WHERE THE
BATTLE WAS FOUGHT
A Novel
BY
CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK
AUTHOR OF “IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS”
FIFTH EDITION.
BOSTON
TICKNOR AND COMPANY
1886
_Copyright, 1884_,
BY JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY.
_All Rights Reserved._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I. 1
CHAPTER II. 23
CHAPTER III. 45
CHAPTER IV. 61
CHAPTER V. 89
CHAPTER VI. 116
CHAPTER VII. 128
CHAPTER VIII. 142
CHAPTER IX. 154
CHAPTER X. 174
CHAPTER XI. 196
CHAPTER XII. 223
CHAPTER XIII. 242
CHAPTER XIV. 256
CHAPTER XV. 274
CHAPTER XVI. 283
CHAPTER XVII. 310
CHAPTER XVIII. 319
CHAPTER XIX. 328
CHAPTER XX. 344
CHAPTER XXI. 370
CHAPTER XXII. 381
CHAPTER XXIII. 399
CHAPTER XXIV. 411
WHERE THE BATTLE WAS FOUGHT.
CHAPTER I.
IT is said that a certain old battlefield in Tennessee is haunted in
these peaceful times. Often there comes out of the dark silence the
sudden wild blare of the bugle, chilling the blood of distant fireside
groups. Then the earth throbs with the roll of drums and the measured
tread of martial hosts. A mysterious clangor, as of the clash of arms,
fills the air. A flash--it is the glinting of bayonets above the grim
earthworks which still loom up against the vague horizon.
And yet there are those who can hear, in the military music and the
tumultuous voices of victory and defeat, only the rush of the wind
across the vast historic plain; who can see, in the gleaming phantoms
that hold the works, only the mist and the moon; who can feel, in the
tremor of the earth beneath a charging column, only the near approach
of the railway train thundering through the cavernous limestone country.
By wintry daylight the battlefield is still more ghastly. Gray with the
pallid crab-grass, which so eagerly usurps the place of last summer’s
crops, it stretches out on every side to meet the bending sky. The
armies that successively encamped upon it did not leave a tree for
miles, but here and there thickets have sprung up since the war, and
bare and black they intensify the gloom of the landscape. The turf in
these segregated spots is never turned. Beneath the branches are rows
of empty, yawning graves where the bodies of soldiers were temporarily
buried. Here, most often, their spirits walk, and no hire can induce
the hardiest ploughman to break the ground. Thus the owner of the land
is fain to concede these acres to his ghostly tenants, who pay no rent.
A great brick house, dismantled and desolate, rises starkly above the
dismantled desolation of the plain. Despite the tragic aspect of this
building, it offers a certain grotesque suggestion--it might seem in
the mad ostentation of its proportions a vast caricature of succumbed
prosperities. There is no embowering shrubbery about it, no inclosing
fence. It is an integrant part of the surrounding ruin. Its cupola
was riddled by a cannonade, and the remnants shake ominously with
every gust of wind; there are black fissures in the stone steps and
pavements, where shells exploded; many of the windows are shattered
and boarded up. In others, however, the glass is intact, and through
those nearest at hand John Estwicke, standing for the first time on the
long, broad portico one afternoon in 1871, caught the genial flicker
of fire-light and the glow of crimson curtains. The whole place was
grimly incongruous with the idea of a home, and as he was ushered into
a wide, bare hall, with glimpses of uninhabited, unfurnished rooms on
either hand, there was intimated something of those more potent terrors
with which it was instinct--the pursuing influences of certain grisly
deeds of trust, for the battlefield, the grewsome thickets, the house
itself, all were mortgaged. The next moment he was in an atmosphere
of goodly domestic cheerfulness, heightened by coloring so vivid
and warm that it seemed to pulsate. A flaring, be-flowered, velvet
carpet covered the floor of a large, square room; the crimson curtains
were long and expansive; the clumsy, old-fashioned, brass fender and
andirons glittered with the reflection of the blazing logs; now and
then a red gleam was evoked from the time-darkened mahogany chairs,
upholstered with thread-bare black hair-cloth which showed here and
there the canvas beneath, for all the furniture was well worn, being
scanty relics of ante-bellum days, saved by some miracle in the general
destruction of the great battle. He caught a bizarre glimpse of himself
in a huge fractured mirror with a showy, gilded frame, which hung above
the mantel-piece, and of his host rising suddenly and turning to meet
him.
