The Battle Ground by Ellen Glasgow (page 7)

bite in an hour.” Placid, wide-girthed, dull-faced, innocent as a child, he sat in the midst of war dangling his line above the silver perch.

VI

THE PEACEFUL SIDE OF WAR

On a sparkling January morning, when Lee’s army had gone into winter quarters beside the Rappahannock, Dan stood in the doorway of his log hut smoking the pipe of peace, while he watched a messmate putting up a chimney of notched sticks across the little roadway through the pines.

“You’d better get Pinetop to daub your chinks for you,” he suggested. “He can make a mixture of wet clay and sandstone that you couldn’t tell from mortar.”

“You jest wait till I git through these shoes an’ I’ll show you,” remarked Pinetop, from the woodpile, where he was making moccasins of untanned beef hide laced with strips of willow. “I ain’t goin’ to set my bar’ feet on this frozen groun’ agin, if I can help it. ‘Tain’t so bad in summer, but, I d’clar it takes all the spirit out of a fight when you have to run bar-footed over the icy stubble.”

“Jack Powell lost his shoes in the battle of Fredericksburg,” said Baker, as he carefully fitted his notched sticks together. “That’s why he got promoted, I reckon. He stepped into a mud puddle, and his feet came out but his shoes didn’t.”

“Well, I dare say, it was cheaper for the Government to give him a title than a pair of shoes,” observed Dan, cynically. “Why, you are going in for luxury! Is that pile of oak shingles for your roof? We made ours of rails covered with pine tags.”

“And the first storm that comes along sweeps them off–yes, I know. By the way, can anybody tell me if there’s a farmer with a haystack in these parts?”

“Pinetop got a load about three miles up,” replied Dan, emptying his pipe against the door sill. “I say, who is that cavalry peacock over yonder? By George, it’s Champe!”

“Perhaps it’s General Stuart,” suggested Baker witheringly, as Champe came composedly between the rows of huts, pursued by the frantic jeers of the assembled infantry.

“Take them earrings off yo’ heels–take ’em off! Take ’em off!” yelled the chorus, as his spurs rang on the stones. “My gal she wants ’em–take ’em off!”

“Take those tatters off your backs–take ’em off!” responded Champe, genial and undismayed, swinging easily along in his worn gray uniform, his black plume curling over his soft felt hat.

As Dan watched him, standing in the doorway, he felt, with a sudden melancholy, that a mental gulf had yawned between them. The last grim months which had aged him with experiences as with years, had left Champe apparently unchanged. All the deeper knowledge, which he had bought with his youth for the price, had passed over his cousin like the clouds, leaving him merely gay and kind as he had been of old.

“Hello, Beau!” called Champe, stretching out his hand as he drew near. “I just heard you were over here, so I thought I’d take a look. How goes the war?”

Dan refilled his pipe and borrowed a light from Pinetop.

“To tell the truth,” he replied, “I have come to the conclusion that the fun and frolic of war consist in picket duty and guarding mule teams.”

“Well, these excessive dissipations have taken up so much of your time that I’ve hardly laid eyes on you since you got routed by malaria. Any news from home?”

“Grandma sent me a Christmas box, which she smuggled through, heaven knows how. We had a jolly dinner that day, and Pinetop and I put on our first clean clothes for three months. Big Abel got a linsey suit made at Chericoke–I hope he’ll come along in it.”

“Oh, Beau, Beau!” lamented Champe. “How have the mighty fallen? You aren’t so particular now about wearing only white or black ties, I reckon.”

“Well, shoestrings are usually black, I believe,” returned Dan, with a laugh, raising his hand to his throat.

Champe seated himself upon the end of an oak log, and taking off his hat, ran his hand through his curling hair. “I was at home last summer on a furlough,” he remarked, “and I declare, I hardly knew the valley. If we ever come out of this war it will take an army with ploughshares to bring the soil up again. As for the woods–well, well, we’ll never have them back in our day.”

“Did you see Uplands?” asked Dan eagerly.

“For a moment. It was hardly safe, you know, so I was at home only a day. Grandpa told me that the place had lain under a shadow ever since Virginia’s death. She was buried in Hollywood–it was impossible to bring her through the lines they said–and Betty and Mrs. Ambler have taken this very hardly.”

“And the Governor,” said Dan, with a tremor in his voice as he thought of Betty.

“And Jack Morson,” added Champe, “he fell at Brandy Station when I was with him. At first he was wounded only slightly, and we tried to get him to the rear, but he laughed and went straight in again. It was a sabre cut that finished him at the last.”

“He was a first-rate chap,” commented Dan, “but I never knew exactly why Virginia fell in love with him.”

“The other fellow never does. To be quite candid, it is beyond my comprehension how a certain lady can prefer the infantry to the cavalry–yet she does emphatically.”

Dan coloured.

“Was grandpa well?” he inquired lamely.

With a laugh Champe flung one leg over the other, and clasped his knee.

“It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good,” he responded. “Grandpa’s thoughts are so much given to the Yankees that he has become actually angelic to the rest of us. By the way, do you know that Mr. Blake is in the army?”

“What?” cried Dan, aghast.

“Oh, I don’t mean that he really carries a rifle–though he swears he would if he only had twenty years off his shoulders–but he has become our chaplain in young Chrysty’s place, and the boys say there is more gun powder in his prayers than in our biggest battery.”

“Well, I never!” exclaimed Dan.

“You ought to hear him–it’s better than fighting on your own account. Last Sunday he gave us a prayer in which he said: ‘O Lord, thou knowest that we are the greatest army thou hast ever seen; put forth thy hand then but a very little and we will whip the earth.’ By Jove, you look cosey here,” he added, glancing into the hut where Dan and Pinetop slept in bunks of straw. “I hope the roads won’t dry before you’ve warmed your house.” He shook hands again, and swung off amid the renewed jeers that issued from the open doorways.

Dan watched him until he vanished among the distant pines, and then, turning, went into the little hut where he found Pinetop sitting before a rude chimney, which he had constructed with much labour. A small book was open on his knee, over which his yellow head drooped like a child’s, and Dan saw his calm face reddened by the glow of the great log fire.

“Hello! What’s that?” he inquired lightly.

The mountaineer started from his abstraction, and the blood swept to his forehead as he rose from the half of a flour barrel upon which he had been sitting.

“‘Tain’t nothin’,” he responded, and as he towered to his great height his fair curls brushed the ceiling of crossed rails. In his awkwardness the book fell to the floor, and before he could reach it, Dan had stooped, with a laugh, and picked it up.

“I say, there are no secrets in this shebang,” he said smiling. Then the smile went out, and his face grew suddenly grave, for, as the book fell open in his hand, he saw that it was the first primer of a child, and on the thumbed and tattered page the word “RAT” stared at him in capital letters.

“By George, man!” he exclaimed beneath his breath, as he turned from Pinetop to the blazing logs.

For the first time in his life he was brought face to face with the tragedy of hopeless ignorance for an inquiring mind, and the shock stunned him, at the moment, past the power of speech. Until knowing Pinetop he had, in the lofty isolation of his class, regarded the plebeian in the light of an alien to the soil, not as a victim to the kindly society in which he himself had moved–a society produced by that free labour which had degraded the white workman to the level of the serf. At the instant the truth pierced home to him, and he recognized it in all the grimness of its pathos. Beside that genial plantation life which he had known he saw rising the wistful figure of the poor man doomed to conditions which he could not change–born, it may be, like Pinetop, self-poised, yet with an untaught intellect, grasping, like him, after the primitive knowledge which should be the birthright of every child. Even the spectre of slavery, which had shadowed his thoughts, as it had those of many a generous mind around him, faded abruptly before the very majesty of the problem that faced him now. In his sympathy for the slave, whose bondage he and his race had striven to make easy, he had overlooked the white sharer of the negro’s wrong. To men like Pinetop, slavery, stern or mild, could be but an equal menace, and yet these were the men who, when Virginia called, came from their little cabins in the mountains, who tied the flint-locks upon their muskets and fought uncomplainingly until the end. Not the need to protect a decaying institution, but the instinct in every free man to defend the soil, had brought Pinetop, as it had brought Dan, into the army of the South.

“Look here, old man, you haven’t been quite fair to me,” said Dan, after the long silence. “Why didn’t you ask me to help you with this stuff?”

“Wall, I thought you’d joke,” replied Pinetop blushing, “and I knew yo’ nigger would.”

“Joke? Good Lord!” exclaimed Dan. “Do you think I was born with so short a memory, you scamp? Where are those nights on the way to Romney when you covered me with your overcoat to keep me from freezing in the snow? Where, for that matter, is that march in Maryland when Big Abel and you carried me three miles in your arms after I had dropped delirious by the roadside? If you thought I’d joke you about this, Pinetop, all I can say is that you’ve turned into a confounded fool.”

Pinetop came back to the fire and seated himself upon the flour barrel in the corner. “‘Twas this way, you see,” he said, breaking, for the first time, through his strong mountain reserve. “I al’ays thought I’d like to read a bit, ‘specially on winter evenings at home, when the nights are long and you don’t have to git up so powerful early in the mornings, but when I was leetle thar warn’t nobody to teach me how to begin; maw she didn’t know nothin’ an’ paw he was dead, though he never got beyond the first reader when he was ‘live.”

He looked up and Dan nodded gravely over his pipe.

“Then when I got bigger I had to work mighty hard to keep things goin’–an’ it seemed to me every time I took out that thar leetle book at night I got so dead sleepy I couldn’t tell one letter from another; A looked jest like Z.”

“I see,” said Dan quietly. “Well, there’s time enough here anyhow. It will be a good way to pass the evenings.” He opened the primer and laid it on his knee, running his fingers carelessly through its dog-eared pages. “Do you know your letters?” he inquired in a professional tone.

“Lordy, yes,” responded Pinetop. “I’ve got about as fur as this here place.” He crossed to where Dan sat and pointed with a long forefinger to the printed words, his mild blue eyes beaming with excitement.

“I reckon I kin read that by myself,” he added with an embarrassed laugh. “T-h-e c-a-t c-a-u-g-h-t t-h-e r-a-t. Ain’t that right?”

“Perfectly. We’ll pass on to the next.” And they did so, sitting on the halves of a divided flour barrel before the blazing chimney.

From this time there were regular lessons in the little hut, Pinetop drawling over the soiled primer, or crouching, with his long legs twisted under him and his elbows awkwardly extended, while he filled a sheet of paper with sprawling letters.

“I’ll be able to write to the old woman soon,” he chuckled jubilantly, “an’ she’ll have to walk all the way down the mounting to git it read.”

“You’ll be a scholar yet if this keeps up,” replied Dan, slapping him upon the shoulder, as the mountaineer glanced up with a pleased and shining face. “Why, you mastered that first reader there in no time.”

“A powerful heap of larnin’ has to pass through yo’ head to git a leetle to stick thar,” commented Pinetop, wrinkling his brows. “Air we goin’ to have the big book agin to-night?”

