ANOTHER CHASE AFTER MOSE.
Asa Whipple and the deputy marshal gazed in a dumbfounded way at each
other through a cruel minute of silence, broken only by the echoing
strokes of Job's axe out in the undergrowth beyond. It was the third
man who first found his tongue; and Asa, looking dumbly at him, saw
that he was no other than Nelse Hornbeck.
"Downright cur'ous that we should 'a' happened to hit on you like this,
ain't it?" Nelse began. "If we'd ben tryin' to find you, we'd never 'a'
done it in this born world! Norm and me, you see, we've ben fishin' up
Panther River three days, and then we followed up the South Branch
outlet, and I'd ben figgerin' on makin' a camp by the lake there, an'
workin' down the other branch; but the flies were pretty bad, and Norm
here, he took a fancy to this 'ere outlet, and our oil of tar was about
give out, and so I----"
"Oh, shut up!" broke in the deputy marshal, impatiently. "Look here,
Asa Whipple, is that straight what you're telling me--that Mose has
started off to give himself up?"
The old man rose from the log and stood erect. He had never seemed so
tall before in his life, and he looked down upon the more lithe and
sinewy figure of the deputy marshal almost haughtily.
"No, not to give himself up. 'To jine his regiment,' was what I said."
Norman Hazzard snorted out an angry laugh.
"Were there ever two such simpletons under one roof?" he cried. "'Jine
his regiment!' Why, man, I tell you, they'll simply take him and shoot
him! They can't do anything else, even if they wanted to. That's the
regulations. He can't jine anything, except what the newspapers call
the 'silent majority.' Do you mean to tell me--a man of your age--you
didn't know _that_?"
"All I know is," said Asa, doggedly, "that Mose seen his duty, and he
done it. He left his regiment because there was nothin' doin', and some
mean Dutchman who had a spite agin him wouldn't let him git a furlough,
and he was scairt to death about me,--and you know as well as I do that
if he hadn't come just as he did I'd been a gone coon,--and then he
come off up in here, and we follered him, and there was so much to do,
fixin' up this new place, that we hadn't time to do much thinkin' about
what was right and what was wrong till only this mornin' I happened to
git hold o' that paper there, and it seems the war's about ten times
worse than ever, and when Mose came in and I showed it to him, and he
read it through, he jest give me a look, and says he, 'You're right. I
ain't got no business here. I'm off.' And off he went. That's all; and
I'm proud of him."
The deputy marshal groaned. "Don't I tell you they won't have him? The
minute they lay eyes on him he's a dead man. I don't believe the
President himself could save him."
"Why don't you save him yourself?" put in a new voice, abruptly.
Mr. Hazzard turned and beheld Job, who had come up with his axe and a
huge armful of wood. He threw these down, brushed his sleeve, and
nodded to the deputy marshal.
"How'd do, Norm," he said now. "Why don't you go and stop him
yourself?"
Hazzard half-closed one of his eyes, and contemplated Job with a
quizzical expression. "Hello, youngster!" he remarked. "You're lookin'
after these loons, heh? Well, I wonder you didn't put a veto on this
tomfoolery. You're the only party in this camp that seems to have any
sense."
"They wouldn't have listened to me," rejoined Job. "They were both too
red-hot about the thing to listen to anybody. I thought it was
foolishness myself, but they didn't ask me, and so I went and chopped
wood and minded my own business. But it'd be different with you. If you
could manage to overtake Mose, he'd listen to you. You can catch him if
you run."
The deputy marshal on the instant had tossed aside his rod, and was
hurriedly getting off his basket and pack.
"I'll have a try for it, anyway," he said. "But it'd be jest like Mose
to put his back up and refuse to come, even after I'd caught him."
"Tell him his father wants him to come back," suggested Job. "That'll
fetch him. Here, Asa," the boy continued, "give us that ring there.
Norm can take that and show it to him as a sign that you've changed
your mind. That's the way they do it in the story-books. That's all
rings are for, accordin' to them."
"But I don't know as I hev changed my mind," old Asa began
hesitatingly, but with his fingers on the ring.
"Well, you'll have time to do that while Norm's gone," commented Job.
With grave insistence he took the old rubber ornament from Asa's hand
and gave it to Hazzard. "Keep on this side of the outlet," he added.
"There's a clear path most of the way. You can get down the big falls
by the stones if you go out close to the stream. You'll catch him easy
this side of the Raquette."
The deputy marshal wheeled and started down the clearing on a
long-stride, loping run, like a greyhound. Almost as they looked he was
lost to sight among the trees beyond.
It occurred to Nelse Hornbeck now to relieve himself of his pack and
accoutrements, and to make himself otherwise at home. He lighted his
pipe, and stretched himself out comfortably on the roots of a stump by
the doorway.
"Well," he remarked after a little, "I allus said I'd ruther have a
pack of nigger bloodhounds after me than Norm Hazzard if I'd done
anything that I wanted to git away for. But of course this is
different. I don't know how much good he'll be tryin' to catch a man
that ain't done anything. I s'pose it would be different, wouldn't it?
But then of course he could pretend to himself that Mose had done
something--and for that matter, all he's got to do is to play that Mose
is still a deserter; and of course if you come to that, why, he _is_
a deserter."
"He ain't nothing of the kind!" roared old Asa, with vehemence.
"Well, of course, Asy, if you say so," Nelse hastened to get in, with a
pacific wave of his pipe, "I don't pretend to be no jedge myself in
military affairs; I dessay you're right. Of course Mose is in one
place, and the army's in another, but that don't prove that it wasn't
the army that deserted Mose, does it? I'm a man of peace myself, and I
don't set up to be no authority on these p'ints."
"Well, then, what are you talkin' about?" interposed Job, severely.
"Don't you see old Asa's upset and nervous about Mose? Tell us about
things you know something about. How's old Teachout?"
"Well, now, cur'ous enough," said Nelse, thoughtfully, "that's jest one
of the things I don't know about at all, and nobody else knows,
either--that is, this side o' Jordan. 'Lishe Teachout's ben dead of
inflammation o' the lungs now--le's see--up'ards of a month. Why, come
to think of it, Asy, why, yes, he ketched his cold goin' out to attend
the sheriff's sale at your old place, and that daughter of his that run
away with the lightnin'-rod agent--you remember?--she's come in for the
hull property, and they say she's goin' to sell it and live down in New
York. I guess she'll scatter the money right and left. And 'Lishe
worked hard for it, too!"
Old Asa cast a ruminant glance over the little shanty, and the clearing
full of warm sunshine, and the broad belt of stately dark firs beyond
rustling their boughs in soft harmony with the tinkle of the stream
below, and swaying their tall tops gently against the light of bright
blue overhead. Then he drew a long, restful breath.
"There's things a heap sight better than money in this world," he said.
Mose had started out on his impulsive errand buoyantly enough. He made
his way down the side hill to the outlet with a light, swinging step,
and pushed along on the descent of the creek-bed, leaping from boulder
to boulder, and skirting the pools with the agility of a practised
woodsman, almost as if his mission were a joyful one.
At the outset, indeed, his ruling sensation was one of relief. He had
had four months and more of solitude here in the woods, from New Year's
through till the weary winter broke at last, in which to think over his
performance.
He could not bring himself to regret having come home; the thought that
it had saved his father's life settled _that_. But side by side with
this conclusion had grown up an intense humiliation and disgust for the
necessities which had forced upon him this badge of "deserter." Granted
that they were necessities, the badge was an itching and burning brand
none the less.
The excitement and change involved in the coming of Asa and Job had
drawn his attention away from this for a time, but the sore remained
unhealed. With the chance occurrence of the newspaper, and the sight of
its effect upon his father, the half-forgotten pain reasserted itself
with such stinging force that the one great end in life seemed to be to
escape from its intolerable burden.
In this mood of shame and self-reproach, Mose had jumped with hot
eagerness at the notion of returning to the ranks, and rushed with
unthinking haste to put it into effect.
As the thought came to him now that perhaps this haste had also been
unfeeling, he unconsciously slackened the pace at which he was
descending the ravine. His father was once more in good health and
vigor, no doubt, and was as eager as he himself about having the odium
of desertion washed from the family name, if not more eager than he;
but Mose began to wish that they had talked it over a little more--that
he had made his leave-taking longer and less abrupt.
The war seemed to have become a much bloodier and deadlier thing than
he had known it. That paper had spoken of a full hundred thousand men
having been lost between the Wilderness and Cold Harbor. It was quite
likely that he now, as he swung along down the waterway, was going to
his death. In his present mood this had no personal terrors for him,
but it did cast a chill shadow over his thoughts of his father.
They two had chosen their own life together--with all the views and
aims of other men's lives put quite at one side. Their happiness had
not been in making money, in getting fine clothes, or houses, or lands,
but just in being together, with the woods and the water and the sky
about them.
Oddly enough, Mose remembered now, for the first time almost since his
escape from the lines at Brandy Station, that if it had not been for
that wretched Teachout mortgage, he need never have gone to the war at
all. The draft would have exempted him, as the only support of an aged
father. That seemed at first sight to justify him in leaving as he did,
and he walked still more slowly now to think this over.
But no, nothing justified him. Perhaps his father's suffering condition
excused him in some measure--gave him the right to say that under the
circumstances he would do the same thing again; but that wasn't a
justification.
So Mose worried his perplexed mind with the confusing moral problems
until in sheer self-defence he had to shake them all off, root and
branch, and say to himself, "At any rate I'm on my way back; I'm
started, and I'll go."
He had halted, as he grasped this solution of the puzzle, to draw
breath and look about him. He stood on a jutting spur of naked granite,
overhanging the steep, shelving hillside, and commanding a vast
panorama of sloping forest reaches, with broken gleams here and there
of the Raquette waters way below, and with range upon range of fir-clad
mountain cones rising in basins beyond.
It dawned upon him, as his glance wandered over this stupendous
prospect, that he had heard at intervals a curious noise in the woods
over at his left, as of some big body making its way through the
underbrush in haste. If he had had a gun with him he reflected now that
he might have investigated the matter.
The sounds seemed more like those made by a bear than by a
deer--perhaps more like a moose than either. Mose had never had the
fortune to see a moose. It would be just his luck, he thought, with a
half-grin, to see one now, when he had no gun, and was quitting the
woods forever.
Hark! there was the noise again, below and ahead of him now, but still
to the left. He thought he almost saw a dark object push through the
bushes, hardly a dozen yards away.
Mose leaped lightly down upon the moss at the base of his perch, and
crept cautiously along under the ledge of rock, the cover of which
would protect him quite to within a few feet of these bushes. Reaching
this point, he lifted his head to look.
His astonished gaze rested upon no moose or bear, or other denizen of
the wild wood, but took in at point-blank instead the lean and leathery
countenance of Deputy Marshal Norman Hazzard. It in no wise lessened
Mose's confusion to note that this unlooked-for countenance wore a
somewhat sardonic grin.
"Well, Mose," Mr. Hazzard observed, "I learnt last winter that a stern
chase was a long chase, and I thought this time I'd make a slicker job
of it by headin' you off, and gittin' 'round in front. See?"
"Yes, I see," said Mose, mechanically; but in truth he felt himself
quite unable to see at all. This sudden intrusion of the officer of the
law between him and his patriotic resolve, this apparition of the man
who had hunted him into the wintry woods with a revolver, seemed to
change and confuse everything.
There rose in him the impulse to throw himself fiercely upon the deputy
marshal; then, oddly enough, he was conscious of a chuckling sense of
amusement instead.
"Guess I got the laugh on you this time, Norm," he said. "You've had
your hull trip for nothin'. I'm on my way now, of my own motion, to
jine my regiment, or enlist somewhere else, I don't care which."
Mr. Hazzard ostentatiously drew a revolver from his pocket.
"I ain't got any handcuffs with me," he remarked, "but you'll do well
to bear in mind that I ain't at all shy about firin' this here, if
there's any need for it."
"But I tell you I'm goin' of my own accord!" Mose expostulated. "If you
had a hull battery of twelve-pounders with you, I couldn't do no more'n
that, could I? You can come along down with me if you like--the hull
way--only there's no use o' your bein' disagreeable and goin' round
pullin' revolvers."
The deputy marshal did not put up the weapon, and the grin on his face
grew deeper.
