He replied: “I suppose you would have been hanged as a spy.”
And it was true.
After breakfast the next day—I remember that breakfast consisted of some green corn taken from a neighboring field and roasted in the ashes with the husks on, and by the way that’s the best way to cook green corn—we escorted the lady back to her home, and under Stuart’s orders stationed two cavalry companies in front as a guard.
There is no doubt, I suppose, that the lady was a spy, and that her green window blind had communicated much valuable information.
But no; there was no courtship, no marriage, no honeymoon, no romance, to follow. The lady was forty-five, if a day; and besides that, Irving was already engaged to a girl down South.
YOUNGBLOOD’S LAST MORNING
WE were all well used to seeing men shot, but this was different.
It was a soft, warm, mellow autumn morning. It was a day suggestive of all gentleness. A purple, Indian-summer haze enveloped the earthworks and the camps. Nature had issued an invitation to peace and repose. The cannon were not at work. Nobody on either side had been tempted to bombard anybody else. Even the mortars and the sharp-shooters were still.
It was not the kind of morning for the bloody work of war.
Yet a young man was to be killed within the hour. He was to be killed deliberately, in cold blood, by sentence of a court-martial, and with great pomp and ceremony; and nobody, even in his heart, could say nay to the justice of the sentence.