“The big book” was a garbled version of “Les Miserables,” which, after running the blockade with a daring English sailor, had passed from regiment to regiment in the resting army. At first Dan had begun to read with only Pinetop for a listener, but gradually, as the tale unfolded, a group of eager privates filled the little hut and even hung breathlessly about the doorway in the winter nights. They were mostly gaunt, unwashed volunteers from the hills or the low countries, to whom literature was only a vast silence and life a courageous struggle against greater odds. To Dan the picturesqueness of the scene lent itself with all the force of its strong lights and shadows, and with the glow of the pine torches on the open page, his eyes would sometimes wander from the words to rest upon the kindling faces in the shaggy circle by the fire. Dirty, hollow-eyed, unshaven, it sat spellbound by the magic of the tale it could not read.

“By Gosh! that’s a blamed good bishop,” remarked an unkempt smoker one evening from the threshold, where his beef-hide shoes were covered with fine snow. “I don’t reckon Marse Robert could ha’ beat that.”

“Marse Robert ain’t never tried,” put in a companion by the fire.

“Wall, I ain’t sayin’ he had,” corrected the first speaker, through a cloud of smoke. “Lord, I hope when my time comes I kin slip into heaven on Marse Robert’s coat-tails.”

“If you don’t, you won’t never git thar!” jeered the second. Then they settled themselves again, and listened with sombre faces and twitching lips.

It was during this winter that Dan learned how one man’s influence may fuse individual and opposing wills into a single supreme endeavour. The Army of Northern Virginia, as he saw it then, was moulded, sustained, and made effective less by the authority of the Commander than by the simple power of Lee over the hearts of the men who bore his muskets. For a time Dan had sought to trace the groundspring of this impassioned loyalty, seeking a reason that could not be found in generals less beloved. Surely it was not the illuminated figure of the conqueror, for when had the Commander held closer the affection of his troops than in that ill-starred campaign into Maryland, which left the moral victory of a superb fight in McClellan’s hands? No, the charm lay deeper still, beyond all the fictitious aids of fortune–somewhere in that serene and noble presence he had met one evening as the gray dusk closed, riding alone on an old road between level fields. After this it was always as a high figure against a low horizon that he had seen the man who made his army.

As the long winter passed away, he learned, not only much of the spirit of his own side, but something that became almost a sunny tolerance, of the great blue army across the Rappahannock. He had exchanged Virginian tobacco for Northern coffee at the outposts, and when on picket duty along the cold banks of the river he would sometimes shout questions and replies across the stream. In these meetings there was only a wide curiosity with little bitterness; and once a friendly New England picket had delivered a religious homily from the opposite shore, as he leaned upon his rifle.

“I didn’t think much of you Rebs before I came down here,” he had concluded in a precise and energetic shout, “but I guess, after all, you’ve got souls in your bodies like the rest of us.”

“I reckon we have. Any coffee over your side?”

“Plenty. The war’s interfered considerably with the tobacco crop, ain’t it?”

“Well, rather; we’ve enough for ourselves, but none to offer our visitors.”

“Look here, are all these things about you in the papers gospel truth?”

“Can’t say. What things?”

“Do you always carry bowie knives into battle?”

“No, we use scissors–they’re more convenient.”

“When you catch a runaway nigger do you chop him up in little pieces and throw him to the hogs?”

“Not exactly. We boil him down and grease our cartridges.”

“After Bull Run did you set up all the live Zouaves you got hold of as targets for rifle practice?”

“Can’t remember about the Zouaves. Rather think we made them into flags.”

“Well, you Rebels take the breath out of me,” commented the picket across the river; and then, as the relief came, Dan hurried back to look for the mail bag and a letter from Betty. For Betty wrote often these days–letters sometimes practical, sometimes impassioned, always filled with cheer, and often with bright gossip. Of her own struggle at Uplands and the long days crowded with work, she wrote no word; all her sympathy, all her large passion, and all her wise advice in little matters were for Dan from the beginning to the end. She made him promise to keep warm if it were possible, to read his Bible when he had the time, and to think of her at all hours in every season. In a neat little package there came one day a gray knitted waistcoat which he was to wear when on picket duty beside the river, “and be very sure to fasten it,” she had written. “I have sewed the buttons on so tight they can’t come off. Oh, if I had only papa and Virginia and you back again I could be happy in a hovel. Dear mamma says so, too.”

And after much calm advice there would come whole pages that warmed him from head to foot. “Your kisses are still on my lips,” she wrote one day. “The Major said to me, ‘Your mouth is very warm, my dear,’ and I almost answered, ‘you feel Dan’s kisses, sir.’ What would he have said, do you think? As it was I only smiled and turned away, and longed to run straight to you to be caught up in your arms and held there forever. O my beloved, when you need me only stretch out your hands and I will come.”

VII

THE SILENT BATTLE

Despite the cheerfulness of Betty’s letters, there were times during the next dark years when it seemed to her that starvation must be the only end. The negroes had been freed by the Governor’s will, but the girl could not turn them from their homes, and, with the exception of the few field hands who had followed the Union army, they still lived in their little cabins and drew their daily rations from the storehouse. Betty herself shared their rations of cornmeal and bacon, jealously guarding her small supplies of milk and eggs for Mrs. Ambler and the two old ladies. “It makes no difference what I eat,” she would assure protesting Mammy Riah. “I am so strong, you see, and besides I really like Aunt Floretta’s ashcakes.”

Spring and summer passed, with the ripened vegetables which Hosea had planted in the garden, and the long winter brought with it the old daily struggle to make the slim barrels of meal last until the next harvesting. It was in this year that the four women at Uplands followed the Major’s lead and invested their united fortune in Confederate bonds. “We will rise or fall with the government,” Mrs. Ambler had said with her gentle authority. “Since we have given it our best, let it take all freely.”

“Surely money is of no matter,” Betty had answered, lavishly disregardful of worldly goods. “Do you think we might give our jewels, too? I have grandma’s pearls hidden beneath the floor, you know.”

“If need be–let us wait, dear,” replied her mother, who, grave and pallid as a ghost, would eat nothing that, by any chance, could be made to reach the army.

“I do not want it, my child, there are so many hungrier than I,” she would say when Betty brought her dainty little trays from the pantry.

“But I am hungry for you, mamma–take it for my sake,” the girl would beg, on the point of tears. “You are starving, that is it–and yet it does not feed the army.”

In these days it seemed to her that all the anguish of her life had centred in the single fear of losing her mother. At times she almost reproached herself with loving Dan too much, and for months she would resolutely keep her thoughts from following him, while she laid her impassioned service at her mother’s feet. Day or night there was hardly a moment when she was not beside her, trying, by very force of love, to hold her back from the death to which she went with her slow and stately tread.

For Mrs. Ambler, who had kept her strength for a year after the Governor’s death, seemed at last to be gently withdrawing from a place in which she found herself a stranger. There was nothing to detain her now; she was too heartsick to adapt herself to many changes; loss and approaching poverty might be borne by one for whom the chief thing yet remained, but she had seen this go, and so she waited, with her pensive smile, for the moment when she too might follow. If Betty were not looking she would put her untasted food aside; but the girl soon found this out, and watched her every mouthful with imploring eyes.

“Oh, mamma, do it to please me,” she entreated.

“Well, give it back, my dear,” Mrs. Ambler answered, complaisant as always, and when Betty triumphantly declared, “You feel better now–you know you do, you dearest,” she responded readily:–

“Much better, darling; give me some straw to plait–I have grown to like to have my hands busy. Your old bonnet is almost gone, so I shall plait you one of this and trim it with a piece of ribbon Aunt Lydia found yesterday in the attic.”

“I don’t mind going bareheaded, if you will only eat.”

“I was never a hearty eater. Your father used to say that I ate less than a robin. It was the custom for ladies to have delicate appetites in my day, you see; and I remember your grandma’s amazement when Miss Pokey Mickleborough was asked at our table what piece of chicken she preferred, and answered quite aloud, ‘Leg, if you please.’ She was considered very indelicate by your grandma, who had never so much as tasted any part except the wing.”

She sat, gentle and upright, in her rosewood chair, her worn silk dress rustling as she crossed her feet, her beautiful hands moving rapidly with the straw plaiting. “I was brought up very carefully, my dear,” she added, turning her head with its shining bands of hair a little silvered since the beginning of the war. “‘A girl is like a flower,’ your grandpa always said. ‘If a rough wind blows near her, her bloom is faded.’ Things are different now–very different.”

“But this is war,” said Betty.

Mrs. Ambler nodded over the slender braid.

“Yes, this is war,” she added with her wistful smile, and a moment afterward looked up again to ask in a dazed way:–

“What was the last battle, dear? I can’t remember.”

Betty’s glance sought the lawn outside where the warm May sunshine fell in shafts of light upon the purple lilacs.

“They are fighting now in the Wilderness,” she answered, her thoughts rushing to the famished army closed in the death grapple with its enemy. “Dan got a letter to me and he says it is like fighting in a jungle, the vines are so thick they can’t see the other side. He has to aim by ear instead of sight.”

Mrs. Ambler’s fingers moved quickly.

“He has become a very fine man,” she said. “Your father always liked him–and so did I–but at one time we were afraid that he was going to be too much his father’s son–he looked so like him on his wild days, especially when he had taken wine and his colour went high.”

“But he has the Lightfoot eyes. The Major, Champe, even their Great-aunt Emmeline have those same gray eyes that are always laughing.”

“Jane Lightfoot had them, too,” added Mrs. Ambler. “She used to say that to love hard went with them. ‘The Lightfoot eyes are never disillusioned,’ she once told me. I wonder if she remembered that afterwards, poor girl.”

Betty was silent for a moment.

“It sounds cruel,” she confessed, “but you know, I have sometimes thought that it may have been just a little bit her fault, mamma.”

Mrs. Ambler smiled. “Your grandpa used to say ‘get a woman to judge a woman and there comes a hanging.'”

“Oh, I don’t mean that,” responded Betty, blushing. “Jack Montjoy was a scoundrel, I suppose–but I think that even if Dan had been a scoundrel, instead of so big and noble–I could have made his life so much better just because I loved him; if love is only large enough it seems to me that all such things as being good and bad are swallowed up.”

“I don’t know–your father was very good, and I loved him because of it. He was of the salt of the earth, as Mr. Blake wrote to me last year.”

“There has never been anybody like papa,” said Betty, her eyes filling. “Not even Dan–for I can’t imagine papa being anything but what he was–and yet I know even if Dan were as wild as the Major once believed him to be, I could have gone with him not the least bit afraid. I was so sure of myself that if he had beaten me he could not have broken my spirit. I should always have known that some day he would need me and be sorry.”

Tender, pensive, bred in the ancient ways, Mrs. Ambler looked up at her and shook her head.

“You are very strong, my child,” she answered, “and I think it makes us all lean too much upon you.”

