Chapter XXXVII: Cedar Creek

On the eighteenth of October, the grey being again drawn up at
Fisher’s Hill, Gordon, with General Clement Evans and Jed Hotchkiss
and Major Hunter of Gordon’s staff, climbed Massanutten, overhanging
the Confederate right. Up here, on the craggy mountain brow, high in
the blue air, resting a moment amid red scrub oak and yellow hickory,
they looked forth. They saw the wonderful country, the coloured forest
falling, slope after slope, from their feet, the clear-flowing
Shenandoah, Cedar Creek winding between hills, and on these hills they
saw with their field-glasses Sheridan’s army. “Not only,” says Gordon,
“did we see the general outlines of Sheridan’s breastworks, but every
parapet where his heavy guns were mounted, and every piece of
artillery, every wagon and tent and supporting line of troops.... I
could count, and did count, the number of his guns. I could see
distinctly the three colours of trimmings on the jackets respectively
of infantry, artillery, and cavalry, and locate each, while the number
of flags gave a basis for estimating approximately the forces with
which we were to contend in the proposed attack.”

Down went Gordon and reported to Early. “We _can_ turn his flank, sir.
We can come with one spring upon his left and rear. Demonstrate right
and centre where he is formed to repel us, but strike him on the left
where he isn’t! He thinks he’s got there for shield an impassable
mountain and a river.”

Early swore. “Well, isn’t the mountain impassable? It looks it. It’s
precipitous.”

“No. There’s a very narrow path. Start at nightfall and we can cross
the corps, single-file, by dawn.”

Early swore again, but in the end approved. “——! It’s a desperate
game, but then we’re desperate gamesters! ——! All right, General! Get
your men ready.”

The red-gold day drew to a close. Through all the Second Corps there
ran an undefined tremor, a beat of hope, a feeling as of, perhaps,—God
knew!—better things at last! Supperless men looked almost fed. With
the shining-out of the evening star the Second Corps began to move
across the face of Massanutten. The way was narrow. Above sprang the
mountain heights, below rolled the Shenandoah. Soldier followed in
soldier’s footsteps, very silently, sure-footed, under orders not to
speak. Ragged and grey and silent, their gun-barrels faintly gleaming,
they went along, high on the side of Massanutten, a long, thin, moving
thread, moving all night in the autumn wind. Steve was of it, of it
because he could not help himself. He had tried—he certainly had tried
hard, as he told himself with water in his eyes—but Dave Maydew had
adopted him, and wouldn’t let him out of his sight. Now he was moving
between Dave and Jim Watts—and he wasn’t let to speak—and he heard
Shenandoah brawling, brawling down below—and the world was lonesomer
than lonesome! There were to-night a number of shooting stars. There
was something awful in the height of the sky and in the appearance and
disappearance of these swift lights. Steve felt an imaginative horror.
The end of the world began to trouble him, and a query as to when it
was going to happen. “Maybe it’s goin’ to happen sooner ’n we think!”

Ahead, where there was a buttress of cliff, very evident from where
the Sixty-fifth moved in a concave filled with shadow, occurred a gash
across the footpath which made it dangerous. This side of the shoulder
was well hidden from any blue picket across the water. A torch had
been lighted and was now held close to the earth, so that eyes might
read and feet might safely cross the gash in the way. The red, smoky,
upstreaming light just showed each passing soldier. The Golden Brigade
moved forward, regiment by regiment. The Sixty-fifth yet halted in the
hollow of the mountain, recognized Cleave as he stood a moment bathed
in the red light. There was a sound of satisfaction. “We’re all right.
We’re going to win some more.”

Over the face of Massanutten went the Second Corps—over in silence and
safety—over and on to the woods beside Shenandoah. Here the divisions
were halted, here they lay down on the fallen leaves and waited. They
heard the river, they heard the voices of the blue vedettes upon the
farther side. They waited—all the ragged grey troops—lying on the
leaves, in the cold hour before the dawn. They were very hungry, very
tired. Some of them slept; others lay and thought and thought, or
looked at pictures in the dark. Steve still watched the shooting
stars, still thought of the Judgment Day. He was conscious of a kind
of exaltation. “I’m gettin’ to be a fighter with the best of them!”

