"My God, here they come!"
Before the astounded Commander could leap from the porch to his horse the flying stragglers of his shattered right were pouring into view—men, wagons, ambulances, in utter confusion. Hooker swung his old division under General Berry into line and shouted to his veterans:
"Forward with the bayonet!"
The sturdy division plowed its way through the receding blue waves of panic-stricken men and dashed into the face of the overwhelming hosts.
Major Keenan, in command of the 8th Pennsylvania Cavalry, charged with his gallant five hundred into the face of almost certain death and held the grey lines in check until the artillery of the Third Corps was saved and turned on the advancing Confederates. He fell at the head of his men.
The fighting now became a battle. It was no longer a rout.
Ned saw a lone deaf man in blue standing bareheaded, fighting a whole army so intent on his work he hadn't noticed that his regiment had retreated and left him.
Two men in grey raised their muskets and fired point blank at this man at the same instant. The unconscious hero fell.
"I hit him!" cried one.
"No, I hit him!" said the other.
And they both rushed up and tenderly offered him help.
A grey soldier came hurrying by taking two prisoners to the rear. A cannon ball from the rescued battery cut off his leg and he dropped beside Ned shouting hysterically:
"Pick me up! Pick me up! Why don't you pick me up?"
The blue prisoner looked back in terror at the battery and started to run. A grey soldier stopped them:
"Here! Here! What'ell's the matter with you? Them's your own guns. What are ye tryin' to get away from 'em for?"
Men were falling now at every step.
Ned had advanced a hundred yards further when the boy on his right suddenly threw his hands over his head and his leg full to the ground, cut off by a cannon ball, Ned leaped to his side and caught him in his arms. A look of anguish swept his strong young face as he gasped:
"My poor old mother! O my God, what'll she do now?"
Ned tied his handkerchief around the mangled leg, twisted the knot, and stayed the blood gushing from the severed arteries, and rushed back to his desperate work.
Four horses dashed by his side dragging through the woods a big gun to train on the battery that was plowing through their lines. A solid shot crashed straight through a horse's head, blinding Ned with blood and brains.
He threw his hand to his face and buried it in the hot quivering mass, exclaiming:
"My God, boys, my brains are out!"
"You've got the biggest set I ever saw then!" the Captain said, helping him to clear his eyes.
A shell exploded squarely against the gun carriage, hurling it into junk and piling all four horses on the ground. Their dying cries rang pitifully through the smoke-wreathed woods. One horse lifted his head, placed both fore feet on the ground and tried to rise. His hind legs were only shreds of torn flesh. He neighed a long, quivering, soul-piercing shriek of agony and a merciful officer drew his revolver and killed him.
A cannoneer lay by this horse's side with both his legs hopelessly crushed so high in the thick flesh of the thighs there was no hope. He was moaning horribly. He turned his eyes in agony to the officer who had shot the horse:
"Please, Captain—for the love of God—shoot me, too, I can't live——"
The Captain shook his head.
"Have mercy on me—for Jesus' sake—kill me—you were kind to my horse—can't you do as much for me?"
The Captain turned away in anguish. He couldn't even send for morphine. The South had no more morphine. The blockade's iron hand was on her hospitals now.
Ned fought for half an hour behind a tree. Twice the bullets striking the hark knocked pieces into his eyes. He was sure at least fifty Minie balls struck it.
A bald-headed Colonel rushed by at double quick leading a fresh regiment into action to support them. The hell of battle was not so hot the Southern soldier had lost his sense of humor. They were glad to see this dashing old fighter and they told him so in no uncertain way.
"Hurrah for Baldy!"
"Sick 'em, Baldy—sick 'em——"
"I'll bet on old man Baldy every time——"
"Hurrah for the bald-headed man!"
The Colonel paid no attention to their shouts. The flash of his muskets in the deepening twilight turned the tide in their favor. The big guns had been unlimbered and pulled back deeper into the blue lines.
John Vaughan's line was swung to support the charge of Hooker's old division which first halted the rush of Jackson's men. In the field beyond the Chancellor House stood a huge straw stack. As the regiment rushed by at double quick the Colonel spied a panic-stricken officer crouching in terror behind the pile.
The Colonel slapped him across the shoulders with his sword:
"What sort of a place is this for you, sir?"
Through chattering teeth came the trembling response:
"W-w-hy, m-my God, do you think the bullets can come through?"
The Colonel threw up his hands in rage and pressed on with his men.
A wagon loaded with entrenching tools, on which sat half a dozen negroes rattled by on its way to the rear. A solid shot plumped squarely into the load.
John saw picks, spades, shovels and negroes suddenly fill the air. Every negro lit on his feet and his legs were running when he struck the ground. They reached the tall timber before the last pick fell.
The regiments were going into battle double quick, but they were not going so fast they couldn't laugh.
"Hurry up men!" the Colonel called. "Hurry up, let's get in there and help 'em!"
A moment more and they were in it.
The man beside John threw up both hands and dropped with the dull, unmistakable thud of death—the soldier who has been in battle knows the sickening sound.
They were thrown around the Third Corps battery to protect their guns which had been dragged to a place more securely within the lines. Still their gunners kept falling one by one—falling ominously at the crack of a single gun in the woods. A Confederate sharpshooter had climbed a tree and was picking them off.
A tall Westerner spoke to the Colonel:
"Let me go huntin' for him!"
The Commander nodded and John went with him—why? He asked himself the question before he had taken ten steps through the shadowy underbrush. The answer was plain. He knew the truth at once. The elemental brutal instinct of the hunter had kindled at the flash in that Westerner's eye. It would be a hunt worth while—the game was human.
For five minutes they crept through the bushes hiding from tree to tree in the open spaces. They searched the tops in vain, when suddenly a piece of white oak bark fluttered down from the sky and struck the ground at their feet.
The Westerner smiled at John and stood motionless:
"Well, I'm damned!"
They waited breathlessly, afraid to look up into the boughs of the towering oak beneath which they were standing.
"Don't move now!" the man from the West cried, "and I'll pot him."
Slowly he stepped backward, softly, noiselessly, his eye fixed in the treetop, his gun raised and finger on the trigger.
He stopped, aimed, and fired.
John looked up and saw the grey figure fall back from the tree trunk and plunge downward, bounding from limb to limb and striking the ground within ten feet of where he stood with heavy thud. The blood was gushing in red streams from his nose and mouth.
They turned and hurried back to their lines—another fierce attack was being made on those guns. The men in grey charged and drove them a hundred feet before they rallied and pushed them back with frightful loss on both sides.
