As we mounted I asked whither we were bound. "Tangipahoa," he said; "then by railroad to Brookhaven, and then out to Squire Wall's."

At the first streak of dawn our slow caravan caught the distant notes of the battle opening behind us. "That's Fisher's battery!" joyously cried the aide-de-camp as we paused and hearkened back. "Well, thank the Lord, this time nobody's got to go back for her doll; she's got it with her; I saw her, just now, combing its hair." We descended into a woody hollow, the sounds of human strife died away, and field and forest offered us only beauty, fragrance, peace, and the love-songs of birds.



LVI

HOTEL DES INVALIDES

A shattered crew we were when in the forenoon of the third day we reached our goal. Harry's hand was giving him less trouble, but both my small wounds were misbehaving as stoutly as their limitations would allow; my aches were cruel and incessant, my side was swollen and my shoulder hot. Miss Harper was "really ill," said the surgeon, but for whose coming with us we should hardly have brought our whole number through alive. Both Ferry and Charlotte were in a critical condition. "Take you in!" said our tearfully smiling Mrs. Wall; "why, we'd take yo' whole crowd in ef we had to go out and bunk undeh the trees owse'v's!... Oh, Mr. Smith, you po' chi—ild!... Oh, my Lawd! is this Lieutenant Do-wrong! Good Lawd, good Lawd! I think this waugh's gone on now jess long enough!"

In the house she gave the younger Harpers a second kiss all round. "You po' dears, yo're hero-ines, now, and hencefo'th fo'evehmo'!" Harry and I agreed they were; it was one of the few points on which we thought alike. We even agreed that Estelle's grasp of earthly realities was not so feeble as we had thought it.

"Fact is," I said to him, on our first day at the Walls', as he was leaving the soldiers' room, where I sat under the surgeon's inspection, "you were totally mistaken about her."

"Yes, I was," he replied; "she's got more sense in a minute than Camille's got in a week," and shut the door between us.

My blood leaped with rage, yet I sat perfectly calm, while the surgeon laughed like a hyena. "As soon as you can let me go, Doctor," I frigidly said, "I shall look up the Lieutenant. I consider that remark ungentlemanly, and his method of making it as worthy only of a coward."

The surgeon cackled again. "If that man," I dispassionately resumed, "was not perfectly sure that I am too honorable a gentleman to give Miss Camille the faintest hint of what he has said, sooner than say it he would go out and cut his throat from ear to ear."

"Well! you oughtn't to get mad at him for thinking you a gentleman."

"He sha'n't take a low advantage of my being one. You think he's open and blunt—he's as sly as a mink. He praises the older sister at the younger's expense, when it's the younger one that he's so everlastingly stuck on that he can't behave like a gentleman to any man to whom she shows the slightest preference." We heard a coming step, but I talked on: "Sense! poor simpleton! he knows he hasn't got"—the door opened and Harry stepped partly in, but I only raised my voice,—"hasn't got as much brains in his whole head as there is in one of her tracks."

With something between a sob, a sputter and a shriek he shut himself out again. Harry was never deep but in a shallow way, and never shallow without a certain treacherous depth. When Ned Ferry the next day summoned me to his bedside I went with a choking throat, not doubting I was to give account of this matter,—until I saw the kindness of his pallid face. Then my silly heart rose as much too high as it had just been too low and I thought "Charlotte has surrendered!" All he wanted was to make me his scribe. But when we were done he softly asked, "That business of yours we talked about on the Plank-road—it looks any better?"

I bit my lip, turned away and shook my head. "Well, anyhow," he said, "I am told there is nobody in your way."

I faced him sharply—"Who told you that?" and felt sure he would name the tricky aide-de-camp. But he pointed to the room overhead, which again, as in the other house, was Charlotte's. I blushed consciously with gratitude. "Well," I said, "it makes me happy to see you beginning again to get well."

Within the same hour I met unexpectedly two other persons. First, Harry Helm; who, before I could speak, was deluging me with words, telling me for the twentieth time how, on that evening of the indoor fight, coming with a platoon of Mississippians which he had procured merely as a guard, he was within a hundred yards of the house before our shots in the bedroom told him he was riding to a rescue. Then suddenly he began to assure me that in what he had said about the two sisters he had sought only to mislead the surgeon, who, he declared, was more utterly dead-gone on Camille than both of us put together. We parted, and within the next five minutes I confronted the maiden herself.

She came from upstairs with a mixed armful of papers, books and sewing, said she had been with Charlotte, and said no more, only made a mysterious mouth. I inquired how Charlotte was. She shrugged, sank into a seat on the gallery, let her arm-load into her lap, and replied, "Ah! she lies up there and smiles and smiles, and calls us pet names, and says she's perfectly contented, and then cannot drop half asleep without looking as though she were pressing a knife into her own heart. Oh, Dick, what is the matter with her?"

"What do you think,—Camille?"

"Oh—I—I'm afraid to say it—even to Estelle, or aunt Martha, or—"

"Say it to me," I murmured.

"Oh, if I could only trust you!" she said, shaking her head sadly and trying to lift her arm's burden again without taking her eyes from mine. It went to her feet in a landslide, and out of one of the books fluttered three stems of sweet-pea each bearing two mated blossoms. I knew them in an instant, and in the next I had them. She would not let me pile the fallen freight anywhere but into her arm again, nor recover her eye before she was fully re-laden. Then she set her lips freezingly and said "Now give me back my flowers."

I meekly gave them and she turned to go into the house; her head gradually sank forward as she went, and her unparagoned ear and neck flushed to a burning red. On the threshold, by some miscalculation, her burdened arm struck the jamb, and the whole load fell again. I sprang and began to gather the stuff into a chair, but she walked straight on as though nothing had occurred, and shut the nearest door behind her.

In those days used to come out to see us Gregory, in his long-skirted black coat and full civilian dress; of whom I have told a separate history elsewhere. Very pointed was Camille's neglect of both Harry and me, to make herself lovely to the dark and diffident new-comer, while Estelle positively pursued me with compensatory sweetness; and Gregory, whenever he and I were alone together, labored to reassure me of his harmlessness by expatiating exclusively upon the charms of Cecile. She seemed to him like a guardian angel of Ferry and Charlotte, while yet everything she said or did was wholly free from that quality of other-worldliness which was beautiful in Estelle, but which would not have endured repetition in the sister or the cousin. There Harry and I, also, once more agreed. Cecile never allowed herself to reflect a spirit of saintliness, or even of sacrifice, but only of maidenly wisdom and sweet philosophy.

"If it weren't for Charlotte," whispered the Lieutenant, "I could swear she was created for Ned Ferry!" and when I shook my head he, too, declared "No, no! if ever a match was made on high Charlotte was made for him and he for Charlotte; but, oh, Lord, Lord! Reach-hard Thorndyke Smith, how is this thing going to end?"

That was the problem in the mind of every looker on, and the lookers-on were legion; the whole wide neighborhood came to see us. Gregory and others outstayed their furloughs; the surgeon lingered shamelessly. Of course, there were three girls besides Charlotte, and it was pure lying—as I told Helm—for some of those fellows to pretend that Captain Ferry's problem was all they stayed for; and yet it was the one heart-problem which was everybody's, and we were all in one fever to see forthwith a conclusion which "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" required should not come for months.

"Pooh!" said Harry, "'a decent respect to the opinions of mankind' requires just the reverse!" and the surgeon avowed that it was required by a decent respect to her powers of endurance; he was every day afraid her slow improvement would stop and she would begin to sink. He admitted the event could wait, but he wished to gracious we could have her decision.

I said suppose it should be negative. "Oh, it won't!" exclaimed both he and Harry. "When it comes to the very point—"

Gregory's approach interrupted us, but I remembered a trait in Charlotte of which I have spoken, and gave myself the hope that their prediction might prove well founded.



LVII

A YES AND A NO

But now Charlotte's recovery took on new speed. Maybe her new brightness meant only that her heart was learning to bear its load; but we hoped that was just what it was unlearning, as she and Ferry sat at chess on the gallery in the afternoons.

