Chapter 3

And inside, the mother, too, was listening; and she heard the elder brother call the boy into his room and the door close, and she as well knew the theme of their talk as though she could hear all they said. Her sons--even the elder one--did not realize what war was; the boy looked upon it as a frolic. That was the way her two brothers had regarded the old war. They went with the South, of course, as did her father and her sweetheart. And her sweetheart was the only one who came back, and him she married the third month after the surrender, when he was so sick and wounded that he could hardly stand. Now she must give up all that was left for the North, that had taken nearly all she had.

Was it all to come again--the same long days of sorrow, loneliness, the anxious waiting, waiting, waiting to hear that this one was dead, and that this one was wounded or sick to death--would either come back unharmed? She knew now what her own mother must have suffered, and what it must have cost her to tell her sons what she had told hers that night. Ah, God, was it all to come again?

V

Some days later a bugle blast started Crittenden from a soldier's cot, when the flaps of his tent were yellow with the rising sun. Peeping between them, he saw that only one tent was open. Rivers, as acting-quartermaster, had been up long ago and gone. That blast was meant for the private at the foot of the hill, and Crittenden went back to his cot and slept on.

The day before he had swept out of the hills again--out through a blossoming storm of dogwood--but this time southward bound. Incidentally, he would see unveiled these statues that Kentucky was going to dedicate to her Federal and Confederate dead. He would find his father's old comrade--little Jerry Carter--and secure a commission, if possible. Meanwhile, he would drill with Rivers's regiment, as a soldier of the line.

At sunset he swept into the glory of a Southern spring and the hallowed haze of an old battlefield where certain gallant Americans once fought certain other gallant Americans fiercely forward and back over some six thousand acres of creek-bottom and wooded hills, and where Uncle Sam was pitching tents for his war-children--children, too--some of them--of those old enemies, but ready to fight together now, and as near shoulder to shoulder as the modern line of battle will allow.

Rivers, bronzed, quick-tempered, and of superb physique, met him at the station.

"You'll come right out to camp with me."

The town was thronged. There were gray slouched hats everywhere with little brass crosses pinned to them--tiny rifles, sabres, cannon--crosses that were not symbols of religion, unless this was a time when the Master's coming meant the sword. Under them were soldiers with big pistols and belts of big, gleaming cartridges--soldiers, white and black, everywhere--swaggering, ogling, and loud of voice, but all good-natured, orderly.

Inside the hotel the lobby was full of officers in uniform, scanning the yellow bulletin-boards, writing letters, chatting in groups; gray veterans of horse, foot, and artillery; company officers in from Western service--quiet young men with bronzed faces and keen eyes, like Rivers's--renewing old friendships and swapping experiences on the plains; subalterns down to the last graduating class from West Point with slim waists, fresh faces, and nothing to swap yet but memories of the old school on the Hudson. In there he saw Grafton again and Lieutenant Sharpe, of the Tenth Colored Cavalry, whom he had seen in the Bluegrass, and Rivers introduced him. He was surprised that Rivers, though a Southerner, had so little feeling on the question of negro soldiers; that many officers in the negro regiments were Southern; that Southerners were preferred because they understood the black man, and, for that reason, could better handle him. Sharpe presented both to his father, Colonel Sharpe, of the infantry, who was taking credit to himself, that, for the first time in his life, he allowed his band to play "Dixie" in camp after the Southerners in Congress had risen up and voted millions for the national defence. Colonel Sharpe spoke with some bitterness and Crittenden wondered. He never dreamed that there was any bitterness on the other side--why? How could a victor feel bitterness for a fallen foe? It was the one word he heard or was to hear about the old war from Federal or ex-Confederate. Indeed, he mistook a short, stout, careless appointee, Major Billings, with his negro servant, his Southern mustache and goatee and his pompous ways, for a genuine Southerner, and the Major, though from Vermont, seemed pleased.

