He could not rise, but, after long and painful effort, he succeeded in turning over on his side. Then he had a view of the scene around him. He lay near the summit of a gentle hill, at whose base a little brook was flowing. At the north it was crowned with a dense growth of oaks and pines and cedar thickets, but at the south and west it sloped away into waving meadows and pleasant cornfields, already green with the opening beauty of spring. Beyond the meadows were other hills, and knolls, and rocky heights, all covered with an almost impenetrable forest, and there the hardest fighting of those terrible days was done. A narrow road, bordered by a worm-fence (Western boys know what a worm-fence is), wound around the foot of the hill, and led to a large mansion standing half hidden in a grove of oaks and elms, not half a mile away. Before this mansion were pleasant lawns and gardens, and in its rear a score or more of little negro houses, whose whitewashed walls were gleaming in the sun. This was the plantation—so James afterwards learned—of Major Lucy, one of those wicked men whose bad ambition has brought this dreadful war on our country.
The scene was very beautiful, and, looking at it, James forgot for a moment the darker picture, drawn in blood, on the grass around him. But there it was. Blackened muskets, broken saddles, overturned caissons, wounded horses snorting in agony, and fair-haired boys and gray-haired men mangled and bleeding,—some piled in heaps, and some stretched out singly to die,—lay all over that green hillside! Here and there a crippled soldier was creeping about among the wounded, and, close by, a stalwart man, the blood dripping from his dangling sleeve, was wrapping a blue-eyed, pale-faced boy in his blanket. “Don't cry, Freddy,” he said; “ye sha'n't be cold! Yer mother'll soon be yere!” But the boy gave no answer, for—he was dead!
“He don't hear you,” said James. “He isn't cold now!”
“I'se afeard he ar',—he said he war. Oh! ef his mother know'd he war yere! 't would break her heart,—break her heart!” moaned the man, still wrapping the blanket about the boy.
James closed his eyes to shut out the painful scene, and the thought of his own mother came to him. Would it not break her heart to know he was wounded? to hear, perhaps, that he was dead? He must not die; for her sake, he must not die! One only could help him, and so he prayed. Again he prayed that the Good Father would come to him, and again the Good Father came!
“What is ye a doin' yere, honey,—a little one loike ye?” asked a kind voice at his side.
He looked up. It was an old black woman, dressed in a faded woollen gown, a red and yellow turban, and a pair of flesh-colored stockings which Nature herself had given her. She was very short, almost as broad as she was long, and had a face as large round as the moon,—and it looked very much like the moon when it shines through a black cloud; for, though darker than midnight, it was all over light,—that kind of light which shines through the faces of good people.
“I am wounded; I want water,” said the little boy, feebly.
“Ye shill hab it, honey,” said the woman, giving him some from a bucket she had set on the ground.
“Guv some ter my lad,” cried the man who sat by the dead boy; “he's been a cryin' fur it all night—all night! Didn't ye yere him?”