"I'll speak to him in the morning about it," said Marsena, with gloomy emphasis. He sighed, bit his lip, fixed an intent gaze upon the big dark bulk of the Parmalee house looming before them, and spoke again. "There'ssomething that I want to say toyou, though, that won't keep till morning."
A tiny movement of the hand on his arm was the only response.
"I see now," Marsena went on, "that I ain't been making any real headway with you at all. I thought—well—I don't know as I know just what I did think—but I guess now that it was a mistake."
Yes—there was a distinct flutter of the little gloved hand. It put a wild thought into Marsena's head.
"Would you," he began boldly—"I never spoke of it before—but would you—that is, if I was to enlist and go to the War—would that make any difference?—you know what I mean."
She looked up at him with magnetic sweetness in her dusky, shadowed glance. "How can any able-bodied young patriot hesitate at such a time as this?" she made answer, and pressed his arm.
V.
Itwas in this same May, not more than a week after the momentous episode of the Field Hospital and Nurse Fund Fair, that Marsena Pulford went off to the War.
There was no ostentation about his departure. He had indeed been gone for a day or two before it became known in Octavius that his absence from town meant that he had enlisted down at Tecumseh. We learned that he had started as a common private, but everybody made sure that a man of his distinguished appearance and deportment would speedily get a commission. Everybody, too, had a theory of some sort as to the motives for this sudden and strange behavior of his. These theories agreed in linking Miss Parmalee with the affair, but there were hopeless divergencies as to the exact part she played in it. One party held that Marsena had been driven to seek death on the tented field by despair at having been given the "mitten." Others insisted that he had not been given the "mitten" at all, buthad gone because her well-known martial ardor made the sacrifice of her betrothed necessary to her peace of mind. A minority took the view which Homer Sage promulgated from his tilted-back chair on the stoop of the Excelsior Hotel.
"They ain't nothin' settled betwixt 'em," this student of human nature declared. "She jest dared him to go, and he went. And if you only give her time, she'll have the whole male unmarried population of Octavius, between the ages of sixteen and sixty, down there wallerin' around in the Virginny swamps, feedin' the muskeeters and makin' a bid for glory."
But in a few days there came the terribly exciting news of Seven Pines and Fair Oaks—that first great combat of the revived war in the East—and we ceased to bother our heads about the photographer and his love. The enlisting fever sprang up again, and our young men began to make their way by dozens and scores to the recruiting office at Tecumseh. There were more farewells, more tears and prayers, not to mention several funerals of soldiers killed at Hanover Court House, where that Fifth Corps, which contained most of our volunteers, had its first spring smell of blood. And soon thereafterburst upon us the awful sustained carnage of the Seven Days' fighting, which drove out of our minds even the recollection that Miss Julia Parmalee herself had volunteered for active service in the Sanitary Commission, and gone South to take up her work.
And so July 3d came, bringing with it the bare tidings of that closing desperate battle of the week at Malvern Hill, and the movement of what was left of the Army of the Potomac to a safe resting place on the James River. We were beginning to get the details of local interest by the slow single wire from Thessaly, and sickening enough they were. The village streets were filled with silent, horror-stricken crowds. The whole community seemed to have but a single face, repeated upon the mental vision at every step—a terrible face with distended, empty eyes, riven brows, and an open drawn mouth like the old Greek mask of tragedy.
"I swan! I don't know whether to keep open to-morrow or not," said Mr. Newton Shull, for perhaps the twentieth time, as he wandered once again from the reception-room into the little workshop behind. "In some ways it's kind of agin my principles to work on Independence Day—but, then again, if Ithought there was likely to be a good many farmers comin' into town——"
"They'll be plenty of 'em coming in," said the boy, over his shoulder, "but they'll steer clear of here."