"Nobody, to look at you," said he, "would think you'd give an officer
like me more trouble than any other man in the district. I had about
the hottest run on record to chase you safely into the woods here. And
now, by gum, here I've had to gallop myself all out of breath, barkin'
my shins and skinnin' my elbows in a rough-and-tumble scoot through the
underbrush, all to keep you from makin' a fool of yourself agin! It's
enough to make a man resign office."
Mose stared at the speaker--puzzled by the smile even more than by this
unintelligible talk.
"See here," Norman Hazzard went on, "I represent Uncle Sam, don't I?
Well, then, Uncle Sam has to be pretty rough on fellows that shirk, and
run away, and behave mean--but he's got a heart inside of him all the
same. He knows about you, and he understands that while you did a very
bad thing, you did it from first-rate motives. So he says to himself,
'Now if that fellow Mose comes around and pokes himself right under my
nose, I'll be obliged to shoot him jest for the effect upon the others;
but if he's only got sense enough to lay low, and keep on my blind
side, why, I won't hurt a hair of his head.' _Now_ do you see?"
"You mean that I'm to stay here?" asked Mose, in bewilderment.
"I mean that you're a dead man if you don't," replied Hazzard. "Of
course my business is to arrest you, and take you back to be shot. But
I ain't workin' at my trade this week--I'm fishin'. And so I tell you
to come back with me, and cook us some trout for supper and shut up,
that's all."
"But my father," stammered Mose, "he was as sot on my goin' back as I
was--this 'deserter' business has been a-stickin' in his crop all
winter."
"No, it's all right," said Hazzard. "I've explained it to him. Here's
the ring you give him--to show that he understands it. The fact is, he
and you ain't got any business to live outside the woods. You're both
too green and too soft to wrastle 'round down amongst folks. They cheat
you out of your eye-teeth, and tromple you underfoot, and drive you to
the poorhouse or the jail. Jest you and Asa stay up here where you
belong, and don't you go down any more, foolin' with that buzz-saw that
they call 'civilization.'"
Then the two men turned and began together the ascent of the outlet.
That is the story. A good deal of it I heard from Mose Whipple's own
lips, at different times, years after the war, when we sat around the
huge fire in front of his shanty in the evening, with the big stars
gleaming overhead, and the barking of the timber wolves coming to us
from the distant mountain side, through the balmy night silence.
Generally Ex-Sheriff Norman Hazzard was one of our fishing party, and
he never failed to joke with Mose about the time when he fired ten
shots at a running target, and missed every one.
I picked up from their numerous conversations too,--for Mose, like all
the old-time Adirondack guides, would rather talk any time than clean
fish or chop fire-wood,--that Asa lived to be a very old Asa indeed,
and that young Job Parshall, whom Hazzard took away with him, saw
through school, and then set up in business, was already being talked
of for supervisor in his native town.
A DAY IN THE WILDERNESS.
CHAPTER I.
THE VALLEY OF DEATH.
The rising sun lifted its first curved rim of dazzling light above the
dark line of distant treetops just as the brigade band began a new
tune--"The Faded Coat of Blue." The musicians themselves, huddled
together under the shelter of a mound of rocks where the road descended
into the ravine, did not get their share of this early morning
radiance, but remained in the shadows.
Only a yard or two away from the outermost drummer-boy these shadows
ended, and a picture began that was full of action and color, and
flooded with golden sunshine.
The bandsmen, as they played, observed this picture, and thanked their
stars they were no part of it. Better a whole life spent in the shade,
than sunlight at such a price as was being paid for it out there in the
road!
This road had never before been anything but a narrow, grass-grown,
out-of-the-way track for mule-carts. Now it had become the bed of a
broad, endless, moving human flood--filling it compactly from side to
side, with ever a fresh wave of blue-coated men entering at the rear,
where the scrub-oak opening began, and ever a front wave gliding off
downward from view with that sinister slipperiness which arches the
brow of a cataract.
The sense of motion conveyed by these thousands of passing men was at
its perfection of rhythm just opposite the band. They were marching in
eights, so close together that they trod continually on any lagging
heel.
The ranks, when they first came in view, seemed pressing forward
without much order. Then, as they drew close to the musicians, they
fell into step instinctively, swung along in swaying unison for a few
rods, and again lapsed into jagged irregularity as they swept downward
behind the rock.
It was indeed only this shifting section of the dozen nearest ranks
that could catch the strains of the band. The others, whether in van or
rear, moved on with their hearing numbed by a ceaseless and terrible
uproar which came from the ravine in front, and, mounting upward,
seemed to shake the earth on which they trod.
The musicians might blow themselves red in the face, the drummers beat
the strained sheepskins to bursting, and make no headway against this
din of cannon.
The men of Boyce's brigade, as they came into the little space where
they could hear the music above the artillery, and caught the step it
was setting, hardly looked that way, but pushed forward with eyes
straight ahead, and grave, drawn faces on which the cheerful sunlight
seemed a mockery.
When the band had finished "The Faded Coat of Blue" the sky was still
clear overhead, but from the gully below a dense cloud of smoke had
spread upward to choke the morning light. While the bandsmen paused,
blowing their instruments clear and breathing hard, this smoke began to
thicken the air about the rock which sheltered them.
In a minute more the front figures of the endless moving chain before
them seemed to be walking off into a fog, and the atmosphere was all at
once heavy with the smell of gunpowder.
Curiously enough, the men's faces brightened at this. There came a
block now somewhere on the road ahead, and the column halted. The
regimental flags, with the color-guard, were just abreast of the band.
The sergeant took out his knife to cut one of the furling strings that
was in a hard knot, and untied the rest, shaking out the silken folds
of the banners.
"I always untie 'em when we get into the smoke," he said, speaking at
large.
The drummer-boy nearest the road moved over to study the flags. He held
his head to one side and scrutinized them critically.
"No bullet holes in 'em yet, to speak of, I notice," he remarked to the
sergeant, raising a clear, sharp young voice above the universal
racket. "Guess you'll get enough to-day to make up!" he added.
The old sergeant nodded his head. "Something besides flags will get
holes in 'em, too," he returned, lifting his voice also, like a man
talking in the teeth of a roaring gale.
"What are you? Michiganders?" shouted the boy.
"No--Ohio!" the sergeant bawled back. "When they changed the corps,
they brigaded us all up fresh, so that we don't know our own mothers.
We've got in with some New Yorkers that ain't got no more sense than to
chew fine-cut tobacco. You can't raise a plug in a whole regiment of
'em. Regular pumpkin-heads!"
"They'll show you fellows the way, down below there, though!" retorted
the boy, his injured state pride adding shrillness to his tone. "Ohio's
no good, anyhow!"
He instinctively moved beyond reach of the sergeant's boot, as he
passed this last remark. Some of the men in the crowded ranks close by
laughed at his impudence, and he himself was grinning with a sense of
successful repartee, when he felt a hand laid on his shoulder. He
looked up, and found himself confronting a young, fair-faced officer,
who was regarding him with gravely gentle eyes.
"Don't say that about any men who are going out to die," this officer
said; and though he did not seem to be speaking loudly, the words fell
very distinctly. "I've got a brother at home about your size. So have
lots of the rest of us here. We want to carry down there with us a
pleasant notion of the last boy we saw."
"I was only fooling!" the drummer-boy rejoined.
There was no time for further words, as the preparatory rattle on the
drum-edge behind warned him. In another minute he was back in his
place, and the band was hurling forth into the general uproar the
strains of "The Red, White, and Blue."
The column had begun to move again. The flags, the color-guard, the
young officer with the sad, gentle eyes, had passed downward out of
sight, and company after company of their regiment came pressing onward
now.
The boy, as he kept up with his part of the familiar work, watched
these Ohio men swing past. They seemed young fellows, for the most
part, and their uniforms were significantly new and clean. Everything
about them showed that they were going under fire for the first time,
though they pushed forward as stoutly as veterans. The boy found
himself hoping that a good many of these Ohio men would come back all
right--and most of all that young officer who had a brother about his
size.
All this while a group of field officers had been standing on the ridge
up above the rocky mound which sheltered the band. Their figures, with
broad hats and big-cuffed gauntlets, had grown indistinct against the
sky as the smoke thickened. Now they gave up trying to follow through
their glasses the movements in the vale below, and turned to descend.
Their horses, which men had been holding near the musicians, were
hastily brought forward, and the general and his staff sprang into the
saddle and trotted over toward the road.
The end of the column was in view, with its disorder of servants,
baggage-carriers, soldiers who had lost their places, and behind, the
looming canvas covers of ambulance-wagons and the train. Into the thick
of this straggling mass General Boyce, sitting splendidly erect and
with a bold smile on his rosy-cheeked face, spurred his way, and the
staff in turn clattered after him down out of sight. The brigade had
passed, and the band stopped playing.
Files of mules, heavily laden with stacks of cartridge-boxes, were
still pouring along the road and being whacked down the ravine path;
but the big wagons, as they came, halted, and were drawn off into the
field to the left. Tall poles were taken out and set up. Coils of rope
were unwound, stakes driven, and huge cylinders of canvas unrolled on
the grass.
Soon there arose the gray outlines of tents--one dominating structure
fully thirty yards long, and around it, like little mushrooms about the
parent stool, a number of smaller tents, some square, some conical. The
drummer-boy, his task ended, sauntered over with his companions toward
the tents.
He paused to watch the heavy folds of canvas being hauled up to the
ridge-pole of the big one. In one way it recalled those preparations on
the old circus-ground at home which he used to watch with such zest.
But in another way it was strangely different.
While some men tugged at the ropes or drove in stakes for the
guy-lines, others were busy bringing from the wagons rolls of blankets
and huge trusses of straw. Even before the roof was secure scores of
rude beds were being spread on the trampled grass underneath.
Bearded and spectacled men, dressed after the fashion of officers, yet
clearly not soldiers at all, were directing everything now. Among them,
here and there, flitted young women, clad also in a sort of uniform,
who seemed busiest of all.
No, this was decidedly different from a circus tent. The thunder of the
batteries on the other side of the ridge was alone enough to throw a
solemn meaning over this long, barn-like house of ropes and cloths. It
was the brigade hospital-tent, and the hundreds of active hands at work
could hardly hope to have it ready before it was needed.
It was the morning of the second day of the Battle of the Wilderness.
The men of Boyce's brigade knew only vaguely, by hearsay, of what had
happened on that terrible yesterday. They themselves, forming the
rear-guard of the great army, had been nearly the last to cross the
Rapidan on the swinging pontoon bridge of Germania ford. They had had a
night's forced march; a two hours' nap in the open starlight; a hasty
bite of rations at half-past three in the morning, and now this plunge
in the chilly twilight of sunrise down into the unknown.
There had been, just before the general advance across the Rapidan, a
wholesale shaking-up of army organization. Two whole corps had been
abolished, and their strength distributed among the three remaining
corps. Regiments found themselves suddenly torn from their old
associates, and brigaded with strangers. Their pet officers
disappeared, and others took their places whom the men did not know and
were disposed to dislike.
To add to this discontent, there was an understanding that their
leaders had been entrapped into this Wilderness fighting. Certainly it
was no place which an invading army would have chosen for battle.
It was a vast, sprawling forest district, densely covered with low
timber, scrub-oak, dwarf junipers, and tangled cedars and pines, all
knit together breast-high and upward with interlacing wild vines, and
foul underfoot with swamp or thicket.
In this gloomy and sinister wilderness men did not know where they
were, nor whom they were fighting. Whole commands were lost in the
impenetrable woods. Mounted orderlies could not get about through the
underbrush, and orders sent out were never delivered.
Though gulches and steep ravines abounded, cutting sharp gashes through
the forest, there were no hills upon which a general and his keen-eyed
staff might perch themselves and get an idea of how the land about them
lay. The Confederates had plenty of this local knowledge, and used it
to terrible purpose. The invaders could only put their heads down, and
strive to crush their way blindly through.
After a little, the drummer-boy put his snare-drum in the wagon where
the other instruments were, and started off up the ridge, to see what
the general and his staff had been observing earlier in the morning.
As he neared the summit, he noticed that the roar of the cannon
directly in front seemed to have died down a good deal. There were
still angry outbursts, but one had to wait for them now; and a new kind
of noise, made up of peal after peal of crackling musketry fire, was
rising from the gully farther to the left.
The boy had come now to the top of the ridge, only to find it crowned
with a thick fringe of alders which completely shut out his view. From
the roots of the farther bushes the hillside dropped precipitously. He
worked his way along until, by a cleft in the rocks, an opening offered
itself.
