That night Colonel Kenwynton had a strange dream. He had come to the time of life when he had no appreciable future. His possibilities were limited to the renewal of his promissory notes secured on his mortgaged lands and the stress to feed the monster debt with its accustomed interest. Beyond these arid vicissitudes he never looked. The day bounded his scope of view. His life lay in the past, and although the present constrained his waking moments, all the furniture of his dreams had garnished the years come and gone. It was not strange to him, therefore, as he lay asleep in his berth, that he should hear in the shaking of the glass-door of his stateroom that opened on the guards the clanking of sabers. The sound was loud, assertive in the night. The wind had risen. Along the convolutions of the “great bends” it swirled, with a wide breathy resonance, the gusts seeming full of gasps. Now and then the timbers of the boat creaked and groaned and the empty chimneys towering into the gloom of the upper atmosphere sometimes piped forth sonorous blasts. No longer the somber monotony held the sky. Clouds were rolling in tumultuous surges from the south, and the wind fretted the currents into leaping turbulence as it struck upon the waves, directly against the course of the waters. Low along the horizon pale lightnings flickered. The river became weirdly visible in these fluctuating glimmers, and anon there was only the sense of a vast black abyss where it flowed, and an overpowering realization of unseen motion—for it was silent, this stupendous concourse of the waters of the great valley, silent as the grave. In the fitful illuminations the lace-like summit of the riparian forest would show momentarily against the clouds; the big, inert structure of the boat, and long ghastly stretch of the arid sand-bar, would be suddenly visible an instant, then as suddenly sunken into darkness.

And again and again the door of Colonel Kenwynton’s stateroom shook with a clatter in its casing.

He was not a light sleeper, which is usual to old age. His robust physique was recruited by the sound slumber that might have accorded with a score less years than had whitened his hair. The lightnings, glimmering ever and anon through the glass door and into his placid, aged, sleeping face—that ere long should sleep hardly more placidly and to stir no more—did not rouse him. The violent vibrations of the glass door would scarcely have impinged upon his consciousness save that the sound suggested the clash of sabers. But all at once Colonel Kenwynton’s whole being was translated into a day of the past—a momentous day. The air blared with a trumpet’s imperious mandate; the clank of sabers filled his ears, and in the lightning’s pale flare he saw, plainly against the surging clouds of the southwest, the face of the man who had ridden close to his bridle rein in a furious cavalry charge that broke the serried ranks of a redoubtable square.

“Regiment! Draw—swords! Trot!—March! Gallop!—March! Charge!—Charge!”

The stentorian, martial cry was filling the restricted spaces of the little stateroom. Colonel Kenwynton, awakened by the sound of his own voice, had pulled himself up on his elbow and was staring in amazement at the dull, opaque black square of the glass door of his stateroom, which might be only discerned because the apartment was partially illumined through the transom of the opposite door, admitting the tempered radiance of the lights burning all night in the saloon within.

He was nettled as with a sense of ridicule. He had known an old war-horse that after peace had been degraded to cheap domestic uses, but was accustomed to prance in futile senility and in stately guise to the sound of a child’s drum. He listened to discern if his wild martial cry had reached other ears. No—the scoffers slept. Peace to their pillows. He grimly wished them rest. He—he was an old man, an old man, and not of much account any more, save at the reunions. Ah, it must have been the associations of the reunion which resurrected that face—the face of a man to whom he owed much, a man but for whom he would scarcely be here now, laying his head down in undisturbed slumber. Once more the similitude of the clank of sabers. With the thought of the possible ridicule should he again, in his dreaming, audibly refer this noisy tumult to the memory of his battles—fought anew here in the dim midnight, he leaned forward to obviate the repetition of the sound and the renewal of the hallucination. From his berth he easily reached the door to the guards, flung it open, and lay down content in the comparative quiet. The river air was dank, but this was on the lee side of the boat, and though he could hear the wind rush by he could only slightly feel its influx here. Still illusions thronged the night. The chimneys piped in trumpet tones to his dreams. The doors of neighboring staterooms clanked faintly; whole squadrons rode by, their sabers unsheathed, and suddenly he became conscious of a presence close at hand that he could not discern in his sleep. All at once he was stiff, vigilant, expectant, fired by the pulses of a day long dead!

