I should have
been glad if you had stayed at home, Dick, but since you have chosen to
be a soldier, I am rejoiced that you have risen in the esteem of your
officers. Write to me as often as you can. Maybe none of your letters
will reach me, but at least start them. I shall start mine, too."

"Of course, mother," said Dick, "and now it's time for me to ride hard."

"Why, you have been here only a half hour!"

"Nearer an hour, mother, and on this journey of mine time means a lot. I
must say good-bye now to you and Juliana."

The two women followed him down the lawn to the point where his horse
was hitched between the two big pines. Mrs. Mason patted the horse's
great head and murmured to him to carry her son well.

"Did you ever see a finer horse, mother?" said Dick proudly. "He's the
very pick of the army."

He threw his arms around her neck, kissed her more than once, sprang
into the saddle and rode away in the darkness.

The two women, the black and the white, sisters in grief, and yet happy
that he had come, went slowly back into the house to wait, while the
boy, a man's soul in him, strode on to war.

Dick was far from Pendleton when the dawn broke, and now he had full
need of caution. His horse was bearing him fast into debatable ground,
where every man suspected his neighbor, and it remained for force alone
to tell to which side the region belonged. But the extreme delicacy of
the tension came to Dick's aid. People hesitated to ask questions, lest
questions equally difficult be asked of them in return. It was a great
time to mind one's own business.

He rode on, fortune with him for the present, and his course was still
west slightly by north. He slept under roofs, and he learned that in
the country into which he had now come the Union sympathizers were more
numerous than the Confederate. The majority of the Kentuckians, whatever
their personal feelings, were not willing to shatter the republic.

He heard definitely that here in the west the North was gathering armies
greater than any that he had supposed. Besides the troops from the three
states just across the Ohio River the hardy lumbermen and pioneers
were pouring down from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Hunters
in deerskin suits and buffalo moccasins had already come from the far
Nebraska Territory.

The power of the west and the northwest was converging upon his state,
which gave eighty thousand of its men to the Northern cause, while half
a