Men? The valley was suddenly alive with them, choking the roads in heavy silent lines; they were in the lanes, they plodded through the orchards, they swarmed across the hills, column on column, until the entire country seemed flowing forward in steady streams. Sandy River awoke, restlessly listening; lights glimmered behind darkened windows; a heavier, vaguer rumor grew, hanging along the hills. It increased to a shaking, throbbing monotone, like the far dissonance of summer thunder!

And now artillery was coming, bumping down the dim street with clatter of chain and harness jingling.

Up at the great house on the hill they heard it—the boy in his white nightdress leaning from the open window, and his sleepy sister kneeling beside him, pushing back her thick hair to peer out into the morning mist. On came the battery, thudding and clanking, horses on a long swinging trot, gun, caisson, forge, mounted artillerymen succeeding each other, faster, faster under the windows. A guidon danced by; more guns, more caissons, then a trampling, plunging gallop, a rattle of sabres—and the battery had passed.

“What is that heavy sound behind the hills?” whispered the boy.

“The river rushing over the shallows—perhaps a train on the trestle at Oxley Court House—” She listened, resting her rounded chin on her hands. “It is thunder, I think. Go to bed now for a while–”

“Hark!” said the boy, laying his small hand on hers.

“It is thunder,” she said again. “How white the dawn is growing. Listen to the birds—is it not sweet?”

“Celia,” whispered the boy, “that is not thunder. It is too hushed, too steady—it hums and hums and hums. Where was that battery galloping? I am going to dress.”

She looked at him, turned to the east and stared at the coming day. The air of dawn was full of sounds, ominous, sustained vibrations.

She rose, went back to her room, and lighted a dip. Then, shading the pallid smoky flame with her hand, she opened a door and peered into the next bedroom. “Grandfather!” she whispered, smiling, seeing that he was already awake. And as she leaned over him, searching the dim and wrinkled eyes, she read something in their unwonted luster that struck her silent. It was only when she heard her brother’s step on the stairs that she roused herself, bent, and kissed the aged head lying there inert among the pillows.

“It is cannon,” she breathed softly—“you know that sound, don’t you, grandfather? Does it make you happy? Why are you smiling? Look at me—I understand; you want something. Shall I open the curtains? And raise the window? Ah, you wish to hear. Hark! Horsemen are passing at a gallop. What is it you wish—to see them? But they are gone, dear. If any of our soldiers come, you shall see them. That makes you happy?—that is what you desire?—to see one of our own soldiers? If they pass, I shall go out and bring one here to you—truly, I will.” She paused, marveling at the strange light that glimmered across the ravaged visage. Then she blew out the dip and stole into the hall.

“Billy!” she called, hearing him fumbling at the front door.

“Oh, Celia! The cavalry trumpets! Do you hear? I’m going out. Perhaps he may pass the house.”

“Wait for me,” she said; “I am not dressed. Run to the cabin and wake Moses, dear!”

She heard him open the door; the deadened thunder of the cannonade filled the house for an instant, shut out by the closing door, only to swell again to an immense unbroken volume of solemn harmony. The bird-music had ceased; distant hilltops grew brighter.

Down in the village lights faded from window and cabin; a cavalryman, signaling from the church tower, whirled his flaming torch aside and picked up a signal flag. Suddenly the crash of a rifled cannon saluted the rising sun; a shell soared skyward through the misty glory, towered, curved, and fell, exploding among the cavalrymen, completely ruining the breakfasts of chief-trumpeter O’Halloran and kettle-drummer Pillsbury.

For a moment a geyser of ashes, coffee, and bacon rained among the men.

“Hell!” said Pillsbury, furiously wiping his face with his dripping sleeve and spitting out ashes.

“Young kettle-drums, he don’t love his vittles,” observed a trooper, picking up the cap that had been jerked from his head by a whirring fragment.

“Rich feedin’ is the sp’ilin’ o’ this here hoss band,” added the farrier, stanching the flow of blood from his scalp; “quit quar’lin’ with your rations, kettle-drums!”

“Y’orter swaller them cinders,” insisted another; “they don’t cost nothin’!”

The band, accustomed to chaffing, prepared to retire to the ambulance, where heretofore their fate had always left them among luggage, surgeons, and scared camp niggers during an engagement.

The Rhode Island battery, placed just north of the church, had opened; the cavalry in the meadow could see them—see the whirl of smoke, the cannoneers moving with quick precision amidst obscurity—the flash, the recoil as gun after gun jumped back, buried in smoke.

It lasted only a few minutes; no more shells came whistling down among the cavalry; and presently the battery grew silent, and the steaming hill, belted with vapor, cleared slowly in the breezy sunshine.

The cavalry had mounted and leisurely filed off to the shelter of a grassy hollow; the band, dismounted, were drawn up to be told off in squads as stretcher-bearers; the bandmaster was sauntering past, buried in meditation, his sabre trailing a furrow through the dust, when a clatter of hoofs broke out along the village street, and a general officer, followed by a plunging knot of horsemen, tore up and drew bridle.

