The outlaw lifted another bucket and took off the lid. It also was full. “There are five mo',” he said—“that last one is silver an' this one—” He lifted the lid of a small cedar box. In it was a large package, wrapped in water-proof. Unravelling it, he shoved out packages of bank bills of such number and denomination as fairly made the old preacher wonder.
“How much in all, Jack?”
“A little the rise of one hundred thousand dollars.”
He pushed them back and put the buckets under their ledge of rocks. “I'd give it all just to have little Jack here agin—an'—an'—start out—a new man. This has cost me ten years of outlawry an' fo'teen bullets. Now I've got all this an'—well—a hole in the groun' an' little Jack in the hole. If you wanter preach a sermon on the folly of pilin' up money,” he went on half ironically, “here is yo' tex'. All me an' little Jack needed or cu'd use, was a few clothes, some bac'n an' coffee an' flour. Often I'd fill my pockets an' say: 'Well, I'll buy somethin' I want, an' that little Jack will want.' I'd go to town an' see it all, an' think an' puzzle an' wonder—then I'd come home with a few toys, maybe, an' bac'n an' flour an' coffee.”
“With all our money we can't buy higher than our source, an' when we go we leave even that behind,” he added.
“The world,” said the old man quaintly, “is full of folks who have got a big pocket-book an' a bac'n pedigree.”
“Do you know who this money belongs to?” he asked the outlaw.
“Every dollar of it,” said Jack Bracken. “It come from railroads, banks and express companies. I didn't feel squirmish about takin' it, for all o' them are robbers. The only diff'r'nce betwix' them an' me is that they rob a little every day, till they get their pile, an' I take mine from 'em, all at onct.”
He thought awhile, then he said: “But it must all go back to 'em, Jack. Let them answer for their own sins. Leave it here until next week—an' then we will come an' haul it fifty miles to the next town, where you can express it to them without bein' known, or havin' anybody kno' what's in the buckets till you're safe back here in this town. I'll fix it an' the note you are to write. They'll not pester you after they get their money. The crowd you've named never got hot under a gold collar. A clean shave will change you so nobody will suspect you, an' there's a good openin' in town for a blacksmith, an' you can live with me in my cabin.”
“But there's one thing I've kept back for the las',” said Jack, after they had gone into the front part of the room and sat down on the deer skins there.
“That sword there”—and he pointed to the wall where it hung.
The Bishop glanced up, and as he did so he felt a strange thrill of recognition run through him—“It belongs to Cap'n Tom,” said Jack quietly.
The old man sprang up and took it reverently, fondly down.
“Jack—” he began.
“I was at Franklin,” went on Jack proudly. “I charged with old Gen. Travis over the breastworks near the Carter House. I saw Cap'n Tom when he went under.”
“Cap'n Tom,” repeated the old man slowly.
“Cap'n Tom, yes—he saved my life once, you know. He cut me down when they were about to hang me for a spy—you heard about it?”
The Bishop nodded.
“It was his Company that caught me an' they was glad of any excuse to hang me. An' they mighty nigh done it, but Cap'n Tom came up in time to cut me down an' he said he'd make it hot for any man that teched me, that I was a square prisoner of war, an' he sent me to Johnson Island. Of course it didn't take me long to get out of that hole—I escaped.”
The Bishop was silent, looking at the sword.
“Well, at Franklin, when I seed Cap'n Tom dyin' as I tho'rt, shunned by the Yankees as a traitor——”
“As a traitor?” asked the old man hotly—“what, after Shiloh—after he give up Miss Alice for the flag he loved an' his old grand sire an' The Gaffs an' all of us that loved him—you call that a traitor?”
“You never heard,” said Jack, “how old Gen'l Travis charged the breastworks at Franklin and hit the line where Cap'n Tom's battery stood. Nine times they had charged Cap'n Tom's battery that night—nine times he stood his ground an' they melted away around it. But when he saw the line led by his own grandsire the blood in him was thicker than water and——”
“An' whut?” gasped the Bishop.
“Well, why they say it was a drunken soldier in his own battery who struck him with the heavy hilt of a sword. Any way I found the old Gen'l cryin' over him: 'My Irish Gray—my Irish Gray,' he kept sayin'. 'I might have known it was you,' and the old Gen'l charged on leaving him for dead. An' so I found him an' tuck him in my arms an' carried him to my own cabin up yonder on the mountain—carried him an'——”
“An' whut?”—asked the old man, grasping the outlaw's shoulder—“Didn't he die? We've never been able to hear from him.”
Jack shook his head. “It 'ud been better for him if he had”—and he touched his forehead significantly.
“Tell me, Jack—quick—tell it all,” exclaimed the old man, still gripping Jack's shoulder.
“There's nothin' to tell except that I kept him ever sence—here—right here for two years, with little Jack an' Ephrum, the young nigger that was his body servant—he's been our cook an' servant. He never would leave Cap'n Tom, followed me offen the field of Franklin. An' mighty fond of each other was all three of 'em.”
The old man turned pale and his voice trembled so with excitement he could hardly say:
“Where is he, Jack? My God—Cap'n Tom—he's been here all this time too—an' me awonderin'—”
“Right here, Bishop—kind an' quiet and teched in his head, where the sword-hilt crushed his skull. All these years I've cared for him—me an' Ephrum, my two boys as I called 'em—him an' little Jack. An' right here he staid contented like till little Jack died last night—then—”
“In God's name—quick!—tell me—Jack—”
“That's the worst of it—Bishop—when he found little Jack was dead he wandered off—”
“When?” almost shouted the old man.
“To-day—this even'. I have sent Eph after him—an' I hope he has found him by now an' tuck him somewhere. Eph'll never stop till he does.”
“We must find him, Jack. Cap'n Tom alive—thank God—alive, even if he is teched in his head. Oh, God, I might a knowed it—an' only to-day I was doubtin' You.”
He fell on his knees and Jack stood awed in the presence of the great emotion which shook the old man.
Finally he arose. “Come—Jack—let us go an' hunt for Cap'n Tom.”
