The Iron Game Part 11

"Yes, I see; but there is no more news of the Caribees. We learn that the wounded have been sent to Richmond, and I shall set out for there to-morrow."

Mrs. Sprague, with Olympia and Merry, drove to the house of a friend she had known years before, whose husband was a Senator. The Boones--or rather Kate--bade them a cordial adieu as they drove off to the National Hotel.

Then the most trying part of the quest began. The War Department was besieged with applicants, mostly women. Orders had been issued to forbid all crossing the lines, and the despairing kinsfolk of the lost were in a panic of impatient terror. In vain Olympia called upon eminent Senators who had been friends of her father; in vain she invoked the aid of the Secretary of State, who had been the family's guest at Acredale.

Once she penetrated, by the aid of strong letters, to the Secretary of War. He was surrounded by a hurried throng of orderlies, officers, and clerks, and even after she had been admitted to his office Olympia was left unnoticed on a settee, waiting some sign to approach the dreaded presence. His imperious and abrupt manner, his alternation of deferential concern for some and disdainful impatience for others, gave her small hope that he would heed her prayer. She waited hours, sitting in the crowded room, ill from the oppressive air, the fixed stare of the officers, and the sobbing of others like herself waiting a word with the autocrat. At length, late in the afternoon, when the crowd had quite gone, she heard the Secretary say in an undertone:

"Send an orderly to those women and see what they want."

Each of the waiting women handed credentials to the young man, and each in turn arose trembling and stood before the decisive official at the great, paper-strewn desk. There was no attempt to soften the refusal, as he turned curtly from the pleaders; and Olympia, shrinking from the ordeal, was about to step out of the room, when a tall, care-worn man shambled in, glancing pityingly at her as she arose, half trembling, recognizing the President.

She stepped in front of him in a desperate impulse, and, throwing up her veil, cried piteously:

"O Mr. Lincoln, you are a father, you have a tender heart; you will listen to the bereaved!" He stopped, looking at her kindly, and put his left arm wearily on the desk by his side.

"Yes, my poor girl, I am a father and have a heart; the more's the pity, for just now something else is needed in its place. I suppose your father is over yonder," and he nodded toward the Virginia sh.o.r.e.

"O Mr. Lincoln, my father is farther away than that. My father was Senator Sprague--you served with him in Congress--I--I--thought that perhaps you might take pity on his widow, his daughter, his son, if the poor boy is still living, and--and--"

"Send you across the lines?"

"Oh, if G.o.d would put it in your heart!"

"It's in my heart fast enough, my poor child, but--"

"Impossible, Mr. President! The enemy, as it is, can open a Sabine campaign on us, and tie our hands by stretching Northern women out in a line of battle between the ranks!"

It was the weary, discouraging voice of the Secretary, imperiously implying that the Executive must not interpose weakness and mercy where Draconian rigor sat enthroned. The President smiled sadly.

"Ah, Mr. Secretary, a sister--a mother--give a great deal for the country. We can not err much in granting their prayer. Make out an order--for whom?"

Olympia, speechless with grat.i.tude reverence could hardly articulate:

"My mother, myself, and Miss Marcia Perley."

"Another mother?"

"Her boy is not of age, and ran away to join my brother's company." She had a woman's presence of mind to answer with this diplomatic evasion.

"I'm afraid you will only add to your distress, my poor child; but you shall go." He inclined his head benignantly and pa.s.sed into the inner sanctuary behind the rail, when Olympia heard the Secretary say, grimly:

"I shall take measures to stop this sort of thing, Mr. President.

Hereafter you shall only come to this department at certain hours. At all other times the doors shall be guarded."

A gray-haired man in undress uniform presently appeared, and as he handed Olympia the large official envelope he said, respectfully:

"You never heard of me, Miss Sprague? Many years ago the Senator, your father, did a kind turn for my brother--an employe in the Treasury. If I can be of any aid to you in this painful business, pray give me a chance to show a kindness to the family of a great and good man. My name is Charles Bevan, and it is signed to one of the papers in this letter."

