ASEA of pale-green sward, bathed in a drift of pink-white apple-blossoms. Above, the softest of blue spring skies.
In the middle distance the hazy mountains brave in their spring panoply. And, between mountains and apple-orchard, a line of trampled grain-fields, sown now with hundreds of sprawling dead men in dark blue and in light gray.
Back of the glowing white orchard a dingy white city that had sprung to life overnight. A city of many long streets, each lined with battered canvas tents.
Over one of these tents—a tent large and less dingy than its humbler fellows—floated an American flag topped by a gilded eagle. The veriest three-month recruit would have known the tent by its insignia as the temporary abode of the general commanding.
Through the opening made by the pinned-back flap the interior was visible. At the back was a cot; beside it a shabby campaign trunk.
In the tent’s center was a collapsible table, at which, on a campaign stool, sat a bearded man in a gold-laced blue coat which bore the rank mark of a general officer of the Union army.
At attention in front of the general stood a tall, wiry man, bronzed of face, his grizzled hair close clipped, his eye the eye of a boy. Sergeant’s stripes adorned the arm of his fatigue jacket.
Few of the old Eagle Hotel coterie back in Ideala would have recognized at a glance, in the trim, alert figure, their old crony, the portly and shambling Dad.
The loose flesh that had accumulated during fourteen years of bibulous indulgence had vanished; to be replaced by hard muscle. The alcohol had been utterly banished from his system by nine months of hard working and clean, outdoor living.
At Ideala he would have passed for sixty; here for little more than forty.
“Sergeant Dadd,” said the general, looking up from some papers and maps on the table as the non-commissioned officer’s shadow fell athwart his vision, “I have sent for you to act as courier in getting copies of some important plans through to General Hooker. Your success in carrying a message across thirty miles of country infested by the enemy’s skirmishing parties last month has been reported to me. That is why I have sent for you now.”
Dad’s face did not relax its look of military blankness. But a faint flush of pleasure tinged the tan of his cheeks.
The general as he spoke was sorting from the heap before him several papers whereon were written pages, columns of figures and rough-drawn plans. These he thrust into an envelope, which he triple-sealed with waxheated in a tallow dip that sputtered for that purpose on one corner of the table.
Then, addressing the envelope, he sanded it and passed it across the table into the outstretched hand of Dad.
“To General Hooker himself, and no other,” he said succinctly.
Dad saluted, thrusting the envelope into the bosom of his flannel shirt. Vaguely he wondered why he, an infantry sergeant, should be chosen for this task in a camp that bristled with aids and couriers.
His former feat of the sort had been performed in a moment of dire emergency, for which volunteers had been requested. He had volunteered, had accomplished the ticklish task, and had thereby won promotion from a second to a first sergeancy in his company.
But as the general spread out a pocket map on the table and pointed to the present position of General Hooker’s headquarters, Dad began to understand why a specially equipped man, instead of an ordinary courier, had been selected for this particular purpose.
Dad was familiar with the surrounding region. His corps of the Army of the Potomac had marched and fought and countermarched and bivouacked and advanced and retreated across nearly every square foot of it for the past two months.
He saw from a glance at the map the location General Hooker had chosen for his new headquarters. It was nearly forty miles away, and between it and the camp behind the apple orchard lay a section of countrythat the Confederate victory of the preceding day would set a-swarm with graycoats.
This battle—whose grim harvest still lay ungathered along the mountain foot, ten miles distant—had driven back a portion of the Union line that was seeking to wriggle its way along the Virginia peninsula toward Richmond.
The several corps were widely scattered.
And in the interstices—notably between this spot and General Hooker’s headquarters—were masses of Confederate guerrilla-bands, Confederate skirmish companies, Confederate scout-parties, and even swift-marching Confederate regiments and brigades.
To cross the intervening space unmolested was an exploit easier for a high-flying crow to accomplish than for a human being—particularly when that human being chanced to be a blue-uniformed Yankee soldier.
The general, raising his eyes from the map on which with a pencil-butt he was tracing the route from start to destination, read in Dad’s eyes the knowledge of what the journey must mean.
“It is an expedition for a full brigade,” said the general, “or—for one resourceful man. I do not underestimate the peril of capture, nor do I formally command you to go. I merely give you a chance to volunteer for the mission if you wish to assume its responsibilities.”
Dad saluted again.
“I beg to volunteer, sir,” said he with decisive military brevity.
“I was certain you would,” nodded the general. “I made the request as a technicality. I warn you, sergeant, that the chances of capture are at least ten to one against you. That is why I wish you to go in uniform. It may lessen your prospects of success, but in the event of capture you will be a prisoner of war and not hanged.”
Dad looked more keenly at the speaker. This general of his had not the reputation of nursing carefully his men’s lives, nor of placing those lives ahead of successful achievement.
Dad wondered a little at the man’s unusual consideration. But quickly he dismissed the problem as not only too deep for him, but as immaterial.
He was eager to be off upon this hazardous venture. He knew the country. He knew his route, and he was anxious to pit his brains and his luck against whatever foes might infest the intervening districts.
“You ride?” asked the general.
“Yes, sir.”
“You will gain time that way. The risk is greater, but so is the speed. Go to your quarters and get ready. I will order a fast horse sent there to you in five minutes. Start at once when it arrives. Well,” he went on impatiently as Dad hesitated, “what is it?”
“Pardon me, sir,” ventured Dad. “A man who is captured may sometimes get away, but the papers he has are seized as soon as he is caught. If I am taken and if I get away again without my papers, is there any verbal message that I may take to General Hooker?Any outline of the nature of those plans I am to carry?”
“No!”
The general spoke sharply and in a tone of stark finality, turning his back on the volunteer courier and resuming his work at the table. His manner toward him had all at once changed from the unwontedly familiar to the customarily dictatorial.
Again wondering a little, Dad left the tent and made his way hurriedly down the camp street to his own company’s quarters.
There it was the work of two minutes to make his soldierly preparations for the trip.
Then, with nothing to do but to await the arrival of the expected horse, he filled and lighted a pipe, sat down on a roll of blankets in the tent doorway, and with a stick fell to tracing in the dirt a line of his proposed route, that each step of the way might thereafter be fresh in his mind as he started on his errand.
This act of concentration was by no means easy, for a half score of lounging infantrymen were lying on the grass near by, smoking and talking over the events of the preceding day’s battle.
