It was just a few days before Christmas, and the men around the large fireplace at the club had, not unnaturally, fallen to talking of Christmas. They were all men in the prime of life, and all or nearly all of them were from other parts of the country; men who had come to the great city to make their way in life, and who had, on the whole, made it in one degree or another, achieving sufficient success in different fields to allow of all being called successful men. Yet, as the conversation had proceeded, it had taken a reminiscent turn. When it began, only three persons were engaged in it, two of whom, McPheeters and Lesponts, were in lounging-chairs, with their feet stretched out towards the log fire, while the third, Newton, stood with his back to the great hearth, and his coat-tails well divided. The other men were scattered about the room, one or two writing at tables, three or four reading the evening papers, and the rest talking and sipping whiskey and water, or only talking or only sipping whiskey and water. As the conversation proceeded around the fireplace, however, one after another joined the group there, until the circle included every man in the room.
It had begun by Lesponts, who had been looking intently at Newton for some moments as he stood before the fire with his legs well apart and his eyes fastened on the carpet, breaking the silence by asking, suddenly: “Are you going home?”
“I don’t know,” said Newton, doubtfully, recalled from somewhere in dreamland, but so slowly that a part of his thoughts were still lingering there. “I haven’t made up my mind—I’m not sure that I can go so far as Virginia, and I have an invitation to a delightful place—a house-party near here.”
“Newton, anybody would know that you were a Virginian,” said McPheeters, “by the way you stand before that fire.”
Newton said, “Yes,” and then, as the half smile the charge had brought up died away, he said, slowly, “I was just thinking how good it felt, and I had gone back and was standing in the old parlor at home the first time I ever noticed my father doing it; I remember getting up and standing by him, a little scrap of a fellow, trying to stand just as he did, and I was feeling the fire, just now, just as I did that night. That was—thirty-three years ago,” said Newton, slowly, as if he were doling the years from his memory.
“Newton, is your father living?” asked Lesponts. “No, but my mother is,” he said; “she still lives at the old home in the country.”
From this the talk had gone on, and nearly all had contributed to it, even the most reticent of them, drawn out by the universal sympathy which the subject had called forth. The great city, with all its manifold interests, was forgotten, and the men of the world went back to their childhood and early life in little villages or on old plantations, and told incidents of the time when the outer world was unknown, and all things had those strange and large proportions which the mind of childhood gives. Old times were ransacked and Christmas experiences in them were given without stint, and the season was voted, without dissent, to have been far ahead of Christmas now. Presently, one of the party said: “Did any of you ever spend a Christmas on the cars? If you have not, thank Heaven, and pray to be preserved from it henceforth, for I’ve done it, and I tell you it’s next to purgatory. I spent one once, stuck in a snow-drift, or almost stuck, for we were ten hours late, and missed all connections, and the Christmas I had expected to spend with friends, I passed in a nasty car with a surly Pullman conductor, an impudent mulatto porter, and a lot of fools, all of whom could have murdered each other, not to speak of a crying baby whose murder was perhaps the only thing all would have united on.”
This harsh speech showed that the subject was about exhausted, and someone, a man who had come in only in time to hear the last speaker, had just hazarded the remark, in a faint imitation of an English accent, that the sub-officials in this country were a surly, ill-conditioned lot, anyhow, and always were as rude as they dared to be, when Lesponts, who had looked at the speaker lazily, said:
“Yes, I have spent a Christmas on a sleeping-car, and, strange to say, I have a most delightful recollection of it.”
This was surprising enough to have gained him a hearing anyhow, but the memory of the occasion was evidently sufficiently strong to carry Lesponts over obstacles, and he went ahead.
“Has any of you ever taken the night train that goes from here South through the Cumberland and Shenandoah Valleys, or from Washington to strike that train?”
No one seemed to have done so, and he went on:
“Well, do it, and you can even do it Christmas, if you get the right conductor. It’s well worth doing the first chance you get, for it’s almost the prettiest country in the world that you go through; there is nothing that I’ve ever seen lovelier than parts of the Cumberland and Shenandoah Valleys, and the New River Valley is just as pretty,—that background of blue beyond those rolling hills, and all,—you know, McPheeters?” McPheeters nodded, and he proceeded:
“I always go that way now when I go South. Well, I went South one winter just at Christmas, and I took that train by accident. I was going to New Orleans to spend Christmas, and had expected to have gotten off to be there several days beforehand, but an unlooked-for matter had turned up and prevented my getting away, and I had given up the idea of going, when I changed my mind: the fact is, I was in a row with a friend of mine there. I decided, on the spur of the moment, to go, anyhow, and thus got off on the afternoon train for Washington, intending to run my luck for getting a sleeper there. This was the day before Christmas-eve and I was due to arrive in New Orleans Christmas-day, some time. Well, when I got to Washington there was not a berth to be had for love or money, and I was in a pickle. I fumed and fussed; abused the railroad companies and got mad with the ticket agent, who seemed, I thought, to be very indifferent as to whether I went to New Orleans or not, and I had just decided to turn around and come back to New York, when the agent, who was making change for someone else, said: ‘I’m not positive, but I think there’s a train on such and such a road, and you may be able to get a berth on that. It leaves about this time, and if you hurry you may be able to catch it.’ He looked at his watch: ‘Yes, you’ve just about time to stand a chance; everything is late to-day, there are such crowds, and the snow and all.’ I thanked him, feeling like a dog over my ill-temper and rudeness to him, and decided to try. Anything was better than New York, Christmas-day. So I jumped into a carriage and told the driver to drive like the—the wind, and he did. When we arrived at the station the ticket agent could not tell me whether I could get a berth or not, the conductor had the diagram out at the train, but he thought there was not the slightest chance. I had gotten warmed up, however, by my friend’s civility at the other station, and I meant to go if there was any way to do it, so I grabbed up my bags and rushed out of the warm depot into the cold air again. I found the car and the conductor standing outside of it by the steps. The first thing that struck me was his appearance. Instead of being the dapper young naval-officerish-looking fellow I was accustomed to, he was a stout, elderly man, with bushy, gray hair and a heavy, grizzled mustache, who looked like an old field-marshal. He was surrounded by quite a number of people all crowding about him and asking him questions at once, some of whose questions he was answering slowly as he pored over his diagram, and others of which he seemed to be ignoring. Some were querulous, some good-natured, and all impatient, but he answered them all with imperturbable good humor. It was very cold, so I pushed my way into the crowd. As I did so I heard him say to someone: ‘You asked me if the lower berths were all taken, did you not?’ ‘Yes, five minutes ago!’ snapped the fellow, whom I had already heard swearing, on the edge of the circle. ‘Well, they are all taken, just as they were the first time I told you they were,’ he said, and opened a despatch given him by his porter, a tall, black, elderly negro with gray hair. I pushed my way in and asked him, in my most dulcet tone, if I could get an upper berth to New Orleans. I called him ‘Captain’, thinking him a pompous old fellow. He was just beginning to speak to someone else, but I caught him and he looked across the crowd and said ‘New Orleans!’ My heart sank at the tone, and he went on talking to some other man. ‘I told you that I would give you a lower berth, sir, I can give you one now, I have just got a message that the person who had “lower two” will not want it.’ ‘Hold on, then, I’ll take that lower,’ called the man who had spoken before, over the crowd, ‘I spoke for it first.’ ‘No you won’t,’ said the Captain, who went on writing. The man pushed his way in angrily, a big, self-assertive fellow; he was evidently smarting from his first repulse. ‘What’s that? I did, I say. I was here before that man got here, and asked you for a lower berth, and you said they were all taken.’ The Captain stopped and looked at him. ‘My dear sir, I know you did; but this gentleman has a lady along.’ But the fellow was angry. ‘I don’t care,’ he said, ‘I engaged the berth and I know my rights; I mean to have that lower berth, or I’ll see which is bigger, you or Mr. Pullman.’ Just then a lady, who had come out on the steps, spoke to the Captain about her seat in the car. He turned to her: ‘My dear madam, you are all right, just go in there and take your seat anywhere; when I come in I will fix everything. Go straight into that car and don’t come out in this cold air any more.’ The lady went back and the old fellow said, ‘Nick, go in there and seat that lady, if you have to turn every man out of his seat.’ Then, as the porter went in, he turned back to his irate friend. ‘Now, my dear sir, you don’t mean that: you’d be the first man to give up your berth; this gentleman has his sick wife with him and has been ordered to take her South immediately, and she’s going to have a lower berth if I turn every man in that car out, and if you were Mr. Pullman himself I’d tell you the same thing.’ The man fell back, baffled and humbled, and we all enjoyed it. Still, I was without a berth, so, with some misgiving, I began: ‘Captain?’ He turned to me. ‘Oh! you want to go to New Orleans?’ ‘Yes, to spend Christmas; any chance for me?’ He looked at his watch. ‘My dear young sir,’ he said, ‘go into the car and take a seat, and I’ll do the best I can with you.’ I went in, not at all sure that I should get a berth.
“This, of course, was only a part of what went on, but the crowd had gotten into a good humor and was joking, and I had fallen into the same spirit. The first person I looked for when I entered the car was, of course, the sick woman. I soon picked her out: a sweet, frail-looking lady, with that fatal, transparent hue of skin and fine complexion. She was all muffled up, although the car was very warm. Every seat was either occupied or piled high with bags. Well, the train started, and in a little while the Captain came in, and the way that old fellow straightened things out was a revelation. He took charge of the car and ran it as if he had been the Captain of a boat. At first some of the passengers were inclined to grumble, but in a little while they gave in. As for me, I had gotten an upper berth and felt satisfied. When I waked up next morning, however, we were only a hundred and fifty miles from Washington, and were standing still. The next day was Christmas, and every passenger on the train, except the sick lady and her husband, and the Captain, had an engagement for Christmas dinner somewhere a thousand miles away. There had been an accident on the road. The train which was coming north had jumped the track at a trestle and torn a part of it away. Two or three of the trainmen had been hurt. There was no chance of getting by for several hours more. It was a blue party that assembled in the dressing-room, and more than one cursed his luck. One man was talking of suing the company. I was feeling pretty gloomy myself, when the Captain came in. ‘Well, gentlemen, ‘Christmas-gift’; it’s a fine morning, you must go out and taste it,’ he said, in a cheery voice, which made me feel fresher and better at once, and which brought a response from every man in the dressing-room. Someone asked promptly how long we should be there. ‘I can’t tell you, sir, but some little time; several hours.’ There was a groan. ‘You’ll have time to go over the battle-field,’ said the Captain, still cheerily. ‘We are close to the field of one of the bitterest battles of the war.’ And then he proceeded to tell us about it briefly. He said, in answer to a question, that he had been in it. ‘On which side, Captain?’ asked someone. ‘Sir!’ with some surprise in his voice. ‘On which side?’ ‘On our side, sir, of course.’ We decided to go over the field, and after breakfast we did.
“The Captain walked with us over the ground and showed us the lines of attack and defence; pointed out where the heaviest fighting was done, and gave a graphic account of the whole campaign. It was the only battle-field I had ever been over, and I was so much interested that when I got home I read up the campaign, and that set me to reading up on the whole subject of the war. We walked back over the hills, and I never enjoyed a walk more. I felt as if I had got new strength from the cold air. The old fellow stopped at a little house on our way back, and went in whilst we waited. When he came out he had a little bouquet of geranium leaves and lemon verbena which he had got. I had noticed them in the window as we went by, and when I saw the way the sick lady looked when he gave them to her, I wished I had brought them instead of him. Some one intent on knowledge asked him how much he paid for them?
“He said, ‘Paid for them! Nothing.’
“‘Did you know them before?’ he asked.
“‘No, sir.’ That was all.
“A little while afterwards I saw him asleep in a seat, but when the train started he got up.
“The old Captain by this time owned the car. He was not only an official, he was a host, and he did the honors as if he were in his own house and we were his guests; all was done so quietly and unobtrusively, too; he pulled up a blind here, and drew one down there, just a few inches, ‘to give you a little more light on your book, sir’;—‘to shut out a little of the glare, madam—reading on the cars is a little more trying to the eyes than one is apt to fancy.’ He stopped to lean over and tell you that if you looked out of your window you would see what he thought one of the prettiest views in the world; or to mention the fact that on the right was one of the most celebrated old places in the State, a plantation which had once belonged to Colonel So-and-So, ‘one of the most remarkable men of his day, sir.’
“His porter, Nicholas, was his admirable second; not a porter at all, but a body-servant; as different from the ordinary Pullman-car porter as light from darkness. In fact, it turned out that he had been an old servant of the Captain’s. I happened to speak of him to the Captain, and he said: ‘Yes, sir, he’s a very good boy; I raised him, or rather, my father did; he comes of a good stock; plenty of sense and know their places. When I came on the road they gave me a mulatto fellow whom I couldn’t stand, one of these young, new, “free-issue” some call them, sir, I believe; I couldn’t stand him, I got rid of him.’ I asked him what was the trouble. ‘Oh! no trouble at all, sir; he just didn’t know his place, and I taught him. He could read and write a little—a negro is very apt to think, sir, that if he can write he is educated—he could write, and thought he was educated; he chewed a toothpick and thought he was a gentleman. I soon taught him better. He was impertinent, and I put him off the train. After that I told them that I must have my own servant if I was to remain with them, and I got Nick. He is an excellent boy (he was about fifty-five). The black is a capital servant, sir, when he has sense, far better than the mulatto.’
