For several days, in snow and rain, General Schofield’s little army had
crouched in its hastily constructed defenses at Columbia, Tennessee. It had
retreated in hot haste from Pulaski, thirty miles to the south, arriving
just in time to foil Hood, who, marching from Florence, Alabama, by another
road, with a force of more than double our strength, had hoped to intercept
us. Had he succeeded, he would indubitably have bagged the whole bunch of
us. As it was, he simply took position in front of us and gave us plenty of
employment, but did not attack; he knew a trick worth two of that.

Duck River was directly in our rear; I suppose both our flanks rested on
it. The town was between them. One night–that of November 27, 1864–we
pulled up stakes and crossed to the north bank to continue our retreat to
Nashville, where Thomas and safety lay–such safety as is known in war. It
was high time too, for before noon of the next day Forrest’s cavalry forded
the river a few miles above us and began pushing back our own horse toward
Spring Hill, ten miles in our rear, on our only road. Why our infantry was
not immediately put in motion toward the threatened point, so vital to our
safety, General Schofield could have told better than I. Howbeit, we lay
there inactive all day.

The next morning–a bright and beautiful one–the brigade of Colonel P.
Sidney Post was thrown out, up the river four or five miles, to see what it
could see. What it saw was Hood’s head-of-column coming over on a pontoon
bridge, and a right pretty spectacle it would have been to one whom it did
not concern. It concerned us rather keenly.

As a member of Colonel Post’s staff, I was naturally favored with a good
view of the performance. We formed in line of battle at a distance of
perhaps a half-mile from the bridge-head, but that unending column of gray
and steel gave us no more attention than if we had been a crowd of
farmer-folk. Why should it? It had only to face to the left to be itself a
line of battle. Meantime it had more urgent business on hand than brushing
away a small brigade whose only offense was curiosity; it was making for
Spring Hill with all its legs and wheels. Hour after hour we watched that
unceasing flow of infantry and artillery toward the rear of our army. It
was an unnerving spectacle, yet we never for a moment doubted that, acting
on the intelligence supplied by our succession of couriers, our entire
force was moving rapidly to the point of contact. The battle of Spring Hill
was obviously decreed. Obviously, too, our brigade of observation would be
among the last to have a hand in it. The thought annoyed us, made us
restless and resentful. Our mounted men rode forward and back behind the
line, nervous and distressed; the men in the ranks sought relief in
frequent changes of posture, in shifting their weight from one leg to the
other, in needless inspection of their weapons and in that unfailing
resource of the discontented soldier, audible damning of those in the
saddles of authority. But never for more than a moment at a time did anyone
remove his eyes from that fascinating and portentous pageant.

Toward evening we were recalled, to learn that of our five divisions of
infantry, with their batteries, numbering twenty-three thousand men, only
one–Stanley’s, four thousand weak–had been sent to Spring Hill to meet that
formidable movement of Hood’s three veteran corps! Why Stanley was not
immediately effaced is still a matter of controversy. Hood, who was early
on the ground, declared that he gave the needful orders and tried vainly to
enforce them; Cheatham, in command of his leading corps, declared that he
did not. Doubtless the dispute is still being carried on between these
chieftains from their beds of asphodel and moly in Elysium. So much is
certain: Stanley drove away Forrest and successfully held the junction of
the roads against Cleburne’s division, the only infantry that attacked him.

That night the entire Confederate army lay within a half mile of our road,
while we all sneaked by, infantry, artillery, and trains. The enemy’s
camp-fires shone redly–miles of them–seeming only a stone’s throw from our
hurrying column. His men were plainly visible about them, cooking their
suppers–a sight so incredible that many of our own, thinking them friends,
strayed over to them and did not return. At intervals of a few hundred
yards we passed dim figures on horseback by the roadside, enjoining
silence. Needless precaution; we could not have spoken if we had tried, for
our hearts were in our throats. But fools are God’s peculiar care, and one
of his protective methods is the stupidity of other fools. By daybreak our
last man and last wagon had passed the fateful spot unchallenged, and our
first were entering Franklin, ten miles away. Despite spirited cavalry
attacks on trains and rear-guard, all were in Franklin by noon and such of
the men as could be kept awake were throwing up a slight line of defense,
inclosing the town.

Franklin lies–or at that time did lie; I know not what exploration might
now disclose–on the south bank of a small river, the Harpeth by name. For
two miles southward was a nearly flat, open plain, extending to a range of
low hills through which passed the turnpike by which we had come. From some
bluffs on the precipitous north bank of the river was a commanding overlook
of all this open ground, which, although more than a mile away, seemed
almost at one’s feet. On this elevated ground the wagon-train had been
parked and General Schofield had stationed himself–the former for security,
the latter for outlook. Both were guarded by General Wood’s infantry
division, of which my brigade was a part. “We are in beautiful luck,” said
a member of the division staff. With some prevision of what was to come and
a lively recollection of the nervous strain of helpless observation, I did
not think it luck. In the activity of battle one does not feel one’s hair
going gray with vicissitudes of emotion.

For some reason to the writer unknown General Schofield had brought along
with him General D. S. Stanley, who commanded two of his divisions–ours and
another, which was not “in luck.” In the ensuing battle, when this
excellent officer could stand the strain no longer, he bolted across the
bridge like a shot and found relief in the hell below, where he was
promptly tumbled out of the saddle by a bullet.

Our line, with its reserve brigades, was about a mile and a half long, both
flanks on the river, above and below the town–a mere bridge-head. It did
not look a very formidable obstacle to the march of an army of more than
forty thousand men. In a more tranquil temper than his failure at Spring
Hill had put him into Hood would probably have passed around our left and
turned us out with ease–which would justly have entitled him to the Humane
Society’s great gold medal. Apparently that was not his day for saving
life.

About the middle of the afternoon our field glasses picked up the
Confederate head-of-column emerging from the range of hills previously
mentioned, where it is cut by the Columbia road. But–ominous
circumstance!–it did not come on. It turned to its left, at a right angle,
moving along the base of the hills, parallel to our line. Other
heads-of-column came through other gaps and over the crests farther along,
impudently deploying on the level ground with a spectacular display of
flags and glitter of arms. I do not remember that they were molested, even
by the guns of General Wagner, who had been foolishly posted with two small
brigades across the turnpike, a half-mile in our front, where he was
needless for apprisal and powerless for resistance. My recollection is that
our fellows down there in their shallow trenches noted these portentous
dispositions without the least manifestation of incivility. As a matter of
fact, many of them were permitted by their compassionate officers to sleep.
And truly it was good weather for that: sleep was in the very atmosphere.
The sun burned crimson in a gray-blue sky through a delicate Indian-summer
haze, as beautiful as a daydream in paradise. If one had been given to
moralizing one might have found material a-plenty for homilies in the
contrast between that peaceful autumn afternoon and the bloody business
that it had in hand. If any good chaplain failed to “improve the occasion”
let us hope that he lived to lament in sackcloth-of-gold and ashes-of-roses
his intellectual unthrift.

The putting of that army into battle shape–its change from columns into
lines–could not have occupied more than an hour or two, yet it seemed an
eternity. Its leisurely evolutions were irritating, but at last it moved
forward with atoning rapidity and the fight was on. First, the storm struck
Wagner’s isolated brigades, which, vanishing in fire and smoke, instantly
reappeared as a confused mass of fugitives inextricably intermingled with
their pursuers. They had not stayed the advance a moment, and as might have
been foreseen were now a peril to the main line, which could protect itself
only by the slaughter of its friends. To the right and left, however, our
guns got into play, and simultaneously a furious infantry fire broke out
along the entire front, the paralyzed center excepted. But nothing could
stay those gallant rebels from a hand-to-hand encounter with bayonet and
butt, and it was accorded to them with hearty goodwill.

Meantime Wagner’s conquerors were pouring across the breastwork like water
over a dam. The guns that had spared the fugitives had now no time to fire;
their infantry supports gave way and for a space of more than two hundred
yards in the very center of our line the assailants, mad with exultation,
had everything their own way. From the right and the left their gray masses
converged into the gap, pushed through, and then, spreading, turned our men
out of the works so hardly held against the attack in their front. From our
viewpoint on the bluff we could mark the constant widening of the gap, the
steady encroachment of that blazing and smoking mass against its disordered
opposition.

“It is all up with us,” said Captain Dawson, of Wood’s staff; “I am going
to have a quiet smoke.”

I do not doubt that he supposed himself to have borne the heat and burden
of the strife. In the midst of his preparations for a smoke he paused and
looked again–a new tumult of musketry had broken loose. Colonel Emerson
Opdycke had rushed his reserve brigade into the melee and was bitterly
disputing the Confederate advantage. Other fresh regiments joined in the
countercharge, commanderless groups of retreating men returned to their
work, and there ensued a hand-to-hand contest of incredible fury. Two long,
irregular, mutable and tumultuous blurs of color were consuming each
other’s edge along the line of contact. Such devil’s work does not last
long, and we had the great joy to see it ending, not as it began, but “more
nearly to the heart’s desire.” Slowly the mobile blur moved away from the
town, and presently the gray half of it dissolved into its elemental units,
all in slow recession. The retaken guns in the embrasures pushed up
towering clouds of white smoke; to east and to west along the reoccupied
parapet ran a line of misty red till the spitfire crest was without a break
from flank to flank. Probably there was some Yankee cheering, as doubtless
there had been the “rebel yell,” but my memory recalls neither. There are
many battles in a war, and many incidents in a battle: one does not
recollect everything. Possibly I have not a retentive ear.

While this lively work had been doing in the center, there had been no lack
of diligence elsewhere, and now all were as busy as bees. I have read of
many “successive attacks”–”charge after charge”–but I think the only
assaults after the first were those of the second Confederate lines and
possibly some of the reserves; certainly there were no visible abatement
and renewal of effort anywhere except where the men who had been pushed out
of the works backward tried to re-enter. And all the time there was
fighting.

After resetting their line the victors could not clear their front, for the
baffled assailants would not desist. All over the open country in their
rear, clear back to the base of the hills, drifted the wreck of battle, the
wounded that were able to walk; and through the receding throng pushed
forward, here and there, horsemen with orders and footmen whom we knew to
be bearing ammunition. There were no wagons, no caissons: the enemy was not
using, and could not use, his artillery. Along the line of fire we could
see, dimly in the smoke, mounted officers, singly and in small groups,
attempting to force their horses across the slight parapet, but all went
down. Of this devoted band was the gallant General Adams, whose body was
found upon the slope, and whose animal’s forefeet were actually inside the
crest. General Cleburne lay a few paces farther out, and five or six other
general officers sprawled elsewhere. It was a great day for Confederates in
the line of promotion.

For many minutes at a time broad spaces of battle were veiled in smoke. Of
what might be occurring there conjecture gave a terrifying report. In a
visible peril observation is kind of defense; against the unseen we lift a
trembling hand. Always from these regions of obscurity we expected the
worst, but always the lifted cloud revealed an unaltered situation.

The assailants began to give way. There was no general retreat; at many
points the fight continued, with lessening ferocity and lengthening range,
well into the night. It became an affair of twinkling musketry and broad
flares of artillery; then it sank to silence in the dark.

