Chapter XIV: Finis (3)

As at last, in the deepening twilight, the people reluctantly began moving toward home, such conversation as they had the heart for seemed to be exclusively centred upon Miss Parmalee, and this queer despatch of hers. Slow-paced, strolling groups wended their way along the main street, and then up this side thoroughfare and that, passing in every block some dark and close-shuttered house of mourning, and instinctively sinking still lower their muffled tones as they passed, and carrying in their breasts, heaven only knows what torturing loads of anguish and stricken despair--but finding a certain relief in dwelling, instead, upon this lighter topic.

One of these groups--an elderly lady in black attire and two younger women of sober mien--walked apart from the others and exchanged no words at all until, turning a corner, their way led them past the Parmalee house. The looming bulk of the old mansion and the fragrant spaciousness of the garden about it seemed to attract the attention of Mrs. Ransom and her daughters. They halted as by a common impulse, and fastened a hostile gaze upon the shadowy outlines of the house and its surrounding foliage.

“If Dwight dies of his wound,” the mother said, in a voice all chilled to calmness, “his murderess will live in there.”

“I always hated her!” said one of the daughters, with a shudder.

“But he isn’t going to die, mamma,” put in the other. “You mustn’t think of such a thing! You know how healthy he always has been, and this is only his shoulder. For my part, we may think ourselves very fortunate. Remember how many have been killed or mortally wounded. It seems as if half the people we know are in mourning. We get off very lightly with Dwight only wounded. Did you happen to hear the details about Mr. Pulford?--you know, the photographer--some one was saying that he was mortally wounded.”

“She sent him to his death, then, too,” said the elder Miss Ransom, raising her clenched hand against the black shadow of the house.

“I don’t care about that man,” broke in the mother, icily. “Nobody knows anything of him, or where he came from. People ran after him because he was good-looking, but he never seemed to me to know enough to come in when it rained. If she made a fool of him, it was his own lookout. But Dwight--my Dwight--!”

The mother’s mannered voice broke into a gasp, and she bent her head helplessly. The daughters went to her side, and the group passed on into the darkness.

VI

It was a dark, soft, summer night in Virginia, that of the 1st of July. After the tropical heat of the day, the air was being mercifully cooled, here on the hilltop, by a gentle breeze, laden with just a moist suggestion of the mist rising from the river flats and marshes down below. It was not Mother Nature’s fault that this zephyr stirring along the parched brow of the hill did not bear with it, too, the scents of fruits and flowers, of new-mown hay and the yellow grain in shock, and minister soothingly to rest and pleasant dreams.

Instead, this breeze, moving mildly in the darkness, was one vile, embodied stench of sulphur and blood, and pestilential abominations. Go where you would, there was no escaping this insufferable burden of foul smells. If they were a horror on the hilltop, they were worse below.

It was one of the occasions on which Man had expended all his powers to prove his superiority to Nature. The elements in their wildest and most savage mood could never have wrought such butchery as this. The vine-wrapped fences, stretching down from the plateau toward the meadow lands below, were buttressed by piles of dead men, some in butternut, some in blue. Clumps of stiffened bodies curled supine at the base of every stump on the fringe of the woodland to the right and among the tumbled sheaves of grain to the left. Out in the open, the broad, sloping hillside and the valley bottom lay literally hidden under ridge upon ridge of smashed and riddled human forms, and the heaped débris of human battle. The clouds hung thick and close above, as if to keep the stars from beholding this repellent sample of earth’s titanic beast, Man, at his worst. An Egyptian blackness was over it all.

At intervals a lightning flash from the crest of the outermost knoll tore this evil pall of darkness asunder, and then, with a roar and a scream, a spluttering line of vivid flame would arch its sinister way across the sky. A thousand little dots of light moved and zigzagged ceaselessly on the wide expanse of obscurity underneath this crest, and when the bursts of wrathful fireworks came from overhead it could be seen that these were lanterns being borne about in and out among the winrows of maimed and slain. Above all, through all, without even an instant’s lull, there arose a terrible babel of chorused groans and prayers and howls and curses. This noise could be heard for miles--almost as far as the boom of the howitzers above could carry--and at a distance sounded like the moaning of a storm through a great pine-forest. Near at hand, it sounded like nothing else this side of hell.

An hour or so after nightfall the battery on the crest of the knoll stopped firing. The wails and shrieks from the slope below went on all through the night, and the lanterns of the search parties burned till the morning sunlight put them out.

Up on the top of the hill--a broad expanse of rolling plateaus--the scene wore a different aspect. At widely separated points bonfires and glittering lights showed where some general of the victorious army held his headquarters in a farm-house; and unless one pried too curiously about these parts, there were few enough evidences on the summit of the day’s barbaric doings.

The chief of these houses--a stately and ancient structure, built in colonial days of brick proudly brought from Europe--had begun the forenoon of the battle as the headquarters of the Fifth Corps. Then the General and his staff had reduced their needs to a couple of rooms, to leave space for wounded men. Then they had moved out altogether, to let the whole house be used as a hospital. Then as the backwash of calamity from the line of conflict swelled in size and volume, the stables and barns had been turned over to the medical staff. Later, as the savage evening fight went on, tons of new hay had been brought out and strewn in sheltered places under the open sky to serve as beds for the sufferers. Before night fell, even these impromptu hospitals were overtaxed, and rows of stricken soldiers lay on the bare ground.