“I became very intimate with the old fellow. You could not help it. He had a way about him that drew you out. I told him I was going to New Orleans to pay a visit to friends there. He said, ‘Got a sweetheart there?’ I was rather taken aback; but I told him, ‘Yes.’ He said he knew it as soon as I spoke to him on the platform. He asked me who she was, and I told him her name. He said to me, ‘Ah! you lucky dog.’ I told him I did not know that I was not most unlucky, for I had no reason to think she was going to marry me. He said, ‘You tell her I say you’ll be all right.’ I felt better, especially when the old chap said, ‘I’ll tell her so myself.’ He knew her. She always travelled with him when she came North, he said.
“I did not know at all that I was all right; in fact, I was rather low down just then about my chances, which was the only reason I was so anxious to go to New Orleans, and I wanted just that encouragement and it helped me mightily. I began to think Christmas on the cars wasn’t quite so bad after all. He drew me on, and before I knew it I had told him all about myself. It was the queerest thing; I had no idea in the world of talking about my matters. I had hardly ever spoken of her to a soul; but the old chap had a way of making you feel that he would be certain to understand you, and could help you. He told me about his own case, and it wasn’t so different from mine. He lived in Virginia before the war; came from up near Lynchburg somewhere; belonged to an old family there, and had been in love with his sweetheart for years, but could never make any impression on her. She was a beautiful girl, he said, and the greatest belle in the country round. Her father was one of the big lawyers there, and had a fine old place, and the stable was always full of horses of the young fellows who used to be coming to see her, and ‘she used to make me sick, I tell you,’ he said, ‘I used to hate ‘em all; I wasn’t afraid of ‘em; but I used to hate a man to look at her; it seemed so impudent in him; and I’d have been jealous if she had looked at the sun. Well, I didn’t know what to do. I’d have been ready to fight ‘em all for her, if that would have done any good, but it wouldn’t; I didn’t have any right to get mad with ‘em for loving her, and if I had got into a row she’d have sent me off in a jiffy. But just then the war came on, and it was a Godsend to me. I went in first thing. I made up my mind to go in and fight like five thousand furies, and I thought maybe that would win her, and it did; it worked first-rate. I went in as a private, and I got a bullet through me in about six months, through my right lung, that laid me off for a year or so; then I went back and the boys made me a lieutenant, and when the captain was made a major, I was made captain. I was offered something higher once or twice, but I thought I’d rather stay with my company; I knew the boys, and they knew me, and we had got sort of used to each other—to depending on each other, as it were. The war fixed me all right, though. When I went home that first time my wife had come right around, and as soon as I was well enough we were married. I always said if I could find that Yankee that shot me I’d like to make him a present. I found out that the great trouble with me had been that I had not been bold enough; I used to let her go her own way too much, and seemed to be afraid of her. I WAS afraid of her, too. I bet that’s your trouble, sir: are you afraid of her?’ I told him I thought I was. ‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘it will never do; you mustn’t let her think that—never. You cannot help being afraid of her, for every man is that; but it is fatal to let her know it. Stand up, sir, stand up for your rights. If you are bound to get down on your knees—and every man feels that he is—don’t do it; get up and run out and roll in the dust outside somewhere where she can’t see you. Why, sir,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t do to even let her think she’s having her own way; half the time she’s only testing you, and she doesn’t really want what she pretends to want. Of course, I’m speaking of before marriage; after marriage she always wants it, and she’s going to have it, anyway, and the sooner you find that out and give in, the better. You must consider this, however, that her way after marriage is always laid down to her with reference to your good. She thinks about you a great deal more than you do about her, and she’s always working out something that is for your advantage; she’ll let you do some things as you wish, just to make you believe you are having your own way, but she’s just been pretending to think otherwise, to make you feel good.’
“This sounded so much like sense that I asked him how much a man ought to stand from a woman. ‘Stand, sir?’ he said; ‘why, everything, everything that does not take away his self-respect.’ I said I believed if he’d let a woman do it she’d wipe her shoes on him. ‘Why, of course she will,’ he said, ‘and why shouldn’t she? A man is not good enough for a good woman to wipe her shoes on. But if she’s the right sort of a woman she won’t do it in company, and she won’t let others do it at all; she’ll keep you for her own wiping.’”
“There’s a lot of sense in that, Lesponts,” said one of his auditors, at which there was a universal smile of assent. Lesponts said he had found it out, and proceeded.
“Well, we got to a little town in Virginia, I forget the name of it, where we had to stop a short time. The Captain had told me that his home was not far from there, and his old company was raised around there. Quite a number of the old fellows lived about there yet, he said, and he saw some of them nearly every time he passed through, as they ‘kept the run of him.’ He did not know that he’d ‘find any of them out to-day, as it was Christmas, and they would all be at home,’ he said. As the train drew up I went out on the platform, however, and there was quite a crowd assembled. I was surprised to find it so quiet, for at other places through which we had passed they had been having high jinks: firing off crackers and making things lively. Here the crowd seemed to be quiet and solemn, and I heard the Captain’s name. Just then he came out on the platform, and someone called out: ‘There he is, now!’ and in a second such a cheer went up as you never heard. They crowded around the old fellow and shook hands with him and hugged him as if he had been a girl.”
“I suppose you have reference to the time before you were married,” interrupted someone, but Lesponts did not heed him. He went on:
“It seemed the rumor had got out that morning that it was the Captain’s train that had gone off the track and that the Captain had been killed in the wreck, and this crowd had assembled to meet the body. ‘We were going to give you a big funeral, Captain,’ said one old fellow; ‘they’ve got you while you are living, but we claim you when you are dead. We ain’t going to let ‘em have you then. We’re going to put you to sleep in old Virginia.’
“The old fellow was much affected, and made them a little speech. He introduced us to them all. He said: ‘Gentlemen, these are my boys, my neighbors and family;’ and then, ‘Boys, these are my friends; I don’t know all their names yet, but they are my friends.’ And we were. He rushed off to send a telegram to his wife in New Orleans, because, as he said afterwards, she, too, might get hold of the report that he had been killed; and a Christmas message would set her up, anyhow. She’d be a little low down at his not getting there, he said, as he had never missed a Christmas-day at home since ‘64.
