The Red Acorn Part 36

Onward sped the mettled brute, so maddened by the first cruel blow she had ever received that she refused to obey the rein, but made her own way by and through such objects as she encountered. When she at last calmed down the road was clear and lonely, and Rachel began searching for indications of a favorable point of approach to the river, that hinted at a bridge or a ford. While engaged in this she heard voices approaching. A moment's listening to teh mingling of tones convinced her that it was another crowd of stragglers, and she obeyed her first impulse, which was to leap her horse over a low stone wall to her right.

Taking her head again, the mare did not stop until she galloped down to the water's edge.

"I'll accept this as lucky," said Rachel to herself. "The ancients trusted more to their horses' instincts than their own perceptions in times of danger, and I'll do the same. I'll cross here."

She urged the mare into the water. The beast picked her way among the boulders on the bottom successfully for a few minutes. The water rose to Rachel's feet, but that seemed its greatest depth, and in a few more yards she would gain the opposite bank, when suddenly the mare stepped upon a slippery steep, her feet went from under her instantly, and steed and rider rolled in the sweeping flood of ice-cold water. Rachel's first thought was that she should surely drown, but hope came back as she caught a limb swinging from a tree on the bank. With this she held her head above water until she could collect herself a little, and then with great difficulty pulled herself up the muddy, slippery bank. The weight of her soaked clothes added greatly to the difficulty and the fatigue, and she lay for some little time p.r.o.ne upon her face across the furrows of a cotton field, before she could stand erect. At last she was able to stand up, and she relieved herself somewhat by taking off her calico riding skirt and wringing the water from it. Her mare had also gained the bank near the same point she had, and stood looking at her with a world of wonder at the whole night's experience in her great brown eyes.

"Poor thing," said Rachel sympathetically. "This is only the beginning.

Heaven knows what we won't have to go through with before the sun rises."

She tried to mount, but her watery garments were too much for her agility, and with the wet skirts fettering her limbs she began toiling painfully over the spongy, plowed ground, in search of a stump or a rock. She thought she saw many around her, but on approaching one after another found they were only large cotton plants, with a boll or two of ungathered cotton on them, which aided the darkness in giving them their deceptive appearance. She prevented herself from traveling in a circle, by remembering this apt.i.tude of benighted travelers, and keeping her eye steadily fixed on a distant camp-fire. When she at last came to the edge of the field she had to lean against the fence for some minutes before she could recover from her fatigue sufficiently to climb upon it.

While she sat for a minute there she heard some c.o.c.ks, at a neighboring farm-house, crow the turn of night.

"It is midnight," she said feverishly, "and I have only begun the journey. Now let every nerve and muscle do its utmost."

She rode along the fence until she came to an opening which led into what appeared in the darkness to be another cotton field, but proved to be a worn-out one, long ago abandoned to the rank-growing briars, which clung to and tore her skirts, and seamed the mare's delicate skin with bleeding furrows. The flinching brute pressed onward, in response to her mistress's encouragement, but the progress was grievously slow.

Presently Rachel began to see moving figures a little way ahead of her, and hear voices in command. She realized that she was approaching the forces moving to the attack on the Union right. There was something grotesque, weird, even frightful in the sounds and the aspect of the moving ma.s.ses and figures, but she at last made out that they were batteries, regiments and mounted men. She decided that her best course was to mingle with and move along with them, until she could get a chance to ride away in advance. For hours that seemed weeks she remained entangled in the slow-moving ma.s.s, whose bewildering vagaries of motion were as trying to the endurance of her steed as they were exasperating to her own impatience. Occasionally she caught glimpses of the Union camp-fires in the distance, that, low and smoldering, told of the waning night, and she would look anxiously over her left shoulder for a hint of the coming of the dreaded dawn. Her mare terrified her with symptoms of giving out.

At last she saw an unmistakable silvery break in the eastern clouds.

Half-frantic she broke suddenly out of the throng by an abrupt turn to the right, and lashing her mare savagely, galloped where a graying in the dense darkness showed an opening between two cedar thickets, that led to the picket-fires, half a mile away. The mare's hoofs beat sonorously on the level limestone floor, which there frequently rises through the shallow soil and starves out the cedar.

"Halt! Go back," commanded a hoa.r.s.e voice in front of her, which was accompanied with the clicking of a gunlock. "Ye can't pa.s.s heah."

