BREVET-MAJOR JAMES DADD, of the Blankth Ohio Infantry, was one of his own tent’s three occupants.
Seated cross-legged on a blanket roll facing the cot where sat his grandfather, was Battle Jimmie. Between the boy’s knees reclined the tent’s third inmate, his Canine Majesty, Emperor Napoleon Peter Bub Bonaparte Brinton Dog, whose august title had been whittled down by custom and verbal necessity to “Emp.”
Emp was exploring regions of his yellow back for fleas, biting at the unseen pests with multitudinous, swift little chattering snaps of half-shut jaws.
“I wonder just exactly what breed Emp really is?” conjectured Jimmie.
“Why,” answered Dad reflectively, “I should say, at a broad guess, that the blood of the finest thoroughbreds flows in his veins.”
“Gee! Honest? What kinds of thoroughbreds, I wonder?”
“All kinds,” responded Dad gravely.
Jimmie glanced at him in doubt. But the man’s face was solemn, even judicious; and the boy eyed his pet with respect.
To Jimmie, Dad’s word was gospel. And if Dad declared Emp the scion of many thoroughbreds there was no room for arguing the statement.
“H’m!” commented Jimmie. “And father called him a mongrel.”
“Son,” explained Dad, “there’s two kinds of folks in this funny world of ours—the sort that sees the quality of the various bloods in a yellow dog, and the kind that sees only the quantity. Let’s you and I always try to see the quality. We won’t make so much money as those that see the quantity; but we’ll have a higher regard for dogs—and for everything else.
“Not that I’m criticizing your father, for one minute,” he added hastily. “He’s a fine man, and a son to be proud of. And he’ll go far. But not as a soldier.
“Now that he’s been invalided home, and his year of service is up anyhow, I guess he’ll call it a day and go back to the store. I’m only grateful he didn’t make you go with him. It’s where you ought to be. I know that. But I’d be awful lonely, Jimmie, lad, without you.”
“Why ought I go back home?” demanded Jimmie. “Anybody can go to school. School will always be there. So will home. But maybe the war won’t. And Iamof use here. You said so, yourself. So did the men. Lot’s of ’em.”
“It isn’t what folks say that counts,” said Dad,though his face glowed a little. “Anybody can get a cheer by spectacular work. I’d rather have you back in Ideala, learning the rule of three, than fighting because you like to have the boys trundle you around on their shoulders the way they did that day when we got back to the corps after that charge.
“It’s nice to be praised. No one but a hypocrite will say he doesn’t like it. But it isn’t the real thing to work for.
“The real thing is this country of ours. I keep dinning that into your ears because I don’t want you to forget it for a second. We’re here to work for it, you and I. I had a hard time to make your father understand. But at last he did. That’s why he let you stay. He’s changed a good deal, your father has, this past year. A year ago he would have proven wisely to me that I was quite wrong.”
“A year ago you would maybe have believed him,” suggested Jimmie. “Isn’t that part of the change?”
“Perhaps,” mused Dad. “Perhaps so. Jimmie, there are times when you have almost too much sense. How about the fearful and ghastly wound? Is it getting all right?”
The boy chuckled. The hurts which he and his grandfather had sustained during the little flurry of attack on the cottage had both been quick of healing.
There had been no occasion to go to hospital; and a few days of semi-invalidism had left the two tough bodies well-nigh as good as new. Yet each was daily in the habit of inquiry, with new superlative adjectivesand expressions of sympathy, after the other’s injury. And to each the joke held a pristine freshness.
“Emp was the slowest of us three to get on his legs again,” said Jimmie. “And even he’s all right now. Say, I wonder will he ever catch that flea? He’s been hunting for it and biting at it ever since the day I found him.”
“Maybe Emp’s just four-flushing. A lot of us spend our spare time hunting for what we know isn’t there. It gives us something to exercise our mind.”
“He fights that flea so long and makes such little headway, I’ve a good mind to change his name and call him General McClellan.”
“Hush, lad!” warned Dad, half-serious, half-jesting. “There’s enough criticism all over without our joining in. The whole country is hammering little Mac just now. And maybe the whole country’s wrong, or maybe the whole country’s right. Anyhow, neither the country nor the army nor Mac is the better for it. So don’t let’s you and I add our lung-power to it.
“It’s easy enough to sit back and criticize. But Little Mac is where a word of praise would help more. So is President Lincoln.”
“Dad,” the boy leaned forward earnestly, as though consulting an all-wise oracle, “is it always going to be like this?”
“Like what, son?”
“The thing that’s gone on all year. The Confeds licking us any time and any way they please, and mussing up all our plans and fooling our generals andslipping out of our traps and then belting us in the jaw? Are we always going to be the licked ones? It’s getting just a little monotonous.
“We win a skirmish—or a little battle, like the one back there with the demi-corps that you got your brevet-majorship for—or same other small, third-rate fight. And then they go to work and thrash us in all the other big battles and turn our campaigns upside down.
“Except out West. There our boys are winning all right. But here we get all the lickings. Isn’t the Army of the Potomac good for anything except for the Rebels to trounce? Is it going to be like this all the time? That’s what I want to know.”
Dad’s face was very grave as he listened. Now he laid aside his pipe and made answer, with none of the former whimsicality in his voice.
“No, lad. It won’t last forever. Here’s the whole idea in just a mouthful of words: For years the South has been getting ready. And for years, up North, we’ve been saying there’d be no war. So, when the real fighting began, it was like a middleweight, trained to the minute, tackling a great big lazy giant who was in bad condition.
“The middleweight has hammered the giant all around the ring in most of the fights so far. But every day the giant is getting wiser and stronger and more used to fighting. And pretty soon his weight and strength has got to begin to tell.
“The South is made up of men who are fighting likeheroes. But there aren’t enough of them, and they have mighty few resources, and every day they grow fewer, and their resources get weaker. And the North’s men and money will never give out. Pretty soon the difference has got to show.
“Be patient. We’re fighting for our Union, we Northerners. For the country that my grandfather helped to make free, and that my great-grandfather helped to win from the Indians and the Frenchies. And that country and the Union are going to last forever; no matter how black the sky happens to look just now, make up your mind to that!”
“But, see,” urged the boy impatiently; “they beat us on the Peninsula. And now Lee and Jackson have driven us clean back to Maryland. And they’re coming after us into the North, so the papers say.”
“Yes,” assented Dad. “They’re coming after us into the North. And they may do as they boast and ‘stable their horses in Boston’s Faneuil Hall,’ before we can drive them back. But we will drive them back. Soon or late, son. Don’t doubt that, either, for a minute. As soon as the giant is strong enough. And he gets stronger every day.
