And so on the night of the battle of Sycamore Ridge, John Barclay closed the door of his childhood and became a boy. He did not remember how Ward's wounds were dressed, nor how the town made a hero of the man; but he did remember Watts McHurdie and Martin Culpepper and the Hendricks boys tramping through the cave that night with torches, and he was the hero of that occasion because he was the smallest boy there and they put him up through the crack in the head of the cave, and he saw the stars under the elm tree far above the town, where he and his mother had spent a Sunday afternoon three years before. He called to the men below and told them where he was, and slipped down through, the hole again with an elm sprout in his hand to prove that he had been under the elm tree at the spring. But he remembered nothing of the night—how the men picketed the town; how he sat up with them along with the other boys; how the women, under his mother's direction and Miss Lucy's, cared for the wounded man, who lapsed into delirium as the night wore on, and gibbered of liberty and freedom as another man would go over his accounts in his dreams.

His mother and Miss Lucy took turns nursing Ward night after night during the hot dry summer. As the sick man grew better, many men came to the house, and great plans were afloat. Philemon Ward, sitting up in bed waiting for his leg to heal, talked much of the cave as a refuge for fugitive slaves. There was some kind of a military organization; all the men in town were enlisted, and Ward was their captain, drums were rattling and men were drilling; the dust clouds rose as they marched across the drouth-blighted fields. One night they marched up to the Barclay home, and Ward with a crutch under his arm, and with Mrs. Barclay and Miss Lucy beside him, stood in the door and made a speech to the men. And then there were songs. Watts McHurdie threw back his head and sang "Scots wha ha' wi' Wallace bled," following it with some words of his own denouncing slavery and calling down curses upon the slaveholders; so withal it was a martial occasion, and the boy's heart swelled with patriotic pride. But for a vague feeling that Miss Lucy was neglecting him for her patient, John would have begun making a hero of Philemon R. Ward. As it was, the boy merely tolerated the man and silently suspected him of intentions and designs.

But when school opened, Philemon Ward left Sycamore Ridge and John Barclay made an important discovery. It was that Ellen Culpepper had eyes. In Sycamore Ridge with its three hundred souls, only fifteen of them were children, and five of them were ten years old, and John had played with those five nearly all his life. But at ten sometimes the scales drop from one's eyes, and a ribbon or a bead or a pair of new red striped yarn stockings or any other of the embellishments which nature teaches little girls to wear casts a sheen over all the world for a boy. The magic bundle that charmed John Barclay was a scarlet dress, "made over," that came in an "aid box" from the Culpeppers in Virginia. And when the other children in Miss Lucy's school made fun of John and his amour, the boy fought his way through it all—where fighting was the better part of valour—and made horsehair chains for Ellen and cut lockets for her out of coffee beans, and with a red-hot poker made a ring for her from a rubber button as a return for the smile he got at the sly twist he gave her hair as he passed her desk on his way to the spelling class. As for Miss Lucy, who saw herself displaced, she wrote to Philemon Ward, and told him of her jilting, and railed at the fickleness and frailty of the sex.

And by that token an envelope in Ward's handwriting came to Miss Lucy every week, and Postmaster Martin Culpepper and Mrs. Martin Culpepper and all Sycamore Ridge knew it. And loyal Southerner though he was, Martin Culpepper's interest in the affair between Ward and Miss Lucy was greater than his indignation over the fact that Ward had carried his campaign even into Virginia; nothing would have tempted him to disclose to his political friends at home the postmarks of Ward's letters. That was the year of the great drouth of '60, remembered all over the plains. And as the winter deepened and the people of Sycamore Ridge were without crops, and without money to buy food, they bundled up Martin Culpepper and sent him back to Ohio seeking aid. He was a handsome figure the day he took the stage in his high hat and his ruffled shirt and broad coat tails, a straight lean figure of a man in his early thirties, with fine black eyes and a shocky head of hair, and when he pictured the sufferings of the Kansas pioneers to the people of the East, the state was flooded with beans and flour, and sheeted in white muslin. For Martin Culpepper was an orator, and though he is in his grave now, the picture he painted of bleeding Kansas nearly fifty years ago still hangs in many an old man's memory. And after all, it was only a picture. For they were all young out here then, and through all the drouth and the hardship that followed—and the hardship was real—there was always the gayety of youth. The dances on Deer Creek and at Minneola did not stop for the drouth, and many's the night that Mrs. Mason, the tall raw-boned wife of Lycurgus, wrapped little Jane in a quilt and came over to the Ridge from Minneola to take part in some social affair. And while Martin Culpepper was telling of the anguish of the famine, Watts McHurdie and his accordion and Ezra Lane's fiddle were agitating the heels of the populace. And even those pioneers who were moved to come into the wilderness by a great purpose—and they were moved so—to come into the new territory and make it free, nevertheless capered and romped through the drouth of '60 in the cast-off garments of their kinsmen and were happy; for there were buffalo meat and beans for the needy, the aid room had flour, and God gave them youth.

