After a peaceful Christmas, New Year's Day rose bright and mild, and Dan as he started from Winchester with the column felt that he was escaping to freedom from the tedious duties of camp life.
“Thank God we're on the war-path again,” he remarked to Pinetop, who was stalking at his side. The two had become close friends during the dull weeks after their first battle, and Bland, who had brought a taste for the classics from the lecture-room, had already referred to them in pointless jokes as “Pylades and Orestes.”
“It looks mighty like summer,” responded Pinetop cheerfully. He threw a keen glance up into the blue clouds, and then sniffed suspiciously at the dust that rose high in the road. “But I ain't one to put much faith in looks,” he added with his usual caution, as he shifted the knapsack upon his shoulders.
Dan laughed easily. “Well, I'm heartily glad I left my overcoat behind me,” he said, breathing hard as he climbed the mountain road, where the red clay had stiffened into channels.
The sunshine fell brightly over them, lying in golden drops upon the fallen leaves. To Dan the march brought back the early winter rides at Chericoke, and the chain of lights and shadows that ran on clear days over the tavern road. Joyously throwing back his head, he whistled a love song as he tramped up the mountain side. The irksome summer, with its slow fevers and its sharp attacks of measles, its scarcity of pure water and supplies of half-cooked food, was suddenly blotted from his thoughts, and his first romantic ardour returned to him in long draughts of wind and sun. After each depression his elastic temperament had sprung upward; the past months had but strengthened him in body as in mind.
In the afternoon a gray cloud came up suddenly and the sunshine, after a feeble struggle, was driven from the mountains. As the wind blew in short gusts down the steep road, Dan tightened his coat and looked at Pinetop's knapsack with his unfailing laugh.
“That's beginning to look comfortable. I hope to heaven the wagons aren't far off.”
Pinetop turned and glanced back into the valley. “I'll be blessed if I believe they're anywhere,” was his answer.
“Well, if they aren't, I'll be somewhere before morning; why, it feels like snow.”
A gust of wind, sharp as a blade, struck from the gray sky, and whirlpools of dead leaves were swept into the forest. Falling silent, Dan swung his arms to quicken the current of his blood, and walked on more rapidly. Over the long column gloom had settled with the clouds, and they were brave lips that offered a jest in the teeth of the wind. There were no blankets, few overcoats, and fewer rations, and the supply wagons were crawling somewhere in the valley.
The day wore on, and still the rough country road climbed upward embedded in withered leaves. On the high wind came the first flakes of a snowstorm, followed by a fine rain that enveloped the hills like mist. As Dan stumbled on, his feet slipped on the wet clay, and he was forced to catch at the bared saplings for support. The cold had entered his lungs as a knife, and his breath circled in a little cloud about his mouth. Through the storm he heard the quick oaths of his companions ring out like distant shots.
When night fell they halted to bivouac by the roadside, and until daybreak the pine woods were filled with the cheerful glow of the campfires. There were no rations, and Dan, making a jest of his hunger, had stretched himself in the full light of the crackling branches. With the defiant humour which had made him the favourite of the mess, he laughed at the frozen roads, at the change in the wind, at his own struggles with the wet kindling wood, at the supply wagons creeping slowly after them. His courage had all the gayety of his passions—it showed itself in a smile, in a whistle, in the steady hand with which he played toss and catch with fate. The superb silence of Pinetop, plodding evenly along, was as far removed from him as the lofty grandeur of the mountains. A jest warmed his heart against the cold; with set lips and grave eyes, he would have fallen before the next ridge was crossed.
Through the woods other fires were burning, and long reddish shadows crept among the pine trees over the rotting mould. For warmth Dan had spread a covering of dried leaves over him, raking them from sheltered corners of the forest. When he rose from time to time during the night to take his turn at replenishing the fire the leaves drifted in gravelike mounds about his feet.
For three days the march was steadily upward over long ridges coated deep with ice. In the face of the strong wind, which blew always down the steep road, the army passed on, complaining, cursing, asking a gigantic question of its General. Among the raw soldiers there had been desertions by the dozen, filling the streets of the little town with frost-bitten malcontents. “It was all a wild goose chase,” they declared bitterly, “and if Old Jack wasn't a March hare—well, he was something madder!”
