Special Messenger. Chambers Robert William

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СКАЧАТЬ she called, hearing him fumbling at the front door.

      “Oh, Celia! The cavalry trumpets! Do you hear? I’m going out. Perhaps he may pass the house.”

      “Wait for me,” she said; “I am not dressed. Run to the cabin and wake Moses, dear!”

      She heard him open the door; the deadened thunder of the cannonade filled the house for an instant, shut out by the closing door, only to swell again to an immense unbroken volume of solemn harmony. The bird-music had ceased; distant hilltops grew brighter.

      Down in the village lights faded from window and cabin; a cavalryman, signaling from the church tower, whirled his flaming torch aside and picked up a signal flag. Suddenly the crash of a rifled cannon saluted the rising sun; a shell soared skyward through the misty glory, towered, curved, and fell, exploding among the cavalrymen, completely ruining the breakfasts of chief-trumpeter O’Halloran and kettle-drummer Pillsbury.

      For a moment a geyser of ashes, coffee, and bacon rained among the men.

      “Hell!” said Pillsbury, furiously wiping his face with his dripping sleeve and spitting out ashes.

      “Young kettle-drums, he don’t love his vittles,” observed a trooper, picking up the cap that had been jerked from his head by a whirring fragment.

      “Rich feedin’ is the sp’ilin’ o’ this here hoss band,” added the farrier, stanching the flow of blood from his scalp; “quit quar’lin’ with your rations, kettle-drums!”

      “Y’orter swaller them cinders,” insisted another; “they don’t cost nothin’!”

      The band, accustomed to chaffing, prepared to retire to the ambulance, where heretofore their fate had always left them among luggage, surgeons, and scared camp niggers during an engagement.

      The Rhode Island battery, placed just north of the church, had opened; the cavalry in the meadow could see them—see the whirl of smoke, the cannoneers moving with quick precision amidst obscurity—the flash, the recoil as gun after gun jumped back, buried in smoke.

      It lasted only a few minutes; no more shells came whistling down among the cavalry; and presently the battery grew silent, and the steaming hill, belted with vapor, cleared slowly in the breezy sunshine.

      The cavalry had mounted and leisurely filed off to the shelter of a grassy hollow; the band, dismounted, were drawn up to be told off in squads as stretcher-bearers; the bandmaster was sauntering past, buried in meditation, his sabre trailing a furrow through the dust, when a clatter of hoofs broke out along the village street, and a general officer, followed by a plunging knot of horsemen, tore up and drew bridle.

      The colonel of the cavalry regiment, followed by the chief trumpeter, trotted out to meet them, saluting sharply; there was a quick exchange of words; the general officer waved his hand toward the south, wheeled his horse, hesitated, and pointed at the band.

      “How many sabres?” he asked.

      “Twenty-seven,” replied the colonel—“no carbines.”

      “Better have them play you in—if you go,” said the officer.

      The colonel saluted and backed his horse as the cavalcade swept past him; then he beckoned to the bandmaster.

      “Here’s your chance,” he said. “Orders are to charge anything that appears on that road. You’ll play us in this time. Mount your men.”

      Ten minutes later the regiment, band ahead, marched out of Sandy River and climbed the hill, halting in the road that passed the great white mansion. As the outposts moved forward they encountered a small boy on a pony, who swung his cap at them gayly as he rode. Squads, dismounted, engaged in tearing away the rail fences bordering the highway, looked around, shouting a cheery answer to his excited greeting; the colonel on a ridge to the east lowered his field glasses to watch him; the bandmaster saw him coming and smiled as the boy drew bridle beside him, saluting.

      “If you’re not going to fight, why are you here?” asked the boy breathlessly.

      “It really looks,” said the bandmaster, “as though we might fight, after all.”

      “You, too?”

      “Perhaps.”

      “Then—could you come into the house—just a moment? My sister asked me to find you.”

      A bright blush crept over the bandmaster’s sun-tanned cheeks.

      “With pleasure,” he said, dismounting, and leading his horse through the gateway and across the shrubbery to the trees.

      “Celia! Celia!” called the boy, running up the veranda steps. “He is here! Please hurry, because he’s going to have a battle!”

      She came slowly, pale and lovely in her black gown, and held out her hand.

      “There is a battle going on all around us, isn’t there?” she asked. “That is what all this dreadful uproar means?”

      “Yes,” he said; “there is trouble on the other side of those hills.”

      “Do you think there will be fighting here?”

      “I don’t know,” he said.

      She motioned him to a veranda chair, then seated herself. “What shall we do?” she asked calmly. “I am not alarmed—but my grandfather is bedridden, and my brother is a child. Is it safe to stay?”

      The bandmaster looked at her helplessly.

      “I don’t know,” he repeated—“I don’t know what to say. Nobody seems to understand what is happening; we in the regiment are never told anything; we know nothing except what passes under our eyes.” He broke off suddenly; the situation, her loneliness, the impending danger, appalled him.

      “May I ask a little favor?” she said, rising. “Would you mind coming in a moment to see my grandfather?”

      He stood up obediently, sheathed sabre in his left hand; she led the way across the hall and up the stairs, opened the door, and motioned toward the bed. At first he saw nothing save the pillows and snowy spread.

      “Will you speak to him?” she whispered.

      He approached the bed, cap in hand.

      “He is very old,” she said; “he was a soldier of Washington. He desires to see a soldier of the Union.”

      And now the bandmaster perceived the occupant of the bed, a palsied, bloodless phantom of the past—an inert, bedridden, bony thing that looked dead until its deep eyes opened and fixed themselves on him.

      “This is a Union soldier, grandfather,” she said, kneeling on the floor beside him. And to the bandmaster she said in a low voice: “Would you mind taking his hand? He cannot move.”

      The bandmaster bent stiffly above the bed and took the old man’s hand in his.

      The sunlit room trembled in the cannonade.

      “That is all,” said the girl simply. She took the fleshless hand, kissed it, and laid it on the bedspread. “A soldier of Washington,” she said dreamily. “I am glad he has СКАЧАТЬ