The first one to emerge from the barn was Hi Tuckerman. He started
to make for the house, but, when he caught sight of our group, came
running toward us at the top of his speed, uttering incoherent shouts
as he advanced, and waving his arms excitedly. It was apparent that
something out of the ordinary had happened.
We were but little the wiser as to this something, when Hi had come
to a halt before us, and was pouring out a volley of explanations,
accompanied by earnest grimaces and strenuous gestures. Even Marcellus
could make next to nothing of what he was trying to convey; but
Aunt Em, strangely enough, seemed to understand him. Still slightly
trembling, and with a little occasional catch in her breath, she bent
an intent scrutiny upon Hi, and nodded comprehendingly from time to
time, with encouraging exclamations, "He did, eh!" "Is that so?" and "I
expected as much." Listening and watching, I formed the uncharitable
conviction that she did not really understand Hi at all, but was only
pretending to do so in order further to harrow Serena's feelings.
Doubtless I was wrong, for presently she turned, with an effort, to her
sister-in-law, and remarked, "P'rhaps you don't quite follow what he's
sayin'?"
"Not a word!" said Serena, eagerly. "Tell me, please, Emmeline!"
Aunt Em seemed to hesitate. "He was shot through the mouth at Gaines's
Mills, you know—that's right near Cold Harbor and—the Wilderness,"
she said, obviously making talk.
"That isn't what he's saying," broke in Serena. "What _is_ it,
Emmeline?"
"Well," rejoined the other, after an instant's pause, "if you want to
know—he says that it ain't Alvy at all that they've got there in the
barn."
Serena turned swiftly, so that we could not see her face.
"He says it's some strange man," continued Em, "a yaller-headed man,
all packed an' stuffed with charcoal, so't his own mother wouldn't know
him. Who it is nobody knows, but it ain't Alvy."
"They're a pack of robbers 'n' swindlers!" cried old Arphaxed, shaking
his long gray beard with wrath.
He had come up without our noticing his approach, so rapt had been
our absorption in the strange discovery reported by Hi Tuckerman.
Behind him straggled the boys and the hired men, whom Si Hummaston had
scurried across from the house to join. No one said anything now, but
tacitly deferred to the old man's principal right to speak. It was a
relief to hear that terrible silence of his broken at all.
"They ought to all be hung!" he cried, in a voice to which the excess
of passion over physical strength gave a melancholy quaver. "I paid
'em what they asked—they took a hundred dollars o' my money—an' they
ain't sent me _him_ at all! There I went, at my age, all through the
Wilderness, almost clear to Cold Harbor, an' that, too, gittin up from
a sick bed in Washington, and then huntin' for the box at New York an'
Albany, an' all the way back, an' holdin' a funeral over it only this
very day—an' here it ain't _him_ at all! I'll have the law on 'em
though, if it costs the last cent I've got in the world!"
Poor old man! These weeks of crushing grief and strain had fairly
broken him down. We listened to his fierce outpourings with sympathetic
silence, almost thankful that he had left strength and vitality enough
still to get angry and shout. He had been always a hard and gusty man;
we felt by instinct, I suppose, that his best chance of weathering this
terrible month of calamity was to batter his way furiously through it,
in a rage with everything and everybody.
"If there's any justice in the land," put in Si Hummaston, "you'd ought
to get your hundred dollars back. I shouldn't wonder if you could, too,
if you sued 'em afore a Jestice that was a friend of yours."
"Why, the man's a fool!" burst forth Arphaxed, turning toward him with
a snort. "I don't want the hundred dollars—I wouldn't 'a' begrudged
a thousand—if only they'd dealt honestly by me. I paid 'em their own
figure, without beatin' 'em down a penny. If it'd be'n double, I'd 'a'
paid it. What _I_ wanted was _my boy_! It ain't so much their cheatin'
_me_ I mind, either, if it 'd be'n about anything else. But to think of
Alvy—_my boy_—after all the trouble I took, an' the journey, an' my
sickness there among strangers—to think that after it all he's buried
down there, no one knows where, p'raps in some trench with private
soldiers, shovelled in anyhow—oh-h! they ought to be hung!"