“The parole, officer of the day,” he gasped, curiously waking, yet still in the thrall of slumber.

“Shoulder to shoulder,” came in a shivering whisper from the twilight of the stateroom.

Suddenly impressed with the reality of the experience the old man, agitated, almost speechless, breathless, struggled up on his elbow.

“Why, Captain,” he began, in a piping travesty of his wonted sonorous greeting, “when did you come aboard?”

“Colonel,” said the man standing by the bed, and even the twilight glimmer of the room showed the wild light in his eyes, “you haven’t forgotten the day when ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ was the parole?”

“Never—! Never!” Colonel Kenwynton clasped his hand on the visitor’s hand. “But for you on that day I should have been these forty odd years in hell.”

“Then follow me. I have something to say. It must be in private—something to disclose. You can trust me, Colonel—Shoulder to Shoulder!”

“Trust you? To the death—Shoulder to Shoulder!” Colonel Kenwynton cried, in a fervor of enthusiasm.

Nevertheless he was chilled while he hastily half dressed and emerged into the dank obscurity of the guards. His hand trembled as he laid it on the stair rail. “An old man,” his lips were involuntarily formulating the words, as he followed his guide, who was descending to the lower deck. “An old man,” and he drew his overcoat about him.

Colonel Kenwynton was born to authority and had had the opportunities of command. But his martial experience had taught him also to obey, and when he had once accepted a mandate he did not hesitate nor even harbor an independent thought. With his soft, broad felt hat drawn far over his brows, down the stairs thumped his groping old feet, doggedly active. The wind was surging amidst the low clouds which were flying before the blast in illimitable phalanxes in some distraught panic of defeat. There must have been a moon lurking beyond their rack and rout, for the weird night landscape was strangely distinct, the forests that restricted the horizon bowed, and bent, and rose again in definite undulations to the successive gusts. One might hardly say how the surface of the far spread of water was discerned, dark, vaguely lustrous, with abysmal suggestions, though with never a glimmer, save where the dim lights of the boat pierced the glooms with a dull ray, here and there, or lay along ripples close at hand with a limited, shoaling glister.

These shallows covered the line of the treacherous sand-bar that had been secretly a-building all summer beneath the surface with the deposits of silt and in the uncovenanted ways of the great water course, till now the tow-head was possibly a peninsula in lieu of the island it had once been, and the packets of the line would never again find free passage as of yore between its stretches and the bank. Accustomed eyes could see how far extended the stabilities of the tow-head and thus differentiate the definite land formation from the element of land transition, that was neither land nor water. Here the wind made great sport, shrilling along the desolate arid spaces of the pallid sand dunes defenseless against the blast. A wild night, and cold.

The tread of his guide was silent—one might almost say secret. He came to a shuddering galvanic pause as he suddenly encountered a watchman, a lantern in his hand. The big, burly Irishman gazed with round, unfriendly, challenging eyes at the foremost of the two advancing figures, then catching sight of the familiar face of the Colonel his whole aspect changed; he beamed with jovial recognition.

“Oh, the Cunnel, is ut? Faix, the top o’ the mornin’ to yez, sor, if it’s got anny top to ’t—’tis after twelve. This grisly black night seems about the ground floor of hell. The river’s risin’ a bit, sor; an’ if this wind would fall we’d sure have a rain, an’ git out o’ this, foreshortly.”

He touched his hat and moved on, the feeble halo of the lantern betokening his progress among the shadowy piles of freight, dimly visible in the dull light of the fixed lamps.

Not even a speculation did Colonel Kenwynton allow himself when suddenly his precursor put a foot on the gunwale of the boiler deck and sprang over into the darkness. The old soldier followed without a moment’s doubt. The unseen water surged about his feet, cold as ice, and at the swiftly flowing, unexpected impact he caught his breath with a gasp. But the guide had forgotten the lapse of time—how old a man, how feeble, was the erstwhile stalwart commander. He pressed on, the water splashing about his feet, now rising to ankle depth, now even deeper, once surging about his knees. Even Colonel Kenwynton at last had a thought of protest. This was always a good soldier, Captain Treherne, but a bit reckless and disposed to unnecessary risks. There was no word of remonstrance, however, from the elder man, and he was fairly blown when suddenly Captain Treherne paused at a considerable distance in a level space near the river’s margin where was beached a clumsy little craft which the Colonel recognized as a dug-out.

