Elizabeth sat on the doorstep, her hands clasped round her knees. If only Herbert were here!—but Herbert had ridden up into the woods.
“Then we had interesting Jesuit settlements, overflow by mistake from Lord Baltimore’s land to the south. We had all the ante-war troubles, slaves escaping over the border and claiming our protection. We protected ’em too with a flourishing underground railroad. But the brigands used to capture them; sometimes they captured our own free darkies and carried them off. There was a young black woman with her children who had lived as a free woman in our county, who was captured and carried screaming in the dead of night through the streets of Gettysburg, she and each of her children across the saddle of a rascal. A posse was made up, but they couldn’t be rescued. In the end they got back, and one of those children grew up in my grandfather’s family. When the Confederates came she crept under the old valanced bed in the downstairs bedroom, and my little brother who crept in there too always remembered two details, the spurred feet of the officers which he could see under the valance and the deathly green-gray of that young girl’s face. She must have been almost twenty, but the terror had never left her.
“Then we had the battle, and you will acknowledge that that was something!”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth. “What happened about here at the time of the battle?”
Colonel Thomas stooped and picked up one of the books which he had laid on the doorstep.
“The best lengthy account of the battle was written by a famous Frenchman, the Count of Paris. Here it is.” He turned from page to page.
“This will answer your question. This is after the first day’s fight. ‘Lee, having determined not to provoke a decisive battle until the concentration of his army was accomplished, must naturally have resorted to every device in order to complete this concentration before that of his adversary. This was easy for him to do, for two of his three army corps were entirely under his control at the close of the first day. Longstreet was still absent. Pickett’s division had remained at Chambersburg for the purpose of covering the defiles of South Mountain; an order to join the army was forwarded to him, but it could not reach him until the next day. The other two divisions, under McLaws and Hood, had started from Greenwood in the morning, after having successfully aided in the passage of Johnson’s division.’”
Colonel Thomas stopped and looked at Elizabeth uneasily.
“Go on,” said Elizabeth.
“‘They all followed the same road. Messengers were sent to expedite their movements; an extraordinary order which had directed the supply train to pass before them had caused a great loss of time which could not be repaired; in fact, the road, muddy and broken up, was encumbered by vehicles, loaded with provisions and ammunition, that were proceeding in the direction of the battle-field, and by others that were already returning with some of the wounded.’ You see there was dreadful congestion and confusion.”