"Where are the others?" asked Dan, grasping his arm in an almost frantic pressure.

"The others? they're all right—all except poor Welch, who got a ball in his thigh, you know. Did you see him when he was taken off the field? He laughed as he passed me and shouted back that he 'was always willing to spare a leg or two to the cause!'"

"Where are you off to?" inquired Dan, still grasping his arm.

"I? oh, I'm on the scent of water. I haven't learned to sleep dirty yet, which Bland says is a sign I'm no soldier. By the way, your darky, Big Abel, has a coffee-boiler over yonder in the fence corner. He's been tearing his wool out over your absence; you'd better ease his mind." With a laugh and a wave of his hand, he plunged into the darkness, and Dan made his way slowly to the campfire, which twinkled from the old rail fence. As he groped toward it curses sprang up like mustard from the earth beneath. "Get off my leg, and be damned," growled a voice under his feet. "Oh, this here ain't no pesky jedgment day," exclaimed another just ahead. Without answering he stepped over the dark bodies, and, ten minutes later, came upon Big Abel waiting patiently beside the dying fire.

At sight of him the negro leaped, with a shout, to his feet; then, recovering himself, hid his joy beneath an accusing mask.

"Dis yer coffee hit's done 'mos' bile away," he remarked gloomily. "En ef'n it don' tase like hit oughter tase, 'tain' no use ter tu'n up yo' nose, caze 'tain' de faul' er de coffee, ner de faul' er me nurr."

"How are you, old man?" asked Bland, turning over in the shadow.

"Who's there?" responded Dan, as he peered from the light into the obscurity.

"All the mess except Welch, poor devil. Baker got his hair singed by our rear line, and he says he thinks it's safer to mix with the Yankees next time. Somebody behind him shot his cowlick clean off."

"Cowlick, the mischief!" retorted Baker, witheringly. "Why, my scalp is as bald as your hand. The fool shaved me like a barber."

"It's a pity he didn't aim at your whiskers," was Dan's rejoinder. "The chief thing I've got against this war is that when it's over there won't be a smooth-shaven man in the South."

"Oh, we'll stand them up before our rear line," suggested Baker, moodily. "You may laugh, Bland, but you wouldn't like it yourself, and if they keep up their precious marksmanship your turn will come yet. We'll be a regiment of baldheads before Christmas."

Dan sat down upon the blanket Big Abel had spread and leaned heavily upon his knapsack, which the negro had picked up on the roadside. A nervous chill had come over him and he was shaking with icy starts from head to foot. Big Abel brought a cup of coffee, and as he took it from him, his hand quivered so that he set the cup upon the ground; then he lifted it and drank the hot coffee in long draughts.

"I should have lost my very identity but for you, Big Abel," he observed gratefully, as he glanced round at the property the negro had protected.

Big Abel leaned forward and stirred the ashes with a small stick.

"En I done fit fer 'em, suh," he replied. "I des tell you all de fittin' ain' been over yonder on dat ar hill caze I'se done fit right yer in dis yer fence conder, en I ain' fit de Yankees nurr. Lawd, Lawd, dese yer folks es is been a-sniffin' roun' my pile all day, ain' de kinder folks I'se used ter, caze my folks dey don' steal w'at don' b'long ter 'em, en dese yer folks dey do. Ole Marster steal? Huh! he 'ouldn't even tech a chicken dat 'uz roos'in in his own yard. But dese yer sodgers!—Why, you cyarn tu'n yo' eye a splinter off de vittles fo' dey's done got 'em. Dey poke dey han's right spang in de fire en eat de ashes en all."

He went off grumbling to lie down at a little distance, and Dan sat thoughtfully looking into the smouldering fire. Bland and Baker, having heatedly discussed the details of the victory, had at last drifted into silence; only Pinetop was awake—this he learned from the odour of the corncob pipe which floated from a sheltered corner.

"Come over, Pinetop," called Dan, cordially, "and let's make ready for the pursuit to-morrow. Why, to-morrow we may eat a civilized dinner in Washington—think of that!"

He spoke excitedly, for he was still quivering from the tumult of his thoughts. There was no sleep possible for him just now; his limbs twitched restlessly, and he felt the prick of strong emotion in his blood.

"I say, Pinetop, what do you think of the fight?" he asked with an embarrassed boyish eagerness. In the faint light of the fire his eyes burned like coals and there was a thick black stain around his mouth. The hand in which he had held his ramrod was of a dark rust colour, as if the stain of the battle had seared into the skin. A smell of hot powder still hung about his clothes.

The mountaineer left the shadow of the fence corner and slowly dragged himself into the little glow, where he sat puffing at his corncob pipe. He gave an easy, sociable nod and stared silently at the embers.

"Was it just what you imagined it would be?" went on Dan, curiously.

Pinetop took his pipe from his mouth and nodded again. "Wall, 'twas and 'twan't," he answered pleasantly.

"I must say it made me sick," admitted Dan, leaning his head in his hand. "I've always been a fool about the smell of blood; and it made me downright sick."

"Wall, I ain't got much of a stomach for a fight myself," returned Pinetop, reflectively. "You see I ain't never fought anythin' bigger'n a skunk until to-day; and when I stood out thar with them bullets sizzlin' like fryin' pans round my head, I kind of says to myself: 'Look here, what's all this fuss about anyhow? If these here folks have come arter the niggers, let 'em take 'em off and welcome.' I ain't never owned a nigger in my life, and, what's more, I ain't never seen one that's worth owning. 'Let 'em take 'em and welcome,' that's what I said. Bless your life, as I stood out thar I didn't see how I was goin' to fire my musket, till all of a jiffy a thought jest jumped into my head and sent me bangin' down that hill. 'Them folks have set thar feet on ole Virginny,' was what I thought 'They've set thar feet on ole Virginny, and they've got to take 'em off damn quick!'"

His teeth closed over his pipe as if it were a cartridge; then, after a silent moment, he opened his mouth and spoke again.

"What I can't make out for the life of me," he said, "is how those boys from the other states gave thar licks so sharp. If I'd been born across the line in Tennessee, I wouldn't have fired my musket off to-day. They wan't a-settin' thar feet on Tennessee. But ole Virginny—wall, I've got a powerful fancy for ole Virginny, and they ain't goin' to project with her dust, if I can stand between." He turned away, and, emptying his pipe, rolled over upon the ground.

Dan lay down upon the blanket, and, with his hand upon his knapsack, gazed at the small red ember burning amid the ashes. When the last spark faded into blackness it was as if his thoughts went groping for a light. Sleep came fitfully in flights and pauses, in broken dreams and brief awakenings. Losing himself at last it was only to return to the woods at Chericoke and to see Betty coming to him among the dim blue bodies of the trees. He saw the faint sunshine falling upon her head and the stir of the young leaves above her as a light wind passed. Under her feet the grass was studded with violets, and the bonnet swinging from her arm was filled with purple blossoms. She came on steadily over the path of grass and violets, but when he reached out to touch her a great shame fell over him for there was blood upon his hand.

There was something cold in his face, and he emerged slowly from his sleep into the consciousness of dawn and a heavy rain. The swollen clouds hung close above the hills, and the distance was obscured by the gray sheets of water which fell like a curtain from heaven to earth. Near by a wagon had drawn up in the night, and he saw that a group of half-drenched privates had already taken shelter between the wheels. Gathering up his oilcloth, he hastily formed a tent with the aid of a deep fence corner, and, when he had drawn his blanket across the opening, sat partly protected from the shower. As the damp air blew into his face, he became quickly and clearly awake, and it was with the glimmer of a smile that he looked over the wet meadow and the sleeping regiments. Then a shudder followed, for he saw in the lines of gray men stretched beneath the rain some likeness to that other field beyond the hill where the dead were still lying, row on row. He saw them stark and cold on the scorched grass beside the guns, or in the thin ridges of trampled corn, where the gay young tassels were now storm-beaten upon the ripped-up earth. He saw them as he had seen them the evening before—not in the glow of battle, but with the acuteness of a brooding sympathy—saw them frowning, smiling, and with features which death had twisted into a ghastly grin. They were all there—each man with open eyes and stiff hands grasping the clothes above his wound.

But to Dan, sitting in the gray dawn in the fence corner, the first horror faded quickly into an emotion almost triumphant. The great field was silent, reproachful, filled with accusing eyes—but was it not filled with glory, too? He was young, and his weakened pulses quickened at the thought. Since men must die, where was a brighter death than to fall beneath the flutter of the colours, with the thunder of the cannon in one's ears? He knew now why his fathers had loved a fight, had loved the glitter of the bayonets and the savage smell of the discoloured earth.

For a moment the old racial spirit flashed above the peculiar sensitiveness which had come to him from his childhood and his suffering mother; then the flame went out and the rows of dead men stared at him through the falling rain in the deserted field.



V

THE WOMAN'S PART

At sunrise on the morning of the battle Betty and Virginia, from the whitewashed porch of a little railway inn near Manassas, watched the Governor's regiment as it marched down the single street and into the red clay road. Through the first faint sunshine, growing deeper as the sun rose gloriously above the hills, there sounded a peculiar freshness in the martial music as it triumphantly floated back across the fields. To Betty it almost seemed that the drums were laughing as they went to battle; and when the gay air at last faded in the distance, the silence closed about her with a strangeness she had never felt before—as if the absence of sound was grown melancholy, like the absence of light.

She shut her eyes and brought back the long gray line passing across the sunbeams: the tanned eager faces, the waving flags, the rapid, almost impatient tread of the men as they swung onward. A laugh had run along the column as it went by her and she had smiled in quick sympathy with some foolish jest. It was all so natural to her, the gayety and the ardour and the invincible dash of the young army—it was all so like the spirit of Dan and so dear to her because of the likeness.

