When he stepped down and started away she crouched before him.
"Whah you bound fuh, ole gen'leman, lookin' so sawt o' funny-sad?"
"I dunno."
"W'at you gwine do, boss?"
"I dunno."
"Well, cayn't you kiss me, Mist' I-dunno?"
He paid the toll and passed out to his play. With an old bayonet fixed on a stick he fell to killing Yankees—colored troops. Pressing them into the woods he charged, yelling, and came out upon the mountain road that led far down to the pike. Here a new impulse took him and he moved down this road to form a junction with his father. For some time the way was comparatively level. By and by he came to heavier timber and deeper and steeper descents. He went ever more and more loiteringly, for his father did not appear. He thought of turning back, yet his longing carried him forward. He was tired, but his mother did not like him to walk long distances when he was tired, so it wouldn't be right to turn back. He decided to wait for his father and ride home.
Meantime he would go to the next turn in the road and look. He looked in vain. And so at the next—the next—the next. He went slowly, for his feet were growing tender. Sometimes he almost caught a butterfly. Sometimes he slew more Yankees. Always he talked to himself with a soft bumbling like a bee's.
But at last he ceased even this and sat down at the edge of the stony road ready to cry. His bosom had indeed begun to heave, when in an instant all was changed. Legs forgot their weariness, the heart its dismay, for just across the road, motionless beside a hollow log, what should he see but a cotton-tail rabbit. As he stealthily reached for his weapon the cotton-tail took two slow hops and went into the log. Charge bayonets!—pat-pat-pat—slam! and the stick rattled in the hole, the deadly iron at one end and the deadly boy at the other.
And yet nothing was impaled. Singular! He got his eyes to the hole and glared in, but although it was full of daylight from a larger hole at the other end, he could see no sign of life. It baffled comprehension. But so did it defy contradiction. There was but one Resource: to play the rabbit was still there and only to be got out by rattling the bayonet every other moment and repeating, in a sepulchral voice, "I—I—I'm gwine to have yo' meat fo' dinneh!"