Tenting on the Plains (Illustrated Edition). Elizabeth Bacon Custer

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СКАЧАТЬ you that I am the happy possessor of a mattress. It is made of the moss which festoons the branches of all the trees at the South. The moss is prepared by boiling it, then burying it in the ground for a long time, till only the small thread inside is left, and this looks like horse-hair. An old darkey furnished the moss for three dollars, and the whole thing only cost seven dollars—very cheap for this country. We are living finely now; we get plenty of eggs, butter, lard and chickens. Eliza cooks better than ever, by a few logs, with camp-kettles and stew-pans. She has been washing this past week, and drying her things on a line tied to the tent-poles and on bushes, and ironing on the ground, with her ironing-sheet held down by a stone on each corner. To-day we are dressed in white. She invites us to mark Sunday by the luxury of wearing white. Her 'ole miss used to.' We are regulated by the doings of that 'ole miss,' and I am glad that among the characteristics of my venerable predecessor, which we are expected to follow, wearing white gowns is included."

      Eliza, sitting here beside me to-day, has just reminded me of that week, as it was marked in her memory by a catastrophe. Eliza's misfortunes were usually within the confines of domestic routine. I quote her words: "It was on the Gros Creek, Miss Libbie, that I had out that big wash, and all your lace-trimmed things, and all the Ginnel's white linen pants and coats. I didn't know nothin' 'bout the high winds then, but I ain't like to forget 'em ever again. The first thing I I knew, the line was jest lifted up, and the clothes jest spread in every direction, and I jest stood still and looked at 'em, and I says, 'Is this Texas? How long am I to contend with this?' [With hands uplifted and a camp-meeting roll in her eyes.] But I had to go to work and pick 'em all up. Some fell in the sand, and some on the grass. I gathered 'em all, with the sun boiling down hot enough to cook an egg. While I was a-pickin' 'em up, the Ginnel was a-standin' in the tent entrance, wipin' down his moustache, like he did when he didn't want us to see him laughin'. Well, Miss Libbie, I was that mad when he hollered out to me, 'Well, Eliza, you've got a spread-eagle thar.' Oh, I was so mad and hot, but he jest bust right out laughin'. But there wasn't anything to do but rinse and hang 'em up again."

      We had been in camp but a short time when the daughter of the newly appointed collector of the port came from their plantation near to see us. She invited me to make my home with them while we remained, but I was quite sure there was nothing on earth equal to our camp. The girl's father had been a Union man during the war, and was hopelessly invalided by a long political imprisonment. I remember nothing bitter, or even gloomy, about that hospitable, delightful family. The young girl's visit was the precursor of many more, and our young officers were in clover. There were three young women in the family, and they came to our camp and rode and drove with us, while we made our first acquaintance with Southern home life. The house was always full of guests. The large dining-table was not long enough, however, unless placed diagonally across the dining-room, and it was sometimes laid three times before all had dined. The upper part of the house was divided by a hall running the length of the house. On one side the women and their guests—usually a lot of rollicking girls—were quartered, while the men visitors had rooms opposite; and then I first saw the manner in which a Southern gallant comes as a suitor or a friend. He rode up to the house with his servant on another horse, carrying a portmanteau. They came to stay several weeks. I wondered that there was ever an uncongenial marriage in the South, when a man had such a chance to see his sweetheart. This was one of the usages of the country that our Northern men adopted when they could get leave to be absent from camp, and delightful visits we all had.

