Part 80 (1/2)
Pelham came heavily into action. There was a blue battery on the opposite hill. The two spoke in whispers beneath the storm. The gunners, now in darkness, now in the vivid lightning, moved about the guns. Now they bent low, now they stood upright. The officer gestured to them and they to each other. Several were killed or wounded; and as now this section, now that, was more deeply engaged, there was some s.h.i.+fting among the men, occasional changes of place. The dusk increased; it was evident that soon night and the storm would put an end to the battle.
Stafford, watching, made out that even now the blue and grey forms in the tossing woods and boggy meadows were showing less and less their glow-worm fires, were beginning to move apart. The guns above them boomed more slowly, with intervals between their speech. The thunder came now, not in ear-splitting cracks but with long rolling peals, with s.p.a.ces between filled only by the wind and the rain. The human voice might be heard, and the officers shouted, not gestured their orders. The twilight deepened. The men about the gun nearest Stafford looked but shadows, bending, leaning across, rising upright. They talked, however, and the words were now audible. ”Yes, if you could handle lightning--take one of them zigzags and turn it loose on blue people!”--”That battery is tired; it's going home! Right tired myself.
Reckon we're all tired but Old Jack. He don't never get tired. This is a pretty behaving gun--” ”That's so! and she's got good men. They do first-rate.”--”That's so! Even the new one's good”--”Good! He learned that gun same as though they _grew_ artillery wherever he came from.
Briery Creek--No, Briony Creek--hey, Deaderick?”
”Briony Creek.”
Stafford dropped his hand. ”Who spoke?”
The question had been breathed, not loudly uttered. No one answered. The gunners continued their movements about the guns, stooping, handling, lifting themselves upright. It was all but night, the lightning less and less violent, revealing little beyond mere shape and action. Stafford sank back. ”Storm within and storm without. They breed delusions!”
The blue battery opposite limbered up and went away. The musketry fire in the hollows between the hills grew desultory. A slow crackle of shots would be followed by silence; then might come with fierce energy a sudden volley; silence followed it, too,--or what, by comparison, seemed silence. The thunder rolled more and more distantly, the wind lashed the trees, the rain beat upon the guns. Officers and men of the horse artillery were too tired, too wet, and too busy for much conversation, but still human voices came and went in the lessening blast, in the semi-darkness and the streaming rain.
There was a gunner near Stafford who worked in silence and rested from his work in silence. Stafford became conscious of him during one of the latter periods--a silent man, leaning against his gun. He was not ten feet away, but the twilight was now deep, and he rested indistinct, a shadow against a shadow. Once there came a pale lightning flash, but his arm was raised as if to s.h.i.+eld his eyes, and there was seen but a strongly made gunner with a sponge staff. Darkness came again at once.
The impression that remained with Stafford was that the gunner's face was turned toward him, that he had, indeed, when the flash came, been regarding him somewhat closely. That was nothing--a man not of the battery, a staff officer sitting on a disabled gun, waiting till he could make his way back to his chief--a moment's curiosity on an artilleryman's part, exhibited in a lull between fighting. Stafford had a certain psychic development. A thinker, he was adventurous in that world; to him, the true world of action. The pa.s.sion that had seized and bound him had come with the force of an invader, of a barbaric horde, from a world that he ordinarily ignored. It held him helpless, an enslaved spirit, but around it vaguely worked the old habits of mind.
Now it interested him--though only to a certain degree--that, in some subtle fas.h.i.+on and for some reason which he could not explain, the gunner with the sponge staff could so make himself felt across s.p.a.ce. He wondered a little about this man; and then, insensibly, he began to review the past. He had resolution enough, and he did not always choose to review the past. To-night it was perhaps the atmosphere, the commotion of the elements, the harp of the wind, the scourging rain--at any rate, he reviewed it and fully. When the circle was completed and his attention touched again the storm and the twilight hill near Chantilly, and he lifted his eyes from the soaked and trodden ground, it was to find the double shadow still before him. He felt that the eyes of the gunner with the sponge staff were on him, had been on him for some time. Quite involuntarily he moved, with a sudden gesture, as though he evaded a blow. A sergeant's voice came through the twilight, the wind and the rain. ”Deaderick!”