The colonel of the cavalry regiment, followed by the chief trumpeter, trotted out to meet them, saluting sharply; there was a quick exchange of words; the general officer waved his hand toward the south, wheeled his horse, hesitated, and pointed at the band.

“How many sabres?” he asked.

“Twenty-seven,” replied the colonel—“no carbines.”

“Better have them play you in—if you go,” said the officer.

The colonel saluted and backed his horse as the cavalcade swept past him; then he beckoned to the bandmaster.

“Here’s your chance,” he said. “Orders are to charge anything that appears on that road. You’ll play us in this time. Mount your men.”

Ten minutes later the regiment, band ahead, marched out of Sandy River and climbed the hill, halting in the road that passed the great white mansion. As the outposts moved forward they encountered a small boy on a pony, who swung his cap at them gayly as he rode. Squads, dismounted, engaged in tearing away the rail fences bordering the highway, looked around, shouting a cheery answer to his excited greeting; the colonel on a ridge to the east lowered his field glasses to watch him; the bandmaster saw him coming and smiled as the boy drew bridle beside him, saluting.

“If you’re not going to fight, why are you here?” asked the boy breathlessly.

“It really looks,” said the bandmaster, “as though we might fight, after all.”

“You, too?”

“Perhaps.”

“Then—could you come into the house—just a moment? My sister asked me to find you.”

A bright blush crept over the bandmaster’s sun-tanned cheeks.

“With pleasure,” he said, dismounting, and leading his horse through the gateway and across the shrubbery to the trees.

“Celia! Celia!” called the boy, running up the veranda steps. “He is here! Please hurry, because he’s going to have a battle!”

She came slowly, pale and lovely in her black gown, and held out her hand.

“There is a battle going on all around us, isn’t there?” she asked. “That is what all this dreadful uproar means?”

“Yes,” he said; “there is trouble on the other side of those hills.”

“Do you think there will be fighting here?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

She motioned him to a veranda chair, then seated herself. “What shall we do?” she asked calmly. “I am not alarmed—but my grandfather is bedridden, and my brother is a child. Is it safe to stay?”

The bandmaster looked at her helplessly.

“I don’t know,” he repeated—“I don’t know what to say. Nobody seems to understand what is happening; we in the regiment are never told anything; we know nothing except what passes under our eyes.” He broke off suddenly; the situation, her loneliness, the impending danger, appalled him.

“May I ask a little favor?” she said, rising. “Would you mind coming in a moment to see my grandfather?”

He stood up obediently, sheathed sabre in his left hand; she led the way across the hall and up the stairs, opened the door, and motioned toward the bed. At first he saw nothing save the pillows and snowy spread.

“Will you speak to him?” she whispered.

He approached the bed, cap in hand.

“He is very old,” she said; “he was a soldier of Washington. He desires to see a soldier of the Union.”

And now the bandmaster perceived the occupant of the bed, a palsied, bloodless phantom of the past—an inert, bedridden, bony thing that looked dead until its deep eyes opened and fixed themselves on him.

“This is a Union soldier, grandfather,” she said, kneeling on the floor beside him. And to the bandmaster she said in a low voice: “Would you mind taking his hand? He cannot move.”

The bandmaster bent stiffly above the bed and took the old man’s hand in his.

The sunlit room trembled in the cannonade.

“That is all,” said the girl simply. She took the fleshless hand, kissed it, and laid it on the bedspread. “A soldier of Washington,” she said dreamily. “I am glad he has seen you—I think he understands: but he is very, very old.”

She lingered a moment to touch the white hair with her hand; the bandmaster stepped back to let her pass, then put on his cap, hooked his sabre, turned squarely toward the bed and saluted.

The phantom watched him as a dying eagle watches; then the slim hand of the granddaughter fell on the bandmaster’s arm, and he turned and clanked out into the open air.

The boy stood waiting for them, and as they appeared, he caught their hands in each of his, talking all the while and walking with them to the gateway, where pony and charger stood, nose to nose under the trees.

“If you need anybody to dash about carrying dispatches,” the boy ran on, “why, I’ll do it for you. My father was a soldier, and I’m going to be one, and I–”

“Billy,” said the bandmaster abruptly, “when we charge, go up on that hill and watch us. If we don’t come back, you must be ready to act a man’s part. Your sister counts on you.”

They stood a moment there together, saying nothing. Presently some mounted officers on the hill wheeled their horses and came spurring toward the column drawn up along the road. A trumpet spoke briskly; the bandmaster turned to the boy’s sister, looked straight into her eyes, and took her hand.

“I think we’re going,” he said; “I am trying to thank you—I don’t know how. Good-by.”

“Is it a charge?” cried the boy.

“Good-by,” said the bandmaster, smiling, holding the boy’s hand tightly. Then he mounted, touched his cap, wheeled, and trotted off, freeing his sabre with his right hand.

The colonel had already drawn his sabre, the chief bugler sat his saddle, bugle lifted, waiting. A loud order, repeated from squadron to squadron, ran down the line; the restive horses wheeled, trampled forward, and halted.

