“Not knowin’, can’t say, as the felleh says; but what I can tell you—I always start out to make a spoon or spoil a horn, and which one I’ll do I seldom ever promise till it’s done. But I have a sneakin’ notion, as it were, that I’m the clean sand, and no discount, as Mr. Lincoln says, and I do my best. Angels can do no more, as the felleh says.”
He drew rein. “Whoa!” Mary saw a small log cabin, and a fire-light shining under the bottom of the door.
“The woods seem to be on fire just over there in three or four places, are they not?” she asked, as she passed the sleeping Alice down to the man, who had got out of the buggy.
“Them’s the camps,” said another man, who had come out of the house and was letting the horse out of the shafts.
“If we was on the rise o’ the hill yonder we could see the Confedick camps, couldn’t we, Isaiah?” asked Mary’s guide.
“Easy,” said that prophet. “I heer ’em to-day two, three times, plain, cheerin’ at somethin’.”
About the middle of that night Mary Richling was sitting very still and upright on a large dark horse that stood champing his Mexican bit in the black shadow of a great oak. Alice rested before her, fast asleep against her bosom. Mary held by the bridle another horse, whose naked saddle-tree was empty. A few steps in front of her the light of the full moon shone almost straight down upon a narrow road that just there emerged from the shadow of woods on either side, and divided into a main right fork and a much smaller one that curved around to Mary’s left. Off in the direction of the main fork the sky was all aglow with camp-fires. Only just here on the left there was a cool and grateful darkness.
She lifted her head alertly. A twig crackled under a tread, and the next moment a man came out of the bushes at the left, and without a word took the bridle of the led horse from her fingers and vaulted into the saddle. The hand that rested a moment on the cantle as he rose grasped a “navy-six.” He was dressed in dull homespun but he was the same who had been dressed in blue. He turned his horse and led the way down the lesser road.
“If we’d of gone three hundred yards further,” he whispered, falling back and smiling broadly, “we’d ’a’ run into the pickets. I went nigh enough to see the videttes settin’ on their hosses in the main road. This here aint no road; it just goes up to a nigger quarters. I’ve got one o’ the niggers to show us the way.”