"Aaron Goldschmidt," he whispered, as we descended into a dry, tangled swamp. In the depths of this wild, beside a roofed pen of logs stored with half a dozen bales of cotton, we were presently in the company of a very small man who tossed a hand in token of great amus.e.m.e.nt.
"h.e.l.lo, Ned!" he whispered in antic irony; "what an accident is dat, meeding so! Whoever is expecting someding like dis!"
"Well, I hope n.o.body, Isidore; I hardly expected it myself, your father set those candles so close the one behind the other."
Isidore doubled with mirth and as suddenly straightened. "Your horse is here since yesterday. She left him--by my father. She didn"t t"ink t"e Yankees is going to push away out here to-night. But he is a pusher, t"at Grierson! You want him to-night, t"at horse? He is here by me, but I t"ink you best not take him, hmm? To cross t"e creek and go round t"e ot"er way take you more as all night; and to go back t"is same way you come, even if I wrap him up in piece paper you haven"t got a lawch insite pocket you can carry him?" He laughed silently and the next instant was more in earnest than ever.
"She is in a tight place! She hires my mother"s pony to ride in to headquarters." He called them hatekvartuss, but we need not. "I t"ink she is not a prisoner--unless--she wants to come back." He doubled again. "Anyhow, I wish you can see her to-night; she got another doll-baby for t"e gildren, and she give you waluable informations by de hatfull.... Find her? I tell you how you find her in finfty-nine minutes--vedder permitting, t"at is."
The last phrase was fitted to a listening pose, and the first mutter of the pending thunder-storm came out of the northwest. Then Isidore hastened through the practical details of his proposition. Ferry drew a breath of enthusiasm. "Can I have my horse, bridled and saddled, in three minutes?"
"I pring um in two!" said Isidore, and vanished. Ferry turned with an overmastering joy in every note of his whispered utterance. "After all!" he said, and I could have thrown my arms around him in pure delight to hear duty and heart"s desire striking twelve together.
"Smith," he asked, "can you start back without me? Then go at once; I shall overtake you on my horse."
I stole through the cornfield safely; the frequent lightnings were still so well below the zenith as to hide me in a broad confusion of monstrous shadows. But when I came to cross the road no crouching or gliding would do. I must go erect and only at the speed of some ordinary official errand. So I did, at a point between two opposite fence-gaps, closely after an electric gleam, and I was rejoicing in the thick darkness that followed, when all at once the whole landscape shone like day and I stood in the middle of the road, in point-blank view of a small squad, a "visiting patrol". They were trotting toward me in the highway, hardly a hundred yards off. As the darkness came again and the thunder crashed like falling timbers, I started into the cotton-field at an easy double-quick. The hoofs of one horse quickened to a gallop. A strong wind swept over, big rain-drops tapped me on the shoulder and pattered on the cotton-plants, the sound of the horse"s galloping ceased as he turned after me in the soft field, and presently came the quiet call "Halt, there, you on foot." I went faster. I knew by my pursuer"s coming alone that he did not take me for a Confederate, and that the worst I should get, to begin with, would be the flat of his sabre. Shrewdly loading my tongue with that hard northern r which I hated more than all unrighteousness, I called back "Oh, I"m under orders! go halt some fool who"s got time to halt!"
I obliqued as if bound for the headquarters fire where we had seen the singers, the lightning branched over the black sky like tree-roots, the thunder crashed and pounded again, the wind stopped in mid-career, and the rain came straight down in sheets. "Halt!" yelled the horseman. He lifted his blade, but I darted aside and doubled, and as he whirled around after me, another rider, meeting him and reining in at such close quarters that the mud flew over all three of us, lifted his hand and said--
"He is right, sergeant, he is carrying out my orders." Ferry"s black silk handkerchief about his neck covered his Confederate bars of rank, and the Federal may or may not have noted the absence of shoulder-straps; our arms remained undrawn; and so the sergeant, catching a breath or two of disconcertion, caught nothing else. While Ferry spoke on for another instant I showed my heels; then he left the dripping Yankee mouthing an angry question and loped after me, and over the low fence went the two of us almost together.
Kendall was not there, the Federal camp-makers had tardily repaired their blunder by posting guards; but these were not looking for their enemies from the side of their own camp, and as we cleared the fence in the full blaze of a lightning flash, only two or three wild shots sang after us. In the black downpour Ferry reached me an invisible hand. I leapt astride his horse"s croup, and trusting the good beast to pick his way among the trees himself, we sped away. Soon we came upon our three men waiting with the horses, and no great while afterward the five of us rejoined our command. The storm lulled to mild glimmerings and a gentle shower, and the whole company, in one long single file, began to sweep hurriedly, stealthily, and on a wide circuit of obscurest byways, deeper than ever into the enemy"s lines.