Realizing that a soldier in the ranks knows far less about the actual actions and effects of a battle in which he has just been engaged than does the non-combatant stay-at-home who reads a telegraphed account of it next day in his morning newspaper, Dad gave no particular heed to their frankly voiced conjectures and boasts.
Presently, as they were discussing a certain disastrous attempt to rally a retreating regiment, he heard a newly joined member of his company—who formerly had fought in the army of the West—break loudly in upon the group’s debating:
“Talk of rallying! We ought to have had Battle Jimmie along. He’d have drummed that whole skedaddling regiment to a halt in less than no time; and then he’d have led ’em back to the firing-line, blackguarding them for a rabble of cowards every step of the way.”
“What’s Battle Jimmie?” drawled a lank New Englander. “That’s a new name to me. What is it—a dog or a bird or a patent medicine?”
“Don’t know who Battle Jimmie is?” cried the Westerner in scornful incredulity. “Next you’ll be askin’ who’s Little Mac or Father Abraham or Fightin’ Joe.”
“Maybe I will at that,” answered the New Englander. “But who the dickens is—”
“Battle Jimmie? There ain’t a man in the army of the West who’d ask that question. And yet—I dunno who he is. Nobody does. First time we ever saw him was back in the late fall. We were chargin’ a line of batteries on a hill, and as fast as we’d get halfway up the hill we’d break and scuttle back to cover, which sure wasn’t none too healthy on that hillside.
“The fourth time we tackled the hill we hadn’t any too much love for the job, and we began to waver and get unenthusiastic before we’ve gone a quarter of thedistance. Then all of a sudden, skallyhootin’ out of nowhere, comes Battle Jimmie.
“He’s in a cast-off uniform miles too big for him, and he’s got hold of a drum somehow or other. And, say, boys, the noise he could tease out of that old drum was sure a caution to snakes.
“Right in front of our first rank he runs, hammerin’ away at that blessed drum; chargin’ up the hill ahead of us in a whole beehive of bullets and grape, yellin’: ‘Come along, you lazy coots! Shake a leg there! Don’t keep me waitin’ when I get to the top. I don’t want the bother of havin’ to clean out them Johnnie Reb batteries all by myself!’
“There was one great big laugh went up that was more like a cheer. It came roarin’ out from the whole line. We forgot to be discouraged any more, and up the hill we kited after that fool boy and his drum.
“We didn’t stop till we was over the breastworks and right in among the guns, and the Confeds was scramblin’ out the opposite side to get away. After that Battle Jimmie could have his pick of anythin’ the army of the West had in their whole camp—”
The arrival of a roan cavalry charger, led by an orderly, ended the narrative of Battle Jimmie, so far as Dad was concerned. His mind full of his mission, he had given little attention to it.
Now, swinging into the saddle, he set off at an easy canter.
Ahead of him lay an errand whose chances of successthe general himself had estimated as one in ten. The prospect of such fearful odds sent a glad thrill of combat tingling warmly through the veteran.
“Jockeys have won races against bigger odds than that,” he mused joyously, “with only a purse as reward. It’ll go hard if I can’t do as well with the country’s fortunes maybe as my stake. I’ll win out, or—I won’t be alive to know I’m a failure.”
For twenty miles Dad rode in safety.
That did not mean he covered twenty straight-away miles of his journey. On the contrary, he lessened the distance between himself and Hooker’s headquarters by less than twelve miles.
Avoiding main roads as far as possible; reconnoitering and then making détours when danger seemed to threaten or when fresh hoof-marks denoted the recent passing of cavalrymen; going out of his way to take advantage of hillock-and-forest shelter—he had almost doubled the distance that would have been needful had he followed the direct route.
Thus far he had met with no mishap. Once he had plunged into a thicket, halted abruptly there, and dismounted as a troop of gray-coated patrols jingled past on the road barely twenty yards distant. Cautiously reaching downward, he had snatched a handful of sweet fern, and with it had rubbed his horse’s nostrils; lest the beast catching the scent of the patrols’ horses, should whinny.
Again he had turned quickly into a high-bankedand twisting lane at sight of a dust-cloud far ahead and thus avoided a battalion of Jackson’s cavalry.
A third time he had spurred his horse into a gully of red clay on sound of hoof-beats, just before a band of guerrillas, or bushwhackers, had cantered by.
His senses super-tense, calling on himself for every scouting trick that old-time experience could devise, Dad wound his tortuous way safely through a score of pitfalls that would have entrapped a lesser man.
The farther he rode the more fully he realized the truth of his general’s forecast that the chances against his winning through to Hooker were ten to one.
In fact, the prospect of any one’s making the whole trip in safety was negligible.
The whole countryside was alive with Confederates. Dad could see traces of their passage everywhere. More than once he was tempted to dismount and trust to the greater safety, if lesser speed, of a foot journey.
Halting, as usual, before rounding the bend of a byroad, he strained his ears to catch any sound of riders ahead. There was only the drowsy spring silence.
He trotted around the wooded curve—and passed four men who sprawled, half asleep, on the wayside grass, their grazing horses hobbled behind them.
A glance told Dad the occupation and character of the resting quartet.
They were guerrillas; such as infected both Northern and Southern armies. Irregular troops in demi-uniform, who pursued a system of free-lance fighting, and often of free-lance plundering as well.
He had ridden too far into their line of vision to retreat. His uniform was an instant introduction. The fine horse that he rode was, alone, worth a chase from these horse-loving Confederate marauders.
At sight of the rider one of the somnolent guerrillas opened an eye. The spectacle of a blue uniform set both eyes wide-open.
He called loudly to his fellows. All four sat up with the grotesque suddenness of jumping-jacks.
Then they scrambled to their feet and flung themselves at the horseman.
Dad had already dug spurs into his mount. Now he flashed out the pistol he had brought along. But, finger on trigger, he hesitated and forbore to fire, lest the report bring to the scene every possible Confederate within a half-mile.
The foremost guerrilla reached his bridle and jumped for it as the horse darted nervously forward under the sudden double impact of the spurs.
Dad threw his own body far forward and with his pistol-butt caught the guerrilla’s outflung wrist a numbing blow that deflected the grasp from the bridle leather.
A second guerrilla clutched at the leg of the rider himself, missed it by a scant inch, and rolled in the dirt from a glancing contact with the roan’s flank.
Dad was clear of the men and was still riding at top speed. A glance over his shoulder gave him a momentary picture of the four turning back and running for their hobbled horses. Apparently it was to be a chase.
