by Grant Allen
I dared not move lest the launch should see, by the dancing reflection of her light on the rippled waves I made, there was something astir ahead, and should give me chase and capture me as a deserter. I floated like a log on the silent surface, and waited with upturned face and closed eyes for the launch to pass by me — or run over me.
As I floated I heard her screw draw nearer and nearer. I wondered whether I lay direct in her course. If so, no help for it; she must run me down. It was safer so than to swim away and attract attention.
I turned my eyes sideways and opened them cautiously as the noise came close. By heavens, yes! She was heading straight for me!
At Harvard I had always been a good diver. I dived now, noiselessly and imperceptibly; it would almost be truer to say, I let myself go under without conscious movement. The water closed above my face at once. I seemed to feel something glide above me. I was dimly aware of the recoil from the screw. I shut my eyes once more, and held my breath in my full chest. Next instant I was whirled by the after-current back to the surface in the wake of the screw, and saw the white stars still shining above me.
“Something black on the water,” shouted a voice behind. “Otter, I take it; or might be a nigger, contraband bound North. Whichever it is, I’ll have a cock-shot at it, captain, anyway.”
I dived again at the word, half dead with cold and fear; and even as I dived felt rather than heard the thud and hiss of a rifle bullet ricochetting on the water, just at the very point where my head had rested an instant earlier.
“Otter!” the voice said again as I reached the surface, numbed and breathless, more dead than alive, and afraid to let anything but my mouth and ears rise above the black level of the water. And the steam-launch moved steadily on her way without waiting to take any further notice of me.
The danger was past once more for the moment, but I was too exhausted to swim any further, deadened in my limbs with cold as I was, and cramped with my exertions. I could only float face upward on my back, and soon became almost senseless from exposure. Every now and again, indeed, consciousness seemed to return fitfully for a moment, and I struck out in blind energy with my legs, I knew not in what direction; but for the most part I merely floated like a log down-stream, allowing myself to be carried resistlessly before the sluggish current.
As day broke I revived a little. I must then have been at least three hours in the ice-cold water. I saw land within a hundred yards of me. With one despairing final effort, I know not how, I struck out with my legs like galvanized limbs, and made for it — for land and Elsie.
Would Federal pickets be guarding the shore? That was now my next anxiety. If so, my doom was sealed. They would challenge me at once, and, as I could not give the countersign, would shoot me down without a thought or a question as a spy from Richmond.
Fortunately the shore was here unguarded; below Mitchell’s redoubt, indeed, attack from southward was always held impossible. I dragged myself on land, over the muddy tidal flat, and found myself in the midst of that terrible, desolate, swampy region known as the Wilderness, the scene of the chief early conflicts in the struggle for disruption, and of the battle-fields where Lee and Stonewall Jackson stood at bay like wounded tigers.
When I came to realize my actual plight I began to feel what a fool I had been to run away from Richmond. I sat there on the bank, frozen and wet, dripping from head to foot, my soaked boots hanging useless round my neck, my blood chilled, my limbs shivering, my heart almost dead, and yet with a terrible sense of fever in my cold lips, and a fierce throbbing in my aching head. I had no food, and no chance of getting any. Around me stretched that broken marshy country, alternating between pine barrens and swampy bottoms. Scouts and pickets held the chief points everywhere: to show myself before them in my wet and ragged Confederate uniform would be to draw fire at a moment’s notice. What to do I had no conception: I merely sat there, my head in my hands, and waited, and waited, and waited still, till the sun was high up in the blank-blue heavens.
I won’t describe the eight days of speechless agony that followed in the Wilderness. I wandered up and down through scrub and pine-woods, not daring at first to show myself openly; and then, when hunger and fatigue at last conquered my fear, not knowing where to look for the Federal outposts. Night after night I lay upon the bare ground, in the highest and driest part of the wild pine-barrens, and saw the cold stars shining above, and heard the whip-poor-will scream shrill overhead in the thick darkness. It was an awful time: I dare not trust myself even now to recall it too vividly. If it had not been for the wild persimmon trees, indeed, I might have starved in that terrible week. But luckily the persimmons were very plentiful; and though a man can’t live on them for ever with absolute comfort, they will serve to keep body and soul together somehow for a longer time than any other wild berry or fruit I know of.
