Ruby, snorting, and struggling hard with the current, pulled me safely to the shore, and little Klitschka followed as well as her loaded saddle would permit. For the moment, with my own life and the lives of two tried companions to care for, I thought of nothing else; but as I sat drying at Magnus’s roaring hearth the direst desolation overwhelmed me. Very far from home,—far even from the home-like surroundings of my own camp,—I had clung to this devoted fellow as a part of myself. He was a proven friend; with him I never lacked the sympathy that, in the army at least, is born of constant companionship, and he filled a place in my life that dearer friends at home might not find. He was the one comrade whose heart, I was sure, was filled only with unquestioning love for me. Henceforth I must look for support to companions who saw me as I was, who knew my faults and my weaknesses, and whose kind regard was tempered with criticism. The one love that was blind, that took me for better or for worse, had been, in an instant, torn from my life, and I was more sad than I can tell.
But Duty knows no sentiment. A saddened party, we mounted, to join the main command; and, as we rode on through the rest of that desolate night, no word passed to tell the gloom that each man felt.
The petty distinctions of earthly rank were swallowed up in a feeling of true brotherhood, and Wettstein—promoted now—rode at our head as a worthy leader, showing the way to a faithful performance of all duty, and a kindly and cheerful bearing of all life’s burdens; and, through the long and trying campaigns that followed, more than one of us was the better soldier for the lesson his soldierly life had taught.
CAMPAIGNING WITH MAX.
Union City was not a city at all; it was hardly a village, and “Disunion” would have been its fairer designation. It lay in the woods at the crossing of two railroads, one pointing toward Mobile and one toward Memphis, but neither leading anywhere. There was a tradition that trains had once been run upon each, but many bridges had had to be rebuilt to make the short line to Columbus passable, and the rest was ruin; for Forrest had been there with his cavalry.
The land was just so much raised above the broad swamp of Northwestern Tennessee that whiskey with men to drink it, and a Methodist Church South with people to attend it, were possible. With these meagre facilities for life, and the vague inducement of a railroad-crossing. Union City had struggled into an amphibious subsistence; but it had never thriven, and its corner-lots had but feebly responded to the hopes of its projectors.
For many a mile around, the forests and swamps were well-nigh impenetrable, and the occasional clearings were but desolate oases in the waste of marsh and fallen timber. The roads were wood-trails leading nowhere in particular, and all marked a region of the most scanty and unfulfilled promise.