The man by the gun moved, took up the sponge staff that had rested beside him, turned in the darkness and went away.
A little later Stafford left the hilltop. The cannon had ceased their booming, except for here and there a fitful burst; the musketry fire had ceased. Pope's rearguard, Lee's advance, the two drew off and the engagement rested indecisive. Blue and grey, a thousand or two men suffered death or wounding. They lay upon the miry earth, beneath the pelting storm. Among the blue, Kearney and Stevens were killed. Through the darkness that wrapped the scene, Stafford found at last his way to his general. He found him with Stuart, who was reporting to Stonewall Jackson. ”They're retreating pretty rapidly, sir. They'll reach Fairfax Court House presently.”
”Yes. They won't stop there. We'll bivouac on the field, general.”
”And to-morrow, sir?”
”To-morrow, sir, we will follow them out of Virginia.”
September the second dawned bright and clear. From Fairfax Court House Pope telegraphed to Halleck. ”There is undoubted purpose on the part of the enemy to keep on slowly turning my position so as to come in on the right. The forces under my command are unable to prevent his doing so.
Telegraph what to do.”
Halleck telegraphed to fall back to the fortifications of Alexandria and Was.h.i.+ngton.
CHAPTER XLI
THE TOLLGATE
On Thunder Run Mountain faint reds and yellows were beginning to show in the maple leaves, while the gum trees dwelling in the hollows had a deeper tinge of crimson. But the ma.s.s of the forest was yet green. The September sun was like balm, amber days, at once alert and dream-like.
The September nights were chilly. But the war, that pinched and starved and took away on all hands, left the forest and the wood for fires. On Thunder Run the women cut the wood, and the children gathered dead boughs and pine cones.
The road over the mountain was in a bad condition. It had not been worked for a year. That mattered the less perhaps, that it was now so little travelled. All day and every day Tom Cole sat in the suns.h.i.+ne on the toll gate porch, the box for the toll beside him, and listened for wheels or horses' hoofs. It was an event now when he could hobble out to the gate, take the toll and pa.s.s the time of day. He grew querulous over the state of the road. ”There'd surely be more travel if 't warn't so bad! Oh, yes, I know there aren't many left hereabouts to travel, and what there are, haven't got the means. But there surely would be more going over the mountain if the road wan't so bad!” He had a touch of fever, and he babbled about the road all night, and how hard it was not to see or talk to anybody! He said that he wished that he had died when he fell out of Nofsinger's hayloft. The first day that he was well enough to be left, Sairy went round to the Thunder Run women, beginning with Christianna Maydew's mother. Several days afterward, Tom hobbling out on the porch was most happily welcomed by the noise of wheels. ”Thar now!” said Sairy, ”ain't it a real picnic feeling to get back to business?” Tom went out to the gate with the tobacco box. A road wagon, and a sulky and a man on horseback! The old man's eyes glistened.
”Mornin', gentlemen!” ”Mornin', Mr. Cole! County's mended your road fine! Big hole down there filled up and the bridge that was just a mantrap new floored! The news? Well, Stonewall Jackson's after them!”
But despite the filled-up holes travel was slight, slight! To-day from dawn until eleven, no one had pa.s.sed. Tom sat in the sun on the porch, and the big yellow cat slept beside him, and the china asters bloomed in the tiny yard. Sairy was drying apples. She had them spread on boards in the sun. Now and then she came from the kitchen to look at them, and with a peach bough to drive the bees away. The close of summer found, as ever, Thunder Run shrunken to something like old age; but even so his murmur was always there like a wind in the trees. This morning there was a fleet of clouds in the September sky. Their shadows drove across the great landscape, the ridges and levels of the earth, out upon which Thunder Run Mountain looked so steadily.
A woman, a neighbour living a mile beyond the schoolhouse, came by.
Sairy went over to the little picket fence and the two talked. ”How is she?”--”She's dead.”--”Sho! You don't say so! Poor thing, poor thing! I reckon I thought of her mor'n I slept last night.--'N the child?”
”Born dead.”