At last, on the eighth morning, as I lay asleep on the ground, wearied and feverish, I felt myself rudely shaken by a rough hand, and, opening my eyes with a start, saw to my joy the Northern uniform on the three men who stood around me.
“Spy!” the sergeant said briefly. “Tie his hands, O’Grady. Lift him up. March him before you.”
I told them at once I was a soldier in the Harvard battalion, escaped from Richmond; but of course they didn’t and couldn’t believe me. My Confederate uniform told too false a story. However, I was far too weak to march, and the men carried me, one of them going on to get me food and brandy; for, spy or no spy, one thing was clear past all doubting, that I was so faint and ill with hunger and exposure that to make me walk would have been sheer cruelty.
“Take him to head-quarters,” my captor or my rescuer said, in a short voice, as soon as I had eaten and drunk greedily the bread and meat and brandy the first man had brought up for me.
They carried me to head-quarters and brought me up before three officers. The officers questioned me closely and incredulously. They would hear nothing of my being a Federal prisoner. The uniform alone was enough to condemn me. “Take him away and search him,” they said peremptorily. The sergeant took me to a tent and searched me; and found nothing.
I knew then what would happen next. They would try me by a rude rough-and-ready court-martial, and hang me for a spy that very morning.
As I marched out from the sergeant’s tent again, absolutely despondent with fatigue and fever, an officer in a major’s uniform strolled casually towards us. Promotion was often quick in those days. The major, I saw at a glance, was Claude Tyack.
He stopped and gazed at me sternly for a moment. Not a muscle of his face stirred or quivered. “Sergeant,” he said, in a cold unconcerned tone, eyeing me from head to foot, “who’s your prisoner?”
“One of Lee’s spies,” the sergeant answered carelessly. “Took him this morning out on the Wilderness. Fourth we’ve taken this week, anyhow. The Rebs are getting kinder desperate, I reckon.”
I looked Claude Tyack back in the face. He knew me perfectly, but never for one instant quailed or faltered. “What will you do with him? Shoot him?” he inquired.
“String him up,” the sergeant replied, with a quiet grin.
I stood still and said nothing.
They took me back and held a short informal drum-head court-martial. It all occupied five minutes. A man’s life counts for so little in war time. I was half dead already, and never listened to it. The bitterness of death was past for me long ago. I stood bolt upright, my arms folded desperately in front, and faced Claude Tyack without ever flinching. Claude Tyack, who only looked on as a mere spectator, faced me in return, mute and white, in solemn expectation.
“Do you admit you are a spy?” the presiding officer asked me.
“No,” I replied, “I am a Federal prisoner from Richmond, late sergeant in the Massachusetts contingent.”
“Can you get any one to identify you?”
“In Burnside’s division — yes; hundreds.”
The presiding officer smiled grimly. “Burnside’s divisi
on is a long way off now,” he said calmly. “It moved a month ago. We can’t bring men all the way from Kentucky, you know, to look at you.”
I bowed my head. It mattered little. I was too wearied out to fight for life any longer. I only thought of Elsie’s misery.
Then I became aware that Claude Tyack had joined the ring a little closer, and was looking at me with fixed and rigid attention.
“Nobody nearer?” the officer asked.
I kept my eyes riveted on Tyack’s. I could not appeal to him; not even for Elsie. He would not help me. I never knew till that moment I was a thought-reader; but in Tyack’s face I read it all — all he was thinking as it passed through his mind: read it, and felt certain I read it correctly.
If he allowed me to be shot then and there, he would not only wipe out old scores, but would also in time marry Elsie.
I saw those very words passing rapidly through his angry mind— “If it weren’t that I love Walter Ponsard with all my soul, I think, Mr. Tyack, for very pity I should have to marry you.”
She would have to marry him! He would go back, certain of my death; he would tell her all, save this one episode; he would plead hard, as he had pleaded before; and then, for pity, Elsie would marry him!
Our eyes met still; I returned his stare: tall and pale he stood confronting me: he gloated over my misfortune: we spoke never a word to one another; and yet, we two men knew perfectly in our own hearts each what the other was thinking.