One night the fellows gave a dance in Brookhaven. We went in two wagons and by the light of mounted torch-bearers, and Charlotte and Ferry stood at the dooryard gate and sent after us their mirthful warnings and good-byes. It set some of us a-hoping—to see them there—a dooryard gate means so much. We fairly prayed he might compel her decision before she should turn to re-enter the house. But the following morning it was evident we had prayed in vain.

On the next afternoon but one we heard that a great column of our soldiers was approaching on the nearest highway, bound up the railroad to Joe Johnston's army from the region about Port Hudson, and Charlotte instantly proposed that our ladies deal out food and drink from some shady spot on the roadside. It was one of those southern summer days when it verily seems hotter in the shade than in the sun—unless you are in the sun. The force was wholly artillery and infantry, the last Confederate infantry that region ever saw in column under arms; poor, limping, brown-faced, bloody-footed boys! their weapons were the only clean things, the only whole things, about them except their unbroken spirit; and when the very foremost command chanced to be one which the Harpers had seen in New Orleans the day it left there marching in faultless platoons and spotless equipments through the crowds that roared acclaim and farewell, our dear ladies, for one weak moment, wept.

"Here come the real heroes, Harry," said my crippled leader; "we are dandies and toy-soldiers, by the side of those infantry boys, Doctor, we cavalry fellows;" and we cavalry fellows would have hid if we honorably could. Yet hardly had he spoken when he and a passing field-officer cried out in mutual recognition, and from that time until the rear-guard was clear gone by we received what the newspapers call "a continuous ovation." A group of brigade officers went back with us to Squire Wall's, to supper, and you could see by the worship they paid Charlotte that they knew her story. Her strength was far overtaxed, and the moment the last fond straggler had gone we came in out of the splendid moonlight.

"Now, Charlotte, my dear," began Miss Harper, "you are too terribly tired to—why, where is Charlotte; did she not come in with us from the—gate?"

Ferry, too, was missing. Mrs. Wall made eyes at the inquirer, Estelle and Cecile began to speak but deferred to each other, and Camille, putting on a deadly exhaustion, whined as she tottered to her smiling guardian, "Kiss your sweet baby good-night, auntie dear, and"—with a hand reached out to Estelle—"make Naughty come, too." She turned to say good-night to Cecile but spoiled her kiss with an unintended laugh. The surgeon, Harry and I bowed from the room and stepped out to the water-bucket and gourd. From there we could see the missing two, lingering at the dooryard gate, in the bright moonlight. As we finished drinking, "Gentlemen," murmured Harry, "I fear our position is too exposed to be tenable."

The surgeon started upstairs. "I'll join you directly, Doctor," Harry said, and in a lower voice added "Smith and I will just lounge in and out of the hall here to sort o' show nobody needn't be in any hurry, don't you see?"

But the other jerked his thumb toward the half-closed parlor, where Miss Harper and Cecile sat close, to each other absorbed in some matter of the tenderest privacy. "They'll attend to that," he muttered; "come on to bed and mind your own business."

Harry huffed absurdly. "You go mind yours," he retorted, and then more generously added, "we'll be with you in a minute." The surgeon went, and the aide-de-camp, as we began to pace the hall, fairly took my breath by remarking without a hint of self-censure, "Damn a frivolous man!" Then irrelatively he added, "Those two out at that gate—this is a matter of life and death with them;" and when I would have qualified the declaration, he broke in upon me—"Right, Dick, you're right, it is worse; it's a choice between true life and death-in-life; whether they'll make life's long march in sunshine together or in darkness apart."

Well, of course, it was no such simple question, and never could be while life held so many values more splendid than any wilfulness could win. There lay the whole of Charlotte's real difficulty—for she had made it all hers. But when I tried in some awkward way to say this Harry cut me short. "Oh, Dick, I—eh—you bother me! I want to tell you something and if I don't hurry I can't. Something's happened to me, old fellow, something that's sobered me more than I ever would 'a' thought anything could. I want to tell you because I can trust you with a secr'—wh'—what's the matter, did I hurt your wound? Honestly, I want to tell you because—well—because I've been deceiving you all along: I've deceived you shamefully, letting on to like this girl more than that, and so on and so on."

"Yes, you thought you were deceiving me."

"Oh, well, maybe I wasn't, but I want to tell you to-night because I'm going to camp in the morning. Oh, yes,"—he named the deepest place known—"the sight of those webfoot boys to-day was too much for me; I'm going; and Dick, when I told her I was going—"

"Told whom?"

"Aw, come, now, Dick, you know every bit as well as I know. Well, when I told her I was going I didn't dream I was going to tell her anything else; I give you my word! Where in the"—same place again—"I ever got the courage I'll never tell you, but all of a sudden thinks I, 'I'm never going to get anything but no, anyhow, and so, Dick, I've been and gone and done it!"

I leaned on the stair-newel, sorry for the poor fool, but glad of this chance. "Why, Lieutenant, not many men would have done as well. You felt honor-bound not to slip away uncommitted, so you took your dose like a hero and licked the spoon." I felt that I was salting his wound, but we were soldiers and—I had the salt.

He drew a sigh. "Yes, I took my dose—of astonishment. Dick, she said yes! Oh, good Lord, Dick, do you reckon they'll ever be such full-blown idiots as to let me have her?"

I sank upon the steps; every pore in my body was a fountain of cold sweat: "Have whom?"

"Cecile." He was going on to declare himself no more fit for her than for the presidency of the Confederate States, which was perfectly true; but I sprang up, caught him (on my well side) by one good hand, and had begun my enthusiastic congratulations, when Charlotte appeared and we swerved against the rail to let her pass upstairs. In some way as she went by it was made plain to us that she had said no. "Good-night," ventured both of us, timorously.

"Good-night," she responded, very musically, but as if from a great distance.



LVIII

THE UPPER FORK OF THE ROAD

Ferry, as he passed us, called my name, and I started after him. At Charlotte's door we heard the greeting of her black maid. The maid's father, who of late had been nightly dressing Ferry's wound and mine, came to us in Ferry's room; and there my Captain turned to greet me, his face white with calamity. He took me caressingly by a button of my jacket. "Can you have your wound washed to-night before mine?"

"Why, certainly, if it's the least—"

"Yes, thank you. And down here in this room instead of upstairs?"

"Captain Ferry! if you knew how horribly it smells, you—"

"Ah! don't I know?" he said, and as I sat naked from throat to waist with the old negro laving the sores, Ferry scanned them narrowly. "They are not so bad, Dick; you think a few hours in the saddle will not make them worse?"

"Not if they're spent for you, Captain."

"Yes, for me; also for much better. We shall ride for—"

"You ride? Oh, Captain, you are in no condition—"

"Tst!" he laid a finger on my lips; "'twill not be hard; we are not going on a scout—to jump fences." He began to make actual preparations, and presently helped me draw my shirt into place again over the clean bandages, while the old man went out after fresh water. "I am a hundred times more fit to go than to stay," he suddenly resumed. "I must go. Ah, idleness, there is nothing like idleness to drive a man mad; I must have something to do—to-night—at once." I wish I knew how to give the words with his quiet intensity.

I began to unclothe his wound. "May I ask one thing?"

"Ah! I know you; you want to ask am I taking that upper fork of the road. I am; 'tis for that I want you; so go you now to the stable, saddle our horses and bring them."

When I reached the front steps with them Ferry was at the gallery's edge, Miss Harper, Cecile and Harry were on three sides of him, and he was explaining away our astonishing departure. We were going to Hazlehurst, to issue clothing and shoes to those ragged and barefoot fellows we had seen that afternoon, and the light of whose tentless camp was yonder in the sky, now, toward Brookhaven. We were to go that way, confer with their officers, telegraph from town for authorizations to be sent to us at Hazlehurst, and then to push on to that place and be ready to issue the stuff when the trains should come up from Brookhaven bringing the brigade. While he spoke Camille and Estelle joined us. "No," he said, "to start any later, 'twould be too late."