The day of intelligent and efficient hospital service had not yet dawned for our army. The breakdown of what service we had had, under the frightful stress of the battles culminating in this blood-soaked Malvern Hill, is a matter of history, and it can be viewed the more calmly now as the collapse of itself brought about an improved condition of affairs. But at the time it was a woful thing, with a lax and conflicting organization, insufficient material, a ridiculous lack of nurses, a mere handful of really competent surgeons and, most of all, a great crowd of volunteer medical students and ignorant practitioners, who flocked southward for the mere excitement and practice of sawing, cutting, slashing right and left. So it was that army surgery lent new terrors to death on the battle-field in the year 1862.

The sky overhead was just beginning to show the ashen touch of twilight, when two men lying stretched on the hay in a corner of the smaller barnyard chanced to turn on their hard couch and to recognize each other. It was a slow and almost scowling recognition, and at first bore no fruit of words.

One was in the dress of a lieutenant of artillery, muddy and begrimed with smoke, and having its right shoulder torn or cut open from collar to elbow. The man himself had now such a waving, tangled growth of chestnut beard and so grimly blackened a face, that it would have been hard to place him as our easy-going, smiling Dwight Ransom.

The new movement had not brought ease, and now, after a few grunts of pain and impatience, he got himself laboriously up in a sitting posture, dragged a knapsack within reach up to support his back, and looked at his companion again.

“I heard that you were down here somewhere,” he remarked, at last. “My sister wrote me.”

Marsena Pulford stared up at him, made a little nodding motion of the head, and turned his glance again into the sky straight above. He also was a spectacle of dry mud and dust, and was bearded to the eyes.

“Where are you hit?” asked Dwight, after a pause.

For answer, Marsena slowly, and with an effort, put a hand to his breast--to the left, below the heart. “Here, somewhere,” he said, in a low, drylipped murmur. He did not look at Dwight again, but presently asked, “Could you fix me--settin’ up--too?”

“I guess so,” responded Dwight. With the help of his unhurt arm he clambered to his feet and began moving dizzily about among the row of wounded men to his left. These groaned or snarled at him as he passed over them, but to this he paid no attention whatever. He returned from the end of the line, bringing two knapsacks and the battered frame of a drum, in which some one had been trying to carry water, and with some difficulty arranged these in a satisfactory heap. Then he knelt, pushed his arm under Marsena’s shoulders, and lifted him up and backward to the support. Both men grimaced and winced under the smart of the effort, and for some minutes sat in silence, with closed eyes.

When they opened them finally it was with a sudden start at the sound of a woman’s voice. Their ears had for long hours been inured to a ceaseless din of other noises--an ear-splitting confusion of cannon and musketry roar from the field less than an eighth of a mile away, of yelping shells overhead, and of screams and hoarse shouts all about them. Yet their senses caught this strange note of a woman’s voice as if it had fallen upon the hush of midnight.

They looked up, and beheld Miss Julia Parmalee!

Upon such a background of heated squalor, dirt, and murderous disorder, it did not seem surprising to them that this lady should present a picture of cool, fresh neatness. She wore a snow-white nurse’s cap, and broad, spotless bands of white linen were crossed over the shoulders of her pale dove-colored dress. Her dark face, dusky pink at the cheeks, glowed with a proud excitement. Her big brown eyes swept along the row of recumbent figures at her feet with the glance of a born conqueror.

“This is not a fit place for him,” she said. “It is absurd to bring a gentleman--an officer of the headquarters staff--out to such a place as this!”

Then the two volunteers from Octavius saw that behind her were four men, bearing a laden stretcher, and that at her side was a regimental hospital steward, who also looked speculatively along the rows of sufferers.

“It’s the best thing we can do, anyway,” he replied, not over-politely; “and for that matter, there’s hardly room here.”

“Oh, there’d be no trouble about that,” retorted Miss Julia, calmly. “We could move any of these people here. The General told me I was always to do just what I thought best. I am sure that if I could see him now he would insist at once that Colonel Starbuck should have a bed to himself, inside the house.”

“I’ll bet he wouldn’t!” said the hospital steward, with emphasis.

“Perhaps you don’t realize,” put in Miss Julia, coldly, “that Colonel Starbuck is a staff officer--and a friend of mine.”

“I don’t care if he was on all the staffs there are,” said the hospital steward, “he’s got to take his chance with the rest. And it don’t matter about his being a friend, either; we ain’t playing favorites much just now. I don’t see no room here, Miss. You’ll have to take him out in the open lot there.”

“Oh, never!” protested Miss Julia, vehemently. “It’s disgraceful! Why, the place is under fire there. I saw them running away from a shell there only a minute ago. No, if we can’t do anything better, we’ll have one of these men moved.”

“Well, do something pretty quick!” growled one of the men supporting the stretcher.

Miss Parmalee had looked two or three times in an absent-minded way at the two men on the ground nearest her--obviously without recognizing either of them. There was a definite purpose in the glance she now bent upon Dwight Ransom--a glance framed in the resourceful smile he remembered so well.

