He had taken the paper out of his ragged breast-pocket to have it in readiness to present to the advance guard, who had perceived them and had quickened the pace for the purpose of halting them. Perhaps Bixby had no intention, save, by sleight-of-hand, to possess himself of the paper. Perhaps he thought that having it in his power the boy would hardly dare to contradict the story he had sketched and the name he intended to claim as the owner of the parole; if Hilary should protest he could say his son was weak-minded, an imbecile, a lunatic. He made a sudden lunge from the saddle and a more sudden snatch at the paper. But the boy’s strong hand held it fast. Jack Bixby hardly noted the surprise, the indignation, the reproach in Hilary’s face—almost an expression of grief—as he turned it toward him. With the determination that had seized him to possess the paper, Bixby struck the boy’s wrist and knuckles a series of sharp, brutal blows with the back of a strong bowie-knife, which had been concealed in his boot-leg at the surrender. They palsied the clutch of the boy’s left hand. But as the quivering fingers opened, Hilary caught the falling paper with his right hand.
“Let go, let go!” cried Jack Bixby in a frenzy; “else I’ll let you hev the blade—there, then!—take the aidge—ez keen ez a razor!”
The steel descended again and again, and as the boy was half dragged out of the saddle the blood poured down upon the parole. It would have been hard to say then what name was there!
A sudden shout rang out from down the road. The approaching men had observed the altercation, and mending their pace, came on at a swift gallop.
With not a glance at them, Jack Bixby turned his horse short around and fled as fast as the animal could go, striking out of the road and into the woods as soon as he reached the timbered land.
Poor “Baby Bunting,” dragged out of his saddle, fell down in the road beneath his horse’s hoofs, and all covered with white dust and red blood there he lay very still till the cavalrymen came up and found him.
For this was what they called him—“Poor Baby Bunting!” They were a small reconnoitering party of his own comrades, and it was with a hearty good will that they pursued Jack Bixby who fled, as from his enemies, through the brush. Perhaps his enemies would have been gentler with him than his quondam friends could they only have laid hands on him, for they all loved “Baby Bunting” for his brave spirit and his little simplicities and his hearty good-comradeship. Hilary recognized none of them. He only had a vague idea of Captain Bertley’s face with a grave anxiety and a deep pity upon it as the officer gazed down at him when he was borne past on the stretcher to the field hospital where his right arm was taken off by the surgeon. He was treated as kindly as possible, for the remembrance of his gallant spirit as well as humanity’s sake, and when at last he was discharged from the more permanent hospital to which he had been removed he realized that he had indeed done with war and fine deeds of valiance, and he set out to return home, tramping the weary way to the mountain and his mother.
After that fateful day, when maimed and wan and woebegone he came forth from the hospital and journeyed out from among the camps and flags and big guns and all the armaments of war, thrice splendid to his backward gaze, it seemed to him that he had left there more than was visible—that noble identity of valor for which he had revered himself.
For he found as he went a strange quaking in his heart. It was an alien thing, and he strove to repudiate it, and ached with helpless despair. When he came into unfamiliar regions, and a sudden clatter upon the lonely country road would herald the approach of mounted strangers, halting him, the convulsive start of his maimed right arm with the instinct to seize his weapons and the sense of being defenseless utterly would so unnerve him that he would give a disjointed account of himself, with hang-dog look and faltering words. And more than once he was seized and roughly handled and dragged to headquarters to show his papers and be at last passed on by the authorities.
He began to say to himself that his courage was in his cavalry pistol.