A Daughter of the South: A War's End Romance

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Contents

I

O

CHAFTBR

II " I ought to be afraid of you, but really Fm not."

" Of course you are not. You're not afraid of anything. Warm-blooded men never are afraid of anything. Now I'm going back to the bushes." *

"No, you are not. It is beginning to rain again, and so Fm going to make a little bush-shelter for you here before the fire. When that is done, FU go out into the bushes myself to sleep. You are chilled and weak ; you must sleep by the fire."

He busied himself at once with the hurried construction of the bush-shelter with a cover of palmete leaves, while the girl sat upon a log watching him with a seeming fascination.

Marvin saw clearly what her condition was. She was overwrought, — worn out, well-nigh in collapse, — and she was resolutely trying to control herself. She had undergone a fearful experience of fright, grief, fatigue, exposure, and starvation. She had lived for days without food or sleep, under excessive strain, and it was only by moral force and the unyielding will of a high-bred woman that she was now able to save herself from breakdown. Her chin was one that betokened boundless strength of character, but it quivered now and then in spite of her will that it should not. Her lips were full, rich, and ripe, — the lips of a true daughter of the South, — but they were nearly livid now, and in speaking she controlled them with difficulty.

Hugh Marvin was tenderly considerate of her condition. He perfectly understood that in all she had said to him she had forced herself to speak lightly and queerly, as her only means of avoiding hysterical collapse, — that her words had been only such as she could for the moment call to mind, and that they had been spoken with little if any reference to their meaning.

He saw clearly that the case was one for the utmost tenderness of care, and the utmost discretion in giving such care. As he worked in constructing the shelter, he now and then saw, from the comer of his eyes, a gentle flow of tears down the maiden's cheeks, but he pretended not to see, in aid of her manifest disposition to conceal her weakness. For further relief he chattered ceaselessly, pretending to instruct her in the art of building a bush-shelter, and exercising the utmost care that there should be no lapse of the conversation into matters personal or emotional. His method was that of the skilled nurse who seeks to divert the patient's mind from emotional to commonplace thoughts.

As his work neared completion it was rudely interrupted. A twelve-pounder shell, fired from nearly three thousand yards away, alighted in the midst of his fire, and exploding, scattered the burning sticks in every direction, completely extinguishing the blaze. At the same moment mini^ balls, fired at long but still effective range, began viciously whizzing, buzzing, and zipping around the pair.

Instantly seizing the girl by the waist, the strong young man carried her bodily over the bank. Running down along the stream with the speed of a sprinter, he quickly carried her outside the zone of random fire, except that the wildly exploring cannon was now shelling the woods in every direction with that ineffectiveness which usually characterizes a waste of ammunition of that purposeless sort.

" Put me down on my feet," commanded the girl, after a few moments. " Fm not an invalid or a child ; I can walk."

" Be still ! " the young man replied, " I am simply saving you."

A moment later he deposited her in the stem of a dugout, — a hollow log canoe, — and, himself going to the bow, paddled away rapidly down the stream.

He felt rather than saw in the darkness that she had fainted. But he wisely gave no heed. He knew that her position, lying prostrate in the boat as she did, was the most favorable one possible for a fainting person. He knew, too, that the girl would recover presently, as well without any assistance from him as with it. So he obeyed the impulse of practical common sense and paddled swiftly and noiselessly down the stream and out of the zone of fire.

II

IT was ten o'clock in the morning when Hugh Marvin, after a night of weary paddling, pushed his canoe through a fog well-nigh thick enough to be ladled with a spoon, and brought her alongside a little stem-wheel steamboat anchored midstream.

The men on board stood with rifles cocked, ready to repel his approach with a deadly volley, but fortunately the officer in charge of them recognized him in time and restrained the firing.

Once on board the steamboat, Marvin assumed command of everybody there.

" Send the chief engineer and the pilot to me instantly," he said to the man in charge of the rifle squad. "In the meanwhile let some of you men carry this young woman as

i6 gently as possible to the protected stateroom. She needs rest."

Then turning to the chief engineer, who had presented himself, Marvin asked : —

" Have you steam pressure ? "

"Yes, a hundred and forty pounds. I can make it a hundred and sixty in ten minutes."

"We won't wait for that. But fire up as fast as you can. We'll need all the speed we can make after we round the bend." Then turning to the pilot he said : —

"Get under way quick. The Rebels are around here in strong force with several batteries. Run down the bayou at full speed and out into the river. It's only a chance that we get there at all."

