ON the last day of the year the young men from Chericoke, as they rode down the turnpike, came upon Betty bringing holly berries from the wood. She was followed by two small negroes laden with branches, and beside her ran her young setters, Peyton and Bill.

As Dan came up with her, he checked his horse and swung himself to the ground. “Thank God I've passed the boundary!” he exclaimed over his shoulder to the others. “Ride on, my lads, ride on! Don't prate of the claims of hospitality to me. My foot is on my neighbours' heath; I'm host to no man.”

“Come, now, Beau,” remonstrated Jack Morson, looking down from his saddle; “I see in Miss Betty's eyes that she wants me to carry that holly—I swear I do.”

“Then you see more than is written,” declared Champe, from the other side, “for it's as plain as day that one eye says Diggs and one Lightfoot—isn't it, Betty?”

Betty looked up, laughing. “If you are so skilled in foreign tongues, what can I answer?” she asked. “Only that I've been a mile after this holly for the party to-night, and I wouldn't trust it to all of you together—for worlds.”

“Oh, go on, go on,” said Dan, impatiently, “doesn't that mean that she'll trust it to me alone? Good morning, my boys, God be with you,” and he led Prince Rupert aside while the rest rode by.

When they were out of sight he turned to one of the small negroes, his hand on the bridle. “Shall we exchange burdens, O eater of 'possums?” he asked blandly. “Will you permit me to tote your load, while you lead my horse to the house? You aren't afraid of him, are you?”

The little negro grinned. “He do look moughty glum, suh,” he replied, half fearfully.

“Glum! Why, the amiability in that horse's face is enough to draw tears. Come up, Prince Rupert, your highness is to go ahead of me; it's to oblige a lady, you know.”

Then, as Prince Rupert was led away, Dan looked at Betty.

“Shall it be the turnpike or the meadow path?” he inquired, with the gay deference he used toward women, as if a word might turn it to a jest or a look might make it earnest.

“The meadow, but not the path,” replied the girl; “the path is asleep under the snow.” She cast a happy glance over the white landscape, down the long turnpike, and across the broad meadow where a cedar tree waved like a snowy plume. “Jake, we must climb the wall,” she added to the negro boy, “be careful about the berries.”

Dan threw his holly into the meadow and lifted Betty upon the stone wall. “Now wait a moment,” he cautioned, as he went over. “Don't move till I tell you. I'm managing this job—there, now jump!”

He caught her hands and set her on her feet beside him. “Take your fence, my beauties,” he called gayly to the dogs, as they came bounding across the turnpike.

Betty straightened her cap and took up her berries.

“Your tender mercies are rather cruel,” she complained, as she did so. “Even my hair is undone.”

“Oh, it's all the better,” returned Dan, without looking at her. “I don't see why girls make themselves so smooth, anyway. That's what I like about you, you know—you've always got a screw loose somewhere.”

“But I haven't,” cried Betty, stopping in the snow. “What! if I find a curl where it oughtn't to be, may I have it?”

“Of course not,” she answered indignantly.

“Well, there's one hanging over your ear now. Shall I put it straight with this piece of holly? My hands are full, but I think I might manage it.”

“Don't touch me with your holly!” exclaimed Betty, walking faster; then in a moment she turned and stood calling to the dogs. “Have you noticed what beauties Bill and Peyton have grown to be?” she questioned pleasantly. “There weren't any boys to be named after papa and Uncle Bill, so I called the dogs after them, you know. Papa says he would rather have had a son named Peyton; but I tell him the son might have been wicked and brought his hairs in sorrow to the grave.”

“Well, I dare say, you're right,” he stopped with a sweep of his hand, and stood looking to where a flock of crows were flying over the dried spectres of carrot flowers that stood up above the snow; “That's fine, now, isn't it?” he asked seriously.