“They drove us out of the Peninsula. And now that he’s licked us so easy on his own ground, Lee’s getting ready to try a turn at us on ours. Whether he can get past us or not—”
“Shucks!” growled Jimmie. “I’m sick of waiting. Here, the war was started to free the slaves. And what does Lincoln do? Hasn’t raised a finger to free ’em.Why, if he’d freed ’em all at the start, and then kept plugging away at Richmond—”
“Don’t be foolish, son,” exhorted Dad, “and the foolishest thing on earth you can do is to join in the howl against Mr. Lincoln. He’s doing the only thing that can be done. And he’s the only man in America that can do it.
“Suppose he’d ordered all the slaves set free. What would have happened? About the same thing that would happen if we ordered the sun to shine at night instead of in the day. Nothing does a boss so much harm as to give an order he can’t enforce. And if he declared the slaves free until he was black in the face, they wouldn’t be free. He must wait till the tide turns. And the giant begins to hold his own against the middleweight before he can give the order. In the meantime—”
“In the meantime,” said Jimmie, with ponderous solemnity, “McCluskey told me this morning that the Third Ambulance Corps came up last night. It came on the Frederick road. Not more’n about seven miles from here.”
“What’s that got to do with—”
“With Mrs. Sessions?” asked the boy innocently. “Nothing, except that she’s quartered with that corps. I know. Because McCluskey showed me the list of nurses there.”
“Son,” said Dad, after glaring coldly at the wholly unimpressed lad for a full minute, “let’s go for a ride. I’m off duty for three hours yet.”
“Fine!” agreed Jimmie. “We’ll go any direction you like, except, perhaps, toward Frederick. The scenery isn’t as pretty out that way.”
“Jimmie,” observed Dad, “there are times when I feel that a spanking would do you worlds of good!”
WAR is not a matter of prancing steeds, troops charging, heroic feats of arms. These spectacular adjuncts typify war as the little finger-nail of one hand might typify the whole human body.
War itself is a huge problem in mathematics; combined with an element of puzzle and gross chance.
In short, a game. An iron game, more like chess in its general mode of playing than any other.
Here in brief was the iron chess-game situation in the early autumn of 1862; an all-important crisis in the long-drawn contest:
Lee had wearied at last of acting solely on the defensive. Since the Civil War’s outset, the Confederates had thus far contented themselves with defending their own territory. On Virginia fell the brunt of the fighting. The Old Dominion had from the very first been the chief battleground of the two conflicting forces.
There the South had won victory after victory; with ludicrous ease defeating its more numerous and better-equipped Northern foes. McClellan in vain had hurled his forces against Richmond. In Northern Virginia, at Manassas, the North had also been beaten;there and nearly everywhere else throughout the length and breadth of the State.
Lee, master strategist, had confuted every Federal plan. Jackson, by a wizardry of generalship, had all but annihilated various Union armies in the mountain district.
It had all been easy conquest for the South, prepared and self-girded beforehand for the conflict.
And now, finding the defensive so simple, Lee had determined to take the aggressive; to cease merely to defend his own and to strike a blow at the very heart of the North to carry war directly and vehemently into the enemy’s own well-bulwarked territory itself.
His plan was clever.
Maryland, adjoining Virginia to the north, had ever been loud in protestations of sympathy to the South. The State had all but seceded. It was alive with ardent Confederate well-wishers.
The song “Maryland, My Maryland,” vied with “Dixie” itself. From a thousand Baltimoreans and other Southern sympathizers Lee had received word that the moment his armies should set foot in Maryland the whole State would rise as one man to his support.
Lee, believing all this, decided to invade the North by way of Maryland, where aid and reënforcements by the wholesale presumably awaited him. Thence he planned to march straight to Pennsylvania, and so through to New York, and even, perhaps, to Boston itself.
Washington, too, might prove vulnerable to a flank attack.
In front of him, seeking to bar his way, lay the Army of the Potomac, sullen from many beatings, yet fearlessly awaiting a chance to check the invader. But Lee, having outwitted and outfought that same army so often in Virginia, had scant doubt he could do the same thing in Maryland.
He hoped to dodge the Army of the Potomac in his northward march, forcing it to follow him to some point where he could conveniently thrash it and drive it back, demoralized. In such an event the whole North would lie practically helpless and paralyzed before him, and there would be no troops to spare for a counter invasion of Virginia.
The plan was as simple as it was shrewd. And on September 5, 1862, Lee proceeded to put it into operation.
First bewildering his foes as to his exact position and projects, he safely crossed the Potomac with his whole army into that land of much promise, the State of Maryland.
Here his first setback awaited him.
Maryland had been noisy and voluble in loyalty to the South. But, now that the moment had come to prove that loyalty, the State failed to “rise as one man” to Lee’s support.
In fact, it failed ignominiously to rise at all.
Maryland, as a whole, received Lee coolly. There was no demonstration in his favor. The erstwhile ardent Marylanders did not care to go on record as favoring Lee. For should his invasion fail they were likely thus to find themselves in the unenviable position of the small boy who has prematurely gone to the help of the school bully’s victim.
There had been plenty of sympathy for Lee. There was no aid there for him.
And Bret Harte’s parody on “Maryland, My Maryland,” was sung derisively throughout the North; a parody beginning:
In battle thou art strangely meek,Maryland, my Maryland!Thy politics are changed each week,Maryland, my Maryland!
In battle thou art strangely meek,Maryland, my Maryland!Thy politics are changed each week,Maryland, my Maryland!
In battle thou art strangely meek,Maryland, my Maryland!Thy politics are changed each week,Maryland, my Maryland!
The Army of the Potomac dashed to the defense of the invaded State.
As Lee marched out of Frederick, McClellan marched into the town. The hour for the decisive clash drew near; the clash that should once and for all decide the invasion’s fate.
In Washington—where the fear of the Union capital’s falling into Lee’s hands was monstrously acute—Abraham Lincoln’s rugged face grew paler and more haggard.
To his advisers he announced that he had taken a solemn vow. A vow that, should the invasion be repelled, he would at once issue a proclamation freeing the slaves.
Word of this pledge reached Lee through underground channels. And the Southern leader knew the promise would be kept; moreover, that, on the heels of such a repulse, the Emancipation Proclamation would prove well-nigh a death-blow to all hope of the South’s ultimate success.
The die was cast. The death duel was at hand.
Thus stood the situation on the September day that Dad and Battle Jimmie, on borrowed horses, cantered forth from camp and on to the Frederick road.
Behind them the far-spread Union camps buzzed and hummed and fermented. Excitement was in every breath of air; excitement and the suspense of stark expectancy.
Days would probably pass before the bulk of the Army of the Potomac would be set in motion. But every man knew just what was coming.
