."

Cram felt his legs and feet grow cold and a chill run up his spine.

"Who were they? Did you catch their names?"

"Only one. I was introduced only as they were about to drive away. A
little old fellow with elaborate manners,--a Monsieur Lascelles."

"And Waring drove away with him?"

"Yes, with him and one other. Seemed to be a friend of Lascelles. Drove
off in a closed carriage with a driver all done up in rubber and
oil-skin who said he perfectly knew the road. Why, what's gone amiss?"

CHAPTER VI.

And all day long the storm beat upon the substantial buildings of the
old barracks and flooded the low ground about the sheds and stables.
Drills for the infantry were necessarily suspended, several sentries,
even, being taken off their posts. The men clustered in the squad-rooms
and listened with more or less credulity to the theories and
confirmatory statements of fact as related by the imaginative or
loquacious of their number. The majority of the officers gathered under
the flaring lamp-lights at the sutler's store and occupied themselves
pretty much as did their inferiors in grade, though poker and
punch--specialties of Mr. Finkbein, the sutler--lent additional color to
the stories in circulation.

From this congress the better element of the commissioned force was
absent, the names, nationalities, and idiomatic peculiarities of speech
of the individual members being identical in most instances with those
of their comrades in arms in the ranks. "Brax" had summoned Minor,
Lawrence, Kinsey, and Dryden to hear what the post surgeon had to say on
his return, but cautioned them to keep quiet. As a result of this
precaution, the mystery of the situation became redoubled by one
o'clock, and was intensified by two, when it was announced that Private
Dawson had attempted to break away out of the hospital after a visit
from the same doctor in his professional capacity. People were tempted
out on their galleries in the driving storm, and colored servants
flitted from kitchen to kitchen to gather or dispense new rumors, but
nobody knew what to make of it when, soon after two, an orderly rode in
from town dripping with mud and wet, delivered a note to the colonel,
and took one from him to Mr. Ferry, now sole representative of the
officers of Battery "X" present for duty. Ferry in return sent the
bedraggled horseman on to the battery quarters with an order to the
first sergeant, and in about fifteen minutes a s