Dan listened to the curses with his ready smile, and walked on bravely. Since the first evening he had uttered no complaint, asked no question. He had undertaken to march, and he meant to march, that was all. In the front with which he veiled his suffering there was no lessening of his old careless confidence—if his dash had hardened into endurance it wore still an expression that was almost debonair.
So as the column straggled weakly upward, he wrung his stiffened fingers and joked with Jack Powell, who stumbled after him. The cold had brought a glow to his tanned face, and when he lifted his eyes from the road Pinetop saw that they were shining brightly. Once he slipped on the frozen mud, and as his musket dropped from his hand, it went off sharply, the load entering the ground.
“Are you hurt?” asked Jack, springing toward him; but Dan looked round laughing as he clasped his knee.
“Oh, I merely groaned because I might have been,” he said lightly, and limped on, singing a bit of doggerel which had taken possession of his regiment.
“Then let the Yanks say what they will,
We'll be gay and happy still;
Gay and happy, gay and happy,
We'll be gay and happy still.”
On the third day out they reached a little village in the mountains, but before the week's end they had pushed on again, and the white roads still stretched before them. As they went higher the tracks grew steeper, and now and then a musket shot rang out on the roadside as a man lost his footing and went down upon the ice. Behind them the wagon train crept inch by inch, or waited patiently for hours while a wheel was hoisted from the ditch beside the road. There was blood on the muzzles of the horses and on the shining ice that stretched beyond them.
To Dan these terrible days were as the anguish of a new birth, in which the thing to be born suffered the conscious throes of awakening life. He could never be the same again; something was altered in him forever; this he felt dimly as he dragged his aching body onward. Days like these would prove the stuff that had gone into the making of him. When the march to Romney lay behind him he should know himself to be either a soldier or a coward. A soldier or a coward! he said the words over again as he struggled to keep down the pangs of hunger, telling himself that the road led not merely to Romney, but to a greater victory than his General dreamed of. Romney might be worthless, after all, the grim march but a mad prank of Jackson's, as men said; but whether to lay down one's arms or to struggle till the end was reached, this was the question asked by those stern mountains. Nature stood ranged against him—he fought it step by step, and day by day.
At times something like delirium seized him, and he went on blindly, stepping high above the ice. For hours he was tortured by the longing for raw beef, for the fresh blood that would put heat into his veins. The kitchen at Chericoke flamed upon the hillside, as he remembered it on winter evenings when the great chimney was filled with light and the crane was in its place above the hickory. The smell of newly baked bread floated in his nostrils, and for a little while he believed himself to be lying again upon the hearth as he thrilled at Aunt Rhody's stories. Then his fancies would take other shapes, and warm colours would glow in red and yellow circles before his eyes. When he thought of Betty now it was no longer tenderly but with a despairing passion. He was haunted less by her visible image than by broken dreams of her peculiar womanly beauties—of her soft hands and the warmth of her girlish bosom.
But from the first day to the last he had no thought of yielding; and each feeble step had sent him a step farther upon the road. He had often fallen, but he had always struggled up again and laughed. Once he made a ghastly joke about his dying in the snow, and Jack Powell turned upon him with an oath and bade him to be silent.
“For God's sake don't,” added the boy weakly, and fell to whimpering like a child.
“Oh, go home to your mother,” retorted Dan, with a kind of desperate cruelty.
Jack sobbed outright.
“I wish I could,” he answered, and dropped over upon the roadside.
Dan caught him up, and poured his last spoonful of brandy down his throat, then he seized his arm and dragged him bodily along.
“Oh, I say don't be an ass,” he implored. “Here comes old Stonewall.”
The commanding General rode by, glanced quietly over them, and passed on, his chest bowed, his cadet cap pulled down over his eyes. A moment later Dan, looking over the hillside, at the winding road, saw him dismount and put his shoulder to a sunken wheel. The sight suddenly nerved the younger man, and he went on quickly, dragging Jack up with him.
That night they rested in a burned-out clearing where the pine trees had been felled for fence rails. The rails went readily to fires, and Pinetop fried strips of fat bacon in the skillet he had brought upon his musket. Somebody produced a handful of coffee from his pocket, and a little later Dan, dozing beside the flames, was awakened by the aroma.
