Part 31 (1/2)

”Then throwing away your life won't save hers! Do you surren'--?”

Ferry made a quick gesture for her to shoot low, but she solemnly shook her head and fired through the top of the uppermost panel, and the a.s.sault came.

The log burst the door in at a blow, Ferry and I fired, and our foes sprang in. Certainly they were brave; the doorway let them in only by twos, and the fire-log, falling under foot, became a stumbling-block; yet in an instant the room was ringing and roaring with the fray and benighted with its smoke. Their first ball bit the top of my shoulder and buried itself in the wall--no, not their first, but the first save one; for the bureau mirror stood in dim shade, and the Federal leader made the easy mistake of firing right into it. The error sealed his fate; Ferry fired under his flash and sent him reeling into the arms of his followers. They replied hotly but blindly, and in a moment the room was void of a.s.sailants. Ferry started to spring from the bed, but Charlotte threw her arms about him, and as she pressed her head hard down on his breast I could not help but hear ”No, my treasure, my heart's whole treasure, no!”

LV

RESCUE AND RETREAT

I sprang for the door, but the fire-log sent me sprawling with my shoulder on the threshold. As I went down I heard in the same breath the wounded officer wailing ”Go back! go in! there are only four of them! don't leave one alive!” and Miss Harper all but screaming ”Our men! our men! G.o.d be praised, our men are coming, they are here! Fly spoilers, for your lives, fly!”

And it was true. Their hoofs rumbled, their carbines banged, and their charge struck three sides of the house at once. Rising only to my elbows,--and how I did that much, stiffened with my wound, the doctors will have to explain,--I laid my cheek to my rifle, and the light of two windows fell upon my gunsights. Every blue-coat in the hall was between me and its rear window, but one besides the officer was wounded, and with these two three others were busy; only the one remaining man saw me. Twice he levelled his revolver, and twice I had almost lined my sights on him, but twice Miss Harper unaware came between us. A third time he aimed, fired and missed. I am glad he fired first, for our two shots almost made one report, and-he plunged forward exactly as I had done over the fire-log, except that he reached the floor dead.

Thereupon came more things at once than can be told: Miss Harper's outcry of horror and pity; Charlotte's cry from the bedside--”Richard! Richard!” a rush of feet and shouts of rage in the hall below; and my leap to the head of the stairs, shouting to half a dozen gray-jackets ”Two men, no more! two men to guard prisoners, no more! go back, all but you two! go back!”

A sabreless officer with a bandaged hand flew up the stair and into my face. It was Helm. ”The ladies! Smith, good G.o.d! Smith, where are the girls?”

”In the smokehouse,” cried Miss Harper from her knees beside the prostrate Federal officer; ”go bring them!--Richard, Charlotte is calling you!”

I ran to Ferry's door; Charlotte was leaning busily over his bared chest, while he, still holding a revolver in his right hand, caressed her arm with his left. ”d.i.c.k, his wound has opened again, but we must get him away at once anyhow. Isn't my wagon still here?--oh, thank G.o.d! there it comes now, I hear it in the back yard!”

A Confederate waiting on Miss Harper with basin and towels barely dodged me as I sprang to the far end of the hall and shouted down into the yard for Harry. The little mules, true enough, were just rattling round a half turn at the lower hall's back door, having been in hiding behind the stables. A score or so of cavalry were boisterously hurrying off across the yard with a few captured horses and prisoners, and I had to call the Lieutenant angrily a second time, to make him hear me amid their din and a happy confusion which he was helping to keep up in a fairer group. For here were all the missing feminine members of the household, white and colored, and Harry was clamorous with joy, compa.s.sion and applause, while Camille and Cecile, pink with weeping, stepped out across the high doorsill of the smokehouse, leading Ned Ferry's horse and mine.

However, there was not the urgency for instant flight that Charlotte had thought there was; night fell; a whole regiment of our mounted infantry came silently up from the rear of the plantation and bivouacked without lights behind a quarter of a mile of worm-fence; our two wounded and three unharmed prisoners, or Miss Harper's, I should say, for it was in response to her entreaties that the latter had thrown down their arms, were taken away; the dead man was borne out; lights glowed in every room, the servants returned to their tasks, a maddening fragrance came from the kitchen, and the three nieces flitted everywhere in their benign activities, never discovering the hurt on my shoulder until everything else on earth had been discovered, and then--”Oh, Richard, Richard!” from Estelle, with ”Reach-hard, Reach-hard!” from Cecile, and ”Mr. Smith!” from Camille, as they bathed and bound it. At length a surgeon arrived, gave a cheering opinion of Ferry and of Charlotte, and scolded Harry savagely for the really bad condition of his hand. Then sounds grew few and faint, our lights went out, we lay down fully dressed, and nearly all of us, for a while, slept.

But about two in the morning Harry awakened me, murmuring ”Reach-hard! Reach-hard! come! our sick-train's moving. Ss.h.!.+ General Austin's asleep in the next room!” I asked where Ferry was. ”Already started,” he whispered, ”--in the General's own ambulance, with Charlotte Oliver in hers, on a mattress, like Ned, and the four Harpers in theirs.” While we stole downstairs he murmured on ”Our brigade's come up and General Austin will attack at daylight with this house as his headquarters.”

As we mounted I asked whither we were bound. ”Tangipahoa,” he said; ”then by railroad to Brookhaven, and then out to Squire Wall's.”

At the first streak of dawn our slow caravan caught the distant notes of the battle opening behind us. ”That's Fisher's battery!” joyously cried the aide-de-camp as we paused and hearkened back. ”Well, thank the Lord, this time n.o.body's got to go back for her doll; she's got it with her; I saw her, just now, combing its hair.” We descended into a woody hollow, the sounds of human strife died away, and field and forest offered us only beauty, fragrance, peace, and the love-songs of birds.

LVI

HoTEL DES INVALIDES

A shattered crew we were when in the forenoon of the third day we reached our goal. Harry's hand was giving him less trouble, but both my small wounds were misbehaving as stoutly as their limitations would allow; my aches were cruel and incessant, my side was swollen and my shoulder hot. Miss Harper was ”really ill,” said the surgeon, but for whose coming with us we should hardly have brought our whole number through alive. Both Ferry and Charlotte were in a critical condition. ”Take you in!” said our tearfully smiling Mrs. Wall; ”why, we'd take yo' whole crowd in ef we had to go out and bunk undeh the trees owse'v's!... Oh, Mr. Smith, you po' chi--ild!... Oh, my Lawd! is this Lieutenant Do-wrong! Good Lawd, good Lawd! I think this waugh's gone on now jess long enough!”

In the house she gave the younger Harpers a second kiss all round. ”You po' dears, yo're hero-ines, now, and hencefo'th fo'evehmo'!” Harry and I agreed they were; it was one of the few points on which we thought alike. We even agreed that Estelle's grasp of earthly realities was not so feeble as we had thought it.

”Fact is,” I said to him, on our first day at the Walls', as he was leaving the soldiers' room, where I sat under the surgeon's inspection, ”you were totally mistaken about her.”

”Yes, I was,” he replied; ”she's got more sense in a minute than Camille's got in a week,” and shut the door between us.