“My dear sir,” exclaimed General Vayne, with a certain rotund emphasis,
“I am happy to see you!”
As he crossed the room and offered his hand to his guest--his left
hand, for his right sleeve was empty--there was something in his
manner which, despite the impressiveness of his fine proportions,
his soldierly gait, his kindling enthusiastic eyes, and the grave
earnestness of his florid face, savored strongly of the ludicrous. He
bore himself with a noble dignity which might well have befitted Julius
Caesar, but which consorted absurdly enough with the uncouthness of
the bare ruin where he lived; with his hunted condition, never out of
sound of the hue and cry of his debts; with the well-worn seams of his
coat--a suggestive contrast to his perfect and immaculate linen, that
in making the most of its virtues only offered another annotation upon
the history of his struggle between gentility and poverty. There was
evident cordiality in his welcome, but it was accorded pre-eminently in
his official character as host. After this the murmured civility with
which the introduction of Estwicke was acknowledged by the General’s
slender young daughter, and the beaming amiability of an old lady, his
sister, who sat on the opposite side of the fireplace, seemed a trifle
irresponsible.
“My brother has told me,” said Mrs. Kirby, her short gray-streaked
curls waving with an animation that threatened to dislodge the little
old-fashioned side-combs which held them from her plump, benignant,
wrinkled face, “that you are a relative, a third cousin, of our
good friend the Reverend Edward Estwicke--regret to hear of his
neuralgia--so sad!”
“An admirable man,” said General Vayne. He fixed his dark earnest eyes
upon the fire, and with his adroit left hand, he reflectively stroked
his long, gray mustache.
“I have never known, sir,” he continued, weightily, “an intellect more
powerful, acute, and analytic than that of that learned and eloquent
divine.”
The relative of the “learned divine” looked at his host with a
momentary touch of surprise, for he knew his cousin only as a dull and
droning old preacher in an obscure little town in West Virginia. He had
not the advantage of General Vayne’s moral magnifying-glass. Through
this unique lens life loomed up as rather a large affair. In the
rickety court-house in the village of Chattalla, five miles out there
to the south, General Vayne beheld a temple of justice. He translated
an office-holder as the sworn servant of the people. The State was this
great commonwealth, and its seal a proud escutcheon. A fall in cotton
struck him as a blow to the commerce of the world. From an adverse
political fortune he augured the swift ruin of the country. Abstract
ideas were to him as potent elements in human affairs as acts of the
Legislature, and in the midst of the general collapse, his large ideals
still retained their pristine proportions.
“I am afraid you have had a cold drive,” said Mrs. Kirby, beaming on
the visitor. “Our climate has changed since the war. It is much more
severe.”
“The loss of the trees, perhaps,” suggested the stranger.
“Perhaps,” said the old lady, with her gurgling laughter, “there may
be something in the superstition that the Yankees forgot their weather
and left it behind them. And now the malaria has gone--I wonder where!
Probably we have to thank the Federal army and their cold weather for
that also.”
General Vayne lifted his eyes. “I thank the Federal army for--nothing,”
declared the unreconstructed, bitterly.
There was an unaccountable astonishment,--more--constraint in the
visitor’s face. He remained stiffly silent, and one sufficiently
observant might have caught in his manner an intimation that he held
himself on the defensive.
Miss Vayne was not sufficiently observant. She laughed out suddenly
with girlish effusion, and as she changed her position, the light was
full upon her delicately fair complexion, her rich brown hair, and her
shabby black silk dress. She turned her joyous eyes upon the pallid
heartbreak of that blighted plain. “To make light of your obligations,
papa,” she cried, “doesn’t make away with them.”
