Complete weird tales of.., p.1216
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 1216
“Here, Bobby,” whispered Ysonde— “close beside you; don’t talk, dear, you are very much hurt.”
“Are you speaking to me, Ysonde?” I said, doubting my senses.
“To you, Bobby,” she whispered close to my ear, “didn’t you know that I loved you? Ah, try to live and you will know!”
My strength was ebbing fast, but I think I muttered something that she understood, for the light touch of her hand was on my cheek, and I felt it tremble. Somebody gave me water, — I was choking, — and my burning lips shrank and cracked beneath the cool draught. I could hear Jimmy Kllis muttering to Buck Hanson, and Hanson’s replies.
“Look out, Buck, here’s a rut, — Mr. Blylock, can you dip your pine knot this side? — so fashion, — steady, Buck.”
“Steady, it is, — hold up his legs, — Mr. Blylock, throw a stun by that windfall, — there’s a lucivee sneakin’ araound in behind—”
Crack! spoke Blylock’s rifle, and then I heard Buck’s nasal drawl: “A stun is jest’s good, Mr. Blylock, they’re scairt haf tu deth — I suspicion it’s the pork they’re after!”
“Throw that pork into the woods, Jimmy,” said Blylock, “we’ll be in before long. Good heavens! how dark it is — lay him down and throw that pork away — there may be a panther among them.”
“There be,” drawled Buck, “I seen him.”
“You did? Why didn’t you say so! I can’t waste cartridges on those infernal lynxes.”
“I sez to you, Mr. Blylock, sez I, throw stuns, it’s jest as good,” replied Buck, placidly; and I was lifted again, fore and aft.
“It’s incredible,” grumbled Blylock; “what’s got into all these moth-eaten lynxes and mangy panthers; I’ve been twenty years in these woods, and I never before saw even a tom-cat.”
“I ain’t seed nothing like this, — there’s three ‘r four bob-cats raound us now, and I ha’n’t never seed but one so close before, — Jimmy was there that night. I jest disremember if it was abaout gummin’ time—”
Crack! went Blylock’s rifle, and I heard a whine from the thickets on the left.
“Thet’s the panther — let him hev it again,” said Ellis.
Again the rifle cracked.
“The darned cuss!” drawled Buck; “shoot again, Mr. Blylock!”
“No need,” said Ellis— “listen! There he goes lopin’ off. Hear him snarl!”
“Hit, I guess,” said Buck, and we moved on. Once I heard Buck complain that a particularly bold lynx kept trotting along the trail behind, “smellin’ and sniffin’ almighty close to my shins,” he asserted, and there certainly was an awful yell when Blylock wheeled in his tracks and fired. I heard Ellis laughing, and Buck said, “haow them lucivees du screech!”
“Worse ‘n a screech-owl,” added Ellis.
That is the last thing I remembered until I woke in my bed in the Rosebud Inn.
The bandage was still on my eyes, — I felt too weak to raise a finger, — and the rest of my body seemed stiff and hard as wood. I heard somebody rocking in a rocking-chair and I spoke.
“I am here,” said Ysonde, — but her voice seemed choked and unsteady.
“What time is it?” I asked, incoherently.
“Half past eleven,” said Ysonde.
“I am hungry,” said I, and that was my last effort until they brought me a bowl of beef broth with an egg in it, and I had managed to swallow it all.
I heard the door close, and for a moment I thought I was alone, but presently the rocking-chair creaked, and I called again: “Ysonde.”
“I am here.”
“What is the matter with me?”
“You have been ill.”
“How long?”
“Two days, Bobby. You will get well — the claws poisoned you. Try to sleep now.”
“What claws?”
“The — the panther’s — don’t you remember?”
“No — yes, a little. Where are the lynxes? Where is Blylock?”
Ysonde laughed softly.
“Mr. Blylock has gone to Boston on important business. I will tell you all about it when you can get up. He’s to be married.”
“And Lynda?”
“Lynda is downstairs. Shall I call her?”
“No.”
The next day I drank more broth, and two days later I sat up, — it took me half an hour and some groans to do so.
“I think,” said I, listening to the rocking-chair, “that it is high time I saw something. Lift my bandage, please, Ysonde.”
