zeke’s tent—a low and lop-sided patchwork of old blankets, strips of wagon-covering and stray pieces of cast-off clothing—was pitched on the high ground nearest to the regimental sentry line. at its back one could discern, by the dim light of the camp-fires, the lowering shadows of a forest. to the west a broad open slope descended gradually, its perspective marked to the vision this night by red points of light, diminishing in size as they receded toward the opposite hill’s dead wall of blackness. upon the crown of this wall, nearly two miles distant, zeke’s sharp eyes now discovered still other lights which had not been visible before.
“caught sight of any rebs yet since you been here, irish?” he asked, as the two stood halted before his tent.
“i saw some prisoners at what they call city point, th’ day before yesterday—the most starved and miserable divils ever i laid eyes on. that’s what i thought thin, but i know betther now. sure they were princes compared wid me this noight.”
“well, it’s dollars to doughnuts them are their lights over yonder on the ridge,” said zeke.
“you’ll see enough of ’em to-morrow to last a lifetime.”
linksy looked with interest upon the row of dim sparks which now crowned the whole long crest. he had brought his blanket, knapsack and rifle from the stacks outside company headquarters, and stood holding them as he gazed.
“faith,” he said at last, “if they’re no more desirous of seeing me than i am thim, there’s been a dale of throuble wasted in coming so far for both of us.”
zeke, for answer, chuckled audibly, and the sound of this was succeeded by a low, soft gurgling noise, as he lifted the flask to his mouth and threw back his head. then, after a satisfied “a-h!” he said:
“well, we’d better be turning in now,” and kicked aside the door-flap of his tent.
“and is it here we’re to sleep?” asked linsky, making out with difficulty the outlines of the little hut-like tent.
“i guess there won’t be much sleep about it, but this is our shebang. wait a minute.” he disappeared momentarily within the tent, entering it on all-fours, and emerged with an armful of sticks and paper. “now you can dump your things inside there. i’ll have a fire out here in the jerk of a lamb’s tail.”
the irishman crawled in in turn, and presently, by the light of the blaze his companion had started outside, was able to spread out his blanket in some sort, and even to roll himself up in it, without tumbling the whole edifice down. there was a scant scattering of straw upon which to lie, but underneath this he could feel the chill of the damp earth. he managed to drag his knapsack under his head to serve as a pillow, and then, shivering, resigned himself to fate.
the fire at his feet burned so briskly that soon he began to be pleasantly conscious of its warmth stealing through the soles of his thick, wet soles.
“i’m thinkin’ i’ll take off me boots,” he called out. “me feet are just perished wid the cold.”
“no. you couldn’t get ’em on again, p’r’aps, when we’re called, and i don’t want any such foolishness as that. when we get out, it’ll have to be at the drop of the hat—double quick. how many rounds of cartridges you got?”
“this bag of mine they gave me is that filled wid ’em the weight of it would tip an outside car.”
“can you shoot?”
“i don’t know if i can. i haven’t tried that same yet.”
a long silence ensued, zeke squatting on a cracker-box beside the fire, flask in hand, linsky concentrating his attention upon the warmth at the soles of his feet, and drowsily mixing up the galtee mountains with the fire-crowned hills of a strange, new world, upon one of which he lay. then all at once he was conscious that zeke had crept into the tent, and was lying curled close beside him, and that the fire outside had sunk to a mass of sparkless embers. he half rose from his recumbent posture before these things displaced his dreams; then, as he sank back again, and closed his eyes to settle once more into sleep, zeke spoke:
“don’t do that again! you got to lie still here, or you’ll bust the hull combination. if you want to turn over, tell me, and we’ll flop together—otherwise you’ll have the thing down on our heads.” there came another pause, and linsky almost believed himself to be asleep again. but zeke was wakeful.
“say, irish,” he began, “that country of yourn must be a pretty tough place, if this kind of thing strikes you fellows as an improvement on it.”
“sur,” said linsky, with sleepy dignity, “ther’s no other counthry on earth fit to buckle ireland’s shoe’s—no offence to you.”
“yes, you always give us that; but if it’s so fine a place, why in ——— don’t you stay there? what do you all pile over here for?”
“i came to america on business,” replied linsky, stiffly.
“business of luggin’ bricks up a ladder!”
“sur, i’m a solicitor’s clark.”
“how do you mean—‘clark?’ thought your name was linsky?”
“it’s what you call ‘clurk’—a lawyer’s clurk—and i’ll be a lawyer mesilf, in toime.”
“that’s worse still. there’s seven hundred times as many lawyers here already as anybody wants.”
