The Cavalier

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"Out on the Natchez Trace waiting for the command. I'm carrying orders
to Fisher's battery, down here by the cross-roads. Haven't you seen the
General this morning? What! haven't seen him in his new uniform? Whoop!
he's a blaze of glory! Look here, Smith, I believe you know who brought
it to him!"

"How on earth should I know?"

"Oh, how innocent you always are! Look here! just tell me this; was it
the Major's brother brought it, or was it Ned Ferry?"

"Suppose it wasn't either."

"I knew it! I knew it was her! Ah, you rogue, you know it was her!"

"Well, that _might_ depend on who 'her' is." We had reached the
cross-roads and he was turning south.

"Look!" he said, and gave the glance and smile of the lady in the
curtained wagon so perfectly that I cackled like a small boy. "Oh, you
know that, do you? I dare you to say she didn't bring it!"

"I give you my word I don't know!" called I as the distance grew between
us. "And I give you my word I don't care!" he crowed back as we
galloped apart. His speech was two or three words longer, but they are
inappropriate at the end of a chapter, and I expurgate.

V

EIGHTEEN, NINETEEN, TWENTY

On entering Hazlehurst I observed all about the railway-station a
surprising amount of quartermaster's stores. A large part were cases of
boots and shoes. Laden with such goods, a train of shabby box-cars stood
facing south, its beggarly wood-burner engine sniffing and weeping,
while the cork-legged conductor helped all hands wood up. Though homely,
the picture was a stirring one. Up through the blue summer morning came
the sun, bringing to mind the words of the dying Mirabeau, "If that is
not God, at least it's his first cousin."

Even in the character of the goods there was eloquence, and not a
drollery in the scene, not even an ugliness, but was touched, was rife,
with the woe of a war whose burning walls were falling in on us. And
outward, too, upon others; a few up-ended cottonbales leaned against
each other ragged and idle, while women and babes starved for want of
them in far-away Lancaster.

One of the cars furthest from the engine had no freight proper, only a
number of trunks; and these were nearly hidden by the widely crinolined
flounces of an elegant elderly lady who sat on the middle one. And now
she, too, was hidden, and the wide doorway in the side of the car more
than filled, by the fashionable gowns of three girls. On the ground
below there stood a lieutenant in a homemade gray uniform, and at his
back half a dozen big, slouching, barefoot boys squirted tobacco juice
and gazed at the ladies. The officer scanned me, spoke to the ladies,
scanned me again, and threw up an arm. "Ho--o! Come here! Hullo! Come
here--if you please."

If he had not said please he should have ho'd and hullo'd in vain, but
at that word I turned. Before I had covered half the distance I read New
Orleans! my dear, dear old New Orleans! in every line of those ladies'
draperies, and at twenty-five yards I saw one noble family likeness in
all four of their sweet faces. Oh, but those three maidens were fair!
and I could name each by her name at a glance: Camille, Cecile, Estelle;
eighteen, nineteen, twenty!

There was a hush of attention among them as the lieutenant and I
saluted. His left hand was gone at the wrist and the sleeve pinned back
on itself. He asked my name; I told him. In the car there was a stir of
deepening interest. I inquired if he was the post-quartermaster here.
He was.

"Ain't you Major Harper's quartermaster-sergeant?" he asked.

"I am his clerk." In the car a flash of joy and then great decorum.

As he handed me a writing he glowed kindly. It proved to be from Major
Harper; a requisition upon this officer for shoes and clothing; not for
a brigade, regiment or company, but for me alone, from hat to shoes. I
tendered it back silently, and saw that he knew its purport already from
the Major, and that the ladies knew it from him. The good fellow looked
quite happy a moment, but then reddened as they joyfully crowded the
car's doorway to see me fitted!

