What we saw was the leather-curtained spring-wagon and its little striped-legged mules. The old negro in charge of them bowed gravely to me and smiled affectionately upon Ferry. About an hour later Gholson appeared. He took such hurried pains to explain his coming that any fool could have seen the real reason. The brigade surgeon had warned him--Oh! had I heard?--Oh! from Ned Ferry, yes. The cause of his threatened breakdown, he said, was the perpetual and fearful grind of work into which of late he had--fallen.
"Did the doctor say 'fallen'?" I shrewdly asked.
"No, the doctor said 'plunged,' but--did Ned Fer'--who put that into your head?"
"Nobody; some fall, you know, some plunge." I did not ask the cause of the plunge; the two little mules told me that. He would never have come, Gholson hurried on to say, had not Major Harper kindly suggested that a Sabbath spent with certain four ladies would be a timely preventive.
"What!" I cried, "are they here t'--too? Why,--where's their carryall? 'Tisn't in the stable; I've looked!"
"No, it was here, but yesterday, when the fighting threatened to be heavy, it was sent to the front. Smith, I didn't know Charlie Tolliver was here!"
I believed him. But I saw he was not in search of a preventive. Ah, no! he was ill of that old, old malady which more than any other abhors a preventive. Waking in the summer dawn and finding Ned Ferry risen and vanished hitherward, a rival's instinct had moved him to follow, as the seeker for wild honey follows the bee. He had come not for the cure of his honey-sickness, but for more--more--more--all he could find--of the honey. "Smith," he said, with a painful screw of his features, "I'm mightily troubled about Ned Ferry!"
"Yes," I dishonestly responded, "his polished irreligion--"
"Oh, no! No," he groaned, "it isn't that so much just now, though I know that to a true religionist like you the society of such a mere romanticist--"
The cause of our interruption was Camille Harper. We had been pacing the side veranda and she came out upon it with an unconscious song on her lips, and on one finger a tiny basket.
Her gentle irruption found me standing almost on the spot where she had stood two evenings before and said good-bye to me. From this point a path led to the rear of the house, where within a light paling fence bloomed a garden. She gave us a blithe good-morning as she passed, descended the two or three side steps, and tripped toward the garden gate, a wee affair which she might have lifted off its hinges with one thumb. I saw her try its latch two or three times and then turn back discomfited because the loose frame had sagged a trifle and needed to be raised half an inch. I did not understand the helplessness of girls as well then as I do now; I ran and opened the gate; and when I shut it again she and I were alone inside.