“Tell the old woman I’m well, but pretty well tuckered out.”
“God soften the hearts of his captors. God keep him in safety!” Annie whispered, and then, as Mrs. Carleton came in, she passed the note to her, and tried to comfort the poor mother, who, in Rose’s absence, leaned on her as on a daughter.
Annie seemed very near the sorrowing woman, who wept bitterly for her poor boy, and in the first hours of her sorrow she spoke out what was in her mind.
“I believe Jimmie loved you, Annie, and that makes you very dear to me. We can mourn for him together, and, Annie, you will pray for him night and day, that God will bring him back to us.”
Annie could only reply by pressing the hand which sought hers, for her heart was too full to speak. Had Jimmie been dead she would scarcely have mourned for him more deeply than she did now. The country was already rife with rumors of the sufferings endured by our prisoners, and death itself seemed almost preferable to months and years of privations and pain in the Southern prisons.
“Sent to Richmond, and probably from thence further South, probably to Georgia.”
This was all the intelligence they could procure from him, until spring, when there came news direct that he was at Salisbury, and there for a time the curtain dropped, leaving his face shrouded in darkness, while in his Northern home tears were shed like rain, and prayers went up to heaven from the quivering lips of a mother, who was just learning to pray as she ought, and into Annie Graham’s heart there gradually crept a wish that the poor, weary prisoner might know how much and how kindly she thought of him, feeling at times half sorry that she had not given him some little hope as a solace for the weary hours of his prison life.
CHAPTER XXV.
GETTYSBURGH.
Rose Mather had brought her husband home as soon as it was safe to move him, and with the good nursing of Mrs. Carleton and Annie, he grew strong enough to rejoin his regiment in May, and the last which Rose heard from him directly was a few words hastily written and sent off to Washington just as the Army of the Potomac was moving on to Gettysburgh. Then came the terrible battle, when the summer air was full of smoke, and dust, and flying splinters, with clouds of torn-up earth which blinded the horror-stricken men, who vainly sought for shelter behind the trees and the headstones of the graveyard, where the dead must almost have heard the fierce commotion around them as wail after wail of human anguish, mingled with the awful shrieks of dying horses, went up to the blackened heavens and then died away in silence. Where the battle was the hottest, and the carnage the most terrible, Will Mather followed, or rather led, and when the fight had ceased he lay upon his face, unconscious of the pitiless rain beating upon his head, or the two savage looking Texans bending over him, and turning him to the light.