TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:
—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.
[Illustration:
_See page 317._
_“I ALREADY KNOW WHAT IS IN THE PAPERS.”_]
EVELYN BYRD
[Illustration]
By GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON
AUTHOR OF “A CAROLINA CAVALIER,” “DOROTHY
SOUTH,” “THE MASTER OF WARLOCK,”
“RUNNING THE RIVER,” ETC., ETC.
ILLUSTRATED BY
CHARLES COPELAND
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
[Illustration]
COPYRIGHT, 1904,
BY
GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON.
[Illustration]
Published May, 1904.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
_PREFACE_
_THIS book is the third and last of a trilogy of romances. In that
trilogy I have endeavoured to show forth the character of the
Virginians—men and women._
_In “Dorothy South” I tried to show what the Virginians were while the
old life lasted—“before the war.”_
_In “The Master of Warlock” I endeavoured faithfully to depict the
same people as they were during the first half of the Civil War, when
their valour seemed to promise everything of results that they desired.
In “Evelyn Byrd” I have sought to show the heroism of endurance that
marked the conduct of those people during the last half of the war,
when disaster stared them in the face and they unfalteringly confronted
it._
_GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A STRICKEN CORSAGE 9
II. OWEN KILGARIFF 29
III. EVELYN BYRD 50
IV. THE LETTING DOWN OF THE BARS 59
V. DOROTHY’S OPINIONS 70
VI. “WHEN GREEK MEETS GREEK” 79
VII. WITH EVELYN AT WYANOKE 102
VIII. SOME REVELATIONS OF EVELYN 118
IX. THE GREAT WAR GAME 144
X. THE LAW OF LOVE 152
XI. ORDERS AND “NO NONSENSE” 167
XII. SAFE-CONDUCT OF TWO KINDS 178
XIII. KILGARIFF HEARS NEWS 185
XIV. IN THE WATCHES OF THE NIGHT 210
XV. IN THE TRENCHES 216
XVI. THE STARVING TIME 224
XVII. A GUN-PIT CONFERENCE 242
XVIII. EVELYN’S REVELATION 269
XIX. DOROTHY’S DECISION 277
XX. A MAN, A MAID, AND A HORSE 283
XXI. EVELYN LIFTS A CORNER OF THE CURTAIN 294
XXII. ALONE IN THE PORCH 302
XXIII. A LESSON FROM DOROTHY 318
XXIV. EVELYN’S BOOK 327
XXV. MORE OF EVELYN’S BOOK 345
XXVI. EVELYN’S BOOK, CONTINUED 370
XXVII. KILGARIFF’S PERPLEXITY 386
XXVIII. EVELYN’S BOOK, CONCLUDED 390
XXIX. EVELYN’S VIGIL 418
XXX. BEFORE A HICKORY FIRE 424
XXXI. THE LAST FLIGHT OF EVELYN 432
XXXII. THE END OF IT ALL 434
ILLUSTRATIONS
“I already know what is in the papers” _Frontispiece_
PAGE
“Who are you?” 89
“I may stroke his fur as much as I please” 166
Taking the papers from Campbell’s hand, passed out of
the house without a word of farewell 208
EVELYN BYRD
[Illustration]
I
A STRICKEN CORSAGE
A BATTERY of six twelve-pounder Napoleon guns lay in a little skirt
of woodland on the south bank of the Rapidan. It was raining, not
violently, but with a soaking persistence that might well have made
the artillery-men tired of life and ready to welcome whatever end that
day’s skirmishing might bring to the weariness of living. But these
men were veteran soldiers, inured to hardship as well as to danger. A
saturating rain meant next to nothing to them. A day’s discomfort, more
or less, counted not at all in the monotonously uncomfortable routine
of their lives.
They had been sent into the woodland an hour or two ago, and had done a
little desultory firing now and then, merely by way of disturbing the
movements of small bodies of the enemy who were being shifted about on
the other side of the river.
Just now the guns were silent, no enemy being in sight, and Captain
Marshall Pollard being disposed to save his ammunition against the
time, now obviously near at hand, when the new commander of the Federal
forces, General Grant, should push the Army of the Potomac across the
river to make a final trial of strength and sagacity with that small
but wonderfully fighting Army of Northern Virginia directed by the
master mind of Robert E. Lee.
But, while no enemy was within sight, there was a hornets’ nest of
Federal sharp-shooters concealed in a barn not far beyond the river,
and from their secure cover they were very seriously annoying the
Confederate lines. The barn lay a little to the left of the battery
front, but near enough for the sharp-shooters’ bullets to cut twigs
from the tree under which Captain Marshall Pollard sat on horseback
with Owen Kilgariff by his side. Still, the fire of the sharp-shooters
was not mainly directed upon the woodland-screened battery, but upon
the troops in the open field on Pollard’s left.
Presently Captain Pollard, with the peculiar deliberation which
characterised all his actions, lowered his field-glass from his eyes,
and, withdrawing a handkerchief from a rain-proof breast pocket,
began polishing the mist-obscured lenses. As he did so, he said to
Kilgariff:—
“Order one of the guns to burn that barn.”
As he spoke, both his own horse and Kilgariff’s sank to the ground; the
one struggling in the agony of a mortal wound, the other instantly dead.
