"Not a word."
"Just what I thought. Wherever a man goes he finds selfishness."
They turned into the northern road, clattered past the cornfield and the church. Gard continued: "One of those Dunker farmers lives up here half a mile. I want his clothes, his expression, and his language, and his theology—the whole outfit."
"Going to steal his most intimate properties. Blanked immoral thing to do. All right, go on."
"About copy. Anything that goes south of the Potomac will be apt to mean a rope for me, and New York papers go south of the Potomac."
"Egotistic still, but perspicuous. I see."
"It's between me and you and the Dunker."
"And that's a pretty combination!"
"Not a sign, Jack."
"Not a misplaced comma, not an agitated phrase shall betray the mystery of this night. Now, then. Why?"
"Oh, you! You'll have to make me up."
"And the Dunker?"
"They're all anti-slavery and non-combatant. Besides, I picked an acquaintance with this one yesterday."
The small, plain, whitewashed house, with its whitewashed barn, stood close to the road and shining in the moonlit dusk. An elderly man, with smooth, gray hair falling to his collar, shaven lips, and spade-shaped beard, came to the door and stood there, mild, quiet, round-shouldered.
"Can we put up our horses here and pass the night?"
He nodded and turned back into the room without speaking, but left the door open.
They spent the evening talking with him, studying the while his outward make-up, his manner and language, critically. He had a certain gentle suggestiveness of his own, and before they parted for the night brought out a pair of saddle-bags and a large bundle of printed sheets.
"De is tracts," he said, gently, "of religion."
"Good," said Mavering. "An ungodly army, no doubt. Oh, I beg pardon!"
"De is not of de doctrine of the bruderen only. De is Christian."
"Oh, well, Captain Windham was bred a Catholic. He'll distribute them, and read some himself."
The quiet elder seemed to have taken a shy liking for Gard. He touched him softly on the back of the hand.
"I hope you are a good man. I hope you are not to die in what you do."
At daybreak they rode away westward, making a wide circuit of the village, Gard with his lips shaven, hair parted and plastered down, and wearing the gentle old brother's waistcoat that buttoned to the throat, his dingy black coat and wide-brimmed hat. His saddle was primitive, his bridle-bit rusty. Mavering's experienced eye judged that he looked his part. Even the whiteness of his lips, where the razor had gone, added to the impression of calm and austere withdrawal. Was it some lingering touch of the monastery? One does not live without result during the formative years, secluded between cool, white walls, among unworldly lives. Mavering called him "the anchorite," and swore the phrase still truthful.
A glimpse of the Potomac between the hills; a troop of Union cavalry breaking camp in a meadow; clank and rattle of side-arms; men gathering and packing kit; men sitting listlessly in their saddles; a mounted officer in the middle of the road, looking down towards the Potomac—large, square-shouldered, and massive. He turned in his saddle.
"Hold on here! Halt!"
Gard pulled up and looked at him under drooped eyelids.
Mavering pushed between.
"Without circumlocution, Captain Map, you're precisely what I'm looking for. Cavalry's the thing for a correspondent. I have an unsubstantial vision I used to know you in Hamilton."
"That's all right. Who's this?"
"Oh, that's a Dunker brother. Got some blanked tracts in his saddle-bags. Let me join you?"
"Is—is he?" His horse blocked the road aggressively. He kept his eyes on Gard.
"Well"—Mavering turned and surveyed the "make-up" critically, complacently—"I slept with him at his old man's last night. If a twenty-minute Dutch prayer is any proof, he's still in the faith of his fathers. I'm leaving you here, brother."
Gard nodded, rode into the ditch with a face conscientiously blank, mild, non-combatant, and passed the obstacle. Morgan watched him ambling leisurely away in the sunlight and the dust. Mavering waited some time.
"Look here, captain. Did I understand you laconically to insinuate I might accompany and chronicle your glories?"
Morgan wheeled his horse slowly.
"I guess so. Yes, you may."
The road went around a sandy hummock and disappeared. Gard did not look back. Beyond the strip of the Potomac the Virginia hills were blue and cool and peaceful.
