Читать книгу Secret Service Operator 13 - Robert William Chambers - Страница 5
II
ОглавлениеNorth and south stretched the range of cobalt-blue mountains. A few trees had turned flame color.
In the valley of Virginia the air had a fragrance like new cider, and everywhere apple trees sagged to the grass, loaded with ripe fruit.
In the pleasant sunshine, Stuart’s idle cavalrymen, strolling from the camp on the oak-covered hill to the river fords below, noticed a young colored girl washing clothes above the ford.
“Pretty li’l nigger,” they said, nudging one another.
She was so slender and dainty that they would have taken her for a grand lady’s maid had she not been washing clothes. For she seemed to be of the more delicate and refined type of domestics reserved as personal servants.
“Who’s yuh quality folks, Mandy?” they called out mischievously, strolling arm in arm; and the girl always answered scornfully:
“Major General Jeb Stuart, if you-all has got to know. And my name is Lucille, not Amanda.”
They didn’t believe it, and were inclined to cluster around her—she being excessively pretty and desirable; but when Bob, Jeb Stuart’s mulatto body servant, came down to the water with a basket of Headquarters table linen, their simmering audacity cooled.
“Yuh cl’ar outen hyar!” said Bob majestically, “an’ quit pesterin’ de Gin’ral’s onliest laun’ress!”
“Oh, Bob,” said the girl, looking up from the water’s edge, “they ain’t bother me none.” She gave the soldiers a coquettish glance, adding that she liked to hear folks talk and carry on while she soaped the linen.
“Pears lak yuh is too fon’ of white trash,” grumbled the mulatto, dumping the table linen on the grass. “Yuh look out fo’ yuhse’f, li’l black gal!”
He stared arrogantly at the snickering troopers, then shuffled away toward the gleaming tents on the hill beyond a fine house called The Bower, where an old colonel and his family still exercised hospitality and eminent domain in the teeth of the Yankee army across the river.
“What yuh doin’ to-night, Lucille?” inquired a sergeant of cavalry, boldly approaching.
“I got a beau,” said the girl, wringing out a man’s shirt. “Look at that shirt,” she added. “Ain’t it pretty? That’s Gin’ral Jeb Stuart’s best shirt. You-all oughta see it when I irons it!”
A clever looking young man in civilian clothing, who happened along, overheard her.
“Howdy, Lucille,” he called out in gay salute.
“Howdy, Cap’n Gailliard, suh,” replied the girl, dimpling at him.
At that moment cavalry trumpets sounded on the hill and the idlers at the ford got up from the brilliant green grass, unwillingly, and moved off toward the tented hill.
Every trooper, as he passed, had a word of banter for the girl; and she had a saucy reply for every one of them and a veiled provocation in her laughing eyes.
Captain Jack Gailliard sat down on the grass, plucked a green blade and chewed it leisurely.
“How yuh comin’, Lucille?” he drawled.
“What yuh want to know for how I’m a-comin’?” she retorted. “I reckon you better quit botherin’ yuh haid about colored girls, Cap’n Gailliard.”
“You’re pretty enough for a white girl,” he said; “give me that soap and I’ll wash the brown off you—”
He reached out for the soap; she snatched it:
“You leave me alone,” she said sweetly.
“You look like a pale gold rose,” he said. “Some day I’ll catch you and kiss you, too.”
“I kick and scratch,” said she. “Maybe I’ll bite.”
He looked around him. Nobody was near. “I think I’ll do it now,” he threatened, a trifle flushed.
“You go long,” she said, “and let me be. I gotta do the Gin’ral’s wash. ’Pears lak Bob’s in a awful hurry. I reckon the cavalry is ridin’ somewhere right soon.”
“So it is,” said Jack Gailliard. “Will you give me a kiss, Lucille?”
“Where yuh reckon they goin’?” she inquired, scrubbing away at an undershirt.
“Oh, somewhere to chase Yankees,” he said carelessly.
“I heard talk they is g’wine off to catch Abe Lincoln in Washington. You hear that talk, Cap’n?”
He laughed.
“Some,” she persisted, “say as how they is ridin’ a raid into Pennsylvania.”
“Where did you hear that nonsense?” he demanded, sharply.
“Nigger’s talk.”
“Too damn much,” he muttered.
“Is we-all sure g’wine to Pennsylvania?” she asked, wonderingly, her wide velvet eyes on his annoyed face.
“You listen to me,” he growled, “and mind your own business, or somebody will give yuh a spanking!”
“Not yuh,” she retorted defiantly. But her pretty eyes dared him; then with a twist of her supple hips she turned again to her soapsuds.
When at last she rose with her basket of snowy, wet clothes, he got up, too. The subtle and disturbing fragrance of her as she moved slowly by him, quite close—and his own business with her—troubled him as she brushed by him; and he passed one arm around her slender body.