“You seem to be able to sit up, my man,” she said, ingratiatingly, to him; “would you be so very kind as to let me have that place for Colonel Star-buck, here--he is on the headquarters staff--and I am sure we should be so very much obliged. You will easily get a nice place somewhere else for yourself. Oh, thank you so much! It is so good of you!”

Suppressing a groan at the pain the movement involved, and without a word, Dwight lifted himself slowly to his feet, and stepped aside, waving a hand toward the hay and knapsack in token of their surrender.

Then Miss Julia helped lift from the litter the object of her anxiety. Colonel Starbuck was of a slender, genteel figure, and had the top of his head swathed heavily in bandages. He wore long, curly, brown side-whiskers, and his chin had been shaved that very morning. This was enough in itself to indicate that he belonged to the headquarters staff, but the fact was proclaimed afresh by everything else about him--his speckless uniform, his spick-and-span gauntlets, his carefully polished boots, the glittering newness of his shoulder-straps, sword scabbard, buttons, and spurs. It was clear that, whatever else had happened, his line of communication with the headquarters baggage train had never been interrupted.

“It is so kind of you!” Miss Parmalee murmured again, when the staff officer had been helped off the stretcher, and in a dazed and languid way had settled himself down into the place vacated for him. “Would you”--she whispered, looking up now, and noting that the hospital steward and the litter-men had gone away--“would you mind stepping over to the house, or to one of the tents beyond--you’ll find him somewhere--and asking Dr. Willoughby to come at once? Tell him it is for Colonel Starbuck of the headquarters staff, and you’d better mention my name--Miss Parmalee of the Sanitary Commission. You won’t forget the name--Parmalee?”

“I don’t fancy I shall forget it,” said Dwight, gravely. “I’ve got a better memory than some.”

Miss Julia caught the tone of voice on the instant, and looked up again from where she knelt beside the Colonel, with a swift smile.

“Why, it’s Mr. Ransom, I do believe!” she exclaimed. “I should never have known you with your beard. It’s so good of you to take this trouble--you always were so obliging! Any one will tell you where Dr. Willoughby is. He’s the surgeon of the Eighteenth, you know. I’m sure he’ll come at once--to please me--and time is so precious, you know!”

Without further words, Dwight moved off slowly and unsteadily toward the house.

Miss Parmalee, seating herself so that some of her mouse-tinted draperies almost touched the face of Dwight’s companion, unhooked a fan from her girdle and began softly fanning Colonel Starbuck. “The doctor won’t be long,” she said, in low, cooing tones, after a little; “do you feel easier now?”

“I am rather dizzy still, and a little faint,” replied the Colonel, languorously. “That fanning is so delicious though, that I’m really very happy. At least I would be if I weren’t nervous about you. You have been through such tremendous exertions all day--out in the sun, amid all these horrid sights and this infernal roar--without a parasol, too. Are you quite sure it has not been too much for you?”

“You are always so thoughtful of others, dear Colonel Starbuck,” murmured Miss Julia, reducing the fanning to a gentle, measured movement, and fixing her lustrous eyes pensively upon the clouds above the horizon. “You never think of yourself!”

“Only to think how happy my fate is, to be rescued and nursed by an angel,” sighed the Colonel.

A smile of gentle deprecation played upon Miss Julia’s red lips, and imparted to her eyes the expression they would wear if they had been gazing upon a tenderly entrancing vision in the sky. Then, all at once; she gave a little start of aroused attention, looked puzzled, and after a moment’s pause bent her head over close to the Colonel’s.

“The man behind me has taken tight hold of my dress,” she whispered, hurriedly. “I don’t want to turn around, but can you see him? He isn’t having a fit or anything, is he?”

Colonel Starbuck lifted himself a trifle, and looked across. “No,” he whispered in return, “he appears to be asleep. Probably he is dreaming. He is a corporal--some infantry regiment. They do manage to get so--what shall I say--so unwashed! Shall I move his hand for you?”

Miss Julia shook her head, with an arch little half smile.

“No, poor man,” she murmured. “It gives me almost a sense of the romantic. Perhaps he is dreaming of home--of some one dear to him. Corporals do have their romances, you know, as well as--”

“As well as colonels,” the staff officer playfully finished the sentence for her. “Well, I congratulate him, if his is a thousandth part as joyful as mine.”

“Oh, then, you have one!” pursued Miss Parma-lee, allowing her eyes to sparkle for an instant before they were coyly raised again to the clouds. Darkness was gathering there rapidly.

“Why pretend that you don’t understand?” pleaded Colonel Starbuck--and there seemed to be no answer forthcoming. The fan moved even more sedately now, with a tender flutter at the end of each downward sweep.

Presently the preoccupation of the couple--one might not call it silence in such an unbroken uproar as rose around them and smashed through the air above--was interrupted by the appearance of a young, sharp-faced man, who marched straight across the yard toward them and, halting, spoke hurriedly.

“I was asked specially to come here for a moment,” he said, “but it can only be a minute. We’re just over our heads in work. What is it?”

Miss Parmalee looked at the young man with a favorless eye. He was unshaven, dishevelled, brusque of manner and speech. He was bareheaded, and his unimportant figure was almost hidden beneath a huge, revoltingly stained apron.

“I asked for my friend, Dr. Willoughby,” she said. “But if he could not come, I must insist upon immediate attention for Colonel Starbuck here--an officer of the headquarters staff.”

