The Battle Ground Part 55

"Take those tatters off your backs--take 'em off!" responded Champe, genial and undismayed, swinging easily along in his worn gray uniform, his black plume curling over his soft felt hat.

As Dan watched him, standing in the doorway, he felt, with a sudden melancholy, that a mental gulf had yawned between them. The last grim months which had aged him with experiences as with years, had left Champe apparently unchanged. All the deeper knowledge, which he had bought with his youth for the price, had pa.s.sed over his cousin like the clouds, leaving him merely gay and kind as he had been of old.

"h.e.l.lo, Beau!" called Champe, stretching out his hand as he drew near. "I just heard you were over here, so I thought I'd take a look. How goes the war?"

Dan refilled his pipe and borrowed a light from Pinetop.

"To tell the truth," he replied, "I have come to the conclusion that the fun and frolic of war consist in picket duty and guarding mule teams."

"Well, these excessive dissipations have taken up so much of your time that I've hardly laid eyes on you since you got routed by malaria. Any news from home?"

"Grandma sent me a Christmas box, which she smuggled through, heaven knows how. We had a jolly dinner that day, and Pinetop and I put on our first clean clothes for three months. Big Abel got a linsey suit made at Cheric.o.ke--I hope he'll come along in it."

"Oh, Beau, Beau!" lamented Champe. "How have the mighty fallen? You aren't so particular now about wearing only white or black ties, I reckon."

"Well, shoestrings are usually black, I believe," returned Dan, with a laugh, raising his hand to his throat.

Champe seated himself upon the end of an oak log, and taking off his hat, ran his hand through his curling hair. "I was at home last summer on a furlough," he remarked, "and I declare, I hardly knew the valley. If we ever come out of this war it will take an army with ploughshares to bring the soil up again. As for the woods--well, well, we'll never have them back in our day."

"Did you see Uplands?" asked Dan eagerly.

"For a moment. It was hardly safe, you know, so I was at home only a day.

Grandpa told me that the place had lain under a shadow ever since Virginia's death. She was buried in Hollywood--it was impossible to bring her through the lines they said--and Betty and Mrs. Ambler have taken this very hardly."

"And the Governor," said Dan, with a tremor in his voice as he thought of Betty.

"And Jack Morson," added Champe, "he fell at Brandy Station when I was with him. At first he was wounded only slightly, and we tried to get him to the rear, but he laughed and went straight in again. It was a sabre cut that finished him at the last."

"He was a first-rate chap," commented Dan, "but I never knew exactly why Virginia fell in love with him."

"The other fellow never does. To be quite candid, it is beyond my comprehension how a certain lady can prefer the infantry to the cavalry--yet she does emphatically."

Dan coloured.

"Was grandpa well?" he inquired lamely.

With a laugh Champe flung one leg over the other, and clasped his knee.

"It's an ill wind that blows n.o.body good," he responded. "Grandpa's thoughts are so much given to the Yankees that he has become actually angelic to the rest of us. By the way, do you know that Mr. Blake is in the army?"

"What?" cried Dan, aghast.

"Oh, I don't mean that he really carries a rifle--though he swears he would if he only had twenty years off his shoulders--but he has become our chaplain in young Chrysty's place, and the boys say there is more gun powder in his prayers than in our biggest battery."

"Well, I never!" exclaimed Dan.

"You ought to hear him--it's better than fighting on your own account. Last Sunday he gave us a prayer in which he said: 'O Lord, thou knowest that we are the greatest army thou hast ever seen; put forth thy hand then but a very little and we will whip the earth.' By Jove, you look cosey here," he added, glancing into the hut where Dan and Pinetop slept in bunks of straw.

"I hope the roads won't dry before you've warmed your house." He shook hands again, and swung off amid the renewed jeers that issued from the open doorways.

Dan watched him until he vanished among the distant pines, and then, turning, went into the little hut where he found Pinetop sitting before a rude chimney, which he had constructed with much labour. A small book was open on his knee, over which his yellow head drooped like a child's, and Dan saw his calm face reddened by the glow of the great log fire.

"h.e.l.lo! What's that?" he inquired lightly.

The mountaineer started from his abstraction, and the blood swept to his forehead as he rose from the half of a flour barrel upon which he had been sitting.

"'Tain't nothin'," he responded, and as he towered to his great height his fair curls brushed the ceiling of crossed rails. In his awkwardness the book fell to the floor, and before he could reach it, Dan had stooped, with a laugh, and picked it up.

"I say, there are no secrets in this shebang," he said smiling. Then the smile went out, and his face grew suddenly grave, for, as the book fell open in his hand, he saw that it was the first primer of a child, and on the thumbed and tattered page the word "RAT" stared at him in capital letters.

"By George, man!" he exclaimed beneath his breath, as he turned from Pinetop to the blazing logs.