Taking her hand, Betty kissed each slender finger. “I lean on you for the best in life, mamma,” she answered, and then turned to the window. “It’s my working time,” she said, “and there is poor Hosea trying to plough without horses. I wonder how he’ll manage it.”

“Are all the horses gone, dear?”

“All except Prince Rupert and papa’s mare. Peter keeps them hidden in the mountains, and I carried them the last two apples yesterday. Prince Rupert knew me in the distance and whinnied before Peter saw me. Now I’ll send Aunt Lydia to you, dearest, while I see about the weaving. Mammy Riah has almost finished my linsey dress.” She kissed her again and went out to where the looms were working in one of the detached wings.

The summer went by slowly. The famished army fell back inch by inch, and at Uplands the battle grew more desperate with the days. Without horses it was impossible to plant the crops and on the open turnpike swept by bands of raiders as by armies, it was no less impossible to keep the little that was planted. Betty, standing at her window in the early mornings, would glance despairingly over the wasted fields and the quiet little cabins, where the negroes were stirring about their work. Those little cabins, forming a crescent against the green hill, caused her an anxiety before which her own daily suffering was of less account. When the time came that was fast approaching, and the secret places were emptied of their last supplies, where could those faithful people turn in their distress? The question stabbed her like a sword each morning before she put on her bonnet of plaited straw and ran out to make her first round of the farm. Behind her cheerful smile there was always the grim fear growing sharper every hour.

Then on a golden summer afternoon, when the larder had been swept by a band of raiders, she became suddenly aware that there was nothing in the house for her mother’s supper, and, with the army pistol in her hand, set out across the fields for Chericoke. As she walked over the sunny meadows, the shadow that was always lifted in Mrs. Ambler’s presence fell heavily upon her face and she choked back a rising sob. What would the end be? she asked herself in sudden anguish, or was this the end?

Reaching Chericoke she found Mrs. Lightfoot and Aunt Rhody drying sliced sweet potatoes on boards along the garden fence, where the sunflowers and hollyhocks flaunted in the face of want.

“I’ve just gotten a new recipe for coffee, child,” the old lady began in mild excitement. “Last year I made it entirely of sweet potatoes, but Mrs. Blake tells me that she mixes rye and a few roasted chestnuts. Mr. Lightfoot took supper with her a week ago, and he actually congratulated her upon still keeping her real old Mocha. Be sure to try it.”

“Indeed I shall–the very next time Hosea gets any sweet potatoes. Some raiders have just dug up the last with their sabres and eaten them raw.”

“Well, they’ll certainly have colic,” remarked Mrs. Lightfoot, with professional interest.

“I hope so,” said Betty, “but I’ve come over to beg something for mamma’s supper–eggs, chickens, anything except bacon. She can’t touch that, she’d starve first.”

Looking anxious, Mrs. Lightfoot appealed to Aunt Rhody, who was busily spreading little squares of sweet potatoes on the clean boards. “Rhody, can’t you possibly find us some eggs?” she inquired.

Aunt Rhody stopped her work and turned upon them all the dignity of two hundred pounds of flesh.

“How de hens gwine lay w’en dey’s done been eaten up?” she demanded.

“Isn’t there a single chicken left?” hopelessly persisted the old lady.

“Who gwine lef’ ’em? Ain’ dose low-lifeted sodgers dat rid by yestiddy done stole de las’ one un ‘um off de nes’?”

Mrs. Lightfoot sternly remonstrated.

“They were our own soldiers, Rhody, and they don’t steal–they merely take.”

“I don’ see de diffunce,” sniffed Aunt Rhody. “All I know is dat dey pulled de black hen plum off de nes’ whar she wuz a-settin’. Den des now de Yankees come a-prancin’ up en de ducks tuck ter de water en de Yankees dey went a-wadin’ atter dem. Yes, Lawd, dey went a-wadin’ wid dey shoes on.”

The old lady sighed.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing, Betty,” she said, “though Congo has gone to town to see if he can find any fowls, and I’ll send some over if he brings them. We had a Sherman pudding for dinner ourselves, and I know the sorghum in it will give the Major gout for a month. Well, well, this is war, I reckon, and I must say, for my part, I never expected it to be conducted like a flirtation behind a fan.”

“I nuver seed no use a-fittin’ unless you is gwine ter fit in de yuther pusson’s yawd,” interpolated Aunt Rhody. “De way ter fit is ter keep a-sidlin’ furder f’om yo’ own hen roos’ en nigher ter de hen roos’ er de somebody dat’s a-fittin’ you.”

“Hold your tongue, Rhody,” retorted Mrs. Lightfoot, and then drew Betty a little to one side. “I have some port wine, my dear,” she whispered, “which Cupid buried under the old asparagus bed, and I’ll tell him to dig up several bottles and take them to you. The other servants don’t know of it, so I can’t get it out till after dark. Poor Julia! how does she stand these terrible days?”

Betty’s lips quivered. “I have to force her to eat,” she replied, “and it seems almost cruel–she is so tired of life.”

“I know, my dear,” responded the old lady, wiping her eyes; “and we have our troubles, too. Champe is in prison now, and Mr. Lightfoot is very much upset. He says this General Grant is not like the others, that he knows him–and he’s the kind to hang on as long as he’s alive.”

“But we must win in the end,” said Betty, desperately; “we have sacrificed so much, how can it all be lost?”

“That’s what Mr. Lightfoot says–we’ll win in the end, but the end’s a long way off. By the way, did you know that Car’line had run off after the Yankees? When I think how that girl had been spoiled!”

“Oh, I wish they’d all go,” returned Betty. “All except Mammy and Uncle Shadrach and Hosea–and even they make starvation that much nearer.”

“Well, we shan’t starve yet awhile, dear; I’m in hopes that Congo will ransack the town. If you would only stay.”

But Betty shook her head and went back across the meadows, walking rapidly through the lush grass of the deserted pastures. Her mind was so filled with Mrs. Lightfoot’s forebodings, that when, in climbing the low stone wall, she saw the free negro, Levi, coming toward her, she turned to him with a gesture that was almost an appeal for sympathy.

“Uncle Levi, these are sad times now,” she said. “I am looking for something for mamma’s supper and I can find nothing.”

The old negro, shabbier, lonelier, poorer than ever, shambled up to the wall where she was standing and uncovered a split basket full of eggs.

“I’se got a pa’cel er hens hid in de woods over yonder,” he explained, “en I keep de eggs behin’ de j’ists in my cabin. Sis Floretty she tole me dat de w’ite folks wuz wuss off den de niggers now, so I brung you dese.”

“Oh, Uncle Levi!” cried Betty, seizing his gnarled old hands. As she looked at his stricken figure a compassion as acute as pain brought the quick tears to her eyes. She remembered the isolation of his life, the scornful suspicion he had met from white and black, and the injustice that had set him free and sold Sarindy up the river.

“You wuz moughty good ter me,” muttered free Levi, shuffling his bare feet in the long grass, “en Marse Dan, he wuz moughty good ter me, too, ‘fo’ he went away on dat black night. I ‘members de time w’en dat ole Rainy-day Jones up de big road (we all call him Rainy-day caze he looked so sour) had me right by de collar wid de hick’ry branch a sizzlin’ in de a’r, en I des ‘lowed de een had mos’ come. Yes, Lawd, I did, but I warn’ countin’ on Marse Dan. He warn’ mo’n wais’ high ter ole Rainy-day, but de furs’ thing I know dar wuz ole Rainy-day on de yerth wid Marse Dan a-lashin’ ‘im wid de branch er hick’ry.”

“We shall never forget you–Dan and I,” answered Betty, as she took the basket, “and when the time comes we will repay you.”

The old negro smiled and turned from her, and Betty, quickening her pace, ran on to Uplands, reaching the house a little breathless from the long walk.

In the chamber upstairs she found Mrs. Ambler sitting before the window with her open Bible on the sill, where a spray of musk roses entered from the outside wall.

“All well, mamma?” she asked in a cheerful voice.

Mrs. Ambler started and turned slowly from the window.

“I see a great light on the road,” she murmured wonderingly.

Crossing to where she sat, Betty leaned out above the climbing roses and glanced to the mountains huddled against the sky.

“It is General Sheridan going up the valley,” she said.

VIII

THE LAST STAND

In the face of a damp April wind a remnant of Lee’s army pushed forward along an old road skirted by thin pine woods. As the column moved on slowly, it threw out skirmishers on either flank, where the Federal cavalry hovered in the distance. Once in an open clearing it formed into a hollow square and marched in battle line to avoid capture. While the regiments kept in motion the men walked steadily in the ranks, with their hollowed eyes staring straight ahead from their gaunt, tanned faces; but at the first halt they fell like logs upon the roadside, sleeping amid the sound of shots and the stinging cavalry. With the cry of “Forward!” they struggled to their feet again, and went stumbling on into the vast uncertainty and the approaching night. Breathless, starving, with their rags pinned together, and their mouths bleeding from three days’ rations of parched corn, they still kept onward, marching with determined eyes to whatever and wherever the end might be. Petersburg had fallen, Richmond was in flames behind them, the Confederacy was, perhaps, buried in the ruins of its Capitol, but Lee was still somewhere to the front, so his army followed.

“How long have we been marching, boys? I can’t remember,” asked Dan, when, after a short rest, they formed again and started forward over the old road. In the tatters of his gray uniform, with his broken shoes tied on his feet and his black hair hanging across his eyes, he might have been one of the beggars who warm themselves in the sun of Southern countries.

“Oh, I reckon we left the Garden of Eden about six thousand years ago,” responded a wag from somewhere–he was too tired to recognize the voice. “There! the skirmishers have struck that blamed cavalry again. Plague them! They’re as bad as wasps!”

“Has anybody some parched corn?” inquired Bland, plaintively. “I’ll trade a whole raw ear for it. It makes my gums bleed so, I can’t chew it.”

Dan plunged his hand into his pocket, and drew out the corn which he had shelled and parched at the last halt. As he exchanged it for the “whole raw ear,” he fell to wondering vaguely what had become of Big Abel since that dim point in eternity when they had left the trenches that surrounded Petersburg. Then time was divided into periods of nights and days, now night and day alike were made up in breathless marching, in throwing out skirmishers against those “wasps” of cavalrymen, and in trying to force aching teeth to grind parched corn. Panting and sick with hunger, he struggled on like a driven beast that sees the place ahead, where he must turn and grapple for the end with the relentless hunter on his track.

As the day ended the moist wind gathered strength and sang in his ears as he crept forward–now sleeping, now waking, for a time filled with warm memories of his college life, and again fighting over the last hopeless campaign from the Wilderness to the trenches where Petersburg had fallen. They had yielded step by step, but the great hunter had pressed on, and now the thin brigades were gathering for the last stand together.

