The Battle Ground Part 61

They pa.s.sed on, while the black horse pawed the dust, and the rider hurled oaths at their retreating figures. At a little house a few yards down the road they stopped to ask for food, and found a woman weeping at the kitchen table, with three small children clinging to her skirts. Her husband had fallen at Five Forks, she said, the safe was empty, and the children were crying for bread. Then Dan slipped into her hand the silver he had borrowed from the Union soldier, and the two returned penniless to the road.

"At least we are men," he said almost apologetically to Pinetop, and the next instant turned squarely in the mud, for a voice from the other side had called out shrilly:--

"Hi, Ma.r.s.e Dan, whar you gwine now?"

"Bless my soul, it's Big Abel," he exclaimed.

Black as a spade and beaming with delight, the negro emerged from the swarm upon the roadside and grasped Dan's outstretched hands.

"Whar you gwine dis away, Ma.r.s.e Dan?" he inquired again.

"I'm going home, Big Abel," responded Dan, as they walked on in a row of three. "No, don't shout, you scamp; I'd rather lie down and die upon the roadside than go home like this."

"Well, you ain' much to look at, dat's sho'," replied Big Abel, his face s.h.i.+ning like polished ebony, "en I ain' much to look at needer, but dey'll have ter recollect de way we all wuz befo' we runned away; dey'll have ter recollect you in yo' fine shuts en fancy waistcoats, en dey'll have ter recollect me in yo' ole uns. Sakes alive! I kin see dat one er yourn wid de little bit er flow'rs all over hit des es plain es ef 'twuz yestiddy."

"The waistcoats are all gone now," said Dan gravely, "and so are the s.h.i.+rts. The war is over and you are your own master, Big Abel. You don't belong to me from this time on."

Big Abel shook his head grinning.

"I reckon hit's all de same," he remarked cheerfully, "en I reckon we'd es well be gwine on home, Ma.r.s.e Dan."

"I reckon we would," said Dan, and they pushed on in silence.

X

ON THE MARCH AGAIN

That night they slept on the blood-stained floor of an old field hospital, and the next morning Pinetop parted from them and joined an engineer who had promised him a "lift" toward his mountains.

As Dan stood in the sunny road holding his friend's rough hand, it seemed to him that such a parting was the sharpest wrench the end had brought.

"Whenever you need me, old fellow, remember that I am always ready," he said in a husky voice.

Pinetop looked past him to the distant woods, and his calm blue eyes were dim.

"I reckon you'll go yo' way an' I'll go mine," he replied, "for thar's one thing sartain an' that is our ways don't run together. It'll never be the same agin--that's natur--but if you ever want a good stout hand for any uphill ploughing or shoot yo' man an' the police git on yo' track, jest remember that I'm up thar in my little cabin. Why, if every officer in the county was at yo' heels, I'd stand guard with my old squirrel gun and maw would with her kettle."

Then he shook hands with Big Abel and strode on across a field to a little railway station, while Dan went slowly down the road with the negro at his side.

In the afternoon when they had trudged all the morning through the heavy mud, they reached a small frame house set back from the road, with some straggling ailanthus shoots at the front and a pile of newly cut hickory logs near the kitchen steps. A woman, with a bucket of soapsuds at her feet, was wringing out a homespun s.h.i.+rt in the yard, and as they entered the little gate, she looked at them with a defiance which was evidently the result of a late domestic wrangle.

"I've got one man on my hands," she began in a shrill voice, "an' he's as much as I can 'tend to, an' a long sight mo' than I care to 'tend to. He never had the s.p.u.n.k to fight anythin' except his wife, but I reckon he's better off now than them that had; it's the coward that gets the best of things in these days."

"Shut up thar, you hussy!" growled a voice from the kitchen, and a fat man with bleared eyes slouched to the doorway. "I reckon if you want a supper you can work for it," he remarked, taking a wad of tobacco from his mouth and aiming it deliberately at one of the ailanthus shoots. "You split up that thar pile of logs back thar an' Sally'll cook yo' supper. Thar ain't another house inside of a good ten miles, so you'd better take your chance, I reckon."

"That's jest like you, Tom Bates," retorted the woman pa.s.sionately. "Befo'

you'd do a lick of honest work you'd let the roof topple plum down upon our heads."

