Battle Ground

by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

  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 whohad promised him a "lift" toward his mountains.

  As Dan stood in the sunny road holding his friend's rough hand, it seemedto 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," hesaid in a husky voice.

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

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

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

  In the afternoon when they had trudged all the morning through the heavymud, they reached a small frame house set back from the road, with somestraggling ailanthus shoots at the front and a pile of newly cut hickorylogs near the kitchen steps. A woman, with a bucket of soapsuds at herfeet, was wringing out a homespun shirt in the yard, and as they enteredthe little gate, she looked at them with a defiance which was evidently theresult of a late domestic wrangle.

  "I've got one man on my hands," she began in a shrill voice, "an' he's asmuch as I can 'tend to, an' a long sight mo' than I care to 'tend to. Henever had the spunk to fight anythin' except his wife, but I reckon he'sbetter off now than them that had; it's the coward that gets the best ofthings in these days."

  "Shut up thar, you hussy!" growled a voice from the kitchen, and a fat manwith bleared eyes slouched to the doorway. "I reckon if you want a supperyou can work for it," he remarked, taking a wad of tobacco from his mouthand aiming it deliberately at one of the ailanthus shoots. "You split upthat thar pile of logs back thar an' Sally'll cook yo' supper. Thar ain'tanother 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 passionately. "Befo'you'd do a lick of honest work you'd let the roof topple plum down upon ourheads."

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

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

  "Go 'way, Marse Dan," protested the negro in disgust. "Gimme dat ar axe enset right down and wait twel supper. You're des es white es a sheet disminute."

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

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

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

  Dan chopped steadily for an hour, and then giving the axe to Big Abel, wentinto 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, andpouring out a glass of buttermilk 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 choseto spend the night there. Then as Big Abel finished his job and took hissupper in his hand, they left the house and went across the darkeningcattle pen, to a rotting structure which they took to be the barn. Insidethe straw was warm and dry, and as Dan flung himself down upon it, hegasped out something like a prayer of thanks. His first day's labour withhis hands had left him trembling like a nervous woman. An hour longer, hetold himself, and he should have gone down upon the roadside.

  For a time he slept profoundly, and then awaking in the night, he lay untildawn listening to Big Abel's snores, and staring straight above where asolitary star shone through a crack in the shingled roof. From the otherside of a thin partition came the soft breathing and the fresh smell ofcows, 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, ashe opened his eyes, he half imagined he still heard the sound of shots. Inhis sleep he had saved the flag and won promotion after victory, and for amoment the trampled straw seemed to him to be the battle-field, and thethin boards against which he beat the enemy's resisting line. As he cameslowly to himself a sudden yearning for the army awoke within him. Hewanted the red campfires and his comrades smoking against the dim pines;the peaceful bivouac where the long shadows crept among the trees and twomen lay wrapped together beneath every blanket; above all, he wanted to seethe Southern Cross wave in the sunlight, and to hear the charging yell asthe brigade dashed into the open. He was homesick for it all to-night, andyet it was dead forever--dead as his own youth which he had given to thecause.

  Sharp pains racked him from head to foot, and his pulses burned as if fromfever. It was like the weariness of old age, he thought, this utterhopelessness, these strained and quivering muscles. As a boy he had beenhardy as an Indian and as fearless of fatigue. Now the long midnightgallops on Prince Rupert over frozen roads returned to him like the dimmemories from some old romance. They belonged to the place ofhalf-forgotten stories, with the gay waistcoats and the Christmasgatherings in the hall at Chericoke. For a country that was not he hadgiven himself as surely as the men who were buried where they fought, andhis future would be but one long struggle to adjust himself to conditionsin which he had no part. His proper nature was compacted of the old lifewhich was gone forever--of its ease, of its gayety, of its lavishpleasures. For the sake of this life he had fought for four years in theranks, and now that it was swept away, he found himself like a man whostumbles on over the graves of his familiar friends. He remembered thewords of the soldier in the long blue coat, and spoke them half aloud inthe darkness: "There'll come a time when you'll find out that the armywasn't the worst you had to face." The army was not the worst, he knew thisnow--the grapple with a courageous foe had served to quicken his pulses andnerve his hand--the worst was what came afterward, this sense of utterfailure and the attempt to shape one's self to brutal necessity. In thefuture that opened before him he saw only a terrible patience which wouldperhaps grow into a second nature as the years went on. In place of the oldgenerous existence, he must from this day forth wring the daily bread ofthose he loved, with maimed hands, from a wasted soil.

  The thought of Betty came to him, but it brought no consolation. Forhimself he could meet the shipwreck standing, but Betty must be saved fromit if there was salvation to be found. She had loved him in the days of hisyouth--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 ofher buoyant strength. "You may take ten--you may take twenty years torebuild yourself," a surgeon had said to him at parting; and he askedhimself bitterly, by what right of love dared he make her strong youth aprop for his feeble life? She loved him he knew--in his blackest hour henever doubted this--but because she loved him, did it follow that she mustbe sacrificed?