“Only one side,” she said, and lowered the cloth that concealed my right eye — the sightless one.
There was a silence, a wretched moment of suspense, and then Ysonde cried: “What — what is it — can’t you see — can’t you see me! — Oh, Bobby!”
When I spoke I hardly knew what I said, but it was something about Keen’s assuring me that nobody but an oculist could tell that I was blind in my right eye. I remember I felt very angry at Keen, and demanded to know how Ysonde could see that my right eye was sightless. I am glad I was spared the agony of her face — I would willingly have been spared the agony of her voice as she cried. “Did I do that?”
I tried to move, but her arms were about me, — I tried to explain, but her warm mouth closed my lips; I only thought that it was very pleasant to be blind.
The eyes of an oculist and the eyes of love see everything. Who says that love is blind?
Her tears fell on my cheeks; when she asked pardon, I answered by asking pardon, and she — but, after all, that is our own affair.
“And my left eye,” said I, “is that gone, too?”
“Almost well,” said Ysonde, “it was a sympathetic shock, or something; I was afraid the claws had struck it, but Dr. Keen—”
“Keen!”
“Yes — he’s gone to Holderness now. Don’t you remember his being here with Dr. Conroy, the surgeon?”
“No,” said I, “I was too badly mauled. I have been clawed by a panther, then?”
“A little,” said Ysonde, with gentle sarcasm.
After a moment I inquired about the present health of the panther, and was assured that he was probably flourishing his tail in excellent spirits somewhere among the Scaur crags.
“Then Blylock didn’t hit him?”
“He hit something, for I heard it scream — Oh, my darling, what a horrible night! — and you dying, as I believed, and the tangled brush, and the flare of the torch, and the firing” —
* * * * * *
“Are you thirsty? — your lips are burning,” said Ysonde.
I have a joke on Keen — James Keen, the great oculist, the wise, the infallible, — and I trust he will swallow his medicine like a little man when he reads this. It happened in this way.
I was sitting under the trees by the Tennis Court with Ysonde, watching the snow-birds fluttering in the meadow grass, and listening to the robin who, boldly balanced on the tip of his spruce tree, was doing his best. The blue-birds were teaching their young to navigate the air, twittering and tittering at the efforts of their youngsters, a truly frivolous family. The drab-coloured cow had also done her best, and the result was a miniature copy of herself, also an expert cud-chewer.
Billy — Ridiculous Billy, the white-whiskered and malicious, was spread in the low forks of an apple tree, a splendid representation of a disreputable door-mat.
Lynda sat at the bay-window in the Rosebud Inn, embroidering something in white and gold. She also succeeded in doing her best in her own line, which was to look more beautiful every day. I saw Blylock’s shadow behind her.
“When are they to be married, Ysonde?” I asked for the fiftieth time.
“On the twenty-seventh, — oh, Bobby, it ‘s shocking to keep forgetting — and we’re to be best man and bride’s maid, too!”
The sun dazzled my left eye, and I closed it for a second. Then a miraculous thing happened, an everlasting joke on Keen, for, although I had closed my sound eye, and, by rights, should have been blind as a bat, I was nothing of the kind.
“My right eye — Ysonde — I can see! — Do you understand? I can see!” I stammered.
Oh, it was glorious — glorious as the joyous wonder in Ysonde’s eyes! — it was a miracle. I don’t care what Keen says about it having happened before, or about it happening once in ten thousand cases, and I don’t care a brass farthing for his subsequent observations concerning the optic nerve, and partial paralysis, and retinas, and things, — it was and must remain one of God’s miracles, and that is enough for Ysonde and for me.
“We will go to the glade and repaint my picture which you erased,” said I.
She understood and forgave me, for I hardly knew what I was saying.
“Come,” she said — her eyes were wonderfully sweet, and bluer than the flowering flax around us.
So, with her hand in mine, we walked up the scented path to the Rosebud Inn, Billy lumbering along behind us, twitching his hoary whiskers.
IN THE NAME OF THE MOST HIGH.
“IL N’EST PAS nécessaire qu’il y ait de l’amour dans un livre pour nous charmer, mais il est nécessaire qu’il y ait beaucoup de tendresse.”
