heartily, forgetting his Federal situation and companions. "Who is he?
Perhaps I know the name."

"Should say you would. It's the same as your own--Winton. Bertie Winton,
they call him. Maybe he's a relative of yours!"

The blood flushed the Englishman's face hotly for a second; then a stern
dark shadow came on it, and his lips set tight.

"I have no knowledge of him," he said, curtly.

"Haven't you now? That's curious. Some said he was a son of yours,"
pursued the Colonel.

The old Lion flung back his silvery mane with his haughtiest
imperiousness.

"No, sir; he's no son of mine."

Lion Winton sat silent, the dark shadow still upon his face. For five
years no rumor even had reached him of the man he had disowned and
disinherited; he had believed him dead--shot, as he had predicted, after
some fray in a gaming-room abroad; and now he heard of him thus in the
war-news of the American camp! His denial of him was not less stern,
nor his refusal to acknowledge even his name less peremptory, because,
with all his wrath, his bitterness, his inexorable passion, and his
fierce repudiation of him as his son, a thrill of pleasure stirred in
him that the man still lived--a proud triumph swept over him, through
all his darker thoughts, at the magnificent dash and daring of a deed
wholly akin to him.

Bertie, a listless man about town, a dilettante in pictures, wines, and
women, spending every moment that he could in Paris, gentle as any young
beauty, always bored, and never roused out of that habitual languid
indolent indifferentism which the old man, fiery and impassioned himself
as the Napiers, held the most damnable effeminacy with which the present
generation emasculates itself, had been incomprehensible, antagonistic,
abhorrent to him. Bertie, the Leader of the Eight Hundred, the reckless
trooper of the Virginian Horse, the head of a hundred wild night raids,
the hero of a score of brilliant charges, the chief in the most daring
secret expeditions and the most intrepid cavalry skirmishes of the
South, was far nearer to the old Lion, who had in him all the hot fire
of Crawford's school, with the severe simplicity of Wellington's stern
creeds. "He is true to his blood at last," he muttered, as he tossed
back his silky white hair, while his blue flashing eyes ranged over the
far distance where the Southern lines lay, with something of eager
restlessness; "he is true to his blood at last!"

There was fighting some days