Despite the cheerfulness of Betty's letters, there were times during the next dark years when it seemed to her that starvation must be the only end. The negroes had been freed by the Governor's will, but the girl could not turn them from their homes, and, with the exception of the few field hands who had followed the Union army, they still lived in their little cabins and drew their daily rations from the storehouse. Betty herself shared their rations of cornmeal and bacon, jealously guarding her small supplies of milk and eggs for Mrs. Ambler and the two old ladies. “It makes no difference what I eat,” she would assure protesting Mammy Riah. “I am so strong, you see, and besides I really like Aunt Floretta's ashcakes.”
Spring and summer passed, with the ripened vegetables which Hosea had planted in the garden, and the long winter brought with it the old daily struggle to make the slim barrels of meal last until the next harvesting. It was in this year that the four women at Uplands followed the Major's lead and invested their united fortune in Confederate bonds. “We will rise or fall with the government,” Mrs. Ambler had said with her gentle authority. “Since we have given it our best, let it take all freely.”
“Surely money is of no matter,” Betty had answered, lavishly disregardful of worldly goods. “Do you think we might give our jewels, too? I have grandma's pearls hidden beneath the floor, you know.”
“If need be—let us wait, dear,” replied her mother, who, grave and pallid as a ghost, would eat nothing that, by any chance, could be made to reach the army.
“I do not want it, my child, there are so many hungrier than I,” she would say when Betty brought her dainty little trays from the pantry.
“But I am hungry for you, mamma—take it for my sake,” the girl would beg, on the point of tears. “You are starving, that is it—and yet it does not feed the army.”
In these days it seemed to her that all the anguish of her life had centred in the single fear of losing her mother. At times she almost reproached herself with loving Dan too much, and for months she would resolutely keep her thoughts from following him, while she laid her impassioned service at her mother's feet. Day or night there was hardly a moment when she was not beside her, trying, by very force of love, to hold her back from the death to which she went with her slow and stately tread.
For Mrs. Ambler, who had kept her strength for a year after the Governor's death, seemed at last to be gently withdrawing from a place in which she found herself a stranger. There was nothing to detain her now; she was too heartsick to adapt herself to many changes; loss and approaching poverty might be borne by one for whom the chief thing yet remained, but she had seen this go, and so she waited, with her pensive smile, for the moment when she too might follow. If Betty were not looking she would put her untasted food aside; but the girl soon found this out, and watched her every mouthful with imploring eyes.
“Oh, mamma, do it to please me,” she entreated.
“Well, give it back, my dear,” Mrs. Ambler answered, complaisant as always, and when Betty triumphantly declared, “You feel better now—you know you do, you dearest,” she responded readily:—
“Much better, darling; give me some straw to plait—I have grown to like to have my hands busy. Your old bonnet is almost gone, so I shall plait you one of this and trim it with a piece of ribbon Aunt Lydia found yesterday in the attic.”
“I don't mind going bareheaded, if you will only eat.”
“I was never a hearty eater. Your father used to say that I ate less than a robin. It was the custom for ladies to have delicate appetites in my day, you see; and I remember your grandma's amazement when Miss Pokey Mickleborough was asked at our table what piece of chicken she preferred, and answered quite aloud, 'Leg, if you please.' She was considered very indelicate by your grandma, who had never so much as tasted any part except the wing.”
She sat, gentle and upright, in her rosewood chair, her worn silk dress rustling as she crossed her feet, her beautiful hands moving rapidly with the straw plaiting. “I was brought up very carefully, my dear,” she added, turning her head with its shining bands of hair a little silvered since the beginning of the war. “'A girl is like a flower,' your grandpa always said. 'If a rough wind blows near her, her bloom is faded.' Things are different now—very different.”
“But this is war,” said Betty.
Mrs. Ambler nodded over the slender braid.
“Yes, this is war,” she added with her wistful smile, and a moment afterward looked up again to ask in a dazed way:—
“What was the last battle, dear? I can't remember.”
Betty's glance sought the lawn outside where the warm May sunshine fell in shafts of light upon the purple lilacs.
“They are fighting now in the Wilderness,” she answered, her thoughts rushing to the famished army closed in the death grapple with its enemy. “Dan got a letter to me and he says it is like fighting in a jungle, the vines are so thick they can't see the other side. He has to aim by ear instead of sight.”
Mrs. Ambler's fingers moved quickly.
“He has become a very fine man,” she said. “Your father always liked him—and so did I—but at one time we were afraid that he was going to be too much his father's son—he looked so like him on his wild days, especially when he had taken wine and his colour went high.”
“But he has the Lightfoot eyes. The Major, Champe, even their Great-aunt Emmeline have those same gray eyes that are always laughing.”
“Jane Lightfoot had them, too,” added Mrs. Ambler. “She used to say that to love hard went with them. 'The Lightfoot eyes are never disillusioned,' she once told me. I wonder if she remembered that afterwards, poor girl.”
Betty was silent for a moment.
“It sounds cruel,” she confessed, “but you know, I have sometimes thought that it may have been just a little bit her fault, mamma.”
Mrs. Ambler smiled. “Your grandpa used to say 'get a woman to judge a woman and there comes a hanging.'”
“Oh, I don't mean that,” responded Betty, blushing. “Jack Montjoy was a scoundrel, I suppose—but I think that even if Dan had been a scoundrel, instead of so big and noble—I could have made his life so much better just because I loved him; if love is only large enough it seems to me that all such things as being good and bad are swallowed up.”
“I don't know—your father was very good, and I loved him because of it. He was of the salt of the earth, as Mr. Blake wrote to me last year.”
