The Cavalier

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Now Major Harper's brother passes a word to the man at the boat's bow,
whereupon this man springs up and a Confederate officer's braids flash
on his sleeve as he waves to the western shore to cease firing. I still
watch the boat, but I listen behind me. I hear voices of command, the
Federal sergeants hurrying the troop out of the jungle and back to their
horses. Then there comes a single voice, the commander's evidently; but
before it can cease it is swallowed up in a low thunder of hoofs and
then in a burst of cries and cheers which themselves the next moment are
drowned in a rattle of carbine and pistol shots--Ferry is down on them
out of hiding. Thick and silent above the din rises the dust of the
turmoil, and out of all the hubbub under it I can single out the voice
of the Federal captain yelling curses and orders at his panic-stricken
men. And now the melee rolls southward, the crackle of shots grows less
and then more again, and then all at once comes the crash of Quinn's
platoon out of ambush, their cheer, their charge, the crackle of pistols
again, and then another cheer and charge--what is that! Ferry re-formed
and down on them afresh? No, it was the hard-used but gallant foe
cutting their way out and getting off after all.

The skiff was touching the farther shore and the three oarsmen lifting
their stricken comrade out and bearing him to the top of the levee, when
Kendall came to recall me. On our way back he told me of the fight,
beginning with the results: none of our own men killed outright, but
four badly wounded and already started eastward in the ambulance left us
by the Major's brother; some others more slightly hurt. My questions
were headlong and his answers quiet; he was a slow-spoken daredevil; I
wish he came more than he does into this story.

Not slow-spoken did we find the command when we reached the road where
they were falling into line. After a brief but vain pursuit, here were
almost the haste and tumult of the onset; the sweat of it still reeked
on everyone; the ground was strewn with its wreckage and its brute and
human dead, and the pools of their blood were still warm. Squarely
across the middle of the road, begrimed with dust, and with a dead
Federal under him and another on top, lay the big white-footed pacer. At
one side the enemy's fallen wounded were being laid in the shade to be
left behind. In our ranks, here was a man with an arm in a bloody
handkerchief, there one with his head so bound, and yonder a young
fellow jesting wildly while he let his garments be cut and a flesh-wound
in his side be rudely stanched. Here there was laughter at one who had
been saved by his belt-buckle, and here at one who had dropped like dead
from his horse, but had caught another horse and charged on. But these
details imply a delay where in fact there was none; the moment Ferry
spied me he asked "Did he get across?" and while I answered he motioned
me into the line. Then he changed it into a column, commanded silence,
and led us across country eastward. For those few wounded who would not
give up their places in the ranks it was a weary ten miles that brought
us swiftly back to a point within five miles of that Clifton which we
had left in the morning. And yet a lovely ten miles it was, withal. You
would hardly have known this tousled crowd for the same dandy crew that
had smiled so flippantly upon me at sunrise, though they smiled as
flippantly now with faces powder-blackened, hair and eyelashes matted
and gummed with sweat and dust, and shoulders and thighs caked with
grime. Yet to Ned Ferry as well as to me--I saw it in his eye every time
he looked at them--these grimy fellows did more to beautify those ten
miles than did June woods beflowered and perfumed with magnolia, bay and
muscadine, or than slant sunlight in glade or grove.

In a stretch of timber where we broke ranks for a short rest, unbitting
but not unsaddling, a lot of fellows pressed me to tell them about the
boat on the river. "You heard what was in it, didn't you?" asked one
nearly as young as I.

"Besides the men? No. Same that was in the ambulance, I suppose; what
was it?"

"Don't you know? Oh, I remember, you were asleep when Quinn told us.
Well, sir,"--he tried to speak calmly but he had to speak somehow or
explode--"it was soldiers' pay--for Dick Taylor's army, over in the
Trans-Mississippi; a million and a half dollars!" He was as proud to
tell the news as he would have been to own the money.

XXV

A QUIET RIDE

Where Ferry's scouts camped that night I do not know, for we had gone
only two or three miles beyond our first momentary halting-place when
their leader left them to Quinn and sprang away southward over fence,
hedge, road, ditch--whatever lay across his bee-line, and by his order I
followed at his heels.

In a secluded north-and-south road he looked back and beckoned me to his
side: "You saw Major Harper's brother land safe and sound, you say? He
told you this morning he is acquainted with your mother, eh; but
not how?"

