you in the
regulars? You're as eccentric as our butternut friends yonder."

"I couldn't buy a full uniform," she said truthfully. She did not add
that she had left at a minute's notice for the most dangerous
undertaking ever asked of her, borrowing discarded makeshifts anywhere
at hazard.

"Are you a West Pointer?"

"No."

"Oh! You've their seat--and their shapely leanness. Are you going with
us?"

"Where are _you_ going?"

Stanley laughed. "I'm sure I don't know. It looks to me as though we
were riding straight into rebeldom."

"Don't you know why?" she asked, looking at him from under the shadow of
her visor.

"No. Do you?"

"Yes."

After a pause: "Well," he said, laughing, "are you going to tell me?"

"Yes--later."

Neck and neck, knee and knee they rode forward at the head of the Black
Horse troop, along a road which became dusky beyond the first patch of
woods.

After the inner camp lines had been passed the regiment halted while a
troop was detailed as flankers and an advanced guard galloped off ahead.
Along the road behind, the guns of the Rhode Island Battery came
thudding and bumping up, halting with a dull clash of chains.

Stanley said: "This is one of Baring's pet raids; we've done it dozens
of times. Once our entire division rode around Beauregard; but I didn't
see the old, blue star division flag this time, so I guess we're going
it alone. Hello! There's infantry! We must be close to the extreme
outposts."

In the dusk they were passing a pasture where, guarded by sentinels, lay
piled, in endless, straight rows, knapsacks, blankets, shelter tents,
and long lines of stacked Springfield rifles. Soldiers with the white
strings of canteens crossing their breasts were journeying to and from a
stream that ran, darkling, out of the tangled woodland on their right.

On the opposite side of the road were the lines of the Seventieth
Indiana, their colors, furled in oilcloth, lying horizontally across the
forks of two stacks of rifles. Under them lay the color guard; the
scabbarded swords of the colonel and his staff were stuck upright in
the ground, and the blanket-swathed figures of the officers in poncho
and havelock reposed close by.

The other regiment was the Eleventh Maine. Their colonel, strapped with
his silver eagles, was watching the disposal of the colors by a sergeant
wearing the broad stripe, blue diamond and triple underscoring on each
sleeve. With the sergeant marched eight co