CHAPTER XXV

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

While I was at Hicksford I stayed at General Chambliss’s. I was very happy there. Dan’s camp was not far off, and he came to see me very often and every morning sent his horses to me. In my rides I used frequently to take the general’s little son, Willie, along as my escort, and one morning, when several miles distant from home and with our horses’ heads turned homeward, who should ride out from a bend in the road and come toward us but two full-fledged Yankees in blue uniform and armed to the teeth. My heart went down into the bottom of my horse’s heels, and I suppose Willie’s heart behaved the same way. We did not speak, we hardly breathed, and we were careful not to quicken our pace as we and our enemies drew nearer and nearer, and passed in that lonely road a yard between our horses and theirs. We did not turn back; we crept along the road to the bend, until our horses’ tails got well around the bend. Then Willie and I gave each other a look, and took out at a wild run for home. We went straight as arrows, and over everything in our way. I had all I could do that day to stick on Nellie Grey, who went as if she knew Yankees were behind--only in her mind it must have been the whole of Grant’s army. Dan laughed our “narrow escape” to scorn, and said the two Yankees were probably Confederates in good Yankee clothes they had confiscated. At this time Confederates would put on anything they found to wear, from a woman’s petticoat to a Yankee uniform, but Dan never could convince us that those two Yankees were not Yankees.

After this I rebelled less against going out, as I sometimes had to do, in “Miss Sally’s kerridge.” This was an old family carriage, a great coach of state with the driver’s perch very high. The driver, an old family negro as venerable and shaky in appearance as the carriage, attached due importance to his office. He thought no piece of furniture on the place of such value as “Miss Sally’s kerridge.” He cared for the horses as if they had been babies. This part of the country had not been so heavily taxed as some others in the support of the two armies, and a little more corn than was usual could be had. Uncle Rube was sure that his horses got the best of what was going, and also that everything a currycomb could do for them was theirs. He himself when prepared for his post as charioteer wore a suit of clothes which must have been in the Chambliss family for several generations, and an old beaver hat, honorable with age and illustrious usage. When we were taken abroad in “Miss Sally’s kerridge,” we were always duly impressed by Uncle Rube with the honor done us. On the occasion of a grand review which took place not far from General Chambliss’s residence, I, with three other ladies, went in the “kerridge.” The roads were awful--in those days roads were always awful. Troops were traveling backward and forward, artillery was being dragged over them, heavy wagons were cutting ruts, and there always seemed to be so much rain.

Uncle Rube quarreled all the way going and coming. He sat on his high perch, and guided his horses carefully along, picking the best places in the road for “Miss Sally’s kerridge,” and talking at us.

“It’s jes gwine to ruin Miss Sally’s kerridge takin’ it out on sech roads as dese hyer.... Nuf to ruin er ox-kyart, dese hyer roads is, much mo’ er fin’ kerridge.... Well, ’tain’ no use fur me ter say nothin’.... Jest well keep my mouf shut.... Monstratin’ don’ do er bit er good.... When dey git it in dar haids dey’s gwine, dey’s gwine, don’t kyeer what happens.... Ain’t gwine heah nothin’, dey ain’t, not ontwell dey gits Miss Sally’s kerridge broke up.... _I_ say folks orter go ter ride when de roads is good, and stay at home when de roads is bad.... An’ lemme take kyeer uv de kerridge.”

With these intermittent mutterings and frank expressions of displeasure Uncle Rube entertained us until we got to the review stand.

To crown his disgust we were late in starting back home, and at dark he was leaning forward from his lofty altitude, peering into the road ahead and seeking vainly “de bes’ place ter drive Miss Sally’s kerridge along.” He said “dar warn’t no bes’ place,” and was in despair of ever getting that valuable vehicle home in safety. At last the crash came! Down went one carriage wheel into a mud-hole! It stuck there, and we were rooted for the time being. However, I think Uncle Rube would have got us out but for some untimely assistance. Bob Lee, the youngest of the Lees, and Bob Mason (the son of the ex-United States Minister to France, whose home was near General Chambliss’s) came riding by. They stopped and shook hands with us through the carriage window, and asserted their gallant intention of getting us out of our mud-hole. They tried to lead the horses forward, to pull and push “the kerridge” out, but in vain. Then Bob, to Uncle Rube’s utter amazement and indignation, made him get down, while he, Bob, mounted the box. Uncle Rube stood on the roadside, the picture of chagrin and despair.