There was a deadly pause. The presiding officer waited patiently. The words seemed to stick in my throat. I moistened my lips with my tongue, and wetted my larynx by swallowing. Then I said slowly, “Nobody nearer.”
The presiding officer waited again. Clearly he was loth himself to condemn a man so weak and ill as I was. At last he cleared his throat nervously, and turned to the court with an inquiring gesture.
Then Claude Tyack took three paces forward and stood before him. The man seemed taller and paler than ever. Great drops of sweat gathered on his brow. His lips and nostrils quivered with emotion. A frightful struggle was going on within him. The demon of revenge — just revenge, if revenge is ever just — for an undeserved insult — I recognized that — fought for mastery in his soul with right and mercy. “I need not identify him,” he cried aloud, clasping his two hands one over the other, and talking as in a dream. “I am not called to give evidence. He has never asked me!”
“I will never ask you,” I replied, with dogged despair. “You have found me, oh my enemy! I have wronged you bitterly. I know it, and regret it. I will ask your forgiveness, but never your mercy.”
Claude Tyack held up his hands, like a child, to his face. He was a rugged man now, though still young and handsome; but the tears rolled slowly, very slowly, one after another, down his bronzed cheeks. “You shall have my mercy,” he answered at last, with a groan, “because you do not ask it; but never, never, never, my forgiveness. For Elsie’s sake, I cannot let her lover be shot for a traitor.”
The presiding officer caught at it all as if by instinct. “You know this man, Major Tyack?” he asked quietly.
“I know him, Colonel Sibthorpe.”
“Who is he?”
The words came as if from the depths of the grave. “Walter Ponsard, sergeant of the Harvard battalion Third Massachusetts infantry, Burnside’s division. He was missing seven months ago, after Chattawauga.”
“The name and description he gave himself. That is quite sufficient. The prisoner is discharged. Sergeant Ponsard, you shall be taken care of. Tyack, a word with you.”
III.
When I next was conscious, I found myself lying in hospital at Washington. Elsie, in a nurse’s dress, was leaning over my bed. She kissed me on the forehead. “How about Tyack?” I asked eagerly.
“Hush, hush!” she whispered, soothing my cheek with her hand. “You mustn’t talk, darling. The fever has been terrible. We never thought your life would be spared for me.”
“But Tyack!” I cried, “I must hear of him! He hasn’t shot himself? His face was so terrible! I could never live if I thought I had killed him.”
“He is there,” Elsie whispered, pointing with her hand to the adjoining bed. “Wounded the very next day in the fight at Fredericksburg. I have nursed you both. Hush, now, hush, darling!”
I said no more, but cried silently. I was glad his blood was not on my head. If he died now, he died for his country, in the only just war ever waged on this world of ours. He had had his ordeal, and passed through it like a man and a soldier.
Late that night I heard a noise and bustle at my bedside. Somebody was talking low and earnestly. I turned round on my side and listened. Elsie was standing by Tyack’s bed, and holding his hand tenderly in hers. I knew why, and was not surprised at her.
“Elsie, Elsie,” he said in a tremulous tone, “press me tighter. It will not be long now. I feel it creeping over me. Is Ponsard conscious?”
I sat up in my bed with delirious strength, in spite of Elsie, and cried aloud in a clear voice, “Tyack, I hear you.”
“Ponsard,” he said, turning his eyes and, without moving his neck, looking across at me, “I said once I would never forgive you. I am sorry I said so. If there is anything to forgive, I forgive it freely.... Before I die, give me your hand, Walter!”
He had never called me Walter before. The hot tears rose fast in my eyes. Feeble and ill as I was, I sprang from my bed. Elsie clasped my left hand tight and flung the coarse coverlet loosely around me. I sat on the edge of Tyack’s bed, and grasped his hand hard in my other. Elsie laid hers over both. She kissed me tenderly with her trembling lips; then she bent down and kissed the dying man too on his white forehead. His hand relaxed; his lips quivered: “Elsie, good-bye!” he said slowly; and all was over.
