the carcass. He started up, then sank
back, and in another moment triumphant nature conquered, and he was
asleep--a dull, dreamless sleep of absolute exhaustion, that perchance
rescued his reason as well as saved his life.

The old chaplain was a man of infinite prejudice, steeped in all the
infirmities and fantasies of dogma; a lover of harmony, and essentially
an apostle of peace. Nevertheless, it would not have been physically
safe to call him a Jesuit. But indeed he scarcely hesitated; he stepped
over the great inert bulk of the dead horse, unclenched the muscular
grasp of the soldier, as if it had been a baby's clasp, slipped the
staff, technically the lance, of the guidon from its socket, and stood
with it in his own hand, looking suspiciously to and fro to descry if
perchance he were observed. The coast clear, he turned to the wall
of rock beside the road, for this was near the mountain sandstone
formation, fissured, splintered, with the erosions of water and weather;
and into one of the cellular, tunnel-like apertures he ran the guidon,
lance and all,--lost forever from human sight.

In those days one might speak indeed of the march of events. Each seemed
hard on the heels of its precursor. Change ran riot in the ordering of
the world, and its aspect was utterly transformed when Casper Girard,
no longer bearing the guidon of Dovinger's Rangers, came out of the war
with a captain's shoulder-straps, won by personal fitness often proved,
the habit of command, and a great and growing opinion of himself. He was
a changeling, so to speak. No longer he felt a native of the mountain
cove where he had been born and reared. He had had a glimpse of
the world from a different standpoint, and it lured him. A dreary,
disaffected life he led for a time.

"'Minds me of a wild tur-r-key in a trap," his mother was wont to
comment. "Always stretchin' his neck an' lookin' up an' away--when
he mought git out by looking down." And the simile was so apt that it
stayed in his mind--looking up and away!

Of all dull inventions, in his estimation the art of printing exceeded.
He had made but indifferent progress in education during his early
youth; he was a slow and inexpert reader, and a writer whose chirography
shrank from exhibition. Now, however, a book in the hand gave him a
cherished sentiment of touch with the larger world beyond those blue
ranges that limited his sphere, and he spent much time in sedulously
reading certain v