Complete weird tales of.., p.1218
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 1218
“I am a spy!” she exclaimed, “and I thank God, and I hate the enemies of my country!”
“Amen,” said Cleymore, wondering at her fierce outburst.
“Do you not hate the Confederates?” she demanded.
“No,” he answered, gravely, “but I hate the rebellion.”
“But you must hate your enemies; I do.”
“I don’t; it makes me sick to see them go down — splendid fellows, — Americans, and to think that such troops might have stood shoulder to shoulder with our own, under the same flag, against the world! — aye, against ten worlds! I hate the rebels? By Heaven, no! Think of Thomas and Grant and Lee and Jackson leading a united army against those thieving French in Mexico! Think of Sherman and Sheridan and Johnston and Stuart facing the fat-brained treachery of England! I tell you I respect the rebels. Look at that heap of dead! Look at those smashed guns! Look at me — the defeated commander, crouching in this slaughter pen, waiting to spring a mine — and die. The men who reduced me to this have my respect as soldiers and my love and admiration as Americans, but if I could blow them all to the four winds by one touch of an electric button, I’d do it, and bless the chance!” The girl trembled at his fervour.
“That is a strange creed,” she murmured.
“Creed? The Union, in the Name of God — that’s my creed!”
IV.
THE next day it rained. The rebel batteries flung a dozen shells among Keenan’s ruined guns, but, receiving no answer, ceased firing. Cleymore was stiff and ill, but he managed to reach the intrenchment and rest his field-glasses against a rock. The four batteries were in motion, filing along the river bank toward the cemetery where a flag drooped above a marquee, the headquarters of some general. The Texan Riflemen were moving about the scrub-oak, showing themselves fearlessly, and a battalion of engineers was hard at work on the smouldering piers of the bridge. Dark masses of troops appeared on the distant hillsides as far as the eye could reach, and along the railroad track cavalry were riding through the rain.
All day long Cleymore watched the rebel army, and at night he shared his hard-tack and bacon with the girl. They spoke very little to each other, but when Cleymore was looking at the rebels her eyes never left him. Once, when he crept into his cave to swallow a drop of brandy, she hurried from rifle-pit to rifle-pit, evidently searching for something, but when again he reappeared she was seated listlessly against the rocky wall, her blond head buried in her hands. And that night too, when he was tossing in feverish slumber, she passed like a shadow through the intrenchment, over rocks, down among the dead in the hollows, her lantern shining on distorted faces and clenched hands.
The next day the rain still fell; the engineers were steadily at work on the ruined bridge, but the river had swollen enormously, and Cleymore could not see that they had progressed. He went back to his cave and dropped on the blanket, the box marked “Watson’s Excelsior Soap” at his side. The girl brought him a bit of hard-tack and a cup of water. It was the last crumb left in the camp, except three biscuits which she had in her own pockets. She did not tell him so.
Toward midnight he fell asleep, and when she saw that he slept, she bent over him and looked into his face, lighting a match. Then she softly raised the blanket and saw his arm encircling a box marked “Watson’s Excelsior Soap.” As she stooped to touch the wires he stirred in his sleep and smiled, and she shrank away, covering her eyes with her hands. The next day she brought Cleymore his biscuit and cup of water, for his strength was ebbing, and he could scarcely crawl to the breastworks. She ate nothing herself. The engineers were progressing a little, the sun shone on the wasted hills, and the music of a Confederate band came in gusts across the river from the cemetery.
“They are playing ‘Dixie,’” said the girl; but Cleymore only sighed and pulled the dirty blanket over his face. The next day she brought him his biscuit, there was but one left now, and he, not knowing, asked for another, and she gave him the last.
About noon he called to her, and she helped him to the breastworks and held his field-glasses. The engineers had made alarming progress, for the river was falling rapidly.
“They’ll be over to-morrow,” he said.
When he was lying in his blanket once more, he beckoned her to come close beside him.
“Are you ill?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“You are so white and frail — I thought you might be ill.”