The two women had stood motionless, with their gaze on the grass; Aunt
Em lifted her head at this.
"If a place is good enough for private soldiers to be buried in," she
said, vehemently, "it's good enough for the best man in the army. On
Resurrection Day, do you think them with shoulder-straps 'll be called
fust an' given all the front places? I reckon the men that carried a
musket are every whit as good, there in the trench, as them that wore
swords. They gave their lives as much as the others did, an' the best
man that ever stepped couldn't do no more."
Old Arphaxed bent upon her a long look, which had in it much surprise
and some elements of menace. Reflection seemed, however, to make
him think better of an attack on Aunt Em. He went on, instead, with
rambling exclamations to his auditors at large.
"Makin' me the butt of the whole county!" he cried. "There was that
funeral to-day—with a parade an' a choir of music an' so on: an' now
it 'll come out in the papers that it wasn't Alvy at all I brought
back with me, but only some perfect stranger—by what you can make out
from his clothes, not even an officer at all. I tell you the War's a
jedgment on this country for its wickedness, for its cheatin' an'
robbin' of honest men! They wa'n't no sense in that battle at Cold
Harbor anyway—everybody admits that! It was murder an' massacre in
cold blood—fifty thousand men mowed down, an' nothin' gained by it!
An' then not even to git my boy's dead body back! I say hangings too
good for 'em!"
"Yes, father," said Myron, soothingly; "but do you stick to what you
said about the—the box? Wouldn't it look better——"
"_No!_" shouted Arphaxed, with emphasis. "Let Dana do what I told
him—take it down this very night to the poor master, an' let him bury
it where he likes. It's no affair of mine. I wash my hands of it. There
won't be no funeral held here!"
It was then that Serena spoke. Strangely enough, old Arphaxed had not
seemed to notice her presence in our group, and his jaw visibly dropped
as he beheld her now standing before him. He made a gesture signifying
his disturbance at finding her among his hearers, and would have
spoken, but she held up her hand.
"Yes, I heard it all," she said, in answer to his deprecatory movement.
"I am glad I did. It has given me time to get over the shock of
learning—our mistake—and it gives me the chance now to say something
which I—I feel keenly. The poor man you have brought home was, you
say, a private soldier. Well, isn't this a good time to remember that
there was a private soldier who went out from this farm—belonging
right to this family—and who, as a private, laid down his life as
nobly as General Sedgwick or General Wadsworth, or even our dear Alva,
or any one else? I never met Emmeline's husband, but Alva liked him,
and spoke to me often of him. Men who fall in the ranks don't get
identified, or brought home, but they deserve funerals as much as
the others—just as much. Now, this is my idea: let us feel that the
mistake which has brought this poor stranger to us is God's way of
giving us a chance to remember and do honor to Abel Jones. Let him be
buried in the family lot up yonder, where we had thought to lay Alva,
and let us do it reverently, in the name of Emmeline's husband, and of
all others who have fought and died for our country, and with sympathy
in our hearts for the women who, somewhere in the North, are mourning,
just as we mourn here, for the stranger there in the red barn."
Arphaxed had watched her intently. He nodded now, and blinked at the
moisture gathering in his old eyes. "I could e'en a'most 'a' thought it
was Alvy talkin'," was what he said. Then he turned abruptly, but we
all knew, without further words, that what Serena had suggested was to
be done.
The men-folk, wondering doubtless much among themselves, moved slowly
off toward the house or the cow-barns, leaving the two women alone. A
minute of silence passed before we saw Serena creep gently up to Aunt
Em's side, and lay the thin white hand again upon her shoulder. This
time it was not shaken off, but stretched itself forward, little by
little, until its palm rested against Aunt Em's further cheek. We heard
the tin-pail fall resonantly against the stones under the rail-fence,
and there was a confused movement as if the two women were somehow
melting into one.
"Come on, Sid!" said Marcellus Jones to me; "let's start them cows
along. If there's anything I hate to see it's women cryin' on each
other's necks."