"I'm 'fraid so," sighed Mr. Shull. He advanced a listless step or two and gazed with dejected apathy at the newspaper map tacked to the wall, on which the boy was making red and blue crosses with a colored pencil. "I don't see much good o' that," he said. "Still, of course, if it eases your mind any——"
"That's where the fightin' finished," observed the boy, pointing to a big mark on the map. "That's Malvern Hill there, and here—down where the river takes the big bend—that's Harrison's Landing, where the army's movin' to. See them seven rings? Them are the battles, one each day, as our men forced their way down through the Chickahominy swamps, beginnin' up in the corner with Beaver Dam Creek. If the map was a little higher it 'ud show the Pamunkey, where they started from. My uncle says that the whole mistake was in ever abandoning the Pamunkey."
"Pa-monkey or Ma-monkey," said Newton Shull, gloomily, "it wouldn't be no comfort to me to see it, even on a map. It's jest taken andbusted me and my business here clean as a whistle. We ain't paid expenses two days in a week sence Marseny went. Here I've got now so't I kin take a plain, everyday sort o' picture jest about as well as he did—a little streakid sometimes, perhaps, and more or less pinholes—but still pretty middlin' fair on an average, and then, darn my buttons if they don't all stop comin'. It positively don't seem to me as if there was a single human bein' in Dearborn County that 'ud have his picture took as a gift. All they want now is to have enlargements thrown up from little likenesses of their men folks that have been killed, and them I don't know how to do no more'n a babe unborn."
"You knew well enough how to make that stereopticon slide," remarked the boy with severity.
"Yes," mused Mr. Shull, "that darned thing—that made a peck o' trouble, didn't it? I dunno what on earth possessed me; I kind o' seemed to git the notion of doin' it into my head all to once't, and somehow I never dreamt of its rilin' Marseny so; you couldn't tell that a man 'ud be so blamed touchy as all that, could you?—and I dunno, like as not he'd a' enlisted any how. But I do wish he'd showed me how to make them pesky enlargements aforehe went. If I'd only seen him do one, even once, I could a' picked the thing up, but I never did. It's just my luck!"
"Say," said the boy, looking up with a sudden thought, "do you know what my mother heard yesterday? It's all over the place that before Marseny left he went to Squire Schermerhorn's and made his will, and left everything he's got to the Parmalee girl, in case he gits killed. So, if anything happens she'd be your partner, wouldn't she?"
Newton Shull stared with surprise. "Well, now, that beats creation," he said, after a little. "Somehow you know that never occurred to me, and yet, of course, that 'ud be jest his style."
"Yes, sir," repeated the other, "they say he's left her every identical thing."
"It's allus that way in this world," reflected Mr. Shull, sadly. "Them that don't need it one solitary atom, they're eternally gettin' every mortal thing left to 'em. Why, that girl's so rich already she don't know what to do with her money. If I was her, I bet a cooky I wouldn't go pikin' off to the battle-field, doin' nursin' and tyin' on bandages, and fannin' men while they were gittin' their legs cut off. No, sirree; I'd let the Sanitary Commissionscuffle along without me, I can tell you! A hoss and buggy and a fust-class two-dollar-a-day hotel, and goin' to the theatre jest when I took the notion—that'd be good enough for me."
"I suppose the sign then 'ud be 'Shull & Parmalee,' wouldn't it?" queried the boy.
"Well, now, I ain't so sure about that," said Mr. Shull, thoughtfully. "It might be that, bein' a woman, her name 'ud come first, out o' politeness. But then, of course, most prob'ly she'd want to sell out instid, and then I'd make the valuation, and she could give me time. Or she might want to stay in, only on the quiet, you know—what they call a silent partner."
"Nobody 'd ever call her a silent partner," observed the boy. "She couldn't keep still if she tried."
"I wouldn't care how much she talked," said Mr. Shull, "if she only put enough more money into the business. I didn't take much to her, somehow, along at fust, but the more I've seen of her the more I like the cut of her jib. She's got 'go' in her, that gal has; she jest figures out what she wants, and then she sails in and gits it. It don't matter who the man is, she jest takes and winds him round herlittle finger. Why, Marseny, here, he wasn't no more than so much putty in her hands. I lost all patience with him. You wouldn't catch me being run by a woman that way."
"So far's I could see," suggested the other, "she seemed to git pretty much all she wanted out of you, too. You were dancin' round, helpin' her at the fair there, like a hen on a hot griddle."
