CHAPTER I.

IT is said that a certain old battlefield in Tennessee is haunted in these peaceful times. Often there comes out of the dark silence the sudden wild blare of the bugle, chilling the blood of distant fireside groups. Then the earth throbs with the roll of drums and the measured tread of martial hosts. A mysterious clangor, as of the clash of arms, fills the air. A flash--it is the glinting of bayonets above the grim earthworks which still loom up against the vague horizon.

And yet there are those who can hear, in the military music and the tumultuous voices of victory and defeat, only the rush of the wind across the vast historic plain; who can see, in the gleaming phantoms that hold the works, only the mist and the moon; who can feel, in the tremor of the earth beneath a charging column, only the near approach of the railway train thundering through the cavernous limestone country.

By wintry daylight the battlefield is still more ghastly. Gray with the pallid crab-grass, which so eagerly usurps the place of last summer’s crops, it stretches out on every side to meet the bending sky. The armies that successively encamped upon it did not leave a tree for miles, but here and there thickets have sprung up since the war, and bare and black they intensify the gloom of the landscape. The turf in these segregated spots is never turned. Beneath the branches are rows of empty, yawning graves where the bodies of soldiers were temporarily buried. Here, most often, their spirits walk, and no hire can induce the hardiest ploughman to break the ground. Thus the owner of the land is fain to concede these acres to his ghostly tenants, who pay no rent.

A great brick house, dismantled and desolate, rises starkly above the dismantled desolation of the plain. Despite the tragic aspect of this building, it offers a certain grotesque suggestion--it might seem in the mad ostentation of its proportions a vast caricature of succumbed prosperities. There is no embowering shrubbery about it, no inclosing fence. It is an integrant part of the surrounding ruin. Its cupola was riddled by a cannonade, and the remnants shake ominously with every gust of wind; there are black fissures in the stone steps and pavements, where shells exploded; many of the windows are shattered and boarded up. In others, however, the glass is intact, and through those nearest at hand John Estwicke, standing for the first time on the long, broad portico one afternoon in 1871, caught the genial flicker of fire-light and the glow of crimson curtains. The whole place was grimly incongruous with the idea of a home, and as he was ushered into a wide, bare hall, with glimpses of uninhabited, unfurnished rooms on either hand, there was intimated something of those more potent terrors with which it was instinct--the pursuing influences of certain grisly deeds of trust, for the battlefield, the grewsome thickets, the house itself, all were mortgaged. The next moment he was in an atmosphere of goodly domestic cheerfulness, heightened by coloring so vivid and warm that it seemed to pulsate. A flaring, be-flowered, velvet carpet covered the floor of a large, square room; the crimson curtains were long and expansive; the clumsy, old-fashioned, brass fender and andirons glittered with the reflection of the blazing logs; now and then a red gleam was evoked from the time-darkened mahogany chairs, upholstered with thread-bare black hair-cloth which showed here and there the canvas beneath, for all the furniture was well worn, being scanty relics of ante-bellum days, saved by some miracle in the general destruction of the great battle. He caught a bizarre glimpse of himself in a huge fractured mirror with a showy, gilded frame, which hung above the mantel-piece, and of his host rising suddenly and turning to meet him.

“My dear sir,” exclaimed General Vayne, with a certain rotund emphasis, “I am happy to see you!”

As he crossed the room and offered his hand to his guest--his left hand, for his right sleeve was empty--there was something in his manner which, despite the impressiveness of his fine proportions, his soldierly gait, his kindling enthusiastic eyes, and the grave earnestness of his florid face, savored strongly of the ludicrous. He bore himself with a noble dignity which might well have befitted Julius Caesar, but which consorted absurdly enough with the uncouthness of the bare ruin where he lived; with his hunted condition, never out of sound of the hue and cry of his debts; with the well-worn seams of his coat--a suggestive contrast to his perfect and immaculate linen, that in making the most of its virtues only offered another annotation upon the history of his struggle between gentility and poverty. There was evident cordiality in his welcome, but it was accorded pre-eminently in his official character as host. After this the murmured civility with which the introduction of Estwicke was acknowledged by the General’s slender young daughter, and the beaming amiability of an old lady, his sister, who sat on the opposite side of the fireplace, seemed a trifle irresponsible.

