the first one to emerge from the barn was hi tuckerman. he started to make for the house, but, when he caught sight of our group, came running toward us at the top of his speed, uttering incoherent shouts as he advanced, and waving his arms excitedly. it was apparent that something out of the ordinary had happened.
we were but little the wiser as to this something, when hi had come to a halt before us, and was pouring out a volley of explanations, accompanied by earnest grimaces and strenuous gestures. even marcellus could make next to nothing of what he was trying to convey; but aunt em, strangely enough, seemed to understand him. still slightly trembling, and with a little occasional catch in her breath, she bent an intent scrutiny upon hi, and nodded comprehendingly from time to time, with encouraging exclamations, “he did, eh!”
“is that so?” and “i expected as much.” listening and watching, i formed the uncharitable conviction that she did not really understand hi at all, but was only pretending to do so in order further to harrow serena’s feelings.
doubtless i was wrong, for presently she turned, with an effort, to her sister-in-law, and remarked, “p’rhaps you don’t quite follow what he’s say-in’?”
“not a word!” said serena, eagerly. “tell me, please, emmeline!”
aunt em seemed to hesitate. “he was shot through the mouth at gaines’s mills, you know—that’s right near cold harbor and—the wilderness,” she said, obviously making talk.
“that isn’t what he’s saying,” broke in serena. “what is it, emmeline?”
“well,” rejoined the other, after an instant’s pause, “if you want to know—he says that it ain’t alvy at all that they’ve got there in the barn.”
serena turned swiftly, so that we could not see her face.
“he says it’s some strange man,” continued em, “a yaller-headed man, all packed an’ stuffed with charcoal, so’t his own mother wouldn’t know him. who it is nobody knows, but it ain’t alvy.”
“they’re a pack of robbers ’n’ swindlers!” cried old arphaxed, shaking his long gray beard with wrath.
he had come up without our noticing his approach, so rapt had been our absorption in the strange discovery reported by hi tuckerman. behind him straggled the boys and the hired men, whom si hummaston had scurried across from the house to join. no one said anything now, but tacitly deferred to the old man’s principal right to speak. it was a relief to hear that terrible silence of his broken at all.
“they ought to all be hung!” he cried, in a voice to which the excess of passion over physical strength gave a melancholy quaver. “i paid ’em what they asked—they took a hundred dollars o’ my money—an’ they ain’t sent me him at all! there i went, at my age, all through the wilderness, almost clear to cold harbor, an’ that, too, gittin’ up from a sick bed in washington, and then huntin’ for the box at new york an’ albany, an’ all the way back, an’ holdin’ a funeral over it only this very day—an’ here it ain’t him at all! i’ll have the law on ‘em though, if it costs the last cent i’ve got in the world!”
poor old man! these weeks of crushing grief and strain had fairly broken him down. we listened to his fierce outpourings with sympathetic silence, almost thankful that he had left strength and vitality enough still to get angry and shout. he had been always a hard and gusty man; we felt by instinct, i suppose, that his best chance of weathering this terrible month of calamity was to batter his way furiously through it, in a rage with everything and everybody.
“if there’s any justice in the land,” put in si hummaston, “you’d ought to get your hundred dollars back. i shouldn’t wonder if you could, too, if you sued ’em afore a jestice that was a friend of yours.”
“why, the man’s a fool!” burst forth arphaxed, turning toward him with a snort. “i don’t want the hundred dollars—i wouldn’t’a’ begrudged a thousand—if only they’d dealt honestly by me. i paid ’em their own figure, without beatin’ ’em down a penny. if it’d be’n double, i’d ’a’ paid it. what i wanted was my boy! it ain’t so much their cheatin’ me i mind, either, if it ’d be’n about anything else. but to think of alvy—my boy—after all the trouble i took, an’ the journey, an’ my sickness there among strangers—to think that after it all he’s buried down there, no one knows where, p’raps in some trench with private soldiers, shovelled in anyhow—oh-h! they ought to be hung!”
the two women had stood motionless, with their gaze on the grass; aunt em lifted her head at this.
