The July sun fell straight and hot upon the camp, and Dan, as he sat on a woodpile and ate a green apple, wistfully cast his eyes about for a deeper shade. But the young tree from which he had just shaken its last fruit stood alone between the scattered tents and the blur of willows down the gentle slope, and beneath its speckled shadow the mess had gathered sleepily, after the mid-day meal.
In the group of privates, stretched under the gauzy shade on the trampled grass, the first thing to strike an observer would have been, perhaps, their surprising youth. They were all young—the eldest hardly more than three and twenty—and the faces bore a curious resemblance in type, as if they were, one and all, variations from a common stock. There was about them, too, a peculiar expression of enthusiasm, showing even in the faces of those who slept; a single wave of emotion which, rising to its height in an entire people revealed itself in the features of the individual soldier. As yet the flower of the South had not withered on its stalk, and the men first gathered to defend the borders were men who embraced a cause as fervently as they would embrace a woman; men in whom the love of an abstract principle became, not a religion, but a romantic passion.
Beyond them, past the scattered tents and the piles of clean straw, the bruised grass of the field swept down to a little stream and the fallen stones that had once marked off the turnpike. Farther away, there was a dark stretch of pines relieved against the faint blue tracery of the distant mountains.
Dan, sitting in the thin shelter on the woodpile, threw a single glance at the strip of pines, and brought back his gaze to Big Abel who was splitting an oak log hard by. The work had been assigned to the master, who had, in turn, tossed it to the servant, with the remark that he “came out to kill men, not to cut wood.”
“I say, Big Abel, this sun's blazing hot,” he now offered cheerfully.
Big Abel paused for a moment and wiped his brow with his blue cotton sleeve.
“Dis yer ain' no oak, caze it's w'it-leather,” he rejoined in an injured tone, as he lifted the axe and sent it with all his might into the shivering log, which threw out a shower of fine chips. The powerful stroke brought into play the negro's splendid muscles, and Dan, watching him, carelessly observed to a young fellow lying half asleep upon the ground, “Big Abel could whip us all, Bland, if he had a mind to.”
Bland grunted and opened his eyes; then he yawned, stretched his arms, and sat up against the logs. He was bright and boyish-looking, with a frank tanned face, which made his curling flaxen hair seem almost white.
“I worked like a darky hauling yesterday,” he said reproachfully, “but when your turn comes, you climb a woodpile and pass the job along. When we go into battle I suppose Dandy and you will sit down to boil coffee, and hand your muskets to the servants.”
“Oh, are we ever going into battle?” growled Jack Powell from the other side. “Here I've been at this blamed drilling until I'm stiff in every joint, and I haven't seen so much as the tail end of a fight. You may rant as long as you please about martial glory, but if there's any man who thinks it's fun merely to get dirty and eat raw food, well, he's welcome to my share of it, that's all. I haven't had so much as one of the necessities of life since I settled down in this old field; even my hair has taken to standing on end. I say, Beau, do you happen to have any pomade about you? Oh, you needn't jeer, Bland, there's no danger of your getting bald, with that sheepskin over your scalp; and, besides, I'm willing enough to sacrifice my life for my country. I object only to giving it my hair instead.”
“I believe you'll find a little in my knapsack,” gravely replied Dan, to be assailed on the spot by a chorus of comic demands.
“I say, Beau, have you any rouge on hand? I'm growing pale. Please drop a little cologne on this handkerchief, my boy. May I borrow your powder puff? I've been sitting in the sun. Don't you want that gallon of stale buttermilk to take your tan off, Miss Nancy?”
“Oh, shut up!” cried Dan, sharply; “if you choose to turn pigs simply because you've come out to do a little fighting, I've nothing to say against it; but I prefer to remain a gentleman, that's all.”
“He prefers to remain a gentleman, that's all,” chanted the chorus round the apple tree.
“And I'll knock your confounded heads off, if you keep this up,” pursued Dan furiously.
“And he'll knock our confounded heads off, if we keep this up,” shouted the chorus in a jubilant refrain.
“Well, I'll tell you one thing,” remarked Jack Powell, feeling his responsibility in the matter of the pomade. “All I've got to say is, if this is what you call war, it's a pretty stale business. The next time I want to be frisky, I'll volunteer to pass the lemonade at a Sunday-school picnic.”
“And has anybody called it war, Dandy?” inquired Bland, witheringly.
