ep. Unconsciously, her throat was arranged for
a sudden shrill scream. High in the tree branches she could hear the
voice of the wind, a melody of the night, low and sad, the plaint of an
endless, incommunicable sorrow. Her own distress, the plight of the men
in gray--these near matters as well as all she had known or imagined of
grief--everything was expressed in this soft mourning of the wind in the
trees. At first she felt like weeping. This sound told her of human
impotency and doom. Then later the trees and the wind breathed strength
to her, sang of sacrifice, of dauntless effort, of hard carven faces
that did not blanch when Duty came at midnight or at noon.

She turned often to scan the shadowy figures that moved from time to
time in the light at the barn door. Once she trod upon a stick, and it
flopped, crackling in the intolerable manner of all sticks. At this
noise, however, the guards at the barn made no sign. Finally, she was
where she could see the knot-holes in the rear of the structure gleaming
like pieces of metal from the effect of the light within. Scarcely
breathing in her excitement she glided close and applied an eye to a
knothole. She had barely achieved one glance at the interior before she
sprang back shuddering.

For the unconscious and cheerful sentry at the door was swearing away in
flaming sentences, heaping one gorgeous oath upon another, making a
conflagration of his description of his troop horse.

"Why," he was declaring to the calm prisoner in gray, "you ain't got a
horse in your hull ---- army that can run forty rod with that there
little mar'!"

As in the outer darkness Mary cautiously returned to the knothole, the
three guards in front suddenly called in low tones: "S-s-s-h!"

"Quit, Pete; here comes the lieutenant." The sentry had apparently been
about to resume his declamation, but at these warnings he suddenly posed
in a soldierly manner.

A tall and lean officer with a smooth face entered the barn. The sentry
saluted primly. The officer flashed a comprehensive glance about him.
"Everything all right?"

"All right, sir."

This officer had eyes like the points of stilettos. The lines from his
nose to the corners of his mouth were deep and gave him a slightly
disagreeable aspect, but somewhere in his face there was a quality of
singular thoughtfulness, as of the absorbed student dealing in
generalities, which was utterly in opposition to the rapacious keenness
of the eyes w