Shoulder-Straps: A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862

by Henry Morford

In an instant the train from Albany broke into sight from the woods above, and came thundering down, barely giving the passengers who had been lounging on the track, time to drag themselves and their baggage out of the way. It was now growing dusk, but the train stopped upon the bridge without accident; and in a few moments the down passengers were unloaded and transferred, those going up were on board, and the long line moved back again, the locomotive in the rear and pushing all the cars backwards like a gigantic wheelbarrow.

Leslie had taken Miss Harris' hint at once, and kept his eye on the Colonel when the embarkation was being made. He saw him step on board one of the rear cars, and himself and his companion took places farther forward, so that any danger of recognition was past for the time.

There was nothing of incident in the night-ride which followed, demanding description in these pages, except that Leslie found a pleasure he had not anticipated, in Miss Josey's growing drowsy and making a pillow of him eventually. There, have been heavier burdens than that he bore; and what with the soft breath playing so near his cheek in the innocence of slumber—the light form around which he was obliged to clasp his arm (as a matter of duty—to keep her from slipping from the seat, of course!)—the dashes through dusky woods and the glimpses of the moonlit river,—what with all these and the pleasant company of a heart that had never yet known what it was to be desponding, Tom Leslie managed to enjoy the latter portion of the ride to Albany, amazingly. At one o'clock he woke up the pleasant burden on his arm, and half an hour after, Josephine Harris was cradled in soft slumbers at the Delavan, in Albany, while Tom Leslie, a very human description of guardian angel, was watching over her slumbers from his sleepless pillow in another wing of the building.

Corresponding precautions to those of the evening were taken in the morning, when the travellers took the cars of the Central Road, for Utica and their separation; but in that instance they seemed to be superfluous. Whether Colonel Egbert Crawford disdained to pursue his route at that early hour in the morning, or whether he had one more favorable report to make at the Adjutant-General's office, of the condition of the Two Hundredth Regiment, detaining him in Albany for another train,—certain it is that he did not make his appearance, and that the "amateur detective" and her companion were free to choose any of the cars of the train. A rapid ride through the Mohawk Valley, with the quiet river of the same name ever at their side, and the Erie Canal continually in view, with its pleasant reminder of the extent and the wealth of the Empire State,—and before their morning's conversation was half finished (for what check or bound is there to the invaluable nothings of two lovers who have not yet recovered from the novelty of their first impressions?) they dashed up to the station at Utica and alighted for dinner at the American.

It is no matter, here, what arrangements had been made between the two for their subsequent meeting and correspondence; it is enough to know that no fetter has yet been forged by any Tubal Cain of them all, strong enough to hold apart those who choose to single out each other from the world. Tom Leslie and Josephine Harris were to meet again, and at an early day; and with that understanding both were reasonably well content—the male member of the combination because he had no option, and the female member because she really had such a multitude of benevolent plans in her busy brain that she had no time to be otherwise.

Before Josephine Harris had finished her capital dinner at the American, and ceased trifling with those magnificent strawberries, the finest of any season within memory, (that young person was favored with a most unromantic appetite, and often managed to astonish those who had the pleasure of paying her bills at a restaurant dinner or supper)—before all this was accomplished, and before the bell had rung, calling the passengers for the Northward to resume their seats on the train, Leslie had succeeded in discovering the whereabouts of the proper stage for the remainder of Miss Josey's journey, and making the necessary arrangements for her baggage and her personal accommodation. This done, and his mind at rest on that particular point, the bell rung, the two made a hurried farewell, in which a warm pressure of the hand served (for propriety's sake) in the place of a parting kiss understood; and Leslie sprung into his car and was whirled away Northward towards the Mecca of American summer-tourists; while the young girl went up to "do" Utica in a bird's-eye view from the window of her room, and to await the four o'clock that was to bear her away in the lumbering stage to West Falls. Perhaps Tom Leslie felt at that moment that he would have been glad of any excuse or any shadow of invitation to accompany her to that rustic paradise, instead of going away alone to any paradise named in Bible or Koran; and perhaps Joe Harris had the faintest suspicion of a heavy and lonely feeling at her heart, at parting with the "eyes" and the merry brain that lay behind them, so suddenly flung as an element into her own existence.

Henceforward, for the present, the business of this narration only requires that the course of Miss Josephine Harris shall be traced, leaving the "other half" of her incomplete "pair of scissors" to be picked up hereafter.

No one who has ever travelled among the mountains or through any of the Northern hill-sections, needs any description of the heavy lumbering "Concord coach" in which the young girl and her stage-companions were slowly dragged up Genesee Street, Utica, by four horses of lymphatic temperament, on that sultry July afternoon with occasional sprinkles of shower thrown in to make it endurable. They are all alike—those heavy coaches—except as to paint and upholstery, wherever we meet them,—whether they drag us up the Cattskills, bear us over from Moreau to Lake George, dash down with us through the gorges of the White Mountains, or jog us heavily along the rough roads that thread the Alleghanies. The same half cord of wood in each of the curved bodies—the same complication of sole-leather in the swinging jacks which serve in the place of springs—the same cumbrous weight of wheel, suggesting that a mill may have gone out on its travels, locomoted on its running-gear. And yet there is no conveyance so safe or so easy for the mountain; and some of us have enjoyed pleasant hours lounging back upon those polished leather cushions within, or shouting out enthusiastic admiration of scenery from the pokerish seats on the top.

It is a pleasant ride, at any season of the year—that from Utica over the range of hills which lies westward, to the Oneida Valley which nestles down a few miles beyond. And it was especially pleasant and enjoyable, that afternoon, with the cloud-shadows playing over the yet uncut wheat-fields, and the glints of sunlight falling on the roofs and gables of cozy-looking farmsteads bordering the road on either hand or peeping out from behind clumps of woods in the distance. The opened back-curtains of the coach gave a delicious view, when they had surmounted the height, of Utica lying on the slope below, stretching downwards towards the Mohawk and the Canal, with its clustering domes and spires and the melancholy Lunatic Asylum overlooking all from the North-west. And a view not less pleasant opened before, of the long stretch of valley lying in the distance, bounded on either side by a continuous range of hills rising up with an almost even slope, crowned with woods and diversified with the divisions of cultivated fields, and here and there a glint of water, showing where the silver Sauquoit, most laboriously taxed of all minor streams except those of the Naugatuck and Housatonic Valleys, wound its busy way down to the Mohawk.

And when the eye tired of resting upon these, it could find variety in studying the Welsh contour and primitive aspect of many of the Oneida countrymen passing upon the road—the clumsy contrivances of a hundred years ago, on which the gathered loads of hay were going homeward from some of the out-lands—and the long, low wagons on which great pyramids of boxes of cheese, the staple of the section, were being slowly dragged towards Utica and a market.