Here, stooping low and bending aside the alders, he could creep out
upon a big, flat, moss-grown boulder, which overhung the ravine like a
balcony. He had not thought he was so high up. The other side of the
gulf spread out before him could not be seen for the smoke--but the
tops of tall pines growing on its bottom were far below him.
The steepness of the descent made him dizzy. The rock on which he stood
seemed to be suspended in mid-air. He drew back a little. Then
curiosity got the upper hand. He laid himself face down on the boulder,
and edged cautiously forward till he could peer over its front.
The fog-like smoke was so dense that at first he could see nothing.
Even when the bearings of the land below, masked as it all was under
forest, began to be apparent to him, his ears were still the best guide
to what was going on. The confused sound of men's shouts and yells
mingled now with the intermittent volleys of musketry to the left. The
cannon-firing had stopped altogether.
He discovered all at once that a good many of the tree-tops in front of
him seemed to have been broken off very recently. Some were hanging to
the trunks by their bark; everywhere the splinters were white and
fresh. Now that he listened more intently, there were weird whistling
noises among these shattered boughs and an incessant dropping of leaves
and twigs.
Suddenly a big branch not far away shook violently, then toppled
downward. At the same moment a swift ringing buzz sounded just over his
head, and a bunch of alder-blossoms fell upon one of his hands. He
pulled himself back abruptly.
Crawling backward out through the alders, he did not venture to lift
his head until there was a comfortable wall of rocks between him and
that murderous ravine. Then, getting to his feet, he looked amazed down
upon the brigade camp, which he had left an hour before. The big tent,
and the little ones about it, only a while ago the scene of such
bustling activity, were all deserted.
Some of the wagons could be seen rolling and bumping off toward the
road to the left under drivers who stood up to lash their teams. The
white, canvas-hooped tops were the centres of wild confusion.
Other drivers were scurrying off on horseback, leading with them in a
frantic gallop groups of the team horses, pulled along by their bunched
reins. The people on foot--doctors, nurses, camp-guards and the
rest--were all racing pell-mell toward the road for dear life.
Thunderstruck at the spectacle, the boy turned to the right. A long,
double line of men had come out through the woods in which the ridge
lost itself, and were advancing upon the camp at a sharp run. They
seemed dressed in a sort of mud-colored uniform, and they raised a
sharp whoop of triumph as they came. At the farther end of the line,
some of these men lifted their guns as they ran, and fired into the
receding mass of fugitives.
Down in front, meantime, the foremost of the advancing line had reached
the camp and entered upon possession. They had begun overhauling the
captured wagons, and were tossing out loaves of bread and hardtack
boxes, which their comrades fell upon eagerly. The boy reflected now
that he himself was hungry, and he scratched his head with perplexity.
The sound of panting breath close beside him made him turn swiftly. A
man had clambered up the side of the ridge, away from the camp, and had
rushed up to him, his eyes starting from his head with excitement. He
waved something like a short stick, with wild gestures, and tried to
shout, but could only pant instead.
He stopped as he came up, stared at the boy, then shook his head
dolefully as he gasped for breath.
"Is dot you, Lafe?" he managed to groan. "Oh, my jiminy priest!"
"Look out!" cried the boy. "Lie down!"
Some of the men below had caught sight of them, and two or three sparks
and jets of smoke told that they were being fired at. Though they were
probably beyond range, it was safer behind the alders, so the two
crawled out on the overhanging ledge.
"I say, Foldeen, have they scooped the old band wagon? I couldn't see
from here," was the boys first remark.
"Dey von't get 'em my flute, anyhow," the other responded, holding
proudly forth the ebony stock with its silver keys, which he had been
waving so vehemently. "I don't catch me putting him in de bant vagon."
Even as he spoke he clutched the boy fiercely by the arm, with a
smothered exclamation of horror. The rock on which they crouched had
stirred from its foundations, and as the two instinctively strove to
turn themselves, it lurched outward, and went crashing down the steep
declivity.
CHAPTER II.
LAFE RECONNOITRES THE VALLEY.
On the river road below the tannery, away back in New York State, there
stood for many years a small house, always surrounded in summer by
sunflowers and hollyhocks and peonies that enwrapped it as in a
beautiful garment. It seemed that flowers grew nowhere else as they did
for the Widow Hornbeck.
There was no other such show of lilacs in Juno Mills as that which
early May brought for her front yard. The climbing roses which covered
the whole front and side of the poor little house were only of the
simple, old sorts,--the Baltimore Belle, the yellow Scotch and the
ordinary pink brier,--but they bore thick clusters of delightful
blossoms. And in the fall, when the frosts had nipped and blackened
other people's flowers, the asters and nasturtiums and gladiolus in
this wee patch appeared unhurt by the weather.
When there was to be a wedding in the village, or some celebration at
the church or the school-house, the children always went to the Widow
Hornbeck to beg for flowers. Often they found her sitting out in her
yard among the plants she loved--a mild-faced, patient little woman,
with thin, bent shoulders and hair whitened before its time; and she
would be poring through her spectacles over the same big Book spread
open on her knees.
The spectacle of Mrs. Hornbeck and her family Bible, framed like a
picture in vines and flowering shrubs, grew pleasantly familiar to
everybody in the district. Strangers driving past used to stop their
buggies and admire the place; and they, too, seeing the white-haired
owner sitting there, would feel that her presence added to the charm of
the scene.
The widow died suddenly one day in the autumn of 1863. She was found
quite lifeless, seated as of old in the garden, with the old patient,
wistful half-smile on her face, and the old Book spread open in her
lap.
The village was sad for a day or two, and gently touched for a
fortnight. Then the widow had been forgotten, and the family Bible had
vanished. The cottage was taken for the mortgage upon it, and its
meagre contents went the way of humble, ownerless things. Mrs. Hornbeck
had been very poor, and nothing was left for her son.
In that family Bible had been written the names of some score of
Hornbecks. Against all these names but two a date of death had also
been inscribed. One of these two names, the last in the list, was that
of the boy, now made an orphan, the Benjamin of the widow's flock. He
was described on the yellowed page, in his mother's scrawling hand, as
"Washington Lafayette Hornbeck, born April 30, 1850." In real life he
had always been known as "Lafe."
He grew up a brown-skinned, hardy sort of ordinary boy, whose face
might suggest some acuteness and more resolution, but whom nobody
thought of calling good-looking.
He turned out to be the best wrestler among the village lads of his
age, and he was also the strongest swimmer of all the lot who used to
go down, of a summer evening, to dive off the spring-board into the
deep pool below the mill-dam. This raised him a good deal in the esteem
of the boys, but somehow their elders were not so much impressed by
"Lafe's" qualities.
He had to work, and he did work, but always at some new job--now
berry-picking, now stripping willows for the basket factory, now
packing "heave-powders" for the local horse-doctor. He had been
employed in the mills and in the tannery, and he had once travelled for
a month as the assistant of a tin-peddler, not to mention various
experiments in general farm-work.
People hardly blamed Lafe for this lack of steadiness in employment.
They said it was in his blood. All the Hornbecks since any one could
remember had been musicians--playing the fiddle or whatever else you
liked at country dances, and some of them even journeying to distant
parts as members of circus or minstrel bands.
It was felt that a boy from such a roving stock could scarcely be
expected to tie himself down to regular work.
Doubtless Lafe felt this, too, for as soon as he began thinking what he
should do, after the shock of his mother's death, he found himself
wishing to be a drummer-boy. The notion struck all the neighbors as
quite appropriate. Lafe was a capital drummer. Kind old Doctor Peabody
went with him to Tecumseh, saw the head recruiting officer at the big
barracks there, and arranged matters for him.
Lafe was sent forward to New York, and thence to headquarters at the
front. Men liked him, and his lifelong familiarity with instruments
made him a handy boy to have about. Before long he was taken out of the
little company drum-corps, and promoted to the big brigade band.
This very morning, when he went up from the hospital camp to the ridge
where he hoped to see the fighting beyond, he had been thinking whether
this promotion had been what he wanted.
All his dreams had been of action--of brave drummer-boys who went into
battle with the fifes, and stood through it all by the side of the
file-leader, valiantly pounding their sheep-skins as the shot and shell
screamed past, and men pitched headlong, and officers were hurled from
their horses, and the fight was lost or won.
Alas! a brigade band never got so much as a whiff of actual warfare,
but tamely stayed about in camp, playing selections outside the
general's headquarters while he ate his dinner, or contributing its
quota to the ceremonial of a Sunday dress-parade.
Perhaps nothing more was to be looked for during the long winter in
peaceful quarters at Brandy Station; but now that spring had come, and
the grand advance was begun, and battles were in the air all about
them--even now the bandsmen merely gave the warriors a tune or two to
start them off, and then ingloriously loafed around the camp till they
returned, or did not return, as the case might be. One might almost as
well have stayed at home in Juno Mills!
The great rock on which Lafe and the German flute-player Foldeen had
taken their station gave way beneath them, as was stated in the last
chapter, and smashed its way down the steep hillside, crushing the
brush and rooting up vines as it went, snapping saplings like
pipestems, and bowling over even trees of a larger growth. It brought
up almost at the bottom of the hill, in the heart of a clump of sturdy
cedars.
A long gash of earth laid bare and of foliage ripped and strewn aside
stretched up the incline to mark the track of the fallen boulder.
Half-way up this pathway of devastation a boy presently appeared.
Lafe had crawled up out of the débris of saplings, boughs, and tangled
creepers into which he had been hurled, and clambered over now to the
open space. Then he stood looking up and down in a puzzled way, rubbing
his head. His clothes were torn a good deal, he had lost his cap, and
he was conscious of numerous bruises under these damaged clothes of
his.
There was blood on the palm of his hand, which had come from his head.
So far as feeling could guide him, this, however, was nothing but a
scalp scratch. He cared more about the tremendous bark one of his shins
had got, close up under his knee. When he took his first aimless steps,
this had already stiffened, and was hurting him.
Suddenly he remembered that he had not been alone on the rock. Foldeen
Schell had been with him, and had grabbed his arm just as everything
gave way under them. His wits were still woolgathering under the
combined scare and tumble, and he began mechanically poking about among
the underbrush at his feet, as if the missing flute-player might be
hidden there. Or was he hunting for his cap? For a dazed minute or two
he hardly knew.
Then the sense of bewilderment lifted itself, and was gone. Lafe
straightened himself, and looked comprehensively about him.
"Foldeen!" he shouted shrilly, and then bent all his powers of hearing
for a reply. There came no answering call.
The air was full of other sounds--the rattling echoes of
musketry-firing and the boom of bigger guns, some far off, others
seemingly near, all mingling here among the thicket recesses in a
subdued, continuous clamor. Perhaps shouting was of no use.
Lafe climbed up the hill a dozen yards or so, to a point where he could
go no farther, and scrutinized his surroundings carefully. The
impenetrable wall of foliage shut out the valley from him even more
completely than when he was on the ridge. He called again and again,
and explored the bushes on either side, to no purpose.
Limping slowly down the track cleared by the passing rock, he continued
his search to the right and left. He knew so little of how he himself
had escaped death that there was nothing to help him guess how it had
fared with his companion.
He had not known much about this missing bandsman heretofore, save that
he seemed to be the best fellow among the three or four German
musicians which the band contained. The boy, like the rest, spoke and
thought of all these alien comrades as "Dutchmen," and he was far from
comprehending that that outlandish name "Foldeen" was only a corruption
of "Valentine." But a common misfortune binds swift ties, and Lafe, as
he kept up his quest, began to think of Schell quite affectionately.
He recalled how good-tempered he had always been; how he alone had made
jokes on the long march, when the cold and driving rain had soured
every one else, and empty stomachs grumbled to keep company with aching
bones.
Reflecting upon this, Lafe realized that he was very fond of the
"Dutchman," and would be in despair if he had come to grief.
"Foldeen!" he yelled out again.
"Sh! sh! geeb guiet!" came a guttural reply, from somewhere near by.
The boy's heart lightened on the instant. He looked hastily about him
with a cheerful eye, trying to trace the direction of the voice. "Where
are you?" he demanded, in a lower tone.
For answer, the blue-coated German rose from a cover of brush, away
down the hill, and beckoned him, enforcing at the same time by emphatic
gestures the importance of coming noiselessly.
Lafe stole down furtively, and in a minute was bending close beside
Foldeen in shrubby shelter.
"Get hurt any?" Lafe asked, subduing his voice almost to a whisper in
deference to the other's visible anxiety.
