“Suh,” continued the captain, turning back to Dad, “you seem to have a singularly queer opinion of a Virginia officer’s sense of decency. May I correct it by suggesting you mount one of those two horses up yonder and get well out of the way before my men come back? Good day, sir.
“And—thank you for a lesson in wrestling—and—and in other things.”
BATTLE JIMMIE was riding.
If his general posture on the black thoroughbred’s back tended to suggest a monkey strapped to the back of a circus pony, he was none the less riding. And at a breakneck speed.
Wholly ignorant of horsemanship’s finer shades, he yet had two great qualifications for a jockey: the lightest of weight and a stark dearth of fear.
He kicked his heels into the black sides of his mount just as often as he could remain in any one spot long enough to direct the kick, and ever and again he would release his grip on the mane long enough to wallop the straining black flanks with the bearing-rein he still held.
The splendid thoroughbred needed none of these incentives to flight. Indignant at his new rider’s gawky horsemanship and at his ignorance at the way a blooded horse should be handled, the black none the less realized that he was called upon to display his fleetest pace.
And he did it.
The futile little heel-thumps and the occasional larrup of the bearing-rein hurt the horse not at all. But theyinsulted his feelings, and he took out his indignation in the form of frantic speed.
Ears flattened back, head and neck in straight line with the withers; long, sinuous black body stretched out close to earth, the beautiful black cleared the uneven ground like a swallow.
A veteran of wild Virginia fox-hunts, the rough going was as nothing to him. Hill, plowed field, and gully were traversed as easily as level sward.
The rider’s weight was a bagatelle, but the rider’s behavior was a gross affront.
Jimmie, in his earlier and runaway ride of the day, had not been too excited to note his general direction—a trait taught him by Dad years before in their rambles through the Ohio forests beyond Ideala.
And the habit served him well to-day, for he was able with no difficulty to follow his former route on the return journey.
The black charger was perfectly amenable to the reins’ guidance, and his gait was as easy as a hobby-horse’s.
Presently the few spires of Frederick came into view; then the house roofs. Topping another rise, Jimmie found he was a scant fifty feet from the Frederick road.
For safer and smoother travel he guided his horse to it, the black clearing a low wall and ditch without breaking his smooth stride.
Down the Frederick pike the headlong ride continued. At a turn of the road two Union sentinelsslung their guns forward and demanded the pass-word. Jimmie had reached the Federal outposts.
The black sped between the two forward-pressing sentries, and Jimmie yelled:
“Courier! Dispatches for General McClellan!”
Seeing that the boy was in blue uniform, the sentinels did not make even a futile effort to detain him.
Not until he had whirled past in a cloud of dust did one of them belatedly recall that the horse’s saddle had borne in brass the letters “C. S. A.,” instead of “U. S. A.”
And he and his comrade fell to speculating bewilderedly as to why a small-boy courier in Union uniform should happen to be riding on a Confederate cavalry saddle.
On galloped Jimmie, giving the dust to the few riders and pedestrians, who now began to appear on the white turnpike.
Into Frederick and through its unpaved, rutted main street galloped the lad. The street through which, less than a week earlier, Stonewall Jackson had led his dusty legions.
From an upper window of one of the thoroughfare’s wooden houses (according to a tale as apocryphal as it was dramatic) aged Barbara Frietchie had waved the bullet-ridden stars and stripes and by her gallant loyalty had touched the chivalric Southern chief’s heart.
The sole basis for the Barbara Frietchie legend, moreover, according to Jackson’s own tale and his staff’s, was this:
As the Confederate swung down the street two little girls, each waving a tiny American flag, ran out from the sidewalk and shook their flags defiantly—almost in Jackson’s very face—whereat, instead of fiercely ordering the flags to be fired on, Jackson had turned to one of his aids and smilingly commented:
“We don’t seem to be especially popular here.”
Jimmie, who had heard of neither the fact nor the more inspiring legend, dashed on, looking neither to right nor left. His horse, wholly unaided by the rider, eluded the scant traffic of the street and saved Jimmie from more than one bad collision.
Pedestrians scattered to left and right before the thundering hoofs and yelled angry warnings after the fast-disappearing horseman. Mounted military men drew to one side and laughed aloud at the scarlet-faced little figure bunched over on the withers of the great charger.
Through the street and beyond galloped Jimmie. He drew up at last (with a suddenness that sent the horse back on his haunches and the rider well-nigh over his mount’s ears) in front of a house whose walk from porch to road was patrolled by a sentinel.
On the veranda lounged several gaudily attired staff officers. From the porch roof jutted a white flagstaff, gold-eagle crowned, supporting a huge silken American flag.
A quarter-mile away that morning Dad had pointed out the house to his grandson as temporary headquarters of Major-General George Brinton McClellan,commander of the Army of the Potomac—a leader who partly for the sake of his middle name had always held Jimmie’s admiring curiosity.
Off the horse scrambled the boy, his body aching all over, and his short, cramped legs all but doubling under him. Through the gate he lurched and up the path.
The sentinel halted him before he had taken three steps.
