replied. “It seems to me that a slip of paper with printed words on it that
I have to spell out as I go, is a mighty poor way to keep a man from
fightin' if he can find a musket. I ain't steddyin' about this parole, but
Marse Robert told me to go home to plant my crop, and I am goin' home to
plant it.”
“It is all over, I think,” said Dan with a quivering lip, as he stared at
the ruined meadows. The smart was still fresh, and it was too soon for him
to add, with the knowledge that would come to him from years,--“it is
better so.” Despite the grim struggle and the wasted strength, despite the
impoverished land and the nameless graves that filled it, despite even his
own wrecked youth and the hard-fought fields where he had laid it
down--despite all these a shadow was lifted from his people and it was
worth the price.
They passed on, while the black horse pawed the dust, and the rider hurled
oaths at their retreating figures. At a little house a few yards down the
road they stopped to ask for food, and found a woman weeping at the kitchen
table, with three small children clinging to her skirts. Her husband had
fallen at Five Forks, she said, the safe was empty, and the children were
crying for bread. Then Dan slipped into her hand the silver he had borrowed
from the Union soldier, and the two returned penniless to the road.
“At least we are men,” he said almost apologetically to Pinetop, and the
next instant turned squarely in the mud, for a voice from the other side
had called out shrilly:--
“Hi, Marse Dan, whar you gwine now?”
“Bless my soul, it's Big Abel,” he exclaimed.
Black as a spade and beaming with delight, the negro emerged from the swarm
upon the roadside and grasped Dan's outstretched hands.
“Whar you gwine dis away, Marse Dan?” he inquired again.
“I'm going home, Big Abel,” responded Dan, as they walked on in a row of
three. “No, don't shout, you scamp; I'd rather lie down and die upon the
roadside than go home like this.”
“Well, you ain' much to look at, dat's sho',” replied Big Abel, his face
shining like polished ebony, “en I ain' much to look at needer, but dey'll
have ter recollect de way we all wuz befo' we runned away; dey'll have ter
recollect you in yo' fine shuts en fancy waistcoats, en dey'll have ter
recollect me in yo' ole uns. Sakes alive! I kin see dat one er yourn wid de
little bit er flow'rs all over hit des es plain es ef 'twuz yestiddy.”
“The waistcoats are all gone now,” said Dan gravely, “and so are the
shirts. The war is over and you are your own master, Big Abel. You don't
belong to me from this time on.”
Big Abel shook his head grinning.
“I reckon hit's all de same,” he remarked cheerfully, “en I reckon we'd es
well be gwine on home, Marse Dan.”
“I reckon we would,” said Dan, and they pushed on in silence.
X
ON THE MARCH AGAIN
That night they slept on the blood-stained floor of an old field hospital,
and the next morning Pinetop parted from them and joined an engineer who
had promised him a “lift” toward his mountains.
As Dan stood in the sunny road holding his friend's rough hand, it seemed
to him that such a parting was the sharpest wrench the end had brought.
“Whenever you need me, old fellow, remember that I am always ready,” he
said in a husky voice.
Pinetop looked past him to the distant woods, and his calm blue eyes were
dim.
“I reckon you'll go yo' way an' I'll go mine,” he replied, “for thar's one
thing sartain an' that is our ways don't run together. It'll never be the
same agin--that's natur--but if you ever want a good stout hand for any
uphill ploughing or shoot yo' man an' the police git on yo' track, jest
remember that I'm up thar in my little cabin. Why, if every officer in the
county was at yo' heels, I'd stand guard with my old squirrel gun and maw
would with her kettle.”
Then he shook hands with Big Abel and strode on across a field to a little
railway station, while Dan went slowly down the road with the negro at his
side.
In the afternoon when they had trudged all the morning through the heavy
mud, they reached a small frame house set back from the road, with some
straggling ailanthus shoots at the front and a pile of newly cut hickory
logs near the kitchen steps. A woman, with a bucket of soapsuds at her
feet, was wringing out a homespun shirt in the yard, and as they entered
the little gate, she looked at them with a defiance which was evidently the
result of a late domestic wrangle.
“I've got one man on my hands,” she began in a shrill voice, “an' he's as
much as I can 'tend to, an' a long sight mo' than I care to 'tend to. He
never had the spunk to fight anythin' except his wife, but I reckon he's
better off now than them that had; it's the coward that gets the best of
things in these days.”
