The snow that had lain along the Appalachian slopes had felt the first breath of thawing breezes in March, 1917. Here and there, in a sun-touched hollow, dry twigs grew less brittle and the hint of buds gave timid forecasting of spring. The roads were deep in red mud and black mud, and men in ill-lighted cabins looked to crowbar and pike-pole and made ready for the swelling of the "spring tide" that should heft their rafted logs on its shoulders of water to the markets of a flattened world.

In the log house which Victor McCalloway had built, Boone Wellver was making his final preparations to go to Washington again—and, after that, if God willed, to Russia. Upon his wall calendar once more a date was marked; the date of a call, come at last, for which through two years his spirit had fretted.

The President had sent his summons for Congress to gather in extraordinary session, and that order, given first for April the sixteenth, had been advanced to April the second. That could carry one meaning only—that at last the fiction of a national aloofness was to be cast aside as a garment unworthy of its wearer; that at last the nation was to take her place at Armageddon!

Ahead lay action; the only medicine for a deep-rooted sorrow which, after a grim clinging to the fringe of hope, had begun to admit despair.

For almost three years Boone had divided himself between his work and his search for Anne, and his mission had come to seem as far from attainment as that of the seekers of the Holy Grail. Now he was to be one of those whose voices should speak for the nation in its declaration of war.

That would not be enough. It would be only a beginning of his self-required service, but since the well-springs of sentiment were deeper in his nature than he realized, it was important to him that he, the pioneer type of American, should join with his modern brethren in committing his country to her forward stride across the Atlantic.

The sun was setting over the "Kaintuck' Ridges" in a blazing glory of wine red and violet, and his imagination flamed responsively until it saw in the bristle of crest pine and spruce, the silhouette of lance-bearing legions marching eastward.

Already his trunk had gone in a neighbour's "jolt wagon," and the horse that he was to ride across Cedar Mountain was saddled. Other respondents to that call might motor to their trains. He must make the beginning of his journey on horseback, with his most immediate needs packed in saddle bags—as Jefferson had done before him.

Boone paused at the door of the house, where already the fire had been quenched and the windows barred. Now he turned the key in the lock and went slowly to the barn, but even when he had led out his mare and stood at the stirrup, something held him there with the spell of memory.

He was not coming back here until he had fulfilled the resolve long ago made—and since in these days overseas journeys were less simple than in other times, he could not be sure of coming back at all. So with his bridle rein over his forearm, he stood for a while with the picture of the log cabin and the sunset in his eyes.

Then he mounted and rode slowly away.

In a few days he was to hear the earnest voice of the President sounding over the sober faces of his gathered colleagues: "Gentlemen of the Congress:—I have called the Congress into extraordinary session because there are serious, very serious, choices to be made, and made immediately, which it was neither right nor constitutionally permissible that I should assume the responsibility of making."

Though he came bearing no official mission, because he was a member of the American Congress and because the United States Ambassador had exerted himself to that end, Boone Wellver found it possible to leave revolutionary Petrograd and make his way to the front where, after a year of successful offensive, the armies of Brussilov lay drugged with the insidious poison of anarchy.

Already, "Order Number One to Army" had with a pen-stroke abolished all the requirements of discipline and all the striking power of unity.

The marvel was that the heart of the organization had not at once stopped beating—but old traditions still held the fragments loosely cemented, and the resolute hand of Brussilov still grasped and steadied the brittle material left to him in the face of the enemy and disaster.

If guns still thundered on the eastern front, the men who had for a year been launching successful assaults knew that their voices were hollow. If his army groups still maintained a zone of activity between themselves and the foe, he knew that it was only a screen behind which he sought to shield the evaporating powers of his forces.

Yet even in these days the commander adhered to his custom and received the correspondents, and when Boone came to his headquarters with the credentials that had passed him that far, he was turned over to an intelligence officer, whose instructions were to serve him in every way compatible with military expediency until the general could grant him an audience.

He had been motored through a timber-patched country of waving wheat fields and had listened to the deep voices of the guns. He had been taken into the trenches where he read the spirit of decay in sullen eyes that had once been stolidly impassive or cheerfully childlike. He had seen the "little and terrible keyholes of heaven and hell" through which one looks, both sickened and exalted, upon modern warfare.

In his mind, still unassimilated, were countless impressions, gruesome and inspiring, petty and magnificent, appalling and ennobling; impressions of broken men and broken villages, of pock-marked country and unbruised valour. As the battered military car, mud-brown over its gray, wallowed back from the front lines, he seemed to be leaving the war behind him, though he knew that he was approaching the nerve centre from which emanated the impulses which forged and wrought the purposes of the Inferno.

Finally in a village less hideously war-spoiled than its fellows, and in a small but tidy room of what had been the inn, he awaited the pleasure of the Commander.

Of his conductor along the front he had put questions as to General Makailoff. Yes, the officer, of course, knew of the General, but where he was now he could not say.

The General was a wheel in the mechanism of Brussilov's staff—and that directing force was remote from the lives of lower grade officers. It belonged to the part of the temple which lay behind the veil. Even in attempted description of the man, the intelligence officer grew vague, and Boone did not press him for a greater explicitness. That military reticence that no civilian could justly appraise might be parent to the officer's indefinite responses, and, if so, its covertness must be respected.