Not drouth, nor famine, nor suffering, nor zeal of a great purpose can burn out the sparkle of youth in the heart. Only time can do that, and so John Barclay remembered the famous drouth of '60, not by his mother's tears, which came as she bent over his little clothes, before the aid box came from Haverhill, not by the long days of waiting for the rain that never came, not even by the sun that lapped up the swimming hole before fall, and left no river to freeze for their winter's skating, not even by his mother's anguish when she had to go to the aid store for flour and beans, though that must have been a sorry day for a Thatcher; but he remembers the great drouth by Ellen Culpepper's party, where they had a frosted cake and played kissing games, and—well, fifty years is along time for two brown eyes to shine in the heart of a boy and a man. It is strange that they should glow there, and all memory of the runaway slaves who were sheltered in the cave by the sycamore tree should fade, and be only as a tale that is told. Yet, so memory served the boy, and he knew only at second hand how his mother gave her widow's mite to the cause for which she had crossed the prairies as of old her "fathers crossed the sea."

Before the rain came in the spring of '61 Martin Culpepper came back from the East an orator of established reputation. The town was proud of him, and he addressed the multitude on various occasions and wept many tears over the sad state of the country. For in the nation, as well as in Sycamore Ridge, great things were stirring. Watts McHurdie filled Freedom's Banner with incendiary verse, always giving the name of the tune at the beginning of each contribution, by which it might be sung, and the way he clanked Slavery's chains and made love to Freedom was highly disconcerting; but the town liked it.

In April Philemon R. Ward came back to Sycamore Ridge, and there was a great gathering to hear his speech. Ward's soul was aflame with anger. There were no Greek gods and Roman deities in what Ward said, as there were in Martin Culpepper's addresses. Ward used no figures of speech and exercised no rhetorical charms; but he talked with passion in his voice and the frenzy of a cause in his eyes. Martin Culpepper was in the crowd, and as Ward lashed the South, every heart turned in interrogation to Culpepper. They knew what his education had been. They understood his sentiments; and yet because he was one of them, because he had endured with them and suffered with them and ministered to them, the town set him apart from its hatred. And Martin Culpepper was sensitive enough to feel this. It came over him with a wave of joy, and as Ward talked, Culpepper expanded. Ward closed in a low tone, and his face was white with pent-up zeal as he asked some one to pray. There was a silence, and then a woman's voice, trembling and passionate, arose, and Sycamore Ridge knew that Mrs. Barclay, the widow of the Westport martyr, was giving sound to a voice that had long been still. It was a simple halting prayer, and not all those in the room heard it clearly. The words were not always fitly chosen; but as the prayer neared its close,—and it was a short prayer at the most,—there came strength and courage into the voice as it asked for grace for "the brother among us who has shared our sufferings and lightened our burdens, and who has cleaved to us as a brother, but whose heart is drawn away from us by ties of blood and kinship"; and then the voice sank lower and lower as though in shame at its boldness, and hushed in a tremulous Amen.

No one spoke for a moment, and as Sycamore Ridge looked up from the floor, its eyes turned instinctively toward Martin Culpepper. He felt the question that was in the hearts about him, and slowly, to the wonder of all, he rose. He had a beautiful deep purring voice, and when he opened his eyes, they seemed to look into every pair of eyes in the throng. There were tears on his face and in his voice as he spoke. "Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: where thou diest, I will die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me." And then he sank to his chair and hid his face, and for a moment a hundred wet-eyed men were still.