To Harry's imploring protest that he, Ferry, was not fit to go to Hazlehurst horseback, he replied "Well! what we going to do? Those boys can't go to Big Black swamp bare-foot."

Our dear friends were too well aware of the untold trouble to say a word about his coming back, but Miss Harper's parting injunction to me was to write them.

The whole night and the following day were a toilsome time for us, but by fall of the next night the brigade had come in rags and passed newly clothed and shod, and in a room of the town tavern we dressed each other's hurts and sank to sleep on one bed. The night was hot, the pain of my wounds was like a great stone lying on them, and at the tragic moment of a frightful dream I awoke. "Captain," I murmured.

"Yes?"

"Did she give no reason?"

"No." A silence followed; then he said, "You know the reason, I think."

"Yes, I think I do; I think—"

"Well? don't be afraid to say it."

I got the words out in some form, that I believed Charlotte loved him deeply, as deeply, passionately, exaltedly, as ever a true woman loved a man—

"Ah, me!" he lifted his arms wide and knitted his fingers on his brow.

"And there is the whole trouble," I added. "She will not let you marry the woman whose—"

"Whose husband I have killed.... Ah, God!... Ah, my God! why was I chosen to do that?... And you think, Dick, it was not a question of time; that I did not ask, maybe a little too soon?"

"No, not as between sooner and later; and yet, in another way, possibly, yes." Without either of us stirring from the pillow I tried to explain. I pointed out that trait in Charlotte which I called an impulse suddenly to surrender the key of her situation, the vital point in her fortunes and fate.

"Yes.... Yes," Ferry kept putting in.

I went on to say that she seemed now to have learned, herself, that it was on this shoal she grounded at every low water of her physical and mental powers; as when over-fatigued, for instance; and that I should not wonder if she had bound herself never again at such a time to let her judgment follow her impulses. He laid his hand on me: "Stop; stop; you stab too deep. I thought to take her by surprise at that very point, and right there she has countermined. My God! can it be that I am served only right?"

"No," I replied, although it was a thing I would have said Ned Ferry would not do, "no, no, it is she who has served both you and herself cruelly wrong. Captain, I believe that when Miss Harper has talked it over with her she will see her mistake as we all see it, and will call you back."

"Ah, me! Ah, me! Do you believe that, Dick?"

"I do, Captain; but at the same time—"

"What, what? Speak out, Dick. You blame me some other way?"

"Oh, no, indeed! I am the one to blame, the only one. If you had not, both of you, been so blameless—so splendidly blameless—I should hardly have let myself sink so deep into blame; but I knew you would never take the last glad step until you had seen the last sad proof that you might take it. Oh, Captain, to-night is the third time that in my dreams I have seen that man alive."

I do not know how long after that we lay silent, but it seemed an endless time before he exclaimed at last "My God! Dick, you should have told me."

"I know it; I know I should! But it was only a dream, and—"

"Ah! 'twas your doubt first and the dream after! But let us think no more of blame, we must settle the doubt. We shall begin that to-morrow." On my venturing to say more he interrupted. "Well, we can do nothing now; at the present, sleep is our first business." However, after a little, he spoke again, and, I believe, purely in order to soothe me to slumber, speculated and counselled with me for the better part of an hour concerning my own poor little love affair.

At breakfast he told me the first step in his further plans would be for us to take the train for Tangipahoa, with our horses, on our way to our own camp; but just before the train came the telegraph brought General Austin's request—which, of course, carried all the weight of an order—for Ferry to remain here and make ready for further issues of quartermaster's stores. He turned on his heel and twisted his small mustache: "That means we are kept here to be kept here, Richard."

It was a mistaken kindness, from our point of view, but it had the merit that it kept us busy. In two days the post-quartermaster's affairs and supplies were reduced to perfect order for the first time in their history. For two days more we ran a construction train and with a swarm of conscripts repaired two or three miles of road-bed and some trestle-work in a swamp; and at every respite in our strenuous activities we discoursed of the girls we'd left behind us; their minds, their manners, their features, figures, tastes and talents, and their walk and talk. So came the end of the week, and while the sun was still above the trees we went on down, inspecting the road beyond our repairs, on our own hand-car to Brookhaven. With heads bare, jackets in our laps, and muddy boots dangling over the car's front edge, and with six big negroes at the levers behind us, we watched the miles glide under our wheels and grow fewer and fewer between us and the shrine of our hearts. "Sing, Dick," said Ferry, and we chanted together, as we had done at every sunset these three days, "O my love is like a red, red rose." We could not have done it had we known that yonder glorious sun was setting forever upon the fortunes of our Southern Confederacy. It was the fourth of July; Lee was in full retreat from Gettysburg, Vicksburg was gone, Port Hudson was doomed, and all that was left for us now was to die hard.



LIX

UNDER CHARLOTTE'S WINDOW

At the tavern, where we went to smarten up and to eat, we chanced upon Gregory. He was very shy of Ferry, because Ferry was a captain, but told me the latest news from the Wall place, where he had spent the previous evening. Harry and the surgeon were gone to camp, the Harpers were well, Charlotte was—better, after a bad turn of several days. We felt in duty bound to stay within hail of the telegraph office until it should close for the night; and when the operator was detained in it much beyond the usual time, Ferry, as we hovered near, said at length, "Well, I'm sorry for you, Dick; 'tis now too late for you to go yonder—this evening."

"Didn't you intend to call, too?" "No," he said; yet the moment the operator turned the key in his door we sauntered away from the station, tavern, town, and out into the rain-famished country. We chose a road on high ground, under pines; the fact that a few miles of it would bring us to Squire Wall's was not sufficient reason for us to shun it, and we loitered on and on, discoursing philosophically on man and woman and the duties of each to other. Through habit we went softly, and so, in time, came up past a small garden under the house's southern side. Here silence was only decorum, for every window in the dark upper rooms was thrown open to the sultry air. The house's front was away from the direction of the town, and at a corner of this garden, where the road entered the open grove, the garden fence turned north at a right angle, while the road went on through the grove into wide cornfields beyond.

We kept to the garden fence till it brought us along the dooryard front, facing the house. Thus far the whole place seemed fast asleep. Along the farthest, the northern, side a line of planted trees ran close to a narrow wing of but one room on each of its two stories, and the upper of these two rooms was Charlotte's. Where we paused, at the dooryard gate, we could not see this wing, but we knew its exterior perfectly; it had a narrow window in front, looking into the grove, and a broader one at the rear, that overlooked an open stretch of the Wall plantation. The place seemed fast asleep, I say, but we had not a doubt we were being watched—by the two terrible dogs that guarded the house but never barked. By this time they should have recognized us and ought to be coming forward and wagging faintly, as who should say "Yes, that's all right, but we have our orders."

"Ah!"—Ferry guardedly pointed to the ground at the corner of the house nearest Charlotte's room; there were both the dogs, dim as phantoms and as silent, standing and peering not toward us but around to the wing side in a way to make one's blood stop. We drew deeper into the grove and made a short circuit that brought us in line with Charlotte's two windows, and there, at the farther one, with her back to us, sat Charlotte, looking toward Hazlehurst. The bloodthirsty beasts at the corner of the house were so intently waiting to spring upon something, somebody, between them and the nearer window, that we were secure from their notice. We had hardly more than become aware of these things when, in the line of planted trees, out of the depths of the one nearest the nearer window, sounded a note that brought Charlotte instantly to her feet; the same feeble, smothered cry she had heard the night she was wounded. She crossed to the front window and listened, first standing erect, and then stooping and leaning out. When we saw her do that we knew how little she cared for her life; Ferry beckoned me up from behind him; neither of us needed to say he feared the signal was from Oliver. "Watch here," he whispered, and keeping the deepest shade, started eagerly, with drawn revolver, toward the particular tree. I saw the dogs discover and recognize him and welcome his aid, yet I kept my closest watch on that tree's boughs and on Charlotte. She was wondering, I guessed, whether the call was from some messenger of Ferry, or was only a bird's cry. As if she decided it was the latter, she moved away, and had nearly re-crossed the room, when the same sad tremolo came searching the air again. Nevertheless she went on to the farther window and stood gazing out for the better part of a minute, while in my heart I besought her not to look behind. For Ferry and the dogs had vanished in shadow, and outside her nearer window, wavering now above and now below the sill, I could just descry a small pale object that reminded me of that missive Coralie Rothvelt had passed up to me outside the window-sill at old Lucius Oliver's house exactly a month before. From the upper depths of the nearest tree this small thing was being proffered on the end of a fishing-rod. Presently the rod must have tapped the sill, with such a start did she face about. Silently she ran, snatched the dumb messenger, and drew down the window-shade. A moment later the room glowed with a candle, while her shadow, falling upon the shade, revealed her scanning a letter, lifting her arms with emotion, and so passing out of the line of view.

