Near General Forrest"s headquarters I dismounted and walked by the side of my horse. Then when Whistling Jim came up, and I would have helped her from the saddle, "Don"t touch me!" she exclaimed. She jumped from the saddle to the ground and stood before me, and for the first time I was ashamed and afraid. "This way," I said. Then to the guard at the door, "Private Shannon, of Captain Forrest"s company, to see the General."
"He"s right in there," said the guard with good-natured informality. I rapped at the inner door, and heard the well-known voice of General Forrest bidding me to enter.
I saluted, and he made some motion with his hand, but his eye wandered over me and rested on my companion. Then, after a moment, they returned to me. "What"s the matter, Shannon?"
"I have brought to you here one who came to my rescue last night when I had been captured by a scouting party. We had gone to see the young fellow who, you will remember, was wounded in our last affair at the river--you saw him in the cabin. He was carried away the next day by his friends, but grew so ill that he could be taken no farther than the house on the turnpike two miles from town."
"You didn"t let "em git you just dry so, did you?" he asked. And then I gave him the details of the affair from beginning to end. "I thought Herndon was mighty keen to go," he remarked with a laugh. "You say this young fellow fixed it so you could git away? And then you went back and captured him? That don"t look fair, does it?" He regarded me with serious countenance.
"It is a lady, General, and I did not want her to fall in rough hands."
He uttered an exclamation of impatience and surprise, and made an indignant gesture. "Now, look here, Shannon, that is a matter that I won"t tolerate. I"ve a great mind to----" He paused, hearing the voice of his wife, who was visiting him. "Go back in there and tell Mrs.
Forrest to come in here a minute, and do you stay out till I call you.
I"m going to look into this business, and if it ain"t perfectly square all the way through you"ll pay for it."
I hunted for Mrs. Forrest, hat in hand, and soon found her. I must have had a queer expression on my face, for she observed it. "You must be frightened," she said.
"I am, madam, for another as well as myself," and then I told her, as we walked along very slowly, just how the matter lay. She regarded me very seriously for a moment, and then smiled. She was a handsome lady, and this smile of hers, full of promise as it was, made her face the most beautiful I have ever seen before or since. It is a large saying, but it is true.
I remember that I remained in the corridor cooling my heels a weary time, but finally Mrs. Forrest came out. "You may go in now," she said.
"It is all right; I"m glad I was called; I think I have made the General understand everything as I do. There are some things that men do not understand as well as women, and it is just as well that they do not. I am sure you will be very kind to that little woman in there."
I tried to thank her, but there is a grat.i.tude that cannot be expressed in words, and I could but stand before her mumbling with my head bent.
"I know what you would say," she remarked, graciously. "The General and I have perfect confidence in you."
I went into the room where General Forrest and Jane Ryder were.
"Shannon, what are you and Herndon up to? What do you mean by going on in this way?" He spoke with some severity, but there was a humorous twinkle in his blue-gray eyes. "More than that, you took occasion to prejudice the jury. What did you say to Mrs. Forrest?"
"I simply asked her to be kind to the lady in here."
"Well, she was all of that," said the General, "and she threatened me with her displeasure if I wasn"t kind to you, and as she"s the only human being that I"m really afeared of, I reckon I"ll have to let you off this time. Oh, you needn"t look so smiling; you are to be punished, and that heavily. You are to be responsible for this young woman. You are to take charge of her and restore her to her own people--mind you, to her own people. You are responsible to me, and I reckon you know what that means; if you don"t you can just ask somebody that knows me."
I knew what it meant well enough, and I knew what his words meant. "The lady is as safe with me, General, as if she were in her mother"s arms."
"Now, that"s the way to talk, and I believe you," said General Forrest.
All this time Jane Ryder had said not a word. She sat very quietly, but there was not a sign of gloom or dejection in her face. But uneasiness looked from her eyes. She spoke presently, while General Forrest was looking through a large morocco memorandum-book that was a little the worse for wear. "If you please," she said, "I should like to go back to my friends to-night, if they are not all killed. They can do you no harm even if they are alive. They are only a couple of women."
"Well, they are not killed," replied General Forrest without looking up. "Wimmen make war on me and do a lot of damage, but I don"t make war on them. I"m letting you off on a technicality, Miss Ryder. You are not a spy; you have never been inside my lines until to-night; and yet you were in a fair way to find out a good many things that the other side would like to know."
"I never found out as much as I"d like to know," she replied; "and since he came bothering me I haven"t found out anything."
Apparently General Forrest ignored the remark. He turned to me with a slip of paper in his hand. "You"ll have to change your name, Shannon.
This pa.s.sport is made out to someone else. Read it."