“Shut up thar, you hussy!” growled a voice from the kitchen, and a fat man
with bleared eyes slouched to the doorway. “I reckon if you want a supper
you can work for it,” he remarked, taking a wad of tobacco from his mouth
and aiming it deliberately at one of the ailanthus shoots. “You split up
that thar pile of logs back thar an' Sally'll cook yo' supper. Thar ain't
another house inside of a good ten miles, so you'd better take your chance,
I reckon.”
“That's jest like you, Tom Bates,” retorted the woman passionately. “Befo'
you'd do a lick of honest work you'd let the roof topple plum down upon our
heads.”
For an instant Dan's glance cut the man like a whip, then crossing to the
woodpile, he lifted the axe and sent it with a clean stroke into a hickory
log.
“We can't starve, Big Abel,” he said coolly, “but we are not beggars yet by
a long way.”
“Go 'way, Marse Dan,” protested the negro in disgust. “Gimme dat ar axe en
set right down and wait twel supper. You're des es white es a sheet dis
minute.”
“I've got to begin some day,” returned Dan, as the axe swung back across
his shoulder. “I'll pay for my supper and you'll pay for yours, that's
fair, isn't it?--for you're a free man now.”
Then he went feverishly to work, while Big Abel sat grumbling on the
doorstep, and the farmer, leaning against the lintel behind him, watched
the lessening pile with sluggish eyes.
“You be real careful of this wood, Sally, an' it ought to last twel
summer,” he observed, as he glanced to where his wife stood wringing out
the clothes. “If you warn't so wasteful that last pile would ha' held out
twice as long.”
Dan chopped steadily for an hour, and then giving the axe to Big Abel, went
into the little kitchen to eat his supper. The woman served him sullenly,
placing some sobby biscuits and a piece of cold bacon on his plate, and
pouring out a glass of buttermilk with a vicious thrust of the pitcher.
When he asked if there was a shelter close at hand where he might sleep,
she replied sourly that she reckoned the barn was good enough if he chose
to spend the night there. Then as Big Abel finished his job and took his
supper in his hand, they left the house and went across the darkening
cattle pen, to a rotting structure which they took to be the barn. Inside
the straw was warm and dry, and as Dan flung himself down upon it, he
gasped out something like a prayer of thanks. His first day's labour with
his hands had left him trembling like a nervous woman. An hour longer, he
told himself, and he should have gone down upon the roadside.
For a time he slept profoundly, and then awaking in the night, he lay until
dawn listening to Big Abel's snores, and staring straight above where a
solitary star shone through a crack in the shingled roof. From the other
side of a thin partition came the soft breathing and the fresh smell of
cows, and, now and then, he heard the low bleating of a new-born calf.
He had been dreaming of a battle, and the impression was so vivid that, as
he opened his eyes, he half imagined he still heard the sound of shots. In
his sleep he had saved the flag and won promotion after victory, and for a
moment the trampled straw seemed to him to be the battle-field, and the
thin boards against which he beat the enemy's resisting line. As he came
slowly to himself a sudden yearning for the army awoke within him. He
wanted the red campfires and his comrades smoking against the dim pines;
the peaceful bivouac where the long shadows crept among the trees and two
men lay wrapped together beneath every blanket; above all, he wanted to see
the Southern Cross wave in the sunlight, and to hear the charging yell as
the brigade dashed into the open. He was homesick for it all to-night, and
yet it was dead forever--dead as his own youth which he had given to the
cause.
Sharp pains racked him from head to foot, and his pulses burned as if from
fever. It was like the weariness of old age, he thought, this utter
hopelessness, these strained and quivering muscles. As a boy he had been
hardy as an Indian and as fearless of fatigue. Now the long midnight
gallops on Prince Rupert over frozen roads returned to him like the dim
memories from some old romance. They belonged to the place of
half-forgotten stories, with the gay waistcoats and the Christmas
gatherings in the hall at Chericoke. For a country that was not he had
given himself as surely as the men who were buried where they fought, and
his future would be but one long struggle to adjust himself to conditions
in which he had no part. His proper nature was compacted of the old life
which was gone forever--of its ease, of its gayety, of its lavish
pleasures. For the sake of this life he had fought for four years in the
ranks, and now that it was swept away, he found himself like a man who
stumbles on over the graves of his familiar friends. He remembered the
words of the soldier in the long blue coat, and spoke them half aloud in
the darkness: “There'll come a time when you'll find out that the army
wasn't the worst you had to face.” The army was not the worst, he knew this
now--the grapple with a courageous foe had served to quicken his pulses and
nerve his hand--the worst was what came afterward, this sense of utter
failure and the attempt to shape one's self to brutal necessity. In the
future that opened before him he saw only a terrible patience which would
perhaps grow into a second nature as the years went on. In place of the old
generous existence, he must from this day forth wring the daily bread of
those he loved, with maimed hands, from a wasted soil.