Somewhere—not far away, she knew—he also was stepping briskly across the first sun rays, and her heart followed him even while she smiled down upon the regiment before her. It was as if her soul were suddenly freed from her bodily presence, and in a kind of dual consciousness she seemed to be standing upon the little whitewashed porch and walking onward beside Dan at the same moment. The wonder of it glowed in her rapt face, and Virginia, turning to put some trivial question, was startled by the passion of her look.

"Have—have you seen—some one, Betty?" she whispered.

The charm was snapped and Betty fell back into time and place.

"Oh, yes, I have seen—some one," her voice thrilled as she spoke. "I saw him as clearly as I see you; he was all in sunshine and there was a flag close above his head. He looked up and smiled at me. Yes, I saw him! I saw him!"

"It was Dan," said Virginia—not as a question, but in a wondering assent. "Why, Betty, I thought you had forgotten Dan—papa thought so, too."

"Forgotten!" exclaimed Betty scornfully. She fell away from the crowd and Virginia followed her. The two stood leaning against the whitewashed wall in the dust that still rose from the street. "So you thought I had forgotten him," said Betty again. She raised her hand to her bosom and crushed the lace upon her dress. "Well, you were wrong," she added quietly.

Virginia looked at her and smiled. "I am almost glad," she answered in her sweet girlish voice. "I don't like to have Dan forgotten even if—if he ought to be."

"I didn't love him because he ought to be loved," said Betty. "I loved him because I couldn't help it—because he was himself and I was myself, I suppose. I was born to love him, and to stop loving him I should have to be born again. I don't care what he does—I don't care what he is even—I would rather love him than—than be a queen." She held her hands tightly together. "I would be his servant if he would let me," she went on. "I would work for him like a slave—but he won't let me. And yet he does love me just the same—just the same."

"He does—he does," admitted Virginia softly. She had never seen Betty like this before, and she felt that her sister had become suddenly very strange and very sacred. Her hands were outstretched to comfort, but Betty turned gently away from her and went up the narrow staircase to the bare little room where the girls slept together.

Alone within the four white walls she moved breathlessly to and fro like a woodland creature that has been entrapped. At the moment she was telling herself that she wanted to keep onward with the army; then her courage would have fluttered upward like the flags. It was not the sound of the cannon that she dreaded, nor the sight of blood—these would have nerved her as they nerved the generations at her back—but the folded hands and the terrible patience that are the woman's share of a war. The old fighting blood was in her veins—she was as much the child of her father as a son could have been—and yet while the great world over there was filled with noise she was told to go into her room and pray. Pray! Why, a man might pray with his musket in his hand, that was worth while.

In the adjoining room she saw her mother sitting in a square of sunlight with her open Bible on her knees.

"Oh, speak, mamma!" she called half angrily. "Move, do anything but sit so still. I can't bear it!" She caught her breath sharply, for with her words a low sound like distant thunder filled the room and the little street outside. As she clung with both hands to the window it seemed to her that a gray haze had fallen over the sunny valley. "Some one is dead," she said almost calmly, "that killed how many?"

The room stifled her and she ran hurriedly down into the street, where a few startled women and old men had rushed at the first roll of the cannon. As she stood among them, straining her eyes from end to end of the little village, her heart beat in her throat and she could only quaver out an appeal for news.

"Where is it? Doesn't any one know anything? What does it mean?"

"It means a battle, Miss, that's one thing," remarked on obliging by-stander who leaned heavily upon a wooden leg. "Bless you, I kin a'most taste the powder." He smacked his lips and spat into the dust. "To think that I went all the way down to Mexico fur a fight," he pursued regretfully, "when I could have set right here at home and had it all in old Virginny. Well, well, that comes of hurryin' the Lord afo' he's ready."

He rambled on excitedly, but Betty, frowning with impatience, turned from him and walked rapidly up and down the single street, where the voices of the guns growled through the muffling distance. "That killed how many? how many?" she would say at each long roll, and again, "How many died that moment, and was one Dan?"

Up and down the little village, through the heavy sunshine and the white dust, among the whimpering women and old men, she walked until the day wore on and the shadows grew longer across the street. Once a man had come with the news of a sharp repulse, and in the early afternoon a deserter straggled in with the cry that the enemy was marching upon the village. It was not until the night had fallen, when the wounded began to arrive on baggage trains, that the story of the day was told, and a single shout went up from the waiting groups. The Confederacy was established! Washington was theirs by right of arms, and tomorrow the young army would dictate terms of peace to a great nation! The flags waved, women wept, and the wounded soldiers, as they rolled in on baggage cars, were hailed as the deliverers of a people. The new Confederacy! An emotion half romantic, half maternal filled Betty as she bent above an open wound—for it was in her blood to do battle to the death for a belief, to throw herself into a cause as into the arms of a lover. She was made of the stuff of soldiers, and come what might she would always take her stand upon her people's side.

There were cheers and sobs in the little street about her; in the distance a man was shouting for the flag, and nearer by a woman with a lantern in her hand was searching among the living for her dead. The joy and the anguish of it entered into the girl like wine. She felt her pulses leap and a vigour that was not her own nerved her from head to foot. With that power of ardent sacrifice which lies beneath all shams in the Southern heart, she told herself that no endurance was too great, no hope too large with which to serve the cause.

The exaltation was still with her when, a little later, she went up to her room and knelt down to thank God. Her people's simple faith was hers also, and as she prayed with her brow on her clasped hands it was as if she gave thanks to some great warrior who had drawn his sword in defence of the land she loved. God was on her side, supreme, beneficent, watchful in little things, as He has been on the side of all fervent hearts since the beginning of time.

But after her return to Uplands in midsummer she suffered a peculiar restlessness from the tranquil August weather. The long white road irritated her with its aspect of listless patience, and at times she wanted to push back the crowding hills and leave the horizon open to her view. When a squadron of cavalry swept along the turnpike her heart would follow it like a bird while she leaned, with straining eyes, against a great white column. Then, as the last rider was blotted out into the landscape, she would clasp her hands and walk rapidly up and down between the lilacs. It was all waiting—waiting—waiting—nothing else.

"Something must happen, mamma, or I shall go mad," she said one day, breaking in upon Mrs. Ambler as she sorted a heap of old letters in the library.

"But what? What?" asked Virginia from the shadow of the window seat. "Surely you don't want a battle, Betty?"

Mrs. Ambler shuddered.

"Don't tempt Providence, dear," she said seriously, untying a faded ribbon about a piece of old parchment. "Be grateful for just this calm and go out for a walk. You might take this pitcher of flaxseed tea to Floretta's cabin, if you've nothing else to do. Ask how the baby is to-day, and tell her to keep the red flannel warm on its chest."

Betty went into the hall after her bonnet and came back for the pitcher. "I'm going to walk across the fields to Chericoke," she said, "and Hosea is to bring the carriage for me about sunset. We must have some white silk to make those flags out of, and there isn't a bit in the house."

She went out, stepping slowly in her wide skirts and holding the pitcher carefully before her.

Floretta's baby was sleeping, and after a few pleasant words the girl kept on to Chericoke. There she found that the Major had gone to town for news, leaving Mrs. Lightfoot to her pickle making in the big storeroom, where the earthenware jars stood in clean brown rows upon the shelves. The air was sharp with the smell of vinegar and spices, and fragrant moisture dripped from the old lady's delicate hands. At the moment she had forgotten the war just beyond her doors, and even the vacant places in her household; her nervous flutter was caused by finding the plucked corn too large to salt.

"Come in, child, come in," she said, as Betty appeared in the doorway. "You're too good a housekeeper to mind the smell of brine."

"How the soldiers will enjoy it," laughed Betty in reply. "It's fortunate that both sides are fond of spices."

The old lady was tying a linen cloth over the mouth of a great brown jar, and she did not look up as she answered. "I'm not consulting their tastes, my dear, though, as for that, I'm willing enough to feast our own men so long as the Yankees keep away. This jar, by the bye, is filled with 'Confederate pickle'—it was as little as I could do to compliment the Government, I thought, and the green tomato catchup I've named in honour of General Beauregard."

Betty smiled; and then, while Mrs. Lightfoot stood sharply regarding Car'line, who was shucking a tray of young corn, she timidly began upon her mission. "The flags must be finished, and I can't find the silk," she pleaded. "Isn't there a scrap in the house I may have? Let me look about the attic."

The old lady shook her head. "I haven't allowed anybody to set foot in my attic for forty years," she replied decisively. "Why, I'd almost as soon they'd step into my grandfather's vault." Then as Betty's face fell she added generously. "As for white silk, I haven't any except my wedding dress, and that's yellow with age; but you may take it if you want it. I'm sure it couldn't come to a better end; at least it will have been to the front upon two important occasions."

"Your wedding dress!" exclaimed Betty in surprise, "oh, how could you?"

Mrs. Lightfoot smiled grimly.

"I could give more than a wedding dress if the Confederacy called for it, my dear," she answered. "Indeed, I'm not perfectly sure that I couldn't give the Major himself—but go upstairs and wait for me while I send Car'line for the keys."

She returned to the storeroom, and Betty went upstairs to wander leisurely through the cool faintly lighted chambers. They were all newly swept and scented with lavender, and the high tester beds, with their slender fluted posts, looked as if they had stood spotless and untouched for generations. In Dan's room, which had been his mother's also, the girl walked slowly up and down, meeting, as she passed, her own eyes in the darkened mirror. Her mind fretted with the thought that Dan's image had risen so often in the glass, and yet had left no hint for her as she looked in now. If it had only caught and held his reflection, that blank mirror, she could have found it, she felt sure, though a dozen faces had passed by since. Was there nothing left of him, she wondered, nothing in the place where he had lived his life? She turned to the bed and picked up, one by one, the scattered books upon the little table. Among them there was a copy of the "Morte d'Arthur," and as it fell open in her hand, she found a bit of her own blue ribbon between the faded leaves. A tremor ran through her limbs, and going to the window she placed the book upon the sill and read the words aloud in the fragrant stillness. Behind her in the dim room Dan seemed to rise as suddenly as a ghost—and that high-flown chivalry of his, which delighted in sounding phrases as in heroic virtues, was loosened from the leaves of the old romance.