“Courier! Dispatches!” snapped Jimmie, and forestalled further argument or delay by ducking nimbly under the soldier’s arm and scampering for the porch.
“Courier! Dispatches!” he repeated grandiloquently to the veranda’s occupants at large as he climbed the steps. “Where’s General McClellan?”
A gorgeous staff officer bustled forward, stepping officiously between the boy and the open front door of the house.
“Dispatches?” echoed the officer. “Give them here.”
“Not much I won’t!” retorted Jimmie. “These are for General McClellan. They aren’t for anyone else.”
“I am General McClellan’s acting secretary,” the officer announced harshly, his dignity rasped by a laugh from fellow officers lounging near by.
The spectacle of a small boy in a big uniform, caked with dust and horse-foam, defying the pompous acting secretary was one of mild joy to everyone.
“I am General McClellan’s acting secretary,” repeated the officer impatiently. “I will take—”
“I wouldn’t care if you was his maiden aunt,” declared Jimmie stoutly. “Dad told me to give a paper to General McClellan himself. He didn’t say anything about giving it to anyone else—even if the someone else happened to be wearing seven diff’rent kinds of gold lace. And what Dad tells me to do goes. Where’s General McClellan?”
“Who’s ‘Dad,’ sonny?” laughed a colonel who was sprawling in the sun on the steps.
“He’s my s’perior off’cer,” returned Jimmie. “And he told me to—”
“Here!” snorted the secretary. “If you’ve got any papers, you little ragamuffin, give them to me. If you haven’t, be off, or I’ll take my riding-switch to you. I—”
“Look!” gasped Jimmie melodramatically, pointing a trembling, stubby forefinger over the secretary’s shoulder.
The secretary involuntarily turned. Jimmie on the instant darted past him through the door and into the hallway beyond.
The dimmer light half-blinded the boy, coming as he did from the glare of the street. But he dared not pause. Vaguely, half-way down the long hallway, he saw a sentinel posted in front of one of several closed doors.
Jimmie needed no further directions. He made for that door. And the sentinel, who had beheld the scene on the porch, made for Jimmie.
The boy halted and attempted to dodge. Out wentthe sentry’s arms to seize him. And, with a sudden lunge forward, crash went Jimmie’s bullet-head into the pit of the soldier’s stomach.
The sentinel doubled up in pain. But as he did so he managed to seize the boy by the coat-collar.
Wriggling eel-like from the too loose garment, Jimmie leaped at the closed door, flung it open, rushed into the room beyond and slammed the door shut again behind him.
Two men were talking earnestly in an embrasure by a window.
One of them Jimmie recognized at once as General Hooker whom Dad had pointed out to him a few days earlier. The shorter and stockier man he also recognized from a hundred photographs he had seen.
Plunging one hand into his shirt-bosom, and pulling forth the precious wad of paper, Battle Jimmie raised the other in salute.
“General McClellan,” he said, “Dad told me to give you this. He says a whole lot depends on it. Read it. It’s more interesting, maybe, than it sounds. Read it!”
THE two men had spun about from the window as the small human whirlwind burst into the room. Jimmie’s first words had been launched at McClellan with almost incoherent velocity.
The army of the Potomac’s commander frowned in annoyed perplexity at the disheveled little apparition and the almost shouted address. Hooker, on the contrary, stared for an instant, then burst into a great guffaw.
The next moment the door burst open again.
In rushed the military secretary, very purple of face. Behind him was the stomach-smitten sentinel, his visage still greenish and pain-twisted from the blow.
“General!” spluttered the secretary. “I—this—”
“What does this mean?” sternly demanded McClellan, finding his voice. The sentinel, at a gesture from the secretary, collared the boy again and started to carry him bodily from the room.
“Wait, you!” shrilled Jimmie. “You lemme go! There’s more to my message. I forgot. Dad told me to tell—”
“Shut up, you crazy little scarecrow!” growled thesentinel under his breath, bestowing a vicious shake which the boy promptly resented by an excruciating kick on his captor’s shins.
“Dad told me to tell you how we came to find the paper,” finished Jimmie loudly. “We picked it up on a hill out—”
The sentinel had him at the door of the room by this time, the empurpled secretary bringing up the rear.
McClellan, into whose hand Jimmie had thrust the crumpled and far from clean bunch of paper, let the document drop to the floor.
“Wait!” yelled the boy in despair. “A lot depends on it. Dad—”
“The brat is crazy,” declared the secretary. “He came to the house here just now and said he was a—”
“Dad told me,” squealed Jimmie, clinging to the door-jamb and hanging on for dear life as the sentinel sought to yank him free, “that I must—”
“Shut up!” exhorted the sentry. “And let go there!”
“A thousand apologies, sir,” went on the secretary to McClellan, “for my allowing this intrusion upon your conference. It was not my fault, nor”—generously—“was it this sentinel’s. I saw the boy assault him. He—”
“General McClellan!” howled Jimmie. “Pick up that paper andreadit! Dad says it—”
“The boy,” babbled on the secretary to all concerned, “was riding a horse with a ‘C. S. A.’ cavalry saddle. He—”
“Pick it up andreadit!” wailed Jimmie again, feeling his hold on the door-jamb slacken under the mighty yanking of the sentinel.