"Lemme pa.s.s, Mister," she pleaded. "I'm on'y a gal, with medicine fur my mammy, an' I'm powerful anxious ter git home."

"No, ye can't git out heah. Orders are strict; besides, ef ye did the Yankees 'd cotch ye. They're jest out thar."

She became aware that there were heavy lines of men lying near, and fearing to say another word, she turned and rode away to the left. She became entangled with a cavalry company moving toward the extreme Union right, and riding with it several hundred yards, turned off into a convenient grove just as the light began to be sufficient to distinguish her from a trooper. She was now, she was sure, outside of the Rebel lines, but she had gone far to the south, where the two lines were wide apart. The Union fifes and drums, now sounding what seemed an unsuspicious and cheerful reveille, were apparently at least a mile away.

It was growing lighter rapidly, and every pa.s.sing moment was fraught with the weightiest urgency. She concentrated all her energies for a supreme effort, and lashed her mare forward over the muddy cotton-field.

The beast's hoofs sank in the loose red loam, as if it were quicksand, and her pace was maddeningly slow. At last Rachel came in sight of a Union camp at the edge of a cedar thicket. The arms were stacked, the men were cooking breakfast, and a battery of cannon standing near had no horses attached.

Rachel beat the poor mare's flanks furiously, and shouted.

"Turn out! The Rebels are coming! The Rebels are coming!"

Her warning came too late. Too late, also, came that of the pickets, who were firing their guns and rushing back to camp before an awful wave of men that had rolled out of the cedars on the other side of the cotton field.

A hundred boisterous drums were now making the thickets ring with the "long roll." Rachel saw the men in front of her leave their coffee-making, rush to the musket stacks and take their places in line.

In another minute they were ordered forward to the fence in front of them, upon which they rested their muskets. Rachel rode through their line and turned around to look. The broad cotton field was covered with solid ma.s.ses of Rebels, rushing forward with their peculiar fierce yell.

"Fire!" shouted the Colonel in front of her. The six field-pieces to her right split her ears with their crash. A thousand muskets blazed out a fire that withered the first line of the advancing foe. Another crash, and the Rebels had answered with musketry and artillery, that tore the cedars around her, sent the fence rails flying into the air, and covered the ground with blue-coats. Her faithful mare shied, caught her hoof in a crack in the limestone, and fell with a broken leg.

So began that terrible Wednesday, December 31, 1862.

Bragg's plan of battle was very simple. Rosencrans had stretched out a long thin wing through the cedars to the right of the pike. At the pike it was very strong, but two miles away it degenerated into scattered regiments, unskilfully disposed. Bragg threw against these three or four to one, with all the fury of the Southern soldier in the onset. The line was crumbled, and before noon crushed back to the pike.

Rachel disengaged herself from her fallen steed, and leaning against a sapling, watched the awful collision. She forgot the great danger in the fascination of the terrible spectacle. She thought she had seen men scale the whole gamut of pa.s.sion, but their wildest excesses were tame and frothy beside this ecstacy of rage in the fury of battle. The rustic Southerners whom she had seen at ball-play, the simple-hearted Northerners whom she had alarmed at their coffee-making, were now transformed into furies mad with the delirium of slaughter, and heedless of their own lives in the frenzy of taking those of others.

"You had better run back, young woman," said some one touching her elbow. "The whole line's going to fall back. We're flanked."

A disorderly stream of men, fragments of the shattered right, caught her in its rush, and she was borne back to the open fields lying along the pike. There, as when a turbulent river empties into a bay, the force of the current subsided, and she was dropped like silt. The cowardly ones, hatless and weaponless, ran off toward the pike, but the greater portion halted, formed in line, called for their comrades to join them, and sent for more cartridges.

Almost dropping with fatigue, Rachel made her way to a pile of cracker-boxes by an Osage-orange hedge, on a knoll, and sat down. Some fragments of hard-bread, dropped on the trampled sod while rations were being issued, lay around. She was so hungry that she picked up one or two that were hardly soiled, and nibbled them.