The thought of Betty came to him, but it brought no consolation. For
himself he could meet the shipwreck standing, but Betty must be saved from
it if there was salvation to be found. She had loved him in the days of his
youth--in his strong days, as the Governor said--now that he was worn out,
suffering, gray before his time, there was mere madness in his thought of
her buoyant strength. “You may take ten--you may take twenty years to
rebuild yourself,” a surgeon had said to him at parting; and he asked
himself bitterly, by what right of love dared he make her strong youth a
prop for his feeble life? She loved him he knew--in his blackest hour he
never doubted this--but because she loved him, did it follow that she must
be sacrificed?
Then gradually the dark mood passed, and with his eyes on the star, his
mouth settled into the lines of smiling patience which suffering brings to
the brave. He had never been a coward and he was not one now. The years had
taught him nothing if they had not taught him the wisdom most needed by his
impulsive youth--that so long as there comes good to the meanest creature
from fate's hardest blow, it is the part of a man to stand up and take it
between the eyes. In the midst of his own despair, of the haunting memories
of that bland period which was over for his race, there arose suddenly the
figure of the slave the Major had rescued, in Dan's boyhood, from the power
of old Rainy-day Jones. He saw again the poor black wretch shivering in the
warmth, with the dirty rag about his jaw, and with the sight he drew a
breath that was almost of relief. That one memory had troubled his own
jovial ease; now in his approaching poverty he might put it away from him
forever.
In the first light of a misty April sunrise they went out on the road
again, and when they had walked a mile or so, Big Abel found some young
pokeberry shoots, which he boiled in his old quart cup with a slice of
bacon he had saved from supper. At noon they came upon a little farm and
ploughed a strip of land in payment for a dinner that was lavishly pressed
upon them. The people were plain, poor, and kindly, and the farmer followed
Dan into the field with entreaties that he should leave the furrows and
come in to meet his family. “Let yo' darky do a bit of work if he wants
to,” he urged, “but it makes me downright sick to see one of General Lee's
soldiers driving my plough. The gals are afraid it'll bring bad luck.”
With a laugh, Dan tossed the ropes to Big Abel, who had been breaking clods
of earth, and returned to the house, where he was placed in the seat of
honour and waited on by a troop of enthusiastic red-cheeked maidens, each
of whom cut one of the remaining buttons from his coat. Here he was asked
to stay the night, but with the memory of the blue valley before his eyes,
he shook his head and pushed on again in the early afternoon. The vision of
Chericoke hung like a star above his road, and he struggled a little nearer
day by day.
Sometimes ploughing, sometimes chopping a pile of logs, and again lying for
hours in the warm grass by the way, they travelled slowly toward the valley
that held Dan's desire. The chill April dawns broke over them, and the
genial April sunshine warmed them through after a drenching in a pearly
shower. They watched the buds swell and the leaves open in the wood, the
wild violets bloom in sheltered places, and the dandelions troop in ranks
among the grasses by the road. Dan, halting to rest in the mild weather,
would fall often into a revery long and patient, like those of extreme old
age. With the sun shining upon his relaxed body and his eyes on the bright
dust that floated in the slanting beams, he would lie for hours speechless,
absorbed, filled with visions. One day he found a mountain laurel flowering
in the woods, and gathering a spray he sat with it in his hands and dreamed
of Betty. When Big Abel touched him on the arm he turned with a laugh and
struggled to his feet. “I was resting,” he explained, as they walked on.
“It is good to rest like that in mind and body; to keep out thoughts and
let the dreams come as they will.”
“De bes' place ter res' is on yo' own do' step,” Big Abel responded, and
quickening their pace, they went more rapidly over the rough clay roads.
It was at the end of this day that they came, in the purple twilight, to a
big brick house and found there a woman who lived alone with the memories
of a son she had lost at Gettysburg. At their knock she came herself, with
a few old servants, prompt, tearful, and very sad; and when she saw Dan's
coat by the light of the lamp behind her, she put out her hands with a cry
of welcome and drew him in, weeping softly as her white head touched his
sleeve.
