Books: The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come
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John Fox, Jr. >> The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come
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"For God's sake, don't kill me at all!" shouts the Yankee. "I'm a dissipated
character, and not prepared to die."
Shots from the right flank and rear, and the line is thrown about like a rope.
But the main body of the Yankees is to the left.
"Left face! Double-quick!" is the ringing order, and, by magic, the line
concentrates in a solid phalanx and sweeps forward.
This was the way Morgan fought.
And thus, marching and fighting, he went his triumphant way into the land of
the enemy, without sabres, without artillery, without even the "Bull Pups,"
sometimes--fighting infantry, cavalry, artillery with only muzzle-loading
rifles, pistols, and shotguns; scattering Home Guards like turkeys; destroying
railroads and bridges; taking towns and burning Government stores, and
encompassed, usually, with forces treble his own.
This was what Morgan did on a raid, was what he had done, what he was starting
out now to do again.
Darkness threatens, and the column halts to bivouac for the night on the very
spot where, nearly a year before, Morgan's Men first joined Johnston's army,
which, like a great, lean, hungry hawk, guarded the Southern border.
Daniel Dean was a war-worn veteran now. He could ride twenty hours out of the
twenty-four; he could sleep in his saddle or anywhere but on picket duty, and
there was no trick of the trade in camp, or on the march, that was not at his
finger's end.
Fire first! Nobody had a match, the leaves were wet and the twigs soggy, but
by some magic a tiny spark glows under some shadowy figure, bites at the
twigs, snaps at the branches, and wraps a log in flames.
Water next! A tin cup rattles in a bucket, and another shadowy figure steals
off into the darkness, with an instinct as unerring as the skill of a
water-witch with a willow wand. The Yankees chose open fields for camps, but
your rebel took to the woods. Each man and his chum picked a tree for a home,
hung up canteens and spread blankets at the foot of it. Supper--Heavens, what
luck--fresh beef! One man broils it on coals, pinning pieces of fat to it to
make gravy; another roasts it on a forked stick, for Morgan carried no cooking
utensils on a raid.
Here, one man made up bread in an oilcloth (and every Morgan's man had one
soon after they were issued to the Federals); another worked up corn-meal into
dough in the scooped-out half of a pumpkin; one baked bread on a flat rock,
another on a board, while a third had twisted his dough around his ram-rod; if
it were spring-time, a fourth might be fitting his into a cornshuck to roast
in ashes. All this Dan Dean could do.
The roaring fire thickens the gloom of the woods where the lonely pickets
stand. Pipes are out now. An oracle outlines the general campaign of the war
as it will be and as it should have been. A long-winded, innocent braggart
tells of his personal prowess that day. A little group is guying the new
recruit. A wag shaves a bearded comrade on one side of his face, pockets his
razor and refuses to shave the other side. A poet, with a bandaged eye, and
hair like a windblown hay-stack, recites "I am dying, Egypt-- dying," and then
a pure, clear, tenor voice starts through the forest-aisles, and there is
sudden silence. Every man knows that voice, and loves the boy who owns
it--little Tom Morgan, Dan's brother-in-arms, the General's seventeen-year-old
brother--and there he stands leaning against a tree, full in the light of the
fire, a handsome, gallant figure--a song like a seraph's pouring from his
lips. One bearded soldier is gazing at him with curious intentness, and when
the song ceases, lies down with a suddenly troubled face. He has seen the
"death-look" in the boy's eyes--that prophetic death-look in which he has
unshaken faith. The night deepens, figures roll up in blankets, quiet comes,
and Dan lies wide awake and deep in memories, and looking back on those early
helpless days of the war with a tolerant smile.
He was a war-worn veteran now, but how vividly he could recall that first
night in the camp of a big army, in the very woods where he now lay--dusk
settling over the Green River country, which Morgan's Men grew to love so
well; a mocking-bird singing a farewell song from the top of a stunted oak to
the dead summer and the dying day; Morgan seated on a cracker-box in front of
his tent, contemplatively chewing one end of his mustache; Lieutenant Hunt
swinging from his horse, smiling grimly.
"It would make a horse laugh--a Yankee cavalry horse, anyhow--to see this
army."
Hunt had been over the camp that first afternoon on a personal tour of
investigation. They were not a thousand Springfield and Enfield rifles at that
time in Johnston's army. Half of the soldiers were armed with shotguns and
squirrel rifle and the greater part of the other half with flintlock muskets.
But nearly every man, thinking he was in for a rough-and-tumble fight, had a
bowie knife and a revolver swung to his belt.