"We can select out sev'l pair--" he began, but heard a puerile titter
and lost his nerve. "Now, you boys that ain't got any business here,
jest clair out!--Go! I tell you, aw I'll--" The boys loitered off toward
the engine. "We can select out sev'l si-izes," he drawled, uncovering a
box, "and fit you ove' in my office. You ain't so pow'ful long nor so
pow'ful slim, but these-yeh gov'ment contrac's they seldom ev' allow
fo' anybody so slim in the waist bein' so long in the, eh,--so, eh,--so
long f'om thah down. But yet still, if you'll jest light off yo' hoss
and come and look into this-yeh box--"

Hmm! yes! I wouldn't have got off my horse and leaned over that box to
save the Confederacy. "I thank you, Lieutenant, but I can't stop. If
you'll hand me up a jacket and pair of shoes I'll sign for them and go.
I don't want a hat, but I reckon I'd as well include shoes, although
really,--" I glanced down brazenly at the stirrup-leathers that so
snugly hid my naked toes.

As the quartermaster lifted out a pair of brogans as broad as they were
long, there came a cry of protestation from the freight-car group, that
brought the entire herd of rustics from the woodpile and the locomotive.
Miss Harper rose behind her nieces, tall, slender, dark, with keen
black eyes as kind as they were penetrating. "My boy!" she cried, "you
cannot wear those things!"

Camille, the youngest, whispered to her, whereupon she beckoned.
"Oh!--oh, do come here!--Mr. Smith, I am the sister of Major Harper.
You're from New Orleans? Does your mother live in Apollo Street?"

"Yes, madam, between Melpomene and Terpsichore."

"Richard Thorndyke Smith! My dear boy," she cried, while the nieces
gasped at each other with gestures and looks all the way between
Terpsichore and Melpomene, and then the four cried in chorus, "We know
your mother!"

"We've got a letter for you from her!" exclaimed Camille.

"And a suit of unie-fawm!" called Cecile, with her Creole accent.

"We smuggled it through!" chanted the trio, ready to weep for virtuous
joy. And then they clasped arms like the graces, about their aunt, and
let her speak.

"We all helped your mother make your uniform," she said. "In the short
time we've known her we've learned to love her dearly." With military
brevity she told how they had unexpectedly got a pass and were just out
of New Orleans--"poor New Orleans!" put in Estelle, the eldest, the
pensive one; that they had come up from Pontchatoula yesterday and last
night, and had thrown themselves on beds in the "hotel" yonder without
venturing to disrobe, and so had let her brother pass within a few
steps of them while they slept! "Telegraph? My dear boy, we came but ten
miles an hour, but we outran our despatch!" Now they had telegraphed
again, to Brookhaven, and thanks to the post-quartermaster, were going
down there at once on this train. While this was being told something
else was going on. The youngest niece, Camille, had put herself entirely
out of sight. Now she reappeared with very rosy cheeks, saying, "Here's
the letter."

My thanks were few and awkward, for there still hung to the missive a
basting thread, and it was as warm as a nestling bird. I bent
low--everybody was emotional in those days--kissed the fragrant thing,
thrust it into my bosom, and blushed worse than Camille.

"Poor boy!" said the aunt. "It's the first line you've had for months.
Your sweet mother wrote, but her letters were all intercepted, and the
last time she was warned that next time she'd be dealt with according to
military usage! I'm glad we could give you this one at once. We can't
give you the uniform, for we--why, girls, what--why, what nonsense!"

Maybe I did not say vindictive things inside me just then! The three
nieces had turned open-mouthed upon one another and sunk down upon their
luggage with averted faces.

