Evelyn Byrd

“I shall order you sent to the guard-house and manacled, until General Early shall have decided what to do with you. He doesn’t like your sort.”

The man fell at once into panic and pleaded for his life.

“Oh, what will become of me?” he piteously moaned.

“I really don’t know,” answered Kilgariff, quite as if the question had related to the disposition to be made of some inanimate object. “General Early may have you shot at sunrise, or he may decide to hang you instead. I don’t at all know, and after all it makes no real difference. The one death is about as painless as the other, and as for the matter of disgrace, of course you are hopelessly incapable of considering that. Perhaps – oh, well, I don’t know. General Early may conclude to turn you loose as a creature too contemptible to be seriously dealt with.”

“God grant that he may!” said the man, with fervour, as the guards took him away.

A minute later Kilgariff mounted his horse, Wyanoke – a special gift from Dorothy – and rode hurriedly to General Early’s headquarters; it was after midnight, but with this army sleeplessly “on service” very little attention was given to hours, either of the day or of the night. So, after a moment’s parley with a sentinel, Kilgariff was conducted to General Early’s presence, under a tree.

It was not Kilgariff’s habit to grow excited. He had passed through too much for that, he thought. But on this occasion his perturbation of spirit was so great that he had difficulty in enunciating his words.

“General,” he said, “I want a little cavalry force, if you please. I want to capture one of the enemy’s hospitals and hold it long enough for me to have a talk with the most infamous scoundrel who ever lived.”

“Calm yourself, Captain,” said Early. “Have a little apple brandy as a tonic. Your nerves are shaken.”

Kilgariff declined the stimulant, but at Early’s earnest solicitation he sat down upon a stump, and presently so far commanded his own spirit as to go on with what he had to say.

“One of those contemptible border wretches got himself smuggled through our lines to-night. I don’t know how. He brought me a note from the most infamous scoundrel I ever knew, together with a safe-conduct under which I could sneak into the enemy’s lines and talk with the fellow, who is mortally wounded. I tore up the safe-conduct and sent the emissary to the guard-house with the comfortable assurance that his case would be submitted to you, and that you would pretty certainly order him shot or hanged according to the gravity with which you might regard his offence. I hope you’ll let him go. He is so poor-spirited a cur that he will suffer a thousand deaths to-night in dreading one for to-morrow. However, that isn’t what I want to speak with you about. I want a cavalry force of a company or two. I want to raid that hospital before morning and talk with that rascal in the interest of others whose fate he may hold in his hands.”

“Do you plan to kill him?”

“Of course not. He is wounded unto death. And besides – well, General, he isn’t of our class.”

“I quite understand – not a man you could ‘call out.’”

“Distinctly not – although he has a major’s commission.”

“Oh – if you want a colonel’s or a brigadier-general’s, you shall have it,” broke in Early, full of the enthusiasm of fight.

“No, General,” answered Kilgariff, with an amused smile; “I have always found it possible to fight anybody I pleased without raising the question of rank. You know, a private, if he is a man of good family, may slap a major-general’s jaws in our army, in full certainty that his escapade will bring a challenge rather than a citation before a court-martial. No. I want to talk with this man before he dies. He sent me a safe-conduct, as I have already said. That was a gracious permission from the Federal authorities for me to see him. I have a very pronounced prejudice against the acceptance of gracious permissions from the Federal authorities. So I have come to ask for a squadron of cavalry, to which I will add a couple of guns, in order that I may capture that post, enter its hospital, and have my talk with its inmate without anybody’s permission but yours, General.”

The humour of the situation appealed strongly to Early, as it did also to Major Irby of the Virginia Cavalry, who was sitting near by. That officer was a man of few words, but he carried an unusually alert sabre, and his sense of humour was uncommonly keen.

“If you don’t mind, General,” he said, in his quiet fashion, “I should like to ‘sit in’ the captain’s game.”

“Do it!” said Early. “Take three companies and two of Kilgariff’s guns, and let him show the fellow that he carries his own safe-conduct at his back.”

Things were done promptly and quickly in those stirring times, and five minutes after Early had spoken his words of permission, Major Irby moved at the head of three companies of cavalry and two of Kilgariff’s guns – the two so recently captured from the enemy, and selected now by way of emphasising the jest.

A dash, a scurry, and every picket post south of Harper’s Ferry was swept out of sight.