“And tell the quartermaster-sergeant to send us two more horses—good
ones,” Captain Pollard added, with no more of change in his tone
than if the killing of the horses at that precise moment had been a
previously ordered part of the programme.
A gun was quickly moved up to a little open space. It fired two shots.
The flames burst from the barn, and instantly a horde of sharp-shooters
abandoned the place and went scurrying across an open field in search
of cover. As they fled, the gun that had destroyed their lurking-place,
and another which Captain Pollard had instantly ordered up, shelled
them mercilessly.
It was then that Owen Kilgariff said:—
“That barn was full of fodder. Its owner had saved a little something
against a future need, and now all the results of his toil have gone up
in smoke. That’s war!”
“Yes,” answered Captain Pollard, “and the worst of it is that the man
whose possessions we have destroyed is our friend, and not our enemy;
again, as you say, ‘that’s war.’ War is destruction—whether the thing
destroyed be that of friend or foe.”
Just then a new and vicious fire of skilled sharp-shooters broke forth
from the mansion-house of the plantation to which the burned barn
had belonged. It was an old-time colonial edifice. Marshall Pollard
had spent many delightful days and nights under its hospitable roof.
He had learned to love its historic associations. He knew and loved
every old portrait that hung on its oak-wainscotted walls. He knew and
loved every stick of its old, colonial, plantation-made furniture;
its very floors of white ash, that had been polished every morning
for two hundred years; and its mahogany dining-table, around which
distinguished guests had gathered through many generations. All these
were dear to the peculiarly sympathetic soul of the scholar-soldier,
Marshall Pollard, a man born for books, and set by adverse fate to
command batteries instead; a man of creative genius, as his novels and
poems, written after the war, abundantly proved, set for the time to
do the brutal work of destruction. He remembered the library of that
mansion, too, the slow accumulation of two hundred years. He had read
there precious volumes that existed nowhere else in America, and that
money could not duplicate, however lavishly it might be offered for
books, of which no fellows were to be found except upon the sealed
shelves of the British Museum, or in other great public collections
from which no treasures are ever to be sold while the world shall
endure.
That house, with all its memories and all its treasures, must be
destroyed. Marshall Pollard clearly understood the necessity, and he
was altogether a soldier now, in spite of his strong inclinations to
peace and civilisation, and all gentleness of spirit. Yet he found it
difficult to order the work of destruction that it was his manifest
duty to do. Presently, with bullets whistling about his ears, he turned
to Owen Kilgariff, and, in a tone of petulance that was wholly foreign
to his habit, asked:—
“Why don’t you order the thing done? Why do you sit there on your horse
waiting for me to give the order?”
Kilgariff understood. He was a man accustomed to understand quickly;
and now that Captain Pollard had made him his chief staff officer,
sergeant-major of the battery, his orders, whatever they might be,
carried with them all the authority of the captain’s own commands.
Kilgariff instantly rode back to the battery and ordered up two
sections—four guns. Advancing them well to the front, where the house
to be shot at could be easily seen, he posted them with entire calm,
in spite of the fact that a Federal battery of rifled guns stationed
at a long distance was playing vigorously upon his position, and not
without effect. The artillery-men in both armies had, by this late
period of the war, become marksmen so expert that the only limit of the
effectiveness of their fire was the limit of their range.
Half a dozen of Marshall Pollard’s men bit the dust, and nearly a dozen
of his horses were killed, while Owen Kilgariff was getting the four
guns into position for the effective doing of the work to be done,
although that process of placing the guns occupied less than a minute
of time. Two wheels of cannon carriages were smashed by well-directed
rifle shells, but these were quickly replaced by the extra wheels
carried on the caissons; for every detail of artillery drill was an
_a-b-c_ to the veterans of this battery, and if the men had nerves, the
fact was never permitted to manifest itself when there was work of war
to be done.
Within sixty seconds after Owen Kilgariff rode away to give the orders
that Marshall Pollard hesitated to give, four Napoleon guns were
firing four shells each, a minute, into a mansion that had been famous
throughout all the history of Virginia, since the time when William
Byrd had been Virginia’s foremost citizen and the Knights of the Golden
Horseshoe had ridden out to possess themselves of the regions to the
west.
Half a minute accomplished the purpose. The mansion was in flames, the
sharp-shooters who had made a fortress of it were scurrying to the
cover of the underbrush a few hundred yards in rear, and Owen Kilgariff
ordered the guns to “cease firing” and return to the cover of the
woodlands whence they had been brought forward for this service. Six of
Marshall Pollard’s men lay stark and stiff on the little meadow which
the guns had occupied. These were hastily removed for decent burial.
Nine others were wounded. They were carried away upon litters for
surgical attention.
These details in no way disturbed the battery camp. They were the
commonplaces of war; so the men, unmindful of them, cooked such dinner
as they could command, and ate it with a relish unimpaired by the
events of the morning.
But Captain Marshall Pollard and his companion, Sergeant-major Owen
Kilgariff, were not minded for dinner. Seeing the flames burst forth
from the upper stories of the old colonial mansion, Kilgariff said to
his captain:—
“I wonder if all those fellows got away? There may be a wounded man or
two left in the house to roast to death. May I ride over there and see?”
“Yes,” answered Pollard, “and I will ride with you. But first order
two of the guns to shell the sharp-shooters in the thicket yonder.
