TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:

—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.

See page [317].

“I ALREADY KNOW WHAT IS IN THE PAPERS.”

EVELYN BYRD

By GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON

AUTHOR OF “A CAROLINA CAVALIER,” “DOROTHY
SOUTH,” “THE MASTER OF WARLOCK,”
“RUNNING THE RIVER,” ETC., ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY
CHARLES COPELAND

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1904,
BY
GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON.

Published May, 1904.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

Preface

THIS book is the third and last of a trilogy of romances. In that trilogy I have endeavoured to show forth the character of the Virginians—men and women.

In “Dorothy South” I tried to show what the Virginians were while the old life lasted—“before the war.”

In “The Master of Warlock” I endeavoured faithfully to depict the same people as they were during the first half of the Civil War, when their valour seemed to promise everything of results that they desired. In “Evelyn Byrd” I have sought to show the heroism of endurance that marked the conduct of those people during the last half of the war, when disaster stared them in the face and they unfalteringly confronted it.

GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON.

Contents

Illustrations

Evelyn Byrd

I

A STRICKEN CORSAGE

A BATTERY of six twelve-pounder Napoleon guns lay in a little skirt of woodland on the south bank of the Rapidan. It was raining, not violently, but with a soaking persistence that might well have made the artillery-men tired of life and ready to welcome whatever end that day’s skirmishing might bring to the weariness of living. But these men were veteran soldiers, inured to hardship as well as to danger. A saturating rain meant next to nothing to them. A day’s discomfort, more or less, counted not at all in the monotonously uncomfortable routine of their lives.

They had been sent into the woodland an hour or two ago, and had done a little desultory firing now and then, merely by way of disturbing the movements of small bodies of the enemy who were being shifted about on the other side of the river.

Just now the guns were silent, no enemy being in sight, and Captain Marshall Pollard being disposed to save his ammunition against the time, now obviously near at hand, when the new commander of the Federal forces, General Grant, should push the Army of the Potomac across the river to make a final trial of strength and sagacity with that small but wonderfully fighting Army of Northern Virginia directed by the master mind of Robert E. Lee.

But, while no enemy was within sight, there was a hornets’ nest of Federal sharp-shooters concealed in a barn not far beyond the river, and from their secure cover they were very seriously annoying the Confederate lines. The barn lay a little to the left of the battery front, but near enough for the sharp-shooters’ bullets to cut twigs from the tree under which Captain Marshall Pollard sat on horseback with Owen Kilgariff by his side. Still, the fire of the sharp-shooters was not mainly directed upon the woodland-screened battery, but upon the troops in the open field on Pollard’s left.

Presently Captain Pollard, with the peculiar deliberation which characterised all his actions, lowered his field-glass from his eyes, and, withdrawing a handkerchief from a rain-proof breast pocket, began polishing the mist-obscured lenses. As he did so, he said to Kilgariff:—

“Order one of the guns to burn that barn.”

As he spoke, both his own horse and Kilgariff’s sank to the ground; the one struggling in the agony of a mortal wound, the other instantly dead.

“And tell the quartermaster-sergeant to send us two more horses—good ones,” Captain Pollard added, with no more of change in his tone than if the killing of the horses at that precise moment had been a previously ordered part of the programme.

A gun was quickly moved up to a little open space. It fired two shots. The flames burst from the barn, and instantly a horde of sharp-shooters abandoned the place and went scurrying across an open field in search of cover. As they fled, the gun that had destroyed their lurking-place, and another which Captain Pollard had instantly ordered up, shelled them mercilessly.

It was then that Owen Kilgariff said:—

“That barn was full of fodder. Its owner had saved a little something against a future need, and now all the results of his toil have gone up in smoke. That’s war!”

“Yes,” answered Captain Pollard, “and the worst of it is that the man whose possessions we have destroyed is our friend, and not our enemy; again, as you say, ‘that’s war.’ War is destruction—whether the thing destroyed be that of friend or foe.”

Just then a new and vicious fire of skilled sharp-shooters broke forth from the mansion-house of the plantation to which the burned barn had belonged. It was an old-time colonial edifice. Marshall Pollard had spent many delightful days and nights under its hospitable roof. He had learned to love its historic associations. He knew and loved every old portrait that hung on its oak-wainscotted walls. He knew and loved every stick of its old, colonial, plantation-made furniture; its very floors of white ash, that had been polished every morning for two hundred years; and its mahogany dining-table, around which distinguished guests had gathered through many generations. All these were dear to the peculiarly sympathetic soul of the scholar-soldier, Marshall Pollard, a man born for books, and set by adverse fate to command batteries instead; a man of creative genius, as his novels and poems, written after the war, abundantly proved, set for the time to do the brutal work of destruction. He remembered the library of that mansion, too, the slow accumulation of two hundred years. He had read there precious volumes that existed nowhere else in America, and that money could not duplicate, however lavishly it might be offered for books, of which no fellows were to be found except upon the sealed shelves of the British Museum, or in other great public collections from which no treasures are ever to be sold while the world shall endure.

That house, with all its memories and all its treasures, must be destroyed. Marshall Pollard clearly understood the necessity, and he was altogether a soldier now, in spite of his strong inclinations to peace and civilisation, and all gentleness of spirit. Yet he found it difficult to order the work of destruction that it was his manifest duty to do. Presently, with bullets whistling about his ears, he turned to Owen Kilgariff, and, in a tone of petulance that was wholly foreign to his habit, asked:—

“Why don’t you order the thing done? Why do you sit there on your horse waiting for me to give the order?”

Kilgariff understood. He was a man accustomed to understand quickly; and now that Captain Pollard had made him his chief staff officer, sergeant-major of the battery, his orders, whatever they might be, carried with them all the authority of the captain’s own commands.

Kilgariff instantly rode back to the battery and ordered up two sections—four guns. Advancing them well to the front, where the house to be shot at could be easily seen, he posted them with entire calm, in spite of the fact that a Federal battery of rifled guns stationed at a long distance was playing vigorously upon his position, and not without effect. The artillery-men in both armies had, by this late period of the war, become marksmen so expert that the only limit of the effectiveness of their fire was the limit of their range.

Half a dozen of Marshall Pollard’s men bit the dust, and nearly a dozen of his horses were killed, while Owen Kilgariff was getting the four guns into position for the effective doing of the work to be done, although that process of placing the guns occupied less than a minute of time. Two wheels of cannon carriages were smashed by well-directed rifle shells, but these were quickly replaced by the extra wheels carried on the caissons; for every detail of artillery drill was an a-b-c to the veterans of this battery, and if the men had nerves, the fact was never permitted to manifest itself when there was work of war to be done.

Within sixty seconds after Owen Kilgariff rode away to give the orders that Marshall Pollard hesitated to give, four Napoleon guns were firing four shells each, a minute, into a mansion that had been famous throughout all the history of Virginia, since the time when William Byrd had been Virginia’s foremost citizen and the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe had ridden out to possess themselves of the regions to the west.

Half a minute accomplished the purpose. The mansion was in flames, the sharp-shooters who had made a fortress of it were scurrying to the cover of the underbrush a few hundred yards in rear, and Owen Kilgariff ordered the guns to “cease firing” and return to the cover of the woodlands whence they had been brought forward for this service. Six of Marshall Pollard’s men lay stark and stiff on the little meadow which the guns had occupied. These were hastily removed for decent burial. Nine others were wounded. They were carried away upon litters for surgical attention.

These details in no way disturbed the battery camp. They were the commonplaces of war; so the men, unmindful of them, cooked such dinner as they could command, and ate it with a relish unimpaired by the events of the morning.

But Captain Marshall Pollard and his companion, Sergeant-major Owen Kilgariff, were not minded for dinner. Seeing the flames burst forth from the upper stories of the old colonial mansion, Kilgariff said to his captain:—

“I wonder if all those fellows got away? There may be a wounded man or two left in the house to roast to death. May I ride over there and see?”

“Yes,” answered Pollard, “and I will ride with you. But first order two of the guns to shell the sharp-shooters in the thicket yonder. Otherwise we may not get back.”

In spite of the heavy fire that the two guns poured into the thicket beyond the house, the sharp-shooters stood their ground like the veterans that they were, and Pollard and Kilgariff were their targets as these two swam the swollen river and galloped across the last year’s corn lands on their way to the burning house.

Arrived there, they hastily searched the upper rooms. Here and there they came upon a dead soldier, left by his companions to be incinerated in company with the portraits of old colonial notables and beautiful colonial dames that were falling from the walls as the ancient oaken wainscot shrivelled in the fire.

But no living thing was found there, and the two Confederates, satisfied now that there was no life to be saved, hurried down the burning stairway and out into the air, where instantly they became targets again for the sharp-shooters, not three hundred yards away.

As they were about to mount their horses, which had been screened behind a wall projection, Kilgariff suddenly bethought him of the cellar, and plunged down the stairway leading to it. He was promptly followed by his captain, though both of them realised the peculiar danger of the descent at a time when the whole structure seemed about to tumble into that pit as a mass of burning timber. But they realised also that the cellar was the place where they were most likely to find living men too badly wounded to make their escape, and so, in spite of the terrible hazard, they plunged into the depths, intent only upon their errand of mercy.

A hasty glance around in the half-light seemed to reveal only the emptiness of the cavernous cellar. But just as the two companions were about to quit the place, in a hurried effort to save themselves, a great, blazing beam fell in, together with a massive area of flame-enveloped flooring, illuminating the place. As Kilgariff turned, he caught sight of a girl, crouching behind an angle of the wall. She was a tall, slender creature, and Kilgariff was mighty in his muscularity. There was not a fraction of a second to be lost if escape from that fire pit was in any wise to be accomplished. Without a moment’s pause, Kilgariff threw his arm around the girl and bore her up the cellar stairs, just as the whole burning mass of timbers sank suddenly into the space below.

His captain followed him closely; and, emerging from the flames, scorched and smoke-stifled, the three stood still for a moment, under the deadly fire of the sharp-shooters. Then, with recovered breath, they turned an angle of the wall, mounted their horses, and sped away toward the river, under a rifle fire that seemed sufficient for the destruction of a regiment. The shells from their own side of the line, shrieking above the heads of the three fugitives, made their horses squat almost to the ground; but with a resolution born of long familiarity with danger, the two soldiers sped on, Kilgariff carrying the girl on the withers of his horse and trying to shield her from the fire of the sharp-shooters by so riding as to interpose his own body between her and the swiftly on-coming bullets.

Finally the river was reached, and, plunging into it, the two horses bore their burdens safely across. Pollard might easily have been fifty yards in advance of his sergeant-major, seeing that he had the better horse, and that his companion’s animal was carrying double. But that was not Marshall Pollard’s way. Instead of riding as fast as he could toward the river and the comparative safety that lay beyond it, he rode with his horse’s head just overlapping the flanks of the animal which bore the girl and her rescuer. In this way he managed to make of himself and his horse a protecting barrier between the enemy and the girl whom Kilgariff was so gallantly trying to bear to safety.

This was not a battle, or anything remotely resembling a battle. If it had been, these two men would not have left their posts in the battery. It was only an insignificant “operation of outposts,” which the commanders in the front of both armies that night reported as “some slight skirmishing along the outer lines.” On neither side was it thought worth while to add that fifty or sixty brave young fellows had been done to death in the “slight skirmishing.” The war was growing old in the spring of 1864. Officers, hardened by experience of human butchery on a larger scale, no longer thought it necessary to report death losses that did not require three figures for their recording.

When Pollard and Kilgariff reached the bit of woodland in which the battery had been posted for a special purpose, they found the guns already gone. The battery had been ordered during their absence to return to its more permanent camp two or three miles in the rear, and in Captain Pollard’s absence his senior lieutenant had taken command to execute the order. It is the way of war that “men may come and men may go,” but there is always some one next in command to take the place of one in authority who meets death or is absent for any other cause. An army organisation resembles Nature herself in its scrupulous care for the general result, and in its absolute indifference to the welfare or the fate of the individual.

War is a merciless thing—inhuman, demoniacal, devilish. But incidentally it calls into activity many of the noblest qualities of human nature. It had done so in this instance. Having fired the house on the enemy’s side of the river, and having thus driven away a company of sharp-shooters who were grievously annoying the Confederate line, Captain Pollard’s duty was fully done. But, at the suggestion that some wounded enemy might have been left in the house to perish in the torture of the flames, he and his companion had deliberately crossed the river into the enemy’s country, and had ridden under a galling fire to the burning building, as earnestly and as daringly intent upon their mission of mercy as they had been a little while before upon their work of slaughter and destruction.

“Man’s a strange animal,” sings the poet, and his song is an echo of truth.

Pollard and Kilgariff rode on until the camp was reached. There Kilgariff pushed his horse at once to the tent of the surgeon, and delivered the girl into that officer’s keeping.

“Quick!” he said. “I fear she is terribly wounded.”

“No, no,” cried the girl; “I am not hurt. It is only that my corsage is—what you call stricken. Is it that that is the word? No? Then what shall I say? It is only that the bullet hurt what you call my stays. Truly it did not touch me.”

Just then Captain Pollard observed that Kilgariff’s left hand was wrapped in a piece torn from the front of the girl’s gown, and that the rude bandage was saturated with blood. Contrary to all military rule, the sergeant-major had been holding his reins in his right hand, and carrying the girl in the support of his left arm. This awkwardness, as he was at pains to explain to the captain, had been brought about by the hurry of necessity.

“I grabbed the girl,” he explained, “without a thought of anything but the danger to her. The house timbers were already falling, and there was no time to be lost. When I got to my horse, the fire of the sharp-shooters was too severe to be trifled with when I had a girl to protect, so I mounted from the right side of my horse instead of the left, and continued to ride with her on my left arm and my bridle-rein in my right hand. I make my apologies, Captain.”

“Oh, confound your apologies!” ejaculated Captain Pollard. “What’s the matter with your left hand? Let the surgeon see it at once.”

“It is nothing of consequence,” answered the young man, stripping off the rudely improvised bandage. “Only the ends of a finger or two carried away. I had thought until a moment ago that the bullet had penetrated the young lady’s body. You see, Captain, I was holding her in front of me and clasping her closely around the waist with my fingers extended, the better to hold her in her uncertain seat on the withers. So, when the bullet struck my fingers, I thought it had pierced her person. Thank God, she has come off safe! But by the time the surgeon is through with his work on my fingers, I shall have to use my right hand on the bridle for a considerable time to come, Captain.”

“You will have to go to the hospital,” said the surgeon.

“Indeed I shall do nothing of the kind.”

“Why not, Kilgariff?” asked Pollard, who had become mightily interested in the strange and strangely reserved young man whom he had made his sergeant-major.

“Why not? Why, because I’m not going to miss the greatest and probably the last campaign of the greatest war of all time.”

As he spoke, the captain turned away toward his tent, leaving Kilgariff to endure the painful operations of the surgeon upon his wounded hand, without chloroform, for there was none of that anæsthetic left among the supplies of this meagrely furnished field-hospital after the work already done upon the wounded men of that morning. Kilgariff endured the amputations without a groan or so much as a flinching, whereat the surgeon marvelled the more, seeing that the patient was a man of exceptionally nervous constitution and temperament. When the bandages were all in place, the sergeant-major said simply:—

“Please let me have a stiff drink of spirits, Doctor. I am a trifle inclined to faintness after the pain.” That was absolutely the only sign the man gave of the fact that he had been enduring torture for nearly a half-hour.

Relighting his pipe, which he had smoked throughout the painful operation, Kilgariff bade the doctor good morning, and walked away to the tent which he and the captain together occupied.

In the meantime Captain Pollard had been questioning the girl as to herself, and getting no satisfactory answers from her, not so much because of any unwillingness on her part to give an account of herself, as seemingly because she either did not understand the questions put to her, or did not know what the answers to them ought to be.

“I’ll tell you what, Captain,” said Kilgariff, when Pollard had briefly suggested the situation to him, “Doctor Brent is at Orange Court House, I hear, reorganising the field-hospital service for the coming campaign, and his wife is with him. Why not send the girl to her?”

“To Dorothy? Yes, I’ll send her to Dorothy. She will know what to do.”

He hastily summoned an ambulance for the girl to ride in, and still more hastily scribbled a note to Dorothy Brent—to her who had been Dorothy South in the days of her maidenhood before the war. In it he said:—

I am sending you, under escort, a girl whom my sergeant-major most daringly rescued this morning from a house on the enemy’s side of the river, after we had shelled and set fire to the place. She seems too badly scared, or too something else, for me to find out anything about her. You, with your womanly tact, will perhaps be able to gain her confidence and find out what should be done. If she has friends at the North to whom she should be returned, I will arrange with General Stuart to send her back across the river under a flag of truce. If she hasn’t any friends, or if for any other reason she should be kept within our lines, you will know what to do with her. I am helpless in such a case, and I earnestly invoke the aid of the very wisest woman I ever knew. When you see the girl—poor, innocent child that she is—you, who were once yourself a child, and who, in growing older, have lost none of the sweetness and especially none of the moral courage of childhood, will be interested, I am very sure, in taking charge of her for her good.

Having despatched this note, and the girl, under escort, Pollard turned to Kilgariff, and abruptly asked:—

“Why did you call this coming campaign ‘the greatest and probably the last campaign’ of the war?”

“Why, all that seems obvious. The Army of the Potomac has at last found a commander who knows how to handle it, and both sides are tired of the war. Grant is altogether a different man from McClellan, or Pope, or McDowell, or Burnside, or Meade. He knows his business. He knows that the chief remaining strength of the Confederacy lies in the fighting force of the Army of Northern Virginia. He will strike straight at that. He will hurl his whole force upon us in an effort to destroy this army. If he succeeds, the Confederacy can’t last even a fortnight after that. If he fails, if Lee hurls him back across the Rapidan, broken and beaten as all his predecessors have been, the North will never raise another army—if the feeling there is anything like what the Northern newspapers represent it to be. You see, I’ve been reading them all the while—but, pardon me, I meant only to answer your question.”

“Don’t apologise,” answered Pollard. And he wondered who this man, his sergeant-major, was—whence he had come, and how, and why. For Captain Marshall Pollard knew absolutely nothing about the man whom he had made his confidential staff-sergeant, his tent mate, his bedfellow, and the executant of all his orders. Nevertheless, he trusted him implicitly. “I do not know his history,” he reflected, “but I know his quality as a man and a soldier.”

II

OWEN KILGARIFF

THE relations between Pollard and Kilgariff were peculiar. In many ways they were inexplicable except upon the ground of instinctive sympathy between two men, each of whom recognised the other as a gentleman; both of whom were possessed of scholarly tastes combined with physical vigour and all that is possible of manliness; both of whom loved books and knew them intimately; and each of whom recognised in the other somewhat more than is common of intellectual force.

The history of their acquaintance had been quite unusual. Marshall Pollard had risen from the ranks to be now the captain of a battery originally organised and commanded by Captain Skinner, a West Point graduate who had resigned from the United States army many years before the war, but not until after he had seen much service in Mexico and in Indian warfare. The battery had been composed at the outset of ruffians from the purlieus of Richmond, jailbirds, wharf-rats, beach-combers, men pardoned out of the penitentiary on condition of their enlistment, and the friends and associates of such men. It had been a fiercely fighting battery from the beginning. Slowly but surely many of the men who had originally constituted it had been killed in battle, and Virginia mountaineers had been enlisted to fill their places. In the meanwhile discipline of the rigidest military sort had wrought a wonderful change for the better in such of the men as survived from the original organisation. By the time that the battery returned to Virginia, after covering itself with glory at Gettysburg, it was no longer a company of ruffians and criminals, but it continued to maintain its reputation for desperate fighting and for cool, self-contained, and unfaltering courage. For those mountaineers of Virginia were desperately loyal to the fighting traditions of their race.

During the winter of 1863-4 Captain Pollard’s battery was stationed at Lindsay’s Turnout, on the Virginia Central Railroad a few miles west of Gordonsville. Indescribable, almost inconceivable mud was the characteristic of that winter, and General Lee had taken advantage of it, and of the complete veto it placed upon even the smallest military operations, to retire the greater part of his army from the Rappahannock and the Rapidan to the railroads in the rear, where it was possible to feed the men and the horses, at least in some meagre fashion.

It was during this stay in winter quarters that Owen Kilgariff had come to the battery. Whence he came, or how he got there, nobody knew and nobody could guess. There were only two trains a day on the railroad; one going east, and the other going west. It was the duty of strong guards from Pollard’s battery to man the station whenever a train arrived and inspect the passports of every passenger who descended from the cars to the platform or passed from the platform to the cars. Owen Kilgariff had not come by any of the trains. That much was absolutely certain, and nobody knew any other way by which he could have come. Yet one evening he appeared in Pollard’s battery at retreat roll-call and stood looking on and listening while the orders for the night were being read to the men.

He was a singularly comely young man of thirty years, or a little less—tall, rather slender, though very muscular, symmetrical in an unusual degree, and carrying his large and well-shaped head with the ease and grace of a trained athlete.

When the military function was ended and the men had broken ranks, Kilgariff approached Captain Pollard, and with a faultlessly correct military salute said:—

“Captain, I crave your permission to pass the night with some of your men. In the morning I think I shall ask you to enlist me in your battery.”

There was something in the man’s speech and manner which strongly appealed to Marshall Pollard’s sympathy and awakened his respect.

“You shall be my own personal guest for the night,” he said; “I can offer you some bacon and corn bread for supper, and a bundle of dry broom-straw grass to sleep upon. As for enlistment, we’ll talk further about that in the morning.”

The evening passed pleasantly. The stranger was obviously a gentleman to his finger tips. He conversed with rare intelligence and interest, upon every subject that happened to arise among the officers who were accustomed to gather in the captain’s hut every evening, making a sort of club of his headquarters. Incidentally some one made reference during the evening to some reported Japanese custom. Instantly but very modestly Kilgariff said:—

“Pardon me, but that is one of many misapprehensions concerning the Japanese. They have no such custom. The notion arose originally out of a misunderstanding—a misinterpretation; it got into print, and has been popularly accepted ever since. Let me tell you, if you care to listen, what the facts really are.”

Then he went on, by eager invitation, to talk long and interestingly about Japan and the Japanese—matters then very slightly known—speaking all the while with the modest confidence of one who knows his subject, but who is in no sense disposed to display the extent of his knowledge.

Finally, inquiry brought out the modestly reluctant information that Kilgariff had been a member—though he avoided saying in what capacity—of Commodore Perry’s expedition which compelled the opening of the Japanese ports, and that instead of returning with the expedition, he had somehow quitted it and made his way into the interior of the hermit empire, where he had passed a year or two in minute exploration.

All this was drawn out by questioning only, and in no case did Kilgariff go beyond the question asked, to volunteer information. Especially he avoided speaking of himself or of his achievements at any point in his conversation. He would say, “An American” did this, “An English-speaking man” saw that, “A foreigner had an experience,” and so forth. The first personal pronoun singular was almost completely absent from his conversation.

One of the lieutenants was a Frenchman, and to him Kilgariff spoke in French whenever that officer seemed at a loss to understand a statement made in English. The surgeon was a German, and with him Kilgariff talked in German about scientific matters, and in such fashion that the doctor said to Pollard next morning:—

“It is that this man an accomplished physician is, or I mightily mistaken am already.”

In the morning Owen Kilgariff warmly thanked Captain Pollard for his entertainment, adding:—

“As one gentleman with another, you have been free to offer, and I free to accept, your hospitality. Be very sure that I shall not presume upon this after I become a common soldier under your command, as I intend to do this morning if I have your permission.”

Pollard protested that his battery was not a proper one for a man of Kilgariff’s culture and refinement to enlist in, explaining that such of the men as were not ex-criminals were illiterate mountaineers, wholly unfit for association on equal terms with him. For answer, Kilgariff said:—

“I am told that you yourself enlisted here, Captain, when the conditions were even less alluring than now.”

“Well, yes, certainly. But my case was peculiar.”

“Perhaps mine is equally so,” answered the man. “At any rate, I very much want to enlist under your command, in a battery that, as I learn, usually manages to get into the thick of every fight and to stay there to the end.”

A question was on Pollard’s lips, which he greatly wanted to ask, but he dared not. With the instinctive shrinking of a gentleman from the impertinence of personal questioning, Pollard found it impossible to ask this man how it happened that he was not already a soldier somewhere. And yet the matter was one which very naturally prompted questioning. The Confederate conscription laws had long ago brought into the army every able-bodied man in the South. How happened it, then, that this man of twenty-eight or thirty years of age, perfect in physique, had managed to avoid service until this fourth year of the war? And how was it, that one so manifestly eager now for service of the most active kind had been willing to keep out of the army for so long a time?

As if divining the thought which Captain Pollard could not bring himself to formulate, Kilgariff said:—

“Some day, perhaps, I shall be able to tell you how and why it is that I am not already a soldier. At present I cannot. But I assure you, on my honour as a gentleman, that there is absolutely no obstacle in the way of your enlistment of me in your command. I earnestly ask you to accept me as one of your cannoniers.”

Accordingly, the man was enrolled as a private in the battery, and from that hour he never once presumed upon the acquaintance he had been privileged to form with the officers. With a scrupulosity greater than was common even in that rigidly disciplined command, he observed the distinction between officers and enlisted men. His behaviour indeed was that of one bred under the strict surveillance of martinet professors in a military school. He did all his military duties of whatever kind with a like attention to every detail of good conduct; always obeying like a soldier, never like a servant. That distinction is broad and very important as an index of character.

The officers liked him, and Pollard especially sought him out for purposes of conversation. The men liked him, too, though they felt instinctively that he was their superior. Perhaps their liking for him was in large part due to the fact that he never asserted or in any wise assumed his superiority—never recognised it, in fact, even by implication.

He nearly always had a book somewhere about his person—a book borrowed in most cases, but bought when there was no opportunity to borrow, for the man seemed always to have money in plenty. Now and then he would go to a quartermaster or a paymaster with a gold piece and exchange it for a great roll of the nearly worthless Confederate notes. These he would spend for books or whatever else he wanted.

On one occasion, when the men of the battery had been left for thirteen bitterly cold days and nights with no food except a meagre dole of corn meal, Kilgariff bought a farmer’s yoke of oxen that had become stalled in the muddy roadway near the camp. These were emphatically “lean kine,” and their flesh would make very tough beef, but the toughest beef imaginable was better than no meat at all, and so Kilgariff paid what looked like a king’s ransom for the half-starved and wholly “stalled” oxen, got two of the men who had had experience in such work to slaughter and dress them, and asked the commissary-sergeant to distribute the meat among the men.

The next day he exchanged another gold piece for Confederate notes enough to paper a goodly sized wall, and the men rightly guessed that for some reason, known only to himself, this stranger among them carried a supply of gold coin in a belt buckled about his waist. But not one of them ever ventured to ask him concerning the matter. He was clearly not a man to be questioned with regard to his personal affairs.

Thus it came about that Captain Pollard, who had made this man successively corporal, sergeant, and finally sergeant-major, solely on grounds of obvious fitness, actually knew nothing about him, except that he was an ideally good soldier and a man of education and culture.

Now that he had become sergeant-major, his association with the captain was close and constant. The two occupied the same tent or hut—when they had a tent or hut—messed together, slept together, and rode side by side whithersoever the captain had occasion to go on duty. They read together, too, in their idle hours, and talked much with each other about books, men, and affairs. But never once did Captain Pollard ask a personal question of his executive sergeant and intimate personal associate.

Nor did Kilgariff ever volunteer the smallest hint of information concerning himself, either to the captain or to anybody else. On the contrary, he seemed peculiarly to shrink even from the accidental or incidental revelation of anything pertaining to himself.