The gesture sharpened the frivolous satire, but the stranger’s
attention had not detached itself from General Vayne, at whom he was
looking with a fiery red spark in his challenging brown eyes. This
was more in accord with an alert aggressiveness habitually expressed
in his face than with his suave reserved manner and his smooth and
punctilious observance of the behests of polite society. His polish was
like that of steel--its pleasing lustre does not deceive as to the
stern possibilities of the weapon or the temper of the blade. He had a
firmly moulded chin, a short upper lip, and excellent teeth. There was
a dash of red in his close-clipped brown hair, and his whiskers and
mustache were of a lighter tinge. His hands were smooth and white, but
his face was darkened and roughened by sun and wind. He looked about
thirty years of age; he was tall and heavily built, and, like all the
men of this region, a military training was very marked in his bearing,
despite his civilian dress.
“Ah well,” said General Vayne, waving the war, the Federal army, and
the nation generally into a diminishing distance with his expressive
left hand, “I have--a--dismissed them--from consideration. Let them go!
Let them go! Nowadays I am no wrangler. I leave all questions of public
policy as a bone of contention for the Political Dogs to gnaw.”
His method of enunciation might suggest to the literary mind the
profuse use of capital letters.
“I am, and have always been, strictly tolerant,” continued General
Vayne,--“conservative in my views. Conservatism, sir,” declared
the tolerant man, with an extreme look in his eye, “is the moral
centripetal force that curbs the flighty world.”
Mrs. Kirby’s interest in politics had diminished since the war, during
which it had a phenomenal growth like Jonah’s gourd. Now an absorption
in personal matters flourished in its stead.
“I hope you find your stay in the neighborhood pleasant, Captain
Estwicke--so glad,” she said. “Of course you’ve been to Chattalla.
Charming, charming town! I am a visitor here myself. I haven’t before
seen my brother since the eve of Shiloh--yes, since Shiloh. I shall
remain some months with him--so delightful to come back! And is it
business or pleasure that brings you to Tennessee?”
This old lady possessed an unbridled imagination. She fancied it
possible that people came to Tennessee for pleasure.
Once more there was that peculiar look of surprise and constraint upon
Estwicke’s face. He hesitated in doubt and embarrassment. It did not
escape her attention this time, but she misinterpreted it as a look of
inquiry, so she smilingly reiterated with great distinctness, “Did you
come to Tennessee for _business_ or _pleasure_?”
“I came to join my regiment,” he replied, tersely--evasively it may be
considered.
This information exploded like a bomb, leaving a sulphurous silence
behind it.
“Ah-h-h!” exclaimed General Vayne, in a tone intended to express
assent, but which was like a prolonged note of surprised comprehension.
He appreciated all at once how it was that he had mistaken this man
for an ex-rebel captain. His letter of introduction from the Reverend
Edward Estwicke had described him broadly as “Captain Estwicke of
Virginia,” and when General Vayne had called upon him at the house of
a mutual friend near Chattalla, where the officer was spending the
last few days of his leave, no allusion as it chanced was made to
the stubborn fact of his regiment, stationed at the city of Marston
twenty miles away. He had subtly impressed General Vayne as a man of
an inordinate personal pride and an extreme sensitiveness. To such a
man the perception that he has accepted an invitation extended under a
mistake can hardly be pleasant. General Vayne, versed in fine issues
of internal dissension, realized how the annoyance must be aggravated
by the stranger’s consciousness that he was secretly regarded as a
renegade, for he could but know how slightly his host would esteem the
replication that he was a representative of the loyal South which had
borne martyrdom between two fires.
General Vayne, however, held hospitality as the first element of
religion, and it was abhorrent to him that a guest should by any
mischievous mischance be rendered uncomfortable in his house. But he
was not helplessly dismayed; he thought himself possessed of tact
equal to any emergency, and he demonstrated this claim by bolting
incontinently from the subject. The old lady beamed upon the equivocal
captain with smiling eagerness to make amends. The girl’s face was
grave, but in her luminous eyes lurked a freakish delight in the
whole misapprehension. Captain Estwicke was not in the habit of being
considered amusing, but if he inwardly resented it he made no sign.