“When dinner-time came he was invited in by pretty nearly everyone in the car, but he declined; he said he had to attend to a matter. I was going in with a party, but I thought the old fellow would be lonely, so I waited and insisted on his dining with me. I found that it had occurred to him that a bowl of eggnogg would make it seem more like Christmas, and he had telegraphed ahead to a friend at a little place to have ‘the materials’ ready. Well, they were on hand when we got there, and we took them aboard, and the old fellow made one of the finest eggnoggs you ever tasted in your life. The rest of the passengers had no idea of what was going on, and when the old chap came in with a big bowl, wreathed in holly, borne by Nick, and the old Captain marching behind, there was quite a cheer. It was offered to the ladies first, of course, and then the men assembled in the smoker and the Captain did the honors. He did them handsomely, too: made us one of the prettiest little speeches you ever heard; said that Christmas was not dependent on the fireplace, however much a roaring fire might contribute to it; that it was in everyone’s heart and might be enjoyed as well in a railway-car as in a hall, and that in this time of change and movement it behooved us all to try and keep up what was good and cheerful and bound us together, and to remember that Christmas was not only a time for merry-making, but was the time when the Saviour of the world came among men to bring peace and good-will, and that we should remember all our friends everywhere. ‘And, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘there are two toasts I always like to propose at this time, and which I will ask you to drink. The first is to my wife.’ It was drunk, you may believe. ‘And the second is, “My friends: all mankind.”’ This too, was drunk, and just then someone noticed that the old fellow had nothing but a little water in his glass. ‘Why, Captain,’ he said, ‘you are not drinking! that is not fair.’ ‘Well, no, sir,’ said the old fellow, ‘I never drink anything on duty; you see it is one of the regulations and I subscribed them, and, of course, I could not break my word. Nick, there, will drink my share, however, when you are through; he isn’t held up to quite such high accountability.’ And sure enough, Nick drained off a glass and made a speech which got him a handful of quarters. Well, of course, the old Captain owned not only the car, but all in it by this time, and we spent one of the jolliest evenings you ever saw. The glum fellow who had insisted on his rights at Washington made a little speech, and paid the Captain one of the prettiest compliments I ever heard. He said he had discovered that the Captain had given him his own lower berth after he had been so rude to him, and that instead of taking his upper berth as he had supposed he would have done, he had given that to another person and had sat up himself all night. That was I. The old fellow had given the grumbler his ‘lower’ in the smoking-room, and had given me his ‘upper’. The fellow made him a very handsome apology before us all, and the Captain had his own berth that night, you may believe.
“Well, we were all on the ‘qui vive’ to see the Captain’s wife when we got to New Orleans. The Captain had told us that she always came down to the station to meet him; so we were all on the lookout for her. He told me the first thing that he did was to kiss her, and then he went and filed his reports, and then they went home together, ‘And if you’ll come and dine with me,’ he said to me, ‘I’ll give you the best dinner you ever had—real old Virginia cooking; Nick’s wife is our only servant, and she is an excellent cook.’ I promised him to go one day, though I could not go the first day. Well, the meeting between the old fellow and his wife was worth the trip to New Orleans to see. I had formed a picture in my mind of a queenly looking woman, a Southern matron—you know how you do? And when we drew into the station I looked around for her. As I did not see her, I watched the Captain. He got off, and I missed him in the crowd. Presently, though, I saw him and I asked him, ‘Captain, is she here?’ ‘Yes, sir, she is, she never misses; that’s the sort of a wife to have, sir; come here and let me introduce you.’ He pulled me up and introduced me to a sweet little old lady, in an old, threadbare dress and wrap, and a little, faded bonnet, whom I had seen as we came up, watching eagerly for someone, but whom I had not thought of as being possibly the Captain’s grand-dame. The Captain’s manner, however, was beautiful. ‘My dear, this is my friend, Mr. Lesponts, and he has promised to come and dine with us,’ he said, with the air of a lord, and then he leaned over and whispered something to her. ‘Why, she’s coming to dine with us to-day,’ she said with a very cheery laugh; and then she turned and gave me a look that swept me from top to toe, as if she were weighing me to see if I’d do. I seemed to pass, for she came forward and greeted me with a charming cordiality, and invited me to dine with them, saying that her husband had told her I knew Miss So-and-So, and she was coming that day, and if I had no other engagement they would be very glad if I would come that day, too. Then she turned to the Captain and said, ‘I saved Christmas dinner for you; for when you didn’t come I knew the calendar and all the rest of the world were wrong; so to-day is our Christmas.’”
—“Well, that’s all,” said Lesponts; “I did not mean to talk so much, but the old Captain is such a character, I wish you could know him. You’d better believe I went, and I never had a nicer time. They were just as poor as they could be, in one way, but in another they were rich. He had a sweet little home in their three rooms. I found that my friend always dined with them one day in the Christmas-week, and I happened to hit that day.” He leaned back.
“That was the beginning of my good fortune,” he said, slowly, and then stopped. Most of the party knew Lesponts’s charming wife, so no further explanation was needed. One of them said presently, however, “Lesponts, why didn’t you fellows get him some better place?”
“He was offered a place,” said Lesponts. “The fellow who had made the row about the lower berth turned out to be a great friend of the head of the Pullman Company, and he got him the offer of a place at three times the salary he got, but after consideration, he declined it. He would have had to come North, and he said that he could not do that: his wife’s health was not very robust and he did not know how she could stand the cold climate; then, she had made her friends, and she was too old to try to make a new set; and finally, their little girl was buried there, and they did not want to leave her; so he declined. When she died, he said, or whichever one of them died first, the other would come back home to the old place in Virginia, and bring the other two with him, so they could all be at home together again. Meantime, they were very comfortable and well satisfied.”
There was a pause after Lesponts ended, and then one of the fellows rang the bell and said, “Let’s drink the old Captain’s health,” which was unanimously agreed to. Newton walked over to a table and wrote a note, and then slipped out of the club; and when next day I inquired after him of the boy at the door, he said he had left word to tell anyone who asked for him, that he would not be back till after Christmas; that he had gone home to Virginia. Several of the other fellows went off home too, myself among them, and I was glad I did, for I heard one of the men say he never knew the club so deserted as it was that Christmas-day.
I
The County had been settled as a “frontier” in early colonial days, and when it ceased to be frontier, settlement had taken a jump beyond it, and in a certain sense over it, to the richer lands of the Piedmont. When, later on, steam came, the railway simply cut across it at its narrowest part, and then skirted along just inside its border on the bank of the little river which bounded it on the north, as if it intentionally left it to one side. Thus, modern progress had not greatly interfered with it either for good or bad, and its development was entirely natural.
It was divided into “neighborhoods”, a name in itself implying something both of its age and origin; for the population was old, and the customs of life and speech were old likewise.
This chronicle, however, is not of the “neighborhoods”, for they were known, or may be known by any who will take the trouble to plunge boldly in and throw themselves on the hospitality of any of the dwellers therein. It is rather of the unknown tract, which lay vague and undefined in between the several neighborhoods of the upper end. The history of the former is known both in peace and in war: in the pleasant homesteads which lie on the hills above the little rivers which make down through the county to join the great river below, and in the long list of those who fell in battle, and whose names are recorded on the slabs set up by their comrades on the walls of the old Court House. The history of the latter, however, is unrecorded. The lands were in the main very poor and grown up in pine, or else, where the head-waters of a little stream made down in a number of “branches”, were swampy and malarial. Possibly it was this poverty of the soil or unwholesomeness of their location, which more than anything else kept the people of this district somewhat distinct from others around them, however poor they might be. They dwelt in their little cabins among their pines, or down on the edges of the swampy district, distinct both from the gentlemen on their old plantations and from the sturdy farmer-folk who owned the smaller places. What title they had to their lands originally, or how they traced it back, or where they had come from, no one knew. They had been there from time immemorial, as long or longer, if anything, than the owners of the plantations about them; and insignificant as they were, they were not the kind to attempt to question, even had anyone been inclined to do so, which no one was.