It was so indeed. No sooner had the steamboat passed beyond a certain protecting point than a merciless fire of twelve-pounder Napoleons and searching Enfield rifles was opened upon her from both banks of the sluggish waterway. The engines and boilers of- the boat — her vitals as it were — were protected by thick bulkheads of timber that even a twelvepound solid shot could not penetrate. The pilot, in his lofty eyrie, was shielded behind a triple-boiler iron barrier. The hull of the steamer was protected by a chain-laced timber raft which contributed to safety, while its resistance to the water greatly hindered speed.

Hugh Marvin had no protection at all as he stood there upon the hurricane-deck by the side of his first mate amid a shower of mini^ bullets, with now and then a bursting shell to emphasize the seriousness of the situation. He felt himself responsible for the safety of the cotton-laden steamer, and so he stood unflinchingly upon her exposed hurricane-deck in the midst of the cannon and musketry fire, in order that his commands might be promptly given and instantly obeyed.

Turning presently to call out a command to the pilot, he saw beside him the girl he had brought out of the bayou.

"What in the name of sanity are you doing here?" he asked. "I ordered you to a stateroom that is doubly protected with

i8 boiler iron and a tier of cotton bales. Go back to it at once ! "

The girl made no answer and no movement as if to obey his command. She simply stood there in a shower of bullets, from which she did not flinch, with now and then a shell whose bursting produced no visible efiEect upon her nerves or her demeanor. She looked at him with wide-open but not understanding eyes. He saw that she was dazed and in a state of semi-unconsciousness.

" And no wonder ! " he thought. " The girl has been starved for many days past and fearfully overwrought. She has had no food since I gave her the bacon and ash-cake last night. What an idiot I am ! "

Then he called to one of his men, who came, crouching low by way of avoiding so much as he could of the fire.

" Escort this young woman to the protected stateroom, quick. Then tell the steward that he is to serve her a breakfast there in the fewest number of minutes possible. Be quick, and tell the steward to be quick. Tell him not to wait for frills, but to send up food and coffee at once!"

A little later the steamboat rounded a point beyond which there were no hostile forces near at hand, and so, except for a random shot now and then, the firing upon her ceased.

It was only necessary now for Hugh Marvin to direct the extinguishment of such fires as the shells had started among his cotton bales, and to seek a secure anchorage in the river he had at last reached.

Then he paid something like a formal call upon the girl, his captive. He found her sitting before the meal that had been served to her by the steward in obedience to his orders. She had tasted no morsel of the food, but sat staring at it like one in a dream.

" Why have you not eaten ? *' he asked. "Surely you are hungry.?"

"Yes," she answered in her low, soft, deliberate, contralto tones, "yes, I am very hungry. But I'm not a pauper. I will not take food in charity, and I have no money with which to pay."

*' But heavens and earth ! this is not charity/' he answered excitedly. " While you are on this steamboat, you are my guest. Surely your host may offer you food without affront."

'' That is true/' she said meditatively, and as if weighing the matter in her mind. Then, after a pause, she added : —

"No, that isn't quite true. I'm not your invited guest. I came out of the canebrake and asked you for food. I made myself a beggar and shamed myself, and this is only the sequel to that."

"And I," he answered, "feel myself your debtor for your company at supper. It was a very great pleasure to me to minister to your need, not as a benefactor or a giver of alms, but as the host of a very welcome guest. But

let us put that aside. All that relates to last

*

night's supper. You remember that when the firing began I took forcible possession of you and brought you here against your will. In brief, I made you a captive, my prisoner, and the captor must feed his prisoner, must he not?"

The girl looked at him out of her deeply sunken eyes. Then she rose to her feet and said : —

" Yes, you are warm blooded. So am I. I will partake of your food, and I thank you."

"I will eat with you, if you permit," he answered, "for I, too, have had no breakfast."

Then, calling to a boy, he sent an order to the steward for fresh supplies that should be hot, as those on the table had grown cold.

He saw clearly that the girl was still intensely excited and not quite mistress of herself, though her effort to control herself was obvious in every word and tone. So for a time he let her alone, asking no questions even of an indirect sort.

After the breakfast had begun to have its normally soothing effect, he said to her : —

"I am going away now for a time to give such orders as may be needed for the fleet of which I have command. When I return, perhaps you will be good enough to tell me how I am to address you. You see I don't know your name."

"Pardon me," she quickly answered, "that

was an oversight I am Gabrielle Latour."