“My mother is dead, thank God,” he murmured, and at his words she looked up
at him a little startled.
“Others have come,” she said, “but they were not like you; they did not
have your voice. Have you been always poor like this?”
He met her eyes smiling.
“I have not always been a soldier,” was his answer.
For a moment she looked at him as if bewildered; then taking a lamp from an
old servant, she led the way upstairs to her son's room, and laid out the
dead man's clothes upon his bed.
“We keep house for the soldiers now,” she said, and went out to make things
ready.
As he plunged into the warm water and dried himself upon the fresh linen
she had left, he heard the sound of passing feet in the broad hall, and
from the outside kitchen there floated a savoury smell that reminded him of
Chericoke at the supper hour. With the bath and the clean clothes his old
instincts revived within him, and as he looked into the glass he caught
something of the likeness of his college days. Beau Montjoy was not starved
out after all, he thought with a laugh, he was only plastered over with
malaria and dirt.
For three days he remained in the big brick house lying at ease upon a sofa
in the library, or listening to the tragic voice of the mother who talked
of her only son. When she questioned him about Pickett's charge, he raised
himself on his pillows and talked excitedly, his face flushing as if from
fever.
“Your son was with Armistead,” he said, “and they all went down like
heroes. I can see old Armistead now with his hat on his sword's point as he
waved to us through the smoke. 'Who will follow me, boys?' he cried, and
the next instant dashed straight on the defences. When he got to the second
line there were only six men with him, beside Colonel Martin, and your son
was one of them. My God! it was worth living to die like that.”
“And it is worth living to have a son die like that,” she added, and wept
softly in the stillness.
The next morning he went on again despite her prayers. The rest was all too
pleasant, but the memory of his valley was before him, and he thirsted for
the pure winds that blew down the long white turnpike.
“There is no peace for me until I see it again,” he said at parting, and
with a lighter step went out upon the April roads once more.
The way was easier now for his limbs were stronger, and he wore the dead
man's shoes upon his feet. For a time it almost seemed that the strength of
that other soldier, who lay in a strange soil, had entered into his veins
and made him hardier to endure. And so through the clear days they
travelled with few pauses, munching as they walked from the food Big Abel
carried in a basket on his arm.
“We've been coming for three weeks, and we are getting nearer,” said Dan
one evening, as he climbed the spur of a mountain range at the hour of
sunset. Then his glance swept the wide horizon, and the stick in his hand
fell suddenly to the ground; for faint and blue and bathed in the sunset
light he saw his own hills crowding against the sky. As he looked his heart
swelled with tears, and turning away he covered his quivering face.
XI
THE RETURN
As they passed from the shadow of the tavern road, the afternoon sunlight
was slanting across the turnpike from the friendly hills, which alone of
all the landscape remained unchanged. Loyal, smiling, guarding the ruined
valley like peaceful sentinels, they had suffered not so much as an added
wrinkle upon their brows. As Dan had left them five long years ago, so he
found them now, and his heart leaped as he stood at last face to face. He
was like a man who, having hungered for many days, finds himself suddenly
satisfied again.
Amid a blur of young foliage they saw first the smoking chimneys of
Uplands, and then the Doric columns beyond a lane of flowering lilacs. The
stone wall had crumbled in places, and strange weeds were springing up
among the high blue-grass; but here and there beneath the maples he caught
a glimpse of small darkies uprooting the intruders, and beyond the garden,
in the distant meadows, ploughmen were plodding back and forth in the
purple furrows. Peace had descended here at least, and, with a smile, he
detected Betty's abounding energy in the moving spirit of the place. He saw
her in the freshly swept walks, in the small negroes weeding the blue-grass
lawn, in the distant ploughs that made blots upon the meadows. For a moment
he hesitated, and laid his hand upon the iron gate; then, stifling the
temptation, he turned back into the white sand of the road. Before he met
Betty's eyes, he meant that his peace should be made with the old man at
Chericoke.
Big Abel, tramping at his side, opened his mouth from time to time to let
out a rapturous exclamation.
“Dar 'tis! des look at it!” he chuckled, when Uplands had been left far
behind them. “Dat's de ve'y same clump er cedars, en dat's de wil' cher'y
lyin' right flat on hit's back--dey's done cut it down ter git de
cher'ies.”
“And the locust! Look, the big locust tree is still there, and in full
bloom!”
“Lawd, de 'simmons! Dar's de 'simmon tree way down yonder in the meadow,
whar we all use ter set ouah ole hyar traps. You ain' furgot dose ole hyar
traps, Marse Dan?”