General Vayne had returned to the loss of the timber. “The aspect of
the country would be almost prairie-like but for that elevation and
those frowning redoubts,” he said, waving his hand toward the western
windows through which the huge earthworks were visible. “There are very
peculiar scenic effects here now and then--very peculiar, sir, indeed.
A horseman there near Fort Despair, will loom up gigantic”--lowering
his voice impressively--“mysterious, wonderful. He seems a bit of
materialized poetry. He looks far more like a gallant knight pricking
across the plain in quest of noble adventure, than”--effective
_diminuendo_--“a ploughman going out to bed up land for cotton.”
“Is that the work we used to call Fort Despair?” exclaimed Estwicke,
as if with sudden recognition. Something strained and unnatural in
his voice struck the girl’s attention. She noted too the look in his
eyes--at once eager and shrinking--as he leaned his elbow upon the
worn arm of the chair and bent forward to the window. Little as she
knew of him she knew it was an uncharacteristic look. She did not
understand it. She only apprehended the emotion that swayed him as one
groping in the dark is conscious of the proximity of an unaccustomed,
it may be a fearful presence.
“Fort Despair,” repeated General Vayne, absorbed in reminiscence--he
had lost his right arm there. “Appropriately named, too, it seems, even
at this late day.”
“Ah, I know!” cried the stranger passionately. “I feel its meaning!
Every weed that stirs in the wind is voiced with a terrible suggestion.”
Then he seemed to check himself. He leaned back in his chair and said
no more. He was panting slightly; his face was flushed; a sharp pain
was expressed in his eyes.
“The man,” thought Marcia, watching him in a tumult of feeling,
half sympathy, half inquisitive amaze, “has a morbid horror of that
battlefield. And a reason for it!”
General Vayne was fighting the day over again. He saw his brigade in
line of battle; he was canvassing once more the problematic strength of
the opposing force; he was regretting again, as he had often regretted,
that he had not disregarded his orders and pushed on through the
timber; if his arm had been spared him one half hour longer! How could
he notice the stranger now; he had no thought even of his guest!
And Mrs. Kirby was thoroughly tired of the war, and welcomed the
opening of the door and the entrance of other visitors, a few
middle-aged people of a decorously dull aspect, and, like their
entertainers, so provincial that they were not even aware of it. This
deplorable state of ignorance has, however, its compensations. With
full faith they indorsed the old-fashioned customs that had always
prevailed among them, and were free from that subtle self-distrust
which hampers many very worthy people, who pay this price for the
knowledge that they do not know everything.
In the general change of position Estwicke found himself beside the
young lady, and nearer the window than before. Through it he could see
the sinking sun, a great red globe, resting a moment on the parapet of
Fort Despair. Far away a vertical line of light was drawn sharply upon
the sad purple of the distant hills. The tapering shaft pierced the
pale saffron belt above the horizon, and at its summit was a bright
flake of crimson. It was the flag-staff, and the flying flag above the
National Cemetery across the river. Certainly this was a grewsome place.
And now the sun was gone. The shadows thronged the battlefield. The
haunted thickets were all a-shiver, and the viewless wind marched over
the plain. The cheerful room seemed a flout, a derisive mockery, to the
woful scene without.
“How we forget!” he thought. “How we forget!”
For the interior was very cheerful; the flames roared up the chimney;
the shattered mirror reflected the homelike group, seated in a wide
semicircle before the fire; the flush of the western sky was still
bright on the girl’s fair face, and there were golden glintings in
her brown hair, as if belated sunbeams were entangled in its midst.
A smile hovered about the curves of her delicate lips; her brilliant
hazel eyes looked out from the tender shadows of long black lashes;
even the genteel poverty expressed in her attire had its gracious,
poetic aspects; her standing linen collar, turning slightly outward
at the edges, might seem the calyx of some lovely flower as her white
neck rose from it, and the plainness of her shabby black silk dress,
of which the only ornament was a knot of black lace at the throat,
accented all the pliant graces of her figure.
He could not understand the tranquil joyousness of her expression.
