“Oh, surely not everything!” cried the girls in dismay.
It was inconceivable that the bustling town they knew, so full of people, so crowded with soldiers, was gone.
All the lovely homes beneath shady trees, all the big stores and the fine hotels—surely they couldn’t be gone!
Melanie seemed ready to burst into tears, for she had been born there and knew no other home.
Scarlett’s heart sank because she had come to love the place second only to Tara.
“Well, almost everything,” Frank amended hastily, disturbed by the expressions on their faces. He tried to look cheerful, for he did not believe in upsetting ladies.
Upset ladies always upset him and made him feel helpless.
He could not bring himself to tell them the worst.
Let them find out from some one else.
He could not tell them what the army saw when it marched back into Atlanta, the acres and acres of chimneys standing blackly above ashes, piles of half-burned rubbish and tumbled heaps of brick clogging the streets, old trees dying from fire, their charred limbs tumbling to the ground in the cold wind.
He remembered how the sight had turned him sick, remembered the bitter curses of the Confederates when they saw the remains of the town.
He hoped the ladies would never hear of the horrors of the looted cemetery, for they’d never get over that.
Charlie Hamilton and Melanie’s mother and father were buried there.
The sight of that cemetery still gave Frank nightmares.
Hoping to find jewelry buried with the dead, the Yankee soldiers had broken open vaults, dug up graves.
They had robbed the bodies, stripped from the coffins gold and silver name plates, silver trimmings and silver handles.
The skeletons and corpses, flung helterskelter among their splintered caskets, lay exposed and so pitiful.
And Frank couldn’t tell them about the dogs and the cats.
Ladies set such a store by pets.
But the thousands of starving animals, left homeless when their masters had been so rudely evacuated, had shocked him almost as much as the cemetery, for Frank loved cats and dogs.
The animals had been frightened, cold, ravenous, wild as forest creatures, the strong attacking the weak, the weak waiting for the weaker to die so they could eat them.
And, above the ruined town, the buzzards splotched the wintry sky with graceful, sinister bodies.
Frank cast about in his mind for some mitigating information that would make the ladies feel better.
“There’s some houses still standing,” he said, “houses that set on big lots away from other houses and didn’t catch fire.
And the churches and the Masonic hall are left.
And a few stores too.
But the business section and all along the railroad tracks and at Five Points—well, ladies, that part of town is flat on the ground.”
“Then,” cried Scarlett bitterly, “that warehouse Charlie left me, down on the tracks, it’s gone too?”
“If it was near the tracks, it’s gone, but—” Suddenly he smiled.
Why hadn’t he thought of it before?
“Cheer up, ladies!
Your Aunt Pitty’s house is still standing.
It’s kind of damaged but there it is.”
“Oh, how did it escape?”
“Well, it’s made of brick and it’s got about the only slate roof in Atlanta and that kept the sparks from setting it afire, I guess.
And then it’s about the last house on the north end of town and the fire wasn’t so bad over that way.
Of course, the Yankees quartered there tore it up aplenty.
They even burned the baseboard and the mahogany stair rail for firewood, but shucks!
It’s in good shape.
When I saw Miss Pitty last week in Macon—”
“You saw her?
How is she?”
“Just fine.
Just fine.
When I told her her house was still standing, she made up her mind to come home right away. That is-if that old darky, Peter, will let her come.
Lots of the Atlanta people have already come back, because they got nervous about Macon.
Sherman didn’t take Macon but everybody is afraid Wilson’s raiders will get there soon and he’s worse than Sherman.”
“But how silly of them to come back if there aren’t any houses!
Where do they live?”
“Miss Scarlett, they’re living in tents and shacks and log cabins and doubling up six and seven families in the few houses still standing.