Foldeen shook his head. "It is much worse," he murmured back. "I have
my flute lost."
The boy could not but smile. "We can thank our stars we weren't both
smashed to atoms," he observed.
"Sh-h! don't talk!" Foldeen adjured him, and indicated with a sidewise
nod of the head that special reasons for silence lay in that direction.
Lafe edged himself forward, and looked out through the bushes. They
were on the crest of a little mound which jutted out slightly from the
descending face of the hillside. The bottom of the ravine lay only
thirty feet or so below them.
Save for scattered clumps of dwarf firs, hardly higher than the mullein
stalks about them, the ground was clear, and the short grass told
Lafe's practised eye that it was pasture land. Beyond, there was the
gravelled bed of a stream, along which a small rivulet wandered from
side to side.
At the first glance his eye had taken in various splashes of color
dotting the grass, which suggested bluebells. He saw now that these
were made by the uniforms of men, who lay sprawled in various unnatural
postures, flat on the green earth. Most of them were on their faces,
and not one of them stirred. Lafe moved his head about among the
screening bushes, and was able to count twenty-six of these motionless
figures.
The boy had seen such sights before, and had even helped bring in the
wounded from the field of Payne's Farm during the most of a long, cold
night in the previous November. This experience guided him now to
remark a curious thing. No muskets, knapsacks, or canteens were
scattered about beside these fallen men. And another odd detail--they
were all barefooted.
"Some one's been along, after the fighting was over, and skinned
everything clean," he muttered to his companion.
Foldeen nodded again, and once more held up a warning hand. He himself
was intently watching something beneath, from his side of the leafy
cover. The boy shifted his position, and craning his neck over the
other's shoulder, saw that just below them, where the ascent began,
there stretched a rough, newly made ridge of sods, fence rails and
tree-tops, which had evidently been used as a breastwork.
Behind this there were other human forms, also lying prone, but clad in
gray or butternut instead of blue. Here, too, there was no sign of
life, but only that fixed absence of motion to which the remote thunder
of gun-fire gave such a bitter meaning.
"Anybody there?" whispered the boy.
"I dink so," returned Foldeen, under his breath. "Dere is some, what
you call it, hanky-banky, goes on here. Look yourself!"
He moved aside, and Lafe crowded into his place, and put his head out
cautiously through the bushes. In one corner of the breastwork there
was to be seen a big pile of accoutrements--knapsacks, muskets, swords,
water-bottles, and the like, as well as a heap of old boots and
miscellaneous foot-gear.
"Vell, how you make it out?" asked Foldeen.
Lafe drew in his head. "The way I figure it," he whispered, "is first,
that they held this place against our men, and drove 'em off. Then they
went out, and gathered up these traps, and brought 'em in there. Then
some more of our men came along, and chased them out. That's what it
looks like."
"Well, den, vare is gone dem second men of ours?" the German demanded.
"They've gone after 'em, up the valley, there."
Foldeen shook his head. "Dey don't do such foolishness," he objected.
"Ven dey take some place like dis, den dey shtick to him. I know so
much, if I do blay mid the band."
"There'd be rations in the knapsacks," mused Lafe, after a pause. He
had never been so hungry before in his life.
"What do you say to sneaking down there, and trying to find something
to eat?" he suggested. "Come on!" he added persuasively. "There's
nobody down there that--nobody that we need be afraid of."
"Vell, I am afraid, dot's all," responded Foldeen.
"They can't do more than make us prisoners," urged the boy, "and that's
better than starving to death. Come on! I'm going to make a try."
The German took his companion by the arm. "See here," he explained;
"ven dey catch you, dot's all right. You are prisoner; dot's all. Ven
dey catch me, den it goes one, two, dree--bang, und den Foldeen Schell
addends his own funeral. Dot's the difference by you und me."
"Nonsense!" said Lafe. "They don't shoot anybody in the band."
"Anyhow, dey shoot me out of de band," persisted Foldeen, gloomily. "I
was in dot oder army myself, sometimes."
The boy drew a long breath of enlightened surprise, which was almost a
whistle.
"Well, then, you stay here," he said, after a little, "and I'll take a
look at the thing by myself."
Suiting the action to the word, Lafe laid hold of the stoutest
saplings, and lowered himself down by his arms to the ledge below. The
footing was not quite easy; but by hanging to the vines he managed to
work his way obliquely across the face of the declivity, and yet keep
pretty well under cover of the bushes.
Suddenly, emerging from the thicket, he found himself quite inside the
breastwork, which he had entered from the open rear. The more terrible
signs of the conflict which had been waged here a few hours before
forced themselves upon his attention, first of all.
He braced himself to walk past them, and to go straight to the heap of
knapsacks piled up among the branches in the corner.
Lifting one of the haversacks, he opened it. There was a tin cup on
top, and some woollen things which might be socks. Pushing his hand
under these, he came upon some bread, and paused to express his content
by a smile.
"Drop it--you!"
[Illustration: "DROP IT--YOU!"]
A loud, peremptory voice close at his shoulder caused the boy to turn
with alarmed abruptness. A burly man, with a rough, sandy stubble of
beard about his face, had come into the breastwork--or perhaps had been
hidden there all the while.
Lafe's first impulse was one of satisfaction at noting that the
stranger wore the blue Union uniform.
Then he looked into the man's face, and the instinct of pleasure died
suddenly away.
CHAPTER III.
THE BOUNTY-JUMPER.
When Lafe Hornbeck looked into the countenance of the strange man who
appeared thus unexpectedly before him in the deserted breastwork, it
needed no second glance to tell him that he had to deal with a
scoundrel. A threatening and formidable scoundrel he seemed, too, with
his heavy, slouching shoulders, his long arms ending in huge, hairy
hands, and the surly scowl on his low-browed, frowzy face.
He wore the dark-blue jacket and light-blue trousers of the Federal
infantry, and their relative newness showed that he was a fresh
recruit. His badge was the Maltese cross of the Fifth Corps, and its
color, red, indicated the First Division. This was the corps and
division of Boyce's brigade.
Even in the first minute of surprised scrutiny of the fellow Lafe found
himself thinking that he probably belonged to that Ohio regiment which
he had seen bringing up the rear of the line forming for battle.
"Drop it, I say!" the man repeated, harshly.
Lafe drew his hand from the haversack slowly and reluctantly.
"There's enough more of 'em here," he protested, nodding at the pile in
the corner of the earthwork. "I haven't had a mouthful since before
sunrise, and I'm hungry."
"Where'd you come from, anyway, and what business have you got here?"
the other demanded, with an oath and a forward step.
"I'm Fifth Corps, same as you are," replied Lafe, making an effort to
keep his voice bold and firm, "and I came here by tumbling head over
heels down that hill there, right spang from top to bottom." He took
courage from the indecision apparent in the man's eyes to add, "And
that's why I'm going to have something to eat."
The stranger gave a grunt, which, bad-tempered though it was, did not
seem to forbid the action, and Lafe drew forth the bread again. It was
dry and tasteless enough, but he almost forgot to look at his unwelcome
companion in the satisfaction which he had in gulping down the food.
The man lounged over to the pile of haversacks, muskets, and clothing,
and seemed to be trying to make out whether anything was missing. He
grunted again, and turned to Lafe just as the last crust was
disappearing.
"You're a drummer, ain't you?" he said roughly. "Where do you belong?"
Lafe held up his hand to signify that his mouth was too full to talk.
"Boyce's brigade," he explained, after a little.
"That ain't what I asked. What's your regiment?"
"Haven't got any regiment," replied Lafe. "I'm in the brigade band."
"Oh!" growled the man, and turned on his heel. The information seemed
to relieve his mind, for when he had taken a few loitering steps about
the enclosure, and confronted Lafe again, his tone was less
quarrelsome. "Left the hospital camp up there, eh?" he asked, with a
sidelong nod of his head toward the top of the hill.
"Well, yes--and no," responded the boy. "It was there when I left it,
but it ain't there now. Or rather, it _is_ there, but _we_ ain't
there."
"What are you driving at?" the man demanded, once more in a rougher
voice.
"The rebs have gobbled it," said Lafe. "Our folks were skedaddling and
the rebs were coming in the last I saw."
The man gave a low whistle of surprise and interest. He began walking
about again, bending his ugly brows in thought meanwhile. From time to
time he paused to ask other questions, as to which way the people of
the brigade camp had fled, how large was the force which had captured
the camp, and the like.
The news evidently impressed him a good deal. Lafe got the idea that
somehow it changed his plans. What were these plans? the boy wondered.
The whole thing was very hard to make out. More than once he had had it
in mind to say that he had left another member of the band, a very nice
fellow indeed, up on the side-hill above them, who must also be hungry,
and to suggest that he should call him down.
But every time, when this rose to his tongue, a glance at the evil face
of the man restrained him. He could not but remember what Foldeen had
hinted, that there was some "deviltry" going on down below here. What
was it?
"There must have been some pretty tough fighting right here," he
ventured to remark, after a while.
"You bet there was!" the other assented. He seemed not averse to a
little talk, though his mind was still on other things.
"I don't quite figure it out," the boy went on, cautiously. "Of course,
wrastling round in the woods like this, you can't make head nor tail of
how things go, or who's on top, or where--but how does it stand--right
here, I mean? We're in our own lines here, ain't we?"
The stranger fixed a long, inquiring glance upon the boy's face. Lafe
returned the gaze with all the calmness he could muster. He could not
help feeling that there was a good deal of stupidity in the stare under
which he bore up. The man was not quick-minded; that was clear enough.
But it was also plain that he was both a stubborn and a brutal
creature.
"Yes," he growled, after he had stared Lafe out of countenance, "yes,
these are our own lines."
The phrase seemed to tickle his fancy, for something like the beginning
of a grin stirred on the stubbly surface about his mouth. "Yes--our own
lines," he repeated. How strange it was! All at once, like a flash,
Lafe remembered having seen this man before. That slow, sulky wavering
of a grimace on his lips betrayed him. Swiftly pursuing the clue, the
boy reconstructed in his mind a scene in which this man had played the
chief part.
It must have been in the early part of the previous December--just
after the army went into winter quarters behind the line of the Orange
railroad, cooped up in its earth-huts all the way from Culpeper Court
House to Brandy Station. Lafe had gone over on leave one afternoon to
the corps headquarters--it must have been of a Thursday, because there
was to be a military execution the next day, and these were always
fixed for Friday.
The army was then receiving almost weekly large batches of raw
recruits, sent from the big cities, some the product of the draft,
others forwarded by the enlistment bureaus. Among these new-comers were
many good citizens and patriots; but there were also a great many
cowards and a considerable number of scoundrels who made a business of
enlisting to get the bounty, deserting as soon as they could, and
enlisting again from some other point.
To prevent wholesale desertions, both of the cowards and the
"bounty-jumpers," the utmost vigilance was needed. Their best chance to
run away was offered by picket duty, when they found themselves posted
out in comparative solitude, in the dark, on the very outskirts of the
army line.
To checkmate this, a cordon of cavalry had to be drawn still farther
out than the pickets--cavalry-men who slept all day, and at night
patrolled the uttermost confines of the great camp, watching with all
their eyes and ears, ready on the instant to clap spurs and ride down
any skulking wretch who could be discovered attempting his escape.
Even in the teeth of this precaution, the attempts were continually
made, and it was the rarest event for a Friday to pass without the
spectacle of summary punishment being meted out to some captured
deserter on the corps' shooting-ground. Often there were more than one
of these victims to martial law.
Lafe now remembered how, with a boy's curiosity, he had prowled about
the provost marshal's guard quarters, fascinated by the idea that
inside the log shanty, where the two sentinels with fixed bayonets
walked constantly up and down, there were men condemned to be shot at
six the following morning.
Standing around, and gossiping amiably with these sentinels, who shared
the common feeling of the army in making pets of the drummer-boys, he
had managed at last to get a glimpse at one of these fated prisoners.
A face had appeared at the little window, square-cut in the logs. It
was a bad, unkempt face, with a reddish stubble of beard on jaws and
cheek. There may have been some rough jest passed by the other
prisoners inside the hut, for as the boy watched this face, a grim,
mean sort of smile flickered momentarily over it.
Then the face itself disappeared, and left the boy marvelling that a
man could grin in presence of the fact that he was to be shot on the
morrow.
