_ CARANCRO CHAPTER IV. THE CONSCRIPT OFFICER
By and by 'Thanase was sixteen. Eighteen was the lowest age for conscription, yet he was in the Confederate uniform. But then so was his uncle Sosthene; so was his father. It signified merely that he had been received into the home guard. The times were sadly unsettled. Every horseman, and how much more every group of horsemen, that one saw coming across the prairie, was watched by anxious eyes, from the moment they were visible specks, to see whether the uniform would turn out to be the blue or the gray. Which was the more unwelcome I shall not say, but this I can, that the blue meant invasion and the gray meant conscription. Sosthene was just beyond the limit of age, and 'Thanase two years below it; but 'Thanase's father kept a horse saddled all the time, and slept indoors only on stormy nights.
Do not be misled: he was neither deserter nor coward; else the nickname which had quite blotted out his real name would not have been Chaouache--savage, Indian. He was needed at home, and--it was not his war. His war was against cattle-thieves and like marauders, and there was no other man in all Carancro whom these would not have had on their track rather than him. But one gray dawn they found there was another not unlike him. They had made an attempt upon Sosthene's cattle one night; had found themselves watched and discovered; had turned and fled westward half the night, and had then camped in the damp woods of a _bas fond_; when, just as day was breaking and they were looking to their saddles about to mount--there were seven of them--just then--listen!--a sound of hoofs!
Instantly every left foot is in stirrup; but before they can swing into the saddle a joyous cry is in their ears, and pop! pop! pop! pop! ring the revolvers as, with the glad, fierce cry still resounding, three horsemen launch in upon them--only three, but those three a whirlwind. See that riderless horse, and this one, and that one! And now for it--three honest men against four remaining thieves! Pop! pop! dodge, and fire as you dodge! Pop! pop! pop! down he goes; well done, gray-bearded Sosthene! Shoot there! Wheel here! Wounded? Never mind--_ora!_ Another rogue reels! Collar him, Chaouache! drag him from the saddle--down he goes! What, again? Shoot there! Look out, that fellow's getting away! Ah! down goes Sosthene's horse, breaking his strong neck in the tumble. Up, bleeding old man--bang! bang! Ha, ha, _ora!_ that finishes--_ora!_ 'Twas the boy saved your life with that last shot, Sosthene, and the boy--the youth is 'Thanase.
He has not stopped to talk; he and his father are catching the horses of the dead and dying jayhawkers. Now bind up Sosthene's head, and now 'Thanase's hip. Now strip the dead beasts, and take the dead men's weapons, boots, and spurs. Lift this one moaning villain into his saddle and take him along, though he is going to die before ten miles are gone over. So they turn homeward, leaving high revel for the carrion-crows.
Think of Bonaventure, the slender, the intense, the reticent--with 'Thanase limping on rude but glorious crutches for four consecutive Saturdays and Sundays up and down in full sight of Zosephine, savior of her mother from widowhood, owner of two fine captured horses, and rewarded by Sosthene with five acres of virgin prairie. If the young fiddler's music was an attraction before, fancy its power now, when the musician had to be lifted to his chair on top of the table!
Bonaventure sought comfort of Zosephine, and she gave it, tittering at 'Thanase behind his back, giving Bonaventure knowing looks, and sticking her sunbonnet in her mouth.
"Oh, if the bullet had only gone into the dandy's fiddle-bow arm!" she whispered gleefully.
"I wish he might never get well!" said the boy.
The girl's smile vanished; her eyes flashed lightning for an instant; the blood flew to her cheeks, and she bit her lip.
"Why don't you, now while he cannot help himself--why don't you go to him and hit him square in the face, like"--her arm flew up, and she smote him with her sunbonnet full between the eyes--"like that!" She ran away, laughing joyously, while Bonaventure sat down and wept with rage and shame.
Day by day he went about his trivial tasks and efforts at pastime with the one great longing that Zosephine would more kindly let him be her slave, and something--any thing--take 'Thanase beyond reach.
Instead of this 'Thanase got well, and began to have a perceptible down on his cheek and upper lip, to the great amusement of Zosephine.