They had the names of the old English gentry, and were a clean-limbed, blond, blue-eyed people.
When they were growing to middle age, their life told on them and made them weather-beaten, and not infrequently hard-visaged; but when they were young there were often among them straight, supple young fellows with clear-cut features, and lithe, willowy-looking girls, with pink faces and blue, or brown, or hazel eyes, and a mien which one might have expected to find in a hall rather than in a cabin.
Darby Stanley and Cove Mills (short for Coverley) were the leaders of the rival factions of the district. They lived as their fathers had lived before them, on opposite sides of the little stream, the branches of which crept through the alder and gum thickets between them, and contributed to make the district almost as impenetrable to the uninitiated as a mountain fastness. The long log-cabin of the Cove-Millses, where room had been added to room in a straight line, until it looked like the side of a log fort, peeped from its pines across at the clearing where the hardly more pretentious home of Darby Stanley was set back amid a little orchard of ragged peach-trees, and half hidden under a great wistaria vine. But though the two places lay within rifle shot of each other, they were almost as completely divided as if the big river below had rolled between them. Since the great fight between old Darby and Cove Mills over Henry Clay, there had rarely been an election in which some members of the two families had not had a “clinch”. They had to be thrown together sometimes “at meeting”, and their children now and then met down on the river fishing, or at “the washing hole”, as the deep place in the little stream below where the branches ran together was called; but they held themselves as much aloof from each other as their higher neighbors, the Hampdens and the Douwills, did on their plantations. The children, of course, would “run together”, nor did the parents take steps to prevent them, sure that they would, as they grew up, take their own sides as naturally as they themselves had done in their day. Meantime “children were children”, and they need not be worried with things like grown-up folk.
When Aaron Hall died and left his little farm and all his small belongings to educate free the children of his poor neighbors, the farmers about availed themselves of his benefaction, and the children for six miles around used to attend the little school which was started in the large hewn-log school-house on the roadside known as “Hall’s Free School”. Few people knew the plain, homely, hard-working man, or wholly understood him. Some thought him stingy, some weak-minded, some only queer, and at first his benefaction was hardly comprehended; but in time quite a little oasis began about the little fountain, which the poor farmer’s bequest had opened under the big oaks by the wayside, and gradually its borders extended, until finally it penetrated as far as the district, and Cove Mills’s children appeared one morning at the door of the little school-house, and, with sheepish faces and timid voices, informed the teacher that their father had sent them to school.
At first there was some debate over at Darby Stanley’s place, whether they should show their contempt for the new departure of the Millses, by standing out against them, or should follow their example. It was hard for a Stanley to have to follow a Mills in anything. So they stood out for a year. As it seemed, however, that the Millses were getting something to which the Stanleys were as much entitled as they, one morning little Darby Stanley walked in at the door, and without taking his hat off, announced that he had come to go to school. He was about fifteen at the time, but he must have been nearly six feet (his sobriquet being wholly due to the fact that Big Darby was older, not taller), and though he was spare, there was something about his face as he stood in the open door, or his eye as it rested defiantly on the teacher’s face, which prevented more than a general buzz of surprise.
“Take off your hat,” said the teacher, and he took it off slowly. “I suppose you can read?” was the first question.
“No.”
A snicker ran round the room, and little Darby’s brow clouded.
As he not only could not read, but could not even spell, and in fact did not know his letters, he was put into the alphabet class, the class of the smallest children in the school.
Little Darby walked over to the corner indicated with his head up, his hands in his pockets, and a roll in his gait full of defiance, and took his seat on the end of the bench and looked straight before him. He could hear the titter around him, and a lowering look came into his blue eyes. He glanced sideways down the bench opposite. It happened that the next seat to his was that of Vashti Mills, who was at that time just nine. She was not laughing, but was looking at Darby earnestly, and as he caught her eye she nodded to him, “Good-mornin’.” It was the first greeting the boy had received, and though he returned it sullenly, it warmed him, and the cloud passed from his brow and presently he looked at her again. She handed him a book. He took it and looked at it as if it were something that might explode.
He was not an apt scholar; perhaps he had begun too late; perhaps there was some other cause; but though he could swim better, climb better, and run faster than any boy in the school, or, for that matter, in the county, and knew the habits of every bird that flitted through the woods and of every animal that lived in the district, he was not good at his books. His mind was on other things. When he had spent a week over the alphabet, he did know a letter as such, but only by the places on the page they were on, and gave up when “big A” was shown him on another page, only asking how in the dickens “big A” got over there. He pulled off his coat silently whenever ordered and took his whippings like a lamb, without a murmur and almost without flinching, but every boy in the school learned that it was dangerous to laugh at him; and though he could not learn to read fluently or to train his fingers to guide a pen, he could climb the tallest pine in the district to get a young crow for Vashti, and could fashion all sorts of curious whistles, snares, and other contrivances with his long fingers.
He did not court popularity, was rather cold and unapproachable, and Vashti Mills was about the only other scholar with whom he seemed to be on warm terms. Many a time when the tall boy stood up before the thin teacher, helpless and dumb over some question which almost anyone in the school could answer, the little girl, twisting her fingers in an ecstacy of anxiety, whispered to him the answer in the face of almost certain detection and of absolutely certain punishment. In return, he worshipped the ground she walked on, and whichever side Vashti was on, Darby was sure to be on it too. He climbed the tallest trees to get her nuts; waded into the miriest swamps to find her more brilliant nosegays of flowers than the other girls had; spent hours to gather rarer birds’ eggs than they had, and was everywhere and always her silent worshipper and faithful champion. They soon learned that the way to secure his help in anything was to get Vashti Mills to ask it, and the little girl quickly discovered her power and used it as remorselessly over her tall slave as any other despot ever did. They were to be seen any day trailing along the plantation paths which the school-children took from the district, the others in a clump, and the tall boy and little calico-clad girl, who seemed in summer mainly sun-bonnet and bare legs, either following or going before the others at some distance.
The death of Darby—of old Darby, as he had begun to be called—cut off Little Darby from his “schoolin’”, in the middle of his third year, and before he had learned more than to read and cipher a little and to write in a scrawly fashion; for he had been rather irregular in his attendance at all times. He now stopped altogether, giving the teacher as his reason, with characteristic brevity: “Got to work.”
Perhaps no one at the school mourned the long-legged boy’s departure except his little friend Vashti, now a well-grown girl of twelve, very straight and slim and with big dark eyes. She gave him when he went away the little Testament she had gotten as a prize, and which was one of her most cherished possessions. Other boys found the first honor as climber, runner, rock-flinger, wrestler, swimmer, and fighter open once more to them, and were free from the silent and somewhat contemptuous gaze of him who, however they looked down on him, was a sort of silent power among them. Vashti alone felt a void and found by its sudden absence how great a force was the steady backing of one who could always be counted on to take one’s side without question. She had to bear the gibes of the school as “Miss Darby”, and though her two brothers were ready enough to fight for her if boys pushed her too hardly, they could do nothing against girls, and the girls were her worst tormentors.