The soldier loosened one tugging hand from Jimmie’s shoulder long enough to administer a sound cuff on the lad’s ear. Jimmie retaliated this time by flinging his head back sharply and with the crown of it catching the sentry a grievous whack on the chin.
“Lemme go!” he grunted. “Dad says the whole army’s fate depends on—”
“Shall I have him turned over to the provost-marshal, sir?” obsequiously queried the secretary, “or—”
“Wait!”
It was “Fighting Joe” Hooker who, choking back his helpless laughter, shouted the order.
The secretary, his question half-uttered, shut his mouth and stood at attention. The sentinel paused with uplifted fist poised in the act of seeking vengeance for the jaw-blow that had made him see stars and had loosened two of his best teeth.
Even McClellan turned from the turmoil to stare in surprise at his subordinate general.
“Wait!” repeated Hooker. “By your leave, General McClellan?”
He glanced at his chief for permission to take over the situation. McClellan nodded.
“I think, general,” went on Hooker, “with your consent, we can do worse than to wait for a minute or so. I don’t at all understand what any of this means. But one or two things lead me to think it may be worth aquestion or two. It isn’t an every-day occurrence for a boy in Federal uniform trousers to ride up on a Confederate army horse and fight his way into the commanding general’s presence, just for the sake of handing that commanding general a bunch of soiled waste paper. May I suggest, general, that we let the boy wait here an instant while we glance at the paper?”
He stooped and picked up the crumpled sheet, handling its unclean outer side gingerly as he proceeded to unfold it. Then he glanced at the written words. The others standing at gaze, McClellan vexedly chewing his mustache.
Hooker’s thin face wore a mask of crass perplexity as his eyes ran down the sheet.
“General McClellan!” he exclaimed, his voice uncertain.
He handed the paper to his superior, who received it as under protest and cast his eye over its first few lines. Then his face all at once took on an aspect of amaze, ludicrously like that of Hooker.
McClellan strode hastily to the window embrasure, followed by Hooker. Side by side, their backs to the others, the two generals read and reread the paper.
Then they fell into eager, excited conversation, speaking in tense whispers.
Meantime the gorgeous secretary stood looking blankly at their backs. The sentinel, his hand still on Jimmie’s shirt-collar, stared at everybody in turn, mouth ajar.
Jimmie alone had no special interest in the proceedings. He had delivered the mysteriously precious paper into General McClellan’s own hands, as Dad had bidden him; and General McClellan had read it.
Nothing remained now but to obey Dad’s second command to tell McClellan how and where the paper had been found. And as the sentinel had been called off from ejecting him from the room, there was every prospect that he would be able to perform this part of his mission, too.
But all in good time.
At present General McClellan seemed far too busy to listen. Soon, no doubt, he would get through making conjectures and begin to ask questions. That was the way with grown people.
In the mean time Jimmie had a chance to recall that he himself was a very tired, very ill-treated, very sore and dusty and thirsty and battered little boy.
Also, that Dad was far away from him and so was Emp. And he was among strangers who hadn’t seemed especially glad to see him and who surely had treated him with more roughness than was absolutely needful.
Jimmie began to feel excessively sorry for himself. In fact, he was suddenly aware of a most unmanly and overweening desire to cry.
He was heartily ashamed of such a babyish impulse. He was a man of fifteen. But a very great many things had happened to him that day, and the day was not yet over.
He choked back the big lump in his throat and tried to square his shoulders and throw back his chest, noeasy feat when the great, hulking sentinel’s grip was still on his shirt-collar, almost choking him. Jimmie found himself wondering just how soon he could hope to be big enough and strong enough to lick a man of—well, of that sentinel’s size!
Presently the wondering, whispered colloquy between the two generals in the window embrasure ended. McClellan and Hooker came back toward the center of the room.
McClellan seated himself at the table there, and with a word dismissed the sentry, who, releasing Jimmie, departed. The secretary, at a gesture from the general, followed the soldier, shutting the door behind him.
“Come here, my boy,” said McClellan kindly.
Jimmie advanced. He felt no special awe for this great little man. All he wanted was to complete his mission, get back to Dad’s tent, and rest for a long, long while.
He wondered when Dad would return, and he resolved to learn from him every minutest detail of the duel. That Dad would worst his opponent Jimmie had not the faintest doubt.
For was not Dad—was he not Dad?
“Tell me,” General McClellan was saying, “where and how did you get this paper?”
“We found it up on the top of a hill. It was lying there. The wind blew it in front of my horse and—”
“What hill?” interposed Hooker. “Where?”
“Out yonder. Miles the other side of Frederick. Out toward Sharpesburg.”
“Sharpesburg?” echoed McClellan. “Right in the track of the Confederate rear-guard. D. H. Hill’s division. You must have been well beyond our lines.”
“We were,” said Jimmie.
“The paper was lying on the ground, you say?”