John's Captain fell, dangerously wounded, and lay fifty feet beyond their battle line. The dry leaves in the woods had taken fire from a shell and the blaze was nearing the wounded men. The Westerner coolly leaped from his position behind a tree, walked out in a hail of lead, picked up his wounded Commander, and carried him safely to the rear. He had just stepped back to take his stand in line by John's side when a flying piece of shrapnel tore a hole in his side. He dropped to his knees, sank lower to his elbow, turned his blue eyes to the darkening sky and slowly muttered as if to himself:
"Poor—little—wife—and—babies!"
The night was drawing her merciful veil over the scene at last. Jackson having crushed and mangled Hooker's right wing and rolled it back in red defeat over five miles in two hours, was slowly feeling his way on his last reconnaissance for the day to make his plans for the next. Through a fatal misunderstanding he was fired on by his own men and borne from the field fatally wounded.
A shiver of horror thrilled the Southerners when the news of Jackson's fall was whispered through the darkness.
At midnight Sickles led his division back into the dense woods and for three terrible hours the men on both sides fought as demons in the shadows. The long lines of blazing muskets in the darkness looked like the onward rush of a forest fire. At times two solid walls of flame seemed to leap through the tree tops into the starlit heavens. A small portion of the captured ground was recovered at a frightful loss—and no man knows to this day how many gallant men in blue were shot down by their own comrades in the darkness and confusion of that mad assault.
Hooker sent a desperate call to Sedgwick to hurry to his relief by carrying out his plan of sweeping Marye's Heights and falling on Lee's rear.
At dawn Stuart in command of Jackson's corps led the new charge on Hooker's lines, his grey veterans shouting:
"Remember Jackson!"
Through the long hours of the terrible third day of May the fierce combat of giants raged. During the morning Hooker's headquarters were reached by the Confederate artillery and the old Chancellor House, filled with the wounded, was knocked to pieces and set on fire. The women and children and slaves of the Chancellor family were shivering in its cellar while the shells were hurling its bricks and timbers in murderous fury on the helpless wounded who lay in hundreds in the yard. The men from both armies rushed into this hell and carried the wounded to a place of safety.
General Hooker was wounded and the report flew over the Federal army that he had been killed. To allay their fears the General had himself lifted into the saddle and rode down his lines and out of sight, when he was taken unconscious from his horse.
Sedgwick was fighting his way with desperation now to force Marye's Heights and strike Lee's rear.
Once more the stone wall blazed with death for the gallant men in blue. They dashed themselves against it wave on wave, only to fall back in confusion. They tried to flank it and failed. Hour after hour the mad charges rolled against this hill and broke in deep red pools at its base. There were but nine thousand men holding it against forty thousand, but it was afternoon before the grey lines slowly gave way and Sedgwick's victorious troops poured over the hill toward Lee's lines. Hooker had asked him to appear at daylight. The long rows and mangled heaps of the dead left on Marye's bloody slopes was sufficient answer to all inquiries as to his delay.
But the way was still blocked. The receding line of grey was suddenly supported by Early's division detached from Lee's reserves. Again Sedgwick was stopped and fought until dark.
"Waving his plumed hat ... he put himself at the head of his troops and charged.""Waving his plumed hat ... he put himself at the head of his troops and charged."
As the sun was sinking over the smoke-wreathed spring-clothed trees of the wilderness, Stuart gathered Jackson's corps for a desperate assault on Hooker's last line of defense. Waving his plumed hat high above his handsome bearded face, he put himself at the head of his troops and charged, chanting with boyish enthusiasm his improvised battle song:
"Old—Joe—Hooker,Won't you come out o' the Wilderness!Come out o' the Wilderness!Come out o' the Wilderness!Old—Joe—Hooker—Come out o' the Wilderness—Come—come—I say!"
"Old—Joe—Hooker,Won't you come out o' the Wilderness!Come out o' the Wilderness!Come out o' the Wilderness!
Old—Joe—Hooker—Come out o' the Wilderness—Come—come—I say!"
The cheering grey waves swept all before them and left Lee in full possession of Chancellorsville and the whole position the Federal army had originally held.
As the Confederates rolled on, driving the fiercely fighting men in blue before them, Lee himself rode forward to encourage his men and then it happened—the thing for which the great have fought, and longed, and dreamed since time dawned—the spontaneous tribute of the brave to a trusted leader.
His victorious troops went wild at the sight of him. Above the crash and roar of battle rose the shouts of the Southerners:
"Hurrah for Lee!"
"Lee!"
"Lee!"
From lip to lip the thrilling name leaped until the wounded and the dying turned their eyes to see and raised their feeble voices:
"Lee!—Lee!—Lee!"
It was at this moment that he received the note from Jackson announcing that he was badly wounded. With the shouts of his men ringing in his ears, he drew his pencil and wrote across the pommel of his saddle:
"General: I have just received your note informing me that you are wounded. I cannot express my regret at the occurrence. Could I have directed events, I should have chosen, for the good of the country, to be disabled in your stead."I congratulate you upon the victory which is due to your skill and energy."Very respectfully, your obedient servant,
"General: I have just received your note informing me that you are wounded. I cannot express my regret at the occurrence. Could I have directed events, I should have chosen, for the good of the country, to be disabled in your stead.
"I congratulate you upon the victory which is due to your skill and energy.
"Very respectfully, your obedient servant,
"R. E. Lee,
General."
It was quick, bloody work next day for the Southerner to turn and spring on Sedgwick with the ferocity of a tiger, crush and hurl his battered and bleeding corps back on the river.
Under cover of a storm General Couch, in command of Hooker's army, retreated across the Rappahannock. The blue and grey picket lines that night were so close to each other the men could talk freely. The Southern boys were chaffing the Northerners over their oft repeated defeats. Through the darkness a Yankee voice drawled:
"Ah, Johnnie, shut up—you make us tired! You're not so much as you think you are. Swap Generals with us and we'll come over and lick hell out of you!"
A silence fell over the boasting ones and then the listening Yankee heard a low voice chuckle to his comrade:
"I'm damned if they wouldn't, too!"
When the grey dawn broke through the storm they began to bury the dead and care for the wounded. The awful struggle had ended at last.
The Northern army had lost seventeen thousand men, the Southerners thirteen thousand.
It was a great victory for the South, but a few more such victories and there would be none of her brave boys left to tell the story.
John Vaughan's company had been detailed to help in cleaning the field. The day before, on Sunday morning, they had eaten their breakfast seated on the ground among hundreds of dead bodies whose odor poisoned the air. It is needless to say, Julius was not present. He had kept the river between him and the roar of contending hosts.
The suffering of the wounded had been terrible. Some of them had fallen on Friday, thousands on Saturday, and it was now Monday. All through the blood-soaked tangled woods they lay groaning and dying. And everywhere the flap of black wings. The keen-eyed vultures had seen from the sky where they fell.
