leton lying there below, so still.

Dick was sensitive and his affections were strong. He loved his mother
with a remarkable devotion, and his friends were for all time. Highly
imaginative, he felt a powerful stirring of the heart, at his second
return to Pendleton since his departure for the war. Yet he was chilled
somewhat by the strange silence hanging over the little town that he
loved so well. It was night, it was true, but not even a dog barked at
his coming, and there was not the faintest trail of smoke across the
sky. A brilliant moon shone, and white stars unnumbered glittered and
danced, yet they showed no movement of man in the town below.

He shook off the feeling, believing that it was merely a sensitiveness
born of time and place, and rode straight for his mother's house. Then
he dismounted, tied his horse to one of the pines, and ran up the walk
to the front door, where he knocked softly at first, and then more
loudly.

No answer came and Dick's heart sank within him like a plummet in a
pool. He went to the edge of the walk, gathered up some gravel and threw
it against a window in his mother's room on the second floor. That would
arouse her, because he knew that she slept lightly in these times, when
her son was off to the wars. But the window was not raised, and he could
hear no sound of movement in the room.

Alarmed, he went back to the front door, and he noticed that while the
door was locked the keyhole was empty. Then his mother was gone away.
The sign was almost infallible. Had any one been at home the key would
have been on the inside.

His heart grew lighter. There had been no violence. No roving band had
come there to plunder. He whistled and shouted through the keyhole,
although he did not want anyone who might possibly be passing in
the road to hear him, as this town was almost wholly Southern in its
sympathies.

There was still no answer, and leading his horse behind one of the pine
trees on the lawn, where it would not be observed, he went to the rear
of the house, and taking a stick pried open a kitchen window. He had
learned this trick when he was a young boy, and climbing lightly inside
he closed the window behind him and fastened the catch.

He knew of course every hall and room of the house, but the moment he
entered it he felt that it was deserted. The air was close and heavy,
showing that no fresh breeze had blown through it for days. It was
impossible that his mother or the f