As I rode back through the woods, it seemed to me about the brightest October morning that I had ever seen, even in that superb Carolina climate.
AROUND THE CAMP-FIRE
IT was a kind of off-night, the 23d of October, 1862, twenty-four hours after the battle of Pocotaligo, on the South Carolina coast.
We had to stop over there until morning, because the creek was out of its banks, and we couldn’t get across without daylight. There were only about a dozen of us, and we had to build a camp-fire under the trees.
After supper we fell to talking, and naturally we talked of war things. There wasn’t anything else to talk about then.
There was the long-legged mountaineer, with the deep voice, and the drawl in his speech which aided the suggestion that he kept his voice in his boots and had to pump it up when anything was to be said. Opposite him was the alert, rapid-speaking fellow, who had come in as a conscript and had made a superb volunteer,—a fellow who had an opinion ready made on every subject that could be mentioned, and who was accustomed to wind up most conversations with a remark so philosophical as to seem strangely out of keeping with the rest of the inconsequent things that he had said. Then there were the two mountaineers who never said anything because they never had anything to say. They had reached that point of intellectual development where the theory is accepted that there ought to be thought behind every utterance; and under this misapprehension they abstained from utterance.
Joe was there, but Joe wasn’t talking that night. Joe was surly and sullen. He had had to kill his horse at Pocotaligo the day before, and all the honors he had harvested from that action had not reconciled him to the loss. The new horse he had drawn was, in his opinion, “a beast.” Of course all horses are beasts, but that isn’t precisely what Joe meant. Besides, he had received a letter from his sweetheart just before we left camp,—she’s his wife now, and the mother of his dozen or more children,—in which that young woman had expressed doubts as to whether, after all, he was precisely the kind of man to whom she ought to “give her life.” Joe was only seventeen years of age at that time, and he minded little things like that. Still again, Joe had the toothache. Besides that, we were hungry after our exceedingly scant meal of roasted sweet potatoes. Besides that, it was raining.
All the circumstances contributed to make us introspective and psychological in our conversation.
The long-legged mountaineer with the deep voice was telling some entirely inconsequent story about somebody who wasn’t known to any of us, and none of us was listening. After a while he said: “He was that sort of a feller that never felt fear in his life.”
From Joe: “There never was any such fellow.”