The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, and Other Stories
camps were composed of young men who had been born and reared to a
sturdy independence, and who did not know what it meant to be ordered
around by Tom, Dick, and Harry, whom they had known familiarly all
their lives, in the village or on the farm. It is quite within the
probabilities that this same thing was happening all over the South.
James Redpath recognised the justice of this assumption, and furnished
the following instance in support of it. During a short stay in East
Tennessee he was in a citizen colonel's tent one day, talking, when
a big private appeared at the door, and without salute or other
circumlocution said to the colonel:
'Say, Jim, I'm a-goin' home for a few days.'
'What for?'
'Well, I hain't b'en there for a right smart while, and I'd like to see
how things is comin' on.'
'How long are you going to be gone?'
''Bout two weeks.'
'Well don't be gone longer than that; and get back sooner if you can.'
That was all, and the citizen officer resumed his conversation where the
private had broken it off. This was in the first months of the war, of
course. The camps in our part of Missouri were under Brigadier-General
Thomas H. Harris. He was a townsman of ours, a first-rate fellow,
and well liked; but we had all familiarly known him as the sole and
modest-salaried operator in our telegraph office, where he had to send
about one dispatch a week in ordinary times, and two when there was a
rush of business; consequently, when he appeared in our midst one day,
on the wing, and delivered a military command of some sort, in a large
military fashion, nobody was surprised at the response which he got from
the assembled soldiery:
'Oh, now, what'll you take to don't, Tom Harris!'
It was quite the natural thing. One might justly imagine that we were
hopeless material for war. And so we seemed, in our ignorant state; but
there were those among us who afterward learned the grim trade; learned
to obey like machines; became valuable soldiers; fought all through the
war, and came out at the end with excellent records. One of the very
boys who refused to go out on picket duty that night, and called me an
ass for thinking he would expose himself to danger in such a foolhardy
way, had become distinguished for intrepidity before he was a year
older.
I did secure my picket that night--not by authority, but by diplomacy.
I got Bowers to go, by agreeing to exchange ranks with him for the time
being, and go along and stand the watch with him as his subordinate. We
stayed out there a couple of dreary hours in the pitchy darkness and
the rain, with nothing to modify the dreariness but Bowers's monotonous
growlings at the war and the weather; then we began to nod, and
presently found it next to impossible to stay in the saddle; so we gave
up the tedious job, and went back to the camp without waiting for the
relief guard. We rode into camp without interruption or objection from
anybody, and the enemy could have done the same, for there were no
sentries. Everybody was asleep; at midnight there was nobody to send out
another picket, so none was sent. We never tried to establish a watch at
night again, as far as I remember, but we generally kept a picket out in
the daytime.
In that camp the whole command slept on the corn in the big corn-crib;
and there was usually a general row before morning, for the place was
full of rats, and they would scramble over the boys' bodies and faces,
annoying and irritating everybody; and now and then they would bite some
one's toe, and the person who owned the toe would start up and magnify
his English and begin to throw corn in the dark. The ears were half
as heavy as bricks, and when they struck they hurt. The persons struck
would respond, and inside of five minutes every man would be locked in
a death-grip with his neighbour. There was a grievous deal of blood shed
in the corn-crib, but this was all that was spilt while I was in the
war. No, that is not quite true. But for one circumstance it would have
been all. I will come to that now.
Our scares were frequent. Every few days rumours would come that the
enemy were approaching. In these cases we always fell back on some other
camp of ours; we never stayed where we were. But the rumours always
turned out to be false; so at last even we began to grow indifferent
to them. One night a negro was sent to our corn-crib with the same old
warning: the enemy was hovering in our neighbourhood. We all said let
him hover. We resolved to stay still and be comfortable. It was a fine
warlike resolution, and no doubt we all felt the stir of it in our
veins--for a moment. We had been having a very jolly time, that was full
of horse-play and school-boy hilarity; but that cooled down now, and
presently the fast-waning fire of forced jokes and forced laughs died
out altogether, and the company became silent. Silent and nervous. And
soon uneasy--worried--apprehensive. We had said we would stay, and we
were committed. We could have been persuaded to go, but there was nobody
brave enough to suggest it. An almost noiseless movement presently began
in the dark, by a general and unvoiced impulse. When the movement was
completed, each man knew that he was not the only person who had crept
to the front wall and had his eye at a crack between the logs. No, we
were all there; all there with our hearts in our throats, and staring
out toward the sugar-troughs where the forest foot-path came through. It
was late, and there was a deep woodsy stillness everywhere. There was a
veiled moonlight, which was only just strong enough to enable us to mark
the general shape of objects. Presently a muffled sound caught our ears,
and we recognised it as the hoof-beats of a horse or horses. And right
away a figure appeared in the forest path; it could have been made of
smoke, its mass had so little sharpness of outline. It was a man on
horseback; and it seemed to me that there were others behind him. I got
hold of a gun in the dark, and pushed it through a crack between the
logs, hardly knowing what I was doing, I was so dazed with fright.