XIII

KILGARIFF HEARS NEWS

AS soon as Major Irby had possessed himself of the hospital and the region round about, he gave orders to throw out pickets a mile or so in every direction, in order to guard against surprise. He posted Kilgariff’s guns on a little hill, where their fire could sweep all of the roads over which an advance of the enemy was possible. Then he ordered the officer of the guard to post a strong line of sentinels around the house itself, which served as hospital, and to send a corporal’s guard into the building with orders to dispose themselves as Kilgariff might direct.

Kilgariff, who had stripped the chevrons off his sleeves, and sewed a captain’s three bars on his collar in obedience to General Early’s order, immediately entered the house and made his way to the separate room in which Campbell’s cot had been placed. Kilgariff turned to the corporal of the guard, and commanded: —

“Place two sentinels in that outer room. Order them to see to it that there is no eavesdropping. You understand?”

“Perfectly, Captain.”

There is this advantage about military over other arrangements, that they can be absolutely depended upon. The sentinel who has “orders” is an autocrat in their execution. He has no discretion. He enters into no argument. He parleys with nobody, whatever that somebody’s rank may be. He simply commands, “Halt”; and if the one advancing takes one other step, the sentinel fires a death shot at short range and with absolutely certain aim. Killing, on the part of a sentinel whose command of “Halt” is disregarded, is not only no crime in military law – it is a virtue, a simple discharge of peremptory duty. And the sentinel himself, if ordered to stand twenty feet away from a door, stands there, not encroaching upon the distance by so much as a foot, under pain of punishment “in the discretion of a court-martial,” as the military law phrases it.

So, when Kilgariff entered the room in which the man who had ruined his life lay wounded, in answer to that man’s summons, he knew that his conversation would be neither interrupted nor overheard in any word or syllable of it. The absoluteness of military law and practice forbade that, even as a possibility.

Kilgariff advanced to the man’s bedside, took his seat upon a camp stool, and without the remotest suggestion of a greeting in his voice or manner, abruptly said: —

“I am here. What do you want?”

“I was sure you would come,” answered the man; “the safe-conduct – ”

“I tore that up the moment I received it,” answered Kilgariff.

“But why? It was valid.”

“For any other officer in our army, yes,” answered Kilgariff; “but not for me, as you very well know. Anyhow, I preferred to come under the safe-conduct of Southern carbines and cannon and sabres. Never mind that. Go on. What do you want?”

The man winced and groaned with pain as he turned himself a little on his cot in order to face his interlocutor. Presently he said: —

“I’m shot through the groin with a canister ball. It is a wound unto death, I suppose.”

“Yes? Well? What else? I did not come to ask after your health.”

“Of course not. I mention my condition only as a man who flings a card upon the table at a critical moment exclaims, ‘That’s a trump.’ You see, the things I want to say to you are in the nature of an ante-mortem statement, and I want you to understand that, so that you may believe all I have to tell you.”

“I understand,” said Kilgariff. “You are precisely the sort of man, who, after lying and cheating all his life, would tell the truth in a dying statement, if only by way of cheating the Day of Judgment and playing stacked cards on the Almighty. Go on.”

But before the man could speak again, Kilgariff added: —

“As a still further stimulus to truth-telling on your part, let me make a few suggestions. You are completely in my power. If I choose, I can have you taken hence to General Early and introduce you to him as a man who accepted a commission in the Confederate Army and then deserted to the other side and deceived the authorities there into giving him a commission to fight the cause he had solemnly sworn to support. You know what would happen in such a case.”

“Yes, I know. There’d be a drumhead court-martial, and I’d be hanged at daybreak. But hear me, Kilgariff. I’m a gambler, as you know, not in one way, but in all ways. And I know how to be a good loser. I’ve drawn a very bad hand this time, but I’ve called the game; and if I’m hanged for it, I shall not whine about my luck. Whenever I die, and however I die, I’ll die game. So you can’t intimidate me. But before I die, there are certain things I want to tell you – for the sake of the others. For although I have no moral principles and don’t profess any, there are some things I want to tell you about – ”

“Go on. Tell me about my brother.”

“That wasn’t what I wanted to talk about first. Besides, you know most of the story.”

“Never mind that. I want to hear it all from your lips. Much of it I never understood. Tell it all and quickly.”

“Well, your brother’s a fool, you know.”

“Yes, I know. Otherwise – never mind that. Tell me the whole story. How far was my brother a sharer in your guilt? How far did he consent to my wrecking? Why did he join you for my destruction, after all I had done for him?”

“It’s very hard to say. Opinions differ, and standards of morality – ”