But it was to the soldier outside that Crittenden's heart had been drawn, for it was his first stirring sight of the regular of his own land, and the soldier in him answered at once with a thrill. Waiting for Rivers, he stood in the door of the hotel, watching the strong men pass, and by and by he saw three coming down the street, arm in arm. On the edge of the light, the middle one, a low, thick-set, black-browed fellow, pushed his comrades away, fell drunkenly, and slipped loosely to the street, while the two stood above him in disgust. One of them was a mere boy and the other was a giant, with a lean face, so like Lincoln's that Crittenden started when the boy called impatiently:

"Pick him up, Abe."

The tall soldier stooped, and with one hand lifted the drunken man as lightly as though he had been a sack of wool, and the two caught him under the arms again. As they came on, both suddenly let go; the middle one straightened sharply, and all three saluted. Crittenden heard Rivers's voice at his ear:

"Report for this, Reynolds."

And the drunken soldier turned and rather sullenly saluted again.

"You'll come right out to camp with me," repeated Rivers.

And now out at the camp, next morning, a dozen trumpets were ringing out an emphatic complaint into Crittenden's sleeping ears:

"I can't git 'em up, I can't git 'em up, I can't git 'em up in the mornin', I can't git 'em up, I can't git 'em up, I can't git 'em up at all. The corporal's worse than the sergeant, The sergeant's worse than the lieutenant, And the captain is worst of all."

This is as high up, apparently, as the private dares to go, unless he considers the somnolent iniquity of the Colonel quite beyond the range of the bugle. But the pathetic appeal was too much for Crittenden, and he got up, stepping into a fragrant foot-bath of cold dew and out to a dapple gray wash-basin that sat on three wooden stakes just outside. Sousing his head, he sniffed in the chill air and, looking below him, took in, with pure mathematical delight, the working unit of the army as it came to life. The very camp was the symbol of order and system: a low hill, rising from a tiny stream below him in a series of natural terraces to the fringe of low pines behind him, and on these terraces officers and men sitting, according to rank; the white tepees of the privates and their tethered horses--camped in column of troops--stretching up the hill toward him; on the first terrace above and flanking the columns, the old-fashioned army tents of company officer and subaltern and the guidons in line--each captain with his lieutenants at the head of each company street; behind them and on the next terrace, the majors three--each facing the centre of his squadron. And highest on top of the hill, and facing the centre of the regiment, the slate-coloured tent of the Colonel, commanding every foot of the camp.

"Yes," said a voice behind him, "and you'll find it just that way throughout the army."

Crittenden turned in surprise, and the ubiquitous Grafton went on as though the little trick of thought-reading were too unimportant for notice.

"Let's go down and take a look at things. This is my last day," Grafton went on, "and I'm out early. I go to Tampa to-morrow."

All the day before, as he travelled, Crittenden had seen the station thronged with eager countrymen--that must have been the way it was in the old war, he thought--and swarmed the thicker the farther he went south. And now, as the two started down the hill, he could see in the dusty road that ran through the old battlefield Southern interest and sympathy taking visible shape. For a hundred miles around, the human swarm had risen from the earth and was moving toward him on wagon, bicycle, horseback, foot; in omnibus, carriage, cart; in barges on wheels, with projecting additions, and other land-craft beyond classification or description. And the people--the American Southerners; rich whites, whites well-to-do, poor white trash; good country folks, valley farmers; mountaineers--darkies, and the motley feminine horde that the soldier draws the world over--all moving along the road as far as he could see, and interspersed here and there in the long, low cloud of dust with a clanking troop of horse or a red rumbling battery--all coming to see the soldiers--the soldiers!

And the darkies! How they flocked and stared at their soldier-brethren with pathetic worship, dumb admiration, and, here and there, with a look of contemptuous resentment that was most curious. And how those dusky sons of Mars were drinking deep into their broad nostrils the incense wafted to them from hedge and highway.

For a moment Grafton stopped still, looking.

"Great!"

Below the Majors' terrace stood an old sergeant, with a gray mustache and a kind, blue eye. Each horse had his nose in a mouth-bag and was contentedly munching corn, while a trooper affectionately curried him from tip of ear to tip of tail.