The name was fastened on her, and it clung to her until, as time went on, she came to almost hate the poor innocent cause of it.
Meantime Darby, beginning to fill out and take on the shoulders and form of a man, began to fill also the place of the man in his little home. This among other things meant opposition, if not hostility, to everything on Cove Mills’s side. When old Darby died the Millses all went to the funeral, of course; but that did not prevent their having the same feeling toward Little Darby afterward, and the breach continued.
At first he used to go over occasionally to see Vashti and carry her little presents, as he had done at school; but he soon found that it was not the same thing. He was always received coolly, and shortly he was given to understand that he was not wanted there, and in time Vashti herself showed that she was not the same she had been to him before. Thus the young fellow was thrown back on himself, and the hostility between the two cabins was as great as ever.
He spent much of his time in the woods, for the Stanley place was small at best, only a score or so of acres, and mostly covered with pines, and Little Darby was but a poor hand at working with a hoe—their only farm implement. He was, however, an unerring shot, with an eye like a hawk to find a squirrel flat on top of the grayest limb of the tallest hickory in the woods, or a hare in her bed among the brownest broomsedge in the county, and he knew the habits of fish and bird and animal as if he had created them; and though he could not or would not handle a hoe, he was the best hand at an axe “in the stump”, in the district, and Mrs. Stanley was kept in game if not in meal.
The Millses dilated on his worthlessness, and Vashti, grown to be a slender slip of a girl with very bright eyes and a little nose, was loudest against him in public; though rumor said she had fallen afoul of her youngest brother and boxed his jaws for seconding something she had said of him.
The Mills’s enmity was well understood, and there were not wanting those to take Darby’s side. He had grown to be the likeliest young man in the district, tall, and straight as a sapling, and though Vashti flaunted her hate of him and turned up her little nose more than it was already turned up at his name, there were many other girls in the pines who looked at him languishingly from under their long sun-bonnets, and thought he was worth both the Mills boys and Vashti to boot. So when at a fish-fry the two Mills boys attacked him and he whipped them both together, some said it served them right, while others declared they did just what they ought to have done, and intimated that Darby was less anxious to meet their father than he was them, who were nothing more than boys to him. These asked in proof of their view, why he had declined to fight when Old Cove had abused him so to his face. This was met by the fact that he “could not have been so mighty afeared,” for he had jumped in and saved Chris Mills’s life ten minutes afterward, when he got beyond his depth in the pond and had already sunk twice. But, then, to be sure, it had to be admitted that he was the best swimmer on the ground, and that any man there would have gone in to save his worst enemy if he had been drowning. This must have been the view that Vashti Mills took of the case; for one day not long afterward, having met Darby at the cross-roads store where she was looking at some pink calico, and where he had come to get some duck-shot and waterproof caps, she turned on him publicly, and with flashing eyes and mantling cheeks, gave him to understand that if she were a man he “would not have had to fight two boys,” and he would not have come off so well either. If anything, this attack brought Darby friends, for he not only had whipped the Mills boys fairly, and had fought only when they had pressed him, but had, as has been said, declined to fight old man Mills under gross provocation; and besides, though they were younger than he, the Mills boys were seventeen and eighteen, and “not such babies either; if they insisted on fighting they had to take what they got and not send their sister to talk and abuse a man about it afterward.” And the weight of opinion was that, “that Vashti Mills was gettin’ too airified and set up anyways.”
All this reached Mrs. Stanley, and was no doubt sweet to her ears. She related it in her drawling voice to Darby as he sat in the door one evening, but it did not seem to have much effect on him; he never stirred or showed by word or sign that he even heard her, and finally, without speaking, he rose and lounged away into the woods. The old woman gazed after him silently until he disappeared, and then gave a look across to where the Mills cabin peeped from among the pines, which was full of hate.
The fish-fry at which Darby Stanley had first fought the Mills boys and then pulled one of them out of the river, had been given by one of the county candidates for election as delegate to a convention which was to be held at the capital, and possibly the division of sentiment in the district between the Millses and Little Darby was as much due to political as to personal feeling; for the sides were growing more and more tightly drawn, and the Millses, as usual, were on one side and Little Darby on the other; and both sides had strong adherents. The question was on one side, Secession, with probable war; and on the other, the Union as it was. The Millses were for the candidate who advocated the latter, and Little Darby was for him who wanted secession. Both candidates were men of position and popularity, the one a young man and the other older, and both were neighbors.
The older man was elected, and shortly the question became imminent, and all the talk about the Cross-roads was of war. As time had worn on, Little Darby, always silent, had become more and more so, and seemed to be growing morose. He spent more and more of his time in the woods or about the Cross-roads, the only store and post-office near the district where the little tides of the quiet life around used to meet. At length Mrs. Stanley considered it so serious that she took it upon herself to go over and talk to her neighbor, Mrs. Douwill, as she generally did on matters too intricate and grave for the experience of the district. She found Mrs. Douwill, as always, sympathetic and kind, and though she took back with her not much enlightenment as to the cause of her son’s trouble or its cure, she went home in a measure comforted with the assurance of the sympathy of one stronger than she. She had found out that her neighbor, powerful and rich as she seemed to her to be, had her own troubles and sorrows; she heard from her of the danger of war breaking out at any time, and her husband would enlist among the first.
Little Darby did not say much when his mother told of her visit; but his usually downcast eyes had a new light in them, and he began to visit the Cross-roads oftener.
At last one day the news that came to the Cross-roads was that there was to be war. It had been in the air for some time, but now it was undoubted. It came in the presence of Mr. Douwill himself, who had come the night before and was commissioned by the Governor to raise a company. There were a number of people there—quite a crowd for the little Cross-roads—for the stir had been growing day by day, and excitement and anxiety were on the increase. The papers had been full of secession, firing on flags, raising troops, and everything; but that was far off. When Mr. Douwill appeared in person it came nearer, though still few, if any, quite took it in that it could be actual and immediate. Among those at the Cross-roads that day were the Millses, father and sons, who looked a little critically at the speaker as one who had always been on the other side. Little Darby was also there, silent as usual, but with a light burning in his blue eyes.
That evening, when Little Darby reached home, which he did somewhat earlier than usual, he announced to his mother that he had enlisted as a soldier. The old woman was standing before her big fireplace when he told her, and she leaned against it quite still for a moment; then she sat down, stumbling a little on the rough hearth as she made her way to her little broken chair. Darby got up and found her a better one, which she took without a word.
Whatever entered into her soul in the little cabin that night, when Mrs. Stanley went among her neighbors she was a soldier’s mother. She even went over to Cove Mills’s on some pretext connected with Darby’s going. Vashti was not at home, but Mrs. Mills was, and she felt a sudden loss, as if somehow the Millses had fallen below the Stanleys. She talked of it for several days; she could not make out entirely what it was. Vashti’s black eyes flashed.
