as the affair could be
regulated, and proffered his best offices for the Acredale victims.

Everything had been prepared by Olympia and her mother for an instant
departure so soon as positive information came. With them Marcia Perley
went, trembling and tearful, and Telemachus Twigg, to extricate his son
from danger, for it was uncertain what his status was in the forces.
Kate, too, joined the melancholy pilgrimage that set out one morning
followed to the station by weeping kinsmen imploring the good offices of
these ambassadors of woe. The sleeping-car gave the miserable company
seclusion, if not rest. They were not the only ones in quest of the
missing, for as yet there was no certainty as to the fate of those left
on the field of battle. Later reports had been more encouraging, for
hundreds who were set down as prisoners or missing began to be heard
from as far northward as the Maryland line. In the station at Washington
Boone met his daughter. Twigg hurried to him and asked:

"Any further news, Mr. Boone? We're all here--about half Acredale."

"Yes, I see; but there is no more news of the Caribees. We learn that
the wounded have been sent to Richmond, and I shall set out for there
to-morrow."

Mrs. Sprague, with Olympia and Merry, drove to the house of a friend
she had known years before, whose husband was a Senator. The Boones--or
rather Kate--bade them a cordial adieu as they drove off to the
National Hotel.

Then the most trying part of the quest began. The War Department was
besieged with applicants, mostly women. Orders had been issued to forbid
all crossing the lines, and the despairing kinsfolk of the lost were in
a panic of impatient terror. In vain Olympia called upon eminent
Senators who had been friends of her father; in vain she invoked the aid
of the Secretary of State, who had been the family's guest at Acredale.
Once she penetrated, by the aid of strong letters, to the Secretary of
War. He was surrounded by a hurried throng of orderlies, officers, and
clerks, and even after she had been admitted to his office Olympia was
left unnoticed on a settee, waiting some sign to approach the dreaded
presence. His imperious and abrupt manner, his alternation of
deferential concern for some and disdainful impatience for others, gave
her small hope that he would heed her prayer. She waited hours, sitting
in the crowded room, ill from the oppressive air, the fixed stare of the
officers, and the sobbing of oth