Betty followed his gesture, then she gave a little cry and threw her arms round the dogs. “The poor crows are so hungry,” she said. “No, no, you mustn't chase them, Bill and Peyton, it isn't right, you see. Here, Jake, come and hold the dogs, while I feed the crows.” She drew a handful of corn from the pocket of her cloak, and flung it out into the meadow.

“I always bring corn for them,” she explained; “they get so hungry, and sometimes they starve to death right out here. Papa says they are pernicious birds; but I don't care—do you mind their being pernicious?”

“I? Not in the least. I assure you I trouble myself very little about the morals of my associates. I'm not fond of crows; but it is their voices rather than their habits I object to. I can't stand their eternal 'cawing!'—it drives me mad.”

“I suppose foxes are pernicious beasts, also,” said Betty, as she walked on; “but there's an old red fox in the woods that I've been feeding for years. I don't know anything that foxes like to eat except chickens, but I carry him a basket of potatoes and turnips and bread, and pile them up under a pine tree; it's just as well for him to acquire the taste for them, isn't it?”

THE noise of the guns rolled over the green hills into the little valley where the regiment had halted before a wayside spring, which lay hidden beneath a clump of rank pokeberry. As each company filled its canteens, it filed across the sunny road, from which the dust rose like steam, and stood resting in an open meadow that swept down into a hollow between two gently rising hills. From the spring a thin stream trickled, bordered by short grass, and the water, dashed from it by the thirsty men, gathered in shining puddles in the red clay road. By one of these puddles a man had knelt to wash his face, and as Dan passed, draining his canteen, he looked up with a sprinkling of brown drops on his forehead. Near him, unharmed by the tramping feet, a little purple flower was blooming in the mud.

Dan gazed thoughtfully down upon him and upon the little purple flower in its dangerous spot. What did mud or dust matter, he questioned grimly, when in a breathing space they would be in the midst of the smoke that hung close above the hill-top? The sound of the cannon ceased suddenly, as abruptly as if the battery had sunk into the ground, and through the sunny air he heard a long rattle that reminded him of the fall of hail on the shingled roof at Chericoke. As his canteen struck against his side, it seemed to him that it met the resistance of a leaden weight. There was a lump in his throat and his lips felt parched, though the moisture from the fresh spring water was hardly dried. When he moved he was conscious of stepping high above the earth, as he had done once at college after an over-merry night and many wines.

Straight ahead the sunshine lay hot and still over the smooth fields and the little hollow where a brook ran between marshy banks. High above he saw it flashing on the gray smoke that hung in tatters from the tree-tops on the hill.

An ambulance, drawn by a white and a bay horse, turned gayly from the road into the meadow, and he saw, with surprise, that one of the surgeons was trimming his finger nails with a small penknife. The surgeon was a slight young man, with pointed yellow whiskers, and light blue eyes that squinted in the sunshine. As he passed he stifled a yawn with an elaborate affectation of unconcern.

A man on horseback, with a white handkerchief tied above his collar, galloped up and spoke in a low voice to the Colonel. Then, as his horse reared, he glanced nervously about, grew embarrassed, and, with a sharp jerk of the bridle, galloped off again across the field. Presently other men rode back and forth along the road; there were so many of them that Dan wondered, bewildered, if anybody was left to make the battle beyond the hill.

The regiment formed into line and started at “double quick” across the broad meadow powdered white with daisies. As it went into the ravine, skirting the hillside, a stream of men came toward it and passed slowly to the rear. Some were on stretchers, some were stumbling in the arms of slightly wounded comrades, some were merely warm and dirty and very much afraid. One and all advised the fresh regiment to “go home and finish ploughing.” “The Yankees have got us on the hip,” they declared emphatically. “Whoopee! it's as hot as hell where you're going.” Then a boy, with a blood-stained sleeve, waved his shattered arm in the air and laughed deliriously. “Don't believe them, friends, it's glorious!” he cried, in the voice of the far South, and lurched forward upon the grass.

