Burial of the Guns — Little Darby, Pt 1

I

The County had been settled as a “frontier” in early colonial days, and when it ceased to be frontier, settlement had taken a jump beyond it, and in a certain sense over it, to the richer lands of the Piedmont.

When, later on, steam came, the railway simply cut across it at its narrowest part, and then skirted along just inside its border on the bank of the little river which bounded it on the north, as if it intentionally left it to one side.

Thus, modern progress had not greatly interfered with it either for good or bad, and its development was entirely natural.

It was divided into “neighborhoods”, a name in itself implying something both of its age and origin; for the population was old, and the customs of life and speech were old likewise.

This chronicle, however, is not of the “neighborhoods”, for they were known, or may be known by any who will take the trouble to plunge boldly in and throw themselves on the hospitality of any of the dwellers therein.

It is rather of the unknown tract, which lay vague and undefined in between the several neighborhoods of the upper end.

The history of the former is known both in peace and in war: in the pleasant homesteads which lie on the hills above the little rivers which make down through the county to join the great river below, and in the long list of those who fell in battle, and whose names are recorded on the slabs set up by their comrades on the walls of the old Court House.

The history of the latter, however, is unrecorded.

The lands were in the main very poor and grown up in pine, or else, where the head-waters of a little stream made down in a number of “branches”, were swampy and malarial.

Possibly it was this poverty of the soil or unwholesomeness of their location, which more than anything else kept the people of this district somewhat distinct from others around them, however poor they might be.

They dwelt in their little cabins among their pines, or down on the edges of the swampy district, distinct both from the gentlemen on their old plantations and from the sturdy farmer-folk who owned the smaller places.

What title they had to their lands originally, or how they traced it back, or where they had come from, no one knew.

They had been there from time immemorial, as long or longer, if anything, than the owners of the plantations about them; and insignificant as they were, they were not the kind to attempt to question, even had anyone been inclined to do so, which no one was.

They had the names of the old English gentry, and were a clean-limbed, blond, blue-eyed people.

When they were growing to middle age, their life told on them and made them weather-beaten, and not infrequently hard-visaged; but when they were young there were often among them straight, supple young fellows with clear-cut features, and lithe, willowy-looking girls, with pink faces and blue, or brown, or hazel eyes, and a mien which one might have expected to find in a hall rather than in a cabin.

Darby Stanley and Cove Mills (short for Coverley) were the leaders of the rival factions of the district.

They lived as their fathers had lived before them, on opposite sides of the little stream, the branches of which crept through the alder and gum thickets between them, and contributed to make the district almost as impenetrable to the uninitiated as a mountain fastness.

The long log-cabin of the Cove-Millses, where room had been added to room in a straight line, until it looked like the side of a log fort, peeped from its pines across at the clearing where the hardly more pretentious home of Darby Stanley was set back amid a little orchard of ragged peach-trees, and half hidden under a great wistaria vine.

But though the two places lay within rifle shot of each other, they were almost as completely divided as if the big river below had rolled between them.

Since the great fight between old Darby and Cove Mills over Henry Clay, there had rarely been an election in which some members of the two families had not had a “clinch”.

They had to be thrown together sometimes “at meeting”, and their children now and then met down on the river fishing, or at “the washing hole”, as the deep place in the little stream below where the branches ran together was called; but they held themselves as much aloof from each other as their higher neighbors, the Hampdens and the Douwills, did on their plantations.

The children, of course, would “run together”, nor did the parents take steps to prevent them, sure that they would, as they grew up, take their own sides as naturally as they themselves had done in their day.

Meantime “children were children”, and they need not be worried with things like grown-up folk.

When Aaron Hall died and left his little farm and all his small belongings to educate free the children of his poor neighbors, the farmers about availed themselves of his benefaction, and the children for six miles around used to attend the little school which was started in the large hewn-log school-house on the roadside known as “Hall’s Free School”.

Few people knew the plain, homely, hard-working man, or wholly understood him.

Some thought him stingy, some weak-minded, some only queer, and at first his benefaction was hardly comprehended; but in time quite a little oasis began about the little fountain, which the poor farmer’s bequest had opened under the big oaks by the wayside, and gradually its borders extended, until finally it penetrated as far as the district, and Cove Mills’s children appeared one morning at the door of the little school-house, and, with sheepish faces and timid voices, informed the teacher that their father had sent them to school.

