The Debatable Land Part 13

Whatsoever supplication or remonstrance Thaddeus may have sent up by himself, he took council of some inward monitor, and did not "sputter."

He had his reward from Helen, who fell into a mood of tentative caressing.

In October they went to Washington. Thaddeus sniffed a few weeks about the streets of the capital, and returned to Hamilton, his bank and club and lonely house, in a state of mind to be expressed by a shrug and the lifting of a white hand in deprecation. In his pursuit of happiness the scent seemed to be lost, the hunt all astray. He realized more than ever how much of his fortune in that commodity he had staked on one issue. He doubted, after all, the wisdom of it, but could not find a way, nor in himself any impulse, to draw back. "The new generation, these new times!

They are strenuous, and one grows old." The air was full of the war; the suck of the whirlpool was felt in every corner.

Part II

Chapter XII

Antietam.

A big gun boomed far away in the dark. From nearer came the snip-snap of picket-shooting, which increased to a rattle and settled into volleying.

On the hill to the right some one climbed on a gun-carriage and stood vaguely against the sky.

Shadows came running from the door of a barn into the gra.s.s. A sleeper cried out and sat up at their feet, rubbing his trodden hand.

"What do you make it?"

"We have no troops over there. They're shooting each other."

"Shooting their midnight dreams."

"Midnight! It's past three."

"How should I know? I was king of the Pleiades five minutes ago."

"Time for trouble to begin?"

"It won't be light for an hour."

"No. Turn in, gentlemen."

Shadows sat upright in the gra.s.s and muttered to each other.

"What's the Pleiades, Jimmie?"

"Do' know. Wa'n't any at home as I know of."

"Stars, you galoop."

"That's what the Johnnies were shooting at."

"Hey! He must 'a' been jokin'," from the shadow called Jimmie.

"Who?"

"The cap'n said he was king of 'em, he did."

"Oh, go to--"

"Can't see any stars to-night."

The distant volleying died down to a rattle--to the crack of a single rifle far away, lonely in the immense night, the encircling silence.

The woods went around behind the hill on the right. On the left a gra.s.sy field stretched off in the dark. One knew by remembrance that it sloped down a gradual mile, till it came somewhere to a slow creek with a mud bottom. Outposts lay forward in a thin line of woods. Some one said that the pickets were in an open field beyond, and that some of them belonged to the other side. In that tense, visionary hour one did not conceive of an enemy as of separate men, watchful in fields, sleeping in distant woods, but of a creature, a thing of folded miles, crouching, sinister, hostile, with red tongue and bitter fangs, waiting for the dawn.

Some of the dark lumps in the gra.s.s were motionless, some stirred and muttered. Through the open door of the barn a group of men could be seen around a lantern and leaning forward. One of them marked and pointed with his finger. A horse kicked and squealed on the hill among the guns.

A dog howled in some indefinite distance and direction. The birds began to twitter in the trees of the beetling woods. A creeping wind chilled the dew on the faces of sleepers and watchers in the open. The blackness grew conscious--dimly gray.

Two or three came out of the barn and ran behind it. In a moment there was a cluttered thudding of horses' feet, which died away down the field. Pickets began shooting in front. Little things whimpered and whined overhead. An officer, by the glimmer of his straps, went forward and shouted in the woods. The near firing stopped, or most of it, but the things overhead continued to whimper and whine. The lumps on the gra.s.s began to sit up and strip off blankets.

"What's he stopping 'em for?"

"Nothing in it."

"The Johnnies keep it up."

"They're firing high."

Fires of gathered dead-wood sprang up on the woods' edge--a score in sight, then a hundred, smoking and crackling. A low murmur, a sense of mult.i.tude, grew as the darkness lifted its oppression. Men sipped and munched by the fires. Some one shouted, "Get ready, men!" A cannon belched and bellowed on the hill to the right, then another and another, to a pa.s.sionate, throbbing roar.

"Company B, forward! Halt here!"

Men poured around in crowds and formed in triple lines. A sh.e.l.l dropped through the roof of the empty barn and splintered some of the boards outward with its burst.

The misty sky was breaking for a clear day. Red clouds of sunrise streamed like pennants in the southwest. A man in the front line pitched forward and lay still.

"Who's that?"

"I do' know."

"Aiken, I guess."

"There, now! You jabbed me twice. Hold up your bayonet."

Men panted as if they had already been running, and shifted their feet nervously.

"To-day's my birthday."