John found a brave old farmer from Northern New York lying beside his son. He had met them in the fight at Fredericksburg in December.
"Well, here we are, Vaughan," the father cried feebly. "My boy's dead, and I'll be with him soon—but it's all right—it's all right—my country's worth it!"
They were lying in a bright open space, where the warm sun of May had pushed the wood violets into blossom in rich profusion. The dead boy's head lay in a bed of blue flowers.
Some of the bodies further on were black and charred by the flames that had swept the woods again and again during the battles. Some of them had been wounded men and they had been burned to death. Their twisted bodies and the agony on their cold faces told the hideous story more plainly than words. The odor of burning flesh still filled the air in these black spots.
With a start John suddenly came on the crouching figure of a Confederate soldier kneeling behind a stump, the paper end of the cartridge was in his teeth and his fingers still grasped the ball. He was just in the act of tearing the paper as a bullet crashed straight through his forehead. A dark streak of blood marked his face and clothes. His gun was in his other hand, the muzzle in place to receive the cartridge, the body cold and rigid in exactly the position death had called him.
A broad-shouldered, bearded man in blue had just fallen asleep nearby. The body was still warm, the blue eyes wide open, staring into the leaden sky. On his breast lay an open Bible with a bloody finger mark on the lines:
"The Lord is my shepherd,I shall not wantHe maketh me to lie down in green pastures—He restoreth my soul."
"The Lord is my shepherd,I shall not wantHe maketh me to lie down in green pastures—He restoreth my soul."
A hundred yards further lay a dead boy from his own company. The stiff hands were still holding a picture of his sweetheart before the staring eyes. Near him lay a boy in grey with a sweetheart's letter clasped in his hand. They had talked and tried to cheer one another, these dying boys—talked of those they loved in far off villages as the mists of eternity had gathered about them.
It was late that night before the wounded had all been moved. Through every hour of its black watches the surgeons, with their sleeves rolled high, their arms red, bent over their tasks, until legs and arms were piled in ghastly heaps ten feet high.
As John Vaughan turned from the scene where he had laid a wounded man to wait his turn, his eye caught the look of terror on the face of a wounded Southern boy. He was a slender little dark-haired fellow, under sixteen, a miniature of Ned. The surgeon had just taken up his knife to cut into the deep flesh wound for the Minie ball embedded there. John saw the slender face go white and the terror-stricken young eyes search the room for help. His breath came in quick gasps and he was about to faint.
John slipped his arm around him:
"Just a minute, Doctor——"
He pressed his hand and whispered:
"Come now, little man, you're among your enemies. You've got to be brave. Show your grit for the South. I've got a brother in your army who looks like you. No white feather now when these Yankees can see you."
The slender figure stiffened and his eyes flashed:
"All right!" the sturdy lips cried. "Let him go ahead—I'm ready now!"
John held his hand, while the knife cut through the soft young flesh and found the lead. The grip of the slim fingers tightened, but he gave no cry. John handed him the bullet to put in his pocket and left him smiling his thanks.
He began to wonder vaguely if he had lost his cook forever. Julius should have found the regiment before this. It was just before day that he came on him working with might and main at a job that was the last one on earth he would have selected.
He had been seized by a burying squad and put to work dragging corpses to the trenches from the great piles where the wagons had dumped them.
The black man rolled his eyes in piteous appeal to his master:
"For Gawd's sake, Marse John, save me—dese here men won't lemme go. I been er throwin' corpses inter dem trenches since dark. I'se most dead frum work, let 'lone bein' scared ter death."
"Sorry, Julius," was the quick answer, "we've all got to work at a time like this. There's no help for it."
Julius bent again to his horrible task. The thing that appalled him was the way the dead men kept looking at him out of their eyes wide and staring in the flickering light of the lanterns.
John stood watching him thoughtfully. He had finished one pile of bodies, dragging them by the heels one by one, and throwing them into the trenches. He was just about to begin on the last stack when he saw that he had left one lying a little further back in the shadows.
Julius looked at it dubiously and scratched his head. He didn't like the idea of going so far back in the dark, away from the light, but there was no help for it. The guard stood with his musket scowling:
"Get a move on you—damn you, don't stand there!" he growled.
Julius walled his eyes at his tormentor and ran for the body. It happened to be the sleeping form of a tired guard who had been up three nights. The negro grabbed his legs and rushed toward the lights and the trenches.
He had almost reached the grave when the corpse gave a vicious kick and yelled:
"Here—what'ell!"
Julius didn't stop to look or to answer. What he felt in his hands was enough. With a yell of terror he dropped the thing and plunged straight ahead.
"Gawd, save me!" he gasped.
His foot slipped on the edge of the trench and he rolled in the dark hole. With the leap of a frightened panther he reached the solid earth and flew, each leap a muttered prayer:
"Save me! Lawd, save me!"
Standing there beside the grim piles of his dead comrades John Vaughan joined the guard in uncontrollable laughter. It was many a day before he saw his cook again.
The laughter suddenly stopped, and he turned from the scene with a shudder.
"I wonder," he muttered, "if I live through this war, whether I'll come out of it with a soul!"
The report from Chancellorsville drifted slowly, ominously, appallingly, over Washington with the clouds and mists of the storm which swept up the Potomac and shrouded the city in a grey mantle of mourning. The White House was still. The dead were walking through its great rooms of state. The anguished heart who watched by the window toward the hills of Virginia saw and heard each muffled footfall.
He walked to the table with stumbling, uncertain step at last, his face ghastly and rigid, its color grey ashes, his deep set eyes streaming with tears, sank helplessly into a chair, and for the first time gave way to despair:
"O my God! My God! what will the country say!"
Betty Winter was quick to answer the hurry call for more nurses in the field hospital at Chancellorsville. The results at the end of three days' carnage had paralyzed the service.
She left the Carver Hospital on receipt of the first cry for help and hurried to her home to complete her preparations to leave for the front.
Her father was at breakfast alone.
She called her greeting from the hall, rushed to her room, packed a bag, and quickly came down.
She slipped her arm around his neck, bent and kissed him good-bye. He held her a moment:
"You must leave so early, dear?"
"I must catch the first bout for Aquia. The news from the front is hideous. The force there is utterly inadequate. They've asked for every nurse that can be spared for a week. The wounded lay on the ground for three days and nights, and hundreds of them can't be moved to Washington. The woods took fire dozens of times and many of the poor boys were terribly burned. The suffering, they say, is indescribable."
The old man suddenly rose, with a fierce light flashing in his eyes:
"Oh, the miserable blunderer in the White House—this war has been one grim and awful succession of his mistakes!"
