CHAPTER XXIII

THE ATTACK

“Fa-ather!” rang out a querulous voice from the cottage.

“Drat that child!” said Mrs. Sessions almost viciously. “James, I’ll give your boy Joseph an earful. He’s a fretful, suspicious fellow, and if ’twa’n’t for his father and his son I’d nurse him with a field battery, I would.”

But she marched into the cottage. She turned Battle Jimmie out to talk to Dad. She changed bandages and tenderly smoothed Joseph’s head, through which the pains were shooting like heat lightning, and on the little old cannon-ball stove in the corner made him toast out of a piece of army hardtack she found and split.

Then she sat down beside the cot and straightway began:

“Joseph--I s’pose you’re ‘Mr. Brinton’ to them that works for you; but I’m older than you, my dear, besides being your nurse. And I want to tell you while I have the chance that if you weren’t so badly wounded I’d want to take and spank you like a house afire for always being so snippy to that splendid father of yours. Why, if I wasn’t just an old, old woman, I’d be tempted to fall in love with him right here on the spot, I would.”

She chuckled comfortably and patted the wounded man’s hand. And right there Joseph Brinton made a mistake which, if duplicated in his business, would have ruined the same beyond recall.

We all of us, when we are ill, feel that the world owes us the privilege of being querulous about our pet grievances; and Joseph now lifted his voice and complained:

“I can’t understand why you make all this fuss over my father. If it hadn’t been for the trouble I’ve had all these years in caring for him, and the shame he’s so often brought on me--”

Emily Sessions changed instantly from a kindly and wise, though easy-going, nurse into a small, almost youthful, spitfire.

“D’ you ever see a Newfoundland dog?” she snapped.

“Why, yes,” he said wonderingly.

“A big, gentle, kind, self-respecting Newfoundland dog?”

“Why, yes--I suppose so.”

“_Suppose!_ Don’t you suppose me any supposes!”

“Well, then, I have. Though why--”

“Well, now, tell me,” she demanded, sitting more and more erect, “if you ever saw a terrier pup trying to dig out a gopher and busy as he could be, and lands! no more chance of catching that gopher than if he was a hundred miles away.”

“Yes. But--”

“Well, then, that’s your father and you. He’s the Newfoundland; and you’re the little rat of a terrier that’s always been so busy with his own self-important concerns that--”

“The Confeds are coming!” shrilled a voice at the door.

It was Battle Jimmie, outlined against the heat-trembling outdoors.

“What?” groaned Emily Sessions.

“Squadron of Reb cavalry riding hell-bent-for-leather toward us,” cried Jimmie and disappeared.

The old lady ran toward the doorway.

“Don’t leave me!” begged the wounded man; but she disappeared.

Outside she found Captain Dadd standing quietly under the big locust-tree, gazing tranquilly down the turnpike, where a gallop of horses’ hoofs rang out from a cloud of dust, through which gray uniforms now and then flashed forth.

Quiet he stood, but expectant, and his sword hung by its strap from his right hand, while even as Mrs. Sessions looked she saw him gently lift the butt of his Colt’s to see if it was loose in the holster.

She ran up beside him and clutched his arm. He looked down at her, smiled quietly, and even more quietly put his arm about her slender waist. She nodded.

Jimmie stood beside them, in his hand a huge .44--resurrected, like the bayonet, from the stricken field.

And so they waited.

The Confederate troop came swinging up the turnpike; lean, capable, hard-bitten men on a raid.

“Halt!”

They drew up at the gate, with a scrabble of hoofs and a confusion of horses’ bodies.

“Take that man and boy prisoner,” came the voice from the big, black-bearded man at the head--a man with the bars of a captain.

Four troopers spurred into the yard and approached.

“Shoot till they get us,” ordered Captain Dadd. “Better anything than a Southern military prison. Especially for Joe when he’s wounded. Good luck, Emily; good luck, Jimmie. Stand behind that tree there, Emily dear. They’re real men. They won’t pester you. Careful aim, Jimmie. Let ’er go!”

The revolvers of two men--one a boy and one gray of hair, but men both--rang out together.

Two troopers, now but ten feet away, swayed in the saddle and one very quietly slid off.

Again rang the revolvers, but before anyone could tell whether the shots had taken effect, the whole troop came hurtling up the lane, and thundering, whirling around them, caught at the two.

A swift down-swoop by the black-bearded captain of Southern cavalry, and a revolver butt laid Captain Dadd out senseless and bleeding.

A quick twirl of a halter and Jimmie was swung up to a trooper’s saddle, kicking, but helpless. A nasty saber scratch was across the lad’s forehead.

The old lady was left alone beside the fallen body of Dad. She knelt beside him with great tears in her eyes, her voice keening the world-old sob of sorrow that brave women give their dying lovers.

Nurse as she was, she did not now stop to realize that a blow from a pistol butt is far more likely to stun than to kill.

The captain of Confederate cavalry swung off his horse and looked in at the doorway.

