31.
Old Jim’s ramshackle house stood in the zone which lay between the Northern and Southern armies during the winter following the first battle of Manassas, or Bull Bun. He was not young enough to shoulder his musket, having been born in the year 1800. Besides, rheumatism had laid its heavy hand upon his left knee. As scouting parties of the enemy frequently came uncomfortably near old Jim’s little farm, he, dreading capture, spent most of his time in the dense woods which surrounded his house, creeping back, at nightfall, beneath its friendly roof. True, the roof leaked here and there, but it was all he had, and he loved it.
One day the enemy pushed forward their picket-line as far as his house, and established a station there. It was late in the afternoon when they came, and old Jim, who had already returned for the night, had barely time, on hearing the clatter of hoofs at his very door, to rush out by the back way and tumble into the dense jungle of a ravine which skirted his little garden. Very naturally, to a Bedouin like old Bush, the idea of being immured in a noisome dungeon, as had happened to some of his less wily neighbors, was full of horrors; and crawling into the densest part of the thicket, he crouched there pale and hardly breathing, lest the men whose voices he heard so clearly should hear him.
Old Joe—for, while Jim differed from Diogenes in many other ways, he was like him in this, that he owned a solitary slave—old Joe they had caught. No doubt the sizzling (the dictionary-man will please put the word in his next edition)—the sizzling of the bacon in his frying-pan dulled his hearing; and so his knees smote together, when, raising his eyes to the darkened door, he saw a Federal soldier standing upon the threshold.
“Sarvant, mahster!” stammered he through his chattering teeth.
In order to explain his terror to readers of the present day, I must beg them to recall the fact that Lincoln had issued a proclamation that the North had no intention or wish to overthrow slavery in the South. “We come to save the Union,—dash the niggers!” was the angry and universal reply of the Federal soldiers when our women jeered them on their supposed mission. Hence the phrase “wicked and causeless rebellion,” without which no loyal editor could get on with the least comfort in those early days of the war.
Just as a poetess, nowadays, rends her ringlets till she finds a way of working “gloaming” into her little sonnet.
The abolitionists,—to praise them is the toughest task my conscience ever put upon me,—though they brought on the war, were not war-men. They honestly abhorred slavery, and had the courage of their convictions. They would have let the “erring sisters depart in peace” so as to rid the Union of the blot of African servitude, and deserve such honor as is due to earnest men. Later on, they changed their position; but middle-aged men will remember what their views were at the opening of the struggle.
Not recognizing, therefore, a friend in the “Yankee” who stood in his door-way, the glitter of his bayonet was disagreeable to old Joe’s eyes, and the point of it looked so sharp that it made his ribs ache; and his knees trembled beneath him. For old Joe was not by nature bloodthirsty, nor longed for gore,—least of all the intimate and personal gore of Joseph Meekins.
“Sarvant, mahster!”