“Yes. Partly folded up, like it had dropped out of somebody’s pocket,” said Jimmie, seeking to finish the story and get away. “But the wind had opened it a little and it blew into the air, and my horse shied and I got thrown—he was running away, anyhow—and then Emp grabbed the paper, and I took it away from him and read some of it aloud. Just for fun. And Dad grabbed it and—”
“Hold on! Hold on!” demanded McClellan. “Go more slowly. It doesn’t make sense. Who are Emp and Dad and—”
“Emp,” said Jimmie in a tone of laboriously patient explanation as to a stupid pupil—“Emp is my dog. That isn’t all his name; it’s just the short of it. Dad’s my grandfather. He’s a brevet-major. I’m Jim Brinton.”
“Brinton?” queried McClellan, repeating his own middle name.
“The soldiers call me ‘Battle Jimmie,’”explained the lad.
“Battle Jimmie!” cried Hooker. “So you’re the youngster who—”
“Yes, sir. I’m that one. Shall I go on about the paper?”
“Yes. More slowly.”
“Dad read it, and he got all het up over it. And he said it must get here right away. That everything depended on it. And that must be so, ’cause Dad knows.”
“So he sent you here with it?” asked McClellan. “If he is an officer in the army here, it would have saved time and explanation if he had brought it here himself.”
“How could he?” flared Jimmie instantly aflame at the implied slur on his idol. “How could he? Tell me that. He couldn’t stop fighting, could he?”
“Fighting? No skirmish on the Sharpesburg road has been reported here. What troops were engaged? Do you know?”
“Dad was. And the Confed, of course.”
“What Confederate?” asked the exasperated general.
“The one I left Dad thrashing. The one who said we were his prisoners. Dad licked him long before this.”
“Hold on, sonny,” intervened Hooker, forestalling a movement of vexed bewilderment on McClellan’s part. “Let’s get this straight. Just answer my questions as simply as you can.”
In a dozen well-put queries Hooker got from the boy the whole story, beginning with the runaway and ending with Jimmie’s arrival at headquarters.
McClellan’s face lost its look of impatience as he listened; and it lighted into keen interest.
“This Dad of yours must be a paladin of valor, besides having a quick, cool brain of his own,” he commented as Jimmie finished. “His country owes him an unpayable debt for sending this dispatch to me so promptly. It is more important than I could make you understand. By the way, you haven’t told us his name?”
“His name? Dad’s? Why, he’s Brevet-Major James Dadd. I thought I told you that.”
The two generals exchanged a quick glance that was quite lost on Jimmie.
“James Dadd!” exclaimed McClellan.
“James Brinton,” gravely corrected Hooker.
Jimmie wheeled on him.
“Who told you that?” he demanded truculently, eyes ablaze and red hair bristling.
“Never mind that, my lad!” laughed Hooker. “I—”
“Look here, you!” cried Jimmie, trembling with fierce indignation. “Now that you people have spied on Dad and spotted his secret, I s’pose you’ll want to turn him out of the army. He said you might. He told me so before he joined. Well, if you do, it’ll be the rottenest trick anyone ever played. He’s the dandiest fighter you’ve got. And he’s the greatest man that ever was.
“Aw, let him stay!” he went on, his voice changing to an eager plea, “Let him stay! It’ll kill him to be kicked out just when he’s doing so fine and everything.Pleaselet him stay. It wasn’t his fault he was turned out of the army the other time, back in Mexico. Gee!if I could get you to understand what a grand man he is—Why, the fellers in the regiment—”
Hooker put a big, kindly hand almost in caress on the boy’s heaving shoulder.
“There, lad!” he said in rough gentleness. “Don’t waste all your good powder blazing into the air. There’s no more danger of your Dad being kicked out of the army than of Jeff Davis becoming President of the United States.
“We all know the story. And we all honor him. Even President Lincoln knows it. And by this time to-morrow President Lincoln will know what Dad has done for the Union to-day in getting that paper to us.
“Now trot along. The paper you brought here is going to keep every general and every courier in the Army of the Potomac busy all day and all night. There’s no time to waste on boys. Not even on Battle Jimmies. Clear out and run along!”
He gave the boy a friendly shove toward the door. As Jimmie, dazed but infinitely relieved, passed out he saw the two generals, wholly oblivious of him, bending once more over the paper.
INTO Frederick rode Dad, astride the erstwhile runaway.
Since passing the Union outposts he had let the tired horse take its own gait. At his heels trotted Emp. There was no hurry. And Dad was tired.
From the sentry at the outposts whom he questioned he had learned of Jimmie’s whirlwind passage down the road, and at the head of the main street of Frederick another query to a goober-vender elicited the fact that Jimmie had entered the town at a gallop nearly an hour earlier.
Satisfied thus in his mind as to the safety of his grandson and of the paper’s delivery to McClellan, he slowed his weary mount to a walk and turned into a bystreet which formed a shorter route toward the Federal camps.
It was a pretty lane into which he turned. Wide-branched trees met above its winding center. Golden glow and asters and phlox bordered the little gardens along either side.