"And I/' he answered, "am Hugh Marvin."

"Thank you," she said, as if to bow him in

queenly fashion out of her presence, and he

took his departure, saying only : —

" I hope you may be able to get some sleep." And in aid of that hope he promptly ordered the steamboat to proceed five miles or so upstream to an anchorage in which she would be free from the disturbance of even occasional shells from Confederate cannon.

Meanwhile Gabrielle Latour slept, and grew less hollow-eyed.

Ill

THE fleet which Hugh Marvin commanded consisted of seven small stern-wheel steamboats of light draught. The business they were engaged in was that of buying and bringing out of the South such cotton as they could.

That period of the Civil War had come, when the struggle — in the West at least — had begun its lapse from patriotism to plunder, when greed had begun to take the place of glory in men's minds.

By the fall of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, the Mississippi River, from its source to the sea, had been opened to navigation. But the country traversed by the great river was still a region of tumult and turmoil. It was certain that no more great armies would assemble there to try conclusions on broad strategic lines, but alert and vigorous bands of Confederates still ceaselessly haunted the swamps and smaller streams and the woodlands along their banks, and with mosquito-like persistence made the occupation of the country by their adversaries a difficult and perilous task

Up and down the great river itself the merchant fleets as well as those of war might steam in comparative security, though even there they had to look out for themselves. But the creeks and bayous and tributary streams, whose navigation was necessary to the effective use of the river for purposes of commerce, were veritable hornets' nests still.

Even earlier than this the time had come when greedy speculators had begun to grow rich out of war operations, with so certain and so speedy a success that they actually feared and dreaded the end of a contest out of which they were making money easily and in enormous sums.

These men clearly foresaw the ultimate triumph of the Union arms, and brutishly

^5 dreaded it as an event that must interfere with their "business." They were men who cared not at all how many young lives might be put out by the continuance of the war, or how many homes at the North and at the South might fall into the shadow, or how great might be what in their commercial phrase they would perhaps have called the "output" of widows and orphans, if only the war could continue indefinitely to afford them opportunities of gain.

Ezra Brass — a man of this type — was one of the owners and promoters of the cotton-buying expedition of which Hugh Marvin was in command. So when Marvin sent for the captains of the six other steamers to come on board his own vessel and report on their cargoes, Ezra Brass came also. He was not one of the captains of the fleet, subject to Hugh Marvin's orders. On the contrary, as one of the half-dozen chief owners of that fleet, he deemed himself entitled to g^ve orders on board any and all the seven little steamboats that constituted the squadron.

Hugh Marvin declined to recognize his right in that respect. He had reasons of his own just now for not wanting to see the man. When he saw Ezra Brass approaching, he hurriedly arose to meet him.

"Go away!" he commanded. "Go away at once, and don't let me see you again till we land at Cairo."

"But I own this steamboat," began Brass, in surprised protest.

" No, you don't," answered the younger man, calmly, but with some touches of anger in his tone. " I own four-fifths of her myself, and the other fifth belongs to a personal friend of mine. I order you oflF."

Brass remembered that this statement of ownership was true. At the beginning of his cotton-buying operations down the river he had employed Marvin as "a young chap that don't mind the risks." The task set the youth was to go up the little streams and bayous secretly, in a canoe, and at momentary risk of his life. He was there to buy cotton at prices ranging from half a cent to ten cents a pound, according to the risk and difficulty of getting it out. The planters who sold the cotton were to pile it on the banks of the streams and bayous, and the speculators who bought it were to take the risk of capturing it there and getting it to market.

That risk was considerable, but the profit was enormous. The cotton thus bought for a trifle on the banks of bayous and little rivers was worth at the North in the year 1864 as much as a dollar and ninety-two cents a pound. A bale weighing five hundred pounds could be had on the banks of a bayou for from five to fifty dollars. It could be sold in New York at from seven hundred to nine hundred and fifty dollars.

Here all the dreams of avarice were made actualities, and avarice was prompt to seize the opportunity.

It was in aid of speculation of this sort that Ezra Brass had at first employed the young Kentuckian, Hugh Marvin. Ever since that time Hugh Marvin had served his employer with a fidelity that never shrank from hardship or flinched in face of danger. But he had many times revolted and refused to do Brass's bidding, because he saw dishonesty in the services demanded at his hands. '^I will keep myself clean/' he had said, ''even if I must drown myself in the muddy river to do it."