At first there was some debate over at Darby Stanley’s place, whether they should show their contempt for the new departure of the Millses, by standing out against them, or should follow their example.

It was hard for a Stanley to have to follow a Mills in anything.

So they stood out for a year.

As it seemed, however, that the Millses were getting something to which the Stanleys were as much entitled as they, one morning little Darby Stanley walked in at the door, and without taking his hat off, announced that he had come to go to school.

He was about fifteen at the time, but he must have been nearly six feet (his sobriquet being wholly due to the fact that Big Darby was older, not taller), and though he was spare, there was something about his face as he stood in the open door, or his eye as it rested defiantly on the teacher’s face, which prevented more than a general buzz of surprise.

“Take off your hat,” said the teacher, and he took it off slowly.

“I suppose you can read?

” was the first question.

“No. ” A snicker ran round the room, and little Darby’s brow clouded.

As he not only could not read, but could not even spell, and in fact did not know his letters, he was put into the alphabet class, the class of the smallest children in the school.

Little Darby walked over to the corner indicated with his head up, his hands in his pockets, and a roll in his gait full of defiance, and took his seat on the end of the bench and looked straight before him.

He could hear the titter around him, and a lowering look came into his blue eyes.

He glanced sideways down the bench opposite.

It happened that the next seat to his was that of Vashti Mills, who was at that time just nine.

She was not laughing, but was looking at Darby earnestly, and as he caught her eye she nodded to him, “Good-mornin’.

” It was the first greeting the boy had received, and though he returned it sullenly, it warmed him, and the cloud passed from his brow and presently he looked at her again.

She handed him a book.

He took it and looked at it as if it were something that might explode.

He was not an apt scholar; perhaps he had begun too late; perhaps there was some other cause; but though he could swim better, climb better, and run faster than any boy in the school, or, for that matter, in the county, and knew the habits of every bird that flitted through the woods and of every animal that lived in the district, he was not good at his books.

His mind was on other things.

When he had spent a week over the alphabet, he did know a letter as such, but only by the places on the page they were on, and gave up when “big A” was shown him on another page, only asking how in the dickens “big A” got over there.

He pulled off his coat silently whenever ordered and took his whippings like a lamb, without a murmur and almost without flinching, but every boy in the school learned that it was dangerous to laugh at him; and though he could not learn to read fluently or to train his fingers to guide a pen, he could climb the tallest pine in the district to get a young crow for Vashti, and could fashion all sorts of curious whistles, snares, and other contrivances with his long fingers.

He did not court popularity, was rather cold and unapproachable, and Vashti Mills was about the only other scholar with whom he seemed to be on warm terms.

Many a time when the tall boy stood up before the thin teacher, helpless and dumb over some question which almost anyone in the school could answer, the little girl, twisting her fingers in an ecstacy of anxiety, whispered to him the answer in the face of almost certain detection and of absolutely certain punishment.

In return, he worshipped the ground she walked on, and whichever side Vashti was on, Darby was sure to be on it too.

He climbed the tallest trees to get her nuts;

waded into the miriest swamps to find her more brilliant nosegays of flowers than the other girls had; spent hours to gather rarer birds’ eggs than they had, and was everywhere and always her silent worshipper and faithful champion.

They soon learned that the way to secure his help in anything was to get Vashti Mills to ask it, and the little girl quickly discovered her power and used it as remorselessly over her tall slave as any other despot ever did.

They were to be seen any day trailing along the plantation paths which the school-children took from the district, the others in a clump, and the tall boy and little calico-clad girl, who seemed in summer mainly sun-bonnet and bare legs, either following or going before the others at some distance.

The death of Darby--of old Darby, as he had begun to be called--cut off Little Darby from his “schoolin’”, in the middle of his third year, and before he had learned more than to read and cipher a little and to write in a scrawly fashion; for he had been rather irregular in his attendance at all times.

He now stopped altogether, giving the teacher as his reason, with characteristic brevity: “Got to work.

” Perhaps no one at the school mourned the long-legged boy’s departure except his little friend Vashti, now a well-grown girl of twelve, very straight and slim and with big dark eyes.

She gave him when he went away the little Testament she had gotten as a prize, and which was one of her most cherished possessions.

Other boys found the first honor as climber, runner, rock-flinger, wrestler, swimmer, and fighter open once more to them, and were free from the silent and somewhat contemptuous gaze of him who, however they looked down on him, was a sort of silent power among them.