Overhead he heard the soughing of the pines, and around him the steady tramp of feet too tired to lift themselves from out the heavy mud. Straight above in the muffled sky a star shone dimly, and for a time he watched it in his effort to keep awake. Then he began on the raw corn in his pocket, shelling it from the cob as he walked along; but when the taste of blood rose to his lips, he put the ear away again, and stooped to rub his eyes with a handful of damp earth. Then, at last, in sheer desperation, he loosened the grip upon his thoughts, and stumbled on, between waking and sleeping, into the darkness that lay ahead.

In the road before him the door at Chericoke opened wide as on the old Christmas Eves, and he saw the Major and the Governor draining their glasses under the garlands of mistletoe and holly, while Betty and Virginia, in dresses of white tarleton, stood against the ruddy glow that filled the panelled parlour. The cheerful Christmas smell was in the air–the smell of apple toddy, of roasted turkey, of plum pudding in a blaze of alcohol. As he entered after his long ride from college, Betty came up to him and slipped a warm white hand into his cold one, while he met the hazel beams from beneath her lashes.

“I hope you have brought Jack Morson,” she said. “Virginia is waiting. See how lovely she looks in her white flounces, with the string of coral about her neck.”

“But the war, Betty?” he asked, with blinking eyes, and as he put out his hand to touch the pearls upon her bosom, he saw that it was whole again–no wound was there, only the snowflakes that fell from his sleeve upon her breast. “What of the war, dear? I must go back to the army.”

Betty laughed long and merrily.

“Why, you’re dreaming, Dan,” she said. “It all comes of those wicked stories of the Major’s. In a moment you will believe that this is really 1812, and you’ve gone without your rations.”

“Thank God!” he cried aloud, and the sound of his own voice woke him, as he slipped and went down in a mudhole upon the road. The Christmas smell faded from his nostrils; in its place came the smoke from Pinetop’s pipe–a faithful friend until the last. Overhead the star was still shining, and to the front he heard a single shot from the hovering cavalry, withdrawing for the night.

“God damn this mud!” called a man behind him, as he lurched sideways from the ranks. Farther away three hoarse voices, the remnant of a once famous glee club, were singing in the endeavour to scare off sleep:–

“Rally round the flag, boys, rally once again!”

And suddenly he was fighting in the tangles of the Wilderness, crouching behind a charred oak stump, while he loaded and fired at the little puffs of smoke that rose from the undergrowth beyond. He saw the low marshland, the stunted oaks and pines, and the heavy creepers that were pushed aside and trampled underfoot, and at his feet he saw a company officer with a bullet hole through his forehead and a covering of pine needles upon his face. About him the small twigs fell, as if a storm swept the forest, and as he dodged, like a sharpshooter from tree to tree, he saw a rush of flame and smoke in the distance where the woods were burning. Above the noise of the battle, he heard the shrieks of the wounded men in the track of the fire; and once he met a Union and a Confederate soldier, each shot through the leg, drawing each other back from the approaching flames. Then, as he passed on, tearing at the cartridges with his teeth, he came upon a sergeant in Union clothes, sitting against a pine stump with his cocked rifle in his hand, and his eyes on the wind-blown smoke. A moment before the man may have gone down at his shot, he knew–and yet, as he looked, an instinct stronger than the instinct to kill was alive within him, and he rushed on, dragging his enemy with him from the terrible woods. “I hope you are not much hurt,” he said, as he placed him on the ground and ran back to where the line was charging. “One life has been paid for,” he thought, as he rushed on to kill–and fell face downward on the wheel-ruts of the old road.

“Rally round the flag, boys, rally once again,”

sang the three hoarse voices, straining against the wind.

Dan struggled to his feet, and the scene shifted.

He was back in his childhood, and the Major had just brought in a slave he had purchased from Rainy-day Jones–“the plague spot in the county,” as the angry old gentleman declared.

Dan sat on the pile of kindling wood upon the kitchen hearth and stared at the poor black creature shivering in the warmth, his face distorted with the toothache, and a dirty rag about his jaw. He heard Aunt Rhody snorting indignantly as she basted the turkeys, and he watched his grandmother bustling back and forth with whiskey and hot plasters.

“Who made slavery, sir?” asked the boy suddenly, his hands in his breeches pockets and his head bent sideways.

The Major started.

“God, sir,” he promptly replied.

“Then I think it very strange of God,” said the boy, “and when I grow up, I shall set them all free, grandpa–I shall set them free even if I have to fight to do it, sir.”

“What! like poor free Levi?” stormed the Major.

“Wake up, confound you!” bawled somebody in his ear. “You’ve lurched against my side until my ribs are sore. I say, are you going on forever, anyhow? We’ve halted for the night.”

“I can’t stop!” cried Dan, groping in the darkness, then he fell heavily upon the damp ground, while a voice down the road began shouting, “Detail for guard!” Half asleep and cursing, the men responded to their names and hurried off, and as the silence closed in, the army slept like a child upon the roadside.

With the first glimmer of dawn they were on the march again, passing all day through the desolate flat country, where the women ran weeping to the doorways, and waved empty hands as they went by. Once a girl in a homespun dress, with a spray of apple blossoms in her black hair, brought out a wooden bucket filled with buttermilk and passed it along the line.

“Fight to the end, boys,” she cried defiantly, “and when the end comes, keep on fighting. If you go back on Lee there’s not a woman in Virginia will touch your hand.”

“That’s right, little gal!” shrieked a husky private. “Three cheers for Marse Robert! an’ we’ll whip the earth in our bar’ feet befo’ breakfast.”

“All the same I wish old Stonewall was along,” muttered Pinetop. “If I could jest see old Stonewall or his ghost ahead, I’d know thar was an open road somewhere that Sheridan ain’t got his eye on.”

As the sun rose high, refugees from Richmond flocked after them to shout that the town had been fired by the citizens, who had moved, with their families, to the Capitol Square as the flames spread from the great tobacco warehouses. Men who had wives and children in the city groaned as they marched farther from the ashes of their homes, and more than one staggered back into the ranks and went onward under a heavier burden.

“Wall, I reckon things are fur the best–or they ain’t.” remarked Pinetop, in a cheerful tone. “Thar’s no goin’ agin that, you bet. What’s the row back thar, I wonder?”

The hovering enemy, grown bolder, had fallen upon the flank, and the stragglers and the rear guard were beating off the cavalry, when a regiment was sent back to relieve the pressure. Returning, Pinetop, who was of the attacking party, fell gravely to moralizing upon the scarcity of food.

“I’ve tasted every plagued thing that grows in this country except dirt,” he observed, “an’ I’m goin’ to kneel down presently and take a good square mouthful of that.”

“That’s one thing we shan’t run short of,” replied Dan, stepping round a mud hole. “By George, we’ve got to march in a square again across this open. I believe when I set out for heaven, I’ll find some of those confounded Yankee troopers watching the road.”

Forming in battle line they advanced cautiously across the clearing, while the skirmishing grew brisker at the front. That night they halted but once upon the way, standing to meet attack against a strip of pines, watching with drawn breath while the enemy crept closer. They heard him in the woods, felt him in the air, saw him in the darkness–like a gigantic coil he approached inch by inch for the last struggle. Now and then a shot rang out, and the little band thrilled to a soldier, and waited breathlessly for the last charge that might end it all.

“There’s only one thing worse than starvation, and it’s defeat!” cried Dan aloud; then the column swung on and the cry of “Close up, there! close up!” mingled in his ears with the steady tramp upon the road.

In the early morning the shots grew faster, and as the column stopped in the cover of a wood, the bullets came singing among the tree-tops, from the left flank where the skirmishers had struck the enemy. During the short rest Dan slept leaning against a twisted aspen, and when Pinetop shook him, he awoke with a dizziness in his head that sent the flat earth slamming against the sky.

“I believe I’m starving, Pinetop,” he said, and his voice rang like a bell in his ears. “I can’t see where to put my feet, the ground slips about so.”

For answer Pinetop felt in his pocket and brought out a slice of fat bacon, which he gave to him uncooked.

“Wait till I git a light,” he commanded. “A woman up the road gave me a hunk, and I’ve had my share.”

“You’ve had your share,” repeated Dan, greedily, his eyes on the meat, though he knew that Pinetop was lying.

The mountaineer struck a match and lighted a bit of pine, holding the bacon to the flame until it scorched.

“You’d better git it all in yo’ mouth quick,” he advised, “for if the smell once starts on the breeze the whole brigade will be on the scent in a minute.”

Dan ate it to the last morsel and licked the warm juice from his fingers.

“You lied, Pinetop,” he said, “but, by God, you saved my life. What place is this, I wonder. Isn’t there any hope of our cutting through Grant’s lines to-day?”

Pinetop glanced about him.

“Somebody said we were comin’ on to Sailor’s Creek,” he answered, “and it’s about as God-forsaken country as I care to see. Hello! what’s that?”

In the road there was an abandoned battery, cut down and left to rot into the earth, and as they swept past it at “double quick,” they heard the sound of rapid firing across the little stream.

“It’s a fight, thank God!” yelled Pinetop, and at the words a tumultuous joy urged Dan through the water and over the sharp stones. After all the hunger and the intolerable waiting, a chance was come for him to use his musket once again.

As they passed through an open meadow, a rabbit, starting suddenly from a clump of sumach, went bounding through the long grass before the thin gray line. With ears erect and short white tail bobbing among the broom-sedge, the little quivering creature darted straight toward the low brow of a hill, where a squadron of cavalry made a blue patch on the green.

“Geriminy! thar goes a good dinner,” Pinetop gasped, smacking his lips. “An’ I’ve got to save this here load for a Yankee I can’t eat.”

With a long flying leap the rabbit led the charge straight into the enemy’s ranks, and as the squirrel rifles rang out behind it, a blue horseman was swept from every saddle upon the hill.

“By God, I’m glad I didn’t eat that rabbit!” yelled Pinetop, as he reloaded and raised his musket to his shoulder.

Back and forth before the line, the general of the brigade was riding bareheaded and frantic with delight. As he passed he made sweeping gestures with his left hand, and his long gray hair floated like a banner upon the wind.

“They’re coming, men!” he cried. “Get behind that fence and have your muskets ready to pick your man. When you see the whites of his eyes fire, and give the bayonet. They’re coming! Here they are!”

The old “worm” fence went down, and as Dan piled up some loose rails before him, a creeping brier tore his fingers until the blood spurted upon his sleeve. Then, kneeling on the ground, he raised his musket and fired at one of the skirmishers advancing briskly through the broom-sedge. In an instant the meadow and the hill beyond were blue with swarming infantry, and the little gray band fell back, step by step, loading and firing as it went across the field. As the road behind it closed, Dan turned to battle on his own account, and entering a thinned growth of pines, he dodged from tree to tree and aimed above the brushwood. Near him the colour bearer of the regiment was fighting with his flagstaff for a weapon, and out in the meadow a member of the glee club, crouching behind a clump of sassafras as he loaded, was singing in a cracked voice:–

“Rally round the flag, boys, rally once again!”

Then a bullet went with a soft thud into the singer’s breast, and the cracked voice was choked out beneath the bushes.