"It was all on his account," put in the partner, with emphasis. "Jest to please him; he seemed so much sot on her bein' humored in everything. I did feel kind o' foolish about it at the time—I never somehow believed much in doin' work for nothin'—but maybe it was all for the best. If what they say about his makin' a will is true, why it won't do me no harm to be on good terms with her—in case—in case——"
Mr. Shull was standing at the window, and his idle gaze had been vaguely taking in the general prospect of the street below the while he spoke. At this moment he discovered that some one on the opposite sidewalk was making vehement gestures to attract his attention. He lifted the sash and put his head out to listen, but the message came across loud enough for even the boy inside to hear.
"You'd better hurry round to the telegraph office!" this hoarse, anonymous voice cried. "Malvern Hill list is a-comin' in—and they say your pardner's been shot—shot bad, too!"
Newton Shull drew in his head and stood for some moments staring blankly at the map on the wall. "Well, I swan!" he began, with confused hesitation, "I dunno—it seems to me—well, yes, I guess prob'ly the best thing'll be for her to put more money into the business—yes, that's the plan—and we kin hire an operator up from Tecumseh."
But there was no one to pass an opinion on his project. The boy had snatched his hat, and could be heard even now dashing his way furiously down the outer stairs.
*****
The summer dusk had begun to gather before Octavius heard all that was to be learned of the frightful calamity which had befallen its absent sons. The local roll of death and disaster from Gaines's Mill earlier in the week had seemed incredibly awful. This new budget of horrors from Malvern was far worse.
"Wa'n't the rest of the North doin' anything at all?" a wild-eyed, disheveled old farmer cried out in a shaking, half-frenzied shriek from the press of the crowd round thetelegraph office. "Do they think Dearborn County's got to suppress this whole damned rebellion single-handed?"
It seemed to the dazed and horrified throng as if some such idea must be in the minds of the rest of the Union. Surely no other little community—or big community, either—could have had such a hideous blow dealt to it as this under which Octavius reeled. The list of the week for the county, including Gaines's Mill, showed one hundred and eight men dead outright, and very nearly five hundred more wounded in battle. It was too shocking for comprehension.
As evening drew on, men gathered the nerve to say to one another that there was something very glorious in the way the two regiments had been thrust into the front, and had shown themselves heroically fit for that grim honor. They tried, too, to extract solace from the news that the regiments in question had been mentioned by name in the general despatches as having distinguished themselves and their county above all the rest—but it was an empty and heart-sickened pretense at best, and when, about dark, the women folks, who had waited in vain for them to come home to supper, began to appear on the skirts of the crowd, it wasgiven up altogether. In after years Octavius got so that it could cheer those sinister names of Gaines's Mill and Malvern Hill, and swell with pride at the memories they evoked. But that evening no one cheered. It was too terrible.
There was, indeed, a single partial exception to this rule. The regular service of news had ceased—in those days, before the duplex invention, the single wire had most melancholy limitations—but the throng still lingered; and when, in the failing light, the postmaster was seen to step up again on the chair by the door with a bit of paper in his hand, a solemn hush ran over the assemblage.
"It is a private telegram sent to me personally," he explained, in the loud, clear tones of one who had earned his office by years of stump speaking; "but it is intended for you all, I should presume."
The silent crowd pushed nearer, and listened with strained attention as this despatch was read:
Headquarters Sanitary Commission,Harrison's Landing, Va., Wednesday Morning.To Postmaster Octavius, N. Y.:No words can describe magnificent record soldiers of Dearborn County, especially Starbuck, made past week.I bless fate which identified my poor services with such superb heroism. After second sleepless night, Col. Starbuck now reposing peacefully; doctor says crisis past; he surely recover, though process be slow. You will learn with pride he been brevetted Brigadier, fact which it was my privilege to announce to him last evening. He feebly thanked me, murmuring, "Tell them at home.""Julia Parmalee."
Headquarters Sanitary Commission,Harrison's Landing, Va., Wednesday Morning.