Somebody said 'Fire!' I pulled the trigger. I seemed to see a hundred
flashes and hear a hundred reports, then I saw the man fall down out of
the saddle. My first feeling was of surprised gratification; my first
impulse was an apprentice-sportsman's impulse to run and pick up his
game. Somebody said, hardly audibly, 'Good--we've got him!--wait for the
rest.' But the rest did not come. There was not a sound, not the whisper
of a leaf; just perfect stillness; an uncanny kind of stillness, which
was all the more uncanny on account of the damp, earthy, late-night
smells now rising and pervading it. Then, wondering, we crept stealthily
out, and approached the man. When we got to him the moon revealed him
distinctly. He was lying on his back, with his arms abroad; his
mouth was open and his chest heaving with long gasps, and his white
shirt-front was all splashed with blood. The thought shot through me
that I was a murderer; that I had killed a man--a man who had never done
me any harm. That was the coldest sensation that ever went through my
marrow. I was down by him in a moment, helplessly stroking his forehead;
and I would have given anything then--my own life freely--to make him
again what he had been five minutes before. And all the boys seemed
to be feeling in the same way; they hung over him, full of pitying
interest, and tried all they could to help him, and said all sorts of
regretful things. They had forgotten all about the enemy; they thought
only of this one forlorn unit of the foe. Once my imagination persuaded
me that the dying man gave me a reproachful look out of his shadowy
eyes, and it seemed to me that I would rather he had stabbed me than
done that. He muttered and mumbled like a dreamer in his sleep, about
his wife and child; and I thought with a new despair, 'This thing that I
have done does not end with him; it falls upon them too, and they never
did me any harm, any more than he.'
In a little while the man was dead. He was killed in war; killed in fair
and legitimate war; killed in battle, as you might say; and yet he
was as sincerely mourned by the opposing force as if he had been their
brother. The boys stood there a half hour sorrowing over him, and
recalling the details of the tragedy, and wondering who he might be, and
if he were a spy, and saying that if it were to do over again they would
not hurt him unless he attacked them first. It soon came out that mine
was not the only shot fired; there were five others--a division of
the guilt which was a grateful relief to me, since it in some degree
lightened and diminished the burden I was carrying. There were six shots
fired at once; but I was not in my right mind at the time, and my heated
imagination had magnified my one shot into a volley.
The man was not in uniform, and was not armed. He was a stranger in the
country; that was all we ever found out about him. The thought of him
got to preying upon me every night; I could not get rid of it. I could
not drive it away, the taking of that unoffending life seemed such a
wanton thing. And it seemed an epitome of war; that all war must be
just that--the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal
animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if
you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it. My
campaign was spoiled. It seemed to me that I was not rightly equipped
for this awful business; that war was intended for men, and I for
a child's nurse. I resolved to retire from this avocation of sham
soldiership while I could save some remnant of my self-respect. These
morbid thoughts clung to me against reason; for at bottom I did not
believe I had touched that man. The law of probabilities decreed me
guiltless of his blood; for in all my small experience with guns I had
never hit anything I had tried to hit, and I knew I had done my best
to hit him. Yet there was no solace in the thought. Against a diseased
imagination, demonstration goes for nothing.
The rest of my war experience was of a piece with what I have already
told of it. We kept monotonously falling back upon one camp or another,
and eating up the country--I marvel now at the patience of the farmers
and their families. They ought to have shot us; on the contrary, they
were as hospitably kind and courteous to us as if we had deserved it. In
one of these camps we found Ab Grimes, an Upper Mississippi pilot,
who afterwards became famous as a dare-devil rebel spy, whose career
bristled with desperate adventures. The look and style of his comrades
suggested that they had not come into the war to play, and their
deeds made good the conjecture later. They were fine horsemen and good
revolver-shots; but their favourite arm was the lasso. Each had one at
his pommel, and could snatch a man out of the saddle with it every time,
on a full gallop, at any reasonable distance.
In another camp the chief was a fierce and profane old blacksmith of
sixty, and he had furnished his twenty recruits with gigantic home-made
bowie-knives, to be swung with the two hands, like the machetes of the
Isthmus. It was a grisly spectacle to see that earnest band practising
their murderous cuts and slashes under the eye of that remorseless old
fanatic.
The last camp which we fell back upon was in a hollow near the village
of Florida, where I was born--in Monroe County. Here we were warned, one
day, that a Union colonel was sweeping down on us with a whole regiment
at his heels. This looked decidedly serious. Our boys went apart and
consulted; then we went back and told the other companies present that
the war was a disappointment to us and we were going to disband. They