What a picture!
There the nation was concentrating its power. Behind him that nation was
patching up its one great quarrel, and now a gray phantom stalked out of
the past to the music of drum and fife, and Crittenden turned sharply to
see a little body of men, in queer uniforms, marching through a camp of
regulars toward him. They were old boys, and they went rather slowly,
but they stepped jauntily and, in their natty old-fashioned caps and old
gray jackets pointed into a V-shape behind, they looked jaunty in spite
of their years. Not a soldier but paused to look at these men in gray,
who marched thus proudly through such a stronghold of blue, and were not
ashamed. Not a man joked or laughed or smiled, for all knew that they
were old Confederates in butter-nut, and once fighting-men indeed. All
knew that these men had fought battles that made scouts and Indian
skirmishes and city riots and, perhaps, any battles in store for them
with Spain but play by contrast for the tin soldier, upon whom the
regular smiles with such mild contempt; that this thin column had seen
twice the full muster of the seven thousand strong encamped there melt
away upon that very battlefield in a single day. And so the little
remnant of gray marched through an atmosphere of profound respect, and
on through a mist of memories to the rocky little point where the
Federal Virginian Thomas--"The Rock of Chickamauga"--stood against
seventeen fierce assaults of hill-swarming demons in butter-nut, whose
desperate valour has hardly a parallel on earth, unless it then and
there found its counterpart in the desperate courage of the brothers in
name and race whose lives they sought that day. They were bound to a
patriotic love-feast with their old enemies in blue--these men in
gray--to hold it on the hill around the four bronze statues that
Crittenden's State was putting up to her sons who fought on one or the
other side on that one battlefield, and Crittenden felt a clutch at his
heart and his eyes filled when the tattered old flag of the stars and
bars trembled toward him. Under its folds rode the spirit of gallant
fraternity--a little, old man with a grizzled beard and with stars on
his shoulders, his hands folded on the pommel of his saddle, his eyes
lifted dreamily upward--they called him the "bee-hunter," from that
habit of his in the old war--his father's old comrade, little Jerry
Carter. That was the man Crittenden had come South to see. Behind came a
carriage, in which sat a woman in widow's weeds and a tall girl in gray.
He did not need to look again to see that it was Judith, and,
motionless, he stood where he was throughout the ceremony, until he saw
the girl lift her hand and the veil fall away from the bronze symbols of
the soldier that was in her fathers and in his--stood resolutely still
until the gray figure disappeared and the veterans, blue and gray
intermingled, marched away. The little General was the last to leave,
and he rode slowly, as if overcome with memories. Crittenden took off
his hat and, while he hesitated, hardly knowing whether to make himself
known or not, the little man caught sight of him and stopped short.