“Poor Will! he would have been so glad!”
Then, as if the news had brought Rose nearer to him, and made her more the object of his special care, he went back to her a second time, and wound his arms about her lovingly, as he said, “Poor little wounded dove! God’s promises are for the widow and fatherless, and He will care for you;” and Rose guessed to what he referred, but there was no answering joy upon her face, and her hands were pressed upon her heart as she watched him from the window, going from her just as Will had gone, and whispered to herself, “It would have been too much happiness if Will had lived; but now I cannot be glad.”
CHAPTER XXVI
COURSE OF EVENTS.
With a howl of despair, Mrs. Baker came rushing into the kitchen of the Mather mansion, one morning in November, startling Annie with her vehemence as she thrust into her hand a dirty, half-worn envelope, which she said was from Bill, who had been missing since August, and who, it now appeared, was at Andersonville.
“Might better be dead,” his mother said, and then she explained that the letter she brought Annie had come in one to herself received that morning from Bill.
How he ever got it through the lines was a mystery which he did not explain; nor did Annie care, inasmuch as it brought news direct from Jimmie. He had written to her with the pencil and on the sheet of paper Bill had brought him, for Bill Baker was employed outside the prison walls, and allowed many privileges which were denied to the poor wretches who crowded that swampy pen. In short, Bill had taken the Confederate oath,—“had done some tall swearin’,” as he wrote to Annie, giving as an excuse for the treasonable act, “that he couldn’t stan’ the racket” in that horrible place, where twenty thousand human beings were crowded together in a space of twenty-five acres, and part of that a marshy swamp, teeming with filth and scum, and hideous living things. Another reason, too, Bill gave, and that was pity for the “Corp’ral,” to whom he could occasionally take little extras, and whom he would have scarcely recognized, he said, so worn and changed had he become from his long imprisonment.
“I mistrusted he was there,” Bill wrote; “and so when me and some other fellow-travellers was safely landed in purgatory, I went on an explorin’ tower to find him. But you bet it want so easy gettin’ through that crowd. Why, the camp-meetin’ they had in the Fair Grounds in Rockland, when Marm Freeman bust her biler hollerin’, was nothin’ to the piles of ragged, dirty, hungry-lookin’ dogs; some standin’ up, some lyin’ down, and all lookin’ as if they was on their last legs. Right on a little sand bank, and so near the dead line that I wonder he didn’t get shot, I found the Corp’ral, with his trouses tore to tatters, and lookin’ like the old gal’s rag-bag that hangs in the suller-way. Didn’t he cry, though, when I hit him a kelp on the back, and want there some tall cryin’ done by both of us as we sat there flat on the sand, with the hot sun pourin’ down on us, and the sweat and the tears runnin’ down his face, as he told me all he’d suffered. It made my blood bile. I’ve had a little taste of Libby, and Bell Isle, too; but they can’t hold a candle to this place. Miss Graam, you are the good sort, kinder pius like; but I’ll be hanged if I don’t bleeve you’ll justify me in the thumpin lies I told the Corp’ral that day, to keep his spirits up. Says he, ‘Have you ever ben to Rockland since Fredericksburg?’ and then I tho’t in a minute of that nite in the woods when he prayed about Anny; and ses I to myself, ‘The piusest lie you ever told will be that you have been home, and seen Miss Graam, with any other triflin’ additions you may think best;’ so I told him I had ben hum on a furbelow, as the old gal (meanin’ my mother) calls it. And I seen her, too, says I, Miss Graam, and she talked an awful sight about you, I said, when you orto have seen him shiver all over as he got up closer to me, and asked, ‘What did she say?’ Then I went on romancin’, and told him how you spent a whole evenin’ at the ole hut, talkin’ about him, and how sorry you was for him, and couldn’t git your natural sleep for thinkin’ of him, and how, when I came away, you said to me on the sly, ‘William, if you ever happen to meet Mr. Carleton, give him Anny Graam’s love, and tell him she means it.’ Great Peter! I could almost see the flesh come back to his bones, and his eyes had the old look in ’em, as he liked to of hugged me to death. I’d done him a world of good, he said, and for some days he seemed as chipper as you please; but nobody can stan’ a diet of raw meal and the nastiest watter that ever run; and ses I to myself, Corp’ral will die as sure as thunder if somethin’ don’t turn up; and so, when I got the hang of things a little, and seen how the macheen was worked, sez I, ‘I’ll turn Secesh, though I hate ’em as I do pizen.’ They was glad enuff to have me, bein’ I’m a kind of carpenter and jiner, and they let me out, and I went to work for the Corp’ral. I’ll bet I told a hundred lies, fust and last, if I did one. I said he was at heart Secesh; that he was in the rebel army, and I took him prisoner at Manassas, which, you know was true. Then I said his sweetheart, meanin’ you, begging your pardon, got up a row, and made him jine the Federals, and promise never to go agin the flag, and that’s how he come to be nabbed up at Fredericksburg. I said ‘twan’t no use to try to make him swear, for he thought more of his gal’s good opinion than he did of liberty, and I set you up till I swan if I bleeve you’d a knowed yourself, and every one of them fellers was ready to stan’ by you, and two of ’em drinked your helth with the wust whisky I ever tasted. One of ’em asked me if I was a fair specimen of the Northern Army, and I’ll be darned if I didn’t tell him no, for I was ashamed to have ’em think the Federals was all like me. I guess, though, they liked me some; anyway, they let me carry something to the Corp’ral every now and then, and I bleeve he’d die if I didn’t. I’ve smuggled him in some paper and a pencil, and he is going to wright to you, and I shall send it, no matter how. The rebs won’t see it, and I guess it’s pretty sure to go safe. I must stop now, and wright to the old woman.
“Yours to command,
“William Baker, Esquare.”