The lines of grey rose from the moss and leaves. A cold and pallid
light was in the forest. Ahead broke out shouting, and then a rapid
carbine firing. Payne and his cavalry were on the bank of Shenandoah,
midstream in Shenandoah,—on the farther bank,—in touch, like lightning
before the storm, with the blue vedettes and mounted supports! _Fall
in! Fall in!—Forward!_

How cold was the water of Shenandoah! North Carolina and Georgia
troops and Terry’s brigade, that held within it most of the fragments
of the old Stonewall Brigade, were the first to enter. Behind came all
the others, the mass of the Second Corps. Cold was the October
water,—cold, deep, and rushing fast to the sea. Over it, holding high
every musket, went the Second Corps, and made no tarrying, formed in
the thickening light in the woods where the blue outposts had been,
formed and went forward at a run, led by the din of the cavalry ahead.
Not only the cavalry, for now they heard Kershaw thundering upon the
front. Everywhere noise arose and tore the solemn dawn. The woods
opened, there came a sense of cleared spaces, and then a vision of a
few breastworks,—not many, for Sheridan had not thought his army could
be turned,—of serried tents, of a headquarters flag, of a great park
of bubbly, white-topped wagons, of the rear, in short, of the Army of
the Shenandoah. It showed a scene of vast and sudden confusion and
noise; it buzzed like an overturned hive. “_Yaaihhh! Yaaiihhh!
Yaaaaiiiihhh!_” rang the yell of the Second Corps.

It struck so fierce and it struck so fell, while in front Kershaw and
Rosser aided so ably—the bees all left the hive and, save those who
were struck to the ground and they were many, and those who were
captured and they were many, streamed to the northward in a strange
panic. They dashed from the tents where they had been sleeping; with
the sleep yet in their eyes they poured across the fields. They left
the wide camp, left arms, knapsacks, clothing, and their huge
supplies. They “possessed not even a company organization,” but
crying, as the grey had cried, hereabouts, a month before, “Flanked!
We are flanked!” the Eighth and Nineteenth Corps, taken with madness,
hurried northward by the pike and by the fields. It was a rout that
for a time savoured of the old, old First Manassas rout. The blue, as
the grey, were brave enough,—no one by now in this war doubted blue
courage or grey courage,—but to be flanked at dawn was to be flanked
at dawn, and brave men or not brave men, and however often in this war
you had outgazed her, smiled her from the field, Panic Fear was yet a
giantess of might! Now or then, here or there, in a blue moon, she had
her innings.

The Sixth Corps on the right stood fast. Gordon proposed to mass the
grey artillery against it, then to attack with infantry. “At this
moment,” he says, “General Early came upon the field and said, ‘Well,
Gordon, this is glory enough for one day! This is the nineteenth.
Precisely one month ago to-day we were going in the opposite
direction.‘ ... I pointed to the Sixth Corps and explained the
movements I had ordered, which I felt sure would compass the capture
of that corps—certainly its destruction. When I had finished, he said,
‘No use in that. They will all go directly.’ ‘That is the Sixth Corps,
General. It will not go unless we drive it from the field.’ ’Yes, it
will go, too, directly.’”

Down went Gordon’s heart, down, down! “And so,” he says, “it came to
pass that the fatal halting, the hesitation, the spasmodic firing and
the isolated movements in the face of the sullen, slow, and orderly
retreat of the superb Federal corps, lost us the great opportunity.”

