“Thank you, in my own behalf!” General Stuart said warmly.
“Perhaps, poor fellow,” said Dan, “he took chances on that card’s reaching you. Seeing my uniform of major of cavalry, he may not have considered it impossible that you should hear of his condition through me.”
“When you have finished your supper, major, we will go after him.”
Tired as they both were, they went out and attended personally to the relief of the poor fellow by the roadside. General Stuart had everything done for him that was possible, smoothed his last moments, and grieved over him as deeply as if his classmate had not been his enemy.
Another sad thing among the sorrows of that supper was when Colonel Sol Williams’s brother-in-law, John Pegram, came in, and sat down in our midst. General Stuart went up to him, and wrung his hand in a silence that even the dauntless Stuart’s lips were too tremulous at once to break. When he could speak he said:
“I grieve for myself as for you, lieutenant, but it was a death that any one of us might be proud to die.”
Even then the shadow and glory of his own death was not far from him.
Colonel Williams had been Lieutenant Pegram’s superior officer as well as brother-in-law. It had been his sorrowful lot to take the body of his colonel on his horse in front of him, and carry it to a house where it could be reverently cared for until he could send it home to bride and kindred. He had cut a lock of hair from the dead, and when the troops went off to Pennsylvania, he gave it to me for his sister. I shall never forget that supper hour, or how the unhappy young fellow looked when he came in among us after his ride with the dead, and I shall never forget how I felt about that poor young Federal soldier who was wounded in the jaws and couldn’t speak, and how I felt about the women who loved him far away; I began to feel that war was an utterly unjustifiable thing, and that the virtues of valor, loyalty, devotion which it brings out had better be brought out some other way. If General Rooney Lee didn’t take my room, I gave it up all the same. Two wounded men were put into it. There were a number of wounded men in the house, and, of course, everybody gave way to their comfort. All but my two were removed in a day or two, but here these two were, and here they were when Aunt Sally came home. Her homecoming was after a fashion that turned our mourning into righteous and wholesome wrath. We were sitting on the porch one afternoon, free and easy in our minds and believing Aunt Sally away in distant Washington, when we noted a small object far off down the road. As it crawled nearer and nearer we perceived that it was an ox-cart; we saw the driver, and behind him somebody else sitting on a trunk.
“Good gracious! that’s Aunt Sally!” cried Mr. Bradford in consternation.
We were all dreadfully sorry, but it couldn’t be helped.