Works of Robert W Chambers

by Robert W. Chambers

  “Keenan,” he called, “do you want volunteers?”

  “Not yet — damn the Texans!” bawled Keenan through the increasing din.

  Douglas began, “Cleymore, they are—” and fell over stone dead.

  Cleymore heard the miniê-balls’ thud! thud! as they struck the dead body, half flung across the breastwork, and Keenan, maddened by the bullets which searched his dwindling files, bellowed hoarsely, as one by one his guns flashed and roared, “Now! In the name of God, lads, to hell with them!”

  Like red devils in the pit the cannoneers worked at their guns, looming through the infernal smoke pall stripped to their waists. Keenan, soaked with sweat and black from eyes to ankle, raged like a fiend from squad to squad while his guns crashed and the whole hill vomited flame.

  Thicker and blacker rolled the smoke from the battery emplacement, until it shrouded the hill. Then out of the darkness reeled Keenan howling for volunteers and weeping over the loss of another gun.

  “Three left?” motioned Cleymore faintly with his lips.

  “Three! Number four dismounted and all killed; send me some of your infantry!” and the artilleryman plunged into the blazing furnace again. Below them the grass and abatis caught fire and the smarting smoke of green wood almost blinded Cleymore. Murphy and his engineers were at work among the crackling logs, but after a while the dull blows of their axes died away and Cleymore knew they were dead.

  “More men for the guns!” roared Keenan from the darkness, and a dozen Rhode Islanders tumbled out of their burrows and groped their way into the battery. In another moment Keenan came staggering out again, gasping like a fish and waving his arms blindly.

  “They’ve got another gun, Cleymore, — only two now, — more men for the guns!”

  Cleymore, half fainting from the loss of blood, motioned to his men for volunteers; and they came, cheering for old New York, and vanished, engulfed in the battery smoke.

  The hill was swept by fierce cyclones of lead; bullets flew in streams, whistling, hurtling among the rocks, rebounding into the rifle-pits, carrying death to those below. Great shells tore through the clouds, bursting and shattering the cliff overhead. A whirlwind of flame from the burning bridge swept over the hillside, hiding the river and the heights opposite, and the burning abatis belched smoke and torrents of sparks. Cleymore sat down near the burrow, and picked the bits of cloth from the long tear which the bullet had made in his flesh above the knee. The last of the engineer company came toiling up from the railroad bridge, and the lieutenant nodded to his question, “Yes, the bridge is blown out of the water. Where can I put my men in, Captain?”

  Cleymore pointed to the pits, and they went into them, cheering shrilly. A moment later a shell fell into one of the crowded pits and exploded, throwing out a column of sand and bodies torn limb from limb. Only one gun was firing now from Keenan’s battery, but from that one gun the lightning sped continuously, fed by a constantly renewed stream of volunteers. Cleymore, watching Keenan, thought that he had really gone mad. Perhaps he had, and perhaps that is why Heaven directed a bullet to his brain, before the loss of his last gun should kill him with grief. Then a shell smashed up the muzzle of the last gun, and the remnants of the servants dragged themselves away to lie panting like hounds on the scorched earth, or die inch by inch from some gaping wound.

  “The jig is up,” said Cleymore aloud to himself.

  For a quarter of an hour the enemy’s guns rained shells into the extinct crater — the tomb of Keenan and his cannon. Then, understanding that Keenan had been silenced forever, their fire died out, and Cleymore could hear bugles blowing clearly in the distance.

  He staggered to his feet and called to his men, but of the 10th New York Rifles, only thirty came stumbling from the pits. Pillsbury also answered the call, sauntering unconcernedly from the burrow whither he had carried Cleymore’s charge.

  All around them the wounded were shrieking for water, and Cleymore aided his men to carry them to the spring which flowed sparkling from the rocks above. It was out of the question to remove them, — it was useless to think of burying the dead. The three days’ struggle for the hill had ended, and now all the living would have to leave, — all except one.

  “Pillsbury,” said Cleymore, “take my men, and strike for the turnpike due north. I can’t walk — I am too weak yet, but you have time to get out. March!”