She was to him the most striking anomaly of the anomalous place--so
manifestly happy, so dominantly contradicting its persistently
reiterated doom of death and decay; so evidently untouched by any
influence of the high tragedy of these surroundings. Clearly she must
lack feeling, sensibility. He looked speculatively at her, as he sat
leaning his elbow on the stiff, angular arm of the chair, and with his
right hand laid meditatively upon his dark red whiskers. Presently he
recognized the appropriateness of beginning a conversation, and said,
at a venture,--
“You have no near neighbors here?”
“No,” she replied, “we have all the world to ourselves. Do you see that
black line?” she added, turning her eyes toward the horizon, where the
sombre hills, miles away, met the darkening sky, “that is the boundary
of the world. You may think there’s something on the other side,
because you don’t know the country; but there isn’t.”
For a moment he was silent. Then he laughed a little.
“I had no idea that I was to meet a distinguished astronomer, with a
new planet,” he said. “It has an orbit of its own, of course, and is
governed by its own laws.”
“That’s the way with everybody,” she declared. “People are always
talking about ‘the world,’ and they only mean the few other people and
the few places that they know.”
“I perceive,” said Estwicke, gravely, “that you are a close reasoner.
The capacity for inductive ratiocination, Miss Vayne, is the noblest
faculty of the human mind. Let me congratulate you on its possession.
Will you reason some more!”
He had been a trifle in doubt as to how she might receive this
pleasantry at her expense, but she laughed gleefully.
“Oh, I will reason with pleasure if you will suggest a topic.”
“You seem pretty expert,” said Estwicke. “Do you spend much time at it?”
“At what?”
“At reasoning.”
“Oh no,” she cried; “I haven’t the leisure for such an elegant
recreation.”
Her eyes were fixed upon him in delighted anticipation of what he
would say next. It occurred to him that it was not often she had an
experience like this; that her world did not abound with people who
“amused” her.
“I should think you might indulge occasionally,” he said. “When, for
instance, your father is away, and your brothers”--he glanced across
the room at a row of small boys, stiff in their best clothes and their
company manners--“are at school, and you have your little planet all to
yourself, you might find time to reason considerably.”
“Oh, but they don’t go to school; I teach them at home, and there’s no
reasoning with _them_--nor with housekeeping either.”
He knew that General Vayne had been for some years a widower, and he
understood now that she presided over the household. This must involve
heavy cares. She was very elastic. The Juggernaut car evidently made no
impression.
Already he could divine that the boys were taught at home to avoid the
expense of the academy and in deference to their father’s prejudice
against the free school, and that the whole system of domestic
education was designated in General Vayne’s magniloquent nomenclature
“Retrenchment.”
“Teach me to reason,” said Estwicke. “I assure you I am amenable.”
“You have a dignified idea of my curriculum. I shouldn’t try to teach
you to reason,” she cried delightedly. “If you were my pupil you would
find yourself laboring to distinguish between the first principles of
geography--North and South.”
His face hardened, but he laughed and made a feint of throwing up both
hands. “I surrender!” he exclaimed.
She looked at him with a sudden grave intentness. However, she said
nothing, for the others were rising to repair to the dining-room.
There the conversation was general, until, after a time, a rubicund,
apoplectic, eager, unwieldly old gentleman of the name of Ridgeway
began to preponderate, while the heavy faces of his auditors bore
witness to the weight of his discourse. He talked of different
processes of agriculture; of new labor-saving machines; most
discerningly of the quality of land, and it was only when he began
to take a morbid pleasure in humiliating himself and his hearers by
comparing Tennessee soil to the alluvial richness of the buckshot
cotton lands of Mississippi that General Vayne came swiftly, potently
to the rescue. Then it became apparent to anyone not sodden in idiocy
that God created first Tennessee, and with what was left over made
the rest of the world. Nothing could live in such rhetoric. From
Reelfoot Lake to the highest peak of Big Smoky Mountain General Vayne
demonstrated his proposition. Its vast mineral wealth might enrich
all the nations of the earth. Its water-power could run the machinery
of--of the universe. On its mountain domes may be found the flora of
the Canadas; its western swamps are rich with sub-tropical vegetation;
between those extremes is every variety of soil and every grade of
climate. He descanted on its geological interest, folded his napkin
into strata and illustrated triumphantly. So at last the transition
was very pretty to spirited sketches of angling in the waters of that
mystic western lake presented by the earthquake to the State; of
fox-chases through the park-like mid-land country; of hunting deer in
the romantic coves and ravines of the Cumberland Mountains; of the
wilder solitudes among the majestic domes and ridges of the great
Unaka chain that bars off the world from our eastern borders. And as
he talked it might have seemed that with his admiration of physical
prowess and the loss of his right arm; with his magniloquent ideas and
phrasings and the scantiness of all his belongings; with his young
family growing up around him and only privation in the present and this
mortgaged ruin to leave them as an estate, he was a marvellously apt
illustration of the ignoble fact, failure,--a fact of which he was most
profoundly, most pathetically unconscious.