Mavering meditated a disclosure. Still, whether Morgan had recognized Gard, or for a time had suspected it was he, or had only acted on constitutional aggressiveness, it did not seem likely in any case that he would chatter about the matter. He could hold his tongue without being warned. "It's none of my funeral." Gard had precisely stated what he wanted. Mavering remarked:
"That Dunker had a pass, if you'd asked for it—permit to scatter his tracts wherever he liked."
But Morgan did not comment. Mavering thought him likely to be dull company, and set himself to making other acquaintance and finding entertainment with experienced skill.
The troop filed out, formed loosely, and clattered south. It occurred to Mavering that they might overtake Gard. Down through the narrow valleys they came at length to the willow-fringed bank of the river, but he saw the broad-brimmed hat nowhere. It seemed to have vanished from the earth. Mavering concluded his connection with it over. New pastures of interest were before him. The nomad owns no real estate in any one else. His soul knows not title or tenure. He will be folding his tent at daybreak and leaving the night's oasis, and the sands drift over his footprints.
The war suited Morgan. It was action in simple terms of purpose and accomplishment. It was sensible and genuine. There no man's complicated trivial tastes and instincts needed to be bothered about; he carried them at his own risk and exercise; they were not in the army lists. Orders were not disguised in requests and reasons. The gradations and shades, the cautions and compunctions, the ten thousand odds and ends of ten thousand years' accumulation for the most part were swept away in bulk. Men battled with men and threw off their shamming benevolences, showed what they were, and enjoyed themselves in the burly lust of struggle. The life satisfied at least half of him to completion.
A fortnight before the late battle he had seen Helen on the steps of the wooden warehouse, that they used as a hospital and filled from wall to wall with blanketed cots. She had looked pale, tired, and smiling. After a moment she had flushed and broken away angrily. And that night he had lain twenty miles off with his troop in the open, a lot of blinking, idiotic stars over him, and could not sleep, and damned in disciplined order the ways of woman and the impalpable barriers around them—Thaddeus Bourn, for keeping his skinny corpse unburied beyond the limit of reason or utility; and Gard Windham to the discomfort of the blistered stars.
There appeared to be another part of him unsatisfied—hungry, rather, and hot on the scent.
Had he not picked out Nellie long ago for her pluck and sense, and a certain tingling challenge in her—a girl fit for his hand to hold? She suited him, fitted one part as a cavalry raid fitted another. Very well. He would take her. Any one that stood in the way would be hurt, very likely; at any rate, taught better. The squire and Thaddeus Bourn might be as futile as they chose, it being no business of his. They had had their day. Let them keep out of the path of men who had still to live. It was no great matter what they did. But when it came to Nell's mooning about the organ-player, with his theories and whining tunes, and getting sick in hospitals—She said that she hadn't seen him since winter, which wasn't likely. She had turned red, and broken away at that. Hospital nurse! What a fool thing for Nell to do! Mrs. Mavering was with her, and Jack Mavering travelled with Windham. The Maverings might have made up. Ten to one there was a game on, and they fancied Morgan Map was that kind of a fool.
The war filled a man's hands. Morgan felt that the germ of his own career lay in these days, and other business ought to wait if it could. Windham must be off scouting in that Dunker outfit, and might by good luck get himself hung, only he was too clever.
Morgan turned in his saddle and looked back for Mavering, who rode in the middle of the cantering troop, and seemed to enjoy himself.
On Saturday, the end of the week after Antietam, the troop rode westward along the line of a railroad. The Confederates had been at it, some of them within a day or two, for the burned ties were still smoking. They had bent the rails by heating them in the middle and twisting them around the trees. At regular intervals were black circles of the fires and charred ends of ties. It was too systematic for guerillas.
"There," said a lieutenant to Mavering, "you can write your papers there are twenty or thirty miles of this, all done under the nose of the chief."
"A vigilant, aggressive man, the latter, I infer, is your matured opinion," said Mavering; and the lieutenant replied, dryly, "Something like that."
The sandy road-bed curved through woods that must have been straggling and discouraged in their green days, and now were black and smoking, for the abandoned fires had spread. The wind mourned through the desolation, and blew thin veils and streamers of smoke overhead.
"And no doubt Captain Map's opinion coincides with yours in favor of activity and vigilance."
"He's a hot-and-cool man to ride with. You might write that we're on a line which was burned through yesterday or the day before, and just now a lot of hostile cavalry are cavorting round the neighborhood somewhere, likely to drop on us any moment. We're out to find about this line and that cavalry, and get back if we can."