Gripped by a sudden pity for the helpless flag he had loved and followed for four years, Dan made an impetuous dash from out the pines, and tearing the colours from the pole, tossed them over his arm as he retreated rapidly to cover. At the instant he held his life as nothing beside the faded strip of silk that wrapped about his body. The cause for which he had fought, the great captain he had followed, the devotion to a single end which had kept him struggling in the ranks, the daily sacrifice, the very poverty and cold and hunger, all these were bound up and made one with the tattered flag upon his arm. Through the belt of pines, down the muddy road, across the creek and up the long hill, he fell back breathlessly, loading and firing as he went, with his face turned toward the enemy. At the end he became like a fox before the hunters, dashing madly over the rough ground, with the colours blown out behind him, and the quick shots ringing in his ears.

Then, as if by a single stroke, Lee’s army vanished from the trampled broom-sedge and the strip of pines. The blue brigades closed upon the landscape and when they opened there were only a group of sullen prisoners and the sound of stray shots from the scattered soldiers who had fought their way beyond the stream.

IX

IN THE HOUR OF DEFEAT

As the dusk fell Dan found himself on the road with a little company of stragglers, flying from the pursuing cavalry that drew off slowly as the darkness gathered. He had lost his regiment, and, as he went on, he began calling out familiar names, listening with strained ears for an answer that would tell of a friend’s escape. At last he caught the outlines of a gigantic figure relieved on a hillock against the pale green west, and, with a shout, he hurried through the swarm of fugitives, and overtook Pinetop, who had stooped to tie his shoe on with a leather strap.

“Thank God, old man!” he cried. “Where are the others?”

Pinetop, panting yet imperturbable, held out a steady hand.

“The Lord knows,” he replied. “Some of ’em air here an’ some ain’t. I was goin’ back agin to git the flag, when I saw you chased like a fox across the creek with it hangin’ on yo’ back. Then I kinder thought it wouldn’t do for none of the regiment to answer when Marse Robert called, so I came along right fast and kep’ hopin’ you would follow.”

“Here I am,” responded Dan, “and here are the colours.” He twined the silk more closely about his arm, gloating over his treasure in the twilight.

Pinetop stretched out his great rough hand and touched the flag as gently as if it were a woman.

“I’ve fought under this here thing goin’ on four years now,” he said, “and I reckon when they take it prisoner, they take me along with it.”

“And me,” added Dan; “poor Granger went down, you know, just as I took it from him. He fell fighting with the pole.”

“Wall, it’s a better way than most,” Pinetop replied, “an’ when the angel begins to foot up my account on Jedgment Day, I shouldn’t mind his cappin’ the whole list with ‘he lost his life, but he didn’t lose his flag.’ To make a blamed good fight is what the Lord wants of us, I reckon, or he wouldn’t have made our hands itch so when they touch a musket.”

Then they trudged on silently, weak from hunger, sickened by defeat. When, at last, the disorganized column halted, and the men fell to the ground upon their rifles, Dan kindled a fire and parched his corn above the coals. After it was eaten they lay down side by side and slept peacefully on the edge of an old field.

For three days they marched steadily onward, securing meagre rations in a little town where they rested for a while, and pausing from time to time, to beat off a feigned attack. Pinetop, cheerful, strong, undaunted by any hardship, set his face unflinchingly toward the battle that must clear a road for them through Grant’s lines. Had he met alone a squadron of cavalry in the field, he would, probably, have taken his stand against a pine, and aimed his musket as coolly as if a squirrel were the mark. With his sunny temper, and his gloomy gospel of predestination, his heart could swell with hope even while he fought single-handed in the face of big battalions. What concerned him, after all, was not so much the chance of an ultimate victory for the cause, as the determination in his own mind to fight it out as long as he had a cartridge remaining in his box. As his fathers had kept the frontier, so he meant, on his own account, to keep Virginia.

On the afternoon of the third day, as the little company drew near to Appomattox Court House, it found the road blocked with abandoned guns, and lined by exhausted stragglers, who had gone down at the last halting place. As it filed into an open field beyond a wooded level, where a few campfires glimmered, a group of Federal horsemen clattered across the front, and, as if by instinct, the column formed into battle line, and the hand of every man was on the trigger of his musket.

“Don’t fire, you fools!” called an officer behind them, in a voice sharp with irritation. “The army has surrendered!”

“What! Grant surrendered?” thundered the line, with muskets at a trail as it rushed into the open.

“No, you blasted fools–we’ve surrendered,” shouted the voice, rising hoarsely in a gasping indignation.

“Surrendered, the deuce!” scoffed the men, as they fell back into ranks. “I’d like to know what General Lee will think of your surrender?”

A little Colonel, with his hand at his sword hilt, strutted up and down before a tangle of dead thistles.

“I don’t know what he thinks of it, he did it,” he shrieked, without pausing in his walk.

“It’s a damn lie!” cried Dan, in a white heat. Then he threw his musket on the ground, and fell to sobbing the dry tearless sobs of a man who feels his heart crushed by a sudden blow.

There were tears on all the faces round him, and Pinetop was digging his great fists into his eyes, as a child does who has been punished before his playmates. Beside him a man with an untrimmed shaggy beard hid his distorted features in shaking hands.

“I ain’t blubberin’ fur myself,” he said defiantly, “but–O Lord, boys–I’m cryin’ fur Marse Robert.”

Over the field the beaten soldiers, in ragged gray uniforms, were lying beneath little bushes of sassafras and sumach, and to the right a few campfires were burning in a shady thicket. The struggle was over, and each man had fallen where he stood, hopeless for the first time in four long years. Up and down the road groups of Federal horsemen trotted with cheerful unconcern, and now and then a private paused to make a remark in friendly tones; but the men beneath the bushes only stared with hollow eyes in answer–the blank stare of the defeated who have put their whole strength into the fight.

Taking out his jack-knife, Dan unfastened the flag from the hickory pole on which he had placed it, and began cutting it into little pieces, which he passed to each man who had fought beneath its folds. The last bit he put into his own pocket, and trembling like one gone suddenly palsied, passed from the midst of his silent comrades to a pine stump on the border of the woods. Here he sat down and looked hopelessly upon the scene before him–upon the littered roads and the great blue lines encircling the horizon.

So this was the end, he told himself, with a bitterness that choked him like a grip upon the throat, this the end of his boyish ardour, his dream of fame upon the battle-field, his four years of daily sacrifice and suffering. This was the end of the flag for which he was ready to give his life three days ago. With his youth, his strength, his very bread thrown into the scale, he sat now with wrecked body and blighted mind, and saw his future turn to decay before his manhood was well begun. Where was the old buoyant spirit he had brought with him into the fight? Gone forever, and in its place he found his maimed and trembling hands, and limbs weakened by starvation as by long fever. His virile youth was wasted in the slow struggle, his energy was sapped drop by drop; and at the last he saw himself burned out like the battle-fields, where the armies had closed and opened, leaving an impoverished and ruined soil. He had given himself for four years, and yet when the end came he had not earned so much as an empty title to take home for his reward. The consciousness of a hard-fought fight was but the common portion of them all, from the greatest to the humblest on either side. As for him he had but done his duty like his comrades in the ranks, and by what right of merit should he have raised himself above their heads? Yes, this was the end, and he meant to face it standing with his back against the wall.

Down the road a line of Federal privates came driving an ox before them, and he eyed them gravely, wondering in a dazed way if the taste of victory had gone to their heads. Then he turned slowly, for a voice was speaking at his side, and a tall man in a long blue coat was building a little fire hard by.

“Your stomach’s pretty empty, ain’t it, Johnny?” he inquired, as he laid the sticks crosswise with precise movements, as if he had measured the length of each separate piece of wood. He was lean and rawboned, with a shaggy red moustache and a wart on his left cheek. When he spoke he showed an even row of strong white teeth.

Dan looked at him with a kind of exhausted indignation.

“Well, it’s been emptier,” he returned shortly.

The man in blue struck a match and held it carefully to a dried pine branch, watching, with a serious face, as the flame licked the rosin from the crossed sticks. Then he placed a quart pot full of water on the coals, and turned to meet Dan’s eyes, which had grown ravenous as he caught the scent of beef.

“You see we somehow thought you Johnnies would be hard up,” he said in an offhand manner, “so we made up our minds we’d ask you to dinner and cut our rations square. Some of us are driving over an ox from camp, but as I was hanging round and saw you all by yourself on this old stump, I had a feeling that you were in need of a cup of coffee. You haven’t tasted real coffee for some time, I guess.”

The water was bubbling over and he measured out the coffee and poured it slowly into the quart cup. As the aroma filled the air, he opened his haversack and drew out a generous supply of raw beef which he broiled on little sticks, and laid on a spread of army biscuits. The larger share he offered to Dan with the steaming pot of coffee.

“I declare it’ll do me downright good to see you eat,” he said, with a hospitable gesture.

Dan sat down beside the bread and beef, and, for the next ten minutes, ate like a famished wolf, while the man in blue placidly regarded him. When he had finished he took out a little bag of Virginian tobacco and they smoked together beside the waning fire. A natural light returned gradually to Dan’s eyes, and while the clouds of smoke rose high above the bushes, they talked of the last great battles as quietly as of the Punic Wars. It was all dead now, as dead as history, and the men who fought had left the bitterness to the camp followers or to the ones who stayed at home.

“You have fine tobacco down this way,” observed the Union soldier, as he refilled his pipe, and lighted it with an ember. Then his gaze followed Dan’s, which was resting on the long blue lines that stretched across the landscape.

“You’re feeling right bad about us now,” he pursued, as he crossed his legs and leaned back against a pine, “and I guess it’s natural, but the time will come when you’ll know that we weren’t the worst you had to face.”

Dan held out his hand with something of a smile.

“It was a fair fight and I can shake hands,” he responded.

“Well, I don’t mean that,” said the other thoughtfully. “What I mean is just this, you mark my words–after the battle comes the vultures. After the army of fighters comes the army of those who haven’t smelled the powder. And in time you’ll learn that it isn’t the man with the rifle that does the most of the mischief. The damned coffee boilers will get their hands in now–I know ’em.”

“Well, there’s nothing left, I suppose, but to swallow it down without any fuss,” said Dan wearily, looking over the field where the slaughtered ox was roasting on a hundred bayonets at a hundred fires.

“You’re right, that’s the only thing,” agreed the man in blue; then his keen gray eyes were on Dan’s face.

“Have you got a wife?” he asked bluntly.

Dan shook his head as he stared gravely at the embers.

“A sweetheart, I guess? I never met a Johnnie who didn’t have a sweetheart.”

“Yes, I’ve a sweetheart–God bless her!”

“Well, you take my advice and go home and tell her to cure you, now she’s got the chance. I like your face, young man, but if I ever saw a half-starved and sickly one, it is yours. Why, I shouldn’t have thought you had the strength to raise your rifle.”