Under orders to continue his retreat, Schofield could now do so unmolested:
Hood had suffered so terrible a loss in life and morale that he was in no
condition for effective pursuit. As at Spring Hill, daybreak found us on
the road with all our impedimenta except some of our wounded, and that
night we encamped under the protecting guns of Thomas, at Nashville. Our
gallant enemy audaciously followed, and fortified himself within
rifle-reach, where he remained for two weeks without firing a gun and was
then destroyed.

In the summer of 1896 Mr. William Holt, a wealthy manufacturer of
Chicago, was living temporarily in a little town of central New
York, the name of which the writer’s memory has not retained. Mr.
Holt had had “trouble with his wife,” from whom he had parted a year
before. Whether the trouble was anything more serious than
“incompatibility of temper,” he is probably the only living person
that knows: he is not addicted to the vice of confidences. Yet he
has related the incident herein set down to at least one person
without exacting a pledge of secrecy. He is now living in Europe.

One evening he had left the house of a brother whom he was visiting,
for a stroll in the country. It may be assumed–whatever the value
of the assumption in connection with what is said to have occurred–
that his mind was occupied with reflections on his domestic
infelicities and the distressing changes that they had wrought in
his life.

Whatever may have been his thoughts, they so possessed him that he
observed neither the lapse of time nor whither his feet were
carrying him; he knew only that he had passed far beyond the town
limits and was traversing a lonely region by a road that bore no
resemblance to the one by which he had left the village. In brief,
he was “lost.”

Realizing his mischance, he smiled; central New York is not a region
of perils, nor does one long remain lost in it. He turned about and
went back the way that he had come. Before he had gone far he
observed that the landscape was growing more distinct–was
brightening. Everything was suffused with a soft, red glow in which
he saw his shadow projected in the road before him. “The moon is
rising,” he said to himself. Then he remembered that it was about
the time of the new moon, and if that tricksy orb was in one of its
stages of visibility it had set long before. He stopped and faced
about, seeking the source of the rapidly broadening light. As he
did so, his shadow turned and lay along the road in front of him as
before. The light still came from behind him. That was surprising;
he could not understand. Again he turned, and again, facing
successively to every point of the horizon. Always the shadow was
before–always the light behind, “a still and awful red.”

Holt was astonished–”dumfounded” is the word that he used in
telling it–yet seems to have retained a certain intelligent
curiosity. To test the intensity of the light whose nature and
cause he could not determine, he took out his watch to see if he
could make out the figures on the dial. They were plainly visible,
and the hands indicated the hour of eleven o’clock and twenty-five
minutes. At that moment the mysterious illumination suddenly flared
to an intense, an almost blinding splendor, flushing the entire sky,
extinguishing the stars and throwing the monstrous shadow of himself
athwart the landscape. In that unearthly illumination he saw near
him, but apparently in the air at a considerable elevation, the
figure of his wife, clad in her night-clothing and holding to her
breast the figure of his child. Her eyes were fixed upon his with
an expression which he afterward professed himself unable to name or
describe, further than that it was “not of this life.”

The flare was momentary, followed by black darkness, in which,
however, the apparition still showed white and motionless; then by
insensible degrees it faded and vanished, like a bright image on the
retina after the closing of the eyes. A peculiarity of the
apparition, hardly noted at the time, but afterward recalled, was
that it showed only the upper half of the woman’s figure: nothing
was seen below the waist.

The sudden darkness was comparative, not absolute, for gradually all
objects of his environment became again visible.

In the dawn of the morning Holt found himself entering the village
at a point opposite to that at which he had left it. He soon
arrived at the house of his brother, who hardly knew him. He was
wild-eyed, haggard, and gray as a rat. Almost incoherently, he
related his night’s experience.

“Go to bed, my poor fellow,” said his brother, “and–wait. We shall
hear more of this.”

An hour later came the predestined telegram. Holt’s dwelling in one
of the suburbs of Chicago had been destroyed by fire. Her escape
cut off by the flames, his wife had appeared at an upper window, her
child in her arms. There she had stood, motionless, apparently
dazed. Just as the firemen had arrived with a ladder, the floor had
given way, and she was seen no more.

The moment of this culminating horror was eleven o’clock and twenty-
five minutes, standard time.

“Do you think, colonel, that your brave Coulter would like to put one of
his guns in here!” the general asked.

He was apparently not altogether serious; it certainly did not seem a place
where any artillerist, however brave, would like to put a gun. The colonel
thought that possibly his division commander meant good-humouredly to
intimate that Captain Coulter’s courage had been too highly extolled in a
recent conversation between them.

“General,” he replied warmly, “Coulter would like to put a gun anywhere
within reach of those people,” with a motion of his hand in the direction
of the enemy.

“It is the only place,” said the general. He was serious, then.

The place was a depression, a “notch,” in the sharp crest of a hill. It was
a pass, and through it ran a turnpike, which, reaching this highest point
in its course by a sinuous ascent through a thin forest, made a similar,
though less steep, descent toward the enemy. For a mile to the left and a
mile to the right the ridge, though occupied by Federal infantry lying
close behind the sharp crest, and appearing as if held in place by
atmospheric pressure, was inaccessible to artillery. There was no place but
the bottom of the notch, and that was barely wide enough for the roadbed.
From the Confederate side this point was commanded by two batteries posted
on a slightly lower elevation beyond a creek, and a half-mile away. All the
guns but one were masked by the trees of an orchard; that one–it seemed a
bit of impudence–was directly in front of a rather grandiose building, the
planter’s dwelling. The gun was safe enough in its exposure–but only
because the Federal infantry had been forbidden to fire. Coulter’s Notch–it
came to be called so–was not, that pleasant summer afternoon, a place where
one would “like to put a gun.”

Three or four dead horses lay there, sprawling in the road, three or four
dead men in a trim row at one side of it, and a little back, down the hill.
All but one were cavalrymen belonging to the Federal advance. One was a
quartermaster. The general commanding the division and the colonel
commanding the brigade, with their staffs and escorts, had ridden into the
notch to have a look at the enemy’s guns–which had straightway obscured
themselves in towering clouds of smoke. It was hardly profitable to be
curious about guns which had the trick of the cuttlefish, and the season of
observation was brief. At its conclusion–a short remove backward from where
it began–occurred the conversation already partly reported. “It is the only
place,” the general repeated thoughtfully, “to get at them.”

The colonel looked at him gravely. “There is room for but one gun,
General–one against twelve.”

“That is true–for only one at a time,” said the commander with something
like, yet not altogether like, a smile. “But then, your brave Coulter–a
whole battery in himself.”

The tone of irony was now unmistakable. It angered the colonel, but he did
not know what to say. The spirit of military subordination is not
favourable to retort, nor even deprecation. At this moment a young officer
of artillery came riding slowly up the road attended by his bugler. It was
Captain Coulter. He could not have been more than twenty-three years of
age. He was of medium height, but very slender and lithe, sitting his horse
with something of the air of a civilian. In face he was of a type
singularly unlike the men about him; thin, high-nosed, grey-eyed, with a
slight blonde moustache, and long, rather straggling hair of the same
colour. There was an apparent negligence in his attire. His cap was worn
with the visor a trifle askew; his coat was buttoned only at the sword
belt, showing a considerable expanse of white shirt, tolerably clean for
that stage of the campaign. But the negligence was all in his dress and
bearing; in his face was a look of intense interest in his surroundings.
His grey eyes, which seemed occasionally to strike right and left across
the landscape, like searchlights, were for the most part fixed upon the sky
beyond the Notch; until he should arrive at the summit of the road, there
was nothing else in that direction to see. As he came opposite his division
and brigade commanders at the roadside he saluted mechanically and was
about to pass on. Moved by a sudden impulse, the colonel signed him to
halt.

“Captain Coulter,” he said, “the enemy has twelve pieces over there on the
next ridge. If I rightly understand the general, he directs that you bring
up a gun and engage them.”

There was a blank silence; the general looked stolidly at a distant
regiment swarming slowly up the hill through rough undergrowth, like a torn
and draggled cloud of blue smoke; the captain appeared not to have observed
him. Presently the captain spoke, slowly and with apparent effort:–

“On the next ridge, did you say, sir? Are the guns near the house?”

“Ah, you have been over this road before! Directly at the house.”

“And it is–necessary–to engage them? The order is imperative?”

His voice was husky and broken. He was visibly paler. The colonel was
astonished and mortified. He stole a glance at the commander. In that set,
immobile face was no sign; it was as hard as bronze. A moment later the
general rode away, followed by his staff and escort. The colonel,
humiliated and indignant, was about to order Captain Coulter into arrest,
when the latter spoke a few words in a low tone to his bugler, saluted, and
rode straight forward into the Notch, where, presently, at the summit of
the road, his field-glass at his eyes, he showed against the sky, he and
his horse, sharply defined and motionless as an equestrian statue. The
bugler had dashed down the road in the opposite direction at headlong speed
and disappeared behind a wood. Presently his bugle was heard singing in the
cedars, and in an incredibly short time a single gun with its caisson, each
drawn by six horses and manned by its full complement of gunners, came
bounding and banging up the grade in a storm of dust, unlimbered under
cover, and was run forward by hand to the fatal crest among the dead
horses. A gesture of the captain’s arm, some strangely agile movements of
the men in loading, and almost before the troops along the way had ceased
to hear the rattle of the wheels, a great white cloud sprang forward down
the slope, and with a deafening report the affair at Coulter’s Notch had
begun.

It is not intended to relate in detail the progress and incidents of that
ghastly contest–a contest without vicissitudes, its alternations only
different degrees of despair. Almost at the instant when Captain Coulter’s
gun blew its challenging cloud twelve answering clouds rolled upward from
among the trees about the plantation house, a deep multiple report roared
back like a broken echo, and thenceforth to the end the Federal cannoneers
fought their hopeless battle in an atmosphere of living iron whose thoughts
were lightnings and whose deeds were death.

Unwilling to see the efforts which he could not aid and the slaughter which
he could not stay, the colonel had ascended the ridge at a point a quarter
of a mile to the left, whence the Notch, itself invisible but pushing up
successive masses of smoke, seemed the crater of a volcano in thundering
eruption. With his glass he watched the enemy’s guns, noting as he could
the effects of Coulter’s fire–if Coulter still lived to direct it. He saw
that the Federal gunners, ignoring the enemy’s pieces, whose position could
be determined by their smoke only, gave their whole attention to the one
which maintained its place in the open–the lawn in front of the house, with
which it was accurately in line. Over and about that hardy piece the shells
exploded at intervals of a few seconds. Some exploded in the house, as
could be seen by thin ascensions of smoke from the breached roof. Figures
of prostrate men and horses were plainly visible.

“If our fellows are doing such good work with a single gun,” said the
colonel to an aide who happened to be nearest, “they must be suffering like
the devil from twelve. Go down and present the commander of that piece with
my congratulations on the accuracy of his fire.”

Turning to his adjutant-general he said, “Did you observe Coulter’s damned
reluctance to obey orders?”

“Yes, sir, I did.”

“Well say nothing about it, please. I don’t think the general will care to
make any accusations. He will probably have enough to do in explaining his
own connection with this uncommon way of amusing the rearguard of a
retreating enemy.”