And he had kept himself clean. He had little by little taught Brass to understand that the honest man must in some respects be the master of the dishonest man, even when the dishonest one is paymaster and the other is a salaried subordinate.

But Hugh Marvin had not been satisfied with refusing to do dishonest things for Ezra Brass. He had steadfastly insisted upon the dishonesty of the wages paid him. He had repeatedly compelled an increase until his earnings grew large, and as he was a man of inexpensive habits, he had accumulated a considerable wealth of his own.

Then he had assumed new relations. As Ezra Brass's enterprises had enlarged their scope so as to require a greater financial backing than his own, he had associated other capitalists with him, forming what would now be called a '^ syndicate." That word of originally evil import, which still covers much of sin, was not applied to reasonably honest business combinations until ten years after the time of Ezra Brass's cotton-buying operations. But, the fact existed then as now, innocently or otherwise as the case might be.

When this latest expedition was in preparation, Hugh Marvin had put himself into it in a way which he had not attempted before. He had by that time accumulated considerable money, and a good deal more of that respect on the part of men of substance which is sometimes worth more than money. So he had made himself in efiFect owner of that one of the seven steamboats on which he personally sailed as the salaried commander of the entire expedition. The other six boats belonged to Ezra Brass and his personal associates — one-third interest, perhaps, being Brass's own, and the rest being subject, in one way or another, to his control.

As practically, though not actually, chief owner of the expedition, Brass had from the first assumed the right to direct its operations from some secure vantage-ground, for it was a '' business principle" with him to avoid personal physical risks. "I can hire other fellows to get killed," he used to say, ''a good deal cheaper than I can take bullet chances myself."

He had from the first assumed that he was himself master of this cotton-buying expedition and of all the steamboats composing it, though Hugh Marvin had an interest in all of them and was in command of all. He was a good deal nonplussed, therefore, when Hugh Marvin repudiated his authority and ordered him o£f the steamboat. But he obeyed the order.

IV

EZRA BRASS was not a sensitive person. Throughout his life it had been his boast that he was " practical " above all things. He was so in fact. He had never in all his life sacrificed a cent to a sentiment. He had never shown reluctance to pocket an affront if he could pocket a dollar with it. He had never "quarrelled with his bread and butter/' and just now he realized that the alert and capable services of Hugh Marvin meant a good deal of bread and butter to him, particularly as his partners in this enterprise were likely to support Manrin in a controversy.

He did not at all understand the young man. He had often wondered that *' so smart a chap as Marvin should be fool enough to throw away his chances/' as that young man had often done, by refusing to do dishonest things which promised gain with little or no risk.

3^

Nevertheless he realized that Marvin's services were of inestimable value to himself, and even that Marvin's integrity had sometimes served him well.

If the young man had brought to naught many of his most promising schemes of dishonest gain by refusing to engage in them, and now and then by threatening their exposure, on the other hand Hugh Marvin's absurdly sentimental integrity had stood Brass in good stead upon occasion.

'' The young fool might have got away with a pot o' my money that time," he once said, ''if he hadn't been so damned honest. And the same thing has happened a good many other times."

So Ezra Brass had accustomed himself not to take the occasional insolences and insults of his employee Hugh Marvin too seriously. It was his habit of mind to accept and overlook them as personal peculiarities which he could not at all understand, but with which he must reckon, in spite of himself.

In brief, Ezra Brass was a speculator to whose mind everything presented itself as a possible minister to his greed. It was said of him that the only reason he had never sold his wife and children was that nobody had ever offered him as much for them as they were worth to him. As for honor, conscience, or scruple of any kind, he had never possessed commodities of that sort to throw upon the market

Ezra Brass had begun life on a farm in southern Indiana. He was a speculator even while at school. Marbles, jack-knives, red apples, and the like had been his merchandise then ; but even at that early age he did not fail to understand the special value of actual money as a medium of exchange, and so whenever he made a trade of any kind, he exacted '' fips " or " bits " as boot

The money that could be made in that way, however, in a school in which the total amount of the circulating medium did not exceed a few dollars, was naturally not much. So Ezra Brass did not get his real start in life till he fell upon an opportunity to rob his father.

That happened when the boy was about twenty years of age. It was his father's practice every year to put all the produce of his farm on board a flatboat and float it to New Orleans for skle. One year the boy Ezra was allowed to go down the river as a " hand " on board the flatboat. The next year, his father's health being unsatisfactory, Ezra, as a bright and helpful y6ung man, suggested that he knew the business well enough to manage the enterprise himself, and it was arranged that he should do so.

