But in a few days there came the terribly exciting news of Seven Pines and Fair Oaks—that first great combat of the revived war in the East—and we ceased to bother our heads about the photographer and his love. The enlisting fever sprang up again, and our young men began to make their way by dozens and scores to the recruiting office at Tecumseh. There were more farewells, more tears and prayers, not to mention several funerals of soldiers killed at Hanover Court House, where that Fifth Corps, which contained most of our volunteers, had its first spring smell of blood. And soon thereafter burst upon us the awful sustained carnage of the Seven Days’ fighting, which drove out of our minds even the recollection that Miss Julia Parmalee herself had volunteered for active service in the Sanitary Commission, and gone South to take up her work.
And so July 3d came, bringing with it the bare tidings of that closing desperate battle of the week at Malvern Hill, and the movement of what was left of the Army of the Potomac to a safe resting place on the James River. We were beginning to get the details of local interest by the slow single wire from Thessaly, and sickening enough they were. The village streets were filled with silent, horror-stricken crowds. The whole community seemed to have but a single face, repeated upon the mental vision at every step—a terrible face with distended, empty eyes, riven brows, and an open drawn mouth like the old Greek mask of tragedy.
“I swan! I don’t know whether to keep open to-morrow or not,” said Mr. Newton Shull, for perhaps the twentieth time, as he wandered once again from the reception-room into the little workshop behind. “In some ways it’s kind of agin my principles to work on Independence Day—but, then again, if I thought there was likely to be a good many farmers comin’ into town—”
“They’ll be plenty of ’em cornin’ in,” said the boy, over his shoulder, “but they’ll steer clear of here.”
“I’m ’fraid so,” sighed Mr. Shull. He advanced a listless step or two and gazed with dejected apathy at the newspaper map tacked to the wall, on which the boy was making red and blue crosses with a colored pencil. “I don’t see much good o’ that,” he said. “Still, of course, if it eases your mind any—”
“That’s where the fightin’ finished,” observed the boy, pointing to a big mark on the map. “That’s Malvern Hill there, and here—down where the river takes the big bend—that’s Harrison’s Landing, where the army’s movin’ to. See them seven rings? Them are the battles, one each day, as our men forced their way down through the Chickahominy swamps, beginnin’ up in the corner with Beaver Dam Creek. If the map was a little higher it ’ud show the Pamunkey, where they started from. My uncle says that the whole mistake was in ever abandoning the Pamunkey.”
“Pa-monkey or Ma-monkey,” said Newton Shull, gloomily, “it wouldn’t be no comfort to me to see it, even on a map. It’s jest taken and busted me and my business here clean as a whistle. We ain’t paid expenses two days in a week sence Marseny went. Here I’ve got now so ’t I kin take a plain, everyday sort o’ picture jest about as well as he did—a little streakid sometimes, perhaps, and more or less pinholes—but still pretty middlin’ fair on an average, and then, darn my buttons if they don’t all stop comin’. It positively don’t seem to me as if there was a single human bein’ in Dearborn County that ’ud have his picture took as a gift. All they want now is to have enlargements thrown up from little likenesses of their men folks that have been killed, and them I don’t know how to do no more’n a babe unborn.”
“You knew well enough how to make that stere-opticon slide,” remarked the boy with severity.
“Yes,” mused Mr. Shull, “that darned thing—that made a peck o’ trouble, didn’t it? I dunno what on earth possessed me; I kind o’ seemed to git the notion o’ doin’ it into my head all to once ’t, and somehow I never dreamt of its rilin’ Marseny so; you couldn’t tell that a man ’ud be so blamed touchy as all that, could you?—and I dunno, like as not he’d ’a’ enlisted anyhow. But I do wish he’d showed me how to make them pesky enlargements afore he went. If I’d only seen him do one, even once, I could ’a’ picked the thing up, but I never did. It’s just my luck!”
“Say,” said the boy, looking up with a sudden thought, “do you know what my mother heard yesterday? It’s all over the place that before Marseny left he went to Squire Schermerhorn’s and made his will, and left everything he’s got to the Parmalee girl, in case he gits killed. So, if anything happens she’d be your partner, wouldn’t she?”