XLIV
CHARLOTTE IN THE TENTS OF THE FOE
From certain rank signs of bad management in the Federal camp one could easily guess that our circuit was designed to bring us around to its rear. That a colonel"s tent--the one where the singers were--was not where the colonel"s tent belonged was a trifle, but the slovenliness with which the forest borders of the camp were guarded was a graver matter. Evidently those troops were at least momentarily in unworthy hands, and I was so remarking to Kendall when a murmured command came back from Ferry, to tell d.i.c.k Smith to stop that whispering. I was sorry, for I wanted to add that I knew we were not going to attack the camp itself. That was on Wednesday night. Charlotte and Gholson had made their ride of fifty miles on Monday. The friends with whom she stopped at nightfall contrived to cram him into their crowded soldiers" room, and he had given the whole company of his room-mates, as they sat up in their beds, a full account of the fight at Sessions"s, Charlotte"s care of the sick and dying, and the singing, by her and the blue-coats, of their battle-song. Next morning Charlotte, without Gholson--who turned off to camp--rode on to Goldschmidt"s store, just beyond which there was then still a Confederate picket. Here she hired Mrs. Goldschmidt"s pony, rode to the picket, and presented the Coralie Rothvelt pa.s.s.
"Miss Coralie Rothvelt; yes, all right," said the officer, "the men that rode with you this morning told me all about you." He went with her as far as his videttes, and thence she rode alone to a picket of the Federal army and by her request was conducted under guard to the headquarters of a corps commander. To him and his chief-of-staff she told the fate of Jewett"s scouts and delivered the messages of their dying leader; and then she tendered the hero"s sword.
The staff-officer cut away its cornhusk wrapping and read aloud the owner"s name on the hilt. The General laid the mighty weapon across his palm and sternly shut his lips. "How did you get through the enemy"s pickets with this?"
"I had a Confederate general"s pa.s.s."
"Ah! Is the Confederate general as nameless as yourself?"
"I am not nameless; I only ask leave to withhold my name until I have told one or two other things."
"But you don"t mind confessing you"re an out-and-out rebel sympathizer?"
Under the broad-brimmed hat her smile grew to a sparkle. "No, I enjoy it."
The chief-of-staff smiled, but the General darkened and pressed his questions. At length he summed up. "So, then, you wish me to believe that you did all you did, and now have come into our lines at a most extraordinary and exhausting speed and running the ugliest kinds of risks, in mere human sympathy for a dying stranger, he being a Union officer and you a secessionist of"--a courtly bow--"the very elect; that"s your meaning, is it not?"
"No, General; in the first place, I am not one of any elect."
A flattering glimmer of amus.e.m.e.nt came into the two men"s faces, but some change in Charlotte"s manner arrested it and brought an enhanced deference.
"In the second place, I am not here merely on this errand."
"Oh!"
"No, General. And in the last place, my motive in this errand is no mere sympathy for any one person; I am here from a sense of public duty--" The speaker seemed suddenly overtaken by emotions, dropped her words with pained evenness, and fingered the lace handkerchief in her lap.
"Pardon," interrupted the General, "the sunlight annoys you. Major, will you drop that curtain?" "Thank you. One thing I am here for, General, is to tell you something, and I have to begin by asking that neither of you will ever say how you learned it."
The two men bowed.
"Thank you. Please understand, also, I have never uttered this but to one friend, a lady. There was no need; I have not wanted aid or counsel, even from friends. But I feel duty bound to tell it to you, now, because, for one thing, the brave soldier who wore that sword--" Her eyes rose to the weapon and fell again; she bit her lip.
"Yes--well--what of him?"
"He was lured to disaster and death by a man whose supreme purpose was, and is to-day, revenge upon me. That man drew him to his ruin purely in search of my life." Charlotte sat with her strange in-looking, out-looking gaze holding the gaze of her questioner until for relief he spoke.
"Why, young lady, it"s hard to doubt anything you say, but really that sounds rather fanciful. Why should you think it?"
"I do not think it, I know it. He sends me his own a.s.surance of it by his own father, so that his revenge may be fuller by my knowing daily and hourly that he is on my trail."
"And you appeal to me for protection?"
She smiled. "No. I am not seeking to divert his fury from myself, but to confine it to myself. Fancy yourself a human-hearted woman, General, and murder being done day by day because you are alive." "Oh, this is incredible! What is its occasion, its origin? How are you in any way responsible?"
"Why, largely I am not. Yet in degree I am, General, because of shortcomings of mine--faults--errors--that--oh--that have their bearing in the case, don"t you see?"
"No, I don"t; pray don"t ask me to draw inferences; I might infer too much."
"Yes, you might, easily," said Charlotte; "for I only mean shortcomings of the kind we readily excuse in others though we never can or should pardon them in ourselves."
The General turned an arch smile of perplexity upon his chief-of-staff. "I don"t think we"re quite up to that line of perpetual snow, Walter, are we?"
The chief-of-staff "guessed they were not."
Charlotte resumed. "I have come to you in the common interest, to warn you against that man. I believe he is on his way here to offer his services as a guide. He is fearless, untiring, and knows all this region by heart."
"Union man, I take it, is he not?"
"No, he"s Federal, Confederate or guerilla as it may suit his b.l.o.o.d.y ends."
"And you want me not to make use of him."
"Oh, more than that; I want him stopped!--stopped from killing and burning on his and my private account. But I want much more than that, too. I know how you commonly stop such men."
"We hang them to the first tree."