  The men refused, and Pillsbury called for a litter of rifles, but a volley whistled in among them and they reeled.

  “Save thet there flag!” shouted Pillsbury, “I’ve got the guidon!”

  Cleymore lay on the ground motionless, and when they lifted him his head fell back.

  “Daid,” said Pillsbury, soberly, “poor cuss!” A rifleman threw his jacket over Cleymore’s face, and started running down the hill to where the colour-guard was closing around a bundle of flags, black and almost dropping from the staffs.

  “Save the colours!” they cried, and staggered on toward the north.

  III.

  IT may have been thirst, it may have been the groans of the wounded that roused Cleymore. He was lying close by the rivulet that ran from the rock spring, and he plunged hands and head into it and soaked his fill.

  The wound on his leg had stiffened, but to his surprise he found it neatly dressed and bandaged. Had aid arrived?

  “Hello!” he called.

  The deep sigh of a dying man was his only answer. He hardly dared to look around. The air was stifling with the scent of blood and powder and filthy clothing, and he rose painfully to his feet and tottered into the cool burrow among the rocks.

  His blanket and flask lay there, but before he raised the flask to his lips he lifted the corner of the blanket nervously. Underneath stood a small oblong box, into which was screwed an electric button. Two insulated wires entered the ground directly in front of the box, which was marked in black letters, “Watson’s Excelsior Soap.”

  Cleymore replaced the blanket, swallowed a mouthful of whiskey and lay down, utterly exhausted. It was late in the afternoon when he awoke from the pain in his leg, but somebody had bandaged it again while he slept, and he was able to move out into the intrenchments. Most of the wounded were dead — the rest were dying in silence. He did what he could for Cunningham who joked feebly and watched Morris with quiet eyes. Morris died first, and Cunningham, hearing the death-rattle in his comrade’s throat, murmured: “Phin he lived he bate me, but oi’ll give him a race to the Saints fur his money! Is Dick Morris dead now?”

  “Dead,” said Cleymore.

  “Thin, good-bye, Captain dear,” whispered Cunningham.

  At first Cleymore thought he was sleeping.

  The evening fell over the hilltop, and the last of the wounded shivered and died with drawn face upturned to the driving clouds. Cleymore covered the boy’s face — he was scarcely sixteen — and sat down with his back against a rock.

  The wreck of Keenan’s battery rose before him in the twilight, stark and mute, silhouetted against the western horizon. Lights began to sparkle along the opposite river bank, and now, from the heights, torches swung in semi-circles signalling victory for the army of the South, death and disaster to the North. Far away over the wooded hills dull sounds came floating on the breeze, the distant rhythmic cadence of volley firing. There were fires too, faint flares of light on the horizon where Thomas was “standing like a rock.” On a nearer slope a house and barn were burning, lighting up the stumps and rocks in the clearing, and casting strange shadows over the black woods. In the gathering twilight someone came down the cliffs at his back, treading carefully among the shellsplit fragments, and Cleymore saw it was the little staff-officer. She did not see him until he called her.

  “I want to thank you for dressing that scratch of mine,” he said, rising.

  “You are very welcome,” she said, “is it better?”

  “Yes — and you?”

  “You saved my life,” she said.

  “But are you burnt — y
ou must have been—”

  “No — only stifled. Are the wounded alive? I did what I could.”

  “They are dead,” said Cleymore. She unhooked her sabre, and sat down beside him looking off over the valley.

  After a silence he said: “I suppose you are one of our spies — I have heard of the women spies, and I once saw Belle Boyd. How did you happen to take the place of an aide-de-camp?”

  “Am I to tell all my secrets to an infantry captain?” she said, with a trace of a smile in her blue eyes.

  “Oh, I suppose not,” he answered, and relapsed into silence.

  Presently she drew a bit of bacon and hard-tack from her pouch and quietly divided it. They both drank from the rivulet after the meal was finished. She brushed the water from her lips with a sun-tanned hand, and looking straight at Cleymore, said: “The hill below the abatis is mined, is it not?”

