“Indeed I shall do nothing of the kind.”
“Why not, Kilgariff?” asked Pollard, who had become mightily interested in the strange and strangely reserved young man whom he had made his sergeant-major.
“Why not? Why, because I’m not going to miss the greatest and probably the last campaign of the greatest war of all time.”
As he spoke, the captain turned away toward his tent, leaving Kilgariff to endure the painful operations of the surgeon upon his wounded hand, without chloroform, for there was none of that anæsthetic left among the supplies of this meagrely furnished field-hospital after the work already done upon the wounded men of that morning. Kilgariff endured the amputations without a groan or so much as a flinching, whereat the surgeon marvelled the more, seeing that the patient was a man of exceptionally nervous constitution and temperament. When the bandages were all in place, the sergeant-major said simply: —
“Please let me have a stiff drink of spirits, Doctor. I am a trifle inclined to faintness after the pain.” That was absolutely the only sign the man gave of the fact that he had been enduring torture for nearly a half-hour.
Relighting his pipe, which he had smoked throughout the painful operation, Kilgariff bade the doctor good morning, and walked away to the tent which he and the captain together occupied.
In the meantime Captain Pollard had been questioning the girl as to herself, and getting no satisfactory answers from her, not so much because of any unwillingness on her part to give an account of herself, as seemingly because she either did not understand the questions put to her, or did not know what the answers to them ought to be.
“I’ll tell you what, Captain,” said Kilgariff, when Pollard had briefly suggested the situation to him, “Doctor Brent is at Orange Court House, I hear, reorganising the field-hospital service for the coming campaign, and his wife is with him. Why not send the girl to her?”
“To Dorothy? Yes, I’ll send her to Dorothy. She will know what to do.”
He hastily summoned an ambulance for the girl to ride in, and still more hastily scribbled a note to Dorothy Brent – to her who had been Dorothy South in the days of her maidenhood before the war. In it he said: —
I am sending you, under escort, a girl whom my sergeant-major most daringly rescued this morning from a house on the enemy’s side of the river, after we had shelled and set fire to the place. She seems too badly scared, or too something else, for me to find out anything about her. You, with your womanly tact, will perhaps be able to gain her confidence and find out what should be done. If she has friends at the North to whom she should be returned, I will arrange with General Stuart to send her back across the river under a flag of truce. If she hasn’t any friends, or if for any other reason she should be kept within our lines, you will know what to do with her. I am helpless in such a case, and I earnestly invoke the aid of the very wisest woman I ever knew. When you see the girl – poor, innocent child that she is – you, who were once yourself a child, and who, in growing older, have lost none of the sweetness and especially none of the moral courage of childhood, will be interested, I am very sure, in taking charge of her for her good.
Having despatched this note, and the girl, under escort, Pollard turned to Kilgariff, and abruptly asked: —
“Why did you call this coming campaign ‘the greatest and probably the last campaign’ of the war?”
“Why, all that seems obvious. The Army of the Potomac has at last found a commander who knows how to handle it, and both sides are tired of the war. Grant is altogether a different man from McClellan, or Pope, or McDowell, or Burnside, or Meade. He knows his business. He knows that the chief remaining strength of the Confederacy lies in the fighting force of the Army of Northern Virginia. He will strike straight at that. He will hurl his whole force upon us in an effort to destroy this army. If he succeeds, the Confederacy can’t last even a fortnight after that. If he fails, if Lee hurls him back across the Rapidan, broken and beaten as all his predecessors have been, the North will never raise another army – if the feeling there is anything like what the Northern newspapers represent it to be. You see, I’ve been reading them all the while – but, pardon me, I meant only to answer your question.”
“Don’t apologise,” answered Pollard. And he wondered who this man, his sergeant-major, was – whence he had come, and how, and why. For Captain Marshall Pollard knew absolutely nothing about the man whom he had made his confidential staff-sergeant, his tent mate, his bedfellow, and the executant of all his orders. Nevertheless, he trusted him implicitly. “I do not know his history,” he reflected, “but I know his quality as a man and a soldier.”
II
OWEN KILGARIFF
THE relations between Pollard and Kilgariff were peculiar. In many ways they were inexplicable except upon the ground of instinctive sympathy between two men, each of whom recognised the other as a gentleman; both of whom were possessed of scholarly tastes combined with physical vigour and all that is possible of manliness; both of whom loved books and knew them intimately; and each of whom recognised in the other somewhat more than is common of intellectual force.
The history of their acquaintance had been quite unusual. Marshall Pollard had risen from the ranks to be now the captain of a battery originally organised and commanded by Captain Skinner, a West Point graduate who had resigned from the United States army many years before the war, but not until after he had seen much service in Mexico and in Indian warfare. The battery had been composed at the outset of ruffians from the purlieus of Richmond, jailbirds, wharf-rats, beach-combers, men pardoned out of the penitentiary on condition of their enlistment, and the friends and associates of such men. It had been a fiercely fighting battery from the beginning. Slowly but surely many of the men who had originally constituted it had been killed in battle, and Virginia mountaineers had been enlisted to fill their places. In the meanwhile discipline of the rigidest military sort had wrought a wonderful change for the better in such of the men as survived from the original organisation. By the time that the battery returned to Virginia, after covering itself with glory at Gettysburg, it was no longer a company of ruffians and criminals, but it continued to maintain its reputation for desperate fighting and for cool, self-contained, and unfaltering courage. For those mountaineers of Virginia were desperately loyal to the fighting traditions of their race.
During the winter of 1863-4 Captain Pollard’s battery was stationed at Lindsay’s Turnout, on the Virginia Central Railroad a few miles west of Gordonsville. Indescribable, almost inconceivable mud was the characteristic of that winter, and General Lee had taken advantage of it, and of the complete veto it placed upon even the smallest military operations, to retire the greater part of his army from the Rappahannock and the Rapidan to the railroads in the rear, where it was possible to feed the men and the horses, at least in some meagre fashion.
It was during this stay in winter quarters that Owen Kilgariff had come to the battery. Whence he came, or how he got there, nobody knew and nobody could guess. There were only two trains a day on the railroad; one going east, and the other going west. It was the duty of strong guards from Pollard’s battery to man the station whenever a train arrived and inspect the passports of every passenger who descended from the cars to the platform or passed from the platform to the cars. Owen Kilgariff had not come by any of the trains. That much was absolutely certain, and nobody knew any other way by which he could have come. Yet one evening he appeared in Pollard’s battery at retreat roll-call and stood looking on and listening while the orders for the night were being read to the men.
He was a singularly comely young man of thirty years, or a little less – tall, rather slender, though very muscular, symmetrical in an unusual degree, and carrying his large and well-shaped head with the ease and grace of a trained athlete.
When the military function was ended and the men had broken ranks, Kilgariff approached Captain Pollard, and with a faultlessly correct military salute said: —
“Captain, I crave your permission to pass the night with some of your men. In the morning I think I shall ask you to enlist me in your battery.”
There