t, I write again--the third
time, to inform you of his condition. He can't last much longer, and
in event of his dying without hearing from his friends, he will be
buried in the common cemetery connected with the prison, and his
identity, in all probability, lost. This is what he appears to dread,
and he entreats that you will come to him, in God's name, if you are
still alive. The utmost dispatch will be necessary.

Respectfully,

PERCIVAL SMITH, B. G. U. S. A.

Comdt., U. S. P., Point Lookout.

Mason returned the letter to its envelope and leaned back in his chair
thinking. It was one of the many messages of sorrow that had winged
their way through the country in the weeks following the close of the
war; one of the murmurs of pain that had swelled the funeral dirge
vibrating through the land.

Pocahontas came and seated herself on her brother's knee, gazing at him
with wide gray eyes filled with inquiry. "When did this come? I never
saw it before," she questioned, gravely.

Then with troubled brow, and voice that grew husky at times, he went
over for her the sad story of the last months of the last year of that
unhappy and fateful struggle. In the autumn of '64 their brother
Temple, a lad of seventeen, had been taken prisoner, with others of his
troop, while making a reconnoissance, and they had been unable to
discover either his condition or place of incarceration. Mason,
himself, had been at home on sick leave, weak and worn with the loss of
his arm and a saber cut across his head. All through the winter and
spring, while calamity followed calamity with stunning rapidity, the
wearing anxiety about Temple continued, made more intolerable by the
contradictory reports of his fate brought by passing soldiers.
Finally, this letter had arrived and converted a dread fear into a
worse certainty.

It had been handed to Roy Garnett by a Federal officer at Richmond, and
Roy had ridden straight down with it all those weary miles, feeling
curiously certain that it contained news of Temple, and sharing their
anxiety to the full. Roy had been stanch and helpful in their trouble,
aiding in the hurried preparations for the journey, and accompanying
the wounded man, and the pale, resolute mother on their desperate
mission. Then came the hideous journey, the arrival at the prison, the
fearful questioning, the relief akin to pain of the reply; the
interview with the bluff, kindly commandant, who took their hands