  “Now, really,” said Cleymore, “am I to tell all my secrets to a girl spy?” She stared at him for a moment, and then smiled.

  “I know it already,” she said.

  “Oh,” said Cleymore, “and do you know where the wires are buttoned?”

  “Wires?” she exclaimed.

  “Of course. Be thankful that poor Murphy’s mines at the bridge were old-fashioned. If there had been wires there, you would not be sitting here.”

  “And you have stayed to fire this mine?” she said at length.

  “Yes.”

  “The bridges are gone, and the river is impassable. It will be days before Longstreet’s men can cross.”

  “I know it,” said Cleymore, “but when they come, I’ll be here — and so will the mine.”

  The spy dropped her clasped hands into her lap.

  “I’ll blow them to hell!” said Cleymore savagely, glaring at the silent dead around him. Then he begged her pardon for forgetting himself, and leaned against the rock to adjust his eyeglasses.

  “That would be useless butchery,” said the girl, earnestly.

  “That will do,” said Cleymore, in a quiet voice.

  The girl shrank away as though she had been struck. Cleymore noticed it, and said: “If you are a Government spy, you are subject to army regulations. I would rather treat you as a woman, but I cannot while you wear that uniform or hold a commission. How, in Heaven’s name, did you come to enter the service? You can’t be eighteen — you are of gentle breeding?”

  “I am a spy!” she exclaimed, “and I thank God, and I hate the enemies of my country!”

  “Amen,” said Cleymore, wondering at her fierce outburst.

  “Do you not hate the Confederates?” she demanded.

  “No,” he answered, gravely, “but I hate the rebellion.”

  “But you must hate your enemies; I do.”

  “I don’t; it makes me sick to see them go down — splendid fellows, — Americans, and to think that such troops might have stood shoulder to shoulder with our own, under the same flag, against the world! — aye, against ten worlds! I hate the rebels? By Heaven, no! Think of Thomas and Grant and Lee and Jackson leading a united army against those thieving French in Mexico! Think of Sherman and Sheridan and Johnston and Stuart facing the fat-brained treachery of England! I tell you I respect the rebels. Look at that heap of dead! Look at those smashed guns! Look at me — the defeated commander, crouching in this slaughter pen, waiting to spring a mine — and die. The men who reduced me to this have my respect as soldiers and my love and admiration as Americans, but if I could blow them all to the four winds by one touch of an electric button, I’d do it, and bless the chance!” The girl trembled at his fervour.

  “That is a strange creed,” she murmured.

  “Creed? The Union, in the Name of God — that’s my creed!”

  IV.

  THE next day it rained. The rebel batteries flung a dozen shells among Keenan’s ruined guns, but, receiving no answer, ceased firing. Cleymore was stiff and ill, but he managed to reach the intrenchment and rest his field-glasses against a rock. The four batteries were in motion, filing along the river bank toward the cemetery where a flag drooped above a marquee, the headquarters of some general. The Texan Riflemen were moving about the scrub-oak, showing themselves fearlessly, and a battalion of engineers was hard at work on the smouldering piers of the bridge. Dark masses of troops appeared on the distant hillsides as far as the eye could reach, and along the railroad track cavalry were riding through the rain.

  All day long Cleymore watched the rebel army, and at night he shared his hard-tack and bacon with the girl. They spoke very little to each other, but when Cleymore was looking at the rebels her eyes never left him. Once, when he crept into his cave to swallow a drop of brandy, she hurried from rifle-pit to rifle-pit, evidently searching for something, but when again he reappeared she was seated listlessly against the rocky wall, her blond head buried in her hands. And that night too, when he was tossing in feverish slumber, she passed like a shadow through the intrenchment, over rocks, down among the dead in the hollows, her lantern shining on distorted faces and clenched hands.

  The next day the rain still fell; the engineers were steadily at work on the ruined bridge, but the river had swollen enormously, and Cleymore could not see that they had progressed. He went back to his cave and dropped on the blanket, the box marked “Watson’s Excelsior Soap” at his side. The girl brought him a bit of hard-tack and a cup of water. It was the last crumb left in the camp, except three biscuits which she had in her own pockets. She did not tell him so.

