had been burnt; but a span, charred and broken, still swung from the
central pier. Over toward the dun-tinted west a house was blazing, fired
by some stray bomb, perhaps, or by official design, to hinder the enemy
from utilizing the shelter, and its red rage of destruction bepainted
the clouds that hung so low above the chimneys and dormer-windows. To
the east, the woods on the steeps had been shelled, and a myriad boughs
and boles riven and rent, lay in fantastic confusion. Through the
mournful chaos the wind had begun to sweep; it sounded in unison with
the battle clamors, and shrieked and wailed and roared as it surged
adown the defiles. Now and then there came on the blast the fusillade of
dropping shots from the south, where the skirmish line of one faction
engaged the rear-guard of the other, or the pickets fell within
rifle-range. Once the sullen, melancholy boom of distant cannon shook
the clouds, and then was still, and ever and again sounded that tireless
cry, "Dovinger's Rangers. Hyar's yer guidon! Rally, boys! Rally on the
guidon! Rally on the reserve!"
The senior surgeon, as the road wound near, stepped down toward it when
the horseman, still holding himself proudly erect, passed by.
"Sergeant," he hailed the guidon, "where is Captain Dovinger?"
The hand mechanically went to the boy's forehead in the usual military
salute. "Killed, sir."
"Where are the other officers of the squadron--the junior captain, the
lieutenants?"
"Killed, sir."
"What has become of the troopers?"
"Killed, sir, in the last charge."
There was a pause. Then Dr. Trent broke forth: "Are you a fool, boy? If
your command is annihilated, why do you keep up this commotion?"
The young fellow looked blank for a moment. Then, as if he had not
reasoned on the catastrophe: "I thought at first they mought be
scattered--some of 'em. But ef--ef--they _war_ dead, but could once
_see_ the guidon, sure 't would call 'em to life. They _couldn't_ be so
dead but they would rally to the guidon! Guide right!" he shouted
suddenly. "Dovinger's Rangers! Rally on the guidon, boys! Rally on the
reserve!"
It was a time that hardened men's hearts. The young soldier had no
physical hurt that might appeal to the professional sympathies of the
senior surgeon, and he turned away with a half laugh. "Let him go along!
He can't rally Dovinger's Rangers this side of the river Styx, it
seems."
But an old chaplain who had been hovering about the field hospital,
whispering a word here and there to stimulate the fortitude of the
wounded and solace the fears of the dying, recognized moral symptoms
alien to any diagnosis of which the senior surgeon was capable. The
latter did not deplore the diversion of interest, for the old man's
presence was not highly esteemed by the hospital corps at this scene of
hasty and terrible work, although, having taken a course in medicine in
early life, he was permitted to aid in certain ways. But the surgeons
were wont to declare that the men began to bleat at the very sight of
the chaplain. So gentle, so sympathetic, so paternal, was he that they
made the more of their wretched woes, seeing them so deeply deplored.
The senior surgeon, moreover, was not an ardent religionist. "This is no
time for a revival, Mr. Whitmel," he would insist. "Jack, there, never
spoke the name of God in his life, except to swear by it. He is too late
for prayers, and if _I_ can't pull him through, he is a goner!"
But the chaplain was fond of quoting:
"Between the stirrup and the ground
He mercy sought and mercy found----"
and sometimes the scene was irreverently called a "love feast" when some
hard-riding, hard-swearing, hard-fighting, unthinking sinner went
joyfully out of this world from the fatherly arms of the chaplain into
the paternal embrace of an eternal and merciful Father, as the man of
God firmly believed.
He stood now, staring after the guidon borne through the rain and the
mist, flaunting red as the last leaves of autumn against the dun-tinted
dusk, that the dead might view the gallant and honored pennant and rise
again to its leading!
No one followed but the tall, thin figure of the gaunt old chaplain,
unless indeed the trooping shadows that kept him company had
mysteriously roused at the stirring summons. Lanterns were now visible,
dimly flickering in one quarter where the fighting had been furious and
the slain lay six deep on the ground. Their aspirations, their valor,
their patriotism, had all exhaled--volatile essences, these incomparable
values!--and now their bodies, weighted with death, cumbered the earth.
