ZEKE TISDALE was the father of Company F. Not that this title had
ever been formally conferred upon him, or even recognized in terms, but
everybody understood about it. Sometimes Company F was for whole days
together exceedingly proud of the relation--but alas! more often it
viewed its parent with impatient levity, not to say contempt. In either
case, it seemed all the same to Zeke.
He was by no means the oldest man in the company, at least as
appearances went. Some there were gathered about the camp-fire, this
last night in March of ‘65, who looked almost old enough to be _his_
father--gray, gaunt, stiff-jointed old fighters, whose hard service
stretched back across four years of warfare to Lincoln’s first call for
troops, and who laughed now grimly over the joke that they had come
out to suppress the Rebellion within ninety days, and had the job still
unfinished on their hands at the end of fourteen hundred.
But Zeke, though his mud-colored hair and beard bore scarcely a trace
of gray, and neither his placid, unwrinkled face nor his lithe, elastic
form suggested age, somehow produced an impression of seniority upon all
his comrades, young and old alike. He had been in the company from the
beginning, for one thing; but that was not all. It was certain that
he had been out in Utah at the time of Albert Sidney Johnston’s
expedition--perhaps had fought under him. It seemed pretty well
established that before this Mormon episode he had been with Walker in
Nicaragua. Over the mellowing canteen he had given stray hints of even
other campaigns which his skill had illumined and his valor adorned.
Nobody ever felt quite sure how much of this was true--for Zeke had a
child’s disregard for any mere veracity which might mar the immediate
effects of his narratives--but enough passed undoubted to make him the
veteran of the company. And _that_ was not all.
For cold-blooded intrepidity in battle, for calm, clear-headed rashness
on the skirmish-line, Zeke had a fame extending beyond even his regiment
and the division to which it belonged. Men in regiments from distant
States, who met with no closer bond than that they all wore the badge
of the same army corps, talked on occasion of the fellow in the --th
New York, who had done this, that or the other dare-devil feat, and yet
never got his shoulder-straps. It was when Company F men heard this talk
that they were most proud of Zeke--proud sometimes even to the point of
keeping silence about his failure to win promotion.
But among themselves there was no secret about this failure. Once the
experiment had been made of lifting Zeke to the grade of corporal--and
the less said about its outcome the better. Still, the truth may as
well be told. Brave as any lion, or whatever beast should best typify
absolute fearlessness in the teeth of deadly peril, Zeke in times of
even temporary peace left a deal to be desired. His personal habits,
or better, perhaps, the absence of them, made even the roughest of his
fellows unwilling to be his tent-mate. As they saw him lounging about
the idle camp, he was shiftless, insubordinate, taciturn and unsociable
when sober, wearisomely garrulous when drunk--the last man out of
four-score whom the company liked to think of as its father.
And Company F had had nothing to do, now, for a good while. Through the
winter it had lain in its place on the great, steel-clad intrenched
line which waited, jaws open, for the fall of Petersburg. The ready-made
railroad from City Point was at its back, and food was plenty. But now,
as spring came on--the wet, warm Virginian spring, with every meadow
a swamp, every road a morass, every piece of bright-green woodland an
impassable tangle--the strategy of the closing act in the dread drama
sent Company F away to the South and West, into the desolate backwoods
country where no roads existed, and no foraging, be it never so
vigilant, promised food. The movement really reflected Grant’s fear
lest, before the final blow was struck, Lee should retreat into the
interior. But Company F did not know what it meant, and disliked it
accordingly, and, by the end of the third day in its quarters, was both
hungry and quarrelsome.
Evening fell upon a gloomy, rain-soaked day, which the men had miserably
spent in efforts to avoid getting drenched to the skin, and in devices
to preserve dry spots upon which to sleep at night. Permission to build
a fire, which had been withheld ever since their arrival, had only come
from division headquarters an hour ago; and as they warmed themselves
now over the blaze, biting the savorless hard-tack, and sipping the
greasy fluid of beans and chicory from their tin cups, they still looked
sulkily upon the line of lights which began to dot the ridge on which
they lay, and noted the fact that their division had grown into an army
corps, almost as if it had been a grievance. Distant firing had been
heard all day, but it seemed a part of their evil luck that it _should_
be distant.
