WHEN Gaston reached Hambright the following day, and whispered to his mother the good news, he hastened to tell his friend Tom Camp. The young man’s heart warmed toward the white-haired old soldier in this hour of his victory. With sparkling eyes, he told Tom of his stormy scene with the General, of its curious ending, and the hours he spent in heaven beneath the limbs of an old magnolia.
Tom listened with rapture. “Ah, didn’t I tell you, if you hung on you’d get her by-and-by? So you bearded the General in his den did you? I ’ll bet his eyes blazed when he seed you! He’s got an awful temper when you rile him. You ought to a seed him one day when our brigade was ordered into a charge where three concealed batteries was cross firin’ and men was failin’ like wheat under the knife. Geeminy but didn’t he cuss! He wouldn’t take the order fust from the orderly, and sent to know if the Major-General meant it. I tell you us fellers that was layin’ there in the grass listenin’ to them bullets singin’ thought he was the finest cusser that ever ripped an oath.
“He reared and he charged, and he cussed, and He damned that man for tryin’ to butcher his men, and he never moved till the third order came. That was the night ten thousand wounded men lay on the field, and me in the middle of ’em with a Minie ball in my shoulder. The Yankees and our men was all mixed up together, and just after dark the full moon came up through the trees and you could see as plain as day. I begun to sing the old hymn, ‘There is a land of pure delight,’ and you ought to have heard them ten thousand wounded men sing!
“While we was singing the General came through lookin’ up his men. He seed me and said, ‘Is that you, Tom Camp?’
“I looked up at him, and he was crying like a child, and he went on from man to man cryin’ and cussin the fool that sent us into that hell-hole. The General’s a rough man, if you rub his fur the wrong way, but his heart’s all right. He’s all gold I tell you!”
“Well, I’m in for a tussle with him, Tom.”
“Shucks, man, you can beat him with one hand tied behind you if you’ve got his gal’s heart. She’s got his fire, and a gal as purty as she is can just about do what she pleases in this world.”
“I hope she can bring him around. I like the General. I’d much rather not fight him.”
“Where’s Flora?” cried Tom looking around in alarm.
“I saw her going toward the spring in the edge of the woods there a minute ago,” replied Gaston.
Tom sprang up and began to hop and jump down the path toward the spring with incredible rapidity.
Flora was playing in the branch below the spring and Tom saw the form of a negro man passing over the opposite hill going along the spring path that led in that direction.
“Was you talkin’ with that nigger, Flora?” asked Tom holding his hand on his side and trying to recover his breath.
“Yes, I said howdy, when he stopped to get a drink of water, and he give me a whistle,” she replied with a pout of her pretty lips and a frown.
Tom seized her by the arm and shook her. “Didn’t I tell you to run every time you seed a nigger unless I was with you!”
“Yes, but he wasn’t hurtin’ me and you are!” she cried bursting into tears.
“I’ve a notion to whip you good for this!” Tom stormed.
“Don’t Tom, she won’t do it any more, will you Flora?” pleaded Gaston taking her in his arms and starting to the house with her. When they reached the house, Tom was still pale and trembling with excitement.
“Lord, there’s so many triflin’ niggers loafin’ round the county now stealing and doin’ all sorts of devilment, I’m scared to death about that child. She don’t seem any more afraid of ’em than she is of a cat.”
“I don’t believe anybody would hurt Flora, Tom,—she’s such a little angel,” said Gaston kissing the tears from the child’s face.
“She is cute—ain’t she?” said Tom with pride. “I’ve wished many a time lately I’d gone out West with them Yankee fellers that took such a likin’ to me in the war. They told me that a poor white man had a chance out there, and that there wern’t a nigger in twenty miles of their home. But then I lost my leg, how could I go?”
He sat dreaming with open eyes for a moment and continued, looking tenderly at Flora, “But, baby, don’t you dare go nigh er nigger, or let one get nigh you no more’n you would a rattlesnake!”
“I won’t Pappy!” she cried with an incredulous smile at his warning of danger that made Tom’s heart sick. She was all joy and laughter, full of health and bubbling life. She believed with a child’s simple faith that all nature was as innocent as her own heart.
Tom smoothed her curls and kissed her at last, and she slipped her arm around his neck and squeezed it tight.
“Ain’t she purty and sweet now?” he exclaimed.
“Tom, you ’ll spoil her yet,” warned Gaston as he smiled and took his leave, throwing a kiss to Flora as he passed through the little yard gate. Tom had built a fence close around his house when Flora was a baby to shut her in while he was at work.
Two days later about five o’clock in the afternoon as Gaston sat in his office writing a letter, to his sweetheart, his face aglow with love and the certainty that she was his, as he read and re-read her last glowing words he was startled by the sudden clang of the court house bell. At first he did not move, only looking up from his paper. Sometimes mischievous boys rang the bell and ran down the steps before any one could catch them. But the bell continued its swift stroke seeming to grow louder and wilder every moment. He saw a man rush across the square, and then the bell of the Methodist, and then of the Baptist churches joined their clamour to the alarm.
He snapped the lid of his desk, snatched his hat and ran down the steps.
As he reached the street, he heard the long piercing cry of a woman’s voice, high, strenuous, quivering!
“A lost child! A lost child!”
What a cry! He was never so thrilled and awed by a human voice. In it was trembling all the anguish of every mother’s broken heart transmitted through t............