“Dar ain’t no tellin’ what’s gwi’ happen now!” he exclaimed. “Mars Bob don’ know how ter manage dem horses no mo’n nothin’. Don’, Mars Bob! Mars Bob! don’ whoop ’em! Law-aw-dy!”

Bob had gathered the lines in one hand and with the other was laying the whip on Rube’s pets. The horses, utterly unused to the whip, plunged like mad. There was an ominous sound!--our axle was broken, and we were helplessly stuck in the mud.

“Dar now!” wailed Uncle Rube. “What I tole you? I said Miss Sally’s kerridge gwi’ git ruint! and now it’s done been did. It’s clean ruint, Miss Sally’s kerridge is. I tole Mars Bob dem horses don’t know nothin’ ’bout a whoop. Dey ain’t nuvver bin ’quainted wid er whoop. I bin er-sayin’ an’ er-sayin’ all erlong dat de kerridge gwi’ git broke, an’ it’s done been did. O Lawdy!”

Our young rescuers borrowed a cart from a farmer near by and got us home in it. I have forgotten how Uncle Rube managed, if I ever knew. But I shall never forget the scene when several hours later we all sat around the fire in the sitting-room, chatting over our adventures, and Uncle Rube, hat in hand, came to the door and made report to his mistress of the family misfortune. His eyes were big as saucers. He laid the blame thick and heavy on “Mars Bob’s” shoulders, exonerating his horses with great care.

“Dey’s sensubble horses ef anybody jes got de sense ter manage ’em, dey is.”

And then Miss Sally, in spite of her efforts to preserve a gravity befitting the calamity, broke down like the “kerridge” and laughed hysterically.

There was plenty to eat at General Chambliss’s. I always remember that fact when it was a fact, because it was beginning to be so pleasant and unusual to have enough to eat. Hicksford hadn’t been raided, and there were still chickens on the roost, bees in the hive, turkeys up the trees, partridges in the woods, and corn in the barns. The barn, by the way, was new, and the soldiers gave a ball in it. We all went and had a most delightful evening. I well remember that I went in “Miss Sally’s kerridge,” and that General Rooney Lee and I led off the ball together. I remember, too, that we had a fine supper: turkeys, chicken-salad, barbecued mutton, roast pig with an apple in his mouth, pound-cake, silver-cake, cheese-cake or transparent pudding, “floating island” or “tipsy squire”; plenty of bread, milk, sure-enough coffee--everything and enough of it. We danced till morning and leaving our gallant entertainers in the gray dawn, went off to sleep nearly all day.

The next ball was in an old farmhouse where some of our cavalry were quartered. We had another good supper--everything good to eat and plenty of it--like the first. There were no chairs or furniture of any kind, as I remember, but there were benches ranged around the barn for us to sit on when resting during the pauses of the dance. After a dance with him General Rooney Lee led me back to the room where the banquet was spread to taste something especially nice which he liked and which I had not touched--eating a good thing when you could get it was a delightful and serious duty in those days. There was quite a circle around us, and we were all nibbling, laughing, chatting away as if there were no such things as war and death in the land, when a courier in muddy boots strode across the room to the general, saluted, spoke a few words, and the general walked aside with him. The music was enticing, and while the general was engaged with the courier I went back with some one else to the ballroom and took my place in the lancers. We were clasping hands and bowing ourselves through the grand chain when the dance was interrupted. The army was to march.

