the saddle of a comrade. Will was acutely ill with pneumonia and when the girls put him to bed, they feared he would soon join the boy in the burying ground.
He had the sallow malarial face of the south Georgia Cracker, pale pinkish hair and
washed-out blue eyes which even in delirium were patient and mild. One of his legs was gone at the knee and to the stump was fitted a roughly whittled wooden peg. He was obviously a Cracker, just as the boy they had buried so short a while ago was obviously a planter's son. Just how the girls knew this they could not say. Certainly Will was no dirtier, no more hairy, no more lice infested than many fine gentlemen who came to Tara. Certainly the language he used in his delirium was no less grammatical than that of the Tarleton twins. But they knew instinctively, as they knew thoroughbred horses from scrubs, that he was not of their class. But this knowledge did not keep them from laboring to save him.
Emaciated from a year in a Yankee prison, exhausted by his long tramp on his ill-fitting
wooden peg, he had little strength to combat pneumonia and for days he lay in the bed moaning, trying to get up, fighting battles over again. Never once did he call for mother, wife, sister or sweetheart and this omission worried Carreen.
"A man ought to have some folks," she said. "And he sounds like he didn't have a soul in the world."
For all his lankiness he was tough, and good nursing pulled him through. The day came
when his pale blue eyes, perfectly cognizant of his surroundings, fell upon Carreen sitting beside him, telling her rosary beads, the morning sun shining through her fair hair.
"Then you warn't a dream, after all," he said, in his flat toneless voice. "I hope I ain't troubled you too much, Ma'm."
His convalescence was a long one and he lay quietly looking out of the window at the
magnolias and causing very little trouble to anyone. Carreen liked him because of his placid and unembarrassed silences. She would sit beside him through the long hot afternoons, fanning him and saying nothing.
Carreen had very little to say these days as she moved, delicate and wraithlike, about the tasks which were within her strength. She prayed a good deal, for when Scarlett came into her room without knocking, she always found her on her knees by her bed. The sight never failed to annoy her, for Scarlett felt that the time for prayer had passed. If God had seen fit to punish them so, then God could very well do without prayers. Religion had always been a bargaining process with Scarlett. She promised God good behavior in exchange for favors. God had broken the
bargain time and again, to her way of thinking, and she felt that she owed Him nothing at all now.
And whenever she found Carreen on her knees when she should have been taking an afternoon nap or doing the mending, she felt that Carreen was shirking her share of the burdens.
She said as much to Will Benteen one afternoon when he was able to sit up in a chair and
was startled when he said in his flat voice: "Let her be, Miss Scarlett. It comforts her."
"Comforts her?"
"Yes, she's prayin' for your ma and him."
"Who is 'him'?"
His faded blue eyes looked at her from under sandy lashes without surprise. Nothing
seemed to surprise or excite him. Perhaps he had seen too much of the unexpected ever to be
startled again. That Scarlett did not know what was in her sister's heart did not seem odd to him.
He took it as naturally as he did the fact that Carreen had found comfort in talking to him, a stranger.
"Her beau, that boy Brent something-or-other who was killed at Gettysburg."
"Her beau?" said Scarlett shortly. "Her beau, nothing! He and his brother were my beaux."
"Yes, so she told me. Looks like most of the County was your beaux. But, all the same, he was her beau after you turned him down, because when he come home on his last furlough they got engaged. She said he was the only boy she'd ever cared about and so it kind of comforts her to pray for him."
"Well, fiddle-dee-dee!" said Scarlett, a very small dart of jealousy entering her.
She looked curiously at this lanky man with his bony stooped shoulders, his pinkish hair
and calm unwavering eyes. So he knew things about her own family which she had not troubled to discover. So that was why Carreen mooned about, praying all the time. Well, she'd get over it.
Lots of girls got over dead sweethearts, yes, dead husbands, too. She'd certainly gotten over Charles. And she knew one girl in Atlanta who had been widowed three times by the war and was still able to take notice of men. She said as much to Will but he shook his head.