Captain Treherne seemed all unconscious of the pallid countenance, the failing breath, the halting step of the old man. For, indeed, Colonel Kenwynton was fain to catch at his companion’s arm for support as he listened, panting.

“Come, Colonel, you will come with me. I need your advice. You can wield a paddle, and together we can make the distance.”

Only the obviously impossible checked the old soldier.

“Wield a paddle against this current, my dear sir? Make the distance! You forget my age—seventy-five, sir; seventy-five years.”

“It is not life and death, Colonel. We have faced that together, you and I, and laughed at both. Dishonest possession is involved now, and legalized robbery, and hidden assets. And I have the secret of the cache, Colonel, I, alone. It must be revealed. I need your help. This is the crucial crisis of my life. My life—!” He broke off with an accent of scorn—“of lives worth infinitely more than mine. And, Colonel Kenwynton,” he laid a sudden, lean hand on the old man’s arm, “the helpless! For they know nothing of their rights. It must be revealed to one who will annul this wrong, this heinous disaster.”

He had drawn very close, and his grasp on the Colonel’s arm, that had once been so firm-fleshed and sinewy, seemed to crush the collapsed muscles into the very bone. The old man winced with the pain, but stood firm.

“I’m with you, heart and soul, always. Command me. But, my dear boy, this is impracticable. Let’s get a roustabout to row.”

The intensifying grip might really have broken the old man’s bone.

“Not for your life—never a whisper to any other living creature! Only you can do this. I—I—I should not be believed.”

“Not believed! You!” cried Colonel Kenwynton in a tone of such indignant, vicarious, insulted pride, that what self-control the other man possessed broke down; he flung his arms about the old man’s quivering frame, bowed his head on the Colonel’s shoulder and sobbed aloud.

“Not even you would believe me—if you knew—if you knew what I have been—what I am.”

“Exactly what I do know,” said the Colonel, sturdily. “You are overcome by your emotions, dear old fellow. You are overwrought. We will put an end to this, sir. Come, halloo the boat. I can’t halloo, Cap—think of that for me!—damn this cough! Halloo the boat, and tell the mate to send us a roustabout to paddle. Or, hadn’t we better take the yawl? That dug-out looks tricky—and, by God, man, it’s leaky.” He had advanced to the brink where the craft lay.

“No, no,” cried the other, “not a breath, not a whisper. It would frustrate all.” Then impressively, “Colonel Kenwynton, strange things have come about in this country because of the war. The rich are the poor; the right are the wrong; the incompetent sit bridling in the places that the capable have builded; an old paper, an old treasure, lost time out of mind, would reverse some lives, by God! And I hold the secret, like an omnipotent fate. There must be no miscarriage of justice here, Colonel Kenwynton.”

The old man’s eyes stared through the dusk like an owl’s.

“You didn’t call me out here at this time of night to talk of titles to property and acts of justice, Hugh Treherne, in this marsh—why, there ain’t a bull-frog left here.”

He lifted his head and gazed out from the flapping broad brim of his hat at the windy waste of waters, the indefinite lines of the shore, the distant summits of the forest trees tossing to and fro against the tumultuous unrest of the clouded horizon.

Close at hand rose sheer precipitous elevations of the tow-head; seeming far away towered the great bulk of the grounded steamer, whitely glimmering through the night, her lamps a dim yellow focus here and there, her fires extinguished, her engines sleeping and supine.

“I called you out here, Colonel, because you are the only man left in the world who respects his promise, who reverences his Maker, who trusts his friend and would go through fire and water on his summons.”

“I’ll take an affidavit to the water, dammy,” said the Colonel, grimly, stamping about as the trickling icy streams ran sleekly down his garments, over his instep. “But come to the steamboat, Hugh. We’ll have a glass of hot brandy and water, and talk this thing over in comfort.”

Captain Treherne seemed to struggle for a modicum of self-control. His voice had a remonstrant cadence such as one might use in addressing a fractious child.