One day, in winter quarters, a gunner was trying to open a shell which had failed to explode when fired from the enemy’s battery into the Confederate lines. The missile burst while the gunner was handling it, and tore off the poor fellow’s hand. The surgeon had ridden away somewhither—nobody knew whither—and it was at least a mile’s distance to the nearest camp where a surgeon might be found. Meanwhile, the man seemed doomed to bleed to death. The captain was hurriedly wondering what to do, when Kilgariff came quietly but quickly, pushed his way through the group of excited men, knotted a handkerchief, and deftly bound it around the wounded man’s arm.

“Hold that firmly,” he said to a corporal standing by. “Watch the stump, and if the blood begins to flow again, twist the loop a trifle tighter, but not too tight, only enough to prevent a free hemorrhage—bleeding, I mean.”

Then, touching his cap brim, he asked the captain:—

“May I go to the surgeon’s tent and bring some necessary appliances? I think I may save this poor fellow’s life, and there is no time to be lost.”

The captain gave permission, of course, and a few minutes later Kilgariff returned with a score of things needed. Kneeling, he arranged them on the ground. Then he examined the wounded man’s pulse, and with a look of satisfaction saturated a handkerchief with chloroform from a bottle he had brought. He then turned again to Captain Pollard, saying:—

“Will you kindly hold that over the man’s nose and mouth? And will you put your finger on his uninjured wrist, observing the pulse-beats carefully? Tell me, please, if any marked change occurs.”

“Why, what are you going to do?” asked the captain.

“With your permission, I am going to amputate this badly shattered wrist. There is no time to be lost.”

With that, he set to work, pausing only to direct one of the corporals to keep the men back and prevent too close a crowding around the patient.

With what seemed to Captain Pollard incredible quickness, Kilgariff amputated the arm above the wrist, took up the arteries, and neatly bandaged the wound. Then he bade some of the men bear the patient on a litter to his hut, and place him in his bunk. He remained by the poor fellow’s side until the effects of shock and chloroform had subsided. Then he returned to his quarters quite as if nothing out of the ordinary routine had happened.

Captain Pollard had seen enough of field surgery during his three years of active military service to know that Kilgariff’s work in this case had been done with the skill of an expert, and his astonishment over this revelation of his sergeant-major’s accomplishment was great. Nevertheless, he shrank from questioning the man about the matter, or saying anything to him which might be construed as an implied question. All that he said was:—

“I thank you, Kilgariff, and congratulate you! You have saved a good man’s life this day, and God does not give it to many men to do that.”

“I hope the surgeon will find my work satisfactory,” responded the sergeant-major. “Is there any soup in the kettle, Tom?”—addressing the coloured cook. “Bring me a cup of it, please.”

The man’s nerves had gone through a fearful strain, of course, as every surgeon’s do when he performs a capital operation, and the captain saw that Kilgariff was exhausted. He offered to send for a drink of whiskey, but Kilgariff declined it, saying that the hot soup was quite all he needed. The bugle blowing the retreat call a moment later, Kilgariff went, quite as if nothing had happened, to call the roll and deliver the orders for the night.

A little later the surgeon returned and was told what had happened. After looking at the bandages, and without removing them, he muttered something in German and walked away to the captain’s quarters. He was surgeon to this battery only, for the reason that the company was for the time detached from its battalion, and must have a medical officer of its own.

Entering the captain’s quarters, the bluff but emotional German doctor grasped Kilgariff’s hand, and broke forth:—

“It is that you are a brother then as well as a frient already. Why then haf you not to me that you are a surgeon told it? Ach! I haf myself that you speak the German forgot. It is only in the German that I can what I wish to tell you say.”

Then in German the excited doctor went on to lavish praise upon the younger man for his skill. Presently the captain, seeing how sorely Kilgariff was embarrassed by the encomiums, came to his relief by asking:—

“Have you taken off the bandages, Doctor, and examined the wound?”

“Shade of Esculapius, NO! What am I, that I should with such a bandaging tamper? One glance—one, what you call, look—quite enough tells me. This the work of a master is—it is not the work with which for me to interfere. The man who those bandages put on, that man knows what the best masters can teach. It is not under the bandages that I need to look to find out that. Ach, Herr Sergeant-major, I to you my homage offer. Five years I in the hospitals of Berlin am, and four years in Vienna. In the army of Austria I am surgeon for six years. Do I not know?”

Then the doctor began to question Kilgariff in German, to the younger man’s sore embarrassment. But, fortunately for his reserve, Kilgariff had the German language sufficiently at his command to parry every question, and when tattoo sounded, the excited surgeon returned to his own quarters, still muttering his astonishment and admiration.

In the morning Captain Pollard asked Kilgariff to ride with him, in order that they two might the better talk together. But even on horseback Pollard found it difficult to approach this man upon any subject that seemed in the least degree personal. It was not that there was anything repellent, anything combative, and still less anything pugnacious in Kilgariff’s manner; for there was never anything of the sort. It was only that the man was so full of a gentle dignity, so saturated with that reserve which a gentleman instinctively feels concerning his own affairs that no other gentleman wishes to intrude upon them.

Still, Pollard had something to say to his sergeant-major on this occasion, and presently he said it:—

“I did not know until yesterday,” he began, “that you were a surgeon, Kilgariff.”

“Perhaps I should not call myself that,” interrupted the man, as if anxious to forestall the captain’s thought. “One who has knocked about the world as much as I have naturally picks up a good many bits of useful information—especially with regard to the emergency care of men who get themselves hurt.”

“Now listen to me, Kilgariff,” said Pollard, with determination. “Don’t try to hoodwink me. I have never asked you a question about your personal affairs, and I don’t intend to do so now. You need not seek by indirection to mislead me. I shall not ask you whether you are a surgeon or not. There is no need. I have seen too much with my own eyes, and I have heard too much from our battery surgeon as to your skill, to believe for one moment that it is of the ‘jack-at-all-trades’ kind. But I ask you no questions. I respect your privacy, as I demand respect for my own. But I want to say to you that this army is badly in need of surgeons, especially surgeons whose skill is greater than that of the half-educated country doctors, many of whom we have been obliged to commission for want of better-equipped men. I learn this from my friend Doctor Arthur Brent, who tells me he is constantly embarrassed by his inability to find really capable and experienced surgeons to do the more difficult work of the general hospitals. He said to me only a week ago, when he came to the front to reorganise the medical service for this year’s campaign, that ‘many hundreds of gallant men will die this summer for lack of a sufficient number of highly skilled surgeons.’ He explained that while we have many men in the service whose skill is of the highest, we have not nearly enough of such to fill the places in which they are needed. Now I want you to let me send you to Doctor Brent with a letter of introduction. He will quickly procure a commission for you as a major-surgeon. It isn’t fit that such a man as you should waste himself in the position of a non-commissioned officer.”

Not until he had finished the speech did Pollard turn his eyes upon his companion’s face. Then he saw it to be pale—almost cadaverous. Obviously the man was undergoing an agonising struggle with himself.

“I beg your pardon, Kilgariff,” hastily spoke Captain Pollard, “if I have said anything to wound you; I could not know—”

“It is not that,” responded the sergeant-major. But he added nothing to the declaration for a full minute afterward, during which time he was manifestly struggling to control himself. Finally recovering his calm, he said:—

“It is very kind of you, Captain, and I thank you for it. But I cannot accept your offer of service. I must remain as I am. I ought to have remained a private, as I at first intended. It is very ungracious in me not to tell you the wherefore of this, but I cannot, and your already demonstrated respect for my privacy will surely forbid you to resent a reserve concerning myself which I am bound to maintain. If you do resent it, or if it displeases you in the least, I beg you to accept my resignation as your sergeant-major, and let me return to my place among the men as a private in the battery.”

“No,” answered Pollard, decisively. “If the army cannot have the advantage of your service in any higher capacity, I certainly shall not let myself lose your intelligence and devotion as my staff-sergeant. Believe me, Kilgariff, I spoke only for your good and the good of the service.”

“I quite understand, Captain, and I thank you. But with your permission we will let matters remain as they are.”

All this occurred about a week before the events related in the first chapter of this story.

III

EVELYN BYRD

WHEN the girl whom Kilgariff had rescued from the burning building was delivered into Dorothy Brent’s hands, that most gracious of gentlewomen received her quite as if her coming had been expected, and as if there had been nothing unusual in the circumstances that had led to her visit. Dorothy was too wise and too considerate to question the frightened girl about herself upon her first arrival. She saw that she was half scared and wholly bewildered by what had happened to her, added to which her awe of Dorothy herself, stately dame that the very young wife of Doctor Brent seemed in her unaccustomed eyes, was a circumstance to be reckoned with.

“I must teach her to love me first,” thought Dorothy, with the old straightforwardness of mind. “Then she will trust me.”

So, after she had hastily read Pollard’s note and characterised it as “just like a man not to find out the girl’s name,” she took the poor, frightened, fawnlike creature in her arms, saying, with caresses that were genuine inspirations of her nature:—

“Poor, dear girl! You have had a very hard day of it. Now the first thing for you to do is to rest. So come on up to my room. You shall have a refreshing little bath—I’ll give it to you myself with Mammy’s aid—and then you shall go regularly to bed.”

“But,” queried the doubting girl, “is it permitted to—”

“Oh, yes, I know you are faint with hunger, and you shall have your breakfast as soon as Dick can get it ready. Queer, isn’t it, to take breakfast at three o’clock in the afternoon? But you shall have it in bed, with nobody to bother you. Fortunately we have some coffee, and Dick is an expert in making coffee. I taught him myself. I don’t know, of course, how much or how little experience you have had with servants, but I have always found that when I want them to do things in my way, I must take all the trouble necessary to teach them what my way is. Get her shoes and stockings off quick, Mammy.”

“I have had little to do with servants,” said the girl, simply, “and so I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you ever have a dear old mammy? queried Dorothy, thus asking the first of the questions that must be asked in order to discover the girl’s identity.

“No—yes. I don’t know. You see, they made me swear to tell nothing. I mustn’t tell after that, must I?”

“No, you dear girl; no. You needn’t tell me anything. I was only wondering what girls do when they haven’t a good old mammy like mine to coddle them and regulate them and make them happy. Why, you can’t imagine what a bad girl I should have been if I hadn’t had Mammy here to scold me and keep me straight. Can she, Mammy?”

“Humph!” ejaculated the old coloured nurse. “Much good my scoldin’ o’ you done do, Mis’ Dorothy. Dere nebber was a chile so cantankerous as you is always been an’ is to dis day. I’d be ’shamed to tell dis heah young lady ’bout your ways an’ your manners. Howsomever, she kin jedge fer herse’f, seein’ as she fin’s you heah ’mong all de soldiers, when you oughter be at Wyanoke a-givin’ o’ dinin’-days, an’ a-entertainin’ o’ yer frien’s. I’se had a hard time with you, Mis’ Dorothy, all my life. What fer you always a-botherin’ ’bout a lot o’ sick people an’ wounded men, jes’ as yo’ done do ’bout dem no-’count niggas down at Wyanoke when dey done gone an’ got deyselves sick? Ah, well, I spec dat’s what ole mammies is bawn fer—jes’ to reg’late dere precious chiles when de’re bent on habin’ dere own way anyhow. Don’ you go fer to listen to Mis’ Dorothy ’bout sich things, nohow, Mis’—what’s yer name, honey?”

“I don’t think I can tell,” answered the girl, frightened again, apparently; “at least, not certainly. It is Evelyn Byrd, but there was something else added to it at last, and I don’t want to tell what the rest of it is.”

“Then you are a Virginian?” said Dorothy, quickly, surprised into a question when she meant to ask none.

“I think so,” said the girl; “I’m not quite sure.”

She looked frightened again, and Dorothy pursued the inquiry no further, saying:—

“Oh, we won’t bother about that. Evelyn Byrd is name enough for anybody to bear, and it is thoroughly Virginian. Here comes your breakfast”—as Dick knocked at the door with a tray which Mammy took from his hands and herself brought to the bed in which the girl had been placed after her bath. “We won’t bother about anything now. Just take your breakfast, and then try to sleep a little. You must be utterly worn out.”

The girl looked at her wistfully, but said nothing. She ate sparingly, but apparently with the relish of one who is faint for want of food, the which led Dorothy to say:—

“It was just like a man to send you on here without giving you something to eat.”

“You are very good to me.” That was all the girl said in reply.

When she had rested, Dorothy sitting sewing in the meanwhile, the girl turned to her hostess and asked:—

“Might I put on my clothes again, now?”

“Why, certainly. Now that you are rested, you are to do whatever you wish.”

“Am I? I was never allowed to do anything I wished before this time—at least not often.”

The remark opened the way for questioning, but Dorothy was too discreet to avail herself of the opportunity. She said only:—

“Well, so long as you stay with me, Evelyn, you are to do precisely as you please. I believe in liberty for every one. You heard what Mammy said about me. Dear old Mammy has been trying to govern me ever since I was born, and never succeeding, simply because she never really wanted to succeed. Don’t you think people are the better for being left free to do as they please in all innocent ways?”

There was a fleeting expression as of pained memory on the girl’s face. She did not answer immediately, but sat gazing as any little child might, into Dorothy’s face. After a little, she said:—

“I don’t quite know. You see, I know so very little. I think I would like best to do whatever you please for me to do. Yes. That is what I would like best.”

“Would you like to go with me to my home, and live there with me till you find your friends?”

“I would like that, yes. But I think I haven’t any friends—I don’t know.”

“Well,” said Dorothy, “sometime you shall tell me about that—some day when you have come to love me and feel like telling me about yourself.”

“Thank you,” said the girl. “I think I love you already. But I mustn’t tell anything because of what they made me swear.”

“We’ll leave all that till we get to Wyanoke,” said Dorothy. “Wyanoke, you should know, is Doctor Brent’s plantation. It is my home. You and I will go to Wyanoke within a day or two. Just as soon as my husband, Doctor Brent, can spare me.”

The girl was manifestly losing something of her timidity under the influence of her new-found trust and confidence in Dorothy, and Dorothy was quick to discover the fact, but cautious not to presume upon it. The two talked till supper time, and the girl accompanied her hostess to that meal, where, for the first time, she met Arthur Brent. That adept in the art of observation so managed the conversation as to find out a good deal about Evelyn Byrd, without letting her know or suspect that he was even interested in her. He asked her no questions concerning herself or her past, but drew her into a shy participation in the general conversation. That night he said to Dorothy:—

“That girl has brains and a character. Both have been dwarfed, or rather forbidden development, whether purposely or by accidental circumstances I cannot determine. You will find out when you get her to Wyanoke, and it really doesn’t matter. Under your influence she will grow as a plant does in the sunshine. I almost envy you your pupil.”

“She will be yours, too, even more than mine.”

“After a while, perhaps, but not for some time to come. I have much more to do here than I thought, and shall have to leave the laboratory work at Wyanoke to you for the present. You’d better set out to-morrow morning. The railroads are greatly overtaxed just now, as General Lee is using every car he can get for the transportation of troops and supplies—mainly troops, for heaven knows there are not many supplies to be carried. I have promised the surgeon-general that the laboratory at Wyanoke shall be worked to its full capacity in the preparation of medicines and appliances, so you are needed there at once. But under present conditions it is better that you travel across country in a carriage. I’ve arranged all that. You will have a small military escort as far as the James River. After that, you will have no need. How I do envy you the interest you are going to feel in this Evelyn Byrd!”

IV

THE LETTING DOWN OF THE BARS

NOT many days after Pollard’s fruitless talk with Kilgariff, the sergeant-major asked leave, one morning, to visit Orange Court House. He said nothing of his purpose in going thither, and Pollard had no impulse to ask him, as he certainly would have been moved to ask any other enlisted man under his command, especially now that the hasty movements of troops in preparation for the coming campaign had brought the army into a condition resembling fermentation.

When Kilgariff reached the village, he inquired for Doctor Brent’s quarters, and presently dismounted in front of the house temporarily occupied by that officer.

As he entered the office, Arthur Brent raised his eyes, and instantly a look of amazed recognition came over his face. Rising and grasping his visitor’s hand—though that hand had not been extended—he exclaimed:—

“Kilgariff! You here?”

“Thank you,” answered the sergeant-major. “You have taken my hand—which I did not venture to offer. That means much.”

“It means that I am Arthur Brent, and glad to greet Owen Kilgariff once more in the flesh.”

“It means more than that,” answered Kilgariff. “It means that you generously believe in my innocence—jail-bird that I am.”

“I have never believed you guilty,” answered the other.

“But why not? The evidence was all against me.”

“No, it was not. The testimony was. But between evidence and testimony there is a world of difference.”

“Just how do you mean?”

“Well, you and I know our chemistry. If a score of men should swear to us that they had seen a jet of oxygen put out fire, and a jet of carbonic acid gas rekindle it from a dying coal, we should instantly reject their testimony in favour of the evidence of our own knowledge. In the same way, I have always rejected the testimony that convicted you, because I have, in my knowledge of you, evidence of your innocence. You and I were students together both in this country and in Europe. We were friends, roommates, comrades, day and night. I learned to know your character perfectly, and I hold character to be as definite a fact as complexion is, or height, or anything else. I had the evidence of my own knowledge of you. The testimony contradicted it. Therefore I rejected the testimony and believed the evidence.”

“Believe me,” answered Kilgariff, “I am grateful to you for that. I did not expect it. I ought to, but I did not. If I had reasoned as soundly as you do, I should have known how you would feel. But I am morbid perhaps. Circumstances have tended to make me so.”

“Come with me to my bedroom upstairs,” said Arthur Brent. “There is much that we must talk about, and we are subject to interruption here.”

Then, summoning his orderly, Arthur Brent gave his commands:—

“I shall be engaged with Sergeant-major Kilgariff upstairs for some time to come, and I must not be interrupted on any account. Say so to all who may ask to see me, and peremptorily refuse to bring me any card or any name or any message. You understand.”

Then, throwing his arm around his old comrade’s person, he led the way upstairs. When the two were seated, Arthur Brent said:—

“Tell me now about yourself. How comes it that you are here, and wearing a Confederate uniform?”

“Instead of prison stripes, eh? It is simple enough. By a desperate effort I escaped from Sing Sing, and after a vast deal of trouble and some hardship, I succeeded in making my way into the Confederate lines. Thinking to hide myself as completely as possible, I enlisted in a battery that has no gentlemen in its ranks, but has a habit of getting itself into the thick of every fight and staying there. You know the battery—Captain Pollard’s?”

“Marshall Pollard’s? Yes. He is one of my very best friends. But tell me—”

“Permit me to finish. I wanted to hide myself. I thought that as a cannonier in such a battery I should escape all possibility of observation. But that battery has very little material out of which to make non-commissioned officers. Very few of the men can read or write. So it naturally came about that I was put into place as a non-commissioned officer, and I am now sergeant-major, greatly to my regret. In that position I must be always with Captain Pollard. When I learned that he and you were intimates, and that your duty often called you to the front, I saw the necessity of coming to you to find out on what terms you and I might meet after—well, in consideration of the circumstances.”

Arthur Brent waited for a time before answering. Then he stood erect, and said:—

“Stand up, Owen, and let me look you in the eyes. I have not asked you if you are innocent of the crimes charged against you. I never shall ask you that. I know, because I know you!”

“I thank you, Arthur, for putting the matter in that way. But it is due to you—due to your faith in me—that I should voluntarily say to you what you refuse to ask me to say. As God sees me, I am as innocent as you are. I could have established my innocence at the critical time, but I would not. To do that would have been to condemn—well, it would have involved—”

“Never mind that. I understand. You made a heroic self-sacrifice. Let me rejoice only in the fact that you are free again. You are enlisted under your own name?”

“Of course. I could never take an alias. It was only when I learned that you and Captain Pollard were friends—”

“But suppose you fall into the hands of the enemy? Suppose you are made prisoner?”

“I shall never be taken alive,” was the response.

“But you may be wounded.”

“I am armed against all that,” the other replied. “I have my pistols, of course. I carry an extra small one in my vest pocket for emergencies. Finally, I have these”—drawing forth two little metallic cases, one from the right, the other from the left trousers pocket. “They are filled with pellets of cyanide of potassium. I carry them in two pockets to make sure that no wound shall prevent me getting at them. I shall not be taken alive. Even if that should happen, however, I am armed against the emergency. Two men escaped from Sing Sing with me. One of them was shot to death by the guards, his face being fearfully mutilated. The other was wounded and captured. The body of the dead man was identified as mine, and my death was officially recorded. I do not think the law of New York would go behind that. But in any case, I am armed against capture, and I shall never be taken alive.”

A little later Arthur Brent turned the conversation.

“Let us talk of the future,” he said, “not of the past. I am reorganising the medical staff for the approaching campaign. I am sorely put to it to find fit men for the more responsible places. My simple word will secure for you a commission as major-surgeon, and I will assign you to the very best post at my disposal. I need just such men as you are—a dozen, a score, yes, half a hundred of them. You must put yourself in my hands. I’ll apply for your commission to-day, and get it within three days at most.”

“If you will think a moment, Arthur,” said the other, “you will see that I could not do that without dishonour. Branded as I am with a conviction of felony, I have no right to impose myself as a commissioned officer upon men who would never consent to associate with me upon such terms if they knew.”

“I respect your scruple,” answered Doctor Brent, after a moment of reflection, “but I do not share it. In the first place, the disability you mention is your misfortune, not your fault. You know yourself to be innocent, and as you do not in any way stand accused in the eyes of the officers of this army, there is absolutely no reason why you should not become one of them, as a man conscious of his own rectitude.

“Besides all that, we are living in new times, under different conditions from those that existed before the war. It used to be said that in Texas it was taking an unfair advantage of any man to inquire into his life before his migration to that State. If he had conducted himself well since his arrival there, he was entitled to all his reserves with regard to his previous course of life in some other part of the country. Now a like sentiment has grown strong in the South since this war broke out. I don’t mean to suggest that we have lowered our standards of honourable conduct in the least, for we have not done so. But we have revised our judgments as to what constitutes worth. The old class distinctions of birth and heritage have given place to new tests of present conduct. There are companies by the score in this army whose officers, elected by their men, were before the war persons of much lower social position than that of a majority of their own men. In any peacetime organisation these officers could never have hoped for election to office of any kind; but they are fighters and men of capacity; they know how to do the work of war well, and, under our new and sounder standards of fitness, the men in the ranks have put aside old social distinctions and elected to command them the men fittest to command. The same principle prevails higher up. One distinguished major-general in the Confederate service was a nobody before the war; another was far worse; he was a negro trader who before the war would not have been admitted, even as a merely tolerated guest, into the houses of the gentlemen who are to-day glad to serve as officers and enlisted men under his command. Still another was an ignorant Irish labourer who did work for day’s wages in the employ of some of the men to whom he now gives orders, and from whom he expects and receives willing obedience. I tell you, Kilgariff, a revolution has been wrought in this Southern land of ours, and the results of that revolution will permanently endure, whatever the military or political outcome of the war may be. In your case there is no need to cite these precedents, except to show you that the old quixotism—it was a good old quixotism in its way; it did a world of good, together with a very little of evil—is completely gone. There is no earthly reason, Kilgariff, why you should not render a higher and better service to the Confederacy than that which you are now rendering. There is no reason—”

“Pardon me, Arthur; in my own mind there is reason enough. And besides, I am thoroughly comfortable as I am. You know I am given to being comfortable. You remember that when you and I were students at Jena, and afterward in the Latin Quarter in Paris, I was always content to live in the meagre ways that other students did, though I had a big balance to my credit in the bank and a large income at home. As sergeant-major under our volunteer system, I am the intimate associate not only of Captain Pollard, whose scholarship you know, but also of all the battery officers, some of whom are men worth knowing. For the rest, I like the actual fighting, and I am looking forward to this summer’s campaign with positively eager anticipations. So, if you don’t mind, we will let matters stand as they are. I will remain sergeant-major till the end of it all.”

With that, the two friends parted.

V

DOROTHY’S OPINIONS

IT was not Arthur Brent’s habit to rest satisfied in the defeat of any purpose. He was deeply interested to induce Owen Kilgariff to become a member of the military medical staff. Having exhausted his own resources of persuasion, he determined to consult Dorothy, as he always did when he needed counsel. That night he sent a long letter to her. In it he told her all he knew about the matter, reserving nothing—he never practised reserve with her—but asking her to keep Kilgariff’s name and history to herself. Having laid the whole matter before that wise young woman, he frankly asked her what he should do further in the case. For reply, she wrote:—

I am deeply interested in Kilgariff’s case. I have thought all day and nearly all night about it. It seems to me to be a case in which a man is to be saved who is well worth saving. Not that I regard service in the ranks as either a hardship or a shame to any man, when the ranks are full of the best young men in all the land. If that were all, I would not have you turn your hand over to lift this man into place as a commissioned officer.

If I interpret the matter aright, Kilgariff is simply morbid, and if you can induce him to take the place you have pressed upon him, you will have cured him of his morbidity of mind. And I think you can do that. You know how I contemn the duello, and fortunately it seems passing out of use. In these war times, when every man stands up every day to be shot at by hundreds of men who are not scared, it would be ridiculous for any man to stand up and let one scared man shoot at him, in the hope of demonstrating his courage in that fashion.

That is an aside. What I want to say is, that while the duello has always been barbarous, and has now become ridiculous as well, nevertheless it had some good features, one of which I think you might use effectively in Owen Kilgariff’s case. As I understand the matter, it was the custom under the code duello, sometimes to call a “court of honour” to decide in a doubtful case precisely what honour required a man to do, and, as I understand, the decision of such a court was final, so far as the man whose duty was involved was concerned. It was deemed the grossest of offences to call in question the conduct of a man who acted in accordance with the finding of a court of honour.

Now why cannot you call a court of honour to sit upon this case? Without revealing Kilgariff’s identity—which of course you could not do except by his permission—you could lay before the court a succinct but complete statement of the case, and ask it to decide whether or not the man concerned can, with honour, accept a commission in the service without making the facts public. I am sure the verdict will be in the affirmative, and armed with such a decision you can overcome the poor fellow’s scruples and work a cure that is well worth working.

Try my plan if it commends itself to your judgment, not otherwise.

Little by little, I am finding out a good deal about our Evelyn Byrd. Better still, I am learning to know her, and she interests me mightily. She has a white soul and a mind that it is going to be a delight to educate. She has already read a good deal in a strangely desultory and unguided fashion, but her learning is utterly unbalanced.

For example, she has read the whole, apparently, of the Penny Cyclopædia—in a very old edition—and she has accepted it all as unquestionable truth. Nobody had ever told the poor child that the science of thirty years ago has been revised and enlarged since that time, until I made the point clear to her singularly quick and receptive mind in the laboratory yesterday. She seems also to have read, and well-nigh committed to memory, the old plays published fifty or sixty years ago under the title of The British Drama, but she has hardly so much as heard of our great modern writers. She can repeat whole dialogues from Jane Shore, She Stoops to Conquer, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, High Life Below Stairs, and many plays of a much lower moral character; but even the foulest of them have manifestly done her no harm. Her own innocence seems to have performed the function of the feathers on a duck’s back in a shower. She is so unconscious of evil, indeed, that I do not care to explain my reasons to her when I suggest that she had better not repeat to others some of the literature that she knows by heart.

I still haven’t the faintest notion of her history, or of whence she came. She is docile in an extraordinary degree, but I think that is due in large measure to her exaggerated sense of what she calls my goodness to her. Poor child! It is certain that she never before knew much of liberty or much of considerate kindness. She seems scarcely able to realise, or even to believe, that in anything she is really free to do as best pleases her, a fact from which I argue that she has been subject always to the arbitrary will of others. She is by no means lacking in spirit, and I suspect that those others who have arbitrarily dominated her life have had some not altogether pleasing experiences with her. She is capable of very vigorous revolt against oppression, and her sense of justice is alert. But apparently she has never before been treated with justice or with any regard whatever to the rights of her individuality. She has been compelled to submit to the will of others, but she has undoubtedly made trouble for those who compelled her. At first with me she seemed always expecting some correction, some assertion of authority, and she is only now beginning to understand my attitude toward her, especially my insistence upon her right to decide for herself all things that concern only herself. The other day in the laboratory, she managed somehow to drop a beaker and break it. She was about to gather up the fragments, but, as the beaker had been filled with a corrosive acid, I bade her let them alone, saying that I would have them swept up after the day’s work should be done. She stood staring at me for a moment, after which she broke into a little rippling laugh, threw her arms around my neck, and said:—

“I forgot. You never scold me, even when I am careless and break things.”

