“What you do? Cut my head off my neck? How do you know what to do about this before you see even? Ah, cette vie barbare!”
Tib consoled him gently.
“This doctor specializes in teeth, Prince Napoleon. He won’t hurt you”
“I am a trained surgeon,” said Dr. Pilgrim stiffly. “Now, sir, will you take off that hat?”
The Prince removed the wide white Cordoba which topped a miscellaneous costume of grey tail coat, French uniform breeches and dragoon boots.
“Can we trust this medicine if he is a Yankee? How can I know he will not cut to kill? Does he know I am a Frenchman citizen?”
“Prince, if he doesn’t do well by you we got some apple trees outside and plenty rope.”
Tib went to summon a servant; then he looked into the parlor where Miss Josie sat frightened on the edge of a horsehair sofa.
“What are you going to do to my brother?”
Very sorry for her pretty, stricken young face, Tib said, “We ain’t fixin to hurt him. I’m more worried what he’s about to do to the Prince.”
An anguished howl arose from the library.
“You hear that?” Tib said. “Your brother’s the one going to do the damage.”
“Are you going to send us to that Libby Prison?”
“Don’t you get excited now, young lady. This time we don’t want any prisoners. You’re going to be held here till your brother fixes up the Prince. Then, as soon as our cavalry pickets come past, you and your brother can continue your journey.”
Josie relaxed.
“I thought all the fighting was down in Virginia.”
“It is. That’s where we’re heading—this is the third time I rode north into Maryland with the army and I reckon it’s the third time I’m heading back with it.”
“What did my brother mean when he said you were a gorilla?”
She looked at him for the first time with a certain human interest.
“I reckon because I didn’t shave since yesterday.” He laughed. “Anyway he didn’t mean ‘gorilla’ he meant ‘guerrilla.’ When it’s a Yankee on detached service they call him a scout but when it’s one of us they call us spies and string us up.”
“Any soldier not in uniform is a spy,” Josie said.
“Me not in uniform? Look at my buckle. Half of Stuart’s cavalry wouldn’t be considered in uniform if they had to have the uniforms they started with. I tell you, Miss Pilgrim, I was a smart-looking trooper when I rode out of Lynchburg four years ago.”
He described to her how the young volunteers had been dressed that day; Josie listened, thinking it was not unlike the scene when the first young volunteers had got on the train at Chillicothe.
“—with a big red ribbon from Mother’s trunk for a sash. One of the girls read a poem I wrote in front of the troop.”
“Oh say the poem,” Josie exclaimed, “I would so enjoy to hear it.”
Tib considered. “Reckon I’ve forgot it. All I remember is ‘Lynchburg, thy guardsmen bid thy hills farewell.’”
“I love it.”
Josie repeated slowly, ‘Lynchburg, thy guardsmen bid thy hills farewell,’ and forgetting the errand on which Lynchburg’s guardsmen were bent she added, “I certainly wish you remembered the rest of it.”
Came a scream from across the hall and a medley of French. The distraught face of the aide-de-camp appeared at the door.
“He has pulled out not just the tooth but the stomatic—He has killed him, he has done him to the death!”
A face pushed over his shoulder.
“Say, Tib—the Yank got the tooth.”
“Did he?” said Tib, but absently. His tendency to metaphor had suddenly reasserted itself and he was thinking, “All inside of half an hour one Yank got a tooth and his sister got a heart.”
II
A minute later Wash dashed back into the living room.
“Say, Tib, we oughtn’t to stay here. A patrol just went by mighty fast shootin back from the saddle. Ain’t we fixin to leave? This here Doctor knows we’re Mosby’s men.”
“You leave without us?” the aide demanded suspiciously.
“We sure do,” said Tib. “The Prince can observe the war from the Yankee side for a while. Miss Pilgrim, I don’t want to take advantage of a prisoner but I must say that I never knew a Yankee girl could be so pretty.”
“I never heard anything so ridiculous,” she answered. But she was pleased at the compliment stretched across the Mason-Dixon line.
Peering hastily into the library Tib found the Prince so far recovered as to be sitting upright, panting and gasping.
“You are an artiste,” he exclaimed to Dr. Pilgrim. “You see I live! After all the terror I still live. In Paris I am told that if they take from you the tooth you have hemorrhage and die. You should come to Paris and I will tell the Emperor of you—of that new instrument you use.”
“It’s just a kind of forceps,” said Dr. Pilgrim gruffly.
