III
The busy troopers in blue scurried about the long lines of stamping
horses. Men crooked their backs and perspired in order to rub with
cloths or bunches of grass these slim equine legs, upon whose splendid
machinery they depended so greatly. The lips of the horses were still
wet and frothy from the steel bars which had wrenched at their mouths
all day. Over their backs and about their noses sped the talk of the men.
"Moind where yer plug is steppin', Finerty! Keep 'im aff me!"
"An ould elephant! He shtrides like a school-house."
"Bill's little mar'--she was plum beat when she come in with Crawford's
crowd."
"Crawford's the hardest-ridin' cavalryman in the army. An' he don't use
up a horse, neither--much. They stay fresh when the others are most
a-droppin'."
"Finerty, will yeh moind that cow a yours?"
Amid a bustle of gossip and banter, the horses retained their air of
solemn rumination, twisting their lower jaws from side to side and
sometimes rubbing noses dreamfully.
Over in front of the barn three troopers sat talking comfortably. Their
carbines were leaned against the wall. At their side and outlined in the
black of the open door stood a sentry, his weapon resting in the hollow
of his arm. Four horses, saddled and accoutred, were conferring with
their heads close together. The four bridle-reins were flung over a post.
Upon the calm green of the land, typical in every way of peace, the
hues of war brought thither by the troops shone strangely. Mary, gazing
curiously, did not feel that she was contemplating a familiar scene. It
was no longer the home acres. The new blue, steel, and faded yellow
thoroughly dominated the old green and brown. She could hear the voices
of the men, and it seemed from their tone that they had camped there for
years. Everything with them was usual. They had taken possession of the
landscape in such a way that even the old marks appeared strange and
formidable to the girl.
Mary had intended to go and tell the commander in blue that her mother
did not wish his men to use the barn at all, but she paused when she
heard him speak to the sergeant. She thought she perceived then that it
mattered little to him what her mother wished, and that an objection by
her or by anybody would be futile. She saw the soldiers conduct the
prisoner in grey into the barn, and for a long time she watched the
three chatting guards and the pondering sentry. Upon her mind in
desolate weight was the recollection of the three men in the feed-box.
It seemed to her that in a case of this description it was her duty to
be a heroine. In all the stories she had read when at boarding-school in
Pennsylvania, the girl characters, confronted with such difficulties,
invariably did hair-breadth things. True, they were usually bent upon
rescuing and recovering their lovers, and neither the calm man in grey,
nor any of the three in the feed-box, was lover of hers, but then a real
heroine would not pause over this minor question. Plainly a heroine
would take measures to rescue the four men. If she did not at least make
the attempt, she would be false to those carefully constructed ideals
which were the accumulation of years of dreaming.
But the situation puzzled her. There was the barn with only one door,
and with four armed troopers in front of this door, one of them with his
back to the rest of the world, engaged, no doubt, in a steadfast
contemplation of the calm man, and incidentally, of the feed-box. She
knew, too, that even if she should open the kitchen door, three heads,
and perhaps four, would turn casually in her direction. Their ears were
real ears.
Heroines, she knew, conducted these matters with infinite precision and
despatch. They severed the hero's bonds, cried a dramatic sentence, and
stood between him and his enemies until he had run far enough away. She
saw well, however, that even should she achieve all things up to the
point where she might take glorious stand between the escaping and the
pursuers, those grim troopers in blue would not pause. They would run
around her, make a circuit. One by one she saw the gorgeous contrivances
and expedients of fiction fall before the plain, homely difficulties of
this situation. They were of no service. Sadly, ruefully, she thought of
the calm man and of the contents of the feed-box.
The sum of her invention was that she could sally forth to the
commander of the blue cavalry, and confessing to him that there were
three of her friends and his enemies secreted in the feed-box, pray him
to let them depart unmolested. But she was beginning to believe the old
greybeard to be a bear. It was hardly probable that he would give this
plan his support. It was more probable that he and some of his men would
at once descend upon the feed-box and confiscate her three friends. The
difficulty with her idea was that she could not learn its value without
trying it, and then in case of failure it would be too late for remedies
and other plans. She reflected that war made men very unreasonable.
All that she could do was to stand at the window and mournfully regard
the barn. She admitted this to herself with a sense of deep humiliation.
She was not, then, made of that fine stuff, that mental satin, which
enabled some other beings to be of such mighty service to the
distressed. She was defeated by a barn with one door, by four men with
eight eyes and eight ears--trivialities that would not impede the real
heroine.
The vivid white light of broad day began slowly to fade. Tones of grey
came upon the fields, and the shadows were of lead. In this more sombre
atmosphere the fires built by the troops down in the far end of the
orchard grew more brilliant, becoming spots of crimson colour in the
dark grove.
The girl heard a fretting voice from her mother's room. "Mary!" She
hastily obeyed the call. She perceived that she had quite forgotten her
mother's existence in this time of excitement.
The elder woman still lay upon the bed. Her face was flushed and
perspiration stood amid new wrinkles upon her forehead. Weaving wild
glances from side to side, she began to whimper. "Oh, I'm just sick--I'm
just sick! Have those men gone yet? Have they gone?"
The girl smoothed a pillow carefully for her mother's head. "No, ma.
They're here yet. But they haven't hurt anything--it doesn't seem. Will
I get you something to eat?"