Every man knew that the next move would bring the rival forces to grips, and under more pregnant circumstances than ever before.
Wherefore the vast camp stirred and muttered like waking monsters underseas at the surface turmoil of mounting wave and wind-blown foam-crest that presages storm.
Ahead for some distance the road was half-choked with provision trains, ammunition wagons, and baggage carts, through which Dad and the boy threaded their way with no great degree of ease.
The fields on either hand were dotted with couriersand returning skirmish-parties taking short cuts back from Frederick, the town whence Lee’s rear guard, under General D. H. Hill, had departed scarce fifteen hours earlier, which had been formerly occupied by the Union vanguard a short time afterward—three hours, in fact.
As the man and the boy jogged along the press in the road grew thinner and thinner, and in time resolved itself into a semi-occasional stray rider or belated wagon or two.
Dad rode with the careless ease of a lifelong equestrian to whom the saddle was as familiar as a rocking-chair; and his sorrel mount’s occasional passaging and curvets gave the rider not the remotest trouble, nor so much as a conscious thought.
With Battle Jimmie it was different. Until the last few months he had never been astride a horse. And hitherto most of his rides had been on the broad back of some caisson or baggage horse whose lumbering gallop was highly uncomfortable, but to whose moorings—or harness—it was possible to cling with an unsportsmanlike grip that was highly needful, in the light of his inexperience.
Of late, though, Dad had taken his grandson’s equestrian education in hand, with the result that Jimmie now restrained the keen yearning to seize the pommel of his army saddle or the equally tempting mane of his mount in the effort to stick on. He rode in shortened stirrups, sat his saddle stiffly, held the reins as nearlyas possible after the correct and approved army fashion—and during the entire operation was as physically miserable as it was possible for him to be.
His horse to-day, a huge, raw-boned bald-face, would have proven a handful for a more expert rider. Jimmie sawed viciously at the brute’s hard mouth more than once; and the horse retaliated by jerking back his head and then suddenly leaning on the bit with a tug that all but pulled the reins free from the rider’s grubby little hands.
Dad viewed the boy’s efforts with covert amusement; now and then, as in the case of the jerked reins, offering a word or two of criticism, then of brief, if kindly spoken, advice.
“I can stay aboard,” panted Jimmie brokenly, as the horse broke into a hard trot that shook the breath from his lungs. “I can stay aboard, all right. But I could get more fun out of a nice gun-carriage without strings or a—Gee, Emp!” he interrupted himself, apostrophizing the many-breeded dog that frisked coquettishly along just ahead of him. “You ain’t got a ghost of an idea how lucky you are to have four feet instead of riding something that has. And whenyousit down you’ve always got something to sit on that won’t jog you up in the air again. Say, Dad, what old duffer ever invented the fool idea that folks mustn’t hang on by the pommel and the mane?”
“The same man, I suppose,” responded Dad, “who invented all the rules that pester us. The rule thatyou mustn’t run away when you’re scared, and that you must tell the truth when a lie would seem to help, and that you must share the half rations you’re so hungry for with the chap who hasn’t any; and every other rule that’s hard to obey and that makes man something better than an animal.
“Stick on, son. It’ll come easier by and by. Everything does. And the outside of a horse is the best thing for the inside of a man. There’s nothing else on earth to equal riding. It’s—Keep the hand lower and the heels higher, son! Ball of the foot, not the instep, in the stirrup. So!”
“It’s funny,” mused Jimmie, “how we happened to take this Frederick road when there are so many others. If we aren’t careful we’re liable to run into the Third Ambulance Corps wagon train before long. Emp!” he went on, hastily, forestalling any possible retort, “you and I are a lonely pair of youngsters, aren’t we? I wonder if you ever had a grandmother. Maybe dogs don’t. I don’t remember mine.
“But sometimes it kind of almost seems to me as if maybe I can look forward to her, Emp. And it makes me feel pretty good. ’Cause I think she’s just the dandiest little lady that ever fell in love with the dandiest man that ever was, or ever will be, Emp.”
“Jimmie!” remarked Dad, sternly. “Your shoulders are hunched over like a black bear cub’s. Square them when you ride. Don’t look more like a meal-sack or a Cherokee squaw than you can help.”
The boy straightened himself to erect military carriage. And at once the jarring trot of the big horse shook his spine excruciatingly.
He slowed his mount to a walk, thereat, with promptitude.
“Want to turn back, son?” queried Dad. “Had enough of it?”
There was a wistfulness in the kind query that went to the boy’s jouncing heart and made him resolve to be shaken to a pulp sooner than deprive Dad of a chance to see the one woman in the ambulance corps.
“Nope!” he lied blithely. “I’m getting to enjoy it fine.”
Their horses plodded along at a comfortable walk, neck and neck, and the boy breathed more easily and shifted his position in the torturing saddle. Emp took advantage of the slackened pace to dart to the roadside and begin to explore truculently a quite-deserted woodchuck hole.
“Sic ’im, Emp!” encouraged Jimmie. “Dig ’im out, boy! Wrassle ’im!”
Thus exhorted, Emp bent his entire canine energy to the task of unearthing a woodchuck from the hole where no woodchuck was. The dog’s yellow forepaws flew like pistons, widening the mouth of the hole; and his red little tongue was speedily flaked with earth.
Backward from the swift-plied paws, as he dug, flew a cloud of yellow dust.
And a generous share of that same yellow dust was hurled against the spotless gaiters and new baggy trousers of a corporal of Zouaves who chanced to be passing by, on foot, at that side of the road.
The corporal, with a single glance at the cause of this defacing of his dandified raiment, swore fluently and launched a kick at the highly industrious Emp. Jimmie cried out in indignant protest. The kick, conscientiously, but too hastily, delivered, barely grazed the flank of the burrowing dog.
Emp, at the alien touch, ceased his excavations and whirled about to investigate. He was just in time to witness the start of the second and even more vicious kick.
With admirable strategy, Emp leaped to one side as the gaitered calf swung past him and, in practically the same motion, sunk his white little teeth in the Zouave’s other gaiter.
The whole series of maneuvers had occupied scarcely a second, hardly enough time for the two riders to bring their mounts to a halt. The Zouave, with a yell, whipped out the bayonet from his belt and made a right-murderous lunge at the puppy which clung to his leg.
The fierce thrust that should have impaled the little dog did not find its intended lodgment. Instead, the bayonet hopped free of the Zouave’s grasp as though endowed with life, and tumbled into the ditch at the far side of the road.
The man nursing his numbed right hand, glowered upward; to find towering above him a giant horseman, bared sword flashing in ready and righteous menace.