Betty placed her hand on his arm in tender protest:
"Father, dear, how can you be so unreasonable—so insanely unjust? Your hatred of the President is a positive mania——"
"I'm not alone in my affliction, child; Arnold is his only friend in Congress to-day——"
"Then it's a shame—a disgrace to the Nation. Every disaster is laid at his door. In his big heart he is carrying the burden of millions—their suffering, their sorrows, their despair. You blamed him at first for trifling with the war. Now you blame him for the bloody results when the army really fights. You ask for an effective campaign and when you get these tragic battles you heap on his head greater curses. It isn't right. It isn't fair. I can't understand how a man with your deep sense of justice can be so cruelly inconsistent——"
The Senator shook his grey head in protest:
"There! there! dear—we won't discuss it. You're a woman and you can't understand my point of view. We'll just agree to disagree. You like the man in the White House. God knows he's lonely—I shouldn't begrudge him that little consolation. His whole attitude in this war is loathsome to me. To him the Southerners are erring brethren to be brought back as prodigal sons in the end. To me they are criminal outlaws to be hanged and quartered—their property confiscated, the foundations of their society destroyed, and every trace of their States blotted from the map——"
"Father!"
"Until we understand that such is the purpose of the war we can get nowhere—accomplish nothing. But there, dear—I didn't mean to say so much. There is always one thing about which there can be no dispute—I love my little girl——"
He slipped his arm about her tenderly again.
"I'm proud of the work you're doing for our soldiers. They tell me in the big hospital that you're an angel. I've always known it, but I'm glad other people are beginning to find it out. In all the horrors of this tragedy there's one ray of sunshine for me—the light that shines from your eyes!"
He bent and kissed her again:
"Run now, and don't miss your boat."
In the five swift days of tender service which followed, Betty Winter forgot her own heartache and loneliness in the pity, pathos, and horror of the scenes she witnessed—the drawn white faces—the charred flesh, the scream of pain from the young, the sigh of brave men, the last messages of love—the gasp and the solemn silences of eternity.
When the strain of the first rush had ended and the time to follow the lines of ambulance wagons back to Washington drew near, the old anguish returned to torture her soul. She told herself it was all over, and yet she knew that somewhere in that vast city of tents, stretching for miles over the hills and valleys about Falmouth Heights, was John Vaughan. She had put him resolutely out of her life. She said this a hundred times—yet she was quietly rejoicing that his name was not on that black roll of seventeen thousand. All doubt had been removed by the announcement in theRepublicanof his promotion to the rank of Captain for gallantry on the field of Chancellorsville.
She hoped that he had freed himself at last from evil associates. She couldn't be sure—there were ugly rumors flying about the hospital of the use of whiskey in the army. These rumors were particularly busy with Hooker's name.
Seated alone in the quiet moonlight before the field hospital, the balmy air of the South which she drew in deep breaths was bringing back the memory of another now. The pickets had been at their usual friendly tricks of trading tobacco and coffee and exchanging newspapers. From a Richmond paper she had just learned that Ned Vaughan had fought in Lee's army at Chancellorsville. Somewhere beyond the silver mirror of the Rappahannock he was with the men in grey to-night. Her heart in its loneliness went out to him in a wave of tender sympathy. Again she lived over the tragic hours when she had fought the battle for his life and won at last at the risk of her own.
A soldier saluted and handed her a piece of brown wrapping paper, neatly folded. Its corner was turned down in the old-fashioned way of a schoolboy's note to his sweetheart.
She went to the light and saw with a start it was in Ned Vaughan's handwriting. She read, with eager, sparkling eyes.
"Dearest: I've just seen in a Washington paper which our boys traded for that you are here. I must see you, and to-night. I can't wait. There will be no danger to either of us. Our pickets are on friendly terms. I've arranged everything with some good tobacco for your fellows. Follow the man who hands you this note to the river. A boat will be ready for you there with one of my men to row you across. I will be waiting for you at the old mill beside the burned pier of the railroad bridge.
"Dearest: I've just seen in a Washington paper which our boys traded for that you are here. I must see you, and to-night. I can't wait. There will be no danger to either of us. Our pickets are on friendly terms. I've arranged everything with some good tobacco for your fellows. Follow the man who hands you this note to the river. A boat will be ready for you there with one of my men to row you across. I will be waiting for you at the old mill beside the burned pier of the railroad bridge.
"Ned."
Betty's heart gave a bound of joy, and in half an hour she was standing on the shining shore of the river before the old mill. Its great wheel was slowly turning, the water falling in broken crystals sparkling in the moonlight. Through the windows of the brick walls peered the black-mouthed guns trained across the water.
She looked about timidly for a moment while the man in grey who had rowed her over made fast his boat.
He tipped his old slouch hat:
"This way, Miss."
He led her down close, to the big wheel, crossed the stream of water which poured from its moss-covered buckets, and there, beneath an apple tree in bloom, stood a straight, soldierly figure in the full blue uniform of a Federal Captain, exactly as she had seen Ned Vaughan that night in the Old Capitol Prison.
The soldier saluted and Ned said:
"Wait, Sergeant, at the water's edge with your boat."
He was gone and Ned grasped both Betty's hands and kissed them tenderly:
"My glorious little heroine! I just had to tell you again that the life you saved is all, all yours. You are glad to see me—aren't you?"
"I can't tell you how glad, Boy! How brown and well you look!"
"Yes, the hard life somehow agrees with me. It's a queer thing, this army business. It makes some men strong and clean, and others into beasts."
"And why did you wear that dangerous uniform, sir?" she asked, with a smile.
"In honor of a beautiful Yankee girl, my guest. I've not worn it since that night, Betty, until now——"
His voice dropped to a whisper:
"It has been a holy thing to me, this blue uniform that cost me the life which you gave back at the risk of your own——"
"I was in no danger. I had powerful friends."
"They might not have been powerful enough—but it's sacred for another reason—as precious to me as the seamless robe for which the Roman soldiers cast lots on Calvary—I wore it in the one glorious moment in which I held you in my arms, dearest."
"O Ned, Boy, you shouldn't be so foolish!"
"I'm not. I'm sensible. I've done no more scout work since. I said that my life was yours and I had no right to place it again in such mad danger——"
"And so you face death on the field!"
"Yes, come sit here, dearest, I've made a seat for you of the broken timbers from the bridge. We can see the moonlit river and the lazy turn of the old wheel while we talk."
He led her to the seat in the edge of the moonlight and Betty drew a deep breath of joy as she drank in the beauty of the entrancing scene. The shadows of night had hidden the scars of war. Only the tall stone piers standing, lone sentinels in the river, marked its ravages where the bridge had fallen. The moon had flung her sparkling silver veil over the blood-stained world.
