Part 5

"I guess so," responded Dwight. With the help of his unhurt arm he clambered to his feet and began moving dizzily about among the row of wounded men to his left. These groaned or snarled at him as he passed over them, but to this he paid no attention whatever. He returned from the end of the line, bringing two knapsacks and the battered frame of a drum, in which some one had been trying to carry water, and with some difficulty arranged these in a satisfactory heap. Then he knelt, pushed his arm under Marsena's shoulders, and lifted him up and backward to the support. Both men grimaced and winced under the smart of the effort, and for some minutes sat in silence, with closed eyes.

When they opened them finally it was with a sudden start at the sound of a woman's voice. Their ears had for long hours been inured to a ceaseless din of other noises—an ear-splitting confusion of cannon and musketry roar from the field less than an eighth of a mile away, of yelping shells overhead, and of screams and hoarse shouts all about them. Yet their senses caught this strange note of a woman's voice as if it had fallen upon the hush of midnight.

They looked up, and beheld Miss Julia Parmalee!

Upon such a background of heated squalor, dirt, and murderous disorder, it did not seem surprising to them that this lady should present a picture of cool, fresh neatness. She wore a snow-white nurse's cap, and broad, spotless bands of white linen were crossed over the shoulders of her pale dove-colored dress. Her dark face, dusky pink at the cheeks, glowed with a proud excitement. Her big brown eyes swept along the row of recumbent figures at her feet with the glance of a born conqueror.

"This is not a fit place for him," she said. "It is absurd to bring a gentleman—an officer of the headquarters staff—out to such a place as this!"

Then the two volunteers from Octavius saw that behind her were four men, bearing a laden stretcher, and that at her side was a regimental hospital steward, who also looked speculatively along the rows of sufferers.

"It's the best thing we can do, anyway," he replied, not over politely; "and for that matter, there's hardly room here."

"Oh, there'd be no trouble about that," retorted Miss Julia, calmly. "We could move any of these people here. The General told me I was always to do just what I thought best. I am sure that if I could see him now he would insist at once that Colonel Starbuck should have a bed to himself, inside the house."

"I'll bet he wouldn't!" said the hospital steward, with emphasis.

"Perhaps you don't realize," put in Miss Julia, coldly, "that Colonel Starbuck is a staff officer—and a friend of mine."

"I don't care if he was on all the staffs there are," said the hospital steward, "he's got to take his chance with the rest. And it don't matter about his being a friend, either; we ain't playing favorites much just now. I don't see no room here, Miss. You'll have to take him out in the open lot there."

"Oh, never!" protested Miss Julia, vehemently. "It's disgraceful! Why, the place is under fire there. I saw them running away from a shell there only a minute ago. No, if we can't do anything better, we'll have one of these men moved."

"Well, do something pretty quick!" growled one of the men supporting the stretcher.

Miss Parmalee had looked two or three times in an absent-minded way at the two men on the ground nearest her—obviously without recognizing either of them. There was a definite purpose in the glance she now bent upon Dwight Ransom—a glance framed in the resourceful smile he remembered so well.

"You seem to be able to sit up, my man," she said, ingratiatingly, to him; "would you be so very kind as to let me have that place for Colonel Starbuck, here—he is on the headquarters staff—and I am sure we should be so much obliged. You will easily get a nice place somewhere else for yourself. Oh, thank you so much! It is so good of you!"

Suppressing a groan at the pain the movement involved, and without a word, Dwight lifted himself slowly to his feet, and stepped aside, waving a hand toward the hay and knapsack in token of their surrender.

Then Miss Julia helped lift from the litter the object of her anxiety. Colonel Starbuck was of a slender, genteel figure, and had the top of his head swathed heavily in bandages. He wore long, curly, brown side-whiskers, and his chin had been shaved that very morning. This was enough in itself to indicate that he belonged to the headquarters staff, but the fact was proclaimed afresh by everything else about him—his speckless uniform, his spick-and-span gauntlets, his carefully polished boots, the glittering newness of his shoulder-straps, sword scabbard, buttons, and spurs. It was clear that, whatever else had happened, his line of communication with the headquarters baggage train had never been interrupted.