J. JOUBERT.
IN THE NAME OF THE MOST HIGH.
I.
ON the third day toward noon the fire slackened; the smoke from the four batteries on the bluff across the north fork of the river slowly lifted, drifting to the east. The Texas riflemen kept up a pattering fusillade until one o’clock, then their bugles rang “Cease firing,” and the echoes of the last sulky shot died out against the cliffs.
Keenan, crouching behind one of his hot guns, could see the Texas sharpshooters retiring to the bluff, little grey shadows in the scrub-oak thicket gliding, flitting like wild hedge-birds toward the nest of cannon above.
“Don’t let ’em get away like that!” shouted Douglas, “give it to them in the name of God!”
And Keenan smiled, and sent the Texans a messenger in the name of God — a messenger which fell thundering from the sky above them, crushing the face of the iron-stained cliff and the lives of those who had clustered there to breathe a little.
“Amen,” said Keenan, patting his gun. Douglas crawled out of a hole in the rocks and drew himself up to the edge of the breastworks. Cleymore emerged from a shallow rifle-pit and walked slowly along the intrenchments, motioning his men back into their burrows.
“Because,” he said, “a hole in the hill is worth two in your head — get into that ditch, Morris! — Cunningham, if you don’t duck that red head of yours, I’ll dock it!”
“Captain Cleymore,” said Douglas, lowering his field-glass, “two batteries have limbered up, and are trotting toward the cemetery—”
“May they trot into it, and stay there!” said Keenan, examining the wreck of an ammunition chest in the ditch.
Cleymore studied the bluff with his marine glasses for a while, then called to Keenan: “How many guns have you now?”
“Four,” shouted Keenan from the ditch; “all my horses are shot except two mules—” A burst of laughter cut him short — his own tattered artillerymen, to their credit, did not smile, but Douglas and Kellogg laughed and rows of grinning faces emerged from holes and pits along the ditch until Cleymore shouted, “Down!” and his infantry disappeared, chuckling. Keenan, red in the face, turned to his battery-men who were running the guns forward, and put his own ragged shoulder to the wheel. Cleymore sat down on a stone and watched a lank artilleryman splicing the dented staff of the battery guidon.
“I guess that’ll dew, Capting,” he drawled, holding the staff out to Cleymore, who took it and rubbed the polished wood with his sleeve.
“It will do, Pillsbury,” he said, “where is O’Halloran?”
“Shot in the stummick,” said the private, “and unable tew work.”
“Dead?”
“I presume likely he’s daid, sir,” returned Pillsbury through his nose.
“I’ve got a man for the guidon,” called Keenan from the ditch, and a fat freckled cannoneer waddled forward and stood at attention.
“Look out!” sang out Douglas from his post on the breastworks, and “Down!” cried Cleymore, as a shell rose in the air over them and the boom of a gun rolled across the river from the bluff. The scream of the shell ceased; a white cloud shot with lightning appeared in the air above them, and a storm of shrapnel swept the breastworks. Cleymore sprang to his feet, but the fat cannoneer remained on the ground., “Get up,” said Cleymore, cautiously, “Pillsbury lift him; is he dead?”
“I guess,” said Pillsbury, “he’s sufferin’ from a hereditary disease.”
“Eh? What disease?” snapped Cleymore, stepping forward.
“I guess it’s death,” said Pillsbury, with an expressionless wink.
Cleymore stared at him through his eyeglasses, then turned on his heel.
“I wish,” grumbled Keenan, “that the wounded would make less noise. Douglas, send them another bucket of water, will you? Is the surgeon dead?”
“Dying,” said Kellogg,—” never mind, Douglas, I’ll see to the water; keep your glass on their batteries; what are they doing now?”
“Nothing,” replied Douglas, “wait a bit — ah! here come their sharpshooters again!”
“To hell with them!” muttered Keenan savagely, for his battery-men had been cruelly scourged by the sharpshooters, and he almost foamed with rage when he looked over into the ditch at the foot of the mound. The odour from the ditch had become frightful.
