inia for a
month, down on the Pamunkey--and the people all said 'gaily.'"

"They say it still," answered the rider. "Not so much, though, in my
part of Virginia. It's Tuckahoe, not Cohee. I'm from the valley of the
South Branch, between Romney and Moorefield."

The heretofore silent blue soldier shifted his rifle. "What in hell--"
he muttered. The sergeant-major looked at the Virginia shore, looked at
the stranger, standing with his arm around his horse's neck, and looked
at the Williamsport landing, and the cannon frowning from Doubleday's
Hill. In the back of his head there formed a little picture--a drumhead
court-martial, a provost guard, a tree and a rope. Then came the hand of
reason, and wiped the picture away. "Pshaw! spies don't _say_ they're
Southern. And, by jiminy! one might smile with his lips, but he couldn't
smile with his eyes like that. And he's lieutenant, and there's such a
thing, Tom Miller, as being too smart!--" He leaned upon the rail, and,
being an observant fellow, he looked to see if the lieutenant's hand
trembled at all where it lay upon the horse's neck. It did not; it
rested as quiet as an empty glove. The tall Marylander began to speak
with a slow volubility. "There was a man from the Great Kanawha to
Williamsport 't other day--a storekeeper--a big, fat man with a beard
like Abraham's in the 'lustrated Bible. I heard him a-talking to the
colonel. 'All the Union men in northwestern Virginia are on the Ohio
side of the mountains,' said he. 'Toward the Ohio we're all for the
Union,' said he. 'There's more Northern blood than Southern in that
section, anyway,' said he. 'But all this side of the Alleghenies is
different, and as for the Valley of the South Branch--the Valley of the
South Branch is a hotbed of rebels.' That's what he said--'a hotbed of
rebels.' 'As for the mountain folk in between,' he says, 'they hunt with
guns, and the men in the valley hunt with dogs, and there ain't any love
lost between them at the best of times. Then, too, it's the feud that
settles it. If a mountain man's hereditary enemy names his baby
Jefferson Davis, then the first man, he names his Abraham Lincoln, and
shoots at the other man from behind a bush. And _vice versa_. So it
goes. But the valley of the South Branch is old stock,' he says, 'and a
hotbed of rebels.'"

"When it's taken by and large, that is true," said the horseman with
coolness. "But there are exceptions to all rules, and there are some
Unio