The smile, and the countenance it played upon for that instant of time,
burned themselves into his memory. Lafe racked his brain now for some
recollection of having heard that these particular prisoners were
reprieved, or had succeeded in escaping from their log jail. His memory
was a blank on the subject. Yet he felt sure that the face he had seen
at that window was the identical face he now saw before him.
For the life of him, he could not resist the temptation to venture upon
this dangerous topic.
"You're one of the new regiments brought over to us from the old First
Corps, ain't you?" he asked, with an effort at an ingratiating tone.
The man nodded his head in indifferent assent. He seemed to be
listening intently to the sounds of battle in the air. These were
reduced now to faint, far-away cracklings of rifle-firing, as if only
distant sharpshooters were engaged.
"Suppose this is about the first time you've been under fire, then,"
Lafe remarked. He added, with a bragging air: "I was all through the
Payne's Farm and Mine Run racket last November! That was hot enough, I
tell you!"
The man made that inarticulate grunt of contempt which we try to convey
by the word humph! "So was I," he growled, "and plenty more fights
worse than them."
"Oh, got your discharge and 'listed again?" commented the boy.
Again the stranger turned upon him that steady, dull stare of
inquiry--like the gaze of a vicious ox. He seemed satisfied at length
with the artlessness of Lafe's countenance, but did not trouble himself
to answer his suggestion.
"What do you figure on doin' with yourself?" he abruptly asked the boy,
after a pause.
"How do I know?" retorted Lafe. "I'd try and join brigade headquarters,
if I knew where they were, but I don't. The next best thing is to try
and find some other brigade's headquarters. It's all clear enough
outside here now. I guess I'll take some bread with me, and make a
break through the woods down the run there. I'll fetch up somewhere,
all right."
He bent over the pile of knapsacks, as if to pick one of them up.
"No," the man called out. "Leave 'em alone! You can't take no more of
them rations, and you can't go down the run. You can't go anywhere."
Lafe straightened himself. "Why not?" he asked, with an assumption of
boldness.
"Because you can't," the other retorted curtly.
"What can I do, then?" Lafe inquired defiantly.
The man looked him over. "You can turn up your toes to the daisies in
about another minute, if you don't mind your own business. That's what
you can do," he remarked, with an ugly frown.
"What's the use of talking that way?" said Lafe. "I haven't done you
any harm, have I?"
"No--and you ain't going to, either," was the reply.
The stranger, as he spoke, took a two-barrelled pistol from his inside
jacket-pocket. It was a beautiful weapon, ornamented with a good deal
of chased silver. Lafe had seen pistols like this before, in the
possession of officers, and knew that they were called Derringers.
Private soldiers were not likely to carry weapons of that sort.
He was sure that this man must have stolen the pistol, and the
conviction did not assist Lafe to calmness, as he observed the man push
one of the hammers back with his thumb to full-cock. It is as bad to be
shot by stolen firearms as by those which have been bought and paid
for.
The stranger drew from another pocket a gold watch, with a long loop of
broad black silk braid hanging from its ring. He held it in the palm of
his free hand, and glanced at its open face.
"It must be getting along toward noon," Lafe had the temerity to
remark. There were cold shivers through his veins, but he managed to
keep his tongue steady. If "cheek" could not help him, nothing could.
"About as nigh noon as you're ever likely to git," said the other,
making a pretence of again consulting the watch.
Instinct told the lad with a flashlight swiftness that this looking at
the watch was buncombe. Men who really meant to kill did not parade
timepieces like that.
"I haven't got anything on me that would be of any use to you," he
said, with an immense effort at unconcern. "Even if I had, you wouldn't
need a gun to take it away from me."
"You've got a mouth on you," said the man, eying him, "and it'll be of
use to me to shut it up."
He lifted the pistol as he spoke, and Lafe instinctively closed his
eyes, with a confused rush of thoughts in which he seemed to see his
old mother sitting in the garden with the Book on her knees, and also
the young Ohio officer, who somehow came in among the tall flowers
beside her, and these flowers themselves were the regimental flags
which the color-sergeant was unfurling.
Then, as nothing happened, the boy opened his eyes again, and found
himself able to look into the two black disks of the Derringer's muzzle
without flinching.
He could even look beyond the muzzle, as the barrels sloped downward
toward him, and he now saw distinctly that the two little upright steel
nipples bore no caps. The discovery made him annoyed at his own
cowardice. It was easier now to be bold.
"What's your idea, anyway?" he asked the man, with an added effrontery
in his tone. "If you'd been going to shoot, you'd have done it long
ago. This thing doesn't scare me at all, and I don't see how it does
you any good. What are you getting at, anyhow?"
"I'd as soon shoot you as look at you!" the other declared with angry
emphasis, but lowering the weapon.
"Yes, but seeing you ain't going to shoot, what are you going to do?"
Lafe put in.
The ruffian eyed him again. "If I agree not to hurt you, will you do
what I tell you?" he demanded.
"Well, maybe I will," replied the boy. His spirits rose as his contempt
for this slow and shilly-shallying sort of scoundrel increased. "What
is it you want me to do?"
"I want you to help me carry some things I've got together over there,
on the other side of the creek. Well go over now, and bring 'em back
here."
"I'll take another bite of bread, first," it occurred to the boy to
say. He lifted a haversack, and shoved in one hand to burrow among its
contents, while with his foot, as if by accident, he pushed one of the
muskets lengthwise so that he might grab it the more readily if
occasion required.
Biting in leisurely fashion on the new crust he had found, Lafe felt
emboldened to make the conversation personal.
"That's a mighty fine watch you've got there," he remarked, affably. "I
suppose it went with the pistol--sort o' thrown in, like."
The man put the watch back into his trousers pocket. He seemed for a
moment disposed to annoyance. Then the furtive, mean grin curled over
the lower part of his face. "Yes--it was thrown in," he replied, almost
with a chuckle. "Come on," he added. "You can chew that bread as you go
along."
"But what am I to get?" the boy queried, slowly turning the crust over
to select a place for the next bite. "Do I come in for any watches and
silver-mounted Derringers, too?"
"You jest help me for all you're worth," replied the man, after a
moment's pause, "and I'll see to it you git something worth your
while."
"It's got to be something pretty good," said Lafe, meditatively chewing
on the hard bread. "A fellow can't be expected to risk the chance of
being shot for nothing."
"There ain't no danger of gittin' shot," the other replied.
"Well, hung, then," Lafe said impudently.
"What's that you say?" the man growled, with reawakened suspicion. "Who
said anything about hangin'? What kind o' nonsense are you talkin',
anyway?"
It might be a desperately foolish thing to do, but Lafe could not hold
himself from doing it--and for that matter didn't try.
[Illustration: LAFE AND THE BOUNTY-JUMPER.]
"Why, they hang men caught robbing the dead on battle-fields, don't
they--specially when they're bounty-jumpers to begin with?"
He had called this out as swiftly as he could, holding himself in
readiness as he spoke, and now he pounced downward, and clutching the
musket, lifted it for defence.
The man sprang forward with a quicker motion than the boy had counted
upon, and before Lafe had got erect he felt the stifling grasp of big,
hard fingers around his throat.
CHAPTER IV.
RED PETE IN CAPTIVITY.
Things grew black before Lafe's eyes as the iron clutch about his
throat tightened. He strove desperately to twist himself loose, using
in a frantic way the wrestling tricks he knew; but the grip of the
bounty-jumper was too powerful. Lafe's head seemed swelling in the
effort to burst, and feeling in all his body below that fatal circlet
became numb. There was room for but a single thought--this was what
being choked to death meant!
Afterward it never seemed to the boy that he entirely lost
consciousness. He could remember that there was a violent sidewise jerk
at his neck, and then the sense of intolerable squeezing there ceased.
But there was still an awful buzzing inside his head, and midnight
blackness, shot with interlacing lines of crazy light, spread itself
indefinitely about him.
Gradually he perceived that he was breathing again, and that he could
feel his arms and legs once more to be parts of him. He knew that he
was exceedingly tired and sleepy, and felt only that the one desirable
thing was to lie still, just as he was. He mentally resolved that he
would not stir nor open his eyes for anybody.
"_How vas it mit you, Lafe?_"
The words were undoubtedly in the air. He realized that, and lay very
still, lazily confident that he would hear them again.
Things began to assort themselves in his brain. Foldeen and he had been
on a big, overhanging rock, which had tumbled with them, and by some
chance they hadn't both been killed, and now Foldeen was looking for
him. But he would lie still and rest.
"Vake up! Lafe! Vake up!"
The boy heard these words, too. The heavy drowsiness upon him seemed to
be lifting, and he felt some one fumbling at his breast, inside his
shirt. On the instant he was awake and sitting up, wonderingly staring.
A tall figure had risen away from him as he opened his eyes. The sun
had come out, and was falling warm and full upon the mass of young
green which covered the hillside. This erect standing figure was for a
moment or two very indistinct against the dazzling light. Then Lafe
made out that this was Foldeen.
Almost in the same glance he saw that he was sitting among the heap of
knapsacks and battle-field débris in the corner of the breastwork.
Close beside him--so near that he felt he must have been lying upon him
when he recovered consciousness--sprawled the burly figure of the
bounty-jumper, face downward, and quite still.
Lafe was so contented with the spectacle on which his eyes rested that
it did not occur to him to ask what had happened.
It was pleasanter to look at Foldeen's honest face, beaming
satisfaction back into the boy's slow and inquiring regard. The German
said nothing, but just smiled at Lafe.
As the boy's memory cleared itself, the fact that Foldeen had had no
breakfast, and that he had left him in his covert on the hillside with
very little compunction, rose above everything else.
Lafe pointed to the knapsacks, and attempted to speak. His throat and
windpipe, the roots of his tongue and everything else involved in vocal
sounds, seemed at the effort to shrivel up in pain. At first he thought
he could not manage to utter a syllable. Then, at the cost of some
suffering, he forced out the words, "Bread--there." They sounded quite
strange in his ears.
Foldeen nodded his head, still with the jubilant grin on his round,
kindly face. "Ya vole," he said, in a matter-of-fact way. "But first I
fix me up dis fellow dight."
He sorted out of the pile of stolen property two officers' sashes of
knitted crimson silk, and kneeling down beside the outstretched form of
the bounty-jumper, proceeded calmly to bind his legs together at the
ankles with one of them.
Then, with some roughness, he dragged the prostrate man's arms together
till their wrists met on the small of his back, and there tied them
securely.
"He ain't dead, then?" commented Lafe, his throat feeling easier.
"Vell, maybe he is," said Foldeen. "I hit him shtraight by the top of
his head mit dot gun-barrel, und he vent down like if he vas a tousand
bricks. But it makes nodding. Ven he is dead, den he is good tied up.
Ven he is alife, den he is much better tied up. Now ve eat us our
breakfast in kviet. Bread, you say? Show me dot bread."
Foldeen needed no showing, but was on the instant wolfing huge
mouthfuls from the half-loaf which the nearest haversack furnished.
Lafe leaned back and watched him, his mind filled with formless
emotions of thanksgiving.
In such intervals as he could spare from the bread, Foldeen lightly
told what had happened. From his perch up on the hillside he had seen
everything, and though beyond earshot, had been able to follow pretty
well what was going on.
When the rascal drew the pistol, Foldeen slipped out from his
hiding-place, and began letting himself noiselessly down the hill. He
had entered the breastwork just at the critical moment, and had dealt
Lafe's assailant a crushing blow on the skull with a gun he picked up.
That was all. It was very simple.
"And mighty lucky for me, too!" was the boy's heartfelt comment.
"Foldeen, do you know what this fellow here's been doing?"
"I haf some brains on my head. I haf seen his business. He is a dief."
"He got these things together here," said Lafe, "and he told me there
was a lot more over on the other side of the creek. He was going to
make me help him bring them here. That was what he had the pistol out
for. But what beats me is, what did he expect to do with them? A man
can't get out of the lines with a load of traps like this, even if he
could carry 'em."
For answer Foldeen rose, and turned the sprawling, inert form of his
captive over on its back. The pallor of the thief's face, contrasted
with the coarse, sandy hair and stubble of beard, made it seem more
repellent than ever.
The German bent over to examine this countenance more carefully.
"By jiminy priest! I bet me anydings I know dot man!" he exclaimed,
staring downward intently. "Vake up dere, you!" he called out, pushing
the recumbent figure with his foot. "I know you, Red Pete! Dot's no
use, your making out you vas asleep! Vake up, kvick now!" and he
stirred him with his boot again.