Otherwise we may not get back.”
In spite of the heavy fire that the two guns poured into the thicket
beyond the house, the sharp-shooters stood their ground like the
veterans that they were, and Pollard and Kilgariff were their targets
as these two swam the swollen river and galloped across the last year’s
corn lands on their way to the burning house.
Arrived there, they hastily searched the upper rooms. Here and there
they came upon a dead soldier, left by his companions to be incinerated
in company with the portraits of old colonial notables and beautiful
colonial dames that were falling from the walls as the ancient oaken
wainscot shrivelled in the fire.
But no living thing was found there, and the two Confederates,
satisfied now that there was no life to be saved, hurried down the
burning stairway and out into the air, where instantly they became
targets again for the sharp-shooters, not three hundred yards away.
As they were about to mount their horses, which had been screened
behind a wall projection, Kilgariff suddenly bethought him of the
cellar, and plunged down the stairway leading to it. He was promptly
followed by his captain, though both of them realised the peculiar
danger of the descent at a time when the whole structure seemed about
to tumble into that pit as a mass of burning timber. But they realised
also that the cellar was the place where they were most likely to find
living men too badly wounded to make their escape, and so, in spite of
the terrible hazard, they plunged into the depths, intent only upon
their errand of mercy.
A hasty glance around in the half-light seemed to reveal only the
emptiness of the cavernous cellar. But just as the two companions
were about to quit the place, in a hurried effort to save themselves,
a great, blazing beam fell in, together with a massive area of
flame-enveloped flooring, illuminating the place. As Kilgariff turned,
he caught sight of a girl, crouching behind an angle of the wall.
She was a tall, slender creature, and Kilgariff was mighty in his
muscularity. There was not a fraction of a second to be lost if escape
from that fire pit was in any wise to be accomplished. Without a
moment’s pause, Kilgariff threw his arm around the girl and bore her
up the cellar stairs, just as the whole burning mass of timbers sank
suddenly into the space below.
His captain followed him closely; and, emerging from the flames,
scorched and smoke-stifled, the three stood still for a moment, under
the deadly fire of the sharp-shooters. Then, with recovered breath,
they turned an angle of the wall, mounted their horses, and sped
away toward the river, under a rifle fire that seemed sufficient for
the destruction of a regiment. The shells from their own side of the
line, shrieking above the heads of the three fugitives, made their
horses squat almost to the ground; but with a resolution born of long
familiarity with danger, the two soldiers sped on, Kilgariff carrying
the girl on the withers of his horse and trying to shield her from the
fire of the sharp-shooters by so riding as to interpose his own body
between her and the swiftly on-coming bullets.
Finally the river was reached, and, plunging into it, the two horses
bore their burdens safely across. Pollard might easily have been fifty
yards in advance of his sergeant-major, seeing that he had the better
horse, and that his companion’s animal was carrying double. But that
was not Marshall Pollard’s way. Instead of riding as fast as he could
toward the river and the comparative safety that lay beyond it, he
rode with his horse’s head just overlapping the flanks of the animal
which bore the girl and her rescuer. In this way he managed to make of
himself and his horse a protecting barrier between the enemy and the
girl whom Kilgariff was so gallantly trying to bear to safety.
This was not a battle, or anything remotely resembling a battle. If
it had been, these two men would not have left their posts in the
battery. It was only an insignificant “operation of outposts,” which
the commanders in the front of both armies that night reported as
“some slight skirmishing along the outer lines.” On neither side was
it thought worth while to add that fifty or sixty brave young fellows
had been done to death in the “slight skirmishing.” The war was growing
old in the spring of 1864. Officers, hardened by experience of human
butchery on a larger scale, no longer thought it necessary to report
death losses that did not require three figures for their recording.
When Pollard and Kilgariff reached the bit of woodland in which the
battery had been posted for a special purpose, they found the guns
already gone. The battery had been ordered during their absence to
return to its more permanent camp two or three miles in the rear, and
in Captain Pollard’s absence his senior lieutenant had taken command to
execute the order. It is the way of war that “men may come and men may
go,” but there is always some one next in command to take the place of
one in authority who meets death or is absent for any other cause. An
army organisation resembles Nature herself in its scrupulous care for
the general result, and in its absolute indifference to the welfare or
the fate of the individual.
War is a merciless thing—inhuman, demoniacal, devilish. But
incidentally it calls into activity many of the noblest qualities of
human nature. It had done so in this instance. Having fired the house
on the enemy’s side of the river, and having thus driven away a company
of sharp-shooters who were grievously annoying the Confederate line,
Captain Pollard’s duty was fully done. But, at the suggestion that
some wounded enemy might have been left in the house to perish in the
torture of the flames, he and his companion had deliberately crossed
the river into the enemy’s country, and had ridden under a galling
fire to the burning building, as earnestly and as daringly intent upon
their mission of mercy as they had been a little while before upon
their work of slaughter and destruction.
“Man’s a strange animal,” sings the poet, and his song is an echo of
truth.
Pollard and Kilgariff rode on until the camp was reached. There
Kilgariff pushed his horse at once to the tent of the surgeon, and
delivered the girl into that officer’s keeping.
“Quick!” he said. “I fear she is terribly wounded.”