“Colonel, you knew once what a council of war might mean.”

“Heigh? I did so—I did so.”

“This is secret—to be kept in the bottom of your heart. Your own thoughts must not revolve about it, lest they grow too familiar and canvass details with which you have no concern.”

“Hugh, I am an old man. I don’t believe it, as a general thing. The rheumatism has to give me a sharp pinch to remind me of the fact. I couldn’t paddle a boat to save my life—and against that current.”

It showed in the chiaro-oscuro like the solution of the problem of perpetual motion as the murky waters sped past.

“Tell me here and now. Where in all the world could we be more private?”

Captain Treherne lifted his head and looked about him,—only the bare sand of the bar, dimly visible in the vague light of the clouded moon, and of a differing tint from the dull neutral hue of the atmosphere of darkness. The steamer was absolutely silent, save as a loose chain might clank, swinging in the wind, for at this distance one could not discern the shaking of the transoms in their casings. There was no sight or sound of living creature, until a great bird, driven forth from its roost by the falling of a bough, or evicted by the wind, went screaming overhead. A shrill blast pursued his flight and presumably from the dark distance down the river one could not have distinguished the sounds of the living cry from the skirling of the restless spirit of the air.

“We crossed the river in a dug-out, under the nose of a gunboat,” Captain Treherne began, suddenly.

“Who? When? Where?” interrupted the old man, his face vaguely mowing under his big hat as he sought to compose his features.

“How can I tell where? In forty years who knows any locality in the course of this deceitful old river? All over here,” he pointed to the expanse of waters, “used to be dense cypress woods. You couldn’t find the sign of a tree now, unless some snag gets washed up by the current.”

“For the government snag-boats to pull up,” commented Colonel Kenwynton.

“Victor Ducie had been wounded, it was thought mortally, in a skirmish on the Arkansas side, and his brother, Archie, and I,—we were together in the rangers then,—slipped through the lines one dark midnight to Duciehurst with the news. You remember the Ducies?”

“Indeed, indeed, I do. There is a gentleman of that name—”

But Treherne was going on. “Mrs. Ducie determined to go to her son Victor at once; she had only one of her children at home then, a twelve-year-old boy named Julian, and she could take him with her. The country was full of bands of wandering marauders and bushwhackers, and in leaving the house Archie placed a few of his father’s most important papers, with a lot of specie, and some family jewels, in a strong box, which we wrapped in an old knapsack and hid away.”

He had pushed his hat back from his brow and Colonel Kenwynton felt a pang of blended pity and surprise to note that the head was nearly bald. The years had trafficked with Treherne as well as with himself, hard dealings, it seemed. For they had taken his youth, his spirit, his pervasive cheer; there was something indefinable suggested that savored of deep melancholy. And had these covetous years given him full value in return—learning, in the lessons of life, just judgment, self-control, disciplined purpose, earnest effort, and, last and not least, resignation and calm and restful faith? Colonel Kenwynton was unwittingly shaking his old white head at the thought in his mind. Time had not dealt honestly by Hugh Treherne. Time had exacted usury and had paid no fair equivalent for the ineffable possession of youth. Colonel Kenwynton realized, however, that his own foible was hasty judgment, and he sought to hold his conclusions in suspension while he listened.

“We will come to the end of the story sooner if I give him his head,” he said to himself and ruefully added as he shivered in his drenched garb, “that is, if it has any end.”

“Archie understood the value of these papers of his father’s,” Treherne resumed suddenly. “There was a mortgage on Duciehurst that had been lifted, but as all courts of record were closed by the operations of war the satisfaction had not been noted on the registered instrument. Carroll Carriton, who held the mortgage, happened to be in Mississippi at the time and he executed a formal release, and quit claim, signed and witnessed, but, of course, not registered. You know the chaotic state of courts of law at that time. The release also expressed a formal relinquishment of the promissory notes, secured on the land, for they were not returned; in fact, all the original papers were still out, having been placed for safekeeping in a bank in Nashville, Tennessee, where Carriton then resided, and which was within the Federal lines. The whole matter of the lifting of the mortgage and the full satisfaction of the debt was thoroughly understood between the principals and the witnesses, although it was a hasty transaction and in a way irregular, owing to the lack of facilities for recording the instruments in the state of war.”

