Battle Ground
Page 26
VI
ON THE ROAD TO ROMNEY
After a peaceful Christmas, New Year's Day rose bright and mild, and Dan ashe started from Winchester with the column felt that he was escaping tofreedom from the tedious duties of camp life.
"Thank God we're on the war-path again," he remarked to Pinetop, who wasstalking at his side. The two had become close friends during the dullweeks after their first battle, and Bland, who had brought a taste for theclassics from the lecture-room, had already referred to them in pointlessjokes as "Pylades and Orestes."
"It looks mighty like summer," responded Pinetop cheerfully. He threw akeen glance up into the blue clouds, and then sniffed suspiciously at thedust that rose high in the road. "But I ain't one to put much faith inlooks," he added with his usual caution, as he shifted the knapsack uponhis shoulders.
Dan laughed easily. "Well, I'm heartily glad I left my overcoat behind me,"he said, breathing hard as he climbed the mountain road, where the red clayhad stiffened into channels.
The sunshine fell brightly over them, lying in golden drops upon the fallenleaves. To Dan the march brought back the early winter rides at Chericoke,and the chain of lights and shadows that ran on clear days over the tavernroad. Joyously throwing back his head, he whistled a love song as hetramped up the mountain side. The irksome summer, with its slow fevers andits sharp attacks of measles, its scarcity of pure water and supplies ofhalf-cooked food, was suddenly blotted from his thoughts, and his firstromantic ardour returned to him in long draughts of wind and sun. Aftereach depression his elastic temperament had sprung upward; the past monthshad but strengthened him in body as in mind.
In the afternoon a gray cloud came up suddenly and the sunshine, after afeeble struggle, was driven from the mountains. As the wind blew in shortgusts down the steep road, Dan tightened his coat and looked at Pinetop'sknapsack with his unfailing laugh.
"That's beginning to look comfortable. I hope to heaven the wagons aren'tfar off."
Pinetop turned and glanced back into the valley. "I'll be blessed if Ibelieve they're anywhere," was his answer.
"Well, if they aren't, I'll be somewhere before morning; why, it feels likesnow."
A gust of wind, sharp as a blade, struck from the gray sky, and whirlpoolsof dead leaves were swept into the forest. Falling silent, Dan swung hisarms to quicken the current of his blood, and walked on more rapidly. Overthe long column gloom had settled with the clouds, and they were brave lipsthat offered a jest in the teeth of the wind. There were no blankets, fewovercoats, and fewer rations, and the supply wagons were crawling somewherein the valley.
The day wore on, and still the rough country road climbed upward embeddedin withered leaves. On the high wind came the first flakes of a snowstorm,followed by a fine rain that enveloped the hills like mist. As Dan stumbledon, his feet slipped on the wet clay, and he was forced to catch at thebared saplings for support. The cold had entered his lungs as a knife, andhis breath circled in a little cloud about his mouth. Through the storm heheard the quick oaths of his companions ring out like distant shots.
When night fell they halted to bivouac by the roadside, and until daybreakthe pine woods were filled with the cheerful glow of the campfires. Therewere no rations, and Dan, making a jest of his hunger, had stretchedhimself in the full light of the crackling branches. With the defianthumour which had made him the favourite of the mess, he laughed at thefrozen roads, at the change in the wind, at his own struggles with the wetkindling wood, at the supply wagons creeping slowly after them. His couragehad all the gayety of his passions--it showed itself in a smile, in awhistle, in the steady hand with which he played toss and catch with fate.The superb silence of Pinetop, plodding evenly along, was as far removedfrom him as the lofty grandeur of the mountains. A jest warmed his heartagainst the cold; with set lips and grave eyes, he would have fallen beforethe next ridge was crossed.
Through the woods other fires were burning, and long reddish shadows creptamong the pine trees over the rotting mould. For warmth Dan had spread acovering of dried leaves over him, raking them from sheltered corners ofthe forest. When he rose from time to time during the night to take histurn at replenishing the fire the leaves drifted in gravelike mounds abouthis feet.
For three days the march was steadily upward over long ridges coated deepwith ice. In the face of the strong wind, which blew always down the steeproad, the army passed on, complaining, cursing, asking a gigantic questionof its General. Among the raw soldiers there had been desertions by thedozen, filling the streets of the little town with frost-bittenmalcontents. "It was all a wild goose chase," they declared bitterly, "andif Old Jack wasn't a March hare--well, he was something madder!"