"You know," Ned went on eagerly, "those big pillars won't stand there naked long. We'll put the timbers back on them soon and run our trains through to Washington——"
"Sh, Ned," Betty whispered, touching his arm lightly, "be still a moment, I want to feel this wonderful scene!"
The air was sweet with the perfume of apple blossoms, the water from the old wheel fell with silvery echo and ran rippling over the stones into the river. Somewhere above the cliff a negro was playing a banjo and far down the river, beside a little cottage torn with shot and shell, but still standing, a mocking-bird was singing in the lilac bushes.
The girl looked at Ned with curious tenderness, and wondered if she had known her own heart after all—wondered if the fierce blinding passion she had once felt for his brother had been the divine thing that links the soul to the eternal? A strange spiritual beauty enveloped this younger man and drew her to-night with new power. There was something restful in its mystery. She wondered vaguely if it were possible to love two men at the same moment. She could almost swear it were. If she had never really loved John Vaughan at all! Why had his powerful, brutal personality drawn her with such terrible power? Was such a force love? It was something different from the tender charm which enveloped the slender straight young figure by her side now. She felt this with increasing certainty.
Ned took her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers.
The touch of his lips sent a thrill through her heart. It was sweet to be worshipped in this old-fashioned, foolish way. Whatever her own feeling's might be, this was love—in its divinest flowering. It drew her to-night with all but resistless tug.
"May I break the silence now, dearest, to ask you something?" he said softly.
"Yes."
"Haven't you realized yet that you are going to be mine?"
"Not in the way you mean——"
"But you are, dearest, you are!" he whispered rapturously. "You love me. You just haven't really faced the thing yet and put it to the test in your heart. War has separated us, that's all. But there's never been a moment's doubt in my soul since I looked into your eyes that night in the old prison. Their light made the cell shine with the glory of heaven! And when you kissed me, dearest——"
"You know why I did that, Ned," she murmured.
"You're fooling yourself, darling! You couldn't have done what you did, if you hadn't loved me. It came to me in a flash as I held you in my arms and pressed you to my heart. There can be no other woman on earth for me after that moment. I lived a life time with it. Say you'll be mine, dearest?"
"But I don't love you, Ned, as you love me——"
"I don't ask it now. I can wait. The revelation will come to you at last in the fullness of time—promise me, dearest—promise me!"
For an hour he poured into her ears his passionate tender plea, until the rapture of his love, the perfumed air of the spring night, and the shimmer of moonlit waters stole into her lonely heart with resistless charm.
She lifted her lips to his at last and whispered:
"Yes."
The morning after Betty returned to Carver Hospital from the front, a mother was pouring out her heart in a burst of patriotic joy over a wounded boy.
She thought of the lonely figure in the White House treading the wine press of a Nation's sorrow alone and asked the mother to go with her to the President, meet him and repeat what she had said. She consented at once.
For the first time Betty failed to gain admission promptly. Mr. Stoddard, his third Secretary, was at the door.
"We must let him eat something, Miss Winter," he whispered. "All night the muffled sound of his footfall came from his room. I heard it at nine, at ten, at eleven. At midnight Stanton left his door ajar and his steady tramp, tramp, tramp, came with heavier sound. The last thing I heard as I left at three was the muffled beat upstairs. The guard told me it never stopped for a moment all night."
Betty was surprised to see his face illumined by a cheerful smile as she entered. She gazed with awe into the deep eyes of the man whose single word could stop the war and divide the Union. She wondered if he had fought the Nation's battle alone with God through the night until his prophetic vision had seen through cloud and darkness the dawn of a new and more wonderful life.
She spoke softly:
"I've brought you a good mother who lost a son at Fredericksburg. She has a message for you."
The tall form bent reverently and pressed her hand. A wonderful smile transfigured his rugged face as he listened:
"God help you in your trials, Mr. President, as he has helped me in mine——"
"And you lost your son at Fredericksburg?"
"Yes. It was long before I could feel reconciled. But I've been praying for you day and night since——"
"For me?"
"You must be strong and courageous, and God will bring the Nation through!"
"You say that to me, standing beside the grave of your son?"
"Yes, and beside the cot of my other boy who is here wounded from Chancellorsville. I'm proud that God gave me such sons to lay on the altar of my country. Remember, I am praying for you day and night!"
Both big hands closed over hers and he was silent a moment.
"It's all right then. I'll get new strength when I remember that such mothers are praying for me."
He pressed Betty's hand at the door:
"Thank you, child. You bring medicine that reaches soul and body!"
The hour of despair had passed and the President returned to his task patient, watchful, strong.
Daily the shadows deepened over the Nation's life. Blacker and denser rose the clouds. Four Northern Generals had now gone down before Lee's apparently invincible genius—McClellan, Pope, Burnside, and Hooker, and with each fall the corpses of young men were piled higher.
Again the clamor rose for the return of McClellan to command. This cry was not only heard in the crushed Army of the Potomac, it was backed by the voice of two million Democrats who had chosen the man on horseback as their leader.
It was for precisely this reason that McClellan could not be considered again for command. His party had fallen under the complete control of its Copperhead leaders who demanded the ending of the war at once and at any sacrifice of principle or of the Union.
The only way the President could stop desertions and prevent the actual secession of the great Northern States of the Middle West, now under the control of these men, was to use his arbitrary power to suspend the civil law and put them in prison. Through the State and War Departments he did this sorrowfully, but promptly.
His answer to his critics was the soundest reasoning and it justified him in the judgment of thinking men.
"I make such arrests," he declared, "because these men are laboring to prevent the raising of troops and encouraging desertion. Armies cannot be maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the penalty of death.
"I will not shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, and refuse to touch a wily agitator who induces him to commit the crime. To silence the agitator and save the boy is not only Constitutional, but withal a great mercy."
Volunteers were no longer to be had and a draft of five hundred thousand men had been ordered for the summer. The Democratic leaders in solid array were threatening to resist this draft by every means in their power, even to riot and revolution.
The masses of the North were profoundly discouraged at the unhappy results of the war. In thousands of patriotic loyal homes, men and women had begun to ask themselves whether it were not cruel folly to send their brave boys to be slaughtered.
The prestige of the Southern army was at its highest point and its terrible power was nowhere more gravely realized than in the North, whose thousands of mourning homes attested its valor.