“My brother has told me,” said Mrs. Kirby, her short gray-streaked curls waving with an animation that threatened to dislodge the little old-fashioned side-combs which held them from her plump, benignant, wrinkled face, “that you are a relative, a third cousin, of our good friend the Reverend Edward Estwicke--regret to hear of his neuralgia--so sad!”

“An admirable man,” said General Vayne. He fixed his dark earnest eyes upon the fire, and with his adroit left hand, he reflectively stroked his long, gray mustache.

“I have never known, sir,” he continued, weightily, “an intellect more powerful, acute, and analytic than that of that learned and eloquent divine.”

The relative of the “learned divine” looked at his host with a momentary touch of surprise, for he knew his cousin only as a dull and droning old preacher in an obscure little town in West Virginia. He had not the advantage of General Vayne’s moral magnifying-glass. Through this unique lens life loomed up as rather a large affair. In the rickety court-house in the village of Chattalla, five miles out there to the south, General Vayne beheld a temple of justice. He translated an office-holder as the sworn servant of the people. The State was this great commonwealth, and its seal a proud escutcheon. A fall in cotton struck him as a blow to the commerce of the world. From an adverse political fortune he augured the swift ruin of the country. Abstract ideas were to him as potent elements in human affairs as acts of the Legislature, and in the midst of the general collapse, his large ideals still retained their pristine proportions.

“I am afraid you have had a cold drive,” said Mrs. Kirby, beaming on the visitor. “Our climate has changed since the war. It is much more severe.”

“The loss of the trees, perhaps,” suggested the stranger.

“Perhaps,” said the old lady, with her gurgling laughter, “there may be something in the superstition that the Yankees forgot their weather and left it behind them. And now the malaria has gone--I wonder where! Probably we have to thank the Federal army and their cold weather for that also.”

General Vayne lifted his eyes. “I thank the Federal army for--nothing,” declared the unreconstructed, bitterly.

There was an unaccountable astonishment,--more--constraint in the visitor’s face. He remained stiffly silent, and one sufficiently observant might have caught in his manner an intimation that he held himself on the defensive.

Miss Vayne was not sufficiently observant. She laughed out suddenly with girlish effusion, and as she changed her position, the light was full upon her delicately fair complexion, her rich brown hair, and her shabby black silk dress. She turned her joyous eyes upon the pallid heartbreak of that blighted plain. “To make light of your obligations, papa,” she cried, “doesn’t make away with them.”

The gesture sharpened the frivolous satire, but the stranger’s attention had not detached itself from General Vayne, at whom he was looking with a fiery red spark in his challenging brown eyes. This was more in accord with an alert aggressiveness habitually expressed in his face than with his suave reserved manner and his smooth and punctilious observance of the behests of polite society. His polish was like that of steel--its pleasing lustre does not deceive as to the stern possibilities of the weapon or the temper of the blade. He had a firmly moulded chin, a short upper lip, and excellent teeth. There was a dash of red in his close-clipped brown hair, and his whiskers and mustache were of a lighter tinge. His hands were smooth and white, but his face was darkened and roughened by sun and wind. He looked about thirty years of age; he was tall and heavily built, and, like all the men of this region, a military training was very marked in his bearing, despite his civilian dress.

“Ah well,” said General Vayne, waving the war, the Federal army, and the nation generally into a diminishing distance with his expressive left hand, “I have--a--dismissed them--from consideration. Let them go! Let them go! Nowadays I am no wrangler. I leave all questions of public policy as a bone of contention for the Political Dogs to gnaw.”

His method of enunciation might suggest to the literary mind the profuse use of capital letters.

“I am, and have always been, strictly tolerant,” continued General Vayne,--“conservative in my views. Conservatism, sir,” declared the tolerant man, with an extreme look in his eye, “is the moral centripetal force that curbs the flighty world.”

Mrs. Kirby’s interest in politics had diminished since the war, during which it had a phenomenal growth like Jonah’s gourd. Now an absorption in personal matters flourished in its stead.

“I hope you find your stay in the neighborhood pleasant, Captain Estwicke--so glad,” she said. “Of course you’ve been to Chattalla. Charming, charming town! I am a visitor here myself. I haven’t before seen my brother since the eve of Shiloh--yes, since Shiloh. I shall remain some months with him--so delightful to come back! And is it business or pleasure that brings you to Tennessee?”

This old lady possessed an unbridled imagination. She fancied it possible that people came to Tennessee for pleasure.

