As the dusk fell Dan found himself on the road with a little company of stragglers, flying from the pursuing cavalry that drew off slowly as the darkness gathered. He had lost his regiment, and, as he went on, he began calling out familiar names, listening with strained ears for an answer that would tell of a friend's escape. At last he caught the outlines of a gigantic figure relieved on a hillock against the pale green west, and, with a shout, he hurried through the swarm of fugitives, and overtook Pinetop, who had stooped to tie his shoe on with a leather strap.
“Thank God, old man!” he cried. “Where are the others?”
Pinetop, panting yet imperturbable, held out a steady hand.
“The Lord knows,” he replied. “Some of 'em air here an' some ain't. I was goin' back agin to git the flag, when I saw you chased like a fox across the creek with it hangin' on yo' back. Then I kinder thought it wouldn't do for none of the regiment to answer when Marse Robert called, so I came along right fast and kep' hopin' you would follow.”
“Here I am,” responded Dan, “and here are the colours.” He twined the silk more closely about his arm, gloating over his treasure in the twilight.
Pinetop stretched out his great rough hand and touched the flag as gently as if it were a woman.
“I've fought under this here thing goin' on four years now,” he said, “and I reckon when they take it prisoner, they take me along with it.”
“And me,” added Dan; “poor Granger went down, you know, just as I took it from him. He fell fighting with the pole.”
“Wall, it's a better way than most,” Pinetop replied, “an' when the angel begins to foot up my account on Jedgment Day, I shouldn't mind his cappin' the whole list with 'he lost his life, but he didn't lose his flag.' To make a blamed good fight is what the Lord wants of us, I reckon, or he wouldn't have made our hands itch so when they touch a musket.”
Then they trudged on silently, weak from hunger, sickened by defeat. When, at last, the disorganized column halted, and the men fell to the ground upon their rifles, Dan kindled a fire and parched his corn above the coals. After it was eaten they lay down side by side and slept peacefully on the edge of an old field.
For three days they marched steadily onward, securing meagre rations in a little town where they rested for a while, and pausing from time to time, to beat off a feigned attack. Pinetop, cheerful, strong, undaunted by any hardship, set his face unflinchingly toward the battle that must clear a road for them through Grant's lines. Had he met alone a squadron of cavalry in the field, he would, probably, have taken his stand against a pine, and aimed his musket as coolly as if a squirrel were the mark. With his sunny temper, and his gloomy gospel of predestination, his heart could swell with hope even while he fought single-handed in the face of big battalions. What concerned him, after all, was not so much the chance of an ultimate victory for the cause, as the determination in his own mind to fight it out as long as he had a cartridge remaining in his box. As his fathers had kept the frontier, so he meant, on his own account, to keep Virginia.
On the afternoon of the third day, as the little company drew near to Appomattox Court House, it found the road blocked with abandoned guns, and lined by exhausted stragglers, who had gone down at the last halting place. As it filed into an open field beyond a wooded level, where a few campfires glimmered, a group of Federal horsemen clattered across the front, and, as if by instinct, the column formed into battle line, and the hand of every man was on the trigger of his musket.
“Don't fire, you fools!” called an officer behind them, in a voice sharp with irritation. “The army has surrendered!”
“What! Grant surrendered?” thundered the line, with muskets at a trail as it rushed into the open.
“No, you blasted fools—we've surrendered,” shouted the voice, rising hoarsely in a gasping indignation.
“Surrendered, the deuce!” scoffed the men, as they fell back into ranks. “I'd like to know what General Lee will think of your surrender?”
A little Colonel, with his hand at his sword hilt, strutted up and down before a tangle of dead thistles.
“I don't know what he thinks of it, he did it,” he shrieked, without pausing in his walk.
“It's a damn lie!” cried Dan, in a white heat. Then he threw his musket on the ground, and fell to sobbing the dry tearless sobs of a man who feels his heart crushed by a sudden blow.
There were tears on all the faces round him, and Pinetop was digging his great fists into his eyes, as a child does who has been punished before his playmates. Beside him a man with an untrimmed shaggy beard hid his distorted features in shaking hands.
“I ain't blubberin' fur myself,” he said defiantly, “but—O Lord, boys—I'm cryin' fur Marse Robert.”
