the slightest misgiving that by so doing he would subject himself to any of the ills and discomforts incidental to carrying out the enterprise upon which they were embarking. He, like every one else, had no very clear idea of what the company would be called upon to do or undergo; but no doubt obtruded itself into his mind that whatever might be disagreeable in it would fall to some one else’s lot, and he continue to have the same pleasant exemption that had been his good fortune so far through life.
And though the company was unexpectedly ordered to the field in the rugged mountains of Western Virginia, instead of to pleasant quarters about Washington, there was nothing to shake this comfortable belief. The slack discipline of the first three months’ service, and the confusion of ideas that prevailed in the beginning of the war as to military duties and responsibilities, enabled him to spend all the time he chose away from his company and with congenial spirits, about headquarters, and to make of the expedition, so far as he was concerned, a pleasant picnic. Occasionally little shadows were thrown by the sight of corpses brought in, with ugly-looking bullet holes in head or breast, but these were always of the class he looked down upon, and he connected their bad luck in some way with their condition in life. Doubtless some one had to go where there was danger of being shot, as some one had to dig ditches and help to pry wagons out of the mud, but there was something rather preposterous in the thought that anything of this kind was incumbent upon him.
The mutterings of the men against an officer, who would not share their hardships and duties, did not reach his ears, nor yet the gibes of the more earnest of the officers at the “young headquarter swells,” whose interest and zeal were nothing to what they would have taken in a fishing excursion.
It came about very naturally and very soon that this continual avoidance of duty in directions where danger might be encountered was stigmatized by the harsher name of cowardice. Neither did this come to his knowledge, and he was consequently ignorant that he had delivered a fatal stab to his reputation one fine morning when, the regiment being ordered out with three days’ rations and forty rounds of cartridges, the sergeant who was sent in search of him returned and reported that he was sick in his tent. Jacob Alspaugh expressed the conclusion instantly arrived at by every one in the regiment:
“It’s all you could expect of one of them kid-glove fellers, to weaken when it came to serious business.”
Harry’s self-sufficiency had left so little room for anything that did not directly concern his own comfort, that he could not understand the deadly earnestness of the men he saw file out of camp, or that there was any urgent call for him to join them in their undertaking.
“Bob Bennett’s always going where there’s no need of it,” he said to a companion, as he saw the last of the regiment disappear into the woods on the mountain side. “He could have staid back here with us just as well as not, instead of trudging off through the heat over these devilish roads, and probably get into a scrape for which no one will thank him.”
“Yes,” said Ned Burnleigh, with his affected drawl, “what the devil’s the use, I’d like to know, for a fellah’s putting himself out to do things, when there’s any quantity of other fellahs, that can’t be better employed, ready and even anxious to do them.”
“That’s so. But it’s getting awful hot here. Let’s go over to the shade, where we were yesterday, and have Dick bring us a bucket of cold spring water and the bottles and things.”
“Abe!” said Jake Alspaugh to his file-leader—a red-headed, pock-marked man, whose normal condition was that of outspoken disgust at every thing—“this means a fight.”
“Your news would’ve been fresh and interesting last night,” growled Abe Bolton. “I suppose that’s what we brought our guns along for.”
“Yes; but somebody’s likely to get killed.”
“Well, you nor me don’t have to pay their life insurance, as I know on.”
“But it may be you or me.”
“The devil’d be might anxious for green wood before he’d call you in.”
“Come, now, don’t talk that way. This is a mighty serious time.”
“I’ll make it a durned sight seriouser for you if you don’t keep them splay feet o’your’n offen my heels when we’re marching.”
“Don’t you think we’d better pay, or—something?”
“You might try taking up a collection.”
“Try starting a hymn, Jake,” said a slender young man at his right elbow, whose face showed a color more intimately connected with the contents of his canteen than the heat of the day. “Line it out, and we’ll all join in. Something like this, for example:
‘Hark, from the tombs a doleful sound
Mine ears attend the cry.
Ye living men, come view the ground
Where you must shortly lie.’”
Alspaugh shuddered visibly.
“Come, spunk up, Jake,” continued the slender young man. “Think how proud all your relations will be of you, if you die for your country.”
“I’m mad at all of my relations, and I don’t want to do nothing to please ‘em,” sighed Jake.
“But I hope you’re not so greedy as to want to live always?” said the slender young man, who answered roll-call to Kent Edwards.
“No, but I don’t want to be knocked off like a green apple, before I’m ripe and ready.”
“Better be knocked off green and unripe,” said Kent, his railing mood changing to one of sad introspection, “than to prematurely fall, from a worm gnawing at your heart.”
Jake’s fright was not so great as to make him forego the opportunity for a brutal retort:
“You mean the ‘worm of the still,’ I s’pose. Well, it don’t gnaw at my heart so much as at some other folkses’ that I know’d.”
Kent’s face crimsoned still deeper, and he half raised his musket, as if to strike him, but at that moment came the order to march, and the regiment moved forward.
The enemy was by this time known to be near, and the men marched in that silence that comes from tense expectation.
The day was intensely hot, and the stagnant, sultry air was perfumed with the thousand sweet odors that rise in the West Virginia forests in the first flush of Summer.
The road wound around the steep mountain side, through great thickets of glossy-leaved laurel, by banks of fragrant honeysuckle, by beds of millions of sweet-breathing, velvety pansies, nestling under huge shadowy rocks, by acres of white puccoon flowers, each as lovely as the lily that grows by cool Siloam’s shady rill—all scattered there with Nature’s reckless profusion, where no eye saw them from year to year save those of the infrequent hunter, those of the thousands of gaily-plumaged birds that sang and screamed through the branches of the trees above, and those of the hideous rattlesnakes that crawled and hissed in the crevices of the shelving rocks.
At last the regiment halted under the grateful shadows of the broad-topped oaks and chestnuts. A patriarchal pheasant, drumming on a log near by some uxorious communication to his brooding mate, distended his round eyes in amazement at the strange irruption of men and horses, and then whirred away in a transport of fear. A crimson crested woodpecker ceased his ominous tapping, and flew boldly to a neighboring branch, where he could inspect the new arrival to good advantage and determine his character.
The men threw themselves down for a moment’s rest, on the springing moss that covered the whole mountain side. A hum of comment and conversation arose. Jake Alspaugh began to think that there was not likely to be any fight after all, and his spirits rose proportionately. Abe Bolton growled that the cowardly officers had no doubt deliberately misled the regiment, that a fight might be avoided. Kent Edwards saw a nodding May-apple flower—as fair as a calla and as odorous as a pink—at a little distance, and hastened to pick it. He came