“Oh, it doesn’t take much strength for that; and besides the coffee did me good, I was only hungry.”

“Hungry, hump!” grunted the Union soldier. “It takes more than hunger to give a man that blue look about the lips; it takes downright starvation.” He dived into his haversack and drew out a quinine pill and a little bottle of whiskey.

“If you’ll just chuck this down it won’t do you any harm,” he went on, “and if I were you, I’d find a shelter before I went to sleep to-night; you can’t trust April weather. Get into that cow shed over there or under a wagon.”

Dan swallowed the quinine and the whiskey, and as the strong spirit fired his veins, the utter hopelessness of his outlook muffled him into silence. Dropping his head into his open palms, he sat dully staring at the whitening ashes.

After a moment the man in blue rose to his feet and fastened his haversack.

“I live up by Bethlehem, New Hampshire,” he remarked, “and if you ever come that way, I hope you’ll look me up; my name’s Moriarty.”

“Your name’s Moriarty, I shall remember,” repeated Dan, trying, with a terrible effort, to steady his quivering limbs.

“Jim Moriarty, don’t you forget it. Anybody at Bethlehem can tell you about me; I keep the biggest store around there.” He went off a few steps and then came back to hold out an awkward hand in which there was a little heap of silver.

“You’d just better take this to start you on your way,” he said, “it ain’t but ninety-five cents–I couldn’t make out the dollar–and when you get it in again you can send it to Jim Moriarty at Bethlehem, New Hampshire. Good-by, and good luck to you this time.”

He strode off across the field, and Dan, with the silver held close in his palm, flung himself back upon the ground and slept until Pinetop woke him with a grasp upon his shoulder.

“Marse Robert’s passin’ along the road,” he said. “You’d better hurry.”

Struggling to his feet Dan rushed from the woods across the deserted field, to the lines of conquered soldiers standing in battle ranks upon the roadside. Between them the Commander had passed slowly on his dapple gray horse, and when Dan joined the ranks it was only in time to see him ride onward at a walk, with the bearded soldiers clinging like children to his stirrups. A group of Federal cavalrymen, drawn up beneath a persimmon tree, uncovered as he went by, and he returned the salute with a simple gesture. Lonely, patient, confirmed in courtesy, he passed on his way, and his little army returned to camp in the strip of pines.

“‘I’ve done my best for you,’ that’s what he said,” sobbed Pinetop. “‘I’ve done my best for you,’–and I kissed old Traveller’s mane.”

Without replying, Dan went back into the woods and flung himself down on the spread of tags. Now that the fight was over all the exhaustion of the last four years, the weakness after many battles, the weariness after the long marches, had gathered with accumulated strength for the final overthrow.

For three days he remained in camp in the pine woods, and on the third, after waiting six hours in a hard rain outside his General’s tent, he secured the little printed slip which signified to all whom it might concern that he had become a prisoner upon his parole. Then, after a sympathetic word to the rest of the division, shivering beneath the sassafras bushes before the tent, he shook hands with his comrades under arms, and started with Pinetop down the muddy road. The war was over, and footsore, in rags and with aching limbs, he was returning to the little valley where he had hoped to trail his glory.

Down the long road the gray rain fell straight as a curtain, and on either side tramped the lines of beaten soldiers who were marching, on their word of honour, to their distant homes. The abandoned guns sunk deep in the mud, the shivering men lying in rags beneath the bushes, and the charred remains of campfires among the trees were the last memories Dan carried from the four years’ war.

Some miles farther on, when the pickets had been passed, a man on a black horse rode suddenly from a little thicket and stopped across their path.

“You fellows haven’t been such darn fools as to give your parole, have you?” he asked in an angry voice, his hand on his horse’s neck. “The fight isn’t over yet and we want your muskets on our side. I belong to the partisan rangers, and we’ll cut through to Johnston’s army before daylight. If not, we’ll take to the mountains and keep up the war forever. The country is ours, what’s to hinder us?”

He spoke passionately, and at each sharp exclamation the black horse rose on his haunches and pawed the air.

Dan shook his head.

“I’m out on parole,” he replied, “but as soon as I’m exchanged, I’ll fight if Virginia wants me. How about you, Pinetop?”

The mountaineer shuffled his feet in the mud and stood solemnly surveying the landscape.

“Wall, I don’t understand much about this here parole business,” he replied. “It seems to me that a slip of paper with printed words on it that I have to spell out as I go, is a mighty poor way to keep a man from fightin’ if he can find a musket. I ain’t steddyin’ about this parole, but Marse Robert told me to go home to plant my crop, and I am goin’ home to plant it.”

“It is all over, I think,” said Dan with a quivering lip, as he stared at the ruined meadows. The smart was still fresh, and it was too soon for him to add, with the knowledge that would come to him from years,–“it is better so.” Despite the grim struggle and the wasted strength, despite the impoverished land and the nameless graves that filled it, despite even his own wrecked youth and the hard-fought fields where he had laid it down–despite all these a shadow was lifted from his people and it was worth the price.

They passed on, while the black horse pawed the dust, and the rider hurled oaths at their retreating figures. At a little house a few yards down the road they stopped to ask for food, and found a woman weeping at the kitchen table, with three small children clinging to her skirts. Her husband had fallen at Five Forks, she said, the safe was empty, and the children were crying for bread. Then Dan slipped into her hand the silver he had borrowed from the Union soldier, and the two returned penniless to the road.

“At least we are men,” he said almost apologetically to Pinetop, and the next instant turned squarely in the mud, for a voice from the other side had called out shrilly:–

“Hi, Marse Dan, whar you gwine now?”

“Bless my soul, it’s Big Abel,” he exclaimed.

Black as a spade and beaming with delight, the negro emerged from the swarm upon the roadside and grasped Dan’s outstretched hands.

“Whar you gwine dis away, Marse Dan?” he inquired again.

“I’m going home, Big Abel,” responded Dan, as they walked on in a row of three. “No, don’t shout, you scamp; I’d rather lie down and die upon the roadside than go home like this.”

“Well, you ain’ much to look at, dat’s sho’,” replied Big Abel, his face shining like polished ebony, “en I ain’ much to look at needer, but dey’ll have ter recollect de way we all wuz befo’ we runned away; dey’ll have ter recollect you in yo’ fine shuts en fancy waistcoats, en dey’ll have ter recollect me in yo’ ole uns. Sakes alive! I kin see dat one er yourn wid de little bit er flow’rs all over hit des es plain es ef ‘twuz yestiddy.”

“The waistcoats are all gone now,” said Dan gravely, “and so are the shirts. The war is over and you are your own master, Big Abel. You don’t belong to me from this time on.”

Big Abel shook his head grinning.

“I reckon hit’s all de same,” he remarked cheerfully, “en I reckon we’d es well be gwine on home, Marse Dan.”

“I reckon we would,” said Dan, and they pushed on in silence.

X

ON THE MARCH AGAIN

That night they slept on the blood-stained floor of an old field hospital, and the next morning Pinetop parted from them and joined an engineer who had promised him a “lift” toward his mountains.

As Dan stood in the sunny road holding his friend’s rough hand, it seemed to him that such a parting was the sharpest wrench the end had brought.

“Whenever you need me, old fellow, remember that I am always ready,” he said in a husky voice.

Pinetop looked past him to the distant woods, and his calm blue eyes were dim.

“I reckon you’ll go yo’ way an’ I’ll go mine,” he replied, “for thar’s one thing sartain an’ that is our ways don’t run together. It’ll never be the same agin–that’s natur–but if you ever want a good stout hand for any uphill ploughing or shoot yo’ man an’ the police git on yo’ track, jest remember that I’m up thar in my little cabin. Why, if every officer in the county was at yo’ heels, I’d stand guard with my old squirrel gun and maw would with her kettle.”

Then he shook hands with Big Abel and strode on across a field to a little railway station, while Dan went slowly down the road with the negro at his side.

In the afternoon when they had trudged all the morning through the heavy mud, they reached a small frame house set back from the road, with some straggling ailanthus shoots at the front and a pile of newly cut hickory logs near the kitchen steps. A woman, with a bucket of soapsuds at her feet, was wringing out a homespun shirt in the yard, and as they entered the little gate, she looked at them with a defiance which was evidently the result of a late domestic wrangle.

“I’ve got one man on my hands,” she began in a shrill voice, “an’ he’s as much as I can ‘tend to, an’ a long sight mo’ than I care to ‘tend to. He never had the spunk to fight anythin’ except his wife, but I reckon he’s better off now than them that had; it’s the coward that gets the best of things in these days.”

“Shut up thar, you hussy!” growled a voice from the kitchen, and a fat man with bleared eyes slouched to the doorway. “I reckon if you want a supper you can work for it,” he remarked, taking a wad of tobacco from his mouth and aiming it deliberately at one of the ailanthus shoots. “You split up that thar pile of logs back thar an’ Sally’ll cook yo’ supper. Thar ain’t another house inside of a good ten miles, so you’d better take your chance, I reckon.”

“That’s jest like you, Tom Bates,” retorted the woman passionately. “Befo’ you’d do a lick of honest work you’d let the roof topple plum down upon our heads.”

For an instant Dan’s glance cut the man like a whip, then crossing to the woodpile, he lifted the axe and sent it with a clean stroke into a hickory log.

“We can’t starve, Big Abel,” he said coolly, “but we are not beggars yet by a long way.”

“Go ‘way, Marse Dan,” protested the negro in disgust. “Gimme dat ar axe en set right down and wait twel supper. You’re des es white es a sheet dis minute.”

“I’ve got to begin some day,” returned Dan, as the axe swung back across his shoulder. “I’ll pay for my supper and you’ll pay for yours, that’s fair, isn’t it?–for you’re a free man now.”

Then he went feverishly to work, while Big Abel sat grumbling on the doorstep, and the farmer, leaning against the lintel behind him, watched the lessening pile with sluggish eyes.

“You be real careful of this wood, Sally, an’ it ought to last twel summer,” he observed, as he glanced to where his wife stood wringing out the clothes. “If you warn’t so wasteful that last pile would ha’ held out twice as long.”

Dan chopped steadily for an hour, and then giving the axe to Big Abel, went into the little kitchen to eat his supper. The woman served him sullenly, placing some sobby biscuits and a piece of cold bacon on his plate, and pouring out a glass of buttermilk with a vicious thrust of the pitcher. When he asked if there was a shelter close at hand where he might sleep, she replied sourly that she reckoned the barn was good enough if he chose to spend the night there. Then as Big Abel finished his job and took his supper in his hand, they left the house and went across the darkening cattle pen, to a rotting structure which they took to be the barn. Inside the straw was warm and dry, and as Dan flung himself down upon it, he gasped out something like a prayer of thanks. His first day’s labour with his hands had left him trembling like a nervous woman. An hour longer, he told himself, and he should have gone down upon the roadside.