"For there was never worshipful man nor worshipful woman but they loved one better than another, and worship in arms may never be foiled; but first reserve the honour to God, and secondly the quarrel must come of thy lady; and such love I call virtuous love."

She leaned her cheek upon the book and looked out dreamily into the green box mazes of the garden. In the midst of war a great peace had come to her, and the quiet summer weather no longer troubled her with its unbroken calm. Her heart had grown suddenly strong again; even the long waiting had become but a fit service for her love.

There was a step in the hall and Mrs. Lightfoot rustled in with her wedding dress.

"You may take it and welcome, child," she said, as she gave it into Betty's arms. "I can't help feeling that there was something providential in my selecting white when my taste always leaned toward a peach-blow brocade. Well, well, who would have believed that I was buying a flag as well as a frock? If I'd even hinted such a thing, they would have said I had the vapours."

Betty accepted the gift with her pretty effusion of manner, and went downstairs to where Hosea was waiting for her with the big carriage. As she drove home in a happy revery, her eyes dwelt contentedly on the sunburnt August fields, and the thought of war did not enter in to disturb her dreams.

Once a line of Confederate cavalrymen rode by at a gallop and saluted her as her face showed at the window. They were strangers to her, but with the peculiar feeling of kinship which united the people of the South, she leaned out to wish them "God speed" as she waved her handkerchief.

When, a little later, she turned into the drive at Uplands, it was to find, from the prints upon the gravel, that the soldiers had been there before her. Beyond the Doric columns she caught a glimpse of a gray sleeve, and for a single instant a wild hope shot up within her heart. Then as the carriage stopped, and she sprang quickly to the ground, the man in gray came out upon the portico, and she saw that it was Jack Morson.

"I've come for Virginia, Betty," he began impulsively, as he took her hand, "and she promises to marry me before the battle."

Betty laughed with trembling lips. "And here is the dress," she said gayly, holding out the yellowed silk.



VI

ON THE ROAD TO ROMNEY

After a peaceful Christmas, New Year's Day rose bright and mild, and Dan as he started from Winchester with the column felt that he was escaping to freedom from the tedious duties of camp life.

"Thank God we're on the war-path again," he remarked to Pinetop, who was stalking at his side. The two had become close friends during the dull weeks after their first battle, and Bland, who had brought a taste for the classics from the lecture-room, had already referred to them in pointless jokes as "Pylades and Orestes."

"It looks mighty like summer," responded Pinetop cheerfully. He threw a keen glance up into the blue clouds, and then sniffed suspiciously at the dust that rose high in the road. "But I ain't one to put much faith in looks," he added with his usual caution, as he shifted the knapsack upon his shoulders.

Dan laughed easily. "Well, I'm heartily glad I left my overcoat behind me," he said, breathing hard as he climbed the mountain road, where the red clay had stiffened into channels.

The sunshine fell brightly over them, lying in golden drops upon the fallen leaves. To Dan the march brought back the early winter rides at Chericoke, and the chain of lights and shadows that ran on clear days over the tavern road. Joyously throwing back his head, he whistled a love song as he tramped up the mountain side. The irksome summer, with its slow fevers and its sharp attacks of measles, its scarcity of pure water and supplies of half-cooked food, was suddenly blotted from his thoughts, and his first romantic ardour returned to him in long draughts of wind and sun. After each depression his elastic temperament had sprung upward; the past months had but strengthened him in body as in mind.

In the afternoon a gray cloud came up suddenly and the sunshine, after a feeble struggle, was driven from the mountains. As the wind blew in short gusts down the steep road, Dan tightened his coat and looked at Pinetop's knapsack with his unfailing laugh.

"That's beginning to look comfortable. I hope to heaven the wagons aren't far off."

Pinetop turned and glanced back into the valley. "I'll be blessed if I believe they're anywhere," was his answer.

"Well, if they aren't, I'll be somewhere before morning; why, it feels like snow."

A gust of wind, sharp as a blade, struck from the gray sky, and whirlpools of dead leaves were swept into the forest. Falling silent, Dan swung his arms to quicken the current of his blood, and walked on more rapidly. Over the long column gloom had settled with the clouds, and they were brave lips that offered a jest in the teeth of the wind. There were no blankets, few overcoats, and fewer rations, and the supply wagons were crawling somewhere in the valley.

The day wore on, and still the rough country road climbed upward embedded in withered leaves. On the high wind came the first flakes of a snowstorm, followed by a fine rain that enveloped the hills like mist. As Dan stumbled on, his feet slipped on the wet clay, and he was forced to catch at the bared saplings for support. The cold had entered his lungs as a knife, and his breath circled in a little cloud about his mouth. Through the storm he heard the quick oaths of his companions ring out like distant shots.

When night fell they halted to bivouac by the roadside, and until daybreak the pine woods were filled with the cheerful glow of the campfires. There were no rations, and Dan, making a jest of his hunger, had stretched himself in the full light of the crackling branches. With the defiant humour which had made him the favourite of the mess, he laughed at the frozen roads, at the change in the wind, at his own struggles with the wet kindling wood, at the supply wagons creeping slowly after them. His courage had all the gayety of his passions—it showed itself in a smile, in a whistle, in the steady hand with which he played toss and catch with fate. The superb silence of Pinetop, plodding evenly along, was as far removed from him as the lofty grandeur of the mountains. A jest warmed his heart against the cold; with set lips and grave eyes, he would have fallen before the next ridge was crossed.

Through the woods other fires were burning, and long reddish shadows crept among the pine trees over the rotting mould. For warmth Dan had spread a covering of dried leaves over him, raking them from sheltered corners of the forest. When he rose from time to time during the night to take his turn at replenishing the fire the leaves drifted in gravelike mounds about his feet.

For three days the march was steadily upward over long ridges coated deep with ice. In the face of the strong wind, which blew always down the steep road, the army passed on, complaining, cursing, asking a gigantic question of its General. Among the raw soldiers there had been desertions by the dozen, filling the streets of the little town with frost-bitten malcontents. "It was all a wild goose chase," they declared bitterly, "and if Old Jack wasn't a March hare—well, he was something madder!"

Dan listened to the curses with his ready smile, and walked on bravely. Since the first evening he had uttered no complaint, asked no question. He had undertaken to march, and he meant to march, that was all. In the front with which he veiled his suffering there was no lessening of his old careless confidence—if his dash had hardened into endurance it wore still an expression that was almost debonair.

So as the column straggled weakly upward, he wrung his stiffened fingers and joked with Jack Powell, who stumbled after him. The cold had brought a glow to his tanned face, and when he lifted his eyes from the road Pinetop saw that they were shining brightly. Once he slipped on the frozen mud, and as his musket dropped from his hand, it went off sharply, the load entering the ground.

"Are you hurt?" asked Jack, springing toward him; but Dan looked round laughing as he clasped his knee.

"Oh, I merely groaned because I might have been," he said lightly, and limped on, singing a bit of doggerel which had taken possession of his regiment.

"Then let the Yanks say what they will, We'll be gay and happy still; Gay and happy, gay and happy, We'll be gay and happy still."

On the third day out they reached a little village in the mountains, but before the week's end they had pushed on again, and the white roads still stretched before them. As they went higher the tracks grew steeper, and now and then a musket shot rang out on the roadside as a man lost his footing and went down upon the ice. Behind them the wagon train crept inch by inch, or waited patiently for hours while a wheel was hoisted from the ditch beside the road. There was blood on the muzzles of the horses and on the shining ice that stretched beyond them.

To Dan these terrible days were as the anguish of a new birth, in which the thing to be born suffered the conscious throes of awakening life. He could never be the same again; something was altered in him forever; this he felt dimly as he dragged his aching body onward. Days like these would prove the stuff that had gone into the making of him. When the march to Romney lay behind him he should know himself to be either a soldier or a coward. A soldier or a coward! he said the words over again as he struggled to keep down the pangs of hunger, telling himself that the road led not merely to Romney, but to a greater victory than his General dreamed of. Romney might be worthless, after all, the grim march but a mad prank of Jackson's, as men said; but whether to lay down one's arms or to struggle till the end was reached, this was the question asked by those stern mountains. Nature stood ranged against him—he fought it step by step, and day by day.

At times something like delirium seized him, and he went on blindly, stepping high above the ice. For hours he was tortured by the longing for raw beef, for the fresh blood that would put heat into his veins. The kitchen at Chericoke flamed upon the hillside, as he remembered it on winter evenings when the great chimney was filled with light and the crane was in its place above the hickory. The smell of newly baked bread floated in his nostrils, and for a little while he believed himself to be lying again upon the hearth as he thrilled at Aunt Rhody's stories. Then his fancies would take other shapes, and warm colours would glow in red and yellow circles before his eyes. When he thought of Betty now it was no longer tenderly but with a despairing passion. He was haunted less by her visible image than by broken dreams of her peculiar womanly beauties—of her soft hands and the warmth of her girlish bosom.

But from the first day to the last he had no thought of yielding; and each feeble step had sent him a step farther upon the road. He had often fallen, but he had always struggled up again and laughed. Once he made a ghastly joke about his dying in the snow, and Jack Powell turned upon him with an oath and bade him to be silent.

"For God's sake don't," added the boy weakly, and fell to whimpering like a child.

"Oh, go home to your mother," retorted Dan, with a kind of desperate cruelty.

Jack sobbed outright.

"I wish I could," he answered, and dropped over upon the roadside.

Dan caught him up, and poured his last spoonful of brandy down his throat, then he seized his arm and dragged him bodily along.