A young officer approached from below, climbing breathless up the
acclivity. Almost before he had saluted he gasped out:–

“Colonel, I am directed by Colonel Harmon to say that the enemy’s guns are
within easy reach of our rifles, and most of them visible from various
points along the ridge.”

The brigade commander looked at him without a trace of interest in his
expression. “I know it,” he said quietly.

The young adjutant was visibly embarrassed. “Colonel Harmon would like to
have permission to silence those guns,” he stammered.

“So should I,” the colonel said in the same tone. “Present my compliments
to Colonel Harmon and say to him that the general’s orders not to fire are
still in force.”

The adjutant saluted and retired. The colonel ground his heel into the
earth and turned to look again at the enemy’s guns.

“Colonel,” said the adjutant-general, “I don’t know that I ought to say
anything, but there is something wrong in all this. Do you happen to know
that Captain Coulter is from the South?”

“No; was he, indeed?”

“I heard that last summer the division which the general then commanded was
in the vicinity of Coulter’s home–camped there for weeks, and–”

“Listen!” said the colonel, interrupting with an upward gesture. “Do you
hear that?”

“That” was the silence of the Federal gun. The staff, the orderlies, the
lines of infantry behind the crest–all had “heard,” and were looking
curiously in the direction of the crater, whence no smoke now ascended
except desultory cloudlets from the enemy’s shells. Then came the blare of
a bugle, a faint rattle of wheels; a minute later the sharp reports
recommenced with double activity. The demolished gun had been replaced with
a sound one.

“Yes,” said the adjutant-general, resuming his narrative, “the general made
the acquaintance of Coulter’s family. There was trouble–I don’t know the
exact nature of it–something about Coulter’s wife. She is a red-hot
Secessionist, as they all are, except Coulter himself, but she is a good
wife and high-bred lady. There was a complaint to army headquarters. The
general was transferred to this division. It is odd that Coulter’s battery
should afterward have been assigned to it.”

The colonel had risen from the rock upon which they had been sitting. His
eyes were blazing with a generous indignation.

“See here, Morrison,” said he, looking his gossiping staff officer straight
in the face, “did you get that story from a gentleman or a liar?”

“I don’t want to say how I got it, Colonel, unless it is necessary” –he was
blushing a trifle– “but I’ll stake my life upon its truth in the main.”

The colonel turned toward a small knot of officers some distance away.
“Lieutenant Williams!” he shouted.

One of the officers detached himself from the group, and, coming forward,
saluted, saying: “Pardon me, Colonel, I thought you had been informed.
Williams is dead down there by the gun. What can I do, sir?”

Lieutenant Williams was the aide who had had the pleasure of conveying to
the officer in charge of the gun his brigade commander’s congratulations.

“Go,” said the colonel, “and direct the withdrawal of that gun instantly.
Hold! I’ll go myself.”

He strode down the declivity toward the rear of the Notch at a break-neck
pace, over rocks and through brambles, followed by his little retinue in
tumultuous disorder. At the foot of the declivity they mounted their
waiting animals and took to the road at a lively trot, round a bend and
into the Notch. The spectacle which they encountered there was appalling.

Within that defile, barely broad enough for a single gun, were piled the
wrecks of no fewer than four. They had noted the silencing of only the last
one disabled–there had been a lack of men to replace it quickly. The debris
lay on both sides of the road; the men had managed to keep an open way
between, through which the fifth piece was now firing. The men?–they looked
like demons of the pit! All were hatless, all stripped to the waist, their
reeking skins black with blotches of powder and spattered with gouts of
blood. They worked like madmen, with rammer and cartridge, lever and
lanyard. They set their swollen shoulders and bleeding hands against the
wheels at each recoil and heaved the heavy gun back to its place. There
were no commands; in that awful environment of whooping shot, exploding
shells, shrieking fragments of iron, and flying splinters of wood, none
could have been heard.

Officers, if officers there were, were indistinguishable; all worked
together–each while he lasted–governed by the eye. When the gun was
sponged, it was loaded; when loaded, aimed and fired. The colonel observed
something new to his military experience– something horrible and unnatural:
the gun was bleeding at the mouth! In temporary default of water, the man
sponging had dipped his sponge in a pool of his comrades’ blood. In all
this work there was no clashing; the duty of the instant was obvious. When
one fell, another, looking a trifle cleaner, seemed to rise from the earth
in the dead man’s tracks, to fall in his turn.

With the ruined guns lay the ruined men–alongside the wreckage, under it
and atop of it; and back down the road–a ghastly procession!–crept on hands
and knees such of the wounded as were able to move. The colonel–he had
compassionately sent his cavalcade to the right about–had to ride over
those who were entirely dead in order not to crush those who were partly
alive. Into that hell he tranquilly held his way, rode up alongside the
gun, and, in the obscurity of the last discharge, tapped upon the cheek the
man holding the rammer, who straightway fell, thinking himself killed. A
fiend seven times damned sprang out of the smoke to take his place, but
paused and gazed up at the mounted officer with an unearthly regard, his
teeth flashing between his black lips, his eyes, fierce and expanded,
burning like coals beneath his bloody brow. The colonel made an
authoritative gesture and pointed to the rear. The fiend bowed in token of
obedience. It was Captain Coulter.

Simultaneously with the colonel’s arresting sign silence fell upon the
whole field of action. The procession of missiles no longer streamed into
that defile of death; the enemy also had ceased firing. His army had been
gone for hours, and the commander of his rearguard, who had held his
position perilously long in hope to silence the Federal fire, at that
strange moment had silenced his own. “I was not aware of the breadth of my
authority,” thought the colonel facetiously, riding forward to the crest to
see what had really happened.

An hour later his brigade was in bivouac on the enemy’s ground, and its
idlers were examining, with something of awe, as the faithful inspect a
saint’s relics, a score of straddling dead horses and three disabled guns,
all spiked. The fallen men had been carried away; their crushed and broken
bodies would have given too great satisfaction.

Naturally, the colonel established himself and his military family in the
plantation house. It was somewhat shattered, but it was better than the
open air. The furniture was greatly deranged and broken. The walls and
ceilings were knocked away here and there, and there was a lingering odour
of powder smoke everywhere. The beds, the closets of women’s clothing, the
cupboards were not greatly damaged. The new tenants for a night made
themselves comfortable, and the practical effacement of Coulter’s battery
supplied them with an interesting topic.

During supper that evening an orderly of the escort showed himself into the
dining-room, and asked permission to speak to the colonel.

“What is it, Barbour?” said that officer pleasantly, having overheard the
request.

“Colonel, there is something wrong in the cellar; I don’t know
what–somebody there. I was down there rummaging about.”

“I will go down and see,” said a staff officer, rising.

“So will I,” the colonel said; “let the others remain. Lead on orderly.”

They took a candle from the table and descended the cellar stairs, the
orderly in visible trepidation. The candle made but a feeble light, but
presently, as they advanced, its narrow circle of illumination revealed a
human figure seated on the ground against the black stone wall which they
were skirting, its knees elevated, its head bowed sharply forward. The
face, which should have been seen in profile, was invisible, for the man
was bent so far forward that his long hair concealed it; and, strange to
relate, the beard, of a much darker hue, fell in a great tangled mass and
lay along the ground at his feet. They involuntarily paused; then the
colonel, taking the candle from the orderly’s shaking hand, approached the
man and attentively considered him. The long dark beard was the hair of a
woman–dead. The dead woman clasped in her arms a dead babe. Both were
clasped in the arms of the man, pressed against his breast, against his
lips. There was blood in the hair of the woman; there was blood in the hair
of the man. A yard away lay an infant’s foot. It was near an irregular
depression in the beaten earth which formed the cellar’s floor–a fresh
excavation with a convex bit of iron, having jagged edges, visible in one
of the sides. The colonel held the light as high as he could. The floor of
the room above was broken through, the splinters pointing at all angles
downward. “This casemate is not bomb-proof,” said the colonel gravely; it
did not occur to him that his summing up of the matter had any levity in
it.

They stood about the group awhile in silence; the staff officer was
thinking of his unfinished supper, the orderly of what might possibly be in
one of the casks on the other side of the cellar. Suddenly the man, whom
they had thought dead, raised his head and gazed tranquilly into their
faces. His complexion was coal black; the cheeks were apparently tattooed
in irregular sinuous lines from the eyes downward. The lips, too, were
white, like those of a stage negro. There was blood upon his forehead.

The staff officer drew back a pace, the orderly two paces.

“What are you doing here, my man?” said the colonel, unmoved.

“This house belongs to me, sir,” was the reply, civilly delivered.

“To you? Ah, I see! And these?”

“My wife and child. I am Captain Coulter.”

Two men sat in conversation. One was the Governor of the State. The year
was 1861; the war was on and the Governor already famous for the
intelligence and zeal with which he directed all the powers and resources
of his State to the service of the Union.

“What! you?” the Governor was saying in evident surprise–”you too want a
military commission? Really, the fifing and drumming must have effected a
profound alteration in your convictions. In my character of recruiting
sergeant I suppose I ought not to be fastidious, but”–there was a touch of
irony in his manner–”well, have you forgotten that an oath of allegiance is
required?”

“I have altered neither my convictions nor my sympathies,” said the other,
tranquilly. “While my sympathies are with the South, as you do me the honor
to recollect, I have never doubted that the North was in the right. I am a
Southerner in fact and in feeling, but it is my habit in matters of
importance to act as I think, not as I feel.”

The Governor was absently tapping his desk with a pencil; he did not
immediately reply. After a while he said: “I have heard that there are all
kinds of men in the world, so I suppose there are some like that, and
doubtless you think yourself one. I’ve known you a long time and–pardon
me–I don’t think so.”

“Then I am to understand that my application is denied?”

“Unless you can remove my belief that your Southern sympathies are in some
degree a disqualification, yes. I do not doubt your good faith, and I know
you to be abundantly fitted by intelligence and special training for the
duties of an officer. Your convictions, you say, favor the Union cause, but
I prefer a man with his heart in it. The heart is what men fight with.”

“Look here, Governor,” said the younger man, with a smile that had more
light than warmth: “I have something up my sleeve–a qualification which I
had hoped it would not be necessary to mention. A great military authority
has given a simple recipe for being a good soldier: Try always to get
yourself killed.’ It is with that purpose that I wish to enter the service.
I am not, perhaps, much of a patriot, but I wish to be dead.”

The Governor looked at him rather sharply, then a little coldly. “There is
a simpler and franker way,” he said.

“In my family, sir,” was the reply, “we do not do that–no Armisted has ever
done that.”

A long silence ensued and neither man looked at the other. Presently the
Governor lifted his eyes from the pencil, which had resumed its tapping,
and said:

“Who is she?”

“My wife.”

The Governor tossed the pencil into the desk, rose and walked two or three
times across the room. Then he turned to Armisted, who also had risen,
looked at him more coldly than before and said: “But the man–would it not
be better that he–could not the country spare him better than it can spare
you? Or are the Armisteds opposed to the unwritten law’?”