“It says on this blade,” drawled Dad, in an almostconfidential tone, to the wrath-dumb Zouave—“it says ‘Draw me not without cause.’ But I guess the man who made up that motto wouldn’t have thought the less of me for drawing sword to save a poor, fluffy puppy-dog from getting spitted like a turkey. There’s worse uses for a white man’s sword than to save the life of one of God’s little wards.”
“The brute bit me!” growled the Zouave.
“Only when agrosserbrute kicked him,” corrected Dad. “I’m no pet-animal coddler, my friend, and sometimes a dog needs punishment—almost as much as a human does. But always from his own master, and never by a kick. Just bear that in mind, and you won’t force a superior officer to work a swordsmanship disarming trick on you again.”
The man, shifting his ground so that the sun no longer dazzled him, saw for the first time that his quiet-voiced conqueror wore the insignia of a major.
He swallowed back a hot mouthful of oaths, sulkily raised his hand in salute, then slouched across the road in search of his flown bayonet.
“You see, Jimmie,” began Dad, turning, “there’s no harm done, and—”
He broke off with an exclamation of amaze. Jimmie was nowhere in sight. Neither up nor down the road, far as eye could travel.
The boy and his horse seemed to have been caught up to the skies or to have sunk into the solid earth!
FOR a brief instant Dad sat blinking, incredulous. Then he saw and understood.
Crossing the field to right of the road and at an acute angle to it, a full quarter of a mile ahead, thundered a runaway horse. And on the horse’s back, clutching frantically to the saddle, his new-learned principles of riding quite forgotten, swayed and clung Battle Jimmie.
At flash of steel against steel the boy’s half-trained cavalry horse had shied violently. The flying bayonet’s point in passing had pricked his shoulder top, narrowly missing Jimmie.
With a wild bound of fear and pain the horse had cleared the roadside ditch and had struck off at a bounding gallop across the field.
Jimmie, almost unseated by that first leap, grabbed the pommel with one hand, while with the other he sawed at the reins.
He might as readily have pulled against an artillery tug-of-war team. The horse merely lunged his long neck forward a little, caught the bit between his teeth, and sped on, frantic with fear.
With high-pitched voice, and futile, brave little handthe boy sought in vain to check or guide the mad, pounding flight. The horse, which the regimental farrier had that morning vouched for to Dad as “a little rough yet, but as gentle as a kitten,” was an old and incurable offender in the vice of running away.
As a matter of fact it was for this grievous fault that his civilian master had recently sold him cheap to a cavalry contractor.
Dad after a first glance saw that the boy was not frightened and that he was likely to keep his seat far more easily at a sweeping run than at a bone-shaking trot. Unless the horse should buck, shy, or catch his foot in some hole in the field, the rider was safe enough.
On the bare chance of one of the casualties Dad put his own horse at the ditch and galloped down the field in pursuit. But it was more in amusement than in fear that he gave chase.
Well-mounted though he was, he was too far behind, and the runaway was going at too furious a pace for Dad to hope to overhaul Jimmie for some time. So he merely settled down to an enlivening gallop, with the hope that the boy’s horse would soon run himself out.
For two miles or more they continued this; Dad gaining little if at all. The runaway’s panic fear and the light weight of his rider helped him maintain his great pace.
Dad began to worry. They were almost abreast of Frederick by this time, and a full half-mile to south ofthe town. Beyond, somewhere in that tumble of light green valleys and dark green hills was the rear guard of the Confederate army.
Perhaps only a few miles away might lurk a belated troop of camp-followers or even a company of bushwhackers.
To the Confederate army, where boys of fifteen were daily enlisting as regular soldiers, a lad of Jimmie’s age in a Federal uniform would readily pass as an enlisted man and, as such, if captured, would be liable to confinement in one of the Southern war-prisons—a possible fate which turned Dad sick with dread for his adored grandson.
He loosed his rein and for the first time touched spur to his sorrel.
The mettled horse, unbreathed by the gallop, responded with the readiness of a machine. The gallop changed to a run. The stubble field over which they were passing became a yellowish blur under the flying feet.
Little by little, steadily, but ever so slowly, the gap between the blooded sorrel and the coarser-grained runaway began to close. By the end of another mile there was a scant hundred yards between them.
Frederick was well behind them now. The last Union outposts, a half-mile beyond the town and as far to the north of the two riders, were past.
Into “no-man’s land,” into that most perilous of regions, the “debatable ground” between two hostile armies, sped pursuer and pursued.
Hearing the ever-nearing drumming of hoofs behind him, the runaway increased his flagging speed.
Jimmie heard, too, and, glancing back over his shoulder, grinned delightedly at the white-faced man who rode so furiously in pursuit of him.
To the boy it was a glorious lark. The long, smooth gait of the runaway did not toss him about in the saddle as had the rough trot and gallop. Jimmie, helpless as he was to curb his mount’s pace, was thoroughly enjoying the novelty of this exploit.
Dad’s spurs were blood-flecked. Dad’s gallant horse was beginning to breathe in gasps. The September wind hammered and whipped the man’s hot face and blurred his eyes. The octuple thud of hoofs was nauseating him.
Another mile and the runaway breasted a steep hillock. Dad was a bare ten yards behind.
“Now, then, Jimmie!” he sung out. “Now’s your chance as he takes that rise. Both hands on the reins. Forget the pommel. Both hands on the reins, I said. Lean back with all your weight. Hold the right rein stiff, and saw on the left. With your whole weight, son!”
The lad obeyed, though with visible reluctance, for he was having a beautiful time and saw no good reason for ending it so soon.
The maneuver with the reins jerked back the bit from between the runaway’s teeth. It incidentally caused him to break momentarily his long stride.
The steepness of the hillock did the rest.
At the summit Dad was alongside. He reached for the boy’s bridle.
As his fingers were almost closing on the rein, a vagrant gust of wind snatched up from under a bush (whither another gust had evidently whisked it) a piece of white paper.
The paper swirled upward in the very track of the runaway like a sentient thing, and danced in air before his bloodshot eyes.
The fear-crazed brute forgot his exhaustion long enough to swerve violently to the right. Dad’s clutching hand closed upon nothingness.
Jimmie remained stationary in mid air—the horse having shied from under him—for the most infinitesimal fraction of a second.
Then he descended to earth with considerable force; landed, still in a sitting posture, with an impact that knocked the breath completely out of him; and stared dazedly upward at his grandfather.
Dad, slipping from his horse, picked the boy up and stood him on his feet.
“Are you hurt, dear lad?” he cried. “Are you badly hurt?”
“No,” responded Jimmie, albeit uncertainly. “But—but it’s blamed lucky for me I got so many spankings from father when I was home. They’ve—they’ve kind of calloused me, I guess. Gee, Dad, but that was one gorgeous ride; and I stuck on, all right, didn’t I,Dad? As long as we kept going. What’s the matter, sir? You’re all gray-white and you look ’most a hundred.”
