War; or, What happens when one loves one's enemy/Chapter 23
XXIII
LUCAS MALLORY—AT LAST
ABOUT two weeks later, one day, Evelyn had been in town and came home late wearing a veil all bound round her head. This was unusual with her, and besides, it was warm.
"I look so dreadfully when I am tired, daddy, that's the reason," she said to me when I asked her. "And might I have a little supper in my room?"
"Of course," says I.
"Then I think I'll go straight to bed. I'm fearfully tired."
"You act like you re going to faint," says I. "If you feel any worse, let me know and one of the boys must go for the doctor."
"Oh, I'll be all right in the morning. Sleep is all I need. Sleep! Oh, God—sleep, sleep!"
She repeats it and sighs like she don't know what it means. And I don't think she did. She looked it. Her light was always burning.
It was my watch that night, and I was further from home than usual. For I had seen some curious lights in the neighborhood of the Ferry Road. I was sitting, in the edge of Harg's woods, quiet, with my carbine ready, listening for a repetition of some sounds I had heard. A whistle and a cough, it seemed like, when I sees something more substantial than the shadows I had watched so often steal out of the woods into the road. In a moment I knew that it was a man. Then, though it was shadowy, I saw that it was a soldier, because of the faint gleam of his rifle.
"Halt!" I calls out. "Who is it? Don't move. If you do I'll fire."
If I'd fired without so much talk I'd have got him then and there. But he dodged back into the bushes. I started to run.
"I'm a Union officer," I yells, "and by the Lord, I'll do my duty if you don't stop. If you do you won't be hurt. I'm armed. Give the password!"
Well, just about the last syllable, he fires at me, the charge going somewhere up in the treetops. Then came several shots at me from different directions.
You know how it is. When a man fires on you, especially several, you fire, too, though he may have missed you by a mile. I suppose it's the intention you don't like. I fired as I ran—straight at the spot in the bushes where the other lead had come from. I heard a cry and knew I hadn't missed.
"It's your own fault," I says, as I runs up.
"If you'd stopped and answered I wouldn't have fired. Are you badly hurt? I don't like to kill people. But these are war-times and—"
I had reached the man. He lay quite still. I lifted him in my arms and ran to the house. Now and then he'd murmur, "Washington!" I remembered, afterward, that he seemed not quite the sort of body I had thought to pick up. I put him down on the kitchen floor and struck a light. It was Evelyn.
She was in heavy army shoes, and a new Confederate uniform. Her hair had been cut off.
I raced up-stairs with her and put her on her bed, calling Betsy. But, before waiting for her to get there, I ripped open her jacket to find the wound. A rough gray undershirt, a man's, instead of the dainty things she ought to have worn, covered her nice body. It was soaked with blood.