The Southerner: A Romance of the Real Lincoln Part 76

"All right!" the st.u.r.dy lips cried. "Let him go ahead--I'm ready now!"

John held his hand, while the knife cut through the soft young flesh and found the lead. The grip of the slim fingers tightened, but he gave no cry. John handed him the bullet to put in his pocket and left him smiling his thanks.

He began to wonder vaguely if he had lost his cook forever. Julius should have found the regiment before this. It was just before day that he came on him working with might and main at a job that was the last one on earth he would have selected.

He had been seized by a burying squad and put to work dragging corpses to the trenches from the great piles where the wagons had dumped them.

The black man rolled his eyes in piteous appeal to his master:

"For Gawd's sake, Ma.r.s.e John, save me--dese here men won't lemme go. I been er throwin' corpses inter dem trenches since dark. I'se most dead frum work, let 'lone bein' scared ter death."

"Sorry, Julius," was the quick answer, "we've all got to work at a time like this. There's no help for it."

Julius bent again to his horrible task. The thing that appalled him was the way the dead men kept looking at him out of their eyes wide and staring in the flickering light of the lanterns.

John stood watching him thoughtfully. He had finished one pile of bodies, dragging them by the heels one by one, and throwing them into the trenches. He was just about to begin on the last stack when he saw that he had left one lying a little further back in the shadows.

Julius looked at it dubiously and scratched his head. He didn't like the idea of going so far back in the dark, away from the light, but there was no help for it. The guard stood with his musket scowling:

"Get a move on you--d.a.m.n you, don't stand there!" he growled.

Julius walled his eyes at his tormentor and ran for the body. It happened to be the sleeping form of a tired guard who had been up three nights. The negro grabbed his legs and rushed toward the lights and the trenches.

He had almost reached the grave when the corpse gave a vicious kick and yelled:

"Here--what'ell!"

Julius didn't stop to look or to answer. What he felt in his hands was enough. With a yell of terror he dropped the thing and plunged straight ahead.

"Gawd, save me!" he gasped.

His foot slipped on the edge of the trench and he rolled in the dark hole. With the leap of a frightened panther he reached the solid earth and flew, each leap a muttered prayer:

"Save me! Lawd, save me!"

Standing there beside the grim piles of his dead comrades John Vaughan joined the guard in uncontrollable laughter. It was many a day before he saw his cook again.

The laughter suddenly stopped, and he turned from the scene with a shudder.

"I wonder," he muttered, "if I live through this war, whether I'll come out of it with a soul!"

The report from Chancellorsville drifted slowly, ominously, appallingly, over Washington with the clouds and mists of the storm which swept up the Potomac and shrouded the city in a grey mantle of mourning. The White House was still. The dead were walking through its great rooms of state. The anguished heart who watched by the window toward the hills of Virginia saw and heard each m.u.f.fled footfall.

He walked to the table with stumbling, uncertain step at last, his face ghastly and rigid, its color grey ashes, his deep set eyes streaming with tears, sank helplessly into a chair, and for the first time gave way to despair:

"O my G.o.d! My G.o.d! what will the country say!"

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE MOONLIT RIVER

Betty Winter was quick to answer the hurry call for more nurses in the field hospital at Chancellorsville. The results at the end of three days' carnage had paralyzed the service.

She left the Carver Hospital on receipt of the first cry for help and hurried to her home to complete her preparations to leave for the front.

Her father was at breakfast alone.

She called her greeting from the hall, rushed to her room, packed a bag, and quickly came down.

She slipped her arm around his neck, bent and kissed him good-bye. He held her a moment:

"You must leave so early, dear?"

"I must catch the first bout for Aquia. The news from the front is hideous. The force there is utterly inadequate. They've asked for every nurse that can be spared for a week. The wounded lay on the ground for three days and nights, and hundreds of them can't be moved to Washington. The woods took fire dozens of times and many of the poor boys were terribly burned. The suffering, they say, is indescribable."

The old man suddenly rose, with a fierce light flashing in his eyes:

"Oh, the miserable blunderer in the White House--this war has been one grim and awful succession of his mistakes!"

Betty placed her hand on his arm in tender protest:

"Father, dear, how can you be so unreasonable--so insanely unjust? Your hatred of the President is a positive mania----"

"I'm not alone in my affliction, child; Arnold is his only friend in Congress to-day----"

"Then it's a shame--a disgrace to the Nation. Every disaster is laid at his door. In his big heart he is carrying the burden of millions--their suffering, their sorrows, their despair. You blamed him at first for trifling with the war. Now you blame him for the b.l.o.o.d.y results when the army really fights. You ask for an effective campaign and when you get these tragic battles you heap on his head greater curses. It isn't right. It isn't fair. I can't understand how a man with your deep sense of justice can be so cruelly inconsistent----"

The Senator shook his grey head in protest:

"There! there! dear--we won't discuss it. You're a woman and you can't understand my point of view. We'll just agree to disagree. You like the man in the White House. G.o.d knows he's lonely--I shouldn't begrudge him that little consolation. His whole att.i.tude in this war is loathsome to me. To him the Southerners are erring brethren to be brought back as prodigal sons in the end. To me they are criminal outlaws to be hanged and quartered--their property confiscated, the foundations of their society destroyed, and every trace of their States blotted from the map----"

"Father!"

"Until we understand that such is the purpose of the war we can get nowhere--accomplish nothing. But there, dear--I didn't mean to say so much. There is always one thing about which there can be no dispute--I love my little girl----"

He slipped his arm about her tenderly again.

"I'm proud of the work you're doing for our soldiers. They tell me in the big hospital that you're an angel. I've always known it, but I'm glad other people are beginning to find it out. In all the horrors of this tragedy there's one ray of sunshine for me--the light that shines from your eyes!"

He bent and kissed her again:

"Run now, and don't miss your boat."

In the five swift days of tender service which followed, Betty Winter forgot her own heartache and loneliness in the pity, pathos, and horror of the scenes she witnessed--the drawn white faces--the charred flesh, the scream of pain from the young, the sigh of brave men, the last messages of love--the gasp and the solemn silences of eternity.