Dad did not answer. He turned from the boy, brushing the back of a shaking hand over his eyes. He fell to examining his panting horse.
The sorrel stood with drooped head and red eyes and nostrils. There were blood-flecks on his sweat-drenched sides. He was heaving and wind-broken.
“Foundered!” pronounced Dad, sorrowfully. “I don’t wonder. The going was harder than any foxhunt. Now, how in blue and pink blazes are we going to get back? It’s a good two miles and more to our outposts.”
He glanced about. Twenty yards distant the runaway, reeking with sweat and breathing in snorts, had come to a standstill, his senseless nightmare fear lost in exhaustion, and was cropping grass.
A hand slipped into Dad’s.
“Honest, sir, I didn’t do it on purpose,” Jimmie was saying. “I’m sorry the horses are so done up. And—and I’m a lot sorrier we missed getting to where the Third Ambulance Corps is. Maybe it isn’t too late, yet. We could walk the horses back, you know. It’s only a few miles. Hallo! Here comes Emp! All tuckered out. But as game as tunket, the good little cuss!”
Sure enough, up the slope toiled the yellow puppy, his tongue hanging out to an unbelievable length, his multishaded fur coated with dust.
He had kept up as well as he could. But he was no fox-hound—at least, not more than perhaps one or two per cent.—and the pace had proven far too hot for him to be in at the death.
Still he had done his level four-legged best. And here at last he was, a trifle belated and very leg-weary, but triumphant at having finally overtaken his little master.
Emp gamboled weariedly yet joyfully about the boy; then, to show his spirit was less impaired than his body, he dashed awkwardly to one side and seized in his teeth the crumpled piece of paper that had caused Jimmie’s tumble.
The paper, its mission accomplished, had lodged at the base of a rock. Thence Emp dragged it and, professing to recognize in it a deadly yet very conquerable foe, shook it fiercely, accompanying his shakes with short, breathless growls of extreme fury.
“Here, you!” exhorted Jimmie, pouncing on Emp and forcibly taking the wad of paper from the dog’s reluctant paws, seeking to mask his own fall-shaken nerves under a display of juvenile bombasity. “Here, you; Emperor Napoleon Pete Bub Bonaparte Brinton Dog, Esq., you drop that! It’s a war-relic, and I’m a goin’ to keep it and show it to my grand-children.
“I’m goin’ to say to ’em: ‘You little numskulls, just you gaze on this yellowed sheet of parchment. Your grandfather had been a-ridin’ horseback, man and boy, for pretty near six months, when this pricelessrelic gave him his first fall.’ I’m going to inscribe on it—on it—
“Why, hello! Thereissomething written on it already. I’ll have to rub it out and write my inscription over it.”
He had partly unfolded the paper as he meandered on.
Now he read aloud, slowly, and with difficulty deciphering the half-chewed screed:
“Special Order No. 191. Headquarters of the Army of Northern Virginia, September 9, 1862.“The army will resume its march to-morrow, taking the Hagerstown road. General Jackson’s command will form the advance and, after passing Middletown, with such portion as he may select—”
“Special Order No. 191. Headquarters of the Army of Northern Virginia, September 9, 1862.
“The army will resume its march to-morrow, taking the Hagerstown road. General Jackson’s command will form the advance and, after passing Middletown, with such portion as he may select—”
“Aw, shucks!” yawned the boy. “Just a lot of military bosh. I kind of had a hope it might turn out to be something interesting.”
Dad, who had been loosening the girth of his foundered horse, turned sharply.
Accustomed as he was to his grandson’s love for enacting all sorts of rôles and declaiming laughably impossible orations, he had listened with real pride to this latest effusion. Deeming that the boy was improvising, he had wondered at the concise and professional wording of the supposedly imaginary dispatch.
But at Jimmie’s exclamation of disgust over the uninteresting nature of the document, he began to wonder if, after all, something of interest, even of importance, might not be sprawled on that much mishandled sheet of paper.
It was over this ground that part of the Confederate army had passed but a few hours earlier. Perhaps—
He took the paper from the boy, spread out its crumbled surface once more, verified at a glance what Jimmie had read aloud, then went on with the reading:
—“take the route toward Sharpsburg, cross the Potomac at the most convenient point, and by Friday night take possession of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and capture such of the enemy as may be at Martinsburg and intercept such as may attempt to escape from Harper’s Ferry.“General Longstreet’s command will—”
—“take the route toward Sharpsburg, cross the Potomac at the most convenient point, and by Friday night take possession of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and capture such of the enemy as may be at Martinsburg and intercept such as may attempt to escape from Harper’s Ferry.
“General Longstreet’s command will—”
Dad’s staring eyes shifted at this point to the bottom of the page; past much more closely written matter, in search of the signature.
He found it.
“(By command of General Robert E. Lee.) R. H. Chilton, Assistant Adjutant-General.”
“(By command of General Robert E. Lee.) R. H. Chilton, Assistant Adjutant-General.”
On the line below was written:
“To Major-General D. H. Hill, Commanding Division.”
“To Major-General D. H. Hill, Commanding Division.”
Unbelieving, dumfounded, Dad went back to the point where he had left off and read to the end.
To-day all the world knows the contents of “Special Order No. 191”—that order, a copy of which was sent by Lee to every division commander. The document telling of Lee’s plan to detach a part of his mainarmy and, under Stonewall Jackson, to send it to capture the unprepared garrison and arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, while Lee himself should strive to hide from McClellan the fact that the Confederate host was sadly depleted by the sending of this detachment; and thus to prevent the Union armies from attacking him until Jackson’s force should return.
Like most of Lee’s plans it was brilliant and simple. It had every prospect of success.
And its success would probably have meant the wrecking of the Union cause through the invasion’s achievement.
Yet General D. H. Hill somehow let drop from a pocket his copy of the order, and that copy really was picked up through sheer chance.
Dad read to the end; then hurriedly reread.
Then he turned to Jimmie; his firm mouth twitching grotesquely.
“This—this has got to get to General McClellan—now—now!” he babbled. “It means—Lord of Battles!—it meanseverythingto us!Everything!It must go to him as fast as a horse can be flogged into running. And—my horse is dead beat; and so, I guess, is yours! Oh,what’sto be done?”
He strode nervously across to where the runaway still cropped grass, half-way down the slope of the farther hillock.
And as he came within arm’s length of the animal arather pleasant voice called to him from a thicket to the left:
“Hands up, Yank! Hands up,bothof you. Up. ‘Way up!”