For a time he slept profoundly, and then awaking in the night, he lay until dawn listening to Big Abel’s snores, and staring straight above where a solitary star shone through a crack in the shingled roof. From the other side of a thin partition came the soft breathing and the fresh smell of cows, and, now and then, he heard the low bleating of a new-born calf.

He had been dreaming of a battle, and the impression was so vivid that, as he opened his eyes, he half imagined he still heard the sound of shots. In his sleep he had saved the flag and won promotion after victory, and for a moment the trampled straw seemed to him to be the battle-field, and the thin boards against which he beat the enemy’s resisting line. As he came slowly to himself a sudden yearning for the army awoke within him. He wanted the red campfires and his comrades smoking against the dim pines; the peaceful bivouac where the long shadows crept among the trees and two men lay wrapped together beneath every blanket; above all, he wanted to see the Southern Cross wave in the sunlight, and to hear the charging yell as the brigade dashed into the open. He was homesick for it all to-night, and yet it was dead forever–dead as his own youth which he had given to the cause.

Sharp pains racked him from head to foot, and his pulses burned as if from fever. It was like the weariness of old age, he thought, this utter hopelessness, these strained and quivering muscles. As a boy he had been hardy as an Indian and as fearless of fatigue. Now the long midnight gallops on Prince Rupert over frozen roads returned to him like the dim memories from some old romance. They belonged to the place of half-forgotten stories, with the gay waistcoats and the Christmas gatherings in the hall at Chericoke. For a country that was not he had given himself as surely as the men who were buried where they fought, and his future would be but one long struggle to adjust himself to conditions in which he had no part. His proper nature was compacted of the old life which was gone forever–of its ease, of its gayety, of its lavish pleasures. For the sake of this life he had fought for four years in the ranks, and now that it was swept away, he found himself like a man who stumbles on over the graves of his familiar friends. He remembered the words of the soldier in the long blue coat, and spoke them half aloud in the darkness: “There’ll come a time when you’ll find out that the army wasn’t the worst you had to face.” The army was not the worst, he knew this now–the grapple with a courageous foe had served to quicken his pulses and nerve his hand–the worst was what came afterward, this sense of utter failure and the attempt to shape one’s self to brutal necessity. In the future that opened before him he saw only a terrible patience which would perhaps grow into a second nature as the years went on. In place of the old generous existence, he must from this day forth wring the daily bread of those he loved, with maimed hands, from a wasted soil.

The thought of Betty came to him, but it brought no consolation. For himself he could meet the shipwreck standing, but Betty must be saved from it if there was salvation to be found. She had loved him in the days of his youth–in his strong days, as the Governor said–now that he was worn out, suffering, gray before his time, there was mere madness in his thought of her buoyant strength. “You may take ten–you may take twenty years to rebuild yourself,” a surgeon had said to him at parting; and he asked himself bitterly, by what right of love dared he make her strong youth a prop for his feeble life? She loved him he knew–in his blackest hour he never doubted this–but because she loved him, did it follow that she must be sacrificed?

Then gradually the dark mood passed, and with his eyes on the star, his mouth settled into the lines of smiling patience which suffering brings to the brave. He had never been a coward and he was not one now. The years had taught him nothing if they had not taught him the wisdom most needed by his impulsive youth–that so long as there comes good to the meanest creature from fate’s hardest blow, it is the part of a man to stand up and take it between the eyes. In the midst of his own despair, of the haunting memories of that bland period which was over for his race, there arose suddenly the figure of the slave the Major had rescued, in Dan’s boyhood, from the power of old Rainy-day Jones. He saw again the poor black wretch shivering in the warmth, with the dirty rag about his jaw, and with the sight he drew a breath that was almost of relief. That one memory had troubled his own jovial ease; now in his approaching poverty he might put it away from him forever.

In the first light of a misty April sunrise they went out on the road again, and when they had walked a mile or so, Big Abel found some young pokeberry shoots, which he boiled in his old quart cup with a slice of bacon he had saved from supper. At noon they came upon a little farm and ploughed a strip of land in payment for a dinner that was lavishly pressed upon them. The people were plain, poor, and kindly, and the farmer followed Dan into the field with entreaties that he should leave the furrows and come in to meet his family. “Let yo’ darky do a bit of work if he wants to,” he urged, “but it makes me downright sick to see one of General Lee’s soldiers driving my plough. The gals are afraid it’ll bring bad luck.”

With a laugh, Dan tossed the ropes to Big Abel, who had been breaking clods of earth, and returned to the house, where he was placed in the seat of honour and waited on by a troop of enthusiastic red-cheeked maidens, each of whom cut one of the remaining buttons from his coat. Here he was asked to stay the night, but with the memory of the blue valley before his eyes, he shook his head and pushed on again in the early afternoon. The vision of Chericoke hung like a star above his road, and he struggled a little nearer day by day.

Sometimes ploughing, sometimes chopping a pile of logs, and again lying for hours in the warm grass by the way, they travelled slowly toward the valley that held Dan’s desire. The chill April dawns broke over them, and the genial April sunshine warmed them through after a drenching in a pearly shower. They watched the buds swell and the leaves open in the wood, the wild violets bloom in sheltered places, and the dandelions troop in ranks among the grasses by the road. Dan, halting to rest in the mild weather, would fall often into a revery long and patient, like those of extreme old age. With the sun shining upon his relaxed body and his eyes on the bright dust that floated in the slanting beams, he would lie for hours speechless, absorbed, filled with visions. One day he found a mountain laurel flowering in the woods, and gathering a spray he sat with it in his hands and dreamed of Betty. When Big Abel touched him on the arm he turned with a laugh and struggled to his feet. “I was resting,” he explained, as they walked on. “It is good to rest like that in mind and body; to keep out thoughts and let the dreams come as they will.”

“De bes’ place ter res’ is on yo’ own do’ step,” Big Abel responded, and quickening their pace, they went more rapidly over the rough clay roads.

It was at the end of this day that they came, in the purple twilight, to a big brick house and found there a woman who lived alone with the memories of a son she had lost at Gettysburg. At their knock she came herself, with a few old servants, prompt, tearful, and very sad; and when she saw Dan’s coat by the light of the lamp behind her, she put out her hands with a cry of welcome and drew him in, weeping softly as her white head touched his sleeve.

“My mother is dead, thank God,” he murmured, and at his words she looked up at him a little startled.

“Others have come,” she said, “but they were not like you; they did not have your voice. Have you been always poor like this?”

He met her eyes smiling.

“I have not always been a soldier,” was his answer.

For a moment she looked at him as if bewildered; then taking a lamp from an old servant, she led the way upstairs to her son’s room, and laid out the dead man’s clothes upon his bed.

“We keep house for the soldiers now,” she said, and went out to make things ready.

As he plunged into the warm water and dried himself upon the fresh linen she had left, he heard the sound of passing feet in the broad hall, and from the outside kitchen there floated a savoury smell that reminded him of Chericoke at the supper hour. With the bath and the clean clothes his old instincts revived within him, and as he looked into the glass he caught something of the likeness of his college days. Beau Montjoy was not starved out after all, he thought with a laugh, he was only plastered over with malaria and dirt.

For three days he remained in the big brick house lying at ease upon a sofa in the library, or listening to the tragic voice of the mother who talked of her only son. When she questioned him about Pickett’s charge, he raised himself on his pillows and talked excitedly, his face flushing as if from fever.

“Your son was with Armistead,” he said, “and they all went down like heroes. I can see old Armistead now with his hat on his sword’s point as he waved to us through the smoke. ‘Who will follow me, boys?’ he cried, and the next instant dashed straight on the defences. When he got to the second line there were only six men with him, beside Colonel Martin, and your son was one of them. My God! it was worth living to die like that.”

“And it is worth living to have a son die like that,” she added, and wept softly in the stillness.

The next morning he went on again despite her prayers. The rest was all too pleasant, but the memory of his valley was before him, and he thirsted for the pure winds that blew down the long white turnpike.

“There is no peace for me until I see it again,” he said at parting, and with a lighter step went out upon the April roads once more.

The way was easier now for his limbs were stronger, and he wore the dead man’s shoes upon his feet. For a time it almost seemed that the strength of that other soldier, who lay in a strange soil, had entered into his veins and made him hardier to endure. And so through the clear days they travelled with few pauses, munching as they walked from the food Big Abel carried in a basket on his arm.

“We’ve been coming for three weeks, and we are getting nearer,” said Dan one evening, as he climbed the spur of a mountain range at the hour of sunset. Then his glance swept the wide horizon, and the stick in his hand fell suddenly to the ground; for faint and blue and bathed in the sunset light he saw his own hills crowding against the sky. As he looked his heart swelled with tears, and turning away he covered his quivering face.

XI

THE RETURN

As they passed from the shadow of the tavern road, the afternoon sunlight was slanting across the turnpike from the friendly hills, which alone of all the landscape remained unchanged. Loyal, smiling, guarding the ruined valley like peaceful sentinels, they had suffered not so much as an added wrinkle upon their brows. As Dan had left them five long years ago, so he found them now, and his heart leaped as he stood at last face to face. He was like a man who, having hungered for many days, finds himself suddenly satisfied again.

Amid a blur of young foliage they saw first the smoking chimneys of Uplands, and then the Doric columns beyond a lane of flowering lilacs. The stone wall had crumbled in places, and strange weeds were springing up among the high blue-grass; but here and there beneath the maples he caught a glimpse of small darkies uprooting the intruders, and beyond the garden, in the distant meadows, ploughmen were plodding back and forth in the purple furrows. Peace had descended here at least, and, with a smile, he detected Betty’s abounding energy in the moving spirit of the place. He saw her in the freshly swept walks, in the small negroes weeding the blue-grass lawn, in the distant ploughs that made blots upon the meadows. For a moment he hesitated, and laid his hand upon the iron gate; then, stifling the temptation, he turned back into the white sand of the road. Before he met Betty’s eyes, he meant that his peace should be made with the old man at Chericoke.

Big Abel, tramping at his side, opened his mouth from time to time to let out a rapturous exclamation.

“Dar ’tis! des look at it!” he chuckled, when Uplands had been left far behind them. “Dat’s de ve’y same clump er cedars, en dat’s de wil’ cher’y lyin’ right flat on hit’s back–dey’s done cut it down ter git de cher’ies.”

“And the locust! Look, the big locust tree is still there, and in full bloom!”

“Lawd, de ‘simmons! Dar’s de ‘simmon tree way down yonder in the meadow, whar we all use ter set ouah ole hyar traps. You ain’ furgot dose ole hyar traps, Marse Dan?”

“Forgotten them! good Lord!” said Dan; “why I remember we caught five one Christmas morning, and Betty fed them and set them free again.”

“Dat she did, suh, dat she did! Hit’s de gospel trufe!”

“We never could hide our traps from Betty,” pursued Dan, in delight. “She was a regular fox for scenting them out–I never saw such a nose for traps as hers, and she always set the things loose and smashed the doors.”

“We hid ’em one time way way in de thicket by de ice pond,” returned Big Abel, “but she spied ’em out. Yes, Lawd, she spied ’em out fo’ ouah backs wuz turnt.”