A plump gray kitten in the middle of the byway was valorously stalking a covey of sparrows that flew away in bored annoyance as she crept near.
Emp proceeded to pursue the pursuer, who, after scratching his nose with unnecessary virulence, ran up a tree.
Emp returned sulky, yet relieved, to his post at the horse’s heels. The lane was deserted of traffic. Somewhere in the arched trees above a late-season mocking-bird was piping its clamorous sweet call.
The afternoon sun shone benignantly through a yellow dust-haze. Peace lay everywhere. Peace, flowers, bird-song—and the brooding hush of afternoon—in the very heart of a great war.
A white cottage, set somewhat back from the lane behind its own patch of green lawn, bore across its porch-front the sign:
THIRD AMBULANCE CORPSArmy of the PotomacTemporary Headquarters
THIRD AMBULANCE CORPSArmy of the PotomacTemporary Headquarters
On the lawn two or three uniformed nurses sat in rocking chairs, scraping lint and sewing. On cots along the narrow porch lay several gaunt-faced, partly dressed convalescents.
Dad instinctively drew his horse to a standstill as he read the sign. The sewing nurses on the lawn glanced up as he halted.
One of them—silvery-haired little woman in gray—gave a joyous exclamation and, springing to herfeet, ran across to the open gate and out into the lane to greet the rider.
On the instant Dad was off his horse and advancing with gladly outstretched hands toward her.
“Emily!” was all he could find voice to say just at first.
“Oh, I was so hoping you’d find where we were, James!” she hailed him. “And that you’d come to see me before I left.”
“Left? The corps is moved again?”
“No. But I’m detailed at one of the Washington hospitals. I’m to start first thing in the morning.”
Dad had passed one arm through his horse’s bridle. Now, with a very proprietary air, he tucked the little woman’s hand under his other arm.
“Walk a way down the lane with me,” he begged. “Now that you’re going to Washington, I don’t know when I’ll ever see you again.”
Eagerly she assented.
Followed by the amused smiles of the group of nurses on the lawn, the two elderly lovers sauntered down the deserted lane together, arm in arm, the tired horse following; the mocking-bird calling to them from the interlaced green branches above.
For a space neither of them spoke. Dad forgot his weariness; forgot everything except the strangely sweet new sense of content; of reaching at last a safe and perfect haven after long years of storm-tossed misery.
The little old lady smiled up at him.
“It’s—it’s kind of likehometo be walking with you, James,” she said shyly.
Then, her housewifely eye beginning to take in details, she exclaimed:
“Land sakes, James Brinton, if you haven’t gone and torn a great rent in the shoulder of your coat! Such a careless man I never did see! And you haven’t even noticed it.”
Dad looked down at the cut made by the Confederate captain’s saber when, in the early stages of the encounter, it had grazed his upper arm.
“That’s so!” he admitted shamefacedly. “I never noticed it. It was shiftless of me. I’ll get it mended as soon as I go back to camp. You aren’t ashamed to be seen walking with a man who’s got a torn coat, are you, Emily?” he finished anxiously. “Because—”
She interrupted him with another exclamation as she looked more keenly at the rent.
“And the shoulder of your shirt, right under it, is torn, too,” she said. “How could you ever get both of them torn like that and never know it?”
She stood still, disengaged her arm from his, and, with the air of a dressmaking expert, drew the sides of the coat’s rent together.
“Why, this isn’t a tear,” she went on, “it’s a cut! A clean cut! How ever did you do it?”
She loosed her hold on the sides of the cut and the released sections of cloth opened again.
So did the cut shirt-sleeve beneath them, revealingthe angry red welt, like a whiplash mark, on the hard, bronzed flesh of Dad’s upper arm.
“James Brinton!” she accused sternly. “You’ve been fighting again!”
“Yessum!” he confessed, hanging his head.
Once more, this time in swift solicitude, she was parting the rents in coat and shirt, and her cool, light fingers were on the burning hot flesh of the welt.
With the true nurse’s deftness she explored the injury, sighing with happy relief on finding it so trivial.
“Tell me about it,” she demanded.
Briefly, he told her; keen shame possessing him as he related, as modestly as possible, his exploit. She had taken his arm again, and as he talked they resumed their sauntering stroll.
When his recital was finished she pressed his arm tightly for an instant in silence. Then—
“Oh, I thank the dear Lord!” she breathed. “He brought you back safe!”
Dad’s other hand closed over hers as it lay on his arm.
“Back to—to you,” he said softly. And for a space they fell silent once more. But their walk waxed slower and his hand did not release hers.
“Emily,” said Dad, at last, speaking with a rush, as one who fears his courage may desert him at any moment, “I guess you know how much I care. It’s—it’s just everything. I can’t put it in any prettier words, because it means so much. Will—will you marry me?”
She looked up at him, her eyes big and dewy.
“Why, of course, James,” she made answer in gentle wonder. “I thought you knew that.”
Regardless of the distant nurses, regardless of possible onlookers from the scattered wayside houses, Dad stopped stock-still, gathered her into his arms, then stooped and kissed her.