"I say we can't give it to you now," Miss Harper persisted, with a
motherly smile; "we're wearing it ourselves. We've had no time to take
it off. I couldn't get the boots off me last night. And even if you had
the boots, the other things--"

"Aunt Martha!" moaned some one. "Well, in short," said the aunt,
twinkling like her brother, "we can't deliver the goods, and--" She
started as though some one had slapped her between the shoulder-blades.
It was the engine caused it, whistling in the old, lawless way, putting
a whoop, a howl, a scream and a wail into one. The young ladies quailed,
the train jerked like several collisions, the bell began tardily to
clang, and my steed whirled, cleared a packing case, whirled again, and
stood facing the train, his eyes blazing, his nostrils flapping, not
half so much frightened as insulted. The post-quartermaster waved to the
ladies and they to us. For a last touch I lifted my cap high and backed
my horse on drooping haunches--you've seen Buffalo Bill do it--and
then, with a leap like a cricket's, and to a clapping of maidens' hands
that made me whooping drunk, we stretched away, my horse and I, on a
long smooth gallop, for Brookhaven.

VI

A HANDSOME STRANGER

Certainly no cricket ever dropped blither music from his legs than did
my beautiful horse that glorious morning as we clattered in perfect
rhythm on the hard clean road of the wide pine forest. Ah! the forest is
not there now; the lumbermen--

For an hour or so the world seemed to have taken me for its center as
smoothly as a sleeping top. Only after a good seven miles did my
meditations begin to reveal any bitter in the sweet; but it was in
recalling for the twentieth time the last sight of Camille, that I
heard myself say, I know not whether softly or loudly,

"Oh, hang the uniform!"

The morning was almost sultry. As I halted in the clear ripples of a
gravelly "branch" to let my horse drink, I heard no great way off the
Harpers' train shrieking at cattle on the track, and looking up I
noticed just behind me an unfrequented by-road carefully masked with
brush, according to a new habit of the "citizens". The next moment my
horse threw up his head to listen. Then I heard hoofs and voices, and
presently there came trotting through the oak bushes and around the mask
of brush two horsemen unusually well mounted, clad and armed. Their very
dark gray uniforms were so trim and so nearly blue that my heart came
into my throat; but then I noticed they carried neither carbines nor
sabres, but repeaters only, a brace to each. They splashed lightly to
either side of me, and the three horses drank together.

"Good-morning," we said. One of the men was a sergeant. He scanned my
animal, and then me, with a dawning smile. "That's a fightin'-cock of a
horse you've got, sonny."

"Yes, bub," I replied. The two men laughed so explosively that my horse
lifted his head austerely.

"Jim," said the younger, "I don't believe all the conscripts we've
caught these three days are worth the powder they've cost!"

"No," replied Sergeant Jim, "I doubt if the most of 'em are." I turned
to him and drew down my under eyelid. "Will you kindly tell me, sir, if
you see any unnatural discoloration in there?"

He smiled. "No, but I can put some there if you want it."

"Thank you, I couldn't let you take so much trouble--or risk."

The three of us pattered out of the stream abreast. "No trouble,"
replied the sergeant, "it wouldn't take half a minute."

"No," I rejoined, "the first step would be the last."

The men laughed again. "You must a-been born with all your teeth," said
the private, as we quickened to a trot. "What makes you think we ain't
after conscripts?"

"Oh, if you were you wouldn't say so. You'd let on to be looking for
good crossings on Pearl River, so that if Johnston should get chewed up
we needn't be caught here in a hole, Ferry's scouts and all."

The pair looked at each other behind my neck for full ten seconds. Then
the younger man leaned to his horse's mane in a silent laugh while
Sergeant Jim looked me over again and remarked that he would be
horn-swoggled!

"I'm willing," I responded, and we all laughed. The younger horseman
asked my name. "Smith," I said, with dignity, and they laughed again,
their laugh growing louder when I would not smile.

"Well, say; maybe you'll tell us who this is we're about to meet up
with."

Through the shifting colonnades of pine, a hundred yards in front of
us, came two horsemen in the same blue-gray of the pair beside me.
"Whoever he is," I said, "that gray he's riding is his second best, or
it's borrowed," for his mount, though good, was no match for him.

"Borrowed!" echoed the sergeant. "If he doesn't own that mare no man
does."

"Nor no woman?" I asked, and again across the back of my neck my two
companions gazed at each other.

