Ellen managed to interpose her brother's name and that of the regiment.
"Twenty-Fourth Ohio? Gone over to-day and this evening. Government has the roads and ferries now, and that keeps passengers back. Troops must be transported, you know,"—and then stopped suddenly, seeing Ellen's face.
"Where did you say he had gone?"
"Over," with a jerk of his thumb across the river,—"into Virginia. You are ill, young woman! I'll call Susan."
Virginia, the country of the man-hunters! A low moon lighted up the broad river and the hills beyond; they were mountains to Ellen, threatening and fierce. She looked at them steadily.
"All the stories I had heard of that country came up quick to me," she said, afterwards. "I thought it was death for me or Joe to venture there. Then he was gone! But I had a great courage, somehow, there at Bellaire. It came to me sudden. I said to the man it did not matter. I would have gone with Joe, and I could follow him. He spoke to me a minute or two, and then he went for 'Susan,' who was his wife. She was a sharp-faced woman, and she scolded her servants all the time; but she was very kind to me. When I told her about Joe, she brought me some tea, and made me lie down until it would be time to cross the ferry, which was not until near morning. She would take no money from me. She said, Sue Myers was no skin-flint to take money from the likes of me. Afterwards she said, if I found Joe and he did well, he could pay her some time again: these soldiers made money easy, lounging round camp. I was angry at that," Ellen said, reddening; "but she would not take the money from me. She told me not to be disappointed, if the regiment had left Benwood and gone out the Baltimore Road. She knew they were to camp at Piedmont, and to follow them up, for they had but a day's start of me. It was quite clear day before our turn came to cross the ferry, and then we had to wait for hours on the other side. When I came out of the ferry-house, I put my foot on the grass, and I thought, 'This is Virginia!' It was as if I had stepped on some place where a murder had been done. I was as silly as a half-witted person," blushing apologetically. "I have had great kindness done to me in Virginia since then."
Though Ellen said no more of this, as she was talking to Virginians, we readily understood the real terror which had seized her, added to the gnawing anxiety to see her brother. Caspar Hauser was not more ignorant of the actual world than this girl, brought up as she had been in such utter seclusion. The last few days had shattered whatever fancies she had formed about life, and given her nothing tangible in their stead. Even Coldwater and Joe, and "them that lay up on the hill," were beginning to be like dreams, cold and far-off. It was just a wild whirling through space, night-storms, strange faces crowding about her from place to place; undefined sights, sounds that terrified her, and a long-drawn sickening hope to find Joe through all. No more warm rooms and comfortable evenings beside the fire with mother, no more suppers made ready for the boys, and jokes and laughing when they came home; there was no more a house to call home, no mother nor boys, only something cold and clammy under the muddy ground yonder.
"Ours had been a damp house on the lake-shore," Ellen said, "and we kept a fire always. Winter or summer, I always had seen a warm fire in the grate; but the morning I left Coldwater they put it out; and in all my travel, when I'd think of home, I'd go back to the thought of that grate, with a few wet ashes scattered over the hearth, and nobody to sweep them up, and the cold sun shining down the chimney on them. When I'd think of that, I'd say, 'It's all over!' It began to seem to me as if there was no more Ellen and no more Joe."
She had come, too, into the border region, where the war was breaking ground, with all its dull, gross reality of horrors, to which the farther South and North were strangers; the broken talk in the cars was even more terrifying to her, because half understood,—of quiet farmers murdered in cold blood, of pillaging and outrage, of anticipated insurrections among the slaves, and vengeance for their wrongs.
"I thought of the Lord Jesus and Joe, but they did not seem to be alive here," she said. "I would peep into my basket and look at the Testament and the spoons and Joe's collars, and that made things seem real to me." (Ellen's basket, by the way, was but another example of the singular habit which we find in persons of unsound intellect, the clinging to some one inanimate object as if it formed a tangible link to hold time and place together.)