Though John Barclay was at the meeting, he remembered only his mother's prayer, but in his heart there was always a picture of a little boy trying to walk home with a little girl, and when he came up with her she darted ahead or dropped back. At the Culpepper gate she stood waiting fully a minute for him to catch her, and when he came up to her, she laughed, "Huh, Mr. Smarty, you didn't, did you?" and ran up the walk, scooted into the house, and slammed the door. But he understood and went leaping down the hill toward home with happiness tingling in his very finger-tips. He seemed to be flying rather than walking, and his toes touched the dirt path so lightly that he rounded the corner and ran plump into Miss Lucy and Philemon Ward standing at the gate. And what he saw surprised him so that he let out a great "haw-haw-haw" and ran, trying to escape his shame and fear at his behaviour. But the next morning Miss Lucy smiled so sweetly at him as he came into the schoolroom, that he knew he was forgiven, and that thrill was lost by the thump of joy that startled his heart when he saw a bunch of dog-tooth violets in his ink bottle, and in his geography found a candy heart with a motto on it so fervent that he did not eat it for three long abstemious days of sheer devotion, in which there were eyes and eyes and eyes from the little girl in the scarlet gown.

It is strange that the boy did not remember how Sycamore Ridge took the call to arms for the war between the states. All he remembered of the great event in our history as it touched the town was that one day he heard there was going to be a war. And then everything seemed to change. A dread came over the people. It fell upon the school, where every child had a father who was going away.

And it was because Madison Hendricks, the first man to leave for the war, was father of Bob and Elmer Hendricks that John's first associations of the great Civil War go back to the big black-bearded man. For Madison Hendricks, who was a graduate of West Point, and a veteran of the Mexican War, was called to Washington in May, and his boys acquired a prestige that was not accorded to them by the mere fact that their father was president of the town company, and was accounted the first citizen of the town. Madison Hendricks, who owned the land on which the town was built, Madison Hendricks, scholar and gentleman, veteran of the Mexican War, first mayor of Sycamore Ridge upon its incorporation,—his sons had no standing. But Madison Hendricks, formally summoned to go to Washington to put down the rebellion, and leaving on the stage with appropriate ceremonies,—there was a man who could bequeath to his posterity in the boy world something of his consequence.

So in the pall that came upon the school in Sycamore Ridge that spring of '61, Bob and Elmer Hendricks were heroes, and their sister—who was their only guardian in their father's absence—had to put them in her dresses and send them to bed, and punish them in all the shameful ways that she knew to take what she called "the tuck out of them." And the boy of all the boys who gave the Hendricks boys most homage was little Johnnie Barclay. There was no dread in his hero-worship. He had no father to go to the war. But the other children and all the women were under a great cloud of foreboding, and for them the time was one of tension and hoping against hope that the war would soon pass.

How the years gild our retrospect. It was in 1903 that Martin Culpepper, a man in his seventies, collected and published "The Complete Poetical and Philosophical Works of Watts McHurdie, together with Notes and a Biographical Appreciation by Martin F. Culpepper." One of the earlier chapters, which tells of the enlistment of the volunteer soldiers for the Civil War in '61, devotes some space to the recruiting and enlistment in Sycamore Ridge. The chapter bears the heading "The Large White Plumes," and in his "introductory remarks" the biographer says, "To him who looks back to those golden days of heroic deeds only the lines of Keats will paint the picture in his soul:—

"'Lo, I must tell a tale of chivalry,
For large white plumes are dancing in mine eyes.'"