Jubal Early thinks otherwise and says so. He says that the position of
the Sixth Corps was very strong and not to be attacked on the left
because the approach was over open, boggy ground, swept by the blue
artillery. He did attack on the right, but just as Ramseur and Pegram
were advancing to occupy an evacuated position, the enemy’s great
force of cavalry began to press heavily on the right, and Pegram was
sent to the north of Middletown to take position across the pike and
oppose this force. Kershaw and Gordon’s commands were broken and took
time to re-form. Lomax had not arrived. Rosser, on the left, had all
he could do barely to hold in check the cloud of threatening cavalry.
The enemy had taken up a new position north of Middletown. Early now,
the morning advancing, ordered Gordon, he says, “to take position on
Kershaw’s left and advance with the purpose of driving the enemy from
his new position—Kershaw and Ramseur being ordered to advance at the
same time.” He continues: “As the enemy’s cavalry on our left was very
strong, and had the benefit of an open country to the rear of that
flank, a repulse at this time would have been disastrous, and I
therefore directed General Gordon, if he found the enemy’s line too
strong to attack with success, not to make the assault. The advance
was made for some distance, when Gordon’s skirmishers came back
reporting a line of battle in front behind breastworks, and General
Gordon did not make the attack. It was now apparent that it would not
do to press my troops farther. They had been up all night and were
much jaded. In passing over rough ground to attack the enemy in the
early morning their own ranks had been much disordered, and the men
scattered, and it required time to re-form them. Their ranks,
moreover, were much thinned by the absence of men engaged in
plundering the enemy’s camps.... The delay ... had enabled the enemy
to rally a portion of his routed troops, and his immense force of
cavalry, which remained intact, was threatening both of our flanks in
an open country, which of itself rendered an advance extremely
hazardous. I determined, therefore, to try and hold what had been
gained.”

Now Gordon was a generous, chivalrous, bold, and devoted soldier. And
Jubal Early was a bold and devoted man and a general of no mean
ability. Which was right and which was wrong, or how largely both were
right, will, perhaps, be never known. But hard upon Early’s slur upon
the conduct of the troops, his repeated statement that they were too
busy plundering to go forward, there comes an indignant cry of denial.
Says Clement Evans, “My command was not straggling and plundering.”
And General Battle, “I never saw troops behave better than ours did at
Cedar Creek.” And General Wharton, “It is true that there were parties
passing over the field and perhaps pillaging, but most of these were
citizens, teamsters, and persons attached to the quartermaster’s and
other departments, and perhaps a few soldiers who had taken the
wounded to the rear. No, General; the disaster was not due to the
soldiers leaving their commands and pillaging.” And another officer,
“The men went through a camp just as it was deserted, with hats,
boots, blankets, tents, and such things as tempt our soldiers
scattered over it, and after diligent enquiry I heard of but one man
who even stopped to pick up a thing. He got a hat and has charges
preferred against him.” And one of the grey chaplains, who says that
he was a freelance that day, and all over the field from rear to
front, “It is true that many men straggled and plundered; but they
were men who in large numbers had been wounded in the summer’s
campaign, who had come up to the army for medical examination, and who
came like a division down the pike behind Wharton, and soon scattered
over the field and camps and helped themselves. They were soldiers
more or less disabled and not on duty. This body I myself saw as they
came on the battle-field and scattered. They were not men with guns.
But there can be no doubt that General Early mistook them for men who
had fallen out of ranks.” And Gordon, “Many of the dead commanders
left on record their testimony; and it is true, I think, that every
living Confederate officer who commanded at Cedar Creek a corps, or
division, or brigade, or regiment, or company would testify that his
men fought with unabated ardour, and did not abandon their places in
line to plunder the captured camps.”

So the Army of the Valley that is about to go down to defeat need not
go there with any imputation of misconduct. Let us say instead that it
continued to do well.

And now it stands there waiting for orders to advance, for orders to
go into battle, to engage the Sixth Corps, and now the day is growing
old, and now Crook and Wright, far down the Valley Pike, begin to
check the fleeing masses of the Eighth and Nineteenth, to bring them
into something more than company organization, and to force them to
listen to talk of going back and retrieving ... and now news comes to
Sheridan himself who had slept the night of the eighteenth in
Winchester.

