Dr. Sevier

This was a man of slender, commanding figure and advanced years. Beside him, next the window, sat a decidedly aristocratic woman, evidently his wife. She, too, was of fine stature, and so, without leaning forward from the back of her seat, or unfolding her arms, she could make kind eyes to Alice, as the child with growing frequency stole glances, at first over her own little shoulder, and later over her mother’s, facing backward and kneeling on the cushion. At length a cooky passed between them in dead silence, and the child turned and gazed mutely in her mother’s face, with the cooky just in sight.

“It can’t hurt her,” said the lady, in a sweet voice, to Mary, leaning forward with her hands in her lap. By the time the sun began to set in a cool, golden haze across some wide stretches of rolling fallow, a conversation had sprung up, and the child was in the lady’s lap, her little hand against the silken bosom, playing with a costly watch.

The talk began about the care of Alice, passed to the diet, and then to the government, of children, all in a light way, a similarity of convictions pleasing the two ladies more and more as they found it run further and further. Both talked, but the strange lady sustained the conversation, although it was plainly both a pastime and a comfort to Mary. Whenever it threatened to flag the handsome stranger persisted in reviving it.

Her husband only listened and smiled, and with one finger made every now and then a soft, slow pass at Alice, who each time shrank as slowly and softly back into his wife’s fine arm. Presently, however, Mary raised her eyebrows a little and smiled, to see her sitting quietly in the gentleman’s lap; and as she turned away and rested her elbow on the window-sill and her cheek on her hand in a manner that betrayed weariness, and looked out upon the ever-turning landscape, he murmured to his wife, “I haven’t a doubt in my mind,” and nodded significantly at the preoccupied little shape in his arms. His manner with the child was imperceptibly adroit, and very soon her prattle began to be heard. Mary was just turning to offer a gentle check to this rising volubility, when up jumped the little one to a standing posture on the gentleman’s knee, and, all unsolicited and with silent clapping of hands, plumped out her full name: —

“Alice Sevier Witchlin’!”

The husband threw a quick glance toward his wife; but she avoided it and called Mary’s attention to the sunset as seen through the opposite windows. Mary looked and responded with expressions of admiration, but was visibly disquieted, and the next moment called her child to her.

“My little girl mustn’t talk so loud and fast in the cars,” she said, with tender pleasantness, standing her upon the seat and brushing back the stray golden waves from the baby’s temples, and the brown ones, so like them, from her own. She turned a look of amused apology to the gentleman, and added, “She gets almost boisterous sometimes,” then gave her regard once more to her offspring, seating the little one beside her as in the beginning, and answering her musical small questions with composing yeas and nays.

“I suppose,” she said, after a pause and a look out through the window, – “I suppose we ought soon to be reaching M – station, now, should we not?”

“What, in Tennessee? Oh! no,” replied the gentleman. “In ordinary times we should; but at this slow rate we cannot nearly do it. We’re on a road, you see, that was destroyed by the retreating army and made over by the Union forces. Besides, there are three trains of troops ahead of us, that must stop and unload between here and there, and keep you waiting, there’s no telling how long.”

“Then I’ll get there in the night!” exclaimed Mary.

“Yes, probably after midnight.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t have thought of coming before to-morrow if I had known that!” In the extremity of her dismay she rose half from her seat and looked around with alarm.

“Have you no friends expecting to receive you there?” asked the lady.

“Not a soul! And the conductor says there’s no lodging-place nearer than three miles” —

“And that’s gone now,” said the gentleman.

“You’ll have to get out at the same station with us,” said the lady, her manner kindness itself and at the same time absolute.

“I think you have claims on us, anyhow, that we’d like to pay.”

“Oh! impossible,” said Mary. “You’re certainly mistaking me.”

“I think you have,” insisted the lady; “that is, if your name is Richling.”

Mary blushed.

“I don’t think you know my husband,” she said; “he lives a long way from here.”

“In New Orleans?” asked the gentleman.

“Yes, sir,” said Mary, boldly. She couldn’t fear such good faces.

“His first name is John, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir. Do you really know John, sir?” The lines of pleasure and distress mingled strangely in Mary’s face. The gentleman smiled. He tapped little Alice’s head with the tips of his fingers.

“I used to hold him on my knee when he was no bigger than this little image of him here.”

The tears leaped into Mary’s eyes.

“Mr. Thornton,” she whispered, huskily, and could say no more.

“You must come home with us,” said the lady, touching her tenderly on the shoulder. “It’s a wonder of good fortune that we’ve met. Mr. Thornton has something to say to you, – a matter of business. He’s the family’s lawyer, you know.”

“I must get to my husband without delay,” said Mary.

“Get to your husband?” asked the lawyer, in astonishment.

“Yes, sir.”

“Through the lines?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I told him so,” said the lady.

“I don’t know how to credit it,” said he. “Why, my child, I don’t think you can possibly know what you are attempting. Your friends ought never to have allowed you to conceive such a thing. You must let us dissuade you. It will not be taking too much liberty, will it? Has your husband never told you what good friends we were?”

Mary nodded and tried to speak.

“Often,” said Mrs. Thornton to her husband, interpreting the half-articulated reply.

They sat and talked in low tones, under the dismal lamp of the railroad coach, for two or three hours. Mr. Thornton came around and took the seat in front of Mary, and sat with one leg under him, facing back toward her. Mrs. Thornton sat beside her, and Alice slumbered on the seat behind, vacated by the lawyer and his wife.

“You needn’t tell me John’s story,” said the gentleman; “I know it. What I didn’t know before, I got from a man with whom I corresponded in New Orleans.”

“Dr. Sevier?”

“No, a man who got it from the Doctor.”

So they had Mary tell her own story.

“I thought I should start just as soon as my mother’s health would permit. John wouldn’t have me start before that, and, after all, I don’t see how I could have done it – rightly. But by the time she was well – or partly well – every one was in the greatest anxiety and doubt everywhere. You know how it was.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Thornton.

“And everybody thinking everything would soon be settled,” continued Mary.

“Yes,” said the sympathetic lady, and her husband touched her quietly, meaning for her not to interrupt.

“We didn’t think the Union could be broken so easily,” pursued Mary. “And then all at once it was unsafe and improper to travel alone. Still I went to New York, to take steamer around by sea. But the last steamer had sailed, and I had to go back home; for – the fact is,” – she smiled, – “my money was all gone. It was September before I could raise enough to start again; but one morning I got a letter from New Orleans, telling me that John was very ill, and enclosing money for me to travel with.”

She went on to tell the story of her efforts to get a pass on the bank of the Ohio river, and how she had gone home once more, knowing she was watched, not daring for a long time to stir abroad, and feeding on the frequent hope that New Orleans was soon to be taken by one or another of the many naval expeditions that from time to time were, or were said to be, sailing.

“And then suddenly – my mother died.”

Mrs. Thornton gave a deep sigh.

“And then,” said Mary, with a sudden brightening, but in a low voice, “I determined to make one last effort. I sold everything in the world I had and took Alice and started. I’ve come very slowly, a little way at a time, feeling along, for I was resolved not to be turned back. I’ve been weeks getting this far, and the lines keep moving south ahead of me. But I haven’t been turned back,” she went on to say, with a smile, “and everybody, white and black, everywhere, has been just as kind as kind can be.” Tears stopped her again.

“Well, never mind, Mrs. Richling,” said Mrs. Thornton; then turned to her husband, and asked, “May I tell her?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Mrs. Richling, – but do you wish to be called Mrs. Richling?”

“Yes,” said Mary, and “Certainly,” said Mr. Thornton.

“Well, Mrs. Richling, Mr. Thornton has some money for your husband. Not a great deal, but still – some. The younger of the two sisters died a few weeks ago. She was married, but she was rich in her own right. She left almost everything to her sister; but Mr. Thornton persuaded her to leave some money – well, two thousand – ’tisn’t much, but it’s something, you know – to – ah to Mr. Richling. Husband has it now at home and will give it to you, – at the breakfast-table to-morrow morning; can’t you, dear?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, and we’ll not try to persuade you to give up your idea of going to New Orleans. I know we couldn’t do it. We’ll watch our chance, – eh, husband? – and put you through the lines; and not only that, but give you letters to – why, dear,” said the lady, turning to her partner in good works, “you can give Mrs. Richling a letter to Governor Blank; and another to General Um-hm, can’t you? and – yes, and one to Judge Youknow. Oh, they will take you anywhere! But first you’ll stop with us till you get well rested – a week or two, or as much longer as you will.”

Mary pressed the speaker’s hand.

“I can’t stay.”

“Oh, you know you needn’t have the least fear of seeing any of John’s relatives. They don’t live in this part of the State at all; and, even if they did, husband has no business with them just now, and being a Union man, you know” —

“I want to see my husband,” said Mary, not waiting to hear what Union sympathies had to do with the matter.

“Yes,” said the lady, in a suddenly subdued tone. “Well, we’ll get you through just as quickly as we can.” And soon they all began to put on wraps and gather their luggage. Mary went with them to their home, laid her tired head beside her child’s in sleep, and late next morning rose to hear that Fort Donelson was taken, and the Southern forces were falling back. A day or two later came word that Columbus, on the Mississippi, had been evacuated. It was idle for a woman to try just then to perform the task she had set for herself. The Federal lines!

“Why, my dear child, they’re trying to find the Confederate lines and strike them. You can’t lose anything – you may gain much – by remaining quiet here awhile. The Mississippi, I don’t doubt, will soon be open from end to end.”

A fortnight seemed scarcely more than a day when it was past, and presently two of them had gone. One day comes Mr. Thornton, saying: —

“My dear child, I cannot tell you how I have the news, but you may depend upon its correctness. New Orleans is to be attacked by the most powerful naval expedition that ever sailed under the United States flag. If the place is not in our hands by the first of April I will put you through both lines, if I have to go with you myself.” When Mary made no answer, he added, “Your delays have all been unavoidable, my child!”

“Oh, I don’t know; I don’t know!” exclaimed Mary, with sudden distraction; “it seems to me I must be to blame, or I’d have been through long ago. I ought to have run through the lines. I ought to have ‘run the blockade.’”

“My child,” said the lawyer, “you’re mad.”

“You’ll see,” replied Mary, almost in soliloquy.

CHAPTER LIV.

“WHO GOES THERE?”

The scene and incident now to be described are without date. As Mary recalled them, years afterward, they hung out against the memory a bold, clear picture, cast upon it as the magic lantern casts its tableaux upon the darkened canvas. She had lost the day of the month, the day of the week, all sense of location, and the points of the compass. The most that she knew was that she was somewhere near the meeting of the boundaries of three States. Either she was just within the southern bound of Tennessee, or the extreme north-eastern corner of Mississippi, or else the north-western corner of Alabama. She was aware, too, that she had crossed the Tennessee river; that the sun had risen on her left and had set on her right, and that by and by this beautiful day would fade and pass from this unknown land, and the fire-light and lamp-light draw around them the home-groups under the roof-trees, here where she was a homeless stranger, the same as in the home-lands where she had once loved and been beloved.

She was seated in a small, light buggy drawn by one good horse. Beside her the reins were held by a rather tall man, of middle age, gray, dark, round-shouldered, and dressed in the loose blue flannel so much worn by followers of the Federal camp. Under the stiff brim of his soft-crowned black hat a pair of clear eyes gave a continuous playful twinkle. Between this person and Mary protruded, at the edge of the buggy-seat, two small bootees that have already had mention, and from his elbow to hers, and back to his, continually swayed drowsily the little golden head to which the bootees bore a certain close relation. The dust of the highway was on the buggy and the blue flannel and the bootees. It showed with special boldness on a black sun-bonnet that covered Mary’s head, and that somehow lost all its homeliness whenever it rose sufficiently in front to show the face within. But the highway itself was not there; it had been left behind some hours earlier. The buggy was moving at a quiet jog along a “neighborhood road,” with unploughed fields on the right and a darkling woods pasture on the left. By the feathery softness and paleness of the sweet-smelling foliage you might have guessed it was not far from the middle of April, one way or another; and, by certain allusions to Pittsburg Landing as a place of conspicuous note, you might have known that Shiloh had been fought. There was that feeling of desolation in the land that remains after armies have passed over, let them tread never so lightly.

“D’you know what them rails is put that way fur?” asked the man. He pointed down with his buggy-whip just off the roadside, first on one hand and then on the other.

“No,” said Mary, turning the sun-bonnet’s limp front toward the questioner and then to the disjointed fence on her nearer side; “that’s what I’ve been wondering for days. They’ve been ordinary worm fences, haven’t they?”

“Jess so,” responded the man, with his accustomed twinkle. “But I think I see you oncet or twicet lookin’ at ’em and sort o’ tryin’ to make out how come they got into that shape.” The long-reiterated W’s of the rail-fence had been pulled apart into separate V’s, and the two sides of each of these had been drawn narrowly together, so that what had been two parallel lines of fence, with the lane between, was now a long double row of wedge-shaped piles of rails, all pointing into the woods on the left.

“How did it happen?” asked Mary, with a smile of curiosity.

“Didn’t happen at all, ’twas jess done by live men, and in a powerful few minutes at that. Sort o’ shows what we’re approachin’ unto, as it were, eh? Not but they’s plenty behind us done the same way, all the way back into Kentuck’, as you already done see; but this’s been done sence the last rain, and it rained night afore last.”

“Still I’m not sure what it means,” said Mary; “has there been fighting here?”

“Go up head,” said the man, with a facetious gesture. “See? The fight came through these here woods, here. ’Taint been much over twenty-four hours, I reckon, since every one o’ them-ah sort o’ shut-up-fan-shape sort o’ fish-traps had a gray-jacket in it layin’ flat down an’ firin’ through the rails, sort o’ random-like, only not much so.” His manner of speech seemed a sort of harlequin patchwork from the bad English of many sections, the outcome of a humorous and eclectic fondness for verbal deformities. But his lightness received a sudden check.

“Heigh-h-h!” he gravely and softly exclaimed, gathering the reins closer, as the horse swerved and dashed ahead. Two or three buzzards started up from the roadside, with their horrid flapping and whiff of quills, and circled low overhead. “Heigh-h-h!” he continued soothingly. “Ho-o-o-o! somebody lost a good nag there, – a six-pound shot right through his head and neck. Whoever made that shot killed two birds with one stone, sho!” He was half risen from his seat, looking back. As he turned again, and sat down, the drooping black sun-bonnet quite concealed the face within. He looked at it a moment. “If you think you don’t like the risks we can still turn back.”

“No,” said the voice from out the sun-bonnet; “go on.”

“If we don’t turn back now we can’t turn back at all.”

“Go on,” said Mary; “I can’t turn back.”

“You’re a good soldier,” said the man, playfully again. “You’re a better one than me, I reckon; I kin turn back frequently, as it were. I’ve done it ‘many a time and oft,’ as the felleh says.”

Mary looked up with feminine surprise. He made a pretence of silent laughter, that showed a hundred crows’ feet in his twinkling eyes.

“Oh, don’t you fret; I’m not goin’ to run the wrong way with you in charge. Didn’t you hear me promise Mr. Thornton? Well, you see, I’ve got a sort o’ bad memory, that kind o’ won’t let me forgit when I make a promise; – bothers me that way a heap sometimes.” He smirked in a self-deprecating way, and pulled his hat-brim down in front. Presently he spoke again, looking straight ahead over the horse’s ears: —

“Now, that’s the mischief about comin’ with me – got to run both blockades at oncet. Now, if you’d been a good Secesh and could somehow or ’nother of got a pass through the Union lines you’d of been all gay. But bein’ Union, the fu’ther you git along the wuss off you air, ’less-n I kin take you and carry you ’way ’long yonder to where you kin jess jump onto a south-bound Rebel railroad and light down amongst folks that’ll never think o’ you havin’ run through the lines.”

“But you can’t do that,” said Mary, not in the form of a request. “You know you agreed with Mr. Thornton that you would simply” —

“Put you down in a safe place,” said the man, jocosely; “that’s what it meant, and don’t you get nervous” – His face suddenly changed; he raised his whip and held it up for attention and silence, looking at Mary, and smiling while he listened. “Do you hear anything?”

“Yes,” said Mary, in a hushed tone. There were some old fields on the right-hand now, and a wood on the left. Just within the wood a turtle-dove was cooing.

“I don’t mean that,” said the man, softly.

“No,” said Mary, “you mean this, away over here.” She pointed across the fields, almost straight away in front.

“’Taint so scandalous far ‘awa-a-ay’ as you talk like,” murmured the man, jestingly; and just then a fresh breath of the evening breeze brought plainer and nearer the soft boom of a bass-drum.

“Are they coming this way?” asked Mary.

“No; they’re sort o’ dress-paradin’ in camp, I reckon.” He began to draw rein. “We turn off here, anyway,” he said, and drove slowly, but point blank into the forest.

“I don’t see any road,” said Mary. It was so dark in the wood that even her child, muffled in a shawl and asleep in her arms, was a dim shape.

“Yes,” was the reply; “we have to sort o’ smell out the way here; but my smellers is good, at times, and pretty soon we’ll strike a little sort o’ somepnuther like a road, about a quarter from here.”

Pretty soon they did so. It started suddenly from the edge of an old field in the forest, and ran gradually down, winding among the trees, into a densely wooded bottom, where even Mary’s short form often had to bend low to avoid the boughs of beech-trees and festoons of grape-vine. Under one beech the buggy stood still a moment. The man drew and opened a large clasp-knife and cut one of the long, tough withes. He handed it to Mary, as they started on again.

“With compliments,” he said, “and hoping you won’t find no use for it.”

“What is it for?”

“Why, you see, later on we’ll be in the saddle; and if such a thing should jess accidentally happen to happen, which I hope it won’t, to be sho’, that I should happen to sort o’ absent-mindedly yell out ‘Go!’ like as if a hornet had stabbed me, you jess come down with that switch, and make the critter under you run like a scared dog, as it were.”

“Must I?”

“No, I don’t say you must, but you’d better, I bet you. You needn’t if you don’t want to.”

Presently the dim path led them into a clear, rippling creek, and seemed to Mary to end; but when the buggy wheels had crunched softly along down stream over some fifty or sixty yards of gravelly shallow, the road showed itself faintly again on the other bank, and the horse, with a plunge or two and a scramble, jerked them safely over the top, and moved forward in the direction of the rising moon. They skirted a small field full of ghostly dead trees, where corn was beginning to make a show, turned its angle, and saw the path under their feet plain to view, smooth and hard.

“See that?” said the man, in a tone of playful triumph, as the animal started off at a brisk trot, lifted his head and neighed. “‘My day’s work’s done,’ sezee; ‘I done hoed my row.’” A responsive neigh came out of the darkness ahead. “That’s the trick!” said the man. “Thanks, as the felleh says.” He looked to Mary for her appreciation of his humor.

“I suppose that means a good deal; does it?” asked she, with a smile.

“Jess so! It means, first of all, fresh hosses. And then it means a house what aint been burnt by jayhawkers yit, and a man and woman a-waitin’ in it, and some bacon and cornpone, and maybe a little coffee; and milk, anyhow, till you can’t rest, and buttermilk to fare-you-well. Now, have you ever learned the trick o’ jess sort o’ qui’lin’2 up, cloze an’ all, dry so, and puttin’ half a night’s rest into an hour’s sleep? ’Caze why, in one hour we must be in the saddle. No mo’ buggy, and powerful few roads. Comes as nigh coonin’ it as I reckon you ever ’lowed you’d like to do, don’t it?”

He smiled, pretending to hold back much laughter, and Mary smiled too. At mention of a woman she had removed her bonnet and was smoothing her hair with her hand.

“I don’t care,” she said, “if only you’ll bring us through.”

The man made a ludicrous gesture of self-abasement.

“Not knowin’, can’t say, as the felleh says; but what I can tell you – I always start out to make a spoon or spoil a horn, and which one I’ll do I seldom ever promise till it’s done. But I have a sneakin’ notion, as it were, that I’m the clean sand, and no discount, as Mr. Lincoln says, and I do my best. Angels can do no more, as the felleh says.”

He drew rein. “Whoa!” Mary saw a small log cabin, and a fire-light shining under the bottom of the door.

“The woods seem to be on fire just over there in three or four places, are they not?” she asked, as she passed the sleeping Alice down to the man, who had got out of the buggy.

“Them’s the camps,” said another man, who had come out of the house and was letting the horse out of the shafts.

“If we was on the rise o’ the hill yonder we could see the Confedick camps, couldn’t we, Isaiah?” asked Mary’s guide.

“Easy,” said that prophet. “I heer ’em to-day two, three times, plain, cheerin’ at somethin’.”

About the middle of that night Mary Richling was sitting very still and upright on a large dark horse that stood champing his Mexican bit in the black shadow of a great oak. Alice rested before her, fast asleep against her bosom. Mary held by the bridle another horse, whose naked saddle-tree was empty. A few steps in front of her the light of the full moon shone almost straight down upon a narrow road that just there emerged from the shadow of woods on either side, and divided into a main right fork and a much smaller one that curved around to Mary’s left. Off in the direction of the main fork the sky was all aglow with camp-fires. Only just here on the left there was a cool and grateful darkness.