"Horse ever first and man ever afterward is the trooper's law," said Grafton.

"I suppose you've got the best colonel in the army," he added to the soldier and with a wink at Crittenden.

"Yes, sir," said the guileless old Sergeant, quickly, and with perfect seriousness. "We have, sir, and I'm not sayin' a wor-rd against the rest, sir."

The Sergeant's voice was as kind as his face, and Grafton soon learned that he was called "the Governor" throughout the regiment--that he was a Kentuckian and a sharpshooter. He had seen twenty-seven years of service, and his ambition had been to become a sergeant of ordnance. He passed his examination finally, but he was then a little too old. That almost broke the Sergeant's heart, but the hope of a fight, now, was fast healing it.

"I'm from Kentucky, too," said Crittenden. The old soldier turned quickly.

"I knew you were, sir."

This was too much for Grafton. "Now-how-on-earth--" and then he checked himself--it was not his business.

"You're a Crittenden."

"That's right," laughed the Kentuckian. The Sergeant turned. A soldier came up and asked some trifling question, with a searching look, Grafton observed, at Crittenden. Everyone looked at that man twice, thought Grafton, and he looked again himself. It was his manner, his bearing, the way his head was set on his shoulders, the plastic force of his striking face. But Crittenden saw only that the Sergeant answered the soldier as though he were talking to a superior. He had been watching the men closely--they might be his comrades some day--and, already, had noticed, with increasing surprise, the character of the men whom he saw as common soldiers--young, quiet, and above the average countryman in address and intelligence--and this man's face surprised him still more, as did his bearing. His face was dark, his eye was dark and penetrating and passionate; his mouth was reckless and weak, his build was graceful, and his voice was low and even--the voice of a gentleman; he was the refined type of the Western gentleman-desperado, as Crittenden had imagined it from fiction and hearsay. As the soldier turned away, the old Sergeant saved him the question he was about to ask.

"He used to be an officer."

"Who--how's that?" asked Grafton, scenting "a story."

The old Sergeant checked himself at once, and added cautiously:

"He was a lieutenant in this regiment and he resigned. He just got back to-day, and he has enlisted as a private rather than risk not getting to Cuba at all. But, of course, he'll get his commission back again." The Sergeant's manner fooled neither Grafton nor Crittenden; both respected the old Sergeant's unwillingness to gossip about a man who had been his superior, and Grafton asked no more questions.

There was no idleness in that camp. Each man was busy within and without the conical-walled tents in which the troopers lie like the spokes of a wheel, with heads out like a covey of partridges. Before one tent sat the tall soldier--Abe--and the boy, his comrade, whom Crittenden had seen the night before.

"Where's Reynolds?" asked Crittenden, smiling.

"Guard-house," said the Sergeant, shaking his head.

Not a scrap of waste matter was to be seen anywhere--not a piece of paper--not the faintest odour was perceptible; the camp was as clean as a Dutch kitchen.

"And this is a camp of cavalry, mind you," said Grafton. "Ten minutes after they have broken camp, you won't be able to tell that there has been a man or horse on the ground, except for the fact that it will be packed down hard in places. And I bet you that in a month they won't have three men in the hospital." The old Sergeant nearly blushed with pleasure.

"An' I've got the best captain, too, sir," he said, as they turned away, and Grafton laughed.

"That's the way you'll find it all through the army. Each colonel and each captain is always the best to the soldier, and, by the way," he went on, "do you happen to know about this little United States regular army?"

"Not much."

"I thought so. Germany knows a good deal--England, France, Prussia, Russia--everybody knows but the American and the Spaniard. Just look at these men. They're young, strong, intelligent--bully, good Americans. It's an army of picked men--picked for heart, body, and brain. Almost each man is an athlete. It is the finest body of men on God Almighty's earth to-day, and everybody on earth but the American and the Spaniard knows it. And how this nation has treated them. Think of that miserable Congress--" Grafton waved his hands in impotent rage and ceased--Rivers was calling them from the top of the hill.

