________________________________________________
_ On a sparkling January morning, when Lee's army had gone into winter
quarters beside the Rappahannock, Dan stood in the doorway of his log hut
smoking the pipe of peace, while he watched a messmate putting up a chimney
of notched sticks across the little roadway through the pines.
"You'd better get Pinetop to daub your chinks for you," he suggested. "He
can make a mixture of wet clay and sandstone that you couldn't tell from
mortar."
"You jest wait till I git through these shoes an' I'll show you," remarked
Pinetop, from the woodpile, where he was making moccasins of untanned beef
hide laced with strips of willow. "I ain't goin' to set my bar' feet on
this frozen groun' agin, if I can help it. 'Tain't so bad in summer, but, I
d'clar it takes all the spirit out of a fight when you have to run
bar-footed over the icy stubble."
"Jack Powell lost his shoes in the battle of Fredericksburg," said Baker,
as he carefully fitted his notched sticks together. "That's why he got
promoted, I reckon. He stepped into a mud puddle, and his feet came out but
his shoes didn't."
"Well, I dare say, it was cheaper for the Government to give him a title
than a pair of shoes," observed Dan, cynically. "Why, you are going in for
luxury! Is that pile of oak shingles for your roof? We made ours of rails
covered with pine tags."
"And the first storm that comes along sweeps them off--yes, I know. By the
way, can anybody tell me if there's a farmer with a haystack in these
parts?"
"Pinetop got a load about three miles up," replied Dan, emptying his pipe
against the door sill. "I say, who is that cavalry peacock over yonder? By
George, it's Champe!"
"Perhaps it's General Stuart," suggested Baker witheringly, as Champe came
composedly between the rows of huts, pursued by the frantic jeers of the
assembled infantry.
"Take them earrings off yo' heels--take 'em off! Take 'em off!" yelled the
chorus, as his spurs rang on the stones. "My gal she wants 'em--take 'em
off!"
"Take those tatters off your backs--take 'em off!" responded Champe, genial
and undismayed, swinging easily along in his worn gray uniform, his black
plume curling over his soft felt hat.
As Dan watched him, standing in the doorway, he felt, with a sudden
melancholy, that a mental gulf had yawned between them. The last grim
months which had aged him with experiences as with years, had left Champe
apparently unchanged. All the deeper knowledge, which he had bought with
his youth for the price, had passed over his cousin like the clouds,
leaving him merely gay and kind as he had been of old.
"Hello, Beau!" called Champe, stretching out his hand as he drew near. "I
just heard you were over here, so I thought I'd take a look. How goes the
war?"
Dan refilled his pipe and borrowed a light from Pinetop.
"To tell the truth," he replied, "I have come to the conclusion that the
fun and frolic of war consist in picket duty and guarding mule teams."
"Well, these excessive dissipations have taken up so much of your time that
I've hardly laid eyes on you since you got routed by malaria. Any news from
home?"
"Grandma sent me a Christmas box, which she smuggled through, heaven knows
how. We had a jolly dinner that day, and Pinetop and I put on our first
clean clothes for three months. Big Abel got a linsey suit made at
Chericoke--I hope he'll come along in it."
"Oh, Beau, Beau!" lamented Champe. "How have the mighty fallen? You aren't
so particular now about wearing only white or black ties, I reckon."
"Well, shoestrings are usually black, I believe," returned Dan, with a
laugh, raising his hand to his throat.
Champe seated himself upon the end of an oak log, and taking off his hat,
ran his hand through his curling hair. "I was at home last summer on a
furlough," he remarked, "and I declare, I hardly knew the valley. If we
ever come out of this war it will take an army with ploughshares to bring
the soil up again. As for the woods--well, well, we'll never have them back
in our day."
"Did you see Uplands?" asked Dan eagerly.
"For a moment. It was hardly safe, you know, so I was at home only a day.
Grandpa told me that the place had lain under a shadow ever since
Virginia's death. She was buried in Hollywood--it was impossible to bring
her through the lines they said--and Betty and Mrs. Ambler have taken this
very hardly."