"It is so kind of you!" Miss Parmalee murmured again, when the staff officer had been helped off the stretcher, and in a dazed and languid way had settled himself down into the place vacated for him. "Would you"—she whispered, looking up now, and noting that the hospital steward and the litter-men had gone away—"would you mind stepping over to the house, or to one of the tents beyond—you'll find him somewhere—and asking Dr. Willoughby to come at once? Tell him it is for Colonel Starbuck of the headquarters staff, and you'd better mention my name—Miss Parmalee, of the Sanitary Commission. You won't forget the name—Parmalee?"

"I don't fancy I shall forget it," said Dwight, gravely. "I've got a better memory than some."

Miss Julia caught the tone of voice on the instant, and looked upward again from where she knelt beside the Colonel, with a swift smile.

"Why, it's Mr. Ransom, I do believe!" she exclaimed. "I should never have known you with your beard. It's so good of you to take this trouble—you always were so obliging! Any one will tell you where Dr. Willoughby is. He's the surgeon of the Eighteenth, you know. I'm sure he'll come at once—to please me—and time is so precious, you know!"

Without further words, Dwight moved off slowly and unsteadily toward the house.

Miss Parmalee, seating herself so that some of her mouse-tinted draperies almost touched the face of Dwight's companion, unhooked a fan from her girdle and began softly fanning Colonel Star buck. "The doctor won't be long," she said, in low, cooing tones, after a little; "do you feel easier now?"

"I am rather dizzy still, and a little faint," replied the Colonel, languorously. "That fanning is so delicious though, that I'm really very happy. At least I would be if I weren't nervous about you. You have been through such tremendous exertions all day—out in the sun, amid all these horrid sights and this infernal roar—without a parasol, too. Are you quite sure it has not been too much for you?"

"You are always so thoughtful of others, dear Colonel Starbuck," murmured Miss Julia, reducing the fanning to a gentle, measured movement, and fixing her lustrous eyes pensively upon the clouds above the horizon. "You never think of yourself!"

"Only to think how happy my fate is, to be rescued and nursed by an angel," sighed the Colonel.

A smile of gentle deprecation played upon Miss Julia's red lips, and imparted to her eyes the expression they would wear if they had been gazing upon a tenderly entrancing vision in the sky. Then, all at once; she gave a little start of aroused attention, looked puzzled, and after a moment's pause bent her head over close to the Colonel's.

"The man behind me has taken tight hold of my dress," she whispered, hurriedly. "I don't want to turn around, but can you see him? He isn't having a fit or anything, is he?"

Colonel Starbuck lifted himself a trifle, and looked across. "No," he whispered in return, "he appears to be asleep. Probably he is dreaming. He is a corporal—some infantry regiment. They do manage to get so—what shall I say—so unwashed! Shall I move his hand for you?"

Miss Julia shook her head, with an arch little half smile.

"No, poor man," she murmured. "It gives me almost a sense of the romantic. Perhaps he is dreaming of home—of some one dear to him. Corporals do have their romances, you know, as well as——"

"As well as colonels," the staff officer playfully finished the sentence for her. "Well, I congratulate him, if his is a thousandth part as joyful as mine."

"Oh, then, you have one!" pursued Miss Parmalee, allowing her eyes to sparkle for an instant before they were coyly raised again to the clouds. Darkness was gathering there rapidly.

"Why pretend that you don't understand?" pleaded Colonel Starbuck—and there seemed to be no answer forthcoming. The fan moved even more sedately now, with a tender flutter at the end of each downward sweep.

Presently the preoccupation of the couple—one might not call it silence in such an unbroken uproar as rose around them and smashed through the air above—was interrupted by the appearance of a young, sharp-faced man, who marched straight across the yard toward them and, halting, spoke hurriedly.

"I was asked specially to come here for a moment," he said, "but it can only be a minute. We're just over our heads in work. What is it?"

Miss Parmalee looked at the young man with a favorless eye. He was unshaven, dishevelled, brusque of manner and speech. He was bareheaded, and his unimportant figure was almost hidden beneath a huge, revoltingly stained apron.

