Special Messenger

And into sight dashed a flying battery, guns and limbers bouncing and thumping, whips cracking, chains crashing, the six-horse teams on a dead run.

An officer drew bridle and threw his horse on its haunches; the first team rushed on to the pass with a clash and clank of wheels and chains, swung wide in a demi-tour, dropped a dully glistening gun, and then came trampling back. The second, third, and fourth teams, guns and caissons, swerved to the right of the hillock and came plunging up the bushy slope, horses straining and scrambling, trampling through the wretched garden to the level grass above.

One by one the gun teams swung in a half circle, each dropped its mud-spattered gun, the cannoneers sprang to unhook the trails, the frantic, half-maddened horses were lashed to the rear.

The Special Messenger rose quietly to her feet, and at the same instant a passing cannoneer turned and saw her in the doorway.

“Hey!” he exclaimed; “what you doin’ thar?”

A very young major, spurring up the slope, caught sight of her, too.

“This won’t do!” he began excitedly, pushing his sweating horse up to the door. “I’m sorry, but it won’t do—” He hesitated, perplexed, eyeing this slim, dark-eyed girl, who stood as though dazed there in her ragged homespun and naked feet.

Colonel Carrick, passing at a canter, turned in his saddle, calling out:

“Major Kent! Keep that woman here! It’s too late to send her back.”

The boy-major saluted, then turned to the girl again:

“Who are you?” he asked, vexed.

She seemed unable to reply.

A cannoneer said respectfully:

“Reckon the li’l gal’s jes’ natch’ally skeered o’ we-uns, Major, seein’ how the caval’y ketched her paw down thar in the crick.”

The Major said briefly:

“Your father is a Union man, but nobody is going to hurt him. I’d send you to the rear, too, but there’s no time now. Please go in and shut that door. I’ll see that nobody disturbs you.”

As she was closing the door the young Major called after her:

“Where’s the well?”

As she did not know she only stared at him as though terrified.

“All right,” he said, more gently. “Don’t be frightened. I’ll come back and talk to you in a little while.”

As she shut the door she saw the cannon at the pass limber up, wheel, and go bumping up the hill to rejoin its bespattered fellows on the knoll.

An artilleryman came along and dropped a bundle of picks and shovels which he was carrying to the gunners, who had begun the emplacements; the boyish Major dismounted, subduing his excitement with a dignified frown; and for a while he was very fussy and very busy, aiding the battery captain in placing the guns and verifying the depression.

The position of the masked battery was simply devilish; every gun, hidden completely in the oak-scrub, was now trained on the pass.

Opposite, across the stream, long files of gray infantry were moving to cover among the trees; behind, a battalion arrived to support the guns; below, the cavalry had begun to leave the pass; troopers, dismounted, were carefully removing from the road all traces of their arrival.

Leaning there by the window, the Special Messenger counted the returning fours as troop after troop retired southward and disappeared around the bend of the road.

For a while the picks and shovels of the gunners sounded noisily; concealed riflemen, across the creek, were also busy intrenching. But by noon all sound had ceased in the sunny ravine; there was nothing to be seen from below; not a human voice echoed; not a pick-stroke; only the sweet, rushing sound of the stream filled the silence; only the shadows of the branches moved.

Warned again by the sentinels to close the battered window and keep the door shut, she still watched the gunners, through the dirty window panes, where they now lay under the bushes beside their guns. There was no conversation among them; some of the artillerymen seemed to be asleep; some sprawled belly-deep in the ferns, chewing twigs or idly scraping holes in the soil; a few lay about, eating the remnants of the morning’s scanty rations, chewing strips of bacon rind, and licking the last crumbs from the palms of their grimy hands.

Along the bush-hidden parapet of earth, heaps of ammunition lay—cannister and common shell. She recognized these, and, with a shudder, a long row of smaller projectiles on which soldiers were screwing copper caps—French hand grenades, brought in by blockade runners, and fashioned to explode on impact—so close was to be the coming slaughter of her own people in the road below.

Toward one o’clock the gunners were served noon rations. She watched them eating for a while, then, nerveless, turned back into the single room of the cabin and opened the rear door—so gently and noiselessly that the boyish staff-major who was seated on the sill did not glance around until she spoke, asking his permission to remain there.