And so the "large white plumes" blinded his eyes to the fear and the dread that were in the hearts of the people, and he tells his readers nothing of the sadness that men felt who put in crops knowing that their wives must cultivate and harvest them. He sees only the glory of it; for we read: "Hail to the spirit of mighty Mars. When he strode through our peaceful village, he awoke many a war song in our breasts. As for our hero, Mars, the war god forged iron reeds for his lute, and he breathed into it the spirit of the age, and all the valour, all the chivalry of a golden day came pouring out of his impassioned reeds." Such is the magic of those large white plumes on Martin Culpepper's memory. Although John Barclay in that latter day bought a thousand copies of the Biography and sent them to public libraries all over the world, he smiled as he read that paragraph referring to Watts McHurdie's accordion as the "impassioned reeds." When he read it, John Barclay, grown to a man of fifty-three, sitting at a great mahogany table, with a tablet of white paper on a green blotting pad before him, and a gorgeous rose rising from a tall graceful green vase on the shining table, looked out over a brown wilderness of roofs and chimneys across a broad river into the hills that were green afar off, and there, rising out of yesterday, he saw, not the bent little old man in the harness shop with steel-rimmed spectacles and greasy cap, whom you may see to-day; but instead, the boy in John Barclay's soul looked through his eyes, and he saw another Watts McHurdie,—a dapper little fellow under a wide slouch hat, with a rolling Byronic collar, and fancy yellow waistcoat of the period, in exceedingly tight trousers. And then, flash! the picture changed, and Barclay saw Watts McHurdie under his mushroom hat; Martin Culpepper in his long-tailed coat; Philemon Ward, tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, slim, and sturdy; skinny, nervous Lycurgus Mason and husky Gabriel Carnine from Minneola; Jake Dolan in his shirt sleeves, without adornment of any kind, except the gold horseshoe pinned on his shirt bosom; Daniel Frye, the pride of an admiring family, in his best home-made clothes; Henry Schnitzler, Oscar Fernald, and nearly a hundred other men, to the boy's eyes so familiar then, now forgotten, and all their faces blurred in the crowd that stood about the recruiting officer by the town pump in Sycamore Ridge that summer day of '61. A score or so of men had passed muster. The line on the post at the wooden awning in front of Schnitzler's saloon was marked at five feet six. All had stood by it with their heads above the line. It was Watts McHurdie's turn. He wore high-heeled boots for the occasion, but strut as he would, his roached hair would not touch the stick that came over the line. "Stretch your neck—ye bantam," laughed Jake Dolan. "Walk turkey fashion, Watts," cried Henry Schnitzler, rushing up behind Watts and grabbing his waistband. The crowd roared. Watts looked imploringly at the recruiting officer and blubbered in wrath: "Yes, damn you—yea; that's right. Of course; you won't let me die for my bleedin' country because I ain't nine feet tall." And the little man turned away trying to choke his tears and raging at his failure. And because the recruiting officer was considerable of a man, Watts McHurdie's name was written in the muster roll, and he went out.

Many days must have passed between the time when the men were mustered in and the day they went away to the war. But to the man who saw those times through the memory of the boy in blue jeans forever playing bugle-calls upon his fife, it was all one day. For that crowd dissolved, and another picture appeared upon the sensitized plate of his memory. There is a crowd in the post-office—mostly men who are going away to war. The stage has come in, and a stranger, better dressed than the men of Sycamore Ridge, is behind the letter-boxes of the post-office. The boy is watching his box; for it is the day when the Springfield Republican is due. Gradually the hum in front of the boxes quiets, and two loud voices have risen behind the screen. Then out walks great Martin Culpepper, white of face, with pent-up fury. His left hand is clutched like a talon in the shoulder of the stranger, whom Martin is holding before him. "Gentlemen, your attention," demands Culpepper. The stranger swallows his Adam's apple as if to speak; Martin turns to him with, "Don't you say that word again, sir, or I'll wring your neck." Then he proceeds:—

"Gentlemen, this busybody has come all the way from Washington here to tell me I'm a thief. I wrote to his damn Yankee government that I was needing the money last winter to go East on the aid committee and would replace it, and now that I'm going out to-morrow to die for his damn Yankee government, he has the impertinence to come in here and say I stole that money. Now what I want to ask you, gentlemen, is this: Do I go out to-morrow to die on the field of glory for my country, or does this here little contemptible whippersnapper take me off to rot in some Yankee jail? I leave it to you, gentlemen. Settle it for yourselves." And with that Culpepper throws the man into the crowd and walks behind the screen in solemn state.

The boy never knew how it was settled. But Martin Culpepper went to "the field of glory," and all the boy knew of the incident is here recorded. However, in the Biography of Watts McHurdie above-mentioned and aforesaid occur these words, in the same chapter—the one entitled "The Large White Plumes": "Let memory with gentle hand cover with her black curtain of soft oblivion all that was painful on that glorious day. Let us not recall the bickerings and the strifes, let the grass watered by Lethe's sweet spring creep over the scars in the bright prospect which lies under our loving gaze. Let us hold in our heart the tears in beauty's eyes; the smile that curls her crimson lips, and the hope that burns upon her brow. Let us fondle the sacred memory of every warm hand clasp of comrade and take to the silent grave the ever green garland of love that adorned our hearts that day. For the sordid thorns that pierced our bleeding hearts—what are they but ashes to-day, blown on the winds of yesterday?"