“There has never been anybody like papa,” said Betty, her eyes filling. “Not even Dan—for I can't imagine papa being anything but what he was—and yet I know even if Dan were as wild as the Major once believed him to be, I could have gone with him not the least bit afraid. I was so sure of myself that if he had beaten me he could not have broken my spirit. I should always have known that some day he would need me and be sorry.”
Tender, pensive, bred in the ancient ways, Mrs. Ambler looked up at her and shook her head.
“You are very strong, my child,” she answered, “and I think it makes us all lean too much upon you.”
Taking her hand, Betty kissed each slender finger. “I lean on you for the best in life, mamma,” she answered, and then turned to the window. “It's my working time,” she said, “and there is poor Hosea trying to plough without horses. I wonder how he'll manage it.”
“Are all the horses gone, dear?”
“All except Prince Rupert and papa's mare. Peter keeps them hidden in the mountains, and I carried them the last two apples yesterday. Prince Rupert knew me in the distance and whinnied before Peter saw me. Now I'll send Aunt Lydia to you, dearest, while I see about the weaving. Mammy Riah has almost finished my linsey dress.” She kissed her again and went out to where the looms were working in one of the detached wings.
The summer went by slowly. The famished army fell back inch by inch, and at Uplands the battle grew more desperate with the days. Without horses it was impossible to plant the crops and on the open turnpike swept by bands of raiders as by armies, it was no less impossible to keep the little that was planted. Betty, standing at her window in the early mornings, would glance despairingly over the wasted fields and the quiet little cabins, where the negroes were stirring about their work. Those little cabins, forming a crescent against the green hill, caused her an anxiety before which her own daily suffering was of less account. When the time came that was fast approaching, and the secret places were emptied of their last supplies, where could those faithful people turn in their distress? The question stabbed her like a sword each morning before she put on her bonnet of plaited straw and ran out to make her first round of the farm. Behind her cheerful smile there was always the grim fear growing sharper every hour.
Then on a golden summer afternoon, when the larder had been swept by a band of raiders, she became suddenly aware that there was nothing in the house for her mother's supper, and, with the army pistol in her hand, set out across the fields for Chericoke. As she walked over the sunny meadows, the shadow that was always lifted in Mrs. Ambler's presence fell heavily upon her face and she choked back a rising sob. What would the end be? she asked herself in sudden anguish, or was this the end?
Reaching Chericoke she found Mrs. Lightfoot and Aunt Rhody drying sliced sweet potatoes on boards along the garden fence, where the sunflowers and hollyhocks flaunted in the face of want.
“I've just gotten a new recipe for coffee, child,” the old lady began in mild excitement. “Last year I made it entirely of sweet potatoes, but Mrs. Blake tells me that she mixes rye and a few roasted chestnuts. Mr. Lightfoot took supper with her a week ago, and he actually congratulated her upon still keeping her real old Mocha. Be sure to try it.”
“Indeed I shall—the very next time Hosea gets any sweet potatoes. Some raiders have just dug up the last with their sabres and eaten them raw.”
“Well, they'll certainly have colic,” remarked Mrs. Lightfoot, with professional interest.
“I hope so,” said Betty, “but I've come over to beg something for mamma's supper—eggs, chickens, anything except bacon. She can't touch that, she'd starve first.”
Looking anxious, Mrs. Lightfoot appealed to Aunt Rhody, who was busily spreading little squares of sweet potatoes on the clean boards. “Rhody, can't you possibly find us some eggs?” she inquired.
Aunt Rhody stopped her work and turned upon them all the dignity of two hundred pounds of flesh.
“How de hens gwine lay w'en dey's done been eaten up?” she demanded.
“Isn't there a single chicken left?” hopelessly persisted the old lady.
“Who gwine lef' 'em? Ain' dose low-lifeted sodgers dat rid by yestiddy done stole de las' one un 'um off de nes'?”
Mrs. Lightfoot sternly remonstrated.
“They were our own soldiers, Rhody, and they don't steal—they merely take.”
“I don' see de diffunce,” sniffed Aunt Rhody. “All I know is dat dey pulled de black hen plum off de nes' whar she wuz a-settin'. Den des now de Yankees come a-prancin' up en de ducks tuck ter de water en de Yankees dey went a-wadin' atter dem. Yes, Lawd, dey went a-wadin' wid dey shoes on.”
The old lady sighed.
“I'm afraid there's nothing, Betty,” she said, “though Congo has gone to town to see if he can find any fowls, and I'll send some over if he brings them. We had a Sherman pudding for dinner ourselves, and I know the sorghum in it will give the Major gout for a month. Well, well, this is war, I reckon, and I must say, for my part, I never expected it to be conducted like a flirtation behind a fan.”
“I nuver seed no use a-fittin' unless you is gwine ter fit in de yuther pusson's yawd,” interpolated Aunt Rhody. “De way ter fit is ter keep a-sidlin' furder f'om yo' own hen roos' en nigher ter de hen roos' er de somebody dat's a-fittin' you.”
“Hold your tongue, Rhody,” retorted Mrs. Lightfoot, and then drew Betty a little to one side. “I have some port wine, my dear,” she whispered, “which Cupid buried under the old asparagus bed, and I'll tell him to dig up several bottles and take them to you. The other servants don't know of it, so I can't get it out till after dark. Poor Julia! how does she stand these terrible days?”
Betty's lips quivered. “I have to force her to eat,” she replied, “and it seems almost cruel—she is so tired of life.”
“I know, my dear,” responded the old lady, wiping her eyes; “and we have our troubles, too. Champe is in prison now, and Mr. Lightfoot is very much upset. He says this General Grant is not like the others, that he knows him—and he's the kind to hang on as long as he's alive.”
“But we must win in the end,” said Betty, desperately; “we have sacrificed so much, how can it all be lost?”