But though they hunted until the moon went down they found no trace of him. For miles they walked, or took turn about in riding the old blind roan.
“It's no use, Bishop,” said Jack. “We will sleep a while and begin to-morrow. Besides, Eph is with him. I feel it—he'll take keer o' him.”
That is how it came that at midnight, that Saturday night, the old Bishop brought home a strange man to live in the little cabin in his yard.
That is how, a week later, all the South was stirred over the strange return of a fortune to the different corporations from which it had been taken, accompanied by a drawling note from Jack Bracken saying he returned ill-gotten gain to live a better life.
It ended laconically:
“An' maybe you'd better go an' do likewise.”
The dim starlight was shining faintly through the cracks of the outlaw's future home when the old man showed him in.
“Now, Jack,” he said, “it's nearly mornin' an' the old woman may be wild an' raise sand. But learn to lay low an' shoe hosses. She was bohn disapp'inted—maybe because she wa'n't a boy,” he whispered.
There was a whinny outside, in a small paddock, where a nearby stable stood: “That's Cap'n Tom's horse,” said the old man—“I mus' go see if he's hungry.”
“I've kept his horse these ten years, hopin' maybe he'd come back agin. It's John Paul Jones—the thoroughbred, that the old General give him.”
“I remember him,” said Jack.
The great bloodlike horse came up and rubbed his nose on the old man's shoulder.
“Hungry, John Paul?”
“It's been a job to get feed fur him, po' as I've been—but—but—he's Cap'n Tom's. You kno'—”
“An' Cap'n Tom will ride him yet,” said Jack.
“Do you believe it, Jack?” asked the old man huskily “God be praised!”
That Saturday night was one never to be forgotten by others beside Jack Bracken and the old preacher of Cottontown.
When Helen Conway, after supper, sought her drunken father and learned that he really intended to have Lily and herself go into the cotton mills, she was crushed for the first time in her life.
An hour later she sent a boy with a note to The Gaffs to Harry Travis.
He brought back an answer that made her pale with wounded love and grief. Not even Mammy Maria knew why she had crept off to bed. But in the night the old woman heard sobs from the young girl's room where she and her sister slept.
“What is it, chile?” she asked as she slipped from her own cot in the adjoining little room and went in to Helen's.
The girl had been weeping all night—she had no mother—no one to whom she could unbosom her heart—no one but the old woman who had nursed her from her infancy. This kind old creature sat on the bed and held the girl's sobbing head on her lap and stroked her cheek. She knew and understood—she asked no questions:
“It isn't that I must work in the mill,” she sobbed to the old woman—“I can do that—anything to help out—but—but—to think that Harry loves me so little as to give me up for—for—that.”
“Don't cry, chile,” said Mammy soothingly—“It ain't registered that you gwine wuck in that mill yit—I ain't made my afferdavit yit.”
“But Harry doesn't love me—Oh, he doesn't love me,” she wept. “He would not give me up for anything if he did.”
“I'm gwine give that Marse Harry a piece of my mind when I see him—see if I don't. Don't you cry, chile—hold up yo' haid an' be a Conway. Don't you ever let him know that yo' heart is bustin' for him an' fo' the year is out we'll have that same Marse Harry acrawlin' on his very marrow bones to aix our forgiveness. See if we won't.”
It was poor consolation to the romantic spirit of Helen Conway. Daylight found her still heart-broken and sobbing in the old woman's lap.
It is remarkable how small a part of our real life the world knows—how little our most intimate friends know of the secret influences which have proven to be climaxes, at the turning points of our existence.
There was no more beautiful woman in Alabama than Alice Westmore; and throughout that state, where the song birds seem to develop, naturally, along with the softness of the air, and the gleam of the sunshine, and the lullaby of the Gulf's soft breeze among the pine trees, there was no one, they say, who could sing as she sang.
And she seemed to have caught it from her native mocking-birds, so natural was it. Not when they sing in the daylight, when everything is bright and joyous and singing is so easy; but when they waken at midnight amid the arbor vitæ trees, and under the sweet, sad influence of a winter moon, pour out their half awakened notes to the star-sprays which fall in mist to blend and sparkle around the soft neck of the night.
For like the star-sprays her notes were as clear; and through them ran a sadness as of a mist of moonlight. And just as moonbeams, when they mingle with the mist, make the melancholy of night, so the memory of a dead love ran through everything Alice Westmore sang.
And this made her singing divine.
Why should it be told? What right has a blacksmith to pry into a grand piano to find out wherein the exquisite harmony of the instrument lies? Who has the right to ask the artist how he blended the colors that crowned his picture with immortality, or the poet to explain his pain in the birth of a mood which moved the world?
Born in the mountains of North Alabama, she grew up there and developed this rare voice; and when her father sent her to Italy to complete her musical education, the depth and clearness of it captured even that song nation of the world.
The great of all countries were her friends and princes sought her favors. She sang at courts and in great cathedrals, and her genius and beauty were toasts with society.
“Still, Mademoiselle will never be a great singer, perfect as her voice is,”—said her singing master to her one day—a famous Italian teacher, “until Mademoiselle has suffered. She is now rich and beautiful and happy. Go home and suffer if you would be a great singer,” he said, “for great songs come only with great suffering.”
If this were true, Alice Westmore was now, indeed, a great singer; for now had she suffered. And it was the death of a life with her when love died. For there be some with whom love is a separate life, and when love dies all that is worth living dies with it.
From childhood she and Cousin Tom—Captain Thomas Travis he lived to be—had been sweethearts. He was the grandson of Colonel Jeremiah Travis of “The Gaffs,” and Tom and Alice had grown up together. Their love was one of those earthly loves which comes now and then that we may not altogether lose our faith in heaven.
Both were of a romantic temperament with high ideals, and with keen and sensitive natures.
Their love was the poem of their lives.
And though a toast in society, and courted by the nobility of the old world, Alice Westmore remembered only a moon-lighted night when she told Cousin Tom good-bye. For though they had loved each other all their lives, they had never spoken of it before that night. To them it had been a thing too sacred to profane with ordinary words.