"I bet he's dead," said Lafe.
No! The man half opened his eyes and moved his head restlessly. The
color came back into his face, the muscles of which were drawn now into
an angry scowl by pain. He fell back helpless after an instinctive
effort to lift himself to a sitting posture. Then, shifting his head,
he discovered the two friends, and fixed upon them a stolid,
half-stupefied stare.
"How you like him, dot Red Pete, eh?" Foldeen burst forth, with
exultation, never taking his jubilant glance from the face of the
wretch on the ground. "Dots a beauty, ain'd it? Dot's a first-glass
Ghristmas bresent, eh, to find in your shtocking! Or no, he is too big.
Ve hang him on a dree, eh? A nize Ghristmas-dree, all by ourselves, eh?
O Red Pete, you vas git the best place by dot dree, right in front, on
the biggest branch!"
The man on the ground had been staring upward at the speaker in a
puzzled fashion. He had slowly taken in the situation that he was
disabled, bound hand and foot, and at the German's mercy. At last he
seemed to recall who it was who was talking to him.
"I never done you no harm!" he growled.
"So-o!" ejaculated Foldeen, with loud sarcasm. "Dot vas no harm, eh,
dot vas only some little fun, eh, to make me on fire und burn me up mit
the rest in dot shteam-boat? Just some funny joke, eh? Veil, den, now I
will haf me _my_ funny liddle jokes mit you."
Speaking with such swift volubility that Lafe followed with difficulty
the thread of his narrative, Foldeen unfolded a curious tale. Before
the war he had drifted about in the South a good deal, playing in
orchestras in New Orleans some of the time, and then for whole seasons
travelling up and down the Mississippi in the bands of the old
passenger steamers.
This man, Red Pete, was a well-known character on the river, too well
known all the way from Cairo to the last levee. Sometimes he was in
charge of a squad of slaves, sometimes travelling on his own account as
a gambler, slave-buyer, or even for a trip as minor boat officer--but
always an evil-minded scoundrel.
One night, when they were lying at the wharf under the bluff at
Natchez, the cabins of the steamer had been robbed, and fire set to the
boat in several places. Those on board barely escaped with their lives,
and when they found that Red Pete was missing, every one knew well
enough that he was the thief and would-be murderer.
Foldeen believed there had been some search for him, but those were
rough times, and he was never tracked down. Then the war came, and
Foldeen perforce went into the band of an Arkansas regiment--until the
opportunity of making his escape to the Union lines occurred.
During that period of reluctant service with the band which played
"Dixie" and "The Bonnie Blue Flag," he had more than once heard of Red
Pete as a sort of unattached guerrilla, who, like many other river
ruffians, played for his own hand between the lines.
"Und now it looks like dot game of his vas pretty near blayed out, eh?"
Foldeen concluded with a chuckle.
Lafe gazed down with loathing upon this burly and powerful desperado,
lying in such utter helplessness. He told Foldeen in turn how he had
seen this very man in the Fifth Corps "quod" only last winter,
condemned to death.
"So-o!" exclaimed the German. "I remember dot. All five deserters und
bounty-chumpers dug deir vay out, und gilled a sentinel, und skipped in
the night. So-o! Ve don't have us dot private Ghristmas-dree, after
all. Ve make Red Pete a bresent to Cheneral Boyce, instead."
"Yes, but where shall we find General Boyce?" Lafe put in.
Moved by a common impulse, the two turned their backs on their
prisoner, and went outside the earthwork.
The sky was overcast with shifting clouds again, and gave no hint as to
the points of compass. The little valley, strewn with motionless,
blue-clad figures, lay wrapped in such silence that they could hear the
murmur of the rivulet beyond. On both sides the hills rose steeply,
covered with thick, tangled verdure.
Behind and before them the valley lost itself a hundred yards away in
dense thickets. A sharp wind had risen, under which the tree-tops
moaned. Above the noises of the gathering gale, faint sounds of distant
firing could be heard.
"We'd better stay where we are," the boy suggested. "There's been
rough-and-tumble fighting all around here, and there's no way of
figuring out where our people are. I guess they don't know themselves.
If we go hunting round, we're as likely as not to walk into a hornets'
nest. I tell you what we'll do. If we can find a piece of white cloth,
we'll put it up on a pole out here, and we'll bury these men of ours.
Nobody'll touch us, if they come along and find us doing that. Besides,
it's the right thing to do."
They turned back into the breastwork, and Lafe, rummaging among the
knapsacks, speedily found a roll of bandage-linen which would serve his
purpose. He got out more bread as well, and found a scrap of fried
bacon. The two ate standing; now that they had a plan, they were all
eagerness to put it into operation.
Red Pete had closed his eyes again, and was lying perfectly still. The
excitement of his capture having died away, they now scarcely gave him
a glance.
"I wonder what time it's got to be," Lafe remarked, as they were
finishing the last mouthful. "Oh, I forgot--he's got a gold watch in
his pocket, and I think it's going."
Foldeen knelt, and feeling about for it, drew the watch from Red Pete's
trousers pocket. "By jiminy priest! it's near four o'clock!" he
exclaimed. Then rising, he looked more attentively at the watch,
turning it over in his hand admiringly, and prying open the back of the
case with his nail.
There seemed to be an inscription on the inside of the cover, and
Foldeen held the watch sidewise to decipher this more readily, while
Lafe peered over his shoulder to look.
"It's in writing," he said; "let me take it. I can make it out easier,
perhaps."
The legend inside the gold case was delicately engraved in small
running script. Lafe, reading with increasing surprise, discovered it
to be this:--
_Presented to
Lieut. Lyman Hornbeck,
January 22, 1864,
by his friends and admirers
Of St. Mark's Church,
Cleveland._
"Say, Foldeen," Lafe burst forth, "I bet that's a relation of mine.
I've got an uncle----"
"So everybody has got some ungles," put in the musician.
"No, but look here," the boy insisted. "That says 'Lyman Hornbeck.'
Well, my father's brother was Lyman Hornbeck. I've heard talk about my
Uncle Lyme ever since I could remember. He left home years ago, before
I was born. They always said he was out West, somewhere. I bet it's the
same man. At any rate, I'm going to take a look around. You fix up the
pole and the white flag outside here, and bring out the shovels. I'll
be back again and help."
Lafe's eyes sparkled with a new excitement as he made his way across
the pasture to the bank of the creek, noting as he strode along that
all the lifeless forms on the grass wore the uniforms of privates.
He walked along the shelving edge of this bank from one end of the
clearing to the other, to make sure that the winding bed of the stream
below did not hold what he sought for. There was no sign, anywhere in
the open, of an officer.
He remembered now that Red Pete had spoken of the other side of the
creek, which lay so much lower than the bank on which he stood that it
could not have been raked by the fire from the breastwork. It was
swampy ground, covered heavily with high, bushing willows and rank
growths of tall marsh grass. No path leading into it was discernible,
perhaps because the wind blew the reeds and flags so stiffly sidewise.
With a running jump Lafe cleared the bed of the stream, and pushed his
way into the morass. It was not so wet underfoot as he had expected,
but the tangle of vines and undergrowth made his progress slow and
troublesome. It was easy enough to see that no portion of the brigade
had passed this way; there were no indications that wild nature here
had ever been disturbed. The boy pressed on until, finding the
swamp-jungle getting worse with every yard, and the shadows deepening
about him, it was clearly useless to go farther.
Turning, he fancied he knew from which direction he had advanced into
this maze. There was no use in merely retracing his steps. He settled
his bearings as well as might be, and struck off to the left, to work
his way diagonally out to the clearing.
When he had floundered on over what seemed twice the distance of his
first direct line, and halted, hot, tired, and out of breath, he could
detect no open space ahead. The wind was blowing hard from up above,
and the noise of its impact upon the wilderness was in itself enough to
confuse the senses. It was undoubtedly growing dark.
"Hello--Hornbeck!" Lafe shouted.
The wind seized the shrill cry and scattered it into fragmentary
echoes. It was worse than useless to call out. He must push doggedly
on. Lafe turned a little to the right, and crushed his way forward
through the brush and bracken, with a step to which dawning fears of
being lost lent added vigor.
He was traversing slightly higher ground now. The willows and marsh
grass had given place to a more orderly second growth of firs, with dry
moss underfoot, and open spaces overhead. In one of these
breathing-places of the thicket, he came suddenly upon the blue-clad
figure of a man sitting propped up against a stump, his head hanging on
his breast.
He was young and fair-haired, and Lafe's glance took in the glint of
gilt straps on his shoulders as he hurried toward him. Almost in the
same instant the boy, kneeling at his side, saw that this was the young
Ohio officer he had spoken with at sunrise, and that he was alive.
As he sought to waken the wounded man, and make out how badly he had
been hurt, it grew suddenly, strangely dark. Looking upward, Lafe saw
above the treetops nearest him, piling skyward on the wind, a great
writhing wall of black smoke.
It mounted in huge, waving coils as he looked, and came nearer, bending
forward in a sinister arch across the heavens. His startled ears dimly
heard a sullen, roaring sound, newly engrafted upon the whistling of
the wind.
The woods were on fire!
CHAPTER V.
LAFE RESCUES AN OFFICER, AND FINDS HIS COUSIN.
Lafe had seen forest fires near Juno Mills, and there was nothing in
his recollection of them to suggest great danger in this one. He was
more interested for the moment in the young Ohio officer propped
against the stump. This lieutenant was barefooted. A thief had
evidently taken also his sash, sword, and belt.
He was probably one of Red Pete's victims. The others could not be far
away, among them Lafe's problematical kinsman with the presentation
watch.
But finding a possible uncle was just now of less importance than
finding a safe way out of the thicket. The smoke grew visibly thicker,
and Lafe could detect, off to the left, the distinct crackling noise of
flames. He dropped on one knee again, and patted the officer's shoulder
with decision.
The young man moved his head restlessly, then opened his eyes and
stared dully at Lafe.
"Which way is the creek?" the drummer-boy shouted.
The lieutenant, as if dazed, looked half wonderingly into the boy's
face. Then he blinked, shook himself, and made a move to sit upright.
He sank back with his mouth drawn awry by the severity of his pain, and
forced the semblance of a laugh upon these pale lips.
"I thought at first I was home, and you were my brother," he said.
"How bad are you hurt? Can you walk?" Lafe demanded. "We've got to get
out of this. The woods are on fire, and the wind is blowing it dead
this way. Where are you hit?"
"Minie ball here--between the shoulder and the lung, I hope," replied
the other, indicating his left side. "It's stiffened and I can't lift
myself. Help me on my feet, and I guess I can walk away."
Lafe put an arm under him and gave him his hand. The lieutenant, with a
groan, set his teeth and scrambled up on his feet. He looked about him
for an instant, and then hastily seated himself on the stump.
"I'm dizzy for the minute," he murmured. "I must have lost so much
blood. It's afternoon, isn't it?"
"Past five. You'd better brace up now, and try to come on. Which way is
it?"
The officer looked vaguely around. "I hardly know," he confessed. "I
can just remember dragging myself off into the swamp. I thought I
should find some water, and I guess my strength gave out about here.
Somebody came along and pulled off my boots and stockings, and went
through my pockets, but I was too near dead to resist, and I kept my
eyes shut."
"Well, you want to keep 'em open now. This must be the way out,
according to the wind. That's it; get your arm over my shoulder, and
we'll make a break."
They walked thus for a dozen steps or so, the officer leaning a little
on Lafe's right shoulder. Then the wounded man stopped.
"I'd rather you went ahead," he called into the boy's ear. "The
branches knock against my game side, this way. I'll keep behind you;"
and so they went on again, Lafe pushing the saplings and boughs aside
for the other.
The smoke had become almost blinding now, as it sifted through the
motionless air of the thicket. The noises had risen now into a
pandemonium of uproar--on the left the furious bellowing of the tempest
and the flames, to the right a series of outbursts that shook the earth
like mine explosions. It sometimes seemed to Lafe as if he
distinguished the cheers and vague cries of men, off on the other
side--and then back would come the chaotic din.
Awed and deafened, the two pushed doggedly on, Lafe stealing glances
over his shoulder, to see if the officer was following. He came,
holding to the branches with his right hand for support, and striving
to pick soft places for his bare feet among the stones and prickly
ground vines.
It had suddenly grown very hot. The heat began to sting Lafe's forehead
and eyes. They were advancing into the temperature of a veritable
furnace. The crackling noises to the left had swollen all at once to an
angry tumult close at hand.