“if a place is good enough for private soldiers to be buried in,” she said, vehemently, “it’s good enough for the best man in the army. on resurrection day, do you think them with shoulder-straps ’ll be called fust an’ given all the front places? i reckon the men that carried a musket are every whit as good, there in the trench, as them that wore swords. they gave their lives as much as the others did, an’ the best man that ever stepped couldn’t do no more.”
old arphaxed bent upon her a long look, which had in it much surprise and some elements of menace. reflection seemed, however, to make him think better of an attack on aunt em. he went on, instead, with rambling exclamations to his auditors at large.
“makin’ me the butt of the whole county!” he cried. “there was that funeral to-day—with a parade an’ a choir of music an’ so on: an’ now it’ll come out in the papers that it wasn’t alvy at all i brought back with me, but only some perfect stranger—by what you can make out from his clothes, not even an officer at all. i tell you the war’s a jedgment on this country for its wickedness, for its cheatin’ an’ robbin’ of honest men! they wa’n’t no sense in that battle at cold harbor anyway—everybody admits that! it was murder an’ massacre in cold blood—fifty thousand men mowed down, an’ nothin’ gained by it! an’ then not even to git my boy’s dead body back! i say hangin’s too good for ’em!”
“yes, father,” said myron, soothingly; “but do you stick to what you said about the—the box? wouldn’t it look better—”
“no!” shouted arphaxed, with emphasis. “let dana do what i told him—take it down this very night to the poor-master, an’ let him bury it where he likes. it’s no affair of mine. i wash my hands of it. there won’t be no funeral held here!”
it was then that serena spoke. strangely enough, old arphaxed had not seemed to notice her presence in our group, and his jaw visibly dropped as he beheld her now standing before him. he made a gesture signifying his disturbance at finding her among his hearers, and would have spoken, but she held up her hand.
“yes, i heard it all,” she said, in answer to his deprecatory movement. “i am glad i did. it has given me time to get over the shock of learning—our mistake—and it gives me the chance now to say something which i—i feel keenly. the poor man you have brought home was, you say, a private soldier. well, isn’t this a good time to remember that there was a private soldier who went out from this farm—belonging right to this family—and who, as a private, laid down his life as nobly as general sedgwick or general wadsworth, or even our dear alva, or any one else? i never met emmeline’s husband, but alva liked him, and spoke to me often of him. men who fall in the ranks don’t get identified, or brought home, but they deserve funerals as much as the others—just as much. now, this is my idea: let us feel that the mistake which has brought this poor stranger to us is god’s way of giving us a chance to remember and do honor to abel jones. let him be buried in the family lot up yonder, where we had thought to lay alva, and let us do it reverently, in the name of emmeline’s husband, and of all others who have fought and died for our country, and with sympathy in our hearts for the women who, somewhere in the north, are mourning, just as we mourn here, for the stranger there in the red barn.”
arphaxed had watched her intently. he nodded now, and blinked at the moisture gathering in his old eyes. “i could e’en a’most ’a’ thought it was alvy talkin’,” was what he said. then he turned abruptly, but we all knew, without further words, that what serena had suggested was to be done.
the men-folk, wondering doubtless much among themselves, moved slowly off toward the house or the cow-barns, leaving the two women alone. a minute of silence passed before we saw serena creep gently up to aunt em’s side, and lay the thin white hand again upon her shoulder. this time it was not shaken off, but stretched itself forward, little by little, until its palm rested against aunt em’s further cheek. we heard the tin-pail fall resonantly against the stones under the rail-fence, and there was a confused movement as if the two women were somehow melting into one.
“come on, sid!” said marcellus jones to me; “let’s start them cows along. if there’s anything i hate to see it’s women cryin’ on each other’s necks.”
