sore--"

Stafford regarded him closely. "I've seen you before. Ah, I remember! On
the Valley pike, moving toward Winchester.... Poor scoundrel!"

Steve, his back against a swamp magnolia, undertook to show that he,
too, remembered, and that gratefully. "Yes, sir. You saved me from
markin' time on a barrel-head, major--an' my foot _was_ sore--an' I
wasn't desertin' that time any more'n this time--an' I was as obleeged
to you as I could be. The colonel's awful hard on the men."

"Is he?" said Stafford gratingly. "They seem to like him."

He sat his horse before the laurel thicket and despised himself for
holding conference with this poor thief; or, rather, some fibre in his
brain told him that, out of this jungle, if ever he came out of it, he
would despise himself. Had he really done so now, he would have turned
away. He did not so; he sat in the heart of the jungle and compared
hatreds with Steve.

The latter glanced upward a moment with his ferret eyes, then turned his
head aside and spat. "If there's any of my way of thinkin' they don't
like him--But they're all fools! Crept down through the swamp a little
ago an' heard it! 'Colonel, get us across, somehow, won't you? We'll
fight like hell!' 'I can't, men. I haven't any orders.' Yaah! I wish
he'd take the regiment over without them, and then be court-martialled
and shot for doing it!" Steve spat again. "I seed long ago that you
didn't like him either, major. He gets along too fast--all the prizes
come his way."

"Yes," said Stafford, from the heart of the jungle. "They come his
way.... And he's standing there at the edge of the water, hoping for
orders to cross."

Steve, beneath the swamp magnolia, had a widening of the lips. "Luck's
turned agin him one way, though. He's out of favour with Old Jack. The
regiment don't know why, but it saw it mighty plain day before
yesterday, after the big battle! Gawd knows I'd like to see him so deep
in trouble he'd never get out--and so would you, major. Prizes would
stop coming his way then, and he might lose those he has--"

"If I entertain a devil," said Stafford, "I'll not be hypocrite enough
to object to his conversation. Nor, if I take his suggestion, is there
any sense in covering him with reprobation. So go your way, miserable
imp! while I go mine!"

But Steve kept up with him, half-running at his stirrup. "I got to
rejoin, 'cause it's jest off one battlefield on to another, and there
ain't nowhere else to go! T