Europe at last seemed ready to spring on the throat of America. Distinct reports were in circulation in the Old World that the Emperor of France, Napoleon III, intended to interfere in our affairs. On the 9th of January, the French Government denied this. The Emperor himself, however, sent to the President an offer of mediation so blunt and surprising it could not be doubted that it was a veiled hint of his purpose to intervene. Beyond a doubt he expected the Union to be dismembered and he proposed to form an alliance between the Latin Empire which he was founding in Mexico and the triumphant Confederate States.
Great Britain was behind this Napoleonic adventure. Outwitted by the President in the affair of theTrent, the British Government was eager for the chance to strike the Republic.
To cap the climax of disasters Lee was preparing to invade the North with his victorious army. The announcement struck terror to the Northern cities and produced a condition among them little short of panic.
The move would be the height of audacity and yet Lee had good reasons for believing its success possible and probable. His grey veterans were still ragged and poorly shod. With Southern ports blockaded and no manufacturing this was inevitable, but they had proven in two years' test of fire Lee's proud boast:
"There never were such men in an army before. They will go anywhere and do anything if properly led."
This opinion was confirmed to the President by Charles Francis Adams, a veteran of his own Army of the Potomac, whom he summoned to the White House for a conference.
"I do not believe," said Adams gravely, "that any more formidable or better organized and animated force was ever set in motion than that which Lee is now leading toward the North. It is essentially an army of fighters—men who individually, or in the mass, can be depended on for any feat of arms in the power of mere mortals to accomplish. They will blanch at no danger. Lee knows this from experience and they have full confidence in him."
He could not hope to enter Pennsylvania with more than sixty-five thousand men, but his plan was reasonable. With such an army he had hurled McClellan's hundred and ten thousand soldiers back from the gates of Richmond and scattered them to the winds. With a less number he had all but annihilated Pope's men and flung them back into Washington a disorganized rabble. With thirty-seven thousand grey soldiers he had repelled in a welter of blood McClellan's eighty-six thousand at Antietam and retired at his leisure. With seventy thousand men he had crushed Burnside's host of one hundred and thirteen thousand at Fredericksburg. With sixty thousand he had just struck Hooker's grand army of a hundred and thirty thousand men and four hundred and thirty-eight guns, rolled it up as a scroll and thrown it across the Rappahannock in blinding, bewildering defeat.
From every prisoner taken at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville he knew the Northern army was discouraged and heartsick. That he could march his ragged men, the flower of Southern manhood, into Pennsylvania and clothe and feed them on her boundless resources he couldn't doubt. Virginia was swept bare, and the demoralization of Hooker's army with the profound depression of the North left his way open.
To say that Lee's invasion, as it rapidly developed under such conditions, struck terror to the Capital of the Republic is to mildly express it. The movement of his army from Culpepper in June indicated clearly that his objective point was Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. If the Capital of the State fell, nothing could withstand the onward triumphant rush of his army into Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington.
To meet the extraordinary danger the President called for one hundred thousand militia for six months' emergency service from the five States clustering around Pennsylvania. And yet as the two armies drew near to each other, General George Meade, the new Union Commander who had succeeded Hooker, had but one hundred and five thousand against Lee's sixty-two thousand. So terrible had been the depression following Chancellorsville, so rapid the desertions, so numerous the leaves of absence, that the combined forces of the Army of the Potomac with the State troops under the new call reached only this pitiful total.
Lee's swift column penetrated almost to the gates of Harrisburg before Meade's advance division of twenty-five thousand men had caught up with his rear at Gettysburg on July 1st.
Seeing that a battle was inevitable, Lee drew in his advance lines and made ready for the clash. The Northern army was going into this fight with the smallest number of men relatively which he had ever met—though outnumbering him nearly two to one. The difference was that here the North was defending her own soil.
It was not surprising that on the eve of such a battle in the light of the frightful experiences of the past two years that Washington should be in a condition of panic. A single defeat now with Lee's victorious army north of the Capital meant its fall, the inevitable dismemberment of the Union, and the bankruptcy and ruin of the remaining Northern States.
Brave men in Congress who had fought heroically with their mouths inveighing with bitter invective against the weak and vacillating policy of the President in temporizing with the South were busy packing their goods and chattels to fly at a moment's notice.
The President realized, as no other man could, the deep tragedy of the crisis. He sat by his window for hours, his face a grey mask, his sorrowful eyes turned within, the deep-cut lines furrowed into his cheeks as though burned with red hot irons.
He was struggling desperately now to forestall the possible panic which would follow defeat.
He had sent once more for McClellan and in painful silence, all others excluded from the Executive Chamber, awaited his coming.
"You are doubtless aware, General," the President began, "that a defeat at Gettysburg might involve the fall of the Capital and the dismemberment of the Union?"
"I am, sir."
"First, I wish to speak to you with perfect frankness about some ugly matters which have come to my ears—may I?"
The compelling blue eyes flashed and the General spoke with an accent of impatience:
"Certainly."
"A number of Secret Societies have overspread the North and Northwest, whose purpose is to end the war at once and on any terms. I have the best of reasons for believing that the men back of these Orders are now in touch with the Davis Government in Richmond. I am informed that a coterie of these conspirators, a sort of governing board, have gotten control or may get control of the organization of your Party. I have heard the ugly rumor that they are counting on you——"
"Stop!" McClellan shouted.
The General sprang to his feet, the President rose and the two men confronted each other in a moment of tense silence.
The compact figure of McClellan was trembling with rage—the tall man's sombre eyes holding his with steady purpose.
"No man can couple the word treason with my name, sir!" the General hissed.
"Have I done so?"
"You are insinuating it—and I demand a retraction!"
The President smiled genially:
"Then I apologize for my carelessness of expression. I have never believed you a traitor to the Union."
"Thank you!"
"I don't believe it now, General. That's why I've sent for you."
"Then I suggest that you employ more caution in the use of words if this conversation is to continue."
"Again I apologize, General, with admiration for your manner of meeting the ugly subject. I'm glad you feel that way—and now if you will be seated we can talk business."
McClellan resumed his seat with a frown and the President went on:
"I have sent for you to ask an amazing thing——"
"Hence the secrecy with which I am summoned?"
"Exactly. I'm going to ask you to take my place and save the Union."
McClellan's handsome face went white:
"What do you mean?"
"Exactly what I've said."
"And your conditions?" the General asked, with a quiver in his voice.
"They are very simple: Preside to-morrow night at a great Democratic Union Mass Meeting in New York and boldly put yourself at the head of the Union Democracy——"
"And you?"
"I will withdraw from the race."
"What race?"
"For the next term of the Presidency."
"Oh——"
"My convention is but ten months off. Yours can meet a day earlier. I will withdraw in your favor and force my Party to endorse you. Your election will be a certainty."
The General lifted his hand with a curious smile:
"You're in earnest?"
