PRISONERS OF WAR.
The heat, the smoke, the thunder of the battle were over, and the fields
of Gettysburg, where the terrible three days' fight had been, were
drenched with human blood and covered with the dead and dying. The
contest had been fearful, and its results carried sorrow and anguish to
many a heart waiting for tidings from the war, and looking so anxiously
for the names of the loved ones who, on the anniversary of the day which
saw our nation's independence, lay upon the hills and plains of
Gettysburg, their white faces upturned to the summer sky, and wet with
the raindrops which like tears for the noble dead the pitying clouds had
shed upon them. And nowhere, perhaps, was there a whiter face or a more
anxious heart than at the farmhouse, where both Helen and her
mother-in-law were spending the hot July days. Since the Christmas Eve
when Helen had watched her husband going from her across the wintry
snow, he had not been back, though several times he had made
arrangements to do so. Something, however, had always happened to
prevent. Once it was sickness which kept him in bed for a week or more;
again his regiment was ordered to advance, and the third time it was
sent on with others to repel the invaders from Pennsylvania soil.
Bravely through each disappointment Helen bore herself, but her cheek
always grew paler and her eye darker in its hue when the evening papers
came, and she read what progress our soldiers had made, feeling that a
battle was inevitable, and praying so earnestly that Mark Ray might be
spared. Then when the battle was over, and up the Northern hills came
the dreadful story of thousands and thousands slain, there was a fearful
look in her eyes, and her features were rigid as marble, while the
quivering lips could scarcely pray for the great fear tugging at her
heart. Mark Ray was not with his men when they came from that terrific
onslaught. A dozen had seen him fall, struck down by a rebel ball, and
that was all she heard for more than a week, when there came another
relay of news.
Captain Mark Ray was a prisoner of war, with several of his own company.
An inmate of Libby Prison and a sharer from choice of the apartment
where his men were confined. As an officer, he was entitled to better
quarters than the filthy pen where the poor privates were, but Mark Ray
had a large, warm heart, and he would not desert those who had been so
faithful to him, and so he took their fare, and by his genial humor and
unwavering cheerfulness kept many a heart from fainting and made the
prisoners' life more bearable than it could have been without him. To
young Tom Tubbs, who had enlisted six months before, he was a
ministering angel, and many times the poor, homesick boy crept to the
side of his captain, and laying his burning head in his lap, wept
himself to sleep and dreamed he was at home again. The horrors of that
prison life have never been told, but Mark bore up manfully, suffering
less in mind, perhaps, than did the friends at home, who lived, as it
were, a thousand years in that one brief summer while he languished in
that horrid den whose very name had a power to send a thrill of fear to
every heart.
At last, as the frosty days of October came on, they began to hope he
might be exchanged, and Helen's face grew bright again, until one day
there came a soiled, half-worn letter, in Mark's own handwriting. It was
the first word received from him since his capture in July, and with a
cry of joy Helen snatched it from Uncle Ephraim, for she was still at
the farmhouse, and sitting down upon the doorstep just where she had
been standing, read the words which Mark had sent to her. He said
nothing of the treatment he received, for he wanted the letter to reach
her, and he knew well that if he complained the chances were small for
the missive ever to leave the capital of the "chivalry." He was very
well, he said, and had been all the time, but he pined for home, longing
for the dear girl-wife never so dear as now, when separated by so many
miles, with prison walls on every side, and an enemy's line between
them.
"But be of good cheer, darling," he wrote. "I shall come back to you
some time, and life will he all the brighter for what you suffer now. I
am so glad my darling consented to be my wife, even though I could stay
with her but a moment. The knowing you are really mine makes me happy
even here, for I think of you by day, and in my dreams I always hold you
in my arms and press you to my heart."
Far different from this cheerful letter was the one which Tom inclosed
in it for his family--a wild, homesick outburst, containing so much of
truth that it was strange it was ever permitted to leave the city. Of
this letter Helen heard by way of Mattie Tubbs, and hope died within
her, especially as Tom spoke of their being sent further South as a
probable event.
"If Mark goes I shall never see him again," Helen said, despairingly;
and when at last the message came that Mark had been removed, and that,
too, just at the time when an exchange was constantly expected, she gave
him up as lost, feeling almost as much widowed as Katy in her weeds.
Slowly the winter passed away, and the country was rife with stories of
the inhuman treatment of our men, daily dying by hundreds, while those
who survived the cruelties were reduced to maniacs and imbeciles. And
Helen, as she listened, grew nearly frantic with the sickening suspense.
She did not know now where her husband was. He had made several attempts
to escape, and with each failure had been removed to safer quarters, so
that the chances now of his being exchanged seemed very far away. Week
after week, month after month, passed on, until came the memorable
battle of the Wilderness, when Lieutenant Bob, as yet unharmed, stood
bravely in the thickest of the fight, his tall figure towering above the
rest, and his soldier's uniform buttoned over a dark tress of hair, and
a face like Bell Cameron's, Lieutenant Bob had taken two or three
furloughs, but the one which had left the sweetest, pleasantest memory
in his heart was that of the autumn before, when the crimson leaves of
the maple and the golden tints of the beech were burning themselves out
on the hills of Silverton, where his furlough was mostly passed, and
where, with Bell Cameron, he scoured the length and breadth of Uncle
Ephraim's farm, now stopping by the shore of Fairy Pond and again
sitting for hours on a ledge of rocks far up the hill, where, beneath
the softly-whispering pines nodding above their heads, Bell gathered the
light brown cones, and said to him the words he had so thirsted to hear:
"I love you, Robert Reynolds."
Much of Bell's time was passed with Katy at the farmhouse, and here
Lieutenant Reynolds found her, accepting readily of Uncle Ephraim's
hearty invitation to remain; and spending his entire vacation there,
with the exception of three days given to his family. Perfectly charmed
with quaint Aunt Betsy, whom he remembered so well, he flattered and
courted her almost as much as he did Bell, but did not take her with him
in his long rambles over the hills, or sit with her at night alone in
the parlor until the clock struck twelve--a habit which Aunt Betsy
greatly disapproved, but overlooked for this once, seeing, as she said,
that:
"The young leftenant was none of her kin, and Isabel only a little."
Those were halcyon days which Robert passed at Silverton, but one stood
out prominently before him, whether sitting by his camp-fire or plunging
into the battle, and that the one when, casting aside all pride and
foolish theories, Bell Cameron freely acknowledged her love for the man
to whom she had been so long engaged, and paid him back the kisses she
had before refused to give.
"I shall be a better soldier for this," Robert had said, as he guided
her down the steep of rocks, and with her hand in his, walked slowly
back to the farmhouse, which, on the morrow, he left to take again his
place in the army.
There were no more furloughs for him after that, and the winter passed
away, bringing the spring again, when came that battle in the
Wilderness, and like a hero he fought until, becoming separated from his
comrades, he fell into the enemy's hands, and two days after there sped
along the telegraphic wires to New York:
"Lieutenant Robert Reynolds captured the first day of the battle."
Afterward there came news that Andersonville was his destination,
together with many others made prisoners that day.
"It is better than being shot, and a great deal better than being
burned, as some of the poor wretches were," Juno said, trying to comfort
Bell, who doubted a little her sister's word.
True, there was now the shadow of a hope that he might survive the
horrors, the mere recital of which made the strongest heart shiver with
dread; but the probabilities were all against it, and Bell's face grew
almost as white as Helen's, while her eyes acquired that restless,
watchful, anxious look which has crept into the eyes of so many
sorrowing women, looking away to the southward, where the dear ones were
languishing in the filthy rebel holes, unworthy the name of prison.