The Battle Ground Part 58

Crossing to where she sat, Betty leaned out above the climbing roses and glanced to the mountains huddled against the sky.

"It is General Sheridan going up the valley," she said.

VIII

THE LAST STAND

In the face of a damp April wind a remnant of Lee's army pushed forward along an old road skirted by thin pine woods. As the column moved on slowly, it threw out skirmishers on either flank, where the Federal cavalry hovered in the distance. Once in an open clearing it formed into a hollow square and marched in battle line to avoid capture. While the regiments kept in motion the men walked steadily in the ranks, with their hollowed eyes staring straight ahead from their gaunt, tanned faces; but at the first halt they fell like logs upon the roadside, sleeping amid the sound of shots and the stinging cavalry. With the cry of "Forward!" they struggled to their feet again, and went stumbling on into the vast uncertainty and the approaching night. Breathless, starving, with their rags pinned together, and their mouths bleeding from three days' rations of parched corn, they still kept onward, marching with determined eyes to whatever and wherever the end might be. Petersburg had fallen, Richmond was in flames behind them, the Confederacy was, perhaps, buried in the ruins of its Capitol, but Lee was still somewhere to the front, so his army followed.

"How long have we been marching, boys? I can't remember," asked Dan, when, after a short rest, they formed again and started forward over the old road. In the tatters of his gray uniform, with his broken shoes tied on his feet and his black hair hanging across his eyes, he might have been one of the beggars who warm themselves in the sun of Southern countries.

"Oh, I reckon we left the Garden of Eden about six thousand years ago,"

responded a wag from somewhere--he was too tired to recognize the voice.

"There! the skirmishers have struck that blamed cavalry again. Plague them!

They're as bad as wasps!"

"Has anybody some parched corn?" inquired Bland, plaintively. "I'll trade a whole raw ear for it. It makes my gums bleed so, I can't chew it."

Dan plunged his hand into his pocket, and drew out the corn which he had sh.e.l.led and parched at the last halt. As he exchanged it for the "whole raw ear," he fell to wondering vaguely what had become of Big Abel since that dim point in eternity when they had left the trenches that surrounded Petersburg. Then time was divided into periods of nights and days, now night and day alike were made up in breathless marching, in throwing out skirmishers against those "wasps" of cavalrymen, and in trying to force aching teeth to grind parched corn. Panting and sick with hunger, he struggled on like a driven beast that sees the place ahead, where he must turn and grapple for the end with the relentless hunter on his track.

As the day ended the moist wind gathered strength and sang in his ears as he crept forward--now sleeping, now waking, for a time filled with warm memories of his college life, and again fighting over the last hopeless campaign from the Wilderness to the trenches where Petersburg had fallen.

They had yielded step by step, but the great hunter had pressed on, and now the thin brigades were gathering for the last stand together.

Overhead he heard the soughing of the pines, and around him the steady tramp of feet too tired to lift themselves from out the heavy mud. Straight above in the m.u.f.fled sky a star shone dimly, and for a time he watched it in his effort to keep awake. Then he began on the raw corn in his pocket, sh.e.l.ling it from the cob as he walked along; but when the taste of blood rose to his lips, he put the ear away again, and stooped to rub his eyes with a handful of damp earth. Then, at last, in sheer desperation, he loosened the grip upon his thoughts, and stumbled on, between waking and sleeping, into the darkness that lay ahead.

In the road before him the door at Cheric.o.ke opened wide as on the old Christmas Eves, and he saw the Major and the Governor draining their gla.s.ses under the garlands of mistletoe and holly, while Betty and Virginia, in dresses of white tarleton, stood against the ruddy glow that filled the panelled parlour. The cheerful Christmas smell was in the air--the smell of apple toddy, of roasted turkey, of plum pudding in a blaze of alcohol. As he entered after his long ride from college, Betty came up to him and slipped a warm white hand into his cold one, while he met the hazel beams from beneath her lashes.

"I hope you have brought Jack Morson," she said. "Virginia is waiting. See how lovely she looks in her white flounces, with the string of coral about her neck."

"But the war, Betty?" he asked, with blinking eyes, and as he put out his hand to touch the pearls upon her bosom, he saw that it was whole again--no wound was there, only the snowflakes that fell from his sleeve upon her breast. "What of the war, dear? I must go back to the army."

Betty laughed long and merrily.

"Why, you're dreaming, Dan," she said. "It all comes of those wicked stories of the Major's. In a moment you will believe that this is really 1812, and you've gone without your rations."

"Thank G.o.d!" he cried aloud, and the sound of his own voice woke him, as he slipped and went down in a mudhole upon the road. The Christmas smell faded from his nostrils; in its place came the smoke from Pinetop's pipe--a faithful friend until the last. Overhead the star was still shining, and to the front he heard a single shot from the hovering cavalry, withdrawing for the night.

"G.o.d d.a.m.n this mud!" called a man behind him, as he lurched sideways from the ranks. Farther away three hoa.r.s.e voices, the remnant of a once famous glee club, were singing in the endeavour to scare off sleep:--

"Rally round the flag, boys, rally once again!"