I waited on. So absorbed was I that I did not hear the coming of a horseman in the fields beyond the grove, nor the click of a field gate; but when the strange quietude of Ferry and the dogs had begun to reassure me I became aware of this new-comer approaching the dooryard. There he reined in and hallooed. I knew the voice. An answer came from an upper window. "Is this Squire Wall's?" asked the traveller. "Well, Squire, I'm from General Austin's headquarters, with orders to Captain Ferry."

"Captain Ferry ain't stopping with us now, sir, he's 'way up at Hazlehurst."

"Yes, sir. I didn't know but he might 'a' come down to spend to-morrow with you, it being the Sabbath. My name's Gholson, sir; I've got letters for the Miss Harpers; yes, sir; and one for Private Smith, from his mother, in New Orleans."

"My sakes! yo' pow'ful welcome, Mr. Wholesome; just wait till I call off my dogs, sir, and I'll let you in."

When the dogs came at the Squire's call I breathed relief. Ferry appeared behind me and beckoned me deeper into the grove. He sank upon a stump, whispering "That was worse than ten fights."

"Who was it?" I asked. "Where is he?"

He pointed to the field gate through which Gholson had come. In the field a small man was re-closing it cautiously, and now he mounted and rode away; it was Isidore Goldschmidt, of the Plank-road swamp. I was wondering why he had behaved in this skulking way, when Ferry, as if reading my thought, said, "Isidore can't afford to be found seventy-five miles inside our lines with no papers except a letter from a Yankee officer—and not knowing, himself, what's in it."

"Oh! why should he risk his life to bring such a thing to her?"

"Because three months ago she risked her life to save the life of his father, and now, since only last week, that Yankee has saved the life of his mother." I asked who this Yankee might be. "Well, that is yet more strange; he is the brother of Captain Jewett."

We were moving to the house; at the steps we halted; the place was all alight and the ladies were arriving in the parlor. A beam of light touching Ferry's face made his smile haggard. I asked if this Jewett was another leader of scouts.

"No, he is a high-rank surgeon. Yet I think he must have heard all about her; he wouldn't send that letter, that way, just for gratitude."

"Yes," I responded, pondering, "he may easily have learned about her," and I called to mind that chief-of-staff of whom Charlotte had told us. Then, remembering her emotional shadow-play on the window-shade, I added, "He knew at least what would be important news to her—Captain, I have it!"

He made a motion of pain—"Don't say it!" and we read in each other's eyes the one conviction that from a surgeon's personal knowledge this man had written to warn Charlotte that Oliver was alive.



LX

TIDINGS

All the glad difference between hope stark drowned and hope sighing back into life lightened Ferry's heart; he gripped my shoulder—the sound one, by good luck,—and drew me into the dining-room, where the whole company were gathered to see Gholson eat. Our entry was a fresh surprise. As we drank the flatteries of seven lovely welcomes, from behind Gholson I reconnoitred Charlotte, and the fullest confirmation of our guess was in the peaceful resolve of her eyes. I noted the Harpers, all, and dear Mrs. Wall's sweet freckled face, take new gladness of the happy change, while unable to define its cause.

But now came raptures and rhapsodies over the opened letters. Ferry's orders had not been expected to reach him to-night, Gholson said, and so we insisted they and my letter should remain in the saddle-pockets while Gholson ate, and while the good news, public and personal, of the Harpers' letters went round.

"But I thought the' was fi-ive letters," said the Squire as we were about to leave the board; at which Mrs. Wall mumbled to him to "hush up;" for the fifth was to Cecile.

"Yes," guilefully said Charlotte, "Richard's letter!" and we all followed Gholson to where his saddle lay on the gallery. There he handed out Ferry's document and went on rummaging for mine.

"The two were right here together," he said, "and Mr. Smith's was marked 'valuable' and had something hard in one corner of it." Camille brought a candle, Estelle another; Gholson rose from his knee: "Smith, it's gone! I've lost it! And yet"—he slapped his breast-pockets—"no, it's somewhere in the grove; it's between here and that cornfield gate! I counted all the papers just this side of that gate, and I must 'a' dropped yours then!" Cecile brought a third light and we sallied forth into the motionless air, Estelle with a candle and Gholson, Camille with a candle and me, Cecile with a candle and Mrs. Wall, Miss Harper and the Squire, and Charlotte and Ferry. In the heart of the grove Estelle gave a soft cry, sprang, stooped, straightened, and handed me the letter.

"Yes," exclaimed Camille as the three candle-bearers gathered close, "that's your mother's writing," and as we fell into marching order again, with the lights still in the front files, I opened it. It was thick and soft with sheet after sheet of thinnest paper. With these was a sealed letter, unaddressed, containing in one corner what seemed to be a ring. Around all was a sheet of writing of later date than any other. Wonderful, my mother's lines declared, was the Providence that had brought her wounded boy among such priceless friends; and wonderful that same Providence that now gave her the chance to send three weeks' daily letters in one, and to send them by a hand so sure that she ventured to add this other note, a matter so secret that it must be delivered only by my own hands, or hands which I could trust as my own, to Charlotte Oliver. We glanced back in search of Charlotte. She and Ferry were well in the rear of the procession, moving with laggard steps, she lighting his page with a borrowed candle, and he evidently reading not his orders, but the Federal surgeon's letter. "Oh, don't speak yet," murmured Camille, "let them alone!"

At the garden gate the most of the company passed on into the house, Gholson among them. His face, as for an instant he turned aside to me, betrayed a frozen rage; for Ferry and Charlotte tarried just at our backs, she seated on the "horse-block" and he leaning against it. A stir of air brought by the rising moon had blown out their light. Gholson left me, and Camille waited at my side while I tried to read by the flare of her guttering candle. "Come, my dear," said Miss Harper from half-way up the walk, but Charlotte called Miss Harper.

"You'd better go in, Camille," insisted the aunt as she passed us, but Charlotte had just asked for our candle to relight her own, and she said to Miss Harper, "Let them stay, won't you?" and then to Ferry, "They might as well, mightn't they? Oh, now,"—as Camille handed her my mother's letter—"they must!" She toyed with the envelope's thinner edge without noticing the ring in the corner. "My dears," she said, looking frail and distressed, yet resolute, "I have positive intelligence—not through Captain, nor Richard, nor Mr. Gholson,—I'll tell you how some day—positive intelligence that—the dead—is not dead; the blow, Richard, glanced. I was foolish never to think of that possibility, it occurs so often. He was profoundly stunned, so that he didn't come-to until he was brought to a surgeon. It's from that surgeon I have the news; here's his letter."

