"Refused me! Oh, it's so; it's so! Ah! if you could have witnessed her dignity, her wisdom, her grace, her compassionate immovableness, you'd never think of her as the little Harper girl again. She said that if the unpremeditated, headlong way in which I had told my passion were my only mistake, and if it were only for my sake, she would not, if she could, answer favorably, and that I, myself, at last, would not have a girl who would have a man who would offer his love in that way, and that she would not have a man who would have a girl who would have a man who should offer his love in that way."

I call it one of the sweetest kindnesses ever done me, that Ned Ferry heard me to the end of that speech and did not smile. Instead he asked "Did she say that as if a'—as if—amused?"

"No, Lieutenant, she nearly cried. Oh, I wish we were on some dangerous errand to-night, instead of just camp and bed!"

"Well, that's all right, Richard; we are."



XLII

"CAN I GET THERE BY CANDLE-LIGHT?"

After a few minutes we quitted the public way by an obscure path in the woods on our right. When we had followed this for two or three miles we turned to the left again and pressed as softly as we could into a low tangled ground where the air seemed stagnant and mosquitoes stung savagely. We wiped away the perspiration in streams. I pushed forward to Ferry's side and whispered my belief that at last we were to see rain.

"Yes," he said, "and with thunder and lightning; just what we want to-night."

I asked why. "Oh, they hate our thunder-storms, those Yankee patrols."

Presently we were in a very dark road, and at a point where it dropped suddenly between steep sides we halted in black shadow. A gleam of pale sand, a whisper of deep flowing waters, and a farther glimmer of more sands beyond them challenged our advance. We had come to a "grapevine ferry." The scow was on the other side, the water too shoal for the horses to swim, and the bottom, most likely, quicksand. Out of the blackness of the opposite shore came a soft, high-pitched, quavering, long-drawn, smothered moan of woe, the call of that snivelling little sinner the screech-owl. Ferry murmured to me to answer it and I sent the same faint horror-stricken tremolo back. Again it came to us, from not farther than one might toss his cap, and I followed Ferry down to the water's edge. The grapevine guy swayed at our side, we heard the scow slide from the sands, and in a few moments, moved by two videttes, it touched our shore. Soon we were across, the two videttes riding with us, and beyond a sharp rise, in an old opening made by the swoop of a hurricane, we entered the silent unlighted bivouac of Ferry's scouts. Ferry got down and sat on the earth talking with Quinn, while the sergeants quietly roused the sleepers to horse.

Now we marched, and when we had gone a mile or so Ned Ferry turned aside, taking with him only Sergeant Jim, Kendall, another private, and me. We went at an alert walk single-file for the better part of an hour and stopped at length in a narrow untilled "deadening." Beyond it at our left a faint redness shone just above the tree-tops. At our right, in the northwest, a similar glow was ruddier, the heavens being darker there except when once or twice they paled with silent lightnings. Sergeant Jim went forward alone and on foot, and presently was back again, whispering to Ferry and remounting.

Ferry led Kendall and me into the woods, the other two remaining. We found rising ground, and had ridden but a few minutes when from its crest we looked upon a startling sight. In front of us was a stretch of specially well farmed land. Our woods swept round it on both sides, crossed a highway, and gradually closed in again so as to terminate the opening about half a mile away. Always the same crops, bottom cause of the war: from us to the road an admirable planting of cotton, and from there to the farther woods as goodly a show of thick corn. The whole acreage swept downward to that terminus, at the same time sinking inward from the two sides. On the highway shone the lighted rear window of a roadside "store," and down the two sides of the whole tract stretched the hundred tent-fires of two brigade camps of the enemy's cavalry. Their new, white canvases were pitched in long, even alleys following the borders of the wood, from which the brush had been cut away far enough for half of them to stand under the trees. The men had quieted down to sleep, but at one tent very near us a group of regimental officers sat in the light of a torch-basket, and by them were planted their colors. A quartet of capital voices were singing, and one who joined the chorus, standing by the flag, absently yet caressingly spread it at such breadth that we easily read on it the name of the command. Let me leave that out.

As they sang, and as we sat in our saddles behind the low fence that ran quite round the opening, Ferry turned from looking across into the lighted window on the road and handed me his field-glass. "How many candles do you see in there?"

I saw two. "Yes," he said, dismounting and motioning me to do the same. Kendall took our bridles. Leaving him with the animals we went over the fence, through the cotton, across the road at a point terribly near the lighted and guarded shop, and on down the field of corn, to and over its farthest fence; stooping, gliding, halting, crouching, in the cotton-rows and corn-rows; taking every posture two upright gentlemen would rather not take; while nevertheless I swelled with pride, to be alone at the side—or even at the heels—of one who, for all this apparent skulking and grovelling, and in despite of all the hidden drawings of his passion for a fair woman at this hour somewhere in peril, kept his straight course in lion-hearted pursuit of his duty (as he saw it) to a whole world of loves and lovers, martyrs and fighters, hosts of whom had as good a right to their heart's desire as I to mine or he to his; and I remembered Charlotte Oliver saying, on her knees, "I believe no beauty and no joy can be perfect apart from a love that loves the whole world's joy better than any separate joy of any separate soul."



XLIII

"YES, AND BACK AGAIN"

One matter of surprise to me was that this whole property had escaped molestation. I wondered who could be so favored by the enemy and yet be so devoted to our cause as to signal us from his window with their sentinels at his doors; and as we passed beyond the cornfield's farther fence I ventured to ask Ferry.

"Aaron Goldschmidt," he whispered, as we descended into a dry, tangled swamp. In the depths of this wild, beside a roofed pen of logs stored with half a dozen bales of cotton, we were presently in the company of a very small man who tossed a hand in token of great amusement.

"Hello, Ned!" he whispered in antic irony; "what an accident is dat, meeding so! Whoever is expecting someding like dis!"

"Well, I hope nobody, Isidore; I hardly expected it myself, your father set those candles so close the one behind the other."

Isidore doubled with mirth and as suddenly straightened. "Your horse is here since yesterday. She left him—by my father. She didn't t'ink t'e Yankees is going to push away out here to-night. But he is a pusher, t'at Grierson! You want him to-night, t'at horse? He is here by me, but I t'ink you best not take him, hmm? To cross t'e creek and go round t'e ot'er way take you more as all night; and to go back t'is same way you come, even if I wrap him up in piece paper you haven't got a lawch insite pocket you can carry him?" He laughed silently and the next instant was more in earnest than ever.

"She is in a tight place! She hires my mother's pony to ride in to headquarters." He called them hatekvartuss, but we need not. "I t'ink she is not a prisoner—unless—she wants to come back." He doubled again. "Anyhow, I wish you can see her to-night; she got another doll-baby for t'e gildren, and she give you waluable informations by de hatfull.... Find her? I tell you how you find her in finfty-nine minutes—vedder permitting, t'at is."

The last phrase was fitted to a listening pose, and the first mutter of the pending thunder-storm came out of the northwest. Then Isidore hastened through the practical details of his proposition. Ferry drew a breath of enthusiasm. "Can I have my horse, bridled and saddled, in three minutes?"

"I pring um in two!" said Isidore, and vanished. Ferry turned with an overmastering joy in every note of his whispered utterance. "After all!" he said, and I could have thrown my arms around him in pure delight to hear duty and heart's desire striking twelve together.

"Smith," he asked, "can you start back without me? Then go at once; I shall overtake you on my horse."

I stole through the cornfield safely; the frequent lightnings were still so well below the zenith as to hide me in a broad confusion of monstrous shadows. But when I came to cross the road no crouching or gliding would do. I must go erect and only at the speed of some ordinary official errand. So I did, at a point between two opposite fence-gaps, closely after an electric gleam, and I was rejoicing in the thick darkness that followed, when all at once the whole landscape shone like day and I stood in the middle of the road, in point-blank view of a small squad, a "visiting patrol". They were trotting toward me in the highway, hardly a hundred yards off. As the darkness came again and the thunder crashed like falling timbers, I started into the cotton-field at an easy double-quick. The hoofs of one horse quickened to a gallop. A strong wind swept over, big rain-drops tapped me on the shoulder and pattered on the cotton-plants, the sound of the horse's galloping ceased as he turned after me in the soft field, and presently came the quiet call "Halt, there, you on foot." I went faster. I knew by my pursuer's coming alone that he did not take me for a Confederate, and that the worst I should get, to begin with, would be the flat of his sabre. Shrewdly loading my tongue with that hard northern r which I hated more than all unrighteousness, I called back "Oh, I'm under orders! go halt some fool who's got time to halt!"

I obliqued as if bound for the headquarters fire where we had seen the singers, the lightning branched over the black sky like tree-roots, the thunder crashed and pounded again, the wind stopped in mid-career, and the rain came straight down in sheets. "Halt!" yelled the horseman. He lifted his blade, but I darted aside and doubled, and as he whirled around after me, another rider, meeting him and reining in at such close quarters that the mud flew over all three of us, lifted his hand and said—

"He is right, sergeant, he is carrying out my orders." Ferry's black silk handkerchief about his neck covered his Confederate bars of rank, and the Federal may or may not have noted the absence of shoulder-straps; our arms remained undrawn; and so the sergeant, catching a breath or two of disconcertion, caught nothing else. While Ferry spoke on for another instant I showed my heels; then he left the dripping Yankee mouthing an angry question and loped after me, and over the low fence went the two of us almost together.

Kendall was not there, the Federal camp-makers had tardily repaired their blunder by posting guards; but these were not looking for their enemies from the side of their own camp, and as we cleared the fence in the full blaze of a lightning flash, only two or three wild shots sang after us. In the black downpour Ferry reached me an invisible hand. I leapt astride his horse's croup, and trusting the good beast to pick his way among the trees himself, we sped away. Soon we came upon our three men waiting with the horses, and no great while afterward the five of us rejoined our command. The storm lulled to mild glimmerings and a gentle shower, and the whole company, in one long single file, began to sweep hurriedly, stealthily, and on a wide circuit of obscurest byways, deeper than ever into the enemy's lines.



