whose naked
saddle-tree was empty. A few steps in front of her the light of the full
moon shone almost straight down upon a narrow road that just there
emerged from the shadow of woods on either side, and divided into a main
right fork and a much smaller one that curved around to Mary's left. Off
in the direction of the main fork the sky was all aglow with camp-fires.
Only just here on the left there was a cool and grateful darkness.

She lifted her head alertly. A twig crackled under a tread, and the next
moment a man came out of the bushes at the left, and without a word took
the bridle of the led horse from her fingers and vaulted into the
saddle. The hand that rested a moment on the cantle as he rose grasped a
"navy-six." He was dressed in dull homespun but he was the same who had
been dressed in blue. He turned his horse and led the way down the
lesser road.

"If we'd of gone three hundred yards further," he whispered, falling
back and smiling broadly, "we'd 'a' run into the pickets. I went nigh
enough to see the videttes settin' on their hosses in the main road.
This here aint no road; it just goes up to a nigger quarters. I've got
one o' the niggers to show us the way."

"Where is he?" whispered Mary; but, before her companion could answer, a
tattered form moved from behind a bush a little in advance and started
ahead in the path, walking and beckoning. Presently they turned into a
clear, open forest and followed the long, rapid, swinging stride of the
negro for nearly an hour. Then they halted on the bank of a deep, narrow
stream. The negro made a motion for them to keep well to the right when
they should enter the water. The white man softly lifted Alice to his
arms, directed and assisted Mary to kneel in her saddle, with her skirts
gathered carefully under her, and so they went down into the cold
stream, the negro first, with arms outstretched above the flood; then
Mary, and then the white man,--or, let us say plainly the spy,--with the
unawakened child on his breast. And so they rose out of it on the
farther side without a shoe or garment wet save the rags of their dark
guide.

Again they followed him, along a line of stake-and-rider fence, with the
woods on one side and the bright moonlight flooding a field of young
cotton on the other. Now they heard the distant baying of house-dogs,
now the doleful call of the chuck-will's-widow; and once Mary's blood
turned, for an instant, to ice, at the unearthly sh