“Well, I'm willing enough to do battle for my country,” said Jack Powell, “but I'll be blessed if I'm going to have my elbow jogged by the poor white trash while I'm doing it.”
“He was scolding at us yesterday because when we were detailed to clean out the camp, we gave the order to the servants,” put in Baker. “Clean out the camp! Does he think my grandmother was a chambermaid?” He suddenly broke off and helped himself to a drink of water from a dripping bucket that a tall mountaineer was passing round the group.
“Been to the creek, Pinetop?” he asked good-humouredly.
The mountaineer, who had won his title from his great height, towering as he did above every man in the company, nodded drowsily as he settled himself upon the ground. He was lithe and hardy as a young hickory, and his abundant hair was of the colour of ripe wheat. At the call to arms he had come, with long strides, down from his bare little cabin in the Blue Ridge, bringing with him a flintlock musket, a corncob pipe, and a stockingful of Virginia tobacco. Since the day of his arrival, he had accepted the pointed jokes of the mess into which he had drifted, with grave lips and a flicker of his calm blue eyes. They had jeered him unmercifully, and he had regarded them with serene and wondering attention. “I say, Pinetop, is it raining up where you are?” a wit had put to him on the first day, and he had looked down and answered placidly:--
As he sat down in the group beside the woodpile, Bland tossed him the latest paper, but carefully folding it into a square, he laid it aside, and stretched himself upon the brown grass.
“This here's powerful weather for sweatin',” he pleasantly observed, as he pulled a mullein leaf from the foot of the apple tree and placed it over his eyes. Then he turned over and in a moment was sleeping as quietly as a child.
Dan got down from the logs and stood thoughtfully staring in the direction of the happy little town lying embosomed in green hills. That little town gave to him, as he stood there in the noon heat, a memory of deep gardens filled with fragrance, of open houses set in blue shadows, and of the bright fluttering of Confederate flags. For a moment he looked toward it down the hot road; then, with a sigh, he turned away and wandered off to seek the outside shadow of a tent.