I tried hard to make her understand that I had no right to scold her, besides having no desire to do so. It seemed a new gospel to her. Finally she said, more to herself than to me:— “It is so different here. There was never anybody so good to me.”

Her English is generally excellent, but it includes many odd expressions, some of them localisms, I think, though I do not know whence they come. Occasionally, too, she frames her English sentences after a French rhetorical model, and the result is sometimes amusing. And another habit of hers which interests me is her peculiar use of auxiliary verbs and intensives. Instead of saying, “I had my dinner,” she sometimes says, “I did have my dinner,” and to-day when we had strawberries and cream for snack, she said, “I do find the strawberries with the cream to be very good.”

Yet never once have I detected the smallest suggestion of “broken English” in her speech, except that now and then she places the accent on a wrong syllable, as a foreigner might. Thus, when she first came, she spoke of something as excellent. I spoke the word correctly soon afterward, and never since has she mispronounced it. Indeed, her quickness in learning and her exceeding conscientiousness promise to obliterate all that is peculiar in her speech before you get home again, unless you come quickly.

The girl doesn’t know what to make of Mammy. That dearest of despots has conceived a great affection for this new “precious chile,” and she tyrannises over her accordingly. She refused to let her get up the other morning until after she had taken a cup of coffee in bed, simply because no fire had been lighted in her room that morning. And how Mammy did scold when she learned that Evelyn, thinking a fire unnecessary, had sent the maid away who had gone to light it!

“You’se jes’ anudder sich as Mis’ Dorothy,” she said. “Jes’ case it’s spring yo’ won’t hab no fire to dress by even when it’s a-rainin’. An’ so you’se a-tryin’ to cotch yo death o’ cole, jes’ to spite ole Mammy. No, yo’ ain’t a-gwine to git up yit. Don’t you dar try to. You’se jes’ a-gwine to lay still till dem no-’count niggas in de dinin’-room sen’s you a cup o’ coffee what Mammy’s done tole ’em to bring jes’ as soon as it’s ready. An’ de next time you goes fer to stop de makin’ o’ you dressin’-fire, you’se a-gwine to heah from Mammy, yo’ is. Jes’ you bear dat in mind.”

Evelyn doesn’t quite understand. She says she thought we controlled our servants, while in fact they control us. But she heartily likes Mammy’s coddling tyranny—as what rightly constructed girl could fail to do? Do you know, Arthur, the worst thing about this war is that there’ll never be any more old mammies after it is ended?

I’m teaching Evelyn chemistry, among other things, and she learns with a rapidity that is positively astonishing. She has a perfect passion for precision, which will make her invaluable in the laboratory presently. Her deftness of hand, her accuracy, her conscientious devotion to whatever she does, are qualities that are hard to match. She never makes a false motion, even when doing the most unaccustomed things; and whatever she does, she does conscientiously, as if its doing were the sum of human duty. I am positively fascinated with her. If I were a man, I should fall in love with her in a fashion that would stop not at fire or flood. I ought to add that the girl is a marvel of frankness—as much as any child might be—and that her truthfulness is of the absolute, matter-of-course kind which knows no other way. But these things you will have inferred from what I have written before, if I have succeeded even in a small way in describing Evelyn’s character. I heartily wish I knew her history; not because of feminine curiosity, but because such knowledge might aid me in my effort to guide and educate her aright. However, no such aid is really necessary. With one so perfectly truthful, and so childishly frank, I shall need only to study herself in order to know what to do in her education.

There was a postscript to this letter, of course. In it Dorothy wrote:—

Since this letter was written, Evelyn has revealed a totally unsuspected accomplishment. She has been conversing with me in French, and such French! I never heard anything like it, and neither did you. It is positively barbaric in its utter disregard of grammar, and it includes many word forms that are half Indian, I suspect. It interests me mightily, as an apt illustration of the way in which new languages are formed, little by little, out of old ones.

There was much else in Dorothy’s letter; for she and her husband were accustomed to converse as fully and as freely on paper as they did orally when together. These two were not only one flesh, but one in mind, in spirit, and in all that meant life to them. Theirs was a perfect marriage, an ideal union—a thing very rare in this ill-assorted world of ours.

VI

“WHEN GREEK MEETS GREEK”

AT midnight on the 3d of May, 1864, a message came to General Lee’s headquarters. It told him only of an event which he had expected to occur about this time. Grant was crossing the river into the Wilderness, his army moving in two columns by way of the two lower fords.

General Lee’s plans were already formed in anticipation of this or any other movement of the Army of the Potomac. He needed to learn only which line of march of the several that were open to him General Grant would adopt. Now he knew, and instantly his orders were given to carry out plans previously and completely wrought out in his mind. Grant’s movement by the lower fords indicated clearly what his plan of campaign was to be. He had under his orders a veteran army of one hundred and thirty thousand men, of whom rather more than one hundred thousand were ready for actual battle. Lee had a total of a little less than sixty thousand men—forty-five thousand of whom, perhaps, he could put upon the firing-line, with which to oppose the Federal advance.

Grant’s plan was to push forward rapidly through the Wilderness before Lee could strike a blow, turn his adversary’s right, and plant his greatly superior army near Gordonsville, in Lee’s rear, and between him and Richmond. If he could have accomplished that purpose, the surrender or destruction of the Army of Northern Virginia would have been a matter only of a few days, or perhaps a few hours. For if cut off in this fashion from all its sources of supply, and with no other army anywhere to come to its relief, the already half-starving Virginia force would have had no resource except to hurl itself upon Grant’s double numbers and shatter itself to fragments in a vain effort to break through impregnable lines. It would have had no possible route of retreat open to it, no conceivable road of escape, no second line of defence to fall back upon.

But General Grant was dealing with the greatest master of strategy of modern times. Grant’s plan of campaign was flawless, but Robert E. Lee stood in the way.

Lee instantly moved forward to interfere with his adversary’s march toward Gordonsville, by assailing him in flank. At the same time he threatened his advance corps on their front, in such fashion as to compel Grant to recall them and accept battle amid the tangled underbrush of the Wilderness.

This Wilderness is, perhaps, the very wildest tract of land that lies anywhere east of the Mississippi. It skirts the southern bank of the Rapidan for fifteen miles, extending inland from that stream for about ten miles. Originally it was densely timbered, but in colonial days, and a little later, the timber was cut away to supply fuel for the iron-furnaces that once abounded there, but that were afterward abandoned. As the region does not at all tempt to agriculture, the abandonment of the iron mines left it a veritable wilderness. Its surface became covered with densely growing scrub trees, interlaced with a tangle of vines and imbedded, as it were, in an undergrowth of a density inconceivable to men who have not acquainted themselves with the lavish luxuriance of Southern vegetation.

It was in this Wilderness that Lee’s columns struck Grant’s in flank, and for two days a battle raged there, of which, for difficulty of conditions, there is scarcely a parallel in the history of warfare.

The men could not see each other at a distance of more than a few rods. Regiments, struggling through the tangled vines and underbrush, came unexpectedly upon regiments of the enemy and fought desperately for the possession of the ground, neither knowing how much or how little the holding, the conquest, or the loss of the position involved might signify in a military way.

Orderly fighting was utterly out of the question. Not only was it impossible for corps commanders to handle their troops with co-operative intent; even brigades were so broken up, and their several parts so hopelessly separated and lost to each other in the thickets, that their commanders knew neither when nor where nor how to set one regiment to reinforce another at a critical juncture.

It was a veritable Donnybrook Fair on a large scale, where the only strategy consisted in pushing forward, and the only tactics in striking with all possible might at the enemy, wherever he was found.

The fighting was desperate on both sides. It was such fighting as only the most hardened veterans could have been expected to do under circumstances so unfavourable, such fighting as would have been simply impossible at any earlier stage of the war. To valour these two armies had added discipline and long use in war. Their determination was that of veterans, their courage that of matchless heroes, their endurance that of insensate machines. Here for the first time the two greatest armies of modern history had met in their perfection of discipline, of experience in war, and of that high courage which makes no distinction between the facing of death and the confronting of a summer shower. To these war-seasoned men on either side the hum of bullets meant no more than the buzzing of mosquitoes; battle, no more than a breeze.

But bullets were by no means the only source of trouble and danger. Several times during the long struggle, the woods caught fire, literally suffocating men by hundreds who had passed safely through hail-storms of bullets and successfully met and repelled charges with the bayonet. Earthworks hastily thrown up with pine-log revetments for their support, after enabling the men behind them to resist and repel successive assaults of desperate adversaries, became themselves an irresistible foe, by the firing of their log fronts and the consequent emanation of a smoke too stifling for human lungs to breathe and yet retain capacity for further breathing. The artillery played a comparatively small and very difficult part in all this. Manœuvring with guns in that underbrush was well-nigh impossible, and there were no vantage grounds anywhere from which a gun could deliver its fire at more than pistol-shot range. So delivering it, either the cannon fire quickly drove the enemy away, or the fire of the enemy drove the gun away; and in neither case, after that, could the artillery-men see any enemy to shoot at.

Nevertheless, Marshall Pollard’s battery managed to expend the greater part of its ammunition during those days, and that with effect. Kilgariff was largely instrumental in this. Early in the contest Pollard had clearly seen the difficulty—nay, the impossibility—of handling a battery of six guns as a unit in such conditions. He was subject to orders, of course, but in the execution of his orders he had a certain necessary discretion, and he exercised it. He had only two lieutenants present for duty. Each of these, of course, had immediate command of a section of two guns. The third section fell to Sergeant-major Kilgariff, as next in command. So to him Marshall Pollard said:—

“I cannot have you personally with me in this fight. You have a lieutenant’s duty to do, and I trust you to do it well. I shall try to keep the battery together, and under my own command so far as I can; but I foresee that it is going to be impossible to do that completely. I must leave each section commander to his own discretion, in a very large degree. Frankly, I have much greater confidence in your ability to fight your guns for all they are worth than I have in that of either of the lieutenants. They are good men and true, but they have had no experience in independent command. You—well, anyhow, you know more than they do So I am glad that you have the left section. That, of course, must be the first to be detached. The others I shall try to keep under my own direction.”

Beyond a mere “Thank you, Captain,” Kilgariff made no response. Half an hour later his section was detached and sent to a point of special difficulty and danger. He plunged into action with an impetuosity which surprised General Ewell, who was in personal command at that point, and whose uniform habit it was to place himself at the post of danger. But a moment later, observing the discretion with which Kilgariff selected a position of vantage and planted his guns, with equal reference to their effectiveness and their safety from capture by a dash of the enemy, General Ewell turned to his staff, and said:—

“That young man evidently knows his business. Who is he?”

Nobody knew.

“Then find out,” said Ewell.

Meanwhile, Kilgariff was using canister in double charges, the range being not greater than two hundred yards. Under this withering fire the enemy gave way at that point, and Ewell’s whole line advanced quickly. Again Kilgariff selected his gun position with discretion, and opened a murderous fire upon the enemy’s key position. But this time he did not use canister. Still, his fire seemed to have all the effect of canister, and his target was for a brief while less than fifty yards distant from the muzzles of his guns.

Presently Ewell himself rode up to the guns, and asked, in his peculiarly querulous voice:—

“What ammunition are you using, Sergeant-major?”

“Shrapnel, doubled and fuse downward,” answered Kilgariff. “It’s hard on the guns, I know, but I’ve run out of canister, and must use what I can, till a new supply comes. I’ve sent for it.”

It should be explained that shrapnel consists of a thin, hollow shell of iron, filled with leaden bullets. In the centre of each shell is a small charge of powder, intended only to open the shell twenty-five yards or so in front of an enemy’s line, and let the leaden bullets with their initial impetus hurl themselves like hailstones into the faces of the troops. But Kilgariff was turning his shrapnel shells reverse way, with their fuses toward the powder charge, so that the fuses should be melted at the moment of firing, and the shells explode within the gun, thus making them serve the purpose of canister, which consists of tin cans filled with iron balls.

“Where did you learn that trick?” queried Ewell.

“Oh, I suppose every artillery-man knows it,” answered the sergeant-major, evasively. “But here comes a fresh supply of canister, so I may spare the guns.”

At that moment a rifled gun of the enemy, posted upon a hill eight or nine hundred yards away, opened upon Kilgariff, through a gap in the forest, threatening, by the precision of its fire, either to dismount his guns or to compel his retirement from the position he had chosen. Instantly he ordered one of his Napoleons to reply. It did so, but without effect. After it had fired three shots to no purpose, Kilgariff went to the gun, bade the gunner stand aside, and himself aimed the piece, with as much of calm in his demeanour as if he had not been under a double fire.

“WHO ARE
YOU?”

The gun was discharged, while Ewell watched the effect through a field-glass. The shell seemed to strike immediately under the muzzle of the enemy’s gun, and to explode at the very moment of striking. When the smoke of its explosion cleared away, Ewell saw through his glass that the enemy’s gun had been dismounted, its carriage destroyed, and the men serving it swept out of existence. Dismounting, he walked up to Kilgariff, and asked simply:—

“Who are you?”

“Owen Kilgariff, sergeant-major of Captain Marshall Pollard’s Virginia battery.”

“Thank you,” said Ewell, remounting as he issued orders for another charge along his entire line.

On both days, night ended the conflict, for the time at least, and the first duty of officers great and small, after darkness set in each evening, was to get their commands together as best they could and reorganise them for the next day’s work.

On the Confederate side, it was confidently expected, after the two days’ fighting, that the next day’s work would consist in vigorously pressing the rear of Grant’s columns on their retreat across the river. For every soldier in the Army of Northern Virginia regarded such retreat as inevitable, and the only difference of opinion among them was as to what General Lee would do next. The general expectation was that he would almost instantly move by his left flank for another invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania, another threatening of Washington City.

And there was good ground of precedent for these Confederate expectations. Lee had undoubtedly inflicted a severer punishment upon Grant than he had before done upon McClellan, Pope, Burnside, or Hooker, and moreover he had completely baffled Grant’s plan of campaign, thwarting his attempt to turn the Confederate right and plant his army in the Confederate rear near Gordonsville. Four times the Army of Northern Virginia had seen its adversary retreat and assume the defensive after less disastrous defeats than that which the Southerners were confident they had inflicted upon Grant in these two days’ desperate work. Why should they not expect Grant, therefore, to retreat across the river, as all his predecessors had done under like circumstances? And why should not Lee again assume the right to decide where and when and how the struggle should be renewed, as he had done three times before?

The fallacy in all this lay in its failure to recognise Grant’s quality, in its assumption that he was another McClellan, another Pope, another Burnside, another Hooker.

Between him and his predecessors there was this fundamental difference: they set out to force their way to Richmond by strategy and fighting, and when they found themselves outmanœuvred and badly damaged in battle, they gave up their aggressive attempts and contented themselves with operations for the defence of the Federal capital; Grant had set out to conquer or destroy Lee’s army by the use of a vastly superior force whose losses could be instantly made good by reinforcements, while Lee had nowhere any source from which to draw fresh troops, and when Grant found his first attempt baffled and his columns badly damaged in fight, he obstinately remained where he was, sent for reinforcements, and made his preparations to “fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”

Thus, in Grant’s character and temperament the Confederates had a totally new condition to meet. And there was another supremely important fact governing this campaign. Grant was the first commander of the Army of the Potomac who also and at the same time controlled all the other Federal armies in the field. These he directed with sole reference to his one supreme strategic purpose—the purpose, namely, of destroying the Army of Northern Virginia and making an end of the tremendous resisting power of Robert E. Lee. In that resisting power he, first of all men, saw clearly that the vitality of the Confederate cause had its being.

In order that he might destroy that, he had not only concentrated a mightily superior force against it, and arranged to keep the strength of his own army up to its maximum by heavy reinforcement after every battle loss, but he had also ordered all the Federal armies in other parts of the country to carry on such operations as should continually occupy every Confederate force and forbid Lee to reinforce the Virginia army from any quarter as its numbers should decline by reason of battle losses.

Grant directed Sherman to begin the Atlanta campaign simultaneously with the beginning of the year’s work on the Rapidan. He ordered Thomas to hold East Tennessee, and to operate in such fashion as to occupy all the Confederate forces there. He ordered the Federal armies west of the Mississippi to abandon their wasteful operations in that quarter, concentrate in New Orleans, and move at once upon Mobile, in order to prevent Lee from drawing troops from the Far South.

He filled the valley of Virginia with forces sufficient to compel Lee to keep a strong army corps there, instead of calling it to his assistance in Northern Virginia. He sent Butler to the James River region below Richmond, by way of compelling Lee to keep strong detachments at Richmond and Petersburg, which otherwise he might have called to his assistance in the crucial struggle with the Army of the Potomac.

As one looks back at all this, and clearly discerns Grant’s purpose and the means he used for its accomplishment, it is easy to see that both Lee and the Confederate cause were doomed in the very hour of Grant’s passage across the Rapidan. The only chance of any other issue lay in the remote possibility that the sixty thousand men of the Army of Northern Virginia should inflict a decisive and destructive defeat upon the one hundred and thirty thousand men of the Army of the Potomac at the outset of the campaign, and in that way bring hopeless discouragement at the North to their aid.

This they did not succeed in doing at the Wilderness, and when, after two days’ battling there, Grant moved by his left flank to Spottsylvania Court House to join battle again, there was scarcely a veteran in the Virginia army who did not fully understand that the beginning of the end had come. Yet not one of them flinched from the further fighting because of its manifest hopelessness. Not one of them lost the courage of despair in losing hope. Perhaps there was no part of the titanic struggle which so honourably distinguished those men of the South as did that campaign in which they doggedly fought on after they had come to understand that their fighting was futile.

It is natural enough that men should be brave when the lure of hope and the confident expectation of victory beckon them to the battle front, but only men of most heroic mould may be expected to fight with still greater desperation after all doors of hope are closed to them.

From that hour when Grant moved from the Wilderness to Spottsylvania till the end came, nearly a year later, these men of the South did, and dared, and endured for love of honour alone, with no hope to inspire them, no remotest chance of ultimate success as the reward of their valour. Theirs was a pure heroism, untouched, untainted, unalloyed.

After two days of such fighting as bulldogs do, the struggle in the Wilderness ended with no decisive advantage on either side. Grant had secured possession of roads leading out of the Wilderness. On the other hand Lee had succeeded in completely baffling his adversary’s strategic purpose, and was still in full possession of that region in his own rear which Grant had hoped to seize upon with decisive effect. Grant’s losses in killed, wounded, and prisoners greatly exceeded Lee’s; but as an offset, he could afford to lose more heavily than the Confederates, not only because his force outnumbered Lee’s by more than two to one, but also because he could repair all his losses by reinforcement, while Lee had no such resource.

Baffled, but not beaten, Grant decided, on the evening of the 7th of May, to move to the left, passing out of the Wilderness and taking up a new position—strong both for attack and defence—on a line of hills near Spottsylvania Court House. It was his hope to possess himself of this position before Lee should discover his purpose, and to that end he began his march after nightfall, pushing strong columns forward by all available roads, while still ostentatiously holding his positions in the Confederate front, as if to renew the battle in the Wilderness the next morning.

But his wily adversary anticipated the movement, and discovered it almost as soon as it was begun. Lee sent his cavalry and a considerable force of infantry to fell trees across the roads and otherwise obstruct the march of Grant’s column. Meanwhile, with his main body, he moved in haste to Spottsylvania Court House. The head of his column reached that point in advance of Grant, and promptly seized upon the coveted line of hills which the men, accustomed to such work, proceeded hastily to fortify, fighting, meanwhile, with such of the Federal commands as had come up to dispute their possession of the strategic position.

It was during this preliminary struggle that a certain little hill in front of the main ridge fell into hot dispute. Its possession by the Federals would greatly weaken the Confederate line, and it was deemed essential by the Confederate commanders present to secure it at all hazards, while the Federals, seeing the importance of the little hill, concentrated the fire of twenty guns upon it, sweeping its top as with a broom, whenever a Confederate force, large or small, showed itself there.

Three times Confederate infantry were advanced to the crest, and three times they were driven back by a storm of cannon shot before they could throw up a dozen shovelfuls of earth.

Kilgariff, again detached with his two guns, sat upon his horse, looking on at all this and wondering what the result would be. Presently a brigade of North Carolinians moved up into line just in front of him, at the moment when the third of the charging bodies was hurled back, baffled, beaten, and broken into fragments.

Just then the chief of artillery of the corps with which Kilgariff was temporarily serving rode up and said to him:—

“Do you want your opportunity for distinction and a commission?”

“I want all the opportunity I can get to render service,” was Kilgariff’s answer.

“Then take your guns to the crest of that hill and stay there!” fairly shouted the officer.

Kilgariff fully realised the desperate character of the attempt, and the practical certainty that his guns, his men, and his horses would be quickly swept off the face of the earth when he should appear upon that shell-furrowed hilltop. But he had no thought of faltering. On the contrary, just as he gave the order, “Forward,” a whimsical thought occurred to him. “The general need not have been at the trouble to order us to ‘stay there.’ We’ll stay there, whether we wish to or not. The enemy will take care of that.” Then came the more serious thought that unless he could bring his guns into battery almost instantly upon reaching the hilltop, the slaughter of his horses might prevent the proper placing of the pieces. So, at a full run, he carried the guns up the slope, shouting the orders, “Fire to the front! In battery!” at the moment of coming within sight of the Federal guns, less than half a thousand yards away, and already partially protected by a hastily constructed earthwork.

Fortunately, the men of Captain Pollard’s battery were perfect in drill to their very finger tips, and their alert precision brought the guns into position within a second or two, and the twelve-pounders were bellowing before the horses began falling just in the rear.

Kilgariff ordered the horses and caissons to be retired a little way down the hill, for the sake of such protection as the ground afforded, but scarcely one of the animals lived to enjoy such protection even briefly.

Meantime, Kilgariff, dismounted now (for his horse had been the first to fall), stood there working his two utterly unsupported guns under the fiercely destructive fire of a score of pieces on the enemy’s side. His men fell one after another, like autumn leaves in a gale. Within half a minute he had called all the drivers to the guns to take the places of their dead or dying comrades, and still each gun was being operated by a detachment too scant in numbers for effectiveness of fire.

It was obviously impossible that any of them could long survive under a fire so concentrated and so terrific. Kilgariff reckoned upon three minutes as the utmost time that any man there could live; and when one of his guns was dismounted at its fifth discharge, and two of his limber-chests exploded almost at the same moment, he hastily counted the cannoniers left to him and found their number to be just seven, all told.

But he had not been ordered to undertake this desperate enterprise without a purpose. Reckoning upon the almost superstitious reverence that the infantry cherish for cannon, the generals in command had sent Kilgariff’s guns into this caldron of fire as a means of luring the infantry to a desperate attempt to take and hold the little hill. Before Kilgariff had traversed half the distance toward the crest, the commander of that North Carolina brigade had called out a message that was quickly passed from mouth to mouth down his line. The message was:—

“We must save those guns and hold that hill. They call us tar heels. Let us show how tar sticks.”

Instantly, and with a yell that might have come from the throats of so many demons, the brigade of about two thousand men bent their heads forward, rushed up the hill, and swarmed around Kilgariff’s guns. Their deployment into line quickly diverted the enemy’s attention to a larger front. Other guns were hurriedly brought up to the hill, and half an hour later a substantial line of earthworks covered its crest.

The three minutes that Kilgariff had allowed for the complete destruction of his little command were scarcely gone when this relief came. He was ordered to withdraw his remaining gun by hand down the hill—by hand, for the reason that not a horse remained of the thirty odd that had so lately galloped up the steep.

VII

WITH EVELYN AT WYANOKE

AS if bearing a charmed life, Kilgariff had gone through all this without a scratch. He had galloped up that hill in the face of a heavy infantry fire; he had planted his section under the murderous cannonading of twenty well-served guns firing at point-blank range; he had fought his pieces under a bombardment so fierce that within the brief space of three minutes his command was well-nigh destroyed. Yet not a scratch of bullet or shell-fragment had so much as rent his uniform.

By one of those grim jests of which war is full, he fell after all this was over, his neck pierced and torn by a stray bullet that had missed its intended billet in front and sped on in search of some human target in the rear.

He was carried immediately to one of the field-hospitals which Doctor Arthur Brent was hurriedly establishing just in rear of the newly formed line of defence. There he fell into Doctor Brent’s own friendly hands; for that officer, the moment he saw who the patient was, left his work of supervision and himself knelt over the senseless form of the sergeant-major to discover the extent of his injury and to repair it if possible. He found it to be severe, but not necessarily fatal. He proceeded to stop the dangerous hemorrhage, cleansed and dressed the wound, and within half an hour Kilgariff regained consciousness.

A few hours later, finding that the temporary hospital was exposed to both artillery and musketry fire, Doctor Brent ordered the removal of the wounded men to a point a mile or so in the rear; and finding Kilgariff, thanks to his elastic constitution, able to endure a little longer journey, he took him to his own quarters, still farther to the rear.

Here Captain Pollard managed to visit his sergeant-major during the night.

“General Anderson, who is in command of Longstreet’s corps, now that Longstreet is wounded,” he said, during the interview, “has asked for your report of your action on the hill. If you are strong enough to answer a question or two, I’ll make the report in your stead.”

“I think I can write it myself,” answered Kilgariff; “and I had rather do that.”

Paper and a pencil were brought, and, with much difficulty, the wounded man wrote:—

Under orders this day, I took the left section of Captain Pollard’s Virginia Battery to the crest of a hill in front.

After three minutes of firing, infantry having come up, I was ordered to retire, and did so. My losses were eighteen men killed and fifteen wounded, of a total force of thirty-eight men. One of my gun carriages was destroyed by an enemy’s shell, and two limber-chests were blown up. All of the horses having fallen, I brought off the remaining gun and the two caissons by hand, in obedience to orders. I was fortunately able also to bring off all the wounded. Every man under my command behaved to my satisfaction.

All of which is respectfully submitted.

Owen Kilgariff,

Sergeant-major.

“Is that all you wish to say?” asked Pollard, when he had read the report.

“Quite all.”

“You make no mention of your own wound.”

“That was received later. It has no proper place in this report.”

“True. That is for me to mention in my report for the day.”

But in his indorsement upon the sergeant-major’s report Pollard wrote:—

I cannot too highly commend to the attention of the military authorities the extraordinary courage, devotion, and soldierly skill manifested by Sergeant-major Kilgariff, both in this affair and in the fighting of the last few days in the Wilderness.

In the meantime General Ewell had mentioned in one of his reports the way in which Kilgariff had done his work in the Wilderness, and now General Anderson wrote almost enthusiastically in commendation of this young man’s brilliant and daring action, so that when the several reports reached General Lee’s headquarters, the great commander was deeply impressed. Here was a young enlisted man whose conduct in action had been so conspicuously gallant and capable as to attract favourable mention from two corps commanders within a brief period of three or four days. General Lee officially recommended that a captain’s commission should be issued at once to a man so deserving of promotion and so fit to command.

The document did not reach Kilgariff until a fortnight later, after Arthur Brent had sent him to Wyanoke for treatment and careful nursing. Kilgariff took the commission in his enfeebled hands and carefully read it through, seeming to find some species of pleasure in perusing the formal words with which he was already familiar. Across the sheet was written in red ink:—

This commission is issued in accordance with the request of General R. E. Lee, commanding, in recognition of gallant and meritorious conduct in battle.