While she spoke the young surgeon had thrown himself on one knee, adroitly though roughly lifted the Colonel’s bandages, run an inquiring finger over his skull, and plumped the linen back again. He sprang to his feet with an impatient grunt. “Paltry scalp wound,” he snorted. Then, turning on his heel, he almost knocked against Dwight Ransom, who had come slowly up behind him. “You had no business to drag me off for foolishness of this sort,” he said, in vexed tones. “Here are thousands of men waiting their turn who really need help, and I’ve been working twenty hours a day for a week, and couldn’t keep up with the work if every day had two hundred hours. It’s ridiculous!”

Dwight shrugged his unhurt shoulder. “I didn’t ask you for myself,” he replied. “I’m quite willing to wait my turn--but the lady here--she asked me to bring help--”

“It can’t be that this gentleman understands,” put in Miss Julia, “that his assistance was desired for an officer of the headquarters staff.”

“Madame,” said the young surgeon, “with your permission, damn the headquarters staff!” and, turning abruptly, he strode off.

“I will go and see the General myself,” exclaimed Miss Parmalee, flushing with wrath. “I will see whether he will permit the Sanitary Commission to be affronted in this outrageous--”

She stopped short. Her indignant effort to rise to her feet had been checked by a hand on the ground, which held firmly in its grasp a fold of her skirt. She turned, pulled the cloth from the clutch of the tightened fingers, looked at the hand as it sprawled limply on the grass, and gave a little, shuddering, half-hysterical laugh. “Mercy me!” was what she said.

“You know who it is, don’t you?” asked Dwight Ransom.

The meaning in his voice struck Miss Julia, and she bent a careful scrutiny through the dusk upon the face of the man stretched out beside her. His head had slipped sidewise on the knapsack, and his bearded chin was unnaturally sunk into his collar. Through the grime on his face could be discerned an unearthly pallor. His wide-opened eyes seemed staring fixedly, reproachfully, at the hand which had lost its hold upon Miss Julia’s dress.

“It does seem as if I’d seen the face before somewhere,” she remarked, “but I don’t appear to place it. It is getting so dark, too. No, I can’t imagine. Who is it?”

She had risen to her feet and was peering down at the dead man, her pretty brows knitted in perplexity.

“He recognized you!” said Dwight, with significant gravity. “It’s Marsena Pulford.”

“Oh, poor man!” exclaimed Julia. “If he’d only spoken to me I would gladly have fanned him, too. But I was so anxious about the Colonel here that I never took a fair look at him. I dare say I shouldn’t have recognized him, even then. Beards do change one so, don’t they!”

Then she turned to Colonel Starbuck and made answer to the inquiry of his lifted eyebrows.

“The unfortunate man,” she explained, “was our village photographer. I sat to him for my picture several times. I think I have one of them over at the Commission tent now.”

“I’ll go this minute and seize it!” the gallant Colonel vowed, getting to his feet.

“Take care! We unprotected females have a man trap there!” Julia warned him; but fear did not deter the staff officer from taking her arm and leaning on it as they walked away in the twilight. Then the night fell, and Dwight buried Marsena.

THE WAR WIDOW

I

Although we had been one man short all day, and there was a plain threat of rain in the hot air, everybody left the hay-field long before sundown. It was too much to ask of human nature to stay off in the remote meadows when such remarkable things were happening down around the house.

Marcellus Jones and I were in the pasture, watching the dog get the cows together for the homeward march. He did it so well and, withal, so willingly, that there was no call for us to trouble ourselves in keeping up with him. We waited instead at the open bars until the hay-wagon had passed through, rocking so heavily in the ancient pitch-hole, as it did so, that the driver was nearly thrown off his perch on the top of the high load. Then we put up the bars, and fell in close behind the haymakers. A rich cloud of dust, far ahead on the road, suggested that the dog was doing his work even too willingly, but for the once we feared no rebuke. Almost anything might be condoned that day.

Five grown-up men walked abreast down the highway, in the shadow of the towering wagon mow, clad much alike in battered straw hats, gray woollen shirts open at the neck, and rough old trousers bulging over the swollen, creased ankles of thick boots. One had a scythe on his arm; two others bore forks over their shoulders. By request, Hi Tuckerman allowed me to carry his sickle.

Although my present visit to the farm had been of only a few days’ duration--and those days of strenuous activity darkened by a terrible grief--I had come to be very friendly with Mr. Tuckerman. He took a good deal more notice of me than the others did; and, when chance and leisure afforded, addressed the bulk of his remarks to me. This favoritism, though it fascinated me, was not without its embarrassing side. Hi Tuckerman had taken part in the battle of Gaines’s Mill two years before, and had been shot straight through the tongue. One could still see the deep scar on each of his cheeks, a sunken and hairless pit in among his sandy beard. His heroism in the war and his good qualities as a citizen had earned for him the esteem of his neighbors, and they saw to it that he never wanted for work. But their present respect for him stopped short of the pretence that they enjoyed hearing him talk. Whenever he attempted conversation, people moved away, or began boisterous dialogues with one another to drown him out. Being a sensitive man, he had come to prefer silence to these rebuffs among those he knew. But he still had a try at the occasional polite stranger--and I suppose it was in this capacity that I won his heart. Though I never of my own initiative understood a word he said, Marcellus sometimes interpreted a sentence or so for me, and I listened to all the rest with a fraudulently wise face. To give only a solitary illustration of the tax thus levied on our friendship, I may mention that when Hi Tuckerman said “_Aak!-ah-aak!-uh_,” he meant “Rappahannock,” and he did this rather better than a good many words.