  Then gradually the dark mood passed, and with his eyes on the star, hismouth settled into the lines of smiling patience which suffering brings tothe brave. He had never been a coward and he was not one now. The years hadtaught him nothing if they had not taught him the wisdom most needed by hisimpulsive youth--that so long as there comes good to the meanest creaturefr
om fate's hardest blow, it is the part of a man to stand up and take itbetween the eyes. In the midst of his own despair, of the haunting memoriesof that bland period which was over for his race, there arose suddenly thefigure of the slave the Major had rescued, in Dan's boyhood, from the powerof old Rainy-day Jones. He saw again the poor black wretch shivering in thewarmth, with the dirty rag about his jaw, and with the sight he drew abreath that was almost of relief. That one memory had troubled his ownjovial ease; now in his approaching poverty he might put it away from himforever.

  In the first light of a misty April sunrise they went out on the roadagain, and when they had walked a mile or so, Big Abel found some youngpokeberry shoots, which he boiled in his old quart cup with a slice ofbacon he had saved from supper. At noon they came upon a little farm andploughed a strip of land in payment for a dinner that was lavishly pressedupon them. The people were plain, poor, and kindly, and the farmer followedDan into the field with entreaties that he should leave the furrows andcome in to meet his family. "Let yo' darky do a bit of work if he wantsto," he urged, "but it makes me downright sick to see one of General Lee'ssoldiers 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 clodsof earth, and returned to the house, where he was placed in the seat ofhonour and waited on by a troop of enthusiastic red-cheeked maidens, eachof whom cut one of the remaining buttons from his coat. Here he was askedto 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 ofChericoke hung like a star above his road, and he struggled a little nearerday by day.

  Sometimes ploughing, sometimes chopping a pile of logs, and again lying forhours in the warm grass by the way, they travelled slowly toward the valleythat held Dan's desire. The chill April dawns broke over them, and thegenial April sunshine warmed them through after a drenching in a pearlyshower. They watched the buds swell and the leaves open in the wood, thewild violets bloom in sheltered places, and the dandelions troop in ranksamong the grasses by the road. Dan, halting to rest in the mild weather,would fall often into a revery long and patient, like those of extreme oldage. With the sun shining upon his relaxed body and his eyes on the brightdust that floated in the slanting beams, he would lie for hours speechless,absorbed, filled with visions. One day he found a mountain laurel floweringin the woods, and gathering a spray he sat with it in his hands and dreamedof Betty. When Big Abel touched him on the arm he turned with a laugh andstruggled 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 andlet the dreams come as they will."

  "De bes' place ter res' is on yo' own do' step," Big Abel responded, andquickening 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 abig brick house and found there a woman who lived alone with the memoriesof a son she had lost at Gettysburg. At their knock she came herself, witha few old servants, prompt, tearful, and very sad; and when she saw Dan'scoat by the light of the lamp behind her, she put out her hands with a cryof welcome and drew him in, weeping softly as her white head touched hissleeve.

  "My mother is dead, thank God," he murmured, and at his words she looked upat him a little startled.

  "Others have come," she said, "but they were not like you; they did nothave 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 anold servant, she led the way upstairs to her son's room, and laid out thedead man's clothes upon his bed.

  "We keep house for the soldiers now," she said, and went out to make thingsready.

  As he plunged into the warm water and dried himself upon the fresh linenshe had left, he heard the sound of passing feet in the broad hall, andfrom the outside kitchen there floated a savoury smell that reminded him ofChericoke at the supper hour. With the bath and the clean clothes his oldinstincts revived within him, and as he looked into the glass he caughtsomething of the likeness of his college days. Beau Montjoy was not starvedout after all, he thought with a laugh, he was only plastered over withmalaria and dirt.

  For three days he remained in the big brick house lying at ease upon a sofain the library, or listening to the tragic voice of the mother who talkedof her only son. When she questioned him about Pickett's charge, he raisedhimself on his pillows and talked excitedly, his face flushing as if fromfever.

  "Your son was with Armistead," he said, "and they all went down likeheroes. I can see old Armistead now with his hat on his sword's point as hewaved to us through the smoke. 'Who will follow me, boys?' he cried, andthe next instant dashed straight on the defences. When he got to the secondline there were only six men with him, beside Colonel Martin, and your sonwas one of them. My God! it was worth living to die like that."

  "And it is worth living to have a son die like that," she added, and weptsoftly in the stillness.

  The next morning he went on again despite her prayers. The rest was all toopleasant, but the memory of his valley was before him, and he thirsted forthe pure winds that blew down the long white turnpike.

  "There is no peace for me until I see it again," he said at parting, andwith a lighter step went out upon the April roads once more.

  The way was easier now for his limbs were stronger, and he wore the deadman's shoes upon his feet. For a time it almost seemed that the strength ofthat other soldier, who lay in a strange soil, had entered into his veinsand made him hardier to endure. And so through the clear days theytravelled with few pauses, munching as they walked from the food Big Abelcarried in a basket on his arm.

  "We've been coming for three weeks, and we are getting nearer," said Danone evening, as he climbed the spur of a mountain range at the hour ofsunset. Then his glance swept the wide horizon, and the stick in his handfell suddenly to the ground; for faint and blue and bathed in the sunsetlight he saw his own hills crowding against the sky. As he looked his heartswelled with tears, and turning away he covered his quivering face.