Colonel Parsons and his wife are receiving the rewards that only Heaven can give to lives of self-sacrifice. Mrs. Parsons, after they came North to a parish, only lived a short time to enjoy the comfort of an Eastern home. When the yellow fever raged so in the Mississippi Valley, in 1878, and volunteers came forward with all the splendid generosity of this part of the world, Colonel Parsons did not wait a second call from his conscience to enter the fever-scourged Memphis, and there he ended a martyr life: not only ready to go because in his Master's service, but because the best of his life, and one for whom he continually sorrowed, awaited him beyond the confines of eternity.
CHAPTER XI.
ORDERS TO REPORT AT FORT RILEY, KANSAS.
General Custer was the recipient of much kindness from the soldiers of his Michigan brigade while he remained in Michigan awaiting orders, and he went to several towns where his old comrades had prepared receptions for him. But when he returned from a reunion in Detroit to our saddened home, there was no grateful, proud father to listen to the accounts of the soldiers' enthusiasm. My husband missed his commendation, and his proud way of referring to his son. His own family were near us, and off he started, when he felt the absence of the noble parent who had so proudly followed his career, and, running through our stable to shorten the distance, danced up a lane through a back gate into his mother's garden, and thence into the midst of his father's noisy and happy household. His parents, the younger brother, Boston, sister Margaret, Colonel Tom, and often Eliza, made up the family, and the uproar that these boys and the elder boy, their father, made around the gentle mother and her daughters, was a marvel to me.
If the General went away to some soldiers' reunion, he tried on his return to give me a lucid account of the ceremonies, and how signally he failed in making a speech, of course, and his subterfuge for hiding his confusion and getting out of the scrape by proposing "Garry Owen" by the band, or three cheers for the old brigade. It was not that he had not enough to say: his heart was full of gratitude to his comrades, but the words came forth with such a rush, there was little chance of arriving at the meaning. I think nothing moved him in this coming together of his dear soldiers, like his pride at their naming babies after him. His eyes danced with pleasure, when he told that they stopped him in the street and held up a little George Armstrong Custer, and the shy wife was brought forward to be congratulated. I dearly loved, when I chanced to be with him, to witness their pride and hear their few words of praise.
Not long ago I was in a small town in Michigan, among some of my husband's old soldiers. Our sister Margaret was reciting for the benefit of the little church, and the veterans asked for me afterward, and I shook hands with a long line of bronzed heroes, now tillers of the soil. Their praise of their "boy General" made my grateful tears flow, and many of their eyes moistened as they held my hand and spoke of war times. After all had filed by, they began to return one by one and ask to bring their wives and children. One soldier, with already silvering head, said quaintly, "We have often seen you riding around with our General in war days," and added, with a most flattering ignoring of time's treatment of me, "You look just the same, though you was a young gal then; and now, tho' you followed your husband and took your hardships with us, I want to show you an old woman who was also a purty good soldier, for while I was away at the front she run the farm." Such a welcome, such honest tribute to his "old woman," recalled the times when the General's old soldiers gathered about him, with unaffected words, and when I pitied him because he fidgeted so, and bit his lips, and struggled to end what was the joy of his life, for fear he would cry like a woman. Among those who sought him out that summer was an officer who had commanded a regiment of troops in the celebrated Michigan brigade—Colonel George Grey, a brave Irishman, with as much enthusiasm in his friendships as in his fighting. His wife and little son were introduced. The boy had very light hair, and though taught to reverence and love the General by his gallant, impulsive father, the child had never realized until he saw him that his father's hero also had a yellow head. Heretofore the boy had hated his hair, and implored his mother to dye it dark. But as soon as his interview with my husband was ended, he ran to his mother, and whispered in eager haste that she need not mind the dyeing now, he never would scold about his hair being light again, since he had seen that General Custer's was yellow.