So in the room of the Russian inn the man from the Cumberlands waited, and at length, when he opened his door in response to a light rap, he saw an officer in a major's uniform, who saluted smartly and announced in excellent English,

"General Brussilov will receive you now, sir."

Again a battered military car lurched through village streets darkening to twilight, and brought up before a plain two-storied house, whose walls, though shell marked, stood upright.

Into a whitewashed room, littered with map-strewn tables, and empty until they entered it, Boone was ushered and left alone.

A lamp upon a crude table stood as yet unkindled, and only candles in two tall sticks on a wall-shelf gave a yellow effect against which the shadows stirred cloudily.

Even the whitewashed walls were the gray yellow of putty in that feeble light, and Boone turned his eyes toward the brighter spot of the door, giving upon another room, where operators sat at switchboards and where were mingled the buzz of voices, the tramp of booted feet, the clink of spurs and accoutrements, into a tempered babel as restlessly constant as surf on rocks.

That door was a kaleidoscopic patch of changing colour, and Boone watched it with a sense of confused unreality until a second opened, letting in a draught under which the candles wavered and grew more dim, and a spare figure entered through it, clad in a field uniform which had seen heavy wear, and holding between the tapering fingers of the left hand a freshly lighted cigarette.

Boone had a realization in that first moment of a shadowy shape in a semi-obscurity, yet out of the dimness, as though they were brightly painted on a dark canvas, stood clear—or so it seemed to him—the features of the man and the cross of St. George on his breast.

Alexieff Brussilov closed the door behind him and inclined his head in something less casual than a nod and less formal than a bow, and the flames of the candles rose and steadied as if standing at attention. In all of Boone's subsequent remembrance of that meeting, it was difficult for him to unravel the fact from the play of an imagination, more fitful just then than the candle glimmer, or to dissociate from the impressions of that moment all that he had known before or learned afterwards of this man, whose feats of arms he had heard so widely acclaimed.

Even when the General's voice had broken the silence and they had exchanged commonplaces, a surge of influences quite apart from his words seemed to emanate from the erect figure and the stern eyes, as electric waves flow out from an induction coil.

Boone questioned himself sternly afterwards and could never answer his own questioning as to whether he actually felt at that time or only realized in retrospect the strong impression of doom and heartbreak in Brussilov's eyes. His story was not yet ended, but he must have known its end. He was yet to be commander-in-chief for two months of futile struggle with crumbling armies, succeeding Alexieff, and being himself supplanted by Korniloff. He was even to essay one more offensive—yet his inner vision must already recognize the writing on the wall. He must have seen the black smudge-smoke of disaster stifling the clean fire of his achievement.

But Boone knew that the time granted him out of those hours of stress must not be abused, and as shortly as possible he told the General with full candour why he had come, and ended by asking that he be presented to General Makailoff and be allowed to see his face. If in Ivangoroff's story there had been even a germ of truth, this man of mysterious advent into the Russian army might well look to his superiors to protect his secret.

So Boone made it unmistakably clear that his eagerness was that of a foster son, and he felt that his testimony needed no corroboration, because under the searching severity of the eyes which held his own, as he talked, any falsity must break into betrayal as manifest as a flaw in crystal.

When he had finished, Brussilov did not at once reply, and Boone thought that back of the mask of reserve stirred a shadowing of strong emotion. At last the General spoke evenly, almost stiffly:

"As to General Makailoff's former record, I have practically no knowledge. He came to me from the Grand Duke Nicholas. Naturally I required nothing more. Of my own knowledge I can declare him a soldier with few peers in Europe."

"Then I may have the honour of being presented, sir? I may see his face? If he is the man I have come to learn of, he will welcome me, I think. If not, I shall pay my respects and rest under a deep obligation to you."

The eager thrill of the civilian's voice was unmistakable, and for a moment the soldier stood looking into the face of his visitor, seeming himself uncertain of his answer. But it was only the words of its couching that troubled him, and presently Brussilov raised a hand and let it fall while his reply came in few syllables and blunt directness:

"Makailoff is dead."

"Dead!" Boone echoed the word with a gasp. Only now did he realize how strongly the hopes stirred to rebirth by Ivangoroff's fantastic narrative had laid hold upon him and what power of shock lay in this dÉnouement. Then he heard again the voice of Russia's second in command:

"It is incredibly strange that you should have come just now—if indeed he is the man you seek. Thirty-six hours since you might have talked with him." The General broke off and began afresh with an undertone of savage protest in his voice: "In these late days when troops may ballot and wrangle as to whether they will advance or retire, we must squander our most indispensable. It is only by precept and example that we can hope to hold them. Makailoff was such a sacrifice. He fell yesterday in a position as far forward as that of any colonel or major of the line. Had I been left a free hand, I could have enforced obedience more cheaply—with machine guns!"

He broke off and raised the forgotten cigarette to his lips, with an ironic shrug of his shoulders, while Boone Wellver steadied himself with an effort.

"You must make allowances for my impatience, sir," he implored. "The suspense of uncertainty is hard. May I know at once?"