"I was never more so. It is needless for me to say that I came into this office with high ambitions to serve my country. My dream of glory has gone—I have left only agony and tears——" He paused and drew a deep breath.
"I did want the chance," he went on wistfully, "to stay here another term to see the sun shine again, to heal my country's wounds, and show all my people, North, South, East, and West, that I love them! But I can't risk this new battle, if you will agree to take my place and save the Union. Will you preside over such a meeting?"
"No," was the sharp, clear answer.
"I am sorry—why?"
"Perhaps I am already certain of that election without your assistance?"
"Oh—I see."
"Besides, what right have you to ask anything of me?"
"Only the right of one who sinks all thought of himself in what he believes to be the greater good."
"You who, with victory in my grasp before Richmond, snatched it away! You, who nailed me to the cross on the bloody field of Antietam with your accursed Proclamation of Emancipation and removed me from my command before I could win my campaign!"
The big hand rose in kindly protest:
"Can't you believe me, General, when I tell you, with God as my witness, that I have never allowed a personal motive or feeling to enter into a single appointment or removal I have made? What I've done has always been exactly what I believed was for the best interests of the country. Can't you believe this?"
"No."
"In spite of the fact that I risked the dissolution of my Cabinet and the united opposition of my party when I restored you to command?"
"No—you had to do it."
"Grant then," the persuasive voice went on, "that I have treated you unfairly, that I had personal feelings. Surely you should in this hour of my reckoning, this hour of my Golgotha, when I climb the hill alone and ask the man I have wronged to take my place—surely you should be content with my humiliation? I shall not hesitate to proclaim it from the housetop when I ask for your election. If I have wronged you, my anguish could not be more pitifully complete! Will you do as I ask, and assure the safety of our country?"
"I'll do my best to save my country," was the slow, firm answer, "but in my own way."
The General rose, bowed stiffly and left the President standing in sorrowful silence, his deep eyes staring into space and seeing nothing.
On the morning of July 1st the two armies were rapidly approaching each other, marching in parallel lines stretched over a vast distance—the extreme wings more than forty miles apart.
Buford, commanding the advance guard of the Union army, struck Hill's division of the Confederates before the town of Gettysburg and the first gun of the great battle echoed over the green hills and valleys of Pennsylvania.
The President caught the flash of the shock from the telegraph wires with a sense of sickening dread. The rear guard of his army was yet forty miles away. What might happen before they were in line God alone could tell. He could not know, of course, that but twenty-two thousand Confederates had reached the field and stood confronting twenty-four thousand under John F. Reynolds, one of the ablest and bravest generals of the Union army.
Through every hour of this awful day he sat in the telegraph office of the War Department and read with bated breath the news.
The brief reports were not reassuring. The battle was raging with unparalleled fury. At ten o'clock General Reynolds fell dead from his horse in front of his men, and when the news was flashed to Meade he sent Hancock forward riding at full speed to take command.
The President read the message announcing Reynolds' death with quivering lip. He put his big hand blindly over his heart as if about to faint.
At three o'clock the smoke which had enveloped the battle line was lifted by a breeze as Hancock dashed on the field. He had not arrived a moment too soon. His superb bearing on his magnificent horse, his shouts of confidence, his promise of heavy reinforcements, stayed the tide of retreat and brought order out of chaos.
The day had been won again by Lee's apparently invincible men. They had driven the Union army from their line a mile in front of Gettysburg back through the town and beyond it, captured the town, taken five thousand men in blue prisoners with two generals, besides inflicting a loss of three thousand killed and wounded, including among the dead the gallant and popular commander, John F. Reynolds.
When this message reached the President late at night he had eaten nothing since breakfast. He rose from his seat in the telegraph office and walked from the building alone in silence. His step was slow, trance-like, and uncertain as if he were only half awake or had risen walking in his sleep.
He went to his bedroom, locked the door and fell on his knees in prayer. Hour after hour he wrestled alone with God in the darkness, while his tired army rushed through the night to plant themselves on the Heights beyond Gettysburg, before Lee's men could be concentrated to forestall them.
Over and over again, through sombre eyes that streamed with tears, the passionate cry was wrung from his heart:
"Lord God of our fathers, have mercy on us! I have tried to make this war yours—our cause yours—if I have sinned and come short, forgive! We cannot endure another Fredericksburg or Chancellorsville. Into thy hands, O Lord, I give our men and our country this night—save them!"
When the sun rose over Gettysburg on the second day of July, the Union army, rushing breathlessly through the night to the rescue of its defeated advance corps, had reached the heights beyond the town. Before Longstreet had attempted to obey Lee's command to take these hills, General Meade's blue host had reached them and were entrenching themselves.
The Confederate Commander discovered that in the death of Jackson, he had lost his right arm.
It was one o'clock before Longstreet moved to the attack, hurling his columns in reckless daring against these bristling heights. When darkness drew its kindly veil over the scene, Lee's army had driven General Sickles from his chosen position to his second line of defense on the hill behind, gained a foothold in the famous Devil's Den at the base of the Round Tops, broken the lines of the Union right and held their fortifications on Culp's Hill.
The day had been one of frightful slaughter.
The Union losses in the two days had reached the appalling total of more than twenty thousand men. Lee had lost fifteen thousand.
The brilliant July moon rose and flooded this field of blood and death with silent glory. From every nook and corner, from every shadow and across every open space, through the hot breath of the night, came the moans of thousands, and louder than all the long agonizing cries for water. Many a man in grey crawled over the ragged rocks to press his canteen to the lips of his dying enemy in blue, and many a boy in blue did as much for the man in grey.
Fifteen thousand wounded men lay there through the long black hours.
At ten o'clock a wounded Christian soldier began to sing one of the old, sweet hymns of faith, whose words have come ringing down the ages wet with tears and winged with human hopes. In five minutes ten thousand voices of blue and grey, some of them quivering with the agony of death, had joined. For two hours the woods and hills rang with the songs of these wounded men.
All through this pitiful music the Confederates were massing their artillery on Seminary Ridge, replacing their wounded horses and refilling their ammunition chests.
The Union army were burrowing like moles and planting their terrible batteries on the brows of the hills beyond the town.
At Lee's council of war that night Longstreet advised his withdrawal from Gettysburg into a more favorable position in the mountains. But the Confederate Commander, reinforced now by the arrival of Pickett's division of fifteen thousand men and Stuart's cavalry, determined to renew the battle.
At the first grey streak of dawn on the 3rd the Federal guns roared their challenge to the Confederate forces which had captured their entrenchments on Culp's Hill. Seven terrible hours of bombardment, charge and counter charge followed until every foot of space had claimed its toll of dead, before the Confederates yielded the Hill.