“That's what Mr. Lightfoot says—we'll win in the end, but the end's a long way off. By the way, did you know that Car'line had run off after the Yankees? When I think how that girl had been spoiled!”
“Oh, I wish they'd all go,” returned Betty. “All except Mammy and Uncle Shadrach and Hosea—and even they make starvation that much nearer.”
“Well, we shan't starve yet awhile, dear; I'm in hopes that Congo will ransack the town. If you would only stay.”
But Betty shook her head and went back across the meadows, walking rapidly through the lush grass of the deserted pastures. Her mind was so filled with Mrs. Lightfoot's forebodings, that when, in climbing the low stone wall, she saw the free negro, Levi, coming toward her, she turned to him with a gesture that was almost an appeal for sympathy.
“Uncle Levi, these are sad times now,” she said. “I am looking for something for mamma's supper and I can find nothing.”
The old negro, shabbier, lonelier, poorer than ever, shambled up to the wall where she was standing and uncovered a split basket full of eggs.
“I'se got a pa'cel er hens hid in de woods over yonder,” he explained, “en I keep de eggs behin' de j'ists in my cabin. Sis Floretty she tole me dat de w'ite folks wuz wuss off den de niggers now, so I brung you dese.”
“Oh, Uncle Levi!” cried Betty, seizing his gnarled old hands. As she looked at his stricken figure a compassion as acute as pain brought the quick tears to her eyes. She remembered the isolation of his life, the scornful suspicion he had met from white and black, and the injustice that had set him free and sold Sarindy up the river.
“You wuz moughty good ter me,” muttered free Levi, shuffling his bare feet in the long grass, “en Marse Dan, he wuz moughty good ter me, too, 'fo' he went away on dat black night. I 'members de time w'en dat ole Rainy-day Jones up de big road (we all call him Rainy-day caze he looked so sour) had me right by de collar wid de hick'ry branch a sizzlin' in de a'r, en I des 'lowed de een had mos' come. Yes, Lawd, I did, but I warn' countin' on Marse Dan. He warn' mo'n wais' high ter ole Rainy-day, but de furs' thing I know dar wuz ole Rainy-day on de yerth wid Marse Dan a-lashin' 'im wid de branch er hick'ry.”
“We shall never forget you—Dan and I,” answered Betty, as she took the basket, “and when the time comes we will repay you.”
The old negro smiled and turned from her, and Betty, quickening her pace, ran on to Uplands, reaching the house a little breathless from the long walk.
In the chamber upstairs she found Mrs. Ambler sitting before the window with her open Bible on the sill, where a spray of musk roses entered from the outside wall.
“All well, mamma?” she asked in a cheerful voice.
Mrs. Ambler started and turned slowly from the window.
“I see a great light on the road,” she murmured wonderingly.
Crossing to where she sat, Betty leaned out above the climbing roses and glanced to the mountains huddled against the sky.
“It is General Sheridan going up the valley,” she said.
In the face of a damp April wind a remnant of Lee's army pushed forward along an old road skirted by thin pine woods. As the column moved on slowly, it threw out skirmishers on either flank, where the Federal cavalry hovered in the distance. Once in an open clearing it formed into a hollow square and marched in battle line to avoid capture. While the regiments kept in motion the men walked steadily in the ranks, with their hollowed eyes staring straight ahead from their gaunt, tanned faces; but at the first halt they fell like logs upon the roadside, sleeping amid the sound of shots and the stinging cavalry. With the cry of “Forward!” they struggled to their feet again, and went stumbling on into the vast uncertainty and the approaching night. Breathless, starving, with their rags pinned together, and their mouths bleeding from three days' rations of parched corn, they still kept onward, marching with determined eyes to whatever and wherever the end might be. Petersburg had fallen, Richmond was in flames behind them, the Confederacy was, perhaps, buried in the ruins of its Capitol, but Lee was still somewhere to the front, so his army followed.
“How long have we been marching, boys? I can't remember,” asked Dan, when, after a short rest, they formed again and started forward over the old road. In the tatters of his gray uniform, with his broken shoes tied on his feet and his black hair hanging across his eyes, he might have been one of the beggars who warm themselves in the sun of Southern countries.
“Oh, I reckon we left the Garden of Eden about six thousand years ago,” responded a wag from somewhere—he was too tired to recognize the voice. “There! the skirmishers have struck that blamed cavalry again. Plague them! They're as bad as wasps!”
“Has anybody some parched corn?” inquired Bland, plaintively. “I'll trade a whole raw ear for it. It makes my gums bleed so, I can't chew it.”
Dan plunged his hand into his pocket, and drew out the corn which he had shelled and parched at the last halt. As he exchanged it for the “whole raw ear,” he fell to wondering vaguely what had become of Big Abel since that dim point in eternity when they had left the trenches that surrounded Petersburg. Then time was divided into periods of nights and days, now night and day alike were made up in breathless marching, in throwing out skirmishers against those “wasps” of cavalrymen, and in trying to force aching teeth to grind parched corn. Panting and sick with hunger, he struggled on like a driven beast that sees the place ahead, where he must turn and grapple for the end with the relentless hunter on his track.
As the day ended the moist wind gathered strength and sang in his ears as he crept forward—now sleeping, now waking, for a time filled with warm memories of his college life, and again fighting over the last hopeless campaign from the Wilderness to the trenches where Petersburg had fallen. They had yielded step by step, but the great hunter had pressed on, and now the thin brigades were gathering for the last stand together.