"I asked for my friend, Dr. Willoughby," she said. "But if he could not come, I must insist upon immediate attention for Colonel Starbuck here—an officer of the headquarter staff."

While she spoke the young surgeon had thrown himself on one knee, adroitly though roughly lifted the Colonel's bandages, run an inquiring finger over his skull, and plumped the linen back again. He sprang to his feet with an impatient grunt. "Paltry scalp wound," he snorted. Then, turning on his heel, he almost knocked against Dwight Ransom, who had come slowly up behind him.

"You had no business to drag me off for foolishness of this sort," he said, in vexed tones. "Here are thousands of men waiting their turn who really need help, and I've been working twenty hours a day for a week, and couldn't keep up with the work if every day had two hundred hours. It's ridiculous!"

Dwight shrugged his unhurt shoulder. "I didn't ask you for myself," he replied. "I'm quite willing to wait my turn—but the lady here—she asked me to bring help——"

"It can't be that this gentleman understands," put in Miss Julia, "that his assistance was desired for an officer of the headquarters staff."

"Madame," said the young surgeon, "with your permission, damn the headquarters staff!" and, turning abruptly, he strode off.

"I will go and see the General myself," exclaimed Miss Parmalee, flushing with wrath. "I will see whether he will permit the Sanitary Commission to be affronted in this outrageous——"

She stopped short. Her indignant effort to rise to her feet had been checked by a hand on firmly the ground, which held in its grasp a fold of her skirt. She turned, pulled the cloth from the clutch of the tightened fingers, looked at the hand as it sprawled limply on the grass, and gave a little, shuddering, half-hysterical laugh. "Mercy me!" was what she said.

"You know who it is, don't you?" asked Dwight Ransom.

The meaning in his voice struck Miss Julia, and she bent a careful scrutiny through the dusk upon the face of the man stretched out beside her. His head had slipped sidewise on the knapsack, and his bearded chin was unnaturally sunk into his collar. Through the grime on his face could be discerned an unearthly pallor. His wide-open eyes seemed staring fixedly, reproachfully, at the hand which had lost its hold upon Miss Julia's dress.

"It does seem as if I'd seen the face before somewhere," she remarked, "but I don't appear to place it. It is getting so dark, too. No, I can't imagine. Who is it?"

She had risen to her feet and was peering down at the dead man, her pretty brows knitted in perplexity.

"He recognized you!" said Dwight, with significant gravity. "It's Marsena Pulford."

"Oh, poor man!" exclaimed Julia. "If he'd only spoken to me I would gladly have fanned him, too. But I was so anxious about the Colonel here that I never took a fair look at him. I dare say I shouldn't have recognized him, even then. Beards do change one so, don't they!"

Then she turned to Colonel Starbuck and made answer to the inquiry of his lifted eyebrows.

"The unfortunate man," she explained, "was our village photographer. I sat to him for my picture several times. I think I have one of them over at the Commission tent now."

"I'll go this minute and seize it!" the gallant Colonel vowed, getting to his feet.

"Take care! We unprotected females have a man trap there!" Julia warned him; but fear did not deter the staff officer from taking her arm and leaning on it as they walked away in the twilight.

Then the night fell, and Dwight buried Marsena.

The War Widow

THE WAR WIDOW

I.

Although we had been one man short all day, and there was a plain threat of rain in the hot air, everybody left the hay-field long before sundown. It was too much to ask of human nature to stay off up in the remote meadows, when such remarkable things were happening down around the house.

Marcellus Jones and I were in the pasture, watching the dog get the cows together for the homeward march. He did it so well and, withal, so willingly, that there was no call for us to trouble ourselves in keeping up with him. We waited instead at the open bars until the hay-wagon had passed through, rocking so heavily in the ancient pitch-hole, as it did so, that the driver was nearly thrown off his perch on the top of the high load. Then we put up the bars, and fell in close behind the haymakers. A rich cloud of dust, far ahead on the road, suggested that the dog was doing his work even too willingly, but for the once we feared no rebuke. Almost anything might be condoned that day.