Once more there was that peculiar look of surprise and constraint upon Estwicke’s face. He hesitated in doubt and embarrassment. It did not escape her attention this time, but she misinterpreted it as a look of inquiry, so she smilingly reiterated with great distinctness, “Did you come to Tennessee for _business_ or _pleasure_?”

“I came to join my regiment,” he replied, tersely--evasively it may be considered.

This information exploded like a bomb, leaving a sulphurous silence behind it.

“Ah-h-h!” exclaimed General Vayne, in a tone intended to express assent, but which was like a prolonged note of surprised comprehension. He appreciated all at once how it was that he had mistaken this man for an ex-rebel captain. His letter of introduction from the Reverend Edward Estwicke had described him broadly as “Captain Estwicke of Virginia,” and when General Vayne had called upon him at the house of a mutual friend near Chattalla, where the officer was spending the last few days of his leave, no allusion as it chanced was made to the stubborn fact of his regiment, stationed at the city of Marston twenty miles away. He had subtly impressed General Vayne as a man of an inordinate personal pride and an extreme sensitiveness. To such a man the perception that he has accepted an invitation extended under a mistake can hardly be pleasant. General Vayne, versed in fine issues of internal dissension, realized how the annoyance must be aggravated by the stranger’s consciousness that he was secretly regarded as a renegade, for he could but know how slightly his host would esteem the replication that he was a representative of the loyal South which had borne martyrdom between two fires.

General Vayne, however, held hospitality as the first element of religion, and it was abhorrent to him that a guest should by any mischievous mischance be rendered uncomfortable in his house. But he was not helplessly dismayed; he thought himself possessed of tact equal to any emergency, and he demonstrated this claim by bolting incontinently from the subject. The old lady beamed upon the equivocal captain with smiling eagerness to make amends. The girl’s face was grave, but in her luminous eyes lurked a freakish delight in the whole misapprehension. Captain Estwicke was not in the habit of being considered amusing, but if he inwardly resented it he made no sign.

General Vayne had returned to the loss of the timber. “The aspect of the country would be almost prairie-like but for that elevation and those frowning redoubts,” he said, waving his hand toward the western windows through which the huge earthworks were visible. “There are very peculiar scenic effects here now and then--very peculiar, sir, indeed. A horseman there near Fort Despair, will loom up gigantic”--lowering his voice impressively--“mysterious, wonderful. He seems a bit of materialized poetry. He looks far more like a gallant knight pricking across the plain in quest of noble adventure, than”--effective _diminuendo_--“a ploughman going out to bed up land for cotton.”

“Is that the work we used to call Fort Despair?” exclaimed Estwicke, as if with sudden recognition. Something strained and unnatural in his voice struck the girl’s attention. She noted too the look in his eyes--at once eager and shrinking--as he leaned his elbow upon the worn arm of the chair and bent forward to the window. Little as she knew of him she knew it was an uncharacteristic look. She did not understand it. She only apprehended the emotion that swayed him as one groping in the dark is conscious of the proximity of an unaccustomed, it may be a fearful presence.

“Fort Despair,” repeated General Vayne, absorbed in reminiscence--he had lost his right arm there. “Appropriately named, too, it seems, even at this late day.”

“Ah, I know!” cried the stranger passionately. “I feel its meaning! Every weed that stirs in the wind is voiced with a terrible suggestion.”

Then he seemed to check himself. He leaned back in his chair and said no more. He was panting slightly; his face was flushed; a sharp pain was expressed in his eyes.

“The man,” thought Marcia, watching him in a tumult of feeling, half sympathy, half inquisitive amaze, “has a morbid horror of that battlefield. And a reason for it!”

General Vayne was fighting the day over again. He saw his brigade in line of battle; he was canvassing once more the problematic strength of the opposing force; he was regretting again, as he had often regretted, that he had not disregarded his orders and pushed on through the timber; if his arm had been spared him one half hour longer! How could he notice the stranger now; he had no thought even of his guest!

And Mrs. Kirby was thoroughly tired of the war, and welcomed the opening of the door and the entrance of other visitors, a few middle-aged people of a decorously dull aspect, and, like their entertainers, so provincial that they were not even aware of it. This deplorable state of ignorance has, however, its compensations. With full faith they indorsed the old-fashioned customs that had always prevailed among them, and were free from that subtle self-distrust which hampers many very worthy people, who pay this price for the knowledge that they do not know everything.

