it was. They told him, and he swore softly, and begged to
be allowed to help. John Wendell yielded his shovel to Hamp Pinner, and
he to Colonel Huger.

Then the women came forward and covered the mound with boughs of green,
and clusters of flowers, and sprays of bright leaves, and Sydney laid
about the whole grave a garland of feathery aster and delicate fern.
Through the quiet came a sweet, sonorous voice reading the words of the
hymn,--

"Love's redeeming work is done,
Fought the fight, the victory won."

Out of the church-yard, side by side, with bowed heads, walked Bud
Yarebrough and Friedrich von Rittenheim,--the man whose fragile honor
had been preserved by Bob's act, and the man whose life he had given
his own to save.

XXV

Carl von Sternburg

Mrs. Morgan and the Doctor had insisted upon giving to von Rittenheim
Gray Eagle and Bob's buggy. They could have done nothing kinder or more
tactful, for Friedrich was apprehensive even of their seeing him for
whom their son had given his life, and their insistence upon his
accepting this remembrance of their dead boy proved their feeling
towards him more cogently than any words.

It was the good gray horse that he was driving towards Asheville a few
days after the funeral, on his way to fulfil his promise to Bob to hunt
up the German who had claimed acquaintance with him.

As he travelled on, he thought of the two notable journeys which he had
made on this same highway,--the heart-chilling ride through the
penetrating morning mist at the head of the men who had arrested him,
and the wild flight through the darkness to secure the surgeon for poor
Bob. Between the two had intervened a lifetime of experience. He had
been branded a criminal, and had rehabilitated himself; he had knocked
at the door of death, and been refused; he had lost his confidence in
man's honesty, and had regained a fuller faith in his goodness; he had
watched the slow blossoming of the tender flower of love's hope within
his heart, and he had seen it overshadowed by the stouter growth of
loyalty to his word.

Of his future, in so far as it might have to do with Sydney, he did not
allow himself to think. There was no shaft of light lying upon that
road. But a clear and steady, though not far-reaching flame illumined
the present, for he felt sure now that she loved him, and that gave him
a certain happiness. It was like having a beautiful secret,--a secret
whose delight wou