“Why Jonesboro?” thought Scarlett, terror striking at her heart at the thought of Tara’s nearness. “Why must they always hit Jonesboro? Why can’t they find some other place to attack the railroad?”

For a week she had not heard from Tara and the last brief note from Gerald had added to her fears. Carreen had taken a turn for the worse and was very, very sick. Now it might be days before the mails came through, days before she heard whether Carreen was alive or dead. Oh, if she had only gone home at the beginning of the siege, Melanie or no Melanie!

There was fighting at Jonesboro—that much Atlanta knew, but how the battle went no one could tell and the most insane rumors tortured the town. Finally a courier came up from Jonesboro with the reassuring news that the Yankees had been beaten back. But they had made a sortie into Jonesboro, burned the depot, cut the telegraph wires and torn up three miles of track before they retreated. The engineering corps was working like mad, repairing the line, but it would take some time because the Yankees had torn up the crossties, made bonfires of them, laid the wrenched-up rails across them until they were red hot and then twisted them around telegraph poles until they looked like giant corkscrews. These days it was so hard to replace iron rails, to replace anything made of iron.

No, the Yankees hadn’t gotten to Tara. The same courier who brought the dispatches to General Hood assured Scarlett of that. He had met Gerald in Jonesboro after the battle, just as he was starting to Atlanta, and Gerald had begged him to bring a letter to her.

But what was Pa doing in Jonesboro? The young courier looked ill at ease as he made answer. Gerald was hunting for an army doctor to go to Tara with him.

As she stood in the sunshine on the front porch, thanking the young man for his trouble, Scarlett felt her knees go weak. Carreen must be dying if she was so far beyond Ellen’s medical skill that Gerald was hunting a doctor! As the courier went off in a small whirlwind of red dust, Scarlett tore open Gerald’s letter with fingers that trembled. So great was the shortage of paper in the Confederacy now that Gerald’s note was written between the lines of her last letter to him and reading it was difficult.

“Dear Daughter,

Your mother and both girls have the typhoid. They are very ill but we must hope for the best. When your mother took to her bed she bade me write you that under no condition were you to come home and expose yourself and Wade to the disease. She sends her love and bids you pray for her.”

“Pray for her!” Scarlett flew up the stairs to her room and, dropping on her knees by the bed, prayed as she had never prayed before. No formal Rosaries now but the same words over and over: “Mother of God, don’t let her die! I’ll be so good if you don’t let her die! Please, don’t let her die!”

For the next week Scarlett crept about the house like a stricken animal, waiting for news, starting at every sound of horses’ hooves, rushing down the dark stair at night when soldiers came tapping at the door, but no news came from Tara. The width of the continent might have spread between her and home instead of twentyfive miles of dusty road.

The mails were still disrupted, no one knew where the Confederates were or what the Yankees were up to. No one knew anything except that thousands of soldiers, gray and blue, were somewhere between Atlanta and Jonesboro. Not a word from Tara in a week.

Scarlett had seen enough typhoid in the Atlanta hospital to know what a week meant in that dread disease. Ellen was ill, perhaps dying, and here was Scarlett helpless in Atlanta with a pregnant woman on her hands and two armies between her and home. Ellen was ill—perhaps dying. But Ellen couldn’t be ill! She had never been ill. The very thought was incredible and it struck at the very foundations of the security of Scarlett’s life. Everyone else got sick, but never Ellen. Ellen looked after sick people and made them well again. She couldn’t be sick. Scarlett wanted to be home. She wanted Tara with the desperate desire of a frightened child frantic for the only haven it had ever known.

Home! The sprawling white house with fluttering white curtains at the windows, the thick clover on the lawn with the bees busy in it, the little black boy on the front steps shooing the ducks and turkeys from the flower beds, the serene red fields and the miles and miles of cotton turning white in the sun! Home!

If she had only gone home at the beginning of the siege, when everyone else was refugeeing! She could have taken Melanie with her in safety with weeks to spare.

“Oh, damn Melanie!” she thought a thousand times. “Why couldn’t she have gone to Macon with Aunt Pitty? That’s where she belongs, with her own kinfolks, not with me. I’m none of her blood. Why does she hang onto me so hard? If she’d only gone to Macon, then I could have gone home to Mother. Even now—even now, I’d take a chance on getting home in spite of the Yankees, if it wasn’t for this baby. Maybe General Hood would give me an escort. He’s a nice man, General Hood, and I know I could make him give me an escort and a flag of truce to get me through the lines. But I have to wait for this baby!… Oh, Mother! Mother! Don’t die!… Why don’t this baby ever come? I’ll see Dr. Meade today and ask him if there’s any way to hurry babies up so I can go home—if I can get an escort. Dr. Meade said she’d have a bad time. Dear God! Suppose she should die! Melanie dead. Melanie dead. And Ashley—No, I mustn’t think about that, it isn’t nice. But Ashley—No, I mustn’t think about that because he’s probably dead, anyway. But he made me promise I’d take care of her. But—if I didn’t take care of her and she died and Ashley is still alive—No, I mustn’t think about that. It’s sinful. And I promised God I’d be good if He would just not let Mother die. Oh, if the baby would only come. If I could only get away from here—get home—get anywhere but here.”

Scarlett hated the sight of the ominously still town now and once she had loved it. Atlanta was no longer the gay, the desperately gay place she had loved. It was a hideous place like a plaguestricken city so quiet, so dreadfully quiet after the din of the siege. There had been stimulation in the noise and the danger of the shelling. There was only horror in the quiet that followed. The town seemed haunted, haunted with fear and uncertainty and memories. People’s faces looked pinched and the few soldiers Scarlett saw wore the exhausted look of racers forcing themselves on through the last lap of a race already lost.

The last day of August came and with it convincing rumors that the fiercest fighting since the battle of Atlanta was taking place. Somewhere to the south. Atlanta, waiting for news of the turn of battle, stopped even trying to laugh and joke. Everyone knew now what the soldiers had known two weeks before—that Atlanta was in the last ditch, that if the Macon railroad fell, Atlanta would fall too.

On the morning of the first of September, Scarlett awoke with a suffocating sense of dread upon her, a dread she had taken to her pillow the night before. She thought, dulled with sleep: “What was it I was worrying about when I went to bed last night? Oh, yes, the fighting. There was a battle, somewhere, yesterday! Oh, who won?” She sat up hastily, rubbing her eyes, and her worried heart took up yesterday’s load again.

The air was oppressive even in the early morning hour, hot with the scorching promise of a noon of glaring blue sky and pitiless bronze sun. The road outside lay silent. No wagons creaked by. No troops raised the red dust with their tramping feet. There were no sounds of negroes’ lazy voices in neighboring kitchens, no pleasant sounds of breakfasts being prepared, for all the near neighbors except Mrs. Meade and Mrs. Merriwether had refugeed to Macon. And she could hear nothing from their houses either. Farther down the street the business section was quiet and many of the stores and offices were locked and boarded up, while their occupants were somewhere about the countryside with rifles in their hands.