      It seemed a great privilege to be again with women, after the long season in which I had only Eliza to represent the sex. But I lost my presence of mind when I went into a room for the first time and caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. The only glass I had brought from the East was broken early in the march, and I had made my toilet by feeling. The shock of the apparition comes back to me afresh, and the memory is emphasized by my fastidious mother's horror when she saw me afterward. I had nothing but a narrow-brimmed hat with which to contend against a Texas sun. My face was almost parboiled and swollen with sunburn, while my hair was faded and rough. Of course, when I caught the first glimpse of myself in the glass I instantly hurried to the General and Tom, and cried out indignantly, "Why didn't you tell me how horridly I looked?"—the inconsistent woman in me forgetting that it would not have made my ugliness any easier to endure. My husband hung his head in assumed humility when he returned me to my mother, six months later, my complexion seemingly hopelessly thickened and darkened; for, though happily it improved after living in a house, it never again looked as it did before the Texas life. My indignant mother looked as if her son-in-law was guilty of an unpardonable crime. I told her, rather flippantly, that it had been offered up on the altar of my country, and she ought to be glad to have so patriotic a family; but she withered the General with a look that spoke volumes. He took the first opportunity to whisper condescendingly that, though my mother was ready to disown me, and quite prepared to annihilate him, he would endeavor not to cast me off, if I was black, and would try to like me, "notwithstanding all."

      The planters about the country began to seek out the General, and invite him to go hunting; and, as there was but little to do while the command was recruiting from the march, he took his father and the staff and went to the different plantations where the meet was planned. The start was made long before day, and breakfast was served at the house where the hunters assembled, dinner being enjoyed at the same hospitable board on the return at night. Each planter brought his hounds, and I remember the General's delight at his first sight of the different packs—thirty-seven dogs in all—and his enthusiasm at finding that every dog responded to his master's horn. He thereupon purchased a horn, and practiced in camp until he nearly split his cheeks in twain, not to mention the spasms into which we were driven; for his five hounds, presents from the farmers, ranged themselves in an admiring and sympathetic semicircle, accompanying all his practicing by tuning their voices until they reached the same key. I had no idea it was such a difficult thing to learn to sound notes on a horn. When we begged off sometimes from the impromptu serenades of the hunter and his dogs, the answer was, "I am obliged to practice, for if anyone thinks it is an easy thing to blow on a horn, just let him try it." Of course Tom caught the fever, and came in one day with the polished horn of a Texas steer ready for action. The two were impervious to ridicule. No detailed description of their red, distended cheeks, bulging eyes, bent and laborious forms, as they struggled, suspended the operation. The early stages of this horn music gave little idea of the gay picture of these debonair and spirited athletes, as they afterward appeared. When their musical education was completed, they were wont to leap into the saddle, lift the horn in unconscious grace to their lips, curbing their excited and rearing horses with the free hand, and dash away amidst the frantic leaping, barking and joyous demonstration of their dogs.

      At the first hunt, when one of our number killed a deer, the farmers made known to our officers, on the sly, the old established custom of the chase. While Captain Lyon stood over his game, volubly narrating, in excited tones, how the shot had been sent and where it had entered, a signal, which he was too absorbed to notice, was given, and the crowd rushed upon him and so plastered him with blood from the deer that scarcely an inch of his hair, hands and face was spared, while his garments were red from neck to toes. After this baptism of gore, they dragged him to our tent on their return, to exhibit him, and it was well that he was one of the finest-hearted fellows in the world, for day and night these pestering fellows kept up the joke. Notwithstanding he had been subjected to the custom of the country, which demands that the blood of the first deer killed in the chase shall anoint the hunter, he had glory enough through his success to enable him to submit to the penalty.

      Tom also shot a deer that day, but his glory was dimmed by a misfortune, of which he seemed fated never to hear the last. The custom was to place one or two men at stated intervals in different parts of the country where the deer were pretty sure to run, and Tom was on stand watching through the woods in the direction from which the sound of the dogs came. As the deer bounded toward him, he was so excited that when he fired, the shot went harmlessly by the buck and landed in one of the General's dogs, killing the poor hound instantly. Though this was a loss keenly felt, there was no resisting the chance to guy the hunter. Even after Tom had come to be one of the best shots in the Seventh Cavalry, and when the General never went hunting without him, if he could help it, he СКАЧАТЬ