The next day Darby went to the Cross-roads to drill; there was, besides the recruits, who were of every class, quite a little crowd there to look at the drill. Among them were two women of the poorest class, one old and faded, rather than gray, the other hardly better dressed, though a slim figure, straight and trim, gave her a certain distinction, even had not a few ribbons and a little ornament or two on her pink calico, with a certain air, showed that she was accustomed to being admired.
The two women found themselves together once during the day, and their eyes met. It was just as the line of soldiers passed. Those of the elder lighted with a sudden spark of mingled triumph and hate, those of the younger flashed back for a moment and then fell beneath the elder’s gaze. There was much enthusiasm about the war, and among others, both of the Mills boys enlisted before the day was ended, their sister going in with them to the room where their names were entered on the roll, and coming out with flashing eyes and mantling cheeks. She left the place earlier than most of the crowd, but not until after the drill was over and some of the young soldiers had gone home. The Mills boys’ enlistment was set down in the district to Vashti, and some said it was because she was jealous of Little Darby being at the end of the company, with a new gun and such a fine uniform; for her hatred of Little Darby was well known; anyhow, their example was followed, and in a short time nearly all the young men in the district had enlisted.
At last one night a summons came for the company to assemble at the Cross-roads next day with arms and equipment. Orders had come for them to report at once at the capital of the State for drill, before being sent into the field to repel a force which, report said, was already on the way to invade the State. There was the greatest excitement and enthusiasm. This was war! And everyone was ready to meet it. The day was given to taking an inventory of arms and equipment, and then there was a drill, and then the company was dismissed for the night, as many of them had families of whom they had not taken leave, and as they had not come that day prepared to leave, and were ordered to join the commander next day, prepared to march.
Little Darby escorted his mother home, taciturn as ever. At first there was quite a company; but as they went their several ways to their home, at last Little Darby and his mother were left alone in the piney path, and made the last part of their way alone. Now and then the old woman’s eyes were on him, and often his eyes were on her, but they did not speak; they just walked on in silence till they reached home.
It was but a poor, little house even when the wistaria vine covered it, wall and roof, and the bees hummed among its clusters of violet blossoms; but now the wistaria bush was only a tangle of twisted wires hung upon it, and the little weather-stained cabin looked bare and poor enough. As the young fellow stood in the door looking out with the evening light upon him, his tall, straight figure filled it as if it had been a frame. He stood perfectly motionless for some minutes, gazing across the gum thickets before him.
The sun had set only about a half-hour and the light was still lingering on the under edges of the clouds in the west and made a sort of glow in the little yard before him, as it did in front of the cabin on the other hill. His eye first swept the well-known horizon, taking in the thickets below him and the heavy pines on either side where it was already dusk, and then rested on the little cabin opposite. Whether he saw it or not, one could hardly have told, for his face wore a reminiscent look. Figures moved backward and forward over there, came out and went in, without his look changing. Even Vashti, faintly distinguishable in her gay dress, came out and passed down the hill alone, without his expression changing. It was, perhaps, fifteen minutes later that he seemed to awake, and after a look over his shoulder stepped from the door into the yard. His mother was cooking, and he strolled down the path across the little clearing and entered the pines. Insensibly his pace quickened—he strode along the dusky path with as firm a step as if it were broad daylight. A quarter of a mile below the path crossed the little stream and joined the path from Cove Mills’s place, which he used to take when he went to school. He crossed at the old log and turned down the path through the little clearing there. The next moment he stood face to face with Vashti Mills. Whether he was surprised or not no one could have told, for he said not a word, and his face was in the shadow, though Vashti’s was toward the clearing and the light from the sky was on it. Her hat was in her hand. He stood still, but did not stand aside to let her pass, until she made an imperious little gesture and stepped as if she would have passed around him. Then he stood aside. But she did not appear in a hurry to avail herself of the freedom offered, she simply looked at him. He took off his cap sheepishly enough, and said, “Good-evenin’.”
“Good-evenin’,” she said, and then, as the pause became embarrassing, she said, “Hear you’re agoin’ away to-morrer?”
“Yes—to-morrer mornin’.”
“When you’re acomin’ back?” she asked, after a pause in which she had been twisting the pink string of her hat.
“Don’t know—may be never.” Had he been looking at her he might have seen the change which his words brought to her face; she lifted her eyes to his face for the first time since the half defiant glance she had given him when they met, and they had a strange light in them, but at the moment he was looking at a bow on her dress which had been pulled loose. He put out his hand and touched it and said:
“You’re a-losin’ yer bow,” and as she found a pin and fastened it again, he added, “An’ I don’ know as anybody keers.”
An overpowering impulse changed her and forced her to say: “I don’t know as anybody does either; I know as I don’t.”
The look on his face smote her, and the spark died out of her eyes as he said, slowly: “No, I knowed you didn’! I don’t know as anybody does, exceptin’ my old woman. Maybe she will a little. I jist wanted to tell you that I wouldn’t a’ fit them boys if they hadn’t a’ pushed me so hard, and I wan’t afeared to fight your old man, I jist wouldn’t—that’s all.”
What answer she might have made to this was prevented by him; for he suddenly held out his hand with something in it, saying, “Here.”
She instinctively reached out to take whatever it was, and he placed in her hand a book which she recognized as the little Testament which she had won as a prize at school and had given him when they went to school together. It was the only book she had ever possessed as her very own.
“I brought this thinking as how maybe you might ‘a’-wanted—me to keep it,” he was going to say; but he checked himself and said: “might ‘a’-wanted it back.”
Before she could recover from the surprise of finding the book in her hand her own, he was gone. The words only came to her clearly as his retreating footsteps grew fainter and his tall figure faded in the darkening light. She made a hasty step or two after him, then checked herself and listened intently to see if he were not returning, and then, as only the katydids answered, threw herself flat on the ground and grovelled in the darkness.
There were few houses in the district or in the county where lights did not burn all that night. The gleam of the fire in Mrs. Stanley’s little house could be seen all night from the door of the Mills cabin, as the candle by which Mrs. Mills complained while she and Vashti sewed, could be faintly seen from Little Darby’s house. The two Mills boys slept stretched out on the one bed in the little centre-room.
While the women sewed and talked fitfully by the single tallow candle, and old Cove dozed in a chair with his long legs stretched out toward the fire and the two shining barrels of his sons’ muskets resting against his knees, where they had slipped from his hands when he had finished rubbing them.
The younger woman did most of the sewing. Her fingers were suppler than her mother’s, and she scarcely spoke except to answer the latter’s querulous questions. Presently a rooster crowed somewhere in the distance, and almost immediately another crowed in answer closer at hand.
“Thar’s the second rooster-crow, it’s gittin’ erlong toward the mornin’,” said the elder woman.
