HE supple, lithe figure of the girl, dark-haired, dark-eyed, head thrown back defiantly, stood out in relief against the lattice where the honey-suckle climbed riotously to the piazza above. The lieutenant in blue who strode up to the great house with clanking spurs thought her a charming figure, proud as a Greek goddess and full of fire to the finger-tips. The audacity of her rage touched his imagination.
"Your ruffians may trample down our co'n, they may burn up our fences, they may eat right spang up the meat in our smoke-house, but I won't have them abuse the niggers on the place," the young rebel was telling Capt. Charles Berry, Company D, Seventeenth Ohio Volunteers, with as much assurance as if she had at hand a regiment to quell these hated turbulent "Yanks."
"If you can point out the man"—began the captain humbly.
The girl stamped her little foot impatiently.
"How can I tell the man? Find out who he is!" she stormed.
"Dey-all am the mos' shif'les', ornery, no-'caount Linkum Erpublican po' white trash I evah did see. 'Pears like de enjurin' time they-all up to some meanness. I yent have no truck with them. Yo' heah me?" added Aunt Becky, who stood behind her young mistress with arms akimbo, the flame of battle shining in her dusky face and the shrill voice carrying half a mile.
The captain's merry Irish eyes twinkled.
"Yes, I hear you, Mammy. Your voice is so soft and low it hardly reaches me, but I manage to get the drift of your remarks. This unsolicited testimonial as to the character of my men"—
"G'lang! Hit p'intedly does jes' natchelly give me the misery tuh see sech like romancin' roun'. Hit air a plumb scan'lous sight ter see."
"That will do, Aunt Becky," interrupted Miss Jimmie Tolliver. "You may go back to the kitchen. I reckon I c'n make out to say what needs be said!"
"I guess you can, Miss," agreed the captain admiringly, with a swift look at Lieutenant Allyn out of the tail of his eye. "Shouldn't wonder if it would do you a heap of good to free your mind about us for once. Now"—he stopped a moment to listen to a whispered message from an orderly—"I'm unfortunately called away on particular business, but if you have anything you'd like to say, you just speak it right out in meeting to this officer and he'll attend to it. Miss Tolliver, this is Lieut. Fordyce Allyn. Lieutenant Allyn—Miss Tolliver. Don't you be afraid of hurting his feelings, Miss Tolliver. He's only a Yank."
And Captain Berry went away chuckling at the situation in which he had contrived to leave his subordinate. It appeared that Miss Tolliver had a good deal to say that she had been saving up for the first Union officer that chanced to cross her path, and Fordyce Allyn got the benefit of it. He judged she could not be more than eighteen, but she was a very Katherine the Shrew in a modern way. He was told things about himself and his motives it is not often given a man to hear from such adorable lips at first acquaintance. Curiously enough, he found the situation more than tolerable. The angry, scornful eyes, the bare full pulsing throat, the great mass of blue-black hair, fascinated the young Federal, and he thought it quite natural that this young Arkansas beauty should think unkindly of the men that were fighting her kinsmen and destroying their property.
Her anger was stirred at the patient admiration of this enemy of the cause she loved, even though he were a handsome boyish young fellow with waving chestnut hair and a manner of almost jaunty cheerfulness—perhaps the more on that account. How dared he take the liberty to admire her! What arrant insolence! Presently there slipped out the worst anathema in her vocabulary.
"A Black Republican! A Yankee Abolitionist!"
Fordyce Allyn smiled. "You're wrong again, Miss Tolliver. As it happens, I've always been a Democrat—that is, before the war began, and in those days I was certainly not an abolitionist."
"At all events you are now. Yo' cayn't deny it. Why are yo' fighting to rob us of our property, then?" she retorted, very erect, very haughty, a fair, slim representative of the daughters of the race of cavaliers so soon to be extinct.
He said something about the principles that animated the North.
"Principles!" she echoed scornfully. "What sort of principle is it that incites those men to trample down our co'n and our cotton?" She swept round a hand to include the Federal camp. "I reckon it was principle that made them beat up old Dan because be w'udn't bring them whiskey."
The girl waited for no answer, but turning swiftly on her heel, marched with chin in air up the steps, through the "gallery," and into the house.