"He had better take care," she said one day to Bonaventure, her eyes leaving their mirth and expanding with sudden seriousness, "or the conscript officer will be after him, though he is but sixteen."
Unlucky word! Bonaventure's bruised spirit seized upon the thought. They were on their way even then _a la chapelle_; and when they got there he knelt before Mary's shrine and offered the longest and most earnest prayer, thus far, of his life, and rose to his feet under a burden of guilt he had never known before.
It was November. The next day the wind came hurtling over the plains out of the north-west, bitter cold. The sky was all one dark gray. At evening it was raining. Sosthene said, as he sat down to supper, that it was going to pour and blow all night. Chaouache said much the same thing to his wife as they lay down to rest. Farther away from Carancro than many of Carancro's people had ever wandered, in the fire-lighted public room of a village tavern, twelve or fifteen men were tramping busily about, in muddy boots and big clanking spurs, looking to pistols and carbines of miscellaneous patterns, and securing them against weather under their as yet only damp and slightly bespattered great-coats, no two of which were alike. They spoke to each other sometimes in French, sometimes in English that betrayed a Creole rather than an Acadian accent. A young man with a neat _kepi_ tipped on one side of his handsome head stood with his back to the fire, a sabre dangling to the floor from beneath a captured Federal overcoat. A larger man was telling him a good story. He listened smilingly, dropped the remnant of an exhausted cigarette to the floor, put his small, neatly booted foot upon it, drew from his bosom one of those silken tobacco-bags that our sisters in war-time used to make for all the soldier boys, made a new cigarette, lighted it with the flint and tinder for which the Creole smokers have such a predilection, and put away his appliances, still hearkening to the story. He nodded his head in hearty approval as the tale was finished. It was the story of Sosthene, Chaouache, 'Thanase, and the jayhawkers. He gathered up his sabre and walked out, followed by the rest. A rattle of saddles, a splashing of hoofs, and then no sound was heard but the wind and the pouring rain. The short column went out of the village at full gallop.
Day was fully come when Chaouache rose and stepped out upon his galerie. He had thought he could venture to sleep in bed such a night; and, sure enough, here morning came, and there had been no intrusion. 'Thanase, too, was up. It was raining and blowing still. Across the prairie, as far as the eye could reach, not a movement of human life could be seen. They went in again, made a fire of a few fagots and an armful of cotton-seed, hung the kettle, and emptied the old coffee from the coffee-pot.
The mother and children rose and dressed. The whole family huddled around the good, hot, cotton-seed fire. No one looked out of window or door; in such wind and rain, where was the need? In the little log stable hard by, the two favorite saddle-horses remained unsaddled and unbridled. The father's and son's pistol-belts, with revolvers buttoned in their holsters, hung on the bedposts by the headboards of their beds. A long sporting rifle leaned in a corner near the chimney.
Chaouache and 'Thanase got very busy plaiting a horse-hair halter, and let time go by faster than they knew. Madame Chaouache, so to call her, prepared breakfast. The children played with the dog and cat. Thus it happened that still nobody looked out into the swirling rain. Why should they? Only to see the wide deluged plain, the round drenched groves, the _maraises_ and sinuous _coolees_ shining with their floods, and long lines of benumbed, wet cattle seeking in patient, silent Indian file for warmer pastures. They knew it all by heart.
Yonder farthest _ile_ is Sosthene's. The falling flood makes it almost undiscernible. Even if one looked, he would not see that a number of horsemen have come softly plashing up to Sosthene's front fence, for Sosthene's house and grove are themselves in the way. They spy Bonaventure. He is just going in upon the galerie with an armful of China-tree fagots. Through their guide and spokesman they utter, not the usual halloo, but a quieter hail, with a friendly beckon.
"Adjieu." The men were bedraggled, and so wet one could not make out the color of the dress. One could hardly call it a uniform, and pretty certainly it was not blue.
"Adjieu," responded Bonaventure, with some alarm; but the spokesman smiled re-assuringly. He pointed far away south-westward, and asked if a certain green spot glimmering faintly through the rain was not Chaouache's _ile_; and Bonaventure, dumb in the sight of his prayer's answer, nodded.