The Armisteds, apparently, could feel an insult: the face of the younger
man flushed, then paled, but he subdued himself to the service of his
purpose.

“The man’s identity is unknown to me,” he said, calmly enough.

“Pardon me,” said the Governor, with even less of visible contrition than
commonly underlies those words. After a moment’s reflection he added: “I
shall send you to-morrow a captain’s commission in the Tenth Infantry, now
at Nashville, Tennessee. Good night.”

“Good night, sir. I thank you.”

Left alone, the Governor remained for a time motionless, leaning against
his desk. Presently he shrugged his shoulders as if throwing off a burden.
“This is a bad business,” he said.

Seating himself at a reading-table before the fire, he took up the book
nearest his hand, absently opening it. His eyes fell upon this sentence:

“When God made it necessary for an unfaithful wife to lie about her husband
in justification of her own sins He had the tenderness to endow men with
the folly to believe her.”

He looked at the title of the book; it was, His Excellency the Fool.

He flung the volume into the fire.

II

How to Say What is Worth Hearing

The enemy, defeated in two days of battle at Pittsburg Landing, had
sullenly retired to Corinth, whence he had come. For manifest incompetence
Grant, whose beaten army had been saved from destruction and capture by
Buell’s soldierly activity and skill, had been relieved of his command,
which neverthless had not been given to Buell, but to Halleck, a man of
unproved powers, a theorist, sluggish, irresolute. Foot by foot his troops,
always deployed in line-of-battle to resist the enemy’s bickering
skirmishers, always entrenching against the columns that never came,
advanced across the thirty miles of forest and swamp toward an antagonist
prepared to vanish at contact, like a ghost at cock-crow. It was a campaign
of “excursions and alarums,” of reconnoissances and counter-marches, of
cross-purposes and countermanded orders. For weeks the solemn farce held
attention, luring distinguished civilians from fields of political ambition
to see what they safely could of the horrors of war. Among these was our
friend the Governor. At the headquarters of the army and in the camps of
the troops from his State he was a familiar figure, attended by the several
members of his personal staff, showily horsed, faultlessly betailored and
bravely silk-hatted. Things of charm they were, rich in suggestions of
peaceful lands beyond a sea of strife. The bedraggled soldier looked up
from his trench as they passed, leaned upon his spade and audibly damned
them to signify his sense of their ornamental irrelevance to the
austerities of his trade.

“I think, Governor,” said General Masterson one day, going into informal
session atop of his horse and throwing one leg across the pommel of his
saddle, his favorite posture–”I think I would not ride any farther in that
direction if I were you. We’ve nothing out there but a line of skirmishers.
That, I presume, is why I was directed to put these siege guns here: if the
skirmishers are driven in the enemy will die of dejection at being unable
to haul them away–they’re a trifle heavy.”

There is reason to fear that the unstrained quality of this military humor
dropped not as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath the
civilian’s silk hat. Anyhow he abated none of his dignity in recognition.

“I understand,” he said, gravely, “that some of my men are out there–a
company of the Tenth, commanded by Captain Armisted. I should like to meet
him if you do not mind.”

“He is worth meeting. But there’s a bad bit of jungle out there, and I
should advise that you leave your horse and”–with a look at the Governor’s
retinue–”your other impedimenta.”

The Governor went forward alone and on foot. In a half-hour he had pushed
through a tangled undergrowth covering a boggy soil and entered upon firm
and more open ground. Here he found a half-company of infantry lounging
behind a line of stacked rifles. The men wore their accoutrements–their
belts, cartridge-boxes, haversacks and canteens. Some lying at full length
on the dry leaves were fast asleep: others in small groups gossiped idly of
this and that; a few played at cards; none was far from the line of stacked
arms. To the civilian’s eye the scene was one of carelessness, confusion,
indifference; a soldier would have observed expectancy and readiness.

At a little distance apart an officer in fatigue uniform, armed, sat on a
fallen tree noting the approach of the visitor, to whom a sergeant, rising
from one of the groups, now came forward.

“I wish to see Captain Armisted,” said the Governor.

The sergeant eyed him narrowly, saying nothing, pointed to the officer, and
taking a rifle from one of the stacks, accompanied him.

“This man wants to see you, sir,” said the sergeant, saluting. The officer
rose.

It would have been a sharp eye that would have recognized him. His hair,
which but a few months before had been brown, was streaked with gray. His
face, tanned by exposure, was seamed as with age. A long livid scar across
the forehead marked the stroke of a sabre; one cheek was drawn and puckered
by the work of a bullet. Only a woman of the loyal North would have thought
the man handsome.

“Armisted–Captain,” said the Governor, extending his hand, “do you not know
me?”

“I know you, sir, and I salute you–as the Governor of my State.”

Lifting his right hand to the level of his eyes he threw it outward and
downward. In the code of military etiquette there is no provision for
shaking hands. That of the civilian was withdrawn. If he felt either
surprise or chagrin his face did not betray it.

“It is the hand that signed your commission,” he said.

“And it is the hand–”

The sentence remains unfinished. The sharp report of a rifle came from the
front, followed by another and another. A bullet hissed through the forest
and struck a tree near by. The men sprang from the ground and even before
the captain’s high, clear voice was done intoning the command “Atten-tion!”
had fallen into line in rear of the stacked arms. Again–and now through the
din of a crackling fusillade–sounded the strong, deliberate singsong of
authority: “Take…arms!” followed by the rattle of unlocking bayonets.

Bullets from the unseen enemy were now flying thick and fast, though mostly
well spent and emitting the humming sound which signified interference by
twigs and rotation in the plane of flight. Two or three of the men in the
line were already struck and down. A few wounded men came limping awkwardly
out of the undergrowth from the skirmish line in front; most of them did
not pause, but held their way with white faces and set teeth to the rear.

Suddenly there was a deep, jarring report in front, followed by the
startling rush of a shell, which passing overhead exploded in the edge of a
thicket, setting afire the fallen leaves. Penetrating the din–seeming to
float above it like the melody of a soaring bird–rang the slow, aspirated
monotones of the captain’s several commands, without emphasis, without
accent, musical and restful as an evensong under the harvest moon. Familiar
with this tranquilizing chant in moments of imminent peril, these raw
soldiers of less than a year’s training yielded themselves to the spell,
executing its mandates with the composure and precision of veterans. Even
the distinguished civilian behind his tree, hesitating between pride and
terror, was accessible to its charm and suasion. He was conscious of a
fortified resolution and ran away only when the skirmishers, under orders
to rally on the reserve, came out of the woods like hunted hares and formed
on the left of the stiff little line, breathing hard and thankful for the
boon of breath.

III

The Fighting of One Whose Heart Was Not in the Quarrel

Guided in his retreat by that of the fugitive wounded, the Governor
struggled bravely to the rear through the “bad bit of jungle.” He was well
winded and a trifle confused. Excepting a single rifle-shot now and again,
there was no sound of strife behind him; the enemy was pulling himself
together for a new onset against an antagonist of whose numbers and
tactical disposition he was in doubt. The fugitive felt that he would
probably be spared to his country, and only commended the arrangements of
Providence to that end, but in leaping a small brook in more open ground
one of the arrangements incurred the mischance of a disabling sprain at the
ankle. He was unable to continue his flight, for he was too fat to hop, and
after several vain attempts, causing intolerable pain, seated himself on
the earth to nurse his ignoble disability and deprecate the military
situation.

A brisk renewal of the firing broke out and stray bullets came flitting and
droning by. Then came the crash of two clean, definite volleys, followed by
a continuous rattle, through which he heard the yells and cheers of the
combatants, punctuated by thunderclaps of cannon. All this told him that
Armisted’s little command was bitterly beset and fighting at close
quarters. The wounded men whom he had distanced began to straggle by on
either hand, their numbers visibly augmented by new levies from the line.
Singly and by twos and threes, some supporting comrades more desperately
hurt than themselves, but all deaf to his appeals for assistance, they
sifted through the underbrush and disappeared. The firing was increasingly
louder and more distinct, and presently the ailing fugitives were succeeded
by men who strode with a firmer tread, occasionally facing about and
discharging their pieces, then doggedly resuming their retreat, reloading
as they walked. Two or three fell as he looked, and lay motionless. One had
enough of life left in him to make a pitiful attempt to drag himself to
cover. A passing comrade paused beside him long enough to fire, appraised
the poor devil’s disability with a look and moved sullenly on, inserting a
cartridge in his weapon.

In all this was none of the pomp of war–no hint of glory. Even in his
distress and peril the helpless civilian could not forbear to contrast it
with the gorgeous parades and reviews held in honor of himself–with the
brilliant uniforms, the music, the banners, and the marching. It was an
ugly and sickening business: to all that was artistic in his nature,
revolting, brutal, in bad taste.

“Ugh!” he grunted, shuddering–”this is beastly! Where is the charm of it
all? Where are the elevated sentiments, the devotion, the heroism, the–”

From a point somewhere near, in the direction of the pursuing enemy, rose
the clear, deliberate singsong of Captain Armisted.

“Stead-y, men–stead-y. Halt! Commence firing.”

The rattle of fewer than a score of rifles could be distinguished through
the general uproar, and again that penetrating falsetto:

“Cease fir-ing. In re-treat…maaarch!”

In a few moments this remnant had drifted slowly past the Governor, all to
the right of him as they faced in retiring, the men deployed at intervals
of a half-dozen paces. At the extreme left and a few yards behind came the
captain. The civilian called out his name, but he did not hear. A swarm of
men in gray now broke out of cover in pursuit, making directly for the spot
where the Governor lay–some accident of the ground had caused them to
converge upon that point: their line had become a crowd. In a last struggle
for life and liberty the Governor attempted to rise, and looking back the
captain saw him. Promptly, but with the same slow precision as before, he
sang his commands:

“Skirm-ish-ers, halt!” The men stopped and according to rule turned to face
the enemy.

“Ral-ly on the right!”–and they came in at a run, fixing bayonets and
forming loosely on the man at that end of the line.

“Forward…to save the Gov-ern-or of your State…doub-le quick…maaarch!”

Only one man disobeyed this astonishing command! He was dead. With a cheer
they sprang forward over the twenty or thirty paces between them and their
task. The captain having a shorter distance to go arrived
first–simultaneously with the enemy. A half-dozen hasty shots were fired at
him, and the foremost man–a fellow of heroic stature, hatless and
bare-breasted–made a vicious sweep at his head with a clubbed rifle. The
officer parried the blow at the cost of a broken arm and drove his sword to
the hilt into the giant’s breast. As the body fell the weapon was wrenched
from his hand and before he could pluck his revolver from the scabbard at
his belt another man leaped upon him like a tiger, fastening both hands
upon his throat and bearing him backward upon the prostrate Governor, still
struggling to rise. This man was promptly spitted upon the bayonet of a
Federal sergeant and his death-grip on the captain’s throat loosened by a
kick upon each wrist. When the captain had risen he was at the rear of his
men, who had all passed over and around him and were thrusting fiercely at
their more numerous but less coherent antagonists. Nearly all the rifles on
both sides were empty and in the crush there was neither time nor room to
reload. The Confederates were at a disadvantage in that most of them lacked
bayonets; they fought by bludgeoning–and a clubbed rifle is a formidable
arm. The sound of the conflict was a clatter like that of the interlocking
horns of battling bulls–now and then the pash of a crushed skull, an oath,
or a grunt caused by the impact of a rifle’s muzzle against the abdomen
transfixed by its bayonet. Through an opening made by the fall of one of
his men Captain Armisted sprang, with his dangling left arm; in his right
hand a full-charged revolver, which he fired with rapidity and terrible
effect into the thick of the gray crowd: but across the bodies of the slain
the survivors in the front were pushed forward by their comrades in the
rear till again they breasted the tireless bayonets. There were fewer
bayonets now to breast–a beggarly half-dozen, all told. A few minutes more
of this rough work–a little fighting back to back–and all would be over.