“But, look here,” cried the Colonel in great excitement, “Duciehurst—you know, I was a friend of George Ducie—Duciehurst was sold to satisfy that mortgage, in behalf of the heirs of Carroll Carriton.”

“Ah, Lord. That’s why I am here, Colonel,” cried Treherne with a strange note of pathos.

“But, man alive, you ought to have been here forty years ago with Carriton’s release.”

“Ah-h, Lord, Colonel, you don’t understand.”

“But I do understand, I understand mighty well,” cried the Colonel. “Archie, God bless his soul, I remember him like yesterday, died of typhoid fever in Vicksburg, where his father was killed by the explosion of a cannon during the siege. His mother died in Arkansas, succumbed to pneumonia, contracted on the river that cold night when she crossed it to join her wounded son, and never returned to Duciehurst. Victor did not die till long afterward, he recovered from his wound and fell at last in the battle before Nashville. Not one of the family was left when the war closed except the youngest son, Julian, and although the suit on the promissory notes, brought by the executors of Carriton, was defended in his behalf, he being a minor at the time, no proof of the satisfaction of the debt could be made, and in default of payment the mortgage was foreclosed, and the magnificent estate of Duciehurst went under the hammer for a mere fraction of its value in the collapsed conditions of those disorganized times.”

“Ah-h-hh, Lord, Colonel,” Treherne was swaying back and forth as in a species of anguish.

“No time to say ‘Ah, Lord, Colonel,’” the old man muttered the words in irascible mimicry. “Where did you and Archie hide that knapsack?” and, with increasing sternness, “why have you never produced those valuables?”

Was there a fluctuating glimmer of moonlight in the rack of clouds, or did the pallid day look forth for one moment, averse and reluctant—he saw distinctly that face which he once knew so well, with something new, strangely unrecognizable upon it. Then he had a sudden vision of a scene wreathed in the smoke of cannon and the mists of rain; the glitter of dull gray light on the polished, serried, fixed bayonets of an infantry square; the sense of the motion of a mad tumultuous gallop of a charge; the sound of trumpets wildly blowing, pandemonium, yells, shrieks of pain, hoofbeats, a gush of blood suffusing eyes, and all consciousness lost save that this man was helping him to his own horse from under the carcass of the slain charger, humbly holding by the stirrup in their mad precarious escape through the broken square.

The years since that momentous day had been something to Colonel Kenwynton, and but for this man’s courage and devotion he would not have lived them.

“Hugh, dear old boy, remember one fact. Through everything misty, I trust you; I trust you implicitly, Hugh. I know your honorable motives. Tell me anything you will, but through thick and thin I trust you.”

“The Ducie valuables are what I am coming to,” said Treherne uneasily, his voice husky, his articulation muffled, his tongue thick. “We hid ’em—Archie and I. We hid ’em at Duciehurst in the mansion. That is what I want to tell you.”

He paused to gaze about, pointing wildly, now up, now down the river.

“Then we crossed there, no, there, and landed on the Arkansas side. We had put Mrs. Ducie and Julian into the skiff, which we rowed ourselves. She had a lot of things with her that she was taking to Victor, bed-linen, blankets, clothes, medicines, wines and such like, so hard to come by in the Confederacy in those times. We landed there, no, there.”

Again he was pointing wildly from place to place. Now and then he took short, agile runs to and fro, as if he sought a better view in the windy obscurity.

“It was very cold and a pitch black night. We almost got under the hull of a Yankee gunboat—she was a vessel that had been captured from the Confederates, armored with iron rails, you know—that kind of iron-clad. As she swung at anchor I wonder the suction didn’t swamp us, but it didn’t. The look-out on deck never challenged nor heard us. We hit it like the bull’s eye, at the Arkansas landing,—Archie knew every twist and quirk in the current like an old song, born at Duciehurst, you know. And after we made it to the farm-house, where Victor was lying at the point of death it seemed, we returned to our command according to orders, our leave being expired, for we had already hid the box in the knapsack at Duciehurst. And that’s all.”

He laid his hand on Colonel Kenwynton’s shoulder and gazed wistfully into his face. Day was coming surely, for the elder man’s feebler vision read a strange fact in those eyes, a fact that made him shudder, even when half perceived, a fact against which his credulity revolted.