"Those Arkansas and Texas fellows have got knives that would make a Malay's
blood run cold."
"Well, they'll do to hew firewood and cut meat," laughed Morgan.
The troops were not only badly armed. On his tour, Hunt had seen men making
blankets of pieces of old carpet, lined on one side with a piece of cotton
cloth; men wearing ox-hide buskins, or complicated wrapping of rags, for
shoes; orderly sergeants making out reports on shingles; surgeon using a
twisted handkerchief instead of a tourniquet. There was a total lack of
medicine, and camp diseases were already breaking out--measles, typhoid fever,
pneumonia, bowel troubles--each fatal, it seemed, in time of war.
"General Johnston has asked Richmond for a stand of thirty thousand arms,"
Morgan had mused, and Hunt looked up inquiringly.
"Mr. Davis can only spare a thousand."
"That's lucky," said Hunt, grimly.
And then the military organization of that army, so characteristic of the
Southerner! An officer who wanted to be more than a colonel, and couldn't be a
brigadier, would have a "legion"-- a hybrid unit between a regiment and a
brigade. Sometimes there was a regiment whose roll-call was more than two
thousand men, so popular was its colonel. Companies would often refuse to
designate themselves by letter, but by the thrilling titles they had given
themselves. How Morgan and Hunt had laughed over "The Yellow Jackets," "The
Dead Shots," "The Earthquakes," "The Chickasha Desperadoes," and "The Hell
Roarers"! Regiments would bear the names of their commanders--a singular
instance of the Southerner's passion for individuality, as a man, a company, a
regiment, or a brigade. And there was little or no discipline, as the word is
understood among the military elect, and with no army that the world has ever
seen, Richard Hunt always claimed, was there so little need of it. For
Southern soldiers, he argued, were, from the start, obedient, zealous, and
tolerably patient, from good sense and a strong sense of duty. They were born
fighters; a spirit of emulation induced them to learn the drill; pride and
patriotism kept them true and patient to the last, but they could not be made,
by punishment or the fear of it, into machines. They read their chance of
success, not in opposing numbers, but in the character and reputation of their
commanders, who, in turn, believed, as a rule, that "the unthinking automaton,
formed by routine and punishment, could no more stand before the high-strung
young soldier with brains and good blood, and some practice and knowledge of
warfare, than a tree could resist a stroke of lightning." So that with
Southern soldiers discipline came to mean "the pride which made soldiers learn
their duties rather than incur disgrace; the subordination that came from
self-respect and respect for the man whom they thought worthy to command
them."
Boots and saddles again at daybreak! By noon the column reached Green River,
over the Kentucky line, where Morgan, even on his way down to join Johnston,
had begun the operations which were to make him famous. No picket duty that
infantry could do as well, for Morgan's cavalry! He wanted it kept out on the
front or the flanks of an army, and as close as possible upon the enemy. Right
away, there had been thrilling times for Dan in the Green River
country--setting out at dark, chasing countrymen in Federal pay or sympathy,
prowling all night around and among pickets and outposts; entrapping the
unwary; taking a position on the line of retreat at daybreak, and turning
leisurely back to camp with prisoners and information. How memories thronged!
At this very turn of the road, Dan remembered, they had their first brush with
the enemy. No plan of battle had been adopted, other than to hide on both
sides of the road and send their horses to the rear.
"I think we ought to charge 'em," said Georgie Forbes, Chad's old enemy. Dan
saw that his lip trembled, and, a moment later, Georgie, muttering something,
disappeared.
The Yankees had come on, and, discovering them, halted. Morgan himself stepped
out in the road and shot the officer riding at the head of the column. His men
fell back without returning the fire, deployed and opened up. Dan recognized
the very tree behind which he had stood, and again he could almost hear
Richard Hunt chuckling from behind another close by.
"We would be in bad shape," said Richard Hunt, as the bullets whistled high
overhead, "if we were in the tops of these trees instead of behind them."
There had been no maneuvering, no command given among the Confederates. Each
man fought his own fight. In ten minutes a horse-holder ran up from the rear,
breathless, and announced that the Yankees were flanking. Every man withdrew,
straightway, after his own fashion, and in his own time. One man was wounded
and several were shot through the clothes.
"That was like a camp-meeting or an election row," laughed Morgan, when they
were in camp.
"Or an affair between Austrian and Italian outposts," said Hunt.
A chuckle rose behind them. A lame colonel was limping past.
"I got your courier," he said.
"I sent no courier," said Morgan.