Thomas Travis had just graduated from West Point, and he was at home on vacation before being assigned to duty. To-night he had ridden John Paul Jones—the pick of his grandfather's stable of thoroughbreds—a present from the sturdy old horse-racing, fox-hunting gentleman to his favorite grandson for graduating first in a class of fifty-six.
How handsome he looked in his dark blue uniform! And there was the music of the crepe-myrtle in the air—the music of it, wet with the night dew—for there are flowers so delicate in their sweetness that they pass out of the realm of sight and smell, into the unheard world of rhythm. Their very existence is the poetry of perfume. And this music of the crepe-myrtle, pulsing through the shower-cooled leaves of that summer night, was accompanied by a mocking-bird from his nest in the tree.
Never did the memory of that night leave Alice Westmore. In after years it hurt her, as the dream of childhood's home with green fields about, and the old spring in the meadow, hurts the fever-stricken one dying far away from it all.
How long they sat on the rustic bench under the crepe-myrtle they did not know. At parting there was the light clasp of hands, and Cousin Tom drew her to him and put his lips reverently to hers. When he had ridden off there was a slender ring on her finger.
There was nothing in Italy that could make her forget that night, though often from her window she had looked out on Venice, moon-becalmed, while the nightingale sang from pomegranate trees in the hedgerows.
Where a woman's love is first given, that, thereafter, is her heart's sanctuary.
Alice Westmore landed at home again amid drum beats. War sweeps even sentiment from the world—sentiment that is stronger than common sense, and which moves the world.
On the retreat of the Southern army from Fort Donelson, Thomas Travis, now Captain of Artillery, followed, with Grant's army, to Pittsburgh Landing. And finding himself within a day's journey of his old home, he lost no time in slipping through the lines to see Alice, whom he had not seen since her return.
He went first to her, and the sight of his blue uniform threw Colonel Westmore into a rage.
“To march into our land in that thing and claim my daughter—” he shouted. “To join that John Brown gang of abolitionists who are trying to overrun our country! Your father was a Southern gentleman and the bosom friend of my youth, but I'll see you damned before you shall ever again come under my roof, unless you can use your pistols quicker than I can use mine.”
“Oh, Tom,” said Alice when they were alone—“how—how could you do it?”
“But it is my side,” he said quietly. “I was born, reared, educated in the love of the Union. My grandfather himself taught it to me. He fought with Jackson at New Orleans. My father died for it in Mexico. I swore fidelity to it at West Point, and the Union gave me my military education on the faith of my oath. Farragut is a Tennessean—Thomas a Virginian—and there are hundreds of others, men who love the Union more than they do their State. Alice—Alice—I do not love you less because I am true to my oath—my flag.”
“Your flag,” said Alice hotly—“your flag that would overrun our country and kill our people? It can never be my flag!”
She had never been angry before in all her life, but now the hot blood of her Southern clime and ancestry surged in her cheeks. She arose with a dignity she had never before imagined, even, with Cousin Tom. “You will choose between us now,” she said.
“Alice—surely you will not put me to that test. I will go—” he said, rising. “Some day, if I live, you can tell me to come back to you without sacrificing my conscience and my word of honor—my sacred oath—write me and—and—I will come.”
And that is the way it ended—in tears for both.
Thomas Travis had always been his grandsire's favorite. His other grandson, Richard Travis, was away in Europe, where he had gone as soon as rumors of the war began to be heard.
That night the old man did not even speak to him. He could not. Alone in his room, he walked the floor all night in deep sorrow and thought.
He loved Thomas Travis as he did no other living being, and when morning came his great nature shook with contending emotions. It ended in the grandson receiving this note, a few minutes before he rode away:
“All my life I taught you to love the Union which I helped to make, with my blood in war and my brains in peace. I gave it my beloved boy—your father's life—in Mexico. We buried him in its flag. I sent you to West Point and made you swear to defend that flag with your life. How now can I ask you to repudiate your oath and turn your back on your rearing?
“Believing as I do in the right of the State first and the Union afterwards, I had hoped you might see it differently. But who, but God, controls the course of an honest mind?
“Go, my son—I shall never see you again. But I know you, my son, and I shall die knowing you did what you thought was right.”
The young man wept when he read this—he was neither too old nor too hardened for tears—and when he rode away, from the ridge of the Mountain he looked down again—the last time, on all that had been his life's happiness.
It was an hour afterwards when the old General called in his overseer.
“Watts,” he said, “in the accursed war which is about to wreck the South and which will eventually end in our going back into the Union as a subdued province and under the heel of our former slaves, there will be many changes. I, myself, will not live to see it. I have two grandsons, as you know, Tom and Richard. Richard is in Europe; he went there following Alice Westmore, and is going to stay, till this fight is over. Now, I have added a codicil to my will and I wish you to hear it.”
He took up a lengthy document and read the last codicil:
“Since the above will was written and acknowledged, leaving The Gaffs to be equally divided between my two grandsons, Thomas and Richard Travis, my country has been precipitated into the horrors of Civil War. In view of this I hereby change my will as above and give and bequeath The Gaffs to that one of my grandsons who shall fight—it matters not to me on which side—so that he fights. For The Gaffs shall never go to a Dominecker. If both fight and survive the war, it shall be divided equally between them as above expressed. If one be killed it shall go to the survivor. If both be killed it shall be sold and the money appropriated among those of my slaves who have been faithful to me to the end, one-fifth being set aside for my faithful overseer, Hillard Watts.”
In the panel of the wall he opened a small secret drawer, zinc-lined, and put the will in it.
“It shall remain there unchanged,” he said, “and only you and I shall know where it is. If I die suddenly, let it remain until after the war, and then do as you think best.”
The real heroes of the war have not been decorated yet. They have not even been pensioned, for many of them lie in forgotten graves, and those who do not are not the kind to clamor for honors or emoluments.
On the last Great Day, what a strange awakening for decorations there will be, if such be in store for the just and the brave: Private soldiers, blue and gray, arising from neglected graves with tattered clothes and unmarked brows. Scouts who rode, with stolid faces set, into Death's grim door and died knowing they went out unremembered. Spies, hung like common thieves at the end of a rope—hung, though the bravest of the brave.