Vashti alone felt a void and found by its sudden absence how great a force was the steady backing of one who could always be counted on to take one’s side without question.

She had to bear the gibes of the school as “Miss Darby”, and though her two brothers were ready enough to fight for her if boys pushed her too hardly, they could do nothing against girls, and the girls were her worst tormentors.

The name was fastened on her, and it clung to her until, as time went on, she came to almost hate the poor innocent cause of it.

Meantime Darby, beginning to fill out and take on the shoulders and form of a man, began to fill also the place of the man in his little home.

This among other things meant opposition, if not hostility, to everything on Cove Mills’s side.

When old Darby died the Millses all went to the funeral, of course; but that did not prevent their having the same feeling toward Little Darby afterward, and the breach continued.

At first he used to go over occasionally to see Vashti and carry her little presents, as he had done at school; but he soon found that it was not the same thing.

He was always received coolly, and shortly he was given to understand that he was not wanted there, and in time Vashti herself showed that she was not the same she had been to him before.

Thus the young fellow was thrown back on himself, and the hostility between the two cabins was as great as ever.

He spent much of his time in the woods, for the Stanley place was small at best, only a score or so of acres, and mostly covered with pines, and Little Darby was but a poor hand at working with a hoe--their only farm implement.

He was, however, an unerring shot, with an eye like a hawk to find a squirrel flat on top of the grayest limb of the tallest hickory in the woods, or a hare in her bed among the brownest broomsedge in the county, and he knew the habits of fish and bird and animal as if he had created them; and though he could not or would not handle a hoe, he was the best hand at an axe “in the stump”, in the district, and Mrs. Stanley was kept in game if not in meal.

The Millses dilated on his worthlessness, and Vashti, grown to be a slender slip of a girl with very bright eyes and a little nose, was loudest against him in public; though rumor said she had fallen afoul of her youngest brother and boxed his jaws for seconding something she had said of him.

The Mills’s enmity was well understood, and there were not wanting those to take Darby’s side.

He had grown to be the likeliest young man in the district, tall, and straight as a sapling, and though Vashti flaunted her hate of him and turned up her little nose more than it was already turned up at his name, there were many other girls in the pines who looked at him languishingly from under their long sun-bonnets, and thought he was worth both the Mills boys and Vashti to boot.

So when at a fish-fry the two Mills boys attacked him and he whipped them both together, some said it served them right, while others declared they did just what they ought to have done, and intimated that Darby was less anxious to meet their father than he was them, who were nothing more than boys to him.

These asked in proof of their view, why he had declined to fight when Old Cove had abused him so to his face.

This was met by the fact that he “could not have been so mighty afeared,” for he had jumped in and saved Chris Mills’s life ten minutes afterward, when he got beyond his depth in the pond and had already sunk twice.

But, then, to be sure, it had to be admitted that he was the best swimmer on the ground, and that any man there would have gone in to save his worst enemy if he had been drowning.

This must have been the view that Vashti Mills took of the case; for one day not long afterward, having met Darby at the cross-roads store where she was looking at some pink calico, and where he had come to get some duck-shot and waterproof caps, she turned on him publicly, and with flashing eyes and mantling cheeks, gave him to understand that if she were a man he “would not have had to fight two boys,” and he would not have come off so well either.

If anything, this attack brought Darby friends, for he not only had whipped the Mills boys fairly, and had fought only when they had pressed him, but had, as has been said, declined to fight old man Mills under gross provocation; and besides, though they were younger than he, the Mills boys were seventeen and eighteen, and “not such babies either; if they insisted on fighting they had to take what they got and not send their sister to talk and abuse a man about it afterward.

” And the weight of opinion was that, “that Vashti Mills was gettin’ too airified and set up anyways.

” All this reached Mrs. Stanley, and was no doubt sweet to her ears.

She related it in her drawling voice to Darby as he sat in the door one evening, but it did not seem to have much effect on him; he never stirred or showed by word or sign that he even heard her, and finally, without speaking, he rose and lounged away into the woods.

The old woman gazed after him silently until he disappeared, and then gave a look across to where the Mills cabin peeped from among the pines, which was full of hate.

***** The fish-fry at which Darby Stanley had first fought the Mills boys and then pulled one of them out of the river, had been given by one of the county candidates for election as delegate to a convention which was to be held at the capital, and possibly the division of sentiment in the district between the Millses and Little Darby was as much due to political as to personal feeling; for the sides were growing more and more tightly drawn, and the Millses, as usual, were on one side and Little Darby on the other; and both sides had strong adherents.

