XLI UNIMPORTANT AND CONFIDENTIAL

On the second night after that morning of frantic mortification I was riding at Ned Ferry's side, in Louisiana. The camp of the brigade was a few miles behind us. Somewhere in front of us, fireless and close hid, lay our company of scouts, ahead of whose march he had pushed the day before to confer with the General, and we were now on our way to rejoin them. Under our horses' feet was that old Plank-road which every "buttermilk ranger" must remember--whether dead or not, I am tempted to say,--who rode under either flag in the Felicianas in '63 and '64.

Late in the evening of the day on which I had conducted the Harpers to Squire Wall's I had received a despatch ordering me to board the next morning's train at Brookhaven with my horse. On it I should find a number of cases of those shoes I had seen at Hazlehurst. At Tangipahoa I was to transfer them to one or two army-wagons which would by that time have reached there, and bring them across to Clinton, where a guard would meet and join me to conduct the wagons to camp. And thus I had done, bearing with me a sad vision of dear dark Miss Harper fluttering her handkerchief above her three nieces' heads, one of whom refrained until the opportunity had all but gone, to wave good-bye to the visibly wretched author of "Maiden passing fair, turn away thine eyes." My lucky Cricket had gone three nights and two whole days with no harness but his halter, and to-night, beside the Yankee's horse, that still bore Ned Ferry, he was as good as new. My leader and I talked of Charlotte. In the middle of this day's forenoon Gholson had come into camp reporting at the General's tent the long ride she had made on Monday; as good a fifty miles as Ferry's own. We called it, now, Ferry and I, a most clever achievement for a woman. "Many women," he said, "know how to ride, but she knows how to march."

"I think you must have taught her," I responded, and he enjoyed his inability to deny it. So I ventured farther and said she seemed to me actually to have reached, in the few days since I had first seen her, a finer spiritual stature.

"She?" he asked; "ah! she is of the kind that must grow or die. Yes, you may be right; but in that time she has kept me so occupied growing, myself, that I did not notice she was doing the same. But also, I think, the eyes with which we look at her have grown."

"She has outgrown this work," I insisted.

"Those letters--to the newspapers?"

"No, this other; this work which she has to do by craft and wiles and disguises. Lieutenant, I don't believe she can go on doing that now with her past skill, since life has become to her a nobler story than it promised to be."

My companion lifted higher in the saddle with delight. Then soberly he said, "We have got to lose her." I turned inquiringly and he continued: "She has done me the honor to tell me--Miss Harper and me--that if she succeeds in what she is now trying to do--you know?--"

"I think I do. It's to prevent Oliver from making himself useful to the enemy, isn't it?"

"Well--like that; and she says if she comes out all right she will leave us; yes, for the hospital service."

"Hosp'--Oh--oh! gangrene, typhoid, lock-jaw, itch, small-pox! Isn't she deep enough in the hospital service already, with her quinine dolls?"

"Ah! but she cannot continue to play dolls that way; she must find something else. I see you have my temptation; yes, the desire to see her always doing something splendid. That is not 'real life,' as you call it. And besides, was not that you said one time to me 'No splendor shines at last so far as a hidden splendor'?"

"No, sir! I suppose it's true, but I never want to see her splendor shining through pock-marks." The reply won from him a gesture of approval, and this gave me a reckless tongue. "Why, if I were you, Lieutenant, she simply shouldn't go! Good Heaven! isn't she far enough away at the nearest? How can you tamely--no, I don't mean tamely, but--how can you endure to let this matter drift--how can you endure it?"

At the beginning of my question he straightened exactly as I had seen him do in the middle of the lane when our recoiled column was staggering; but as my extravagance flamed up he quieted rebukingly, and with a quieter smile than ever asked "Is that a soldier's question? Smith, is there not something wrong with you to-night?"

"There always is," I replied.

"No, but to-night I think you are taking that 'lower fork' you talk sometimes about. Of course, if you don't want to tell--"

"May I tell you?"

"Ah, certainly! Is it that little Harper girl?"

I nodded, all choked up. When I could speak I had to drop the words by ones and twos, and did not so much as say them as let them bleed from my lips; and never while I live shall I forget the sweet, grave, perfect sympathy with which my friend listened and led me on, and listened and led me on. I said I had never believed in love at first sight until now when it had come upon me to darken and embitter my life henceforth.

He replied that certainly love sometimes germinated at first sight, and I interrupted greedily that that was all I claimed--except that love could also, at times, grow to maturity with amazing speed, a speed I never could have credited previous to these last four days. And he admitted as much, but thought time only could prove such love; whereto I rejoined that that was what she had answered.

He glanced at me suddenly, then smoothed his horse's mane, and said, gently, "That means you have declared yourself to her?"

I confessed I had, and told him how, on our journey to Squire Wall's, being stung to desperation by the infantile way in which she had drooled out to others what my love had sacredly confided to her alone, I had abruptly confronted her with the fact, and in the ensuing debate, carried away by the torrent of my emotions, had offered her my love, for life and all.

"And she--ah, yes. I see; and I see, too, that in all she ever said or did or seemed, before, she never made herself such a treasure to be longed for and fought and lived for as in the way in which she--" He paused.

"Refused me! Oh, it's so; it's so! Ah! if you could have witnessed her dignity, her wisdom, her grace, her compassionate immovableness, you'd never think of her as the little Harper girl again. She said that if the unpremeditated, headlong way in which I had told my passion were my only mistake, and if it were only for my sake, she would not, if she could, answer favorably, and that I, myself, at last, would not have a girl who would have a man who would offer his love in that way, and that she would not have a man who would have a girl who would have a man who should offer his love in that way."

I call it one of the sweetest kindnesses ever done me, that Ned Ferry heard me to the end of that speech and did not smile. Instead he asked "Did she say that as if a'--as if--amused?"

"No, Lieutenant, she nearly cried. Oh, I wish we were on some dangerous errand to-night, instead of just camp and bed!"

"Well, that's all right, Richard; we are."