Privates, freezing, starving, wounded, dying,—unloved, unsoothed, unpitied—giving their life with a last smile in the joy of martyrdom. Women, North, whose silent tears for husbands who never came back and sons who died of shell and fever, make a tiara around the head of our reunited country. Women, South, glorious Rachels, weeping for children who are not and with brave hearts working amid desolate homes, the star and inspiration of a rebuilded land. Slaves, faithfully guarding and working while their masters went to the front, filling the granaries that the war might go on—faithful to their trust though its success meant their slavery—faithful and true.
O Southland of mine, be gentle, be just to these simple people, for they also were faithful.
Among the heroic things the four years of the American Civil War brought out, the story of Captain Thomas Travis deserves to rank with the greatest of them.
The love of Thomas Travis for the preacher-overseer was the result of a life of devotion on the part of the old man for the boy he had reared. Orphaned as he was early in life, Thomas Travis looked up to the overseer of his grandfather's plantation as a model of all that was great and good.
Tom and Alice,—on the neighboring plantations—ran wild over the place and rode their ponies always on the track of the overseer. He taught them to ride, to trap the rabbit, to boat on the beautiful river. He knew the birds and the trees and all the wild things of Nature, and Tom and Alice were his children.
As they grew up before him, it became the dream of the preacher-overseer to see his two pets married. Imagine his sorrow when the war fell like a thunderbolt out of a harvest sky and, among the thousand of other wrecked dreams, went the dream of the overseer.
The rest is soon told: After the battle of Shiloh, Hillard Watts, Chief of Johnston's scouts, was captured and sent to Camp Chase. Scarcely had he arrived before orders came that twelve prisoners should be shot, by lot, in retaliation for the same number of Federal prisoners which had been executed, it was said, unjustly, by Confederates. The overseer drew one of the black balls. Then happened one of those acts of heroism which now and then occur, perhaps, to redeem war of the base and bloody.
On the morning before the execution, at daylight, Thomas Travis arrived and made arrangements to save his friend at the risk of his own life and reputation. It was a desperate chance and he acted quickly. For Hillard Watts went out a free man dressed in the blue uniform of the Captain of Artillery.
The interposition of the great-hearted Lincoln alone saved the young officer from being shot.
The yellow military order bearing the words of the martyred President is preserved to-day in the library of The Gaffs:
“I present this young man as a Christmas gift to my old friend, his grandsire, Colonel Jeremiah Travis. The man who could fight his guns as he did at Shiloh, and could offer to die for a friend, is good enough to receive pardon, for anything he may have done or may do, from
Afterwards came Franklin and the news that Captain Tom had been killed.
But General Jeremiah Travis could not keep out of the war; for toward the last, when Hood's army marched into Tennessee the Confederacy called for everything—even old age.
And so there rode out of the gates of The Gaffs a white-haired old man, who sat his superb horse well. He was followed by a negro on a mule.
They were General Jeremiah Travis and his body-servant, Bisco.
“I have come to fight for my state,” said General Travis to the Confederate General.
“An' I am gwine to take keer of old marster suh,” said Bisco as he stuck to his saddle girth.
It was the middle of the afternoon of the last day of November—and also the last day of many a gallant life—when Hood's tired army marched over the brow of the high ridge of hills that looked down on the town of Franklin, in front of which, from railroad to river, behind a long semicircular breastwork lay Schofield's determined army. It was a beautiful view, and as plain as looking down from the gallery into the pit of an amphitheatre.
Just below them lay the little town in a valley, admirably situated for defense, surrounded as it was on three sides by the bend of a small river, the further banks of which were of solid rocks rising above the town. On the highest of these bluffs—Roper's Knob—across and behind the town, directly overlooking it and grimly facing Hood's army two miles away, was a federal fort capped with mighty guns, ready to hurl their shells over the town at the gray lines beyond. From the high ridge where Hood's army stood the ground gradually rolled to the river. A railroad ran through a valley in the ridge to the right of the Confederates, spun along on the banks of the river past the town and crossed it in the heart of the bend to the left of the federal fort. From that railroad on the Confederate right, in front and clear around the town, past an old gin house which stood out clear and distinct in the November sunlight—on past the Carter House, to the extreme left bend of the river on the left—in short, from river to river again and entirely inclosing the town and facing the enemy—ran the newly made and hastily thrown-up breastworks of the federal army, the men rested and ready for battle.
There stands to-day, as it stood then, in front of the town of Franklin, on the highest point of the ridge, a large linden tree, now showing the effects of age. It was half-past three o'clock in the afternoon, when General Hood rode unattended to that tree, threw the stump of the leg that was shot off at Chickamauga over the pommel of his saddle, drew out his field glasses and sat looking for a long time across the valley at the enemy's position.
Strange to say, on the high river bluff beyond the town, amid the guns of the fort, also with field glass in hand anxiously watching the confederates, stood the federal general. A sharp-shooter in either line could have killed the commanding general in the other. And now that prophesying silence which always seems to precede a battle was afloat in the air. In the hollow of its stillness it seemed as if one could hear the ticking of the death-watch of eternity. But presently it was broken by the soft strains of music which floated up from the town below. It was the federal band playing “Just Before The Battle, Mother.”
The men in gray on the hill and the men in blue in the valley listened, and then each one mentally followed the tune with silent words, and not without a bit of moisture in their eyes.
Suddenly Hood closed his glasses with that nervous jerk which was a habit with him, straightened himself in the saddle and, riding back to General Stewart, said simply: “We will make the fight, General Stewart.”
Stewart pressed his General's hand, wheeled and formed his corps on the right. Cheatham formed his on the left. A gun—and but few were used by Hood in the fight for fear of killing the women and children in the town—echoed from the ridge. It was the signal for the battle to begin. The heavy columns moved down the side of the ridge, the brigades marching in echelon.
At the sound of the gun, the federal army, some of whom were on duty, but the larger number loitering around at rest, or engaged in preparing their evening meal, sprang noiselessly to their places behind the breastworks, while hurried whispers of command ran down the line.