DAD wheeled. At the hillock’s foot, just in front of him, a bare ten feet away, stood a man in the frayed and stained gray uniform of a captain of Confederate cavalry.
A path, running down the hill, wound through thick undergrowth beyond. And along this thicket-grown path, from somewhere in the rear of the Confederate army, the captain had evidently ridden.
At sight of the two Northerners he must have dismounted; for his horse stood directly behind him within the high screen of bushes.
So silently had the man approached, and so engrossed had Dad been in the mighty fate that hung on his own strangely acquired tidings, that no warning of the enemy’s approach had come to put him on his guard.
And now the boy on the hillock crest and his grandfather near the hillock foot found themselves looking into the steadily leveled mouth of an army revolver.
The Confederate eyed them with a slight smile of almost deprecatory politeness.
“Hands up, Isaid,” he repeated.
“Hands up, Jimmie!” called Dad cheerfully, overhis shoulder. “He’s got the drop on us. And a loaded pistol is apt to be a nasty thing to argue with. It’s got a snappish way of insisting on having the last word.”
He set his grandson the example by raising his own hands well above his head. Striding forward toward his captor, he smiled back into the Confederate’s smiling face and said:
“What next, sir? We seem to be at your orders. Or, rather, at your pistol’s. What do you want of us?”
“Why,” said the captain politely, his soft, slurring accent unruffled by the faintest trace of excitement, “I’m mighty sorry to discommode you, suh. But I’m afraid I’ll have to get you-all to walk ahead of me a half-mile or so along that path to where my company is resting for dinner.
“After that I’m afraid it’ll be Libby for you, suh, and Belle Isle prison for your little orderly up yonder. Off’cers to the right; privates to the left. May I trouble you to stand still in that uncomfortable attitude just a minute longer, suh?”
Shifting his pistol muzzle ever so little, and embracing both Dad and Jimmie in the same glance of his sleepy eyes, the Confederate raised his voice:
“You orderly up there!” he called. “Walk back to that sorrel horse! Straight back! He’s in line with you! Keep your hands up! Go back there and unfasten the bearing-rein from the bit. Then, with your hands still up, come down this slope in the sameline and tie this gentleman’s wrists together with the rein.
“You see, suh,” he explained courteously to Dad, “the way is pretty crooked. And there’s bushes both sides of the road. I can’t quite make certain of you both, walking ahead of me, unless at least one of you is tied. Hurry up there, orderly! Get me that rein.”
“I’ll see you and Jeff Davis and Bob Lee and all the rest of the South in Kingdom Come, first!” shrilled Jimmie. “I put up my hands because Dad told me to. Not because I’m afraid of that pop-gun of yours. But if you think I’m going to tie him up for you—say, Reb, I could pretty near lick you myself. And I’ll try it, if you’re man enough to gimme half a show by pocketin’ that gun.”
“They breed ’em game in your part of the world, sonny,” smiled the captain. “And now that you’ve said your little piece, just shut up on the heroics and do as I tell you. A bullet hole in your little stomach would be a mighty unbecoming sight. Step lively!”
“I won’t!” roared Jimmie. “You soft-voiced bully! I’m getting to hate every bone in your body. Dad! Dad! Say, can I put my hands down, and I’ll take a chance with his gun. I licked Roddy Slade, and Roddy’s pretty near as big as that Reb is—I can dohim, I bet you!”
“Jimmie!” called Dad, his voice steady with a gentle authority. “Do as he says.”
“Dad!”
“Exactly as he says,” ordered Dad.
“Oh, Dad! Let me—”
“Jimmie! Obey orders.”
There was now no doubt as to the authority in Dad’s voice. Jimmie groaned aloud and started at snail-pace toward the sorrel.
“I’d a lot rather charge a gun battery,” he lamented. “Say, Reb, I’m doing this because my grandfather tells me to. And he’s my s’perior officer. Not because you told me to, or because I’m scared of your gun. And say, you! Don’t you go getting the notion Dad’s a-scared of you, either. He isn’t scared of anything. I don’t know why he’s surrendering, but if he’s doing it, it’s all right, somehow.”
Still grumbling, mouthing horribly murderous threats, the boy began to unfasten the bearing rein from bit and saddle bow.
“You’ll pardon my grandson’s heat, sir,” apologized Dad to his captor. “He’s only a youngster, and he hasn’t learned philosophy yet. You see, we—
“Pardon me, captain,” broke off Dad, with a sudden wide grin as his eyes chanced to drop from the Confederate’s face to the leveled revolver whose muzzle was now less than a yard from his own chest, “but when you try to hold men up with a pistol, mightn’t it be just a trifle wiser to see that your pistol is cocked?”
The Confederate involuntarily glanced down at his weapon—which, by the way, chanced to be fully cocked—and at the same instant Dad struck.
He struck palm-wide with the speed of a cat. His open hand smote the Confederate across the knuckles;all the force of trained sinews and scientific skill behind the lightning-swift blow.
The pistol was knocked clean out of the captain’s hand and tumbled into the bushes; happily and irretrievably removed from the situation.
Dad’s hand in a flash was at his own holster.
But too late he remembered that he had left his pistol in his tent—having had no idea that he should be riding that day beyond his own army’s lines. He knew, too, that Jimmie was unarmed; for he himself had very vigorously vetoed the boy’s yearning to keep on carrying a huge revolver.
The ruse, to this point had succeeded with ridiculous ease. The Confederate, deceived by his captive’s meek submission, had been wholly unsuspecting.
Wherefore Dad had been able, without trouble, to edge up within striking distance and by use of a time-honored trick to distract and then disarm his would-be captor.
But as he reached in vain for his pistol the situation shifted once more. For the captain, his revolver lost, whipped out the light cavalry saber he carried, and, springing forward, swung the slender blade aloft for a stroke that should avenge his tricking. His colossal and courteous calm had momentarily forsaken him.
There was no time for Dad to snatch his own sword, no chance for thinking. But the blind instinct, wherewith a thousand primeval ancestors have succeeded in enrolling themselves among the “fittest,” came to Dad’s aid.
As the saber fell, he leaped back out of reach—yet barely far enough, for the blade grazed his arm in whizzing past; grazed it, glancingly; shearing a gash in coat and shirt sleeve, and the deflected blade raising a welt on the flesh of the upper arm.
Before the weapon could be swung aloft for a second slash, or its wielder’s arm shortened for a lunge, Dad was at the Confederate’s throat.
Bare-handed, unafraid, he ran in; too close to his foe to allow the use of saber play. The instinct that had prompted him to dodge and then to attack, had also warned him to come to grips before the saber could be put to use.
Had Dad sought to strike or to keep for an instant longer at long range, the sword would have rendered him helpless. As it was at close quarters he rendered the saber a handicap rather than an aid to his enemy.