To Postmaster Octavius, N. Y.:
No words can describe magnificent record soldiers of Dearborn County, especially Starbuck, made past week.I bless fate which identified my poor services with such superb heroism. After second sleepless night, Col. Starbuck now reposing peacefully; doctor says crisis past; he surely recover, though process be slow. You will learn with pride he been brevetted Brigadier, fact which it was my privilege to announce to him last evening. He feebly thanked me, murmuring, "Tell them at home."
"Julia Parmalee."
In the silence which ensued the postmaster held the paper up and scanned it narrowly by the waning light. "There is something else," he said—"Oh, yes, I see; 'Franked despatch Sanitary Commission.' That's all."
Another figure was seen suddenly clambering upon the chair, with an arm around the postmaster for support. It was the teller of the bank. He waved his free arm excitedly, as he faced the crowd, and cried:
"Our women are as brave as our men! Three cheers for Miss Julia Parmalee! Hip-hip!"
The loyal teller's first "Hurrah!" fell upon the air quite by itself. Perhaps a dozen voices helped him half-heartedly with the second. The third died off again miserably, and he stepped down off the chair amid a general consciousness of failure.
"Who the hell is Starbuck?" was to beheard in whispered interrogatory passed along through the throng. Hardly anybody could answer. Boyce we knew, and McIntyre, and many others, but Starbuck was a mystery. Then it was explained that it must be the son of old Alanson Starbuck, of Juno Mills, who had gone away to Philadelphia seven or eight years before. He had not enlisted with any Dearborn County regiment, but held a staff appointment of some kind, presumably in a Pennsylvania command. We were quite unable to work up any emotion over him.
In fact, the more we thought it over, the more we were disposed to resent this planting of Starbuck upon us, in the very van of Dearborn County's heroes. His father was a rich old curmudgeon, whom no one liked. The son was nothing to us whatever.
As at last, in the deepening twilight, the people reluctantly began moving toward home, such conversation as they had the heart for seemed to be exclusively centred upon Miss Parmalee, and this queer despatch of hers. Slow-paced, strolling groups wended their way along the main street, and then up this side thoroughfare and that, passing in every block some dark and close-shuttered house of mourning, and instinctively sinking still lower theirmuffled tones as they passed, and carrying in their breasts, heaven only knows what torturing loads of anguish and stricken despair—but finding a certain relief in dwelling, instead, upon this lighter topic.
One of these groups—an elderly lady in black attire and two younger women of sober mien—walked apart from the others and exchanged no words at all until, turning a corner, their way led them past the Parmalee house. The looming bulk of the old mansion and the fragrant spaciousness of the garden about it seemed to attract the attention of Mrs. Ransom and her daughters. They halted as by a common impulse, and fastened a hostile gaze upon the shadowy outlines of the house and its surrounding foliage.
"If Dwight dies of his wound," the mother said, in a voice all chilled to calmness, "his murderess will live in there."
"I always hated her!" said one of the daughters, with a shudder.
"But he isn't going to die, mamma," put in the other. "You mustn't think of such a thing! You know how healthy he always has been, and this is only his shoulder. For my part, we may think ourselves very fortunate. Remember how many have been killed or mortallywounded. It seems as if half the people we know are in mourning. We get off very lightly with Dwight only wounded. Did you happen to hear the details about Mr. Pulford?—you know, the photographer—someone was saying that he was mortally wounded."
"She sent him to his death, then, too," said the elder Miss Ransom, raising her clenched hand against the black shadow of the house.
"I don't care about that man," broke in the mother, icily. "Nobody knows anything of him, or where he came from. People ran after him because he was good-looking, but he never seemed to me to know enough to come in when it rained. If she made a fool of him, it was his own lookout. But Dwight—my Dwight——!"
The mother's mannered voice broke into a gasp, and she bent her head helplessly. The daughters went to her side, and the group passed on into the darkness.
VI.
Itwas a dark, soft, summer night in Virginia, that of the 1st of July. After the tropical heat of the day, the air was being mercifully cooled, here on the hilltop, by a gentle breeze, laden with just a moist suggestion of the mist rising from the river flats and marshes down below. It was not Mother Nature's fault that this zephyr stirring along the parched brow of the hill did not bear with it, too, the scents of fruits and flowers, of new-mown hay and the yellow grain in shock, and minister soothingly to rest and pleasant dreams.