Overhead he heard the soughing of the pines, and around him the steady tramp of feet too tired to lift themselves from out the heavy mud. Straight above in the muffled sky a star shone dimly, and for a time he watched it in his effort to keep awake. Then he began on the raw corn in his pocket, shelling it from the cob as he walked along; but when the taste of blood rose to his lips, he put the ear away again, and stooped to rub his eyes with a handful of damp earth. Then, at last, in sheer desperation, he loosened the grip upon his thoughts, and stumbled on, between waking and sleeping, into the darkness that lay ahead.
In the road before him the door at Chericoke opened wide as on the old Christmas Eves, and he saw the Major and the Governor draining their glasses under the garlands of mistletoe and holly, while Betty and Virginia, in dresses of white tarleton, stood against the ruddy glow that filled the panelled parlour. The cheerful Christmas smell was in the air—the smell of apple toddy, of roasted turkey, of plum pudding in a blaze of alcohol. As he entered after his long ride from college, Betty came up to him and slipped a warm white hand into his cold one, while he met the hazel beams from beneath her lashes.
“I hope you have brought Jack Morson,” she said. “Virginia is waiting. See how lovely she looks in her white flounces, with the string of coral about her neck.”
“But the war, Betty?” he asked, with blinking eyes, and as he put out his hand to touch the pearls upon her bosom, he saw that it was whole again—no wound was there, only the snowflakes that fell from his sleeve upon her breast. “What of the war, dear? I must go back to the army.”
Betty laughed long and merrily.
“Why, you're dreaming, Dan,” she said. “It all comes of those wicked stories of the Major's. In a moment you will believe that this is really 1812, and you've gone without your rations.”
“Thank God!” he cried aloud, and the sound of his own voice woke him, as he slipped and went down in a mudhole upon the road. The Christmas smell faded from his nostrils; in its place came the smoke from Pinetop's pipe—a faithful friend until the last. Overhead the star was still shining, and to the front he heard a single shot from the hovering cavalry, withdrawing for the night.
“God damn this mud!” called a man behind him, as he lurched sideways from the ranks. Farther away three hoarse voices, the remnant of a once famous glee club, were singing in the endeavour to scare off sleep:—
“Rally round the flag, boys, rally once again!”
And suddenly he was fighting in the tangles of the Wilderness, crouching behind a charred oak stump, while he loaded and fired at the little puffs of smoke that rose from the undergrowth beyond. He saw the low marshland, the stunted oaks and pines, and the heavy creepers that were pushed aside and trampled underfoot, and at his feet he saw a company officer with a bullet hole through his forehead and a covering of pine needles upon his face. About him the small twigs fell, as if a storm swept the forest, and as he dodged, like a sharpshooter from tree to tree, he saw a rush of flame and smoke in the distance where the woods were burning. Above the noise of the battle, he heard the shrieks of the wounded men in the track of the fire; and once he met a Union and a Confederate soldier, each shot through the leg, drawing each other back from the approaching flames. Then, as he passed on, tearing at the cartridges with his teeth, he came upon a sergeant in Union clothes, sitting against a pine stump with his cocked rifle in his hand, and his eyes on the wind-blown smoke. A moment before the man may have gone down at his shot, he knew—and yet, as he looked, an instinct stronger than the instinct to kill was alive within him, and he rushed on, dragging his enemy with him from the terrible woods. “I hope you are not much hurt,” he said, as he placed him on the ground and ran back to where the line was charging. “One life has been paid for,” he thought, as he rushed on to kill—and fell face downward on the wheel-ruts of the old road.
“Rally round the flag, boys, rally once again,”
sang the three hoarse voices, straining against the wind.
Dan struggled to his feet, and the scene shifted.
He was back in his childhood, and the Major had just brought in a slave he had purchased from Rainy-day Jones—“the plague spot in the county,” as the angry old gentleman declared.
Dan sat on the pile of kindling wood upon the kitchen hearth and stared at the poor black creature shivering in the warmth, his face distorted with the toothache, and a dirty rag about his jaw. He heard Aunt Rhody snorting indignantly as she basted the turkeys, and he watched his grandmother bustling back and forth with whiskey and hot plasters.
“Who made slavery, sir?” asked the boy suddenly, his hands in his breeches pockets and his head bent sideways.
The Major started.
“God, sir,” he promptly replied.
“Then I think it very strange of God,” said the boy, “and when I grow up, I shall set them all free, grandpa—I shall set them free even if I have to fight to do it, sir.”
“What! like poor free Levi?” stormed the Major.
“Wake up, confound you!” bawled somebody in his ear. “You've lurched against my side until my ribs are sore. I say, are you going on forever, anyhow? We've halted for the night.”
“I can't stop!” cried Dan, groping in the darkness, then he fell heavily upon the damp ground, while a voice down the road began shouting, “Detail for guard!” Half asleep and cursing, the men responded to their names and hurried off, and as the silence closed in, the army slept like a child upon the roadside.
With the first glimmer of dawn they were on the march again, passing all day through the desolate flat country, where the women ran weeping to the doorways, and waved empty hands as they went by. Once a girl in a homespun dress, with a spray of apple blossoms in her black hair, brought out a wooden bucket filled with buttermilk and passed it along the line.
“Fight to the end, boys,” she cried defiantly, “and when the end comes, keep on fighting. If you go back on Lee there's not a woman in Virginia will touch your hand.”
“That's right, little gal!” shrieked a husky private. “Three cheers for Marse Robert! an' we'll whip the earth in our bar' feet befo' breakfast.”
“All the same I wish old Stonewall was along,” muttered Pinetop. “If I could jest see old Stonewall or his ghost ahead, I'd know thar was an open road somewhere that Sheridan ain't got his eye on.”
As the sun rose high, refugees from Richmond flocked after them to shout that the town had been fired by the citizens, who had moved, with their families, to the Capitol Square as the flames spread from the great tobacco warehouses. Men who had wives and children in the city groaned as they marched farther from the ashes of their homes, and more than one staggered back into the ranks and went onward under a heavier burden.