“Well, somebody might, you know,” replied Jack, opening his fine white shirt at the neck, “did I hear you call it war, Kemper?” he asked politely, as he punched a stout sleeper beside him.
Kemper started up and aimed a blow at vacancy. “Oh, you heard the devil!” he retorted.
“I beg your pardon; it was mistaken identity,” returned Jack suavely.
“Look here, my lad, don't fool with Kemper when he's hot,” cautioned Bland, “He's red enough to fire those bales of straw. I say, Kemper, may I light my pipe at your face?”
“Shut up, now, or he'll be puffing round here like a steam engine,” said a small dark man named Baker, “let smouldering fires lie on a day like this. Give me a light, Dandy.”
Jack Powell held out his cigar, and then, leaning back against the tree, blew a cloud of smoke about his head.
“I'll be blessed if I don't think seven hours' drill is too much of a bad thing,” he plaintively remarked; “and I may as well add, by the bye, that the next time I go to war, I intend to go in the character of a Major-general.”
“Make it Commander-in-chief. Don't be too modest, my boy.”
“Well, you may laugh if you like,” pursued Jack, “but between you and me, it was all the fault of those girls at home—they have an idea that patriotism never trims its sleeves, you know. On my word, I might have been Captain of the Leicesterburg Guards after Champe Lightfoot joined the cavalry; but such averted looks were turned from me by the ladies, that I had to jump into the ranks merely to reinstate myself in their regard. They made even Governor Ambler volunteer as a private, I believe, but he was lucky and got made a Colonel instead.”
Bland laughed softly.
“That reminds me of our Colonel,” he observed. “I overheard him talking to himself the other day, and he said: 'All I ask is not to be in command of a volunteer regiment in hell.'”
“Oh, he won't,” put in Dan; “all the volunteers will be in heaven—unless they're sent down below because they were too big fools to join the cavalry.”
“Then, in heaven's name, why didn't you join the cavalry?” inquired Baker.
Dan looked at him a moment, and then threw the apple core at a water bucket that stood upside down upon the grass. “Well, I couldn't go on my own horse, you see,” he replied, “and I wouldn't go on the Government's. I don't ride hacks.”
“So you came into the infantry to get court-martialled,” remarked Bland. “The captain said down the valley, you'll remember, that if the war lasted a month, you'd be court-martialled for disobedience on the thirtieth day.”
Dan growled under his breath. “Well, I didn't enter the army to be hectored by any fool who comes along,” he returned. “Look at that fellow Jones, now. He thinks because he happens to be Lieutenant that he's got a right to forget that I'm a gentleman and he's not. Why, the day before we came up here, he got after me at drill about being out of step, or some little thing like that; and, by George, to hear him roar you'd have thought that war wasn't anything but monkeying round with a musket. Why, the rascal came from my part of the country, and his father before him wasn't fit to black my boots.”
“Did you knock him down?” eagerly inquired Bland.
“I told him to take off his confounded finery and I would,” answered Dan. “So when drill was over, we went off behind a tent, and I smashed his nose. He's no coward, I'll say that for him, and when the Captain told him he looked as if he'd been fighting, he laughed and said he had had 'a little personal encounter with the enemy.'”
“Well, I'm willing enough to do battle for my country,” said Jack Powell, “but I'll be blessed if I'm going to have my elbow jogged by the poor white trash while I'm doing it.”
“He was scolding at us yesterday because when we were detailed to clean out the camp, we gave the order to the servants,” put in Baker. “Clean out the camp! Does he think my grandmother was a chambermaid?” He suddenly broke off and helped himself to a drink of water from a dripping bucket that a tall mountaineer was passing round the group.
“Been to the creek, Pinetop?” he asked good-humouredly.
The mountaineer, who had won his title from his great height, towering as he did above every man in the company, nodded drowsily as he settled himself upon the ground. He was lithe and hardy as a young hickory, and his abundant hair was of the colour of ripe wheat. At the call to arms he had come, with long strides, down from his bare little cabin in the Blue Ridge, bringing with him a flintlock musket, a corncob pipe, and a stockingful of Virginia tobacco. Since the day of his arrival, he had accepted the pointed jokes of the mess into which he had drifted, with grave lips and a flicker of his calm blue eyes. They had jeered him unmercifully, and he had regarded them with serene and wondering attention. “I say, Pinetop, is it raining up where you are?” a wit had put to him on the first day, and he had looked down and answered placidly:—
“Naw, it's cl'ar.”