There was great confusion, hurried hand-shaking, sometimes no hand-shaking at all, no time for good-bys. The soldiers could not stand on the order of their going. I do not remember how I came to the farmhouse, but I know that my husband bundled me unceremoniously into a cart with some people I hardly knew, and sent me home, telling me to pack my trunk but not to be disappointed if he could not take me with him. I did not lie down at all. I packed my trunk as soon as I got home, then sat down and waited, and before long my husband came for me in an ambulance. His courier, Lieutenant Wumble, was with him, and the ambulance was driven by an Irishman named Miles. The horses were tied to the back of the ambulance, and frequently my husband and Lieutenant Wumble rode ahead reconnoitering. It began to rain. “What made you always start in the rain?” I have been asked by friends to whom I was relating my campaigns. What I want to know is, what made it always rain when I started? Let me but step into an ambulance and immediately it began to rain. My movements had to be regulated by the movements of the army, not by the weather, though really the weather seemed to regulate itself by mine.

We found the roads worse as we advanced. The farther we went the deeper was the mud. Mud came up to the hubs of our wheels; the mules could hardly pull their feet up out of the miry mass in some places. At last we found ourselves regularly “stuck in the mud.” There was no pushing or pulling the ambulance farther. It was nearly dark, but fortunately we were near a farmhouse, and at the side of the road where we got stuck was a stile made by blocks of unequal heights set on either side of a plank fence. These blocks were simply sections of the round body of a tree which had been sawed up. On the opposite side of the stile a pathway led to the house. The mud-hole in which our ambulance was embedded was about ten yards from the stile. My husband insisted that I be carried bodily to the stile, and Lieutenant Wumble, who was one of the most gallant fellows in the world, took it as a matter of course that he must carry me. He urged that he had been brought along to be useful and that Dan had never recovered entirely from his wound. But Dan hooted at the idea! He was very much obliged to the lieutenant, but really he was used to this sort of thing, and understood lifting ladies about much better than Wumble. It was not altogether brute strength, but some science that was required. So Dan stepped out of the ambulance on to the side of the mud-hole, where of course the ground was not so muddy as in the center where we were stuck, but where it was rather slippery, nevertheless. Balancing himself nicely, he took me out, but just as he poised me on his arm with scientific ease and grace he slipped and fell backward, sprawling in the mud, and I went over his head, sprawling, too.

Whereupon Lieutenant Wumble, laughing, came to pick me up, saying as he did so:

“I told you that you ought to let me carry you. Just lie there, major, and I’ll come back for you as soon as I set your wife down. Keep quiet, major,” as Dan swore at the mud and slipped again, “and I’ll pick you up and get you along all right.”

As Dan dragged himself up he was a perfect mud man, and he had left the print of himself in the mud behind him. They took us in at the farmhouse, and sent men to help the driver prize the ambulance out of the hole. They scraped the mud off me, and a colored woman washed my clothes and hung them by the fire, so they might be dry by morning. Of course, this process put me in bed at once. Our supper was poor and the bed uncomfortable, but it was the best our hosts could do.

After an uncomfortable night we started off again toward Dinwiddie Court-house, which was to be our next stopping-place. As we journeyed on we knew that we were getting into most dangerous quarters. The nearer we drew to Petersburg the nearer we were to the tangle of Federal and Confederate lines; the nearer to skirmishers and scouts from both armies. The night got blacker and blacker--you could not see your hand before you--and the blacker it grew the more frightened old Miles became. Out of the darkness where, invisible, he sat astride the invisible mule he drove, he poured an unceasing stream of complaint.

“Arrah! the divil a bit can Oi see where Oi’m goin’. It’s so dark ye couldn’t see a light if there was any. The mules, intilligint crathurs they are, maybe they know where they be goin’. It’s more than the loikes of me does. But what Oi’ve got agin a mule is that they don’t know an honest Amerikin in gray clothes--or mixed rags it is now--from a nasty, thavin’ Yankee.”

If we were silent for a few minutes, then Miles spoke out for company’s sake, or asked unnecessary questions perhaps to find out if we were there, and that the Yankees hadn’t spirited us away.

“These woods are full of Yankees,” he said. “It’s chock-full of them, it is. An’ it’s so dark, it is, they could just come out here an’ kill us all, they could, an’ we’d never know it.”

“Shut your mouth up, you fool!” said my husband, who knew that the woods were full of Yankees. “If we can’t see them they can’t see us, and how are they to know but we are Yankees unless you tell them, you blathering idiot?”