Over the field the beaten soldiers, in ragged gray uniforms, were lying beneath little bushes of sassafras and sumach, and to the right a few campfires were burning in a shady thicket. The struggle was over, and each man had fallen where he stood, hopeless for the first time in four long years. Up and down the road groups of Federal horsemen trotted with cheerful unconcern, and now and then a private paused to make a remark in friendly tones; but the men beneath the bushes only stared with hollow eyes in answer—the blank stare of the defeated who have put their whole strength into the fight.
Taking out his jack-knife, Dan unfastened the flag from the hickory pole on which he had placed it, and began cutting it into little pieces, which he passed to each man who had fought beneath its folds. The last bit he put into his own pocket, and trembling like one gone suddenly palsied, passed from the midst of his silent comrades to a pine stump on the border of the woods. Here he sat down and looked hopelessly upon the scene before him—upon the littered roads and the great blue lines encircling the horizon.
So this was the end, he told himself, with a bitterness that choked him like a grip upon the throat, this the end of his boyish ardour, his dream of fame upon the battle-field, his four years of daily sacrifice and suffering. This was the end of the flag for which he was ready to give his life three days ago. With his youth, his strength, his very bread thrown into the scale, he sat now with wrecked body and blighted mind, and saw his future turn to decay before his manhood was well begun. Where was the old buoyant spirit he had brought with him into the fight? Gone forever, and in its place he found his maimed and trembling hands, and limbs weakened by starvation as by long fever. His virile youth was wasted in the slow struggle, his energy was sapped drop by drop; and at the last he saw himself burned out like the battle-fields, where the armies had closed and opened, leaving an impoverished and ruined soil. He had given himself for four years, and yet when the end came he had not earned so much as an empty title to take home for his reward. The consciousness of a hard-fought fight was but the common portion of them all, from the greatest to the humblest on either side. As for him he had but done his duty like his comrades in the ranks, and by what right of merit should he have raised himself above their heads? Yes, this was the end, and he meant to face it standing with his back against the wall.
Down the road a line of Federal privates came driving an ox before them, and he eyed them gravely, wondering in a dazed way if the taste of victory had gone to their heads. Then he turned slowly, for a voice was speaking at his side, and a tall man in a long blue coat was building a little fire hard by.
“Your stomach's pretty empty, ain't it, Johnny?” he inquired, as he laid the sticks crosswise with precise movements, as if he had measured the length of each separate piece of wood. He was lean and rawboned, with a shaggy red moustache and a wart on his left cheek. When he spoke he showed an even row of strong white teeth.
Dan looked at him with a kind of exhausted indignation.
“Well, it's been emptier,” he returned shortly.
The man in blue struck a match and held it carefully to a dried pine branch, watching, with a serious face, as the flame licked the rosin from the crossed sticks. Then he placed a quart pot full of water on the coals, and turned to meet Dan's eyes, which had grown ravenous as he caught the scent of beef.
“You see we somehow thought you Johnnies would be hard up,” he said in an offhand manner, “so we made up our minds we'd ask you to dinner and cut our rations square. Some of us are driving over an ox from camp, but as I was hanging round and saw you all by yourself on this old stump, I had a feeling that you were in need of a cup of coffee. You haven't tasted real coffee for some time, I guess.”
The water was bubbling over and he measured out the coffee and poured it slowly into the quart cup. As the aroma filled the air, he opened his haversack and drew out a generous supply of raw beef which he broiled on little sticks, and laid on a spread of army biscuits. The larger share he offered to Dan with the steaming pot of coffee.
“I declare it'll do me downright good to see you eat,” he said, with a hospitable gesture.
Dan sat down beside the bread and beef, and, for the next ten minutes, ate like a famished wolf, while the man in blue placidly regarded him. When he had finished he took out a little bag of Virginian tobacco and they smoked together beside the waning fire. A natural light returned gradually to Dan's eyes, and while the clouds of smoke rose high above the bushes, they talked of the last great battles as quietly as of the Punic Wars. It was all dead now, as dead as history, and the men who fought had left the bitterness to the camp followers or to the ones who stayed at home.