They must be hurried out of sight, out of remembrance soon, and the
burial parties were urged to diligence at the trenches where these
cast-off semblances were to lie undistinguished together. And still the
reflection of the burning house reddened the gloomy west, and still the
cry, "Rally on the guidon! Dovinger's Rangers!" smote the thick air.
Suddenly it was silent. The white horse that had been visible in the
flare from the flaming house, now and again flung athwart the landscape,
no longer loomed in the vista of the shadowy road. He had given way at
last, sinking down with that martial figure still in the saddle, and,
with no struggle save a mere galvanic shiver, passing away from the
scene of his faithful devoirs.
Fatigue, agitation, anguish, his agonized obsession of the possibility
of rallying the squadron, had served to prostrate the soldier's physical
powers of resistance. He could not constrain his muscles to rise from
the recumbent position against the carcass. He started up, then sank
back, and in another moment triumphant nature conquered, and he was
asleep--a dull, dreamless sleep of absolute exhaustion, that perchance
rescued his reason as well as saved his life.
The old chaplain was a man of infinite prejudice, steeped in all the
infirmities and fantasies of dogma; a lover of harmony, and essentially
an apostle of peace. Nevertheless, it would not have been physically
safe to call him a Jesuit. But indeed he scarcely hesitated; he stepped
over the great inert bulk of the dead horse, unclenched the muscular
grasp of the soldier, as if it had been a baby's clasp, slipped the
staff, technically the lance, of the guidon from its socket, and stood
with it in his own hand, looking suspiciously to and fro to descry if
perchance he were observed. The coast clear, he turned to the wall of
rock beside the road, for this was near the mountain sandstone
formation, fissured, splintered, with the erosions of water and weather;
and into one of the cellular, tunnel-like apertures he ran the guidon,
lance and all,--lost forever from human sight.
In those days one might speak indeed of the march of events. Each seemed
hard on the heels of its precursor. Change ran riot in the ordering of
the world, and its aspect was utterly transformed when Casper Girard, no
longer bearing the guidon of Dovinger's Rangers, came out of the war
with a captain's shoulder-straps, won by personal fitness often proved,
the habit of command, and a great and growing opinion of himself. He was
a changeling, so to speak. No longer he felt a native of the mountain
cove where he had been born and reared. He had had a glimpse of the
world from a different standpoint, and it lured him. A dreary,
disaffected life he led for a time.
"'Minds me of a wild tur-r-key in a trap," his mother was wont to
comment. "Always stretchin' his neck an' lookin' up an' away--when he
mought git out by lookin' down." And the simile was so apt that it
stayed in his mind--looking up and away!
Of all dull inventions, in his estimation the art of printing exceeded.
He had made but indifferent progress in education during his early
youth; he was a slow and inexpert reader, and a writer whose chirography
shrank from exhibition. Now, however, a book in the hand gave him a
cherished sentiment of touch with the larger world beyond those blue
ranges that limited his sphere, and he spent much time in sedulously
reading certain volumes which he had brought home with him.
"Spent _money_ fur 'em!" his mother would ejaculate, contemplating this
extreme audacity of extravagance.
As she often observed, "the plough-handles seemed red-hot," and as soon
as political conditions favored he ran for office. On the strength of
his war record, a potent lever in those days, he was elected register of
the county. True, there was only a population of about fifty souls in
the county town, and the houses were log-cabins, except the temple of
justice itself, which was a two-story frame building. But his success
was a step on the road to political preferment, and his ambitious eyes
were on the future. Into the midst of his quiet incumbency as register
came Fate, all intrusive, and found him through the infrequent medium of
a weekly mail. It was at the beginning of the retrospective enthusiasm
that has served to revive the memories of the War, and he received a
letter from an old comrade-in-arms, giving the details of a brigade
reunion shortly to be held at no great distance, and, being of the
committee, inviting him to be present.