“No, no,” cried the girl; “I am not hurt. It is only that my corsage
is—what you call stricken. Is it that that is the word? No? Then what
shall I say? It is only that the bullet hurt what you call my stays.
Truly it did not touch me.”
Just then Captain Pollard observed that Kilgariff’s left hand was
wrapped in a piece torn from the front of the girl’s gown, and that the
rude bandage was saturated with blood. Contrary to all military rule,
the sergeant-major had been holding his reins in his right hand, and
carrying the girl in the support of his left arm. This awkwardness, as
he was at pains to explain to the captain, had been brought about by
the hurry of necessity.
“I grabbed the girl,” he explained, “without a thought of anything
but the danger to her. The house timbers were already falling, and
there was no time to be lost. When I got to my horse, the fire of the
sharp-shooters was too severe to be trifled with when I had a girl to
protect, so I mounted from the right side of my horse instead of the
left, and continued to ride with her on my left arm and my bridle-rein
in my right hand. I make my apologies, Captain.”
“Oh, confound your apologies!” ejaculated Captain Pollard. “What’s the
matter with your left hand? Let the surgeon see it at once.”
“It is nothing of consequence,” answered the young man, stripping
off the rudely improvised bandage. “Only the ends of a finger or two
carried away. I had thought until a moment ago that the bullet had
penetrated the young lady’s body. You see, Captain, I was holding
her in front of me and clasping her closely around the waist with my
fingers extended, the better to hold her in her uncertain seat on
the withers. So, when the bullet struck my fingers, I thought it had
pierced her person. Thank God, she has come off safe! But by the time
the surgeon is through with his work on my fingers, I shall have to use
my right hand on the bridle for a considerable time to come, Captain.”
“You will have to go to the hospital,” said the surgeon.
“Indeed I shall do nothing of the kind.”
“Why not, Kilgariff?” asked Pollard, who had become mightily interested
in the strange and strangely reserved young man whom he had made his
sergeant-major.
“Why not? Why, because I’m not going to miss the greatest and probably
the last campaign of the greatest war of all time.”
As he spoke, the captain turned away toward his tent, leaving Kilgariff
to endure the painful operations of the surgeon upon his wounded hand,
without chloroform, for there was none of that anæsthetic left among
the supplies of this meagrely furnished field-hospital after the work
already done upon the wounded men of that morning. Kilgariff endured
the amputations without a groan or so much as a flinching, whereat
the surgeon marvelled the more, seeing that the patient was a man of
exceptionally nervous constitution and temperament. When the bandages
were all in place, the sergeant-major said simply:—
“Please let me have a stiff drink of spirits, Doctor. I am a trifle
inclined to faintness after the pain.” That was absolutely the only
sign the man gave of the fact that he had been enduring torture for
nearly a half-hour.
Relighting his pipe, which he had smoked throughout the painful
operation, Kilgariff bade the doctor good morning, and walked away to
the tent which he and the captain together occupied.
In the meantime Captain Pollard had been questioning the girl as to
herself, and getting no satisfactory answers from her, not so much
because of any unwillingness on her part to give an account of herself,
as seemingly because she either did not understand the questions put to
her, or did not know what the answers to them ought to be.
“I’ll tell you what, Captain,” said Kilgariff, when Pollard had briefly
suggested the situation to him, “Doctor Brent is at Orange Court
House, I hear, reorganising the field-hospital service for the coming
campaign, and his wife is with him. Why not send the girl to her?”
“To Dorothy? Yes, I’ll send her to Dorothy. She will know what to do.”
He hastily summoned an ambulance for the girl to ride in, and still
more hastily scribbled a note to Dorothy Brent—to her who had been
Dorothy South in the days of her maidenhood before the war. In it he
said:—
I am sending you, under escort, a girl whom my sergeant-major most
daringly rescued this morning from a house on the enemy’s side of the
river, after we had shelled and set fire to the place. She seems too
badly scared, or too something else, for me to find out anything about
her. You, with your womanly tact, will perhaps be able to gain her
confidence and find out what should be done. If she has friends at
the North to whom she should be returned, I will arrange with General
Stuart to send her back across the river under a flag of truce. If
she hasn’t any friends, or if for any other reason she should be kept
within our lines, you will know what to do with her. I am helpless in
such a case, and I earnestly invoke the aid of the very wisest woman
I ever knew. When you see the girl—poor, innocent child that she
is—you, who were once yourself a child, and who, in growing older,
have lost none of the sweetness and especially none of the moral
courage of childhood, will be interested, I am very sure, in taking
charge of her for her good.
Having despatched this note, and the girl, under escort, Pollard turned
to Kilgariff, and abruptly asked:—
“Why did you call this coming campaign ‘the greatest and probably the
last campaign’ of the war?”
“Why, all that seems obvious. The Army of the Potomac has at last found
a commander who knows how to handle it, and both sides are tired of the
war. Grant is altogether a different man from McClellan, or Pope, or
McDowell, or Burnside, or Meade. He knows his business. He knows that
the chief remaining strength of the Confederacy lies in the fighting
force of the Army of Northern Virginia. He will strike straight at
that. He will hurl his whole force upon us in an effort to destroy this
army. If he succeeds, the Confederacy can’t last even a fortnight after
that. If he fails, if Lee hurls him back across the Rapidan, broken and
beaten as all his predecessors have been, the North will never raise
another army—if the feeling there is anything like what the Northern
newspapers represent it to be. You see, I’ve been reading them all the
while—but, pardon me, I meant only to answer your question.”