“You have fine tobacco down this way,” observed the Union soldier, as he refilled his pipe, and lighted it with an ember. Then his gaze followed Dan's, which was resting on the long blue lines that stretched across the landscape.
“You're feeling right bad about us now,” he pursued, as he crossed his legs and leaned back against a pine, “and I guess it's natural, but the time will come when you'll know that we weren't the worst you had to face.”
Dan held out his hand with something of a smile.
“It was a fair fight and I can shake hands,” he responded.
“Well, I don't mean that,” said the other thoughtfully. “What I mean is just this, you mark my words—after the battle comes the vultures. After the army of fighters comes the army of those who haven't smelled the powder. And in time you'll learn that it isn't the man with the rifle that does the most of the mischief. The damned coffee boilers will get their hands in now—I know 'em.”
“Well, there's nothing left, I suppose, but to swallow it down without any fuss,” said Dan wearily, looking over the field where the slaughtered ox was roasting on a hundred bayonets at a hundred fires.
“You're right, that's the only thing,” agreed the man in blue; then his keen gray eyes were on Dan's face.
“Have you got a wife?” he asked bluntly.
Dan shook his head as he stared gravely at the embers.
“A sweetheart, I guess? I never met a Johnnie who didn't have a sweetheart.”
“Yes, I've a sweetheart—God bless her!”
“Well, you take my advice and go home and tell her to cure you, now she's got the chance. I like your face, young man, but if I ever saw a half-starved and sickly one, it is yours. Why, I shouldn't have thought you had the strength to raise your rifle.”
“Oh, it doesn't take much strength for that; and besides the coffee did me good, I was only hungry.”
“Hungry, hump!” grunted the Union soldier. “It takes more than hunger to give a man that blue look about the lips; it takes downright starvation.” He dived into his haversack and drew out a quinine pill and a little bottle of whiskey.
“If you'll just chuck this down it won't do you any harm,” he went on, “and if I were you, I'd find a shelter before I went to sleep to-night; you can't trust April weather. Get into that cow shed over there or under a wagon.”
Dan swallowed the quinine and the whiskey, and as the strong spirit fired his veins, the utter hopelessness of his outlook muffled him into silence. Dropping his head into his open palms, he sat dully staring at the whitening ashes.
After a moment the man in blue rose to his feet and fastened his haversack.
“I live up by Bethlehem, New Hampshire,” he remarked, “and if you ever come that way, I hope you'll look me up; my name's Moriarty.”
“Your name's Moriarty, I shall remember,” repeated Dan, trying, with a terrible effort, to steady his quivering limbs.
“Jim Moriarty, don't you forget it. Anybody at Bethlehem can tell you about me; I keep the biggest store around there.” He went off a few steps and then came back to hold out an awkward hand in which there was a little heap of silver.
“You'd just better take this to start you on your way,” he said, “it ain't but ninety-five cents—I couldn't make out the dollar—and when you get it in again you can send it to Jim Moriarty at Bethlehem, New Hampshire. Good-by, and good luck to you this time.”
He strode off across the field, and Dan, with the silver held close in his palm, flung himself back upon the ground and slept until Pinetop woke him with a grasp upon his shoulder.
“Marse Robert's passin' along the road,” he said. “You'd better hurry.”
Struggling to his feet Dan rushed from the woods across the deserted field, to the lines of conquered soldiers standing in battle ranks upon the roadside. Between them the Commander had passed slowly on his dapple gray horse, and when Dan joined the ranks it was only in time to see him ride onward at a walk, with the bearded soldiers clinging like children to his stirrups. A group of Federal cavalrymen, drawn up beneath a persimmon tree, uncovered as he went by, and he returned the salute with a simple gesture. Lonely, patient, confirmed in courtesy, he passed on his way, and his little army returned to camp in the strip of pines.
“'I've done my best for you,' that's what he said,” sobbed Pinetop. “'I've done my best for you,'—and I kissed old Traveller's mane.”
Without replying, Dan went back into the woods and flung himself down on the spread of tags. Now that the fight was over all the exhaustion of the last four years, the weakness after many battles, the weariness after the long marches, had gathered with accumulated strength for the final overthrow.