Girard had participated in great military crises; he had marshalled his
troop in line of battle; as a mere boy, he had ridden with the guidon
lance planted on his stirrup, with the pennant flying above his head, as
the marker to lead the fierce and famous Dovinger Rangers into the
thickest of the fight; yet he had never felt such palpitant tremors of
excitement as when he stood on the hotel piazza of the New Helvetia
Springs, where the banqueters had gathered, and suffered the ordeal of
introduction to sundry groups of fashionable ladies. He had earlier seen
specimens of the species in the course of military transitions through
the cities of the low-lands, and he watched them narrowly to detect if
they discerned perchance a difference between him and the men of
education and social station with whom his advancement in the army had
associated him. He did not reflect that they were too well-bred to
reveal any appreciation of such incongruity, but he had never
experienced a more ardent glow of gratification than upon overhearing a
friend's remark: "Girard is great! Anybody would imagine he was used to
all this!"
No strategist was ever more wary. He would not undertake to dance, for
he readily perceived that the gyrations in the ball-room were utterly
dissimilar to the clumsy capering to which he had been accustomed on the
puncheon floor of a mountain cabin. He had the less reason for regret
since he was privileged instead to stroll up and down the
veranda,--"promenade" was the technical term,--a slender hand,
delicately gloved, on the sleeve of his gray uniform, the old
regimentals being _de rigueur_ at these reunions. A white ball-gown,
such as he had never before seen, fashioned of tissue over lustrous
white silk, swayed in diaphanous folds against him, for these were the
days of voluminous draperies; a head of auburn hair elaborately dressed
gleamed in the moonlight near his shoulder. Miss Alicia Duval thought
him tremendously handsome; she adored his record, as she would have
said--unaware how little of it she knew--and she did not so much intend
to flirt as to draw him out, for there was something about him different
from the men of her set, and it stimulated her interest.
"Isn't the moon heavenly?" she observed, gazing at the brilliant orb,
now near the full, swinging in the sky, which became a definite blue in
its light above the massive dark mountains and the misty valley below;
for the building was as near the brink as safety permitted--nearer, the
cautious opined.
"Heavenly? Not more'n it's got a right to be. It's a heavenly body,
ain't it?" he rejoined.
"Oh, how sarcastic!" she exclaimed. "In what school did you acquire your
trenchant style?"
He thought of the tiny district school where he had acquired the very
little he knew of aught, and said nothing, laughing constrainedly in
lieu of response.
The music of the orchestra came to them from the ball-room, and the
rhythmic beat of dancing feet; the wind lifted her hair gently and
brought to them the fragrance of flowering plants and the pungent aroma
of mint down in the depths of the ravine hard by, where lurked a
chalybeate spring; but for the noisy rout of the dance, and now and
again the flimsy chatter of a passing couple on the piazza, promenading
like themselves, they might have heard the waters of the fountain rise
and bubble and break and sigh as the pulsating impulse beat like
heart-throbs, and perchance on its rocky marge an oread a-singing.
"But you don't answer me," she pouted with an affectation of
pettishness. "Do you know that you trouble yourself to talk very little,
Captain Girard?"
"I think the more," he declared.
"Think? Oh, dear me! I didn't know that anybody does anything so
unfashionable nowadays as to _think_! And what do you think about,
pray?"
"About you!"
And that began it: he was a gallant man, and he had been a brave one. He
was not aware how far he was going on so short an acquaintance, but his
temerity was not displeasing to the lady. She liked his manner of
storming the citadel, and she did not realize that he merely spoke at
random, as best he might. He was in his uniform a splendid and martial
presentment of military youth, and indeed he was much the junior of his
compeers.
"Who are Captain Girard's people, Papa?" she asked Colonel Duval next
morning, as the family party sat at breakfast in quasi seclusion at one
of the small round tables in the crowded dining-room, full of the
chatter of people and the clatter of dishes.
"Girard?" Colonel Duval repeated thoughtfully. "I really don't know. I
have an impression they live somewhere in East Tennessee. I never met
him till just about the end of the war."
"Oh, Papa! How unsatisfactory you are! You never know anything about
anybody."
"I should think his people must be very plain," said Mrs. Duval. Her
social discrimination was extremely acute and in constant practice.
"I don't know why. He is very much of a gentleman," the Colonel
contended. His heart was warm to-day with much fraternizing, and it was
not kind to brush the bloom off his peach.
"Oh, trifles suggest the fact. He is not at all _au fait_."