The sight of the soaked shirt and the smell of blood turned Dan faint. He felt a sudden tremor in his limbs, and his arteries throbbed dully in his ears. “I didn't know it was like this,” he muttered thickly. “Why, they're no better than mangled rabbits—I didn't know it was like this.”

They wound through the little ravine, climbed a hillside planted in thin corn, and were ordered to “load and lie down” in a strip of woodland. Dan tore at his cartridge with set teeth; then as he drove his ramrod home, a shell, thrown from a distant gun, burst in the trees above him, and a red flame ran, for an instant, along the barrel of his musket. He dodged quickly, and a rain of young pine needles fell in scattered showers from the smoked boughs overhead. Somewhere beside him a man was groaning in terror or in pain. “I'm hit, boys, by God, I'm hit this time.” The groans changed promptly into a laugh. “Bless my soul! the plagued thing went right into the earth beneath me.”

“Damn you, it went into my leg,” retorted a hoarse voice that fell suddenly silent.

With a shiver Dan lay down on the carpet of rotted pine-cones and peered, like a squirrel, through the meshes of the brushwood. At first he saw only gray smoke and a long sweep of briers and broom-sedge, standing out dimly from an obscurity that was thick as dusk. Then came a clatter near at hand, and a battery swept at a long gallop across the thinned edge of the pines. So close it came that he saw the flashing white eyeballs and the spreading sorrel manes of the horses, and almost felt their hot breath upon his cheek. He heard the shouts of the outriders, the crack of the stout whips, the rattle of the caissons, and, before it passed, he had caught the excited gestures of the men upon the guns. The battery unlimbered, as he watched it, shot a few rounds from the summit of the hill, and retreated rapidly to a new position. When the wind scattered the heavy smoke, he saw only the broom-sedge and several ridges of poor corn; some of the gaunt stalks blackened and beaten to the ground, some still flaunting their brave tassels beneath the whistling bullets. It was all in sunlight, and the gray smoke swept ceaselessly to and fro over the smiling face of the field.

Then, as he turned a little in his shelter, he saw that there was a single Confederate battery in position under a slight swell on his left. Beyond it he knew that the long slope sank gently into a marshy stream and the broad turnpike, but the brow of the hill went up against the sky, and hidden in the brushwood he could see only the darkened line of the horizon. Against it the guns stood there in the sunlight, unsupported, solitary, majestic, while around them the earth was tossed up in the air as if a loose plough had run wild across the field. A handful of artillerymen moved back and forth, like dim outlines, serving the guns in a group of fallen horses that showed in dark mounds upon the hill. From time to time he saw a rammer waved excitedly as a shot went home, or heard, in a lull, the hoarse voices of the gunners when they called for “grape!”

As he lay there, with his eyes on the solitary battery, he forgot, for an instant, his own part in the coming work. A bullet cut the air above him, and a branch, clipped as by a razor's stroke, fell upon his head; but his nerves had grown steady and his thoughts were not of himself; he was watching, with breathless interest, for another of the gray shadows at the guns to go down among the fallen horses.

Then, while he watched, he saw other batteries come out upon the hill; saw the cannon thrown into position and heard the call change from “grape!” to “canister!” On the edge of the pines a voice was speaking, and beyond the voice a man on horseback was riding quietly back and forth in the open. Behind him Jack Powell called out suddenly, “We're ready, Colonel Burwell!” and his voice was easy, familiar, almost affectionate.

“I know it, boys!” replied the Colonel in the same tone, and Dan felt a quick sympathy spring up within him. At that instant he knew that he loved every man in the regiment beside him—loved the affectionate Colonel, with the sleepy voice, loved Pinetop, loved the lieutenant whose nose he had broken after drill.

At a word he had leaped, with the others, to his feet, and stood drawn up for battle against the wood. Then it was that he saw the General of the day riding beside fluttering colours across the waste land to the crest of the hill. He was rallying the scattered brigades about the flag—so the fight had gone against them and gone badly, after all.