What indeed, Martin Culpepper—what indeed, smiled John Barclay as he reached for the rose on his broad mahogany desk across forty long years, and looking through a wide window, saw on the blank wall of a great hulk of a building half a mile away, the fine strong figure of a man with black shaggy hair on his young leonine head rise and wave his handkerchief to a woman with tears running down her face and anguish in her eyes, standing in a swarm of children. What indeed are sordid thorns when the "large white plumes are dancing"—what indeed?

That was a busy night in Sycamore Ridge—the night before the men left for war in the summer of '61. And the busiest man in all the town was Philemon R. Ward. Every man in the town was going, and most of the men were going who lived in the county—an area as large as a New England state, and yet when they were all gathered in Main Street, there were less than fivescore of them. They had agreed to elect Ward captain, Martin Culpepper first lieutenant, Jake Dolan second lieutenant. It was one of the diversions of the occasion to call out "Hello, Cap," when Ward hustled by a loitering crowd. But his pride was in his work, and before sundown he had it done. The Yankee in him gave him industry and method and foresight. At sunset the last of the twenty teams and wagons he had ordered came rattling down the hill west of town, driven by Gabriel Carnine of Minneola, with Mrs. Lycurgus Mason sitting like a war goddess on the back seat holding Lycurgus, a spoil of battle, while he held their daughter on his lap, withal a martial family party. Mrs. Barclay and Miss Lucy went to the aid store-room and worked the long night through, getting breakfast for the men. Mary Murphy and Nellie Logan came from the Thayer House to the aid room when the hotel dishes were washed, and helped with the work. And while they were there the Culpeppers walked in, returning from a neighbourly visit to Miss Hendricks; John Barclay in an apron, stirring a boiling pot of dried apples, turned his back on the eyes that charmed him, but when the women sent him for a bucket of water, he shook the handle at Ellen Culpepper and beckoned her with a finger, and they slipped out into the moonlight together. She had hold of the handle of the bucket with him, and they pulled and hauled and laughed as boy and girl will laugh so long as the world turns round. The street was deserted, and only the bar of light that fell across the sidewalk from Schnitzler's saloon indicated the presence of human beings in the little low buildings that pent in the highway. The boy and the girl stood at the pump, and the boy stuck a foot in the horse trough. He made a wet silhouette of it on the stone beneath him, and reached for the handle of the pump. Then he said, "I got somepin I won't tell."

"Three little niggers in a peanut shell," replied the girl.

"All right, Miss Cuteness. All right for you; I was going to tell you somepin, but I won't now." He gave the pump-handle a pull. It was limp and did not respond with water. "Ellen—" the boy repeated as he worked the handle, "I got somepin to tell you. Honest I have."

"I don't care, Mr. Smarty," the girl replied; she made a motion as if to walk away, but did not. The boy noticed it and said, "Yes, sir—it's somepin you'd like to know." The girl did not turn round. The boy, who had been working with the wheezy pump, was holding the handle up, and water was gurgling down the well. And before she could answer he said, "Say, Ellen—don't be mad; honest I got somepin."

"Who's it about?" she asked over her shoulder.

"Me."

"That's not much—who else?"

"Elmer Hendricks!"

"Who else?" The girl was halfway turned around when she spoke.

"Bob—Bob Hendricks," replied the boy.

"Aw—Bob Hendricks—" returned the girl, in contempt. Then she faced the boy and said, "What is it?"

"Come here 'n' I'll tell you."

"I'll come this far." The girl took two steps.

"I got to whisper it, and you can't hear."

"Well, 'tain't much." The girl dangled one bare foot hesitatingly.

"I'll come halfway," she added.

The boy made a mark in the dust of the road a few feet from him with his toe, and said, "Come to there."

The girl shook her head, and spoke. "Tell me part—'n' I'll see if it's good."

"Me and Elmer an' Bob are goin' to run away!" The girl stepped to the toe mark and cried, "What?"