He handed it to me, and I read aloud: "The bearer of this, Captain Francis Leroy, is authorized to pa.s.s in and out the Federal lines, night or day, without let or hindrance." It was signed by a great man at Washington and counter-signed by one almost as great.
"Why, that belongs to me," said Jane Ryder; "where did you find it?"
"I reckon it"s just a duplicate," said the General, smiling. "I"ve had it some time."
A little frown of perplexity appeared above Jane Ryder"s eyes, and if it had never gone away until she solved the mystery of this pa.s.sport it would have been there yet, for neither one of us ever knew where General Forrest obtained the precious doc.u.ment.
"You will want to go out of my lines, Shannon, and you"ll want to come back, so I"ll fix it up for you." He went into the next room and dictated to an orderly, and presently brought me a paper signed with his own name, and I have it yet.
Everything was ready for us to take our leave, and we did so. "You are a different man from what I thought you," said Jane Ryder to General Forrest, "and I have to thank you for your kindness and consideration."
"It ain"t what people think of you--it"s what you are that counts,"
replied General Forrest. I have thought of this homely saying hundreds of times, and it rings truer every time I repeat it to myself. It covers the whole ground of conscience and morals.
As I was going out, Jane Ryder being in advance, the General said to me again, "Don"t make no mistake about what I mean. You are responsible to me for the safety of that young lady. I believe in you, but I may be wrong. If I am wrong you"d just as well go out and hang yourself and save me the trouble."
"You needn"t worry about me, General. I can take care of myself,"
declared Jane Ryder. We went out of the house and came to where Whistling Jim was holding the horses. I dismissed him then and there, and told him to put his horse in the stable and have plenty of feed for mine. But Jane Ryder, for reasons of her own, preferred to walk, so that Whistling Jim went away with the two horses and we were left to ourselves.
I remember that I said very little during that long walk, and all the burden of the conversation fell on the young woman. She was not at all elated over the narrow escape she had had, and preferred to make light of it, but I knew that, under different circ.u.mstances, she would have been put in prison in Richmond, and I think that her nature would have succ.u.mbed to close confinement.
"You have had your way, after all, but I am not sure that I like it,"
she said. She waited for me to make some reply, but none was forthcoming. "I hope you don"t think you have won a great victory. If I had been a man, perhaps the victory would have been the other way."
"I didn"t compel you to come with me," I remarked.
"You mean I came of my own accord. If I did, it was to avoid a scene before my mother--the lady you saw at the house. I didn"t want her to hear you bl.u.s.ter and threaten; and, besides, I wanted to tell you what I think of you. We have both had our way. My mother thinks you are a gentleman in a way, and I know what I know."
I trudged along by her side silently; I had no relish for an argument in which I was sure to get the worst of it. In some matters a man is no match for a woman: he cannot cope with her in a war of words. Nor will silence discomfit them. At least, it had no such effect in this instance, for the more I was silent, the louder and faster she talked, and, apparently, the angrier she became.
"You will boast, no doubt," said she, "and tell your comrades how you lorded it over a young fellow who turned out to be a woman--how you compelled her to go with you to General Forrest"s headquarters. But how did you know me? How did you know who I was?"
I laughed aloud. "Why, I"d know you through a thousand disguises, as I knew you here that first night."
"I don"t believe it; you didn"t know me that first night; you had never seen me but once before, and you couldn"t have known me. How did you know me to-night? You won"t answer, or if you do you"ll say you knew me by my swagger. Anything to insult a woman. I"d like to be a man for a few hours just to see how they feel toward women--just how much more contempt they feel than they show. I tell you, you didn"t know me that first night."
"Then why did I insist on going home with you?"
This rather stumped her. "Because--because you thought I was a slip of a lad, and you knew you could impose on me. If you had known I was a woman, you wouldn"t have called me a little devil--Yes, you would!" she quickly added. "You would have abused me worse than that if you had known I was a woman. How did you know--if you knew?"
"By your eyes; the moment I looked into them fairly I said to myself, "Here"s Jane Ryder again; no one has eyes like hers!""
She was silent for a little s.p.a.ce, and then, "Did it never occur to you that it would be politer to refer to me as _Miss_ Jane Ryder?" Now, I had never thought of her as Miss Jane Ryder, and I told her so. "Are my eyes so peculiar that you would know them anywhere? Are they positively hideous, as the young women say?" I hesitated, and she went on, "But why do I ask? No matter what you think, it can never, never make any difference to me, after the way you have treated me to-night, and I hope that when you bid me good-by, as you will have to do directly, that I shall never see you again."
"That is the talk of a child, and you are supposed to be a grown woman," I replied. "You know very well that I am obliged to carry out the orders of my General, no matter how much they go against the grain."
She stopped in the road and tried to read my face even in the dark. "Do you really mean that?" and then, without waiting for an answer, she turned and ran, and I followed the best I could.
X