These four were charmed with an old field given up to sedge, its deep rain-gullies as red as gaping wounds, its dead trees in tatters of long gray moss. Estelle became a student of flowers, Cecile of birds, Camille of trees. All my explanations were alike enchantingly strange. To their minds it had never occurred that the land sloped the same way the water ran! When told that these woods abounded in deer and wild turkey they began to look out for them at every new turn of the road. And the turns came fast. Happy miles, happy leagues; each hour was of a mellower sweetness than the last; they seemed to ripen in the sun. The only drawback was my shame of a sentimental situation, but once or twice I longed to turn the whole equipage into the woods--or the ditch. As, for instance, when three pine-woods cavalrymen had no sooner got by us than they set up that ribald old camp-song,
"We"re going to get married, mamma, mamma; We"re going to get married, but don"t tell pa--"
"Deserters, I don"t doubt!" was my comment to the ladies. Tongue revenge is poor, but it is something.
Except in such moments, however, the war seemed farther away than it had for months and months. But about eleven o"clock we began to find the way scored by the fresh ruts of heavy wheels and the dust deepened by hundred of hoofs. The tops and faces of the roadside banks were newly trampled and torn by clambering human feet. Here was a canteen, smashed in a wheel-track; yonder a fragment of harness; here lay a broken hame, there was the half of a russet brogan and yonder a ragged sock stained and b.l.o.o.d.y.
"Why, what does all this mean?" asked Miss Harper amid her nieces" cries.
I said it meant Fisher"s battery hurrying to the front. Twenty miles since five that morning was a marvel, horse artillery though they were, for, as I pointed out by many signs, their animals were in ill condition. "We shall have to go round them by neighborhood roads," I said, and presently we were deeper than ever in woodland shades and sources of girlish wonderment. The humid depths showed every sort of green and gray, their trunks, bushes and boughs, bearded with hanging moss, robed with tangled vines and chapleted with mistletoe. We seemed to have got this earth quite to ourselves and very much to our liking.
One o"clock. Miss Harper suggested a halt to feed the horses. I, knowing what it would cost me to dismount and go walking about, said no, thrice no; let us first get back upon the main road in front of that battery. On, therefore, we hurried, and soon the reality of the war was vivid to us again. In a stretch of wet road where the team had mutely begged leave to walk and the ladies had urged me to sing we had at length paused in a pebbly rivulet to allow the weary animals to drink, and the girls and the aunt and the greenwood and I were all in chorus bidding somebody
"Unloose the west port and let us go free,"
when, just as our last note died among the trees one of us cried, "Listen!" and through the stillness there came from far away on our right the last three measures of a bugle sounding The March.
My eyes rested in Camille"s and hers in mine. A musical license gave us the courage. At the last note our gaze did not sink but took on more glow, while out of the forest behind us a distant echo answered the last measure of the strain. Then our eyes slowly fell; and however it may have seemed to her, to me it was as if the vanished strains were not only or chiefly of bugle and echo, but as though our two hearts had called and answered in that melodious unison.
All that warm afternoon we paid the tiresome penalty of having pushed our animals too smartly at the outset. We grew sedate; sedate were the brows of the few strangers we met. We talked in pairs. When I spoke with Miss Harper the four listened. She asked about the evils of camp life; for she was one of that fine sort to whom righteousness seems every man"s and woman"s daily business, one of the most practical items in the world"s affairs. And I said camp life was fearfully corrupting; that the merest boys cursed and swore and stole, or else were scorned as weaklings. Then I grew meekly silent and we talked in pairs again, and because I yearned to talk most with Camille I talked most with Estelle. Three times when I turned abruptly from her to Camille and called, "Hark!" the f.a.gged-out horses halted, and as we struck our listening pose the bugle"s faint sigh ever farther in our rear was but feebly proportioned to the amount of our gazing into each other"s eyes.
Once, when we were not halted or harkening, we heard overmuch; heard that which brought us to an instant stand and caused even Miss Harper to gaze on me with dismayed eyes and parted lips, and the blood to go thumping through my veins. From a few hundred yards off in the northwest, beyond the far corner of an old field and the woods at its back, two gunshots together, then a third, with sharp, hot cries of alarum and command, and then another and another shot, rang out and spread wanderingly across the tender landscape.
X
THE SOLDIER"S HOUR
To regain the highroad we had turned into a northerly fork, and were in as lovely a spot as we had seen all day. Before us and close on our right were the dense woods of magnolia, water-oak, tupelo and a hundred other affluent things that towered and spread or clambered and hung. On the left lay the old field, tawny with bending sedge and teeming with the yellow rays of the sun"s last hour. This field we overlooked through a fence-row of persimmon and wild plum. Among these bushes, half fallen into a rain-gully, a catalpa, of belated bloom, was loaded with blossoms and bees, and I was directing Camille"s glance to it when the shots came. Another outcry or two followed, and then a weird silence.
"Some of our boys attacked by a rabbit," I suggested, but still hearkened.