"Charlotte, my dear," interrupted Miss Harper, "tell us the remainder to-morrow, but now—"

"No, sweetest friend, there will never be another chance like this; Captain Ferry's orders carry him to Jackson at daylight to-morrow, and—and we may not meet again for years; let me go on. When the gash was sewed up, the hand was really the worse hurt of the two, and after a few days he was sent down on a steamer to New Orleans with a great lot of other sick and wounded, and with the commanding general's warning not to come back on peril of his life. 'Tisn't easy to tell this, but you four have a particular right to know it from me and at once. So let me say"—she handed Ferry my mother's letter as if it were a burdensome distraction—"I'm not sorry for the mistake, Richard, which we all so innocently made; and you mustn't be sorry for me and be saying to yourselves that my captivity is on me again; for I'm happier tonight than I've been since the night the mistake was made."

She dropped a hand to Ferry's to receive again the neglected letter, and chanced to take it by the corner that held the ring. With that she stared at us, fingered it, rended the envelope, gave one glance to her own name engraved inside a plain gold ring of the sort New Orleans girls bestow upon those to whom they are betrothed, and springing to the ground between our two candles, bent over the open page and cried through a flood of tears, "Oh, God, have mercy on him, he is gone! He is gone, Edgard! Oh, Edgard, he is gone at last; gone beyond all doubt, and our hands—our hands and our hearts are clean!"

Ferry tossed away his candle and turned upon her, but she retreated into Miss Harper's arms laughing through her tears. "Oh, no, no! we've never hurried yet, never yet, my master in patience, and we'll not hurry now! Go and come again. Go, wait, hide your eyes till I cry 'whoop,' and come again and find me, and, I pledge you before these dear witnesses, I'll be 'it' for the rest of my life!"

With the letter again held open, and bidding Miss Harper and Camille read with her, she swept a fleet glance along the close lines that told how Oliver, half cured of his wounds, had died in a congestive chill, of swamp-fever, the day he landed in New Orleans. "See, see, Richard, here your mother has copied the hospital's certificate."

She read on aloud how two private Federal soldiers, hospital convalescents, had come to my mother telling her of his death, and how he had named my mother over and over in his delirium, desiring that she should be given charge of the small effects on his person and that she would return them to his father in the Confederacy. My mother wrote how she had been obliged secretly to buy back from the hospital steward a carte-de-visite photograph of Charlotte, and this ring; how, Oliver not being a Federal soldier, she had been allowed to assume the expense and task of his burial; how she had found the body already wrapped and bound, in the military way, when she first saw it, but heard the two convalescents praising to each other the strong, hard-used beauty of the hidden face, and was shown the suit of brown plantation jeans we all knew so well; and how, lastly, when her overbearing conscience compelled her to tell them she might find it easier to send the relics to the wife rather than the father, they had furtively advised her to do as she pleased.



"Charlotte," said Miss Harper, "the thing is an absolute certainty! Even without your likeness or—"

"Ah, no, no, not without this! the ring, the ring! But with it, yes! This is the crowning proof! my ring to him! Oh, see my name inside it, Camille; this little signet is Heaven's own testimony and acquittal! Look, Richard, look at it now, for no living soul, no light of day, shall ever see it again—"

"Sweet heart," replied Miss Harper, "very good! very good! but now say no more of that sort. God bless you, dear, just let yourself be happy. Good-night—no, no, sit still; stay where you are, love, while Camille and I go in and Richard steps around to the stable and puts our team into the road-wagon; for, Captain Ferry, neither you nor he is fit to walk into Brookhaven; we can bring the rig back when we come from church to-morrow."

"No, Richard," said Charlotte, "get my wagon and the little Mexicans." Then to Miss Harper and Camille, "Good-night, dears; I'll wait here that long, if Captain Ferry will allow me." She turned to him with the moonlight in her eyes, that danced riotously as she said in her softest, deepest note, "You're afraid!" and I thanked Heaven that Coralie Rothvelt was still a pulsing reality in the bosom of Charlotte Oliver.



LXI

WHILE DESTINY MOVED ON

Ned Ferry and I never saw Squire Wall's again. When our hand-car the next morning landed us in Hazlehurst the news of Gettysburg and Vicksburg was on every tongue, in every face, and a telegram awaited Ferry which changed his destination to Meridian, a hundred miles farther to the east. He kept me with him at Hazlehurst for two days, to help him and the post-quartermaster get everything ready to be moved and saved if our cavalry should be driven east of the Jackson Railroad. But it was not, and by and by we were sundered and I went and became at length in practical and continuous reality one of Ferry's scouts—minus Ferry. Oh, the long hot toils and pains of those July and August days! the scorching suns, the stumbling night-marches, the aching knees, the groaning beasts, the scant, foul rations, the dust and sweat, the blood and the burials. To be sure, I speak of these hardships far more from sympathy than from experience, so much above the common lot of the long dust-choked column was that of our small band of scouts. After July our brigade operated mainly in the region of the Big Black, endeavoring, with others, to make the enemy confine his overflow meetings to the Vicksburg side of that unlovely stream. How busy our small troop was kept; and what fame we won! On a certain day we came out of a dried swamp in column and ambled half across a field to see if a brigade going by us at right angles in the shade of a wood at the field's edge might be ours. It was not, though they were Confederates; but one of its captains was sent out toward us with a squadron to see who we might be, in our puzzling uniform, and when, midway, he made us out and called back to his commander, "Ferry's scouts!" the whole column cheered us. I feel the thrill of it to this hour.

How busy we were kept, and how much oftener I wrote to Ferry, and to Camille, than to my mother. And how much closer I watched the trend of things that belonged only to this small story than I did that great theatre of a whole world's fortunes, whose arches spread and resounded from the city of Washington to the city of Mexico. In mid-August one of Camille's heartlessly infrequent letters brought me a mint of blithe news. Harry and Cecile were really engaged; Major Harper, aunt Martha, General Austin, Captain Ferry and Charlotte had all written the distant father in his behalf, and the distant father had capitulated. Furthermore, Captain Ferry's latest letter to Charlotte had brought word that in spite of all backsets he was promised by his physician that in ten days more he could safely take the field again. But, best of all, Major Harper, having spent a week with his family—not on leave, but on some mysterious business that somehow included a great train of pontoon bridges—had been so completely won over to Charlotte by her own sweet ways that, on his own suggestion to his sister, and their joint proposition, by correspondence, to Ferry, another group of letters, from Miss Harper, the Major and the General, had been sent to the Durands in New Orleans—father, mother, and grandmother—telling them all about Charlotte; her story, her beauty, her charms of manner, mind, and heart. And so, wrote my correspondent, the Wall household were living in confident hope and yet in unbearable suspense; for these things were now full two weeks old, and would have been told me sooner only that she, Camille, had promised never to tell them to any one whomsoever.

A week later came another of these heartlessly infrequent letters. Mr. Gregory, it said,—oh, hang Mr. Gregory!—had called the previous evening. Then followed the information that poor Mr. Gholson—oh, dear! the poor we have always with us!—had arrived again from camp so wasted with ague as to be a sight for tears. He had come consigned to "our hospital," an establishment which the Harpers, Charlotte and the Walls had set up in the old "summer-hotel" at Panacea Springs, and had contrived to get the medical authorities to adopt, officer and—in a manner—equip. They were giving dances there, to keep the soldiers cheerful, said the letter, in which its writer took her usual patriotic part, and Mr. Gregory—oh, save us alive! And now I was to prepare myself: the Durands had got the bunch of letters and had written a lovely reply to Captain Ferry, who had sent it to Charlotte, claiming her hand, and Charlotte had answered yes. If I thought I had ever seen her beautiful or blithe, or sweet, or happy, I ought to see her now; while as for the writer herself, nothing in all her life had ever so filled her with bliss, or ever could again.