“i had no intintion of stoppin’. my business was to foind a certain man, the heir to a great estate in ireland, and thin to returrun; but i didn’t foind my man—and—sure, it’s plain enough i didn’t returrun, ayether; and i’ll go to sleep now, i’m thinkin’.” zeke paid no attention to the hint.
“go on,” he said. “why didn’t you go back, irish?”
“it’s aisy enough,” linsky replied, with a sigh. “tin long weeks was i scurryin’ from wan ind of the land to the other, lukkin’ for this invisible divil of a hugh o’mahony”—zeke stretched out his feet here with a sudden movement, unnoted by the other—“makin’ inquiries here, foindin’ traces there, gettin’ laughed at somewhere else, till me heart was broke entoirely. ‘he’s in the army,’ says they. ‘whereabouts?’ says i. here, there, everwhere they sint me on a fool’s errand. plintv of places i came upon where he had been, but divil a wan where he was; and thin i gave it up and wint to new york to sail, and there i made some fri’nds, and wint out wid ’em and they spoke fair, and i drank wid ’em, and, faith, whin i woke i was a soldier, wid brass buttons on me and a gun; and that’s the truth of it—worse luck! and now i’ll sleep!”
“and this hugh what-d’ye-call-him—the fellow you was huntin’ after—where did he live before the war?”
“’twas up in new york state—a place they call tecumsy—he’d been a shoemaker there for years. i have here among me papers all they know about him and his family there. it wan’t much, but it makes his identity plain, and that’s the great thing.”
“and what d’ye reckon has become of him?”
“if ye ask me in me capacity as solicitor’s clark, i’d say that, for purposes of law, he’d be aloive till midsummer day next, and thin doy be process of statutory neglict, and niver know it as long as he lives; but if you ask me proivate opinion, he’s as dead as a mackerel; and, if he isn’t, he will be in good toime, and divil a ha’porth of shoe-leather will i waste more on him. and now good-noight to ye, sur!”
linsky fell to snoring before any reply came. zeke had meant to tell him that they were to rise at three and set out upon a venturesome vidette-post expedition together. he wondered now what it was that had prompted him to select this raw and undrilled irishman as his comrade in the enterprise which lay before him. without finding an answer, his mind wandered drowsily to another question—ought o’mahony to be told of the search for him or not? that vindictive and sullen hughie should be heir to anything seemed an injustice to all good fellows; but heir to what linsky called a great estate!—that was ridiculous! what would an ignorant cobbler like him do with an estate?
zeke was not quite clear in his mind as to what an “estate” was, but obviously it must be something much too good for o’mahony. and why, sure enough! only a fortnight before, while they were still at fort davis, this o’mahony had refused to mend his boot for him, even though his frost-bitten toes had pushed their way to the daylight between the sole and upper. zeke could feel the toes ache perceptibly as he thought on this affront. sleepy as he was, it grew apparent to him that o’mahony would probably never hear of that inheritance; and then he went off bodily into dream-land, and was the heir himself, and violently resisted o’mahony’s attempts to dispossess him, and—and then it was three o’clock, and the sentry was rolling him to and fro on the ground with his foot to wake him.
“sh-h! keep as still as you can,” zeke admonished the bewildered linsky, when he, too, had been roused to consciousness. “we mustn’t stir up the camp.”
“is it desertin’ ye are?” asked the irishman, rubbing his eyes and sitting upright.
“sh-h! you fool—no! feel around for your gun and knapsack and cap, and bring ’em out,” whispered zeke from the door of the tent.
linsky obeyed mechanically, groping in the utter darkness for what seemed to him an age, and then crawling awkwardly forth. as he rose to his feet, he could hardly distinguish his companion standing beside him. only faint, dusky pillars of smoke, reddish at the base, gray above, rising like slenderest palms to fade in the obscurity overhead, showed where the fires in camp had been. the clouded sky was black as ink.
“fill your pockets with cartridges,” he heard zeke whisper. “we’ll prob’ly have to scoot for our lives. we don’t want no extra load of knapsacks.”
it strained linsky’s other perceptions even more than it did his sight to follow his comrade in the tramp which now began. he stumbled over roots and bushes, sank knee-deep in swampy holes, ran full tilt into trees and fences, until it seemed to him they must have traveled miles, and he could hardly drag one foot after the other. the first shadowy glimmer of dawn fell upon them after they had accomplished a short but difficult descent from the ridge and stood at its foot, on the edge of a tiny, alder-fringed brook. the irishman sat down on a fallen log for a minute to rest; the while zeke, as fresh and cool as the morning itself, glanced critically about him.