Elsie flung her arms wildly around my neck. “He saved your life, my darling,” she cried. “Walter, I hoped I might have saved his for him.”
“It is better so, Elsie,” I answered, with an effort; and then I fell back fainting beside him.
TOM’S WIFE.
I.
Tom and Jake lived together most amicably in a rough log hut in one of the wildest wooded parts of that great frozen tract which we know as the Hudson Bay Company’s territory. If they’d ever had surnames they’d almost forgotten those needless appendages themselves long since, and certainly nobody else on earth had ever heard of them. They were Tom and Jake to one another and all the world beside, that world in their case consisting of a few distant neighbours some fifty miles off on either side, and the Company’s agent at Fort Nitchegouna, with whom they exchanged their skins and furs at long intervals for tobacco, salt, clothing, and other simple necessaries of life in a far northern clearing.
For Tom and Jake were trappers by trade — trappers born and bred in the Hudson Bay district, who had shouldered rifles almost as soon as they could walk a mile, and knew no other mode of life but that lonely existence in the wild woods, snaring beaver, and musquash, and silver fox, and wolverene. Forest and snow were all their scenery. They were men of action, not men of words. Their speech was infrequent, direct, and natural. When they had nothing to say to each other they held their tongues. And as their life afforded few occasions for philosophic reflections they seldom exchanged a sentence between themselves through the long, cold winter and the short, hot summer, except in so far as it was necessary to give or receive instructions about joint action against some particular four-footed enemy — generally a “bar” or a stray northward-wandering summer “painter.” Save at these rare moments they were mostly mute, going about the two rooms of their bare log hut with their pipes between their lips, and very little else in their mouths or fancies.
Still, in their own way, those two were deeply attached to one another. They loved like brothers — undemonstratively, but none the less truly. When Tom came back from a long hunting expedition alone he held up his skins for a show in his hand, and said, “Hello, Jake!” and Jake held up his in return, and said, �
��Hello, Tom!” and both of them felt glad to see the other’s face, with a profound consciousness that in that simple greeting they had fulfilled all the duties of backwoods’ politeness, and satisfied the claims of eternal friendship.
Perhaps one reason why they liked one another so much was because each formed the other’s entire environment. Though, to be sure, if you had told them so they would have smiled blankly and answered, “Sure!” in profound surprise that they should possess anything on earth that had so fine a name without even suspecting it. They had grown up together from the time they were boys, and no womankind had ever come in between to divide their allegiance one to the other. The only female society they ever saw, indeed, was when a party of wandering Indians passed that way to exchange their furs with the whites for spirits and gunpowder. On such occasions Tom and Jake had a rare old frolic with the youngest and prettiest squaws. They organized a moonlight entertainment on the cleared space in front of the hut, and danced to their heart’s content for hours at a stretch with their dusky partners, while the Indian men sat by, smoking their pipes, and looked on impassive, wrapped in their blankets and in the true impenetrable Indian silence. At the end of it all, when Tom and Jake could dance no more, they stood glasses of grog to the tribe all round, and the Indians sang “He’s a jolly good fellow!” to the familiar tune and in the Ojibway language. But with the trilling exceptions of these primitive orgies once in a twelvemonth Tom and Jake never saw a woman’s face from year’s end to year’s end. They lived their own monotonous life alone among the trees and snows, contented to do so because they know and could conceive no other.
II.
At last, one day an unheard-of event took place by common consent in the little household. Tom went on a shopping expedition to Toronto.
For years the pair had been slowly accumulating a goodly stock of Canadian bank-notes, the surplus of their sales over their purchases from the Company’s agent, and having nothing to do with them in the wild north they found these bank-notes had gathered head at last, till Tom and Jake began to feel it was a sin to lock up so much capital idle; and not being economists enough to have heard of investment, they decided between them that Tom, who was the best speaker, must set off to spend it, or part of it, at Toronto. There were things there, no doubt, in the stores they had heard tell of which would come in handy for the hut in snow-time. So off Tom set, in bright mid-winter, on his trusty snow-shoes, taking advantage of the easy travelling down, and meaning to bring back his purchases over the even road afforded by the snow on a hired sleigh from Barrie or Portage.