That rubric seemed especially to please the sick man. For a moment it brought light to his eyes, but in the next instant a look of trouble, almost of despair, overspread his face.

“Send it back,” he said to Evelyn, who was watching by the side of the couch that had been arranged for him in the broad, breeze-swept hall at Wyanoke. “Send it back; I do not want it.”

Ever since Kilgariff’s removal to the house of the Brents, Evelyn had been his nurse and companion, tireless in her attention to his comfort when he was suffering, and cheerily entertaining at those times when he was strong enough to engage in conversation.

“You know, it was he who took me out of the burning house,” she said to Dorothy, by way of explanation, not of apology; for in the innocent sincerity of her nature, she did not understand or believe that there can ever be need of an apology for the doing of any right thing.

For one thing, she was accustomed to write the brief and infrequent letters that Kilgariff wished written. These were mostly in acknowledgment of letters of inquiry and sympathy that came to him from friends in the army.

Usually he dictated the notes to her, and she wrote them out in a hand that was as legible as print and not unlike a rude print in appearance. At first glance her manuscript looked altogether masculine, by reason of the breadth of stroke and the size of the letters, but upon closer scrutiny one discovered in it many little peculiarities that were distinctly feminine.

Kilgariff asked her one day:—

“Who taught you to write, Evelyn?”

“Nobody. Nobody ever taught me much of anything till I came to live at Wyanoke.”

“How, then, did you learn to read and write, and especially to spell so well?”

The girl appeared frightened a bit by these questions, which seemed to be master keys of inquiry into the mystery of her early life. Kilgariff, observing her hesitation, said quickly but very gently:—

“There, little girl, don’t answer my ‘sick man’s’ questions. I didn’t mean to ask them. They are impertinent.”

“No,” she said reflectively, “nothing that comes from you can be impertinent, I reckon,”—for she was rapidly adopting the dialect of the cultivated Virginians. “You see, you took me out of that house afire, and so you have a right—”

“I claim no right whatever, Evelyn,” he said, “and you must quit thinking about that little incident up there on the Rapidan.”

“Oh, but I can never quit thinking about that. You were great and good, and oh, so strong! and you did the best thing that ever anybody did for me.”

“But I would have done the same for a negro.”

“But you didn’t do it for a negro. You did it for me. So you see I am right about it. Am I not?”

“I suppose so. Your logic is a trifle lame, perhaps, but your heart is right. Never mind that now.”

“But I want to tell you all I can,” the girl resumed. “You see, I can’t tell you much, because I don’t know much about myself, and because they made me swear. But I can answer this question of yours. I don’t know just how I learned to read. I reckon somebody must have taught me that when I was so little that I have forgotten all about it. Anyhow, I don’t remember. But after I had read a good many books, there came a time when I couldn’t get any books, except three that I was carrying with me. That was when I was a little boy, and—”

“A little boy? A little girl, you mean.”

“No, I mean a little boy, but I mustn’t tell you about that, only I have already told you that once I was a little boy. It slipped out, and you must forget it, please, for I didn’t mean to say it. I wasn’t really a boy, of course, but I had to wear a boy’s clothes and a boy’s name. Never mind that. You mustn’t ask me about it. As I was saying, when I grew tired of reading my three books over and over again, I decided to write some new ones for myself. The only trouble was that I had never learned to write. That didn’t bother me much, because I had seen writing and had read a little of it sometimes; so I knew that it was just the same as print, only that the letters were made more carelessly and some of them just a little differently in shape. I knew I could do it, after a little practice. I got some eagle’s quills from—” here the girl checked herself, and bit her lip. Presently she continued:—

“I got some eagle’s quills from a man who had them, and I made myself some pens. I had some blank-books that had been partly written in at the—well, partly written in. But there wasn’t any ink there, so I made myself some out of oak bark and nutgalls, ‘setting’ the colour with copperas, as I had seen the people at the—well, as I had seen somebody do it in that way. It made very good ink, and I soon taught myself how to write. As for the spelling, I tried to remember how all the words looked in the books I had read, and when I couldn’t remember, I would stop writing and look through the three books I still had till I came upon the word I wanted. After that, I never had any trouble about spelling that word.”

“I should imagine not,” said Kilgariff. “But did you succeed in writing any books for yourself?”

“Yes, two of them.”

“What were they about?”

“Well, in one of them I wrote all I could remember about myself; they got hold of that and threw it into the fire.”

“Who did that?”

“Why—well, the people I was with—no, I mustn’t tell you about them. In another of my books I wrote all I had learned about birds and animals and trees and other things. I reckon I know a good deal about such things, but what I wrote was only what I had learned for myself by seeing so much of them. You see, I was alone a good deal then, except for the wild creatures, and I got pretty well acquainted with them. Even here, where they never knew me, I can call birds or squirrels to me out of the trees, and they soon get so they will come to me even without my calling them.”

“Is that book in existence still?” asked Kilgariff, with manifest eagerness.

“I reckon so, but maybe not. I really don’t know. Anyhow, I shall never see it again, of course, and nobody else would care for it.”

“Oh, yes, somebody else would. I would give a thousand dollars in gold for it at this moment.”

“Why, what for? It was only a childish thing, and besides I had never studied about such things.”

“Listen!” interrupted Kilgariff. “Do you know where science comes from, and what it is? Do you realise that absolutely every fact we know, of the kind we call scientific, was originally found out just by somebody’s looking and listening as you did with your animals and birds and flowers? And the persons who looked and listened and thought about what they saw, told other people about them in books, and so all our science was born? Those other people have put things together and given learned names to them, and classified the facts for convenience, but the ones who did the observing have always been the discoverers, the most profitable workers in science. Audubon was reckoned an idle, worthless fellow by the commonplace people about him, because he ‘wasted his time’ roaming about in the woods, making friends of the wild creatures and studying their habits. But scientific men, who are not commonplace or narrow-minded, were glad to listen when this idle fellow told them what he had learned in the woods. In Europe and America the great learned societies never tired of heaping honours upon him and the books he wrote; and the pictures he painted of his woodland friends sold for fabulous sums, bringing him fame and fortune.”

“I am glad of that,” answered the girl, simply; “for I like Audubon. I’ve been reading his Birds of America, since I came to Wyanoke. But I am not Audubon, and my poor, childish writings are not great like his.”

“They are if they record, as they must, observations that nobody else had made before. On the chance of that, I would give a thousand dollars in gold, as I said before, for that childish manuscript. Could you not reproduce it?”

“Oh, no; never. Of course, I remember all the things I put into it, but I set them down so childishly—”

“You set them down truthfully, of course.”

“Oh, yes—but not in any proper order. I just wrote in my book each day the new things I had seen or learned or thought. Mostly I was interested in finding out what animals think, and how or in what queer ways plants behave under certain circumstances. There was nothing in all that—”

“There was everything in all that, and it was worth everything. But of course, as you say, you cannot reproduce the book—not now at least. Perhaps some day you may.”

“But I don’t understand?” queried the girl. “If I can’t rewrite the book now—and I certainly can’t—how shall I ever be able to do it ‘some day’? Before ‘some day’ comes I shall have forgotten many things that I remember now.”

“No, you will not forget anything of vital interest. But now you are self-conscious and therefore shy and self-distrustful, as you were not in your childhood when you wrote the book, and as you will not be when you grow into a maturer womanhood and learn to be less impressed by what you now think the superiority of others. When that time comes, you will write the book again, adding much to its store of observed facts, for you are not going to stop observing any more than you are going to stop thinking.”

Evelyn shook her head.

“I could never write a book—a real book, I mean—fit to be printed.”

“We shall see about that later,” said Kilgariff. “You are a young woman of unusual intellectual gifts, and under Mrs. Brent’s influence you will grow, in ways that you do not now imagine.”

Kilgariff was profoundly interested, and he was rapidly talking himself into a fever. Evelyn was quick to see this, and she was also anxious to escape further praise and further talk about herself. So, with a demure little air of authority, she said:—

“You must stop talking now. It is very bad for you. You must take a few sips of broth and then a long sleep.”

All this occurred long after the day when Kilgariff handed her his captain’s commission and bade her “send it back,” saying, “I don’t want it.” At that time she was wholly ignorant of military formalities. She did not know that under military usage Kilgariff could not communicate with the higher authorities except formally and “through the regular channels”; that is to say, through a succession of officers, beginning with his captain. She saw that this commission was dated at the adjutant-general’s office in Richmond and signed, “S. Cooper, Adjutant-general.” Nothing could be simpler, she thought, than to relieve Kilgariff of all trouble in the matter by herself sending the document back, with a polite note to Mr. S. Cooper. So she wrote the note as follows:—

S. Cooper, Adj’t-general,

Richmond.

Dear Sir:—

Sergeant-major Kilgariff is too weak from his wound to write his own letters, so I’m writing this note for him, to send back the enclosed paper. Mr. Kilgariff doesn’t want it, but he thanks you for your courtesy in sending it.

Yours truly,

Evelyn Byrd.

Precisely what would have happened if this extraordinary note with its enclosure had reached the adjutant-general of the army, in response to his official communication, it is difficult to imagine. Fortunately, Evelyn was puzzled to know whether she should write on the envelope, “Mr. S. Cooper,” or “S. Cooper, Esq.” So she waited till Kilgariff should be awake and able to instruct her on that point.

When he saw what she had written, his first impulse was to cry out in consternation. His second was to laugh aloud. But he did neither. Instead, he quietly said:—

“We must be a little more formal, dear, and do this business in accordance with military etiquette. You see, these official people are very exacting as to formalities.”

Then he wrote upon the official letter which had accompanied the commission a respectful indorsement declining the commission, after which he directed his secretary-nurse to address it formally to Captain Marshall Pollard, who, he explained, would indorse it and forward it through the regular channels, as required by military usage.

“But why not accept the commission?” asked Evelyn, simply. She did not at all realise—and Kilgariff had taken pains that she should not realise—the enormity of her blunder or the ludicrousness of it. “Isn’t it better to be a captain than a sergeant-major?”

“For most men, yes,” answered Kilgariff; “but not for me.”

But he did not explain.

VIII

SOME REVELATIONS OF EVELYN

IN the meanwhile Arthur Brent had acted upon Dorothy’s suggestion. He had prepared a careful statement of Kilgariff’s case, withholding his name of course, and had submitted it to General Stuart, with the request that that typical exemplar of all that was best in chivalry should himself choose such officers as he deemed best, to constitute the court.

The verdict was unanimous. Stuart wrote to Arthur Brent:—

Every member of the court is of opinion that your own assurance of the innocence of the gentleman concerned is conclusive. They are all of opinion that he is entirely free and entitled to accept a commission, and that he is not under the slightest obligation to reveal to anybody the unfortunate circumstances that have caused him to hesitate in this matter. It is the further opinion of the court, and I am asked to express it with emphasis, that the course of the gentleman concerned, in refusing to accept a commission upon the point of honour that influenced him to that decision, is in itself a sufficient assurance of his character. Tell him from me that, without at all knowing who he is, I urge and, if I may, I command him to accept the post you offer him, in order that he may render his best services to the cause that we all love.

Arthur Brent hurried this letter to his friend at Wyanoke; but before it arrived, the writer of it, the “Chevalier of the Lost Cause,” had passed from earth. He fell at the Yellow Tavern, at the head of his troopers in one of the tremendous onsets which he knew so well how to lead, before this generous missive—perhaps the last that he ever wrote—fell under the eyes of the man, all unknown to him, whom he thus commanded to accept honour and duty with it.

The fact of Stuart’s death peculiarly embarrassed a man of Kilgariff’s almost boyish sensitiveness.

I feel [he wrote to Arthur Brent] as if I were disobeying Stuart’s commands and disregarding his dying request, in still refusing to reconsider my decision. Yet I feel that I must do so in spite of the decision of your court of honour, in spite of your friendly insistence, in spite of everything. After all, Arthur, a man must be judge in his own case, when his honour is involved. The most that others can do—the most even that a court of honour can do—is to excuse, to pardon, to permit. I could never submit to the humiliation of excuse, of pardon, of permission, however graciously granted. I sincerely wish you could understand me, Arthur. In aid of that, let me state the case. I am a man condemned on an accusation of crime. I am an escaped prisoner, a fugitive from justice. I am innocent. I know that, and you are generous enough to believe it. But the hideous fact of my conviction remains. It seems to me that even upon the award of a court of honour, backed by something like the dying injunction of our gallant cavalier, Stuart, I cannot honourably consent to accept a commission and meet men of stainless reputation upon equal terms, or perhaps even as their superior and commanding officer, without first revealing to each and all of them the ugly facts that stand in the way. Generous they may be; generous they are. But it is not for me to impose myself upon their generosity, or to deceive them by a reserve which I am bound to practise.

I have already sent back a captain’s commission which I had fairly won by that little fight on the hill at Spottsylvania. With you I may be frank enough to say that any sergeant-major doing what I did on that occasion would have been entitled to his captaincy as a matter of right, and not at all as a matter of favour. I had fairly won that commission, yet I returned it to the war department, simply because I could not forget the facts in my case. How much more imperative it is that I should refuse the higher commission which you press upon me, and which I have not won by any conspicuous service! Will you not understand me, my friend? Will you not try to look at this matter from my point of view? So long as I am a condemned criminal, a fugitive from justice, I simply cannot consent to become a commissioned officer entitled by my government’s certification to meet on equal terms men against whom no accusation has been laid.

Let that matter rest here. I shall remain a sergeant-major to the end—an enlisted man, a non-commissioned officer whose captain may send him back to the gun whenever it pleases him to do so, a man who must touch his cap to every officer he meets, a man subject to orders, a man ready for any work of war that may be given him to do. In view of the tedious slowness with which I am recovering from this wound, and the great need I know Captain Pollard has for an executive sergeant, I wrote to him, two weeks ago, resigning my place, and asking him to select some other capable man in my stead. He replied in his generous fashion, absolutely refusing to accept my resignation.

That was Kilgariff’s modest way of putting the matter. What Pollard had actually written was this:—

By your gallantry and your capacity as a hard-fighting soldier, you have won for my battery such honour and distinction as had not come to it from all its previous good conduct. Do you imagine that I am going to lose such a sergeant-major as you are, merely because his honourable wounds temporarily incapacitate him? I had thought to lose you by your richly earned promotion to a rank equal to my own, or superior to it. That promotion you have refused—foolishly, I think—but at any rate you have refused it. You are still my sergeant-major, therefore, and will remain that until you consent to accept a higher place.

This was the situation so far as Kilgariff was concerned, as it revealed itself to Pollard and Arthur Brent. Dorothy knew another side of it. For with Dorothy, Kilgariff had quickly established relations of the utmost confidence and the truest friendship; and to Dorothy, Kilgariff revealed every thought, as he had never done to any other human being.

Indeed, revelation was not necessary. Dorothy was a woman of that high type that loves sincerely and with courage, and Dorothy had seen the daily and hourly growing fascination of Kilgariff for Evelyn. She had seen Evelyn’s devoted ministry to him, and had understood the unconscious love that lay behind its childlike reserve. She had understood, as he had not, that, all unknown to herself, Evelyn had made of Kilgariff the hero of her adoration, and that Kilgariff’s soul had been completely enthralled by a devotion which did not recognise its own impulse or the fulness of its meaning. Dorothy knew far more, indeed, of the relations between these two than either of themselves had come to know.

She was in no way unprepared, therefore, when one day Kilgariff said to her, as they two sat in converse:—

“You know, of course, that I am deeply in love with Evelyn?”

“Yes,” Dorothy answered; “I must be blind if I did not see that.”

“Of course,” responded the man, “I have said nothing to her on the subject, and I shall say nothing, to the end. I speak to you of it only because I want your help in avoiding the danger-point. Evelyn is not in the least in love with me.”

Dorothy made no response to that.

“She is grateful to me for having saved her life, and gratitude is a sentiment utterly at war with love. Moreover, Evelyn is perfectly frank and unreserved in her conversations with me. No woman is ever so with the man she loves, until after he has made her his wife. So I regard Evelyn, as for the present, safe. She is not in love with me, and I shall do nothing to induce such sentiment on her part.”

Again Dorothy sat silent.

“But there is much that I can do for her, and I want to do it. You must help me. And above all you must tell me the moment you discover in her any shadow or trace of that reserve toward me which might mean or suggest a dawning of love. I shall be constantly on the lookout for such signs, but you, with your woman’s wit and intuitions, may be quicker than I to see.”

“Precisely what do you mean, Kilgariff?” Dorothy asked, in her frank way of going directly to the marrow of every matter with which she had occasion to deal. “You say you are in love with Evelyn. Do you not wish her to be in love with you?”

“No! By every consideration of propriety, by every sentiment of honour, no!” he answered, with more of vehemence than he was accustomed to put into his words.

“Do you not understand? I can never ask her to marry me; I am therefore in honour bound not to win her love. I shall devote myself most earnestly to the task of repairing such defects in her education as I discover. But the moment I see or suspect the least disposition on her part to think of me otherwise than with the indifference of mere friendship, I shall take myself out of her life completely. I ask you to aid me in watching for such indications of dawning affection, and in forestalling them.”

“You shall have all the assistance you need to discover and do your real duty,” said Dorothy. But that most womanly of women did not at all share Kilgariff’s interpretation either of his own duty or of Evelyn’s sentiment toward him. She knew from her own experience that a woman grows shy and reserved with a man the moment she understands herself to be in love with him. But equally she knew that love may long conceal itself even from the one who cherishes it, and that reserve, when it comes, comes altogether too late for purposes of safeguarding.

But Dorothy did not care. She wanted these two to love each other, and she saw no reason why they should not. She recognised their peculiar fitness for each other’s love, and as for the rest—wise woman that she was—she trusted love to overcome all difficulties. In other words, Dorothy was a woman, and she herself had loved and mated as God meant that women should. So she was disposed to let well alone in this case.

Kilgariff’s wound was healing satisfactorily now, and little by little his strength was coming back to him. So, every day, he sat in the laboratory with Dorothy and Evelyn, helping in the work by advice and suggestion, and often in more direct and active ways. For Arthur Brent had written to Dorothy:—

I must remain with the army yet a while in order to keep the hospital service in as efficient a state as adverse circumstances will permit, and the constant shiftings from one place to another render this difficult. When Kilgariff grows strong enough, set him at work in the laboratory. He would never tell you so, but he is a better chemist than I am, better even than you in some respects. Especially he is expert in shortening processes, and the army’s pressing need of medicines renders this a peculiarly valuable art just now. We need everything at every hour, but especially we need opium and its products, and quinine or quinine substitutes. Please give your own special attention to your poppy fields, and get all you can of opium from them. Send to Richmond all the product except so much as you can use in the laboratory in extracting the still more valuable alkaloids.

Another thing: the dogwood-root bark bitters you are sending prove to be a valuable substitute for quinine. Please multiply your product if you can. Enlist the services of your friends everywhere in supplying you with the raw material. Get them to set their little negroes at work digging and drying the roots, so that you may make as much of the bitters as possible. There are a good many wild cherry trees at Wyanoke and on other plantations round about. Won’t you experiment, with Kilgariff’s assistance, and see if you can’t produce some quinine? Our need of that is simply terrible. Malaria kills five times as many men as Federal bullets do, and, apart from that, hundreds of sick or wounded men could be returned to duty a month earlier than they now are if we had quinine enough. Tell Kilgariff I invoke his aid, and you’ll get it.

Kilgariff responded enthusiastically to this appeal. He personally investigated the quinine-producing capacity of every tree and plant that grew at Wyanoke or in its neighbourhood.

“The dog fennel,” he said to Dorothy, “is most promising. It yields quinine in greater quantity, in proportion to the time and labour involved, than anything else we have. Of course, if ours were a commercial enterprise, it would not pay to attempt any of these manufactures. But our problem is simply to produce medicines for the army at whatever cost. So I have taken the liberty of ordering all your chaps”—the term “chaps” in Virginia meant juvenile negroes—“to gather all the dog fennel they can, and to dry it on fence-rail platforms. I am having the men put up some kettles in which to steep it. The rest we must do in the laboratory. Our great lack is that of kettles enough.”

“Must they be of iron?” asked Evelyn, with earnest interest. “Must they have fires under them?”

“N-no,” answered Kilgariff, hesitatingly. “I suppose washtubs or anything that will hold water will do. We must use hot water to steep the plants in, but we might pour hot water into vessels in which we couldn’t heat it. Yes, Evelyn, any sort of vessel that will hold water will answer our purpose.”

“Then I’ll provide all the tanks you need, if Dorothy will give me leave to command the servant-men. I do know how.”

The leave was promptly given, and Evelyn instructed the negroes how to make staves of large proportions, and how to put them together. Three days later, with an adequate supply of these, and with a quantity of binding hoops which she had herself fashioned out of hickory saplings to the utter astonishment of her comrades, the girl manufactured a number of wooden and water-tight tanks, each capable of holding many scores of gallons.

“Where did you learn to do that?” Kilgariff asked, when the first of the tanks was set up.

“Among the whale fishermen,” she answered. “But I mustn’t tell you about that, and you mustn’t ask. But my tanks will hold oil as well as water, and I am going to make a little one for castor oil. You know we have five acres in castor beans. I reckon you two do know how to make castor oil out of them.”

“Come here, Evelyn, and sit down,” said Dorothy. “Of course we know how to extract castor oil from the beans, but we don’t know where or how you got your peculiar English. Tell us about it.”

“I do not understand. Is my English not like your own?”

“In some respects, no. When you volunteered to make these tanks for us, you said, ‘I do know how,’ and now you say, ‘You do know.’ We should say, ‘I know,’ and ‘You know.’ Where did you get your peculiar usage?”

The girl flushed crimson. Presently she answered:—

“It is that I have not been taught. Pardon me. I am trying to learn. I do listen—no, I should say—I listen to your speech, and I try to speak the same. I have read books and tried to learn from them what the right speech is. Am I not learning better now? I try, or I am trying—which is it? And the big book—the dictionary—I am studying. I never saw a dictionary until I came to Wyanoke.”

“Don’t worry,” said Kilgariff, tenderly. “You speak quite well enough to make us glad to listen.”

And indeed they were glad to listen. For now that the girl had become actively busy in the laboratory, she had lost much of her shy reserve, and her conversation was full of inspiration and suggestiveness. It was obvious that while her instruction had been meagre and exceedingly irregular, she had done a world of thinking from such premises as were hers, and the thinking had been sound.

Her ways were sweet and winning, chiefly because of their utter sincerity, and they fascinated both Dorothy and Kilgariff.

“Kilgariff must marry her,” Dorothy wrote to Arthur Brent. “God evidently intended that, when he made these two; but how it is to come about, I do not at all know. Kilgariff has some foolish notions that stand in the way, but of course love will overcome them. As for Evelyn—well, she is a woman, and that is quite enough.”

Evelyn’s use of the intensives, ‘do’ and ‘did’ and the like, was not at all uniform. Often she would converse for half an hour without a lapse into that or any other of her peculiarities of speech. It was usually excitement or embarrassment or enthusiasm that brought on what Dorothy called “an attack of dialect,” and Kilgariff one day said to Dorothy:—

“The girl’s speech ‘bewrayeth her,’ as Peter’s did in the Bible.”

“How do you mean?”

“Why, it is easy and perfectly safe to infer from her speech a good deal of her life-history.”

“Go on, I am interested.”

“Well, you observe that she has almost a phenomenal gift of unconscious imitation. She has been with you for only a very brief while, yet in the main her pronunciation, her inflection, and even her choice of words are those of a young woman brought up in Virginia. She says ‘gyarden,’ ‘cyart,’ and the like, and her a’s are quite as broad as your own when she talks of the grass or the basket. Now when she lapses into her own dialect, there is a distinctively French note in her syntax, from which I argue that she has lived among French-speaking people for a time, catching their construction. But, on the other hand, her English is so good that I cannot think her life has been mainly passed among French-speaking people. Have you tried her in French itself?”

“Yes, and she speaks the most extraordinary French I ever heard.”

“Well, that fits in with the other facts. This morning she spoke of a hashed meat at breakfast as ‘pemmican,’ though she quickly corrected herself; she often uses Indian terms, too, by inadvertence. Then again, her accomplishments all smell of the woods. Putting all things together, I should say that she has spent a good deal of time among, or at least in frequent contact with, Canadian Frenchmen and Indians.”

“I think you are right,” said Dorothy, “and yet some part of her life has been passed in company with a well-bred and accomplished woman.”

“Your body of facts, please?” said Kilgariff.

“Her speech, for one thing; for in spite of its oddities it is mainly the speech of a cultivated woman. She never uses slang; indeed, I’m sure she knows no slang. Her constructions, though often odd, are always grammatical, and her diction is that of educated people. Then again, her scrupulous attention to personal neatness tells me much. More important still, at least in my woman’s eyes, is the fact that she perfectly knows how to make a bed and how to make the most of the little ornaments and fripperies of a room. She did not learn these things from squaws or half-breeds. Moreover, she does needlework of an exquisite delicacy which I never saw matched anywhere. That tells of a highly bred woman as an influence in her life and education.”

While these three were at dinner that day, the negro head-man—for even in his enforced absence Arthur Brent would not commit his authority over his negroes to the brutal instincts of any overseer—came to the door and asked to speak with “Mis’ Dorothy.”

“Bring me a decanter and a glass, Elsie,” said Dorothy to the chief serving-maid. She poured a dram into the glass, and handed it to the girl.

“Take that out to Uncle Joe,” she said, “and tell him to come in after he has drunk it.”

It was a peculiarity of the plantation negro in Virginia that he never refused a dram from “the gre’t house,” and yet that he never drank to excess. Those negroes that served about the house in one capacity or another were always supplied with money—the proceeds of “tips”—and could have bought liquor at will. Yet none of them ever formed the drink habit.

When Uncle Joe came into the dining-room, he had a number of matters concerning which he desired instruction. When these affairs had been disposed of, and Dorothy had directed him to slaughter a shoat on the following morning, the mistress asked:—

“How about the young mare, Uncle Joe? Are you ever going to have her broken?”

“Well, you see, Missus, Dick’s de only pusson on de plantation what dars to tackle dat dar mar’, an’ Dick he’s done gone off to de wah wid Mahstah. ‘Sides dat, de mar’ she done trowed Dick hisse’f tree times. Dey simply ain’t no doin’ nuffin’ wid dat dar mar’, Missus. I reckon de only ting to do wid her is to sell her to de artillery, whah dey don’ ax no odds o’ no hoss whatsomever. She’s five year ole, an’ as strong as two mules, an’ nobody ain’t never been able to break her yit.”

“Poor creature!” said Evelyn. “May I try what I can do with her, Dorothy?”

“You, little Missus?” broke in Joe. “You try to tackle de iron-gray mar’? Why, she’d mash you like a potato wid her foh-feet, an’ den turn roun’ an’ kick you to kingdom come wid de hind par.”

“May I try, Dorothy?” the girl calmly asked again, quite ignoring Uncle Joe’s prophecies of evil.

“Hadn’t you better let some of the men or boys break her first?”

“No. To me it is plain they have done too much of that already. Let me have her as she is. Have her brought up to the house, Uncle Joe, soon after dinner, with nothing on her but a halter.”

“Why, little Mis’, you don’ know—”

“Do precisely as I tell you,” interrupted the girl, who could be very imperious when so minded.

When the mare was brought, she was striking viciously at the negro who led her. With ears laid back close to her head, and with the whites of her eyes showing menacingly, she was striking out with her hoofs as if intent upon committing homicide without further delay.

“Turn her loose, Ben,” said the girl, who sat idly in the porch as if she had no task on her hands. “Then go away from her, and make all the rest go away, too—” motioning toward the gang of little negroes who had assembled, “to see de iron-gray mar’ kill little Missie.”