“Don’t apologise,” answered Pollard. And he wondered who this man, his
sergeant-major, was—whence he had come, and how, and why. For Captain
Marshall Pollard knew absolutely nothing about the man whom he had made
his confidential staff-sergeant, his tent mate, his bedfellow, and the
executant of all his orders. Nevertheless, he trusted him implicitly.
“I do not know his history,” he reflected, “but I know his quality as a
man and a soldier.”
II
OWEN KILGARIFF
THE relations between Pollard and Kilgariff were peculiar. In many ways
they were inexplicable except upon the ground of instinctive sympathy
between two men, each of whom recognised the other as a gentleman;
both of whom were possessed of scholarly tastes combined with physical
vigour and all that is possible of manliness; both of whom loved books
and knew them intimately; and each of whom recognised in the other
somewhat more than is common of intellectual force.
The history of their acquaintance had been quite unusual. Marshall
Pollard had risen from the ranks to be now the captain of a battery
originally organised and commanded by Captain Skinner, a West Point
graduate who had resigned from the United States army many years
before the war, but not until after he had seen much service in Mexico
and in Indian warfare. The battery had been composed at the outset
of ruffians from the purlieus of Richmond, jailbirds, wharf-rats,
beach-combers, men pardoned out of the penitentiary on condition of
their enlistment, and the friends and associates of such men. It had
been a fiercely fighting battery from the beginning. Slowly but surely
many of the men who had originally constituted it had been killed in
battle, and Virginia mountaineers had been enlisted to fill their
places. In the meanwhile discipline of the rigidest military sort
had wrought a wonderful change for the better in such of the men as
survived from the original organisation. By the time that the battery
returned to Virginia, after covering itself with glory at Gettysburg,
it was no longer a company of ruffians and criminals, but it continued
to maintain its reputation for desperate fighting and for cool,
self-contained, and unfaltering courage. For those mountaineers of
Virginia were desperately loyal to the fighting traditions of their
race.
During the winter of 1863-4 Captain Pollard’s battery was stationed
at Lindsay’s Turnout, on the Virginia Central Railroad a few miles
west of Gordonsville. Indescribable, almost inconceivable mud was the
characteristic of that winter, and General Lee had taken advantage
of it, and of the complete veto it placed upon even the smallest
military operations, to retire the greater part of his army from the
Rappahannock and the Rapidan to the railroads in the rear, where it
was possible to feed the men and the horses, at least in some meagre
fashion.
It was during this stay in winter quarters that Owen Kilgariff had come
to the battery. Whence he came, or how he got there, nobody knew and
nobody could guess. There were only two trains a day on the railroad;
one going east, and the other going west. It was the duty of strong
guards from Pollard’s battery to man the station whenever a train
arrived and inspect the passports of every passenger who descended from
the cars to the platform or passed from the platform to the cars. Owen
Kilgariff had not come by any of the trains. That much was absolutely
certain, and nobody knew any other way by which he could have come.
Yet one evening he appeared in Pollard’s battery at retreat roll-call
and stood looking on and listening while the orders for the night were
being read to the men.
He was a singularly comely young man of thirty years, or a little
less—tall, rather slender, though very muscular, symmetrical in an
unusual degree, and carrying his large and well-shaped head with the
ease and grace of a trained athlete.
When the military function was ended and the men had broken ranks,
Kilgariff approached Captain Pollard, and with a faultlessly correct
military salute said:—
“Captain, I crave your permission to pass the night with some of your
men. In the morning I think I shall ask you to enlist me in your
battery.”
There was something in the man’s speech and manner which strongly
appealed to Marshall Pollard’s sympathy and awakened his respect.
“You shall be my own personal guest for the night,” he said; “I can
offer you some bacon and corn bread for supper, and a bundle of dry
broom-straw grass to sleep upon. As for enlistment, we’ll talk further
about that in the morning.”
The evening passed pleasantly. The stranger was obviously a gentleman
to his finger tips. He conversed with rare intelligence and interest,
upon every subject that happened to arise among the officers who were
accustomed to gather in the captain’s hut every evening, making a sort
of club of his headquarters. Incidentally some one made reference
during the evening to some reported Japanese custom. Instantly but very
modestly Kilgariff said:—
“Pardon me, but that is one of many misapprehensions concerning the
Japanese. They have no such custom. The notion arose originally out of
a misunderstanding—a misinterpretation; it got into print, and has
been popularly accepted ever since. Let me tell you, if you care to
listen, what the facts really are.”
Then he went on, by eager invitation, to talk long and interestingly
about Japan and the Japanese—matters then very slightly
known—speaking all the while with the modest confidence of one who
knows his subject, but who is in no sense disposed to display the
extent of his knowledge.
Finally, inquiry brought out the modestly reluctant information
that Kilgariff had been a member—though he avoided saying in what
capacity—of Commodore Perry’s expedition which compelled the
opening of the Japanese ports, and that instead of returning with
the expedition, he had somehow quitted it and made his way into the
interior of the hermit empire, where he had passed a year or two in
minute exploration.