"Oh, I say don't be an ass," he implored. "Here comes old Stonewall."

The commanding General rode by, glanced quietly over them, and passed on, his chest bowed, his cadet cap pulled down over his eyes. A moment later Dan, looking over the hillside, at the winding road, saw him dismount and put his shoulder to a sunken wheel. The sight suddenly nerved the younger man, and he went on quickly, dragging Jack up with him.

That night they rested in a burned-out clearing where the pine trees had been felled for fence rails. The rails went readily to fires, and Pinetop fried strips of fat bacon in the skillet he had brought upon his musket. Somebody produced a handful of coffee from his pocket, and a little later Dan, dozing beside the flames, was awakened by the aroma.

"By George!" he burst out, and sat up speechless.

Pinetop was mixing thin cornmeal paste into the gravy, and he looked up as he stirred busily with a small stick.

"Wall, I reckon these here slapjacks air about done," he remarked in a moment, adding with a glance at Dan, "and if your stomach's near as empty as your eyes, I reckon your turn comes first."

"I reckon it does," said Dan, and filling his tin cup, he drank scalding coffee in short gulps. When he had finished it, he piled fresh rails upon the fire and lay down to sleep with his feet against the embers.

With the earliest dawn a long shiver woke him, and as he put out his hand it touched something wet and cold. The fire had died to a red heart, and a thick blanket of snow covered him from head to foot. Straight above there was a pale yellow light where the stars shone dimly after the storm.

He started to his feet, rubbing a handful of snow upon his face. The red embers, sheltered by the body of a solitary pine, still glowed under the charred brushwood, and kneeling upon the ground, he fanned them into a feeble blaze. Then he laid the rails crosswise, protecting them with his blanket until they caught and flamed up against the blackened pine.

Near by Jack Powell was moaning in his sleep, and Dan leaned over to shake him into consciousness. "Oh, damn it all, wake up, you fool!" he said roughly, but Jack rolled over like one drugged and broke into frightened whimpers such as a child makes in the dark. He was dreaming of home, and as Dan listened to the half-choked words, his face contracted sharply. "Wake up, you fool!" he repeated angrily, rolling him back and forth before the fire.

A little later, when Jack had grown warm beneath his touch, he threw a blanket over him, and turned to lie down in his own place. As he tossed a last armful on the fire, his eyes roamed over the long mounds of snow that filled the clearing, and he caught his breath as a man might who had waked suddenly among the dead. In the beginning of dawn, with the glimmer of smouldering fires reddening the snow, there was something almost ghastly in the sloping field filled with white graves and surrounded by white mountains. Even the wintry sky borrowed, for an hour, the spectral aspect of the earth, and the familiar shapes of cloud, as of hill, stood out with all the majesty of uncovered laws—stripped of the mere frivolous effect of light or shade. It was like the first day—or the last.

Dan, sitting watchful beside the fire, fell into the peculiar mental state which comes only after an inward struggle that has laid bare the sinews of one's life. He had fought the good fight to the end, and he knew that from this day he should go easier with himself because he knew that he had conquered.

The old doubt—the old distrust of his own strength—was fallen from him. At the moment he could have gone to Betty, fearless and full of hope, and have said, "Come, for I am grown up at last—at last I have grown up to my love." A great tenderness was in his heart, and the tears, which had not risen for all the bodily suffering of the past two weeks, came slowly to his eyes. The purpose of life seemed suddenly clear to him, and the large patience of the sky passed into his own nature as he sat facing the white dawn. At rare intervals in the lives of all strenuous souls there comes this sense of kinship with external things—this passionate recognition of the appeal of the dumb world. Sky and mountains and the white sweep of the fields awoke in him the peculiar tenderness he had always felt for animals or plants. His old childish petulance was gone from him forever; in its place he was aware of a kindly tolerance which softened even the common outlines of his daily life. It was as if he had awakened breathlessly to find himself a man.

And Betty came to him again—not in detached visions, but entire and womanly. When he remembered her as on that last night at Chericoke it was with the impulse to fall down and kiss her feet. Reckless and blind with anger as he had been, she would have come cheerfully with him wherever his road led; and it was this passionate betrayal of herself that had taught him the full measure of her love. An attempt to trifle, to waver, to bargain with the future, he might have looked back upon with tender scorn; but the gesture with which she had made her choice was as desperate as his own mood—and it was for this one reckless moment that he loved her best.

The east paled slowly as the day broke in a cloud, and the long shadows beside the fire lost their reddish glimmer. A little bird, dazed by the cold and the strange light, flew into the smoke against the stunted pine, and fell, a wet ball of feathers at Dan's feet. He picked it up, warmed it in his coat, and fed it from the loose crumbs in his pocket.

When Pinetop awoke he was gently stroking the bird while he sang in a low voice:—

"Gay and happy, gay and happy, We'll be gay and happy still."



VII

"I WAIT MY TIME"

When he returned to Winchester it was to find Virginia already there as Jack Morson's wife. Since her marriage in late summer she had followed her husband's regiment from place to place, drifting at last to a big yellow house on the edge of the fiery little town. Dan, passing along the street one day, heard his name called in a familiar voice, and turned to find her looking at him through the network of a tall, wrought-iron gate.

"Virginia! Bless my soul! Where's Betty?" he exclaimed amazed.

Virginia left the gate and gave him her hand over the dried creepers on the wall.

"Why, you look ten years older," was her response.

"Indeed! Well, two years of beggary, to say nothing of eight months of war, isn't just the thing to insure immortal youth, is it? You see, I'm turning gray."

The pallor of the long march was in his face, giving him a striking though unnatural beauty. His eyes were heavy and his hair hung dishevelled about his brow, but the change went deeper still, and the girl saw it. "You're bigger—that's it," she said, and added impulsively, "Oh, how I wish Betty could see you now."

Her hand was upon the wall and he gave it a quick, pleased pressure.

"I wish to heaven she could," he echoed heartily.

"But I shall tell her everything when I write—everything. I shall tell her that you are taller and stronger and that you have been in all the fights and haven't a scar to show. Betty loves scars, you see, and she doesn't mind even wounds—real wounds. She wanted to go into the hospitals, but I came away and mamma wouldn't let her."

"For God's sake, don't let her," said Dan, with a shudder, his Southern instincts recoiling from the thought of service for the woman he loved. "There are a plenty of them in the hospitals and it's no place for Betty, anyway."

"I'll tell her you think so," returned Virginia, gayly. "I'll tell her that—and what else?"

He met her eyes smiling.

"Tell her I wait my time," he answered, and began to talk lightly of other things. Virginia followed his lead with her old shy merriment. Her marriage had changed her but little, though she had grown a trifle stately, he thought, and her coquetry had dropped from her like a veil. As she stood there in her delicate lace cap and soft gray silk, the likeness to her mother was very marked, and looking into the future, Dan seemed to see her beauty ripen and expand with her growing womanhood. How many of her race had there been, he wondered, shaped after the same pure and formal plan.

"And it is all just the same," he said, his eyes delighting in her beauty. "There is no change—don't tell me there is any change, for I'll not believe it. You bring it all back to me,—the lawn and the lilacs and the white pillars, and Miss Lydia's garden, with the rose leaves in the paths. Why are there always rose leaves in Miss Lydia's paths, Virginia?"

Virginia shook her head, puzzled by his whimsical tone.

"Because there are so many roses," she answered seriously.

"No, you're wrong, there's another reason, but I shan't tell you."

"My boxes are filled with rose leaves now," said Virginia. "Betty gathered them for me."

The smile leaped to his eyes. "Oh, but it makes me homesick," he returned lightly. "If I tell you a secret, don't betray me, Virginia—I am downright homesick for Betty."

Virginia patted his hand.

"So am I," she confessed, "and so is Mammy Riah—she's with me now, you know—and she says that I might have been married without Jack, but never without Betty. Betty made my dress and iced my cake and pinned on my veil."

"Ah, is that so?" exclaimed Dan, absent-mindedly. He was thinking of Betty, and he could almost see her hands as she pinned on the wedding veil—those small white hands with the strong fingers that had closed about his own.

"When you get your furlough you must go home, Dan," Virginia was saying; "the Major is very feeble and—and he quarrels with almost everyone."

"My furlough," repeated Dan, with a laugh. "Why, the war may end to-morrow and then we'll all go home together and kill the fatted calf among us. Yes, I'd like to see the old man again before I die."

"I pray every night that the war may end tomorrow," said Virginia, "but it never does." Then she turned eagerly to the Governor, who was coming toward them under the leafless trees along the street.

"Here's Dan, papa, do make him come in and be good."

The Governor, holding himself erect in his trim gray uniform, insisted, with his hand upon Dan's shoulder, that Virginia should be obeyed; and the younger man, yielding easily, followed him through the iron gate and into the yellow house.

"I don't see you every day, my boy, sit down, sit down," began the Governor, as he took his stand upon the hearth-rug. "Daughter, haven't you learned the way to the pantry yet? Dan looks as if he'd been on starvation rations since he joined the army. They aren't living high at Romney, eh?" and then, as Virginia went out, he fell to discussing the questions on all men's lips—the prospect of peace in the near future; hopes of intervention from England; the attitude of other foreign powers; and the reasons for the latest appointments by the President. When the girl came in again they let such topics go, and talked of home while she poured the coffee and helped Dan to fried chicken. She belonged to the order of women who delight in feeding a hungry man, and her eyes did not leave his face as she sat behind the tray and pressed the food upon him.

"Dan thinks the war will be over before he gets his furlough," she said a little wistfully.

A shadow crossed the Governor's face.

"Then I may hope to get back in time to watch the cradles in the wheat field," he remarked. "There's little doing on the farm I'm afraid while I'm away."