“Wall, I reckon things are fur the best—or they ain't.” remarked Pinetop, in a cheerful tone. “Thar's no goin' agin that, you bet. What's the row back thar, I wonder?”
The hovering enemy, grown bolder, had fallen upon the flank, and the stragglers and the rear guard were beating off the cavalry, when a regiment was sent back to relieve the pressure. Returning, Pinetop, who was of the attacking party, fell gravely to moralizing upon the scarcity of food.
“I've tasted every plagued thing that grows in this country except dirt,” he observed, “an' I'm goin' to kneel down presently and take a good square mouthful of that.”
“That's one thing we shan't run short of,” replied Dan, stepping round a mud hole. “By George, we've got to march in a square again across this open. I believe when I set out for heaven, I'll find some of those confounded Yankee troopers watching the road.”
Forming in battle line they advanced cautiously across the clearing, while the skirmishing grew brisker at the front. That night they halted but once upon the way, standing to meet attack against a strip of pines, watching with drawn breath while the enemy crept closer. They heard him in the woods, felt him in the air, saw him in the darkness—like a gigantic coil he approached inch by inch for the last struggle. Now and then a shot rang out, and the little band thrilled to a soldier, and waited breathlessly for the last charge that might end it all.
“There's only one thing worse than starvation, and it's defeat!” cried Dan aloud; then the column swung on and the cry of “Close up, there! close up!” mingled in his ears with the steady tramp upon the road.
In the early morning the shots grew faster, and as the column stopped in the cover of a wood, the bullets came singing among the tree-tops, from the left flank where the skirmishers had struck the enemy. During the short rest Dan slept leaning against a twisted aspen, and when Pinetop shook him, he awoke with a dizziness in his head that sent the flat earth slamming against the sky.
“I believe I'm starving, Pinetop,” he said, and his voice rang like a bell in his ears. “I can't see where to put my feet, the ground slips about so.”
For answer Pinetop felt in his pocket and brought out a slice of fat bacon, which he gave to him uncooked.
“Wait till I git a light,” he commanded. “A woman up the road gave me a hunk, and I've had my share.”
“You've had your share,” repeated Dan, greedily, his eyes on the meat, though he knew that Pinetop was lying.
The mountaineer struck a match and lighted a bit of pine, holding the bacon to the flame until it scorched.
“You'd better git it all in yo' mouth quick,” he advised, “for if the smell once starts on the breeze the whole brigade will be on the scent in a minute.”
Dan ate it to the last morsel and licked the warm juice from his fingers.
“You lied, Pinetop,” he said, “but, by God, you saved my life. What place is this, I wonder. Isn't there any hope of our cutting through Grant's lines to-day?”
Pinetop glanced about him.
“Somebody said we were comin' on to Sailor's Creek,” he answered, “and it's about as God-forsaken country as I care to see. Hello! what's that?”
In the road there was an abandoned battery, cut down and left to rot into the earth, and as they swept past it at “double quick,” they heard the sound of rapid firing across the little stream.
“It's a fight, thank God!” yelled Pinetop, and at the words a tumultuous joy urged Dan through the water and over the sharp stones. After all the hunger and the intolerable waiting, a chance was come for him to use his musket once again.
As they passed through an open meadow, a rabbit, starting suddenly from a clump of sumach, went bounding through the long grass before the thin gray line. With ears erect and short white tail bobbing among the broom-sedge, the little quivering creature darted straight toward the low brow of a hill, where a squadron of cavalry made a blue patch on the green.
“Geriminy! thar goes a good dinner,” Pinetop gasped, smacking his lips. “An' I've got to save this here load for a Yankee I can't eat.”
With a long flying leap the rabbit led the charge straight into the enemy's ranks, and as the squirrel rifles rang out behind it, a blue horseman was swept from every saddle upon the hill.
“By God, I'm glad I didn't eat that rabbit!” yelled Pinetop, as he reloaded and raised his musket to his shoulder.
Back and forth before the line, the general of the brigade was riding bareheaded and frantic with delight. As he passed he made sweeping gestures with his left hand, and his long gray hair floated like a banner upon the wind.
“They're coming, men!” he cried. “Get behind that fence and have your muskets ready to pick your man. When you see the whites of his eyes fire, and give the bayonet. They're coming! Here they are!”
The old “worm” fence went down, and as Dan piled up some loose rails before him, a creeping brier tore his fingers until the blood spurted upon his sleeve. Then, kneeling on the ground, he raised his musket and fired at one of the skirmishers advancing briskly through the broom-sedge. In an instant the meadow and the hill beyond were blue with swarming infantry, and the little gray band fell back, step by step, loading and firing as it went across the field. As the road behind it closed, Dan turned to battle on his own account, and entering a thinned growth of pines, he dodged from tree to tree and aimed above the brushwood. Near him the colour bearer of the regiment was fighting with his flagstaff for a weapon, and out in the meadow a member of the glee club, crouching behind a clump of sassafras as he loaded, was singing in a cracked voice:—
“Rally round the flag, boys, rally once again!”
Then a bullet went with a soft thud into the singer's breast, and the cracked voice was choked out beneath the bushes.
Gripped by a sudden pity for the helpless flag he had loved and followed for four years, Dan made an impetuous dash from out the pines, and tearing the colours from the pole, tossed them over his arm as he retreated rapidly to cover. At the instant he held his life as nothing beside the faded strip of silk that wrapped about his body. The cause for which he had fought, the great captain he had followed, the devotion to a single end which had kept him struggling in the ranks, the daily sacrifice, the very poverty and cold and hunger, all these were bound up and made one with the tattered flag upon his arm. Through the belt of pines, down the muddy road, across the creek and up the long hill, he fell back breathlessly, loading and firing as he went, with his face turned toward the enemy. At the end he became like a fox before the hunters, dashing madly over the rough ground, with the colours blown out behind him, and the quick shots ringing in his ears.