“Rappahannock,” alas! was a word we heard often enough in those days, along with Chickahom-iny and Rapidan, and that odd Chattahoochee, the sound of which raised always in my boyish mind the notion that the geography-makers must have achieved it in their baby-talk period. These strange Southern river names and many more were as familiar to the ears of these four other untravelled Dearborn County farmers as the noise of their own shallow Nedahma rattling over its pebbles in the valley yonder. Only when their slow fancy fitted substance to these names they saw in mind’s eye dark, sinister, swampy currents, deep and silent, and discolored with human blood.

Two of these men who strode along behind the wagon were young half-uncles of mine, Myron and Warren Turnbull, stout, thick-shouldered, honest fellows not much out of their teens, who worked hard, said little, and were always lumped together in speech, by their family, the hired help, and the neighbors, as “the boys.” They asserted themselves so rarely, and took everything as it came with such docility, that I myself, being in my eleventh year, thought of them as very young indeed. Next them walked a man, hired just for the haying, named Philleo, and then, scuffling along over the uneven humps and hollows on the outer edge of the road, came Si Hummaston, with the empty ginger-beer pail knocking against his knees.

As Tuckerman’s “Hi” stood for Hiram, so I assume the other’s “Si” meant Silas, or possibly Cyrus. I dare say no one, not even his mother, had ever called him by his full name. I know that my companion, Marcellus Jones, who wouldn’t be thirteen until after Thanksgiving, habitually addressed him as Si, and almost daily I resolved that I would do so myself. He was a man of more than fifty, I should think, tall, lean, and what Marcellus called “bible-backed.” He had a short iron-gray beard and long hair. Whenever there was any very hard or steady work going, he generally gave out and went to sit in the shade, holding a hand flat over his heart, and shaking his head dolefully. This kept a good many from hiring him, and even in haying time, when everybody on two legs is of some use, I fancy he would often have been left out if it hadn’t been for my grandparents. They respected him on account of his piety and his moral character, and always had him down when extra work began. He was said to be the only hired man in the township who could not be goaded in some way into swearing. He looked at one slowly, with the mild expression of a heifer calf.

We had come to the crown of the hill, and the wagon started down the steeper incline, with a great groaning of the brake. The men, by some tacit understanding, halted and overlooked the scene.

The big old stone farm-house--part of which is said to date almost to the Revolutionary times--was just below us, so near, indeed, that Marcellus said he had once skipped a scaling-stone from where we stood to its roof. The dense, big-leafed foliage of a sap-bush, sheltered in the basin which dipped from our feet, pretty well hid this roof now from view. Farther on, heavy patches of a paler, brighter green marked the orchard, and framed one side of a cluster of barns and stables, at the end of which three or four belated cows were loitering by the trough. It was so still that we could hear the clatter of the stanchions as the rest of the herd sought their places inside the milking-barn.

The men, though, had no eyes for all this, but bent their gaze fixedly on the road, down at the bottom. For a long way this thoroughfare was bordered by a row of tall poplars, which, as we were placed, receded from the vision in so straight a line that they seemed one high, fat tree. Beyond these one saw only a line of richer green, where the vine-wrapped rail-fences cleft their way between the ripening fields.

“I’d ’a’ took my oath it was them,” said Philleo. “I can spot them grays as fur’s I can see ’em. They turned by the school-house there, or I’ll eat it, school-ma’am ’n’ all. And the buggy was fol-lerin’ ’em, too.”

“Yes, I thought it was them,” said Myron, shading his eyes with his brown hand.

“But they ought to got past the poplars by this time, then,” remarked Warren.

“Why, they’ll be drivin’ as slow as molasses in January,” put in Si Hummaston. “When you come to think of it, it _is_ pretty nigh the same as a regular funeral. You mark my words, your father’ll have walked them grays every step of the road. I s’pose he’ll drive himself--he wouldn’t trust bringin’ Alvy home to nobody else, would he? I know I wouldn’t, if the Lord had given _me_ such a son; but then he didn’t!”

“No, He didn’t!” commented the first speaker, in an unnaturally loud tone of voice, to break in upon the chance that Hi Tuckerman was going to try to talk. But Hi only stretched out his arm, pointing the forefinger toward the poplars.

Sure enough, something was in motion down at the base of the shadows on the road. Then it crept forward, out in the sunlight, and separated itself into two vehicles. A farm wagon came first, drawn by a team of gray horses. Close after it came a buggy, with its black top raised. Both advanced so slowly that they seemed scarcely to be moving at all.

“Well, I swan!” exclaimed Si Hummaston, after a minute, “it’s Dana Pillsbury drivin’ the wagon after all! Well--I dunno--yes, I guess that’s prob’bly what I’d ’a’ done too, if I’d b’n your father. Yes, it does look more correct, his follerin’ on behind, like that. I s’pose that’s Alvy’s widder in the buggy there with him.”

