hoofs beat them out ceaselessly:

"The wires are cut--the wires are cut!"

The mystery would have been clear, had Chad known the message that lay
on the Commandant's desk back at the Capital, for the boy knew Morgan,
and that Morgan's lips never opened for an idle threat. He would have
ridden just as hard, had he known, but a different purpose would have
been his.

An hour more and there was still no light in the East. An hour more and
one red streak had shot upward; then ahead of him gleamed a picket
fire--a fire that seemed farther from town than any post he had seen on
his way down to the Capital--but he galloped on. Within fifty yards a
cry came:

"Halt! Who comes there?"

"Friend," he shouted, reining in. A bullet whizzed past his head as he
pulled up outside the edge of the fire and Chad shouted indignantly:

"Don't shoot, you fool! I have a message for General Ward!"

"Oh! All right! Come on!" said the sentinel, but his hesitation and the
tone of his voice made the boy alert with suspicion. The other pickets
about the fire had risen and grasped their muskets. The wind flared the
flames just then and in the leaping light Chad saw that their uniforms
were gray.

The boy almost gasped. There was need for quick thought and quick
action now.

"Lower that blunderbuss," he called out, jestingly, and kicking loose
from one stirrup, he touched Dixie with the spur and pulled her up with
an impatient "Whoa," as though he were trying to replace his foot.

"You come on!" said the sentinel, but he dropped his musket to the
hollow of his arm, and, before he could throw it to his shoulder again,
fire flashed under Dixie's feet and the astonished rebel saw horse and
rider rise over the pike-fence. His bullet went overhead as Dixie
landed on the other side, and the pickets at the fire joined in a
fusillade at the dark shapes speeding across the bluegrass field. A
moment later Chad's mocking yell rang from the edge of the woods beyond
and the disgusted sentinel split the night with oaths.

"That beats the devil. We never touched him I swear, I believe that
hoss had wings."

Morgan! The flash of that name across his brain cleared the mystery for
Chad like magic. Nobody but Morgan and his daredevils could rise out of
the ground like that in the very midst of enemies when they were
supposed to be hundreds of mlles away in Tennessee. Morgan had cut
those wires. Morgan had every road around Lexington guarded, no doubt,