"Yessir. In Greenbrier Cove."
"Did he pay you in gold?" sneered Ackert. "Or in greenbacks? Or mebbe in Cornfed money?"
"I wouldn"t hev his gold." She drew herself up proudly, though the tears were still coursing down her cheeks. "So he gin me a present--a whole pa.s.sel o" coffee in my milk-piggin." Then to complete a candid confession she detailed the disposition she had made of this rare and precious luxury at the rebel smallpox camp.
His eyes seemed to dilate as they gazed up at her. "Jesus Gawd!" he exclaimed, with uncouth profanity. But the phrase was unfamiliar to her, and she caught at it with a meaning all her own.
"That"s jes" it! Folks in gineral don"t think o" _them_, "cept ter git out o" thar way; an" n.o.body keers fur _them_, but kase Jesus is Gawd He makes _somebody_ remember them wunst in a while! An" they did seem pa.s.sable glad."
A vague sweet fragrance was on the vesperal air; some subtle distillation of asters or jewel-weed or "mountain-snow," and the leaf.a.ge of crimson sumac and purple sweet-gum and yellow hickory and the late ripening frost-grapes--all in the culmination of autumnal perfection; more than one star gleamed whitely palpitant in a sky that was yet blue and roseate with a reminiscence of sunset; a restful sentiment, a brief truce stilled the guerilla"s tempestuous pulse as he continued to stand beside his horse"s head while the girl waited, seated on the saddle blanket.
Suddenly he spoke to an unexpected intent. "Ye took a power o" risk in goin" nigh that Confederate pest-camp--an" yit ye"re fur the Union an"
saved a squadron from capture!" he upbraided the inconsistency in a soft incidental drawl.
"Yes, I be fur the Union," she trembled forth the dread avowal. "But somehows I can"t keep from holpin" any I kin. They war rebs--an" it war Yankee coffee--an" I dun"no"--I jes" dun"no"----"
As she hesitated he looked long at her with that untranslated gaze. Then he fell ponderingly silent.
Perhaps the revelation of the sanct.i.ties of a sweet humanity for a holy sake, blessing and blessed, had illumined his path, had lifted his eyes, had wrought a change in his moral atmosphere spiritually suffusive, potent, revivifying, complete. "She is as good as the saints in the Bible--an" plumb beautiful besides," he muttered beneath his fierce mustachios.
Once more he gazed wonderingly at her.
"I expect to do some courtin" in this kentry when the war is over," the guerilla said, soberly, reaching down to readjust the reins. "I haven"t got time now. Will _you_ be waiting fur me here in Tanglefoot Cove--if I promise not to hang you fur your misdeeds right off now?" He glanced up with a sudden arch jocularity.
She burst out laughing gleefuly in the tumult of her joyous rea.s.surance, as she laid her tremulous fingers in his big gauntlet when he insisted that they should shake hands as on a solemn compact. Forthwith he mounted again, and the great charger galloped back, carrying double, in the red afterglow of the sunset, to the waiting group before the flaring doors of the forge.
The fine flower of romance had blossomed incongruously in that eager heart in those fierce moments of the bitterness of defeat. Life suddenly had a new meaning, a fair and fragrant promise, and often and again he looked over his shoulder at the receding scene when the trumpets sang "to horse," and in the light of the moon the guerilla rode out of Tanglefoot Cove.
But Ethelinda saw him never again. All the storms of fate overwhelmed the Confederacy with many a rootless hope and many a plan and pride. In lieu of the materialization of the stalwart ambition of distinction that had come to dominate his life, responsive to the discovery of his peculiar and inherent gifts, his destiny was chronicled in scarce a line of the printed details of a day freighted with the monstrous disaster of a great battle; in common with others of the "missing" his bones were picked by the vultures till shoved into a trench, where a monument rises to-day to commemorate an event and not a commander. Nevertheless, for many years the flare of the first red leaves in the cleft among the pines on the eastern slope of Tanglefoot Cove brought to Ethelinda"s mind the gay flutter of the guidon, and in certain sonorous blasts of the mountain wind she could hear martial echoes of the trumpets of the guerilla.