e was
handed in time and time again that the young men had come and gone, and
red-faced commanding officers cursed indignant subalterns, and implied
that Beauty had had a hand in it. Councils of war were held over the
advisability of seizing Mr. Carvel's house at Glencoe, but proof was
lacking until one rainy night in June a captain and ten men spurred up
the drive and swung into a big circle around the house. The Captain
took off his cavalry gauntlet and knocked at the door, more gently than
usual. Miss Virginia was home so Jackson said. The Captain was given an
audience more formal than one with the queen of Prussia could have been,
Miss Carvel was infinitely more haughty than her Majesty. Was not the
Captain hired to do a degrading service? Indeed, he thought so as he
followed her about the house and he felt like the lowest of criminals
as he opened a closet door or looked under a bed. He was a beast of the
field, of the mire. How Virginia shrank from him if he had occasion to
pass her! Her gown would have been defiled by his touch. And yet the
Captain did not smell of beer, nor of sauerkraut; nor did he swear in
any language. He did his duty apologetically, but he did it. He pulled
a man (aged seventeen) out from under a great hoop skirt in a little
closet, and the man had a pistol that refused its duty when snapped in
the Captain's face. This was little Spencer Catherwood, just home from a
military academy.

Spencer was taken through the rain by the chagrined Captain to the
headquarters, where he caused a little embarrassment. No damning
evidence was discovered on his person, for the pistol had long since
ceased to be a firearm. And so after a stiff lecture from the Colonel
he was finally given back into the custody of his father. Despite the
pickets, the young men filtered through daily,--or rather nightly.
Presently some of them began to come back, gaunt and worn and tattered,
among the grim cargoes that were landed by the thousands and tens of
thousands on the levee. And they took them (oh, the pity of it!) they
took them to Mr. Lynch's slave pen, turned into a Union prison of
detention, where their fathers and grandfathers had been wont to send
their disorderly and insubordinate niggers. They were packed away, as
the miserable slaves had been, to taste something of the bitterness
of the negro's lot. So came Bert Russell to welter in a low room whose
walls gave out the stench of years. How you cooked for them, a