“Oh, no,” she said.
“Have you plenty to eat?”
“Plenty.”
“When are you going?”
“Going?” she faltered.
“You must go, of course,” he said, querulously, “they will be over the river to-morrow.”
“And you?” said the girl.
“It’s my business to stay here.”
“And — fire the mine?”
“And fire the mine,” he repeated.
“What is the use? They will enter all the same.”
“Not all of them,” said Cleymore, grimly.
“No — not all of them — a hundred half-starved young fellows will be mangled — a hundred mothers will be childless — but what matter, Captain Cleymore?”
“What matter,” he repeated,—” my orders are to defend this hill until hell freezes over, and I am going to do it.” Then, again, he wearily asked pardon for his words.
Toward evening she saw he was sleeping; his eye-glasses had fallen beside him on the blanket. Almost timidly she picked them up, held them a moment, then bent her head and touched them with her lips.
The morning broke in a burst of splendid sunlight. Over the river the rebel bands were playing when Cleymore’s hot eyes unclosed, but he could not rise from his blanket.
The girl brought him a cup of water and held it while he drank.
“There are no more biscuits,” she said.
“I shall not need them,” he murmured, “what are the rebels doing?”
“They are massing to cross. The bridge is almost ready.”
“And I’m ready,” he said, “good-bye.”
The girl knelt beside him and took both of his hands in hers. “I am not going,” she said.
“I order you,” he muttered.
“I refuse,” she answered gently.
A hectic flush touched the hollows under his eyes and he raised his head. “I order you to leave these works,” he said angrily.
“And I refuse,” she repeated gently.
A burst of music from the river bank came up to them as their eyes met in mute conflict. Cleymore’s hand instinctively felt for the button and the wires, then he gave a great cry and sat up among his rags, and the girl rose slowly to her feet beside him.
“Traitor!” he gasped, and pointed at her with shaking hands.
She turned perfectly white for a moment, then a wan smile touched her lips, and she quietly drew a revolver from her jacket.
“I am not a traitor,” she said, “I am a Confederate spy, and I cut those wires last night. You are my prisoner, Captain Cleymore.”
The silence was broken by the noise from the bands, now massing about the further end of the completed bridge. Cleymore bent silently over the ruined wires, touched the button, then, turning savagely, whipped his revolver to his head and pulled the trigger. The hammer struck an empty cylinder, and he flung it from him with a sob.
In an instant the girl was on her knees beside him, raised him in her arms, holding his head on her shoulder.
“Is it so hard to surrender to a woman?” she asked, “see, I give you my revolver — here — now shoot me down at your feet! I cut those wires! Shoot fearlessly — Ah, do you think I care for my life?”
Cleymore raised his head a little.
“I surrender,” he sighed, and fainted.
Then there came a great sound of cheering from below, the drums rattled, and the music of the bugles swelled nearer and nearer, until a crash of eager feet sounded among the branches of the abatis and a figure clad in grey leaped upon the breastworks and drove the steel point of a standard into the gravel.
“In the name of God!” he shouted in a voice choked with emotion.
“Let him pray, “ muttered the dusty veterans of Longstreet’s infantry as they wheeled into the parallels, “he’s one of Jackson’s men.”
And all these things were done in the Name of the Most High.
THE BOY’S SISTER.
“LE PLUS GRAND tort de la plupart des maris envers leurs femmes, c’est de les avoir épousées.”
“Je ne me sens jamais plus seul que lorsque je livre mon coeur à quelque ami.”
MAUPASSANT.
I.
GARLAND’S profession took him to Ten Pin Corners. His profession was to collect butterflies for the Natural History Museum of New York. “Uncle Billy,” who kept the Constitution Hotel at Ten Pin Corners, thought “bug huntin’” was a “dampoor bizness, even fur a dood,” — and perhaps it was — but that is none of your business or mine. Garland lived at the Constitution Hotel. The hotel did small honour to its name, in fact it would have ruined any other constitution. It was ruining Garland’s by degrees, but a man of twenty-five doesn’t notice such things. So Garland swallowed his saleratus biscuits and bolted pork and beans, and was very glad that he was alive.
