第43章 Little Darby(9)

Where the axe came from no one knew; but a minute later a man slung himself across the road, and the next second the sharp, steady blows of an axe were ringing on the pike.The axeman had cut a wide cleft in the brown wood, and the big chips were flying before his act was quite taken in, and then a cheer went up from the line.It was no time to cheer, however;other chips were flying than those from the cutter's axe, and the bullets hissed by him like bees, splintering the hard post and knocking the dust from the road about his feet; but he took no notice of them, his axe plied as steadily as if he had been cutting a tree in the woods of the district, and when he had cut one side, he turned as deliberately and cut the other; then placing his hand high up, he flung his weight against the post and it went down.A great cheer went up and the axeman swung back across the road just as two batteries of artillery tore through the opening he had made.

Few men outside of his company knew who the man was, and few had time to ask;for the battle was on again and the infantry pushed forward.

As for Little Darby himself, the only thing he said was, "I knowed I could cut it down in ten minutes." He had nine bullet holes through his clothes that night, but Little Darby thought nothing of it, and neither did others;many others had bullet holes through their bodies that night.

It happened not long afterward that the general was talking of the battle to an English gentleman who had come over to see something of the war and was visiting him in his camp, and he mentioned the incident of a battle won by an axeman's coolness, but did not know the name of the man who cut the post away; the captain of the company, however, was the general's cousin and was dining with his guest that day, and he said with pride that he knew the man, that he was in his company, and he gave the name.

"It is a fine old name," said the visitor.

"And he is a fine man," said the captain; but none of this was ever known by Darby.He was not mentioned in the gazette, because there was no gazette.The confederate soldiery had no honors save the approval of their own consciences and the love of their own people.

It was not even mentioned in the district; or, if it was, it was only that he had cut down a post; other men were being shot to pieces all the time and the district had other things to think of.

Poor at all times, the people of the district were now absolutely without means of subsistence.Fortunately for them, they were inured to hardship;and their men being all gone to the war, the women made such shift as they could and lived as they might.They hoed their little patches, fished the streams, and trapped in the woods.But it was poor enough at best, and the weak went down and only the strong survived.Mrs.Mills was better off than most, she had a cow -- at first, and she had Vashti.

Vashti turned out to be a tower of strength.She trapped more game than anyone in the district; caught more fish with lines and traps --she went miles to fish below the forks where the fish were bigger than above;she learned to shoot with her father's old gun, which had been sent back when he got a musket, shot like a man and better than most men;she hoed the patch, she tended the cow till it was lost, and then she did many other things.Her mother declared that, when Chris died (Chris was the boy who died of fever), but for Vashti she could not have got along at all, and there were many other women in the pines who felt the same thing.

When the news came that Bob Askew was killed, Vashti was one of the first who got to Bob's wife; and when Billy Luck disappeared in a battle, Vashti gave the best reasons for thinking he had been taken prisoner;and many a string of fish and many a squirrel and hare found their way into the empty cabins because Vashti "happened to pass by."From having been rather stigmatized as "that Vashti Mills", she came to be relied on, and "Vashti" was consulted and quoted as an authority.

One cabin alone she never visited.The house of old Mrs.Stanley, now almost completely buried under its unpruned wistaria vine, she never entered.Her mother, as has been said, sometimes went across the bottom, and now and then took with her a hare or a bird or a string of fish -- on condition from Vashti that it should not be known she had caught them; but Vashti never went, and Mrs.Mills found herself sometimes put to it to explain to others her unneighborliness.

The best she could make of it to say that "Vashti, she always DOdo her own way."

How Mrs.Stanley's wood-pile was kept up nobody knew, if, indeed, it could be called a wood-pile, when it was only a recurring supply of dry-wood thrown as if accidentally just at the edge of the clearing.

Mrs.Stanley was not of an imaginative turn, even of enough to explain how it came that so much dry-wood came to be there broken up just the right length; and Mrs.Mills knew no more than that "that cow was always a-goin' off and a-keepin' Vashti a-huntin' everywheres in the worl'."All said, however, the women of the district had a hungry time, and the war bore on them heavily as on everyone else, and as it went on they suffered more and more.Many a woman went day after day and week after week without even the small portion of coarse corn-bread which was ordinarily her common fare.They called oftener and oftener at the house of their neighbors who owned the plantations near them, and always received something; but as time went on the plantations themselves were stripped; the little things they could take with them when they went, such as eggs, honey, etc., were wanting, and to go too often without anything to give might make them seem like beggars, and that they were not.Their husbands and sons were in the army fighting for the South, as well as those from the plantations, and they stood by this fact on the same level.

The arrogant looks of the negroes were unpleasant, and in marked contrast to the universal graciousness of their owners, but they were slaves and they could afford to despise them.Only they must uphold their independence.