"CAPTAIN, THEY'VE GOT US"
More days slipped by. Neighbors pressed sweet favors upon us; calls,
joyful rumors, delicacies, flowers. One day Major Harper paid us a
flying visit, got kisses galore, and had his coat sponged and his
buttons reanimated. In the small town some three miles northwest of us
he was accumulating a great lot of captured stuff. On another day came
General Austin and stayed a whole hour. Ferry took healing delight in
these visits, asking no end of questions about the movements afield,
and about the personal fortunes of everyone he knew. When the General
told him Ferry's scouts were doing better without him than with him--"I
thought he would smile himself into three pieces," said the General at
the supper-table.
On a second call from Major Harper, when handed a document to open and
read, he went through it carefully twice, and then dropping it on the
coverlet asked--"and Quinn?"
"Oh, Quinn's turn will come."
"Ah! Major, that is not fair to Quinn!" said Ferry. Yet when he took up
the paper again he gazed on it with a happy gravity; it made him a
captain. "By the by," he said, "that Yankee horse that Dick Smith
captured at Sessions's; I'd like to buy that horse from you, Major."
They made the sale. "And there's that captured ambulance still here,
Major, with its team eating their heads off."
"Yes, I'm going to take that away with me to-day."
This meant that Charlotte's negro man and his daughter, her maid, had
come with her spring-wagon, and Harry and I would have liked the Major
better if he had smiled at this point, as he did not. Yet he was most
lovable; sent so kind a message up to Charlotte that Harry and I
wondered; and received back from her a reply so gracious that--since we
could not wonder--we worshipped. In the evening of that day Ferry and
Charlotte were transferred, she into the room behind her, and he
upstairs into the one out of which she was taken. That night a slave and
his wife, belonging to the place, ran away to the enemy. If they should
tell the Yankees Ned Ferry was here--! "By Jo'!" said Harry Helm, "I'm
glad I didn't cut my throat; I told that darkey, yesterday, Ned's name
was O'Brien!"
Toward the close of that day came tidings of the brigade's splendid work
at a steamboat-landing on the Mississippi River, how they had stolen in
by night between two great bodies of the enemy, burned a vast store of
military supplies, and then brilliantly cut their way out; yet we were
told to be ready to withdraw into Mississippi again as soon as our newly
made captain could safely be moved. Pooh! what of that? Lee was on his
way into Pennsylvania; the war was nearly over, sang the Harper girls,
and we were the winners! They cheerily saw Helm and me, next morning,
ride southward in search of further good news. At a cross-roads I
proposed that we separate, and meet there again near the end of the day.
He turned west; I went an hour's ride farther south and then turned
west myself.
When we met again I knew that he--while he did not know that I--had been
to Gilmer's plantation. We wanted to see if the Federals had left a
grave there. They had left three, and a young girl who had been one of
the dancers told me she had seen Oliver's body carried off by two blue
troopers who growled and cursed because they had been sent back to bury
it. Neither Harry nor I mentioned the subject when we met at the
cross-roads again, for we came on our horses' necks at a stretched out
run; the Federals were rolling up from the south battalion after
battalion, hoping to find Major Harper's store of supplies feebly
guarded and even up with us for that steamboat-landing raid. Presently
as we hurried northward we began to hear, off ahead of us on our left,
the faint hot give-and-take of two skirmish lines. We came into the
homestead grove at a constrained trot and found the ladies out on the
veranda in liveliest suspense between scepticism and alarm.
"Yes, they're fighting, now, on the edge of town," we said, "but our
boys will keep them there." Our host and hostess moaned their unbelief.
"However," added Harry, "I'll go tell the old man to hitch up the little
mules and--"
"You dawn't need," said Cécile, "'tis done!" and Camille confirmed her
word, while the planter and his wife returned to the kitchen yard, where
the servants were loading the smokehouse meat into a wagon to hide it in
the woods; Miss Harper and Estelle went into the house, summoned by
Charlotte's maid. On Ferry's chamber floor sounded three measured thumps
of his scabbarded sword.
"Dick, you answer that," exclaimed Harry, reining in half wheeled; "but
keep him on his back, if you have to hold him down!" He spurred away to
learn whether we had better stay or fly. I threw my rein to Camille and
flew up the hall stairs.
Ferry lay in bed with three pillows behind him and his sheathed sword
across his lap. "Good-evening, Richard," he said, "you are returned just
in time; will you please hand me my two pistol' from yonder?--thank
you." He laid one beside each thigh. "Now please turn the head of my
bed a little bit, to face the door--thank you; and now, good-bye. You
hear those footstep' there in the room behind? she is dressing to go;
the other ladies they are helping her. Richard, I place them in your
charge; have them all ready to get into her wagon at a moment's notice,
with you on your horse--and you better take that Jewett horse, too; he
came to-day."
I hesitated, but a single flash of authority from his eye was enough and
I had passed half-way to the door, when, through the window over the
front veranda, I saw a small body of horsemen trotting up through the
grove. The dusk of the room hid me, but there was no mistaking them.
"Too late, Captain," I said, "they've got us."
"How many do you see?"
"About sixteen. Our two horses will be Yankees again to-morrow."
"Ah! not certainly. Where is your carbine?"
"Just outside this door. They know you're here, Captain, they're
surrounding the house." As I reached toward the door I heard his sword
crawl out, the doorknob clicked without my touching it, the door swung
and closed again, and Charlotte Oliver was with us. The light of the
western window shone full upon her; she was in the same dress, hat and
all, in which I had seen her the night we rode together alone. Though
wasted and pale, she betrayed a flush on either cheek and a smile that
mated with the sweet earnest of her eyes. She tendered me my carbine,
patted my hand caressingly, and glided onward to Ferry's bedside. With
my back to them and my ear to the door I hearkened outward. In the front
doorway below sounded the jingling tread of cavalry-boots and a clank
of sabres.