Westward likewise we soon were bickering. The morning sun shone high;
the thin, hot dust blew out over the blackened ground of some forest
"burn" or through the worm fence of some field where a gang of slave men
and women might be ploughing or hoeing between the green rows of young
cotton or corn. The level stretches were many, the slopes gradual, and
to those sweet city-bird ladies everything was new and delightful; a log
cabin!--with clay chimney on the outside!--a well and its
well-sweep!--another cabin with its gourd-vines! They knew that blessed
alchemy which turns all things into the poetry of the moment. Sweet they
would have been anywhere to any eye or mind; but I was a homeless
trooper lad, and sweeter to the soldier boy than water on the
battlefield are short hours with ladies who love him for his banner
and his rags.
These four were charmed with an old field given up to sedge, its deep
rain-gullies as red as gaping wounds, its dead trees in tatters of long
gray moss. Estelle became a student of flowers, Cécile of birds, Camille
of trees. All my explanations were alike enchantingly strange. To their
minds it had never occurred that the land sloped the same way the water
ran! When told that these woods abounded in deer and wild turkey they
began to look out for them at every new turn of the road. And the turns
came fast. Happy miles, happy leagues; each hour was of a mellower
sweetness than the last; they seemed to ripen in the sun. The only
drawback was my shame of a sentimental situation, but once or twice I
longed to turn the whole equipage into the woods--or the ditch. As, for
instance, when three pine-woods cavalrymen had no sooner got by us than
they set up that ribald old camp-song,
"We're going to get married, mamma, mamma;
We're going to get married, but don't tell pa--"
"Deserters, I don't doubt!" was my comment to the ladies. Tongue revenge
is poor, but it is something.
Except in such moments, however, the war seemed farther away than it had
for months and months. But about eleven o'clock we began to find the way
scored by the fresh ruts of heavy wheels and the dust deepened by
hundred of hoofs. The tops and faces of the roadside banks were newly
trampled and torn by clambering human feet. Here was a canteen, smashed
in a wheel-track; yonder a fragment of harness; here lay a broken hame,
there was the half of a russet brogan and yonder a ragged sock stained
and bloody.
"Why, what does all this mean?" asked Miss Harper amid her nieces'
cries.
I said it meant Fisher's battery hurrying to the front. Twenty miles
since five that morning was a marvel, horse artillery though they were,
for, as I pointed out by many signs, their animals were in ill
condition. "We shall have to go round them by neighborhood roads," I
said, and presently we were deeper than ever in woodland shades and
sources of girlish wonderment. The humid depths showed every sort of
green and gray, their trunks, bushes and boughs, bearded with hanging
moss, robed with tangled vines and chapleted with mistletoe. We seemed
to have got this earth quite to ourselves and very much to our liking.
One o'clock. Miss Harper suggested a halt to feed the horses. I, knowing
what it would cost me to dismount and go walking about, said no, thrice
no; let us first get back upon the main road in front of that battery.
On, therefore, we hurried, and soon the reality of the war was vivid to
us again. In a stretch of wet road where the team had mutely begged
leave to walk and the ladies had urged me to sing we had at length
paused in a pebbly rivulet to allow the weary animals to drink, and the
girls and the aunt and the greenwood and I were all in chorus
bidding somebody
"Unloose the west port and let us go free,"
when, just as our last note died among the trees one of us cried,
"Listen!" and through the stillness there came from far away on our
right the last three measures of a bugle sounding The March.
My eyes rested in Camille's and hers in mine. A musical license gave us
the courage. At the last note our gaze did not sink but took on more
glow, while out of the forest behind us a distant echo answered the last
measure of the strain. Then our eyes slowly fell; and however it may
have seemed to her, to me it was as if the vanished strains were not
only or chiefly of bugle and echo, but as though our two hearts had
called and answered in that melodious unison.
All that warm afternoon we paid the tiresome penalty of having pushed
our animals too smartly at the outset. We grew sedate; sedate were the
brows of the few strangers we met. We talked in pairs. When I spoke with
Miss Harper the four listened. She asked about the evils of camp life;
for she was one of that fine sort to whom righteousness seems every
man's and woman's daily business, one of the most practical items in the
world's affairs. And I said camp life was fearfully corrupting; that the
merest boys cursed and swore and stole, or else were scorned as
weaklings. Then I grew meekly silent and we talked in pairs again, and
because I yearned to talk most with Camille I talked most with Estelle.
Three times when I turned abruptly from her to Camille and called,
"Hark!" the fagged-out horses halted, and as we struck our listening
pose the bugle's faint sigh ever farther in our rear was but feebly
proportioned to the amount of our gazing into each other's eyes.
Once, when we were not halted or harkening, we heard overmuch; heard
that which brought us to an instant stand and caused even Miss Harper to
gaze on me with dismayed eyes and parted lips, and the blood to go
thumping through my veins. From a few hundred yards off in the
northwest, beyond the far corner of an old field and the woods at its
back, two gunshots together, then a third, with sharp, hot cries of
alarum and command, and then another and another shot, rang out and
spread wanderingly across the tender landscape.
X