What we saw was the leather-curtained spring-wagon and its little striped-legged mules. The old negro in charge of them bowed gravely to me and smiled affectionately upon Ferry. About an hour later Gholson appeared. He took such hurried pains to explain his coming that any fool could have seen the real reason. The brigade surgeon had warned him--Oh! had I heard?--Oh! from Ned Ferry, yes. The cause of his threatened breakdown, he said, was the perpetual and fearful grind of work into which of late he had--fallen.

"Did the doctor say 'fallen'?" I shrewdly asked.

"No, the doctor said 'plunged,' but--did Ned Fer'--who put that into your head?"

"n.o.body; some fall, you know, some plunge." I did not ask the cause of the plunge; the two little mules told me that. He would never have come, Gholson hurried on to say, had not Major Harper kindly suggested that a Sabbath spent with certain four ladies would be a timely preventive.

"What!" I cried, "are they here t'--too? Why,--where's their carryall? 'Tisn't in the stable; I've looked!"

"No, it was here, but yesterday, when the fighting threatened to be heavy, it was sent to the front. Smith, I didn't know Charlie Tolliver was here!"

I believed him. But I saw he was not in search of a preventive. Ah, no! he was ill of that old, old malady which more than any other abhors a preventive. Waking in the summer dawn and finding Ned Ferry risen and vanished hitherward, a rival's instinct had moved him to follow, as the seeker for wild honey follows the bee. He had come not for the cure of his honey-sickness, but for more--more--more--all he could find--of the honey. "Smith," he said, with a painful screw of his features, "I'm mightily troubled about Ned Ferry!"

"Yes," I dishonestly responded, "his polished irreligion--"

"Oh, no! No," he groaned, "it isn't that so much just now, though I know that to a true religionist like you the society of such a mere romanticist--"

We were interrupted.

XXVIII

OLDEST GAME ON EARTH

The cause of our interruption was Camille Harper. We had been pacing the side veranda and she came out upon it with an unconscious song on her lips, and on one finger a tiny basket.

Her gentle irruption found me standing almost on the spot where she had stood two evenings before and said good-bye to me. From this point a path led to the rear of the house, where within a light paling fence bloomed a garden. She gave us a blithe good-morning as she pa.s.sed, descended the two or three side steps, and tripped toward the garden gate, a wee affair which she might have lifted off its hinges with one thumb. I saw her try its latch two or three times and then turn back discomfited because the loose frame had sagged a trifle and needed to be raised half an inch. I did not understand the helplessness of girls as well then as I do now; I ran and opened the gate; and when I shut it again she and I were alone inside.

She let me cut the flowers. "You know who's here?" she asked.

"Yes," I guilefully replied, "I came with him."

"I don't mean Lieutenant Ferry," she responded, "nor anybody you'd ever guess if you don't know; but you do, don't you?"

I said I knew and went on gathering sweet-pea blossoms.

"Did you ever see her?"

"Yes," I replied, stepping away for some roses, "I--saw her--by chance--for a moment--she was in the wagon she's got here--last --eh,--Thursday--morn'--" I came back tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the roses, and as she reached for them and our glances met, she laughed and replied, with a roguish droop of the head--

"She told us about it. And you needn't look so disturbed; she only praised you."

Still I frowned. "How does it come that she's here, anyhow?"

"Why! she's got to be everywhere! She's a war-correspondent! She was at the front yesterday nearly the whole time, near enough to see some of the fighting, and to hear it all! she calls it 'only a skirmish'!"

"When did she get here?"

"About five in the morning. But we didn't see her then; she shut herself up and wrote and wrote and wrote! They say she runs the most daring risks! And they say she's so wise in finding out what the Yankees are going to do and why they're going to do it, that they'd be nearly as glad to catch her as to catch Lieutenant Ferry! Didn't you know? Ah, you knew!" She attempted a reproachful glance, but exhaled happiness like a fragrance. I asked how she had heard these things.

"How did I hear them? Let me see. Oh, yes! from--from Harry."

I flinched angrily. "From what?"

She looked into her basket and fingered its flowers. "That's what he asked me to call him."

I stiffened up as though I heard a thief picking the lock of my lawful treasure. She threw me, side wise, a bantering smile and then a more winsome glance, but I refused to see either. I burned with so many feelings at once that I could no more have told them than I could have raised a tune. "Don't you like him?" she asked, and tried to be very arch.

"Like whom?"

"You know perfectly well," she replied.

"No, I do not like him. Do you?"

"Why,--yes,--I do. I--I thought everybody did." She averted her face and toyed with the sweet-pea vines. Suddenly she gulped, faced me, blinked rapidly, and said "If I oughtn't to call him--that,--then I oughtn't to have called--" she dropped her eyes and bit her lip.

"That," I replied, "is a very different matter! At least I had hoped it was!"

Her rejoinder came in a low, grieved monotone: "Did you say had hoped?"

It was the sweetest question my ear had ever caught, and I asked her, I scarce know how, if I might still say "do hope".

"Why, I--I didn't know you ever did say it. I don't see that I have any right to forbid you saying things--to--to yourself."

So we played the game--oldest game on earth--and loveliest. Bungling moves we made, as you see, and sometimes did not know whose move it was. At length she admitted that this is a very unsafe world in which to be kind to soldiers. I told how fickle some of them were. She would not say she would--or wouldn't--make my case a permanent exception or a solitary one; yet with me she blissfully pooh-poohed the idea that our acquaintance was new, she being so wonderfully like my mother, and I being so wonderfully ditto, ditto. And when I burst into a blazing eulogy of my mother, my listener gave me kinder looks than I ever deserved of any woman alive. On my trying to reciprocate, she asked me for more flowers and hurried back to our earlier theme.

"And really, you know, they say she's almost as truly a scout as Ned Fer'--as Lieutenant Ferry-Durand. She's from New Orleans, you know, and she's like us, half-Creole; but her other half is Highland Scotch--isn't that romantic! When she told us about it she laughed and said it explained some things in her which nothing else could excuse! Wasn't that funny!--oh, pshaw! it doesn't sound a bit funny as I tell it, but she said it in such a droll way! She was so full of fun and frolic that day! You can't conceive how full of them she is--sometimes; how soberly she can say the funniest things, and how funnily she can say the soberest things!"

"You say she was so full of fun that day; what day?"

The young thing gaped at me, gasped, and melted half to the ground: "O--oh--I've let it out!"

"Yes, you may as well go right on, now."

She straightened to her toes, covered her open mouth an instant, and then said "Yes, we knew her--at our house--in New Orleans--poor New Orleans! Your mother--oh, your splendid, lovely little mother is such a brave Confederate!"

"My mother brought her to your house?"

"Yes, oh, yes! and that's why it isn't wrong to tell you. Charlotte's been three times through the lines, to and from the city; once by way of Natchez and twice through Baton Rouge. And oh, the things she's brought out to our poor boys in the hospitals!"

"Generals' uniforms, for example?"

"Oh, now you're real mean! No! what she's brought the most of is--guess! You'll never guess it in the world!"