For an instant Dan's glance cut the man like a whip, then crossing to the woodpile, he lifted the axe and sent it with a clean stroke into a hickory log.

"We can't starve, Big Abel," he said coolly, "but we are not beggars yet by a long way."

"Go 'way, Ma.r.s.e Dan," protested the negro in disgust. "Gimme dat ar axe en set right down and wait twel supper. You're des es white es a sheet dis minute."

"I've got to begin some day," returned Dan, as the axe swung back across his shoulder. "I'll pay for my supper and you'll pay for yours, that's fair, isn't it?--for you're a free man now."

Then he went feverishly to work, while Big Abel sat grumbling on the doorstep, and the farmer, leaning against the lintel behind him, watched the lessening pile with sluggish eyes.

"You be real careful of this wood, Sally, an' it ought to last twel summer," he observed, as he glanced to where his wife stood wringing out the clothes. "If you warn't so wasteful that last pile would ha' held out twice as long."

Dan chopped steadily for an hour, and then giving the axe to Big Abel, went into the little kitchen to eat his supper. The woman served him sullenly, placing some sobby biscuits and a piece of cold bacon on his plate, and pouring out a gla.s.s of b.u.t.termilk with a vicious thrust of the pitcher.

When he asked if there was a shelter close at hand where he might sleep, she replied sourly that she reckoned the barn was good enough if he chose to spend the night there. Then as Big Abel finished his job and took his supper in his hand, they left the house and went across the darkening cattle pen, to a rotting structure which they took to be the barn. Inside the straw was warm and dry, and as Dan flung himself down upon it, he gasped out something like a prayer of thanks. His first day's labour with his hands had left him trembling like a nervous woman. An hour longer, he told himself, and he should have gone down upon the roadside.

For a time he slept profoundly, and then awaking in the night, he lay until dawn listening to Big Abel's snores, and staring straight above where a solitary star shone through a crack in the s.h.i.+ngled roof. From the other side of a thin part.i.tion came the soft breathing and the fresh smell of cows, and, now and then, he heard the low bleating of a new-born calf.

He had been dreaming of a battle, and the impression was so vivid that, as he opened his eyes, he half imagined he still heard the sound of shots. In his sleep he had saved the flag and won promotion after victory, and for a moment the trampled straw seemed to him to be the battle-field, and the thin boards against which he beat the enemy's resisting line. As he came slowly to himself a sudden yearning for the army awoke within him. He wanted the red campfires and his comrades smoking against the dim pines; the peaceful bivouac where the long shadows crept among the trees and two men lay wrapped together beneath every blanket; above all, he wanted to see the Southern Cross wave in the sunlight, and to hear the charging yell as the brigade dashed into the open. He was homesick for it all to-night, and yet it was dead forever--dead as his own youth which he had given to the cause.

Sharp pains racked him from head to foot, and his pulses burned as if from fever. It was like the weariness of old age, he thought, this utter hopelessness, these strained and quivering muscles. As a boy he had been hardy as an Indian and as fearless of fatigue. Now the long midnight gallops on Prince Rupert over frozen roads returned to him like the dim memories from some old romance. They belonged to the place of half-forgotten stories, with the gay waistcoats and the Christmas gatherings in the hall at Cheric.o.ke. For a country that was not he had given himself as surely as the men who were buried where they fought, and his future would be but one long struggle to adjust himself to conditions in which he had no part. His proper nature was compacted of the old life which was gone forever--of its ease, of its gayety, of its lavish pleasures. For the sake of this life he had fought for four years in the ranks, and now that it was swept away, he found himself like a man who stumbles on over the graves of his familiar friends. He remembered the words of the soldier in the long blue coat, and spoke them half aloud in the darkness: "There'll come a time when you'll find out that the army wasn't the worst you had to face." The army was not the worst, he knew this now--the grapple with a courageous foe had served to quicken his pulses and nerve his hand--the worst was what came afterward, this sense of utter failure and the attempt to shape one's self to brutal necessity. In the future that opened before him he saw only a terrible patience which would perhaps grow into a second nature as the years went on. In place of the old generous existence, he must from this day forth wring the daily bread of those he loved, with maimed hands, from a wasted soil.