As he mounted his horse there came a confused rumour of disaster; as,
a hard rider, he thundered out of Winchester with twenty miles to
make, the wind brought him faintly the din of distant battle. He bent
to the horse’s neck and used the spur. About nine o’clock, south of
Winchester, “the head of the fugitives appeared in sight, trains and
men coming to the rear with appalling rapidity.” His followers did
what they could to stop the torrent; he galloped on.

The day wore away, the grey under arms, but inactive, waiting—waiting.
Upon the top of Massanutten, in a wine-hued world above the smoke and
clamour, was a grey signal station, and it signalled the Army of the
Valley below. It signalled first, “The enemy has halted and is
re-forming.” It signalled second, “They are coming back by the pike
and neighbouring roads.” It signalled third, “The enemy’s cavalry has
checked General Rosser, and assumed the offensive.” It signalled
fourth, “The enemy, in heavy column, is coming up the pike.”

The rallied Eighth and Nineteenth Corps, Sheridan at their head, came
back and joined the steadfast Sixth. Together they gave battle to the
grey who had waited for this strange hour. In it the tables were
turned. Command after command, the grey were broken. There was a gap
in the line, left who knew how? Through it like a river in freshet
roared the blue.

It beat upon Steve’s brain like waves of hell, that battle. The
Sixty-fifth had held him like a vise; not for one moment had he
escaped. In the midst of plenty he was not let to plunder; in the face
of danger he was not somehow able to fall out, to straggle, or to
malinger. All his talents seemed to desert him. Perhaps Dave Maydew
had him really under observation, or perhaps he only fancied that that
was the case. He was afraid of Dave. Through the forenoon, indeed,
hope sustained him. The Yankees had run away, and though the Golden
Brigade with others shifted its place, moving from left to right, and
though, beside the first great onset, it came sharply several times
into touch with the foe, it, too, under division orders, must end in
waiting, waiting. Steve was convinced that the Yankees were too
frightened to come back, and that presently there would be broken
ranks and permission to the men to help themselves in moderation. The
hope kept him cheerful, despite the grumbling of the Sixty-fifth. “Why
don’t we go forward? What are we waiting here for? We’re losing
time.—and losing it to _them_. Why don’t we—What are they signalling
up there on the mountain?”—And then burst the storm and hope went out.

The lantern slides shifted rapidly—now black, now fearful, vivid
pictures. For what seemed an eternity Steve did tear cartridges, load
and fire with desperation. A black ring came round his mouth; the
sweat poured down, his chest heaved beneath his ragged shirt.
_Fire!—Fire!—Fire!—Fire!_ And all to right and left was the
Sixty-fifth, fighting grimly, and beyond, the balance of the Golden
Brigade, fighting grimly. He saw Dave Maydew sink to his knees, and
then forward upon his hands, and at last roll over and lie dead with a
quiet face. He saw Sergeant Billy Maydew, passing down the line, pause
just a moment when he saw Dave. “I reckon I’ll be coming, too,
directly, Dave,” said Billy, then went on with his duty. He saw Allan,
tall and strong and fair, set in a great smoke wreath firing steadily.
_Fire!—Fire!—Fire!—Fire!_ There rose a question of ammunition. Jim
Watts was one of those who went for cartridges and brought them while
the air was a shriek of shells. Steve saw the cartridge-bearers
askance, coming, earnest-faced, through the cloud—then the cloud grew
red-bosomed, and he saw them no more. He heard a voice, “_Fix
bayonets!_” and he saw Cleave, dismounted, leading the charge. He went
with the Sixty-fifth; he could not help it; he had in effect run
amuck. He felt the uneven ground beneath his feet like a rhythm, and
the shrieking of the minies became, for the first and only time in his
life, a siren’s song. Then through the smoke came a loom of forms; he
saw the blue cavalry bearing down, many and fast. _Halt!—Left Face!
Fire!_—but on they came, for all the emptied saddles. A thousand
cymbals clashed in the air, a thousand forms, gigantic in the reek,
towered before the vision; there came a chaos of voices, appalled or
triumphant, a frightful heat, a pressure, a roaring in the brain.
Steve saw Richard Cleave where he fell, desperately wounded, he saw
the Golden Brigade, he saw the Sixty-fifth Virginia broken and dashed
to pieces. With the cry of a Thunder Run creature in a trap, he caught
at the reins of the horse that reared above him, red-nostrilled, with
eyes of fire. Its rider, a tall and powerful man with yellow
mustaches, bending sideways, cut at him with a sabre. Steve, a gash
across each arm, dropped the bridle. The horse’s hoof struck him on
the forehead, and the world went down in a black and roaring sea.

