One night in autumn a few men were gathered about a fire on the slope
of a hill. They belonged to a small detachment of Confederate forces and
were awaiting orders to march. Their gray uniforms were worn beyond the
point of shabbiness. One of the men was heating something in a tin cup
over the embers. Two were lying at full length a little distance away,
while a fourth was trying to decipher a letter and had drawn close to
the light. He had unfastened his collar and a good bit of his flannel
shirt front.
"What's that you got around your neck, Ned?" asked one of the men lying
in the obscurity.
Ned--or Edmond--mechanically fastened another button of his shirt and
did not reply. He went on reading his letter.
"Is it your sweet heart's picture?"
"'Taint no gal's picture," offered the man at the fire. He had removed
his tin cup and was engaged in stirring its grimy contents with a small
stick. "That's a charm; some kind of hoodoo business that one o' them
priests gave him to keep him out o' trouble. I know them Cath'lics.
That's how come Frenchy got permoted an never got a scratch sence he's
been in the ranks. Hey, French! aint I right?" Edmond looked up absently
from his letter.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Aint that a charm you got round your neck?"
"It must be, Nick," returned Edmond with a smile. "I don't know how I
could have gone through this year and a half without it."
The letter had made Edmond heart sick and home sick. He stretched
himself on his back and looked straight up at the blinking stars. But he
was not thinking of them nor of anything but a certain spring day when
the bees were humming in the clematis; when a girl was saying good bye
to him. He could see her as she unclasped from her neck the locket
which she fastened about his own. It was an old fashioned golden locket
bearing miniatures of her father and mother with their names and the
date of their marriage. It was her most precious earthly possession.
Edmond could feel again the folds of the girl's soft white gown, and see
the droop of the angel-sleeves as she circled her fair arms about his
neck. Her sweet face, appealing, pathetic, tormented by the pain of
parting, appeared before him as vividly as life. He turned over, burying
his face in his arm and there he lay, still and motionless.
The profound and treacherous night with its silence and semblance of
peace settled upon the camp. He dreamed that the fair Octavie
brought him a letter. He had no chair to offer her and was pained and
embarrassed at the condition of his garments. He was ashamed of the poor
food which comprised the dinner at which he begged her to join them.