The Sword of Antietam: A Story of the Nation's Crisis by Joseph A. Altsheler (little bear else holmelund minarik txt) 📗

Warner and Pennington were by his side, the colonel rode before, and the Winchester regiment marched behind. Volunteers from Kentucky and other states had raised it to about three hundred men, and the new lads listened with amazement, while the unbearded veterans told them of Shiloh, the Second Manassas and Antietam.

“Good country, this of yours, Dick,” said Warner, as they rode through the rich lands east of Louisville. “Worth saving. I'm glad the doctor ordered me west for my health.”

“He didn't order you west for your health,” said Pennington. “He ordered you west to get killed for your country.”

“Well, at any rate, I'm here, and as I said, this looks like a land worth saving.”

“It's still finer when you get eastward into the Bluegrass,” said Dick, “but it isn't showing at its best. I never before saw the ground looking so burnt and parched. They say it's the dryest summer known since the country was settled eighty or ninety years ago.”

Dick hoped that their line of march would take them near Pendleton, and as it soon dropped southward he saw that his hope had come true. They would pass within twenty miles of his mother's home, and at Dick's urgent and repeated request, Colonel Winchester strained a point and allowed him to go. He was permitted to select a horse of unusual power and speed, and he departed just before sundown.

“Remember that you're to rejoin us to-morrow,” said Colonel Winchester. “Beware of guerillas. I hope you'll find your mother well.”

“I feel sure of it, and I shall tell her how very kind and helpful you've been to me, sir.”

“Thank you, Dick.”

Dick, in his haste to be off did not notice that the colonel's voice quivered and that his face flushed as he uttered the emphatic “thank you.” A few minutes later he was riding swiftly southward over a road that he knew well. His start was made at six o'clock and he was sure that by ten o'clock he would be in Pendleton.

The road was deserted. This was a well-peopled country, and he saw many houses, but nearly always the doors and shutters of the windows were closed. The men were away, and the women and children were shutting out the bands that robbed in the name of either army.

The night came down, and Dick still sped southward with no one appearing to stop him. He did not know just where the Southern army lay, but he did not believe that he would come in contact with any of its flankers. His horse was so good and true, that earlier than he had hoped, he was approaching Pendleton. The moon was up now, and every foot of the ground was familiar. He crossed brooks in which he and Harry Kenton and other boys of his age had waded—but he had never seen them so low before—and he marked the tree in which he had shot his first squirrel.

It had not been so many months since he had been in Pendleton, and yet it seemed years and years. Three great battles in which seventy or eighty thousand men had fallen were enough to make anybody older.

Dick paused on the crest of a little hill and looked toward the place where his mother's house stood. He had come just in this way in the winter, and he looked forward to another meeting as happy. The moonlight was very clear now and he saw no smoke rising from the chimneys, but this was summer, and of course they would not have a fire burning at such an hour.

He rode on a little further and paused again at the crest of another hill. His view of Pendleton here was still better. He could see more roofs, and walls, but he noticed that no smoke rose from any house. Pendleton lay very still in its hollow. On the far side he saw the white walls of Colonel Kenton's house shining in the moonlight. Something leaped in his brain. He seemed to have been looking upon such white walls only yesterday, white walls that stood out in a fiery haze, white walls that he could never forget though he lived to be a hundred.

Then he remembered. The white walls were those of the Dunkard church at Antietam, around which the blue and the gray had piled their bodies in masses. The vast battlefield ranged past him like a moving panorama, and then he was merely looking at Pendleton lying there below, so still.

Dick was sensitive and his affections were strong. He loved his mother with a remarkable devotion, and his friends were for all time. Highly imaginative, he felt a powerful stirring of the heart, at his second return to Pendleton since his departure for the war. Yet he was chilled somewhat by the strange silence hanging over the little town that he loved so well. It was night, it was true, but not even a dog barked at his coming, and there was not the faintest trail of smoke across the sky. A brilliant moon shone, and white stars unnumbered glittered and danced, yet they showed no movement of man in the town below.

He shook off the feeling, believing that it was merely a sensitiveness born of time and place, and rode straight for his mother's house. Then he dismounted, tied his horse to one of the pines, and ran up the walk to the front door, where he knocked softly at first, and then more loudly.

No answer came and Dick's heart sank within him like a plummet in a pool. He went to the edge of the walk, gathered up some gravel and threw it against a window in his mother's room on the second floor. That would arouse her, because he knew that she slept lightly in these times, when her son was off to the wars. But the window was not raised, and he could hear no sound of movement in the room.

Alarmed, he went back to the front door, and he noticed that while the door was locked the keyhole was empty. Then his mother was gone away. The sign was almost infallible. Had any one been at home the key would have been on the inside.

His heart grew lighter. There had been no violence. No roving band had come there to plunder. He whistled and shouted through the keyhole, although he did not want anyone who might possibly be passing in the road to hear him, as this town was almost wholly Southern in its sympathies.

There was still no answer, and leading his horse behind one of the pine trees on the lawn, where it would not be observed, he went to the rear of the house, and taking a stick pried open a kitchen window. He had learned this trick when he was a young boy, and climbing lightly inside he closed the window behind him and fastened the catch.

He knew of course every hall and room of the house, but the moment he entered it he felt that it was deserted. The air was close and heavy, showing that no fresh breeze had blown through it for days. It was impossible that his mother or the faithful colored woman could have lived there so long a time with closed doors and shuttered windows.

When he passed into the main part of his home, and touched a door or chair, a fine dust grated slightly under his fingers. Here was confirmation, if further confirmation was needed. Dust on chairs and