He had met the male population of Ten Pin Corners over the bar at the Constitution Hotel, — it being a temperance state — and there he had listened to their views on all that makes life worth living.
He tried to love his fellow-countrymen. When Orrin Hayes spat upon the stove and denounced woman’s suffrage — when Cy Pettingil, whose wife was obliged to sign his name for him, agreed profanely — when the Hon. Hanford Perkins, A. P. A., demonstrated the wickedness of Catholicism, and proffered vague menaces against Rome, Garland conscientiously repressed a shudder.
“They are my countrymen, God bless ‘em,” he thought, smiling upon the free-born.
Uncle Billy’s felonious traffic in the “j’yfull juice,” did not prevent his attendance at town meeting, nor his enthusiastic voice against local option.
“I ain’t no dum fool,” he observed to Garland, “let the wimmen hev their way.”
“But don’t you think,” suggested Garland, “that a liberal law would be better?”
“Naw,” replied Uncle Billy.
“But don’t you think even a poor law should be observed until wise legislation can find a remedy?”
“Naw,” said Uncle Billy, and closed the subject.
Sometimes Uncle Billy would come out on the verandah where Garland was sitting in the sun, fussing over some captured caterpillar. His invariable salute was, “More bugs? Gosh!”
Once he brought Garland a cockroach, and suggested the bar-room as a new and interesting collecting ground, but Garland explained that his business did not include such augean projects, and the thrifty old man was baffled.
“What’s them bugs good fur?” he demanded at length. Garland explained, but Uncle Billy never got over the impression that Garland’s real business was the advertising of Persian Powder. Most of the prominent citizens of Ten Pin Corners came to Garland to engage his services as potato-beetle exterminator, measuring-worm destroyer, and general annihilator of mosquitoes, and to each in turn he carefully explained what his profession was.
They were skeptical — sometimes sarcastic. One thing, however, puzzled them; he had never been known to try to sell anybody Persian Powder, for, possessed with the idea that he was some new species of drummer, they found this difficult to reconcile with their suspicions.
“Bin a-buggin’, haint ye?” was the usual salute from the free-born whom he met in the fields; and when Garland smiled and nodded, the free-born would expectorate and chuckle, “Oh, yew air slick, Mister Garland, yew’re more ‘n a Yankee than I be.”
Ten Pin Corners was built along both sides of the road; the Constitution Hotel stood at one extremity of the main street, the Post Office at the other. Garland once asked why the place was called Ten Pin Corners, and Uncle Billy told him a lie about its having been named from his, Uncle Billy’s, palatial ten pin alley.
“Then why not Ten Pin Alley?” asked Garland.
“Cuz it ain’t no alley,” sniffed Uncle Billy.
“But,” persisted Garland, “why Corners?”
“Becuz there haint no corners,” said Uncle Billy evasively, and retired to his bar, thirsty and irritated. “Asks enough damfool que-estions t’ set a man crazy,” he confided to the Hon. Hanford Perkins; “I’ve hed drummers an’ drummers at the Constitooshun, but I h’aint seen nothin’ tew beat him.”
The Hon. Hanford Perkins looked at Uncle Billy and spat gravely upon the stove, and Uncle Billy spat also, to put himself on an equality with the Hon. Hanford Perkins.
Concerning the mendacity of Uncle Billy there could be no question. Ten Pin Corners had been originally Ten Pines Corners. Half a mile from the terminus of the main street stood a low stone house. It was included in the paternal government of Ten Pin Corners, and it was from this house, surrounded by ten gigantic pines, and from the four cross-roads behind it, now long disused and overgrown with grass and fireweed, that the village name degenerated from Ten Pines to Ten Pin.
