quivered and that his face flushed as he uttered the emphatic "thank
you." A few minutes later he was riding swiftly southward over a road
that he knew well. His start was made at six o'clock and he was sure
that by ten o'clock he would be in Pendleton.

The road was deserted. This was a well-peopled country, and he saw many
houses, but nearly always the doors and shutters of the windows were
closed. The men were away, and the women and children were shutting out
the bands that robbed in the name of either army.

The night came down, and Dick still sped southward with no one appearing
to stop him. He did not know just where the Southern army lay, but he
did not believe that he would come in contact with any of its flankers.
His horse was so good and true, that earlier than he had hoped, he was
approaching Pendleton. The moon was up now, and every foot of the ground
was familiar. He crossed brooks in which he and Harry Kenton and other
boys of his age had waded--but he had never seen them so low before--and
he marked the tree in which he had shot his first squirrel.

It had not been so many months since he had been in Pendleton, and
yet it seemed years and years. Three great battles in which seventy or
eighty thousand men had fallen were enough to make anybody older.

Dick paused on the crest of a little hill and looked toward the place
where his mother's house stood. He had come just in this way in the
winter, and he looked forward to another meeting as happy. The moonlight
was very clear now and he saw no smoke rising from the chimneys, but
this was summer, and of course they would not have a fire burning at
such an hour.

He rode on a little further and paused again at the crest of another
hill. His view of Pendleton here was still better. He could see more
roofs, and walls, but he noticed that no smoke rose from any house.
Pendleton lay very still in its hollow. On the far side he saw the white
walls of Colonel Kenton's house shining in the moonlight. Something
leaped in his brain. He seemed to have been looking upon such white
walls only yesterday, white walls that stood out in a fiery haze, white
walls that he could never forget though he lived to be a hundred.

Then he remembered. The white walls were those of the Dunkard church at
Antietam, around which the blue and the gray had piled their bodies in
masses. The vast battlefield ranged past him like a moving panorama, and
then he was merely looking at Pend