The Star of Gettysburg: A Story of Southern High Tide, Joseph A. Altsheler [best value ebook reader txt] 📗

The colonel's severity of tone was belied by a faint twinkle in the corner of his eye, and the lads knew that they had nothing to fear, especially as Lieutenant-Colonel St. Hilaire was quite as stern and able a guardian as Colonel Talbot.

Colonel Talbot departed, good wishes following him in a shower, and that day a young officer arrived from South Carolina and took a place in the Invincibles that had been made vacant by death.

Harry was still with his friends when this officer arrived, and the tall, slender figure and dark face of the man seemed familiar to him. A little thought recalled where he had first seen that eager gesture and the manner so intense that it betrayed an excessive enthusiasm. But when Harry did remember him he remembered him well.

"How do you do, Captain Bertrand?" he said—the man wore the uniform of a captain.

Bertrand stared at Harry, and then he gradually remembered. It was not strange that he was puzzled at first, as in the two years that had passed since Bertrand was in Colonel Kenton's house at Pendleton, Harry had grown much larger and more powerful, and was deeply tanned by all kinds of weather. But when he did recall him his greeting was full of warmth.

"Ah, now I know!" he exclaimed. "It is Harry Kenton, the son of Colonel George Kenton! And we held that meeting at your father's house on the eve of the war! And then we went up to Frankfort, and we did not take Kentucky out of the Union."

"No, we didn't," said Harry with a laugh. "Captain Bertrand, Lieutenant St. Clair and Lieutenant Langdon."

But Bertrand had known them both in Charleston, and he shook their hands with zeal and warmth, showing what Harry thought—as he had thought the first time he saw him—an excess of manner.

"We've a fine big dry place under this tree," said St. Clair. "Let's sit down and talk. You're the new Captain in our regiment, are you not?"

"Yes," replied Bertrand. "I've just come from Richmond, where I met my chief, that valiant man, Colonel Leonidas Talbot. I have been serving mostly on the coast of the Carolinas, and when I asked to be sent to the larger theater of war they very naturally assigned me to one of my own home regiments. Alas! there is plenty of room for me and many more in the ranks of the Invincibles."

"We have been well shot up, that's true," said Langdon, whom nothing could depress more than a minute, "but we've put more than a million Yankees out of the running."

"How are your Knights of the Golden Circle getting on?" asked Harry.

Bertrand flushed a little, despite his swarthiness.

"Not very well, I fear," he replied. "It has taken us longer to conquer the Yankees than we thought."

"I don't see that we've begun to conquer them as a people or a section," said St. Clair, who was always frank and direct. "We've won big victories, but just look and you'll see 'em across the river there, stronger and more numerous than ever, and that, too, on the heels of the big defeat they sustained at Fredericksburg. And, if you'll pardon me, Captain, I don't believe much in the great slave empire that the Knights of the Golden Circle planned."

Bertrand's black eyes flashed.

"And why not?" he asked sharply.

"To take Cuba and Mexico would mean other wars, and if we took them we'd have other kinds of people whom we'd have to hold in check with arms. A fine mess we'd make of it, and we haven't any right to jump on Cuba and Mexico, anyway. I've got a far better plan."

"And what is that?" asked Bertrand, with an increasing sharpness of manner.

"The North means to free our slaves. We'll defeat the North and show to her that she can't. Then we'll free 'em ourselves."

"Free them ourselves!" exclaimed Bertrand. "What are we fighting for but the right to hold our own property?"

"I didn't understand it exactly that way. It seems to me that we went to war to defend the right of a state to go out of the Union when it pleases."

"I tell you, this war is being fought to establish our title to our own."

"It's all right, so we fight well," said Harry, who saw Bertrand's rising color and who believed him to be tinged with fanaticism; "it's all that can be asked of us. After Happy Tom sleeps in the White House with his boots on, as he says he's going to do, we can decide, each according to his own taste, what he was fighting for."

"I've known all the time what was in my mind," said Bertrand emphatically. "Of course, the extension of the new republic toward the north will be cut off by the Yankees. Then its expansion must be southward, and that means in time the absorption of Mexico, all the West Indies, and probably Central America."

St. Clair was about to retort, but Harry gave him a warning look and he contented himself with rolling into a little easier position. Harry foresaw that these two South Carolinians would not be friends, and in any event he hated fruitless political discussions.

Bertrand excused himself presently and went away.

"Arthur," said Harry, "I wouldn't argue with him. He's a captain in the Invincibles now, and you're a lieutenant. It's in his power to make trouble for you."

"You're not appealing to any emotion in me that might bear the name of fear, are you, Harry?"

"You know I'm not. Why argue with a man who has fire on the brain? Although he's older than you, Arthur, he hasn't got as good a rein on his temper."

"You can't resist flattery like that, can you, Arthur? I know I couldn't," said Happy Tom, grinning his genial grin.

St. Clair's face relaxed.

"You're right, fellows," he said. "We oughtn't to be quarreling among ourselves when there are so many Yankees to fight."

Mail forwarded from Richmond was distributed in the camp the next day and Harry was in the multitude gathered about the officers distributing it. The delivery of the mail was always a stirring event in either army, and as the war rolled on it steadily increased in importance.

