And none of us shall ever hear again.
As for old Jim, who had never laid the weight of his finger on the romancer whose imagination was now playing like a fountain, tears of affectionate gratitude came into his eyes.
An instant later, and all kindly feeling was curdled in his simple heart.
Hearing a bustle, he peeped through the briers, and saw the officer in command of the party coming towards the kitchen, bearing in his hand the Virginia flag. He had discovered it in old Jim’s bedroom, where he had tacked it upon the bare wall, so that it was the last thing he saw at night and the first his opening eyes beheld. It was an insult to the Union soldiers, he heard the officer say, to flaunt the old rag in their faces. It was what no patriot could stand. He would teach the dashed rebels a lesson. “Set fire to this house,” he ordered. “The old rattletrap would fall down anyway, the first high wind that came along,” he added, with a laugh.
That laugh had a keener sting for old Jim than the order to burn down the house which had sheltered him for sixty years. The bitterest thing about poverty, says Juvenal, is that it makes men ridiculous.
Late in the night, when the smoking ruins of his house no longer gave any light, Jim crawled stealthily down the ravine. Could the sentry, as he marched back and forth on his beat, have seen the look that the old man, turning, fixed upon him every now and then as he made his way through the jungle, he would have felt less comfortable. As for Jim, half dead with cold, he reached the fires of the Confederate pickets at daybreak. On his way he had stopped at a certain old oak, and, thrusting down his arm into its hollow trunk, drew forth his rifle.
“Bushy-tails,” said he, with grave passion, waving his hand in the direction of the tree-tops above him, “you needn’t mind old Jim any longer. Lead is skeerce these times. You may skip ’round and chatter all you want to. Your smellers is safe. And gobblers, you may gobble and strut in peace now. You needn’t say put! put! when you see me creepin’ ’round. I won’t be a-lookin’ for you. You’ll have to excuse the old man. Bullets is skeerce these days, let alone powder. So, good-by, my honeys. And if you will forgive me the harm I have done you, old Jim won’t trouble you any more.”
And so, with his rifle across his lap, he sat upon a log and warmed his benumbed limbs, and, looking into friendly faces, warmed his heart, too.
“I say, old man,” said a young soldier, chaffing him, “what do you call that thing lying in your lap? Can it shoot?”
“I call her Old Betsey,” said he. “You may laugh at her, but if you hold her right and steady, she hurts. There ain’t anything funny about Old Betsey’s business end, I promise you.” And he tapped the muzzle of his rifle with a grim smile.