ding food for himself
or his horse, though both were famishing.

About midnight, however, he came upon a bit of wild pasture land on a
steep mountain side, where his horse at least might crop the early grass
of the spring. There he halted, removed his saddle and bridle, and
turned the animal loose, saying:

"Poor beast! You will not stray far away. There's half an acre of grass
here, with bare rocks all around it. Your appetite will be leash enough
to keep you from wandering."

Then the young man--no longer a captain now, but a destitute, starving
wanderer on the face of the earth--threw himself upon a carpet of pine
needles in a little clump of timber, made a pillow of his saddle, drew
the saddle blanket over his shoulders to keep out the night chill,
loosened his belt, and straightway fell asleep.

Before doing so, however,--faint with hunger as he was, and weary to the
verge of collapse,--he had a little ceremony to perform, and he
performed it--in answer to a sentimental fancy. With the point of his
sword he found an earth-bank free of rock, and dug a trench there. In it
he placed his sword in its scabbard and with its belt and sword-knot
attached. Then drawing the earth over it and stamping it down, he said:

"That ends the soldier chapter of my life. I must turn to the work of
peace now. I have no fireplace over which to hang the trusty blade. It
is better to bury it here in the mountains in the midst of desolation,
and forever to forget all that it suggests."

When he waked in the morning a soaking, persistent, pitiless rain was
falling. The young man's clothing was so completely saturated that, as
he stood erect, the water streamed from his elbows, and he felt it
trickling down his body and his legs.

"This is a pretty good substitute for a bath," he thought, as he removed
his garments, and with strong, nervous hands, wrung the water out of
them as laundresses do with linen.

He had no means of kindling a fire, and there was no time for that at
any rate. Guilford Duncan had begun to feel the pangs not of mere
hunger, but of actual starvation--the pains that mean collapse and
speedy death. He knew that he must find food for himself and that
quickly. Otherwise he must die there, helpless and alone, on the
desolate mountain side.

He might, indeed, kill his horse and live for a few days upon its flesh,
until it should spoil. But such relief would be only a postponing of the
end, and without the horse he