"I notice—a point that strikes an artist in realistic description inevitably—that Captain Map is calmly reading something as he rides. Such things illustrate."
"His nerve? Oh, that's all right."
"But the artist's imagination proceeds. Reading what? A newspaper? No, a written sheet, which the wind blows about in his hands. Perhaps instructions—or, better, a love letter."
"Likely enough."
"They do more than illustrate. They fill in the foreground with humanity against the background of nature and event. You are an army officer, lieutenant, unlessoned, uninspired, unreflective, and may take the word of one old in variety, that the gist of life lies in men and women rather than in event, and that men and women are more worthy of consideration in persons than in masses. The play is played in the foreground, and there is the plot and the crisis and the solution; there the action lies; practicable scenery left and right, practicable mob of courtiers, soldiers, or peasants in the rear—and—"
Morgan pulled in his horse and flung up his hand, the white paper fluttering in it. The troop halted short, plunging and scattering sand.
"Enter," observed Mavering, "a practicable enemy, lieutenant, from a practicable wood."
A quarter of a mile away the sandy road-bed curved and disappeared. A large body of cavalry swung around it. Morgan shaded his eyes with his hand and the fluttering paper. The troops sat stiff and intent. He shouted and wheeled his horse.
"Left wheel! Hard!"
Whirl, plunge, and shout. Mavering's horse slipped on the sand-bank, lost footing, and fell headlong into the ditch. Mavering struck the opposite bank in a heap, unlimbered, and came down with his feet across the horse's neck. He seized the bridle, jumped, and tugged. The troop was two hundred feet away, the squadron a thousand. A white paper, blown by the wind, danced and twinkled along in the sand. He tugged harder, leaning forward, and caught the paper, thinking, "That's Map's love-letter," heaved and shouted. The horse half rose; something went "thud" in his neck; he screamed and dropped again. Another bullet whined by Mavering's ear. He dropped the bridle—"I'm done, then"—and saw Morgan two hundred feet away, his horse halted and half turned, lifting his revolver again. Mavering dove down the sand, lay still in the ditch, and heard the third bullet whine close by, an inch from his ear, then the swift flight of Morgan's horse and the coming thunder of the squadron.
"Blanked if I don't read his blanked letter! What in—'Pass man wearing loose black clothes, broad, stiff-brimmed hat, shaven lips, black beard, smooth hair, of sect called Dunkers, carrying saddle-bags, riding bay horse with white forefoot, through all Union lines—bears important information, give all facilities, forward to Washington, signed—' And no signature."
But the rattle and roar were at hand, and the sense of a thousand horsemen about to charge into the small of his back. He thought, "I'll be searched in a minute," swept a handful of sand over the paper, clambered up the bank and sat on the burned turf above, hugging his angular knees. The head horseman pulled to the right and shouted.
"Follow 'em half a mile, Cary, and wait there."
The bulk of the squadron swept on.
"Search that man, you there! Pull that paper out of the sand."
Mavering groaned disgustedly. Two men were up the bank, feeling him all over with skilled precision. The colonel pulled his chin-whisker over the mysterious writing. "What's all this?" Mavering sat down again and brushed the sand from his trousers and long black coat-tails. His hat lay in the ditch. The troop remaining gathered in a semicircle, the colonel and Mavering in the centre, with ditch and the prostrate kicking horse between, practicable scenery of a September sky and burned woods around.
"I don't know, colonel," said Mavering, in solemn and rhythmic bass, "but I judge it's a job put up on you by the recondite and taciturn captain of the troop lately departed. He appeared to drop it with a policy and plugged at me with a revolver when I picked it up."
"You hid it, sir"—sharply.
"So I did. The truth is ever beautiful. He plugged my horse. Supposing he meant that for you, I'm not backing his game to-day. It's too deep for me, anyhow."
A young officer broke in at the colonel's elbow.
"Dunker? We passed that man Monday up by the river, colonel. He was scattering tracts."
"Did? Here, then—Martinsburg, or further up! Go hard. Now, then, who are you?"
"Correspondent. You've got my credentials with the rest of the loot, of which you might lend me a dollar and a half and return the note-book containing a half-written but masterly article on—"
"Note-book? Article? Very good. Do for a Richmond paper. Credentials? Where—Oh!"
