zeke tisdale was the father of company f. not that this title had ever been formally conferred upon him, or even recognized in terms, but everybody understood about it. sometimes company f was for whole days together exceedingly proud of the relation—but alas! more often it viewed its parent with impatient levity, not to say contempt. in either case, it seemed all the same to zeke.
he was by no means the oldest man in the company, at least as appearances went. some there were gathered about the camp-fire, this last night in march of ‘65, who looked almost old enough to be his father—gray, gaunt, stiff-jointed old fighters, whose hard service stretched back across four years of warfare to lincoln’s first call for troops, and who laughed now grimly over the joke that they had come out to suppress the rebellion within ninety days, and had the job still unfinished on their hands at the end of fourteen hundred.
but zeke, though his mud-colored hair and beard bore scarcely a trace of gray, and neither his placid, unwrinkled face nor his lithe, elastic form suggested age, somehow produced an impression of seniority upon all his comrades, young and old alike. he had been in the company from the beginning, for one thing; but that was not all. it was certain that he had been out in utah at the time of albert sidney johnston’s expedition—perhaps had fought under him. it seemed pretty well established that before this mormon episode he had been with walker in nicaragua. over the mellowing canteen he had given stray hints of even other campaigns which his skill had illumined and his valor adorned. nobody ever felt quite sure how much of this was true—for zeke had a child’s disregard for any mere veracity which might mar the immediate effects of his narratives—but enough passed undoubted to make him the veteran of the company. and that was not all.
for cold-blooded intrepidity in battle, for calm, clear-headed rashness on the skirmish-line, zeke had a fame extending beyond even his regiment and the division to which it belonged. men in regiments from distant states, who met with no closer bond than that they all wore the badge of the same army corps, talked on occasion of the fellow in the —th new york, who had done this, that or the other dare-devil feat, and yet never got his shoulder-straps. it was when company f men heard this talk that they were most proud of zeke—proud sometimes even to the point of keeping silence about his failure to win promotion.
but among themselves there was no secret about this failure. once the experiment had been made of lifting zeke to the grade of corporal—and the less said about its outcome the better. still, the truth may as well be told. brave as any lion, or whatever beast should best typify absolute fearlessness in the teeth of deadly peril, zeke in times of even temporary peace left a deal to be desired. his personal habits, or better, perhaps, the absence of them, made even the roughest of his fellows unwilling to be his tent-mate. as they saw him lounging about the idle camp, he was shiftless, insubordinate, taciturn and unsociable when sober, wearisomely garrulous when drunk—the last man out of four-score whom the company liked to think of as its father.
and company f had had nothing to do, now, for a good while. through the winter it had lain in its place on the great, steel-clad intrenched line which waited, jaws open, for the fall of petersburg. the ready-made railroad from city point was at its back, and food was plenty. but now, as spring came on—the wet, warm virginian spring, with every meadow a swamp, every road a morass, every piece of bright-green woodland an impassable tangle—the strategy of the closing act in the dread drama sent company f away to the south and west, into the desolate backwoods country where no roads existed, and no foraging, be it never so vigilant, promised food. the movement really reflected grant’s fear lest, before the final blow was struck, lee should retreat into the interior. but company f did not know what it meant, and disliked it accordingly, and, by the end of the third day in its quarters, was both hungry and quarrelsome.
evening fell upon a gloomy, rain-soaked day, which the men had miserably spent in efforts to avoid getting drenched to the skin, and in devices to preserve dry spots upon which to sleep at night. permission to build a fire, which had been withheld ever since their arrival, had only come from division headquarters an hour ago; and as they warmed themselves now over the blaze, biting the savorless hard-tack, and sipping the greasy fluid of beans and chicory from their tin cups, they still looked sulkily upon the line of lights which began to dot the ridge on which they lay, and noted the fact that their division had grown into an army corps, almost as if it had been a grievance. distant firing had been heard all day, but it seemed a part of their evil luck that it should be distant.