“By George!” he burst out, and sat up speechless.
Pinetop was mixing thin cornmeal paste into the gravy, and he looked up as he stirred busily with a small stick.
“Wall, I reckon these here slapjacks air about done,” he remarked in a moment, adding with a glance at Dan, “and if your stomach's near as empty as your eyes, I reckon your turn comes first.”
“I reckon it does,” said Dan, and filling his tin cup, he drank scalding coffee in short gulps. When he had finished it, he piled fresh rails upon the fire and lay down to sleep with his feet against the embers.
With the earliest dawn a long shiver woke him, and as he put out his hand it touched something wet and cold. The fire had died to a red heart, and a thick blanket of snow covered him from head to foot. Straight above there was a pale yellow light where the stars shone dimly after the storm.
He started to his feet, rubbing a handful of snow upon his face. The red embers, sheltered by the body of a solitary pine, still glowed under the charred brushwood, and kneeling upon the ground, he fanned them into a feeble blaze. Then he laid the rails crosswise, protecting them with his blanket until they caught and flamed up against the blackened pine.
Near by Jack Powell was moaning in his sleep, and Dan leaned over to shake him into consciousness. “Oh, damn it all, wake up, you fool!” he said roughly, but Jack rolled over like one drugged and broke into frightened whimpers such as a child makes in the dark. He was dreaming of home, and as Dan listened to the half-choked words, his face contracted sharply. “Wake up, you fool!” he repeated angrily, rolling him back and forth before the fire.
A little later, when Jack had grown warm beneath his touch, he threw a blanket over him, and turned to lie down in his own place. As he tossed a last armful on the fire, his eyes roamed over the long mounds of snow that filled the clearing, and he caught his breath as a man might who had waked suddenly among the dead. In the beginning of dawn, with the glimmer of smouldering fires reddening the snow, there was something almost ghastly in the sloping field filled with white graves and surrounded by white mountains. Even the wintry sky borrowed, for an hour, the spectral aspect of the earth, and the familiar shapes of cloud, as of hill, stood out with all the majesty of uncovered laws—stripped of the mere frivolous effect of light or shade. It was like the first day—or the last.
Dan, sitting watchful beside the fire, fell into the peculiar mental state which comes only after an inward struggle that has laid bare the sinews of one's life. He had fought the good fight to the end, and he knew that from this day he should go easier with himself because he knew that he had conquered.
The old doubt—the old distrust of his own strength—was fallen from him. At the moment he could have gone to Betty, fearless and full of hope, and have said, “Come, for I am grown up at last—at last I have grown up to my love.” A great tenderness was in his heart, and the tears, which had not risen for all the bodily suffering of the past two weeks, came slowly to his eyes. The purpose of life seemed suddenly clear to him, and the large patience of the sky passed into his own nature as he sat facing the white dawn. At rare intervals in the lives of all strenuous souls there comes this sense of kinship with external things—this passionate recognition of the appeal of the dumb world. Sky and mountains and the white sweep of the fields awoke in him the peculiar tenderness he had always felt for animals or plants. His old childish petulance was gone from him forever; in its place he was aware of a kindly tolerance which softened even the common outlines of his daily life. It was as if he had awakened breathlessly to find himself a man.
And Betty came to him again—not in detached visions, but entire and womanly. When he remembered her as on that last night at Chericoke it was with the impulse to fall down and kiss her feet. Reckless and blind with anger as he had been, she would have come cheerfully with him wherever his road led; and it was this passionate betrayal of herself that had taught him the full measure of her love. An attempt to trifle, to waver, to bargain with the future, he might have looked back upon with tender scorn; but the gesture with which she had made her choice was as desperate as his own mood—and it was for this one reckless moment that he loved her best.
The east paled slowly as the day broke in a cloud, and the long shadows beside the fire lost their reddish glimmer. A little bird, dazed by the cold and the strange light, flew into the smoke against the stunted pine, and fell, a wet ball of feathers at Dan's feet. He picked it up, warmed it in his coat, and fed it from the loose crumbs in his pocket.
When Pinetop awoke he was gently stroking the bird while he sang in a low voice:—
We'll be gay and happy still.”
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