General Travis had been given a place of honor on General Hood's staff. He insisted on going into the ranks, but his commander had said: “Stay with me, I shall need you elsewhere.” And so the old man sat his horse silently watching the army forming and marching down. But directly, as a Mississippi regiment passed by, he noticed at the head of one of the companies an old man, almost as old as himself, his clothes torn, and ragged from long marching; shoeless, his feet tied up in sack-cloth and his old slouch hat aflop over his ears. But he did not complain, he stood erect, and gamely led his men into battle. As the company halted for a moment, General Travis rode up to the old man whose thin clothes could not keep him from shivering in the now chill air of late afternoon, for it was then past four o'clock, saluted him and said:
“Captain, will you do me the favor to pull off this boot?” Withdrawing his boot from the stirrup and thrusting it towards the old man, the latter looked at him a moment in surprise but sheathed his sword and complied with the request. “And now the other one?” said Travis as he turned his horse around. This, too, was pulled off.
“Just put them on, Captain, if you please,” said the rider. “I am mounted and do not need them as much as you do?” and before the gallant old Captain could refuse, he rode away for duty—in his stocking feet!
And now the battle began in earnest.
The confederates came on in splendid form. On the extreme right, Forrest's cavalry rested on the river; then Stewart's corps of Loring, Walthall, French, from right to left in the order named. On the left Cheatham's corps, of Cleburne, Brown, Bate, and Walker. Behind Cheatham marched Johnston's and Clayton's brigade for support, thirty thousand and more of men, in solid lines, bands playing and flags fluttering in the afternoon wind.
Nor had the federals been idle. Behind the breastworks lay the second and third divisions of the 23rd Corps, commanded in person by the gallant General J. D. Cox. From the railroad on the left to the Carter's Creek pike on the right, the brigades of these divisions stood as follows: Henderson's, Casement's, Reilly's, Strickland's, Moore's. And from the right of the Carter's Creek pike to the river lay Kimball's first division of the Fourth Corps. In front of the breastworks, across the Columbia pike, General Wagner, commanding the second division of the Fourth Corps, had thrown forward the two brigades of Bradley and Lane to check the first assault of the confederates, while Opdyck's brigade of the same division was held in the town as a reserve. Seven splendid batteries growled along the line of breastworks, and showed their teeth to the advancing foe, while three more were caged in the fort above and beyond the town.
Never did men march with cooler courage on more formidable lines of defense. Never did men wait an attack with cooler courage. Breastworks with abatis in front through which the mouth of cannon gaped; artillery and infantry on the right to enfilade; siege guns in the fort high above all, to sweep and annihilate.
Schofield, born general that he was, simply lay in a rock-circled, earth-circled, water-circled, iron-and-steel-circled cage, bayonet and flame tipped, proof against the armies of the world!
But Hood's brave army never hesitated, never doubted.
Even in the matter of where to throw up his breastworks, Schofield never erred. On a beautiful and seemingly level plain like this, a less able general might have thrown them up anywhere, just so that they encircled the town and ran from river to river.
But Schofield took no chances. His quick eye detected that even in apparent level plains there are slight undulations. And so, following a gentle rise all the way round, just on its top he threw up his breastworks. So that, besides the ditch and the abatis, there was a slight depression in his immediate front, open and clear, but so situated that on the gentle slope in front, down which the confederates must charge, the background of the slope brought them in bold relief—gray targets for the guns. On that background the hare would loom up as big as the hound.
There were really two federal lines, an outer and an inner one. The outer one consisted of Bradley's and Lane's brigades which had retired from Spring Hill before the Confederate army, and had been ordered to halt in front of the breastworks to check the advance of the army. They were instructed to fire and then fall back to the breastworks, if stubbornly charged by greatly their superiors in numbers. They fired, but, true to American ideas, they disliked to retreat. When forced to do so, they were swept away with the enemy on their very heels and as they rushed in over the last line at the breastworks on the Columbia pike the eager boys in gray rushed over with them, swept away portions of Reilly's and Strickland's troops, and bayoneted those that remained.
It was then that Schofield's heart sank as he looked down from the guns of the fort. But Cox had the forethought to place Opdyck's two thousand men in reserve at this very point. These sprang gallantly forward and restored the line.
They saved the Union army!
The battle was now raging all around the line. There was a succession of yells, a rattle, a shock and a roar, as brigade after brigade struck the breastworks, only to be hurled back again or melt and die away in the trenches amid the abatis. Clear around the line of breastworks it rolled, at intervals, like a magazine of powder flashing before it explodes, then the roar and upheaval, followed anon and anon by another. The ground was soon shingled with dead men in gray, while down in the ditches or hugging the bloody sides of the breastworks right under the guns, thousands, more fortunate or daring than their comrades, lay, thrusting and being thrust, shooting and being shot. And there they staid throughout the fight—not strong enough to climb over, and yet all the guns of the federal army could not drive them away. Many a gray regiment planted its battle-flag on the breastworks and then hugged those sides of death in its efforts to keep it there, as bees cling around the body of their queen.
“I have the honor to forward to the War Department nine stands of colors,” writes General Cox to General Geo. L. Thomas; “these flags with eleven others were captured by the Twenty-third Army Corps along the parapets.”
Could Bonaparte's army have planted more on the ramparts of Mount St. Jean?
The sun had not set; yet the black smoke of battle had set it before its time. God had ordained otherwise; but man, in his fury had shut out the light of heaven against the decree of God, just as, equally against His decree, he has now busily engaged in blotting out many a brother's bright life, before the decree of its sunset. Again and again and again, from four till midnight—eight butchering hours—the heart of the South was hurled against those bastions of steel and flame, only to be pierced with ball and bayonet.
And for every heart that was pierced there broke a dozen more in the shade of the southern palmetto, or in the shadow of the northern pine. After nineteen hundred years of light and learning, what a scientific nation of heart-stabbers and brother-murderers we Christians are!