Brussilov bowed, and the falcon eyes moderated with the abruptness of a transformation. "He lies only a few versts from this spot. Tonight we bury him and fire his last salute.... You shall go with me.... I am waiting now for—a gentleman, who knew him even better than I. I cannot say who was more devoted to him, for that, I think, would be impossible."

An aide entered, saluted, handed his chief a paper, and went out again. To Boone it seemed the irritating interruption of an automaton, in boots of clicking heels that moved on hinges and pivots, but it served to bring back to the General's attitude and bearing that impersonal and aloof concentration which for the moment had been lost. Again his eyes were windows of drawn shades, and as he studied the communication in his hand, the civilian remembered that, though comrades fell, the task went on, and its director could not be deflected.

Beyond the door the noise of the switchboard operators and the tramp of heavy feet coming and going sounded monotonously through the silence, and then a second officer entered, saluted, as though he were twin automaton to the first, and spoke in Russian.

"You will excuse me for a moment," said the General. "The gentleman of whom I spoke has arrived."

He left the room, and Boone remained standing, his gaze wandering, but his brain singularly numb and inoperative, like stiff machinery, until he heard footsteps again, and with a conscious effort shook off his heaviness of torpor. Then quite instinctively his civilian attitude altered into something like the soldier's attention, as General Brussilov re-entered with another figure, wrapped to the chin in a heavy motor coat. The newcomer was not in uniform, yet Boone felt the creep along his scalp of an electric and dramatic thrill because the giant height of lean stature, the calmly indomitable bearing and the indescribable stamp of greatness proclaimed the Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaivitch; the man from whose sure grasp the supreme command had been filched by a jealous weakling; the man who might have saved Russia.

He was a gray old eagle, whose mighty talons had been clipped and whose strong pinions had been broken, but the eagle light was in the iris still and the eagle power in its glance.

The Kentuckian's thoughts flashed back to the night when life had first begun to take on colour before his visioning. Then McCalloway and Prince had named the pitifully few great soldiers of the present, peers of those who had passed to Valhalla. Were it tonight instead of almost two decades ago, they must have named this man among the mighty few.

Boone found himself bowing, then he heard the deep voice of the tall gentleman saying, "General Brussilov has told me. Let us go at once."

Under a sky banked with clouds the car which they entered felt its way along a broken road. Its lights glared on dark masses that leaped out of the blackness and became lines of exhausted men stumbling rearward, or carts of wounded bumping toward relief. The throats of the guns bellowed with a nearer roar, and eventually they halted at another headquarters and silently passed between saluting officers into a bare room where candles burned dimly at the head of a coffin and Cossacks stood at attention, guarding the dead.

At a low-voiced word from Brussilov the place emptied, save for the three who looked down on the casket, closed but not yet fastened. Then, as Boone drank in his breath deeply with a steadying inhalation, the General lifted the covering and raised his eyes interrogatively toward the American.

Boone's lips stirred at first, without sound, then moved again as he said quietly: "It is he."

With the last monosyllable, answering to a command of reverence and awe and stricken grief, he dropped to his knees and knelt beside the casket, and when at length he looked up—and rose gropingly—the picture of two elderly soldiers, standing stiff and tight-lipped, stamped itself ineradicably on his brain. He found himself a minute later fumbling in a pocket and bringing out a small object from which with slow and tremulous fingers he removed the tissue paper wrapping.

His eyes turned first toward the Grand Duke, then toward the General, in a mute appeal for counsel in a matter of fitness.

"This is his," he said, with awkward pauses between his word groups; "he won it in Manchuria.... May I pin it on his breast?"

"The Japanese decoration of the Rising Sun," said the Grand Duke, gravely and acquiescently bowing his head. "Why not?"

Then, turning back his heavy civilian coat, his fingers sought the spot where should have been the Cross of St. George, and came away empty.

"I had forgotten," he observed drily, "I no longer wear a uniform—nor have I any longer the authority. You, Brussilov—with you it is different."

So the man who still held precarious reins over a runaway army detached the clasp of his ornament and pinned the two side by side on the unstirring breast of the dead man; the emblem of honour he had gained in war on Russia and that which rewarded the giving of his life to Russia.

The Grand Duke turned his gaze on Boone Wellver. "Brussilov tells me that this man was as a father to you ... that you had his permission, when he was dead, to inspect papers revealing his true identity.... Is that true?"

"It is true, sir," came the low reply.

"Then on my own responsibility I am going to share that secret with General Brussilov—implicitly trusting his discretion. He"—the tall Romanoff indicated with a gesture the body of the man who lay dead—"he told me, when he came to me. He was one of the world's greatest soldiers. Once before a casket, draped with flags and supposedly containing his body, was borne to the grave on a gun caisson—and a court paid tribute." The Grand Duke paused and spoke again in the manner of one challenging contradiction. "But he was not buried. He had not died except to the eyes of the world which was his right. His name was Hector Dinwiddie."

For a little while no one spoke, and at last Brussilov, with a reverent hand, lowered the plate over the white face. "Come, gentlemen," he said, with a brusque masking of agitation, "the burial detachment is ready."