Suddenly a lively firing was heard on the right and the left: a fresh line
of Federal skirmishers came forward at a run, driving before them those
parts of the Confederate line that had been separated by staying the
advance of the centre. And behind these new and noisy combatants, at a
distance of two or three hundred yards, could be seen, indistinct among the
trees a line-of-battle!

Instinctively before retiring, the crowd in gray made a tremendous rush
upon its handful of antagonists, overwhelming them by mere momentum and,
unable to use weapons in the crush, trampled them, stamped savagely on
their limbs, their bodies, their necks, their faces; then retiring with
bloody feet across its own dead it joined the general rout and the incident
was at an end.

IV

The Great Honor The Great

The Governor, who had been unconscious, opened his eyes and stared about
him, slowly recalling the day’s events. A man in the uniform of a major was
kneeling beside him; he was a surgeon. Grouped about were the civilian
members of the Governor’s staff, their faces expressing a natural
solicitude regarding their offices. A little apart stood General Masterson
addressing another officer and gesticulating with a cigar. He was saying:
“It was the beautifulest fight ever made–by God, sir, it was great!”

The beauty and greatness were attested by a row of dead, trimly disposed,
and another of wounded, less formally placed, restless, half-naked, but
bravely bebandaged.

“How do you feel, sir?” said the surgeon. “I find no wound.”

“I think I am all right,” the patient replied, sitting up. “It is that
ankle.”

The surgeon transferred his attention to the ankle, cutting away the boot.
All eyes followed the knife.

In moving the leg a folded paper was uncovered. The patient picked it up
and carelessly opened it. It was a letter three months old, signed “Julia.”
Catching sight of his name in it he read it. It was nothing very
remarkable–merely a weak woman’s confession of unprofitable sin–the
penitence of a faithless wife deserted by her betrayer. The letter had
fallen from the pocket of Captain Armisted; the reader quietly transferred
it to his own.

An aide-de-camp rode up and dismounted. Advancing to the Governor he
saluted.

“Sir,” he said, “I am sorry to find you wounded–the Commanding General has
not been informed. He presents his compliments and I am directed to say
that he has ordered for to-morrow a grand review of the reserve corps in
your honor. I venture to add that the General’s carriage is at your service
if you are able to attend.”

“Be pleased to say to the Commanding General that I am deeply touched by
his kindness. If you have the patience to wait a few moments you shall
convey a more definite reply.”

He smiled brightly and glancing at the surgeon and his assistants added:
“At present–if you will permit an allusion to the horrors of peace–I am in
the hands of my friends.’ “

The humor of the great is infectious; all laughed who heard.

“Where is Captain Armisted?” the Governor asked, not altogether carelessly.

The surgeon looked up from his work, pointing silently to the nearest body
in the row of dead, the features discreetly covered with a handkerchief. It
was so near that the great man could have laid his hand upon it, but he did
not. He may have feared that it would bleed.

Having murdered his brother-in-law, Orrin Brower of Kentucky was a
fugitive from justice. From the county jail where he had been
confined to await his trial he had escaped by knocking down his
jailer with an iron bar, robbing him of his keys and, opening the
outer door, walking out into the night. The jailer being unarmed,
Brower got no weapon with which to defend his recovered liberty. As
soon as he was out of the town he had the folly to enter a forest;
this was many years ago, when that region was wilder than it is now.

The night was pretty dark, with neither moon nor stars visible, and
as Brower had never dwelt thereabout, and knew nothing of the lay of
the land, he was, naturally, not long in losing himself. He could
not have said if he were getting farther away from the town or going
back to it–a most important matter to Orrin Brower. He knew that
in either case a posse of citizens with a pack of bloodhounds would
soon be on his track and his chance of escape was very slender; but
he did not wish to assist in his own pursuit. Even an added hour of
freedom was worth having.

Suddenly he emerged from the forest into an old road, and there
before him saw, indistinctly, the figure of a man, motionless in the
gloom. It was too late to retreat: the fugitive felt that at the
first movement back toward the wood he would be, as he afterward
explained, “filled with buckshot.” So the two stood there like
trees, Brower nearly suffocated by the activity of his own heart;
the other–the emotions of the other are not recorded.

A moment later–it may have been an hour–the moon sailed into a
patch of unclouded sky and the hunted man saw that visible
embodiment of Law lift an arm and point significantly toward and
beyond him. He understood. Turning his back to his captor, he
walked submissively away in the direction indicated, looking to
neither the right nor the left; hardly daring to breathe, his head
and back actually aching with a prophecy of buckshot.

Brower was as courageous a criminal as ever lived to be hanged; that
was shown by the conditions of awful personal peril in which he had
coolly killed his brother-in-law. It is needless to relate them
here; they came out at his trial, and the revelation of his calmness
in confronting them came near to saving his neck. But what would
you have?–when a brave man is beaten, he submits.

So they pursued their journey jailward along the old road through
the woods. Only once did Brower venture a turn of the head: just
once, when he was in deep shadow and he knew that the other was in
moonlight, he looked backward. His captor was Burton Duff, the
jailer, as white as death and bearing upon his brow the livid mark
of the iron bar. Orrin Brower had no further curiosity.

Eventually they entered the town, which was all alight, but
deserted; only the women and children remained, and they were off
the streets. Straight toward the jail the criminal held his way.
Straight up to the main entrance he walked, laid his hand upon the
knob of the heavy iron door, pushed it open without command, entered
and found himself in the presence of a half-dozen armed men. Then
he turned. Nobody else entered.

On a table in the corridor lay the dead body of Burton Duff.

If you had seen little Jo standing at the street corner in the rain, you
would hardly have admired him. It was apparently an ordinary autumn
rainstorm, but the water which fell upon Jo (who was hardly old enough
to be either just or unjust, and so perhaps did not come under the law
of impartial distribution) appeared to have some property peculiar to
itself: one would have said it was dark and adhesive — sticky. But that
could hardly be so, even in Blackburg, where things certainly did occur
that were a good deal out of the common.

For example, ten or twelve years before, a shower of small frogs
had fallen, as is credibly attested by a contemporaneous chronicle, the
record concluding with a somewhat obscure statement to the effect that
the chronicler considered it good growing-weather for Frenchmen.

Some years later Blackburg had a fall of crimson snow; it is cold
in Blackburg when winter is on, and the snows are frequent and deep.
There can be no doubt of it — the snow in this instance was of the
colour of blood and melted into water of the same hue, if water it was,
not blood. The phenomenon had attracted wide attention, and science had
as many explanations as there were scientists who knew nothing about it.
But the men of Blackburg — men who for many years had lived right there
where the red snow fell, and might be supposed to know a good deal about
the matter — shook their heads and said something would come of it.

And something did, for the next summer was made memorable by the
prevalence of a mysterious disease — epidemic, endemic, or the Lord
knows what, though the physicians didn’t — which carried away a full
half of the population. Most of the other half carried themselves away
and were slow to return, but finally came back, and were now increasing
and multiplying as before, but Blackburg had not since been altogether
the same.

Of quite another kind, though equally ‘out of the common,’ was the
incident of Hetty Parlow’s ghost. Hetty Parlow’s maiden name had been
Brownon, and in Blackburg that meant more than one would think.

The Brownons had from time immemorial — from the very earliest of
the old colonial days — been the leading family of the town. It was the
richest and it was the best, and Blackburg would have shed the last drop
of its plebeian blood in defence of the Brownon fair fame. As few of the
family’s members had ever been known to live permanently away from
Blackburg, although most of them were educated elsewhere and nearly all
had travelled, there was quite a number of them. The men held most of
the public offices, and the women were foremost in all good works. Of
these latter, Hetty was most beloved by reason of the sweetness of her
disposition, the purity of her character and her singular personal
beauty. She married in Boston a young scapegrace named Parlow, and like
a good Brownon brought him to Blackburg forthwith and made a man and a
town councillor of him. They had a child which they named Joseph and
dearly loved, as was then the fashion among parents in all that region.
Then they died of the mysterious disorder already mentioned, and at the
age of one whole year Joseph set up as an orphan.

Unfortunately for Joseph the disease which had cut off his parents
did not stop at that; it went on and extirpated nearly the whole Brownon
contingent and its allies by marriage; and those who fled did not
return. The tradition was broken, the Brownon estates passed into alien
hands, and the only Brownons remaining in that place were underground in
Oak Hill Cemetery, where, indeed, was a colony of them powerful enough
to resist the encroachment of surrounding tribes and hold the best part
of the grounds. But about the ghost:

One night, about three years after the death of Hetty Parlow, a
number of the young people of Blackburg were passing Oak Hill Cemetery
in a wagon — if you have been there you will remember that the road to
Greenton runs alongside it on the south. They had been attending a May
Day festival at Greenton; and that serves to fix the date. Altogether
there may have been a dozen, and a jolly party they were, considering
the legacy of gloom left by the town’s recent sombre experiences. As
they passed the cemetery the man driving suddenly reined in his team
with an exclamation of surprise. It was sufficiently surprising, no
doubt, for just ahead, and almost at the roadside, though inside the
cemetery, stood the ghost of Hetty Parlow. There could be no doubt of
it, for she had been personally known to every youth and maiden in the
party. That established the thing’s identity; its character as ghost was
signified by all the customary signs — the shroud, the long, undone
hair, the ‘far-away look’ — everything. This disquieting apparition was
stretching out its arms toward the west, as if in supplication for the
evening star, which, certainly, was an alluring object, though obviously
out of reach. As they all sat silent (so the story goes) every member of
that party of merrymakers — they had merrymade on coffee and lemonade
only — distinctly heard that ghost call the name ‘Joey, Joey!’ A moment
later nothing was there. Of course one does not have to believe all that.

Now, at that moment, as was afterward ascertained, Joey was
wandering about in the sagebrush on the opposite side of the continent,
near Winnemucca, in the State of Nevada. He had been taken to that town
by some good persons distantly related to his dead father, and by them
adopted and tenderly cared for. But on that evening the poor child had
strayed from home and was lost in the desert.

His after history is involved in obscurity and has gaps which
conjecture alone can fill. It is known that he was found by a family of
Piute Indians, who kept the little wretch with them for a time and then
sold him — actually sold him for money to a woman on one of the
east-bound trains, at a station a long way from Winnemucca. The woman
professed to have made all manner of inquiries, but all in vain: so,
being childless and a widow, she adopted him herself. At this point of
his career Jo seemed to be getting a long way from the condition of
orphanage; the interposition of a multitude of parents between himself
and that woeful state promised him a long immunity from its disadvantages.