He took the flatboat to New Orleans in safety. He sold the boat and cargo with excellent discretion, and he took back with him memoranda showing that he had so shrewdly managed the business as to get a good deal better prices for the farm produce than his father had ever been able to secure.

But Ezra brought back no money with him. He reported that all had gone well with him until the evening before his arrival at home. On that evening he had boarded the ''Mailboat " at Louisville, and feeling safe now, had left bis belt, containing the eight hundred and odd dollars of net proceeds, in his stateroom. Somebody had entered the stateroom, he said, and had stolen the belt with its heavy load of Spanish coin.

For three days after Ezra told that story his father reflected upon it. Then, one morning early, the elder man called his son, and said to him: —

''Ezra, I reckon you'd better go off somewhere and set up for yourself; you can sell onions and hay and hams a good deal higher in New Orleans than ever I could, so it seems to me you'll get on. But, with your habit of leavin' money around loose, I've concluded you're too expensive a luxury for a plain farmer like me to keep on hand, so you'd better go, Ezra. Me and the rest of the family will pull through somehow till we make another crop."

So before attaining his majority, Ezra Brass left home to do for himself.

He rather regretted that he must leave his mother while buckwheat cakes were still in season, but he reflected that " there are higher things than buckwheat cakes to live for in an earnest world.'' He had purloined the substance of that phrase from a Methodist preacher whom he had talked with on a steamboat, and who had tried to 'improve an opportunity" to win the youth from sordid views of life.

Otherwise Ezra Brass was entirely content to leave the paternal roof, with such small possessions as he had, including a coin-packed belt which he returned by night to dig up from the sand beneath a well-remembered sycamore tree down by the river.

From that time until the war broke out Ezra Brass managed to do fairly well for himself in speculation of one sort and another, so that when the war came, he had several thousand dollars employed in his business, and was reckoned a capitalist of some note in a region where a few thousands then meant far more than vastly larger sums mean now anywhere.

The war, however, brought to Ezra Brass his first adequate opportunity. There *' wasn't much money in it," he used to relate, " till after things sort o' got a-goin' our way." For several years preceding the war he had ''maintained business relations " with the South. That is to say he had been surreptitiously active in inducing negro slaves there to run away and cross the Ohio, where he became active in capturing them, and returning them to their masters in every case in which an adequate reward was offered. In his own picturesque phrase he ''worked the underground railroad for a profit both ways."

When the war came, a prospect of much larger and less risky earning opened itself to this '' practical man's " vision. As soon as ^contracts were advertised for, he began looking into the matter, and now and then he made a little profit of twenty or twenty-five per cent by supplying the army with one or another necessity.

But in that early stage of the war quartermasters and purchasing agents were reasonably honest. More annoying still, there was an exacting supervision and scrutiny ** higher up,'' 80 that the enterprises of Ezra Brass were subject to an embarrassing surveillance which sharply limited the profit of them.

The " real thing " — again to employ Ezra Brass's own form of speech — did not come until later, when the government's needs ran up into multimillions, and when '' men of open minds/' as he described them, came into control both of the letting and of the criticism of contracts.

Then it was that Ezra Brass first secured a satisfactory opportunity for the exercise of his genius for business. The government wanted shoes for its soldiers. It wanted clothing for them. It must have blankets. Ezra Brass knew very little about shoes, clothing, and blankets, but, as he was accustomed to boast, he was '' mighty quick to learn."

He went East for his education, and got it from men whose charges for tuition he was willing enough to pay. He was presently ** enabled to provide for his family " by furnishing, at twice or thrice their cost, army overcoats that had a tendency to dissolve in a heavy dew, and shoes that went to pieces the first time their wearers indiscreetly marched through a mud puddle. As for blankets, he found a manufacturer who knew how to make an "all wool" article out of ten per cent of sheep's coating and ninety per cent of cotton. But the price of cotton presently became so high that Ezra Brass decided not to go into blanket contracts.

After Grant had reduced the Confederate forts — Henry and Donelson — on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, and in some degree opened the South to traffic under military surveillancei the business sagacity of Ezra Brass enabled him to see and seize other opportunities.

Trade with the people along the shores of those rivers was permitted by the government only under such restrictions as were made necessary by war conditions. Cargoes must in every case be inspected, in order that no war materials or other contraband goods should in that way reach the Confederates.