The Red Acorn Part 19

"I've been round looking over the field," said Kent, as he came up.

A contemptuous snort answered him.

"You ought to've been along. I saw a great many interesting things."

"O, yes, I s'pose. Awful interesting. Lot o' dead men laying around in the mud. 'Bout as interesting, I should say, as a spell o' setting on a Coroner's jury. The things you find interesting would bore anybody else to death."

Abe gave the obstinate clump a savage twist which only made its knots more rebellious, and he looked as if strongly tempted to throw it into the fire.

"Don't do it, Abe," said Kent, with a laugh that irritated Abe worse still. "Thread's thread, out here, a hundred miles from nowhere. You don't know where you'll get any more. Save it--my dear fellow--save it. Perchance you may yet sweetly beguile many an hour of your elegant leisure in unraveling its fantastic convolutions with your taper fingers, and----"

"Lord! Lord!" said Abe with an expression of deep weariness, but without looking in Kent's direction, "Who's pulled the string o' that clack-mill and set it going? When it gets started once it rolls out big words like punkins dropping out o' the tail of a wagon going up hill. And there's no way o' stopping it, either. You've just got to wiat till it runs down."

"The Proverbs say so fittingly that 'A fool delighteth not in wise instruction,'" said Kent, as he stepped around to the other side of the fire. His foot fell upon a projecting twig, the other end of which flew up and landed a very hot coal on the back of Abe's hand. Abe's action followed that of the twig, in teh suddenness of his upspringing. He hurled an oath and a firebrand at his comrade.

"This is really becoming domestic," said Kent as he laughingly dodged.

"The gentle amenities could not cl.u.s.ter more thickly around our fireside, even if we were married."

When Abe resumed his seat he did not come down exactly upon the spot from which he had arisen. It was a little farther to the right, where he had stuck the needle. He had forgotten about it, but he rose with a howl when it keenly reminded him that like the star-spangled banner, it "was still there."

"Don't rise on my account, I beg," said Kent with a deprecatory wave of the hand, as he hurried off to wher he could laugh with safety. A saucy drummer-boy, who neglected this precaution, received a cuff from Abe's heavy hand that thrilled the rest of the drum-corps with delight.

When Abe's wrath subsided from this ebullient stage back to its customary one of simmer, Kent ventured to return.

"Say," said he, pulling over the coats and blankets near the fire, "where's the canteen?"

"There it is by the cups. Can't you see it? If it was a snake it'd bite you."

"It's done that already, several times, or rather its contents have. You know what the Bible says, 'Biteth liek a serpent and stingeth like an adder?' Ah, here it is. But gloomy forebodings seize me: it is suspiciously light. Paradoxically, its lightness induces gravity in me.

But that pun is entirely too fine-drawn for camp atmosphere."

He shook the canteen near his ear. "Alas! no gurgle responds to my fond caresses--

Canteen, Mavourneen, O, why art thou silent, Thou voice of my heart?

It is--woe is me--it is empty."

"Of course it is--you were the last one at it."

"I hurl that foul imputation back into thy teeth base knave. Thou thyself art a very daughter of a horse-leech with a canteen of whisky."

Abe looked at him inquiringly. "You must've found some, some place," he said, "or you wouldn't be so awful glib. It's taken 'bout half-a-pint to loosen your tongue so that it'd run this way. I know you."

"No, I've not found a spoonful. The eloquence of thirst is the only inspiration I have at present. I fain would stay its cravings by quaffing a beaker of mountain-distilled hair-curler. Mayhap this humble receptacle contains yet a few drops which escaped thy ravenous thirst."

Kent turned the canteen upside down and placed its mouth upon his tongue. "No," he said, with deep dejection, "all that delicious fluid of yesterday is now like the Father of his Country."

"Eh?" asked Abe, puzzled.

"Because it is no more--it is no more. It belongs to the unreturning past."

"I say," he continued after a moment's pause, "let's go out and hunt for some, there must be plenty in this neighborhood. Nature never makes a want without providing something to supply it. Therefore, judging from my thirst, this country ought to be full of distilleries."

They buckled on their belts, picked up their guns and started out, directing their steps to the front.

In spite of the sunshine the walk through the battle-field was depressing. A chafing wind fretted through the naked limbs of the oaks and chestnuts, and drew moans from the pines and the hemlocks. The brown, dead leaves rustled into little tawny hillocks, behind protecting logs and rocks. Frequently those took on the shape of long, narrow mounds as if they covered the graves of some ill-fated being, who like themselves, had fallen to the earth to rot in dull obscurity. The clear little streams that in Summer-time murmured musically down the slopes, under canopies of nodding roses and fragrant sweet-brier, were now turbid torrents, brawling like churls drunken with much wine, and tearing out with savage wantonness their banks, matted with the roots of the blue violets, and the white-flowered pucc.o.o.n.

Scattered over the mountain-side were fatigue-parties engaged in hunting up the dead, and burying them in shallow graves, hastily dug in clay so red that it seemed as if saturated with the blood shed the day before.

The buriers thrust their hands into the pockets of the dead with the flinching, nauseated air of men touching filth, and took from the garments seeping with water and blood, watches, letters, ambrotypes, money and trinkets, some of which they studied to gain a clue to the dead man's ident.i.ty, some retained as souvenirs, but threw the most back into the grave with an air of loathing. The faces of the dead with their staring eyes and open mouths and long, lank hair, cloyed with the sand and mud thrown up by the beating rain, looked indescribably repulsive.