"By ganny!" exclaimed one, and--"You're a coon," murmured the other, as
the new-comers drew near. The younger of these also was a private.
Behind his elbow was swung a Maynard rifle. Both carried revolvers. The
elder wore a long straight sword whose weather-dimmed orange sash showed
at the front of a loose cut-away jacket. Under this garment was a shirt
of strong black silk, made from some lady's gown and daintily corded
with yellow. On the jacket's upturned collar were the two gilt bars of a
first lieutenant, but the face above them shone with a combined
intelligence and purity that drew my whole attention.

A familiar friendship lighted every countenance but mine as this second
pair turned and rode with us, the lieutenant in front on Sergeant Jim
Longley's right, and the two privates with me between them behind. For
some minutes the sergeant, in under-tone, made report to his young
superior. Then in a small clearing he turned abruptly into a
neighborhood road, and at his word my two companions pricked after him
westward. I closed up beside the lieutenant; he praised the weather, and
soon our talk was fluent though broken, as we moved sometimes at a trot
and often faster. In stolen moments I scanned him with the jealousy of
my youth. Five feet, ten; humph! I was five, nine and a thirty-second.
In weight he looked to be just what I always had in mind in those
prayers without words with which I mounted every pair of commissary
scales I came to. The play of his form as our smooth-gaited horses sped
through the flecking shades was worth watching for its stanch and supple
grace. Alike below the saddle and above it he was as light as a leaf and
as firm as a lance. I had long yearned to own a pair of shoulders not
too square for beauty nor too sloping for strength, and lo, here they
were, not mine, but his. No matter; the slender mustache he sported he
was welcome to, I had shaved off nearly as good a one; wished now I
hadn't. As once or twice he lifted his kepi to the warm breeze I took
new despair from the soft locks of darkest chestnut that lay on his head
in manly order, ready enough to curl but waiving the privilege.

"Cock-a-doodle-doo," thought I; "if those are not the same
hundred-dollar boots I saw yesterday morning, at least they are their
first cousins!"

VII

A PLAGUE ON NAMES!

Once more I measured my man. Celerity, valor, endurance, they were his
iridescent neck and tail feathers. On a certain piece of road where we
went more slowly I mentioned abruptly my clerkship under Major Harper
and watched for the effect, but there was none. Did he know the Major?
Oh, yes, and we fell to piling item upon item in praise of the
quartermaster's virtues and good looks. Presently, with shrewdest
intent, I said the Major was fine enough to be the hero of a novel! Did
not my companion think so?

Yes, he thought so; but I believed the glow in his tone was for novels.
I extolled the romance of actual life! I denounced that dullness which
fails to see the poetry of daily experience, and goes wandering after
the mirages of fiction! And I was ready to fight him if he liked. But he
agreed with me most cordially.

"And yet," he began to add,--

"Yet what?" I snapped out, with horse eyes.

"Doesn't a good story revive the poetry of our actual lives?" He wiped
the rim of his cap with a handkerchief of yellow silk enriched at one
corner with needlework.

"Um-hm!" I thought; "Charlotte Oliver, eh?" I responded tartly that I
had that very morning met four ladies the poetry of whose actual,
visible loveliness had abundantly illustrated to me the needlessness and
impertinence of fiction! By the way, did he not think feminine beauty
was always in its ripest perfection at eighteen?

Well, he thought a girl might be prettiest at eighteen and handsomest
much later. And again I said to myself, "Charlotte Oliver!" But when I
looked searchingly into his eyes their manly sweetness so abashed me
that I dropped my glance and felt him looking at me. I remembered my
fable and flinched. "Isn't your name--" I cried, and choked, and when I
would have said Ferry, another word slipped out instead. He did not hear
it plainly:

"Cockerel, did you say?"

A sweet color was I. "Yes, that's what I said; Cockerel. Isn't your last
name Cockerel?"

"No," he said, "my last name is Durand." He gave it the French
pronunciation.

