The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, and Other Stories
some playing games. By late supper-time all hands were famished; and
to meet the difficulty all hands turned to, on an equal footing, and
gathered wood, built fires, and cooked the meal. Afterward everything
was smooth for a while; then trouble broke out between the corporal and
the sergeant, each claiming to rank the other. Nobody knew which was the
higher office; so Lyman had to settle the matter by making the rank of
both officers equal. The commander of an ignorant crew like that has
many troubles and vexations which probably do not occur in the regular
army at all. However, with the song-singing and yarn-spinning around the
camp-fire, everything presently became serene again; and by-and-by we
raked the corn down level in one end of the crib, and all went to bed on
it, tying a horse to the door, so that he would neigh if any one tried
to get in.(1)
We had some horsemanship drill every forenoon; then, afternoons, we
rode off here and there in squads a few miles, and visited the farmers'
girls, and had a youthful good time, and got an honest good dinner or
supper, and then home again to camp, happy and content.
For a time, life was idly delicious, it was perfect; there was nothing
to mar it. Then came some farmers with an alarm one day. They said it
was rumoured that the enemy were advancing in our direction, from
over Hyde's prairie. The result was a sharp stir among us, and general
consternation. It was a rude awakening from our pleasant trance.
The rumour was but a rumour--nothing definite about it; so, in the
confusion, we did not know which way to retreat. Lyman was for not
retreating at all, in these uncertain circumstances; but he found that
if he tried to maintain that attitude he would fare badly, for the
command were in no humour to put up with insubordination. So he yielded
the point and called a council of war--to consist of himself and the
three other officers; but the privates made such a fuss about being left
out, that we had to allow them to remain, for they were already present,
and doing the most of the talking too. The question was, which way to
retreat; but all were so flurried that nobody seemed to have even a
guess to offer. Except Lyman. He explained in a few calm words, that
inasmuch as the enemy were approaching from over Hyde's prairie, our
course was simple: all we had to do was not to retreat toward him; any
other direction would answer our needs perfectly. Everybody saw in
a moment how true this was, and how wise; so Lyman got a great many
compliments. It was now decided that we should fall back upon Mason's
farm.
It was after dark by this time, and as we could not know how soon the
enemy might arrive, it did not seem best to try to take the horses and
things with us; so we only took the guns and ammunition, and started at
once. The route was very rough and hilly and rocky, and presently the
night grew very black and rain began to fall; so we had a troublesome
time of it, struggling and stumbling along in the dark; and soon some
person slipped and fell, and then the next person behind stumbled over
him and fell, and so did the rest, one after the other; and then Bowers
came with the keg of powder in his arms, whilst the command were all
mixed together, arms and legs, on the muddy slope; and so he fell, of
course, with the keg, and this started the whole detachment down the
hill in a body, and they landed in the brook at the bottom in a pile,
and each that was undermost pulling the hair and scratching and biting
those that were on top of him; and those that were being scratched and
bitten, scratching and biting the rest in their turn, and all saying
they would die before they would ever go to war again if they ever got
out of this brook this time, and the invader might rot for all they
cared, and the country along with them--and all such talk as that, which
was dismal to hear and take part in, in such smothered, low voices,
and such a grisly dark place and so wet, and the enemy maybe coming any
moment.
The keg of powder was lost, and the guns too; so the growling and
complaining continued straight along whilst the brigade pawed around the
pasty hillside and slopped around in the brook hunting for these things;
consequently we lost considerable time at this; and then we heard a
sound, and held our breath and listened, and it seemed to be the enemy
coming, though it could have been a cow, for it had a cough like a cow;
but we did not wait, but left a couple of guns behind and struck out for
Mason's again as briskly as we could scramble along in the dark. But we
got lost presently among the rugged little ravines, and wasted a deal of
time finding the way again, so it was after nine when we reached Mason's
stile at last; and then before we could open our mouths to give the
countersign, several dogs came bounding over the fence, with great riot
and noise, and each of them took a soldier by the slack of his trousers
and began to back away with him. We could not shoot the dogs without
endangering the persons they were attached to; so we had to look on,
helpless, at what was perhaps the most mortifying spectacle of the civil
war. There was light enough, and to spare, for the Masons had now run
out on the porch with candles in their hands. The old man and his son
came and undid the dogs without difficulty, all but Bowers's; but they
couldn't undo his dog, they didn't know his combination; he was of the
bull kind, and seemed to be set with a Yale time-lock; but they got him
loose at last with some scalding water, of which Bowers got his share
and returned thanks. Peterson Dunlap afterwards made up a fine name for
this engagement, and also for the night march which preceded it, but
both have long ago faded out of my memory.