XLIV

CHARLOTTE IN THE TENTS OF THE FOE

From certain rank signs of bad management in the Federal camp one could easily guess that our circuit was designed to bring us around to its rear. That a colonel's tent—the one where the singers were—was not where the colonel's tent belonged was a trifle, but the slovenliness with which the forest borders of the camp were guarded was a graver matter. Evidently those troops were at least momentarily in unworthy hands, and I was so remarking to Kendall when a murmured command came back from Ferry, to tell Dick Smith to stop that whispering. I was sorry, for I wanted to add that I knew we were not going to attack the camp itself. That was on Wednesday night. Charlotte and Gholson had made their ride of fifty miles on Monday. The friends with whom she stopped at nightfall contrived to cram him into their crowded soldiers' room, and he had given the whole company of his room-mates, as they sat up in their beds, a full account of the fight at Sessions's, Charlotte's care of the sick and dying, and the singing, by her and the blue-coats, of their battle-song. Next morning Charlotte, without Gholson—who turned off to camp—rode on to Goldschmidt's store, just beyond which there was then still a Confederate picket. Here she hired Mrs. Goldschmidt's pony, rode to the picket, and presented the Coralie Rothvelt pass.

"Miss Coralie Rothvelt; yes, all right," said the officer, "the men that rode with you this morning told me all about you." He went with her as far as his videttes, and thence she rode alone to a picket of the Federal army and by her request was conducted under guard to the headquarters of a corps commander. To him and his chief-of-staff she told the fate of Jewett's scouts and delivered the messages of their dying leader; and then she tendered the hero's sword.

The staff-officer cut away its cornhusk wrapping and read aloud the owner's name on the hilt. The General laid the mighty weapon across his palm and sternly shut his lips. "How did you get through the enemy's pickets with this?"

"I had a Confederate general's pass."

"Ah! Is the Confederate general as nameless as yourself?"

"I am not nameless; I only ask leave to withhold my name until I have told one or two other things."

"But you don't mind confessing you're an out-and-out rebel sympathizer?"

Under the broad-brimmed hat her smile grew to a sparkle. "No, I enjoy it."

The chief-of-staff smiled, but the General darkened and pressed his questions. At length he summed up. "So, then, you wish me to believe that you did all you did, and now have come into our lines at a most extraordinary and exhausting speed and running the ugliest kinds of risks, in mere human sympathy for a dying stranger, he being a Union officer and you a secessionist of"—a courtly bow—"the very elect; that's your meaning, is it not?"

"No, General; in the first place, I am not one of any elect."

A flattering glimmer of amusement came into the two men's faces, but some change in Charlotte's manner arrested it and brought an enhanced deference.

"In the second place, I am not here merely on this errand."

"Oh!"

"No, General. And in the last place, my motive in this errand is no mere sympathy for any one person; I am here from a sense of public duty—" The speaker seemed suddenly overtaken by emotions, dropped her words with pained evenness, and fingered the lace handkerchief in her lap.

"Pardon," interrupted the General, "the sunlight annoys you. Major, will you drop that curtain?" "Thank you. One thing I am here for, General, is to tell you something, and I have to begin by asking that neither of you will ever say how you learned it."

The two men bowed.

"Thank you. Please understand, also, I have never uttered this but to one friend, a lady. There was no need; I have not wanted aid or counsel, even from friends. But I feel duty bound to tell it to you, now, because, for one thing, the brave soldier who wore that sword—" Her eyes rose to the weapon and fell again; she bit her lip.

"Yes—well—what of him?"

"He was lured to disaster and death by a man whose supreme purpose was, and is to-day, revenge upon me. That man drew him to his ruin purely in search of my life." Charlotte sat with her strange in-looking, out-looking gaze holding the gaze of her questioner until for relief he spoke.

"Why, young lady, it's hard to doubt anything you say, but really that sounds rather fanciful. Why should you think it?"

"I do not think it, I know it. He sends me his own assurance of it by his own father, so that his revenge may be fuller by my knowing daily and hourly that he is on my trail."

"And you appeal to me for protection?"

She smiled. "No. I am not seeking to divert his fury from myself, but to confine it to myself. Fancy yourself a human-hearted woman, General, and murder being done day by day because you are alive." "Oh, this is incredible! What is its occasion, its origin? How are you in any way responsible?"

"Why, largely I am not. Yet in degree I am, General, because of shortcomings of mine—faults—errors—that—oh—that have their bearing in the case, don't you see?"

"No, I don't; pray don't ask me to draw inferences; I might infer too much."

"Yes, you might, easily," said Charlotte; "for I only mean shortcomings of the kind we readily excuse in others though we never can or should pardon them in ourselves."

The General turned an arch smile of perplexity upon his chief-of-staff. "I don't think we're quite up to that line of perpetual snow, Walter, are we?"

The chief-of-staff "guessed they were not."

Charlotte resumed. "I have come to you in the common interest, to warn you against that man. I believe he is on his way here to offer his services as a guide. He is fearless, untiring, and knows all this region by heart."

"Union man, I take it, is he not?"

"No, he's Federal, Confederate or guerilla as it may suit his bloody ends."

"And you want me not to make use of him."

"Oh, more than that; I want him stopped!—stopped from killing and burning on his and my private account. But I want much more than that, too. I know how you commonly stop such men."

"We hang them to the first tree."

"Yes, our side does the same. If I wanted such a fate to overtake him I should only have to let him alone. At risks too hideous to name I have saved him from it twice. I am here to-day chiefly to circumvent his purposes; but if I may do so in the way I wish to propose to you, I shall also save him once more. I am willing to save him—in that way—although by so doing I shall lose—fearfully." She dropped her glance and turned aside.

"How do you propose to circumvent and yet save him?"

"By getting you to send him so far to your own army's rear that he cannot get back; to compel him to leave the country; to go into your country, where law and order reign as they cannot here between the lines."

"And you consider that a reasonable request?"

"Oh, sir, I must make it! I can ask no less!"

"But you say if this scheme works you lose by it. What will you lose?"

"I may lose track of him! If I lose track of him I may have to go through a long life not knowing whether he is dead or alive."

"And suppose—why,—young lady, I thought you were unmarried. I—oh, what do you mean; is he—?"

Charlotte's head drooped and her hands trembled. "Yes, by law and church decree he is my husband."

"Good Heaven!" murmured the General, drew a breath, and folded his arms. "But, madam! if a man abandons his wife—"

"I abandoned him."

"Good for you!" "It was vital for me. But I did it on evidence which our laws ignore, the testimony of slaves. Oh, General, don't try to untangle me; only stop him!"

"Ah! madam, I'll do the little I can. How am I to know him?"

"By a pistol-wound in his right hand, got last week. He would have got it in his brain but for my pleading. His name is Oliver."

"Oliver; hmm! any relation to Charlotte Oliver, your so called newspaper correspondent? I'd like to stop her.—How?—I don't quite hear you."

"I am Charlotte Oliver."

The two officers glanced sharply at each other. When the General turned again he flushed resentfully. "Have you never resumed your maiden name?"

"Never."

"Then, madam, tell me this! With a whole world of other people's names to choose from, why have you borrowed Charlotte Oliver's? Have you come here determined to be sent to prison, Miss Coralie Rothvelt?"



XLV

STAY TILL TO-MORROW

Charlotte did not move an eyelash. Gradually a happy confidence lighted her face. "Freedom or prison is to me a secondary question. I came here determined to use only the truth. No wild creature loves to be free more than I do. I want to go back into our lines, and to go at once; but—I am Charlotte Oliver."

"Young lady, listen to me. I know your story is nearly all true. I know some good things about you which you have modestly left out; one of the rebels who stopped where you did last night and rode with you this morning was brought to me a prisoner half an hour ago. But he said your name was Rothvelt. How's that?"

"Unfortunately, General, my name is Charlotte Oliver. Two or three times I have had use for so much concealment as there was in the childish prank of turning my name wrong side out." The speaker made a sign to the chief-of-staff: "Write the two names side by side and see if they are not one."

He was already doing so, and nodded laughingly to his superior. Charlotte spoke on. "I tell you the truth only, gentlemen, though I tell you no more of it than I must. I have run many a risk to get the truth, and to get it early. If it is your suspicion that by so doing, or in any other way, I have forfeited a lady's liberty, let me hear and answer. If not—"

"Oh, I'll have to send you to the provost-martial at Baton Rouge and let you settle that with him."

"Ah, no, General! By the name of the lady you love best, I beg you to see my need and let me go. I promise you never henceforth to offend your cause except in that mere woman's sympathy with what you call rebellion, for which women are not so much as banished by you—or if they are, then banish me! Treat me no better, and no worse, than a 'registered enemy'!"

The General shook his head. "Your registration has been in the open field of military action; sometimes, I fear, between the lines. At least it has been with your pen."

"General, I have laid down the pen."

"Indeed! to take up what?"

"The spoon!" said Charlotte, with that smile which no man ever wholly resisted. "I leave the sword and its questions to my brother man, in the blue and in the gray—God save it!—and have pledged myself to the gray, to work from now on only under the yellow flag of mercy and healing."

"Yes, of course; mercy—and comfort—and every sort of unarmed aid—to rebels."

"To the men you call so, yes. Yet I pledge you, General, to deal as tenderly with every man in blue who comes within range of my care as I did with Captain Jewett."

"Oh, I know you did even better than you've told me, but I'd be a fool to send you back on the instant, so. Stay till to-morrow or next day." The captor smiled. "Major, I think we owe the lady that much hospitality."

The Major thought so, and that she must need a day's rest, more than she realized. She could be made in every way comfortable—under guard at "Mr. Gilmer's." The Gilmers were Unionists, whose fine character had been their only protection through two years of ostracism, yet he believed they would treat her well. "Oh! not there, please," said Charlotte; "I hear they are to give some of your officers a dance to-morrow evening!" and there followed a parley that called forth all her playfullest tact. "Oh, no," she said, at one critical point, "I'm not so narrow or sour but I could dance with a blue uniform; but suppose—why, suppose one's friends in gray should catch one dancing with one's enemies in blue. Such things have happened, you know."

"It sha'n't happen to-morrow night," laughed the General.

She offered to nurse the Federal sick, instead, in the command's field-hospital, but no, the General rose to end the interview. "My dear young lady, the saintliest thing we can let you do is to dance at that merrymaking."