They stared, too, with a sullen indifference at the spectacle of a
sergeant who entered their camp escorting a half-dozen recruits, and,
with stiff salutation, turned them over to the captain at the door of
his tent. The men of Company F might have studied these bounty-men,
as they stood in file waiting for the company’s clerk to fill out
his receipt, with more interest, had it been realized that they were
probably the very last men to be enrolled by the Republic for the Civil
War. But nobody knew that, and the arrival of recruits was an old
story in the --th New York, which had been thrust into every available
hellpit, it seemed to the men, since that first cruel corner at Bull
Run. So they scowled at the newcomers in their fresh, clean uniforms,
as these straggled doubtfully toward the fire, and gave them no welcome
whatever.
Hours passed under the black sky, into which the hissing, spluttering
fire of green wood was too despondent to hurl a single spark. The men
stood or squatted about the smoke-ringed pile on rails and fence-boards
which they had laid to save them from the soft mud--in silence broken
only by fitful words. From time to time the monotonous call of the
sentries out in the darkness came to them like the hooting of an owl.
Sharp shadows on the canvas walls of the captain’s tent and the sound of
voices from within told them that the officers were playing poker.
Once or twice some moody suggestion of a “game” fell upon the smoky
air outside, but died away unanswered. It was too wet and muddy and
generally depressing. The low west wind which had risen since nightfall
carried the threat of more rain.
“Grant ain’t no good, nor any other dry-land general, in this dripping
old swamp of a country,” growled a grizzled corporal, whose mud-laden
heels had slipped off his rail. “The man we want here is Noah. This is
his job, and nobody else’s.”
“There’d be one comfort in that, anyway,” said another, well read in
the Bible. “When the rain was all over, he set up drinks.”
“Don’t you make any mistake,” put in a third. “He shut himself up in his
tent, and played his booze solitaire. He didn’t even ask in the officers
of the ark and propose a game.”
“I--I ‘ve got a small flask with me,” one of the recruits diffidently
began. “I was able to get it to-day at Dinwiddie Court House. Paid more
for it I suppose, than--”
In the friendly excitement created by the recruit’s announcement, and
his production of a flat, brown bottle, further explanation was lost.
Nobody cared how much he had paid. Two dozen of his neighbors took a
lively interest in what he had bought. The flask made its tour of only
a segment of the circle, amid a chorus of admonitions to drink fair,
and came back flatter than ever and wholly empty. But its ameliorating
effect became visible at once. One of the recruits was emboldened to
tell a story he had heard at City Point, and the veterans consented to
laugh at it. Conversation sprang up as the fire began to crackle under
a shift of wind, and the newcomers disclosed that they all had clean
blankets, and that several had an excess of chewing tobacco. At this
last, all reserve was cleared away. Veterans and recruits spat into the
fire now from a common ground of liking, and there was even some rivalry
to secure such thoughtful strangers as tent-mates.
Only one of the newcomers stood alone in the muddiest spot of the
circle, before a part of the fire which would not burn. He seemed to
have no share in the confidences of his fellow-recruits. None of their
stories or reminiscences referred to him, and neither they nor any
veteran had offered him a word during the evening.
He was obviously an Irishman, and it was equally apparent that he had
just landed. There was an indefinable something in the way he stood, in
his manner of looking at people, in the very awkwardness with which
his ill-fitting uniform hung upon him, which spoke loudly of recent
importation. This in itself would have gone some way toward prejudicing
Company F against him, for Castle Garden recruits were rarely popular,
even in the newest regiments. But there was a much stronger reason for
the cold shoulder turned upon him.
This young man who stood alone in the mud--he could hardly have got half
through the twenties--had a repellent, low-browed face, covered with
freckles and an irregular stubble of reddish beard, and a furtive
squint in his pale, greenish-blue eyes. The whites of these eyes showed
bloodshot, even in the false light of the fire, and the swollen lines
about them spoke plainly of a prolonged carouse. They were not Puritans,
these men of Company F, but with one accord they left Andrew Linsky--the
name the roster gave him--to himself.
Time came, after the change of guard, when those who were entitled to
sleep must think of bed. The orderly-sergeant strolled up to the fire,
and dropped a saturnine hint to the effect that it would be best to
sleep with one eye open; signs pointed to a battle next day, and the
long roll might come before morning broke. Their brigade was on the
right of a line into which two corps had been dumped during the day, and
apparently this portended the hottest kind of a fight; moreover, it was
said Sheridan was on the other side of the ridge. Everybody knew what
that meant.
“We ought to be used to hot corners by this time,” said the grizzled
corporal, in comment, “but it’s the deuce to go into ’em on empty
stomachs. We’ve been on half-rations two days.”
“There’ll be the more to go round among them that’s left,” said the
sergeant, grimly, and turned on his heel.