Her mother gestured her away with the impatience of the ill. "No--no--
just don't bother me. My head is splitting, and you know very well that
nothing can be done for me when I get one of these spells. It's trouble--
that's what makes them. When are those men going? Look here, don't you
go 'way. You stick close to the house now."
"I'll stay right here," said the girl. She sat in the gloom and
listened to her mother's incessant moaning. When she attempted to move,
her mother cried out at her. When she desired to ask if she might try to
alleviate the pain, she was interrupted shortly. Somehow her sitting in
passive silence within hearing of this illness seemed to contribute to
her mother's relief. She assumed a posture of submission. Sometimes her
mother projected questions concerning the local condition, and although
she laboured to be graphic and at the same time soothing, unalarming,
her form of reply was always displeasing to the sick woman, and brought
forth ejaculations of angry impatience.
Eventually the woman slept in the manner of one worn from terrible
labour. The girl went slowly and softly to the kitchen. When she looked
from the window, she saw the four soldiers still at the barn door. In
the west, the sky was yellow. Some tree-trunks intersecting it appeared
black as streaks of ink. Soldiers hovered in blue clouds about the
bright splendour of the fires in the orchard. There were glimmers of
steel.
The girl sat in the new gloom of the kitchen and watched. The soldiers
lit a lantern and hung it in the barn. Its rays made the form of the
sentry seem gigantic. Horses whinnied from the orchard. There was a low
hum of human voices. Sometimes small detachments of troopers rode past
the front of the house. The girl heard the abrupt calls of sentries. She
fetched some food and ate it from her hand, standing by the window. She
was so afraid that something would occur that she barely left her post
for an instant.
A picture of the interior of the barn hung vividly in her mind. She
recalled the knot-holes in the boards at the rear, but she admitted that
the prisoners could not escape through them. She remembered some
inadequacies of the roof, but these also counted for nothing. When
confronting the problem, she felt her ambitions, her ideals tumbling
headlong like cottages of straw.
Once she felt that she had decided to reconnoitre at any rate. It was
night; the lantern at the barn and the camp fires made everything
without their circle into masses of heavy mystic blackness. She took two
steps toward the door. But there she paused. Innumerable possibilities
of danger had assailed her mind. She returned to the window and stood
wavering. At last, she went swiftly to the door, opened it, and slid
noiselessly into the darkness.
For a moment she regarded the shadows. Down in the orchard the camp
fires of the troops appeared precisely like a great painting, all in
reds upon a black cloth. The voices of the troopers still hummed. The
girl started slowly off in the opposite direction. Her eyes were fixed
in a stare; she studied the darkness in front for a moment, before she
ventured upon a forward step. Unconsciously, her throat was arranged for
a sudden shrill scream. High in the tree-branches she could hear the
voice of the wind, a melody of the night, low and sad, the plaint of an
endless, incommunicable sorrow. Her own distress, the plight of the men
in grey--these near matters as well as all she had known or imagined of
grief--everything was expressed in this soft mourning of the wind in the
trees. At first she felt like weeping. This sound told her of human
impotency and doom. Then later the trees and the wind breathed strength
to her, sang of sacrifice, of dauntless effort, of hard carven faces
that did not blanch when Duty came at midnight or at noon.
She turned often to scan the shadowy figures that moved from time to
time in the light at the barn door. Once she trod upon a stick, and it
flopped, crackling in the intolerable manner of all sticks. At this
noise, however, the guards at the barn made no sign. Finally, she was
where she could see the knot-holes in the rear of the structure gleaming
like pieces of metal from the effect of the light within. Scarcely
breathing in her excitement she glided close and applied an eye to a
knot-hole. She had barely achieved one glance at the interior before she
sprang back shuddering.
For the unconscious and cheerful sentry at the door was swearing away
in flaming sentences, heaping one gorgeous oath upon another, making a
conflagration of his description of his troop-horse. "Why," he was
declaring to the calm prisoner in grey, "you ain't got a horse in your
hull ---- army that can run forty rod with that there little mar'!"
As in the outer darkness Mary cautiously returned to the knot-hole, the
three guards in front suddenly called in low tones: "S-s-s-h!" "Quit,
Pete; here comes the lieutenant." The sentry had apparently been about
to resume his declamation, but at these warnings he suddenly posed in a
soldierly manner.
A tall and lean officer with a smooth face entered the barn. The sentry
saluted primly. The officer flashed a comprehensive glance about him.
"Everything all right?"
"All right, sir."
This officer had eyes like the points of stilettos. The lines from his
nose to the corners of his mouth were deep, and gave him a slightly
disagreeable aspect, but somewhere in his face there was a quality of
singular thoughtfulness, as of the absorbed student dealing in
generalities, which was utterly in opposition to the rapacious keenness
of the eyes which saw everything.
Suddenly he lifted a long finger and pointed. "What's that?"
"That? That's a feed-box, I suppose."
"What's in it?"
"I don't know. I--"
"You ought to know," said the officer sharply. He walked over to the
feed-box and flung up the lid. With a sweeping gesture he reached down
and scooped a handful of feed. "You ought to know what's in everything
when you have prisoners in your care," he added, scowling.
During the time of this incident, the girl had nearly swooned. Her
hands searched weakly over the boards for something to which to cling.
With the pallor of the dying she had watched the downward sweep of the
officer's arm, which after all had only brought forth a handful of feed.
The result was a stupefaction of her mind. She was astonished out of her
senses at this spectacle of three large men metamorphosed into a handful
of feed.