The whole affair was a forced march to Estwicke; his interest lagged;
the perception of the mistake under which he had been invited rankled
within him throughout the evening, and even when he had taken his
departure and was driving away under the frostily glinting stars.
And so the entertainment--a rare occasion for Marcia--was over.
To-morrow would come again the dull routine of teaching and
housekeeping--this last a matter of problems, of careful ingenuity,
of reconciling large necessities and small means. But she was not
thinking of that. She was ready for tears, for self-reproach, for that
utter despair of youth, which, with the infinite lengths of the future
before it, deems everything irrevocable. He was sensitive, she said
to herself, and she had hurt him. She had let him go without a word,
because she feared to speak. He seemed on the lookout for slights--but
that perhaps was because he had found slights on the lookout for
him. And he had had in his life some ungentle--it might even be some
terrible experience; she had divined that early in the evening. And
she, too, must wound him! She was so sorry--she was so sorry!
Her father’s voice broke upon her absorption. “I can respect--I can
even admire,” he said, addressing the family circle, “a real bona
fide Yankee. Born so”--he added, liberally. “But these home-made
Yankees--these Southern Yankees--for my life, for my life I can’t
understand them.”
It seemed to General Vayne a monstrous freak of nature that a man
should be born south of Mason’s and Dixon’s line without a full set of
indigenous principles warranted to stick.
His daughter turned her head suddenly. For they were not gone. Old Mr.
Ridgeway was re-entering the room, stumbling over a foot-stool and
spluttering and gasping in his apoplectic agitation. “I have--yes, I
have”--he exclaimed. “I have broken the wheel of my buggy.”
By degrees, in the tumult of his explanation, the facts were developed
that Mrs. Ridgeway was not hurt in the fall, and that Captain Estwicke,
who happened to overtake them at the “big gate,” had kindly offered
them his buggy. In order that he might not be kept waiting until they
could send the vehicle back, Mr. Ridgeway desired to ask if his host
could lend Captain Estwicke a saddle-horse.
General Vayne could and would, and apologized for not offering a
vehicle instead. Before the war he had been “horsey” on a princely
scale. Now he possessed a saddle-horse or two, and a pair of jog-trot
sorrels that served alternately in the plough and in a certain
dilapidation which he called his barouche. This had already rumbled off
to Chattalla full of the elderly guests.
During the few moments required for the horse to be saddled the
whole party waited on the front steps. The night air was keen and
penetrating. A great star, in splendid isolation near the zenith,
shivered in those wide spaces made dark by its own brilliancy. And the
moon was bright, too--the ragged, withered crab-grass, still tufting
the fissures of the bomb-riven pavements, glittered with rime as if
every blade was frosted with silver. Vague belts of vapor lay upon the
battlefield, and fluctuated with mystic glimmers. Estwicke watched
it absently as he stood a little aside, heedless of the talk of the
elders, whose black shadows and animated gestures were grotesquely
defined on the blocks of limestone that floored the portico.
Marcia was silent, too. Once she cast a timorous glance upon him. Then
her eyes fell. Still she did not doubt that he would receive what she
wished to say as simply and kindly as it was intended.
“Captain Estwicke,” she faltered, “I want to tell you--I--I--am very
sorry, but--but--you won’t do for a pupil at all. You can’t learn to
reason. You have too much imagination.”