"And how do you get there?" the man asks, still in Acadian French; for he is well enough acquainted with prairies to be aware that one needs to know the road even to a place in full view across the plain. Bonaventure, with riot in his heart, and feeling himself drifting over the cataract of the sinfullest thing that ever in his young life he has had the chance to do, softly lays down his wood, and comes to the corner of the galerie.
It is awful to him, even while he is doing it, the ease with which he does it. If, he says, they find it troublesome crossing the marshy place by Numa's farm,--_le platin a cote d' l'habitation a Numa_,--then it will be well to _virer de bord_--go about, _et naviguer au large_--sail across the open prairie. "Adjieu." He takes up his fagots again, and watches the spattering squad trot away in the storm, wondering why there is no storm in his own heart.
They are gone. Sosthene, inside the house, has heard nothing. The tempest suffocates all sounds not its own, and the wind is the wrong way anyhow. Now they are far out in the open. Chaouache's _ile_ still glimmers to them far ahead in the distance, but if some one should only look from the front window of its dwelling, he could see them coming. And that would spoil the fun. So they get it into line with another man's grove nearer by, and under that cover quicken to a gallop. Away, away; splash, splash, through the _coolees_, around the _maraises_, clouds of wild fowl that there is no time to shoot into rising now on this side, now on that; snipe without number, gray as the sky, with flashes of white, trilling petulantly as they flee; giant snowy cranes lifting and floating away on waving pinions, and myriads of ducks in great eruptions of hurtling, whistling wings. On they gallop; on they splash; heads down; water pouring from soaked hats and caps; cold hands beating upon wet breasts; horses throwing steaming muzzles down to their muddy knees, and shaking the rain from their worried ears; so on and on and on.
The horse-hair halter was nearly done. The breakfast was smoking on the board. The eyes of the family group were just turning toward it with glances of placid content, when a knock sounded on the door, and almost before father or son could rise or astonishment dart from eye to eye, the door swung open, and a man stood on the threshold, all mud and water and weapons, touching the side of his cap with the edge of his palm and asking in French, with an amused smile forcing its way about his lips:--
"Can fifteen of us get something to eat, and feed our horses?"
Chaouache gave a vacant stare, and silently started toward the holsters that hung from the bedpost; but the stranger's right hand flashed around to his own belt, and, with a repeater half drawn, he cried:
"Halt!" And then, more quietly, "Look out of the door, look out the window."
Father and son looked. The house was surrounded.
Chaouache turned upon his wife one look of silent despair. Wife and children threw themselves upon his neck, weeping and wailing. 'Thanase bore the sight a moment, maybe a full minute; then drew near, pressed the children with kind firmness aside, pushed between his father and mother, took her tenderly by the shoulders, and said in their antique dialect, with his own eyes brimming:--
"Hush! hush! he will not have to go."
* * * * *
At a gentle trot the short column of horsemen moves again, but with its head the other way. The wind and rain buffet and pelt horse and rider from behind. Chaouache's door is still open. He stands in it with his red-eyed wife beside him and the children around them, all gazing mutely, with drooping heads and many a slow tear, after the departing cavalcade.
None of the horsemen look back. Why should they? To see a barefoot man beside a woman in dingy _volante_ and _casaquin_, with two or three lads of ten or twelve in front, whose feet have known sunburn and frost but never a shoe, and a damsel or two in cotton homespun dress made of one piece from collar to hem, and pantalettes of the same reaching to the ankles--all standing and looking the picture of witless incapacity, and making no plea against tyranny! Is that a thing worth while to turn and look back upon? If the blow fell upon ourselves or our set, that would be different; but these illiterate and lowly ones--they are--you don't know--so dull and insensible. Yes, it may be true that it is only _some_ of them who feel less acutely than _some_ of us--we admit that generously; but when you insinuate that when we overlook parental and fraternal anguish tearing at such hearts the dulness and insensibility are ours, you make those people extremely offensive to us, whereas you should not estrange them from our tolerance.
Ah, poor unpitied mother! go back to your toils; they are lightened now--a little; the cooking, the washing, the scrubbing. Spread, day by day, the smoking board, and call your spared husband and your little ones to partake; but you--your tears shall be your meat day and night, while underneath your breath you moan, "'Thanase! 'Thanase!" _