“Draw—sabres!”

The air shrilled with the swish of steel.

Far down the road horsemen were galloping in—the returning pickets.

“Forward!”

They were moving.

“Steady—right dress!” taken up in turn by the company officers—“steady—right dress!”

The bandmaster swung his sabre forward; the mounted band followed.

Far away across the level fields something was stirring; the colonel saw it and turned in his saddle, scanning the column that moved forward on a walk.

Half a mile, and, passing a hill, an infantry regiment rose in the shallow trenches to cheer them. Instantly the mounted band burst out into “The Girl I Left Behind Me”; an electric thrill passed along the column.

“Steady! Steady! Right dress!” rang the calm orders as a wood, almost behind them, was suddenly fringed with white smoke and a long, rolling crackle broke out.

“By fours—right-about—wheel!”

The band swung out to the right; the squadrons passed on; and—“Steady! Trot! Steady—right dress—gallop!” came the orders.

The wild music of “Garryowen” set the horses frantic—and the men, too. The band, still advancing at a walk, was dropping rapidly behind. A bullet hit kettle-drummer Pillsbury, and he fell with a grunt, doubling up across his nigh kettle-drum. A moment later Peters struck his cymbals wildly together and fell clean out of his saddle, crashing to the sod. Schwarz, his trombone pierced by a ball, swore aloud and dragged his frantic horse into line.

“Right dress!” said the bandmaster blandly, mastering his own splendid mount as a bullet grazed its shoulder.

They were in the smoke now, they heard the yelling charge ahead, the rifle fire raging, swelling to a terrific roar; and they marched forward, playing “Garryowen”—not very well, for Connor’s jaw was half gone, and Bradley’s horse was down; and the bandmaster, reeling in the saddle, parried blow on blow from a clubbed rifle, until a stunning crack alongside of the head laid him flat across his horse’s neck. And there he clung till he tumbled off, a limp, loose-limbed mass, lying in the trampled grass under the heavy pall of smoke.

Long before sunset the echoing thunder in the hills had ceased; the edge of the great battle that had skirted Sandy River, with a volley or two and an obscure cavalry charge, was ended. Beyond the hills, far away on the horizon, the men of the North were tramping forward through the Confederacy. The immense exodus had begun again; the invasion was developing; and as the tremendous red spectre receded, the hem of its smoky robe brushed Sandy River and was gone, leaving a scorched regiment or two along the railroad, and a hospital at Oxley Court House overcrowded.

In the sunset light the cavalry returned passing the white mansion on the hill. They brought in their dead and wounded on hay wagons; and the boy, pale as a spectre, looked on, while the creaking wagons passed by under the trees.

But it was his sister whose eyes caught the glitter of a gilt and yellow sleeve lying across the hay; and she dropped her brother’s hand and ran out into the road.

“Is he dead?” she asked the trooper who was driving.

“No, miss. Will you take him in?”

“Yes,” she said. “Bring him.”

The driver drew rein, wheeled his team, and drove into the great gateway. “Hospital’s plum full, ma’am,” he said. “Wait; I’ll carry him up. Head’s bust a leetle—that’s all. A day’s nussin’ will bring him into camp again.”

The trooper staggered upstairs with his burden, leaving a trail of dark, wet spots along the stairs, even up to the girl’s bed, where he placed the wounded man.

The bandmaster became conscious when they laid him on the bed, but the concussion troubled his eyes so that he was not certain that she was there until she bent close over him, looking down at him in silence.

“I thought of you—when I was falling,” he explained vaguely—“only of you.”

The color came into her face; but her eyes were steady. She set the flaring dip on the bureau and came back to the bed. “We thought of you, too,” she said.

His restless hand, fumbling the quilt, closed on hers; his eyes were shut, but his lips moved, and she bent nearer to catch his words:

“We noncombatants get into heaps of trouble—don’t we?”

“Yes,” she whispered, smiling; “but the worst is over now.”

“There is worse coming.”

“What?”

“We march—to-morrow. I shall never see you again.”

After a silence she strove gently to release her hand; but his held it; and after a long while, as he seemed to be asleep, she sat down on the bed’s edge, moving very softly lest he awaken. All the tenderness of innocence was in her gaze, as she laid her other hand over his and left it there, even after he stirred and his unclosing eyes met hers.

“Celia!” called the boy, from the darkened stairway, “there’s a medical officer here.”

“Bring him,” she said. She rose, her lingering fingers still in his, looking down at him all the while; their hands parted, and she moved backward slowly, her young eyes always on his.

The medical officer passed her, stepping quickly to the bedside, stopped short, hesitated, and bending, opened the clotted shirt, placing a steady hand over the heart.

The next moment he straightened up, pulled the sheet over the bandmaster’s face, and turned on his heel, nodding curtly to the girl as he passed out.

When he had gone, she walked slowly to the bed and drew the sheet from the bandmaster’s face.

And as she stood there, dry-eyed, mute, from the dusky garden came the whispering cry of the widow bird, calling, calling to the dead that answer never more.