CHAPTER XX

THE PRODIGAL FATHER

The fan-formation made the Federal line wide-scattered, as in “deploying skirmishers.” Every man had fully fifty feet of space between himself and the next soldier.

This formation, and the eccentric method of advance and retreat, combined with the long range, made the Yankee regiments extremely difficult targets for volley fire.

Almost unscathed, they had made their advance. And almost unscathed they were coming back.

It was not a battle. It was merely a bit of bull-baiting.

And now it was over; and the two regiments, at a command, were withdrawing from range, preparatory to massing and resuming their march, to catch up with their own main body.

The few men who had fallen were easily “brought in” by their comrades.

But Dad’s alert eyes had just seen, from his point of vantage, what the half-wriggling, half-crawling skirmishers had not. A man at the extreme left of the “fan” had jumped to his feet midway in the return, had whirled clean about and had fallen.

The wounded man got to his hands and knees, tried to move back, and fell again.

And now, from a roof in the village, two or three sharpshooters were evidently at work amid the din of useless volleying. And one or more of these sharpshooters began to single out this crawling man--the only Federal still within range--as a mark.

The fellow had once more risen to his knees, and was working his way back toward his unseeing comrades.

A bullet whipped up a puff of dust just behind him. A second carried away his cap. A third grazed him on hand or wrist and knocked him from his balance.

Then it was that Dad shouted aloud. For, as the stumbling man lurched forward, head thrown backward like a hurt animal’s, Dad had seen his face.

“Jimmie!” cried the old man. “It’s--it’s Joe! He’s bronzed and he’s got a beard; but it’s Joe! And those sharpshooters back there are testing their aim on him. Wait for me here, son, for a minute!”

As he spoke a bugle sounded--the bugle that summoned the re-formed Federal regiments to the march.

Dad, running low, and darting eccentrically from side to side to confuse the aim of the sharpshooters, dashed out onto the deserted field.

Quickly he was seen, as was tested by renewed spits of fire from a roof. And bullets began to whine past him.

Untouched, he gained the spot where his son lay momentarily senseless from pain.

He bent over the fallen man, caught him up in his arms, and started heavily back toward the tree, keeping his own body between Joseph and the village.

Then it was that Dad discovered Jimmie close at his side.

“I told you to wait--back there--for me to come back!” he panted.

“I couldn’t!” muttered Jimmie in the same short-of-breath tone. “Gimme his feet to carry--I want to help some way.”

Dad assented, and the limp weight was shifted between the two.

Bullets spatted the ground near them. One rifle-ball ripped through the wooden sides of Jimmie’s worshiped drum slung at the lad’s hip.

“Over to the right,” ordered Dad. “To that cottage over yonder. We can get him there, I guess. And then you can cut ahead and see if you can overhaul a company of our men to come back for us.”

A one-story stone hut stood some fifty yards distant; and thither they bore the injured man.

It was no longer a task of peril, for suddenly the firing had stopped from the now-beyond-range rooftops of the village.

Dad, as they reached the cottage porch, glanced back toward the town to learn the reason; pessimistically certain that the cessation of firing meant a detachment of Confederates had been detailed to capture them.

But a single look relieved his fears and explained the situation to him. The village was a-buzz with hurrying men. They were pouring out of houses and barns like ants from a hill in an excited swarm.

The Confederates had evidently just discovered the meaning of the Federal ruse and the fact that the two regiments which had attacked them were again on the march.

Wherefore, to seize at least a remnant of glory from the day of defeats, the Confederate leader was taking his men in pursuit of the withdrawing regiments in the hope of overhauling and thrashing them before they could come up with the remainder of the demi-corps, which had now passed out of sight.

At such a moment the capture or killing of three fugitive Yankees was too trivial a matter to think of. The village was emptied with incredible speed.

The hut’s occupants were as devoid of danger as they were devoid of reasonable chance, by this move on the part of the enemy, of rescue.

Dad explained this in a dozen words to Jimmie as they laid Joseph’s body on a truckle bed in the half-furnished front room of the cottage.

“We’ve got to tend to him ourselves,” he ended. “We can’t carry him, wounded like this, to headquarters. It might kill him. If there was just someone here who understood something more than we do about nursing--”

“There is!” spoke up Jimmie.

“What?”

“When that general of yours hustled all the guns and the baggage along he left the two biggest wagons to follow. I know why, too. They’re Red Cross wagons. Volunteer nurses, sawbones, and all that sort of thing. They’re immune from getting shot or nabbed. So he didn’t clog up the ‘rush’ baggage with ’em.

“I got all that while I was waiting for leave to go ahead with my drum. They can’t be over a mile or so off. They’ll be on that main road over yonder somewhere.”

“Go and find one of the wagons if you can,” ordered Dad. “Beg a nurse and a surgeon--both, if you can, and get back as quickly as possible. You’ve got a good head, son, to remember all that. It’s the real man who stores up petty details and makes use of them. Hurry!

“Wait!” he exclaimed, the memory of a woman’s chance words flashing athwart his mind. “Wait! She--she said she might become a nurse. Ask if there is a Mrs. Sessions--remember the name--_Sessions_--in the corps of nurses there. If there is, ask if she can be detailed for this work!”

Jimmie was gone.

Dad turned back to the couch and loosened the throat of his son’s jacket and shirt.

Joseph had grown thinner and darker and older this past year. The smugly self-sufficient look seemed gone from his face, as his father bent solicitously to scan it.

Dad’s hands ran over his body in search of the wound.

The graze on the wrist was a mere nothing. But a spent ball had struck the shoulder and, without piercing the skin, had snapped the shoulder-blade by its impact--one of the most painful and least perilous of injuries.

It was this hurt which had caused Joseph to spring up, stumble and fall, and whose pain had later made him swoon.

The man came back to his senses. Opening his eyes and seeing above him an officer in the uniform of a captain, he raised his uninjured arm with difficulty in an all-but-involuntary salute.

“Joe!” cried the old man. “Don’t you know me? Don’t you know me? It’s Dad. I--mean ‘father.’”

Joseph Brinton looked up dully; with eyes that had in them no faintest glint of recognition. He had known the uniform. He did not at all know the face.

His father, to the best of his son’s belief, was still spending the bulk of his days and nights lording it in frowzy dignity in the Eagle bar; his long, silvery hair hanging down above his film-eyed and somewhat bloated face; his pursy form incased in the shiny old-fashioned frock suit.

Mrs. Joseph Brinton had not thought best to notify her absent lord that his father had run away.

Partly for fear of worrying the soldier-husband; partly lest Joseph be inclined in his primly perfect way to blame her for not keeping closer watch on the old man, or of making his stay at the big house happier than had been her frigid course in reality.

Of Jimmie’s deflection from the home nest, Joseph knew nothing, for the very good reason that Mrs. Brinton, still in Europe, had not herself been to date apprised of the fact. Her family had feared her lofty wrath, and they still hoped that, his war craze satiated, Jimmie might return home before his mother should arrive back at Ideala.

In the alert and muscular soldierly figure and the lean, strong face bent above him, Joseph now saw not one lineament of a father whose vagaries he had borne so long and with such exemplary patience.

But at a repetition of the words: “Don’t you know me, Joe?” something in the voice struck him as vaguely familiar. Not in the intonation which was wholly new; but the timber.

He blinked perplexedly. Then a new twinge of pain made him wince.

“You are not dangerously hurt,” said Dad. “It is a painful wound, but it is not serious. Try to stand it like a soldier.”

“Yes, sir,” answered Joseph.

“You still don’t know me? Think, man! I am your father.”

“My--my _father_!” echoed Joseph incredulously.