Looking up with smarting eyes through the pungent smoke, the boy beheld
scattered flashes of flame dotting the murky shadows of the forest
beyond, and even as he looked these tongues of fire ran forward under
the wind with darting swiftness. An imperative outcry behind Lafe
called a halt. He turned as his companion reeled, clutched wildly at an
ash sapling, and fell against it, his head hanging helplessly forward
on his breast.
"It's no use," he gasped, as the boy strode back. "I'm choking, and I'm
played out. I can't go another step."
He falteringly lifted one of his torn and bleeding feet, and put it
down again. His arm slipped from around the sapling, and he would have
fallen if Lafe had not caught him.
"Why don't you be a man!" the boy screamed shrilly through the tumult.
A sort of angry desperation seized upon Lafe. He would drag this Ohio
tenderfoot out of the fire in spite of himself. With rough energy he
fitted his shoulder under the officer's armpit, and drew his right arm
forward in the determined clutch of both his hands.
"Come on now, the best way you can. Never mind your feet or your
shoulder either!" he yelled, and then, stiffening his back under the
burden, he staggered forward.
He could never afterward recall anything definitely of how he did it,
or how long it took. But through the shrivelling heat, through the
murderous swoop of fire and smoke, somehow he came. All at once there
was the play of cooler air upon his face. Instead of the choking smoke
and darkness he was wrapped about by a clean wind. It had grown
suddenly daylight again.
Bent almost double under his burden, he strove in vain to fill his
lungs with this fresh air. It was dimly in his mind to straighten
himself, and breathe in all he could hold. But the load on his back
seemed to be pressing him further down, and whirling him round as well.
Then he was lying face downward, on dry, soft earth with the sharp
edges of stiff marsh grass in his hair. Something heavy lay across him.
He rolled himself free from the encumbrance, and stretched himself out
luxuriously on his back. The wind soughed pleasantly through the reeds
about his head.
He went to sleep, dreaming placidly as he dropped off that ordered
swarms of men were passing through the tall grass close beside him,
firing volleys and cheering as they fired.
Four red points of light, at regular distances apart, and shining
faintly against a broad canopy of blackness, was what Lafe, still lying
on his back, beheld when he woke. He looked at them lazily for what
seemed a long time, and did not care in the least what they signified.
Then, quite without any effort, he knew that they were lanterns hung on
a rope.
There were sinuous lines of motion in the darkness above the lanterns,
and these revealed themselves to him as the sides of canvas-strips
stirring in the wind. This, too, did not seem important, and he
indolently closed his eyes again.
A sharp cry, ringing abruptly out close at hand, awoke him more
thoroughly. He even lifted his head a little, and saw many more
lights--lanterns, kerosene lamps, and tallow-dips stuck in bottles.
They stretched out irregularly in all directions, illumining little
patches of space, which seemed all the smaller by comparison with the
vast blocks of deep shadows surrounding them.
The radiance of many of these lights centred upon a broad table, about
which several men were standing in their shirtsleeves, and with aprons
like butchers. There seemed to be another man lying on this table, and
one of his legs was bared to the thigh. Some of these shadowy figures
moved, and another cry arose. Lafe shut his eyes, and turned away from
the spectacle.
There was now a rustle of straw under him, and he noted that his head
was resting on a canvas pillow filled with straw. A strong smell, as of
arnica, attracted his attention. Now he understood that he was in a
hospital tent.
He wondered where he himself had been hurt. Except for a general, dull
aching of the muscles, he was conscious of no special pain. He tried
opening and closing his fingers, and moving his toes.
Each member seemed in working order. He passed his hands along his
sides, and still found nothing amiss. But his head certainly did ache.
Vague recollection of the events of the day began to stir in his
memory, but not at all in their right order. It seemed as if it was
Foldeen Schell whom he had carried out of the burning woods, and nearer
still in point of time seemed to be Red Pete's stifling grip upon his
neck. Then, somehow, his thoughts drifted to the watch and its
inscription.
He drowsily tried to think what this Lyman Hornbeck must be like--a
gray-bearded old man and a church-member, and yet only a lieutenant. So
his vagrant fancy drifted about on the border-land of sleep.
Suddenly there were voices close about him. Half opening his eyes, Lafe
blinked at three or four torches which some soldiers were holding up at
the foot of his bed. A half-dozen officers were there as well, and the
foremost one was General Boyce.
The light hurt Lafe's eyes, and he closed them. The general's cheery
voice remained in his ears, though, and conveyed so true a notion of
the man that Lafe seemed to continue to behold him, the red torchlight
heightening the glow of health on his round cheeks and shining in his
brave, kindly eyes.
"Oh, you'll be up and about in a day or two," the general was saying,
in a hearty, encouraging way. "Won't he, surgeon-major?"
"Well, inside a week," answered another voice. "The wound in itself
wasn't much. It's the loss of blood that's worst."
"Lieutenant," the general went on, "if I don't call you captain when
you get back from your furlough, it won't be my fault. You've been
mentioned in the despatches. Your company's tussle with the breastwork
under the hill was as plucky a thing as has been done to-day. Well,
good luck to you!"
There was a rattle of spurs and swords, as if the group were moving,
and then Lafe was conscious that the young Ohio officer spoke, as if
from the very next bed.
"O general," he called out, "I'll save my own thanks for some other
time! But I want you to take notice of this boy here. _He's_ one
who ought to be mentioned in despatches. I'd have been roasted alive if
it hadn't been for him. He came into the woods and found me, and routed
me up, and made me walk, and when I gave out he actually carried me
right through the blaze. Talk about charging the breast-work! What he
did was worth fifty of it."
Lafe felt through his closed eyelids that the torches were being held
so as to cover him with their light. Oddly enough, he seemed without
desire to look.
"I won't forget," said the general. "How badly off is he?"
"He was brought in with the lieutenant here," returned the
surgeon-major. "I didn't see him myself. You were here, nurse?"
A woman's voice took up the thread: "Poor little fellow, he doesn't
seem to have been shot, but his head was laid open to the bone somehow.
Doctor Alvord thought it must have been a horse's hoof."
"We were both on the ground in the way when the big charge down the run
was made," explained the lieutenant. "He must have got trampled on. I
think he's a drummer in the brigade band. I noticed him when we went
into line this morning."
"I wonder if it can be our Juno Mills boy," broke in the general. Lafe
felt that the great man was bending over close to him. "Some Dutchman
in the band was telling a tremendous yarn about a youngster who went
down alone into the breast-work after it was deserted, and had a fight,
single-handed, with a baggage-thief, and played the deuce generally.
Does anybody know whether he's the same one?"
Lafe could never understand afterward what ailed him to behave so, but
at this he kept his breathing down to its gentlest possible form. The
general and his attendants moved off down the aisles, halting with the
torches at other bedsides to give cheer. Their going gave Lafe leisure
for the thought which interested him most.
The news that his head had been laid open to the bone had fascinated
him. He put up a hand now and felt of his skull. It was covered all
over with interlaced strips of stiff plaster encased in a soft linen
bandage drawn tight.
"Are you feeling all right?"
It was the voice of the lieutenant. Lafe, proud of his plasters, opened
his eyes and made out the young officer, propped up with a couple of
straw pillows on the bed next his.
"My head aches a little, that's all," said Lafe. "Say, we had a squeak
for it, didn't we?"
"I shan't forget it--nor you," responded the other.
"Cleveland's in Ohio, ain't it?" the boy asked, all at once pursuing a
subject which had kept dodging in and out of his mind. "Perhaps you
know an old man in one of the Ohio regiments--he must be getting along
toward sixty--he's a lieutenant, and his name's Lyman Hornbeck. I was
looking for him this afternoon when--when I lighted on you."
The young officer, quite heedless of his bandages, sat bolt upright and
stared at Lafe as if too much amazed for words.
"I don't know what you're driving at," he said at last. "_My_ name
is Lyman Hornbeck, and I'm a Cleveland man and a lieutenant--but I'm a
long way off from sixty. You can't mean my father? He's been dead two
years. His name was Lyman. Why, hold on! General Boyce said something
about Juno Mills--my father came from near there--you don't mean to say
you're a Hornbeck?"
An irresistible impulse moved Lafe to crawl out of his bed and totter
across to the other's pallet. He sat down on the edge of it, and leaned
his head back on the officer's two pillows.
"Say, I'm Steve Hornbeck's son," he said, "and your father was my Uncle
Lyme. Do you know, I kind of felt like takin' a shine to you when you
spoke to me early this morning."
[Illustration: "I'M STEVE HORNBECK'S SON!"]
The officer had put his arm affectionately round the boy's neck. "Why,
don't you remember," he cried, with pleased interest, "how I said I had
a brother like you at home?"
And so the two lay close together in a delighted gossip until the
surgeon came, and laughingly but peremptorily drove them apart. They
told him something of the strange story, and an attendant went out and
found Foldeen, and brought him in, and he added many striking
variations to the legend which now, by midnight, had become the talk of
the brigade.
General Boyce came back to the hospital tent purposely to see the boy
from his own Dearborn County whom men were talking about. He nodded his
head approvingly as he stood by the bedside and listened to Foldeen's
excited narrative of the lad's fight with Red Pete.
"I remember hearing of that fellow before," he said. "We'll hang him in
the morning, if we have to go without breakfast to do it."
Foldeen shook his head. "He is no good for hanging, dot Red Pete,"
he explained. "When the fire is gone out by dot breastwork where he
vas, maybe you find some chargoals from him--und maybe two, dree
buttons--dot's all."
The beautiful city by the lake wore its most velvety, green robes of
June when Lieutenant Hornbeck, who had been home invalided for some
weeks, was able at last to accept the reception which the good people
of St. Mark's Church wished to hold in his honor.
It seemed as if all Cleveland sought for admission to this festival of
welcome to the brave young officer. Yet when he came in, leaning on his
wife's arm, and with the flush of honest pride mantling upon the pallor
of his face, it turned out that the real hero of the evening was the
wiry, brown-faced boy he brought with him.
Lafe's story had been told in many other places. They knew it by heart
here in his new home, where henceforth he was to live with his cousin.
He blushed many times that evening at the things admiring people said
to his face about him, and he still says if folks _will_ insist on
discussing it, that the only interesting thing of the whole day was his
taking a shine to his cousin before he knew who he was.
HOW DICKON CAME BY HIS NAME.
A Tale of Christmas in the Olden Time.
CHAPTER I.
THE MAKING OF A SOLDIER.
Though more crests are blazoned nowadays than there are minutes in
which the heralds may count them, yet old families still live, with
roots deep down in rural England's soil, and nourish in quiet legends
which, when they come to notice, are the fairest flowers in the garden
of English folk-lore.
Such a tale the Tambows of Shropshire can tell. Once, it is dimly
understood, the narrative was written out, and even printed from types
in Caxton's own press. If this be true, the book has long been lost.
But the story is worth keeping.
Dickon looked at this time to be well on in his teens. He was so tall
and stout a lad that grown men spoke to him, now and again, as to one
of themselves. Just what his age might be, however, it lay beyond
mortal power to discover. His mother was long since dead. His native
hamlet had been wiped by fire and sword from the face of the earth.
His father could remember nothing more of Dickon's birth than that it
was either just before the Battle of Bloreheath in Stafford, or soon
after the fierce fight at Mortimer's Cross in Hereford. The one would
make him sixteen years old, the other scarcely more than fourteen.
Whether it was sixteen or fourteen no living soul in England cared.
There was as yet no other name for him than Dickon--that is to say, any
securely fastened name. He had been called Smithson, and even Smith, by
word of mouth among strangers. But the rough men close at hand commonly
hailed him with oaths, which pointed to no surname whatever. Indeed,
surnames were matters strictly for his betters--for gentlefolk, or at
the least for thrifty yeomen with a dozen cows or fourscore sheep on a
walk.
There could never have been a thought, therefore, in Dickon's head as
to what name was likest to stick to him, since of all unlabelled hinds
in Salop surely he was the lowliest.
Thought, in truth, is an over-fine word for aught that went forward in
Dickon's brain. He knew only some few things more clearly than did the
horses and dogs about him.
He did know, first of all, that his grim master, who lived up in the
castle just above, was named Sir Watty Curdle, and that the castle
itself was Egswith. That he was Sir Watty's man was by far the most
important thing there was for him to know; and that it might be kept
always fresh before his eyes and patent to all others, this lord's
device of two running hares, back to back, one turned upside down, was
sewed upon the breast of Dickon's leather jerkin.