Dad settled himself low in the saddle, returned his pistol to its holster, and nursed his eager horse along at every atom of speed the mettled brute possessed.
The horse was not fresh, but was strong and swift. Dad, despite his five feet eleven inches of muscular height, was slender and no galling weight in the saddle.
Also, there was every probability that his pursuers’ mounts were little fresher than his own.
Yet he was riding straight into the enemy’s country, with no further chance of subterfuge or skulking. At any point he might be headed off, or speedier horses might be added to the chase.
He must trust to blind luck and to no other mortal agency, that he might possibly be able to gain sufficient lead to give the four guerrillas the slip before they could drive him into some body of Confederates coming from an opposite direction or rouse the whole region against him.
And so he rode as never before he had ridden.
Once and again he looked back. The guerrillas were mounted now and in full pursuit, strung out in a long line of three vari-sized groups. As he looked the second time the foremost gave voice to the Virginian foxhunters’ “View-halloo!”
It was an insult that stung the fugitive to hot rage.
Snake-fences, copses, and fields swept past on either hand. The roan was well in his mile-eating stride, and thus far showed no sign of distress at the fearful strain put upon him. Yard by yard, he was pulling awayfrom the four laboring steeds that thundered along in his dusty wake.
The by-road, at an acute angle, met and merged with the highway.
Here was added danger of meeting foes. But there was no other course to take.
And into the yellow highway Dad guided the fleeing roan. As he did so he rose in his stirrups and peered forward, the sharp, old eyes scanning the broad ribbon of road for a full three miles ahead.
The next moment he had brought his horse to a mercilessly quick and sliding standstill that well-nigh threw the gallant beast off balance. Directly in front hung a dust-cloud seemingly no larger than a man’s hand.
THE campaigner instinct told Dad what raised so odd a cloud on the dry dust of the road. From its position and formation, he knew it hung above a cavalry column of considerable size.
A glance at the road at his feet showed him that no such large body of horsemen had passed during the past two hours. The column, then, was coming toward him.
And between him and it lay no crossroad.
There was but one possible move for him; for already the hoof-beats of the four guerrillas’ horses were growing louder.
Dad wheeled his horse and rode back at a dead gallop along the main road he had just entered.
Past the byway’s mouth he sped and straight on. The guerrillas, still on the byway, noted the maneuver and, with a quadruple yell, struck out across the intervening field to cut him off.
And for a brief space their action favored the refugee.
For the field they entered was newly and deeply plowed. Moreover, through its center, in a depression,was a bit of boggy ground almost worthy the name of quagmire.
The horses lumbered heavily over the plowed ground and sank almost to their knees when they came to the strip of mire. The roan, meantime, tore along the hard, yellow highway with undiminished speed.
One of the guerrillas whipped out a pistol and fired thrice in quick succession.
A bullet whined querulously past Dad’s head. A second caught him fairly in the bridle arm.
The shot was fired at longest pistol-range, and its force was almost spent before it reached its mark. Yet it bit its way through the uniform coat and the shirt-sleeve, and inflicted a light flesh-wound in the forearm.
The shock of the blow knocked the rein from Dad’s left hand and numbed his left arm to the shoulder. At the jerk on the bit the great roan swerved sharply in surprise.
Dad caught the loose-flung rein in his right hand and guided the terrified horse back into the road’s center.
As he did so a chinkapin and live-oak forest shut him off from the view of the floundering guerrillas.
“They never knew I was hit,” he growled. “That’s one comfort.”
He glanced down at his left arm. Already an inordinately large patch of blood was discoloring the blue uniform on either side of the bullet hole.
“Must have tapped a big vein or maybe an artery,” he conjectured, as he saw the blood trickle fast fromthe edge of his cuff. “At this rate, I’ll be too weak in a few minutes to sit in the saddle. I’ll have to stop somewhere to stanch it.”
He looked back. No sign yet of the guerrillas. He had been too far away from the larger cavalry column, he knew, for any of its riders to distinguish himself or his uniform. The thick woods still closed in the road on either side.
Dad looked for a likely spot to penetrate the forest.
But on both sides of the road a high snake-fence arose, a fence too high for any horse to jump.
There would be no time to dismount, tear down a panel of the fence, lead his horse through, and repair the gap so that the guerrillas’ sharp eyes would not detect the recent break.
So on he galloped, hoping for a gate or a lane farther ahead.
With a deal of wriggling Dad got his right arm out of his jacket and managed to wind the jacket itself roughly around his left arm, that a trail of bloodspots on the road’s dust might not mark his path to his pursuers.
Around another bend swept the galloping roan. And now both forest and snake-fence stopped abruptly, to continue a furlong farther on. The intervening space was filled by a soft, green lawn dotted with trees, and cut off from the road by a four-foot stone wall.
Far back on the lawn and bowered by oaks stood a rambling house of colonial style.
On its pillared front porch sat the littlest and daintiest woman imaginable. She was in black and wore a little, frilled, white apron. Her grayish hair formed a mass of soft curls around her forehead. On her lap was a basket of knitting.
All these details Dad’s eyes saw without fairly grasping them as he galloped into view. And his heart sank.
He had heard of Southern women’s splendid loyalty to “the cause.” This woman would assuredly tell his pursuers that she had seen a man in Yankee uniform ride past. She would add that he was very palpably wounded.
Thus would die his last hope that they might give extra time by pausing to beat up the woods for him.
Dad was turning away from his fleeting glance to scan the road ahead for a lane or other opening, when suddenly he shifted his gaze in astonishment back toward the white-columned portico.
The little woman had sprung to her feet with the agility of a child and was waving her knitting to him in frantic summons.
He had traversed fully half the length of the cleared lawn’s space as he saw the signal. Acting on lightning instinct, he reined in his mount, wheeled him to one side, and put him at the wall.
The roan, with a mighty effort, cleared the obstacle, came down heavily on all fours on the springy turf of the lawn, and bounded toward the house.
The little lady had run down the steps and wasjumping up and down in wild excitement in the driveway.
“Tumble off, quick!” she ordered. “Get into the hall there and shut the door behind you. I’ll tie your horse in that magnolia copse over yonder. It’s so thick-grown I guess they’d hunt a week before suspicioning a critter was hid there.”
Dad rolled out of the saddle in dazed obedience, staggered weakly up the steps and into a broad hall that bisected the house from front to rear. The dim coolness struck him like a blow. He groped for a horsehair sofa that he could just distinguish in the half-light, sank down on it, and slid helplessly from its slippery seat to the polished floor—in a dead faint.
