was not. I refused because—because there was certain to be more or less drinking. And—”
“And, as the guest of honor, you might have had to get very pleasantly drunk? Or are you a temperance devotee?”
“Neither, sir. I would probably have been foolish enough to drink. And then—all I have been striving for this past year would have gone for nothing. I was afraid. So I ran away from the danger.”
Hooker was eying him narrowly.
“You couldn’t trust yourself where drink was?”
“I don’t say that,” corrected Dad. “I only say it was safer for me not to. That’s why I refused.”
“You have not the look of a man who has been a heavy drinker,” said Hooker, noting the lean and muscular figure, the clear and level eyes, the firm mouth.
Dad made no comment.
Hooker spoke again.
“There is much curiosity about you in your corps, Major Dadd,” said he. “And while I have no wish to pry into any man’s personal affairs, yet the interests of all my officers are close to me. And I do notlike to have rumors about them spread among the men. Soldiers are worse gossips than spinsters.
“Your action in last week’s affair was not like that of a man recently promoted from the ranks—a man who, until a year or so ago, was a mere civilian. The tactics you made use of in extricating your demi-corps from a bad corner were those of a strategist. Other officers are commenting on that.”
He paused.
Dad looked at him miserably. The past that he had so carefully buried was stirring in its grave. The old disgrace threatened to rise, to rob him of all he had so hardly earned.
Where there was gossip and curiosity there was fairly certain to be plenty of amateur investigation. And investigation might readily unearth the truth. There were many men in the Army of the Potomac who had served in Mexico.
“Is there any good reason for concealing the fact that you had held a commission before this present war?” went on the general. “It was clear to me the first day I saw you. I knew it by the way you drew your sword. Let me say again that I have no wish to break in upon any man’s privacy. But I wish you to know that others are asking questions. And to tell you that the truth often stops the circulation of such rumors as you might not care to have circulated.”
“Rumors?”
“One is that you deserted from the army at some earlier time and that—”
“Pardon me, general,” interposed Dad stiffly, “but if you can persuade the man who voiced such a lie to face me with it, I shall be your debtor.”
“Who can nail army gossip? One man guesses at a thing to-day. To-morrow fifty men are quoting it as a proven fact.
“I like you, Dadd. You are a good deal of a man. That is why I have bothered to advise you in this matter. Not officially, but as man to man. If you do not care to speak I have no wish to urge you. That is all.”
He turned back to a notebook in which close-scrawled hieroglyphics crammed every page. Dad saluted, turned, and walked away.
At the top step of the porch Dad halted, wheeled and, on impulse, returned to the table where Hooker lounged.
“I thank you, general,” he said, speaking in a rush, as though fearing to lose hold on his new-made resolve. “It was kind of you to take an interest in me, and I am sorry if I seemed ungracious. I—I served for more than two years in the United States army, in the Mexican War. I was a lieutenant-colonel of cavalry and I was afterward attached to General Taylor’s staff.”
Hooker looked up in quick interest. Speaking from an almost phenomenal memory of American war-history, he hastily interjected:
“There was no officer on Taylor’s staff—and no commissioned officer in the Mexican War—named James Dadd. I will stake my reputation on that.”
“No, sir. ‘Dadd’ is not my name. I—I assumed it when I reëntered the service.”
“But why, man, why? Surely you knew that commissioned officers with military experience were at a premium when the Civil War began, and that they were certain of promotion. Look at the men in the army who have had war experience and how they have risen. Dozens of them.”
“I enlisted under an assumed name,” said Dad slowly and forcing each word from his whitened lips, “because I did not believe I would be accepted under my own name.”
“But why? With a war record—By the way, if it is a fair question, what is your name?”
“My name,” said Dad, bidding farewell to hope, “is James Brinton.”
“Brinton?” repeated Hooker reflectively. “Brinton?”
He was evidently racking his brain. And presently he found what he sought. For he glanced up, wide-eyed.
“Not—not the Brinton who—”
“Who was kicked out of the army for drunkenness and for grossly insulting the general commanding,” supplemented Dad, his voice dead as though he were reciting some entirely impersonal fact.
“I remember,” said Hooker briefly.
Then fell a pause. The two men were eying each other. Hooker’s face a mask; Dad’s white and wretched. It was Dad who broke the silence.
“You will wish—General McClellan will wish—myresignation?” he said haltingly. “It irks me to beg a favor of any man, sir. But I entreat you not to drive me from the army. You can take away my commission if it seems best to you. But let me serve in the ranks.
“If I did wrong I have paid for it. Paid more heavily than I have words to tell you or than you would care to hear.
“I do not ask anything except leave to serve my country at a time when she needs every man she can get. Drunkards, thieves, blackguards are recruited in every regiment nowadays and no questions are asked. May I not serve, too? If I have forfeited a right to my commission, at least let me—”
“Major Dadd,” interposed Hooker, his voice harsh and more abrupt than ever, “you talk like a fool. You have brooded over a silly piece of ancient history till it has made you lose all judgment.
“Why, man,” he broke out angrily, “what in blazes does Uncle Sam care about your getting drunk fifteen years ago and telling old Fuss-and-Feathers what you thought of him? Many a perfectly sober man has said worse things of poor old Scott.”
“But—but, sir—”
“But nothing! Here you’ve been doing a real man’s work for a year or more and getting none of the benefits of it, first because you are dunce enough to think the American nation has nothing to do but remember you once got drunk! Why, half the country has even forgotten the Mexican War. And the otherhalf doesn’t care if a man named Brinton chased Scott with an ax. Ever hear of Grant in those Mexican days? He was down there.”
“Yes, sir,” stammered Dad, his brain a-whirl. “I—”
“Well, he’s doing big things out West, just now. And some idiot complained the other day to Lincoln that Grant enjoys a bout with John Barleycorn, now and then.
“Do you know what the President said? He said: ‘I wish I knew what brand of whisky Grant uses. I’d buy a hogshead of it for every other general in the army.’
“That’s what Lincoln thinks of such things. And I, for one, would rather be judged by Abraham Lincoln than by any other man alive. Man, don’t look so dumfounded! You’ve been in a fool nightmare. Wake up!”
“Do you mean, sir, that—”
“I mean I’m going to tell your story to everyone who asks me about you. And I’m going to write to the President about it next time I send him a report. It’s the sort of story he likes to hear.
“Good Lord! Do you think it’s nothing for a man to drop drink at your age and make his life all over afresh? Why, why—curse it all, shake hands! And get out of here. I’m busy.”
Dad walked away, his feet on air; the angry fuming of the general behind him sounding like wondrous music in his ears.
All at once he seemed like Christian in his favorite“Pilgrim’s Progress” to have dropped from his shoulders a world-heavy burden which had crushed him to earth. All at once his terrible secret was seen by him through Hooker’s keen eyes. And from that moment it forever lost its terror.
“I—I wish,” he murmured, “I wish I knew just exactly where Mrs. Sessions is. I’d love to tell her. And, till I can tell her—I guess I’ll be happy over it all alone. James Brinton. Lieutenant-Colonel James Brinton. Of Taylor’s staff!”