Smith, holding his sabre very stiffly, raised the bronze knocker on Mrs.
Ashley’s door and rapped three times. Then he loosened the chin-strap of
his forage-cap; drew off both gauntlets, folded them, and placed them in
his belt.
As he waited for admittance he saw the flag over the porch, motionless
in the still air; he heard the wild bees’ harmony overhead, he heard the
rustle of a summer gown behind the door. But the door did not open. He
waited. A burr stuck to the crimson stripe on his riding breeches; he
flicked it off with his middle finger. Presently he knocked again, once;
the door opened, and Mrs. Ashley came out, smiling faintly.
“I hope you want another cup of tea,” she said with the slightest gesture
toward the table under the magnolias where the two chairs still stood as
they had left them in the morning.
He attended her, cap in hand, to the table; when she was seated, he stood
beside her.
“Is it tea, Captain Smith?” she asked, looking up at him.
He grew suddenly red, but did not reply.
“What is it then?” she repeated, smiling: “not the mere honour of my poor
presence I am sure. But, as a gallant officer, you must contradict me,
Captain Smith.”
Fear whitened her lips that the smile had not left; she faced him with
the coquetry of desperation; and the pathos of it turned him sick at
heart.
“I brought the Bible to you,” he said; “it is the one you swore on—the
oath of allegiance. You kissed it.”
She inclined her throbbing head and took it.
“Open it,” he said.
She obeyed. The wet bit of folded paper caught her eyes and she held it
out to Smith, saying: “This is yours.”
“No!” he said, “it is yours.”
She glanced swiftly up at him, caught her breath; and sat motionless,
the paper clutched nervously in her fingers.
“Read it,” he said in a scarcely audible voice.
She opened it; one glance was enough. Then she dropped it on the grass at
her feet. Presently he stooped and recovered it.
“Yes,” she said, obeying his eyes’ command, “my husband is not dead. What
of it?”
“Where is he?”
She was silent.
“A deserter.”
“Yes.”
“A traitor.”
“Yes.”
Smith walked to the gate, looked down the road toward the church where
the artillery pickets paraded, naked sabres drawn. Then he came back.
“You are under arrest,” he said, looking at the ground.
She turned a bloodless face to his, and raised one slender hand to her
forehead.
“Do you doubt my loyalty?” she stammered.
He turned his back sharply.
“My loyalty?” she repeated as though dazed.
He was silent.
“But—but you administered the oath—you saw me kiss the Book,” she
persisted with childlike insistence.
“And your husband?” he asked, turning abruptly.
“What of him!” she cried, revolted; “I am myself!—I have a brain and a
body and a soul of my own! Do you think I would damn my soul with a kiss
on that Book! Do you think if I were a Rebel I would deny it to save my
body?”
“You have denied it,” he said. He took the Bible from her hand and opened
it at a marked page:
“By their acts ye shall know them,” he read steadily, then closed the
Book and laid it on the table. Their eyes met; the anguish in his bore a
message to her that pleaded for forgiveness for what he was about to do.
“Not _that_!—” she stammered, half rising from the chair.
He turned, drew out a handkerchief, and signalled the artillery picket,
flag-fashion. Then, before he could prevent it, she was on her knees to
him, there on the grass, her white face lifted, speechless with horror.
“For God’s sake don’t do that,” he said, trying to raise her, but she
clung to him and pushed him toward the gate murmuring, “Go! Go!”
Furious at the agony he was causing her, tortured by the agony it cost
him, he held her firmly and told her to be silent.
“Your husband is hidden in that house,” he said: “he is attempting to
add to his treason by communicating with the Rebel cavalry. He tried to
force your own pastor, at the point of a pistol, to hang a red shirt on
his clothes-line, which means ‘attack!’ The pastor is a good man; he had
taken the oath; such villainy horrified him. To save his life in the
room above he consented to hang out a signal, but the signal he hung out
is a white shirt which means ‘retreat.’ There it is!”
He pointed angrily at the white shirt hanging on the minister’s
clothes-line down the road.
“Now,” he said, “let me do my duty.”
He took her by the wrists, and looked straight into her eyes, adding:
“I’d rather be lying dead at your feet than doing what I’ve got to do.”
“But,” she cried, struggling to free herself, “but the signal! Can’t you
understand? The man lied! He lied! He lied! The white rag means ‘attack!’”
Stupefied, he dropped her wrists and stepped back.
“Run to your battery!” she wailed, “run! run! Can’t you understand!
They’re coming! They’ll kill you!”
Scarcely had she spoken when a rifle shot rang out from the race-track,
another, another, then a scattered volley.
An artillery guard approached the garden, halted, turned, then scattered
pell-mell toward the church. The next moment Smith was running for
his battery and shouting to Steele, who, mounted, cantered among the
grave-stones, and hurried the panic-stricken cannoniers to their stations.
A frightful tumult arose from the race-track, where the “Dead Rabbits,”
taken utterly unprepared by a cloud of Confederate cavalry, ran like
rabbits very much alive. Through them galloped the Confederate riders,
heavy sabres dripping to the hilt. The Union cavalry at the water-tank
was overwhelmed; the gray-jacketed troopers, shouting their “Hi! yi! yi!
yi!” wheeled into the village, shaking a thousand glittering sabres; but
here they met a blast of cannister from the churchyard that sent them
reeling and tumbling back to the race-track, now swarming with the entire
Confederate division.
Smith’s battery, limbered up, filed out of the churchyard, while Smith,
looking annihilation in the face, saw the last of the “Dead Rabbits”
legging it for the woods. He turned with a groan to Steele, and Steele
said, “Ride for it, if we’re to save the guns! The whole rebel cavalry is
here!”