For the first time in his life he was brought face to face with the tragedy of hopeless ignorance for an inquiring mind, and the shock stunned him, at the moment, past the power of speech. Until knowing Pinetop he had, in the lofty isolation of his cla.s.s, regarded the plebeian in the light of an alien to the soil, not as a victim to the kindly society in which he himself had moved--a society produced by that free labour which had degraded the white workman to the level of the serf. At the instant the truth pierced home to him, and he recognized it in all the grimness of its pathos. Beside that genial plantation life which he had known he saw rising the wistful figure of the poor man doomed to conditions which he could not change--born, it may be, like Pinetop, self-poised, yet with an untaught intellect, grasping, like him, after the primitive knowledge which should be the birthright of every child. Even the spectre of slavery, which had shadowed his thoughts, as it had those of many a generous mind around him, faded abruptly before the very majesty of the problem that faced him now.

In his sympathy for the slave, whose bondage he and his race had striven to make easy, he had overlooked the white sharer of the negro's wrong. To men like Pinetop, slavery, stern or mild, could be but an equal menace, and yet these were the men who, when Virginia called, came from their little cabins in the mountains, who tied the flint-locks upon their muskets and fought uncomplainingly until the end. Not the need to protect a decaying inst.i.tution, but the instinct in every free man to defend the soil, had brought Pinetop, as it had brought Dan, into the army of the South.

"Look here, old man, you haven't been quite fair to me," said Dan, after the long silence. "Why didn't you ask me to help you with this stuff?"

"Wall, I thought you'd joke," replied Pinetop blushing, "and I knew yo'

n.i.g.g.e.r would."

"Joke? Good Lord!" exclaimed Dan. "Do you think I was born with so short a memory, you scamp? Where are those nights on the way to Romney when you covered me with your overcoat to keep me from freezing in the snow? Where, for that matter, is that march in Maryland when Big Abel and you carried me three miles in your arms after I had dropped delirious by the roadside? If you thought I'd joke you about this, Pinetop, all I can say is that you've turned into a confounded fool."

Pinetop came back to the fire and seated himself upon the flour barrel in the corner. "'Twas this way, you see," he said, breaking, for the first time, through his strong mountain reserve. "I al'ays thought I'd like to read a bit, 'specially on winter evenings at home, when the nights are long and you don't have to git up so powerful early in the mornings, but when I was leetle thar warn't n.o.body to teach me how to begin; maw she didn't know nothin' an' paw he was dead, though he never got beyond the first reader when he was 'live."

He looked up and Dan nodded gravely over his pipe.

"Then when I got bigger I had to work mighty hard to keep things goin'--an'

it seemed to me every time I took out that thar leetle book at night I got so dead sleepy I couldn't tell one letter from another; A looked jest like Z."

"I see," said Dan quietly. "Well, there's time enough here anyhow. It will be a good way to pa.s.s the evenings." He opened the primer and laid it on his knee, running his fingers carelessly through its dog-eared pages. "Do you know your letters?" he inquired in a professional tone.

"Lordy, yes," responded Pinetop. "I've got about as fur as this here place." He crossed to where Dan sat and pointed with a long forefinger to the printed words, his mild blue eyes beaming with excitement.

"I reckon I kin read that by myself," he added with an embarra.s.sed laugh.

"T-h-e c-a-t c-a-u-g-h-t t-h-e r-a-t. Ain't that right?"

"Perfectly. We'll pa.s.s on to the next." And they did so, sitting on the halves of a divided flour barrel before the blazing chimney.

From this time there were regular lessons in the little hut, Pinetop drawling over the soiled primer, or crouching, with his long legs twisted under him and his elbows awkwardly extended, while he filled a sheet of paper with sprawling letters.

"I'll be able to write to the old woman soon," he chuckled jubilantly, "an'

she'll have to walk all the way down the mounting to git it read."

"You'll be a scholar yet if this keeps up," replied Dan, slapping him upon the shoulder, as the mountaineer glanced up with a pleased and shining face. "Why, you mastered that first reader there in no time."

"A powerful heap of larnin' has to pa.s.s through yo' head to git a leetle to stick thar," commented Pinetop, wrinkling his brows. "Air we goin' to have the big book agin to-night?"

"The big book" was a garbled version of "Les Miserables," which, after running the blockade with a daring English sailor, had pa.s.sed from regiment to regiment in the resting army. At first Dan had begun to read with only Pinetop for a listener, but gradually, as the tale unfolded, a group of eager privates filled the little hut and even hung breathlessly about the doorway in the winter nights. They were mostly gaunt, unwashed volunteers from the hills or the low countries, to whom literature was only a vast silence and life a courageous struggle against greater odds. To Dan the picturesqueness of the scene lent itself with all the force of its strong lights and shadows, and with the glow of the pine torches on the open page, his eyes would sometimes wander from the words to rest upon the kindling faces in the s.h.a.ggy circle by the fire. Dirty, hollow-eyed, unshaven, it sat spellbound by the magic of the tale it could not read.