There were men in this very group who had not heard from home since they left it two years before, and there were letters for men who would never receive them. The letters were being given out at various points, but where Harry stood a major was calling them in a loud, clear voice.

"John Escombe, Field's brigade."

Escombe, deeply tanned and twenty-two, ran forward and received a thick letter addressed in a woman's handwriting, that of his mother, and, amid cheering at his luck, disappeared in the crowd.

"Thomas Anderson, Gregg's brigade. Girl's handwriting, too. Lucky boy, Tom."

"Hey, Tom, open it and show it to us! Maybe her picture's inside it! I'll bet she's got red hair!"

But Tom fled, blushing, and opened his letter when he was at a safe distance.

"Carlton Ives, Thomas' brigade."

"In hospital, Major, but I'll take the letter to him. He's in my company."

"Stephen Brayton, Lane's brigade."

There was a silence for a moment, and then some one said:

"Dead, at Antietam, sir."

The major put the letter on one side, and called:

"Thomas Langdon, the Invincibles."

Langdon darted forward and seized his letter.

"It's from my father," he said as he glanced at the superscription, although it was half hidden from him by a mist that suddenly appeared before his eyes.

"Here, Tom, stand behind us and read it," said Harry, who was waiting in an anxiety that was positively painful for a letter to himself.

"Henry Lawton, Pender's brigade," called the major. "This is from a girl, too, and there is a photograph inside. I can feel it. Wish I could get such a letter myself, Henry."

Lawton, his letter in his hand, retreated rapidly amid envious cheers.

"Charles Carson, Lane's brigade."

"Dead at Fredericksburg, sir; I helped to bury him."

"Thomas Carstairs, Field's brigade."

"Killed at the Second Manassas, sir."

"Richard Graves, Archer's brigade."

"Died in hospital after Antietam, sir."

"David Moulton, Field's brigade."

"Killed nearly a year ago, in the valley, sir."

"William Fitzpatrick, Lane's brigade."

"Taken prisoner at Antietam. Not yet exchanged, sir."

"Herbert Jones, Pender's brigade."

"Killed at South Mountain, sir."

Harry felt a little shiver. The list of those who would never receive their letters was growing too long. But this delivery of the mail seemed to run in streaks. Presently it found a streak of the living. It was a great mail that came that day, the largest the army had yet received, but the crowd, hungry for a word from home, did not seem to diminish. The ring continually pressed a little closer.

St. Clair received two letters, and, a long while afterwards, there was one for Dalton, who, however, had not been so long a time without news, as the battlefield was his own state, Virginia. Harry watched them with an envy that he tried to keep down, and after a while he saw that the heap of letters was becoming very small.

His anxiety became so painful that it was hard to bear. He knew that his father had been in the thick of the great battle at Stone River, but not a word from him or about him had ever come. No news in this case was bad news. If he were alive he would certainly write, and there was Confederate communication between Eastern Tennessee and Northern Virginia.

It was thus with a sinking heart that he watched the diminishing heap. Many of the disappointed ones had already gone away, hopeless, and Harry felt like following them, but the major picked up a thick letter in a coarse brown envelope and called:

"Lieutenant Henry Kenton, staff of Lieutenant-General Thomas Jonathan Jackson."

Harry sprang forward and seized his letter. Then he found a place behind a big tree, where St. Clair, Langdon and Dalton were reading theirs, and opened it. He had already seen that the address was in his father's handwriting and he believed that he was alive. The letter must have been written after the battle of Stone River or it would have arrived earlier. He took a hurried glance at the date and saw that it was near the close of January, at least three weeks after the battle. Then all apprehension was gone.

It was a long letter, dated from headquarters near Chattanooga, Tennessee. Colonel Kenton had just heard of the battle of Fredericksburg and he was rejoicing in the glorious victory. He hoped and believed that his son had passed through it safely. The Southern army had not been so successful in the west as in the east, but he believed that they had met tougher antagonists there, the men of the west and northwest, used to all kinds of hardships, and, alas! their own Kentuckians. At both Perryville and Stone River they had routed the antagonists who met them first, but they had been stopped by their own brethren.

Harry smiled and murmured to himself:

"You can never put down dad's state pride. With him the Kentuckians are always first."

He had a good deal of this state pride himself, although in a less accentuated form, and, after the momentary thought, he went on. The colonel was looking for a letter from his son—Harry had written twice since Fredericksburg, and he knew now that the letters would arrive safely. He himself had been wounded slightly in a skirmish just after Stone River, but he was now entirely well. The Southern forces were gathering and General Bragg would have a great army with which they were confident of winning a victory like that of the Second Manassas or Fredericksburg. He was glad that his son was on the staff of so great a genius as General Jackson and that he was also under the command of that other great genius, Lee.

Harry stopped reading for a moment or two and smiled with satisfaction. The impression that Lee and Jackson had made upon the South was as great in the west as in the east. The hero-worship which the fiery and impressionable South gives in such unstinted measure to these two men had begun already. Harry was glad that his father recognized the great Virginians so fully, men who allied with genius temperate and lofty lives.

He resumed his reading, but the remainder of the letter was occupied with personal details. The colonel closed with some good advice to his son about caring for himself on the march and