He was, however, experienced in ways of the world unimagined in her
philosophy. The reunion had drawn to a close, ending in a flare of
jollity and tender reminiscence and good-fellowship. The old soldiers
were all gone save a few regular patrons of the hotel, who with their
families were completing their summer sojourn. Captain Girard lingered,
too, fascinated by this glimpse of the frivolous world, hitherto
unimagined, rather than by the incense to his vanity offered by his
facile acceptance as a squire of dames. For the first time in his life
he felt the grinding lack of money. Being a man of resource, he set
about swiftly supplying this need. In the dull days of inaction, when
the armies lay supine and only occasionally the monotony was broken by
the engagement of distant skirmishers or a picket line was driven in on
the main body, he had learned to play a game at cards much in vogue at
that period, though for no greater hazards than grains of corn or
Confederate money, almost as worthless. In the realization now that the
same principles held good with stakes of value, he seemed to enter upon
the possession of a veritable gold mine. The peculiar traits that his
one unique experience of the world had developed--his coolness, his
courage, his discernment of strategic resources--stood him in good
stead, and long after the microcosm of the hotel lay fast asleep the
cards were dealt and play ran high in the little building called the
casino, ostensibly devoted to the milder delights of billiards and
cigars.
Either luck favored him or he had rare discrimination of relative
chances in the run of the cards, or the phenomenally bold hand he played
disconcerted his adversaries, but his almost invariable winning began to
affect injuriously his character. Indeed, he was said to be a rook of
unrivalled rapacity. Colonel Duval was in the frame of mind that his
wife called "bearish" one morning as his family gathered for breakfast
in the limited privacy of their circle about the round table in the
dining-room.
"I want you to avoid that fellow, Alicia," he growled _sotto voce_, as
he intercepted a bright matutinal smile that the fair Alicia sent as a
morning greeting to Girard, who had just entered and taken his seat at a
distance. "We know nothing under heaven about his people, and he himself
has the repute of being a desperate gambler."
His wife raised significant eyebrows. "If that is true, why should he
stay in this quiet place?"
Colonel Duval experienced a momentary embarrassment. "Oh, the place is
right enough. He stays, no doubt, because he likes it. You might as well
ask why old Mr. Whitmel stays here."
"The idea of mentioning a clergyman in this connection!"
"Mr. Whitmel is professionally busy," cried Alicia. "He told me that he
is studying 'the disintegration of a soul.' I hope it is not _my_ soul."
The phrase probably interested Alicia in her idleness, for she was
certainly actuated by no view of a moral uplift in the character of
Girard, the handsome gambler. She did not recognize a subtle cruelty in
her system of universal fascination, but her vanity demanded constant
tribute, and she was peculiarly absorbed in the effort to bring to her
feet this man of iron, her knight in armor, as she was wont to call him,
to control him with her influence, to bend this unmalleable material
like the proverbial wax in her hands.
She had great faith in the coercive power of her hazel eyes, and she
brought their batteries to bear on Girard on the first occasion when she
had him at her mercy.
"I have heard something about you which is very painful," she said one
day as they sat together beside the chalybeate spring. The crag, all
discolored in rust-red streaks by the dripping of the mineral water
through its interstices, towered above their heads; the ferns, exquisite
and of subtle fragrance, tufted the niches; the trees were close about
them, and below, on the precipitous slope; sometimes the lush green
boughs parted, revealing a distant landscape of azure ranges, far
stretching against a sky as blue, and in the valley of the foreground
long bars of golden hue, where fields, denuded of the harvested wheat,
took the sun. Girard lounged, languid, taciturn, and quiescent as ever,
on the opposite side of the circular rock basin wherein the clear water
fell.
"I will tell you what it is," Alicia went on, after a pause, for, though
he looked attentive, he gave not even a glance of question. "I hear that
you gamble."
His gaze concentrated as he knitted his brows, but he said nothing.
She pulled her broad straw hat forward on her auburn hair and readjusted
the flounces of her white morning dress, saying while thus engaged,
"Yes, indeed; that you gamble--like--like fury!"
"Why, don't you know that's against the law?" he demanded unexpectedly.
"I know that it is very wrong and sinful," she said solemnly.
"Thanky. I'll put that in my pipe an' smoke it! I'm very wrong and
sinful, I am given to understand."