Around him the men drifted back, frightened, straggling, defeated, and the broken ranks closed up slowly. The standards dipped for a moment before a sharp fire, and then, as the colour bearers shook out the bright folds, soared like great red birds' wings above the smoke.

It seemed to Dan that he stood for hours motionless there against the pines. For a time the fight passed away from him, and he remembered a mountain storm which had caught him as a boy in the woods at Chericoke. He heard again the cloud burst overhead, the soughing of the pines and the crackling of dried branches as they came drifting down through interlacing boughs. The old childish terror returned to him, and he recalled his mad rush for light and space when he had doubled like a hare in the wooded twilight among the dim bodies of the trees. Then as now it was not the open that he feared, but the unseen horror of the shelter.

Again the affectionate voice came from the sunlight and he gripped his musket as he started forward. He had caught only the last words, and he repeated them half mechanically, as he stepped out from the brushwood. Once again, when he stood on the trampled broom-sedge, he said them over with a nervous jerk, “Wait until they come within fifty yards—and, for God's sake, boys, shoot at the knees!”

He thought of the jolly Colonel, and laughed hysterically. Why, he had been at that man's wedding—had kissed his bride—and now he was begging him to shoot at people's knees!

With a cheer, the regiment broke from cover and swept forward toward the summit of the hill. Dan's foot caught in a blackberry vine, and he stumbled blindly. As he regained himself a shell ripped up the ground before him, flinging the warm clods of earth into his face. A “worm” fence at a little distance scattered beneath the fire, and as he looked up he saw the long rails flying across the field. For an instant he hesitated; then something that was like a nervous spasm shook his heart, and he was no more afraid. Over the blackberries and the broom-sedge, on he went toward the swirls of golden dust that swept upward from the bright green slope. If this was a battle, what was the old engraving? Where were the prancing horses and the uplifted swords?

Something whistled in his ears and the air was filled with sharp sounds that set his teeth on edge. A man went down beside him and clutched at his boots as he ran past; but the smell of the battle—a smell of oil and smoke, of blood and sweat—was in his nostrils, and he could have kicked the stiff hands grasping at his feet. The hot old blood of his fathers had stirred again and the dead had rallied to the call of their descendant. He was not afraid, for he had been here long before.

Behind him, and beside him, row after row of gray men leaped from the shadow—the very hill seemed rising to his support—and it was almost gayly, as the dead fighters lived again, that he went straight onward over the sunny field. He saw the golden dust float nearer up the slope, saw the brave flags unfurling in the breeze—saw, at last, man after man emerge from the yellow cloud. As he bent to fire, the fury of the game swept over him and aroused the sleeping brute within him. All the primeval instincts, throttled by the restraint of centuries—the instincts of bloodguiltiness, of hot pursuit, of the fierce exhilaration of the chase, of the death grapple with a resisting foe—these awoke suddenly to life and turned the battle scarlet to his eyes.

Two hours later, when the heavy clouds were smothering the sunset, he came slowly back across the field. A gripping nausea had seized upon him—a nausea such as he had known before after that merry night at college. His head throbbed, and as he walked he staggered like a drunken man. The revulsion of his overwrought emotions had thrown him into a state of sensibility almost hysterical.

The battle-field stretched grimly round him, and as the sunset was blotted out, a gray mist crept slowly from the west. Here and there he saw men looking for the wounded, and he heard one utter an impatient “Pshaw!” as he lifted a half-cold body and let it fall. Rude stretchers went by him on either side, and still the field seemed as thickly sown as before; on the left, where a regiment of Zouaves had been cut down, there was a flash of white and scarlet, as if the loose grass was strewn with great tropical flowers. Among them he saw the reproachful eyes of dead and dying horses.