"That was not play, Mr. Smith," Miss Harper had begun to respond, when a voice across the sedge-field called with startling clearness,
"Hi! there goes one of them!--Halt!--Halt, you blue--" pop!--pop!--pop!
"Prisoners making a break!" I forgot all my tatters and stood on tiptoe in the stirrups to overpeer the fence-row. The next instant--"Sh--sh!" said I and slid to the ground. "Hold this bridle!" I gave it to Camille. "Don"t one of you make a sound or a motion; there"s a Yankee coming across this field in the little gully just behind us."
I bent low, ran a few steps, c.o.c.king my revolver as I went. Then I rose, peeped, bent again, ran, rose, peeped, waited a few seconds behind the catalpa, and without rising peeped once more. Here he came! He was an officer. His uniform was torn and one whole side of him showed he had at some earlier hour ridden through a hedge and fallen from his horse. On he came! nearer--nearer--oh, what a giant! Quickly, warily, he crouched under the fence where it hung low across the gully, and half through it in that huddled posture he found my revolver between his astonished eyes. I did not yell at him, for I did not want the men he had escaped from to come and take him from me; yet when I said, "Halt, or you die!" the four ladies heard me much too plainly. For, frankly, I said more and worse. I felt my slenderness, my beardless youth, my rags, and his daring, and to offset them all in a bunch, I--I cursed him. I let go only one big d.a.m.n and I"ve never spoken one since, though I"ve done many a worse thing, of course. I protest it was my modesty prompted it then.
"I surrender," he said, with amiable ease. I stepped back a pace and he drew out and straightened up--the tallest man I had ever seen. I laughed, he smiled, laughed; my eyes filled with tears, I blazed with rage, and in plain sight and hearing of those ladies he said, "That"s all right, my son, get as scared as you like; only, you don"t need to cry about it."
"Hold your tongue!" I barked my wrath like a frightened puppy, drawing back a stride and laying my eye closer along the pistol. "If you call me your son again I"ll send you to your fathers."
His smile darkened. "I am your prisoner," he said, with a sudden splendid stateliness, and right then I guessed who he was.
"Yess, sir, you are!" I retorted. "Move to that wagon! And if you take one step out of common time you"ll never take another."
The aunt and her nieces were standing in the carry-all, she majestic, they laughing and weeping in the one act. I waved them into their seats.
"Halt!" We halted. "About face!" As the prisoner eyed me both of us listened. His equanimity was almost winsome, and I saw that friendliness was going to be his tactics.
"Guess I"m the first Yankee y" ever caught, ain"t I?" His smile was superior, but congratulatory.
"You"ll be the first prisoner I ever shot if you get any funnier!"
We listened again. "They"ve gone the wrong way," I said, still savage.
"No," he replied, "I came the wrong way."
The ladies smiled; I glowered. "Take those horses by their heads and turn them to me!"
An instant his superb eye resented, but then he pleasantly did my bidding. "Suits me well; rather chance it with you than with those I"ve just left."
"Easier to get away, you think?" I asked, with a worse frown than ever, as he stepped into the carry-all and took the lines.
"No, not so easy; but those fellows are Arkansans, and they"re in a bad humor with me."
I took the hint and grew less ferocious. "While you," I said, "are Captain Jewett."
"I am," was his reply, and my heart leaped for joy. We hurried away. My captive was the most daring Union scout between Vicksburg and New Orleans; these very Harpers knew that. The thing unknown to us was that already his fate was entangled with Ned Ferry"s and Charlotte Oliver"s, as yet more it would be, with theirs and ours, in days close at hand.
XI
CAPTAIN JEWETT
Once more we were in the by-road which had brought us westward parallel with the highway. The prisoner drove. Aunt Martha sat beside him, slim, dark, black-eyed, stately, her silver-gray hair rolled high a la Pompadour. With a magnanimity rare in those bitter days she incited him to talk, first of New Orleans, where he had spent a month in camp on one of the public squares, and then of his far northern home, and of loved ones there, mother, wife and child. The nieces, too, gave a generous attention. Only I, riding beside the hind wheels, held solemnly aloof.
"Front!" I once snapped out with a ring that made the trees reply and the ladies catch their breath. "If you steal one more look back here I"ll put a ball into your leg."
He smiled, chirped the horses up and resumed his chat. I heard him praise my horse and compare him not unfavorably with his own which he had lost that morning". He and a few picked men had been surprised in a farmhouse at breakfast. They had made a leap and a dash, he said, but one horse and rider falling dead, his horse, unhurt, had tumbled over them, and here was his rider.
I prompted Camille to ask if he had ever encountered Ned Ferry, and he laughed.
"No," he said, but Ned Ferry had lately restored to him, by proxy, some lost letters, with an invitation to come and see him.
I laughed insolently. The young ladies sparkled, and so did Miss Harper, as she asked him who had been the proxy.
He said the proxy was a young woman who had a knack of getting pa.s.ses through the lines, and the three girls exchanged looks as knowing as they were delighted.
"I tell her as a friend," he said, "she"ll get one into Fortress Monroe yet!"