Dan listened to the curses with his ready smile, and walked on bravely.Since the first evening he had uttered no complaint, asked no question. Hehad undertaken to march, and he meant to march, that was all. In the frontwith which he veiled his suffering there was no lessening of his oldcareless confidence--if his dash had hardened into endurance it wore stillan expression that was almost debonair.
So as the column straggled weakly upward, he wrung his stiffened fingersand joked with Jack Powell, who stumbled after him. The cold had brought aglow to his tanned face, and when he lifted his eyes from the road Pinetopsaw that they were shining brightly. Once he slipped on the frozen mud, andas his musket dropped from his hand, it went off sharply, the load enteringthe ground.
"Are you hurt?" asked Jack, springing toward him; but Dan looked roundlaughing as he clasped his knee.
"Oh, I merely groaned because I might have been," he said lightly, andlimped on, singing a bit of doggerel which had taken possession of hisregiment.
"Then let the Yanks say what they will, We'll be gay and happy still; Gay and happy, gay and happy, We'll be gay and happy still."
On the third day out they reached a little village in the mountains, butbefore the week's end they had pushed on again, and the white roads stillstretched before them. As they went higher the tracks grew steeper, and nowand then a musket shot rang out on the roadside as a man lost his footingand went down upon the ice. Behind them the wagon train crept inch by inch,or waited patiently for hours while a wheel was hoisted from the ditchbeside the road. There was blood on the muzzles of the horses and on theshining ice that stretched beyond them.
To Dan these terrible days were as the anguish of a new birth, in which thething to be born suffered the conscious throes of awakening life. He couldnever be the same again; something was altered in him forever; this he feltdimly as he dragged his aching body onward. Days like these would prove thestuff that had gone into the making of him. When the march to Romney laybehind him he should know himself to be either a soldier or a coward. Asoldier or a coward! he said the words over again as he struggled to keepdown the pangs of hunger, telling himself that the road led not merely toRomney, but to a greater victory than his General dreamed of. Romney mightbe worthless, after all, the grim march but a mad prank of Jackson's, asmen said; but whether to lay down one's arms or to struggle till the endwas reached, this was the question asked by those stern mountains. Naturestood ranged against him--he fought it step by step, and day by day.
At times something like delirium seized him, and he went on blindly,stepping high above the ice. For hours he was tortured by the longing forraw beef, for the fresh blood that would put heat into his veins. Thekitchen at Chericoke flamed upon the hillside, as he remembered it onwinter evenings when the great chimney was filled with light and the cranewas in its place above the hickory. The smell of newly baked bread floatedin his nostrils, and for a little while he believed himself to be lyingagain upon the hearth as he thrilled at Aunt Rhody's stories. Then hisfancies would take other shapes, and warm colours would glow in red andyellow circles before his eyes. When he thought of Betty now it was nolonger tenderly but with a despairing passion. He was haunted less by hervisible image than by broken dreams of her peculiar womanly beauties--ofher soft hands and the warmth of her gir
lish bosom.
But from the first day to the last he had no thought of yielding; and eachfeeble step had sent him a step farther upon the road. He had often fallen,but he had always struggled up again and laughed. Once he made a ghastlyjoke about his dying in the snow, and Jack Powell turned upon him with anoath and bade him to be silent.
"For God's sake don't," added the boy weakly, and fell to whimpering likea child.
"Oh, go home to your mother," retorted Dan, with a kind of desperatecruelty.
Jack sobbed outright.
"I wish I could," he answered, and dropped over upon the roadside.
Dan caught him up, and poured his last spoonful of brandy down his throat,then he seized his arm and dragged him bodily along.
"Oh, I say don't be an ass," he implored. "Here comes old Stonewall."
The commanding General rode by, glanced quietly over them, and passed on,his chest bowed, his cadet cap pulled down over his eyes. A moment laterDan, looking over the hillside, at the winding road, saw him dismount andput his shoulder to a sunken wheel. The sight suddenly nerved the youngerman, and he went on quickly, dragging Jack up with him.
That night they rested in a burned-out clearing where the pine trees hadbeen felled for fence rails. The rails went readily to fires, and Pinetopfried strips of fat bacon in the skillet he had brought upon his musket.Somebody produced a handful of coffee from his pocket, and a little laterDan, dozing beside the flames, was awakened by the aroma.