"It was Forbes who wanted to charge 'em," said Dan.
Again the Colonel chuckled.
"The Yankees ran when you did," he said, and limped, chuckling, away.
But it was great fun, those moonlit nights, burning bridges and chasing Home
Guards who would flee fifteen or twenty miles sometimes to "rally." Here was a
little town through which Dan and Richard Hunt had marched with nine prisoners
in a column--taken by them alone--and a captured United States flag, flying in
front, scaring Confederate sympathizers and straggling soldiers, as Hunt
reported, horribly. Dan chuckled at the memory, for the prisoners were
quartered with different messes, and, that night, several bottles of sparkling
Catawba happened, by some mystery, to be on hand. The prisoners were told that
this was regularly issued by their commissaries, and thereupon they plead,
with tears, to be received into the Confederate ranks.
This kind of service was valuable training for Morgan's later work. Slight as
it was, it soon brought him thirty old, condemned artillery-horses--Dan smiled
now at the memory of those ancient chargers--which were turned over to Morgan
to be nursed until they would bear a mount, and, by and by, it gained him a
colonelcy and three companies, superbly mounted and equipped, which, as
"Morgan's Squadron," became known far and near. Then real service began.
In January, the right wing of Johnston's hungry hawk had been broken in the
Cumberland Mountains. Early in February, Johnston had withdrawn it from
Kentucky before Buell's hosts, with its beak always to the foe. By the middle
of the month, Grant had won the Western border States to the Union, with the
capture of Fort Donelson. In April, the sun of Shiloh rose and set on the
failure of the first Confederate aggressive campaign at the West; and in that
fight Dan saw his first real battle, and Captain Hunt was wounded. In May,
Buell had pushed the Confederate lines south and east toward Chattanooga. To
retain a hold on the Mississippi valley, the Confederates must make another
push for Kentucky, and it was this great Southern need that soon put John
Morgan's name on the lips of every rebel and Yankee in the middle South. In
June, provost-marshals were appointed in every county in Kentucky; the dogs of
war began to be turned locals on the "secesh sympathizers" throughout the
State, and Jerome Conners, overseer, began to render sly service to the Union
cause.
For it was in June that Morgan paid his first memorable little visit to the
Bluegrass, and Daniel Dean wrote his brother Harry the short tale of the raid.
"We left Dixie with nine hundred men," the letter ran, "and got back in
twenty-four days with twelve hundred. Travelled over one thousand miles,
captured seventeen towns, destroyed all Government supplies and arms in them,
scattered fifteen hundred Home Guards, and paroled twelve hundred regular
troops. Lost of the original nine hundred, in killed, wounded, and missing,
about ninety men. How's that? We kept twenty thousand men busy guarding
Government posts or chasing us, and we're going back often. Oh Harry, I AM
glad that you are with Grant."
But Harry was not with Grant--not now. While Morgan was marching up from Dixie
to help Kirby Smith in the last great effort that the Confederacy was about to
make to win Kentucky--down from the yellow river marched the Fourth Ohio
Cavalry to go into camp at Lexington; and with it marched Chadwick Buford and
Harry Dean who, too, were veterans now--who, too, were going home. Both lads
wore a second lieutenant's empty shoulder-straps, which both yet meant to fill
with bars, but Chad's promotion had not come as swiftly as Harry had
predicted; the Captain, whose displeasure he had incurred, prevented that. It
had come, in time, however, and with one leap he had landed, after Shiloh, at
Harry's side. In the beginning, young Dean had wanted to go to the Army of the
Potomac, as did Chad, but one quiet word from the taciturn colonel with the
stubbly reddish-brown beard and the perpetual black cigar kept both where they
were.
"Though," said Grant to Chad, as his eye ran over beautiful Dixie from tip of
nose to tip of tail, and came back to Chad, slightly twinkling, "I've a great
notion to put you in the infantry just to get hold of that horse."