Ferry did not arrive, but day by day, night by night, we stalked the enemy, longing for our Captain to return to us. Quinn was fearless, daring, indefatigable; but Quinn was not Ferry. Often we talked it over by twos or fours; the swiftness of Ferry's divinations, the brilliant celerity with which he followed them out, the kindness of his care; Quinn's care of us was paternal, Ferry's was brotherly and motherly. We loved Quinn for the hate and scorn that overflowed from his very gaze upon everything false or base. But we loved Ferry for loving each and every one of us beyond his desert, and for a love which went farther yet, we fancied, when it lived and kept its health in every insalubrious atmosphere, from the sulphurous breath of old Dismukes to the carbonic-acid gas of Gholson's cant. We made great parade of recognizing his defects; it had all the fine show of a motion to reconsider. For example, we said, his serene obstinacy in small matters was equally exasperating and ridiculous; or, for another instance,—so and so; but in summing up we always lumped such failings as "the faults of his virtues," and neglected to catalogue them. Thinking it all over a thousand times since, I have concluded that the main source of his charm, what won our approval for whatever he did, however he did it, was that he seemed never to regard any one as the mere means to an end—except himself.

If this history were more of war than of love—and really at times I fear it is—we might fill pages telling of the brigade's September and early October operations in that long tongue of devastated country which narrowed from northeast to southwest between Big Black on our front and the Tallahala and Bayou Pierre behind us. At Baker's Creek it had a bloody all-day fight, in which we took part after having been driven in upon the brigade. It was there that at dusk, to the uproarious delight of half the big camp, and with our Captain once more at our head, for he had rejoined us that very morning, we came last off the field, singing "Ned Ferry's a-comin' down de lane."

On a day late in October our company were in bivouac after some hard night-riding. Some twenty-five miles west of us the brigade had been resting for several days on the old camp-ground at Gallatin, but now they were gone to Union Springs. Ferry, with a few men, was scouting eastward. Quinn awaited only his return in order to take half a dozen or so of picked fellows down southward and westward about Fayette. Between ten and eleven that night a corporal of the guard woke me, and as I flirted on my boots and jacket and saddled up, said Ferry was back and Quinn gone. I reported to Ferry, who handed me a despatch: "Give that to General Austin; he has gone back to Gallatin—without the brigade—to wait—with the others"—his smile broadened.

"Captain,"—I swallowed a lump—"what others?"

"Well,—all the others; Major Harper, Colonel Dismukes, Harry Helm, Squire Wall, Mrs. Wall, the four Harper ladies, and—eh,—let me see, is that all?—ah, no, the old black man and his daughter, and—eh,—the two little mule'! that's all—stop! I was forgetting! What is that fellow's name we used to know? ah, yes; Charlie Toliver!" In a moment he sobered: "Yes, all will be yonder, and I wait only for Quinn to get back in the morning, to come myself." In the fulness of his joy he had to give my horse a parting slap. "Good-night! good-bye—till to-morrow!"

I galloped away filled with an absurd foreboding that he was too sure, which may have come wholly from my bad temper at being started too late to see our ladies before morning. However, at two that night, my saddle laid under my head, and haversack under the saddle, I fell asleep with all Gallatin for my bedchamber, the courthouse square for my bed, the sky for my tester, the pole-star for my taper, hogs for mosquitoes and a club for a fan.



LXII

A TARRYING BRIDEGROOM

Joyous was the dawn. With their places in the hospital filled for the brief time by Brookhaven friends, here were all our fairs, not to speak of the General, the Colonel, the Major, idlers of the town and region, and hospital bummers who had followed up unbidden and glaringly without wedding-garments. Cecile, Harry, Camille "and others" prepared the church. The General kept his tent, the Major rode to Hazlehurst, and the Colonel, bruised and stiffened by a late fall from his horse, lounged amiably just beyond talking range of the ladies and grumbled jokes to Chaplain Roly-poly, whose giggling enjoyment of them made us hope they were tempered to that clean-shaven lamb.

However, there came a change. By mid-forenoon our gaiety ran on only by its momentum. The wedding was to be at eleven. At ten the Colonel, aside, told me, with a ferocious scowl, that my Captain ought to have arrived. At half-past he told me again, but Major Harper, returning from Hazlehurst, said, "Oh, any of a hundred trifles might have delayed him a short time; he would be along." The wedding-hour passed, the wedding-feast filled the air with good smells. Horsemen ambled a few miles up the road and came back without tidings. Then a courier, one of Ferry's scouts, galloped up to the General's tent, and presently the Major walked from it to the tavern and up to Charlotte's room, to say that Ferry was only detained by Quinn's non-arrival. "It's all right," said everyone.

Another hour wore on, another followed. The General and old Dismukes played cards and the latter began to smell of his drams, Harry and Cecile walked and talked apart, Camille kept me in leash with three other men, and about two o'clock came another courier with another bit of Ferry's writing; Quinn had returned. He had had a brush with jayhawkers in the night, had captured all but their leader, and had sent his prisoners in to brigade headquarters at Union Church, while he returned to Ferry's camp bringing with him, mortally wounded—"O—oh! Oh—oh!" exclaimed Charlotte, gazing at the missive,—"Sergeant Jim Langley!"

"Does Ned say when he will start?" asked the Colonel, and Charlotte, reading again, said the sergeant, at the time of the writing, was not expected to live an hour. Whereupon the word went through town that Ferry was on his way to us.

"Smith," said the Colonel, just not too full to keep up a majestic frown, "want to saddle my horse and yours?" and very soon we were off to meet the tardy bridegroom. The October sunshine was fiery, but the road led us through our old camp-ground for two or three shady miles before it forked to the right to cross the Natchez Trace, and to the left on its way to Union Springs, and at the fork we halted. "Smith, I reckon we'd best go back." I mentioned his bruises and the torrid sun-glare before us, but he cursed both with equal contempt; "No, but I must go back; I—I've left a—oh, I must go back to wet my whistle!"

We had retraced our way but a few steps, when, looking behind me as a scout's habit is, I saw a horseman coming swiftly on the Union Church road. "Colonel," I said, "here comes Scott Gholson."

Without pausing or turning an eye my hearer poured out a slow flood of curses. "If that whelp has come here of his own accord he's come for no good! Has he seen us?"

Gholson had not seen us; we had been in deep shade when he came into sight, and happened at that moment to turn an angle that took us out of his line of view. In a minute or so we were again at the small bridge over the embowered creek which ran through the camping-ground. The water was low and clear, and the Colonel turned from the bridge as if to cross beneath it and let his beast drink, yet motioned back for me to go upon it. As I reached its middle he came under it in the stream and halted. Guessing his wish I turned my horse across the bridge and waited. Gholson was almost within hail before he knew me. He was a heaving lump of dust, sweat and pain.

"Has Ned Ferry come?" was his first call. I shook my head. "Oh, thank God!" he cried with a wild gesture and sank low in the saddle; but instantly he roused again: "Oh, don't stop me, Smith; if I once stop I'm afraid I'll never get to her!"

I stopped him. "Why, Gholson, you're burning up with fever."

"Yes, I started with a shaking chill. I'm afraid, every minute, I'll go out of my head. Oh, Smith, Oliver's alive! He's alive, he's alive, and I've come to save his poor wife from a fate worse than death!"

"Gholson, you are out of your head."

"Oh, yes, yes, yes! and yet I know what I'm saying, I know what I'm saying!"

"You do not! Gholson, Oliver's been food for worms these four months. I know he wasn't dead at Gilmer's; but he died—now, let me tell you—he—"

"Smith, I know the whole story and you know only half!"

"No, no! I know all and you know only half; I have seen the absolute—"

"Proofs? no! you saw things taken from the body of another man in Oliver's clothes! Oliver swapped places with him on the boat going down to the city so's he could come back to these parts without being hung by the Yankees; swapped with a sick soldier, one of a pair that wanted to desert; swapped names, clothes, bandages, letters, everything. It was that soldier that died of the congestive chill and was buried by your mother with his face in a blanket—as, like enough, mine will be before another day is done—Oh, Lord, Lord! my head will burst!"

"Gholson, you're mistaken yet! That soldier came to my mother—"

"No, he never! the other one went to her, in cahoots with Oliver, and worked the thing all through so's to have the news of Oliver's death, so called, come back here to the Yankees and us; and to his wife, so's she would marry Ned Ferry to her everlasting shame, and people would say they was served right when he killed 'em at last! O—oh! Smith,—"

"Listen to me!" I had tried twice to interrupt and now I yelled; "was it Oliver, and a new gang, that Quinn fought last night, and have you got him at Union Church?"