"If they hold out six months longer—well, I'll be surprised," exclaimed Dan, slapping the arm of his chair with a gesture like the Major's. "They've found out we won't give in so long as there's a musket left; and that's enough for them."

"Maybe so, maybe so," returned the Governor, for it was a part of his philosophy to cast his conversational lines in the pleasant places. "Please God, we'll drink our next Christmas glass at Chericoke."

"In the panelled parlour," added Dan, his eyes lighting.

"With Aunt Emmeline's portrait," finished Virginia, smiling.

For a time they were all silent, each looking happily into the far-off room, and each seeing a distinct and different vision. To the Governor the peaceful hearth grew warm again—he saw his wife and children gathered there, and a few friendly neighbours with their long-lived, genial jokes upon their lips. To Virginia it was her own bridal over again with the fear of war gone from her, and the quiet happiness she wanted stretching out into the future. To Dan there was first his own honour to be won, and then only Betty and himself—Betty and himself under next year's mistletoe together.

"Well, well," sighed the Governor, and came back regretfully to the present. "It's a good place we're thinking of, and I reckon you're sorry enough you left it before you were obliged to. We all make mistakes, my boy, and the fortunate ones are those who live long enough to unmake them."

His warm smile shone out suddenly, and without waiting for a reply, he began to ask for news of Jack Powell and his comrades, all of whom he knew by name. "I was talking to Colonel Burwell about you the other day," he added presently, "and he gave you a fighting record that would do honour to the Major."

"He's a nice old chap," responded Dan, easily, for in the first years of the Army of Northern Virginia the question of rank presented itself only upon the parade ground, and beyond the borders of the camp a private had been known to condescend to his own Colonel. "A gentleman fights for his country as he pleases, a plebeian as he must," the Governor would have explained with a touch of his old oratory. "He's a nice old chap himself, but, by George, the discipline fits like a straight-jacket," pursued Dan, as he finished his coffee. "Why, here we are three miles below Winchester in a few threadbare tents, and they make as much fuss about our coming into town as if we were the Yankees themselves. Talk about Romney! Why, it's no colder at Romney than it was here last week, and yet Loring's men are living in huts like princes."

"Show me a volunteer and I'll show you a grumbler," put in the Governor, laughing.

"Oh, I'm not grumbling, I'm merely pointing out the facts," protested Dan; then he rose and stood holding Virginia's hand as he met her upward glance with his unflinching admiration. "Come again! Why, I should say so," he declared. "I'll come as long as I have a collar left, and then—well, then I'll pass the time of day with you over the hedge. Good-by, Colonel, remember I'm not a grumbler, I'm merely a man of facts."

The door closed after him and a moment later they heard his clear whistle in the street.

"The boy is like his father," said the Governor, thoughtfully, "like his father with the devil broken to harness. The Montjoy blood may be bad blood, but it makes big men, daughter." He sighed and drew his small figure to its full height.

Virginia was looking into the fire. "I hope he will come again," she returned softly, thinking of Betty.

But when he called again a week later Virginia did not see him. It was a cold starlit night, and the big yellow house, as he drew near it, glowed like a lamp amid the leafless trees. Beside the porch a number of cavalry horses were fastened to the pillars, and through the long windows there came the sound of laughter and of gay "good-bys."

The "fringe of the army," as Dan had once jeeringly called it, was merrily making ready for a raid.

As he listened he leaned nearer the window and watched, half enviously, the men he had once known. His old life had been a part of theirs and now, looking in from the outside, it seemed very far away—the poetry of war beside which the other was mere dull history in which no names were written. He thought of Prince Rupert, and of his own joy in the saddle, and the longing for the raid seized him like a heartache. Oh, to feel again the edge of the keen wind in his teeth and to hear the silver ring of the hoofs on the frozen road.

"Jine the cavalry, Jine the cavalry, If you want to have a good time jine the cavalry."

The words floated out to him, and he laughed aloud as if he had awakened from a comic dream.

That was the romance of war, but, after all, he was only the man who bore the musket.



VIII

THE ALTAR OF THE WAR GOD

With the opening spring Virginia went down to Richmond, where Jack Morson had taken rooms for her in the house of an invalid widow whose three sons were at the front. The town was filled to overflowing with refugees from the North and representatives from the South, and as the girl drove through the crowded streets, she exclaimed wonderingly at the festive air the houses wore.

"Why, the doors are all open," she observed. "It looks like one big family."

"That's about what it is," replied Jack. "The whole South is here and there's not a room to be had for love or money. Food is getting dear, too, they say, and the stranger within the gates has the best of everything." He stopped short and laughed from sheer surprise at Virginia's loveliness.

"Well, I'm glad I'm here, anyway," said the girl, pressing his arm, "and Mammy Riah's glad, too, though she won't confess it.—Aren't you just delighted to see Jack again, Mammy?"

The old negress grunted in her corner of the carriage. "I ain' seed no use in all dis yer fittin'," she responded. "W'at's de use er fittin' ef dar ain' sumpen' ter fit fer dat you ain' got a'ready?"

"That's it, Mammy," replied Jack, gayly, "we're fighting for freedom, and we haven't had it yet, you see."

"Is dat ar freedom vittles?" scornfully retorted the old woman. "Is it close? is it wood ter bu'n?"

"Oh, it will soon be here and you'll find out," said Virginia, cheerfully, and when a little later she settled herself in her pleasant rooms, she returned to her assurances.

"Aren't you glad you're here, Mammy, aren't you glad?" she insisted, with her arm about the old woman's neck.

"I'd des like ter git a good look at ole Miss agin," returned Mammy Riah, softening, "caze ef you en ole Miss ain' des like two peas in a pod, my eyes hev done crack wid de sight er you. Dar ain' been nuttin' so pretty es you sence de day I dressed ole Miss in 'er weddin' veil."

"You're right," exclaimed Jack, heartily. "But look at this, Virginia, here's a regular corn field at the back. Mrs. Minor tells me that vegetables have grown so scarce she has been obliged to turn her flower beds into garden patches." He threw open the window, and they went out upon the wide piazza which hung above the young corn rows.

During the next few weeks, when Jack was often in the city, an almost feverish gayety possessed the girl. In the war-time parties, where the women wore last year's dresses, and the wit served for refreshment, her gentle beauty became, for a little while, the fashion. The smooth bands of her hair were copied, the curve of her eyelashes was made the subject of some verses which The Examiner printed and the English papers quoted later on. It was a bright and stately society that filled the capital that year; and on pleasant Sundays when Virginia walked from church, in her Leghorn bonnet and white ruffles flaring over crinoline as they neared the ground, men, who had bled on fields of honour for the famous beauties of the South, would drop their talk to follow her with warming eyes. Cities might fall and battles might be lost and won, but their joy in a beautiful woman would endure until a great age.

At last Jack Morson rode away to service, and the girl kept to the quiet house and worked on the little garments which the child would need in the summer. She was much alone, but the delicate widow, who had left her couch to care for the sick and wounded soldiers, would sometimes come and sit near her while she sewed.

"This is the happiest time—before the child comes," she said one day, and added, with the observant eye of mothers, "it will be a boy; there is a pink lining to the basket."

"Yes, it will be a boy," replied Virginia, wistfully.

"I have had six," pursued the woman, "six sons, and yet I am alone now. Three are dead, and three are in the army. I am always listening for the summons that means another grave." She clasped her thin hands and smiled the patient smile that chilled Virginia's blood.

"Couldn't you have kept one back?" asked the girl in a whisper.

The woman shook her head. Much brooding had darkened her mind, but there was a peculiar fervour in her face—an inward light that shone through her faded eyes.

"Not one—not one," she answered. "When the South called, I sent the first two, and when they fell, I sent the others—only the youngest I kept back at first—he is just seventeen. Then another call came and he begged so hard I let him go. No, I gave them all gladly—I have kept none back."

She lowered her eyes and sat smiling at her folded hands. Weakened in body and broken by many sorrows as she was, with few years before her and those filled with inevitable suffering, the fire of the South still burned in her veins, and she gave herself as ardently as she gave her sons. The pity of it touched Virginia suddenly, and in the midst of her own enthusiasm she felt the tears upon her lashes. Was not an army invincible, she asked, into which the women sent their dearest with a smile?

Through the warm spring weather she sat beside the long window that gave on the street, or walked slowly up and down among the vegetable rows in the garden. The growing of the crops became an unending interest to her and she watched them, day by day, until she learned to know each separate plant and to look for its unfolding. When the drought came she carried water from the hydrant, and assisted by Mammy Riah sprinkled the young tomatoes until they shot up like weeds. "It is so much better than war," she would say to Jack when he rode through the city. "Why will men kill one another when they might make things live instead?"

Beside the piazza, there was a high magnolia tree, and under this she made a little rustic bench and a bed of flowers. When the hollyhocks and the sunflowers bloomed it would look like Uplands, she said, laughing.

Under the magnolia there was quiet, but from her front window, while she sat at work, she could see the whole overcrowded city passing through sun and shadow. Sometimes distinguished strangers would go by, men from the far South in black broadcloth and slouch hats; then the President, slim and erect and very grave, riding his favourite horse to one of the encampments near the city; and then a noted beauty from another state, her chin lifted above the ribbons of her bonnet, a smile tucked in the red corners of her lips. Following there would surge by the same eager, staring throng—men too old to fight who had lost their work; women whose husbands fought in the trenches for the money that would hardly buy a sack of flour; soldiers from one of the many camps; noisy little boys with tin whistles; silent little girls waving Confederate flags. Back and forth they passed on the bright May afternoons, filling the street with a ceaseless murmur and the blur of many colours.