So it was no queer turn of fate that had soon sent both the lads to help hold
Zollicoffer at Cumberland Gap, that stopped them at Camp Dick Robinson to join
forces with Wolford's cavalry, and brought Chad face to face with an old
friend. Wolford's cavalry was gathered from the mountains and the hills, and
when some scouts came in that afternoon, Chad, to his great joy, saw, mounted
on a gaunt sorrel, none other than his old school-master, Caleb Hazel, who,
after shaking hands with both Harry and Chad, pointed silently at a great,
strange figure following him on a splendid horse some fifty yards behind. The
man wore a slouch hat, tow linen breeches, home-made suspenders, a belt with
two pistols, and on his naked heels were two huge Texan spurs. Harry broke
into a laugh, and Chad's puzzled face cleared when the man grinned; it was
Yankee Jake Dillon, one of the giant twins. Chad looked at him curiously; that
blow on the head that his brother, Rebel Jerry, had given him, had wrought a
miracle. The lips no longer hung apart, but were set firmly, and the eye was
almost keen; the face was still rather stupid, but not foolish--and it was
still kind. Chad knew that, somewhere in the Confederate lines, Rebel Jerry
was looking for Jake, as Yankee Jake, doubtless, was now looking for Jerry,
and he began to think that it might be well for Jerry if neither was ever
found. Daws Dillon, so he learned from Caleb Hazel and Jake, was already
making his name a watchword of terror along the border of Virginia and
Tennessee, and was prowling, like a wolf, now and then, along the edge of the
Bluegrass. Old Joel Turner had died of his wound, Rube had gone off to the war
and Mother Turner and Melissa were left at home, alone.
"Daws fit fust on one side and then on t'other," said Jake, and then he smiled
in a way that Chad understood; "an' sence you was down thar last Daws don't
seem to hanker much atter meddlin' with the Turners, though the two women did
have to run over into Virginny, once in a while. Melissy," he added, "was
a-goin' to marry Dave Hilton, so folks said; and he reckoned they'd already
hitched most likely, sence Chad thar--"
A flash from Chad's eyes stopped him, and Chad, seeing Harry's puzzled face,
turned away. He was glad that Melissa was going to marry--yes, he was glad;
and how he did pray that she might be happy!
Fighting Zollicoffer, only a few days later, Chad and Harry had their baptism
of fire, and strange battle orders they heard, that made them smile even in
the thick of the fight.
"Huddle up thar!" "Scatterout, now!" "Form a line of fight!" "Wait till you
see the shine of their eyes!"
"I see 'em!" shouted a private, and "bang" went his gun. That was the way the
fight opened. Chad saw Harry's eyes blazing like stars from his pale face,
which looked pained and half sick, and Chad understood--the lads were fighting
their own people, and there was no help for it. A voice bellowed from the
rear, and a man in a red cap loomed in the smoke-mist ahead:
"Now, now! Git up and git, boys!"
That was the order for the charge, and the blue line went forward. Chad never
forgot that first battle-field when he saw it a few hours later strewn with
dead and wounded, the dead lying, as they dropped, in every conceivable
position, features stark, limbs rigid; one man with a half-smoked cigar on his
breast; the faces of so many beardless; some frowning, some as if asleep and
dreaming; and the wounded--some talking pitifully, some in delirium, some
courteous, patient, anxious to save trouble, others morose, sullen, stolid,
independent; never forgot it, even the terrible night after Shiloh, when he
searched heaps of wounded and slain for Caleb Hazel, who lay all through the
night wounded almost to death.
Later, the Fourth Ohio followed Johnston, as he gave way before Buell, and
many times did they skirmish and fight with ubiquitous Morgan's Men. Several
times Harry and Dan sent each other messages to say that each was still
unhurt, and both were in constant horror of some day coming face to face.
Once, indeed, Harry, chasing a rebel and firing at him, saw him lurch in his
saddle, and Chad, coming up, found the lad on the ground, crying over a
canteen which the rebel had dropped. It was marked with the initials D. D.,
the strap was cut by the bullet Harry had fired, and not for a week of
agonizing torture did Harry learn that the canteen, though Dan's, had been
carried that day by another man.
It was on these scouts and skirmishes that the four--Harry and Chad, and Caleb
Hazel and Yankee Jake Dillon, whose dog-like devotion to Chad soon became a
regimental joke--became known, not only among their own men, but among their
enemies, as the shrewdest and most daring scouts in the Federal service. Every
Morgan's man came to know the name of Chad Buford; but it was not until Shiloh
that Chad got his shoulder-straps, leading a charge under the very eye of
General Grant. After Shiloh, the Fourth Ohio went back to its old quarters
across the river, and no sooner were Chad and Harry there than Kentucky was
put under the Department of the Ohio; and so it was also no queer turn of fate
that now they were on their way to new head-quarters in Lexington.