“You mustn’t open that door,” he said, looking up, surprised by the sweetness of the voice which he heard now for the first time.

“How can anybody see me from the pass?” she asked innocently. “That is what you are afraid of, isn’t it?”

He shot a perplexed and slightly suspicious glance at her, then the frowning importance faded from his beardless face; he bit a piece out of the soggy corncake he was holding and glanced up at her again, amiably conscious of her attractions; besides, her voice and manner had been a revelation. Evidently her father had had her educated at some valley school remote from these raw solitudes.

So he smiled at her, quite willing to be argued with and entertained; and at his suggestion she shyly seated herself on the sill outside in the sunlight.

“Have you lived here long?” he asked encouragingly.

“Not very,” she said, eyes downcast, her clasped hands lying loosely over one knee. The soft, creamy-tinted fingers occupied his attention for a moment; the hand resembled the hand of “quality”; so did the ankle and delicate arch of her naked foot, half imprisoned in the coarse shoe under her skirt’s edge.

He had often heard that some of these mountaineers had pretty children; here, evidently, was a most fascinating example.

“Is your mother living?” he asked pleasantly.

“No, sir.”

He thought to himself that she must resemble her dead mother, because the man whom the cavalry had caught in the creek was a coarse-boned, red-headed ruffian, quite impossible to reconcile as the father of this dark-haired, dark-eyed, young forest creature, with her purely-molded limbs and figure and sensitive fashion of speaking. He turned to her curiously:

“So you have not always lived here on the mountain.”

“No, not always.”

“I suppose you spent a whole year away from home at boarding-school,” he suggested with patronizing politeness.

“Yes, six years at Edgewood,” she said in a low voice.

“What?” he exclaimed, repeating the name of the most fashionable Southern institute for young ladies. “Why, I had a sister there—Margaret Kent. Were you there? And did you ever—er—see my sister?”

“I knew her,” said the Special Messenger absently.

He was very silent for a while, thinking to himself.

“It must have been her mother; that measly old man we caught in the creek is ‘poor white’ all through.” And, munching thoughtfully again on his soggy corncake, he pondered over the strange fate of this fascinating young girl, fashioned to slay the hearts of Southern chivalry—so young, so sweet, so soft of voice and manner, condemned to live life through alone in this shaggy solitude—fated, doubtless, to mate with some loose, lank, shambling, hawk-eyed rustic of the peaks—doomed to bear sickly children, and to fade and dry and wither in the full springtide of her youth and loveliness.

“It’s too bad,” he said fretfully, unconscious that he spoke aloud, unaware, too, that she had risen and was moving idly, with bent head, among the weeds of the truck garden—edging nearer, nearer, to a dark, round object about the size of a small apple, which had rolled into a furrow where the ground was all cut up by the wheel tracks of artillery and hoofs of heavy horses.

There was scarcely a chance that she could pick it up unobserved; her ragged skirts covered it; she bent forward as though to tie her shoe, but a sentinel was watching her, so she straightened up carelessly and stood, hands on her hips, dragging one foot idly to and fro, until she had covered the small, round object with sand and gravel.

That object was a loaded French hand grenade, fitted with percussion primer; and it lay last at the end of a long row of similar grenades along the shaded side of the house.

The sentry in the bushes had been watching her; and now he came out along the edge of the laurel tangle, apparently to warn her away, but seeing a staff officer so near her he halted, satisfied that authority had been responsible for her movements. Besides, he had not noticed that a grenade was missing; neither had the major, who now rose and sauntered toward her, balancing his field glasses in one hand.

“There’s ammunition under these bushes,” he said pleasantly; “don’t go any nearer, please. Those grenades might explode if anyone stumbled over them. They’re bad things to handle.”

“Will there be a battle here?” she asked, recoiling from the deadly little bombs.

The Major said, stroking the down on his short upper lip:

“There will probably be a skirmish. I do not dare let you leave this spot till the first shot is fired. But as soon as you hear it you had better run as fast as you can”—he pointed with his field glasses—“to that little ridge over there, and lie down behind the rocks on the other side. Do you understand?”