"Why, I didn't mean _you_ so much," she faltered, perturbed by this
sudden charge of the enemy. "I meant the practice."
"Oh, I know that I'm a sinner in more ways 'n one; but I _didn't_ know
that you were a lady-preacher."
"You mean that it is none of my business----"
"You ought to be so glad of that," he retorted.
She maintained a silence that might have suggested a degree of offended
pride, and she was truly humiliated that her vaunted hazel eyes had so
signally failed to work their wonted charm. As they strolled back
together up the steep path to the hotel he seemed either unobservant or
uncaring, so impassive were his manners, and she was aware that her
demonstration had resulted in giving him information which he could not
otherwise have gained. Later, she was nettled to notice that he had
utilized it in prosaic fashion, for that night no lights flared late
from the casino.
The gamesters, informed that rumors were a-wing, had betaken themselves
elsewhere. A small smoking-room in the hotel proper seemed less
obnoxious to suspicion in the depleted condition of the guest-list,
since autumn was now approaching. After eleven o'clock the coterie would
scarcely be subject to interruption, and there they gathered as the hour
waxed late. The cards were duly dealt, the draw was on, when suddenly
the door opened and old Mr. Whitmel, his favorite meerschaum in his hand
and a sheaf of newly arrived journals, entered with the evident
intention of a prolonged stay. A "standpatter" seemed hardly so assured
as before he encountered the dim, surprised gaze, but the old clergyman
was esteemed a good sort, and he ventured on a reminder:
"You have been here before, haven't you, Mr. Whitmel? Saw a deal of this
sort of thing in the army!" And he rattled the chips significantly.
"Used to see that sort of thing in the army? Yes, yes, indeed--more than
I wanted to see--very much more!"
Colonel Duval took schooling much amiss. He turned up his florid face
with its auburn mustachios and Burnside whiskers from its bending over
the cards and showed a broad arch of glittering white teeth in an
ungenial laugh.
"Remember, Mr. Whitmel, at that fight we had in the hills not far from
the Ocoee, how you rebuked two artillerymen for swearing? Something was
wrong with the vent-hole of the piece, and one of the gunners asked
what business you had with their language; and you said, 'I am a
minister of the Lord,' and the fellow gave it back very patly, 'I ain't
carin' ef you was a minister of state!' Then you said, 'No, you would
doubtless swear in the presence of an angel.' And the fellow with the
sponge-staff declared, 'Say, Mister, ef you are _that_, you are an angel
off your feed certain'--you were worn to skin and bone then--'an' the
rations of manna must be ez skimpy in heaven ez the rations o' bacon
down here in Dixie.' Ha, ha, ha!"
Mr. Whitmel had taken a seat in an easy-chair; he had struck a match and
was composedly kindling his pipe. "I felt nearer a higher communion that
day than often since," he said.
The coterie of gentlemen looked at one another in disconsolate
uncertainty, and one turned his cards face downward and laid them
resignedly on the table. The party was evidently in for one of the old
chaplain's long stories, with a few words by way of application, and
there was no decent opportunity to demur. They were the intruders in the
smoking-room--not he! Here with his pipe and his paper, he was within
the accommodation assigned him. They must hie them back to the casino to
be at ease, and this would they do when he should reach the end of his
story--if indeed it had an end.
For with the prolixity of the eye-witness he was detailing the points of
the battle; what troops were engaged; how the flank was turned; how the
reserve was delayed; how the guns were planted; how the cavalry was
ordered to charge over impracticable ground, and how in consequence he
saw a squadron literally annihilated; how for hours after the fight was
over a sergeant of the Dovinger Rangers pervaded the field with the
guidon, calling on them by name to rally.
"And, gentlemen," he continued, turning in his chair, the fire kindling
in his eyes as it died in the bowl of his pipe, "not one man responded,
for none could rise from that horrid slaughter."
There was a moment of tense silence. Then, "Back and forth the guidon
flaunted, and the rain began to fall, and the night came on, and still
the dusk echoed the cry, 'Guide right! Dovinger's Rangers! Rally on the
guidon! Rally on the reserve!'"
The old chaplain stuck his pipe into his mouth and brought it aflare
again with two or three strong indrawing respirations.