"And the Governor," said Dan, with a tremor in his voice as he thought of
Betty.
"And Jack Morson," added Champe, "he fell at Brandy Station when I was with
him. At first he was wounded only slightly, and we tried to get him to the
rear, but he laughed and went straight in again. It was a sabre cut that
finished him at the last."
"He was a first-rate chap," commented Dan, "but I never knew exactly why
Virginia fell in love with him."
"The other fellow never does. To be quite candid, it is beyond my
comprehension how a certain lady can prefer the infantry to the
cavalry--yet she does emphatically."
Dan coloured.
"Was grandpa well?" he inquired lamely.
With a laugh Champe flung one leg over the other, and clasped his knee.
"It's an ill wind that blows nobody good," he responded. "Grandpa's
thoughts are so much given to the Yankees that he has become actually
angelic to the rest of us. By the way, do you know that Mr. Blake is in the
army?"
"What?" cried Dan, aghast.
"Oh, I don't mean that he really carries a rifle--though he swears he would
if he only had twenty years off his shoulders--but he has become our
chaplain in young Chrysty's place, and the boys say there is more gun
powder in his prayers than in our biggest battery."
"Well, I never!" exclaimed Dan.
"You ought to hear him--it's better than fighting on your own account. Last
Sunday he gave us a prayer in which he said: 'O Lord, thou knowest that we
are the greatest army thou hast ever seen; put forth thy hand then but a
very little and we will whip the earth.' By Jove, you look cosey here," he
added, glancing into the hut where Dan and Pinetop slept in bunks of straw.
"I hope the roads won't dry before you've warmed your house." He shook
hands again, and swung off amid the renewed jeers that issued from the open
doorways.
Dan watched him until he vanished among the distant pines, and then,
turning, went into the little hut where he found Pinetop sitting before a
rude chimney, which he had constructed with much labour. A small book was
open on his knee, over which his yellow head drooped like a child's, and
Dan saw his calm face reddened by the glow of the great log fire.
"Hello! What's that?" he inquired lightly.
The mountaineer started from his abstraction, and the blood swept to his
forehead as he rose from the half of a flour barrel upon which he had been
sitting.
"'Tain't nothin'," he responded, and as he towered to his great height his
fair curls brushed the ceiling of crossed rails. In his awkwardness the
book fell to the floor, and before he could reach it, Dan had stooped, with
a laugh, and picked it up.
"I say, there are no secrets in this shebang," he said smiling. Then the
smile went out, and his face grew suddenly grave, for, as the book fell
open in his hand, he saw that it was the first primer of a child, and on
the thumbed and tattered page the word "RAT" stared at him in capital
letters.
"By George, man!" he exclaimed beneath his breath, as he turned from
Pinetop to the blazing logs.
For the first time in his life he was brought face to face with the tragedy
of hopeless ignorance for an inquiring mind, and the shock stunned him, at
the moment, past the power of speech. Until knowing Pinetop he had, in the
lofty isolation of his class, regarded the plebeian in the light of an
alien to the soil, not as a victim to the kindly society in which he
himself had moved--a society produced by that free labour which had
degraded the white workman to the level of the serf. At the instant the
truth pierced home to him, and he recognized it in all the grimness of its
pathos. Beside that genial plantation life which he had known he saw rising
the wistful figure of the poor man doomed to conditions which he could not
change--born, it may be, like Pinetop, self-poised, yet with an untaught
intellect, grasping, like him, after the primitive knowledge which should
be the birthright of every child. Even the spectre of slavery, which had
shadowed his thoughts, as it had those of many a generous mind around him,
faded abruptly before the very majesty of the problem that faced him now.
In his sympathy for the slave, whose bondage he and his race had striven to
make easy, he had overlooked the white sharer of the negro's wrong. To men
like Pinetop, slavery, stern or mild, could be but an equal menace, and yet
these were the men who, when Virginia called, came from their little cabins
in the mountains, who tied the flint-locks upon their muskets and fought
uncomplainingly until the end. Not the need to protect a decaying
institution, but the instinct in every free man to defend the soil, had
brought Pinetop, as it had brought Dan, into the army of the South.