Instead, this breeze, moving mildly in the darkness, was one vile, embodied stench of sulphur and blood, and pestilential abominations. Go where you would, there was no escaping this insufferable burden of foul smells. If they were a horror on the hilltop, they were worse below.
It was one of the occasions on which Man had expended all his powers to prove his superiority to Nature. The elements in their wildestand most savage mood could never have wrought such butchery as this. The vine-wrapped fences, stretching down from the plateau toward the meadow lands below, were buttressed by piles of dead men, some in butternut, some in blue. Clumps of stiffened bodies curled supine at the base of every stump on the fringe of the woodland to the right and among the tumbled sheaves of grain to the left. Out in the open, the broad, sloping hillside and the valley bottom lay literally hidden under ridge upon ridge of smashed and riddled human forms, and the heaped debris of human battle. The clouds hung thick and close above, as if to keep the stars from beholding this repellent sample of earth's titanic beast, Man, at his worst. An Egyptian blackness was over it all.
At intervals a lightning flash from the crest of the outermost knoll tore this evil pall of darkness asunder, and then, with a roar and a scream, a spluttering line of vivid flame would arch its sinister way across the sky. A thousand little dots of light moved and zigzagged ceaselessly on the wide expanse of obscurity underneath this crest, and when the bursts of wrathful fireworks came from overhead it could be seen that these were lanterns being borne about in and out among the winrows ofmaimed and slain. Above all, through all, without even an instant's lull, there arose a terrible babel of chorused groans and prayers and howls and curses. This noise could be heard for miles—almost as far as the boom of the howitzers above could carry—and at a distance sounded like the moaning of a storm through a great pine-forest. Near at hand, it sounded like nothing else this side of hell.
An hour or so after nightfall the battery on the crest of the knoll stopped firing. The wails and shrieks from the slope below went on all through the night, and the lanterns of the search parties burned till the morning sunlight put them out.
Up on the top of the hill—a broad expanse of rolling plateaus—the scene wore a different aspect. At widely separated points bonfires and glittering lights showed where some general of the victorious army held his headquarters in a farm-house; and unless one pried too curiously about these parts, there were few enough evidences on the summit of the day's barbaric doings.
The chief of these houses—a stately and ancient structure, built in colonial days of brick proudly brought from Europe—had begun the forenoon of the battle as the headquarters ofthe Fifth Corps. Then the General and his staff had reduced their needs to a couple of rooms, to leave space for wounded men. Then they had moved out altogether, to let the whole house be used as a hospital. Then as the backwash of calamity from the line of conflict swelled in size and volume, the stables and barns had been turned over to the medical staff. Later, as the savage evening fight went on, tons of new hay had been brought out and strewn in sheltered places under the open sky to serve as beds for the sufferers. Before night fell, even these impromptu hospitals were overtaxed, and rows of stricken soldiers lay on the bare ground.
The day of intelligent and efficient hospital service had not yet dawned for our army. The breakdown of what service we had had, under the frightful stress of the battles culminating in this blood-soaked Malvern Hill, is a matter of history, and it can be viewed the more calmly now as the collapse of itself brought about an improved condition of affairs. But at the time it was a woful thing, with a lax and conflicting organization, insufficient material, a ridiculous lack of nurses, a mere handful of really competent surgeons and, most of all, a great crowd of volunteer medical students and ignorant practitioners, who flocked southward forthe mere excitement and practice of sawing, cutting, slashing right and left. So it was that army surgery lent new terrors to death on the battle-field in the year 1862.
The sky overhead was just beginning to show the ashen touch of twilight, when two men lying stretched on the hay in a corner of the smaller barnyard chanced to turn on their hard couch and to recognize each other. It was a slow and almost scowling recognition, and at first bore no fruit of words.
One was in the dress of a lieutenant of artillery, muddy and begrimed with smoke, and having its right shoulder torn or cut open from collar to elbow. The man himself had now such a waving, tangled growth of chestnut beard and so grimly blackened a face, that it would have been hard to place him as our easy-going, smiling Dwight Ransom.