Thither Garland was wont to go in the evenings, for the pines were the trysting places of moths — grey moths with pink and black under wings, brown moths with gaudy orange under wings, rusty red moths flecked with silver, nankeen yellow moths, the product of the measuring-worm, big fluffy moths, little busy moths, and moths that you and I know nothing about. The sap from the pines attracted some of these creatures, the lily garden in front of the stone house attracted others, and the whole combination attracted Garland. Also there lived in the stone house a boy’s sister.
One afternoon when Uncle Billy’s continued expectoration and Cy Pettingil’s profanity had driven Garland from the hotel, he wandered down into a fragrant meadow, butterfly net in one hand, trout rod in the other, and pockets stuffed with cyanide jar, fly-book, sandwiches, and Wilson on Hybrids.
The stream was narrow and deep, for the most part flowing silently between level banks fragrant with mint and scented grass; but here and there a small moss-grown dam choked the current into a deeper pool below, into which poured musical waterfalls.
There were trout there, yellow, speckled, and greedy, but devious in their ways, and uncertain as April mornings. There were also frogs there, solemn green ones that snapped at the artificial flies and came out of the water with slim limbs outstretched and belly glistening.
“It’s like pulling up some nude dwarf, when they grab the fly,” wrote Garland to his chief in New York, “really they look so naked and indecent.” Otherwise Garland was fond of frogs; he often sat for hours watching them half afloat along the bank or squatting majestically upon some mossy throne.
That afternoon he had put on a scarlet ibis fly, and the frogs plunged and lunged after it, flopping into the pools and frightening the lurking trout until Garland was obliged to substitute a yellow fly in self defence. But the trout were coy. One great fellow leaped for the fly, missed it, leaped again to see what was wrong, and finding out, fled into the depths, waving his square tail derisively. Garland walked slowly down the brook, casting ahead into the stream, sometimes catching his fly in the rank grass, sometimes deftly defeating the larcenous manœuvres of some fat frog, and now and then landing a plump orange-bellied trout among the perfumed mint, where it flopped until a merciful tap on the nose sent its vital spark into Nirvana and its crimson flecked body into Garland’s moss-lined creel.
Once or twice he dropped his rod in the grass to net some conceited butterfly that flaunted its charms before the serious-minded clover bees, but he seldom found anything worth keeping, and the butterfly was left to pursue its giddy interrupted flight.
As he passed, walking lightly on the flowering turf, the big black crickets sang to him, the katydids scraped for him, and the grasshoppers, big and little, brown, green, and yellow, hopped out of the verdure before him, a tiny escort of outriders.
It was nearly four o’clock in the afternoon when he came to the last pool, before the meadow brook flows silently into the woods where slim black trout lurk under submerged rocks and mosquitos swoop thankfully upon the wanderer.
On the bank of the pool sat a beautiful boy watching a cork floating with the current.
“Hello,” said Garland, “you ought to be in school, Tip.”
The boy looked at Garland through gilded tangled curls. “Can’t you see I’m fishin’?” he said in a whisper.
“I see,” said Garland, “but you know your sister wouldn’t allow it. Why did you stay away from school, Tip?”
The angelic eyes were lowered a moment, then the boy carefully raised his pole, and, seeing the bait intact, dropped it into the water again.
“Bill Timerson biffed me,” said the child.
“If Willy Timerson struck you, you should not stay away from school,” he said; “did you — er — hit him back?”
“Did I?”
“Did you?” repeated Garland, repressing a smile.
“Heu! Why, Mister Garland, I slammed that d — n mug of his—”
“Tip!” said Garland.
The boy hung his head and looked at the cork. Garland sat down beside him and lighted his pipe.
After a moment he said: “Tip, I thought you promised me not to swear.”
The boy was silent.
“Did you?” said Garland.
“Yes,” replied the boy, sullenly.
“Well?” persisted Garland.
“I lied,” said the boy.
“You forgot,” said Garland, quietly, “you don’t lie, Tip.”
The boy looked at him shyly, then turned to his cork again.
“Tip,” said Garland, “what do you think of these?” he opened his creel and Tip looked in.
“Hell!” said the child softly.
