The time was now drawing to a close that I should pass amid the familiar scenes of this region. The good people at Daker's were still kindly; but having climbed into the great bed one night, I found my legs aching, my brain violently throbbing, my chest full of pain and my eyes weak. When I woke in the morning my lips were fevered, I could eat nothing, and when I reached my saddle, it seemed that I should faint. In a word, the Chickahominy fever had seized upon me. My ride to New Bridge was marked by great agony, and during much of the time I was quite blind. I turned off, at Gaines's Mill, to rest at Captain Kingwalt's; but the old gentleman was in the grip of the ague, and I forebore to trouble him with a statement of my grievances. Skyhiski made me a cup of tea, which I could not drink, and Fogg made me lie on his "poncho." It was like old times come back, to hear them all speak cheerfully, and the man Clover said that if there "warn't" a battle soon, he knew what he'd do, he did! he'd go home, straight as a buck!
"Becoz," said the man Clover, flourishing his hands, "I volunteered to fight. To fight, sir! not to dig and drive team. Here we air, sir, stuck in the mud, burnin' with fever, livin' on hardtack. And thair's Richmond! Just thair! You can chuck a stone at it, if you mind to. A'ter awhile them rebbils'll pop out, and fix us. Why ain't we led up, sa-a-y?"
The man Clover represented common sentiment among the troops at this time; but I told him that in all probability he would soon be gratified with a battle. My prediction was so far correct, that when I met the man Clover on the James River, a week afterward, he said, with a rueful countenance—
"Sa-a-a-y! It never rains but it pours, does it?"
As I rode from the camp of the Pennsylvania Reserves, at noon, on the 21st of June, I seemed to feel a gloomy premonition of the calamities that were shortly to fall upon the "Army of the Potomac." I passed in front of Hogan house; through the wood above the mill; along Gaines's Lane, between his mansion and his barn; across a creek, tributary to the Chickahominy; and up the ploughed hills by a military road, toward Grapevine Bridge. Lieutenant-Colonel Heath, of the Fifth Maine Regiment, was riding with me, and we stopped at the tip of an elevated field to look back upon the scene. I was very sick and weary, and I lay my head upon the mane of my nag, while Heath threw a leg across his saddle pommel, and straightened his slight figure; we both gazed earnestly.
The river lay in the hollow or ravine to the left, and a few farm-houses sat among the trees on the hill-tops beyond. A battery was planted at each house, and we could see the lines of red-clay parapets marking the sites. From the roof of one of the houses floated a speck of canvas,—the revolutionary flag. A horseman or two moved shadow-like across a slope of yellow grain. Before and back the woods belted the landscape, and some pickets of both sides paced the river brink: they did not fire upon each other.
Our side of the Chickahominy was not less peaceful. A couple of batteries lay below us, in the meadows; but the horses were dozing in the harness, and the gunners, standing bolt upright at the breech, seemed parts of their pieces; the teamsters lay grouped in the long grass. Immediately in front, Gaines's Mansion and outhouses spotted a hillside, and we could note beyond a few white tents shining through the trees. The roof of the old mill crouched between a medley of wavy fields and woods, to our right, and just at our feet a tiny rill divided Gaines's Mill from our own. Behind us, over the wilderness of swamp and bog-timber, rose Smith's redoubt, with the Federal flag flaunting from the rampart.
"Townsend," said Heath, as he swept the whole country with his keen eye, "do you know that we are standing upon historic ground?"
He had been a poet and an orator, and he seemed to feel the solemnity of the place.
"It may become historic to-morrow," I replied.