When all were gone, Evelyn began nibbling at a sugar lump. Presently, after the mare had discovered that she was quite free and that her tormentors were gone, Evelyn held out her hand with the sugar lump in its palm. The animal was obviously unfamiliar with sugar lumps, but she had the curiosity which is commonly—perhaps erroneously—attributed to her sex. So, as Evelyn sat on the bench and made no motion indicative of any purpose to seize the halter, the animal presently became interested in the extended hand. Little by little, and with occasional snortings and recessions, she approached the girl. Finally, finding that the extended hand was not moved, she nosed the sugar lump, and then with her long, flexible tongue, swept it into her mouth.

Evelyn did not withdraw the hand at once, but held it extended till the mare had got the full flavour of the sweet. Meanwhile, she cooed to the animal soothingly, and, after a little, she produced a second sugar lump and laid it upon the extended palm. This time, as the mare took the dainty, Evelyn, still talking soothingly, ventured with her other hand to stroke the beast’s silky nose, caressingly. There was a shrinking back on the part of the timid creature, but the lure of the sugar was enticing, and after once the gentle hand had stroked the mare’s face, she seemed rather to welcome than to resent the caress.

Thus, little by little, did the girl establish relations of amity between herself and the spirited mare. After a while, Evelyn quitted her seat, went out upon the lawn, and with a sugar-lump bribe tempted the animal to approach her. Then she stroked its head and neck and sides, gradually giving it to understand that she meant no harm and accustoming it to the pleasant touch of her hands. Finally she stroked its legs vigorously, and lifted one foot after another, examining each.

By this time the mare seemed to have concluded that the young woman, who talked ceaselessly in her cooing, contralto voice, was an altogether pleasant acquaintance. Wherever the girl went, around the grounds, the mare followed, nosing her and seemingly soliciting her attention.

At last the girl tolled the mare to a horse block, and for a time stood upon it, gently stroking her silky back.

Then she made a motion as if to sit upon that shapely back. The mare shied away, perhaps remembering former attempts of the kind which she had resented as indignities. But as Evelyn did not insist upon her apparent purpose, and as the mare was by this time very much in sympathy, if not in love, with the gentle girl, she presently sidled back into position, and Evelyn seated herself upon her back, at the same time caressingly stroking the sides of her neck. She had neither saddle on which to sit securely, nor bridle with which to control her mount, but there was no need of either. The mare was nibbling grass by this time, and Evelyn permitted her to do so, letting her wander about the house grounds at will, in search of the most succulent tufts. As the supper hour drew near, the girl slipped from the animal’s back and led the way, the animal following, to the stables. There, with her own hands she filled the manger and the hay-rack, and after an affectionate farewell to her new friend, returned to the house. But first she said to Ben, the hostler:—

“Let nobody feed the mare but me. I will be at the stables in time in the morning. And let nobody touch her with a currycomb. I will myself attend to all.”

Three or four days later the high-spirited mare was Evelyn Byrd’s very humble servant indeed. The girl rode her everywhere, teaching her a number of pretty tricks, the most astonishing of which was the art of lifting a gate latch with her teeth, and letting herself and her rider through the many barriers that Virginian law accommodatingly permitted planters to erect across the public roads.

“But how did you learn all this?” asked Kilgariff, full of interest.

“Oh, I do not know. I reckon I never learned it at all. You see, the animals fight us only because they think we mean to fight them. So long as they are afraid of us, they fight, of course. When they learn that we are friendly, they are glad to be friends. Anybody can tame any animal if he goes to work in the right way. I once tamed a Canada lynx, and it became so used to me that I let it sleep on the foot of my bed. But the lynx has a great deal of sense and very little affection, while a horse has a great deal of affection and very little sense. With the lynx, I appealed to its good sense, but I did never—I mean, I never trusted its affection.

“I have treated this mare like a baby that does not understand much, but I have won its affection completely, and I trust that. The animal has so little sense that it would scare at a scrap of paper lying in the road, and go almost frantic if it saw a man pulling a buggy. But if I were on its back, it would not run or do anything that might throw me off. You see, one must know which is stronger in each animal—sense or sentiment. With a horse it is sentiment, so I curry the mare myself, talking to her all the while in a loving way, and I never let anybody else go into the stall. Another thing: a horse loves liberty better than anything else, so I have taken off the halter with which the mare used to be tied in her stall, and, as you know, I turn her loose every morning when she has finished her fodder, and she follows me up here to the house grounds where she is perfectly free to nibble grass. But she loves me so much that she often quits the grass and comes up here to the porch just to get me to rub her nose or stroke her neck. She is strong, and I am light, so she likes me to sit upon her back, as you have seen me do for an hour at a time. She doesn’t quite like a saddle yet—and neither do I. I would never use anything more than a blanket, just for the protection of my clothes, only that Dorothy thinks that people would wonder, if I should go visiting or to church riding bareback. Why do people wonder in that way, Mr. Kilgariff, about other people’s doings?”

“Upon my word, I don’t know, unless it is that we are all like the Pharisee in the parable, and want to emphasise our own superiority by criticising others.”

“But why shouldn’t the others criticise, too? The ways of the people they criticise are no more different from their ways, than their ways are different from those of the people they criticise. I confess I don’t quite understand.”

“Neither do I, Evelyn, except that it is the habit of people to set up their own ways as a standard and model, and to regard every departure from them as a barbarism. If it were not an accepted fact that the Venus of Milo is the most perfect exemplification we have of feminine beauty, and that it is the fashion to go into raptures over that piece of sculpture, I imagine that nine fashionable women in every ten would ridicule the way in which her hair is done up, simply because they do not do up theirs in the same way.”

“Yes, I know,” answered the girl, dreamily, and as if in a reverie. “That was the trouble in the circus.”

“In the circus? What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Don’t ask me.”

IX

THE GREAT WAR GAME

ALL this while the war was going on tremendously and Kilgariff was chafing at the restraint of a wound which forbade him to bear his part in it.

As we have seen, General Grant had crossed into the Wilderness with a double strategic purpose. He had hoped to turn Lee’s right flank and compel the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. Failing in that, he had hoped, with his enormously superior numbers, to crush and destroy Lee’s army in battle.

He had failed in that purpose also. By his promptitude and vigour in assailing Grant’s army in flank, Lee had compelled his adversary to abandon his flanking purpose, and to withdraw his advance columns over a distance of more than ten miles in order to reinforce his sorely beset divisions in the Wilderness and to save his own army from the destruction he had hoped to inflict upon his adversary.

After suffering a far heavier loss than he inflicted, Grant had summoned reinforcements and moved by his left flank to Spottsylvania Court House. By this movement he had again hoped to turn Lee’s right flank, place himself between the Confederates and their capital, and in that way compel the surrender or dispersal of the Army of Northern Virginia. Again he had been foiled by Lee’s alertness and by the marvellous mobility of an army that moved without a baggage-train, and whose men carried no blankets, no extra clothing, no overcoats, no canteens, no tin cups, no cooking-utensils—nothing, in fact, except their rifles and their ammunition.

Those men were on the verge of starvation all the while. Often they had no rations at all for two days or more at a time. When rations were fullest, they consisted of one, two, or three hard-tack biscuits a day for each man, and perhaps a diminutive slice of salt pork or bacon, which was eaten raw.

But these men, who had formerly fought with the courage of hope, inspired by splendid victory, were fighting now with the courage of utter despair. A great wave of religious fervour had passed over the army and the South. It took upon itself the fatalistic forms of Calvinism, for the most part. The men of the army came to believe that every event which occurs in this world was foreordained of God to occur, decreed “before ever the foundations of the world were laid.” They had not ceased to trust the genius and sagacity of Lee, but they had accepted the rule and guidance of a greater than Lee—of God Almighty himself. With a faith that was sublime even in its perversion, these men committed themselves and their cause to God, and ceased to reckon upon human probabilities as factors in the problem.

There were prayer meetings in every tent and at every bivouac fire, every day and every night. At every pause in the fighting, were it only for a few minutes, the men on the firing-line threw themselves upon their knees and besought God to crown their efforts and their arms with victory, submissively leaving it to Him to determine the where, the when, the how. And in this worship of God and this absolute dependence upon His will the men of that army learned to regard themselves personally as mere pawns upon the chess-board of the divine purpose. They came to regard their own lives as dust in the balance, to be blown away by the breath of God’s will, to be sacrificed, as fuel is, for the maintenance of a flame.

Believing firmly and without question that their cause was in God’s charge, they executed every order given to them with an indifference to personal consequences for the like of which one may search history in vain.

In his movement from the Wilderness to Spottsylvania, General Grant again failed to turn the flank of his wily adversary, and, after a prolonged endeavour to break and destroy Lee’s army there, the Federal commander again moved by his left flank, in the hope of reaching Hanover Court House in advance of the arrival there of the Army of Northern Virginia.

Again he was baffled of his purpose. Again Lee got there first, and took up a position in which, by reason of the river’s tortuous course and the conformation of the ground, Grant could not assail him without dividing his own army into three parts, no one of which could be depended upon to support either of the others.

At one point the Federal general very nearly succeeded. There was a bridge across the stream near Hanover Court House. If that could be seized, the Federal forces might cross and assail Lee’s left flank with effect. A strong column of Federals was thrown forward to possess the bridge, and for a time it looked as if they would succeed and bring the war to an end right there.

But two Confederate batteries—utterly unsupported—were thrown forward. One was Captain Pollard’s; the other was a battery from the battalion of Major Baillie Pegram. Advancing at a full run, the two batteries planted their guns at the head of the bridge, just as the Federal columns were beginning to cross it, and within five minutes the bridge had ceased to be.

Has the reader ever seen Shepard’s spirited painting called “Virginia, 1864”? The sketch from which that painting was made was drawn on this hotly contested field, the artist having three pencils carried away from his grasp by rifle bullets and half a dozen rents made in his drawing-paper while he worked.

Thus, for the third time baffled in his effort to place his army between Lee and Richmond, Grant moved again by his left flank to the neighbourhood of Cold Harbour, where one of the severest battles of the seven days’ fight between Lee and McClellan had been waged.

Again Lee discovered his purpose, and again he got there first. He seized upon a line of hills and hastily fortified them. He was now in front of Richmond and only a few miles in advance of that city’s defences. He thought it not imprudent, therefore, to call to his assistance such troops as were engaged in garrisoning the works about Richmond; thus for the first time in all that strenuous campaign having an opportunity in some small degree to make good the waste of war, by way of preparing himself to meet an enemy who had been reinforced almost daily since the beginning of the campaign, and whose army at that time outnumbered the Confederate force by more than three to one.

At Lee’s back lay the now bridgeless Chickahominy—an erratic stream which might at any moment cut him off from all possibility of retreat. If Grant could defeat him where he lay, or even seriously cripple him, the pathway of the Army of the Potomac into Richmond would be scarcely at all obstructed.

In hope of this result, Grant determined upon an assault in force. In the gray of the morning of June 3, he assailed Lee with all of impetuosity and all of force that an army of one hundred and fifty thousand men could bring to bear against an army of less than fifty thousand.

The result was disastrous in the extreme to the Federals. They marched into a very slaughter pen, where they lost about ten thousand men within twenty minutes, for the reason that Lee had previously discovered their purpose and had prepared himself to receive their onslaught with all the enginery of slaughter.

In effect, this disaster to the Federal arms ended the field campaign of 1864. It had been four times demonstrated that in strategy Lee was more than a match for his adversary. It had been four times demonstrated that in field fighting the little Army of Northern Virginia could not be overcome by the force, three times as great, which Grant had so often and so determinedly hurled against it.

There was nothing left to the Federal commander except to besiege Richmond, either directly on the north and east, or indirectly by way of Petersburg, twenty-two miles south and commanding the main lines of Confederate military communication.

Butler already lay on the south side of the James River with a strong detachment and within easy striking distance of Petersburg, a city defended by an exceedingly inadequate force under Beauregard. Grant ordered Butler to seize upon Petersburg quickly, before the place could be defended. If that plan had been successful, Richmond must have surrendered or been evacuated, and the war must have ended in the early summer of 1864, instead of dragging its slow length along for nearly a year more. But Beauregard’s extraordinary alertness and vigour baffled Butler’s purpose. In spite of the exceeding meagreness of the Confederate defending force, before Grant could push the head of his column into Petersburg, Lee was there; and within a few hours the Army of Northern Virginia, equally skilled in the use of bayonet and spade, had created that slender line of earthworks behind which Lee’s thin and constantly diminishing force defended itself for two thirds of a year to come.

X

THE LAW OF LOVE

“MRS. BRENT—” Kilgariff so began a sentence one morning.

But Dorothy interrupted him, quickly.

“Why do you persist in addressing me in that way?” she asked. “Are we not yet sufficiently friends for you to call me ‘Dorothy,’ as all my intimates do? You know, I exacted that of Evelyn in the first moment that I found myself fond of her and knew that she loved me.”

“But there is a difference,” answered Kilgariff. “You see—”

“Yes, there is a difference, but it is altogether on the side of my contention. Evelyn is much younger than I am; for although, as you know, I am still only twenty-four, Evelyn has the advantage of several years of age. She thinks she is only seventeen, but as nearly as I can figure out from what she tells me she must be approaching nineteen. However that may be, you, at any rate, are nearly as old as Arthur. You and he have been intimates all your lives, and if that intimacy is well-founded, I see no reason why you should not include me in it, so far at least, as to call me by my Christian name. You see, I was ‘Dorothy’ long before I became ‘Mrs. Brent,’ and my given name has many pleasing associations in my ears. My father always called me that. So did my mother, after I came to know her. Arthur did so, too, after I learned to like him and gave him leave. Of course, to all outsiders I am ‘Mrs. Brent’—a name that I am proud and glad to bear, because—well, because of Arthur. But to the insiders—to my friends—I have a strong inclination to be just ‘Dorothy.’ Don’t you think you have become an insider?”

Kilgariff hesitated for a time before answering. Finally he said:—

“It is very gracious of you—all this. But I wonder how much Arthur has told you about me?”

“He has told me everything he knows,” she answered, with an added touch of dignity. “We should not be man and wife if either were capable of practising reserve with the other in such a case as this.”

“Very well, then,” responded Kilgariff. “I do not like sailing under false colours; but, as you know all, why, it will be a special pleasure to me to be permitted to call you ‘Dorothy.’”

“Now, what were you going to say when I interrupted you?” asked Dorothy, the direct.

“I’m afraid I forget.”

“No, you don’t, or at least you can remember in such a case. So think a bit, Owen, and tell me what you were going to say. It was something about Evelyn.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Why, for several reasons. For one thing, you caught sight of Evelyn just at that moment, as she was teaching her mare to kneel down for her to mount. You heard her voice, too, as she chided the mare in half playful fashion for rising too abruptly after the mount. A woman’s voice means much to a man of sensitive nature. She talks in just that way to the children—my babies—and their liking for it is positively wonderful. Only this morning Mammy and I were having all sorts of trouble to get them out of their bath. Bob, the boy, was bent upon spending the rest of the day in the tub, and was disposed to raise a rumpus over every effort to lift him out, and Mildred, girl-like, took her cue from her ‘big brother.’ In the midst of the turmoil Evelyn came in. She assumed a look of astonishment, which attracted Bob’s attention and for the moment quieted him. Then she said:—

“‘Oh, Bob! I m sorry you’re bad. But you are. You’re very bad indeed, so I mustn’t tell you about the ten little Injuns. You’re getting to be bad just like them.’

“By that time she had lifted the boy out of the tub and dried him and slipped a garment upon him, he not protesting in the least. Then she stood him up in her lap, and, looking at him in seeming surprise, she exclaimed:—

“‘Why, Bob isn’t bad a bit! Evey made a great big mistake. Evey’s going to tell Bob about the ten little Injun boys.’ And from that moment there was no disturbance in the nursery except the noise of joyous laughter.

“I said to her:—

“‘You deal with them just as if they were wild animals to be tamed.’

“She answered:—

“‘So they are, only people often forget it, cruelly.’”

“Well, now,” said Kilgariff, “let me have your other reason, or reasons, for thinking that what I set out to say had some reference to Evelyn. I plead guilty to your charge that I caught sight of Evelyn teaching the mare, and that I was charmed by the sweetness and sympathetic jollity of her voice, as she addressed the animal in her winning way. But you were going to offer another fact in support of your assumption. What was it?”

“Why, simply that you hadn’t spoken for ten minutes before you addressed me. You were meditating, and whenever you meditate nowadays, you are thinking of Evelyn.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Absolutely. You are not always aware of the fact, but the fact is always there. I like it to be always there.”

“Why, Dorothy?”

“Why, because I want you to be that way with Evelyn. It will mean happiness in the future for both of you.”

“No; it will mean at best a gently mitigated unhappiness to me—and I shall be glad of the gentle mitigation. To her it will mean nothing more than a pleasant friendship. I do not intend that it ever shall mean more than that to her.”

“But why not? Why should it not mean everything to her that womanhood longs for? Why should you not win Evelyn’s love and make her your wife? I never knew two people better fitted to make each other happy, and fortunately you have possessions in Europe and at the North which will enable you to take a wife, no matter how disastrously this war may end for us of the South. Believe me, Owen, in creating men and women, God intended marriage and happiness in marriage for the common lot of humanity. He does not give it to all of us to be great, or to achieve great things, or to render great services, but, if we hearken to His voice as it whispers within us, He intends happiness for us, and His way of giving happiness is in marriage, prompted by love. We poor mortals interfere with Nature’s plan in many ways. Especially we sin by ‘match-making’—by bringing about marriages without love and for the sake of convenience of one kind or another. We wed bonds to city lots. We trade girls for titles, giving a money boot. We profane the holiest of human relations in order to join one plantation to another, or to unite two distinguished houses, or for some other equally devilish reason.

“It is the best thing about this war that its tendency is to obliterate artificialities and restore men and women to natural conditions—at least here at the South. Believe me, Owen, the union of a man and a woman who really love each other, is the crowning fact of all existence. You and I are somewhat skilled in science. We know the truth that Nature is illimitably attentive not only to the preservation of the race, but to its improvement also; and we know that Nature takes no care whatever of the individual, but ruthlessly sacrifices him for the sake of the race. Nature is right, and we are criminally wrong when we thwart her purposes, as we do when we make marriages that have no love for their inspiration, or in any way bar marriage where love prompts it. I am old-fashioned, I suppose, but old fashions are sometimes good fashions. They are always so when they are the outgrowths of natural conditions.

“Now put all that aside. I have had my little say. Let me hear what it was that you were going to say to me concerning Evelyn. I recognise your right, as you do not, to criticise in that quarter.”

“Oh, I had no thought of criticising,” answered Kilgariff. “On the contrary, I am disposed to think you and I have made a valuable discovery in pedagogics.”

“What is it?”

“Why, that the best way to teach science is backward.”

“I confess I do not understand.”

“Well, look at the thing. If Evelyn had been sent to a scientific school to study chemistry, her professor would have set her to studying a book of general principles. Then, after three or four months of drudgery, she would have been permitted to perform a few experiments in the laboratory, by way of illustrating and verifying what the book had told her, the greater part of which she had known before she began. You and I have begun at the other end. We have set Evelyn to do practical work in the laboratory. I remember that her first task was to wash opium, and her next to manufacture blue mass out of rose petals and mercury. Incidentally we explained to her the general principles involved, and in that purely incidental way she has learned her general chemistry so thoroughly within a few weeks, and without opening a book, that she could pass any examination upon it that any college professor could put up. She has learned more in a month than any systematic class work would have taught her in a year.”

“I suppose you are right,” answered Dorothy. “But that is the only way I know. It is the way in which Arthur taught me.”

“Yes, I should suppose that Arthur is distinctly a man of original genius. He knows how to get things done. He is so immeasurably the superior of all the professors I ever knew that I am disposed to name none of them in comparison with him. If it is ever my lot to undertake the teaching of science, I shall adopt precisely that method. And I do not see why the same principle should not be applied to other departments of learning. We begin at the wrong end. The teacher makes the boy begin where he himself did. I think Arthur’s methods immeasurably better, and I spoke of Evelyn’s case only as an illustration of their superiority. That young woman knows much—very much—of science without having had any formal instruction in it at all. She has learned it in the natural way, and she is deeply imbued with the scientific spirit. Only yesterday she said to me, in answer to some question of mine, that she ‘looked straight at things, and thought about them.’ I cannot imagine a more perfect method than that.

“And what book ever taught her what she knows about animals and their ways? What lecturer in all the world could have told her how to subdue that wild and rebellious mare as she has done? She learned all that simply by ‘looking straight at things and thinking about them.’ The professional horse-tamers—Rarey and the rest—set to work, with their mechanical appliances, to convince a horse that they are mightier than he is. They succeed in a way. They make the horse afraid of them, and so long as they deal with him, he submits, in fear of their superior power. But let a timid novice undertake to ride horses thus broken, or to drive them, and disaster comes. Evelyn’s way is incalculably better and more scientific. She has studied animals and learned to understand them and sympathise with them. She makes her appeal to what is best in their natures, not to what is worst, and she gets results that no horse-tamer of them all could ever hope for. The horse-tamer’s processes belong to the domain of artifice. Hers are purely scientific.”

“Absolutely,” answered Dorothy; “and I often wonder where she learned it all, or rather where she got her inspiration, for it is not so much learning as a natural bent.”

“Well, she was born with an instinct of truthfulness for one thing,” said Kilgariff. “That is the only basis of the scientific temperament. I observed her yesterday trying to tempt a fox squirrel out of one of the trees. She chirped to him in her peculiar fashion, and, in response to her invitation, he would run down as far as the root of the tree; but there he would pause and shrewdly reconnoitre, after which he would run back up the tree.

“‘Why don’t you hold out your hand?’ I asked.

“She quickly answered:—

“‘That would be lying to him. Whenever I hold out my hand to him, I have something in it for him to eat. If I held it out empty, I should be saying there was something for him to eat in it, and that would be a lie. He would come to me then and find out that I had deceived him. You do quit believing—pardon me—you quit believing—anybody that tells you lies.’

“I admitted my propensity to distrust untruthful persons, and she gravely asked:—

“‘Why then do you wish me to deceive the poor little squirrel? Do you want him to think me a person not to be trusted?’

“I made some lame excuse about his being only a dumb animal, and she quickly responded:—

“‘But dumb animals are entitled to truthfulness, are they not, particularly when we ask them to confide in us? I should be ashamed of you, Monsieur’—you know she always calls me ‘Monsieur’ when she is displeased with me—‘if I did not understand. The human people do not know the animals—how trustful they want to be if only we would let them. We set traps for them, we deceive them in a hundred ways, and that is why they distrust us. I did read a few days ago—you smile, Monsieur; I should say, I read the other day—that the wild creatures are selfish, that they care for us only as a source of food supply. That is not true, as that squirrel shall teach you. It is true that all the wild creatures are hungry all the time. There is not food enough for all of them, and so when we offer them food, they come to us, even in fear. They have many of their young to feed, and their supplies are very scant. That is why they congregate around houses where there is waste thrown out. But oh, Monsieur, many hundreds of them do starve to death in the long winters. You notice that in the spring there are a dozen robins on the lawn; in the early summer, when they have brought forth their broods, there are scores and hundreds of them. But in the next spring there are only the dozens again. The rest have perished of cold and hunger. I have been reading Mr. Darwin’s book, and I know that this is the universal law of progress, of advancement by the struggle for existence, and the survival of the fittest under the law of heredity. But it is very cruel. That isn’t what I wanted to say. I wanted to show you that even the wild creatures—hungry as they always are—have affection. I am going to make that squirrel come to me and sit on my shoulder without giving him any food as a temptation. You shall see. After that, I will give him plenty to eat.’

“And she did. She wheedled the squirrel till he came down his tree, crossed the lawn, and invaded her lap. It was only then that she gave him the peanuts with which she had filled her pockets. I tell you that girl is a born scientist, and that her knowledge is wonderful. Did it ever occur to you that the squirrels and birds that seem so happy here in the Wyanoke grounds are habitually in a state of starvation?”

Just then Evelyn came walking toward the porch. The mare was closely following her, and a squirrel perched upon one shoulder, while a robin clung to the other. She had pockets in her gown—she insisted upon pockets—and from these she fed the wild creatures. Upon getting a nut, the squirrel leaped to the ground, and upon receiving a bit of bread, the robin flew away.

“You see,” said Kilgariff, “how coldly selfish and calculating your wild creatures are. The moment they get something to eat, they quit your hospitality.”

“Not so, Monsieur,” the girl answered. “They have their babies to feed. They will come back to me when that is done,” and they did.

“Touch the squirrel,” she said to Kilgariff, “and he will fasten his long teeth in your flesh. But I may stroke his fur as much as I please. That is because he has made friends with me. And see! The robin is a wild bird. His first instinct is to keep his wings free for flying. Yet I may take him thus”—possessing herself of the bird—“and lay him on his back in my lap, so that his wings are useless to him, and he does not mind. It is because he knows me for his friend and trusts me. Ah, if only people would learn to know the wild creatures and teach them the lesson of love!”

Kilgariff felt like saying, “I know no such teacher of that lesson as you are,” but he refrained, and so it fell to Dorothy afterward to say:—

“Not many people have your gift, dear, of making other creatures love them.”

“But you have it,” the girl answered enthusiastically. “Oh, how I do love you, Dorothy!”

“I MAY STROKE HIS FUR AS MUCH AS I PLEASE.”

XI

ORDERS AND “NO NONSENSE”

WHEN General Grant, with one hundred and twenty thousand men, sat down before Petersburg and Richmond and called for reinforcements as a necessary preliminary to further operations, his plan was obvious, and its ultimate outcome was nearly as certain as any human event can be before it has happened.

Richmond lies on the north bank of the James River. Petersburg lies on the Appomattox River twenty-two miles due south of Richmond. Each river is navigable up to the gates of the city situated upon it, so that in besieging the two cities from the east, General Grant had an uninterrupted water communication over which to bring supplies and reinforcements at will. His line of fortifications stretched from a point on the north of Richmond, eastwardly and southwardly to the James River, and thence southwardly, with a westerly trend, to a point south of Petersburg. A rude outline map, which accompanies the text, will give a clearer understanding than words can.

A glance at the map will show the reader three lines of railway upon which Richmond depended for communication with the South and for supplies for Lee’s army. All of them lay south of the James River.

Grant’s problem was to break these three lines of railway, and thus to compel Richmond’s surrender or evacuation. If he could break the Weldon railway first, and the others later, as he purposed, his vastly superior army at the time of Richmond’s evacuation could be easily interposed between Lee and any point farther south to which the Confederate commander might plan to retreat.

That is what actually happened eight months later, with Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House as the outcome of this successful strategy.

In the meanwhile, Lee, with less than forty thousand men, was called upon to defend a line more than thirty miles long against an enemy whose numbers were three or four times his own, and whose capacity of reinforcement was almost limitless.

Sketch Map showing Lee’s and Grant’s lines about
Richmond and Petersburg

Still more important was the fact that Lee must stand ready, by day and by night, to defend every point on this long line, while his adversary, with the assistance of ships and railroads in his rear, could concentrate irresistible forces at any point he pleased and at any time he pleased, without the knowledge of the Confederate commander. To the military on-looker it appeared easy for Grant to break through Lee’s lines whenever he pleased, by hurling an overwhelming force with irresistible momentum against any part of the attenuated thread that he might elect, breaking through with certainty and entire ease.

Such would have been the case but for the splendid fighting quality of that Army of Northern Virginia which was struggling almost literally in its “last ditch.” Time after time Grant massed his forces and threw them with all his might against the weakest points he could find in Lee’s defensive lines, only to be baffled and beaten by a fighting force that was absolutely unconquerable in its obstinate determination.

But Grant had other arrows in his well-stocked quiver. His enormous superiority in numbers, and his easy ability to manœuvre beyond his adversary’s sight or ken, made it possible for him continually to extend his lines to the left; pushing south and west, and compelling Lee to stretch out his already slender line to the point of hopeless thinness.