"Yes, sir—in the mornin'." He caught hold of the girl's arm awkwardly and swung her around to the opposite side of the pump-handle, and put her hands on it and began to pump. She pumped with him as he puffed between the strokes, "Um' huh—we're going to hide in the provision wagons, under some saddles they is there and go—to—war!" The water was pouring into the bucket by the time he had got this out. Their hands touched on the pump-handle. It was the boy who drew his hand away. The girl gasped:—

"Why, John Barclay,—it ain't no such thing—does your ma know it?"

He told her that no one knew it but her, and they pumped in silence until the bucket was full, and walking back carrying the bucket between them, he told her another secret: that Watts McHurdie had asked John to get his guitar after midnight, and play an accompaniment to the accordion, and that Watts and Ward and Jake Dolan and Gabriel Carnine were going out serenading. Further he told her that Watts was going to serenade Nellie Logan at the Thayer House, and that Gabriel Carnine was going to serenade Mary Murphy, and that Philemon Ward was going to serenade Miss Lucy, and that he, John Barclay, had suggested that it would be fine to serenade Mrs. Culpepper, because she was such a nice woman, and they agreed that if he would bring his guitar, they would!

When the boy and girl returned to the store, Ward and Miss Lucy went to the Barclay home for the guitar. When they came back, Mrs. Barclay noted a pink welt on one of Ward's fingers where his cameo ring had been, and she observed that from time to time Miss Lucy kept feeling of her hair as if to smooth it. It was long after midnight before the girls from the hotel went home, and Miss Lucy and Mrs. Barclay lay on the counter in the store, trying to sleep. They awoke with the sound of music in their ears, and Miss Lucy said, "It's Captain Ward—and the other boys, serenading us." They heard the high tenor voice of Watts McHurdie and the strong clear voice of Ward rising above the accordion and guitar:—

"For her voice is on the breeze,
Her spirit comes at will,
At midnight on the seas
Her bright smile haunts me still."

And underneath these high voices was the gruff bass voice of Gabriel Carnine and the baritone of Jake Dolan. And when Mrs. Barclay heard the piping treble of her son, and the tinkle of his guitar, her eyes filled with tears of pride.

The serenaders waked the chickens, and the crowing roosters roused Mrs. Barclay, and in the hurry of the hour she forgot to look for her son. As "the gray dawn was breaking," a hundred men came into the room, and found the smoking breakfast on the table. It was a good breakfast as breakfasts go when men are hungry. But they sat in silence that morning. The song was all out of them; the spring of youth was crushed under the weight of great events. And as they rose—they who had been so merry the day before, and had joked of the things the soldier fears, they were all but mute, and left their breakfasts scarcely tasted.

The women remember this,—the telltale sign of the untouched breakfast,—and their memory is better than that of Martin Culpepper, who wrote in that plumy chapter of the Biography, before mentioned:—

"The soldiers left their homes that beautiful August morning as the sun was kissing the tips of the sycamore that gave the magnificent little city its name. They had partaken abundantly of a bountiful breakfast, and as they satisfied their inner man from a table groaning with good things prepared by the fair hands of the gentler sex, the gallant men rose with song and cheer, and went on their happy way where duty and honour called them."

But the women who scraped the plates that morning knew the truth. One wonders how much of history would be thrown out as worthless, like Martin Culpepper's fine writing, if the women who scraped the plates might testify. For those "large white plumes" do not dance in women's eyes!

After breakfast the men tumbled into the wagons, and as one wagon after another rattled out of Fernald's feed lot and came down the street, the men waved their hats and the women waved their aprons, and a great cloud of dust rose on the highway, and as the wagons ducked down the bank to the river, only the tall figure of Martin Culpepper, waving his handkerchief, rose above the cloud. At the end of the line was a provision wagon, and on it rode Philemon Ward—Yankee in his greatest moment, scorning the heroic place in the van, and looking after the substantials. In the feed lot, just as the reins were in his hands, Ward saw Elmer Hendricks' foot peeping from under a saddle. Ward dragged the boy out, spanking him as he came over the end gate, and noted the sheepish smile on his face. Ten days later, as Ward, marching in the infantry, was going up a hill through the timber at the battle of Wilson's Creek, that same boy rode by with the cavalry, and seeing Ward, waved a carbine and smiled as he charged the brow of the hill. That night, going back under the stars, Ward stumbled over a body, and stooping, saw the smile still on the boy's face, and the carbine clutched in his hand. But for the hole through the boyish brow, the eyes might still have been laughing.