For three days he remained in camp in the pine woods, and on the third, after waiting six hours in a hard rain outside his General's tent, he secured the little printed slip which signified to all whom it might concern that he had become a prisoner upon his parole. Then, after a sympathetic word to the rest of the division, shivering beneath the sassafras bushes before the tent, he shook hands with his comrades under arms, and started with Pinetop down the muddy road. The war was over, and footsore, in rags and with aching limbs, he was returning to the little valley where he had hoped to trail his glory.
Down the long road the gray rain fell straight as a curtain, and on either side tramped the lines of beaten soldiers who were marching, on their word of honour, to their distant homes. The abandoned guns sunk deep in the mud, the shivering men lying in rags beneath the bushes, and the charred remains of campfires among the trees were the last memories Dan carried from the four years' war.
Some miles farther on, when the pickets had been passed, a man on a black horse rode suddenly from a little thicket and stopped across their path.
“You fellows haven't been such darn fools as to give your parole, have you?” he asked in an angry voice, his hand on his horse's neck. “The fight isn't over yet and we want your muskets on our side. I belong to the partisan rangers, and we'll cut through to Johnston's army before daylight. If not, we'll take to the mountains and keep up the war forever. The country is ours, what's to hinder us?”
He spoke passionately, and at each sharp exclamation the black horse rose on his haunches and pawed the air.
Dan shook his head.
“I'm out on parole,” he replied, “but as soon as I'm exchanged, I'll fight if Virginia wants me. How about you, Pinetop?”
The mountaineer shuffled his feet in the mud and stood solemnly surveying the landscape.
“Wall, I don't understand much about this here parole business,” he replied. “It seems to me that a slip of paper with printed words on it that I have to spell out as I go, is a mighty poor way to keep a man from fightin' if he can find a musket. I ain't steddyin' about this parole, but Marse Robert told me to go home to plant my crop, and I am goin' home to plant it.”
“It is all over, I think,” said Dan with a quivering lip, as he stared at the ruined meadows. The smart was still fresh, and it was too soon for him to add, with the knowledge that would come to him from years,—“it is better so.” Despite the grim struggle and the wasted strength, despite the impoverished land and the nameless graves that filled it, despite even his own wrecked youth and the hard-fought fields where he had laid it down—despite all these a shadow was lifted from his people and it was worth the price.
They passed on, while the black horse pawed the dust, and the rider hurled oaths at their retreating figures. At a little house a few yards down the road they stopped to ask for food, and found a woman weeping at the kitchen table, with three small children clinging to her skirts. Her husband had fallen at Five Forks, she said, the safe was empty, and the children were crying for bread. Then Dan slipped into her hand the silver he had borrowed from the Union soldier, and the two returned penniless to the road.
“At least we are men,” he said almost apologetically to Pinetop, and the next instant turned squarely in the mud, for a voice from the other side had called out shrilly:—
“Hi, Marse Dan, whar you gwine now?”
“Bless my soul, it's Big Abel,” he exclaimed.
Black as a spade and beaming with delight, the negro emerged from the swarm upon the roadside and grasped Dan's outstretched hands.
“Whar you gwine dis away, Marse Dan?” he inquired again.
“I'm going home, Big Abel,” responded Dan, as they walked on in a row of three. “No, don't shout, you scamp; I'd rather lie down and die upon the roadside than go home like this.”
“Well, you ain' much to look at, dat's sho',” replied Big Abel, his face shining like polished ebony, “en I ain' much to look at needer, but dey'll have ter recollect de way we all wuz befo' we runned away; dey'll have ter recollect you in yo' fine shuts en fancy waistcoats, en dey'll have ter recollect me in yo' ole uns. Sakes alive! I kin see dat one er yourn wid de little bit er flow'rs all over hit des es plain es ef 'twuz yestiddy.”
“The waistcoats are all gone now,” said Dan gravely, “and so are the shirts. The war is over and you are your own master, Big Abel. You don't belong to me from this time on.”
Big Abel shook his head grinning.
“I reckon hit's all de same,” he remarked cheerfully, “en I reckon we'd es well be gwine on home, Marse Dan.”
“I reckon we would,” said Dan, and they pushed on in silence.
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