We now went into the house, and they began to ask us a world of
questions, whereby it presently came out that we did not know anything
concerning who or what we were running from; so the old gentleman made
himself very frank, and said we were a curious breed of soldiers, and
guessed we could be depended on to end up the war in time, because no
Government could stand the expense of the shoe-leather we should cost
it trying to follow us around. 'Marion Rangers! good name, b'gosh!' said
he. And wanted to know why we hadn't had a picket-guard at the place
where the road entered the prairie, and why we hadn't sent out a
scouting party to spy out the enemy and bring us an account of his
strength, and so on, before jumping up and stampeding out of a strong
position upon a mere vague rumour--and so on, and so forth, till he
made us all feel shabbier than the dogs had done, and not half so
enthusiastically welcome. So we went to bed shamed and low-spirited;
except Stevens. Soon Stevens began to devise a garment for Bowers which
could be made to automatically display his battle-scars to the grateful,
or conceal them from the envious, according to his occasions; but Bowers
was in no humour for this, so there was a fight, and when it was over
Stevens had some battle-scars of his own to think about.
Then we got a little sleep. But after all we had gone through, our
activities were not over for the night; for about two o'clock in the
morning we heard a shout of warning from down the lane, accompanied by
a chorus from all the dogs, and in a moment everybody was up and flying
around to find out what the alarm was about. The alarmist was a horseman
who gave notice that a detachment of Union soldiers was on its way from
Hannibal with orders to capture and hang any bands like ours which
it could find, and said we had no time to lose. Farmer Mason was in
a flurry this time, himself. He hurried us out of the house with all
haste, and sent one of his negroes with us to show us where to hide
ourselves and our tell-tale guns among the ravines half a mile away. It
was raining heavily.
We struck down the lane, then across some rocky pasture-land which
offered good advantages for stumbling; consequently we were down in the
mud most of the time, and every time a man went down he blackguarded the
war, and the people who started it, and everybody connected with it, and
gave himself the master dose of all for being so foolish as to go
into it. At last we reached the wooded mouth of a ravine, and there we
huddled ourselves under the streaming trees, and sent the negro back
home. It was a dismal and heart-breaking time. We were like to be
drowned with the rain, deafened with the howling wind and the booming
thunder, and blinded by the lightning. It was indeed a wild night. The
drenching we were getting was misery enough, but a deeper misery still
was the reflection that the halter might end us before we were a day
older. A death of this shameful sort had not occurred to us as being
among the possibilities of war. It took the romance all out of the
campaign, and turned our dreams of glory into a repulsive nightmare. As
for doubting that so barbarous an order had been given, not one of us
did that.
The long night wore itself out at last, and then the negro came to us
with the news that the alarm had manifestly been a false one, and that
breakfast would soon be ready. Straightway we were light-hearted again,
and the world was bright, and life as full of hope and promise as
ever--for we were young then. How long ago that was! Twenty-four years.
The mongrel child of philology named the night's refuge Camp
Devastation, and no soul objected. The Masons gave us a Missouri country
breakfast, in Missourian abundance, and we needed it: hot biscuits; hot
'wheat bread' prettily criss-crossed in a lattice pattern on top;
hot corn pone; fried chicken; bacon, coffee, eggs, milk, buttermilk,
etc.;--and the world may be confidently challenged to furnish the equal
to such a breakfast, as it is cooked in the South.
We stayed several days at Mason's; and after all these years the memory
of the dullness, the stillness and lifelessness of that slumberous
farm-house still oppresses my spirit as with a sense of the presence
of death and mourning. There was nothing to do, nothing to think about;
there was no interest in life. The male part of the household were away
in the fields all day, the women were busy and out of our sight; there
was no sound but the plaintive wailing of a spinning-wheel, forever
moaning out from some distant room--the most lonesome sound in nature,
a sound steeped and sodden with homesickness and the emptiness of
life. The family went to bed about dark every night, and as we were not
invited to intrude any new customs, we naturally followed theirs. Those
nights were a hundred years long to youths accustomed to being up till
twelve. We lay awake and miserable till that hour every time, and
grew old and decrepit waiting through the still eternities for the
clock-strikes. This was no place for town boys. So at last it was with
something very like joy that we received news that the enemy were on our
track again. With a new birth of the old warrior spirit, we sprang to
our places in line of battle and fell back on Camp Ralls.
Captain Lyman had taken a hint from Mason's talk, and he now gave
orders that our camp should be guarded against surprise by the posting
of pickets. I was ordered to place a picket at the forks of the road in
Hyde's prairie. Night shut down black and threatening. I told Sergeant
Bowers to go out to that place and stay till midnight; and, just as I
was expecting, he said he wouldn't do it. I tried to get others to go,
but all refused. Some excused themselves on account of the weather;
but the rest were frank enough to say they wouldn't go in any kind
of weather. This kind of thing sounds odd now, and impossible, but it
seemed a perfectly natural thing to do. There were scores of little
camps scattered over Missouri where the same thing was happening. These