Wash called from the door.
“Come on, Tib!”
Tib spoke to the Prince.
“Well, au revoir, sir.”
There was firing very near now. The two scouts had scarcely unhitched their horses when Wash exclaimed: “Hell fire!” and pointed down the drive. Half a dozen Federal troopers had come into view behind the foliage of the far gate. Wash swung his carbine one-handed to his right shoulder and with his free arm reached for a cartridge in his pouch.
“I’ll take the two on the left,” he said.
Standing concealed by their horses they waited.
“Maybe we could run for it,” Tib suggested.
“I looked the place over. It’s got seven rail fences.”
“Don’t fire till they get nearer.”
Leisurely the file of cavalry trotted up the drive. Even after four years on detached service up and down the valley, Tib hated to shoot from ambush, but he concentrated on the business and the front sight of his carbine came into line with the center of the Yankee corporal’s tunic.
“Got your mark, Wash?”
“Think so.”
“When they break we’ll ride through ’em.”
But the ill luck of Southern arms that day took shape before they could loose a shot. A heavy body flung against Tib and pinioned him. A voice shouted beside his ear.
“Men, they’re rebels here!”
Even as Tib turned, wrestling desperately with Dr. Pilgrim, the Northern patrol stopped, drew pistols. Wash was bobbing desperately from side to side to get a shot at Pilgrim, but the Doctor maneuvered Tib’s body in between.
In a split second it was over. Wash loosed a single shot but the Federals were around them before he was in his saddle. Furious, the two young men faced their captors. Dr. Pilgrim spoke sharply to the Federal corporal:
“These are Mosby’s men.”
Those years were bitter on the border. The Federals slew Wash when he made another attempt to get away—grabbing at the revolver in the corporal’s hand. Tib, still struggling, was trussed up at the porch rail.
“There’s a good tree,” one of the Federals said, “and there’s a rope on the swing.”
The corporal glanced from Dr. Pilgrim to Tib.
“Are you one of Mosby’s men?”
“I’m with the Seventh Virginia Cavalry.”
“Didn’t ask you that. Are you one of Mosby’s men?”
“None of your business.”
“All right, boys, get the rope.”
Dr. Pilgrim’s austere presence asserted itself again.
“I don’t think you should hang him but certainly this type of irregular has got to be discouraged.”
“We hang them up by their thumbs, sometimes,” suggested the corporal.
“Then do that,” said Dr. Pilgrim. “He spoke of hanging me.”
… By six that evening the road outside was busy again. Two brigades of Sheridan’s Finest were on Early’s trail, pursuing and harassing him down the valley. Mail and fresh vegetables were moving toward the capital and the raid was over, except for a few stragglers who lay exhausted along the Rockville Pike.
In the farmhouse it was quiet. Prince Napoleon was waiting for an ambulance from Washington. There was no sound there—except from Tib, who, as his skin slipped off his thumbs, gradually down the knuckles, said fragments of his own political verses aloud to himself. When he could think of no more verses he ruminated on what was happening to him.
“Thumbs are like a glove—they turn inside out. When the nails turn over I’ll yell out loud …
He kept singing a new song that he had sung just before they had marched out of Lynchburg:
We’ll follow the feather of Mosby tonight;
We’ll steal from the Yankees our horse-flesh and leather.
We’ll follow the feather, Mosby’s white feather.
‘Twas once made a sign of a sin and a shame;
The plume was of white hut he gave it a name
As different from shame as the dark is from light
So we’ll follow the feather of Mosby tonight.
Josie had waited till it was full dark and she could hear the sentry snoring on the porch. She knew where the step-ladder was because she had heard them dump it down after they had strung up Tib. When she had half sawed through the rope she went back to her room for pillows and moved the table under him and laid the pillows on it.
Josie did not need any precedents for what she was doing. When he fell with a grunting gasp, murmuring “—serve your country and nothing to be ashamed of,” Josie poured half a bottle of sherry wine over his hands. Then, suddenly sick herself, she ran back to her room.
III
As always with victorious causes, the war was over in the North by sixty- seven. Josie was grown at nineteen and proud at helping along her brother’s career with her tact atoning for his arrogance. Her lovely face shone for the young men on Government pay when she danced at the balls with President Johnson’s profile at the end of the room melancholy against the massed flowers from the Shenandoah.
“What is a guerrilla—exactly?” she asked a military man one time.
“You’re holding me