And again the crowd would part suddenly to make way for a battalion marching to the front, or for a single soldier riding, with muffled drums, to his grave in Hollywood. The quick step or the slow gait of the riderless horse; the wild cheers or the silence on the pavement; the "Bonnie Blue Flag" or the funeral dirge before the coffin; the eager faces of men walking to where death was or the fallen ones of those who came back with the dead; the bold flags taking the wind like sails or the banners furled with crepe as they drooped forward—there was not a day when these things did not go by near together. To Virginia, sitting at her window, it was as if life and death walked on within each other's shadow.

Then came the terrible days when the city saw McClellan sweeping toward it from the Chickahominy, when senators and clergymen gathered with the slaves to raise the breastworks, and men turned blankly to ask one another "Where is the army?" With the girl the question meant only mystification; she felt none of the white terror that showed in the faces round her. There was in her heart an unquestioning, childlike trust in the God of battles—sooner or later he would declare for the Confederacy and until then—well, there was always General Lee to stand between. Her chief regret was that the lines had closed and her mother could not come to her as she had promised.

In the intense heat that hung above the town she sat at her southern window, where the river breeze blew across the garden, and watched placidly the palm-leaf fan which Mammy Riah waved before her face. The magnolia tree had flowered in great white blossoms, and the heavy perfume mingled in Virginia's thoughts with the yellow sunshine, the fretful clamour, and the hot dust of the city. When at the end of May a rain storm burst overhead and sent the wide white petals to the earth, it was almost a relief to see them go. But by the morrow new ones had opened, and the perfume she had sickened of still floated from the garden.

That afternoon the sound of the guns rolled up the Williamsburg road, and in the streets men shouted hoarsely of an engagement with the enemy at Seven Pines. With the noise Virginia thrilled to her first feeling of danger, starting from a repose which, in its unconsciousness, had been as profound as sleep. The horror of war rushed in upon her at the moment, and with a cry she leaned out into the street, and listened for the next roll of the cannon.

A woman, with a scared face, looked up, saw her, and spoke hysterically.

"There's not a man left in the city," she cried. "They've taken my father to defend the breastworks and he's near seventy. If you can sew or wash or cook, there'll be work enough for you, God knows, to-morrow!"

She hurried on and Virginia, turning from the window, buried herself in the pillows upon the bed, trying in vain to shut out the noise of the cannonading and the perfume of the magnolia blossoms which came in on the southern breeze. With night the guns grew silent and the streets empty, but still the girl lay sleepless, watching with frightened eyes the shadow of Mammy Riah's palm-leaf fan.

At dawn the restless murmur began again, and Virginia, looking out in the hot sunrise, saw the crowd hastening back to the hospitals lower down. They were all there, all as they had been the day before—old men limping out for news or returning beside the wounded; women with trembling lips and arms filled with linen; ambulances passing the corner at a walk, surrounded by men who had staggered after them because there was no room left inside; and following always the same curious, pallid throng, fresh upon the scent of some new tragedy. Presently the ambulances gave out, and yet the wounded came—some walking, and moaning as they walked, some borne on litters by devoted servants, some drawn in market wagons pressed into use. The great warehouses and the churches were thrown open to give them shelter, but still they came and still the cry went up, "Room, more room!"

Virginia watched it all, leaning out to follow the wagons as they passed the corner. The sight sickened her, but something that was half a ghastly fascination, and half the terror of missing a face she knew, kept her hour after hour motionless upon her knees. At each roll of the guns she gave a nervous shiver and grew still as stone.

Then, as she knelt there, a man, in clerical dress, came down the pavement and stopped before her window. "I hope your husband's wound was not serious, Mrs. Morson," he said sympathetically. "If I can be of any assistance, please don't hesitate to call on me."

"Jack wounded!—oh, he is not wounded," replied Virginia. She rose and stood wildly looking down upon him.

He saw his mistake and promptly retracted what he could.

"If you don't know of it, it can't be true," he urged kindly. "So many rumours are afloat that half of them are without foundation. However, I will make inquiries if you wish," and he passed on with a promise to return at once.

For a time Virginia stood blankly gazing after him; then she turned steadily and took down her bonnet from the wardrobe. She even went to the bureau and carefully tied the pink ribbon strings beneath her chin.

"I am going out, Mammy Riah," she said when she had finished. "No, don't tell me I mustn't—I am going out, I say."

She stamped her foot impatiently, but Mammy Riah made no protest.

"Des let's go den," she returned, smoothing her head handkerchief as she prepared to follow.

The sun was already high above, and the breeze, which had blown for three days from the river, had dropped suddenly since dawn. Down the brick pavement the relentless glare flashed back into the sky which hung hot blue overhead. To Virginia, coming from the shade of her rooms, the city seemed a furnace and the steady murmur a great discord in which every note was one of pain.

Other women looking for their wounded hurried by her—one stopped to ask if she had been into the unused tobacco warehouse and if she had seen there a boy she knew by name? Another, with lint bandages in her hand, begged her to come into a church hard by and assist in ravelling linen for the surgeons. Then she looked down, saw the girl's figure, and grew nervous. "You are not fit, my dear, go home," she urged, but Virginia shook her head and smiled.

"I am looking for my husband," she answered in a cold voice and passed on. Mammy Riah caught up with her, but she broke away. "Go home if you want to—oh, go back," she cried irritably. "I am looking for Jack, you know."

Into the rude hospitals, one after one, she went without shuddering, passing up and down between the ghastly rows lying half clothed upon the bare plank floors. Her eyes were strained and eager, and more than one dying man turned to look after her as she went by, and carried the memory of her face with him to death. Once she stopped and folded a blanket under the head of a boy who moaned aloud, and then gave him water from a pitcher close at hand. "You're so cool—so cool," he sobbed, clutching at her dress, but she smiled like one asleep and passed on rapidly.

When the long day had worn out at last, she came from an open store filled with stretchers, and started homeward over the burning pavement. Her search was useless, and the reaction from her terrible fear left her with a sudden tremor in her heart. As she walked she leaned heavily upon Mammy Riah, and her colour came and went in quick flashes. The heat had entered into her brain and with it the memory of open wounds and the red hands of surgeons. Reaching the house at last, she flung herself all dressed upon the bed and fell into a sleep that was filled with changing dreams.

At midnight she cried out in agony, believing herself to be still in the street. When Mammy Riah bent over her she did not know her, but held out shaking hands and asked for her mother, calling the name aloud in the silent house, deserted for the sake of the hospitals lower down. She was walking again on and on over the hot bricks, and the deep wounds were opening before her eyes while the surgeons went by with dripping hands. Once she started up and cried out that the terrible blue sky was crushing her down to the pavement which burned her feet. Then the odour of the magnolia filled her nostrils, and she talked of the scorching dust, of the noise that would not stop, and of the feeble breeze that blew toward her from the river. All night she wandered back and forth in the broad glare of the noon, and all night Mammy Riah passed from the clinging hands to the window where she looked for help in the empty street. And then, as the gray dawn broke, Virginia put her simple services by, and spoke in a clear voice.

"Oh, how lovely," she said, as if well pleased. A moment more and she lay smiling like a child, her chin pressed deep in her open palm.

* * * * *

In the full sunrise a physician, who had run in at the old woman's cry, came from the house and stopped bareheaded in the breathless heat. For a moment he stared over the moving city and then up into the cloudless blue of the sky.

"God damn war!" he said suddenly, and went back to his knife.



IX

THE MONTJOY BLOOD AGAIN

A month later Dan heard of Virginia's death when, at the end of the Seven Days, he was brought wounded into Richmond. As he lay upon church cushions on the floor of an old warehouse on Main Street, with Big Abel shaking a tattered palm-leaf fan at his side, a cavalryman came up to him and held out a hand that trembled slightly from fatigue.

"I heard you were here. Can I do anything for you, Beau?" he asked.

For an instant Dan hesitated; then the other smiled, and he recognized Jack Morson.

"My God! You've been ill!" he exclaimed in horror. Jack laughed and let his hand fall. The boyish colour was gone from his face, and he wore an untrimmed beard which made him look twice his age.

"Never better in my life," he answered shortly. "Some men are made of india-rubber, Montjoy, and I'm one of them. I've managed to get into most of these blessed fights about Richmond, and yet I haven't so much as a pin prick to show for it. But what's wrong with you? Not much, I hope. I've just seen Bland, and he told me he thought you were left at Malvern Hill during that hard rain on Tuesday night. How did you get knocked over, anyway?"

"A rifle ball went through my leg," replied Dan impatiently. "I say, Big Abel, can't you flirt that fan a little faster? These confounded flies stick like molasses." Then he held up his left hand and looked at it with a grim smile. "A nasty fragment of a shell took off a couple of my fingers," he added. "At first I thought they had begun throwing hornets' nests from their guns—it felt just like it. Yes, that's the worst with me so far; I've still got a bone to my leg, and I'll be on the field again before long, thank God."

"Well, the worst thing about getting wounded is being stuffed into a hole like this," returned Jack, glancing about contemptuously. "Whoever has had the charge of our hospital arrangements may congratulate himself that he has made a ghastly mess of them. Why, I found a man over there in the corner whose leg had mortified from sheer neglect, and he told me that the supplies for the sick had given out, and they'd offered him cornbread and bacon for breakfast."

Dan began to toss restlessly, grumbling beneath his breath. "If you ever see a ball making in your direction," he advised, "dodge it clean or take it square in the mouth; don't go in for any compromises with a gun, they aren't worth it." He lay silent for a moment, and then spoke proudly. "Big Abel hauled me off the field after I went down. How he found me, God only knows, but find me he did, and under fire, too."

"'Twuz des like pepper," remarked Big Abel, fanning briskly, "but soon es I heah dat Marse Dan wuz right flat on de groun', I know dat dar warn' nobody ter go atter 'im 'cep'n' me. Marse Bland he come crawlin' out er de bresh, wuckin' 'long on his stomick same es er mole, wid his face like a rabbit w'en de dawgs are 'mos' upon 'im, en he sez hard es flint, 'Beau he's down over yonder, en I tried ter pull 'im out, Big Abel, 'fo' de Lawd I did!' Den he drap right ter de yerth, en I des stop long enough ter put a tin bucket on my haid 'fo' I began ter crawl atter Marse Dan. Whew! dat ar bucket hit sutney wuz a he'p, dat 'twuz, case I des hyeard de cawn a-poppin' all aroun' hit, en dey ain' never come thoo yit.