Grant could one day assail the defences below Richmond on the north side of the James River in vastly superior force, and the next morning at daybreak hurl five men to Lee’s one against the works defending the Weldon Railroad, thirty miles or more to the south.

Yet even under these conditions the brilliant Confederate strategist not only held his own, but detached from his all too meagre force a strong column under Early, and sent it to sweep the valley of Virginia, invade Maryland, and so far threaten Washington as to compel Grant either to send forces for the defence of the Federal capital or to forego for the time being the reinforcements which he was clamorously demanding for the strengthening of his lines at Petersburg.

Captain Marshall Pollard’s battery was included in the detail of troops made for this final and despairing invasion of the country north of the Potomac; and when the battery marched, Sergeant-major Owen Kilgariff rode by the side of his captain, ready for any duty that might fall to his lot.

The wound in his neck was not yet well, or even nearly so, but he was quite regardless of self in his eagerness to bear his part, and so, in spite of all the warnings of all the doctors, he had rejoined his command at the first moment in which he was strong enough to sit upright in the saddle.

Captain Pollard had but one commissioned officer with him on this dare-devil expedition, and that one officer was shot in the first skirmish, so that Owen Kilgariff, non-commissioned officer that he was, was second in command of the battery.

Early’s column swept like a hurricane down the valley, and like a cyclone burst upon Maryland and Pennsylvania. It marched fearlessly wherever it pleased and fought tremendously wherever it encountered a foe. Its invasion of the North at a time when Grant with three or four men to Lee’s one was beleaguering the Southern capital, was romantic, gallant, picturesque, startling. But it did not accomplish the purpose intended. It was Grant’s conviction that Washington City could take care of itself; that the authorities there had force enough at command, or within call, to meet and repel a Confederate invasion, without any assistance from him. He, first of all Federal generals, acted upon this conviction, and refused to weaken his lines at Petersburg and Richmond by sending any considerable forces to defend Washington against Early. Grant had little imagination, but he had a great fund of common sense.

Only one considerable action was the outcome of this expedition. In a minor encounter on the day before the battle was fought, Captain Marshall Pollard lost a leg, thus leaving his sergeant-major, Owen Kilgariff, in command of the battery, reduced now to four guns, with only four horses to each piece or caisson.

At Monocacy, Kilgariff fought the guns at their best, and by a dash of a kind which artillery is neither armed nor expected to make, captured two Federal rifled guns, with their full complement of horses. In his report he spoke of this feat of arms only as “an opportunity which offered to add two guns to the battery and to raise the tale of horses to the regulation number of six to each gun and caisson.”

But that night General Early sent for Kilgariff, in response to that non-commissioned officer’s request that a commissioned officer should be sent to take command of the battery.

“I don’t see the necessity,” said Early, in his abrupt way. “I don’t see how anybody could fight his guns better than you have done. Get yourself killed if you want somebody else to command Pollard’s battery. So long as you live, I shall send nobody else. How does it happen that you haven’t a commission?”

“I do not covet that responsibility,” Kilgariff answered evasively.

“Well, that responsibility will rest on your shoulders from this hour forth, till the end of this campaign, unless you escape it by getting yourself killed. I shall certainly not send anybody else to command your battery while you live. From this hour I shall regard you as Captain Kilgariff; and when I get myself into communication with General Lee or the war department, I’ll see that the title is made good.”

“Thank you, General,” answered Kilgariff. “But I sincerely wish you wouldn’t. I have already received and rejected one commission as captain, and I have declined a still higher rank offered me.”

“What an idiot you must be!” squeaked Early in his peculiar, falsetto voice. “But you know how to fight your guns, and I’ve got a use for such men as you are. You may do as you please after this campaign is over, but while you remain under my command you’ll be a captain. I’ll see to that, and there’ll be no nonsense about it, either.”

An hour later, an order, officially signed and certified, came to Kilgariff. It read in this wise:—

Special Order No. 7. Sergeant-major Owen Kilgariff, of Captain Pollard’s Virginia Battery, is hereby ordered to assume command of said Battery as Acting Captain, and he will exercise the authority of that rank in all respects. He is ordered hereafter to sign his reports and orders as “Captain Commanding,” and all officers concerned are hereby directed, by order of the Commanding General, to recognise the rank thus conferred, not only in matters of ordinary obedience to orders, but also in making details for court-martial service and the like. This temporary appointment of Captain Kilgariff is made in recognition of peculiarly gallant and meritorious conduct, and in due time it will be confirmed by the War Department. In the meanwhile Captain Kilgariff’s rank, commission, and authority are to be fully recognised by all persons concerned, by virtue of this order.

This order was duly signed by General Early’s adjutant-general, as by his command.

There was nothing for Kilgariff to do but obey an order so peremptory, from a commander who was not accustomed to brook opposition with patience. Kilgariff’s first thought was to send through the regular military channels a written protest and declination. But an insuperable difficulty stood in the way. Under Early’s order, he must sign that document not as “Sergeant-major,” but as “Captain.” Otherwise, his act would be of that contumacious sort which military law defines as “conduct subversive of good order and military discipline.”

But aside from that consideration was the fact that General Early had sent Kilgariff a personal note, in which he had written:—

I have issued an order in your case. Obey it. I don’t want any damned nonsense.

Kilgariff was too good a soldier to protest further while the campaign under Early should continue. He meant to ask excuse later, but for the time being there was nothing for him to do except assume the captain’s rank and command to which Early had thus peremptorily assigned him.

XII

SAFE-CONDUCT OF TWO KINDS

AS Early was slowly making his way back into the valley of Virginia—fighting wherever there was a force to be fought—there came a messenger to Owen Kilgariff one night a little before midnight. He bore a slip of paper on which these words were written:—

Come to me quickly. I am mortally wounded, and it is very necessary for me to see you before I die—not for my sake, for you’d rejoice to see me in hell, but for the sake of others and for your own sake—though for yourself you don’t often care much. I’m in a farm-house hospital three miles south of Harper’s Ferry on the Martinsburg road. My messenger will guide you. The Federals have possession, of course, but the bearer of this note has a safe-conduct for you. Of course, this might be a trick, but it is not. On the word of a gambler (and you know what that means) I am playing fair this time. You are a brave enough man to risk this thing anyhow. Come!

This note bore no signature, but Owen Kilgariff knew the hand that had written it. That handwriting had sent him to jail once upon a time. He had not forgotten. He was not given to forgetting.

He summoned the messenger who had brought him the note.

“You have a safe-conduct for me, I believe?” he asked.

“Yes, Captain,” and he produced the document.

“How did you manage to pass our picket lines? Did you come under a flag of truce?”

“No. That would have taken time, and there is no time to be wasted. Major Campbell is terribly wounded. I live in these parts. I ain’t a soldier, you know. So I slipped through the lines.”

For a moment Kilgariff regarded the fellow with indignant contempt. Then the indignation passed, and the contempt was intensified in his expression. Presently he said:—

“You low-lived, contemptible hound, I can’t make up my mind even to be angry with you. You and your kind are the pest in this war. You haven’t character enough to take sides. You serve either side at will, and betray both with jaunty indifference. Now listen to me. Within twenty-four hours I shall see Major Campbell, who sent me this note. But I shall not go to him under the safe-conduct you have brought.”

With that, Kilgariff tore the paper to bits and scattered its fragments to the night wind.

“I shall order you sent to the guard-house and manacled, until General Early shall have decided what to do with you. He doesn’t like your sort.”

The man fell at once into panic and pleaded for his life.

“Oh, what will become of me?” he piteously moaned.

“I really don’t know,” answered Kilgariff, quite as if the question had related to the disposition to be made of some inanimate object. “General Early may have you shot at sunrise, or he may decide to hang you instead. I don’t at all know, and after all it makes no real difference. The one death is about as painless as the other, and as for the matter of disgrace, of course you are hopelessly incapable of considering that. Perhaps—oh, well, I don’t know. General Early may conclude to turn you loose as a creature too contemptible to be seriously dealt with.”

“God grant that he may!” said the man, with fervour, as the guards took him away.

A minute later Kilgariff mounted his horse, Wyanoke—a special gift from Dorothy—and rode hurriedly to General Early’s headquarters; it was after midnight, but with this army sleeplessly “on service” very little attention was given to hours, either of the day or of the night. So, after a moment’s parley with a sentinel, Kilgariff was conducted to General Early’s presence, under a tree.

It was not Kilgariff’s habit to grow excited. He had passed through too much for that, he thought. But on this occasion his perturbation of spirit was so great that he had difficulty in enunciating his words.

“General,” he said, “I want a little cavalry force, if you please. I want to capture one of the enemy’s hospitals and hold it long enough for me to have a talk with the most infamous scoundrel who ever lived.”

“Calm yourself, Captain,” said Early. “Have a little apple brandy as a tonic. Your nerves are shaken.”

Kilgariff declined the stimulant, but at Early’s earnest solicitation he sat down upon a stump, and presently so far commanded his own spirit as to go on with what he had to say.

“One of those contemptible border wretches got himself smuggled through our lines to-night. I don’t know how. He brought me a note from the most infamous scoundrel I ever knew, together with a safe-conduct under which I could sneak into the enemy’s lines and talk with the fellow, who is mortally wounded. I tore up the safe-conduct and sent the emissary to the guard-house with the comfortable assurance that his case would be submitted to you, and that you would pretty certainly order him shot or hanged according to the gravity with which you might regard his offence. I hope you’ll let him go. He is so poor-spirited a cur that he will suffer a thousand deaths to-night in dreading one for to-morrow. However, that isn’t what I want to speak with you about. I want a cavalry force of a company or two. I want to raid that hospital before morning and talk with that rascal in the interest of others whose fate he may hold in his hands.”

“Do you plan to kill him?”

“Of course not. He is wounded unto death. And besides—well, General, he isn’t of our class.”

“I quite understand—not a man you could ‘call out.’”

“Distinctly not—although he has a major’s commission.”

“Oh—if you want a colonel’s or a brigadier-general’s, you shall have it,” broke in Early, full of the enthusiasm of fight.

“No, General,” answered Kilgariff, with an amused smile; “I have always found it possible to fight anybody I pleased without raising the question of rank. You know, a private, if he is a man of good family, may slap a major-general’s jaws in our army, in full certainty that his escapade will bring a challenge rather than a citation before a court-martial. No. I want to talk with this man before he dies. He sent me a safe-conduct, as I have already said. That was a gracious permission from the Federal authorities for me to see him. I have a very pronounced prejudice against the acceptance of gracious permissions from the Federal authorities. So I have come to ask for a squadron of cavalry, to which I will add a couple of guns, in order that I may capture that post, enter its hospital, and have my talk with its inmate without anybody’s permission but yours, General.”

The humour of the situation appealed strongly to Early, as it did also to Major Irby of the Virginia Cavalry, who was sitting near by. That officer was a man of few words, but he carried an unusually alert sabre, and his sense of humour was uncommonly keen.

“If you don’t mind, General,” he said, in his quiet fashion, “I should like to ‘sit in’ the captain’s game.”

“Do it!” said Early. “Take three companies and two of Kilgariff’s guns, and let him show the fellow that he carries his own safe-conduct at his back.”

Things were done promptly and quickly in those stirring times, and five minutes after Early had spoken his words of permission, Major Irby moved at the head of three companies of cavalry and two of Kilgariff’s guns—the two so recently captured from the enemy, and selected now by way of emphasising the jest.

A dash, a scurry, and every picket post south of Harper’s Ferry was swept out of sight.

XIII

KILGARIFF HEARS NEWS

AS soon as Major Irby had possessed himself of the hospital and the region round about, he gave orders to throw out pickets a mile or so in every direction, in order to guard against surprise. He posted Kilgariff’s guns on a little hill, where their fire could sweep all of the roads over which an advance of the enemy was possible. Then he ordered the officer of the guard to post a strong line of sentinels around the house itself, which served as hospital, and to send a corporal’s guard into the building with orders to dispose themselves as Kilgariff might direct.

Kilgariff, who had stripped the chevrons off his sleeves, and sewed a captain’s three bars on his collar in obedience to General Early’s order, immediately entered the house and made his way to the separate room in which Campbell’s cot had been placed. Kilgariff turned to the corporal of the guard, and commanded:—

“Place two sentinels in that outer room. Order them to see to it that there is no eavesdropping. You understand?”

“Perfectly, Captain.”

There is this advantage about military over other arrangements, that they can be absolutely depended upon. The sentinel who has “orders” is an autocrat in their execution. He has no discretion. He enters into no argument. He parleys with nobody, whatever that somebody’s rank may be. He simply commands, “Halt”; and if the one advancing takes one other step, the sentinel fires a death shot at short range and with absolutely certain aim. Killing, on the part of a sentinel whose command of “Halt” is disregarded, is not only no crime in military law—it is a virtue, a simple discharge of peremptory duty. And the sentinel himself, if ordered to stand twenty feet away from a door, stands there, not encroaching upon the distance by so much as a foot, under pain of punishment “in the discretion of a court-martial,” as the military law phrases it.

So, when Kilgariff entered the room in which the man who had ruined his life lay wounded, in answer to that man’s summons, he knew that his conversation would be neither interrupted nor overheard in any word or syllable of it. The absoluteness of military law and practice forbade that, even as a possibility.

Kilgariff advanced to the man’s bedside, took his seat upon a camp stool, and without the remotest suggestion of a greeting in his voice or manner, abruptly said:—

“I am here. What do you want?”

“I was sure you would come,” answered the man; “the safe-conduct—”

“I tore that up the moment I received it,” answered Kilgariff.

“But why? It was valid.”

“For any other officer in our army, yes,” answered Kilgariff; “but not for me, as you very well know. Anyhow, I preferred to come under the safe-conduct of Southern carbines and cannon and sabres. Never mind that. Go on. What do you want?”

The man winced and groaned with pain as he turned himself a little on his cot in order to face his interlocutor. Presently he said:—

“I’m shot through the groin with a canister ball. It is a wound unto death, I suppose.”

“Yes? Well? What else? I did not come to ask after your health.”

“Of course not. I mention my condition only as a man who flings a card upon the table at a critical moment exclaims, ‘That’s a trump.’ You see, the things I want to say to you are in the nature of an ante-mortem statement, and I want you to understand that, so that you may believe all I have to tell you.”

“I understand,” said Kilgariff. “You are precisely the sort of man, who, after lying and cheating all his life, would tell the truth in a dying statement, if only by way of cheating the Day of Judgment and playing stacked cards on the Almighty. Go on.”

But before the man could speak again, Kilgariff added:—

“As a still further stimulus to truth-telling on your part, let me make a few suggestions. You are completely in my power. If I choose, I can have you taken hence to General Early and introduce you to him as a man who accepted a commission in the Confederate Army and then deserted to the other side and deceived the authorities there into giving him a commission to fight the cause he had solemnly sworn to support. You know what would happen in such a case.”

“Yes, I know. There’d be a drumhead court-martial, and I’d be hanged at daybreak. But hear me, Kilgariff. I’m a gambler, as you know, not in one way, but in all ways. And I know how to be a good loser. I’ve drawn a very bad hand this time, but I’ve called the game; and if I’m hanged for it, I shall not whine about my luck. Whenever I die, and however I die, I’ll die game. So you can’t intimidate me. But before I die, there are certain things I want to tell you—for the sake of the others. For although I have no moral principles and don’t profess any, there are some things I want to tell you about—”

“Go on. Tell me about my brother.”

“That wasn’t what I wanted to talk about first. Besides, you know most of the story.”

“Never mind that. I want to hear it all from your lips. Much of it I never understood. Tell it all and quickly.”

“Well, your brother’s a fool, you know.”

“Yes, I know. Otherwise—never mind that. Tell me the whole story. How far was my brother a sharer in your guilt? How far did he consent to my wrecking? Why did he join you for my destruction, after all I had done for him?”

“It’s very hard to say. Opinions differ, and standards of morality—”

“Damn opinions and standards!—especially yours. I want the facts—all of them, to the last detail. Go on, and don’t waste time.”

“Well, your brother is a fool, as I said before, though in the end he did ‘make his jack’ and win a pot of money. But that was good luck—not good play.”

“Don’t fall into reflections,” interrupted Kilgariff, seeing that Campbell was in a reminiscent mood. “We’ve no time for that sort of thing. Go on with the facts.”

“Well, you see your brother was that sort of man about whom people say that he was ‘more sinned against than sinning.’ He always wanted to do right, and if he could have got a good steady job as a millionaire, I don’t know anybody who would have been more scrupulously upright than he. You see, he really thought he had principles—moral character and that sort of thing—when he hadn’t anything of the kind. Many people deceive themselves in that way. I never did. I was born of as good a family as yours, or any other. I was raised in the most honourable traditions, and as a young man I was reckoned a pattern of high-minded conduct. I knew all the time that I had no moral character, no principles. Or rather, I gradually became conscious of that fact.”

Kilgariff was exceedingly impatient of this autobiography, but he thought the shortest way to the man’s facts was to let him talk on in his own way. So he forebore to interrupt, and Campbell continued:—

“I would have killed any man who called me a liar, but I never hesitated to lie when lying seemed to me of advantage. I was scrupulous in paying my debts and discharging every social duty, but I knew myself well enough to know that if an opportunity came to me to rob any man without being found out, I would do it and not hesitate or repent over it. Like the great majority of men, I was honest only as a matter of policy. I had no moral character. Most people haven’t any, but they go on thinking they have and pretending about it until they completely deceive themselves. They refuse to take the old sage’s advice to ‘know thyself.’ I took it. I early learned to know myself.

“But if I had no principles, I at least had sentiments. One of those sentiments was pride in my family. When I saw clearly that I was going to be an adventurer, a gambler, a swindler, a man living by his wits, I did not shrink from that, but I shuddered at the thought of disgracing the name I bore. So I decided not to bear that name, but to choose another. At first I thought of calling myself ‘George Washington Bib’—just for the humour of the thing. The sudden slump from the resonance of ‘George Washington’ to the monosyllabic inconsequence of ‘Bib’ struck me as funny. But I reflected that while I had never heard of anybody named Bib, there might be people by that name. Still further, it occurred to me that anybody on being introduced to George Washington Bib would be sure to remember the name, and in the career I had marked out for myself that might be inconvenient. So I made up my mind to call myself Campbell. There are so many families of that name, and they are so prolific, that the mere name means nothing—not even a probability of kinship. But you’re not interested in all this. You want to hear about your brother.”

“Yes,” answered Kilgariff.

“Well, your brother was highly respectable, as you know. He was comfortably rich at the first, and after he lost most of his money he struggled hard to keep up the pretence of being still comfortably rich. He did the thing very cleverly, and it let him into several pretty good things in Wall Street. But it let him into a good many very bad things also, and in his over-anxiety to become really rich again, he went into the bad things headforemost and blindfold. I was posing as a lawyer then, you know, and cutting a large swath. I really had no regular practice of any consequence, but I kept two large suites of offices and any number of clerks, as a blind, and I managed every now and then to find out things that I could turn to account—”

“Blackmail, I suppose.”

“Yes, I suppose you’d call it that, but always with a weather eye on the law. You see, when an active lawyer finds out that a big banker has been doing things he oughtn’t, the big banker is apt to conclude that he needs the services of precisely that particular lawyer as private counsel. There are big fees in the business sometimes, but it’s risky and uncertain. So I had my ups and downs. I was in one of the very worst of my downs when this bank affair fell in. I had been a bank examiner at one time, and had twice examined the affairs of this bank. I knew that its deposits were enormous and its assets sufficient, if properly handled, to pay out everything and leave a large surplus, besides something for the receiver. So I decided to become in effect, though not in fact, the receiver. I owned a judge. He owed me money which he couldn’t pay, and that money was owing on account of things which he couldn’t on any consideration allow to be inquired into in ‘proceedings.’ Moreover, I knew a lot of other things which in themselves made me his master. Still again, his term was nearly at an end, and I had the political influence necessary to secure or defeat his renomination and re-election, as I might choose. In short, I owned him body and soul. So, when it fell to him to appoint a receiver for this bank, he naturally sent for me in consultation. His idea was to appoint me to the receivership, but I saw clearly that that would not do. It would raise a row, for I was pretty well known to the big financiers, many of whom had been obliged to employ me by way of silencing me at one time or another. But more important than that was the fact that the plans I had formed for the handling of the bank’s affairs involved a good deal of risk to the receiver. The bank had a great many investments that must be closed out in order to put the institution on its feet again, and there are various ways of closing out such investments. It was my idea that they should be so closed out as to leave the bank just barely solvent and able to pay its depositors, you understand—”

“Yes—and that you and your pals should pocket the surplus.”

“Precisely. I didn’t imagine you had so good a head for business.”

“Never mind my head. Consider your own neck, and go on with the story.”

“Now won’t you understand,” said the adventurer, “that I’m not thinking about my neck? I’ve staked that as my ’ante’ in this game, and I never ask the ante back. Well, I showed my judge that it wouldn’t do at all to make me receiver, but I told him I would find him the right man. Your brother had already occurred to me as available. He was in extreme financial difficulties at that time. He was in arrears in his club dues, and his tailor’s bills, and even to his servants. He had sold out every bond and every share of stock he owned, and still his debts were sorely pressing him. He lived at a fine though small place just out of town, where he and his wife and daughters entertained sumptuously. For even to his wife and daughters he kept up the pretence of being comfortably rich, so that they had no hesitation in giving orders at the caterers’ and the florists’ and directing that the bills be sent to him.

“I knew his condition. I knew that he was passing sleepless nights in dreadful apprehension of the quickly coming time when the florists and the caterers would surely refuse to fill the orders of his wife and daughters on the ground that he owed them and didn’t pay.

“One day I sent for him to dine with me in a private room at an expensive hotel. I vaguely suggested to him that his fortune was made; that within a few days I should be able to put him in position to twiddle his fingers at the florists and the caterers. But I gave him no details. I gave him limitless champagne instead, and, as my digestion resented champagne at that time, I excused myself from drinking more than a very small share of the enticing beverage. We decided to play poker, after dinner, just for amusement. The chips were valued high—a dollar for a white chip, two and a half for a red, and five dollars for a blue.

“For a time your brother had marvellous ‘luck.’ He won enough of my paper promises to pay to make him feel already quite independent of the caterers and the florists, and to convince him that at poker I was exceedingly easy prey to a man who ‘really understood the game,’ as he conceitedly thought he did. Well, we played on till morning; and when sunrise came, he had given me his I O U’s for more money than he had ever owned in his life.”

“That is to say, you had made him drunk on champagne, and then had cheated him without limit?”

“Well, yes, that’s about it. Anyhow, I owned him. After he had got over the headache and the champagne, he came to me at my office to see what could be done by way of compromise. I told him that I had no money and no resources except my wits; I frankly confessed that but for certain cash payments he had made early in the game, I could not have paid for the hotel room and tipped the waiters to the tune that waiters set when they are privy to a game of that kind.

“‘But it’s all right,’ I assured him. ‘Don’t bother about the I O U’s. They’ll keep. They are debts of honour, of course, but they needn’t be paid till it is convenient to pay them; and when you go into the position that I’ve secured for you, it will be not only convenient, but exceedingly easy.’

“Then I told him about the receivership and my purpose to have him appointed. I explained that in the mere matter of commissions it would give him a princely income, to say nothing of perquisites. I didn’t explain what ‘perquisites’ in such a case meant. That was because I had no moral character. He didn’t ask. That was because he thought he had a moral character and wished to spare it affront.

“It was easily arranged that the judge I owned should appoint as receiver the man I owned. But I didn’t own my man completely, as yet. He owed me more money, as a debt of honour, than he could pay at that time; but once in the receivership, he could quickly pay off all that, and then I shouldn’t own him at all. Indeed, he might have repudiated the I O U’s as illegal gambling debts; he might have refused to pay them at all. But I wasn’t afraid of that. Your brother fondly imagined that he was a man of honour, of high moral principle, and so I knew that in order to keep up that pretence with himself he would stand by his debts of honour. But I foresaw that he might presently discharge them all, out of the proceeds of the receivership, and send me adrift. I must get a stronger grip on him. So I told my judge to send for him and say certain things to him.

“‘You must setup a house,’ the judge told him, ‘in a fashionable quarter of the town, by way of maintaining your position. You see, it won’t do for me to put anybody in charge of those many millions who isn’t recognised as himself a man of independent wealth. You must have a good house and enlarge your establishment. The receivership will abundantly recoup you in the end, but from the beginning we must keep up appearances.’

“Your brother came to me in great distress of mind to tell me what the judge had required of him. He frankly told me he hadn’t the money necessary to make a first payment on the lease of a town house, to furnish it suitably, and to establish himself in it. I pretended to be worried over the matter, and I took twenty-four hours in which to think about it. Then I sent for your brother again and told him I saw a way out; that certain clients of mine had money to invest on bond and mortgage, and had placed it in my hands; that by a little stretching of my authority I could let him have the amount he needed, as a mortgage loan on his place in the country. I saw his face fall when I suggested this, as I had expected to see it fall. Presently he explained that in order to give a mortgage on his country place, which really stood in his wife’s name and had in fact come to her as a dowry, he must get her to execute the papers. That would be very awkward, he explained, as he had never thought it necessary to bother his womankind about his affairs. To ask his wife to execute a mortgage would necessitate a statement to her of his financial position, and a whole lot more of that sort, which I had expected. I told him I thought I could arrange the matter; that my clients had placed their affairs completely in my hands; that all they wanted was the prompt payment of interest and adequate security for their invested money; that the profits of the receivership would be ample to secure all this; and that any arrangement I might make would never be questioned by my clients. I told him that the mortgage security was after all only a matter of form in a case where the other security was so ample, and that the whole thing was in my hands. So I suggested that he should—as a mere matter of form—execute the mortgage, himself signing his wife’s name in her stead. I would take care of the document, not even recording it, and the loan could be paid off presently, with nobody the wiser. Your brother fell into the trap. He executed the mortgage, signing his wife’s name to it, and he was at once made receiver of the bank.

“From that hour, of course, he was my property. No negro slave in all the South was ever more completely owned, or more absolutely under the control of his master.

“I had only to reveal the facts at any moment in order to send him to jail. He had committed a felony—he, the highly respectable receiver of a savings bank, and a man regarded as a leader in social and even in religious movements of every kind. I held complete proofs of his felony in my own hands. He must do my bidding or go to State’s prison.

“My first order to him was to put me into the bank as counsel to the receiver, at a good salary, and also as expert accountant, at another good salary. The bank could afford all this and vastly more. Its assets were easily three times its liabilities—if properly handled, and I knew how to handle them. I meant no harm to your brother. On the contrary, I meant to make him rich and let him retire from the completed receivership with the commendation of the court for the masterly manner in which he had so handled the affairs of the institution as to make good every dollar of its deposits with interest, and to deliver it into the hands of its trustees again in a perfectly solvent condition. You see, the assets were ample for that, and to provide for my future besides. The only trouble before had been bad management and a deficient knowledge of the art of bookkeeping on the part of the respectable old galoots who had been in control of the bank. They might easily have straightened out everything without any court proceedings at all, if they had known how. Their violations of the law had been purely technical—such as occur in every bank every day—and these things can always be arranged on a good basis of assets, if the people in charge only know how.

