Flags in the Dust Read Online Free

scattered reports, crashed focalized again, and the noise to the right swelled nearer. “Let go, Allan,” Stuart said. “He is my friend.”
    But the other clung on. “It is too late,” he said. “Sartoris can only be killed: you would be captured.”
    “Forward, Sir, I beg,” the captive major added. “What is one man, to a paladin out of romance?”
    “Think of Lee, for God’s sake, General!” the aide implored. “Forward!” he shouted to the troop, spurring his own mount and dragging the General’s onward as a body of Federal horse broke from the woods behind them.
    “And so,” Aunt Jenny finished, “Mister Stuart went on and Bayard rode back after those anchovies, with all Pope’s army shooting at him. He rode yelling ‘Yaaaiiiiih, Yaaaiiiih, come on, boys!’ right up the knoll and jumped his horse over the breakfast table and rode it into the wrecked commissary tent, and a cook who was hidden under the mess stuck his arm out and shot Bayard in the back with a derringer.
    “Mister Stuart fought his way out and got back home without losing but two men. He always spoke well of Bayard. He said he was a good officer and a fine cavalryman, but that he was too reckless.”
    They sat quietly for a time, in the firelight. The flames leaped and popped on the hearth and sparks soared in wild swirling plumes up the chimney, and Bayard Sartoris’ brief career swept like a shooting star across the dark plain of their mutual remembering and suffering, lighting it with a transient glare like a soundless thunder-clap, leaving a sort of radiance when it died. The guest, the Scottish engineer, had sat quietly, listening. After a time he spoke.
    “When he rode back, he was no actually cer-rtain there wer-re anchovies, was he?”
    “The Yankee major said there were,” Aunt Jenny replied.
    “Ay.” The Scotsman pondered again. “And did Muster-r Stuart retur-rn next day, as he said in’s note?”
    “He went back that afternoon,” Aunt Jenny answered,“looking for Bayard.” Ashes soft as rosy feathersshaled glowing onto the hearth, and faded to the softest gray. John Sartoris leaned forward into the firelight and punched at the blazing logs with the Yankee musket-barrel.
    “That was the god-damdest army the world ever saw, I reckon,” he said.
    “Yes,” Aunt Jenny agreed. “And Bayard was the god-damdest man in it.”
    “Yes,” John Sartoris admitted soberly, “Bayard was wild.” The Scotsman spoke again.
    “This Musterr Stuart, who said your brother was reckless: Who was he?”
    “He was the cavalry general Jeb Stuart,” Aunt Jenny answered. She brooded for a while upon the fire; her pale indomitable face held for a moment a tranquil tenderness. “He had a strange sense of humor,” she said. “Nothing ever seemed quite so diverting to him as General Pope in his night-shirt.” She dreamed once more on some far away place beyond the rosy battlements of the embers. “Poor man,” she said. Then she said quietly: “I danced a valse with him in Baltimore in ’58,” and her voice was proud and still as banners in the dust.
    ……. But the door was closed now, and what light passed through the colored panes was richly solemn. To his left was his grandsons’ room, the room in which his grandson’s wife and her child had died last October. He stood beside this door for a moment, then he opened it quietly. The blinds were closed and the room had that breathless tranquillity of unoccupation, and he closed the door and tramped on with that heavy-tooted obliviousness of the deaf and entered his own bedroom and crashed the door behind him, as was his way of shutting doors.
    He sat down and removed his shoes, the shoes that weremade to his measure twice a year by a Saint Louis house, then he rose and went in his stockings to the window and looked down upon his saddle-mare tethered to a mulberry tree in the back yard and a negro lad lean as a hound, richly static beside it. From the kitchen, invisible