"Well, suh, w'en I h'ist dat bucket ter git a good look out dar dey wuz a-fittin' twel dey bus', a-dodgin' in en out er de shucks er wheat dat dey done pile 'mos' up ter de haids. I ain' teck but one good look, suh, den I drap de bucket down agin en keep a-crawlin' like Marse Bland tole me twel I git 'mos' ter de cawn fiel' dat run right spang up de hill whar de big guns wuz a-spittin' fire en smoke. En sho' 'nough dar wuz Marse Dan lyin' unner a pine log dat Marse Bland hed roll up ter 'im ter keep de Yankees f'om hittin' 'im; en w'en he ketch sight er me he des blink his eyes fur a minute en laugh right peart.

"'Wat dat you got on yo' haid, Big Abel?' he sez."

"Big Abel's a hero, there's no mistake," put in Dan, delighted. "Do you know he lifted me as if I were a baby and toted me out of that God-forsaken corn field in the hottest fire I ever felt—and I tipped the scales at a hundred and fifty pounds before I went to Romney."

"Go way, Marse Dan, you ain' nuttin' but a rail," protested Big Abel, and continued his story. "Atter I done tote him outer de cawn fiel' en thoo de bresh, den I begin ter peer roun' fer one er dese yer ambushes, but dere warn' nairy one un um dat warn' a-bulgin' a'ready. I d'clar dey des bulged twel dey sides 'mos' split. I seed a hack drive long by wid two gemmen a-settin' up in hit, en one un em des es well es I is,—but w'en I helt Marse Dan up right high, he shake his haid en pint ter de udder like he kinder skeered. 'Dis yer's my young brudder,' he sez, speakin' sof'; 'en dis yer's my young Marster,' I holler back, but he shake his haid agin en drive right on. Lawd, Lawd, my time's 'mos' up, I 'low den—yes, suh, I do—but w'en I tu'n roun' squintin' my eyes caze de sun so hot—de sun he wuz kinder shinin' thoo his back like he do w'en he hu't yo' eyes en you cyan' see 'im—dar came a dump cyart a-joltin' up de road wid a speckled mule hitch ter it. A lot er yuther w'ite folks made a bee line fer dat ar dump cyart, but dey warn' 'fo' me, caze w'en dey git dar, dar I wuz a-settin' wid Marse Dan laid out across my knees. Well, dey lemme go—dey bleeged ter caze I 'uz gwine anyway—en de speckled mule she des laid back 'er years en let fly fer Richmon'. Yes, suh, I ain' never seed sech a mule es dat. She 'uz des es full er sperit es a colt, en her name wuz Sally."

"The worst of it was after getting here," finished Dan, who had lain regarding Big Abel with a proud paternal eye, "they kept us trundling round in that cart for three mortal hours, because they couldn't find a hole to put us into. An uncovered wagon was just in front of us, filled with poor fellows who had been half the day in the sweltering heat, and we made the procession up and down the city, until at last some women rushed up with their servants and cleared out this warehouse. One was not over sixteen and as pretty as a picture. 'Don't talk to me about the proper authorities,' she said, stamping her foot, 'I'll hang the proper authorities when they turn up—and in the meantime we'll go to work!' By Jove, she was a trump, that girl! If she didn't save my life, she did still better and saved my leg."

"Well, I'll try to get you moved by to-morrow," said Jack reassuringly. "Every home in the city is filled with the wounded, they tell me, but I know a little woman who had two funerals from her house to-day, so she may be able to find room for you. This heat is something awful, isn't it?"

"Damnable. I hope, by the way, that Virginia is out of it by now."

Jack flinched as if the words struck him between the eyes. For a moment he stood staring at the straw pallets along the wall; then he spoke in a queer voice.

"Yes, Virginia's out of it by now; Virginia's dead, you know."

"Dead!" cried Dan, and raised himself upon his cushion. The room went black before him, and he steadied himself by clutching at Big Abel's arm. At the instant the horrors of the battle-field, where he had seen men fall like grass before the scythe, became as nothing to the death of this one young girl. He thought of her living beauty, of the bright glow of her flesh, and it seemed to him that the earth could not hide a thing so fair.

"I left her in Richmond in the spring," explained Jack, gripping himself hard. "I was off with Stuart, you know, and I thought her mother would get to her, but she couldn't pass the lines and then the fight came—the one at Seven Pines and—well, she died and the child with her."

Dan's eyes grew very tender; a look crept into them which only Betty and his mother had seen there before.

"I would have died for her if I could, Jack, you know that," he said slowly.

Jack walked off a few paces and then came back again. "I remember the Governor's telling me once," he went on in the same hard voice, "that if a man only rode boldly enough at death it would always get out of the way. I didn't believe it at the time, but, by God, it's true. Why, I've gone straight into the enemy's lines and heard the bullets whistling in my ears, but I've always come out whole. When I rode with Stuart round McClellan's army, I was side by side with poor Latane when he fell in the skirmish at Old Church, and I sat stock still on my horse and waited for a fellow to club me with his sabre, but he wouldn't; he looked at me as if he thought I had gone crazy, and actually shook his head. Some men can't die, confound it, and I'm one of them."

He went out, his spurs striking the stone steps as he passed into the street, and Dan fell back upon the narrow cushions to toss with fever and the memory of Virginia—of Virginia in the days when she wore her rose-pink gown and he believed he loved her.

At the door an ambulance drew up and a stretcher was brought into the building, and let down in one corner. The man on it was lying very still, and when he was lifted off and placed upon the blood-soaked top of the long pine table, he made no sound, either of fear or of pain. The close odours of the place suddenly sickened Dan and he asked Big Abel to draw him nearer the open window, where he might catch the least breeze from the river; but outside the July sunlight lay white and hot upon the bricks, and when he struggled up the reflected heat struck him down again. On the sidewalk he saw several prisoners going by amid a hooting crowd, and with his old instinct to fight upon the weaker side, he hurled an oath at the tormenters of his enemies.

"Go to the field, you crows, and be damned!" he called.

One of the prisoners, a ruddy-cheeked young fellow in private's clothes, looked up and touched his cap.

"Thank you, sir, I hope we'll meet at the front," he said, in a rich Irish brogue. Then he passed on to Libby prison, while Dan turned from the window and lay watching the surgeon's faces as they probed for bullets.

It was a long unceiled building, filled with bright daylight and the buzzing of countless flies. Women, who had volunteered for the service, passed swiftly over the creaking boards, or knelt beside the pallets as they bathed the shattered limbs with steady fingers. Here and there a child held a glass of water to a man who could not raise himself, or sat fanning the flies from a pallid face. None was too old nor too young where there was work for all.

A stir passed through the group about the long pine table, and one of the surgeons, wiping the sweat from his brow, came over to where Dan lay, and stopped to take breath beside the window.

"By Jove, that man died game," he said, shaking his handkerchief at the flies. "We took both his legs off at the knee, and he just gripped the table hard and never winked an eyelash. I told him it would kill him, but he said he'd be hanged if he didn't take his chance—and he took it and died. Talk to me about nerve, that fellow had the cleanest grit I ever saw."

Dan's pulses fluttered, as they always did at an example of pure pluck.

"What's his regiment?" he asked, watching the two slaves who, followed by their mistresses, were bringing the body back to the stretcher.

"Oh, he was a scout, I believe, serving with Stuart when he was wounded. His name is—by the way, his name is Montjoy. Any relative of yours, I wonder?"

Raising himself upon his elbow, Dan turned to look at the dead man beside him. A heavy beard covered the mouth and chin, but he knew the sunken black eyes and the hair that was like his own.

"Yes," he answered after a long pause, "he is a relative of mine, I think;" and then, while the man lay waiting for his coffin, he propped himself upon his arm and followed curiously the changes made by death.

At his first recognition there had come only a wave of repulsion—the old disgust that had always dogged the memory of his father; then, with the dead face before his eyes, he was aware of an unreasoning pride in the blood he bore—in the fact that the soldier there had died pure game to the last. It was as a braggart and a bully that he had always thought of him; now he knew that at least he was not a craven—that he could take blows as he dealt them, from the shoulder out. He had hated his father, he told himself unflinchingly, and he did not love him now. Had the dead man opened his eyes he could have struck him back again with his mother's memory for a weapon. There had been war between them to the grave, and yet, despite himself, he knew that he had lost his old boyish shame of the Montjoy blood. With the instinct of his race to glorify physical courage, he had seen the shadow of his boyhood loom from the petty into the gigantic. Jack Montjoy may have been a scoundrel,—doubtless he was one,—but, with all his misdeeds on his shoulders, he had lived pure game to the end.

A fresh bleeding of Dan's wound brought on a sudden faintness, and he fell heavily upon Big Abel's arm. With the pain a groan hovered an instant on his lips, but, closing his eyes, he bit it back and lay silent. For the first time in his life there had come to him, like an impulse, the knowledge that he must not lower his father's name.



BOOK FOURTH

THE RETURN OF THE VANQUISHED



I

THE RAGGED ARMY

The brigade had halted to gather rations in a corn field beside the road, and Dan, lying with his head in the shadow of a clump of sumach, hungrily regarded the "roasting ears" which Pinetop had just rolled in the ashes. A malarial fever, which he had contracted in the swamps of the Chickahominy, had wasted his vitality until he had begun to look like the mere shadow of himself; gaunt, unwashed, hollow-eyed, yet wearing his torn gray jacket and brimless cap as jauntily as he had once worn his embroidered waistcoats. His hand trembled as he reached out for his share of the green corn, but weakened as he was by sickness and starvation, the defiant humour shone all the clearer in his eyes. He had still the heart for a whistle, Bland had said last night, looking at him a little wistfully.

