eyes. Above him stood a trooper,
with a revolver leveled at and within ten feet of him. Figure to
yourself any predicament in life in which vital stakes hang on the
issue; figure to yourself the shipwrecked seizing ice where he had hoped
for timber; the condemned criminal walking into the jailer's toils where
he had laboriously dug through solid walls; the captain of an army
leaving the field victor, to find his legions rushing upon him in rout;
figure any monstrous overturn in well-laid schemes, and you have but a
faint reflex of poor Jack's heart-breaking anguish when this jocular
fate stood above him, with the five gaping barrels pointed at his
miserable head. Oh, if Dick had only been there! His quick eye and keen
activity would have discovered this lurking devil; perhaps, between
them, they would have averted the disaster. Where could Dick be?

BOOK III

_THE DESERTERS_.

CHAPTER XXIV.

BETWEEN THE LINES.

On quitting Jack, Dick had but one thought in mind--to make his
departure less abrupt for Rosa. If he left her without a word, what
would she think? Then, with an officer's uniform, he could be of much
more help to Jack and the party than in the rough civilian homespun
furnished at the cabin. Besides, he knew of certain blank headquarter
passes lying on Vincent's desk. He would get a few of these; they might
extricate the party in the event of a surprise.

He tore over the solemn roadway, under the spectral foliage, and in
twenty minutes he was in his room in the Atterburys'. Vincent's old
uniform he had often noticed in a spare closet adjoining his own
sleeping-room. In an instant he was in it, and, though it was not a fit,
he soon put it in order to pass casual inspection. The line for Rosa was
the next delay. What should he say? He had had his mind full for days of
the most tender sentiments and prettily turned phrases, but the turmoil
of the last hour, the vital value of every moment to Jack's plans, left
him no time to compose the poem he had meditated so long. Rosa's own
pretty desk was open, and on a sheet of her own paper he wrote, in a
scrawling, school-boy hand:

"DARLING ROSA: You've often said that you would disown Vincent if he
were not true to the South. Think of Vincent in my place--dawdling in
Acredale or Washington while battles were going on. You would not hold
him less contemptible that he was in love; that he let his love, or his
life, for you are both to me, stand as a