"Look here, old man, you haven't been quite fair to me," said Dan, after
the long silence. "Why didn't you ask me to help you with this stuff?"
"Wall, I thought you'd joke," replied Pinetop blushing, "and I knew yo'
nigger would."
"Joke? Good Lord!" exclaimed Dan. "Do you think I was born with so short a
memory, you scamp? Where are those nights on the way to Romney when you
covered me with your overcoat to keep me from freezing in the snow? Where,
for that matter, is that march in Maryland when Big Abel and you carried me
three miles in your arms after I had dropped delirious by the roadside? If
you thought I'd joke you about this, Pinetop, all I can say is that you've
turned into a confounded fool."
Pinetop came back to the fire and seated himself upon the flour barrel in
the corner. "'Twas this way, you see," he said, breaking, for the first
time, through his strong mountain reserve. "I al'ays thought I'd like to
read a bit, 'specially on winter evenings at home, when the nights are long
and you don't have to git up so powerful early in the mornings, but when I
was leetle thar warn't nobody to teach me how to begin; maw she didn't know
nothin' an' paw he was dead, though he never got beyond the first reader
when he was 'live."
He looked up and Dan nodded gravely over his pipe.
"Then when I got bigger I had to work mighty hard to keep things goin'--an'
it seemed to me every time I took out that thar leetle book at night I got
so dead sleepy I couldn't tell one letter from another; A looked jest like
Z."
"I see," said Dan quietly. "Well, there's time enough here anyhow. It will
be a good way to pass the evenings." He opened the primer and laid it on
his knee, running his fingers carelessly through its dog-eared pages. "Do
you know your letters?" he inquired in a professional tone.
"Lordy, yes," responded Pinetop. "I've got about as fur as this here
place." He crossed to where Dan sat and pointed with a long forefinger to
the printed words, his mild blue eyes beaming with excitement.
"I reckon I kin read that by myself," he added with an embarrassed laugh.
"T-h-e c-a-t c-a-u-g-h-t t-h-e r-a-t. Ain't that right?"
"Perfectly. We'll pass on to the next." And they did so, sitting on the
halves of a divided flour barrel before the blazing chimney.
From this time there were regular lessons in the little hut, Pinetop
drawling over the soiled primer, or crouching, with his long legs twisted
under him and his elbows awkwardly extended, while he filled a sheet of
paper with sprawling letters.
"I'll be able to write to the old woman soon," he chuckled jubilantly, "an'
she'll have to walk all the way down the mounting to git it read."
"You'll be a scholar yet if this keeps up," replied Dan, slapping him upon
the shoulder, as the mountaineer glanced up with a pleased and shining
face. "Why, you mastered that first reader there in no time."
"A powerful heap of larnin' has to pass through yo' head to git a leetle to
stick thar," commented Pinetop, wrinkling his brows. "Air we goin' to have
the big book agin to-night?"
"The big book" was a garbled version of "Les Miserables," which, after
running the blockade with a daring English sailor, had passed from regiment
to regiment in the resting army. At first Dan had begun to read with only
Pinetop for a listener, but gradually, as the tale unfolded, a group of
eager privates filled the little hut and even hung breathlessly about the
doorway in the winter nights. They were mostly gaunt, unwashed volunteers
from the hills or the low countries, to whom literature was only a vast
silence and life a courageous struggle against greater odds. To Dan the
picturesqueness of the scene lent itself with all the force of its strong
lights and shadows, and with the glow of the pine torches on the open page,
his eyes would sometimes wander from the words to rest upon the kindling
faces in the shaggy circle by the fire. Dirty, hollow-eyed, unshaven, it
sat spellbound by the magic of the tale it could not read.
"By Gosh! that's a blamed good bishop," remarked an unkempt smoker one
evening from the threshold, where his beef-hide shoes were covered with
fine snow. "I don't reckon Marse Robert could ha' beat that."
"Marse Robert ain't never tried," put in a companion by the fire.