"Sign it J.R. Mavering, and tell 'em the price is forty dollars."
The colonel was a small man, high-voiced, quick-eyed, but not without a certain cheerfulness. He glanced up from the papers with an appreciative twinkle. The men slouched easily in their saddles. The horses stamped and shifted.
"Here! Give these back to him."
"Don't we take him, colonel?"
"No. What for? Give him back everything. All ready! Forward! Wait!" He pulled up suddenly.
"Mr. Mavering." The little colonel was dignified.
Mavering pocketed his property calmly, as if in the common flux of things, the flowing change of time, scene, and event, it was not strange, whatever went and came, or however suddenly. Anyway, this world was a fleeting show, an incessant comedy without plot.
"Sir."
"Such Northern newspapers as yours, which have—in the past, at least—been inclined to criticise the unprovoked invasion of Virginia, it is desired by the authorities that such newspapers should be treated with consideration. You follow me, sir?"
"With strict attention." Mavering leaned forward, his hands on the burned turf. His feet dangled against the bank.
"Distinguished consideration. You will mention that attitude, no doubt."
"No doubt at all."
"Good-morning, sir."
"Good-morning, colonel."
The troop departed with crowded thud of hoofs and scatter of sand.
Mavering watched them out of sight, then slid down the bank and picked up his hat. He lifted the head of the prostrate horse, but the eyes were dull, the throat full of blood; unbuckled the bridle and slung it over his arm. The long, yellow level of the road-bed to the nearest curves was empty in both directions. He was quite alone in the desolation. He muttered and hummed in profoundest bass. "Singular game—'Plaidie to the angry airt'—recondite, astrological. Make a note of it; cavalry officers as a class are eccentric and deep. It's not my funeral. It appears to be the anchorite's. 'The brightest jewel in my crown'"—He crossed the road-bed, picked his way eastward into the woods, long-stepping, bridle on arm, gaunt and black, over the black ground among the gaunt, black stumps of the charred trees—"Wad be my queen."
The Shenandoah goes by the eastern edge of the wide valley, murmuring its own musical name, "Shenandoah," as if it knew the word's significance in glory, tumult, and pain, but had taught all three to march to a quiet requiem; "Shenandoah"—old, unhappy, far-off things, under the lulling and palliation now of many years.
Gard rode directly south, through plodding, dusty lines of haggard-eyed men, and came to it a few miles above the junction and the famous Ferry. The cannon boomed all day on his left over by the larger river. He rode by daylight and openly and none seemed to doubt him; his dress and little printed tracts were passports enough for the time. He fell into the habit, first by impulse and then by policy, of carrying a tract in his hand, using its subject and phraseology for the next conversation and entering on the subject promptly.
It gave him a sense of detachment and isolation of a peculiar kind, this urging on some weary and hurrying group a doctrine of peace, compassion, and humility, as if the manner and language were working inward and growing less alien to him, and he really were a mysterious evangelist—a messenger with spiritual tidings and council. He noticed—and it seemed from its recurrence to have a certain pathos—that, after the laughter which rose around him in most cases had subsided, the faces would lose their weariness and strain, and seem to express another side of their humanity. They reminded him, then, of the fruit-seller and the policeman on the avenue, where he used to go to and from the Brotherhood of Consolation and the Church of the Trinity, who recognized in him some one apart and remote from the current of events—the river of humanity on the avenue.
It was even a more turbulent river that was pouring west and southwest along the two railroads leading from the Ferry. They were beginning to tear up and burn the northern line, but along the other the trains still moved in puffing succession. To Gard the sense of the part he played was strong almost to reality. The quaint, biblical, old-world phrases which he ever kept reading and repeating reacted upon him. He seemed, even to himself, to become intangible and apart.
"What shall a man take in exchange for his soul?" halting his horse and taking out the little white tract.
"I don't know. If you've got a plug of tobacco I might trade."
"If I had any, friend, I would give it to you freely."
The man looked at him curiously.
"I reckon you would now. This the best you know how, ain't it?"
Others who had stopped laughed and swarmed around. "Give me one!" "Me one!"
"There are more who need them."
"Oh, all right."
"No hogs here."