Dickon had more reasons for holding his master to be a foul ruffian and
robber than the dumb brutes in stable and kennel could have possessed,
though doubtless they, too, were of the same opinion. He knew,
furthermore, that the king was a tall and fine young man, because he
had seen him after Tewksbury. He knew that the Lady Curdle came from
Cheshire, which was reputed to lie northward.
He knew that all men-at-arms who wore three stags' heads on their
jackets were his natural enemies; and that it was thought better to be
a soldier than the son of a smith. Sometimes he thought that it must be
better to be dead than either.
Dickon's belongings were all on his back. He owned a thick shirt of
rough woollen, which had been his share of the spoil of a Yorkist
archer, slain the year before in a fray on Craven highroad. Formerly
the lad had been harassed by dreams that the dead man, all shivering
and frosted over, had come back for his shirt, but these dreams were
past long since, and he wore the shirt now like a second skin, so
wholly did it seem a part of him.
Over this shirt was drawn his leather tunic, which was becoming too
tight. Under this were fastened with cowhide thongs the points of his
old leathern hose, also strained now almost to bursting. His shoes were
rude and worn contrivances of leather, bound on over ankle and instep
with cords. His neck and tangled shock of yellow hair were hidden under
a caped hood of coarse brown cloth.
In these garments he toiled miserably by day; in them he slept in his
cold corner of the smithy floor by night. By night and day the solitary
aspiration of his mind was for the time when he might escape his
fathers curses and beatings, and bear a spear among the men-at-arms.
This chance came to him suddenly, on a December day, when the air over
the Marches was so thick and gray and cold that men desired to fight,
if only to keep their blood from chilling within them. Out of this
chance proceeded strange things, the legend of which has lived these
hundreds of years in Salop.
Sir Watty Curdle did what he dared toward being a law to himself. In
the fastness of the Welsh mountains, just back of his domain, there
were always whisperings of new Lancastrian plots and bold adventures.
These drifted to Egswith Castle, on its steep, ugly crag, and made an
atmosphere of treason there which hung over the Marches like a fog.
That Sir Watty had a rushlight's choice between King Edward and Queen
Margaret no one ever believed. If it had suited his ends he would as
easily have been the king's man. But since the hated Stanleys were
cheek by jowl with the king, there could be nothing for Sir Watty but
the other side.
Besides, he had grievances. That is to say, other gentlemen in the
countryside had houses and fair daughters and plate and fat cattle.
These things rankled in Sir Watty's mind.
Sir Watty rose on this December morning with his head clear from a
month's carouse, with his muscles itching for sharp work, and with the
eager sniff of rapine in his nostrils.
Word that sport was afoot ran presently about through the galleries and
yards and clustering outer hovels within the high-perched walls of
Egswith. Rough, brawny men forthwith dragged out haubergeons and
sallets, and leathern jackets stuffed with wool, and smiled grimly over
them and put them on.
Two troopers in sleeveless coats of plate mail, and heavy greaves and
boots, came clanking down the jagged hill-path. They routed with loud
halloos the threescore people who dwelt in the foul and toppling huts
huddled at the foot of the crag, under the shadow of gray Egswith.
"Ho! Ho-o!" they bawled. "Out with you--out! out! Your lord rides
to-day!"
A bustling crowd arose on the instant. Strong men swarmed in the open.
Some were sent into the fields with horns to summon yokels who were
grubbing among the roots. Others haled forth armor and saddle-gear, and
bows and spears, and shouted joyous quips from group to group.
Dull-browed women, with backs bent like beasts of burden, brought food
and hoods and such tackle at command, in sulky silence. Half-clad
children hung about the doorways, gazing wonderingly. From the castle
gates some horses were being led out; and about the high walls rang the
shrill blare of trumpet-calls.
The two troopers, after setting all in motion outside, clanked their
way into the smithy, and the black one, Morgan, he with a brutish face,
seamed and gashed with red scars,--where only one eye remained to glare
in rude arrogance,--kicked the door open, and cried out as he did so:
"Are you dead here, then? What are your ears for, fools? And no fire!"
Dickon crossed the floor of the smithy, and stood before the intruders.
"The old man will light fires no more," he said, with dogged
indifference, pointing a sidelong thumb to the bundle of straw at the
tail of the forge, beneath the bellows.
There, flat on his back, lay the smith, with wide-open, staring eyes,
and a face of greenish-brazen hue; his huge grizzled beard spread
stiffly outward like the bristling collar of some unclean giant
vulture.
"He was ever a surly swine," Morgan growled. "Even as we need him most,
he fails us thus!"
Dickon offered no opinion upon this. "It fell on him in the night," he
said.
Morgan leant over as far as his iron casings permitted, to note what
share of breath remained in the smith's body. Then he rose, and looked
the lad from top to toe with his sullen single eye.
"Get you into his foot-gear, then, and follow on," he snarled curtly.
Then for the first time the other man-at-arms spoke. He was a huge,
reddish warrior, with the shoulders of an ox, and a face which flamed
forth from out the casings of his head-piece like a setting winter sun.
"Were it not better to leave him?" this Rawly asked. "If he chance to
get his head broken, how will Sir Watty make shift for a smith?"
Morgan sneered this down. "The lout hath not the wit for the tenth part
of a smith," he said. "Between this and Bromfield there are a dozen of
the craft to be had at the bare mention of a halter."
Thus it was that a soldier's life opened before Dickon.
He made haste to don his father's sleeveless chain coat and sallet.
Then, choosing a crossbow and sheaf of quarrels for himself, he
gathered such other weapons as the smithy held, and carried them out
into the open. Now the troop was forming, and the start close at hand.
The lad had seen many of these rallies for a raid; but this one,
wherein he was to have part, had a new glory in his eyes. He rubbed
shoulders with the men who were making ready against the ride. With the
boldness of an equal he bore a hand to help them fit the armor to their
backs. There was none to make him afraid. When a knavish hobler offered
to force his cross-bow from him in exchange for a rusty pole-axe,
Dickon smote him on the head with a full man's might and heart, and
kept his weapon.
[Illustration: "SIR WATTY CAME STALKING DOWN."]
At last Sir Watty came stalking down the broken, winding path, with his
chestnut stallion led prancing from rock to rock at his heels. Behind
him came a score of men-at-arms, and then still other horses at halter.
The knight stopped on the boulder at the foot of the hill, that two men
might lift him to the saddle. As he moved forward there arose a great,
joyful shout and clanking bustle of men mounting to follow. Dickon was
of the sorrier sort who must run on their own legs; but no man on
armored steed was prouder than he.
Sir Watty sat with alert, poised lightness in his stirrups, as if the
brigandines which cased him from nape to ankle had been of linen
instead of close-set, burnished metal plates overlapping one the other
like a fish's scales and planned with cunning joints. Gilt nails
studded the angles of this glittering suit, and the body of it was
covered with green velvet, with the two hares of Curdle wrought in gold
upon the breast.
Unlike the lesser riders, he wore bascinet and gorget on head and neck,
with light pauldrons, velvet-clad and shaped like eagles' talons,
running out to his shoulders over the scaled mail.
There were unnumbered tales as to how Sir Watty had come by this
princely harness, all of a likeness in that they imputed its possession
to plunder. One might well credit this on looking at the man's face as
he rode with lifted visor--the curved, bony, beak-like nose, the
stone-gray eyes, the thin, brief line of lips twisted tight
together--all as relentless and shrewd and cruel as something born of
snake or hawk.
Clustering at his back rode thirty men-at-arms, no other knight among
them. There were unfrocked monks, loose, wandering troopers, murderers,
revolted townsmen and mere generic ruffians from anywhere on the face
of the earth, all gathered to Egswith by the magnet of its lawless
fame, and all risking life and facing punishment here and hereafter
with Sir Watty because they knew him for a master knave and robber.
These wore ill-assorted armor, the random product of years of
raiding--some nearly covered with iron, others with no more than a
rusted haubergeon and battered sallet. Of weapons, too, there was as
mongrel a show. Some bore hagbuts, or hand-guns, to be fired with
powder, and had leather bags full of stone bullets hanging at their
saddles. Among the others were crossbows with wyndacs and without,
lances, bills, long and short pole-axes, and even spiked clubs of iron.
Dickon joined the score of footmen who turned into the road as the
cavalcade filed by.
For a little these all trudged behind the horses, bearing their lighter
cuirasses and caps and their long or cross-bows with easy spirits. It
was a morning made for walking, with black frost holding the ground so
stiff that it rang like stone under the clattering hoofs ahead. A sharp
air tweaked nostrils and ears, and made the blood glow even in churlish
veins.
It was to the footmen nothing short of delight to stride onward thus,
with a captain in front who feared naught, and on one's shoulder a
weapon of death.
Later in the day, when their course lay over a rough moorland stretch
where bleak winds whistled, and hunger began to gnaw upon fatigue, the
adventure became less joyful. Still Dickon pressed forward upon the
freshest hoof-marks, gay of heart. Others, who carried more years and a
staler fancy, began to lag. Then an interesting thing happened.
At a word from Morgan, huge Rawly and a dozen others wheeled out from
the troop and, halting at the side of the highway in waiting till the
footmen had passed, drew close in behind them.
To make the meaning of this more clear, some of these horsemen
pleasantly pricked their spear-points into the weariest of those
walking before them. Thereafter the whole body moved on more swiftly.
None of the peasants knew whither the expedition was proceeding. For
the first few leagues, journeying down the valley of the little stream
which rose back of Egswith, they had seen at a distance more than one
frowning castle. But they had come near to no human habitation. Then
had ensued the arduous march across the moor, with no sign of castle or
roof-tree.
But now, some hours after high noon, they were advancing upon a
better-ordered country, with smooth roads and farm-lands. The mountains
on the right were farther away now, and hung pale blue upon the
confines of the gray sky. There were farm-houses in view, and these
were of a larger and more prosperous aspect than Dickon had seen
before. The husbandmen seemed to have small appetite for fighting, too,
for they could be discerned presently fleeing with their women,
children, and cattle across their fields to woodland shelter.
The spectacle of people making their escape before his approach was new
to Dickon. He swelled out his chest to a greater girth because of it,
and forgot the heated aching of his feet.
Sir Watty permitted the men to enter and ransack one of these
farm-places. No living soul was to be discovered, but of food there was
plenty. Some of the older and wiser troopers knew where to look for
gear of less transient moment. But the spoil was not of importance.
Soon they were all pressing on again, along the highroad traversing
this peaceful and fertile plain. By and by an old archer who trudged by
Dickon's side halted in surprise, and as he stepped forward again
growled out in perplexed disquiet:--
"Nay--aught but that, Sir Waddy, aught but that!"
Dickon, looking ahead, noted that his lord, after a moment's parley,
had turned his course to the left, and was leading the party into a
narrow lane.
Some of the hoblers, mounted on their light nags, were sent flying off
across fields still more to the left, and Morgan came galloping back to
the rear of the column. When he had muttered some charge to Rawly and
then set back again to join his chief, it became known that Rawly with
his handful of horse and all the footmen were to continue on the
highroad.
The lad would never have thought out what this division of forces
signified, but the old archer, little by little, and more to hear his
own voice than from kindness to the boy, informed his mind. The company
had been split in twain because the quarry was near at hand, and must
needs be surrounded.
This was good soldiery, but in the present case it would be useless.
Sir Watty and every mother's son with him would be slain--the footmen
as well as the rest. Of this there could be no tittle of doubt, the
archer cheeringly insisted. He was a native of these parts, and knew
the evil repute of the stronghold they were about to attack. Not a
man-jack of them would ever find himself back upon this blessed
highroad again! Of that he made certain.
Dickon listened to these astounding tidings without any very near sense
of fear. To look Death in the eye seemed not an unnatural thing, now
that he was a soldier and wore an iron jacket. But his blood chilled
within him when he heard the answer to his idle query.
"Is it bigger then than Egswith?" he had asked.
The gray old archer, stealing an apprehensive glance about him, and
whispering sidelong, replied:--
"There are no walls--that eye can see. But inside is a sorcerer who
fights with magic fires, and can on the instant raise up battlements of
poisoned adders and scorpions, and blow upon us with a wind so deadly
that at its touch our flesh will melt from our bones. If yon men wist
whither Sir Waddy led them, they would fall upon him first and tear him
limb from limb."