"No, except that it was through--"

"Yes, I know. But you don't know even how your mother is acquainted with
her."

"No, though of course if she lived in the city, common sympathies might
easily bring them together."

"She did not live in the city; she lived across the river from the city.
'Tis but a year ago her father died. He was an owner of steamboats. She
made many river trips with him, and I suppose that explains how she
knows the country about Baton Rouge, Natchez, Grand Gulf, Rodney, better
than she knows the city. But the boats are gone now; some turned into
gunboats, one burnt when the city fell, another confiscated. I think
they didn't manage her bringing-up very well."

"Maybe not," I replied, being nothing if not disputatious, "and she does
strike me as one thrown upon her own intuitions for everything; but if
she's the lady she is entirely by her own personal quality, Lieutenant,
she's a wonder!"

"Ah, but she is a wonder. In a state of society more finished--"

"She would be incredible," I said for him, and he accepted the clause by
a gesture, and after a meditative pause went on with her history. The
subject of our conversation had first met Oliver, it seemed, when by
reason of some daring performance in the military field--near Milliken's
Bend, in the previous autumn--he was the hero of the moment. Even so it
was strange enough that he should capture her; one would as soon look to
see Vicksburg fall; but the world was upside down, everything was
happening as if in a tornado, and he cast his net of lies; lies of his
own, and lies of two or three match-making friends who chose to believe,
at no cost to themselves, that war, with one puff of its breath, had
cleansed him of his vices and that marriage would complete the happy
change. This was in Natchez, Ferry went on to say. Most fortunately for
the bride one of the bridegroom's wedding gifts was a certain young
slave girl; before the wedding was an hour past--before the
orange-blossoms were out of the bride's hair--this slave maid had told
her what he was, "And you know what that is."

We rode in silence while I tried to think what it must be to a woman of
her warmth--of her impulsive energies--to be, week in, week out, month
after month, besieged by that man's law-protected blandishments and
stratagems. "I wish you would use me in her service every time there is
a chance," I said.

"The chances are few," he answered; "even to General Austin she laughs
and says we must let the story work itself out; that she is the fool in
it, but there is a chance for the fool to win if not too much burdened
with help."

"How did you make her acquaintance?" I ventured to ask.

"You remember the last time the brigade was in this piece of country?"
he rejoined.

I did; it had been only some five weeks earlier; Grant had driven us
through Port Gibson, General Bowen had retired across the north fork of
Bayou Pierre, and we had been cut off and forced to come down here.

"Yes; well, she came to us that night, round the enemy's right, with a
letter from Major Harper's brother--he was then in New Orleans--and with
information of her own that saved the brigade. I had just got my
company. I took it off next morning on my first scout, whilst the
brigade went to Raymond. She was my guide all that day; six times she
was my guide before the end of May. Yet the most I have learned about
her has come to me in the last few days."

"She has a fearful game to play."

"Oh!--yes, that is what she would call it; but me, I say--though not as
Gholson would mean it, you know,--she has a soul to save. If it is a
game, it is a very delicate one; let her play it as nearly alone as she
can." "Yes," said I, "a man's hand in it would be only his foot in it;"
and Ferry was pleased. He scanned me all over in the same bright way he
had done it in the morning, and remarked "This time I see they have
given you a carbine."

We went down into some low lands, crossed a creek or two, and in one of
them gave our horses and ourselves a good scrubbing. On a dim path in
thick woods we paused at a worm fence lying squarely across our way. It
was staked and ridered and its zig-zags were crowded with brambles and
wild-plum. A hundred yards to our left, still overhung by the woods, it
turned south. Beyond it in our front lay a series of open fields, in
which, except this one just at hand, the crops were standing high. The
nearer half of this one, a breadth of maybe a hundred yards, though
planted in corn, was now given up to grass, and live-stock, getting into
it at some unseen point, had eaten and trampled everywhere. The farther
half was thinly covered with a poor stand of cotton, and between the
corn and the cotton a small, trench-like watercourse crossed our line of
view at right angles and vanished in the woods at the field's eastern
edge. The farther border of this run was densely masked by a growth of
brake-cane entirely lacking on the side next us. Between the cotton and
the next field beyond, a double line of rail fence indicated the Fayette
and Union Church road. Suddenly Ferry looked through his field-glasses,
and my glance followed the direction in which they were pointed. Dust
again; one can get tired of dust! Some two miles off, a little southward
of the setting sun, a golden haze of it floated across a low
background of trees.