The new movement had not brought ease, and now, after a few grunts of pain and impatience, he got himself laboriously up in a sitting posture, dragged a knapsack within reach up to support his back, and looked at his companion again.
"I heard that you were down here somewhere," he remarked, at last. "My sister wrote me."
Marsena Pulford stared up at him, made a little nodding motion of the head, and turned his glance again into the sky straight above. He also was a spectacle of dry mud and dust, and was bearded to the eyes.
"Where are you hit?" asked Dwight, after a pause.
For answer, Marsena slowly, and with an effort, put a hand to his breast—to the left, below the heart. "Here, somewhere," he said, in a low, dry-lipped murmur. He did not look at Dwight again, but presently asked, "Could you fix me—settin' up—too?"
"I guess so," responded Dwight. With the help of his unhurt arm he clambered to his feet and began moving dizzily about among the row of wounded men to his left. These groaned or snarled at him as he passed over them, but to this he paid no attention whatever. He returned from the end of the line, bringing two knapsacks and the battered frame of a drum, in which some one had been trying to carry water, and with some difficulty arranged these in a satisfactory heap. Then he knelt, pushed his arm under Marsena's shoulders, and lifted him up and backward to the support. Both men grimaced and winced under the smart of the effort, and for some minutes sat in silence, with closed eyes.
When they opened them finally it was with a sudden start at the sound of a woman's voice. Their ears had for long hours been inured to a ceaseless din of other noises—an ear-splitting confusion of cannon and musketry roar from the field less than an eighth of a mile away, of yelping shells overhead, and of screams and hoarse shouts all about them. Yet their senses caught this strange note of a woman's voice as if it had fallen upon the hush of midnight.
They looked up, and beheld Miss Julia Parmalee!
Upon such a background of heated squalor, dirt, and murderous disorder, it did not seem surprising to them that this lady should present a picture of cool, fresh neatness. She wore a snow-white nurse's cap, and broad, spotless bands of white linen were crossed over the shoulders of her pale dove-colored dress. Her dark face, dusky pink at the cheeks, glowed with a proud excitement. Her big brown eyes swept along the row of recumbent figures at her feet with the glance of a born conqueror.
"This is not a fit place for him," she said. "It is absurd to bring a gentleman—an officer of the headquarters staff—out to such a place as this!"
Then the two volunteers from Octavius sawthat behind her were four men, bearing a laden stretcher, and that at her side was a regimental hospital steward, who also looked speculatively along the rows of sufferers.
"It's the best thing we can do, anyway," he replied, not over politely; "and for that matter, there's hardly room here."
"Oh, there'd be no trouble about that," retorted Miss Julia, calmly. "We could move any of these people here. The General told me I was always to do just what I thought best. I am sure that if I could see him now he would insist at once that Colonel Starbuck should have a bed to himself, inside the house."
"I'll bet he wouldn't!" said the hospital steward, with emphasis.
"Perhaps you don't realize," put in Miss Julia, coldly, "that Colonel Starbuck is a staff officer—and a friend of mine."
"I don't care if he was on all the staffs there are," said the hospital steward, "he's got to take his chance with the rest. And it don't matter about his being a friend, either; we ain't playing favorites much just now. I don't see no room here, Miss. You'll have to take him out in the open lot there."
"Oh, never!" protested Miss Julia, vehemently."It's disgraceful! Why, the place is under fire there. I saw them running away from a shell there only a minute ago. No, if we can't do anything better, we'll have one of these men moved."
"Well, do something pretty quick!" growled one of the men supporting the stretcher.
Miss Parmalee had looked two or three times in an absent-minded way at the two men on the ground nearest her—obviously without recognizing either of them. There was a definite purpose in the glance she now bent upon Dwight Ransom—a glance framed in the resourceful smile he remembered so well.
"You seem to be able to sit up, my man," she said, ingratiatingly, to him; "would you be so very kind as to let me have that place for Colonel Starbuck, here—he is on the headquarters staff—and I am sure we should be so much obliged. You will easily get a nice place somewhere else for yourself. Oh, thank you so much! It is so good of you!"