So all morning Crittenden watched the regimental unit at work. He took a sabre lesson from the old Sergeant. He visited camps of infantry and artillery and, late that afternoon, he sat on a little wooded hill, where stood four draped, ghost-like statues--watching these units paint pictures on a bigger canvas below him, of the army at work as a whole.

Every green interspace below was thickly dotted with tents and rising spirals of faint smoke; every little plain was filled with soldiers, at drill. Behind him wheeled cannon and caisson and men and horses, splashed with prophetic drops of red, wheeling at a gallop, halting, unlimbering, loading, and firing imaginary shells at imaginary Spaniards--limbering and off with a flash of metal, wheel-spoke and crimson trappings at a gallop again; in the plain below were regiments of infantry, deploying in skirmish-line, advancing by rushes; beyond them sharpshooters were at target practice, and little bands of recruits and awkward squads were everywhere. In front, rose cloud after cloud of dust, and, under them, surged cloud after cloud of troopers at mounted drill, all making ready for the soldier's work--to kill with mercy and die without complaint. What a picture--what a picture! And what a rich earnest of the sleeping might of the nation behind it all. Just under him was going an "escort of the standard," which he could plainly see. Across the long drill-ground the regiment--it was Rivers's regiment--stood, a solid mass of silent, living statues, and it was a brave sight that came now--that flash of sabres along the long length of the drill-field, like one leaping horizontal flame. It was a regimental acknowledgment of the honour of presentation to the standard, and Crittenden raised his hat gravely in recognition of the same honour, little dreaming that he was soon to follow that standard up a certain Cuban hill.

What a picture!

There the nation was concentrating its power. Behind him that nation was patching up its one great quarrel, and now a gray phantom stalked out of the past to the music of drum and fife, and Crittenden turned sharply to see a little body of men, in queer uniforms, marching through a camp of regulars toward him. They were old boys, and they went rather slowly, but they stepped jauntily and, in their natty old-fashioned caps and old gray jackets pointed into a V-shape behind, they looked jaunty in spite of their years. Not a soldier but paused to look at these men in gray, who marched thus proudly through such a stronghold of blue, and were not ashamed. Not a man joked or laughed or smiled, for all knew that they were old Confederates in butter-nut, and once fighting-men indeed. All knew that these men had fought battles that made scouts and Indian skirmishes and city riots and, perhaps, any battles in store for them with Spain but play by contrast for the tin soldier, upon whom the regular smiles with such mild contempt; that this thin column had seen twice the full muster of the seven thousand strong encamped there melt away upon that very battlefield in a single day. And so the little remnant of gray marched through an atmosphere of profound respect, and on through a mist of memories to the rocky little point where the Federal Virginian Thomas--"The Rock of Chickamauga"--stood against seventeen fierce assaults of hill-swarming demons in butter-nut, whose desperate valour has hardly a parallel on earth, unless it then and there found its counterpart in the desperate courage of the brothers in name and race whose lives they sought that day. They were bound to a patriotic love-feast with their old enemies in blue--these men in gray--to hold it on the hill around the four bronze statues that Crittenden's State was putting up to her sons who fought on one or the other side on that one battlefield, and Crittenden felt a clutch at his heart and his eyes filled when the tattered old flag of the stars and bars trembled toward him. Under its folds rode the spirit of gallant fraternity--a little, old man with a grizzled beard and with stars on his shoulders, his hands folded on the pommel of his saddle, his eyes lifted dreamily upward--they called him the "bee-hunter," from that habit of his in the old war--his father's old comrade, little Jerry Carter. That was the man Crittenden had come South to see. Behind came a carriage, in which sat a woman in widow's weeds and a tall girl in gray. He did not need to look again to see that it was Judith, and, motionless, he stood where he was throughout the ceremony, until he saw the girl lift her hand and the veil fall away from the bronze symbols of the soldier that was in her fathers and in his--stood resolutely still until the gray figure disappeared and the veterans, blue and gray intermingled, marched away. The little General was the last to leave, and he rode slowly, as if overcome with memories. Crittenden took off his hat and, while he hesitated, hardly knowing whether to make himself known or not, the little man caught sight of him and stopped short.

