“If you had seen it—”
The silence held a moment; then said the other painfully, “Yes. You are perhaps right. In what a gulf and hollow man’s being is rooted!... I will not ask again for what I see would be difficult for any man to give—Here is General Lee.”
Cleave slept that night in the tent of Fauquier Cary. When, in the dusk of the morning, reveille sounding clearly through the woods by Rappahannock, he rose, and presently came out into the autumn world, an orderly met him. “There’s a negro and a horse here, sir, asking for you. He says he comes from your county.”
From under the misty trees, out upon the misty road before the tent, came Tullius and Dundee. “Yaas, Marse Dick,” said Tullius. “Miss Margaret, she done sont us. She say she know all erbout hit, en’ that Three Oaks is er happy place!”
CHAPTER XX
CHICKAMAUGA
“It is said to be easy to defend a mountainous country,” said General Braxton Bragg, commanding the Army of Tennessee, “but mountains hide your foe from you, while they are full of gaps through which he can pounce upon you at any time. A mountain is like the wall of a house full of rat-holes. Who can tell what lies hidden behind that wall?”
The wall was the Cumberland Range. The several general officers, riding with General Bragg, uttered a murmur, whether of agreement or disagreement was not apparent.
General D.H. Hill, lately sent from Virginia to the support of the forces in Tennessee, made a sound too gruff for agreement. He fell back a pace or two and drew up beside General Cleburne. “You can know mountainous country, you know,” he said. “It’s a matter of learning, like everything else.”
“True enough,” agreed the other. “But there’s precious few of mankind with any talent for learning!”
The group sitting their horses in the scrub oak, in the September sunshine, gazed in a momentary silence upon Pigeon Mountain and Missionary Ridge and the towering Lookout Mountain. Bragg, brave, able in his own way, but melancholy, depressed, ill in body and mind, at war with himself and all his subordinates, sat staring. Below him lay the slender valley of the Chickamauga. Clear, sinuous, the little stream ran between overbending shrubs and trees. A vague purple mist hung over the valley and the tree-clad slopes beyond. The knot of horsemen fell silent, there in the oak scrub, looking at the folds of the Cumberland Range. Past them on the Lafayette road marched endlessly the Army of Tennessee. Tanned and gaunt, ragged and cheerful, moving out from Chattanooga, but moving out, there was assurance, to give fight, by went the grey, patient, hardy legions, corps of Hill, Polk, Buckner, and Walker, divisions of Cheatham, Cleburne, Breckinridge, Liddell, Hindman, Bushrod Johnson, Preston, and Stewart. Colours, mounted officers, grey foot soldiers and grey foot soldiers and grey foot soldiers, the rumbling guns, old, courageous battalions, on they went, endlessly. The dust rose and clothed them; the purple mountains made a dreamy background. The party, sitting their horses on the scrub-covered low hill, looked again westward.