"Good-luck to you, elder."
The stream flowed on, some chuckling over their tracts, some silent. An officer said:
"You ought to get a pass, elder." So he came to where the Shenandoah murmured its musical name. A range of blue mountains rose beyond it. There seemed to be little going on by the river. The retreat had shifted to the west along the railroads into the Opequan valley, and he turned and rode west among low, wooded hills. It was Wednesday. They were tearing and burning the southern of the two railroads now—an endless row of bonfires of the ties, the iron rails laid across them to be heated for bending.
"'Let not your hearts be troubled.'"
A man bending over a rail drew his hand back, swore lustily, and straightened up.
"What's that? Oh!" He took the tract.
"That's what it says, sure enough. Maybe you don't know that rail was hot." The tract was passed around. One read aloud, "He hath taken charge and command. He hath established His law."
Gard sat motionless on his horse, looking placidly over their heads to the pale-blue horizon.
"Who is the one greatest in authority here?"
"This side of God Almighty and Winchester. I reckon you mean the old man. Hi, lieutenant!" The cantering officer pulled up. "He wants the general."
"Does, does he? What for?"
A pause. Gard dropped his eyes to the officer who was reading the tract.
"It is said to be best that I should have his permission to—"
"Oh, I see. Come along, then."
They rode beside the track through strata of heat and smoke from the fires, Gard following. It occurred to him that he had given his name on an impulse the day before as Moselle, and would possibly need it now. They came to a group of horsemen, talking, except one in front of them, who watched the toiling squads silently. He wore a full black beard, and sat his horse awkwardly.
"This seems to be some kind of a missionary, general. He wants to see you."
The general glanced up under the brim of his slouched hat; then suddenly flung back his head, so that his big beard stood out from his chest, and said, simply:
"What do you want?"
"I am directed by a Session of the Brethren to distribute these."
"Who are you?"
"Of a congregation in Maryland."
"What is your name?"
"Moselle."
"Who are the Brethren?"
"We are called Dunkers by those not of our communion. We do not use the name."
"There was a church of that sect near Sharpsburg."
"It is our church."
"They seemed to be German. You have no accent."
"It was said to be the reason I was chosen—the speaking freely the language. It was said at the Session."
"Very well."
He dropped his eyes to the tract in his hand.
Gard remained placid, persistent.
"It was said a permission might be written."
"Very well."
He wrote a few words on a scrap of paper and handed it to Gard.
"May I keep this tract in exchange?"
"It is not exchanged. It is given."
Gard turned his horse. The general looked up.
"You are a young man"—silence—"But your sect takes no part in wars." Gard waited. "Do you know the subject of this tract?"
"It is on the text, 'I must be about my Father's business.'"
The general seemed to have in mind to say more. He looked at Gard peculiarly—not quite as the others had seemed to do, half suspecting, half recognizing an alien being, a moral and mental unknown at some withdrawn height, but as if recognizing one like himself in isolation and pilgrimage, and so understanding his bearing and capacity for silence.
The horsemen behind whispered and smiled.
"Very well." The general turned again to the working squads, and Gard rode away in the smoke that drifted from the fires across the track. He had a sense, too, of some flash of recognition that had gone below the part he was playing, and seemed to involve a salutation and question of other import and circumstance, a recognition of kinship in the knowledge of other realities than the feet walk upon or the eyes see; knowledge of the silence out of which one is born, of the flux of his present, of destiny in ambush, of the "stream of the flying constellations," and the steady pour of time, "inhaled as a vapor;" knowledge of the individual's own lonely issue in the midst of these. But the turning again to his working squads seemed to have been the general's solution—or, at least, conclusion. "Very well;" one must be about the business set him to do. "He must work in his garden," had been more than one sage's conclusion.
Gard did not entirely wish to work his way back to the point of view that once had been his, of a spectator of events, who only acted in them in order to appreciate them vividly. He wished to regain his old enthusiasm, the poise and the clear sense of things, the interest, dulled since the Peninsular campaign; and for the rest, to go on to positions requiring new definitions. So far as the general had served as a councillor, he had seemed to advise attention to business, to imply that there was personal value in simple and direct doing.