She raised her lips to his and smiled tenderly up at him.
Then of a sudden she drew back in ostentatious haste.
“There!” she declared vehemently. “It’s true there’s no fool like an old fool. Here I am, a woman with a married daughter, making a spectacle of myself in a public street. Shame on me! And shame on you, too, Jim Brinton!”
“I never dreamed,” said Dad, “that shame could be such a nice thing. But you’re wrong about one thing, dearie. About our being old. For a lot of years I’ve been looking on myself as an old man. And now I know I’m not. I’m just a man. And as for you, Emily—why, I don’t believe you’d know how to be old if you lived to be a million.”
She laughed gayly, in dainty, old-world coquetry.
“I guess you’ve had plenty of practise in making cute speeches like that, James,” she said, “You do it awful easy.”
A momentary vision of nausea came to him of the barren stretch of years at Ideala, when he had believed that all good women shunned him as a drunkard; of hispitiful efforts to make friends with his son’s wife; his avoidance of her social-climber women friends.
“No,” he said shortly. “I’ve had no practise, dear. None.”
She understood.
“I’ll—I’ll make it up to you, Jim!” she whispered tremulously. “All of it, dear man. All the horrid lonely years, and everything. I promise.”
Another divine silence, broken only by the mocking-bird among the treetops.
“Emily,” he said, “the tide is going to turn in this war. The next move will be the turning-point. And it’ll turn hard. I’ll be in the thickest of it, dear.
“But I’ve got a kind of feeling that I’ll get through it safe. Because your love will be taking me through it. And after that—”
“I’ll be waiting, Jim,” she said.
ALL day, along the steep banks of Antietam Creek, the battle had roared and bellowed and done its wholesale murdering.
All day, that red 17th of September, 1862—“the bloodiest single day’s fighting of the Civil War”—the Army of the Potomac had flung itself in dogged fury upon the V-shaped position of the Confederates on the creek’s farther side.
It was the second day of the battle of Antietam; the first day having been consumed in a more or less ineffectual artillery duel, and in maneuvering for positions of strategic advantage.
Thanks to his foreknowledge of Lee’s plans—and, incidentally, thanks to Dad and Battle Jimmie—McClellan had been able to take advantage of Lee’s moment of comparative weakness by forcing battle upon him before Stonewall Jackson’s force could return from the raid on Harper’s Ferry.
Thanks, also, to a delay that has never been explained, McClellan had held off from the attack long enough to let Jackson’s vanguard of ten thousand men join Lee.
Still, the bulk of Jackson’s soldiers—the flower of the Southern host—were still absent when the battle was waged. Jackson, too, whose presence and whose counsels at such a moment would have been worth more than fifty thousand additional men, was still absent at Harper’s Ferry.
Lee was thus coerced by McClellan into giving battle, with his ablest leader and his best fighters far away.
So much for the historic carelessness of the Confederate major-general, D. H. Hill, in losing an all-important paper on the way from Frederick; a carelessness that did untold harm to his cause; and that perhaps might have done far more had McClellan seized all his opportunities instead of merely part of them.
Yet, as historians agree, the finding of the lost paper, and its falling into McClellan’s hands, turned the whole tide of the invasion and changed Lee’s most brilliant campaign into a costly failure. A failure that smote the Confederacy a well-nigh mortal blow on the bare heart.
On the morning of the seventeenth Hooker’s corps was entrenched on the far side of the Antietam, the creek between him and the main Army of the Potomac. On the preceding afternoon, at McClellan’s orders, Fighting Joe had crossed one of the creek’s four stone bridges, defeated a Confederate detachment under Hood, and had seized on a position.
Now, on the seventeenth, Hooker received further orders to attack the Confederate line, engaging it closely; while the bulk of the main army should cross the creekunder cover of the fighting and throw itself on the Confederates.
The plan met with only fair success. General Mansfield was killed early in the action. Hooker was wounded.
The embattled Confederates stood firm as a rock; and all day long, at close quarters, the mutual slaughter raged.
Four times with his regiment in Hooker’s corps Dad led his men against the Confederate center. Four times the murderous volleys of the Southerners sent back the assailants, almost cut to pieces.
Once more, Battle Jimmie far to the fore, clanging on his deafening drum, the regiment charged with its brigade.
Half-way up the slope, Dad found himself senior officer, not only of his regiment, but of his brigade.
Battles make field-promotion very swift.
Bare-headed, sword in hand, Dad toiled upward, calling to his fast-thinning ranks to close up and follow. At his side drummed Jimmie, crazy with excitement; screaming mingled insults, praise and encouragement to the survivors.
Like some gaunt old war spirit, Dad raged at the head of his men; a cyclone of lead roaring and whistling around him. His example, and that of the howling, drumming boy at his side, proved infectious.
With a gasping cheer the depleted ranks staggered forward in the wake of the gray-haired man and thedrummer. Against the Confederate batteries they crashed, headlong.
There was a mêlée of hand-to-hand fighting for an instant; then a break and a scrambling run on the part of the defenders.
And the hill was won.
