e women
and children by and by lying down to slumber, in soldier fashion, with
their feet to the brands, under the pines and the stars, while the
gray-coats stood guard in the wavering fire-light; but Mary lying broad
awake staring at the great constellation of the Scorpion, and thinking
now of him she sought, and now remorsefully of that other scout, that
poor boy whom the spy had shot far away yonder to the north and
eastward. Now she rose and journeyed again. Rare hours were those for
Alice. They came at length into a low, barren land, of dwarfed and
scrawny pines, with here and there a marshy flat; thence through a
narrow strip of hickories, oaks, cypresses, and dwarf palmetto, and so
on into beds of white sand and oyster-shells, and then into one of the
villages on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain.

Her many little adventures by the way, the sayings and doings and
seeings of Alice, and all those little adroitnesses by which Mary from
time to time succeeded in avoiding or turning aside the suspicions
that hovered about her, and the hundred times in which Alice was her
strongest and most perfect protection, we cannot pause to tell. But we
give a few lines to one matter.

Mary had not yet descended from the ambulance at her journey's end;
she and Alice only were in it; its tired mules were dragging it slowly
through the sandy street of the village, and the driver was praising
the milk, eggs, chickens, and genteel seclusion of Mrs. ----'s
"hotel," at that end of the village toward which he was driving, when a
man on horseback met them, and, in passing, raised his hat to Mary. The
act was only the usual courtesy of the highway; yet Mary was startled,
disconcerted, and had to ask the unobservant, loquacious driver to
repeat what he had said. Two days afterward Mary was walking at the
twilight hour, in a narrow, sandy road, that ran from the village out
into the country to the eastward. Alice walked beside her, plying her
with questions. At a turn of the path, without warning, she confronted
this horseman again. He reined up and lifted his hat. An elated look
brightened his face.

"It's all fixed," he said. But Mary looked distressed, even alarmed.

"You shouldn't have done this," she replied.

The man waved his hand downward repressively, but with a countenance
full of humor.

"Hold on. It's _still_ my deal. This is the last time, and then I'm
done. Make a spoon or spoil a horn, you know. When you commence to