The question was on one side, Secession, with probable war; and on the other, the Union as it was.

The Millses were for the candidate who advocated the latter, and Little Darby was for him who wanted secession.

Both candidates were men of position and popularity, the one a young man and the other older, and both were neighbors.

The older man was elected, and shortly the question became imminent, and all the talk about the Cross-roads was of war.

As time had worn on, Little Darby, always silent, had become more and more so, and seemed to be growing morose.

He spent more and more of his time in the woods or about the Cross-roads, the only store and post-office near the district where the little tides of the quiet life around used to meet.

At length Mrs. Stanley considered it so serious that she took it upon herself to go over and talk to her neighbor, Mrs. Douwill, as she generally did on matters too intricate and grave for the experience of the district.

She found Mrs. Douwill, as always, sympathetic and kind, and though she took back with her not much enlightenment as to the cause of her son’s trouble or its cure, she went home in a measure comforted with the assurance of the sympathy of one stronger than she.

She had found out that her neighbor, powerful and rich as she seemed to her to be, had her own troubles and sorrows; she heard from her of the danger of war breaking out at any time, and her husband would enlist among the first.

Little Darby did not say much when his mother told of her visit; but his usually downcast eyes had a new light in them, and he began to visit the Cross-roads oftener.

At last one day the news that came to the Cross-roads was that there was to be war.

It had been in the air for some time, but now it was undoubted.

It came in the presence of Mr. Douwill himself, who had come the night before and was commissioned by the Governor to raise a company.

There were a number of people there--quite a crowd for the little Cross-roads--for the stir had been growing day by day, and excitement and anxiety were on the increase.

The papers had been full of secession, firing on flags, raising troops, and everything; but that was far off.

When Mr. Douwill appeared in person it came nearer, though still few, if any, quite took it in that it could be actual and immediate.

Among those at the Cross-roads that day were the Millses, father and sons, who looked a little critically at the speaker as one who had always been on the other side.

Little Darby was also there, silent as usual, but with a light burning in his blue eyes.

That evening, when Little Darby reached home, which he did somewhat earlier than usual, he announced to his mother that he had enlisted as a soldier.

The old woman was standing before her big fireplace when he told her, and she leaned against it quite still for a moment; then she sat down, stumbling a little on the rough hearth as she made her way to her little broken chair.

Darby got up and found her a better one, which she took without a word.

Whatever entered into her soul in the little cabin that night, when Mrs. Stanley went among her neighbors she was a soldier’s mother.

She even went over to Cove Mills’s on some pretext connected with Darby’s going.

Vashti was not at home, but Mrs. Mills was, and she felt a sudden loss, as if somehow the Millses had fallen below the Stanleys.

She talked of it for several days; she could not make out entirely what it was.

Vashti’s black eyes flashed.

The next day Darby went to the Cross-roads to drill; there was, besides the recruits, who were of every class, quite a little crowd there to look at the drill.

Among them were two women of the poorest class, one old and faded, rather than gray, the other hardly better dressed, though a slim figure, straight and trim, gave her a certain distinction, even had not a few ribbons and a little ornament or two on her pink calico, with a certain air, showed that she was accustomed to being admired.

The two women found themselves together once during the day, and their eyes met.

It was just as the line of soldiers passed.

Those of the elder lighted with a sudden spark of mingled triumph and hate, those of the younger flashed back for a moment and then fell beneath the elder’s gaze.

There was much enthusiasm about the war, and among others, both of the Mills boys enlisted before the day was ended, their sister going in with them to the room where their names were entered on the roll, and coming out with flashing eyes and mantling cheeks.

She left the place earlier than most of the crowd, but not until after the drill was over and some of the young soldiers had gone home.

The Mills boys’ enlistment was set down in the district to Vashti, and some said it was because she was jealous of Little Darby being at the end of the company, with a new gun and such a fine uniform; for her hatred of Little Darby was well known; anyhow, their example was followed, and in a short time nearly all the young men in the district had enlisted.

At last one night a summons came for the company to assemble at the Cross-roads next day with arms and equipment.

Orders had come for them to report at once at the capital of the State for drill, before being sent into the field to repel a force which, report said, was already on the way to invade the State.

There was the greatest excitement and enthusiasm.

This was war!

And everyone was ready to meet it.