She rose. "As a prisoner under guard, General, I can nurse the sick, but I will not dance."

The General smiled. "I'll take your parole."

"Oh! exact a parole from a woman?"

"Good gracious, why shouldn't I! As for you,—ha!—I'd as soon turn a commissioned rebel officer loose in my camp unparoled as you."

"Then take my parole! I give it! you have it! I'll take the chances."

"And the dances?" asked the Major.

"Very good," said the General, "you are now on parole. See the lady conducted to Squire Gilmer's, Major. And now, Miss—eh,—day after to-morrow morning I shall either pass you beyond my lines or else send you to Baton Rouge. Good-day." When Charlotte found herself alone in a room of the Gilmer house she lay down upon the bed staring and sighing with dismay; she was bound by a parole! If within its limit of time Oliver should appear, "It will mean Baton Rouge for me!" she cried under her breath, starting up and falling back again; "Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Ship Island!" She was in as feminine a fright as though she had never braved a danger. Suddenly a new distress overwhelmed her: if—if—someone to deliver her should come—"Oh Heaven! I am paroled!—bound hand and foot by my insane parole!"

Softly she sprang from the bed, paced the floor, went to the window, seemed to look out upon the landscape; but in truth she was looking in upon herself. There she saw a most unaccountable tendency for her judgment—after some long overstrain—momentarily, but all at once, to swoon, collapse, turn upside down like a boy's kite and dart to earth; an impulse—while fancying she was playing the supremely courageous or generous or clever part—suddenly to surrender the key of the situation, the vital point in whatever she might be striving for. "Ah me, ah me! why did I give my parole?"

At the close of the next day—"Walter," said the General as the chief-of-staff entered his tent glittering in blue and gold,—"oh, thud devil!—you going to that dance?"



XLVI

THE DANCE AT GILMER'S

All the while that I recount these scenes there come to me soft orchestrations of the old tunes that belonged with them. I am thinking of one just now; a mere potsherd of plantation-fiddler's folk-music which I heard first—and last—in the dance at Gilmer's. Indeed no other so widely recalls to me those whole years of disaster and chaos; the daily shock of their news, crashing in upon the brain like a shell into a roof; wail and huzza, camp-fire, litter and grave; battlefield stench; fiddle and flame; and ever in the midst these impromptu merrymakings to keep us from going stark mad, one and all,—as so many literally did.

The Gilmer daughters were fair, but they were only three, and the Gilmers were the sole Unionists in their neighborhood. "Still, a few girls will come," said Charlotte, sparkling first blue and then black at a sparkling captain who said that, after all, the chief-of-staff had decided he couldn't attend. I know she sparkled first blue and then black, for she always did so when she told of it in later days.

"They say," responded the captain, "that in this handy little world there are always a few to whom policy is the best honesty; is that the few who will come?"

"You are cynical," said Charlotte, "this is only their unarmed way of saving house and home for the brothers to come back to when you are purged out of the land."

When the time came there were partners for eight gallants, and the gallants numbered sixteen. They counted off by twos; the evens waited while the odds danced the half of each set, and then the odds waited and cooled, tried to cool, out on the veranda. But when a reel was called the whole twenty-four danced together, while the fiddler (from the contraband camp) improvised exultant words to his electrifying tunes.

"O ladies ramble in, Whilst de beaux ramble out, For to guile[1] dat golden cha—ain. My Lawdy! it's a sin Fo' a fiddleh not to shout! Miss Charlotte's a-comin' down de la—ane!"

[Footnote 1: Coil.]

Now the dance is off, but now it is on again, and again. The fiddler toils to finer and finer heights of enthusiasm; slippers twinkle, top-boots flash, the evens come in (to the waltz) and the odds, out on the veranda, tell one another confidentially how damp they are. Was ever an evening so smotheringly hot! Through the house-grove, where the darkness grows blacker and blacker and the tepid air more and more breathless, they peer toward the hitching-rail crowded with their horses. Shall they take their saddles in, or shall they let them get wet for fear the rebels may come with the shower, as toads do? [Laughter.] One or two, who grope out to the animals, report only a lovely picture: the glowing windows; the waltzers circling by them; in the dining-room, and across the yard in the kitchen, the house-servants darting to and fro as busy as cannoneers; on their elbows at every windowsill, and on their haunches at every door, the squalid field-hands making grotesque silhouettes against the yellow glow that streamed out into the trees.

Now the lightning seems nearer. Hark, that was thunder; soft, but real. At last the air moves; there is a breeze, and the girls come out on the gallants' arms to drink it in. As they lift their brows and sigh their comfort the lightning grows brighter, the thunder comes more promptly and louder, and the maidens flinch and half scream, yet linger for one more draft of the blessed coolness. Suddenly an inverted tree of blinding light branches down the sky, and the thunder crashes in one's very ears; the couples recoil into a group at the door, the lightning again fills heaven and earth, it shows the bending trees far afield, and the thunders peal at each other as if here were all Vicksburg and Port Hudson, with Porter and Farragut going by. So for a space; then the wind drops to a zephyr, and though the sky still blazes and crashes, and flames and roars, the house purrs with content under the sweet strokings of the rain.

Let it pour! the dining-room is the centre of all things; the ladies sip the custards and nibble the cake the gallants cram the cake and gulp the punch. The fiddler-improvisator disappears, reappears, and with crumbs on his breast and pan-gravy and punch on his breath remounts his seat; and the couples are again on the floor. The departing thunders grumble as they go, the rain falls more and more sparingly, and now it is a waltz, and now a quadrille, and now it's a reel again, with Miss Sallie or Louise or Laura or Lucille or Miss Flora "a-comin' down de lane!"

So come the stars again, one by one. In a pause between dances Charlotte and the staff captain go to the veranda's far end and stand against the rail. The night is still very dark, the air motionless. Charlotte is remarking how far they can hear the dripping of the grove, when she gives a start and the captain an amused grunt; a soft, heart-broken, ear-searching quaver comes from just over yonder by the horses. "One of those pesky little screech-owls," he says. "Don't know as I ever heard one before under just these condi'—humph! there's another, around on this side."

"I think I will go in," says Charlotte, with a pretence of languor. As they do so the same note sounds a third time; her pace quickens, and in passing a bright window, with a woman's protecting impulse she changes from his left arm to his right so as to be on the side next the owls. A moment later she is alone in the middle of her room, a lighted candle in one hand, a regally dressed doll in the other, and in her heart the cry, "Oh, Edgard, Edgard, my parole, my parole!"

Once more she is downstairs, in the lane which the dancers are making for their last reel. Two of the gallants have gone out to see the horses, and something keeps them, but there is no need to wait. The fiddle rings a chord! the merry double line straightens down the hall from front door to rear, bang! says the fiddler's foot—"hands round!"—and hands round it is! In the first of the evening they had been obliged to tell the fiddler the names of the dancers, but now he knows them all and throws off his flattering personalities and his overworked rhymes with an impartial rotation and unflagging ardor. Once in a while some one privately gives him a new nickname for the next man "a-comin' down de lane," and as he yawps it out the whole dance gathers new mirth and speed.

Now the third couple clasp hands, arch arms, and let the whole countermarching train sweep through; and a beautiful arch they make, for they are the aforesaid captain and Charlotte Oliver. "Hands round!"—hurrah for the whirling ellipse; and now it's "right and left" and two ellipses glide opposite ways, "to quile dat golden chain." In the midst of the whirl, when every hand is in some other and men and girls are tossing their heads to get their locks out of their eyes, at the windows come unnoticed changes and two men loiter in by the front hall door, close to the fiddler. One has his sword on, and each his pistols, and their boots and mud-splashed uniforms of dubious blue are wet and steamy. The one without the sword gives the fiddler a fresh name to sing out when the spinning ring shall straighten into its two gay ranks again, and bids him—commandingly—to yell it; and with never a suspicion of what it stands for, the stamping and scraping fiddler shouts the name of a man who "loves a good story with a positive passion."

"Come a-left, come a-right, Come yo' lily-white hand, Fo' to quile dat golden cha—ain. O ladies caper light— Sweetest ladies in de land— NED FERRY's a-comin' down de la—ane!"



XLVII

HE'S DEAD.—IS SHE ALIVE?

Cries of masculine anger and feminine affright filled the hall, but one ringing order for silence hushed all, and the dance stood still with Ned Ferry in its centre. In his right hand, shoulder high, he held not his sword, but Charlotte's fingers lightly poised for the turn in the arrested dance. "Stand, gentlemen, every man is covered by two; look at the doors; look at the windows." The staff captain daringly sprang for the front door, but Ferry's quick boot caught his instep and he struck the floor full length. Like lightning Ferry's sword was out, but he only gave it a deferential sweep. "Sir! better luck next time!—Lieutenant Quinn, put the Captain in your front rank."

Quinn hustled the captives "down a lane," as the fiddler might have said, of Ferry's scouts, mounted them on their own horses at the door, and hurried them away. Charlotte had vanished but was back again in hat and riding-skirt. Ferry caught her hand and they ran to the front veranda steps just as the prisoners and guard rode swiftly from them. Kendall and I had the stirrup ready for her; the saddle was a man's, but she made a horn of its pommel, and in a flash the four of us were mounted. Nevertheless before we could move the grove resounded with shots, and Ferry, bidding us ride on after the fleeing guard, wheeled and galloped to where half our troop were holding back their assailants in the dark. But then, to our distraction, Charlotte would not fly. "Richard, I'm paroled!"—"Charlotte Oliver, you're my prisoner!" I reached for her bridle, but she avoided me and with a cry of recollection wheeled and was on her way back. "I forgot something! I can get it, I left the room lighted!"

I remember vividly yet the high purpose and girlish propitiation that rang together in her voice. Kendall dashed after her while I went against a wet bough that all but threw me; but before he could reach her she flew up the steps, crying "Hold my horse!"

