"YES, AND BACK AGAIN"
One matter of surprise to me was that this whole property had escaped
molestation. I wondered who could be so favored by the enemy and yet be
so devoted to our cause as to signal us from his window with their
sentinels at his doors; and as we passed beyond the cornfield's farther
fence I ventured to ask Ferry.
"Aaron Goldschmidt," he whispered, as we descended into a dry, tangled
swamp. In the depths of this wild, beside a roofed pen of logs stored
with half a dozen bales of cotton, we were presently in the company of a
very small man who tossed a hand in token of great amusement.
"Hello, Ned!" he whispered in antic irony; "what an accident is dat,
meeding so! Whoever is expecting someding like dis!"
"Well, I hope nobody, Isidore; I hardly expected it myself, your father
set those candles so close the one behind the other."
Isidore doubled with mirth and as suddenly straightened. "Your horse is
here since yesterday. _She_ left him--by my father. She didn't t'ink t'e
Yankees is going to push away out here to-night. But he is a pusher,
t'at Grierson! You want him to-night, t'at horse? He is here by me, but
I t'ink you best not take him, hmm? To cross t'e creek and go round t'e
ot'er way take you more as all night; and to go back t'is same way you
come, even if I wrap him up in piece paper you haven't got a lawch
insite pocket you can carry him?" He laughed silently and the next
instant was more in earnest than ever.
"_She_ is in a tight place! She hires my mother's pony to ride in to
headquarters." He called them hatekvartuss, but we need not. "I t'ink
she is not a prisoner--_unless_--she wants to come back." He doubled
again. "Anyhow, I wish you can see her to-night; she got another
doll-baby for t'e gildren, and she give you waluable informations by de
hatfull.... Find her? I tell you how you find her in finfty-nine
minutes--vedder permitting, t'at is."
The last phrase was fitted to a listening pose, and the first mutter of
the pending thunder-storm came out of the northwest. Then Isidore
hastened through the practical details of his proposition. Ferry drew a
breath of enthusiasm. "Can I have my horse, bridled and saddled, in
three minutes?"
"I pring um in two!" said Isidore, and vanished. Ferry turned with an
overmastering joy in every note of his whispered utterance. "After all!"
he said, and I could have thrown my arms around him in pure delight to
hear duty and heart's desire striking twelve together.
"Smith," he asked, "can you start back without me? Then go at once; I
shall overtake you on my horse."
I stole through the cornfield safely; the frequent lightnings were still
so well below the zenith as to hide me in a broad confusion of monstrous
shadows. But when I came to cross the road no crouching or gliding would
do. I must go erect and only at the speed of some ordinary official
errand. So I did, at a point between two opposite fence-gaps, closely
after an electric gleam, and I was rejoicing in the thick darkness that
followed, when all at once the whole landscape shone like day and I
stood in the middle of the road, in point-blank view of a small squad, a
"visiting patrol". They were trotting toward me in the highway, hardly a
hundred yards off. As the darkness came again and the thunder crashed
like falling timbers, I started into the cotton-field at an easy
double-quick. The hoofs of one horse quickened to a gallop. A strong
wind swept over, big rain-drops tapped me on the shoulder and pattered
on the cotton-plants, the sound of the horse's galloping ceased as he
turned after me in the soft field, and presently came the quiet call
"Halt, there, you on foot." I went faster. I knew by my pursuer's
coming alone that he did not take me for a Confederate, and that the
worst I should get, to begin with, would be the flat of his sabre.
Shrewdly loading my tongue with that hard northern _r_ which I hated
more than all unrighteousness, I called back "Oh, I'm under orders! go
halt some fool who's got time to halt!"
I obliqued as if bound for the headquarters fire where we had seen the
singers, the lightning branched over the black sky like tree-roots, the
thunder crashed and pounded again, the wind stopped in mid-career, and
the rain came straight down in sheets. "Halt!" yelled the horseman. He
lifted his blade, but I darted aside and doubled, and as he whirled
around after me, another rider, meeting him and reining in at such close
quarters that the mud flew over all three of us, lifted his hand
and said--
"He is right, sergeant, he is carrying out my orders." Ferry's black
silk handkerchief about his neck covered his Confederate bars of rank,
and the Federal may or may not have noted the absence of
shoulder-straps; our arms remained undrawn; and so the sergeant,
catching a breath or two of disconcertion, caught nothing else. While
Ferry spoke on for another instant I showed my heels; then he left the
dripping Yankee mouthing an angry question and loped after me, and over
the low fence went the two of us almost together.
Kendall was not there, the Federal camp-makers had tardily repaired
their blunder by posting guards; but these were not looking for their
enemies from the side of their own camp, and as we cleared the fence in
the full blaze of a lightning flash, only two or three wild shots sang
after us. In the black downpour Ferry reached me an invisible hand. I
leapt astride his horse's croup, and trusting the good beast to pick his
way among the trees himself, we sped away. Soon we came upon our three
men waiting with the horses, and no great while afterward the five of us
rejoined our command. The storm lulled to mild glimmerings and a gentle
shower, and the whole company, in one long single file, began to sweep
hurriedly, stealthily, and on a wide circuit of obscurest byways, deeper
than ever into the enemy's lines.