Suppressing a groan at the pain the movement involved, and without a word, Dwight lifted himself slowly to his feet, and stepped aside, waving a hand toward the hay and knapsack in token of their surrender.
Then Miss Julia helped lift from the litter theobject of her anxiety. Colonel Starbuck was of a slender, genteel figure, and had the top of his head swathed heavily in bandages. He wore long, curly, brown side-whiskers, and his chin had been shaved that very morning. This was enough in itself to indicate that he belonged to the headquarters staff, but the fact was proclaimed afresh by everything else about him—his speckless uniform, his spick-and-span gauntlets, his carefully polished boots, the glittering newness of his shoulder-straps, sword scabbard, buttons, and spurs. It was clear that, whatever else had happened, his line of communication with the headquarters baggage train had never been interrupted.
"It is so kind of you!" Miss Parmalee murmured again, when the staff officer had been helped off the stretcher, and in a dazed and languid way had settled himself down into the place vacated for him. "Would you"—she whispered, looking up now, and noting that the hospital steward and the litter-men had gone away—"would you mind stepping over to the house, or to one of the tents beyond—you'll find him somewhere—and asking Dr. Willoughby to come at once? Tell him it is for Colonel Starbuck of the headquarters staff, and you'd better mention my name—MissParmalee, of the Sanitary Commission. You won't forget the name—Parmalee?"
"I don't fancy I shall forget it," said Dwight, gravely. "I've got a better memory than some."
Miss Julia caught the tone of voice on the instant, and looked upward again from where she knelt beside the Colonel, with a swift smile.
"Why, it's Mr. Ransom, I do believe!" she exclaimed. "I should never have known you with your beard. It's so good of you to take this trouble—you always were so obliging! Any one will tell you where Dr. Willoughby is. He's the surgeon of the Eighteenth, you know. I'm sure he'll come at once—to please me—and time is so precious, you know!"
Without further words, Dwight moved off slowly and unsteadily toward the house.
Miss Parmalee, seating herself so that some of her mouse-tinted draperies almost touched the face of Dwight's companion, unhooked a fan from her girdle and began softly fanning Colonel Star buck. "The doctor won't be long," she said, in low, cooing tones, after a little; "do you feel easier now?"
"I am rather dizzy still, and a little faint," replied the Colonel, languorously. "Thatfanning is so delicious though, that I'm really very happy. At least I would be if I weren't nervous about you. You have been through such tremendous exertions all day—out in the sun, amid all these horrid sights and this infernal roar—without a parasol, too. Are you quite sure it has not been too much for you?"
"You are always so thoughtful of others, dear Colonel Starbuck," murmured Miss Julia, reducing the fanning to a gentle, measured movement, and fixing her lustrous eyes pensively upon the clouds above the horizon. "You never think of yourself!"
"Only to think how happy my fate is, to be rescued and nursed by an angel," sighed the Colonel.
A smile of gentle deprecation played upon Miss Julia's red lips, and imparted to her eyes the expression they would wear if they had been gazing upon a tenderly entrancing vision in the sky. Then, all at once; she gave a little start of aroused attention, looked puzzled, and after a moment's pause bent her head over close to the Colonel's.
"The man behind me has taken tight hold of my dress," she whispered, hurriedly. "I don't want to turn around, but can you see him? He isn't having a fit or anything, is he?"
Colonel Starbuck lifted himself a trifle, and looked across. "No," he whispered in return, "he appears to be asleep. Probably he is dreaming. He is a corporal—some infantry regiment. They do manage to get so—what shall I say—so unwashed! Shall I move his hand for you?"
Miss Julia shook her head, with an arch little half smile.
"No, poor man," she murmured. "It gives me almost a sense of the romantic. Perhaps he is dreaming of home—of some one dear to him. Corporals do have their romances, you know, as well as——"
"As well as colonels," the staff officer playfully finished the sentence for her. "Well, I congratulate him, if his is a thousandth part as joyful as mine."