The dreadful clamor of battle grew louder continually. The musketry had swollen into a sullen roar, with the artillery pulsating high above it. Crashing vollies of hundreds of muskets fired at once, told of new regiments joining in the struggle. Rebel brigades raised piercing treble yells as they charged across the open fields against the Union positions. The latter responded with deep-lunged cheers, as they hurled their a.s.sailants back. Clouds of slowly curling smoke rose above thickets filled with maddened men, firing into one another's b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Swarms of rabbits and flocks of birds dashed out in terror from the dark coverts in which they had hitherto found security.

No gallantry could avail against such overwhelming numbers as a.s.sailed the Union right. The stream of disorganized men flowing back from the thickets became wider and swifter every minute; every minute, too, the din of the conflict came closer; every minute the tide of battle rolled on to regiments lying nearer the pike.

A Surgeon with a squad of stretcher-bearers came up to where Rachel was sitting.

"Pull down some of those boxes, and fix a place to lay the Colonel till we can make other arrangements," said a familiar voice. Rachel looked up, and with some difficulty reconciled a grimy-faced man in torn clothes with the trim Hospital Surgeon she had known.

"Can that be you, Dr. Denslow?" she said.

He had equal difficulty in recognizing her.

"Is it possible that it is you, Miss Bond?" he said in amazement, after she had spoken to him again. "Yes, this is I, or as much as is left of me. And here," and his voice trembled, "is about all that is left of the regiment. The rest are lying about the roots of those accursed cedars, a full mile from here."

"And Harry Glen--where is he?" she said, rising hurriedly from the boxes and pa.s.sing along the line of stretchers, scanning each face.

A new pain appeared in the Doctor's face, as he watched her.

"You'll not find him there," he said. "The last I saw of him he was forming a handful of the regiment that were still on their feet, to retake cannon which the Rebels had captured. I was starting off with the Colonel here, when they dashed away."

"Come," he said, after making some temporary provisions for the comfort of his wounded. "You must get away from here as quickly as possible. I fear the army is badly defeated, and it may be a rout soon. You must get away before the rush begins, for then it will be terrible."

He took her over the pike, and across it to where some wagons were standing. As he was about to put Rachel in one of these their attention was arrested by an officer, apparently acting as Provost Marshal, dragging from behind a huge rock a Lieutenant who was skulking there.

They were too far away to hear what was said, but not so far that they could not recognize the skulker as Lieutenant Jacob Alspaugh. The Provost Marshal apparently demanded the skulker's name, and wrote it in a book. Alspaugh seemed to give the information, and accompanied it with a lugubrious pointing to a bandage around his knee. The Provost Marshal stooped and took the handkerchief off, to find that not even the cloth of the pantaloons had been injured. He contemptuously tore the straps from Alspaugh's shoulders, and left him.

"The rascal's cowardice is like the mercy of G.o.d," said Denslow, "for it endureth forever."

He put Rachel in the wagon, and ordered the driver to start at once for Nashville with her. She pressed his hand, as they separated with fatigue and grief.

How had it been faring all this time with Harry Glen and those with him?

The fierce wave had dashed against the regiment early in the morning, and although the first fire received from the Rebels made gaps in the ranks where fifty men fell, it did not recoil a step, but drove its a.s.sailants back with such slaughter that their dead, lying in the open ground over which they crossed, were grimly compared by Abe Bolton to "punkins layin' in a field where the corn's been cut off."

Then the fight settled into a murderous musketry duel across the field, in which the ranks on both sides melted away like frost in the sun. In a few minutes all the field officers were down, and the only Captain that remained untouched took command of the regiment, shouting to Harry Glen at the same moment to take command of the two companies on the right, whose Captains, and Lieutenants had fallen. Two guns escaping from the crush at the extreme right, had galloped down, and opened gallantly to a.s.sist the regiment. Almost instantly horses and men went down under the storm of bullets. An Aide broke through the cedars behind.

"Fall back--fall back, for G.o.d's sake!" he shouted. "The Rebels have got around the right, and will cut you off."

"Fall back, boys," shouted the Captain in command, "but keep together, listen to orders, and load as you go." The same instant he fell with a ball through his chest.

"Sergeant Glen, you're in command of the regiment, now," shouted a dozen voices.

The Lieutenant of the battery--a mere boy--ran up to Harry. A stream of blood on his jacket matched its crimson tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs.

"Don't go off and leave my guns, after I've helped you. Do not, for the love of Heaven! I've saved them so far. Bring them off with you."