"Mine is Smith," I said, and we galloped.

A plague on names! But I was not done with them yet. We met other scouts
coming out of the east, who also gave reports and went on westward,
sometimes through the trackless woods. At a broad cross-road which
spanned the whole State from the Alabama line to the Mississippi River
stood another sergeant, with three men, waiting. They were the last.

Again we galloped alone; and as our horses' hoofs beat drummers' music
out of the round earth our dialogue drifted into confessions of our own
most private theories of conduct, character and creation. Now that this
man's name was not--Cockerel, my heart opened to him and we began to
admit to each other the perplexities of this great, strange thing called
Life. Especially we confessed how every waking hour found us jostled and
torn between two opposite, unappeasable tendencies of soul; one an
upward yearning after everything high and pure, the other a
down-dragging hunger for every base indulgence. I was warmed and fed.
Yet I was pained to find him so steeped in presumptuous error, so
wayward of belief and unbelief. The sweet ease with which he overturned
and emptied out some of my arguments gave me worse failure of the
diaphragm than a high swing ever did. Nevertheless I responded; and he
rejoined; and I rejoined again, and presently he gave me the notion that
he was suffering some cruel moral strain.

VIII

ANOTHER CURTAINED WAGON

Upon whatever fundamental scheme we perseveringly concentrate our
powers, upon whatever main road of occupation we take life's
journey,--art, politics, commerce, science,--if only we will take its
upper fork as often as the road divides, then will that road itself, and
not necessarily any cross-road, lead us to the noblest, truest plane of
convictions, affections, aspirations. Such a frame of mind may be quite
without religiosity, as unconscious as health; but the proof of its
religious reality will be that, as if it were a lighthouse light and we
its keeper, everybody else, or at any rate everybody _out on the deep_,
will see it plainer than we. Such is the gist of what this young man was
saying to me, when our speculations were brought to an end by our
overtaking a man well mounted, and a woman whose rough-gaited was
followed by a colt.

The pair took our pace, the man plying me with questions, and his wife,
in front, telling Lieutenant Durand all the rumors of the day. Her scant
hair was of a scorched red tone, she was freckled down into her collar,
her elbows waggled to the mare's jog, and her voice was as flat as a
duck's. Her nag had trouble to keep up, and her tiny faded bonnet had
even more to keep on. Yet the day was near when the touch of those
freckled hands was to seem to me kinder than the breath of flowers, as
they bathed my foul-smelling wounds, and she would say, in the words of
the old song, "Let me kiss him for his mother," and I should be helpless
to prevent her. By and by the man raised his voice:--

"Why, yo' name _is_ Smith, to be sho'! I thought you was jest a-tryin'
to chaw me. Why, Major Harper alludened to you not mo'n a half-ow ago.
Why, Miz Wall! oh, Miz Wall!"

But the wife was absorbed. "Yayse, seh," she was saying to the
lieutenant, "and he told us about they comin' in on the freight-kyahs
f'om Hazlehurst black with dust and sut and a-smuttyin' him all oveh
with they kisses and goin's-on. He tol' me he ain't neveh so enjoyed
havin' his face dirty sence he was a boy. He would a-been plumb happy,
ef on'y he could a-got his haynds on that clerk o' his'n. And when he
tol' us what a gay two-hoss turn-out he'd sekyo'ed for the ladies to
travel in, s' I, Majo', that's all right! You jest go on whicheveh way
you got to go! Husband and me, we'll ride into Brookhaven and bring 'em
out to ow place and jest take ca'e of 'em untel yo' clerk is _found_."

"Miz Wall!" cried the husband--"She's busy talkin'.--Miz Wall!--she
don't hyuh me. I hate to interrupt heh.--Oh, Miz Wall! hyuh's Majo'
Harper's clerk, right now!"

"Law, you hain't!" cried Mrs. Wall, smiling back as she jounced. "If you
air, the Majo's sisteh's got written awdehs fo' you."