In the general change of position Estwicke found himself beside the young lady, and nearer the window than before. Through it he could see the sinking sun, a great red globe, resting a moment on the parapet of Fort Despair. Far away a vertical line of light was drawn sharply upon the sad purple of the distant hills. The tapering shaft pierced the pale saffron belt above the horizon, and at its summit was a bright flake of crimson. It was the flag-staff, and the flying flag above the National Cemetery across the river. Certainly this was a grewsome place.

And now the sun was gone. The shadows thronged the battlefield. The haunted thickets were all a-shiver, and the viewless wind marched over the plain. The cheerful room seemed a flout, a derisive mockery, to the woful scene without.

“How we forget!” he thought. “How we forget!”

For the interior was very cheerful; the flames roared up the chimney; the shattered mirror reflected the homelike group, seated in a wide semicircle before the fire; the flush of the western sky was still bright on the girl’s fair face, and there were golden glintings in her brown hair, as if belated sunbeams were entangled in its midst. A smile hovered about the curves of her delicate lips; her brilliant hazel eyes looked out from the tender shadows of long black lashes; even the genteel poverty expressed in her attire had its gracious, poetic aspects; her standing linen collar, turning slightly outward at the edges, might seem the calyx of some lovely flower as her white neck rose from it, and the plainness of her shabby black silk dress, of which the only ornament was a knot of black lace at the throat, accented all the pliant graces of her figure.

He could not understand the tranquil joyousness of her expression. She was to him the most striking anomaly of the anomalous place--so manifestly happy, so dominantly contradicting its persistently reiterated doom of death and decay; so evidently untouched by any influence of the high tragedy of these surroundings. Clearly she must lack feeling, sensibility. He looked speculatively at her, as he sat leaning his elbow on the stiff, angular arm of the chair, and with his right hand laid meditatively upon his dark red whiskers. Presently he recognized the appropriateness of beginning a conversation, and said, at a venture,--

“You have no near neighbors here?”

“No,” she replied, “we have all the world to ourselves. Do you see that black line?” she added, turning her eyes toward the horizon, where the sombre hills, miles away, met the darkening sky, “that is the boundary of the world. You may think there’s something on the other side, because you don’t know the country; but there isn’t.”

For a moment he was silent. Then he laughed a little.

“I had no idea that I was to meet a distinguished astronomer, with a new planet,” he said. “It has an orbit of its own, of course, and is governed by its own laws.”

“That’s the way with everybody,” she declared. “People are always talking about ‘the world,’ and they only mean the few other people and the few places that they know.”

“I perceive,” said Estwicke, gravely, “that you are a close reasoner. The capacity for inductive ratiocination, Miss Vayne, is the noblest faculty of the human mind. Let me congratulate you on its possession. Will you reason some more!”

He had been a trifle in doubt as to how she might receive this pleasantry at her expense, but she laughed gleefully.

“Oh, I will reason with pleasure if you will suggest a topic.”

“You seem pretty expert,” said Estwicke. “Do you spend much time at it?”

“At what?”

“At reasoning.”

“Oh no,” she cried; “I haven’t the leisure for such an elegant recreation.”

Her eyes were fixed upon him in delighted anticipation of what he would say next. It occurred to him that it was not often she had an experience like this; that her world did not abound with people who “amused” her.

“I should think you might indulge occasionally,” he said. “When, for instance, your father is away, and your brothers”--he glanced across the room at a row of small boys, stiff in their best clothes and their company manners--“are at school, and you have your little planet all to yourself, you might find time to reason considerably.”

“Oh, but they don’t go to school; I teach them at home, and there’s no reasoning with _them_--nor with housekeeping either.”

He knew that General Vayne had been for some years a widower, and he understood now that she presided over the household. This must involve heavy cares. She was very elastic. The Juggernaut car evidently made no impression.

Already he could divine that the boys were taught at home to avoid the expense of the academy and in deference to their father’s prejudice against the free school, and that the whole system of domestic education was designated in General Vayne’s magniloquent nomenclature “Retrenchment.”

“Teach me to reason,” said Estwicke. “I assure you I am amenable.”

“You have a dignified idea of my curriculum. I shouldn’t try to teach you to reason,” she cried delightedly. “If you were my pupil you would find yourself laboring to distinguish between the first principles of geography--North and South.”

His face hardened, but he laughed and made a feint of throwing up both hands. “I surrender!” he exclaimed.

She looked at him with a sudden grave intentness. However, she said nothing, for the others were rising to repair to the dining-room. There the conversation was general, until, after a time, a rubicund, apoplectic, eager, unwieldly old gentleman of the name of Ridgeway began to preponderate, while the heavy faces of his auditors bore witness to the weight of his discourse. He talked of different processes of agriculture; of new labor-saving machines; most discerningly of the quality of land, and it was only when he began to take a morbid pleasure in humiliating himself and his hearers by comparing Tennessee soil to the alluvial richness of the buckshot cotton lands of Mississippi that General Vayne came swiftly, potently to the rescue. Then it became apparent to anyone not sodden in idiocy that God created first Tennessee, and with what was left over made the rest of the world. Nothing could live in such rhetoric. From Reelfoot Lake to the highest peak of Big Smoky Mountain General Vayne demonstrated his proposition. Its vast mineral wealth might enrich all the nations of the earth. Its water-power could run the machinery of--of the universe. On its mountain domes may be found the flora of the Canadas; its western swamps are rich with sub-tropical vegetation; between those extremes is every variety of soil and every grade of climate. He descanted on its geological interest, folded his napkin into strata and illustrated triumphantly. So at last the transition was very pretty to spirited sketches of angling in the waters of that mystic western lake presented by the earthquake to the State; of fox-chases through the park-like mid-land country; of hunting deer in the romantic coves and ravines of the Cumberland Mountains; of the wilder solitudes among the majestic domes and ridges of the great Unaka chain that bars off the world from our eastern borders. And as he talked it might have seemed that with his admiration of physical prowess and the loss of his right arm; with his magniloquent ideas and phrasings and the scantiness of all his belongings; with his young family growing up around him and only privation in the present and this mortgaged ruin to leave them as an estate, he was a marvellously apt illustration of the ignoble fact, failure,--a fact of which he was most profoundly, most pathetically unconscious.

The whole affair was a forced march to Estwicke; his interest lagged; the perception of the mistake under which he had been invited rankled within him throughout the evening, and even when he had taken his departure and was driving away under the frostily glinting stars.

And so the entertainment--a rare occasion for Marcia--was over. To-morrow would come again the dull routine of teaching and housekeeping--this last a matter of problems, of careful ingenuity, of reconciling large necessities and small means. But she was not thinking of that. She was ready for tears, for self-reproach, for that utter despair of youth, which, with the infinite lengths of the future before it, deems everything irrevocable. He was sensitive, she said to herself, and she had hurt him. She had let him go without a word, because she feared to speak. He seemed on the lookout for slights--but that perhaps was because he had found slights on the lookout for him. And he had had in his life some ungentle--it might even be some terrible experience; she had divined that early in the evening. And she, too, must wound him! She was so sorry--she was so sorry!

Her father’s voice broke upon her absorption. “I can respect--I can even admire,” he said, addressing the family circle, “a real bona fide Yankee. Born so”--he added, liberally. “But these home-made Yankees--these Southern Yankees--for my life, for my life I can’t understand them.”

It seemed to General Vayne a monstrous freak of nature that a man should be born south of Mason’s and Dixon’s line without a full set of indigenous principles warranted to stick.

His daughter turned her head suddenly. For they were not gone. Old Mr. Ridgeway was re-entering the room, stumbling over a foot-stool and spluttering and gasping in his apoplectic agitation. “I have--yes, I have”--he exclaimed. “I have broken the wheel of my buggy.”

By degrees, in the tumult of his explanation, the facts were developed that Mrs. Ridgeway was not hurt in the fall, and that Captain Estwicke, who happened to overtake them at the “big gate,” had kindly offered them his buggy. In order that he might not be kept waiting until they could send the vehicle back, Mr. Ridgeway desired to ask if his host could lend Captain Estwicke a saddle-horse.

General Vayne could and would, and apologized for not offering a vehicle instead. Before the war he had been “horsey” on a princely scale. Now he possessed a saddle-horse or two, and a pair of jog-trot sorrels that served alternately in the plough and in a certain dilapidation which he called his barouche. This had already rumbled off to Chattalla full of the elderly guests.

During the few moments required for the horse to be saddled the whole party waited on the front steps. The night air was keen and penetrating. A great star, in splendid isolation near the zenith, shivered in those wide spaces made dark by its own brilliancy. And the moon was bright, too--the ragged, withered crab-grass, still tufting the fissures of the bomb-riven pavements, glittered with rime as if every blade was frosted with silver. Vague belts of vapor lay upon the battlefield, and fluctuated with mystic glimmers. Estwicke watched it absently as he stood a little aside, heedless of the talk of the elders, whose black shadows and animated gestures were grotesquely defined on the blocks of limestone that floored the portico.

Marcia was silent, too. Once she cast a timorous glance upon him. Then her eyes fell. Still she did not doubt that he would receive what she wished to say as simply and kindly as it was intended.

“Captain Estwicke,” she faltered, “I want to tell you--I--I--am very sorry, but--but--you won’t do for a pupil at all. You can’t learn to reason. You have too much imagination.”

She glanced up and smiled. The next moment her heart misgave her. He was looking at her in cool surprise.

And what if she had taken too much for granted! He might not have cared at all--he might even have forgotten. She blushed painfully. She could not think to choose her words--she could not be silent while his eyes tacitly asked an explanation. She hastily stipulated--

“I alluded to teaching you to distinguish between North and South. I only meant the points of the compass--_Geography_, you know,” she added, lucidly.

“I am very grateful that you should trouble yourself to tell me,” he said, gravely. “I misunderstood you. I hope you will forgive me.”

She was silent in astonishment. What chaos was here! She had tendered her regrets, and now _he_ was begging her pardon. In the simple life of her little planet she had never before had occasion to question the appropriateness of any of her good and gentle impulses. It came upon her with a crushing sense of humiliation that she had done an awkward, a silly thing--she even thought it, at this moment, forward. She wondered that she should discern all this so late. She said to herself that he was a man of the world, whose spurious gallantry would not permit him to accept an apology from a lady. The slight wordy dexterity with which he had reversed their mutual position, and placed himself in the humble case of begging her pardon, instead of granting forgiveness, seemed to her painfully insincere. It was her first experience of the world’s little feints, and it chilled her. She flinched too from the thought of how absurd the whole episode must be to him.

And in fact he laughed as he rode away in the moonlight.

“Now, that was mighty good of her,” he protested. “She thought I was cut to pieces--routed!” And he laughed again.

He had pressed the horse into a gallop, and was speeding through the infinite loneliness of the moonlit expanse. When the animal abruptly swerved aside, he glanced down to recognize the shallow rifle-pits of the old picket line. He knew none of the traditions of the place, but as he reached Fort Despair, and rode along, close upon the crest of the counterscarp--dank and sodden with the late rains now, once dank and sodden with a darker current--there came upon him a mysterious sense of a mighty multitude astir in the vast, vague plain. A strange, rhythmic throb shook the earth--or was it in the air? The haunted thickets shuddered audibly as he passed. Once, when the steely gleam of a sabre was thrust suddenly forth, he turned and looked back with fierce eyes--that changed and were startled. But it might have been only the shimmering of a moonbeam on the white bark of an aspen shoot. As he rode on down the scarred, treeless bank of the river, the earth pulsated with a stronger tremor, a great white light sprang upon the horizon, and the whistle of the down train from Marston split the air.

Into the mist and into the moonlight a series of massive, isolated columns of masonry rose starkly out of the black water. They were the piers of the old turnpike bridge, burned one night long ago to cover a frantic retreat and impede a frantically fierce pursuit. He checked his horse near the brink and gazed at them. There was something so picturesque and martial in the equestrian figure, thus thrown into bold relief against the moonlit sky, that Mr. Ridgeway, in mid-stream upon the broad, flat ferry-boat, called his wife’s attention to it.

“Captain Estwicke is not going back to his friend’s house,” added the old gentleman. “He tells me he will spend the night at the hotel in Chattalla, in order to catch the early train for Marston. The barracks are five miles from Marston.”

The ferryman heard this. He lived on the highway, he saw everybody that came and went, and he had the interest of the professed gossip in small details. He noted the name, and when he had landed the old couple on the opposite bank he pulled lustily upon the rope, and the cumbersome craft, pulsing with the current, crossed more rapidly than usual under the impetus of Tom Toole’s curiosity about the stranger. As he ran in to land there was a sudden, sharp change on his stolid, unspeculative countenance. He stood staring, with wild, dumfounded recognition, at Estwicke, who still sat motionless upon the horse, his eyes fixed upon the obeliscal columns, a dreary memorial, in the midst of the swift current. After a moment of doubt and hesitation, Toole tremulously held the lantern up at arm’s length, throwing the light full upon the officer’s face. It was no longer pallid, spectral, as it had been in the moonlight. The artificial gleam suddenly evoked all its peculiar coloring--the dark red of his hair and beard, the fiery spark in his challenging brown eyes, the warm tint of his tanned complexion.

“My good Lord A’mighty!” the ferryman broke forth, “thar ain’t many men ez knows what I knows, an’ hev seen what I hev seen, ez would like ter git a glimge of ye now--a-settin’ in that saddle an’ a-lookin’ fust at the old forts, like ye war a-studyin’ ’bout’n the range o’ the guns, an’ then a-medjurin’ that thar bridge with yer eye.”

Estwicke turned quickly. Toole flinched beneath his glance, and held up one hand as if to ward it off, laughing confusedly at himself the while for the involuntary gesture.

“Ye might have knocked me down with a feather jes’ now. Bless God, I thought ’twas _him_ agin!” he protested, laying his hand on the rope as Estwicke pushed his horse down upon the ferry-boat. The pause was broken only by the gurgling of the water, and the rattling of the “block an’ tickle” as every effort sent the broad, flat craft throbbing on its way. Then he replied to the inquiry in Estwicke’s face.

“By God!” he exclaimed, wildly, “I’ve seen ye hyar afore, a-ridin’ an’ a-raidin’ on the banks o’ this ruver, mounted an’ armed, an’ a-medjurin’ the bridge with yer eye. But then--ye fired it with yer own hands--_with yer own hands_. I know it. These rocks know it. None of us hev forgot. An’ I seen ye hyar agin,” he added, lowering his voice, “a-lyin’ dead--dead!--on the ground yander a-nigh Fort Despair, shot through the lungs, an’ through the head, an’ half crushed by the carcass o’ yer horse!”

He paused abruptly.

There was on Estwicke’s face a sudden look of recoil which imposed silence. The ferryman had loosened his grasp upon the rope, and the wayward plunging of the boat was like the disordered throbbing of some great heart. He could not interpret that look. He was wrestling with a vague, superstitious thrill. The equestrian figure seemed to rise into abnormal proportions. Its eyes--its inscrutable eyes--were fixed with some imperious protest upon him. And he remembered the face! He was shut off from the world with it--all the moonlit water was around them and all the misty air. Again he laid hold on the rope, pulling hard for the shore--for deliverance, keeping his shoulder toward the figure, but ever and anon turning, under a morbid fascination, a fluctuating glance upon it, impelled by the very strength of the contradictory desire to see it no more.

But when he was about to land, the approach to a mere familiar element restored, in a measure, his self-possession.

“Ye air the livin’ image o’ that man, cap’n,” he said, tremulously. “Of course I know ’taint _him_ agin. _His_ name warn’t yourn. I useter know _his_ name, though I hev furgot it now. I hope ye don’t take no grudge at bein’ called like a Johnny Reb. They hev hed the respec’ o’ soldiers afore now.”

There was no answer. The horse’s hoofs sounded loud upon the planks; the rider pressed swiftly in among the mists and the shadows; and he was gone.

Then the ferryman looked down at the boat. It had risen in the water. “He weighs!” he exclaimed suddenly. After a moment he turned about with a laugh. “Of course the man weighs. Thar’s two of ’em! An’ this man’s name is Estwicke--an’ what war t’other one’s name? Ef”--he cast a swift glance at the empty embrasures of the distant fort--“ef thar ever war enny other one.”

He pondered upon this problem as he pulled the boat across the river, and again while he walked up the bank toward a little log-house where the window was still a-light.

He paused half-way in his absorption, only roused when a breath of wind brought to him a strange sound from out the thicket close to Fort Despair, a sound of the whickering of horses and the heavy tramp of hoofs, and a clangor as of the clash of sabres, and a note--was it?--a note from a bugle. He remembered that a company of cavalry was literally annihilated there under a murderous cross-fire--he hastened on--and on the evening of the first day’s fight, when captured and led to the rear, he saw, lying among the dead on the ground that the enemy held, this man--this staff-officer. He had reached the door of his house; he struck it with his heavy hand. He had recalled the name at last, and the recollection entered with him into his home like a curse.