day; laked within it lay a deep and abiding peace like golden wine; yet beneath this solitude and permeating it was that nameless and waiting portent, patient and brooding and sinister.
“Your sword, Sir,” Stuart commanded, and the prisoner removed his weapon and Stuart took it and pinned his scribbled note to the table-top with it. The note read:
“General Stuart’s compliments to General Pope, and he is sorry to have missed him again. He will call again tomorrow.”
Stuart gathered his reins, forward,” he said.
They descended the knoll and crossed the emptyglade and at an easy canter they took the road they had traversed that dawn—the road that led toward home. Stuart glanced back at his captive, at the gallant black with its double burden. “If you will direct us to the nearest cavalry picket I will provide you with a proper mount,” he offered again.
“Will General Stuart, cavalry leader and General Lee’s eyes, jeopardize his safety and that of his men and his cause in order to provide for the temporary comfort of a minor prisoner of his sword? This is not bravery: it is. the rashness of a heedless and headstrong boy. There are fifteen thousand men within a radius of two miles of this point; even General’ Stuart cannot conquer that many, though they are Yankees, single-handed.”
“Not for the prisoner, Sir,” Stuart replied haughtily, “but for the officer suffering the fortune of war. No gentleman would do less.”
“No gentleman has any business in this war,” the major retorted. “There is no place for him here. He is an anachronism, like anchovies. General Stuart did not capture our anchovies,” he added tauntingly. “Perhaps he will send Lee for them in person?”
“Anchovies,” repeated Bayard Sartoris who galloped nearby, and he whirled his horse. Stuart shouted at him, but he lifted his reckless stubborn hand and flashed on; and as the General would have turned to follow a Yankee picket fired his musket from the roadside and darted into the woods, shouting the alarm. Immediately other muskets exploded on all sides and from the forest to the right came the sound of a considerable body put suddenly into motion, and behind them in the direction of the knoll, a volley crashed. A third officer spurred up and caught Stuart’s bridle.
“Sir, Sir,” he exclaimed. “What would you do?”
Stuart held his horse rearing, and another volley rang behind them, dribbling off into single scattered reports, crashed focalized again, and the noise to the right swelled nearer. “Let go, Allan,” Stuart said. “He is my friend.”
But the other clung on. “It is too late,” he said. “Sartoris can only be killed: you would be captured.”
“Forward, Sir, I beg,” the captive major added. “What is oneman, to a paladin out of romance?”
“Think of Lee, for God’s sake, General!? the aide implored, forward!” he shouted to the troop, spurring his own horse and dragging the General’s onward as a body of Federal horse burst from “the woods behind them.
“And so” Aunt Jenny finished, “Mister Stuart went on and Bayard rode back after those anchovies, with all Pope’s army shooting at him. He rode yelling Yaaaiiih, Yaaaiiih, come on, boys!’ right up the knoll and jumped his horse over the breakfast table and rode it into the wrecked commissary tent, and a cook who was hidden under the mess stuck his arm out and shot Bayard in the back with a derringer.
“Mister Stuart fought his way out and got back home without losing but two men. He always spoke well of Bayard. He said he was a good officer and a fine cavalryman, but that he was too reckless.”
They sat quietly for a time, in the firelight. The flames leaped and popped on the hearth and sparks soared in wild swirling plumes up the chimney, and Bayard Sartoris’ brief career swept like a shooting star across the dark plain of their mutual remembering and suffering, lighting it with a transient glare like a soundless thunder-clap, leaving a sort of radiance when it died. The guest, the Scottish engineer, had sat quietly, listening. After a time he spoke.
“When he rode back, he was not actually certain there were anchovies, was he?” .
“The Yankee major said there were,” Aunt Jenny replied.
“Ay.” The Scotsman pondered again. “And did Mister Stuart return next day, as he said in’s note?”
“He went back that afternoon,” Aunt Jenny answered, “looking for Bayard.” Ashes soft as rosy feathers shaled glowing onto the hearth, and faded to the softest gray. John Sartoris leaned forward into the firelight and punched at the blazing logs with the Yankee musket-barrel.
“That was the god-damdest army the world ever saw, I reckon,” he said.
“Yes,” Aunt Jenny agreed. “And Bayard was the god-damdest man in it.”
“Yes,” John Sartoris admitted soberly, “Bayard was wild.” The Scotsman spoke again.
“This Mister Stuart, who said your brother was reckless: Who was he?”
“He was the cavalry general Jeb Stuart,” Aunt Jenny answered. She brooded for a while upon the fire; her pale indomitable face held for a moment a tranquil tenderness. “He had a strange sense of humor,” she said. “Nothing ever seemed quite so diverting to him as General Pope in his night-shirt,” She dreamed once more on some faraway place beyond the rosy battlements of the embers. “Poor man,” she said. Then she said quietly: “I danced a valse with him in Baltimore in ‘58,” and her voice was proud and still as banners in the dust.
...But the door was closed now, and what light passed through the colored panes was richly and solemnly hushed. To his left was his grandsons’ room, the room in which .his grandson’s wife and her child had died last October. He stood beside this door for a moment, then he opened it quietly. The blinds were closed and the room was empty, and he stood on the dark threshold for a while. Then he slammed the door to and tramped on with that heavy-footed obliviousness of the deaf and entered hisown bedroom and crashed the door behind him, as was his way of shutting doors.
He sat down and removed his shoes, the shoes that were “made to his measure twice a year by a Saint Louis house, then he rose and went in his stockings to the window and looked down upon his saddle-mare tethered to a mulberry tree in the back yard and a negro lad lean and fluid of movement as a hound, lounging richly static nearby. From the direction of the kitchen, invisible from this window, Elnora’s endless minor ebbed and flowed unheard by him upon the lazy scene.
He crossed to his closet and drew therefrom a pair of scarred and stained riding-boots and stamped into