“Yes, that’s Serena--it looks like her little girl with her,” said Myron, gravely.

“I s’pose we might’s well be movin’ along down,” observed his brother, and at that we all started.

We walked more slowly now, matching our gait to the snail-like progress of those coming toward us. As we drew near to the gate, the three hired men instinctively fell behind the brothers, and in that position the group halted on the grass, facing the driveway where it left the main road. Not a word was uttered by any one. When at last the wagon came up, Myron and Warren took off their hats, and the others followed suit, all holding them poised at the level of their shoulders.

Dana Pillsbury, carrying himself rigidly upright on the box-seat, drove past us with eyes fixed straight ahead, and a face as coldly expressionless as that of a wooden Indian. The wagon was covered all over with rubber blankets, so that whatever it bore was hidden. Only a few paces behind came the buggy, and my grandfather, old Arphaxed Turnbull, went by in his turn with the same averted, faraway gaze, and the same resolutely stolid countenance. He held the restive young carriage horse down to a decorous walk, a single firm hand on the tight reins, without so much as looking at it. The strong yellow light of the declining sun poured full upon his long gray beard, his shaven upper lip, his dark-skinned, lean, domineering face--and made me think of some hard and gloomy old prophet seeing a vision, in the back part of the Old Testament. If that woman beside him, swathed in heavy black raiment, and holding a child up against her arm, was my Aunt Serena, I should never have guessed it.

We put on our hats again, and walked up the driveway with measured step behind the carriage till it stopped at the side-piazza stoop. The wagon had passed on toward the big new red barn--and crossing its course I saw my Aunt Em, bareheaded and with her sleeves rolled up, going to the cow-barn with a milking-pail in her hand. She was walking quickly, as if in a great hurry.

“There’s your Ma,” I whispered to Marcellus, assuming that he would share my surprise at her rushing off like this, instead of waiting to say “How-d’-do” to Serena. He only nodded knowingly, and said nothing.

No one else said much of anything. Myron and Warren shook hands in stiff solemnity with the veiled and craped sister-in-law, when their father had helped her and her daughter from the buggy, and one of them remarked in a constrained way that the hot spell seemed to keep up right along. The newcomers ascended the steps to the open door, and the woman and the child went inside. Old Arphaxed turned on the threshold, and seemed to behold us for the first time.

“After you’ve put out the horse,” he said, “I want the most of yeh to come up to the new barn. Si Hummaston and Marcellus can do the milkin’.”

“I kind o’ rinched my wrist this forenoon,” put in Si, with a note of entreaty in his voice. He wanted sorely to be one of the party at the red barn.

“Mebbe milkin’ ’ll be good for it,” said Arphaxed, curtly. “You and Marcellus do what I say, and keep Sidney with you.” With this he, too, went into the house.

II

It wasn’t an easy matter for even a member of the family like myself to keep clearly and untangled in his head all the relationships which existed under this patriarchal Turnbull roof.

Old Arphaxed had been married twice. His first wife was the mother of two children, who grew up, and the older of these was my father, Wilbur Turnbull. He never liked farm-life, and left home early, not without some hard feeling, which neither father nor son ever quite forgot. My father made a certain success of it as a business man in Albany until, in the thirties, his health broke down. He died when I was seven and, although he left some property, my mother was forced to supplement this help by herself going to work as forewoman in a large store. She was too busy to have much time for visiting, and I don’t think there was any great love lost between her and the people on the farm; but it was a good healthy place for me to be sent to when the summer vacation came, and withal inexpensive, and so the first of July each year generally found me out at the homestead, where, indeed, nobody pretended to be heatedly fond of me, but where I was still treated well and enjoyed myself. This year it was understood that my mother was coming out to bring me home later on.

The other child of that first marriage was a girl who was spoken of in youth as Emmeline, but whom I knew now as Aunt Em. She was a silent, tough-fibred, hard-working creature, not at all goodlooking, but relentlessly neat, and the best cook I ever knew. Even when the house was filled with extra hired men, no one ever thought of getting in any female help, so tireless and so resourceful was Em. She did all the housework there was to do, from cellar to garret, was continually lending a hand in the men’s chores, made more butter than the household could eat up, managed a large kitchen-garden, and still had a good deal of spare time, which she spent in sitting out in the piazza in a starched pink calico gown, knitting the while she watched who went up and down the road. When you knew her, you understood how it was that the original Turnbulls had come into that part of the country just after the Revolution, and in a few years chopped down all the forests, dug up all the stumps, drained the swale-lands, and turned the entire place from a wilderness into a flourishing and fertile home for civilized people. I used to feel, when I looked at her, that she would have been quite equal to doing the whole thing herself.

All at once, when she was something over thirty, Em had up and married a mowing-machine agent named Abel Jones, whom no one knew anything about, and who, indeed, had only been in the neighborhood for a week or so. The family was struck dumb with amazement. The idea of Em’s dallying with the notion of matrimony had never crossed anybody’s mind. As a girl she had never had any patience with husking-bees or dances or sleigh-ride parties. No young man had ever seen her home from anywhere, or had had the remotest encouragement to hang around the house. She had never been pretty--so my mother told me--and as she got along in years grew dumpy and thick in figure, with a plain, fat face, a rather scowling brow, and an abrupt, ungracious manner. She had no conversational gifts whatever, and, through years of increasing taciturnity and confirmed unsociability, built up in everybody’s mind the conviction that, if there could be a man so wild and unsettled in intellect as to suggest a tender thought to Em, he would get his ears cuffed off his head for his pains.