The buriers found it better to begin their work by covering the features with a cap or a broad-brimmed hat. It was difficult for the coa.r.s.est of them to fling a spadeful of dank clay directly upon the wide-open eyes and seemingly-speaking mouth.

"Those fellows' souls," said Kent, regarding the corpses, "seem to have left their earthly houses in such haste that they forgot to close the doors and windows after them. Somewhere I have read of a superst.i.tion that bodily tenements left in this way were liable to be entered and occupied by evil spirits, and from this rose the custom of piously closing the eyes and mouths of deceased friends."

"No worse spirit's likely to get into them than was shot out of 'em,"

growled Abe. "A Rebel with a gun is as bad an evil spirit as I ever expect to meet. But let's go on. It's another kind of an evil spirit that we are interested in just now--one that'll enter into and occupy our empty canteen."

"You're right. It's the enemy that my friend Shakspere says we 'put into our mouths to steal away our brains.' By the way, what a weary hunt he must have in your cranium for a load worth stealing."

"Thee goes that clack-mill again. Great Caesar! if the boys only had legs as active as your tongue what a racer the regiment would be!

Cavalry'd be nowhere."

Toward the foot of the mountain their path led them across a noisy, swollen little creek, whose overflowing waters were dyed deeply red and yellow by the load of hill clay they were carrying away in their headlong haste. A little to the left lay a corpse of more striking appearance than any they had yet seen. It was that of a tall, slender, gracefully formed young man, clad in an officer's uniform of rich gray cloth, lavishly ornamented with gilt b.u.t.tons and gold lace. The features were strong, but delicately cut, and the dark skin smooth and fine-textured. One shapely hand still clasped the hilt of a richly ornamented sword, with which he had evidently been directing his men, and his staring gray eyes seemed yet filled with the anger of battle. A bullet had reached him as he stood upon a little knoll, striving to stay the headlong flight. Falling backward his head touched the edge of the swift running water, which was now filling his long, black locks with slimy sediment.

"The ounce o' lead that done that piece o' work," said Abe, "was better'n a horseload o' gold. A few more used with as good judgement would bring the rebellion to an end in short meter."

"Yes," answered Kent, "he's one of the Chivalry; one of the main props; one of the fellows who are trying to bring about Secession in the hopes of being Dukes, or Marquises, or Earls--High Keepers of His Majesty Jeff. Davis's China Spittoons, or Grand Custodians of the Prince of South Carolina's Plug Tobacco, when the Southern Confederacy gains its independence."

"Well," said Abe, raising the Rebel's hat on the point of his bayonet, and laying it across the corpse's face, "he's changed bosses much sooner than he expected. Jeff. Davis's blood-relation, who presides over the Sulphur Confederacy, will put on his shoulder-straps with a branding-iron, and serve up his rations for him red-hot. I only wish he had more going along with him to keep him company."

"Save your feelings against the Secessionists for expression with your gun in the next fight, and come along. I'm getting thirstier every minute."

They walked on rapidly for a couple or three hours, without finding much encouragement in their search. The rugged mountain sides were but thinly peopled, and the few poor cabins they saw in the distance they decided were not promising enough of results to justify clambering up to where they were perched. At last, almost wearied out, they halted for a little while to rest and scan the interminable waves of summits that stretched out before them.

"Ah," said Kent, rising suddenly, "let's go on. Hope dawns at last. I smell apples. That's a perfume my nose never mistakes. We're near an orchard. Where there's an orchard there's likely to be a pretty good style of house, and where in Kentucky there's a good style of house there's a likelihood of being plenty of good whisky. Now there's a train of brilliant inductive reasoning that shows that nature intended me to be a great natural philosopher. Come on, Abe."

The smell of apples certainly did grow more palpable as they proceeded, and Abe muttered that even if they did not get any thing to drink they would probably get enough of the fruit to make an agreeable change in their diet.

They emerged from the woods into a cleared s.p.a.ce where a number of roads and paths focused. To the right was a little opening in the mountain-side, hardly large enough to be called a valley, but designated in the language of the region as a "hollow." At its mouth stood a couple of diminutive log-cabins, of the rudest possible construction, and roofed with "clapboards" held in place by stones and poles. A long string of wooden troughs, supported upon props, conducted the water from an elevated spring to the roof of one of the cabins, and the water could be seen issuing again from underneath the logs at one side of the cabin.

A very primitive cider mill--two wooden rollers fastened in a frame, and moved by a long sapling sweep attached to one of them--stood near. The ground was covered with rotting apple pomace, from which arose the odor that had reached Kent's nose.

"h.e.l.lo!" said the latter, "here's luck; here's richness! We've succeeded beyond our most sanguine expectations, as the boy said, who ran away from school to catch minnows, and caught a ducking, a bad cold and a licking. We've struck an apple-jack distillery, and as they've been at work lately, they've probably left enough somewhere to give us all that we can drink."

Abe's sigh was eloquent of a disbelief that such a consummation was possible, short of the blissful hereafter.

Inside of one of the cabins they found a still about the size of a tub, with a worm of similar small proportions, kept cook by the flow from the spring. Some tubs and barrels, in which the lees of cider were rapidly turning to vinegar, gave off a fruity, spirituous odor, but for awhile their eager search did not discover a bit of the distilled product.

At last, Kent, with a cry of triumph, dragged from a place of cunning concealment a small jug, stopped with a corncob. He smelled it hungrily.

"Yes, here is some. It's apple-jack, not a week old, and as rank as a Major General. Phew! I can smell every stick they burned to distil it.