I shot forward, but had hardly more than sent back my good-bye when
around a bend of the road, in a wagon larger than Charlotte Oliver's,
with the curtains rolled up, came the four Miss Harpers, unsooted and
radiant. The aunt drove. We turned, all four, and rode with them, and
while the seven chatted gaily I read to myself the Major's note. It bade
me take these four ladies into my most jealous care and conduct them to
a point about thirty miles west of where we then were. A dandy's task in
a soldier's hour! I ground my teeth, but as I lifted my glance I found
Camille's eyes resting on me and read anxiety in them before she could
put on a smile of unemotional friendliness that faded rapidly into
abstraction. She was as pretty as the bough of wild azaleas in her hand,
yet moving forward I told her aunt the order's purport and that it
implied the greatest despatch compatible with mortal endurance. The
whole four seemed only delighted.

But Mrs. Wall protested. No, no, her hospitality first, and a basket of
refreshments to be stowed in the vehicle, besides. "Why, that'll
_sa-ave_ ti-ime. You-all goin' to be supprised to find how hungry
y'all ah, befo' you come to yo' journey's en', to-night, and them col'
victuals goin' taste pow'ful fi-ine!"

Our acceptance was unanimous. I even decided not to inform Lieutenant
Durand until after the repast, that ladies under my escort did not pick
acquaintanceship with soldiers on the public highway. But before the
brief meal was over I was wishing him hanged. Hang the heaven-high
theories that had so lately put me in love with him! Hang his melodious
voice, his modest composure, his gold-barred collar, his easy command of
topics! Hang the women! they feasted on his every word and look! Ah,
ladies! if I were mean enough to tell it--that man doesn't believe in
hell! He has a down-dragging hunger for every base indulgence; he has
told me so!

How fast acquaintance grew! When he addressed himself to Cecile, the
cousin of the other two, her black eyes leapt with delight; for as
calmly as if that were the only way, he spoke to her in French--asked
her a question. She gave answer in happiest affirmation, and explained
to her aunt that her Durand schoolmates of a year or two back were
cousins to the Lieutenant. When the throng came out to the carry-all I
was there and mounted. Squire Wall took me a few rods to point out where
a fork of his private road led into the highway. Then the carry-all came
merrily after, and with a regret that surprised me I answered our
Lieutenant's farewell wave, forgave him all his charms, and saw him face
westward and disappear by a bridle-path.

IX

THE DANDY'S TASK

Westward likewise we soon were bickering. The morning sun shone high;
the thin, hot dust blew out over the blackened ground of some forest
"burn" or through the worm fence of some field where a gang of slave men
and women might be ploughing or hoeing between the green rows of young
cotton or corn. The level stretches were many, the slopes gradual, and
to those sweet city-bird ladies everything was new and delightful; a log
cabin!--with clay chimney on the outside!--a well and its
well-sweep!--another cabin with its gourd-vines! They knew that blessed
alchemy which turns all things into the poetry of the moment. Sweet they
would have been anywhere to any eye or mind; but I was a homeless
trooper lad, and sweeter to the soldier boy than water on the
battlefield are short hours with ladies who love him for his banner
and his rags.

These four were charmed with an old field given up to sedge, its deep
rain-gullies as red as gaping wounds, its dead trees in tatters of long
gray moss. Estelle became a student of flowers, Cecile of birds, Camille
of trees. All my explanations were alike enchantingly strange. To their
minds it had never occurred that the land sloped the same way the water
ran! When told that these woods abounded in deer and wild turkey they
began to look out for them at every new turn of the road. And the turns
came fast. Happy miles, happy leagues; each hour was of a mellower
sweetness than the last; they seemed to ripen in the sun. The only
drawback was my shame of a sentimental situation, but once or twice I
longed to turn the whole equipage into the woods--or the ditch. As, for
instance, when three pine-woods cavalrymen had no sooner got by us than
they set up that ribald old camp-song,

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