A chorus of sympathetic remonstrances rose from the men.
“Yes, I know,” said Travers, “but it just shows what sacrifices a man will make for the woman he loves.”
MARY’S NIGHT RIDE
By George W. Cable
Mary Richling, the heroine of this story, was the wife of John Richling, a resident of New Orleans. At the breaking out of the Civil War she went to visit her parents in Milwaukee. About the time of the bombardment of New Orleans, she received news of the dangerous illness of her husband, and decided at once to reach his bedside, if possible. Taking with her her baby daughter, a child of three years, she proceeded southward, where, after several unsuccessful attempts to secure a pass, she finally determined to break through the lines.
About the middle of the 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. 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 on 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 for a moment on the cantle 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, we’d a run into the pickets. I went nigh enough to see the videts settin’ on their horses in the main road. This here ain’t no road; it just goes up to a nigger quarters. I’ve got one of the niggers to show us the way.”
“Where is he?” whispered Mary, but, before her companion could answer, a tattered form moved from behind a bush a little in advance and started ahead in the path, walking and beckoning. Presently they turned into a clear, open forest and followed the long, rapid, swinging strides of the negro for nearly an hour. Then they halted on the bank of a deep, narrow stream. The negro made a motion for them to keep well to the right when they should enter the water. The white man softly lifted Alice to his arms, and directed and assisted Mary to kneel in her saddle with her skirts gathered carefully under her; so they went down into the cold stream, the negro first with arms outstretched above the flood, then Mary and then the white man, or let us say plainly the spy, with the unawakened child on his breast. And so they rose out of it on the farther side without a shoe or garment wet, save the rags of their dark guide.
Again they followed him along a line of stake-and-rider fence, with the woods on one side and the bright moonlight flooding a field of young cotton on the other. Now they heard the distant baying of housedogs, now the doleful call of the chuckwill’s widow, and once Mary’s blood turned for an instant to ice at the unearthly shriek of a hoot-owl just above her head. At length they found themselves in a dim, narrow road, and the negro stopped.