they stared, too, with a sullen indifference at the spectacle of a sergeant who entered their camp escorting a half-dozen recruits, and, with stiff salutation, turned them over to the captain at the door of his tent. the men of company f might have studied these bounty-men, as they stood in file waiting for the company’s clerk to fill out his receipt, with more interest, had it been realized that they were probably the very last men to be enrolled by the republic for the civil war. but nobody knew that, and the arrival of recruits was an old story in the —th new york, which had been thrust into every available hellpit, it seemed to the men, since that first cruel corner at bull run. so they scowled at the newcomers in their fresh, clean uniforms, as these straggled doubtfully toward the fire, and gave them no welcome whatever.
hours passed under the black sky, into which the hissing, spluttering fire of green wood was too despondent to hurl a single spark. the men stood or squatted about the smoke-ringed pile on rails and fence-boards which they had laid to save them from the soft mud—in silence broken only by fitful words. from time to time the monotonous call of the sentries out in the darkness came to them like the hooting of an owl. sharp shadows on the canvas walls of the captain’s tent and the sound of voices from within told them that the officers were playing poker. once or twice some moody suggestion of a “game” fell upon the smoky air outside, but died away unanswered. it was too wet and muddy and generally depressing. the low west wind which had risen since nightfall carried the threat of more rain.
“grant ain’t no good, nor any other dry-land general, in this dripping old swamp of a country,” growled a grizzled corporal, whose mud-laden heels had slipped off his rail. “the man we want here is noah. this is his job, and nobody else’s.”
“there’d be one comfort in that, anyway,” said another, well read in the bible. “when the rain was all over, he set up drinks.”
“don’t you make any mistake,” put in a third. “he shut himself up in his tent, and played his booze solitaire. he didn’t even ask in the officers of the ark and propose a game.”
“i—i ‘ve got a small flask with me,” one of the recruits diffidently began. “i was able to get it to-day at dinwiddie court house. paid more for it i suppose, than—”
in the friendly excitement created by the recruit’s announcement, and his production of a flat, brown bottle, further explanation was lost. nobody cared how much he had paid. two dozen of his neighbors took a lively interest in what he had bought. the flask made its tour of only a segment of the circle, amid a chorus of admonitions to drink fair, and came back flatter than ever and wholly empty. but its ameliorating effect became visible at once. one of the recruits was emboldened to tell a story he had heard at city point, and the veterans consented to laugh at it. conversation sprang up as the fire began to crackle under a shift of wind, and the newcomers disclosed that they all had clean blankets, and that several had an excess of chewing tobacco. at this last, all reserve was cleared away. veterans and recruits spat into the fire now from a common ground of liking, and there was even some rivalry to secure such thoughtful strangers as tent-mates.
only one of the newcomers stood alone in the muddiest spot of the circle, before a part of the fire which would not burn. he seemed to have no share in the confidences of his fellow-recruits. none of their stories or reminiscences referred to him, and neither they nor any veteran had offered him a word during the evening.
he was obviously an irishman, and it was equally apparent that he had just landed. there was an indefinable something in the way he stood, in his manner of looking at people, in the very awkwardness with which his ill-fitting uniform hung upon him, which spoke loudly of recent importation. this in itself would have gone some way toward prejudicing company f against him, for castle garden recruits were rarely popular, even in the newest regiments. but there was a much stronger reason for the cold shoulder turned upon him.
this young man who stood alone in the mud—he could hardly have got half through the twenties—had a repellent, low-browed face, covered with freckles and an irregular stubble of reddish beard, and a furtive squint in his pale, greenish-blue eyes. the whites of these eyes showed bloodshot, even in the false light of the fire, and the swollen lines about them spoke plainly of a prolonged carouse. they were not puritans, these men of company f, but with one accord they left andrew linsky—the name the roster gave him—to himself.
time came, after the change of guard, when those who were entitled to sleep must think of bed. the orderly-sergeant strolled up to the fire, and dropped a saturnine hint to the effect that it would be best to sleep with one eye open; signs pointed to a battle next day, and the long roll might come before morning broke. their brigade was on the right of a line into which two corps had been dumped during the day, and apparently this portended the hottest kind of a fight; moreover, it was said sheridan was on the other side of the ridge. everybody knew what that meant.
“we ought to be used to hot corners by this time,” said the grizzled corporal, in comment, “but it’s the deuce to go into ’em on empty stomachs. we’ve been on half-rations two days.”