During the two following days Gard rode along the railroad to Winchester, and up and down the Opequan valley, picking up information and asking such questions as he could make bear on the distribution of tracts. Once or twice he thought he recognized a face he had seen across the road by the Dunker church. It was not impossible. But one could not identify from such smoky glimpses.
On Saturday he left Winchester and went eastward, crossing the Opequan where the turnpike led by a shallow, rippling ford, and the flat-fenced meadows of the bottom lands were all about. His saddle-bags were nearly empty, and beyond the Blue Ridge he might find means to send a message north.
A horseman was watering his horse at the ford, his hat tipped back, a bandage around his head. They greeted, and Gard handed him a tract.
"Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown." It was one of the faces he seemed to have seen.
"Oh, you're that missionary they call 'Abstract Piety.' Well, look here!"
He stopped and stared. Gard leaned forward to let his horse drink, saw his own face in the stream, and wondered what it might mean to the man with the bandage who watched him, and whom he had somewhere seen. It might be a critical question, what his face meant to the man with the bandage. Crises! As one went on, every step was a crisis between the moment past and the moment in front. The current streaked the reflections in the water, and there were little brown minnows holding their heads up-stream. He noticed his own expression in the reflection—the impassive mask that he had come to wear without effort, the spade-shaped beard, the lips whiter than the rest of the tanned skin, which might suggest to the acute that the shaving of them was recent, the swift curve of the hair-line, the heavy eyelids over eyes that looked up dreamily out of the wavering water. He thought that, from an artistic standpoint, he must look his part, or something like it, with an emphasis. But every one travels by his own road to his own conclusions. The man, whose white bandage wavered and gleamed in the water near his own reflection, reminded him of one from whom he had taken a pistol in the cornfield by the Dunker church, whose eyes had been mad and glaring, and his hair soaked in his own blood. In fact, that was the face. Crises! Did it mean the sudden end of his running days? Probably either his or the other man's. Their reflections in the stream seemed to parody them, to watch and mimic. The water chuckled. There was something ironic in things. One fancied the current of time itself to be streaming and streaked yellow in the sunlight, and full of bubbles. The minnows poised and darted against the stream.
Gard's horse flung up his head with a start.
"If the message I have given you is not for you, will you not give it to another?"
As he left the water he heard the other's horse splashing behind him. The road turned from the river through a sandy cut in the woods. At the woods' edge the bandaged head was beside him.
"Stranger, you don't happen to have that gun about you you stole from me?"
Gard turned and looked into the small, black, fatal circle of a pistol barrel, like an eye-socket with the ball in ominous retreat.
"I do not carry weapons," he said, quietly.
"You don't! I reckon you do. You ought to have plugged me down at the ford with one of those weapons you don't carry. We're going back."
"If you wish to take my life—"
"I'd like to, mightily."
"Very well."
"You're a Yankee spy. Wheel around there and keep ahead."
"This mistake delays me. I have permission—"
"Keep your hand out of your pocket."
Gard paused an instant, then said: "Very well," and turned his horse slowly to the right, shook his left foot from the stirrup, and guided his horse close in. Their right shoulders almost touched. He gripped the man's pistol-hand and throat with the same movement. The pistol spat past his cheek. He heaved, left foot in the saddle, and leaped. The man gurgled, and they fell over his horse's cruppers heavily in the road, the man below on his bandaged head. The bandage fell off; his blood trickled into the dust, and he lay still. The horses had cantered apart.
Gard twisted his head around as he lay athwart, looked an instant, and loosened his hand from the black-bearded throat. The grip was so hard and sinewy, it was like untying a knot. It took effort, as if his muscles had been screwed up and rusted in place. The man was dead or stunned.
Gard got up with the pistol in his hand. He brushed his own clothes, caught his horse, sent the other's with a cut from a switch galloping away into the woods, and came back. He found cartridges and a glass flask full of whiskey in the man's pockets, and put them in his own. If not dead, perhaps he had better be; otherwise one must change disguise, and proper disguises were not easy. He slipped a cartridge and cocked the trigger.
The sun above the trees shone on the livid face in the dust. It was about noon, and the hour that Mavering stalked from the sandy road-bed thirty miles away into the charred forest and murmured: "It's not my funeral. It appears to be the anchorite's."