"Mine, too!" I cried, springing up after her. How queerly the inner house stood alight and silent, its guests and inmates hidden, while outside pistols and carbines flashed and cracked. I came upon Charlotte, just recrossing her chamber to leave it, with her doll in her arms. "Come!" I cried, "our line is falling back behind the house!" Her head flinched aside, a bit of her hat flew from it, and a pistol-ball buried itself in the ceiling straight over my head. We ran downstairs together, pulling, pushing and imploring each other in the name of honor, duty and heaven to let him—let her—go out first through the bright hall door. Kendall was not in sight, but in a dim half-light a few yards off we saw Oliver. He was afoot, bending low, and gliding toward us with his revolver in his left hand. He fired as I did; her clutch spoiled my aim; with eager eyes she straightened to her finest height, cried "Richard! tell Lieutenant Ferry he—" and with a long sigh sank into my arms. A rush of hoofs sounded behind Oliver, he glanced up, and Ferry's blade fell across his brow and launched him face upward to the ground. I saw a bunch of horses, with mine, at the foot of the steps, and a bunch of men at the top; Ferry snatched Charlotte's limp form from me and said over his shoulder as he went down the steps, "Go get him and bring him along, dead or alive!"

I called a man to my aid and was unlucky in not getting the cool-headed Kendall, for my own wits were gone. The next moment all had left us and I was down on the ground toiling frantically, with no help but one hand of my mounted companion, to heave the stalwart frame of Oliver up to my saddle.

"Why, he's dead!" cried the lad, letting him slide half-way down when we had all but got him up; "don't you see he's dead? His head's laid wide open! He's as dead as a mackerel! I'll swear we ain't got any right to get captured trying to save a dead Yankee."

I was in despair; our horses had caught our frenzy and were plunging to be after their fellows, and a fresh body of the enemy were hurtling into the grove. Dropping my burden I vaulted up, and we scurried away, saved only by the enemy's healthy fear of an ambush. The first man we came up with was Quinn, with the rear-guard. "Is he dead?" he growled.

"Dead as Adam!" said I, and my comrade put in "Head laid wide open!"

"Drop back into the ranks," said Quinn to him. "Smith, ride on to Lieutenant Ferry. Corporal,"—to a man near him—"you know the way so well, go with him."

The two of us sprang forward. How long or what way we went I have now no clear idea, but at length we neared again the grapevine ferry. The stream was swollen, we swam our horses, and on the farther side we found Kendall waiting. To the corporal's inquiry he replied that Ferry had just passed on. "You know Roy's; two miles off the Plank Road by the first right? He expects to stop there."

"Is she alive, Kendall?" I interrupted. "Is she alive?"

"No," said he, to some further question of the corporal; "I'm to wait here for the command."

"Is she alive, Kendall?" I asked again.

"Hello, Smith." He scanned my dripping horse. "Your saddle's slipped, Smith. Yes, she's alive."



XLVIII

IN THE HOLLOW OF HIS RIGHT ARM

"There they are!" said the corporal and I at the same moment, when we had been but a few minutes on the Plank-road. Two men were ahead of us riding abreast, and a few rods in front of them was a third horseman, apparently alone. Two others had pushed on, one to the house, the other for surgical aid. The two in the rear knew us and let us come up unchallenged; the corporal stayed with them, and I rode on to my leader's side.

Charlotte lay in his double clasp balanced so lightly on the horse's crest as hardly to feel the jar of his motion, though her head lay as nearly level with it as Ferry's bending shoulders and the hollow of his lowered right arm would allow; from under his other arm her relaxed figure, in its long riding-skirt, trailed down over his knee and stirrup; her broad limp hat, as if it had been so placed in sport, hung at his back with its tie-ribbons round his throat, while the black masses of her hair spread in ravishing desolation over and under his supporting arm. Her face was fearfully pale, the brows glistened with the damp of nervous shock, and every few moments she feebly brought a handkerchief to her lips to wipe away the blood that rose to them with every sigh. Steadfastly, except when her eyes closed now and then in deathly exhaustion, her gaze melted into his like a suffering babe's into its mother's. From time to time a brief word passed between them, and with joy I noticed that it was always in French; I hoped with my whole heart and soul that they had already said things, and were saying things yet, which no one else ought to hear. I waited some time for his notice, and when he gave it it was only by saying to her in a full voice and in English "Dick Smith is here, alongside of us."

Her response was a question, which he repeated: "Is he hurt? no, Richard never gets hurt. Shall he tell us whatever he knows?"

He bent low for the faint reply, and when it came he sparkled with pride. "'It matters little,' she says, 'to either of us, now.' Give your report; but I tell you"—there came a tiger look in his eyes—"there is now no turning back; we shall go on." I answered with soft elation: "My news needn't turn you back: Oliver is dead."

He drew a long breath, murmured "My God!" and then suddenly asked "You found him so, or—?"

"We found him so; had to leave him so; head laid wide open; we were about to be captured—thought the news would be better than nothing—"

"Certainly, yes, certainly. Now I want you to ride to the brigade camp and telegraph Miss Harper this: 'She needs you. Come instantly. Durand.'"—I repeated it to him.—"Right," he said. "Send that first; and after that—here is a military secret for you to tell to General Austin; I think you like that kind, eh? Tell him I would not send it verbally if I had my hands free. You know that regiment at whose headquarters we saw them singing; well, tell him they are to make a move to-day, a bad mistake, and I think if he will stay right there where he is till they make it, we can catch the whole lot of them. As soon as they move I shall report to him."

Two gasping words from Charlotte brought his ear down, and with a worshipping light in his eyes he said to her "Yes,—yes!" and then to me, "Yes, I shall report to him in person. Now, Smith, the top of your speed!"

Reveille was sounding as I entered the camp. In the middle of my story to the General—"Saddle my horse," he said to an attendant, "and send Mr. Gholson to me. Yes, Smith, well, what then?"—I resumed, but in a minute—"Mr. Gholson, good-morning. My compliments to Major Harper, Mr. Gholson, and ask him if he wouldn't like to take a ride with me; and let me have about four couriers; and send word to Colonel Dismukes that I shall call at his headquarters to see him a moment, on my way out of camp. Now, Smith, you've given me the gist of the matter, haven't you? Oh, I think you have; good-morning."

Gholson had helped me get the despatch off to Miss Harper, whose coming no one could be more eager to hasten. Before leaving camp I saw him again. He was strangely reticent; my news seemed to benumb and sicken him. But as I remounted he began without connection—"You see, she'll be absolutely alone until Miss Harper gets there; not a friend within call! He won't be there, she won't let him stay; she dislikes him too much; I know that, Smith. Why, Smith, she wouldn't ever 'a' let him carry her off the field if she'd been conscious; she'd sooner 'a' gone to Ship Island, or to death!" He looked as though he would rather she had. His tongue, now it had started, could not stop. "Ned Ferry can't stay by her; he mustn't! he hadn't ought to use around anywheres near her."

I gave a sort of assent—attended with nausea—and turned to my saddle, but he clung. "Why, how can he hang around that way, Smith, and he a suitor who's just killed her husband? Of course, now, he'd ought to know he can't ever be one henceforth. I'm sorry for him, but—"

"Good-morning," I interrupted, quite in the General's manner, and made a spirited exit, but it proved a false one; one thing had to be said, and I returned. "Gholson, if she should be worse hurt than—" "Ah! you're thinking of the chaplain; I've already sent him. Yonder he goes, now; you can show him the way."

"Understand," I said as I wheeled, "I fully expect her to recover."

"Yes, oh, yes!" replied my co-religionist, with feverish zest; "we must have faith—for her sake! But o—oh! Smith, what a chastening judgment this is against dancing!"

I moved away, looking back at him, and seeing by his starved look how he was racking his jaded brain for some excuse to go with me, I honestly believe I was sorry for him. The chaplain was a thick-set, clean-shaven, politic little fellow whose "Good-mawning, brothah?" had the heavy sweetness of perfumed lard. We conversed fluently on spiritual matters and also on Ned Ferry. He asked me if the Lieutenant was "a believer."

"Why," said I, "as to that, Lieutenant Ferry believes there's something right about everything that's beautiful, and something wrong about everything that isn't. Now, of course that's a very dangerous idea, and yet—" So I went on; ah me! the nightmare of it hangs over me yet, "religionist" though I am, after a fashion, unto this day. In Ferry's defence I maintained that only so much of any man's religion as fitted him, and fitted him not as his saddle or his clothes, but as his nervous system fitted him, was really his, or was really religion. I said I knew a man whose ready-made religion, small as it was, bagged all over him and made him as grotesque as a child in his father's trousers. The chaplain tittered so approvingly that I straightened to spout again, but just then we saw three distant figures that I knew at a glance.

"There he is, now!—Excuse me, sir—" I clapped in the spurs, but the chaplain clattered stoutly after me. The two horsemen moving from us were the General and Major Harper, and the one meeting them was Ned Ferry. Between the three and us rose out of a hollow the squad of couriers. And yonder came the sun.



XLIX

A CRUEL BOOK AND A FOOL OR TWO

I could see by Ferry's face that there was no worse news. He met me aside, and privately bade me go to Roy's (where Charlotte was). "Kendall is there," he said; "I leave you and him in charge. That will rest your horses. Kendall has your Yankee horse, his own is sick. You and Kendall get all the sleep you can, you may get none to-night."

"Lieutenant," I began eagerly as he was drawing away, "is—?"

"Yes! oh, yes, yes!" His eyes danced, and a soft laugh came, as happy as a child's. "The surgeon is yonder, he will tell you."

This person Kendall and I had the luck to meet at the Roy's breakfast-table. "Yes, left lung," he said. "No, hardly 'perforated,' but the top deeply grazed." The ball, he said, had passed on and out, and he went into particulars with me, while I wondered if Kendall knew, as I did, what parts of the body the pleura, the thorax, the clavicle and the pyemia were.

We lay down to sleep on some fodder in the Widow Roy's stable, while around three sides of the place, in a deep wooded hollow, Quinn and the company, well guarded by hidden videttes, drowsed in secret bivouac. I dreamed. I had feared I should, and it would have been a sort of bitter heart's-ease to tell Kendall of my own particular haunting trouble. For now, peril and darkness, storm, hard riding, the uproar and rage of man-killing, all past and gone, my special private wretchedness came back to me bigger than ever, like a neglected wound stiffened and swollen as it has grown cold. But Kendall would not talk, and when I dreamed, my dream was not of Camille. It seemed to me there was a hot fight on at the front, and that I, in a sweat of terror, was at the rear, hiding among the wagons and telling Gholson pale-faced lies as to why I was there. All at once Gholson became Oliver, alive, bloody-handed, glaring on me spectrally, cursing, threatening, and demanding his wife. His head seemed not "laid wide open," but to have only a streak of the skull bared by Ferry's glancing left-cut and a strip of the scalp turned inside out. Cecile drew his head down and showed it to me, in a transport of reproaches, as though my false report had wronged no one else so ruinously as her.