Mrs. Darnell, his newest mother, lived in Cleveland, Ohio. But her
adopted son did not long remain with her. He was seen one afternoon by a
policeman, new to that beat, deliberately toddling away from her house,
and being questioned answered that he was ‘a doin’ home.’ He must have
travelled by rail, somehow, for three days later he was in the town of
Whiteville, which, as you know, is a long way from Blackburg. His
clothing was in pretty fair condition, but he was sinfully dirty. Unable
to give any account of himself he was arrested as a vagrant and
sentenced to imprisonment in the Infants’ Sheltering Home — where he
was washed.

Jo ran away from the Infants’ Sheltering Home at Whiteville — just
took to the woods one day, and the Home knew him no more for ever.

We find him next, or rather get back to him, standing forlorn in
the cold autumn rain at a suburban street corner in Blackburg; and it
seems right to explain now that the raindrops falling upon him there
were really not dark and gummy; they only failed to make his face and
hands less so. Jo was indeed fearfully and wonderfully besmirched, as by
the hand of an artist. And the forlorn little tramp had no shoes; his
feet were bare, red, and swollen, and when he walked he limped with both
legs. As to clothing — ah, you would hardly have had the skill to name
any single garment that he wore, or say by what magic he kept it upon
him. That he was cold all over and all through did not admit of a doubt;
he knew it himself. Anyone would have been cold there that evening; but,
for that reason, no one else was there. How Jo came to be there himself,
he could not for the flickering little life of him have told, even if
gifted with a vocabulary exceeding a hundred words. From the way he
stared about him one could have seen that he had not the faintest notion
of where (nor why) he was.

Yet he was not altogether a fool in his day and generation; being
cold and hungry, and still able to walk a little by bending his knees
very much indeed and putting his feet down toes first, he decided to
enter one of the houses which flanked the street at long intervals and
looked so bright and warm. But when he attempted to act upon that very
sensible decision a burly dog came browsing out and disputed his right.
Inexpressibly frightened, and believing, no doubt (with some reason,
too), that brutes without meant brutality within, he hobbled away from
all the houses, and with grey, wet fields to right of him and grey, wet
fields to left of him — with the rain half blinding him and the night
coming in mist and darkness, held his way along the road that leads to
Greenton. That is to say, the road leads those to Greenton who succeed
in passing the Oak Hill Cemetery. A considerable number every year do not.

Jo did not.

They found him there the next morning, very wet, very cold, but no
longer hungry. He had apparently entered the cemetery gate — hoping,
perhaps, that it led to a house where there was no dog — and gone
blundering about in the darkness, falling over many a grave, no doubt,
until he had tired of it all and given up. The little body lay upon one
side, with one soiled cheek upon one soiled hand, the other hand tucked
away among the rags to make it warm, the other cheek washed clean and
white at last, as for a kiss from one of God’s great angels. It was
observed — though nothing was thought of it at the time, the body being
as yet unidentified — that the little fellow was lying upon the grave
of Hetty Parlow. The grave, however, had not opened to receive him. That
is a circumstance which, without actual irreverence, one may wish had
been ordered otherwise.

Connecting Readyville and Woodbury was a good, hard turnpike nine or ten
miles long. Readyville was an outpost of the Federal army at Murfreesboro;
Woodbury had the same relation to the Confederate army at Tullahoma. For
months after the big battle at Stone River these outposts were in constant
quarrel, most of the trouble occurring, naturally, on the turnpike
mentioned, between detachments of cavalry. Sometimes the infantry and
artillery took a hand in the game by way of showing their goodwill.

One night a squadron of Federal horse commanded by Major Seidel, a gallant
and skillful officer, moved out from Readyville on an uncommonly hazardous
enterprise requiring secrecy, caution and silence.

Passing the infantry pickets, the detachment soon afterward approached two
cavalry videttes staring hard into the darkness ahead. There should have
been three.

“Where is your other man?” said the major. “I ordered Dunning to be here
tonight.”

“He rode forward, sir,” the man replied. “There was a little firing
afterward, but it was a long way to the front.”

“It was against orders and against sense for Dunning to do that,” said the
officer, obviously vexed. “Why did he ride forward?”

“Don’t know, sir; he seemed mighty restless. Guess he was skeered.”

When this remarkable reasoner and his companion had been absorbed into the
expeditionary force, it resumed its advance. Conversation was forbidden;
arms and accountrements were denied the right to rattle. The horses
tramping was all that could be heard and the movement was slow in order to
have as little as possible of that. It was after midnight and pretty dark,
although there was a bit of moon somewhere behind the masses of cloud.

Two or three miles along, the head of the column approached a dense forest
of cedars bordering the road on both sides. The major commanded a halt by
merely halting, and, evidently himself a bit “skeered,” rode on alone to
reconnoiter. He was followed, however, by his adjutant and three troopers,
who remained a little distance behind and, unseen by him, saw all that
occurred.

After riding about a hundred yards toward the forest, the major suddenly
and sharply reined in his horse and sat motionless in the saddle. Near the
side of the road, in a little open space and hardly ten paces away, stood
the figure of a man, dimly visible and as motionless as he. The major’s
first feeling was that of satisfaction in having left his cavalcade behind;
if this were an enemy and should escape he would have little to report. The
expedition was as yet undetected.

Some dark object was dimly discernible at the man’s feet; the officer could
not make it out. With the instinct of the true cavalryman and a particular
indisposition to the discharge of firearms, he drew his saber. The man on
foot made no movement in answer to the challenge. The situation was tense
and a bit dramatic. Suddenly the moon burst through a rift in the clouds
and, himself in the shadow of a group of great oaks, the horseman saw the
footman clearly, in a patch of white light. It was Trooper Dunning, unarmed
and bareheaded. The object at his feet resolved itself into a dead horse,
and at a right angle across the animal’s neck lay a dead man, face upward
in the moonlight.

“Dunning has had the fight of his life,” thought the major, and was about
to ride forward. Dunning raised his hand, motioning him back with a gesture
of warning; then, lowering the arm, he pointed to the place where the road
lost itself in the blackness of the cedar forest.

The major understood, and turning his horse rode back to the little group
that had followed him and was already moving to the rear in fear of his
displeasure, and so returned to the head of his command.

“Dunning is just ahead there,” he said to the captain of his leading
company. “He has killed his man and will have something to report.”

Right patiently they waited, sabers drawn, but Dunning did not come. In an
hour the day broke and the whole force moved cautiously forward, its
commander not altogether satisfied with his faith in Private Dunning. The
expedition had failed, but something remained to be done.

In the little open space off the road they found the fallen horse. At a
right angle across the animal’s neck face upward, a bullet in the brain,
lay the body of Trooper Dunning, stiff as a statue, hours dead.

Examination disclosed abundant evidence that within a half hour the cedar
forest had been occupied by a strong force of Confederate infantry–an
ambuscade.

Many years ago, on my way from Hong Kong to New York, I passed a week in
San Francisco. A long time had gone by since I had been in that city,
during which my ventures in the Orient had prospered beyond my hope; I
was rich and could afford to revisit my own country to renew my
friendship with such of the companions of my youth as still lived and
remembered me with the old affection. Chief of these, I hoped, was Mohun
Dampier, an old schoolmate with whom I had held a desultory
correspondence which had long ceased, as is the way of correspondence
between men. You may have observed that the indisposition to write a
merely social letter is in the ratio of the square of the distance
between you and your correspondent. It is a law.

I remembered Dampier as a handsome, strong young fellow of
scholarly tastes, with an aversion to work and a marked indifference to
many of the things that the world cares for, including wealth, of which,
however, he had inherited enough to put him beyond the reach of want. In
his family, one of the oldest and most aristocratic in the country, it
was, I think, a matter of pride that no member of it had ever been in
trade nor politics, nor suffered any kind of distinction. Mohan was a
trifle sentimental, and had in him a singular element of superstition,
which led him to the study of all manner of occult subjects, although
his sane mental health safeguarded him against fantastic and perilous
faiths. He made daring incursions into the realm of the unreal without
renouncing his residence in the partly surveyed and charted region of
what we are pleased to call certitude.

The night of my visit to him was stormy. The Californian winter was
on, and the incessant rain splashed in the deserted streets, or, lifted
by irregular gusts of wind, was hurled against the houses with
incredible fury. With no small difficulty my cabman found the right
place, away out toward the ocean beach, in a sparsely populated suburb.
The dwelling, a rather ugly one, apparently, stood in the centre of its
grounds, which as nearly as I could make out in the gloom were destitute
of either flowers or grass. Three or four trees, writhing and moaning in
the torment of the tempest, appeared to be trying to escape from their
dismal environment and take the chance of finding a better one out at
sea. The house was a two-story brick structure with a tower, a story
higher, at one corner. In a window of that was the only visible light.
Something in the appearance of the place made me shudder, a performance
that may have been assisted by a rill of rainwater down my back as I
scuttled to cover in the doorway.

In answer to my note apprising him of my wish to call, Dampier had
written, ‘Don’t ring – open the door and come up.’ I did so. The
staircase was dimly lighted by a single gas-jet at the top of the second
flight. I managed to reach the landing without disaster and entered by
an open door into the lighted square room of the tower. Dampier came
forward in gown and slippers to receive me, giving me the greeting that
I wished, and if I had held a thought that it might more fitly have been
accorded me at the front door the first look at him dispelled any sense
of his inhospitality.

He was not the same. Hardly past middle age, he had gone grey and
had acquired a pronounced stoop. His figure was thin and angular, his
face deeply lined, his complexion dead-white, without a touch of colour.
His eyes, unnaturally large, glowed with a fire that was almost uncanny.

He seated me, proffered a cigar, and with grave and obvious
sincerity assured me of the pleasure that it gave him to meet me. Some
unimportant conversation followed, but all the while I was dominated by
a melancholy sense of the great change in him. This he must have
perceived, for he suddenly said with a bright enough smile, ‘You are
disappointed in me – /non sum qualis eram./’

I hardly knew what to reply, but managed to say: ‘Why, really, I
don’t know: your Latin is about the same.’

He brightened again. ‘No,’ he said, ‘being a dead language, it
grows in appropriateness. But please have the patience to wait: where I
am going there is perhaps a better tongue. Will you care to have a
message in it?’

The smile faded as he spoke, and as he concluded he was looking
into my eyes with a gravity that distressed me. Yet I would not
surrender myself to his mood, nor permit him to see how deeply his
prescience of death affected me.

‘I fancy that it will be long,’ I said, ‘before human speech will
cease to serve our need; and then the need, with its possibilities of
service, will have passed.’

He made no reply, and I too was silent, for the talk had taken a
dispiriting turn, yet I knew not how to give it a more agreeable
character. Suddenly, in a pause of the storm, when the dead silence was
almost startling by contrast with the previous uproar, I heard a gentle
tapping, which appeared to come from the wall behind my chair. The sound
was such as might have been made by a human hand, not as upon a door by
one asking admittance, but rather, I thought, as an agreed signal, an
assurance of someone’s presence in an adjoining room; most of us, I
fancy, have had more experience of such communications than we should
care to relate. I glanced at Dampier. If possibly there was something of
amusement in the look he did not observe it. He appeared to have
forgotten my presence, and was staring at the wall behind me with an
expression in his eyes that I am unable to name, although my memory of
it is as vivid to-day as was my sense of it then. The situation was
embarrassing! ; I rose to take my leave. At this he seemed to recover
himself.