“yes, here we are,” he said as last. “we can strike through here, get up the side hill, and sneak across by the hedge into the house afore it’s square daylight. come on, and no noise now!”
linsky took up his gun and followed once more in the other’s footsteps as well as might be. the growing light from the dull-gray east made it a simpler matter now to get along, but he still stumbled so often that zeke cast warning looks backward upon him more than once. at last they reached the top of the low hill which had confronted them.
it was near enough to daylight for linsky to see, at the distance of an eighth of a mile, a small, red farm-house, flanked by a larger barn. a tolerably straight line of thick hedge ran from close by where they stood, to within a stone’s throw of the house. all else was open pasture and meadow land.
“now bend your back,” said zeke. “we’ve got to crawl along up this side of the fence till we git opposite that house, and then, somehow or other, work across to it without bein’ seen.”
“who is it that would see us?”
“why, you blamed fool, them woods there”—pointing to a long strip of undergrowth woodland beyond the house—“are as thick with johnnies as a dog is with fleas.”
“thin that house is no place for any dacent man to be in,” said linsky; but despite this conviction he crouched down close behind zeke and followed him in the stealthy advance along the hedge. it was back-breaking work, but linsky had stalked partridges behind the ditch-walls of his native land, and was able to keep up with his guide without losing breath.
“faith, it’s loike walking down burrds,” he whispered ahead; “only that it’s two-legged partridges we’re after this toime.”
“how many legs have they got in ireland?” zeke muttered back over his shoulder.
“arrah, it’s milking-stools i had in moind,” returned linsky, readily, with a smile.
“sh-h! don’t talk. we’re close now.”
sure enough, the low roof and the top of the big square chimney of stone built outside the red clapboard end of the farmhouse were visible near at hand, across the hedge. zeke bade linsky sit down, and opening the big blade of a huge jackknife, began to cut a hole through the thorns. before this aperture had grown large enough to permit the passage of a man’s body, full daylight came. it was not a very brilliant affair, this full daylight, for the morning was overcast and gloomy, and the woods beyond the house, distant some two hundred yards, were half lost in mist. but there was light enough for linsky, idly peering through the bushes, to discern a grey-coated sentry pacing slowly along the edge of the woodland. he nudged zeke, and indicated the discovery by a gesture.
zeke nodded, after barely lifting his eyes, and then pursued his whittling.
“i saw him when we first come,” he said, calmly.
“and is it through this hole we’re goin’ out to be kilt?”
“you ask too many questions, irish,” responded zeke. he had finished his work and put away the knife. he rolled over now to a half-recumbent posture, folded his hands under his head, and asked:
“how much bounty did you git?”
“is it me? faith, i was merely a disbursing agent in the thransaction. they gave me a roll of paper notes, they said, but divil a wan could i foind when i come to mesilf and found mesilf a soldier. it’s thim new fri’nds o’ moine that got the bounty.”
“so you didn’t enlist to git the money?”
“sorra a word did i know about enlistin’, or bounty, or anything else, for four-and-twenty hours afther the mischief was done. is it money that ’ud recompinse a man for sittin’ here in the mud, waitin’ to be blown to bits by a whole plantation full of soldiers, as i am here, god help me? is it money you say? faith, i’ve enough to take me back to cork twice over. what more do i want? and i offered the half of it to the captain, or gineral, or whatever he was, to lave me go, when i found what i’d done; but he wouldn’t hearken to me.”
zeke rolled over to take a glance through the hedge.
“tell me some more about that fellow you were tryin’ to find,” he said, with his gaze fixed on the distant sentry. “what’ll happen now that you haven’t found him?”
“if he remains unknown until midsummer-day next, the estate goes to some distant cousins who live convanient to it.”
“and he can’t touch it after that, s’posin’ he should turn up?”
“the law of adverse possession is twinty years, and only five of ’em have passed. no; he’d have a claim these fifteen years yet. but rest aisy. he’ll never be heard of.”
“and you wrote and told ’em in ireland that he couldn’t be found?”
“that i did—or—wait now! what i wrote was that he was in the army, and i was afther searching for him there. sure, whin i got to new york, what with the fri’nds and the drink and—and this foine soldiering of moine, i niver wrote at all. it’s god’s mercy i didn’t lose me papers on top of it all, or it would be if i was likely ever to git out of this aloive.”
zeke lay silent and motionless for a time, watching the prospect through this hole in the hedge.
“hungry, irish?” he asked at last, with laconic abruptness.
“i’ve a twist on me like the county kerry in a famine year.”
“well, then, double yourself up and follow me when i give the word. i’ll bet there’s something to eat in that house. give me your gun. we’ll put them through first. that’s it. now, then, when that fellow’s on t’other side of the house. now!”
with lizard-like swiftness, zeke made his way through the aperture, and, bending almost double, darted across the wet sward toward the house.
linsky followed him, doubting not that the adventure led to certain death, but hoping that there would be breakfast first.