Before him, on the gradual slope of the hill, stood a group of abandoned guns, and there was something almost human in the pathos of their utter isolation. Around them the ground was scorched and blackened, and scattered over the broken trails lay the men who had fallen at their post. He saw them lying there in the fading daylight, with the sponges and the rammers still in their hands, and he saw upon each man's face the look with which he had met and recognized the end. Some were smiling, some staring, and one lay grinning as if at a ghastly joke. Near him a boy, with the hair still damp on his forehead, had fallen upon an uprooted blackberry vine, and the purple stain of the berries was on his mouth. As Dan looked down upon him, the smell of powder and burned grass came to him with a wave of sickness, and turning he stumbled on across the field. At the first step his foot struck upon something hard, and, picking it up, he saw that it was a Minie ball, which, in passing through a man's spine, had been transformed into a mass of mingled bone and lead. With a gesture of disgust he dropped it and went on rapidly. A stretcher moved beside him, and the man on it, shot through the waist, was saying in a whisper, “It is cold—cold - so cold.” Against his will, Dan found, he had fallen into step with the men who bore the stretcher, and together they kept time to the words of the wounded soldier who cried out ceaselessly that it was cold. On their way they passed a group on horseback and, standing near it, a handsome artilleryman, who wore a red flannel shirt with one sleeve missing. As Dan went on he discovered that he was thinking of the handsome man in the red shirt and wondering how he had lost his missing sleeve. He pondered the question as if it were a puzzle, and, finally, yielded it up in doubt.

Beyond the base of the hill they came into the small ravine which had been turned into a rude field hospital. Here the stretcher was put down, and a tired-looking surgeon, wiping his hands upon a soiled towel, came and knelt down beside the wounded man.

“Bring a light—I can't see—bring a light!” he exclaimed irritably, as he cut away the clothes with gentle fingers.

Dan was passing on, when he heard his name called from behind, and turning quickly found Governor Ambler anxiously regarding him.

“You're not hurt, my boy?” asked the Governor, and from his tone he might have parted from the younger man only the day before.

“Hurt? Oh, no, I'm not hurt,” replied Dan a little bitterly, “but there's a whole field of them back there, Colonel.”

“Well, I suppose so—I suppose so,” returned the other absently. “I'm looking after my men now, poor fellows. A victory doesn't come cheap, you know, and thank God, it was a glorious victory.”

“A glorious victory,” repeated Dan, looking at the surgeons who were working by the light of tallow candles.

The Governor followed his gaze. “It's your first fight,” he said, “and you haven't learned your lesson as I learned mine in Mexico. The best, or the worst of it, is that after the first fight it comes easy, my boy, it comes too easy.”

There was hot blood in him also, thought Dan, as he looked at him—and yet of all the men that he had ever known he would have called the Governor the most humane.

“I dare say—I'll get used to it, sir,” he answered. “Yes, it was a glorious victory.”

He broke away and went off into the twilight over the wide meadow to the little wayside spring. Across the road there was a field of clover, where a few campfires twinkled, and he hastened toward it eager to lie down in the darkness and fall asleep. As his feet sank in the moist earth, he looked down and saw that the little purple flower was still blooming in the mud.

AT daybreak they took up the march again, Dan walking slowly, with his musket striking the ground and his arm on Big Abel's shoulder. Where the lane curved in the hollow, they came upon a white cottage, with a woman milking a spotted cow in the barnyard. As she caught sight of them, she waved wildly with her linsey apron, holding the milk pail carefully between her feet as the spotted cow turned inquiringly.

“Go 'way, I don't want no stragglers here,” she cried, as one having authority.

Leaning upon the fence, Dan placidly regarded her.

“My dear madam, you commit an error of judgment,” he replied, pausing to argue.

With the cow's udder in her hand the woman looked up from the streaming milk.

“Well, ain't you stragglers?” she inquired.

Dan shook his head reproachfully.

“What air you, then?”

“Beggars, madam.”

“I might ha' knowed it!” returned the woman, with a snort. “Well, whatever you air, you kin jest as eas'ly keep on along that thar road. I ain't got nothing on this place for you. Some of you broke into my smokehouse night befo' last an' stole all the spar' ribs I'd been savin'. Was you the ones?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Oh, you're all alike,” protested the woman, scornfully, “an' a bigger set o' rascals I never seed.”

“Huh! Who's a rascal?” exclaimed Big Abel, angrily.

“This is the reward of doing your duty, Big Abel,” remarked Dan, gravely. “Never do it again. remember. The next time Virginia is invaded we'll sit by the fire and warm our feet. Good morning, madam.”

“Why ain't you with the army?” inquired the woman sharply, slapping the cow upon the side as she rose from her seat and took up the milk pail. “An officer rode by this morning an' he told me part of the army was campin' ten miles across on the other road.”

“Did he say whose division?”

“Oh, I reckon you kin fight as well under one general as another, so long as you've got a mind to fight at all. You jest follow this lane about three miles and then keep straight along the turnpike. If you do that I reckon you'll git yo' deserts befo' sundown.” She came over to the fence and stood fixing them with hard, bright eyes. “My! You do look used up,” she admitted after a moment. “You'd better come in an' git a glass of this milk befo' you move on. Jest go roun' to the gate and I'll meet you at the po'ch. The dog won't bite you if you don't touch nothin'.”

“All right, go ahead and hide the spoons,” called Dan, as he swung open the gate and went up a little path bordered by prince's feathers.

The woman met them at the porch and led them into a clean kitchen, where Dan sat down at the table and Big Abel stationed himself behind his chair.

“Drink a glass of that milk the first thing,” she said, bustling heavily about the room, and brow-beating them into submissive silence, while she mixed the biscuits and broke the eggs into a frying-pan greased with bacon gravy. Plump, hearty, with a full double chin and cheeks like winter apples, she moved briskly from the wooden safe to the slow fire, which she stirred with determined gestures.

“It's time this war had stopped, anyhow,” she remarked as she slapped the eggs up into the air and back again into the pan. “An' if General Lee ever rides along this way I mean to tell him that he ought to have one good battle an' be done with it. Thar's no use piddlin' along like this twil we're all worn out and thar ain't a corn-field pea left in Virginny. Look here (to Big Abel), you set right down on that do' step an' I'll give you something along with yo' marster. It's a good thing I happened to look under the cow trough yestiddy or thar wouldn't have been an egg left in this house. That's right, turn right in an' eat hearty—don't mince with me.” Big Abel, cowed by her energetic manner, seated himself upon the door step, and for a half-hour the woman ceaselessly plied them with hot biscuits and coffee made from sweet potatoes.

“You mustn't think I mind doing for the soldiers,” she said when they took their leave a little later, “but I've a husban' with General Lee and I can't bear to see able-bodied men stragglin' about the country. No, don't give me nothin'—it ain't worth it. Lord, don't I know that you don't git enough to buy a bag of flour.” Then she pointed out the way again and they set off with a well-filled paper of luncheon.

“Beware of hasty judgments, Big Abel,” advised Dan, as they strolled along the road. “Now that woman there—she's the right sort, though she rather took my breath away.”

“She 'uz downright ficy at fu'st,” replied Big Abel, “but I d'clar dose eggs des melted in my mouf like butter. Whew! don't I wish I had dat ole speckled hen f'om home. I could hev toted her unner my arm thoo dis wah des es well es not.”

The sun was well overhead, and across the landscape the heavy dew was lifted like a veil. Here and there the autumn foliage tinted the woods in splashes of red and yellow; and beyond the low stone wall an old sheep pasture was ablaze in goldenrod. From a pointed aspen beside the road a wild grapevine let down a fringe of purple clusters, but Big Abel, with a full stomach, passed them by indifferently. A huge buzzard, rising suddenly from the pasture, sailed slowly across the sky, its heavy shadow skimming the field beneath. As yet the flames of war had not blown over this quiet spot; in the early morning dew it lay as fresh as the world in its beginning.

At the end of the lane, when they came out upon the turnpike, they met an old farmer riding a mule home from the market.