Spring brought the fighting and the tragedy—of the latter, Solomon was the ink.
They made him color-bearer—he was so strong, and it was so easy to see him in his coon-skin cap, his Deckerd strapped to his back. For he would not lay it down even while carrying the flag. At Resaca he took the colors through balls which came thick enough to stop a bluebird. Mines cut the tail from his cap, a buck-and-ball cleared one foot of bunions, and canister carried his canteen bodily from his body; but in the thick of it he yelled out savagely at the General: “Say, thar, Gen’l, get out o’ thar on that hoss! You mout get ’im hurt!”
He spent the next week nursing the wounded enemy: “For ain’t they our brothers?” he asked, and the scoffers in blue were silent.
A beautiful valley beyond Resaca and Solomon had never seen such rich land. A grand mansion in the valley and Solomon had never seen such a house. The General had pitched his camp near by. A thousand other camps dotted the valleys and hills. A hundred battle flags fluttered from their staffs. There was planning, priming; trenches crept across the hills in the night, like mole-paths in a garden, and the valleys were billowed with them, cannon crowned and picketed with steel. They would give little Joe his death blow.
Solomon stood sentinel that night by the big house on the lawn. It was never the color-bearer’s duty to stand sentinel—but “Yer see, Gen’l, Ajax is stalled right over thar beyant, an’ them brothers o’ our’n from Kentucky loves a good hoss.”
It was past midnight and the army was asleep. There was a light suspiciously faint in the window of the big house. Solomon slipped up and peeped in through a blind slat, awry. He stepped back blushing, ashamed that he had peeped. He picked up his Deckerd. The light went out and the door opened silently and a handsome man dressed in citizens’ clothes kissed a Beautiful One good-bye. Then he slipped out into the dark and mounted a horse hid so securely as to surprise Solomon, with his keen mountain eyes.
“Halt, thar, brother, an’ gin the countersign.”
Pistol shots buzzing from the cylinder of Colt, and that quick grapple of horse hoofs in the gravel which tells of a rowel driven in suddenly; then the sound of a flying horse through the lane.
Silence, then quaintly as if talking to himself: “A cyclone spiked with hell-fire! Solomon, yer nurver had so narrow a shave—yer’ll be keerful ther nex’ time yer brother a gatlin’-gun buckled to a thoroughbred.”
The girl clutched the window—white and with eyes lit with flashes of the weird starlight. It seemed a half hour to Solomon before he heard her give a rippling, cut-off laugh, and the dawn sprang to her cheeks as the starlight went out of her eyes. High up on the mountain she had seen what Solomon had not—a splinter of light leap out of the heart of the mountain beyond the picket lines. Solomon was still watching her—so strangely fascinated that he had not noticed the blood running down his arm. She closed the window with a happy laugh, and Solomon felt that it was now night—all around him.