Judge, then, how like a thunderbolt the episode of the mowing-machine agent fell upon the family. To bewildered astonishment there soon enough succeeded rage. This Jones was a curly-headed man, with a crinkly black beard like those of Joseph’s brethren in the Bible picture. He had no home and no property, and didn’t seem to amount to much even as a salesman of other people’s goods. His machine was quite the worst then in the market, and it could not be learned that he had sold a single one in the county. But he had married Em, and it was calmly proposed that he should henceforth regard the farm as his home. After this point had been sullenly conceded, it turned out that Jones was a widower, and had a boy nine or ten years old, named Marcellus, who was in a sort of orphan asylum in Vermont. There were more angry scenes between father and daughter, and a good deal more bad blood, before it was finally agreed that the boy also should come and live on the farm.

All this had happened in 1860 or 1861. Jones had somewhat improved on acquaintance. He knew about lightning-rods, and had been able to fit out all the farm buildings with them at cost price. He had turned a little money now and again in trades with hop-poles, butter-firkins, shingles, and the like, and he was very ingenious in mending and fixing up odds and ends. He made shelves and painted the woodwork, and put a tar roof on the summer kitchen. Even Martha, the second Mrs. Turnbull, came finally to admit that he was handy about a house.

This Martha became the head of the household while Em was still a little girl. She was a heavy woman, mentally as well as bodily, rather prone to a peevish view of things, and greatly given to pride in herself and her position, but honest, charitable in her way, and not unkindly at heart. On the whole she was a good stepmother, and Em probably got on quite as well with her as she would have done with her own mother--even in the matter of the mowing-machine agent.

To Martha three sons were born. The two younger ones, Myron and Warren, have already been seen. The eldest boy, Alva, was the pride of the family, and, for that matter, of the whole section.

Alva was the first Turnbull to go to college. From his smallest boyhood it had been manifest that he had great things before him, so handsome and clever and winning a lad was he. Through each of his schooling years he was the honor man of his class, and he finished in a blaze of glory by taking the Clark Prize, and practically everything else within reach in the way of academic distinctions. He studied law at Octavius, in the office of Judge Schermerhorn, and in a little time was not only that distinguished man’s partner, but distinctly the more important figure in the firm. At the age of twenty-five he was sent to the Assembly. The next year they made him District Attorney, and it was quite understood that it rested with him whether he should be sent to Congress later on, or be presented by the Dearborn County bar for the next vacancy on the Supreme Court bench.

At this point in his brilliant career he married Miss Serena Wadsworth, of Wadsworth’s Falls. The wedding was one of the most imposing social events the county had known, so it was said, since the visit of Lafayette. The Wadsworths were an older family, even, than the Fairchilds, and infinitely more fastidious and refined. The daughters of the household, indeed, carried their refinement to such a pitch that they lived an almost solitary life, and grew to the parlous verge of old-maidhood simply because there was nobody good enough to marry them. Alva Turnbull was, however, up to the standard. It could not be said, of course, that his home surroundings quite matched those of his bride; but, on the other hand, she was nearly two years his senior, and this was held to make matters about even.

In a year or so came the war, and nowhere in the North did patriotic excitement run higher than in this old abolition stronghold of upper Dearborn. Public meetings were held, and nearly a whole regiment was raised in Octavius and the surrounding towns alone. Alva Turnbull made the most stirring and important speech at the first big gathering, and sent a thrill through the whole country-side by claiming the privilege of heading the list of volunteers. He was made a captain by general acclaim, and went off with his company in time to get chased from the field of Bull Run. When he came home on a furlough in 1863 he was a major, and later on he rose to be lieutenant-colonel. We understood vaguely that he might have climbed vastly higher in promotion but for the fact that he was too moral and conscientious to get on very well with his immediate superior, General Boyce, of Thessaly, who was notoriously a drinking man.

It was glory enough to have him at the farm, on that visit of his, even as a major. His old parents literally abased themselves at his feet, quite tremulous in their awed pride at his greatness. It made it almost too much to have Serena there also, this fair, thin-faced, prim-spoken daughter of the Wadsworths, and actually to call her by her first name. It was haying time, I remember, but the hired men that year did not eat their meals with the family, and there was even a question whether Marcellus and I were socially advanced enough to come to the table, where Serena and her husband were feeding themselves in state with a novel kind of silver implement called a four-tined fork. If Em hadn’t put her foot down, out to the kitchen we should both have gone, I fancy. As it was, we sat decorously at the far end of the table, and asked with great politeness to have things passed to us, which by standing up we could have reached as well as not. It was slow, but it made us feel immensely respectable, almost as if we had been born Wadsworths ourselves.

We agreed that Serena was “stuck up,” and Mar-cellus reported Aunt Em as feeling that her bringing along with her a nursemaid to be waited on hand and foot, just to take care of a baby, was an imposition bordering upon the intolerable. He said that that was the sort of thing the English did until George Washington rose and drove them out. But we both felt that Alva was splendid.