“Yes—I think so.”

“And you’ll lie there very still until it is—over?”

“I understand. May I go immediately and hide there?”

“Not yet,” he said gently.

“Why?”

“Because your father is a Union man.... And you are Union, too, are you not?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling; “are you afraid of me?”

A slight flush stained his smooth, sunburnt skin; then he laughed.

“A little afraid,” he admitted; “I find you dangerous, but not in the way you mean. I—I do not mean to offend you–”

But she smiled audaciously at him, looking prettier than ever; and his heart gave a surprised little jump at her unsuspected capabilities.

“Why are you afraid of me?” she asked, looking at him with her engaging little smile. In her eyes a bewitching brightness sparkled, partly veiled by the long lashes; and she laughed again, poised there in the sunshine, hands on her hips, delicately provoking his reply.

And, crossing the chasm which her coquetry had already bridged, he paid her the quick, reckless, boyish compliment she invited—a little flowery, perhaps, possibly a trifle stilted, but very Southern; and she shrugged like a spoiled court beauty, nose uptilted, and swept him with a glance from half-closed lids, almost insolent.

The sentry in the holly and laurel thicket stared hard at them both. And he saw his major break off a snowy Cherokee rose and, bending at his slim, sashed waist, present the blossom with the courtly air inbred through many generations; and he saw a ragged mountaineer girl accept it with all the dainty and fastidious mockery of a coquette of the golden age, and fasten it where her faded bodice edged the creamy skin of her breast.

What the young major said to her after that, bending nearer and nearer, the sentry could not hear, for the major’s voice was very low, and the slow, smiling reply was lower still.

But the major straightened as though he had been shot through and through, and bowed and walked away among the weeds toward a group of officers under the trees, who were steadily watching the pass through their leveled field glasses.

Once the major turned around to look back: once she turned on the threshold. Her cheeks were pinker; her eyes sparkled.

The emotions of the Special Messenger were very genuine and rather easily excited.

But when she had closed the door, and leaned wearily against it, the color soon faded from her face and the sparkle died out in her dark eyes. Pale, alert, intelligent, she stood there minute after minute, searching the single room with anxious, purposeless eyes; then, driven into restless motion by the torturing tension of anxiety, she paced the loose boards like a tigress, up and down, head lowered, hands clasped against her mouth, worrying the fingers with the edge of her teeth.

Outside, through the dirty window glass, she could see sentries in the bushes, all looking steadily in the same direction; groups of officers under the trees still focused their glasses on the pass. By and by she saw some riflemen in butternut jeans climb into trees, rifles slung across their backs, and disappear far up in the foliage, still climbing.

Toward five o’clock, as she was eating the bacon and hoe cakes which she had found in the hut, two infantry officers opened the door, stared at her, then, without ceremony, drew a rough ladder from the corner, set it outside, and the older officer climbed to the roof.

She heard him call down to the lieutenant below:

“No use; I can’t see any better up here.... They ought to set a signal man on that rock, yonder!”

Other officers came over; one or two spoke respectfully to her, but she did not answer. Finally they all cleared out; and she dragged a bench to the back door, which swung open a little way, and, alert against surprise, very cautiously drew from the inner pocket her linen contour map and studied it, glancing every second or two out through the crack in the door.

Nobody disturbed her; with hesitating forefinger she traced out what pretended to be a path dominating the northern entrance of the pass, counted the watercourses and gullies crossing the ascent, tried to fix the elevations in her mind.

As long as she dared she studied the soiled map, but, presently, a quick shadow fell across the threshold, and she thrust the map into the concealed pocket and sprang to open the door.

“Coming military events cast foreboding shadows,” she said, somewhat breathless.

“Am I a foreboding and military event?” asked the youthful major, laughing. “What do I threaten, please?”

“Single combat,” she said demurely, smiling at him under half-veiled lids. And the same little thrill passed through him again, and the quick color rose to his smooth, sunburnt face.

“I was ready to beat a retreat on sight,” he said; “now I surrender.”

“I make no prisoners,” she replied in airy disdain.

“You give no quarter?”

“None.... Why did you come back?”

“You said I might.”