I awoke aghast. If Kendall had still been with me I might, in the first flush of my distress, have told my vision; but in the place where Kendall had lain lay Harry Helm. Kendall was gone; a long beam of afternoon sunlight shone across my lair through a chink in the log stable. I sprang half up with an exclamation, and Harry awoke with a luxurious yawn and smile. Kendall, he said, had left with the company, which had marched. Quinn was in command and had told Harry that he was only going to show the enemy that there was no other hostile force in their front, and get himself chased away southeastward.

"I don't know whether he was telling me the truth or not," said Helm, as we led our saddled horses toward the house; "I reckon he didn't want me alongside of him with this arm in a sling." The hand was bad; lines of pain were on the aide's face. He had taken the dead Louisianian home, got back to camp, and ridden down here to get the latest news concerning Charlotte. Kendall had already given him our story of the night; I had to answer only one inquiry. "Oh, yes," was my reply, "head laid wide open!" But to think of my next meeting with Ned Ferry almost made me sick.

Harry was delighted. "That lays their way wide open—Ned's and hers! Smith, some God-forsaken fool brought a chaplain here to talk religion to her! He hasn't seen her—Doctor wouldn't let him; but he's here yet, and—George! if I was them I'd put him to a better use than what he came here for, and I'd do it so quick it would make his head swim!" He went on into all the arguments for it; the awkwardnesses of Charlotte's new situation, her lack of means for even a hand-to-mouth daily existence, and so on. Seeing an ambulance coming in through the front gate, and in order not to lose the chance for my rejoinder, I interrupted. "Lieutenant, she will not allow it! She will make him wait a proper time before he may as much as begin a courtship, and then he will have to begin at the beginning. She's not going to let Ned Ferry narrow or lower her life or his—no, neither of them is going to let the other do it—because a piece of luck has laid the way wide open!" I ended with a pomp of prophecy, yet I could hear Ned Ferry saying again, with Charlotte's assenting eyes in his, "There is no turning back."

The driver of the ambulance did not know why he had been ordered to report here, but when the Widow Roy came to the door she brought explanation enough. A courier had come to her and gone again, and the chaplain and the surgeon and every one else of any "army sort" except us two had "put out," and she was in a sad flurry. "The Lieutenant," she said, "writes in this-yeh note that this-yeh place won't be safe f'om the Yankees much longer'n to-day, and fo' us to send the wounded lady in the avalanch. Which she says, her own self, it'd go rough with her to fall into they hands again. My married daughter she's a-goin' with her, and the'd ought to be a Mr. Sm'—oh, my Lawdy! you ain't reg-lahly in the ahmy, air you?"

With some slave men to help us, Harry and I bore Charlotte out and laid her in the ambulance, mattress and all, on an under bedding of fodder. She had begged off from opiates, and was as full of the old starlight as if the day, still strong, were gone. I helped the married daughter up beside the driver, Harry and I mounted, and we set forth for the brigade camp. Mrs. Roy's daughter had with her a new romance, which she had been reading to Charlotte. Now she was eager to resume it, and Charlotte consented. It was a work of some merit; I have the volume yet, inscribed to me on the fly-leaf "from C.O.," as I have once already stated, in my account of my friend "The Solitary." At the end of a mile we made a change; Harry rode a few yards ahead with an officer who happened to overtake us, I took the reins from the ambulance driver, and he followed on my horse; I thought I could drive more smoothly than he.

And so I began to hear the tale. I was startled by its strong reminder of Charlotte's own life; but Charlotte answered my anxious glance with a brow so unfretted that I let the reading go on, and so made a cruel mistake. At every turning-point in the story its reader would have paused to talk it over, but Charlotte, with a steadily darkling brow, murmured each time "Go on," and I was silent, hoping that farther along there would be a better place to stop for good. Not so; the story's whirling flood swept us forward to a juncture ever drawing nearer and clearer, clearer and crueler, where a certain man would have to choose between the woman he loved and that breadth and fruitfulness of life to which his splendid gifts imperiously pointed him. Oh, you story-tellers! Every next page put the question plainer, drove the iron deeper: must a man, or even may a man, wed his love, when she stands between him and his truest career, a drawback and drag upon his finest service to his race and day? And, oh, me! who let my eye quail when Charlotte searched it, as though her own case had brought that question to me before ever we had seen this book. And, oh, that impenetrable woman reading! Her husband was in Lee's army, out of which, she boasted, she would steal him in a minute if she could. She was with us, now, only because, at whatever cost to others, she was going where no advancement of the enemy's lines could shut her off from him; and so stop reading a moment she must, to declare her choice for Love as against all the careers on earth, and to put that choice fairly to shame by the unworthiness of her pleadings in its defence. I intervened; I put her grovelling arguments aside and thrust better ones in, for the same choice, and then, in the fear that they were not enough, stumbled into special pleading and protested that the book itself had put the question unfairly.

"Shut it," said Charlotte, with a sigh like that which had risen when the lead first struck her. "If I could be moved ever so little,—" she said.

I had the driver tie my horse behind the vehicle and resume the lines. Then the soldier's wife and I moved Charlotte, and when the reader began to handle the book again wishfully our patient said, with the kindest voice, "Read the rest of it to yourself; I know how it will end; it will end to please you, not as it ought; not as it ought."

For a while we went in silence, and she must have seen that my heart was in a rage, for with suffering on her brow, amusement on her lips, and a sweet desperation in her eyes, she murmured my name. "Richard:—what fun it must have been to live in those old Dark Ages—when all you had to do—was to turn any one passion into—one splendid virtue—at the expense—of all the rest."

I could answer pleadingly that it were far better not to talk now. But she would go on, until in my helplessness I remarked how beautiful the day had been. Her eyes changed; she looked into mine with her calm inward-outward ken, and once more with smiling lips and suffering brow murmured, "Yes." I marvelled she should betray such wealth of meaning to such as I; yet it was like her splendid bravery to do it.

At the brigade's picket, where I was angry that Ferry did not meet us, and had resumed the saddle and stretched all the curtains of the ambulance, who should appear but Scott Gholson. Harry and I were riding abreast in advance of the ambulance. Gholson and he barely said good-evening. I asked him where was Lieutenant Ferry, and scarcely noted his words, so promptly convinced was I by their mere tone that he had somehow contrived to get Ferry sent on a distant errand. "Is she better?" he inquired; "has the hemorrhage stopped?"

"It's begun again," growled Harry, who wanted both of us to suffer all we could. Gholson led us through the camp. A large proportion of the men were sleeping when as yet it was hardly night.

"Has the brigade got marching orders?" I asked, and he said the three regiments had, though not the battery. He passed over to me two pint bottles filled, corked, and dangling from his fingers by a stout double twine on the neck of each. "Every man has them," he said; "hang one on each side of your belt in front of your pistol."

I held them up and scowled from them to Harry, and we both laughed, so transparent was Gholson's purpose to get every one away from our patient who yearned to be near her. "One in front of each pistol," I said, so tying them; "but use the pistols first, I suppose."

"Yes," replied Gholson, "pistols first, and then the turpentine." Whereat Harry and I exchanged glances again, it came so pat that Scott Gholson should be a dispenser of inflammables. At a house a mile behind the camp the surgeon stood waiting for us. He frowned at me the instant he saw Charlotte, and I heard him swear. As we bore her in with Gholson and me next her head she murmured to him:

"Mr. Gholson, when does the command move?"

"At twelve," he replied, and I bent and softly added "That's why—"

"Yes," she said, with a quick, understanding look, and wiped her lips as daintily as if it were with wine they were crimsoned.



L

THE BOTTOM OF THE WHIRLWIND

On my way back through camp with Gholson I saw old Dismukes. He called me to him, quit his cards, and led me into his tent. There, very beguilingly, he questioned me at much length, evidently seeking to draw from the web of my replies the thread of Ferry's and Charlotte's story; and as I saw that he believed in both of them with all his brutal might, I let him win a certain success. "Head laid wide open!" he said gleefully, and boiled over with happy blasphemings.

I left him, found supper, and had been long asleep tinder a tree, when I grabbed savagely at some one for silently shaking me, and found it was Ned Ferry. His horse's bridle was in his hand; his face was more filled with the old pain than I had ever seen it; he spoke low and hurriedly. "Come, tell me what this means."

In an envelope addressed to him in the handwriting I had first seen at Lucius Oliver's I found a scripture-text, a heading torn from a tract which the chaplain may have sent in to Charlotte in the morning. I turned it to the light of my fire. Under this printed line she had pencilled her name.

I asked if he had seen her. "Ah, no! the Doctor has drugged her to sleep; but that woman who came with you was still in the parlor, reading a book, and she gave me this. What does it mean?"

"Lieutenant," I replied, choking with dismay, "why mind her meanings now? Ought you not rather to ignore them? She is fevered, dejected, overwrought. Why, sir, she is the very woman to say and mean things now which she would never say or mean at any other time!" But my tone must have shown that I was only groping in desperation after anything plausible, and he waved my suggestions away.

"The Doctor says that woman has been reading her an exciting story."

"Yes, and that helps to account—"

"Richard, it helps the wrong way; I know that story. After hearing that story she is, yes! the one woman of all women to send me this."

I took it again. The signature was extended in full, with the surname blackly underlined. The first clause of the print, too, was so treated. "Keep thy heart," it read; "Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.—Charlotte Oliver."

"Why, Lieutenant, that is just what you have done—"

"You think so? But I have done. I will keep it no longer! Ah, I never kept it; 'twas she! Without taking it from me she kept it—'with all diligence'; otherwise I should have lost it—and her, too—and all that is finest and hardest to keep—long ago. Give me that paper; come; saddle up; you may go with me if you want, as my courier." No bugle had sounded, yet the whole camp was softly and diligently astir. We rode toward the staff tents; the pulse of enterprise enlivened him once more, though he clung to the same theme. "I have her heart now, Smith, and I will keep that with all diligence, for out of that are the issues of my life—if I live. And if I do live I will have her if I have to steal her even from herself, as last night from the Yankees."

