"Yer a powerful peart sort of a gal, an' ez purty ez a fawn.yer mammy kin git 'long without the medicine a little while, an'---"He did not finish the sentence, for before his hand could touch her Rachel's whip cut a deep wale across his face, and then it fell so savagely upon the mare's flank that the high-spirited animal sprung forward as if shot from a catapult, and was a hundred yards away before the rascals really comprehended what had happened.
Onward sped the mettled brute, so maddened by the first cruel blow she had ever received that she refused to obey the rein, but made her own way by and through such objects as she encountered.When she at last calmed down the road was clear and lonely, and Rachel began searching for indications of a favorable point of approach to the river, that hinted at a bridge or a ford.While engaged in this she heard voices approaching.A moment's listening to teh mingling of tones convinced her that it was another crowd of stragglers, and she obeyed her first impulse, which was to leap her horse over a low stone wall to her right.Taking her head again, the mare did not stop until she galloped down to the water's edge.
"I'll accept this as lucky," said Rachel to herself."The ancients trusted more to their horses' instincts than their own perceptions in times of danger, and I'll do the same.I'll cross here."She urged the mare into the water.The beast picked her way among the boulders on the bottom successfully for a few minutes.The water rose to Rachel's feet, but that seemed its greatest depth, and in a few more yards she would gain the opposite bank, when suddenly the mare stepped upon a slippery steep, her feet went from under her instantly, and steed and rider rolled in the sweeping flood of ice-cold water.Rachel's first thought was that she should surely drown, but hope came back as she caught a limb swinging from a tree on the bank.With this she held her head above water until she could collect herself a little, and then with great difficulty pulled herself up the muddy, slippery bank.The weight of her soaked clothes added greatly to the difficulty and the fatigue, and she lay for some little time prone upon her face across the furrows of a cotton field, before she could stand erect.At last she was able to stand up, and she relieved herself somewhat by taking off her calico riding skirt and wringing the water from it.Her mare had also gained the bank near the same point she had, and stood looking at her with a world of wonder at the whole night's experience in her great brown eyes.
"Poor thing," said Rachel sympathetically."This is only the beginning.Heaven knows what we won't have to go through with before the sun rises."She tried to mount, but her watery garments were too much for her agility, and with the wet skirts fettering her limbs she began toiling painfully over the spongy, plowed ground, in search of a stump or a rock.She thought she saw many around her, but on approaching one after another found they were only large cotton plants, with a boll or two of ungathered cotton on them, which aided the darkness in giving them their deceptive appearance.She prevented herself from traveling in a circle, by remembering this aptitude of benighted travelers, and keeping her eye steadily fixed on a distant camp-fire.When she at last came to the edge of the field she had to lean against the fence for some minutes before she could recover from her fatigue sufficiently to climb upon it.While she sat for a minute there she heard some cocks, at a neighboring farm-house, crow the turn of night.
"It is midnight," she said feverishly, "and I have only begun the journey.Now let every nerve and muscle do its utmost."She rode along the fence until she came to an opening which led into what appeared in the darkness to be another cotton field, but proved to be a worn-out one, long ago abandoned to the rank-growing briars, which clung to and tore her skirts, and seamed the mare's delicate skin with bleeding furrows.The flinching brute pressed onward, in response to her mistress's encouragement, but the progress was grievously slow.
Presently Rachel began to see moving figures a little way ahead of her, and hear voices in command.She eralized that she was approaching the forces moving to the attack on the Union right.
There was something grotesque, weird, even frightful in the sounds and the aspect of the moving masses and figures, but she at last made out that they were batteries, regiments and mounted men.She decided that her best course was to mingle with and move along with them, until she could get a chance to ride away in advance.For hours that seemed weeks she remained entangled in the slow-moving mass, whose bewildering vagaries of motion were as trying to the endurance of her steed as they were exasperating to her own impatience.
Occasionally she caught glimpses of the Union camp-fires in the distance, that, low and smoldering, told of the waning night, and she would look anxiously over her left shoulder for a hint of the coming of the dreaded dawn.Her mare terrified her with symptoms of giving out.
At last she saw an unmistakable silvery break in the eastern clouds.Half-frantic she broke suddenly out of the throng by an abrupt turn to the right, and lashing her mare savagely, galloped where a graying in the dense darkness showed an opening between two cedar thickets, that led to the picket-fires, half a mile away.
The mare's hoofs beat sonorously on the level limestone floor, which there frequently rises through the shallow soil and starves out the cedar.