“Now, when I began operations in the bank, your brother was inclined to object to some of the things I did. I had only to remind him of the mortgage papers in order to reduce him to subjection. He still thought he had a moral character, and so when I proposed to sell out the bank’s securities at ten or twenty or fifty per cent less than their value, and take a commission of five or ten or forty per cent for ourselves from the buyers, he raised grave moral objections. But he was in no position to insist upon them, and besides he was largely profiting by the transactions. Meanwhile, I was slowly getting the bank’s affairs into shape—very slowly, for there were the salaries of him and myself to be considered. Then came the revolt of the chief bookkeeper, and his complaint that we were robbing the bank. I tried hard to square him, but he wouldn’t square. That fellow really had a moral character, and, worse still, he couldn’t be scared. I showed him that as he had already permitted false entries in the bank’s books, he must himself be involved in any exposure that might be made. He answered that he knew that, and was prepared to explain matters in court and ‘take the consequences.’ Then your brother got scared half to death, and consulted you. If he had waited for forty-eight hours, I should have had that bookkeeper in jail, and your brother would have got credit for extreme vigilance. But when he sent for you, all was up. You came into the bank and practically took your brother’s place and function. But you neglected to provide yourself with legal authority to be in the bank at all. Another thing you didn’t reckon upon was my foresight. I had taken pains to win several of the clerks and bookkeepers to my side. I had ‘let them in,’ so that when you angrily dismissed me, I still had daily and hourly information of what was going on. You found out that the bank’s securities had been sold for less than they were worth, and you set to work to repair the wrong. You couldn’t cancel the sales that had been made, but you could and did pay your own money into the bank to make good what you regarded as the defalcations. That made it easy for me. I went to my judge—the one I owned—and laid before him the fact that you were handling the bank’s assets without a shadow of legal authority; that you had dismissed me—the receiver’s counsel and expert accountant—upon discovering that I knew of defalcations, and all the rest of it. You know that part of the story, for you suffered from it. To save your brother, you had sacrificed large sums of money. When that failed and you found that either he or you must go to prison for these defalcations, you decided to sacrifice your liberty and your reputation in order to save him and his wife and daughters. You refused to defend yourself. I thought your plan was to get a stay, give bail, and skip it. But you had the disadvantage of having a moral character, so you stood your hand and were sent to prison. Your brother, having no moral character, let you do this thing and pretended great grief over your dishonesty and perfidy. But he had learned the business by that time, and so he got away with the swag, and with the reputation of a man of truly Roman virtue who suffered acutely over the misbehaviour of his ‘black sheep’ brother. What a farce it all is anyhow—life, I mean—if one tries to take it seriously! Let me have a little brandy, please! I’m growing very faint.”

The brandy did its appointed work of stimulation, and presently Campbell resumed:—

“I don’t in the least understand why you should care for your brother, but, as you do, it may gratify you to know that he is leading a quiet life of luxury in the country on the Hudson. He is a comfortably rich man; for he kept the money he got out of the bank and invested it prudently—a thing I never could do when I had money. He highly disapproved of me, of course; but when I quitted the Southern army and went North—”

“When you deserted, you mean.”

“Yes, if you look at it in that way—he used his influence to get me my present commission. That was cheaper than supporting me, which he must otherwise have done, for I had lost and squandered everything. That brings me to what I really want to talk to you about. I have a daughter somewhere in the South, if she is still alive. She was captured a few months ago during an effort on the part of—well, never mind whom—to smuggle her through the lines into the South, where she has some relatives, though I don’t believe she knows who they are. It doesn’t matter. They say I’ve persecuted the girl—and I suppose in a way I have.

“Never mind that. I’m sinking fast now and haven’t any time for explanations. I have some papers here that may mean everything to her after she comes of age. She has been taught that she is only seventeen years old. In fact, she is nineteen, and she must have these papers when she is twenty-one. I sent for you to ask you to find her and deliver them. You really have a moral character, and so you won’t trade on this matter. With your wide acquaintance, you’ll know how to find the girl. Her name is Evelyn Byrd.”

If a shell had exploded in the room, Kilgariff would not have been so startled as he was by this announcement. But he had no time for questions. He had heard picket-firing for several minutes past, and his practised ear told him with certainty that the rattle of the musketry was steadily drawing nearer. He knew what that meant. The Federals were advancing in adequate force for the recapture of the position and the destruction of Major Irby’s little handful of men.

A few minutes before Campbell made his startling announcement, a note had come to Kilgariff from Major Irby, saying:—

“Enemy advancing in considerable force, but I can hold place for an hour or more if absolutely necessary. You needn’t hurry. Only cut it as short as you can.”

But just at the moment of the mention of Evelyn Byrd’s name, the voices of two rifled cannon were heard near at hand, and Kilgariff knew the guns for his own. Instantly he sprang up, and, taking the papers from Campbell’s hand, passed out of the house without a word of farewell, leaped upon his horse, and galloped to the little hill where his guns had been posted.

It was in the gray of early dawn, and even considerable bodies of troops could not be seen except at short distances. But the enemy was pressing Major Irby hard, apparently bent upon capturing his force. Both his flanks were threatened, while his centre was specially hard pressed.

TAKING THE PAPERS FROM CAMPBELL’S HAND, PASSED OUT OF THE HOUSE WITHOUT A WORD OF FAREWELL.

No sooner had Kilgariff reported that his mission was finished, and that he was himself with the guns, than Irby gave some rapid commands, threw his whole force upon the enemy with great impetuosity, and then, while the recoil before his charge lasted, swung his little band about and made good its escape at a gallop.

XIV

IN THE WATCHES OF THE NIGHT

OWEN KILGARIFF was now beset with perplexities. So long as he should continue to serve with Early in the valley, he must retain the rank of captain which that commander had forced upon him, and this he was determined not to do. He knew that Early had reported upon his case, and that very certainly a commission would come to him in regular form from Richmond. He foresaw that its coming would greatly increase his embarrassment. He could not decline it except officially through General Early, to whom, of course, he could give no satisfactory reason for his erratic course.

Then, too, he was puzzled about the papers that Campbell had given him. These clearly belonged to Evelyn, and his first impulse was to send them to her and let her do what she would with them. But he remembered that Campbell’s injunction had been, or seemed to be, to deliver the documents into her hands only when she attained the age of twenty-one years. Not knowing what might be in the papers, Kilgariff could not know what or how much of harm might come to her from their premature delivery.

It is true that he had given no promise to Campbell, and as for the wishes of the adventurer, Kilgariff was in no way bound to respect them, and certainly he was not disposed to do so. His sole concern in the matter was for Evelyn’s welfare, and he could not make up his mind what his course of conduct ought to be with respect to that. He needed counsel very sorely, and there was only one man in all the South of whom he could freely ask counsel. That man was Arthur Brent, who might be still at Petersburg, or might have gone back to his laboratory work at Wyanoke.

In either case, consultation with him seemed equally out of the question. No confidence was to be placed in mails at that disturbed time, and of course Kilgariff would not ask for or accept even the sick furlough which the increasing inflammation of his neglected wound rendered exceedingly desirable, so long as there was well-nigh continuous fighting in progress at the front.

Altogether, Owen Kilgariff was sorely beset with puzzling uncertainty of mind. He was in action during most of the day after the night he had spent with Campbell, but neither weariness nor loss of sleep enabled him to close his eyes during the following night. He lay throughout the hours of darkness stretched upon the ground under a great chestnut tree, weary but with wide-open eyes, staring upward at the stars that showed through the leaves, and thinking to no purpose.

One thought occurred to him at last which caused him suddenly to sit up, and for a moment made his heart bound.

His vigil of ceaseless thought and perplexity had taught him much of his own soul’s condition which he had but vaguely guessed at before. It had shown him clearly what his feeling was toward Evelyn Byrd. He understood now, as he had not done before, that his love for the girl was the supreme passion of his life—the limitless, all-embracing, all-conquering impulse of a strong nature which had schooled itself to repression and self-sacrifice. He saw clearly that all this self-discipline—greatly as it had enabled him to endure and to make sacrifice—had given him no strength adequate to his present need. He had thought to conquer his passionate love; he knew now that he could never conquer it. He had thought to put it out of his mind as a longing for the unattainable; he knew now that it would for ever refuse to be dismissed.

“So long as I live,” he thought, “I must bear this burden; so long as I live, I must suffer and be still. For I shall at any rate retain too much of manhood and courage to win Evelyn’s love or to sadden her life by linking it with my own. My honour, at any rate, shall remain unspotted. Fortunately, a bullet or a sabre stroke is likely to solve all my riddles for me before this year comes to an end—and so much the more imperative is it that I arrange quickly for the disposal of her papers to her best advantage. But what is best? If these papers reveal to her the cruel fact that her father was an adventurer, a gambler, a swindler—and they must if they reveal anything—will it not be a great wrong to let her have them at all? And yet who but herself has a right to decide that she shall not receive whatever revelation the documents may make?”

Then it was that the thought came to Kilgariff which made him sit up suddenly.

“She is the daughter of that man. Is there not in that fact an offset to my disability? Am I not free to tell her concerning myself, after she has learned her own origin, and to stand with eyes on a level with her own, asking her to be my wife?”

No sooner had he formulated the thought thus than he rejected it as unworthy. For a time he scourged himself for permitting the suggestion to arise in his mind, but presently he comforted himself by recalling the words of a great divine who, speaking of evil thoughts quickly dismissed, said:—

“I cannot prevent the birds from flying over my head, but I can forbid them to make nests in my hair.”

“I will not let that bird make a nest in my hair,” thought Kilgariff, resolutely, and greatly to the relief of his troubled conscience.

At that moment the reveille sounded in all the camps, and Kilgariff rose to his feet, stripped himself to the waist, sluiced his head, shoulders, and chest in the cold water of a neighbouring spring, resumed his clothing, and was ready for the day’s duties, whatever their nature might be. But his vigil had not brought him any nearer than he was before to the solution of the problems that so greatly perplexed him. It had only added a new and distressing self-knowledge to the burdens that weighed upon his mind. He had never feared death; now he looked upon it as a chance of welcome release from a sorely burdened life. Thenceforth he thought of the bullets as friendly messengers, one of which might bear a message for him.

XV

IN THE TRENCHES

OPERATIONS in front of Petersburg had by this time settled down into a sullenly obstinate struggle for mastery between the two finest armies of veterans that ever met each other anywhere in the world. It is no exaggeration to characterise those armies by such superlatives. For in them it was not only organisations—regiments, brigades, and divisions—that were war-seasoned, but the individual men themselves. They had educated themselves by four years of fighting into a personal perfection of soldiership such as has nowhere else been seen among the rank and file of contending armies.

The slender lines of hastily constructed earthworks behind which these two opposing hosts had confronted each other at the beginning of that supreme struggle of the war, had been wrought into other and incalculably stronger forms by work that had never for one moment ceased and would not pause until the end.

The breastworks had been raised, broadened, and strengthened under the direction of skilled engineers. At every salient angle a regular fort of some sort had been constructed and heavily armed for offence and defence.

In rear of these lines every little eminence had been crowned by a frowning fortification, as sullen in appearance and as capable of destructive work as the Redan or the Malakoff at Sebastopol.

At brief intervals along the outer lines traverses had been built at right angles to the works, as a protection against all enfilading fire.

The fields just behind the lines were intricately laced with trenches and protective earthworks of every kind. Without these the men in front would have been completely cut off from communication with the rear, by a resistless, all-consuming fire.

Great covered ways—protected passages—were cut as the only avenues by which men or supplies could be moved even for the shortest distances. Every spring that could yield water with which to quench the thirst of the fighting men was defended by jealous fortifications.

There was no more thought now of enumerating the actions fought, or naming them. There was one continuous battle, ceaseless by day or by night, in which dogged resistance opposed itself daily and hourly to desperate assault, both inspired by a courage that did not so much resemble anything human as it did the struggle of opposing and titanic natural forces. Did the reader ever see the breaking up of the ice in a great river or lake, under the angry impulse of flood and storm? As the great ice floes in that case assailed the rocks with seemingly resistless fury, and as the rocks stood fast in the courage of their immovability, so at Petersburg the opposing forces met, day after day, with the courage and determination of inanimate forces.

Every great gun that either side could bring from any quarter was placed in position, so that the fire, continuous by day and by night, grew steadily greater in volume and more destructive in effect.

In this matter of guns, as well as in numbers of men, the Federals had enormous advantage. They had arsenals and foundries equipped with the most improved machinery to supply them, and they could draw freely upon the armouries of Europe, besides. The Confederates had no such resources. The few and small shops within their command were antiquated in their equipment and very sharply limited in their capacity. But they did their best.

As soon as regular siege operations began, the Federals set to work establishing mortar batteries at every available point. Mortars are very short guns fired at a high “elevation”; that is, pointing upward at an angle of forty-five degrees to the horizon, or more than that, so as to throw shells high in air and let them fall perpendicularly upon an enemy’s works, breaking down defences and reaching points in rear of works to which ordinary cannon fire cannot penetrate.

The lines were so close together—at one point only fifty yards apart—that everything had to be done under cover of some kind, and thus mortars became a vitally necessary arm with which to break down the enemy’s cover. The Confederates had none of these guns at first, but their foundries were at least capable of manufacturing so simple a weapon in a rude but effective fashion, making the mortars of iron instead of brass, and mounting them in oaken blocks heavily banded with wrought iron. In a very brief time the mortars began to arrive, and their numbers rapidly increased, but there were very few of the officers who knew how to handle a weapon so wholly different from ordinary guns both in construction and in methods of use.

This scarcity of mortar-skilled officers in the lower grades gave Owen Kilgariff his opportunity. The thought occurred to him suddenly on the day after his vigil, and he acted upon it at once.

He wrote to Arthur Brent, addressing his letter to Wyanoke, whence it would of course be forwarded should Doctor Brent be at Petersburg still.

I want you, Arthur [he wrote], to use your influence in my behalf in a matter that touches me closely. For several reasons I want to be ordered from this place to Petersburg. For one thing, there is a matter of business, vitally interesting to you and me and closely involving the welfare of others. I simply must see you concerning it without delay. If I can get to Petersburg, I can see you, for Wyanoke is near enough to the beleaguered city for you to visit me in the trenches. There are other reasons, but the necessity of seeing you is the most important and the least personal to myself, so I need not bother you now with the other considerations that move me to desire this change, which you can bring about if you will—and I am sure you will.

I should ask for the transfer of the battery now under my command, if I did not know that it would be idle to do so. For some reason General Early seems to have taken a fancy to me, and still more to two highly improved rifle guns that I recently added to the battery by capture. He will never let me go unless compelled by orders to do so.

But I see another way. I learn that our mortar fire at Petersburg is less effective than it should be, by reason of our lack of battery officers skilled in handling that species of ordnance. Now that is a direction in which I could render specially valuable service, not only by commanding many mortar pits myself, and instructing the men, but also by teaching our unskilled battery officers what to do with such guns, and how to do it. If you will personally see General Lee’s chief of artillery and lay the case before him, I am sure he will order me transferred to the trenches. You can tell him that I was graduated at Annapolis, taking special honours in gunnery. You need tell him no more of my personal history than that after graduation I resigned from the navy to study medicine, and that you learned to know me well in our student days at Jena, Berlin, and Paris.

Do this thing for me, Arthur, and do it as quickly as possible. And as soon as I reach Petersburg, make some occasion to see me there, bearing in mind that to see you with reference to matters of vital importance to others is my primary purpose in asking for this transfer.

Arthur Brent was at Wyanoke when this letter came, but he hastened to Petersburg to execute his friend’s commission. He told more of Kilgariff’s personal history than Kilgariff had suggested. That is to say, he told of his gallantry at Spottsylvania and of its mention in general orders. He had neither to urge nor beseech. No sooner was the chief of artillery made aware of the facts than he answered:—

“I want such a man badly. Orders for his immediate transfer to the lines here shall go to-day.”

So it came about that before the end of that week, Owen Kilgariff stood in a drenching rain-storm and nearly up to his knees in the mud of a mortar pit at Petersburg, bombarding a salient in the enemy’s lines.

The storm of bullets and rifle shells that raged around his pits was as ceaseless as the downpour of rain, but as calmly as a schoolmaster expounding a lesson in algebra, he alternately instructed his men and explained to the half a dozen subaltern officers who had been sent to him to learn. He was teaching them the methods of mortar range-finding, the details of powder-gauging for accuracy, the art of fuse-cutting, and all the rest of it, when out of a badly exposed covered way came Doctor Arthur Brent to greet him.

XVI

THE STARVING TIME

THE stress of war had now fallen upon every Southern household. Its terrors had invaded every home. Its privations made themselves manifest in scanty food upon tables that had been noted for lavish and hospitable abundance, and in a score of other ways. The people of Virginia were not only standing at bay, heroically confronting an invading force three or four times outnumbering their own armies, but at the same time starvation itself was staring them in the face.

The food supplies of Virginia were exhausted. Half the State had been trampled over by contending armies, until it was reduced to a desert so barren that—as Sheridan picturesquely stated the case—“the crow that flies over it must carry his rations with him.” The other half of the State, already stripped to bareness, was compelled during that terrible summer, almost wholly to support the army at Richmond and Petersburg and the army in the valley, for the reason that the means of drawing even scanty supplies from the well-nigh exhausted country farther south were practically destroyed. Little by little Grant had extended his left southward and westward until it crossed the Weldon Railroad south of Petersburg, thus severing that most important line of communication. In the meanwhile the Federal cavalry was continually raiding the South Side Railroad and the Richmond and Danville Line, tearing up tracks, burning the wooden bridges, and so seriously interrupting traffic as to render those avenues of communication with the South practically valueless, so far at least as the bringing of supplies for the armies was concerned.

Thus Virginia had not only to bear the calamities of the war, but also, single-handed, to maintain the armies in the field, and Virginia was already stripped to the point of nakedness.

Yet the people bore all with patriotic cheerfulness. They emptied their smokehouses, their corncribs, and their granaries. They sent even their milky herds to the slaughter, by way of furnishing meat for soldiers’ rations, and they went thereafter without milk and butter for lack of cows, as they were already going without meat. Those of them who were near enough the lines desolated their poultry yards, and lived thereafter upon corn pone, with greens gathered in the fields and such perishable fruits as could in no wise be converted into rations.

The army was being slowly destroyed by the daily losses in the trenches, which, excluding the greater losses of the more strenuous battles, amounted to about thirty per cent a month in the commands that defended the most exposed points. Thus Owen Kilgariff’s mortar command of two hundred and ten men lost sixty-two within a single month, and some others lost still more heavily for lack of the wise discretion Kilgariff constantly brought to bear upon the problem of husbanding the lives and limbs of his men while getting out of them the uttermost atom of effective service of which they were capable.

Whenever a severe mortar fire was opened upon his line of pits, he would station himself in a peculiarly exposed position on top of the earth mound that protected his magazine. From that point he could direct the work of every gun under his command and at the same time do much for the protection of his men. A mortar shell can be seen in the air—particularly at night, when its flaming fuse is a torch—and its point of contact and explosion can be calculated with a good deal of precision. It was Kilgariff’s practice to watch for the enemy’s shells, and whenever he saw that one of them was likely to fall within one or other of his pits and explode there with the certainty of blowing a whole gun detachment to atoms, he would call out the numbers of the exposed pits, whereupon the men within them would run into the boom-proofs provided for that purpose and shelter there till the explosion was over.

In the meanwhile, he, posted high upon the magazine mound, was exposed not only to the mortar fire that endangered his men, but still more to a hail-storm of musket bullets and to a ceaseless flow of rifled cannon shells that skimmed the edge of his parapet, with fuses so skilfully timed and so accurately cut that every shell exploded within a few feet of his head.

Perhaps he was thinking of the kindly bullet or the friendly shell fragment that was to make an end of his perplexities. Who knows? Yet his exposure of himself was not reckless, but carefully calculated for the preservation of his men. It was only such as was common among the Confederate officers at Petersburg, where the percentage of officers to men among the killed and wounded was greater than was ever recorded in any war before or since.

By this exposure of his own person Kilgariff undoubtedly saved the lives of many of his men, all of whom were volunteers who had offered themselves to man a position so dangerous that the chief of artillery had refused to order mortars to occupy it, and had reluctantly consented to its occupation by Kilgariff and his desperately daring men as volunteers in an excessively perilous service. He might have reduced his losses still more if he had been willing to order his subordinates at the several groups of pits to expose themselves as he did in the interest of the men. But this he refused to do, on the ground that to order it would be to exact more than even a soldier’s duty requires of the bravest man.

One of his sergeants—a boy of fifteen, who had won promotion by gallantry—had indeed emulated his captain’s example in the hope of sparing his men. But the second time he did it, a Hotchkiss shell carried away his head and shoulders, and the world suffered loss.

The hospital service, under such conditions, was terribly overtaxed, and for relief the plantation houses were asked to receive and care for such of the wounded as could in any wise be removed to their hospitable shelter. Thus, presently, every half-starving family in the land was caring for and feeding as best it could from three to a dozen wounded men.

At Wyanoke Dorothy had met this emergency by establishing a regular hospital camp, in which she received and cared for not less than fifty wounded officers and men. With the wise foresight that was part of her mental make-up, and aided by Arthur’s advance perceptions of what this terrible campaign was likely to bring forth, Dorothy had begun early in the spring to prepare for the emergency. She had withdrawn a large proportion of the field hands from the cultivation of crops, and set them at work raising garden stuff instead. To the same end, she had diverted to her gardens a large part of the stable fertiliser which was ordinarily spread upon corn, wheat, or tobacco lands. She had said to Arthur:—

“There is nothing certain after this year except disaster. We must meet disaster as bravely as we can, and leave the future to take care of itself. I shall devote all our resources this year, outside the poppy fields, to the production of food stuffs—vegetables, fowls, and pigs—with which to feed the wounded who must presently come to us.”

Thus it came about that Dorothy was able to care for fifty wounded men at a time, when the mistresses of other plantations as great as Wyanoke and Pocahontas found themselves sorely taxed in taking ten. And as the wounded men were impatient to get back into the trenches as soon as their injuries were endurably half healed, the ministry of mercy at Wyanoke was brought to bear upon many hundreds of brave fellows during that most terrible of summers, and the fame of Dorothy Brent as an angel of mercy and kindness spread throughout the army, fairly rivalling that of her mother—unknown as such—Madame Le Sud. Madame Le Sud, defiant alike of weariness and danger, poured water down many parched throats on Cemetery Hill at Petersburg, until at last a Minié ball made an end of her ministry; and on that same day a dozen brave fellows fell while carving her name on a rude boulder which marked the place of her final sacrifice. The places of those who fell in this service were promptly taken by others equally intent, at whatever cost, upon marking for remembrance the spot on which that woman gave up her life who had ministered so heroically to human suffering.

All these things are only incidents illustrative of that heroism on the part of women which the poet, if we had a poet, would seize upon as the vital and essential story of the Confederate war. If that heroism could be properly celebrated, it would make a literature worthy to stand shoulder to shoulder with the hero-songs of old Homer himself. But that story of woman’s love and woman’s sacrifice has never been told and never will be, for the reason that there is none worthy to tell it among those of us who survive of those who saw it and knew the self-sacrificing absoluteness of its heroism.

Into all this work of mercy Evelyn Byrd entered not only with enthusiasm, but with the tireless energy of healthy youth and with a queer sagacity—born, perhaps, of her strange life-experience—which enabled her sometimes to double or quadruple the beneficent effects of her work by the deftness of its doing.

Her enthusiasm in the cause rather astonished Dorothy, at first. If the girl had been brought up in Virginia, if her home had always been there, if she had had a people of her own there, with a father and a brother in the trenches, her devotion would have been natural enough. But none of those reasons for her enthusiasm existed. She had probably been born in Virginia, or at least of Virginian parentage, though even that assumption rested upon no better foundation than the fact that she bore a historic Virginian name. She had lived elsewhere during her childhood and youth. She had come into the Southern country under compulsion, and three fourths of the war was over before she came. So far as she knew, she had no relatives in Virginia, and very certainly she had none there whom she knew and loved.

Yet she was passionate almost to madness in her Virginianism, and she was self-sacrificing even beyond the standards of the other heroic women around her.

That she should enter passionately into any cause into which she enters at all [wrote Dorothy to Arthur during one of his absences at the front] is altogether natural. Her nature is passionate in an extreme degree, and, good as her judgment is when it is cool, she sends it about its business whenever it assumes to meddle with her passionate impulses. She has certain well-fixed principles of conduct, from which she never departs by so much as a hair’s breadth—chiefly, I imagine, because they are principles which she has wrought out in her mind without anybody’s teaching or anybody’s suggestion. They are the final results of her own thinking. She regards them as ultimates of truth. But subject to these, she is altogether a creature of impulse. Even to save one she loves from great calamity, she would not think of compromising the most trivial of her fundamental principles; yet for the sake of one she loves, she would sacrifice herself illimitably even upon the most trivial occasion. It is a dangerous character to possess, but a most interesting one to study, and certainly it is admirable.

Arthur smiled lovingly as he read this analysis. “How little we know ourselves!” he exclaimed, in thought. “If I had worked with pen and paper for a month in an effort to describe Dorothy’s own character fittingly, I couldn’t have done it so perfectly as she has done it in describing the make-up of Evelyn. Yet she never for one moment suspects the similarity. Just because the external circumstances are different in the two cases, she is utterly blind to the parallel. It doesn’t matter. It is far better to have such a character as Dorothy’s than to try to create it—much better to have it than to know that she has it.”

It is worthy of observation and remark that in his thinking about this matter of character, and admiring and loving it, Arthur Brent connected the subject altogether with Dorothy, not at all with Evelyn.

That was because Arthur Brent was in love with his wife, and happy is the man with whom such a love lingers and dominates after the honeymoon is over!

One day Dorothy and Evelyn talked of this matter of Evelyn’s enthusiasm for the Confederate cause and her passionate devotion to those who had received wounds in the service of it. It was Evelyn who started the conversation.

“The best thing about you, Dorothy,” she said, one morning while they two were waiting for a decoction they were making to drip through the filtering-paper, “is your devotion to Cousin Arthur.” Evelyn had come to that stage of Virginian culture in which affection expressed itself in the claiming of kinship where there was none. “It seems to me that that is the way every woman should feel toward her husband, if he is worthy of it, as Cousin Arthur is.”

“Tell me your whole thought, Byrdie,” answered Dorothy, who had fastened that pet name upon her companion. “It interests me.”

“Well, you see I haven’t seen much of this sort of thing between husbands and wives, though I am satisfied it ought to exist in every marriage. I heard a woman lecture once on what she called the ‘Subjection of Women.’ She made me so angry that I wanted to answer her—mere slip of a girl that I was—but they—well, I wasn’t let. That isn’t good English, I know, but it is what I mean. The woman wanted to strike the word ‘obey’ out of the marriage service, just as if the form of a marriage ceremony had anything to do with a real marriage. As well as I could make out her meaning, she wanted every woman to enter upon wedlock with fixed bayonets, with her glove in the ring, and with a challenge upon her lips. I don’t believe in any such marriage as that. I regard it as an infamous degradation of a holy relation. It isn’t marriage at all. It is a mere bargain, like a contract for supplies or any other contract. You see, I had never seen a perfect marriage like yours and Cousin Arthur’s at that time, but I had thought about it, because I had seen the other kind. It was my idea that in a true marriage the wife would obey for love, while for love the husband would avoid commanding. I don’t think I can explain—but you understand me, Dorothy—you must understand, because it is just so with you and Cousin Arthur.”

“Yes, I understand,” answered Dorothy.

“Of course you do. You are never so happy as in doing whatever you think Cousin Arthur would like you to do, and he never wants you to do anything except what it pleases you to do. I reckon the whole thing may be ciphered down to this: you love Cousin Arthur, and Cousin Arthur loves you; each wants the other to be free and happy, and each acts as is most likely to produce that result. I can’t think of any better way than that.”

“Neither can I,” answered Dorothy, with two glad tears glistening on her cheeks; “and I am glad that you understand. I can’t imagine anything that could be better for you than to think in that way. But tell me, Byrdie, why you are so enthusiastic in our Southern cause and in your ministry to our wounded soldiers?”

“Because your cause is my cause. I haven’t any friends in the world but you and Cousin Arthur, and—your friends.”