“there’ll be the more to go round among them that’s left,” said the sergeant, grimly, and turned on his heel.
the irishman, pulling his feet with difficulty out of the ooze into which they had settled, suddenly left his place and walked over to the corporal, lifting his hand in a sidelong, clumsy salute.
“wud ye moind tellin me, sur, where i’m to sleep?” he asked, saluting again.
the corporal looked at his questioner, spat meditatively into the embers, then looked again, and answered, briefly:
“on the ground.”
linsky cast a glance of pained bewilderment, first down at the mud into which he was again sinking, then across the fire into the black, wind-swept night.
“god forgive me for a fool,” he groaned aloud, “to lave a counthry where even the pigs have straw to drame on.”
“where did you expect to sleep—in a balloon?” asked the corporal, with curt sarcasm. then the look of utter hopelessness on the other’s ugly face prompted him to add, in a softer tone; “you must hunt up a tent-mate for yourself—make friends with some fellow who’ll take you in.”
“sorra a wan’ll be friends wid me,” said the despondent recruit. “i’m waitin’ yet, the furst dacent wurrud from anny of ’em.”
the corporal’s face showed that he did not specially blame them for their exclusiveness, but his words were kindly enough.
“perhaps i can fix you out,” he said, and sent a comprehensive glance round the group which still huddled over the waning fire, on the other side.
“hughie, here’s a countryman of yours,” he called out to a lean, tall, gray-bearded private who, seated on a rail, had taken off his wet boots and was scraping the mud from them with a bayonet; “can you take him in?”
“i have some one already,” the other growled, not even troubling to lift his eyes from his task.
it happened that this was a lie, and that the corporal knew it to be one. he hesitated for a moment, dallying with the impulse to speak sharply. then, reflecting that hugh o’mahony was a quarrelsome and unsociable creature with whom a dispute was always a vexation to the spirit, he decided to say nothing.
how curiously inscrutable a thing is chance! upon that one decision turned every human interest in this tale, and most of all, the destiny of the sulky man who sat scraping his boots. the wheel of fortune, in this little moment of silence, held him poised within the hair’s breadth of a discovery which would have altered his career in an amazing way, and changed the story of a dozen lives. but the corporal bit his lip and said nothing. o’mahony bent doggedly over his work—and the wheel rolled on.
the corporal’s eye, roaming about the circle, fell upon the figure of a man who had just approached the fire and stood in the full glare of the red light, thrusting one foot close to the blaze, while he balanced himself on the other. his ragged hair and unkempt beard were of the color of the miry clay at his feet. his shoulders, rounded at best, were unnaturally drawn forward by the exertion of keeping his hands in his pockets, the while he maintained his balance. his face, of which snub nose and grey eyes alone were visible in the frame of straggling hair and under the shadow of the battered foragecap visor, wore a pleased, almost merry, look in the flickering, ruddy light. he was humming a droning sort of tune to himself as he watched the steam rise from the wet leather.
“zeke’s happy to-night; that means fight tomorrow, sure as god made little fishes,” said the corporal to nobody in particular. then he lifted his voice:
“have you got a place in your diggin’s for a recruit, zeke—say just for to-night?” he asked.
zeke looked up, and sauntered forward to where they stood, hands still in pockets.
“well—i don’t know,” he drawled. “guess so—if he don’t snore too bad.”
he glanced linsky over with indolent gravity. it was plain that he didn’t think much of him.
“got a blanket?” he asked, abruptly.
“i have that,” the irishman replied.
“anything to drink?”
linsky produced from his jacket pocket a flat, brown bottle, twin brother to that which had been passed about the camp-fire circle earlier in the evening, and held it up to the light.
“they called it whiskey,” he said, in apology; “an’ be the price i paid fur it, it moight a’ been doimonds dissolved in angel’s tears; but the furst sup i tuk of it, faith, i thought it ’ud tear th’ t’roat from me!”
zeke had already linked linsky’s arm within his own, and he reached forth now and took the bottle.
“it’s p’zen to a man that ain’t used to it,” he said, with a grave wink to the corporal. “come along with me, irish; mebbe if you watch me close you can pick up points about gittin’ the stuff down without injurin’ your throat.”
and, with another wink, zeke led his new-found friend away from the fire, picking his steps through the soft mud, past dozens of little tents propped up with rails and boughs, walking unconsciously toward a strange, new, dazzling future.