Dad whirled about on the handful of blue-coated victors who clustered around him, yelling ecstatically.
“Bully!” cried Dad. “Good boys! We’ve got the hill. Now to hold it until the support can come up. Captain Fitch, deploy—”
Dad saw ten million sparks leap into crackling life. A billion more exploded within his brain.
He fell from a great, great height into a cool darkness that lovingly wrapped itself about soul and mind and body.
Somewhere, he vaguely remembered, a battle was raging. But it had ceased to interest him.
Then he fell quietly asleep.
Dad shook off the sweet lethargy and opened his eyes.
There was work to do. He recalled everything now. The senior officers of his brigade were dead or incapacitated.
He had led his men up a hill that vomited fire and shot. They had barely won the summit.
This surely was no moment for their leader to drop into a doze. He felt heartily ashamed of himself.
With an effort he gripped at his sword-hilt—andhis fingers closed weakly over the folds of a hospital sheet.
His newly opened eyes focused at last—not on the blue sky, with its hell of flame and smoke, but on the dingy gray canvas ceiling of a tent.
This was all wrong. He raised himself on one elbow to peer about him.
A sharp dizziness well-nigh made him swoon. At the same instant he was aware that the unbearable din of musketry and artillery had ceased and that soothing quiet reigned everywhere.
Exhausted, he fell back, his head sinking into the depths of a soft pillow. Someone crossed the tent hastily and stood beside him.
It was Battle Jimmie.
For the briefest interval, as he lay blinking at his grandson, Dad believed they were back at Ideala, and that the boy had crept into his room, as had been his wont, for a good-night chat. Then he noted the lad’s ill-fitting uniform, and reason came to its own again.
For a full minute they remained, without speech, looking into each other’s eyes, while slowly Dad’s brain cleared and he began to realize where he was.
“Dad!” whispered Jimmie at last. “Dad, do you know me?”
“Know you?” repeated Dad, in a weak but honestly surprised voice. “Why shouldn’t I know you? What a crazy question, son, to ask me!”
Jimmie gripped one of Dad’s hands in both his own.
“You’re all right!” he exulted. “You’re all right!The surgeon said if your mind was clear when you came to you’d be out of danger. Oh, gee, but it’s grand to have you alive again!”
“Alive? What on earth do you mean?”
“Why—why, nothing,” ended the boy.
“What do you mean, dear lad?” insisted his grandfather. “Why shouldn’t I be alive? I’ve been alive ever since I can remember. It’s a kind of habit I got into ever so many years ago.”
Jimmie giggled in sheer relief; a shaky giggle, but vibrant with joy. His grandfather’s voice was very weak and it faltered; but his grandfather’s spirit still burned bright and strong.
And Jimmie rejoiced.
“Go ahead and tell me how I got here, and what’s the matter with me,” murmured Dad haltingly. “I’m in a hospital tent, I suppose.”
“Yes, sir. Been here a week. Senseless all the time. Concussion of the brain, the sawbones called it. Said if you came out of it sane you’d be all right in just a few days. Oh, but it’s been a rotten time, Dad! They let me stay, because I wouldn’t keep out. But you kept looking so—sodead!”
The boy shuddered violently, then grinned again and squeezed Dad’s hand.
“Tell me all about it, son,” begged Dad. “Everything. From—from—”
“We’d just taken the hill,” answered Jimmie, seeking to marshal his facts in correct order. “They were shelling us from a couple of batteries to the left. Someshells burst over us. A piece of one hit you in the head and over you went. Say, but I wished ’most a hundred times that it had been me instead.”
Dad lifted a fractiously unsteady hand to his head. It was swathed in cold, wet cloths.
Jimmie went on:
“They didn’t send us support and we couldn’t hold the hill, but we toted you back with us.”
“The battle?” asked Dad in sudden anxiety.
“It lasted till after dark. We didn’t know who had won. Nobody did.
“But next morning Lee was gone. Helter-skelter back across the Potomac into Virginia again. Invasion busted up for good.
“Some of the fellers say the folks in Washington are giving Little Mac blazes for letting Lee get back safe into Virginia instead of catching him before he could get to the Potomac. But I kind of guess it would have been just a little bit like catching a rattlesnake by the tail.
“Anyhow, campaign’s over, and Johnnie Reb won’t stable his horses in Faneuil Hallthistrip. Say, Dad, they’re talking a whole lot about you everywhere—about how you—”
The boy checked himself. Through sheer weakness Dad had fallen asleep.
DAD sat in the late September sunlight at the door of the hospital tent where for ten days he had lain. Slowly, but very surely, the old, wiry strength was beginning to creep back to the lean body.
No longer did the slightest sudden motion or an effort to concentrate his thoughts set his head to aching blindly, and no longer did his knees buckle under him when he tried to cross the tent from bed to door.
Dad was well out of danger, the surgeons said. Nothing but a few more days of rest was needed to bring him back to health.
An injury to the head is always dangerous, but it has this redeeming quality—it does not long keep its victim in suspense. It kills, crazes, or gets entirely well in an unbelievably short time. The issue is settled, one way or another, in far less time than in the case of an equally severe wound in any other part of the anatomy.
