Ashley also sat up with the sick and he, too, attended the Democratic meetings and he was usually away on the same nights as Frank. On these nights, Archie escorted Pitty, Scarlett, Wade and little Ella though the back yard to Melanie's house and the two families spent the evenings together. The ladies sewed while Archie lay full length on the parlor sofa snoring, his gray whiskers fluttering at each rumble. No one had invited him to dispose himself on the sofa and as it was the finest piece of furniture in the house, the ladies secretly moaned every time he lay down on it, planting his boot on the pretty upholstery. But none of them had the courage to remonstrate with him. Especially after he remarked that it was lucky he went to sleep easy, for otherwise the sound of women clattering like a flock of guinea hens would certainly drive him crazy.
Scarlett sometimes wondered where Archie had come from and what his life had been before he came to live in Melly's cellar but she asked no questions. There was that about his grim one-eyed face which discouraged curiosity. All she knew was that his voice bespoke the mountains to the north and that he had been in the army and had lost both leg and eye shortly before the surrender. It was words spoken in a fit of anger against Hugh Elsing which brought out the truth of Archie's past.
One morning, the old man had driven her to Hugh's mill and she had found it idle, the negroes gone and Hugh sitting despondently under a tree. His crew had not made their appearance that morning and he was at a loss as to what to do. Scarlett was in a furious temper and did not scruple to expend it on Hugh, for she had just received an order for a large amount of lumber -- a rush order at that. She had used energy and charm and bargaining to get that order and now the mill was quiet.
"Drive me out to the other mill," she directed Archie. "Yes, I know it'll take a long time and we won't get any dinner but what am I paying you for? I'll have to make Mr. Wilkes stop what he's doing and run me off this lumber. Like as not, his crew won't be working either. Great balls of fire! I never saw such a nincompoop as Hugh Elsing! I'm going to get rid of him just as soon as that Johnnie Gallegher finishes the stores he's building. What do I care if Gallegher was in the Yankee Army? He'll work. I never saw a lazy Irishman yet. And I'm through with free issue darkies. You just can't depend on them. I'm going to get Johnnie Gallegher and lease me some convicts. He'll get work out of them. He'll --"
Archie turned to her, his eye malevolent, and when he spoke there was cold anger in his rusty voice.
"The day you gits convicts is the day I quits you," he said.
Scarlett was startled. "Good heavens! Why?"
"I knows about convict leasin'. I calls it convict murderin'. Buyin' men like they was mules. Treatin' them worse than mules ever was treated. Beatin' them, starvin' them, killin' them. And who cares? The State don't care. It's got the lease money. The folks that gits the convicts, they don't care. All they want is to feed them cheap and git all the work they can out of them. Hell, Ma'm. I never thought much of women and I think less of them now."
"Is it any of your business?"
"I reckon," said Archie laconically and, after a pause, "I was a convict for nigh on to forty years."
Scarlett gasped, and, for a moment, shrank back against the cushions. This then was the answer to the riddle of Archie, his unwillingness to tell his last name or the place of his birth or any scrap of his past life, the answer to the difficulty with which he spoke and his cold hatred of the world. Forty years! He must have gone into prison a young man. Forty years! Why -- he must have been a life prisoner and lifers were --
"Was it -- murder?"
"Yes," answered Archie briefly, as he flapped the reins. "M' wife."
Scarlett's eyelids batted rapidly with fright. The mouth beneath the beard seemed to move, as if he were smiling grimly at her fear. "I ain't goin' to kill you, Ma'm, if that's what's frettin' you. Thar ain't but one reason for killin' a woman."
"You killed your wife!"
"She was layin' with my brother. He got away. I ain't sorry none that I kilt her. Loose women ought to be kilt. The law ain't got no right to put a man in jail for that but I was sont."
"But -- how did you get out? Did you escape? Were you pardoned?"
"You might call it a pardon." His thick gray brows writhed together as though the effort of stringing words together was difficult.
" 'Long in 'sixty-four when Sherman come through, I was at Milledgeville jail, like I had been for forty years. And the warden he called all us prisoners together and he says the Yankees are a-comin' a-burnin' and a-killin'. Now if that's one thing I hates worse than a nigger or a woman, it's a Yankee."
"Why? Had you -- Did you ever know any Yankees?"
"No'm. But I'd beam tell of them. I'd beam tell they couldn't never mind their own bizness. I hates folks who can't mind their own bizness. What was they doin' in Georgia, freein' our niggers and burnin' our houses and killin' our stock? Well, the warden he said the army needed more soldiers bad, and any of us who'd jine up would be free at the end of the war -- if we come out alive. But us lifers -- us murderers, the warden he said the army didn't want us. We was to be sont somewheres else to another jail. But I said to the warden I ain't like most lifers. I'm just in for killin' my wife and she needed killin'. And I wants to fight the Yankees. And the warden he saw my side of it and he slipped me out with the other prisoners."
He paused and grunted.
"Huh. That was right funny. They put me in jail for killin' and they let me out with a gun in my hand and a free pardon to do more killin'. It shore was good to be a free man with a rifle in my hand again. Us men from Milledgeville did good fightin' and killin' -- and a lot of us was kilt. I never knowed one who deserted. And when the surrender come, we was free. I lost this here leg and this here eye. But I ain't sorry."
"Oh," said Scarlett, weakly.
She tried to remember what she had heard about the releasing of the Milledgeville convicts in that last desperate effort to stem the tide of Sherman's army. Frank had mentioned it that Christmas of 1864. What had he said? But her memories of that time were too chaotic. Again she felt the wild terror of those days, heard the siege guns, saw the line of wagons dripping blood into the red roads, saw the Home Guard marching off, the little cadets and the children like Phil Meade and the old men like Uncle Henry and Grandpa Merriwether. And the convicts had marched out too, to die in the twilight of the Confederacy, to freeze in the snow and sleet of that last campaign in Tennessee.
For a brief moment she thought what a fool this old man was, to fight for a state which had taken forty years from his life. Georgia had taken his youth and his middle years for a crime that was no crime to him, yet he had freely given a leg and an eye to Georgia. The bitter words Rhett had spoken in the early days of the war came back to her, and she remembered him saying he would never fight for a society that had made him an outcast. But when the emergency had arisen he had gone off to fight for that same society, even as Archie had done. It seemed to her that all Southern men, high or low, were sentimental fools and cared less for their hides than for words which had no meaning.
She looked at Archie's gnarled old hands, his two pistols and his knife, and fear pricked her again. Were there other ex-convicts at large, like Archie, murderers, desperadoes, thieves, pardoned for their crimes, in the name of the Confederacy? Why, any stranger
on the street might be a murderer! If Frank ever learned the truth about Archie, there would be the devil to pay. Or if Aunt Pitty -- but the shock would kill Pitty. And as for Melanie -- Scarlett almost wished she could tell Melanie the truth about Archie. It would serve her right for picking up trash and foisting it off on her friends and relatives.
"I'm -- I'm glad you told me, Archie. I -- I won't tell anyone. It would be a great shock to Mrs. Wilkes and the other ladies if they knew."
"Huh. Miz Wilkes knows. I told her the night she fuss let me sleep in her cellar. You don't think I'd let a nice lady like her take me into her house not knowin'?"