mong
them. At the Spottswood Hotel, the day after his coming, he met Elisha
Boone, haggard, depressed, almost despairing. Dick had no love for the
hard-headed plutocrat, but he couldn't resist making himself known.

"How d'ye do, Mr. Boone? I hope Wesley is coming on well, sir."

Boone brought his wandering eyes down to the stripling in dull
amazement.

"Why, where on earth do you come from? How is it you are free and
allowed in the streets?"

"Oh, I am a privileged person, sir. I am looking up Company K. You
haven't heard anything of young Moore, Barney, who lives on the Callao
road south of Acredale?"

"No, my mind has been taken up with my son"; his voice grew softer. "He
is in a very bad way, and the worst is there is no decent doctor to be
got here for love or money; all the capable ones are in the army, and
those that are here refuse to take any interest in a Yankee."

The father's grief and the unhappy situation of his whilom enemy touched
the lad; forgetting Jack's and Vincent's warning, Dick said,
impulsively:

"Oh, I can get him a good doctor. We have friends here." He knew, the
moment he had spoken the words, that he had been imprudent--how
imprudent the sudden, suspicious gleam in Boone's eye at once
admonished him.

"Friends here? Union men have no friends here. There are men here with,
whom I have done business for years, men that owe prosperity to me, but
when I called on them they almost insulted me. If you have friends, you
must have sympathies that they appreciate."

Dick knew what this meant. To be a Democrat had been, in Acredale, to be
charged with secret leanings to rebellion. He restrained his wrath
manfully, and said, simply:

"An old college friend of Jack's has been very kind to us."

"Us? I take it you mean the Spragues. They are stopping with Jeff Davis,
I suppose? It's the least he could do for allies so steadfast."

"You shouldn't talk that way, sir. Every man in the Caribees, except old
Oswald's gang, is a Democrat, but they are for the country
before party."

"Yes, yes, it may be so--but, the North don't think that way. Well, I'm
going to Washington to see if I can't get my boy out of this infernal
place, where a man can't even get shaved decently."

"And Miss Kate, Mr. Boone, where is she?"

"She is nursing Wesley, poor girl. She is having a harder trial than any
of us; for these devilish women fairly push into the sick-room to abuse
the North and berate the soldiers