It was now that the genius of the confederate cavalry leader, Forrest, asserted itself. With nearly ten thousand of his intrepid cavalry-men, born in the saddle, who carried rifles and shot as they charged, and whom with wonderful genius their leader had trained to dismount at a moment's notice and fight as infantry—he lay on the extreme right between the river and the railroad. In a moment he saw his opportunity, and rode furiously to Hood's headquarters. He found the General sitting on a flat rock, a smouldering fire by his side, half way down the valley, at the Winstead House, intently watching the progress of the battle.
“Let me go at 'em, General,” shouted Forrest in his bluff way, “and I'll flank the federal army out of its position in fifteen minutes.”
“No! Sir,” shouted back Hood. “Charge them out! charge them out!”
Forrest turned and rode back with an oath of disgust. Years afterwards, Colonel John McGavock, whose fine plantation lay within the federal lines and who had ample opportunity for observation, says that when in the early evening a brigade of Forrest's cavalry deployed across the river as if opening the way for the confederate infantry to attack the federal army in flank and rear, hasty preparations were made by the federal army for retreat. And thus was Forrest's military wisdom corroborated. “Let me flank them out,” was military genius. “No, charge them out,” was dare-devil blundering!
The shock, the shout and the roar continued. The flash from the guns could now plainly be seen as night descended. So continuous was the play of flame around the entire breastwork that it looked to the general at headquarters like a circle of prairie fire, leaping up at intervals along the breastworks, higher and higher where the batteries were ablaze.
In a black-locust thicket, just to the right of the Columbia turnpike and near the Carter House, with abatis in front, the strongest of the batteries had been placed. It mowed down everything in front. Seeing it, General Hood turned to General Travis and said: “General, my compliments to General Cleburne, and say to him I desire that battery at his hands.”
The old man wheeled and was gone. In a moment, it seemed, the black smoke of battle engulfed him. Cleburne's command was just in front of the old gin house, forming for another charge. The dead lay in heaps in front. They almost filled the ditch around the breastworks. But the command, terribly cut to pieces, was forming as coolly as if on dress parade. Above them floated a peculiar flag, a field of deep blue on which was a crescent moon and stars. It was Cleburne's battle flag and well the enemy knew it. They had seen and felt it at Shiloh, Murfreesboro, Ringgold Gap, Atlanta. “I tip my hat to that flag,” said General Sherman years after the war. “Whenever my men saw it they knew it meant fight.”
As the old man rode up, the division charged. Carried away in the excitement he charged with them, guiding his horse by the flashes of the guns. As they rushed on the breastworks a gray figure on a chestnut horse rode diagonally across the front of the moving column at the enemy's gun. The horse went down within fifty yards of the breastwork. The rider arose, waved his sword and led his men on foot to the very ramparts. Then he staggered and fell, pierced with a dozen minie balls. It was Cleburne, the peerless field-marshal of confederate brigade commanders; the genius to infantry as Forrest was to cavalry. His corps was swept back by the terrible fire, nearly half of them dead or wounded.
Ten minutes afterwards General Travis stood before General Hood.
“General Cleburne is dead, General”—was all he said. Hood did not turn his head.
“My compliments to General Adams,” he said, “and tell him I ask that battery at his hands.”
Again the old man wheeled and was gone. Again he rode into the black night and the blacker smoke of battle.
General Adams's brigade was in Walthall's division. As the aged courier rode up, Adams was just charging. Again the old man was swept away with the charge. They struck the breastworks where Stile's and Casement's brigades lay on the extreme left of the federal army. “Their officers showed heroic examples and self-sacrifice,” wrote General Cox in his official report, “riding up to our lines in advance of their men, cheering them on. One officer, Adams, was shot down upon the parapet itself, his horse falling across the breastworks.” Casement himself, touched by the splendor of his ride, had cotton brought from the old gin house and placed under the dying soldier's head. “You are too brave a man to die,” said Casement tenderly; “I wish that I could save you.”
“'Tis the fate of a soldier to die for his country,” smiled the dying soldier. Then he passed away.
It was a half hour before the old man reached Hood's headquarters again, his black horse wet with sweat.
“General Adams lies in front of the breastworks—dead! His horse half over it—dead”—was all he said.
Hood turned pale. His eyes flashed with indignant grief.
“Then tell General Gist,” he exclaimed. The old man vanished again and rode once more into the smoke and the night. Gist's brigade led the front line of Brown's division, Cheatham's corps. It was on the left, fronting Strickland's and Moore's, on the breastworks. The Twenty-fourth South Carolina Infantry was in front of the charging lines. “In passing from the left to the right of the regiment,” writes Colonel Ellison Capers commanding the South Carolina regiment above named, “the General (Gist) waved his hat to us, expressed his pride and confidence in the Twenty-fourth and rode away in the smoke of battle never more to be seen by the men he had commanded on so many fields. His horse was shot, and, dismounting, he was leading the right of the brigade when he fell, pierced through the heart. On pressed the charging lines of the brigade, driving the advance force of the enemy pell-mell into a locust abatis where many were captured and sent to the rear; others were wounded by the fire of their own men. This abatis was a formidable and fearful obstruction. The entire brigade was arrested by it. But Gist's and Gordon's brigade charged on and reached the ditch, mounted the works and met the enemy in close combat. The colors of the Twenty-fourth were planted and defended on the parapet, and the enemy retired in our front some distance, but soon rallied and came back in turn to charge us. He never succeeded in retaking the line we held. Torn and exhausted, deprived of every general officer and nearly every field officer, the division had only strength enough left to hold its position.”
The charging became intermittent. Then out of the night, as Hood sat listening, again came the old man, his face as white as his long hair, his horse once black, now white with foam.
“General Gist too, is dead,” he said sadly.
“Tell Granbury, Carter, Strahl—General! Throw them in there and capture that battery and break that line.”
The old man vanished once more and rode into the shock and shout of battle.
General Strahl was leading his brigade again against the breastworks. “Strahl's and Carter's brigade came gallantly to the assistance of Gist's and Gordon's” runs the confederate report sent to Richmond, “but the enemy's fire from the houses in the rear of the line and from guns posted on the far side of the river so as to enfilade the field, tore their line to pieces before it reached the locust abatis.”