Three hours later the stars still gleamed down through the balmy night above the long westward-galloping column of our brigade, that for those three hours had not slackened from the one unmitigated speed. The Federal regiment of whose plans Charlotte had apprised Ferry had been camped well to southward of this course, but in the day just past they had marched to the north, intending a raid around our right and into our rear. To-night they were resting in a wide natural meadow through the middle of which ran this road we were on. Around the southern edge of this inviting camp-ground by a considerable stream of water; the northern side was on rising ground and skirted by woods, and in these woods as day began to break stood our brigade, its presence utterly unsuspected in all that beautiful meadow whitened over with lane upon lane of the tents of the regiment of Federal cavalry, whose pickets we had already silently surprised and captured. Now, as warily as quails, we moved along an unused, woodcutters' road and began to trot up a gentle slope beyond whose crest the forest sank to the meadow. We were within a few yards of this crest, when a small mounted patrol came up from the other side, stood an instant profiled against the sky, bent low, gazed, wheeled and vanished.

Over the crest we swept after them at a gallop and saw them half-way down an even incline, going at a mad run and yelling "Saddle up! saddle up! the rebels are coming! saddle up!" The bugles had begun the reveille; it ceased, and the next instant they were sounding the call To Arms. It was only a call to death; already we were half across the short decline and coming like a tornado; in the white camp the bluecoats were running hither and yon deaf to the brave shoutings of their captains; above the swelling thunder of our hoofs rose the mad yell of the onset; and now carbines peal and pistols crack, and here are the tents so close you may touch them, and yonder is one already in a light blaze, and at every hand and under every horse's foot is the crouching, quailing, falling foe, the air is one crash of huzzas and groans, screams, shots and commands, horses with riders and horses without plunge through the flames and smoke of the burning tents, and again and again I see Ned Ferry with the flat of his unstained sword strike pistol or carbine from hands too brave to cast them tamely down, and hear him cry "Throw down your arms! For God's sake throw down your arms and run to the road! run to the public road!"

And still every moment men fell, and what could we do but smite while the foe's bugles still rang out from beside his unfurled standard. Thitherward sprang a swarm of us and found a brave group massed on foot around the colors, men and officers shoulder to shoulder in sudden equality. I saw Ned Ferry make straight for their commander, who alone had out his sabre; the rest stood with cocked revolvers, and at twenty yards fired low. Ferry's horse was hit; he reared, but the spur carried him on; his rider's sword flashed up and then down, the Federal's sabre turned it, the pistols cracked in our very faces, and down went my leader and his horse into the bottom of the whirlwind, right under the standard. I saw the standard-bearer bring down one of our men on top of Ferry, and as Ferry half regained his feet the Federal aimed point-blank against his breast. But it was I who fired and the Federal who fell. As he reeled I stretched out for the standard, and exactly together Ned Ferry and I seized it—the same standard we had seen the night before. But instantly, graciously, he thrust it from him. "Tis yours!" he cried in the midst of a general huzza, smiling up at it and me as I swung the trophy over my head. Then he turned ghastly pale, his smile faded to an unmeaning stare, two or three men leaped to his side, and he sank lifelessly into their arms beside his dying horse.

I was swinging from the saddle to my leader's relief, when a familiar voice forbade it, and old Dismukes came by at a long trot, pointing forward with the reddest sabre I ever saw, and bellowing to right and left with oaths and curses "Fall in, every man, on yon line! Ride to yon line and fall in, there's more Yankees coming! Ride down yonder and fa'—here, you, Legs, there! follow me, and shoot down every man that stops to plunder!"

Now I saw the new firing-line, out on our left, and as the rattle of it quickened, the Colonel galloped, still roaring out his rallying-cries and wiping his reeking blade across his charger's mane. Throngs gathered after him; the high-road swarmed with prisoners double-quicking to the rear under mounted guards; here, thinly stretched across the road at right-angles, were our horse-holders, steadily, coolly falling back; farther forward, yet vividly near, was our skirmish-line, crackling and smoking, and beyond it the enemy's, in the edge of a wood, not yet quite venturing to fling itself upon us. We passed General Austin standing, mounted, at the top of the rise, with a number of his staff about him. Minie balls had begun to sing about them and us, and some officer was telling me rudely I had no business bringing that standard—when something struck like a sledge high up on my side, almost in the arm-pit; I told one of our men I was wounded and gave him the trophy, our horse-holders suddenly came forward, every man afoot rose into his saddle, and my horse wheeled and hurried rearward at a speed I strove in vain to check. Then the old messmate to whom I had said good-bye at this very hour just a week before, came and held me by the right arm, while I begged him like a drunk-and-disorderly to let me go and find Ned Ferry.

But he said Lieutenant Ferry was in a captured ambulance ahead of us and of our hundreds of prisoners, that a full creek and a burning bridge were between us and the foe, and that the fight was over.



LI

UNDER THE ROOM WHERE CHARLOTTE LAY

The fight was over only in degree. Our brigade was drawing away into the north and the enemy were pressing revengefully after them. Our hundreds of prisoners and our few wounded were being taken back eastward over the road by which we had come in the night, and even after we had turned into it I saw a Yankee shell kill a wounded man and his horse not thirty yards from me.

Before we had gone another mile I met Harry Helm. The General had left him in camp with flat orders to remain, but at daylight he had ridden out to find us. He was in two tremendous moods at once; lifted to heaven on the glory of our deeds, yet heart-broken over the fate of Ned Ferry. "Surgeon's told him he can't live, Dick! And all the effect that's had—'No opiates, then, Doctor,' s'e, 'till I get off these two or three despatches.' So there he lies in that ambulance cross-questioning prisoners and making everybody bring him every scrap of information, as if he were General Austin and Major Harper rolled into one and they were wounded instead of him—By George! Dick, he knows you're hit and just how you're hit, and has sent me to find you!"

I said I thought I could gallop if Harry could, and in a few minutes we were up with the ambulance. It had stopped. There were several men about it, including Sergeant Jim and Kendall, which two had come from Quinn, and having just been in the ambulance, at Ferry's side, were now remounting, both of them openly in tears. "Hello, Kendall."

"Hello, Smith." He turned sharply from me, horse and all.

"Good-morning, sergeant, is Lieutenant Ferry—worse?"

The sergeant only jabbed in the spurs, and leapt away with Kendall, bearing despatches to the brigade. Harry, looking back to me from the ambulance, called softly, "All right again; it was only a bad swoon!"

"Hello, Smith," said some one whom I was too sick and dizzy to recognize, "one of those prisoners says he saw Oliver dead."

They say two or three men sprang to catch me, but the first thing I knew was that the ambulance was under way and I in it on my back within elbow-touch of Ferry, looking up into a surgeon's face. "How's the Lieutenant?" I asked.

"Oh—getting on, getting on," he replied. Doctors think patients are fools.

In a parlor under the room where Charlotte lay they made a bed for Ferry and one for me, and here, lapped in luxury and distinction, I promptly fell asleep, and when I reopened my eyes it was again afternoon. In the other bed Ferry was slumbering, and quite across the room, beside a closed door, sat Cecile and Camille. The latter tiptoed to me. Her whispers were as soft as breathing, and when I answered or questioned, her ear sank as near as you would put a rose to smell it. "The Lieutenant, sleeping? yes, this hour past; surgeons surprised and more hopeful. Miss Estelle? in another room with other wounded. Her aunt? upstairs with Charlotte, who was—oh—getting on, getting on." That made me anxious.

"Does Charlotte," I asked, "know—everything?"

Camille allowed herself all the motions of a laugh, and said "No, not quite everything;" and then with solemn tenderness she added that Charlotte knew about Ferry. "And she knows about you," the whisperer went on; "they all know."

I thought she was alluding to the verses, and had an instant of terror and rage before I saw what she meant. She glided back to the door and the two opened it an inch or so to answer some inquirer without. I saw her no more until bedtime, when she stood at her aunt's elbow to hand and hold things, while Miss Harper, to my all but screaming embarrassment, bared the whole upper half of one side of me and washed and dressed my wound anew. Ferry it was imperative to let alone, but when I awoke the next morning there was a radiance of joy throughout all the house; for he had slept and improved. The next morning again he was ever so much stronger, and Harry Helm rode off in simulated disgust, not seeing "any fun in hanging round girls who were hanging round other fellows."

Another day arose. A courier brought passes for our three or four other wounded to go home as soon as they were fit to travel, and by night they were all gone. At early bedtime came two surgeons of high rank all the way from Johnston's army up in Mississippi. General Austin had asked this favor by telegraph. Harry had been gone thirty-six hours, and Ferry was just asking if he had not yet got back, when the surgeons came in to the room. A pleasantry or two consumed a few moments. Then the surgeon in charge of us told of a symptom or two, to which they responded only "hmm," and began the examination. Miss Harper sent her three nieces away. I lay and listened in the busy stillness. Presently one of the examiners murmured with a certain positiveness to the other, who after a moment's silence replied with conviction; Miss Harper touched our surgeon's arm inquiringly and he looked back in a glad way and nodded. Miss Harper nodded to me; they had located the ball! Now the conversation turned upon men and events of the day, while one of the visitors, with his back to the patient, opened a case of glittering knives. Presently the professional heads came so close together as quite to hide the patient; they spoke once or twice in a manly soothing tone. Miss Harper stroked my temples to keep me down, one of the busy ones spoke again, and lo! the thing was done, there was the ball in the basin. As the men of blood sped through their kind after-work the news flew to and fro; Camille wept,—since she could not hurrah,—Cecile told Charlotte, the heavenly-minded Estelle was confirmed in her faith, Miss Harper's black eyes, after a brief overflow, were keener and kindlier than ever, and as the surgeons spoke the word "done," Ferry asked again if Harry had not got back yet. Pretty soon Harry did arrive, with news of great feats by our cavalry against our old enemy Grierson, in which Austin's brigade had covered themselves with glory, and in which he had had his own share; his hand was swelled as big as his heart. In all the Confederacy no houseful went to sleep that night in sweeter content. I sank into perfect bliss planning a double wedding.