Five grown-up men walked abreast down the highway, in the shadow of the towering wagon mow, clad much alike in battered straw hats, gray woollen shirts open at the neck, and rough old trousers bulging over the swollen, creased ankles of thick boots. One had a scythe on his arm; two others bore forks over their shoulders. By request, Hi Tuckerman allowed me to carry his sickle.

Although my present visit to the farm had been of only a few days' duration—and those days of strenuous activity darkened by a terrible grief—I had come to be very friendly with Mr. Tuckerman. He took a good deal more notice of me than the others did; and, when chance and leisure afforded, addressed the bulk of his remarks to me. This favoritism, though it fascinated me, was not without its embarrassing side. Hi Tuckerman had taken part in the battle of Gaines's Mill two years before, and had been shot straight through the tongue. One could still see the deep scar on each of his cheeks, a sunken and hairless pit in among his sandy beard. His heroism in the war and his good qualities as a citizen had earned for him the esteem of his neighbors, and they saw to it that he never wanted for work. But their present respect for him stopped short of the pretence that they enjoyed hearing him talk. Whenever he attempted conversation, people moved away, or began boisterous dialogues with one another to drown him out. Being a sensitive man, he had come to prefer silence to these rebuffs among those he knew. But he still had a try at the occasional polite stranger—and I suppose it was in this capacity that I won his heart. Though I never of my own initiative understood a word he said, Marcellus sometimes interpreted a sentence or so for me, and I listened to all the rest with a fraudulently wise face. To give only a solitary illustration of the tax thus levied on our friendship, I may mention that when Hi Tuckerman said "_Aah!_-ah-_aah!_-uh," he meant "Rappahannock," and he did this rather better than a good many other words.

"Rappahannock," alas! was a word we heard often enough in those days, along with Chickahominy and Rapidan, and that odd Chattahoochee, the sound of which raised always in my boyish mind the notion that the geography-makers must have achieved it in their baby-talk period. These strange Southern river names and many more were as familiar to the ears of these four other untravelled Dearborn County farmers as the noise of their own shallow Nedahma rattling over its pebbles in the valley yonder. Only when their slow fancy fitted substance to these names they saw in mind's eye dark, sinister, swampy currents, deep and silent, and discolored with human blood.

Two of these men who strode along behind the wagon were young half-uncles of mine, Myron and Warren Turnbull, stout, thick-shouldered, honest fellows not much out of their teens, who worked hard, said little, and were always lumped together in speech, by their family, the hired help, and the neighbors, as "the boys." They asserted themselves so rarely, and took everything as it came with such docility, that I myself, being in my eleventh year, thought of them as very young indeed. Next them walked a man, hired just for the haying, named Philleo, and then, scuffling along over the uneven humps and hollows on the outer edge of the road, came Si Hummaston, with the empty ginger-beer pail knocking against his knees.

As Tuckerman's "Hi" stood for Hiram, so I assume the other's "Si" meant Silas, or possibly Cyrus. I dare say no one, not even his mother, had ever called him by his full name. I know that my companion, Marcellus Jones, who wouldn't be thirteen until after Thanksgiving, habitually addressed him as Si, and almost daily I resolved that I would do so myself. He was a man of more than fifty, I should think, tall, lean, and what Marcellus called "bible-backed." He had a short iron-gray beard and long hair. Whenever there was any very hard or steady work going, he generally gave out and went to sit in the shade, holding a hand flat over his heart, and shaking his head dolefully. This kept a good many from hiring him, and even in haying-time, when everybody on two legs is of some use, I fancy he would often have been left out if it hadn't been for my grandparents. They respected him on account of his piety and his moral character, and always had him down when extra work began. He was said to be the only hired man in the township who could not be goaded in some way into swearing. He looked at one slowly, with the mild expression of a heifer calf.

We had come to the crown of the hill, and the wagon started down the steeper incline, with a great groaning of the brake. The men, by some tacit understanding, halted and overlooked the scene.

The big old stone farm-house—part of which is said to date almost to the Revolutionary times—was just below us, so near, indeed, that Marcellus said he had once skipped a scaling-stone from where we stood to its roof. The dense, big-leafed foliage of a sap-bush, sheltered in the basin which dipped from our feet, pretty well hid this roof now from view. Farther on, heavy patches of a paler, brighter green marked the orchard, and framed one side of a cluster of barns and stables, at the end of which three or four belated cows were loitering by the trough. It was so still that we could hear the clatter of the stanchions as the rest of the herd sought their places inside the milking-barn.