“Forgotten them! good Lord!” said Dan; “why I remember we caught five one
Christmas morning, and Betty fed them and set them free again.”
“Dat she did, suh, dat she did! Hit's de gospel trufe!”
“We never could hide our traps from Betty,” pursued Dan, in delight. “She
was a regular fox for scenting them out--I never saw such a nose for traps
as hers, and she always set the things loose and smashed the doors.”
“We hid 'em one time way way in de thicket by de ice pond,” returned Big
Abel, “but she spied 'em out. Yes, Lawd, she spied 'em out fo' ouah backs
wuz turnt.”
He talked on rapidly while Dan listened with a faint smile about his mouth.
Since they had left the tavern road, Big Abel's onward march had been
accompanied by ceaseless ejaculations. His joy was childlike, unrestrained,
full of whimsical surprises--the flight of a bluebird or the recognition of
a shrub beside the way sent him with shining eyes and quickened steps along
the turnpike.
From free Levi's cabin, which was still standing, though a battle had raged
in the fallen woods beyond it, and men had fought and been buried within a
stone's throw of the doorstep, they heard the steady falling of a hammer
and caught the red glow from the rude forge at which the old negro worked.
With the half-forgotten sound, Dan returned as if in a vision to his last
night at Chericoke, when he had run off in his boyish folly, with free
Levi's hammer beating in his ears. Then he had dreamed of coming back
again, but not like this. He had meant to ride proudly up the turnpike,
with his easily won honours on his head, and in his hands his magnanimous
forgiveness for all who had done him wrong. On that day he had pictured the
Governor hurrying to the turnpike as he passed, and he had seen his
grandfather, shy of apologies, eager to make amends.
That was his dream, and to-day he came back footsore, penniless, and in a
dead man's clothes--a beggar as he had been at his first home-coming, when
he had stood panting on the threshold and clutched his little bundle in his
arms.
Yet his pulses stirred, and he turned cheerfully to the negro at his side.
“Do you see it, Big Abel? Tell me when you see it.”
“Dar's de cattle pastur',” cried Big Abel, “en dey's been a-fittin'
dar--des look.”
“It must have been a skirmish,” replied Dan, glancing down the slope. “The
wall is all down, and see here,” his foot struck on something hard and he
stooped and picked up a horse's skull. “I dare say a squad of cavalry met
Mosby's rangers,” he added. “It looks as if they'd had a little frolic.”
He threw the skull into the pasture, and followed Big Abel, who was
hurrying along the road.
“We're moughty near dar,” cried the negro, breaking into a run. “Des wait
twel we pass de aspens, Marse Dan, des wait twel we pass de aspens, den
we'll be right dar, suh.”
Then, as Dan reached him, the aspens were passed, and where Chericoke had
stood they found a heap of ashes.
At their feet lay the relics of a hot skirmish, and the old elms were
perforated with rifle balls, but for these things Dan had neither eyes nor
thoughts. He was standing before the place that he called home, and where
the hospitable doors had opened he found only a cold mound of charred and
crumbled bricks.
For an instant the scene went black before his eyes, and as he staggered
forward, Big Abel caught his arm.
“I'se hyer, Marse Dan, I'se hyer,” groaned the negro in his ear.
“But the others? Where are the others?” asked Dan, coming to himself. “Hold
me, Big Abel, I'm an utter fool. O Congo! Is that Congo?”
A negro, coming with his hoe from the corn field, ran over the desolated
lawn, and began shouting hoarsely to the hands behind him:--
“Hi! Hit's Marse Dan, hit's Marse Dan come back agin!” he yelled, and at
the cry there flocked round him a little troop of faithful servants,
weeping, shouting, holding out eager arms.
“Hi! hit's Marse Dan!” they shrieked in chorus. “Hit's Marse Dan en Brer
Abel! Brer Abel en Marse Dan is done come agin!”
Dan wept with them--tears of weakness, of anguish, of faint hope amid the
dark. As their hands closed over his, he grasped them as if his eyes had
gone suddenly blind.
“Where are the others? Congo, for God's sake, tell me where are the
others?”
“We all's hyer, Marse Dan. We all's hyer,” they protested, sobbing. “En Ole
Marster en Ole Miss dey's in de house er de overseer--dey's right over dar
behine de orchard whar you use ter projick wid de ploughs, en Brer Cupid
and Sis Rhody dey's a-gittin' dem dey supper.”