The thought of Betty came to him, but it brought no consolation. For himself he could meet the s.h.i.+pwreck standing, but Betty must be saved from it if there was salvation to be found. She had loved him in the days of his youth--in his strong days, as the Governor said--now that he was worn out, suffering, gray before his time, there was mere madness in his thought of her buoyant strength. "You may take ten--you may take twenty years to rebuild yourself," a surgeon had said to him at parting; and he asked himself bitterly, by what right of love dared he make her strong youth a prop for his feeble life? She loved him he knew--in his blackest hour he never doubted this--but because she loved him, did it follow that she must be sacrificed?

Then gradually the dark mood pa.s.sed, and with his eyes on the star, his mouth settled into the lines of smiling patience which suffering brings to the brave. He had never been a coward and he was not one now. The years had taught him nothing if they had not taught him the wisdom most needed by his impulsive youth--that so long as there comes good to the meanest creature from fate's hardest blow, it is the part of a man to stand up and take it between the eyes. In the midst of his own despair, of the haunting memories of that bland period which was over for his race, there arose suddenly the figure of the slave the Major had rescued, in Dan's boyhood, from the power of old Rainy-day Jones. He saw again the poor black wretch s.h.i.+vering in the warmth, with the dirty rag about his jaw, and with the sight he drew a breath that was almost of relief. That one memory had troubled his own jovial ease; now in his approaching poverty he might put it away from him forever.

In the first light of a misty April sunrise they went out on the road again, and when they had walked a mile or so, Big Abel found some young pokeberry shoots, which he boiled in his old quart cup with a slice of bacon he had saved from supper. At noon they came upon a little farm and ploughed a strip of land in payment for a dinner that was lavishly pressed upon them. The people were plain, poor, and kindly, and the farmer followed Dan into the field with entreaties that he should leave the furrows and come in to meet his family. "Let yo' darky do a bit of work if he wants to," he urged, "but it makes me downright sick to see one of General Lee's soldiers driving my plough. The gals are afraid it'll bring bad luck."

With a laugh, Dan tossed the ropes to Big Abel, who had been breaking clods of earth, and returned to the house, where he was placed in the seat of honour and waited on by a troop of enthusiastic red-cheeked maidens, each of whom cut one of the remaining b.u.t.tons from his coat. Here he was asked to stay the night, but with the memory of the blue valley before his eyes, he shook his head and pushed on again in the early afternoon. The vision of Cheric.o.ke hung like a star above his road, and he struggled a little nearer day by day.

Sometimes ploughing, sometimes chopping a pile of logs, and again lying for hours in the warm gra.s.s by the way, they travelled slowly toward the valley that held Dan's desire. The chill April dawns broke over them, and the genial April suns.h.i.+ne warmed them through after a drenching in a pearly shower. They watched the buds swell and the leaves open in the wood, the wild violets bloom in sheltered places, and the dandelions troop in ranks among the gra.s.ses by the road. Dan, halting to rest in the mild weather, would fall often into a revery long and patient, like those of extreme old age. With the sun s.h.i.+ning upon his relaxed body and his eyes on the bright dust that floated in the slanting beams, he would lie for hours speechless, absorbed, filled with visions. One day he found a mountain laurel flowering in the woods, and gathering a spray he sat with it in his hands and dreamed of Betty. When Big Abel touched him on the arm he turned with a laugh and struggled to his feet. "I was resting," he explained, as they walked on.

"It is good to rest like that in mind and body; to keep out thoughts and let the dreams come as they will."

"De bes' place ter res' is on yo' own do' step," Big Abel responded, and quickening their pace, they went more rapidly over the rough clay roads.

It was at the end of this day that they came, in the purple twilight, to a big brick house and found there a woman who lived alone with the memories of a son she had lost at Gettysburg. At their knock she came herself, with a few old servants, prompt, tearful, and very sad; and when she saw Dan's coat by the light of the lamp behind her, she put out her hands with a cry of welcome and drew him in, weeping softly as her white head touched his sleeve.

"My mother is dead, thank G.o.d," he murmured, and at his words she looked up at him a little startled.

"Others have come," she said, "but they were not like you; they did not have your voice. Have you been always poor like this?"

He met her eyes smiling.

"I have not always been a soldier," was his answer.

For a moment she looked at him as if bewildered; then taking a lamp from an old servant, she led the way upstairs to her son's room, and laid out the dead man's clothes upon his bed.