Dad’s right hand found the captain’s throat. His left shot aloft and seized the wrist that brandished the saber. His lithe old body twisted forward and sideways into the “hiplock.”
The Confederate, meantime tugging furiously to free his own imprisoned sword-arm, struck with all his might, his left fist clenched, at Dad’s face.
Dad ducked and the blow landed full on the tough crown of his head.
Dad saw a choice assortment of stars, but he held his grip, dogged, tense, unyielding in spite of the dizzy nausea that the head blow had caused him.
The Confederate, on the contrary, cried out in sharp pain, and Dad, with a grim thrill of joy, knew why.
The fist, crashing with all its force on Dad’s skull, had met the same fate as has many a pugilist’s in landing a blow in the same inauspicious spot. Two of the Confederate’s fingers were broken by the jarring impact, and his wrist was badly sprained.
Dad, instinctively seeking to protect his own face, had resorted, without intent, to a favorite street-fight maneuver; by opposing his head-crown to a blow instead of his jaw. Hundreds of hands have been broken or otherwise put out of commission by that simple ruse.
The Confederate’s left hand being helpless, Dad shifted his own right from the man’s throat to the sword wrist. A heaving wrench of both hands and the saber flew from the captain’s back-twisted arm.
Jimmy (who, during the second or two that had elapsed since Dad and the Confederate had so unexpectedly shifted their rôles of captor and captive, had stared fascinated at the fray) now jumped forward with a whoop and snatched up the fallen saber.
“Where’ll I give it to him, Dad?” he yelled exultantly. “Not to hurt him much, but to make him let up on you.”
“Keep out of this!” panted Dad.
He could not, now, use his sword with honor, and it would hamper him. Leaping back he unbuckled belt and all, flung them in Jimmy’s direction, and closed again.
Disregarding the broken hand, the Confederate threwboth arms about the old man in a right-unloving embrace, and the two crashed to earth.
Over and over they rolled; the Confederate pounding and struggling like mad; Dad seeking merely to gain the upper hand.
Jimmy danced about them, saber threateningly poised, shouting:
“Surrender, you! Surrender or I’ll stick this sword into you!”
He could not have carried out his threat, even had he so chosen. For the two men on the ground were so inextricably snarled together and were writhing and pummeling and shifting their relative positions with such suddenness, that the boy could not possibly attack one of them without an equal chance of injuring the other.
Presently they were on their feet, and Dad secured the hold he had been groping for. By use of a simple old wrestling trick known to athletes of those days as “bustling the bridge,” he whirled his foe fully a yard in air and brought him down breathless on his back with a thump that half-stunned the fallen man. As he fell Dad heard the shoulder bone crack.
Dad wasted no time. Kneeling on the Confederate’s forearms, he called to Jimmy:
“Son! That paper? Is it where I dropped it? The one I was reading when—”
“Lemme help you hold him down, Dad!” pleaded the boy, unhearing. “Maybe he’ll—”
“Jimmie!” roared Dad, the old voice vibrant withan authority the lad could not disregard. “Listen to me! (No, I don’t need any help. Keep away from his feet.) That bit of paper you found. The one that scared your horse. The one I was reading. Where is it? Find it!Quick!”
He bent to the task of quieting the wriggling Confederate; then went on:
“Find it! Is—”
“Here it is,” said Jimmy, sighting the fallen paper a few feet away and going to pick it up. “But, say, let me help—”
“Have you got it?” demanded Dad, far too busy with his fallen antagonist to look around.
“Yes, sir. Here it is. Oh, Dad, smash him! Don’t let him wriggle free. Why don’t you hit him? He ain’t really down! Make him say he’s had enough. Want any help, sir? Shall I pitch in, too? Or can I sic Emp onto him? I—”
“Quick, son!” broke in Dad, his voice shaken by passionate earnestness, as he bent every atom of strength to maintain his position above his foe. “Take that paper, jump on the horse in the path yonder, andridestraight to General McClellan! I pointed out his headquarters to you. Get that paper to him. No matter what happens to stop you.Getit to him, and tell him how we found it. Ride, lad! Hang on by mane, or saddle, or any way you like, butride! It’s for our country. It may even save the Union. You can serve America to-day better than fifty generals. Get thatpaper to him! Into his own hands! Ride the horse to death if you have to!”
Each sentence came in a shouted gasp. At the first words the Confederate had redoubled his struggles and, by a mighty heave, had all but reversed their positions. Despite the handicap of a broken hand and wrenched shoulder the Southerner was fighting like a wildcat.
And knowledge of the injuries made Dad gentle in dealing with him. The old man struck no blow; merely held to earth his writhing opponent, and shouted the gasping commands to his grandson.
In all his fifteen years, Battle Jimmie had never heard so excited, so madly pleading a tone in his beloved grandfather’s voice.
In no way understanding the cause for the vehemence, he felt none the less the pressing need to obey. If, in that tone, Dad had bidden him eat one of the horses, Jimmie would at once have started to gnaw the nearest hoof.
He ran down the slope, seized the rein and pommel of the captain’s horse, a black Virginia thoroughbred, scrambled to the saddle, sticking the sheet of paper inside the neck of his shirt, and dug his heels into the horse’s side with every ounce of his energy.
Much has been written—chiefly in verse—of the intelligence and loyalty of a thoroughbred horse. But that same loyalty and intelligence does not prevent him from allowing himself to be ridden away by a thief from under the very eyes of his master.
Wherein even the best horse appears to show infinitely less sense and affection than does a mongrel dog or even an alley cat.
Under his new and clumsy rider’s exhortations, the black thoroughbred bounded up the slope.
“I’m off!” called Battle Jimmie, stopping. “But—say! I wish I could stay and help you. Are you dead sure you can finish licking him without me, Dad?”
“Yes!” gasped Dad. “Go—everything depends on it! You’re carrying the fate of the whole army!Ride!And—God go with you, lad!”
“All right, sir! Get back there, Emp! Go back! Wait for Dad! You can’t keep up with me!”
Over the hillock crest swept the black horse, the boy clinging to his mane and, by kicks and shouts, urging him to top speed. Over the hill summit and down the steep slope and on until the thud of hoofs died to the straining ears of Dad.
Then Dad turned back to the business in hand; first angrily shoving off Emp, who, with shrill barks, had been encircling the fighters, seeking for a good chance to sink his teeth into some part of the Confederate’s struggling anatomy.
But there was little more to do. With a final kick and a straining heave of the shoulders, the Southerner’s body all at once grew limp.
“Fainted from the pain, poor cuss!” mused Dad, rising. “But maybe it’s best to make sure.”
