University of Virginia Library

36. CHAPTER XXXVI.
ANDERSONVILLE PRISONERS.

THIS seems to be one of the worst cases we have
had. I doubt if his mind will survive the
horrors he has endured, even if his body
does. Poor fellow! his mother would not recognize him
now.”

This was what the physician at Annapolis said to Mrs.
Simms of a miserable, emaciated skeleton, which had
come up from Andersonville with the last arrival of prisoners.

While we in the mountains of Tennessee were tracing
the wanderings of Will Mather and Captain Carleton,
Mrs. Simms and Annie had stood untiringly at their
posts beside the sick and dying soldiers who had learned
to bless and watch for the stern widow, and to love and
worship the beautiful Annie Graham. And well had
she earned such appreciation, for she had been most
faithful to the wretched ones committed to her care,—
faithful both to body and soul, and in the better world
she knew there was waiting to welcome her more than
one, whose darkened mind she had led to the fountain
of all light. And Annie had made a vow to stay till
from that foul Southern prison, where 28,000 men had
died, there came to her the one for whom she always
looked so anxiously when new arrivals came, her blue
eyes running rapidly over each wasted form, and then
filling with tears when the scrutiny was found to be in
vain.

James Carleton had never been heard from since that
letter sent to her so long ago, and hope had died out of
Annie's heart, when at last, with Widow Simms, she
stood by the cot where lay the insensible form of which
the physician had spoken so discouragingly.

It was the figure of a young man, who must once have
been finely formed, with handsome face and hair and
eyes. The latter were closed now, and only the lids
moved with a convulsive motion, as Annie bent over
him. The dark hair, matted and coarse and filthy, had
curled in rings about the bony forehead, but had been
cut away when the bath was given, and the closely
shorn head was like many other heads which Annie
Graham's hands had touched, gently, tenderly, as they
now moved over this one, trying to infuse some life into
the breathing skeleton. He was to be her charge,—he

was in her division and Mrs. Simms' keen grey eyes
scanned Annie curiously as she bent over the poor fellow.

He was helpless as an infant, and Annie nursed him
much as she would have nursed a baby whose life hung
on a thread. He had been there four days, and only a
faint, moaning sound had given token of life or consciousness.
But at the close of the fourth day, as Annie sat
chafing the pulseless fingers where the grey skin hung so
loosely, the eyes opened for a moment and were fixed
upon her face. There was no consciousness in them,—
no recognition of her presence, nothing but the strained,
hungry, despairing look Annie had seen in the eyes of
somany of our prisoners, and which to a greater or
less degree was peculiar to them all. Annie saw this
look, and then underneath it all she saw something
more,—what it was she could not tell, but it brought
back to her those moonlight nights upon the beach at
New London, and that other night of more recent date,
when she sat with Jimmie Carleton beneath the Rockland
sky and heard his passionate words of love, and
saw his soft, black eyes kindle with earnestness and then
grow sad and sorrowful with disappointment. There
was no kindling in them now,—no ardent passion or heat
of love,—but a certain softness and brightness, and even
sauciness, lingered still and told Annie at last who it was.

“Oh, merciful Father! it is Jimmie!” she said, and unmindful
of any who might be looking on, she bent down
and kissed the sunken cheeks from which the flesh was
gone.

She had expected him so long, and grown so weary
and hopeless with expectations unfulfilled, that she could
scarcely believe it now, or realize that the half dead
wretch before her was once the lively, humorous, teasing

Jimmie Carleton. How she pitied him, and how her
heart throbbed as she thought of the suffering he must
have endured ere he reached this state of apparent imbecility.
Then, as she remembered what the physician
said about his mind, she dropped upon her knees, and
clasping her hands over her face, prayed earnestly that
God would remove the darkness and wholly restore the
man whom she loved so dearly.

“Do you think he will die?” she asked Mrs. Simms,
who had come for a moment to her side.

“You know him, then. I was wondering that an old
woman like me should see clearer than you. I mistrusted
from the first,” Mrs. Simms answered, and then to
Annie's eager questioning she replied, “It will be almost
a miracle if we do get any sense into that brain, or flesh
upon these bones, but we'll do the best we can.”

Her words were not very encouraging, and Annie's
tears fell like rain upon the face of the man who gave no
sign that he knew where he was, or who was bending
over him. Oh! how he had longed for the air of the
North, as his face daily grew thinner, greyer, and more
corpse-like, while his flesh seemed shrivelling and drying
on his bones. Bill Baker had done what he could to
ameliorate his condition,—done too much in fact, and as
the result he suddenly found himself shorn of his privileges,
and an inmate again of the dreadful prison. Even
then he clung to and cared for Jimmie, until the pangs
of starvation and the pains of sickness made him forgetful
of all but himself. And there they pined and wept
and waited until the day of their release, when Bill was
too ill to be removed, and was left in charge of a humane
family, who kindly promised to care for him until he was
better. From a Rockland soldier who had been taken
prisoner at the battle of the Wilderness, Jimmie had

heard that Mrs. Graham was at Annapolis, and then! oh,
how he longed for the time when it might be his fate to be
tended and nursed by her. She would do it so gently, and
so kindly, and in his dreams the walls of his pestilential
prison stretched away to the green fields of the North,
where he walked again with Annie, and felt the clasp of her
little hand, and the light of her blue eyes. She was always
present with him,—she or the little Lulu, of Pequot
memory. Somehow these two were strangely mixed, and
when his mind began to totter as the physical strain on it
became too great, the two faces were united in one body,
and both bent lovingly over him, just as Annie Graham
was doing now when he was past knowing or caring who
ministered to him. A vague suspicion he had at intervals
that in some respects there was a change, that his
bed was not the filthy sand bank, nor his covering the
pitiless sky. Gradually, too, there came a different look
upon his face; the color was changing from the dingy
gray, to a more life-like hue; flesh was showing a little
beneath the skin, and the dark hair began to grow, and
Annie watered the tiny curls with bitter tears, for, as
proof of the terrible life whose horrors will never half be
written, the once black hair was coming out streaked with
grey. They knew in Rockland that he was at Annapolis,
but Annie had peremptorily forbidden either Mrs. Carleton
or Rose to come. “They could do no good,” she
wrote. “Jimmie would not know them; and they
might be in the way.”