“Look down there, Captain,” he called to Cleymore, his voice trembling with passion, but Cleymore only nodded sadly. He was watching something else. A figure in the uniform of a staff-officer, filthy with grime and sweat, had crawled through what was left of the covered bridge across the South Fork, and was wriggling his way toward the debris of Keenan’s battery. Cleymore watched him with puckered eyes.
“What do you want, sonny?” he asked, as the staff officer crept past him,— “orders? Give ’em to me — keep to the ground, you fool,” he added, as a flight of bullets swept overhead. The staff-officer lifted a flushed face, scratched and smeared with dust and sweat, and attempted a salute.
“Colonel Worth’s compliments to Colonel Randal—” he began, but was interrupted by Cleymore: “Colonel Randal’s in the ditch below with most of his regiment piled on top of him. What are your orders? — hold on to the bridge till hell freezes? — I thought so, — I’m Cleymore, Captain in the 10th New York Sharpshooters, yonder’s what’s left of us, and there’s two dozen of Colonel Randal’s Rhode Islanders among ‘em, too. Major Wilcox has got a hole in his face, and can’t speak — you see what’s left of Keenan’s battery — four guns, and few to serve ’em except my riflemen. Isn’t General Hooker in sight?”
The staff-officer raised his blue eyes to the wreck of the battery, and then looked questioningly at Cleymore. The latter lay moodily twisting and untwisting the stained leather thong whipped about his sword hilt.
“I’m ranking officer here,” he said, “the rest are dead. My compliments to General Kempner, and tell him his orders shall be obeyed. Both bridges are mined. Murphy is watching for Longstreet — What are you shivering for?”
“Ague,” said the staff-officer in a low voice. Cleymore spat out a mouthful of dust that a bullet had flung in his face, and wiped his glasses on his sleeve. “Who are you from, anyway? “ he demanded. “I don’t take orders from Colonel Worth.”
“General Kempner is dead,” said the staff-officer simply.
Keenan came up chewing a twig and whistling.
“Captain Cleymore,” said the staff-officer, “my horse has been shot and Colonel Worth is waiting. Will you point out to me the quickest way back?”
“Back!” broke in Keenan, “you can’t get back, my boy!”
“I must,” said the youngster, without glancing at the artillery officer.
“Oh, if it’s a case of must,” said Cleymore indifferently, “come ahead,” and he rose to his knees and peered across the swollen South Fork, now a vast torrent of mud.
Crack! Crack! rang the rifles from the opposite shore, and the little staff-officer’s cap was jerked from his head and rolled down the embankment into the river. Keenan cursed.
“Come on, sonny,” said Cleymore, scrambling down the embankment to the ditch. The ditch was choked with mangled bodies in blue, flung one over the other amid smashed gun-wheels, caissons, knapsacks, and rifles; and the staff-officer hesitated for an instant at the brink.
“Jump!” called Cleymore, “here! Get down behind this rock and keep your nose out of sight; those Texas gentlemen waste few bullets; are you hit?”
“No,” said the little staff-officer.
“Bull luck; did you see Randal’s men? The shells did it — look there.”
He pointed the length of the ditch. The staff-officer turned pale. Everywhere corpses, — mere heaps of blue rags, stained yellow by dust and black with stiff blood, everywhere dented canteens, twisted muskets, unsavoury scattered clothing, worn shoes, and shrunken blue caps. A big black horse, bloated and dusty lay with both hind legs stark in the air; under him were dead men, mostly Keenan’s, by the red stripes on the faded trousers.
Cleymore pulled his short blond moustache and turned to the staff-officer.
“You see that slaughter pen,” he said; “tell Colonel Worth.”
The staff-officer felt for his cap, remembered it had been shot off his head, and looked gravely at Cleymore.
“I have four guns and two hundred and twenty odd men,” said the latter; “if they bring back their batteries, an hour or two will see us all in the ditch below with Randal; if they don’t we can hold on to the South Fork bridge I fancy. Do you know why they withdrew their batteries?”
“No, — unless it was to shell Colonel Worth’s cavalry. His men are in the woods behind the railroad. If you can hold the bridge until night they will keep the line open. Colonel Worth is waiting. I must go back now, Captain.”
Cleymore leaned along the edge of the protecting ledge and handed his field-glasses to the boy.