She glanced up and smiled. The next moment her heart misgave her. He
was looking at her in cool surprise.
And what if she had taken too much for granted! He might not have cared
at all--he might even have forgotten. She blushed painfully. She could
not think to choose her words--she could not be silent while his eyes
tacitly asked an explanation. She hastily stipulated--
“I alluded to teaching you to distinguish between North and South. I
only meant the points of the compass--_Geography_, you know,” she
added, lucidly.
“I am very grateful that you should trouble yourself to tell me,” he
said, gravely. “I misunderstood you. I hope you will forgive me.”
She was silent in astonishment. What chaos was here! She had tendered
her regrets, and now _he_ was begging her pardon. In the simple
life of her little planet she had never before had occasion to question
the appropriateness of any of her good and gentle impulses. It came
upon her with a crushing sense of humiliation that she had done an
awkward, a silly thing--she even thought it, at this moment, forward.
She wondered that she should discern all this so late. She said to
herself that he was a man of the world, whose spurious gallantry
would not permit him to accept an apology from a lady. The slight
wordy dexterity with which he had reversed their mutual position, and
placed himself in the humble case of begging her pardon, instead of
granting forgiveness, seemed to her painfully insincere. It was her
first experience of the world’s little feints, and it chilled her. She
flinched too from the thought of how absurd the whole episode must be
to him.
And in fact he laughed as he rode away in the moonlight.
“Now, that was mighty good of her,” he protested. “She thought I was
cut to pieces--routed!” And he laughed again.
He had pressed the horse into a gallop, and was speeding through the
infinite loneliness of the moonlit expanse. When the animal abruptly
swerved aside, he glanced down to recognize the shallow rifle-pits of
the old picket line. He knew none of the traditions of the place, but
as he reached Fort Despair, and rode along, close upon the crest of
the counterscarp--dank and sodden with the late rains now, once dank
and sodden with a darker current--there came upon him a mysterious
sense of a mighty multitude astir in the vast, vague plain. A strange,
rhythmic throb shook the earth--or was it in the air? The haunted
thickets shuddered audibly as he passed. Once, when the steely gleam
of a sabre was thrust suddenly forth, he turned and looked back with
fierce eyes--that changed and were startled. But it might have been
only the shimmering of a moonbeam on the white bark of an aspen shoot.
As he rode on down the scarred, treeless bank of the river, the earth
pulsated with a stronger tremor, a great white light sprang upon the
horizon, and the whistle of the down train from Marston split the air.
Into the mist and into the moonlight a series of massive, isolated
columns of masonry rose starkly out of the black water. They were the
piers of the old turnpike bridge, burned one night long ago to cover
a frantic retreat and impede a frantically fierce pursuit. He checked
his horse near the brink and gazed at them. There was something so
picturesque and martial in the equestrian figure, thus thrown into bold
relief against the moonlit sky, that Mr. Ridgeway, in mid-stream upon
the broad, flat ferry-boat, called his wife’s attention to it.
“Captain Estwicke is not going back to his friend’s house,” added the
old gentleman. “He tells me he will spend the night at the hotel in
Chattalla, in order to catch the early train for Marston. The barracks
are five miles from Marston.”
The ferryman heard this. He lived on the highway, he saw everybody that
came and went, and he had the interest of the professed gossip in small
details. He noted the name, and when he had landed the old couple on
the opposite bank he pulled lustily upon the rope, and the cumbersome
craft, pulsing with the current, crossed more rapidly than usual under
the impetus of Tom Toole’s curiosity about the stranger. As he ran in
to land there was a sudden, sharp change on his stolid, unspeculative
countenance. He stood staring, with wild, dumfounded recognition, at
Estwicke, who still sat motionless upon the horse, his eyes fixed upon
the obeliscal columns, a dreary memorial, in the midst of the swift
current. After a moment of doubt and hesitation, Toole tremulously
held the lantern up at arm’s length, throwing the light full upon the
officer’s face. It was no longer pallid, spectral, as it had been in
the moonlight. The artificial gleam suddenly evoked all its peculiar
coloring--the dark red of his hair and beard, the fiery spark in his
challenging brown eyes, the warm tint of his tanned complexion.