As he sat down in the group beside the woodpile, Bland tossed him the latest paper, but carefully folding it into a square, he laid it aside, and stretched himself upon the brown grass.
“This here's powerful weather for sweatin',” he pleasantly observed, as he pulled a mullein leaf from the foot of the apple tree and placed it over his eyes. Then he turned over and in a moment was sleeping as quietly as a child.
Dan got down from the logs and stood thoughtfully staring in the direction of the happy little town lying embosomed in green hills. That little town gave to him, as he stood there in the noon heat, a memory of deep gardens filled with fragrance, of open houses set in blue shadows, and of the bright fluttering of Confederate flags. For a moment he looked toward it down the hot road; then, with a sigh, he turned away and wandered off to seek the outside shadow of a tent.
As he flung himself down in the strip of shade, his gaze went longingly to the dim chain of mountains which showed like faint blue clouds against the sky, while his thoughts returned, as a sick man's, to the clustered elm boughs and the smooth lawn at Chericoke, and to Betty blooming like a flower in a network of sun and shade.
The memory was so vivid that when he closed his eyes it was almost as if he heard the tapping of the tree-tops against the roof, and felt the pleasant breeze blowing over the sweet-smelling meadows. He looked, through his closed eyes, into the dim old house, seeing the rustling grasses in the great blue jar and their delicate shadow trembling on the pure white wall. There was the tender hush about it that belongs to the memories of dead friends or absent places; a hush that was reverent as a Sabbath calm. He saw the shining swords of the Major and the Major's father; the rear door with the microphylla roses nodding upon the lintel, and, high above all, the shadowy bend of the staircase, with Betty standing there in her cool blue gown.
He opened his eyes with a start, and pillowing his head on his arm, lay looking off into the burning distance. A bee, straying from a field of clover across the road, buzzed, for a moment, round his face, and then knocked, with a flapping noise, against the canvas tent. Far away, beyond the murmur of the camp, he heard a partridge whistling in a tangled meadow; and at the same instant his own name called through the sunlight.
“I say, Beau, Beau, where are you?” He sat up, and shouted in response, and Jack Powell came hurriedly round the tent to fling himself down upon the beaten grass.
“Oh, you don't know what you missed!” he cried, chuckling. “You didn't stay long enough to hear the joke on Bland.”
“I hope it's a fresh one,” was Dan's response. “If it's that old thing about the mule and the darky, I may as well say in the beginning that I heard it in the ark.”
“Oh, it's new, old man. He made the mistake of trying to get some fun out of Pinetop, and he got more than he bargained for, that's all. He began to tease him about those blue jean trousers he carries in his knapsack. You've seen them, I reckon?”
Dan nodded as he chewed idly at a blade of grass. “I tried to get him to throw them away yesterday,” he said, “and he did go so far as to haul them out and look them over; but after meditating a half hour, he packed them away again and declared there was 'a sight of wear left in them still.' He told me if he ever made up his mind to get rid of them, and peace should come next day, he'd never forgive himself.”
“Well, I warned Bland not to meddle with him,” pursued Jack, “but he got bored and set in to make things lively. 'Look here, Pinetop,' he began, 'will you do me the favour to give me the name of the tailor who made your blue jeans?' and, bless your life, Pinetop just took the mullein leaf from his eyes, and sang out 'Maw.' That was what Bland wanted, of course, so, without waiting for the danger signal, he plunged in again. 'Then if you don't object I should be glad to have the pattern of them,' he went on, as smooth as butter. 'I want them to wear when I go home again, you know. Why, they're just the things to take a lady's eye—they have almost the fit of a flour-sack—and the ladies are fond of flour, aren't they?' The whole crowd was waiting, ready to howl at Pinetop's answer, and, sure enough, he raised himself on his elbow, and drawled out in his sing-song tone: 'I say, Sonny, ain't yo' Maw done put you into breeches yit?'”
“It serves him right,” said Dan sternly, “and that's what I like about Pinetop, Jack, there's no ruffling him.” He brushed off the bee that had fallen on his head, and dodged as it angrily flew back again.
“Some of the boys raised a row when he came into our mess,” returned Jack, “but where every man's fighting for his country, we're all equal, say I. What makes me dog-tired, though, is the airs some of these fool officers put on; all this talk about an 'officer's mess' now, as if a man is too good to eat with me who wouldn't dare to sit down to my table if he had on civilian's clothes. It's all bosh, that's what it is.”
He got up and strolled off with his grievance, and Dan, stretching himself shadows thickened.
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