When he came to himself it was dark. The smoke hung heavy and there
was the taste and scent of the battle-field. At first there seemed no
noise, then he heard the groaning and the sighing. The greater noise,
the thunder and shouting, had, however, rolled away. He raised himself
on his elbow, and then he sat up and rested his head on his knees. He
was deadly sick and shivering. As little by little his wits came back,
he began to draw conclusions. There had been a battle—now he
remembered—and the army was beaten.... He listened now in reality and
he heard, far up the pike and across the fields, in the darkness, the
sound of retreat and pursuit. It made a wall of sound, stretching east
and west, rolling southward, going farther and farther away, dwindling
at last into a hollow murmur, leaving behind it the bitter, pungent
night, and the sounds as near at hand as crickets in the grass.
_Water—water—water—water ... O God!—O God!—O God!_

Steve rose uncertainly. His tongue, too, was swollen with thirst. He
saw lights wavering over the field, and here and there a flare where
camp followers had built themselves a fire. There reached his ears a
burst of harsh laughter, then from some quarter where there was
pillaging a drunken quarrel. The regularly moving lights were, he
knew, gatherers of the wounded. A shrill crying from a hollow where
was a red glare proclaimed a field hospital. But the gatherers of
the wounded were clothed in blue. They would touch no grey wounded
until their own were served, and then, if events allowed them to
minister, they would prove but lifters and forwarders to Northern
prisons. Steve, swaying as he stood, stared at the bobbing lights.
He was dead from hunger, tortured with thirst, and his head ached
and ached from the blow of the horse’s hoof. A thought came to him.
If he told the bobbing lights that he loved the North and would
fight for it in a blue coat, then, maybe, things would happen like a
full canteen and a handful of hard-tack and a long and safe sleep
beside one of those camp-fires. He started toward the lights.
_Water!—Water!—Water!—Water!_ cried the plain. _Ahhhh! Aaahhh!
Water!_

Somewhere out of starveling and poor soil there pushed upward in the
soul of Steve, came into a murky and muddy light, and there flowered,
though after a tarnished and niggard sort, a something that first
stayed his steps, then turned them away from the bobbing lights. It
was not a strong growth, but the flower of it rubbed his eyes so that
he saw Thunder Run rather than Northern plenty, and the haggard,
fleeing grey army rather than a turned coat. He did not feel virtuous
as he had done when he saved the army from the “avalanche,” he only
felt homesick and wretched and horribly suffering. When at a few paces
he came to a deep gully and slipped and slid down its side to the
bottom, where he was safe from the lights and from the thrust of some
plunderer of the dead,—or the wounded whom they often, as safest, made
the dead,—he found here beside him his old companion, Fear. Before
this, on the day of Cedar Creek, from dawn to dusk, he had hardly once
been afraid. Now he was—he was horribly afraid. There was long grass
at the bottom of the gully, and he hoped for a runlet of some sort. He
dragged himself along, hands and breast, until he felt mud, and then
more and more moisture, until at last there came a puddle out of which
he drank and drank as though he would never stop. It was too dark to
see how bloody it was, and not even after moving his arm a little to
the left and encountering the body of a soldier, did he cease to
drink. His own arms were yet bleeding from the sabre cut and he was so
dizzy that even here, with the lanterns all left behind, there were
lights in the night like will-o’-the-wisps.