“My good Lord A’mighty!” the ferryman broke forth, “thar ain’t many men
ez knows what I knows, an’ hev seen what I hev seen, ez would like ter
git a glimge of ye now--a-settin’ in that saddle an’ a-lookin’ fust at
the old forts, like ye war a-studyin’ ’bout’n the range o’ the guns,
an’ then a-medjurin’ that thar bridge with yer eye.”
Estwicke turned quickly. Toole flinched beneath his glance, and held up
one hand as if to ward it off, laughing confusedly at himself the while
for the involuntary gesture.
“Ye might have knocked me down with a feather jes’ now. Bless God, I
thought ’twas _him_ agin!” he protested, laying his hand on the
rope as Estwicke pushed his horse down upon the ferry-boat. The pause
was broken only by the gurgling of the water, and the rattling of the
“block an’ tickle” as every effort sent the broad, flat craft throbbing
on its way. Then he replied to the inquiry in Estwicke’s face.
“By God!” he exclaimed, wildly, “I’ve seen ye hyar afore, a-ridin’
an’ a-raidin’ on the banks o’ this ruver, mounted an’ armed, an’
a-medjurin’ the bridge with yer eye. But then--ye fired it with yer
own hands--_with yer own hands_. I know it. These rocks know it.
None of us hev forgot. An’ I seen ye hyar agin,” he added, lowering his
voice, “a-lyin’ dead--dead!--on the ground yander a-nigh Fort Despair,
shot through the lungs, an’ through the head, an’ half crushed by the
carcass o’ yer horse!”
He paused abruptly.
There was on Estwicke’s face a sudden look of recoil which imposed
silence. The ferryman had loosened his grasp upon the rope, and the
wayward plunging of the boat was like the disordered throbbing of some
great heart. He could not interpret that look. He was wrestling with a
vague, superstitious thrill. The equestrian figure seemed to rise into
abnormal proportions. Its eyes--its inscrutable eyes--were fixed with
some imperious protest upon him. And he remembered the face! He was
shut off from the world with it--all the moonlit water was around them
and all the misty air. Again he laid hold on the rope, pulling hard for
the shore--for deliverance, keeping his shoulder toward the figure, but
ever and anon turning, under a morbid fascination, a fluctuating glance
upon it, impelled by the very strength of the contradictory desire to
see it no more.
But when he was about to land, the approach to a mere familiar element
restored, in a measure, his self-possession.
“Ye air the livin’ image o’ that man, cap’n,” he said, tremulously. “Of
course I know ’taint _him_ agin. _His_ name warn’t yourn.
I useter know _his_ name, though I hev furgot it now. I hope ye
don’t take no grudge at bein’ called like a Johnny Reb. They hev hed
the respec’ o’ soldiers afore now.”
There was no answer. The horse’s hoofs sounded loud upon the planks;
the rider pressed swiftly in among the mists and the shadows; and he
was gone.
Then the ferryman looked down at the boat. It had risen in the water.
“He weighs!” he exclaimed suddenly. After a moment he turned about with
a laugh. “Of course the man weighs. Thar’s two of ’em! An’ this man’s
name is Estwicke--an’ what war t’other one’s name? Ef”--he cast a swift
glance at the empty embrasures of the distant fort--“ef thar ever war
enny other one.”
He pondered upon this problem as he pulled the boat across the river,
and again while he walked up the bank toward a little log-house where
the window was still a-light.
He paused half-way in his absorption, only roused when a breath of
wind brought to him a strange sound from out the thicket close to
Fort Despair, a sound of the whickering of horses and the heavy tramp
of hoofs, and a clangor as of the clash of sabres, and a note--was
it?--a note from a bugle. He remembered that a company of cavalry was
literally annihilated there under a murderous cross-fire--he hastened
on--and on the evening of the first day’s fight, when captured and led
to the rear, he saw, lying among the dead on the ground that the enemy
held, this man--this staff-officer. He had reached the door of his
house; he struck it with his heavy hand. He had recalled the name at
last, and the recollection entered with him into his home like a curse.