  Toward midnight he fell asleep, and when she saw that he slept, she bent over him and looked into his face, lighting a match. Then she softly raised the blanket and saw his arm encircling a box marked “Watson’s Excelsior Soap.” As she stooped to touch the wires he stirred in his sleep and smiled, and she shrank away, covering her eyes with her hands. The next day she brought Cleymore his biscuit and cup of water, for his strength was ebbing, and he could scarcely crawl to the breastworks. She ate nothing herself. The engineers were progressing a little, the sun shone on the wasted hills, and the music of a Confederate band came in gusts across the river from the cemetery.

  “They are playing ‘Dixie,’” said the girl; but Cleymore only sighed and pulled the dirty blanket over his face. The next day she brought him his biscuit, there was but one left now, and he, not knowing, asked for another, and she gave him the last.

  About noon he called to her, and she helped him to the breastworks and held his field-glasses. The engineers had made alarming progress, for the river was falling rapidly.

  “They’ll be over to-morrow,” he said.

  When he was lying in his blanket once more, he beckoned her to come close beside him.

  “Are you ill?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “You are so white and frail — I thought you might be ill.”

  “Oh, no,” she said.

  “Have you plenty to eat?”

  “Plenty.”

  “When are you going?”

  “Going?” she faltered.

  “You must go, of course,” he said, querulously, “they will be over the river to-morrow.”

  “And you?” said the girl.

  “It’s my business to stay here.”

  “And — fire the mine?”

  “And fire the mine,” he repeated.

  “What is the use? They will enter all the same.”

  “Not all of them,” said Cleymore, grimly.

  “No — not all of them — a hundred half-starved young fellows will be mangled — a hundred mothers will be childless — but what matter, Captain Cleymore?”

  “What matter,” he repeated,—” my orders are to defend this hill until hell freezes over, and I am going to do it.” Then, again, he wearily asked pardon for his words.

  Toward evening she saw he was sleeping; his eye-glasses had fallen beside him on the blanket. Almost timidly she picked them up, held them a moment, then bent her head and touched them with her lips.

  The morni
ng broke in a burst of splendid sunlight. Over the river the rebel bands were playing when Cleymore’s hot eyes unclosed, but he could not rise from his blanket.

  The girl brought him a cup of water and held it while he drank.

  “There are no more biscuits,” she said.

  “I shall not need them,” he murmured, “what are the rebels doing?”

  “They are massing to cross. The bridge is almost ready.”

  “And I’m ready,” he said, “good-bye.”

  The girl knelt beside him and took both of his hands in hers. “I am not going,” she said.

  “I order you,” he muttered.

  “I refuse,” she answered gently.

  A hectic flush touched the hollows under his eyes and he raised his head. “I order you to leave these works,” he said angrily.

  “And I refuse,” she repeated gently.

  A burst of music from the river bank came up to them as their eyes met in mute conflict. Cleymore’s hand instinctively felt for the button and the wires, then he gave a great cry and sat up among his rags, and the girl rose slowly to her feet beside him.

  “Traitor!” he gasped, and pointed at her with shaking hands.

  She turned perfectly white for a moment, then a wan smile touched her lips, and she quietly drew a revolver from her jacket.

  “I am not a traitor,” she said, “I am a Confederate spy, and I cut those wires last night. You are my prisoner, Captain Cleymore.”

  The silence was broken by the noise from the bands, now massing about the further end of the completed bridge. Cleymore bent silently over the ruined wires, touched the button, then, turning savagely, whipped his revolver to his head and pulled the trigger. The hammer struck an empty cylinder, and he flung it from him with a sob.

  In an instant the girl was on her knees beside him, raised him in her arms, holding his head on her shoulder.

  “Is it so hard to surrender to a woman?” she asked, “see, I give you my revolver — here — now shoot me down at your feet! I cut those wires! Shoot fearlessly — Ah, do you think I care for my life?”