lry having been in touch through the earlier
part of the day. The road was level, with the mournful boggy fields,
with the wild bending woods. In the fields and in the woods there were
dark objects, which might be mounds of turf or huge twisted roots, or
which might be dead men and horses. Stafford, riding through wind and
rain, had no sooner thought this than he saw, indeed, what seemed a mere
hummock beneath a clump of cedars undoubtedly move. He looked as closely
as he might for the war of water, air, and fire, and made out a horse
outstretched and stark, and a man pinned beneath. The man spoke. "Hello,
upon the road there! Come and do a Christian turn!"

Stafford left his horse and, stepping through a quagmire of watery turf,
came into the ring of cedars. The man who had called upon him, a tall,
long-moustached person in blue, one arm and booted leg painfully caught
beneath the dead steed, spoke in a voice curt with suffering. "Grey,
aren't you? Don't care. Can't help it. Get this infernal weight off me,
won't you?"

The other bent to the task, and at last managed to free the blue
soldier. "There! That position must have been no joke! How long--"

The blue cavalryman proceeded to feel bone and flesh, slowly and
cautiously to move the imprisoned limbs. He drew a breath of relief.
"Nothing broken!--How long? Well, to reckon by one's feeling I should
say about a week. Say, however, since about noon. We drove against a
party under Stuart. He got the best of us, and poor Caliph got a bullet.
I could see the road. Everything grey--grey as the sea."

"Why didn't you call before? Any one would have helped you."

The other continued to rub his arm and leg. "You haven't got a drop of
brandy--eh?"

"Yes, I have. I should have thought of that before." He gave the other a
small flask. The cavalryman drank. "Ah! in '55, when I was with Walker
in Nicaragua, I got pinned like that beneath a falling cottonwood." He
gave the flask back. "You are the kind of Samaritan I like to meet. I
feel a new man. Thanks awfully."

"It was foolish of you to lie there for hours--"

The other leaned his back against a cedar. "Well, I thought I might hold
out, perhaps, until we beat you and I was again in the house of my
friends. I don't, however, object to acknowledging that you're hard to
beat. Couldn't manage it. Growing cold and faint--head ringing. Waited
as long as I could, then called. They say your prisons are very bad."

"They are