All this was drawn out by questioning only, and in no case did
Kilgariff go beyond the question asked, to volunteer information.
Especially he avoided speaking of himself or of his achievements at any
point in his conversation. He would say, “An American” did this, “An
English-speaking man” saw that, “A foreigner had an experience,” and so
forth. The first personal pronoun singular was almost completely absent
from his conversation.
One of the lieutenants was a Frenchman, and to him Kilgariff spoke in
French whenever that officer seemed at a loss to understand a statement
made in English. The surgeon was a German, and with him Kilgariff
talked in German about scientific matters, and in such fashion that the
doctor said to Pollard next morning:—
“It is that this man an accomplished physician is, or I mightily
mistaken am already.”
In the morning Owen Kilgariff warmly thanked Captain Pollard for his
entertainment, adding:—
“As one gentleman with another, you have been free to offer, and I free
to accept, your hospitality. Be very sure that I shall not presume upon
this after I become a common soldier under your command, as I intend to
do this morning if I have your permission.”
Pollard protested that his battery was not a proper one for a man of
Kilgariff’s culture and refinement to enlist in, explaining that such
of the men as were not ex-criminals were illiterate mountaineers,
wholly unfit for association on equal terms with him. For answer,
Kilgariff said:—
“I am told that you yourself enlisted here, Captain, when the
conditions were even less alluring than now.”
“Well, yes, certainly. But my case was peculiar.”
“Perhaps mine is equally so,” answered the man. “At any rate, I very
much want to enlist under your command, in a battery that, as I learn,
usually manages to get into the thick of every fight and to stay there
to the end.”
A question was on Pollard’s lips, which he greatly wanted to ask, but
he dared not. With the instinctive shrinking of a gentleman from the
impertinence of personal questioning, Pollard found it impossible
to ask this man how it happened that he was not already a soldier
somewhere. And yet the matter was one which very naturally prompted
questioning. The Confederate conscription laws had long ago brought
into the army every able-bodied man in the South. How happened it,
then, that this man of twenty-eight or thirty years of age, perfect in
physique, had managed to avoid service until this fourth year of the
war? And how was it, that one so manifestly eager now for service of
the most active kind had been willing to keep out of the army for so
long a time?
As if divining the thought which Captain Pollard could not bring
himself to formulate, Kilgariff said:—
“Some day, perhaps, I shall be able to tell you how and why it is that
I am not already a soldier. At present I cannot. But I assure you, on
my honour as a gentleman, that there is absolutely no obstacle in the
way of your enlistment of me in your command. I earnestly ask you to
accept me as one of your cannoniers.”
Accordingly, the man was enrolled as a private in the battery, and from
that hour he never once presumed upon the acquaintance he had been
privileged to form with the officers. With a scrupulosity greater than
was common even in that rigidly disciplined command, he observed the
distinction between officers and enlisted men. His behaviour indeed was
that of one bred under the strict surveillance of martinet professors
in a military school. He did all his military duties of whatever kind
with a like attention to every detail of good conduct; always obeying
like a soldier, never like a servant. That distinction is broad and
very important as an index of character.
The officers liked him, and Pollard especially sought him out for
purposes of conversation. The men liked him, too, though they felt
instinctively that he was their superior. Perhaps their liking for him
was in large part due to the fact that he never asserted or in any
wise assumed his superiority—never recognised it, in fact, even by
implication.
He nearly always had a book somewhere about his person—a book
borrowed in most cases, but bought when there was no opportunity to
borrow, for the man seemed always to have money in plenty. Now and then
he would go to a quartermaster or a paymaster with a gold piece and
exchange it for a great roll of the nearly worthless Confederate notes.
These he would spend for books or whatever else he wanted.
On one occasion, when the men of the battery had been left for thirteen
bitterly cold days and nights with no food except a meagre dole of corn
meal, Kilgariff bought a farmer’s yoke of oxen that had become stalled
in the muddy roadway near the camp. These were emphatically “lean
kine,” and their flesh would make very tough beef, but the toughest
beef imaginable was better than no meat at all, and so Kilgariff paid
what looked like a king’s ransom for the half-starved and wholly
“stalled” oxen, got two of the men who had had experience in such work
to slaughter and dress them, and asked the commissary-sergeant to
distribute the meat among the men.
The next day he exchanged another gold piece for Confederate notes
enough to paper a goodly sized wall, and the men rightly guessed
that for some reason, known only to himself, this stranger among them
carried a supply of gold coin in a belt buckled about his waist. But
not one of them ever ventured to ask him concerning the matter. He was
clearly not a man to be questioned with regard to his personal affairs.
Thus it came about that Captain Pollard, who had made this man
successively corporal, sergeant, and finally sergeant-major, solely on
grounds of obvious fitness, actually knew nothing about him, except
that he was an ideally good soldier and a man of education and culture.
Now that he had become sergeant-major, his association with the captain
was close and constant. The two occupied the same tent or hut—when
they had a tent or hut—messed together, slept together, and rode side
by side whithersoever the captain had occasion to go on duty. They read
together, too, in their idle hours, and talked much with each other
about books, men, and affairs. But never once did Captain Pollard ask
a personal question of his executive sergeant and intimate personal
associate.