Dorothy observed that the girl paused before adding “—and your friends,” and Dorothy understood that the girl was thinking of Owen Kilgariff. To Dorothy it meant much that she avoided all mention of Kilgariff’s name.

The girl had completely lost her mannerisms of speech in a very brief while, a fact which Dorothy attributed to her rare gift of imitation. Only once in a great while, when she was under excitement, did she lapse into the peculiarities either of pronunciation or of construction which had at first been so marked a characteristic of her utterance. She read voraciously now, reading always, apparently, with minute attention to language in her eager desire to learn. Her time for reading was practically made time. That is to say, it consisted chiefly of brief intervals between occupations. She was up every morning at five o’clock, in order that she might go to the stables and personally see to it that the horses and mules were properly fed and curried.

“The negroes neglect them shamefully when I am not there in Cousin Arthur’s place,” she said, “and it is cruel to neglect poor dumb beasts that cannot provide for themselves or even utter a complaint.”

As soon after seven as Dorothy’s nursery duties permitted, the two mounted their horses and rode away for a half-intoxicating draught of the air of a Virginia summer morning. Returning to a nine o’clock “breakfast of rags,” as Dorothy called the scant, makeshift meal that alone was possible to them in that time of stress, Evelyn went at once to the laboratory. After setting matters going there, she mounted again and rode away to the camp of the wounded soldiers to whose needs she ministered with a skill and circumspection that had been born of her peculiar experience in remote places.

“The best medicine she brings us,” said one of the wounded men, one day, “is her laugh.” And yet Evelyn rarely laughed at all. It was her ever present smile and the general joyousness of her countenance that the invalids interpreted as laughter.

She always carried a light shot-gun with her, and she rarely returned to the “gre’t house” without three or four squirrels for her own and Dorothy’s dinner. Now and then she filled her bag with partridges—or “quails,” as those most toothsome of game birds are generally, and quite improperly, called at the North. When September came, she got an occasional wild turkey also, her skill both in finding game and in the use of her gun being unusually good.

One day Dorothy challenged her on this point.

“You are a sentimentalist on the subject of animals,” she said, “and yet you are a huntswoman.”

“But why not?” asked Evelyn, in astonishment at the implied question. “In the summer, the wild creatures multiply enormously. When the winter comes, they starve to death because there is not food enough. In the fall, the woods are full of them; in the spring, there are very few. Nine tenths of them must die in any case, and if my gun hastens the death of one, it betters the chance of another to survive. I could never deceive them, or persuade them to trust me and then betray their trust. I don’t think I am a sentimentalist, Dorothy, and—”

Just then Dorothy thought of something else and said it, and the conversation was diverted into other channels.

Nearly always Evelyn had a book with her, which she read at odd moments, and quite always she had one book or more lying around the house, each open at the place at which she had last read, and each lying ready to her hand whenever a moment of leisure should come in her very busy day. For besides her attendance upon the sick, she relieved Dorothy of the greater part of her household duties, and was tireless in her work in the laboratory. Her knowledge of chemistry was scant, of course, but she had quickly and completely mastered the processes in use in the laboratory, and her skill in drug manufacture was greater than that of many persons more familiar with the technical part of that work.

She had from the first taken exclusive care of her own room, peremptorily ordering all the maids to keep out of it.

“A maid always reminds me,” she said to Dorothy, by way of offering an explanation that did not explain; for she did not complete her sentence. But so earnest was her objection that, even to the daily polishing of the white ash floor with a pine needle rubbing, she did everything within those precincts with her own hands.

Dorothy let her have her way. It was Dorothy’s habit to let others do as they pleased so long as their pleasing was harmless.

XVII

A GUN-PIT CONFERENCE

FOR full half an hour after Arthur Brent came out of the covered way and greeted his friend, Kilgariff’s bombardment and the enemy’s vigorous response continued. Arthur Brent stood by his friend in the midst of it all quite as if “the scream of shot, the burst of shell, and the bellowing of the mortars” had been nothing more than a harmless exhibition of “pyrotechny for our neighbour moon,” as Bailey phrases it in Festus.

It did not occur to Kilgariff to invite Doctor Brent to take refuge in one of the bomb-proofs till the fierceness of the fire should be past. It never did occur to Owen Kilgariff that a gentleman of education and culture could think of shrinking from danger, even though, as in this case, he had nothing to do with the war business immediately in hand, but was, technically at least, a non-combatant. Indeed, that gallant corps of doctors who constituted the medical field-service in the Confederate army never did regard themselves as non-combatants, at least so far as going into or keeping out of danger was concerned. They fired no guns, indeed, but in all other ways they participated in the field-fighting on quite equal terms with officers of the line. Wherever their duty called them, wherever an errand of mercy demanded their presence, they went without hesitation and stayed without flinching. They performed the most delicate operations, where a moment’s unsteadiness of hand must have cost a human life, while shells were bursting about their heads and multitudinous bullets were whistling in their ears. Sometimes their patients were blown out of their hands by a cannon shot. Sometimes the doctors themselves went to their death while performing operations on the battlefield.

In one case a surgeon was shot unto death while holding an artery end. But while waiting for the death that he knew must come within the brief space of a few minutes, the gallant fellow held his forceps firmly and directed his assistant how to tie the blood vessel. Then he gave up the ghost, in the very act of thus saving a human life perhaps not worth a hundredth part of his own. The heroism of war does not lie altogether with those who make desperate charges or desperately receive them.

Arthur Brent was high in rank in that medical corps, the cool courage of whose members, if it could be adequately set forth, would constitute as heroic a story as any that has ever been related in illustration of daring and self-sacrifice, and he honoured his rank in his conduct. His duty lay sometimes in the field, whither he went to organise and direct the work of others, and sometimes in the laboratory, where no element of danger existed. In either case he did his duty with never a thought of self and never a question of the cost.

On this occasion he stood upon the exposed mound of the magazine, watching Kilgariff’s splendid work with the guns, until at last the bombardment ceased as suddenly and as meaninglessly as it had begun; for that was the way with bombardments on those lines.

When at last the fire sank to its ordinary dead level of ceaseless sharp-shooting, with only now and then a cannon shot to punctuate the irregular rattle of the rifles, Kilgariff gave the order, “Cease firing,” and the clamorous mortars were stilled. Then he turned to the officers who had come to him for instruction, and said:—

“Some of my men have been quick to learn and are now experts. If any of you gentlemen desire it, I will send some of the best of them to you now and then to help you instruct your cannoniers and your gunners. You will yourselves impress upon the magazine men the importance of not compressing the powder in measuring it. A very slight inattention at that point often makes a difference of twenty-five or fifty yards in the range, and so renders worthless and ineffective a shell which might otherwise do its work well. If you need the services of any of my men as tutors to your own, pray call upon me. Now good evening. I’m sorry I cannot invite you to sup with me, but I really haven’t so much as a hard-tack biscuit to offer you.”

When the officers had gone, Kilgariff and Brent seated themselves on top of the magazine mound and talked.

“First of all,” said Arthur Brent, “I want to hear about the things personal to yourself. You put them aside, in your letter, as of smaller consequence than the matters, whatever they were, which related to others. I do not so regard them. So tell me first of them.”

“Oh, those things have pretty well settled themselves,” answered Kilgariff, with a touch of disgust in his tone. “It was only that I very much wanted to decline this captain’s commission, under which I have been commanding sixty mortars and something like a battalion of men here. General Early fairly forced the rank upon me, after Captain Pollard lost his leg—”

“By the way,” interrupted Doctor Brent, “Pollard is at Wyanoke and convalescent. With his superb constitution and his lifelong wholesomeness of living, his recovery has been rapid. He very much wants to see you. He would like you to continue in command of his battery—or would have liked it if you had not been transferred to Petersburg. He is a major now, you know, promoted for gallantry and good service, and when he returns to duty (which will be within a day or two) he will have command of his battalion. Of course, your special qualification for the work you are doing here forbids you to go back to your battery. The chief of artillery would never permit that. But I’m interrupting. Tell me what you set out to say.”

“Well, it’s all simple enough. You know my reasons for wishing to be an enlisted man rather than a commissioned officer. When I wrote to you, I was acting as captain under General Early’s peremptory orders, but the commission he had asked the authorities at Richmond to send me had not yet come. I knew that if it should come while I was with Early, he would never let me decline it. He would have refused even to forward my declination through the regular channels. It was my hope to get myself ordered to Petersburg before the commission could come.

“In that case, I thought, I could decline it and take service in my own non-commissioned rank as sergeant-major and special drill-master for the mortar batteries. But the commission came, through Early, on the day before I left the valley, and when I reported here for duty, asking to have it cancelled, the chief of artillery peremptorily refused. He took me to General Lee’s headquarters and there explained the situation. General Lee settled the matter by saying that I could render much better service with a commission than without one, and that he ‘desired’ me to act in the capacity to which I had been commissioned. I had no choice but to yield to his wish, of course, so I took command here as captain, and immediately all the fragments of batteries that had been disintegrated during the campaign, and especially those whose officers had been killed or captured, were turned over to me to be converted into mortar men.

“They number about two hundred and fifty men, some of whom are non-commissioned officers, ranking all the way from corporal to sergeant-major, so that it is impossible to handle the command effectively under a single company organisation. I made a report on the matter two days ago suggesting that the body be organised into a number of small, compact companies, and that some major of artillery already holding his commission be ordered to assume control of the whole. To-day came my reply—about two hours ago. It was to the effect that by recommendation of the chief of artillery, approved by General Lee, I had been appointed lieutenant-colonel, in command of all the mortars on this part of the line. I am instructed to organise this service with a view to effectiveness, and to report only through the chief of artillery, without the intervention of any colonel or brigadier or major-general. I cannot refuse to obey such orders, given in aid of effective service. I cannot even ask to be excused without offering an affront to my superiors and seeming, at least, to shirk that service in which they think I can make the best use of my capacities in behalf of our cause.

“So that matter has settled itself. I shall have two stars sewed upon my collar to-night, and to-morrow morning I shall begin the work of reorganising the mortar service. I shall encounter very black looks in the countenances of some of the courteous captains whom you saw here half an hour ago. They are men who care for military rank, as I do not, and they will not be pleased to find themselves overslaughed by my promotion. They will never believe that I wish, even more heartily than they can, that some one of them had been set to do this duty, and that I might have returned to the ranks. But a soldier must take what comes. I must accept their black looks, and their jealousies, and perhaps even the lasting enmity of some of them, precisely as I accept the fact of the shells flung at me by the enemy.”

At that moment a sergeant approached, and, saluting, said:—

“Captain Kilgariff”—for Kilgariff had not yet announced his promotion even to his men—“one of the men is hurt by a fragment of the shell that burst over us half a minute ago. He seems badly wounded.”

Instantly Kilgariff and Arthur Brent hurried to the pit where the wounded man lay, and Doctor Brent dressed his wound, which was serious. At his suggestion, Kilgariff ordered two of the men to carry the stricken one to the rear through the covered way, and deliver him to the surgeons of the nearest field-hospital.

Just as the party started, a huge fifteen-inch mortar shell descended from a great height, struck the apex of the earth mound that covered the magazine, where ten minutes before the two friends had been sitting in converse, and there instantly exploded with great violence.

Kilgariff hastened to inspect. He found the magazine intact, so far, at least, as its contents were concerned. There were more than a thousand pounds of Dupont rifle powder there, secured in wooden boxes called “monkeys,” and there were two thousand mortar shells there also, each weighing twenty-four pounds, each terribly destructive, potentially at least, and each loaded with a heavy charge of gunpowder. Fortunately the explosion of the gigantic shell had not ignited the magazine. Had it done so, neither a man nor a gun nor any trace of either would have remained in all that circle of mortar pits, to tell the tale of their occupancy.

But practically all of the earth that had constituted the mound had been blown completely away, and some of the timbers that had supported it had been crushed till they had broken and fallen in. The man who had been in charge of the magazine was found crushed to a pulp by the falling of the timbers.

When Kilgariff had fully explored, and discovered the extent of the disaster, he swore. Pointing to the mangled body of the man who had been caught in the ruin, he said to Arthur Brent:—

“There was never a better man than Johnny Garrett. He had a wife and four children up in Fauquier County. The wife is a widow now, and the children are orphans, and Johnny Garrett is a shapeless mass of inert human flesh, all because of the incapacity of an engineer, damn him! I know the fellow—” But before continuing, Kilgariff turned to a sergeant and said:—

“Go at once to General Gracie’s headquarters, and say that Lieutenant-colonel Kilgariff—be sure to say Lieutenant-colonel Kilgariff—commanding the mortars, asks the instant attendance of a capable engineer and at least twenty-five sappers and miners to repair damages and guard against an imminent danger at Fort Lamkin. If General Gracie cannot furnish the assistance needed, go to General Bushrod Johnson’s headquarters and prefer a like request. Take a look first, and you’ll understand how imperative it is to get help at once. There lie a thousand pounds of rifle powder exposed to every spark that a shell may fling into it; and there are two thousand loaded shells to explode. Go quickly, and don’t return without the assistance required.”

Ten minutes later came the sappers and miners, armed with picks, shovels, axes, and the other tools of their trade. At their head was the engineer officer, Captain Harbach, who had constructed the magazine in the first place.

Kilgariff was a cool, self-possessed person, who very rarely lost his temper in any obvious fashion. But when he saw Harbach in command, he had difficulty in controlling himself. Pointing to the ruined magazine, he said:—

“See one result of your carelessness and gross ignorance.”

Then, pointing to the crushed and mangled body of Johnny Garrett, he added:—

“Look upon another result of your criminality in seeking a commission in the engineers when you perfectly knew you had no adequate knowledge of engineering. When you were constructing that magazine, I warned you that your single tier of timbers under the earth was insufficient. I reminded you of the importance of adequately protecting the vast amount of powder that must be stored there. I begged you to use longer timbers for the sake of greater elasticity, and to use three tiers of them instead of one. Your rank at that time was older than my own, and I could only give you advice, which you disregarded. You now have before you abundant evidence of your own criminal ignorance, your own criminal neglect of plain duty, your own criminal folly. For these I shall prefer charges against you before this night ends, and I shall press those charges with vigour enough to offset even the personal and political influence that secured a commission for an incapable like you.”

Kilgariff was in a towering rage, and with the mangled body of Johnny Garrett lying there before him for his text, he found it impossible to restrain his speech; but to the very end, that speech was so far under control that its tones, at least, gave no indication of the excitement that inspired it. If the man speaking had been delivering a university lecture, his voice and manner could scarcely have been under better control.

When he paused, Harbach broke in:—

“Be careful of your words, Captain Kilgariff—”

“Lieutenant-colonel Kilgariff, if you please; that is my present rank, and I’ll trouble you to recognise it.”

“Oh, well, Lieutenant-colonel Kilgariff, if that pleases you better. Be careful of your words. You have already spoken some for which I shall hold you responsible.”

“Quite right,” answered Kilgariff. “I hold myself responsible, and I’ll answer for my words in any way and at any time and to any extent that you may desire. But meanwhile, and as your superior officer, I now order you to set to work to render that magazine safe. As your superior officer, I shall assume authority to direct your work and to insist that it shall be done as I command. Let your men shovel away all that remains of the earth mound and send your axe-men into the timber there to cut seventy or eighty sticks, each twenty-three feet long and eight inches in diameter.”

The captain showed signs of standing on his dignity by refusing, but Kilgariff promptly brought him to terms by saying:—

“Whenever you want to call me to account, I shall respond—I’ll do it in an hour hence, if you choose. But for the sake of the lives of some hundreds of men, I am going to have this magazine securely constructed within the briefest possible time. After that, I shall be very much at your service. You may either set your men at work in the way I have suggested, or you may return to your quarters, in which case I shall assume command of your men and do the work myself. If you elect to return to your quarters, I pledge you my honour as an officer that I shall not make your desertion of duty at a critical moment the subject of an additional charge in the court-martial proceedings that I shall surely institute against you to-morrow morning.”

Thus permitted, Captain Harbach retired through the covered way, and Owen Kilgariff assumed command of the men he had left behind him.

Within two hours, the magazine was reconstructed, and so strongly that no danger remained of the kind that had threatened the lives of Owen Kilgariff’s men.

When all was done, Kilgariff turned again to Arthur Brent and said:—

“Now let us resume our conversation.”

“But what about this quarrel with Captain Harbach? He will surely challenge you.”

“Of course, and I shall accept. Never mind that. He may possibly shoot me through the head or heart or lungs. The chance of that renders it only the more imperative that you and I shall talk out our talk. I have much to say to you that must be said before morning. Besides, I must prepare my charges against Captain Harbach. It is a duty that I owe to the service to expose the arrogant incapacity of such men as he. Such incapacity imperils the lives of better men, by scores and hundreds, every day. If I can do anything to purge the service of such incapables—men whose fathers’ or friends’ influence has secured commissions for them to assume duties which they are utterly incapable of discharging properly or even with tolerable safety to the lives of other men—it will be a greatly good achievement. Let us talk now of something else.”

Then he told Arthur about the papers that the man who called himself Campbell had intrusted to his keeping.

“The matter sorely embarrasses me,” he explained. “I don’t know what I ought to do. Of course I am in no way bound by that fellow’s half-spoken, half-suggested injunction not to give the papers to Evelyn till she attains the age of twenty-one. I completely disregard that. But there are other things to be thought of. My command here on the lines is losing from twenty to thirty per cent of its personnel each month. Nothing is more likely than that I shall turn up among the ‘killed in action’ some morning. If I keep the papers with me, they are liable to fall into other and perhaps unfriendly hands at any moment. As I have not the remotest notion of what is recorded in them, of course I cannot even conjecture how much of harm that might work to Evelyn. You perfectly understand that her welfare, her comfort, her feelings, constitute the controlling consideration with me.”

“Oh, yes, I understand that,” said Arthur.

“Don’t jest, if you please,” broke in Kilgariff, with a note of offence in his voice.

“My dear fellow,” answered Arthur, with profound seriousness, “nothing could be farther from my thought than jesting on a subject so serious. I beg you to believe—”

“I do. I believe you implicitly. But somehow this explosion, and poor Johnny Garrett’s needless death, and my quarrel with that reckless incapable, Harbach, have set my nerves on edge, so that I am querulous. Forgive me, and let me go on. As to these papers, I want to do that which is best for Evelyn; but I don’t know what is best, and I can’t find out by questioning my own mind. You see, I not only do not know what is in the papers, but I do not even know what circumstances gave them birth, or what purpose of good or evil lies behind them, or what distressing revelations they may make for her affliction. The cold-blooded gambler, swindler, adventurer, cheat, who gave the papers to me is—or was, for I don’t know whether he is now dead or alive—capable of any atrocity. He admitted to me that he had cruelly persecuted the girl, his daughter. It would not be inconsistent with his character, I think, for him to send her from his deathbed a bundle of papers that should needlessly afflict and torture her. He cherished quite enough of enmity to me, I think, to make him happy in the conviction that he had made me his unwilling and unwitting agent in inflicting such wounds upon her spirit.

“Thus I dare not give her the papers, nor dare I withhold them, lest thereby I do her a wrong. Counsel me, my friend. Tell me what I should do!”

“Consult Dorothy,” answered Arthur. “Her judgment in such a case will be immeasurably wiser than yours or mine, or both combined.”

“Thank you. That is the best solution. I wonder I didn’t think of it before. I will act upon it at once. I’ll send the papers to Dorothy by your hand, and I’ll ask you also to bear her a letter in which I shall beg for her judgment. That’s the end of one of my perplexities, for the time being at least. Now let us talk of another thing that concerns me very deeply. I am a pretty rich man, as you know. I own some real estate in New York City. That will probably be confiscated when this war comes to an end, as you and I clearly see that it must do very soon. I own a good many stocks and bonds and other securities, which cannot be so easily confiscated, inasmuch as they are in possession of my bankers, who are like drums for tightness, and are besides my very good friends. In addition to these things, the bulk of my fortune is invested in Europe, where it cannot be confiscated at all. The securities are held by the Liverpool branch of Frazer, Trenholm, and Company, of Charleston, for my account, so that they are perfectly safe.

“Now the only relatives I have in the world, so far as I know, are my brother and his family. I have every reason for desiring that none of them shall ever get a single cent from my estate. So much on the negative side. Affirmatively, I very earnestly desire that every dollar I have in the world shall go at my death to the one woman I ever loved—Evelyn Byrd.

“It may seem to you a simple and easy thing to arrange that, but it is not so. Any will that I might make cutting off my relatives from the inheritance of my property would be obstinately contested in the courts.”

“But upon what grounds?”

“Oh, the lawyers can be trusted to find reasons ‘as plenty as blackberries.’ For one thing, they could insist that I was a dead man long before the date of my will.”

“How do you mean?”

“Why, when I escaped from Sing Sing, there were two other men with me. As we swam out into the Hudson, the guards opened a vigorous fire upon us. One of my companions was killed outright, his face being badly mutilated by the bullets. The other was wounded and recaptured. He positively identified the dead man’s body as mine. It was buried in my name, and my death was officially recorded as a fact. So, you see, I am officially a dead man, if ever my relatives have occasion to prove me so. But apart from that, my estate, when I die, will be a sufficiently large carcass to induce a great gathering of the buzzards about it. With half a million dollars or more to fight over, the lawyers may be trusted to find ample grounds for fighting.”

“It seems a difficult problem to solve,” said Arthur, meditatively. “I don’t see how you can manage it.”

“Such matters are easy enough when one has friends, as I have, who may be trusted implicitly. I have thought this matter out, and I think I know how to handle the situation.”

“Tell me your plan, if you wish.”

“Of course I wish. My first thought was to give everything I have in the world to Evelyn now, giving her deeds for the real estate and absolute bills of sale for the securities. But of course I could not do that. I could never gain her consent to such an arrangement without first winning her love and making her my affianced bride.”

“Do you think that would be impossible?”

“I do not know—perhaps so. At any rate, it is out of the question.”

“I confess I do not see why.”

“I am a convicted criminal, you know—a fugitive from justice.”

“No. You are officially dead. The courts of New York will not hold a dead man to be a fugitive from justice. And morally you are nothing of the kind. It was not justice, but infamous injustice, that condemned you.”

“However that may be, I can never ask Evelyn Byrd to be my wife, to share the life of a man who might even possibly be sent back to Sing Sing. I can never ask her to make of her children the sons and daughters of a convicted criminal. I will not do that. So I have thought out another plan. My second thought was to turn over all I have to you in trust for Evelyn. When I am dead, she need not refuse the gift. But there again is a difficulty. When this war ends in the complete conquest of the South, as it soon must, political passion at the North is well-nigh certain to find expression in acts of wholesale confiscation, directed against men of wealth at the South, and men who have served as officers in our army. They may, indeed, include all who have served at all, even as privates. At any rate, you are an officer of high rank, and between you and Dorothy you are one of the greatest plantation owners in Virginia. You are pretty sure to be included in whatever is done in this way.

“It will not do, therefore, to make you my trustee for Evelyn. I must have some non-combatant to serve in that capacity, and, with your permission, I am going to ask Dorothy to accept the duty.”

“You have my permission, certainly. But I see another danger. Suppose anything should happen to Dorothy?—God forbid it! Suppose she should die?”

“I have thought of all that,” answered Kilgariff, “and I think I see a way out. I shall ask Dorothy to select some friend, some woman whom she can absolutely trust, to serve with her as a joint trustee, giving full power to the survivor to carry out the trust in case of the death of either of the two. I haven’t a doubt she knows such a woman.”

“She does—two of them. There is Edmonia Bannister, one of God’s elect in character, and there is Mrs. Baillie Pegram—she who was Agatha Ronald. Either of them would serve the purpose perfectly.”

“I’ll get Dorothy to ask both of them,” responded Kilgariff. “Then all possible contingencies will be fully met and provided for.

“Now for present concerns. If I can make a Confederate taper burn for an hour, I’ll write my letter to Dorothy, to accompany the papers, and to ask her to serve me in this matter of the trusteeship. I have a very capable young lawyer under my command here as a sergeant. Early in the morning I shall set him to work preparing the trust conveyances. He is a rapid worker, and will have the documents ready by nightfall. Then I’ll send them to Wyanoke by a courier. In the meanwhile I have Captain Harbach on my hands. I’m afraid I must ask you to act for me in that matter. While we have been talking, it has occurred to me that when I prefer my charges against Captain Harbach, he will be placed under arrest. In that position he would not be permitted to send me the hostile message he threatened to-night. It would be extremely unfair to him to place him in such a position. I want you to write to him, if you will, as my friend. Say to him that in view of his expressed desire to hold me responsible for words spoken to-night, and in order to give him opportunity to do so without embarrassment, I shall postpone for twenty-four hours, or for a longer time, if for any reason he cannot conveniently act within twenty-four hours, the preferring of my official charges against him. Ask him, please, to advise you of his wishes in the matter in order that I may comply with them.”

“You are a very cool hand, Kilgariff,” said Arthur, “and your courtesy to an enemy is extreme.”

“Oh, courtesy in such a case is a matter of course. Let me say to you, now, that when I meet Captain Harbach on the field, I shall fire high in the air. I have no desire to kill him or to inflict the smallest hurt upon him. I am merely giving him the opportunity he desires to kill me, by way of avenging himself upon me for the severe criticisms I have made upon his character, his conduct, and his assumption of functions that he is incapable of discharging with tolerable safety to other men. Let me make this matter plainer to your mind, Arthur. I do not at all believe in the duello. I think it barbarous in intent and usually ridiculous in its conduct. But I had the best of good reasons for saying what I did to Captain Harbach, and so I said it. What I said was exceedingly offensive to him, and the only way he knows of ‘vindicating’ himself is by challenging me to a duel. It would be a gross injustice on my part to refuse to meet him, and to do an injustice is to commit an immorality. So, of course, I shall meet him. As I have no desire to do him other harm than to get him removed from a position which he is incapable of filling with safety to others and benefit to the service, I shall not think of shooting at him. But I shall give him the privilege he craves of shooting at me. I really don’t mind, you know, under the circumstances, except that in any case I shall postpone his shooting at me till I can execute the documents relating to my property.”

“In view of your explanation,” answered Arthur, “I must decline to act as your friend in this matter.”

“But why?”

“Because I will have no part nor lot in a murder. I detest duelling, as you do; I regard it as a relic of feudalism which ought to give place to something better in our enlightened and law-governed time. But while it lasts, I am forced to consent to it, however unwillingly. I recognise the fact that the right of the individual to make private war on his own account is the only basis on which nations can logically or even sanely claim the right to make public war. Nations are only aggregations of individuals, and their rights are only the sum of the rights previously possessed by the individuals composing them. But while I feel in that way about duelling, I can have no part in a contest in which I know in advance that one of the contestants is going to shoot to kill, while the other is merely standing up to be shot at and does not himself intend to make war at all.”

“Very well,” answered Kilgariff. “I’ll get some one else to send the letter.”

He summoned an orderly and directed him to go to a neighbouring camp and ask an officer there to call upon Lieutenant-colonel Kilgariff, “concerning a purely personal matter, and not at all with reference to any matter of service.”

The officer, a fiery little fellow, responded at once to the summons, and he promptly wrote—spelling it very badly—the message which Kilgariff had asked Arthur to send.

Half an hour later, the messenger who had borne the note returned with it unopened. For explanation, he said:—

“Captain Harbach had his head blown off in the trenches just before daylight this morning.”

XVIII

EVELYN’S REVELATION

IT was during Arthur’s absence at Petersburg that Evelyn began talking with Dorothy about herself.

“It isn’t nice,” she said, as the two sat together in the porch one day, “for me to have reserves and secrets with you, Dorothy.”

“But why not? Every one is entitled to have reserves. Why should not you?”

“Oh, because—well, things are different with me. You are good to me—nobody was ever so good to me. I am living here, and loving you and letting you love me, and all the time you know nothing at all about me. It isn’t fair. I hate unfairness.”