Emily Sessions, frantically kissing the forehead of Dad, didn’t hear, but within the cottage the erstwhile sedate Joseph Brinton staggered from his bed, dizzy with pain, and snarled out hysterically:

“You get the hell out of here!”

The huge, black-bearded captain merely smiled and, mounting, rode back along the lane toward the highroad.

He stopped so suddenly that the horse of the trooper behind almost piled up on the haunches of the captain’s horse.

Facing the Confederates in the lane, standing beside the body of her wounded, stood an old lady steadily and ferociously aiming a huge .44.

Beside her, bristling and fearless, was another adversary--Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte Dog, who was tearing his little heart out as he leaped up, trying to reach the boot of the trooper who firmly held the still struggling and kicking Jimmie.

“You stop!” demanded Emily Sessions.

Gone was the rosy and placid look of her. Very old and very terrible were her cold eyes. She seemed to glare into the eyes of death, but gallantly; and she had drawn a bead full on the captain’s heart.

Rather whimsically smiling, the black-bearded captain held up both his hands, crying “Halt!” to his troop, who obeyed the command in somewhat amused wonder.

“You needn’t to smile so nice as all that,” snapped the old lady. “I’ve half a mind to shoot you. And you tell that man of yours to let Jimmie go. You got the captain, but you ain’t goin’ to get Jimmie, too!”

And then she felt around her shoulders the iron arm of one of the Confederate troopers, whose horse had been concealed by the cottage, but who had slipped round in back of her.

Desperately she tried to turn the muzzle of the gun on him, but his strong hand slipped down on her arm, caught the revolver and wrenched it from her.

She faced the captain again, her shoulders up, ready.

“Tell your murderers to finish me, too,” she said.

The captain of cavalry, for all his big bulk, slipped from his horse as easily as a youngster dismounting before his sweetheart.

“Ma’am,” he said, “we’re soldiers, but Ah reckon we ain’t quite murderers. Mah mother’s a powerful lot like you, ma’am, and Ah reckon Ah love her most’s well most sons do. Sanders, let that boy go. And Ah hope your husband ain’t killed, ma’am. And, ma’am, Ah reckon you’re a praying woman--will you think of my mother to-night when you say your prayers? Last Ah heard, there was a right smart o’ Yanks burnin’ an’ raidin’ near her house, an’--

“Mount! Ride! Trot!”

Standing in the lane, watching the bunch of Confederate cavalry go swirling along the turnpike, bound on a raid right for the Federal lines, the old lady suddenly bent back her shoulders and saluted.

And the boy Jimmie, beside her, saluted their dust-hidden troop with her.

Then immediately:

“Take his feet, Jim dear. He ain’t dead. I hear his heart,” said Mrs. Sessions.

And stooping, straining, she lifted Dad’s shoulders.

They bore him into the house. She ordered Joseph peremptorily to move to the corner, where she laid out a “comfortable” for him to lie on, and she straightened out the still form of Dad on the cot.

“Bring water, Jim!” she commanded almost harshly.

The boy sped back down the lane with a can of cool water, and she sat bathing Dad’s head, sobbing softly, but always with a pitiful, artificial, unreal, golden little smile ready to spring out if he should come to consciousness.

The Confederate captain had called Dad her husband. She caught herself trembling with a soft, happy little emotion, which died swiftly as she realized that Dad might--might never speak to her again.

In a corner of the room Jimmie stood anxiously watching beside the recumbent Joseph. He looked down. His father was looking up as anxiously.

Suddenly all their former lack of sympathy for one another was forgotten.

“Dad--grandad--” gasped the boy.

It was all he could say, but it expressed many things--and Joseph Brinton understood them.

“Yes, yes!” said he gently, and stroked his son’s hair.

The silent, grim woman by the bed still watched and her lips moved in many prayers--prayers that Dad might recover--a prayer, too, for the mother of the Confederate captain.

More than an hour passed. Dad’s heart still beat, evenly, soundly, but he did not awaken.

Perhaps he would not, dreaded the old lady. A passionate tenderness came over her. She crossed to the corner where sat Jimmie and Joseph, and with soft words made her peace with Joseph and renewed his bandages.

Jimmie’s hand she patted. She went to the door and snapped her fingers to Napoleon Bonaparte Dog, who was lying in the shade by the doorstone, but awake, ready for his little god to come out of the cottage again.

Napoleon jumped up and came running. Emily tossed him a corner of hardtack.

As she swiftly stepped to Dad’s cot again she found him lying awake, his eyes on her, filled with a great, soft-shining reverence.

She knelt by the bed.

“All right?” she whispered.

“Yes, Emily.”

Then their cheeks were together.

All at once Mrs. Sessions sprang up and snapped out:

“Well, I declare! We’re a fine lot. Jimmie, you go out and get me some fresh water. Never see such a shiftless lot as we are.”

And up the road jingled the slow-moving hospital wagons.