He was a fine creature physically--taller even than old Arphaxed, with huge square shoulders and a mighty frame. I could recall him as without whiskers, but now he had a waving lustrous brown beard, the longest and biggest I ever saw. He didn’t pay much attention to us boys, it was true; but he was affable when we came in his way, and he gave Myron and Warren each a dollar bill when they went to Octavius to see the Fourth of July doings. In the evening some of the more important neighbors would drop in, and then Alva would talk about the war, and patriotism, and saving the Union, till it was like listening to Congress itself. He had a rich, big voice which filled the whole room, so that the hired men could hear every word out in the kitchen; but it was even more affecting to see him walking with his father down under the poplars, with his hands making orator’s gestures as he spoke, and old Arphaxed looking at him and listening with shining eyes.

Well, then, he and his wife went away to visit her folks, and then we heard he had left to join his regiment. From time to time he wrote to his father--letters full of high and loyal sentiments, which were printed next week in the Octavius _Transcript_, and the week after in the Thessaly _Banner of Liberty_. Whenever any of us thought about the war--and who thought much of anything else?--it was always with Alva as the predominant figure in every picture.

Sometimes the arrival of a letter for Aunt Em, or a chance remark about a broken chair or a clock hopelessly out of kilter, would recall for the moment the fact that Abel Jones was also at the seat of war. He had enlisted on that very night when Alva headed the roll of honor, and he marched away in Alva’s company. Somehow he got no promotion, but remained in the ranks. Not even the members of the family were shown the letters Aunt Em received, much less the printers of the newspapers. They were indeed poor misspelled scrawls, about which no one displayed any interest or questioned Aunt Em. Even Marcellus rarely spoke of his father, and seemed to share to the full the family’s concentration of thought upon Alva.

Thus matters stood when spring began to play at being summer in the year of ‘64. The birds came and the trees burst forth into green, the sun grew hotter and the days longer, the strawberries hidden under the big leaves in our yard started into shape, where the blossoms had been, quite in the ordinary, annual way, with us up North. But down where that dread thing they called “The War” was going on, this coming of warm weather meant more awful massacre, more tortured hearts, and desolated homes, than ever before. I can’t be at all sure how much later reading and associations have helped out and patched up what seem to be my boyish recollections of this period; but it is, at all events, much clearer in my mind than are the occurrences of the week before last.

We heard a good deal about how deep the mud was in Virginia that spring. All the photographs and tin-types of officers which found their way to relatives at home, now, showed them in boots that came up to their thighs. Everybody understood that as soon as this mud dried up a little, there was to be most terrific doings. The two great lines of armies lay scowling at each other, still on that blood-soaked fighting ground between Washington and Richmond where they were three years before. Only now things were to go differently. A new general was at the head of affairs, and he was going in, with jaws set and nerves of steel, to smash, kill, burn, annihilate, sparing nothing, looking not to right or left, till the red road had been hewed through to Richmond. In the first week of May this thing began--a push forward all along the line--and the North, with scared eyes and fluttering heart, held its breath.

My chief personal recollection of these historic forty days is that one morning I was awakened early by a noise in my bedroom, and saw my mother looking over the contents of the big chest of drawers which stood against the wall. She was getting out some black articles of apparel. When she discovered that I was awake, she told me in a low voice that my Uncle Alva had been killed. Then a few weeks later my school closed, and I was packed off to the farm for the vacation. It will be better to tell what had happened as I learned it there from Marcellus and the others.

Along about the middle of May, the weekly paper came up from Octavius, and old Arphaxed Turnbull, as was his wont, read it over out on the piazza before supper. Presently he called his wife to him, and showed her something in it. Martha went out into the kitchen, where Aunt Em was getting the meal ready, and told her, as gently as she could, that there was very bad news for her; in fact, her husband, Abel Jones, had been killed in the first day’s battle in the Wilderness, something like a week before. Aunt Em said she didn’t believe it, and Martha brought in the paper and pointed out the fatal line to her. It was not quite clear whether this convinced Aunt Em or not. She finished getting supper, and sat silently through the meal, afterwards, but she went upstairs to her room before family prayers. The next day she was about as usual, doing the work and saying nothing. Marcellus told me that to the best of his belief no one had said anything to her on the subject. The old people were a shade more ceremonious in their manner toward her, and “the boys” and the hired men were on the lookout to bring in water for her from the well, and to spare her as much as possible in the routine of chores, but no one talked about Jones. Aunt Em did not put on mourning. She made a black necktie for Marcellus to wear to church, but stayed away from meeting herself.

A little more than a fortnight afterwards, Myron was walking down the road from the meadows one afternoon, when he saw a man on horseback coming up from the poplars, galloping like mad in a cloud of dust. The two met at the gate. The man was one of the hired helps of the Wadsworths, and he had ridden as hard as he could pelt from the Falls, fifteen miles away, with a message, which now he gave Myron to read. Both man and beast dripped sweat, and trembled with fatigued excitement. The youngster eyed them, and then gazed meditatively at the sealed envelope in his hand.

“I s’pose you know what’s inside?” he asked, looking up at last.

The man in the saddle nodded, with a tell-tale look on his face, and breathing heavily.

Myron handed the letter back, and pushed the gate open. “You’d better go up and give it to father yourself,” he said. “I ain’t got the heart to face him--jest now, at any rate.”