At noon there was an ominous lull in the battle. At one o'clock a puff of smoke from Seminary Ridge was followed by a dull roar. The signal gun had pealed its call of death to thousands. For two miles along the crest of this Ridge the Confederates had planted one hundred and fifty guns. Two miles of smoke-wreathed flame suddenly leaped from those hills in a single fiery breath.
The longer line of big Federal guns on Seminary Ridge were silent for a few minutes and then answered gun for gun until the heavens were transformed into a roaring hell of bursting, screaming, flaming shells. For two hours the earth trembled beneath the shock of these volcanoes, and then the two storms died slowly away and the smoke began to lift.
An ominous sign. The grey infantry were deploying in line under Pickett to charge the heights of Cemetery Ridge. Fifteen thousand gallant men against an impregnable hill held by seventy thousand intrenched soldiers, backed by the deadliest and most powerful artillery.
They swept now into the field before the Heights, their bands playing as if on parade—their grey ranks dressed on their colors. Down the slope across the plain and up the hill the waves rolled, their thinning ranks closing the wide gaps torn each moment by the fiery sleet of iron and lead.
A handful of them lived to reach the Union lines on those heights. Armistead, with a hundred men, broke through and lifted his battle flag for a moment over a Federal battery, and fell mortally wounded.
And then the shattered grey wave broke into a spray of blood and slowly ebbed down the hill. The battle of Gettysburg had ended.
For the first time the blue Army of the Potomac had won a genuine victory. It had been gained at a frightful cost, but no price was too high to pay for such a victory. It had saved the Capital of the Nation. The Union army had lost twenty-three thousand men, the Confederate twenty thousand. Meade had lost seventeen of his generals, and Lee, fourteen.
When the thrilling news from the front reached Washington on July 4th, the President lifted his big hands above his head and cried to the crowd of excited men who thronged the Executive office:
"Unto God we give all the praise!"
None of those present knew the soul significance of that sentence as it fell from his trembling lips. He seated himself at his desk and quickly wrote a brief proclamation of thanks to Almighty God, which he telegraphed to the Governor of each Union State, requesting them to repeat it to their people.
While the North was still quivering with joy over the turn of the tide at Gettysburg, Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Navy, hurried into the President's office and handed him a dispatch from the gunboat under Admiral Porter coöperating with General Grant announcing the fall of Vicksburg, the surrender of thirty-five thousand Confederate soldiers of its garrison, and the opening of the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico.
The President seized his hat, his dark face shining with joy:
"I will telegraph the news to General Meade myself!"
He stopped suddenly and threw his long arms around Welles:
"What can we do for the Secretary of the Navy for this glorious intelligence? He is always giving us good news. I cannot tell you my joy over this result. It is great, Mr. Welles, it is great!"
With the eagerness of a boy he rushed to the telegraph office and sent the message to Meade over his own signature.
For the first time in dreary months the sun had burst for a moment through the clouds that had hung in endless gloom over the White House. The sorrowful eyes were shining with new hope. The President felt sure that General Lee could never succeed in leading his shattered army back into Virginia. He had lost twenty thousand men out of his sixty-two thousand—while Meade was still in command of a grand army of eighty-two thousand soldiers flushed with victory. The Potomac River was in flood and the Confederate army was on its banks unable to recross.
It was a moral certainty that the heroic Commander who had saved the Capital at Gettysburg could, with his eighty-two thousand men, capture or crush Lee's remaining force, caught in this trap by the swollen river, and end the war.
The men who crowded into the Executive office the day after the news of Vicksburg, found the Chief Magistrate in high spirits. Among the cases of deserters, court-martialed and ordered to be shot, he was surprised to find a negro soldier bearing the remarkable name of Julius Cæsar Thornton. John Vaughan had telegraphed the President asking his interference with the execution of this cruel edict.
The President was deeply interested. It was the beginning of the use of negro troops. He had consented to their employment with reluctance, but they were proving their worth to the army, both in battle and in the work of garrisons.
Julius was brought from prison for an interview with the Chief Magistrate.
Stanton had sternly demanded the enforcement of the strictest military discipline as the only way to make these black troops of any real service to the Government. He asked that an example be made of Julius by sending him back to the army to be publicly shot before the assembled men of his race. He was convicted of two capital offenses. He had been caught in Washington shamelessly flaunting the uniform he had disgraced.
Julius faced the President with an humble salute and a broad grin. The black man liked the looks of his judge and he threw off all embarrassment his situation had produced with the first glance at the kindly eyes gazing at him over the rims of those spectacles.
"Well, Julius Cæsar Thornton, this is a serious charge they have lodged against you?"
"Yassah, dat's what dey say."
"You went forth like a man to fight for your country, didn't you?"
"Na, sah!"
"How'd you get there?"
"Dey volunteered me, sah."
"Volunteered you, did they?" the President laughed.
"Yassah—dat dey did. Dey sho' volunteered me whether er no——"
"And how did it happen?"
"Dey done hit so quick, sah, I scacely know how dey did do hit. I was in de war down in Virginia wid Marse John Vaughan—an' er low-lifed Irishman on guard dar put me ter wuk er buryin' corpses. I hain't nebber had no taste for corpses nohow, an' I didn't like de job—mo' specially, sah, when one ob 'em come to ez I was pullin' him froo de dark ter de grave——"
"Come to, did he?" the President smiled.
"Yassah—he come to all of er sudden an' kicked me! An' hit scared me near 'bout ter death. I lit out fum dar purty quick, sah, an' go West. An' I ain't mor'n got out dar 'fore two fellers drawed dere muskets on me an' persuaded me ter volunteer, sah. Dey put dese here cloze on me an' tell me dat I wuz er hero. I tell 'em dey must be some mistake 'bout dat, but dey say no—dey know what dey wuz er doin'. Dey keep on tellin' me dat I wuz er hero an', by golly, I 'gin ter b'lieve hit myself till dey git me into trouble, sah."
"You were in a battle?"
Julius scratched his head and walled his eyes:
"I had er little taste ob it, sah,——"
"Well, you tried to fight, didn't you?"
"No, sah,—I run."
"Ran at the first fire?"
"Yas,sah! An' I'd a ran sooner ef I'd er known hit wuz comin'——"
Julius paused and broke into a jolly laugh:
"Dey git one pop at me, sah, 'fore I seed what dey wuz doin'!"
The President suppressed a laugh and gazed at Julius with severity:
"That wasn't very creditable to your courage."
"Dat ain't in my line, sah,—I'se er cook."
"Have you no regard for your reputation?"
"Dat ain't nuttin' ter me, sah, 'side er life!"
"And your life is worth more than other people's?"
"Worth er lot mo' ter me, sah."