"By George!" he burst out, and sat up speechless.
Pinetop was mixing thin cornmeal paste into the gravy, and he looked up ashe stirred busily with a small stick.
"Wall, I reckon these here slapjacks air about done," he remarked in amoment, adding with a glance at Dan, "and if your stomach's near as emptyas your eyes, I reckon your turn comes first."
"I reckon it does," said Dan, and filling his tin cup, he drank scaldingcoffee in short gulps. When he had finished it, he piled fresh rails uponthe fire and lay down to sleep with his feet against the embers.
With the earliest dawn a long shiver woke him, and as he put out his handit touched something wet and cold. The fire had died to a red heart, and athick blanket of snow covered him from head to foot. Straight above therewas a pale yellow light where the stars shone dimly after the storm.
He started to his feet, rubbing a handful of snow upon his face. The redembers, sheltered by the body of a solitary pine, still glowed under thecharred brushwood, and kneeling upon the ground, he fanned them into afeeble blaze. Then he laid the rails crosswise, protecting them with hisblanket until they caught and flamed up against the blackened pine.
Near by Jack Powell was moaning in his sleep, and Dan leaned over to shakehim into consciousness. "Oh, damn it all, wake up, you fool!" he saidroughly, but Jack rolled over like one drugged and broke into frightenedwhimpers such as a child makes in the dark. He was dreaming of home, and asDan listened to the half-choked words, his face contracted sharply. "Wakeup, you fool!" he repeated angrily, rolling him back and forth before thefire.
A little later, when Jack had grown warm beneath his touch, he threw ablanket over him, and turned to lie down in his own place. As he tossed alast armful on the fire, his eyes roamed over the long mounds of snow thatfilled the clearing, and he caught his breath as a man might who had wakedsuddenly among the dead. In the beginning of dawn, with the glimmer ofsmouldering fires reddening the snow, there was something almost ghastly inthe sloping field filled with white graves and surrounded by whitemountains. Even the wintry sky borrowed, for an hour, the spectral aspectof the earth, and the familiar shapes of cloud, as of hill, stood out withall the majesty of uncovered laws--stripped of the mere frivolous effect oflight or shade. It was like the first day--or the last.
Dan, sitting watchful beside the fire, fell into the peculiar mental statewhich comes only after an inward struggle that has laid bare the sinews ofone's life. He had fought the good fight to the end, and he knew that fromthis day he should go easier with himself because he knew that he hadconquered.
The old doubt--the old distrust of his own strength--was fallen from him.At the moment he could have gone to Betty, fearless and full of hope, andhave said, "Come, for I am grown up at last--at last I have grown up to mylove." A great tenderness was in his heart, and the tears, which had notrisen for all the bodily suffering of the past two weeks, came slowly tohis eyes. The purpose of life seemed suddenly clear to him, and the largepatience of the sky passed into his own nature as he sat facing the whitedawn. At rare intervals in the lives of all strenuous souls there comesthis sense of kinship with external things--this passionate recognition ofthe appeal of the dumb world. Sky and mountains and the white sweep of thefields awoke in him the peculiar tenderness he had always felt for animalsor plants. His old childish petulance was gone from him forever; in itsplace he was aware of a kindly tolerance which softened even the commonoutlines of his daily life. It was as if he had awakened breathlessly tofind himself a man.
And Betty came to him again--not in detached visions, but entire andwomanly. When he remembered her as on that last night at Chericoke it waswith the impulse to fall down and kiss her feet. Reckless and blind withanger as he had been, she would have come cheerfully with him wherever hisroad led; and it was this passionate betrayal of herself that had taughthim the full measure of her love. An attempt to trifle, to waver, tobargain with the future, he might have looked back upon with tender scorn;but the gesture with which she had made her choice was as desperate as hisown mood--and it was for this one reckless moment that he loved her best.
The east paled slowly as the day broke in a cloud, and the long shadowsbeside the fire lost their reddish glimmer. A little bird, dazed by thecold and the strange light, flew into the smoke against the stunted pine,and fell, a wet ball of feathers at Dan's feet. He picked it up, warmed itin his coat, and fed it from the loose crumbs in his pocket.
When Pinetop awoke he was gently stroking the bird while he sang in a lowvoice:--
"Gay and happy, gay and happy, We'll be gay and happy still."