Nor did Kilgariff ever volunteer the smallest hint of information
concerning himself, either to the captain or to anybody else. On the
contrary, he seemed peculiarly to shrink even from the accidental or
incidental revelation of anything pertaining to himself.
One day, in winter quarters, a gunner was trying to open a shell which
had failed to explode when fired from the enemy’s battery into the
Confederate lines. The missile burst while the gunner was handling
it, and tore off the poor fellow’s hand. The surgeon had ridden away
somewhither—nobody knew whither—and it was at least a mile’s distance
to the nearest camp where a surgeon might be found. Meanwhile, the man
seemed doomed to bleed to death. The captain was hurriedly wondering
what to do, when Kilgariff came quietly but quickly, pushed his way
through the group of excited men, knotted a handkerchief, and deftly
bound it around the wounded man’s arm.
“Hold that firmly,” he said to a corporal standing by. “Watch the
stump, and if the blood begins to flow again, twist the loop a
trifle tighter, but not too tight, only enough to prevent a free
hemorrhage—bleeding, I mean.”
Then, touching his cap brim, he asked the captain:—
“May I go to the surgeon’s tent and bring some necessary appliances? I
think I may save this poor fellow’s life, and there is no time to be
lost.”
The captain gave permission, of course, and a few minutes later
Kilgariff returned with a score of things needed. Kneeling, he arranged
them on the ground. Then he examined the wounded man’s pulse, and with
a look of satisfaction saturated a handkerchief with chloroform from
a bottle he had brought. He then turned again to Captain Pollard,
saying:—
“Will you kindly hold that over the man’s nose and mouth? And will
you put your finger on his uninjured wrist, observing the pulse-beats
carefully? Tell me, please, if any marked change occurs.”
“Why, what are you going to do?” asked the captain.
“With your permission, I am going to amputate this badly shattered
wrist. There is no time to be lost.”
With that, he set to work, pausing only to direct one of the corporals
to keep the men back and prevent too close a crowding around the
patient.
With what seemed to Captain Pollard incredible quickness, Kilgariff
amputated the arm above the wrist, took up the arteries, and neatly
bandaged the wound. Then he bade some of the men bear the patient on a
litter to his hut, and place him in his bunk. He remained by the poor
fellow’s side until the effects of shock and chloroform had subsided.
Then he returned to his quarters quite as if nothing out of the
ordinary routine had happened.
Captain Pollard had seen enough of field surgery during his three
years of active military service to know that Kilgariff’s work in this
case had been done with the skill of an expert, and his astonishment
over this revelation of his sergeant-major’s accomplishment was great.
Nevertheless, he shrank from questioning the man about the matter, or
saying anything to him which might be construed as an implied question.
All that he said was:—
“I thank you, Kilgariff, and congratulate you! You have saved a good
man’s life this day, and God does not give it to many men to do that.”
“I hope the surgeon will find my work satisfactory,” responded the
sergeant-major. “Is there any soup in the kettle, Tom?”—addressing the
coloured cook. “Bring me a cup of it, please.”
The man’s nerves had gone through a fearful strain, of course, as every
surgeon’s do when he performs a capital operation, and the captain
saw that Kilgariff was exhausted. He offered to send for a drink of
whiskey, but Kilgariff declined it, saying that the hot soup was quite
all he needed. The bugle blowing the retreat call a moment later,
Kilgariff went, quite as if nothing had happened, to call the roll and
deliver the orders for the night.
A little later the surgeon returned and was told what had happened.
After looking at the bandages, and without removing them, he muttered
something in German and walked away to the captain’s quarters. He was
surgeon to this battery only, for the reason that the company was for
the time detached from its battalion, and must have a medical officer
of its own.
Entering the captain’s quarters, the bluff but emotional German doctor
grasped Kilgariff’s hand, and broke forth:—
“It is that you are a brother then as well as a frient already. Why
then haf you not to me that you are a surgeon told it? Ach! I haf
myself that you speak the German forgot. It is only in the German that
I can what I wish to tell you say.”
Then in German the excited doctor went on to lavish praise upon the
younger man for his skill. Presently the captain, seeing how sorely
Kilgariff was embarrassed by the encomiums, came to his relief by
asking:—
“Have you taken off the bandages, Doctor, and examined the wound?”
“Shade of Esculapius, NO! What am I, that I should with such a
bandaging tamper? One glance—one, what you call, look—quite enough
tells me. This the work of a master is—it is not the work with which
for me to interfere. The man who those bandages put on, that man knows
what the best masters can teach. It is not under the bandages that I
need to look to find out that. Ach, Herr Sergeant-major, I to you my
homage offer. Five years I in the hospitals of Berlin am, and four
years in Vienna. In the army of Austria I am surgeon for six years. Do
I not know?”
Then the doctor began to question Kilgariff in German, to the younger
man’s sore embarrassment. But, fortunately for his reserve, Kilgariff
had the German language sufficiently at his command to parry every
question, and when tattoo sounded, the excited surgeon returned to his
own quarters, still muttering his astonishment and admiration.
In the morning Captain Pollard asked Kilgariff to ride with him,
in order that they two might the better talk together. But even on
horseback Pollard found it difficult to approach this man upon any
subject that seemed in the least degree personal. It was not that there
was anything repellent, anything combative, and still less anything
pugnacious in Kilgariff’s manner; for there was never anything of
the sort. It was only that the man was so full of a gentle dignity,
so saturated with that reserve which a gentleman instinctively feels
concerning his own affairs that no other gentleman wishes to intrude
upon them.
