Part 40 (1/2)
”Awful. 'T is going to be like running the gauntlet, to run that town, and we're most there. If I don't get out alive, and if you ever go to New Bedford--Whoa, there! Look out!”
Steve, thrust by the press away from the pike into a Middletown street, looked for a cellar door through which he might descend and be in darkness. All the street was full of struggling forms. A man on horseback, tall and horrible in the nightmare, cut at him with a sabre as long as himself. Steve ducked, went under the horse's belly, and came up to have a pistol shot take the cap from his head. With a yell he ran beneath the second horse's arching neck. The animal reared; a third horseman raised his carbine. There was an overturned Conestoga wagon in the middle of the street, its white top like a bubble in all the wild swirl and eddy of the place. Steve and the ball from the carbine pa.s.sed under the arch at the same instant, the bullet lodging somewhere in the wagon bed.
Steve at first thought he might be dead, for it was cool and dark under the tilted canvas, and there was a momentary effect of quietness. The carbine had been fired; perhaps the bullet was in his brain. The uncertainty held but a second; outside the fracas burst forth again, and beneath him something moved in the straw. It proved to be the driver of the wagon, wounded, and fallen back from the seat in front. He spoke now in a curious, dreamy voice. ”Get off the top of my broken leg--d.a.m.n you to everlasting h.e.l.l!” Steve squirmed to one side. ”Sorry. Gawd knows I wish I wasn't any nearer it than the Peaks of Otter!” There was a triangular tear in the canvas. He drew down the flap and looked out.
”They were Ashby's men--all those three!” He began to cry, though noiselessly. ”They hadn't ought to cut at me like that--shooting, too, without looking! They ought to ha' seen I wasn't no d.a.m.ned Yank--” The figure in the straw moved. Steve turned sick with apprehension. ”Did you hear what I said? I was just a-joking. Gawd! It's enough to make a man wish he was a Johnny Reb--Hey, what did you say?”
But the figure in blue said nothing, or only some useless thing about wanting water. Steve, rea.s.sured, looked again out of window. His refuge lay a few feet from the pike, and the pike was a road through pandemonium. He could see, upon a height, dimly, through the dust and smoke the Rockbridge battery. Yellow flashes came from it, then ear-splitting sound. A Federal force, horse, foot and guns, had hastily formed in the opposite fields, seized a crest, planted cannon. These sent screaming sh.e.l.ls. In between the iron giants roared the melee--Ashby jousting with Hatch's convoying cavalry--the Louisiana troops firing in a long battle line, from behind the stone fences--a horrible jam of wagons, overturned or overturning, panic-stricken mules, drivers raving out oaths, using mercilessly long, snaky, black whips--heat, dust, thirst and thunder, wild excitement, blood and death!
There were all manner of wagons. Ambulances were there with inmates,--fantastic sickrooms, with glare for shade, Tartarean heat for coolness, cannon thunder and shouting for quietness, grey enemies for nursing women, and for home a battlefield in a hostile land. Heavy ordnance wagons, far from the guns they were meant to feed, traces cut and horses gone, rested reef-like for the tides to break against.
Travelling forges kept them company, and wagons bearing officers'
luggage. Beneath several the mules were pinned; dreadful sight could any there have looked or pitied! Looming through there were the great supply wagons, with others of lighter stores, holding boxes and barrels of wines and fruits, commodities of all sorts, gold-leafed fripperies, luxuries of all manner, poured across the Potomac for her soldiers by the North. Sutlers' wagons did not lack, garishly stocked, forlorn as Harlequin in the day's stress. In and around and over all these stranded hulls roared the opposing forces. Steve saw Ashby, on the black stallion, directing with a gauntleted hand. Four great draught horses, drawing a loaded van, without a driver, maddened with fright, turned into this street up and down which there was much fighting. A shout arose. Carbines cracked. One of the leaders came down upon his knees.