Then, as if by a single stroke, Lee's army vanished from the trampled broom-sedge and the strip of pines. The blue brigades closed upon the landscape and when they opened there were only a group of sullen prisoners and the sound of stray shots from the scattered soldiers who had fought their way beyond the stream.
As the dusk fell Dan found himself on the road with a little company of stragglers, flying from the pursuing cavalry that drew off slowly as the darkness gathered. He had lost his regiment, and, as he went on, he began calling out familiar names, listening with strained ears for an answer that would tell of a friend's escape. At last he caught the outlines of a gigantic figure relieved on a hillock against the pale green west, and, with a shout, he hurried through the swarm of fugitives, and overtook Pinetop, who had stooped to tie his shoe on with a leather strap.
“Thank God, old man!” he cried. “Where are the others?”
Pinetop, panting yet imperturbable, held out a steady hand.
“The Lord knows,” he replied. “Some of 'em air here an' some ain't. I was goin' back agin to git the flag, when I saw you chased like a fox across the creek with it hangin' on yo' back. Then I kinder thought it wouldn't do for none of the regiment to answer when Marse Robert called, so I came along right fast and kep' hopin' you would follow.”
“Here I am,” responded Dan, “and here are the colours.” He twined the silk more closely about his arm, gloating over his treasure in the twilight.
Pinetop stretched out his great rough hand and touched the flag as gently as if it were a woman.
“I've fought under this here thing goin' on four years now,” he said, “and I reckon when they take it prisoner, they take me along with it.”
“And me,” added Dan; “poor Granger went down, you know, just as I took it from him. He fell fighting with the pole.”
“Wall, it's a better way than most,” Pinetop replied, “an' when the angel begins to foot up my account on Jedgment Day, I shouldn't mind his cappin' the whole list with 'he lost his life, but he didn't lose his flag.' To make a blamed good fight is what the Lord wants of us, I reckon, or he wouldn't have made our hands itch so when they touch a musket.”
Then they trudged on silently, weak from hunger, sickened by defeat. When, at last, the disorganized column halted, and the men fell to the ground upon their rifles, Dan kindled a fire and parched his corn above the coals. After it was eaten they lay down side by side and slept peacefully on the edge of an old field.
For three days they marched steadily onward, securing meagre rations in a little town where they rested for a while, and pausing from time to time, to beat off a feigned attack. Pinetop, cheerful, strong, undaunted by any hardship, set his face unflinchingly toward the battle that must clear a road for them through Grant's lines. Had he met alone a squadron of cavalry in the field, he would, probably, have taken his stand against a pine, and aimed his musket as coolly as if a squirrel were the mark. With his sunny temper, and his gloomy gospel of predestination, his heart could swell with hope even while he fought single-handed in the face of big battalions. What concerned him, after all, was not so much the chance of an ultimate victory for the cause, as the determination in his own mind to fight it out as long as he had a cartridge remaining in his box. As his fathers had kept the frontier, so he meant, on his own account, to keep Virginia.
On the afternoon of the third day, as the little company drew near to Appomattox Court House, it found the road blocked with abandoned guns, and lined by exhausted stragglers, who had gone down at the last halting place. As it filed into an open field beyond a wooded level, where a few campfires glimmered, a group of Federal horsemen clattered across the front, and, as if by instinct, the column formed into battle line, and the hand of every man was on the trigger of his musket.
“Don't fire, you fools!” called an officer behind them, in a voice sharp with irritation. “The army has surrendered!”
“What! Grant surrendered?” thundered the line, with muskets at a trail as it rushed into the open.
“No, you blasted fools—we've surrendered,” shouted the voice, rising hoarsely in a gasping indignation.
“Surrendered, the deuce!” scoffed the men, as they fell back into ranks. “I'd like to know what General Lee will think of your surrender?”
A little Colonel, with his hand at his sword hilt, strutted up and down before a tangle of dead thistles.
“I don't know what he thinks of it, he did it,” he shrieked, without pausing in his walk.
“It's a damn lie!” cried Dan, in a white heat. Then he threw his musket on the ground, and fell to sobbing the dry tearless sobs of a man who feels his heart crushed by a sudden blow.
There were tears on all the faces round him, and Pinetop was digging his great fists into his eyes, as a child does who has been punished before his playmates. Beside him a man with an untrimmed shaggy beard hid his distorted features in shaking hands.
“I ain't blubberin' fur myself,” he said defiantly, “but—O Lord, boys—I'm cryin' fur Marse Robert.”
Over the field the beaten soldiers, in ragged gray uniforms, were lying beneath little bushes of sassafras and sumach, and to the right a few campfires were burning in a shady thicket. The struggle was over, and each man had fallen where he stood, hopeless for the first time in four long years. Up and down the road groups of Federal horsemen trotted with cheerful unconcern, and now and then a private paused to make a remark in friendly tones; but the men beneath the bushes only stared with hollow eyes in answer—the blank stare of the defeated who have put their whole strength into the fight.
Taking out his jack-knife, Dan unfastened the flag from the hickory pole on which he had placed it, and began cutting it into little pieces, which he passed to each man who had fought beneath its folds. The last bit he put into his own pocket, and trembling like one gone suddenly palsied, passed from the midst of his silent comrades to a pine stump on the border of the woods. Here he sat down and looked hopelessly upon the scene before him—upon the littered roads and the great blue lines encircling the horizon.