As he lay there, with the dusty sumach shrub above him, he saw the ragged army pushing on into the turnpike that led to Maryland. Lean, sun-scorched, half-clothed, dropping its stragglers like leaves upon the roadside, marching in borrowed rags, and fighting with the weapons of its enemies, dirty, fevered, choking with the hot dust of the turnpike—it still pressed onward, bending like a blade beneath Lee's hand. For this army of the sick, fighting slow agues, old wounds, and the sharp diseases that follow on green food, was becoming suddenly an army of invasion. The road led into Maryland, and the brigades swept into it, jesting like schoolboys on a frolic.

Dan, stretched exhausted beside the road, ate his ear of corn, and idly watched the regiment that was marching by—marching, not with the even tread of regular troops, but with scattered ranks and broken column, each man limping in worn-out shoes, at his own pace. They were not fancy soldiers, these men, he felt as he looked after them. They were not imposing upon the road, but when their chance came to fight, they would be very sure to take it. Here and there a man still carried his old squirrel musket, with a rusted skillet handle stuck into the barrel, but when before many days the skillet would be withdrawn, the load might be relied upon to wing straight home a little later. On wet nights those muskets would stand upright upon their bayonets, with muzzles in the earth, while the rain dripped off, and on dry days they would carry aloft the full property of the mess, which had dwindled to a frying pan and an old quart cup; though seldom cleaned, they were always fit for service—or if they went foul what was easier than to pick up a less trusty one upon the field. On the other side hung the blankets, tied at the ends and worn like a sling from the left shoulder. The haversack was gone and with it the knapsack and the overcoat. When a man wanted a change of linen he knelt down and washed his single shirt in the brook, sitting in the sun while it dried upon the bank. If it was long in drying he put it on, wet as it was, and ran ahead to fall in with his company. Where the discipline was easy, each infantryman might become his own commissary.

Dan finished his corn, threw the husks over his head, and sat up, looking idly at the irregular ranks. He was tired and sick, and after a short rest it seemed all the harder to get up and take the road again. As he sat there he began to bandy words with the sergeant of a Maryland regiment that was passing.

"Hello! what brigade?" called the sergeant in friendly tones. He looked fat and well fed, and Dan felt this to be good ground for resentment.

"General Straggler's brigade, but it's none of your business," he promptly retorted.

"General Straggler has a pretty God-forsaken crew," taunted the sergeant, looking back as he stepped on briskly. "I've seen his regiments lining the road clear up from Chantilly."

"If you'd kept your fat eyes open at Manassas the other day, you'd have seen them lining the battle-field as well," pursued Dan pleasantly, chewing a long green blade of corn. "Old Stonewall saw them, I'll be bound. If General Straggler didn't win that battle I'd like to know who did."

"Oh, shucks!" responded the sergeant, and was out of hearing.

The regiment passed by and another took its place. "Was that General Lee you were yelling at down there, boys?" inquired Dan politely, smiling the smile of a man who sits by the roadside and sees another sweating on the march.

"Naw, that warn't Marse Robert," replied a private, limping with bare feet over the border of dried grass. "'Twas a blamed, blank, bottomless well, that's what 'twas. I let my canteen down on a string and it never came back no mo'."

Dan lowered his eyes, and critically regarded the tattered banner of the regiment, covered with the names of the battles over which it had hung unfurled. "Tennessee, aren't you?" he asked, following the flag.

The private shook his head, and stooped to remove a pebble from between his toes.

"Naw, we ain't from Tennessee," he drawled. "We've had the measles—that's what's the matter with us."

"You show it, by Jove," said Dan, laughing. "Step quickly, if you please—this is the cleanest brigade in the army."

"Huh!" exclaimed the private, eying them with contempt. "You look like it, don't you, sonny? Why, I'd ketch the mumps jest to look at sech a set o' rag-a-muffins!"

He went on, still grunting, while Dan rose to his feet and slung his blanket from his shoulder. "Look here, does anybody know where we're going anyway?" he asked of the blue sky.

"I seed General Jackson about two miles up," replied a passing countryman, who had led his horse into the corn field. "Whoopee! he was going at a God-a'mighty pace, I tell you. If he keeps that up he'll be over the Potomac before sunset."

"Then we are going into Maryland!" cried Jack Powell, jumping to his feet. "Hurrah for Maryland! We're going to Maryland, God bless her!"

The shouts passed down the road and the Maryland regiment in front sent back three rousing cheers.

"By Jove, I hope I'll find some shoes there," said Dan, shaking the sand from his ragged boots, and twisting the shreds of his stockings about his feet. "I've had to punch holes in my soles and lace them with shoe strings to the upper leather, or they'd have dropped off long ago."

"Well, I'll begin by making love to a seamstress when I'm over the Potomac," remarked Welch, getting upon his feet. "I'm decidedly in need of a couple of patches."

"You make love! You!" roared Jack Powell. "Why, you're the kind of thing they set up in Maryland to keep the crows away. Now if it were Beau, there, I see some sense in it—for, I'll be bound, he's slain more hearts than Yankees in this campaign. The women always drain out their last drop of buttermilk when he goes on a forage."

"Oh, I don't set up to be a popinjay," retorted Welch witheringly.

"Popinjay, the devil!" scowled Dan, "who's a popinjay?"

"Wall, I'd like a pair of good stout breeches," peacefully interposed Pinetop. "I've been backin' up agin the fence when I seed a lady comin' for the last three weeks, an' whenever I set down, I'm plum feared to git up agin. What with all the other things,—the Yankees, and the chills, and the measles,—it's downright hard on a man to have to be a-feared of his own breeches."

Dan looked round with sympathy. "That's true; it's a shame," he admitted smiling. "Look here, boys, has anybody got an extra pair of breeches?"

A howl of derision went up from the regiment as it fell into ranks.

"Has anybody got a few grape-leaves to spare?" it demanded in a high chorus.

"Oh, shut up," responded Dan promptly. "Come on, Pinetop, we'll clothe ourselves to-morrow."

The brigade formed and swung off rapidly along the road, where the dust lay like gauze upon the sunshine. At the end of a mile somebody stopped and cried out excitedly. "Look here, boys, the persimmons on that tree over thar are gittin' 'mos fit to eat. I can see 'em turnin'," and with the words the column scattered like chaff across the field. But the first man to reach the tree came back with a wry face, and fell to swearing at "the darn fool who could eat persimmons before frost."

"Thar's a tree in my yard that gits ripe about September," remarked Pinetop, as he returned dejectedly across the waste. "Ma she begins to dry 'em 'fo' the frost sets in."

"Oh, well, we'll get a square meal in the morning," responded Dan, growing cheerful as he dreamed of hospitable Maryland.

Some hours later, in the warm dusk, they went into bivouac among the trees, and, in a little while, the campfires made a red glow upon the twilight.

Pinetop, with a wooden bucket on his arm, had plunged off in search of water, and Dan and Jack Powell were sent, in the interests of the mess, to forage through the surrounding country.

"There's a fat farmer about ten miles down, I saw him," remarked a lazy smoker, by way of polite suggestion.

"Ten miles? Well, of all the confounded impudence," retorted Jack, as he strolled off with Dan into the darkness.

For a time they walked in silence, depressed by hunger and the exhaustion of the march; then Dan broke into a whistle, and presently they found themselves walking in step with the merry air.

"Where are your thoughts, Beau?" asked Jack suddenly, turning to look at him by the faint starlight.

Dan's whistle stopped abruptly.

"On a dish of fried chicken and a pot of coffee," he replied at once.

"What's become of the waffles?" demanded Jack indignantly. "I say, old man, do you remember the sinful waste on those blessed Christmas Eves at Chericoke? I've been trying to count the different kinds of meat—roast beef, roast pig, roast goose, roast turkey—"

"Hold your tongue, won't you?"

"Well, I was just thinking that if I ever reach home alive I'll deliver the Major a lecture on his extravagance."

"It isn't the Major; it's grandma," groaned Dan.

"Oh, that queen among women!" exclaimed Jack fervently; "but the wines are the Major's, I reckon,—it seems to me I recall some port of which he was vastly proud."

Dan delivered a blow that sent Jack on his knees in the stubble of an old corn field.

"If you want to make me eat you, you're going straight about it," he declared.

"Look out!" cried Jack, struggling to his feet, "there's a light over there among the trees," and they walked on briskly up a narrow country lane which led, after several turnings, to a large frame house well hidden from the road.

In the doorway a woman was standing, with a lamp held above her head, and when she saw them she gave a little breathless call.

"Is that you, Jim?"

Dan went up the steps and stood, cap in hand, before her. The lamplight was full upon his ragged clothes and upon his pallid face with its strong high-bred lines of mouth and chin.

"I thought you were my husband," said the woman, blushing at her mistake. "If you want food you are welcome to the little that I have—it is very little." She led the way into the house, and motioned, with a pitiable gesture, to a table that was spread in the centre of the sitting room.

"Will you sit down?" she asked, and at the words, a child in the corner of the room set up a frightened cry.

"It's my supper—I want my supper," wailed the child.

"Hush, dear," said the woman, "they are our soldiers."

"Our soldiers," repeated the child, staring, with its thumb in its mouth and the tear-drops on its cheeks.

For an instant Dan looked at them as they stood there, the woman holding the child in her arms, and biting her thin lips from which hunger had drained all the red. There was scant food on the table, and as his gaze went back to it, it seemed to him that, for the first time, he grasped the full meaning of a war for the people of the soil. This was the real thing—not the waving banners, not the bayonets, not the fighting in the ranks.