Still, Pollard had something to say to his sergeant-major on this
occasion, and presently he said it:—
“I did not know until yesterday,” he began, “that you were a surgeon,
Kilgariff.”
“Perhaps I should not call myself that,” interrupted the man, as if
anxious to forestall the captain’s thought. “One who has knocked about
the world as much as I have naturally picks up a good many bits of
useful information—especially with regard to the emergency care of men
who get themselves hurt.”
“Now listen to me, Kilgariff,” said Pollard, with determination.
“Don’t try to hoodwink me. I have never asked you a question about
your personal affairs, and I don’t intend to do so now. You need not
seek by indirection to mislead me. I shall not ask you whether you are
a surgeon or not. There is no need. I have seen too much with my own
eyes, and I have heard too much from our battery surgeon as to your
skill, to believe for one moment that it is of the ‘jack-at-all-trades’
kind. But I ask you no questions. I respect your privacy, as I demand
respect for my own. But I want to say to you that this army is badly in
need of surgeons, especially surgeons whose skill is greater than that
of the half-educated country doctors, many of whom we have been obliged
to commission for want of better-equipped men. I learn this from my
friend Doctor Arthur Brent, who tells me he is constantly embarrassed
by his inability to find really capable and experienced surgeons to
do the more difficult work of the general hospitals. He said to me
only a week ago, when he came to the front to reorganise the medical
service for this year’s campaign, that ‘many hundreds of gallant men
will die this summer for lack of a sufficient number of highly skilled
surgeons.’ He explained that while we have many men in the service
whose skill is of the highest, we have not nearly enough of such to
fill the places in which they are needed. Now I want you to let me send
you to Doctor Brent with a letter of introduction. He will quickly
procure a commission for you as a major-surgeon. It isn’t fit that such
a man as you should waste himself in the position of a non-commissioned
officer.”
Not until he had finished the speech did Pollard turn his eyes upon
his companion’s face. Then he saw it to be pale—almost cadaverous.
Obviously the man was undergoing an agonising struggle with himself.
“I beg your pardon, Kilgariff,” hastily spoke Captain Pollard, “if I
have said anything to wound you; I could not know—”
“It is not that,” responded the sergeant-major. But he added nothing to
the declaration for a full minute afterward, during which time he was
manifestly struggling to control himself. Finally recovering his calm,
he said:—
“It is very kind of you, Captain, and I thank you for it. But I cannot
accept your offer of service. I must remain as I am. I ought to have
remained a private, as I at first intended. It is very ungracious in me
not to tell you the wherefore of this, but I cannot, and your already
demonstrated respect for my privacy will surely forbid you to resent
a reserve concerning myself which I am bound to maintain. If you do
resent it, or if it displeases you in the least, I beg you to accept my
resignation as your sergeant-major, and let me return to my place among
the men as a private in the battery.”
“No,” answered Pollard, decisively. “If the army cannot have the
advantage of your service in any higher capacity, I certainly shall not
let myself lose your intelligence and devotion as my staff-sergeant.
Believe me, Kilgariff, I spoke only for your good and the good of the
service.”
“I quite understand, Captain, and I thank you. But with your permission
we will let matters remain as they are.”
All this occurred about a week before the events related in the first
chapter of this story.
III
EVELYN BYRD
WHEN the girl whom Kilgariff had rescued from the burning building was
delivered into Dorothy Brent’s hands, that most gracious of gentlewomen
received her quite as if her coming had been expected, and as if
there had been nothing unusual in the circumstances that had led to
her visit. Dorothy was too wise and too considerate to question the
frightened girl about herself upon her first arrival. She saw that she
was half scared and wholly bewildered by what had happened to her,
added to which her awe of Dorothy herself, stately dame that the very
young wife of Doctor Brent seemed in her unaccustomed eyes, was a
circumstance to be reckoned with.
“I must teach her to love me first,” thought Dorothy, with the old
straightforwardness of mind. “Then she will trust me.”
So, after she had hastily read Pollard’s note and characterised it as
“just like a man not to find out the girl’s name,” she took the poor,
frightened, fawnlike creature in her arms, saying, with caresses that
were genuine inspirations of her nature:—
“Poor, dear girl! You have had a very hard day of it. Now the first
thing for you to do is to rest. So come on up to my room. You shall
have a refreshing little bath—I’ll give it to you myself with Mammy’s
aid—and then you shall go regularly to bed.”
“But,” queried the doubting girl, “is it permitted to—”
“Oh, yes, I know you are faint with hunger, and you shall have your
breakfast as soon as Dick can get it ready. Queer, isn’t it, to take
breakfast at three o’clock in the afternoon? But you shall have it
in bed, with nobody to bother you. Fortunately we have some coffee,
and Dick is an expert in making coffee. I taught him myself. I don’t
know, of course, how much or how little experience you have had with
servants, but I have always found that when I want them to do things in
my way, I must take all the trouble necessary to teach them what my
way is. Get her shoes and stockings off quick, Mammy.”
“I have had little to do with servants,” said the girl, simply, “and so
I don’t know.”