"Quinn didn't know it, for Oliver got away, but they got the Yankee deserter, and brought him in when everybody was asleep but me, and I cross-examined him. Oh, my friend, God's arm is not shortened that he cannot save! He maketh the wrath of the wicked to praise him! The man was dying then, but thank God, I choked the whole truth out of him with a halter over a limb, and then for three mortal hours I couldn't start because the squad that took him out to—Who—who is that?"

The Colonel moved from under the bridge, spurred up the bank, and turned to us with a murderous smile. "Howdy, Gholson." The smile grew. "Had to stay with the hanging-squad to keep his mouth shut, you was going to say, wa'n't you? But you knew Captain Ferry would be delayed waiting for Quinn, too; yes. Does any one know this now besides us three; no! Good, we're well met! Smith and me are going to Union Church, and you'd better go with us; I've got a job that God A'mighty just built you two saints and me for; come, never mind Gallatin, Ferry's not there, and when he gets there Heaven ain't a-going to stop that wedding, and hell sha'n't." Gholson had barely caught his breath to demur when old Dismukes, roaring and snarling like a huge dog, whipped out his revolver, clutched the sick man's bosom, and hanging over him and bellowing blasphemies, yelled into his very teeth "Come!"

We galloped. A courier from the brigade-camp met us, and the Colonel scribbled a purely false explanation of our absence, begging that no delay be made because of it. As the man left us, who should come up from behind us but Harry, asking what was the matter. "Matter enough for you to come along," said the Arkansan, and we went two and two, he and Gholson, Harry and I. We reached camp at sundown, and stopped to feed and rest our horses and to catch an hour's sleep. Gholson's fatigue was pitiful, but he ate like a wolf, slept, and awoke with but little fever. The Colonel kept him under his eye, forcing on him the honors of his own board, bed and bottle, and at nine we galloped again.

Between eleven and twelve the Colonel, Harry and I were in a dense wood, moving noiselessly toward a clearing brilliantly lighted by the moon. I was guide. A few rods back in the woods Gholson was holding our horses and with cocked revolver detaining a young mulatto woman from whom the Colonel had extorted the knowledge which had brought us to this spot. The clearing was fenced, but was full of autumn weeds. Near the two sides next us, tilted awry on its high basement pillars, loomed an old cotton-gin house, its dark shadows falling toward us. A few yards beyond towered and gleamed a white-boled sycamore, and between the two the titanic arms of the horse-power press widened broadly downward out of the still night sky. The tree was the one which old Lucius Oliver had once pointed out to me at dawn.



LXIII

SOMETHING I HAVE NEVER TOLD TILL NOW

At the fence I ceased to lead, and we crept near the gin-house from three sides, warily, though all the chances were that wherever Oliver lay he was heavy with drink. The Colonel stole in alone. He was lost to us for, I should say, five minutes; they seemed thirty; then there pealed upon the stillness an uproarious laugh mingled with oaths and curses, sounds of a plunge, a struggle, a groan, and old Dismukes calling "Come, boys, I've got him! Take it easy, take it easy, I've got him on the floor by the hair of his head; call Gholson!"

Gholson brought the mulatress. In the feeble rays of an old tin lantern, on some gunny-sacking that lay about the gin-room floor, sat old Dismukes cross-legged and smiling, with arms folded and revolver dangling from his right hand, at full cock. On one side crouched Harry and I, on the other side Gholson and the slave woman. Facing him, half sat, half knelt Oliver, bound hand and foot, and gagged with his own knotted handkerchief. The lantern hung from a low beam just above his face; his eyes blazed across the short interval with the splendor of a hawk's. The dread issue of the hour seemed all at once to have taken from his outward aspect the baser signs of his habits and crimes, and I saw large extenuation for Charlotte's great mistake. From the big Colonel's face, too, the heaviness of drink was gone, and its smile grew almost fine as he spoke.

"Ten minutes for prayer is a good while to allow you, my amiable friend; we ain't heard for our much speaking, are we, Brother Gholson? Still, we've given you that, and it's half gone. If you don't want the other half we won't force it on you; we've got that wedding to go to, and I'm afraid we'll be late."

The bound man sat like a statue. The slave girl went upon her knees and began to pray for her master,—with whom she had remained after every other servant on the place had run off to the Federals, supplicating with a piteous fervor that drew tears down Harry's cheeks. "Humph!" said the Arkansan, still smiling straight into Oliver's eyes, "she'd better be thanking God for her freedom, for that's what we're going to give her to-night; we're going to take her and your poor old crippled father to the outposts and turn 'em loose, and if either of 'em ever shows up inside our lines after to-night, we'll hang 'em. You fixed the date of your death last June, and we're not going to let it be changed; that's when you died. Ain't it, Gholson? Whoever says it ain't fixes the date of his own funeral, eh, boys? I take pleasure in telling you we're not going to hang your father, because I believe in my bones you'd rather we'd hang him than not. Mr. Gholson, you're our most pious believer in obedience to orders; well, I'm going to give you one, and if you don't make a botch of it I sha'n't have to make a botch of you; understand?"

Gholson's lips moved inaudibly, his jaws set hard, and he blanched; but the Colonel smiled once more: "I've heard that at one time you said, or implied, that Captain Ferry had betrayed his office, because when he had a fair chance to shoot this varmint he omitted, for private reasons, to do it. And I've heard you say, myself, that this isn't your own little private war. So,—just change seats with me."

They exchanged. The slave girl sank forward upon her face moaning and sobbing. Harry silently wept. "Now, Gholson, you know me; draw—pistol."

Gholson drew; I grew sick. "Ready,"—Gholson came to a ready and so did the Colonel; "aim," Gholson slowly aimed, the Colonel kept a ready, and Oliver, for the first time took his eyes from him and gazed at Gholson. "Fire!" Gholson fired; Oliver silently fell forward; with a stifled cry the girl sprang to him and drew his head into her lap, and he softly straightened out and was still. "Oh, sweet Jesus!" she cried, "Oh, sweet Jesus!"

The amused Colonel held the lantern close down. "He's all right, Brother Gholson," was his verdict; the ball had gone to the heart. "Still, just to clinch the thing, we'll calcine him, gin-house and all."

Gin-house and all, we burned him up. On our horses out in the open road to the house, we sat, the girl perched behind the Colonel, and watched the fire mount and whirl and crackle behind the awful black arms of the cotton-press. The Arkansan shook his head: "It's too fine; 'tain't a dog's death, after all. Lord! why didn't I think of it in time? we'd ought to 'a' just dropped him alive into that lint-box and turned the press down onto him with our horses!"

When the pile was in one great flame we rode to the dwelling, and the girl was sent in to bid old Lucius begone. The doors stood open, a soft firelight shone from his room. We saw her form darken his chamber threshold and halt, and then she wailed: "Oh, Lawd God A'mighty! Oh, Lawd God A'mighty!"

"Stop that noise! Gholson, hold the horses. Come. Lieutenant, come Smith, maybe he's killed himself, but it seems too good to be true. Here, girl, go cram what you can get into a pillow-case, and mount behind my saddle again; be quick, we're going to burn this hornet's nest too." Harry and I had already run to the old man's room, and, sure enough, there lay the aged assassin hideous in his fallen bulk, with his own bullet in his brain.

Once more the Arkansan shook his head at the leaping flames. "Too good, too good for either of 'em, entirely; we've let 'em settle at five cents on the dollar. Here girl,"—he reached back and handed her a wad of greenbacks,—"here's your dividend; you're a preferred creditor." He had rifled the pockets of both the dead men, and this was their contents. "Now, boys, we'll dust, or we'll be getting shot at by some fool or other. We're leaving a fine horse hid away somewhere hereabouts, but we can't help that; come on."