But the water, such as it was, put some spirit into him. Hands and
knees, he crept down the floor of the gully until it deepened and
widened into a ravine. Finally it led him to the creek side. Here,
half in, half out of the water, was something that he put his foot
upon for a log, but discovered to be the body of a man. Having
reasoned that in this locality it would not improbably be the body of
a blue vedette, Steve took it by the legs and drew it quite out upon
the miry bank. He was correct, and there was a haversack, and in it
bread and slices of meat. Steve, squatting in the mire, ate it all,
then drank of the creek. He was dead for sleep; there had been none
the night before, clambering along the face of Massanutten, and not
too much the night before that; dead for sleep, and more tired than
any dog.... He stood up, gazing haggardly into the night beyond the
creek, then shook his head, and dropped upon the soft earth beside the
dead vedette. It seemed to him that he had hardly closed his eyes when
he heard a bugle and then the sound of trotting horse. “Cavalry comin’
this way—Damn them to hell!” He staggered to his feet and down into
the stream, crossed it somehow, and went up the farther bank, and on
through forest and field, over stock and stone. He went away from the
pike. “For I never want to see it again. It’s ha’nted.”

He went westward toward the mountains, and he walked all night over
stock and stone and briar. Day broke, wan and sickly. It showed him a
rough country, rising steeply to the wilder mountains, rough and so
sparsely inhabited that he did not see a house. He went on, swaying
now in his gait, and presently by the rising sun he saw a sloping
field, ragged and stony and covered with a poor stand of corn, and at
the top a fairish log cabin set against a pine wood. A curl of smoke
was coming from the chimney.

Steve stumbled up the hillside and through a garden path to a crazy
porch overhung by a gourd vine. Here a lean mountain woman met him.
“Better be keerful!” she said. “The dawg’s awful fierce! Here, dawg!”

The dog came, bristling. Steve retreated a few steps. “I ain’t nothin’
but a poor Confederate soldier!—’n’ I’m jest about dead for hunger ’n’
tiredness. There’s been an awful big battle ’n’ I got my wounds. If
you’d jest let me rest a bit here, ma’am, ’n’, for God’s sake, give me
somethin’ to eat—”

“Well,” said the woman, “you kin rest, an’ then you kin pay by helpin’
me stack the corn. My husband was killed over in Hampshire,
bushwhackin’, an’ the dawg an’ I an’ a gun air livin’ together.”

Steve slept all day in the lean-to, beneath a quilt of bright
patchwork. He had cornbread and a chicken for supper, and then he
wrapped himself luxuriously in the quilt again and slept all night.
The next day he helped the mountain woman stack the corn.

“You live so out of the way,” he said, “I don’t reckon Sheridan’ll
never come burnin’ ’n’ slayin’ up here! You got chickens ’n’ a cow ’n’
the fat of the land.”

“It air a peaceful mountain,” agreed the woman. “I ain’t never seen a
Yankee an’ I don’t know as I want to. Thar’s a feud on between the
folks in the Cove an’ the folks on Deer Mountain, but my husband was a
Hampshire man, an’ I’m out of it. Don’t nobody give me any trouble an’
I get along. Yaas, the cow’s a good milker an’ I got a pig an’ plenty
of chickens.”

“Don’t you get lonesome, livin’ this way by yourself—’n’ you a
fine-lookin’ woman, too?”

“Am I fine-lookin’?” said the mountain woman. “I never knew that
before.”

They stacked the corn all day, and at dark Steve had another chicken
and more cornbread and an egg for supper.

“Tell me about your folks,” said the woman, “an’ how life’s done you,
an’ about soldiering.”

They sat on either side of the hearth, for the night was cold, and
while the hickory log blazed, and the mountain woman used snuff, Steve
indulged in a rhodomontade that did him credit.