“Did I? I had quite forgotten what I had said to you. When are you going to let me go?”

His face fell and he looked up at her, troubled.

“I’m afraid you don’t understand,” he said. “We dare not send you away under escort now, because horses’ feet make a noise, and some prowling Yankee vidette may be at this very moment hanging about the pass–”

“Oh,” she said, “you prefer to let me remain here and be shot?”

He said, reddening: “At the first volley you are to go with an escort across the ridge. I told you that, didn’t I?”

But she remained scornful, mute and obstinate, pretty head bent, twisting the folds of her faded skirt.

“Do you think I would let you remain here if there were any danger?” he asked in a lower voice.

“How long am I to be kept here?” she asked pettishly.

“Until the Yankees come through—and I can’t tell you when that will be, because I don’t know myself.”

“Are they in the pass?”

“We don’t know. Everybody is beginning to be worried. We can’t see very far into that ravine–”

“Then why don’t you go where you can see?” she said with a shrug.

“Where?” he asked, surprised.

“Didn’t you know that there is a path above the pass?”

“A path!”

“Certainly. I can show you if you wish. You ought to be able to see to the north end of the pass—if I am not mistaken–”

“Wait a moment!” he said excitedly. “I want you to take me there—just a second, to speak to those officers—I’m coming back immediately–”

And he started on a run across the ravaged garden, holding his sabre close, midway, by the scabbard.

That was her chance. Picking up her faded sunbonnet, she stepped from the threshold, swinging it carelessly by one string. The sentries were looking after the major; she dropped her sunbonnet, stooped to recover it, and straightened up, the hidden hand grenade slipping from the crown of the bonnet into her bodice between her breasts.

A thousand eyes seemed watching her as, a trifle pale, she strolled on aimlessly, swinging the recovered sunbonnet; she listened, shivering, for the stern challenge to halt, the breathless shout of accusation, the pursuing trample of heavy boots. And at last, quaking in every limb, she ventured to lift her eyes. Nobody seemed to be looking her way; the artillery pickets were still watching the pass; the group of officers posted under the trees still focused their glasses in that direction; the young major was already returning across the garden toward her.

A sharp throb of hope set her pulses bounding—she had, safe in her bosom, the means of warning her own people now; all she needed was a safe-conduct from that knoll, and here it was coming, brought by this eager, boyish officer, hastening so blithely toward her, his long, dark shadow clinging like death to his spurred heels as he ran.

Would she guide him to some spot where it was possible to see the whole length of the pass?

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak, and turned, he at her side, into the woods.

If her map was not betraying her once more the path must follow the edges of the pass, high up among those rocks and trees somewhere. There was only one way of finding it—to climb upward to the overhanging ledges.

Raising her eyes toward the leafy heights, it seemed to her incredible that any path could lead along that wall of rock, which leaned outward over the ravine.

But somehow she must mount there; somehow she must manage to remain there unmolested, ready, the moment a single Union vdette cantered into the pass, to hurl her explosive messenger into the depths below—a startling but unmistakable signal to the blue column advancing so unsuspiciously into that defile of hell.

As they climbed upward together through the holly-scrub she remembered that she must not slip, for the iron weight in her bosom would endure no rough caress from rock or earth.

How heavy it was—how hot and rough, chafing her body—this little iron sphere, with a dozen deaths sealed up inside!

Toiling upward, planting her roughly shod feet with fearful precision, she tried to imagine what it would be like if the tiny bomb in her bosom exploded—tried to picture her terrified soul tearing skyward out of bodily annihilation.

“It is curious,” she thought with a slight shudder, “how afraid I always am—how deeply, deeply afraid of death. God knows why I go on.”

The boy beside her found the ascent difficult; spur and sabre impeded him; once he lurched heavily against her, and his quick, stammered apology was cut short by the dreadful pallor of her face, for she was deadly afraid of the bomb.

“Did I hurt you?” he faltered, impulsively laying his hand on her arm.

She shivered and shook off his hand, forcing a gay smile. And they went on together, upward, always upward, her pretty, provocative eyes meeting his at intervals, her heart beating faster, death at her breast.

He was a few yards ahead when he called back to her in a low, warning voice that he had found a path, and she hastened up the rocks to where he stood.