So this was the end, he told himself, with a bitterness that choked him like a grip upon the throat, this the end of his boyish ardour, his dream of fame upon the battle-field, his four years of daily sacrifice and suffering. This was the end of the flag for which he was ready to give his life three days ago. With his youth, his strength, his very bread thrown into the scale, he sat now with wrecked body and blighted mind, and saw his future turn to decay before his manhood was well begun. Where was the old buoyant spirit he had brought with him into the fight? Gone forever, and in its place he found his maimed and trembling hands, and limbs weakened by starvation as by long fever. His virile youth was wasted in the slow struggle, his energy was sapped drop by drop; and at the last he saw himself burned out like the battle-fields, where the armies had closed and opened, leaving an impoverished and ruined soil. He had given himself for four years, and yet when the end came he had not earned so much as an empty title to take home for his reward. The consciousness of a hard-fought fight was but the common portion of them all, from the greatest to the humblest on either side. As for him he had but done his duty like his comrades in the ranks, and by what right of merit should he have raised himself above their heads? Yes, this was the end, and he meant to face it standing with his back against the wall.
Down the road a line of Federal privates came driving an ox before them, and he eyed them gravely, wondering in a dazed way if the taste of victory had gone to their heads. Then he turned slowly, for a voice was speaking at his side, and a tall man in a long blue coat was building a little fire hard by.
“Your stomach's pretty empty, ain't it, Johnny?” he inquired, as he laid the sticks crosswise with precise movements, as if he had measured the length of each separate piece of wood. He was lean and rawboned, with a shaggy red moustache and a wart on his left cheek. When he spoke he showed an even row of strong white teeth.
Dan looked at him with a kind of exhausted indignation.
“Well, it's been emptier,” he returned shortly.
The man in blue struck a match and held it carefully to a dried pine branch, watching, with a serious face, as the flame licked the rosin from the crossed sticks. Then he placed a quart pot full of water on the coals, and turned to meet Dan's eyes, which had grown ravenous as he caught the scent of beef.
“You see we somehow thought you Johnnies would be hard up,” he said in an offhand manner, “so we made up our minds we'd ask you to dinner and cut our rations square. Some of us are driving over an ox from camp, but as I was hanging round and saw you all by yourself on this old stump, I had a feeling that you were in need of a cup of coffee. You haven't tasted real coffee for some time, I guess.”
The water was bubbling over and he measured out the coffee and poured it slowly into the quart cup. As the aroma filled the air, he opened his haversack and drew out a generous supply of raw beef which he broiled on little sticks, and laid on a spread of army biscuits. The larger share he offered to Dan with the steaming pot of coffee.
“I declare it'll do me downright good to see you eat,” he said, with a hospitable gesture.
Dan sat down beside the bread and beef, and, for the next ten minutes, ate like a famished wolf, while the man in blue placidly regarded him. When he had finished he took out a little bag of Virginian tobacco and they smoked together beside the waning fire. A natural light returned gradually to Dan's eyes, and while the clouds of smoke rose high above the bushes, they talked of the last great battles as quietly as of the Punic Wars. It was all dead now, as dead as history, and the men who fought had left the bitterness to the camp followers or to the ones who stayed at home.
“You have fine tobacco down this way,” observed the Union soldier, as he refilled his pipe, and lighted it with an ember. Then his gaze followed Dan's, which was resting on the long blue lines that stretched across the landscape.
“You're feeling right bad about us now,” he pursued, as he crossed his legs and leaned back against a pine, “and I guess it's natural, but the time will come when you'll know that we weren't the worst you had to face.”
Dan held out his hand with something of a smile.
“It was a fair fight and I can shake hands,” he responded.
“Well, I don't mean that,” said the other thoughtfully. “What I mean is just this, you mark my words—after the battle comes the vultures. After the army of fighters comes the army of those who haven't smelled the powder. And in time you'll learn that it isn't the man with the rifle that does the most of the mischief. The damned coffee boilers will get their hands in now—I know 'em.”
“Well, there's nothing left, I suppose, but to swallow it down without any fuss,” said Dan wearily, looking over the field where the slaughtered ox was roasting on a hundred bayonets at a hundred fires.
“You're right, that's the only thing,” agreed the man in blue; then his keen gray eyes were on Dan's face.
“Have you got a wife?” he asked bluntly.
Dan shook his head as he stared gravely at the embers.
“A sweetheart, I guess? I never met a Johnnie who didn't have a sweetheart.”
“Yes, I've a sweetheart—God bless her!”
“Well, you take my advice and go home and tell her to cure you, now she's got the chance. I like your face, young man, but if I ever saw a half-starved and sickly one, it is yours. Why, I shouldn't have thought you had the strength to raise your rifle.”
“Oh, it doesn't take much strength for that; and besides the coffee did me good, I was only hungry.”
“Hungry, hump!” grunted the Union soldier. “It takes more than hunger to give a man that blue look about the lips; it takes downright starvation.” He dived into his haversack and drew out a quinine pill and a little bottle of whiskey.
“If you'll just chuck this down it won't do you any harm,” he went on, “and if I were you, I'd find a shelter before I went to sleep to-night; you can't trust April weather. Get into that cow shed over there or under a wagon.”
Dan swallowed the quinine and the whiskey, and as the strong spirit fired his veins, the utter hopelessness of his outlook muffled him into silence. Dropping his head into his open palms, he sat dully staring at the whitening ashes.
After a moment the man in blue rose to his feet and fastened his haversack.
“I live up by Bethlehem, New Hampshire,” he remarked, “and if you ever come that way, I hope you'll look me up; my name's Moriarty.”
“Your name's Moriarty, I shall remember,” repeated Dan, trying, with a terrible effort, to steady his quivering limbs.