"'Tis the enemy, I think," he said, "but only scouts, I suppose."

XXVI

A SALUTE ACROSS THE DEAD-LINE

I was not seeking enemies just then and was not pleased. "Didn't the
Yankees fall back this morning before day and move southward?" I asked.

"For what would they do that?" inquired my leader, still using the
glass, but before I could reply he gave a soft hiss, dropped the glass,
and turned his unaided eye upon a point close beyond our field, in the
road. Now again he lifted the glass, and I saw over there two small,
black, moving objects. They passed behind some fence-row foliage,
reappeared nearer, and suddenly bobbed smartly up to the roadside
fence--the dusty hats of two Federal horsemen. The wearers sat looking
over into the field between them and us. I asked Ferry if he wasn't
afraid they would see us.

"That is what we want," was his reply; "only, they must not know we want
it. Keep very still; don't move." At that word they espied us and
galloped back.

We turned to our left and hurried along our own fence-line, first
eastward, then south, and reined up behind some live brush at the edge
of the public road. "Soon know how many they are, now," he said, smiling
back at me.

"Are you going to count them?" It seemed so much easier to let them
count us.

"Yes," he replied. "Wish we had our boys here," he added, and did not
need to tell me how he would have posted them; the place was so
favorable for an ambush that those Yankees had no doubt been looking for
us before they saw us. Half of us would be in the locks of these
highroad fences to lure them on, and half in the little gully masked
with canes to take them in the flank. "We would count many times our own
number before they should pass," he added.

"Can't we make them think our men are here?" I suggested. "Couldn't I go
back to where this fence crosses the gully and let them see me opening a
gap in it?"

He was amused. "Go if you want; but be quick; here they come already, a
small bunch of them."

By the time I reached the spot they were in plain view, six men and an
officer. I leaped to the ground, tugged at a rail and threw one end off.
I thought I had never handled rails so heavy and slippery in my life. As
I got a second one down I looked across to the road. The officer was
distributing his men. Barely a mile behind was the dust of their column.
The third rail stuck and the sweat began to pour down into my eyes and
collar. Two of the blue-coats easily let down a panel of fence on the
far side of the road and pushed into the tall corn; three others came
galloping across the thin cotton to reconnoitre the fringe of canes; the
officer and the remaining man cantered on up the road toward the spot
where I could see Ferry observing everything from the saddle behind his
mask of leaves. Of a sudden the Federal commander descried me wildly at
work. He paused and pointed me out to the man at his back, but had no
glass and seemed puzzled. At his word the man pricked up to the fence
to come over it, but his horse was of another mind, and the impatient
officer, crowding him away, cleared the fence himself and came across
the furrows at a nimble trot. Still I tussled with the rails, and grew
peevish. The enemy was counted, closely enough! one troop. Their dust
showed it, the small advance guard proved it.

"Hello!" called the Federal officer, "who are you, over there?"

He might have known by looking a trifle more narrowly; I saw plainly,
thrillingly, who he was; but his attention was diverted by some signal
from the men he had sent to the fringe of cane; they had found the
tracks of horses leading through the canes into the corn. But now he
hailed me again. "Here, you! what are you doing at that fence? Who
are you?"

He was within easy range and was still trotting nearer. I snatched up my
carbine, aimed, and then recovered, looking sharply to my left as if
restrained by the command of some one behind the canes. The Federal's
cool daring filled me with admiration. Had the foes he was looking for
been actually in hiding here they could have picked him out of his
saddle like a bird off a bush. His only chance was that they would not
let themselves be teased into firing prematurely on any one man or six.
Ferry beckoned me. I mounted and trotted down the woods side of the
fence, at the same time the Federal's six men approached from three
directions, and down the road the main column entered upon the scene.

The officer halted with revolver drawn and sent a man back with some
order to the main body. And then Ferry's beautiful brown horse, as
though of his own choice, reared straight up where he stood, dropped his
forelegs upon his breast, rose, over the fence, master and all, as
unlaboriously as a kite, trotted out from the brush and halted in the
open field. His rider's outdrawn sword flashed to the setting sun. The
Federal, pointing here and there was deploying his remaining five men
toward the spot I had left, but glancing round and seeing Ferry he
trotted toward him. Thereupon Ferry advanced at a walk, and I--for I had
followed him--moved at the same gait a few paces behind. "Halt him,"
said my leader.