"Why--why, bless my soul, aren't you Tom Crittenden's son?"

"Yes, sir," said Crittenden.

"I knew it. Bless me, I was thinking of him just that moment--naturally enough--and you startled me. I thought it was Tom himself." He grasped the Kentuckian's hand warmly.

"Yes," he said, studying his face. "You look just as he did when we courted and camped and fought together." The tone of his voice moved Crittenden deeply. "And you are going to the war--good--good! Your father would be with me right now if he were alive. Come to see me right away. I may go to Tampa any day." And, as he rode away, he stopped again.

"Of course you have a commission in the Legion."

"No, sir. I didn't ask for one. I was afraid the Legion might not get to Cuba." The General smiled.

"Well, come to see me"--he smiled again--"we'll see--we'll see!" and he rode on with his hands still folded on the pommel of his saddle and his eyes still lifted, dreamily, upward.

It was guard-mount and sunset when Crittenden, with a leaping heart, reached Rivers's camp. The band was just marching out with a corps of trumpeters, when a crash of martial music came across the hollow from the camp on the next low hill, followed by cheers, which ran along the road and were swollen into a mighty shouting when taken up by the camp at the foot of the hill. Through the smoke and faint haze of the early evening, moved a column of infantry into sight, headed by a band.

"Tramp, tramp, tramp, The boys are marching!"

Along the brow of the hill, and but faintly seen through the smoky haze, came the pendulum-like swing of rank after rank of sturdy legs, with guidons fluttering along the columns and big, ghostly army wagons rumbling behind. Up started the band at the foot of the hill with a rousing march, and up started every band along the line, and through madly cheering soldiers swung the regiment on its way to Tampa--magic word, hope of every chafing soldier left behind--Tampa, the point of embarkation for the little island where waited death or glory.

Rivers was deeply dejected.

"Don't you join any regiment yet," he said to Crittenden; "you may get hung up here all summer till the war is over. If you want to get into the fun for sure--wait. Go to Tampa and wait. You might come here, or go there, and drill and watch for your chance." Which was the conclusion Crittenden had already reached for himself.

The sun sank rapidly now. Dusk fell swiftly, and the pines began their nightly dirge for the many dead who died under them five and thirty years ago. They had a new and ominous chant now to Crittenden--a chant of premonition for the strong men about him who were soon to follow them. Camp-fires began to glow out of the darkness far and near over the old battlefield.

Around a little fire on top of the hill, and in front of the Colonel's tent, sat the Colonel, with kind Irish face, Irish eye, and Irish wit of tongue. Near him the old Indian-fighter, Chaffee, with strong brow, deep eyes, long jaw, firm mouth, strong chin--the long, lean face of a thirteenth century monk who was quick to doff cowl for helmet. While they told war-stories, Crittenden sat in silence with the majors three, and Willings, the surgeon (whom he was to know better in Cuba), and listened. Every now and then a horse would loom from the darkness, and a visiting officer would swing into the light, and everybody would say:

"How!"

There is no humour in that monosyllable of good cheer throughout the United States Army, and with Indian-like solemnity they said it, tin cup in hand:

"How!"

Once it was Lawton, tall, bronzed, commanding, taciturn--but fluent when he did speak--or Kent, or Sumner, or little Jerry Carter himself. And once, a soldier stepped into the circle of firelight, his heels clicking sharply together; and Crittenden thought an uneasy movement ran around the group, and that the younger men looked furtively up as though to take their cue from the Colonel. It was the soldier who had been an officer once. The Colonel showed not a hint of consciousness, nor did the impassive soldier to anybody but Crittenden, and with him it may have been imagination that made him think that once, when the soldier let his eye flash quite around the group, he flushed slightly when he met Crittenden's gaze. Rivers shrugged his shoulders when Crittenden asked about him later.