‘Please be seated,’ he said; ‘it is nothing – no one is there.’

But the tapping was repeated, and with the same gentle, slow
insistence as before.

‘Pardon me,’ I said, ‘it is late. May I call tomorrow?’

He smiled – a little mechanically, I thought. ‘It is very delicate
of you,’ said he, ‘but quite needless. Really, this is the only room in
the tower, and no one is there. At least -’ He left the sentence
incomplete, rose, and threw up a window, the only opening in the wall
from which the sound seemed to come. ‘See.’

Not clearly knowing what else to do I followed him to the window
and looked out. A street-lamp some little distance away gave enough
light through the murk of the rain that was again falling in torrents to
make it entirely plain that ‘no one was there.’ In truth there was
nothing but the sheer blank wall of the tower.

Dampier closed the window and signing me to my seat resumed his own.

The incident was not in itself particularly mysterious; any one of
a dozen explanations was possible (though none has occurred to me), yet
it impressed me strangely, the more, perhaps, from my friend’s effort to
reassure me, which seemed to dignify it with a certain significance and
importance. He had proved that no one was there, but in that fact lay
all the interest; and he proffered no explanation. His silence was
irritating and made me resentful.

‘My good friend,’ I said, somewhat ironically, I fear, ‘I am not
disposed to question your right to harbour as many spooks as you find
agreeable to your taste and consistent with your notions of
companionship; that is no business of mine. But being just a plain man
of affairs, mostly of this world, I find spooks needless to my peace and
comfort. I am going to my hotel, where my fellow-guests are still in the
flesh.’

It was not a very civil speech, but he manifested no feeling about
it. ‘Kindly remain’, he said. ‘I am grateful for your presence here.
What you have heard to-night I believe myself to have heard twice
before. Now I /know/ it was no illusion. That is much to me – more than
you know. Have a fresh cigar and a good stock of patience while I tell
you the story.’

The rain was now falling more steadily, with a low, monotonous
susurration, interrupted at long intervals by the sudden slashing of the
boughs of the trees as the wind rose and failed. The night was well
advanced, but both sympathy and curiosity held me a willing listener to
my friend’s monologue, which I did not interrupt by a single word from
beginning to end.

‘Ten years ago,’ he said, ‘I occupied a ground-floor apartment in
one of a row of houses, all alike, away at the other end of the town, on
what we call Rincon Hill. This had been the best quarter of San
Francisco, but had fallen into neglect and decay, partly because the
primitive character of its domestic architecture no longer suited the
maturing tastes of our wealthy citizens, partly because certain public
improvements had made a wreck of it. The row of dwellings in one of
which I lived stood a little way back from the street, each having a
miniature garden, separated from its neighbours by low iron fences and
bisected with mathematical precision by a box-bordered gravel walk from
gate to door.

‘One morning as I was leaving my lodging I observed a young girl
entering the adjoining garden on the left. It was a warm day in June,
and she was lightly gowned in white. From her shoulders hung a broad
straw hat profusely decorated with flowers and wonderfully beribboned in
the fashion of the time. My attention was not long held by the exquisite
simplicity of her costume, for no one could look at her face and think
of anything earthly. Do not fear; I shall not profane it by description;
it was beautiful exceedingly. All that I had ever seen or dreamed of
loveliness was in that matchless living picture by the hand of the
Divine Artist. So deeply did it move me that, without a thought of the
impropriety of the act, I unconsciously bared my head, as a devout
Catholic or well-bred Protestant uncovers before an image of the Blessed
Virgin. The maiden showed no displeasure; she merely turned her glorious
dark eyes upon me with a look that made me catch my breath, and without
other recognition of my act passed into the house. For a moment I stood
motionless, hat in hand, painfully conscious of my rudeness, yet so
dominated by the emotion inspired by that vision of incomparable beauty
that my penitence was less poignant than it should have been. Then I
went my way, leaving my heart behind. In the natural course of things I
should probably have remained away until nightfall, but by the middle of
the afternoon I was back in the little garden, affecting an interest in
the few foolish flowers that I had never before observed. My hope was
vain; she did not appear.

‘To a night of unrest succeeded a day of expectation and
disappointment, but on the day after, as I wandered aimlessly about the
neighbourhood, I met her. Of course I did not repeat my folly of
uncovering, nor venture by even so much as too long a look to manifest
an interest in her; yet my heart was beating audibly. I trembled and
consciously coloured as she turned her big black eyes upon me with a
look of obvious recognition entirely devoid of boldness or coquetry.

‘I will not weary you with particulars; many times afterward I met
the maiden, yet never either addressed her or sought to fix her
attention. Nor did I take any action toward making her acquaintance.
Perhaps my forbearance, requiring so supreme an effort of self-denial,
will not be entirely clear to you. That I was heels over head in love is
true, but who can overcome his habit of thought, or reconstruct his
character?

‘I was what some foolish persons are pleased to call, and others,
more foolish, are pleased to be called – an aristocrat; and despite her
beauty, her charms and graces, the girl was not of my class. I had
learned her name – which it is needless to speak – and something of her
family. She was an orphan, a dependent niece of the impossible elderly
fat woman in whose lodging-house she lived. My income was small and I
lacked the talent for marrying; it is perhaps a gift. An alliance with
that family would condemn me to its manner of life, part me from my
books and studies, and in a social sense reduce me to the ranks. It is
easy to deprecate such considerations as these and I have not retained
myself for the defence. Let judgement be entered against me, but in
strict justice all my ancestors for generations should be made
co-defendants and I be permitted to plead in mitigation of punishment
the imperious mandate of heredity. To a mésalliance of that kind every
globule of my ancestral blood spoke in opposition. In brief, my tastes,
habits, instinct, with whatever of reason my love had left me – all
fought against it. Moreover, I was an irreclaimable sentimentalist, and
found a subtle charm in an impersonal and spiritual relation which
acquaintance might vulgarise and marriage would certainly dispel. No
woman, I argued, is what this lovely creature seems. Love is a delicious
dream; why should I bring about my own awakening?

‘The course dictated by all this sense and sentiment was obvious.
Honour, pride, prudence, preservation of my ideals – all commanded me to
go away, but for that I was too weak. The utmost that I could do by a
mighty effort of will was to cease meeting the girl, and that I did. I
even avoided the chance encounters of the garden, leaving my lodging
only when I knew that she had gone to her music lessons, and returning
after nightfall. Yet all the while I was as one in a trance, indulging
the most fascinating fancies and ordering my entire intellectual life in
accordance with my dream. Ah, my friend, as one whose actions have a
traceable relation to reason, you cannot know the fool’s paradise in
which I lived.

‘One evening the devil put it into my head to be an unspeakable
idiot. By apparently careless and purposeless questioning I learned from
my gossipy landlady that the young woman’s bedroom adjoined my own, a
partywall between. Yielding to a sudden and coarse impulse I gently
rapped on the wall. There was no response, naturally, but I was in no
mood to accept a rebuke. A madness was upon me and I repeated the folly,
the offence, but again ineffectually, and I had the decency to desist.

‘An hour later, while absorbed in some of my infernal studies, I
heard, or thought I heard, my signal answered. Flinging down my books I
sprang to the wall and as steadily as my beating heart would permit gave
three slow taps upon it. This time the response was distinct,
unmistakable: one, two, three – an exact repetition of my signal. That
was all I could elicit, but it was enough – too much.

‘The next evening, and for many evenings afterward, that folly went
on, I always having “the last word”. During the whole period I was
deliriously happy, but with the perversity of my nature I persevered in
my resolution not to see her. Then, as I should have expected, I got no
further answers. “She is disgusted,” I said to myself, “with what she
thinks my timidity in making no more definite advances”; and I resolved
to seek her and make her acquaintance and – what? I did not know, nor do
I now know, what might have come of it. I know only that I passed days
and days trying to meet her, and all in vain; she was invisible as well
as inaudible. I haunted the streets where we had met, but she did not
come. From my window I watched the garden in front of her house, but she
passed neither in nor out. I fell into the deepest dejection, believing
that she had gone away , yet took no steps to resolve my doubt by
inquiry of my landlady, to whom, indeed, I had taken an unconquerable
aversion from her having once spoken of the girl with less of reverence
than I thought befitting.

‘There came a fateful night. Worn out with emotion, irresolution
and despondency, I had retired early and fallen into such sleep as was
still possible to me. In the middle of the night something – some malign
power bent upon the wrecking of my peace forever – caused me to open my
eyes and sit up, wide awake and listening intently for I knew not what.
Then I thought I heard a faint tapping on the wall – the mere ghost of
the familiar signal. In a few moments it was repeated: one, two, three -
no louder than before, but addressing a sense alert and strained to
receive it. I was about to reply when the Adversary of Peace again
intervened in my affairs with a rascally suggestion of retaliation. She
had long and cruelly ignored me; now I would ignore her. Incredible
fatuity – may God forgive it! All the rest of the night I lay awake,
fortifying my obstinacy with shameless justifications and – listening.

‘Late the next morning, as I was leaving the house, I met my
landlady, entering.

‘ “Good morning, Mr. Dampier,” she said. “Have you heard the news?”

‘I replied in words that I had heard no news; in manner, that I did
not care to hear any. The manner escaped her observation.

‘ “About the sick young lady next door,” she babbled on. “What! you
did not know? Why, she has been ill for weeks. And now – “

‘I almost sprang upon her. “And now,” I cried, “now what?’

‘ “She is dead.”

‘That is not the whole story. In the middle of the night, as I
learned later, the patient, awakening from a long stupor after a week of
delirium, had asked – it was her last utterance – that her bed be moved
to the opposite side of the room. Those in attendance had thought the
request a vagary of her delirium, but had complied. And there the poor
passing soul had exerted its failing will to restore a broken connection
- a golden thread of sentiment between its innocence and a monstrous
baseness owing a blind, brutal allegiance to the Law of Self.

‘What reparation could I make? Are there masses that can be said
for the repose of souls that are abroad such nights as this – spirits
“blown about by the viewless winds” – coming in the storm and darkness
with signs and portents, hints of memory and presages of doom?

‘This is the third visitation. On the first occasion I was too
sceptical to do more than verify by natural methods the character of the
incident; on the second, I responded to the signal after it had been
several times repeated, but without result. To-night’s recurrence
completes the ‘fatal triad’ expounded by Parapelius Necromantius. There
is no more to tell.’

When Dampier had finished his story I could think of nothing
relevant that I cared to say, and to question him would have been a
hideous impertinence. I rose and bade him good night in a way to convey
to him a sense of my sympathy, which he silently acknowledged by a
pressure of the hand. That night, alone with his sorrow and remorse, he
passed into the Unknown.