"Halt!" I yelled with carbine at a ready, and the Federal halted. In
fact he had come to a small hollow full of bushes and grapevines and had
no choice but to halt or go round it.

"Don't swallow him," said Ferry, smilingly, "this isn't your private
war."

"He's on my private horse!" I retorted.

"Well, you're on his," replied my commander. The giant before us,
mounted on Cricket, was my prisoner of the previous day.

"Who are you?" he was calling imperiously.

"Captain Jewett ought to know," Ferry called back, and on that the
questioner recognized us both. He became very stately. "Lieutenant
Durand, I believe."

"At times," said Lieutenant Durand.

"And at other times--?"

"Lieutenant Ferry--Ferry's scouts."

The Federal expanded with surprise and then with austere pleasure. He
glanced toward his five men galloping back to him having found no enemy,
and then at his column, which had just halted. Frowning, he motioned the
advance guard to the road again and once more hailed Ferry while he
pointed at me. He straightened and swelled still more as he began his
question, but as he finished it a smile went all over him. "Is that your
entire present force?"

"It is."

"Then what the devil do you want?" he thundered.

"We have what we wanted," said Ferry, "only now we desire to cross the
road."

"You're not asking my permission?"

"I am afraid not."

"I admit you are quite able to cross without."

"Thank you," said Ferry; "will you pardon me for passing in front of
you?"

The Federal's pistol slid into its holster and his sabre flashed out. He
threw its curved point up in a splendid salute. Ferry saluted with his
straight blade. Then both swords rang back into their scabbards, and
Jewett whirled away toward his column. For a moment we lingered, then
faced to the left, trotted, galloped. Over the fence and into the road
went he--went I. Down it, as we crossed, the blue column was just moving
again. Then the woods on the south swallowed us up.

[Illustration: Ferry saluted with his straight blade.]

"If Captain Jewett will only go on to Union Church," said Ferry, "Quinn
will see that he never gets back."

"But you think he will not go on?"

"Ah, now he is discovered, surely not. I think he will turn back at
Wiggins."

"Why Wiggins? does he know Coralie Rothvelt?"

"Yes, he does; and if since last night he has maybe found out she is
Charlotte Oliver,--"

"Oh! Lieutenant Ferry, oh! would such a man as that come hunting down a
woman, with a troop of cavalry?"

"He is not hunting her; yet, should he find her, I have the fear he
would do his duty as a soldier, anyhow. No, he _was_ looking, I think,
for Ferry's scouts."

"But if she should be at Wiggins--"

My leader smiled at my simplicity. "She is not at Wiggins."

"Where is she?"

"I do not know."

XXVII

SOME FALL, SOME PLUNGE

At a farm-house well hidden in the woods of a creek we got a brave
supper for the asking and had our uniforms wonderfully cleaned and
pressed, and at ten that evening we dismounted before the three brightly
illumined tents of General Austin, Major Harper and that amiable cipher
our Adjutant-general. On the front of the last the shadow of a deeply
absorbed writer showed through the canvas, and Ferry murmured to me "The
ever toiling." It was Scott Gholson. I had heard the same name for him
the evening before, from her whose own lovely shadow fell so visibly and
so often upon the bright curtain of Ned Ferry's thought.

My leader went in while I held our horses. Then he and Gholson came out
and entered the General's tent; from which Gholson soon emerged again
and sent an orderly away into the gloom of the sleeping camp, and I
heard a small body of men mount and set off northward. Presently Ferry
came out and sent me in, and to my delight I found, on standing before
the General, that I did not need to tell what Charlotte Oliver wanted
kept back.

"No, never mind that," he said, "Miss Rothvelt was here and saw me this
afternoon, herself." Up to the point of my arrival at the bridge I had
merely to fumble my cap and answer his crisp questions. But there he
lighted a fresh cigar and said "Now, go on."

Gholson dropped in with something to be signed, and the General waved
him to wait and hear. For Gholson, despite the sappy fetor of his mental
temperament, had abilities that made him almost a private secretary to
the General. Who, nevertheless, knew him thoroughly. When I had
described Oliver's escape and would have hurried on to later details,
General Austin raised a hand.

"Hold on; you say nearly everybody fired at Oliver; who did not?" "I
did not, General."

"Did Lieutenant Ferry fire?"

