min'!
He needs men. They've been recruitin' for him on the quiet; you know
they have. And I've got to make up for Sheldon----"

Drew swung around and caught Boyd's wrist in a grip tight enough to
bring a reflex backward jerk from the boy. "That's no way to make up for
Sheldon's death-runnin' away from home to fight. Don't give me any
nonsense about goin' to kill Yankees because they killed him! When a man
goes to war ... well, he takes his chances. Shelly did at Chickamauga.
War ain't a private fight, just one man up against another--"

But he was making no impression; he couldn't. At Boyd's age you could
not imagine death as coming to you; nor were you able to visualize the
horrors of an ill-equipped field hospital. Any more than you could
picture all the rest of it--the filth, hunger, cold, and boredom with
now and then a flash of whirling horses and men clashing on some road or
field, or the crazy stampede of other men, yelling their throats raw as
they charged into a hell of Minie balls and canister shot.

"I'm goin' to ride with General Morgan, like Shelly did," Boyd repeated
doggedly, with that stubbornness which seasons ago had kept him
eternally tagging his impatient elders.

"That's up to you." Suddenly Drew was tired, tired of trying to find
words to pierce to Boyd's thinking brain--if one had a thinking brain at
his age. Slinging his carbine, Drew mounted Shawnee. "But I do know one
thing--you're not goin' with me."

"Drew-Drew, just listen once...."

Shawnee answered to the pressure of his rider's knees and leaped the
brook. Drew bowed his head to escape the lash of a low branch. There was
no going back ever, he thought bitterly, shutting his ears to Boyd's
cry. He'd been a fool to ride this way at all.

2

_Guns in the Night_

There were sounds enough in the middle of the night to tell the
initiated that a troop was on the march--creak of saddle leather, click
of shod hoof, now and then the smothered exclamation of a man shaken out
of a cavalryman's mounted doze. To Drew's trained ears all this was loud
enough to send any Union picket calling out the guard. Yet there was no
indication that the enemy ahead was alert.

Near two o'clock he made it, and the advance were walking their horses
into the fringe of Lexington--this was home-coming for a good many of
the men sagging in the saddles. Morgan's old magic was working again.
Escaping from the Ohio prison, he had managed to gather up the r