The other slipped in blood and fell. The van overturned, pinning beneath it one of the wheel horses. Its fall, immediately beside the Conestoga, blocked Steve's window. He turned to crawl to the other side. As he did so the wounded soldier in the straw had a remark to make. He made it in the dreamy voice he had used before. ”Don't you smell cloth burning?”
Steve did; in an instant saw it burning as well, first the corner of the canvas cover, then the straw beneath. He gave a screech. ”We're on fire!
Gawd! I've got to get out of this!”
The man in the straw talked dreamily on. ”I got a bullet through the end of my backbone. I can't sit up. I been lying here studying the scoop of this here old wagon. It looks to me like the firmament at night, with all the stars a-s.h.i.+ning. There's no end of texts about stars. 'Like as one star differeth from another--'” He began to cough. ”There seems to be smoke. I guess you'll have to drag me out, brother.”
At the end of the village a stone fence ran between two houses, on the other side of a little garden slope planted with potatoes. In the shadow of the wall a line of men, kneeling, rested rifle barrel upon the coping and fired on Hatch's cavalry, now much broken, wavering toward dispersion. At first the line was hidden by a swirl of smoke; this lifted, and Steve recognized a guidon they had planted, then the men themselves. They were the Louisiana Tigers, Wheat's Battalion, upgathered from levee and wharf and New Orleans purlieu, among many of a better cast, not lacking rufflers and bravos, soldiers of fortune whom Pappenheim might not have scorned. Their stone wall leaped fire again.
Steve looked to heaven and earth and as far around as the dun cloud permitted, then moved with swiftness across the potato patch. All about in the mingled dust and smoke showed a s.h.i.+fting pageantry of fighting men; upon the black earth below the rank green leaves and purple blooms lay in postures hardly conceivable the dead and wounded. In the line by the stone fence was here and there a gap. Steve, head between shoulders, made for the breastwork and sank into one of these openings, his neighbour upon one hand an Irish roustabout, on the other a Creole from a sugar plantation. He explained his own presence. ”I got kind of separated from my company--Company A, 65th Virginia. I had an awful fight with three d.a.m.ned Yanks, and a fourth came in and dragged my gun away! If you don't mind I'll just stay here and help you--”
”Sorra an objection,” said the Irishman. ”Pick up Tim's musket behind you there and get to wurruk!”
”Bon jour!” said the other side. ”One camarade ees always zee welcome!”
An order rang down the line. ”Sthop firing, is it?” remarked the Irishman. ”And that's the first dacint wurrud I've heard this half hour!
Wid all the plazure in life, captin!” He rested his musket against the stones, drew himself up, and viewed the prospect. ”Holy Saint Pathrick!
look at them sthramin' off into s.p.a.ce! An' look at the mile of wagons they're afther lavin! Refrishmint in thim, my frind, for body and sowl!”
Steve pulled himself up beside the other. ”Thar ain't any danger now of stray bullets, I reckon? There's something awful in seeing a road like that. There's a man that his mother wouldn't know!--horse stepped on his face, I reckon. Gawd! we have gangs of prisoners!--Who's that coming out of the cloud?”
”Chew's Horse Artillery--with Ashby, the darlint!”
Ashby stopped before the stone house to the right. ”There are men in here--officers with them. Captain, go bid them surrender.”
The captain, obeying, found a barred door and no answer. An approach to the window revealed behind the closed blinds the gleam of a musket barrel. ”Go again! Tell them their column's cut and their army dispersed. If they do not surrender at once I will plant a sh.e.l.l in the middle of that room.”
The captain returned once more. ”Well?”
”They said, 'Go to h.e.l.l,' sir. They said General Banks would be here in a moment, and they'd taken the house for his headquarters. They've got something in there beside water, I think.”
A sergeant put in a word. ”There's a score of them. They seized this empty house, and they've been picking off our men--”
”Double canister, point-blank, Allen.--Well, sergeant?”
”It's not certain it was an empty house, sir. One of the Tigers, there, thinks there are women in it.”
”Women!”