As I look back and consider what a descent the major-generals of the war made, on returning to their lineal rank in the regular army after the surrender at Appomattox, I wonder how they took the new order of things so calmly, or that they so readily adapted themselves to the positions they had filled before the firing on Sumter in 1861. General Custer held his commission as brevet major-general for nearly a year after the close of hostilities, and until relieved in Texas. He did not go at once to his regiment, the Fifth Cavalry, and take up the command of sixty men in place of thousands, as other officers of the regular army were obliged to do, but was placed on waiting orders, and recommended to the lieutenant-colonelcy of one of the new regiments of cavalry, for five new ones had been formed that summer, making ten in all. In the autumn, the appointment to the Seventh Cavalry came, with orders to go to Fort Garland. One would have imagined, by the jubilant manner in which this official document was unfolded and read to me, that it was the inheritance of a principality. My husband instantly began to go over the "good sides" of the question. He was so given to dwelling on the high lights of any picture his imagination painted, that the background, which might mean hardships and deprivations, became indefinite in outline, and obscure enough in detail to please the most modern impressionists. Out of our camp luggage a map was produced, and Fort Garland was discovered, after long prowling about with the first finger, in the space given to the Rocky Mountains. Then he launched into visions of what unspeakable pleasure he would have, fishing for mountain trout and hunting deer. As I cared nothing for fishing, and was afraid of a gun, I don't recall my veins bounding as his did over the prospect; but the embryo fisherman and Nimrod was so sanguine over his future, it would have been a stolid soul indeed that did not begin to think Fort Garland a sort of earthly paradise. The sober colors in this vivid picture meant a small, obscure post, then several hundred miles from any railroad, not much more than a handful of men to command, the most complete isolation, and no prospect of an active campaign, as it was far from the range of the warlike Indians. But Fort Garland soon faded from our view, in the excitement and interest over Fort Riley, as soon as our orders were changed to that post. We had no difficulty in finding it on the map, as it was comparatively an old post, and the Kansas Pacific Railroad was within ten miles of the Government reservation.
We ascertained, by inquiry, that it was better to buy the necessary household articles at Leavenworth, than to attempt to carry along even a simple outfit from the East. My attention had been so concentrated on the war, that I found the map of Virginia had heretofore comprised the only important part of the United States to me, and it was difficult to realize that Kansas had a city of 25,000 inhabitants, with several daily papers. Still, I was quite willing to trust to Leavenworth for the purchase of household furniture, as it seemed to me, what afterward proved true, that housekeeping in garrison quarters was a sort of camping out after all, with one foot in a house and another in position to put into the stirrup and spin "over the hills and far away." We packed the few traps that had been used in camping in Virginia and Texas, but most of our attention was given to the selection of a pretty girl, who, it was held by both of us, would do more toward furnishing and beautifying our army quarters than any amount of speechless bric-à-brac or silent tapestry. It was difficult to obtain what seemed the one thing needful for our new army home. In the first place, the mothers rose en masse and formed themselves into an anti-frontier combination. They looked right into my eyes, with harassed expression, and said, "Why, Libbie, they might marry an officer!" ignoring the fact that the happiest girl among them had undergone that awful fate, and still laughed back a denial of its being the bitterest lot that can come to a woman. Then I argued that perhaps their daughters might escape matrimony entirely, under the fearful circumstances which they shuddered over, even in contemplation, but that it was only fair that the girls should have a chance to see the "bravest and the tenderest," and, I mentally added, the "livest" men, for our town had been forsaken by most of the ambitious, energetic boys as soon as their school-days ended. The "beau season" was very brief, lasting only during their summer vacations, when they came from wide-awake Western towns to make love in sleepy Monroe. One mother at last listened to my arguments, and said, "I do want Laura to see what men of the world are, and she shall go." Now, this lovely mother had been almost a second one to me in all my lonely vacations, after my own mother died. She took me from the seminary, and gave me treats with her own children, and has influenced my whole life by her noble, large way of looking at the world. But, then, she has been East a great deal, and in Washington in President Pierce's days, and realized that the vision of the outside world, seen only from our Monroe, was narrow. The dear Laura surprised me by asking to have over night to consider, and I could not account for it, as she had been so radiant over the prospect of military life. Alas! next morning the riddle was solved, when she whispered in my ear that there was a youth who had already taken into his hands the disposal of her future, and "he" objected. So we lost her.