Flags in the Dust Read Free

roses of Death, incalculable and sudden as meteors in General Pope’s troubled military sky, thrusting upon him like an unwilling garment that notoriety which his skill as a soldier could never have won him. And still in a spirit of pure fun: neither Jeb Stuart nor Bayard Sartoris, as their actions clearly showed, had any political convictions involved at all.
    Aunt Jenny told the story first shortly after she came to them. It was Christmas time and they sat before a hickory fire in the rebuilt library—Aunt Jenny with her sad resolute face and John Sartoris, bearded and hawklike, and his three childrenand a guest: a Scottish engineer whom John Sartoris had met in Mexico in ’45 and who was now helping him to build his railway.
    Work on the railroad had ceased for the holiday season and John Sartoris and his engineer had ridden in at dusk from the suspended railhead in the hills to the north, and they now sat after supper in the firelight. The sun had set ruddily, leaving the air brittle as thin glass with frost, and presently Joby came in with an armful of firewood. He put a fresh billet on the fire, and in the dry air the flames crackled and snapped, popping in fading embers outward upon the hearth.
    “Chris’mus!” Joby exclaimed with the grave and simple pleasure of his race, prodding at the blazing logs with the Yankee musket-barrel which stood in the chimney corner until sparks swirled upward into the dark maw of the chimney like wild golden veils, “year dat, chilluns?” John Sartoris’ eldest daughter was twenty-two and would be married in June, Bayard was twenty, and the younger girl seventeen; and so Aunt Jenny for all her widowhood was one of the chillen too, to Joby. Then he replaced the musket-barrel in its niche and fired a long pine sliver at the hearth in order to light the candles. But Aunt Jenny stayed him, and he was gone—a shambling figure in an old formal coat too large for him, stooped and gray with age; and Aunt Jenny, speaking always of Jeb Stuart as Mister Stuart, told her story.
    It had to do with an April evening, and coffee. Or the lack of it, rather; and Stuart’s military family sat in scented darkness beneath a new moon, talking of ladies and dead pleasures and thinking of home. Away in the darkness horses moved invisibly with restful sounds, and bivouac fires fell to glowing points like spent fireflies, and somewhere neither near nor far the General’s body servant touched a guitar in lingering random chords. Thus they sat in the poignance of spring and youth’simmemorial sadness, forgetting travail and glory, remembering instead other Virginian evenings with fiddles above the myriad candles and slender grave measures picked out with light laughter and lighter feet, thinking
When will this be again? Shall I make one?
until they had talked themselves into a state of savage nostalgia and words grew shorter and shorter and less and less frequent. Then the General roused himself and brought them back by speaking of coffee, or its lack.
    This talk of coffee began to end a short time later with a ride along midnight roads and then through woods black as pitch, where horses went at a walk and riders rode with sabre or musket at arm’s length before them lest they be swept from saddle by invisible boughs, and continued until the forest thinned with dawn-ghosts and the party of twenty was well within the Federal lines. Then dawn accomplished itself yet more and all efforts toward concealment were discarded and they galloped again and crashed through astonished picket-parties returning placidly to camp, and fatigue parties setting forth with picks and axes and shovels in the golden sunrise, and swept yelling up the knoll where General Pope and his staff sat at breakfast al fresco.
    Two men captured a fat staff-major, others pursued the fleeing breakfasters for a short distance into the sanctuary of the woods, but most of them rushed on to the General’s private commissary tent and emerged