The Irishman, pulling his feet with difficulty out of the ooze into
which they had settled, suddenly left his place and walked over to the
corporal, lifting his hand in a sidelong, clumsy salute.
“Wud ye moind tellin me, sur, where I’m to sleep?” he asked, saluting
again.
The corporal looked at his questioner, spat meditatively into the
embers, then looked again, and answered, briefly:
“On the ground.”
Linsky cast a glance of pained bewilderment, first down at the mud
into which he was again sinking, then across the fire into the black,
wind-swept night.
“God forgive me for a fool,” he groaned aloud, “to lave a counthry where
even the pigs have straw to drame on.”
“Where did you expect to sleep--in a balloon?” asked the corporal, with
curt sarcasm. Then the look of utter hopelessness on the other’s
ugly face prompted him to add, in a softer tone; “You must hunt up a
tent-mate for yourself--make friends with some fellow who’ll take you
in.”
“Sorra a wan’ll be friends wid me,” said the despondent recruit. “I’m
waitin’ yet, the furst dacent wurrud from anny of ’em.”
The corporal’s face showed that he did not specially blame them for
their exclusiveness, but his words were kindly enough.
“Perhaps I can fix you out,” he said, and sent a comprehensive glance
round the group which still huddled over the waning fire, on the other
side.
“Hughie, here’s a countryman of yours,” he called out to a lean, tall,
gray-bearded private who, seated on a rail, had taken off his wet boots
and was scraping the mud from them with a bayonet; “can you take him
in?”
“I have some one already,” the other growled, not even troubling to lift
his eyes from his task.
It happened that this was a lie, and that the corporal knew it to be
one. He hesitated for a moment, dallying with the impulse to speak
sharply. Then, reflecting that Hugh O’Mahony was a quarrelsome and
unsociable creature with whom a dispute was always a vexation to the
spirit, he decided to say nothing.
How curiously inscrutable a thing is chance! Upon that one decision
turned every human interest in this tale, and most of all, the destiny
of the sulky man who sat scraping his boots. The Wheel of Fortune, in
this little moment of silence, held him poised within the hair’s breadth
of a discovery which would have altered his career in an amazing way,
and changed the story of a dozen lives. But the corporal bit his lip and
said nothing. O’Mahony bent doggedly over his work--and the wheel rolled
on.
The corporal’s eye, roaming about the circle, fell upon the figure of a
man who had just approached the fire and stood in the full glare of
the red light, thrusting one foot close to the blaze, while he balanced
himself on the other. His ragged hair and unkempt beard were of the
color of the miry clay at his feet. His shoulders, rounded at best, were
unnaturally drawn forward by the exertion of keeping his hands in his
pockets, the while he maintained his balance. His face, of which snub
nose and grey eyes alone were visible in the frame of straggling hair
and under the shadow of the battered foragecap visor, wore a pleased,
almost merry, look in the flickering, ruddy light. He was humming a
droning sort of tune to himself as he watched the steam rise from the
wet leather.
“Zeke’s happy to-night; that means fight tomorrow, sure as God made
little fishes,” said the corporal to nobody in particular. Then he
lifted his voice:
“Have you got a place in your diggin’s for a recruit, Zeke--say just for
to-night?” he asked.
Zeke looked up, and sauntered forward to where they stood, hands still
in pockets.
“Well--I don’t know,” he drawled. “Guess so--if he don’t snore too bad.”
He glanced Linsky over with indolent gravity. It was plain that he
didn’t think much of him.
“Got a blanket?” he asked, abruptly.
“I have that,” the Irishman replied.
“Anything to drink?”
Linsky produced from his jacket pocket a flat, brown bottle, twin
brother to that which had been passed about the camp-fire circle earlier
in the evening, and held it up to the light.
“They called it whiskey,” he said, in apology; “an’ be the price I paid
fur it, it moight a’ been doimonds dissolved in angel’s tears; but the
furst sup I tuk of it, faith, I thought it ’ud tear th’ t’roat from
me!”
Zeke had already linked Linsky’s arm within his own, and he reached
forth now and took the bottle.
“It’s p’zen to a man that ain’t used to it,” he said, with a grave wink
to the corporal. “Come along with me, Irish; mebbe if you watch me close
you can pick up points about gittin’ the stuff down without injurin’
your throat.”
And, with another wink, Zeke led his new-found friend away from the
fire, picking his steps through the soft mud, past dozens of little
tents propped up with rails and boughs, walking unconsciously toward a
strange, new, dazzling future.