LII

SAME BOOK AND LIGHT-HEAD HARRY

The next day found me so robustly happy that I was allowed to dress and walk out to the front door. Three days later the surgeons were gone, all three, and at the approach of dew-fall Cecile and Harry, Camille and I, walked in a field-path, gathered hedge roses, and debated the problem of Mrs. Roy's daughter's book, which all of us were reading and none had finished.

"A woman," I remarked, "who, for very love of a man, can say to him, 'Go on up the hill without me, I have a ball and chain on my foot and you shall not carry them and me, you have a race to run,'—a woman so wonderfully good as to say that—"

"Ah, no!" interrupted Cecile, with her killing Creole accent, "not a woman so good to say that, only with the so-good sanse to say it."

Harry was openly vexed. "Well, either way! would any true man leave that woman behind?" and I tried to put in that that was what I had been leading up to; but it makes me smile yet, to recall how jauntily she discomfited us both. She triumphed with the airy ease of a king-bird routing a crow in the upper blue. Camille had more than once told me that Cecile was wise beyond the hope of her two cousins to emulate her; which had only increased my admiration for Camille; yet now I began to see how the sisters came by their belief. In the present discussion she was easily first among the four of us. At the same time her sensuous graces also took unquestionable preeminence; city-bred though she was, she had the guise of belonging to the landscape, or, rather, of the landscape's belonging, by some fairy prerogative, to her. She seemed just let loose into the world, yet as ready and swift to make right use of it as any humming-bird let into a garden; as untimorous as any such, and as elusive. In this sultry June air she had all the animation both of mind and of frame that might have been expected of her on a keen, clear winter day. Her face never bore the same expression at the beginning and middle, or at either of these and the close, of any of her speeches, yet every change was lovely, the sign of a happy play of feeling, and proof of a mercurial intelligence. No report of them by this untrained pen would fully bear me out, and the best tribute I can offer is to avoid the task.

It was a sweet mercy in her to change the subject, and tactful to change it to Charlotte, as if Charlotte were quite an unrelated theme. The cousins vied with each other ever so prettily in telling how beautiful the patient was on her couch of enfeeblement and pain, how her former loveliness had increased, and what new nobility it had taken on. That any such problem overhung her life as that which we had just been weighing, seemed never to have entered their thought, and if they had ever conceived of a passion already conscious between Charlotte and Ferry, they veiled the fact with charming feminine art.

When we got back to the house Harry detained me on the veranda alone. Camille told me how long I might tarry. It was heaven to have her bit in my mouth, and I found it hard to be grum even when Harry beat with his good hand the rhythm of "Maiden passing fair, turn away thine eyes."

"Dick," he said, suddenly grave as he walked me down the veranda, "her cousin Cecile! isn't it awful? Now that poor girl's gone back to Ned's bedside; back to her torture! Why do they let her? My George! it's merciless! Has her aunt no eyes?"

"But, Lieutenant, you don't know she loves him; there are signs, I admit; but proofs, no. She's lost color, and her curves are more slender, but, my goodness! a dozen things might account for that."

"Dick Smith,"—my questioner worked himself up over the rail and sat out on the shelf that held the bucket of drinking-water and its gourd—"do you imagine she didn't know, when we were talking about that book, that she was arguing against the union of Ned Ferry and Charlotte Oliver? Didn't she do it bravely! Richard, my friend, she couldn't have done it if she had suspected us of suspecting her. It's a bleeding pity! And yet you can't side with her, for I just swear Ned's got to have Charlotte Ol'—what? No, he won't overhear a blank word; here's his window shut, right here. He's got to have her, I say, and he's got to have her just as soon as the two of 'em can stand up together to be sworn in! Don't you say so?"

I replied that I was not aware of any one who did not say so.

"Well, I can name several! I don't call Scott Gholson anybody, but there's Major Harper—No, I'm not talking too loud, Ned isn't hearing a word. Major Harper's so hot against this thing that he brought it up, with me, yesterday on the battlefield."

"Major Harper doesn't really know her," I softly remarked.

Harry swore with military energy. "I told him he didn't, and he fairly snorted. We don't know her, he says; you nor I nor his sister nor his niece nor his daughters, oh, we don't know her at all; and neither do we know Ned; Ned has graceful manners, and she's a born actress, and we're simply infatuated by their romantic situation. Good Lordy! he got up on his Charleston pride-of-family like a circus-girl on stilts, and 'Edgard Ferry-Durand has got a great public career before him,' s's he, 'and no true friend will let him think of taking a wife who is all history and no antecedents, a blockade-runner, a spy, and the brand-new widow of a blackguard and a jayhawker she had run away from practically on her wedding-night.' Hy Jo'! the way he went on, you'd 'a' thought he was already Ned's uncle-in-l'—" The speaker's face took a sudden distress—"Great Caesar!" He pointed up to the second-story front room and slipped down from the shelf just as Estelle came out to us with her aunt's message for me to come in.

"How's the fair patient?" I hurried to ask as the three of us went.

"Why, Mr. Smith, she's actually been sitting up—in the twilight—at the open window—while Aunt Martha and I smoothed up her bed." Harry groaned.

"She's still very weak," said Aunt Martha when we came to her; "the moment her bed was made up she asked to lie down again."

"Yes," softly exclaimed Camille, "but, oh, aunt Martha, with such courage in those eyes!"

"Smith," privately asked the agonized Harry, "what would you do if you were in my place; go and cut your throat from ear to ear?"

"No," I said, as black as an executioner, "but I wish you'd done it yesterday."



LIII.

"CAPTAIN, THEY'VE GOT US"

More days slipped by. Neighbors pressed sweet favors upon us; calls, joyful rumors, delicacies, flowers. One day Major Harper paid us a flying visit, got kisses galore, and had his coat sponged and his buttons reanimated. In the small town some three miles northwest of us he was accumulating a great lot of captured stuff. On another day came General Austin and stayed a whole hour. Ferry took healing delight in these visits, asking no end of questions about the movements afield, and about the personal fortunes of everyone he knew. When the General told him Ferry's scouts were doing better without him than with him—"I thought he would smile himself into three pieces," said the General at the supper-table.

On a second call from Major Harper, when handed a document to open and read, he went through it carefully twice, and then dropping it on the coverlet asked—"and Quinn?"

"Oh, Quinn's turn will come."

"Ah! Major, that is not fair to Quinn!" said Ferry. Yet when he took up the paper again he gazed on it with a happy gravity; it made him a captain. "By the by," he said, "that Yankee horse that Dick Smith captured at Sessions's; I'd like to buy that horse from you, Major." They made the sale. "And there's that captured ambulance still here, Major, with its team eating their heads off."

"Yes, I'm going to take that away with me to-day."

This meant that Charlotte's negro man and his daughter, her maid, had come with her spring-wagon, and Harry and I would have liked the Major better if he had smiled at this point, as he did not. Yet he was most lovable; sent so kind a message up to Charlotte that Harry and I wondered; and received back from her a reply so gracious that—since we could not wonder—we worshipped. In the evening of that day Ferry and Charlotte were transferred, she into the room behind her, and he upstairs into the one out of which she was taken. That night a slave and his wife, belonging to the place, ran away to the enemy. If they should tell the Yankees Ned Ferry was here—! "By Jo'!" said Harry Helm, "I'm glad I didn't cut my throat; I told that darkey, yesterday, Ned's name was O'Brien!"

Toward the close of that day came tidings of the brigade's splendid work at a steamboat-landing on the Mississippi River, how they had stolen in by night between two great bodies of the enemy, burned a vast store of military supplies, and then brilliantly cut their way out; yet we were told to be ready to withdraw into Mississippi again as soon as our newly made captain could safely be moved. Pooh! what of that? Lee was on his way into Pennsylvania; the war was nearly over, sang the Harper girls, and we were the winners! They cheerily saw Helm and me, next morning, ride southward in search of further good news. At a cross-roads I proposed that we separate, and meet there again near the end of the day. He turned west; I went an hour's ride farther south and then turned west myself.

When we met again I knew that he—while he did not know that I—had been to Gilmer's plantation. We wanted to see if the Federals had left a grave there. They had left three, and a young girl who had been one of the dancers told me she had seen Oliver's body carried off by two blue troopers who growled and cursed because they had been sent back to bury it. Neither Harry nor I mentioned the subject when we met at the cross-roads again, for we came on our horses' necks at a stretched out run; the Federals were rolling up from the south battalion after battalion, hoping to find Major Harper's store of supplies feebly guarded and even up with us for that steamboat-landing raid. Presently as we hurried northward we began to hear, off ahead of us on our left, the faint hot give-and-take of two skirmish lines. We came into the homestead grove at a constrained trot and found the ladies out on the veranda in liveliest suspense between scepticism and alarm.

"Yes, they're fighting, now, on the edge of town," we said, "but our boys will keep them there." Our host and hostess moaned their unbelief. "However," added Harry, "I'll go tell the old man to hitch up the little mules and—"

"You dawn't need," said Cecile, "'tis done!" and Camille confirmed her word, while the planter and his wife returned to the kitchen yard, where the servants were loading the smokehouse meat into a wagon to hide it in the woods; Miss Harper and Estelle went into the house, summoned by Charlotte's maid. On Ferry's chamber floor sounded three measured thumps of his scabbarded sword.

"Dick, you answer that," exclaimed Harry, reining in half wheeled; "but keep him on his back, if you have to hold him down!" He spurred away to learn whether we had better stay or fly. I threw my rein to Camille and flew up the hall stairs.

Ferry lay in bed with three pillows behind him and his sheathed sword across his lap. "Good-evening, Richard," he said, "you are returned just in time; will you please hand me my two pistol' from yonder?—thank you." He laid one beside each thigh. "Now please turn the head of my bed a little bit, to face the door—thank you; and now, good-bye. You hear those footstep' there in the room behind? she is dressing to go; the other ladies they are helping her. Richard, I place them in your charge; have them all ready to get into her wagon at a moment's notice, with you on your horse—and you better take that Jewett horse, too; he came to-day."

