The Cavalier | Page 2

stamping, neighing, braying, whooping,
guffawing, and singing--all the daybreak charivari beloved of a camp of
Confederate "critter companies." In the midst of it a chum and I sat
close together on a log near the mess fire, and as the other boys of the
mess lifted their heads from their saddle-tree pillows, from two of them
at once came a slow, disdainful acceptance of the final lot of the
wicked, made unsolicited on discovering that this chum and I had sat
there talking together all night. I had the day before been wheedled into
letting myself be detailed to be a quartermaster's clerk, and this
comrade and I were never to snuggle under the one blanket again. The
thought forbade slumber.
"If I go to sleep," I said,--"you know how I dream. I shall have one of
those dreams of mine to carry around in my memory for a year, like a
bullet in my back." So there the dear fellow had sat all night to give me

my hourly powders of reassurance that I could be a quartermaster's
clerk without shame.
"Certainly you can afford to fill a position which the leader of Ferry's
scouts has filled just before you."
But my unsoldierly motive for going to headquarters kept my
misgivings alive. I was hungry for the gentilities of camp; to be where
Shakespeare was part of the baggage, where Pope was quoted, where
Coleridge and Byron and Poe were recited, Macaulay criticized, and
"Les Misérables"--Madame Le Vert's Mobile translation--lent round;
and where men, when they did steal, stole portable volumes, not
currycombs. Ned Ferry had been Major Harper's clerk, but had
managed in several instances to display such fitness to lead that
General Austin had lately named him for promotion, and the
quartermaster's clerk was now Lieutenant Ferry, raised from the ranks
for gallantry, and followed ubiquitously by a chosen sixty or so drawn
from the whole brigade. Could the like occur again? And could it occur
to a chap who could not comprehend how it had ever occurred at all?
By and by we breakfasted. After which, my precious horse not having
finished his corn, I spread my blanket and let myself doze, but was
soon awakened by the shouts of my companions laughing at me for
laughing so piteously in my sleep.
"Would I not tell my dream, as nice young men in the Bible always
did?"
"No, I would not!" But I had to yield. My dream was that our General
had told me a fable. It was of a young rat, which seeing a cockerel,
whose tail was scarcely longer than his own, leap down into a barrel,
gather some stray grains of corn and fly out again, was tempted to
follow his example, but having got in, could only stay there. The boys
furnished the moral; it was not complimentary.
"Well, good-bye, fellows."
"Good-bye, Smith." I have never liked my last name, but at that

moment the boys contrived to put a kindness of tone into it which made
it almost pleasing. "Good-bye, Smith, remember your failings."
Remember! I had yet to make their discovery. But I was on the eve of
making it.
As I passed up the road through the midst of our nearly tentless camp I
met a leather-curtained spring-wagon to which were attached a pair of
little striped-legged mules driven by an old negro. Behind him, among
the curtains, sat a lady and her black maid. The mistress was of
strikingly graceful figure, in a most tasteful gown and broad Leghorn
hat. Her small hands were daintily gloved. The mules stopped, and
through her light veil I saw that she was handsome. Her eyes, full of
thought, were blue, and yet were so spirited they might as well have
been black, as her hair was. She, or fate for her, had crowded thirty
years of life into twenty-five of time.
For many a day I had not seen such charms of feminine attire, and yet I
was not charmed. Every item of her fragrant drapery was from the
world's open market, hence flagrantly un-Confederate, unpatriotic,
reprehensible. Otherwise it might not have seemed to me that her thin
nostrils had got their passionateness lately.
"Are you not a New Orleans boy?" she asked as I lifted my képi and
drew rein.
Boy! humph! I frowned, made myself long, and confessed I had the
honor to be from that city. Whereupon she let her long-lashed eyes take
on as ravishing a covetousness as though I had been a pretty baby.
"I knew it!" she said delightedly. "But tell me, honor bright,"--she
sparkled with amusement--"you're not regularly enlisted, are you?"
I clenched my teeth. "I am nineteen, madam."
Her eyes danced, her brows arched. "Haven't you got"--she hid her
smile with an embroidered handkerchief--"haven't