Straight along the turnpike that ran between the Dean and the Buford farms,
the Fourth Ohio went in a cloud of thick dust that rose and settled like a
gray choking mist on the seared fields. Side by side rode Harry and Chad, and
neither spoke when, on the left, the white columns of the Dean house came into
view, and, on the right, the red brick of Chad's old home showed through the
dusty leaves; not even when both saw on the Dean porch the figures of two
women who, standing motionless, were looking at them. Harry's shoulders
drooped, and he stared stonily ahead, while Chad turned his head quickly. The
front door and shutters of the Buford house were closed, and there were few
signs of life about the place. Only at the gate was the slouching figure of
Jerome Conners, the overseer, who, waving his hat at the column, recognized
Chad, as he rode by, and spoke to him, Chad thought, with a covert sneer.
Farther ahead, and on the farthest boundary of the Buford farm, was a Federal
fort, now deserted, and the beautiful woodland that had once stood in perfect
beauty around it was sadly ravaged and nearly gone, as was the Dean woodland
across the road. It was plain that some people were paying the Yankee piper
for the death-dance in which a mighty nation was shaking its feet.
On they went, past the old college, down Broadway, wheeling at Second
Street--Harry going on with the regiment to camp on the other edge of the
town; Chad reporting with his colonel at General Ward's head-quarters, a
columned brick house on one corner of the college campus, and straight across
from the Hunt home, where he had first danced with Margaret Dean.
That night the two lay on the edge of the Ashland woods, looking up at the
stars, the ripened bluegrass--a yellow, moonlit sea--around them and the woods
dark and still behind them. Both smoked and were silent, but each knew that to
the other his thoughts were known; for both had been on the same errand that
day, and the miserable tale of the last ten months both had learned.
Trouble had soon begun for the ones who were dear to them, when both left for
the war. At once General Anderson had promised immunity from arrest to every
peaceable citizen in the State, but at once the shiftless, the prowling, the
lawless, gathered to the Home Guards for self-protection, to mask deviltry and
to wreak vengeance for private wrongs. At once mischief began. Along the Ohio,
men with Southern sympathies were clapped into prison. Citizens who had joined
the Confederates were pronounced guilty of treason, and Breckinridge was
expelled from the Senate as a traitor. Morgan's great raid in June, '61,
spread consternation through the land and, straightway, every district and
county were at the mercy of a petty local provost. No man of Southern
sympathies could stand for office. Courts in session were broken up with the
bayonet. Civil authority was overthrown. Destruction of property, indemnity
assessments on innocent men, arrests, imprisonment, and murder became of daily
occurrence. Ministers were jailed and lately prisons had even been prepared
for disloyal women. Major Buford, forced to stay at home on account of his
rheumatism and the serious illness of Miss Lucy, had been sent to prison once
and was now under arrest again. General Dean, old as he was, had escaped and
had gone to Virginia to fight with Lee; and Margaret and Mrs. Dean, with a few
servants, were out on the farm alone.
But neither spoke of the worst that both feared was yet to come--and "Taps"
sounded soft and dear on the night air.
CHAPTER 23. CHAD CAPTURES AN OLD FRIEND
Meanwhile Morgan was coming on--led by the two videttes in gray--Daniel Dean
and Rebel Jerry Dillon--coming on to meet Kirby Smith in Lexington after that
general had led the Bluegrass into the Confederate fold. They were taking
short cuts through the hills now, and Rebel Jerry was guide, for he had joined
Morgan for that purpose. Jerry had long been notorious along the border. He
never gave quarter on his expeditions for personal vengeance, and it was said
that not even he knew how many men he had killed. Every Morgan's man had heard
of him, and was anxious to see him; and see him they did, though they never
heard him open his lips except in answer to a question. To Dan he seemed to
take a strange fancy right away, but he was as voiceless as the grave, except
for an occasional oath, when bush-whackers of Daws Dillon's ilk would pop at
the advance guard--sometimes from a rock directly overhead, for chase was
useless. It took a roundabout climb of one hundred yards to get to the top of
that rock, so there was nothing for videttes and guards to do but pop back,
which they did to no purpose. On the third day, however, after a skirmish in
which Dan had charged with a little more dare-deviltry than usual, the big
Dillon ripped out an oath of protest. An hour later he spoke again:
"I got a brother on t'other side."
Dan started. "Why, so have I," he said. "What's your brother with?"
"Wolford's cavalry."
"That's curious. So was mine--for a while. He's with Grant now." The boy
turned his head away suddenly.
"I might meet him, if he were with Wolford now," he said, half to himself, but
Jerry heard him and smiled viciously.
"Well, that's what I'm goin' with you fellers fer--to meet mine."
"What!" said Dan, puzzled.
"We've been lookin' fer each other sence the war broke out. I reckon he went
on t'other side to keep me from killin' him."
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