Bullets began to sing into the bewildered column; the cannoniers
struggled with the horses and swore. Suddenly a shell fell squarely on
the church tower and burst.
“They’ve got artillery; we’re goners!” shouted a teamster.
Smith drew his sabre and raised it high above his head: “Battery
forward!” he cried: “by the left flank! Gallop!”
“God help us,” gasped Steele.
Team after team dashed into position, dropped their guns, and wheeled
into station behind. Smith dismounted and, standing by gun No. 1, began
to make calculations, pad and pencil in hand. Presently he gave his
orders; a shrapnel shell was rammed home, the screw twisted to the
elevation, then:
“Fire!”
A lance of flame pierced the white cloud, the shell soared away toward
the race-track and burst beyond it.
Before gun No. 2 could be fired, a roar broke from the wooded heights
close to the left, and a flight of shells struck Smith’s battery
amidships. For a moment it was horrible; teams were butchered, guns
dismounted, cannoniers torn to shreds.
“Steele, bring that limber up!” shouted Smith; “they shan’t have every
gun!”
Steele seized the bridle; the terrified animals lashed out right and
left, threatening to kick the traces to bits. A cannonier tried to hook
up the gun but fell dead under the limber. A caisson blew up, hurling a
dozen men into the air and stunning as many more. With blackened face and
jacket, Steele reeled toward the gun again but fell on his face in the
long grass.
“Bring off that gun!” shouted Smith, standing straight up in his
stirrups. Crack! went the wheel, and the gun sank to its axle. Then
Smith sprang from his horse and helped the gunners take the spare wheel
from the caisson, roll it up over the grass, and mount it on the broken
pieces. Smith hammered it on the axle, then drove home the linchpin,
brushed the sweat from his half-blinded eyes, and looked around.
What he saw was the wreck of three guns and caissons, the blackened
fragments of gunners and horses, and a mess of trampled grass; and
beyond, between his single gun and the race-track, a long gray line,
glittering with naked steel, sweeping straight upon him.
Of his battery there remained three men with him; the others were lying
dead around Steele or stunned and mangled somewhere in the rank grass.
Scarcely conscious of what he did, he helped his three gunners hook
the gun to the limber, then mounted and followed the gun back into the
village through a constantly increasing rain of bullets. One of his men
fell to the earth.
“I guess the whole Rebel army’s here,” he said, as though speaking to
himself: “I guess I’d better get this gun to the Junction damn quick.”
In front of Mrs. Ashley’s cottage, as the cannon passed, Ashley, in his
shirt-sleeves, fired from the window point-blank at a cannonier and shot
him out of his saddle. The dead man’s clutch on the team’s bridle brought
the gun to a halt, and the remaining gunner sprang from his saddle with
an oath and dashed into the house, sabre unsheathed.
“Come back!” shouted Smith, reining in; “man! man! we’ve got to save the
gun! Come back!” He climbed from his own saddle into the saddle of the
nigh battery horse and seized the heavy rawhide. A bullet broke his wrist
as he lifted it.
There was a struggle going on in the room from which Ashley had fired,
but Smith did not see it; his head swam and he looked at his gun with
sick eyes. For a second all round grew black, then he found himself
rising from his horse’s neck, and, in the road beside him, he saw Mrs.
Ashley and ’Biah, holding the bridles he had dropped.
“They’ve hit me, I can’t guide the team,” he said vacantly. “I’ve got to
save the gun, you know.”
His eyes fell on the dead body of her husband, lying where it had been
flung from the window among the flowers below.
“He’s dead,” said Mrs. Ashley; “I can’t stay. Don’t leave me! I can sit a
horse if you will let me. I’ll go with you. Don’t refuse me!”
She sprang into the limber seat and clutched the railing with both hands;
’Biah followed with a howl of terror. There was a whip there; she swung
the heavy rawhide and, seizing a horse by the mane, drew herself forward
to the saddle, calling; “here they come! Gallop! gallop!”
With a plunge the six horses leaped forward, and tore down the road,
Smith swaying in his saddle with a broken arm, the young girl, enveloped
in a torrent of dust, riding the nigh horse of the wheel-team, limber and
gun swaying and crashing on behind, ’Biah bouncing, jouncing, and howling
intermittently.
“Guide!” called Smith faintly: “I can’t.”
She seized the bridles and lashed the horses. ’Biah shrieked.
“There are soldiers ahead!” she cried to him,—“Rebel infantry! They’re
going to fire!”
“Drive over them!” he gasped.
With a rumble, a roar, and a tearing crash, the train broke into the
shouting mass of men, the scurrying wheels crunched on something, there
came a flash of rifles, and Smith staggered. Before his eyes all was a
blurr; he still heard the hoofs clink, the chains clash, the wheels thump
and pound. Gun and limber struck an opposing body and leaped into the
air; Smith’s glazing eyes opened; he clung to his mount and attempted to
turn.
He tried to say: “Is the wheel broken?”
She could not reply, nor did she dare turn her head to that heap in the
road already far behind. Terror sealed her lips—had sealed her lips when,
through the dust ahead, she saw Smull, almost under the head team’s
hoofs, start to run, then go down to death beneath her very eyes.
* * * * *
Six wild horses, a runaway limber and gun, two half-dead creatures
hanging to the saddles, and a frantic darkey on the limber,—that was all
of Smith’s battery that tore into the Junction to the horror of Wilson
and the scandal of the rank and file.
It all happened years ago; too long ago to fix the year or the date.
Perhaps the incident is recorded in the archives of the Nation. Perhaps
not. At all events when they had picked some stray bullets out of Smith
and set his wrist in splints, he went North on furlough.
I think Mrs. Ashley went with him; and ’Biah being of no account, toted
their luggage and breathed hard.