"Wall, I ain't sayin' he had," corrected the first speaker, through a cloud
of smoke. "Lord, I hope when my time comes I kin slip into heaven on Marse
Robert's coat-tails."
"If you don't, you won't never git thar!" jeered the second. Then they
settled themselves again, and listened with sombre faces and twitching
lips.
It was during this winter that Dan learned how one man's influence may fuse
individual and opposing wills into a single supreme endeavour. The Army of
Northern Virginia, as he saw it then, was moulded, sustained, and made
effective less by the authority of the Commander than by the simple power
of Lee over the hearts of the men who bore his muskets. For a time Dan had
sought to trace the groundspring of this impassioned loyalty, seeking a
reason that could not be found in generals less beloved. Surely it was not
the illuminated figure of the conqueror, for when had the Commander held
closer the affection of his troops than in that ill-starred campaign into
Maryland, which left the moral victory of a superb fight in McClellan's
hands? No, the charm lay deeper still, beyond all the fictitious aids of
fortune--somewhere in that serene and noble presence he had met one evening
as the gray dusk closed, riding alone on an old road between level fields.
After this it was always as a high figure against a low horizon that he had
seen the man who made his army.
As the long winter passed away, he learned, not only much of the spirit of
his own side, but something that became almost a sunny tolerance, of the
great blue army across the Rappahannock. He had exchanged Virginian tobacco
for Northern coffee at the outposts, and when on picket duty along the cold
banks of the river he would sometimes shout questions and replies across
the stream. In these meetings there was only a wide curiosity with little
bitterness; and once a friendly New England picket had delivered a
religious homily from the opposite shore, as he leaned upon his rifle.
"I didn't think much of you Rebs before I came down here," he had concluded
in a precise and energetic shout, "but I guess, after all, you've got souls
in your bodies like the rest of us."
"I reckon we have. Any coffee over your side?"
"Plenty. The war's interfered considerably with the tobacco crop, ain't
it?"
"Well, rather; we've enough for ourselves, but none to offer our visitors."
"Look here, are all these things about you in the papers gospel truth?"
"Can't say. What things?"
"Do you always carry bowie knives into battle?"
"No, we use scissors--they're more convenient."
"When you catch a runaway nigger do you chop him up in little pieces and
throw him to the hogs?"
"Not exactly. We boil him down and grease our cartridges."
"After Bull Run did you set up all the live Zouaves you got hold of as
targets for rifle practice?"
"Can't remember about the Zouaves. Rather think we made them into flags."
"Well, you Rebels take the breath out of me," commented the picket across
the river; and then, as the relief came, Dan hurried back to look for the
mail bag and a letter from Betty. For Betty wrote often these days--letters
sometimes practical, sometimes impassioned, always filled with cheer, and
often with bright gossip. Of her own struggle at Uplands and the long days
crowded with work, she wrote no word; all her sympathy, all her large
passion, and all her wise advice in little matters were for Dan from the
beginning to the end. She made him promise to keep warm if it were
possible, to read his Bible when he had the time, and to think of her at
all hours in every season. In a neat little package there came one day a
gray knitted waistcoat which he was to wear when on picket duty beside the
river, "and be very sure to fasten it," she had written. "I have sewed the
buttons on so tight they can't come off. Oh, if I had only papa and
Virginia and you back again I could be happy in a hovel. Dear mamma says
so, too."
And after much calm advice there would come whole pages that warmed him
from head to foot. "Your kisses are still on my lips," she wrote one day.
"The Major said to me, 'Your mouth is very warm, my dear,' and I almost
answered, 'you feel Dan's kisses, sir.' What would he have said, do you
think? As it was I only smiled and turned away, and longed to run straight
to you to be caught up in your arms and held there forever. O my beloved,
when you need me only stretch out your hands and I will come." _
Read next: BOOK FOURTH - THE RETURN OF THE VANQUISHED: Chapter VII - The Silent Battle
Read previous: BOOK FOURTH - THE RETURN OF THE VANQUISHED: Chapter V - "The Place Thereof"
Table of content of Battle Ground
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
