ain
stigma from his associates and superiors, if not an actual distrust. A
whole history of itself would be the daily, nightly, monthly war of
passions between him, her, Flora, and those around them, but time flies.

One day Greenleaf, returning from a week-long circuit of outposts, found
awaiting him a letter bearing Northern imprints of mailing and
forwarding, from Hilary Kincaid, written long before in prison and
telling another whole history, of a kind so common in war that we have
already gone by it; a story of being left for dead in the long stupor of
a brain hurt; of a hairbreadth escape from living burial; of weeks in
hospital unidentified, all sense of identity lost; and of a daring feat
of surgery, with swift mental, not so swift bodily, recovery. Inside the
letter was one to Anna. But Anna was gone. Two days earlier, without
warning, the Callenders--as much to Flora's affright as to their
relief, and "as much for Fred's good as for anything," said his obdurate
general when Flora in feigned pity pleaded for their stay--had been
deported into the Confederacy.

"Let me carry it to her," cried Flora to Greenleaf, rapturously clasping
the letter and smiling heroically. "We can overtague them, me and my
gran'mama! And then, thanks be to God! my brother we can bring him back!
Maybe also--ah! maybee! I can obtain yo' generals some uzeful news!"

After some delay the pair were allowed to go. At the nearest gray
outpost, in a sudden shower of the first true news for a week--the
Mississippi crossed, Grant victorious at Port Gibson and joined by
Sherman at Grand Gulf--Flora learned, to her further joy, that the
Callenders, misled by report that Brodnax's brigade was at Mobile, had
gone eastward, as straight away from Brodnax and the battery as
Gulf-shore roads could take them, across a hundred-mile stretch of
townless pine-barrens with neither railway nor telegraph.

Northward, therefore, with Madame on her arm, sprang Flora,
staggeringly, by the decrepit Jackson Railroad, along the quiet eastern
bound of a region out of which, at every halt, came gloomy mention of
Tallahala River and the Big Black; of Big Sandy, Five Mile and Fourteen
Mile creeks; of Logan, Sherman and Grant; of Bowen, Gregg, Brodnax and
Harper, and of daily battle rolling northward barely three hours' canter
away. So they reached Jackson, capital of the state and base of General
Joe Johnston's army. They found it in high ferment and full of
straggl