The young girl made no answer, but a moment later rose and, laying aside the thing she was sewing, walked to the low door and stepped out into the night. When she returned and picked up her sewing again, her mother said:
“I de-clar, Vashti, you drinks mo’ water than anybody I ever see.”
To which she made no answer.
“Air they a-stirrin’ over at Mis’s Stanley’s?” asked the mother.
“They ain’t a-been to bed,” said the girl, quietly; and then, as if a sudden thought had struck her, she hitched her chair nearer the door which she had left open, and sat facing it as she sewed on the brown thing she was working on a small bow which she took from her dress.
“I de-clar, I don’t see what old Mis’s Stanley is actually a-gwine to do,” broke out Mrs. Mills, suddenly, and when Vashti did not feel called on to try to enlighten her she added, “Do you?”
“Same as other folks, I s’pose,” said the girl, quietly.
“Other folks has somebody—somebody to take keer on ‘em. I’ve got your pappy now; but she ain’t got nobody but little Darby—and when he’s gone what will she do?”
For answer Vashti only hitched her chair a little nearer the door and sewed on almost in darkness. “Not that he was much account to her, ner to anybody else, except for goin’ aroun’ a-fightin’ and a-fussin’.”
“He was account to her,” flamed up the girl, suddenly; “he was account to her, to her and to everybody else. He was the fust soldier that ‘listed, and he’s account to everybody.”
The old woman had raised her head in astonishment at her daughter’s first outbreak, and was evidently about to reply sharply; but the girl’s flushed face and flashing eyes awed and silenced her.
“Well, well, I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ against him,” she said, presently.
“Yes, you air—you’re always sayin’ somethin’ against him—and so is everybody else—and they ain’t fitten to tie his shoes. Why don’t they say it to his face! There ain’t one of ‘em as dares it, and he’s the best soldier in the comp’ny, an’ I’m jest as proud of it as if he was my own.”
The old woman was evidently bound to defend herself. She said:
“It don’t lay in your mouth to take up for him, Vashti Mills; for you’re the one as has gone up and down and abused him scandalous.”
“Yes, and I know I did,” said the girl, springing up excitedly and tossing her arms and tearing at her ribbons. “An’ I told him to his face too, and that’s the only good thing about it. I knowed it was a lie when I told him, and he knowed it was a lie too, and he knowed I knowed it was a lie—what’s more—and I’m glad he did—fo’ God I’m glad he did. He could ‘a’ whipped the whole company an’ he jest wouldn’t—an’ that’s God’s truth—God’s fatal truth.”
The next instant she was on her knees hunting for something on the floor, in an agony of tears; and as her father, aroused by the noise, rose and asked a question, she sprang up and rushed out of the door.
The sound of an axe was already coming through the darkness across the gum thickets from Mrs. Stanley’s, telling that preparation was being made for Darby’s last breakfast. It might have told more, however, by its long continuance; for it meant that Little Darby was cutting his mother a supply of wood to last till his return. Inside, the old woman, thin and faded, was rubbing his musket.
The sun was just rising above the pines, filling the little bottom between the cabins with a sort of rosy light, and making the dewy bushes and weeds sparkle with jewel-strung gossamer webs, when Little Darby, with his musket in his hand, stepped for the last time out of the low door. He had been the first soldier in the district to enlist, he must be on time. He paused just long enough to give one swift glance around the little clearing, and then set out along the path at his old swinging pace. At the edge of the pines he turned and glanced back. His mother was standing in the door, but whether she saw him or not he could not tell. He waved his hand to her, but she did not wave back, her eyes were failing somewhat. The next instant he disappeared in the pines.
He had crossed the little stream on the old log and passed the point where he had met Vashti the evening before, when he thought he heard something fall a little ahead of him. It could not have been a squirrel, for it did not move after it fell. His old hunter’s instinct caused him to look keenly down the path as he turned the clump of bushes which stopped his view; but he saw no squirrel or other moving thing. The only thing he saw was a little brown something with a curious spot on it lying in the path some little way ahead. As he came nearer it, he saw that it was a small parcel not as big as a man’s fist. Someone had evidently dropped it the evening before. He picked it up and examined it as he strode along. It was a little case or wallet made of some brown stuff, such as women carry needles and thread in, and it was tied up with a bit of red, white and blue string, the Confederate colors, on the end of which was sewed a small bow of pink ribbon. He untied it. It was what it looked to be: a roughly made little needle-case such as women use, tolerably well stocked with sewing materials, and it had something hard and almost square in a separate pocket. Darby opened this, and his gun almost slipped from his hand. Inside was the Testament he had given back to Vashti the evening before. He stopped stock-still, and gazed at it in amazement, turning it over in his hand. He recognized the bow of pink ribbon as one like that which she had had on her dress the evening before. She must have dropped it. Then it came to him that she must have given it to one of her brothers, and a pang shot through his heart. But how did it get where he found it? He was too keen a woodsman not to know that no footstep had gone before his on that path that morning. It was a mystery too deep for him, and after puzzling over it a while he tied the parcel up again as nearly like what it had been before as he could, and determined to give it to one of the Mills boys when he reached the Cross-roads. He unbuttoned his jacket and put it into the little inner pocket, and then rebuttoning it carefully, stepped out again more briskly than before.
It was perhaps an hour later that the Mills boys set out for the Cross-roads. Their father and mother went with them; but Vashti did not go. She had “been out to look for the cow,” and got in only just before they left, still clad in her yesterday’s finery; but it was wet and bedraggled with the soaking dew. When they were gone she sat down in the door, limp and dejected.
More than once during the morning the girl rose and started down the path as if she would follow them and see the company set out on its march, but each time she came back and sat down again in the door, remaining there for a good while as if in thought.
Once she went over almost to Mrs. Stanley’s, then turned back and sat down again.
So the morning passed, and the first thing she knew, her father and mother had returned. The company had started. They were to march to the bridge that night. She heard them talking over the appearance that they had made; the speech of the captain; the cheers that went up as they marched off—the enthusiasm of the crowd. Her father was in much excitement. Suddenly she seized her sun-bonnet and slipped out of the house and across the clearing, and the next instant she was flying down the path through the pines. She knew the road they had taken, and a path that would strike it several miles lower down. She ran like a deer, up hill and down, availing herself of every short cut, until, about an hour after she started, she came out on the road. Fortunately for her, the delays incident to getting any body of new troops on the march had detained the company, and a moment’s inspection of the road showed her that they had not yet passed. Clambering up a bank, she concealed herself and lay down. In a few moments she heard the noise they made in the distance, and she was still panting from her haste when they came along, the soldiers marching in order, as if still on parade, and a considerable company of friends attending them. Not a man, however, dreamed that, flat on her face in the bushes, lay a girl peering down at them with her breath held, but with a heart which beat so loud to her own ears that she felt they must hear it. Least of all did Darby Stanley, marching erect and tall in front, for all the sore heart in his bosom, know that her eyes were on him as long as she could see him.