The campaign was over.
The Confederate army, back in its lair, was licking the grievous wounds sustained in the Antietam fight. The Army of the Potomac, nearly thirteen thousand ofits soldiers dead from that same fight, was resting on its doubtful laurels.
Here and there skirmish parties or small detachments of the rival forces were in motion, but between the main bodies of both armies brooded the truce of exhaustion.
The Federals that summer and early fall had invaded Virginia, and after a series of fearful defeats had been driven out. Lee in September had invaded the North, and had met with like fate.
The season was too far advanced for any more extensive operations, and a lull came.
Almost directly after Antietam’s battle President Lincoln had electrified the world by issuing the so-called “Provisional Proclamation,” declaring in effect that slavery within the limits of the United States was forever dead, and that every negro in America was henceforth a human being, not a piece of transferable property.
Three months later the more formal “Emancipation Proclamation” was to follow. But its forerunner, the provisional proclamation, quite as effectively struck the slavery shackles from a million wrists.
Lincoln had kept his solemn vow—the vow to free the slaves should the tide of invasion be turned.
All these bits of news as they reached camp were faithfully transmitted to Dad by that most zealous of nurses and entertainers, Battle Jimmie.
The old man listened in wondering gratitude as he realized the boundless fruitage of the finding of “Order 191.”
To Dad the whole thing was a miracle, and mostmiraculous of all to him was the praise showered on his embarrassed self by his fellow officers.
“I feel like a blackleg, Jimmie,” he confided to his grandson on this his first day of removal from the tent’s interior to the sunshine outside its doorway. “I feel like the original man who stole the original other fellow’s thunder. Here folks keep coming to the tent and shaking hands with me and telling me what a big thing I did in getting that paper to Little Mac and what it’s meant to the country and all.
“And I don’t know which way to look. Anybody’d think I’d ridden up to General Hill and grabbed him by the throat and held him helpless in the presence of all his overawed men while I went through his pockets for the order, instead of our just happening by a miracle of chance to find it lying on the ground. Why,anyonemight have happened to pick it up. It’s no credit.”
“That’s right,” bravely agreed Jimmie, scratching Emp’s rough head as the multi-breed dog trotted back from a round of the cook-tents and lay down with a little grunt of repletion at his master’s feet. “That’s right. Anyonemighthave found it, but ‘anyone’ didn’t. And if most folks had they wouldn’t ’a’ caught the point of it or known what to do with it. And it’s dead sure they wouldn’t ’a’ thought to send it in a rush to Little Mac at the minute a man’s fingers were trying for their throat.
“Oh, I guess there’s one or two worse impostors than you, Dad.”
The old man’s tired eyes suddenly grew bright withhappy expectancy. Jimmie without turning to look divined the cause.
“I can see fine out of the back of my head,” announced the boy. “For instance, I can see the mail-courier coming down this row right now with the hospital post-bag under his arm.”
He twisted his head as he spoke, and pointed in triumph at the approaching post-bag bearer.
“See!” he exclaimed. “What did I tell you? Sometimes it just fairly scares me to think how clever I’m getting to be. Lay back and rest. I’ll jump over to the office tent, and I’ll bring you her letter the second it tumbles out of the bag.”
He was off at a dead run.
Dad looked after him with the feeble impatience of the convalescent. Mrs. Sessions’ letters had been the event of each day to him. Not until Dad had recovered consciousness had Jimmie written to the little lady that his grandfather was wounded.
A line from a staff surgeon, written at Jimmie’s plea, accompanied the letter, vouching for Dad’s recovery.
The little lady, unable to leave her post at Washington, had done her best to atone for her absence by long daily letters—letters as spicily, sweetly old-fashioned as a garden of cinnamon roses and lavender—letters containing learned exhortation as to the care the patient must take of his precious self; throbbing with egregious pride at the wounded man’s valor; seeking to entertain him by lively accounts of the daily happenings in Washington.
Small wonder that helpless old Dad looked forward to these daily epistles as a parched throat to cool drink.
Presently—or, as it seemed to Dad, after about two and a half centuries—Jimmie came back at the double.
“I’m sorry,” began the boy ruefully, “but—”
The change in his grandfather’s face made him cry out in hot contrition:
“Aw, I was fooling, Dad! I just wanted to have a joke with you like we used to. I’m a chump! Here it is—a dandy fat letter, too.”
Dad seized the letter, laughing perfunctorily to show Jimmie he appreciated the jest that had constricted his heartstrings and throat. The boy tactfully withdrew to a little distance and proceeded to engage Emp in a thrilling game of “wrassle the bear,” Emp reluctantly enacting the ursine rôle.
Dad opened the envelope with the luxurious slowness of one who seeks to drag out a pleasure to its utmost bounds. He smoothed wide the crinkly sheets with their fine, quaint handwriting, and began to read.
This letter began neither with admonitions to carefulness nor with eager queries as to his health. In fact, it could scarce be said to “begin” at all. It started off in the very middle of the writer’s burst of excitement.
Dad read: