His early thoughts were true. A long era had ended, and now one, charged
with wonders and marvels, had begun. This mighty war was the signal of
the change, and it would not be confined to the physical world. The mind
and soul would undergo like changes. People would never look at things
in the same way. There had been such mental revolutions in the long
past, and it was not against nature for another to come now.

John was thoughtful, perhaps beyond his years, but he had been subjected
to tremendous emotions. The unparalleled convulsion of the old world was
enough to make even the foolish think. Event and surmise passed and
repassed through his mind, while he walked up and down in the wood.
Hours crept slowly by, the clouds drifted away, and the moon came out in
a gush of silver. The stars, great and small, danced in a sky that was
always blue, beyond the veil.

He came back for the third time to the brook. He was thirsty that night,
but before he knelt down to drink he paused and every muscle suddenly
became rigid. He was like one of those early borderers in his own land
who had heard a sinister sound in the thicket. It was little, a slight
ring of steel, but every nerve in John was alive on the instant.

Still obeying the instincts of ancestors, he knelt down among the trees.
His vivid fancy might be at work once more! And then it might not! The
ringing of steel on steel came again, then a second time and nearer. He
slid noiselessly forward, and lay with his ear to the earth. Now he
heard other sounds, and among them one clear note, the steady tread of
hoofs.

Cavalry were approaching the grove, but which? German or French? John
knew that he ought to go and awake Lannes at once, but old inherited
instincts, suddenly leaping into power, held him. By some marvelous
mental process he reverted to a period generations ago. His curiosity
was great, and his confidence in his powers absolute.

He dragged himself twenty or thirty yards along the edge of the brook
toward the tread of hoofs, and soon he heard them with great
distinctness. Mingled with the sound was the jingling of bits and the
occasional impact of a steel lance-head upon another. John believed now
that they were Germans and he began to creep away from the brook, toward
which the troop was coming directly. It was not possible to estimate
well from sound, but he thought they numbered at least five hundred.

He was back thirty yards from the brook, lying f