“Hugh, Hugh, why in the name of God have you not produced those papers, restored the gold and jewels?”

“Why, why, why,” Treherne’s voice rose to a shriek. “Why, I have forgotten where they were hidden. Forgotten! Forgotten! Forgotten!”

Colonel Kenwynton was trembling like a leaf. A chill keener than the cold had set his heart a-quiver. “Forgotten,” he echoed in a vague fright. “Forgotten—impossible!”

The contradiction seemed to restore Treherne—not so much that it aroused the instinct of contention as the determination to set himself right in the eyes of his old commander.

“Do you know, Colonel, where I have been these forty years?” he demanded, quietly.

“I thought, in Paradise, dear old boy. I often asked, but could never hear a word.”

Wherever he had been it was evident he had not been happy there. The trembling clasp of Colonel Kenwynton’s arm on his shoulder brought the younger man’s face down on the soft old wrinkled neck. But now there were no tears.

“I have been at Glenrose.”

The words came from between set teeth, in the merest thread of a voice.

“Glenrose?” Colonel Kenwynton was aware that there was a significance in the reply which he had not grasped. “A beautiful little town, I am told, not far from Caxton, and growing quite into commercial importance,” he said, glibly, his instinct of courtesy and compliment galvanically astir.

“Oh, horrible! Horrible!” Hugh Treherne cried, poignantly. “Do you wonder now that I have forgotten? I can only wonder that I remember anything. They pretend that it was the wound at Franklin—the injury to the medulla substance.”

“Hugh! Hugh!” the old Colonel was near to falling into the marshy slough at his feet. “You don’t mean—you can’t mean—the—asylum—the private sanatorium for the insane. Oh, my poor boy, my poor boy. Wait, wait, give me your hand, I shall fall, wait, wait.”

But there were sudden voices on the wind, calling here, calling there. Colonel Kenwynton heard his own name, but he did not respond. He only sought to detain his old comrade in his endearing clasp. The younger man was the stronger. Treherne wrested himself away, though not without repeated efforts, seized the paddle, pushed off the dug-out, and in a moment was lost in the gloom, for the moon was down, mists were rising from the low-lying borders of a bayou delta, and the frail craft was invisible on the face of the waters.

Colonel Kenwynton was not devoid of a certain kind of policy. He rallied his composure, realizing that the Captain of the steamboat had been alarmed by his absence on this precarious spot which the sound of his voice had betrayed, and before the emissaries sent out to seek him had reached the old man he had determined on his line of conduct. He maintained a studied reticence, the more easily since Treherne’s presence had not been observed to excite curiosity and he himself was in a state of exhaustion and cold that precluded more than a shivering gasp in reply to questions. For he was determined to take counsel within himself before he indulged in explanations. He said to himself that he could better afford misconstruction of his conduct as some fantastic freak of drunkenness than run the risk of divulging the interests of another man to his possible detriment,—this man, who had so obviously, so appealingly suffered. He steeled himself in this, although he loved the approval, or rather the admiration, of his fellows, and he felt that his position in some sort forfeited it, not being aware how thoroughly established he was as a public favorite, so that, indeed, he could hardly incur reprobation.

“Ain’t the old Colonel game—must have been tight as a drum last night,” the Captain said to the clerk. “He was making the tow-head fairly sing when I heard him, luckily enough.”

Then to the Boots, who was looking from one to the other of the miry shoes into which he had thrust each hand: “Take his clothes and get them dried and pressed and see that you are careful about it. Colonel Kenwynton shall have the best service aboard as long as I have a plank afloat.”

He had no plank afloat now, high and dry as the Cherokee Rose was on the sand-bar, but his meaning was clear, and Colonel Kenwynton’s gear, despite its strenuous experience, seemed improved by this careful handling when once more donned, and he strode out, serene and smiling, into the outer air.

“How the old fellows stand their liquor—a body would think he was never overtaken in his life.”

The Captain possessed the grace of reticence. None of the passengers had any inkling of the incident of the previous night, either as Colonel Kenwynton knew it, or in the interpretation which the Captain had placed upon it.