The Red Acorn Part 12

"Clean and clear as a whistle inside," he said, approvingly. "She'll make music that our Secession friends will pay attention to, though it may not be as sweet to their ears as 'The Bonnie Blue Flag.'"

"More likely kick the whole northwest quarter section of your shoulder off when you try to shoot it," growled Abe, who had been paying similar close attention to his gun. "If we'd had anybody but a lot of mullet-heads for officers we'd a'been sent up here last week, when the weather and the roads were good, and when we could've done something.

Now our boys'll be licked before we can get where we can help 'em."

Glen leaned on his musket, and listening to the deepening roar of battle, was shaken by the surge of emotions natural to the occasion. It seemed as if no one could live through the incessant firing the sound of which rolled down to them. To go up into it was to deliberately venture into certain destruction. Memory made a vehement protest. He recalled all the pleasant things that life had in store for him; all that he could enjoy and accomplish; all that he might be to others; all that others might be to him. Every enjoyment of the past, every happy possibility of the future took on a more entrancing roseatenesss.

Could he give all this up, and die there on the mountain top, in this dull, brutal, unheroic fas.h.i.+on, in the filthy mud and dreary rain, with no one to note or care whether he acted courageously or otherwise?

It did not seem that he was expected to fling his life away like a dumb brute entering the reeking shambles. His youth and abilities had been given him for some other purpose. Again palsying fear and ign.o.ble selfishness tugged at his heart-strings, and he felt all his carefully cultivated resolutions weakening.

"A Sergeant must be left in command of the men guarding this property,"

said the Colonel. "The Captain of Company A will detail one for that duty."

Captain Bennett glanced from one to another of his five Sergeants.

Harry's heart gave a swift leap, with hope that he might be ORDERED to remain behind. Then the blood crimsoned his cheeks, for the first time since the sound of the firing struck his ears; he felt that every eye in the Company was upon him, and that his ign.o.ble desire had been read by all in his look of expectancy. Shame came to spur up his faltering will.

He set his teeth firmly, pulled the tompion out of his gun, and flung it away disdainfully as if he would never need it again, blew into the muzzle to see if the tube was clear, and wiped off the lock with a fine white handkerchief--one of the relics of his by-gone elegance--which he drew from the breast of his blouse.

"Sergeant Glan--Sergeant Glancey will remain," said the Captain peremptorily. Glancey, the Captain knew, was the only son and support of a widowed mother.

"Now, boys," said the Colonel in tones that rang like bugle notes, "the time has come for us to strike a blow for the Union, and for the fame of the dear old Buckeye State. I need not exhort you to do your duty like men; I know you too well to think that any such words of mine are at all necessary. Forward! QUICK TIME! MARCH!"

The mountain sides rang with the answering cheers from a thousand throats.

The noise of the battle on the distant crest was at first in separate bursts of sound, as regiment after regiment came into position and opened fire. The intervals between these bursts had disappeared, and it had now become a steady roar.

A wild mob came rus.h.i.+ng backward from the front.

"My G.o.d, our men are whipped!" exclaimed the young Adjutant in tones of Anguish.

"No, no," said Captain Bennett, with cheerful confidence. "These are only the camp riff-raff, who run whenever so much as a cap is burst near them."

So it proved to be. There were teamsters upon their wheel-mules, cooks, officers' servants, both black and white, and civilian employees, mingled with many men in uniform, skulking from their companies. Those were mounted who could seize a mule anywhere, and those who could not were endeavoring to keep up on foot with the panic-stricken riders.

All seemed wild with one idea: To get as far as possible from the terrors raging around the mountain top. They rushed through the regiment and disordered its ranks.

"Who are you a-shovin', young fellow--say?" demanded Abe Bolton, roughly collaring a strapping hulk of a youth, who, hatless, and with his fat cheeks white with fear came plunging against him like a frightened steer.

"O boys, let me pa.s.s, and don't go up there! Don't! You'll all be killed. I know it, I'm all the one of my company that got away--I am, really. All the rest are killed."

"Heavens! what a wretched remnant, as the dry-goods man said, when the clerk brought him a piece of selvage as all that the burglars had left of his stock of broadcloth," said Kent Edwards. "It's too bad that you were allowed to get away, either. You're not a proper selection for a relic at all, and you give a bad impression of your company. You ought to have thought of this, and staid up there and got killed, and let some better-looking man got away, that would have done the company credit.

Why didn't you think of this?"

"Git!" said Abe, sententiously, with a twist in the coward's collar, that, with the help of an opportune kick by Kent, sent him sprawling down the bank.

