“After Bull Run did you set up all the live Zouaves you got hold of as targets for rifle practice?”
“Can't remember about the Zouaves. Rather think we made them into flags.”
“Well, you Rebels take the breath out of me,” commented the picket across the river; and then, as the relief came, Dan hurried back to look for the mail bag and a letter from Betty. For Betty wrote often these days—letters sometimes practical, sometimes impassioned, always filled with cheer, and often with bright gossip. Of her own struggle at Uplands and the long days crowded with work, she wrote no word; all her sympathy, all her large passion, and all her wise advice in little matters were for Dan from the beginning to the end. She made him promise to keep warm if it were possible, to read his Bible when he had the time, and to think of her at all hours in every season. In a neat little package there came one day a gray knitted waistcoat which he was to wear when on picket duty beside the river, “and be very sure to fasten it,” she had written. “I have sewed the buttons on so tight they can't come off. Oh, if I had only papa and Virginia and you back again I could be happy in a hovel. Dear mamma says so, too.”
And after much calm advice there would come whole pages that warmed him from head to foot. “Your kisses are still on my lips,” she wrote one day. “The Major said to me, 'Your mouth is very warm, my dear,' and I almost answered, 'you feel Dan's kisses, sir.' What would he have said, do you think? As it was I only smiled and turned away, and longed to run straight to you to be caught up in your arms and held there forever. O my beloved, when you need me only stretch out your hands and I will come.”
VII. — THE SILENT BATTLE
Despite the cheerfulness of Betty's letters, there were times during the next dark years when it seemed to her that starvation must be the only end. The negroes had been freed by the Governor's will, but the girl could not turn them from their homes, and, with the exception of the few field hands who had followed the Union army, they still lived in their little cabins and drew their daily rations from the storehouse. Betty herself shared their rations of cornmeal and bacon, jealously guarding her small supplies of milk and eggs for Mrs. Ambler and the two old ladies. “It makes no difference what I eat,” she would assure protesting Mammy Riah. “I am so strong, you see, and besides I really like Aunt Floretta's ashcakes.”
Spring and summer passed, with the ripened vegetables which Hosea had planted in the garden, and the long winter brought with it the old daily struggle to make the slim barrels of meal last until the next harvesting. It was in this year that the four women at Uplands followed the Major's lead and invested their united fortune in Confederate bonds. “We will rise or fall with the government,” Mrs. Ambler had said with her gentle authority. “Since we have given it our best, let it take all freely.”
“Surely money is of no matter,” Betty had answered, lavishly disregardful of worldly goods. “Do you think we might give our jewels, too? I have grandma's pearls hidden beneath the floor, you know.”