ry holding every card. He spoke cheerfully. "Shenandoah
beautifully swollen! Don't believe Fremont has pontoons. He's out of the
reckoning for at least a day and a night--probably longer. Nice for us
all!"

"It has been a remarkable campaign."

"'Remarkable'! Tell you what it's like, Stafford. It's like
1796--Napoleon's Italian campaign."

"You think so? Well, it may be true. Hear the wind in the pines!"

"Tell you what you lack, Stafford. You lack interest in the war. You are
too damned perfunctory. You take orders like an automaton, and you go
execute them like an automaton. I don't say that they're not
beautifully executed; they are. But the soul's not there. The other day
at Tom's Brook I watched you walk your horse up to the muzzle of that
fellow Wyndham's guns, and, by God! I don't believe you knew any more
than an automaton that the guns were there!"

"Yes, I did--"

"Well, you may have known it with one half of your brain. You didn't
with the other half. To a certain extent, I can read your hand. You've
got a big war of your own, in a country of your own--eh?"

"Perhaps you are not altogether wrong. Such things happen sometimes."

"Yes, they do. But I think it a pity! This war"--he jerked his head
toward the environing night--"is big enough, with horribly big stakes.
If I were you, I'd drum the individual out of camp."

"Think only of the general? I wish I could!"

"Well, can't you?"

"No, not yet."

"There are only two things--barring disease--which can so split the
brain in two--send the biggest part off, knight-errant or Saracen, into
some No-Man's Country, and keep the other piece here in Virginia to
crack invaders' skulls! One's love and one's hate--"

"Never both?"

"Knight-errant and Saracen in one? That's difficult."

"Nothing is so difficult as life, nor so strange. And, perhaps, love and
hate are both illnesses. Sometimes I think so."

"A happy recovery then! You are too good a fellow--"

"I am not a good fellow."

"You are not at least an amiable one to-night! Don't let the fever get
too high!"

"Will you listen," said Stafford, "to the wind in the pines? and did you
ever see the automatic chess-player?"

Two days later, Fremont, having bridged the Shenandoah, crossed, and
pushed his cavalry with an infantry support southward by the pike. About
three in the afternoon of the sixth, Ashby's horses were grazing in the
green fields south of Harrisonburg, on the Port Republic road