Surely here was a trail winding along the very edge of the ledges, under masses of overhanging rock—some dizzy runway of prehistoric man, perhaps trodden, too, by wolf and panther, and later by the lank mountaineer hunter or smuggler creeping to some eerie unsuspected by any living creature save, perhaps, the silver-headed eagles soaring through the fathomless azure vault above.

Below, the pass lay; but they could see no farther into it at first. However, as they advanced cautiously, clinging to the outjutting cliff, which seemed maliciously striving to push them out into space, by degrees crag and trail turned westward and more of the pass came into view—a wide, smooth cleft in the mountain, curving away toward the north.

A few steps more and the trail ended abruptly in a wide, grassy space set with trees, sloping away gently to the west, chopped off sheer to the east, where it terminated in a mossy shelf overlooking the ravine.

Only a few rods away the dusk of the pass was cut by a glimmer of sunlight; it was the northern entrance.

Something else was glimmering there, too; dozens of dancing points of white fire—sunshine on buckle, button, bit and sabre. And the officer beside her uttered a low, fierce cry and jerked his field glasses free from the case.

“Their cavalry!” he breathed. “The Yankees are entering the pass, so help me God!” And he drew his revolver.

So help him God! Something dark and round flew across his line of vision, curving out into space, dropping, dropping into the depths below. A clattering report, a louder racket as the rocky echoes, crossing and recrossing, struck back at the clamoring cliffs.

So help him God! Half stunned, he stumbled to his feet, his dazed eyes still blurred with a vision of horsemen, vaguely seen through vapors, stampeding northward; and, at the same instant, she sprang at him, striking the drawn revolver from his hand, tearing the sabre free and flinging it into the gulf. White-faced, desperate, she clung to him with the tenacity of a lynx, winding her lithe limbs around and under his, tripping him to his knees.

Over and over they rolled, struggling in the grass, twisting, straining, slipping down the westward slope.

“You—devil!” he panted, as her dark eyes flashed level with his. “I’ve got—you—anyhow–”

Her up-flung elbow, flexed like a steel wedge, caught him in the throat; they fell over the low ridge, writhing in each other’s embrace, down the slope, over and over, faster, faster—crack!—his head struck a ledge, and he straightened out, quivering, then lay very, very still and heavy in her arms.

Fiercely excited, she tore strips from her skirt, twisted them, forced him over on his face, and tied his wrists fast.

Then, leaving him inert there on the moss, she ran back for his revolver, found it, opened it, made certain that the cylinder was full, and, flinging one last glance down the pass, hastened to her prisoner.

Her prisoner opened his eyes; the dark bruise on his forehead was growing redder and wetter.

“Stand up!” she said, cocking her weapon.

The boy, half stupefied, struggled to his knees, then managed to rise.

“Go forward along that path!”

For a full minute he stood erect, motionless, eyes fixed on her; then shame stained him to the temples; he turned, head bent, and walked forward, wrists tightly tied behind him.

And behind him, weapon swinging, followed the Special Messenger in her rags, pallid, disheveled, her dark eyes dim with pity.

VIII

EVER AFTER

—And they married, and had many children, and lived happy ever after.

Old Tales

For two days the signal flags had been talking to each other; for two nights the fiery torches had been conversing about that beleaguered city in the South.

Division after division, corps after corps, were moving forward; miles of wagons, miles of cavalry in sinuous columns unending, blackened every valley road. Later, the heavy Parrots and big Dahlgrens of the siege train stirred in their parked lethargy, and, enormous muzzles tilted, began to roll out through the valley in heavy majesty, shaking the ground as they passed, guarded by masses of red artillerymen.

Day after day crossed cannon flapped on red and white guidons; day after day the teams of powerful horses, harnessed in twenties, trampled through the valley, headed south.

Off the sandy headland a Federal gunboat lay at anchor, steam up—a blackened, chunky, grimy thing of timber and iron plates, streaked with rust, smoke blowing horizontally from her funnels. And day after day she consulted hill and headland with her kaleidoscopic strings of flags; and headland and hill talked back with fluttering bunting by day and with torches of fire by night.