I hesitated, but a single flash of authority from his eye was enough and I had passed half-way to the door, when, through the window over the front veranda, I saw a small body of horsemen trotting up through the grove. The dusk of the room hid me, but there was no mistaking them. "Too late, Captain," I said, "they've got us."

"How many do you see?"

"About sixteen. Our two horses will be Yankees again to-morrow."

"Ah! not certainly. Where is your carbine?"

"Just outside this door. They know you're here, Captain, they're surrounding the house." As I reached toward the door I heard his sword crawl out, the doorknob clicked without my touching it, the door swung and closed again, and Charlotte Oliver was with us. The light of the western window shone full upon her; she was in the same dress, hat and all, in which I had seen her the night we rode together alone. Though wasted and pale, she betrayed a flush on either cheek and a smile that mated with the sweet earnest of her eyes. She tendered me my carbine, patted my hand caressingly, and glided onward to Ferry's bedside. With my back to them and my ear to the door I hearkened outward. In the front doorway below sounded the jingling tread of cavalry-boots and a clank of sabres.



LIV

THE FIGHT IN THE DOORWAY

Charlotte's whisper came to me: "Richard!" Standing by Ferry's pillow she spoke for him. "If they start upstairs come and stand like me, on the other side."

I nodded and slyly opened the door enough to pass half-way out. Some man was parleying with Miss Harper. "Now, madam, you know you haven't locked up your parlor to maintain an abstract right; you've locked it up because you've got the man in there that I've come for."

"Whom have you come for, sir?"

"Lieutenant O'Brien, of the rebel army. Shall I order this man to kick that door in? Answer quickly."

"Sir, there is no Lieutenant O'Brien in there, nor elsewhere in this house; there never has been."

"Stand aside, madam."

"Stop, sir! I command you! There is no Lieutenant of any name on this place!"

"Oh, yes there is; he goes by various names, but one of them is Ned Ferry. Sergeant, we'll kick together; now!"—Bang!

I leaned back into the room to say "It's all right! Oh, but that sweet woman's a 'coon! Let them batter!" As I thrust my head out again Miss Harper was exclaiming "Oh, sirs, don't do that!"—Bang!—"For the honor of your calling and your flag—" Bang!

"There's no Lieutenant in there." Bang!

"Corporal, go find an axe or something."

"Oh, you need not, sirs, I'll unlock the door."

"Well, be quick about it, and then stand clear; we don't want any woman hurt." The key rattled at the keyhole and then dropped to the floor. "You did that by intention! Give me that key!" He tried the lock. "We've jammed it, corporal, but another good kick will fetch it; now!"—Bang!—crash!—open flew the door.

"Well, I will be damned!" said the officer.

"Sir," said Miss Harper, "you give me no occasion to doubt it." She followed the men upstairs. "Estelle, go back to your sister and cousin; and if you, my dear,"—to our hostess—"will kindly go also, and stay with them—"

I closed the door. It had no key, but there was a small catch to the knob and I turned it on while the men were looking into the adjacent rooms. When they reached ours Miss Harper was again at their front. Inside, the three of us silently noted our strategic advantages: we were in the darkest part of the room, the bed's covering was a dull red, Ferry had on his shirt of black silk, the white pillows were hidden at his back, Charlotte and I were darkly clad, the light from our west window would be in our assailants' faces as they entered, and they would be silhouetted against a similar light from the hall's front. We noiselessly cocked our weapons and Charlotte and I each sank to one knee. "The door is very thin," murmured Ferry, "we can fire before they enter; they will get, anyhow, our smoke, and if they fire as they rush in we can aim under their flash."

It was only then that I observed that Charlotte was armed. But the fact made her seem only the more a true woman, since I knew that only for her honor or his life would she ever take deadly aim. Her weapon was the slender revolver she had carried ever since the day which had made her Charlotte Oliver, the thing without which she never could have reached this hour of blissful extremity.

"In here there is a lady, ill," we heard Miss Harper say.

"Is she alone?"

Ferry prompted in a whisper, the three of us cried "Yes!" and he added "Pass one side from the door, Miss Harper, we are going to shoot through it."

"Hello, in there! Lieutenant Ferry, of Ferry's scouts,"—

"Captain Ferry," retorted Miss Harper, and I echoed the amendment.

"Damn the difference; I give you one half-minute, Captain Ferry, to say you surrender! If you weren't wounded I wouldn't give you that. Corporal, go get a log out of that fireplace downstairs."

"Oh, shame!" wailed Miss Harper, half-way down the hall.

"Captain," called Ferry, "I give you one quarter-minute to get away from that door." He whispered to Charlotte, pointing to a panel of it higher than any one's head.

"Oh, sirs," we again heard Miss Harper cry, "withhold! Captain Ferry, they have called in four more men!" We heard the four downstairs coming at a run. "Oh, sir—"

"Go away, madam!" bellowed the officer as his men thundered into the upper hall. "Now, Captain Ferry, there are six of us here and three under each of your windows. Do you—?"

"Oh, sir, the lady! the sick lady!"

"That's his look-out, madam. If the sick lady isn't Charlotte Oli'—"

"And if she is?" called Ferry, depressing Charlotte's weapon to an aim barely breast high.

"Then throwing away your life won't save hers! Do you surren'—?"

Ferry made a quick gesture for her to shoot low, but she solemnly shook her head and fired through the top of the uppermost panel, and the assault came.

The log burst the door in at a blow, Ferry and I fired, and our foes sprang in. Certainly they were brave; the doorway let them in only by twos, and the fire-log, falling under foot, became a stumbling-block; yet in an instant the room was ringing and roaring with the fray and benighted with its smoke. Their first ball bit the top of my shoulder and buried itself in the wall—no, not their first, but the first save one; for the bureau mirror stood in dim shade, and the Federal leader made the easy mistake of firing right into it. The error sealed his fate; Ferry fired under his flash and sent him reeling into the arms of his followers. They replied hotly but blindly, and in a moment the room was void of assailants. Ferry started to spring from the bed, but Charlotte threw her arms about him, and as she pressed her head hard down on his breast I could not help but hear "No, my treasure, my heart's whole treasure, no!"



LV

RESCUE AND RETREAT

I sprang for the door, but the fire-log sent me sprawling with my shoulder on the threshold. As I went down I heard in the same breath the wounded officer wailing "Go back! go in! there are only four of them! don't leave one alive!" and Miss Harper all but screaming "Our men! our men! God be praised, our men are coming, they are here! Fly spoilers, for your lives, fly!"

And it was true. Their hoofs rumbled, their carbines banged, and their charge struck three sides of the house at once. Rising only to my elbows,—and how I did that much, stiffened with my wound, the doctors will have to explain,—I laid my cheek to my rifle, and the light of two windows fell upon my gunsights. Every blue-coat in the hall was between me and its rear window, but one besides the officer was wounded, and with these two three others were busy; only the one remaining man saw me. Twice he levelled his revolver, and twice I had almost lined my sights on him, but twice Miss Harper unaware came between us. A third time he aimed, fired and missed. I am glad he fired first, for our two shots almost made one report, and-he plunged forward exactly as I had done over the fire-log, except that he reached the floor dead.



Thereupon came more things at once than can be told: Miss Harper's outcry of horror and pity; Charlotte's cry from the bedside—"Richard! Richard!" a rush of feet and shouts of rage in the hall below; and my leap to the head of the stairs, shouting to half a dozen gray-jackets "Two men, no more! two men to guard prisoners, no more! go back, all but you two! go back!"

A sabreless officer with a bandaged hand flew up the stair and into my face. It was Helm. "The ladies! Smith, good God! Smith, where are the girls?"

"In the smokehouse," cried Miss Harper from her knees beside the prostrate Federal officer; "go bring them!—Richard, Charlotte is calling you!"

I ran to Ferry's door; Charlotte was leaning busily over his bared chest, while he, still holding a revolver in his right hand, caressed her arm with his left. "Dick, his wound has opened again, but we must get him away at once anyhow. Isn't my wagon still here?—oh, thank God! there it comes now, I hear it in the back yard!"

A Confederate waiting on Miss Harper with basin and towels barely dodged me as I sprang to the far end of the hall and shouted down into the yard for Harry. The little mules, true enough, were just rattling round a half turn at the lower hall's back door, having been in hiding behind the stables. A score or so of cavalry were boisterously hurrying off across the yard with a few captured horses and prisoners, and I had to call the Lieutenant angrily a second time, to make him hear me amid their din and a happy confusion which he was helping to keep up in a fairer group. For here were all the missing feminine members of the household, white and colored, and Harry was clamorous with joy, compassion and applause, while Camille and Cecile, pink with weeping, stepped out across the high doorsill of the smokehouse, leading Ned Ferry's horse and mine.

However, there was not the urgency for instant flight that Charlotte had thought there was; night fell; a whole regiment of our mounted infantry came silently up from the rear of the plantation and bivouacked without lights behind a quarter of a mile of worm-fence; our two wounded and three unharmed prisoners, or Miss Harper's, I should say, for it was in response to her entreaties that the latter had thrown down their arms, were taken away; the dead man was borne out; lights glowed in every room, the servants returned to their tasks, a maddening fragrance came from the kitchen, and the three nieces flitted everywhere in their benign activities, never discovering the hurt on my shoulder until everything else on earth had been discovered, and then—"Oh, Richard, Richard!" from Estelle, with "Reach-hard, Reach-hard!" from Cecile, and "Mr. Smith!" from Camille, as they bathed and bound it. At length a surgeon arrived, gave a cheering opinion of Ferry and of Charlotte, and scolded Harry savagely for the really bad condition of his hand. Then sounds grew few and faint, our lights went out, we lay down fully dressed, and nearly all of us, for a while, slept.

But about two in the morning Harry awakened me, murmuring "Reach-hard! Reach-hard! come! our sick-train's moving. Ssh! General Austin's asleep in the next room!" I asked where Ferry was. "Already started," he whispered, "—in the General's own ambulance, with Charlotte Oliver in hers, on a mattress, like Ned, and the four Harpers in theirs." While we stole downstairs he murmured on "Our brigade's come up and General Austin will attack at daylight with this house as his headquarters."