I said he did not. The General turned his strong eyes to Gholson's and
kept them there while he took three luxurious puffs at his cigar. Then
he took the waiting paper, and as he wrote his name on it he said,
smiling, "I wish you had been in Lieutenant Ferry's place, Mr. Gholson;
you would have done your duty."

The flattered Gholson received the signed paper and passed out, and the
General smiled again, at his back. I hope no one has ever smiled the
same way at mine.

Ferry and I slept side by side that night, and he told me two companies
of our Louisianians were gone to cut off Jewett and his band. "Still, I
think they will be much too late," he said, and when I rather violently
turned the conversation aside to the subject of Scott Gholson, saying,
to begin with, that Gholson had wonderful working powers, he replied,
"'Tis true. Yet he says the brigade surgeon told him to-day he is on the
verge of a nervous break-down." But on my inquiring as to the cause of
our friend's condition, my bedmate pretended to be asleep.

We rose at dawn and rode eastward, he and I alone, some fourteen miles,
to the Sessions's, where the dance had been two nights earlier. On
entering the stable to put up our horses we suddenly looked at each
other very straight, while Ferry's countenance confessed more pleasure
than surprise, though a touch of care showed with it. "I did not know
this," he said, "and I did not expect it."

What we saw was the leather-curtained spring-wagon and its little
striped-legged mules. The old negro in charge of them bowed gravely to
me and smiled affectionately upon Ferry. About an hour later Gholson
appeared. He took such hurried pains to explain his coming that any fool
could have seen the real reason. The brigade surgeon had warned him--Oh!
had I heard?--Oh! from Ned Ferry, yes. The cause of his threatened
breakdown, he said, was the perpetual and fearful grind of work into
which of late he had--fallen.

"Did the doctor say 'fallen'?" I shrewdly asked.

"No, the doctor said 'plunged,' but--did Ned Fer'--who put that into
your head?"

"Nobody; some fall, you know, some plunge." I did not ask the cause of
the plunge; the two little mules told me that. He would never have come,
Gholson hurried on to say, had not Major Harper kindly suggested that a
Sabbath spent with certain four ladies would be a timely preventive.

"What!" I cried, "are they here t'--too? Why,--where's their carryall?
'Tisn't in the stable; I've looked!"

"No, it was here, but yesterday, when the fighting threatened to be
heavy, it was sent to the front. Smith, I didn't know Charlie Tolliver
was here!"

I believed him. But I saw he was not in search of a preventive. Ah, no!
he was ill of that old, old malady which more than any other abhors a
preventive. Waking in the summer dawn and finding Ned Ferry risen and
vanished hitherward, a rival's instinct had moved him to follow, as the
seeker for wild honey follows the bee. He had come not for the cure of
his honey-sickness, but for more--more--more--all he could find--of the
honey. "Smith," he said, with a painful screw of his features, "I'm
mightily troubled about Ned Ferry!"

"Yes," I dishonestly responded, "his polished irreligion--"

"Oh, no! No," he groaned, "it isn't that so much just now, though I know
that to a true religionist like you the society of such a mere
romanticist--"

We were interrupted.

XXVIII

OLDEST GAME ON EARTH

The cause of our interruption was Camille Harper. We had been pacing the
side veranda and she came out upon it with an unconscious song on her
lips, and on one finger a tiny basket.

Her gentle irruption found me standing almost on the spot where she had
stood two evenings before and said good-bye to me. From this point a
path led to the rear of the house, where within a light paling fence
bloomed a garden. She gave us a blithe good-morning as she passed,
descended the two or three side steps, and tripped toward the garden
gate, a wee affair which she might have lifted off its hinges with one
thumb. I saw her try its latch two or three times and then turn back
discomfited because the loose frame had sagged a trifle and needed to be
raised half an inch. I did not understand the helplessness of girls as
well then as I do now; I ran and opened the gate; and when I shut it
again she and I were alone inside.

She let me cut the flowers. "You know who's here?" she asked.

"Yes," I guilefully replied, "I came with him."

"I don't mean Lieutenant Ferry," she responded, "nor anybody you'd ever
guess if you don't know; but you do, don't you?"

I said I knew and went on gathering sweet-pea blossoms.

"Did you ever see her?"

"Yes," I replied, stepping away for some roses, "I--saw her--by
chance--for a moment--she was in the wagon she's got here--last
--eh,--Thursday--morn'--" I came back trimming the roses, and
as she reached for them and our glances met, she laughed and replied,
with a roguish droop of the head--

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