On the whole, the neighborhood was too lively for loose pistol-shooting. Gard lifted the limp body and carried it into a thicket, brought the bandage and laid it beside, kicked the dust over the blood-pools in the road, mounted his horse and smoothed his face, trying to settle its placidity.
He trotted and cantered all the afternoon northeastward among low hills, passing many untroubled farm-yards, but little soldiery. A couple of horsemen said, "Howdy, elder," and seemed to have met with him and his mission before. He gave them one of his few remaining tracts absent-mindedly, without answering, came when the sun was low to the Shenandoah, and heard it murmur its musical name.
"Probably he'd been more convenient dead."
The bridge was burned. He swam his horse through the current. The blue mountains fronted him darkly against the sky. The turnpike led up through a gap and so over into the elder Virginia. It was dark when he reached the end of the meadow lands where the upward pitch and the woods of the mountain road began. "Probably he'd be handier that way."
At the top of the gap were open pastures, a cabin where a dog barked, but no light shone in the windows. The stars were out innumerably, the valley behind in the cold, blue vapor of the night.
"But it might be better to change the part, after all," he thought; "better for luck."
Fortune might grow weary, a good mule be overworked, a good tune sung too long; for instance, the doxology was a good tune, two-four time, the measure of the tread of the moral law, a taciturn, single-minded tune, something like the general who sat his horse awkwardly by the burning railroad.
The moon that was slender and new at Antietam had grown round as a shield and rose late. Beyond the pastures on the gap the road led down through the woods to the elder land asleep in the moonrise.
"Einst, O Wunder, einst," the world and the young man, the big wars, the stir of living! And how wonderful then the moon and the night's infinite valleys, the glory of being and of loneliness, when to be a living soul was royal and the splendor of the night was its crown, when palpable currents, rivers thrilling and divine, poured into it, as the universe paid homage to its worth. Gard felt that he had somewhere lost his resonance. He must look for another coat and a happier disposition, shave his beard and shake dice with chance again. The road plunged down into the cavern of the woods. He let his horse pick his way, and judged the character of the road-bed from the sound of his steps below in the darkness.
It was chilly at that height. Gard rode all night down the mountain-side, and saw at last the lights of moon and sunrise mingling over the meadows and cornfields of a plantation close below him. The forest grew thinner and broke into clearing and pastures. He left the highway by an old cart-road whose ruts were grass-grown, though its centre was trodden hard by many human feet, and passed an empty building of rough boards—a school-house or a negro church. The big chestnuts hung over it, and underbrush grew up to its windows. The path went to the door, swerved aside through the thicket, and at last ran into a little, lonely, hollow pasture, with the sunlight pouring over its edge as into a cup. He picketed his horse to a thin sapling that would bend and let the horse eat, and lay down near a bowlder where the sunlight seemed to be the yellowest, smiling to feel the warmth steal through him. "There's too much luxury in my bones for an evangelist." Presently he was asleep. The sun mounted, swung around by the south, and the shadow of the bowlder went over the sleeper. An old negro, with bowed head and cane in hand, stumped vigorously along the path towards the building under the chestnuts. He passed the bowlder on the other side, and saw neither the sleeper nor the horse picketed among the saplings and feeding quietly. He wore a suit of fine broadcloth, the coat lined with silk and stained and threadbare, a white vest, a blue, dotted cravat, and a soft, gray hat. After that the clearing was silent except for passing crows and drowsy insects.
Suddenly the woods became choral, a burst of singing from the chestnut grove. Gard started, sat up, and listened.
"That's no jingle! That's music!"
He jumped to his feet and ran across the pasture, crept hurriedly through a thicket to a window brushed by leaves of the underwood. He was absorbed and eager.
"Man there with a voice like a bass viol!" he muttered.
Each verse boomed up a noble crescendo and fell away in plaintive minor chords. The preacher in the pulpit, in white vest, dotted cravat, and fashionably cut coat, cried:
"Mou'n an' pray! Mou'n an' pray!"
"You wa'min, brer'n, you wa'min! Lo'd God! Jordan! Mou'n an' pray!"