And suddenly he was fighting in the tangles of the Wilderness, crouching behind a charred oak stump, while he loaded and fired at the little puffs of smoke that rose from the undergrowth beyond. He saw the low marshland, the stunted oaks and pines, and the heavy creepers that were pushed aside and trampled underfoot, and at his feet he saw a company officer with a bullet hole through his forehead and a covering of pine needles upon his face. About him the small twigs fell, as if a storm swept the forest, and as he dodged, like a sharpshooter from tree to tree, he saw a rush of flame and smoke in the distance where the woods were burning. Above the noise of the battle, he heard the shrieks of the wounded men in the track of the fire; and once he met a Union and a Confederate soldier, each shot through the leg, drawing each other back from the approaching flames. Then, as he pa.s.sed on, tearing at the cartridges with his teeth, he came upon a sergeant in Union clothes, sitting against a pine stump with his c.o.c.ked rifle in his hand, and his eyes on the wind-blown smoke. A moment before the man may have gone down at his shot, he knew--and yet, as he looked, an instinct stronger than the instinct to kill was alive within him, and he rushed on, dragging his enemy with him from the terrible woods. "I hope you are not much hurt," he said, as he placed him on the ground and ran back to where the line was charging. "One life has been paid for," he thought, as he rushed on to kill--and fell face downward on the wheel-ruts of the old road.

"Rally round the flag, boys, rally once again,"

sang the three hoa.r.s.e voices, straining against the wind.

Dan struggled to his feet, and the scene shifted.

He was back in his childhood, and the Major had just brought in a slave he had purchased from Rainy-day Jones--"the plague spot in the county," as the angry old gentleman declared.

Dan sat on the pile of kindling wood upon the kitchen hearth and stared at the poor black creature shivering in the warmth, his face distorted with the toothache, and a dirty rag about his jaw. He heard Aunt Rhody snorting indignantly as she basted the turkeys, and he watched his grandmother bustling back and forth with whiskey and hot plasters.

"Who made slavery, sir?" asked the boy suddenly, his hands in his breeches pockets and his head bent sideways.

The Major started.

"G.o.d, sir," he promptly replied.

"Then I think it very strange of G.o.d," said the boy, "and when I grow up, I shall set them all free, grandpa--I shall set them free even if I have to fight to do it, sir."

"What! like poor free Levi?" stormed the Major.

"Wake up, confound you!" bawled somebody in his ear. "You've lurched against my side until my ribs are sore. I say, are you going on forever, anyhow? We've halted for the night."

"I can't stop!" cried Dan, groping in the darkness, then he fell heavily upon the damp ground, while a voice down the road began shouting, "Detail for guard!" Half asleep and cursing, the men responded to their names and hurried off, and as the silence closed in, the army slept like a child upon the roadside.

With the first glimmer of dawn they were on the march again, pa.s.sing all day through the desolate flat country, where the women ran weeping to the doorways, and waved empty hands as they went by. Once a girl in a homespun dress, with a spray of apple blossoms in her black hair, brought out a wooden bucket filled with b.u.t.termilk and pa.s.sed it along the line.

"Fight to the end, boys," she cried defiantly, "and when the end comes, keep on fighting. If you go back on Lee there's not a woman in Virginia will touch your hand."

"That's right, little gal!" shrieked a husky private. "Three cheers for Ma.r.s.e Robert! an' we'll whip the earth in our bar' feet befo' breakfast."

"All the same I wish old Stonewall was along," muttered Pinetop. "If I could jest see old Stonewall or his ghost ahead, I'd know thar was an open road somewhere that Sheridan ain't got his eye on."

As the sun rose high, refugees from Richmond flocked after them to shout that the town had been fired by the citizens, who had moved, with their families, to the Capitol Square as the flames spread from the great tobacco warehouses. Men who had wives and children in the city groaned as they marched farther from the ashes of their homes, and more than one staggered back into the ranks and went onward under a heavier burden.

"Wall, I reckon things are fur the best--or they ain't." remarked Pinetop, in a cheerful tone. "Thar's no goin' agin that, you bet. What's the row back thar, I wonder?"

The hovering enemy, grown bolder, had fallen upon the flank, and the stragglers and the rear guard were beating off the cavalry, when a regiment was sent back to relieve the pressure. Returning, Pinetop, who was of the attacking party, fell gravely to moralizing upon the scarcity of food.

"I've tasted every plagued thing that grows in this country except dirt,"

he observed, "an' I'm goin' to kneel down presently and take a good square mouthful of that."

"That's one thing we shan't run short of," replied Dan, stepping round a mud hole. "By George, we've got to march in a square again across this open. I believe when I set out for heaven, I'll find some of those confounded Yankee troopers watching the road."

Forming in battle line they advanced cautiously across the clearing, while the skirmishing grew brisker at the front. That night they halted but once upon the way, standing to meet attack against a strip of pines, watching with drawn breath while the enemy crept closer. They heard him in the woods, felt him in the air, saw him in the darkness--like a gigantic coil he approached inch by inch for the last struggle. Now and then a shot rang out, and the little band thrilled to a soldier, and waited breathlessly for the last charge that might end it all.

"There's only one thing worse than starvation, and it's defeat!" cried Dan aloud; then the column swung on and the cry of "Close up, there! close up!"

mingled in his ears with the steady tramp upon the road.

In the early morning the shots grew faster, and as the column stopped in the cover of a wood, the bullets came singing among the tree-tops, from the left flank where the skirmishers had struck the enemy. During the short rest Dan slept leaning against a twisted aspen, and when Pinetop shook him, he awoke with a dizziness in his head that sent the flat earth slamming against the sky.

"I believe I'm starving, Pinetop," he said, and his voice rang like a bell in his ears. "I can't see where to put my feet, the ground slips about so."