General Carter fell mortally wounded before reaching the breastworks, but General Strahl reached the ditch, filled with dead and dying men, though his entire staff had been killed. Here he stood with only two men around him, Cunningham and Brown. “Keep firing” said Strahl as he stood on the bodies of the dead and passed up guns to the two privates. The next instant Brown fell heavily; he, too, was dead.
“What shall I do, General?” asked Cunningham.
“Keep firing,” said Strahl.
Again Cunningham fired. “Pass me another gun, General,” said Cunningham. There was no answer—the general was dead.
Not a hundred yards away lay General Granbury, dead. He died leading the brave Texans to the works.
To the commanding General it seemed an age before the old man returned. Then he saw him in the darkness afar off, before he reached the headquarters. The General thought of death on his pale horse and shivered.
“Granbury, Carter, Strahl—all dead, General,” he said. “Colonels command divisions, Captains are commanding brigades.”
“How does Cheatham estimate his loss?” asked the General.
“At half his command killed and wounded,” said the old soldier sadly.
“My God!—my God!—this awful, awful day!” cried Hood.
There was a moment's silence and then: “General?” It came from General Travis.
The General looked up.
“May I lead the Tennessee troops in—I have led them often before.”
Hood thought a moment, then nodded and the horse and the rider were gone. It was late—nearly midnight. The firing on both sides had nearly ceased,—only a desultory rattling—the boom of a gun now and then. But O, the agony, the death, the wild confusion! This was something like the babel that greeted the old soldier's ears as he rode forward:
“The Fourth Mississippi—where is the Fourth Mississippi?” “Here is the Fortieth Alabama's standard—rally men to your standard!” “Where is General Cleburne, men? Who has seen General Cleburne?” “Up, boys, and let us at 'em agin! Damn 'em, they've wounded me an' I want to kill some more!”
“Water!—water—for God's sake give us water!” This came from a pile of wounded men just under the guns on the Columbia pike. It came from a sixteen year old boy in blue. Four dead comrades lay across him.
“And this is the curse of it,” said General Travis, as he rode among the men.
But suddenly amid the smoke and confusion, the soldiers saw what many thought was an apparition—an old, old warrior, on a horse with black mane and tail and fiery eyes, but elsewhere covered with white sweat and pale as the horse of death. The rider's face too, was deadly white, but his keen eyes blazed with the fire of many generations of battle-loving ancestors.
The soldiers flocked round him, half doubting, half believing. The terrible ordeal of that bloody night's work; the poignant grief from beholding the death and wounds of friends and brothers; the weird, uncanny groans of the dying upon the sulphurous-smelling night air; the doubt, uncertainty, and yet, through it all, the bitter realization that all was in vain, had shocked, benumbed, unsettled the nerves of the stoutest; and many of them scarcely knew whether they were really alive, confronting in the weird hours of the night ditches of blood and breastworks of death, or were really dead—dead from concussion, from shot or shell, and were now wandering on a spirit battle-field till some soul-leader should lead them away.
And so, half dazed and half dreaming, and yet half alive to its realization, they flocked around the old warrior, and they would not have been at all surprised had he told them he came from another world.
Some thought of Mars. Some thought of death and his white horse. Some felt of the animal's mane and touched his streaming flanks and cordy legs to see if it were really a horse and not an apparition, while “What is it?” and “Who is he?” was whispered down the lines.
Then the old rider spoke for the first time, and said simply:
“Men, I have come to lead you in.”
A mighty shout came up. “It's General Lee!—he has come to lead us in,” they shouted.
“No, no, men,”—said the old warrior quickly. “I am not General Lee. But I have led Southern troops before. I was at New Orleans. I was—”
“It's Ole Hick'ry—by the eternal!—Ole Hick'ry—and he's come back to life to lead us!” shouted a big fellow as he threw his hat in the air.
“Ole Hickory! Ole Hickory!” echoed and re-echoed down the lines, till it reached the ears of the dying soldiers in the ditch itself, and many a poor, brave fellow, as his heart strings snapped and the broken chord gurgled out into the dying moan, saw amid the blaze and light of the new life, the apparition turn into a reality and a smile of exquisite satisfaction was forever frozen on his face in the mould of death, as he whispered with his last breath:
“It's Old Hickory—my General—I have fought a good fight—I come!”
Then the old warrior smiled—a smile of simple beauty and grandeur, of keen satisfaction that such an honor should have been paid him, and he tried to speak to correct them. But they shouted the more, and drowned out his voice and would not have it otherwise. Despairing, he rode to the front and drew his long, heavy, old, revolutionary sword. It flashed in the air. It came to “attention”—and then a dead silence followed.
“Men,” he said, “this is the sword of John Sevier, the rebel that led us up the sides of King's Mountain when every tyrant gun that belched in our face called us—rebels!”
“Old Hick'ry! Old Hick'ry, forever!” came back from the lines.
Again the old sword came to attention, and again a deep hush followed.
“Men,” he said, drawing a huge rifled barreled pistol—“this is the pistol of Andrew Jackson, the rebel that whipped the British at New Orleans when every gun that thundered in his face, meant death to liberty!”
“Old Hickory! Old Hickory!!” came back in a frenzy of excitement.
Again the old sword came to attention—again, the silence. Then the old man fairly stood erect in his stirrups—he grew six inches taller and straighter and the black horse reared and rose as if to give emphasis to his rider's assertion:
“Men,” he shouted, “rebel is the name that tyranny gives to patriotism! And now, let us fight, as our fore-fathers fought, for our state, our homes and our firesides!” And then clear and distinct there rang out on the night air, a queer old continental command:
“Fix, pieces!”
They did not know what this meant at first. But some old men in the line happened to remember and fixed their bayonets. Then there was clatter and clank down the entire line as others imitated their examples.
