Dust and noise enveloped them. A foraging party, twenty jovial troopers, drew rein, surrounded the carriage, declined to molest or trouble the lady, but claimed the carriage-horses in the name of the Union.
They cut the traces and took them, Désirée standing by the roadside watching. These men, she thought, were much like schoolboys, in wild spirits, ready for rough play but no malice. She was so used to soldiers and used to seeing in them such sudden, rough and gay humour as this that she felt no fear at all. When a freckled, humorous-faced man came over and asked her if she had far to travel, and if she really minded walking, she answered with a wit and composure that made him first chuckle, then laugh, then take off his cap and make her a bow. The troop was in a hurry. When it had the horses and had joked and laughed and caracoled enough, off it prepared to go in another cloud of dust. But the freckled man came back for a moment to Désirée. “If I may make so bold, ma’am,” he said, “I’d suggest that you don’t do much walking on this road, and that as soon as you come to a house you ask the people to let you take pot-luck with them for a while! The army’s coming on, and we’ve got plenty of bands out that don’t seem ever to have had any good womenfolk to teach them manners. If you’ll take a friend’s advice you’ll stop at the nearest house—though of course, in these times, that ain’t very safe neither!”
The carriage had the forlornest air, stranded there in the road, beneath a sky so cloudy that now there threatened a storm. The negro driver was old and slightly doddering. Moreover, when she said, “Well, Uncle, now we must walk!” he began to plain of his rheumatism. She found that it was actual enough; he would be able to walk neither fast or far. She looked behind her. A league or two back lay the turning that would lead to the house she had quitted.... But she shook her head. She had made her choice.
A mile from where they left the carriage they found at a crossroads the cabin of some free negroes—a man and a woman and many children. Here Désirée left her companion. If she took the narrower road, where, she asked, would it lead her? Could she reach Winnsboro’ that way?—Yes, if she went on to a creek and a mill, and if then she took the right-hand road. No, it wasn’t much out of the way—three or four miles.
“And a quiet, safe road?”
“Yaas, ma’am. Jus’ er-runnin’ along quiet by itself. Hit ain’t much travelled.”
“But it will bring me to Winnsboro’?”
“Yaas, ma’am. Quicker’n de main road wif all dese armies hollerin’ down it.”
“Those men who went by a little while ago—were they the first to pass to-day?”
“No, ma’am, dat dey wasn’t! En dey was sober, Lawd!”