Within an hour all was ready, but they could not set out until the next morning, when, by eight o'clock, the three ladies were _en route_. There was a large company with them, all under a flag of truce. They pa.s.sed through the long lines of soldiery that lay intrenched on the Virginia side of the Potomac, and pushed on to Annandale, where the rebel outpost received them. Olympia's eyes dwelt on the wide-stretching lands of pine and oak, remembering the pictures Jack had given in his letters of this very same route. But there were few signs of war. The cleared places lay red and baking under the hot August sun; the trees seemed crisp and sapless.

At Fairfax Court-House, where the first signs of real warlike tenure were seen, the visitors were taken into a low frame house, and each in turn asked to explain the objects of her mission. Then the hospital reports were searched. In half a dozen or more instances the sad-eyed mothers were thrown into tremulous hope by the tidings of their darlings' whereabouts. But for Olympia and Aunt Merry there was no clew.

No such names as Sprague or Perley were recorded in the fateful pages of the hospital corps. But there were several badly wounded in the hospital at Mana.s.sas, where fuller particulars were accessible.

They were conducted very politely by a young lieutenant in a shabby gray uniform to an ambulance and driven four miles southward to Fairfax Station on the railway, when, after despairing hours of waiting, they were taken by train to Mana.s.sas. An orderly accompanied them, and as the train pa.s.sed beyond Union Mills, where the Bull Run River runs along the railway a mile or more before crossing under it, the young soldier pointed out the distant plateau, near the famous stone bridge, and, when the train crossed the river, the high bluffs, a half-mile to the northward, where the action had begun at Blackburn's Ford. He was very respectful and gentle in alluding to the battle, and said, ingenuously, pointing to the plateau jutting out from the Bull Run Mountains:

"At two o'clock on Sunday we would have cried quits to McDowell to hold his ground and let us alone. But just as we were on our heel to turn, Joe Johnston came piling in here, right where you see that gully yonder, with ten thousand fresh men, and in twenty minutes we were three to one, and then your folks had the worst of it. President Davis got off the train at the junction yonder, and as he rode across this field, where we are now, the woods yonder were full of our men, flying from the Henry House Hill, where Sherman had cut General Bee's brigade to pieces and was routing Jackson--'Stonewall,' we call him now, because General Bonham, when he brought up the reserves, shouted, 'See, there, where Jackson stands like a stone wall!' He's a college professor and very pious; he makes his men pray before fighting, and has 'meetings' in the commissary tent twice a week."

"Did Mr. Davis join in the battle?" Olympia asked, more to seem interested in the garrulous warrior's narrative than because she really had her mind on the story.

"Oh, dear, no. Old Johnston had finished the job before the President (Olympia noticed that all Southerners dwelt upon this t.i.tle with complacent insistence) could reach the field. He was barely in time to see the cavalry of 'Jeb' Stuart charge the regulars on the Warrenton road."

The train came to a halt, and the young man said, cheerfully:

"Here we are. The hospital's still right smart over yonder in the trees."

"But you will go with us, will you not?" Olympia asked in alarm, for it was wearing toward night.

"Oh, yes; I'm detailed to remain with you until you have found out about your kinsfolk."

In the mellow sunset the three women followed the orderly across the fields strewed with armaments, supplies, and the rough depot paraphernalia of an army at rest. The hospital consisted of a large tent for the slightly hurt, and a few old buildings and a barn for the more serious cases. The search was futile. There were two or three of the Caribees in the place, but they knew nothing of their missing comrades.

Indeed, Jack's detail by Colonel Sherman had effectually cut off all trace of his movements after the battle began.

Mrs. Sprague's tears were falling softly as the orderly led them to the surgeon's office. They were there shown the records of all who had been buried on the field. Many, he informed them, sympathetically, had been buried where they fell, in great ditches dug by the sappers. In every case the garments had been stripped from the bodies before burial, so that there was absolutely no means of identification. Most of the wounded had, however, been sent to Richmond with the prisoners. "It would not do," he added, kindly, "to give up all hope of the lost ones, until they had seen the roster of the prisoners and the wounded in the Richmond prisons and hospitals."