“Jim Moriarty, don't you forget it. Anybody at Bethlehem can tell you about me; I keep the biggest store around there.” He went off a few steps and then came back to hold out an awkward hand in which there was a little heap of silver.
“You'd just better take this to start you on your way,” he said, “it ain't but ninety-five cents—I couldn't make out the dollar—and when you get it in again you can send it to Jim Moriarty at Bethlehem, New Hampshire. Good-by, and good luck to you this time.”
He strode off across the field, and Dan, with the silver held close in his palm, flung himself back upon the ground and slept until Pinetop woke him with a grasp upon his shoulder.
“Marse Robert's passin' along the road,” he said. “You'd better hurry.”
Struggling to his feet Dan rushed from the woods across the deserted field, to the lines of conquered soldiers standing in battle ranks upon the roadside. Between them the Commander had passed slowly on his dapple gray horse, and when Dan joined the ranks it was only in time to see him ride onward at a walk, with the bearded soldiers clinging like children to his stirrups. A group of Federal cavalrymen, drawn up beneath a persimmon tree, uncovered as he went by, and he returned the salute with a simple gesture. Lonely, patient, confirmed in courtesy, he passed on his way, and his little army returned to camp in the strip of pines.
“'I've done my best for you,' that's what he said,” sobbed Pinetop. “'I've done my best for you,'—and I kissed old Traveller's mane.”
Without replying, Dan went back into the woods and flung himself down on the spread of tags. Now that the fight was over all the exhaustion of the last four years, the weakness after many battles, the weariness after the long marches, had gathered with accumulated strength for the final overthrow.
For three days he remained in camp in the pine woods, and on the third, after waiting six hours in a hard rain outside his General's tent, he secured the little printed slip which signified to all whom it might concern that he had become a prisoner upon his parole. Then, after a sympathetic word to the rest of the division, shivering beneath the sassafras bushes before the tent, he shook hands with his comrades under arms, and started with Pinetop down the muddy road. The war was over, and footsore, in rags and with aching limbs, he was returning to the little valley where he had hoped to trail his glory.
Down the long road the gray rain fell straight as a curtain, and on either side tramped the lines of beaten soldiers who were marching, on their word of honour, to their distant homes. The abandoned guns sunk deep in the mud, the shivering men lying in rags beneath the bushes, and the charred remains of campfires among the trees were the last memories Dan carried from the four years' war.
Some miles farther on, when the pickets had been passed, a man on a black horse rode suddenly from a little thicket and stopped across their path.
“You fellows haven't been such darn fools as to give your parole, have you?” he asked in an angry voice, his hand on his horse's neck. “The fight isn't over yet and we want your muskets on our side. I belong to the partisan rangers, and we'll cut through to Johnston's army before daylight. If not, we'll take to the mountains and keep up the war forever. The country is ours, what's to hinder us?”
He spoke passionately, and at each sharp exclamation the black horse rose on his haunches and pawed the air.
Dan shook his head.
“I'm out on parole,” he replied, “but as soon as I'm exchanged, I'll fight if Virginia wants me. How about you, Pinetop?”
The mountaineer shuffled his feet in the mud and stood solemnly surveying the landscape.
“Wall, I don't understand much about this here parole business,” he replied. “It seems to me that a slip of paper with printed words on it that I have to spell out as I go, is a mighty poor way to keep a man from fightin' if he can find a musket. I ain't steddyin' about this parole, but Marse Robert told me to go home to plant my crop, and I am goin' home to plant it.”
“It is all over, I think,” said Dan with a quivering lip, as he stared at the ruined meadows. The smart was still fresh, and it was too soon for him to add, with the knowledge that would come to him from years,—“it is better so.” Despite the grim struggle and the wasted strength, despite the impoverished land and the nameless graves that filled it, despite even his own wrecked youth and the hard-fought fields where he had laid it down—despite all these a shadow was lifted from his people and it was worth the price.
They passed on, while the black horse pawed the dust, and the rider hurled oaths at their retreating figures. At a little house a few yards down the road they stopped to ask for food, and found a woman weeping at the kitchen table, with three small children clinging to her skirts. Her husband had fallen at Five Forks, she said, the safe was empty, and the children were crying for bread. Then Dan slipped into her hand the silver he had borrowed from the Union soldier, and the two returned penniless to the road.
“At least we are men,” he said almost apologetically to Pinetop, and the next instant turned squarely in the mud, for a voice from the other side had called out shrilly:—
“Hi, Marse Dan, whar you gwine now?”
“Bless my soul, it's Big Abel,” he exclaimed.
Black as a spade and beaming with delight, the negro emerged from the swarm upon the roadside and grasped Dan's outstretched hands.
“Whar you gwine dis away, Marse Dan?” he inquired again.
“I'm going home, Big Abel,” responded Dan, as they walked on in a row of three. “No, don't shout, you scamp; I'd rather lie down and die upon the roadside than go home like this.”
“Well, you ain' much to look at, dat's sho',” replied Big Abel, his face shining like polished ebony, “en I ain' much to look at needer, but dey'll have ter recollect de way we all wuz befo' we runned away; dey'll have ter recollect you in yo' fine shuts en fancy waistcoats, en dey'll have ter recollect me in yo' ole uns. Sakes alive! I kin see dat one er yourn wid de little bit er flow'rs all over hit des es plain es ef 'twuz yestiddy.”
“The waistcoats are all gone now,” said Dan gravely, “and so are the shirts. The war is over and you are your own master, Big Abel. You don't belong to me from this time on.”
Big Abel shook his head grinning.
“I reckon hit's all de same,” he remarked cheerfully, “en I reckon we'd es well be gwine on home, Marse Dan.”
“I reckon we would,” said Dan, and they pushed on in silence.