He passed the dropped bearing rein about the senseless man’s ankles; then fell to examining the hurt handand shoulder. As Dad worked over him, the Confederate opened his eyes and lay very quiet, staring up at his conqueror.
“Nothing dangerous,” cheerily reported Dad. “Broken fingers and—I guess your collar bone needs attention.”
DAD subconsciously recalled what the captain had said about his company taking their noon rest a half-mile beyond.
A cavalry company at that, from the captain’s uniform and saber. Probably one of the many small bodies of horse thrown out to guard the rear of Lee’s army and to forage.
At any moment some of the men in search of their leader might come down the winding path that led from their temporary bivouac to the hillock.
Yet Dad hated to leave temporarily helpless a man whom he himself had crippled. He hesitated.
“I—I suppose I am your prisoner, suh?” muttered the captain.
“You surrender?”
“I’m afraid I’ve no alternative. You have me at your mercy. And this confounded hand and arm are torturing me. They’re useless. I surrender.”
“Good,” sighed Dad, in genuine relief.
He was very tired. He wanted to sit down somewhere and get back his breath and his sorely overtaxed strength.
“There is my sword, on the grass yonder,” went on the Southerner. “It is yours by right of war.”
“My dear boy,” laughed Dad. “I don’t want your hardware. Keep it. What earthly use is it to me? It’s a saber. And I’m an infantry officer.”
“It is customary, suh, as you know,” stiffly returned the captain, “for a prisoner to give up his sword to—”
“But, man, dear, you’re not my prisoner,” interrupted Dad. “Idon’t want you. What would I do with you? There are more men in the prisons now than we can afford to feed well.”
“Do I understand, suh,” asked the bewildered captain, “that you release me on parole?”
“Parole?” mused Dad reflectively. “I ought to, I suppose. I ought to demand your sacred word of honor that you’ll never again draw sword in the Cause you think is right. That you go back home, eating your heart out, while your brothers are at the front.
“But I’ve had much those same things happen to me in my time. And it’s a hell I wouldn’t send my worst enemy through.
“No, Mister Confed, I’m not going to parole you or any other man. As far as I’m concerned, you’re free to do what you want to.”
“Do you mean that I—”
“By the way,” went on Dad, “I had my grandson borrow your horse. I’m sorry. It was a military necessity. You can take that sorrel over there in its place. The horse is foundered, I’m afraid, but your regimental farrier can bring him back to condition ina day or so. And he’s got good blood and plenty of speed in him.”
“You mean, suh,” muttered the captain, dazed, “that after capturing me you’ll give me not only my freedom but a horse, as well?”
“I’ve tried to make it plain,” said Dad patiently.
The captain made as though to speak; then turned his head abruptly away. When he faced Dad again, the look of physical pain in the sleepy eyes was all but effaced by one of utter shame.
“It is only fair to tell you, suh,” he began jerkily, his glance downcast, like a scolded schoolboy, “it’s only fair to tell you that I had every intention, a while back, of taking you and your orderly prisoner and turning you over to our provost marshal to be shipped off to prison.”
“Well,” responded Dad, “suppose you had? That is your affair. Every man to his own whim. Perhaps when you get to my age, friend, you’ll think twice before sticking a harmless old codger and a little boy into the living death of a war prison. Or perhaps you won’t. It is your own affair, as I told you. And now let me finish with those hurts of yours. I must be on my way.”
Briskly, if a whit stiffly, he went on with his “first aid” work. The Confederate, as in a trance, sat still, and let his conqueror work over him. He seemed for the time bereft of the power of speech.
Emp, ordered back by his master and scolded by Dad for interfering, had sat gravely on the hillock top,and with cocked head and critical eye had surveyed the combat below. Still brooding over Jimmie’s defection and the cruel order not to follow, the dog remained on the hilltop and, the fight being over, fell to studying the world at large in the hope of seeing his master return, penitent at his act of desertion, and make friends with him again.
But Jimmie did not come back. Once Emp thought the boy was drawing near, for his keen-pricked ears caught the sound of approaching horse-hoofs.
A second of listening, however, told him that these hoofs were walking; not galloping. Also, that there were several horses approaching in single file and from a direction opposite to that in which Jimmie had vanished.
The hoof-beats drew nearer. Emp’s watchdog instincts—one of his multi-breed ancestors having perhaps been guardian of a farmstead—stirred within him. War experience had taught him that where there were horses there were likely to be men.
Indeed, his twitching, moist nostrils had already caught the scent of men—several men—strange men, approaching.
These outsiders assuredly had no right to intrude on Dad and the new friend, who were resting so comfortably. Emp’s fur, between the shoulders and then down along the spine-ridge, began to bristle with resentment.
Far down in his thirsty throat a growling “Woof!” was born. Then another.
Then the dog jumped to his feet, the stifled growls bursting forth in a storm of yapping barks.
Dad, at the shrill warning, glanced up from his task of surgery. He glanced up—to see at the path’s end, a few yards distant, a half-dozen lean, finely mounted Confederate cavalrymen, seated carelessly in their saddles and eyeing in grave astonishment the unusual spectacle of a Federal infantry major tending the hurts of a Confederate cavalry officer.
“Fortune of war!” remarked Dad, with dreary philosophy.
At his words, the Confederate captain looked up. And he, too, saw the clump of gray-clad troopers, barely ten yards off, staring down at him.
As they met their captain’s eyes, the cavalrymen’s hands went up in salute. But their gaze still rested in wonder on the odd scene that lay before them.
“Friend,” said Dad to the captain, “there’s a favor I’d like to ask of you.”
The Confederate looked up at him in quick surprise.
“It’s this,” continued Dad. “My sword here was given me by someone—by someone I care for. I wish you’d keep track of what becomes of it and where it’s stored. Because some day I’m likely to be exchanged or set free in some other way, and when I am I want to get it back if I can.”
“I—I don’t understand it, suh,” said the captain.
Dad nodded toward the troopers.
“There doesn’t seem much mystery about it,” he said. “Both of my horses up there are too tired togo much above a walk. Even if I could get to one of them, your men would overhaul me before I’d ridden fifty feet. And your men are between me and the only cover I could hide in if I should try to get away on foot.”
“My men?” repeated the captain dully. “Oh, yes! My men. I’d forgotten.”
Rousing himself by strong effort from the inertia due to exhaustion and pain, he turned toward the troopers.
“Fauquier!” he drawled.
A corporal saluted.
“Go back to camp and have a stretcher brought here for me. I’m hurt. Take the men with you. ’Tention! Threes about! Wheel!Trot!”
Obedient, if still wondering, the perfectly disciplined Southern cavalrymen wheeled and trotted off in double rank of threes along the path and its bush-encroaching sides.