"Captain Bennett," shouted the Colonel angrily, "Fix bayonets there in front, and drive these hounds off, or we'll never get there."

A show of savage-looking steel sent the skulkers down a side-path through the woods.

The tumult of the battle heightened with every step the regiment advanced. A turn in the winding road brought them to an opening in the woods which extended clear to the summit. Through this the torrent of noise poured as when a powerful band pa.s.ses the head of a street. Down this avenue came rolling the crash of thousands of muskets fired with the intense energy of men in mortal combat, the deeper pulsations of the artillery, and even the fierce yells of the fighters, as charges were made or repulsed.

Glen felt the blood settle around his heart anew.

"Get out of the road and let the artillery pa.s.s! Open up for the artillery!" shouted voices from the rear. Everybody sprang to the side of the road.

There came a sound of blows rained upon horses bodies--of shouts and oaths from exited drivers and eager officers--of rus.h.i.+ng wheels and of ironed hoofs striking fire from the grinding stones. Six long-bodied, strong-limbed horses, their hides reeking with sweat, and their nostrils distended with intense effort, tore past, s.n.a.t.c.hing after them, as if it were a toy, a gleaming bra.s.s cannon, surrounded by galloping cannoneers, who goaded the draft horses on with blows with the flats of their drawn sabers. Another gun, with its straining horses and galloping attendants, and another, and another, until six great, grim pieces, with their scores of desperately eager men and horses, had rushed by toward the front.

It was a sight to stir the coldest blood. The excited infantry boys, wrought up to the last pitch by the spectacle, sprang back into the road, cheered vociferously, and rushed on after the battery.

Hardly had the echoes of their voices died away, when they heard the battery join its thunders to the din of the fight.

Then wounded men, powder-stained, came straggling back--men with shattered arms and gashed faces and garments soaked with blood from bleeding wounds.

"Hurrah, boys!" each shouted with weakened voice, as his eyes lighted up at sight of the regiment, "We're whipping them; but hurry forward!

You're needed."

"If you ain't pretty quick," piped one girl-faced boy, with a pensive smile, as he sat weakly down on a stone and pressed a delicate hand over a round red spot that had just appeared on the breast of his blouse, "you'll miss all the fun. We've about licked 'em already. Oh!--"

Abe and Kent sprang forward to catch him, but he was dead almost before they could reach him. They laid him back tenderly on the brown dead leaves, and ran to regain their places in the ranks.

The regiment was now sweeping around the last curve between it and the line of battle. The smell of burning powder that filled the air, the sight of flowing blood, the shouts of teh fighting men, had awakened every bosom that deep-lying KILLING instinct inherited from our savage ancestry, which slumbers--generally wholly unsuspected--in even the gentlest man's bosom, until some accident gives it a terrible arousing.

Now the slaying fever burned in every soul. They were marching with long, quick strides, but well-closed ranks, elbow touching elbow, and every movement made with the even more than the accuracy of a parade.

Harry felt himself swept forward by a current as resistless as that which sets over Niagara.

They came around the little hill, and saw a bank of smoke indicating where the line of battle was.

"Let's finish the canteen now," said Kent. "It may get bored by a bullet and all run out, and you know I hate to waste."

"I suppose we might as well drink it," a.s.sented Abe--the first time in the history of the regiment, that he agreed with anybody. "We mayn't be able to do it in ten minutes, and it would be too bad to 've lugged that all the way here, just for some one else to drink."

An Aide, powder-grimed, but radiant with joy, dashed up. "Colonel," he said, "you had better go into line over in that vacant s.p.a.ce there, and wait for orders; but I don't think you will have anything to do, for the General believes that the victory is on, and the Rebels are in full retreat."

As he spoke, a mighty cheer rolled around the line of battle, and a band stationed upon a rock which formed the highest part of the mountain, burst forth with the grand strains of "Star-spangled Banner."

The artillery continued to hurl screaming shot and sh.e.l.l down into the narrow gorge, through which the defeated Rebels were flying with mad haste.

Chapter X. The Mountaineer's Revenge.

And if we do but watch the hour, There never yet was human power Which could evade, if unforgiven, The patient search and vigil long Of him who treasures up a wrong.

--Byron.

Harry Glen's first feeling when he found the battle was really over, was that of elation that the crisis to which he had looked forward with so much apprehension, had pa.s.sed without his receiving any bodily harm.

This was soon replaced by regret that the long-coveted opportunity had been suffered to pa.s.s unimproved, and still another strong sentiment--that keen sense of disappointment which comes when we have braced ourselves up to encounter an emergency, and it vanishes. There is the feeling of waste of valuable acc.u.mulated energy, which is as painful as that of energy misapplied.