The day was given to taking an inventory of arms and equipment, and then there was a drill, and then the company was dismissed for the night, as many of them had families of whom they had not taken leave, and as they had not come that day prepared to leave, and were ordered to join the commander next day, prepared to march.

Little Darby escorted his mother home, taciturn as ever.

At first there was quite a company; but as they went their several ways to their home, at last Little Darby and his mother were left alone in the piney path, and made the last part of their way alone.

Now and then the old woman’s eyes were on him, and often his eyes were on her, but they did not speak; they just walked on in silence till they reached home.

It was but a poor, little house even when the wistaria vine covered it, wall and roof, and the bees hummed among its clusters of violet blossoms; but now the wistaria bush was only a tangle of twisted wires hung upon it, and the little weather-stained cabin looked bare and poor enough.

As the young fellow stood in the door looking out with the evening light upon him, his tall, straight figure filled it as if it had been a frame.

He stood perfectly motionless for some minutes, gazing across the gum thickets before him.

The sun had set only about a half-hour and the light was still lingering on the under edges of the clouds in the west and made a sort of glow in the little yard before him, as it did in front of the cabin on the other hill.

His eye first swept the well-known horizon, taking in the thickets below him and the heavy pines on either side where it was already dusk, and then rested on the little cabin opposite.

Whether he saw it or not, one could hardly have told, for his face wore a reminiscent look.

Figures moved backward and forward over there, came out and went in, without his look changing.

Even Vashti, faintly distinguishable in her gay dress, came out and passed down the hill alone, without his expression changing.

It was, perhaps, fifteen minutes later that he seemed to awake, and after a look over his shoulder stepped from the door into the yard.

His mother was cooking, and he strolled down the path across the little clearing and entered the pines.

Insensibly his pace quickened--he strode along the dusky path with as firm a step as if it were broad daylight.

A quarter of a mile below the path crossed the little stream and joined the path from Cove Mills’s place, which he used to take when he went to school.

He crossed at the old log and turned down the path through the little clearing there.

The next moment he stood face to face with Vashti Mills.

Whether he was surprised or not no one could have told, for he said not a word, and his face was in the shadow, though Vashti’s was toward the clearing and the light from the sky was on it.

Her hat was in her hand.

He stood still, but did not stand aside to let her pass, until she made an imperious little gesture and stepped as if she would have passed around him.

Then he stood aside.

But she did not appear in a hurry to avail herself of the freedom offered, she simply looked at him.

He took off his cap sheepishly enough, and said, “Good-evenin’.

” “Good-evenin’,” she said, and then, as the pause became embarrassing, she said, “Hear you’re agoin’ away to-morrer?

” “Yes--to-morrer mornin’.

” “When you’re acomin’ back?

” she asked, after a pause in which she had been twisting the pink string of her hat.

“Don’t know--may be never.

” Had he been looking at her he might have seen the change which his words brought to her face; she lifted her eyes to his face for the first time since the half defiant glance she had given him when they met, and they had a strange light in them, but at the moment he was looking at a bow on her dress which had been pulled loose.

He put out his hand and touched it and said: “You’re a-losin’ yer bow,” and as she found a pin and fastened it again, he added, “An’ I don’ know as anybody keers.

” An overpowering impulse changed her and forced her to say: “I don’t know as anybody does either; I know as I don’t. ” The look on his face smote her, and the spark died out of her eyes as he said, slowly: “No, I knowed you didn’!

I don’t know as anybody does, exceptin’ my old woman.

Maybe she will a little.

I jist wanted to tell you that I wouldn’t a’ fit them boys if they hadn’t a’ pushed me so hard, and I wan’t afeared to fight your old man, I jist wouldn’t--that’s all.

” What answer she might have made to this was prevented by him; for he suddenly held out his hand with something in it, saying, “Here.

” She instinctively reached out to take whatever it was, and he placed in her hand a book which she recognized as the little Testament which she had won as a prize at school and had given him when they went to school together.

It was the only book she had ever possessed as her very own.

“I brought this thinking as how maybe you might ‘a’-wanted--me to keep it,” he was going to say; but he checked himself and said: “might ‘a’-wanted it back.

” Before she could recover from the surprise of finding the book in her hand her own, he was gone.

The words only came to her clearly as his retreating footsteps grew fainter and his tall figure faded in the darkening light.

She made a hasty step or two after him, then checked herself and listened intently to see if he were not returning, and then, as only the katydids answered, threw herself flat on the ground and grovelled in the darkness.