“But I ain’t sure I’ll go soldierin’ any more,” he closed. “Savin’ the
army ’n’ all’s enough. I got a honourable discharge.”

The mountain woman dipped a bit of hazel twig again into the small
round tin box of snuff. She was not much older than Steve, and, in a
gaunt way, not bad-looking. “An’ you ain’t married?”

“Naw. I ain’t never found any one to suit me—at least, till recently I
thought I hadn’t.”

In the lean-to, when he had rolled himself in the rising-sun quilt, he
lay and looked out of the open door at the stars below the hilltop.
“The army’s beaten,” he thought, “’n’ the war’s ended, or most ended.
Anyhow it’s fightin’ now without any chance of anything but dyin’.” He
sat up and rested his chin on his knees. “I ain’t ready to die....
Sheridan’s drivin’ the Second Corps, ’n’ the Sixty-fifth’s all cut to
pieces ’n’ melted away, ’n’ Grant’s batterin’ down Petersburg ’n’
gettin’ ready to fall on Richmond. We’re beaten, ’n’ I know it, ’n’ I
ain’t a-goin’ back; ’n’ I ain’t a-goin’ back to Thunder Run
neither—not yet awhile! An’ she’s strong ’n’ a good worker, ’n’ she’s
got property, ’n’ I’ve seen a plenty worse-lookin’. Lucinda Heard was
worse-lookin’.”

The next day they gathered apples, for the mountain woman said she
would make apple butter. It was beautiful weather, mild and bright.
Steve lay on the porch beneath the gourd vine and watched his hostess
hang the kettle over the outdoor fire and bring water in a bucket from
the spring and fill it. While the fire was burning she came and sat
down on the porch edge. “When air you goin’ away?”

Steve grinned propitiatively. “Gawd knows I don’t want to go away at
all! I like it here fust-rate.—You ain’t never told me your name?”

“My name’s Cyrilla.”

“That’s an awful pretty name,” said Steve. “It’s prettier ’n
Christianna, ’n’ Lucinda, ’n’ a lot others I’ve heard.”

After supper they sat again on either side of the hearth, with a
blazing hickory log between, and the mountain woman dipped snuff and
Steve nursed his ankle.

“It’s this-a-way,” he remarked after a silence in which the crickets
chirped. “I’ve kind of thought it out. War kills men off right along.
When they’re brave they get killed all the quicker, or they just get
off by the skin of their teeth like I done. No matter how strong, ’n’
brave, ’n’ enterprising ’n’ volunterin’ they are, they get killed, ’n’
killed. Killed off jest the same’s the bees sting the best fruit. ’N’
then what becomes of the country? It ain’t populated ’less ’n the rest
of us—them that got off by the skin of their teeth like I did, ’n’
them that ain’t never gone in like some bomb-proofs I know—’less ’n
the rest of us acts our part! That’s what war does. It ’liminates the
kind that pushes to the front ’n’ plants flags. ’N’ then—as Living
don’t intend to drop off—what’s the rest of us that’s left got to be?
We got to be what I heard a preacher call ’seed-corn ’n’ ancestors.’
We got to marry ’n’ people the earth. We ain’t killed.” Steve ceased
to nurse his ankle, straightened his lean red body, and widening his
lips until his lean red jaws wrinkled, turned to his hostess.
“_Cyrilla._—That’s a mighty pretty name.... Why shouldn’t you ’n’ me
marry? You got a house ’n’ I got a house, over in Blue Ridge on
Thunder Run Mountain, ’n’ I got a little real money, too! When the
war’s over we can go get it.—What d’ ye say?”

Cyrilla screwed on the top of the snuff-box. “I been right lonesome,”
she admitted. “But ef I marry you, you got to promise not to go
bushwhackin’! You got to stay safe at home, ’n’ you got to do what I
tell you. I ain’t goin’ to have two husbands killed fightin’ Yankees.”