“The divil a bit Oi’ll be tellin’ ’em, the nasty blue thaves. Thrust Miles O’Flannigan for thet. But they could just come out o’ them woods, they could, an’ take us all prisoners an’ we’d never know it. An’ the driver’s the fust man they’d git, sure.”

At last Dan got out, mounted his horse, and rode in front of the ambulance.

“Now,” said he to Miles, “follow me, and if you open your d---- mouth again, I’ll blow your brains out.”

Lieutenant Wumble brought up the rear, riding behind the ambulance with a cocked pistol. And so we rode through the Egyptian darkness of the night, and the now more than Egyptian silence. Miles’s mouth was effectually closed. He followed Dan, whom he could not see, by the sound of his horse’s tread, and as he was careful to keep as close to him as possible we made better progress.

We had been in the darkness so long that none of us knew our whereabouts. Presently we heard the low, deep mutterings of thunder. It came nearer and grew louder rapidly. Suddenly the sky seemed rent! There came a sheet of white lightning and with it an awful crash which made my heart stand still. A tree a few feet from us had been struck. The lightning had shown us that we were only a few miles from the Court-house. I have never known such a storm as the one through which we traveled that night. One peal of thunder did not die away before another began. One instant we were in thick darkness--a darkness that could be _felt_--the next, ourselves, the woods, the road, were bathed in a fierce white light. Between the Yankees and the storm that night I think Miles would have become a gibbering idiot but for the equalizing influence of Dan’s pistol.

“No trouble for the Yankees to rickonize us--ugh!” the rest of the sentence would be lost in the darkness, but I knew that Miles was feeling the salutary muzzle of Dan’s pistol against some part of his face.

By the time we entered the village the storm had abated. We drove to the hotel. It was crowded, packed with soldiers; no room for us, nor food either, and nine o’clock at night!

“Two miles the other side of town there is a place of entertainment where you can be accommodated, I think,” the hotel proprietor told Dan.

“I don’t go any farther to-night with my wife,” Dan said resolutely.

“It’s not mesilf as wants to be traveling any farther aither,” Miles put in. “It’s divil a bit of a pleasure ride Oi’m havin’.”

He was promptly silenced, and was made to drive us around to the various places in the village that had been mentioned; and in spite of the discouragements received, he added his earnest solicitations to ours that we might be lodged for the night. But in spite of our own pleas and Miles’s eloquence, midnight found us out at the two-miles place. I don’t know how long it had taken us to make those two miles. We had toiled over muddy roads, through fierce extremes of light and darkness, and amid deafening thunder, for the storm had come on again with renewed fury and was at its height when we stopped at the house to which we had been directed. In response to my husband’s knock an old man came to the door--the meanest old man I have ever seen before or since. He said we couldn’t come in, there wasn’t standing room in the house, the house was full of soldiers. My husband said he _would_ come in--that he had a lady with him. I think he would have shot that old man then and there rather than have carried me farther. But the old man said if he had a lady with him all the more reason why he should not come in; the soldiers were drinking, and he whispered to Dan, and I saw Dan give in. He told Dan that he had a cousin in the village who would house us, and he directed us how to get to this cousin’s house, so we turned and drove back to the village we had just left. We made better time on our return, as we were better directed and took a shorter route, found the house to which we had been sent, and were taken in.

It was a strange old house, built in colonial days, with the veranda that ran all around it supported by tall Corinthian columns. We woke the owner up--an old man, who came down to the door shivering, candle in hand, and led us through a latticed room, then into another room and up a narrow flight of stairs with sharp turns to a bedroom with dormer windows and ancient furniture. We were welcome to our lodgings, he said, but he had nothing to eat in the house--we would be welcome to it if he had. He looked gaunt and hungry himself.

We had no fire. He left us his candle and went down in the dark himself and we got to bed as quickly as possible. Lieutenant Wumble, who was down-stairs looking after Miles and the horses and the mules, got himself stowed away somewhere.

Next morning my husband was ill; but the old man’s wife gave him some of her remedies, and with the help of a little money from me got something for us all to eat. About noon Dan insisted that he was able to travel, and that he must reach his command that day.

When we arrived at Petersburg my husband put me on the train for Richmond and bade me good-by. It was the last time I saw him before the surrender.