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Evelyn Byrd
Evelyn Byrd
Preface
THIS book is the third and last of a trilogy of romances. In that trilogy I have endeavoured to show forth the character of the Virginians – men and women.
In “Dorothy South” I tried to show what the Virginians were while the old life lasted – “before the war.”
In “The Master of Warlock” I endeavoured faithfully to depict the same people as they were during the first half of the Civil War, when their valour seemed to promise everything of results that they desired. In “Evelyn Byrd” I have sought to show the heroism of endurance that marked the conduct of those people during the last half of the war, when disaster stared them in the face and they unfalteringly confronted it.
GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON.
I
A STRICKEN CORSAGE
A BATTERY of six twelve-pounder Napoleon guns lay in a little skirt of woodland on the south bank of the Rapidan. It was raining, not violently, but with a soaking persistence that might well have made the artillery-men tired of life and ready to welcome whatever end that day’s skirmishing might bring to the weariness of living. But these men were veteran soldiers, inured to hardship as well as to danger. A saturating rain meant next to nothing to them. A day’s discomfort, more or less, counted not at all in the monotonously uncomfortable routine of their lives.
They had been sent into the woodland an hour or two ago, and had done a little desultory firing now and then, merely by way of disturbing the movements of small bodies of the enemy who were being shifted about on the other side of the river.
Just now the guns were silent, no enemy being in sight, and Captain Marshall Pollard being disposed to save his ammunition against the time, now obviously near at hand, when the new commander of the Federal forces, General Grant, should push the Army of the Potomac across the river to make a final trial of strength and sagacity with that small but wonderfully fighting Army of Northern Virginia directed by the master mind of Robert E. Lee.
But, while no enemy was within sight, there was a hornets’ nest of Federal sharp-shooters concealed in a barn not far beyond the river, and from their secure cover they were very seriously annoying the Confederate lines. The barn lay a little to the left of the battery front, but near enough for the sharp-shooters’ bullets to cut twigs from the tree under which Captain Marshall Pollard sat on horseback with Owen Kilgariff by his side. Still, the fire of the sharp-shooters was not mainly directed upon the woodland-screened battery, but upon the troops in the open field on Pollard’s left.
Presently Captain Pollard, with the peculiar deliberation which characterised all his actions, lowered his field-glass from his eyes, and, withdrawing a handkerchief from a rain-proof breast pocket, began polishing the mist-obscured lenses. As he did so, he said to Kilgariff: —
“Order one of the guns to burn that barn.”
As he spoke, both his own horse and Kilgariff’s sank to the ground; the one struggling in the agony of a mortal wound, the other instantly dead.
“And tell the quartermaster-sergeant to send us two more horses – good ones,” Captain Pollard added, with no more of change in his tone than if the killing of the horses at that precise moment had been a previously ordered part of the programme.
A gun was quickly moved up to a little open space. It fired two shots. The flames burst from the barn, and instantly a horde of sharp-shooters abandoned the place and went scurrying across an open field in search of cover. As they fled, the gun that had destroyed their lurking-place, and another which Captain Pollard had instantly ordered up, shelled them mercilessly.
It was then that Owen Kilgariff said: —