The Last Three Soldiers

by W. H. Shelton

"They carried a ladder along, and when they had climbed up the ledge they found a little log shelter not fit for a sheep-hovel; and as for the prisoner, he kept out of their way, for it was a pretty big place, with plenty of trees and rocks to hide among. Well, as the years went on, Jo-siah brought back less and less of suspicious packages in his cart when he came up from the low country; but it was known that he still went up the mountain on certain dark nights with a keg on his shoulder. The strange old man himself was seen at a distance from time to time, but at last his existence on the mountain came to be a settled fact, and the people ceased to worry about him.

"Well, five years ago, as I said," continued Andy, "Jo-siah took sick with a fever, and come down into the settlement to see the doctor; and he was that bad that the doctor had to go back with him to drive the cattle. He rallied after that so as to be about again, and even out at night; but three months from the time he took the fever he died. The doctor was with him at the time, and the night before he breathed his last he told the doctor that the little man on the mountain was dead. After the funeral another party went up to the top of the mountain, and, sure enough, there was the grave, just outside of the miserable shelter he had lived in so long; and it looks like he did, sure enough, drink himself to death, for there was no sign about the hovel that he ever cooked or ate ordinary food.

"The strangest thing about the whole strange business," said Andy, getting on to his feet, "is that there was nothing in Jo-siah's poor cabin worth carrying away; and if the old man didn't build this here bridge with his own hands thirty year ago, hit stands to reason that he helped Jo-siah."

CHAPTER III
THE MOUNTAIN OF THE TWENTIETH RED PIN

A fortnight before the events described in the opening chapter of this story, the topographical officer attached to General Sherman's headquarters might have been seen leaning over a table in his tent, busily engaged in sticking red-headed pins into a great map of the Cumberland and Blue Ridge Mountains. The pins made an irregular line, beginning at Chattanooga, and extending through Tennessee and North Carolina at no great distance from the Georgia border. Altogether there were just twenty of these pins, and each pin pierced the top of a mountain whose position and altitude were laid down on the map. After this officer, who was a lieutenant-colonel, had spent half the night, by the light of guttering candles, in arranging and rearranging his pins, he sent in the morning for the adjutant of a regiment of loyal mountaineers. Beginning with the first pin outside of Chattanooga, he requested the presence of a mountaineer who lived in the neighborhood of that particular peak. When the man reported, the colonel questioned him about the accessibility of the mountain under the first pin, its distance from that under the second pin, and whether each peak was plainly visible from the other. The colonel's questions, which were put to the soldier in the shade of the fly outside the tent where the map lay, brought out much useful information, and much more that was of no use whatever, because half the questions were intended to mislead the soldier and conceal the colonel's purpose. Sometimes he changed a pin after the soldier went away; and at the end of three days of interviewing and shifting the positions of his pins, the twentieth red head was firmly fixed above the point laid down on the map as Whiteside Mountain. Still a little farther along a blue-headed pin was set up, and then the work of the topographical officer of the rank of lieutenant-colonel was done.

These pins represented a chain of signal-stations, nineteen of which the captain of cavalry, with Andy Zachary to guide him, had now established one after the other, with as much secrecy as the lieutenant-colonel had employed in selecting the positions. And now the gray dawn was coming on the side of the twentieth mountain as Andy finished his story. In fact, as the last word fell from his lips a lusty cock tied on one of the pack-saddles set up a shrill crow to welcome the coming day. Although tall pines grew thick about the bridge-head where the troopers were still sleeping, it was light enough to see that only low bushes and gnarled chestnuts grew on the other bank. The noisy branch kept up its ceaseless churning and splashing among the rocks far down in the throat of the black gorge, and the great height and surprising length of its single span made the crazy old bridge look more treacherous than ever. It swayed and trembled with the weight of the captain by the time he had advanced three steps from the bank, so that he came back shaking his head in alarm. By this time the men were afoot, and Andy asked for an ax, which at the first stroke he buried to its head in the rotten string-piece.

"Just what I feared," said the captain. "Do you think I am going to trust my men on that rotten structure?"

Andy said nothing in reply as he kicked off with his boot a huge growth of toadstools, together with the bark and six inches of rotten wood from the opposite side of the log. Then he struck it again with the head of the ax such a blow that the old sticks of the railing and great sections of bark fell in a shower upon the tree-tops below. The guide saw only consternation in the faces of the men as he looked around, but there was a smile on his own.

"Hit may be old," said Andy, throwing down the ax, "but there is six inches of tough heart into that log, and I'd trust hit with a yoke o' cattle." With that he strode across to the other side, and coming back jounced his whole weight on the center, with only the effect of rattling another shower of bark and dry fungi into the gorge.