Presently Captain Pollard, with the peculiar deliberation which characterised all his actions, lowered his field-glass from his eyes, and, withdrawing a handkerchief from a rain-proof breast pocket, began polishing the mist-obscured lenses. As he did so, he said to Kilgariff:—
“Order one of the guns to burn that barn.”
As he spoke, both his own horse and Kilgariff’s sank to the ground; the one struggling in the agony of a mortal wound, the other instantly dead.
“And tell the quartermaster-sergeant to send us two more horses—good ones,” Captain Pollard added, with no more of change in his tone than if the killing of the horses at that precise moment had been a previously ordered part of the programme.
A gun was quickly moved up to a little open space. It fired two shots. The flames burst from the barn, and instantly a horde of sharp-shooters abandoned the place and went scurrying across an open field in search of cover. As they fled, the gun that had destroyed their lurking-place, and another which Captain Pollard had instantly ordered up, shelled them mercilessly.
It was then that Owen Kilgariff said:—
“That barn was full of fodder. Its owner had saved a little something against a future need, and now all the results of his toil have gone up in smoke. That’s war!”
“Yes,” answered Captain Pollard, “and the worst of it is that the man whose possessions we have destroyed is our friend, and not our enemy; again, as you say, ‘that’s war.’ War is destruction—whether the thing destroyed be that of friend or foe.”
Just then a new and vicious fire of skilled sharp-shooters broke forth from the mansion-house of the plantation to which the burned barn had belonged. It was an old-time colonial edifice. Marshall Pollard had spent many delightful days and nights under its hospitable roof. He had learned to love its historic associations. He knew and loved every old portrait that hung on its oak-wainscotted walls. He knew and loved every stick of its old, colonial, plantation-made furniture; its very floors of white ash, that had been polished every morning for two hundred years; and its mahogany dining-table, around which distinguished guests had gathered through many generations. All these were dear to the peculiarly sympathetic soul of the scholar-soldier, Marshall Pollard, a man born for books, and set by adverse fate to command batteries instead; a man of creative genius, as his novels and poems, written after the war, abundantly proved, set for the time to do the brutal work of destruction. He remembered the library of that mansion, too, the slow accumulation of two hundred years. He had read there precious volumes that existed nowhere else in America, and that money could not duplicate, however lavishly it might be offered for books, of which no fellows were to be found except upon the sealed shelves of the British Museum, or in other great public collections from which no treasures are ever to be sold while the world shall endure.