He talked on rapidly while Dan listened with a faint smile about his mouth. Since they had left the tavern road, Big Abel’s onward march had been accompanied by ceaseless ejaculations. His joy was childlike, unrestrained, full of whimsical surprises–the flight of a bluebird or the recognition of a shrub beside the way sent him with shining eyes and quickened steps along the turnpike.

From free Levi’s cabin, which was still standing, though a battle had raged in the fallen woods beyond it, and men had fought and been buried within a stone’s throw of the doorstep, they heard the steady falling of a hammer and caught the red glow from the rude forge at which the old negro worked. With the half-forgotten sound, Dan returned as if in a vision to his last night at Chericoke, when he had run off in his boyish folly, with free Levi’s hammer beating in his ears. Then he had dreamed of coming back again, but not like this. He had meant to ride proudly up the turnpike, with his easily won honours on his head, and in his hands his magnanimous forgiveness for all who had done him wrong. On that day he had pictured the Governor hurrying to the turnpike as he passed, and he had seen his grandfather, shy of apologies, eager to make amends.

That was his dream, and to-day he came back footsore, penniless, and in a dead man’s clothes–a beggar as he had been at his first home-coming, when he had stood panting on the threshold and clutched his little bundle in his arms.

Yet his pulses stirred, and he turned cheerfully to the negro at his side.

“Do you see it, Big Abel? Tell me when you see it.”

“Dar’s de cattle pastur’,” cried Big Abel, “en dey’s been a-fittin’ dar–des look.”

“It must have been a skirmish,” replied Dan, glancing down the slope. “The wall is all down, and see here,” his foot struck on something hard and he stooped and picked up a horse’s skull. “I dare say a squad of cavalry met Mosby’s rangers,” he added. “It looks as if they’d had a little frolic.”

He threw the skull into the pasture, and followed Big Abel, who was hurrying along the road.

“We’re moughty near dar,” cried the negro, breaking into a run. “Des wait twel we pass de aspens, Marse Dan, des wait twel we pass de aspens, den we’ll be right dar, suh.”

Then, as Dan reached him, the aspens were passed, and where Chericoke had stood they found a heap of ashes.

At their feet lay the relics of a hot skirmish, and the old elms were perforated with rifle balls, but for these things Dan had neither eyes nor thoughts. He was standing before the place that he called home, and where the hospitable doors had opened he found only a cold mound of charred and crumbled bricks.

For an instant the scene went black before his eyes, and as he staggered forward, Big Abel caught his arm.

“I’se hyer, Marse Dan, I’se hyer,” groaned the negro in his ear.

“But the others? Where are the others?” asked Dan, coming to himself. “Hold me, Big Abel, I’m an utter fool. O Congo! Is that Congo?”

A negro, coming with his hoe from the corn field, ran over the desolated lawn, and began shouting hoarsely to the hands behind him:–

“Hi! Hit’s Marse Dan, hit’s Marse Dan come back agin!” he yelled, and at the cry there flocked round him a little troop of faithful servants, weeping, shouting, holding out eager arms.

“Hi! hit’s Marse Dan!” they shrieked in chorus. “Hit’s Marse Dan en Brer Abel! Brer Abel en Marse Dan is done come agin!”

Dan wept with them–tears of weakness, of anguish, of faint hope amid the dark. As their hands closed over his, he grasped them as if his eyes had gone suddenly blind.

“Where are the others? Congo, for God’s sake, tell me where are the others?”

“We all’s hyer, Marse Dan. We all’s hyer,” they protested, sobbing. “En Ole Marster en Ole Miss dey’s in de house er de overseer–dey’s right over dar behine de orchard whar you use ter projick wid de ploughs, en Brer Cupid and Sis Rhody dey’s a-gittin’ dem dey supper.”

“Then let me go,” cried Dan. “Let me go!” and he started at a run past the gray ruins and the standing kitchen, past the flower garden and the big woodpile, to the orchard and the small frame house of Harris the overseer.

Big Abel kept at his heels, panting, grunting, calling upon his master to halt and upon Congo to hurry after.

“You’ll skeer dem ter deaf–you’ll skeer Ole Miss ter deaf,” cried Congo from the rear, and drawing a trembling breath, Dan slackened his pace and went on at a walk. At last, when he reached the small frame house and put his foot upon the step, he hesitated so long that Congo slipped ahead of him and softly opened the door. Then his young master followed and stood looking with blurred eyes into the room.

Before a light blaze which burned on the hearth, the Major was sitting in an arm chair of oak splits, his eyes on the blossoming apple trees outside, and above his head, the radiant image of Aunt Emmeline, painted as Venus in a gown of amber brocade. All else was plain and clean–the well-swept floor, the burnished andirons, the cupboard filled with rows of blue and white china–but that one glowing figure lent a festive air to the poorly furnished room, and enriched with a certain pomp the tired old man, dozing, with bowed white head, in the rude arm chair. It was the one thing saved from the ashes–the one vestige of a former greatness that still remained.

As Dan stood there, a clock on the mantel struck the hour, and the Major turned slowly toward him.

“Bring the lamps, Cupid,” he said, though the daylight was still shining. “I don’t like the long shadows–bring the lamps.”

Choking back a sob, Dan crossed the floor and knelt down by the chair.

“We have come back, grandpa,” he said. “We beg your pardon, and we have come back–Big Abel and I.”

For a moment the Major stared at him in silence; then he reached out and felt him with shaking hands as if he mistrusted the vision of his eyes.

“So you’re back, Champe, my boy,” he muttered. “My eyes are bad–I thought at first that it was Dan–that it was Dan.”

“It is I, grandpa,” said Dan, slowly. “It is I–and Big Abel, too. We are sorry for it all–for everything, and we have come back poorer than we went away.”

A light broke over the old man’s face, and he stretched out his arms with a great cry that filled the room as his head fell forward on his grandson’s breast. Then, when Mrs. Lightfoot appeared in the doorway, he controlled himself with a gasp and struggled to his feet.

“Welcome home, my son,” he said ceremoniously, as he put out his quivering hands, “and welcome home, Big Abel.”

The old lady went into Dan’s arms as he turned, and looking over her head, he saw Betty coming toward him with a lamp shining in her hand.

“My child, here is one of our soldiers,” cried the Major, in joyful tones, and as the girl placed the lamp upon the table, she turned and met Dan’s eyes.

“It is the second time I’ve come home like this, Betty,” he said, “only I’m a worse beggar now than I was at first.”

Betty shook his hand warmly and smiled into his serious face.

“I dare say you’re hungrier,” she responded cheerfully, “but we’ll soon mend that, Mrs. Lightfoot and I. We are of one mind with Uncle Bill, who, when Mr. Blake asked him the other day what we ought to do for our returned soldiers, replied as quick as that, ‘Feed ’em, sir.'”

The Major laughed with misty eyes.

“You can’t get Betty to look on the dark side, my boy,” he declared, though Dan, watching the girl, saw that her face in repose had grown very sad. Only the old beaming smile brought the brightness now.

“Well, I hope she will turn up the cheerful part of this outlook,” he said, surrendering himself to the noisy welcome of Cupid and Aunt Rhody.

“We may trust her–we may trust her,” replied the old man as he settled himself back into his chair. “If there isn’t any sunshine, Betty will make it for us herself.”

Dan met the girl’s glance for an instant, and then looked at the old negroes hanging upon his hands.

“Yes, the prodigal is back,” he admitted, laughing, “and I hope the fatted calf is on the crane.”

“Dar’s a roas’ pig fur ter-morrow, sho’s you bo’n,” returned Aunt Rhody. “En I’se gwine to stuff ‘im full.” Then she hurried away to her fire, and Dan threw himself down upon the rug at the Major’s feet.

“Yes, we may trust Betty for the sunshine,” repeated the Major, as if striving to recall his wandering thoughts. “She’s my overseer now, you know, and she actually looks after both places in less time than poor Harris took to worry along with one. Why, there’s not a better farmer in the county.”

“Oh, Major, don’t,” begged the girl, laughing and blushing beneath Dan’s eyes. “You mustn’t believe him, Dan, he wears rose-coloured glasses when he looks at me.”

“Well, my sight is dim enough for everything else, my dear,” confessed the old man sadly. “That’s why I have the lamps lighted before the sun goes down–eh, Molly?”

Mrs. Lightfoot unwrapped her knitting and the ivory kneedles clicked in the firelight.

“I like to keep the shadows away myself,” she responded. “The twilight used to be my favourite hour, but I dread it now, and so does Mr. Lightfoot.”

“Well, the war’s given us that in common,” chuckled the Major, stretching out his feet. “If I remember rightly you once complained that our tastes were never alike, Molly.” Then he glanced round with hospitable eyes. “Draw up, my boy, draw up to the fire and tell your story,” he added invitingly. “By the time Champe comes home we’ll have rich treats in store for the summer evenings.”

Betty was looking at him as he bent over the thin flames, and Dan saw her warm gaze cloud suddenly with tears. He put out his hand and touched hers as it lay on the Major’s chair, and when she turned to him she was smiling brightly.

“Here’s Cupid with our supper,” she said, going to the table, “and dear Aunt Rhody has actually gotten out her brandied peaches that she kept behind her ‘jists.’ If you ever doubted your welcome, Dan, this must banish it forever.” Then as they gathered about the fruits of Aunt Rhody’s labours, she talked on rapidly in her cheerful voice. “The silver has just been drawn up from the bottom of the well,” she laughed, “so you mustn’t wonder if it looks a little tarnished. There wasn’t a piece missing, which is something to be thankful for already, and the port–how many bottles of port did you dig up from the asparagus bed, Uncle Cupid?”

“I’se done hoed up ‘mos’ a dozen,” answered Cupid, as he plied Dan with waffles, “en dey ain’ all un um up yit.”

“Well, well, we’ll have a bottle after supper,” remarked the Major, heartily.

“If there’s anything that’s been improved by this war it should be that port, I reckon,” said Mrs. Lightfoot, her muslin cap nodding over the high old urns.

“And Dan’s appetite,” finished Betty, merrily.

When they rose from the table, the girl tied on her bonnet of plaited straw and kissed Mrs. Lightfoot and the Major.

“It is almost mamma’s supper time,” she said, “and I must hurry back. Why, I’ve been away from her at least two hours.” Then she looked at Dan and shook her head. “Don’t come,” she added, “it is too far for you, and Congo will see me safely home.”

“Well, I’m sorry for Congo, but his day is over,” Dan returned, as he took up his hat and followed her out into the orchard. With a last wave to the Major, who watched them from the window, they passed under the blossoming fruit trees and went slowly down the little path, while Betty talked pleasantly of trivial things, cheerful, friendly, and composed. When she had exhausted the spring ploughing, the crops still to be planted and the bright May weather, Dan stopped beside the ashes of Chericoke, and looked at her with sombre eyes.