Within a minute he opened his eyes and broke into a fit of strangled coughing. A most horrible odor had gripped his sense of smell.
Above him knelt the little woman. In one hand she held a bunch of feathers tom from a duster; in the other a still lighted match. A fume of smoke from the feathers spoke eloquently of the odor’s origin.
“Nothing like burning a bunch of feathers under a body’s nose to bring them out of a fainting fit,” she was saying cheerily. “Don’t look so wild, man. You’re safe enough. Or you will be presently. Can you stand up? Try.”
Dad called on all his failing strength and, helped by the little lady and a hand on the sofa-arm, reeled to his feet.
“So!” she approved. “Now, you just lean on me and on the banisters. We’ve got some climbing to do. Your horse is safe hid. And the men that were chasing you have ridden past. But they’ll be back.”
GRITTING his teeth to keep his will-power up to the task, Dad began mounting the spiral stairs that led from the big hallway to the upper regions of the house. He leaned heavily on the mahogany banisters on one side, and as lightly as possible on the little lady’s black bombazine shoulder upon the other.
Once or twice dizziness again overcame him. But he forced it back.
They reached the upper hall. Dad would have stopped, but his inexorable guide urged him on.
Down the hall they went, and at the farther end came to a door that she unlocked and opened. Before them rose a shorter, narrower, steeper flight of steps.
A herculean struggle brought Dad to the summit of these. Around him were dim spaces, vaguely redolent of old lavender. Somewhere near bees were sleepily booming and crooning.
His eyes growing used to the dim light, he saw that he was in a huge garret—a garret wherein were strewn quaint bits of bygone furniture, horse-hide trunks, ghostly garments in white muslin wrappings, and broken-down household goods of every description.
“Sit there!” ordered the little lady, thrusting himgently into the depths of a soft, old armchair whose upholstery was shamelessly moth-eaten.
“Now,” as he gratefully followed her command, “just stay there till I come back.”
She vanished.
Dad stared after her in dull wonder. His mind was still hazy. He knew he had fainted momentarily through loss of blood. But he wondered that he had since then felt no weaker as the minutes had gone on. Gingerly he unwound the coat from his injured arm and rolled up the sleeve of his shirt.
Then he understood.
The vein that had been tapped—it was assuredly no artery nor even one of the very largest veins—had bled in crass profusion for a space. Then the caking of the blood had checked further flow.
Dad was surgeon enough to realize that that meant there could be little if any more flow of blood from so petty a wound.
He was looking from side to side in search of something better than a uniform jacket wherewith to bind the hurt, when again the little lady stood before him.
Tucked under one arm was a black case, under the other were rolls of white bandages. In both hands she bore a basin of hot water in which a soft sponge bobbed like a floating island.
“There!” she said soothingly. “Just you lean back and rest. I’ll ’tend to the wound.”
With deft fingers she bathed the arm, then sponged the bullet-graze clean of blood. From the black caseshe drew a bottle filled with some pungent liquid. With this liquid she washed out the wound, then proceeded to bind it skillfully with a roll of the bandages.
So slight was the hurt that, but for the accident of its touching the wrong vein, it might well have caused so healthy a man no more annoyance than would the process of vaccination.
Yet for once in his life Dad felt no inclination to belittle a physical mishap.
He discovered—and wondered vaguely at the discovery—that it was marvelously pleasant to lie back like this and let his strange little hostess minister to his hurt. Her touch, too, held for him a strange and soothing magnetism all its own. Not for twenty years had a gentlewoman laid her hand upon him.
The novelty of it was delightful. Yet in his heart Dad felt the novelty was by no means all.
As she worked, the little lady’s tongue went as nimbly as her fingers.
“Isn’t this what Ehud used to call rank good luck?” she was saying. “This afternoon of all afternoons, too. Why, three days out of four I’m as busy as tunket all afternoon. And here, just to-day, I said to myself: ‘I guess I’ll sit on the stoop a spell and play lady, and do some knitting.’ And I hadn’t been there three minutes, hardly, when past you came prancing.
“There’s another piece of luck, too. Only this noon I let all three of the house servants run over to the Winstons’ plantation to a wedding in the servants’ quarters over there. And I sent Tom—he’s my gardener, theonly man slave I’ve got left here—over to see they didn’t stay too late. Any other day they’d be screeching like a pack of wildcats at sight of a Yankee.”
“But, madam,” expostulated Dad, finding his voice at last, “surely you run a risk, harboring a fugitive Union soldier. It was selfish in me not to—”
“Risks?” She caught him up gayly. “Sakes! I run risks every day of my blessed life these times. When the Confederates aren’t stealing my chickens the Yankees are stealing my pigs. Or both of them in turns are stealing my cows. It’s a mercy my teeth are my own, or those would have gone, too, long ago.”
“Still, there must surely be a risk in hiding me here. You said those men would come back. And if they do—”
“If they do,” she finished, “I’ll have to ask the recording angel to blot out some of the fibs I’ll tell them. Risk? There’s no risk. They aren’t likely to search the house. Not upstairs, anyhow. The servants won’t know anything, and I don’t believe anyone will search the magnolia thicket to see if there’s a horse tethered there.
“Just you rest easy. There’s no risk—either for you or for me.”
“I can’t thank you,” he faltered. “I haven’t words to. But I think you know how grateful I am.”
“Grateful for what? For not letting you ride on until you ran into some picket-party down the road? Nonsense! There’s nothing to be grateful about.
“When I saw you streaking past my house, wounded,on that fine big horse of yours, I knew well enough no Yankee soldier would be choosing these parts to take a pleasure ride in, I knew by the way you rode there must be someone after you. So what was there to do but ask you in?”
“I—I thought you Southern ladies hated all Yankees like poison. I hardly expected—”
“Southern ladies?Me?Dear man, southern Massachusetts is the farthest southIwas born. Born and bred there. In South Wilbr’am, ten miles out of Springfield. Do I talk Southern?”
“No. I—that is why I wondered—”
“We came South here, to Virginia, ten years ago. My husband—he was Captain Ehud Sessions—captain in the Mexican War, you know—his health failed him, and Dr. Ballard said he’d best go South to live. So we sold out in Wilbr’am and came down here. We and our daughter. She’s married now and living out in New York City.
“A couple of years later Ehud died. It didn’t seem to do him any good down here, and all the time he kept peaking for the Wilbr’am mountains. After he died I kept on running the place here. Because it was less lonely here than it would have been back home without Ehud.
“I’ve been doing it now for eight years. All alone. Except the servants. But a body that’s busy hasn’t much time for pining. So—Have I fastened that bandage too tight?”
“No. It is perfect. You are a wonderful nurse.”
“Ehud always said so,” she answered, highly gratified at the praise. “He knew a lot about doctoring and nursing. Picked it up in the Mexican War. And he taught it to me. I’ve thought sometimes, if this war keeps up, maybe I’ll close the place here and run up to Washington and volunteer as a nurse. They say they’re needed badly sometimes after battle; and there aren’t any too many of them.”
“You would put a premium on recklessness. Every man would be trying to get sick or step in the way of a bullet.”
“Now isn’t that a real pretty speech!” she cried, flushing delicately. “And a woman fifty years old her last birthday, too.”
“Madam,” said Dad, right gallantly, “I beg you won’t tax my credulity by saying you are a day over thirty.”
“Listen to the man!” she laughed happily. “Yes, sir. I’m fifty years old last May. According to the record in my family Bible.”
“Never before in my life,” returned Dad, “have I been tempted to doubt the truth of one word that is written in the Book of Books. But—”
“Wait!” she said, as though reminded of some neglected duty; and again she vanished.
This time she was gone for fully ten minutes; leaving the fugitive to dream strange, sweet, vague dreams in the shadows of the quaint, old-world garret.
At last she came back, bearing this time a tray whereon rested a most delectable little supper.
Dad had eaten nothing since dawn. At her behest he fell to with a will. And as he ate his strength came slowly back to him. Rest and food were steadily repairing whatever damage the temporary loss of blood might have wrought upon his seasoned constitution.
“I took a good look for those guerrillas of yours,” she said, as he finished eating. “But there’s no sign of them yet. This road, in the direction you were going, winds and twists like a sick adder. They might ride on for ten miles before they could be sure you weren’t riding just ahead of them. And they’d have to search all along the way back before they could get here.”
“I must go,” he said, starting up. “I’ve lost too much time already.”
“If you’re aiming to lose time,” said she, “go by all means. But if you want to get safely to wherever you were riding, you’ll stand a better chance after nightfall, and especially after those fellows pass here on their way back. Otherwise you might run into them at the gate. There’s much less traveling at night on these roads. Only the patrols. And they generally sing to keep from falling asleep in their saddles. So you’ll probably hear them in time to get out of their way. Oh, and I sneaked out and fed and watered your horse.”
Inclination for once sided with common-sense, and Dad sank back again in the big chair. The thought that this utterly charming little woman might be annoyed by a search of her house on his account sent his hand involuntarily to his pistol holster.
It was empty.
With a thrill of dismay the man realized that he must make the rest of his perilous journey weaponless.
He remembered thrusting back the revolver into its holster after his brush with the guerrillas on the byroad. He had thrust it back carelessly. And hard riding had evidently caused it to slip out of its resting place and tumble, unnoted by him, to the ground.
His start of surprise drew the little lady’s attention.
“What ails you?” she asked solicitously. “Does the wound hurt?”
“I wish it did,” he replied in the ponderous gallantry which suddenly had seemed to come so easy to him, “so that I might get you to bind it for me again. But it is something more important than a petty scratch on the forearm that bothers me just now. I’ve somehow lost my pistol. I have no weapon to protect you in case those ruffians should try to come in; and no weapon to protect myself for the balance of my ride.”
“Oh, that’s too bad!” she sympathized. “It beats all how careless a man is about losing weapons. Ehud was just like that with his razors.
“Don’t you worry about protectingme. I won’t need any protecting. But if you want something to fight with in case you should be held up on the road—why, I’ve got just the very thing for you. Take good care of it, though, won’t you?”
She darted across the attic floor and in among the shadows; returning presently with a straight-bladed infantry sword of a somewhat antique make.
Handling it almost with reverence, she offered it hilt foremost to Dad.
“It was Ehud’s,” she said gently. “He set a lot of store by it. He carried it all through the Mexican War. I think I told you he was a captain there. It cost thirty-two dollars and seventy-five cents, including the lettering. Is the light too dim for you to see the lettering? It’s on the blade.
“It says ‘Draw me not without cause. Sheathe me not without honor.’
“I—I kind of think you’re the kind of man who can keep that commandment. Take the sword.”
DAD received the weapon from her hands as reverently as she had tendered it. His fingers closed about the fretted ivory hilt, and he read in the fading light the inscription on its blue-steel blade.
Then he handed it back.
“A beautiful sword,” he said, a catch in his voice, “and one that any soldier might rejoice to wear at his side. The sword of a brave man, I am sure. Such a man as would to-day be striking gallantly for our dear country if he were still living. I am honored past words at your gift. But—I cannot accept it.”
“What?” she asked, her eyes big with wondering disappointment. “Why not? I don’t grudge it to you, a mite. Nor Ehud wouldn’t either.”
“You don’t understand,” he explained, feeling as though he had brutally rejected the love-offering of a child. “I cannot wear this splendid sword because I am not entitled to. Such a weapon is worn by none but commissioned officers. I am only a sergeant. And a sergeant is not permitted to carry a sword of this kind. Any more than he is allowed to wear epaulets.”
“But—”
“I should treasure this gift above any other I haveever had,” he went on, “if the laws of warfare would let me take it. I shall never forget that you offered it to me—an utter stranger—out of the generous bounty of your heart. Please don’t think I don’t appreciate it.”
Reluctantly she restored the sword to its hook on the raftered ceiling.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “If Ehud’s sword could go on fighting, I’d feel happier.”
“If I could carry it to victory, madam, I’d feel prouder than I can tell you.”
“Well, maybe you’ll be able to wear a sword at your side some of these days. If you’re a sergeant now and if you had the pluck to ride alone into this nest of hornets—By the way,didyou come alone or were you separated from your regiment?”
“I came alone. I am carrying dispatches. To General Hooker.”
“Fighting Joe, eh? That’s a man after my own heart. Where is he?”
Dad told her.
“Sakes alive!” she ejaculated. “That’s the best part of twenty miles from here. And all the district just abuzzing with Confeds. You must be brave!”
“No one in our war is brave,” he corrected. “Some are cowardly. Some are foolhardy. But the bulk of us on both sides of the quarrel just plod along and do our duty, as I’ve tried to do mine to-day. It isn’t bravery. It’s duty.”
“I’ve an idea,” she suggested, “that bravery andduty add up to pretty much the same thing; whether it’s in storming a fort or selling a yard of calico. Anyhow, mister—mister—”
“Dadd,” he answered glibly. “James Dadd.”
“Anyhow, Sergeant Dadd,” she continued, smiling ever so faintly at the odd name, “I know men pretty well. And I believe you’d do your duty, squarely and honestly, whether it was in war or in a shop.”
“Madam,” said Dad, miserably, “I didn’t do my duty in either. And, as for honesty, I have been even more remiss. Why, I have just told a lie that shames me to the soul. I have told it to the ministering angel who saved me from death or capture and who has since played Good Samaritan to me. The only woman in years who has shown me her sex’s divine pity.
“I have lied to you about my name. It is not James Dadd. It is James Brinton.”
He dared not look at her, but spoke rapidly, his eyes downcast, his fingers foolishly busy with the torn fringe of the chair in which he sat.
“I—I call myself James Dadd,” he blundered on. “And I suppose I have a right to. For it doesn’t harm anyone, and it gives me a chance to be in the army. They wouldn’t take me under my own name. But, oh, I love the old name, and it makes me ashamed every time I have to use the other one. Still, I’ve always figured—till now—that it’s nobody’s business. But—somehow I can’t lie to a woman that’s got eyes like yours.”
“Unless I’m very wrong,” she said, after a littlebreathless silence, “you aren’t given to telling lies to anyone at all, man or woman, Mr.—Brinton. As for going to the war under another name, I can’t see anything very terrible in that. I take it you didn’t enlist with the idea of cheating folks out of anything?”
“No!” he declared, almost fiercely. “No!”
And again silence fell, there in the dusty, lavender-scented garret.
Dusk was pushing the shadows forward from the mysterious corners and shoving them farther and farther into the little window-lit space where sat the man and woman.
At last Mrs. Sessions said:
“I s’pose all women are inquisitive.”
“They must have one drawback to keep them mortal,” he countered, with a brave attempt at his earlier tone of gallantry.
“But,” she went on impersonally, “why a fine, upstanding man like you should go to war under a silly name like Dadd, when he’s got such a fine name as Brinton, certainly does make me curious. Not,” she added, in polite haste, “not that it’s any of my business—as maybe you were going to say.”
“I was going to say,” he contradicted, “that any of my affairs are also your affairs. As far as you honor me, ma’am, by making them so.”
“You say pretty things,” she laughed in pleased embarrassment. “I wonder if a woman ever gets too old to love to hear them. Pretty speeches wasn’t Ehud’s way. But he always liked to hear other menfolk make them to me. It flattered his judgment, he used to say.”
“I fancy his judgment used to get flattered tolerably often,” ventured Dad.
But she did not hear. Her brows were puckered, and she was murmuring his name in perplexity.
“Brinton,” she mused. “Brinton. It’s queer how natural that name seems to me. Because it isn’t such a common name either. Wait a second and I can tell you where I heard it. My brain’s all full of little scraps of things I’ve heard and tucked away there. I’m rummaging there now, like fury. Presently I’ll find it. Oh, I know!” she broke off.
Then she stopped, ashamed.
“You remember?” he asked miserably.
“No,” she denied. “That is, I can’t remember but one man of that name. Ehud told me about him. Long ago. And it made an impression on me at the time.”
“Tell me about him,” urged Dad.
“Oh, ’tisn’t a nice story. Besides there’s just a bare chance that maybe he was some kin of yours—the name being so uncommon—and I’d hate to hurt your feelings.”
“Go ahead!” he begged, in the same perverse spirit that had prompted him, since his turn of the conversation, to pursue it toward the bitter end. “There are many Brintons. I—I believe a man named Brinton was down in Mexico during the war there. Perhaps that’s where Captain Sessions heard the name?”
“That was the place and that was the man,” she said. “Ehud was in General Scott’s army, you know. A captain of infantry. His regiment was on duty one day at a celebration—for some victory or other—and up rides this Brinton man disgustingly drunk and spoils the whole celebration.
“He insulted General Scott something terrible, Ehud said. Then he fell off his horse asleep, and they lugged him to the guard-house; and that’s the last Ehud was ever able to find out about him. They never courtmartialed the man or anything. Ehud said he guessed Brinton escaped in the night; the wicked old sot! What’s the matter, sir? Is the wound hurting you so bad?”
“Yes!” panted Dad. “But not the silly scratch on my arm. It is a thousand times deeper.”
“And you never told me!” she cried in genuine alarm. “Here I’ve been chatting so selfishly with you and never doing a thing to help you! Wait till I fetch you some brandy.”
“I—I don’t need it, thank you,” he replied, “and I never touch it any more. I’ve sworn I never will. The wound I spoke of is on my soul; not my body. I—”
“I thought all army men drank once in a while. Shall I get—”
“No, thank you. I’m all right again. I don’t know that the majority of army men drink. Though a drink is a consoler after a long day’s march, and it helps drown the memory of the comrade who was shot to pieces at one’s side. But it is a consolation that’s notfor me. It consoled me too often—till nothing else worth while would trouble to console me.
“Mrs. Sessions, you have been very good to me. I haven’t the words to tell you how good; and—
“And because of that, as well as because no man could lie to eyes like yours, I wanted to tell you something. Something that may make you sorry you’ve done so much for a worthless old derelict. Something that will surely make you ashamed that you honored him with the offer of your husband’s sword. I—I am the James Brinton whose story Captain Sessions told you.”
“Land’s sake! You never are!”
“And the reason he heard no more of me was because I was ‘dismissed from the service I had degraded,’ and was secretly kicked out of the army. And because I was forever kicked out of it, I had to sneak back into the service under a false name.”
“Is that all?” she asked, quietly.
“That is all—except to say good-by and get out of the house where I’ve let myself be entertained under false pretenses.”
He rose as he spoke; sick at heart, and all at once feeling very, very old and wretched.
He realized with a queer pang that the last hour had somehow been the happiest he had ever known. And by contrast the future seemed to stretch away before him dreary and barren as a rainy sea.
Dad took an uncertain step toward the head of theattic stairs. A small and determined figure barred his way.
“Go back!” came the imperious command. “Go right back where you were, and sit down there. You may have said allyou’vegot to say. ButIhaven’t, by a long shot.”
Dully he obeyed her. His flesh shrank from the thought of listening to the merited tongue-lashing that he felt was his due. Yet, like a scared schoolboy, he recognized and meekly obeyed the note of authority in his hostess’s voice.
“Now, then!” she said, planting herself squarely in front of him. “Aren’t you ashamed, Sergeant James Brinton? Aren’t youashamed? Tolling me on like that to say scand’lous things about a poor man whose story I only half-knew. Oh, I’m a cruel, shrewish old woman to go on like I did about Brinton—about you.
“Who am I to sit in judgment on a poor, weak man whose love for drink overcomes him sometimes? Why, I’m just every mite as bad myself. Without my morning cup of tea, I’m no good at all. I lean on it as men lean on whisky.”
“But, madam—” he stammered.
“I want to tell you how sorry I am for talking like that,” she rushed on, unheeding. “And to tell you that no man who looks and talks the way you do was ever a sot or a scoundrel. Weak, maybe. Yes, we all are. But never bad.”
“Would—would you let me tell you?” he faltered,gripped by a sudden, overwhelming impulse to make this wonderful little woman his mother confessor—to tell her what he had never clearly told himself.
She nodded eager, kindly assent.
In a voice at first incoherent, almost broken, but that soon steadied into narrative force, Dad told the whole pitiful tale.
He did not strive for effect. He spared no needful detail. He spoke as though of a third person; calmly, impartially.
When the story of his Mexican disgrace was done, he went on to tell her of his homecoming, his futile life for the past fourteen years, his continued degradation, the sordid surroundings, the unworthy hopelessness of it all.
Only when he spoke of Jimmie did an unconscious softness and a thrill of pride come into the deep voice.
He told of his son’s departure for the front, the bedside talk with Jimmie in the moonlight, the escape from Ideala, the kneeling vigil on the hill-top where he had forever shaken off his dead self. Of his later army achievements he said little.
It was twilight now, all over the battle world. The long twilight of early summer. And in the attic darkness left the faces of the man and woman visible only as dim white rifts in the gloom.
Presently Dad’s deep voice ceased. There was a hush; through which the far-off throb of a complaining whippoorwill, from down in the bottom-lands, by the river, came to their ears.
Mrs. Sessions had drawn insensibly closer to the speaker as the story progressed. But she had not once interrupted. Nor, now that the tale was done, did she speak.
“Now you know it all,” he said, breaking the long silence. “And I suppose you’re as disgusted with me as I am with myself. As General Scott was when I—”
He caught his breath with a gasp. Something in falling had touched the back of his outflung hand.
Something tiny, and stingingly hot—a tear!
“Mrs. Sessions!” he exclaimed in wonder.
“I—I’m not given to blubbering,” she answered, choking back her sobs. “I didn’t know I was doing it. Oh, you poor,poordear!”
“You don’t despise me, after all I’ve told you about—”
“Despise you?” she echoed, almost shrilly. “Despiseyou? Listen to me, sergeant! Any man can strut around, pompouslike, on the top of the mountain if he was born up there or boosted up there. But the man who canclimbthere—as you’ve done—who can climb there out of the mire and muck that he’s been shoved down into; that man’s a—aman! And the mud on his garments comes pretty close to looking like royal ermine.
“I’m talking like a schoolgirl that reads novels. But it’s all true. Sergeant Brinton, I’d like to shake you by the hand, please. I wish Ehud was here to do it, too!”
Dad, even as he groped for and found the warm andslender little hand in the darkness, could not bring himself to give mental endorsement to the last half of her wish. He was quite satisfied that the late Captain Ehud should remain in Paradise, instead of invading his earthly home’s attic just then.
The two hands met in a clasp that each sought to make frank and hearty. But hands are less docile than faces in masking their heart’s mandates. And the fingers that met so formally forgot somehow to unclasp. Dad found the little woman’s hand nestling quite comfortably and contentedly in the big grip of his own. And if she struggled to withdraw it, the struggle was so very faint as to escape the notice of either of them.
Dad had risen to his feet. Through the gloom he was looking down at the half-seen figure whose hand he held. And something long, long dead was stirring strangely in his heart and his soul.
Very reverently he lifted the little hand and laid it against his lips; holding it there a moment while the tender sweetness of the contact mounted like music to his brain. Reluctantly he unclasped his fingers from about their precious burden. And for a space he and his hostess stood staring wide-eyed into each other’s half-invisible faces.
Then—
“If my daughter could see me now,” said Mrs. Sessions, a little break in the laugh she forced to her lips, “she’d say I was an old fool.”
“If my son could see me now,” answered Dad, “he’d say I was not only an old fool, but an old scoundrel aswell. But Jimmie wouldn’t. Jimmie would understand. Jimmie always understands. Oh, you must meet Jimmie!”
“I’d love to. I’d love to be just like a mother to the boy who’s done so much for—”
“If you don’t mind,” ventured Dad bashfully, “I’d a lot rather you’d be just like a—a grandmother to him.”
Then in the dark there—very simply, like two little children, they kissed.
And on the instant, the quaint old-world stillness of the attic was split by the noise of many pounding hoof-beats.
THE ground-shell of the driveway below resounded thickly to the thudding of hard-ridden horses. Then, with a multifold shuffle, the hoofs came to a standstill.
There were heavy steps on the porch. A hammering broke out, as of gunbutt or sword hilt against the front door panels. And a voice shouted “Let us in!”
“Sakes!” whispered Mrs. Sessions. “I’d clean forgot! There must be a hundred of ’em from the sound.”
“No,” corrected Dad, his practiced ear having enumerated the hoof-beats. “Not more than four or five, I should say. Probably the men who chased me this morning. They’ve come back, as you said, and—”
She was gone, slipping down the stairs in swift noiselessness, closing the attic stairway door behind her.
Pausing only long enough to light a sconce of candles on the table in the wide hallway, Mrs. Sessions sped to the front door, whence the clamor had risen to a deafening pitch.
Unbarring the door, she flung it open, and stood on the threshold, a tiny spirit of wrath.
“What do you folks mean?” she demanded hotly. “What do you folks mean by banging all the varnishoff my door panels like that? Couldn’t you use the brass knocker? What do you want, anyway; disturbing an old woman, like this?”
Four guerrillas gave back for an instant—if only for a bare instant—before her indignant outburst. Then one of them laughed.
The spell was broken. Pushing past her, the quartet trooped into the hallway.
At a glance, Mrs. Sessions could see they were tired, cross, and—apparently—more or less drunk. They had evidently moistened more than once the dry tedium of their afternoon’s search.
“You’re old Yankee Sessions’s widder, I reckon,” said one of the four.
“Yes,” she snapped, “I am. But I’ve lived hereabouts for ten years without ever before hearing rude language from any Southern man. No regular Confederate soldier would speak to a woman that way, either, or burst into her house without a ‘by-your-leave.’ It’s you guerrillas that are the pest of both armies. But you aren’t going to be the pest ofmyhouse. Out you go, all of you!”
“You spitfire!” hiccoughed the camp-follower. “I wish there was still a ducking-stool for scolds. Keep a civil tongue in your head or we’ll find a way to revive the ducking.”
“What do you want here?”
“We’re looking for a runaway Yank. Seen him go past?”
“Why didn’t you say so first, instead of clutteringup my clean hall with mud and kicking the polish off my door? Yes,” she added with perfect truth, “I saw a Yankee. He was riding lickety-split along the road there.”
“How long ago?”
“I don’t know. Quite a while back. He seemed to be wounded.”
The four moved excitedly toward the door.
“I said so!” cried one of the men. “Just what I told you. He sneaked into the woods somewhere, and we rode past him. Then he doubled back.”
“Wounded, hey?” said another. “My shots don’t miss. I knew I winged him. If we can get another mile or two of speed out of those nags, we may overhaul him yet.”
Three of the men were at the door. The fourth, following, paused to light a cheroot by one of the candles on the table.
As he was starting on after the others, he came to a sudden stop. His exclamation brought the three bushwhackers back into the hall. The man pointed melodramatically at a little pool of drying blood on the polished hardwood floor in the full glare of the candlelight. Beside the pool lay a Federal infantry cap.
There was no need for words. The story told itself. The four men with one accord turned on Mrs. Sessions.
She had, as though by sheer chance, taken up a position at the stair foot. And there she stood; magnificently futile and as futilely magnificent as a sparrow that bars a prowling tomcat’s way to her nest.
“Well,” she demanded shrilly, “what are you going to do about it?”
“Do?” laughed the drunkest of the four. “Root him out, of course. And you’re li’ble to keep your hair tidier if you’ll take us straight off to where you’ve hid him.”
“I’ve told you twice to get out of here,” she replied, not a faintest trace of fear in her authoritative voice. “And now I tell—”
“Yes,” growled the man, suddenly turning savage at her words, “and your husband, old Yankee Sessions, told me to get out of his house once, a few years back. I was just out of pen, and I was hungry. I stopped here and told his black butler to rustle me some grub and a little spending-money, or I’d cave his woolly head in. That’s the way to speak to niggers. And he—”
“That’s the way nobody but ‘poor white trash’ ever speaks to them, down here,” contradicted Mrs. Sessions. “I remember the time. Ehud was sick abed with quinsy and—”
“And just as I’d got that nigger so scared that he’d do anything I told him,” snarled the bushwhacker, drink and a sour memory combining to enrage him, “down them stairs rushes old Yankee Sessions, half-dressed, and wavin’ a sword in his hand. And he kicked me—yes, kickedme—out of his house, the dirty Yank. I reckon here’s where I square accounts with his long-tongued widder.”
He lurched to the stair-foot and caught Mrs. Sessions roughly by the shoulder.
“Show us where you’ve hid the blue-backed cur!” he ordered. “Or we’ll—”
He got no further.
At his brutal touch Mrs. Sessions had involuntarily cried out. A cry of stark indignation, not of terror.
And in the midst of the guerrilla’s surly threat she saw the unshaven mouth grow speechless and slack; the drink-bleared eyes widen in crass horror.
The unwashed paw fell inert from her shoulder. The man reeled back a step as though struck across the face. He was staring stupidly at the stairway. And his fellows had followed the direction of his gaze.
All this in the fraction of a second; even as Mrs. Sessions turned to note the cause of the strange panic.
Out of the darkness of the upper landing had sprung a terrible figure. For an instant, as it gathered itself to bound down the broad and shallow flight of stairs, it was vaguely and weirdly outlined by the uncertain candlelight below.
A man, towering, fierce; coatless and without waist-coat. His face was white and distorted with wrath. His eyes blazed in the half-light like living coals. His gray hair was a-bristle.
Above his head flashed a sword-blade.
“Yankee Sessions!” croaked the drunken guerrilla, in babbling fear. “Yankee Sessions’s ghost! Just as he came at me that day when—”
The man at the stair-head cleared the intervening steps in three bounds. With a berserk yell he wasamong the guerrillas, his swirling sword giving forth a million sparks of reflection from the candle-glow.
There was a moment of wild turmoil; of clashing, of yells, of madly stamping feet.
Mrs. Sessions, leaning weakly against the newel-post of the banisters, saw an indistinguishable mass of figures, whirling, jostling, screaming; while once and again above the ruck flashed the sword-blade like a tongue of silver flame.
A cleverly aimed sweep of the blade as the knot of men swayed bodily toward the table, and both candle sconces were knocked violently to the floor.
The sudden darkness was too much for the guerrillas’ drink-shaken nerves. Still in strong doubt as to whether the hero who had attacked them were ghost or human, they had made shift momentarily to hold their ground.
But to cope in the dark with a possible wraith—a homicidal wraith at that—was more than they had bargained for.
Panic—mad and unreasoning—possessed them. Behind, an oblong of lesser gloom through the blackness showed the location of the door.
And through the door they surged pell-mell.
Down the steps they rushed and flung themselves upon their waiting horses. Out of the grounds they galloped and down the road.
A hundred yards farther on they drew rein as by common consent. But before they could bring theirmounts to a halt the clatter of hoofs behind them sent their scared gaze backward.
By the pale starlight they could just distinguish their half-clad foe—enormous and ghostly in the dim light—astride a monster horse, bearing down on them at the speed of an express-train. The sword still gleamed above his head.
There was no pause; there was no consultation; there was no impulse to investigate.
Swayed by a single purpose, the four guerrillas urged their tired horses to a run. Down the road they streamed, their ghostly foe in close pursuit.
Presently—or, as it seemed to them, after a thousand years of terror-flight—the foremost of them reached the by-road. And, with the instinct of a burrow-seeking rabbit, he wheeled his horse into it. His three comrades followed his example.
They had ridden for perhaps a mile when the rear-most of them paused to make certain of what he had begun to hope, that their terrible ghost-foe had ceased his pursuit.