doubted that he could travel far toward
that western land which he had half unwittingly fixed upon as his goal.

He was well up in the mountains now, and near the crest of the great
range. The Valley lay beyond, and he well knew that he would find no
food supplies in that region when he should come to cross it. Sheridan
had done a perfect work of war there, so devastating one of the most
fruitful regions on all God's earth that in picturesque words he had
said: "The crow that flies over the Valley of Virginia must carry his
rations with him."

In the high mountains matters were not much better. There had been no
battling up there in the land of the sky, but the scars and the
desolation of war were manifest even upon mountain sides and mountain
tops.

For four years the men who dwelt in the rude log cabins of that
frost-bitten and sterile region had been serving as volunteers in the
army, fighting for a cause which was none of theirs and which they did
not at all understand or try to understand. They fought upon instinct
alone. It had always been the custom of the mountain dwellers to
shoulder their guns and go into the thick of every fray which seemed to
them in any way to threaten their native land. They went blindly, they
fought desperately, and they endured manfully. Ignorant, illiterate,
abjectly poor, inured to hardship through generations, they asked no
questions the answers to which they could not understand. It was enough
for them to know that their native land was invaded by an armed foe.
Whenever that occurred they were ready to meet force with force, and to
do their humble mightiest to drive that foe away or to destroy him,
without asking even who he was.

It had been so in all the Indian wars and in the Revolutionary struggle,
and it was so again in the war between the States. As soon as the call
to arms was issued, these sturdy mountaineers almost to a man abandoned
their rocky and infertile fields to the care of their womankind and went
to war, utterly regardless of consequences to themselves.

During this last absence of four years their homes had fallen into
fearful desolation. Those homes were log cabins, chinked and daubed,
mostly having earthen floors and chimneys built of sticks thickly
plastered with mud. But humble as they were, they were homes and they
held the wives and children whom these men loved.

All that was primitive in American life survived without change in the
high mountains of