The men, though, had no eyes for all this, but bent their gaze fixedly on the road, down at the bottom. For a long way this thoroughfare was bordered by a row of tall poplars, which, as we were placed, receded from the vision in so straight a line that they seemed one high, fat tree. Beyond these one saw only a line of richer green, where the vine-wrapped rail-fences cleft their way between the ripening fields.

"I'd 'a' took my oath it was them," said Philleo. "I can spot them grays as fur's I can see 'em. They turned by the school-house there, or I'll eat it, school-ma'am 'n' all. And the buggy was follerin' 'em, too."

"Yes, I thought it was them," said Myron, shading his eyes with his brown hand.

"But they ought to got past the poplars by this time, then," remarked Warren.

"Why, they'll be drivin' as slow as molasses in January," put in Si Hummaston. "When you come to think of it, it _is_ pretty nigh the same as a regular funeral. You mark my words, your father'll have walked them grays every step of the road. I s'pose he'll drive himself—he wouldn't trust bringin' Alvy home to nobody else, would he? I know I wouldn't, if the Lord had given _me_ such a son; but then he didn't!"

"No, He didn't!" commented the first speaker, in an unnaturally loud tone of voice, to break in upon the chance that Hi Tuckerman was going to try to talk. But Hi only stretched out his arm, pointing the forefinger toward the poplars.

Sure enough, something was in motion down at the base of the shadows on the road. Then it crept forward, out in the sunlight, and separated itself into two vehicles. A farm wagon came first, drawn by a team of gray horses. Close after it followed a buggy, with its black top raised. Both advanced so slowly that they seemed scarcely to be moving at all.

"Well, I swan!" exclaimed Si Hummaston, after a minute, "it's Dana Pillsbury drivin' the wagon after all! Well—I dunno—yes, I guess that's prob'bly what I'd 'a' done too, if I'd b'n your father. Yes, it does look more correct, his follerin' on behind, like that. I s'pose that's Alvy's widder in the buggy there with him."

"Yes, that's Serena—it looks like her little girl with her," said Myron, gravely.

"I s'pose we might's well be movin' along down," observed his brother, and at that we all started.

We walked more slowly now, matching our gait to the snail-like progress of those coming toward us. As we drew near to the gate, the three hired men instinctively fell behind the brothers, and in that position the group halted on the grass, facing our drive-way where it left the main road. Not a word was uttered by any one. When at last the wagon came up, Myron and Warren took off their hats, and the others followed suit, all holding them poised at the level of their shoulders.

Dana Pillsbury, carrying himself rigidly upright on the box-seat, drove past us with eyes fixed straight ahead, and a face as coldly expressionless as that of a wooden Indian. The wagon was covered all over with rubber blankets, so that whatever it bore was hidden. Only a few paces behind came the buggy, and my grandfather, old Arphaxed Turnbull, went by in his turn with the same averted, far-away gaze, and the same resolutely stolid countenance. He held the restive young carriage horse down to a decorous walk, a single firm hand on the tight reins, without so much as looking at it. The strong yellow light of the declining sun poured full upon his long gray beard, his shaven upper lip, his dark-skinned, lean, domineering face—and made me think of some hard and gloomy old prophet seeing a vision, in the back part of the Old Testament. If that woman beside him, swathed in heavy black raiment, and holding a child up against her arm, was my Aunt Serena, I should never have guessed it.

We put on our hats again, and walked up the drive-way with measured step behind the carriage till it stopped at the side-piazza stoop. The wagon had passed on toward the big new red barn—and crossing its course I saw my Aunt Em, bareheaded and with her sleeves rolled up, going to the cow-barn with a milking-pail in her hand. She was walking quickly, as if in a great hurry.

"There's your Ma," I whispered to Marcellus, assuming that he would share my surprise at her rushing off like this, instead of waiting to say 'How-d'-do' to Serena. He only nodded knowingly, and said nothing.