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Few men outside of his company knew who the man was, and few had time to ask; for the battle was on again and the infantry pushed forward. As for Little Darby himself, the only thing he said was, “I knowed I could cut it down in ten minutes.” He had nine bullet holes through his clothes that night, but Little Darby thought nothing of it, and neither did others; many others had bullet holes through their bodies that night. It happened not long afterward that the general was talking of the battle to an English gentleman who had come over to see something of the war and was visiting him in his camp, and he mentioned the incident of a battle won by an axeman’s coolness, but did not know the name of the man who cut the post away; the captain of the company, however, was the general’s cousin and was dining with his guest that day, and he said with pride that he knew the man, that he was in his company, and he gave the name.

“It is a fine old name,” said the visitor.

“And he is a fine man,” said the captain; but none of this was ever known by Darby. He was not mentioned in the gazette, because there was no gazette. The confederate soldiery had no honors save the approval of their own consciences and the love of their own people. It was not even mentioned in the district; or, if it was, it was only that he had cut down a post; other men were being shot to pieces all the time and the district had other things to think of.

Poor at all times, the people of the district were now absolutely without means of subsistence. Fortunately for them, they were inured to hardship; and their men being all gone to the war, the women made such shift as they could and lived as they might. They hoed their little patches, fished the streams, and trapped in the woods. But it was poor enough at best, and the weak went down and only the strong survived. Mrs. Mills was better off than most, she had a cow–at first, and she had Vashti. Vashti turned out to be a tower of strength. She trapped more game than anyone in the district; caught more fish with lines and traps–she went miles to fish below the forks where the fish were bigger than above; she learned to shoot with her father’s old gun, which had been sent back when he got a musket, shot like a man and better than most men; she hoed the patch, she tended the cow till it was lost, and then she did many other things. Her mother declared that, when Chris died (Chris was the boy who died of fever), but for Vashti she could not have got along at all, and there were many other women in the pines who felt the same thing.

When the news came that Bob Askew was killed, Vashti was one of the first who got to Bob’s wife; and when Billy Luck disappeared in a battle, Vashti gave the best reasons for thinking he had been taken prisoner; and many a string of fish and many a squirrel and hare found their way into the empty cabins because Vashti “happened to pass by.”

From having been rather stigmatized as “that Vashti Mills”, she came to be relied on, and “Vashti” was consulted and quoted as an authority.

One cabin alone she never visited. The house of old Mrs. Stanley, now almost completely buried under its unpruned wistaria vine, she never entered. Her mother, as has been said, sometimes went across the bottom, and now and then took with her a hare or a bird or a string of fish–on condition from Vashti that it should not be known she had caught them; but Vashti never went, and Mrs. Mills found herself sometimes put to it to explain to others her unneighborliness. The best she could make of it to say that “Vashti, she always DO do her own way.”