"Oh, then, you have one!" pursued Miss Parmalee, allowing her eyes to sparkle for an instant before they were coyly raised again to the clouds. Darkness was gathering there rapidly.
"Why pretend that you don't understand?" pleaded Colonel Starbuck—and there seemed to be no answer forthcoming. The fan moved even more sedately now, with a tender flutter at the end of each downward sweep.
Presently the preoccupation of the couple—one might not call it silence in such an unbroken uproar as rose around them and smashed through the air above—was interrupted by the appearance of a young, sharp-faced man, who marched straight across the yard toward them and, halting, spoke hurriedly.
"I was asked specially to come here for a moment," he said, "but it can only be a minute. We're just over our heads in work. What is it?"
Miss Parmalee looked at the young man with a favorless eye. He was unshaven, dishevelled, brusque of manner and speech. He was bareheaded, and his unimportant figure was almost hidden beneath a huge, revoltingly stained apron.
"I asked for my friend, Dr. Willoughby," she said. "But if he could not come, I must insist upon immediate attention for Colonel Starbuck here—an officer of the headquarter staff."
While she spoke the young surgeon had thrown himself on one knee, adroitly though roughly lifted the Colonel's bandages, run an inquiring finger over his skull, and plumped the linen back again. He sprang to his feet with an impatient grunt. "Paltry scalpwound," he snorted. Then, turning on his heel, he almost knocked against Dwight Ransom, who had come slowly up behind him.
"You had no business to drag me off for foolishness of this sort," he said, in vexed tones. "Here are thousands of men waiting their turn who really need help, and I've been working twenty hours a day for a week, and couldn't keep up with the work if every day had two hundred hours. It's ridiculous!"
Dwight shrugged his unhurt shoulder. "I didn't ask you for myself," he replied. "I'm quite willing to wait my turn—but the lady here—she asked me to bring help——"
"It can't be that this gentleman understands," put in Miss Julia, "that his assistance was desired for an officer of the headquarters staff."
"Madame," said the young surgeon, "with your permission, damn the headquarters staff!" and, turning abruptly, he strode off.
"I will go and see the General myself," exclaimed Miss Parmalee, flushing with wrath. "I will see whether he will permit the Sanitary Commission to be affronted in this outrageous——"
She stopped short. Her indignant effort to rise to her feet had been checked by a hand onfirmly the ground, which held in its grasp a fold of her skirt. She turned, pulled the cloth from the clutch of the tightened fingers, looked at the hand as it sprawled limply on the grass, and gave a little, shuddering, half-hysterical laugh. "Mercy me!" was what she said.
"You know who it is, don't you?" asked Dwight Ransom.
The meaning in his voice struck Miss Julia, and she bent a careful scrutiny through the dusk upon the face of the man stretched out beside her. His head had slipped sidewise on the knapsack, and his bearded chin was unnaturally sunk into his collar. Through the grime on his face could be discerned an unearthly pallor. His wide-open eyes seemed staring fixedly, reproachfully, at the hand which had lost its hold upon Miss Julia's dress.
"It does seem as if I'd seen the face before somewhere," she remarked, "but I don't appear to place it. It is getting so dark, too. No, I can't imagine. Who is it?"
She had risen to her feet and was peering down at the dead man, her pretty brows knitted in perplexity.
"He recognized you!" said Dwight, with significant gravity. "It's Marsena Pulford."
"Oh, poor man!" exclaimed Julia. "Ifhe'd only spoken to me I would gladly have fanned him, too. But I was so anxious about the Colonel here that I never took a fair look at him. I dare say I shouldn't have recognized him, even then. Beards do change one so, don't they!"
Then she turned to Colonel Starbuck and made answer to the inquiry of his lifted eyebrows.
"The unfortunate man," she explained, "was our village photographer. I sat to him for my picture several times. I think I have one of them over at the Commission tent now."
"I'll go this minute and seize it!" the gallant Colonel vowed, getting to his feet.
"Take care! We unprotected females have a man trap there!" Julia warned him; but fear did not deter the staff officer from taking her arm and leaning on it as they walked away in the twilight.
Then the night fell, and Dwight buried Marsena.