In due time the Colonel, with the slave girl, and Harry with her pillow-case of duds, turned toward Fayette, and Gholson and I toward the brigade, at Union Church. Then, at last, my old friend and co-religionist let his wrath loose. He began with a flood of curses, lifting high a loaded carbine which we had found with Oliver and which he was ordered to turn in. As he gave his ecstasy utterance it grew; he brandished the weapon like a Bedouin, dug the rowels into his overspent beast and curbed him back to his haunches, fisted him about the ears, gnashed with the pain of his own blows, and howled, and stood up in the stirrups and cursed again. I had heard church-members curse, but they were new church-members, camp converts, and their curses were an infant's cooing, to this. Unwittingly he caused his horse to stumble, and the torrent of his passion gathered force like rain after a peal of thunder; he clubbed the gun to bring it down upon the beautiful creature's head, and when I caught it on the rise he wrenched it from me as if I were a girl, threw it fifty feet away, sprang to the ground and caught it up, fired it in the air, and with one blow against a tree sent the stock flying, threw the barrel underfoot, leapt upon it, tore his hair and his hat, and cursed and champed and howled. I sat holding his horse and feeling my satisfaction rise like the mercury in a warmed thermometer. Contrasting this mood with the cold malignancy and resolve of his temper in the soldiers' room at Sessions's, I saw, to my delight, that our secret was forever imprisoned in his breast, gagged and chained down by the iron of his own inextricable infamy. At dawn he awakened me that he might persuade me to reject the evidences brought against his character by his doings and endurings of the night, and that he might rebuild the old house of words in which habitually he found shelter, too abysmally self-conceited ever to see his own hypocrisy. We breakfasted with the "attatchays"; after which he had barely secured my final assurance that our friendship remained unmarred, when old Dismukes and Harry mounted at the Colonel's tent, and the old brute, as they trotted out into the Gallatin road, beckoned me to join them.



LXIV

BY TWOS. MARCH

The Arkansan was happy. "Come up, Legs," he bawled to me as soon as we were beyond the pickets, "come up from behind there; this ain't no dress parade."

"Are they married?" I softly asked Harry at the first opportunity, but he could not tell me. He knew only that Ferry had been expected to arrive about an hour before midnight; if he arrived later the wedding would be deferred until to-day. On our whole ride we met no one from Gallatin until near the edge of the town we passed a smiling rider who called after us, "You-all a-hurryin' for nothin'!"

We dropped to a more dignified gait and moved gayly in among our gathering friends, asking if we were in time. "No—o! you're too late!—but still we've waited for you; couldn't help ourselves; she wouldn't stir without you."

The happy hubbub was bewildering. "Where's this one?" "Where's that one?" "See here, I'm looking for you!" "Now, you and I go together—" "Dick Smith! where's Dick Sm'—Miss Harper wants you, Smith, up at the bride's door." But Miss Harper only sent me in to Charlotte.

"Richard, tell me," the fair vision began to say, but there the cloud left her brow. "No," she added, "you couldn't look so happy if there were the least thing wrong, could you?" Her fathoming eyes filled while her smile brightened, and meeting them squarely I replied "There's a-many a thing wrong, but not one for which this wedding need wait another minute."

"God bless you, Richard!" she said; "and now you may go tell Edgard I am coming."

Old Gallatin is no more. I would not mention without reverence the perishing of a town however small, though no charm of antiquity, of art or of nature were lost in its dissolution. Yet it suits my fancy that old Gallatin has perished. Neither war nor famine, flood nor fever were the death of it; the railroad and Hazlehurst sapped its life. Some years ago, on a business trip for our company—not cavalry, insurance,—I went several miles out of my way to see the spot. Not a timber, not a brick, of the old county-seat remained. Where the court-house had stood on its square, the early summer sun drew tonic odor from a field of corn. In place of the tavern a cotton-field was ablush with blossoms. Shops and houses had utterly vanished; a solitary "store," as transient as a toadstool, stood at the cross-roads peddling calico and molasses, shoes and snuff. But that was the only discord, and by turning my back on it I easily called up the long past scene: the wedding, the feast, the fiery punch, the General's toast to the bridal pair, and the heavy-eyed Colonel's bumper to their posterity! It was hardly drunk when a courier brought word that the enemy were across Big Black, and the brigade pressing north to meet them. Charlotte glided away to her room to be "back in a moment"; into their saddles went the General, the Colonel, the Major and the aide-de-camp, and thundered off across the bridge in the woods; Charlotte came back in riding-habit, and here was my horse with her saddle on him, and the Harpers and Mrs. Wall clasping and kissing her; and now her foot was in Ferry's hand and up she sprang to her seat, he vaulted to his, and away they galloped side by side, he for the uttermost front of reconnoissance and assault, she for the slow but successful uplifting of Sergeant Jim back to health and into his place in the train of our hero and hers. In the little leather-curtained wagon, with the old black man and his daughter, and all her mistress's small belongings, and with my saddle and bridle, I followed on to the house where lay the sergeant, and where my horse would be waiting to bear me on to Ferry's scouts.

I saw the Harpers only twice again before the war was over. Nearly all winter our soldiering was down in the Felicianas, but by February we were once more at Big Black when Sherman with ten thousand of his destroyers swarmed out of Vicksburg on his great raid to Meridian. Three or four mounted brigades were all that we could gather, and when we had fought our fiercest we had only fought the tide with a broom; it went back when it was ready, a month later, leaving what a wake! The Harpers set up a pretty home in Jackson, where both Harry and Gholson were occasional visitors, on errands more or less real to department headquarters in that State capital; yet Harry and Cecile did not wed until after the surrender. Gholson's passion far Charlotte really did half destroy him, while it lasted; nevertheless, one day about a year after her marriage, when I had the joy of visiting the Harpers, I saw that Gholson's heart was healed of that wound and had opened in a new place. That is why Estelle, with that danger-glow of emotion ever impending on her beautiful cheek, never married. She was of that kind whose love, once placed, can never remove itself, and she loved Gholson. Both Cecile and Camille had some gift to discern character, and some notion of their own value, and therefore are less to be excused for not choosing better husbands than they did; but Estelle could never see beyond the outer label of man, woman or child, and Gholson's label was his piety. She believed in it as implicitly, as consumingly, as he believed in it himself; and when her whole kindred spoke as one and said no, and she sent him away, she knew she was a lifelong widow from that hour. Gholson found a wife, a rich widow ten years his senior, and so first of all, since we have reached the page for partings, good-bye Gholson. "Whom the gods love die young"—you must be sixty years old now, for they say you're still alive. And good-bye, old Dismukes; the Colonel made a fortune after the war, as a penitentiary lessee, but they say he has—how shall we phrase it?—gone to his reward? Let us hope not.

But what is this; are we calling the roll after we have broken ranks? Our rocket has scaled the sky, poised, curved, burst, spread out all its stars, and dropped its stick. All is done unless we desire to watch the fading sparks slowly sink and melt into darkness. The General, the Major, his brother, their sister, my mother, Quinn, Kendall, Sergeant Jim, the Sessionses, the Walls—do not inquire too closely; some have vanished already, and soon all will be gone; then—another rocket; it is the only way, and why is it not a good one? Harry and Cecile—yes, they still shine, in "dear old New Orleans." Camille kept me on the tenter-hooks while she "turned away her eyes" for years; but one evening when we were reading an ancient book together out dropped those same old sweet-pea blossoms; whereupon I took her hand and—I have it yet. There, we have counted the last spark—stop, no! two lights beam out again; Edgard and Charlotte, our neighbors and dearest friends through all our life; they glow with nobility and loveliness yet, as they did in those young days when his sword led our dying fortunes, and she, in her gypsy wagon, followed them, binding the torn wound, and bathing the aching bruise and fevered head. Oh, Ned Ferry, my long-loved partner, as dear a leader still as ever you were in the days of bloody death, life's choicest gifts be yours, and be hers whose sons and daughters are yours, and the eldest and tallest of whom is the one you and she have named Richard.

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OTHER BOOKS BY MR. CABLE

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THE END