“Yuh quit pesterin’,” she murmured. “Ain’t yuh ’shamed o’ yuhse’f, Cap’n Jack?”
But she had been taken at a disadvantage and was helpless, holding tightly to the basket full of clothes in front of her; and the young fellow laid one hand flat on her pale brown cheek, turned her shapely head, and kissed her.
They felt the shock of it, both of them; unprepared for such sensation.
Neither of them spoke. Presently she moved on lightly, gracefully, with her basket of wet clothes. A little way along the path she looked back at him.
Young Gailliard walked across the meadow toward the cluster of tents where the Confederate Secret Service was housed near Headquarters.
Halfway he turned to the right and looked out over the lovely September landscape. Haze softened the mountains near Harpers Ferry to a delicate powder blue; the great river glimmered below. Cavalry were riding on the Darksville Pike. He could see cavalry guarding all the fords from McCoy’s down to White’s Ferry. On the knoll to the left a standard was flying lazily over Jeb Stuart’s modest Headquarters tent. He could hear the distant wind-blown music from a cavalry band near Martinsburg; even see the flash of their brazen instruments as the sun caught them.
The west wind was sweet with the odor of ripened apples. But the pretty dark girl he had kissed smelled like apple bloom in April.
The boy stood unquietly, looking out over the valley—or clusters of valleys—to the eastward.
Across that shining river lay a huge Yankee army, perplexed, undecided, still shocked from the crash of the great battle where ten thousand gray jackets lay dead among twelve thousand dead blue jackets in the lovely and fatal Valley of Virginia.
As he stood there, Vespasian Chancellor, Jeb Stuart’s chief scout, came loping along on his scrawny horse.
“Nice view, ain’t it?” he said politely, drawing bridle.
“Yes. I want to ask you something, Vespy; you know a mulatto or a quadroon when you see one?”
“I reckon.”
“You can always tell, no matter how white they seem?”
“Yaas, suh.”
“How much white blood does a quadroon show? Enough to take the blue out of the half-moon on the finger nails?”
“I reckon not, suh.”
“It’s always bluish and never white?”
“I don’t guess it’s ever white like ours.”
They turned together and proceeded toward the tents and shanties of the Confederate Secret Service, Gailliard walking with one hand on the cantle.
“Mr. Gaston sent for me,” remarked Chancellor. “Reckon they’s a Yankee spy in the Valley.”
“He sent for me, too,” said Gailliard.
They found General Lee’s chief cipher operator talking in his tent to Colonel Stoddard Johnston, Forrest’s chief of spies.
“Chancellor,” said Mr. Gaston, “did you get through to Frederick?”
“Yaas, suh. I jes’ rid in.”
“Any record of a Mary Vail there?”
“Thar wuz a Mary Vail thar, suh. She left when the Yankees arrived.”
“Did you get her description?”
“Yes, suh. I reckon she’s the same lady that’s bo’din’ over to Claybourn’s in Martinsburg.”
“Are all her papers in order?”
“Yaas, suh.”
“Then you are satisfied that she is all right?”
“No, suh,” drawled the spy.
“Why not?” asked Gaston, sharply.
“I can’t say, Mr. Gaston. I jes’ don’t reckon she’s all right.”
“Well, then, watch her closely. There’s too much talk going on in this camp. The very niggers are discussing secret orders from Richmond. Anybody can pick up enough loose gossip in Martinsburg to damage this army and damn the Confederacy.” And, to Gailliard: “Captain, did you learn anything about that mulatto laundress that General Stuart’s Bob picked up in Martinsburg last week?”
“She gossips—like all—niggers. That’s all, sir,” said the boy. He had reddened and choked a little at the word nigger.
“What did she gossip about?” demanded Mr. Gaston.
“She said she’d heard that the cavalry were going to raid Pennsylvania. Wanted to know if ‘we-all’ were going.”
Gaston said angrily to Colonel Johnston: “I told you how it is in this goddam camp. How do you keep your own camp clean of gabblers?”
“Lock ’em up,” replied Johnston tersely. “Bragg’s orders.”
“He’s damned right! Vespasian, if you hear a word out of this Vail woman, lock her up! And you, Jack, find that yellow girl who washes the General’s shirts, and tell her to shut her yellow mouth or go to the calaboose! I want you to watch her, anyway. She has been seen talking to the Vail woman. I’ve sent for Rose O’Neil. I’m turning her loose on Mary Vail. She’s in Martinsburg now. Any least sign—any loose talk about the cavalry and Pennsylvania—and you fetch both these women to me—the mulatto Lyndon, and Mary Vail, I mean. I’ve sent Belle Boyd into Chambersburg; and I’m damned if I let this cursed gossip leak into the Yankee lines to hang her and destroy Jeb Stuart and his whole command.”