Away up in the heart of the Allegheny mountains, in Pocahontas county, West
Virginia, is a beautiful little valley through which flows the east fork of
the Greenbrier river. At a point where the valley road intersects the old
Staunton and Parkersburg turnpike, a famous thoroughfare in its day, is a
post office in a farm house. The name of the place is Travelers’ Repose,
for it was once a tavern. Crowning some low hills within a stone’s throw of
the house are long lines of old Confederate fortifications, skilfully
designed and so well”preserved”that an hour’s work by a brigade would put
them into serviceable shape for the next civil war. This place had its
battle–what was called a battle in the”green and salad days”of the great
rebellion. A brigade of Federal troops, the writer’s regiment among them,
came over Cheat mountain, fifteen miles to the westward, and, stringing its
lines across the little valley, felt the enemy all day; and the enemy did a
little feeling, too. There was a great cannonading, which killed about a
dozen on each side; then, finding the place too strong for assault, the
Federals called the affair a reconnaissance in force, and burying their
dead withdrew to the more comfortable place whence they had come. Those
dead now lie in a beautiful national cemetery at Grafton, duly registered,
so far as identified, and companioned by other Federal dead gathered from
the several camps and battlefields of West Virginia. The fallen soldier
(the word”hero”appears to be a later invention) has such humble honors as
it is possible to give.

     His part in all the pomp that fills
     The circuit of the Summer hills
     Is that his grave is green.

True, more than a half of the green graves in the Grafton cemetery are
marked”Unknown,”and sometimes it occurs that one thinks of the
contradiction involved in”honoring the memory”of him of whom no memory
remains to honor; but the attempt seems to do no great harm to the living,
even to the logical.

A few hundred yards to the rear of the old Confederate earthworks is a
wooded hill. Years ago it was not wooded. Here, among the trees and in the
undergrowth, are rows of shallow depressions, discoverable by removing the
accumulated forest leaves. From some of them may be taken (and reverently
replaced) small thin slabs of the split stone of the country, with rude and
reticent inscriptions by comrades. I found only one with a date, only one
with full names of man and regiment. The entire number found was eight.

In these forgotten graves rest the Confederate dead–between eighty and one
hundred, as nearly as can be made out. Some fell in the”battle;”the
majority died of disease. Two, only two, have apparently been disinterred
for reburial at their homes. So neglected and obscure is this campo santo
that only he upon whose farm it is–the aged postmaster of Travelers’
Repose–appears to know about it. Men living within a mile have never heard
of it. Yet other men must be still living who assisted to lay these
Southern soldiers where they are, and could identify some of the graves. Is
there a man, North or South, who would begrudge the expense of giving to
these fallen brothers the tribute of green graves? One would rather not
think so. True, there are several hundreds of such places still
discoverable in the track of the great war. All the stronger is the dumb
demand–the silent plea of these fallen brothers to what is”likest God
within the soul.”

They were honest and courageous foemen, having little in common with the
political madmen who persuaded them to their doom and the literary bearers
of false witness in the aftertime. They did not live through the period of
honorable strife into the period of vilification–did not pass from the iron
age to the brazen–from the era of the sword to that of the tongue and pen.
Among them is no member of the Southern Historical Society. Their valor was
not the fury of the non-combatant; they have no voice in the thunder of the
civilians and the shouting. Not by them are impaired the dignity and
infinite pathos of the Lost Cause. Give them, these blameless gentlemen,
their rightful part in all the pomp that fills the circuit of the summer
hills.

In 1830, only a few miles away from what is now the great city of
Cincinnati, lay an immense and almost unbroken forest. The whole region
was sparsely settled by people of the frontier – restless souls who no
sooner had hewn fairly habitable homes out of the wilderness and
attained to that degree of prosperity which today we should call
indigence, than, impelled by some mysterious impulse of their nature,
they abandoned all and pushed farther westward, to encounter new perils
and privations in the effort to regain the meagre comforts which they
had voluntarily renounced. Many of them had already forsaken that region
for the remoter settlements, but among those remaining was one who had
been of those first arriving. He lived alone in a house of logs
surrounded on all sides by the great forest, of whose gloom and silence
he seemed a part, for no one had ever known him to smile nor speak a
needless word. His simple wants were supplied by the sale or barter of
skins of wild animals in the river town, for not a thing did he grow
upon the land which, if needful, he might have claimed by right of
undisturbed possession. There were evidences of “improvement” – a few
acres of ground immediately about the house had once been cleared of its
trees, the decayed stumps of which were half concealed by the new growth
that had been suffered to repair the ravage wrought by the axe.
Apparently the man’s zeal for agriculture had burned with a failing
flame, expiring in penitential ashes.

The little log house, with its chimney of sticks, its roof of
warping clapboards weighted with traversing poles and its “chinking” of
clay, had a single door and, directly opposite, a window. The latter,
however, was boarded up – nobody could remember a time when it was not.
And none knew why it was so closed; certainly not because of the
occupant’s dislike of light and air, for on those rare occasions when a
hunter had passed that lonely spot the recluse had commonly been seen
sunning himself on his doorstep if heaven had provided sunshine for his
need. I fancy there are few persons living today who ever knew the
secret of that window, but I am one, as you shall see.

The man’s name was said to be Murlock. He was apparently seventy
years old, actually about fifty. Something besides years had had a hand
in his ageing. His hair and long, full beard were white, his grey,
lustreless eyes sunken, his face singularly seamed with wrinkles which
appeared to belong to two intersecting systems. In figure he was tall
and spare, with a stoop of the shoulders – a burden bearer. I never saw
him; these particulars I learned from my grandfather, from whom also I
got the man’s story when I was a lad. He had known him when living near
by in that early day.

One day Murlock was found in his cabin, dead. It was not a time and
place for coroners and newspapers, and I suppose it was agreed that he
had died from natural causes or I should have been told, and should
remember. I know only that with what was probably a sense of the fitness
of things the body was buried near the cabin, alongside the grave of his
wife, who had preceded him by so many years that local tradition had
retained hardly a hint of her existence. That closes the final chapter
of this true story – excepting, indeed, the circumstance that many years
afterward, in company with an equally intrepid spirit, I penetrated to
the place and ventured near enough to the ruined cabin to throw a stone
against it, and ran away to avoid the ghost which every well-informed
boy thereabout knew haunted the spot. But there is an earlier chapter -
that supplied by my grandfather.

When Murlock built his cabin and began laying sturdily about with
his axe to hew out a farm – the rifle, meanwhile, his means of support -
he was young, strong and full of hope. In that eastern country whence he
came he had married, as was the fashion, a young woman in all ways
worthy of his honest devotion, who shared the dangers and privations of
his lot with a willing spirit and light heart. There is no known record
of her name; of her charms of mind and person tradition is silent and
the doubter is at liberty to entertain his doubt; but God forbid that I
should share it! Of their affection and happiness there is abundant
assurance in every added day of the man’s widowed life; for what but the
magnetism of a blessed memory could have chained that venturesome spirit
to a lot like that?

One day Murlock returned from gunning in a distant part of the
forest to find his wife prostrate with fever, and delirious. There was
no physician within miles, no neighbour; nor was she in a condition to
be left, to summon help. So he set about the task of nursing her back to
health, but at the end of the third day she fell into unconsciousness
arid so passed away, apparently, with never a gleam of returning reason.

From what we know of a nature like his we may venture to sketch in
some of the details of the outline picture drawn by my grandfather. When
convinced that she was dead, Murlock had sense enough to remember that
the dead must be prepared for burial. In performance of this sacred duty
he blundered now and again, did certain things incorrectly, and others
which he did correctly were done over and over. His occasional failures
to accomplish some simple and ordinary act filled him with astonishment,
like that of a drunken man who wonders at the suspension of familiar
natural laws. He was surprised, too, that he did not weep – surprised
and a little ashamed; surely it is unkind not to weep for the dead.
“Tomorrow,” he said aloud, “I shall have to make the coffin arid dig the
grave; and then I shall miss her, when she is no longer in sight; but
now – she is dead, of course, but it is all right – it must be all
right, somehow. Things cannot be so bad as they seem.”

He stood over the body in the fading light, adjusting the hair and
putting the finishing touches to the simple toilet, doing all
mechanically, with soulless care. And still through his consciousness
ran an undersense of conviction that all was right – that he should have
her again as before, and everything explained. He had had no experience
in grief; his capacity had not been enlarged by use. His heart could not
contain it all, nor his imagination rightly conceive it. He did not know
he was so hard struck; that knowledge would come later, and never go.
Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he
plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest
notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the
slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it
stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the
sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon,
which in crushing benumbs. We may conceive Murlock to have been that way
affected, for (and here we are upon surer ground than that of
conjecture) no sooner had he finished his pious work than, sinking into
a chair by the side of the table upon which the body lay, and noting how
white the profile showed in the deepening gloom, he laid his arms upon
the table’s edge, and dropped his face into them, tearless yet and
unutterably weary. At that moment came in through the open window a
long, wailing sound like the cry of a lost child in the far deeps of the
darkening woods! But the man did not move. Again, and nearer than
before, sounded that unearthly cry upon his failing sense. Perhaps it
was a wild beast; perhaps it was a dream. For Murlock was asleep.

Some hours later, as it afterward appeared, this unfaithful watcher
awoke and lifting his head from his arms intently listened – he knew not
why. There in the black darkness by the side of the dead, recalling all
without a shock, he strained his eyes to see – he knew not what. His
senses were all alert, his breath was suspended, his blood had stilled
its tides as if to assist the silence. Who – what had waked him, and
where was it?

Suddenly the table shook beneath his arms, and at the same moment
he heard, or fancied that he heard, a light, soft step – another -
sounds as of bare feet upon the floor!

He was terrified beyond the power to cry out or move. Perforce he
waited – waited there in the darkness through seeming centuries of such
dread as one may know, yet live to tell. He tried vainly to speak the
dead woman’s name, vainly to stretch forth his hand across the table to
learn if she were there. His throat was powerless, his arms and hands
were like lead. Then occurred something most frightful. Some heavy body
seemed hurled against the table with an impetus that pushed it against
his breast so sharply as nearly to overthrow him, and at the same
instant he heard and felt the fall of something upon the floor with so
violent a thump that the whole house was shaken by the impact. A
scuffling ensued, and a confusion of sounds impossible to describe.
Murlock had risen to his feet. Fear had by excess forfeited control of
his faculties. He flung his hands upon the table. Nothing was there!

There is a point at which terror may turn to madness; and madness
incites to action. With no definite intent, from no motive but the
wayward impulse of a madman, Murlock sprang to the wall, with a little
groping seized his loaded rifle, and without aim discharged it. By the
flash which lit up the room with a vivid illumination, he saw an
enormous panther dragging the dead woman toward the window, its teeth
fixed in her throat! Then there were darkness blacker than before, and
silence; and when he returned to consciousness the sun was high and the
wood vocal with songs of birds.

The body lay near the window, where the beast had left it when
frightened away by the flash and report of the rifle. The clothing was
deranged, the long hair in disorder, the limbs lay anyhow. From the
throat, dreadfully lacerated, had issued a pool of blood not yet
entirely coagulated. The ribbon with which he had bound the wrists was
broken; the hands were tightly clenched. Between the teeth was a
fragment of the animal’s ear.