Quarters were given to them in a tent put at their disposal by the surgeons, and in the long, wakeful hours of the night Olympia heard the guard pacing monotonously before the door. The music of the bugles aroused them at sunrise--a wan, haggard group, sad-eyed and silent. The girl made desperate efforts to cheer the wretched mother, and even privily took Merry to task for giving way before what was as yet but a shadow. 'Twould be time enough for tears when they found evidence that the stout, vigorous boys had been killed. As they finished the very plain breakfast of half-baked bread, pea-coffee, and eggs, bought by the orderly at an exorbitant rate, he said, good-naturedly:

"The train don't come till about ten o'clock. If you'd like to see the battle-field, I can get the ambulance and take you over."

Olympia eagerly a.s.sented--anything was preferable to this mute misery of her mother and Merry's sepulchral struggles to be conversational and tearless. They drove through bewildering numbers of tents, most of them, Olympia's sharp eyes noted, marked "U.S.A.," and she reflected, almost angrily, that the chief part of war, after all, was pillage. The men looked shabby, and the uniforms were as varied as a carnival, though by no means so gay. Whenever they crossed a stream, which was not seldom, groups of men were standing in the water to their middle, was.h.i.+ng their clothing, very much as Olympia had seen the washer-women on the Continent, in Europe. They were very merry, even boisterous in this unaccustomed work, responding to rough jests by resounding slashes of the tightly wrung garments upon the heads or backs of the unwary wags.

"Why, there must be a million men here," Merry cried, as the tents stretched for miles, as far as she could see.

"No; not quite a million, I reckon," the orderly said, proudly; "but we shall have a million when we march on Was.h.i.+ngton."

"March on Was.h.i.+ngton!" Merry gasped, as though it was an official order she had just heard promulgated. "But--but we aren't ready yet. We--"

Then she halted in dismay. Was she giving information to the enemy?

Would they instantly make use of it? Ah! she must, at any cost, undo this fatal treason, big with disaster to the republic. "I mean we are not ready yet to put our many million men on the march."

The orderly laughed. "I reckon your many million will be ready as soon as our one million. You know we have a big country to cover with them.

You folks have only Was.h.i.+ngton to guard and Richmond to take. We have the Mississippi and fifteen hundred miles of coast to guard. Now, this corner is Newmarket, where Johnston waited for his troops on Sunday and led them right along the road we are on--to the pine wood yonder--just north of us. We won't go through there, because we ain't making a flank movement," and he laughed pleasantly. They drove on at a rapid rate as they came upon the southern shelf of the Mana.s.sas plateau.

"This," the orderly said, pointing to a small stone building in a bare and ragged waste of trees, shrubs, and ruined implements of war, "is the Henry House--what is left of it--the key of our position when Jackson formed his stone wall facing toward the northwest, over there where your folks very cleverly flanked us and waited an hour or two, Heaven only knows what for, unless it was to give us time to bring up our re-enforcements. Your officers lay the blame on Burnside and Hunter, who, they declare, just sat still half the day, while Sherman got in behind us and would have captured every man Jack of our fellows, if Johnston hadn't come up, where I showed you, in the very nick of time."

The women were looking eagerly at the field of death. It was still as on the day of the battle, save that instead of the thousands of beating hearts, the flaunting flags, and roaring guns, there were countless ridges torn in the sod, as if a plow had run through at random, limbs and trees torn down and whirled across each other, broken wheels, musket stocks and barrels, twisted and sticking, gaunt and eloquent, in the tough, gra.s.sy fiber of the earth.

"In this circle of a mile and a half fifty thousand men pelted each other from two o'clock that Sunday morning until four in the afternoon.

Up to two o'clock we were on the defensive. We were driven from the broad, smooth road yonder that you see cutting through the trees, northward a mile from here. Jackson alone made a stand; if it hadn't been for him we should have been prisoners in Was.h.i.+ngton now, I reckon.

You see those men at work? They are picking up lead. We reckon that it takes a ton of lead to kill a man."

"A ton of lead?" Olympia repeated.