"De tex'," began the preacher, "is 'bout er man what he Lord len' him a talent—da's a big bit of money, oom!—an' he wrap it in a napkin caze he skeered of it an' hide it, an' go 'way crackin' he knuckle-bones. 'Hiyi!' An' he Lord say, 'You shif'less brack rascal! Ain' you got sense to buy er cow what he feed in de pasture, an' bimeby deh's er calf, an' de cow's good as befo', an' da's de calf, wuf eighteen dollars, Confed'ate money?' Das' what Mars Ca'leton give Miss Meely fo' de white yeahlin' what ain' any special so't of er calf. He Lord say, 'Give me dat talent! You go hoe co'n in de co'nfield. I spec you skeered to tu'n roun' when you get de end of de row. You ain' got business ent'prise,' he say. 'You go fin' er slipper-sloppy mud turkle what know how keep he shirt on he back an' he fingehs an' toes inside he shirt, an' lay down in de slipper-sloppy mud wid him. Da's de habit an' perfession,' he say, 'ez sholy 'bout right fo' you.' Disher's de sayin' of scripcheh, caze Miss Meely read it ter me las' night, an' ef it ain' de exac' wo'ds, da's de efficaciousness. Da's de efficaciousness. Wha's de residuum?
"Ef you kotch a rabbit, an' skin him, an' clean him to he bone meat, an' bile him till he swim in he own gravy, an' smell, oom! he smell sweeter 'n Miss Meely's flower-gyarden, da's de efficaciousness of de rabbit. But afteh you done et de rabbit, an' he mek de sunshine inside, an' de notion how soon you go kotch one mo', da's de residuum. I tell you fo' sho fac'. Wha's de residuum? Ain' I heah las' week to Leesburg how de Yankees done mek er Proclamation, an' deh pos' it on de do' of de Cyounty House up no'th, dat de niggehs gwine all be free? Ain' Brer Jacob dar skip up f'om de gyarden whar he rakin' weeds an' tell Miss Meely how he gwine be free? Ain' Miss Meely cuff he yeahs fo' pesterin' her? Ain' he got no mo' use fo' he freedom 'n ter gallop roun' fo' he got it, an' pester Miss Meely what been shovin' co'n pone 'n bacon in he mouf since he been a pickaninny? Oom!
"What you gwine do wid er talent ef you got it? Gwine git so tickle befo' you know what it is? Gwine git ter de end of de co'n row an' hoe on out 'n in de swamp caze ain' no man tell you tu'n. Gwine lie in de roadway for er jumpy-tail wabble-yeah rabbit run down you mouf when you hungry? Gwine splash in de creek wid de mud turkle wid he fingehs an' toes wrap in he shirt. Hiyah! Oom! Comin' a day of-er-er-lamentation an' dry bones, when de whippo'will be cryin' he lonesome lak he lookin' fo' some one he cyarn fin'; an' ef he lookin' fo' a niggeh wuf len'in' a talent to, da's some one he cyarn fin'.
"He Lord len' him a talent, say de good book. Oom! De efficaciousness of de tex' am disher solemn wa'nin'. Don' go roun' ast white folks len' you money. De borrowin' money's de beginnin' of trouble. Ain' nobody know when deh gwine ast fo' it again. Mote ast fo' it de day afteh you put in er pocket wid de hole clean down de groun'. Mote tell you buy er cow an' wait fo' de calf, what de sojers take it lak deh tuk Miss Meely's ho'ses 'cep de two up in de hill pasture. De efficaciousness of de tex' am disher solemn wa'nin. Wha's de residuum?"
The preacher swung his arms over his head shouting:
"Jo'dan! Jo'dan! Ain' no shinin', ain' no gladness, on'y 'yond Jo'dan! Ain' gwine be no free niggeh! Ain' gwine be no slave! Gwine 'yond Jo'dan!"
The congregation swayed, moaned, shouted:
"Jordan! Jordan!"
"Ain' I hyah de whippo'will cryin' de yevenin', 'Daddy Joe, come 'yond Jo'dan, Daddy Joe.' Jo'dan Jo'dan!"
"Amen!"
"Now you shoutin'!"
From his ambush Gard could see the preacher plainly through the window and two or three of the swaying heads nearest the preacher. The service from now on seemed like an incoherent tumult, the preacher's voice now and then above it, crying, "Mou'n an' pray!" until, at last, after half an hour, it all died away, and there was silence except for the sobbing, moaning, and panting. The preacher had sat down, or was not in sight from where Gard was hidden. Some one unseen at the other end of the building began to sing softly: