DIXIE.

In her sleep Mary dreamed over again the late rencontre. Again she heard the challenging outcry, and again was lashing her horse to his utmost speed; but this time her enemy seemed too fleet for her. He overtook—he laid his hand upon her. A scream was just at her lips, when she awoke with a wild start, to find the tall woman standing over her, and bidding her in a whisper rise with all stealth and dress with all speed.

“Where’s Alice?” asked Mary. “Where’s my little girl?”

“She’s there. Never mind her yit, till you’re dressed. Here; not them cloze; these here homespun things. Make haste, but don’t get excited.”

“How long have I slept?” asked Mary, hurriedly obeying.

“You couldn’t ’a’ more’n got to sleep. Sam oughtn’t to have shot back at ’em. They’re after ’im, hot; four of ’em jess now passed through on the road, right here past my front gate.”

“What kept them back so long?” asked Mary, tremblingly attempting to button her dress in the back.

“Let me do that,” said the woman. “They couldn’t come very fast; had to kind o’ beat the bushes every hundred yards or so. If they’d of been more of ’em they’d a-come faster, ’cause they’d a-left one or two behind at each turn-out, and come along with the rest. There; now that there hat, there, on the table.” As Mary took the hat the speaker stepped to a window and peeped into the early day. A suppressed exclamation escaped her. “O you poor boy!” she murmured. Mary sprang toward her, but the stronger woman hurried her away from the spot.

“Come; take up the little one ’thout wakin’ her. Three more of ’em’s a-passin’. The little young feller in the middle reelin’ and swayin’ in his saddle, and t’others givin’ him water from his canteen.”

“Wounded?” asked Mary, with a terrified look, bringing the sleeping child.

“Yes, the last wound he’ll ever git, I reckon. Jess take the baby, so. Sam’s already took her cloze. He’s waitin’ out in the woods here behind the house. He’s got the critters down in the hollow. Now, here! This here bundle’s a ridin’-skirt. It’s not mournin’, but you mustn’t mind. It’s mighty green and cottony-lookin’, but—anyhow, you jess put it on when you git into the woods. Now it’s good sun-up outside. The way you must do—you jess keep on the lef’ side o’ me, close, so as when I jess santer out e-easy todes the back gate you’ll be hid from all the other houses. Then when we git to the back gate I’ll kind o’ stand like I was lookin’ into the pig-pen, and you jess slide away on a line with me into the woods, and there’ll be Sam. No, no; take your hat off and sort o’ hide it. Now; you ready?”

Mary threw her arms around the woman’s neck and kissed her passionately.

“Oh, don’t stop for that!” said the woman, smiling with an awkward diffidence. “Come!”

“What is the day of the month?” asked Mary of the spy. They had been riding briskly along a mere cattle-path in the woods for half an hour, and had just struck into an old, unused road that promised to lead them presently into and through some fields of cotton. Alice, slumbering heavily, had been, little by little, dressed, and was now in the man’s arms. As Mary spoke they slackened pace to a quiet trot, and crossed a broad highway nearly at right angles.

“That would ’a’ been our road with the buggy,” said the man, “if we could of took things easy.” They were riding almost straight away from the sun. His dress had been changed again, and in a suit of new, dark brown homespun wool, over a pink calico shirt and white cuffs and collar, he presented the best possible picture of spruce gentility that the times would justify. “‘What day of the month,’ did you ask? I’ll never tell you, but I know it’s Friday.”

“Then it’s the eighteenth,” said Mary.

They met an old negro driving three yoke of oxen attached to a single empty cart.

“Uncle,” said the spy, “I don’t reckon the boss will mind our sort o’ ridin’ straight thoo his grove, will he?”

“Not ’tall, boss; on’y dess be so kyine an’ shet de gates behine you, sah.”

They passed those gates and many another, shutting them faithfully, and journeying on through miles of fragrant lane and fields of young cotton and corn, and stretches of wood where the squirrel scampered before them and reaches of fallow grounds still wet with dew, and patches of sedge, and old fields grown up with thickets of young trees; now pushing their horses to a rapid gallop, where they were confident of escaping notice, and now ambling leisurely, where the eyes of men afield, or of women at home, followed them with rustic scrutiny; or some straggling Confederate soldier on foot or in the saddle met them in the way.

“How far must we go before we can stop?” asked Mary.

“Jess as far’s the critters’ll take us without showin’ distress.”

“South is out that way, isn’t it?” she asked again, pointing off to the left.

“Look here,” said the spy, with a look that was humorous, but not only humorous.

“What?”

“Two or three times last night, and now ag’in, you gimme a sort o’ sneakin’ notion you don’t trust me,” said he.

“Oh!” exclaimed she, “I do! Only I’m so anxious to be going south.”

“Jess so,” said the man. “Well, we’re goin’ sort o’ due west right now. You see we dassent take this railroad anywheres about here,”—they were even then crossing the track of the Mobile and Ohio Railway—“because that’s jess where they sho to be on the lookout fur us. And I can’t take you straight south on the dirt roads, because I don’t know the country down that way. But this way I know it like your hand knows the way to your mouth, as the felleh says. Learned it most all sence the war broke out, too. And so the whole thing is we got to jess keep straight across the country here till we strike the Mississippi Central.”

“What time will that be?”

“Time! You don’t mean time o’ day, do you?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Mary, smiling.

“Why, we’ll be lucky to make it in two whole days. Won’t we, Alice!” The child had waked, and was staring into her mother’s face. Mary caressed her. The spy looked at them silently. The mother looked up, as if to speak, but was silent.

“Hello!” said the man, softly; for a tear shone through her smile. Whereat she laughed.

“I ought to be ashamed to be so unreasonable,” she said.

“Well, now, I’d like to contradict you for once,” responds the spy; “but the fact is, how kin I, when Noo Orleens is jest about south-west frum here, anyhow?”

“Yes,” said Mary, pleasantly, “it’s between south and south-west.”

The spy made a gesture of mock amazement.

“Well, you air partickly what you say. I never hear o’ but one party that was more partickly than you. I reckon you never hear’ tell o’ him, did you?”

“Who was he?” asked Mary.

“Well, I never got his name, nor his habitation, as the felleh says; but he was so conscientious that when a highwayman attackted him onct, he wouldn’t holla murder nor he wouldn’t holla thief, ’cause he wasn’t certain whether the highwayman wanted to kill him or rob him. He was something like George Washington, who couldn’t tell a lie. Did you ever hear that story about George Washington?”

“About his chopping the cherry-tree with his hatchet?” asked Mary.

“Oh, I see you done heard the story!” said the spy, and left it untold; but whether he was making game of his auditor or not she did not know, and never found out. But on they went, by many a home; through miles of growing crops, and now through miles of lofty pine forests, and by log-cabins and unpainted cottages, from within whose open doors came often the loud feline growl of the spinning-wheel. So on and on, Mary spending the first night in a lone forest cabin of pine poles, whose master, a Confederate deserter, fed his ague-shaken wife and cotton-headed children oftener with the spoils of his rifle than with the products of the field. The spy and the deserter lay down together, and together rose again with the dawn, in a deep thicket, a few hundred yards away.

The travellers had almost reached the end of this toilsome horseback journey, when rains set in, and, for forty-eight hours more, swollen floods and broken bridges held them back, though within hearing of the locomotive’s whistle.

But at length, one morning, Mary stepped aboard the train that had not long before started south from the town of Holly Springs, Mississippi, assisted with decorous alacrity by the conductor, and followed by the station-agent with Alice in his arms, and by the telegraph-operator with a home-made satchel or two of luggage and luncheon. It was disgusting,—to two thin, tough-necked women, who climbed aboard, unassisted, at the other end of the same coach.

“You kin just bet she’s a widder, and them fellers knows it,” said one to the other, taking a seat and spitting expertly through the window.

“If she aint,” responded the other, putting a peeled snuff-stick into her cheek, “then her husband’s got the brass buttons, and they knows that. Look at ’er a-smi-i-ilin’!”

“What you reckon makes her look so wore out?” asked the first. And the other replied promptly, with unbounded loathing, “Dayncin’,” and sent her emphasis out of the window in liquid form without disturbing her intervening companion.

During the delay caused by the rain Mary had found time to refit her borrowed costume. Her dress was a stout, close-fitting homespun of mixed cotton and wool, woven in a neat plaid of walnut-brown, oak-red, and the pale olive dye of the hickory. Her hat was a simple round thing of woven pine straw, with a slightly drooping brim, its native brown gloss undisturbed, and the low crown wrapped about with a wreath of wild grasses plaited together with a bit of yellow cord. Alice wore a much-washed pink calico frock and a hood of the same stuff.

“Some officer’s wife,” said two very sweet and lady-like persons, of unequal age and equal good taste in dress, as their eyes took an inventory of her apparel. They wore bonnets that were quite handsome, and had real false flowers and silk ribbons on them.

“Yes, she’s been to camp somewhere to see him.”

“Beautiful child she’s got,” said one, as Alice began softly to smite her mother’s shoulder for private attention, and to whisper gravely as Mary bent down.

Two or three soldiers took their feet off the seats, and one of them, at the amiably murmured request of the conductor, put his shoes on.

“The car in front is your car,” said the conductor to another man, in especially dirty gray uniform.

“You kin hev it,” said the soldier, throwing his palm open with an air of happy extravagance, and a group of gray-headed “citizens,” just behind, exploded a loud country laugh.

“D’ I onderstaynd you to lafe at me, saw?” drawled the soldier, turning back with a pretence of heavy gloom on his uncombed brow.

“Laughin’ at yo’ friend yondeh,” said one of the citizens, grinning and waving his hand after the departing conductor. “’Caze if you lafe at me again, saw,”—the frown deepened,—“I’ll thess go ’ight straight out iss caw.”[3]

The laugh that followed this dreadful threat was loud and general, the victims laughing loudest of all, and the soldier smiling about benignly, and slowly scratching his elbows. Even the two ladies smiled. Alice’s face remained impassive. She looked twice into her mother’s to see if there was no smile there. But the mother smiled at her, took off her hood and smoothed back the fine gold, then put the hood on again, and tied its strings under the upstretched chin.

Presently Alice pulled softly at the hollow of her mother’s elbow.

“Mamma—mamma!” she whispered. Mary bowed her ear. The child gazed solemnly across the car at another stranger, then pulled the mother’s arm again, “That man over there—winked at me.”

And thereupon another man, sitting sidewise on the seat in front, and looking back at Alice, tittered softly, and said to Mary, with a raw drawl:—

“She’s a-beginnin’ young.”

“She means some one on the other side,” said Mary, quite pleasantly, and the man had sense enough to hush.

The jest and the laugh ran to and fro everywhere. It seemed very strange to Mary to find it so. There were two or three convalescent wounded men in the car, going home on leave, and they appeared never to weary of the threadbare joke of calling their wounds “furloughs.” There was one little slip of a fellow—he could hardly have been seventeen—wounded in the hand, whom they kept teazed to the point of exasperation by urging him to confess that he had shot himself for a furlough, and of whom they said, later, when he had got off at a flag station, that he was the bravest soldier in his company. No one on the train seemed to feel that he had got all that was coming to him until the conductor had exchanged a jest with him. The land laughed. On the right hand and on the left it dimpled and wrinkled in gentle depressions and ridges, and rolled away in fields of young corn and cotton. The train skipped and clattered along at a happy-go-lucky, twelve-miles-an-hour gait, over trestles and stock-pits, through flowery cuts and along slender, rain-washed embankments where dewberries were ripening, and whence cattle ran down and galloped off across the meadows on this side and that, tails up and heads down, throwing their horns about, making light of the screaming destruction, in their dumb way, as the people made light of the war. At stations where the train stopped—and it stopped on the faintest excuse—a long line of heads and gray shoulders was thrust out of the windows of the soldiers’ car, in front, with all manner of masculine head-coverings, even bloody handkerchiefs; and woe to the negro or negress or “citizen” who, by any conspicuous demerit or excellence of dress, form, stature, speech, or bearing, drew the fire of that line! No human power of face or tongue could stand the incessant volley of stale quips and mouldy jokes, affirmative, interrogative, and exclamatory, that fell about their victim.

At one spot, in a lovely natural grove, where the air was spiced with the gentle pungency of the young hickory foliage, the train paused a moment to let off a man in fine gray cloth, whose yellow stripes and one golden star on the coat-collar indicated a major of cavalry. It seemed as though pandemonium had opened. Mules braying, negroes yodling, axes ringing, teamsters singing, men shouting and howling, and all at nothing; mess-fires smoking all about in the same hap-hazard, but roomy, disorder in which the trees of the grove had grown; the railroad side lined with a motley crowd of jolly fellows in spurs, and the atmosphere between them and the line of heads in the car-windows murky with the interchange of compliments that flew back and forth from the “web-foots”[4] to the “critter company,” and from the “critter company” to the “web-foots.” As the train moved off, “I say, boys,” drawled a lank, coatless giant on the roadside, with but one suspender and one spur, “tha-at’s right! Gen’l Beerygyard told you to strike fo’ yo’ homes, an’ I see you’ a-doin’ it ez fass as you kin git thah.” And the “citizens” in the rear car-windows giggled even at that; while the “web-foots” he-hawed their derision, and the train went on, as one might say, with its hands in its pockets, whooping and whistling over the fields—after the cows; for the day was declining.

Mary was awed. As she had been forewarned to do, she tried not to seem unaccustomed to, or out of harmony with, all this exuberance. But there was something so brave in it, coming from a people who were playing a losing game with their lives and fortunes for their stakes; something so gallant in it, laughing and gibing in the sight of blood, and smell of fire, and shortness of food and raiment, that she feared she had betrayed a stranger’s wonder and admiration every time the train stopped, and the idlers of the station platform lingered about her window and silently paid their ungraceful but complimentary tribute of simulated casual glances.

For, with all this jest, it was very plain there was but little joy. It was not gladness; it was bravery. It was the humor of an invincible spirit—the gayety of defiance. She could easily see the grim earnestness beneath the jocund temper, and beneath the unrepining smile the privation and the apprehension. What joy there was, was a martial joy. The people were confident of victory at last,—a victorious end, whatever might lie between, and of even what lay between they would confess no fear. Richmond was safe, Memphis safer, New Orleans safest. Yea, notwithstanding Porter and Farragut were pelting away at Forts Jackson and St. Philip. Indeed, if the rumor be true, if Farragut’s ships had passed those forts, leaving Porter behind, then the Yankee sea-serpent was cut in two, and there was an end of him in that direction. Ha! ha!

“Is to-day the twenty-sixth?” asked Mary, at last, of one of the ladies in real ribbons, leaning over toward her.

“Yes, ma’am.”

It was the younger one who replied. As she did so she came over and sat by Mary.

“I judge, from what I heard your little girl asking you, that you are going beyond Jackson.”

“I’m going to New Orleans.”

“Do you live there?” The lady’s interest seemed genuine and kind.

“Yes. I am going to join my husband there.”

Mary saw by the reflection in the lady’s face that a sudden gladness must have overspread her own.

“He’ll be mighty glad, I’m sure,” said the pleasant stranger, patting Alice’s cheek, and looking, with a pretty fellow-feeling, first into the child’s face and then into Mary’s.

“Yes, he will,” said Mary, looking down upon the curling locks at her elbow with a mother’s happiness.

“Is he in the army?” asked the lady. Mary’s face fell.

“His health is bad,” she replied.

“I know some nice people down in New Orleans,” said the lady again.

“We haven’t many acquaintances,” rejoined Mary, with a timidity that was almost trepidation. Her eyes dropped, and she began softly to smooth Alice’s collar and hair.

“I didn’t know,” said the lady, “but you might know some of them. For instance, there’s Dr. Sevier.”

Mary gave a start and smiled.

“Why, is he your friend too?” she asked. She looked up into the lady’s quiet, brown eyes and down again into her own lap, where her hands had suddenly knit together, and then again into the lady’s face. “We have no friend like Dr. Sevier.”

“Mother,” called the lady softly, and beckoned. The senior lady leaned toward her. “Mother, this lady is from New Orleans and is an intimate friend of Dr. Sevier.”

The mother was pleased.

“What might one call your name?” she asked, taking a seat behind Mary and continuing to show her pleasure.

“Richling.”

The mother and daughter looked at each other. They had never heard the name before.

Yet only a little while later the mother was saying to Mary,—they were expecting at any moment to hear the whistle for the terminus of the route, the central Mississippi town of Canton:—

“My dear child, no! I couldn’t sleep to-night if I thought you was all alone in one o’ them old hotels in Canton. No, you must come home with us. We’re barely two mile’ from town, and we’ll have the carriage ready for you bright and early in the morning, and our coachman will put you on the cars just as nice—Trouble?” She laughed at the idea. “No; I tell you what would trouble me,—that is, if we’d allow it; that’d be for you to stop in one o’ them hotels all alone, child, and like’ as not some careless servant not wake you in time for the cars to-morrow.” At this word she saw capitulation in Mary’s eyes. “Come, now, my child, we’re not going to take no for an answer.”

Nor did they.

But what was the result? The next morning, when Mary and Alice stood ready for the carriage, and it was high time they were gone, the carriage was not ready; the horses had got astray in the night. And while the black coachman was on one horse, which he had found and caught, and was scouring the neighboring fields and lanes and meadows in search of the other, there came out from townward upon the still, country air the long whistle of the departing train; and then the distant rattle and roar of its far southern journey began, and then its warning notes to the scattering colts and cattle.

“Look away!”—it seemed to sing—“Look away!”—the notes fading, failing, on the ear,—“away—away—away down south in Dixie,”—the last train that left for New Orleans until the war was over.