“Poise, fo'k!” rang out again more queerly still. The old men who remembered brought their guns to the proper position. “Right shoulder, fo'k!”—followed. Then, “Forward, March!” came back and they moved straight at the batteries—now silent—and straight at the breastworks, more silent still. Proudly, superbly, they came on, with not a shout or shot—a chained line with links of steel—a moving mass with one heart—and that heart,—victory.
On they came at the breastworks, walking over the dead who lay so thick they could step from body to body as they marched. On they came, following the old cocked hat that had once held bloodier breastworks against as stubborn foe.
On—on—they came, expecting every moment to see a flame of fire run round the breastworks, a furnace of flame leap up from the batteries, and then—victory or death—behind old Hickory! Either was honor enough!
And now they were within fifty feet of the breastworks, moving as if on dress parade. The guns must thunder now or never! One step more—then, an electrical bolt shot through every nerve as the old man wheeled his horse and again rang out that queer old continental command, right in the mouth of the enemy's ditch, right in the teeth of his guns:
“Charge, pieces!”
It was Tom Travis who commanded the guns where the Columbia Pike met the breastworks at the terrible deadly locust thicket. All night he had stood at his post and stopped nine desperate charges. All night in the flash and roar and the strange uncanny smell of blood and black powder smoke, he had stood among the dead and dying calling stubbornly, monotonously:
“Ready!”
“Aim!”
“Fire!”
And now it was nearly midnight and Schofield, finding the enemy checked, was withdrawing on Nashville.
Tom Travis thought the battle was over, but in the glare and flash he looked and saw another column, ghostly gray in the starlight, moving stubbornly at his guns.
“Ready!” he shouted as his gunners sprang again to their pieces.
On came the column—beautifully on. How it thrilled him to see them! How it hurt to think they were his people!
“Aim!” he thundered again, and then as he looked through the gray torch made, starlighted night, he quailed in a cold sickening fear, for the old man who led them on was his grandsire, the man whom of all on earth he loved and revered the most.
Eight guns, with grim muzzles trained on the old rider and his charging column, waited but for the captain's word to hurl their double-shotted canisters of death.
And Tom Travis, in the agony of it, stood, sword in hand, stricken in dumbness and doubt. On came the column, the old warrior leading them—on and:—
“The command—the command! Give it to us, Captain,” shouted the gunners.
“Cease firing!”
The gunners dropped their lanyards with an oath, trained machines that they were.
It was a drunken German who brought a heavy sword-hilt down on the young officer's head with:
“You damned traitor!”
A gleam of gun and bayonet leaped in the misty light in front, from shoulder to breast—a rock wall, tipped with steel swept crushingly forward over the trenches over the breastworks.
Under the guns, senseless, his skull crushed, an upturned face stopped the old warrior. Down from his horse he came with a weak, hysterical sob.
“O Tom—Tom, I might have known it was you—my gallant, noble boy—my Irish Gray!”
He kissed, as he thought, the dead face, and went on with his men.
It was just midnight.
“At midnight, all being quiet in front, in accordance with orders from the commanding Generals,” writes General J. D. Cox in his official report, “I withdrew my command to the north bank of the river.”
“The battle closed about twelve o'clock at night,” wrote General Hood, “when the enemy retreated rapidly on Nashville, leaving the dead and wounded in our hands. We captured about a thousand prisoners and several stands of colors.”
Was this a coincidence—or as some think—did the boys in blue retreat before they would fire on an old Continental and the spirit of '76?
An hour afterwards a negro was sadly leading a tired old man on a superb horse back to headquarters, and as the rider's head sank on his breast he said:
“Lead me, Bisco, I'm too weak to guide my horse. Nothing is left now but the curse of it.”
And O, the curse of it!
Fifty-seven Union dead beside the wounded, in the little front yard of the Carter House, alone. And they lay around the breastworks from river to river, a chain of dead and dying. In front of the breastworks was another chain—a wider and thicker one. It also ran from river to river, but was gray instead of blue. Chains are made of links, and the full measure of “the curse of it” may have been seen if one could have looked over the land that night and have seen where the dead links lying there were joined to live under the roof trees of far away homes.
But here is the tale of a severed link: About two o'clock lights began to flash about over the battle-field—they were hunting for the dead and wounded. Among these, three had come out from the Carter House. A father, son and daughter; each carried a lantern and as they passed they flashed their lights in the faces of the dead.
“May we look for brother?” asked the young girl, of an officer. “We hope he is not here but fear he is. He has not been home for two years, being stationed in another state. But we heard he could not resist the temptation to come home again and joined General Bate's brigade. And O, we fear he has been killed for he would surely have been home before this.”
They separated, each looking for “brother.” Directly the father heard the daughter cry out. It was in the old orchard near the house. On reaching the spot she was seated on the ground, holding the head of her dying brother in her lap and sobbing:
“Brother's come home! Brother's come home!” Alas, she meant—gone home!
“Captain Carter, on staff duty with Tyler's brigade,” writes General Wm. B. Bate in his official report, “fell mortally wounded near the works of the enemy and almost at the door of his father's home. His gallantry I witnessed with much pride, as I had done on other fields, and here take pleasure in mentioning it especially.”
The next morning in the first light of the first day of that month celebrated as the birth-month of Him who declared long ago that war should cease, amid the dead and dying of both armies, stood two objects which should one day be carved in marble—One, to represent the intrepid bravery of the South, the other, the cool courage of the North, and both—“the curse of it.”
The first was a splendid war-horse, dead, but lying face forward, half over the federal breastworks. It was the horse of General Adams.
The other was a Union soldier—the last silent sentinel of Schofield's army. He stood behind a small locust tree, just in front of the Carter House gate. He had drawn his iron ram-rod which rested under his right arm pit, supporting that side. His gun, with butt on the ground at his left, rested with muzzle against his left side, supporting it. A cartridge, half bitten off was in his mouth. He leaned heavily against the small tree in front. He was quite dead, a minie ball through his head; but thus propped he stood, the wonder of many eyes, the last sentinel of the terrible night battle.
But another severed link cut deepest of all. In the realization of her love for Thomas Travis, Alice Westmore's heart died within her. In the years which followed, if suffering could make her a great singer, now indeed was she great.