They were constantly expecting Tom from Tennessee,
with Mande De Vere and her friends, and so they remained
at home the more willingly, enjoining it upon
Annie to write them every day, just a line to tell how
Jimmie was.

The summer rain was falling softly upon the streets of
Annapolis, and the cool evening air came stealing into
the room, where Annie Graham sat by her patient.
There were not so many now in her ward, and she had
more time for Jimmie, by whose bedside every leisure
moment was passed. She was sitting by him now, watching
him as he slept, and listening breathlessly to his low
murmurings as he seemed to be talking of her and the
dreadful prison-life. Then he slept more soundly, and
she arranged the light so that it left his face in shadow,
but fell full upon her own.

Half an hour passed in this way, and Annie's head was
beginning to droop from languor and drowsiness, when
a sudden exclamation startled her, and she looked up to
see her patient's eyes fixed upon her, while with his finger
he pointed to the window opposite, and whispered,

“The star, it's risen again, when I thought it had set
forever. I take it as a good omen, Bill. I shall see her
face again.”

Did he think himself in prison still, with that star
shining over him, and did he take her for Bill Baker?
The thought was not a very complimentary one, but Annie
forgot everything in her joy, at this evidence of returning
reason.

“Jimmie,” she said softly, and she bent her face so
close to his, that her lips touched his forehead, “Jimmie,
don't you know that you are in Annapolis, with me, with
Annie Graham. You remember Annie?”

She had many a time said these very words in his ear,
hoping somehow to impress them upon him, and now
she had succeeded, for he repeated them after her slowly,
and with long pauses, like a school-boy trying to say a
half-learned lesson.

“Jimmie—don't you—know—that you—are here—in

—Annapolis—with me—with—Annie—Graham—You remember—Annie?”

And as he said them consciousness began to struggle
back,—the black eyes fastened themselves upon Annie
with a wistful look; then they took in her dress, her
hands folded in her lap, the decent covering on the bed,
the furniture of the room, and then throwing up his arms
he felt of his flesh, and examined his linen, and patted
the pillow, while still the look of wonder and perplexity
deepened on his face. Suddenly he let his arms drop
helplessly, then stretched them feebly towards Annie, and
while both chin and lip quivered touchingly, and the
tears streamed from his eyes, he whispered,

“Clean face, clean hands, soft pillow and bed, with
the hunger, and thirst, and home-sickness gone. This
is—yes, this must be God's land, and she is there with
me.”

He fainted then. The shock of coming back to “God's
land” had been too great, and for a week or more he
paid but little heed to what was passing around him.

“Don't you know me, Jimmie? It's I,—it's Annie,”
Mrs. Graham would say to him, as his restless eyes turned
upon her, and he would repeat after her,

“Don't you—know—me, Jimmie? It's I,—it's Annie.”

This was a peculiarity of his, and it continued until
Bill Baker, who had become strong enough to be moved,
came to Annapolis, and asked to see the “Cop'ral.”

At first the physician refused, but Annie approved the
plan, hoping for a good result, and she waited anxiously,
while Bill said cheerily,

“Hallo, old Cop'ral. Rather nicer quarters here than
that sand-bank down by that infernal nasty stream.”

Bill Baker's voice was the last which in the far-off
prison had sounded kindly in Jimmie's ears, and now as

he heard it again his face lighted up, and his eyes kindled
with something like their olden fire.

“You know me, Cop'ral. I'm Bill. We've been exchanged.
We're up to Annapolis, and Miss Graam is
nussin' you,” Bill continued, and then Jimmie drew a
long breath, and burst into a passionate fit of tears.
“They'll do him good. They allus did to Andersonville.
He'd hold in till he was fit to burst, and then he'd let
'em slide, and feel better. He'll know you, Miss Graam,
after this.”

Annie was called away just then, to attend to another
patient, and Bill was left alone with Jimmie. There
were a few broken sentences from the latter, and then
Bill Baker was heard talking rapidly, but very gently
and cautiously, and Jimmie lifted his head once and
looked across the room where Annie was.

“Better leave him alone a spell, till he thinks it out,
and gets it arranged,” Bill said to Annie. “I made him
understand where he was, and that you was here, and all
right on the main question; and though he'd like to have
bust his biler for a minute, he'll come all straight, I
reckon.”

It was more than an hour before Annie went to Jimmie
again, but when she did, the eager, joyful look in
his eyes told her that she was recognized.

“Don't speak to me,—don't talk,” she said, laying one
hand lightly upon the lips, which began to move, while
with the other she smoothed the short curls of hair.

He kissed the hand upon his lips, and whispered,
through the fingers:

“Tell me first, was it true, he told me? Do you”—

He did not finish the sentence, for Annie understood
him, and bending so near to him that no one else could
hear, she said:

“Yes, Jimmie,—I do.”

He seemed satisfied, and something of his old manner
came back to him when, later in the day, Annie tried to
straighten the clothes about him, and wet and brushed
his hair.

“Look like a hippopotamus, don't I?” he asked, touching
his thick-skinned face.

“Not half as much as you did,” Annie replied; and
the first smile her face had worn for weeks glimmered
around her lips, for she knew now the danger was past,
and Jimmie Carleton would live.